Atheism: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 302-306

 Works like this survive on vibes, and one of the vibes that they have to exploit is fear. Most of that fear is about changing the orthodoxy that the reader regards as “the default.” People hate change, especially Americans. An American will brag about surviving suffering rather than every question why they suffered in the first place. When the Communist/Socialists takeover (in Webster’s view these ideologies are the same), one of the cultural institutions that they target are the religious ones.

From the perspective of the revolutionaries the reason that this is a necessary step is because religious institutions are part of the problem. The French revolution targeted the Catholic church because the Catholic church, at the time, was part of the oppression of the French peasantry. They not only blessed the Aristocracy they were inextricable from it. The Russian Orthodox church was the same. The Tsarist government was endorsed by the church and benefitted from it. What Webster likes to ignore is that the revolutionaries didn’t target the ideas of the religion they targeted the institutions. The day to day moral prescriptions were fine—but the conceit that one must always supplicate to something else, that to break the law of the king was not just illegal but offended god was the problem. It was another facet of the control. Remember that Christianity, especially Catholicism, teaches that suffering is good and that the lower you are on the social ladder the greater your reward in the next life.

“…ikons torn down and spat upon, and countless priests murdered…”

I’ve never seen “icon” spelled this way outside of the Greek.

Another issue that we see with people like Webster is that they are fundamentally bad people for whom only the threat of eternal punishment keeps them in line. They exploit this made up fear that without social institutions society will collapse and the people will just start murdering each other. There’s no evidence of this happening, and Webster’s attempt to make it seem like hundreds of thousands of people died in the French Revolution is silly. It’s France, people are Catholic by default in the 18^th century.

The final issue with this section is that it’s obvious. Her quotations are actually well cited for once and she isn’t doing the game of pulling from various parts of a book. No person she has been talking about has refrained from talking about their disdain for religion. What we should have here is her argument against the atheism position. She should be attempting to argue why a state needs an official religion, instead she’s trying to shock us with a story she’s already been telling us for three hundred pages at this point. It would also be helpful if she actually cited Weishaupt’s writing about how he disdained the existence of religion and its effect on people instead of using Baurrell’s version of it. It’s not fundamentally different but it does show us that she’s never actually read the writings of the Illuminati.

Moving from religion we get a section that is odd because she tries to defend the opposite of what people like her believe today. She points out that Russian writers criticized the cities because that is where the wage slavery existed and they wrote that the cities should be abolished. I had no idea what this meant or why this would be the case. The strange thing is that now, people like Webster hate urban life and the people in the cities so I was curious why she was taking the opposite position.

According to “The City in Russian Literature: Images Past and Present” (Porter 1999), there is a strange relationship that Russian writers have with the city. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks were heavily interested in modernization and the urban environment was one of their targets because Russia was late to the Industrial Revolution. Porter observes that because of this, “In economic terms towns were often more consumptive than productive, their inhabitants fed by the toilers in the field, but with few of the benefits of urban life spreading out to the countryside.”

What I think is occurring is that she’s ignoring the metaphor being used by the Russian writers. They’re not talking about literally burning the cities down but rather what this view that Porter describes. The evidence we have is that the Bolsheviks didn’t burn all of the cities down. They still exist, in fact, they still exist today.

Webster leans heavily into an attack on H.G. Wells who commented that “it was not Cummunism which built up these great impossible cities but capitalism.” That’s it, that’s all of the quote that we get, but there’s so much more to it. Webster represents this single sentence as being indicative of Wells dismissal of the ruin of Russian cities by the Soviets as they took over, a ruin which didn’t happen. However, she ignores that Wells was openly hostile to Marx. He didn’t hear anything from his Russian friends about this, as she writes, Wells was in Russia talking to people in Gorky park and then meeting Vladimir Lenin himself.  

Our main gripe here is what she isn’t saying. Webster isn’t making an argument that is pro-city, pro-urban, or even pro-industrialization. All we are getting is an individual trying to drudge up panic because people with different ideas than her did something successful. I get more sympathetic with the revolutionaries every time, I have to admit that, and Webster is doing nothing to dissuade me of that tendency.

The Russian writers are anti-city because that’s where unearned wealth was located. That’s it, that is the thing they wanted to change. So what, can Webster offer us as a counter-argument? Nothing, we get nothing from her on this or the religion question that she raised before. It’s been a problem throughout the entire book but here she’s beginning to wrap this book up so we’re hitting the greatest hits. My doubt is that we will ever get an argument that isn’t, blah blah blah bad stuff, French revolution, Jews, Bakunin.