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For those interested, this is what I sent out to my email lists this morning.

We all know that there are always going to be Stalinists among us who will be able to convince some people that it is possible to bring about “utopia on earth” if only they will vote for the right leader to run everything by “correctly” implementing the ideology of “Marxism-Leninism theory”. We have all heard them make statements to the effect that, “The only reason Communism has never worked so far is the fact that the wrong people have been trying to implement it.”

[[ Stalinism - The term usually defines the style of a government (force/fascistic tactics) rather than an ideology. The ideology is “Marxism-Leninism theory”, reflecting that Stalin himself was not a theoretician, in contrast to Marx and Lenin, and prided himself on maintaining the legacy of Lenin as a founding father for the Soviet Union and the future Socialist world. Stalinism is an interpretation of their ideas, and a certain political regime claiming to apply those ideas in ways fitting the changing needs of society, as with the inevitable transition from socialism to communism. (Forest rangers tell people not to feed the animals who live in the wild because once they become dependent on people providing their food, they lose the natural ability to hunt and forage for themselves. Once they lose that ability - it is INEVITABLE that they can no longer remain free - their dependency has made them weak and vulnerable in the wild. After that happens, they feel safer being penned up and are thankful for any crumbs their owner/benefactor decides to throw them from time to time.) ]]

This especially should be read by anybody who admires the Stalinists who promise to feed, clothe, & provide a “job” for him in exchange for his vote, as it will help him to connect the dots - (if he has the courage) - and understand why his life decisions invariably wind up making him unhappy and disappointed. :)

Pat Santy (aka: Dr. Sanity)
Industry: Science
Occupation: M.D. (Psychiatry / Aerospace Medicine)

Friday, March 27, 2009
PERFECT TOTALITARIANISM, IMPERFECT FREEDOM AND BIOLOGICAL FANTASIES
The following post was originally published on 3/29/07 and continues to be relevant today...]

Avaro Vargas Llosa writes in TCS about the impossibility of “perfect” totalitarianism (a perfect oxymoron, in my opinion)

Why Perfect Totalitarianism Is Impossible
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

“As I was watching “The Lives of Others,’’ Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s masterful Oscar-winning film, I couldn’t help thinking how many Cubans, North Koreans, Iranians or Zimbabweans must have been performing little bits of moral heroism in the face of oppression at that very moment. Even their fellow countrymen will never know how many acts of defiance are being perpetrated today by ordinary people against totalitarian regimes — ensuring that the human spirit continues to exist when everything seems bent on crushing it.

The German film focuses on Gerd Wiesler, a captain in the Stasi, East Germany’s feared secret police, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is ordered to spy on a playwright and his actress girlfriend simply because the minister in charge of culture lusts for the lady and needs an excuse to put the writer away in order to clear the path. Through a tantalizing series of small twists and turns in which what is not said is more important than what is, the plot leads us toward the moral awakening of Wiesler. As he records the details of the playwright’s and his girlfriend’s lives, the gray, obedient bureaucrat discovers in himself a humane depth to which nothing in his ideological rigidity or in the chilling machinery he efficiently serves seemed to predispose him. This moral awakening is intimate and unassuming, and it leads Wiesler to an act of quiet heroism that will save his intended victim from the fate that the minister wishes for him without leaving traces or claiming credit for his actions later on.

What “The Lives of Others’’ reminds us of — and the reason it is such a timeless work of art — is that man is capable of totalitarianism, but not perfect totalitarianism.

Even when all the pegs are in place, something will alter the clockwork mechanism of the regime. That ``something’’ is human nature, pure and simple.

Nobody in the film is a perfect totalitarian in the sense that no one — not the bosses, not the servants, not the victims — acts in the way that the logic of the system dictates they should act in any given circumstance.

There will be moments of weakness in the least humane of despots and moments of fortitude in the most hopeless victims that will shatter the perfect order of the totalitarian system. ..... [snip] Continued: http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

bttt