One of the things that maya and I found while writing this paoaer is we were looking at
the discourse that preceded genocide in genocidal states. The enhancement of a sense of victimization
on the part of one of the groups. Usually the group that’s going to commit the genocide.
First of all their sense of being victims is much heightened by the demagogues who are
trying to stir up this sort of hatred. And so they basically say look, you’ve been
oppressed in a variety of ways and these are the people who did it and they’re not going
to stop doing it and this time we’re going to get them before they get us.
It’s something like that and so there’s something very pathological about the enhancement
of victimization which is well….
See the problem as far as I’m concerned with it is it’s not thought through very
well. Because there’s a point that’s been made. And the point is that, people have been
oppressed and they suffer. And that’s true. That point.
But then the proper framework from within which to interpret that, I believe, is that’s
characteristics of life. You can’t take it personally in some sense. And you can’t
divide the world neatly into perpetrators and victims. And you certainly can’t divide
the world neatly into perpetrators and victims and then assume that you’re only in the
victim class and then assume that that gives you certain access to certain forms of redress
let’s say. It gets dangerous very rapidly if you do that sort of thing.
For example, one of the things that characterized the soviet union and this was particularly
true in the 1920’s but afterwards. So the soviets were very much enamored with the idea
of class guilt.
So for example althout it was only about 40 years previously that the surfs had been emancipated.
They weren’t much more than slaves and that was the bulk of the russian population. They
were bought and sold along with the land. so they had been emancipated, some of them,
many of them had turned into independent farmers, and some of them had become reasonably prosperous
because at least in principle, i presume a certain portion of them from being crooked,
but I presume a larger proportion from being able to actually raise food.
Of course at that time, the bulk of the russian food population was produced by these relatively
successful peasant farmers. Relatively successful means maybe they had a brick house and a couple
of cows and were able to hire a few people and so you know it wasn’t like they were
massive land owners or anything.
But I talked to you a little bit about the Pareto principle. A notion that in any domain
of activity a small proportion of people end up producing most of what’s in that domain
of activity. The same was true in Russia with most of these peasant farmers. Some of them
were extraordinarily efficient and they produced most of Russia’s food. When the communists
came in, they described those land holders as parasites, essentially. Predicated on the
Marxist idea that if someone had extracted profit from an enterprise that they had basically
stolen that profit from the people that they employed or otherwise oppressed. So you could
be a member of the Kulak K U L A K you could be a member of the kulak class. And because
you were a member of that class you were automatically guilty.
And you gotta think this through to really understand what happened. What happened was
the intellectual communists were sent out in cadres into these little towns to find
people to help them round up the kulaks.
Now you gotta think about what a small town is like. So imagine you’re in a town and
there’s 3 or 4 people or maybe 10 people who are a little more successful than everyone
else. And a certain number of people are going to be fine with that and maybe even happy
about it because they regard those people as particularly productive. As stalwart members
of the community regardless of their flaws.
But there’s going to be some people who are not happy about it at all. That are going
to be very resentful about it and jealous. And those are going to be people I would say
are going to be of the less positive type and so when the intellectuals came in and
described the reason these people should be treated as parasites and profiteers, then
it was the resentful minority in those towns and that would be the kind of guy that hangs
around in the bar all the time and is completely unconscientious and fails at everything and
then blames everyone else for it.
The intellectuals came in and said “This is unfair that this happened to you. You’ve
actually been victimized and now it’s your opportunity to go have your revenge. And so
that’s exactly what happened.
Now in some of the villages sometime the peasants would actually surround the farmsteads of
these more successful people and try to defend them but that never worked out for every long
and so these mobs, these angry mobs would go into the and strip these place down to
nothing and pack these people up and send them on trains with no food out to Siberia
where there was no place to live. So they were packed into houses where maybe they had
a square meter to live while their children died of typhoid and many of them froze to
death. Many many people died. Millions of people died as a consequence of the de-kulakization.
Or at least as a consequence of its total effect.
And so what happened then was there wasn’t any food produced. And then 6 million Ukrainians
starved to death in the 1920’s. Which is something you never hear about. Why? Why do
you never hear about that? That’s a question worth asking. You know it was an absolute
catastrophe. So these people were starving. Right to the point of cannibalism. It was
ugly. As ugly as anything you could imagine.
If you were a mother, so you’re supposed to hand all your grain to the central committee,
mostly for distribution into the cities. You didn't get to keep any for yourself. And so
maybe if you were a mother you’d go out in fields that had already been harvested
and you’d pick up individual grains of wheat and if you didn’t turn those in that was
death for you. So that’s how far it was pushed. So…
So that’s a little story about how the idea of victimization and perpetration can get
out of hand extraordinarily rapidly. So whenever people are beating the victim drum you know
they’ll cover that up with empathy roughly speaking. “We’re speaking on behalf of
the oppressed.” It’s like maybe you are, but maybe you’re no saint. Because you’re
so sure that you’re a saint and you’re only speaking from a position of good. Highly
unlikely.