Century Twenty-one: the Desolate March*

Moral nihilism is not only the central feature of National Socialism, but also the common factor between it and Bolshevism.** 

                                                               Hugh Seton-Watson

The twenty-first century is well underway. We can readily contemplate the remarkable, socially and morally transforming effects of these powerful, intermingling forces that have come into ascendancy: personalism, a proto-modern ideological system that urges the pursuit and enlargement of the subjective self, liberated from the confines of repressive, traditional institutions; therapy, that seeks to nurture and speak reassuringly to that subjective self and that identifies what forces may impede its growth and development; and amusement (particularly in the electronic form) that conjures up for the restless subjective self, programs for stimulation, provides endless possibilities for self-expression, and  promises everyone diverse opportunities for temporary escape. The twenty-first century is the perfect time and place for the nihilist and the hedonist.

In such a volatile, connected world, with so many changes and so much uncertainty, one discovers what seems to be a persistent, devilish play of the ironic in human events. History has always been a perverse affair. It is also often cruelly ironic, as Edward Gibbon, writing of the decadence of an earlier great civilization, the Roman empire, brilliantly demonstrated over two hundred years ago. Human beings, when they come to be measured against the goodness and greatness of their Gods, can only be regarded as feeble, deluded creatures. Says Gibbon in one of his bitterest, ironic musings:

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from Heaven arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian.  He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

Gibbon pits the theologian against the historian. These two classes of theorists represented for Gibbon two perennial philosophical archetypes for interpreting or understanding the deep complexities of the human condition.  Theology, understood in this context, is a theoretical dreaming, the corruption of the Christian faith by metaphysics and superstition. The “theologian” comprehends (or invents) and dwells upon the possibilities of perfection—hence perhaps the delusion-based pleasure of believing that man can achieve something approximating divinity and escape his limitations. Gibbon’s theologian was transmogrified in the twentieth into the most grotesque and dangerous of all creatures, the ideologue. The ideologue, the man of total revolution, sought to recreate society and make man perfect.

The historian by contrast is a moral pathologist, a moral philosopher, actually, grounded in the knowledge of the constraining realities of human nature. He probes reluctantly, with a “melancholy duty,” into the many human aspirations that seem to descend into folly. He measures the expressed aspirations against the actual accomplishments. In these investigations, he often discovers the processes of degradation. The historian in a way has the worst of it since what he must return to, again and again, is the stark, unavoidable reality of human arrogance, folly and corruption.

History, therefore, must often become a mocking and deeply melancholy scene. The irony of history thus is all too often cruel and wildly perverse. In the narratives of success and failure, history captures painfully the disparity between the reaches of human aspirations and the reality of their achievement, grotesque applications of the law of unintended consequence—efficiency experts who produce less work, social reformers who make peoples’ lives even more miserable than imagined, spiritual leaders who degrade their followers below the level of beasts, utopias that turn into hells. History manages to highlight the dominance of human pride and arrogance. Nowhere, I would suggest, does this observation strike with more force and vivacity than in the contemplation of the events of the twentieth century. Never has there been a time in which we have collectively possessed such immense bodies of knowledge and so much material capacity to advance it. Never before have the technologies been so powerful and so rich with potential, and the aspirations so ambitious and full of confidence. Yet with all of this, the ironic lesson is the danger of losing sight of our own limitations: and with that vital loss of moral understanding we find ourselves on a desolate march.

*Excerpted from Stephen Paul Foster, Desolation's March: the Rise of Personalism and the Reign of Amusement in 21st-America, Bethesda, Md. Academica Press, 2003.
 Complete electronic copy free on demand.

**Quoted from: Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Norton, 2000.

Of Vice and Victimhood*

“The essential feature of Conduct Disorder is a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others or major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated..... The behavior pattern is usually present in a variety of settings such as the home, school, or the community.”

From: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

A remarkable and near complete metamorphosis of our basic understanding of moral character and personal responsibility—vice into sickness; virtue into health—has been under way for a long time and has moved at a highly accelerated pace in the last twenty years. The shifting preference for health over virtue as a conceptual framework for judging and sanctioning human conduct derives from two sources.

 The first is the cultural ascendance of the Left and the wide un-reflecting embrace of its view of individual human beings as disaggregated units of warring, conflicting groups as expressed in its program of identity politics. These conflicts, so the argument goes, are the ultimate source of all existing social evils, both the losers and the winners distinctively marked.  The winners are privileged exploiters, dehumanized by their own aggressive exploitation: the losers are impoverished and particularly vulnerable to social “pathologies,” e.g., drug addiction, criminality, and the like. Poverty, crime, drug abuse are all the result of the exploitation and domination exerted by the winners over the losers. “Pathology” in this explanatory framework no longer works as a metaphor – vice is now disease caused by a broken social system.  Disease gives way to knowledge and technique as discovered and determined by experts who require power to fix the broken system.       

The second and related source is the late nineteenth-century expansion of confidence in the capacity of science to explain, and ultimately produce the technology to manipulate and control everything, including human behavior. The ugly, seamy, corrupt sides of the human personality and the vice produced, regarded by our ancestors as the unfortunate elements of human imperfection, have come to be seen not as perennial manifestations of weaknesses or limitations inherent in human nature, but as technical problems that can be eliminated with the application of the right kind of technical knowledge. Vice has been, considered a perennial human propensity to be tamped down, but now as disease it becomes a “social problem” for which “cures” can be discovered and applied by technicians. Perhaps no better articulation of this “social problem” view of vice—curable by enlightened, empowered, informed expertise— is the following, written in the 1980s by Berkeley sociologist Neil Smelser.

[A]nother necessary part of what defines a social problem is that we believe we can do something about it.  It has to be something at which we can successfully throw resources; something we can ease by getting people to shape up; something that can be cured through social policy legislation and decisions and the application of knowledge; something that can be ameliorated. Otherwise it is seen as one of those ineradicable scars on the social body that we have to live with, a necessary evil, one of those inevitable frailties of human nature.**

Smelser’s summary of the perspective is superb—succinct but complete—not only in content but in style as well. The opening sentence puts up the Straw Man as if everyone before the author had given up on trying to make the world better.  Though Smelser’s academic residence is in the Sociology department, he fancies himself as an engineer – “shaping people up,” applying expensive tools (“successfully throwing resources”) and “the application of knowledge” to solve technical problems, otherwise known as “social problems". These social problems—he cites as examples crime, violence, alcohol, and drug abuse—are manifestations of human behavior that can either be viewed as an inevitable consequence of limitations of human nature (“frailties”) or as failures of social functions remedied with the enlightened application of “resources.” Smelser does not want to believe that there is something like “human nature” with moral and social limitations that we should recognize and work with. Containment or correction is unacceptable when the problems can, in his words, “be cured.” The medical metaphor of the “cure” he invokes, with all of its positive, healthful connotations, however, quickly gives way to the more literally-expressed means of practical application, which is political action and legal coercion, that is, “social policy and legislation.” The cure, in effect, for social problems is the right dosage of social policy: the real cure will be the direct result of incorporating social science research into law, a translation of social science theory into public policy. Coercion is to play a large part in the “cures.”  

*Excerpted from Stephen Paul Foster, Desolation's March: the Rise of Personalism and the Reign of Amusement in 21st-America, Bethesda, Md. Academica Press, 2003.
 Complete electronic copy free on demand.

**Neil J. Smelser, “Self-Esteem and Social Problems: An Introduction,” The Social Importance of Self-esteem, Andrew M. Mecca, Neil J. Smelser, and John Vasconcellos, editors, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 4.

I am the Immaculate Deception: The Dying of Dictators

“He needed to defecate…Stalin got out of the car and asked ‘whether the bushes along the roadside were mined .  Of course no one could give such a guarantee…Then the Supreme Commander-in-Chief pulled down his trousers in everyone’s presence.’  In a metaphorical commentary on his treatment of the Soviet people, and his performance as military commander, he ‘shamed himself in front of his general s and officers… and did his business right there on the road.’”  Stalin on the way back from the Front, 1943.

 (From: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tzar, New York, Random House, 2003, 652)

The grief-extravaganza that engulfed North Korea following the recent demise of Kim Jong-Il, the first and only Communist boss to inherit from his father his own personal dictatorship and cult of personality, displayed for the outside world a curious and bizarre array of death rituals traceable back to the collective insanity in Russia that ensued after J.V. Stalin took his last breaths on March 5, 1953. 

Kim Jong-Il, like Stalin and like Mao, descended from ordinary folks but during his revolutionary travails acquired superhuman attributes – virtue, wisdom, selfless devotion – beyond the likes of any other in his midst.

Stalin, Mao, Kim – these Marxist Übermenschen ruled over lesser mortals as near perfect beings.  They are not supposed to die. But die they do, which comes as a jarring and untimely reminder of their ordinary fleshly composition.  Breathless and cold they are now just like all of those millions who were made to perish under their benevolent watch – food for the worms.  Thus the fiction of their perfection must be affirmed, first by an elaborately choreographed theatrics of universal despair and grief, with a cast of distraught thousands. Then the worms must be denied.  From the embalmer’s table the grayish corpse, transformed, moves to center stage, a rosy colored, death defying shrine. “I am the immaculate deception.”  The leader in death lives forever as an object of veneration.

The passing of a creature such as Kim Jong-Il is the kind of event that perhaps more than of any other exposes and dramatizes the absurd and fraudulent nature of Communism, an ideology whose enthusiasts have always been pleased to have us know speaks to the modernizing, progressive impulses of humanity and moves relentlessly toward the calculated improvement of the human condition.

The highly demonstrable, wide-spread grief that we see emanating from the throngs of people, crying, wailing with their faces contorted in the pain of sorrow and loss.  Why are they so distressed?  Is it genuine or feigned?    Both probably, but this hedge of an answer only serves to underlie the difficulty making sense of the collective outpouring of grief for the tyrant-turned-cadaver.   This difficulty, however, can be addressed with the maxim that: communism is the highest form of pretending.  The greatest communists are the greatest pretenders.  “Dizzy with success,” was how Stalin in the 1930s described the efforts his party underlings as they completed the forced extraction of the grain harvest from the Ukrainian farmers and then watched them starve by the millions.

  

These grief rituals for the passing of the communist bosses are the crowning absurdity of the cult of personality, the consummate achievement in the art of pretending.  They bring to culmination the life of the Dear Leader which has been long imaged to mirror the exact opposite of reality – criminality masquerading as glory, ruthlessness celebrated as genius.  The wisdom of the Leader has been folly; his benevolence, unspeakable wickedness.  Progress has been nothing more than stagnation and corruption.  The people’s highly visible anguish for the loss of the Leader is sublimated relief.  Is he really, finally dead? Everything in the worker’s paradise is the opposite of what it appears.

 

Stalin’s death was consistent with his life as a supreme communist ruler.  For the world to contemplate, his funeral in the middle days of March 1953 was a massive production out of which emanated the love, devotion and worship of the millions of Russians.  The circumstances of his death on March 5^th , observed only by his family and underlings, were desperate, sordid and disgusting.  Death came from a stroke that left him lying on his bedroom floor, speech impaired, soaking in his own urine.  His assistants, terrified of him, were reluctant to call the doctors. Stalin distrusted doctors, especially Jewish doctors.  His devoted henchman – Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov – deserted the deathwatch, fled to the office to destroy the Boss’s papers and the evidence of their criminality.

Fidel tarries.  The embalmers are anxious.          

The Left: “Yes, I’m the Great Pretender”

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
                                                                                George Santayana

Gazing across the political spectrum one might search for a single word or phrase that captures the essence of any one of the ideological occupiers.  The Left has long settled on “stupid” as the most fitting for conservatives.  “Conservatives as stupid” reaches a long way back with England’s great utilitarian philosopher and reformer, John Stuart Mill, calling the Tories the “stupid party.”

So it was then and so it is today.  The pundits have recently savaged the current crop of Republican Presidential aspirants mostly with aspersions on the paucity of their intellects. Whatever other many unseemly qualities they may evince – meanness, ignorant religiosity, greed, and hypocrisy – all are overshadowed with the low levels of intelligence by which they operate.   Rick Perry was stupid. Michelle Bachmann was ignorant and dumb.  Newt Gingrich may appear to be smart, but it is merely superficial camouflage. He is not really bright at all.  All of these troglodytes by comparison now, so we hear from columnist Clarence Page, make Ronald Reagan look wise.   Of course when Reagan was a candidate for President he too was simple-minded, senile, “an amiable dunce,” per Clark Clifford, vapid and intellectually inferior. 

By contrast the Left is the Mensa segment of the political spectrum, a brainy, high IQ society of college professors, trial lawyers and Hollywood actors, actresses and directors.  Whatever their shortcomings, they are smart. No one impugns their intellects.  George W. Bush, the only President to earn an M.B.A (from Harvard) was widely disparaged as much dumber than divinity school drop-out Al Gore.  President Obama, qualified “to heal the planet”, as he promised in his campaign, is said to be a brilliant constitutional lawyer and scholar, although he has never published a single article on the subject, even as editor of the Harvard Law Review, much less a book.  His only publications to date are two books are about his favorite subject, himself. 

So, what single word might we essay to capture the essence of the Left?  “Pretenders” – the politicos of compassion are the Great Pretenders.  What then do they pretend to?

First, they pretend to know.  Karl Marx, the Great Pretender of the 19^th century claimed to have discovered the “laws of history” from which he deduced and then predicted how the history of the modern world would unfold and what the end result would be.  The “good guys”, the oppressed workers of the world, would rise up take power from the capitalist exploiters and build a society free of domination, poverty, war and unhappiness.  Of course, none of this worked out.  Marx as a knower, a theorist was an abject failure.  But Marx’s disciples continued to pretend in the theory.  Not only would the “socialist workers paradise” predicted by Marx come to pass, but they pretended to be the chosen ones who would make it happen. 

The pretend-knower persists to this day.  The academy abounds with Leftists who invent “theories” which, they proudly assert, “unmask” the culprits in social world who dominate and exploit an assortment of unfortunates.  The University of California at Berkeley’s Judith Butler’s is one of the acclaimed knowers.  This theoretical bombshell appeared in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the “scholarly” journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

No one outside of a university philosophy and English department would bother to decipher this mental ordure.  Other than her graduate assistants and an assortment of her queer theory, post-modernist, post-structuralist camp followers, no one else would pretend that this says anything important, insightful or even interesting.  Good theories lead to inventions, innovations, deeper understanding.  Theories of this sort lead only to tenure, promotion and academic conference junkets – to read them makes for a headache.

Second, the Leftists pretend to be virtuous.   Their intellectual and theoretical superiority is complemented by their moral superiority.  They represent and speak for the oppressed, exploited and marginalized, and unlike conservatives who are motivated solely by greed and narrow self-interest, the luminaries of the Left are genuinely altruistic and benevolent.  They put people over profit, light candles and protest at the execution of murders, and congratulate themselves for their boundless compassion and devotion to the environment.  

Of course, these moralists are no more upright and decent generally speaking than the stupid conservatives and the masses they look down upon, including the rubes in the flyover states who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them.”  The Left too is full of antipathy – particularly for cigarette smokers, traditional Christians and owners of gas guzzlers – but they pretend to be open-minded and tolerant.  The many heroes of the Left – Lenin, Mao, Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh – while they were building the gulags, murdering their opposition and impoverishing their own people, were lionized and lauded by Leftist in the West as Robin Hoods, benefactors of humanity, tireless and selfless devotees of the poor and oppressed. 

      

Third, the Leftists pretend that their failures are successes.  For decades Leftists in the West pretended that the Soviets, then the Chinese Communists, then Fidel Castro had built societies far superior to the capitalist ones they comfortably lived in and disparaged.  The pretending persisted across the years in spite of the accumulating evidence of misery, penury and servitude in these paradises.  No one in Miami was building rafts and braving the open ocean waters and sharks to arrive in Havana. Yet, Fidel remains a hero who gave the Cubans who couldn’t escape his paradise free health care. His eventual New York Times obituary will pretend he was a humanitarian.  In the U.S. the Left has presided over the apotheosis of FDR pretending he was the greatest of American Presidents in spite of ample evidence that his policies greatly prolonged the Great Depression and that he seriously misjudged Stalin and was manipulated by him.  The peoples of eastern and central Europe paid dearly for FDR's avuncular view of Joseph Stalin.

While conservatives may remain the stupid party, the Left has been and continues to be the party of pretenders, to paraphrase Santayana above, it persists as “a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.”      

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.    

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.       

Twenty-first Century Stalinists

Nation columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel (she will never be taken for a NASCAR follower) was in an exceptionally high dudgeon just the other day. (November 30, 2011) “We need a transformational presidency, able to smash the failed, entrenched and corrupt politics of the center. That standard isn’t some perfectionism perennially demanded by disappointed liberals. It is required by the times. And what this nation desperately needs isn’t partisan unity, but a fierce and growing movement that will challenge not just the wing nuts of the right, but an establishment in both parties that has failed the country.”

I was struck by the Stalinist style, particularly her call for someone to “smash” the old, corrupt capitalist order.  Well, she did not say “capitalist” but perhaps that was an oversight.  After all, she is writing for The Nation.   What a moralizing Pharisee this woman is.   “We need… this nation desperately needs…..”   Who exactly is the “we”?  It’s all of us, I suppose.  But only a cognitively gifted few can comprehend how really ugly things are, and more importantly, who is responsible for the mess and what action “is required by the times.”  Ah yes, she will have us know that she is not one of those whiny, disappointed, self-deluded liberals.  She has firmly grasped what is “required” (What is to be Done? as Lenin put it).  The Nation scribblers are among those immaculate few who stand far above the corruption, the greed, the failure, in sum, all that unpleasant, unnecessary stuff that you expect to accumulate when the right wingers and the centrists end up in charge.  If only they were.

What then is it that she thinks we all “desperately” need?    Someone, actually, a President, who is up for some serious smashing, a “transformational” sort of guy or gal.  The idea of a “smasher-in-chief” might make a good portion of the electorate inclined toward the “wing nuts” a bit nervous as they try to guess exactly who is going to get smashed and what it might feel like.   Many of the unenlightened might be quite happy with a modest improvement of the status quo, better employment opportunities, for example, but Ms. vanden Heuvel wants  a fierce and growing movement.”  To do what?   Challenge a failed establishment. 

Transformation” is 21^st century Stalinese for “revolution.”  The old order as she notes is entrenched.   It must be overthrown, smashed, transformed.   The premise embedded in this screed is that politics is war.   One does not argue with, respect, or engage the opposition.  It is corrupt and cannot be  redeemed. This premise has always been the foundation of Bolshevik intellectuals.