Revolutions betrayed
I’ve been wading through Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a book about Soviet Russia and its crimes and betrayals. The reason I’m reading that particular book is that one of Amis’s goals in writing it was to explain how it was that so many intellectuals on the left became apologists for and dupes of a regime so (to use Reagan’s word) evil.
At some future date I plan to write a post on that subject. But right now—because Memorial Day has got me thinking about the subject of liberty—it was this paragraph of Maxim Gorky’s, reproduced by Amis in his book, that caught my attention. It was written by Gorky, who had been a supporter of the 1917 October Revolution, only two weeks later:
Lenin and Trotsky do not have the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the Rights of Man. They have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power, and this is shown by their shameful attitude towards freedom of speech, the individual, and all those other civil liberties for which the democracy struggled.
I quote this for several reasons. One is to show how smart and creative people such as Gorky are used and then betrayed by revolutions such as the Communist one (or the recent one in Egypt, which has been on my mind lately). Another is to show how early the character of the Russian Revolution was apparent; no one who was paying attention to the events of 1917 had any real excuses for thinking that its results would be any different, or any better, than what they eventually were. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but Gorky had foresight. Unfortunately for him and so very many others (twenty million? more?) his foresight came too late, and there were too few who shared it.
Gorky’s own story is a dark and terrible one indeed. But that’s not the point of this post, which is to reflect on how uncommon it is that revolutions are not betrayed, and why.
Revolutions tend to attract an alliance—usually quite temporary—of different groups with very different psychological and political makeups and motives. First there are the idealists, the ones who see human nature as infinitely malleable, and who believe their own rhetoric and that of others who would manipulate their naivete to get what they want. Then there are those on the bottom—let’s call them the proletariat, although the group has had other names in other times—who in a society such as czarist Russia had a lot to complain about, and who wanted things to get materially better for themselves. Then there are also those who love liberty, and who see the revolution as a way to further that cause. These groups are not mutually exclusive, but there’s not necessarily a great deal of overlap.
And then there are the leaders who are adept at taking power and whose rhetoric inflames and inspires the others to action. They are the most interesting of all. In the American Revolution we were fortunate enough to have leaders who cared deeply about liberty, and who had thought long and hard about the seduction of power and how to draw up institutions to resist it and the tyranny that could follow. This is rare, because such character traits are antithetical to those that ordinarily animate revolutionaries.
People who are attracted to that line of work tend to be extremists in their cause, “ends justifies the means” folk. That is, if they believe in their cause at all; some are nihilists. But my guess is that many or even most of them do believe, at least initially, but that overarching it all there’s almost always a driving personality trait: the desire for and love of power for its own sake. That is antithetical to considerations of liberty. Revolutionaries so often have as their goal liberty for me (the leaders themselves) but not for thee, and anyone who gets in the way of the glorious enterprise is fair game.
Successful revolutionary leaders must be adept at wielding power not only within their countries, against the regime they wish to overthrow, but within their own revolutionary cadres. That’s how they get to be leaders in the first place. After the success of the revolution, when they come to control the government, they continue to use those skills to fight to stay on top, and that ordinarily requires a strong dose of ruthlessness. They are generally quite up to the task. Stalin, for example, was a master at it—his solution, like that of so many others, was to kill the opposition.
Over time he killed almost all his old colleagues. But you know, there was that wonderful omelet he was making—although I think that goal became subsumed quite early to the other goal of Stalin’s, which was total control.
Yes, Stalin was just about the worst of the offenders against liberty. But those who would separate him out as qualitatively different from the others such as Lenin and Trotsky are sadly mistaken. The seeds of Stalinism were present from the very beginning, and they were inherent in the entire project, which was to go against human nature. How could that be accomplished except by brute force? Here’s Trotsky way back in December of 1917, as quoted by Amis:
In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine… will be ready for our enemies… that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.
He accepted and even embraced the prospect.
Here in the United States we were very, very lucky. We had leaders who rejected the “great” French Revolution and its “remarkable invention,” and therefore we were able—not perfectly, but to an extent greater than in any other revolution—to preserve liberty in its aftermath. So on this Memorial Day, as we honor the fallen in wars that had as one of their goals to preserve that liberty both at home and abroad, let us also mourn the fallen in so many revolutions betrayed.
[ADDENDUM: Some people have pointed out in the comments section here that the French Revolution came after the American one. My reply is that yes, I’m well aware that the French revolution came shortly afterward. But the French solution – to murder the opposition, and to establish a Reign of Terror – was always present as an alternative, and was actually quite an obvious one, even without the French Revolution having happened. It was the way it had been done since time immemorial, really. The Founding Fathers in the US rejected not the guillotine itself, but something like it. A rope or firing squad or ax would have done just as well; the guillotine was only used by the French because it was thought to be more humane, so it’s not the instrument I’m talking about, it’s the idea of killing off the opposition without legal niceties being involved. But I admit I should have phrased it more clearly in the original post.]
Neo:
IIRC, The French Revolution came AFTER the American one. Even so, we were lucky in our choice of revolutionaries.
Happy Memorial Day, Neo…we have also been fortunate in our choice of citizens.
Happy Memorial Day…
Well put…
I am having to blink and think on this one. To one degree, I have to admit the people who were betrayed and worse offer cause for grief. On the other hand, that so many people allowed so few people to do such terrible things makes me think that there weren’t that many good people to begin with. It looks like a rat pack and that one rat climbed on top of the others was more a matter of sheer ruthlessness (and a bit of luck for that rat) than it was a matter of betrayal. They all wanted their own power, few to none wanted liberty or any such for anyone else.
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That is how it looks from here. One difference that might explain why America was different was that, while at times ruthless, the British Empire was not as historically brutal to Americans as Russian Emperors were to their own people. We had wealthy, middle class, AND poor people, property rights to a degree, and such. Those people merely wanted… hope and change. Americans wanted more of what they already knew to be good, things like freedom, wealth, opportunity, land rights, religious choice. Things the Russians could not have considered because they never had such things, not even in smaller doses.
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I respect your sentiments, held them myself at one time in the fog of time gone. I just am not so sure anymore. Perhaps the sadness I have is so few people in the world have ever experienced anything like even pre-American Revolutionary folk had. They simply don’t know any better than brutal violence and top-down rule. Period.
Neo, you should read “Darkness in the Noon” by Arthur Koestler, the best book on the subject. It is also a great literature. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon as eighth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Regarding the American revolution, it doesn’t seem to me that it was a revolution in the strictest sense. The political institutions that ran the nation more or less survived intact.
Regarding you initial question of “how it was that so many intellectuals on the left became apologists for and dupes of a regime so (to use Reagan’s word) evil”. it has always been my thought that the attraction is twofold. First, is the attraction to the opportunity to make the reordering of society more than an academic problem. Second, and perhaps more important, is the feeling intellectuals have that society is ordered incorrectly, because it elevates lesser people who are engaged in crass commercial activities above the obviously superior intellectuals.
“Revolutions tend to attract an alliance–usually quite temporary–of different groups with very different psychological and political makeups and motives.”
This is true even of social reform movements…the phrase “Baptists and Bootleggers” has been used. If removing the prohibition against liquor sales in a given county is on the table, then certain religious leaders will support it, because they think drinking is sinful (or at least very harmful)…bootleggers will also support it, because legalization will cut into their market.
I agree with Sergey’s recommendation of “Darkness at Noon.”
Another Koestler book which is very relevant to our current situation is his 1950 novel of ideas “The Age of Longing.” It’s all about the West’s loss of societal self-consciousness. I reviewed it here:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11799.html
>>> “We had leaders who rejected the “great” French Revolution and its “remarkable invention,””
GOC: I think she realizes this, though the sentence above does come across ambiguously on that point. I believe she was speaking of how they responded to the French revolution’s “solutions” when it came to their own actions towards power.
But this was inevitably thus, as they revealed beforehand a remarkably effective understanding of the issue of power — how to control it while assuring an orderly transition of power.
The transition of power is the key thing that makes the American Revolution so distinctively effective compared to so many, if not all others.
The FFs came up with an exceptionally effective system for ensuring that the transition of power was both steady and hard-coded into the system, that no person in particular or group in general could or would stay in power for overlong.
That is, usually where civil wars start, during the transition times when some issue or concern occurs regarding those who are in power and those who would take over the reigns.
One of the strengths of the american system comes from the way it is ingrained into the people how it is supposed to go, so that any “odd” circumstance — such as occurred in 2000, cannot seriously disrupt it. When the signal-to-noise ratio of the election was overwhelmed by the noise in FL, there proceeded a maneuver-counter-maneuver game of back and forth as each side jockeyed to gain the upper hand in the decision process (and anyone who thinks the election of 2000 stunk more than any election in history needs to look into The Corrupt Bargain (even moreso here — and you thought politics had changed much?)
If you consider either of these elections, while certainly there was serious noise about violence in both cases, of the candidates themselves there was little or no suggestion of resorting to arms to settle the issue.
Both sides realize that actual violence is an unacceptable means to select any candidate over another in the minds of the people, and that any candidate that claimed supremacy by virtue of violent acts would almost certainly be met with strong opposition from the electorate when they attempted to take office.
And that’s one place where the American Revolution was distinct, in the form of imposing a steady and consistent transfer of power away from specific individuals, and an equally steady and consistent transfer of power away from specific groups — the Dems of now are not the same as the Dems of forty years ago — and the same goes for the GOP. Though they have identical names, they are very different groups from their predecessors.
The American Revolution was not the same sort of uprising as in France or Russia. It was more akind to the Vietnamese ousting foreign occupiers. Over the 150 years prior to the War for Independence Americans became so different culturally from Britons that the latter seemed nearly foreign. Crucial to this developing difference was the grassroots tradition of democratic church governance among Protestant sects, e.g., Presbyterians. Anti-authoritarianism was baked into the pie before the American Revolution.
Last year I read “Stalin” by H. Montgomery Hyde.
I do not know where Hyde places in the pecking order of the Monster’s biographers but I found it a darn good read and equal parts informative and terrifying.
Once the “real” revolution was under way, Stalin (who grew up disaffected and in anarchist/bolshevik circles) became the “problems” guy for the central committee.
He understood power. He understood organization. He understood loyalty but more importantly he understood interest, and how to ensure that interest was always on his side.
Kill the ones who weren’t, and that just left the ones who were.
Of course, it would be necessary to kill some of the loyal ones from time to time, just to be sure.
Lenin recognized that he’d been supplanted as the leader of the Revolution about a year before he died. In reality, the first time Stalin was dispatched to take care of a problem as an instrument of the Party, he never looked back.
I wonder what the OWS tools will think when their turn comes.
Happy Memorial Day from Boston, neo.
Mrs. Oblio and I started the day at Cambridge Common, where G Washington took command of the Continental Army on July 4, 1775. Washington was seen in his time around the world as one of the greatest men of his time because of his willingness to relinquish power. He was the modern Cincinnatus.
In honor of the day, Mrs. Oblio made the staff at the Sheraton Commander remove the Celtics jersey they had put on the statue of the General.
I highly recommend ” Dupes” by Paul Kengor. It covers commie duplicity from Lenin and Trotsky to Barry. Lots of good info.
To those who say the American Revolution was not a revolution: when I wrote this post, I originally included a paragraph on that very topic, but then I decided a full treatment of that side issue would be too long, so I took out the paragraph. Maybe I’ll write about it another day, but I’m aware of the controversy on that subject. I happen to think it was a revolution—a political one, but not a huge social one as well, unlike the French or Russian revolutions, which were both. But if you think about the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, they apply:
At the time of the beginning of the American Revolution, the ideas contained therein had their seeds in Europe (particularly certain British—including Scottish–thinkers), but there was no country on earth at the time, to the best of my knowledge, that had actually tried the great experiment of putting such a government into practice. England was going in that direction, but it wasn’t there yet; it was most definitely a monarchy (although a limited one), and not just a figurehead monarchy as it is now. I think the differences between the government of Britain and of the US at the time of the revolution were profound enough to call it an actual revolution.
Doom: when I speak of those betrayed, I’m not primarily thinking of the leaders and/or Party operatives who believed at first and then were betrayed. I’m thinking of the men/women in the street, not the ones that were struggling for power among themselves. Although some of that latter group were naive and idealistic at first and were betrayed too, I’m not so sure what percentage fit that description.
And yes, I know the French revolution came shortly afterward. But the French solution—to murder the opposition, and to establish a Reign of Terror—was always present, and was quite obvious, even without the French Revolution having happened. It was the way it had been done since time immemorial, really. The Founding Fathers in the US rejected not the guillotine itself, but something like it. A rope or firing squad or ax would have done just as well; the guillotine was only used by the French because it was thought to be more humane, so it’s not the instrument I’m talking about, it’s the idea of killing off the opposition without legal niceties being involved.
I think it’s probably a consequence of aging, but as I get older I become increasingly astonished and grateful that our founders had such wisdom and courage, and took such care to establish a nation such as ours. I’m appalled at those on the left who would prefer to scuttle the constitution we have in favor of something “fairer”. Those who won’t be satisfied until we have perfection have no idea what we’ll have to relinquish to achieve it. It won’t matter to them in the end, though, because power will be its own reward.
Evil has always thrived on the shoulders of ignorance. Show me a contemporary American who doesn’t know the barbaric history of communism and i’ll show you a potential supporter of evil.
The seeds of Stalinism were present from the very beginning, and they were inherent in the entire project, which was to go against human nature. How could that be accomplished except by brute force?
This is the key insight into socialism: that it always has, and always ineluctably must, lead to coercion, because it is an attempt to govern contrary to human nature.
It starts with small things (e.g., mandatory recycling, in a contemporary context), but over time, as socialism’s failures become more and more apparent, the system reflexively resorts to more and more coercion. Those not going along are screwing up what could be heaven on earth!
There is a straight line from prosaic and apparently inconsequential policies (seat belts, bike helmets, recycling, secondhand smoke) and barbed wire, machine guns, and gulags. Underlying each is the urge to control others, to coerce them into doing “what’s best for them,” as decided by someone else.
And in this fashion freedom dies, inch by inch.
Occam’s Beard: but the trick is where to draw the line.
Governments make laws, and some of them feel too restrictive. Someone who’s very libertarian (or even anarchist) finds a great many more of them too restrictive (i.e. the road to tyranny) than someone who is not. So, at what point are we sliding down the slippery slope?
We should look closely at the path we trod, so we don’t make the mistake of throwing away (rightfully so) one extremism to get caught in another which has the same end product. Many see collectivism and flee into the arms of what we have mostly now in the U.S. – a growing Fascism. In reality a strange mix. But despots could care less how they take power – just as long as they do!
EXECUTIVE ORDERS (as Hitler liked) seem to be a favorite among many of the last several Presidents. I REALLY liked J.F.K. but even that far back he signed an E.O. to put our troops under the U.N.
Frederick Bastiat has clear insight when it comes to liberty and freedom. “The Law” that he wrote was one of the most powerful books (quite small) in that vein that I’ve read.
“”Governments make laws””..””So, at what point are we sliding down the slippery slope?””
Neo
I’d say when the average person is unavoidably violating multiple laws on a daily basis that could cost him a fortune in legal fees at a minimum if someone in power decides it to be so.
For example, you can’t take a kid fishing in America without risk of unknowingly violating several ridiculous laws.
That “paper of record”, The New York Times, continues to include among “its” Pulitzer Prizes the one “awarded” to Walter Duranty for his non-reporting of the mass starvation in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The linked article contains some of Duranty’s lies the NYT carried and to this day has not repudiated. Nor has the Pulitzer Prize committee revoke its award to Duranty — shame on the NYT and shame on the Pulitzer Prize committee.
http://www.ukemonde.com/duranty/pulitzer_winning_lies.html
So, at what point are we sliding down the slippery slope?
At the point that the laws are designed to protect people from the consequences of their own decisions, rather than the consequences of the decisions of others.
People have a right to do stupid things (or, put more precisely, things other people consider stupid). Many people exercise that right. If Darwin should come into it, so be it. The bad part arises when others suffer from their stupidity.
I’m not against the intended outcome of some of the Reds’ policies, but rather against the mechanism for achieving it. Think trans fats are bad? Require foods to be labeled, but don’t ban them. Think recycling is good? (Most of it is bullshit, except for recycling aluminum, production of which is extraordinarily energy-intensive.) Provide a market for recycled materials, so people don’t want to throw them away.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Incentives are OK; mandates and prohibitions are not. And those implementing policy need to remain humble; today’s verity is tomorrow’s joke.
Occam’s Beard: ah, but it’s still not always easy to draw that line, because lots of things have consequences both to oneself and to others. Personally, I tend to come down on the more libertarian side of things, but not strictly so.
Plus, if for example a municipality bans something (plastic bags, for example), don’t the people of that city have a right to pass such a law? And if a resident doesn’t like it, can’t he/she just move out of the city? Who’s to decide which laws of that type are okay and which not? One could certainly argue (although you might disagree with the argument) that plastic bags don’t hurt the person who uses them, but hurt the community as a whole, and therefore that the community has a right to ban them rather than just offer incentives for the use of alternatives. Do you agree with that, or do you think such laws are an infringement on liberty that shouldn’t be permitted?
Are you just saying that incentives are preferable to bans? Or should we ban the bans? And where do we draw that line? Do communities have the right to ban things like plastic bags?
“But those who would separate him out as qualitatively different from the others such as Lenin and Trotsky are sadly mistaken.”
The longer I live, and the more intimately I know many liberals, the more I come to believe that it is not a case of being “mistaken” but rather a lack of caring. Over and over, liberals have let slip the mask and revealed to me that their claims of loving freedom are little more than a mask, and that they will support or at least excuse anything that serves their socialist ideology.
With respect to the question of “what’s up with these people?” I have another book recommendation:
“Guilt, Blame, and Politics” by Alan Levitte. He gives a stunning analysis of what he calls “political guilt” and I think takes account of every significant figure in every commie organization from the Jacobins to the First International and the Comintern, noting whether they were aristocrats or working people (almost all were aristocrats or born to privilege).
On the question of the nature of “revolution,” Martin Malia’s “History’s Locomotives” is utterly essential. His history of socialism and the USSR, “The Soviet Tragedy” is also a gem.
That’s it. I agree with neo, on Malia’s grounds, that the American revolution was a revolution in the sense that that is its genus, while its species was different from the so-called “social” or “modern” revolutions beginning with the French catastrophe. The impulse to be leery of applying the term to the American is understandable though – given how the term “revolution” is used today, it mostly confuses matters to call what happened in America a “revolution.” Technically, though, it fits the bill (IMHO).
The central question is, What is it that is moral for a government to do and is not moral for an individual to do? How you answer this question is your attitude toward liberty. For Obama the answer is easy. There is NOTHING that a ‘progressive’ government can do to the individual (for their own good of course) that is wrong.
Occam’s Beard: but the trick is where to draw the line.
Wrong… THATS The fools game..
the trick is to not draw the line at all
if the state does not own you, then we lose nothing by your own actions and outcomes.
there is never a way to justify a partial spectrum.
and this is the fools believe we are conditioned to believe. that we can balance on a razorblades edge…
to analyse your point… what your saying is that totalitarianism can work, its just what degree you push it.
if your not saying that, then maybe you dont understand coercion… and saying a little bit of it is ok, but a lot is not.
who decides? the person who is holding your neck pinching hard getting you to eat crap every day, or the person under the yolk?
i will tell you that the answer the forefathers figured out was that there was no such thing as a tiny collar being ok, a collar is a collar is a collar… whether thin and pretty or thick and onerous.
to subject another to something one needs either their permission, or their subjugation.
where do we draw the line on abortions? since abortion is the cornerstone of eugenics, and if the state is changing circumstances and outcomes of peoples lives by race, gender, etc… then the people affected are making birth choices based on those changes. its eugenics and one can only think otherwise if one can imagine separating the inseparable.
now they are moving the line to after birth abortions… but then the question is how far after? 1 month? 1 year? 10 years? how about till the definition changes and its euthanasia?
now… what if they were NOT allowed to redistribute wealth?
well, first of all they have no such right to do so… as they have no right to use taxes as a whip and carrot to control behavior. it perfects the voting system… we wont let them bribe voters with their own money, but if they take yours and mine, then its ok, right?
Excellent points, neo.
I’m not advocating bans on bans, or anything of the kind. I’m advocating a cultural shift, so that anyone advocating using the legal system to enforce his views of how other people should live gets immediately pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables. (For my money, that should also apply to anyone who advocates anything as being “for the children,” or necessary to “save the planet.”)
Cultural shifts are difficult to effect, but not impossible. Back when we were kids, communist sympathies and homosexual proclivities were anathema, but now are accepted, even chic, so it can be done.
First step: clean out Hollywood, or at least that al Qaeda does it for us, because that’s where the cultural pus originates.
The French Revolution, traditionally dated as starting in 1789, was two years after America ratified its Constitution, but that made it a very live and very close example for the Founders; the George Washington administration was worried as hell about it for example, and that may have had something to do with the extremely firm response they had to the Whisky Rebellion, and with both Washington (first President) and Adams (second President) refusing to get drawn into the French Revolution or the new revolutionary government’s conflict with the British.
America also experimented very slowly and very carefully with democracy. We often forget this–shockingly often we forget this–but America was most definitely no democracy when it was founded. The right to vote was restricted to property owners under the presumption that only people with something to lose (property) could be counted on to vote responsibly. This in effect meant it was almost always the right only of white male men of means, although the thinking was less racist/sexist than just pragmatic.
The various states all still got to set rules for who was allowed to vote, and it took generations before all men were allowed to vote, and then of course the issue of allowing women to vote came along and was debated back and forth for about 70 years before all the states were required to allow women to vote… and furthermore, blacks (male and female alike) were not given the vote as an inalienable right everywhere in the US until 1965.
I’m going a little far afield here, but, the Founders took a very dim view of what they called “mob rule” and most of them opposed just willy-nilly allowing everyone to vote, and a lot of them pointed to the French Revolution as a big part of their reluctance to just jump in the “allow everybody a vote” camp.
A characteristic of the dupes supporting the communist takeover in Russia after the revolution is that, once its horror is discovered–eventually–the dupes need an excuse.
Thus, however bad Czarist Russia was, its horror has to be emphasized, reinforced, emphasized, and exaggerated so that, at least, communism is “better”, and we can understand what drove people to do this to themselves.
Chances are, given that Russia was a primitive country with an even more primitive Asia on its eastern border, that its size prevented the neat infrastructure that, say, Germany had during the era described as fin-de-siecle, and that its culture was backward, that it wasn’t as bad as what came after. Did I just say, “chances are”?. Whether the progress we saw in the next, say, twenty years on the material front would have passed it by if the Czars had still been around is a question. Not a conclusion either way.
So the dupes will have to exaggerate the Egyptian situation under Mubarak, the Libyan situation under Ghadaffi, the Iranian situation prior to their revolution.
As bad as the Assad dynasty has been, I fully expect its crimes to be exaggerated to excuse the dupes’ support for whatever follows. Which will, in the inevitable progress of progress, be worse.
We’re lucky.
See Cincinnatus, and “The Society of The Cincinnati”. Also G. Washington and his officers.
Book plugs: If you can read French( I can,barely) or German or, of course, Russian don’t miss Solzhenitsyn’s “March 1917” cycle. He got off to a bumpy start in “August 1914” and “November 1916”, which is why “1917” probably won’t ever make it into English; but if you want to know what an unfolding revolution looks like, this is it. It’s 4 thick volumes and covers with extraordinary vividness approx. the first 7 days of the Russian Revolution. I’m only on vol 2 and can’t give you a complete book report, but you quickly get a sense of just how quickly a government can lose its grip. There are no heroes here; the Czar and his ministers are more bumbling than evil; the chattering classes, as we call them now, ie the opinion formers, the ambitious politicians, the radical lawyers, the caviar progressives, who were mooning for a revolution, think their day has come. It came and went very quickly indeed. (Lenin & Co haven’t shown up yet, they’re still in Switzerland squabbling.) As for the “people”, they nod at the fine words the politicians spout & settle down to the pleasant business of looting and killing. No, no heroes.
It makes me get down on my knees and thank God that our Revolution was different. But many of the types that we met in 1917 are in place here in 2012.
Artfldgr: the trick is indeed where to draw the line. Municipalities will make rules for their citizens. No society has ever been an anarchy, as far as I know. It’s all just degrees of liberty, never complete liberty. There is always some coercion, both from the law and from society/culture itself.
“Koba the Dread” is easily the best small volume on the horrors of communism. Beautifully written and beyond my mere ability to describe the monumentality–the ALL consuming scale–the vast dehumanizing of Soviet ‘humanity’ leaves a reader absolutely gasping. The subtitle,”Laughter and the Twenty Million”, is far understated, as Amis says on pg.83: “..begins to look more like 40-million.”
The resistance of western Liberals and Leftists to completely condemn communism’s ‘gifts’–so long proved–are succinctly stated on pgs.86-7:”Ideology brings about a disastrous fusion: that of violence and righteousness–a savagery without stain. Hitler’s ideology was foul, Lenin’s fair-seeming. And we remember (Orlando)Fige’s simple point: the Russian Revolution launched’ an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its evolution, the logical conclusion of humanity’s historic striving for SOCIAL JUSTICE AND COMRADESHIP'”(Caps are mine.) Bolshevism came from middle class intellectuals, the ideals(get your mind around this)of the Enlightenment. (pg.85)
Amis mentions the sheer scale in other ways as well. 1-million children killed in the ‘Shoah’, the holocaust. In the Soviet Union 3-million children perished in the 1933 Terror Famine, alone.
N-Neocon: Read near the bottom of page 67 for a random piece of horror that tops most of ALL: The ‘ghost ship’, Dzhurma, trapped in the ice near Wrangel Island, filled with 12,000 political slaves bound for the arctic gulag of Kolyma. The NKVD locked her down and abandoned her for the winter. All, needless to say, perished. Just a tiny hiccup in the ‘gifts’ of communism.
The American Revolution wasn’t really a revolution but a rebellion.
Also, I believe we had such success in large part due to our culture, which had been experimenting with limited government and democracy for a very long time. When Jamestown was founded in 1607, England already had a Parlament, and King James did not support the idea of Jamestown.
It is interesting to note tat the first American political parties, the Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans (not the modern GOP) sprang up around two different views of the French Revolution in large degree.
The Federalists tended to be pro English a favored the creation of a navy, while the Republicans were pro French and French Revolution, and opposed building a navy.
The Republican position basically fell apart when the details of the XYZ affair were handed to Congress.
We ended up in a quasi war with France, since the French were trying to gain funds by siezing American shipping.
It wosn’t so much the Founding Fathers as the American culture more generally.
Look at the American Civil War. Considering the horrors inherent in the Civil War, it is an amazing event in how the violence was limited to the battlefield. What happened to Jefferson Davis after the war? He and his family were not persecuted, he lost his right to sit on the legislature or govern.
NeoConScum: yes, Amis’ book is overwhelming in its description of the horrors of the Soviet “experiment,” even if you already know a lot of the history. To me, the most interesting parts are twofold: his emphasis on the fact that it was not just Stalin responsible for the horrors, it was there from the start and Stalin was the one with the time to bring it to full fruition; and the complicity and apologia of western intellectuals.
Neo, you missed my point..
the trick is NOT where to draw the line when the point is you cant do the trick…
don’t you get that?
Don’t you get that this is the logic behind all murderous despotism and justifications?
and a nice straw man argument its totalitarianism or anarchy..
all your arguing is that you can be a bit dirty and still be pure…
that is erroneous..
what your claiming is that the state which is incompetent will set competent lines when drawing them.
so where do we find these angels that will run a command economy and set these lines right?
after all, once you go outside the purity of thou shalt not kill, it only remains what list to draw up to permit killing… for you certainly dont need one to not kill…
and after you have permission for abortion, you only have to figure out how to hurt or impact people so they have self loathing, or self doubt, or cant afford it, and you can have euthanasia… so the point then becomes when can you allow it… so now they are working for post birth abortions…
what your proposing is the key to slicing the salami.. how do you avoid that process?
Dont slice it…
there is no other way in reality
in the mind, it seems possible
but what would you put in place to halt incrementalism in a social milieu of constant change for the sake of change?
heck… how do you stop incrementalism. because without it, your idea of drawing the line is meaningless.
basically what they did was make normal a bunch of abnormal premises, and you never questioned that… (Even less so if you have a law degree!)
so the FIRST STEP of EVERY salami slicing is to get the people to decide to put the salami up on the table at all!!!!
so where do you draw the line?
if you have no salami, there is no line
if you do, then you might as well go to the end result as that will be the result over time.
if abortion is not allowed, eugenics is dead and still born… if it is allowed, then its only a matter of time before we do what happened before…
you also have TWO more problems to solve for your line drawing ability.
one is.. how do you get people to remember, so they dont do that again…
ie. how do you get the people to remember it doesnt work, and go back to absolutes
you see… you have accepted that there are no absolutes, and so there can be no absolute ideas, and so we have to just set the lines to make it all well and good…
but your never in the meeting to set the line.
you don’t even believe there are such meetings
the whole of all that was put fort for a reason
its toxic poison to freedom
do you own yourself or not?
if your partially owned by someone else, then your in a totalitarian regime of a degree less than 100%..
its the key behind the idea of giving you small doses of communism till you become communist and dont know how it happened.
its a way to completely replace something one piece at a time, which is not possible if you dont let them take any pieces.
[edited for length by n-n]
Artfldgr: No, I definitely did not miss your point. I believe you miss mine.
Let me try one more time: since societies always have laws and rules that by definition must limit the liberty of their members, the trick is where to draw the line. There is no way not to limit liberty in some way (if only, for example, to prevent theft and murder). So everything is a question of deciding how much limitation is too much. I think we have gone way too far in the US, although other countries have gone much further, to limit liberty. But it is still always a question of where to draw the line. It is not possible to be absolutist about it. I believe that even anarchists ordinarily acknowledge that the state (especially at the local level) needs to have a police function.
The right to vote was restricted to property owners under the presumption that only people with something to lose (property) could be counted on to vote responsibly.
What a concept. That’s just crazy talk.
Crazy talk that has been borne out by events, alas.
Hitler’s ideology was foul, Lenin’s fair-seeming.
They were equally foul, in my opinion. They just demonized different groups.
And as regards the Holocaust, Stalin killed as many Ukrainians (full disclosure: I am part Uki) in ONE YEAR in the famine he engineered as Hitler & Co. killed in the entire 12 years of their reign.
by the way, two methods of moving that line and creating it are “dialoging to consensus” and “normalizing the abnormal” (Stalin version of frog in the pot).
ie. we have social games we can play on each other that makes it impossible to set such lines once you give up the idea of absolutism in morals and ethics.
its another case of a technique of action and the DODO… in this case, your the DODO that has not the common sense to be afriad having not learned what to be afraid of.
you will sit with a snake or refuse to run from what others know to be a horror, because your the dodo… and of course… you want others to confirm…
experience will show you what matters, hows its employed, etc…
you forget that the WHOLE IDEA behind a trap is that the people caught in it believe its not a trap!!!!!!!!!!!
so yes… your going to argue that the trick is to do the impossible… (the trick with a command economy is… the trick with law is to draw the line right… the trick with being alone with someone and not having an accident is self control… etc)
in our media your constantly bombarded with the message the impossible is possible. when the experts tell you somethnig is impossible, go out and do it… shall i call up the media message on accepting the impossible as possible out of hand without any consideration?
this is your zeitgeist (not mine), you have yet to put all these parts together… you have yet to correct them. ie. you may not trust X, but X is supported by WYZGHTYUR… which you lean back on and have yet to realize they are just as corrupted as X
they have to be to make X appear functional
HOW do you think that the south americans found human sacrifice to be normal?
why do you find deprication of one races men ok? (and are hypersensitive to another races deprecation?)
the process of moving that line to a place where you think it wont go is the process of normalizing perversion
you may not move that line, but without fathers, family, and lineage… and the ability of moms and dads to pass on stuff that the state has no control over… (thanks feminism) yhou have no way to make any rule to prevent the moving of a line once the salami is on the table.
by allowing a front to destroy that, you destroyh any ability to hold a line against time.. (which is the point of their existence)
you may not think that being a pedophile is normal…but to the progressives and Kinsey and Meade… pedophilia is “a good rape”..
ie. they have been normalizing perversions as a perverted state with no values is a conquered state…
you think its normal… but you also dont get to see the information honestly… see papers that conflict with that message… know history of such… and so on..
so its easy for them to skew the debate and dialogue to consensus… to the point that those who they are using dont GET what is going on.
as you read move of what happened before your going to find out its not that these people were exceptionally bad people, or any such thing… but that these people were victims of people who studied sociology and applied it to them… making up false ideas, and so on… which facilitated things
and that once consciousness has been raised to the false idea, then the rest becomes easy.
[edited for length by n-n]
Artfldgr: you continue to misunderstand my point. You are setting up strawmen and making points that have little to do with what I’m saying. You are also making incorrect assumptions about what I believe and don’t believe, what I favor and don’t favor, in general.
There is no way not to limit liberty in some way (if only, for example, to prevent theft and murder).
Not sure I would classify preventing theft and murder as a restriction upon liberty.
Occam’s Beard: that’s why I wrote “fair-seeming.” And the “fair-seeming” part was the rhetoric about equality and all that. The Nazis’ rhetoric wasn’t even fair-seeming.
To me, the most interesting parts are twofold: his emphasis on the fact that it was not just Stalin responsible for the horrors, it was there from the start and Stalin was the one with the time to bring it to full fruition; and the complicity and apologia of western intellectuals
My understanding is that under Lenin they essentially forced White Russian women into sexual slavery as a form of state terror. It is one thing to risk your life by picking up a rifle, quite another to risk sending your wife and daughters into sexual slavery, degradation and eventual death.
DonS: such laws are a limitation on the personal liberty of the perpetrator-individual—the liberty to do whatever he wants to whomever he wants.
But such laws are simultaneously a protection of the personal liberty of the victim-individual to live his life and be secure in his personal possessions.
Lack of all such rules would be chaotic, but each person would have the liberty to do whatever he wanted to everybody else, and each person would also have the liberty to protect himself in whatever way he saw fit.
Not a course of action I’m advocating, by the way.
Let’s take a more relevant example: second-hand smoke. Let’s stipulate, for the sake of argument, that it is proven that second-hand smoke harms the health of non-smokers in the vicinity (I don’t think it actually is proven, although it might be the case, but let’s just say it is for the sake of the discussion). Smokers have liberty to smoke; smoking is not forbidden. But where should they be allowed to smoke? When they’re alone, of course. But what about public places?
A libertarian (which I mostly am) might say that they should be allowed to smoke anywhere, and let the market determine the rest. In other words, if a restaurant allows smoking and people want that, they’ll frequent that restaurant. If a restaurant bans smoking, the people who want it banned will patronize that restaurant.
But what about public places you can’t avoid? Schools, airports, airplanes, etc? It goes on and one, with lots of complications. Do you protect the liberty of the smoker, or the liberty of the non-smoker to go to public places without becoming ill? And that’s just one tiny example. Some people would never have the government ban smoking anywhere (even hospitals?) because it’s too much of an intrusion on liberty, but would leave it to be done on an individual institutional basis.
so you accept the idea of total freedom that the left conditions us for?
what happened to the idea of free to swing your arms as long as you dont hit someone?
you see… we have already past that line… smoking laws… gender laws… race laws.. affirmative action… forced sterilization etc.
no.. you are missing MY point as my point comes from the large work on this we no longer know (and i thought you did)
only the communists argue to absurdism total freedom.. no one argues that but anarchists.
but your missing the point…
and i know you are since our culture has changed from that classical point to the point they no longer know the arguments that established it.
your first sentence is the soviet argument almost direct from Lenin Stalin and Trotsky..
that governments exist to ration freedom
when has anyone ever argued the straw man left argument of anarchy? why use that on me?
your arguing totalitarianism or nothing…
and don’t even know that.
Let me try one more time: since societies always have laws and rules that by definition must limit the liberty of their members, the trick is where to draw the line.
ok… WHAT freedoms are you talking about limiting? your examples were things like murder, which cost someone else their freedom…
so, what freedom, that does not cost someone else theirs, does the state limit?
i never argued the idea of total freedom to go out and murder your boss, rape his daughter, etc.
you are a totalitarian…
and have missed the whole point of the constitution.
that a government is instituted among men to limit GOVERNMENT which seeks to take all our freedoms.
so no.. i didnt miss anything.
i know the difference between what yous aid and what the constitution is and what you said is directly out of the soviet constitutions i told you to read which you never did.
There is no way not to limit liberty in some way (if only, for example, to prevent theft and murder).
the ONLY people that made that argument are the soviets… so you dont even know the history of that line of thought…
not only that… but you missed that the state does not limit your freedom, it punishes you for costing someone else theirs.
so you have reversed our whole legal basis to a soviet one and dont know it. and are telling me that this is about freedom to murder..
well, put your way, the state is only reserving the freedom to murder to itself..
under my way, the state cant murder either!!!
your point is just one of who gets to do what, and the state decided, and people have no say..
[edited for length by n-n]
Artfldgr: once again, it is clear to me that you do not understand my point. I cannot possibly spend more time explaining this right now, unfortunately. Perhaps if you read what I just wrote to DonS, here (which I wrote prior to reading your most recent comment) it will help make my position more clear. But perhaps not.
by the way..
your conceding that we have gone to far..
is conceding my point, that such does not work
if it did, then you would never say that, we would have preserved those lines skillfully drawn
and the idea that absolute is not possible is also false… it is possible… just not in a soviet society where such arguments are not allowed full flower.
the point was that your thinking in lines and rules and so on… which was not the founders way.. thats the soviet central planners philip dru way..
the founders way was to give you complete freedom and only limit you when your actions limited someone else… or took theirs..
ie… you have absolute freedom except where your actions cost someone else theirs.
the other way you get:
show me the man and i will show you the crime…
read below as below is the idea of limiting freedom… and the absurd argument you took…
which was given to you long ago – in the US by feminists… ie. the progressives promise you freedom without responsiblitity… how so?
so the argument shifted for women and feminists to the state taking the oppressors freedom away, and granting extra freedom… (violating equality before the law, and working towards soviet equality of outcome!)
so a long time ago.. this changed… because under the old system, they had no candy to give you…. ie. how can you be granted more freedom when you had freedom to act BUT DIDNT ACT… (which is why when they decided to act, they were not stopped… as it would be if the claims were valid).
how could they give women the candy of more freedom if they didnt take away someone elses? and how could they do that if they didnt convince you that they dispense freedom?
being lenin and stalin lovers, is it all that hard to see they took the position of rationing freedom? appling it unequally (ie they get to bless or curse by their design)… and so on.
in the old system, based on the old view, all that is not possible and the public would resist.
under the new, the one your speaking, all that is possible and more.. .and the victims believe its not, that they can stop it when they have no families, no lineage.. they work and the state gets their kids and they dont even know what they are teaching…
nope…
i am talking reality, not philosophy.
where metaphysics and material meet.
study the philosophy behind these views and note where they switched them on you.
Human rights in the Soviet Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Union
and if your secular you may not know where these ideas come from and that our being a christian judaic place MATTERS.
let me point out that it derives from the fact that there is TRUTH that is apart from us. that there are facts and principals that are not under our control. the universe is real and outside us.
ie… TRUTH is a principal of reality…
you say that the state is there to declare murder… to limit freedom.. is THAT why?
or was it to prevent free people from taking actions that when a mistake costed more their freedom?
ie. did they do it to limit freedom, or to preserve the freedom of the innocent to be unmolested and unpunished by other free people that accuse them?
if your soviet. its the first
if your a founding father type american, its the latter.
[edited for length by n-n]
Artfldgr: I am not conceding your point. I have agreed with you from the start about that point. What’s more, I agree about the different goals of the Soviets vs. the Founding Fathers (I side with the latter).
I certainly don’t say the state is there for the purpose of limiting freedom. I have not been speaking of the state’s motives or reasons or goals. I am saying that government de facto limits some freedoms, certainly with the goal of preserving the freedom of (as you say) “the innocent to be unmolested.” I am in agreement on that.
And by the way I haven’t been speaking of states and nations doing this so much as local governments, that is municipalities (or states in the sense of New York, Massachusetts, etc). It is municipalities which have the police actions of which I’ve been speaking, and I was referring to that here and here.
Occam: Pg.84 of “Koba the Dread”: “He(Stalin)knew that human beings, given certain conditions, can in fact kill all day, and all year. Is there a clear moral difference between the railtracks and smokestacks of Poland, on the one hand, and on the other, the huge and unnatural silence that slowly settled on the villages of the Ukraine in 1933?”
And Pg.85: “The distinction may be that Nazi terror strove for precision, while Stalinist terror was deliberately random. Everyone was terrorized all the way up: everyone except Stalin.” And Amis again quotes Figes:”The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment–it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx–which makes Western liberals, even in this age of postmodernism, sympathise with it, or at least obliges us to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals; whereas the Nazi efforts to ‘improve mankind,’ whether through eugenics or genocide, spat in the face of the Enlightenment and can only fill us with revulsion.”
Added note by NCS: Occam, I’ve immersed myself in the Nazi horrors and their machinery of of death and the Soviet Communists–mostly under Stalin, but also Lenin–for about 4.5 decades, off & on. For me, the Soviet Terrors–whether gulag, Terror Famine, mass executions, deportation of entire populations, etc–is far more chilling, if such can be compared and measured. There are several reasons(time now doesn’t permit), but suffice that if you will read the small book discussed here by N-Neocon, it covers the reasons I hav..breathtakingly.
Reagan addressed this very concept as well:
“The full power of centralized government”–this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.
This is the difference between planning in theory, and planning in practice. Governments necessarily have to use force and coercion in order to implement their schemes, and moreover:
For three decades, we’ve sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.
This right here is what makes it tyrannical, all things can be tested in reality, and when we test the theory of planning vs the practice of planning, planners treat individuals very, very poorly. Because when governments have usurped that much power over the people they govern, they don’t stop ruining peoples lives. If the plan fails, the planners keep finding an excuses and devise new schemes in what becomes one big never-ending destructive path – The Road to Serfdom.
ack… left out http://progressingamerica.blogspot.com/2012_05_01_archive.html
sorry
N-Neocon: There’s another fascinating ‘little’ book you’d find well worth reading, I suspect: “The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death and Legacy” by Roy & Zhores Medvedev, veteran dissident historians of very large repute on the Stalin subject. (Overlook Press,2004)
Oh, and a helluva read, too, is: Simon Seabag Montefiore’s,”Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar”(Knopf,2003). Insider-Archived-Personal stuff that blew the socks off this old Stalin ‘junky’s feet. Horrifically fascinating.
http://www.sovereignsociety.com/pages/slt/video/FreedomExpires0512Vid.php?pub=SLT&code=ESLTN534&o=719459&s=724326&u=38278999&l=442362&r=Milo