Evita, I need you: Obama our Juan Perón

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

                          Barack Obama

The Party of Justice understands that the function of politics is to raise the grievances of the people and convert them into concrete acts of government.

                                       From the Partido Justicialista  -- founded by Juan Perón

Barack Obama bears a passable resemblance to the Latin demagogue and wrecker of Argentina, Juan Perón, in both style and substance. Perón used the descamisados, the “shirtless ones” to symbolize his affinity with the marginalized elements of Argentina and to justify a war against the rich and advantaged land owners.  Obama has recently identified himself with the shirtless “Occupy Wall Street” protestors against the “One Percent.”  Like Perón, he appears to believe that the economic and social problems his people face are best solved by identifying, isolating and punishing the “greedy” and well-off – the bankers, oil companies and corporations. 

In his recently published book, Redentores: Ideas y Poder en America Latina, the Mexican historian Enrique Krause writes of  Perónism: “Perónism was certainly the first populist regime in Latin America.  It has at least three defining features:  vertical mobilization of the masses; a tendency to place social resentment above the nation’s productive energies (with disastrous economic consequences) and a cult of the leader, in this case Juan and Eva.” * 

The Perón-Obama resemblance lacks only a contemporary Eva, but Obama’s monumental egotism and his unfailing self-adulation might fill this void.  At the age of 47 he had already published two autobiographies. In fact these two books about his favorite subject were the only pieces he has ever authored notwithstanding the fact that he is routinely touted as a “constitutional law scholar.”  The President’s “scholarship” has yet to be discovered anywhere in writing.

The 2008 campaign was America’s first experience with the launching of a “cult of a personality” for one of its own.  In spite of a blank resume with no legislative accomplishments, no executive experience, no serious intellectual or scholarly endeavors and no reservoirs of wisdom gained from national-level, tested political engagement the freshman Senator from Illinois virtually overnight catapulted to the heights of a rock star with all of the glamor and excitement typically associated with new celebrities.  His campaign appearances became media extravaganzas with his special podium designed to look like the presidential seal, a speech given among fake Greek columns in a football stadium, vast mesmerized crowds and swooning young women. Like Perón, Obama was a man of political theater.

Not only were the young people and the Hollywood-limo set smitten with The One.  He was instantaneously crowned by the media establishment as a colossal genius, a miracle man who would heal the deep wounds inflicted on the world by George W. Bush and Dick Chaney.  Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek declared on television that “Obama is like a God standing above the country and a great teacher.”  “Great teacher” with its intimations of superhuman cognitive superiority was one of the standard panegyrics favored in an earlier era by the liegemen of Joseph Stalin and the CPSU controlled press. The Obama campaign was throughout greeted on the media side with Pravda-like rhapsodies from the Obama-smitten commentators.   

After the 2008 election the adulation from the media continued unabated. The new president was immediately compared with Lincoln, FDR and JFK. Presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, on national television was heard to bluster:  “whatever one’s partisan views this is a guy whose IQ is off the charts…”  When pressed by Don Imus who was interviewing him – What is his IQ? -- the Ivy League, sterling-credentialed professor had to cough, gulp, and finally confess that he did not know.

No one, however, was more smitten with Obama than Obama himself.  In one of his many soaring orations during the Presidential Campaign Obama predicted that his election would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal…” a signal of this man’s vast and swollen ego and his delusional perception of his capacities to massively restructure the world that were fed by his entourage of sycophants and groupies.

Once elected, the President was everywhere on news shows, talk-shows, sports shows, late-night television, magazine covers, sharing his persona and imparting his wisdom and advice on every conceivable subject from sports to child rearing to science education. The Norwegians immediately awarded him a Nobel Peace prize for not being George W. Bush and the American now had their very own Caudillo, a self-proclaimed authority on every aspect of American life.

Never was there a greater distance between the rhapsody and the real.  “Hope and Change”, as vacuous as it was cynical, was an anodyne for the largely apolitical middle-America, a successful ploy to convince them that Barack Obama was a wholesome, earnest “change-agent” far above politics as usual.

Obama’s entire career in fact has been shaped and driven largely by resentment and a feeling of being “the other”. Resentment is what makes Obama, Obama.  One merely needs to peruse a few pages of Dreams from my Father to realize that the President’s view of the world growing up was shaped by a deep sense of anger and grievance out of which sprang a life-long affinity for associations with mentors, in writing and in person, with their own highly polished and richly articulated views of America’s many iniquities. The title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope was taken from a sermon by Obama’s spiritual guide of many years, Jeremiah Wright, a gifted professional purveyor of the harshest sort of racial hostility and bitterness.

Obama managed to dissimulate his own resentment during the campaign. His wife, Michelle, in a momentary lapse of candor let it slip when she commented that America was “just downright mean,” that she had “never been proud of her country” until her husband had become a leading Presidential candidate.

Out of this long festering resentment the President has fashioned a Peronist political style that vilifies “the rich” and exploits racial and social grievances.  “We’re gonna  punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” he told his supporters shortly before the Congressional elections of 2010 in a radio interview that aired on Univision. This was the same man who as a candidate had assured prospective voters: “I'm not going to demonize you because you disagree with me....  I don't think the Democrats have a monopoly on wisdom.”   Sometimes President Obama just cannot suppress his “inner-Perón.”

Punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends is the standard modus operandi for every gangster-led governing clique. What Perónism adds is the moralizing cover of Robin Hood – take from the rich and give to the poor.   This is very popular with the poor, of course.  One problem with this is that it is the political bosses who decide who is rich and who is poor and how to even things out just right,  how to make it all “fair.” “Fairness” is the demagogue's tool for converting resentment into righteousness. The other problem is that in the long run everyone but the bosses and their “friends” who “represent” the poor end up poor.

 Using a populist-oriented “fairness” rhetoric as a guise, Obama practices a Caudillo-style politics distributing money, jobs, and political access to his friends, union bosses, and political supporters, spurning legality, tradition and the “transparency” he promised to be the hallmark of his administration.  One of the more spectacular examples of this was the move the President made in 2009 to set aside the normal Chapter Eleven bankruptcy proceedings for GM to restructure its debt using a special set of proceedings crafted by his party men that stiffed the GM bondholders, rewarded the UAW for their political support and put GM under federal control.       

Nearly fifty years after Perón’s death, the Peronistas still rule over the Argentines and carry on with the “loot-and-reward-your-friends” approach to government that Obama has regularized as his own form of statecraft. The current kleptocrat-President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has just announced her plan to nationalize YPF, Argentina’s largest oil company.  YPF belongs to a Spanish parent company, Repsol, and has operated in Argentina for decades.  S&P’s Rating Services has already lowered Repsol’s long-term credit rating.   Repsol wants ten billion dollars in compensation for what Cristina is taking.  She scorns the request and refuses to pay. Why should she?  Repsol is a big, rich corporation, part of the one per cent, one of the enemies that Obama would like to punish. The Argentines want the company. Who cares anyway about bond holders?  Shearing bond holders is a Peronist tradition. Kirchner has already taken over the national airline and confiscated billions in what were private Argentine pension funds.  She is very popular

Pollster Scott Rasmussen notes that Obama’s support is highest among those who earn less than $20,000 and those who earn more than $100,000, a base that splits between the poor for whom he stokes envy and the well-off who feel guilty.  He too is popular. 

Before November of 2012 Americans might want to look more closely at Argentina as it is today and its history over the past sixty years.  They could be seeing their future.

*From Enrique Krause, Redentores: Ideas y Poder en America Latina, Random House, Mexico, 2011, 313.

“El peronismo fue seguramente el prémire regimen populista de América Latina. Lo caracterizaron al menos tres rasgos: movilización vertical de las mases, tendencia privilegiar la demanda social por encima de las energía productiva de la nación (con desastrosas consecuencias económicas) y, sobre todo, el culto al líder, al caudillo, en este caso a Juan y Eva.”       

Ideologues versus philosophers – Lenin versus Russell

“The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true.”

         V. I. Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism

How does one distinguish an ideologue from a philosopher?  The question is complicated somewhat by the fact that our most “accomplished” ideologues have employed the work of philosophers and passed themselves off as philosophers.  Lenin, of course, immediately jumps to mind.  His entire mental universe was built on the centerpiece of late nineteenth-century German metaphysics, the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx.  Lenin ‘s venture into technical philosophy, his book, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, was conceived, in his own words, “to seek for the stumbling block to people who under the guise of Marxism are offering something incredibly baffling, confused and reactionary.”* 

 Written in 1908 nearly a decade before Lenin’s Bolshevik party had overthrown the Provisional Government, his sectarian impulses for this philosophical production are clearly evident in this concise delineation of his authorial motives.  Here we have the priestly, pastoral Lenin guiding his vulnerable flock, steering them away from the precipices of alluring, but false doctrine, and ultimately, the chasm of … reactionary thinking.  He alone could navigate the narrow path of true Marxism and steer away from the baffling and confused detours into its perversion.   Lenin from his earliest moments could always sniff the odors of Marxist heresy that marked the reactionaries and their enablers.

From this also it is not difficult to parse evidence of the two connected core elements that compose the soul of the ideologue; Lenin’s likely being the purest of them all. First, the ideologue is “the knower”**, but a knower of rare and remarkable powers.  He has penetrated a reality hidden from others, resisted even.   Moreover, that knowledge confers an entitlement of a very special kind, an entitlement to exert an unrestricted power over others.  Thus, the second core element of the ideologue’s soul – a relentless quest for power over the lives of other people.  

The entitlement claim to power is derived from the “hidden” nature of what the ideologue knows.  Which in its simplest form is:  the wrong people are in charge. They exploit. They oppress, and they pretend to be entitled to their privileges.  However, this ugly reality is largely hidden from view. The power possessed by the exploiters has long been legitimized by a false knowing, a “false consciousness”, as it is commonly expressed, which embraces the entirety of the society’s cultural heritage.   The laws, religion, art, science altogether compose a vast superstructure that represents both the natural and social world in ways that makes the undeserved power and privilege of ruling class appear natural, reasonable and acceptable.  This hidden knowledge as well is a repudiation and rejection of the wisdom and experience of the social order that is in place.         

         The ideologue-knower is thus entitled to power because (a) unlike most others, he sees through the false rationale of legitimacy that supports the wrong people who are in charge, and (b) by virtue of this knowledge he represents the people who should be in charge.  Resistance to the ideologue-knower is immoral because he alone is determined to transform the status quo of corruption and misery into a new era of virtue and happiness.

Compare, however, the ideologue, Lenin, to a philosopher, Bertrand Russell.  Russell, like Lenin, was also a man of the Left and a critic of capitalism.   Bertrand Russell traveled to the Soviet Union in 1920 during the early days of the Bolshevik consolidation of power with a group of British socialists to observe the progress of socialism which they hoped would be a more humane and equitable system than capitalism.  Russell was, so to speak, “a friendly critic.” Upon his return he wrote a short but amazingly insightful book about his experience and encounters with the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin. This short book, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism wonderfully illustrates the difference between an ideologue and a philosopher.

  While sympathetic to the goals of the revolution in Russia, Russell, unlike Lenin, never claimed to be a “knower.”   Russell captured in his own inimitable style, Lenin, The Knower:  “He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory…. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree….  I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat.“***

Two items stand out in Russell’s picture of this “embodied theory” of a man:  his fury with those who might disagree or dissent from his opinions, and his general loathing for the bulk of humanity. Lenin could not begin to conceive that what he believed about the unfolding of history, the emerging modern world, and how a society should be ordered might be mistaken or confused -- thus, the fury with dissent and the disdain for the “great many people” unable to comprehend the gnosis that he had long ago intuited and that defined his entitlement to rule over demos and reorder their lives. Lenin lived in a rigidly dichotomous world populated by the self-appointed clique of illuminati (historically destined to rule, they asserted) and all the rest of humanity who would do what they were told.        

In his preface Russell states the profound difference he sees between himself and with Lenin and Bolshevism.  “Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures.  When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Lenin. He [Lenin] is a man who entertains a number of elaborate and dogmatic beliefs … which may be true, but are not, to a scientific temper, capable of being known to be true with any certainty.  This habit, of militant certainty about objectively doubtful matters, is one from which, since the Renaissance, the world has been gradually emerging, into that temper of constructive and fruitful scepticism which constitutes the scientific outlook. I believe the scientific outlook to be immeasurably important to the human race.”***         

Russell here captures the atavistic and primitive features of Lenin’s intellectual universe.  “Militant certainty about objectively doubtful matters” was the essence of Leninism.  Lenin was above all else a ferociously driven fanatic, convinced of his omniscience, obsessed to rule over others --   Unlimited“ power above all law,” as he himself put it.

         The obsession with power is what distinguishes an ideologue from a philosopher.   Russell’s embrace of the “scientific outlook” with its premise of skepticism suggests a suspicion of power. Ideologues crave power: power makes philosophers nervous. Russell recognized in 1920, a mere three years into the failed seventy-four year Soviet experiment, that the Bolsheviks were deluded about what they were and what they thought they could do.  “They think themselves utterly free from sentiment, but, in fact, they are sentimental about Communism and about the regime they are creating; they cannot face the fact that what they are creating is not complete Communism…”*** Russell mentions one of Lenin’s first “initiatives” – the CHEKA and its unlimited power. “It has spies everywhere, and ordinary mortals live in terror of it.”***               

       Lenin, as noted above, was a fanatic. Leninism was fanaticism institutionalized and operationalized across the planet throughout much of the twentieth century by men – Stalin, Mao, Castro, and others – who like Lenin were ideologues, men who claimed unlimited power over others because they “believed that they knew.”   

*V. I. Lenin,  Selected Works,  v. 11, 90.

**“Lenin does not know that he believes. He believes that he knows.” From: Alain Besancon, The Rise of the Gulag: Intellectual Origins of Leninism, New York, Continuum, 1981, 9.

*** Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 1920, 19, 5, 37.

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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.   

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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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.

The Left and Its Enemies

We will merciless destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, by his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!*

                                                                    Joseph Stalin, November, 1937

We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us…**

                                                              President Obama, October, 2010

From Karl Marx to the present day the modus operandi of the Left, whenever and wherever it competes for power, is not compromise with the opposition or even the defeat of the opposition, but its elimination.  Power is to be completely owned, not shared.  The ideology of the Left always drives its practitioners toward total monopoly.  Competition when it exists is disdained and when possible, disallowed.  Lenin defined the rules of political engagement from his earliest days – “Everything that is done in the interest of the proletarian cause is honest” ***– which was a remarkably honest declaration of the Leninist determination not to be bound by any rules, and in effect makes politics into a theater of total war with no quarter given to the enemy.   Lenin’s prescription of politics as war still holds for his progeny.

             The Left’s quest for a monopoly of power is and always has been inevitable because it derives from the foundational premise that every social evil comes into being and persists because the wrong people are in power. What these “wrong people” believe is delusion. What they say is false.  What they do is self-serving. What they own is undeserved.  All that matters is that they are removed: whatever means that accomplishes this is permitted.

“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles,” as we remember from the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.  The “final” struggle puts the right people, the proletariat, in charge, people free of false-consciousness, above personal and class interest, dedicated to creating a just society where everyone will have what they need and deserve what they get.

Opposition to the Left is defective in two fundamental regards. The first is intellectual.  Those in opposition do not recognize their own ignorance and responsibility for the corrupt status quo that produces the misery of those they exploit.  The second defect is moral.  Their ignorance lives and grows through a rationalization of their self-interest which supports their false and pernicious views of the world.  Phony, greedy and mean-spirited, not only do they benefit undeservedly from the status quo, they hypocritically rationalize it and defend it.  

            The Left in stark contrast is both intellectually and morally superior.   They see through the rationalizations and delusions of the opposition and understand the world as it really is. With the audacity of hope they do not “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment….”  Rising above naked self-interest, religious and ethnic bigotry, and sectarian small mindedness, their moral superiority comes from the altruistic purity of their motives, their unlimited benevolence and empathy for the oppressed, and the nobility of their aspirations.   

            This sense of vast superiority explains the Left’s monopolistic impulse for control – the opposition is unfit for power and should not be permitted to compete for it.  Thus, when the Left does have to compete for power they regard the opposition not as worthy opponents to engage in a respectful rule-governed contest and defeat by showing the deficiency of their ideas and programs.  Rather, they regard them as enemies and move against them as enemies.  The character, motives and personalities of the opposition are the focus of attack, a relentlessly ad hominem barrage.  The ideas and programs of the opponents of the Left do not even have to be seriously considered because they are formulated and advanced by people who are intellectually primitive, morally suspect and at times clinically deranged.    

            No norms or protocols of mutual respect, civil debate or procedural fair play will be observed by Leftist political strategists because they have no respect for those who do not share their ideological convictions or enthuse over their programs. There can be no serious debate about alternative ideas or approaches or perspectives because the truth is already settled and grasped only by those who lay claim to the gnosis of the Left.  Those who dissent or disagree are stupid and simple minded.  Or, their opposition comes from the corruption of their character and personalities. They are motivated by greed and full of hatred for those not like them.  “Republicans want dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health care,”**** remarked President Obama recently.  Of course they do.  They are the wrong people – morally bankrupt, heartless and uncaring, servants of the rich.  They are the enemy, and if they think that they will ever be treated otherwise, they are hopeless amnesiacs. 

*Quoted from Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia, Atlas, 2008, 272.

**http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/in-appeal-to-hispanics-obama-promises-to-push-immigration-reform/

*** Quoted from: Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, New York: Random House, 1994, 275n.

****http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/10/17/obama_gop_wants_dirtier_air_dirtier_water_less_people_with_health_insurance.html

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.