Absolutism and Agitprop versus True Grit
Securely ensconced in his Alpine redoubt far removed from the recent rioting in the United States, the international college dean, Andrew A. Michta, has recently highlighted the political thought of the Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz. (See the August 1-2, 2020 weekend print edition of the Wall Street Journal.) Milosz, an anti-totalitarian and a future Nobel Prize winner, managed an escape from Poland during the Stalinist era; criticized Western intellectuals who saw communism as overcoming the “bourgeois forces” that had caused World War II; warned the West of the fate of the human mind and soul under totalitarianism; and published his book, The Captive Mind, in 1953. In the Soviet type of absolutism, the main intellectual tool for reshaping individuals into “affirmative cogs” serving the state is the transformation of ordinary human language into ideologically sanctioned language. Clear external referents are replaced by cloudy subjective preferences; formerly clear expressions may be forbidden at a moment’s notice; and no linguistic legerdemain is out of bounds while promoting the purposes of the political hegemon.
It would be illustrative to specify a concrete example of such linguistic legerdemain in the United States today. As background, recall that the acronym NAACP refers to a prestigious civil rights organization. Now consider recent news reports regarding a radio announcer who, while congratulating an individual on nomination to candidacy for high federal office, referred to that individual as a “CP,” in the sense of the aforementioned acronym. That radio announcer was promptly fired from his job. So “CP” is fine for acronyms but not for individuals? Who knew? This linguistic convention, dating from some unknown time and promulgated by some unknown elitist authority, certainly chills free speech, detracts from ordinary civility, and increases the number of “Captive Minds.”
Returning to Michta’s argument: If radicals can enforce the idea that race is the exclusive lens for viewing all U.S. history, then they may use that lens to identify and reward societal groups that are deemed meritorious. This process may fairly be referred to as resegregation, because it is diametrically opposed to traditional civil rights. Resegregation would demand massive re-education of the American public; inundating Marxist agitprop (a type of propaganda - see below); and, one surmises, the round-up of linguistic miscreants for Maoist-style self-criticism and confession. One might have thought that current American elites would stand up for free speech; but, alas, these elites believe not that they have an obligation to serve the republic, but only that they have a right to rule it and to “cancel” all historical references that do not conform to today’s Zeitgeist.
Michta contends that resegregation is fundamentally un-American; that focusing on individuals’ melanin content would lead to a caste system; that academic speech codes and safe spaces destroy democratic debate; that absolutism “cancels” political compromise; and that the current absolutism may be a harbinger of violence not seen since the Civil War. The current ideological experiment in totalitarianism would have been seen by Milosz as the result of “an American mind bloated by a steady diet of identity politics and group grievance served up by ideologues in schools nationwide.” On Friday, August 7, 2020 the WSJ published five letters to the editor regarding Michta’s article. Four of the letters supported Michta’s viewpoint.
Agitprop refers to the use of the arts, culture, and historical memory to promulgate the doctrines of ruling elites; if those elites are extreme-socialist or communist, then it may fairly be said that agitprop promotes Marxist doctrine. (Soviet Russia had a Department of Agitation and Propaganda.) Robert L. Woodson, Sr. has recently written about a taxpayer-funded museum display that meets the definition of agitprop (WSJ, 8/7/20). In July, 2020 a branch of the Smithsonian Institution “posted a graphic on its website outlining the ‘Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States’ … From the sounds of it, these ‘assumptions’ … would be debilitating and deleterious to minorities.” As it turned out, however, those supposedly menacing “assumptions” were fairly anodyne aphorisms such as “hard work is the key to success.” In fact, Woodson continues, “the qualities attributed to ‘whiteness’ are the same principles and values that have empowered blacks in America to succeed despite lingering discrimination and bigotry. The museum removed the graphic after a public outcry, saying ‘it’s not working in the way that we intended.’” This museum fiasco of July, 2020 was just one instance of “the demeaning and disabling message of racial grievance merchants, who claim that any and all failures of black Americans are attributable to so-called systemic racism.” (Jackie Robinson overcame real systemic racism in order to join the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, some 73 years ago.) Woodson’s article gives two stories of black resilience and success, as follows:
During World War II, blacks were initially prohibited from becoming officers in the U.S. Navy. Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that 16 college-educated black cadets be chosen for a line-officer training class in 1944. “Someone in the Navy” tried to sabotage their training, but the cadets in this all-black class covered the windows of their barracks, stayed up all night to study, and passed with higher marks than an all-white class. An incredulous chain of command forced the black cadets to re-take the exam, but they all passed again. The Navy offered commissions to 13 of these cadets (the “Golden 13”), who became naval officers because of their “true grit.” (A person is said to have “true grit” if he or she sets goals and follows through to achieve them with enthusiasm and perseverance in the face of significant obstacles; the idea being that tiny, hard particulate matter can eventually wear down whatever opposes it.)
A second example of true grit is seen in the case of the best-selling book and award-winning movie Hidden Figures. Three black female employees of a NASA research facility, Katherine Johnson (mathematics and computation), Mary Jackson (engineering), and Dorothy Vaughan (mathematical supervisor), played critical roles in John Glenn’s 1962 mission to orbit the earth. Each of these employees overcame obstacles too numerous to recount in this review, but which are vividly portrayed in the excellent movie. Hidden Figures, Woodson observes, “is but one of thousands of black American stories demonstrating that the most powerful antidote to disrespect isn’t protest but performance and [that] the most potent answer to repression is resilience.”