From RJ Moeller's Dostoevsky’s 6 Nightmare Prophecies That Came True in the 20th Century, Part One
"However much you tinker with the world, you can't make a good job of it, but by cutting off a hundred million heads and so lightening one's burden, one can jump over the ditch of transforming society more safely..."
Few people in the last 200 years understood human nature and
mankind’s fallen state quite like Dostoevsky. His uncanny abilities to
dissect the pathology of a killer or the spiritual joy of a contented
Russian peasant have inspired generations of writers, thinkers and even
psychologists for a century and a half.
But more than simply being an insightful novelist on the human
condition, Dostoevsky turned out to be a truly prophetic voice in his
predictions of the dangerous and deadly places where certain ideologies
and philosophies popular at the time would lead his beloved Russia in
particular, and the modern Western world in general.
In the course of a number of his books – The Devils (aka The Possessed) and The Brothers Karamazov for example – he foretold of the coming socioeconomic and geopolitical nightmares that awaited 20th century
societies who would adopt progressivism, nihilism, and socialism as
their guiding principles. His words carry with them a deeper weight
since Dostoevsky lived during his youth as a progressive ideologue
eventually sentenced first to death and then, after a mock execution
meant to “get his attention,” to four years of hard labor in Siberia.
He returned a deeply religious man and after spending a few years in
Europe investigating the teachings of leading Western intellectuals, a
vehement anti-socialist.
In describing the underlying motivations of the young, radical, rabble-rousing character Peter Verkhovensky in The Devils, Dostoevsky said:
“He’s a kind, well-meaning boy, and awfully sensitive…But let me tell you, the whole trouble stems from immaturity and sentimentality! It’s not the practical aspects of socialism that fascinate him, but its emotional appeal – its idealism –what we may call its mystical, religious aspect – its romanticism…and on top of that, he just parrots other people.”
Only someone who has known the “other side” of the psychological
lines, commiserating among those who wish to tear civilizations and
their institutions down from within can write with such creative
specificity.
But again, Dostoevsky’s strength remains the predictive quality of
his novels. He identified the strategies the Left would use in the 20th
century and their final destinations. Three of these nightmare
prophecies stand out: the war on the family, the replacement of old
theistic religions for a new (thoroughly secular) one, and the
extermination of millions of citizens on behalf of “the cause.”
1) Generational Sins: The War on the Family
Before our philosophy of life develops, before our religious
worldview forms, before our political convictions solidify there exists
the family. Dostoevsky’s novels and short stories are packed with
familial themes because, apart from his later Christian faith, his
experiences as a child and young adult had profound and lasting
consequences – just as they do for all of us.
No big secret here.
But where Dostoevsky’s study of the institution of the family and its
relation to society and politics goes from “some fairly obvious
observations” to “a wealth of discerning insights” comes in just how
much importance for almost everything he places at the feet of the
family. His respect for this sacred institution only increased with age
as he began to comprehend progressives’ militant disdain for the family,
for marriage, and for any other type of education save the kind they –
the revolutionaries who would one day rule the nation – provided.
Consequently, Dostoevsky’s later books, such as The Adolescent, Brothers, and Devils, focus on these themes with characters overwhelmed by their family’s past.
In Devils, the character Peter Verkhovensky poses as
a beguiling and well-connected socialist dissident. We learn that his
father, a former professor named Stepan Trofimovitch, abandoned him as a
child to be raised by intellectuals at various academies and
universities. Peter’s odd choice of his own home province in the Russian
countryside for the site of a cultural coup suddenly makes more sense:
he wants to make his dad and those in the community suffer and feel
humiliation. He craves payback for a miserable childhood. And what
better way than to pose as a “man of the people” who is simply trying to
over-throw greedy capitalists and oppressive religious traditions?
The reality: Stepan Trofimovitch did in fact abandon his son. And the
seeds of skepticism and rebellion against authority that Stepan’s
generation had sown appeared fully-realized in their offspring.
The results were disastrous. Just as they are in any culture where
abdication of the primal duty to take care of your own children is
tolerated (or worse still, encouraged). Because Stepan Trofimovitch
disregarded his family and consequently his son grew up to want to
destroy everyone else’s.
But the attack on the family, and the exploitation of the difficult
or disillusioned childhoods many young people in 1870s Russia
experienced, was not enough. Progressives knew this, and so did
Dostoevsky. For even in the worst of circumstances, in the most broken
of homes, faith still endured in the hearts of many Russians. Like
Alyosha, the saintly youngest brother in Brothers Karamazov,
the spiritual convictions of millions in Mother Russia would not die
only through the undermining of the family. Something bigger had to be
done. Someone bigger had to go.
They needed to murder God.
2) Militant Atheism: The War on God
Socialism, the economic and political theory that advocates for the
state to control the means of production and oversee the distribution of
resources, was relatively new back in Fyodor’s day and the assumption
among small groups of intellectuals from Moscow to Mexico was that it
would inevitably become the way all countries ran their governments,
societies, and economies. Dostoevsky not only believed the sincerity in
their beliefs, but that their convictions would win-out in nations
around the globe to cause unprecedented suffering before collapsing
under the weight of internal contradictions and weaknesses.
Dostoevsky
held that the inherent weakness of the Utopian visions of socialism was
a rejection of God and the institution of the family. He saw that for
the Left, their politics became their religion. The members of the
progressive-Left were demanding standards of Judeo-Christian morality be
replaced with new (arbitrary) standards handed down from central
councils and planning committees.
Dostoevsky wrote the following description of the youngest Karamazov brother Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov:
“The path he chose was a path going in the opposite direction of many his age, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously on it, he was convinced and convicted of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul, and at once he instinctively said to himself: ‘I want to live for immortality with Him and I will accept no compromise.’
In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, but it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today. It is the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth.”
Dostoevsky believed that if even religious nations could commit
heinous acts, a secular state would be capable of unspeakable
atrocities.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later put it: “A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Side note: In 1958, a film version of Brothers Karamazov was released
and starred Yul Brenner and a young William Shatner. Here’s a clip to
whet your whistle:
3) Genocide: The War on Man
From Walter E. Williams’ August 8th column “Liberals, Progressives, and Socialists“:
The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis pale in comparison to the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel’s website here, and in his book “Death by Government.”
The numbers involved stagger the mind. We must shine a spotlight on a
truth our modern education system has failed to teach American
students: these were all secular, socialist nations that began under the
auspices of such lofty-sounding goals as “a workers’ paradise” and “the
peoples’ republic.”
Like lambs to the slaughter, millions went simply
because dutiful bureaucrats and foot-soldiers carried out the orders of
philosopher-kings who were ready to sacrifice humanity for the sake of
their “rational” and “progressive” and “scientific” system of
governance.
And yet this nightmare did not begin to play itself out until a few
decades into the 20th century. Some fifty years earlier, a Russian
novelist by the name of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky conceivied of
characters such as the social theorist “Shigalov” in The Devils who
announced to the inner circle of socialist revolutionaries he belonged
to the logical long-term plan for ruling the people once the Czar was
toppled:
“Dedicating my
energies to the study of the social organisation which is in the future to
replace the present condition of things, I’ve come to the conviction that all
makers of social systems from ancient times up to the present year, 187-, have
been dreamers, tellers of fairy-tales, fools who contradicted themselves, who
understood nothing of natural science and the strange animal called man…
I suggest as a final
solution of the question the division of mankind into two unequal parts.
One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other
nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to
speak, a herd, and, through boundless submission, will by a series of
regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like the Garden of Eden.
They’ll have to work, however. The measures I propose for depriving nine-tenths
of mankind of their freedom and transforming them into a herd through the
education of whole generations are very remarkable, founded on the facts of
nature and highly logical.”
To this the aforementioned ring-leader Peter Verkhovensky responds:
“However much you tinker with the world, you
can’t make a good job of it, but by cutting off a hundred million heads and so
lightening one’s burden, one can jump over the ditch of transforming society
more safely…It’s a new religion, my good friend, coming to take the place of
the old one. That’s why so many fighters come forward, and it’s a big movement…
I ask you which you
prefer: the slow way, which consists in the composition of socialistic romances
and the academic ordering of the destinies of humanity a thousand years hence,
while despotism will swallow the savory morsels which would almost fly into
your mouths of themselves if you’d take a little trouble; or do you, whatever
it may imply, prefer a quicker way which will at last untie your hands, and
will let humanity make its own social organisation in freedom and in action,
not on paper? They shout ‘cut off a hundred million heads’; that may be only a
metaphor; but why be afraid of it if, with the slow day-dream on paper,
despotism in the course of some hundred years will devour not a hundred but
five hundred million heads?”
What’s one-to-five-hundred million “heads” among friends, right?
Again, keep in mind Dostoevsky penned these words in 1872. Great
evils like tyrannical monarchies and human slave-trafficking had existed
on planet earth since time began, but this devious mixture of both with
a calculated and cavalier attitude toward human life startled those in
the 19th century like Dostoevsky who first heard the schemes of the
original community organizers (and had the good sense to believe that
they’d carry out their plans should they ever gain power).
It’s very difficult for my generation – the current 18 to 35
demographic – to grasp just how much suffering and death and oppression
took place in the 20th century. We do not receive a
comprehensive version of history in our public schools and institutions
of higher education that might shed critical light on ideologies many in
academia support. And to be sure, we can’t count on Hollywood and the
entertainment industry to pick up any such slack in the culture.
But this matters. Ideas have consequences. Tens of millions died in the last century because of evil ideas.
And if an epileptic, compulsive-gambling, ex-convict in Russia 150
years ago could so accurately peer into the murky future to warn us, the
least we can do is simply turn around to take in the much clearer view
from this side of world history.