The Axis of Woke. Part Two
Wokeness means totalitarianism which means total control over you and me.
An interesting thing about the adjective Woke (with a capital W) is that almost everybody knows what it is, but few people are able to define it or specify its boundaries.
Therefore, in order to write accurately about the Axis of Woke, which I am doing right now, I need to zero in on a clear definition of what Woke or Wokeness or Wokery is.
Thanks to two people, whom I am about to name, I am able to do just that. The people are Giovanni Amendola and Hannah Arendt.
Giovanni Amendola was an Italian journalist who was beaten to death with clubs by fifteen Italian Fascist Blackshirts on April 7, 1926.
Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish political writer who was helped to escape Vichy France in 1941 and who settled in New York. She is famous for her work on the mass-murdering Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, but also wrote a three-volume book entitled The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Giovanni Amendola described totalitarianism as being a specific kind of tyranny, not like ordinary historical tyranny, whose origin as a political phenomenon goes back to Plato and earlier.
The key idea in the totalitarian form of tyranny is the word total. The tyrant doesn’t just control you in one little way or another; he controls you totally.
That’s why, in my first post in this Substack series on The Axis of Woke, I used a title image featuring Mussolini and Hitler, who are part of the original Pact of Steel axis against whom the Allies fought in World War Two. Mussolini and Hitler are not usually associated with the Woke ideology, but my whole point is that Wokeness and Fascism are not all that different when it comes to total control. Furthermore, the idea of Totalitarianism extends to the rogue Left, among whom can include Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Un, and Xi Jinping.
Whereas the early Fascist, National Socialist, and International Socialist totalitarians primarily used intimidation as their method of total control (mobs with clubs, gulags, mass murder, etc.) today’s Woke totalitarians depend more on technolology rather physical violence for total control. Two quick examples:
The Social Credit system used by the Chinese Communist Party.
The de-banking of truckers by the Canadian government to crush a rebellion against vaccination mandates.
Giovanni Amendola, though the originator of the idea of totalitarianism as an ultimate form of tyranny bridging the so-called far right and the so-called far left, was no right-winger himself, having joined a socialist youth organization at age 15, and then having been awarded the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Pisa. A center-leftist, he pursued electoral politics and wrote for newspapers in opposition to Mussolini’s Fascists.
In 1923 he wrote, in the newspaper Il Mondo,
the most salient characteristic of the fascist movement will remain, for those who study it in the future, the ‘totalitarian’ spirit; which does not allow the future to have dawns that will not be greeted with the Roman gesture
The “Roman gesture” to which he referred was the salute with palm spread and arm extended, used, and required, by both Mussolini’s Fascists and and Hitler’s National Socialists. We are, in fact, studying the totalitarian spirit in Amendola’s future, which is our present. The “Roman gesture” has, in my opinion, been replaced by the mandatory announcement of pronouns, the flying on public buildings of odd, non-traditional rainbow flags, and the wearing of surgical masks when the only surgery going on is the excision of thought.
And this brings me to several notable quotes from the very productive pen of Hannah Arendt, beginning with this one concerning the mass murder aided and abetted by Adolf Eichmann, who proclaimed his innocence because he was “only following orders:”
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
Along the same lines, another Hannah Arendt quote:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
And she goes on with her clarification of totalitarianism by describing how the totalitarians make this happen:
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
This, in my opinion, is a paradox of the modern university, whose primary purpose, also in my opinion, is to teach students how to form convictions.
And how do they destroy this capacity to form convictions in students?
The same method that the club-wielding Blackshirts used in April of 1926: intimidation.
Before moving on to contrasting the Axis of World War Two with the Axis of Woke, I’ll give one example of recent intimidation:
The latest outrage occurred at Stanford Law, where a group of students shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan. Here is the story. Source.
What has changed since the Hitler-Mussolini-Tojo Pact of Steel and the present promotion of totalitarianism by the Preachers of Woke?
The difference is technological change, and, in particular, two changes. The first is the widespread deployment of thermonuclear devices which have created worldwide terror of escalating warfare beyond local brutality, as in Afghanistan and Ukraine, and substituting endless “Forever Wars” for World Wars.
The second is the creation of instant global communication via cyberspace, enhanced with machine learning, making it possible to substitute psywar for kinetic warfare. Instead of Blackshirt gangs with clubs targeting journalists that they don’t like, the black shirts of our age are televised, after being filmed in such places as Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis, intimidating anyone with a TV or smartphone screen.
And concerning journalists that they don’t like, the totalitarians of the Axis of Woke employ Cancel Culture, accusing those journalists of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, hate speech, or racism. If the target is a former President of the United States, or an attorney supporting him, then the accusations become indictments and arrests and mug shots.
In the near future, if not occurring already, the roving gangs of Brownshirts and Blackshirts will be substituted by software algorithms, seeking out opinions to be silenced and sending them to the new software of Cancel Culture.
What can be done about the new, high-tech totalitarianism?
We are already doing it. This Substack post is an example.
In future posts in this series on the Axis of Woke, I hope to expand the discussion of what we can do to stop it.
Willful Order Killing Entrepreneurship (WOKE)