"Our Holocaust Is The Good Holocaust"
That wasn't how it was put but that's what it meant. For the second time in less than two weeks someone has said pretty much that about the murders committed under the Marxist regimes of the 20th century as opposed to the murders committed under Nazism, for some reason they neglect to mention those murdered by Mussolini and other fascists but when you can excuse the murders of scores of millions of people maybe that's an established habit. It certainly is among the fascists. So there is some indication of similarity in the two mindsets, a view of human beings that allows them to be considered as objects and even lower as material, useful or disposable and if disposable then not worthy of consideration.
That is the "scientific" view of human life, And by the use of those quotes I'm not saying that it is something scientists do as part of science but that the pretense that the study of political-economy is a science, something that Marxists, fascists, Nazis, some, not all, anarchists, and others pretend. I think a general category of such "science" can be made and it is the extension of the agriculture of raising animals for food and other uses applied to the human population. Any system that produces the results that Marxism, fascism, Nazism, have begins with that view of human beings as material entities and the results are no different from how other living beings are treated when they are considered in terms of utility and use. The details of how those chosen for slaughter and those chosen to keep as breeding stock or to put to other uses before they, too, are not useful and so disposable are the real differences among them.
The alternative to that is to consider people as more than mere material objects, to consider them as sacred, as the possessors of inherent and inalienable rights and moral obligations to respect those in others without discrimination, the gift of their Creator. And, as a consequence of that status, only a political and economic system that respects all of those conditions on an equal basis, with the consent of The People, is legitimate or capable of just and sustained rule under peaceful conditions without violating the rights of people. The extent to which The People take up that moral obligation is the extent to which they will be able to govern themselves justly and obtain the good that is the result of that practice.
There is a reason that the Marxists have violence as an inherent feature of their system, put there by Marx and Lenin, in common with the fascists and Nazis and it is because their ideological framing and consideration of people as material entities can't produce a stable government on any other basis than terror and inhibition of opposition by that means. It was a given in Marx and Engels that violence would be necessary to take power but that it would also be necessary to transform society from feudalism and bourgeois capitalism to their workers paradise, they imagined that the violence would be as beneficial for the survivors as the Nazis did. I really do have to wonder at how the white collar Marxists whose soft hands never did anything more like work than move books around read them and Lenin, even more an enthusiast for violence, and how they saw only differences where the similarities are far more striking. Maybe they figured their Never Land lay just over the pile of corpses on their side of the divide.
I went into the hypocrisy of the ACLU free-speech, free-press, privacy worshiping, study-group Marxists here as their heroes were slaughtering tens of millions of people, banning free speech and press and setting up massive surveillance operations* to intimidate people even in the most private settings, making heroes of 12-year-olds** who informed on their parents. Just to complete the picture, as they were also opposing the death penalty here, memorializing Sacco and Vanzetti and Joe Hill (today it seems odd how Marxists shed so many tears for anarchists), it was legal to execute 12-year-olds in their workers' paradise. And that is only the "legal" killing of children, there.
One of the most unfortunate results of the entirely unnecessary, entirely futile and opportunistic red scares in the United States is that it discredited the criticism of communism for decades. The excesses in anti-communism, the vulgarity of its public face, the sleaziness of the means it used and the company it kept in our domestic fascists still impede speaking honestly about the massive evil that was done in the name of workers rights, socialism*** and other goods more in keeping with the opposite of both the fascists and communists. The best you can do in trying to cover up that is to try to associate what I said with that vulgar anti-red effort. But, just as you fail to see the similarities between Nazism and Communism, you fail to see the differences between a criticism of both from a genuine egalitarian-democratic point of view. My critique notes the features of both of those which they hold in common, My criticism of communism and communists is on the same basis as my criticism of fascism and Nazism.
As for why atheism and materialism is relevant to those, I pointed that out at length over the past several weeks. Materialism produces the mindset that sees people in material terms and denies their metaphysical possessions of rights, equality and moral obligations. Every time you accept materialism as your ideological framework, you will come up with similar results, merely some details being dissimilar. My non-materialist, religious beliefs require me to concentrate on the many millions of murder victims that produces, your materialism allows you to choose to pretend the details Marxism and Nazism don't share in common is more important than those people are. There isn't anything that isn't totally obvious in the differences between our thinking and why that difference is there.
* I saw a figure recently that said that the Stasi in East Germany under Communism was twice the size of that which the Nazis set up over the entire German
** The infamous, gaudily sentimental and likely entirely false cult of Pavlik Morozov, encouraging children to turn their families in to the Soviet State, was well known, even to those white-collar Marxists here as they whined about the FBI surveillance of communists here as a violation of human rights. Of course it was but that only points out the hypocrisy of them approving of the system that guaranteed such violations in places they didn't choose to live.
*** It is one of the tragic features of the Communists and others distorting the use of the word "socialism" and discrediting their distortions of it to the extent that I don't think the word is useful anymore. Any "socialism" that doesn't begin with egalitarian democracy as co-equal with economic justice and worker ownership of the means of production is a "socialism" that will be oppressive. I don't think any materialist-socialism will avoid discrediting it by seeing the very workers socialism exists to serve as more than the thing through which labor is created. The word "socialism" needs to be scrapped and a new, accurate and closely defined term used to name democratic economic justice.
Update: I think the progression of the Marxist view of violence from being something forced on communists by the bourgeois capitalists who resisted change, to a means of forcing change under Marx but even more so, Engels to a tool of administration and the exercise of authority under Lenin to its even greater extension and casual bureaucratic use of mass murder and terror to control under Stalin, Mao, the Kim regime in North Korea and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia shows what inevitably happens when there is no inhibiting force working against that. I don't think it is a progression that is unique to Marxism but is characteristic of any system, atheist or religious, which doesn't begin with the view of people I take as its only alternative, above. I can't recall an instance of its use in the name of Christianity when it wasn't associated with political despotism or outright banditry, both forbidden by the Gospels.
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