Wessel was what Hannah Arendt would have called a failed intellectual: a product of the dark underworld of modern, atomized society, whereby a person of above average intelligence, burning ambition and an essential rootlessness and absence of moral values becomes the building block of totalitarian movements – or, perhaps, the scum that floats to the top in times of social crisis. Unlike the street-fighter Wessel, Kirov was a member of the Soviet Politburo, head of the Communist Party in Leningrad and, by some accounts, the second-most powerful figure in the USSR after Joseph Stalin. The eagerness of institutions to go the extra mile to please Trump is the key to the consolidation of the regime’s power.
Author: Mike Lofgren
Published at: 2025-09-28 10:30:30
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