Where is the Refuge in Post-Obama America?

In 1989 Zbigniew Kazimierz Brezezinski, a premier theorist of totalitarian political systems, published The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. He lived a long and eventful life and unfortunately sold the services of his formidable Polish intellect to the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the feckless, attempted rabbit slayer, James Earl Carter Jr. (For those taken with odd coincidences, Brezezinksi was awarded his Harvard Ph.D. with a dissertation on Lenin’s terror-command state in 1953, the same year Stalin turned room temperature, leaving his second-string in charge of the one Lenin had created.)

One also cannot help but wonder whether Brezezinski ever came to regret that portion of the sub-title he gave to his book – the “Death of Communism” – having died in 2017, a couple of months after Barack “Mugabe” Obama was done with the “transformation” he had earlier promised of the United States of America back in 2008. In his mistitled book, Brezezinski made an observation that really jumps out at a discerning reader: “Communism thus appealed to the simpletons and the sophisticates alike…” Yes, except for the past-tense of the verb. Moreover, these days it can be a challenge to separate the sophisticates from the simpletons.

This insight does help to dispel the mystery of Obama’s rapid ascendency – from a no-account, back-bench, corrupt state senator to “heal the planet” President of the United States. Obama is a simpleton who passed himself off as a sophisticate with a great deal of assistance from high placed, fake-sophisticates like New York Times columnist, David Brooks. Recall, that it was Brooks, who after interviewing candidate Obama, was so smitten with the combination of his blackness and well-pressed slacks, gushed that that he was destined be a great President. Then, of course, there was Senior Newsweek Editor, Evan Thomas’s comment on Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Here is a clue as to how it unfolded, how Obama rose to divinity, happily documented for us by, again, the New York Times long before the thin, street agitator from South Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, or wherever he was from, proclaimed himself as The One. 

BOSTON, Feb. 5, 1990 — The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.
The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.
''The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress,'' Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ''It's encouraging.” 

What the NYT scribblers omit in this article, one of their typical “first black fill-in-the-blank” panegyrics, is more interesting and relevant than what we get to read. But skipping through the boiler plate, reverential tripe, here, luckily, we have Obama captured, unaware, on record as the self-promoting simpleton he is and has always been. “The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress…. It’s encouraging.” Perhaps, but the little we know about Harvard and the lot we know about Obama suggest that this election had nothing to do with what most people think of as “progress.”

His remarks in fact do tell us all we need to know about the career path Obama had in mind and the fake sophistication that would be layered around him as he hustled his way up to the highest ring on the boss-ladder. “Progress” is a gem of Obama-Speak, one that captures the solipsistic equation of his personal advancement with “that arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice.” Recall, this was a Martin Luther King apothegm, a favorite of OHB, used during his reign to keep reminding those “folks” out there that the course of his presidency and the “moral arc of the universe” were pretty much on the same track. This sort of theatrical moralizing yourself into the woven fabric of the universe is a common adolescent trait, usually forgivable because most adolescents grow up and wise up. Obama did neither and ended up convinced that the banalities that always seemed to be popping into his head and out of his busy mouth were profound moral revelations. “If you're walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.” Ok, well maybe this inspiration came to Obama after channeling that old Nancy Sinatra tune: “These boots are made for walking and that's just what they'll do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you,” which, when you think about it, is what happened to the American people when Obama started walking down his path.

But, on to “It’s encouraging.” Always the master of misdirection and condescension, even at 28 years old Obama was already posing as the sage elder who has divined the “right way” everyone needs to go and, if politely asked, is willing to point in that direction.

It was certainly encouraging for Obama, enabling him to tout himself later in quest of another presidency as a constitutional law scholar even though during his tenure as editor of this “most prestigious” journal he skipped on one of the standard expectations for appointment to the post, never publishing a single paragraph on the law or anything remotely related. In fact, he never published anything other than two books about his favorite subject, himself, and there is ample reason to suspect that, even with those, he had a lot of help. All of this was fairly common knowledge, but for the sophisticates in journalism and the commentariat (Brezezinski’s sophisticates, including his airhead daughter, Mika, it seems) it was time for white America to atone for its racist past. Obama was the right black, platitude-polishing slickster to make it happen, endorsed by the illustrious Senator Harry Reid for his “light-skinned” appearance and speaking patterns “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

We are in the post-Obama era, the bad news being that the eight- year-long lobotomy he performed on the country was successful. How else to explain that in the 2016 Presidential election campaign, the Obama-endorsed candidate, who was under a federal criminal investigation with a decades long history of graft, influence peddling and subornation, got almost 66 million Americans, the plurality in the country, to vote for her. 
  
Obama’s Presidency with its culmination in Cult-Marx, identity politics vastly expanded the population of Brezesinski’s simpletons who swoon when the “free stuff for everyone guy” comes along and says things like “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Identity politics, crudely reductionist in its approach and primitive in its emotional appeal, makes the natives even more restless. The mad scramble is on. All the incentives are to join, if you can, one of the communities of the marginalized and oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge and demand the assistance of the state in taking it. If none is immediately available for membership more are under development, and barring that, you can resort to being a self-flagellating advocate for one of them. There are many self-serving options.

The moralists who call the shots now are all about structuring this new social order so as to protect and reward the oppressed, and then punish the oppressors after they are outed. Most importantly, in such an order it is obviously neither healthy nor prudent for anyone to risk being branded as an oppressor of any sort, or even suspected as such. Which is why in the post-Obama era not-being-a-racist certification has become the most coveted social prize. “Please, really, I am not a racist. How can I convince you? I’ll do anything.” Consider for a moment the power dynamics in play here, and then you quickly understand why political resistance has almost completely collapsed to the moral-extortion racketeering that Obama and his minions institutionalized and now operates openly in both parties.
   

In her great work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed.” Written long before the arrival of The One, it is comforting to believe that if she had been alive to contemplate the crackpot of Hope and Change, she would have been a one of the few sophisticates who did not fall for the scam.

Hillary Clinton and Robin Lakoff, the Idiot Professor

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female.  

Robin Lakoff, Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women http://time.com/4551711/hillary-clinton-emailgate/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter

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Robin Lakoff’s opinion piece in Time (excerpted above) is arguably the stupidest thing yet written about the 2016 election, and an ocean of stupidity has been flowing for months. Her piece is the mother of all non sequiturs.  

Lakoff, a professor of linguistics, of all things, leans into this screed with her raw emotion, how she is feeling. And guess what? She is not happy. “I am mad”.  Who cares? Join the crowd.  I am mad.  All of my friends are mad.  Everybody is mad these days, and for good reason. 

But wait! She is scared too, which is the reason, she says, she is mad, a curious causality. Can someone be scared and mad at the same time? Why would an arch feminist, supposedly a sophisticated thinker, jump into the fray all lathered up with the favorite unhappy stereotype of the emotional, hysterical woman?  

So far, though, we only have a very mad and very scared woman, but here is where the non sequiturs begin, a leap from a personal whiny sounding “how I feel” (fine, again, who cares) to the mailed fist feminist ukase, “if you are a woman you should be too.” We have moved now to the grand pronouncement ex cathedra. So, the deplorable status of women isn’t bad enough, they (all of womanhood) should like Lakoff be quivering with rage and fear, furiously jabbing pins into their Donald Trump voodoo dolls. Because? And off we go, a dumpster-dive into an alternative universe where facts, logic and empirical reality have no bearing on our understanding of current events.

“Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton.  It’s us.” A “bitch hunt?” No, let’s try for a simpler time and channel Sargent Joe Friday – “just the facts, Mam.” The target is Hillary Clinton.  She set up the private email server, exempting herself from the law and the rules, plus lying about it. The FBI director said she was “extremely careless.” If she would have done what she was supposed to do there would be no Emailgate, no one complaining about Hillary and her emails, no FBI investigation, no pronouncements of her carelessness. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky or Hannah Arendt to comprehend such a simple cause-effect relationship. What you do have to be to ignore it is a tenured grievance specialist, intoxicated by your own moral goodness, dedicated to interpreting your place in the world as an eternal victim, invincibly oblivious to world as it really is.

However, let us continue this journey in the land of feminist paranoid imagination.  “The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female.” Really? Take a peek at “Ten times people were punished for far less than what Hillary Clinton did”. These ten people listed, including Bill Clinton’s former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger “were actually punished for similar or lesser offenses than what Mrs. Clinton got away with.” Seven of them were men. http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/hillary-clinton-email-10-punished-less/#ixzz4P3JYmLQA How does this square with “it’s only because she is a female” thesis?  You don’t let empirical reality intrude.

But being in a fantasy world, let us go on and pretend that in some years past Hillary had “transgendered” herself into Heinrich Rodham Clinton. Now as a man (gender is whatever you want it to be, so if you say you’re a man, you’re a man) running the Department of State now he sets up his private email system and sends out classified documents over the unsecured server. Would the FBI not pursue an investigation of Heinrich Rodham Clinton?

But enough of Lakoff's world. Being in it just briefly is too disorienting. Let’s go back and try to understand why this Berkeley professor is so scared. Mad, I understand.  Radical feminists are always mad and always will be. If and when Hillary becomes President they will be mad because of the sexist opposition. 

But what is she scared of?  She is tenured, presumably, so she has life time job security and no penalty for saying and writing whatever pops into her head, no matter how ludicrous, fatuous or absurd.  She is at Berkeley, for God sake, long a haven for the oppressed, protected by the diversity inquisitors, full of “safe spaces”, guarded by “trigger warnings”, a place where even “micro-aggressors” are ruthlessly tracked down, pilloried and ceremoniously ejected. If Professor Lakoff is scared at Berkeley, we have to be deeply, deeply sorry for her. Medication recommended.

But, as she says, “if you are a woman, you should be, too”… that is, mad and scared.  Well, Professor, good luck with that. Keep trying. There is an abundance of things for women today to be mad and scared about, but the vast majority of them do not hang out at Berkeley and they probably see things a bit differently. 

Shame on you, Time. Have you no standards? 

Hannah’s Obama – the Genius and the Crackpot

Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. 

                          Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, a brilliant jewel of a political thinker, made this trenchant observation in her monumental work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, post WWII. She was speaking specifically of Hitler and the “magic spell” he had cast over his German listeners. The fascination with the Fuhrer, she adds, rested on “his pseudo-authoritative judgments about everything under the sun, and on the fact that his opinions – whether they dealt with the harmful effects of smoking or with Napoleon’s policies – could always be fitted into an all-encompassing ideology.” (305)  

So, it is hard to resist the suspicion that the occupant of the White House for the past seven years is just the sort of “crackpot posing as a genius” that Arendt was describing.  Consider: in 2008 a self-proclaimed “genius,” devoid of the relevant credentials and experience burst upon the political landscape promising to heal the planet, change the world, bring racial harmony and move the country beyond the frustrations and impediments of partisan politics. Well and good. Crackpots and their delusional promises abound, but sanity and common sense usually inoculate us against the nostrums of bloviating political charlatans, especially ones who promise things like “complete transformation.”

With the ascent of Obama in 2008 one could only contemplate with astonishment the rapture, the delirium, the intoxicated enthrallment with which hordes of serious, grownup people basked in the saccharin smog of vacuity that came out of his traveling carnival show.  College students, yes, but not only did the members of the fourth estate – professionally obliged to be skeptical – consume the snake oil, they stupidly joined the frenzied rituals of apotheosis. Evan Thomas of Newsweek with a straight-face proclaimed The One to be “a sort of God standing among us.”  Well … just what “sort of God” was he?   One that uttered proclamations such as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, silly, bewildering humbuggery, a grandiose slogan of egotism and solipsism that one might expect from a collection of spoiled twerps running for 10^th grade student council. The dogged determination of the press corps to remain amnesiacs with regard to Obama’s past helped to put into office a man whose basic instincts, personal history and ideological fixtures were deeply inimical to America’s history and traditions.  He aspired not just to lead America, but as he said shortly before his first election, to “completely transform” it. That arrogant display of colossal egotism and condescension by itself should have finished him.

Shortly after his first inauguration before he even began being President came his Nobel Peace prize – gotten like the presidency for nothing related to any substantive achievement – and installation in the Pantheon of the Greats (FDR, Lincoln, JFK) by the adulating media. Years later, however, no one, including Evan Thomas, comments on the divinity or even the genius of the man who was proclaimed during his campaign as a “Lightworker.”  No comparisons now with FDR. He is sometimes likened to Jimmy Carter – Jimmy Carter, minus the humility. No president has ever produced such a vast disparity between the promises of the campaign and the fulfillment in office. His 2008 campaign was a masterpiece of illusion, deception and misdirection: his 2012 campaign was an unprecedented and depressing work of slander and character assassination. 

Our experience clearly shows that Obama from the beginning was pretending to be something of which he was the polar opposite. Transparency, moderation, civility, mutual respect, accountability, responsible stewarding of resources, racial healing, post-partisan politics – none of these have ever been remotely in evidence, which he is always eager to say is the fault of others. The Hope & Change act was a cynical cover for his deeply resentful and adversarial mentality and his intolerance and condescending disdain for any political opposition.

    

Since there was so little evidence of anything Obama had done or experience that he had that would justify his ambition, one must ponder the question: how was this pretender able to succeed? The answer captured in the title of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Everybody Knows” was bluntly and correctly asserted during the 2008 Democratic primary season by Geraldine Ferraro, who happened to be working for Hillary Clinton.  “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”  For her honesty and perspicacity she was promptly sacked. Indeed, the country was “caught up in the concept,” the concept being that Obama was no ordinary mortal candidate: he was in fact an opportunist extraordinaire posing as a miracle man. Thus he appeared at the right time and right place with a deal – white redemption, guilt no more.  “He can be President and we can finally be done with racism,” seemed to be the barely sublimated motif.  Obama was not selling his experience – he had none. He was not selling his ideological convictions – he hid them. He could not sell his integrity and character – they were compromised and questionable.  He was selling himself as a nice, well-intentioned, well-spoken, well-educated black man possessed of unique, transcendent qualities of personality who would be a President like no other. Doing that required a carefully honed message empty of content, wildly bold and grandiose, yet anodyne and non-threatening, and, it necessitated that he dissimulate his past association with the unseemly likes of  Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, a past inconsistent with the wholesome, “we’re all in it together” change agent image that David Axelrod had helped him craft.  Plus, as Ms. Ferraro pointed out, he was, indeed, lucky. Young, sleek and fresh with the GQ looks and the crisp crease of his slacks that so impressed New York Times pundit, David Brooks, the cool and confident Obama stood beside the dumpy, “been-there-done-that” harridan in a pants suit, Hillary Clinton.  

Obama’s “deal” was a bait-and-switch.  No post-racial America in the horizon as some may have hoped with the election to the Presidency of a black man.  Racism is an unrelenting refrain of the Left, and the charge has been constantly used as a smear for anyone on the Right who finds fault with what the President does. A careful reading of Dreams from my Father reveals that  Obama, like his pastor-mentor, Jeremiah Wright is reflexively hostile on matters racial and can never be expected to relinquish his grievances.

Once in office throughout his presidency Obama appears everywhere – magazine and book covers, talk shows, interviews, speech after speech – delivering, as Arendt puts it, “his pseudo-authoritative judgments about everything under the sun,” all of it wrapped into a crude neo-Marxist ideology that finds exploitation and oppression and unfairness everywhere. The America he had sought to lead was in his mind a rigged system, burdened with iniquity, its “bitter clingers to their guns and religion” needing to relinquish their shotguns and bigotry. The remarks of his wife during the 2008 campaign captured the usually dissimulated rancor and bitterness of the Obamas: “[L]ife [in America] is not good: we're a divided country, we're a country that is just downright mean…”  In the White House for these long years, we have a President and First Lady long marinated in the juices of racial resentment, palling around with scurrilous race baiters and riot fomenters like Al Sharpton, meditating upon and nurturing the myriad grievances of identity politics, and insulting and vilifying anyone who happens to disagree. 

Rather than being humbled by the responsibilities of the office he had assumed, Obama’s arrogance and conviction of infallibility seemed to expand exponentially.  Again, Hannah Arendt: “The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can proved wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run.” (348-49) 

Obama’s intellectual and moral conceit renders him incapable of acknowledging shortcomings or mistakes and of according any respect to those who differ with him.  He is the personal embodiment of progress, a force of rectification, The One who was destined to turn that “mean America” into a just America, and, not just America.  As his wife, high on the vapors of Obama worship in 2008 told a group of admirers, “Barack is going to change the world.” He  has surrounded himself with the sycophant celebrities of Hollywood, and to protect his thin skin and swollen ego his handlers usually put him in venues fully orchestrated where to the amusement of his adulators, he dispenses his sarcasms and insults his critics. He disdains the press conference where on occasion his wisdom is called into question.

For his much vaunted “superior intelligence” little evidence has ever been  produced.  His university grades, test scores and school records are all under lock. Though touted as a constitutional law scholar and professor he has produced not a single published page of scholarship, even as editor of the Harvard Law Review.  His only two publications are about his favorite subject, himself, and of these his authorship remains somewhat questionable. 

Obama’s infallibility rests, as Arendt suggests, not on his superior intelligence but on the mantle he adroitly donned as the great orator for “progressive politics.”  His national prominence came from a single speech. From the beginning, the foundation of Obama’s “genius” was to rest on his supposed inspirational, eloquent oratory.  But the more he talks, the less he says. When he is not mean spirited and petulant his talks are composed of boring and predictable cliches. At the end of year seven there is no inspiration or eloquence. Mocked for his teleprompter dependency, not even his admirers can find the remnants of oratorical brilliance. His genius, whatever it was supposed to be, is long gone.  When he leaves office and recedes into history, he will increasingly be come to viewed as the sort of "crackpot" so ably described by Hannah Arendt.

Communism: The Best Kept Secret

The totalitarian movements have been called ‘secret societies established in broad daylight. ’              

                                                                          Hannah Arendt

One of the hallmarks of Communist practice, that is, what Communists always do when they are in power is to authorize and document their decisions and actions in secret. Secrecy rules: their centers of power are mysterious – remote, inaccessible, protected from outside scrutiny, protean. The policies they create and apply are arbitrary and opaque.

This penchant for secrecy underscores the fact that dishonesty resides at the heart of Communist rule.  Communists are now and always have been monumental liars. They lie to get power. They lie to keep it and they lie about what they do to keep it.  When they hold power their operations embody what is the opposite of what we today call “transparency.” Secrecy and opacity are necessary elements of their self-preservation.  

A liar’s risk of exposure runs much higher if he must perform in a milieu where logic and empirical reality have some basic hold on serious discussion and communication.  Thus, Communist organs of power must be relentlessly secretive in order to preserve the ideological fictions of legitimacy and protect the power-holders and decision makers from the consequences of failure.  Secrecy protects the liars; those who attempt to penetrate it and to know and tell the truth become targets of systematic abuse.  Depending on how morally debased the regime is and how seriously threatened they feel that abuse ranges from slander and character assassination to physical destruction. 

The Soviet officials’ Central Office of Statistics we now know kept two separate and distinct sets of demographic statistics, one for internal use the other for publication.*  Demography measures the essential activities of people, and the practical effect of Communism tends to reduce what demographers measure: in short, Communist rule physically diminishes people and their activities, a sort of living death. They live shorter lives, produce less, have less and reproduce less.  Under Stalin, demography was a hazardous occupation. The secret, true statistics could never be publicized or shared because what they revealed contradicted the official claims of the regime and established its incompetence and failure.    

Hannah Arendt notes in her study of the Stalinist apparatus in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that there were three separate apparati in the Soviet system: The party; the soviet or state appartat; and the NKVD, that is, the secret police that did Stalin’s bidding.+  However, she makes the important point that the more visible the agencies were, the less real power they actually had—the secret agencies such as the NKVD were the real power centers, hence the secret police-state fundamental nature of this regime. “Real power begins where secrecy begins.”+ The “real power” is unlimited power. Police who are secret are unconstrained by law which means that they can do whatever the leaders want them to do to the people they are supposed to protect.

 Stalin also created extensive and obscure labyrinths of bureaucracy in order to occlude the paths of decision-making and deflect the application of accountability. “The multiplication of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence…”+ The organ of the secret police combined the two essential elements of Communist rule, coercion and dishonesty. Secret police are a ubiquitous feature of Communist governments and are a necessary and inevitable result of the regime’s need to shield the operations of the ruling elite from public view.

East Germany’s Stasi, built by Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker may have been the most ubiquitous secret police force ever assembled.  It numbered 91,000 by 1989 compared with Hitler’s Gestapo of 7,000 in 1937. There was one full-time Stasi employee for every 180 East Germans.# The East German Party leaders not only produced the typical propaganda of Communism’s vast superiority and inevitable triumph, but it directed massive amounts of its human resources to prevent the East German people from knowing the truth and to punish those who might attempt to speak it.

          The need for secrecy in the Communist dictatorships would eventually take a toll. What is secret cannot be communicated and the absence of trust worthy communication makes effective decision-making difficult. Of the Post WWII, Eastern European communist states, Stephen Kotkin writes.  “[T]he Communist establishments were often incoherent, riven by turf wars and hyper-secrecy.  Decision making remained a black box even within the upper echelons, while wiretapping and informing were so widespread that elites often hesitated to socialize.”#  

Secrecy and the collateral suspicion made it hard even for the elites to manage and govern.  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 shift saps energy and exhausts resources.

The secrecy and dishonesty necessary to perpetuate Communist rule mean that enormous resources must be concentrated on coordinating the constant production of lies, a challenging task because each one of the many lies has a limited and uncertain durability and an unpredictable time-span span of utility.  Since the lies are in conflict with reality, but at the same time crafted and launched to represent reality, they are inevitably tested against reality – which unfolds often in unpredictable, uncontrollable ways – by the lied-to.  The lie must compete with the truth, and even though the competition is blunted by the secretive, coercive party organs, still the lie is at a disadvantage with the truth.  Once launched, the lie at some point falls under scrutiny and invites detection.  The liar, of course, has an investment in the lie, a practical investment with some gain or advantage to be anticipated. The more ambitious the lie, the more is at stake for the liar if the lie gets exposed.  For governments that are built on lies, of course, the investment in them is huge and what is at stake is their existence.  This explains why Communist governments have never been able to continue to function without massive and unrelenting coercion. Communists govern not only in opposition to their own people but against the truth – a perpetual war on two fronts which takes a toll.

Once the coercion is relaxed, the institutionalized lies, long privately doubted, can be publically contested and repudiated as they were all across Eastern and Central Europe in 1989-1991.  Once the lies are openly acknowledged and impossible to uphold, the leaders have nothing left to offer and no authority to govern.  Cynicism and resentment fill the void. They must either resort to force or quit.

The constant lies that were so successful for a good part of the twentieth century in perpetuating the delusion of Communist inevitability and superiority finally no longer convinced even many of those who ruled under its auspices. Secrecy even at is best is porous, fragile and unstable.  Once the secrets lost their coercive protection, disillusionment with Communism set in even in Western Europe where it was popular with the intellectuals.

The Italian Communist Party (PCI), muscular and confident at the end of WWII, by the 1970s had jettisoned its Leninist revolutionary purism in order to pursue power-sharing coalitions with non-Communist parties.  By the late 1980s its membership was in severe decline and the CPI was about little more than a refuge for ersatz revolutionaries.  Similarly the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1946 received 28% of the vote in the national elections. Though bitterly clinging more rigidly and desperately to its doctrinal purity than the Italians, by the late 1980s the PCF had become politically marginal and irrelevant to practical French politics.**   Communism without coercion cannot be sustained. 

The grim, anhedonic Communism that Mao and his Red Guard had imposed on the Chinese gave way to a full embrace of Western-style consumerism. The ugly, unisex Mao suits were finally abandoned.  Thirty years after Mao’s death Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wall Mart and shopping malls began to decorate the Communist Chinese landscape with Mercedes and Lexis autos filling the streets of Beijing and Shanghai.  Starbucks coffee could be purchased at the Great Wall.

The decades-long practice of Communism in large portions of the planet had finally in spite of the torrent of lies, the propaganda and the corruption, revealed the inanity of the theory and the failure of its practice. The satellites of the Soviet Communism Empire rebelled; in Russia the system simply collapsed.  The Chinese Communist overlords opted for schizophrenia.  They tolerated even encouraged capitalist economic practices while still talking like old guard Leninists and monopolizing political power as Leninists always do.  The archives are still closed, the crimes of the Moa era still to be kept secret from the Chinese people. 

Mao remains for his people the revered founder of modern China.  However, the murderous historical reality of his career was horrendous and intrusive enough to force even the ruling elite to the coining of a euphemism that hinted at least hinted at some imperfection in the rule of the Great Oarsman: “Mao was 70% good, 30% bad.”  The Cultural Revolution is now a collective memory of a disagreeable sort and as the vapors of Maoist fanaticism dissipated, chicken McNuggets, burgers and fries from Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds would be clasped in the hands of the youth instead of the Little Red Book.  During the 13^th Party Congress in 1987 the CCP formally changed the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to “people’s democratic dictatorship,” a contradiction or nonsense-phrase that one would usually only associate with mentally ill people or advertising executives.              

                                                ***********

*Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: the History of China’s most Devastating Catastrophe, 158-162, New York 2010, 325

+Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1976, 402, 403, 409

#Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, New York, 2009, 53, 13

** Zbigniew Brezezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Charles Schribner’s Son, New York, 1989 , 205-06

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Communism & Romance

It is true, that certain living creatures, as Bees, and Ants, live sociably one with another…therefore some man perhaps desire to know, why Man-kind cannot do the same.     
                                          Thomas Hobbes

The twentieth century can be well argued to be one of the one of the most savage and destructive times in all recorded periods of human history.  Between 1904 when the German army in southwest Africa wiped out most of the  Hereros, a part of the Bantu tribal peoples, [ Jon Bridgman and Leslie J. Worley, “Genocide of the Hereros” Century of Genocide) 17-50] and 1994 when the Hutu in Rwanda slaughtered 800,000 of their rival Tutsi tribesman in 100 days,  somewhere between 600,000 to 1.5 million  Armenians were murdered by the Turks in the collapsing Ottoman empire during WWI,  Spain  fought a bloody, atrocity-filled civil war, two world wars raged in which perished not only millions of actual combatants, but thirty-eight to fifty-six civilians as well, many of them dispatched by their own governments who regarded them (women, children, old & infirmed) as enemies and sub-humans.

One and one-half million Cambodians are estimated to have been destroyed by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) in the 1970s.  The Khmer Rouge was arguably the most lethal regime in the twentieth century.  Pol Pot, who imbibed the Marxist inspiration for his social experiment in Paris, has the distinction of having butchered the greatest percentage (20 to 25 percent) of his countrymen, more than of any the accomplished mass-murders of the era.   [Robert Service, Camaradas: Breve Historia del Comunismo, 2007 566]  The co-religionist of Iran and Iraq fought each other from 1980 to 1988 (longest conventional war of the 20^th century) and managed to kill or maim between and quarter to a half a million people. And, there were many other “lesser” massacres during the twentieth century sponsored by governments or political movements in former East Pakistan, Central America, Indonesia, Burundi, and the Balkans.  The history of the twentieth century can be summed up with one short phrase – an orgy of mass murder.

 The careers of the best known arch-killers of the century spanned the middle decades from the 1930s through the 1960s.  Stalin and Hitler, after imprisoning and liquidating  their political rivals, building and populating  concentration camps, and unleashing the organs of terror on their own people,  then turned their armies on each other and made Europe a chard ruin, a slaughter house.  The massive human and economic damage of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution in the 1950s and 1960s have tested the skills of historians and demographers over several decades as they speculate on and calculate how many tens of millions Chinese had likely perished directly from the Chairman’s strenuous efforts to make the Chinese people into obedient, happy Communists. The low-end estimates come in at around 26 million people. [Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: the History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, New York, 2010, xx]  Overall, if we look at the numbers put together  by demographer R.J. Rummel in his Death by Government the estimates of people killed by the regimes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao amounts to approximately 118 million people. [R.J., Rummel, Death by Government, 1994, 4]  

Nazism and Communism were catastrophes that fell upon huge numbers of innocent people in the twentieth century. They were evils of the highest order.  Communism, however, with its universalist aspirations and promises and with its highly self-regarded theoretical apparatus turned out to be much more dishonest than Nazism.  Communism was launched with the loftiest of ideals and optimistic promises which were immediately betrayed in implementation and then persistently and skillfully lied about.  Hitler signaled early on his intentions for the Jews and acted on them when he had power.  The Nazi’s while never hesitating to lie when they thought it was necessary, nevertheless were to the outside world largely what they said they were.  The Stalinists however always claimed to be on the side of the angels never ceasing to identify themselves with oppressed, exploited and impoverished peoples from every corner of the earth, promising them hope and change. 

Stalinism with its self-crowning humanism, unlike Nazism became highly exportable and easy to mold and popularize to suit particular local settings.  The “humanist” Stalinist regimes were multiplied across the planet, and as well the dishonesty, misery and brutality of the original one.  The fake trials, the party purges, the forced famines, the repression, the corruption were all replayed many times in many different languages and countries.  The names and specifics varied, but the script was the same, the outcome predictable.

 National Socialism played itself out as a one act drama.  Stalinism on the other hand had many. China’s Communist government in the fifties and sixties followed with a remarkable resemblance the Russian agenda from the twenties and thirties: overthrow and physical destruction of the old ruling class, expropriation of private property, forced collectivization of the peasantry, forced requisition of food with resulting mass-starvation, party purges, continuous terror, and a cult of personality.  Both in Russia and in China when the long-ruling chief Ideologue-Mesmerist was finally dead, the successive collective leadership scrambled to tamp down the terror.  However, they continued to punish ferociously dissent and to tolerate no competitors for power.          

At the end of WWII the Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, a student of Martin Heidegger, attempted to explain the what had happened in Europe with a generic “Totalitarian” type of political system into which fit both Fascism (Nazism as the most virulent species of a generic Fascism) and Communism with Stalinism as the most Totalitarian of the existing Communist regimes. These efforts at a Totalitarian modeling and the close comparison of Nazism and Stalinism came under increasing attack during the course of the Cold War from Sovietologists and others in the West who came to view the Soviet Union, post-Stalin, as a legitimate state, operating in pursuit of its own self-interest.  Stalin was dead. After 1953 his terror had been relaxed.  His successors had made the transition from “ideology trumps everything” Marxist revolutionaries to “just like any other” pragmatic politicians.  [Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia,1917-1991, New York, Free Press, 1996, 512] The Soviet model of governance, as the revisionists came to describe it, was good in some ways, bad in others.  They castigated the Cold War Warriors in the west as moralizers of the conflict (the Good Guy Western Democracies versus the Evil Communists) rather than attempting to understand it as a geopolitical conflict.  They were appalled when President Reagan in 1983 referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” which, a few short years later given the widespread loathing of the people under its domination for its Communist hierarchy and the eagerness of its captive satellite peoples to be done with it, may not have been quite so outrageous a choice of words.

Unlike the Soviets until 1991, Hitler, the Nazi state and all of their crimes were pure history and the holocaust a fully documented unique evil.  The Totalitarian concept with its Nazi-Communist moral and political equation was vehemently resisted by the historical enablers on the Left who argued that though Stalin was flawed, he was nevertheless in a bad place.  He had played his best cards from a bad hand, but in some serious measures he was in retrospect, accomplished. 

Efforts to expose to the world fully the monstrous character of Mao and Maoism continue to this day to be thwarted by the CCP whose genealogy goes directly to Mao and whose legitimacy depends upon a false, air brushed version of Mao. The CCP works strenuously to keep the Chinese people ignorant of what Mao and his followers did to millions of their own neighbors and relatives a few short decades ago.   “In short, the entire record of the Maoist era, as reflected in official and internally published sources, is a skillful exercise in obfuscation and, as such, an inadequate basis for historical research.” [Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine, 344]  Mao’s real history is officially off limits in China.  His many Chinese apologists, attempting to make some concession to historical reality of the mass starvation he wrought, even today speak of him as “seventy percent good; thirty percent bad.”  Perhaps the “thirty percent” is derived from the commonly estimated thirty million Chinese that died as a result of his rule.     

            Stalinism thus, in spite of its practical and ideological affinities with Nazism, came to be viewed and treated differently. The robust anti-Communism of the 1950s in the U.S. and the antipathy felt for the work of Stalin and his successors by the 1990s had largely evaporated.  The Vietnam war initially launched and justified as a rollback of Communism’s advance in Southeast Asia, was a disaster for the U.S. in so many ways that never could have been foreseen.  The war quickly became unpopular in part because it was fought with conscripts harvested by a selective service system that offered the sons of the well-off more opportunities for exemption and in part because of the arrogance of the war’s principal architect, Robert McNamara, who with his “whiz kid” credentials approached it as a kind of technical “systems” problem that he could easily engineer to a favorable outcome.  The America that John Kennedy in his 1961 inauguration speech promised would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty” quickly came to be perceived as an imperial power that in South Vietnam had propped up its own corrupt puppet-client who ruled with little popular support. The North Vietnamese Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, became for the young Left in the West, a populist democrat who heroically resisted the U.S. imperialist aggressors.

            The collapse of the Soviet Communist empire at the beginning of the 1990s, however, now meant that the two twentieth century pillar-states of terror, Hitler’s Third Reich, and Stalin’s Soviet Union now both existed only in the past tense. Both were history. The ideological under-pinning of the Soviet Union had persisted through the Cold War but was now rejected.  Both ideocratic states had wreaked havoc upon their own peoples as well as others. They had been set up and run by men for whom mass murder was an acceptable solution for their political challenges.  Moreover, the documentation of Soviet crimes and atrocities, covered up and hidden by the highest ranking officials in the regime for decades, was finally open to at least partial inspection with its collapse.  Only in the 1990s for example were researchers able to see Stalin’s signed order for the execution of the 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn.  In 2011, seventy-one years after the crime, the Communist delegation in the Duma was still denying that Stalin ordered and the Soviets carried it out.

          Communism, unlike Nazism, has not finished its career. Perhaps it never will.  Its persistence and endurance derives from more than just the fact that, unlike its Nazi counterpart, it did not suffer a complete military defeat.   It was and still is a much more compelling ideology with a universal appeal and a remarkable capacity for playing to the strong human propensities for envy, self-righteous moralizing and self-delusion. Like Nazism, the intellectual edifice of Communism though more sophisticated is completely false. Like Nazism the Party-theorists had ample opportunity to put their ideas into practice with the result of tyranny and mass murder.

Communism as an ideology, however, is much more persistent and hydra-headed than Nazism. The inevitable perversion of its proclaimed ideals has always been afforded protection and insulation through the ample bulk of its universal and humanitarian pretenses.  The attainment of social equality, the driving force and goal of Communism, remains always somewhere in the future, never quite within a short reach.  Against this shiny image stands an imperfect, tainted status quo, and perforce, those responsible for it make perennial villains deserving execration.  The perennially flawed, unfair and messy present, therefore, will never be able to compete with the ideal and perfect future of full equality promised by moralizing utopians.  Nazism was burlesque; Communism is romance.