Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator
Anne Applebaum in 2020 on collaboration and resistance:
Separately, each man’s story makes sense. But when examined together, they require some deeper explanation. Until March 1949, Leonhard’s and Wolf’s biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system. Both were educated in Communist ideology, and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system, allegedly built to promote equality, was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair, and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?
It’s a question that never really gets answered.
One possible answer I think is mostly useless: that X has more courage than Y. There’s more to it than that, and what the more may be is an interesting puzzle.
Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience. In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers.
That’s the kind of answer that’s more interesting.
You know what I’m thinking about, of course – the chronic question of why so many otherwise reasonable/skeptical people have embraced a loony fantasy-based ideology, and done so with such zeal and venom.
This is why courage is irrelevant. It takes more than fear of ostracism to explain the collapse.
IMO, related to why people join cults… people don’t join cults out of fear – although that might play into why they don’t leave them. The cult belief offers them something, and not just material gain.
And in many cases, they have to give up material success to be part of the cult; they still do it. Cults do have a lot of ways to keep people under their influence, not limited to group peer pressure, fasting, and music, but they still have to get them in first.
‘ To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses”, ‘
See “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer, which I recently read for my book club.
copyright 1951
exactly, which is why they offer something much deeper… not merely community, but a sense of purpose and righteousness, a sense that you are superior. See also: conspiracy theories.
Of course genderism isn’t so much a “mass movement” as it is a movement forced upon the “masses” by way of forced teaming and captured institutions. They’re at no risk of being plowed under if they’re driving the plow. So much the better for one’s self image if you can claim that resistance is bigotry.
Having fooled themselves that transgenderism is progressive, they can no longer see how much they resemble the forces of compulsory, civic Christianity, and that the ubiquitous “Pride Progress” flag is as much a symbol of a hegemonic imposition as the religious Right’s Ten Commandments plopped on courthouse lawns, or posted in classrooms. Both are the symbols of religious belief systems attempting to turn the commons into an totalizing, state-enforced, intellectual and political monoculture, to which all must give public obeisance or face ostracism, or worse. Questions, criticisms, and pushback are signs of irredeemable Evil, rather than principalled defence against the erosion of rights and freedoms. You don’t make deals with the Devil. “NO DEBATE!”
Our erstwhile skeptics, like Republican Dominionists, have decided that the righteousness of their movement means that, so long as it is in the service of She/Her, they can do no wrong. They can say “Be kind,” and “KILL TERFS” in the same breath, with a straight face, without any thought of inconsistancy or hypocracy. After all, they’re fighting for a “marginalized, vulnerable community,” despite the fact that a movement that has succeeded in taking control of large swathes of government, business, the courts, the police, the schools, unions, news media, etc., can no longer convincingly claim to be “oppressed.” But don’t try pointing that out. You don’t have to worry about that sort of thing when you’re on the Right Side of History.
I thought this was helpful:
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/