Marquette University: the journey from Joe McCarthy to Angela Davis

                                                           

Is it possible to shame whoever is supposed to be in charge at Marquette University – The President, the Board of Trustees, a distinguished, influential Jesuit somewhere in residence, someone, anyone who might know even a little history from the last hundred years or so and understand what Communists do to Christians when they get power?  Not even remotely. The real operatives, the social justice “priests” at this pretend Catholic university apparently have deeply inhaled the same fetid vapors of the cultural Marxism that saturate every molecule of air at the most secular, anti-Christian universities such as Berkeley, or closer to home, the one in Madison.  From the MU website:

The Marquette Forum will host Dr. Angela Davis for a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, March 29 ….  Davis is a scholar, activist and sought-after speaker who has presented at dozens of universities….  This event is part of the Marquette Forum, a yearlong series of conversations inspired by visions of inclusion and a better world emerging from black freedom struggles.

Here is Orwell-inspired, DiversitySpeak perfected – anodyne, flawlessly crafted so as not to arouse suspicion that the foxes now guard the hen house, that the radicals at MU run the show and stage their phony PC-scripted lectures and discussions. No one can object to healthy “conversations”, especially ones “inspired by visions of inclusion.” Who could be opposed to “a better world” or cheering on the “freedom struggles” of anyone? This announcement in both content and style smacks of Soviet era agitprop, the technique of which is to show how morally immaculate you are by wrapping all the right words around yourself – “peace,” “justice,” “freedom,” “democracy.” Communist East Germany (euphemistically, The German Democratic Republic), it might be recalled, was so just, democratic, free and prosperous, that the Stalinists in charge needed to build a wall to keep its citizens from leaving and shot them whenever they tried.

What is omitted in the vapid, banal happy talk about the “scholar, activist and sought-after speaker” is that at 73 years of age, the life-long Marxist, Angela Davis, is not just some intellectually formidable village atheist imported to rattle the sheltered, complacent young Christians on campus.  Neither is she a 1960s-era, hallowed civil rights celebrity who happened to have mellowed out of a distant radical past and embraced American traditions and joined the Rotary Club. Her life’s mission continues to unfold with an unwavering, militant commitment to the destruction of what this 136 year-old Jesuit university is (supposed to be) all about. From Marquette University’s website:

Marquette University Guiding Values

Endorsed Dec. 8, 2014

In accordance with the Catholic, Jesuit mission and vision of Marquette University, we hold that all people and things are created to praise, reverence and serve God in our community and throughout the world, and thus every aspect of the university’s lifeblood and work holds this principle and foundation as its beginning and end. Therefore, we will enact the following values and behaviors in our lives and our work to serve the greater glory of God…

One does not have to be a Jesuit-educated theologian or a philosopher to grasp that nowhere in any country that might have had the misfortune to be governed by this former Black Panther, FBI fugitive and Communist Party USA candidate for Vice President 1980 would any follower of MU’s Catholic, Jesuit mission – praising, revering and serving God – not find his life to be pure misery, assuming that he was not liquidated. Those at MU who extended the “distinguished lecture” invitation to Davis should review the video clip of her remarks in her pilgrimage in 1979 to Moscow where she accepted the Lenin Peace Prize, in her words,  “the esteemed peace prize bearing the glorious name of Vladimir Illich Lenin here on the soil where he led the great October Revolution.”  Sounds very reverential, doesn’t it? And, for a man whose violent hatred for religion could not be matched by anyone.
 

Davis was also feted in 1972 by the East German Stalinist, Erich Honecker, collecting honorary degrees, effusing praise and admiration for the GDR and denouncing her native land for its repression and racism. 

Most of those MU students who had hoped to be “inspired” by Davis’s “visions of inclusion” were likely unaware that after the “great October Revolution,” the “glorious” Lenin’s vision for the millions of Christians in the Russia he was about to turn into a “workers’ paradise” was somewhat less than inclusive.  In a 1922 letter to his ruling Politboro, Lenin outlined his approach to religious diversity in the young regime that was struggling to gain control over those who were somewhat less than enthusiastic about their prospects – show trials, followed by executions, public ones just to make sure everyone got the message.  “The result,” he wrote, “of the trial is to be the execution, by public shooting, of a large number of the Chuya Black Hundreds as well as the shooting of as many as possible from Moscow and other important religious centers…  The more we shoot, the better it will be for us.” [Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 125-26, emphasis added]  Not exactly encouraging for those who wanted "to serve the greater glory of God." Lenin, and then his disciple, Stalin went on to obliterate Russian Christianity with an unprecedented savagery, as well as to persecute Islam.  The pattern was repeated by Communist dictatorships across the world, as in China, Cuba and the Soviet block in Eastern and Central Europe.  

    

That an institution like Marquette University would host and honor a militant atheist like Angela Davis, an implacable enemy of its sacred teachings, its religious faith and aspirations, someone who has made a life-long, worshipful embrace of Lenin’s October Revolution and the failed Communist regimes through out the last century that repressed, tortured and murdered millions of Christians all over the world, is just one more piece of the depressing evidence that resistance to the cultural Marxism that pervades even our once conservative, religious institutions has utterly collapsed.  

One of the curious and largely unnoticed ironies of this debacle is that Marquette University, so eager and enthusiastic to welcome an aging Communist radical peddling all the standard Marxist tropes, is that it is the alma mater of perhaps the most famous anti-Communist of all, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a 1935 graduate of its school of law.  

 It is a safe bet that very few of the current students at Marquette University Law School (MULS) are even aware that Joe McCarthy is an alumnus (LL.B., 1935) of the law school. This unawareness, however, is excusable. The halls, offices, and classrooms of most law schools are teeming with portraits, plaques, and busts of prominent alumni. It is not uncommon for law schools to name buildings, classrooms, courtrooms, professorships, and scholarships after prominent graduates. At MULS, however, Joe McCarthy-undoubtedly the law school's most famous alumnus and a man Lyndon B. Johnson said "will never be forgotten"-is persona non grata. [From, Jeffry S. Kinsler, Marquette Law Review, #2, 2001]

Indeed, even more than ever, Senator McCarthy remains a persona non grata at MU.  However, the irony, of course, is that this most anti- of anti-communists is an embarrassment to the cognitive-dissonant Jesuit Catholics at MU who at the same time roll out the red carpet for a speaker whose long, illustrious CV describes someone who might well be called the perfect American Bolshevik, a life-long apologist for communist butchers (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro) across the globe. Those who refuse to recognize their enemies, especially ones who are so open, consistent and brazen as Angela Davis, are a hopeless, pathetic lot.    

The pattern of philo-communism and PC-enforced, leftist identity politics is not, of course, unique to MU. It is a pervasive feature of higher education. Recently, Young America’s Foundation’s spokeswoman Emily Jashinsky told staff at the National Review “that there has been a “disturbing pattern of suppressing conservativism” on Jesuit campuses, citing DePaul University and Gonzaga University as the most recent instances of conservative speakers receiving significant backlash from university faculty.  

For a parent seeking a Catholic university education for his child – some advice.  Skip Marquette University. Save the money and send the kid to a state university.  There is no difference.  

If Hillary Wins

“But we – Communists, the party – will not divide power with anyone.”

These words were uttered by Anatoly Lukyanov, Secretary of the Central Committee, Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1987 at a time when just four years separated the Soviet Union from collapse and dissolution. Some thirty years later the U. S. is on the brink of destroying its political-cultural system of limited government.  The words of Lukyanov suitably edited compose the “Vision Statement” of todays Democrat party.  This vision underlies its drive to a one party state where it completely owns all of the power.  No competition allowed.  We are almost there.

To achieve its goal of making the U.S. like Brazil or Argentina, the Democrat party with no shame or conscience has surrendered to a grifter of herculean stature, a Brezhnev-like robot straight out of a dark political satire.  That this dreary, humorless harridan is triumphantly waddling toward the White House cheer led by the propaganda organs of the media syndicates, Wall Street and the Hollywood idiots, signals the inauguration of a one-party state and the descent into a full blown kleptocracy.  Hillary will be our very own Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the Argentine corruption-queen President who followed in the footsteps of her President husband, Néstor, after he croaked.  The parallels with Bill and Hillary really are quite disturbing, although the randy ex-president has been more physically durable than his Latin doppelganger, Mr. Kirchner.

The Democrats have ceased to regard the Republicans as a party of loyal opposition.  Obama calls them his “enemies”.   Hillary has reduced them to Klansmen, neo-Nazis and white supremacists.  You don’t do business or share power with your enemies. You don’t respect and cooperate with Nazis: you eliminate them.  

The Republican establishment has yet to figure this out. They still think that American politics operates with Marquess of Queensberry rules:  the Democrats, however, have for a long time been channeling Vladimir Lenin and have only one rule, which is: there are no rules.  Whatever puts them in power – lying, suborning, cheating, character assassination, pay-to-play – stays in the playbook. “You gotta do what you gotta do”,

as Bill Clinton quipped to Bob Dole after he whipped him in 1996.
http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2008/01/you-gotta-do-what-you-gotta-do-bill.html

Obama, the community organizer, has normalized the Bolshevik-inspired Alinsky approach to politics in his now nearly eight years in office, employing his favorite Alinsky rule, number five: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.” Republicans have typically been about concessions, trying to show the Democrats and their propagandists that they really are not the bigots and racists that Democrats unrelentingly accuse them of being.  Please, I am not a racist! How can I show you?  Not a real strong bargaining position. Donald Trump and his Republican supporters are now the target of a massive, unprecedented campaign of ridicule and character assassination. Trump has been cast out of the mainstream, not to be considered as a legitimate contender for power, but as the tool of brutal atavistic political chauvinism, a water carrier for the KKK.  There is a close analog here with how the Communist Party in the Soviet Union denounced any and all opposition to their rule as “fascist”, thus completely outside the pale.  Racism is the American version of fascism for the Democrats.  If you oppose them, you are a racist and racists are not legitimate competitors, they are enemies, “haters of people not like themselves”.  “Racism” is the ultimate “Orwellianism” of our time as it is the tool of powerful ideologues who use race as a political weapon of division, vituperation and rancor and who despise anyone outside of their ideological orbit as morally and intellectually defective.

We now appear to be close to an end-game. The Republican establishment has thrown in with Hillary fully immersed in the delusion that their party can survive yet another Clinton presidency.  Some of them appear to believe that Hillary will be a one-term president, being awful enough that the Republicans can look forward to a restoration in 2020.  This is laughable. The Clintons, aligned as they are with the major organs of social and political power, now have no fear of accountability or lawful constraint. In the next four years Hillary will turn the Supreme Court a mutual admiration society of Marxist intellectuals pleased to stamp their imprimaturs on her depredations. President Hillary will flood the red states with federal dollar handouts and third world immigrants to enrich the Democrat client base and turn the country, electorally, into what we now see in California. Al Sharpton will likely have a cabinet appointment and ex-President Obama will be ubiquitously bloviating and excoriating his former “enemies”, the Republicans before his trained seals in the mainstream media. The 2020 Presidential election will be a Democrat landslide of 45 to 48 states with the Republicans blamed for the deteriorating economy and the continuous black rioting in the Democrat-run, rotting American big cities.

 

Twenty-First Century Leninists

The republicans are a bunch of moronic idiots!

                                                          Bill Maher

 

The man who took Communism from theoretical enchantment into gruesome reality for millions of people entered the world in 1871 in a backwater providence of the Russian empire as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.  Before 1917 he was little known outside of professional revolutionary circles and the Okhrana, the Russian Imperial Police. When he died in 1924, he was famous world-wide as Lenin, the number one Bolshevik, master-mind of the October Revolution and architect of the first Socialist society.  His party had toppled the Provisional Government, in place nine months after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.  Lenin personally ordered the defenseless captive Tsar to be murdered along with his entire family. The savage killing of the royal family was a foretelling of Bolshevik humanity for all those whose “backgrounds” would make them unfit to participate in the new order.

In death, Lenin left for his revolutionary posterity, Leninism, a fearsome ideological assault arsenal used to frame the enemy, stalwarts of the old corrupt order in the most violent, scurrilous fashion and render them as fully dehumanized objects of loathing and contempt.  From the verbal violence then proceeded the physical abuse and destruction. 

It was, Lenin, a master of scorn and vituperation who invented a raging disputation style that would become the twentieth-century prototype of Communist polemical abuse for vanquishing rivals.  Stalin would perfect it. In order to grasp the full import of Leninist polemics and why it seems to be a permanent fixture in contemporary Left-wing discourse one must first grasp the Leninist view of the political universe.

Lenin was an anti- modernist  in politics, if one understands by “modern” in politics a willingness to vie for power within a framework  of mutually agreed upon rules (formal and informal) of competition, procedural protocol and power sharing.  The emergence of the concept and practice of “loyal opposition” found in constitutional governments embodied a set of norms, including mutual respect, civil disagreement and political compromise, that permitted vigorous political competition and orderly and non-violent transfers of power within a stable political and legal system.   

This kind of modernism was an anathema to Lenin and his followers.   Politics for them was and is total war.  When they possess power no opposition is permitted, loyal or otherwise; when they have to compete for it they seek to destroy the opposition.  Politics-as-total-war was derived from the absolute certainty Lenin held for his ideological convictions.   His intellectual arrogance rendered him incapable of imagining that he might be mistaken and that his opponents might have something to offer.  Lenin’s opposition was not just wrong; it was morally debased, fit only to be purged.   Lenin did not debate, argue or converse with his opponents.  He harangued and insulted them.  Language for him was not an instrument of persuasion.  It was a weapon used to malign and dismiss.   He possessed an expansive lexicon of abuse:  “scum”, “insects”, “cockroaches”, “bedbugs” and “vermin” were some of his favorite designations for those who resisted his plans or were insufficiently enthusiastic.  Lenin was particularly loathing of religion and when in power sought to exterminate every vestige of it.

Lenin as a theorist, however, was very modern, if one understands by “modern” in theory, a recondite etiology of systemic oppression that is couched in a ponderous language of rarified abstractions by our contemporary post-modern illuminati who occupy the scholarly chairs in our universities.  “Theory” for our post-modern practitioners is always about identifying, “unmasking” as it is usually said, a class of exploiters and oppressors who hide behind a façade of conventional morality that justifies their privilege.

When we move nearly one hundred years forward from the Bolshevik Revolution and their consolidation of power, the Leninist-style of political discourse is enthusiastically embraced in many quarters, but is especially a staple of contemporary Leftist polemics.  The blue collar, robustly anti-Communist Democrat Party of the 1950s and early 1960s has moved far to Left and is now comprised of trial lawyers, teacher union activists, angry feminists, preening Hollywood celebrities and the Ivy League professoriate.  They combine self-righteous moral indignation with abuse and scorn for those whose social and political views differ from their own.  Convinced of their own vast intellectual and moral superiority they are all about sneering, mockery and vituperation. They do not comprehend how anyone could possibly disagree with their ideas, oppose their programs or resist their policies.  And so those who do must fall into one or more of the following categories: they can only be stupid, greedy or bigoted.  There is no need to debate, argue or converse.  Insults and abuse are the order of the day.  They, of course, exude compassion for the less fortunate, care about “the planet” and evince a complete grasp of the complexities of the modern world.

Their Republican adversaries look out only for the very rich, do not care if they pollute the water and the air, force women into back allies for abortions and know nothing about science or art.  They are routinely denounced as Nazis, as racist bigots and as ignorant, stupid Neanderthals. Those who embrace traditional Christianity are regarded as particularly offensive and are targets of mockery and disdain.  Special vitriol is reserved for politically conservative women by the influential media-entertainment impresarios. Recently one of the Democrats prominent pundits, Bill Maher, whose abusive and foul routines pass for his many followers as witty and enlightened commentary, referred Sarah Palin as a “cunt” and a “dumb twat.”     

          The Democrat Party has become Leninist in its attitude and style, especially in the undisguised contempt its leaders and spokesmen routinely show for their fellow citizens who hold different political views.  Politics for them is indeed total war. This is evident from their language, their relentless ad hominem attacks, the complete absence of any sense on their part of fair play and loyal opposition.  It is not difficult to envision what Maher and his followers would like to do to the “scum” who displease them if they were able.   

The “Progress” of Communism – Idealism to Solipsism to Nihilism

 

No profound and popular movement in all history has taken place without its share of filth, without adventurers and rogues, without boastful and noisy elements... A ruling party inevitably attracts careerists.

                               Vladimir Lenin, 1921

The Left’s most virulent incarnation is Communism.  Wherever it has been put into place it has followed the same trajectory: a degenerative procession that moves from an original idealism to solipsism and finally descends into nihilism, a depressing amalgam of the purest cynicism and shameless, shoulder-shrugging corruption.

The noble aspiration of resisting and then defeating the forces of human oppression was the originating ideal of the theorists who conceived of Communism as both an historically inevitable human attainment – a classless society suitably ordered to bring out the best in all and satisfy the needs and wants of everyone – and a mobilizing social force that would act to free mankind from its long history of domination and exploitation.  From division and bitter conflict, perfect harmony would emerge.

Contemplating the factories and slums in nineteenth-century England gave Karl Marx the material he needed to immortalize himself – to leave the world with Marx-ism, a contagious, sweeping view of the social world that both explained human misery and proposed its elimination. Marx the penurious philosopher became for his revolutionary progeny, Marx the Prophet, his work endowed with moral infallibility, assurance that however hard they had to be, all would be justified in the end.

With the industrial revolution unfolding and profoundly altering the social and political landscape of Europe, Marx believed he had isolated and identified the cause of misery and the instrument of human oppression – capitalism with its bourgeois overseers.  As well, Marx discovered in these factories and slums that wasted, exploited underbelly of humanity that he made into the requisite theoretical antipode to the capitalist oppressor – the proletariat, a historically determined force of fury and rectification that would permanently remove the practitioners and beneficiaries of oppression.

The vast and powerful mobilizing appeal of Marx’s philosophical-historical labor came from the congealing of its confident predictions of historical and scientific inevitability with the moral outrage that naturally arose from the contemplation of human suffering and misery that was attributed to the greed and indifference of the exploiters whom he had unmasked.  Marxism was at one and the same time, science and romance – knowledge harnessed to heroic action – “Arise…you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

What the theorists deeply coveted was power. The knowers possessed of real power would force the oppressor’s hand, turn the tables. The ideal would become real.  Power would not be handed to them in spite of the compelling demonstration of the historical laws initially grasped by the theorists and the spectacle of human misery produced by the exploiters.  It would have to be taken and by extreme force through a violent revolution that Marx and his followers would never cease to romanticize as the great and permanent historical solution to the deepest of moral problems – man’s inhumanity to man.

At the beginning of the twentieth century none of these ambitious theorists anywhere had power, but they would take it in countries large and small.  One hundred years later when the 20^th century was history it was obvious that the fruit of the massive power wielded by the proudest and most ambitious of the Communists Lords across the globe – Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot – was not, had never been, nor ever would be a classless society. They had profoundly changed the world, but not in the way they had promised.  Communists wanted power to alleviate poverty and oppression and to eradicate every barrier of privilege that separates people into haves and have-nots .  When they got it they turned their Party into a privileged clan, their lands into ghastly prisons and their people into paupers, slaves and corpses.

In power the Communist removed the capitalists even in places where there were none or very few, like China and Ethiopia. They did this on behalf of the proletariat, also in places where they were scarce.  But it really did not matter.  “Capitalist” and the “proletariat” were quite fluid, protean categories. The world they wanted to rule over simply had to be made up of oppressors and oppressed of some fundamental sort – landlords/peasants, colonialists/indigenous peoples, imperialists/conquered peoples. The essential task was to strip away the rationalizing mask of privilege and difference, identify the oppressors behind it, crush them and then make the world far better than it had ever been.

Communists in power excelled at the crushing part of the promise but never delivered on the humanitarian side of it. It was impossible, and all of the oppressed and exploited on whose behalf Communists took power witnessed the surreptitious transposition of its mobilizing ideals into stark betrayals of principle and purpose. 

The Communist presentation of their new and wonderful society was no less than a solipsistic cocoon woven by its apologists who ignored or rationalized away every untoward intrusion of fact and reality.  The solipsist believes that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.  Communism in power became that “Self” under its own constant modification preternaturally blind to the conspicuously brutal reality of its own failures, recognizing nothing but the invented glorious movement of its own journey to perfection.   

The twentieth-century’s great Communist figures were themselves solipsists of sort.  Leon Trotsky was said by a fellow revolutionary, Milovan Đilas, to be: “an excellent speaker, brilliant stylist and skilled polemicist, a man cultured and of excellent intelligence, was deficient in only one quality: sense of reality.”* Indeed. Convinced of his own omniscience, ensconced defiantly in his hermetic Marxist world, Trotsky spent his action-packed life using his formidable intelligence to bend reality through the prism of his own imagined perfect understanding of the world. Stalin, who turned himself into the God of the Communist world, was completely removed from the people living in workers’ paradise he was so busy making and extolling.  He never visited any of the kolkhozy, the collective farms, inhabited by the tens of millions peasants he had brutally coerced into joining, spent no time with nor associated with factory workers.  He never ventured to Ukraine in the early 1930s where he might have caught a glimpse of the families he had pushed to starvation, people driven by their savage hunger to insanity and cannibalism, individuals numbering in the millions.  When his officers brought him bad news from the German front during World War II he often had them shot.   He allowed no part of the world to intrude upon or disrupt the flow of his genius.  Stalin’s entire working world was composed of himself and the conniving sycophants he retrieved from the dregs and cycled through his entourage, a grotesque, treacherous crew. Stalin trusted only himself.  Being close to him was highly precarious and frequently lethal.

The perfection of the unreal “self” of Communism’s solipsistic stage culminates with the Cult of Personality, the elevation of a single individual, morally and cognitively complete, a ludicrous phantasm whose being becomes “the Revolution,” the full expression of the goodness and humanity that Communism had promised. The Self is complete. Nothing remains to be added – “Stalin the Great Teacher” for Russian Communism was both sufficient and necessary.   

Communist solipsism gives way to nihilism. Nothing of the original ideal is left. The nihilism so conspicuous in the final days of the Soviet Union marked the final default of the ruling ideology and signaled the moral collapse of a society whose members no longer possessed any enduring principles and defensible ideas around which to organize and make sense of their daily lives. 

In the “mature” Socialist Workers Paradise no longer does anyone pretend to believe in the system except out of fear.  The ruled-over pretend to believe to avoid harassment and punishment, mainly to be left alone.  The rulers also pretend to believe the lies because they know that their power is only sustained by the persistence of the lie. They too are afraid, afraid of the people they rule over.  Everyone knows the truth and everyone knows that everyone else knows – mutual mistrust, suspicion and loathing flow.

And cynicism – the systematic, pervasive lying which sustains Communist regimes produces the purest, rawest cynicism.  Cynicism is indiscriminate revenge taken against liars and institutions and practices that are immersed in lies.  A cynic is one who has given up on the truth.  He sees everyone as a liar, a fraud or a dupe.  The cynic, unlike the skeptic, is a believer, but can only bring himself to believe the worst of others.  He concedes the entire expanse of humanity to the liar and his dupes.  There are no other categories to envision or employ.  In the cynic’s world everyone is on his own – one does whatever one has to do. The person of integrity is a dupe and a loser; corruption rules.

Cynicism and corruption are the indelible marks of mature Communist regimes.  Some, like the Soviet Union simply collapse – too sclerotic, too tired, to incompetent to continue. Others persist, their wily and intelligent leaders not willing to relinquish their power, able to adapt, reinvent themselves and keep the fiction working.   

*Quoted from Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, A Reassessment, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008, 9.

Where’s My Omelet? Or, Lenin versus Kant

“Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.”

                                                                  Immanuel Kant

“He [Lenin] was the only member of the local intelligentsia who not only refused to participate in the aid for the hungry, but publicly opposed it.  As one of his friends later recalled, ‘Vladimir Illich Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, particularly in the appearance of a new industrial proletariat, which would take over from the bourgeoisie… Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the state that necessarily followed capitalism. Famine would also destroy faith not only in the tsar, but in God too.’” 

                                                                     Black Book of Communism

In attempting to understand the savagery and ultimately the nihilism of Communism’s twentieth century global career, it might be helpful to juxtapose the Enlightenment’s sublime moral voice, Immanuel Kant, with the profoundly cynical calibrations of Vladimir Lenin, once he had power over the lives of others.  Lenin was Karl Marx’s supreme Man of Action, the arch revolutionary who did what Marx only dreamed of – he put the Capitalists out of business.  After that, so the theory went, life would be much better.  Well, except if you were a part of the bourgeoisie hoping for something to eat or inclined toward stupidities like faith in God.

It is difficult to conceive of a more startling juxtaposition of polarity of moral and human vision.  From Kant’s formulation of his categorical imperative each and every human being emerges not as an abstraction but as a unique person inviolate and irreplaceable, a creature whose very nature morally forbids that he become merely a means for the designs and ambitions of another.  To use another human being as a pure means is to de-humanize him, to turn him into matter.  As Kant saw it, human beings as rational creatures were bound by a moral law whose validity was tested by its universality, transcending the particularity of groups, classes, tribes, or race.  Everyone from the King to the servant was bound by the moral law, even God himself.  

Kant’s moral philosophy was one of the crowning achievements of the Enlightenment with its universality of reach and application across a rapidly emerging modern world where individuals from the entire spectrum of humanity would be becoming in some way connected with each other and in need of a moral vision that moved beyond the tribe.  Kant’s notion of an inviolate human core was articulated by Thomas Jefferson in theistic terms:  “All men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”  

For Lenin by contrast human beings were nothing but means, things to be used, not persons. They were material, waste products in fact if they were obstacles to his plans to elevate humanity and realize his utopian abstraction – they were to be assigned to the “dust bin of history” as his colleague, Leon Trotsky, put it.  Lenin was particularly fond of de-humanizing “disinfectant” terminology when speaking of his political opposition – liquidation, extermination, etc. – applied to “insects,” “vermin,” “leeches,” anyone basically who did not embrace his transformational vision.  Human beings were not for him individuals but disaggregated pieces of warring social classes that grind against each other and produce winners who rule and losers who conform to the winners’ will or die. 

Kant understood that morality is universally binding.  Morality forces one to concede the presence of boundaries of reality that may limit or frustrate specific desires and aspirations, sometimes very powerful ones.  Lenin eschewed any limitation to his action -- “Unlimited power above all law,” as he succinctly put it.  Fiercely atheistic, Lenin wanted to be God and craved unlimited power so as to remake humanity.   Almost un-human in his intellectual self-regard, his absolute self-certainty and conviction of omniscience rendered him unable to view those who opposed or resisted him as anything but human garbage to be swept aside and dumped into an abyss.  

Kant late in his life had reflected: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”  Kant’s frame was bowed and humbled by the vast reach of the universe and the deep mystery of the human heart.  Lenin, it is safe to surmise, was never awed by anything.  He was the Supreme Knower, absolutely convinced that he possessed the blueprint to restructure humanity and bring it to perfection. Kant for all the great power and breadth of his mind was intellectually and spiritually humble. Lenin was astonishingly arrogant with not a trace of humility, and his arrogance made him into one of the most ruthless individuals to ever walk the earth.  Only someone with such fanatical self-conceit could welcome a famine to sweep his land and enthuse over its “positive” effects.  This was a crisis that would not be wasted. Equally remarkable and appalling is the report of Lenin’s friend speaking of Lenin’s “courage” in announcing his pleasure over contemplating the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people.  The moral universe of the Bolsheviks was completely upside down, inhabited by men and women of the deepest immorality.      

Lenin’s had many disciples.  Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot were all cast from Lenin’s mold, supreme knowers, dedicated to the making the abstraction they called the Revolution into a lethal reality.  They excelled in breaking millions of eggs, but the omelets that were supposed to follow somehow never made it to the dish plates. Lenin was succeeded by Stalin, the consummate Leninist. It was Stalin, contrary to the wishes of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who decided to turn Lenin’s corpse into a mummy, to make the man who served the impersonal forces of history into a very personal piece of material for his own purposes, a Communist relic for the faithful to see and remember.    

After Stalin came Khrushchev, then Brezhnev.  Murder and extermination gave way to corruption and stagnation -- from Lenin, the fanatical believer to Brezhnev, the alcoholic pretender.  Finally, the urbane, well-educated Gorbachev.  Gorbachev’s impossible task was to extract from the nihilism that inevitably engulfed a land ruled by liars and frauds a pristine, original Leninism somehow forsaken by Stalin and his progeny that might rescue the Party and produce the long promised omelet.  Alas, the only thing to be had from Vladimir Illich Ulyanov was his mummy, bequeathed by Stalin, after decades still moldering away.