The scandals, the public, and the left: believe it
The last week or so has been filled with so much news that I can hardly keep up despite spending a ton of time reading and listening and thinking. You probably feel the same way.
And yet I know—I am nearly positive—that way too few people are paying much attention at all. Why would they? Boring stuff, much less interesting than—well, take your pick of whatever it is that people are more excited about in their lives, be it trivial or important, serious or fun, active or passive.
That’s not really surprising; it’s human nature. And it’s a human nature on which the left relies to do its dirty work. What galls me more and more as time goes by (and I was already plenty galled already) are the transparently duplicitous, manipulative, hypocritical, condescending, and cynical attitudes of way too many (although not all) writers, pundits, activists, and politicians on the left, who have reacted to the three or four scandals that have erupted (somehow the Sebelius Obamacare donor problem has fallen by the wayside) with either minimization or mockery or both.
Scandals? What scandals? they say. All fakes, drummed up by the right. Obama did nothing wrong, no one did anything wrong except Republicans, yada yada yada. Those hawking this line think Americans are way too lazy to read for themselves, way too uncurious to find out for themselves, way too stupid to think for themselves, and the left plays on this and has played on this for as far back as I can remember.
Whether these writers (I hesitate to link to them, but they are easy to find—just go to RealClearPolitics, look at the lists of articles during the last week or so, and click on the appropriate headlines), believe what they are saying or whether they are cynical manipulators of others hardly matters. It’s of mere psychological interest; the effect is the same either way.
I wrote about the phenomenon before, in a post from 2009. But it’s so important that I’m going to reproduce that entire post again right now. The title is, “The willingness to believe that two plus two makes five.” The gist of the message is in the line, uttered by protagonist Winston Smith in Orwell’s great masterpiece 1984, “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four,” and the knowledge that the essence of being a mouthpiece of the left is to be able to avoid seeing what is in front of your eyes, and to believe that two and two are five if it would suit the party aims to say so.
The post follows.
I read Orwell’s masterful dystopic political vision 1984 when I was about twelve years old, old enough to get what it was aiming at but young enough to be especially frightened by some of its most memorable images, which have stuck with me ever since.
Of course, there was Room 101 with the rats—who could forget that? But another image that made a deep impression, but that described a concept I didn’t quite understand at the time, was that of Winston Smith’s manipulative and brilliant interrogator O’Brien torturing Winston in order to force him to say—and what’s more to believe—that two plus two makes five if the Party willed it.
Here’s the relevant passage:
“Do you remember,” [O’Brien] went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four’?”
“Yes,” said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back toward Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the Party says that it is not four but five — then how many?”
“Four.”
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four.”
The needle went up to sixty.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!”
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Five! Five! Five!”
“No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”
“Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!”
Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.
“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston, sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, you haven’t got one.
At this point in my life, I think I understand the passage all too well. It ties directly into observations such as the following one by Hilton Kramer (he is referring to Stalinism, but he could just as well be talking about the most rabid adherents of any sort of Leftism):
It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying—and not only to others, but first of all to themselves—a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically For their loyalty is to something other than the truth. And no historical enormity is so great, no personal humiliation or betrayal so extreme, no crime so heinous that it cannot be assimilated into the ‘ideals’ that govern the true Stalinist mind which is impervious alike to documentary evidence and moral discrimination.”
I saw this propensity first-hand myself as a child, in an uncle of mine who was a pro-Communist and whom I’ve described in this essay. My uncle had no problem integrating any new fact about Communism into his pro-Soviet world view.
At the time, my uncle’s behavior was a puzzlement to me. But now I know that he was a true believer, and the goal was the most important thing. If the ideals of Communism (or progressivism, or socialism, or whatever far-Left movement one is considering) are considered the greatest good—equality, “fairness,” help for the poor—then one never has to notice all the evils that are knowingly committed in its name, or all its dreadful although unintended (and yet inevitable) consequences, even for the poor people it is supposedly designed to help. In fact, one is obliged to deny them, no matter how strong the evidence.
To keep one’s eyes on the prize, whether that prize be the idealistic goals cited above or the simple drive for absolute power voiced by the fictional O’Brien when he tells Winston “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power”—it is necessary for the follower to filter out reality and to believe whatever is seen as bringing the world closer to the goal.
The mental gymnastics involved are described very well in another literary work, this time one of nonfiction, the autobiography of Communist-turned-government-informant Whittaker Chambers, entitled Witness [emphasis mine]:
When I first knew him, Harry Freeman [who later become the assistant US chief of Tass, the Soviet news service] was just out of Cornell University, where he had brilliantly majored in history…the best mind that I was to meet among the American Communist intellectuals. It was an entirely new type of mind to me. No matter how favorable his opinion had been to an individual or his political role, if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly. That was not strange, that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrasment. There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one. If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else.
O’Brien would be proud—now that’s the sort of mental flexibility that the Party needs and desires.
Of course, rationalization and denial of facts that don’t fit a person’s previously held beliefs is not just a province of the Left. It’s a general human trait, and that is why a mind is a difficult thing to change. But the Left carefully nurtures, fosters, advocates, and even requires this sort of denial, whereas it is my observation that the Right (and this was something that was formative in my own change experience), while hardly immune, is much less demanding that its adherents dismiss and deny logic and inconvenient facts.
This just in:
Nation Supposes It’s Outraged By White House Scandals
‘I Guess It’s Bad, Sure,’ Populace Shrugs
WASHINGTON–Reacting to the number of major scandals currently plaguing the White House, a somewhat confused American populace told reporters Friday that yeah, sure, they’re totally outraged or whatever about what’s currently going on in Washington.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-supposes-its-outraged-by-white-house-scanda,32486/
I’m not saying that I’m an intellectual, and I’ve read what Thomas Sowell has to say, but I have always and will always (I think) find it difficult to reconcile intelligence with the tendency to keep believing this stuff.
Winston’s torture is one thing. So is being raised and/or educated to believe it. I know that you grew out of it, Neo. So did I. So did many here.
And yet, in my recollection, that phase was just that…a phase. One that went on too long for me but a phase nonetheless. Maybe even a necessary “Road of Excess” on the way to wisdom.
How does a rational intellect not grow out of it? I understand the “Changers”. But what about the others?
Jim Sullivan:
Was O’Brien, Winston’s interlocutor, tortured? There’s no indication that he was. And he was an intelligent man (and although of course he was fictional, he was probably based on people Orwell had known or heard about). And yet O’Brien accepted and embraced that 2+2=5 when necessary—as did my uncle, as did Chambers’ Harry Freeman, and none of them were tortured.
The belief’s the thing. If you believe that you are on the side of right (the left, that is), or power, or glory, or whatever it is you are most interested in, you will suspend judgment. Believe me, it is hard to give up a belief in the face of evidence! Evidence is easy to ignore for most people, and rationalization and sophistry can help immeasurably. And of course the right is hardly perfect, and so focusing on the sins of the right (and their demonization by the left) is always available, and helpful at helping a person to ignore the sins of the left.
That’s for people who are paying a lot of attention. For those who are not (most liberals; most people in general), it’s much easier. One just has to read the Times or the Globe or the New Yorker or listen to NPR (or all four, if one wants to be especially liberally well-informed) and call it a day.
What’s hard is to seek out alternate sources of information, really read them and listen to them with an open mind, and think for oneself—and be willing to risk becoming what one has always been told is evil, a person on the right, and also to earn the ire of one’s friends, trouble on the job, and perhaps ostracism.
Political leftism is incredibly at odds with the principles of Judeo-Christianity. The lefts’ constant questing for power equates to Adam’s sin in the garden: trying to be one’s own god. The left’s exploitation of class warfare, and of grievance, is exploitation of the envy of Cain. At the most basic level: political leftism is antithetical to Judeo-Christianity.
The Gnostic impulse that would overrule nature’s determinacy is the very epitome of totalitarianism. Having that power, the power of 2+2= other than four, is to have power over everything. That State that will determine what it is that constitutes ‘marriage’, may determine what constitutes freedom, that Freiheit ist Arbeit; that ‘citizen’ requires no more than physical presence; that religion is not moral conscience but political conscience — that, indeed, the political is the moral and the Christian intolerable. A society where reality is a felony and truth not vindicatory, is a totalitarian society. It takes but one crime to become a criminal, one murder to become a murderer, and one contravention of ‘what is so’ to be totalitarian.
We are a totalitarian nation.
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! — Isaiah 5:20
Neo,
It’s not goals or ideals. Their right and wrong are consistent based on identity, tribal loyalty, and adversarial orientation.
I consider the typical modern Democrat to be worse than a typical leftist. With all that’s problematic about them, ‘leftist’ at least implies loyalty to principles. The typical modern Democrat is characterized by unquestioning loyalty to the tribe.
To understand Democrats, think of mafia or gang dynamics. Coalition cohesion and allegiance are their highest values. Right and wrong is whatever their tribal patriarchs and matriarchs decide is right and wrong.
One of the Alinskyite tactics, which really only works for liberal nations, is to hold the opposition accountable to his own rules. A mirror.
The Democrats’ chameleon changes is one reason I advocate using an Obama v Bush frame, to hold a mirror to the Democrats’ true nature and failings. The other reasons are to correct the BDS false narrative that’s causing damage to our nation’s affairs in its own right and demonstrate that Bush was right and better via direct, clear comparison to Obama.
It works. For example, my case for the Iraq mission is in large part based on the congruity of Clinton and Bush’s Iraq policies, including Clinton’s contemporary support of Bush on Iraq. Democrats that I debate can’t handle the mirror.
If the GOP would establish frame, context, and narrative using an Obama v Bush frame, push it energetically, and hold to it, the American people would pay attention. Flip the narrative to Bush and the GOP were right and Obama and the Dems are wrong, and everything changes.
Neo: “The belief’s the thing.”
Again, no it’s not. At least, not anymore. Maybe in your day as a Democrat, the belief or consistency of principles was still the thing.
These days for Democrats, the thing is the identity, the tribe, the gang, the in-group, the clique. Their centering orientation is Us v Them and adversarial, zealous advocacy.
For proof that belief is *not* the thing for Democrats (anymore), see the attack responses by Democrats against principled leftists who have called out Obama:
Democrats v Ralph Nader:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014245332
Glenn Greenwald v Democrats:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/11/progressives-defend-obama-kill-list
Add: These days, the Democratic party does operate like a Communist central committee dictating what is right and wrong and what is good for its membership.
Jim Sullivan wrote: “…but I have always and will always (I think) find it difficult to reconcile intelligence with the tendency to keep believing this stuff.”
With all due respect, I don’t believe intelligence is the key. A long time ago a friend imparted an observation that’s stuck with me ever since: When it comes to accepting and keeping in touch with reality, intelligence can–and often is–a serious impediment. After being smacked upside the head a few times with hard facts, the average person has little choice but to acknowledge the truth and try to reconcile his beliefs accordingly. But the oh-so-clever person, like Chambers’ friend Freeman, can almost always devise a rationalization (however covoluted and perverse) to avoid such an unpleasant refutation of dearly held beliefs.
In the final paragraph few comments above, Neo described what is really difficult for most people: “…to seek out alternate sources of information, really read them and listen to them with an open mind, and think for oneself … [be] willing to risk becoming what one has always been told is evil … earn the ire of one’s friends” etc. What all this requires most of all is courage, not intelligence.
It is no coincidence, I think, that a surprisingly large percentage of the most screwed-up people I’ve encountered have also been among the most intelligent. Intelligence without courage can be a curse.
If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else.
That’s one of the more astounding characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (and other PDs, maybe?). Which leads me to wonder if NPDs are attracted to power-first ideologies (my NPD father & grandfather were not) or if the power-first impulse induces NPD symptoms.
I guess ultimately it doesn’t matter what causes what; it probably varies across individuals.
What matters is that the tendency to rewrite history in your own brain is a drastic defense mechanism: in the NPD, to protect against the idea that they’ve made a mistake, and in the Leftist, to protect against the knowledge that they’re monsters.
These days for Democrats, the thing is the identity, the tribe, the gang, the in-group, the clique.
That’s why their “arguments” are actually retorts wherein they strike a pose: Being Hip, Being Smart, Being Sophisticated, Being Moral, Being Enlightened.
Mockery, snideness, snark: the prime indicators that a pose is being struck rather than a reasoned argument being made.
It is no coincidence, I think, that a surprisingly large percentage of the most screwed-up people I’ve encountered have also been among the most intelligent. Intelligence without courage can be a curse.
Amen to that, only change “can be” to “is.” I’m not sure that being an intelligent coward can be anything BUT a curse, especially to the rest of the populace.
I entered an Ivy-League grad school as a committed Christian and left the same, yet the Intelligentsia often wonders why I didn’t un-convert, as if there were some compelling argument being made there.
I fully expected to find anti-religious sentiment at the uni, but I also expected there to be more depth than “Religion is the root cause of all racism/sexism/homophobia” and “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE INQUISITION AND THE CRUSADES???!!11!!?”
Oddly enough, I didn’t find those “arguments” to be persuasive on their merits. I also noticed that the force of those arguments was not in any type of logic but in old-fashioned peer pressure. “You wanna be taken seriously, you drop that God stuff.”
That pressure convinces quite a few college kids, needless to say, because the greatest fear to the intellectually inclined is to be thought a fool by their peers. (Precious few people of any stripe can withstand scorn, as it turns out.)
I left academia, else I might have buckled to it or at least bended a bit.
And that’s how they keep people on the reservation: stay with us or forever be mocked by Jon Stewart. It’s a sad commentary on human nature that so few have the moral courage to withstand the Sneer of the Hipster.
dicentra,
It’s more than posing. It’s maneuver in the military, business, or any real-world competitive sense. Their goal is not to win debates. Their goal is social (political) control – better yet, dominance.
Trying to reach them with reasoned argument is about as effective as trying to reason with ‘mean girl’ bullies in JHS or HS. Alinskyite tactics are like mean girl tactics. They involved pretty much the same dynamic and incentives.
Reasoned argument should remain a tool of the right, but the right needs to understand that reasoned argument alone cannot win the (social) political game as it is.
It’s more than posing. It’s maneuver in the military, business, or any real-world competitive sense.
Yes. They use language not to express what’s on their minds but as a weapon toward domination.
The pose is the “team color,” as it were, to identify themselves to other team members.
Me at May 18th, 2013 at 4:35 pm:
Their centering orientation is Us v Them and adversarial, zealous advocacy.
That should have been:
Their centering orientation is Us v Them and adversarial, *zero sum*, zealous advocacy.
adversarial, *zero sum*, zealous advocacy.
Of which they accuse us constantly.
JINGOISM! RACISM!
Projection also being one of their collective tendencies.
dicentra,
That tactic is included in Alinsky’s rules for radicals, too.
Eric: Note that I didn’t say the belief was a belief in principles. “Belief” can encompass things like “the left are the good guys, the right the bad guys, and I want to be a good guy.” They can be things like, “I’m a Jew (or black person, or Hispanics) and Jews (or black people, or Hispanics) are liberal Democrats.
Your points and mine are not mutually exclusive.
Neo,
Okay, thanks for clarifying. That’s broad enough.
This matters because it’s vital that the right understands the nature of what they’re up against and the game for what it is.
I learned the toxic, corrupted nature of the present-day Democrats as a college activist, a volunteer for a Dems presidential candidate in 2004, and a liberal defending the definitively liberal Iraq mission.
Defending the Iraq mission was especially eye-opening because the Democrats know better. They, Clinton most of all, understood the context and stakes of the Iraq intervention equally as well as the Republicans. After all, the Iraq problem inherited by Bush matured during the whole course of the Clinton administration. Iraq should have been as bipartisan a political effort as WW2. Yet knowing the context and the stakes in Iraq, the Democrats deliberately chose to amplify and validate anti-American propaganda from the usual suspects and go so far as to employ radical leftist, go-for-the-jugular propagandists like Dave Sirota to play against the national interest, not to mention the enormous human stakes, in Iraq in order to advance the Democrats’ parochial partisan interests vs the Republicans.
When Clinton – the only American who understood the Iraq problem as well as Bush – succumbed to party pressure in order to avoid the fate of Lieberman, and flipped on his support for Bush and OIF, it was done. The Democrats have embraced mean girls and the lord of the flies. They have chosen the power of the dark side of the force. They have sold their souls.
The right needs to understand the organic nature of what they’re up against.
The Left’s enemies will never understand the Left. Because they weren’t part of the Left. They don’t hate the Left. They never loved the Left.
You cannot understand that which you have never felt any strong emotions about.
Humanity functioned based upon instincts first, emotions second, and logic third. It is in that order that “truth” is discovered and learned.
Most of the Left’s enemies still think they are in negotiations with the Left. While the Left knows they are in a war and act accordingly.
Humanity, my dear ysmarker, functions upon tomatoes. There is no rift between intincts, emotions and logic. However, science has showed that frontal lobe activity does respond to calm shell scenes and unicorn smiles.
Good points, Eric. I think what dems really want is a society of willing slaves. It would not surprise me to see establishment Republicans rationalize and deny the seriousness of the scandals. As neo says, it is human nature to do so. The tea party, the NRA and people like Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have all been targets of the establishment GOP. Now they seem quite sane, and their critics appear out of touch with reality.
Political leftism is incredibly at odds with the principles of Judeo-Christianity. The lefts’ constant questing for power equates to Adam’s sin in the garden: trying to be one’s own god. The left’s exploitation of class warfare, and of grievance, is exploitation of the envy of Cain. At the most basic level: political leftism is antithetical to Judeo-Christianity.
THIS! This is why the Left hates Christians and Christendom with a special passion.
Eric, the process of disillusionment you described re the Iraq War is exactly what I went through after the September 11th massacres in 2001.
“There I saw them — there I smelt ’em out.”
I was appalled and viscerally enraged when I saw the Usual Suspects do a volte face and start cooing and clucking over the Moslem monsters — who espouse every single value the Left claims to hate.
Then everything was clear, like a battlefield illuminated by a tremendous lightning bolt: carnage everywhere. Orwell was right: they want power, above all power, always and only Power.
Great article, Neo, and wonderful comments, commenters. Thank you.
Eric @ 7:26 . . .
Your post really resonates with me. I made my final “change,” i.e. metamorphosis when I realized that the Democrats DID NOT CARE about the success of the war in Iraq and the success of the United States nation. They actively supported the enemy in order to achieve political power and “transnational progressivism,” i.e. rule by a supranational elite who herd the “sheeple” like Mao and Stalin herded their victims into poverty and death.
One of my senators called American troops “Nazis.” My other senator, a RINO, now supports homosexual “marriage,” never mind the consequences for children and for society in general, but hey it’s cool.
These human trash politicians are dead to me.
After the 2004 election, I took leave of the Democrat party and the term “liberal.” I am now outside the comfortable zone of friends and family, but I’ve made contact with like-minded non-statists (conservatives? right-wingers?) and do what I can to save the American Republic.
BTW, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics.” I had a fruitless discussion today with two college professors who support Obamacare because the insurance companies only care about “profit.” Evil “profit.” I told them to read Sowell to learn about the role of supply and demand in determining “price” and that “profit” should always be called “profit and loss.”
Will they inform themselves about simple economic concepts? I doubt it. The mountain of ignorance is very high. The valley of sludge is very deep.
Brilliant commentary, thanks!
Goes a long way to “explain” how our current “Baghdad Bob”-Jay Carney could go on national TV and declare “there are no scandals”
Often wondered how he sleeps at night and shaves himself… now, I’m guessing – with no trouble at all.
That’s really scary when it begins to predominate in a society, when lies are accepted as a matter of course. …
Great essay….but with the familiar flaw of equating both sides. Sure, the Left does a little more you imply, but the right does it to and so therefore….
Therefore the Left is excused and enabled yet again.
Yet again.
The bad guys never pay the price. The good guys always pay the price.
When you read your history you see how civilizations and nations fall. This is how.
Good post, good comments. Can’t believe no one’s mentioned Eric Hoffer and his The True Believer. It’s all in there folks and it explains my experience with progs to a tee.
In the USSR telling the truth would get you into trouble so everybody lied. That was why Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote his essay ,”live not by lies” in 1974.
Mike: I don’t see at all where you say both sides are equated. I make a clear distinction in that last paragraph. And it’s a very important and basic distinction, too.
I don’t know if Neo has written on Whittaker Chambers but he was certainly an interesting “changer”. What follows are excerpts from his “A Letter to my Children” and might help us better understand the progressive mindset.
====
The revolutionary heart of Communism is not the theatrical appeal: “Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain.” It is a simple statement of Karl Marx, further simplified for handy use: “Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.”
Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them … even unto death, is a simply conviction: It is necessary to change the world. Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large measure, the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and act upon them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die — to bear witness — for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.
It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different version of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The communist vision is the vision of Man without God.
[…]
The vision is a challenge and inspires a threat. It challenges man to prove by his acts that he is the masterwork of the Creation by making thought and act one. It challenges him to prove it by using the force of his rational mind to end the bloody meaninglessness of man’s history — by giving it purpose and a plan …
It is an intensely practical vision. The tools to turn it into reality are at hand — science and technology, whose traditional method, the rigorous exclusion of all supernatural factors in solving problems, has contributed to the intellectual climate in which the vision flourishes, just as they have contributed to the crisis in which Communism thrives. For the vision is shared by millions who are not Communists (they are part of Communism’s secret strength). Its first commandment is found, not in the Communist Manifesto, but in the first sentence of the physics primer: “All of the progress of mankind to date results from the making of careful measurements.” But Communism, for the first time in history, has made this vision the faith of a great modern political movement.
Hence the Communist party is quite justified in calling itself the most revolutionary party in history. It has posed in practical form the most revolutionary question in history: “God or Man?” It has taken the logical next step which three hundred years of rationalism hesitated to take, and said what millions of modern minds think but do not dare or care to say: “If man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God?” Henceforth, Man’s Mind is Man’s Fate.
This vision is the Communist revolution, which, like all great revolutions, occurs in man’s mind before it takes form in man’s acts. […] On the plane of faith, it summons mankind to turn its vision into practical reality. On the plane of action, it summons men to struggle against the inertia of the past which, embodied in social, political and economic form, Communism claims, is blocking the will of mankind to make its next great forward stride.
This is Communism’s moral sanction, which is twofold. Its vision points the way to the future; its faith labors to turn the future into present reality. It says to every man who joins it:
“the vision is a practical problem of history; the way to achieve it is a practical problem of politics, which is the present tense of history. Have you the moral strength to take upon yourself the crimes of history so that man at last may close his chronicle of age-old suffering, and replace it with purpose and a plan?”
The answer a man makes to this question is the difference between the Communist and those miscellaneous socialists, liberals, fellow travelers, unclassified progressives and men of good will, all of whom share a similar vision, but do not share the faith because they will not take upon themselves the penalties of the faith. The answer is the root of that sense of moral superiority which makes Communists, though caught in crime, berate their opponents with withering self-righteousness.
The vision inspires, the crisis impels. The workingman is chiefly moved by the crisis. The educated man is chiefly moved by the vision. The workingman … can afford few visions — even practical visions. An educated man, peering from the Harvard yard, or any college campus, upon a world in chaos, finds in the vision the two certainties for which the mind of man tirelessly seeks: a reason to live and a reason to die.
No other faith of our time presents them with the same practical intensity. That is why Communism is the central experience of the first half of the 20th century and may be its final experience — will be, unless the free world, in the agony of its struggle with Communism, overcomes its crisis by discovering, in suffering and pain, a power of faith which will provide man’s mind, at the same intensity, with the same two certainties: a reason to live and a reason to die. If it fails, this will be the century of the great social wars. If it succeeds, this will be the century of the great wars of faith.
[…]
It is a fact that a man can join the Communist Party, can be very active in it for years, without completely understanding the nature of Communism, of the political methods that follow inevitably from its vision. One day such incomplete Communists discover that the Communist Party is not what they thought it was. They break with it and turn on it with the rage of an honest dupe, a dupe who has given a part of his life to a swindle. Often they forget that it takes two to make a swindle.
Others remain communists for years, warmed by the light of its vision, firmly closing their eyes to the crimes and horrors inseparable from its practical politics. One day they have to face the facts. They are appalled at what they have abetted. They spend the rest of their days trying to explain, usually without great success, the dark clue to their complicity. As their understanding of Communism was incomplete and led them to a dead end, their understanding of breaking with it is incomplete and leads them to a dead end.
…. Not grasping the source of the evil they sincerely hate, such ex-Communists in general make ineffectual witnesses against it. They are witnesses against something; they have ceased to be witnesses for anything.
Yet there is one experience which most sincere ex-Communists share, whether or not they go only part way to the end of the question it poses. The daughter of a former German diplomat in Moscow was trying to explain to me why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had been extremely pro-Communist, had become an implacable anti-Communist. It was hard for her because as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed here. “He was immensely pro-Soviet,” she said, “and then — you will laugh at me — but you must not laugh at my father — and then one night — in Moscow — he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.”
A child of Reason and the 20th century, she knew that there is a logic of the mind. She did not know that the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind’s. She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.
What Communist has not heard those screams? They come from husbands torn from forever from their wives in midnight arrests. They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police, from the torture chambers of the Lubianka, from all the citadels of terror now stretching from Berlin to Canton. They come from those freight cars loaded with men, women and children, the enemies of the Communist State, locked in, packed in, left on remote sidings to freeze to death at night in the Russian winter. They come from minds driven mad by the horrors of mass starvation ordered and enforced as a policy of the Communist state. They come from the starved skeletons, worked to death, or flogged to death (as an example to others) in the freezing filth of sub-arctic labor camps. They come from children whose parents are suddenly, inexplicably, taken away from them — parents they will never see again.
What Communists has not heard these screams? Execution, says the Communist code, is the highest measure of social protection. What man can call himself a Communist who has not accepted the fact that Terror is an instrument of policy, right if the vision is right, justified by history, enjoined by the balance of forces in the social wars of this century? Those screams have reached every Communist’s mind. Usually they stop there. What judge willingly dwells upon the man the laws compel him to condemn to death — the laws of nations or the laws of history?
But one day the Communist really hears those screams. He is going about his routine party tasks. He is lifting a dripping reel of microfilm from a developing tank. He is justifying to a Communist faction in a trade union an extremely unwelcome directive of the Central Committee. He is receiving from a trusted superior an order to go to another country and, in a designated hour, meet a man whose name he will never know, but who will give him a package whose contents he will never learn. Suddenly, there closes around that Communist a separating silence, and in that silence he hears screams.
He hears them for the first time. For they do not merely reach his mind. They pierce beyond. They pierce to his soul. He says to himself, “Those are not the screams of a man in agony. Those are the screams of a soul in agony.” He hears them for the first time because a soul in extremity has communicated with that which alone can hear it — another human soul.
Why does the Communist ever hear them? Because in the end there persists in every man, however he may deny it, a scrap of soul. The Communist who suffers this singular experience then says to himself: “What is happening to me? I must be sick.” If he does not instantly stifle that scrap of soul, he is lost. If he admits it for a moment, he has admitted that there is something greater than Reason, greater than the logic of the mind, of politics, of history, of economics, which alone justifies the vision.
If the party senses his weakness, and the party is peculiarly cunning at sensing such weakness, it will humiliate him, degrade him, condemn him, expel him. If it can, it will destroy him. And the party will be right. For he has betrayed that which alone justifies its faith — the vision of the Almighty Mind. He stands before the fact of God.
[…]
One thing most ex-Communists could agree upon: They broke because they wanted to be free. They do not all mean the same thing by “free”. Freedom is a need of the soul and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul, there is not justification for freedom. … A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between two irreconcilable opposites — God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.
Communism is what happens when, in the name of Mind, men free themselves from God. But its view of God, it knowledge of God, its experience of God, is what alone gives character to a society or nation, and meaning to its destiny. Its culture, the voice of this character, is merely that view, knowledge, experience of God, fixed by its most intense spirits in terms intelligible to the mass of men. There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God and died.
The crisis of Communism exists to the degree in which it has failed to free the peoples that it rules from God. Nobody knows this better than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. It exists to the degree in which the Western world actually shares Communism’s materialist vision, is so dazzled by the logic of the materialist interpretation of history, politics and economics that it fails to grasp that, for it, the only possible answer to the Communist challenge: Faith in God or Faith in Man? is the challenge: Faith in God.
Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem — but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism’s Faith in Man.
* Beverley: “I was appalled and viscerally enraged when I saw the Usual Suspects do a volte face and start cooing and clucking over the Moslem monsters – who espouse every single value the Left claims to hate.”
* Promethea: “I made my final “change,” i.e. metamorphosis when I realized that the Democrats DID NOT CARE about the success of the war in Iraq and the success of the United States nation.”
Beverley, Promethea,
What struck me the most was how easily and without regret that self-labeled liberals sacrificed the most fundamental liberal principles that defined our Iraq mission in order to attack Bush and the GOP. They thereby showed they don’t stand for anything except their tribe.
I understood the principled domestic opposition to OIF by dogmatic pacifists who oppose any military use even in humanitarian interventions, libertarian ‘America First’ isolationists, and Cold War-nostalgic IR realists who preferred Saddam in charge, but I was angered and disappointed by the vitriolic opposition from fellow self-labeled liberals to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Remember, the “war” in Iraq that ousted Saddam was short. The propaganda attacks were most intense against the post-war *Peace Operations* (the actual technical term for the spectrum of tasks in the post-war) in Iraq, which by the way, were paper-sanctioned by the UN.
Our Iraq mission, among other foreign policy aspects, was the greatest liberal internationalist *humanitarian* intervention of our generation and probably of the modern age. The Counterinsurgency “surge” especially was the liberal dream realized of our military building the peace more than fighting wars.
Moreover, greater than the liberal principles at stake, the terrorist onslaught meant our soldiers were fighting to protect Iraqi lives in the most urgent, real, and immediate way. Yet self-labeled liberals – except for principled liberal stalwarts like Joe Lieberman – joined the calls demanding that we abandon the Iraqi people to mass-murdering terrorists.
All the aspects of what we were trying to achieve in Iraq, from resolving a festering Iraq problem with Saddam, which included a strong humanitarian dimension, to building a revolutionary liberal peace in an illiberal part of the world after Saddam, to our larger aspirations for regional reform, and Americans and Iraqis together fighting to build a new Iraq against the dark forces attacking post-Saddam Iraq, all form the sharpest possible delineation and realization of Wilsonian liberalism, particularly as articulated by John F Kennedy.
In other words, our Iraq mission was a definitively liberal endeavor by America in her role as the leader of the free world. It should have set a new course for vigorous American liberal leadership, similar to how Truman’s Korea intervention set our course after WW2.
Yet self-labeled liberals, by attacking the Iraq mission also undermined the fundamental liberal principles that defined the mission, thus severely damaging America’s standing as leader of the free world.
They betrayed liberalism.
If we hold onto our liberal internationalist posture that has guided our foreign policy since WW2, then the only alternative to Bush’s America that leads from the front is Obama’s America that ‘leads’ from behind.
Neo,
I am arguing against the general proposition I hear so often that says words to the effect of “it happens on both sides”.
You will never ever ever ever zero hear someone from the Left say this – unless they mean that the right also does what they are caught doing. You hear it from people who are generally normal or conservative all the time. We have been trained that moderation and balance and fairness are important. Therefore, we sometimes accuse ourselves when it is not right to do so, and the effect is to let the Left off the hook….again! Not to mention the difference between the form of the thing in question and the content of the thing in question. Two people can do the same form of action, and one is good and the other bad.
In this case, it really would be good for the IRS to target Al Queda affiliates in the U.S (just making up an example). It really would be good to single out terror groups to make sure they did not get tax exempt status. But the same action applied to Tea Party groups makes it a completely different action morally speaking – the difference is between good and evil.
99 Liberals go after George Bush 24/7 365 for eight years, most of it not criticism at all but mere slander.
1 Conservative goes after Obama once on a matter of substance and both the Liberal and the misguided Conservative will say, “See, well both sides do it [so the Liberal is excused]”
Mike: yes, people sometimes do that. I am not doing it here.
I make no false equivalence. What the left does is way worse, and I think I make that clear.
The reason I mention that the right does it is that the right does do it. It pains me when I see people on the right rationalizing away the errors the right makes, and they do rationalize it away. Nor do I like it when someone on the right makes stupid and incorrect accusations against someone on the left, or misquotes them. I see that done all too often, unfortunately—although nowhere near as often as I see similar stuff emanating from the left. And, as I said, the left encourages this sort of thing because it has an overarching “ends justifies the means” mentality. Far more dangerous.
But that doesn’t mean I’ll ignore what the right does that I disagree with. I didn’t go from left to right for that purpose. When I was a liberal I never marched in lockstep with the left, always criticized it and questioned it when I saw errors (I just didn’t read enough from non-liberal sources to see all the errors and lies that the left was putting out). I won’t make excuses for the right, either, when I see things I don’t like.
I wonder if anyone had ever thought that the principle strategic reason the Left was against liberating Iraq was merely because they didn’t want their political enemies in the US to gain the victory where their US military allies could overthrow a popularly elected totalitarian dictatorship. Since, after all, the Left was building on that very regime here in the US. They certainly didn’t want the US Marines, a faithful ally of the US Constitution and its people, to obtain high morale and good experience fighting a corrupt dictatorship or a murderous terrorist regime. It might get in the way of Democrat slave plantations like Chicago if ever somebody set the US Marines free on Chicago’s streets. As was done in Fallujah.
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jm, a great piece there.
I postulated that when humans are faced with adversity they have two paths they can take: change the world or change themselves.
“Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
It should be noted that the source of the quote, Marx’s Theses of Feuerbach, was published in 1845 and pre-dates the Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1848.
At that point, it was still a general philosophical position that was not yet particularized to Marxist revolution, though it was well on its way.
Activists across the political spectrum – not just on the Left – consider the Theses of Feuerbach a seminal work for the activist mindset.
Excuse me – Theses *on* Feuerbach, not of.