Thread by @Tinkzorg

This is honestly just an indication of ruling class neurosis and fear in America. Though some other western countries are in the same general ballpark as this, there's a quality to this covid alarlism in the US that remind me of the show trials during the stalinist period.

https://twitter.com/AlecMacGillis/status/1449481545438404608

This isn't some "hurr durr communism bad" point. Stalinist Russia *needed* these show trials against people like Radek and Bukharin, even if they sabotaged the USSR's reputation among communists abroad. It would have been smarter to just kill these people and dump them in a lake.

If you were an enemy of the nazis and they considered you a threat, they just shot you. If you were an enemy of the nazis and well-known enough for your death to be a problem, they handed you a gun and told you to shoot yourself with it, or else your family would suffer.

The idea of staging show trials to "prove" that they were in the right would, generally speaking, have been completely ridiculous to the nazis. To what end? Like why would they need to *prove* anything?

In the soviet case, they were facing the failure of prophecy, with the belief in the advent of a new communist society basically breaking down during the 20s and early 30s. They *needed* to fix these failures to specific causes and individuals to keep the faith alive.

Bukharin, Radek, and basically every old bolshevik that hadn't had the good fortune to die before the purges were going to get murdered anyway. During this period, only a small handful of bolshevik revolutionaries survived. Being an old communist was a veritable death sentence.

But purges like this don't always get dressed up in some big ideological explanation. Most of the time, you just shoot your enemies and that's it. No show trials necessary. In fact, big public rituals like this cost time and resources, so they have to have some purpose.

Where I live, if you tried to get people to do what these americans are doing, everyone would just go "uh... that sounds like a pain in the ass." And then they'd quote some data showing that they didn't have to go through this huge pain in the ass because it doesn't work anyway.

Outside of Stalin's own paranoia, the USSR needed to externalize its own failures and contradictions. The most loyal bolsheviks, that had been with the party the longest, had to be made into "capitalist spies" and "wreckers". "Amputation" was the only way to save communism.

I would bet a lot of money that most people engaging in these rituals of cleanliness in the US know that it is a ritual, even if they'd never say it aloud. They can read the papers, they can see how unique this is. But they're not dupes or brainwashed, they know it is necessary.

In order to "amputate" the US' own "wreckers" and "spies" - this ritual has to be performed. The USSR needed show trials before it killed its old leaders, because if it just said "we're killing them because they can", they wouldn't be communists anymore, just bandits.

That's an aspect to this the boomer right often misses. They think the bolsheviks were just cynical thieves who laughed all the way to the bank. In fact the opposite is true: they were true believers, zealots, and so even their crimes had to be motivated by Scripture.

It just so happened that they were hankering to commit a LOT of crimes, and so scripture had to be used and abused quite a lot as time went on. The nazis weren't bothered. Saddam Hussein wasn't bothered either. Most rulers aren't zealots in this way.

At this point I wonder if liberals don't have the same basic problems. As things stand right now, they just might have to commit a lot of crimes, crimes that are likely to stain the soul in the eyes of the religion, so to speak. And that's why these rituals are now necessary.

The second you, as a democratic liberal, say "well you're in the way, I'm just going to kill you now, buddy", you're no longer a liberal. You're just a bandit. The nazis didn't care about being bandits, so this is what they did. The USSR did, and so they had to have show trials.

Note that I'm not saying that Kamala Harris is Stalin and that there's going to be american gulags building chemical plants with slave labor somewhere in Alaska come next spring. Obviously that isn't true (OR IS IT????????).

But I think it's an important point that needs to be made that these rituals going on here don't happen because people are "stupid". European libs are just as "stupid" as american ones. But you don't see them doing this, because why bother with *useless* rituals?

But in parts of America, these rituals likely *aren't* useless, they are probably necessary to maintain some sort of ideological coherence. Telling people "uhhh, masks don't work" is about as smart as telling the soviet prosecutor "uhhh, Karl Radek isnt working for the english".

*Everybody knows* that Radek isn't working for the english, and that vaccinating and triple masking and then never drinking water unless wearing a hazmat suit doesn't prevent disease. But preventing disease is no longer the point!

I think liberalism in general is preparing mentally to do a lot of things that in 1989 would never have been accepted as being liberal. Just as the communists had to bend themselves into knots to justify summary justice, slave labor, and continued class oppression.

In that light, these rituals don't appear as dumb or irrational. They're probably fairly necessary and on some subconscious level everyone is vaguely aware that what is being done is just a modern take on a ten thousand year old scapegoating rituals.

And those rituals - in whatever form they take - have been with us for ten thousand years because they just work. It really is that simple.

End note: for those interested in reading about what I allude to about the Soviet situation, I warmly recommend the following book:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House…

You can, as always, find it for free on Libgen.