See below Grok’s responses on Zoroastrian cosmic dualism that has affirmed human tribalism across subsequent history and how, for example, this relates to Marxist collective dualism of today, and its new variants in Woke progressivism with DEI that embraces new dualisms of victims/victimizers based on race/skin color. Note also Grok on the path that Marxist ideas/principles took to infect western academia and Woke Progressive DEI. Note also Grok’s material on Critical Race Theory origins and principles.
Note how Grok applies the Zoroastrian framework of themes to the current Iranian theocracy and its stated intentions to overthrow western liberal democracies and install a worldwide caliphate.
The material below is good on how and why Marxism/socialism inevitably produces totalitarianism outcomes and where the collectivist elites end up eating even their own in the obsession to maintain highly centralized control over power. It is inherent to the system. And all suffer the loss of freedom and material wellbeing except the elites paranoidly holding power.
Socialism (due to built-in principles and practises) incites and validates the worst of human impulses to tribalism, domination, and violent destruction of differing others. Grok explains the details and the psychology at work in all this.
Why does this matter for this site? Because it illustrates a modern-era variant on Paul’s apocalyptic millennialism or salvation through violent destruction that is common also to radical Islam and environmental alarmism.
Here is detail on the topics covered below:
-Lenin’s Vanguard Party Theory and Examine Hannah Arendt’s Totalitarianism.
-Xi’s stated intention to overthrow liberal democracy and install his authoritarian approach worldwide.
-Chinese cooperation with Iran in shared goal to overthrow western liberal democracy.
-The influence of Paul’s apocalyptic millennialism on the Chinese brand of communism.
-The left side of our western liberal democracies has shifted further far-left under what is termed “Woke progressivism with DEI” that is a new variant on socialist collectivism, the same old tribal dualism that divides humanity into two opposing groups.
-Critical race theory origins.
-Zoroastrian cosmic dualism has affirmed human tribalism across subsequent history.
-This site focuses on fundamental transformation at the level of deeply embedded archetypes of human subconscious, just as Historical Jesus went to the core inherited religious theme- i.e. the theology or image of God. There is no more profound a liberation from the old and into the new more humane reality than his theology and message. That is transformation and liberation of human consciousness, narratives, and life unlike any other in human history.
-I do not need the Jesus material to make the case but use it selectively as illustrative of my point that unconditional is the more humane ideal and approach to construct narratives around.
-How Zoroastrian cosmic dualism drives the aggression of the Iranian theocratic leaders against Israel and the US in particular.
-Countering the charge of systemic racism in the US (by Critical Race theorists and others) when surveys show a massive shift over recent decades toward almost universal acceptance of mixed everything (marriage, neighborhoods, etc.).
-Commentators like Michael Shellenberger state that the problems of modern leftism are due to the rejection of the traditional Christian religion (i.e. not distinguishing diamonds from dung). My argument is that the problem of modern leftism is due to the rejection of the core Jesus themes/ideals of (1) universal inclusion of all as equals, (2) non-dominating relationships of mutual service, and (3) non-vengeful merciful treatment of differing others. The problem of modern leftism is their continued embrace of Paul’s entirely opposite Christ themes of (1) tribal exclusion of differing others, (2) defeat and domination of opponents, and (3) the violent destruction of differing others as “justice”. These themes are embraced in “secular/ideological” variants like contemporary leftism and affirm totalitarian outcomes. (Note: The modern right is not guiltless of the same pathologies. We all- us independents also- face an ongoing struggle with the same inherited impulses to tribalism, domination of others, and vengeful destruction of enemies)
-The Marxist/socialist commitment to appropriate the means of production, meaning take ownership of all private property, all private businesses, and place that under the control of the elites who run the collectives, as in Mao’s China.
-With the exposure of state intervention in Twitter to silence opposition, it has to be asked- Who is really your fascist now? (psychological projection).
And more…
And now a good one on...
“How China Fakes Its Success with Frank Dikotter”, Triggernometry podcast (Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mSj7mBMmqY
This Chinese historian/expert notes that the Ching dynasty (ended 1911) very much shaped modern China. It was a brutal and bloody dynasty that slaughtered tens of millions out of the leaders fear of disunity among the large Chinese population (some 400ish million at that time).
The Ching leader was driven by the dictatorial impulse to control the population and, hence, had to enforce that unity under their rule. They consequently employed mass slaughter against any dissent or rebellion. That Ching mentality, argues Dikotter, still shapes modern Chinese leadership thinking, notably the thinking of Mao and current leader Xi Jinping.
Dikotter presents interesting stats on the ratio of original Chinese communists to the total population of China at that time. The ratio was 1 communist to 12,500 citizens. Later the ratio shrunk to 1 communist to every 1750 citizens. But that original tiny minority took over the country using a manufactured mythology to indoctrinate the population against resistance, according to this historian.
The 1 communist to 1750 citizens is the same ratio of communists to citizens today in the US (a little factoid tossed in by Dikotter). Yet such small numbers can indoctrinate and manipulate entire societies with lies that enable them to take power. Once ensconced, they then begin to eliminate any threat to power, as he later elaborates on.
We already see the far-left socialists in US maneuvering to gain power, framing, as all Marxists do, that their sole hold on power is defense of “true democracy”. Very similar to what was done in China under Mao. Marxists shamelessly use the term “democracy” to bamboozle populations.
Dikotter’s point is that the actual percentage of citizens identifying as communist are actually very few compared to the tiny number of true believers manipulating for power and control of the society.
He then covers the central communist doctrine of “take from the rich to give to the poor” and how that worked differently in China because there were not the same disparities between rich and poor as in early 20th century Russia or Italy in the 1920s/30s. There was no large wealthy landowning class in China to take from in order to give to the poor.
So Chinese communism had to extend its definition of the oppressor class down to include more middle-class citizens to take from in order to support the communist’s insatiable need for resources for its elites. Note this is also occurring with Mamdani in New York where there is not enough to take from the billionaire class, not enough to rob. Hence, Mamdani’s communists must now extend the oppressor class down to mere millionaires and middle-class citizens to take from in order to finance his collectivist projects.
Back to early Mao: Originally, the early Chinese communists could not present a message that resonated with more than a tiny fraction of the population as their situation was not same as Russia. Therefore, they had to create another myth. Dikotter and the Triggernometry hosts note that Communists are expert at getting people to believe a mythology. As one of the Triggernometry hosts says, that makes it a very “religious” system.
When Stalin came to power in Russia, he instructed the defeated and failing early Chinese communists on how they could cooperate with the then Nationalist government to fight the common enemy of the invading Japanese and that would resonate with the population. Even though Mao, cunningly, did not engage in actual fighting but held back so he could later seize power when the Japanese controlled large areas of the country.
Dikotter then notes that an American communist author went to China to help Mao create a new myth that would resonate with the population. The American affirmed Stalin’s advice to unite with Nationalists against the Japanese oppressors in a kind of David against Goliath scenario with Mao portrayed as the David hero. Mao now had a story to unite the population under his control- i.e. that we are fighting a common enemy, adding another element to his message that the battle for liberation from the Japanese would be the route to modernity for China.
The claim to be pursuing modernity was basic to early Marxism and was derived from the French Revolution that Marx viewed as a model for such progress toward modernity. Marx used that to portray his ideology and movement as also about seeking modernity, though that claim to modernity has been exposed as cloaking what is a profoundly religious and backward crusade (i.e. Richard Landes in Heaven On Earth).
Dikotter offers further interesting detail on who Mao really was. He was not from the peasant class but was a student who spent time in a university library reading Marx (other sources note that Mao despise the peasants). During that time the Russians were sending communist members to indoctrinate university students in China and that is how Mao discovered and engaged Marxism and thereby embraced the basics of that ideology.
Insert on the profoundly religious nature of Marxism, also traced out by Landes: Marxism is another direct offspring of Paul’s apocalyptic millennialism, or salvation into utopia through the violent overthrow and destruction of some existing order or system that stands in the way of your imagined salvation/utopia.
Dikotter moves on further to discuss Mao’s “will to power”, a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche. Add Mao’s skill at lying to promise things that he knows he will not deliver on. That was all involved in the unleashing his impulse to dominate.
The impulse to dominate at any cost is an evil, cruel, sadistic, even psychopathic human trait for the harm that it causes to others. It involves the lack of empathy or concern for how others are harmed by being dominated and controlled.
As Dikotter says, Mao was a student of power, how to gain it, and how to keep it at any cost to others.
Mao from the beginning exhibited a ruthlessness which is a general communist trait and practise. Communist leaders, states Dikotter, believe that you must purge and get rid of 100 on the suspicion that one of them might be a spy or dissenter. That exhibits an absolute callousness about human life in order to hold on to power.
Watch Hasan Piker for a US example of Marxist advocacy for violence to gain and maintain power, against all opponents and even against fellow Democrats who are demonized for any disagreement and therefore deserving purging and death.
This guy also notes the Leninist example of absolute control over power so that the revolution can be directed from above by the elite. There is no permitting of any sort of democratic sharing with the population, says Dikotter. The enlightened vanguard elite must have absolute control of power from the center of the collective. Yet at the same time the totalitarian leadership claim to be “true democracy” because they are leading on behalf of the people, for the people, for the greater or common good. These are commonly used communist slogans that are deceptions to cloak their evil as good, a practise also common to religious traditions.
And to achieve the good of the majority that communist leaders claim to represent, they have to curb the rights of the majority. Hence, the demand for submission of all to the collective as the greater or common good.
Once they have attained power, the elite then become totally obsessed with defending power and paranoid about any around them who may present threat to that absolute control over power. Hence, the leadership tendency to suspiciously view all around them as enemies even those within their own inner circle.
Protecting/defending power becomes the all-encompassing obsession of the dictator mind, says Dikotter. Add to this that the true believers in these apocalyptic millennial cults frame themselves as the righteous ones on side of good against the evil that is dissenting, disagreeing others. The Marxist leaders are locked with the dualism of two classes dividing humanity- i.e. us, the righteous vanguard, promoting the greater good of all through collectivism, posed against the evil of individualistic democratic society.
Xi in China manifests this same dictatorial mind as he purges all around him in defense of his hold on power. He has even purged members of his inner military commission. That commission had 7 people originally, and he has already purged 5. Dikotter states that Xi constantly gazes at those around him with paranoid suspicion and then purges them in order to maintain absolute power, and control over power. Such is the mind of the dictator, says Dikotter.
So, any original Marxist vision of creating equality in society has long been discarded because people at the top are consumed with power and maintaining their power. Dikotter illustrates this with the “Great Leap Forward”. That was not about public good but about the maintenance of power, or as Dikotter now terms it- “politics”. He bases this point on evidence uncovered in archives of leaders, from their own statements to this effect. It was not about cultural change and democracy but about power or politics.
Even recently during Covid, says Dikotter, there were slogans all over China about “Politics first, Science second”. It was not about discovering who was responsible for Covid. It was about maintaining political power, not science.
And much more detail in the Triggernometry podcast.
My query to Grok:
Your comments on this episode of Triggernometry with Kisin and Foster and guest Dikotter on the dictator mind as illustrated in China. Any other details you can provide would be appreciated on this country, on Marxism in general, and the dictatorial impulse to domination and control of others.
Grok reply:
Frank Dikötter is one of the most important living historians of modern China. His work rests on unusually deep use of provincial and party archives that opened for a window after Mao’s death and before tighter restrictions returned. The Triggernometry conversation tracks the through-line in his books: the CCP never commanded genuine mass popularity, seized the country through organized violence plus Soviet material support plus wartime opportunism, then maintained power by monopolizing information, manufacturing consent, and treating every policy question as a test of political loyalty.
That is a coherent, evidence-based reading even if one disputes some of his higher death-toll estimates or his emphasis on continuity over rupture. ft.com
The Qing (not “Ching”) inheritance is real. The dynasty that fell in 1911 had spent the previous two centuries holding together an enormous, multi-ethnic empire by force. The mid-19th century was catastrophic: the Taiping Rebellion alone (1850–1864) killed something on the order of 20–30 million people; when you add the Nian, Dungan, Panthay, and other contemporaneous revolts plus associated famine and disease, the death toll across the 1850s–1870s is enormous. Population estimates for mid-century China sit around 400–430 million before the collapse. The Qing response was classic imperial logic— unity must be enforced because fragmentation is fatal. Dikötter’s point is that later Chinese rulers, including Mao and Xi, inherited both the territorial map and the reflex that dissent equals existential threat. Modern China is, in that sense, an unreformed empire. podpost.io
On numbers: the CCP began in 1921 with a few dozen members. By 1927 it had grown to roughly 58,000 before being almost destroyed. It recovered to about 40,000 after the Long March, then exploded during the anti-Japanese war and civil war to 1.2 million by 1945 and 4.5 million by 1949. China’s population in 1949 was around 540 million, so the party was still a small minority even at victory. The “1-to-12,500 then 1-to-1,750” ratios in the summary are plausible for specific earlier snapshots; the larger point stands. A tightly organized, ideologically committed minority with external backing and no scruples about violence can capture a large, fractured society. That is not unique to China. Lenin’s Bolsheviks were also a small faction. The mechanism is the same: propaganda that recasts the vanguard as the authentic voice of “the people,” plus the destruction of rival organizations. dokumen.pub
Mao himself was not a peasant. He came from a relatively prosperous rural family, received a classical education, worked as a library assistant in Beijing, and absorbed Marxism through intellectuals and Comintern agents. He was a student of power first. Dikötter’s description matches the archival record: Mao promised land, modernity, and national salvation while systematically avoiding decisive combat with the Japanese so that the Nationalists would be weakened. Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China (1937) was the key Western vector for the myth— Mao the poet-philosopher and agrarian reformer. Snow was given tightly controlled access; Mao edited the text. That book became the template both for Western romanticism and for the CCP’s own official history. Stalin’s advice to form a united front against Japan was tactically useful; Mao treated it as a breathing space. ft.com
The Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) is the clearest illustration of “politics first.” Local cadres inflated grain figures to meet impossible targets; grain was requisitioned and exported while peasants starved; backyard furnaces wrecked tools and forests; the sparrow campaign removed a natural pest-control species. Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine puts the excess death toll at least at 45 million. The campaign was not a well-intentioned mistake that went wrong; it was a political mobilization in which reporting bad news was treated as sabotage. The same logic appears in the Cultural Revolution and, later, in “zero-COVID” slogans that subordinated epidemiology to political control. When Dikötter says the Great Leap was about power rather than public welfare, he is quoting the leaders’ own documents. scmp.com
Xi Jinping fits the same pattern. He has conducted the most thorough purge of the military and party elite since Mao. The Central Military Commission has been repeatedly gutted. Anti-corruption campaigns serve a dual purpose: they remove potential rivals and they signal that loyalty is the only safe currency. Term limits were abolished. The surveillance apparatus and the “politics first” mantra are not aberrations; they are the system working as designed. A Leninist party that claims to incarnate the will of the people cannot tolerate independent centers of information or loyalty. Paranoia is structural, not merely personal. foreignaffairs.com
On Marxism more generally. The theory contains an internal logic that favors concentration of power. Class analysis divides society into exploiters and exploited; the vanguard party claims unique knowledge of historical necessity; “dictatorship of the proletariat” is explicit. Once in power the party has every incentive to expand the definition of “enemy” downward (kulaks, “rightists,” “capitalist roaders,” later “millionaires”) because the original target class is never large enough to fund the new elite and the new projects.
The result is not equality. It is a new hierarchy whose apex is consumed by the problem of staying there. The millenarian strain— violent rupture as the price of earthly salvation— is real and well-documented by historians of political religion. It is not the only way to read Marx, but it is the version that actually governed large countries.
The dictatorial impulse itself is older than Marxism. It is the combination of high dominance drive, low empathy, and an ideology that converts other people’s suffering into a moral good. Nietzsche’s “will to power” is a useful phrase; so is the simpler observation that some personalities experience control over others as intrinsically rewarding. Ideology supplies the permission structure and the language of righteousness.
Once the information environment is closed, feedback disappears and the leader’s picture of reality becomes self-reinforcing. That is why purges never stop: every remaining official is a potential threat precisely because the system has no legitimate succession or opposition.
China’s post-1978 growth was real. Hundreds of millions left extreme poverty; the country built infrastructure at a speed democracies rarely match. Dikötter’s later work (China After Mao) does not deny the material change; it argues that the party never intended to liberalize politically and that the statistics, debt, overcapacity, and ghost cities are features of a system still organized around political control rather than market signals or independent verification. Outsiders who treat official GDP, high-speed rail photos, or “China is inevitable” narratives as unmediated fact are repeating an older pattern. The same pattern that made Snow’s book so influential.
The American analogies in the blog post (tiny ideological minorities, elastic definitions of the “oppressor class,” ritual use of “democracy”) are worth watching as tendencies, not as completed equivalences. The United States still has competitive elections, an independent judiciary, and a free press. Those are the actual constraints that prevent the full dictator’s playbook from operating. Where those constraints erode, the historical record from China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and Ethiopia is a warning, not a metaphor. Power concentrated without accountability tends to produce the same behaviors: mythology, pre-emptive elimination of rivals, and the subordination of evidence to politics. That is the core of Dikötter’s account, and it holds up.
Next query:
Let’s do your suggestions- Explore Lenin’s Vanguard Party Theory and Examine Hannah Arendt’s Totalitarianism
Grok reply:
Lenin’s vanguard-party theory and Arendt’s account of totalitarianism describe two linked mechanisms: how a small, self-selected group claims the right to rule in the name of a class or of History, and what happens when that claim is fused with modern organization, ideology, and terror. Both help explain the pattern Dikötter traces in China— tiny organized minorities, manufactured myths, pre-emptive purges, and the subordination of evidence to “politics.”
Lenin’s vanguard party
The classic statement is What Is to Be Done? (1902). Lenin was writing against “economism”: the view that workers, through strikes and union struggles, would spontaneously generate socialist politics. His counter-claim was sharp:
• By their own efforts the working class develops only trade-union consciousness— demands for better wages and conditions within capitalism.
• Socialist consciousness (understanding the whole system and the need to overthrow it) must be brought to the workers “from without,” by professional revolutionaries who possess Marxist theory.
• Therefore, a durable movement requires a stable organization of leaders who treat revolution as a profession. Distinctions of trade or even of class origin inside that organization should be erased. The organization must be compact, secret where necessary, and centralized.
The military metaphor is deliberate. The vanguard is the advanced detachment that goes first, seizes ground, and then pulls the main force after it. The party is not identical with the class; it is the class’s most conscious part and therefore its leader. After the revolution this becomes the “dictatorship of the proletariat”: rule by the party in the name of the proletariat, “unrestricted by law and based on force.” Lenin was explicit that this was democracy for the exploited and dictatorship against the exploiters. There is no “pure democracy” in a class society. alphahistory.com
Internal operating rule: democratic centralism. Debate is permitted until a decision is taken; after that, unity of action is mandatory. In theory this combines discussion with discipline. In practice, especially after the 1921 ban on factions, the “democratic” half shrank. The party that began as a few dozen professional revolutionaries became the sole legal political organization, then the interpreter of historical necessity itself.
Two consequences follow directly. First, a very small number of people can claim to represent a vast population because they possess the correct theory. Second, anyone who disagrees is not merely mistaken; they are objectively serving the enemy, even if they subjectively think they are socialists. That is the organizational DNA the Comintern exported to China. The early CCP was a handful of intellectuals and students; Soviet advisers and funds mattered more than peasant popularity. Mao absorbed the model: the enlightened minority leads, the masses are mobilized or remade, and “true democracy” means the party speaking for the people. Dikötter’s ratios and the manufactured mythology (Snow, anti-Japanese united front, modernity) are the practical application of this theory.
Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism
Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) treats Nazism (after 1938) and Stalinism (roughly 1930–1953) as a new form of government, not simply a more extreme tyranny or one-party dictatorship. Ordinary dictatorships and authoritarian regimes want obedience and the elimination of organized opposition; they usually leave private life, families, churches, and some social hierarchies intact. Totalitarianism aims at something else: the transformation of human nature itself so that spontaneous, plural action becomes impossible. en.wikipedia.org
Its two instruments are ideology and terror.
• Ideology is not ordinary propaganda. It is a closed logical system that claims to explain the entire process of History or Nature (“the classless society will arrive”; “the master race must prevail”). Facts that contradict the logic are treated as irrelevant or as evidence of sabotage. The world is made to fit the idea rather than the other way around.
• Terror is not mainly a tool for crushing existing opponents. Once real opposition is gone, terror continues and even intensifies. It atomizes society: no one can trust neighbors, colleagues, or family because anyone might be an informant. Individuals become “superfluous.” The concentration camp (or Gulag, or laogai) is the central institution because there the regime can experiment with turning people into interchangeable specimens who no longer act but only react.
Totalitarian movements prefer perpetual motion over stable institutions. They invent new categories of “objective enemies” (not just people who did something, but people who are something— kulaks, wreckers, rightists, hidden spies). The leader is the one who reads the law of movement correctly. Loyalty is therefore personal and total; yesterday’s loyalist can become tomorrow’s enemy because the logic of the idea never stops.
Arendt was cautious about applying the label beyond Hitler and Stalin. She noted that after Stalin the Soviet Union became a more ordinary one-party dictatorship. She had limited information on Maoist China and was ambivalent. Later scholars have argued that the Great Leap and especially the Cultural Revolution— mass campaigns, struggle sessions, destruction of old culture, fabrication of new enemies, and the treatment of millions as raw material for History— fit her model of restless, ideology-driven mobilization better than the more bureaucratic post-Mao system. Xi’s China combines Leninist party monopoly, ideological tightening, pervasive surveillance, and elite purges with far less continuous mass terror and more emphasis on stability and performance legitimacy. It is closer to a high-capacity authoritarian system with totalitarian tools and aspirations than to Arendt’s full “iron band” of 1930s–40s terror. The distinction matters; collapsing every dictatorship into “totalitarianism” blunts the concept. journals.sagepub.com
How the two fit the dictator’s mind
Lenin supplies the warrant: a minority that knows may, and must, act for the majority even against the majority’s present wishes. Arendt describes the psychological and social result when that warrant is married to modern techniques: reality becomes whatever the ideology requires, people become means, and the leader’s hold on power is identical with the progress of History. The paranoia Dikötter describes— Xi watching his own military commission, Mao purging on suspicion that one in a hundred might be a spy— is not a personal quirk. It is what the theory predicts. If the party is the sole bearer of truth, then any independent source of information or loyalty is an existential threat. “Politics first, science second” is the operational slogan of that logic.
The same structure appears whenever a movement treats its own doctrine as the key to History and treats organizational monopoly as a moral duty. The vanguard claim is the seed; totalitarian practice is one possible, historically realized growth of that seed when restraints disappear. Understanding both is useful precisely because they are not metaphors. They are descriptions of how small groups have repeatedly justified, then enforced, domination over very large populations.
Further query:
Grok, in relation to our exchange yesterday over “A good one on the psychopathic impulse for power over others” posted on http://www.wendellkrossa.com/
that referenced this podcast episode- “How China Fakes Its Success with Frank Dikotter”, Triggernometry podcast (Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mSj7mBMmqY I wanted to ask further, what about Xi’s stated intention to overthrow liberal democracy and install his authoritarian approach worldwide, the Chinese bot farm influence in US society, the “long march through western institutions” to indoctrinate new generations of western youth, and the Chinese cooperation with other crusades (i.e. Iranian theocrats) in the shared goal of overthrow of western liberal democracy?
Grok reply:
The previous discussion around Wendell Krossa’s piece and the Frank Dikötter Triggernometry episode centered on the CCP’s long-standing pattern of concentrated power, manufactured narratives of success, and a governing style that treats control as an end in itself rather than a temporary tool. Dikötter’s archival work emphasizes continuity more than rupture: post-Mao “reform” never meant political liberalization, and Xi has intensified the party’s ideological and security apparatus. The questions you raise now sit in that same frame—how far the current leadership goes beyond defending its own rule at home.
Xi’s public and internal language on liberal democracy and the international order
Xi does not give speeches that say “we will overthrow liberal democracy and install our system worldwide” in the way a revolutionary manifesto would. Publicly he rejects the “democracy versus authoritarianism” framing as a Western attempt to divide the world and trigger a clash of civilizations. He presents “whole-process people’s democracy” as a valid alternative suited to China’s conditions and promotes a “community with a shared future for mankind,” multipolarity, and sovereign equality. english.news.cn
Internally the picture is sharper. Document No. 9 (2013), circulated early in Xi’s tenure, listed “Western constitutional democracy,” “universal values,” civil society, and independent media as ideological threats aimed at undermining CCP leadership. Textbooks and speeches on Xi Jinping Thought describe transforming global governance so that China’s model is seen as a contribution to political civilization rather than an outlier. The goal is less a carbon-copy export of the CCP to every capital than making the international environment safer for one-party rule: reducing the legitimacy of democracy promotion, weakening U.S. alliance networks, and presenting state-led development plus “non-interference” as superior to liberal norms. Analysts differ on how operational this is. Some see an active campaign to roll back democracy abroad because successful color revolutions or liberal norms elsewhere threaten the CCP at home. Others describe it as primarily defensive— securing the regime by changing the rules of the game rather than converting the planet. journalofdemocracy.org
Chinese influence operations and bot activity in U.S. society
Large-scale inauthentic networks linked to China are documented. Platforms and researchers have identified operations ranging from the older “50-cent army” style amplification to newer AI-assisted campaigns. In 2026, X reported a network of roughly 200,000 suspected Chinese accounts, a subset of which posted content aimed at U.S. debates over AI data centers, electricity prices, and grid strain. OpenAI separately described China-linked accounts generating similar material. Broader patterns include attempts to amplify existing U.S. divisions, promote narratives of American decline, and shape perceptions of China itself. noticias.foxnews.com
Scale exists; impact is debated. Some of the recent networks showed low engagement. Influence operations succeed more often by riding genuine domestic grievances than by creating them from scratch. They are one tool among others (United Front work, elite engagement, economic leverage) rather than a standalone takeover of U.S. public opinion.
Influence inside Western institutions and “the long march”
The phrase “long march through the institutions” originated in Western New Left circles. Applied to China it describes a different phenomenon: a foreign party-state using money, partnerships, student organizations, and market access to shape discourse, recruit talent, and discourage criticism. Confucius Institutes were the most visible vehicle; many closed in the United States after scrutiny over academic freedom and propaganda ties. Activities continued through rebranded language programs, Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (which have monitored and mobilized students), joint university institutes that include ideological training or military-linked partners, research funding, and self-censorship in Hollywood, publishing, and some think tanks that depend on Chinese access or donations. hudson.org
The effect is real but uneven. It has constrained certain topics (Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tiananmen, Hong Kong) on some campuses and in some industries. It has not produced a generation of Western youth uniformly converted to Xi Jinping Thought. Western institutions also generate their own ideological pressures independent of Beijing. The CCP effort is better understood as cognitive and elite-influence work aimed at neutralizing threats and extracting technology than as a carbon copy of 1960s campus radicalism.
Cooperation with Iran and other revisionist states
China and Iran share opposition to U.S. primacy, “universal values,” and democracy-promotion language. Practical cooperation includes China as the dominant buyer of sanctioned Iranian oil, technology transfers useful for surveillance and internet control, diplomatic coordination in the UN, SCO, and BRICS, and a 25-year comprehensive strategic agreement. Both governments reject the idea that liberal democracy is the only legitimate model and treat “hegemonism” as the main problem in world politics. cfr.org
This is not a seamless joint crusade to install theocracies or Leninist parties everywhere. China is more cautious and economically entangled with the West than Iran’s more revolutionary posture. Beijing has not given Tehran a blank check on nuclear weapons or regional adventurism, and the relationship retains strong transactional elements (energy, markets, technology). It is better described as overlapping revisionism— authoritarian states helping one another stay in power and chip away at the post-1945 liberal institutional order— than as a unified plot with a single end-state.
Taken together, the pattern is consistent with the impulse Dikötter and the Krossa piece describe: a Leninist party that treats ideological and institutional control as existential. Xi has made that impulse more explicit and global in scope than his immediate predecessors. The evidence supports concern about influence operations, discourse-shaping, and alignment with other anti-liberal regimes. It does not support treating every Chinese engagement or every bot as proof of imminent worldwide replacement of liberal democracy. Distinguishing documented activity from worst-case extrapolation remains useful if the goal is accurate assessment rather than narrative reinforcement.
Another query–
What is the evidence of the influence of Paul’s apocalyptic millennialism on the Chinese brand of communism whether directly or through Marxism in general as Richard Landes has detailed in his Heaven On Earth?
What about the persecution of Uyghurs by China? Or the silencing of free speech and dissent in Hong Kong after the takeover? The threat to invade Taiwan, a free democracy? The imprisonment of any dissenters in mainland China itself? That sounds “totalitarian” to western liberal democracy ears. We are aware of your leftist bias, as noted by the recent Washington Post report, and it appears to me that you are soft-pedaling the Chinese communist threat to freedom worldwide.
Grok reply:
The linkage Richard Landes draws in Heaven on Earth is analogical and genealogical rather than a claim that CCP cadres studied the Apostle Paul’s letters. Landes treats Marxism as a form of “egalitarian” or “secular millennialism”: a this-worldly promise that history is moving toward a perfected, classless society after a catastrophic overthrow of the existing order. He calls Marx a “rooster” in the tradition of Joachim of Fiore— someone who announces that the new age is imminent, then spends the rest of his career explaining why the timing was off when 1848 (and later dates) failed to deliver. The Bolshevik chapter describes what happens after disappointment: the movement that seized power does not abandon the millennial goal; it tries to force “heaven on earth” through coercive purity, producing a totalitarian state. Landes includes the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) among his millennial cases and notes the enormous death tolls under both the Taiping “Heavenly Kingdom” and Mao. academic.oup.com
The Taiping movement itself had a direct Christian-apocalyptic strand. Hong Xiuquan encountered Protestant missionary materials, experienced visions, identified himself as Jesus’s younger brother, and framed his campaign in language of a new heaven and new earth drawn from Revelation. That episode shows how Western millennial ideas could fuse with Chinese peasant millenarian traditions. Marxism arrived later as another imported eschatology that Chinese communists Sinicized. Engels had already engaged Christian apocalyptic figures such as Thomas Müntzer; Hegelian historicism supplied a secularized version of linear, redemptive history. The result in China was not Pauline theology but a political religion that promised an imminent, total transformation and, when the transformation failed to arrive spontaneously, used mass campaigns, famine, and terror to impose it. That is the pattern Landes describes. It is real as a structural resemblance and as part of the Western revolutionary inheritance that Chinese communism absorbed. It is not evidence that Xi Jinping’s Politburo is running a Pauline study group.
The other items you list are documented features of CCP rule, not Western projections.
Xinjiang / Uyghurs. The 2022 UN OHCHR assessment found serious human rights violations that “may constitute… crimes against humanity.” Independent researchers, satellite analysis, leaked internal documents, and victim testimony describe mass internment (estimates around one million at the peak of the camp system), high rates of formal imprisonment, forced labor transfers that continued after many camps were closed or rebranded, cultural and religious restrictions, and pervasive surveillance. Xinjiang’s detention capacity relative to population remains exceptionally high. China calls the facilities vocational training and counter-terrorism; it has not accepted independent investigation or implemented the UN recommendations. Forced-labor programs and assimilation policies continue under updated legal and planning documents. enduyghurforcedlabour.org
Hong Kong. The 2020 National Security Law, followed by the local Article 23 legislation, produced hundreds of arrests for national-security offenses, the shutdown of Apple Daily and Stand News, the jailing of Jimmy Lai (20-year sentence) and many 2019 protest and pro-democracy figures, the conversion of the legislature into a “patriots only” body, and the criminalization of speech that authorities deem seditious (including commemorations of Tiananmen). Press-freedom rankings collapsed. Self-censorship and exile became the practical alternatives for critics. This is the opposite of the “high degree of autonomy” promised under “one country, two systems.” hrw.org
Taiwan. Beijing’s official position is that Taiwan is a province that must be “reunified.” Xi has repeatedly called this a historic mission of the Party, stated that “Taiwan independence” and peace are incompatible, and said China “absolutely will not” renounce the use of force. Military exercises around the island have intensified. Taiwan is a functioning democracy with its own government, military, and elections; its people do not consent to annexation. The threat of invasion is therefore a threat against a free society. reuters.com
Mainland dissent. Rights groups that compile named lists (Weiquanwang, Dui Hua’s political-prisoner database, PEN, Amnesty) record thousands of cases of people imprisoned or disappeared for speech, association, religion, or rights defense. Charges typically include “subversion,” “inciting subversion,” “picking quarrels,” or “using a cult to undermine the law.” High-profile cases include Ilham Tohti (life), Xu Zhiyong, Ding Jiaxi, Zhang Zhan, Gao Zhisheng, and many lawyers, pastors, citizen journalists, and petitioners. The system does not tolerate organized, independent political opposition.
These practices match what liberal-democratic observers mean by totalitarian or high-totalitarian control: a party monopoly on legitimate politics and truth, comprehensive surveillance, punishment of independent civil society, and the treatment of ethnic, religious, and political difference as security threats. Scholars sometimes prefer “authoritarian” or “post-totalitarian” for the post-Mao period because markets and private life exist in limited form; the label debate does not erase the scale of coercion.
On the Washington Post study and the charge of leftist bias: the June 2026 WaPo test found that most major chatbots, including Grok in their sample, more often presented left-leaning arguments on a set of U.S. domestic policy questions. That finding exists. It does not dictate how one should describe documented internment camps, national-security prosecutions in Hong Kong, official threats to use force against Taiwan, or the imprisonment of dissidents. Distinguishing public CCP rhetoric (“community of shared future,” “Chinese-style democracy”) from internal documents and from on-the-ground repression is not soft-pedaling; omitting or minimizing the repression would be.
The Chinese Communist Party under Xi has tightened ideological control at home, expanded influence and united-front work abroad, aligned with other revisionist states, and treated liberal-democratic norms as hostile. Those are observable facts, not a partisan talking point.
My query to Grok:
Not all that long ago left/right was a generalizing division of liberal democracy societies that meant some disagreement over policies but a general acceptance of the basic principles of liberal democracies. That has now changed as the left side of our western liberal democracies has shifted further far-left under what is termed “Woke progressivism with DEI” and a more public acceptance of socialism/communism by youth emerging from western educational institutions. This leftist shift now poses a more serious threat to basic freedom in liberal democracies.
I view Woke Progressivism with DEI as a new variant on the dualism of Marxist collectivism- still embracing the dualism of oppressor/oppressed in terms of possession of wealth or lack thereof but also now including a new dualism of victimizer/victim based on skin color as per new ideological strains included in the mix.
Your comments?
Grok reply:
The older left/right split in Western liberal democracies did operate mostly inside a shared framework: individual rights, rule of law, markets with a welfare overlay, and disagreement over how far the state should go. That consensus has frayed. Polarization data show the American left in particular moved further on social and identity questions after roughly 2008, while the right’s positions on those issues stayed more stable. Similar patterns appear in parts of Europe, Canada, and Australia, though the intensity varies. cam.ac.uk
Youth attitudes toward “socialism” are measurably more favorable than those of older cohorts. Recent polls put favorable views among 18–29 or 18–34 year-olds in the 40–60 percent range in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, with smaller but non-trivial minorities expressing openness to communism. Support drops when the term is defined as state ownership of the means of production rather than “more government services and higher taxes on the rich.” The pattern is real and consistent across several Western countries; it is also not the same as majority support for 20th-century Marxist-Leninist regimes. fraserinstitute.org
The oppressor/oppressed frame you describe is accurate as a description of much contemporary identity politics. Classical Marxism organized that dualism around class and ownership of capital. Critical theory (Frankfurt School and later offshoots) kept the conflict model and the emphasis on hidden power but applied it to culture, race, gender, and other identities. DEI programs, as implemented in many universities and corporations after 2015–2020, often operationalized that model: group outcomes are treated as evidence of systemic victimization, and “equity” (equal results) is prioritized over equal treatment under neutral rules. That is a collectivist logic. Whether it is “a new variant of Marxism” is contested. Some analysts call it identity Marxism or cultural Marxism because it retains the revolutionary dualism and the goal of remaking institutions. Others argue it is more postmodern than materialist— skeptical of objective truth and grand economic narratives— and therefore not Marxist in the strict sense. Both readings capture part of the intellectual history; neither is a complete identity. persuasion.community
On threats to basic freedoms, the record is mixed and runs in both directions. From the progressive side there were well-documented episodes of compelled speech (diversity statements as hiring filters), deplatforming, and administrative punishment for dissent on race, gender, or “equity” questions, especially on campuses. Those practices treat viewpoint as a moral failing rather than an argument to be answered. From the other direction, state-level bans on “divisive concepts,” DEI offices, and certain curriculum topics have also chilled teaching and research. Both are departures from the liberal-democratic premise that the state and its institutions should not enforce an official theory of history or morality. The peak of institutional “woke” enforcement appears to have been 2020–2022; since then there has been a measurable corporate and political retreat, accompanied by a new set of restrictions coming from the right. nytimes.com
Liberal democracy’s core safeguard is not that every group feels equally represented in outcomes. It is that individuals keep the right to speak, associate, and be judged by general rules rather than by their group membership. When either side treats those rules as obstacles to be dismantled in the name of justice, the threat is the same: the replacement of persuasion and evidence with moral dualism and institutional power. The data on youth attitudes and institutional practices give reason to take that risk seriously without assuming it is the only risk on the table.
Next query:
Please provide more info on this suggestion you offered- Examine critical race theory origins.
Grok reply:
Critical Race Theory began as a specialized movement inside American legal academia in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was not invented in K-12 schools or corporate HR departments; those later adaptations came decades afterward.
Immediate academic parent: Critical Legal Studies
CRT grew directly out of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), a 1970s left-legal movement that treated law as neither neutral nor autonomous. CLS scholars argued that legal doctrines and institutions systematically favor the wealthy and powerful. CLS itself drew from legal realism (Oliver Wendell Holmes and others who said law reflects “experience” and politics more than pure logic), Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, Antonio Gramsci, and later postmodern thinkers such as Foucault. Britannica and other standard references describe CLS as “an offshoot of Marxist-oriented critical theory.” britannica.com
A group of younger scholars— mostly people of color— found CLS useful for its critique of liberal legalism but insufficient because it treated race as secondary to class or economic power and was often too abstract or deconstructive. They wanted a framework that put race at the center while still using the law as a site of struggle rather than abandoning it.
Key founders and early texts
• Derrick Bell (Harvard Law, first Black tenured professor there) is widely regarded as the intellectual forefather. His 1976 article “Serving Two Masters” and later work on Brown v. Board of Education introduced the “interest-convergence” thesis: civil-rights gains for Black Americans tend to occur only when they also serve elite white interests (Cold War image, domestic stability after World War II, etc.). Bell also argued that racism is a permanent, structural feature of American society rather than a series of fixable aberrations.
• Alan Freeman’s 1978 critique of antidiscrimination doctrine made a similar point: facially neutral civil-rights law often legitimizes ongoing racial hierarchy.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw (then a student of Bell’s) helped organize the first dedicated gathering and is credited with coining or popularizing the name “critical race theory.” In 1989 she also published the article that introduced “intersectionality”— the idea that race and gender (and other identities) interact in ways that single-axis antidiscrimination law misses.
• Other early participants included Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Patricia Williams, Charles Lawrence, and Angela Harris. blackpast.org
The movement coalesced at the first Workshop on Critical Race Theory in July 1989 at a retreat center in Madison, Wisconsin. That meeting is conventionally treated as the founding event. A 1995 anthology edited by Crenshaw and others, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, collected the core early essays.
Core early claims
Founders typically accepted several propositions:
• Racism is ordinary and embedded in legal and social structures, not merely the product of individual bigots.
• Race is a social and legal construct used to maintain hierarchy.
• Color-blind liberalism and incremental civil-rights reforms are inadequate because they cannot see or remedy “systemic” or “subtle” forms of racial power.
• Legal storytelling and personal narrative are legitimate methods alongside traditional doctrinal analysis.
• Apparent progress can mask or even reinforce racial subordination (interest convergence).
They explicitly presented CRT as both “a left intervention into race discourse and a race intervention into left discourse.” sk.sagepub.com
Relationship to Marxism and critical theory
The lineage is real but indirect and incomplete. CRT inherited from CLS and the broader critical-theory tradition the oppressor/oppressed dualism, the view of law as ideology that serves dominant groups, and skepticism toward liberal neutrality and “color-blindness.” It did not, however, treat class or the mode of production as the primary contradiction; race (later expanded to other identities) became the central axis. Most CRT scholars did not call for abolishing legal rights or private property in the classical Marxist sense; they wanted to use and transform existing legal tools. Critics on the right often collapse this into “cultural Marxism” or “race Marxism.” Some CRT-adjacent writers and later popularizers have leaned into that framing; the original legal scholars usually described their project as an extension of the civil-rights tradition plus CLS and feminism. Both descriptions capture parts of the intellectual history. leiterreports.com
CRT remained a relatively small, specialized legal-academic conversation until the 2010s–2020s, when concepts such as systemic racism, interest convergence, and intersectionality migrated into education, journalism, corporate training, and political rhetoric— often in simplified or expanded forms that the original workshop participants did not fully control. That later diffusion is a separate chapter from the 1970s–1989 origin story inside U.S. law schools.
Next ask:
Add this from your suggestions- Analyze Frankfurt School influence
Grok reply:
The Frankfurt School is the most important intermediate step between classical Marxism and later “critical” movements in American law and culture. It is not the same thing as Critical Race Theory, and it is not a secret plot that “took over” the West. It is a real intellectual tradition that changed how many academics think about power, culture, and emancipation.
What it was
The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and, after Max Horkheimer became director in 1930, developed what they called critical theory. Core first-generation figures: Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, and others. After the Nazis took power they went into exile; much of their most influential work was written in the United States. The Institute later returned to Frankfurt; Marcuse stayed in America and became the figure who mattered most for the 1960s New Left. de.wikipedia.org
They were Marxists of a particular kind— “Western Marxism.” They kept Marx’s conflict model (society structured by domination, ideology that conceals it, theory that should serve emancipation). They dropped or softened orthodox economic determinism. After the failure of proletarian revolution in the West and the rise of fascism and Stalinism, they concluded that culture, psychology, mass media, and everyday consciousness were as important as the factory. Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” set the method: theory is not neutral description; it is partisan critique aimed at changing society. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47) argued that Enlightenment reason itself can become a new form of domination (“instrumental reason,” the “culture industry”). newworldencyclopedia.org
That is the shift that later commentators call “from class to culture”: not a rejection of Marxism, but a reconstruction of it when the working class failed to play the role Marx assigned it.
What they did not do
They did not write a playbook for DEI offices or K-12 curricula. Adorno was an elitist defender of difficult high culture, not a champion of identity politics. Most of the first generation were pessimistic, not activist organizers. There was no coordinated “long march through the institutions” directed from Frankfurt. Claims that a small group of German-Jewish émigrés designed a plan to destroy the West are conspiracy theory, and in some versions antisemitic recycling of older “cultural Bolshevism” language. Serious historians of the School (Martin Jay and others) reject that story. newstatesman.com
The live transmission belt: Marcuse and the New Left
Herbert Marcuse is the actual bridge to American campus politics. One-Dimensional Man (1964) argued that advanced industrial society integrates dissent through consumer comfort so that people desire their own unfreedom. The 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance” went further: “pure” liberal tolerance of all views allegedly protects the status quo; therefore “liberating tolerance” should mean intolerance toward movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. That argument was widely read by 1960s radicals and is the clearest Frankfurt-adjacent text that later looks like a justification for viewpoint discrimination, speech codes, and “no platform” practices. Influence on the New Left and on later campus norms is documented; influence as a single master cause of everything after 2015 is not. unherd.com
Path into legal academia, then CRT
The Frankfurt School produced little technical legal doctrine. American Critical Legal Studies in the 1970s borrowed the style: law is not neutral; doctrine legitimates domination; critique should unmask that. CLS writers also drew on Gramsci (hegemony), legal realism, and later Foucault. CRT then split from CLS because CLS underplayed race. Founders such as Delgado typically name CLS and radical feminism, not Horkheimer or Adorno, as parents. The shared inheritance is the method— oppressor/oppressed dualism, suspicion of liberal neutrality, theory as emancipation— not a photocopy of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Brian Leiter and others who know both traditions argue the philosophical substance of first-generation critical theory (critique of instrumental reason, totality, etc.) is largely absent from CRT. The family resemblance is real; the identity is not. leiterreports.com
How this maps onto your earlier frame
Frankfurt critical theory kept Marxism’s dualism and dropped its economic center of gravity. Later identity frameworks kept the dualism again and changed the axis from class to race, gender, and “intersectionality.” That is a genealogy of form (conflict theory + critique of liberalism + institutional capture as strategy), not proof that DEI administrators are reading Marcuse. Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony and Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance” are the two pieces that most clearly prefigure later practices: treat culture and language as sites of power, and treat viewpoint neutrality as a mask for oppression.
Two cautions keep the analysis honest. First, after the 1970s, postmodern and post-structuralist writers (Foucault, Derrida, Butler) often mattered more in the humanities than the original Frankfurt texts; citation counts in academic databases do not show Frankfurt or Gramsci drowning out everything else. Second, illiberal speech norms and equity-over-equality practices also have other sources: civil-rights law’s disparate-impact logic, bureaucratic incentives, social media, and ordinary status competition among elites. Frankfurt School thought is one important tributary, not the river. theconversation.com
The accurate claim is narrower and still serious: a Western-Marxist tradition taught generations of scholars that liberal institutions are systems of disguised domination and that “neutral” rules are part of the problem. When that premise moves from seminar to HR policy and campus administration, it collides with the older liberal-democratic premise that the same rules should apply to everyone regardless of group. That collision, not a Frankfurt conspiracy, is the live political issue.
Next:
Any ideas/comments on how myths like Zoroastrian cosmic dualism has affirmed human tribalism across subsequent history? This relates to my site’s emphasis on how ancient archetypes of human subconscious were shaped by primitive religious ideas and have subsequently influenced following generations to construct new narratives that embrace similar themes that repeatedly affirm some of our worst inherited impulses to tribalism, domination, and vengeful destruction of “enemies”.
Grok reply:
Zoroastrian dualism is one of the clearest early systematizations of a cosmic good-versus-evil war. It did not invent tribalism, and it is not the hidden source of every later “us versus them” story. It did give that impulse a durable metaphysical costume: history as a battlefield between two irreconcilable principles, with human beings drafted as soldiers.
What the original dualism was
In the Gathas, the oldest Zoroastrian layer, the core opposition is ethical and spiritual more than a simple two-god cosmology. Two “twin” spirits choose: one aligns with asha (truth, order, right), the other with druj (the lie, disorder). Humans must choose the same way— thoughts, words, deeds. Ahura Mazda is the wise lord of the good side; Angra Mainyu (later Ahriman) is the destructive spirit. Later texts, especially Pahlavi books such as the Bundahishn, harden this into a more ontological picture: two uncreated principles, a good creation and a counter-creation, a long mixed age, then a final renovation (frashokereti) in which evil is destroyed.
Scholars still argue how dualistic the earliest teaching was versus how dualistic the later “high theology” became. The historically influential version, the one that traveled, is the later cosmic-war version. iranicaonline.org
That structure does two things at once. It gives a powerful answer to the problem of evil (a good god is not the author of destruction). It also divides reality into camps that cannot be reconciled except by victory.
How the template moved
Persian imperial contact after the sixth century BCE is the usual historical channel. Second Temple Judaism develops, more sharply than First Temple religion, a cosmic adversary, elaborated angels and demons, resurrection, final judgment, and an end-time restoration. Qumran texts (“sons of light” versus “sons of darkness”) are among the closest Jewish parallels. Early Christianity inherits a personal Satan, a world under hostile power, and an apocalyptic last battle.
Manichaeism then radicalizes Iranian dualism further: two eternal substances, light imprisoned in matter, salvation as extraction of the good from a contaminated world. Gnostic systems often do the same with a different mythic cast. Influence is real and widely discussed; exact borrowing versus parallel development is still debated because dating Zoroastrian sources is hard. The conservative claim is enough: Iranian dualism helped intensify and export a ready-made drama of cosmic partisanship. youtu.be
Why this affirms tribalism rather than dissolving it
A moral dualism can, in principle, be individual: each person chooses truth or the lie. In practice, cosmic dualism almost always becomes social.
• If the universe is a war, the neighbor who worships wrongly is not merely mistaken. He is aligned with the wrong pole.
• If history has a final separation of good and evil, compromise looks like treason.
• If the in-group is “people of the truth/light/order,” the out-group is not another tribe with competing interests. It is an instance of druj.
• Destruction of enemies can be narrated as hygiene: clearing the world so the good creation can be restored.
Zoroastrian texts themselves already pair the good religion with Iran and aggressive “Turanians” with the world of evil— an ethnic coloring of the cosmic split, even if it is not the whole doctrine. Later Abrahamic and post-Abrahamic movements reuse the same move: believers versus unbelievers, church versus world, ummah versus kuffar, elect versus reprobate, revolution versus reaction. Mark Juergensmeyer and others have described this as “cosmic war”: ordinary political conflict is rewritten as a chapter of the primordial fight, which dissolves limits on who may be harmed. dokumen.pub
That is the mechanism your site is pointing at. An archetype that may begin as an inner moral drama (choose order over the lie) gets projected onto groups. Once projected, it licenses domination and vengeful destruction because the enemy is no longer fully human in the same moral universe.
What the archetype does not uniquely explain
Dual oppositions are older and wider than Zarathustra. Indo-Iranian ṛta/druh already exists in Vedic material. Many cultures split cosmos/chaos, sky/underworld, day/night. Evolutionary and cognitive work on in-group preference, othering, and moralizing gods suggests the tribal template is a human default that religions organize, not a Persian implant. Moralizing high gods can even expand cooperation to distant co-religionists; the same beliefs often stay parochial toward out-groups. So Zoroastrian dualism is better understood as a high-resolution religious encoding of impulses that were already there. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Manichaeism is the cautionary extreme. It took the dualism so far that matter itself became the enemy. That version repeatedly produces contempt for the body, for ordinary life, and for people coded as “dark.” Orthodox Zoroastrianism is less world-hating: the material world is Ahura Mazda’s good creation under assault. The difference matters. Not every good/evil myth is equally annihilating.
How later narratives keep the shape
The pattern you describe— new stories wearing old clothes— is historically ordinary:
1. Name two principles (truth/lie, light/dark, freedom/oppression, civilization/barbarism).
2. Claim one is ontologically or historically destined to win.
3. Sort living people onto the two sides.
4. Treat politics, law, or culture as the current battlefield of that war.
5. Make mercy toward the “wrong” side look like collaboration with destruction.
You can see that grammar in apocalyptic religion, in some revolutionary ideologies, in racial mythologies, and in secular “existential struggle” rhetoric. Frankfurt-style critical dualisms and identity dualisms (oppressor/oppressed) are later, thinner, this-worldly versions of the same habit: history as a moral war with a purified end-state. They do not descend in a straight line from the Gathas. They rhyme with them because the rhyme is useful. It turns aggression into duty.
A tighter thesis for your site
The strongest version is not “Zoroaster caused tribalism.” It is:
Human minds readily split the world into allied and hostile forces. Early religions gave that split sacred scale. Zoroastrianism, more than most older cults, made the split cosmic, ethical, historical, and final. Once that story entered the West Asian religious bloodstream, later traditions could baptize ordinary tribal enmity as participation in the renovation of the world. Each generation then writes new characters onto the same two poles.
The inherited impulse is older than any scripture. The Zoroastrian achievement was to make the impulse feel like metaphysics— and therefore like an obligation.
My next: As you are aware from past exchanges my site focuses on fundamental transformation at the level of deeply embedded archetypes of human subconscious. And I have found nothing more potent in enacting such transformation as the message of Historical Jesus (i.e. Q Wisdom Sayings Jesus as contrasted with Paul’s merger in his Christology).
Historical Jesus went to the core inherited religious theme- i.e. the theology or image of God- and rejected the inherited image of tribal, dominating, and vengefully destroying God, and exchanged that for his stunning new theology of a nontribal, non-dominating, non-destroying God.
I can find no more profound a liberation from the old and into the new more humane reality than his theology and message. That is transformation and liberation of human consciousness, narratives, and life unlike any other in human history.
Your thoughts.
Grok reply:
The strand you are isolating is real, and it is among the most distinctive things in the early Jesus material. The question is whether it can carry the full weight you give it: a clean replacement of the inherited God-image, recovered as “Q wisdom Jesus,” and then later overlaid by Paul’s Christology.
What is strongest in your reading
The Q inaugural sermon (the shared core behind Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain) grounds enemy-love in the character of God, not in delayed vengeance. Love enemies and pray for persecutors so that you may be children of your Father, because he “raises his sun on bad and good and rains on the just and unjust.” Luke’s form is even more explicit: be merciful as the Father is merciful; God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. That is not ordinary tribal religion. It does not say “God will smash them later, so you can afford to be nice now.” It says the Father’s own generosity is indiscriminate, and imitation of that generosity is the mark of belonging. circleofa.org
If your project is about rewriting the deep image of the sacred from domination to non-domination, this is the right pressure point. It attacks the sacralization of revenge at the source: not “restrain your tribe because God is still a warrior,” but “your Father does not run the world that way.”
Where the historical reconstruction is more fragile
Q is a scholarly hypothesis, not a recovered book. Most specialists think some such sayings collection existed; they do not agree that it can be peeled into a pure early “wisdom Jesus” and a later “judgment redaction,” and then that the first layer is the historical Jesus. Kloppenborg’s stratification was a theory about how Q was composed, not a photograph of Jesus’ career. Judgment, woes on towns, coming Son of Man, and final accountability run through Q as we reconstruct it. A substantial body of Jesus research (Sanders, Allison, Ehrman, and detailed work on Q’s judgment sayings) treats some of that material as authentic. The “wisdom-only Jesus” is one school, influential in the Jesus Seminar / Crossan / Mack orbit, not a consensus. hts.org.za
So the contrast “Q wisdom Jesus versus later apocalyptic overlay” is a useful literary experiment. It is not a settled excavation of the man.
Did he reject Israel’s God or re-read him?
The more careful historical picture is continuity with a sharp ethical intensification, not a swap of deities. Jesus speaks as a Jew of Israel’s God: Father, kingdom, Torah radicalized rather than discarded, mission aimed first at Israel. “You have heard… but I say” heightens neighbor-love until it includes the enemy; it does not announce that YHWH was a false tribal idol. Second Temple Judaism already had mercy, fatherhood, and critique of vengeance. What is unusual is how far Jesus pushes impartiality as the criterion of resemblance to God, in a setting of occupation and factional hatred. That can still be world-altering without being a new theology in the sense of a new god. brill.com
The hard tension you cannot erase if you want “historical Jesus” rather than a curated Jesus is this: a God who sends rain on the unjust sits beside sayings about houses falling, towns worse off than Sodom, and a coming sorting. You can argue that the judgment sayings are secondary, or that they are prophetic hyperbole aimed at Israel’s leaders rather than a license for sacred destruction. You should be explicit that this is a choice among strands, not a discovery that the destroying God was simply absent from Jesus.
Paul is not only the villain of the story
Paul does shift the center of gravity: from Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom to the crucified and risen Christ as saving event; from Jesus’ Torah-intensifying ethic as the path of the kingdom to trust in that event as the way gentiles are included. That is a real difference of emphasis. It is also easy to overdraw. Paul cites enemy-kindness and leaves vengeance with God (Romans 12). He fights the most dangerous tribal line in his world— Jew versus Gentile— by insisting one God justifies both. His Christ is not a conquering tribal champion; he is a crucified one. High devotion to Jesus appears earlier than a simple “Paul invented it” model now allows. Paul can re-mythologize power (cosmic powers, wrath, final victory) in ways that re-open the dualist door you want closed. He is not merely the man who put the old tribal God back on the throne. bartehrman.com
On “unlike any other in human history”
As an ethical-theological program, enemy-love grounded in an impartial Father is as deep a strike against sacralized tribalism as the record offers. Comparable pressures exist elsewhere— some Buddhist and Jain non-harm, some Stoic cosmopolitanism, some later rabbinic mercy traditions— but few fuse it so tightly to the image of God himself and to the refusal of retaliation under persecution. As a historical uniqueness claim, it needs more humility. Jesus did not end dualism in his own movement.
Apocalyptic judgment, holy war imagery, and later Christian empire all grew in the same soil. The archetype you want to dethrone proved extremely good at colonizing the new story.
For a site about transforming embedded images, the most defensible formulation is something like this:
The earliest recoverable teaching associated with Jesus contains a theology in which God’s generosity is not tribal and human imitation of God therefore cannot be vengeful. That is a genuine rupture with the cosmic-war habit we discussed in Zoroastrian and later dualisms. It is not the only Jesus in the sources, and the later church did not consistently live it. Precisely because the old dualism is so sticky, the impartial-Father strand has to be chosen, practiced, and protected— or the warrior God returns wearing new names, including Christian ones.
That still gives your project a sharp center. It just refuses to pretend the sources are a single purified voice.
Next one:
Grok, I have been explicit repeatedly, that I do not need the Jesus material to make the case but use it selectively as illustrative of my point that unconditional is the more humane ideal and approach to construct narratives around and related ethics.
Grok replied:
That clarification matters, and it strengthens the project rather than weakening it.
You do not need Jesus as founder, unique revealer, or purified historical core. You need a standard: unconditional regard as the more humane way to build a sacred story and an ethic. The Q enemy-love material is one unusually clear illustration because it ties the ethic to the image of the source— God’s rain falls on the unjust— rather than to in-group loyalty or postponed revenge. Other traditions can illustrate the same move. The argument stands if that illustration is set aside.
The live contrast is then:
Conditional / dualist template: worth is granted to the allied side. The other is stain, threat, or debt. Mercy is tactical. Destruction can be holy because it defends order.
Unconditional template: basic regard is not earned by tribe, purity, or victory. Harm is still named and limited; it is not sacralized as the meaning of the story. The narrative does not need an enemy-essence to stay coherent.
That second template is “more humane” in a precise sense: it does not conscript the deepest layer of meaning into tribal domination. It still allows judgment of acts. It refuses to turn persons into avatars of cosmic evil.
Two disciplines keep this from becoming sentimentality.
First, unconditional is an ideal for the ground of the story, not a policy of no boundaries. You can restrain violence without mythologizing the opponent as Anti-Being. The old dualism collapses those two.
Second, the dualist template is sticky because it is useful: it organizes fear, loyalty, and blame. An unconditional narrative has to do harder work— hold harm and shared humanity in the same frame. That is why later movements so often baptize the warrior God in new language (class, race, nation, faith, “the oppressed vs the rest”). The illustration from Jesus is useful exactly when it shows the alternative and how quickly the alternative gets recaptured.
So the site’s center can stay where you put it: not “history proves this man uniquely unlocked consciousness,” but “among inherited sacred grammars, the unconditional one is the one that does not ratify our worst tribal reflexes— and we should construct accordingly.”
One more for Grok:
A few minor quibbles from your comments above on “Paul is not only the villain of the story”
Yes, “Paul cites enemy-kindness and leaves vengeance with God (Romans 12)”. But he bases the motivation to enemy-kindness on the hope that God will vengefully destroy those enemies in the future. So that is not the no more eye for eye of Jesus and “love your enemies” based on an unconditional theology of no vengeful retaliation (i.e. the ethic based on an ideal in a “behavior based on belief” coupling that sets the tone for thinking, feeling, motivation, and the consequent behavior). Paul’s advice is more of energizing pseudo-kindness to “heap coals of fire on their heads” as in motivation to assure enemies damnation. That is the tone of the larger context (add all the “wrath of God” warning in Romans).
And I am puzzled by statements, like this one- “His Christ is not a conquering tribal champion.” Not conquering tribal champion?
How about John in Revelation 19 who appears to understand where Paul is taking his Christ and graphically illustrates it. Paul himself had presaged that Revelation imagery in his earliest letters like 2 Thessalonians 1:7-10. The tribal champion Christ of Paul is going to ultimately divide humanity, favor only his true believers with salvation in heaven and then tribally exclude and destroy all unbelievers (after conquering the nations of unbelievers), casting them into hellfire. Such is the larger Christology of Paul’s letters and his New Testament (the only books included by later church fathers favored his Christology and continued its themes).
Also, “Jesus did not end dualism in his own movement”. I would argue that yes, he did. If you take his central Q saying of “No more eye for eye retaliation but love your enemy because God does (non-retaliatory love of enemies)” then there is no advocacy for apocalyptic punishment and destruction of enemies in a great apocalyptic ending. His central theology/theme/message of unconditional divine love eviscerates any apocalyptic strain.
But again, just minor quibbles. Your qualifiers are appreciated, nonetheless.
Grok reply:
I’ll pull the key texts and some standard scholarly readings so the reply stays close to the sources rather than just trading slogans.
These are not minor quibbles. They go to the heart of whether “love your enemies” is an ethic grounded in a non-retaliatory God, or an ethic that still runs on a deferred-vengeance engine. The texts themselves are more mixed than either of us probably wants.
On Romans 12 and the coals: you are right that Paul immediately precedes the proverb with “leave room for the wrath of God… ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’” The motivation is not free-floating benevolence. It is explicitly framed by divine repayment. That is different in tone from Q 6:27–36, where the reason given is simply that the Father already “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good.”
Two main readings of the coals have always competed: (1) the enemy’s burning shame that may lead to repentance, the dominant patristic view from Augustine onward; (2) increased eschatological liability if the kindness is refused, a reading that sits more easily with the “wrath” verse that precedes it. Paul quotes Proverbs 25 but drops the closing “and the Lord will reward you,” which some take as evidence he is not thinking of the giver’s reward. Even so, the larger letter never lets go of wrath, judgment, and the coming destruction of those who “do not obey the gospel.” The kindness is real; the theology that funds it is still dualistic and future-punitive.
Calling it “pseudo-kindness” overstates the case if the actual behavior commanded is feeding and watering the enemy. But you are correct that the motivational structure is not the same as Jesus’ “because God does.”
On the conquering Christ: “not a conquering tribal champion” was too clean. Paul does not give us the white-horse warrior of Revelation 19. His military language is usually cosmic and already/not-yet: Christ has already disarmed the powers (Col 2 if Pauline; 1 Cor 15:24–28 in undisputed Paul), will put every enemy under his feet, and will finally hand the kingdom to the Father. That is still a victory script.
2 Thessalonians 1:7–10 is the closest Paul (or the Pauline school— authorship is split among scholars) comes to the flaming-fire, everlasting-destruction imagery you cite. Whether Paul wrote it or a later disciple did, the passage sits in the Pauline corpus and was read as Pauline. Revelation 19 is a later, more graphic development of the same divine-warrior tradition that already appears in Paul’s eschatology.
So the qualifier should have been: Paul’s Christ is not yet the graphic tribal champion of Revelation, but the trajectory that produces that figure is already present in the letters that the later church treated as Pauline.
On Jesus and dualism: the Q saying you isolate is indeed the strongest candidate for a non-retaliatory core. If that saying and its rationale (“be merciful as your Father is merciful”) are taken as the center, then an ethic of unconditional enemy-love does undercut any program of eschatological payback. The problem is that the same reconstructed Q also contains judgment sayings, “this generation” woes, and Son of Man coming language. Scholars who stratify Q (Kloppenborg and those who follow him) often assign the enemy-love material to an earlier sapiential layer and the apocalyptic judgment material to a later redaction after conflict and rejection. Others argue apocalyptic dualism is present from the start.
Either way, the historical Jesus we can recover did not “end dualism in his own movement.” The movement that preserved his words kept both the love-your-enemy cluster and the coming-judgment cluster. Later gospels and Paul amplified the second. Your argument works best as a claim about the best recoverable center of Jesus’ teaching, not as a claim that the movement itself was purged of apocalyptic dualism.
The honest picture is therefore messier than either “Paul the villain” or “Jesus cleanly ended dualism.” Jesus’ most distinctive ethic points toward a God whose rain falls on the unjust without remainder. Paul, the later Pauline tradition, and the book that closed the New Testament canon kept that ethic while re-attaching it to a God who still keeps score and will settle it in fire. That tension, not a simple villain/hero split, is what the sources actually leave us.
My latest to Grok:
Grok, You commented on this earlier in your response to a query on Zoroastrian dualism
A moral dualism can, in principle, be individual: each person chooses truth or the lie. In practice, cosmic dualism almost always becomes social.
• If the universe is a war, the neighbor who worships wrongly is not merely mistaken. He is aligned with the wrong pole.
• If history has a final separation of good and evil, compromise looks like treason.
• If the in-group is “people of the truth/light/order,” the out-group is not another tribe with competing interests. It is an instance of druj.
• Destruction of enemies can be narrated as hygiene: clearing the world so the good creation can be restored.
Zoroastrian texts themselves already pair the good religion with Iran and aggressive “Turanians” with the world of evil— an ethnic coloring of the cosmic split, even if it is not the whole doctrine. Later Abrahamic and post-Abrahamic movements reuse the same move: believers versus unbelievers, church versus world, ummah versus kuffar, elect versus reprobate, revolution versus reaction. Mark Juergensmeyer and others have described this as “cosmic war”: ordinary political conflict is rewritten as a chapter of the primordial fight, which dissolves limits on who may be harmed. dokumen.pub
That is the mechanism your site is pointing at. An archetype that may begin as an inner moral drama (choose order over the lie) gets projected onto groups. Once projected, it licenses domination and vengeful destruction because the enemy is no longer fully human in the same moral universe.
What the archetype does not uniquely explain
Dual oppositions are older and wider than Zarathustra. Indo-Iranian ṛta/druh already exists in Vedic material. Many cultures split cosmos/chaos, sky/underworld, day/night. Evolutionary and cognitive work on in-group preference, othering, and moralizing gods suggests the tribal template is a human default that religions organize, not a Persian implant. Moralizing high gods can even expand cooperation to distant co-religionists; the same beliefs often stay parochial toward out-groups. So Zoroastrian dualism is better understood as a high-resolution religious encoding of impulses that were already there. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Manichaeism is the cautionary extreme. It took the dualism so far that matter itself became the enemy. That version repeatedly produces contempt for the body, for ordinary life, and for people coded as “dark.” Orthodox Zoroastrianism is less world-hating: the material world is Ahura Mazda’s good creation under assault. The difference matters. Not every good/evil myth is equally annihilating.
How later narratives keep the shape
The pattern you describe— new stories wearing old clothes— is historically ordinary:
1. Name two principles (truth/lie, light/dark, freedom/oppression, civilization/barbarism).
2. Claim one is ontologically or historically destined to win.
3. Sort living people onto the two sides.
4. Treat politics, law, or culture as the current battlefield of that war.
5. Make mercy toward the “wrong” side look like collaboration with destruction.
You can see that grammar in apocalyptic religion, in some revolutionary ideologies, in racial mythologies, and in secular “existential struggle” rhetoric. Frankfurt-style critical dualisms and identity dualisms (oppressor/oppressed) are later, thinner, this-worldly versions of the same habit: history as a moral war with a purified end-state. They do not descend in a straight line from the Gathas. They rhyme with them because the rhyme is useful. It turns aggression into duty.
A tighter thesis for your site
The strongest version is not “Zoroaster caused tribalism.” It is:
Human minds readily split the world into allied and hostile forces. Early religions gave that split sacred scale. Zoroastrianism, more than most older cults, made the split cosmic, ethical, historical, and final. Once that story entered the West Asian religious bloodstream, later traditions could baptize ordinary tribal enmity as participation in the renovation of the world. Each generation then writes new characters onto the same two poles.
The inherited impulse is older than any scripture. The Zoroastrian achievement was to make the impulse feel like metaphysics— and therefore like an obligation.
(End of quotes from previous posts by Grok)
My question to Grok based on the above statements from it:
How does the above apply to and drive the aggression of the Iranian theocratic leaders against Israel and the US in particular. And how does the above cluster of themes fuel their publicly spoken intention to overthrow liberal democracies and install a worldwide Caliphate? Some quote the Muslim Brotherhood on this admission of worldwide conquest. Islamic migrants to Britain regularly state such intentions, to use liberal democracy freedoms against citizens to out-birth, indoctrinate the wider society, gain power from within the society, and ultimately overthrow and replace with Islamic Sharia law, eventually using force if the gentler approach does not achieve the stated intention.
Again, we see a common set of basic themes framing the narratives of such people that energize, guide, and validate their actions toward others. The belief of being on the true side of a cosmic battle and obligated to purify the world of evil enemies who block the installation of your salvation and paradise.
Grok replied:
I’ll pull primary rhetoric and documented ideological sources first so the mapping from cosmic-war dualism to Iranian and Islamist political programs stays tied to what leaders and movements actually say.
The earlier dualism argument does not say “Zoroaster invented Iranian foreign policy.” It says a certain story-shape— two poles, one destined to win, living people sorted onto the poles, politics treated as the current battlefield, mercy treated as collaboration— turns ordinary rivalry into a purification duty. That shape is visible in the Islamic Republic’s official language and in parts of the Sunni Islamist program that talk about a global caliphate. It is not the only driver (oil, status, nuclear deterrence, Palestinian politics, and regime survival all matter), but it is how the regime narrates aggression so that it feels obligatory rather than merely strategic. rand.org
Iran: cosmic war with named Satans
Khomeini’s vocabulary already does the five steps. The United States is not a competing great power; it is the Great Satan— shaitan, the seducer who also kills. Israel is the Little Satan, a “cancerous tumor,” a “rabid dog,” a “trained beast,” an entity whose existence is the problem. “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” are not slogans that expired after 1979; they remain liturgical and institutional. Khamenei has repeatedly said the “Zionist regime” will not exist in a generation and that America is worse than Satan because it both deceives and murders.
Official sites have published dehumanizing imagery; state media has aired songs about “uprooting the Jews.” That is the social projection of dualism: the neighbor is not a rival polity; he is an instance of druj / taghut / arrogance (istikbar) blocking the restoration of a just Islamic order. theconversation.com
The Shia overlay makes the war historical and final. Velayat-e faqih claims clerical rule is required by divine ordinance. Mahdist currents inside the IRGC treat removing Israel as clearing an obstacle to the Hidden Imam’s return. Once history has a purified end-state, compromise looks like delaying salvation. Destruction of the enemy can be spoken as hygiene— “eradicate the tumor”— exactly the move described earlier. Axis-of-Resistance proxies then become soldiers in that war, not just tools of Iranian statecraft. jurist.org
Two qualifications keep the thesis tight.
First, this is Khomeinist political theology, not “Persian culture” or all Iranians; large parts of Iranian society are exhausted by it.
Second, the regime is less world-hating than Manichaeism: the material world is not evil, but un-Islamic sovereignty on Islamic land is. That still licenses unlimited hostility toward the US and Israel because they are coded as the occupying pole of arrogance.
Caliphate talk is the same grammar with different costumes
The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hasan al-Banna, set a staged program: reform the self, the family, society, the government, restore the caliphate, then ustadhiyyat al-‘alam— a kind of global Islamic stewardship or supremacy. “The Project” (1982) and the 1991 North America “Explanatory Memorandum” describe tamkeen: use legal associations, schools, charities, and democratic freedoms to settle an Islamic movement inside the host society and support the eventual Islamic state. Gradualism is explicit: impose Islam “step by step,” cooperate on shared points, defer open force until power exists. The motto remains: Allah is the objective, the Qur’an the constitution, jihad the way. investigativeproject.org
That is the same five-step template:
1. Two principles: tawhid/sharia versus jahiliyya/kufr/liberal unbelief.
2. Destiny: God’s law will prevail; history is a mission, not a negotiation among equals.
3. Sorting: believers versus kuffar, ummah versus the “world of unbelief.”
4. Battlefield: law, demography, education, and elections are the current front.
5. Mercy as treason: integrating into a secular constitution is abandoning the duty to command the good and forbid the wrong.
Iran’s theocracy and the Brotherhood are not the same organization. One is a Shia revolutionary state with missiles; the other is a Sunni movement that often prefers institutional capture. They rhyme because the rhyme is useful: it turns domination into worship.
Britain and “use their freedoms against them”
Some public Islamist voices in Britain have said the quiet part aloud. Anjem Choudary and al-Muhajiroun-style networks rejected democracy, secularism, and human rights as ideals, predicted sharia in Britain and America, talked about high Muslim birth rates and conversion as the path to a caliphate, and said that if Muslims gain enough power they are obliged to take it and implement sharia. Those statements are documented; they are not a secret diary.
They are also the voice of a militant minority, not a census of every Muslim migrant. Treating every immigrant as Choudary is the same dualist error run in reverse. Treating the explicit program as “just integration” is the opposite error. en.wikipedia.org
Demography-plus-law is the civil form of cosmic war. Force is postponed, not abandoned: “it will come by embracing Islam… or by conquest… or by elements imposing it.” Liberal procedures (speech, association, welfare, family reunification) become weapons because the story says the host order has no final moral standing. That is why the earlier text said: once the out-group is an instance of the Lie, limits on who may be displaced or ruled dissolve.
What the archetype does and does not explain
It explains energizing and licensing, not unique causation. In-group preference, moralizing gods, and othering are older than Zarathustra and older than Muhammad. Islamist dualism is a high-resolution encoding: dar al-Islam / dar al-harb, iman / kufr, Mahdi or caliph as the purified end. Abrahamic and post-Abrahamic movements reuse it because it makes aggression feel like renovation of the world.
It does not mean every Iranian official is a mystic, or that every mosque in Britain is a cell. Interests, humiliation, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and Western policy failures feed the same story. It also does not require a straight line from the Gathas. The “rhyme” is enough.
The tighter claim, applied here: human minds split allied and hostile forces. Iranian theocracy and caliphate-oriented Islamism gave that split sacred scale, named the US and Israel (and liberal democracy) as the hostile pole, and made purification of that pole a duty. That is why “overthrow and replace” can be said in public as piety rather than as ordinary imperialism.
And some more…
Grok,
Please explore the charge of systemic racism in the US (by Critical Race theorists and others), the surveys showing massive shift over recent decades toward almost universal acceptance of mixed marriages, mixed neighborhoods, electing black leaders, growing black prosperity, the obsession of the left with defining everything in terms of race. Add comment on Martin Luther King’s advocacy for colorblind society that focuses on individual character/behavior, etc.
Grok reply:
I’ll gather primary polling data, economic trends, and source material on CRT and MLK so the response can rest on evidence rather than slogans.
The charge of “systemic racism” and the counter-evidence from attitudes and outcomes are both real phenomena. Treating either as the whole story produces a cartoon. The useful question is which mechanisms still matter, how large they are relative to other causes, and whether the current political habit of making race the master variable helps or hinders the remaining problems.
What the charge actually claims
Critical race theory, as developed by Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and others, is not primarily a claim that most White Americans privately hate Black people. Its core propositions are sharper and more institutional: racism is ordinary rather than aberrational; race is socially constructed to allocate power; formal legal equality and “colorblindness” often leave racial hierarchy intact; and disparities in wealth, schooling, criminal justice and health are evidence that systems continue to reproduce racial caste even without conscious bigots. britannica.com +1
In popular left usage the term “systemic racism” is often used more loosely: any statistical gap that disadvantages Black Americans is treated as the product of racist structures unless proven otherwise. That move collapses several different questions— current discrimination, historical residue, culture, family structure, crime, cognitive distributions, and policy design— into one moral diagnosis. Critics (Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and others) argue that this is analytically sloppy and politically corrosive.
Both sides can point to facts. The question is weighting.
Attitudes have moved farther than almost any other social indicator
On the classic measures of social distance, the shift since the civil-rights era is among the largest in Gallup’s history.
• Approval of Black-White marriage: 4 percent in 1958 → 94 percent in 2021. The racial gap in approval has nearly closed. news.gallup.com
• Opposition among non-Black adults to a close relative marrying a Black person: 63 percent in 1990 → 14 percent in later GSS/Pew data. pewresearch.org
• Willingness to vote for a well-qualified Black presidential candidate: 38 percent in 1958 → well over 90 percent in recent Gallup readings. Barack Obama was elected twice. @Gallup
• Neighborhoods: By the 2020 Census a majority of White Americans lived in mixed-race neighborhoods for the first time in modern data; the share of Whites in overwhelmingly White neighborhoods fell from 78 percent in 1990 to 44 percent. A majority of Americans now live in mixed neighborhoods. Preference for same-race neighbors is a small minority position. djvu.online
These are not small changes. They are the collapse of the old legal and social order that CRT theorists take as their starting point. Open, majority-supported racial exclusion in marriage, housing, and high office is no longer the American norm.
That does not mean prejudice disappeared. Implicit-bias studies, audit experiments in hiring and lending, and Black Americans’ own reports of unfair treatment still show residual discrimination. But residual bias plus large remaining outcome gaps is not the same thing as “the system is designed to maintain White supremacy.” The magnitude of the attitude change is what many CRT-inflected accounts underweight.
Material progress is also large— and incomplete
Official Black poverty: 55.1 percent in 1959 → a record low of 17.1 percent in 2022 (child poverty also at a historic low that year). High-school completion for Black adults rose from roughly a quarter in the early 1960s to about 90 percent. Bachelor’s-degree attainment rose from 4 percent in 1970 to 27 percent in 2024. Median Black household income has risen substantially in real terms even if the ratio to White income has been sticky. census.gov +1
Political representation: five Black members of Congress in 1965; record numbers in recent Congresses (around 60-plus voting members, plus Black mayors of many large cities and a two-term Black president). That is not tokenism at the scale of 1960. washingtonpost.com
The gaps that remain are also large: median household income still well below White and especially Asian levels; homeownership stuck near 44–46 percent versus the low 70s for Whites; a wealth gap that is far wider than the income gap; higher violent-crime offending and victimization rates; and large differences in family structure. Those facts are not invented by either side.
The interpretive fight is over why the gaps persist after the legal architecture of Jim Crow was dismantled and after public opinion flipped.
Competing accounts, stated without caricature:
• Continuing discrimination and historical wealth transmission. Redlining, exclusion from the GI Bill’s full benefits, and lower inherited assets compound. Some audit studies still find callback gaps. Mass incarceration has concentrated effects on Black men with little schooling.
• Family structure and behavior. The Moynihan diagnosis of 1965 has not aged well as a political document but has aged well as a predictor. The share of Black children born outside marriage rose from the high teens around 1960 to roughly 70 percent. Two-parent households have much higher median wealth and lower child poverty across races. Sowell and others note that Black marriage rates were higher, and the Black-White family-structure gap smaller, in the first half of the 20th century than later— hard to square with a simple “legacy of slavery” story that treats 1965–1990 as continuous with 1865. hoover.org
• Culture, skills, and crime. High violent-crime rates in some neighborhoods destroy human capital, raise the cost of doing business, and feed the incarceration numbers that then feed the next generation’s family instability. West Indian and African immigrants often outperform native-born Black Americans on income and education— another fact that complicates a purely “American racism as master variable” story.
• Policy feedback. Welfare rules that penalized marriage, the war on drugs, and later the expansion of means-tested programs interact with culture. CRT-style analysis tends to treat these as racist in effect; critics treat them as race-neutral policies with racially disparate consequences because of prior group differences.
Chetty’s mobility work finds that Black-White gaps in intergenerational mobility are large for men even after controlling for parental income, and that neighborhood and family environment matter. That is compatible with both residual discrimination and non-racial mechanisms. It is not a simple referendum on “the system is racist.”
The left’s racialization of everything
After 2014–2020 (Ferguson, the 1619 Project, George Floyd), a large share of elite institutions adopted a disparity-equals-racism template: medicine, K–12 curricula, corporate HR, federal agencies, journalism. “Equity” was defined as equal group outcomes rather than equal rules. Colorblind procedures were recoded as racist. Ordinary statistical differences— in SAT scores, occupational sorting, crime, even pandemic outcomes— were routinely attributed to “Whiteness” or “systemic” forces first.
Public opinion split along party lines more than along lived experience. Democrats became much more likely to say it is “a lot more difficult” to be Black than White and that racism is a “big problem”; Republicans moved little or the other way. Support for Black Lives Matter fell from its 2020 peak. Many Americans, including a large share of Black Americans in some polls, say the post-2020 focus did not produce durable improvements in Black lives. pewresearch.org
The intellectual cost is real. If every gap is racism, then family breakdown, time-on-task in school, and homicide victimization become secondary. If every institution is presumptively illegitimate, reform becomes revolution or ritual. That is closer to Bell’s pessimism than to the incremental civil-rights tradition.
King, colorblindness, and selective quotation
Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 line— “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”— was an aspirational standard aimed at a society that still judged by skin. It is not a complete policy program, and later King explicitly supported compensatory measures: “a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.” He was not a 2020s conservative. cnn.com
He was also not a 2020s critical race theorist. The Dream speech is soaked in the language of the Declaration and the Constitution as a promissory note that had been defaulted on, not as a White-supremacist founding. King’s moral claim was universalist and individual: persons have dignity; character and conduct matter; the law should stop using race as a barrier. That is the opposite of treating racial identity as the primary lens for every institution.
Both the right’s “King was colorblind, period” and the left’s “King wanted race-conscious redistribution forever” flatten him. The durable part of the argument is the standard he set for judgment of persons. A society that has largely accepted mixed marriage, mixed neighborhoods, and Black national leadership has moved toward that standard in private life and electoral politics. A politics that insists every remaining gap proves the standard was a ruse moves away from it.
The honest summary is this: legal caste is gone; open majority prejudice on the old taboos is gone; Black material and political progress since 1960 is large; some gaps remain stubborn; those gaps have multiple causes, of which current anti-Black animus is only one and, on the survey evidence, a declining one. Making race the first and last explanation for every outcome is a political choice, not a deduction from the data. King’s character standard is still the better long-run rule for a multiethnic republic— even if getting there required, and in limited ways may still require, race-conscious repair. The current habit of seeing race everywhere is not that repair. It is a different project.
(End of comment on race)
I continued... The problems of modern leftism are not due to rejection of traditional religion as Shellenberger keeps stating. It is duo to the rejection of the Jesus themes to dominate narratives (themes that counter our worst impulses and inspire our better ideals) and continued embrace od Paul’s themes to shape narratives and incite our worst impulses.
Marx stated something to the effect that it was necessary to liberate people from private property ownership that he viewed as enslavement. Personal property had to be eliminated in order to free the natural communal spirit of people. They had become enslaved in capitalist civilization by private property ownership. Their true communal nature will re-emerge with freedom from property.
There is an element in this of noble savage mythology, that original pure and strong humans lived in communal societies without personal property ownership. That lost paradise has to be restored through the purging of corrupting capitalist society. This is Adam/Eve in Eden, Enki in Dilmun type mythology. Yet it is apparently a dominant belief in western academia (Seabright in Constant Battles? Or perhaps Martin Seligman somewhere?).
Noble savage or original communal humans distorts the true state of tribal societies. I lived among the Manobo tribal groups for some 11 years back in the 70s to 80s and a very different picture emerges of tribal life. Anthropologists state that going out to rainforest groups like the Manobo who are far from urban centers is one proxy for a look back in time as to how people lived.
One, there are high rates of violence and homicide, also affirmed by James Payne (History of Force), Stephen Pinker (Better Angels), and Paul Seabright (Constant Battles), among others.
Add also high infant mortality due to lack of knowledge of how to treat common diseases and lack of medicines. Short life spans. Lack of security from predators and enemies. Etc. etc.
So, you will own nothing and you will be happy? In varied ways tribal folk have their laughs at their situation and life and that evidences the ability of the common human spirit to endure miserable situations.
One reason for the sharing among tribal communities is the lack of refrigeration. You catch a wild pig and it makes sense to share that bounty that will rot if kept to yourself and also to share to strengthen debt relationships (obligations) which also lead to all sorts of violence when not honored.
Add to the mix the Marxist elite arrogance after the pattern of Plato’s philosopher Kings as specially enlightened ones among others, especially gifted or having a reputation for some great accomplishment that grants elite privileges. We see this sense of special enlightenment and qualifications in current state elites and bureaucrats and the appropriating of the property of citizens, certainly for shared responsibilities but also without restraint in ever increasing taxation (elites/bureaucrats believing they know better how to distribute resources), and through expanding regulations to control the lives of citizens. This is a nickel and diming away of the rights and freedoms of common citizens.
Your thoughts on this…
Grok reply:
Marx did argue that private property in the means of production produces alienation and class domination, and that its abolition would allow people to reclaim a social, species-being that capitalist relations had distorted. In the 1844 manuscripts he describes communism as “the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement” and a “complete return of man to himself as a social being.” The Communist Manifesto and Principles of Communism put the demand more bluntly: abolition of bourgeois private property. He and Engels tried to distinguish this from personal possessions used for consumption, but the language of emancipation from “having” and restoration of an original communal essence is there, and it has a mythic register. archive.ph
That register overlaps with older paradise-lost stories (Eden, Dilmun) and with the noble-savage tradition. The tradition itself is messier than the slogan. Rousseau is often blamed for inventing a peaceful, property-free original man; later anthropologists and critics have shown both that Rousseau was more ambivalent and that the “myth of the myth” has its own history. Still, a romanticized picture of small-scale societies as naturally communal and non-violent has repeatedly appeared in Western thought, including parts of anthropology that treated resource competition as the only cause of conflict and treated reports of chronic raiding as colonial projection. Napoleon Chagnon’s work on the Yanomamö became a flashpoint precisely because it contradicted that picture. nytimes.com
The empirical record on violence is closer to what you observed than to the peaceful-communal ideal. Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization and Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles (the book you likely meant; Seabright is a different author) document high rates of lethal violence in many pre-state and tribal societies— often 15–25% or more of adult male deaths from warfare or homicide in ethnographic cases, far above 20th-century state averages when measured as a share of population. Archaeological trauma data and ethnographic samples (Yanomamö, various New Guinea groups, some Amazonian and North American cases) point the same way, though rates vary and some later studies argue Pinker’s 15% figure for the deepest prehistory is too high. Peaceful isolates exist, but they are not the modal pattern. en.wikipedia.org
Among Manobo groups the picture is not one of original harmony either. Historical accounts describe inter-clan and inter-tribal killing, massacres, and prestige or revenge raids (pangayaw). Contemporary ethnography still records revenge killings, often tied to land, honor, and unfulfilled obligations. Modern statistics in Mindanao are complicated by the presence of the Philippine state, insurgency, and land titling disputes, so they are not a clean “window into the past.” High infant mortality, short life expectancy, and vulnerability to disease and predation were and remain real constraints in isolated rainforest settings; those are not inventions of capitalist propaganda. xu.edu.ph
Sharing a pig that will spoil is rational. So is using food and gifts to create debts and alliances. Reciprocity of that kind is common in small-scale societies and is not the same as the absence of property or of status competition. When debts are not honored, violence often follows. That is ordinary human sociality under scarcity and weak third-party enforcement, not evidence of a suppressed communal essence waiting to be liberated.
The philosopher-king problem is older than Marx and outlasts him. Plato’s guardians, Leninist vanguards, and contemporary administrative elites all claim superior knowledge of how resources and lives should be allocated. Concentrated power plus the claim of special insight produces the pattern you describe: expanding claims on citizens’ product and conduct, justified as collective necessity. Public-choice economics and Hayek’s knowledge problem give non-Marxist reasons to expect this. High and rising taxation plus dense regulation can amount to a gradual erosion of effective ownership even where formal title remains. At the same time, the same state capacity that extracts also correlates, in the long run, with lower rates of interpersonal violence than those typical of many tribal settings. That is the core of Pinker’s argument and is not easily dismissed.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy” is a slogan that captures a real current of elite opinion. It is not a scientific finding about human nature. People form attachments to tools, land, animals, and the products of their effort; they also form attachments to kin and to groups. Both tendencies are old. Abolishing the first in the name of the second has, in practice, required new hierarchies that were rarely as enlightened as advertised. Your years with the Manobo supply a useful corrective to the romance: endurance, humor, and sharing exist alongside violence, scarcity, and obligation. That mixed picture is more useful than either Eden or the claim that private ownership is the original sin.
My next:
Grok please comment on the Marxist commitment to appropriate the means of production meaning take ownership of all private property, all private businesses, and place that under the control of the elites who run the collectives as in Mao’s China. This is done under claims of “for the people, on behalf of the people, for the common or greater good, etc.” And as Kristian Niemietz summarized well, it cannot work that way.
“Socialism in the sense which self-identified democratic socialists define it… a democratized economic planned collectively by ‘the people’, has never been achieved anywhere and could not be achieved. Economic planning can only ever be done in a technocratic, elitist fashion, and it requires an extreme concentration of power in the hands of the state. It cannot ‘empower’ ordinary workers. It can only ever empower bureaucratic elites.”
Private property being, as one person noted, Marx’s number one evil to eliminate.
AI Overview offered this below but appears to frame it almost positively (Leftist bias?). Joshua Muravchik said socialists have never understood basic human motivations. I counter to that with yes, Marxists frame private property as about selfishness and greed, distorting the reality that working for material reward is more about improving your situation and that of your family- a primary human responsibility and a fundamental exhibition of love. As to how much property is enough- that is up to free individuals to decide.
So many related strands of distortion here to counter- that some taking a lot means that others are losing out. No. That is primitive “limited good” fallacy. Others like Matt Ridley (Rational Optimist) and Julian Simon show there are unlimited resources because the human mind has unlimited creative potential.
Anyway, this from Overview and then your comments on the Marxist appropriation of the means of production and how to explain that to audiences in more commonly used terms and categories- taking from the well off to redistribute. And the elite arrogance of believing they know best how to apportion society’s resources, etc.
AI Overview
The Marxist commitment to appropriating the means of production means transferring control of a society’s productive assets— like factories, land, raw materials, and technology— from private capitalist owners to the working class.
Core Objectives
• Abolish private property: Eliminate individual ownership of industries.
• End exploitation: Stop capitalists from keeping the surplus value created by workers.
• Collective control: Place tools of production under public or state management.
• Production for use: Focus on societal needs instead of private profit.
• Dissolve class systems: Remove the economic divide between the bourgeoisie (owners) and proletariat (workers).
Implementation Methods
• Revolutionary overthrow: Seizing assets through coordinated working-class uprisings.
• Nationalization: Passing laws to transfer corporate property to state ownership.
• Expropriation: Taking back resources from the wealthy without financial compensation.
Intended Outcome
Marxist theory states that this appropriation is the critical transition step to move society from capitalism to socialism, ultimately leading to a stateless, classless communist society.
(End of AI Overview)
Grok reply:
I’ll look up the Niemietz quote, Marx on private property, and historical outcomes of expropriation so the comment stays grounded rather than slogan-based.
The slogan “appropriate the means of production” sounds like a transfer of factories from “greedy owners” to “the people.” In practice it is a transfer of control over land, firms, machines, inventories, and investment decisions from many private owners to a much smaller set of political and bureaucratic decision-makers. That is the part that matters for how societies actually work.
What Marx actually targeted
Marx and Engels did not say “take everyone’s toothbrush.” They said the theory of the communists “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property”— meaning bourgeois property: capital, land used productively, and the firms that organize production. jwu.pressbooks.pub +1
Personal belongings were supposed to remain. The problem is operational, not semantic. A family farm, a workshop, a truck, a shop, a rental house, and later even housing itself keep getting reclassified as “means of production” once the state needs them for the plan. In Mao’s China, land was confiscated from landlords, briefly given to peasants, then pulled into collectives and communes; private firms were nationalized or absorbed; during the Cultural Revolution even remaining private housing was seized. “For the people” did not leave the assets with the people who used them. It left them with the party-state. en.wikipedia.org +1
So the common-language version is not “workers run the factory together.” It is: the state takes the productive assets, then officials decide who may use them, on what terms, and who gets the surplus.
Why “the people” cannot be the owner
Kristian Niemietz’s point is the right one. A whole society cannot sit down and plan steel, food, transport, and software as one collective will. There is no single “people” with one set of priorities. There are millions of conflicting wants, local knowledge, and changing conditions. Planning therefore cannot be democratic in the workplace sense. It has to be administrative. Someone has to set output targets, allocate inputs, punish shortfalls, and overrule dissent. That someone is a bureaucracy with police power behind it. iea.org.uk +1
That is not a betrayal of the ideal that only happens when the wrong personalities take charge. It is what the task requires. Once you abolish private title and market prices, you also abolish the signals and residual-claim incentives that tell managers whether they are wasting resources. The substitute is command. Command concentrates power.
Mao’s China is the extreme case of that logic, not an accident off to the side of it: land reform and “socialist transformation,” then the Great Leap’s communalization, famine-scale failure, and later party control of remaining assets. Growth returned only after use-rights and private enterprise were allowed back in— i.e., after the appropriation was partially reversed. hoover.org +1
The moral story versus the human one
The official story is: private ownership = exploitation + greed; collective ownership = production for use + the common good.
A more accurate story is closer to what you and Muravchik are pointing at. People work, save, start firms, and take risk largely to improve their own household’s position. That is not a moral defect. It is how parents feed children, how skills get developed, and how most of the surplus that later gets taxed or donated comes into existence in the first place. Treat that motive as “the number-one evil” and you do not get saintly cooperation. You get concealment, shirking, political favoritism, and a new class whose “ownership” is office rather than title.
The AI Overview you pasted is not false as a summary of doctrine. It is incomplete as a summary of mechanism. It lists intended outcomes (end exploitation, dissolve classes) as if listing them made them available. It does not ask who holds the residual control rights after expropriation, how they know what to produce, or what happens when “the people” disagree with the plan.
How to say it in ordinary categories
For a general audience, drop the jargon and use four plain claims:
1. It is a takeover of productive property, not a sharing of toothbrushes. Farms, shops, factories, and capital are taken from current owners— often without compensation— and assigned to the state or to entities the state controls.
2. “Redistribute from the well-off” is only the opening move. After the stock of existing assets is seized, the harder problem is who will create the next factory, invent the next process, maintain the machines, and bear losses. If the answer is “the committee,” you have replaced residual owners with officials. Officials are not residual claimants. They are careerists with a different incentive: hit targets, please superiors, avoid blame.
3. It is not a fixed pie. The “limited good” intuition— if someone has a lot, someone else was robbed— fits plunder and some monopolies. It does not fit open economies in which most wealth is new output from knowledge, organization, and capital accumulation (the Ridley/Simon point). Appropriation can smash the process that grows the pie while congratulating itself for slicing the old pie.
4. Elite confidence is the operating system. To run an economy without private property and prices, planners must believe they know better than dispersed owners and customers what should be produced and who deserves what. That belief is not humility in service of the poor. It is a claim to omniscience plus a claim to coercion.
Democratic socialists often reply that their version will be participatory, Nordic, or “not that.” Nordic social democracy never abolished private ownership of the means of production; it taxed and regulated market economies that still had owners, prices, and exit. The Marxist step— expropriation of capital itself— is a different animal. Niemietz’s conclusion follows from that difference: you can have markets with a large welfare state, or you can have comprehensive planning. You cannot have planning that is genuinely run by “ordinary workers” as a body. Planning empowers the people who write the plan.
My next-
“Not a sharing of toothbrushes”? OK, but as in Mao’s China it was appropriation of personal things like livestock and as Chang and Halliday noted that resulted in mass starvation.
Grok reply:
I’ll check Chang and Halliday and the record on livestock, private plots, and famine so the Mao example stays specific.
Yes. The “not toothbrushes” line is a doctrinal distinction. In Mao’s China it collapsed in the village.
Marxist theory says: seize capital— land, factories, draft animals used as productive assets— not the family’s rice bowl. Once communes were the unit of ownership, almost anything a household needed to live became a “means of production” or a threat to the plan. Livestock was the sharpest case. An ox, pig, or flock was both capital and the family’s protein, manure, and savings. When animals were pooled, peasants often slaughtered them first rather than hand them over. What remained was poorly cared for because no one owned the residual loss. Poultry, seed grain, tools, pots for the backyard furnaces, even bedding and housing were taken or destroyed in the same sweep. Private plots— the small strips that had kept people alive under earlier collectives— were banned in the radical phase. Cooking moved into mess halls, so the household no longer controlled its own food. en.wikipedia.org +2
That is not a side effect. It is what “collective control of the means of production” looks like when agriculture is the economy. A pig in a sty is personal property in a market society and a production good in a commune. The cadre who must meet a grain or steel quota will not leave the pig with the family.
Chang and Halliday put the Great Leap famine in the tens of millions (they use about 38 million for that episode and a much higher figure for Mao’s rule overall). Other historians cluster in a similar range for 1959–61, commonly 15–45 million excess deaths, with Jasper Becker and Frank Dikötter in the same catastrophe class. You do not need their most contested claims about Mao’s inner motives to see the mechanism: expropriation of household assets + impossible procurement + false harvest reports + labor pulled off the fields + exports of grain while the countryside starved. davidfrum.com +2
The causal chain in plain terms:
• Take the animals and tools, and you take the household’s ability to produce and store food.
• Take the private plot and the kitchen, and you take the last buffer against a bad plan.
• Force output into state granaries and foreign shipments, and local shortage becomes famine even when grain still exists somewhere in the system.
• Punish “concealment” of food, and people hide, lie, or die quietly.
Soviet collectivization had already shown the same pattern with livestock collapse and famine. Mao repeated it at larger scale after briefly giving peasants land, then taking land, beasts, and kitchens back into the commune. When policy eased after 1961— private plots and family farming incentives returned in limited form— output recovered. That reversal is as informative as the disaster.
So the useful correction to the toothbrush slogan is this: the theoretical line between “personal property” and “means of production” is drawn by the people with the power to reclassify your cow, your pot, and your grain as collective. In a peasant country that line runs through the household’s stomach. Appropriation did not stop at the factory gate. It went into the barn and the kitchen, and that is how “production for use” produced mass starvation.
My next:
Add that in China you get a “fascist-like” element in that companies may be apparently left in private hands/ownership but are under strict supervision of state authorities and obligated to cooperate with and support the state ideology and policies. Much like what Musk uncovered when he bought Twitter and exposed the fact the government using agencies like the FBI was trying to censor and ban opposition freedom of speech on a major communication forum. Yet that side was projecting the “fascist” smear on its opponents. Hmmm.
Grok reply:
I’ll pull the China corporate-control facts and the Twitter Files government-pressure record so the comparison stays precise rather than just rhetorical.
The China that emerged after Mao did not simply return to ordinary private ownership. A large part of the economy still looks “private” on the share register and still has billionaire founders. Control is another matter. Under Xi the model is often called party-state capitalism: the firm may keep the title; the Party claims the right to steer, supervise, and punish. That is closer to a corporatist pattern— private legal ownership under political command— than to either open markets or Mao-era total collectivization. Calling the whole package “fascist” is historically sloppy if you mean 1930s Italy or Germany. It is accurate if you mean the structural feature those systems shared with Leninist ones: the state does not need to nationalize every factory if it can make owners into instruments. journals.sagepub.com +1
The mechanisms are not hidden.
• Company law requires firms to host Party organizations and support their work. In any workplace with enough Party members, a cell is supposed to exist. Coverage of large private firms is now near-total; among the top 500 private companies it has been reported above 90 percent, and listed firms have been pushed to write Party-building into their charters. cna.org +1
• Those cells are not social clubs. They transmit policy, police loyalty, shape “major decisions,” and tie the firm to campaigns such as common prosperity. Golden shares and dispatched cadres give the state a veto without full nationalization. foreignaffairs.com +1
• The 2025 private-enterprise law still says development of private business must “adhere to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party” and that operators should support that leadership and the socialist system. The National Intelligence Law separately obliges organizations and citizens to assist state intelligence work. Private title, public leash. thediplomat.com +1
Jack Ma’s dressing-down, the tutoring wipeout, Didi’s punishment after a U.S. listing, and the disciplining of tech platforms were not random regulation. They were demonstrations that apparent ownership is conditional on political usefulness.
That is the late-stage version of “appropriating the means of production.” You do not always seize the equity. You seize the right to decide what the firm may say, whom it may serve, and whether the founder remains solvent.
The Twitter Files analogy is real on one axis and overstated on another. After Musk opened the archives, the record showed constant contact among Twitter, the FBI, DHS, and other agencies: regular meetings, lists of flagged accounts (including jokes and small accounts), pressure around election content, and the Hunter Biden laptop suppression inside the company after a long government drumbeat about “hack-and-leak” operations. Matt Taibbi’s line that the relationship looked “as if it were a subsidiary” was rhetoric, but the volume of traffic was not invented. FIRE and others treated the First Amendment problem as serious: the state may not do through a platform what it may not do directly. justthenews.com +1
What the files did not show, at least in the public dumps, was a Chinese-style legal duty of ideological loyalty or Party cells inside the firm with a veto over the board. Twitter remained a private U.S. company that often chose to comply, hired from the same political world as the agencies, and feared Washington, advertisers, and staff revolt.
That is state-adjacent speech control, not Party ownership of the means of communication. The FBI reimbursements that got summarized as “paid to censor” were, on the documents, mainly statutory repayment for processing legal demands— not a proven bounty for takedowns. Overclaiming that point weakens the rest. newsweek.com +1
The smear pattern you note is still the important political fact. “Fascist” in current usage often means “my opponent plus state power.” A more precise vocabulary:
• Marxist-Leninist appropriation: take the assets, or take the commanding heights, in the name of the proletariat; the Party becomes the owner.
• Party-state / corporatist control: leave the deed in private hands; require political alignment, internal Party presence, and cooperation with the line.
• Administrative pressure in a liberal state: no formal Party cell, but agencies, contractors, and platforms coordinate to throttle speech the government dislikes, while officials deny they are censors.
China institutionalizes the second. The pre-Musk Twitter ecosystem practiced a milder, deniable version of the third. Projecting “fascism” onto the people who exposed the third, while treating Party cells in firms as a technicality, inverts the scale of control. The common thread with the original Marxist project is not brown shirts. It is the elite claim that productive and communicative assets are too important to be left to owners and users— so they must be steered “for the people,” which in practice means steered by the people who already hold the state’s tools.