Posted on 11/14/2011 12:12:46 PM PST by bkopto
I think my Ukrainian heritage fuels my twin obsessions with Soviet history and economics. Sadly, this often puts me on opposing ideological ground from my good friends and fellow alumni of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which recently helped bring Utopia in Four Movements to Iowa City's local tax-supported theater.
Sam Green, the filmmaker who narrated the exploration of "the battered state of the utopian impulse," on one hand described socialism has having gone "monstrously wrong" and on the other expressed open sentimentality for the Russian and Maoist revolutions. He showed pictures of executed Cambodians and also said a copy of Mao's Little Red Book was among his favorite possessions.
For any readers who may have left the theater with a sense of moral ambiguity, I offer this brief history lesson.
In The Black Book of Communism, French researchers estimate communist China slaughtered 65 million of its own citizens. Estimates of Soviet citizens killed by their leaders range from 20 million to 62 million made by political-science professor R.J. Rummel. In Cambodia, after an unholy combination of Marx and Rousseau, they attempted an agrarian-based communist society and managed, in an astonishingly short period of time, to slaughter almost a third of their population.
Perhaps Stalin was right. Killing one person is a tragedy. Killing millions is only a statistic.
The sound of societies turning into gigantic meat grinders was accompanied by three choruses from leftist intellectuals. One sang, "It's not so bad." Perhaps its leading performer was New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for dismissing the starvation of 6 million to 10 million Ukrainians as "malignant propaganda."
The second chorus sang "next time": Forget Lenin's hostages and mass executions, forget the extermination of the Don Cossacks. The right people weren't in charge. Forget the Gulag Archipelago. Forget China's "Great Leap Forward" and North Korea's "Arduous March." Forget the cannibalism. Revoke private property, and this next time, we will deliver paradise.
The last chorus sang "that's not real communism." For them, I present some of Marx's and Engels' less publicized writing: In the January 1849 edition of Marx's journal "Neue Reinische Zeitung," Engels wrote, "Basques, Scottish Highlanders, Serbs are racial trash and will have to be destroyed." Marx wrote in his "People's Paper," April 16, 1852, "The classes and races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way. They must perish in the Revolutionary Holocaust."
Green showed a picture of Bolshevik soldiers marching during the Russian Revolution and wondered how exciting it would have felt to be among them. By what standards does he go sentimental? If it's brute force combined with a glorious vision of the future, he could easily include Germany's National Socialists (i.e., Nazis) on his list of supposedly noble and only slightly misguided movements. They had a great vision too, for the living.
Contrary to what I learned in school, the National Socialists of Germany were not ideologically opposite from the Marxist-Leninist socialists of the Soviet Union. Their great difference lay in the fact that one slaughtered millions according to ethnicity and the other slaughtered millions according to "class" — the ambiguous, undefined term at the center of Marxism. They were two wings of the same cult of state power, determined to carve society into a better version of itself using bullets and bayonets. It deserves no sentimentalism.
Let's hope the "state of the utopian impulse" remains battered.
The basis of liberal/leftist ideology is demonstrably Satanic.
‘nuff said.
Socialism is a symptom of the political disease of Democracy..
Democracy has become a “Holy Word” to most...
When it is merely Mob Rule by mobsters..
Always was, is, and will continue to be...
All of Europe and the cretins in Canada drool over it..
Thats why America is not a democracy...
Any that says it is are droolers..
America is NOT a democratic-republic..
It is a Constitutional Republic.. a unique one..
UNmatched anywhere at any time..
Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution are the words..
Democracy, democratic or democrat USED AT ALL..
It is on purpose.. it is not an oversight..
Liberals’ dedication to the destruction of a free society renders them unfit to live in that same society.
Yes, but a crackpot with a receptive audience.
It presents an interesting situation. What would a nation do if many thousands (tens of thousands?) of its people are billions-genocidal?
The US military uses “surety” programs to insure that personnel who are involved with nuclear weapons are not “differently-mentally-abled”. As little as using cough syrup or any kind of psycho-reactive drug is enough for them to be suspended for a period of from days to for life.
But there is no surety program for civilians in lines of work that are equally hazardous. Should any person who applauded Dr. Pianka be allowed to work with dangerous pathogens? Certainly not. Nor should they be permitted to have involvement with anything else that could be used as a genocidal tool.
I understand he drew great inspiration from America’s eugenics laws, and the writings of one of America’s champions of eugenics, Margaret Sanger. She also founded the organization we know today as Planned Parenthood.
Many on the Left follow a destructive meme that owes its origin, substance and methodology to Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky and the Cloward-Piven duo. There are many others, but these four are the most toxic – and yes, evil – of the lot.
The other meme is that of the dehumanization of humanity itself - the reduction of humankind to things, animals or machines. Look to Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, B.F. Skinner, Dr. Peter Singer and the current crop of so-called ‘bio-ethicists’ for that particular chain of thought. You can hardly ask for something more insidiously evil than that.
Converged and combined, these two streams of thought have served those who have committed the most monstrous crimes in history – These are the killers without conscience. The book that I am presently writing suggests that the emergence of the will to power as the driving force behind those who have committed those crimes – the slaughter, enslavement, torture and impoverishment of hundreds of millions. As I see it, ideology matters little to those whose desire to control Mankind – it’s merely the horse they’re riding on the eway to dominus terra firma.
We have not seen the end of these monsters, nor will we. The desire to control others – and to harm others – without consequence appears to be ‘black code’ that’s written into our DNA. Modern ideology, that is, all of the modern totalitarian ‘isms’ – communism, socialism, and so on – provide the perfect environment for that ‘black code’ of the will to power to prosper and flourish. This is one of our great human failings, an aspect of our tragic nature that must always be recognized, fought and destroyed, if only for a little while. But for that, we’d be out among the stars by now.
I highly recommend two recent works by Chantal Delsol: Icarus Fallen – the Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century – an Essay on Late Modernity. The insights are compelling and fairly leap off the page. The points of disagreement that I have with this author’s works are honest and thoughtful ones. Her European perspective often misses what makes America so unique among the world's civilizations, but is does provide valuable insights as to just why the lights are going out all over Europe. Even so, those points in no way invalidate the main themes of her works.
Because they had studied history and knew that the lives of democracies tended to be nasty, brutish, and short. I should think on a continuum it would lie just short of anarchy, with absolute despotism on the other end of the scale but... the scale is circular because it invariably LEADS to autocracy and a feeding frenzy to get to the top.
Yes, but a crackpot with a receptive audience.
I underlined the telling part of the main body of your original post. He may well *have* a 'receptive' audience, but keeping the speech 'off the record' and cameras were 'required' to be turned off so as to maintain an air of deniability about what he was saying shows that what he was espousing was not the norm, and in fact, were it to become public knowledge, would be considered evil, or at best certifiably insane.
He is a crackpot, and a cockroach who could not withstand exposure to the light of day...
the infowarrior
BFLR - everything that’s wrong in the world today can trace itself to the basis of this article.
Some enterprising photoshopper REALLY needs to add Obama to that picture ...
It's simply another manifestation of our sinful nature.
Not a bad statement. I just wish people would use the real term Socialism not liberalism. We are much more liberal then they are and they took it from us. it was originally what we called ourselves. In Europe they still call conservatives the liberals.
"Progressive" was our term. Socialism is just the opposite of progressivism Marx knew his concepts would create more stagnation. Every time we have a good slogan they take it and use it against us.
Charles Darwin, in my opinion, is an accessory to this crime. He was a deist and believed that "God" created the first cell, and then he (God) stepped out of the way and let thing evolve on their own.
We have not seen the end of these monsters, nor will we. The desire to control others – and to harm others – without consequence appears to be ‘black code’ that’s written into our DNA.
You are correct. You should look at (if you haven't already) the monograph of the Russian mathematician Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon, which has a part which traces the socialist impulse back to antiquity.
I agree with you. I lifted those sentences from an unknown Freeper's tag line verbatim, as I liked it, but I prefer the terms leftism or socialism, personally (like you).
As Jefferson put it
"government is like a fire it must be strictly controlled for safety against its getting out of hand and doing great harm... government is force and must be feared and controlled accordingly."
Socialist have no fear of government and want it to grow like a bomb fire. if one little thing goes wrong with that bomb fire people die.
Smaller the government the smaller the fire and best for everyone
“...were it to become public knowledge, would be considered evil, or at best certifiably insane.”
I grant that he is evil, but I doubt the label of insane in fitting, any more than it would be for Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or other sociopaths.
I call them sociopaths, instead of psychopaths, and yet the two terms are not mutually exclusive. Psychopaths are neurologically incapable of empathy with other people, to varying degrees on a large scale. They may be otherwise mentally normal, and most are not even violent, having other mechanisms to avoid abusing others.
Sociopaths may or may not be psychopaths, but have been *trained* to not have empathy for others. The average education in the Waffen SS was to have a Master’s degree, and yet many were trained to be sociopathic.
This is not, as supposed, done with brutal training, but intellectual persuasion. And this is a telling point. Dr. Pianka is, in effect, teaching an audience of scientists and students to be sociopaths like him, and they have voluntarily been persuaded to become sociopaths.
By any reasonable definition astoundingly evil, but the furthest thing from being insane. And its secretiveness, my point, is not out of fear from the public, but out of *contempt* for the public.
Were you to ask Dr. Pianka or many of his colleagues, they would assure you that the public are far too “ignorant and uneducated” to appreciated the proposed genocide. The ivory tower “us and them” attitude.
At this point, I would like to reference a positively *charming* book, still in print after all these years, which can proudly brag of a book review by none other than the illustrious Abraham Lincoln, who called it “The most dangerous book ever written.”
Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), by George Fitzhugh. On the surface it appears to be a passionate defense of slavery. But it is more than just a defense, it advocates that slavery is such a powerful force for good, that 9 out of 10 humans should be slaves. Only 1 in 10 are fit enough to be masters. (The book assumes that anyone smart enough to read and agree is by definition, one of the 1 in 10).
Importantly, this 90% theory crops up on its own, independently, very frequently in socialism, and it even did so in the proto-socialism that preceded it.
Fitzhugh was content, however, that 90% of people be slaves. But that is not good enough for Dr. Pianka, who wants 90% of people to be exterminated.
And yet the “us and them” theme is very consistent. Only we, the elites, should rule, dominate and survive. The rest of mankind are contemptible and expendable. (And invariably, the opinion of the 90% does not matter, so trying to teach them this sociopathy is just a waste of time.)
Insane, no. Evil beyond measure, proven.
Which goes to my follow up comment, namely “what do we do with thousands of people who philosophically embrace genocide?”
So, are we talking about Democratic Socialists, or National Socialists?
We have both.
>> Many leftist intellectuals sympathize with mass homicide?
How else would Stalin, Mao, Hitler, etc have succeeded?
I hope you guys all read the comments at the bottom of the article.
The nationalist have given up that concept for a more world view. Socialist are socialist they are no different other then giving up the nationalist title
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