Geo-Political Massive Sacks: Communism

While Communism is not 100 percent done and dead, it has been sacked.   Communism’s current ideological torchbearers are fossils and freaks like Castro and Kim Jong Il, serious depletion since the October Revolution.   It seems safe to call the whole movement landfill crap and end the debate at that.

Oh, but what a debate it was.   Seems funny to think it these days, that smart folks running around the real world actually thought that merit and talent had to be stifled (or purged), and that power needed to be vested solely in the State, all for the greater good.   Say what you want about corporate greed, but most CEO’s have to answer to shareholders.   Who did Stalin or Mao answer to?  

Communism came this close to taking over the world, with over half the earth’s population, at one point, under its quirky and fashion-lame spell.   It's wonderful proof that we are clueless on issues of moral equivalence, and uncomfortable with our nature.   That behaviorist claptrap about smarts and character being formed entirely by environmental stimulus will go down as one of the great Flat-Earth theories of our age.   Genetics is at least half the mental equation.   If the machine is defective, the testing terrain does not matter.   Remnants of the Behaviorist School remain scattered across the globe, but they are revising like crazy.   Those who retain the notion that a Stephen Hawking brain can be purely taught grow senile inside the walls of social science buildings, living off tenure, resigned yet bitter that the engineering schools get all the donor-money.   That’s what happens when you sponsor the great Red Curse of the 20th Century.  

So, were the starving Ukrainian peasants of 1930s just the canvas of a large scientific experiment?   When Stalin decided that the USSR needed to rapidly industrialize to keep its territorial integrity, he acquired much of the needed labor by grouping together thousands of small Ukrainian farms into a few huge ones and sending the extra former-farmers to factories to make shitty product.   No longer was it in the individual farmer’s best interest to grow a good crop, since the State decided how those crops were to be allocated.   Thus the Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket-- think Iowa times ten with more vodka and funny furry hats-- endured one of the worst famines in human history.   Millions died.   Is this what Marx had in mind?

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. – Karl Marx

All property should be government property?  Shoot, this guy is endorsing collectivization, and collectivization has never ever worked on any scale larger than a hippie commune.   Let’s get something straight, Marx was a decent philosopher, and folks say he was a great thinker, whatever the hell that means, but he was a dipshit economist.   If the Marxist ideal had been closer to America’s Jazz Age Labor Movements, instead of the agrarian collectivization voodoo our Asiatic brethren foisted upon their tired and weary peoples, Socialism might have won the day…even the epoch. The Marxist notion that governments should ensure enough food and shelter for its people is a great one.   In fact, Bismarck and FDR, two among many leaders with slight socialist streaks, implemented Marxist-tinged kinks to strengthen the bonds of their respective societies during challenging times.   Germany in the late 19th century was a new nation with many hostile neighbors, and thus needed cohesion in the form of government benefits, most prominently, universal healthcare.   When us Yanks went through a tough stretch in the 1930s, FDR helped ameliorate the pain with his New Deal reforms, which still piss off the Yahoo Conservatives (and planted seeds for the conservative dominance we see in modern political America), but hey, to keep order at the end of the day, a populace must be made to think that their government is worth keeping…or they must be beaten into submission.   The Russians, as usual, took things even further; making their populace think Government was their very God.

Lenin bent socialist thinking to suit the Russian Way, which typically includes lots of violence, general angst, and depopulation.   Later on, Stalin perverted socialism entirely and encouraged Mao, in China, to do the same…party on every block, comrade.   By time we take a gander at Maoist disciples Pol Pot (Cambodia) and Kim Il Sung (North Korea), there are no more dark avenues left to explore.   I mean, Cambodia had monuments built from skulls, in the 20th Century!   How in the hell does that push society forward? Pol Pot ran Cambodia so deep into ruin that the natives were ecstatic when Vietnam invaded in 1977.   Think about that.  The VC seemed like modernist liberators next to the evil trip the Khmer Rouge laid down.   It was Regular Communism fighting against Extreme Championship Communism.   It was hard to find a rooting interest, yet all those skulls, everywhere.   That is a part Communism’s tragedy. Not only was the movement originally borne from a desire to improve the lives of the masses, the working masses at that, but like a message passed ear-to-ear across a classroom of first-graders, the meaning of the message was warped, and eventually lost. Humans are not programmed for selfless behavior, which implies that we are not born as mental blank slates, which implies….  

Communism is for ants.   Mankind, composed of individual minds, needs a different kink than more blindly socialized species.  That was one of Marx’s real blind spots— the inability to place proper stock in the value and power of the individual.   One of the 20th Century’s most popular individualist philosophers, Ayn Rand, was Russian.   She was on hand for the Bolshevik revolution and all it’s up-with-people pre-Whorolian poster-art.   Apparently she was not too impressed:

If you write a whole line of zeroes, it's still- nothing. – Ayn Rand (We The Living)

and/or

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men – Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

Good luck trying to reconcile that with Marx.   Ayn Rand left the USSR in 1926, probably thinking that this Stalin fellow who had just taken the keys to the country was a bad egg and that bad times were going to kill a shitload of Russians.   She wisely got out of Dodge-grad.   If anyone wonders how and / or why I’m equating Rand with Marx, I’m doing so simply to point out that both were taken way too seriously, and we have to deal with the fallout of their extremism to this day.

Marx perceived the depersonalization and stratification inherent in industrialized societies as somehow worse than the depersonalization and stratification inherent in agrarian societies.   This is odd on many levels, and especially regarding the fact that with Marxism, the only arbiter of said stratification and depersonalization was an unelected government. Would a free people elect to produce for an untalented and unelected bureaucracy? If they had crack in the 19th century, I might see how Marx arrived at such conclusions.

Though he was born into comfortable surroundings near Trier, Germany, Marx lived much of his adult life in poverty.   Not to rag on the impoverished— many noble but poor souls never acquire the keep they deserve, but, if you have little or no money, you tend to resent those who do.   It’s human nature, it’s in our inherent software.   Human evolution dictates that the ones who are best at acquiring and keeping and creating cool stuff also acquire the best mates and the fattest back accounts.   It’s not so warm and fuzzy, but it’s the truth, and trying to reprogram folks to behave against the processes of evolution is ridiculous and leads to things like that human skull museum outside of Phnom Penh.

Funny how a pack of PhD’s who make no money consistently found it easy to buy into Marxism while business schools and people who actually built stuff turned to the likes of Adam Smith.   It must be the system, right?   So, if we just forcibly even the playing field so everyone can feel equal with everyone else irregardless of talent, drive, or cleverness, well then, utopia must be right around the corner.   But damn, someone has to rule.   Otherwise you have Afghanistan circa 1996…a shithole so torn asunder by anarchy that the Taliban seemed like a good idea.   More on that in a bit.  

Politics, like art, emerges from the environment. That's one thing Behaviorists should have embraced, but didn’t.   Communism was especially brutal in Russia not because the ideology of Communism is especially brutal, Marx never proposed that anyone whack half the population…but because Russians, if we look at the last thousand years or so, have a habit of killing the shit out of each other.   Concentrating such skills into the state produces predictable results, as any old-school Ukrainian will tell you.   Same thing with China.   When it became apparent that Mao would be successful in China, Stalin sent him money and ideas.   It happens that the Chinese are pretty good at killing the shit out of each other as well.   Mao, of course, inspired Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung of North Korea (father of Kim Jong Il Loony Poo...funny how it’s always the hermit psycho who is the last to catch the joke).   

Whatever, it’s all water under the bridge and just a nasty little nightmare…and a high eight-figure body-count.   The world is trying to forget, even though those partying North Koreans like to lob the occasional missile over Japan and into the Pacific every now and then, because sometimes a tired old Commie needs to a drama queen.   That mess will be resolved as well, and at some point in the near future, our planet will be Commie-free, or really close to it.   However, Newton’s Third Law applies to geopolitical situations, which means we get to deal with the blowback of Communism, probably for another fifty years.

For one thing, we are still moving, politically, to the right.   This is a trend that first came to the fore with McCarthyism and the intellectual rantings of Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley.   Rand was being taken seriously, and the John Birch Society was getting up and moving.   Look at it this way, Teddy Kennedy was once considered a centrist.   Look it up, ask your parents, I shit you not.  

Why is political balance so hard to find?   Why can’t advanced societies embrace private enterprise as capital growth engines that not only reward innovation and hard work, but also provide and properly distribute the funds necessary to make sure everyone has a legit shot at a good education and subsequent participation in the wealth creation game, not to mention a social safety net.   I’ve been around a bit, and it’s true that motivated, generous, materially comfortable folks are a joy to be around and represent an ideal we need to strive for.   We don’t need a bloated bureaucracy to get there, nor do we need a stripped down to nothing government tasked only with keeping the military beefed and our neighbors scared.   There is a third way, though we may not get there because the second major effect of Communism’s blowback might bite us hard.

If anything good came out of Communism, it was that the ideology distracted us from a millennia of racism and religious warfare.   Well, we are getting back to that in a hurry.

Look again at Afghanistan:   The USSR helped to install a communist puppet regime in 1978.   The locals were not pleased, and started shooting Afghan communists. Tiring of seeing their puppets being clipped, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to reinforce their lackeys.   The rebels, hearing stories about the spoils of collectivization, defended their farms and livestock with fervor.   They also died, a lot…over a million in all.   For several years, the Afghan insurgency was poorly organized and fought with basically game rifles and a lot heart inherent to those defending their property.   Then a funny thing happened in the mid 80s, these rebels got organized and fancied calling themselves the Muhajadeen.   The CIA was the primary organizing force, spending over two billion dollars in the endeavor.   Thinking that, in Afghanistan, religious fervor was the best way to defeat communism, the Afghan rebellion became the world’s second well-armed fundamental Islamist force…the first had just taken power in Iran.   These CIA folks really plan ahead.

The Soviets, more comfortable with the craziness of communism than that of religious fanaticism, turned tail and bailed in 1988.   Unfortunately, this Muhajadeen thing didn’t go away, but nor could they govern well.   A victorious armed force tends to get cocky, and if they also believe God is smiling on them and rooting them on, well, the rest is but typical history sense monotheism and weapons coalesced.  I wonder what God thinks of the Daisy Cutter?

Over here in the USA, Evangelicalism was our response to far-left behavior.  Although typical Catholic and traditional Protestant churches have been bleeding parishioners by the millions for almost two generations, Evangelical bents on Christianity are thriving, and not coincidentally, the same can be said for Islam. When Socialism was on the accent, true believers figured that secular humanism would win the day. We wouldn’t need to follow some mystical holy calling to be nice to our neighbors, work hard, learn to think objectively…all that cool stuff that drives humanity in the right direction. That was the better side of the Far-Left. Alas, like any baby-with-the- bath water scenario, secular humanism has taken a beating since Republicans started winning national elections. Modern American Evangelicalism has even co-opted much of what secular humanism preached-- education, self-reliance, etc., adding to the mix, of course, that we are all under the whimsy of an unseen and unknowable God, and by the way, the world will end soon, so discipline is important. 

Robert Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, and a wonderful liberal mind in the Patrick Moynihan sense, wrote a book in 2000 called The Fourth Great Awakening, positing that an evangelical awakening, beginning in the 1950s, had gripped the American South and Midwest, and was going to direct our country for a good part of the 21 st Century.   This, again, was a response to the official atheism of communism.   When I read The Fourth Great Awakening, about a year before 9-11, I thought Fogel had lost it.   Surely people have developed to the point that you don’t take things like creationism and/or 72 virgins in paradise to advance the good side of human nature. We were moving beyond that, I was certain of it.   There were too many cool things to think about.

If you push too hard in one direction...like what Newton said.

So, that is the other blowback we get to wrestle with, fervent Religion all up in us, once again, thanks in part to the official atheism of Communism.   Hopefully we won’t need one more Dark Age to finally make us get our gear in a sack, because religion and nationalism tend to go hand in hand when times get dark, and if you question that, look at our current president and what he says about our exceptionalism. The rest of the world does not like to be reminded that we are better than they are, especially when we make such pronouncements from an Evangelical Christian banner. Funny how fallout works. Communism was given every opportunity across the globe to prove it’s worth, and all it did was prove, without a doubt, that Communism is utter shit.