The Tale of the Two Systems

So there are pragmatic political systems, when politicians are not restrained by sloppily or sophisticatedly concocted ideology. Such was the capitalism of the laissez-faire period, or today’s China, Russia and even Trumpism.

And there are ideologically driven political systems. Nazism, Soviet Socialism and now Wokism that took over United States and EU.

Since I did’t live under Nazism, I am not going to pontificate on the subject, but I do know something about both Soviets and Wokist way of running the country.

In the Soviet Union, they invented the concept of the workers-peasants State. Mind you, the people who invented it, was Lenin — the member of intelligentsia, Stalin — failed seminarian, and a bunch of scions of various Jewish families, be it wealthy merchants or poor artisans. None of them had anything to do with workers and peasants, but the idea of promoting workers and peasants was very strong. The same corrupt intelligentsia continued to run the show under cynical Stalin; serving the mythical worker and selecting and parading this mythical worker as the new ruler of the country was a must.

Wokism is not much different. It is not a true Marxism that is supposed to care about the plight of real workers and real peasants. No! It is the Soviet style tokenism. When we have the corrupt intelligentsia, running financial, corporate, political, and media institutions, but claiming we are now creating the paradise for “underprivileged.” That’s all.

Workers and peasants are replaced with “underprivileged,” and the token “underprivileged” like Obamas or Oprahs, are turned into the face of the nation, the way, Stalin had turned Stakhanov into the face of the nation. Add to that the endless amount of politically correct commissars, wasting their own and everyone else’s time on indoctrination, brainwashing, and creating alternative sources of power that lead to more confusion and disruption.

Wokism is clearly as effective economically, as was its Soviet predecessor. It surely looks and feels better, but it has the same limitations, that it can’t over-come due to its ideological nature. If ideology says no oil but wind, so be it. If ideology says that Russian gas is bad while American liquefied fracking poison is good, be it. Same was with soviets. Down with genetics, down with computers, or with any other “bourgeois” excesses.

The paradoxical aspect of the present, is that Trump — from one side, and Putin and Xi Jinping on the other, had enough of the ideology, and want to run their countries in a more pragmatic way.

Yet, wokism is still going strong in EU and in Democratic Party of the USA. And apparently even the ever pragmatic Japan had decided to elect some sort of the Woke idiot. These dudes can’t really let it go. In the manner of retarded Brezhnev and Chernenko, they pushed forward Biden and Harris, phony Greens and fake Labor, posh socialists, and blood thirsty antifa and salivate over more ideology-driven wars and cynical propaganda. And as always, it costs people’s lives. A lot of lives. But the ideologues do not care. The purity of the doctrine is what matters.

Granted that a rare politician is capable of learning from history, but still…

I remember a story told by the late Czesław Miłosz, who besides being a Nobel Prize winner in poetry, had also taught Russian literature at Berkeley at one time. So after spending a few weeks discussing Dostoevsky’s Demons, and the horrors of nihilism and terrorism, he gets a note from a student: “Dear Professor, thank you for the class. It opened my eyes. I am quitting the university and joining the Revolution.”

That’s the same conclusion that the EU leader had taken from studying the excesses of Stalinism and Hitlerism.