Radical Roots of the DEATH Cult
13th November 2023
Radical ideology takes many forms: Marxist, Islamist, a combination of the two (termed the red-green alliance), anarchist, what was once called Third Worldist and is now rebranded “postcolonial theory,” intersectional and anti-TERF feminism, and so on. What too many variants share is a visceral attraction to fantasies of transformative, retributive violence.
In roughly psychoanalytic terms, they gravitate toward alibis for sadism, humiliation, and even outright murder of the hated, fantasized object or “other” standing in the way of their “progress.” They seek a “permission structure” to vent their spleen. According to René Girard, these befuddled victimizers of innocents—ironically enough, most convinced of their own moral purity in the very commission of their crime—hunger for sacrificial scapegoats, designated essentially arbitrarily as responsible for the ills of the world, and bond together as a solidaristic community of the (self-)righteous in the act of executing them together. And if they can’t actually be there for the event itself, they applaud as spectators from a distance.
Add to that the predominance of “woke” progressive ideology on the American college campus today—a wooly-minded mélange of every sort of anti-civilizational, anti-systemic “thought”—and what you get is the uninhibited cries of bloodlust, worthy of a proud troop of resentful Raskolnikovs on the loose, their shrieks echoing through the halls of academe. But will these pyromaniacs in expensive sneakers and fancy eyewear ever undergo Dostoevsky’s antihero’s redemptive acknowledgment of a guilty conscience? At present it seems doubtful.