…because they’re advocating going down a road that would have an excellent chance of leading there.
For those unfamiliar with the Red Guards, please see this.
And for those who think I’m engaging in hyperbole, please read an essay appearing today entitled “This is just the beginning.” One of the many interesting things about that sort of call for action is that if the right was anywhere near as power-mad and oppressive as the author seems to think it is, he and his fellow-travelers would already be in prison or worse. But they’re not.
As Orwell said, “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”
That quote is often offered without its context, but if you go here you’ll see the Orwell essay from which it came. Orwell was a politically complex man himself (I wrote about his socialism here), but he was certainly more aware of the dangers than most people.
Here is an except from his essay that shows you the context of the quote, which is about why British writers of the ’30s gravitated towards Communism. I think it’s instructive to take a look:
…[W]hat do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in.…
I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. If was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Füehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises….
But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.
Orwell goes on to quote a poem by W. H. Auden, who during the 30s was a Communist supporter. It contains the phrase “necessary murder” (of the type that is necessary under Communism), and of this Orwell writes [emphasis mine]:
Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.The warmongering to which the English intelligentsia [on the left] gave themselves up in the period 1935-9 was largely based on a sense of personal immunity.
The left in America today thinks it’s already the target of enormous persecution. On the contrary; it enjoys freedoms and liberties only dreamed of in most societies. Fomenting a civil war is a kind of playing with fire by people who may know that fire is hot, but who don’t think it ever will burn them.
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