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 Relearning the Obvious 


August 8, 2006, 2006 
[Originally published by the Universal Press Syndicate, March 13, 1997]
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indentIntellectuals like to notice and savor subtleties that other people miss. But the really valuable intellectuals are those who notice the things that are too obvious for most of us to see, a category I like to call the “superobvious.”

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Relearning the ObviousAs G.K. Chesterton put it, “Men can Today's column is "Relearning the Obvious" -- Read Joe's columns the day he writes them.always be blind to a thing, so long as it is big enough.” Once somebody does point out the superobvious, you wonder how you failed to notice it yourself, and you aren’t likely to forget it again.

paragraph indent for 
Relearning the ObviousReviewing a book on “comparative genocide” in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Andre Bernstein remarks that “there is something disheartening in the very existence of a rubric like comparative genocide.

paragraph indent for 
Relearning the ObviousWell, now that you mention it, yes. The practice of destroying whole peoples, as a matter of official policy, has become so frequent in this century that whole books are written weighing the relative horrors of various exterminations.

paragraph indent for 
Relearning the ObviousMr. Bernstein also cites Robert Conquest’s alternative phrase (coined to describe Stalin’s “great terror”): nation-killing. That phrase eerily echoes the optimistic phrase nation-building. They go together.

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Relearning the ObviousIn the past, most governments saw it as their duty to preserve the social fabric and keep peace among their subjects. Government was so inherently conservative that nobody used the word conservative, because there was hardly any other kind of regime. Even the most brutal rulers were blessedly free of the modern utopian idea of “building a new society.” The Roman Empire conquered many countries, but it didn’t try to remake them on some abstract model. The American Revolution was largely an attempt to preserve the traditional liberties of Englishmen against an encroaching monarch.

[Breaker quote for Relearning the Obvious: But we keep forgetting]paragraph indent for Relearning the ObviousIt was only in the age of the modern nation-state that rulers began defining some of their own subjects as “aliens,” not because those subjects came from abroad, but because they were, according to official ideologies, racial or class enemies. A Jew who had lived in Germany all his life was no longer a “true” German. A Russian whose ancestry was purely Russian found himself redefined as a “counterrevolutionary element.” Japanese Americans suddenly found themselves deprived of constitutional rights for racial reasons.

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Relearning the ObviousBuilding a new society has generally meant the preliminary destruction of an old one to make way for a utopian perfection that never seems to arrive. The revolutionary “leader” often excites intellectuals with his dynamism and genius; various members of the brainy set have fawned on Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and others whose chief achievements, in retrospect, have been the purge and the systematic massacres we’ve come to call “genocide.” Most of these have been peacetime policies, not wartime measures — except in the sense that the “new society” is at war with the traditional society.

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Relearning the ObviousUntil recently, the intellectuals, sneering at religion and “bourgeois” morality, have accepted the ambition to remake society as self-evidently laudable. They’re a little more subdued these days. As we look back on the 20th century, the big question isn’t which utopia has turned out best, but which has inflicted the most horror on its subjects. This question has now yielded a new academic field: the aforementioned “comparative genocide.”

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Relearning the ObviousIf this blighted century yields one clear lesson, it’s that concentrated political power is the most deadly danger the human race faces. “Well,” it will be said, “we already knew that.” Yes, we did. But somehow we forgot it, and kept forgetting it. It was too obvious to be repeated, so we stopped saying it, and finally we stopped knowing it.

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Relearning the ObviousAt some point the benign possibilities of the centralized state seemed to outweigh the perils. But the benign possibilities never materialized, and all the perils took their revenge — in terrible wars, and in “peace” that was more terrible than most wars of the past.

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Relearning the ObviousUtopianism is out of fashion now, but the progressive-minded intellectuals we have always with us. After a century of mass murder, they still feel menaced by the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools and courthouses. It bears reflection that the Ten Commandments, those superbly obvious injunctions, are among the few things they don’t want children exposed to.

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2006 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
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