We’ve come to resemble them

The latest School of War episode dropped yesterday and featured historian Sean McMeekin, whose book Stalin’s War I’ve quoted and recommended here before. McMeekin discussed his latest, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, a book that’s been on my to-read list since it was announced.

The interview was insightful and wide-ranging despite coming in under an hour and is well worth a listen. But the conclusion was especially pointed. Speaking of Communist regimes that not only survived the fall of the USSR but have become globally ascendant—note carefully the subtitle of his book—McMeekin assessed the present dangers not only of external Communist enemies but of threats from within. These threats are not the Hollywood pinkos of Cold War anxiety but our own inbuilt mimetic tendencies, through which we gradually become like the thing we resist, and, even more to the point, the uncritical embrace and celebration of technologies that enable tyranny:

I don’t think the kind of threat, let’s say, to either Western values or our way of life is quite the same as you might have seen from the years of high Stalinism or high Maoism, even as far as people being fellow travelers or kind of trying to embrace those ideas, but some of it I still think—and I guess this is what I was trying to get at in my epilogue—certain elements of Communist practice which have in some ways actually you might even say been streamlined or improved that is to say: the repression, the censorship, the state control of information, social credit system. . . .

I remember back in the 90s when I was in Model UN among other things there were all these debates about US policy vis-à-vis China and the idea of opening up China, and back then the argument was that we should trade with China, we should open up to China . . . because that way we’ll make them more like us. That is to say, “You know, it’s true they crushed the rebels, the student protestors at Tiananmen Square . . . they obviously crushed and suppressed them, they obviously did not introduce any kind of genuine democracy or accountability to the public, however, if we trade with them they’ll be a little bit more like us and eventually they’ll develop liberal political institutions.”

That doesn’t seem to have happened. If anything, the opposite seems to have happened. I mean, if anything I think we’ve come to resemble them more than they resemble us, that is to say, our own public life is increasingly kind of taken over by social controls. And, you know, the early euphoria about the internet, maybe we should have been suspicious because the internet was originally ARPANET, a project of basically the Pentagon and the Defense Department. Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that, in the end, these tools of social or political liberation could also be turned against us by governments, large corporations, etc.

I think it’s something to worry about. I think, you know, we just have to stay vigilant, and make sure our own traditions are upheld.

Host Aaron MacLean ends the episode by inviting McMeekin back someday to discuss “the global designs of universal liberalism.” I’d be there for that. Not exactly uplifting but necessary. Listen to the full interview here.

Food for thought, especially when it comes to discerning what “stay[ing] vigilant” means and just which of “our own traditions” we wish to preserve. For some related thoughts about the warping effect of the technologies used against ideological opponents, see this post from three years ago.