|
Socialism: 'If You Build It, They Will Leave' One
night during my ten year college reunion in June of 2001, my friend
Grange and I retraced our old malingering grounds in the Coventry
section of Cleveland Heights. We
were disappointed to discover that the free-wheeling locale had turned
into a suburban yuppie borough. All
that remained from its bohemian past was a communist bookstore.
Out of novelty, we decided to go in; although, much to our
credit, even as clueless, over-emotional college students, we never
flirted with the nefarious religion of communism.
Inside, we were received by an obese redheaded woman in her
forties and, mistaking us for future indoctrinees, gave us a sales
pitch that passionately interpreted the events of recent race riots in
Cincinnati as being indicative of the coming of a communist USA.
She confused race baiting and our mindless over-sensitivity to
race with economic oppression. I
gave Grange a knowing smile and said to her, “Don’t you agree with
the famous words of Edmund O. Wilson: ‘communism, interesting idea,
wrong species?’” Alas,
she did not, and we left the store 20 seconds later.
There
probably is no better way to describe the pointless and brutal love
affair that many countries have had with socialism in the Twentieth
Century than with the phrase “wrong species.”
Socialism is a plague on humanity.
When it is boiled down to its most base elements, socialism
becomes synonymous with state coercion.
No socialist state can exist without it, as the state must
attempt to sell its citizens on a system totally opposed to their
individual interests. It
is a crime against nature, and has decreased health and happiness
everywhere it has been implemented.
The errors of the communal impulse are meticulously documented
in Joshua Muravchik’s sensational Heaven
on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.
I have seldom encountered a book that is such a perfect balance
of entertainment and education as is Muravchik’s.
In a world where one can pay $25 for 200 pages of utter tripe, Heaven
on Earth stands as a
bargain and an ideal. It
entertains as much as it educates.
His compendium of the mayhem of that is socialism is also a
testament to the necessity for historical analysis.
He is similar to Anthony Beevor in the way his prose and style
can create interest in a topic that one never wanted to study before.
The
author of this work made a clever decision, and it was to focus on
many of the lesser known members of the cult of socialism.
Less publicized figures like Gracchus Babeuf, Robert Owen, and
Julius Nyerere are given chapter long treatments.
Clement Atlee, Samuel Gompers, George Meany, and the Israeli
kibbutzim are discussed in order to flesh out the overall picture of
the political actualities behind the success or lack of success of the
socialist movement. It
makes for a surprisingly suspenseful read, as many of the facts,
stories, and quotations contained it the book the reader may never
have gazed upon before. Gracchus
Babeuf, whose name in French directly translates as “jackass”
(well, it should anyway) is the real patriarch of the story.
Indeed, Marx thought him a genius.
Babeuf was not just another Jacobin in the French Revolution.
He survived the death of Robespierre– albeit for a short
while– but was not happy about it: “Robespierre!
Beloved ashes! Spring
once more to life . . . .” At
one time, an organization that Babeuf was a member of, called the
Pantheon Club, was labeled a brigands’ den and had the distinction
of being padlocked shut by (then only General) Napoleon Bonaparte
himself. Babeuf’s
Conspiracy of Equals was an incompetent attempt to overthrow the
Directory who, upon hearing about it, immediately locked up all of its
members and put them on trial. Only
two of the 65 were sent to the guillotine, but Babeuf was one of the
two forced to receive the “cool whisp” at the back of his neck.
The Conspiracy of Equals was believed to be the first actual
movement to embrace the concepts of socialism.
Their credo is fairly recognizable even in our present day:
“If there is a single man on earth who is richer and more powerful
than his fellows . . . then the equilibrium is broken: crime and
misfortune are on earth.” Ah,
actually no. Crime and
misfortune are on earth and always will be; however, as for the
continued presence of demented leftist fanatics, we can only hope that
our future differs from the past in this respect.
Babeuf’s dreaming appeared to be limitless.
He said, “Society must be made to operate in such a way that
it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer,
or wiser, or more powerful than others.”
Undergraduates of the world unite!
Such missives are poignant to those of us who understand that
men have genes and are not made of clay.
The appeal of Babeuf’s words should rightly expire at the end
of the reader’s adolescence. His
coverage of Marx and Engels makes one ask the inevitable question,
which is how two rogues such as these could have seduced a large
portion of the world’s population with their delusions.
Marx appears to have been the prototype for what I call the
“self-righteous leftist” who still swings, like a Bonobo in search
of a five second mate, from the girders of our political
infrastructure today. His
personality was exacting and ungrateful.
This radical, who wrote of the way that capitalism alienated
man from his family in turn had absolutely no respect for his own
relations or for his fellow men in general.
The same could be said of Engel.
Marx appears to have despised his mother.
The story of their relationship is “one of love repaid in
hatred.” Marx
also hated his Jewish past and, most probably, although Muravchik does
not state it, all members of the Jewish creed.
His words are not ambiguous.
“We discern in Judaism . . . a universal antisocial element
of the present time . . . . What is the worldly cult of the Jew?
Huckstering. What
is his worldly god? Money
. . . Money is the jealous god of Israel.”
Then he later laughs at another man’s “Jewish nose” and
calls an associate a “Jewish nigger” and Engels substantiates his
opinion, agreeing that the man “is a greasy Jew disguised under
brilliantine and flashy jewels.”
If only Jews like Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had read this
description and decided to join forces with Kerensky instead of Lenin,
then perhaps Russia may have avoided the Bolshevik boot.
Marx
did not seem to have any love for anyone, and turned on his closest
associates like Wilhelm Weitling and Moses Hess for petty reasons.
His father wondered about his internal makeup, “Does you
heart match your head and your talents?”
The graves or debris of 100 million dead from his political
fantasies informs us that it did not.
Moses Hess did everything for Marx and even embraced communism
before anyone else did. Marx
viewed him as one of “those pieces of party excrement,” and Engels
happily reported to Marx about having sex with Hess’s wife.
One of the more amusing anecdotes about Engels comes from 1848
(surely one of the most important years in all of history).
Rather
than return to Germany to engage in revolutionary agitation, this
great visionary of a
monastic existence for all of humanity decided to go on a tour of
French vineyards instead! He
spent two months “lying in the grass with the vintners and their
girls, eating grapes, drinking wine, chatting and laughing.”
Remember that when you think of the Lubianka. It
is strangely reminiscent of the situation in East Germany, as “the
people” referred to the area in which the party elite were housed as
being “Volvograd” due to it being the only place in the country
where such exotic automobiles could be found.
Perhaps a verse should be added to the “Internationale”
about austerity, Krug Champagne, foix gras, and brotherhood. Both
Marx and Engels would have been very alienated by the prospects of
either of them being relegated to jobs requiring physical labor.
Their families provided them with extra compensation and capital
so they could live their lives of intellectual violence.
Marx always had at least one domestic servant in his household
and thought that not having one would have been an undue sacrifice.
Neither of them had any sympathy for the working man (they
called them “jackasses” and “ignorant curs”) and regarded the
proletariat as mere matchsticks with which to use to ignite fires that
would incinerate the western world.
Much like the condescending attitude of today’s liberals
[sic] towards the poor, the common man was only important to Marx if
he would swallow his outrageous ideas for social programming and
government. If not, then
he would be one of the many eggs that had to be cracked in order to
build the socialist omelet. As
one who has been reading about the Third Reich since the time that one
of our most famous socialists, Jimmy Carter, was only a Governor, I
found the chapter on fascism to be quite rewarding.
Muravchik makes clear that socialism was an intrinsic part of
fascism. He uses Mussolini
as a case study, and it is quite convincing.
The author refers to him as being one of the original red
diaper babies. Mussolini
began his political career as a socialist and even said, after he was
kicked out of the party, that “I am and shall remain a socialist and
my convictions will never change.”
They did not. One
of Mussolini’s aides died with the last words, “Long live
Mussolini! Long live
socialism.” Of note also
is the intrinsic link between socialist fascism and statism.
They cannot be separated, and in the words of Mussolini:
“Everything inside the state; nothing outside the state.”
It was Il Duce who created the phrase “totalitarian state”
as the embodiment of his governing ideal.
In fact, the state was so involved in the lives of its citizens
that taxes were even imposed in the case of “unjustified
celibacy.” As
for Nazism, there has never been much question that it was an offshoot
of the socialist movements of the left.
Indeed, as Hitler himself said, “National Socialism derives
from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterizes it,
national resolution from the bourgeois tradition, [and] vital,
creative socialism from the teachings of Marxism.”
Muravchik valuably explains that it was the Jewishness of
Marxism that Hitler objected to and wanted eradicated, but not its
position that socialism was a solution for the world’s problems.
Goebbels left no doubt that socialism was intrinsically part of
the Nazi weltanschung: “We look towards Russia, because
Russia is that country most likely to take the road to socialism with
us . . . . ” Yet it was
this same Russia that thankfully dispelled their communal cousins into
the pit of history’s untouchables. The men who founded the movement known as socialism can best be described by a quote meant for Robert Owen which was, “He became a humanitarian, and lost his humanity.” No better sentence can sum up the socialist mind and their 150 years of ruthless social engineering. Pass a cemetery and think of their legacy to the world. It is unfortunate that their bankrupt ideology remains politically viable in many locales today. Upon reading Heaven on Earth, the reader will realize that you can no more build a socialism which works than you can create a human being who will live forever.
Bernard Chapin works as a school psychologist full-time, a college instructor part-time and writes whenever possible.
|
