A new edition of
Political Ponerology, by Andrew M. Łobaczewski, edited by Harrison Koehli, is now available on Amazon.
1 This strange and provocative book argues that totalitarianism is the result of the extension of psychopathology from a group of psychopaths to the entire body politic, including its political and economic systems.
Political Ponerology is essential reading for concerned thinkers and all sufferers of past and present totalitarianism. It is especially crucial today, when totalitarianism has once again emerged, this time in the West, where it is affecting nearly every aspect of life, including especially the life of the mind.
When I first encountered
Political Ponerology, I had been struggling to understand just how totalitarian leftism had effectively taken over the United States of America. Ever since my encounters with the rabid social justice warriors as a professor at New York University — recounted in my book
Springtime for Snowflakes — I began to note, with no little alarm, the totalitarian character of the contemporary Left. Then the emergence of "woke" ideology and its metastasis from academia into the entire social body set me on a mission to understand the rise of totalitarianism — because I believed, and still do, that "wokism" is totalitarian. Far from being "liberal" in the classical sense, woke ideology is akin to the Jacobinism that fueled the communist revolutions in Russia, China, and elsewhere. It aims to tear down the established order in its entirety, and to remake the world in its image of utopia.
I began with the study of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and continued by examining the exportation of Bolshevik variants to Eastern Europe and Asia. Communism was more interesting to me than Nazism and a much more neglected terrain in the US academy. Further, it was more relevant in the current context. In attempting to research leftist political criminality, I was both amazed and enraged at how the academy had buried much of the history. For example, searches for the practices of "struggle sessions" and "autocritique," which were so prevalent during the Cultural Revolution in China, yielded next to nothing. These and related topics were either not treated or else simply disappeared. I suspected that a vast coverup had been undertaken.
Comment: The weaponization of Ukraine was designed to do more than mine the country in anticipation of Russian forces intervening.
The question is, why did Russia intervene? Does it just not like seeing Ukraine go the way it has gone? Or is its claim that Ukraine - in its current form - represents a fundamental threat to Russian statehood a valid one?
600,000+ armed Ukrainians trained to NATO standards and backed up by NATO supply lines and led by fanatical Nazis were not going to just sit tight in western Ukraine and wait for the Russians to come.
At the very least, they were poised to retake the Donbass and Crimea by force before Russia pre-emptively nixed their immediate plan. But the longer-term plan was for them to keep going, on into Russia, all the way to Moscow ideally, bringing about regime change and/or the break-up of the Russian Federation.
Ukraine was way more than a de facto NATO member; it was a bridgehead for the NATO invasion of Russia. With nuclear war out of the question due to mutually-assured destruction, proxy 'hybrid' warfare is the only means available to the Western Empire. So the question for Russia becomes, at what point to we intercede here to prevent Russia from being 'given the Syria treatment'?
As Joe Quinn explained in a recent NewsReal, the British and Americans in 2019 and 2020 built two naval bases, either side of Crimea, and supplied them with warships forally under the 'Ukrainian flag'. Such moves were not mere gestures...
Russia's invasion of Ukraine was not a 'war of choice'. It was a genuinely pre-emptive war, with just cause.