Ruin: A How-To

On October 5, 1941, a Soviet bomber pilot reported the presence of a German armored column on a highway eighty miles outside Moscow, racing toward the city’s outer line of defense. He was arrested, because Soviet authorities didn’t tolerate defeatism, alarmism, and absurd conspiracy theories. I’d tell you where that German column actually turned out to be, but you already know.

This was the Soviet Union’s experience of 1941, over and over and over again.

You can’t tell this dude anything

Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact in the summer of 1939, and then Stalin sank his fingernails into the thing and believed it. It was declarative political reality, paper with signatures, and it was pretty clear to Koba that the German leader wasn’t the kind of guy who went around telling lies. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Not to trust anybody was very typical of Josef Stalin. All the years of his life did he trust one man only, and that was Adolf Hitler.” I thought of Stalin and his trustworthy Bavarian bro¹ this week because I was reading MT Anderson’s magnificent book about Dmitri Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad, and he covers all of this as background:

Several sources quite specifically reported to the Soviet government that the Germans would invade around dawn on June 22. Their reports can be found in the Soviet archives in a “folder of dubious and misleading reports.” Then, shortly before dawn on June 22, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Military leaders on the border called in reports of the invasion, and the people they talked to in Moscow declined to believe them. Soviet border troops held their fire, seeing Germans while being ordered to understand that no true invasion could possibly be underway. Stalin knew better, and contradicting Josef Stalin was known to be a fatal mistake. Achieving an entirely avoidable surprise, the Germans destroyed much of the Soviet air force on the ground, parked wingtip-to-wingtip for the convenience of the invader’s bombers.

The Germans lost the resulting war, but they lost it because Soviet leadership accepted the waste of human life to grind down the enemy. The US and the UK each lost a little over 400,000 people to World War II; the Soviets lost somewhere well north of 20 million, about half of that in civilian deaths.

An invasion that could have been met with brutal severity from the first moment instead achieved considerable initial success against a supine nation because the Soviet leader, and the chain of subordinates beneath him who were forced to adopt his conception of facts and truth, assumed that things they didn’t wish to believe constituted disinformation. Millions of lives were wasted for that illusion. A society that categorizes inconvenient truths in this way is committing a form of suicide, hiding from hard facts that demand acknowledgment.

Now: In 2021, the lab leak theory was a disgusting lie with “racist roots.”

In June of 2023, the, uh, first people who got sick with Covid turn out to have been, uh, scientists at the lab in Wuhan. BUT THEY PROBABLY HAD SOME BAT SOUP AT THE WET MARKET, IS WHY, or something.

Stupid conspiracy theorists, you people are such MORONS, do you actually bel— okay, that one’s true too.

We’ve somehow developed an industry of professional information barriers, dimwitted parasitical human garbage whose sole function in life is to prevent understanding by pasting “disinformation” stickers on things that you’re not supposed to know.

New York *CITY* govt was monitoring social media for the spread of misinformation within 4 NYC specific communities

The problem now is rice bowls: too many people get paid to do this. It’s not just a social cancer — it’s a career field.

We’ll be ignoring these people for the rest of our lives. But they’ll hold their grip on the mediocre minds that occupy government, academia, and the allegedly mainstream media, and their destructive function will persist. They have to be destroyed, and they probably can’t be destroyed. Interesting trajectory implied. “Tell me how this ends.”

1. Thanks to reader Heike Ellwood for pointing out that Hitler was born in Austria. His family moved to Bavaria when he was a very young child, but his origins weren’t Bavarian.