Cancel Culture, Face Masks, and the Libertarian Cranks in Our Midst

In his imperious work, Moscow 1937, Karl Schlogel mines as perhaps no other writer has the tragedy that befell the Russian capital at the height of the Great Terror unleashed by Stalin at a time when the dark night of fascism had begun to descend over Europe. The paranoia which gripped the diseased mind of the Soviet helmsman determined that countless thousands were arrested, tortured, and executed in the name of defending the coming Communist Utopia that had been bequeathed to the Soviet peoples by the great Lenin, set to arrive in their midst at some undefined point in the future.

The way that so many became infused with the belief that the multiple accidents that were taking place in factories and plants across the country during this period was down to the wrecking activities of Trotskyite cells, rather than the inevitable result of hyper-industrialisation at breakneck speed, stands as a warning from history of how great societal, political and/or economic crises can destroy the collective mind and rationality of an entire country, leaving it open to turning in on itself and devouring its own.

Schlogel:

What makes the year 1937 so terrible, however, is not merely the number of victims. Few of those who were persecuted and killed knew why they had been singled out for this fate. The allegations were incredible and fantastic, and even more fantastic was the fact that the accused repeated and reproduced them in their confessions.

Compare and contrast Moscow during the Great Terror in 1937 with the UK during Covid19 in 2020. Here the abandonment of reason is the product not of totalitarianism but libertarianism — in other words in service to an ideology of rampant individualism and selfishness. Evidence for this is the hysteria that’s been whipped up by some over the mandatory wearing of face masks in supermarkets and other retail stores.

At time of writing, face masks have just been made mandatory in Scotland and will likely also become mandatory in England sooner rather than later. Being…