Review: China Miéville’s “A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto”

“Sentimental and sycophantic by turns, it may be hard to dispel the impression that Miéville is merely a hysteric. All the same, A Spectre, Haunting is a post-Nietzschean book, which leans into the charge of ressentiment. Spurning subterfuge, Miéville quite openly asserts that justice and revenge amount, more or less, to the same thing.”

It sounds unlikely, perhaps. But on every single wall and ceiling in Jordan Peterson’s home, the bathroom not excepted, hang paintings of Lenin and other early Bolshevik leaders. Peterson is a collector of Socialist Realism. His house, we learn in the introduction to 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos—the book that brought the controversial Canadian clinical psychologist, academician, and enemy of wokism notoriety and fame—is a reliquary of Soviet propaganda.

Why? Simple: Peterson wants to be reminded of something he knows that he and nearly everyone would prefer to forget, namely, the fact that almost a hundred million people were murdered less than a hundred years ago in the name of utopia, in the name of equality, red plenty, and a conflict-free world.

Peterson is a strange man. Strange, but brilliant. He likes a visual daily reminder about the human capacity for evil in the nominal interest of altruism, progress, and—as it is often grandly termed—“humanity.” It is an idiosyncratic way to go about remembering the crimes of communism, certainly. It is probably unnecessary, too. Karl Popper, for instance, also insisted on the vital connection between utopianism and violence, yet Popper, presumably, did not turn his house into a Museum of Communist Terror.

It does pay, however, to be vigilant. Yet, in a post-Soviet world, our vigilance about the threat posed by utopian thought seems to be waning.