BY DANIEL JUPP

It’s easy to see how tyranny depends on forgetting.

As tyranny grows, people forget that their political opposition are human beings. Tyrants classify certain groups as innately evil, and these groups, whether convenient scapegoats or actual rivals, are then a legitimate target for any kind of mistreatment.

The sad truth is that whilst we were reminded constantly that right wing nationalism was bad, the people giving us those reminders were often also deeply invested in making us forget that left wing socialism and Communism did this too.

We were told to remember the National in National Socialist and to forget the Socialist.

We were told to never forget Nazism, but we were also told that the only people who worried about Communism were dangerous bigots and lunatics seeing ‘reds under the bed’.

This selectivity seems deliberate. It was engineered by Marxist historians and academics, and it dominated the teaching and textbooks of the western world even when the Cold War was still active and the Soviet Union still existed. Some departments of Western education have been a long procession of Marxist infiltration.  

Whilst every person’s moral understanding of Nazism should of course be one of loathing and disgust (I’m certainly not saying the teachers and professors got THAT wrong) it was always odd, and should always have been considered odd, that the Russian gulag, the Communist torturer, and the Marxist genocides always seemed to get off the hook.

If you wanted to know anything about Stalin’s purges, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a leftist propensity for mass execution going back to the Terror of the French Revolution, the genocidal crimes of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or the deliberate mass starvation famines so often produced by Communist regimes worldwide, the British state education system might offer you a single elementary course on the Russian Revolution, stripped of anything save the most neutral language regarding Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. (I recall these materials as mentioning deaths caused by Communism rather as if they were a force of nature, not the work of men, an unpleasant storm that all were suffering during war, rather than a sea of deaths which were the results of Communist theory, practice and power).

It used to be that the Left claimed to be the friend and representatives of the working class. It used to be thought that the Right was composed of people who were on the side of Big Business and the ruling class. But the great changes we have witnessed since World War Two are changes primarily driven by the subversion of the elite. It was for many years the elite class who went to university, where the Left’s grip on education became strongest. Conservative-minded middle class parents in the US literally saved and paid tens of thousands of dollars to see their affluent-background children turned into Communists who hated them, despised capitalism and also hated America.

Groups like Extinction Rebellion are today funded by vast amounts of money supplied by a Getty oil fortune heiress, a billionaire who inherited family oil wealth and now funds borderline terrorist activities pushing for net zero and the end of oil. Her private family psychodrama of (university educated) guilt and rebellion against her own ancestors is played out at the cost of imperilling the energy supply and standard of living of much poorer people.

The subversion of the elite to leftist rhetoric and aims, though, on the surface would not seem to make much sense. If anyone should be invested in preserving the way western society was, it should be those who sit at the top. They are the ones who have received the greatest personal advantage from these nation states and from a capitalist system. They are the ones with the wealth and power. What do they gain by embracing leftist radicalism? Why do they think they benefit from destroying the social pyramid that they are sitting on, or by sweeping everything away that built the conditions of their success or their inherited success?

If you are already rich, you might adopt leftist causes and radicalism as a way of forgiving yourself for that guilty advantage, or as a cynical way of distracting others from it. As the influence of the radicalism grows around you and within your class, not signalling these beliefs actually becomes a social stigma in your class, and a way of suggesting you don’t belong in the elite in the first place.

Ordinary people tend not to be radical in their tastes, loyalties and politics. So being radical becomes attractive as a means of signalling you are better than ordinary people, that your tastes are different and more refined, more complex, even more humane. You, for instance, are sophisticated enough to care for the people who commit suicide bombings, whereas the lumpen proletariat side with the people who aren’t strapping bombs to themselves. Your humanity is so advanced that you can excuse child murderers. Or back the IRA. Or back Hamas. After all, it’s imperialism that is the real evil. Your Marxist professor told you so. You have this special moral sophistication that makes you better and more human than the gross ordinary citizen, whose archaic worldview is really the cause of all evil (which conveniently excuses your wealth and power and your part in every leftist policy that never worked).

In reality, evil calls itself Good. Every single time. It’s evil that is the quickest to talk about compassion. It’s evil that always says it is fighting oppression. It’s evil that is obsessed with abstract terms of alleged goodness-equity, inclusion, diversity, and ‘social justice’. Evil just switches the labels around. It never parades around admitting that it’s evil, although when it’s socially dominant the robes of compassion often slip a fair bit showing the rotten corpse beneath. Evil’s purposes will always seem benign.

Good is not presenting itself this way. Good is too busy with the hard task of building, creating, working and preserving. Good is raising a family right, paying a mortgage, holding down a job, and trying not to personally harm anyone else while doing these things. Doing good simply doesn’t leave you much time for Doing Good in the demonstrative way that evil usually adopts.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex. Daniel’s SubStack is available here.