The Fire This Time, Part 2

The protesters in Seattle's "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone" (CHAZ)* might want to read George Orwell's masterpiece about the Spanish Civil War, "Homage to Catalonia," to learn what happened to the anarchists who took over the town of Barcelona.  Or read about the members of the French Commune in 1870. Or the Bolshevik creators of the Munich commune in the aftermath of the First World War. It didn't end well for them.  Given the choice between anarchy and order, most citizens opt for order.  And the worse the anarchy is, the more brutal the strongman who restores that order. Witness Napoleon after the chaos of the French Revolution.

Orwell admitted that he was at first exultant over the anarchists in Barcelona eliminating money, private property, and all class distinctions, with people from all different backgrounds serving as waiters and sanitation workers. But his enthusiasm quickly dissipated when he saw how the anarchists were being executed by their ostensible allies, the Soviet-backed militias who took over the Republican cause. Orwell never fully got over his disillusionment from the Spanish Civil War, and his bitterness led to the writing of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.  The protesters who are now pulling down monuments and attempting to eliminate history may well have been inspired by the bureaucrats of Orwell's Ministry of Truth in the latter novel. More likely they have not read the book and are simply following the natural pattern of all totalitarians who disguise themselves as liberators.

* Now renamed "Capitol Hill Organized Protest" (CHOP) 6/25/2020

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Tom Wolfe Takes on Darwin and Noam Chomsky!

I read Tom Wolfe's new non-fiction book, The Kingdom of Speech, over the holiday weekend. A short but immensely entertaining and provocative volume. Wolfe spends half the book eviscerating Noam Chomsky, drawing on recent research by young linguists and anthropologists to toppple the Chomskyite notions of a "Universal Grammar" and an "LAD" (Language Acquisition Device), supposedly hardwired in the brain. Along the way Wolfe demolishes Chomsky's anarchist politics, which he sees as a sentimental hangover from Chomsky's roots in the East European shtetl as well as his boyhood crush on the Spanish anarchists who briefly took over Barcelona in the late 1930s. This contoversial book is going to upset a lot of people -- neo-Darwinists, orthodox Chomskyites, and much of the cultural and scientific establishment. But most of all it is a paean to the powers of human speech, which Wolfe sees as the most powerful and defining creation of the human race. In short, a delightful and highly stimulating way to spend Labor Day weekend. To say more would ruin your own reading pleasure.

Photo by Mark Seliger.