Shortly before his death, in the face of his exile from Austria due to the rise of Nazism, Sigmund Freud wrote, “We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.”
Today, we live in remarkable times again, but the nature of those times is somewhat different: We find with astonishment that totalitarianism has concluded an alliance with irony.
Proof of this is yet again before us in the form of the recent scandal over British academic Jason Arday, who lied and plagiarized himself to the heights of U.K. academia at Cambridge University, was exposed and then apparently committed suicide.
The most shocking aspect of the scandal was not Arday himself. Academia on both sides of the Atlantic has been on a long slide toward total corruption for decades, and the progressive regime that rules it was bound to cough up another disgrace.
Nor can academia’s astounding psychoses on the issue of race be ignored, given that Arday was a black Briton who concocted an extraordinary and self-evidently unbelievable story of overcoming innumerable hardships on his way to the top. Such things are catnip to racially obsessed progressives. Indeed, what is surprising is not that Cambridge hired Arday, but that it actually managed to admit, albeit under massive public pressure, to his malfeasances.
Arday, however, has had the last word. As a consummate con artist, he likely knew that the spectacle of his suicide would be his masterstroke—and he was right. Progressive activists and academics have sprung to his defense, proclaiming him the victim of a racist witch hunt and demanding accountability not from the con artist and those who enabled him, but from those who exposed him. Indeed, they have gone so far as to demand legal limits on media coverage of public figures in response to the scandal.
Journalist Eve Barlow has made short work of the idea. She wrote, “If you’ve ever witnessed a real witch hunt, which I have, you would know that ‘Arday’s Law’ would be completely unenforceable. How do you ensure that only, say, 10 pieces of media a week are produced about said public figure? You cannot. It would become a tool for the new dictators of who should be silenced and who should not be silenced.”
Clearly, if Barlow is right—and she is—such a law would effectively end freedom of speech in Britain. Indeed, this is likely the intention of those advocating it. After all, it would give them essentially unlimited power over the public discourse, which has been an avowed ambition of progressives for well over a decade, whether through “cancel culture” or outright censorship.
The horrifying is hilarious, the hilarious is horrifying and all the more horrifying the more hilarious it is.
Such totalitarian impulses are hardly new, and historically they have been the province of both right- and left-wing extremists. Nonetheless, there is something a bit novel about their latest iteration. Indeed, the possibility that the great British tradition of free speech might be annihilated in the name of an academic con artist is not just horrifying; it feels zeitgeist-defining, because it not only threatens a basic democratic freedom, but is also comically mad. That is to say, it is not just sinister, but also quite funny. It is the second time as farce.
This strange confluence of totalitarianism and irony has been on display for some time, particularly in the form of the antisemitic alliance between progressives, the far-right and Muslim extremists who are currently scorching the West.
In this movement, we find genocidists who denounce an imaginary genocide; racist anti-racists; conservatives who embrace revolutionary anarchism; socialists with million-dollar homes and trust funds; a movement that acts in the name of the working class that has essentially no working class support; feminists who justify mass rape and homicidal misogyny; avowed Christians who ally themselves with Islamists who consider them idolators; LGBT people who work in concert with those who would slaughter them; and suicidally collaborationist Jews who claim to speak for the majority of the Jewish community while damning the majority of the Jewish community for countless fictional malfeasances.
Perhaps the supreme irony is that all this annihilationist hate is presented as an expression of empathy and compassion. Whether on behalf of Hamas or Arday, we are subjected to the spectacle of the weeping terrorist, the weeping tyrant, the weeping antisemite, the weeping Hitler, the weeping Stalin and the weeping Haman.
One may have different responses to this phenomenon, but foremost among them must be laughter. Like it or not, it is riotously funny. The finest comedian could never conceive of such hilarious derangement.
Jews have long been inured to such irony, and Jewish humor has reflected it for centuries. It was best understood, perhaps, by Kafka, who illustrated it brilliantly at the climax of his story “In the Penal Colony,” in which a sadistic official, in a fit of frustrated pique at his malfunctioning torture machine, leaps into the mechanism and is willingly mutilated and killed.
The horrifying is hilarious and the hilarious is horrifying. Indeed, it is all the more horrifying the more hilarious it is. This too is not new. For example, no one can deny that most films of Hitler speaking, so long as the sound is off, look uproariously ridiculous.
In the end, Hitler was not ridiculous, and however allied with irony, totalitarianism is not ridiculous either. Indeed, a totalitarianism defined by irony may be the most insidious of all. Because it is funny, it can seem innocuous and even vaguely charming. At the same time, people often view it as so ludicrous that it could not possibly gain political power. Thus, they fail to take the threat seriously.
They should take it very seriously indeed. Totalitarianism may be funny at times, but it is not a laughing matter. It remains what it is even with irony as its ally. When it comes to power, it always slaughters and enslaves. If we allow it to have its victory, it will do so again, even if it comes with a smile on its face.
