Woke society is turning us into a SOVIET STATE
From a Russian migrant whose family suffered under Stalin — and who faced the wrath of cancel culture as a comedian — a chilling warning...
AN IMMIGRANT’S LOVE LETTER TO THE WEST by Konstantin Kisin (Constable €26.59)
WHEN people decry the evils of Western capitalism, Konstantin Kisin remembers the words of his grandmother. She told him that, during her childhood in the USSR, ‘People were jailed for inadvertently having their chips wrapped in a newspaper with Stalin’s face on it.’
Kisin is a journalist and comedian who was born in the Soviet Union in 1982. At the age of 11 he was sent to school in England by his parents, who knew the West would give him a much better future. He’s lived there ever since.
This excellent book is both a thank-you to the country he now calls home and a reminder to many of his generation that they should be careful what they wish for.
Unlike those fans of Communism, Kisin comes from a family who know what it can lead to. His great-grandfather did ten years’ hard labour in a Soviet gulag for criticising the Stalin regime. When his grandfather questioned the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, not only was he ostracised, but so were his relatives — his son (Kisin’s father) was thrown out of university.
And should anyone on the Left reply that those were the bad old days, Kisin will point them to the corruption of modern Russia. Last year, a policeman there was found to have a gold-plated toilet in his home.
But it isn’t only the politicians and officials who are at fault — it’s the philosophy itself.
‘Socialism’s answer to poverty,’ writes Kisin, ‘is the equivalent of helping wheelchair users by cutting everyone else’s legs off.’
JOHN F KENNEDY used to say of capitalism: ‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’ Kisin’s verdict is that the free market ‘has liberated more people from poverty than anything else, yet is portrayed as wholly exploitative’.
Nathan Robinson, author of Why You Should Be A Socialist, says that ‘the moral imperative is to place the economy under the control of the people’. Yet as Kisin points out, ‘the truth is it already is... consumers assert their democratic power with every penny they spend’.
And it isn’t only in economics that Kisin thinks ‘West is best’. There’s the question of free speech, or as he calls it, ‘the ultimate disinfectant for bad ideas’.
His experience as a stand-up comic has shown him the threat this precious commodity is currently under. In 2018, having been booked for a gig at the University of London, Kisin was asked by student leaders to sign a contract forbidding him from making jokes relating to ‘racism, sexism, classism, ageism, homophobia, biphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion or anti-atheism’ (we’ll pass over the cumbersome wording).
This Behavioural Agreement Form, they said, was to ensure that the event was a ‘safe space’. Kisin admirably refused to sign.
In the ensuing media dust-up, one radio listener called him a Nazi. ‘I must be the only
Jewish Nazi comedian in the world,’ says Kisin.
To achieve their longed-for offence, some modern audiences deliberately take jokes at face value. Kisin cites one instance ‘when someone complained about a comedian making epilepsy-related jokes, despite the fact the comedian himself was epileptic and had made this fact abundantly clear.’
One of the scariest sentences in the book describes the effect all this has had on comics themselves: ‘The sad truth is, the vast majority of comedians are now funnier in green rooms and WhatsApp groups than they are on stage.’
The problem is a recent one. ‘When I first moved to the UK in the 1990s, hate crimes... didn’t even exist. Now . . . the list is growing faster than Boris Johnson’s child support bill.’
Language is ever-changing — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both happy to use the term ‘illegal alien’, but now it has to be ‘undocumented migrant’. This despite the fact that ‘nobody actually thought Mexicans were crossing the Rio Grande in UFOs’.
What’s particularly worrying is that officialdom has started coming down on the side of the new orthodoxy. In 2019, a man who’d tweeted about transgender issues was visited by police, one of whose officers said: ‘I need to check your thinking.’ Literally the ‘thought police’. You can see why Kisin titled one of his shows, Orwell That Ends Well.
The book is especially strong on the campaigners’ motives. Kisin notes that the people who ‘patronise me with the “virtues” of socialism or Communism . . . tend to have double-barrelled names and posh accents’, and speculates that their anger might be a case of ‘Thanatos’.
This was the term used by Sigmund Freud for the destruction of your own life or society as a way of alleviating guilt.
Take, for example, the way the word ‘Latinos’ was replaced by ‘Hispanics’ and then by the
baffling ‘Latinx’. ‘I’m not sure who is happy with this; it’s certainly not Latinos but it doesn’t matter because it’s not about them, it’s about guilty white people feeling good about themselves.’
THE author Lionel Shriver, who was a guest on Kisin’s YouTube series Triggernometry, agrees: ‘These people think they’re motivated by virtue, but the thrill isn’t doing good, it’s authoritarian: pushing people around.’
‘Weirdly,’ adds Kisin, ‘none of the people who tell you how evil, bigoted, racist and sexist the West is ever move to any of the other “much better” countries.’
John Cleese argues that ‘PC [political correctness] took a good idea — let’s not be nasty to people — and stretched it ad absurdum’. In this, the people behind the idea are repeating the mistake of the Soviet Communists themselves.
That movement, writes Kisin, ‘grew slowly from some wellintended but seriously misguided ideas... [the revolutionaries] did not destroy tyranny; they became its new, uglier face’.
But that’s a relatively subtle point, and so the most selfrighteous millennials will completely fail to get it.
If, on the other hand, you know a youngster who’s flirting with these dangerous ideas, get a copy of this book into their hands as soon as possible. You might just drag them back to reality.