Maverick Philosopher

Kimball on Kolakowski on Marxism as a Bogus Form of Religion

I have argued time and again that Marxism is not a religion. But many have a burning need so to misunderstand it. What the great Kolakowski says below reinforces me in the correctness of my opinion.  As for Fredric Jameson, whom Roger Kimball discusses in his Guilt of the Intellectuals, I haven't read him and never will. Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, I have read with care.  I rate him higher than Roger Kimball does, who is more of a public intellectual (a very good one!) than a philosopher. (PhilPapers lists only seven works of his.) I consider Adorno worth reading and evaluating, as I do in Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy.

Kimball:

Whatever Professor Jameson’s personal commitment to Marxist doctrine, there can be little doubt that his habits of thought were deeply tinged by the gnostic contempt for everyday experience and faith in a secular apocalypse that has characterized Marxism from the beginning. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted in the third volume of his magisterial study Main Currents of Marxism, this is the ultimate source of Marxism’s Utopian dreams and its great seductiveness for suitably disposed intellectuals. “The influence that Marxism has achieved,” Kolakowski wrote,

far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects. … In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.

That the Marxist apocalypse is declared to be the inevitable result of inscrutable “scientific” laws only means that its partisans are potentially as dangerous as they are mystifying: the revolutionary is one whose possession of “the truth” is impervious to experience. For him, “History” speaks with a voice beyond contradiction or appeal.

By the way, 'magisterial' is exactly the word to describe Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism. It is the work of a master, a magister. But would it have killed Kimball to provide a page reference? If he had, the editors would probably have deleted it.  Why do you think that is?

Trotsky's (Misplaced) Faith in Man

On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own.

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe, a mountaineering implement far more deadly than an ice pick when used as a weapon.   Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

Read the rest over at my Substack site.

Among those who guarded Trotsky in exile was a fascinating character in his own right, Jean van Heijenoort. I have two Substack entries about him: Thomas Merton and Jean van Hejenoort: A Tale of Two Idealists and Like a Moth to the Flame: A Sermon of Sorts on Romantic Folly.  The latter begins:

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

In these days when Comrade Kamala threatens to preside over a once-great nation, I offer a salutary reflection on the horrors of communism with the help of Lev Kopelev. It begins:

While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):

Finally, a question for Tony Flood, one-time card-carrying member of the CPUSA, who knows more about communism than I ever will.  Trotsky says somewhere something along the lines of: You may attempt to distance yourself from politics, but politics won't distance itself from you.  What exactly did he say? And where did he say it?

I fear that old Trotsky is right, which is why we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable must fight, Fight, FIGHT!

Lenin: 100 Years Later

Here:

Academic Marxists of various stripes still appeal to Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet The State and Revolution in an effort to find a more “libertarian” Lenin. But this is at once a chimera and a bad joke. Like Marx himself, but even more intensely and ferociously, Lenin combines a Jacobin defense of terror and tyranny with a confidence that once the bourgeois “machinery” of domination is “suppressed,” the state will quickly “wither away.” In 1918, Max Weber had already exposed the absurd logic, and the ignorance of human nature, underlying such a claim. On some level, as Solzhenitsyn points out to great effect in The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin was a fabulist. He had persuaded himself, in words quoted by Solzhenitsyn, that “’the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, that is going to cost much less in blood […] will be much cheaper for humanity’ than the preceding suppression of the minority.” The result of this delusory expectation was that millions, even tens of millions, would perish under Lenin and Stalin.  Declaring war to the death on established customs, private property, religion, sundry “class enemies” and “enemies of the people,” and on political liberty and human nature itself, was never going to be simple or easy affair.

Lenin made of the Solovetsky monastery the SU's first and cruellest gulag. How different is the US from the SU?  Different, yes, but how different? Headed in the same direction under the able leadership of that devout Catholic, Joe Dementia? Harrison Butker seems to have triggered our lefty pals, bigly.  Interesting times. And that reminds me: to the range on Monday.

Related: Tony Flood wonders why Earth Day falls on Lenin's birthday.

Oppenheimer and Putin's Suitcases

Anthony G. Flood:

I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had urged on President Roosevelt. As Oppenheimer was a pro-Soviet Communist, I thought it ironic that in 1946 Ayn Rand, who fled the Communist system that had impoverished her family, interviewed him for a stillborn movie project. Neither of them (or anyone else to my knowledge) ever noted that irony.

Oppie’s Red politics was not a youthful, romantic fling from which he was detached only by the imperative of stopping Hitler. Two days ago Diana West, having read my post, wrote to suggest that while Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the scholarly witnesses that informed my post, established the color of Oppie’s politics, there is evidence that he crossed the line demarcating political activity from disloyalty. I am grateful to her for pointing me toward that evidence, part of which I now pass along to you.

Read it all.

Herbert Aptheker

To understand the Left and its depredations, you must study communism. Herbert Aptheker was a major player in the CPUSA. Our friend Tony Flood, once a card-carrying member of the CPUSA, and an assistant to Aptheker, points us to a Wikipedia piece on the man which will provide some background to Aptheker and his work. 

Tony would have us note that he, or rather his name, leads off the Further References:

• Anthony Flood, "The History of Herbert Aptheker", Opera Historica, 22(1), 2021, 127–144 | doi:10.32725/oph.2021.007
• Anthony Flood, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness (Independently published on Amazon, 2019).
• Anthony Flood, "C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker's Invisible Man", The C. L. R. James Journal, vol. 19, nos. 1 & 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 276–297.

Old Commie Update

Remember Angela Davis? Here she links the 'war on Gaza' with the 'racist lynching of George Floyd.'

When Rand Met Oppenheimer

A Neglected Opportunity

Edith Bone (1889-1975)

A brief Stack post in memory of one whom Communism sucked in and spit out.  In the measure that leftists work to erase the historical record, we must work to preserve it.

Stop Concealing Soviet Crimes

Why no equal time for Soviet crime? An explanation.

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Substack leader. In this entry I unpack what I consider to be a brilliant insight of Finkielkraut.

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

The Downward Drift of the Democrat Party

Substack latest.

Like a Moth to the Flame

Top o' the Stack: A Saturday sermon of sorts on romantic folly.

Trotsky's Faith in Man

On 20 August 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.

It makes no sense to put your faith in Man, as I argue in a 2021 Substack entry.

Why Did Communism Fail?

Top o' the Stack.

The Chinese Trial Balloon, Realpolitik, and What it Excludes

Now this you should read. Excerpt:

If I’m right, Beijing’s chief reason for floating a balloon over North America was to see whether it would elicit a response from the U.S. government and military, as well as from the American people.

And so it did, judging from the subsequent uproar in the press and on social media. Advantage: Xi Jinping & Co.

Now China will use what it learned about American psychology to sharpen its “three warfares” strategy. Three warfares refers to China’s all-consuming effort to shape the political and strategic environment in its favor by deploying legal, media, and psychological means. This is a 24/7/365 endeavor, and it’s in keeping with venerated strategic traditions.

After all, Mao Zedong—the Chinese Communist Party’s founding chairman and military North Star—instructed his disciples that war is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed.

In the Maoist worldview, in other words, there is no peacetime. It’s all war, all the time for Communist China.

"War is politics with bloodshed while politics is war without bloodshed." Strongly reminiscent of von Clausewitz: "War is politics by other means." Both exemplify Realpolitik. What does Realpolitik exclude? It excludes any politics based on otherworldly principles such as Christian principles. Does it not?

The exclusion is implied in this passage from  Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin, 1968, p. 245):

The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

"Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters." Nietzsche says something similar somewhere in his Nachlass.  I paraphrase from memory. (And it may be that the thought is expressed in one of the works he himself published.)

The philosopher  is like a ship with insufficient ballast: it rides too high on the seas of life for safe navigation. Bobbing like a cork, it capsizes easily.  The solid bourgeois, weighted and freighted with the cargo of Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof, ploughs deep the waves and weathers the storms of Neptune's realm and reaches safe harbor.

The philosophers who shouldn't be given any say in matters mundane and political are of course the otherworldly philosophers, those I would dub, tendentiously, the 'true philosophers.' There are also the 'worldly philosophers' discussed by Robert L. Heilbroner in his eponymous book, such thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.

The 'true philosophers,' which include Plato and his opposite number Nietzsche, have something like contempt for those who would occupy themselves with the human-all-too-human alone.

Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism

Here are some half-baked thoughts that perhaps Vito C. and Ed B. can help me formulate. The new global-capitalist woke leftism (GCWL) is very different from the old socialist-humanist leftism (which I take to include both the Old Left and the New Left). I want to understand the similarities and the differences.

GCWL versus SHL

1) Both are secular and anti-religion.  Since 1789 the Left has been virulently anti-clerical and anti-religious. Nota bene: an ersatz religion is not a religion! So stop calling leftism a religion, Dennis Prager.

2) Both target the middle class.

3) Both are internationalist  and anti-nationalist.

4) The main difference seems to be that SHL is humanist while GCWL tends toward the erasure of humanity and humanism via anti-natalism, paganism, nature-idolatrous environmentalism, misanthropy, Orwellian subversion of language, and leukophobic ethno-masochism and much else besides.

So that's a start. Inadequate, no doubt. Come on boys, help me out. Why do I have to do all the work?

Memories of the Moscow Trials

An important 1984 essay by Sidney Hook. 

Related: The Trial of Kyle: The Show Trial Comes to America

See also: 

Sidney Hook Reviews Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

Sidney Hook on Freda Utley

Marxism and Pelagianism

If Pelagianism is the false belief that man can save himself without help ab extra, then Marxism is a latter-day secularized form of Pelagianism. Among the central  pillars of Marxist and indeed all leftist delusion is the conceit that human beings are fundamentally good. The blood-drenched attempts at the remaking of humanity in the image of this destructive doctrine are the clearest proofs of its falsehood.

'The Wrong Side of History'

This is a re-thought and  much improved version of a post that first appeared on this weblog on 15 May 2012. 

................................

I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.' This question I want to raise is whether this is a phrase that a self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. For if there is a 'wrong side,' then there must be a 'right side.' 'Right side of history,' however, suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and these outcomes are somehow justified or rendered good by the actual tendency of events. But how could the mere fact of a certain drift justify or render good or attach any positive normative predicate to that drift and its likely outcomes? For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty. This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power. Would a self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it or renders it good?  Presumably not.

'Everyone today believes that such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is true. 'Everyone now does such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is morally permissible.  'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. (If a mountaineer is sliding into the abyss and fails to self-arrest, would you say that he is headed in a salutary direction?) In each of these cases there is arguably if not obviously a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, values from facts, desirability* from the fact of being desired, or progress from change.  Progress is change for the better. But that a change is for the better is not validly inferable from the change qua change.

One who opposes the drift toward a socialist surveillance state, one in which 'equity' (equality of outcome) is enforced by state power, a drift that is accelerating, and indeed jerking under President Biden, could be said to be on the wrong side of history only on the assumption that history's direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that.  Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it. Alexandre Kojève reads Hegel as claiming  that the master-slave dialectic in the Swabian's Phenomenology of Spirit (ch. 4, sec. A) is the motor of history, which, I note, clearly anticipates the opening paragraph of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Logically prior to the question of what the motor of history is, is the question of whether it has one. If history has a motor, it lies deeper than the succession of events and any empirical regularities the events display; it lies deeper as the driver of these events and the ground of their patterns and regularities.  The Hegelians and the Marxists, despite their important differences, have their answer: there is a motor but the motor is immanent, not transcendent, and the end state will be attained in the here and now, in this material world by human collective effort, and not hereafter by transcendent divine agency.  Crudely put, the 'pie' is not in 'the sky' but in the future. This is what is meant by the immanentization of the eschaton.  

For Kojève and his fellow travellers, 'right side of history' has a legitimate use: you are on the right side if you are hip to, and in line with, history's internal 'logic,' dialectical to be sure, a logic driven by a spiritual Logos in Hegel, which is a secularization and immanentization of the triune God of Christianity, but in Marx arguably the same except stood on its head and materialized.  You are on the 'right side' which is also the left side if you march in step with the beat of  the internal 'drummer' toward the immanent eschaton whereat all alienation and class distinctions will be at an end, a state in which the State will have withered away (V. I. Lenin), all coercion will cease, a state  in which all will be free and equal, mutual recognition and respect will be universal and humanity will realize itself fully als Gattungswesen, as species-being, and embrace this life, this world, and its finitude, making it so beautiful and so satisfying that there will be no hankering for the nonexistent hinter worlds of the metaphysicians and the religionists. The friends of finitude will achieve such a rich state of self-realization that their finite lives, albeit extended somewhat by technological means,  will suffice and there will be no longer any craving for nirvanic narcotics or religious opiates.

So while the mere fact of a certain empirically discernible drift of events does not justify or render good the drift and its probable outcomes, a drift driven by a hidden motor might. This brings us to the theocon, the theistic conservative. 

Many if not most conservatives are theists and theists typically believe in divine providence. God provides and he fore-sees (pro-videre). God created the world and he created it with a plan in mind. The teleology is built in and not up for decision by such frail reeds as ourselves. He created it for a purpose and in particular he created us for a purpose. For theists God is the hidden motor, the Prime Mover, and First Cause, both efficiently and finally. God is Alpha, Omega, and everything in between. He caused the world to exist ex nihilo and he gave it its purpose which in our case is to  share in his life and to achieve our ultimate felicity and highest good thereby.  A theistic conservative, then, has a legitimate use for 'right side of history.' You are the right side when you submit to the divine plan and live you life in accordance with it.  You are on the wrong side when you don't, in rebellion and glorifying your own miserable ego.

To conclude, I see two ways of attaching a legitimate sense to the expressions 'right side of history' and 'wrong side of history.'  One is theistic, the other atheistic, as above.

I now refer you to Malcolm Pollack's effort in a similar direction. We pretty much agree, except that he doesn't credit the atheist option which is a secularization and immanentization of the theistic.  I am a theist myself, for the record. 

Is the secularization a betrayal, a fulfillment, or a disaster which is the inevitable consequence of the false Judeo-Christian starting point?

Before logging off, I would like to recommend to Malcolm and the rest of you Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, which includes the Strauss-Kojeve correspondence and a very clear and informative introduction.

_______________

*Note the ambiguity of 'desirable' as between 'worthy of being desired' and 'able to be desired.' I intend the former.

Stalin the Bookman

Here is a review of Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books. Excerpts:

He was also an avid reader. Roberts’s book begins as an analysis of the personal library Stalin left behind, scattered around his various dachas and offices. It comprised some 25,000 volumes, covering a wide range of subjects including Marxism, political and military history, economics, biographies and classic works of Russian literature. Some surviving books have found their way into the archives, to be studied by scholars for insights into the dictator’s mind.

But this is no dry examination of dusty texts. Roberts takes us through Stalin’s life and shows how his reading molded his actions. Books transformed the bright seminary student into a ferocious revolutionary, prepared to sacrifice family, friends and a vast array of enemies — capitalists, kulaks, fellow Bolsheviks, imperialists, Trotskyist deviationists and millions of ordinary Soviet citizens — on the altar of his rigid dogmas.

[. . .]

Roberts emphasizes throughout that Stalin was an intellectual, whose firm belief in Marxism was grounded in a deep study of the subject; that his actions, however cruel, cynical and misguided, stemmed from the conviction that he was building the world’s first socialist state, which would be a model for the rest of humanity. By insisting on Stalin’s seriousness, and his profound faith in Marxism as modified by Lenin and the experience of revolution in Russia, Roberts perhaps downplays the fearful cost in human suffering involved. As a result, the book can seem to gloss over the gruesome awfulness of Soviet society — not to mention the serious mistakes for which Stalin was personally responsible, including his refusal to believe that his ally Hitler would attack him until he actually did.

The Babbitts of the world heap scorn upon philosophy because it "bakes no bread," to which my stock reply is: "Man does not live by bread alone." Matthew 4:4 has Jesus saying as much, and continuing, "but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."  While not disagreeing with Christ's words, this philosopher says that man does not live by bread alone but also by ideas the implementation of some of which will ameliorate and the implementation of others of which will devastate, securing  bread for some and denying it to others.

Ideas matter. They matter most when they are enmattered by men of power who bring them from the heaven of ideas to this  grubby earth of blood, sweat, and tears. Whether they work weal or woe will depend on their truth, assuming that there is truth in William James' dictum that the true is the good by way of belief.

But why should (the knowledge of) truth be conducive to human flourishing? Must it be? This is an important and unavoidable question, one that itself testifies to the importance of ideas. I mention it only to set it aside. For now.

Addendum (4 March 2022). Dmitri D. comments:

The book review (and the book "Stalin's library" if the review is accurate) is a complete nonsense. Stalin desperately wanted to appear as intellectual but he never was one. He indeed read a lot, but was a terrible student judged by his seminary grades and intellectuals who knew him closely. He executed his private philosophy tutor among hundreds of thousands of others.

 

Here is a quote from an old guard Bolshevik from Wikipedia's article on Jan Sten, Stalin's executed tutor:

 

Hardly anyone knew Stalin better than Sten. Stalin, as we know, received no systematic education. He struggled to understand philosophical questions, without success. And then, in 1925, he called in Jan Sten, one of the leading Marxist philosophers of that time, to direct his study of Hegelian dialectics. Sten drew up a program of study for Stalin and conscientiously, twice a week, dinned Hegelian wisdom into his illustrious pupil. Often he told me in confidence about these lessons, about the difficulties he, as a teacher, was having because of his student's inability to master the material of Hegelian dialectics. Jan often dropped in to see me after a lesson with Stalin, in a depressed and gloomy state, and despite his naturally cheerful disposition, he found it difficult to regain his equilibrium...The meetings with Stalin, the conversations with him on philosophical matters, during which Jan would always bring up contemporary political problems, opened his eyes more and more to Stalin's true nature, his striving for one-man rule, his crafty schemes and methods...As early as 1928, in a small circle of his personal friends, Sten said: "Koba [a nickname for Stalin] will do things that will put the trials of Dreyfus and Beilis in the shade."

 

Trotsky's Faith in Man

Substack latest.

On 20 August 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

Is the US Becoming the SU?

I've been warning of this for years. Ed West, America has become its own worst enemy. Excerpt:

Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of science, to the extent that as in Russia, scientists teach things which are obviously untrue because it supports the prevailing ideology. Then there is the media, much of which parrots the party line with almost embarrassing, “Comrade Stalin has driven pig iron to record production” levels of conformity. Once again, if you want to hear the truth, go to the BBC (until the young people who run the website take over).

America, once the most trusting of societies, is heading in the direction of Russia, one of the least trusting. Most disturbing of all is that, formerly the most demographically vibrant of western countries, today the United States has suffered a spectacular collapse in fertility. This is mostly down to stagnant wages among the middle class, who can no longer afford a family with one breadwinner, and a rapid decline of religious faith. But maybe people have also lost belief in themselves, and the ideals of their country.

The Soviet Union broke into 15 different pieces, and the transition was, as CNN might put it, mostly peaceful — although Gorbachev’s old dacha is now in Russia once again after some local unpleasantness.

Today it is the United States where people talk of secession, escaping a crumbling superpower ruled by geriatrics. This seems very unlikely to happen, more clickbait than reality, because why would you leave what has been for more than two centuries the richest, most impressive state on earth? But then a generation ago few would have foreseen the Soviet Union crumbling in a haze of alcoholic despair.

Commentary by Rod Dreher here.

Is America Pre-Totalitarian?

Rod Dreher raises the question. The video is less than ten minutes long.

History Lesson

The Pitesti Gulag in Romania

Rebel with a Cause

"The eighty-year-old mystery of the murder of Sheldon Robert Harte, Leon Trotsky’s most controversial bodyguard."

Jean van Heijenoort was another of the Old Man's bodyguards.  I met van Heijenoort in the mid-70s when he came to Boston College on the invitation of my quondam girlfriend, Charaine H., a student at Brandeis University where van Heijenoort taught.  I had arranged for Robert Sokolowski to come and read a paper on Husserl. Comrade Van attended the talk. By then, however, the political enthusiasms of his youth were a thing of the distant past.  He had given up politics for logic and love. My entry tells the tale of his murder by a crazed lover in Mexico City where Lev Davidovich Bronstein  met his grisly end.

Moral?  Stick to logic if you want to play it safe. But there is more of life (and death) in politics and love.

A comment from Joseph:

I regularly read your blog, but I never comment because I do not know how. Anyway, I wanted to send a note about the Monsignor -- what an incredible man. He is one of my personal models for how an academic should be. He is not only brilliant but also patient with students not so gifted (99.99% of them) -- and he has quite a knack for teaching to several levels simultaneously. He is also funny (and not just for a priest). I'm glad that you have had the chance to meet him.

Trotsky's Faith in Man

On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

Read the rest.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.  His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a title of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium. 

Why Do Leftists Call Good People Racists?

Dennis Prager:

First, truth is not a left-wing value. As I have said and written ever since studying communism and the left in graduate school at the Columbia University Russian Institute, truth is a [classically] liberal value and a conservative value, but it is not a left-wing value. However, destroying opponents by destroying their reputations is a left-wing value -- whether it's charging Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with multiple rapes, preoccupying the country with the fake charge that Donald Trump's presidential campaign colluded with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election, or the charges such as those made against me.

Second, smearing opponents is not only a left-wing value; it is the left's modus operandi. And the reason for that is: The left does not win through argument. It wins through smear. If you differ with the left, you are, by definition, sexist, racist, bigoted, intolerant, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, fascist and/or a hater. The proof? You cannot name a single opponent of the left who has not been so labeled.

True, but we need to go deeper. Why don't leftists value truth, and why do they smear their opponents? The most obvious answer is that leftists are just not good people. Prager has said in the past that leftism turns good people bad. I see it the other way around: some if not most of the people who embrace leftism in the first place do so because they are morally defective specimens of humanity blind to their defects because of their absurd conceit that people are basically good.  It's paradoxical: believing humanity to be good at bottom and held back  by contingent socio-economic arrangements, leftists see their way clear to the commission of the most horrendous crimes. Communists, using the power of the state, murdered some 100 million in the 20th century alone.

They broke a lot of eggs, but where's the omelet?

Solzhenitsyn on Gulag Interrogation

Here are some passages from The Gulag Archipelago that everyone should read.  A sample:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

Do you say that it can't happen here? Are you quite sure? Are you aware of how extreme in its hard-Leftism the Democrat party has become? Are you paying attention? Or are you lost in your private life?  If you value your private life you are well-advised to pay attention lest you wake up some morning to find that the private life is no more.

Now read this Dreher article to see that I am not exaggerating: Post Card from Pre-Totalitarian America.

Reading Now: Lev Kopelev on the Horrors of Communism

While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):

With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to “intellectual squeamishness” and “stupid liberalism,” the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.”

That was how I had reasoned, and everyone like me, even when I did have my doubts, when I believed what Trotsky and Bukharin were saying. I saw what “total collectivization” meant—how they 'kulakized' and 'dekulakized', how mercilessly they stripped the peasants in the winter of 1932–33. I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for it; that their distress and suffering were a result of their own ignorance or the machinations of the class enemy; that those who sent me—and I myself—knew better than the peasants how they should live, what they should sow and when they should plow.

In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses— corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov....I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me to take away the peasants’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking, skeleton-thin or sickly-swollen people to go into the fields in order to “fulfill the Bolshevik sowing plan in shock-worker style.”

Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe. Thus from time immemorial men have believed when possessed by a desire to serve powers and values above and beyond humanity: gods, emperors, states; ideals of virtue, freedom, nation, race, class, party. . . .

Any single-minded attempt to realize these ideals exacts its toll of human sacrifice. In the name of the noblest visions promising eternal happiness to their descendants, such men bring merciless ruin on their contemporaries. Bestowing paradise on the dead, they maim and destroy the living. They become unprincipled liars and unrelenting executioners, all the while seeing themselves as virtuous and honorable militants—convinced that if they are forced into villainy, it is for the sake of future good, and that if they have to lie, it is in the name of eternal truths.

Und willst du nicht mein Bruder  sein
So schlag ich dir dein Schaedel ein.
[And if you won't be my brother
I'll crack your skull open.]

they sing in a Landsknecht song.

That was how we thought and acted—we, the fanatical disciples of the all-saving ideals of Communism. When we saw the base and cruel acts that were committed in the name of our exalted notions of good, and when we ourselves took part in those actions, what we feared most was to lose our heads, fall into doubt or heresy and forfeit our unbounded faith.

I was appalled by what I saw in the 1930s and was overcome by depression. But I would still my doubts the way I had learned to: 'we made a mistake,' 'we went too far,' 'we didn't take into consideration,' 'the logic of the class struggle,' 'objective historical need,' 'using barbaric means to combat barbarism' . . . .

Good and evil, humanity and inhumanity -- these seemed empty abstractions. I did not trouble myself with why 'humanity' should be abstract but 'historical necessity' and 'class consicousness' should be concrete.  The concepts of conscience, honor, humaneness we dismissed as idealistic prejudices, “intellectual” or “bourgeois,” and hence, perverse.

Lukes mistakenly refers to Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought (London: Secker and Warburg, 1977, tr. Anthony Austin from the 1975 Russian original), pp. 32-34.  The passage is not to be found there, and where it is from, I do not know. Paging Dave Lull! But the main thing is that I got introduced to Kopelev.  It is essential to study communism because that is now the pronounced drift of the Democrat Party in the USA as the battle for the soul of America rages on.  

Anyone with eyes to see can spot the ominous parallels between the Soviet horror and what the contemporary Left in the USA has in store for us.

I mentioned Kopelev to Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence, and he promptly wrote a post about him which I reproduce in full (to save it for my files):

'And They Served Out of Fear'

Bill Vallicella, dba The Maverick Philosopher, tells me he is reading No Jail for Thought (trans. Anthony Austin, Secker & Warburg, 1977; Penguin, 1979), which I have not read, by Lev Kopalev (1912-1997). I know of the Soviet dissident from Anne Applebaum’s Gulag Voices: An Anthology (2011).

Kopalev was born in Kiev and as a young man was an enthusiastic communist. His first arrest came in 1929, for fraternizing with Bukharinists and Trotskyists, and he spent ten days in jail. He worked as a journalist and witnessed the confiscation of grain from Ukrainian peasants and the subsequent genocide-famine, Holomodor. He became a major in the Red Army’s Political Department, charged with maintaining the ideological purity of the troops. Kopalev’s disillusionment with communism started only at the end of World War II, when he witnessed mass murders and rapes committed by Red Army troops in East Prussia. He wrote a letter of complaint to his superiors and in 1945 was arrested. He spent nine years in a camp in the Volga region and in a Moscow prison for scientists, was “rehabilitated” in 1954 and became a writer and literary critic. He helped Solzhenitsyn publish A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

For twelve years Kopalev taught in the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy and the Institute of History of Arts. He was fired in 1968 and expelled from the Communist Party and the Writers’ Union for publicly supporting Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and protesting Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Writers’ Union. In 1980, while on a visit to West Germany, Soviet authorities revoked his citizenship, which was restored by Gorbachev in 1990.

In her anthology, Applebaum includes an excerpt, “Informers,” from Kopalev’s memoir To Be Preserved Forever (trans. Anthony Austin, Ardis Publishers, 1975). The subject is a rich one. Applebaum refers to informers as “an intrinsic part of the Soviet system.” An informer was responsible for Osip Mandelstam’s second arrest and eventual death in a Siberian transit camp. A network of informers forming a web of mutually enforced anxiety and fear is essential to the ongoing existence of any totalitarian regime. One scholar estimates that 11 million informers, or one out of every eighteen adults, were formally employed in the Soviet Union when Yuri Andropov headed the KGB (1967-82). We shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too quickly. Twitter suggests a certain enthusiastic ripeness in the U.S. for trading in rumors and slander, and denouncing one’s fellow citizens. Kopalev writes:

“In prison we used to be afraid of informers and talked about them in whispers. Here in the camp we spoke of them out loud. The lowest of all the minions of the mighty state, as helpless and humiliated as the rest of us, and often as falsely accused and as unfairly sentenced, they were nevertheless the indispensable cogs of the cruel punitive machine. They served for the little handouts the machine threw their way, and they served out of fear.”

Communism and Christianity

Communism is a 'religion' refuted by experience. It delivered not paradise, but the gulag and the torture chamber. Its attempted redemption by blood succeeded in spilling oceans of it but achieved no redemption. It is only the spilling of the God-Man's blood that can achieve the redemption of man. Man cannot save himself. That is the teaching of Christianity.  Is Christianity true? Whether or not it is, it remains the case that man cannot save himself. 

Trotsky's Dream

Here we find:

Socialism, when it comes at long last, will conquer the hideous inequality of capitalism, but the groundwork, as it were, will have been done by capitalism’s destruction of feudalism and slavery.  We may allow ourselves to dream, with Leon Trotsky, that under socialism, “[m]an will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”  [The great concluding lines of Literature and Revolution.]

Utopian nonsense, dangerous utopian nonsense.

Berdyaev: Communism as a Form of Idolatry

David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Touchstone, 1997, p. 55:

After the Russian Revolution of 1905, the philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev analyzed communism as a form of idolatry in a way that proved to be prophetic. Berdyaev traced the origins of what he called the Marxist “heresy” back to the tower of Babel. In that story, people had tried to achieve their own redemption — without a transcendent God — by building a ladder to heaven. Communists had a similar ambition. They had projected onto fallible beings godlike powers that would enable them to overcome their human fate. In do so, Berdyaev warned, the communists had created demons they would not be able to control.

Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment

Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire to save the world, Tom was driven by contemptus mundi to flee the world and retreat to a monastery, which is what he did in 1941 at the age of 26 when he joined the Trappists. A convert to Catholicism, with the zeal of the convert, he took it to the limit the old-time doctrine implied: if the temporal order is but a vanishing quantity, then one should live with eternity ever before one's mind.

Both became disillusioned,* but in different ways. Van lost his secular faith, broke with Marxism, and went back to the serene but lifeless precincts of mathematics to become a distinguished bourgeois professor of the subject.  Tom remained a monk but dropped the contemptus mundi. Van abandoned activism for mathematical logic and romantic affairs. Tom dropped his quietism -- not entirely, however -- and became active in human affairs, the peace movement in particular, during that heady period of ferment inside and outside of the Church, the 1960s.

Both met their ends in foreign venues by unusual means. Unable to stay put like a good monk in Gethsemani, Tom flew to Bangkok for a theological conference where he died of accidental electrocution in December of 1968 at the relatively young age of 53. Van's addiction to sexual love and 'romance' led to his destruction, and in the same Mexico City where the long arm of Stalin, extended by Ramon Mercader's ice axe,  finally slew his erstwhile mentor, Trotsky. Van couldn't stay away from Anne-Marie Zamora even though he believed she would kill him. Drawn like a moth to the flame he flew from Boston to Mexico City.  And kill him she did. While he was asleep, Zamora pumped a couple of rounds from her .38 Special into his head.  Trotsky was done in by the madness of politics; Van by the madness of love. 

What is the moral of this comparison?

Superior individuals feel the lure of the Higher. They seek something more from human existence than a jejune bourgeois life in pursuit of property, pelf, and social status.  They seek transcendence, and sometimes, like Marxist activists, in the wrong places.  No secular eschaton is "right around the corner" to borrow from the prevalent lingo of the 1950s CPUSA.  Man cannot save himself by social praxis. The question as to how we should live remains live. Tom chose a better and nobler path than Van. But can any church be the final repository of all truth? 

For sources, see articles below.

Related:

Like a Moth to the Flame

Trotsky's Faith in Man

A Monk and his Political Silence

___________________________

*Is 'disillusioned' a  predicate adjective of success? If a person becomes disillusioned about X, does it follow that X really is an illusion? Or can one be wrongly disillusioned about X, i.e. come to believe falsely that X is an illusion?  I would say that 'disillusioned' is not a predicate adjective of success.  

ADDENDUM (11/13): WAS THOMAS MERTON ASSASSINATED? 

This just over the transom from Hugh Turley:

Dear Mr. Vallicella,

In your article “Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment” you repeated a popular error when you wrote that Thomas Merton "died of accidental electrocution.”

 

It is understandable that you could repeat this mistake because there was deliberate deception to conceal the truth about Merton’s death and the falsehoods have been repeated for over 50 years.  In 2018 I co-authored The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation with David Martin.

 

There is absolutely no evidence to support the accidental electrocution story.

 

I invite you to visit our website and look at the official documents from Thailand concerning Merton’s death and find more information.  http://www.themartyrdomofthomasmerton.com

 

There is also a video of a presentation that I gave in New York City in September.

https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=9O1A7KHOUY2X

 

Yours for the truth,

 

Hugh Turley

I confess to not having considered, until now, the possibility that Merton was assassinated. So this is news to me and I take no position on the matter. The reviews of Turley's book I have so far located are all positive. If there has been an attempt to rebut his (and his co-author's) claims, I would like someone to let me know.  

 

Here is one of the favorable reviews. And here is a June 2019 article by the authors on the ongoing cover-up of what they take to be the truth.

The Fall of the Wall

Thirty years ago, today.

Here we come face to face with the fundamental reason for the collapse of European Communism. For all of the sophisticated “structural” and “materialist” analyses of the Communist world, it comes down to the simple fact that the European Communist rulers—most of them anyway—lost the will to shoot their own people in large numbers. (Not so the Chinese.) This might seem an inevitable consequence of the loss of belief in the Marxist ideology of class struggle, but the will to power of rulers has never been dependent on ideology, and it might have turned out differently.

Trotsky's Faith in Man

On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

.................................................

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe.  Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)

No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future.  Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some.  But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic.   Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?  Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?

I should think that it is less credible.  Note first that there is no Man, only men.  And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division.  The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of Communism.  In the 20th century, communists  murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.

We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith.  You say that God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say that it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future.  Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence.  But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory.  Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't. 

There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social program that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence.  Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky.  Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people'  is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator.  The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'  What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.  His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a tile of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium. 

It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein.  Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via  revolution.  Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion?  It is of course possible that both quests were illusory.

How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.

On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

.................................................

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe.  Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)

No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future.  Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some.  But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic.   Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?  Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?

I should think that it is less credible.  Note first that there is no Man, only men.  And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division.  The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of Communism.  In the 20th century, communists  murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.

We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith.  You say that God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say that it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future.  Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence.  But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory.  Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't. 

There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social program that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence.  Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky.  Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people'  is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator.  The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'  What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.  His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a tile of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium. 

It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein.  Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via  revolution.  Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion?  It is of course possible that both quests were illusory.

How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.

Catholics Defending Communists!?

Hats off to Rod Dreher for condemning the Jesuit magazine America for publishing an article defending commies.  Excerpt:

Wait a minute. No fair-minded and intellectually curious person could object to an essay in a Catholic magazine criticizing the excesses of capitalism. It’s also easy to see the justification for publishing an essay defending democratic socialism from a Catholic point of view. And nobody could reasonably complain about an essay like Dorothy Day wrote in 1933, explaining why some idealists are drawn to Communism.

But an essay defending Communism? Really? What to make of this?

My own views are very strong. A couple of weeks ago, I knelt in Warsaw at the grave of the Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity labor union movement. He was beaten to death by agents of the Communist government for opposing them. This is what Communists did to Father Jerzy:

So yes, in Poland, Communism and the Catholic Church had a “complicated” relationship.

On Securing a Toilet in the Soviet Socialist Craphole

Yet another reason why you don't want the U. S. to become the S. U. 

Bernie Sanders take note!

Rod Dreher reports that a Russian friend visited him and recounted the following story:

Vladimir told a great one about how his father, during Soviet times, solved the family’s toilet problem.

When the family’s toilet bowl cracked, you couldn’t just go to the hardware store and buy a replacement. What hardware store? The government installed that toilet, and it was the government’s responsibility to replace it. But good luck getting on a list to have your toilet replaced. Finally, Vladimir’s father, a senior engineer, cooked up a plan. He had a Communist Party connection in a city called Novokuznetzk, a guy who could get him a new toilet.

Problem: Vladimir’s family lived in Dnipro, Ukraine; Novokuznetzk is on the other side of the USSR, near the Mongolian border — a 17-hour flight.

But the family needed a toilet. So off dad went.

How did he get the toilet home? He lugged it onto the Aeroflot flight, and sat on the toilet all the way back to Dnipro. Though a small man, Vladimir’s dad wrestled the toilet up into their apartment and installed it. There it remains to this day.

A system that makes a man have to fly 17 hours one way to get a new toilet through back channel connections, then ride all the way back home sitting on top of that commode — that’s not a system that works.

No shit!

Why Did Communism Fail?

Richard Pipes, Communism: A History, Modern Library, 2001, p. 154:

In sum, Communism failed and is bound to fail for at least two reasons: one, that to enforce equality, its principal objective, it is necessary to create a coercive apparatus that demands privileges and thereby negates equality; and two, that ethnic and territorial loyalties, when in conflict with class allegiances, everywhere and at all times overwhelm them, dissolving Communism into nationalism, which is why socialism so easily combines with "Fascism."

The enforcing of equality requires an agency of enforcement, the revolutionary vanguard, that is vastly unequal in power to those who are being equalized. And this for the simple reason that people will resist expropriation: they will not willingly surrender what they consider to be the product of their labor.  The deplorable masses will have to be forced, for their own good, to become good socialists. But once the vanguard gets a taste of power and its privileges and perquisites, it will not willingly surrender them  and the wealth that comes in their train.  Greed is ancient and endemic in the human condition. It antedates capitalism.  It is therefore not a product of capitalism, and cannot be erased by erasing capitalism.  The upshot is that the method by which Communists aim to enforce equality insures that equality will never be reached.

As for the second reason, there is an innate tendency in humans to revert to the tribal and the territorial. International communism is no match for the nationalism that comes naturally to people. 

The underlying problem is that Communism is irremediably flawed in its philosophical anthropology: there is no understanding of human nature, and what is worse, no recognition that there even is such a thing as human nature.  The utopian conceit of the Communists was and is that man is infinitely malleable: collectively, he can remake himself. Change the relations of production and you change man from the petty, greedy, individualistic bastard he hitherto has been into a transformed being willing to merge with his species-being (Gattungswesen) and work for the common good. 

What is now called cultural Marxism retains this notion of the malleability of man in the form of social constructivism. 

Now apply the above insights to the current political situation as the Democrat party moves in the Communist direction!

The Rosenbergs: Still Guilty After All These Years

On this date in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death as atomic spies for the Soviet Union.  They were most certainly guilty as we now know. But no amount of proof of their guilt will stop the Left from lying about them as victims of  American 'fascism.' In those days we weren't the decadent weaklings we have become, unsure of ourselves, and unwilling to defend our nation against deadly threats.

Why, for example, is Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, still alive?  He committed his crimes to the cry of Allahu akbar in 2009, was sentenced to death in 2013, but is still alive.  Why hasn't he been executed?  Why the endless appeals?  

We need a judicial fast track to execution for convicted terrorists.  Justice demands it. 

We have lost our way.  We now longer believe in ourselves. We have elected and re-elected a hate-America leftist fool who actually had the temerity to refer to Hasan's terror as "work place violence."  Many of us feared that he would  be elected for a third term in the guise of Hillary Milhous Clinton. But Trump put a stop to that. Thank God for the Orange Man! 

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

I must have written this in 2004. It makes good on yesterday's promise to say more about why greed is not the origin of capitalism.

.....................................................

The C-Span Washington Journal of 31 May 2004 with Steve Scully at the helm was particularly excellent.  One of the guests was a sweet old lady by the name of Mary Alice Herbert, the vice-presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA in 2004.

She spouted a lot of nonsense, but the assertion that really got my blood up was the claim that, and I quote from my notes, "The engine of capitalism is greed." This is no better than saying that the engine of socialism is envy.

Greed (avarice) and envy are vices. A vice is a habit. Habits don't float in the air; they are dispositions of agents. A greedy person is one who is disposed toward inordinate acquisition, while an envious person is one who is disposed to feel diminished by the success or well-being of others to the extent of hating them for their success or well-being. Clearly, one can support, and participate in, a free market economy without being greedy. Anyone who is reading this post is most likely an example. Equally, one can support, and participate in, a socialist economy without being envious. Think of all the good Russians who really believed the Commie nonsense, made their selfless contributions, but ended up in the Gulag anyway, not to mention non-Russians who succumbed as well, Freda Utley being one example among many.

Winifred Utley (January 23, 1898 – January 21, 1978), commonly known as Freda Utley, was an English scholar, political activist and best-selling author. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 as a trade union activist, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. Later, married and living in Moscow, she quickly became disillusioned with communism. When her Russian husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was arrested in 1936, she escaped to England with her young son. (Her husband would die in 1938.)

In 1939, the rest of her family moved to the United States, where she became a leading anticommunist author and activist.^[1] She became an American citizen in 1950. ^[2]

Greed is not what drives a free market economy; indeed, greed is positively harmful to such an economy. Take Enron. The greed of Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth Lay, et al. led to the collapse of the company and to massive losses for the shareholders. Please don't confuse greed with acquisitiveness. A certain amount of acquisitiveness is reasonable and morally acceptable. Greed is inordinate acquisitiveness, where 'inordinate' carries not only a quantitative, but also a normative, connotation: the greedy person's acquisitiveness harms himself and others. Think of the miser, and the hoarder. What's more, greed cannot be measured by one's net worth. Bill Gate's net worth is in the billions. But he is not greedy as far as I can tell: he benefits millions and millions of people with his software, the employment and investment opportunities he provides, and the vast sums he donates to charities. 

C-Span viewers who called in to object to Herbert that socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried were met with the standard Marxist response, namely, that capitalist encirclement, capitalist opposition, is responsible for socialism's failure. This is an example of the classic double standard leftists employ. The problems of capitalism are blamed on capitalism, but the problems of socialism are ALSO blamed on capitalism. Another form of the double standard involves the comparison of capitalist reality, not with socialist reality, but with socialist ideality, socialist fiction, socialist utopia. A reality-to-reality comparison issues in an unfavorable judgment on socialism.

Finally, there is a problem with the sort of 'bottom up' or democratic socialism that people like Herbert espouse. This is supposed to avoid the problems attendant upon the sort of 'top down' socialism attempted in the Soviet Union. The latter required a revolutionary vanguard unequal in power to those on whom it sought to impose socialism — in obvious contradiction to the ultimate socialist desideratum of equality. Simply put, if equality is the end, the means cannot be dictatorship by the Party or by one man of steel. No entity, once it gains power, is likely to give it up. This is why Castro still rules his island paradise, forty six years after his 1959 ousting of Battista. [Remember, this was written in aught-four.] The will to power is the will to the preservation and expansion of power. 

Therefore, many socialists nowadays call themselves democratic socialists. But this smacks of a contradiction in terms. If socialism is to replace capitalism — as opposed to being confined to isolated pockets of society such as communes — then it must be imposed by force by a central authority. For there are just too many of us who cannot see why material (as opposed to formal) equality is even a value. 

Addendum 29 March 2019:

I've modified my view a bit. Then as now I hold that  there is nothing wrong with material inequality as such, assuming that it has arisen by just means and thus not by force and fraud, and that the worthy worst-off have the minimal needed.   But that strikes me now as logically consistent with saying that a reduction in material inequality would be a good thing.  X can be axiologically preferable to Y even if no one is under any moral obligation to bring about X over Y.

Inequality is a breeding ground for envy, an ugly thing indeed, and one of the Seven Deadly Sins to boot. But you would be morally obtuse if you thought that clamping down on the liberty that naturally issues in material inequality is a moral requisite.  Envy is a free choice of the morally benighted who practice the vice. Inequality may be conducive to the exercise of the vice, but nothing and no one forces anyone to be envious.

Stalin on Philology

For insight into the depredations suffered by science and scholarship in Stalin's USSR, I recommend Chapter 4 of Volume III of Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1978). It is astonishing what happened to literature, philosophy, economics, physics, cosmology, and genetics in the Workers' Paradise. Not even philology was spared. Kolakowski, pp. 141-142:

In the first few days of the Korean War, when international tension was at its height, Stalin added to his existing titles as the leader of progressive humanity, the supreme philosopher, scientist, strategist, etc., the further distinction of being the world's greatest philologist. (As far as is known, his linguistic attainments were confined to Russian and his native Georgian.) In May 1950 Pravda had published a symposium on the theoretical problems of linguistics and especially the theories of Nikolay Y. Marr (1864-1934). Marr, a specialist in the Caucasian languages, had endeavoured towards the end of his life to construct a system of Marxist linguistics and was regarded in the Soviet Union as the supreme authority in this field: linguists who rejected his fantasies were harassed and persecuted. His theory was that language was a form of 'ideology' and, as such, belonged to the superstructure and was part of the class system. . . .

Stalin intervened in the debate with an article published in Pravda on 29 June, followed by four explanatory answers to readers' letters. He roundly condemned Marr's theory, declaring that language was not part of the superstructure and was not ideological in character. . . .

The Marrists were ousted from the domain of linguistics. . . .

Don't say it can't happen here.  It is happening here as witness the ideological tainting of climatology by the gasbags of global warming.

For insight into the depredations suffered by science and scholarship in Stalin's USSR, I recommend Chapter 4 of Volume III of Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1978). It is astonishing what happened to literature, philosophy, economics, physics, cosmology, and genetics in the Workers' Paradise. Not even philology was spared. Kolakowski, pp. 141-142:

In the first few days of the Korean War, when international tension was at its height, Stalin added to his existing titles as the leader of progressive humanity, the supreme philosopher, scientist, strategist, etc., the further distinction of being the world's greatest philologist. (As far as is known, his linguistic attainments were confined to Russian and his native Georgian.) In May 1950 Pravda had published a symposium on the theoretical problems of linguistics and especially the theories of Nikolay Y. Marr (1864-1934). Marr, a specialist in the Caucasian languages, had endeavoured towards the end of his life to construct a system of Marxist linguistics and was regarded in the Soviet Union as the supreme authority in this field: linguists who rejected his fantasies were harassed and persecuted. His theory was that language was a form of 'ideology' and, as such, belonged to the superstructure and was part of the class system. . . .

Stalin intervened in the debate with an article published in Pravda on 29 June, followed by four explanatory answers to readers' letters. He roundly condemned Marr's theory, declaring that language was not part of the superstructure and was not ideological in character. . . .

The Marrists were ousted from the domain of linguistics. . . .

Don't say it can't happen here.  It is happening here as witness the ideological tainting of climatology by the gasbags of global warming.

Dissecting Leftism

John Jay Ray blogs on year after year and takes no prisoners.  I went on ego surfari at his site and pulled up a quotation and a reference for which I thank Dr. Ray:

Good comment from Bill Vallicella: "It is difficult to get lefties to appreciate the moral equivalence of the two totalitarian movements because there is a tendency to think that the Commies had good intentions, while the Nazis did not. But this is false: both had good intentions. Both wanted to build a better world by eliminating the evil elements that made progress impossible. Both thought that they had located the root of evil, and that the eradication of this root would usher in a perfect world. It is just that they located the root of evil in different places. Nazis really believed that Judentum ist Verbrechertum, as one of their slogans had it, that Jewry is criminality. They saw the extermination of Jews and other Untermenschen as an awful, but necessary, task on the road to a better world. Similarly with the Commie extermination of class enemies".

Bill Vallicella has a post saying that the Left are insensitive to danger. He says this is why they are always pretending that human nature is good and ignoring the fact that some people can be evil and dangerous. I think it is a bit worse than that. I think Leftist ideologues don't care about reality at all. That's one reason why they often claim that reality does not exist. They are so preoccupied with puffing up their own image and self-esteem that everything else just has to go hang. And anything that threatens that image will simply be denied. They will do and say ANYTHING in order to sound good. Clinically, it is called "Narcissism" and in more extreme cases, it is part of "Psychopathy".

John Jay Ray blogs on year after year and takes no prisoners.  I went on ego surfari at his site and pulled up a quotation and a reference for which I thank Dr. Ray:

Good comment from Bill Vallicella: "It is difficult to get lefties to appreciate the moral equivalence of the two totalitarian movements because there is a tendency to think that the Commies had good intentions, while the Nazis did not. But this is false: both had good intentions. Both wanted to build a better world by eliminating the evil elements that made progress impossible. Both thought that they had located the root of evil, and that the eradication of this root would usher in a perfect world. It is just that they located the root of evil in different places. Nazis really believed that Judentum ist Verbrechertum, as one of their slogans had it, that Jewry is criminality. They saw the extermination of Jews and other Untermenschen as an awful, but necessary, task on the road to a better world. Similarly with the Commie extermination of class enemies".

Bill Vallicella has a post saying that the Left are insensitive to danger. He says this is why they are always pretending that human nature is good and ignoring the fact that some people can be evil and dangerous. I think it is a bit worse than that. I think Leftist ideologues don't care about reality at all. That's one reason why they often claim that reality does not exist. They are so preoccupied with puffing up their own image and self-esteem that everything else just has to go hang. And anything that threatens that image will simply be denied. They will do and say ANYTHING in order to sound good. Clinically, it is called "Narcissism" and in more extreme cases, it is part of "Psychopathy".

The Last Days and Words of Leon Trotsky

On this date in 1940 in Mexico City Ramon Mercader drove an ice axe (not an ice pick as some accounts have it) into the skull of Leon Trotsky.  He died the next day.  Here we read:

Mercader later testified at his trial:

I laid my raincoat on the table  in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I  decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment  Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe  from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a  terrible blow on the head.

According to Joseph Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party  (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin  has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before."

Trotsky, who didn't shrink from murder and brutality in pursuit of his utopian fata morgana, met his end brutally. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Related: Trotsky's Faith

Trotsky's erstwhile secretary, the logician Jean van Heijenoort, himself came to a brutal end in Mexico City a victim, not of politics, but of . . . well read it:

Like a Moth to the Flame.

Is John Brennan a Communist?

Sebastian Gorka thinks so.  Brennan voted for Gus Hall, presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA , back in the Brehznev era.  Or maybe Comrade Brennan is only a crypto-commie hate-America crapweasel.  You decide. Either way, whether red or pink, it takes chutzpah for this deep-state operative to call Trump treasonous.

 

 

Seeing Red

If you want to understand the Democrat Party you have to study Communism. Here is a CRB review of three fairly recent books. I have read the first, the Radosh effort. A page-turner! I also recommend Sidney Hook's Out of Step.

A review ofCommies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh andA Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left, by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner andRed Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture, by Michael Barson and Steven Heller

ommies should have appeared long ago but proves well worth the wait. Like Sidney Hook's Out of Step, it is the personal odyssey of an honest mind coping with left-wing illusions and it provides, to boot, a useful directory of key players on the Left. 

A one-time member of the Communist Party USA, Ron Radosh was familiar with many of the Old Left stalwarts, and went to school with a veritable who's-who of the Left: Victor Navasky of The Nation; CPUSA vice-presidential candidate Angela Davis, punctiliously referred to in the media as a "social activist"; Weatherman Kathy Boudin; and the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. 

Radosh is a veteran of Camp Woodland for Children, which he dubs "commie camp." Singer Paul Robeson, a leading apologist for Stalin, performed there. So did Pete Seeger, the banjo Bolshevik himself, later honored by President Bill Clinton. In few other books will one find a recollection of the left-wing anti-comic campaign of the 1950s, or of Birobidzhan, Stalin's bogus homeland for the Jews. Radosh helpfully includes Seeger's lyrics in praise of Birobidzhan. 

Seeger, in fact, was one of the Communist Party's "artists in uniform," who believed that "songs are weapons." Seeger was a hero to Radosh, but that does not stop him from recalling Seeger's slavish defense of Stalin. Radosh reminds us that Seeger's Songs for John Doe, an album he made with the Almanac Singers during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, was swiftly recalled when the Party line changed from "peace" to outright jingoism.

Radosh learned his boyhood lessons well. He became part of the left-wing vanguard at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a movement whose veterans are still making trouble. They include Tom Hayden, who proclaimed that anti-Communism was "the moral equivalent of rape," and Los Angeles Times columnist Bob Scheer, who breathlessly told Radosh in a radio interview that utopia had been realized in North Korea. Bob Cohen, another of Radosh's comrades, candidly confessed that "we don't want peace in Korea, we want the North Koreans to win." In similar style, television producer Danny Schechter wore a tee-shirt proclaiming, "We won in Vietnam and Cambodia."

Radosh's withdrawal from these ranks began with one of the defining events of his life, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953. It was an article of faith on the Left that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of a reactionary, xenophobic, anti-Semitic America. Nearly two decades later, Radosh set out to make the definitive case in the Rosenberg's favor, but wound up convinced of their guilt. The Rosenberg File, written with Joyce Milton, proves beyond doubt that Julius Rosenberg was a Stalinist spy and that Ethel was his accomplice. 

The Left quickly denounced Radosh as a heretic. Leading the charge was Marxist historian Eric Foner of Columbia University. But the response of Michael Harrington, America's leading socialist, also proved revealing. "I always knew they were guilty," he said, "but we're trying to get former Communists who have left the party but are still pro-Soviet into our organization, and I can't do anything to alienate them." The same kind of doublethink prompted Communist Party executive Dorothy Healey to tell Radosh how the Soviet Union generously funded the CPUSA — "How do you think the CP bought its building on West 23rd Street?" — and then threaten to sue when he repeated the exchange in a review of her book.

Exposing the Rosenberg's guilt was not politically correct, and the Left never forgave Radosh, who was willing to follow the truth wherever it led. "The reaction to The Rosenberg File, made me finally move on to consider the ultimate heresy: perhaps the Left was wrong not just about the Rosenberg case, but about most everything else." The present book, which contains some funny vignettes about Bob Dylan and Bianca Jagger, confirms that the Left has always been a kind of hate group. "Today's Left has no Soviet Union as a beacon," Radosh notes, "but its reflexive hatred of the American system is intact." 

Related: Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness 

 

Why Did America Fight the Korean War?

Victor Davis Hanson explains in less than five minutes. 

South Korea is a model global citizen and a strong ally of the U.S.—and stands in sharp contrast to the communist regime in the North that has starved and murdered millions of its own people and caused untold mischief in the world community. Had it not been for U.S. intervention and support to the South, the current monstrous regime in Pyongyang would now rule all of Korea, ensuring its nuclear-armed dictatorship even greater power and resources.

The American effort to save South Korea also sent a message to both communist China and the Soviet Union that the free world, under U.S. leadership, would no longer tolerate communist military take-overs of free nations. The resulting deterrence policy helped to keep the communist world from attempting similar surprise attacks on Japan, Taiwan, and Western Europe.

Finally, the Korean War awakened the United States to the dangers of disarmament and isolationism and led to the bipartisan foreign policy of containment of global communism that in 1989 finally led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it victory in the Cold War.

The Korean War was an incomplete American victory in its failure to liberate North Korea and unite the peninsula, but a victory nonetheless. And not just from a military perspective, but from a moral one as well. The reason 35,000 Americans died in Korea was to keep at least half the Korean people free. Korea did not have a single material resource that would have benefited America.

The Korean War merits more than a blank stare. It deserves to be remembered and studied – with pride.

Michael J. Totten on Cuba

Excerpt:

As Christopher Hitchens once said of North Korea, communist states are places where everything that isn’t absolutely compulsory is absolutely forbidden. Mounting any kind of resistance against them is nearly impossible unless and until the state loses its will to continue. Don’t be deceived by Havana’s crumbling beauty, its upbeat music and people, its enviable location in the Caribbean. “The surveillance and denunciation system is so rigorous,” French historian Pascal Fontaine wrote in The Black Book of Communism, “that family intimacy is almost nonexistent.” “Cuba looks exactly like its photos,” M.J. Porter wrote in the Introduction to Havana Real by Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez in 2011, “and yet if feels different. I fell in love with Cuba and Cubans. Something felt like home. Completely unforeseen, however, was the weight of the totalitarian state.”

Surveillance-cum-denunciation. Don't say it can't happen here. It is happening here.  

And you are still a Democrat?

Related: Mona Charen on the Left-Leaning Pope Francis

Communists

Seeking heaven on earth, they gave humanity the gulag, hell on earth. 

Man's Second Oldest Faith

It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God. 

― Whittaker Chambers, Witness

Related: Reading about Commies

Did the U. S. Defeat the S. U. just to Become another S. U.?

Not only are we slouching toward Gomorrah, we are sliding toward something like communism. Trump, I fear, is only a temporary brake. Excerpts from an article by Stella Morabito:

Erasure of collective memory. Another crime of radical education reform is its attack on the study of history, civics, and the classics of literature. Today we can see the bitter fruits of such 1960s radical education reform, which has roots going back to 1920s with John Dewey. If we are no longer able to place ourselves and society into the context of historical events, our vision going forward will be blurred at best.

It gets even worse if we don’t learn how our form of government functions. Today fewer and fewer college students have the capacity to understand that the First Amendment serves as a buffer against totalitarianism, not something to be abolished under the pretext of “hate speech.” And depriving students exposure to literary classics like Shakespeare (based on the charge that such works are “Western” and therefore ethnocentric) prevents them from discussing the universal human condition and our common humanity.

Instead, students are increasingly fed grievance studies and identity politics. As universities go this route, it trickles down to K-12 education. As a result, we are losing the social glue of our common traditions and heritage—not just as a nation, but as human beings. This cultivation of ignorance by the education establishment over the years compounds the isolating effect on people. It makes youth especially vulnerable to becoming fodder for power elites.

[ . . .]

Language manipulation. The whole point of the totalitarian abuse of language is to prevent independent thought, the subject of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” When people accept the abuse of language, and incorporate it into their own vocabularies without thinking about it, they can be easily ventriloquized by power elites.

Victor Klemperer addressed this phenomenon in his book “Language of the Third Reich.” His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis. He writes, “They found it difficult to think about life and morality in any other way. . . .Words are like tiny doses of arsenic, swallowed unnoticed, and then after a while the toxic reaction sets in.”

His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis.

Consider all the weaponized memes and slogans we swallow today that shape how we think: “woke,” “bend the knee,” and “cisgender” are just a few. All are meant to modify our thoughts and behaviors in everyday life. An especially aggressive abuse of language are new laws that enforce strange pronoun usages that destabilize the structure of our language. By passing laws that punish the “misgendering” of someone as “hate speech,” we veer into kangaroo court territory, as well as force unnatural changes in our language.