The Seeds Of Moderate Defeat might have been better called the Seeds of Fanatical Success. A recent example is the recent [ 2021 ] disorderly American retreat from Afghanistan & Kabul. The "world's best army" was beaten by a bunch of goat herds, who had been irritated by wedding parties being shot up and similar atrocities.
The Seeds Of Moderate Defeat
When the Bolsheviks seized control of the Russian state during the October Uprising, it set off what would come to be known as the Russian Civil War. It lasted from 1917 to 1923, when the Bolsheviks finally crushed their opposition. That is the most overlooked, but most important, part of the story. The czarist system had collapsed and in the wake of that collapse came a battle over what would replace it.
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The two sides in the civil war were the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and the anti-Bolsheviks, an incoherent collection of army officers, property holders, various right-wing political groups, and socialists. They were united in their opposition to the radical restructuring promised by the Bolsheviks. This dichotomy would actually survive the civil war until Stalin put an end to it in the 1930s.
This type of conflict would eventually leak into the West and become the animating dynamic of liberal democracy. On one side is the minority faction of radicals promising to restructure society. The opposition is a disorganized collection of groups who only agree on their opposition to the latest radical innovations. In every case, the radical minority carries the day, defeating the ad hoc opposition.
“The only antidote to the egalitarian madness of liberal radicalism is an equally fanatical illiberal radicalism.”This reality of liberal political philosophy was just as confusing to the radicals a century ago as it is to Western people today. After the Bolsheviks won the civil war, the more prudent elements gained the upper hand and implemented a moderate program aimed at incrementally creating a socialist society. The moderates came up with something called the New Economic Policy, which became policy in 1922.
As an aside, the NEP, as it came to be called, was a program, according to Lenin, that included a free market and capitalism, but it would be regulated by the state. The socialized state enterprises would operate on a profit basis as well. If this sounds familiar, it should, as it is the economic policy of the West. The only innovation of Western liberals is the use of central banks to manipulate economic activity.
Putting that aside, the moderate program lasted just seven years. The Bukharin faction defeated the Trotsky faction after Lenin’s death, but eventually Stalin came to embrace the radical position, despite having had them killed. In what was called the #Great Break, Stalin collectivized agriculture, nationalized all industry, and, of course, rounded up the moderates and had most of them killed. The NEP and the NEPmen were dead.
This bit of history is important to keep in mind while watching the ruling party struggle with their economic agenda in Washington. It is one of the rare periods of clarity we see in American politics. Usually, they pretend the two parties are squabbling over policy, but in reality, the Republicans are bit players. This is obvious in the present budget battle as the action is between inner party moderates and inner party radicals.
The seeds of moderate defeat are always the same. They agree in principle with the goals and philosophy of the radicals, they just lack the guts to do it. In 1920s Russia, the moderates did not want to murder millions to create socialism. Today, the moderates don’t want to commit to trillions in spending to Build Back Better. When your only complaint about the plan to murder society is the price tag, you are not in opposition. You are in the way.
The radicalism in this Build Back Better agenda is not in the price tag or in the groups it promises to reward and punish. What makes this bill so radical is that it does not exist as a written piece of legislation spelling out the spending plan. Instead, it is a framework that authorizes the federal bureaucracy to spend trillions to achieve the goals of this new economic and cultural framework.
In a functioning parliamentary system, annual budgets are debated among the representatives, usually over taxes and spending. For decades now, the American system has been one where the prior budget is the baseline. Additions and subtractions are what get debated in Congress. In other words, budget debates are largely ceremonial, but there is room for tinkering around the edges of the budget for political purposes.
Even though budget debates have been reduced to ceremony, the budgets actually exist, and in theory they can be altered. In this new bill, the thing that passes is more like a set of suggestions, which will be filled out later with other bills passed by Congress and regulations created by the bureaucracy. In other words, the people endlessly yapping about threats to “our democracy” are about to kill the democratic process.
In principle, this is not a bad thing, as democracy is the most ridiculous form of government ever conceived. If taxing, spending, and war are no longer topics of debate, then most people can get back to their lives and forget about politics. After all, if it no longer matters which party wins, then there is no point in voting. Think about how much happier life would be if politics was removed from the public square.
The trouble, as was quickly discovered by the Russians after the revolution, is that putting unbalanced lunatics in charge never ends well. Having that ridiculous sissy Mark Milley in charge of the military, for example, ensures a future disaster. Putting the legions of innumerate simpletons who make up the federal bureaucracy in charge of the economy is probably worse than communism.
The absurdity of empowering the managerial class to take full control of the economy and culture will not stop the radicals from carrying the day. That is the great lesson of Western liberalism. The radicals always win. The NEPmen of the Soviet system learned this the hard way. The so-called moderates of the inner party will soon learn the same lesson, although in less colorful fashion.
The consolation, if there is any, is that it will prove that you cannot defeat radicalism with moderation. The only antidote to the egalitarian madness of liberal radicalism is an equally fanatical illiberal radicalism. If the West is ever going to awake from this egalitarian madness called liberal democracy, it will start with Occidental people waking up to the reality of their situation. Only then can we Build Back Better.
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The Z Man is out there, sensible as ever.
New Economic Policy ex Wiki
The New Economic Policy (NEP) (Russian: новая экономическая политика (НЭП), tr. novaya ekonomicheskaya politika) was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control," while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis."[1]The NEP represented a more market-oriented economic policy (deemed necessary after the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1922) to foster the economy of the country, which had suffered severely since 1915. The Soviet authorities partially revoked the complete nationalization of industry (established during the period of War Communism of 1918 to 1921) and introduced a mixed economy which allowed private individuals to own small and medium sized enterprises,[2] while the state continued to control large industries, banks and foreign trade.[3] In addition, the NEP abolished prodrazvyorstka (forced grain-requisition)[2] and introduced prodnalog: a tax on farmers, payable in the form of raw agricultural product.[4] The Bolshevik government adopted the NEP in the course of the 10th Congress of the All-Russian Communist Party (March 1921) and promulgated it by a decree on 21 March 1921: "On the Replacement of Prodrazvyorstka by Prodnalog". Further decrees refined the policy. Other policies included monetary reform (1922–1924) and the attraction of foreign capital.
The NEP created a new category of people called NEPmen (нэпманы) (nouveau riches). Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP in 1928 with the Great Break.
Great Break ex Wiki
The Great Turn or Great Break (Russian: Великий перелом) was the radical change in the economic policy of the USSR from 1928 to 1929, primarily consisting of the process by which the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 was abandoned in favor of the acceleration of collectivization and industrialization and also a cultural revolution. The term came from the title of Joseph Stalin's article "Year of the Great Turn" ("Год великого перелома: к XII годовщине Октября", literally: "Year of the Great Break: Toward the 12th Anniversary of October) published on November 7, 1929, the 12th anniversary of the October Revolution.[1] David R. Marples argues that the era of the Great Break lasted until 1934.[2]:Collectivization
Up to 1928, Stalin supported the New Economic Policy implemented by his predecessor Vladimir Lenin. The NEP had brought some market reforms to the Soviet economy, including allowing peasants to sell surplus grain on the domestic and international market.[3]: 174 However, in 1928 Stalin changed his position and opposed continuation of the NEP.[2]: 98 Part of the reason for his change was that the peasants in the years before 1928 started hoarding grain in response to low domestic and international prices for their produce.[4]: 25Stalin implemented agricultural collectivization, which would end private ownership of land. The state would take land from its previous owners and place it either under collective ownership of peasants (kolkhoz) or under state ownership (sovkoz).[2]: 112 The idea behind collectivization was that large estates tend to yield more agricultural output. Also, owners of a large farm tended to be better able to afford machinery such as tractors and threshers than owners of small plots of land, and these technological implements would increase worker productivity, freeing up peasants to move to the cities and construction sites to aid the industrialization process.[4]: 24 Before collectivization, the owners of large farms tended to be wealthy peasants (kulaks) but the Bolsheviks regarded the kulaks as capitalist exploiters, and wished to redistribute the surplus land to the poorer peasants.[2]: 100 The only way to have large farms without kulak owners was to form collective farms.
The Soviet state needed increased agricultural output to feed the workers in the cities and construction sites.[2]: 101 The end of the NEP meant that peasants would no longer be able to sell grain to the state. Thus, the state would have to requisition surplus grain.[3]: 236
Collectivization met with little success before 1934 in terms of agricultural output.[4]: 44 The Soviet state was slow to provide the necessary tractors and other machinery to the collective farms and this delay caused a reduction in agricultural output.[4]: 47 Some peasants also resisted the collectivization process and slaughtered their livestock in protest, reducing output even more.[2]: 105 On top of these two conditions, the state was requisitioning more grain than the peasants could spare.[4]: 47 These three factors led to a famine in parts of the countryside in 1932–33 including Ukraine and southern Russia.[5]: 626 In Ukraine, at least four million peasants died.
Nikolai Bukharin ex Wiki
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (Russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Буха́рин) (9 October [O.S. 27 September] 1888 – 15 March 1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician, Marxist philosopher and economist and prolific author on revolutionary theory.As a young man, he spent six years in exile working closely with fellow exiles Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. After the revolution of February 1917, he returned to Moscow, where his Bolshevik credentials earned him a high rank in the party, and after the October Revolution became editor of their newspaper Pravda.
Within the Bolshevik Party, Bukharin was initially a left communist, but gradually moved to the right from 1921. His strong support for and defence of the New Economic Policy (NEP) eventually saw him lead the Right Opposition. By late 1924, this stance had positioned Bukharin favourably as Joseph Stalin's chief ally, with Bukharin soon elaborating Stalin's new theory and policy of Socialism in One Country. Together, Bukharin and Stalin ousted Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev from the party at the 15th Communist Party Congress in December 1927. From 1926 to 1929, Bukharin enjoyed great power as General Secretary of the Comintern's executive committee. However, Stalin's decision to proceed with collectivisation drove the two men apart, and Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in 1929.
When the Great Purge began in 1936, some of Bukharin's letters, conversations and tapped phone-calls indicated disloyalty. Arrested in February 1937, Bukharin was charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. After a show trial that alienated many Western communist sympathisers, he was executed in March 1938.