Hasan Piker Will Kill Billions If We Let Him
People who miss Soviet communism are not serious people
“I don’t have any patriotism in my heart for America”, says Hasan Piker. Instead, he loves Communism with a capital C. According to The Black Book of Communism, the most commonly-cited source on the topic, Communism killed roughly 94 million people in the 20th century. Some scholars maintain there is double-counting, and say the number might be as low as 60 or 70 million, which is another way of saying that even apologists for Communism cannot hide the very murderous and oppressive nature of their cult.
I use the word ‘cult’ advisedly. Communism is a political religion. “Hegel is not a philosopher,” Glenn Alexander Magee writes in the first sentence of Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. “He is no lover or seeker of wisdom — he believes he has found it.” Hegel titled Phenomenology of Spirit so that we would understand his work as a kind of bible. All the hallmarks of political religion — faith, a moral purpose to history, a community of the elect, and the sacrifice of the masses — “are to be found in the private papers and published works of both Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx”, A. James Gregor writes. “Their presence there is a testament to Hegel and the continuity of his thought among those who imagine themselves having left him behind.”
Gregor’s book, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History, explains how the 19th century philosophers wanted to replace traditional religion, not simply repudiate it. Marx held “atheism, being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretical humanism,” an idea that he got from Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Hegelianism “takes the place of religion and has the essence of religion within itself.” They wanted to capture the spiritual impulse, used religious motifs, made moral arguments, and displayed religious devotion to their belief in the redemption of mankind. This is still the operating system of Communism.
Put simply, Hasan Piker is in a cult. “The fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century”, he told Yale students this week, to applause. (Gee, I wonder why public confidence in higher education has plummeted, according to Yale?) Piker further opined that China’s political system is “an example that we should learn from.” He has stood in Tiananmen Square to livestream and encountered the freedoms enjoyed by the Chinese in person, been to Cuba and partied with Code Pink, and praises Hamas as a popular resistance. Piker talks of America as the gnostic demiurge of the world, for the United States creates the world and all the problems in it at the same time, on purpose, to oppress Hasan Piker.
Piker comes from a wealthy family. He launched his successful career as a Twitch streamer through The Young Turks, the media platform co-hosted by his cousin, Cenk Uygur. He once tortured abused faced credible accusations of mishandling his dog on a livestream and made lame excuses that it was all a misunderstanding. Piker pairs expensive Cartier glasses with a few days’ of facial hair growth to achieve the perfect hipster look when he visits a communist workers’ paradise that has no electricity. Piker stays in the one hotel that has enough generators to keep the lights and A/C and ice machine working, in that country, and then tells rapturous crowds of young idiots how awesome the solidarity of the international proletariat can be.
People like Hasan Piker never come from the actual proletariat. Ché Guevara was born into an upper-middle-class, bohemian Argentine family of Spanish-Irish descent with leftist, anti-fascist leanings. His parents, Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa, were politically active intellectuals from aristocratic, land-owning backgrounds. Genteel poor, they turned multiple houses “into a shambles” according to Ché’s brother Juan Martin.
Parallels are obvious. His memoir, Che My Brother, reveals that their father “was the charming but feckless son” who had “no degree and a life-long tendency to involve himself in failing enterprises”, including a yerba maté farm that failed, where Ché was born. A “seasoned seducer”, he frequently left the house and danced the night away just like Piker, and avoided getting a real job.
Piker has expressed admiration for Guevara. This public piety, along with his revolutionary cosplay and luxury lifestyle, has led critics to call Piker a ‘champagne socialist’ or ‘Ché Guevara in Gucci’, but in reality this is his religion. He wears it, confesses it, bears witness for it, and explains the history of the world with it. Rather than hypocrisy, Hasan genuinely believes the entire world is entitled to Cartier rims, and the only thing holding us back from that paradise of style is capitalism.
