What Would the Stasi Have Done With Twitter?
The wokes are using the Stasi playbook and should be treated accordingly.
A very quick note of thanks.
I can’t possibly thank you enough for the outpouring of support I received after the passing of my father. By outpouring, I mean truly overwhelming. I read every note, but frankly haven’t had the courage or capacity to thank each of you individual. Just know that — for my part — I couldn’t be more grateful to each of you.
Warm regards,
SVK
Mr. Joseph Epstein writes in the pages of the Wall Street Journal this morning about the culture war — such as it remains:
I happened to mention the phrase “culture war” in a 1996 conversation with Irving Kristol, who was a contributor to these pages and always a penetrating observer of contemporary American life. “The culture war is over,” Irving said, then paused and added: “We lost.” Alive today, Irving would have been sadly reaffirmed in his declaration, surprised perhaps only at the extent of the loss and the cost it has entailed.
The article is worth reading in its entirety, not solely for the fact that Mr. Epstein felt the utter wrath of the wokes for daring to suggest that not all doctorates are made equal; that the honorific may be more pretense than substantive — especially when such luminaries as Doctor Jill Biden seem to insist upon it.
Most of us are not old enough to remember the venerable institutions of the German Democratic Republic, but the Ministry for State Security — abbreviated to Stasi — had a word for this tactic. They called it biodegration or Zersetzung as a means of silencing either active or possible dissidents. The method was rather diabolical. First they would promote the target, then by cuts of a thousand knives they would systematically undermine and calumniate the individual. Promotions would not come as easily. Scandals would be manufactured. Rumors would be spread. If the individual was a writer or an artist, their work would be panned on both sides of the Iron Curtain so as to break their spirit to create.
In later years, the size and extent of the Stasi’s ability to create informants would shock many as the Berlin Wall collapsed and Germany reunited. Millions of East Germans were recruited to inform on their fellow citizens. A simple misstatement, joke, or observation in a classroom would be enough to ruin a person for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Epstein brings the observation to a rather speedy point:
All this might be deleterious enough, but woke culture adds to the nightmare by punishing its opponents through disgrace and cancellation, the latter often affecting not only reputation but income. To suggest that surgery and hormone treatment in connection with transgendering may bring biological penalties, or that riotous looting has any connection at all with the Black Lives Matter organization, or that the anti-Israel movements on campus are a form of thinly veiled anti-Semitism, or that defunding the police will above all hurt black and Latino communities—all this under the reign of woke culture is beyond the pale, and disqualifies anyone who dares to suggest any of it.
Instinctively, we all know these things to be true. Yet to express these opinions — or rather, truths — on Twitter or Facebook is to expose yourself to an ocean of hundreds of Twitter accounts (typically run by one or two people), a sycophantic media hungry for scandal, and a political mindset that treats every person right of center as evil — all backed and abetted by the institutions: media, entertainment, education, academia, federal bureaucrats, state and local bureaucrats — even our churches in certain quarters.
Mr. Epstein’s solution to the loss — or rather, forfeiture — of the culture war is to shift to a more guerilla mindset. Openly supporting publications such as Commentary, First Things, The Claremont Review and The Wall Street Journal (and dare I say, The Republican Standard in Virginia) are a good start. Setting your phasers to mock and refusing to allow the woke progressives to continue their march towards the eschaton unimpeded is worth the fight.
Of course, it is important to remember that despite the protestations of the left, it is they — not us — who have prosecuted the culture war with divisive social issues, as Kevin Drum goes to great lengths to explain what most objective observers would argue is an undeniable truth:
Now: maybe you're personally delighted by the Democratic Party's leftward march and maybe you're not. It doesn't matter. Despite endless hopeful invocations of "but polls show that people like our positions," the truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary—something that Fox News takes vigorous advantage of.
It is one thing to tolerate the beliefs of another person. Something else to be forced to bake their cake.
Something else entirely to be subjected to Zersetzung only to have Americans passively survive the shark attack by stabbing a friend.
Lest one be tempted to interpret this call to arms in the worst possible light — i.e. a call to theocracy or some alternate form of totalitarian do-gooder-ism — allow me to share with you the thoughts of the late Professor Jeffery Hart on his definition of conservatism:
“Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism. Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative. My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense."
-- Professor Jeffrey Hart, Letter to the Dartmouth Review (2006)
For my Protestant friends, you are going to have to wince a bit at the sentiment. Or perhaps not, because what I think Dr. Hart was aiming towards was not true evangelical sentiment, nor was it true populism, but rather the sort of secularized religion that we see in any movement that prizes ideological ends over individuals — much as the Nazis and Communists, Jacobins and Wokes all permit in order to create their perfect worlds.
In that — if the wokes and Marxists ever had any true sense of social justice — they would regard the Zersetzung of a single individual as a repudiation of their entire project.
Yet they don’t.
Because they can’t.
That is what Professor Hart was stabbing towards. As conservatives in the honorable sense of the word stretching back from Reagan to Goldwater through to Jefferson and Burke, there is a sense of conservatism as moderation in the moral sense. Not compromise for its own sake, but the quiet reserve of those confident in the virtues of effort, merit, achievement, tradition, life and liberty.
The question remains for the rest of us as to whether those ideals are still worth fighting for in the postmodern age. Certainly the present-day Stasi of bots and influencers desperately want you to believe otherwise and will punish you accordingly with algorithm and ratio just as vigorously as any Spanish inquisitor or East German apparatchik.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.