"Burn It Down"
By Karl Marx:
Worlds I would destroy forever,
Since I can create no world;
Since my call they notice never …
Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,
Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.
Every word of mine is fire and action.
My breast is equal to that of the Creator.
I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind:
Ha! Eternity! She is an eternal grief …
Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,
Made to be the foul-calendars of Time and Space,
Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,
So that there shall be something to ruin …
If there is a something which devours,
I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins-
The world which bulks between me and the Abyss
I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
I’ll throw my arms around its harsh reality:
Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,
And then sink down to utter nothingness,
Perished, with no existence — that would be really living!
By one of the two Columbine high school shooters:
"I will sooner die than betray my own thoughts, but before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit..." (Think Marx's "...that would be really living!")
"I want to burn the world, I want to kill everyone except about 5 people...if we get busted any time, we start killing then and there...I ain't going out without a fight."
"You know what I hate? .....MANKIND!!!!...kill everything...kill everything..."
And in the eeriest echo of Marx's juvenile whine about how nobody ever notices his call:
"I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things."
Marx was no "economist," not even a coherent social philosopher. He never bothered to do field research among the "proletariat" he purportedly loved. From a cozy library he penned his demented manifestos against the existence that dared to exist without his permission, making the fantastical "proletariat" the pawns of his obsession of ultimate self-immolation.
Marx was a template for a Columbine shooter and all others possessed by a hatred of whatever dares to exist without submitting to their dictates. It's a spirit that today screams, "Burn it all down and start again!" Of course, what they mean is, "Make me king." They never mean "Burn down me."
PS: What really happens is, the head "Burn it all down!" cheerleaders who blackmail the desperate-to-be-stroked virtue-signallers for cash go on to buy themselves fancy houses (think "Cullors") that they'll never let anybody burn down. "All are equal but some are more equal than others."
"Dog Whistles"
There is an old joke from Soviet days--typical dark humor, naturally. A plumber was called to check the pipes in a family's house. After his inspection he said, "The whole system has to be changed."
25 years in Siberia.
Ha, ha.
In the language of 21st-century American sociopolitical polemic the poor plumber would be accused (by the rabidly-religiously fanatic ideologues) of having used a "dog whistle." Sure, on the surface he was talking about the house's plumbing system, but "We all knooow what system he reaaaally meant."
Especially in a system that thrives on snitching and the identification of "oppressors," "counter-revolutionaries" and other public enemies in its inquisitorial zeal to scramble to the heap of the Virtue Pile and all its perks.
In a a spiritually and intellectually bankrupt environment like that, "Dog whistle!" is the free kick, the ace up the sleeve, the gratuitous club to wield over the head of anybody who doesn't sign up to your orthodoxy.
It doesn't MATTER anymore what they really say or (hmph!) mean--you'll call it "a dog whistle" concealing every fiendish, malignant intention your fevered imagination can conjure up. Even before they say it. 'Cause you always knew your crusade demanded it. The verdict was in before the case opened.
And why not. No skin off your nose. It gets you your cult's brownie points. And it's so easy. And fun. If, that is, you've successfully switched off your human soul. Which is what Solzhenitsyn's work is all about: the appalling degree to which whole societies succeed in switching that off.
"Intolerance"
We all know this, though perhaps we're unaccustomed to putting it that way.
We do not (or try not to) tolerate theft, murder, vandalism, extortion, embezzlement, human trafficking, sexual assault/abuse, etc.
So, yes, this is something we all know.
The question is not therefore whether we must be intolerant. We know we must.
The questions are "Of what?" and "To what degree?"
Sometimes "degree" is a non-starter. It's absurd to speak of tolerating just a wee bit of human trafficking or murder.
On more innocuous levels, perhaps we can tolerate a degree of jaywalking or under-the-table employment, like paying your neighbor kid $5 to mow your lawn (that's what the rate was last time I checked, in the 1970s).
The social pact, coherence and survival are inextricable from intolerance. Arriving at that pact is, of course, the devilishly difficult thing. But without the pact there is, first, no society, then no civilization.
