A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924
I was planning on making more notes so I could point out parts that remind me of the left today. Except almost every paragraph in the entire book does that! Just wait till you get to book 6 and the
chapters about communist feminism and the new soviet man...
But today let's start with:
Chapter ~23,874:
Looting The Looters.
We're going to skip the boring political maneuvering and get straight to when "
social justice" starts dismantling "
privilege":
...class divisions were based much more on emotion than objective social criteria. The popular term burzhooi, for example, had no set class connotations, despite its obvious derivation from the word 'bourgeois'. It was used as a general form of abuse against employers, officers, landowners, priests, merchants, Jews, students, professionals or anyone else well dressed (gay?), foreign looking...The burzhoois, in other words, were not so much a class as a set of popular scapegoats, or internal enemies, who could be redefined almost at will...Villagers often described the burzhooi as a 'hidden' and 'crafty' enemy of the peasants who was to blame for all their problems...the words burzhooi, 'speculator', 'German' and 'Jew' were virtually synonymous.
When talk is replaced by action, when the rubber hits the road and the bullet hits the bone, the definition of "
borgie" meant the same as "
white" or "
elite" means today. You guessed it: it means "
middle-class Jews". Every time the richest 19% promise to overthrow the richest 1%, you end up mobs going after middle-class Jews.
To see how quickly the hated "
class enemy" can change, look at how in a generation Chinese people became white
(by working hard and becoming successful) only to suddenly become non-white in a matter of days
(because one of them ate a bat).
TL;DR:
This was a society at war with itself — only everyone thought they were fighting the burzhooi.