Alan Moore is Full of Shit

 

“I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see ‘Batman’ movies,” Moore said. “Because that kind of infantilization – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” -Alan Moore

I have never liked this quote. Ever. Something about it has always felt wrong, and the fact that it has been pushed so freaking hard as of late has not warmed me to it. If anything, it just dredges up all the reading I've been doing and fills me with a rant. So take this for what it is: a rant. Alan Moore's wrong. Just period. He's using Communist-style propaganda and his clout to confuse people who think he may be a truly great writer. Facts don't really agree with him, and I don't think my interpreation of said facts is really that far off.

Here's what we got. 

Alan Moore claims to be an anarchist: no leaders. He regards all leadership as inherently oppressive. And there is some truth in this: the definition of government is the monopolization of force. An organization has decided that it should be the only one to have the right to kill people. That's a government. Some of you will have shuddered at that. Some of you either weren't bullied as kids, or you forgot how most bullies stop bullying you: you make them. You stand up and make a stand of force that's so overwhelming the bully leaves you the fuck alone. I had to do this at twelve, against a whole freaking neighbhood of kids. One day they attacked my six year old brother.. a group of thirteen year olds. Yeah, a group of thirteen year olds had attacked a six year old boy. I had let them bully me for years. I could have stopped them, but frankly I didn't really want to do what needed to be done. But this was it. That was my brother. And the bastards were going to pay.

I remember very well how onerous I found it: I had to fight, ambush, and intimidate an entire group of people. By myself. And I did it. By the time I was done with that neighborhood all who had bullied me and mine without cause for five years were begging me to leave them alone. And I do mean begging. As in, they sent a delegation of their smallest and most vulnerable (they noticed I didn't go after their little siblings, the cowardly fuckers) to sue for peace. They agreed to leave me and mine alone and I agreed that I would no longer stalk them openly in the streets, my taunts in their ears. I would follow them and yell obscenities at them until they would attack me.. and then I'd beat them in front of their friends. I'd embarrass, break them in front of their friends, who for some odd reason decided that they didn't want to find out what would happen if they went after me right then and there.

By Alan Moore's and most modern comic writers' metrics, I should be a supervillain. 

I'm not. 

Oh don't get me wrong, I've got a lot of anger, sure! I'm still working through the anger of watching my family get picked on mercilessly, and frankly I've got enough abuse leveled at me for three or four people. But that has nothing to do with the violence I did. It is a hard instrument to wield, but your intention in picking it up really does make all the difference. I wanted my siblings safe, and so therefore I picked up the tool of violence. It is not addictive, if anything the work is repulsive and brutal and if you have any soul in you at all you will avoid it as much as you can for the rest of your life. In fact, most of the infrantrymen I've met have a strange nobility and honor to them that is hard to truly define. If anything, the experience with violence and killing seems to have done something to them, made them make a decision that made them better. You can't know it until you see what I'm talking about. So Alan Moore is just flat out wrong in this aspect, on an obvious level.

A government is an organizing body who has a monopoly on violence. Which is not corruptive on a very obvious level.

But even beyond that, the idea of an anarchist, whose philosophy led to many a mass murder (they were the original "blow up places of huge public import!", the godfather of all school shooters in America today) having the gall to call superheroes a precursor to facism is so obviously hilarious that I could end the essay right here. The guy who shares an ideology with mass murdering fools is telling me that superheroes are bad for me? Sure, Mr. Moore, what are the historical consequences of your worldview again?

Oh, wait, that's right, the mass scale deaths of the very people you're trying to save. Watchmen sure looks ironic at this point, doesn't it?

But that's really not the worst of it. The worst of it is that, historically, his words have some really really clear connections. See, anarchism eventually gave way to Marxism: instead of just trying to blow up the upper class they hated, the upper class who thought they had sympathy for the working class organized to try and sting the populace into action. What they found was shocking: the upper classes they thought were evil were just mostly ignorant of the working class's pain. As it turns out, the nobles were actually noble enough. 

If you are looking at today's elites and going "But what about them?" you really must start asking yourself the content of today's elites' education versus then, and actually do some deep soul-searching on what noblesse oblige really might mean. I do not claim it is 100% effective, nor am I doing anything other than asking the question.

Anyways, the nobles were actually noble enough, and actual change began. This put the Marxists in a bind: they thought the revolution was coming, while it objectively grew less and less likely with each protest and rally! Even in Germany, the heart of Marxism, the force of objective reality was beginning to win out.  So the reformed school began to form, and by 1913 or so the Marxists, the ones who thought revolution inevitable, were more or less the minority. We call the descendants of the reformed school democratic socialists.

But over in Russia the elites laughed and came up with what we now know as Communism, or Leninism, etc. See, part of the dirty secret of Marxism is that it was never a movement of the people, but a weaponizing of the people by the elites for their own supposed good. That's true of all socialism, for the record, but the Russians reached the logical conclusion: if the common people will not rise up we will do it for them. 

And thus began the Bolshevik Revolution.

We talk about Nazis a lot these days. I'm not saying not to. Nazis are evil bastards and anyone who says different needs to get their head examined. But we have a kill count for the Nazis, no matter how approximate: about 17 million people, by way of a quick Google search. Holy. Shit. That's a lot of people. That's monstrous. What an awful thing to have happened!

But that's chump change.

The Soviets we can't get a number on, for sure, but the minimum death count for the Soviet Union is 28, 326,000, by way of a Google search. 28. Million. People. That's one and a half times the Nazis, and that's us being conservative and kind to the Soviets, and they don't deserve that. If we were liberal and vicious it could be in the neighorhood of 126, 891, 000. But even that we don't truly know. That's over ten times the Nazis. That's actually maybe more than the Chinese, who are still actively killing people today! But yes, somehow facism is the problem.

You know that saying "Silence is compliance?"

Oh, you want to know where I'm going with this? I mean, sure, these are all awful facts and figures and whatnot, but why am I doing this? I just accused Mr. Moore of being in cahoots with the Soviet Union, that's a pretty awful thing to say, not to mention probably unfounded, not to mention where are you going with this Nathan???

Look over that history I just presented. Look over it. Like, really look over it. Communism or Leninism, the one party state, whatever it is you want to call it, did not occur first. Anarchism, the belief that no human can handle power, came first. When that didn't work the Marxists stepped up. And when they failed to bring about the revolution someone else said "Okay, we'll make it happen then!" Pretending that theMarxists and then Communists weren't influenced by the stuff  going on in Europe isn't just factually inaccurate, it's naive; the Socialists talked to each other internationally frequently and often. They were an openly international brotherhood, by their own proud admission. The Anarchists did not organize, but they wrote funny little pamphlets that said "You should kill your boss, 'cause if you did your awful working conditions would improve". And then they dropped them off in neighborhoods and watch as the blood started. And everyone knew about this, internationally. So yes, the Communists reacted to the Marxists who reacted to the Anarchists. It's one long river of blood.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and power is as natural as it gets. As is hierarchy. So, Mr. Anarchist, when you start killing people in the streets so they run red and terrify the entirety of Europe, because as it turns out you were never on the side of the people, you create a vacuum of violence. And nature loves filling vacuums. The consequence of "no one can have power" is inevitably someone taking power over you. And then killing so quickly and quietly that we still can't figure out the kill count, decades later.

But the thing that clinches it, at least for me, is that the words facist and reactionnary are specfically Communist insults. If you said anything against the Party you were called a facist or a reactionnary. In fact, Solzhenitsyn was frequently told by former colleauges that his writing of the Gulag Archipelago, a work that insults the Nazis as rank amateurs in the world of genocide was written because he'd been corrupted by facistic thought. 

The guy who couldn't stand Nazis and thought they were just garden variety assholes was accused of being a facist.

So, for you leftists who like to throw that word around, congrats, you're in the fine company of a government whose kill count cannot be properly ascertained. As is Mr. Moore. The garden variety leftist can be forgiven for such things, given that all leftists I've talked to are ignorant of the Soviet Union. Mr. Moore should know better. 

The thing is that, if you shame people into thinking that the law is the only way force can be used (which is an inherently Communist tactic) you create a vacuum. One which others will think that they have a right to. And they will. You can't say "Eh, that can't happen, no one would do that!" because it did, and we still don't know where they put all the bodies. To say "no one should have power" and to say "to idealize those who vanquish evil-doers is bad" does nothing for the people who will ignore that statement, because humans have a habit of not following the directions. And if the people who actually mean well think of violence and force as inherently evil things then they will stand aside and let themselves be steamrollered.

The folks who went to see that Batman film, Mr. Moore, did so because there is some part of the human soul that knows that violence, although a grave force that should never be picked up lightly, is not inherently evil, that it is not evil to rejoice in the defeat of the bandit and the looter, and that sometimes it is perfectly fine to say "Well, he certainly had that coming". To conflate the catharsis of seeing the bandit and the looter defeated (even if you must do it yourself because of the incompetence of the government) with an addiction to violence will lead to the very power vacuum (and thus totalitarian government) that Mr. Moore professes to hating.

At best Alan Moore is a useful idiot.

Regardless he's full of shit.