The American conservative movement is intellectually bankrupt and hasn’t produced anything new or interesting for decades. All they can do is cling to ancient Cold War propaganda and racist stereotypes. When they’re not being triggered by Dr. Seuss or Starbucks cups, they’re complaining that Wikipedia is too neutral. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and is supposed to be neutral. If you want a racist fantasy novel, pick up a Tom Clancy book. Yes, American liberals are guilty of cancel culture, but it is important to remember that conservatives invented cancel culture (McCarthy, anyone?). Even now, conservatives love canceling any idea that scares them and aren’t even aware of their own hypocrisy. Both movements are equally guilty. Conservatives and liberals are sitting in the same guard tower at the concentration camp.
What are conservatives pearl-clutching about now? The Wikipedia page for Mass Killings Under Communist Regimes has been flagged for possible deletion. Thousands of Wikipedia pages are edited, rewritten, or deleted every day. Do conservatives keep track of them all? Do they even try to look for a trend one way or another? Of course not. An honest analysis to find trends wouldn’t fit the conservative victimhood narrative. It is much easier for them to cherrypick data and then whine about it. Also, keep in mind that Wikipedia actually isn’t one project. There are more than 300 Wikipedia projects for human languages around the world. Each language has its own team of volunteer editors to independently produce content. Wikipedia articles, even ones about the same topic, will vary from language to language, and (usually) aren’t copy/pastes.
One charming feature about Wikipedia is that the editing process is kept out in the open and subject to public scrutiny. To see the reasoning for why “Mass Killings Under Communist Regimes” is being debated for deletion, check out the talk page. I’ll paraphrase some of the arguments in favor of deletion below:
- The information provided is redundant with many other pages specific to those leaders and regimes.
- Governments like the USSR, Maoist China, DPRK have almost nothing in common with each other.
- Claiming that communism is inherently violent is a weak argument at best. Ideology is a poor predictor of how violent a regime will be.
- Wikipedia typically doesn’t lump atrocities together into vaguely similar groups. For example, there is no “Mass Killings Under Capitalism” article. There isn’t even a “Mass Killings in Europe” article.
To expand upon that last point, just imagine how triggered conservatives would be if Wikipedia did make a “Mass Killings Under Capitalist Regimes” page. No, you can’t say that! Capitalism is good! No, that wasn’t real capitalism!
But even the talk page, as fair as it is, loses track of the biggest point in favor of deletion. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an opinion page. Show an unbiased play-by-play description of events and leaders like Stalin and Tito, and leave it at that. Let the reader see all the facts and make a conclusion for himself. That’s literally what encyclopedias are for. You’re reading an opinion article right now, and there’s a reason that it’s here on a personal blog, not on Wikipedia.
Furthermore, tragedies and atrocities need context. They absolutely should not be lumped together to make some vapid ideological point. That is disgusting and there is no other word for it. So communism is to blame for the famines in the 1932 USSR? There were no famines in the Russian Empire? There were no famines in other places? Didn’t the entire world suffer in 1932, including the USA? I find it interesting that conservatives howl and blame communist industrial revolutions of the 20th Century for causing famines, but never give them credit for ending famines in their respective countries.
Here is the reason I find American conservatism so repulsive. As a collective movement, American conservatism is cowardly and doesn’t stand for anything. They don’t even have confidence in their own beliefs. If they actually believed that the so-called free market is vastly better than socialism and communism, conservatives wouldn’t be so scared. They wouldn’t feel the need to brainwash children and teach them what to think and believe. In fairness, mainstream conservatives do have valid reason to be scared. Their ideas are hateful and stupid. They don’t hold up against even the slightest bit of scrutiny. I’m supposed to believe that single-payer healthcare is a gateway drug to GULAG? That’s the corner that conservatives have painted themselves into. That’s why they’re so desperate to endlessly peddle xenophobic propaganda that was absurd even during the Cold War and didn’t get more plausible with age. When an idea is inherently stupid and disgusting, fear is the only tactic that works.
I’m not defending Wikipedia as a pinnacle of neutrality. It certainly has problems and I do think that insufficient neutrality is one of them. The more controversial a topic, the harder it is for any system, no matter how perfect, to police neutrality. Conservatives aren’t being completely facetious when they claim that there is a shift to the left on Wikipedia. When it comes to Wikipedia English, at least, liberal editors do seem to be gaining the upper hand in proselytizing their favorite pet causes, like global warming. That said, Wikipedia is too massive and diverse for one ideological movement to gain the upper hand on anything more than a local level.
Anyway, liberals are simply a different wing of the same church pews, guards in the same concentration camp. To all conservatives wringing their hands about the “leftist agenda” on Wikipedia English, I challenge you to find me even one article that isn’t openly hostile toward any supposed enemy, alive or dead, of the Western powers. If there really was some “conspiracy” against good God-fearing American conservativism, wouldn’t these conspirators be trying to paint various leftist world leaders in a positive light? Apparently not. Social and economic disagreements aside, liberals and conservatives in the West are almost uniformly in favor of dominating the rest of the world and spreading their ideas of “democracy” by force.
If you doubt me, Dear Reader, when was the last time American foreign policy changed in any meaningful way? Starting with the Wilson Administration, every American president (with the possible exception of Carter, who only lasted one term) has been in favor of war and genocide. Regardless of who’s in the White House at the moment, the option of preemptive nuclear genocide has always been considered a viable geopolitical option since World War II. Every administration has considered using nuclear weapons on countries being “liberated,” and strong deterrence from America’s adversaries is literally the only reason they haven’t. I cannot overstate this.
The Department of Defense considered nuclear warheads as tactical weapons that could be casually used on the battlefield like a flare gun. There was no objective too trivial for nukes. Military leaders seriously advocated nuclear weapons in both Korea and Vietnam. The reason they didn’t, the only reason they didn’t, was fear of reprisal from the Soviet Union. Say what you will about the Ruskis, but if they didn’t exist, our government probably would have nuked a dozen countries by now.
All of our information is tightly controlled, but not in the way that conservatives claim. They’re a part of the same hegemony as their liberal counterparts. The American citizen is taught from birth that all of our “enemies” are Untermensch monsters who want to steal our bodily fluids, and the only way to survive is to kill them before they kill us.
The media, both on the “left” and the “right,” is careful to prevent us from ever being accidentally exposed to information that might contradict the imperial narrative. Even allegedly anti-war movies and shows made by liberals still parrot the narrative that all of our enemies are warlike and will slit our throats at the first opportunity.
Even liberal causes like global warming have an imperialist agenda. Global warming might just be the most convenient ideology that ever existed. Now that Western Europe and the USA are comfortably industrialized and saturated with luxury, it is wonderful that we have invented a “scientific consensus” that industrialization is bad. Now we’re free to punish the rest of the world for trying to improve their countries while not making any meaningful sacrifices ourselves. Corporate media outlets in the West screeched in rage when Putin and Xi declined to attend the most recent climate virtue-signaling parade summit. But who cares? Those countries are not serious polluters. Per capita, they’re not even in the top 20. It’s exciting that Biden gave the Chinese and Russians a stern talking to before naptime, but that still doesn’t change the fact that at the individual level, Americans cause more pollution than either of them.
Here’s an inconvenient question. Conservative talking heads get so mad about communism, but they are strangely quiet about Nazism. Even liberals usually don’t have much to say about Nazism, but hate communism with the same passion as conservatives. Why? Maybe it’s because liberals and conservatives have painted themselves into the same corner. It is a little awkward to have an honest discussion about World War II without acknowledging that NATO was created to pick up the towel where Hitler dropped it. But despite all the hysteria about the “mass killings under communist regimes,” NATO was never about communism. If it was, NATO would have been dissolved in 1991. Instead, the opposite happened. NATO expanded into the political vacuum left by the Soviet Union and is behaving as aggressively as ever before. It doesn’t actually matter if the Untermensch are communist, capitalist, or anything else except dead. They’re alive and apparently, that can’t be tolerated. Let’s just call NATO what it is. The Hitler Fan Committee.
Ian Kummer
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