Posted on 11/14/2011 12:12:46 PM PST by bkopto
I think my Ukrainian heritage fuels my twin obsessions with Soviet history and economics. Sadly, this often puts me on opposing ideological ground from my good friends and fellow alumni of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which recently helped bring Utopia in Four Movements to Iowa City's local tax-supported theater.
Sam Green, the filmmaker who narrated the exploration of "the battered state of the utopian impulse," on one hand described socialism has having gone "monstrously wrong" and on the other expressed open sentimentality for the Russian and Maoist revolutions. He showed pictures of executed Cambodians and also said a copy of Mao's Little Red Book was among his favorite possessions.
For any readers who may have left the theater with a sense of moral ambiguity, I offer this brief history lesson.
In The Black Book of Communism, French researchers estimate communist China slaughtered 65 million of its own citizens. Estimates of Soviet citizens killed by their leaders range from 20 million to 62 million made by political-science professor R.J. Rummel. In Cambodia, after an unholy combination of Marx and Rousseau, they attempted an agrarian-based communist society and managed, in an astonishingly short period of time, to slaughter almost a third of their population.
Perhaps Stalin was right. Killing one person is a tragedy. Killing millions is only a statistic.
The sound of societies turning into gigantic meat grinders was accompanied by three choruses from leftist intellectuals. One sang, "It's not so bad." Perhaps its leading performer was New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for dismissing the starvation of 6 million to 10 million Ukrainians as "malignant propaganda."
The second chorus sang "next time": Forget Lenin's hostages and mass executions, forget the extermination of the Don Cossacks. The right people weren't in charge. Forget the Gulag Archipelago. Forget China's "Great Leap Forward" and North Korea's "Arduous March." Forget the cannibalism. Revoke private property, and this next time, we will deliver paradise.
The last chorus sang "that's not real communism." For them, I present some of Marx's and Engels' less publicized writing: In the January 1849 edition of Marx's journal "Neue Reinische Zeitung," Engels wrote, "Basques, Scottish Highlanders, Serbs are racial trash and will have to be destroyed." Marx wrote in his "People's Paper," April 16, 1852, "The classes and races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way. They must perish in the Revolutionary Holocaust."
Green showed a picture of Bolshevik soldiers marching during the Russian Revolution and wondered how exciting it would have felt to be among them. By what standards does he go sentimental? If it's brute force combined with a glorious vision of the future, he could easily include Germany's National Socialists (i.e., Nazis) on his list of supposedly noble and only slightly misguided movements. They had a great vision too, for the living.
Contrary to what I learned in school, the National Socialists of Germany were not ideologically opposite from the Marxist-Leninist socialists of the Soviet Union. Their great difference lay in the fact that one slaughtered millions according to ethnicity and the other slaughtered millions according to "class" — the ambiguous, undefined term at the center of Marxism. They were two wings of the same cult of state power, determined to carve society into a better version of itself using bullets and bayonets. It deserves no sentimentalism.
Let's hope the "state of the utopian impulse" remains battered.
"Liberalism kills. When it’s not starving you, poisoning you, killing you in the womb, letting you get butchered by a tyrant, denying you medical care or yanking your life support, it will come after you with a loaded gun. Liberalism will make sure you die as quickly as possible. Liberals are the people and party of death."
Socialism did not ‘go’ monstrously wrong.
Socialism IS monstrously wrong.
That tagline should have ended with “...for the children”
“Sympathize”?........no, they advocate.
Of course they do...as long as it’s the “right kind” of people who are killed. You know...those who harbor a belief in God, those that believe in personal freedom, those kind of people. You can kill all you want of them.
"Their great difference lay in the fact that one slaughtered millions according to ethnicity and the other slaughtered millions according to "class" — the ambiguous, undefined term at the center of Marxism."
"They were two wings of the same cult of state power, determined to carve society into a better version of itself using bullets and bayonets. It deserves no sentimentalism."
But the NYT tells me NAZI are rightwing conservatives that attend TEA Parties.
I’ve always thought Left wingers follow anti-human ideology. They are pro-environment because they’re anti-human
They fear increase of human population on earth
They have such low opinion of other human beings that they don’t think individuals can take care of themselves and require and overlord
Stalin confiscated the crops in Ukraine. Then his secret police raided the homes of the peasants and took all their food. Then a law was passed making it illegal for the peasants to buy food, trade for food, and work for food. They wouldn't let the peasants on the trains to go the cities and try to get food, and many of them died by the railroad tracks. CHILDREN who went to the wheat fields which were guarded by the secret police were shot dead on the spot if they took any amount of wheat. In the winter of 1932 and 1933, 7 MILLION Ukrainians starved to DEATH!
Socialism, what's not to like?
In fact, Hitler got the inspiration for "The Final Solution" from seeing what Stalin did in the Ukraine.
I know of a lot of people like that. They exist by confiscating the wages of others. A lot of them live in Washington D.C.
Dr. Eric R. Pianka, speaking at the Texas Academy of Science in 2006. Pianka’s speech was ordered to be kept off the record before it began as cameras were turned away and hundreds of students, scientists and professors sat in attendance.
Standing in front of a slide of human skulls, Pianka gleefully advocated airborne ebola as his preferred method of exterminating the necessary 90% of humans, choosing it over AIDS because of its faster kill period.
Pianka then cited “Peak Oil” as another reason to initiate global genocide. “And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.”
Later, the scientist welcomed the potential devastation of bird flu and spoke glowingly of China’s enforced one child policy, before commenting, “We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth.”
At the end of Pianka’s speech the audience erupted not to a chorus of boos and hisses but to a raucous reception of applause and cheers as audience members clambered to get close to the scientist to ask him follow up questions. Pianka was later presented with a distinguished scientist award by the Academy. Pianka is no crackpot. He has given lectures to prestigious universities worldwide.
A good Socialist is a dead Socialist.
*I* hope to see the day it expires, permanently...
the infowarrior
Mass death of class enemies is the very PURPOSE of a Leninist revolutionary dictatorship.
See tagline.
While the latter part of your statement is no doubt true, the former is demonstrably false. He *is* a crackpot, as evidenced by the body of your post, and a lethally dangerous one at that...
the infowarrior
Lets never forget, Barry’s mentor, the guy down the block, and what the plans of the Weather Underground were and are.
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