The Slow Pravdaization of Our Press

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

'We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!

From the O.C. Register:

In legal news, CNN recently settled what is being described as a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Covington Catholic High school student Nick Sandmann over its false and misleading coverage of a viral confrontation with a Native American elder that left viewers with the impression that the teenager and his pals were being racist provocateurs.

Turns out that Sandmann’s group had been taunted with racially charged, profane rants by the Black Hebrew Israelites. 

...Thanks to Google and shoddy memories, Sandmann will forever be known as the racist kid who harassed a Native American elder, even though there’s absolutely no truth to it whatsoever.

What could push 'the most trusted name in news' to commit such eye-wateringly expensive folly, all in the name of a narrative?

It's a question worth asking. We invite you to have a look at this piece from a few years back, in the hope that you will find it enlightening.

[Re-post, original post here.]

Reacting to Spree Killings, Progressively

[Please excuse this brief detour; we are still hard at work on our 'Re-colonization' series.]

Of the many things Progressives are known for, number one is being on the right side of history.

So in the wake of this latest U.S. spree killing, we turn to our leading leftist voices to help us make sense of the madness.

Having studied their recent corpus on the question of the spree-killer-for-a-cause, we believe we've found some progressive principles to light our way.


I. Do not make generalizations about his group

Bring low the enemy of Multiculturalism

 'Comrade, come to our kolkhoz!'

We have seen how the free press in a liberal democracy can spout the reigning dogma in ways that call to mind the old Pravda or Izvestya.

The parallels do not end there.  Many Westerners today have the growing sense their children's schools as well as pop culture are becoming propaganda fountains, and that questioning the orthodoxy entails real risk.  Are we mad to make such comparisons?  To orient ourselves, it can be helpful to look back at examples of overt scholarly and artistic indoctrination in the U.S.S.R.  How near are we to them? How did we get here? What comes next?


1) From the time a child can toddle

Images of industrious Soviet children

W.H. Chamberlin in 1934:

From the time when a child can toddle, a red flag is pushed into its hand; it learns the new Soviet songs and is taught in nursery and kindergarten to lisp Soviet slogans. The stream of propaganda, all directed to the purpose of making a new type of man and woman, entirely devoted to Soviet and Communist ideas, becomes intensified as the child grows older.  

No one can visit a Soviet school without being impressed by the thorough manner in which the pupils are taught to hate "capitalism" and the "bourgeoisie" and to regard the Soviet system as the best in the world.  (1) 

In today's West, Great Britain has led the charge in punishing Wrongthink in its youth:

The mother of a seven-year-old boy was told to sign a school form admitting he was racist after he asked another pupil about the colour of his skin.  Elliott Dearlove had asked a five-year-old boy in the playground whether he was ‘brown because he was from Africa.’

‘I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation,’ she said.  ‘I refused to sign it.' ... '[Elliott] kept saying to me, “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty” and he was extremely distressed by it all.’

British thought criminal Elliott Dearlove, seven

Five-Year Plan in Four Years

'We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!

Two weeks before Walter Russell Mead of The American Interest decided to shut down commenting at his blog, on a post about an Arab riot in France the following exchange took place:

'PC is intellectual Stalinism. It is also a betrayal of Liberalism in all its historical incarnations...'

'Intellectual Leninism might be a better way to characterize PC than intellectual Stalinism....Stalin just follwed suit.'

     '… like reading TASS and PRAVDA, one learns to interpret what is unsaid by what IS said.'

To Right-Thinking Americans, these comparisons might sound laughable.  We're a liberal democracy, after all, with the strongest free speech protections in the world.  What could we have in common with an iron-fisted one-party totalitarian state whose dissenters were sent to die in massive slave camps?

A better question might be, how is it possible that a liberal democracy in the 21st century is home to phenomena that so readily call to mind those of an iron-fisted one-party totalitarian state?

'Absurd,' you may say. We'd be tempted to say it ourselves. To all such people, we here at Those Who Can See can only ask: Won't you take our hand, Comrade, and come with us to the back of the four-hour toilet-paper queue as we seek out just where the parallels may lie?