Black Lives Manors, Dostoevsky

 I post this video above not to wallow in the subject of the utter hypocrisy of the BLM co-founder living in an almost totally white wealthy area, or even as it turns out that this is only one of a number of her properties, but that it just suddenly flashed in me a memory of Dostoevsky covering just this little aspect of such people in his novel Demons, which I’ve written about several times in relation to socialism and revolutionary politics, and which rather than being something of a historical museum piece relevant to particularly the Russia of Dostoevsky’s unfolding time is perhaps unfortunately extremely prescient to the present. But the particular little thing that came to mind is this quote from the genteel, idle, liberal figure Stepan Verkhovensky, who is appalled and shocked to see the kinds of offshoots in terms of people and ideologies arising down the line from the progressive ideas he had revered and helped in his small way to foster. Here, after seeing in evidence some of the acquisitive nature of his son, Pyotr, who is the main revolutionary figure in the novel, is the following, which sparked up in me when watching the above short video:

“Why is it, I’ve noticed,” Stepan Trofimovich once whispered to me at the time, “why is it that all these desperate socialists and communists are at the same time such incredible misers, acquirers, property-lovers, so much so that the more socialist a man is, the further he goes, the more he loves property . . .

why is it? Can that too come from sentimentality?”