The Left side of History

Here we see a key fallacy about History exposed — one cannot be both on the right side of it and constantly touting its tendency to repeat itself! 

Perhaps the most influential conspiracy theory of the last century and a half goes under the name of Marxism. 

Its originator, Karl Marx, began by saying that the driving force of History is always resistance and struggle, then later on changed his mind and said it wasn’t. For the foil-hatted die-hards this was not a significant update to the model, but rather a lasting excuse for having it both ways.

Even at the time of its early confection, Marxism fared badly when exposed to actual history: the people who owned the land and those tied to it were thinking and behaving in ways that significantly challenged the predictions of the doctrine. (Perhaps aware of this, Marx never much cared for peasants, speaking of “the idiocy of rural life”, a form of bigotry that boded ill for the rustic sort once his conspiracy had been elevated to state religion status in Russia, and elsewhere.)

Conversely however, History has tended not to falter to anywhere near the same extent whenever exposed to Marxism. 

For this reason one of the most interesting things we can note today about the 1930s today is the mental state of the 1920s — almost a whole decade before the Nazis had seized power in Germany, the Marxist left in Germany had a workable theory about what was going to happen — which may or may not have played a part in how events subsequently unfolded —  and certainly influenced the immediate retrospectives as WWII came to an end and thereafter, at least for the first couple of decades the end of the Reich. 

The essence of the prediction was that Germany’s advanced techno-capitalists were secretly planning to fabricate a mass political movement which would serve their class interests and profit goals. (Sound at all familiar?) 

At the time this forecast was backed by precious little hard evidence and there were few concrete signs of an emerging fascist base. Yet as I have mentioned previously (in regard to the situation in Spain), these prophecies have a self-fulfilling quality about them. 

So when today we speak of ‘History repeating itself’, we need to carefully distinguish between the sequences of events themselves and the sequences of mentalities which influenced how those events subsequently took shape. 

Actors on one extreme of the spectrum often imagine their antagonists before the latter even materialise. In effect, they help conjure them into existence. They are then likely to blame this enemy which they have at least partially fabricated for everything bad that results from the confrontation thus engendered. 

This broadly applies to both Left and Right, and usually results in a fast-gyrating spiral. If you don’t believe me, consider (briefly) the Middle East...