Censorship and the Collapse of the Soviet Union: Are there Lessons for the USA?

By Frank Ellis

If for decades and decades one is not allowed to tell the truth, people’s minds wander all over the place, getting hopelessly lost. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward[1]

Failure to permit the circulation of new ideas including economic and political ideas, even if unflattering to the state is almost always prima facie proof that the state is weak at its core, and that those in power regard staying there as more important than economic development in the lives of their people.

Alvin Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the edge of the 21st Century[2]

1. Information and a Functioning State
2. Infotropism, Information Deficit and Information Corruption
3. The Origins of Censorship
4. Soviet Censorship
5. Censorship in America
6. Free Speech and Truth
7. Diversity Indoctrination in the Armed Forces & Police
8. Disintegration or Consolidated Tyranny

I. Information and a Functioning State

Every function discharged by a state in whatever form it exists — liberal-democratic, corporatist, authoritarian or totalitarian — requires vast amounts of information and raw data. Some areas, economic and military matters, for example, are more critically-dependent on such raw material than others but the basic point remains that a state in any form cannot discharge even minimal levels of statecraft and competence in all core areas without access to timely and accurate information, just one reason why states conduct censuses. The trend to ever greater complexity — a hallmark of the modern state — generates more information and data which in turn must be processed, stored, protected from unauthorised access, retrieved and analysed. In view of this trend Western states may well be moving to a situation in which the volume, diversity and complexity of information will overwhelm the ability of human agents to make rational decisions.

The trend towards efficient information management did not start with the rise of IBM or the arrival of desktop personal computers in the 1980s. High levels of information complexity and data requiring efficient processing and analysis were being generated by states in the nineteenth century. Thus, in 1917 when Lenin and his revolutionaries seized power they were confronted with the problems of running a state which over the previous four decades had experienced rapid industrialization. Their solutions to state management were ideologically-justified violence and the creation of a massive censorship apparatus. Intended to protect the new Soviet state, this censorship apparatus actually worked against the state, stifling innovation and the exchange of ideas and information and can, in my opinion, be considered to be the main factor in bringing about the final Soviet collapse in 1991. Three decades later, a relevant question is whether the widespread censorship in the public and private sphere in America, primarily in matters of race, feminism and multiculturalism will prove to be as destructive to the survival of the American Republic, as Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist censorship was to the Soviet state.

II. Infotropism, Information Deficit and Information Corruption

All living things regardless of phylogenetic complexity and intelligence are compelled to seek out and to register survival-critical information about their environment. This is the trait of infotropism. With his large brain, the bipedal ape, Homo sapiens sapiens, demonstrates the highest degree of infotropism among all living creatures on Earth. He is driven to understand his origins and recorded history, seeing in the latter the vague and inchoate possibilities of his future. In order to satisfy his curiosity he climbs the tallest mountains, sails the oceans, explores their depths, penetrates the world’s jungles, taiga and deserts and stands in awe and ecstasy in the presence of what Jack London called the “white silence.” But our Earth is not enough. In the second half of the twentieth century man’s lust for knowledge and exploration has propelled him to the Moon and he has sent his probes to Mars and beyond. Homo will not stop until he knows everything about everything. His drive to know is relentless and unstoppable: it is his defining feature.

Two reactions to infotropism are the creation of information deficit and active corruption of information. The first arises when power structures contrive to deny information to societies or to prohibit the flow of ideas. This is the behaviour most commonly associated with censorship, though, in well defined situations access to information vital to state security and defence is strictly and properly controlled. In order to bring about certain outcomes considered desirable by the state it is not enough to deny information and restrict its flow. An understanding or narrative of the world which is based not on empirically reliable and verifiable information — because the state withholds the information or will not allow it to be made available to individuals — has to be constructed to fill the void. This leads to information corruption (fake news is a variation on this process). For example, the Soviet state explained away food shortages and lack of consumer goods as being due to saboteurs and wreckers: naturally it had nothing to do with the appalling inefficiency of state ownership of the means of production. In twenty-first century America it is official state policy to claim that race and sex differences are socially and politically constructed and to deny any connection between low mean black IQ and educational failure and high levels of crime. Black educational failure, it is maintained, can only be due to all kinds of racism and the consequences of “whiteness” and “white skin privilege.” Any other publicly expressed explanation is political and social death.

III. The Origins of Censorship

The more complex a society becomes the more information it generates and the more vital this information becomes not just in the discharge of the practical affairs of state but also in the exercise of power whether pursued for religious, political or, eventually, in the twentieth century, for ideological reasons. The exercise of power based on a particular religious or a political doctrine must offer a compellingly coherent explanation of the world in order to justify its claims to pre-eminent status. At the very least a majority of people must be persuaded to suspend any sense of disbelief. From these claims arise the conflicts in man’s affairs; between rulers and ruled, and the struggle between the defenders of any orthodoxy and dissenters and heretics. This describes the contemporary conflict between those who propagate and impose the cult of multiculturalism and those who resist it. The contestants change but it is, in essence, a very familiar and ancient power struggle. Here, too, in these early struggles “free” and “speech” become conjoined to give us one of the West’s fundamental ideas: speech which is not free defines the slave.

The initial contests were typically theological. They may have been intra-theocratic, an internal power struggle among competing doctrines to assert the one true faith or inter-theocratic, between competing world views. Intra-theocratic disputes were especially dangerous and destabilizing since dissenters from theological orthodoxy threatened to undermine the all-important relationship between rulers whose secular legitimacy relied on its being blessed — often literally — by theology. The priestly caste (theocracy) provided justification for the exercise of power based on some supporting interpretation of unique patristic texts and revealed truths.

In societies largely shaped and dominated by the expressions and rituals of religious faith, deviation from theological doctrine threatened not just the privileged position of the church in the state, its claim to be the sole interpreter and doctor of the faith, but also the very existence of the state itself. In such a climate effective censorship and the eradication of heresy could determine whether the state survived. It was precisely this fear — this dread — that inspired the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome, the final bastion of the true faith. Two versions of Rome have succumbed to heresy (Rome and Constantinople): there will be no fourth Rome for Moscow will not fall. In this age of neo-orthodoxy all heresies must be crushed.

In these early disputes, before the emergence of industrialization, the theocracy enjoyed a number of advantages, specifically:

(i). It was symbiotically linked with power and through this relationship had ready access to the means of violence and other forms of oppression. It was able to incite violence against opponents (Today’s politically-correct castes enjoy similar powers and readily use them against dissenters);

(ii). It owned large holdings of fertile agricultural land, along with forests. It controlled access through strictly enforced hunting laws to high quality wild protein (hare, deer, boar and wild fowl) and enjoyed exclusive riparian rights in major rivers. It was a major employer and owner of housing and was, therefore, able to deny the means of survival to deplorables and rebels (Western states are major employers and the threat of unemployment mandates full public conformity with the cult the full extent of which is being revealed by the work of Chris Rufo. Western universities seek to control vast intellectual assets);

(iii). Its presence was universal and although this arose from the need to minister to the flock it also functioned as an effective intelligence-gathering agency, warning rulers of discontent and potential rebellions in the rural areas beyond the cities. In such a way it enhanced its status in the eyes of any ruler. Moreover, since the theocracy acquired the information through its own administrative structure, one that functioned independently of any king or queen, it could determine, based on an assessment of its own interests, whether to withhold or to disseminate information. Information that might help a ruler who was well disposed to the church could be passed on; whereas information that weakened a ruler hostile to the church could be withheld (Western universities censor information that undermines the multicultural world view, data about low black SAT and GPA, for example);

(iv). The theocracy, having earlier determined what constituted the key patristic texts, secured itself a major advantage since disputes would be fought on intellectual and theological terrain of its choice (Neo-Marxist publications and organisations enjoy special status: they set the standard and tone of any discussion and universities function as ideological gatekeepers claiming to be uniquely qualified to function as the interpreters of history, culture, language and art);

(v). The theocracy often enjoyed a near complete monopoly in literacy. Thus its interpretation of patristic texts and commentary could not easily be challenged, if at all. Illiteracy, it turns out, is a highly effective form of passive censorship and oppression. Literate individuals who posed a threat could be ostracized, demonized, excommunicated, forced into exile, executed, anathematized, their ideas, texts, books and pamphlets proscribed (Today, dissenters can be censored, doxed, subjected to physical intimidation, rendered unemployed, denied publishing contracts, de-platformed and reduced to penury. The proliferation of university courses based on fabricated grievances — black studies, critical race theory and feminism — ensures very low intellectual standards. The outcome is ideologically and deliberately induced ignorance about the world. Things are made worse for the student, or rather the subject of this experiment, by the inculcation of disdain for “reason,” “logic,” “evidence” and “truth,” and even reading. Thus the subject is denied the tools which might have made it possible to navigate an escape route out of the educational-corrective facility, still often referred to as a university. The intellectual and moral damage may well be permanent or long lasting. The effects of this indoctrination, combined with disregard for reasoned analysis, exert an even greater negative effect on understanding the world than illiteracy did in earlier ages: the man who could not read and write at least knew it, whereas today’s radicals believe they possess special insight, blissfully unaware that they have succumbed to, and been possessed by, nonsense);

(vi). In pre-industrial societies the lack of literacy meant that rebellions against crown and church tended to be based on a very rudimentary theological understanding and more on long-standing and deep-seated resentments the causes of which had been repeatedly ignored. When rebellions eventually occur they released extraordinary levels of cruelty and violence. By this time the rebels were driven by revenge as much as by any desire for reform (Persecution masquerading as restitutional justice, along with censorship, affirmative action and demonization of whites contribute to a climate which makes volcanic violence far more likely).

In general terms the above synopsis describes the way the prerogatives and interests of power — religious and secular — arose and were maintained in a pre-industrial age but the methods cited have not exhausted their utility. Not only has multiculturalism which survived, and evolved from, the rubble of Soviet communism become the ruling cult in Western states it is also zealously supported by Western churches whose position as the cultural oracle, certainly in Britain, has been usurped and superseded by the neo-Marxist BBC. As a major employer the state can propagandize multiculturalism and so-called “critical race theory,” imposing these ideas on willing or unwilling employees. The universities, now the fanatical advocates of politically-correct ideas, have emerged to replace the medieval churches as the most salacious persecutors of dissenters and heretics. Like the medieval churches before them, they are well placed to shape the terms on which any discussion of free speech and the constituent causes of multiculturalism take place so as to ensure maximum propaganda advantage and isolation of enemies.

IV. Soviet Censorship

In the revolutionary underground Lenin squabbled and argued with the comrades about the future Russia they would build after R-Day. In power, Lenin had no intention of allowing unfettered discussion and dissemination of ideas among either apparent allies or opponents. Party members were now required to follow the latest line on any given matter laid down by the Party (read Lenin). Factionalism was now a deadly sin and ideas hostile to socialism, implicit or explicit, had to be suppressed not merely because they offered a counter to the ideological world view disseminated by the emerging Soviet agitation and propaganda apparatus but also because, according to Lenin, they were harmful and incorrect (nepravil’nye). As Valentin Turchin noted: “The chief function of the Soviet press is to ‘educate,’ not to inform. Information is allowed only to the extent that it does not interfere with the ‘educating.’”[3] Politically incorrect ideas were aberrations of the mind and had to be combated in the same way a physician treated disease. Here one sees the basis of psychiatric abuse that was deployed against Soviet dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s. Historically, Lenin’s recourse to censorship was, therefore, nothing new, but its practical, ideologically-based features, its scope and depth, its destructive nature and longevity — formally abolished only as late as 1st August 1990 — made it a unique institution in the history of ideas and the war against them. In these circumstances ad hominem attacks easily mutated to the mass physical and ideologically-justified destruction of opponents: genocide.

The other unique aspect to Soviet censorship which only fully emerged after the Soviet collapse was the damage it had inflicted. Censorship undermined the day-to-day functioning of the Soviet state. For example, the 1937 census conducted after the genocide in Ukraine and mass starvation elsewhere showed a reduction in the projected population increase by about 10-12 million (a source cited by Robert Conquest put the deficit at 15-16 million). So Stalin had the census-takers shot. Another census compiled by new personnel told him what he wanted to hear. Soviet-style censorship also undermines the quest for the new and undiscovered. This threat arose directly from the ideological postulates of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. From class struggle which played so central a role in Soviet ideology, can be deduced, it is claimed, the course of historical progress and the means to bring about the classless society. Bearing the imprimatur of Lenin and Stalin, this interpretation of history and how it will end acquires infallible status and since Lenin, its primary architect has solved the essential questions of historical progress, it marks the end of all intellectual progress. That the essential questions have been posed and answered means that no more remain. It is the End of History.

An ideological view of the world which is divorced from the way human beings actually behave and which propagandizes idealised behaviour as real-existing behaviour must suppress information and reportage presenting a world and human behaviour which deviate from the new ideological norms established by Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. A declaration from the Party that the nationalities question has been solved means that inter-racial strife and conflict which bedevilled the multiracial Soviet state throughout its existence can never be admitted to exist. Any decree to the effect that the nationalities question has been solved means not only that it no longer exists: the problem never existed.

Meanwhile, the hatreds fester, and everybody knows it. When in the second half of the 1980s these inter-racial stresses and hatreds were finally acknowledged, the damage was done. This was the moment when Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians and Ukrainians, among others, started to reassert long-suppressed racial and cultural identities eventually going their own ways, an outcome envisaged by Richard Pipes in 1967. Further south, at the same time, the same multicultural happy-family myth assiduously cultivated and ruthlessly imposed by Tito since 1945 (Tito died in 1980) was also falling apart, ending in genocidal wars of separation. In Ukraine, blanket Soviet censorship of the Holodomor played its part. Imagine, you are a Ukrainian being told in school and later that only a few kulaks hostile to the Soviet state perished in the drive to collectivize agriculture in the 1930s when the reality was that 6 million people were exterminated in Ukraine alone. Every Westerner knows about the Armenian Genocide, Holocaust and Year Zero but why the appalling ignorance about the Ukrainian genocide, the Holodomor? In Russia today there is no wish to talk about the genocide — Stalin is enjoying something of a comeback — but why is the Holodomor denied and ignored in the West’s educational institutions and Hollywood? I surmise that in the West today there is, despite what is known, a great deal of residual sympathy and even affection for the Soviet experiment, and these sympathisers have no interest in acknowledging the Holodomor. So it is subjected to censorship: the genocidal violence is killed by silence.

The Soviet censorship apparatus tried to hide the full scale of the ecological disaster caused by Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands project, the destruction of the Aral Sea and the damaged being inflicted on Lake Baikal, one of the wonders of the world. The 1930s saw the rise of the Lysenkoism (Trofim Lysenko) and his particular brand of genetics according to which plants and animals could be changed merely by environmental manipulation. Applied to man, these policies would lead to the creation of the new Soviet man, Homo sovieticus. An opponent of Lysenkoism, the famous geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested and died in an NKVD prison. Since the Soviet farming system based on the kolkhoz (collective farm) was relentlessly propagandized as the pinnacle of agricultural production — it was certainly the pinnacle of ideological production — its origins in the genocide of the 1930s and its failure to produce the required amounts of grain and meat could never be admitted. Thus arose the grotesque situation in which the Soviet state in order to make good the self-inflicted grain deficits had to purchase grain on global markets. Consider that Tsarist Russia generated grain surpluses for export. In fact, collectivization of agriculture was such a catastrophe that the Soviet regime made every effort, as Boris Pasternak noted in Doctor Zhivago, “to terrorise people, to stop them judging and thinking for themselves and to compel them to see that which did not exist and to prove the opposite of what could be seen.”[4] So began in the 1930s the reign of terror carried out by Nikolai Ezhov, one of Stalin’s minions.

Control of information flows which was mandated by the need to protect the Soviet infosphere from Western ideas and reportage effectively ruled out the widespread use of personal computers, tape cassette recorders, high-quality cameras, fax machines, camcorders, videos, photocopiers, mobile satellite television and electronic mail so denying the Soviet economy the benefits of these media as enablers of wealth creation and innovation. By contrast, the West fully and devastatingly exploited these media in the 1980s. One of the central policies in Gorbachev’s reform process was glasnost (openness). Gorbachev took the view that opening up the Soviet past to scrutiny, essentially the Stalin period, would heal the wounds and make it possible for the Soviet Union to reconstruct itself and prosper (perestroika).

This policy (glasnost) failed for two specific reasons. To begin with, there was the scale and depth of the revelations about Stalin and his own policies: genocide in Ukraine, mass deportations of national minorities during the war (Volga Germans, Chechen-Ingush, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, Karachaev, Balkar, accompanied by the long-suffering Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Poles), the forced-labour colonies (Gulag), the Great Terror, the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler, complete with secret protocols, and the disastrous conduct of the war. From about 1985 onwards the literary journals were finally allowed to publish long-banned and censored authors: Andrei Platonov (The Foundation Pit), Evgenii Zamiatin (We), Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago), Vasilii Grossman (Life and Fate & Everything Flows), the works of the great Sage, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Gulag Archipelago) and even a Russian translation of 1984.

Towards the very end of the Soviet state’s existence Gorbachev finally admitted, so confirming what had long been known in the West, though denied by Western Sovietophiles, that the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, not the Gestapo, had murdered 21,857 Polish prisoners of war in the mass executions generally referred to as the Katyn massacre. My research on the mass deportations of Soviet minorities suggests that another batch of Polish prisoners of war may also have been murdered (11,516), so taking the execution death toll to 33,373. In 1990, it was revealed that the mobile gas killing vans, which, it had always been claimed since Nürnberg, were pioneered by the German extermination squads, the Einsatzgruppen, had in fact been invented and first used by the NKVD in 1937. Overwhelmed by the number of prisoners sentenced to death at the height of the Great Terror, the NKVD desperately needed an efficient method of mass killing. The administrative section of the NKVD Directorate in Moscow, supervised by Isai Davidovich Berg, a middle-ranking official, provided the final solution. So that large numbers of prisoners could be executed at once, vans were converted into mobile gas chambers. Prisoners were stripped naked, hands tied behind their backs, gagged and placed in the rear of the van. A tube from the exhaust pipe would be directed into the rear of the van. By the time the vans, camouflaged as bread delivery vehicles, arrived at the pre-dug burial pits on the outskirts of Moscow, the prisoners were dead. Any prisoners who survived this truly terrible journey to the devil’s pit got a bullet in the neck. Berg was shot in 1939 and rehabilitated (!) in 1956. Consider, too, that it was only in 1993, two years after the Soviet collapse, and fifty years after the battle itself, that Russians finally learned the official cost in lives of defending and recapturing Stalingrad from German 6th Army: 1,129,619 killed, wounded and missing.

The second factor was that glasnost fortuitously exposed the crimes of Stalin and then Lenin at the very moment when the power of the new electronic media to broadcast instant news to anywhere on the planet occurred. This meant that the weaknesses of the Soviet state, hidden and denied for so long or protected by censorship, were exposed simultaneously, rapidly and in concentrated form to maximum internal and external scrutiny. The cumbersome ideological and time-consuming pre-transmission controls to which Soviet mass media were routinely subjected allowed Western mass media organisations to react quickly and to set and to dominate the agenda. Inside the Soviet Union, however, some print and television journalists were making the most of the new openness while they could fearful that Gorbachev would be ousted. The Russian proverb — kui zhelezo, poka goriacho (strike while the iron is hot) was adapted to kui zhelezo, poka Gorbachev (strike the iron while Gorbachev is still in power or make the most of things while you can). Externally, the waves of revelations about Stalin generated extraordinary interest and it was thoroughly delightful to watch those Western academics and politicians squirm as the real nature of the state they had always venerated and defended as some utopia was publicly and finally exposed for the monstrous and depraved totalitarian prison it always was.

The cumulative effects and critical mass of these revelations so totally discredited the Soviet experiment that it could not be reformed, even by an incompetent coup attempt (August 1991) — it was simply too dreadful — and the Soviet Union ceased to exist at the end of 1991. It is possible that some version of the Soviet state might have survived had Gorbachev-style reforms been launched in the 1950s after Stalin’s death, but Khrushchev, Molotov, Brezhnev, Suslov (and the rest of the gang) — Stalin’s very willing executioners — had no intention of allowing their role in Stalin’s crimes to be examined and having to face the possibility of some version of a Nürnberg War Crimes Tribunal.

V. Censorship in America

Censorship was so ultimately destructive of the Soviet state because it affected just about every aspect of Soviet life. More efficient methods of industrial and agricultural production were not adopted because adoption of these methods would necessarily mean that the Party would have to relinquish control over information flows. Once that happened it would inevitably have led to an examination of the past (Lenin and Stalin) and demands for change, even from within the Party. The pervasively destructive strata of censorship which characterised the Soviet state and society and which inflicted such damage on the economy do not yet exist in America, and are unlikely in the foreseeable future. Censoring the obviously very awkward questions on low mean black IQ and crime inflicts no damage on the sectors of the economy that matter, STEM, weapons and space research, robotics and AI. As long as these areas and emerging technologies are left alone and not substantially contaminated by critical race theory, as opposed to their scientists being merely irritated by it, no real harm will be done.

Interestingly, there is something of a Soviet precedent. In his epic novel, Life and Fate, Vasilii Grossman records the ideological persecution to which Soviet scientists were subjected just after WWII when the Party was reasserting its control over intellectual life which had been relaxed somewhat during the war. Citing or praising Western scientists (Gregor Mendel, Norbert Wiener, Albert Einstein, William Shannon) was now deemed to be kowtowing to the West (rabolepstvo pered zapadom) and degrading to the achievements of Soviet science. One of Grossman’s characters defends Einstein, providing a brutal putdown to those who believed Lenin’s views on matter should be taken seriously: “Modern physics without Einstein — is the physics of apes. We have no right to joke about the names of Einstein, Galileo, and Newton.”[5] Whatever Soviet propaganda campaigns said about kowtowing to Western science, dialectical materialism was not allowed to obstruct Soviet attempts to get the atomic bomb. The institute charged with the task under the supervision of Igor’ Kurchatov, which received a steady stream of priceless data on the progress of the Manhattan Project from Western agents of the NKGB, the decisive factor in the successful Soviet atomic bomb programme, was left alone.

Today, in Silicon Valley, NASA and in the Pentagon, whatever the public statements on “diversity,” it is also clearly understood that ICBMs, Falcon rockets, C4ISTAR and high performance combat aircraft do not function according to the ravings of critical race theory. China’s rise to power and wealth began when Mao was shunted sideways. Mao can still be venerated as the Great Helmsman, or as a sheng ren, a “sacred man,” but China’s leaders know that in order to build supersonic missiles capable of sinking US aircraft carriers they need designers and engineers who can master the necessary mathematics and physics not Maoist zealotry. I make a prediction: should sometime in the next three decades the Chinese project to isolate the genetic factors determining higher IQ achieve success such that it becomes commercially viable for parents to consider gene-editing at some stage in pregnancy, very large numbers of wealthy liberal Americans and Britons, the same people who today will publicly condemn such a procedure as eugenics and the “sort of thing the Nazis would have done,” will be booking flights to Wuhan.

Affirmative action and equal opportunities programmes blight American life. Once again, there is a Soviet precedent for what appears to be a uniquely self-inflicted, American ill. Eager to secure the loyalty of the national minorities, the Soviet state initiated a policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization) which accorded priority to national minorities in employment and education. The main victims were Russians who were denied posts and promotions so that incompetent and often barely literate national minorities could be hired. Over the period from 1924 to 1932 Soviet affirmative action policies in education anticipate to an extraordinary and accurate degree what is now standard practice in American educational institutions. The most important qualification determining entry to a higher education institute was race (ethnicity) not ability. As Terry Martin notes in The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (2001), ‘Russians interpreted korenizatsiia as a deep and undeserved status insult.’ Those who objected were accused of manifesting “Great Russian chauvinism” (an early version of “white skin privilege”). Soviet affirmative action policies also prefigured the dysfunctional and unexpected outcomes which today can be observed in America: racial (ethnic) segregation, incompetence and permanent racial tension which can and does erupt into violence on the flimsiest of pretexts.

The Soviet commitment to the eradication of illiteracy combined with an attempt to portray the Party and its programme as the natural and moral heirs to the social activism of nineteenth-century writers eventually worked against the Soviet regime. Soviet socialist realism was not merely propaganda, but very poor propaganda and no match for the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Contemporary ideologues of diversity have learned the lesson. Since it is not yet possible to ban the likes of Plato, Thucydides and Shakespeare — authors who give people ideas unwelcome to diversity — they have to be neutralised in other ways: so-called “dead white European men” can be removed from the curriculum; their hidden agendas can be “deconstructed” and exposed as “racist” and “sexist” (what else); or plays and novels can be subjected to ideological re-writing in which white characters are now non-white. Film is the ideal medium for diversophile propaganda since the combination of music, pace of action, intense emotional responses, plausible, even blatant lying and often outstanding acting work to overwhelm the critical faculties of viewers in the cinema temple. And now the affirmative-action assassins have come for Bond: 007 is black and always has been.

VI. Free Speech and Truth

Tsarist Russia had no established tradition of free speech, though there were encouraging signs, so it was very straightforward for Lenin to maintain and to strengthen censorship after 1917. Unlike the Soviet Union, America has a strong tradition of free speech and in all kinds of ways is still the most open society in the world. Free speech in America is undeniably under attack but it is far from defeated. It is, however, being stealthily abandoned. If too many Americans (and Britons) behave as if they are not allowed to say certain things when it is perfectly reasonable and lawful to say them, then, over time the institution of free speech will be weakened. In such circumstances, it will cease to be an essential right, recognised and valued as such, and will come to be regarded as a relic of a barbarous age whose time has passed. If a majority of Americans come to accept that status, formal abolition will not be necessary since appeals to free speech will be invite contempt or appeals to free speech will be merely symbolic, ceremonial vestiges of an abandoned right, and in any case, no American will by then have the intellectual and moral courage to stand up and break the power of the Lie.

Defence of the right to state that mean black IQ is lower than mean white IQ as an exclusive free-speech right is perfectly reasonable but runs the risk that it inadvertently invites the suspicion that the speaker is merely being deliberately provocative. Thus, the speaker is to be dismissed as an ignorant demagogue, though the fact that assertions about low mean black IQ are met with visceral hatred and not laughter suggests that the attackers know and fear the truth. By asserting that the statement — mean black IQ is lower that mean white IQ — is a true statement, the speaker challenges any opponent to make the case against his claim or to concede the point. In any normally functioning university that is how the matter would be resolved.

Critically important though free speech is, the struggle to break the power exerted by multiculturalism on public life is not exclusively or essentially one of free speech. Ultimately the struggle is a matter of truth and the right — the obligation — to pursue the truth and to assert something as true. The statement that mean black IQ is lower than mean white IQ and that evolution and genes account for most of the difference is, I assert, a true statement or much closer to the truth than competing explanations. Those who reject that assertion as false can and will, of course, denounce it as “racist” which ignores the obvious question whether it is true. If, on the other hand, they are themselves truth seekers and not truth-denying revolutionaries, they can enter the intellectual arena and demonstrate why the assertion is false. I shall listen to what they say. This is where free speech is so important since free speech is the facilitator, the instrument by means of which one gets to the truth or something as close to it as possible.

Things are complicated by the fact that the very notion of truth is rejected. It is, apparently, a mere social and political construct. Recall the statement, very common in the 1980s, that “there are no privileged perspectives.” I ask in passing whether the assertion that truth is a social and political construct is itself socially and politically constructed. If so, what are the means and criteria I must use in order to discriminate between competing social and political constructs of the truth: reason, my feelings, the mob, ideological intimidation or guns? If truth is a social and political construct, what then is the status of the claim that the statement — black mean IQ is lower than white mean IQ — is “racist”? Can accusations of racism ever be true? It suits the upholders of racial orthodoxy in universities to claim that truth effectively does not exist because they have indirectly declared war on the truth (thereby acknowledging its existence and traditional application). They cannot mount a direct assault on truth so statements which enrage them are not examined on the basis that they might be true but are instantly dismissed on the basis that they are “racist” and, therefore, need not be considered. The process by means of which the speaker in these circumstances knows that something is “racist” or “sexist” is never explained. In seeking out class enemies the Soviet commissar and censor would be guided by their infallible sense of “revolutionary justice,” whereas the woking class radical is guided by the strength of her commitment, her feelings and her infallible sense of “social justice” in identifying “racists” and “sexists” and the hordes of prefixed “phobes.”

It is also significant that those who claim that truth is a social and political construct, thereby materially and irreversibly changing any accepted meaning, and the procedure for ascertaining the truth, nevertheless retain the use of the word truth. For the sake of clarity, honesty and truthfulness, a new word embodying this radically changed concept is required. That the radical left has not concocted a new word to replace what its ideologues consider to be the outdated “truth” when it routinely bombards the world with ever new additions to its woke vocabulary, suggests that use of truth is retained in order to deceive the unwary, which is why university charters continue to declare a commitment to truth and academic freedom while terrorizing those who exercise their rights to academic freedom and who pursue and articulate the truth.

The last Soviet Constitution (1977) provides the precedent for this persecution. Article 50 granted Soviet citizens rights to free speech and printing provided the exercise of the right was ‘consistent with the interests of the people and with the aims of strengthening and developing the socialist structure.’ Everything is permitted provided the Party approves. Demanding, in other words, the abolition of an economic system based on the common ownership of the means of production would be anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary. The provisions of Article 50 are reinforced by Article 62 which stipulates that a Soviet citizen ‘is obliged to safeguard the interests of the Soviet state, to strengthen its power and authority.’ So, denouncing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979) would also make you an “enemy of the people.” This same Constitution also granted constituent republics the right to secede from the Soviet Union — Article 72 — as long as the “right” was not exercised. In America today the tacit, often explicit demand, is that the exercise of free speech ‘must be consistent with the interests of people of colour and must strengthen and develop diversity.’

Additional consequences stem from the claim that “truth is a social and political construct.” If the factors in determining truth are social and political, as opposed to something that has to be uncovered from available data, the way is open for the ideologue to construct the truth by applying intense social and political pressure to a population: emotions, the powerful need to belong, the spurious sense of democracy, mob violence, the sense of being part of an élite vanguard and sheer feelgoodery now become the publicly approved methods to determine what constitutes truth. This is what is meant by the “social and political construction of truth.” Mass propaganda (Soviet and Maoist) and contemporary social media sites can be used to generate intense emotional pressure to accept, and to conform to, whatever is deemed to be ideologically correct.

Socially and politically constructed statements about anything are not permanent and can be changed in an instant to suit the whims and plans of the revolutionaries. The impact on language and culture is striking: everything is in constant flux and this lack of certainty induces disorientation, and may well be a factor in what Angus Deaton has identified as “deaths of despair.” In such circumstances, in the chaos of revolutionary uncertainty, the utterances of various individuals — Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and their contemporary imitators — acquire the status of holy writ. Further, if the truth about anything is constructed according to ideological exigencies and not something to be discovered then the ideologue in search of a better world can build the future on the basis of his blueprint, regardless of any objective physical limitations or obstacles. The outcome of the 1937 census displeased Stalin so he took appropriate measures to rectify the egregious errors of the census takers. In such a way, the Dear Leader, Ideologue Supreme, creates the future in an act of titanic will.

Truth is not a luxury or the exclusive preserve of philosophers: it is survival-critical. Our ancestors who ignored the danger posed by the sabre-toothed tiger, believing that it was a harmless, misunderstood herbivore which just needed a loving hug, would not have survived very long. In view of the fact that being able to distinguish between “false”/“probably false” and “true”/“probably true” is so survival-critical — and remains so — there will be a strong genetic basis for pursuing the truth and being able to differentiate between “true” and “false.” Greater social complexity and knowledge about the environment also require higher orders of abstract thinking in order, among other things, to separate “true” from “false,” with or without the corrupting effects of theocracy, Marxism-Leninism, political correctness and the woking classes. If, in fitness terms there is a clear benefit to pursuing and knowing the truth, there will also be a clear advantage in distorting the truth, lying and deception, yet another survival-critical reason why the ability to discriminate between “false” and “true” is so important. This is why states have intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies: they seek out information (infotropism); they deny states information (information deficit); and they deceive states about their intentions (information corruption). Sunday, 22nd June 1941 and Tuesday, 6th June 1944 represent the gold standard in terms of information acquisition, denial and deception.

Here is another problem. People of average intelligence who are able to discriminate between “true” and “false” but who knowingly accept “false” as “true” in the name of some cause confirm the extraordinary power of group pressure to secure conformity. National Socialism, Maoist China and Soviet communism, sought to achieve a unified, conformist, contesserate mind. Post-Maoist, largely racially homogenous China pursues the same end, as does multiculturalism in America. Both states have systems of social credit: explicit in China; tacit in America. Social media platforms are huge enablers, bringing us ever closer to total unanimity. Another paradox is that the more sophisticated liars, dissemblers and deceivers who propagandize multiculturalism as a good thing know the true state of multiculturalism — they must know — since in order that their lies and deceptions are effective they must possess some true standard or set of criteria from which their statements (lies) can plausibly deviate: I need to know where I have laid my anti-personnel mines in order not to step on them. A person who insists that “diversity is a strength” but avoids it in his private life reveals what he really thinks about “diversity.” Not only that, diversophiles are striving — they claim — to build a better world. Claims that a better world has been built cannot be tested if there are no agreed criteria of truth. Thus, in the Soviet Union the Lie must be upheld by permanent repression (censorship) until the empire collapses under the weight of lies, and in America multiculturalism must be maintained by permanent lies and increasing repression.

Homo’s brain is the ultimate, evolutionarily-determined infotropic instrument. From this it follows that the Left’s attempt to terrorise people into believing that in terms of IQ there are no real differences between blacks and whites and that where any differences do exist they have no basis in genes amounts, firstly, to an experiment to impose acceptance along the lines of the Solomon Asch group conformity experiment, though on a global scale, and, secondly, given the role played by evolution in selecting for Homo’s uniquely and intensely directed infotropic brain, amounts to an attempt to liquidate the evolutionary advantage derived from such a brain. In other words, the war against truth is, in evolutionary terms, totally regressive and maladaptive. It arises largely, as do so many other left-wing malaises, from the left’s almost religious belief that human affairs somehow, almost miraculously, operate independently of biology.

VII. Diversity Indoctrination in the Armed Forces & Police

Both the Red Army and its successor, the Soviet Army, were subjected to strict ideological supervision and indoctrination. An unanswered question and one that will require much greater scrutiny in the years ahead is the degree to which at least thirty years of affirmative action and “diversity” indoctrination have undermined the US armed forces. I wonder whether the assumption — one to which I incline myself — that members of the armed forces and police overwhelmingly reject diversity is entirely reliable or stable. Soldiers do not enjoy any greater degree of immunity to politically-correct lying than the rest of us. As the Tsarist army fell apart in 1917 there was no shortage of Tsarist officers and NCOs who threw their lot in with the new regime (Georgii Zhukov, later Marshal of the Soviet Union, was one of them). Former members of the Wehrmacht, SS and Gestapo readily accepted employment in the US and DDR. Members of the armed forces (and police forces) are adaptable. This is why the indoctrination of the armed forces with critical race theory is potentially dangerous, since it is far more than an attempt to make its members “diversity-aware.” These programmes have long-term goals one of which is to create a cadre of future military leaders and administrators whose loyalty is not to the Constitution in its present form but to an emerging, redrafted one. An American government that wanted to move to an even harsher interpretation and imposition of diversity would find it much easier to accomplish such goals if it was able to rely on armed forces that had been conditioned to accept the ideological programme of diversity, and was commanded by men and women who had internalised the programme and whose career progression depended on ideological loyalty.

The same applies to the police. Do not be fooled by calls to defund them. Calls to defund the police really mean defund police forces as they are presently constructed and reinvent them as a “people’s militia,” a police force whose loyalty is to the revolutionary programme of “diversity.” The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle is an example. Once again there is a Soviet precedent. Riots, looting and a breakdown in law and order create a vacuum which can be filled by the newly created “People’s Police.” In the immediate aftermath of 1917 the new People’s Police was the Cheka, the All-Russian Special Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage (Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia komissiia po bor’be s kontrrevoliutsiei, spekulatsiei i sabotazhem). In 1918 it carried through a programme of mass arrests and executions of “enemies of the people,” known as the Red Terror. In 1933, Hermann Göring moved quickly to purge the German police of elements deemed to be hostile to the NS-regime, so creating a reliable and obedient instrument of oppression. In 1999, London’s Metropolitan Police Service psychologically collapsed under the weight of a BBC-sponsored campaign of anti-police hate propaganda, supported by the then Labour government, in which the Police were accused of “institutional racism.” The sickening thing about these attacks was the manner in which the police grovelled and capitulated, eagerly and unquestioningly accepting that they were “institutionally racist,” and begging for forgiveness. That was in 1999. In 2011, the British police stood idly by as black rioters ran amok in London and Birmingham, and in 2020, they made public displays of obeisance to so-called BLM.

VIII. Disintegration or Consolidated Tyranny

Meanwhile, inside the universities and federal bureaucracies America’s Red Guards continue to terrorise the arts, literature, law, history, psychology and philosophy: and this will most certainly matter since it will affect the substance and tone of America’s conversations with itself and all kinds of social and fiscal policies. America’s allies will also be indirectly affected. It must also affect the intellectual quality of faculty. Either they will continue to debase themselves and to permit themselves to be cowed into submission or they will actively be complicit in the relentless promotion of ideological indoctrination pretending to be higher education. Degrees acquired on this basis are junk bonds. Graduates in subjects such as black studies, public relations, communications, history of art, sociology, critical race theory and feminism are indoctrinated with the view that they represent a new intellectual élite — Lenin and his agitators used the same trickery to gull the young — when, in fact, their utterances and behaviour reveal them to be little more than unthinking, screeching and expendable loudspeakers.

As a consequence of this ideological terror America will be weakened, not in the quality of military assets but as a nation. It is not that America’s woking class will collaborate with, say, China in any war (they might, of course) but that the traditional values and ideas — the very notion of defending the patria in danger — will have been so discredited that too few will take up arms to defend the Republic. The process is well underway. How, I ask, can America’s sons and daughters even contemplate removing the monuments to Robert E. Lee? How long before the Washington D.C. monument of US Marines and a navy corpsman raising Old Glory on Mt. Suribachi is disgraced and violated? When the sense of the sacred historical is despoiled wantonly, with impunity, even with approval, what does a people have left? Netflix? Facebook? The war against censorship in America must be won in the universities. If the humanities, a vital intellectual enterprise in any civilized society, are permanently abandoned and ceded to the enemy, America, in its present form, and even without majority white secession, will cease to exist, and all the available signs are that this dissolution will not be peaceful.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia suggests that the longer oppressive censorship — and everything that accompanies and supports it — is maintained, the more destructive and unforgiving are the consequences when the truth is finally revealed, when the ruling caste loses the will to impose the lie, or when a critical mass of people refuses to live by the lie. This is the stage of penultimate collapse. What would happen in America if there was a sudden outbreak of openness on the matter of race and race differences, if decades of lies were suddenly acknowledged to have been lies all along? Could America survive such revelations? Given the fact that so much capital, in every sense of the word, has been invested in constructing the lies and imposing them, the realistic assumption has to be that there will be no such formal recognition and things will continue as they are. And why not indeed? If a majority of people can be made through ever more aggressive and adept propagandistic and psychological interventions and physical coercion, and at some stage pharmacological prescriptions, to believe or just to accept that all resistance is futile, and some form of managed dissent is permitted in order to maintain the fiction that America has not been transformed into a new-variant totalitarian state, there is no good reason why the cult cannot survive and prosper indefinitely. Contrary to Lincoln it may well be possible to lie to people all the time: people can become accustomed to lies, and then they will hate the truth tellers for exposing their stupidity and cowardice. Meanwhile, the relentless process of demographic transition will be doing its work, reducing whites to a minority and condemning their opinions and fears about their survival as a race to utter irrelevance.

Notes

1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Rakovyi korpus (Cancer Ward, 1968), YMCA-Press, Paris, 1970, p.385
2. Alvin Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the edge of the 21st Century, Bantam books, New York & London, 1990, p.410
3. Valentin Turchin, The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview, Martin Robertson & Company Ltd, Oxford, 1981, p.92
4. Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1957, p.519
5. Vasilii Grossman, Zhizn’ i sud’ba, Sovetskii pisatel, Moscow, 1990, p.343