The Mummy Lives – Careers for Communist Dead Heads

“He took care of all North Korean people with his warm love.”

                                                                                        Kim Jong IL on Kim Jong IL

The body of Kim Jong Il now like that of his father, Kim Il Sung, has been suitably embalmed and ready for a post-respiratory career as a venerable mummy.  The current speculation is that the National Palace will soon become a unique historical site where visitors will be able to gaze upon the corpses-in-repose of both the Father and the Son, Kim Sr. (“our Fatherly Leader” as he was affectionately called by his hungry and malnourished subjects) and Kim Jr., who made it through sixty-nine years, it is reported in the official obituaries, never having to defecate, immaculate in his own special way.

Should the North Korean people enjoy the beneficence of a long-lived Kim Jong Eun, a mere chubby-faced lad with many years ahead to enhance the paradise bequeathed by his elders, he will no doubt have performed many miracles of his own, maybe an even longer feces-free existence than his father.  Perhaps someday the National Palace will host for the curious to behold a rosy communist Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy --- well … expectations will no doubt be high for Kim III.

All of this must be somewhat disconcerting for the keepers and groomers of Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh – but perhaps not.   How many mummies mounted in gaudy mausoleums, after all, does a properly functioning communist dictatorship need to maintain?  How many can one afford?   In China, Mao, 36 years expired, is ubiquitous.  His visage decorates the currency.  His face is everywhere, on buildings, posters, tee-shirts, ties.   Long lines of Chinese still form to stroll past his bier in the gigantic hall.  Lenin, who died at fifty-four, is only two years shy of ninety years of mummy-hood.  He gets an occasional chemical bath, I have read.  One does wonder.

One also wonders if Raul Castro might be thumbing through the Greater Havana Yellow Pages under the "embalmer" heading, readying himself to appoint soon The Master to prepare hermano mayor for eventual display.  El Lider Maximo is old and looking mighty peeked.  Pedro Ara, the Spaniard who did the nice work on Eva Peron’s mortal coil is himself long dead, unfortunately.  Unlike Moscow or Pyonyang, Havana, however, is really warm year around.   How much spare electricity on this island of notable basic scarcities will it take to keep Fidel’s withered cadaver looking, uh, revolutionarily fit?

The communist affinity for mummification of the Leader has become a comically symbolic gesture that speaks emphatically to the false and delusional nature of the system, a system that consists of everyone at every level pretending.   The Party pretends to believe in the perfection of the departed Chief, making even his corpse into an uncorrupted object for eternal contemplation and edification.  The people pretend to grieve and everyone pretends that the misery and depravation they experienced daily never ever happened under the rule of the Dearly Departed.   All is sweetness and light in the magic kingdom where the handsome Prince reigns over his happy and prosperous subjects. The mausoleum that holds his remains is constructed to remind everyone that visits of the vast goodness and unfathomable virtue of the Departed that never actually existed. 

This weird deification rite of passage for the Dead Heads was born in desperation.   In 1924 when Lenin’s brain hemorrhaged its last, the regime he imposed was floundering. The Russian people were not happy with the progress of communism. The peasants were starving and the workers were worse off than ever.  At this moment of crisis, Lenin’s determined disciple, Stalin, needed a religious-like relic, a physical, personal object of grief for the peasants and workers who had not yet grasped the impersonal nature of Marxian dialectics.  It seemed to work, and the mummy in the glass box has become one of the more curious and ironic elements of “communist culture.”

  

Much of the outside world now contemplates the ghastly and hideous death rituals of the North Koreans dictators with macabre amusement and scorn.  There are notable and depressing exceptions.   In a letter of personal condolence to Kim Jong Eun, our very own Fatherly Leader, Jimmy Carter, wished the new dictator “every success as he assumes his new responsibility of leadership, [and was] looking forward to another visit [to   North Korea ] in the future.”   It would be enlightening, no doubt, to know how Mr. Carter imagined the new Kim might parse these well-wishing words.    

From Joseph Stalin to Jimmy Carter

Stalin died near the mid-point of the twentieth century, eight years after the end of WWII.  In the early years of the century when the young Stalin (Koba) was making himself into a professional revolutionary and climbing into the upper reaches of the Bolshevik hierarchy there were no Communist governments anywhere, nor did there seem to be much likelihood at that time that there would soon be any. The Bolsheviks were a small, quarrelsome sect and scattered about Russia and Europe in exile.  By the time of his death Stalinism had become a permanent ideological fixture in the world’s political firmament. Communist satrapies were firmly lodged over large portions of the globe – China, North Korea, Eastern and Central Europe were all under the watchful care of men who imitated or resembled the Kremlin Chief. 

Four years later, Fidel Castro launched his own Bolshevik experiment ninety miles from the coast of Florida.  Over a half a century lie ahead for the Cubans to digest the long lectures of Fidel, absorb his wisdom and learn to love the life of penury and servitude under the Lider Maximo.  His brother, Raul, parked in the shadows, always made sure that the Cuban Gulag ran at peak capacity. No one contradicted Fidel and Raul. The Cubans people, themselves, were never given the opportunity of a free election to test just how popular the Castro brothers and their “Revolution” really were. Three years after Fidel’s triumphal march into Havana Khrushchev, Stalin’s understudy and successor, and John Kennedy brought the world to the brink of a nuclear WWIII over the Soviet missiles in Cuba that had been smuggled in and were aimed at the U.S. 

Stalin’s ideological progeny had like the master made their revolutions, installed themselves in power and obliterated the opposition.  Mao, Castro, Pol Pot – each one would display in his own unique way Stalin’s affinity for deceit, cult of personality, and homicidal rampages spoken of as war against “enemies of the people.” 

The people under the rule of each and every new Stalinist who emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century experienced harsh deprivations of all the basic human necessities, both material and spiritual, similar to those that the Russians had long come to expect from their Bolshevik masters   As well, each and every new Stalinist came to the stage with the admiration and applause of high placed adulators from the imperialist camp.  Edgar Snow produced his hagiography of Mao for American readers. Herbert Mathews and the New York Times in the best tradition of Walter Duranty were enthralled with the Caribbean Robin Hood, Fidel. Various American notables made their political pilgrimages to the lands of the newly liberated downtrodden to show them support and to show contempt for the “criminals’ back home.  [Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims:travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978, New York, 1981]  Jane Fonda landed in Hanoi to enthuse over the “George Washington of Southeast Asia,” Ho Chi Minh, and to denounce American imperialist aggression. Meanwhile American soldiers were being killed by North Vietnamese Communists troops.  

The outpouring of self-congratulations in the West in 1991 that lubricated the celebration of the victory of freedom and vindication of the market when the Soviet Union self-imploded and the Eastern Block countries shook off their Communists masters was to say the least, premature.  More accurately, it was fatuous and self-deluded.  Forgotten or overlooked were: the durability and adaptability of the Chinese Communists; the massive and permanent leftward cultural drift of the Western democracies in the 1960s and 1970s; and the resilience of the Left and its ability to reinvent and reassert itself.

The Democrat Party of Scoop Jackson and George Meany in the 1950s and early 1960s, blue collar and robustly anti-Communist, by the end of the century had moved far to Left.  By the 1980s the once muscular, lunch bucket Democratic coalition of coal miners and auto workers was comprised of trial lawyers, teacher union activists, angry feminists and the Ivy League professoriate.  Former President Jimmy Carter in 2004, after a career of embracing Left-wing dictators and tut-tutting the American people for their fear and suspicion of Communism sat in a celebrity box at the Democratic Presidential convention with Michael Moore, an avowed Socialist and admirer of Fidel Castro. In 2011 after a trip to Pyongyang, Carter accused the United States and its ally South Korea of “human rights” violations in its dealings with the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of North Korea, arguably one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, one, that as of this writing starves large numbers of its own citizens.  Our globe-trotting former President is perhaps the perfect embodiment of what Lenin described as the “useful idiot.”

Lenin & the Legacy of Nihilism

And therefore in reasoning, a man must take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker.

                                                                Thomas Hobbes

From the beginning, with the toppling of the Provisional Government in October 1917, the Bolsheviks never permitted a free and democratic election.  They forcefully disbanded the constituent assembly when they realized they could not control the outcome.  

Once in power Lenin began to operate as if he believed that he could build his perfect society simply by giving orders and shooting whoever was reluctant or unenthused.  His first major “accomplishment” upon taking power was the creation of the Cheka, the chief organ of repression and terror that became Stalin’s chief instrument of rule.  The second was the invention of the concentration camp, a dehumanized space deliberately created to maximize human misery and to assert the absolute power of the ruling party over whomever it cared to. Massive, unrelenting coercion was Lenin’s gift to the world, stamping itself all over the regime from its beginning and persisting to the end. “Unlimited power above all law,” as Lenin himself put it. [From Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, New York, 1994, 118] 

No one, absolutely no one, was permitted to question or resist. Lenin was a master of scorn and vituperation. Language for Lenin was not an instrument of persuasion. It was a weapon. Resisters in his expansive lexicon of abuse were “scum.”  The “bourgeois” Kulaks he marked for elimination were “blood suckers.”  “[F]rom 1920 on Lenin described enemies in terms eerily anticipating the SS: ‘bloodsuckers,’ ‘spiders,’ ‘leeches,’ ‘parasites,’ ‘insects,’ ‘bedbugs,’ ‘fleas,’ the language suggesting threatening and dehumanized enemies infecting the people, requiring cleansing.” [Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005, 322]  Oppositionists in Stalin’s world were “insects”.  Decades later in Cambodia Pol Pot identified for “liquidation” “malignant microbes” within the party.  [Robert Service, Camaradas: Breve Historia del Comunismo, 2009, 565]  The boundless intellectual conceit of the men who installed themselves as champions of the world’s oppressed people made them into ferocious haters. They were incapable of viewing those who did not share their ideas and resisted their program as human beings. Thus when their efforts to build the perfect society failed, their frustration, disappointment and fury had a perfect target, an array of “enemies” that had populated their binary, ideological world — “counterrevolutionaries,” “bourgeoisie scum,” “reactionaries,” “priests” – all the remnants of the old order and utterly debased.

The lying and the hyper- and coercive- secrecy that was necessary to rationalize the abuse of the unenthused, to sustain the lies and to insulate the Party bosses from the consequences of their failure eventually made effective governmental decision-making impossible for the Communist governments.  When no one can tell the truth, or when the truth simply becomes the official propaganda pronouncement of the moment eventually no one can trust anyone. Suspenseful anticipation of the next propaganda turn saps energy, exhausts resources. With massive, institutional lying the power brokers ultimately slide into a state of helplessness.  “Establishments that could collectivize a peasantry and nationalize an entire country subsequently found themselves unable to take the slightest collective actions when something failed to go according to plan….  Instead….all manner of incentives [were provided] for even loyalists to lie and report fairy tales.” [Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, New York, 13-14]  

The land that would become the first Socialist Workers Paradise and the model for the Proletarian revolution, promised by Lenin in 1917 was by 1989 reduced through corruption, dishonesty and incompetence to a crummy, third world shamble whose vodka-besotted workers could not even make a decent bread toaster.

Over time the coercion necessary to perpetuate the increasingly apparent dishonesty that rationalized the coercion and violence was simply insufficient to disguise the disparity between the reality reflected by the facts all around, and the glaring absurdity of the official propaganda. 

Even the efforts of the Soviet leaders after Stalin’s passing to soften and humanize the nakedly brutal and coercive system their mentor had left them of necessity to continue the systematic lying and deception. The regime by 1955 two years after Stalin’s death was attempting the rehabilitation of victims of his terror from the previous two decades.  But it now faced a huge dilemma: it would not be good for the Bolshevik leaders’ future prospects if the people they had now ruled for a generation learned the truth about the how many innocent people Stalin and his assistants (many of whom  were now in charge) had selected over the years to be shot. As Dmitri Volkogonov reports:  “It was therefore decided that the KGB and the State Prosecutor’s office should publish ‘Instruction No. 108ss on Camps’, which stipulated that in the information given to families, for those who had been shot on non-judicial orders the date of death should be given as roughly ten years from the time of their arrest, and the cause should be fictitious.” [Victor Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire: the Seven Leaders who Build the Soviet Regime, New York, 1998, 393]   Such was the staggering cynicism and dishonesty of a regime that was now hopelessly trapped in its own secretive murderous history.  Though pressed to reform and even wanting to reform, Stalin’s heirs were unable to let go of their dirty secrets. They now attempted to escape accountability through distortion and half-truths. The character of the men in charge could never be anything more than a reflection of the coercive, dishonest system they had imposed.  

The governing architecture of the Soviet Union, grounded in the Marxist eschatological promise of the end of capitalism, was put into place with the same kind of massive coercion around the world with the similar resulting waste, wreckage and misery.  The methods and practices of the Soviet masters, including the systematic dishonesty, were imitated with similar disastrous effects. The systemic, highly coerced perversion of truth-telling would with each imitative Communist dictatorship – from East Germany to Cuba to North Korea – ultimately degenerate into moral nihilism, entirely bereft of any purpose or rationale beyond the preservation of privilege and power of the ruling class – corruption and degeneracy of the masters; misery for the ruled.  Nihilism was the inevitable culmination of Communist morality. This fact, perhaps, helps to explain why the Communist leaders could sustain for decades the murder, persecution, and desolation so characteristic of these regimes and yet pretend to be virtuous. “Moral nihilism is not only the central feature of National Socialism, but also the common factor between it and Bolshevism.”  [Robert Conquest, Reflections of a Ravaged Century, New York, 2000, 64]