At Least It's an Ethos pp. 235-239

This week’s section is an odd one and Webster is starting to lose her thread. I’ve noticed in the eight conspiracy books that we’ve read so far, that as the books go on the author loses the ability to stay on target. The only exception to this observation was Cooper’s book, because that was never on target to begin with. Webster is just bouncing around too much. She’s been confining herself to one time period per chapter, that’s good, but now we’re mixing revolutions between Russian and France and it’s getting a bit weird.

We get, right out of the gate in chapter VIII, some anti-Semitism, “the Marxist synagogue’ as Bakunin described it…”

Obviously, we’re returning to Webster’s crush, but we aren’t citing Bakunin. We’re citing someone else’s work on the history of Anarchism. It’s a small gripe but she has this pattern of citing what someone else said someone said. Here we have Ettore Zoccoli telling us that Bakunin called the Internationale a Marxist Synagogue. She should just cite Bakunin directly.

The chapter is titled “the Course of Anarchy” and for that we get several pages on the history of Nihilism. Nihilism, in a very short summary, is the belief that nothing has value beyond our own perception of it. In other words, an action isn’t moral or immoral unless we ascribe meaning to it. A piece of art has no aesthetic value without an observer, and cultural traditions are just the product of inertia and habit. It’s kind of bleak, but Nihilism is also the recognition that people give life meaning. The philosophical tradition is varied and if there are any of you philosophers out there who are crashing out on my summary; remember, I have to be brief.

Webster though gets some things objectively wrong, they’re minor, but Webster is attempting to frame this book as historical so she should do better. She claims that “Nihilism – of which the name first appears in Turghenieff’s novel, Fathers and Sons, in 1861…”

No, this isn’t correct. The word is Latin in origin so making the claim that a Russian author coined it is strange. It would be possible but odd. The novel did popularize the concept, but it didn’t create it. That honor would go to a German named Friedrich Jacobi, and since Webster’s racism targets Germans, I’m reluctant to think that this is an honest mistake. Turgenev (she misspells Russian names so consistently I think this is not her fault), popularizes the term in his book which has a plot summary very similar to The Graduate.

Webster tries to explain that Turgenev was writing the book as a proscription of Nihilism when, instead, he was writing it as a response to a cultural movement in Russian society. The Nihilist character sees the only path forward for Russia to be a rejection of the values of Russian society that only exist because they’ve always existed. Webster attempts to claim that this is some attempt to claim a spiritual origin in the Russian people for Nihilism, which shows how little she actually understands about Nihilism.

She makes all sorts of odd claims about the power of Nihilism, which again, is a strange type of claim to make, “The ‘equality of the sexes’ was a fundamental doctrine of Nihilism which, as Pere Deschamps points out, is only another expression for the destruction of family life.”

I love when people like her tip their hand too much. This is rage baiting, she wants us to be upset at the concept of sex equality, so she lays the idea on the feet of the Nihilists. The reason sex equality would have been appealing to Nihilism is because sex inequality has no inherent basis. The only reason that sex inequality exists is that it is a social construct. She heaps on to her rage bait attempt by claiming that the family would become communal having the children raised by the group rather than a single family. This isn’t Nihilism, this is Plato. I’m not a fan of Plato, or his Republic, but at least aim at the right target.

“Above all, of course, religion must be destroyed…”—yeah, that’s Nihilism; because there is no value intrinsic to religion. This much is at least accurate.

She claims that this hatred of religion is just a resurrected form of Weishaupt’s Illuminism. What she can’t consider is that there could be two different reasons that two independent movements could have to want to eliminate religion. The Illuminati wanted, at the very least, the removal of religion as an influence in politics. The theocratic autocracy of Europe is what Weishaupt opposed. Nihilists aren’t political in this respect. Yes, both would rely on reason to dissuade people from superstition but that’s not evidence of collusion or continuation. The hand of religion is used as oppression in Tsarist Russia and it’s merely the rule because the rulers say it is. If everywhere you go you see people opposing theocratic rule, maybe we should begin questioning what it is that they have a problem with. Webster just wants these peasants to be grateful for their religiously ordered place in society.

I’ve explained that Webster hates Germans and that she hates Communism. I always assumed that her dislike for Russians was based on the USSR, but no, it’s more racism. It’s too bad because she has the seed of an interesting opposition to Nihilism. She explains that any civilization that is going to pretend to have a value must have a great personage to instill ideas of honor and justice in the people. She explains that England had Alred the Great and Richard the Lionheart, France had Saint Louis and Henry IV; but the Russians never had such a person. The Russian people are people of an insufficient bloodline because they were founded by Tartars not Romans. This made them nothing but barbarians until Peter the Great who fostered civilization on a people incapable of it. They are primitive, and if one were to travel to the interior of Russia they would see a patriarchal society that is the true Russian.

The Russians are not a true civilization until The Romanovs attempted to Westernize it (which is actually what Peter the Great attempted to do). In return, the Russian people learned how to overthrow a Western monarchy by imitating Western revolutionaries like her boyfriend Bakunin. This was easy for the Russian people because they are a group naturally predisposed to violence, “And when we consider this peculiarity (that Russians easily respond to suggestions of violence), when we remember the tendency to drunkenness and to brutality that underlies his surface impassiveness we realize the fearful danger of taking from him the only restraints he knew—respect for God and the Czar.”

The only people Websters seem to like are the French and the English. She’s got racism toward so many other people it’s almost impressive. It’s not just regular, “I’m better than you;” style racism either. She’s got very specific beefs against the Russians, Germans, and Jews.

Next week we will learn about the Revolutions in Russia and how Tsarist oppression is really the fault of the oppressed.