“And we say these things in the name of our Lord and Savior: Secular Humanism.”

Table of Contents

The Festival of the Supreme Being

A meaning it must have, or it would not be here. If we can find the right meaning of it, we may, wisely submitting or wisely resisting and controlling, still hope to live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be possible! Thomas Carlyle

Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m a man of wealth and taste. The Rolling Stones

What is “atheism,” anyway? A question easily answered, from one point of view.

Take Richard Dawkins: evolutionary biologist; inventor of the word “meme”; author of The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006); Oxford University’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science; Prospect’s top “world thinker” (2013); one of the “top 100 living geniuses,” according to The Telegraph (2007); and so on and so forth.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins introduces a “spectrum of probabilities” for “human judgements about the existence of God,” featuring seven “milestones”:

Strong theist. 100 percent probability of God. In the words of C. G. Jung, ‘I do not believe, I know.’ Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. De facto theist. […] Higher than 50 percent but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. […] Exactly 50 percent. Completely impartial agnostic. […] Lower than 50 percent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. ‘I don’t know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.’ Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” Strong atheist. ‘I know there is no God, with the same convictions as Jung “knows” there is one.’

I’m not 100 percent certain myself what God’s underlying probability space is supposed to be, but otherwise, that seems reasonably clear. (Personally, I believe Cantor space, equipped with the Borel sigma algebra and Lebesgue measure, must, in the words of David Stove, “recommend itself to every rational mind” as the heavenly choice.)

Dawkins, by the way, puts himself at a “6.9 out of seven” (2012). In other words, “I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden” (God Delusion), as Douglas Adams famously put it.

Or take Sam Harris: philosopher, lecturer, columnist, neuroscientist; author of The End of Faith (2004), The Moral Landscape (2010), and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006); leader of Project Reason; frequent guest of television and radio programs; etc, etc.

In The End of Faith, Harris muses:

What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alternative” to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge. We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of “alternatives” to religious faith is to miss the point.

And again (2011):

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. […] Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

And yet again, in some detail (2007):

I think that “atheist” is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people “non-astrologers.” All we need are words like “reason” and “evidence” and “common sense” and “bullshit” to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion.

[…]

Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy […] Atheism is not a worldview — and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.

[…]

We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything.

(In other words, they’re catholic.)

That’s probably enough definitions, but you can also check with Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great (“Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith”), Daniel Dennett in ‘How to Tell if You’re an Atheist’ (“Do you believe that God is on our side in war — or in football games? [Laughter.] If not, you might be an atheist”), A. C. Grayling in The God Argument (“Atheism is to theism as not stamp-collecting is to stamp-collecting”), etc, etc — not to mention any given “atheist” internet forum.

So: “atheism” means either (a) simply an absence of belief in God, which we’ll continue to label atheism; or (b) science, reason, genuine knowledge, skepticism, free thinking, and/or common sense — all of which, as Sam Harris kindly pointed out, already have names, which, for clarity, we will henceforth use instead of “atheism.” It is also clear that anyone who refers to (b) as “atheism,” and indeed the self-identified “atheist” in general, believes that (b) implies (a). Easily answered — from one point of view.

I have just one problem with these definitions. (Aside from their self-congratulatory tone, that is; a peccadillo, after the soi-disant “Age of Enlightenment.”) The problem is, they provide no insight into atheism as a historical phenomenon — as a movement, that is, made up of real people. Call it “Irreligion,” or “Atheism” (with a capital A).

And I think the foregoing definitions suggest that, whatever you might believe about God, mere atheism — atheism under laboratory conditions, “simply an absence of belief” — isn’t nearly as interesting as Atheism — atheism on the loose, in the wild; walking, talking, organizing conferences, putting up billboards, casting votes and passing laws. And then of course we have to consider Skeptics as distinct from (dictionary definition) skepticism, Freethinkers as opposed to free thought, etc.

When we fail to make these distinctions… well, as we’ll soon see, mysteries abound.

We’ll try to avoid as much confusion as possible by borrowing a few ideas from evolutionary biology. (What self-respecting atheist could object?) How can we understand Irreligion, or any other movement? Here are three types of analysis:

Cladistic: When and where did Irreligion come from? What came from Irreligion? What other movements are the Irreligious likely to sympathize with? Adaptive: How does Irreligion spread? What is its reproductive strategy? (No one is necessarily following this strategy consciously; see, e.g., The Selfish Gene.) Morphological: What do the Irreligious do? In particular, what sort of things do the Irreligious get up to when they achieve power? I think we’d all like to know.

Now, what we’re not going to do, because it’s kind of stupid, if you think about it, is have a member of a movement tell us what the movement means. I mean, really. Failed, Comrades? Communism, failed? Why, Communism has never been tried!

The point is, our subject is history. However rational, skeptical, free-thinking, and scientastic you may be, you cannot derive history from first principles. You have to learn it from dusty old books. But never fear: the Carlyle Club is here to help!

… Okay, maybe fear a little.

Each century has its own wisdom and foolishness, its own truths and errors. One begins sometimes with the sale of a great truth and ends up with an even greater error. Often the converse also occurs. Friedrich Karl von Moser

It is hard to know where to start untangling these pernicious memes. Sam Harris

I don’t mean to pick on him, but Sam Harris has a bit of a blind spot. Let me walk you through it. ‘Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks’ appears on his website as one of “Sam’s Favorites,” and I must admit, I enjoyed it too (2008):

Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world’s most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film entitled Fitna (“strife” in Arabic) over the internet. The film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur’an. […] Controversial or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free society to strenuously defend Wilders’ right to make such a film. […] Witness the free world’s response to Fitna: The Dutch government sought to ban the film outright, and European Union foreign ministers publicly condemned it, as did UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Dutch television refused to air Fitna unedited. When Wilders declared his intention to release the film over the internet, his U.S. web-host, Network Solutions, took his website offline.

[…]

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called “a chilling effect” on our exercise of free speech. I have, in my own small way, experienced this chill first hand. […] My first book, The End of Faith, almost did not get published for fear of offending the sensibilities of (probably non-reading) religious fanatics. […] Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet, recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar “Beyond the troubled relationship.” Nature 448, 131–133; 2007). The author began, as though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of Islam to be “intrinsically rational.” He then went on to argue, amid a highly idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational religion’s current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be fully ascribed to the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation, Nature also agreed to publish a brief response from me. What readers of my letter to the editor could not know, however, was that it was only published after perfectly factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam were expunged. […] I was grateful that Nature published my letter at all. In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders’ film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a “kill fee.” I declined.

[…]

Any honest comparison between these two faiths [Islam and the “Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints”] reveals a bizarre double standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children. But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam?

Harris has a parsimonious explanation for this “bizarre double standard,” this wildly disparate treatment of good atheism, which is pointed at Christians, versus evil atheism, which is pointed at Muslims; treatment, that is, by academics, journalists and civil servants: the people whose job it is to tell us what to think.

I understood the [Nature] editors’ concerns at the time: not only did they have Britain’s suffocating libel laws to worry about, but Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK had just revealed a penchant for suicide bombing. […] While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates, infidels, and critics in the 21st century.

Well, who wouldn’t be afraid of that? And yet… there is another double standard to consider. Bombs and blades and hand grenades are flashy, I admit, but what’s this about “libel laws,” now? And accusations of — what was it? “Islamophobia”?

This is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

Of course, it isn’t just Muslims who are accusing Harris of thoughtcrimes against humanity. The man is quite simply attacking the wrong people, cries Pulitzer Prize-winning plagiarist “progressive” Chris Hedges (2008):

These New Atheists attack a form of religious belief many of us hate. I wrote a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I am no friend of Christian radicals. We dislike the same people. […] I started Harris’ book when it was published but soon put it aside. His facile attack on a form of religious belief I detest, his childish simplicity and ignorance of world affairs, as well as his demonization of Muslims, made the book tedious, at its best, and often idiotic and racist. […] Many of these atheists, like the Christian fundamentalists, support the imperialist projects and preemptive wars of the United States as a necessity in the battle against terrorism and irrational religion. […] Harris, echoing the blood lust of Hitchens, calls, in his book The End of Faith, for a nuclear first strike against the Islamic world. […] Harris reduces a fifth of the world’s population to a vast, primitive enemy.

And by the way, don’t think for a minute that Hedges is soft on Muslims (2008):

A lot of the book is devoted to making this comparison between Christian and what some call secular fundamentalists, but you are pretty hands off when it comes to fundamentalist Islam. The only reason I go after Christian fundamentalists and New Atheists is because they’re here and I’m an American. […]

Okay, but…

You believe new atheism has emerged in reaction to religious fundamentalism, but I wonder if you also see it as a reaction to a kind of cultural relativism and multicultural mind-set that a lot of people perceive as weak and self-destructive, in its tendency to sympathize with enemies. [“Let’s say al-Qaida.”] Well, “enemies” is a pretty loaded word.

Anyway. Sure, some people are witches — I mean, “racists.” But not Sam (2012):

There are also many nefarious people, in both Europe and the U.S., who are eager to keep well-intentioned liberals confused on this point, equating any criticism of Islam with racism or “Islamophobia.” The fact that many critics of Islam are also racists, Christian fascists, or both does not make these apologists any less cynical or sinister.

And yet — despite his crystal-clear disavowal and denunciation of “Christian fascists,” “racists,” wreckers, reactionaries, kulaks, and assorted other perils of our post-racial paradise — Harris has come under ferocious attack by prominent Atheists (2012):

Another flurry of emails arrives alerting me to a very personal and misleading attack on me (along with a few friends and colleagues) now lighting up Alternet — a website that has distorted my views in the past. Many readers want to know when they can expect my response to “The 5 Most Awful Atheists.” I read this poisonous and inane concoction written by a deeply unserious person who has made no effort to understand my arguments, and I decide that the best thing to do is to forget all about it.

[…]

I then hear that the article has been gleefully endorsed by that shepherd of Internet trolls PZ Myers, amplifying its effect. Soon thereafter it appears on Salon, under the slightly more restrained title “5 Atheists who ruin it for everyone else.” […] People like PZ Myers continue to malign me as an advocate of “racial profiling.” I have written to Myers personally about this and answered his charges publicly. His only response has been to attack me further and to endorse the false charges of others. I do not think that I am being especially thin-skinned to worry about this. Accusations of racism and similar libels tend to stick online. If my daughter one day reads in my obituary that her father “was persistently dogged by charges of racism and bigotry,” unscrupulous people like PZ Myers will be to blame.

Less-than-prominent Atheists, too (2012):

To see how the denial of the obvious has become a new article of faith for secular liberals, consider the response I received from Chris Stedman. In an article published in The Huffington Post, Stedman urged me to visit a mosque with him. This invitation was much celebrated online. […] Stedman’s article is worth reading. It is well written and earnest, and it reveals just how confused my fellow liberals are about Islam. Stedman is a gay, atheist, interfaith activist.

[…]

My fellow secularists are falling all over themselves for a chance to put their feet in my mouth.

And they’re not especially scrupulous about it (2013):

[Harris:] Before you retweet defamatory garbage about me to 125,000 people, it would nice if you looked at the article from which that joker had mined that “very revealing quote.” The whole point of my original article, written in 2006, was to bemoan the loss of liberal moral clarity in the war on terror — and to worry about the influence of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. and fascists in Europe.

[…]

[Glenn Greenwald:] To be honest, I really don’t see how that full quote changes anything. You are indeed saying — for whatever reasons — that the fascists are the ones speaknig [sic] most sensibly about Islam, which is all that column claimed.

[…]

[Harris:] There is absolutely nothing racist about my criticism of Islam. […] I wasn’t making common cause with fascists — I was referring to the terrifying fact (again, back in 2006), that when you heard someone making sense on the subject of radical Islam in Europe — e.g. simply admitting that it really is a problem — a little digging often revealed that they had some very unsavory connections to Anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi, etc. hate groups. The point of my article was to worry that the defense of civil society was being outsourced to extremists.

[…]

[Greenwald:] You can sneer and hurl insults all you want, but I’ve long believed that the crowd of which you’re a part has been flirting with, and at times embracing, Islamophobia. […] I understand “the process” perfectly fine. I think you’re embarrassed that people are now paying attention to some of the darker and uglier sentiments that have been creeping into this form of athesim [sic] advocacy, and are lashing out at anyone helping to shine a light on that. A bizarre and wholly irrational fixation on Islam, as opposed to the evils done by other religions, has been masquerdaing [sic] in the dark under the banner of rational atheism for way too long.

[…]

[Harris:] Your treatment of these issues, and of me in this email exchange, has been remarkably disingenuous.

Our atheist stands amazed. What can any of this have to do with science, reason, common sense, or putting illogical people “in their place”? You know, atheism — by some definition (above)? For God’s sake, where has all the free thought gone?

The Washington Post wanted to print Harris’ opinion — until it didn’t. The editors of Nature are understandably concerned about breaking “Britain’s suffocating libel laws” — but that’s not all they’re worried about. Mind that ‘Dangerous work’ (2013):

Although the ability to investigate the genetic factors that underlie the heritability of traits such as intelligence, violent behaviour, race and sexual orientation is new, arguments and attitudes about the significance of these traits are not. Scientists have a responsibility to do what they can to prevent abuses of their work, including the way it is communicated. Here are some pointers.

[…]

For instance, in light of increasing evidence that race is biologically meaningless [sic], research into genetic traits that underlie differences in intelligence between races, or that predispose some races to act more aggressively than others, will produce little.

So don’t even think about researching them. We’ve got our answer — and your godforsaken “research” is “prone” to refuting it (2013):

In 2005, for instance, geneticist Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago in Illinois published studies suggesting that variants of two brain-development genes possibly linked to intelligence are evolving differently in white Europeans and African ethnic groups. This provoked a wave of worried comments by scientists about how the studies might be interpreted. […] Lahn says he felt “ambushed” during the debate over his findings. At meetings, even his co-authors did not defend him. “My friends said nothing,” he says. Some argue that Lahn should have been more cautious. “Science always plays out in a certain socio-political context, and you have to look at the consequences of how the science might play out,” says John Horgan, a journalist who has written widely on the societal implications of science. “Research on race and intelligence is much more prone to supporting racist ideas about the inferiority of certain groups, which plays into racist policies.” Horgan says that institutional review boards should ban or seriously question proposed studies on race and IQ. Lahn no longer works on the genetics of race and has urged researchers to have a more transparent discussion about whether such studies should proceed at all.

And just the other day (2014):

Is race biologically real? A clutch of books published this year argue the question.

[…]

Wade’s book is by far the most insidious, but all three are polemics that become mired in proving (in Wade’s case) or disproving (in the others’) whether race is biological and therefore ‘real.’ This question is a dead end, a distraction from what is really at stake in this debate: human social equality.

The words “racism” or “racist” occur ten times in this book review. Arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet.

(No, I promise this is not going to turn into another episode of “Radish on Race.”)

Now, personally, I love science and logic and all that good stuff. Can’t get enough of it! So I’m genuinely pleased to see this great (by the standards of our benighted century) intellectual duelist, the Viscount de Harris, grown not at all soft in his middle age, dust off his epaulets, yank the ol’ rapier from his umbrella stand and wade into the mêlée. They’re still calling you a “racist,” Sam! Go on, get in there! Tussle!

Going all the way back to ‘Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks’ (2008):

If anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the western apologists and “multiculturalists” who deem Arabs and Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of “affirmative action” at work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name of paying “respect” to the glaring pathologies in their culture.

Take that, “multiculturalists”! And that!

Wherever “moderate Islam” does announce itself, one often discovers frank Islamism lurking just a euphemism or two beneath the surface. The subterfuge is rendered all but invisible to the general public by political correctness, wishful thinking, and “white guilt.”

Clink, clank —

All of their talk about how benign Islam “really” is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time: Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world’s Muslims, is antithetical to civil society.

— whoosh.

Whether Christianity is true or false, and whether European morality is good or bad, European morality is in fact founded upon religion, and the destruction of the one must of necessity involve the reconstruction of the other. James Fitzjames Stephen

To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. Theodore Dalrymple

Apparently (above), the cultural practices of a rapidly increasing population of Third World colonizers of Europe — primarily Arabs, Maghrebis, Pashtuns, etc — have actually turned out to be “antithetical” to the primarily white “civil society” of white Western civilization of white people. So… uh… was that supposed to bring your “fellow liberals” over to your side, Mr. Harris? A bold stratagem indeed.

You mentioned that certain “conservatives” are waging a “culture war” on behalf of “western standards of moral order,” which are under attack by “multiculturalists” wielding accusations of “racism,” “Islamophobia,” and a “legacy of colonialism.” “Political correctness” and “white guilt” are out of control, and your fellow Liberals, in a puzzling display of illiberalism, have rejected you. Your “reason,” “evidence” and “common sense” are not welcome. You simply do not fit in. What have we learned?

Well, the late Christian paleoconservative Lawrence Auster has an opinion — but he was one of those right-wing extremists you’ve heard so much about (2004):

Treating leftists as “liberals,” they are constantly surprised and scandalized at the “liberals’” illiberal intolerance. They deceive themselves in regarding political correctness and the double standard as extraneous to liberalism, as a mistake or silly excess or regrettable hypocrisy, which, if pointed out to the “liberals,” the “liberals” will renounce.

[…]

He never seems to notice that his brilliant exposure of the double standard fails to stop his “liberal” adversaries for even a single beat.

[…]

Conservatives never suspect that there may be something about “liberalism’s” essential nature that has generated this double standard, and that will keep generating it as long as “liberalism” itself survives.

Or maybe we can just teach your fellow Liberals to be reasonable, so we can all band together and fight the “multiculturalism” brought about by “diversity” (2006):

I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict. This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

[…]

My correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith. On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

[…]

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization.

[…]

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game. While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t. The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

“Moral clarity” from the big, bad right-wing Christian Crusaders (they’re usually good for that); “masochistic unreason” and a suicidal “dogma of multiculturalism” from the self-proclaimed forces of reason and tolerance. Who could imagine?

Sam, I think it might be time to trade that rapier for a hammer…

Yeah, I went there (images: 1, 2)

In July 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, an ethnic Norwegian, bombed a government building in Oslo, killing eight and injuring over two hundred, before travelling to the island of Utøya, where he shot and killed a further sixty-nine and injured over a hundred more, mostly teenagers, at a summer camp of the youth wing of the socialist Labour Party. In a lengthy manifesto, Breivik denounced the colonization of Europe by Muslims, and accused the Labour Party of “promoting multiculturalism and endangering Norway’s identity” (Issue 19). I include this excerpt for the record:

We used to hang out with GSV crew, or B-Gjengen as they are popularly called today, a Muslim Pakistani gang, quite violent even back then. “Gang alliances” was a part of our everyday life at that point and assured that you avoided threats and harassment. Alliances with the right people guaranteed safe passage everywhere without the risk of being subdued and robbed (Jizya), beaten or harassed. […] Even at that time, the Muslim gangs were very dominant in Oslo East and in inner city Oslo. They even arranged “raids” in Oslo West occasionally, subduing the native youths (kuffars) and collecting Jizya from them (in the form of cell phones, cash, sunglasses etc.). I remember they systematically harassed, robbed and beat ethnic Norwegian youngsters who were unfortunate enough to not have the right affiliations. Muslim youths called the ethnic Norwegians “poteter” (potatoes, a derogatory term used by Muslims to describe ethnic Norwegians). These people occasionally raped the so-called “potato whores.” In Oslo, as an ethnic Norwegian youth aged 14–18 you were restricted if you didn’t have affiliations to the Muslim gangs. Your travel was restricted to your own neighbourhoods in Oslo West and certain central points in the city. Unless you had Muslim contacts you could easily be subject to harassment, beatings and robbery. Our alliances with the Muslim gangs were strictly seen as a necessity for us, at least for me. We, however, due to our alliances had the freedom of movement. As a result of our alliances we were allowed to have a relaxing and secure position on the West side of Oslo among our age group. Think of it as being local “warlords” for certain “kuffar areas”, which were regulated by the only dominant force, Muslim gangs collaberating with anarcho-Marxist networks. Many of these groups claim to be tolerant and anti-fascist, but yet, I have never met anyone as hypocritical, racist and fascist as the people whom I used to call friends and allies. The media glorifies them while they wreak havoc across the city, rob and plunder. Yet, any attempts their victims do to consolidate are harshly condemned by all aspects of the cultural establishment as racism and Nazism. I have witnessed the double standards and hypocrisy with my own eyes, it is hard to ignore. I was one of the protected “potatoes,” having friends and allies in the Jihadi-racist gangs. […] In retrospect, it’s easy to understand why ethnic Norwegians are fleeing Muslim areas. No one likes to be “subdued” — live in fear, being harassed, beaten and robbed. The Muslim ghettofication process has been ongoing the last thirty years and it will continue until there is close to 100 percent concentrated Muslim areas in Oslo (the same tendency we see in Paris, London and other large Western European cities). When I was around 15–16 there was only one or two schools where the majority was non-ethnic Norwegian. Now, fifteen years later, there are around fifty schools on the East side of Oslo where the majority of students are non-natives and primarily Muslim. It’s a miracle how I managed to successfully pass through my “vulnerable years” without being subdued by Muslim gangs even once. I know that there are hundreds, even thousands of incidents per year (I have personally witnessed around 50 incidents) where ethnic Norwegian youths ranging 14–18 are harassed, beaten, raped and robbed and it’s getting worse every year. I really don’t envy the new generations and the challenges that are facing them regarding Muslim subjugation. If ethnic Norwegian youth or other non-Muslims attempt to create gangs of their own (for protection purposes), they are immediately labelled as racists and Nazis. At the same time numerous Muslim gangs commit thousands of racist acts each year against ethnic Norwegians and it’s either hushed down, ignored and therefore tolerated.

And so on. “At the time,” says Jonathan Freedland (2013),

there was no shortage of voices on the right rushing to denounce what Breivik had done, before suggesting he was voicing a widely felt sentiment, adding that perhaps a frank conversation about the excesses of diversity and the alienating effects of globalisation and migration was overdue. As I wrote at the time: “To listen to it, you’d think Breivik had simply wanted to start a debate, that he’d perhaps written a provocative pamphlet for Demos, rather than committed an act of murderous cruelty.” Some shook their heads ruefully, sadly noting that they had long warned such violence would be the result of the headlong rush to a multicultural, rainbow-hued future. Liberal and left opinion knew what it thought of such talk. It was wrong to accord Breivik’s warped beliefs such a respectful hearing. Airing his ideas this way was to reward his massacre, surely providing an incentive for others to repeat the slaughter. His actions should be treated as murder, plain and simple. To respond by debating his grievances was to cede him, and violence itself, too much power.

Freedland concurs: “Breivik’s views on Islam did not deserve a hearing by the right.”

Yes, any occasion is a good occasion not to have that “frank conversation about the excesses of diversity and the alienating effects of globalisation and migration.” Bombings, beheadings, elections, epidemics, the vernal equinox or the Witches’ Sabbath, just after a large meal or right before going swimming — all of these are appropriate times not to question the merits of the Western world’s “headlong rush to a multicultural, rainbow-hued” but mostly brown “future.” Don’t worry, if there is ever an appropriate time to have that conversation, the left will let us know! Probably through the information organs of the state — the universities and the press, which they control. Until then, you can just keep your racist mouth shut, you Christian fascist.

Yet when the killer’s cause is the matter of western intervention in Muslim countries, it seems some left voices find their previous fastidiousness has deserted them. […]

You see, a couple of imported African Muslims had just hacked off a British soldier’s head on a London street in broad daylight. So look out! — for a completely fictitious “wave” of “anti-Muslim” “hate crimes” caused by “underlying Islamophobia.”

Imagine what they would say to the claim that Breivik’s terror vindicated the old rivers-of-blood warnings, predicting that decades of multiculturalism would end in disaster, and now it was time to change course. […] Of course they’d have rejected such logic utterly.

Yes, it’s almost as if Progressives don’t really believe that “debating grievances” will “cede violence itself too much power” — or even that political violence is necessarily wrong. (“Who? Whom?”) Meet Herbert Marcuse, “Father of the New Left” (1965):

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: … it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. […] The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. […] Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds. […] It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.

(Amid pages of Marxist-Freudian hybrid sophistry, some examples of “progress in civilization” as Marcuse conceives it: the French, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions.)

More recently, the Guardian (2014) printed an open letter signed by distinguished academics including Marxist “critical theorist” Judith Butler, Marxist “critical theorist” Étienne Balibar, Marxist “critical legal theorist” Costas Douzinas, Marxist “critical theorist” Wendy Brown, Marxist “cultural critic” Slavoj Žižek, and Marxist terrorist Antonio Negri, to name a few. “Left-wing ‘extremism’” is good, the letter explains, because it is extremely “egalitarian,” and extremely “egalitarian” political theories (I’m sure you can think of one or two examples from the 20th century) are good:

Media accounts that misrepresent the importance of the growing electoral support for Syriza [the “radical left”] as the rise of leftwing “extremism” must be countered in the strongest of terms. There is no contemporary symmetry between the so-called “extremism” of left and right.

(The leaders of the Greek “radical right” are currently in prison.)

A truly cynical observer might even suggest that, to Sam’s “fellow liberals,” such high-minded concepts as tolerance and free speech were never anything more than words — words to be wielded as weapons against their political opponents, when other weapons were unavailable. Meet Roger Nash Baldwin, founder of the ACLU (1934):

I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers’ rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. […] When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies, at home and abroad.

(Consult Issue 31 for more on this fascinating subject.)

Anyway, Sam Harris responded to Breivik’s attack quite reasonably (2011):

One can only hope that the horror and outrage provoked by Breivik’s behavior will temper the growing enthusiasm for right-wing, racist nationalism in Europe. However, one now fears the swing of another pendulum: We are bound to hear a lot of deluded talk about the dangers of “Islamophobia” and about the need to address the threat of “terrorism” in purely generic terms. The emergence of “Christian” terrorism in Europe does absolutely nothing to diminish or simplify the problem of Islam — its repression of women, its hostility toward free speech, and its all-too-facile and frequent resort to threats and violence.

Right on cue (2011):

Over at Truthdig, the celebrated journalist Chris Hedges has discovered that Christopher Hitchens and I are actually racists with a fondness for genocide. He has broken this story before — many times, in fact — but in his most recent essay he blames “secular fundamentalists” like me and Hitch for the recent terrorist atrocities in Norway. Very nice. Hedges begins, measured as always: The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas. The editors at Truthdig have invited me to respond to this phantasmagoria. There is, however, almost no charge worth answering in Hedges’ writing — there never is. Which is more absurd, the idea of “secular fundamentalism” or the notion that its edicts pose a greater threat of terrorism than the doctrine of Islam? Do such assertions even require sentences to refute?

Dunno, Sam. I’m a stoopid raciss, like yoo (Issue 18).

In other news, “animal rights activist” Volkert van der Graaf (not a Muslim) was just released from a Dutch prison after serving a grand total of twelve years for the assassination of “anti-immigration” politician (and homosexual Catholic liberal sociology professor) Pim Fortuyn (2014). “More than a few members of Europe’s political establishment,” Steve Sailer noted at the time, “appear to believe that Pim Fortuyn… had it coming” (2002). And Harris — is still sparring with his fellow liberals (2014):

Increasingly, questioning Islam results in a person’s being vilified as an “Islamophobe” and a “bigot” — or, in a ridiculous but omnipresent misuse of the term, as a “racist.” These charges come from Muslims themselves and from their apologists on the Left. Even major news sites, such as The Guardian and Salon, frequently publish these attacks.

[…]

I also find it very depressing, and rather ominous, that liberal women are not celebrating you [Ayaan Hirsi Ali] as the best example in a generation of what could and should happen for nearly a billion of their sisters currently living under Islam. Your lack of feminist allies is alarming. And the fact that so many liberals ditch their commitment to gender equality and attack you in the name of “religious sensitivity,” despite all that you’ve been through — making your life both less pleasant and more dangerous in the process — is just infuriating.

[…]

So the truly mortifying answer to the question of why you are at the AEI is that no liberal institution would offer you shelter when you most needed it — and when your value to the global conversation about free speech, the rights of women, and other norms of civilization was crystal clear. And ever since, your affiliation with the one institution that did take you in has been used to defame you in liberal circles. Perfect.

[…]

It will probably seem tendentious to many readers for me to put it this way, but our critics are just dishonest.

And yet, Mr. Harris, your “ugly Islamophobia” remains a popular topic among your fellow liberals (2014). Meanwhile, Brandeis University rescinds its offer of an honorary degree to “Islamophobic” Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2014).

Years ago, when the academic left began to ostracize professors identified as “conservative,” university administrators stood aside or were complicit. The academic left adopted a notion espoused back then by a “New Left” German philosopher — who taught at Brandeis, not coincidentally — that many conservative ideas were immoral and deserved to be suppressed. […] No one could possibly count the compromises of intellectual honesty made on American campuses to reach this point.

She’s none too popular at Yale, either (2014):

In an open letter sent to Buckley Program student leaders, members of 35 campus groups say they feel “highly disrespected” by the September 15 lecture “Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West.” […] They accuse Hirsi Ali of “hate speech” and express outrage that she should “have such a platform in our home.” “We cannot overlook,” they write, “how marginalizing her presence will be to the Muslim community and how uncomfortable it will be for the community’s allies.”

[…]

These groups claim “to act on Yale’s fundamental values of freedom of speech and diversity of thought,” but they are, of course, interested in no such things. Freedom of speech and diversity of thought are agreeable insofar as the speech spoken and the thoughts pondered are agreeable to the Muslim Students Association/Women’s Center/Black Students Alliance/other acceptable grievance lobby. Verboten is speech that transgresses select political orthodoxies.

Well, best keep updating your ‘Response to Controversy,’ Mr. Harris.

Clink, clank, clink, clank…

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. O’Sullivan’s Law

Ye cannot serve God and mammon. The Gospel of Matthew

Irreligion seems to be experiencing — dare I say — a schism.

Take Michael Shermer: editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine and executive director of the Skeptics Society (over 50,000 members), both of which he founded; author of Why People Believe Weird Things (1997), How We Believe (2001), Denying History (2002), The Science of Good and Evil (2004), and Why Darwin Matters (2006); editor of The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience (2002); an all-around skeptical fellow.

Shermer is surprised, like Lavoisier and Condorcet before him, to find his own head upon the chopping block of Moral Progress, but no lessons are learned (2013):

Google “women in atheism” and you’ll find hundreds more examples, emblematic of how far we’ve come toward gender equality in just a quarter-century and of how much there is to celebrate. Let me provide another example of moral progress that at first will seem counterintuitive. It involves a McCarthy-like witch hunt within secular communities to root out the last vestiges of sexism, racism, and bigotry of any kind, real or imagined. Although this unfortunate trend has produced a backlash against itself by purging from its ranks the likes of such prominent advocates as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I contend that this is in fact a sign of moral progress. […]

(We’ll come back to this fascinating notion of “moral progress” later.)

When self-proclaimed secular feminists attacked Richard Dawkins for a seemingly innocent response to an equally innocent admonishment to guys by Rebecca Watson (the founder of Skepchicks) that it isn’t cool to hit on women in elevators, this erupted into what came to be known as “Elevatorgate.” I didn’t speak out because I figured that an intellect as formidable as Richard Dawkins’s did not need my comparatively modest brainpower in support.

(Which sordid episode I will not recapitulate here.)

When these same self-described secular feminists went after Sam Harris for a commentary supporting racial profiling in the search for terrorists, again I didn’t speak out. When Harris wrote, “If my daughter one day reads in my obituary that her father ‘was persistently dogged by charges of racism and bigotry,’ unscrupulous people like P.Z. Myers will be to blame,” I thought to myself: “Don’t worry about it, Sam. Your work is for the ages. PZ Myers’s work is for the minutes — the half-life measure of blogs relative to books.” But perhaps I should have spoken out, because now the inquisition has been turned on me [Skeptic, 2012], by none other than one of the leading self-proclaimed secular feminists [Ophelia Benson] whose work has heretofore been important in the moral progress of our movement. […] I have been pilloried as a sexist, misogynist, and bigot (with, thankfully, even more positive comments in support and against this secular witch hunt).

[…]

I shall close with a warning about the propensity for social movements to turn on themselves in purges that distract from the original goals and destroy the movement from within. […] As the aforementioned Harriet Hall e-mailed me, she “was vilified on Ophelia’s blog for not following a certain kind of feminist party line of how a feminist should act and think. And I was attacked there in a disturbingly irrational, nonskeptical way.”

Purges, you say? And a party line interfering with your original goals? Good heavens. My stars. I can’t imagine how that could have happened. Oh, wait.

Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (1990):

With the white chauvinism campaign of 1949–1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. Thousands of people were caught up in this campaign — not only in the Party itself, but within the Progressive Party and some of the Left unions as well. In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner.

“Denying history” indeed. I have one word for you, Mr. Shermer, and for your Skeptics Society, and that word is entryism — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

“That isn’t purging,” Benson cackles at Freethought Blogs: not being “the KGB nor even the Stasi,” Feminists just “don’t have the power to ‘purge’ people.” Our Christian-hating biology professor P. Z. Myers, Benson’s partner in doxing, howls right along:

Astonishing. Apparently, criticizing anything Mr Michael Shermer says is now a “McCarthy-like witch hunt,” an “inquisition” with the goal of “purging” Shermer from the ranks of… what? He’s a publisher and author. Is there a threat to take his word processor away?

(I decline to link to these people, and promise this will not degenerate into drama.)

Here, by the way, is P. Z. Myers explaining how this community of Freethinkers, having banned an insufficiently left-wing Atheist from the blogging network, can, should, and must purge him entirely from their Skeptical movement (2012):

Yes, we want to make [internet pseudonym]/[real name] a pariah in the atheist movement.

Later, Myers will defame Michael Shermer with rape accusations (2013).

Incidentally, in 2008, Myers openly rejoiced in the death of a priest — and went on to win the American Humanist Association’s “Humanist of the Year Award” and the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s “International Humanist Award.” Dawkins considers him a reliable source of “trenchant good sense” (God Delusion).

The last word to Sam Harris (2012):

Having a blog and building a large community of readers can destroy a person’s intellectual integrity — as appears to have happened in the case of PZ Myers. […] I hold him responsible for circulating and amplifying some of the worst distortions of my views found on the Internet.

Meanwhile, 22 leaders of national Atheist organizations “pledge to make our best efforts toward improving the tone and substance of online discussions” and “to promote productive debate and discussion” (2013). The ever-so-Rational, exceedingly Skeptical, Freethinking Feminists of Secular Woman reject the pledge outright for giving “equal voice” to “sexist ideas and beliefs” (2013). My emphasis:

As a secular feminist organization committed to understanding and exposing societal constructs that contribute to the inequality of women and other oppressed groups, we have no desire to listen to, respect, or continuously debunk overtly sexist viewpoints. Just as most scientists are not interested in debating the beliefs of creationists, we are not interested in debating gender-biased, racist, homophobic, or trans*phobic [sic] beliefs. […] Those of us working to challenge systemic sexism should be under no obligation to listen to or be more charitable to our opponents.

They kindly provide a “textbook definition” of feminism, which of course tells us nothing about Feminism, except what the movement would like us to believe about it.

Proving that feminism is a valid worldview is something Secular Woman is not interested in pursuing. What we are interested in pursuing is the strategic goals that we have set for our organization.

Indeed. Now, personally, I love listening and debating and being charitable to my opponents. So I did a little investigating (Issue 24), and it turns out that, according to many prominent Feminists, at least one of whom is also a prominent Atheist, those “overtly sexist viewpoints” and “gender-biased beliefs” include evolutionary biology as applied to the species Homo sapiens. See, for example (or don’t), Rebecca Watson, Amanda Marcotte, Lindy West (2012), and Sharon Begley (2009).

I also refer the reader to evolutionary psychologist Anne Campbell’s contribution to Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists (2006):

For many feminists in the social sciences, evolutionary psychologists are still seen as the enemy. The disagreement is not about the desirability of social change, but about where the causes of gender differences can be found. Unlike social constructionists, evolutionary psychologists accept that beliefs reside in the mind and not just in discourse and language. Traditional empirical method may not be perfect but it has the advantage of being a self-correcting system. Liberal feminists identify causes that are proximate and external but ultimately incompatible with a mass of empirical research.

(“Why Darwin matters” indeed.)

Ladies! Gentlemen! Can we not be reasonable about this? To that end, lawyer and philosopher Ronald Lindsay (president of the Center for Inquiry, author of Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogmas and The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What To Do) delivers some remarks on privilege (2013):

Let me emphasize at the outset that I think it’s a concept that has some validity and utility; it’s also a concept that can be misused, misused as a way to try to silence critics. In what way does it have validity? I think there is sufficient evidence to indicate that there are socially embedded advantages that men have over women, in a very general sense. These advantages manifest in various ways, such as the persistent pay gap between men and women. Also, I’m not a believer in a priori arguments, but I will say that given the thousands of years that women were subordinated to men, it would be absolutely amazing if in the space of several decades all the social advantages that men had were promptly and completely eradicated. Legislation can be very effective for securing rights, but changing deeply engrained patterns of behavior can take some time. That said, I am concerned the concept of privilege may be misapplied in some instances. First, some people think it has dispositive explanatory power in all situations, so, if for example, in a particular situation there are fewer women than men in a given managerial position, and intentional discrimination is ruled out, well, then privilege must be at work. But that’s not true; there may be other explanations. The concept of privilege can do some explanatory work at a general level, but in particular, individualized situations, other factors may be more significant. To bring this point home let’s consider an example of another broad generalization which is unquestionably true, namely that people with college degrees earn more over their lifetime than those who have only high school diplomas. As I said, as a general matter, this is unquestionably true as statistics have shown this to be the case. Nonetheless in any particular case, when comparing two individuals, one with a high school degree and one with a college degree, the generalization may not hold. But it’s the second misapplication of the concept of privilege that troubles me most. I’m talking about the situation where the concept of privilege is used to try to silence others, as a justification for saying, “shut up and listen.” Shut up, because you’re a man and you cannot possibly know what it’s like to experience x, y, and z, and anything you say is bound to be mistaken in some way, but, of course, you’re too blinded by your privilege even to realize that. This approach doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t work for me. It’s the approach that the dogmatist who wants to silence critics has always taken because it beats having to engage someone in a reasoned argument. It’s the approach that’s been taken by many religions. It’s the approach taken by ideologies such as Marxism. You pull your dogma off the shelf, take out the relevant category or classification, fit it snugly over the person you want to categorize, dismiss, and silence and… poof, you’re done. End of discussion. You’re a heretic spreading the lies of Satan, and anything you say is wrong. You’re a member of the bourgeoisie, defending your ownership of the means of production, and everything you say is just a lie to justify your power. You’re a man; you have nothing to contribute to a discussion of how to achieve equality for women. Now don’t get me wrong. I think the concept of privilege is useful; in fact it is too useful to have it ossified and turned into a dogma. By the way, with respect to the “Shut up and listen” meme, I hope it’s clear that it’s the “shut up” part that troubles me, not the “listen” part. Listening is good. People do have different life experiences, and many women have had experiences and perspectives from which men can and should learn. But having had certain experiences does not automatically turn one into an authority to whom others must defer. Listen, listen carefully, but where appropriate, question and engage.

[…]

Enforced silence is always and everywhere the enemy of truth and progress. If someone is forbidden from speaking, you are obviously not going to hear what they have to say. But enforced silence is also a way of robbing someone of their humanity. […] Freedom, real freedom, authentic freedom, that is what we want for everyone. Of course, how to get there — that is not yet determined. But that is what we are here to figure out. I look forward to the conversation.

In context, these are indeed reasonable things to say in front of reasonable people.

Unfortunately, Mr. Lindsay was actually speaking at the second annual “Women In Secularism” conference, so you can imagine how that turned out.

Commentary by Amanda Marcotte — God help us (2013):

Instead of acting in his role as a leader — to welcome the participants and offer a quick introduction of the speakers — he used his time to issue a condescending, unnecessary lecture to the women present about their supposedly naughty behavior when dealing with those who oppose the existence of feminism. […] Needless to say, preening about how men are “silenced” when asked to shut up and listen to women’s experiences before rendering judgment on the validity of them is offensive enough. Under the circumstances, where he is a speaker and the audience present is required to shut up and listen out of politeness, the arrogance of this complaint was particularly grotesque. We are to shut up and listen to him, but men are entitled at all points in time, it appears, to yap over any woman whose complaints about sexism they find beneath their attention.

Thirteen conference speakers put their names on this open letter (2013):

He then ended with a plea for us to respect the humanity of men by allowing them to continue to speak, perpetuating the myth that feminists are trying to (or are in any position to) silence men. […] To say this is unacceptable would be an understatement. This is bizarre behavior.

[…]

Lindsay’s behavior on this topic has energized and emboldened these harassers. They are lauding him as a hero for standing up to the victims of harassment. They are crowing to those they harass that the weekend was a victory for them. They are filling official CFI blog comment threads with malicious nonsense that is being allowed to stand. They are copying him on their Twitter harassment, which has increased dramatically over the weekend and since the conference has ended.

[…]

Lindsay is aware of all of this. He has not spoken out to stop it.

Behold the harassment (their own first example):

@jeh704: @GretaChristina @NotungSchwert I loved @RALindsay talk at WIS. please retweet and keep the hater out like Greta.

(We’ll meet Greta shortly.)

I guess Ronald Lindsay didn’t get the “conversation” he was looking for (2013):

I am sorry that I caused offense with my talk. I am also sorry I made some people feel unwelcome as a result of my talk. From the letters sent to me and the board, I have a better understanding of the objections to the talk. I am also sorry that my talk and my actions subjected my colleagues and the organization to which I am devoted to criticism. Please accept my apologies.

But now Dawkins is in trouble again — right on cue (2013):

“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though,” he wrote.

[…]

From issuing messages dubbing him a “an old white racist” to claiming the atheist leader is unfairly targeting the Muslim faith, many excoriated Dawkins.

Lines must be drawn! Revolutionary tribunals, convened! So says Martin Robbins, expert on “science, pseudoscience and evidence-based politics” (2013):

Whatever you choose to call this phenomenon, it’s clear that there’s a line between criticism (or ridicule) of Islam, and bigotry against Muslims. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have blundered into that line with an alarming degree of recklessness.

[…]

As Nathan Lean pointed out in Salon a few weeks ago, this is part of a pattern of behavior that has seen Dawkins flirt with hard-right thinking on numerous occasions, from his words of support for the likes of Geert Wilders and Pat Condell to his adoption of vaguely conspiracy-minded beliefs about the police, the suggestion that ‘multiculturism’ is “code for Islam” in Europe, and clumsily overblown rhetoric about the “menacing rise of Islam.” […] Whatever you choose to call this, it’s far from intelligent. Both men are at risk of buying in to Kenan Malik’s a ‘culture of delusion’; their rhetoric not dissimilar to the far right’s talk of “Eurabia” or “Londonistan,” fuelled by fears blown out of all proportion to any real threat. […] Inflammatory, irrational and blundering attacks by privileged white male atheists against Muslims of all stripes achieve little more than book sales.

“Irrational attacks,” “clumsily overblown rhetoric,” “fears blown out of all proportion.” No evidence is necessary, and none is provided. For God’s sake, they’re white males. What more do you need to know? Science, pseudoscience and evidence-based politics.

Dawkins, that enemy of progress, is quite simply being left behind — by Atheism’s consistent leftward shift, that is (M. Robbins, 2013):

In the olden days, at the turn of the century, it was hard to come by vaguely-racist bigotry in our day-to-day lives. Back then you had to go and visit your grandparents a few times a year, and sit there quietly while they talked about the coloured folk in the corner shop and how you couldn’t walk to Sainsbury’s to buy your Daily Mail without being robbed by a gang of Asians. Then somebody built Twitter, and then Richard Dawkins joined.

Tee hee, “a gang of Asians.” More or less amusing now, in light of Rotherham? (Dawkins tweets: “Newspapers describe Rotherham groomers as ‘of Asian descent.’ What? Why? Are they Chinese? Mongolian? Are they Hindu? Sikh? Buddhist? Jain?”)

What’s frustrating is the practiced naivety with which Dawkins and his supporters defend bigotry like this. “It’s a simple statement of fact,” people protest, but of course there’s no such thing [my emphasis]. All statements are made in a context: if I were to create a Tumblr linking to stories about black people who did dumb things, each story might simply be a ‘statement of fact,’ but that wouldn’t detract from the inherent racism of such an exercise.

So how many true but unflattering statements about protected classes are we allowed to make before it qualifies as inherent thoughtcrime? Never mind, I think I know.

“Islam isn’t a race,” is the “I’m not racist, but…” of the Atheist movement, a tedious excuse for lazy thinking that is true enough to be banal while simultaneously wrong in any meaningful, real-world sense. Yes, congratulations, you can read a dictionary. Well done. But it’s possible for a statement to be both true and wrong. […]

(Freethought means no wrongthink.)

He contributes to racially-charged discourse through his choice of dubious facts, the exaggerated and inflammatory language he uses to describe them, and the context within which he presents them. In short, he is beginning to sound disturbingly like a member of the far right — many of his tweets wouldn’t look out of place on Stormfront. Whatever the motives behind it, one wonders how much further he can continue down this path before the tide of opinion turns firmly against him. Dawkins remains a powerful force in atheism for the time being. Increasingly though, his public output resembles that of a man desperately grasping for attention and relevance in a maturing community. A community more interested in the positive expression of humanism and secularism than in watching a rich and privileged man punching down at people denied his opportunities in life.

“The positive expression of humanism and secularism.” Privileged white male atheists.

Say what you will about Dawkins, but the man’s got a little fight left in him (2013):

I don’t think Muslims should segregate sexes at University College London events. Oh NO, how very ISLAMOPHOBIC of me. How RACIST of me.

But enough of this dross. What exactly are we looking at, here? If it has a name — that is, if it hasn’t already swallowed Atheism whole — that name must be “Atheism Plus.” Basically, in the words of its inventor, Jen McCreight (2012):

We are… Atheists plus we care about social justice,

Atheists plus we support women’s rights,

Atheists plus we protest racism,

Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism. It speaks to those of us who see atheism as more than just a lack of belief in god.

But I thought — oh, never mind.

“Atheism Plus” also calls itself “Ethical Atheism” and “Moral Atheism” (FAQ).

Atheism Plus does not attempt to conflate atheism with feminism or any other ideology. […] It is up to each individual to determine which values they wish to connect to their atheism if any. It just so happens that there is a sizable contingent of atheists who agree that a desire for social justice connects to their atheism in a meaningful way.

And it just so happens that anyone who opposes us is unethical and immoral.

Where did this sizable contingent come from, anyway (2012)?

On one level, this is just the logical culmination of the huge upsurge in interest prompted by the so-called “New Atheists” and the growth over the last few years of a recognisable community or movement based around ideas of atheism, scientific scepticism and a progressive political agenda. While atheism is, by definition, no more or less than a non-belief in God, in practice it clusters with a variety of other positions, from pro-choice to campaigns against homeopathy. People who espouse “liberal atheism” as it might be called, oppose religion for political as well as philosophical reasons, just as the forces of religion seem to line up — though of course not exclusively — behind seemingly unconnected issues such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and, in the US, gun-control.

“In practice” it tends to “cluster.” Do tell.

Atheism+ is, at its most basic, an attempt wrap things together more formally, to create a movement that prioritises issues of equality and does so from an explicitly non-religious perspective. Some would say that such a philosophy already exists in the form of humanism. […] Atheism+, however, seeks to capitalise on the sense of identity that has grown up around the word “atheism” during the past few years.

I have one word for you…

One supporter of the idea, Greta Christina, celebrates the term as “a slap in the face that wakes people up.”

[…]

Any community, new or old, has its tensions, and in the past year the atheist/sceptical community has been rocked by a divisive and increasingly bad-tempered debate over sexism and, more generally, a sense that the dominant voices have tended to be white, male and middle-class. […] The first item on the Atheism+ agenda, then, is a cleansing one. Greta Christina has gone so far as to devise a checklist of goals to which atheist organisations should aspire, including anti-harassment policies and ensuring diversity among both members and invited speakers. “To remember that not all atheists look like Richard Dawkins.” That sounds like, at least party [sic], a negative programme — “getting rid of the garbage.”

Let the purges begin!

I apologize in advance, but meet Greta Christina: Atheist; Feminist; author of Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More; editor of Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients; contributor to Everything You Know About God Is Wrong; founder of “Godless Perverts” (don’t ask); and I think that’s enough.

Greta explains “what Atheism Plus might mean” (2012):

What I think it would mean, at a minimum, is that atheist organizations would keep their own houses clean. At a minimum, it means they would pay attention to social justice issues with their own internal matters: hiring, event organization, community structure, etc. […] None of this constitutes mission drift, even in the slightest. Any more than it would be “mission drift” for an exclusionary golf club to change its policies and include women and Jews and people of color. This wouldn’t transform them into a radical-left political organization. […] Now, that’s just the minimum. It could certainly mean more than that — without getting into mission drift. It could mean, when deciding which issues to focus on, making a conscious effort to focus attention on atheist/religious issues that are of particular concern to marginalized people. Such as: The effects of the Religious Right on birth control legislation.

The effects of the Religious Right on sex education in the public schools.

The effects of the Religious Right on recognition and acceptance of trans people.

But without becoming some sort of “radical-left political organization,” obviously.

There is no way to make an atheist movement that fits everyone. So we have to decide: Who do we want to make it fit?

Just one more, I promise. Meet Richard Carrier: historian; Atheist activist; author of Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith, Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (we’re about to see his naturalist “sense and goodness” in action), On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, and Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (yes, friends: the art of history, reduced to a formula).

I know I promised this wouldn’t degenerate into drama, but you should see this (2012):

There is a new atheism brewing, and it’s the rift we need, to cut free the dead weight so we can kick the C.H.U.D.’s back into the sewers and finally disown them, once and for all […] so we could start marginalizing the evil in our midst, and grooming the next generation more consistently and clearly into a system of more enlightened humanist values. […] The dregs will now publicly mock humanist values, and abusively disregard the happiness of their own people. Well, that starts drawing the battle lines pretty clearly then.

[…]

Everyone who attacks feminism, or promotes or defends racism or sexism, or denigrates or maliciously undermines any effort to look after the rights and welfare and happiness of others, is simply not one of us. […] They have rejected compassion as a fundamental value. Regardless of what they say, that is in actual fact what they have done.

Bloodsuckers! Kulaks! Saboteurs! Counter-revolutionaries!

I don’t want anything to do with you. You are despicable. You are an awful person. You disgust me. You are not my people.

[…]

And so I am declaring here and now, that anyone who acts like this, is not one of us, and should be marginalized and disowned, as not part of our movement, and not anyone we any longer wish to deal with. In fact it is especially important on this point that we prove that these vile pissants are a minority in our movement, by making sure our condemnation of them is vocalized and our numbers seen. We must downvote their bullshit, call it out in comments, blog our outrage.

[…]

And this very much is an us vs. them situation. The compassionate vs. the vile. You can’t sit on the fence on this one. In a free society, apathy is an endorsement of villainy. This also applies to the sexists and racists and other dirtbags who try to make themselves seem reasonable through the specious tactic of merely not using curse words or insults, as if that is all that it takes to be a reasonable person. No, when you see apologists for sexism and racism and other anti-humanistic views of the world, […] even when they try to mimic what they think “sounding reasonable” looks like, you needn’t resort to invective or insults, but on the same even keel they are pretending at, simply declare that they are not one of you, but are one of them. […]

The Anti-Human walks among Us. It mimics Human speech. Do not be fooled! The Anti-Human is not one of Us. Liquidation of the Anti-Human is Social Justice.

Are you with us, or with them; are you with the Atheism+ movement, or do you at least cheer and approve it’s [sic] values and aims (since you don’t have to label yourself), or are you going to stick with Atheism Less and its sexism and cruelty and irrationality?

Well, there you have it. Atheism Plus: where Atheism meets Communism!

… Again. As usual.

We, at that time, were all materialists, or, at least, very advanced free-thinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable that almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts of impossible miracles. Friedrich Engels

Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty. As it is in particular persons, so it is in nations. Sir Francis Bacon

What is the relationship between Irreligion and Revolutionary Terror? Another question all too easily answered, from a certain point of view.

Start with the late Christopher Hitchens: journalist, polemicist; author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007); co-author of Is Christianity Good for the World? A Debate (2008); editor of The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer (2007); self-described anti-theist, Marxist, and lifelong Trotskyist.

Cancerous in more ways than one.

In his own contribution to the Gospel of the New Atheists, the Book of Hitchens, better known as God Is Not Great (which is fatuous, specious, unfair, and tedious, even by New Atheist standards), Hitchens finally gets around to mentioning and sort of condemning the regrettable excesses of Comrade Stalin in Chapter 17: ‘The “Case” Against Secularism.’ (And communism in general? Well, he’s no Red-baiting fascist.)

Turning to Soviet and Chinese Stalinism, with its exorbitant cult of personality and depraved indifference to human life and human rights, one cannot expect too much overlap with preexisting religions. For one thing, the Russian Orthodox Church had been the main prop of the czarist autocracy, while the czar himself was regarded as the formal head of the faith and something a little more than merely human. […] The long association of religion with corrupt secular power has meant that most nations have to go through at least one anticlerical phase.

Religion is bad, and communism beat it.

Lenin and Trotsky were certainly convinced atheists who believed that illusions in religion could be destroyed by acts of policy and that in the meantime the obscenely rich holdings of the church could be seized and nationalized. In the Bolshevik ranks, as among the Jacobins of 1792, there were also those who saw the revolution as a sort of alternative religion, with connections to myths of redemption and messianism. […] Stalin then pedantically repeated the papal routine of making science conform to dogma, by insisting that the shaman and charlatan Trofim Lysenko had disclosed the key to genetics and promised extra harvests of specially inspired vegetables.

Religion is bad, and communism repeated it, which turned communism bad.

A political scientist or anthropologist would have little difficulty in recognizing what the editors and contributors of The God That Failed put into such immortal secular prose: Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it. The solemn elevation of infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessing; the permanent search for heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics; the lurid show trials that elicited incredible confession by means of torture… none of this was very difficult to interpret in traditional terms. […]

(At this time I feel I should point out that the “Spanish Inquisition” is a myth.)

Nor was the hysteria during times of plague and famine, when the authorities unleashed a mad search for any culprit but the real one. […] Nor was the ceaseless invocation of a “Radiant Future,” the arrival of which would one day justify all crimes and dissolve all petty doubts.

Communism was bad, and communism was like a religion, so religion is bad.

All that the totalitarians have demonstrated is that the religious impulse — the need to worship — can take even more monstrous forms if it is repressed. This might not necessarily be a compliment to our worshipping tendency.

Lack of religion is worse than religion, so religion is bad.

Religion even at its meekest has to admit that what it is proposing is a “total” solution, in which faith must be to some extent blind, and in which all aspects of the private and public life must be submitted to a permanent higher supervision. This constant surveillance and continual subjection, usually reinforced by fear in the shape of infinite vengeance, does not invariably bring out the best mammalian characteristics. It is certainly true that emancipation from religion does not always produce the best mammal either. […] Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief. Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, “faith-based.”

Here are some religion words. Everything bad is religion; religion, everything bad.

Yes, “religion” really does poison everything, in Hitchens’ eyes. Even Marxism turns out to be “religious” — exactly to the extent that Hitchens now regrets it (Chapter 10):

When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectical materialism was not an absolute and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctrinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect that admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we also had our prophets. […] Trotsky had a sound materialist critique that enabled him to be prescient, not all of the time by any means, but impressively so on some occasions. And he certainly had a sense — expressed in his emotional essay Literature and Revolution — of the unquenchable yearning of the poor and oppressed to rise above the strictly material world and achieve something transcendent. For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality.

My careful research has identified the courageous moment when Hitchens faced reality head-on as occurring sometime between 8 August 2006, when he declared his lifelong admiration for Leon Trotsky to the BBC, and 28 July 2009, when he declared his resumed admiration for Leon Trotsky to the Hoover Institution, more on which later. (Hitchens was also a lifelong fan of Che Guevara: a “role model” and a “hero.”)

Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. […] Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic.

“Comparably dogmatic,” but at least Marxism had some “ethical glories” along the way.

See the great debater in action, as historian Jon Wiener sets up one straw man after another for Hitchens to tear apart (2007). First we learn (a) that the Atheist movement is essentially left-wing, and (b) that Marxism is essentially Atheistic:

Wiener: What about practical politics for progressives: since almost all Americans believe in God, for progressives to attack, ridicule and dismiss religion as you do is political suicide that will ensure religious Republican domination forever. […] Hitchens: […] Marxism begins by arguing that people have to emancipate their minds. The beginning of that emancipation is outgrowing of religion.

Next, we learn the subtle difference between faith, on the one hand, which is stupid, and you’re stupid; and conviction, on the other, which means progress, and in Hitchens’ case led straight to Marxism, which we already know is emancipation of the mind:

Wiener: I know you’ve often been told that everybody has faith in something — for most Americans, it’s Jesus; for you, it’s reason and science. Hitchens: That’s not faith, by definition. You can’t have faith in reason. It’s not a dogma. It’s a conviction that this is the only way that discovery and progress can be made.

Finally, we learn — actually, I’m not sure what we learn from this:

Wiener: What about Stalin? He wasn’t religious. Hitchens: Stalin — easier still. For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you’re Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you can’t exploit the pool of servility and docility that’s ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

Stalin exposed — as no true atheist! You see, religion made the peasants servile — it takes Marxism to “emancipate their minds.” It just so happens that, in this case, a dictator took the reins — but of course the tsar was a despot, which is basically the same thing, right? A true Marxist Atheist would have raised up the people, emancipated their minds and built a kingdom of philosophers, instead of just announcing that he was going to raise up the people, emancipate their minds and build a kingdom of philosophers — which is why you should believe the Marxist Atheist Christopher Hitchens, who super-swears that he is going to raise up the people, emancipate their minds and build a kingdom of philosophers. In the immortal words of George W. Bush: “Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again!”

“No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.” What would that look like, by the way? What would qualify as “following the path” of Paine or Jefferson? Bearing in mind that goalposts can always be shifted, and probably will be (2003):

The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings: Marx, Marat, Paine, Mao Tse-Tung, Gandhi and Others This concise anthology presents a broad selection of writings by the world’s leading revolutionary figures. Spanning three centuries, the works include such milestone documents as the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), and the Communist Manifesto (1848). It also features writings by the Russian revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky; Marat and Danton of the French Revolution; and selections by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emma Goldman, Mohandas Gandhi, Mao Zedong, and other leading figures in revolutionary thought.

You think there might be some kind of path between these “milestones”?

Where are you, Spinoza? There you are: “For us Spinoza is essentially a great atheist and materialist. In this appraisal of Spinoza I am in complete agreement with Plekhanov. In all of Plekhanov’s works, as I know, the fundamental thought is emphasized that Marxism, considered as a world‑view, is nothing other than a ‘variety of Spinozism’” (Abram Deborin, Marxist philosopher, 1927). “Spinoza is to this day highly regarded in the Soviet Union” (Isaiah Berlin, scholar of Marxism, 1953).

Tom Paine channels Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Issue 25) in Agrarian Justice (1795):

Whether that state that is proudly, perhaps erroneously, called civilization, has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested. […] To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe. Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. […] It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. […] Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it.

Sadly, Dawkins reports, Paine was not appreciated in his time (God Delusion):

In times of stronger faith, deists have been reviled as indistinguishable from atheists. Susan Jacoby, in Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, lists a choice selection of the epithets hurled at poor Tom Paine: ‘Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, archbeast, brute, liar, and of course infidel.’ Paine died abandoned (with the honourable exception of Jefferson) by political former friends embarrassed by his anti-Christian views.

Whereas his fellow revolutionaries… tried to chop his head off.

Shall we search farther back along the path? Engels (1892):

Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more’s the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.

So what would it look like, to follow this path? I assume I don’t need to connect the dots from the American Revolution to the French (In Defence of Marxism, 2002):

The international significance of the American Revolution was far greater than what most people realize today. The connection between the American and French Revolutions was very close. That great American revolutionary Thomas Paine lived in France and developed the most radical ideas. The proclamation of The Rights of Man was a most revolutionary idea for its time. People like Thomas Paine were the most advanced revolutionary democrats of their day.

Or the French to the Russian — say, via Marxist historian Albert Mathiez (1920):

The similarities between Jacobinism (by which I mean the government of the Montagnards between June 1793 and July 1794) and Bolshevism are not in the least factitious, since Lenin himself spoke of it in his speeches and he recently had a statue of Robespierre raised.

Or via Rosa Luxemburg, Hitchens’ favourite (1918):

The Bolsheviks are the historic heirs of the English Levellers and the French Jacobins.

Look, if the people responsible for the Red Terror believe they were following in the footsteps of the Roundheads, the Patriots, and the Jacobins — I don’t know, maybe you find Hitchens convincing. A lot of people do.

Imagine there’s no countries; it isn’t hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.

Imagine all the people, living life in peace. John Lennon

… is virtually the Communist Manifesto. John Lennon

Now, as long as we’re comparing Tsarist autocracy to Soviet communism, which replaced it: immediately, under the Bolsheviks, “the Cheka’s methods within Russia were far more brutal and murderous than any measures experienced under the Tsars” (The Soul of the East, 2010). But I fear this rather understates the disparities.

Allow me to share with you a few selections from The Red Terror in Russia (1926) by Sergei Melgunov, who was actually there at the time. (“The classic account of the terror at the local level… he had no need to exaggerate the horrors, and much of the evidence he used had been published in the Bolshevik press… confirmed by recent revelations from the Russian archives and by historians,” according to historian Robert Gellately.)

In time the Che-Ka began to add moral tortures to physical: executions began to be carried out in such close proximity to the cells that the other prisoners could plainly hear the rifle shots as they issued from the small, dark kitchen which Saenko had converted into a torture and execution chamber. And when later, in June of the year in question, Denikin’s searchers inspected the room, they found there two pood-weights [35 lbs. each] so tied together with an arshin-long [28-inch] section of rubber piping as to form a kind of flail, with the straw covering of the floor sodden with the blood of the slaughtered, and the wall facing the door seamed and scarred with bullet marks, and the other walls bespattered with blood and fragments of scalp, and hair, and particles of brain, and the floor littered with similar fragments. And when 107 corpses were disinterred in the adjacent concentration camp the most horrible atrocities became revealed — terrible traces of flogging, shattered ribs and leg bones, fractured skulls, amputated hands and feet, heads attached to the trunk only with a strip of cartilage, patches where the skin had been burnt off with red-hot instruments, stripes branded upon the back, and general mutilations. The first body to be exhumed was the body of Zhako-britsky, an ex-cornet of the 6th Hussars. He must have been cruelly beaten before death, for some of his ribs had been fractured, and there were thirteen scars on the body caused by pressure against some red-hot, circular implement. All the scars were on the front of the body save for a single stripe burnt upon the back. The skull of another corpse was found flattened into a single, smooth, round disk about a centimetre in thickness. Such expatulation of the head could have been caused only by enormous pressure between two flat objects. On a woman whose identity we could not establish we found seven stab and shot wounds. Also, manifestly she had been thrown into the grave before death. And the Commission discovered corpses of persons who had been scalded from head to foot with boiling liquid, and of persons who had been slowly (beginning with wounds intended only to torture, not to prove of a fatal character) hacked to death. And in every town in the region where concealed hiding-places had been available were corpses in a similar condition brought to light.

There’s a few hundred pages of this stuff:

And with that Nilostonsky goes on to describe the appearance of a “human slaughter-house” (he asserts that that had come actually to be the official appellation of such places) when, later, the Denikin Commission inspected one. The place had formerly been a garage, and then the provincial Che-Ka’s main slaughter-house. And the whole of it was coated with blood — blood ankle deep, coagulated with the heat of the atmosphere, and horribly mixed with human brains, chips of skull — bone, wisps of hair, and the like. Even the walls were bespattered with blood and similar fragments of brain and scalp, as well as riddled with thousands of bullet holes. In the centre was a drain about a quarter of a metre deep and wide, and about ten metres long. This led to the sanitary system of the neighbouring house, but was choked to the brim with blood. The horrible den contained 127 corpses, but the victims of the previous massacre had been hurriedly buried in the adjacent garden. What struck us most about the corpses was the shattering of their skulls, or the complete flattening out of those skulls, as though the victims had been brained with some such instrument as a heavy block. And there were corpses the heads of which were altogether missing. But in these cases the missing heads cannot possibly have been cut off. They must have been wrenched off. In the main, bodies were identifiable only if they still had left on them some such mark as a set of gold-mounted teeth — left, of course, only because the Bolshevists had not had time to extract it. And in every case the corpses were naked. Also, though it had been the Bolshevists’ rule to load their victims on to wagons and lorries as soon as massacred, and take them outside the town for burial, we found that a corner of the garden near the grave already described had in it another, older grave, and that this second grave contained eighty bodies which in every instance bore almost unimaginably horrible wounds and mutilations. In this grave we found corpses with, variously, entrails ripped out, no limbs remaining (as though the bodies had literally been chopped up), eyes gouged out, and heads and necks and faces and trunks all studded with stab wounds. Again, we found a body which had had a pointed stake driven through its chest, whilst in several cases the tongue was missing. And placed together in one corner of the grave we found a medley of detached arms and legs, as well as, near the garden fence, some corpses which bore no sign at all of death by violence. It was only a few days later that, on these unmarked bodies being subjected to post-mortem examination, our doctor discovered their mouths and throats and lungs to be choked with earth. Clearly the unfortunate wretches had been buried alive, and drawn the earth into their respiratory organs through their desperate efforts to breathe. And it was persons of all ages and of both sexes — old, and middle-aged, and women and children — that we found in the grave. One woman was lying tied with a rope to her daughter, a child of eight; and both bore shot wounds. Further, a grave in the yard of the building yielded the body of a Lieutenant Sorokin (accused of espionage on behalf of the Volunteer Army) and the cross on which he had been crucified a week before our arrival. Also, we found a chair like a dentist’s chair which still had attached to it straps for the binding of its tortured victims. And the whole of the concrete floor around the chair was smeared with blood, and the chair itself studded with clots of blood, and fragments of human skin, and bits of hairy scalp. And the same with the premises of the district Che-Ka, where, similarly, the floor was caked with blood and fragments of bone and brain. There, too, a conspicuous object was the wooden block upon which the victims had had to lay their heads for the purpose of being brained with a crowbar, with, in the floor beside it, a traphole filled to the brim with human brain-matter from the shattering of the skulls.

Look! There! An Enemy of the People! Die, Anti-Humanist scum!

“And I will tell you also how a Madame Dombrovskaya, an ex-school teacher, was tortured in her solitary confinement cell. It seems that the accusation against her had been that there had been discovered at her house a suit case of officers’ clothing which the officer concerned, a relative of hers, had left with her for safe keeping whilst the Denikin regime had been operative in the town. Also, it seems that though Madame Dombrovskaya had confessed to this ‘crime,’ the Che-Ka had been informed that she had by her jewellery which another relative, a general, had deposited in her keeping: wherefore on receipt of this fresh information, she was ordered to be tortured until she should reveal where the jewellery might be. For a beginning she was raped and outraged generally — the raping taking place in order of seniority of torturers, with a man called Friedmann raping her first, and the others in regular sequence. And, that done, she was questioned further as to the whereabouts of the jewellery, and further tortured by having incisions made into her body, and her finger tips nipped with pliers and pincers. Until at last, in her agony, with the blood pouring from her wounds, she confessed that the jewels were hidden in an outbuilding of her house. The same evening (the date being November 6) she was shot, and when she had been dead about an hour, one of the Che-Ka’s employees searched the outbuilding indicated, and duly found hidden there — a plain gold brooch and a few rings!”

And then, boys and girls, we have the case

of a young woman who, sentenced to death by the Che-Ka of Kislovodsk for “speculative trading,” was subsequently violated by the head of the “counter-espionage department” before being killed with his sword, and having foul sport made of her naked, dismembered body. A