The Brothers Wolodzko

How bad ideas happen to good people

Alice Neal, Untitled (Karamazov, his sons, servant Gregory), 1938

We had Bolsheviks in my family. The brothers Wołodźko. I remembered the story when I saw progressives in the West celebrating Hamas’s atrocities on October 7. How could thinking people persuade themselves they were fighting oppression by justifying the rape and mutilation of 1,400 innocent Jews? How could they give full-throated support to those that would see them raped, enslaved, or beheaded? These are the kind of people, Christopher Hitchens once wrote, who would find a viper in their child’s bed and place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. But he was writing decades ago. Now we have the sort of people who would find a rapist in a child’s bed and celebrate, provided the child is white and the rapist is not. If the child is an American Jew, you might even find black intellectuals of the bell hooks variety explaining to us why the little boy or girl deserves it.

On November 18, 2014, two Palestinian men entered Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in the neighborhood of Har Nof, which sits upon a hillside in western Jerusalem. I used to live nearby with an old buddy, a krav maga instructor for the IDF, and I sometimes walked to Har Nof because the people of the neighborhood were kind, the neighborhood was surrounded by tranquil forests, and there was good hiking in those woods. That November morning, some of the good people of the neighborhood were at synagogue saying the silent amidah standing prayer, which includes asking God for peace and goodness and compassion, when the two Palestinians came in and began chopping people up, literally hacking them apart with with axes and meat cleavers. They murdered four rabbis and shot a Druze police officer in the head. Another man, Howard Rotman, was struck in the face multiple times with a meat cleaver and spent a year in a vegetative coma before succumbing to his wounds. The very next day, Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani called the massacre a “natural response” to Israel’s existence. Kiswani has repeatedly called for the “annihilation of Israel.” Two years ago at a march in Brooklyn, she screamed, “We want all of it and we will not stop … from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” When protestors set off firecrackers behind her, she added, “I hope that pop-pop is the last sound some Zionists hear within their lifetime!” Only the stupid, at this point, believe when she said Zionists that she meant anything other than Jews.

This morning, I saw a video in which pro-Palestinian protestors targeted a cancer hospital on New York’s Upper East Side. Kiswani was leading the protest, shouting into her bullhorn, “We will continue to march as we talk about another complicit institution—Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center!” The protestors booed and howled at the building, which also houses a pediatric day hospital for children with cancer. “Make sure they hear you!” Kiswani shouted, pointing. “They’re in the windows!” You can hear more howls of anger as the camera pans right to reveal…children standing in the window. The camera pans back to the crowd and there are white protesters, black protesters, all sorts. Look closely and you can see some of them are not howling so loud anymore. Maybe the idea of screaming at children with cancer made them a little uncomfortable. But most of the crowd was fine with it.

The Hitchens essay noted above, Stranger in a Strange Land: The dismay of an honorable man of the left, was written in December 2001, mere months after the September 11 attacks. In it, Hitchens describes being on a panel at the New York Film Festival in early October and hearing Oliver Stone talk about “the revolt of September 11,” followed by bell hooks informing the audience of the Lincoln Center, not six miles from where the planes hit, that “state terrorism” was nothing new in America, putting the blame on us. The crowd booed when Stone used the term “revolt,” to which Hitchens replied, “What happened on September 11 was state-supported mass murder using human beings as missiles!” Stone replied, “The Arabs have a point, whether they did it right or not. And they’re going to be joined by the people from Seattle,” referring to the Seattle protesters. The crowd began to boo and hiss at these remarks, and shortly, Stone and hooks got the shit hitchslapped out of them. Today, I worry, the crowd would be on the other side, but Hitchens uses this scene to consider the larger problem, referencing Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. “It’s not the sentence about the historical relation between tragedy and farce,” he says. “It’s the observation that when people are learning a new language, they habitually translate it back into the one they already know.”

This translation problem is really nothing more than ethnocentrism. It is true that Americans, in their worldly ignorance and cultural arrogance, think of all the problems of the planet in terms of their problems, so of course the conflict between Israel and Palestine becomes nothing more than a story about white colonizers and occupied people of color. But ethnocentrism is only part of the problem. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the problem has evolved in the 23 years since Hitchens offered his assessment. We have a new enemy now. In the ignoble tradition of Franz Boas and Michel Foucault, these are relativists who do not believe in truth or justice in any higher sense. Their moral philosophy is not taken from the teachings of Aristotle but from the theatrics of Johnnie Cochran, in that they are not interested in what’s true because for them Truth is a fiction used to exert power. As the sociologist David Hirsh writes, they deal in “discursive force rather than rational debate.”

Like Cochran, there is no striving for justice or accounting of the actual facts. There is only how one uses the idea of justice and the appearance of fact to achieve victory by any means for the people. It is entirely cynical. Worse, this is, again, not some Aristotelian body of moral citizens but an identitarian body of people with the same skin color as you. Also like Cochran, they make great use of thought-terminating cliches. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Stay woke, black lives matter, impact over intent, and cetera. These people have no moral integrity. As Hannah Arendt said in the early pages of On Revolution, hypocrisy is the “vice of vices” because integrity can coexist with every other vice except this. There is honor among thieves and even the assassin has his creed. But, she said, “only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

Consider for a moment the hypocrisy of the woke progressive. They claim slavery is one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated, but they direct all their fury at America despite the fact that across the New World only the tiny islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix took fewer slaves. Brazil took 6 million African slaves, compared to fewer than 400,000 who ended up in North America, but we are told America is the problem and nothing is said of Brazil. More than this, the Atlantic slave trade stole 12.5 million Africans to the Americas while Muslims have enslaved more than twice that figure and have never stopped since. Yet we hear nothing at all from that side of the room about the Arab slave trades. Yes, plural. The Saharan slave trade alone stole roughly 9 million Africans, the Red Sea slave trade took millions more, the Indian Ocean slave trade took millions also, and the Barbary slave trade took about 1 million Europeans. Add to this the slavery of the Ottoman Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, and more. The fact is, white people have nothing on Arabs when it comes to slavery. Not only did Arabs have vastly more slaves, and continue the practice to this day—the progressives’ new pet monkey, the Houthis, are slave-traders—but white people have fought long and hard to end slavery. Consider the British abolitionist movement led by people such as Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce. Or the anti-slavery patrols of the British Royal Navy. Or how about the American Civil War, the bloodiest conflict this nation ever fought.

They claim to oppose colonialism too. But what of the Arab conquests of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Iran, Malta, Cyprus, Sicily, and the Indian subcontinent? They claim to oppose sexism, but you’ll find it worse nowhere more than in the Arab states, where they shoot women for going to school and throw acid in their faces, where brothers murder sisters and fathers murder daughters for things such as seeking a divorce from your abusive husband or marrying someone you love of another faith. And let’s not even talk about child trafficking, or child rape, which is widely tolerated if not celebrated in Muslim countries on the basis of the example set forth by the prophet Muhammad himself, who married Aisha when she was 6 years old and consummated the marriage when she was 9 years old. He was in his early 50s at the time. This is according to Islamic tradition, and is mentioned in the Hadiths, and cultural and historical contexts have evolved since, and of course Islam is not monolithic. But try asking Muslims you may know, as I have done, what they think of this. Only the most liberal—we’re talking Sufis and ijtihad thinkers (free thinkers in jurisprudence)—will condemn the act. But the vast majority of Muslims are not ijtihad but taqlid (conformists). The Islamic modernism movement of the 19th century, which attempted to reconcile the Muslim faith with modernity, died for lack of oxygen. My ex-girlfriend was Sufi but most of my Muslim friends are Indian, Turkish, and Uyghur, all of which are predominantly Sunni. I love them, I love them. But they wrestle with their faith. And I respect that. But is there anything more pathetic than these allies you see on social media? Will we ever see Queers for Matthew Shepherd’s killers? How about BLM for KKK? Of course not. But we have queers for homophobic murderers. Feminists for rapists. BLM for slave-traders.

Where have we gone wrong and why did we let this happen? I am sickened, of course, and yet whatever is in them is also in me, in my very blood. And so, to the story of the brothers Wołodźko. You see, during the Middle Ages, my forefathers lived along the Desna River in what would later become northern Ukraine. By the 17th century, we found ourselves out west, halfway between Dresden and Prague in the Czech village of Vysoká Lípa, which now has a population of about 100 people. Then in the year 1776, two great events took place. The American colonies declared their independence and my great-great-great-great-great grandparents Michał and Krystyna got married. They lived in the town of Novogrudok, now in western Belarus, where they raised their five children. To paraphrase the opening lines of possibly the greatest novel ever written, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, my great-great-grandfather Wołodźko was the third son of Wikency Wołodźko, a landowner well-known in the village of Bojary on the outskirts of Białystok, Poland. Wikency purchased his lot in 1863, built a house on it with his own hands, and lived there with his beloved wife until the end of their days.

They had a daughter and three sons, including my great-great-grandfather Ignacy, who moved to the village of Horodziej, which was about one-third Jewish. There he and his wife Sofia had four sons named Josef, Fyodor, my great-grandfather Ignacy, and Wladzimir. Ignacy was a volunteer firefighter and a member of the city marching band. In those days, to be a fireman you had to play a wind instrument and Ignacy not only played several, but was also a good singer. In the summer, he performed with the local brass band in outdoor concerts and at weddings and dances. Life was good.

When the First World War broke out, Germany entered the conflict hoping to do what Adolf Hitler would later attempt with his blitzkrieg strategy. Namely, defeat France then turn on Russia. Hitler quickly achieved the first part of that plan but his predecessor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, found himself mired in a line of trench warfare so long it nearly cut the continent in half. If you’ve read Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 classic All Quiet on the Western Front, or seen either of the searingly painful film adaptations, you will have some idea of the dehumanizing horrors of this theater of the war.

But if the Western Front was a quiet and deathly desert full of pregnant silences and blood-soaked battles over inches, the Eastern Front was a tempest sea, a vast and fluid battlefield that spanned modern-day Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. So it remained for at least the first year, but by late 1915, the Eastern Front had also become a trench war that hardly moved for three years and ran not more than 18 miles from Ignacy’s house. Ignacy’s brothers were sent to fight the Germans on the Eastern Front, and as a result of their different posts, Ignacy ended up in Russia while his siblings ended up in Poland. Though they were only a few miles apart, they would never see each other again.

The other three brothers were brilliant young men but were cursed with what I call “Sherlock syndrome,” meaning their brilliance was profound yet narrow. In case you don’t know what I mean, Sherlock Holmes possessed amazing powers of inductive reasoning but was astonishingly ignorant in areas outside sleuthing. In “A Study in Scarlet,” we learn that he was not familiar with Shakespeare or Goethe, did not follow politics or the news, and was ignorant of science unless it could help solve a case. He knew about various plant poisons, but nothing of general botany, and did not know the Earth revolves around the Sun. Like Sherlock, the brothers Wolodzko had enormous blind spots that made them vulnerable to the propaganda of their intellectual social circles. They also had big Russian hearts and were fatally faithful to the idea of a more perfect society.

So what became of them? Well, Wladzimir became a railway inspector in Ivanovo and died of tuberculosis in July 1940. His life was not profoundly impacted by his socialist ideals. Josef studied communications in Lithuania, where socialism was popular among the students, and became a revolutionary. He joined the Communist Party, and in 1931, he became the mayor of Minsk. In 1933, he became the head of the Ministry of Communication of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. But in 1937, he took a new job and moved to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he was betrayed by his own party, arrested for allegedly counter-revolutionary activities, tried by a military tribunal, and executed by shooting. As for Fyodor, he became the head of a brick factory just outside Moscow, but he too was arrested on false charges and died in prison around 1943. Like his brother Josef, Fyodor was betrayed and ruined by his own utopian ideals. More specifically, by the utopian idealists he had mistaken for his brethren.

Anyone who has perused the pages of communist history or taken a look at our current political landscape will be well acquainted with the fact that in-fighting is extremely common among such groups. Like neo-Nazis, who are radical perfectionists of a different nature, the sociopathic obsession with perfection leads to constant in-fighting as members invariably fail the latest purity test. The great American author Richard Wright once flirted with communism, but was literally thrown out on his ass and later wrote about the experience, focusing largely on the incessant internal bitching.

Other great writers have told stories about political betrayals of this kind. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith starts off as an ideologue and ends up betrayed by the Party. In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the Bolshevik Nikolai Rubashov is tortured and executed by the very government he once fervently supported. And of course in Bertolt Brecht’s play “The Decision,” we see more or less the same thing play out. Another example is the poem “Mayakovsky” by Frank O’Hara, about the Bolshevik poet Mayakovsky who lost his faith in the cause when he saw the reality of it up close. The poem includes these lines, that I feel describe well some of our present-day Bolsheviks.

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

But I do not think of the brothers Wołodźko as fools or immoral monsters or even as useful idiots undone by the corrupted faith they chose to embrace, because I understand they did it for the best possible reasons, and also that they were wrong in the worst possible way. I do not hate them, nor do I refrain judgment merely because they are blood of my blood. Rather, I feel the same sense of depressed sympathy for them as I feel for pro-Hamas students or tankies or Russian nationalists.

I try to keep this understanding in mind when I reflect on the words and actions of pro-Hamas activists. Namely, that they are not monsters in the same sense as the people actually perpetrating the violence. They are generally intelligent and well-meaning people who truly believe they are on the side of the good, yet whose map of reality is so profoundly warped that their sense of good is no longer recognizable. They are potentially still reachable, because while we disagree about the facts on the ground, we agree on basic matters of moral justification.

What keeps me up at night, however, is the thought that they are also privy to the best education and sources of information in the world, yet come to the same conclusions. As for how people come to embrace these ideas in the first place, we should take a page from Hannah Arendt and remember, it is often for reasons we would praise, even if the conclusions they come to are ones we would condemn.

The failure is not that they were lied to by their compatriots, or that they believed the lie, but that in doing so, they lied to themselves. When you lie to yourself, you lose respect for yourself, you mar the line and make excuses, and eventually, become completely depraved. Dostoevsky described the process in The Brothers Karamazov:

Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize the truth, whether in himself or anyone else, and so ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.

However repulsive the perspectives of radical students, we must acknowledge it often springs from a well of romantic idealism, and allow this insight to illuminate the shades of humanity within their ethos. Whether it’s pro-Hamas protesters or Winston Smith, from the brothers Karamazov to the brothers Wolodzko, these are not faceless monsters but romantics striving for equality. That they keep striving despite the cost is what makes it monstrous, and yet still, beneath these political creeds beats a human heart. This realization doesn’t erase the harsh realities. Nor does it mean we go easy on the wicked. I am not saying that because we see the inner heart of a romantic that we behave foolishly. You may love your child with all your heart, but you still don’t leave a toddler alone with a kitten and a pair of scissors. We must remind ourselves also because the threat of going astray lies within us all. But that is exactly how we lose sight, in the self-same hate in which they swim. Whatever we do, we must not let them make us forget who we are. I might be talking more to myself right now than anybody else, because I do at times, I admit, feel almost…bloodlust. But then I also recall, that the day after the massacre at Har Nof, Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue was again full of worshippers, again saying the silent amidah, again asking God for peace and goodness and compassion.

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I later received a letter from Dr. Lisbeth Lipari, chair of the Department of Communication at Denison University in Ohio.

I’m hoping to find citations for your discussion of Arab slavery in today’s article. Thank you for your work.

Dr. Lipari,

Thank you for your message. I am a fan of your work in civil discourse. Here are some of my sources.

I use SlaveVoyages, a slave trade database put together by a diverse team of scholars, for figures regarding the Atlantic slave trade. Although I cited 400,000 for North America in my essay, you will see that the figure for the U.S. is 300,000, which is more precise, but requires further explanation, and I didn't want to spend time in my essay pulling that apart.

I have since corrected the estimate for the Saharan slave trade from 12 million to 9 million, having found a better source. Namely, Ralph Austen, professor emeritus of African history at the University of Chicago. In African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency, he cites 9 million for the Saharan slave trade, 4 million for the Red Sea slave trade, and 4 million for the Indian Ocean slave trade, although I did not specify figures for the latter two in my essay. In Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, the activist Ronald Regal cites roughly 7 million slaves in the Saharan slave trade, but I used Austen’s figures given that he is an academic and a specialist in the area. I also think it’s worth noting that the Congolese historian Elikia M’bokolo has cited Austen’s figures in his own writing.

The Barbary slave trade is actually estimated at up to 1.25 million, with 1 million, the figure I cited, being at the bottom end of the range, as noted in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 by Robert Davis, professor emeritus of European history at Ohio State University.

As for the claim that Muslims have enslaved more than twice the number of people in the Atlantic slave trade, which would be at least 25 million, that comes from 18 million outlined above plus about 15 to 20 million today, based on Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery at the University of Nottingham. In that text, Bales notes that his figure of 27 million slaves today is quite conservative and that some put the figure as high as 200 million. This to say nothing of slavery in Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, or Kuwait, which have among the highest prevalence rates of slavery in the world today, according to the Global Slavery Index.

As for the claim that the Houthis are slave-traders, this is fairly uncontroversial but you can find some information in this report by Asharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic paper based in London.

I hope this is helpful. Have a great week.