Socialism's Free Pass: Roger Kimball Responds

Liberal Fascism on National Review Online ^ | July 06, 2008 | Jonah Goldberg

[Uncle Ralph]

[In The death of Socialism Roger Kimball wrote:]

[Joshua Muravchik's Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism] provides a devastating anatomy of the socialist dream -- a dream that with clocklike regularity becomes a nightmare. If, as Muravchik suggests, "socialism was . . . the most popular political idea ever invented," it is also undoubtedly the bloodiest. Of course, many who profess socialism are decent and humane people. And it is worth noting that socialism comes in mild as well as tyrannical versions. Muravchik, who was once a socialist himself, pays frequent homage to the generous impulses that lie behind some allotropes of the socialist enterprise. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that "regimes calling themselves socialist have murdered more than one hundred million people since 1917." Why? . . .

A large part of the answer lies in the intellectual dynamics of utopianism. "Utopia" is Greek for "nowhere": a made-up word for a make-believe place. The search for nowhere inevitably deprecates any and every "somewhere". Socialism, which is based on incorrigible optimism about human nature, is a species of utopianism. It experiences the friction of reality as an intolerable brake on its expectations. "Utopians," the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observed in The Death of Utopia Reconsidered [PDF], "once they attempt to convert their visions into practical proposals, come up with the most malignant project ever devised: they want to institutionalize fraternity, which is the surest way to totalitarian despotism."

[Uncle Ralph]

Jonah Goldberg's blog entry today included this bit from Kimball which I found especially edifying. Also some interesting references at the links.

[wintertime]

ping for later.

[Trailerpark Badass]

Muravchik’s book is excellent. Better, though, is the biography of Mao, by Jung Chang, where the impulses of socialism are stripped of all their Western proprieties and reduced to their basic motivation: power and violence.

[the anti-liberal]

[hellbender]

Another good analysis is The Socialist Phenomenon, by Igor Shafarevich, which shows that socialism is little more than a return to the social organization of ancient empires like those of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Incas, in which hordes of ant-like serfs had no rights, but served all-powerful kings. The similarities include obsessive building of colossal structures (then pyramids; in the 20th century dams, factories, Great Halls of the People, etc.) and fondness for mummifying deceased leaders (think Stalin, Lenin, Mao).

[IronJack]

the generous impulses that lie behind some allotropes of the socialist enterprise.

That's just the point: those impulses are NOT "generous." It's never generosity to assist the weak and the suffering using money you extort from others. It's simply thievery. Noble in end, to be sure, but the means DO count. Robin Hood may have robbed for the right reasons, but he was no less a thief than a less "altruistic" highwayman.

All socialism does is trade the inequities of Nature for the inequities of Nature's agent: Man.

[Cacique]

btt

[Rembrandt]

“Muravchik’s book is excellent. Better, though, is the biography of Mao, by Jung Chang, where the impulses of socialism are stripped of all their Western proprieties and reduced to their basic motivation: power and violence.”
—
Jung Chang’s earlier book, “Wild Swans,” is much more readable, shorter and equally hard hitting as it summarizes the bloodthirsty march of Chinese commie politics as witnessed by three generations of women.