A Review of "The Communist Hypothesis" by Alain Badiou

For those of you who live a sheltered life, I have news for you: there really are real, live Communists alive and kicking today. Yes, real, live, actual "let's start the revolution, take over the government and the media, and then kill all the capitalists" type Communists. While it may be true that most people consider Communism to be passe, the supposedly dead corpse roams the earth refusing to die like a zombie out of a horror movie.

In fact, it is dangerous to think that the idea of Communism is dead when it has just gone partially underground inside the universities of the West and in the minds of many union activists, communist party activists, plus various people in many left-wing organizations including feminist and environmentalist organizations.

A vague version of the basic idea of communism continues to lurk in the minds of many people today, including those who have accepted the failure of actual communist states in the 20th century. The basic idea is that, in a just society, income ought to be basically equal and so everyone deserves to be supported by the government whether they work or not and taxing the rich is justified - in fact morally mandated - as the means to this end. It is a grave mistake to think that this basic idea of communism no longer powers action in our world just because the Soviet Union has collapsed. It is particularly dangerous to think this can be accomplished without violence and economic collapse.

It is the idea of communism that forms the subject of Alain Badiou's book: The Communist Hypothesis. Badiou is a French intellectual, writer and university professor who occupies a position on the political spectrum to the left of the Communist Party of France. A lot of people probably wouldn't even believe that there is anything to the left of the Communist Party of France! But there is and it is called Maoism. Badiou's book is even published in a small, red, hardback format reminiscent of Mao's Little Red Book.

In the middle of the 20th century Communism was in crisis. the crisis was caused by Nikita Khrushchev, who gave his famous "secret speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956 in which he exposed and denounced the purges of Stalin and purportedly inaugurated a "less repressive era" in the Soviet Union. This turned what had been a moral crisis into a public relations or propaganda crisis and led to a number of responses in world communism.

First, most of the Communist Parties in the West divided into Stalinist and non-Stalinist factions. The non-Stalinists claimed that what happened under Stalin in the USSR was not "true Communism" and tried to maintain some critical distance from the Soviet Union thereafter.

Second, some Communists underwent an intense struggle of conscience which ended with their conversion to liberalism and capitalism such as Whittaker Chambers.

Third, some of those previously sympathetic to the USSR in the West responded by becoming social democrats or democratic socialism. They attempted to distinguish between socialism and communism and tried to maintain an appreciation for Marx while viewing the Soviet experiment as the betrayal of Marx. Communists were thus Marxist-Leninists, while the non-communists were Marxian socialists. They often called themselves "Neo-Marxists" to stress the difference.

Fourth, there was the rise of the New Left in America in the early 1960s. They were more influenced by the "critical theory" of the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism than they were by communism per se. They attempted to re-formulate Marxism in a new age by focusing on oppressed minorities, Third world people struggling for liberation, women, and students instead of the proletariat. Their goal was to overthrow the cultural institutions that resist Communism: the Church, the Family, the Military and Big Business. Their method was through the infiltration of the universities, the entertainment industry and the mass media.

Fifth, there was a strong movement in France to embrace the Maoist cultural revolution and this movement had American branches in the more radical student groups of the 60s such as the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society. Many of these people went to Vietnam and proclaimed their support for the Chinese-supported North Vietnamese regime including Jane Fonda and others.

Badiou's book is a manifestation of the fifth response to the revelation of Stalin's crimes. It professes to be a different kind of Marxism from the Soviet model. It is similar in important ways to the fourth, cultural Marxist approach of the New Left, and the third approach of Neo-Marxism. It goes beyond economics to culture and it tries to be non-Stalinist. But it is different from these two approaches - which are designed for consumption in the still somewhat anti-Communist West - by its frank and open embrace of revolutionary violence.

Badiou proclaims his everlasting fealty to the movements symbolized by two dates: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Student Revolutions of May 1968. Each is treated in its own chapter in this book and both are viewed as precursors to the Chinese Cultural Revolution in which over 30 million people were murdered between 1966 and 1976. What makes it possible to view the the 1871 and 1968 movements in a romanticized (and sanitized) light is that, unlike the Russian Revolution, these movements never gained power. Both advocated the kind of direct democracy and egalitarian approach to decision-making that we see in the contemporary Occupy Wall Street protests, which was possible since they never became responsible for the government of millions of citizens over a long period of time.

What makes Mao's cultural revolution superior for Badiou to the Marxist-Leninist revolution in Russia and to the Stalinism it produced is two-fold:

First, it is significant that Mao launched his cultural revolution from within what Badiou refers to as "the party state," which is his label for the corruption of the pure idea of communism represented by Stalinism. The "party state" is one in which the communist revolution results in a new state power, controlled by the party, which fails to live up to the ideals of localism, direct democracy, people power and freedom. Since Mao is using workers from outside the party to battle against the "bourgeois elements" within the party, his murderous rampage is totally different from Stalin's!

Second, Mao's cultural revolution was not merely about military or economic power, but about culture: how people think. What Chairman Mao implicitly recognized was the falsity of Marx's contention that economics drives culture and that once economic structures are changed by the Revolution human nature will change as well. Oddly, Mao is partially agreeing with Pope John Paul II that culture precedes economics and is the real driving force in history. In a way he even agreed with the Pope that religion is the source and basis for culture by promoting a vicious and dogmatic atheism. But it is telling that the Pope's campaign to bring down Communism in Poland was non-violent whereas Mao's cultural revolution in China caused tens of millions of murders.

What Badiou simply refuses to recognize is the inner contradiction in the idea of communism, which is that you can't get equality without destroying liberty.

By refusing to recognize the need for a state to control predatory human behaviour by coercion he tries to make it possible to dismisses all the violent, murderous communist regimes in the 20th century as not really communist. Yet, he at the same time recognizes the need for revolutionary violence to bring communism to power. And, worse, he proposes to solve the problem of human nature not changing as soon as economic structures are changed by still further violence!

As the Red Guards and workers rampaged around lawlessly murdering people for incorrect thought we see what politically incorrectness really is all about. As people are sent to re-education camps to be "taught" (forced) to think correctly we come to understand that all forms of Marxism, socialism and communism can only get so far in re-making the world without resorting to murder and coercion. As we look at the cultural revolution we see the contradiction of communism in action.

To put it succinctly, the inner contradiction of communism is that it claims to be able to build a better world by redistributing wealth but it cannot achieve this goal except by creating a hell on earth by murder. Economics is not fundamental to human society, religion and the culture shaped by religion are. And, eventually, communism must attack these mainsprings of human society and in so doing it attacks the dignity and rights of the human person created in the image of God and thus becomes anti-humanistic.

You can't produce a humane society by anti-humanism.

Badiou's book is blind to the inner contradictions of communism, but it is a valuable read because nobody can come away from having read it and think that any of the usual excuses for communist "excesses" have the slightest shred of credibility. Badiou knows that revolutionary violence is necessary in order for communism to be implemented. He even quotes (without criticism) Mao's speculation that 20 or 30 cultural revolutions might be necessary before the idea of communism really takes hold in the human heart. Badiou is honest - and that is fatal for any true communist.

Conservatives and Progressives: The Guardian Mixes Them Up on Purpose

The famously, progressive, left-leaning newspaper in Britain, The Guardian, believes that conservatives are always uncaring individualists who hold back progress and that progressives are leading us toward a more collectivist and equal future. But when they start talking about the collapse of that great progressive experiment, the Soviet Union, they get all twisted into knots.

Here is a paragraph from a story about Mikail Gorbachev, one of their heroes. Read it slowly and let it sink in.

By the spring of 1991 Gorbachev was caught between two powerful trends which were narrowing his room for manoeuvre. On one side conservatives and reactionaries in the party were trying to reverse his policies; on the other were progressives who wanted to establish a full multi-party system and take the country towards market reforms.

Huh? Let's read that again and see if it said what it seemed to say first time through.

So . . . Gorbachev was trying to end Communism and bring about economic and personal freedom (which is liberalism) and opposing him were Communists, that is, the progressive forces who seized control of Russia in a revolution against the conservative, Czarist regime. But The Guardian calls these leftists: conservatives. Then, how do they refer to the liberalizing forces who were fighting for free markets? Why, as progressives, of course!

So, in America if you are for free markets, limited government and representative democracy, then you are a conservative. And if you are for social democracy or even outright socialism, then you are a progressive. If you are in Congress, you could even join the Congressional Progressive Caucus, where you could join the socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, and his fellow-travelers in the House in the fight against free markets and for building up the welfare state to Soviet levels (they have already achieved Soviet levels of deficit spending).

But if you are in Russia and you are for free markets, limited government and representative democracy, then you are a progressive, not a nasty old conservative. And if you are for socialism, you are a nasty old conservative.

By now, you might be thinking that the Left is out to hide something with its completely dishonest misuse of the terms. And you would be right; this level of confusion has to be deliberate. The progressives in America today would rather you did not associate them with the nightmare that was the Soviet Union, even though they promote policies that veer as close to outright socialism as they think they can get away with in the context of a center-right country.

This is a rather different stance than Western leftists took during the 1920s and 1930s when they hailed the Soviet Union as the incarnation of Progress and saw it as the wave of the future. How times change. I think the official word for this kind of stuff is "propaganda." You have to wonder how long before the party line changes again.

But look, let's be honest. To call Communists "conservatives" and conservatives and liberals "progressives" is the absolute height of hypocrisy. To re-phrase Sarah Palin, "Hey, if we were really Communists, they would want to pal around with us!"

Mobs Ransack London as the Socialists Protest Fiscal Sanity

The Daily Telegraph reports on mob violence in supposedly civilized London today by anti-capitalists and anarchists (which is how Communists describe themselves these days):

Police fought mobs of masked thugs who pelted officers with ammonia and fireworks loaded with coins.

The anti-capitalists started fires and smashed their way into banks, hotels and shops, bringing chaos to Britain’s busiest shopping street.

The violence began as Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, addressed a TUC rally of at least 250,000 peaceful protesters in Hyde Park who had marched from Westminster to demonstrate against government spending cuts.

As he spoke, an apparently co-ordinated attack began on shops and police in Oxford Street as a mob tried to storm into shops including Topshop, BHS and John Lewis.

MPs and retailers said the scenes damaged Britain’s reputation around the world.

The move was the first of a string of actions by anarchists in which:

• There was violence last night in Trafalgar Square, with protesters setting banners ablaze and throwing missiles including broken bottles at police officers. As police contained protesters around Nelson’s Column, there were running battles in Strand. Close to Charing Cross railway station, a fire was started near shops;

• Fortnum and Mason, the department store, was occupied by 200 “anti-cuts” protesters who smashed windows and knocked over displays;

• A huge fire was started in the centre of Jermyn Street, the Ritz hotel was attacked with dustbins and a “Trojan horse” set on fire in Oxford Circus;

• Banks were broken into, their windows smashed and daubed with graffiti reading “smash the bank”;

• Windows were smashed in New Bond Street and running scuffles took place on Piccadilly, where a Porsche car showroom was attacked.

Let's be clear: these people are the enemy of humanity. They hate our prosperity and they hate liberty. They are spoiled children of an overly-generous welfare state and they do not fear the police, the judicial system or any authority whatsoever. If they are not put down they will bring poverty, chaos, killing, oppression and finally totalitarianism.

Liberals think these people can be reasoned with and charmed into being nice. They can't. Not everyone wants to be civil, argue reasonably and participate in democracy. Some just want to smash things up because of their own inner rage and emotional problems. They need to be jailed so ordinary people can be safe.

The Brits should be concerned; they haven't even started with the pain that will be necessary to avoid bankruptcy because of decades of overspending and deficits. And they have hitched their wagon to the failing European Union and will suffer for the sins of others as well as their own. The future looks rather bleak for broken Britain. Having brought so much enlightenment, prosperity, peace and order to the world, it is sad beyond words to see Britain on her collective knees being beaten up by thugs.

Remembering Communism

Here is a link to an interesting website: The Global Museum on Communism. Many people today seem to be rather uninformed and naive about the horrifying impact Communism has had on our world. 100 million victims in the 20th century caused by a totalitarian system that preaches "scientific socialism" and "equality" is an astonishing outcome. I challenge you with the idea that no matter how bad you think Communism was and is, you probably underestimate how purely evil it actually is.

This site is a good resource for homeschoolers.

A great book on Communism, for those who want a short introduction to its history by a leading historian is: Richard Pipes, Communism: A Brief History.

A longer book which documents the horrors of Stalin's Russia is Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment.

Of course, the books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn are essential. A good one to start with is his short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denesovich.

Also essential is Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The original three-volume work is abridged in an abridged, one-volume paperback edition.

Finally, I would recommend a book by a team of French scholars entitled: The Black Book of Communism. (I have the paperback edition; I think it is available from Amazon.com.) This book continues Solzhenitsyn's work by covering not merely Russia or the Soviet Union, but the whole world. It is an act of remembrance which refuses to let the victims go unknown, unlamented and unheeded.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 
- George Santayana

Progressive Fantasies in 1927

I'm now reading Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (Harper Perennial, 2007). I've decided that my education was lamentably deficient in economics and it is time to do something about it. (Up next is Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics.)

This book is readable, insightful and interesting. I'm always impressed when academic experts produce works that are helpful to the non-expert who is willing to do a little work. Shlaes is senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and a syndicated columnist at Bloomberg.

In July of 1927, a group of American progressives - labor leaders, academics, journalists - boarded a steamship aptly named The President Roosevelt after America's first progressive president for a trip to Europe that would ultimately take them to the promised land: the Soviet Union. The group would eventually meet for six and a half hours with Joseph Stalin himself, which was the highlight of their trip. During the trip, one of the members of the group, Stuart Chase, was deeply impressed with the Russian method of state planning of the economy. Shlaes quotes him and writes:

The official goals of the Russian state planning commission impressed him deeply. This was "the attempt to do away with wastes and frictions that do such dreadful damage in Western countries." The scale of management took his breath away: "Sixteen men in Moscow today are attempting one of the most audacious economic experiments in history . . . they are laying down the industrial future of 146 million people and of one-sixth of the land area of the world for fifteen years." Chase continued, "These sixteen men salt down the whole economic life of 146 million people for a year in advance as calmly as a Gloucester man salts down his fish." And, Chase noted with enormous admiration, "the actual performance for the year 1928 will not be so very far from the prophecies and commandments so calmly made . . . One suspects that even Henry Ford would quail before the order." Perhaps the United States could organize its economy in similar fashion. Chase, like Steffens, believed he saw something that worked.

Several thoughts occurred to me when I first read this passage.

1. These were the kind of people who were led by Roosevelt to implement the New Deal in the 1930s and their degree of openness to collectivism is amazing. There can be no doubt that many of them would have gladly turned America into a socialist state if they had had the power to do so. For them, sixteen men in Moscow making economic decisions for 146 million others was not totalitarianism, but efficiency.

2. About this time, Aldous Huxley was writing his dystopian novel, Brave New World, which would be published in Great Britain in 1932. What aroused Chase's breathless admiration represented a nightmare of soft totalitarianism to Huxley.

3. The common factor between the New Dealers and the Soviet Communists was not government ownership of the means of production, but something more fundamental though it is not usually considered to be the difference between socialism and capitalism. What united them was a faith in the ability of bureaucratic experts under the control and direction of a highly centralized and powerful head to do what the market and individuals could not do. They were, above all, modern in their worship of bigness, technocracy and centralization. The fact that after 75 years the USSR collapsed under its own weight as a massive economic failure is an damning indictment of this modernist faith, not just Communism.

The application of these lessons to the current political situation in the United States is obvious.

Communists on the March in Greece

From the Globe and Mail comes this story about how civil servants are striking in Greece over government austerity measures taken to prevent the country from going bankrupt.

Greece's state sector shut down Thursday as civil servants walked off the job in a 24-hour strike, demanding the government take back stringent austerity measures designed to pull the country out of a debt crisis.

Tax and customs offices, municipalities, schools and universities were closed, while state-run hospitals were functioning on emergency staff as doctors walked off the job for the day.

Flights were to be grounded for four hours Thursday afternoon as air traffic controllers joined in the protests with a work stoppage from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. (1200GMT-1600GMT). Greece's two main airlines, Olympic Air and Aegean, cancelled or changed the times of dozens of other flights during the day because of the strike.

Greece narrowly avoided defaulting on its debts in May after the International Monetary Fund and other European Union countries using the euro granted it rescue loans under a three-year €110-billion ($152-billion) package. In return, the government has imposed austerity measures that included trimming pensions, cutting civil servants' salaries and increasing taxes. . . .

About 5,000 civil servants marched through central Athens towards Parliament in a peaceful demonstration, while hundreds more affiliated to a communist party-backed union held a separate march.

Communists, eh? In case you thought communism was dead, there it is alive and well telling people that the government is just being mean and not doling out the goodies that it must be hiding under the mattress.

Communists, like socialist everywhere, live in an alternate reality in which wealth just magically appears every morning like manna from heaven and the only serious political question worth discussing is how to divvy it up. Creating wealth is assumed; redistributing it is their only concern.

But lest Americans (and Canadians) feel too smug about our situation, have a look at this deer in the headlights moment for Dick Blumenthal when Linda McMahon gets to ask him a question in their debate the other night. She asks, "How do you create a job?" and he stumbles, flails around and stalls for time before falling safely back into Mummie's arms by talking about how government will take care of us. What is amazing is that this clueless rich boy is actually ahead in the polls - and this is not Greece but the United States!



Linda McMahon's response makes her sound like an adult and we need more of those occupying high political office. (I believe in the wrestling business this is regarded as a body slam.)

If this exchange does not make her poll numbers surge then they really ought to check out citizens of Connecticut to see if there is still a pulse.

Revel on Why Socialism is an Ideology and Liberalism is Not

Jean-Francois Revel is a major French thinker, who is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, but has written a number of books skewering Communism, Socialism and the mindless anti-Americanism which is rampant in France. He is unable to believe that socialism has not gone out of business after the fall of the Soviet Union and probes into why this is not the case.

His last book, La Grande Parade: Essai sur la survie de ll'utopie socialiste, has now been translated into English under the title: Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era. Writing in a country where the Soviet-controlled Communist Party actually won seats and posed a serious threat, although it never was able to seize total power, Revel writes with a realism born of experience with actual socialism that eludes many idealistic Americans.

Here is Revel on ideology:

(Note: he is using the word "libleralism" in its classic 19th century sense of free enterprise, individual liberty, limited government etc., not in its late 20th century meaning of socialism lite. The only classical liberals in America today are known as conservatives because the center has shifted leftward.)

"A perennial misapprehension distorts virtually all discussions about the competing merits of socialism and liberalism: Socialists like to imagine that liberalism is an ideology. Reared on ideology themselves, they cannot imagine that any other form of intellectual activity exists, so they constantly detect in others the same propensity toward abstract and moralistic systematizing by which they themselves are possessed. Socialists are convinced that opposing doctrines are an inverted imitation of their own, and that these opposing doctrines are an inverted imitation of their own, and that these opposing doctrines must be promising absolute perfection, albeit by a different route. And liberals, reflexively complaint as always, have too frequently accepted this grossly mistaken view of their own position.

If a liberal asserts, 'In practice, the market seems to be a less inefficient means of allocating resources than top-down, planned distribution,' a socialist will immediately shoot back, 'The market is not a solution to every problem.' Of course not. Who ever maintained such an absurdity? But since socialism was conceived in the delusion of being able to resolve every problem, its partisans project the same ambition onto their opponents. Fortunately, not everyone shares their megalomania. Liberals have never aimed to build a perfect society. They are content to compare the various types of societies that exist or have existed, and to draw appropriate conclusions from studying those that have functioned the least badly. . .

Liberalism has never been an ideology, by which I mean a theory based on a priori concepts; nor is it an unchanging dogma divorced from the course of events and outcomes. It is merely a set of observations on facts. The general ideas derived from these observations do ot constitute a global doctrine aspiring to comprehensiveness, but rather a series of interpretive hypotheses concerning real world events. Adam Smith, when he undertook to write The Wealth of Nations, noticed that some countries were richer than others. He attempted to locate in their economic arrangements the features and practices that could account for such disparities, with the practical goal of being able to recommend prudent policies. . . .

As an a priori construction, formulated without regard to facts or ethics, ideology is distinct from science and philosophy on the one hand, and from religion and ethics on the other. Ideology is not science - which it pretends to be. Science accepts the results of the experiments it devises, whereas ideology systematically rejects empirical evidence. It is not moral philosophy - which it claims to have a monopoly on, while striving furiously to destroy the source and necessary condition of morality: the free will of the individual. the basis of morality is respect for the person, whereas ideology invariably tramples on the person wherever it reigns. Ideology is not religion - to which it is often, and mistakenly, compared; for religion draws its meaning from faith in a transcendent reality, while ideology aims to perfect the world here below.

Ideology - that malignant invention of the human spirit's dark side, an invention which has cost us dearly - has the singular property of causing zealots to project the structural features of their own mentality onto others. Ideologues cannot imagine that an objection to their abstract systems could come from any source other than a competing system.

All ideologies are aberrations. A sound and rational ideology cannot exist. . . . The confrontation between socialism and liberalism is not a confrontation of ideologies. Liberalism is not upside-down socialism; it it not a totalizing ideology governed by intellectual rules equivalent to those it criticizes."

If Revel is right in his argument here, several points follow.

First, it is no wonder that socialists cannot understand capitalism. They make capitalism into their devil because they misinterpret it as if it were an ideology.

Second, capitalism and liberalism are scientific and socialism is irrational.

Third, Christianity has nothing whatsoever to learn from socialism - not its earthly Utopianism, not its critique of capitalism, not its worship of economic equality, not its materialism - nothing.

Fourth, if socialism is an ideology and an ideology is a totalizing dogma, then socialism is incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which shatters all such totalizing dogmas.

Fifth, if socialism destroys the free will of the individual, as Revel claims, then socialism is an attack on the dignity of man created in the image of God and therefore fundamentally anti-humanistic.

I think Revel's description of socialism as an ideology and his definition of ideology ring true to the historical implementation of socialism in the 20th century. Therefore, I believe the above implications are valid. I will have more quotations from Revel in coming days. It is taking me some time to read and digest his book, which I highly recommend.

Communism as a Reactionary Return to the Bad Old Days

The best way to understand Communism, and the Marxist ideas which inspire it, is to see it as reactionary insofar as it advocates a retreat to the pre-Christian and pre-Western past. Why? Because it involves a massive repudiation of many of the basic principles that undergird the West and which have grown out of the Christian influence on the West.

The essence of the idea of the West is that man is created in the image of God and has true moral freedom, which is designed to be used in the service of God and one's fellow man in relationships of love. Political freedom grows out of this seed in the form of ideas like individual liberty, the rule of law, limited government, the division of powers, free speech, freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, free enterprise, and the need for positive law to be based on natural law.

Communism represents a lapsing back into the absolute tyranny that grows out of the union of religion and the State, the lack of private property and the denial of human rights that characterized the great civilizations of the East which preceded the rise of the West out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. Drawing on ideas found in Israel and Republican Rome, but most of all those found in the Bible, the West created something new in history: something that has been under attack by Marxists and Social Darwinists for the past century and a half. Communism is a re-lapse backward into what existed before the rise of the West.

In this light of these musings, I came across this quotation from Richard Pipes in his magisterial little book: Communism: A History.

Nowhere in the world has a poor majority, or any majority for that matter, voted the Communists into power. Rather, poor countries are less able to resist Communist takeovers because they lack the institutions that in richer, more advanced societies thwart aspiring radical dictators. It is the absence of institutions making for affluence, especially the rights of property and the rule of law, that keeps countries poor and, at the same time, makes them vulnerable to dictatorships, whether of the left or right variety. In the words of a student of the Cambodian Communist regime, the most extreme on record, 'the absence of effective intermediary structures between the people and their successive leaders predisposed the society to the unrestrained exercise of power.' Thus, the same factors that keep countries poor - above all, lawlessness - facilitate Communist takeovers.

These factors have a further effect. In the Orient, since the earliest times, the absence of private property in land meant that distinction and affluence could be gained in one way only: by acquiring prominence in the sovereign's employ. Government posts, consequently, were viewed not as service to the country but as a means of personal enrichment. It was natural, therefore, that participation in Communist regimes, which concentrated all power and all wealth in their hands, was perceived as the principal means of gaining status as well as fortune. (This, of course, held true also in Russia.)

I just want to highlight a couple of points from this intriguing quotation.

First, Pipes asserts that poor people do not want Communism and Communism does not help the poor. This upsets the conventional wisdom of most of the denizens of Western universities.

Second, it is the lack of a strong civil society - intermediary structures - that facilitates the downward slide of a country into dictatorship of the Communist or any other kind. In this light, the assault of "cultural Marxism" upon the family is significant for the family is far and away the most important of these intermediary structures. As the welfare state replaces fathers with government cheques, it effectively intrudes into families and remakes them. The high-tax, welfare state also "nationalizes" much of private charity and also thereby weakens civil society. So those who worry about the symbiotic growth of individualism and big government are right to worry.

Third, the lack of private property in land and the attitude of individuals seeking personal enrichment by acquiring government posts go hand in hand and are characteristic of both pre-Christian and pre-Western empires and of modern Communism.

Therefore, it seems legitimate to me to label Communism as a reactionary return to the past, falsely sold as "scientific" and "modern." Communism is going back to the way empires worked prior to the influence of the Judeo-Christian worldview. It is not the way forward.

Is it Fair to Hold Democratic Socialists Responsible for Stalin's Crimes?

This is a provocative question designed to get your attention. But the answer to this question is more complicated than you might think.

After Khrushchev's secret speech to the Soviet Politburo in 1956 and the invasion of Hungary in the same year, the Communists, fellow-travelers and other left-leaning individuals in the West became aware of the crimes of Stalin and the utter and complete failure of the Marxist-Leninist revolution in the Soviet Union. Stalinism was revealed as a totalitarian, anti-human, evil political movement. The question was how far back in the genealogy of this movement did the poison go?

So if Stalinism was evil, did that discredit Lenin? If Lenin was discredited, did that discredit Trotsky too? or Mao? or Castro? or Third World liberation movements like the Sandinistas? If Lenin and Trotsky were discredited were Marx's ideas discredited too? If Marx's ideas are discredited, are just some of his ideas discredited or his system as a whole? If Marx's ideas (or some of them) are discredited, are social democratic principles discredited as well? Or does the magic bullet of "democracy" instantly transform evil into good?

The issue is which, if any, parts of "The Left" escape responsibility for Stalin's evil deeds. Ideas that are put into practice and result in murder, tyranny and poverty are not good ideas and only half implementing them or implementing them as only as thoroughly as possible in the face of determined conservative resistance does not make them into good ideas. It may well be that the only reason socialism has not (yet) resulted in horrible evils in Western Europe is that these ideas have not been as fully implemented as they were in the Soviet Union; but that does not make them benign or morally good.

The New Left that arose in the West between the late 1950s and early 1970s was an attempt to be Marxist but not Stalinist. Yet, as David Horowitz (who was at the center of the rise of the New Left in Berkley, California) chronicles in his political memoir, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, makes clear, the New Left not only did not abandon the Marxist ideas that were put into practice by Lenin and Stalin (with their own twists and adapted to their own historical context), but the New Left also fell for the siren call of violence and destruction as the way to advance the revolution.

For one example, the New Left valorized the murders and drug pushers who made up the Black Panther Party. Horowitz recounts his own personal involvement with Huey Newton and his defense of the Panthers as editor of Ramparts magazine. One factor that eventually drove him away from the New Left was the murder of a friend of his who he recommended to the organization and who was asking too many pointed questions about party finances. Another example was the take-over of the Students for a Democratic Society by the ultra-extreme Weathermen, who were committed to using violence to provoke the revolutionary war that would overthrow the American government. New Leftists like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were involved in acts of terrorism in an attempt to ferment revolution; democracy was a failure for them.

So the attempt by the New Left in the 1960s to be Marxist (or even Communist) without being Stalinist must be judged a failure. Even many of the central players themselves seemed to recognize this. Ayers and Dohrn, like Tom Hayden and many others, eventually gave up revolutionary violence (that is, for their part, though they still supported it in other parts of the world) and began to work within "the system" to change it according to their own Darwinist-Marxist worldview. They have been part of the "long march through the institutions" the goal of which is to subvert the Capitalist West from within rather than confronting it directly through revolutionary violence.

It is clear that the strategy of using Marxist ideas but renouncing Stalinist violence and embracing democracy is perfectly compatible with calling oneself either a "Progressive" (which many in the Democratic Party do today) or a "Democratic Socialist" (which is more of a European label). In other words, I am questioning whether a Marxist who claims to be committed to democratic process is any less dangerous or culpable than an outright Communist who is infiltrating the system to undermine it from within. Does a commitment to procedural democracy in and of itself sanitize false view of human nature, history and justice?

My point is that the ideas are far more profoundly important than the political strategy. The methods can change according to the circumstances. But what is the ultimate goal? And what view of human nature is driving the movement? And is the movement based on a materialist interpretation of history? Is the definition of justice compatible with absolute right and wrong written into creation the Creator or is it a social construct, a projection of the will of the strong?

What got me thinking along these lines was the observation that radical Islamists have learned how to use Western democracy for profoundly anti-democratic goals. The goal of an imposition of sharia law and an Islamic theocracy is utterly anti-democratic, but what if the majority vote for it? Does it suddenly become good? And if a majority of American voted in a Hitler (as the Germany people did) or a Stalin, would that make the ensuing regime morally good? The only possible answer to these questions is "no" - unless on wants to defend the Third Reich.

But what would the West have to believe in order to say no and defend itself against a determined foe who uses individual liberties to subvert individual liberty, uses religious freedom to subvert freedom of religion, uses free speech to stifle free speech, uses democracy to implement a system run by unelected religious leaders who, once in power, are answerable to no one (as in Iran, for example)?

The West faces the same dilemma with regard both to Marxism and Islamism. Both are essentially totalitarian systems based on heretical doctrines that want to supplant Western liberal democracy with their own regime. Both are adept at using democracy to overthrow liberal democracy.

The answer is that the West needs a commitment to certain principles and beliefs that go far deeper than procedural democracy and individual liberty. These good political beliefs must be grounded in deeper metaphysical and ethical beliefs - in certain convictions about man being created in the image of God and in natural law and in the reality of original sin and the the folly of utopianism. A deep respect for tradition and a healthy suspicion of radical social engineering will help, but even these will not replace what are ultimately religious convictions about the nature of God, the nature of man and the limits of politics. Without such convictions, traditionalism will degenerate into a mindless nostalgia and narrow-mindedness.

The West needs a revival of Christianity and this is the crucial issue in whether the West will survive or fall. Only a religious people committed to faith in God will be able to withstand the assaults from Islamism and Marxism. Only the Judeo-Christian worldview that built the West can sustain it through this crisis. If this is not present, then freedom is at risk.

Diagnosing the "True Believers" of the Left

Jamie Glazov is editor of the online FrontPage Magazine and a Canadian historian and the son of Soviet dissident parents during the Brezhnev era who made his way to Canada in 1972. He has published Canadian Policy Toward Krushchev's Soviet Union (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002). Now he has written a book, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror (WorldNetDaily, 2009), in which he explores the fascinating question of what motivates people to embrace sociopathic murders such as Stalin, Mao, Castro etc. as secular messiahs or demi-gods. As Glazov puts it:

what exactly inspires a person, and an entire mass movement, to deify a monstrous tyrant as a father-god who transcends the singular and emcompasses, as Satre puts it, all the people and the land? The answer to this question helps illuminate the contemporary Left's romance with the Islamist jihadists, just as it helps crystallize the Left's alliance with the most vicious totalitarians of the twentieth century. (p. 6)

I read this book with interest because I was puzzled as to how it was possible for the left to support Hamas so diligently over the past few years and in particular with regard to the Gaza flotilla stunt. How do people who profess to stand for "peace and justice" support a 7th century death cult which has genocide as its official goal and which is supported by a revolutionary Islamic state that is close to going nuclear, namely Iran?

I am now reading Paul Berman's The Flight of the Intellectuals, which is a very well-researched work on the refusal of Western intellectuals to face up to the true nature of Islamism. Hamas comes out of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was greatly influenced by Nazi ideology, including anti-Semitism, during the second world war. Berman shows that, whereas fascist ideology was discredited pretty much everywhere in the world after the war, the Muslim Middle East constituted a significant exception. From then to now, fascist ideas have influenced the rise of militant Islamist movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas and Hizbullah. Al-Queda is just one of a number of smaller movements in this general stream. As a concrete example of what this means, the Hamas Charter quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian secret police forgery based on a French document from the 1860s. The whole civilized world knows the Protocols, so beloved of Nazis everywhere, is a fake and a slander. But in the Muslim Middle East, this document is taken seriously as historically true. When the president of Iran denies the reality and extent of the Holocaust, we see how pervasive the fascist ideology is today in the Middle East.

So the question is why is the Left in bed with fascists and the answer is a bit surprising. Glazov argues that the true believer's journey begins with a sense of alienation from his own society and his fantasies about building a perfect society in which he will finally fit in. The type of person attracted to the Leftist fantasy world is one who has not internalized the kind of values that enable him to find meaning in life, who is spiritually empty and who has failed to develop lasting interpersonal relationships. This person then seeks material solutions to what is essentially his spiritual emptiness. Glazov elaborates:

Convinced that it is incumbent upon society, and not him, to imbue his life with purpose, the believer becomes indignant; he scapegoats his society - and ends up despising and rejecting it. (p. 6)

This person becomes a believer in the secular, progressive faith and seeks the redemption not of himself, but of society. As I wrote in an earlier post, Marxism is essentially a heresy of Christianity, and Glazov sees this as being true of modern, progressive religions in general:

Tortured by his personal alienation, which is accompanied by feelings of self-loathing, the believer craves a fairy tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible. The believer fantasizes about how his own individuality and self will be submerged within the collective mass of the whole. (p. 7)

It is especially ironic that people in the grip of this kind of escapist fantasy actually criticize Christians for being "irrelevant" and "too heavenly minded." Of course, it all has to end in tears. Utopian fantasies lead to hell on earth. Why?

The political faith rejects the basic reality of the human condition - that human beings are flawed and driven by self-interest - and rests on the erroneous assumption that humanity is malleable and can be reshaped into a more perfect form. This premise spawned the nightmarish repressions and genocidal campaigns of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other communist dictators in the twentieth century. Under their rule, more than one hundred million human beings were sacrificed on the altar where a new man would ostensibly be created. (pp. 7-8)

Note the essence of this argument: Leftist politics fails because it denies the truth about reality. This is a deeply Christian insight and it is a metaphysical one, not merely an ethical one. Marxism is bad not because it has led to excesses by zealots, but rather because it distorts and denies the metaphysical truth about the world.

So it is not possible to combine Marxist analysis of what is wrong with the world with a Christian solution. Why not? Because Christianity and Marxism do not view the world in compatible ways: one has to choose which vision of reality is true, but they cannot both be true. And these two visions of reality lead to radically different solutions.

Glazov stresses that the political faith is not a search for truth (p. 9), but rather a sacrifice of the intellect to a movement that promises to bring about Utopia. The true believer is ready to lose his own life for the cause because he does not believe that the individual is as important as the cause. This also hardens him to the suffering of the masses who are being reshaped by dictators in the name of the cause. Glazov writes:

Beneath the believer's veneration of the despotic enemy lies one of his most powerful yearnings: to submit his whole being to a totalist entity. (p. 11)

Support for the Stalinist regime actually peaked during the 30s when the show trials, gulags, and famines were in full force. Although he would never admit it in public, the true believer does not believe in spite of the murders and violence, he believes precisely in the murders and violence as the summit of what attracts him to this secular, political faith in the first place.

The psychology of the true believer in death cults like Hamas is alas all too familiar; we have seen it all before in the prostration before murderous regimes like that of Stalin by Western Leftists. Strictly speaking it is a form of madness, but it is a high-functioning form of madness in which the believer is ready with propaganda, highly argumentative and full of passion and feeling. But it is irrational and, in the end, destructive.

Marxism: The Great Western Heresy

The greatest threat to peace, justice and freedom in the word today comes, not from Christianity as the Left would have you believe, but from the heretical offshoot of Christianity known as Marxism.

When I speak of "the Left" I am using a deliberately vague word whose meaning expands and contracts depending upon the context. It is an umbrella term that includes a number of different categories of people, publications and organizations, all of which trace their intellectual heritage back to Karl Marx (just as groups as different as the Roman Catholic Church, Baptists and Messianic Jews all trace their heritage back to Jesus Christ.) Let me list some of them:

1. Communists - or Marxist/Leninists or Stalinists - unreconstructed cold warriors; many European countries still have Communist parties capable of winning seats in the legislature.
2. Social Democrats - Marxists who renounce violence to achieve their collectivist goals; often believe in a highly taxed, tightly regulated and state monitored "free" market to generate wealth.
3. Progressives - an American movement originating in the early 20th century and dominant in today's Democratic Party that seeks to head off full-blown Communism by transforming America into a European-style, social democratic state.
4. Big Government Liberals -or Welfare State Liberals are liberals in the process of losing their faith in liberalism and becoming socialists in all but name. There is a controversy whether people who self-identify in this way are cynically using a more palatable political label or whether they are honestly trying to prevent Communism by moving in a social democratic or welfare state direction. (The same goes for Progressives.)
5. Liberation Theologians - attempt to combine Marxist analysis with a secularized, politicized, immanentized version of Christian eschatology
6. Anti-Globalization Protesters - also known as Anti-Capitalists; you see this show on TV every time there is a G20 or G8 Summit. These people simplistically identify Capitalism as the source of all evil in the world, but some will not admit to being socialists or communists. The hard core of the movement, however, is definitely Marxist of some kind and the rest are fellow-travelers.
7. Anarchists -claim to believe that no government would be better than imperfect government; it is difficult to believe that they believe in what they claim to believe. Underneath the anarchist exterior is usually a Utopian core. They feel free to tear down without proposing an alternative order because they naively believe that whatever arises after the destruction of the current political order would necessarily be better than the status quo. If you didn't believe that, then you would be no better than a common criminal.
8. Environmentalists - not all those concerned with pollution, but those with a Utopian, anti-industrialist society streak; the latter often make common cause with Marxists.
9. Feminists - second wave Feminists originating in the 1960s use Marxist analysis instead of appealing to Christian humanism and Enlightenment rationalism as earlier Feminists did.

While these nine distinct groups differ over tactics and although some are more extreme than others, all share a common hatred of:

1. Natural law - the belief in objective moral rules and principles that are based in the way reality is; may be specifically Christian or may be rooted in other religions or worldviews.
2. Free enterprise and Private Property - even though many of the movements mentioned above claim to respect private property and the market mechanism, the fact is that doing so makes them inconsistent Marxists. For Marx, private property is equivalent to the disobedience of God's command in Gen. 3 as the cause of original sin.
3. Individual Freedom under the Rule of Law - The state is superior to the individual in all forms of Marxism, which is to say that "Social Justice" (or equality) trumps "Individual Freedom" (or liberty).
4. Judeo-Christian Religion - The Ten Commandments is the basis of Western law and natural law is understood as being congruent with natural law.

Some of these groups claim merely to use Marxist analysis to diagnose the nature of the problems of the world (eg. Latin American Liberation Theology), while others believe that Marxism provides the positive solution as well as the diagnosis of the problem. It is not easy to tell what an individual person believes because in some cases it would make no sense to diagnose capitalism as the problem if socialism is not the solution. In such a case what would the solution be?

All believe that America and Israel are evil and must be severely weakened, if not destroyed. (Anti-Colonialism is often code for Anti-Americanism). They all believe that after a purging of capitalism and liberal democracy from the world there will emerge, somehow, a new world that will be better. All the ideological descendants of Marxism are essentially Utopian. This is the new religion that has come to dominate the Western academy and academic freedom is a tool it uses to eradicate all traces of the Judeo-Christian and Greek philosophical heritage that undergirds the West from the academy.

It is no stretch to call this multi-faceted movement, which traces its roots back to all or aspects of the thought of Karl Marx, a new religion. It is actually a Christian heresy, however, which means that it is a corruption of and a departure from Christianity. A new religion that has its origins in Christianity is a heresy and one that does not have its roots in Christianity is simply another religion, but not a heresy.

1. Eschatology - the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God, which is heaven come to earth after the return of Christ, the final judgment and the resurrection of the dead, is transformed into an earthly political kingdom founded through revolution (or, in the progressive version, through continuous socio-political progress).

2. Redemption - the Christian teaching that God becomes incarnate in Jesus and sheds his blood to propitiate his own justice so that sinful humanity can be redeemed is transformed into the doctrine that bloody revolution and mass murder are the prerequisites for the coming of Utopia and therefore all Marxist-inspired revolutions from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot to Castro and so on have all been bloody and the blood is seen as redemptive.

3. Sin - the Christian teaching that human beings are born in sin by virtue of being descendants of Adam and Eve and then go on to actualize this evil tendency by their own free will is changed into the idea that individuals are born innocent but suffer evil because a corrupt socio-economic system (Capitalism) dominates the world. (Where evil came from before the invention of Capitalism is not explained, but if you go back far enough in history, they believe, you find matriarchal, socialist, free-sex Utopias all over the place. When somebody invented private property - that was the beginning of evil in the world.)

So Marxism is a Christian heresy and Modernity is the period of Western civilization in which this heresy gradually replaces and drives out orthodox Christianity. We are living in the period after Christendom in the sense that we live in the declining phase of Western culture during which time time the heresy predominates, although orthodox Christianity is far from dead. Yet the center of the Christian world is moving south as the Marxist heresy spreads throughout the West. Whether or not some form of Marxism will triumph in the West is not yet known, nor do we know which form it will take if it does. But this we know: if it does triumph Christianity will be eradicated.

Stalin, the NY Times and Walter Duranty

The following post, "Crimes of the NY Times" by Vladimir Steblina, is from American Thinker. When you read about the NY Times slamming Pope Benedict XVI or Sarah Palin or whoever, just think of this story and think of how much credibility that paper actually has. The information in this post is completely true. If you want to read more about Stalin's manufactured famine in the Ukraine, try The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by distinguished historian, Robert Conquest.

The reference librarian's answer was brief and to the point "There is no record of it. It never happened. Your father lied."

My father had the misfortune to be born in June 1917 in the southern Ukraine. He spent the first thirty years of his life under Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler and survived them all. He never lived in a free country until we immigrated to America is 1956.

As I was growing up, my father told me stories of his life. They were not pleasant. Stories of the Red Army sweeping across the farm in 1926 and taking all the horses. The Communists returning a year later and confiscating the farm, shooting my grandmother, and making my father an orphan at the age of 10.

He told stories of surviving in the Black Sea marshes by fishing for pike and trapping ducks and other wildlife. The German army marched into the Ukraine in 1941. Here the stories included surviving summary execution by the Germans not once, but twice.

He went to Germany as a forced laborer and spent the war years there. The only funny story I can remember him telling is when the United States Air Force bombed the local brewery in Austria and the streets ran with beer for the drinking. Even that story had the backdrop of war.

But the story he always kept coming back to was the famine in the early 1930s. He had already been an orphan for five years when the Soviet government removed all food and seed stocks from the Ukrainian people, sealed their borders, and waited for them to die. And die they did, by the millions.

It was this story that prompted my visit to the library. I looked in the subject card catalog and could not find any books under the Ukrainian famine. So I went to ask the reference librarian and there got her "definitive" answer.

Like any son, I had issues with my father. But I never knew him to lie or overstate facts. At that time, I was the same age he was when the famine started. So I just chalked it up to a local famine that somehow got blown out of proportion in the telling.

Then, in the late 1980s, I received a phone call from my father. In an excited voice, he said "The truth is finally out. The world now knows the truth." I immediately knew what he was talking about. He was tired of people doubting his story, same as the rest of the Ukrainians who survived the famine only to have their stories denied. The Harvest of Despair documentary was shown on the local PBS station.

Further investigation brought to light the fact that New York Times reporter Walter Duranty knew of Stalin's murder of ten million people and refused to report it. To add insult to injury, Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1930s for his reporting from the Soviet Union.

But it gets worse. A British reporter, Gareth Jones, discovered the truth and started writing stories about the famine. The New York Times published Walter Duranty's rebuttals, admitting that times were tough in the Soviet Union, but there was no Holodomor, or "murder by famine" killing millions of Ukrainians, even though the Ukrainians themselves knew the truth. America's "newspaper of record" with its worldwide reputation convinced the world that they, not Gareth Jones, had the story correct. And so people continued to die.

Nearly eighty years later, the New York Times has still refused to apologize to the Ukrainian people for its complicity in the murder of ten million people. They still hang Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize in their building.

The reference librarian was wrong. There is a record of it. It did happen. The New York Times lied, and ten million people died. My father told the truth.

For that I will never forgive the New York Times.

Nor should anyone.

The G-20 Summit "Protests"

I flew out of Toronto in the middle of the G-20 so I was spared the "bloodbath." To hear the whiny-leftist fellow-travelers of the adolescent violence addicts who broke windows, burned police cars and acted like anti-social jerks talking in the media you would think that (1) Toronto had descended into lawless anarchy and desperation and (2) that Toronto also had turned into a police state with all human rights abolished forever by a military government. How the two scenarios go together is something no can understand. The whiners need to get their stories straight. It was not a big deal; it just criminals out in the daylight for a change.

I planned to write something on the "protester" but Rex Murphy was more eloquent than I and hit just the right note in his piece in the National Post: "Hooligans Coddles for Too Long."

For this set of malcontents — they’re not protestors; protestors have moral standing — the deliberations of heads of government in a time of crisis are merely a background stage on which to engage in violent and arrogant abuse of the idea of civic action.

They degrade protest.

Don’t buy their muddled mendacious rhetoric either. They care as much about the general well-being of the rest of us as the stone or brick in their hand, or that hammer cares for the well-being of the Starbucks window.

Some people are saying that Toronto shouldn’t have hosted the summit of world leaders — because this crowd would cause trouble. Absolutely wrong.

Cities and governments don’t choose to do or not to do things because a couple of hundred hit-and-run artists put up a smarmy threat of “direct action.” The splinter doesn’t direct the oak.

Yesterday’s mini-riot had one irony that will be very hard for some to digest. It gives at least partial cover for the extraordinary one $1-billion cost that went into security for the G20 meeting here in Toronto.

The Black Bloc, and you can bet they will love this, is Stephen Harper’s best political friend today.

For very long the pseudo-anarchists have been coddled and played with.

The costs of that approach showed up in the images of Toronto broadcast all over the world yesterday — Toronto the mild looking like Toronto the war zone.

Insofar as it is at all possible, those who are responsible for the criminal activity and damage to property should be arrested and charged. They should be banned for good from any like event in future. Penalties should be heavy.

Toronto is a decent, civilized city — hooligans and thugs should never be allowed to twist those virtues into a shield for their own ignorant and dangerous ends.

To the extent that the protesters have any ideology it amounts to little more than nostalgia for the Communism of the Soviet Union. They deserve no sympathy from the public, no leniency from the courts, and far harsher treatment than they received from the police.

Marxism is More Moral, But Capitalism Produces More Moral Effects. Huh?

For a guy who supposedly has been reborn in order to enlighten others, the Dhali Lama seems a bit confused.

TIBETAN spiritual leader the Dalai Lama says he's a Marxist, yet credits capitalism for bringing new freedoms to China, the communist country that exiled him.

"Still I am a Marxist," the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived today with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.

"(Marxism has) moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits," the Dalai Lama, 74, said.

However, he credited China's embrace of market economics for breaking communism's grip over the world's most populous country and forcing the ruling Communist Party to "represent all sorts of classes".

"(Capitalism) brought a lot of positive to China. Millions of people's living standards improved," he said.

The Dalai Lama, giving a series of lectures at the Radio City Music Hall in central Manhattan until Sunday, struck a strikingly optimistic note in general, saying that he believed the world is becoming a kinder, more unified place.

Anti-war movements, huge international aid efforts after Haiti's earthquake this year, and the election of Barack Obama as the first black president in a once deeply racist US are "clear signs of human beings being more mature", he said.

The Dalai Lama said he felt a "sense of the oneness of human beings," jokingly adding: "If those thoughts are wrong, please let me know!"

Although China, which forced him to escape for his life in 1959, is loosening up, he had harsh words for a Communist leadership that he said still seeks to rule by fear.

As Chinese become richer, "they want more freedoms, they want an independent judiciary, they want to have a free sort of press", he said.

The Chinese Government, he said, seeks harmony, "but harmony must come out of the heart, not out of fear. So far, methods to bring harmony mostly rely on use of force."

Marxism has more moral ethics, but Capitalism brings freedom.

Marxism has more moral ethics, yet Capitalism has liberated the people of China from a Marxist government.

Marxism has more moral ethics, but Capitalism is responsible for raising the living standards of millions.

Marxism has more moral ethics, but "China's embrace of market economics for breaking communism's grip over the world's most populous country and forcing the ruling Communist Party to "represent all sorts of classes"."

Is it just me, or is this all just a bunch of contradictory gobbly-gook?

What an incredible hold Marxism exercises on the mind of those who embrace its superstitions.

What is Wrong with Socialism?

In academia and in elite circles in late-modern Western culture there is a widespread perception that socialism is humane and loving and that only rich capitalists, selfish apologists for big business, and stupid people, who are duped into defending a system that is not in their own best interests, oppose socialism.

Left-wing Christians in the liberal Protestant denominations, the Roman Catholic Church and the small but noisy Evangelical Left believe that socialism is simply the implementation on a society-wide basis of the OT prophets' call to be concerned about the poor and Jesus' command to love our neighbor. They see it is as self-evident that Christians would naturally be socialists and that any Christian who is not is somehow lacking either morally or intellectually or both.

This is such a widespread prejudice that it is seldom questioned or examined. It simply defines the parameters of who is "in" and who is "out." To accept the desirability of socialism is not so much a conviction as it is a membership card in the club of late-modern, cultural elites. Socialism is a matter of blind faith, not a working hypothesis to be questioned, tested and either implemented or abandoned on the basis of the results.

The attitude that presumes the goodness of socialism also functions as the basis for general attitudes of contempt for business and commercial activity. Businesspeople are seen as the enemy, except when they are enlightened enough to fund the promotion of socialism. Even business owners feel the pull of social approval and are drawn into supporting socialist political action as an extension of the charity that many of them are moved to engage in. There is something supposedly unseemly and slimy about business, whereas public service is seen as noble and enlightened, which accounts for how corrupt unions are excused and honest corporations regarded with suspicion.

So why do I think socialism is a bad thing? And how can I be so categorical? When pressed about the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, many socialists will denounce those regimes as "corruptions of socialism" and will argue that there is a great deal of difference between Communism and Social Democracy or Democratic Socialism. So why do I condemn the whole lot? There are two basic reasons.

The Critique of Capitalism: First, all forms of socialism from the most democratic ones that resemble basically Capitalism joined to a welfare state, at one extreme, to Stalinism at the other extreme, all tend to agree with and utilize the Marxian critique of capitalism, which I think is a failure. Marx's theory is wrong from the presuppositions all the way down to the practical conclusions. He wanted to abolish the market, which is the engine of Western economic progress and the only human invention that has ever really been able to lift people out of poverty in the history of the human race. I have never encountered a form of socialism that does not see the market as immoral and evil, so I therefore think that all forms of socialism that I know about are evil and wrong.

The Trajectory of Collectivism: Second, it seems to me that where actual Communism has not been able to seize power it is not for lack of desire by hard-core Marxist agitators, but rather because Christian, democratic, liberal and natural law traditions have been too firmly entrenched. Social democracy is what socialists preach when the possibility of a Communist revolution is remote or impossible. It softens up the opposition for a more complete implementation of the socialist ideal later on and is therefore an uneasy compromise. Why do I say "compromise"? Because it is clear to me that socialism is impossible without a centralized command economy and a gigantic, administrative state bureaucracy, both of which are incompatible with freedom and democracy. The more centralized the economic decision-making process becomes and the larger the government becomes, the less democratic the socialism is.

So if we imagine a continuum between chaos at one end and total centralized control at the other, liberal democracy comes in the middle and the various forms of socialism - Communism fall along the line moving closer and closer to total centralized control. Capitalism is not chaos, it is government upholding law with economic decisions dispersed widely among the various actors in society. It is the center of the political spectrum. The West emerged out of highly centralized Eastern civilizations such as Babylon, Egypt and Persia by developing the legacy of Israel and Republican Rome. Imperial Rome reverted to dictatorship and then fell like all dictatorship always do (eg. the USSR). And out of the chaos of the end of the Western Empire came ordered liberty with neither Church or State becoming an exclusive central power in society, but with both contributing to the culture in different, complementary ways.

Socialism is a heresy of Christianity which leads us down a dead end road back to the East and the highly-centralized political economies that predated the market. It is no coincidence that Marxism took root in Russia where Lenin and Stalin continued the legacy of the Tsars and in China where the Imperial legacy continued in the Chinese Communist Party. Marxism is in a struggle to the death with Christianity in the West and, one fears, it has won that struggle in Europe. Marxism is a modern configuration of a tendency that has ruled civilization for all of human history wherever large empires have been carved out by revolutionary leaders (eg. Alexander the Great) who then imposed their will on conquered peoples. In terms of St. Augustine's The City of God, socialism is the archetypal "city of man," a civilization built on a rejection of God and the worship of idols.

What is wrong with socialism? Let me merely list the major problems for I cannot defend each one extensively in a blog post.

1. Socialism keeps the masses in poverty and provides no hope of a rising standard of living. Any gains for ordinary people as a result of socialist revolution are short-lived and basically a one-off. The poor suffer under socialism because the means of creating new wealth are stifled under the heavy hand of central planning.

2. The appeal of socialism is not justice in the classic sense of "each receiving what is due him" but rather envy. The labor theory of value is essentially a metaphysical justification for envy and is bunk. Socialism encourages people to feel entitled to be as rich as their neighbor simply because their neighbor is richer than they are. This violates the 10th commandment.

3. Redistribution of wealth is a hallmark of all forms of socialism including "democratic" socialism. But if there are many less well off people and a few better off people and they have a vote to transfer wealth from one group to the other, that is not really democracy. It is actually stealing, a violation of the 8th commandment, upon which the right to private property is based.

4. Socialism is inherently revolutionary, which means that it is essentially anti-traditional. This makes it clash with Biblical teaching in both Testaments. Both the Old and New Testaments urge the people of God to remember the past revelation of God to them and to strive constantly to look backward to that revelation as the ultimate standard by which all activities and aspirations are to be evaluated morally. This is a violation of the 5th commandment.

Everywhere in the world you will find all socialist parties in favor of the sexual revolution, the abolition of gender and the undermining of the family. The USSR tried to abolish the family overnight and failed; the Marxists who infect our educational, health and other institutions in the West are trying to abolish marriage and the family gradually. They will fail too.

5. Socialism empowers bureaucracies and dis-empowers ordinary people. It attacks corporations as oppressive and corrupt and then replaces them with corrupt, oppressive, government bureaucrats who are not held in check by the rule of law.

6. Socialism despises natural law and exalts the power and ability of human reason to design, change and operate society according to a Utopian dream born in the mind of philosophers. It does not recognize limits to human wisdom to alter nature including human nature and it dismisses original sin as a myth designed to keep the masses in their place. It thus leads to bloodshed, disaster and social upheaval followed by a reversion to past patterns of oppression.

Summary: Socialism hurts poor people, promotes vices such as envy and theft, violates numerous Biblical commandments, disdains tradition, twists Biblical calls for charity and love of neighbor into centralized government power, attacks marriage and family, creates totalitarian governments and fails to recognize the reality of both natural law and sin.

My question is "How could any Christian be in favor of such an ideology?"

Falling for the Materialist Lie in Post-Communist Poland

The other day, Rod Dreher wrote a post called: "John Paul II and the Mall Girls" in which he explored the sadness felt by John Paul II at the way Poland embraced the materialism and hedonism of the West instead of using its freedom after liberation from Communist tyranny to choose God and life. The post is well worth reading, especially where it quotes from a speech John Paul II gave in Poland, which is basically a lament.

But what I wanted to call attention to in the post is a quote from a New York Times article dealing with a film recently made in Poland about girls who engage in acts of prostitution in mall washrooms in exchange, not for money, but for expensive articles of clothing from the mall stores. The film, by Katrazyna Roslaniec, is called Galerianki (Mall Girls) and it is a commentary on Poland 20 years after the fall of Communism. The NYT article by Dan Bilefsky says:

"The revelation that Catholic girls, some from middle-class families, are prostituting themselves for a Chanel scarf or an expensive sushi dinner is causing many here to question whether materialism is polluting the nation’s soul.

- - - snip - - -

Ms. Roslaniec called mall girls the daughters of capitalism. “Parents have lost themselves in the race after a new washing machine or car and are rarely home,” she said. “A 14-year-old girl needs a system of values that can’t be shaped without the guidance of parents. The result is that these girls live in a world where there are no feelings, just cold calculation.”

Now the whole phenomenon of teen prostitution is unbearably sad, but it is prevalent in countries all over the world, not just ones recently emerged from Communism. The Asia child sex trade is well known. But what I found interesting was the almost reflexive link made both by the filmmaker and by the NYT writer between prostitution and materialism, on the one hand, and Capitalism, on the other. I wonder to myself: "Why is this link made so automatically?"

Bilefsky writes: "whether materialism is polluting the nation's soul" in the present tense, as if materialism entered Poland in the post-Communist period. Why not ask instead if the materialism of generations of Marxism has left the nation without the resources to handle freedom? Bilefsky quotes Roslaniec, who sounds like she is channeling James Dobson, when he writes that 14 year old girls need parents - even implying that a stay-at-home mom would help prevent her from developing such an unfeeling, cold calculating approach to morality.

Why does he quote her so approvingly when he is a liberal who rejects such ideas when they come from conservatives? Well, he want to make the point that the parents are chasing material goods in the new post-Marxist, Capitalist economic order and therefore ignoring their families. This is a bit rich coming from the NYT, is it not? After all, is not the NYT an advocate of abortion on demand so women can be in the work force and compete like men? It is good in New York, but bad in Poland, at least when you are bashing Capitalism.

Somehow, it is an automatic reflex on the Left to associate materialism and hedonism with capitalism. But here the filmmaker and the NYT overreach. It is actually conservative Christianity, not Communism, that promotes spirituality, morality, stay-at-home mothers and self-discipline. Communism is just as materialistic and hedonistic as Capitalism. If Capitalism makes a virtue out of greed, Communism makes a virtue out of envy.

The analysis here could just as well have been that after generations of Marxist atheism and materialism, Poland has yet to recover her historic faith. Her soul has been scarred by an ideology of cold calculation and statist bureaucracy imposed upon her by her Russian masters and people lack the spiritual resources needed to resist Capitalist materialism. But it is preferable to blame Capitalism than to see both Capitalism and Communism as deviations from orthodox Christianity.

John Paul II and I would both agree that post-Communist Poland has seen many people embrace the empty, Western, liberal notion of freedom as freedom for materialism, hedonism and soul-destroying cold calculation. But, unlike Bilefsky and Roslaniec, neither of us would point to an economic system as the cause of the evil. We would point to the sinfulness of the human heart. That is because we are Christians and not Marxists.

What Lies Beyond Marxism and Capitalism?

It was a commonplace in the 90's to remark about how the fall of the Berlin Wall, coupled with the move of China toward state capitalism, symbolized the end of Communism as an historical force. During the current economic meltdown, it has become a commonplace to speak of the end of capitalism as an economic system. But this is old news. Marxism was finished once the crimes of Stalin became widely known and Capitalism had to absorb many Marxist ideas into itself as the welfare state emerged out the New Deal. It was either that or perish in the fires of revolution. Capitalism has been like the corpse of Lenin under glass for quite some time now.

Now that we are moving decisively beyond the two great religions of the Enlightenment, what lies ahead? It seems to me that there are two possibilities: either a revival of Christian faith in the West, which will lead to a distributivist economic system and freedom or the continued rise of the bureaucratic, managerial, state and the loss of freedom.

The bureaucratic, managerial state is operated by a special class of experts who function as managers throughout the state apparatus, which continuously grows and expands until all human life comes under its purview. At that point, human life can be managed effectively for maximum efficiency and rational planning can ensure human happiness. There is every reason to believe that most people will gladly trade freedom for security, as Dostoevesky's Grand Inquisitor argued in The Brothers Karamazov. The state is nameless and faceless. No one person is in charge; no one is accountable. The state is ubiquitous (a property of Jesus Christ) and it is all-powerful (an attribute of God). The state eliminates the vagaries of chance, individual initiative, disease and fortune and provides total security for every person. The state controls most of the wealth, of course; individuals are put on "an allowance." Personal initiative or eccentricity is diminished and the pleasures of the flesh are emphasized. Through expert planning the state not only rules or governs; its controls and manipulates.

But unlike the "hard totalitarianisms" of the mid-Twentieth century, this "solft totalitarianism" does not provoke fear, hatred and resistance from its citizens because the state appears as the Great Benefactor of the populace. In other words, human nature has changed and no longer yearns for freedom from state control because people have been conditioned to love security, fear freedom and accept state control.

This dystopia is perfect in every respect, as prophet like Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), and Fyodor Dostoevesky (The Brothers Karamazov) have foreseen, except for one little detail. C. S. Lewis points it out in The Abolition of Man. In the great war of man to conquor nature, (which is the chief enemy of the bureaucratic, managerial state), the conquest of nature turns out to be the conquest of human nature as well and this means that it is the conquest of some men by other men. In other words, Nietzsche's vision wins out in the end.

If I were to boil down what it means to be a conservative today, I would say it means to oppose the bureaucratic, managerial state and all its works - including eugenics, the increasing separation of human reproduction from sexuality, high taxes and big government social programs, the endless regulation of all aspects of life, the ursurpation of authority over the family, the usurpation of authority over the Church, policies designed to ensure the continued destruction of the family farm, globalization, the government monopoly on education, and the glorification of greed, lust and sloth as the highest ideals.

If I were to answer the question of what it is, exactly, that conservative seek to conserve, I would answer: humanity itself.