Pepe, Peterson and the age of political confusion

I feel that it is time to clarify certain terms often employed  by both the left and right which appear to me to be improperly used as well as poorly understood. I am writing my blog today on the so-called alt-right movement. On what I believe to be some dangerous misconceptions regarding it. On the alt-right’s peculiar range of beliefs. Its weird association with an anthropomorphic frog named Pepe as well as some of its adherents’ dalliances with fascism.

This blog will deal with the most important yardstick for any political movement; how much centralized social control does it require? To what extent is social coercion needed for it to function? Asking this question honestly will allow us to place political systems on the left-right spectrum. Understand that the far left requires intense social coercion while as we move further to the right along the scale less coercion is needed. Why? Because moving to the right on the scale places increasing emphasis on the individual, and his/her rights as well as responsibilities. Obviously, I chose to live with the least amount of social coercion to maintain social cohesion. But where do your beliefs place you? We are about to find out.

All belief systems have their origins. But beware of any who have their origins in philosophies which purport to create utopia. Of all the warnings Professor Jordan B. Peterson gives, this appears to me to be the one which most concerns him. Here’s a list of the number of murdered civilians who died to help create utopia under communism. Data posted from http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/ ;

Communist Body Count: 149,469,610

Rank		Country
1		People’s Republic of China Body Count: 73,237,000 1949-Present (57+ years and counting)R.J. Rummel originally estimated China’s body count between between the years of 1949-1987 to be 35,236,000 (Rummel 1994). This excluded 38,000,000 million that died of famine during the Great Leap Forward. After the release of Mao: The Unknown Story, Rummel became convinced that the Chinese government was directly responsible for the famine, thus increasing his original estimate by 38,000,000 (Rummel 2005). 1,000 was added for Tienanmen Square in 1989 (Courtois 1999).
2		Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Body Count: 58,627,000 1922-1991 (69 years)The body count only covers the years 1923-1987 (Rummel 1996).
3		Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic Body Count: 3,284,000 1918-1922 (4 years)This body count does not include the 6,210,000 killed in the civil war (Rummel 1996).
4		Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Body Count: 3,163,000 1948-Present (58+ years and counting)1,663,000 is attributed between 1948-1987 excluding the Korean War (Rummel 1994). 2,500,000 is the mid-estimate for those who starved to death between 1995-1998 (U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea 2006).
5		Cambodia Body Count: 2,627,000 1975-1987 (12 years)The body count estimate is complete (Rummel 1994). The offical country name was Democratic Kampuchea during Pol Pot’s reign and then known as People’s Republic of Kampuchea afterwards.
6		Democratic Republic of Afghanistan Body Count: 1,750,000 1978-1992 (14 years)The body count estimate is complete (Courtois 1999).
7		Vietnam Body Count: 1,670,000 1975-Present (30+ years and counting)The body count covers the years 1945-1987 for Vietnam/North Vietnam and excludes 1,062,000 from the Vietnam War (Rummel 1994).
8		People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia Body Count: 1,343,610 1974-1991 (17 years)The body count includes 10,000 political assasinations during 1977-1978, 1,000 children killed in 1977, 110 massacred in an Orthodox church in 1975, 80,000 during the civil war between 1978-1980, 250,000 that died in 1982 through Transit Camps, and 2,500 killed in a bombing raid (Courtois 1999). Another 1,000,000 is added for the famine during 1984-1985 (BBC News 2000).
9		Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Body Count: 1,072,000 1945-1992 (47 years)The body count only covers the years 1945-1992 excluding 100,000 from the Tito Partisans between 1941-1944 (Rummel 1994).
10		Chinese Soviet Republic Body Count: 700,000 1931-1934 (3 years)The body count only includes the Jiangxi and Fujian provinces (Chang 2005). Although Mozambique has 700,000 to its name, the Chinese Soviet Republic produced more bodies in a shorter time period and the estimate is low.
11		People’s Republic of Mozambique Body Count: 700,000 1975-1990 (15 years)100,000 civilians murdered between 1986 and mid-1988 (Young 1991) and 600,000 starved to death between 1975-1985 (Courtois 1999).
12		Socialist Republic of Romania Body Count: 435,000 1947-1989 (42 years)The body count only covers the years 1947-1987 (Rummel 1997).
13		People’s Republic of Bulgaria Body Count: 222,000 1946-1990 (44 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1987 (Rummel 1997).
14		People’s Republic of Angola Body Count: 125,000 1975-1992 (17 years)The body count only covers the years 1975-1987 (Rummel 1997).
15		Mongolian People’s Republic Body Count: 100,000 1924-1992 (68 years)The body count only covers the years 1924-1987 (Rummel 1997).
16		People’s Socialist Republic of Albania Body Count: 100,000 1946-1991 (45 years) The body count only covers the years 1944-1987 (Rummel 1997).
17		Republic of Cuba Body Count: 73,000 1961-Present (45+ years and counting)The body count only covers the years 1959-1987 (Rummel 1997).
18		German Democratic Republic Body Count: 70,000 1949-1990 (41 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1987 (Rummel 1997).
19		Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia Body Count: 65,000 1948-1990 (42 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1968 (Rummel 1997).
20		Lao People’s Democratic Republic Body Count: 56,000 1975-Present (31+ years and counting)The body count only covers the years 1975-1987 excluding 47,000 war dead (Rummel 1997).
21		Hungarian People’s Republic Body Count: 27,000 1949-1989 (40 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1987 (Rummel 1997).
22		People’s Republic of Poland Body Count: 22,000 1948-1989 (41 years)The body count only covers the years 1948-1987 (Rummel 1997). Excludes 1,585,000 from ethnic cleansing between 1945-1950 (Rummel 1994).
23		People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen Body Count: 1,000 1969-1990 (21 years)The body count only covers the years 1969-1987 (Rummel 1997).

And here's what utopia looked like under the Nazis. Data taken from  https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193 ;

"What follow are the current best estimates of civilians and disarmed soldiers killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

These estimates are calculated from wartime reports generated by those who implemented Nazi population policy, and postwar demographic studies on population loss during World War II.

Number of Deaths

Jews: up to 6 million

Soviet civilians: around 7 million (including 1.3 Soviet Jewish civilians, who are included in the 6 million figures for Jews)

Soviet prisoners of war: around 3 million (including about 50,000 Jewish soldiers)

Non-Jewish Polish civilians: around 1.8 million (including between 50,000 and 100,000 members of the Polish elites)

Serb civilians (on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina): 312,000

People with disabilities living in institutions: up to 250,000

Roma (Gypsies): 196,000–220,000

Jehovah's Witnesses: around 1,900

Repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials: at least 70,000

German political opponents and resistance activists in Axis-occupied territory: undetermined

Homosexuals: hundreds, possibly thousands (possibly also counted in part under the 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocials noted above)

Jewish Loss by Location of Death

With regard to the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, best estimates for the breakdown of Jewish loss according to location of death follow:

Auschwitz complex (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps): approximately 1 million

Treblinka 2: approximately 925,000

Belzec: 434,508

Sobibor: at least 167,000

Chelmno: 156,000–172,000

Shooting operations at various locations in central and southern German-occupied Poland (the so-called Government General): at least 200,000

Shooting operations in German-annexed western Poland (District Wartheland): at least 20,000

Deaths in other facilities that the Germans designated as concentration camps: at least 150,000

Shooting operations and gas wagons at hundreds of locations in the German-occupied Soviet Union: at least 1.3 million

Shooting operations in the Soviet Union (German, Austrian, Czech Jews deported to the Soviet Union): approximately 55,000

Shooting operations and gas wagons in Serbia: at least 15,088

Shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaša regime: 23,000–25,000

Deaths in ghettos: at least 800,000

Other*: at least 500,000

*"Other" includes, for example, persons killed in shooting operations in Poland in 1939–1940; as partisans in Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, France or Belgium; in labor battalions in Hungary; during anti-Semitic actions in Germany and Austria before the war; by the Iron Guard in Romania, 1940–1941; and on evacuation marches from concentration camps and labor camps in the last six months of World War II. It also includes people caught in hiding and killed in Poland, Serbia, and elsewhere in German-occupied Europe."

Now that’s one hell of a utopia. Both systems have several things in common. Foremost among them are that both ideologies have their origins in socialism, both purport they can create utopia and both share the need for enormous social coercion for them to function. This includes laws which regulate thought and speech, just as we see in Canada today. Please understand that socialism means societal control of all social and economic interactions. It refers to the state run collective making 'the state' the manifestation of ‘the people', therefore socialism is no friend to the individual. Both types of totalitarian social control vied for ascension throughout the 20th Century because they cannot coexist. They pose too great a threat to one another. The other possibility is that would eventually merge under a more statist hybrid which would combine elements of both philosophies. Witness the crony capitalism we see today which to a large extent has replaced laissez-faire.

Here is an excellent article on the socialist origins of fascism; https://www.partyforfreedom.org.au/2013/05/21/the-socialist-origins-of-fascism-and-nazism/ .

Every single prominent Fascist/Nazi cut their teeth on socialism. Here is an excerpt on fascist philosophy’s foremost philosopher, Giovanni Gentile;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile#Gentile's_definition_of_and_vision_for_Fascism

Mussolini, like Hitler, was a renown socialist. His break from the communist version of socialism was centered around his notion that the nation state was to be all important as opposed to supranationalism (globalism). It was over this disagreement that he was expelled from the socialist party. https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/precursors-origins-italian-fascism Therefore “Mussolini’s break with his party on the issue of war is a pivotal point in the history of fascism. Where more traditional socialism had made the workers themselves central and paramount, proposing an international harmony between them, Italian fascism reasserted the importance of national character and its distinctions; it sought empire and the aggrandizement of the Italian nation through war, which Mussolini said “brings all human energies to their highest tension.” Such ideas on the virtues of violence and the spiritual purification of the people through war Mussolini borrowed from syndicalism—the aspect of socialism to which fascism owes most. As historian Alexander De Grand argues, “National syndicalism was the original nucleus of the fascist ideology.” Syndicalism is a revolutionary variant of socialism that emphasizes the role of the trade union in the empowerment of the working class and in the reorganization or society. Distrustful of politics generally, syndicalists urged direct action in the form of wildcat strikes and violent propaganda of the deed, their philosophy stressing the morally transformative quality of violence. In the words of Georges Sorel, perhaps the greatest theoretician of syndicalism, “Proletarian violence … [is] a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization.” In Sorel’s accentuation of violent, physical acts of heroism, we see hints of Mussolini’s fascism. Syndicalism thus provides fascism with its point of departure from orthodox socialism’s hostility toward nationalism and imperialism.”

OK, I have argued that Fascism/Nazism and Communism are socialist left-wing ideologies. Which leaves one important question. How on earth does Fascism/Nazism get labelled as ‘far right’ while communism is labelled as ‘far left’ when they share the same origins? That is the real question. Well, as with many things, the answer is so glaringly obvious you will wonder why so many miss it. The two radical left-wing ideologies compete with one another. Therefore, they do not wish to be compared. Since the radical left controls much of the discourse on main stream media, they seek to create a false narrative to confuse people.

Back in 2013, when I was fairly new to Norway, I witnessed a very disturbing trend developing around the immigration issue. Norwegians were becoming polarized as a result. The government had refused to address problems with its immigration policies and at the same time appeared to engage in tactics aimed at undermining Norwegian culture. This included doing what Trudeau does at present, imply Norwegians were bigoted if they expected their government to fix said issues. This in turn had led to resistance in certain circles as well as a homegrown terrorist incident with a man named Breivik. Although this incident had happened prior to my time in Norway, the aftermath was still deeply felt and always will be. However, this fracturing of ideologies did not occur along a properly defined left-right political divide. It occurred along some very insidious old lines not new to Norway, namely fascism versus socialism. I heard the old arguments regarding nationalism versus globalism about the immigration crisis. I predicted this would create tensions and very sadly we are seeing that scenario play out. To put this succinctly, this is the old argument as to which version of social control is better, fascism or socialism? This is not good, to say the very least, yet so predictable.

Enough of Norway, I am home now. I came back in May of 2015. And yes, back to the same damn thing I saw in Scandinavia. By his own party’s admission, Harper was an authoritarian at best and an oligarch at worst. He insisted on clinging to the reins of power while refusing to listen to his own people. Partly as a result his party lost the election in 2015. Canadians were ready for a change. But it hasn't been the change they had hoped for. The current Liberal Party's government has proven itself to be far to the left of what many thought. Virtue signaling has become Justin Trudeau's government's only mantra. The old beliefs of placing the individual before the collective, of fair play as opposed to raison d’etat, and raising the law above government are long gone. Virtually the entire political class has been corrupted by a lust for power and control. People have become complacent. They place far too much trust in their political party of choice to do their thinking for them not realizing how many of our liberties we are surrendering to the state by doing so. Worse, we are failing our kids.

WTF Is Pepe? I watched an interview last evening, “Jordan Peterson sits down with the CBC’s Wendy Mesley to talk about political polarization, Pepe the Frog and his support from the far right. He has a new book called 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos. Peterson sparked controversy in 2016, when he spoke against a federal bill on gender expression and the University of Toronto’s policy requirement to address students by their gender pronoun of choice.” https://youtu.be/0BoOdMx_zDU  In this video Mesley tried to nail Peterson on the idiotic Pepe meme but failed, as most do who have the temerity to challenge his significant intellect and grasp of the psychological meaning of societal trends. But, there is one major thing Professor Peterson appears to fail to understand, at least in my layman’s opinion. The meaning of the left versus right political divide. When young people, apparently mostly young men, feel the need to identify with an anthropomorphic frog, well, I am at a loss as to what to write. But to take this further, to equate anthropomorphic frogs with Nazism? And Kek? WTF? I suppose I could dismiss this by saying “Ok, these kids are just brain dead", but that is not true, at least I hope it isn't. How the hell can anthropomorphic frogs and Nazism have anything, even in the most rabid leftist's addled brain, to do with conservatism or classical liberalism which subscribes to limited, responsible government? We advocate for small government which will leave folks to their own devices to keep and invest as much of their hard-earned money as possible such that government is just sufficient on the coercion scale to maintain law, order and good governance with basic social structures! Is this the best that parents and our publicly funded education system can do to teach our children about the very foundations of our system of limited constitutional government? Face it, we have failed, neo-Nazis aren’t right wing and I am not even certain anthropomorphic frogs have anything to do with fascism. Confused? I hope so, I am too. Let us end the confusion! Nazism, fascism, socialism, statism, and yes, political Islamism are all version of radical leftist ideologies under which we cannot live as a free people!

Peterson did make one thing clear though and hear it loud and clear when you listen to the video I have posted above. Identity politics is the mantra of both fascism and socialism, they just play that game for different reasons. We are all equal before the law. No identity group has rights, only the individual does. The individual is the single most oppressed minority. Choose your political philosophy carefully. And teach your kids to think for themselves or they will force you to answer to Pepe!