Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec’s new book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How To Crush Them) isn’t even out yet, and won’t be out until July 4th, but like hordes of Bolsheviks pouring into the Winter Palace, the book has already stormed the Amazon charts and taken very few prisoners. At time of writing, it was ranked at number 33 in All Books on Amazon, overall out of however many million books there are on the site. It also had the dubious honour of being number one in perhaps the most radioactive book-category of all, besides “self-help”: “fascism.” (Who even chooses those categories?) Unhumans also hit the top spot in “communism and socialism”, and thus completed the Amazon political horseshoe, where they ranked next to Jesse Watters’ new book.
A stunning victory, right? Tens of thousands more good people learning about the most murderous, evil regimes in history and the murderous, evil ideology that unites them. Tens of thousands more good people warned of the current red flags of communist infiltration and takeover. Tens of thousands empowered, we hope, to fight back and protect their families, communities and their nation.
How could any of this be a bad thing?
And yet with depressing inevitability come the voices of doubt from “our own side.” You’re making a terrible mistake, Jack and Joshua.
Isn’t the title a bit much? I mean, un-humans. Come ON. Doesn’t that suggest communists aren’t really humans? And if they aren’t really humans doesn’t that mean we don’t have to treat them as humans—you know, denying them their rights as human beings? Isn’t that exactly what the communists did themselves, degrading their opponents—“class enemies,” “kulaks,” “remnants of the petty bourgeoisie”—to justify dispossessing them, exiling them to the frigid wastes of Siberia or just killing them on the spot?
And even if you’re not trying to say communists aren’t really people, it seems a bit mean, doesn’t it, saying they’re not quite fully developed, like they lack something? They probably have plenty of redeeming qualities you don’t see when they’re bayoneting children and throwing their bodies into mineshafts, or shovelling dirt down prisoners’ throats in a sordid windowless cell in the bowels of the Lubyanka. Stalin famously loved his little black terrier dog.
It's all so tiresome.
Exhibit A: James Lindsay. James is never happier, when he’s not got a large weapon in his hand, to reach for his pearls and clutch them as tightly as possible. He can’t resist an opportunity to remind us all that he is, in fact, the most reasonable person in the world. A sensible centrist. A classical liberal. A Good Person. “Idk about this,” he tweeted. “The people on the Left are definitely humans, and the line of good and evil cuts through every one of their human hearts as well. What has been corrupted can be renewed. Repentance is a miracle that’s always possible.”
Possible, maybe. But probable? I don’t think so. That’s why it’s called a miracle. You said so yourself.
The suggestion from Posobiec that Lindsay should actually read the book before passing judgement on it was, of course, met with scorn. “I’ll put it near the bottom of the pile,” he said.
Anyway, it’s nice to see that James has remembered the one line from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago that everybody knows because Jordan Peterson won’t stop saying it. If communists are “unhumans,” you’re just as bad, Jack and Joshua. You’re unhumans too! Talk about a third-hand opinion.
Here’s a selection of other helpful commentary on Unhumans and its title, taken from Twitter:
“It’s needlessly inflammatory language to get the low IQ engaged. It would be counter-productive for conservatives to start calling woke progs ‘unhumans’ tho.”
“There’s a clear difference between ‘unhuman’ and ‘anti-human.’ Unhuman can (and will) be used against the Right. Given them unnecessary, ‘dehumanizing’ fodder.”
“I don’t like calling them ‘unhumans’—Thomas Sowell was a Marxist in his youth, he eventually saw the light and went on to write some of the most important books ever.”
Astute observers, like “Foundation Father” (@foundationdads), grasped that the title isn’t intended to tell us communists are subhumans and therefore ripe for the kind of treatment they so gleefully dish out on anybody who gets in their way. Fire up the helicopters, President Pinochet! In actual fact, the title is a much more subtle reflection on the effects of communist ideology on those who willingly accept it, and those who have it forced upon them.
“They seek to abolish man as he is, to unhuman him,” tweeted “Foundation Father” (@foundationdads), who noted how much the title reminded him of C.S. Lewis’s classic series of essays, The Abolition of Man. “They have denied the image of God in themselves, and they seek to get others to do the same... through force if necessary.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
The real lesson here, once again, is that the right are losers. Sorry, but it’s true. Decades of humiliation and reversal have conditioned far too many on the right to welcome defeat and fear success. At the first sign of an advance, as a few brave souls begin to move forward and push the enemy back, the James Lindsays kick out in unison, like Pavlov’s poor dogs, aiming their sharp little punts at the calves of those in front of them who are leading the charge.
Stop! Wait a second!
We might actually win!
Don’t be surprised. Back in August 2023, I wrote about an extensive study carried out to test the empathy levels of conservatives and liberals for their political opponents, using subjects from the US and the UK. And guess what? It turns out that conservatives show the same pathological regard for their enemies under experimental conditions as they do out there, in the real world.
“Conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives,” the researchers wrote. “This pattern—neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical in the expected direction—remains surprising.” But the results were unequivocal: Liberals made harsher moral judgments about “outgroup members” and also saw conservatives as “more harmful than conservatives saw liberals.”
The researchers couldn’t quite believe it. They clearly believed the liberals should have been “the good guys,” just like they say they are. But anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that conservatives are just too nice and leftists are utterly ruthless when it comes to getting what they want—which is, of course, power.
That’s why the regime is doing whatever it takes to destroy President Trump. Dragging his name even further through the mud, as if that were possible. Belabouring him and attempting to bankrupt and seize his property with spurious case after spurious case in the courts. Anything to prevent him from running in November and ruining their plans to collapse America and turn it into a great Zimbabwe of the Western Hemisphere. They’ve even started issuing barely disguised threats, in the form of op-eds from deep-state functionaries like Robert Kagan, wife of Victoria Nuland, that they might exercise “the Brutus Option” if all else fails. Trump, the would-be dictator—America’s Caesar—must be stopped, at any cost. Beware the Ides of March.
The James Lindsays of the world still don’t seem to get that when Trump says, “They’re coming after you—and I’m just standing in the way,” he really means it. It’s not just a meme. The regime is coming after you, and the only difference is that when they get you it will be too late to do much about it. Look at what’s happening to Douglass Mackey, just an ordinary guy the regime wants to grind into paste because he spread some funny jokes on Twitter that made Hillary Clinton look as stupid and bloodthirsty as she really is. That’s you. That’s where we are. Right now.
How much will it take for the James Lindsays and all the other doubters to realise, finally, that this plan for takeover has to be resisted with more than “cherished principles” and trite quotations from Solzhenitsyn? Will the revelation only come as they stand before the bloodstained wall and face the firing-squad, as they kneel in the cold mud on the edge of their grave—a grave they dug not just with their own hands, but their own stubbornness and unwillingness to see the truth, clear as day, in front of them?
For all our sakes, and not just theirs, I sincerely hope not.
