When I was studying to be professionally useless, which is to say when I was on an almost (I still had to be admitted, and I will admit it was not a foregone conclusion due to my political tendencies) Ph.D track, sacrifice and particularly human sacrifice were a prime interest of mine.
My current operative hypothesis is that both serve to channelize in usable social directions the primal bestial energy of our gut nervous system. It seeks to kill, to feed. Animal sacrifices were often burnt, as the odor was considered pleasing to the “gods”, which is to say the human appetite. A “holocaust” is a fully burnt animal sacrifice.
The point I wanted to make here is that human sacrifice clearly plays a role in Communist societies. This is the role of the dissident, the nay-sayer, the “enemy of the people”, or worse yet, the “capitalist, or bourgeois pig”. Why so much death? It reinforced the class system, the social hierarchy.
This is the great delusion of Communism, that it does away with classes. I have called it Pharaohism, for the simple reason that it seeks monumental power, consolidated entirely, and to build upon that edifice a thousand year Reich. As far as that goes, why stop at 1,000?
The opposite of Communism is true egalitarianism, which rejects human sacrifice, which actually shares voluntarily.
The movement of human freedom is away from ritual murder, away from “acts of the sacred”, and towards communion based upon mutual affection, shared beliefs and practices, and a sense of our common humanity, and our common Verworfenheit.
Edit: I would add that the most stratified social system I know is that of the orthodox Hindus in India. Since they are all vegetarian, people assume they are pacifistic. Nothing could be further from the truth. What they have done is borrow a trick from the Communists and simply deny the very existence of an entire class of people–the Untouchables, Harijans, or Dalits, your choice–who they abuse in any manner they want to, any time they feel like it; and this is perfectly consistent with their religion, as they construe it
As I have commented from time to time the condition of the Dalits in India is worse than that of black slaves in America before the Civil War: http://www.ncdhr.org.in/dalits-untouchability/ Their numbers are vastly larger, too, and this condition exists TODAY.
Where is the Left? Fucking worrying about dudes with dicks being able to go into the women’s fucking bathroom.