The following is an excerpt from Rufo's new book, America’s Cultural Revolution. The book is out today. Order a copy now on Amazon or wherever books are sold.
The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists desired not only to remake the world of politics and economics, but to reshape human nature according to the dictates of left-wing ideology. “And so,” he continued, “I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.”
This concept—the ruthless application of politics to the most intimate recesses of the human spirit—would drive the communist regimes for the middle part of the twentieth century. The Soviets had their artists. The Chinese had their propagandists. The Third World armies had their pedagogists. All were committed to the creation of the New Man.
Continue reading the entire piece here at First Things
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Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of the new book, America's Cultural Revolution.
Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images