Attack of the Nihilists Did Dostoevsky’s Demons Predict Wokeism, Antifa and the Gender-Benders?
KEVIN BARRETT • MARCH 8, 2021
“…..Dostoevsky literally wrote the book on ideological extremism and its causes and consequences. That book is Demons, otherwise known in various translations as The Devils, The Demons, and The Possessed. The author’s penultimate novel, it details the process by which liberal parents and educators produce radicalized, ideology-maddened children bent on tearing down the world into which they were born. This unquenchable thirst for destruction—call it nihilism if you will—is the engine of all post-religious political ideologies, be they of the left or right. Socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism, Nazism, woke-ism: all share a barely-concealed urge to blow up the inherited social order, ostensibly to rebuild it as some sort of nebulous paradise on earth. But all those rebuilding plans are just window-dressing. It’s the destruction, only the destruction, that counts…..”
“…..Dostoevsky originally envisioned Demons as political polemic, but it expanded into a polyphonic masterpiece in the writing. Horrified by news reports of nihilist leader Sergey Nechayev’s orchestration of a pointless political murder, Dostoevsky set about fictionalizing the story, hoping to shed light on how the sensitive, genteel, well-meaning liberals of the 1840s had prepared the way for the 1860s generation of nihilist lunatics. (Today, we might ask ourselves how the complacent neoliberals of a generation ago, especially their avant-garde academic fringe, managed to midwife the emergence of today’s woke generation of sanctimonious COVID-masked rioters, Antifa thugs, social media censors, gender-denialists, statue-smashers, and others bent on the nihilistic extermination of American and human tradition if not reality itself.)….”
“…..Is the red reaction, represented by such groups as the Proud Boys, a voice of sanity? Or is it just another “demonic” and ultimately nihilistic ideological movement? If Dostoevsky were a columnist at the Unz Review (the only site that would publish him if he were alive today and participating in the American culture wars) he would undoubtedly argue that the Proud Boys and most of the rest of the alt right are correct about the necessity of patriarchy, but wrong about grounding it in ethnicity rather than religion. You are calling yourselves European chauvinists? he would sneer. Are you out of your minds? Europe is the source of the infection! Come to Mother Russia! Return to the Holy Orthodox Church and to Christ! Work to restore the Czar, and in the meantime make do with the next best thing, Vladimir Putin!…..”
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