PURITY. UNITY. ERASURE.
I have observed this pattern for several years. For a long time I would not accept what I saw. It did not reflect the reality I lived in. So I dismissed it. Excused it. Explained it away. Pretended it wasn't that bad. I want so much to be good. And pure.
But it surfaces again. And again. In very different guises, so it is hard to see - until you place the systems side by side, pull the pieces out of the boxes, unpack the language and see what they actually do.
That is the pattern I want to show here. Three systems that look different on the surface - communism, nazism, islamism - but which along one axis move according to the same inner logic. And that is precisely what makes it hard to see. Because Stalin hated nazis, nazis hated muslims, islamists hate communists. In every other way they are each other's opposites. But along this one axis they do the same thing.
And the mechanism has returned. It is here again, in institutions that still call themselves peaceful, in a language that still sounds friendly. I want to show why this is not accidental. And I want to show what once dismantled it - and why it can only return when we forget. Which we have done. And which we today fight those who try to remind us of.
Here is the pattern.
Stalin shot his own old guard. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin - the men who had stood at Lenin's side, written the revolution with him, carried its banner before all others. He did not shoot unbelievers. He shot his own.
Hitler murdered the SA leadership in their beds the year after seizing power. Röhm had been his comrade since Munich. The Night of the Long Knives was not a derailment. It was the logic finding its natural direction.
The Khmer Rouge executed more of their own cadres than class enemies. Mao's red guards consumed each other before the dust had settled.
Khomeini's Iranian revolution ate first the communists and liberals who had helped it to power, before it started on the rest of the population. The feminists got veils and dress codes and a crane if they said anything further.
This is not coincidence. And it is not what happens when revolutions go off track.
It IS the track.
The common denominator is this.
A system that claims to own the Truth cannot tolerate difference. There will always be someone who is a little less pure. Someone who is not sufficiently aligned with the manual's direction. Someone who is not submissive enough to the holy book's doctrine. And when the external enemies are gone - or perhaps never existed - the purge turns inward. Because that is the only direction left to continue the system's inner logic.
That is why they eat themselves.
And fortunately you need not take my word that this is how it is. Because the decisive thing in pattern-reading and recognition is this - each of the systems has a word for what they do.
It is a built-in category in their own language.
Islamism has takfir - the formal declaration of other muslims as apostates. It is a juridical-theological mechanism, not a misuse of the system. Shia, sufis, ahmadiyyas, alawites, anyone who reads a sura "wrongly enough" makes the list grow. That is why the greatest amount of violence in islamism's history is turned inward, against other muslims. Victims of political islam. Not as a deviation from the teaching, but as its literal execution. It is not a paradox. It is the mechanism working.
Impurity must be punished. And the list of the impure always grows from within.
Communism had deviation, counterrevolutionary and enemy of the people as technical terms in legislation. The Moscow trials were therefore not an exception. They were the consequence of a system that promises history's direction and therefore must have a word for those who stand in the way of the direction. The word exists in Russian, in Chinese, in Khmer. It exists in paragraphs, in verdicts, in archives.
Nazism had the Nuremberg Laws' measures for Aryan purity and the gradual narrowings of who could be included. First the obvious external enemies. Then the spouses. Then the questionable relatives. Then the politically unreliable. Then the church. Then the generals.
The line moves, because the line MUST ALWAYS move. That is the mechanism.
Crane Brinton described the pattern already in 1938. The revolution radicalizes inward. The moderate phase becomes heretical. Those who were faithful yesterday are not faithful enough today. It is history's pattern. It has happened every time.
Western civilization has had only one fundamental confrontation with this logic. And you know the story. But that does not mean you know why it is so central to what developed into a foundation pillar in western civilization's - society's and human being's - understanding of reality.
Let me try to retell it briefly for you.
It happened the day a woman just over 2000 years ago was dragged before a temple. She was caught in adultery. And Mosaic law was clear. The stones lay ready. Her guilt was not up for discussion, and those who held her knew it. The purge mechanism was in full swing, ready to do its work, as it always has done in all cultures at all times. It is humanity's oldest reaction. Someone has broken order. Order must be restored. Blood must cleanse.
Before the assembly stood a young rabbi. Without office. Without army. Without law in hand. And without authority to stop them, and they knew it. That was precisely why they had brought the woman to him. It was a trap. If he said stone her, he had confirmed the mechanism and betrayed everything he had taught until then. If he said let her go, he had broken Mosaic law, and then they could stone him afterwards.
There was no third way. That was the whole point of the trap.
He bent down and wrote in the sand. We do not know precisely what he wrote. For John does not tell it, and the church fathers have guessed at it for two thousand years. Perhaps names. Perhaps sins. Perhaps nothing. What matters is that he waited. He let the pressure rise. He let them stand there with the stones in their hands and feel their own decision.
Then he stood up.
And said - "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
And here we stop for a moment.
Because notice what he did not do. He did not deny her guilt. He did not defend her with legal tricks. He did not say the law was unjust, or that stoning in general should be abolished, or that adultery was not serious. He did not move the discussion to her.
He moved it to them.
And in that moment he dismantled the entire mechanism of purging. Because the question was no longer - is she pure enough to live?
The question became - are you pure enough to kill her?
And the answer was no. For everyone. Forever.
One by one they laid down the stones and left. The oldest first. John emphasizes this. Those who had lived longest knew earliest that they could not bear that stone.
It is in this scene that the West - our civilization and order - is born as something different from the rest of the world.
Not because Jesus abolished morality. Not because he said that everything was permitted. But because he placed the judge inside the human being itself, instead of in the crowd around it. No human court, no mob, no party, no revolutionary committee, no religious authority, no moral vanguard can ever again legitimately assume the position that those at the temple had. To be the pure ones who judge the impure. Because no one is pure enough.
This is the seed of Conscience as principle, not as executive power. It is the seed of power always standing under judgment, not above it. It is the seed of every human being having a value that cannot be repealed by vote. It is the seed of mercy standing above law. It is the seed of the accused having rights, even against the state. It is the seed of the victim not being guilty of their own victimhood, and the executioner bearing guilt alone.
Take away that one scene, and you no longer have the West. You have something else. Perhaps something great. Perhaps something beautiful. But something else.
Without this one man who placed himself between the woman and the stones, there would still have been no limit to what the group could do to the individual in truth's name - as there still is not in many places.
All other civilizations have had their purging mechanisms. But only the West has had a foundation for dismantling them. And that is precisely why we feel it so strongly when they return. Because we all know, in our bones, that once a man came and said stop.
There is nothing equivalent in the Quran. There is nothing equivalent in Plato. There is nothing equivalent in Marxism's writings. It is a civilizational singular event, and it carries the West's deepest rejection of purging as principle.
The same man later said - I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Not - here is the book, submit.
Not - here is the manual, become pure.
But - I am something living, and you move toward it.
Truth became a person, instead of a system. Something one approaches through an entire life, not something one achieves and must defend. Because you are not pure or impure in the Christian image. You are on the way. And the way opens you, it does not erase you.
As long as the West remembered this root, it had a built-in immunity against systems that demand total alignment. Purging did not belong here. Because it does not exist in the gospel. It had to be smuggled in from outside or reinvented when one had forgotten one's own starting point, as we have done several times.
The Inquisition is the clearest example. It arose precisely where Christianity imported the purging logic from outside - from the Roman state religion, from the medieval conflation of church and power, from rulers' need for a tool to keep populations in place. The Inquisition does not express the gospel. It contradicts it. A man who placed himself between a woman and stones cannot simultaneously be the foundation for an institution that lights fires under living people. One cancels the other.
Therefore the pattern is always the same. Every time Christianity forgets its source, it becomes yet another purging system. Every time it remembers, it dissolves purging from within.
Jesus stands at the temple with a woman who is to be stoned - not with the stone in hand.
And now the mechanism has returned. It is here again, in new guises, in institutions that still call themselves peaceful.
Climate has become a manual. You cannot be climate-pure enough. There always comes a new demand, a new wrong choice, a new sin you did not know you committed. "The science is settled", they say. Discussion is closed. Truth is established. Locked. Anyone who asks questions is not a skeptic but a denier - and denier is not a scientific term, it is theological. It belongs to a different language. A language about apostasy, about heresy, about those who will not see the light.
Even those who believe in climate change but doubt the catastrophe's timeline have gotten their own heretic word - "lukewarmer". The one who is lukewarm. That word is not taken from climate science. It is taken from Revelation. From the ancient vocabulary about apostasy.
Gender ideology - the dissolution of biology as truth - moves according to the same pattern. You cannot become inclusive enough. The alphabet expands endlessly, standards tighten, and each generation of activists demands more of the previous. The word TERF was originally narrow. Now it hits any woman who asks even the smallest question. It shames, exposes, judges - and in some environments is ready for violence, if you do not submit to its dogmas. The position that was orthodox in 2015 was called hateful in 2020 and hate crime in 2025. Not because reality has moved, but because the manual has narrowed. The purge has found new insufficiently pure ones.
Technocracy works in a different language, but according to the same logic. There is always a new compliance, a new standard, a new procedure you lag behind. You cannot become qualified enough. The system cannot be satisfied with you, because if it were satisfied, it would no longer have a reason to grow. It is GDPR forms for an association with seven members. It is workplace environment legislation that requires a sole proprietorship to document its psychological workplace. It is food authorities threatening grandmothers with fines for selling home baking at flea markets. It is energy labels on houses no one can understand, issued by consultants no one asked for, based on spreadsheets no one has read. It is EU directives about bananas and vacuum cleaners and cucumbers and water in showers. It is CO2 accounting for kindergartens. Surveillance and criminalization without filling out 8 forms for cake sales at the weekend's junior football match. It is digital self-service portals you need help to use. It is municipal forms that assume you have access to documents the municipality itself has lost…
"We'll just put the 17th garbage bin in your driveway, and then you do as we say or you get a fine - and if you don't pay it, it goes to a court - are you with me?"
And all three share the same underlying premise - you must not just agree. You must erase yourself. The system must take over what you are, what you believe, and what you yourself think is true. Your own interior must be cleansed until there is nothing left that opposes. Only then are you pure enough.
It is the same mechanism.
It was there with Stalin. It was there in Nuremberg. It is there in takfir. It is there in our own institutions today, in a language that (still) sounds friendly.
And it is there in what is coming. The complete digital surveillance. Money that becomes programmable, so it only works when you do as you are told. The account that can be closed if you say the wrong thing. This is no longer dystopia. This is infrastructure being built now, by people in suits, at conferences with nice names and broad smiles - who would so like you to do as they say you should. The purge has found its newest language, and it is technical.
Purging is not a western idea. And every time it returns, it is a sign that we have forgotten ourselves.
The West was born of a man who laid down the stone and said - I am the way.
Not the manual you must achieve.
Not the book you must submit to.
Not the party you must purge yourself for.
But the way. Living. Open. Infinite.
Truth does not require your erasure.
Only its counterfeits do.
❤️🔥🪽
