Technology, Communism, and the Brown Scare
9th February 2014
Mencius Moldbug lays down some inconvenient truth.
For there’s nothing new here. At the height of the lame, doomed “Red Scare,” the Brown Scare was ten times bigger. You may think it was difficult making a living as a communist screenwriter in 1954. It was a lot easier than being a fascist screenwriter. Or even an anticommunist screenwriter. (Same thing, right?) And as any pathetic last shreds of real opposition shrink and die off, the Scare only grows. That’s how winners play it. That’s just how the permanent revolution rolls.
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Of course, ain’t nothin’ new here. For quite some time in America it’s been illegal to employ racists, sexists and fascists, and mandatory to employ a precisely calibrated percentage of women, workers and peasants. Because America is a free country and that’s what freedom means.
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It’s actually not hard to explain the Brown Scare. Like all witch hunts, it’s built on a conspiracy theory. The Red Scare was based on a conspiracy theory too, but at least it was a real conspiracy with real witches – two of whom were my father’s parents. (The nicest people on earth, as people. I like to think of them not as worshipping Stalin, but worshipping what they thought Stalin was.) Moreover, the Red Scare was a largely demotic or peasant phenomenon to which America’s governing intellectual classes were, for obvious reasons, immune. Because power works and culture is downstream from politics – real politics, at least – the Red Scare soon faded into a joke.
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Think about it. Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn’t waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They’re getting burned right and left, for Christ’s sake! Priorities! No, they’d turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.