Posted on 01/06/2011 11:19:04 AM PST by betty boop
The epiphany of Social Justice as the end-stage of history is perhaps the holy of holies for communists of all descriptions. And all communists defend their ideological system as the only true means to this end.
And yet it cannot be denied that all communist attempts to achieve this goal in the past have been miserable, bloody, wasteful, and immensely costly failures, involving incalculable suffering by, and injustice towards, a hundred million human persons at least, according to conservative estimates.
This plain fact of history, however, never seems to discourage a “true believer.” For the “true believer,” just because all past attempts have failed — e.g., under Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, et al. — doesn’t mean there’s anything inherently wrong with communist theory. It only means that “we haven’t gotten the formula right yet — but we will, next time.”
Today one notices very few people openly call themselves “communists.” But there are synonyms for “communist” that people do use: socialist, national socialist, liberal, social democrat, and (most popular now it seems) “progressive.” Hillary Clinton, for example, is a self-described “Progressive.” That’s a nicer word than “communist”; but it boils down to the same thing.
In America’s 30 Years War: Who Is Winning? (1998), Bálint Vázsonyi — Hungarian ex-patriot, naturalized American citizen, internationally renowned concert pianist, philosopher, historian, and former director of the Center for the American Founding (until his death in 2003) — argues that there are only two fundamental political philosophies; and they are irreconcilably opposed to each other due to their respective most basic premises and presuppositions: the Anglo-American and the Franco-German.
Anglo-American political theory is ultimately premised in natural law theory and the Judeo-Christian moral code. Thus its fundamental political “unit” is the individual human person. “Human rights” inalienably inhere in human persons, not in the groups to which they “belong” (or can be sorted into by powerful political elites). Human rights are rooted, not in the State, but in God; they are His gift to every human person and, as such, cannot be legitimately alienated by State power.
The Franco-German model, according to Vázsonyi , is an amalgam of French egalitarianism — which in practice proves to be a system of social leveling — and German intellectual methods, as preeminently exemplified by Marx and Hegel.
Both models spawned sociopolitical revolutions in the late 18th century, namely the American (1775) and the French (1789). One can judge the merits of the two fundamental models by simply looking at the respective outcomes of the two revolutions. [For details, see the article “Two Revolutions, Two Views of Man”, posted here last summer.]
Where the Anglo-American model deals with “concrete” reality — the real empirical conditions deducible from direct observation and experience that affect the choices (liberty) and well-being of concrete individuals — the Franco-German model is an exercise in abstraction: It does not recognize individuals as individuals, but only as members of groups based on accident of birth or some perceived “unjust” advantage or disadvantage. Such as, for instance, socioeconomic status.
Thus in the Franco-German model, it is the human group, not the human individual, that is the fundamental political “unit” that has — or does not have — “human rights.” The “recognition” of human rights devolves on the State: It may freely grant or rescind “rights.” (In this model, there is no God to restrain the State from doing whatever it wants to.)
The instantiation of the Franco-German model in human affairs is what the French Revolution of 1789 was all about. Vázsonyi points out that “mass killings had occurred before, of course, but the spectacle of the state, ‘in the name of the people,’ engaging in the public execution of entire categories of people was new. It introduced the concept of administrative extermination [and of ‘political crime’]. Even the Spanish Inquisition offered the opportunity of repentance. There is no way out if the ‘crime’ is based on an accident of birth [or an act of conscience deemed inimical by the reigning political orthodoxy; i.e., ‘hate crimes’].”
Call them whatever you will, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al. were following this model, certainly not the Anglo-American one! And the sheer magnitude of abomination that these men perpetrated on their own people, supposedly in the name of “Social Justice,” makes the French Revolution look like a garden party by comparison.
According to Vázsonyi , communists of all stripes have learned from the “mistakes” of their “infancy” and “adolescence,” and so plan not to repeat them. So, what are these mistakes?
Along the way, three big mistakes were made. First was the costly error of killing millions of people. Next in importance was the confiscation of the means of production. Finally, it proved counterproductive to maintain power through a monolithic party, and to continue calling it “communist.”
Killing millions of people. The communists have learned to their rue (one hopes) that it is a great mistake to kill millions of people. Not only does this give them a lasting reputation as perpetrators of savage brutality against their fellow human beings, but it turns out to be counterproductive to their own interests. Vázsonyi sums up the situation this way:
The people they killed happened to be among the most productive, ordinarily considered as assets to a nation. Harvesting the possessions of millions of Jews was obviously tempting, but the benefits proved short-lived. Harnessing their creative powers could have given Hitler lasting advantage. Similarly, the kulaks, the Ukrainians, the shopkeepers who were killed on orders from Lenin and Stalin may have yielded up their land and possessions. But the Soviet Union permanently lost those who knew how to make the land produce food, and how to get it to the people. Russia has not been able to feed itself since.
Confiscation of the means of production. Vázsonyi writes, “My generation [in Stalinist-ruled Hungary] received theoretical training in Marxism — and experienced the starvation that inevitably follows when it is applied.”
Marx prescribed taking into “public” ownership all means of production. That doctrine proved a disaster wherever consummated. State bureaucracies are utterly unable to manage economies.
Modern day case in point: Hugo Chavez nationalized the Venezuelan oil industry; i.e., it was thereafter to be regarded as theoretically “owned” by the “people” of Venezuela. In short order, these supposed “owners” found themselves responsible for making taxpayer subsidies to the oil industry, just to keep it afloat.
Chavez confiscated the wealth of various American companies and their shareholders, and triggered a mass exodus of American geological scientists, administrators, and energy technologists — in short, the “human capital” that supports any state-of-the-art energy concern. The upshot is, the Venezuelan energy sector is becoming increasingly decrepit in its physical plant, and dysfunctional in its operations. And the Venezuelan people are paying for this, directly and indirectly.
Maintaining power through a monolithic party. Especially a party named “communist” — given communism’s unquestionably bad historical baggage (see above). That’s why people today are hesitant to embrace the “communist” label, even though they worship at its “social justice” alter. Rather, they call themselves “liberals,” or “social democrats,” or “progressives.”
There’s more to this third aspect than first meets the eye, as Vázsonyi discerns:
The third error was Russian in origin, contributed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Russia had never progressed beyond a feudal hierarchy, and the strict orthodoxy of the Eastern Church was successful in attracting an unwavering allegiance by its members. Lenin thus took the view that only a similarly feudal structure and an alternative orthodoxy could compete successfully with the existing order. Hence he built a party hierarchy much along the lines of the Church, and made the party’s infallibility an article of religious canon. From 1919 onward, Leninist parties everywhere copied the ecclesiastic structure, while writers and artists created an equally religious universe around the word “communist.”… The halo that once adorned saints was spread over the Kremlin at the close of motion pictures. Hitler, too, made himself into an object of religious worship, and the Nuremberg rallies replaced the pilgrimages of old, where revelation awaited the faithful.
On this score, has the reader noticed that our currently sitting president was largely elected to office on the basis of his “messianic” appeal? Or that the expanding rank of appointed “czars” accountable only to himself smacks of an ersatz College of Cardinals? So maybe the communists haven’t yet digested the lessons from this third “adolescent mistake” as well as they ought to….
Leading to a Conclusion….
To my mind, the testimony of Bálint Vázsonyi regarding these matters is eminently trustworthy. As a Hungarian citizen and resident of Budapest, he experienced first-hand not only the Nazi invasion of Hungary “on a Sunday before dawn” in 1944; he also experienced the Soviet invasion of his country that followed at the conclusion of World War II — which also took place before dawn on a Sunday morning in 1947. (Vázsonyi is pretty certain that President Roosevelt ceded post-war Hungary to Stalin’s control at the Yalta Conference of 1945).
By 1948, the Communist Party had assumed police authority over all economic activity [in Hungary], and began to classify people’s political attitudes. Communist operatives worked out of the same building occupied not long before by the Gestapo and wore the same shining leather jackets as the Nazis.
In both the German and the Russian incursions of Hungary, several hundred thousand Hungarian people took “the long walk” into personal oblivion, either by assassination or a trip to the gulag, never to be heard from again. And of course, these people were mainly the cream of Hungarian society…. (Pol Pot later presided over the same kind of nonsense in Cambodia….)
Vázsonyi himself was put on the list of potential targets, when in 1950 — the year Stalin consolidated absolute control over Hungary — he innocently remarked to a fellow music student, “A real artist cannot be a communist.” The fellow student reported this remark to “the authorities.”
Which to put it mildly, got Vázsonyi into deep trouble. In due course he realized he would be prohibited from attending international music competitions, from admission to advanced musical studies in Hungary, and from leaving the country — all because of an “innocent” and to his mind truthful remark. A person preparing for a career as a concert pianist could not receive worse news about his future prospects….
So what did he do? Shortly after the abortive Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he managed to escape to Czechoslovakia, and from there a couple years later to the United States. He became a naturalized citizen on April 20, 1964. He tells us he was thrilled to hear the words of the presiding judge: “You are no longer a Hungarian-American. You are simply an American.”
Conclusion
I’ll let Vázsonyi write the conclusion of this piece, and then comment on what he says:
…[C]ommunism’s policy of outright confiscation has been replaced by measures that will yield all the control and none of the obligations of ownership. [No mass killing, no destruction of human capital; but the State controls everything nonetheless, via unpredictable regulatory policies (especially as issuing from unelected bureaucrats — the “czars” — in Executive departments), willy-nilly Congressional action, and/or Supreme Court constitutional malfeasance.]
He gives a prime example of what he means by this:
Given that incorporating the Mississippi and its watershed permits control of 40 percent of the land in the United States with a single stroke of the pen, why spend time, money, and energy taking on individual property owners?
The process of transforming the country into one that lives by Franco-Germanic, as opposed to Anglo-American, political tenets is a lengthy one, because America possesses vast resources. The plenty with which we are surrounded tends to lull us into a state of lassitude, and provides an ideal cover for the efforts aimed at curtailing our freedom. Our material wealth appears to be increasing every day as Americans once again demonstrate their unlimited capacity to adapt and adjust. But let us not forget that human potential — and our freedom to develop it fully — is what provides America’s real strength.
Maintaining that strength demands that we retain our common American identity. No one knows that better than those who labor to extinguish it altogether.
The incorporation of the Mississippi River and its watershed into federal policy (meaning: control) — via the so-called American Heritage Rivers Initiative — was effected by a presidential Executive Order signed by President Clinton on September 11, 1997. This same president also declared, by Executive Order, that the massive deposits of high-quality “clean” coal found in the state of Utah — the best and most extensive clean-coal deposits in the entire country — cannot be commercially developed, because the ground on which these resources reside has been redesignated as a United States national park. Most of Utah is now “owned” by the federal government — apparently without any assent from the citizens of Utah. (Whatever happened to the Tenth Amendment???)
Historically the Executive Order has been understood as a presidential advisory to the executive (administrative) departments of government as to how to interpret and apply Congressional law in their duties. That’s a very spare definition.
And yet the first President Roosevelt seems to have found them effective tools for Executive encroachments — “silent, violent usurpations” — of the constitutional powers of Congress, and of the States and the People.
Nowadays “progressive presidents” — Clinton, and now Obama — use Executive Orders as if they had the force and command equal to Congressional legislation.
Which under the Constitution, they do not have. In the instant case of the American Heritage Rivers Initiative, the president had no constitutional authority to “make national law,” although that, in fact, is what he did. In the act, he usurped Congress — the only legitimate law-making body under the federal Constitution.
Notwithstanding, a subsequent president can nullify any Executive Order effected by a predecessor president. Not to mention that EOs have no standing in court superior to Congressional acts. Thus they cannot be any kind of long-term surety for American law.
But it seems EOs are “perfect tools” for those of communist, i.e., of “social justice” persuasion. Since communist ideas have no traction, no validity in constitutional law as historically understood, communists have to change the rules of the game.
What I find most striking today is the use of EOs, activating seemingly unlimited and unaccountable regulatory powers in the executive branch departments, in ways that have so powerfully transformed the basic institutions of American society, virtually in the blink of the eye — with little protest from Americans outside the Tea Party.
Case in point: President Obama effectively “nationalized” GM. He had absolutely zero constitutional authority to do that. But then he told American citizens that what he did was okay, because he had taken pains to return to you, dear taxpayer, a decent profit on your [compulsory] investment in the American auto industry — and you saved jobs thereby! See, it’s a “win–win situation.” [And the Constitution be damned.]
I think Obama gets this: You don’t have to outright own the United States of America to control it in every conceivable way. But for this, you need “a little help from your friends”….
The sad thing is Vázsonyi is very likely right: If the American people will not stand up for the Constitution and its system of government, which stresses individual liberty and equal justice under equal laws, governmental transparency and accountability, and the recognition that, in the USA, We the People are sovereign, then the people will shortly lose their liberty.
If Vázsonyi is right, then the American people will soon enough become the next victims of communist ideology, with all its accompanying pain and suffering and its sheer, inchoate, irrelievable, irrational madness…. In short, victims of communism’s successful instantiation of Hell on earth….
©2010, Jean F. Drew
Thought you might find this of interest....
Social justice through denial of true freedom to all . . . except those in charge of doling out the justice.
Any time I hear the term “social justice” my radar goes up. Sometimes it is followed by a discussion of charitable acts, but more often than not it is followed by a description of some weird need for aggressive socialism.
Like I always say, they always leave out the “ist” at the end of “social.”
Thanks so much for your reply!
Super rant.
I was so impressed with this essay, the clarity and thoroughness, that I forwarded it to Glenn Beck’s staff. I hope you don’t mind.
I so agree!
Thank you for writing RatRipper!
Social Justice is generally invoked in the name of human rights and equality, but its intent is to take the wealth and the freedom of some and give it to others, who have not earned it, with the expectation that the grateful recipients will bestow their unreserved support on their new benefactors. Of course, that support is not permanent. It is a lease only arrangement, and the lease must be renewed at a higher price after a relatively short time. Hence, the demands on our wealth, on our labor, and on our freedoms will never end until the “idea” of Social Justice is consigned to the dustbins of history.
You don't get it. Communism has been a roaring success whenever it's been tried, vastly increasing the standard of living of the people who matter most under Communism -- the Party insiders.
Under Communism, the Party insiders (at least the ones smart enough and ruthless enough to survive the political purges) lived lives of extreme luxury compared to the common people. They had personal servants. No common woman was allowed to say no if a member of the Leadership wanted her in his bed. It was the Good Life.
If you understand this one thing, it all makes sense.
So, in effect, he gets a book report instead!
Thank you so very much for your kind words!
What do you expect — these are not honest people. They prefer to conceal their true motives, and to obsfucate their true meaning as much as possible.
Thanks so much for your observation!
Thanks Jacquerie!
Freedom is not for the weak. The weak get taken care of by the strong. When our society started changing from a masculine focus to a feminine focus the slow creep of the state taking the masculine role began.
If we truly want to keep our freedom we have to assume the burden that comes with it. The state can't be expected to guarantee a "good life" for everyone. Does anyone really expect seniors to go along with cutting Social Security, increasing Medicare premiums, or for parents to support the ending of govt student loans? There are a huge number of "goodies" we have to get rid off if we don't want govt in charge. I doubt that a majority of this country is willing to do that.
Yes, and there is no more maddeningly self-contradictory notion anywhere than this idea that the universe is the product of meaningless chance and has no significance whatsoever (and will one day cease to exist in oblivion) but that in the meantime human history is teleologically "programmed" to end in perfection.
"The world is meaningless! Make a difference!"
At least Hegel was a pantheist who believed the universe was in the process of creating G-d (chas vechalilah!). What the excuse of Marxist materialists is I have no earthly idea.
To summarize, you're talking about the transition from the former, to the latter, in American life.
There's a good deal of truth to Vázsonyi's observation that we are "lull[ed]... into a state of lassitude," and there are certainly those who consciously seek to curtail our freedom.
However, these factors are insufficient to satisfactorily explain what has been happening over the past 110+ years.
You started out talking about "social justice," but in the remaining text, that topic seems to have been pushed off the table.
Which is unfortunate, because the history of the (supposed) transition from one model to the other, really cannot be properly understood without looking at the very real social injustices that had grown up under the so-called Anglo-American model as a result of industrialization -- things like exploitation of workers, child labor issues, discrimination of various sorts, or pollution, and so on. The transition was (and is) driven in large part by the various attempts to address these problems. At the time, it seemed that government was the only entity strong enough to contend with the "robber barons" and their political allies -- thus setting the stage for later resort to government interventions.
And here it is important to distinguish between the moral requirement (imposed on us by Jesus Himself) to address social injustices; and the particular means by which they're addressed.
And it is tempting to associate conservatives and liberals with the Anglo-American and Franco-German models; but that really doesn't work.
I've observed that conservatives often fail to distinguish between the problem and the solution; in arguing against the means, we all too often do so by claiming that an underlying problem does not exist, or doesn't matter: we end up using the Franco-German approach of arguing "abstractions" that do "not recognize individuals as individuals," but only as examples of what happens when one does or does not live according to whatever Grand Principle we happen to espouse. In effect, the conservative "solution" is often to do nothing, which may be true to the principle, but often does not address a real problem.
Unlike conservatives, liberals have tended to focus on people (either cynically or, more often, out of genuine concern), generally without regard to underlying principles. They are content to address the immediate problems, without regard to the longer-term consequences (often unintended and unpleasant) of whatever actions they take. To them, people are examples of "the issue of....," and again we see the Franco-German model at work. The default position has increasingly become to use the convenient and quick solution of using government power to address the immediate problem.
This carries with it the powerful temptation to accumulate and use power, and it certainly attracts those whose interests run more toward control than in addressing real problems. To that sort of person, identifying (or creating) "problems" becomes a lever to accumulate power. Note, however, that the lure of economic power has the same result -- an industrialist or financier is no less tempted to seek more power; and he's just more likely to argue based on "freedom," albeit without acknowledging or living up to the the responsibilities that freedom imposes.
Most people are observers of these sorts of debates, rather than participants -- a trend that seems to have accelerated over the past few decades, as the scope of government has increased. But that doesn't mean such people are entirely passive (they still vote). And people can tell the difference between abstractions and people as individuals, even if they can't provide names to the models, as you have.
The left has been very successful in framing issues in terms of things that hurt people (or animals, or landscapes), and to the extent that they've sold "injustice," they have been able to trump conservatives who argue according to principle. That's why the left has pretty much steadily gained ground over the years over us conservatives, who are stuck in our abstractions.
If we are truly interested in reversing the trend of government intrusion, it seems to me that we need to find a way to argue and behave that accounts for our God-imposed moral responsibilities, as well as our God-given freedoms. That's the true basis of the Anglo-American model -- not just freedom, but also responsibility.
Indeed, the state can't be expected to guarantee a "good life" for everyone. This is a cadge worthy of a Bernie Madoff.
As Noumenon pointed out in a in a recent post, what the government is doing is a Ponzi scheme. Yet the fact is it simply has no constitutional warrant to be in the social services business anyway.
The Ponzi scheme consists of the fact that the government doesn't create wealth. It needs the wealth created by others to fund its promises; i.e., to take from Peter to give to Paul. If, then, it turns around and reduces the human liberty necessary to create wealth, (e.g., through endless regulation and taxation), its posture is hostile to what generates the wealth of the nation, which is the private economy. There is no other source of wealth. And the upshot is there is less and less wealth for it to distribute to the non-productive members of our society. Rather than "'grow the pie," current government policies shrink the pie; it gets smaller and smaller over time, while their promises to "help" us proliferate.
The cadge is really a bribe: Do what we say and we'll give you funds out of your neighbor's pocket. So the foolish find this irresistible: They gladly put their necks into the government yoke. We agree to submit to its commissars in exchange for "a mess of pottage." But they are fools who submit to this; for the government, if not outright killing the goose that lays the golden eggs (i.e., the private economy) is strangling it. The strangulation consists of destroying the liberty necessary for creative private persons to create wealth in the first place. The upshot is there is no way for the government to keep the promises it is making.
I think you are right, wmfights: There are a number of "goodies" we have to get rid of if we want to keep the government in its constitutional bounds. But again, these "goodies" generally do not have a constitutional warrant in the first place and, therefore, should never have been attempted.
Some may scream that their "bennies" are being taken away. But the fact of the matter is they are inexorably going away anyway; for the government has made promises it simply can't keep. The most ominous sign of this is the fact that the federal debt ($14 trillion and climbing) already exceeds the total wealth of the nation. And the debt service has gotten to the point that it is engulfing the federal budget, leaving less and less money to pay for social services, not to mention such constitutionally-warranted items as national defense.
Will people wake up and face the implications of this reality? And then get serious about dealing with it, before our liberties, our economy, and our way of life implode?
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