In Praise of Chumps
When a red Ferrari recently crashed in Beijing, the rumor mills exploded with reports that the driver was none other than Bo Guagua, son of the Communist Party chief of Chonquing and graduate of Harrow and Oxford. Such is life among the vanguard of the Proletariat: in a Ferrari one day, on the run the next. Bo’s dad, Bo Xilai, has just been cashiered by the Politburo, and Bo’s mother is under arrest. But it was good while it lasted:
The Proletarian Life
Bo Guagua had been making social media headlines in China as he squired around Chen Xiaodan, the daughter of “Chen Yuan, the governor of the China Development Bank and one of China’s most influential bankers”:
Chen, now studying at Harvard for an MBA, is the granddaughter of Chen Yun, one of China’s top leaders until his death in 1995 and one of the “eight immortals” of the Communist leadership of the 1980s and 90s …
Her background thus makes her one of the most eligible women in the country. Together with 17-year-old Jasmin Li — the granddaughter of Jia Qinglin, a member of the all-powerful nine-member Politburo Standing Committee — they are better known among Europe’s elite as China’s “red princesses” for their high-profile appearances at blue-blooded Paris balls.
Chen has featured in photographs of debutante balls such as the Crillon Ball in Paris which have appeared on Twitter and Facebook as well as the usual Chinese social networking sites. In 2006, Chen was considered the most attractive young woman at the ball attended by beauties such as 20-year-old Princess Costanza of Italy and other European royals.
Wearing her Oscar de la Renta dresses, her stylish looks have been an inspiration to many young people in the new China, yet as news about these red princesses who mingle with the European and American glitterati is kept out of the state-run Chinese press, little is actually known in China about them.
The thing about communism, at least to the uninitiated, is that it appears to be identical in all respects to a hereditary aristocracy. If one didn’t know better, it would seem that the more communist a country, such as North Korea, the more it resembles a monarchy. In China, the children of the Politburo members are actually called princesses and princes, and they gad about in a style that makes the current European royalty look like a bunch of low-rent grifters.
How admirable then, that intellectuals like Cornel West, Van Jones, and Bill Ayers can go around and seriously sell socialism and Marxism in the name of “equality” and “egalitarianism”. You know, because they are one with the Common Man. Surely their superior educations must provide a true insight into the nature of Marxist societies, because to the uninitiated the whole thing looks like a scam to trick people into waging “revolution” in which a few odd million will be horribly killed to create a worker’s paradise and green society. All the resulting outcomes we actually examine reveal only societies ruled by an aristocracy no different from — nay, more lavish than — the Court of the Sun King at Versailles. Versailles didn’t even have indoor plumbing.
But at least it had trees and bushes in the garden. North Korea doesn’t. North Korea’s forests have been burned down by the happy peasants to cook their gruel and to keep from dying of cold in winter. Defectors heading south know they’ve reached the capitalist Republic of Korea because they can see trees again. And as for the environment in China: well, why do you think the red princes and princesses go to Paris to dance the night away?
Future generations may wonder how it was possible for sophisticated Western intellectuals to actually devote their lives to bringing about communism as if it were anything more than a swindle. Consider Walter Kendall Myers, a distinguished State Department intelligence analyst, who together with his wife Gwendolyn spied on America for years on behalf of Fidel Castro. They were not paid money. In fact, their only known reward was being congratulated by Fidel himself:
Myers, an Ivy League-educated Europe specialist who made his home in Northwest Washington’s diplomat-friendly precincts, began working for the State Department as a contract instructor in 1977. He joined full time in 1985 and become a senior analyst with a top-secret clearance in the department’s sensitive bureau of intelligence and research.
…
“We did not act out of anger toward the United States or from any thought of anti-Americanism,” Walter Myers said in a 10-minute statement in seeking leniency for his wife. “We did not intend to hurt any individual American. Our only objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution. We only hoped to forestall conflict” between the countries.
They acted, as always, from what they believed to be idealism. Never did they entertain the notion that they might have been led on by stupidity. Gross, manifest, and terminal imbecility. They betrayed their country, and not in order to advance the cause of “peace” or “prosperity” for the “poor and downtrodden”. In reality, they sold out their country so that slimy tyrants in foreign countries could live the life of kings, and they did not even have the wit to notice.
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Saif al Islam, from jet-setter became a paria in 6 months too
I can never quite make up my mind about people like Bill Ayers. Are they true believers (with good intentions) or are they blackhearts, virtual–or actual–servants of Satan?
I just can’t decide.
Bill Ayers, however, gives me chills. It’s that constant but cold commissar smile of his. My gut tells me that, were he ever to get the upper hand, he would either be supervising executions or perpetrating them; and if the latter, using a small-caliber automatic pistol, pressed firmly at the base of his victims’ necks.
The population on the Left can be divided into three categories — the “useful fools”, the revolutionary saints and the players. Of the useful fools we will say no more. Then there are the “saints” for whom Marxism is a religion and whose reward is to blind them to its actual purposes. It’s there to give them the transcendental experience that mysticism once gave the contemplatives. That’s what they’re in it for. They give the revolution whatever dignity it has; they do all the dangerous and necessary things and few of them survive it. Those who do are killed off by the third category, the players.
All Communist societies are built on the bones of its saints. That’s all they’re good for really: to dream and to die.
But the players are those who actually know what it is all about. Which is that it is about power and money. Always was, always has been and always will be. That’s why they survive and while all the saints won’t. Because they know the Big Secret, they know what really matters. As for ideology, the players know that “Marxism” is just a disinformational narrative for the useful fools. They believe in Communism in the same way a crooked preacher believes in God. That is to say, not at all.
When Myers met Castro, one was the fool and one was the player. But what of Ayers? Bill Ayers, I think, has the mind of player. A lousy one it’s true. But what he lacks in talent, he makes up for in attitude. The “revolution” was never about the ‘poor’. It was always and will always be about Bill Ayers.
Humans tend to worship power, authority, and legitimacy because it reminds them of God — even, and perhaps especially, when they don’t believe in God. A public show of solidarity with the People is today’s “Divine Right of Kings.” At least medieval Christian kings really did, for the most part, believe they were answerable to a higher power. There probably aren’t a lot of ChiCom princes and princesses who delude themselves into believing that they are answerable either to Marx’s dialectic or peasants stamping out circuit boards in a distant factory.
> 3. Wretchard: “But the players are those who actually know what it is all about. Which is that it is about power and money.”
It looks like another example of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy in action.
“Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.”
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail408.html#Iron
3. wretchard
But was Lenin a true believer or a player? Which is to say, did he really believe that Marxism was a transcending [sic] ideology or was he simply a cynical and very evil man–i.e., evil by choice, intent, and desire? Paul Johnson observed that Lenin’s exterior persona concealed an accountant struggling to get out. People were, to him, mere statistics. Numbers. There can be no denying that this aspect of his character caused great evil to befall a great many people. He was functionally evil. But was he purposely evil?
Tolkien remarked, in his character sketch of Melkor, that the mightiest of the Valar was stupid by virtue of becoming, by choice, purely evil. Tolkien also pointed out at that Melkor was insane. Could the same be said of Lenin and those like him?
Versailles didn’t even have indoor plumbing. At least that explains why I had some much trouble finding the loo.
Folks like Ayes and Van Jones are about as arrogant as one can be while still allowed to roam the planet without restraints. The characteristic in focus is absence of humility – inability to be wrong. Rationality is absent, because reasoning leads to proof by contradiction in cases where the premise is false.
The ultimate kind of evil man, as I argued in the Charlie Manson thread, isn’t the guy with the pliers and the sharp knives as much as the calm bureaucrat planning and building his paradise on the bones of millions. As some other Marxist put it, “one man’s death is a tragedy, a million is just a statistic”.
Charlie Manson is of a low order of evil, the kind that is fueled by passion, anger, lust or insanity. High order evil is that of Satan: proud, controlling, vain. Manson says “stay away from me, I am mean”. He knows he is bad. “I am God. I am the Devil.” Lenin, I think, saw himself as God, or as much God as a man could be, given that God didn’t exist. Lenin was Raskolnikov with guts. God doesn’t exist, therefore nothing is forbidden. Truly, if you buy the premises, how can you deny the conclusion?
This is where the revolutionary saints go wrong. All of them are in it for heaven. All of them half hope that the skies will open and that the real God, if only the God of History, will come down and say, “by your tears have I heeded your cry”. The revolutionary saints hunger for God the way the real saints did; except that they cannot, in their disbelief, call Him by that name.
If Lenin was coldly cruel, Stalin’s big problem was that he frankly enjoyed it. He liked seeing people squirm and watching show trials. He got a rise out of seeing people he once feared to offend scream and plead. You can say that Lenin drank his power with intellectual asceticism. Stalin guzzled it down like a slob. Hence the Left prefers Lenin; purely for aesthetic reasons.
In the last scenes of Downfall, Hitler says, “if only I was as cruel as Stalin then I would have won”. Hitler was as bad as a man can be, yet in justice he was right. There was in him some vestige, a whisper of a scruple that Stalin, in order to be fully unfettered, had long since cast away.
That’s why I like science – you push the button and it flies, or it don’t.
That’s why the Renaissance in the west was skeptical and empirical and seeking of freedom, to escape dogma wars.
Dogma, even theory, is not for everyone, that is they will parrot it but not ever know wtf they are doing. The same of course is true of physical endeavors, but there failure is usually more obvious.
epignosis #8:
“Folks like Ayers and Van Jones are about as arrogant as one can be while still allowed to roam the planet without restraints.”
Say what you will about hunter/gatherer or pastoralist or herding societies. When they had to deal with the like of these two they either killed them outright or shunned them and cast them out. There is simple and useful wisdom in this.
Interesting the hold that Paris has on Chinese ‘Communist’ princesses. Much like the hold that Europe has on the American Ruling Clique. (How many US Supreme Court Justices choose to vacation in France or Italy rather than in the USA?)
Well, if we look at what Europhilia has done to the quality of political leadership in the US, the Chinese people ought to be worried.
Obviously the Chinese have sold out. They were never serious about the Revolution. Don’t worry – Ayers and his followers, the TRUE Communists, will keep the Revolution going. /sarc
josh@#10: science – you push the button and it flies, or it don’t
Well, maybe science gives you that clarity. Maybe not. Endogenous global warming? Maybe we know what we know, or maybe we don’t. The moment of conception of a fetus? Maybe even if we know what we know, it won’t keep us from deciding to sanction (pro or con!) a thing or action or not. We will always need the “saints”.
Wretchard -
So from which of the 3 groups do the defectors from Communism come?
And are the saints ever, in your opinion, able to renounce their religion? Or is it still on their lips when they die?
Others free free to chime in as well. But I was interested in W’s perspective based on people he has personally known.
thanks
bw
You get defectors from the saints and players, not hardly ever from the useful fools. The saints who defect are like David Horowitz, and they become apostates with a will. I kept the company of apostates, and learned much from as you probably have guessed, to supplement what I saw myself. And these were the most hated of all — the fallen angels. They say no man is a hero to his own valet. And they’d seen the Politburo at their most ludicrous.
The players defect too, when they can spot a better deal. Stalin for example, was probably an informer in the Okhrana during his career as a junior thug and cadre. Of course, when he figured Lenin’s bunch were going to win, he probably buried everyone who remembered his Okhrana past and emerged as Stalin, the Socialist Man of Steel! He had a sense of humor, that guy, like calling yourself Captain Starman or the man from FEAR — Fighting Evil Always Ready! I have no doubt Stalin would have been Democrat or a Republican, had he seen any advantage in it. He was that kind of guy.
The useful fools, I think, are just that: dopes. If they could only hear the cackles of players who’ve just finished passing the hat after the dupes had filled them. Castro probably laughed himself hoarse when Myers left the room, holding his crackerjack Order of the Hero of Cuba medal. “What an idiot! What a maroon!”
The thing about a useful fool is they have to have to be just conceited enough to think they are clever without actually having any real cleverness to speak of. A player can spot them the way you spot the marks at the 3 card monte.
I believe that Bo Xilai and his generation call themselves “the second red generation” because their parents were part of Mao’s revolution. They seem to believe that they deserve to be in power simply because of their lineage. I think they are usually against the liberalization of the Chinese economy because they say it is anti-communist. The communist princes and princesses are the children of the second red generation.
Anywhere else, these people would be called the hereditary aristocracy. I also think that regular folks in China are becoming mightily cheesed off at the Chinese aristocracy.
Anyone interested in reading a charming (really) first hand apology for the Communist Revolution in Russia by a useful idiot should look up “Russia in 1919″ by Arthur Ransome. Lenin, Kamenev, Litvinov, Dherzinsky, Trotsky and all the other team members appear in this 100 page account of first hand encounters, conversations and Party committee meetings. Ransome eventually married Trotsky’s secretary. The book is available free from the Gutenberg Foundation.
This is the same Arthur Ransome who later wrote some of the best ever children’s books in the “Swallows and Amazons” series. Go figure.
Bogie Wheel -
The Saints. The useful idiots normally too stupid to no notice that they being used. So they keep being used. Look at how many useful idiots still support Obama.
The Saints aren’t necessarily stupid, they just have to have the scales fall from their eyes. Some kind of significant emotional event causes it more often then not. Stalin and Hitler signing a pact. Hungary getting invaded. 9/11.
Good point, wretchard, about the players. I hadn’t even thought of that.
Actually, I was thinking about David Horowitz as an example of a defecting Saint. His significant emotional event (which I couldn’t remember while posting my earlier replay about the defectors) was the death of Betty Van Patter, at the hands of Black Panther members. He had gotten her the job that got her killed.
Affectation is a vulgar declassée attribute. True aristocrats only climb into the funny costumes because it is part of the job. They know that entertaining the mob is the price they have to pay. Even if they do not feel any special devotion to the commoners as opposed to their international peers they have learned to act like patriots. The newly rich and transnational socialist elites have not learned these lessons. The public displays of the grandchildren of revolutionaries and the grandchildren of self made businessmen are a mark of their weakness.
There is a fine balance to tread. Overdo the common touch and the magic vanishes and you end up like the Scandinavians that the English royals dismiss as “bicycle kings.” Wallow to deeply in spectacle, fall into the trap of enjoying it for its own sake and the great unwashen will turn on you and cut off your head. The trick, and it is I believe a survival mechanism that has been internalized, is to publicly display your devotion to the community and traditional values. Males serve in the military and when pressed as to what their job is most old aristocrats would claim they are merely gentry and that they are simply farmers. A few could enter the learned professions without being seen as threats.
This adherence to rural agriculture and the military, and the avoidance of business, goes back at least to Greece and Rome. It is I suspect partly due to the fact that even commercial urban dwellers, who would claim that they despise the country folk, trust and feel less threatened by aristocrats in traditional roles, where they do not compete with mercantile interests. One reason that most from the Right and the Left agreed that Edward VIII had to go was that he refused to fit into the traditional roles. That Conservative iconoclast Churchill did not want the king to abdicate.
In America both Reagan and Bush made a public display of their devotion to clearing brush on their ranches when not doing the nation’s business. LBJ may have been the only Democratic in the last century to assume the pastoral role. Carter claimed to be a peanut farmer but he came across as what he was, the overbearing warehouse owner. Carter was America’s Ted Sandyman. What traditional pastimes can anyone imagine Obama doing on his copious time off, besides playing golf and maybe selling weed?
Thanks, Wretchard & Smashmaster. Believe it or not, your thoughts on the subject are actually useful to me. I’m working on a Cold War era story in which a KGB agent (not the main character, but an important one) defects. Only I haven’t decided whether the defection is real or not. (I’m intrigued by Edward Jay Epstein’s account of the double-defection in the 1960s of two Soviet agents during a time window narrow enough to suggest that the two defections were somehow linked; Epstein posits that one of the defections was false & was set up to discredit the other one. Epstein is also sympathetic to Angleton’s assertions that the CIA had long been penetrated by moles, i.e. since at least the 1950s.)
Whether the defection is real or not probably hinges on whether this guy is a saint or a player. That, too, is something I have not yet decided. At any rate, ultimately, his motives have to be credible, whoever/whichever he is.
I have ruled out useful idiot. For obvious reasons … guy would not have survived in his line of work if that blinkered. Plus, the useful idiots just aren’t very interesting characters. Who wants to write about a dope when you could have the Emperor Claudius or Verbal Kint?
(probably why the explanation for the success of Adam Sandler movies escapes me)
So unlike American political dynasties that only gained following their run-ins, the Chinese system actually punished these miscreants and held the parents responsible as well. No doubt they are all rightly scared and ashamed at this moment, rather than pouting in rehab as they would be over here.
China additionally executes high officials for graft and embezzlement, while sentencing partners for life. No doubt the U.S. counts those as “human rights abuses” and casts it as Soviet-style infighting… signs that “the regime” is about to collapse… any day now…
If an American even suggested harsh justice for our officials, he or she would surely be placed under surveillance or flat-out arrested for threatening.
Remember, it’s systems we are talking about here – not the reality of human sins everywhere, and certainly not about race…. Right?
Josh @ 10
LOL!
Every time I have to listen to some leftist/statist/commie gab on about social justice, science, liberty, or The Constitution I’ll think of the Turbo Encabulator: http://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag
Via G Vanderleun’s American Digest.
The party has a long tradition of executing people — whether for graft and embezzlement or other offenses — is possibly irrelevant. There’s only one sin in a Worker’s Paradise; the one in fact that Bo is charged with. Breach of discipline. Stealing, killing, indeed any act whatsoever, is never ipso facto wrong or bad, if it is sanctioned by the Party. Any act, however moral, is conversely bad, if it is performed in rebellion to the Party.
But before we admire the Chinese, consider they are only playing by the rules. The harshness of the punishment is the flipside for the grant of unlimited power and the opportunity to exercise it. The Chinese government wields unlimited power over its citizens. The American system, by contrast, was designed as one of limited government.
In a limited government system, where being a member of the a political party or even holding high office does not grant absolute power, the protections of due process are indeed appropriate. The protections of due process are in fact predicated on a system of limited government. Only a limited government can be successfully policed by a system of laws.
But consider an unlimited government. One run by ruthless and violent men. Once a government become unlimited — as threatens to be the case in many Western countries — the power of laws to restrain it becomes correspondingly reduced. One easy way to see this is that during wartime, when the government assumes (one hopes temporarily) extraordinary powers, then it in effect becomes a limited term police state. You shoot spies peremptorily. You wiretap people.
A Communist state is in a perpetual state of emergency; paradoxically because it has to control unlimited power with unlimited punishment. A Marxist dictatorship could not exist without a secret police and basement cells with blood drains in them. The foundation of the Leninist state is the cheka. Everyone who enters a Revolutionary Party (not the useful fools) understands he is entering a high-stakes casino.
The penalty for snitching in clandestine conditions is death. It has to be. In China, where the Party is no longer clandestine, the rules are relaxed somewhat. But only somewhat. Hence, executions among Chinese party members are probably chiefly remarkable for their rarity. Maybe among the rank and file the sentences for transgressors are delivered by night, with a bullet to the forehead.
In Bo’s case, he is high ranking enough so that this is not practical. He has to be destroyed politically. And the only way to do this is a show trial. That is probably coming next.
But at any rate, if one wants to save a society of laws from becoming like China’s, the price is limiting government. Only a civil and polite government can be successfully constrainted by mere words on paper and popular legitimacy. You may even go so far as to say that the basic protection of rights is the limitation of government. Remove the limits on government power and you remove the limit on possible punishment.
Any government powerful enough to give you whatever you want can take whatever it wants. And the discourse between citizens and states in those cases, indeed between internal factions in such a state, is never in words, but in calibers.
In my youth I had a “friend” (we were co workers) who was a hard core socialist communist. The real deal. His parents undoubtably brought him up that way. We would debate the topic, but no argument ever shook him. After a while it got tiresome.
It is strange how such ideas can take hold.
2. Roughcoat
I can never quite make up my mind about people like Bill Ayers. Are they true believers (with good intentions) or are they blackhearts, virtual–or actual–servants of Satan?…Bill Ayers, however, gives me chills. It’s that constant but cold commissar smile of his. My gut tells me that, were he ever to get the upper hand, he would either be supervising executions or perpetrating them; and if the latter, using a small-caliber automatic pistol, pressed firmly at the base of his victims’ necks.
I see Bill Ayers as a true believer. Prairie Fire, which included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn as two of its four co-authors, advocated dictatorship of the proletariat for the US. That is true believer territory, coming as it was written after four years on the run. Dictatorship of the proletariat ends up with mass executions, so Bill Ayers as executioner rings true.
The only renunciation of his previous beliefs has been to say that instead of a Communist, he is now a communist. Big difference. Were he a player and not a true believer, he would have come up with a much stronger renunciation of his past.
The population on the Left can be divided into three categories — the “useful fools”, the revolutionary saints and the players.
I think there is a fourth category – the apostates. Neither fools nor saints nor players; decent human beings who are outraged by the status quo yet are at least as outraged by the Communist alternative. These are people whom the Left will try to bamboozle, yet these are the same people who will turn on the Left whenever leftists act like leftists. These are reformers who battle year after year to keep their cause from getting hijacked by Communists who don’t have their best interests in mind, reformers wary of outsiders who do nothing to build resistance but descend like hawks to gobble up grass roots organizations.
Such people may talk the language of the Left, and even believe that they are part of the Left, yet they hate the Communists with a bitter passion. These are people who don’t desire paradise, but merely a better life – a decent life, and are pragmatic enough to watch for what works and what doesn’t. Too jaded and cynical to be saints, too watchful to be fools, and too honest and conscientious to be players – such people tend to be outraged whenever Communists violate community standards.
All too often, these apostates don’t see themselves as leaving anything; they are what they always were. The problem is Communists who change the rules to suit themselves, moving around their flocks en masse without regard to ideology or logic.
An “honest prince” knows he must work for the good of the community. If he did otherwise, he would be a parasite and he would be honest enough to know it. So, he must make himself useful. Hence, noblesse oblige.
The essential problem with the Left is not that it has princes. Princes come in many times and places, in many forms, in many varieties. No, the problem is that leftist princes feel a strong sense of entitlement while feeling no noblesse oblige. They talk about “diversity” rather than treating other people decently. They talk about “social justice” rather than being just. They lecture others on morality while failing to practice it. The only form of charity they recognize is government largesse. They imagine themselves to be philosophers – they regurgitate leftist dogma and call it philosophy.
Under Communism, there is unlimited power. Yet, the rise of Communism also prompted the rise of dictatorships in Spain, Italy, Hungary, Argentina, and Brazil dedicated to eradicating Communism. They also had unlimited power.
The problem we face is being able to defend ourselves against totalitarian fanatics without becoming its mirror image. I think Communists call their opponents “Fascists” because that is what they truly desire in their enemies. A slave broken under one master can be made to serve another.
Wouldn’t a big difference between true believers and players be age? How many “true believers” become players once they become old and jaded?
There’s only one sin in a Worker’s Paradise; the one in fact that Bo is charged with. Breach of discipline. Stealing, killing, indeed any act whatsoever, is never ipso facto wrong or bad, if it is sanctioned by the Party. Any act, however moral, is conversely bad, if it is performed in rebellion to the Party.
Today’s Chinese have a written code of laws, and it isn’t “embarrass the party, go to jail”. It’s fine to wonder whether justice is applied equally, and while cases like this seem to say yes, they never receive credit for that. If your only measure of justice is process rather than outcomes, then I can suggest some religions to you… It was, after all, due process that made Charles Manson a celebrity – testament to the flaws in our system, not its beauty.
Maybe among the rank and file the sentences for transgressors are delivered by night, with a bullet to the forehead.
Possibly, but how often compared to anywhere? It’s paranoid to dwell on and shameful to exploit if it did happen.
In Bo’s case, he is high ranking enough so that this is not practical. He has to be destroyed politically.
How is this bad? I mean, other than being “Chinese”?
Any government powerful enough to give you whatever you want can take whatever it wants. And the discourse between citizens and states in those cases, indeed between internal factions in such a state, is never in words, but in calibers.
There were protests about this. People had just lived through two generations of perpetual revolution – longer if you precede their founding – and along came some youths demanding still more. “Mistakes were made” but a return to sheer turmoil was prevented. Sorry, no warring states, much to the sadness of the western media.
Oh, so Angela Corey has been appointed to the case then? Well, I guess that should calm the crowds.
Alexis, your “apostates” are really just another platoon in the bridage of useful idiots. If they really were “outraged” by the antics of their fellow Leftists, they wouldn’t work with them. Honestly, there are many complaints one can lodge about the typical capitalist system, but they all pale compared to what communists do. To champion any form of Leftism over even stunningly corrupt capitalism you need to be stupid, blind, or evil. The useful idiots are stupid, the saints are blind, and the plalyers are evil. “Apostates” as you described them would be either stupid or blind. I’d go with stupid, since apparently they’ve seen the problems with the Left and are too dumb to understand what they’ve seen.
And about that Ferrari: did he get the MI-6 discount, or was that just for Aston-Martins? They should check the car for opium in any case…
Lenin suffered from cerebral syphilis in maniacal form so he was medically insane. But he also was ultimately evil and nihilistic openly declaring that moral is bourgeous prejudice and insisting that everything faforable to the “Cause” (establishing dictatorship of proletariat) is moral and any crimes helpful to this goal are justified.
#31 JMH
You beat me to it. There have been very successful reformers throughout the history of the west during the time of leftism, from July 14 1789 on down, who would never, ever dabble in the leftist way to accomplish said reforms and instead work within free enterprise/democratic republican systems and would fight the centralist/autocratic/redistributionist model at every turn.
The “apostates” Alexis describes are just another flavor of useful idiot.
Wretchard:
“The population on the Left can be divided into three categories — the “useful fools”, the revolutionary saints and the players.”
The useful fools are easy to identify. They are the education industry/government employee/NGO/nonprofit/entertainment industry wannabes, what I have called here the NPR-listening, NYT-reading, Colbert-and-Stewart-watching pseudointellectual class who imagine that their slavish participation in these outlets and the unreflective parroting of the platitudes makes them one of the elite. Not LIKE one of the elite but actually a PART of the elite. Pfft.
As has been written above they are both the most numerous and the least likely leftists to ever be turned. And are the ones that the “players” hold in highest contempt. Least likely to be turned because they require the herd identifiers to have any sense of being or self-esteem. Contempt because even among the left smart, capable people find social climbers excruciating and lack of real intelligence or analytical ability tedious. I just finished reading Mamet’s biographical book “The Secret Knowledge” on his experience of having the scales fall from his eyes in seeing through the BS and evil of the left he inhabited for decades, and his journey to the center/right. Mamet would be among the “saint” class in your nomenclature. In this book he decribes in great detail the entire mechanism and process of the need of the leftist wannbe useful idiot class for shibboleths and identity with a group (membership in which is perceived by the useful idiots as being magically transformative into being one of the elite, of course).
If you ever want to see frothing, unhinged writing at its irrational worst go to the reviews section at amazon for this book and you’ll see the fearful apoplectic dynamic of the useful idiot clade when its claim on being part of the “smart set” is challenged in any way.
“Saints” like Mamet, as you describe them, can be turned. I would very strongly recommend reading the book to anyone who has not.
As I pointed out above, “players” are best incarcerated or executed. Their sociopathy predates their leftism and they are a danger regardless of their politics.
If you want to find out who Bill Ayers, our goat herding half bred Kenyan presidents neighbor, really is listen to the tapes of him. During the 70′s he was taped by a FBI informant talking about the REVOLUTION. He talks about how there would be reeducation camps in the Arizona desert and that for the 20 million or so that could not be “reeducated” there would be mass graves. Ayers, given the opportunity, would put a bullet in the head of everyone at the Club and not even reflect on the event except to hope the blood stains on his shoes weren’t permenant. Bill Ayers didn’t get this on his own. His father, the president of the Chicago power company was a hard over socialist and Bill learned this alien philosophy at home.
The useful idiots are the ones that astound me. They have so much to lose in a socialist system and they don’t seem to see that. I suppose they are lost in their arrogance and self delusion of intelegince that they can’t see the insanity of it all.
Phil Graham once said he believed that we would eventually be hunting Democrats with dogs and shotguns; I believe we are very close to that now.
Marx argued for stateless communism or world communism with the essence being a “withering away of the state”. He somehow believed that “strictly speaking, pure communism is a stage of social development where material and productive forces are advanced to a degree where actual freedom (freedom from necessity, and thus from wage labor and alienation from work) for every person is possible. The state apparatus becomes redundant because classes cease to exist.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_communism) How Marx ever got to this conclusion is beyond me.
Lenin knew better. In his 1902 work “What is to be done” he states “In the fourth and fifth chapters of his work, Lenin substantiated his plan for building a Marxist party, a rough outline of which he had presented earlier in the article “Where to Begin” (ibid., vol. 5, pp. 1–13). The Social Democratic groups and committees that existed in Russia at the time, being scattered and poorly organized, were not capable of leading the effort to implement the political goals of the proletariat. What was needed was a single organization—that is, a party—and it was the necessity of building such a party that the Economists denied. Lenin addressed this point when he wrote that “the spontaneous struggle of the proletariat will not become its genuine ’class struggle’ until this struggle is led by a strong organization of revolutionaries” (ibid., vol. 6, p. 135). http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/What+Is+To+Be+Done%3f+(pamphlet+by+Lenin) Lenin knew that in order to bring about the revolution a strong central organization would be needed. He also knew that this organization would never go away.
What is astounding to me is when idiots like Ayers, Cornell West and Van Jones blather on with their nonsense about the evils of capitalism that they somehow can’t read Marx, realize what his stated vision was, and then look at the Russian revolution (or any communist revolution) and see how it turned out. They somehow can’t see that communism has and will always dissolve into a hereditary monarchy (astute observation) and or dictatorship because that is the nature of man. How many more millions of people must die before communism as political system and socialism as an economical system is completely discredited? How can they ignore Solzhenitsyn?
KWB @ 36: “They somehow can’t see that communism has and will always dissolve into a hereditary monarchy …”
The bigger problem may be that any form of political structure ultimately degenerates (evolves?) into fascism — where private wealth is tolerated as long as the possessors of private wealth follow directions from the political elite (whether hereditary or not).
That certainly has happened to “Communism” in China. Today’s Russia is effectively operating on the fascist model. More distressingly, that is clearly the direction in which “Democracies” like the US, Australia, and the EU are heading. One could even argue that the 18th Century British government was steppping on to the fascist path when it used political power to condemn land for private canal building.
The whole Left/Right argument in modern democracies seems like a classic application of misdirection by the elites — keep the marks attention focused on irrelevancies while their pockets are picked and their liberties stolen.
no mo uro 11 – “Say what you will about hunter/gatherer or pastoralist or herding societies. When they had to deal with the like of these two they either killed them outright or shunned them and cast them out. There is simple and useful wisdom in this.”
I fully agree and support your methods, sir. Perhaps if the opportunity arises in the future we could move to implement these. A luddite approach to solutions!
RE: #24 “Any act, however moral, is conversely bad, if it is performed in rebellion to the Party.” It was ever thus. According to the Judeo Christian myth, Adam and Eve were punished for the “sin” of disobedience.
The ability to convince oneself that one is acting out of pure altruism, no matter how cruel the actual deed, is the calling card of the narcissist. All of the various forms of leftism — Marxism, Communism, Nazism — are political expressions of narcissism. As the famous saying does, these are the people who are most dangerous because they act with the complete approval of their own consciouses, such as they are.
A planned economy will always seem attractive to those narcissistic enough to dream of being among the planners. That’s it’s main attraction, for those who dream of greater status than the free market has bestowed upon them.
Look at a lot of the people who are most fervent about socialism, and you will see sons and daughters of very capable men who know they could not achieve what their parents did in the free market arena on their own merits.
William Ayers? Son of Thomas G. Ayers, CEO and Chairman of Commonwealth Edison of Illinois, on the board of many large corporations.
Lenin? Son of minor nobility. The list goes on.
In socialist circles you have a lot of people who are good at argumentation, but whose skills would not give them the status they think they deserved in the private sector.
I don’t think I agree with this analysis:
“I see Bill Ayers as a true believer. Prairie Fire, which included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn as two of its four co-authors, advocated dictatorship of the proletariat for the US. That is true believer territory, coming as it was written after four years on the run. Dictatorship of the proletariat ends up with mass executions, so Bill Ayers as executioner rings true.
The only renunciation of his previous beliefs has been to say that instead of a Communist, he is now a communist. Big difference. Were he a player and not a true believer, he would have come up with a much stronger renunciation of his past.”
Seems to me they are players–they assume that they will be the dictators.
Your last point rests on the assumption that it would be beneficial for a player to renounce his past. I don’t think that’s a valid assumption. Unfortunately, his schtick still sells.
America’s had its open royalty long before China was communist! Prediction from a couple days ago is going strong, MSM only reporting Black on White crime after being forced too! http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/04/police_probe_march_stabbing_in.html
I have another prediction; 0bama will dump Biden, of course it won’t be portrayed as Biden being dumped but 0bama needs shot in the arm and a new VP will help 0bama garner better numbers and fresh talking points.
The hierarchy of useful idiots, saints, and players rings true to me. It is a pyramid built on the foundation of the useful, all hopeful of winning the lottery through sheer loyalty and something more akin to belonging to something bigger than themselves, perhaps a secular god. The idiots fill out the ranks, the Saints stand as ideological stars and martyrs and crown it parapets, and the players hold it together as an organizational mortar. I especially appreciate the idea of teachers, unions, and government workers as the immovable face of a communist tyranny. They are the street soldiers like those many wanna be’s who would protect the Mafia Don’s with their life though unknown to them. It is like belonging to a ball club that plays, wins and loses and cashes in with no more support from the base than their votes and compulsory contributions at the gate. I put the Yankees in the pennant and all I got is this t-shirt. They are fanatical, maybe more so than the saints because saints can fall on acquired wisdom but idiots are dyed in the wool without a modicum of ideology. For them, belonging is good enough.
Trayvon Martin – useful idiot
Henry Louis Gates Jr. – saint
Al Sharpton – play’a
Bill Cosby – apostate
One difference from the old-fashiioned royalty is that the Communist kings always have to be cast down and out and widely disparaged after they assume room temperature.
I think this is a form of catharsis – the nation and the Party can offload all its crimes and mistakes onto the previous evil bunch, while the new, enlightened annoited can take power as pure and perfect creatures, Phoenix, risen from the ashes.
In other words, all previous evil and error is explained by some version of “It’s Bush’s fault.”
Add to the mix in America a unique state religion based on race. The Democrat slave holders of past generations called their chattel in from the fields and put them to work in the house. This absolves them of original sin and transposes it on any who might argue with their political vision. The state religion is founded on the notion that the victims of past injustices are free from sin, yea are incapable of it. Any excess is an expression of the ancient oppression that they suffered. Conversely, there are those who are born of sin. A sin of race, which is to say, it is in their genetic makeup, socially inferiority in the flesh. The new epistemology espoused by Reverend White and Al Sharpton embraced by the state, by the attorney general himself seeks to cleave away the sinners from individual liberty to the safe harbor of collective justice. So when the USG rides into town, it is as sure as the hooded riders have arrived to see frontier justice mete out. Trayvon Martin died for the sins of the Romans and the false prophets. I have no respect for his killer, white Hispanic or not, I do not belong to a group that must be punished for his sins. Under these circumstances the decisions left/right, right and wrong, tax and spend, are intractable problems that will always be fought ferociously and the conflation with white sin with social issues, with calls for liberty, individual choice and responsibility will never be solved. We will not be free until government itself is committed to a colorblind society.
Reading these powerful condemnations of Marxism is encouraging. Thank you all.
Serious question: What do you say to someone of influence who publicly professes both a Christian faith AND an admiration for Karl marx?
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Here is a pretty good review of Chinese succession struggles since Mao.
http://news.yahoo.com/china-ejects-bo-elite-ranks-wife-suspected-murder-020552782.html
Talking about true believers, useful idiots, and players is useful in understanding the Left, but it can be misleading. What ideology doesn’t have true believers, useful idiots, and players? Islam has all of these features. So does Fascism. So do some branches of Christianity. To say that Communism has its revolutionary saints, useful fools, and players is merely to say that Communists are human. Their minds may be full of kitsch but their rectums are full of excrement.
It’s rather like a German WWII era joke about fairy godmothers. For each German infant, there were three fairy godmothers. One would bless him with being good. Another would bless him with being intelligent. A third would bless him with being a National Socialist. But then, an evil fairy cursed them all by declaring that each infant could have only two out three blessings. So, you had good Nazis who weren’t intelligent, intelligent Nazis who weren’t good, and good intelligent Germans who weren’t Nazis.
The same joke could be told about Communists.
Socialism is just feudalism without the pagentry…you have your dictator (king), politiburo (knights), political officers (the state church), the court jester (hollywood), and the peasants (that’s us). Unfortunately it seems to be the natural order of things that the majority of people want to be taken care of and easily fall for the false narrative of socialism’s impossible promises. In time however the people do rebel and heads roll.
> [9. Wretchard] “If Lenin was coldly cruel, Stalin’s big problem was that he frankly enjoyed it. He liked seeing people squirm and watching show trials. He got a rise out of seeing people he once feared to offend scream and plead. You can say that Lenin drank his power with intellectual asceticism. Stalin guzzled it down like a slob. Hence the Left prefers Lenin; purely for aesthetic reasons.”
In the early Eighties, some years before the Soviet Union fell, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s memoirs were smuggled out and published in the West under the title “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich”. The authenticity and veracity of the memoirs have been challenged, as they were published by a fellow named Solomon Volkov; Volkov’s critics charged that the views expressed therein were more Volkov than Shostakovich. I can’t say one way or the other — but “Testimony” has the ring of truth and makes for fascinating reading, and I dismissed Volkov’s critics at the time as just a leftist response by fellow-traveling “useful fools.” Maybe I was wrong.
Anyhow, we know that the composer had endured his share of ups and downs with Stalin through the years, and for much of his life lived in fear that he’d be getting one of those 2 AM knocks on the door. Apparently, Stalin had come to some private decision about sparing Shostakovich because he liked the composer’s film music. But the composer didn’t know that.
One of the stories related in “Testimony” is what happened when Soviet composer Tikhon Khrennikov (whom “Testimony” describes as a miserable toady) was summoned to Stalin’s chambers:
“Stalin didn’t look up and went on writing… Silence. Suddenly, Stalin raised his head and peered at Khrennikov. As the people say, ‘he put his eye on him.’ They say that Stalin had worked out this tactic very well. Anyway, the hereditary worker behind the counter [Khrennikov] felt a warm mass under him, which scared him even more. He jumped up and backed toward the door, muttering something… He was grabbed by two male nurses, who were specially trained and knew what to do. They dragged Khrennikov off to a special room, where they undressed him and cleaned him up and put him down on a cot to get his breath. They cleaned his trousers in the meantime… It was a routine operation…. To shit your pants in front of the leader and teacher is not something that everyone achieves, it’s kind of an honor, a higher delight, and a higher degree of adulation.”
Stalin was a man who had an insatiable taste for cruelty.
a @ 49: It’s rather like a German WWII era joke about fairy godmothers. For each German infant, there were three fairy godmothers. One would bless him with being good. Another would bless him with being intelligent. A third would bless him with being a National Socialist. But then, an evil fairy cursed them all by declaring that each infant could have only two out three blessings. So, you had good Nazis who weren’t intelligent, intelligent Nazis who weren’t good, and good intelligent Germans who weren’t Nazis.
The same joke could be told about Communists.
Or Democrats.
Or you name it, it’s a good variation on other two-out-of-three-aint-bad sayings.
–
pw @ 47: Serious question: What do you say to someone of influence who publicly professes both a Christian faith AND an admiration for Karl Marx?
There were Christian communes in Europe for hundreds of years before the French Revolution or Marx, and communism takes its name from them, for better or worse.
Arlen Specter- playah!!
I think there is a dimension people fail to consider about the Left. It should be regarded as more of a language than an ideology.
George Orwell wasn’t kidding when he juxtaposed “We have always been at war with Eurasia” against “We have always been at was with East Asia”. Leftists not only seek to change the rules in the middle of the game, but their very power comes from their ability to arbitrarily change the rules. The Left sometimes claims to be pro-capitalist (hence, “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better” from Animal Farm); its useful idiots are often executives from powerful corporations! (Was George W. Bush a useful idiot when he bailed out the big banks in October 2008?) Communists claim that theirs is the only legitimate form of leftism – and then change their minds at regular intervals.
The ideology of the Left changes as fast as a weathervane, but the political language used by the Left remains remarkably constant. Leftists are often blinded by a common academic fault – analyzing other people without realizing that the observer is part of the situation he is analyzing. So, Communists and their fellow travelers become blind to their own privilege and fail to comprehend their own motives.
For example, no Communist support for the September 11 attacks makes any sense in terms of traditional Marxist analysis. This was an attack by feudalist vanguard of Islamic crusaders from a petroleum rentier class armed with an ideology of enforcing oriental despotism upon the entire human race – against the proletariat and bourgeoisie of New York City. By any stretch of the imagination, the world’s Communists would have taken the side of the United States if they were thinking logically – and Christopher Hitchens did! However, given that the ideology of a Communist vanguard is essentially feudalism in leftist garb, Communist class affinity – and its propensity toward using terrorism to bully people into submission – is closer to al-Qaeda. The class interest of “The New Class” (as Milovan Djilas dubbed it) has trumped Marxist ideology.
In plain English, Leftist ideals have no ideological or moral consistency beyond the self-interest of the players.
When people know no political language other than Leftspeak, they may bitterly oppose the leftist hierarchy and bitterly oppose leftist ideology, but they become unable to communicate with their natural allies among conservatives on the outside. It is important to understand Leftspeak – think of it as learning a foreign language – but one should never regard it as a sacred language. The important thing to remember about players is that they don’t take Leftspeak seriously as a liturgical language.
Wretchard: “You get defectors from the saints and players, not hardly ever from the useful fools. ”
To gauge how this construct of Players, Saints and Useful Fools, fits the society of America, I think it is a mistake to think of all the fashionable liberals as useful fools or idiots.
Most fashionable liberals still think of themselves as liberals – that is in some form as defenders of liberty – rather than leftists, socialists or communists. And as such, they have a huge psychological blind spot from which they can be turned.
To my way of thinking there is a huge fault line on the Left that Conservatives have failed to exploit. That fault line is the Liberal/ Fascist-Marxist divide. Conservatives, and perhaps more accurately the Republican establishment, has let the Left paper over their big problem of when supposedly well meaning “liberal’ programs go bad and fall into the Fascist Authoritarian abyss. The end, no matter how supposedly desirable, does not justify the means if you lose your liberties in the process. This point has not been expounded to any where near the amount it should be.
So when talking to a fashionable liberal one can easily mess with their heads and point out how they are really not liberals anymore if they support these fascist programs ( or Obama) that take away our liberties. Watch there face get all scrunched up and their head figuratively explode. They will have no good answers.
Wretchard said:
“How admirable then, that intellectuals like Cornel West, Van Jones, and Bill Ayers can go around and seriously sell socialism and Marxism in the name of “equality” and “egalitarianism”. You know, because they are one with the Common Man. Surely their superior educations must provide a true insight into the nature of Marxist societies, because to the uninitiated the whole thing looks like a scam to trick people into waging “revolution” in which a few odd million will be horribly killed to create a worker’s paradise and green society. All the resulting outcomes we actually examine reveal only societies ruled by an aristocracy no different from — nay, more lavish than — the Court of the Sun King at Versailles. Versailles didn’t even have indoor plumbing.”
Bill Ayers would probably respond that previous socialist/communist governments were corrupted by “capitalist roaders”. If these traitors/enemies against the proletariat had been detected early enough and “liquidated” then the “worker’s paradise” could have been achieved. Bill Ayers’ narrative would probably say that these failed socialist/communist governments were actually capitalists/bourgeois who were impersonating genuine socialists. For socialism to work, it merely needs one-more-chance with a leadership sufficiently indoctrinated in true Marxism, i.e. the narrative is never wrong no matter how many times it is proven wrong by reality (2+2=5).
The key point here is that socialists and useful idiots (moonbats) must never be allowed to hold positions of authority or public trust (They are a danger to themselves and the people around them). I might add that for this very reason, we are seriously screwed having Obama as President.
Bill Ayers and a roomate gang-raped a sometime girlfriend of Ayers. Bill’s brother refused to participate. The victim came forth in 2008. Bernadine Dohrn is notorious for having joked in admiration of the Manson murders.
Other members of the Weather Underground speculated about killing “all the rednecks” out in the desert or something. They figured that would come to some 19 million people at that time in the 70′s.
And, of course, these various folks participated in violence that killed people.
Whether such people could ever gain governing power in the U.S. is a matter of speculation, but it can be established that they have no moral compass whatsoever.
Don Rodrigo @ 57 said:
“Other members of the Weather Underground speculated about killing “all the rednecks” out in the desert or something. They figured that would come to some 19 million people at that time in the 70′s.”
I vaguely remember that killing off 10% of the original population is standard operating procedure after a communist government takes over (this is called “liquidating fascists”). I’m sure the numbers are out there on the Internet somewhere but I’ll let someone else confirm or deny this if they feel like it.
Their “moral compass” is establishment of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. That objective trumps all other forms of morality including “obsolete” ethics such as those from Judeo-Christian tradition (opiate of the masses).
Tolerating communists is like allowing a rattlesnake to run loose in your house. There should be some process where these people can be marked as dangerous but it’s not clear how it can be done without creating adverse civil liberty problems. There is also the whole revolution/reactionary thing, i.e. Nazis/fascists crawl out of the woodwork after people get terrified by the communists.
Anarchism was a serious nuisance in the late 19th century with them causing a significant amount of havoc (lots of terrorism and assassination). For the most part, we were able to get the anarchist thing behind us (still a few of them, of course). Why can’t we get the communist thing behind us?
So was that really uncle joe in the video clip? He sounds just like every other politician, blah, blah, blah.
Peter Warner @ 47:
Sadly, I don’t think there is anything you can really *say* to this person if they are more under the sway of Marx than the Holy Spirit. No matter what they profess with their lips, they either are born again or they are not. If they are, then the Holy Spirit will guide them to the truth. If they are not, then they will be terribly resistant to challenge.
Intercessory prayer is most likely your most effective weapon.
Should you also choose to attempt dialogue, you may want to probe just what it is about Marx that appeals to them. You may know the answers already & just did not mention in your post, but it helps to know things like the following:
(1) Is this person academic in their approach to Marxism? i.e. do they formally read & study Marxist writings? If so, who are they reading? Which authors would this person say have been most persuasive, and why? … If this is the case (Marxism appeals to this person’s intellect, and the enjoy the scholarly pursuit), then you may want to seek out the works of intellectuals who write eloquently on behalf of free enterprise, and see what criticisms they have to make of Marxism (I’m thinking of Milton Frienman’s statement on Donahue, “Where do you find these angels who run/control everything?”)
(2) Is Marxism’s appeal to this person primarily an emotional one? Have they not made much formal, personal study of it, but they more or less like what they’ve heard from others? Are they into the “equality” and “social justice” labels? If so, and if you think this person really is a genuine Christian who would respond to the use of Scripture, then you could point out Jesus’ teachings on mercy, justice, etc., in the context of His emphatic declarations that “My kingdom is not of this world” and his dealings with wealthy people. Socialists often like to fling the anecdote of the wealthy young man to whom Jesus said, Go sell all your belongings and give the proceeds to the poor …. but they avoid (out of deliberate deception or ignorance, it can be either) all the wealthy people Jesus interacts with to whom He does NOT give this instruction and what He does or does not have to say about their wealth on those occasions. That saying, “The poor you will always have with you” comes directly from the mouth of Christ in response to his disciples’ criticism of a woman who spent her money on some expensive perfume & poured it all over Jesus’ feet as an act of worship. (The disciples’ opinion being that she would have done better with her money by donating it to the poor. Jesus’ response confounds Marxist expectations & disrupts their preferred narrative of how He viewed earthly wealth.)
*********
The bottom line is, Marxism is a Godless religion. Which is to say, it is an -ism that attempts to perfect man, without God. That is the fundamental reason why Marxism and Christianity can never, ever be compatible.
That, and those 150 million (and still counting) corpses. Not very Christ-like, that.
Whittaker Chambers has a most excellent exploration of the “Godless religion” in the beginning of his book “Witness.” It’s either in the Intro or in Chapter One. If you see this angle (Marxism as counterfeit theology) being useful to you in your discussion with your acquaintance, then I highly recommend reading and studying the beginning of Chambers’ book. He was one of the “saints” who became an apostate. And his understanding of the theological/spiritual appeal is very, very thorough.
Imagine a group of smug, condescending jerks who like to preach their particular religion at you. Now also imagine that these same people openly flaunt their living in damn-near complete violation/obomination of their purported beliefs. Does this make you want to counsel them back onto the true path – or openly laugh at them and mock their total Bull**it self-invalidation lives?
Let Van Jones, et al talk and talk and talk. Speak so that I may know you…
#20, Blast from the Past — interesting theory, but aristos in the ancient world did involve themselves in trade. OK, at arms length with a favored slave handling the work, but it was not a secret who owned the guy negotiating the trade.
Peter @ 47 – I take my hat off to bogie on this topic. He always does a much better job of explaining these things using powerful logic.
The church, that is the disparate group of believers alive at any given time, has many functions. One of the most important is carrying the gospel message throughout the world – missionary activity. Only a prosperous and secure nation, with freedom of religion, can accomplish this mission.
Historically, Marxist states could not. They have always been adverse to religious freedoms, and indeed, to freedom of travel. As for security, judge that also from history.
Because of human nature, especially that of fallen mankind, collectivist solutions always fail. Why work hard to contribute to great storehouse (or treasury) when you can receive from the storehouse without working hard? A simple question, but this simple notion is the seed of the failure of Marxism.
Productivity decreases, prosperity disappears, and eventually liberty and freedom are taken because the state cannot afford to arm and defend itself.
Is that consistent with a nation that can evangelize the world?
9. wretchard wrote,
“If Lenin was coldly cruel, Stalin’s big problem was that he frankly enjoyed it. He liked seeing people squirm and watching show trials. He got a rise out of seeing people he once feared to offend scream and plead. You can say that Lenin drank his power with intellectual asceticism. Stalin guzzled it down like a slob. Hence the Left prefers Lenin; purely for aesthetic reasons.”
Well, Bertrand Russell met Lenin in 1920 and had this to say: ‘When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, “and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree ha! ha! ha!” His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.’ –”Eminent Men I Have Known”, “Unpopular Essays”
Maybe Stalin is just the scapegoat the left uses to blame for the “failure” of Communism.
Implicit in all this discussion and the mention of Bill Ayres especially, is the close connection between Ayres and Obama that is now coming into focus.
The struggle to understand who Obama really is continues.
Doesn’t there political prescription rest on their ethics, on their accepted mechanism of knowledge, on their accept view on the universe?
If they feel that nature (including the nature of [other] men) is subordinate to their desires, and they arrive at the conclusion that men are fundamentally some collective organism (“most scientist believe [insert some bullshit], who are you to doubt?”), then their communist wants are the expected excrement.
The thing about communism, at least to the uninitiated, is that it appears to be identical in all respects to a hereditary aristocracy
“Uninitiated”? Into what? This? I’ve never heard people who see what is real called “uninitiated” before.
The bottom line is, Marxism is a Godless religion.
That affects what slogans are carved into the side of the sacrificial altar. Nothing more than that.
But was Lenin a true believer or a player?
If you are on a bus that’s headed over a cliff, does it matter whether the driver did it because he thought it was the right and moral thing to do — or whether he did it because he was evil?
There comes a point where that doesn’t matter. That point should come well before all the sounds of screaming metal and victims.
I can never quite make up my mind about people like Bill Ayers. Are they true believers (with good intentions) or are they blackhearts, virtual–or actual–servants of Satan?
What difference does that make? It doesn’t matter.
Seriously, people, that is the kind of “thinking” that disarms good people in the face of evil. This “good intentions” bullshit is what will disarm you again when the next Stalin comes along.
All that matters is what a person is actually doing. What matters is where their road really goes. Not what they *imagine* they are doing, of where they delude themselves into thinking their road goes.
When the road leads to hell, intentions mean squat.
Talking about true believers, useful idiots, and players is useful in understanding the Left, but it can be misleading. What ideology doesn’t have true believers, useful idiots, and players? Islam has all of these features. So does Fascism. So do some branches of Christianity. To say that Communism has its revolutionary saints, useful fools, and players is merely to say that Communists are human. Their minds may be full of kitsch but their rectums are full of excrement.
Can you identify the “true believers”, “useful idiots” and “players” among the Founding Fathers?
No? Then perhaps you have identified a crucial truth: the believer-idiot-player triumvirate is not a feature of all ideologies, but of a certain *kind* of ideology, unified by some common fundamental which is not shared with the liberty movement. In other words, Fascism, Communism, Islam and “some branches of” Christianity are all birds of a certain feather.
What fundamental is that? Well, let’s see.
All of your examples hold something as being morally sovereign over the individual, something “bigger than the self” (though that “something” does vary between them, its supremacy does not). All of them stress *service* as a virtue over liberty. All of them are big on moral duty and sacrifice.
And all of them, in practice, have ended in tyranny whenever practiced without any effective cultural opposition or constraint.
Hmm, you don’t suppose that collectivism might have something to do with this?
I’ve a slightly different take on the Left. In my eyes the Left is a slow-motion death cult (granted faster for some than others) with a “Hope and Change” happy face. While some of the goals espoused by the Left are admirable, their policies used to achieve those goals usually make things worse and even when they ‘work’ they leave a trail of misery and death.
So why is the Left so popular with so many people? Well throughout history there have been many nihilist movements. The Left as a whole is just another such movement. To me the interesting question is why are so many people are attracted to such movements? I mean the motivation of the Players is obvious as well the ignorance of the Useful Idiots. It’s the True Believers that creep me out.
Wretchard, the socialist arithmetic is not as simple as 2+2=5. It’s arithmetic that requires endless computation to obtain the perfect.
Its more like:
2+2=3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679…………….’
Okay Wretch. Grade me on this. Myself I have always divided PI communists
into two broad categories. Populists and Ideologues. The former could be persudaded to get on the side of the Angels. (But don’t let that slow down your time on target until such arrangments come about.) The latter needed, and still need, killing.
Now for your premise: Dante=Saint and Apostate Conrado Balweg=Saint and Apostate. JOMA= player late for his own hanging.
Useful idots? The vast majority of those who supported Marcos joined by the vast majority of those who opposed Marcos.
Marcos himself? player more skilled than JOMA. Fabian Ver? low-order thuggish player. Imelda, Imee, Bong-Bong? Useful idots manipulated by husband and father. (Irene seems to have escaped the trap or learned to go Apostate early on.) Elizabeth Keon? (Marcos Sister) Saint. Could have gone Apostate but alcoholism killed her first. (Spent an enjoyable evening drinking with her in the Hilton circa 1974. I narrowly escaped her fate myself about the time she passed away.) May she RIP. She deserved better than she got.
Well that is enough. You may roast at will Wretch. I think I have given you plenty of material at which to aim!
Docbill @#35: Did you mean Phil Gramm?
Phil’s good buddy Dickie Flatt once said “If Phil Gramm tells you that
chickens dip snuff, look under their wings. You will find the can.”
And to show you not to underestimate the power of human stupidity, numerous
True Believing Useful Idots still insist that Dickie Flatt is a fictional character!
Years ago, pre-internet, I read an hilarious print article by an Italian journalist about his tour of North Korea. He had previously written a satirical article praising the Great Leader and the Dear Leader for using scientific principles to modernize one of the oldest institutions of government: hereditary succession. His article caught the attention of the North Koreans, who, having no concept of what satire is, invited him for a visit and gave him the red carpet treatment. Your article reminded me of that.
Right wing trog that I am, I can never figure out a couple of nagging things about the “left”: One is, if their social models are so wonderful for the “workers” or “little people”, how come you are never allowed to leave the paradise they have created? Why would they need that restriction, it would seem like nobody would want to leave paradise! Right? The other thing is, all the lefties I ever met profess to being “anti-war”, yet their social models always have the biggest armies on the planet. The corollary to that is that since about 9/20/09 our own “anti-war” movement has been missing in action. Where did they go? Also, lefties claim to be pro-feminist, yet their abortion regimen kills mostly little girls. So many questions that my less than nuanced brain is capable of dealing with.
Thank you, Bogie Wheel, Epignosis and Josh for your thoughtful replies to my question.
Bogie Wheel summarized: ‘The bottom line is, Marxism is a Godless religion. Which is to say, it is an -ism that attempts to perfect man, without God. That is the fundamental reason why Marxism and Christianity can never, ever be compatible.’
That is the kind of clear and simple statement that I’m looking for, something to bring the strongest contrast to the fore. Thank you. Reading the Communist Manifesto chills me, so the question ‘exactly which item of the Communist Manifesto inspires you the most?’ sounded dramatic, but likely would only get lost in a mist of arguing cloudy concepts. I despise obscurity while people are being butchered.
Honestly, I don’t think the man is moved by the Holy Spirit. In his last email message, he told me to never quote the Bible to him again. That is hard to accept, and harder to forgive.
The idea that communism got its name from some Christian communities is unsettling, but not shocking: I myself was devoted to a ostensibly spiritual commune for over twenty years.
The analysis of Left Wing – Right Wing dynamics mean little to me if it isn’t based on religious analysis. None of the Left’s pathological contradictions make sense until they are seen as driven by demonic forces. We are created beings, and God’s Word is our best guidance to Truth and healthy living. May God be with us.
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Ayers, etc want marxism because they beleive that. being early party members, they will be part of the resulting aristocratic nobility. Its all about power, being concerned about common people is just part of the spiel for the rubes.
George Orwell stated it clearly in 1984. The goal of any revolution is to replace one aristocracy with another, consisting of middle class revolutionaries who then become the new aristocrats. They justify the revolution in the name of the people, but their real goal is power for themselves and their descendents.
Even the american revolution had the goal of creating a new aristocracy, except that they wanted an aristocracy of merit, rather than birth or gov connections. The big difference in the american revolution is they also beleived in liberty and free enterprise, not just power, and hoped that the new aristocracy would be determined by ability to prosper in a free market, rather than aristocratic birth, or being connected to the gov. They never pretended that everybody was equal, since many of the revolutionaries were rich planters or merchants, but beleived that any ineguality in birth could be overcome by merit. For many of them this was actually true, since many were not born to wealth, but became wealthy by effort or marriage. Of course slavery was a glaring exception to this, but that problem was corrected by the civil war.
Do you think the murder of two Chinese students at USC recently is connected to these events in China?
re: ..deserve to be in power simply because of their lineage..
Not new, has always been the case in Chinese culture. They have the family, then the state, and very little we’d recognize as civil (voluntary) society in the middle. And unlike the Japanese who had a similar challenge until they began the custom of the (business, political, ..) leader “adopting” a first son (based on merit, outside the family, perhaps anywhere in the (family run) company, even an outsider, China hasn’t been able to sustain early attempts at same (civil society). So if the state doesn’t do it, it doesn’t get done. The French have similar challenges.
I’ve worked with Chinese “Law” – some of which descends from the civil rule of the Mandarins (predating feudalism) – and when the powerful are engaged elsewhere, it works. But if you’ve ignored (or worse, offended) one of the provincial families, the law is no help. Similar to Stalin’s wonderful (1936) constitution.