David Barnhizer
How do you know when fascism starts? “First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent.” Posted by quoteresearch, February 28, 2024. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/02/28/fools-muzzle/.
In 1967 “The Great Quotations” compiled by George Seldes included an entry for the quotation with an accurate citation:
“The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.” Bertrand Russell, 1940, Freedom: Its Meaning, Edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, Chapter: “Freedom and Government” by Bertrand Russell (William James Lecturer, Harvard University), p. 253, Harcourt, Brace, New York.
The Wisdom of Justice Louis Brandeis
Linguist and philosopher Ruth Nanda Anshen offers a vital insight in explaining that humans do not only “use” language but “become” the language they use, even to the extent it defines their identity and sets limits on their ability to perceive and interpret reality. She explains: “man is that being on earth who does not have language. Man is language.”
“[Ruth Nanda] Anshen’s Core Philosophy is that Language is Man’s Essence. In her 1957 book, Language: An Enquiry into Its Meaning and Function, Anshen argues that [phenomenon occurs] by virtue of the “procreative power of language,” which “grasps, shakes, and transforms…”. She [adds] the critical insight that: “Language is Not Just a Tool: Anshen believed that language is the manifestation of the human spirit.”
There is a reason those of us who actually paid attention in our Constitutional Law classes appreciate one of the giants of American jurisprudence, Louis Brandeis. In his words, the First Amendment Center captures the vital importance of free speech and honest argumentation in healthy systems of representative democracy.
“Those who find an idea, epithet, literary work or other form of expression offensive can oppose, counteract and perhaps refute it with further speech — not by banning the speech deemed to be offensive. As Justice Louis Brandeis said in a famous quote, ‘If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.’” http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/Speech/pubcollege/faqs.aspx?faq=all.
Justice Brandeis’s position is one with which I am in total accord. Free speech protects and enriches the overall social community. This has been presumed to occur through the venting of sensitive differences and internal hostilities in ways that we can “talk through” our disagreements rather than allow them to fester. Anger, hurt feelings, indignation and resentment inevitably occur in such a dynamic and open-ended system. But those are inevitably part of the price paid for real communication between humans.
The obvious problem is that if the persons with whom you are seeking to interact are not willing to engage in true dialogue, all that takes place are fake interactions and public relations pretenses. In such contexts, failures to communicate or take action become the fault of your intransigent opponent who is accused of being at fault and “not having the best interests of “the people” in mind”. The tragedy is, as we are experiencing in today’s America, that the warring factions see honest, evidence-based rational discourse as an obstacle to what they are trying to achieve which is always the acquisition or the preservation of power. In that situation agreement is impossible.
America’s Neo-Maoism: Controlling Journalism, Social Media Access and Content, and Speech
Diana Zhang compares the media behavior in Communist China with what is occurring in America.
“When I was growing up in China, the communist state-run media were the only voice we were exposed to. We were told only the Communist Party can take care of people. [We were taught] Only socialism is the right path for human life, and the only way to provide us with a happy life. As I grew older, after I immigrated to America and lived a different life, read more and travelled more, I started to understand the communist media is like poison. It poisons minds and plagues society.” In the comments below, Zhang describes the disturbing similarities between Chinese and US media.
[1]. The communist media is not meant to inform. It is a machine the communists created to lie. It is made to hide the truth and to use lies to control the people. It is not meant for small lies. It is a lie machine that systematically leads the entire society to believe in its lies.
[2.] The communist media are not meant to foster mutual understanding. They sow division and create hatred. The communists destroy human society by driving people into opposite groups, creating hatred and leading people to fight.
[3.] Communist propaganda can be hard to spot because it disguises its evil intentions with political correctness. The communists claim to be “serving people,” achieving “equality,” and “helping the poor.” It sounds like idealism, which is why it has been effective in attracting young people. “Racism” in the United States is for our mainstream media what class struggle was in China. … [B]y pushing this narrative of racism, the media are fomenting division. It is no accident that this summer we saw young people rioting and burning in our big cities. They have been trained to hate, just as in China, the communists trained people to hate.”
Russian “Physics teacher Alexei Alexeyev still can’t believe he was fired on the spot after taking part in a rally in support of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
“They want to scare teachers so that they no longer share their opinions, even on social media.” “It will be very difficult to find work in the public sector,” Alexeyev tells AFP by phone from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. … Alexeyev says he does not talk to students about politics and knows that he has to be “very careful””. Intimidation and silencing of dissent are central aims of the Cancel Culture.
Journalist Paul Sperry explains the dangers to America’s tradition of free speech. He warned: “They are trying to push me off their platform and silence my voice through harassment. If they can harass and silence a professional journalist, they can silence anybody,”
In a leaked video former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that more bans will be handed down following Trump’s suspension from social media after ending his first term. “This is going to be much bigger than just one account, and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, and the next few weeks, and it’s going to go on beyond the inauguration,” Dorsey said.”
If We “Cave” to the “Linguistic Social-Engineers” the Fascists Win
When this occurs, particularly with activist collectives, “their” language becomes “their” personal reality, one they zealously seek to impose on the “unenlightened masses.” Nikolas Lanum offers the insight of William Jacobson on this issue. Lanum writes:
“Cornell Law Professor [and Founder of the Legal Insurrection Foundation] William A. Jacobson warned that colleges and universities are “manifesting authoritarianism” by removing “problematic” words and firing staff that don’t abide by left-wing ideologies. Jacobson said he believes the increase in stories about word-banning on college campuses is a manifestation of what is referred to as “repressive tolerance,” wherein tolerance serves to preserve a repressive society by neutralizing opposition to impose forms of authoritarianism.
“They monitor your language, they get you to use language that only they approve, and once you’ve done that with somebody, once you’ve done that with a campus, that’s enormous control,” he [stated]. There are numerous examples of colleges attempting to change the language of faculty and students, according to Jacobson. He pointed to the implementation of author Ibram Kendi’s antiracism agenda in staff training sessions as one of the more recent examples. The concept of “antiracism” has embedded itself in the diversity, equity, and inclusion departments and programs now widely implemented in colleges across the country.”
This is why the Woke/CRT movement, and the burgeoning and increasingly coordinated Marxist/Socialist “pseudo-Democratic” and Neo-Maoist movements continually invent new language for the use of the existing language we are obligated to use or avoid. This does not only apply to dictating words and concepts we must use in our discourse, but also applies to language they newly announce as “taboo” that we must abandon or be punished. It is all about power for their movement.
Once you allow an interest group to have control over language, you have granted power to that group and that allows the self-interested assortment to define the “moral” terms of engagement. As that process unfolds, the rest of us are always “walking on eggshells” lest we suffer the “wrath of the “Woke”, the ”anti-Racists” and “Phobia” accusers or be condemned as bigoted, racist, sexist, misogynistic, xenophobic, or some other condition that renders us defectives or enemies of whatever movement is seeking power. All revolutions movements need an enemy to blame for whatever social ills the radicals are denouncing. This is an essential part of building an energetic “army”. Creating an enemy to hate and overthrow is requires convincing propagandized followers that they are the innocent victims of the targeted “enemy”.
Extinguishing “The Oxygen of Liberty”: “Revolutionary Utopians” Want Only Their Speech to Be Free
Walter Williams warns:
“Tyrants everywhere, from the Nazis to the communists, started out supporting free speech rights. Why? Because speech is important for the realization of leftist goals of command and control. People must be propagandized, proselytized, and convinced. Once leftists have gained power, as they have in most of our colleges and universities, free speech becomes a liability. It challenges their ideas and agenda and must be suppressed.” “The Fight for Free Speech”, Walter E. Williams, 10/7/20.
The fact that the Progressives, radical Leftists and Marxist/Socialists have become so obvious in their language control is a bad omen. It signals that the “Revolutionary Utopians” feel sufficiently developed in terms of their spreading base of power to shift more aggressively toward language control and suppression characteristic of Marxist/Socialist repression. They are using the powers afforded them by the Internet and social media to force their desired narrative and to intimidate and control dissent. The speed and extent of this development is unprecedented. Heather Higgins warns that: Big Tech is “Cutting off the oxygen of Liberty”.
“If you’ve lived in a repressive society, where only permitted … thoughts are tolerated, then you see this for what it is, whether the mechanism to get there is the same or different.” Higgins went on to say that the Big Tech companies are cutting off the people’s “oxygen of liberty.” “Part of what makes our country so remarkable is that we start with the idea that government is from the people and responsible to the people. People can’t have you be responsive to them unless they’re free to say what they think. People can’t let you know that something’s wrong if they’re not allowed to point out what’s wrong.” “Silencing People and Forcing Them to ‘Accept Guilt’ Not the Way to Unity”, Li Hai and Jan Jekielek, 1/22/21.
The Fight for Free Speech and the Deviousness of “Hate Speech”
The struggle to develop our fullest humanity depends on being able to utilize our minds and insights to perceive as broadly and deeply as possible. Otherwise we are little more than a “human herd” little different from other faceless collections of biological creatures or automatons. Undermining and “canceling” our ability to have freedom of speech suppresses our minds, blocks the range and depth of our insights, and recreates us as the fleshy version of “cardboard cutouts”. Speech and the ability to think clearly and creatively are intimately connected. Walter Williams provided some direction.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-fight-for-free-speech_3528032.html. “The Fight for Free Speech”, Walter E. Williams, 10/7/20.
“It’s a tragic state of affairs when free speech and inquiry require protection at institutions of higher learning. Indeed, freedom in the marketplace of ideas has made the United States, as well as other Western nations, a leader in virtually every area of human endeavor. A monopoly of ideas is just as dangerous as a monopoly in political power or a monopoly in the production of goods and services. We might ask what is the true test of a person’s commitment to free speech? The true test doesn’t come when he permits people to say those things he deems acceptable. The true test comes when he permits people to say those things that he deems offensive. The identical principle applies to freedom of association; its true test comes when someone permits others to voluntarily associate in ways that he deems offensive.
Attacks on free speech to accommodate multiculturalism and diversity are really attacks on Western values… The indispensable achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights, the idea that individuals have certain inalienable rights that are not granted by government. Governments exist to protect these inalienable rights. It took until the 17th century for that idea to arise and mostly through the works of English philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume. And now the 21st-century campus leftists are trying to suppress these inalienable rights.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/hate-speech-laws-take-away-freedom-of-speech-arthur-milikh_3710979.html. “Hate Speech Laws Take Away Freedom of Speech: Arthur Milikh”, Li Hai and Jan Jekielek, 2/25/21.
“Arthur Milikh, executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, [stated that] that policies and laws regulating hate speech are really about silencing opinions and thus take away freedom of speech, leading to tyranny. “The public view is that to criminalize hate speech really is to rid the public square of racial epithets and Holocaust denial,” Milikh [said]. “The truth is that’s not actually what these laws do.” [N]owadays, the doctrines beneath controlling hate speech have become more and more radical. In the 1990s, political correctness had a lot to do with politeness, “you shouldn’t say this because it’ll hurt people’s feelings.”
“But today, there’s an entire doctrinal world beneath controlling so-called hate speech,” Milikh continued. “And it … has to do with silencing the thoughts and speech of the so-called oppressor group, so as to increase and free the speech of the so-called marginalized.”
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Defining people into oppressor groups and marginalized groups is what “identity politics” is promoting. Milikh suggested that the critical race theory, or identity politics, is trying to “propagandize people by saying that all of history was oppression, there was nothing good whatsoever in the past.” The New York Times’s 1619 Project asserts that the United States is founded fundamentally on white supremacy. And the narrative is the marginalized are pure, good and the oppressor groups are “unconscious beneficiaries of all sorts of privileges, and they, therefore, should remain silent when told what justice is,” Milikh added. That’s why it’s “incredible, yet it makes perfect sense” that fifth-grade kids in Buffalo are being taught advanced Black Lives Matter (BLM) materials in school, Milikh indicated.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Sees the Truth of What Is Happening
Just as the 19th Century French political analyst Alexis de Tocqueville revealed in his brilliant classic Democracy in America, people from other cultures are often better able to perceive the trends and realities in a nation such as America. Ayaan Hirsi Ali further proves that point. Few people have been hounded as much as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Raised as a Muslim in Somalia, moving away from that faith and her family while relocating in the Netherlands, and then relocating to America after her friends were murdered by Islamic fanatics and she was put under a threat of death herself, Hirsi Ali has the perfect “lived experience” that, unlike most Americans who are too subjectively close to a system they take for granted, entitles her to voice warnings about fanaticism, the “Cancel Culture” and “Wokeism”.
Some of the thoughts she offered on September 11, 2020 are set out below. Forgive the length, but she captures the current situation with an unmatched nuance and depth that must be shared. Born in Somalia, and leaving behind her family after she broke away from traditional Islam, she has experienced the too-real specter of death threats from Islamic fanatics for decades. In Europe, she became a member of the Netherlands parliament. Then Hirsi Ali saw her friends murdered in the Netherlands by Islamists before she moved to the US to escape the fanaticism. Now she warns us about the changes that are emerging in American society.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/ayaan-hirsi-ali-september-11-islamist-wokeists. “Ayaan Hirsi Ali: On September 11, here’s what Islamists and ‘Wokeists’ have in common: Adherents of both pursue ideological purity, refuse to engage in debate and demand submission”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 9/11/20.
“For two decades, I have opposed the fanatical illiberalism of those strands of Islam that gave rise to Al Qaeda. I broke with my Somali family and ultimately with their faith because I believed that it is human freedom that should be sacrosanct, not antiquated doctrines that demand submission by the individual. So implacable are the proponents of Shariah that I have faced repeated death threats. Yet I have always consoled myself that, in the U.S., freedom of conscience and expression rank above any set of religious beliefs. It was partly for this reason that I moved here and became a citizen in 2013.
It never occurred to me that free speech would come under threat in my newly adopted country. Even when I first encountered what has come to be known as “cancel culture”—in 2014 I was invited to receive an honorary degree at Brandeis University and then ungraciously disinvited—I didn’t fret too much. I was inclined to dismiss the alliance of campus leftists and Islamists as a lunatic fringe.
But the power of the illiberal elements in the American left has grown, not just on campus but in the media and many corporations. They have inculcated in a generation of students an ideology that has much more in common with the intolerant doctrines of a religious cult than with the secular political thought I studied at Holland’s Leiden University.
In the debates after 9/11, many people sought materialist explanations for the attacks. American foreign policy in the Middle East was blamed, or lack of education and employment opportunities in the Arab world. I argued that none of these could explain the motivations of the plotters and hijackers, who in any case were far from underprivileged. Their goal was religious and political: to wage jihad against their kin if they didn’t accept a literal interpretation of Islam, to denounce Arab governments as corrupt and their Western allies as infidels, and ultimately to overthrow the established order in the Middle East and establish a caliphate.
Naive observers explain this summer’s [2020] protests in terms of African-Americans’ material disadvantages. These are real, as are the (worse) socio-economic problems of the Arab world. But they aren’t the main driver of the protests, which appear to be led mainly by well-off white people. Their ideology goes by many names: cancel culture, social justice, critical race theory, intersectionality. For simplicity, I call it all Wokeism.
The adherents of each [Wokeism and Islamism] constantly pursue ideological purity, certain of their own rectitude. Neither Islamists nor the Woke will engage in debate; both prefer indoctrination of the submissive and damnation of those who resist. The two ideologies have distinctive rituals: Islamists shout “Allahu Akbar” and “Death to America”; the Woke chant “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe.” Islamists pray to Mecca; the Woke take the knee. Both like burning the American flag.
Both ideologies aim to tear down the existing system and replace it with utopias that always turn out to be hellish anarchies: Islamic State in Raqqa, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. Both are collectivist: Group identity trumps the individual. Both tolerate—and often glorify—violence carried out by zealots. Both believe that those who refuse conversion may be harassed, or worse. Both take offense at every opportunity and seek not just apologies but concessions. Islamism inveighs against “blasphemy”; Wokeism wants to outlaw “hate speech.” Islamists use the word “Islamophobia” to silence critics; the Woke do the same with “racism.”
“Sapping” the Foundations of Western Civilization’s “Institutional Citadel”
The “keys” in our American system of government are the ability to control our fundamental institutions and direct them in ways that advance the power of the new revolutionaries. Adolf Berle wrote in his 1969 book, Power, that gaining control of institutions is the best way for people to extend their power beyond the often counter-productive reach of overwhelming violence or civil war. Peter Drucker echoes this view, warning about what he called the “new pluralism”. Drucker explains:
“The new pluralism … focuses on power. It is a pluralism of single-cause, single-interest groups—the “mass movements” of small but highly disciplined minorities. Each of them tries to obtain through power what it could not obtain through numbers or through persuasion. Each is exclusively political.” Peter Drucker, The New Realities 76 (1989).
This attack on history and what we will call “Western thought” is all a strategy, one equivalent to the role of Medieval “sappers” in sieges on fortified towns and castles. The “sappers” burrowed beneath otherwise impenetrable walls to weaken their foundations and then plant destructive charges. The attackers would blow up their planted charges, weakening or destroying the foundations, breach the walls, and conquer the “Citadel”.
This burrowing and “sapping” is what is now occurring and why the “social justice warriors” and activists of today are rewriting history to fit their “narrative”. They are redefining reality in ways aimed at making people feel guilty about what was done a century or more before they or the people they are seeking to shame and intimidate even existed. The aim is to create a strategic version of “Original Sin” by which all people of a specific Identity are tainted. Their only option is to atone by willingly handing over the “keys to the castle”.