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Fluid Streets of Gold for Totalitarians

Fluid Streets of Gold for Totalitarians

December 30, 2019 Posted by Paul Ethics, Family, Lifestyle, Politics

Fluid Streets of Gold for Totalitarians

So I was in the library with my kids one day and we’re applying for a library card for my daughter. Public library. And unless you worked for the public sector, in Boulder county, during the Obama years, you got no respect. But the librarian, well… she was kinda cute, and this was just after my divorce so, well, you know.

Anyhow she looks at my daughter and avoids any eye contact with me whatsoever. Like I don’t even exist. She says, “do you want your dad to know what books you check out? You can say no if you like.”

My daughter looks up at me and I can see she’s starting to get a little uncomfortable.

And then the librarian says, “No, look at me, honey. Do you want your dad to know what books you check out? You can say no if you like.”

So my daughter looks at the librarian then looks at me – she’s no dummy – and I can tell by looking at her that she knows the librarian wants her to say “no” but I know how her little mind works and she wants to feel like she can trust me too. So finally I look at the librarian, and then at my daughter and I say, “Honey, do you want this dear sweet librarian to know what books we burned last night? You can say, “no” if you like.”

It’s like, if you don’t work in the public sector, sometimes you get no respect. Especially in that bastion of progressivism, Boulder, Colorado. We’re all like Rodney – you know, Dangerfield. Unless we gots one of them gov’ment jobs. No respect. I tell ya. Or if we don’t become an activist for the latest political correctness fads – take gender fluids for example. I’m thinkin’ both genders gots fluids. And that’s all I gotta say about that.

Okay, maybe I was s’posed to say gender fluidity instead of gender fluids. Personally I think “gender fluids” is a whole lot more fun. But isn’t it true that progressives want everything to be fluid? I think that’s the key. They want the Constitution to be a “working document.” They want morality to be relative, maybe because their relatives have no morality. Just sayin’. Here’s looking at you Hunter Biden. All of which means it’s okay to bend the rules. Fluid. Rules are fluid. Rules are meant to be bended. And us old farts understand that they even want truth to be fluid. There was a day when truth was truth. It wasn’t fluid. Facts mattered, and we were willing to trudge ten miles each way through ten feet of snow to learn what we could about the truth. Hear what I’m sayin’?

But now my truth can be different than your truth. And I tell you what. I’m having nightmares that I’m starting to grow gills. Because everything’s fluid. And that’s not the worst of it – I wake up in a cold sweat thinking my legs have morphed into a fish’s tail. And then I get excited because I think I’ve grown… uh, you know. Big, beautiful uh hum you know – like the mermaid in Splash. Whoops, sorry.

So yeah, why stop with gender-fluid? Let’s do species-fluid. It’s been a thing since Egyptian times, and probably sooner. There was a sphinx which had the body of a lion and the head of a human. And then there’s those fox-like guys – head of a fox body of a man (Ra and this other guy, Amun-Ra). And don’t forget the fabled mother of Ra, the goddess Hathor. Hathor was often depicted as a cow. I mean talk about fluids. I’m thinkin’ there’s fluids everywhere. Think about it. Cow goddess. Fluids. Everywhere. Nothing could be more fluid than that, right?

And let’s not forget about Sekhmet – an ancient Egyptian cat goddess with the head of a lioness and the body of a woman – possibly the world’s first vampire. Goddess of home, love, fertility, joy, dance, women, and secrets. Goddess of secrets, really? What female could ever be a goddess of secrets? Just askin’. Victoria? Okay, you got me. But I think they might have had a little wishful thinking going on right there. Goddess of secrets. Humans making gods in images we like. It’s been going on for a few thousand years now. Since before that golden calf thing even.

So, obviously species-fluid has been around a while too. Head of a man, body of a lion. Head of a cat, body of a woman. Trunk of a man, body of a horse. Morality. Species. Gender. Reality. It’s all fluid, right? One wise guy asked, “What is truth?” And another wise guy said, “Truth is God’s perception of reality.” Oh really. I did not know that. Well, as far as I know, I’m the only one who’s got the right perception of reality around here. Just sayin’.

But I think a lot of this fluidity stuff was exacerbated by the Old Soviet Union. Certain laws were fluid in the way they were written. And I don’t mean poetically fluid. If you haven’t read Gulag Archipelago, you need to read it. Timeout. Take a timeout from this and go read that bad boy. Did you know that it’s required reading for High School kids in Russia? I hope they read it seriously and get something out of it. When I was a kid we had to read George Orwell. We read Animal Farm and I think we read 1984. And that stuff stuck with me. I mean how many clichés came from Orwell? “Big brother is watching.” “Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.” “Newspeak.” “the Thought Police.” And who doesn’t call something “Orwellian” when it lines up with what happened in his book 1984?

Now Solzhenitsyn mentioned this, so if you’ve read Gulag Archipelago, I got a little quiz for ya. Did you know that one of the most feared laws in the Old Soviet Union was Article 58? It was enacted in February 1927 and designed to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities[1]. From en.wikipedia.org:

The article covered the following offenses.

  • 58-1: Definition of counter-revolutionary activity:

A counter-revolutionary action is any action aimed at overthrowing, undermining or weakening of the power of workers’ and peasants’ Soviets… and governments of the USSR and Soviet and autonomous republics, or at the undermining or weakening of the external security of the USSR and main economical, political and national achievements of the proletarial revolution

[define your terms, that’s good. But notice how they wrote it. It’s fluid. Like poetry it’s so fluid.] [And] It was not limited to anti-Soviet acts: by “international solidarity of workers”, any other “worker’s state” was protected by this article. [In other words you could use Article 58 it in Cuba, China, or perhaps even San Francisco. Anywhere there is a worker’s paradise.]
  • 58-1а. Treason: death sentence or 10 years of prison, both cases with property confiscation.
    • 58-1б. Treason by military personnel: death sentence with property confiscation.
    • 58-1в. In the case of flight of the offender in treason subject to 58-1б (military personnel only), his relatives were subject to 5–10 years of imprisonment with confiscation or 5 years of Siberia exile, depending on the circumstances: either they helped or knew and didn’t report or simply lived with the offender.
    • 58-1г. Non-reporting of a treason by a military man: 10 years of imprisonment. Non-reporting by others: offense by Article 58-12.
    • 58-2. Armed uprising or intervention with the goal to seize the power: up to death with confiscation, including formal recognition as “enemy of workers”.
    • 58-3. Contacts with foreigners “with counter-revolutionary purposes” (as defined by 58-1) are subject to Article 58-2.[2]

Article 58. A beautiful thing, comrade. You could arrest somebody then torture them until you got them to confess to some counter-revolutionary crime (which they may or may not have committed). And then they might torture them some more if they thought they could get them to rat out one of their neighbors. And the torture wasn’t for whimps. Here’s the true story of a guy named Vsevolod Meyerhold:

… Under torture, Meyerhold confessed to working for British and Japanese Intelligence, and also incriminated his fellow-director Sergei Eisenstein, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich and many other figures from the arts world. The letters Meyerhold wrote to leading politician Vyacheslav Molotov about his torture have survived:

‘… they beat me, a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap; then they sat me on a chair and beat me hard on the legs with the same strap … For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap, and the pain was so intense that it felt as though boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I yelled out and wept from the pain … My nerve endings were very close to the surface of my body and my skin was as tender and sensitive as a child’s, while my eyes turned out to be capable of weeping bucketsful of tears. Lying face down, I found myself writhing and squirming and howling like a dog being beaten by its owner. They would beat me on the old bruises and contusions, so my legs turned into a bloody mess. My interrogator kept repeating the same threat: “If you don’t sign a confession, we’ll go on beating you. We’ll leave your head and right hand alone, but we’ll turn the rest of you into a shapeless bloody lump of meat”. And I signed everything they wanted.’[3]

That was a true story. Jesus said, “Change the way you think and believe the good news. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” The kingdoms of this world will at best fail us and at worst torture or kill us or both. And always with confiscation of property. Because might makes right in the kingdoms of this world and it’s okay for the powerful to take our stuff.

And one takeaway from the Article 58 story or Solzhenitsyn’s book is that Dr. Jordan Peterson is right. Any one of us could turn into a Soviet interrogator given the right circumstances. Or a concentration camp guard, capable of unspeakable atrocities. These people wielded absolute power over their prisoners. And as Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The fluid nature of article 58 allowed the authorities to wield total power. You would think they would just take their prisoners out and shoot them or send them off to some labor camp in Siberia. But no, they had to get a confession first. In other words, they had to feed a narrative – Pravda demanded that there be a good reason for the arrest and whatever sentence might be handed out. And let’s not forget: “with property confiscation” my brother.

Here’s an excerpt from Lenin during the early years of the revolution, known as the “Red Terror”:

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity … You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday’s telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so … Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people[4]

All of this made possible by fluidity. Fluid laws are like streets of gold for totalitarians and dictators. But notice there were quotas. “At least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers.” I’m guessing the quotas weren’t so fluid. And with one exception, comrade. Who decides what a “known bloodsucker” is? Any bureaucrat worth his salt could find a lot of fluidity in that one. And so you have to make a quota, and maybe there are not enough “rich bastards” around, so you find a “known bloodsucker” and arrest his or her butt. “Show me the man and I’ll find you a crime.”

But two thousand years ago Jesus told us that the good news is that His Kingdom is at hand and then He went about healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding the five thousand, turning the water into wine, and generally demonstrating that God never intended for human existence to be weighed down by oppression, malevolence, suffering, or even death. The NT writer Paul wrote that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” and “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ has set me free from the law of sin and death.” I’m not sure he was thinking of political regimes when he wrote those things, but it seems like they apply now more than ever. He also wrote that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” And notice there’s nothing fluid about the Ten Commandments. “Do not kill.” “Do not steal.” “Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.” “Do not commit adultery.” “Do not covet your neighbor’s stuff.” Because before you arrest, torture, and confiscate your neighbor’s stuff, you first have to covet what your neighbor has.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58_(RSFSR_Penal_Code), downloaded 9/8/2019

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58_(RSFSR_Penal_Code), downloaded 9/8/2019

[3] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/comrade-stalins-secret-prison/, downloaded 10/22/2019

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror, downloaded 9/2/2019

Tags: Free-moral AgencyGeorge OrwellRelativityTotalitarianismWill to PowerWorld View
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About Paul

C.S. Lewis fan. I think Lord Voldemort is one of the greatest antagonists in all of literature. I write because... painting pictures doesn't cut it anymore. Sometimes I think satire helps keep me sane.

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Wofian's Journal seeks to bridge the gap between Science and Religion, among others. It seeks to inform and entertain readers with books or blog articles that are deeply rooted in our inner-self, masked or hidden by our desire to conform to what the world dictates, matters that usually malign what we truly believe, and what we truly are.

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