Cyrus Maximus

Chapter 3 – Of Its Masks: Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Leftism, Wokism. 
The law: the masks change; the Lie does not. §1. Every discussion of socialism soon becomes a discussion about words. That was communism, not socialism. That was Stalin, not Marx. That is wokism, and wokism does not exist. The argument about the name is never innocent: while we argue about the mask, nobody looks at the face behind it. So let us begin with what they say about themselves. In the doctrine of Marx and Lenin, socialism is not the opposite of communism. It is its first stage – the waiting room. The Soviet Union never called itself communist. It called itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and announced communism for later. Khrushchev even set a date: 1980. Communism never arrived. The waiting room was all there ever was, and the camps were built in it. §2. The differences between the five are real, but they are differences of role, not of nature. Marxism is the theory: history as a war between oppressors and oppressed, which the oppressed must win. Communism is the destination, and the party that rules in its name. Socialism is the program: the state takes over what people own and what they decide – in part or in whole – in the name of equality. Leftism is the broad camp: all who put equality above liberty, the collective above the person, and the state above the family. Wokism is the latest generation: the same war, with race, sex and identity in place of class, and the university and the HR department in place of the factory. Five names, one story: a world divided into oppressors and oppressed, a paradise postulated at the end, and in the meantime, power for those who speak in the name of the victims. §3. The masks are not made for the believers. The believers do not need a mask; they love the face. The masks are made for the decent people who would never vote for the face: the worker who wants a fair wage, the mother who wants her child treated kindly, the student who wants to do good. Most people who vote for the left want none of what follows. That is precisely what the mask is for. §4. Every mask wears out. Reality discredits it – the famine, the camp, the queue, the bankruptcy – and the name can no longer be sold. Then the movement does to itself what, as we have seen, it does to everything else: it renames. Communism became socialism. Socialism became "progressive." "Progressive" became "social justice," and then "woke" – until that word, too, became an insult, and we were told that wokism does not exist. Poland watched it happen in a single weekend. In January 1990, at its last congress, the Polish communist party carried its banner out of the hall and dissolved itself. The same delegates founded a new party on the spot, called Social Democracy. Five years later, its leader was elected president. The movement loses every argument with reality, but every defeat costs it only a name. §5. The victim changes as easily as the name. Marx announced that the workers would rise. In the West, they grew rich instead. The movement did not abandon the theory; it changed the oppressed. Gramsci turned to culture, and his heirs in the universities found new victims for the same war: the colonized, women, minorities, and finally the planet itself. The oppressor changed with them: the bourgeois, then the West, then the man, then the white man, then mankind. The movement does not exist to liberate a class. It needs an oppressed class in order to exist. And when it cannot find one, it manufactures one. §6. The mask also changes with the audience. In Moscow, it called itself communism. In Caracas, the socialism of the twenty-first century. On American campuses, social justice. In Brussels, European values. And in Paris, Sartre changed idols every decade – Stalin, then Castro, then Mao – without ever changing his mind. The idol changes. The worship does not. §7. Take off all the masks, and the same face is underneath: the Systemic Lie – what Poles call zakłamanie. Each mask says the opposite of what the face does. Leftism postulates tolerance and produces censorship. Wokism postulates inclusion and produces exclusion: the cancelled, the fired, the silenced. Socialism postulates equality and produces privilege. Communism postulates paradise and produces the camp. Each mask tells a different lie. Underneath, it is always the same Lie: the gap between what is proclaimed and what is done, maintained every day by those who live from it. That is why the masks can change so easily. The mask is only the Lie's method. The face is the Lie itself. §8. The last mask is the most refined: the one that denies there is a face. That was not real socialism. Wokism does not exist. Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory. Whoever describes the mechanism is called paranoid, and the description itself becomes suspect. Baudelaire put it best, writing that the Devil's finest trick is to persuade us that he does not exist – and the Prince of Lies has learned the trick well. A thing that does not exist cannot be fought, cannot be judged, and never has to apologize. The counter: do not fight the masks one by one. There will always be a new one, and the argument about the name is how the face buys time. Judge by the mechanism. Ask three questions of any program, whatever it calls itself. Who is declared guilty? Who receives the power to fix it? And what happens to those who disagree? Wherever the answers are the same – a guilty class, an apparatus that grows, and silence for the dissenters – the face is the same, whatever the mask. There are five masks and a hundred names, but only one face: the Lie. Learn it once, and no new name will ever fool you again. Next: Chapter 4 – Of Mental Communism: the Child Who Did Not Grow Up.