An Answer To An Angry Marxist At Another Place - equality is the only secure basis for the practice of freedom

SOME PEOPLE I TALK TO have become startled at the development in my thinking as I've  become extremely skeptical of the post-WWII notions of libertarian liberty as a general misconception of freedom in democratic society and law and government.  They seem to have an irrational belief that apostasy from the traditional American secular left means you've joined the right when the truth is I had to quit it to go farther left.   It is only superficially counter-intuitive that libertarianism is, in reality, a destroyer of freedom, when you think about it and observe it in reality instead of abstract modeling, it is not only sensible, it makes perfect sense. Rights are only just when they are limited by the rights of others on an equal basis. If that's not the limit of them they are not rights but privileges.  That's something I think I started learning when I went to college and had to live with upper middle class and more well off people who were accustomed to that kind of privilege.  In my experience, that's a lot of what the so-called "counter-culture" of the later 1960s was shot through with.  It is certainly what Marxism in reality instead of academic play-time make-believe turned out to be. Look at the dictators of Nicaragua, North Korea and other places where Marxism has reached its real-life conclusion in gangsterism and Victorian era capitalism on steroids.  Inequality is a guarantee of gangster government as equality is the absolute bedrock requirement of democracy.  

But a similar critique is also true of old-fashioned capitalism and earlier economic schemes.  The liberty of slave-owners to enslave and wealthy people to oppress the poor is the basis of "liberal democracy" as it has come to exist as that replaced feudalism. That is the basis of the 18th century European notion of "liberalism" as grew under such things as the Brit class system, other traditional, habitual habits of practicing and tolerating injustice.  That was among the most obvious motives of the United States Constitutional Convention and the results of that are still the foremost means of thwarting real democracy, egalitarian democracy in this, the self-promoted "birthplace" of modern democracy, in the popular misunderstanding of things.  It is the tragic history of the American left that it got detoured into Marxism and other academic theories that, in practice, turned into even more efficient and ruthless forms of gangsterism.

Any practice of what we foolishly consider to be the virtue of "liberty" which is not in every way conditioned by the moral responsibility to the truth and to the morally binding requirements of mutual reciprocity as expressed in the "Golden Rule" is false liberty, something which cannot generate freedom as it hoards privilege for a small number of People.  

I have repeatedly thrown the spectacle of that up against the mythology of the self-promoted birthplace of such idiotic notions of libertarian liberty, the United States.  

That in decadent, eutrophic Trump era America the biggest fattest promoters of "freedom of speech," "freedom of press," "The First Amendment" are, in fact, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, Republican-fascists, the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, the native form of American fascism, white supremacists and other assorted passive promoters of casual to grindingly oppressive and violent would-be murderous "patriotism."  I throw that fact in the face of those who object to my critique of their mistaken notion of such things as genuine democracy.  It is certainly not an accident that it is among younger People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ and others who are the targets of such libertarian liberty have been among the first to notice the discrepancy in the promise of the ACLU style libertarianism and what it produces. It is no surprise that it is among those who benefit from that discrepancy among alleged liberals who are the blindest to what their heroes have wrought in the lives of we who are targets of that libertarian liberty.

Today, when the slogans of the 1960s "civil liberties" industry mistaken as a manifestation of traditional American liberalism are most frequently on the lips of idiot-fascists such as Matt Gaetz, Marjory Taylor Green, other Republican-fascist icons, Proud-Boys [Why hasn't Gavin McInnes been deported yet?], incel losers, neo-Nazis, etc. should cause even the more meat-headed civil libertarians who disdain them to question their notions so useful to such complete rotters.  

Those who champion their "right" to SO SUCCESSFULLY lie and promote murderous, grinding inequality are their willing dupes who demonstrate that they really don't much care about the rights and freedom and lives of Black People, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQ+, etc.  They should look in the mirror because the typically white, straight male privileged face they see is who they are really in favor of privileging.  That's especially true of those who work in "journalism" and the legal and academic rackets.   As a gay, white, male, working-class traditional American liberal who has witnessed Republican-fascism rise and flourish under libertarian First Amendment absolutism, I don't trust it's promoters and passive supporters anymore.  

As with the secular left who championed the equivalent of the native American supporters of Nazism, in American Stalinists and Trotskyites and Maoists (despite what such "leftists" tacitly obviously believe, their mountains of murdered People, their enslaved People are no less dead and enslaved than those under Nazism), the "civil libertarians" of the secular and even religious left in the United States, are the saps and dupes of the enemies of real freedom, egalitarian freedom, equality being the only secure basis for the practice of freedoms.

Personal freedom is self-limited on the basis of not violating the rights and freedoms of others and not denying the truth or it is an engine of the tyranny of those with real or artificial power and strength over many others. That's as true if it's on the basis of some idiotically proclaimed scientific ideology as it is when enslaving, oppressing and murdering for personal profit is the motive.   

The United States, certainly under the Constitution and, perhaps especially, the badly written Bill of Rights gamed by corrupt Supreme Courts has always been just such a tyranny of the wealthy, the white, the male over Native Americans, Black People, Women, most of all those lower on the economic scale.  The wealthy and powerful have flourished at the expense of those consciously excluded in the Constitution from the beginning, that is the actual and real history of the United States, the reaction of those various groups in the still unfulfilled struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LEGAL ESTABLISHMENT is the actual best thing about us.  I have pointed out before that it is one of the greatest virtues of the Jewish Bible that it repeatedly admits the sins of the Children of Israel, especially the corrupt government and the generally corrupt Temple establishment.  The quasi-official "history" of the United States as is taught in schools - including the universities - and, even more so, promoted in the default school of post-literate times which is responsible for the miseducation of America, TV, the movies, hagiographic and falsely heroic ahistorical historical fiction and pop culture coercion, has little to none of that virtuous moral reflection and honesty, it is more like the stuff of the industrial producer of lies, advertising and public relations who have been among its worst promoters.  That was true even before the advent of movies, Broadway musicals are among the earliest venues of such lies.

I used to think that there was some alternative to that in "radical" criticism of the United States but even that falls far short.  Most of that is wedded to an alternative mythology that is based in a romantic reading of the Constitution and an idiotic elevation of such things as "the free press,"  "The First Amendment" when a real and unromantic reading of the results of that hagiography shows them to be a very mixed blessing and not infrequently, a deadly curse in effect.  The idiotic idea that those whose profession is supposed to be in judging differences, judges, are powerless to tell the difference is one of the foundations of that idiocy.  Judges who can make the most precisian of distinctions when it's a question of money and who it "rightly" belongs to play totally stupid when it comes to something typically of blinding obviousness.

Of course, most of that comes from affluent, or relatively affluent, safe, white men who write for establishment organs such as the New York Times, the networks, work at elite institutions fully wedded to the system of inequality, such as the elite universities or otherwise benefit or hope to benefit from the system, ever patient as it grinds up and destroys those mentioned above.  I picked up Anthony Lewis' "Gideon's Trumpet" a couple of years ago and re-read it in light of the Post Warren Burger Court rotting into the corruption of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts and, for all my rose colored  view of it in my younger days, it read like a cheap and phony lie as to how things really are under the Constitution.  I think in almost no other way, the standard Warren Court era romantic liberal view of the Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights has to stand as among the most putrid and false propaganda during my lifetime.  Earl Warren is long dead, lots of his Court's landmarks have been turned round into tools of the privilege of wealth, white-supremacy and other gangsters.  Look what they did to the 14th Amendment to see that the Court can do that to anything.

I go back to one time listening to the silver-tongued racist, fascist William F. Buckley condemning equality as a violation of his right to enjoy his privilege as a wealthy, white male, which he explicitly called his "liberty."  That is something I remember as perhaps the beginning of my skepticism about such libertarian notions.  That was one of the unintended early steps in the direction I've taken even before I'd realized it.  Another was reading the truly idiotic book "In Defense of Anarchism," by Robert Wolfe which, when I discussed it with a teacher of language in college, she made me think by pointing out essentially it was an argument to jettison any kind of progress and go back to a lack of protection for the weak against the strong.  That was another step in my understanding of reality.  

I have to say again reading Emma Goldman's writing in full online instead of the typical cherry picked misrepresentation of her and finding that for anything appealing about her there was far more that was truly awful, and not just her political writing.  Reading about how, late in her life, seeing the rise of actual fascism and Nazism as well as the Soviet style of oppression that she early recognized during the Lenin years, she pathetically asked her friends if she and her colleagues had wasted their lives on anarchism.  The anwer to that was so obvious that she probably should have faced the fact and admitted it instead of asking the question. Reading her adoration of Nietzsche was another land mark of the final journey into my  disillusionment with that strain of American pseudo-radicalism.  And as I've said, when a far fuller record of primary documentation of the American secular left became available to me online, and those I could read in other languages, at every turn there was more than enough to persuade me that the whole thing is and was as phony and false as it could be.  I won't go into it right now but it was more intimately tied in with the primary documentation of both natural selection and the developments of fascism and Nazism than a good little college-credentialed liberal or leftist, or moderate or conservative of my pre-online generation would ever have suspected. Reading the primary record and noticing what was being said in it can be a real eye-opener.  I distrust Marxists and anarchists as much as I distrust capitalists, all along the way.

The Hollywood 10 were Stalinists, objectively, they were the moral equivalent of those who promoted fascism and doing business with Hitler.  I have mentioned a number of times here the brief period when American Communists were under order from Stalin to push that Republican-farm state-businessman line during the brief period of the Hitler Stalin pact.  And such heroes of us 60s era lefties as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the other Almanac Singers followed that order from as accomplished a mass murderer and enslaver and imperialist as Hitler was.  

It is one of the great idiocies in the wake of their persecution and prosecution by American fascists in the anti-communist post-WWII period, the infamous HUAC hearings, the show hearings and trials, the degradation ceremonies, that the victims of that may have been victims but they were never anything like heroes.  Despite what Hollywood and copy-cat scribblers of novels and shows claim.  With few exceptions those in the role of inquisitor and those in the role of accused were merely two somewhat different kinds of villains.  Whatever habits of sympathy extended to those without power in those dramas is more than made up by the reality of what their heroes, the ideological system they wanted to reproduce in the United States did in the Soviet Union, those countries occupied by them after WWII, later among the Maoists of the 1960s and 1970s.  Marxism was in every way more oppressive and murderous than even the United States during the Truman and Eisenhower years.  That is unless you were a Black Person or other member of a subjugated race in the states under American Apartheid or lived in a country subject to a client fascist dictatorship.  Those were quite similar to the occupied countries under the control of Communist dictators.

I will bet you there was not a single sworn Communist who fell under the judgement or process or torture-execution without trial under communism, no Soviet or East German or Hungarian or Chinese Person tortured, imprisoned or murdered under their idea of a paradise on Earth who wouldn't have traded places with the Hollywood 10 or those who escaped prosecution but were blacklisted in the "free press" of Hollywood studios or other "free press" media, lied about under "freedom of speech" or otherwise victimized under the red scare here without any hesitation.   

No claims of rights by American Communists or their allies in that period should ever be allowed to pass without pointing out, for example, that a dissident writer or scribbler or speaker under the system they championed would likely have gotten out of it without a bullet in the head, mostly likely after torture into a false confession or a sentence at slave labor, perhaps worked to death in a way not at all different from what happened under Nazism just a few years earlier or under American apartheid.  Anyone murdered by a communist dictator is equal to anyone murdered by Hitler or under Mussolini or under Imperial Japan.  Or in the Jim Crow states or anywhere under American fascism such as flourished in many of the several states all along.  There's something truly sickening in hearing the "First Amendment" whining of American Stalinists in the era when his genocides and oppression had been accurately reported in the West and was known to all. It is even more revolting to hear a fascist mean girl like Marjorie Taylor Greene spew the same ACLU-Hollywood Blacklist drama style "First Amendment" "free speech"  bullshit to whine about the fascist Tucker Carlson being fired by his fascist employers, the third cabloid network that had hired the liar to lie his fat face of to start with.  From what I see the only thing that's going to silence him is the dirt Murdoch has to hold over him.

Marxism is, indeed, as fully discredited as fascism and Nazism, it had been by the 1930s.  You had to be a willing idiot or as morally depraved as a Nazi to deny that.  All those popular heroes of the period who were Marxists of that kind are and should be jettisoned by any real and genuine egalitarian left today.  The younger generation of American leftists and liberals should face that folly of my and previous generations, condemn the hypocrisy of it and go on with better heroes or, best of all, none who aren't subjected to a rigorous and honest and realistic inspection on the basis of an equality that faces that those murdered and oppressed under Marxism are as much victims as those under any fascism.  I have a short list of former Marxists from the past, who did reject the sins of Marxim and the folly of their earlier lives, maybe someday I'll go into it. And I certainly don't mean by that the Trotsyites who exchanged that so cynically for neo-consevatism or other forms of profitable American corporate fascism.  I especially distrust the Marxists who took that tiny baby step from Marxism to fascism.  

No one who doesn't start out with and stick with egalitarian democracy as their ultimate goal, one in which any liberties are tied to moral responsibility to all others no matter how unpretentious or favored, is to be trusted.  You're far more likely to find such People among the religious than the secular in my experience.

I've found a lot more of those who stand up to rigorous criticism on the religious left than the secular ones.  There are even rare ones who can make an honest and critical use of some of Marx's ideas.  You should always keep in mind while reading Marx or, more likely under the typical post-literacy, hear some crank professor or instructor claiming to represent his thinking, that he, himself, declared that he wasn't a Marxist.  Anyone who is tempted to become one should remember Marx, himself, rejected it.

Anyone who holds with Marxism in 2023 when its mountain range of murders has been exposed is the moral equivalent of a neo-Nazi or neo-fascist or, their native American form, white supremacists or male supremacists.*  Their presence on university faculties are as absurd as flat-earthers teaching geography or "young Earth creationists" teaching on science faculties or catho-fascist Integralists on elite law faculties.  They are lying cranks, young people gulled by them are idiots who need to learn some real history. I suspect everything they know about history is from the movies or TV or some other lie filled fiction.  A lot of that is called "history". The "free press" and "freedom of speech" that refuses to distinguish between the right to tell the truth and that there is no right to lie has cost us too much to stop making that distinction effective in reality instead of hair-brained theory.

* It should never be forgotten that world-wide Women have been and still are subjected to a terror campaign, including daily lynchings, that on top of any racial or class or other forms of oppression, that it is almost always worse for Women whose subjugation and oppression often cuts through even the most obvious substrate of privilege.