Dostoevsky’s 6 Nightmare Prophecies That Came True in the 20th Century, Part One
3) Genocide: The War on Man
From Walter E. Williams’ August 8th column “Liberals, Progressives, and Socialists“:
The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis pale in comparison to the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel’s website here, and in his book “Death by Government.”
The numbers involved stagger the mind. We must shine a spotlight on a truth our modern education system has failed to teach American students: these were all secular, socialist nations that began under the auspices of such lofty-sounding goals as “a workers’ paradise” and “the peoples’ republic.”
Like lambs to the slaughter, millions went simply because dutiful bureaucrats and foot soldiers carried out the orders of philosopher-kings who were ready to sacrifice humanity for the sake of their “rational” and “progressive” and “scientific” system of governance.
And yet this nightmare did not begin to play itself out until a few decades into the 20th century. Some fifty years earlier, a Russian novelist by the name of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky conceived of characters such as the social theorist “Shigalov” in The Devils who announced to the inner circle of socialist revolutionaries he belonged to the logical long-term plan for ruling the people once the czar was toppled:
Dedicating my energies to the study of the social organisation which is in the future to replace the present condition of things, I’ve come to the conviction that all makers of social systems from ancient times up to the present year, 187-, have been dreamers, tellers of fairy-tales, fools who contradicted themselves, who understood nothing of natural science and the strange animal called man…
I suggest as a final solution of the question the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and, through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like the Garden of Eden. They’ll have to work, however. The measures I propose for depriving nine-tenths of mankind of their freedom and transforming them into a herd through the education of whole generations are very remarkable, founded on the facts of nature and highly logical.
To this, the aforementioned ringleader Peter Verkhovensky responds:
“However much you tinker with the world, you can’t make a good job of it, but by cutting off a hundred million heads and so lightening one’s burden, one can jump over the ditch of transforming society more safely. … It’s a new religion, my good friend, coming to take the place of the old one. That’s why so many fighters come forward, and it’s a big movement…
I ask you which you prefer: the slow way, which consists in the composition of socialistic romances and the academic ordering of the destinies of humanity a thousand years hence, while despotism will swallow the savory morsels which would almost fly into your mouths of themselves if you’d take a little trouble; or do you, whatever it may imply, prefer a quicker way which will at last untie your hands, and will let humanity make its own social organisation in freedom and in action, not on paper? They shout “cut off a hundred million heads”; that may be only a metaphor; but why be afraid of it if, with the slow day-dream on paper, despotism in the course of some hundred years will devour not a hundred but five hundred million heads?
What’s one-to-five-hundred million “heads” among friends, right?
Again, keep in mind Dostoevsky penned these words in 1872. Great evils like tyrannical monarchies and human slave-trafficking had existed on planet earth since time began, but this devious mixture of both with a calculated and cavalier attitude toward human life startled those in the 19th century like Dostoevsky who first heard the schemes of the original community organizers (and had the good sense to believe that they’d carry out their plans should they ever gain power).
It’s very difficult for my generation – the current 18 to 35 demographic – to grasp just how much suffering and death and oppression took place in the 20th century. We do not receive a comprehensive version of history in our public schools and institutions of higher education that might shed critical light on ideologies many in academia support. And to be sure, we can’t count on Hollywood and the entertainment industry to pick up any such slack in the culture.
But this matters. Ideas have consequences. Tens of millions died in the last century because of evil ideas.
And if an epileptic, compulsive-gambling, ex-convict in Russia 150 years ago could so accurately peer into the murky future to warn us, the least we can do is simply turn around to take in the much clearer view from this side of world history.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
Dissecting Baby Boomer Liberalism Like a Frog in Science Class
Why Is Identity Politics Evil?
Great, fascinating column! Thank you.
So glad you enjoyed it. I’m clearly no scholar of the man or of literature in general, but I love Dostoevsky’s work and believe he still has much to teach us today.
Thank you for bringing Dostoyevsky’s insights to us in this way. I think he also predicted the rise of the terrorist mindset. His novel “The Devils” is a good example of how the ideology of terrorism arose.
The Devils is probably my favorite book by the great Russian. He really lets the reader know what he thinks of secularism and collectivism, but the story always comes first. That’s so important.
Very interesting. Now I’ve got some more books to add to my collection.
While you’re doing that, add one more: Dostoyevsky’s novella, “Notes from the Underground.” It’s an absolutely brilliant look at human psychology and the nature of modern man, that anticipated Freud and existential philosophy.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll check that one out, too.
Agreed. Notes from the Underground is an intense (however brief) psychological analysis of a man who has pulled himself out of society because of “progressive” ideas he’s embraced (and a spiteful, hateful resentment of those who are happy he’s developed in his soul). Heavy read, but important one.
Interesting article. Makes me sad, though. Evidently, humankind has two choices: be miserable because we neglect each other or be miserable because we won’t stop trying to “improve” each other. Neglect is supposed to be the conservative’s sin; ceaseless interference is definitely the liberal’s. There’s a happy medium somewhere – I think it used to be called “good government.” Unfortunately, it’s no longer fashionable.
BTW, you can whet your appetite and you can wet your whistle but you cannot whet your whistle.
P.S. – you may be able to whip your weasel. I’m not sure how that would help roll back progressivism, though.
Bugs-
Thanks for clearing up the whole whistle/wetting situation!
Many people read Dostoevsky and come away feeling sad. I actually have the opposite reaction – I am reinvigorated to continue “fighting the good fight” and advocating for the values and convictions I cherish. We’ll always have evil people in our midst. We’ll always have those who are suffering. We can’t create Utopia, but we can make things better. And more than anything, I believe, it is the duty of each new generation to battle those forces (in word and deed) who would put an end to our way of life. Not to be overly dramatic, but just like listening to the blues cheers me up, so to does reading Old Fyodor inspire me.
I would have loved to come away happy. Some would say, you have to choose to be positive, but I look into history and I see no time where an advanced civilization decayed and then was renewed. I’m afraid, if there are future generations after then next great world war, that they’ll study the American experiment in government 20 centuries from now, asking, “What contributed to the decline and fall of the United States?”
“be miserable because we neglect each other or be miserable because we won’t stop trying to “improve” each other”
How about pursuing your own dreams, letting others live their lives as they choose, and offering help to the truly needy (rather than, in the modern formulation, the “less fortunate”)? Seems to me that pursuing your own dreams should keep you from being miserable, letting others live their own lives will let them keep from being miserable, and helping the needy will deal with the rough patches everyone encounters.
“Neglect is supposed to be the conservative’s sin”
As a Conservative, I resent this charge. I definitely believe in being a busybody when it comes to sin.
Seriously, neglect is the charge, but that is presuming that government is the only answer. Conservatives believe in the responsibility of each individual to aid others. It is the notion of the collective versus the individual. Left versus Right.
Unlike Dostoevsky, Eric Hoffer, America’s greatest philosopher, was a man of few words. He summed up R.J. Moeller’s thoughtful essay in aphorisms 67 and 104 respectively from “The Passionae Sate of Mind,” in 1954.
“Quite often in history, action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers of the second half of the nineteenth.”
“The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.”
Thank you for mentioning Eric Hoffer, during the height of the Obama worship in 2008, I found his books to be reassuring and challenging. Fight the good fight, indeed.
Thank you, Leigh. I also turn to Eric Hoffer for reassurance and, for lack of a better word, comfort. It is no coincidence that Hoffer has been pushed into obscurity. Liberals don’t like him.
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Karl Marx
This year, tragedy and farce seem to be happening at the same time. Go figure.
I believe the easy way to illuminate the way forward is to shine the light of history on first the past, then the present. Times change; human nature doesn’t.
I have been thinking a lot about this stuff lately as I research my family history and try to make sense of things that were passed down verbally. I have recently learned some terrifying things. Some of them, I was taught in school but it never really settled in. Some other things I was never taught and I believe it was intentional.
Great article. And do you believe, as Sozhenitsyn did, that Dostoevskys’ prophecy that beauty will saveq2 the world will come true ?
That would depend on how one defines beauty. Seeing the beauty of God’s creation in all things – that might help. But that won’t be enough by itself. I never could figure out what Dostoevsky meant by that.
A set of Orthodox Christian religious texts written by the early fathers of the church is called the “Philokalia” – love of beautiful things. As an Orthodox Christian, he might have been aware of that.
Excellent overview of the oft-overlooked “Devils” by F. M. Dostoevsky. I think, in its depiction of a Russian province gone mad with theorizing, conspiracy and murder, it is as relevant and important novel as its great successor, “Brothers Karamazov,” where we witness the same devils at play inside a single family. To me, the single greatest theme of Dostoevsky’s own life and work is the absence of a single positive father figure, from the Tsar who mock-executed him through the sponger/intellectual Verhovensky Sr to Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov on down to the author’s own father who was murdered under murky circumstances by his own serfs. Stavrogin, the enigmatic protagonist (his own father, a general, long since deceased), broods at the center of “Devils,” a darker Hamlet than Hamlet, diseased with secrets. In college, I posited that the essential energy of these novels is the attempt by man to place meaning into the void left by the absence of strong, disciplining, emulable father characters, and I sought to connect this to the “absentee father” situation regnant in our own society, whose ramifications, I am sure you will agree, reach all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Dostoevsky is truly the most influential of all Russia’s cultural contributions. Read him early in life, and often, thereafter, and the world and its people become more transparent. Not that that’s always a good thing. Thank you for the essay.
The only lesson we learn from history is that we fail to learn the lessons of history. It used to be AOL, America On Line. Now it’s AID, America In Decline. God help us.
The only lesson we learn from history is that we fail to learn the lessons of history.
Aptly said. I think I prefer that quote over Santayana’s “those who cannot remember…” quote. I’m going to modify it slightly. The only lesson we learn from history is that we fail to learn from history.
Bill Whittle has his own unique take on America and the lessons of history. He thinks that the spread of tyrannical, socialist big government was a product of the industrial-age urban mindset. He thinks that the information age will eventually undermine that mindset.
As I said in my remarks following the video, I have a lot of reservations about Whittle’s views, and I am less sanguine.
Beauty, no more than gold, “can save the world.” The appreciation of beauty, and of self-reliant pursuit of gold, a sufficiency of it to provide a minimum of security for oneself and family, when “enough is as good as a feast,” can. Beauty is everywhere; too many are too busy hating to see, smell, hear, touch it, to notice. Discovering beauty can become a way of life, but only for those who are willing to quit defining and controlling it for everyone else.
Peter Verkhovensky poses as a beguiling and well-connected socialist dissident. … he wants to make his dad and those in the community suffer and feel humiliation. He craves payback for a miserable childhood. And what better way than to pose as a “man of the people” who is simply trying to overthrow greedy capitalists and oppressive religious traditions?…Stepan Stepan Trofimovich disregarded his family, and consequently his son grew up to want to destroy everyone else’s.
A fairly accurate description of Billy Ayers, motivations tied to his dysfunctional relationship with his father.
Describes other so called “radicals” as well.
“progressivism” as revenge.
(for the record, Mohammad Atta & Osama bin laden had known daddy issues)
the social theorist “Shigalov” in The Devils…
“They’ll have to work, however. The measures I propose for depriving nine-tenths of mankind of their freedom and transforming them into a herd through the education of whole generations are very remarkable, founded on the facts of nature and highly logical.”
A 20th century Russian (ex KGB) lays out the dynamic
Dostoyevsky had a crystal ball which was frequently on the blink. He was a fanatic Russophile (and anti-European) who despised the Pope and Western Christianity.
His most memorable howler as a prophet was his settled conviction that the holy Russian people were going to show the rest of the word how to live a truly civilized and Christ-centered life.
He was also a rabid anti-capitalist.
See Joseph Frank’s masterful biography.
By the way, none of this is meant to detract from D’s supreme artistic powers.
“His most memorable howler as a prophet was his settled conviction that the holy Russian people were going to show the rest of the word how to live a truly civilized and Christ-centered life.”
A howler? Not so much.
It’s what Russian people have done in the past, and are doing today – both in Russia and in the diaspora.
Visit a Russian Orthodox church; there probably is one within reach of wherever you live, and most of them offer English-language services. You’ll probably meet some Russians there.
By the way, I’m American-born and have no Russian relatives.
“His most memorable howler as a prophet was his settled conviction that the holy Russian people were going to show the rest of the word how to live a truly civilized and Christ-centered life.”
Well, there is the old saying about some people existing merely to serve as an example of what not to do….
One of my first passions in literature was for Dostoyevsky. Given the extremes he saw in Russian culture, one could argue that he would see our current system as relatively fair and just. We have done socialism the slow way. Some PJMers use the Gulag and the related exterminations as an example of why we cannot move toward socialism, as such will be the inevitable result here. However, one can more likely make the case that our culture is significantly different than the Russian, which had its Czar, aristocracy, serfs, etc. without our strong middle class. (D. saw Mother Russia as a troika, hurtling out of control. It has always had a much greater range of extremes than our own. A lot of blood was shed in our culture to free the last serfs, the slaves, making it less likely that a Stalin butcher will arise and cause future bloodshed because we embrace Obamacare.
As for the God question, I like Dostoyevsky believe in God (some of the time) because I need one.
“It’s different this time.”
Freedom in Faith
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/the-freedom-of-faith-a-christmas-sermon/#more-137965
Two things missing in the link
1. Jesus said as far as his action from his free will he could no nothing on his own thus he became a willing slave
2. Divine Love the gift from God is something much more than our human love could ever imagine so that it is not just once a week you hear the “voice of God” which makes this feel like a miracle but every single hour of the day so then “miracles” are normal as normal as talking on a telephone and the slavery of blind human thinking his own will has sent him free he sees there is no way out except amnesia acceptance come what may
is that faith in God to this author? Where is you must love the lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind then what happens?
Jesus say you can remove mountains thus comes the religious antichrist as we see with Moses when he made water come out of stone ,he forgot God in that moment thus what is the point of miracles: You must love God with all your mind heart and soul and only then can Divine Love from above flow to you with you childlike faith miracles become normal every single hour of the day
Just a note:
Amazon has the individual works (kindle ed.) available at NO COST.
Plus a ‘Complete Works’ package for $3.00. This Digital Age is paying off.
Dostoevsky has been one of my lodestones. Another of his under-appreciated books is The Idiot in which prince Myshkin’s friends provide a devastating portrayal of “the new man”, which very neatly resembles the proggies of our modern era.
The novel was banned in the Soviet Union until perestroika.
The communist rule (economic policy, ideology, cultural policy, virulent atheism etc) destroyed the social fabric of the society that in the early 20th century, was moving slowly but surely toward democracy and freedom. The communists reversed this process of gradual development, and the country was turned into political and cultural savagery. When that completely artificial system collapsed, the society found itself absolutely defenseless against the brutality of gangsters and transformed monsters of KGB and state apparatus. Seventy years of destruction of human decency and freedom could not go without consequences. It is sad that political maniacs and opportunists of different kinds so ruthlessly raped such a great land for almost a century. Countless millions of people were exterminated, starved to death, thrown to prison camps. This historical lesson should be learned in every American school, but on the contrary, we hear totally the opposite. As my daughter complained about her English teacher who said, “Communism is good, because people worked and had fun together”.
“As my daughter complained about her English teacher who said, “Communism is good, because people worked and had fun together”.”
And they let these dolts near children. Ugh. Forcing children to attend public school is child abuse.
Indeed it is!
Thanks for the article. Looks like I’ll purchase his works next chance I get. Also, as seen over 2,000 years ago, the further leaders get from God, the more perverse they become. Look in the Book of Wisdom 1:1-5
1 Love uprightness you who are rulers on earth, be properly disposed towards the Lord and seek him in simplicity of heart;
2 for he will be found by those who do not put him to the test, revealing himself to those who do not mistrust him.
3 Perverse thoughts, however, separate people from God, and power, when put to the test, confounds the stupid.
4 Wisdom will never enter the soul of a wrong-doer, nor dwell in a body enslaved to sin;
5 for the holy spirit of instruction flees deceitfulness, recoils from unintelligent thoughts, is thwarted by the onset of vice.
Bugs,
Good government, as nearly all Founders commented, requires virtuous citizens. Virtue comes from grace lifting nature, perfecting nature in ways nature without God cannot attain on its own.
As the article notes the nihilist progressives knew they must educate the young to disdain family and God in order to bring the chaos they cherished to rise to power. The twentieth century was a workshop in destroying faith in God by wounding our childrens sense of family, beauty, friendship and prudence.
This 21st century continues the grind down. This will not end well. The terror the progressives seek will come again as in WW2, who knows how it will end. Let’s hope it ends in Beauty.
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Maybe that teacher never knew anyone who had lived under Communism. Fortunately I have; and people who had lived under Nazism, too. They were forced to work together and rarely had fun. Live was cheap and uncertain. Both the Leftists of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany destroyed millions of lives, supposedly for the ultimate good. Both systems were atheist and brought out the worst in humanity.
Marxism is a form of slavery; if you’re one of the 10% it may not be too bad; if you’re in the 90% that is forced to work, well…
BTW: the 10% is called “Communist Cadre’s; “good intentioned” commissars who decide what’s right for the 90%…much like the growing government agencies where the unelected circumvent Congress and make laws and enforce them…
But conning people into the 90% isn’t so hard; get them to sign up for “free” stuff the government has taken from someone else, disarm them and teach them to go hat in hand on their knees to a petty bureaucrat for their basic needs and permissions…
Your papers, please..
That mindset still prevails among liberals on this side of the pond.
10% ruling over the 90%. Makes me think of the tithe. They wish to be the new priest class, meseems.
Newsrealblog, Horowitz’s former site, ran a couple of short pieces on D a couple of years ago. D was first and foremost a Christian, then a Russophile with a true spirit-much like American patriots who love their country–he despised the Jesuits and he he was creamed by the intelligentsia at the end for his “reactionary” turn against the nihilists–Tolstoy ostensibly was at war with him-but in the end stated the book he kept at his bedside night after night was The Brothers Karamazov.Pure genius and a literary prophet.
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/11/12/a-genius-weighs-in-on-the-insanity-of-the-left/
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/06/11/the-left%E2%80%99s-grand-inquisitor-and-the-tea-party/
Thanks for this good article.
A lot of Americans seem to miss the comedy in Doestoyevski’s work, especially in ‘The Possessed’ (The Devils). That’s my second favorite novel by him. And I remember laughing out loud at the antics of his characters in several passages. There is a Marx Brothers quotient to be found in this novel.
There is the well-intentioned, fashionably Liberal society matron who’s frantically planning a grand fete. But the young leftists she helps subsidize are planning to sabotage her ball and spoil her evening. There is Kirillov, a depressed guy, obsessed with suicide. Yet he performs calisthenics every day. He wants to be in tip-top shape when he kills himself. And then there is D’s hilarious parody of rival novelist Ivan Turgenev, who reads his ‘farewell to literature’ at the grand ball. It is hilarious and vicious.
This is a serious and prophetic novel. But it is also funny as Hell in some parts. So be on the look-out for D’s gags.
Stylistically & structurally, it’s a big mess. But that’s true of a lot of his work. But he gives you laughs now and then. And he is probably unrivaled at portraying the awful choices human beings are forced to make under duress.
I’d start off with ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ before reading ‘The Devils’ (Possessed). But that’s just my opinion.
Oh yeah, be forewarned, Dostoyevsky was a deeply flawed man. He was a compulsive gambler, a child molester and a classic anti-Semite. But those flaws aren’t so apparent in these two novels. D had a big problem was with the Liberals of his day. He was once one of them. He was a conservative.
Excellent article.
The lesson of tyrannical History was permanently infused for me. The good sisters in grade school allowed the kids from Poland and Lithuania tell us about the horrors of life under communism. Very real very enlightening. I’ve used this reality to counter argue fascist-progressives through college and Gard School.