North Korea And The Amoral Insanity That Marxism Was In Reality Instead of On Paper

Another thing I remember from the 1970s, as the new left was sinking into political powerlessness, was hearing an old lefty, one of those who left the Communist Party way later than any decent person should have, after Khrushchev's admissions to a fraction of the crimes of Stalin, after the invasion of Hungary, when trying to explain why she had remained when the crimes of her hero were published and had been for more than two decades.   In struggling to articulate a reason she had willfully overlooked the mass murders, the enormous numbers of individual murders, the oppression, the slave labor, the pact with Hitler, etc. she said that she had hoped for a "more logical society".  She didn't say she wanted a more equal society, a more charitable society but a more logical one.  What about that desire, for a "more logical society" would have led a literate person to ignore reality to that extent when the evidence that Stalin was just about the champion murderer and oppressor of the century, in a century was he was far from the only contender for that role.   I can't say that I've got any patience with such people who supported dictators of the pretended left.  I can't see such a yearning for "a more logical society" as being any less self-centered than those who yearn for a "freer society" who support fascists.

And so we have, in 2016 the remnant of the 20th century Communist dictatorships, especially the state-capitalist-Communists in China and the ultra-Stalinist state, North Korea which has been protected by China because they don't want a united Korea which would abut their border.  In order for that aspect of their state policy to stand, the Communists of China have been willing to tolerate and to protect what is likely the most oppressive dictatorship of the modern period.  The horrendous oppression, a mixture of the worst of Nazism and Stalinism with such horrible absolute dictatorships as those in Albania, Romania, with probably the largest number of people held in perpetual and inherited slavery, girls trained to be sex slaves to the ruling junta, the brutalization of society in an active and routine terror state.   For a lot of westerners, that is all secondary to the bizarre and horrific spectacles of parades and performances that look like fantastic variations on the routine as in the  practiced conformity on A Wrinkle in Time's  Camazotz mixed with Las Vegas style glitz.

Now the logic of Chinese Communism is presented with the prospect of North Korea not only having a small number of atomic weapons but a nuclear bomb, a result of its logical pursuit of its state interests.   And, we in the the west have a practical example in real life of what Marxism really has been for 99 years of its practical testing.   Anyone who still has any faith in it in light of its uniformly terrible nature is an idiot, no matter how logical their case is on paper.  The real history of that hugest catastrophe for the left is written in bloodstains and bones and destroyed lives. Now, going on, in light of the latter day history of Communism in North Korea, the death toll could get far larger.  The remnant romantics of Communism in the United States are depraved idiots, the most ignorant among them are still fighting the battles of the Red Scare from the 1950s, as seen in pop movie histories, without any concern at all about what the reality of Communism was to the people who actually lived under it.  The manner in which those who had the practical experience of living under the real life logic of communism have, notably, not chosen to repeat the experiment when it was up to them.

Though this latest stunt by North Korea's elite will be made Obama's fault in the United States, that has everything to do with our politics instead of anything relevant to the problem.  It is largely China's problem to deal with as they are the ones who have enabled it in the post Soviet period.  I doubt that China will be able to come up with a clean solution to the insanity its logic created but they are about the only ones who can.

Update:  Of course he fits into the stupidest of the pseudo-lefties who get most of what they mistake for knowledge from movies and other such crap.  It's not such a great feat for him to have realized he's in that category but only because it was me who said it.