Yes. We don’t know what real tyranny is, we haven’t had to live under it. But I think that America has the potential to be the most horrible in history. Those who think we won’t go down that road are simply ignorant of history, and/or are not paying attention.
My brother and I had a long conversation the other night, and in talking about tyranny, I mentioned that I tend to stratify tyrannies, because they were different in many ways. He asked “Well, what is the worst in the 20th Century, then?
I thought everyone tends to rank the Soviets up there, and I opined there was something absolutely bureaucratic, smothering, and almost tediously commonplace about the dull, wholly impersonal tyranny of the Soviets. When they came to your house to take you away, they were bureaucrats with guns. They didn’t really care. They had orders. If they had to take you away from your family or shoot you in your head so you would fall down a flight of stone stairs clotted with bodes sporting holes in their heads, it was just a job. They might have elicited the same bored response having to fill out the paperwork on what they did. They didn’t hate YOU per se. They just loved control. And everyone had to be controlled and in fear. You had no value past serving as an example to someone else who might have had disagreements. I have probably read “The Gulag Archipelago” maybe five times over the years, and the boring banality of arrest, torture, imprisonment, and starvation strikes me every time.
Then I thought about the Nazis. They were bureaucrats too, but highly efficient ones, which is probably why they stick in people’s heads. That fabled teutonic efficiency bent to the purpose of murder. Finding the most efficient way. Not wasting anyone. If they could perform experiments on them and kill them at the same time there might be knowledge gained or useful utility made of the process. We are going to kill you anyway. But, if we immerse your body in a tub of ice water, we can find out more about the effects of hypothermia so we can make our sailors and U-Boat personnel more efficient and long lived. That kind of thing. But the Nazis were fixated on race, then on those that opposed them. That was their hierarchy. they weren’t bored. They were actively pursuing, and seemed entertained by the hunt, for rooting out and murdering people. The fictional Nazi officer portrayed in the movie “Inglorious Basterds” was the cinematic expression of that.
Then there were the East Germans. The East Germans were, in my estimation, the living embodiment of Orwell’s “1984”. They actively wanted to control people. Control everything. Control everything about everything. It seemed almost more important to control people than it was to eliminate them. They had a vast, highly organized network of people working towards that end. Any unorthodoxy was sniffed out by this huge body of unwilling spies who were blackmailed and threatened by the government to ensure compliance and efficiency. They were well versed in the use of technology to achieve these ends, and kept meticulous records of all of it. One of the things I found most oddly chilling was the account of their interrogation process. People were brought in for interrogation all the time, it was routine. They had a chair the subject would sit in that a removable fabric could be attached to. They would put a fresh fabric on for each interrogation, and the person being interrogated would sit on it. When the interrogation was done, they would remove the fabric from the chair and place it in a hermitically sealed glass jar, meticulously label it with all kinds of information and store it in a specific way on a vast array of highly organized floor to ceiling shelves so the jar containing the seat fabric for any given person could be more easily and efficiently found by retrieving the fabric from a person’s interrogation and exposing bloodhounds to it.
The Khmer Rouge was oddly, at the top of my list. They were a tyranny. But they didn’t seem to care about anything, even power itself. They seemed to be interested only in murder as a mechanism to obtain and exert control. They would just outright murder people. Very little questioning, even pro-forma questioning. They would just go to a village, find out who the village leaders were, and kill them. Then and order the people to identify the teachers. Then they would kill them. Then, they would get the medical personnel, doctors, round them up, and just kill them. Next, anyone with a college degree. And they would kill them. Basically, anyone who was not a farmer. Then they would use anyone remaining as a farmer. They didn’t seem to care if you agreed or disagreed, from what I could tell. They were just as happy to make you a farmer as they were to murder you and cut your head off. By all accounts, they murdered up to one-third of a population of 6 million. This quote I saw titled “Khmer Rouge Warning” seems to sum up the Khmer Rouge philosophy between 1975-1979: “To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss.”
And the Communist Chinese? Life has no meaning. None. They have murdered in cold blood between 40-120 million of their own people. When I argue points, I use the 40 million because even Leftists will agree on that, though I believe the 120 million is closer to reality. Each Chinese individual is useful only in what that person can contribute to the party. Everything else is irrelevant. One of the most knowledgable Americans on Communist China is General Robert Spalding (Ret.) who thought (while he lived and studied there as a commissioned major in the US Air Force) that the Chinese Communists actually had the purest and most cut-throat brand of capitalism that exists today. You can steal from people as long as they aren’t Party Members or likely to bring the attention of Party Members. You can poison them if they aren’t Party Members or likely to bring the attention of Party Members. You don’t need a license to start a business. You can steal ideas and plans from other businesses...as long as they aren’t Party Members or likely to bring the attention of Party Members. And when killing their own citizens, they put even the Soviets to shame, now, they want to use the organs of dissidents, criminals, political enemies, or even people who might have made a joke about communism, as a way to obtain donor organs for both their own upper party and foreigners who want to pay cash. They put these people on ECMO machines, and slowly, over a period of months, extract organs from them to transplant into Party Members or those foreigners who are willing to pay in hard currency. Today, with their embrace of technology, AI, data, surveillance, etc. it is hard not to think that they, in the words of Winston Churchill, are the ones leading the way in creating and mining “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”.
That’s an excellent short essay, RL. I don’t think I’ve ever before read a comparison of the tyrannies of the 20th century and their differences. You should expand that into an article.
When my few liberal friends and a couple in the extended family bring up issues which shoehorn nicely in the larger subject, I start by removing the Left-Right model. I replace it with the "big and powerful" versus the "small and far less powerful." When they agree, as some have, it becomes simple to gather the Mao, Stalin and Hitler murderous regimes alongside Pol Pot and so many others.
The comes the interesting challenge. List the "small and far less powerful" after having parsed away the murderers and psychopaths. It becomes very difficult when one thinks this through only a short while, and then queries which direction governments are heading. Towards the big and powerful? Away from....?
That's been my wee strategy in debates and discussions. It works and often flummoxes the closet "big and powerful" believers, as the mask is removed.
Best wishes.
Just my two cents - I never lived in the Soviet Union, or Cambodia, but have visited them. I know many people who did.
I won’t say one was worse than the other, but at least in the Soviet Union and East Germany, these people were still under the influence of Christian/Western civilization. Of course the communist ideologues grasped this, hated it, and suppressed it - but the masses still operated unwittingly according to a millenia of this imperceptible influence in their cultural DNA.
There were no such limitations in the Chinese or Cambodian tyrannies.
And still, a few here at FreeRepublic support Putin and the Russians.
But, but, Putin is not a true communist ("True Scotsman"?) and he supposedly supports Christianity, and hates gays...
"Religion ... is the opiate of the masses." Said Marx
Historical ignorance isn’t bliss; it’s suicide.
Agree. I believe we are on the road of putting the structure in place through the indoctrination throughout all levels of our institutions. There are some exceptions. The one to watch and fear if the trend continues is our military, it used to be one that one would not have to worry about them using force against their own citizens, but know I’m beginning to question if how true that might be today or in the near future. Since the COVID mandates/lockdowns under the current administration started a purge of our military whether it was alleged “White Supremacy”, COVID vaccine mandates and now the LGBT..... indoctrination/mandated acceptance.
The true American patriots who would normally join the military because they believe in what we stood for. Now all the branches of our military are having a hard time meeting their quotas and will soon have to look at other means. One dangerous aspect would be to allow the illegals that have flooded our borders to join with certain promises. Depending on who is in the WH, it doesn’t take much of an imagination how this can go badly. Even with the ranks filled with Marxists will be bad for those Americans who still believe in their GOD given freedom and liberty.
Thank you for sharing that.
Thanks for your analysis, and I think you’ve got it right.