INTERVIEW ⟩ Woke and Islam are strange bedfellows, US professor says

Photo: Eero Vabamägi

• I’ve seen the emergence of a new moral monster out of the fight against racism - the woke.
• Both radical Islam and cultural Marxists see Western civilisation as their main enemy.
• Trump is useful for defeating the woke ideology. More reasonable people come thereafter.

Political ideologies are the modern surrogate religions that have taken the place of traditional ones, says Andrey Znamenski, professor of history at the University of Memphis (USA): «It is because people need to believe in something».

We met and talked about the role of ideologies in our turbulent world in a cold October morning in a large shopping mall in Tallinn, just days before the Hamas attacked Israel.

Martin Ehala: You have travelled extensively, taught at the Hokkaido University in Japan, the University of Toledo, were a resident scholar at the Library of Congress. But you were born in the USSR, in provincial Samara…

Andrei Znamenski: Yes, I was born in Samara. Fortunately, my parents gave me good education. I was interested in American Indians, the history of the Wild West. My father encouraged me to study English and hired me an English teacher. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, I was prepared to emigrate – I could understand English perfectly but could not speak well because of lack of practice.

You have written a disillusioned history of socialism. Did your family have a dissident background?

My family had an intelligencia background. They were no dissidents at all, they were regular Soviet people. My mother was a teacher of literature, and at some point, a vice rector of a medical college. She had little time for home and family. My father was professor of chemistry and geology, and he had more time for me.

He had a peculiar attitude towards the Soviet regime: don’t object anything they tell you, superficially agree with whatever they tell you, but don’t give a damn about them, don’t trust them, mind your own business. Follow your interest, follow your hearth, pretend that you believe…

I know the attitude, it was the same here, the double consciousness.

Exactly, the double consciousness, it is the best way to describe it. But there was something that very much upset me when I was a young adult. When I was finishing my high school, I planned to become a historian. My naïve expectation was that all roads were open to me. I passed my university entrance exams well, but they did not accept me. By chance I found out that this happened because they thought I was a Jew - my name Znamenski sounded Jewish to them. The funny thing is that I am not Jewish. At that time in the Soviet Union (1978-79), there was an unofficial practice to limit the admission of Jews into Soviet universities, and because of that, they did not accept me. When I learned about that, something broke inside me, because it was so disgusting. I thought, what was going on? It was just unbelievable. I felt that I was kicked out of the system.

And this is when you lost your faith in socialism?

Not exactly. At that time, I started thinking that the Soviets distorted socialism. I happened to go to Moscow where in the foreign language library (so-called Inostranka) I started to read books on Western socialism – I read Herbert Marcuse, and other the New Left scholars. Something was going on in my mind, I thought we should upgrade socialism, we should improve it. Yet, at the same time, my major goal was to go to university and to become a historian, and then to get a candidate of historical sciences degree (a Soviet PhD type degree) My long term plan was to become americanist – that is how at that time they called scholars who studies the United States. It was my dream because I knew I could not get out of the Soviet Union. Eventually, I must say, I did accomplish my goal by being able to wiggle myself into a university, then to a graduate school. In fact, I was also able to teach World History at the Samara Pedagogical Institute between 1986 and 1991.

How did you act upon the idea of upgrading socialism?

In 1989 there was a guy, he was a democratic socialist, his name is Boris Kagarlitski, proponent of the New Left ideas; by the way, the Putin regime recently threw him into prison. He came to Samara to visit some of his friends, and I was introduced to him. It was when Gorbachev started perestroika. We created a discussion club. It was called Perspectives.

Boris Kagarlitsky in 2023 Photo: Rabkor / YouTube

So, Boris Kagarlitsky had a dream to set up a Western-type Democratic Socialist Party in Russia. In fact, I took part in an inauguration meeting of this party. Of course, it was an absolutely failed project. At that time, observing people around me, I realised that they did not want socialism, they wanted to get rid of everything remotely reminding them of socialism. Still, I naively assumed that maybe, if I go to the West, there may be some ideas in the West for us to create a good socialism, maybe in Sweden, maybe in Finland where they mixed some socialism with capitalism. And that was how I eventually came to the United States. It was 1991.

In New York, you made a connection to a Marxist humanist activist group? How did you find them?

Once, wandering New York streets, I noticed a poster hanging on a bulletin board at the Columbia University campus. The poster announced that there was a Marxist-humanist meeting. This is how I was introduced to that group. It was founded in 1950s by Raya Dunayevskaya, she was once a personal secretary of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. When he was killed, she returned to USA to promote Trotskyite ideas.

Marxist-Humanists and like-minded groups had eventually realised that the proletariat (the industrial working class that was expected to liberate the world from capitalism) did not want to go to the barricades, but they did not want to give up on that “chosen people” of classical Marxism. So, Raya Dunayevskaya began working to mix ideas of proletariat with race and gender, searching for new groups that could act as allies for the proletariat or even as a surrogate proletariat. Among primary candidates to the role of these new revolutionary «movers and shakers» one could find African Americans, American Indians, Hispanics, and women. Later, that type of neo-Marxist thinking that was pursued by Dunayevskaya and various left ideologues in the 1960s-1970s laid the foundation for Cultural Marxism and, more broadly, for the so-called Woke mentality that is currently the dominant mainstream trend on the left in North America, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

 April 29, 1992 demonstrators protest the verdict in the Rodney King beating case in front of the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters in Los Angeles. Photo: Nick Ut/AP

Thit New Left woke mentality was emerging right in front of my eyes when I came to the United States. In the summer of 1992, when I happened to be in Chicago for a Marxist humanist conference, there were the infamous Los Angeles riots, when some marginal segments of African Americans vandalized numerous LA stores and facilities, being upset that one black criminal on parole (Rodney King) was beaten by the police after a car chase when he refused to comply. And the Marxist humanist crowd cheered: oh, right, here we go – first sparks of a revolution were ignited in LA! For me it was the first big red flag, because the rioting people were just looting, destroying the stores, and the Marxist humanist celebrated them as the spontaneous spearheads of the revolution. Since the working class did not rise, it was these «people of colour» who were to take the torch.

When did your academic interest turn to the history of socialism?

Strange as it may sound, this came from my interest in American Indians, as I was originally an historian of religion who was exploring Native American spirituality; while still in the Soviet Union, I translated Black Elk Speaks (1961), memoirs of a famous Sioux Indian medicine man, which is considered a classic of Native American literature. And I started to ask myself why people in the West were so obsessed with the non-Western people and culture. In the course of my research, I noticed that Western people heavily romanticised China, India, the black people, and the Native Americans. Furthermore, I noted that it also had something to do with the idealization of people who were viewed as oppressed. If they said something, everybody was expected to stay silent and listen to their «wisdom». Later, I realized that I was dealing with a grand change in the left thinking that in the 1970s-1980s was giving up on idealizing the proletariat and moving toward the new «chosen people» whom they located in the Third World, in Native American reservations, and Black ghettoes.

There was a funny episode when I was for the first time introduced to that type of «progressive» thinking. In 2001, I went to a conference in Quebec, Canada. There was a panel, three speakers, each had 15 minutes to speak. One of the speakers happened to be an American Indian, he was speaking more than 15 minutes, he was speaking 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. I started looking around me trying to figure out what was going on.

While they were trying fight against racism, they created another moral monster, that we call the Woke mindset, a semi-religious ideological frenzy when people constantly police the behaviour of surrounding individuals, looking everywhere for an evidence of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

My colleague who got my eye, a Jewish-Russian immigrant who had lived there for a long time, whispered to me, «He is native American, you should not interrupt him». What I see in US and Canada, while they were trying fight against racism, they created another moral monster, that we call the Woke mindset, a semi-religious ideological frenzy when people constantly police the behaviour of surrounding individuals, looking everywhere for an evidence of racism, sexism, and homophobia. The current American life is full of examples of woke moral panic when entire crowds literally go crazy over something that frequently turns out to be false alarms. A several years ago, a Dominican monk in his traditional white gown who happened to visit the Indiana University was mistakenly taken for a KKK member, and in a few hours the entire campus was put on a high alert being caught in a severe panic over the «racist invasion» with students and staff running around and screaming.

Woke is in fact the recycling of the old Marxist idea. In old times, the bourgeoise were the oppressors and proletarians were considered oppressed. In our days, the mainstream left considers the entire white majority oppressors, whereas all sorts of minorities are declared the oppressed, and, as such, they are automatically admitted in the category of protected people. The «oppressor» is expected to constantly repent. Instead of assessing people as individuals, instead of assessing them on the basis of merit, the current cultural left wants to pigeonhole society into different groups, locking people into their identities. It is a very dangerous trend.

A disturbing trend, indeed. But why in history, the leftist ideas have been so immensely popular, what is the secret of their success?

The cover of the book by Andrei Znamenski, downloadable here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:41511/ Photo: screenchot

A good question. In the modern time we have a decline of the traditional religions, especially among the educated people. But you must believe in something, you cannot live without a faith. It reminds me the famous novel by Ivan Turgenev, «Fathers and sons». He describes a dialog between an old aristocrat and a nihilist, a student-leftist. The student says: «I do not believe in anything, I am atheist». And the old aristocrat asks: «Do you really believe this?» and the student says «Yes!». So, the aristocrat replies: «You see, you still believe in something». Basically, we must believe in something.

When the traditional religion started to collapse, a surrogate religion in a secular guise came in to fill the void. Liberalism and nationalism are surrogate religions, too, but socialism was one of the most powerful ones, particularly Marxist socialism. Because the Marxian socialism gives you the science and faith in the same package.

Marx and Engels promoted themselves as people of science. And at that time science was very popular, in the 19^th century many educated people worshipped science. In fact, the Jacobines, the intellectual children of Enlightenment, during the French revolution were the first to create the so-called Religion of Reason. Into their teaching that they advertised as hard science, Marx and Engels were able to instil a very powerful element of faith in the form of the socioeconomic transformations – from slavery to feudalism to capitalism and finally to communism.

Historical materialism, as it was called.

Yes, correct. The founding fathers of Marxism presented it as a scientific theory, but it was also a profoundly Christian theological narrative: in the beginning there was a paradise – the primitive communism – as they called it. And then the downfall followed, the unavoidable evil. It was unavoidable, they argued, because without the “oppressive” stages from slavery to capitalism, humankind would not be able to create wealth, according to the so-called «laws of history». After these stages, finally the «chosen people», the proletarians (who are equivalent of Jews that are the chosen people in the Bible), liberate the whole world, and they bring that future golden paradise called communism. And there is also the secular version of final judgement here in the form of a socialist revolution.

Yet after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communism was literally dead. And even at present you do not see Marx or Engels quoted very often. Is the Marxist enterprise still viable, is it marching on?

Of course, it is! The Marxian socialism repeatedly failed, the Soviet Union collapsed, China partially decomposed socialism, India rejected socialist ideas, etc, etc. But this did not mean that the socialist ideas died. Right now, Marxism tries to revive itself in a new guise. As I pointed out earlier, they have found the new «chosen people» - the racial, ethnic and gender minorities.

It did not happen overnight, it happened gradually. When Lenin said that that the working class is a tiny minority, and it needed allies, and that peasants are going to be allies, he already made a first crack in the classical Marxian philosophy. When Mao Ze Dong in China came to power in 1949, they did not have any proletariat. So he broadened this definition by saying that Chinese peasants were going to be surrogate proletarians headed by the Chinese Communist Party.

This was when Franz Fanon, the third world theoretician, wrote his book called «The wretched of the world». He picked up the Maoist idea that peasants would be new surrogate proletarians and expanded that idea to the African peasantry and linked it to the national liberation struggle against colonialism in 1960s. That was how eventually the New Left got its revolutionary classes.

In US and the Western countries, Cultural Marxists innovated even more. There were no revolutionary peasants or proletarians in the first world, so they needed something different. They said: if a group’s average income was lower than the «white people», it meant that group was oppressed. And they came to cultivate them as a revolutionary class. This was how the New Left shifted from the proletarians to cultivating identities of various minorities.

In 1962, sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote a «Letter to the New Left» in which he summarised the ideas about what should be done. He said that we needed to get rid of the Victorian Marxism. The old idea that we had to rely on the proletarians and the old idea that we had to always to nationalise economy, these did not work any longer.

Professor Andrei Znamenski( right) and Martin Ehala in Tallinn Viru keskus. Photo: Eero Vabamägi

He too was looking for new classes to do the work of revolution. Mills believed that intelligentsia represented by university professors and disgruntled students was going to become the new proletariat. In their turn, two more New left theoreticians Stuart Hall and Herbert Marcuse argued that it was black people and gender minorities that were designated to become new «movers and shakers». So there was a wide debate among the New Left on who was to become the new class of «chosen people». Eventually they agreed that it should be the intelligentsia and the racial and gender minorities.

By now, that became the mainstream view on the left. To be exact, to the present day there are still some debates. The classical proletariat-oriented Marxists still accuse the Woke that they have betrayed Marxism. Moreover, these traditional Marxists sometimes compare current identity-oriented left with Hitler because of that obsession of the mainstream left with race and identity. The Woke replies – no, you are the ones who have betrayed Marxism, because Marx and Lenin said to be creative, and we, the cultural left, are creative.

This is the situation in the US and the West. But what kind of socialism is there in China? Are they traditional Marxists or they have innovated, too? What is the situation there?

China is a fulfilment of the Leninist idea of the NEP (The New Economic Policy). Remember, Lenin argued that socialist state can and should rely on the capitalist economic basis if they built socialism in an underdeveloped country. They should use the capitalist «cow» to provide «milk» to the emerging socialist state. And this is what China is doing right now. Deng Xiao Ping, he used Leninist works to justify change from the radical Maoist bone-breaking policy to the new policy of limited private enterprise under the communist control.

When I try to explain my students is the situation in present-day China, I usually draw a pyramid, and divide it horizontally in the middle. The upper part is the so called commanding hights – the power that is in the hands of the Communist Party and the Secret Police of China who controls everything. By the way, regarding Ali Baba, Huawei – you cannot become a CEO of such a company without being approved by the secret police and the communist party. That is what many westerners do not understand. At the same time, the bottom of that pyramid is capitalist, or to be exact, a limited private enterprise. We need to remember that local communist bureaucracy controls Chinese economy and its direction. The free flow of capital from China is not allowed without state permission; Chinese peasants are still not allowed to privately own their land – they lease it from the government for a fifteen-year period and then have to renew the lease.

Economically and ideologically, China is at the crossroad. They are still trying to sit on two chairs by encouraging that type of market socialism that they dubbed «socialism with Chinese characteristics». Yet, eventually they must decide either want to kill their economy for the sake of ideological purity by promoting socialism or they will have downsize socialism to give capitalism a chance to develop. I will put it this way: you cannot be a little bit pregnant: you are either pregnant or not.

If the communist top is not able to control the situation, and the capitalist ideals take over, would China be a liberal capitalist state?

Unfortunately, I am pessimistic. What I see right now in China, what I read and what I heard about talking with Chinese people is that the alternative, what is going to replace socialism is a form of Chinese nationalism – a Chinese version of Putin’s regime in Russia.

What I see amongst the Chinese students who have come to US, they are very strongly attached to Chinese culture, they say they are proud to be Chinese, but not in a neutral way (everybody should be proud of their culture and identity), but the way how they express this and xenophobia that accompanies those sentiments, particularly if they feel offended by something.

Unfortunately, I am pessimistic about China. What is going to replace socialism is a form of Chinese nationalism – a Chinese version of Putin’s regime in Russia.

So, if you remove the communist party from China, what is going to replace it will be die-hard nationalism. And, by the way, we have seen it in post-soviet countries. What comes to replace socialism, is nationalism – stronger or milder forms of it.

If the socialism as a surrogate religion fails, is there any possibility that the belief in real metaphysical God will return?

It is a very important question. To some extent, we currently observe a revival of religion. Not necessarily church-oriented Christian religion or any other traditional religion, but it is a more individually oriented religion. Think of Reformation when the hierarchical power of the Pope had been destroyed and religion became more individualised. Now we might be going through the same process, a second Reformation so to speak.

We are still in this process of individualisation. We cannot live without religion. Something will return, the idea of God. I feel it myself. Being raised as an atheist I have become agnostic right now, because I believe that there is something unknown in this world. We are so arrogant to think that we know everything about the world. Religion will return.

What will be the role of Islam in the future, in the near future, say in 15-20 years.

Islam is a fairly young religion and unfortunately, we now have to deal with its radical stage. Christianity had been in the same situation in the 1500s-1600s when we had had religious wars in Europe. Thousands of peoples had been killed over religion during these wars.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian refugee and former politician, who is an important secular conservative thinker, and an ardent critic of Islam, wrote a book called «Infidel» in which she says that Islam did not have Reformation, and it needs one. So, we, the Muslims (she speaks from her Islamic perspective) are dangerous to the world. The sooner Islam goes through the process of reformation the more tolerant it becomes. Unfortunately, we have what we have - Hamas and all their atrocities.

And despite what Hamas is and does, the identarian left, the Woke and progressive liberals are still OK with radical Islam.

Yes, they are strange bedfellows. Since the 1970s when the traditional Marxian left started to lose their proletarian basis, they went to shop around to find allies, and radical Islam was seen as such an ally. Among the first to say this were the UK Trotskyites who started to argue, when radical Islam become powerful in Iran, that we do not like those die hard Islamic people, but they are good, because they are fighting against Western capitalism. And since Western capitalism is our major enemy, they should be our allies.

And, in fact, Michel Foucault went to Iran in 1979, and interviewed mullahs, because he thought that the revolutionary guards of Iran were to inspire the West to become revolutionised. This was bizarre how the left Western intellectuals shifted towards cultural Marxism.

October 28, 2023, London, England, UK: Members of the LGBT community show their support on Westminster Bridge. Tens of thousands of people marched in central London in solidarity with Palestine as the Israel-Hamas war intensifies. Photo: Vuk Valcic

And to the present day, even though Muslim radicals hate the West and Western values, still the western Left sees them as their potential allies. It might appear as very strange. But there is certain twisted logic here: since the Western civilisation is the main enemy both for the radical Islam and for the Cultural Marxists, they advocate that alliance. Of course, it is a very masochistic, suicidal attitude on the part of the Western left.

It is suicidal, indeed. If they help Islam to prevail in the West…

I tell you more. Right now, there is a threat towards the Western civilisation from both outside and inside. From outside, it is the emerging alliance of three powers: Russia, Iran, and China. From inside it is the Cultural identitarian Left or Woke who work to destroy the Western civilisation from within. It is the biggest challenge. How do we handle this challenge?

I agree with your assessment that the West is being undermined from within and from outside. But it is very hard to handle, too many people are blinded by this political religion, particularly the young.

You see, the major problem here is education and media that were seized by the left for the past sixty years as part of their strategy of the «long march through institutions». Much of what the New Left accomplished since 1960s and 1970s, we must undo now. And there are in fact examples in US when liberty-minded activists literally took over some failed leftist universities and shaped them according to the ideals of classical liberalism.

For example, in Florida, the New College of Florida which was a top notch Woke liberal arts college was taken over by activists who rebuilt it by introducing programs that put stress on intellectual diversity by replacing the ones that were focused in cultivating racial and gender identity. Governor De Santis appointed a new board for that college, and the university has been restructured into a classical liberal college. In fact, students started to receive real grades. Prior to that, this college did not have grading system at all, because under the earlier «progressive» system there was an assumption that if you gave a grade to a student, the student could be traumatized. And that’s why they were failing. 

I think that because classical liberal system was open and tolerant, it made it easy for the Left to infiltrate the educational institutions and the media. And then, when they were in power, the Left got easily rid of intellectual diversity because they are intolerant of traditional liberal ideas.

Exactly, it was easy for the New Left to exploit the classical liberal system! And now the people who promote classical liberal views, became marginal, because the mainstream left controls the narrative.

What helps classical liberals, though, is that the situation is turning bad, the society is degrading, and this makes the criticism of the Woke credible. Classical liberal views become more popular; society is becoming more receptive.

When in the US people ask me, how to fight against the Woke ideas, I tell them that there are two simple ways. First, ask questions, because they do not like questions, and that is why they want the media censored. And, second, use the «weapon» that we relied on at the Soviet time, which means making fun of their dogmas, ridicule them, and share anecdotes. They do not like when people laugh at them.

But do Americans have such jokes as we had during the Soviet times? Everybody told these jokes because everybody knew that the system was rotten. But it seems to me that in America, the majority just believes the mainstream, and this is why they do not have this double consciousness and ability to ridicule the system.

It is true, and this is a profoundly more dangerous situation, because at that time, we were pressured from the up above, but in US and other Western countries it is something from within, and that is why the situation is more challenging than in the Soviet Union. It has something to do with the mindset of people.

And that is why I am talking about the role of education. Society needs to return to classical liberal values. Little kids should be introduced to the folklore, fairy tales, Greek tales, Roman tales, Estonian folklore, why not.

Yes, because Greek and Roman tales are based on the Aristotelian virtue ethics that the left has been dismantling for over fifty years, now. What are the chances of the political turn in US? Has Trump a chance to win?

Absolutely. I am optimist in this case. Right now, the US is a very much divided country, the lines even go through families. The fact is, that in the Republican party, 60 percent of people support Trump, even if they do not like him. I am not a fan of Trump. In fact, I do not like him as a person: I do not like his narcissism, I do not like his manners. But he is very useful person who by his «no prisoners taken» tactics will help to clear the ground for civic nationalism and liberty ideas.

Can you specify this?

He speaks his mind, and he promotes civic nationalism. Many people in Europe think that Trump is a soil-and-blood nationalist, which is wrong. He is a civic nationalist who promotes the idea that all citizens of the United States irrespective of their race should be treated equally by the law. He says: I close my borders for illegal immigrants, but the citizens whoever they are, minorities or not, they should be treated equally.

Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump holds a campaign rally at Ted Hendricks Stadium in Hialeah, Florida, U.S. November 8, 2023. REUTERS/Octavio Jones Photo: OCTAVIO JONES

This is why he is against the BLM that insists that «white» people are inherently racist and they should repent, and that the so-called people of colour not only should be elevated through quota-based programs but also should receive special treatment from the legal system. BLM literally says that colour-blind system of justice, which is the foundation of the Western legal system, is racist! BLM says that as the black people are oppressed, they should be treated differently. But Trump promotes colour-blind justice. Yet in the eyes of the left liberal mainstream, the colour-blind justice is reactionary.

BLM literally says that colour-blind system of justice, which is the foundation of the Western legal system, is racist! BLM says that as the black people are oppressed, they should be treated differently. But Trump promotes colour-blind justice.

Trump is not perfect. He is not even religious. But majority of the religious people chose to vote for him as they see him as the one who could destroy the woke culture and the domination of the left in the mainstream. So, Trump acts like an ice breaker and we need him as an ice breaker. Other, more reasonable people will come after him to sue the ground he would clear.

No doubt «interesting times» will follow when he is elected.

Znamenski: Life is unpredictable, in a normal Western country a politician might or might not be elected, and that is what makes life scary and interesting and fresh at the same time unlike such countries as Iran, Russia, and China which, as people joke, have predictable future and unpredictable past.

Ehala: I agree that life is unpredictable. But messianic ideologies see history as being driven by one general principle towards one single goal, such as justice. These ideologies are like Newtonian physics, they see the world as determined.

Despite what conventional wisdom says, there is no determined path to the final judgement, the ways of the world are totally unpredictable and that is what frequently drives people crazy. And the God’s advice is often contradictory in different parts. And this is how the world is. You cannot reduce it to a single principle as Marxism does by peddling its natural laws of history, you must balance between different principles.

The same with equality. Every religion has some commands for reducing inequality, but religions do not aim towards the absolute equality. They acknowledge that inequality exists in our world, and it has its purpose.

Znamenski: A very interesting point you made. Whether we like it or not, the world is unfair, but this is what the leftist won’t accept. They want to make the world perfect – yet the way to hell is paved with good intentions.