Posted on 08/21/2005 4:21:13 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
"Utopians are people who dream about ensuring for mankind the position of pensioner and who are convinced that this position is so splendid that no sacrifices... are too great to achieve it," he writes. But the communist fantasy can be realized only through ruthlessness, and this is always so: There is no "reason to expect that it can ever come true, except in the cruel form of despotism," he explains, adding, as somone with firsthand knowledge of communism at work, "and despotism is a desparate simulation of paradise."
"Evil, I contend, is... a stubborn and unredeemable fact," he avers. Why was communism evil? Because, he argues, its much-trumpeted goal for social justice was a lie. Ultimately, what communism wanted to do (and at times succeeded) was to destroy "civil society in all its aspects: all human bonds, all forms of communication, information, exchange, and organization that are not arbitrarily imposed by the government," all in the name of power. "Communism was a gigantic facade," he says, "and the reality concealed behind it was the sheer drive for power, for total power as an end in itself." The communist lie made communism "a more heinous thing than was Hitler's system," Mr. Kolakowski writes, "because the Stalinist practice of nationalism, slavery, and genocide is the complete negation of the avowed aims of the Soviet system," which were peace and social justice.
"When a culture loses its sacred sense, it loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposes limits on the perfection that can be attained by secular society, one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization arises -- the illusion that there are no limits to the challenges we can undergo; that society is an endless flexible thing subject to the arbitrary whims of our creative capacities."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
"Leszek Kolakowski is not a name familiar to Americans, but it should be. No one has done more to define the evils that communism has visited on mankind than Mr. Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher who now lives in Oxford, England. Nor has any other living author written with greater depth and precision about the dangers faced by the modern world in its often welcoming embrace of nihilism and moral relativism."
Christian Moral Philosophy Ping!
BTTT - going to Discovery Place this afternoon!
Stalin, the ghost who haunts China
Times Online | July 24, 2005 | Jonathan Fenby
Posted on 08/21/2005 4:30:17 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1467613/posts
Looks cool - I'll have to see what the library's got.
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