Many leftist intellectuals sympathize with mass homicide?

Daily Iowan ^ | Nov 11, 2011 | Roman Skaskiw

[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.

[infowarrior]

Which goes to my follow up comment, namely “what do we do with thousands of people who philosophically embrace genocide?”

What does any rational person do when faced with an existential threat?

the infowarrior

[NativeNewYorker]

[Steve Van Doorn]

That first post the guy attempts to use this statement to claim Hitler was for private property rights
":"You maintain, gentlemen, that the German economy must be constructed on the basis of private property. Now such a conception of private property can only be maintained in practice if it in some way appears to have a logical foundation. This conception must derive its ethical justification from the insight that this is what nature dictates."

Assuming Hitler said this which I doubt because the word "private" wasn't in his vocabulary. It doesn't make any difference if he said it or not other then I would be surprised to see him say anything about individuality in any since of the word.

Hitler doesn't explain what the logical foundation is. Since Hitler was strongly against the individuals needs the foundation isn't hard to guess. and wanted to do away with private property as we know it today.

Was there something of interest in the comments?

[Big Giant Head]

Was there something of interest in the comments?

Oh, heck yeah! That super-brain liberal, making bold assumptions about conservatives. Very oh-so-intellectual while assuming that conservatives won't possibly understand.

I laughed. I get a kick out of their snobbery.

[hosepipe]

Thanks.... will pay attention to those sources..
(a heads up when your book is released!)..

[Noumenon]

Yes, Darwin does indeed have a role in this, and I examine that in my work-in-progress book. David Stove's take on Darwin in Against the Idols of the Age is... remarkable. And right on the money, I think.

Haven't seen the Shafarevich work. Looks interesting. I'll check it out. Right now, I'm revisitng Fukuyama's Trust (yeah, I know - like a stopped clock, he's right twice a day), but he's got some ideas that are useful as points of departure for other things. He confirms, for instance, Quigley's astonishing analysis (Tragedy and Hope) that defines what he calls the "Pakistani-Peruvian axis" - a combination of Asian despotism and Arabic outlook (key word, that - outlook), both of which have their roots in Bronze Age antiquity, that pervade what Quigley calls the shattered cultures that dwell on its axis. This analysis makes apalling sense out the cultural trainwrecks that persist to this day from the Arabic East (Pakistan) to South America (Peru) - and boardrooms in Paris, London and New York. And it provides the perfect framework for the triumph of the greatest evil of modernity - the will to power as the dominating and driving force of those who would exterminate most of the worlds population and rule the remainder of humanity like cattle.

I fear for our civilization.

[W. W. SMITH]

I just wish people would use the real term Socialism not liberalism. We are much more liberal then they are and they took it from us. it was originally what we called ourselves. In Europe they still call conservatives the liberals.

“Progressive” was our term. Socialism is just the opposite of progressivism Marx knew his concepts would create more stagnation. Every time we have a good slogan they take it and use it against us.

---

That is why they chose those terms, because we used them to describe ourselves, thereby inducing uncertainty and confusion.

The terms Communist, Progressive and Liberal as used by the left, all mean the same thing. Let me explain why. Carl Marx in 1848 finished writing and then published the Communist Manifesto. Over the next 30 to 40 years the book gained some followers, mostly self anointed elites with PHDs. ( Now there is a subject worth some grant money. Why are highly educated people with PHDs so susceptible to such an absurd philosophy.) As people became aware of their agenda, the communists picked the term progressive in an attempt to hide that agenda. Years later, the same problem, too many people have spotted the agenda again so they picked the term liberal. ( Note that the dictionary definitions of progressive and liberal are very far removed from the political definitions.)

One of the goals of their agenda is to infiltrate and take control of both major political parties. The Democrat party is at this time wholly controlled, 90% to 95%. The Republican party is 40% to 45% controlled. This leaves WE THE PEOPLE with very little true representation inside the belt way.

If we want to survive, as a nation, as a republic, we must flush the progressives from both parties, from all government offices, from the media, from positions of instruction, both public schools and universities. The progressive political philosophy must be rendered ineffectual, laughable, an object of ridicule. The progressive must be excoriated and driven out of any position of authority. Any adherent of such an absurd idea should never be paid more than minimum wage.

In a brief spasm of vigilantism, shooting or hanging fifteen too twenty thousand progressives would end their agenda for at least two hundred years.

[elteemike]

“Socialism, in general, has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Thomas Sowell

[Steve Van Doorn]

"In a brief spasm of vigilantism, shooting or hanging fifteen too twenty thousand progressives would end their agenda for at least two hundred years."

This can only be done when they hit us with another wave of their version of 1000 years of utopia. right now they are hitting us with Fabian socialism which ethically we can not shoot back

[Nebr FAL owner]

Sadly people don’t seem to learn that the search for & attempt to create a “utopia” always ends up the same way.

That is with folks who aren’t in absolute lock step with the folks in charge ending up standing at the edge of a mass grave followed by a pistol shot to the back of the head.

That is why I like the idea of a Republic you can live your life for the most part as you want but in a utopia if you don’t fit the mold exactly you are subject to removal/liquidation/extermination to preserve the utopia.

Thanks but I think I’ll pass on Utopia.