Book Notes: The Wokesters of 100 Years Ago

Your progressive beliefs are a religion of sorts. Only your God isn’t in the heavens. You moved God into people. Everything that was clear, intelligent and necessary in religion, in your teaching is foggy, invented, and utterly useless.

– Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Balance (1912)

Vynnychenko was a best-selling Ukrainian writer and the Prime Minister of the Ukrainian Republic in 1918. Balance was one of his early novels where he tells about the lives of revolutionaries exiled in Paris. This isn’t one of his most accomplished novels but the portrayal of last century wokesters stuns with its continued relevance.

Vynnychenko was such a sincere socialist that, as he shared many years later, he believed that when socialism arrived, there would never be bad weather again. When the long-awaited and passionately desired socialism finally came and culminated in the only form of government it can possibly culminate in, which is Stalinism, Vynnychenko was compensated for his life-long fight for socialism with exile and a complete erasure of his name and work in Ukraine. Even now, much of his work has not been published.

He was a writer first, though, and in his literary work did not show progressives as any better than they were. Even in 1912, when he wrote Balance, Vynnychenko offered a devastating portrayal of his fellow socialists. Spoiled children of rich parents, they engage in acts of adolescent rebellion that include sexual perversions, satanism, and all sorts of addictions. They are physically and morally degenerate yet believe themselves to be carriers of superior morality. The depths of their condescension towards “workers” whom they strive to “liberate” are unfathomable.

In 1912, the phenomenon of spoiled brats clamoring for a revolution was new. Nobody could say for certain how the story would end. Today, however, we do know. Maybe it’s time we started learning from the mistakes of the past.