What the hell is woke, anyway?
It means critical consciousness which means communist radicalisation
In my previous post, we looked at Freire's critical consciousness and its derivation from a long line of communist thought (from Marx’s class consciousness and Mao’s socialist consciousness) and how woke is the colloquial term for critical consciousness.
But what’s the difference between class consciousness, socialist consciousness and critical consciousness aka woke? As you might expect with communists, it’s whatever gets the job done! When communists were out of power in early 20th century industrial societies they antagonised people’s (often legitimate) economic grievances to induce them into class consciousness. When they were in power they struggled people into socialist consciousness which required total unity and fealty to the government. But the modern West is a tougher nut to crack. Most people are comfortable and few have genuine grievances to be antagonised. So they indoctrinate people (mainly children and students) into critical consciousness which can be thought of as class consciousness in solidarity with other oppressed classes (i.e. on behalf of others). You don’t even need to feel oppressed yourself to join in!
Critical consiousness is class consciousness in solidarity with other oppressed classes
The goal is to form an amorphous political bloc of various classes and grievances that can include people who don’t even share those grievances themselves. In other words, anyone who thinks in a particular way regardless of their personal circumstances. This widens the net so they can get greater numbers. And they do it by antagonising a combination of first world problems (“that’s a micro-aggression”) and total make-believe (“we live in a cis-heteronormative patriarchal, systemicaly racist society”). This is why you see the ever expanding LGBTQIA2S+ acronym and assortment of flags. It’s becoming an increasingly aggressive political bloc where the individual components have little in common. The thing that binds them together is their critical consciousness. So the means might be different but the goal is the same. To indoctrinate enough people to get the numbers to take over society. Communists even have a euphemism for this - they call it transformation.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire (emphasis mine)
Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.
- Vladimir Lenin
It’s also worth considering the severity of what we’re talking about here. Critical consciousness is radicalisation - radicalisation into the communist mindset. In other words when you use the word woke, it might sound light and humorous but what you're really describing is a radicalised communist nutjob who wouldn't hesitate to cut your throat if they thought this would even modestly advance their cause. Think I'm being hyperbolic? Go and look at the insane atrocities committed by the communists who were the woke of their time. They had consciousness and didn't even blink when they did the Pitesti Experiments or the Great Purge or siezed food from peasants, pushing them into cannabalism (as a punishment for the peasants themselves not having consciousness). And having commited these atrocities and witnessed the horror show first hand, they turned around and calmly described them as things like “accelerating the contradictions” because it’s all ok if it’s for the greater good.
Fortunately, for now, these kinds of atrocities (or even just plain old violence) would greatly damage their cause. The sane majority would be horrified. And even the soft Western justice system would deal with them harshly. And they would lose ground. They know this and that’s why they're busy quietly converting school children and university students until they have the numbers. For now they’re pretending to be kind but they have the same atrocity-commiting mindset as the Bolsheviks. And the same basic tactics.
All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
Someone with consciousness (who has been radicalised) has completely abandoned their humanity. They only have loyalty to the cause and everything is justified for the cause. Just like religious nutjobs and jihadis, their entire consciousness is their political struggle (hence the name). All their personal connections and loyalties have been replaced with their political cause. Think being their friend or even a direct family member will make any difference to them? No chance. You mean nothing to them.
They beat her, bound her and led her from home. She knelt before the crowds as they denounced her. Then they loaded her on to a truck, drove her to the outskirts of town and shot her.
Fang Zhongmou's execution for political crimes during the Cultural Revolution was commonplace in its brutality but more shocking to outsiders in one regard: her accusers were her husband and their 16-year-old child.
- China's Cultural Revolution: son's guilt over the mother he sent to her death, The Guardian Newspaper (emphasis mine)
The woke are already committing the atrocities that they can get away with. Like removing the wombs and ovaries and genitals of teenagers who have become confused about their gender (a confusion they encourage). And they’re just getting started.
Boston Children’s Hospital is facing a wave of backlash over its Center for Gender Surgery that performs mastectomies on teenagers as young as 15, as well as since-deleted wording on the hospital's website that claimed teens as young as 17 can get vaginoplasties.
So what do we do about all this? I’m afraid there are no quick and easy answers. What we’re seeing now is the product of decades of effort that has (until recently) flown under the radar. For now, you can laugh at woke people and politely decline their preposterous demands. This is a good way to deal with them. The law is currently on your side (for the most part) and consequences for doing so will be limited (but already not zero). But this situation isn’t getting any better. We really need to turn off the tap that's producing more and more of these woke nutjobs. And this means getting woke radicalisation out of universities and out of schools. We also need to figure out a way of de-radicalising those that have already been radicalised as there are far too many of them already. And we should hurry - we’re late to this fight.