Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. Skyhorse Publishing, 2024; 258 pp.
With their profoundly mediocre new book Unhumans: the Secret History of Communist Revolutions, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec inadvertently illustrate some of the reasons why conservatives so often fail to counter the ideological victories of the Left. Like so many conservative activists before them, Posobiec and Lisec attempt to fight the Left with strategies that can yield only short-term tactical victories, while retreating when it comes to the larger more important battle: the battle of ideas.
This book appears to be an attempt by the authors to address some larger historical and strategic questions about the problem of communist coups and revolutions. Unfortunately, it lacks the depth to do so. Indeed, Unhumans has the feel of a book that was written strictly for a social-media audience—heavy on slogans and bumper-sticker-level zingers, but lacking any weightier analysis that addresses the foundations beneath today’s ideological battles. Moreover, the book suffers from the sorts of broad generalizations that are common in social media. The book lumps together, for example, today’s social-democratic Left with the armed partisans of the Spanish Civil War, or the merciless Red Guard of the Bolsheviks. While it’s true that all these groups share certain characteristics common to the Left overall, the lack of precision is unhelpful, to say the least.
Worst of all, the book largely assumes away the role of ideology in laying the groundwork for the success of various leftwing movements. Without addressing these larger more fundamental ideological questions, we can never hope to understand why the Left and has been so successful in winning repeated victories in the ideological and political “long game.”
Instead, the focus of Unhumans is almost totally on political tactics and events. The authors are competent enough at describing the tactics used by leftwing groups to carry out coups and win elections. But Posobiec and Lisec are apparently at a loss when it comes to understanding why public opinion so often sides with the Left in the first place. Without this understanding, opponents of the Left can never hope to move beyond fighting a haphazard, rearguard defense against an ever-growing menace.
A Very Incomplete View of History
The full subtitle of Unhumans is “The secret history of communist revolutions (and how to crush them.)” Unfortunately, for these authors, this grand strategy for fighting communists amounts to little more than installing a dictator or other military strongman to counter the communists militarily.
To be fair, historical experience suggests that this strategy—as a last resort—is sometimes the less-bad option. The facts, unfortunately, repeatedly show that in many cases people have been forced to choose between nationalist dictators and communist totalitarians. Ordinary despots like, say, Engelbert Dollfuss or Tsar Nicholas II are preferable to totalitarians like Hitler or Lenin.
For the authors of Unhumans, however, this support for dictators is no last resort, but is a primary strategy. Moreover, the authors shower dictators like Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco with adulation. To support this hero worship, Posobiec and Lisec make some wild claims, such as their contention that Franco and Thomas Jefferson are men cut from the same cloth. In one passage, nearly comical in its ahistoricity, the authors write: “Franco and his forces were …akin to 1770s George Washington and the colonial patriots.” Posobiec and Lisec then go on to say that Franco and his generals were “much like the United States founding fathers” and the authors also state that the words of the Declaration of Independence “perfectly describe the 1936 counterrevolution in Spain.”
It is easy enough to have some sympathy for Franco’s supporters in Spain in the 1930s. Many of them faced massacres at the hands of Republican death squads. On the other hand, “absurd” is the word that comes to mind when we see these authors trying to frame the Francoists as akin to libertarian Jeffersonians of the eighteenth century.
Posobiec and Lisec take similarly hamfisted approaches to a variety of historical situations. They heap praise on Tsar Nichoas II, for example, a man who helped build the despotic Russian state that the Bolsheviks later augmented to even more disastrous effect. The fact that Nicholas facilitated the Bolshevik takeover—i.e., with his decision to impoverish Russia and delegitimate the Russian state rather than exit the first World War—gets little mention.
Posobiec and Lisec also have an odd affinity for the Roman dictator Julius Caesar, whom the authors anachronistically attempt to portray as an anti-communist activist. Although Caesar clearly has nothing to do with modern-day contests against communists, Posbiec and Lisec can’t resist the opportunity to declare their enduring fondness for yet another military strongman. It’s only surprising that the authors don’t compare Caesar to Samuel Adams or George Mason. That may have proven difficult, though, since the name “Caesar” was used as an insult by some American founding fathers.
The Central Role of Ideology
As one progresses through this book it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore how Posobiec and Lisec display little interest in understanding why these revolutionary movements become so popular. We see this in the way the authors present their historical case studies over and over. Each of these cases begin with a doddering old regime losing legitimacy while public opinion is already largely in favor of the Leftist revolutionaries. Then, once the communists (or other leftist groups) have secured enough public support to make a play for control of the state, the authors tell us we must install a new nationalist despot to militarily neutralize the communist threat.
The authors never ask the question of why the communists and the Left are, time and again, able to gain so much favor among the public in the first place. Were Posobiec and Lisec to seriously ask this question, they might discover that the communists remain an enduring threat because they are so adept at fighting the ideological battle. The communists, and the Left in general, understand that so long as they continue to win victories in the battle of ideas, they create fertile ground for new political victories in the future.
Posbiec and Lisec have no answer to this aspect of the fight. In their political model, the popularity of communism is assumed to be an immutable force of nature that appears out of nowhere. Thus, there is no way—other than grooming the next dictator—to fight back against the incessant encroachments of the Left.
In the authors’ version of history, the primary problem with communists and the Left is that they are “radical” and that they teach people to have a “grievance.” These are concepts that could be applied to any ideology, and hardly specific to the Left or to communists. For example, if radicalism and “having a grievance” are only for communists, then Thomas Jefferson was a communist. The Declaration of Independence, after all, was largely just a long list of grievances against the ruling class. The American secessionists of 1776 were nothing if not radicals.
The author’s inability to comprehend the importance of ideology leads to some strange observations. In their section on the French Revolution, for example, Posobiec and Lisec completely ignore the role of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He is mentioned, in passing, only once, with no hint that that he was the most widely read and most influential political theorist in France in the years before the revolution. His anti-clericalism and his concept of the “general will”—both central ideas to the revolution—are simply ignored here. Rather, Posobiec and Lisec attribute the motivations behind the revolution to the supposed fact that “if there’s one thing the French love above all else, it’s criticism.” You see, the French complained too much, and complaining is how you end up with the Reign of Terror.
This ideology-free view of history and human society permeates the book, but only when we appreciate the centrality of the battle over ideas and ideology can we even hope to strike at the Left’s foundations. It is through its ideological victories that the Left turns the public against private property and in favor of a powerful centralized state that can impose the Left’s version of “justice.” In turn, this ideological shift allows the Left to make ever larger political gains. Political action such as voting is “downstream” from ideology, and whoever is winning the ideological war will eventually win the political one.
Without some victories on the ideological battlefield, those who oppose communists will only repeatedly have to fall back on despotic regimes to eradicate communist ideas by force. Having to resort to a Franco or a Pinochet is a sign of failure in the realm of ideas and public opinion. In contrast, we could ask ourselves why it is that some parts of the world—i.e., Latin America, Southern Europe—seem to require dictators to keep Leninists at bay, while other parts of the world do not. Why is it that Spain required decades of Francoist rule to keep it from going communist while the Netherlands and Switzerland somehow escape this fate? The answer is found in the public’s ideology, but you’d never guess this from reading Unhumans.
The title of this book promises to us the “secret history” of communist revolutions, and “how to crush them.” Unfortunately, the book doesn’t deliver as promised.
Originally Posted at https://mises.org/