I don’t know if these games actually help me think better, but what I have noticed–and I do think I have commented on this, but will comment again, since I can’t remember exactly what I said–is that there is a part of me which holds onto patterns which cause me to make mistakes. I get in touch with a psychological stickiness. There is a need there, which makes me stupider.
Even in apparent abstraction, even in places where emotion should not intrude, it does, clearly.
And I would submit that most of the maladies of the modern world stem from something like what causes me to make mistakes on River Ranger or Speed Match.
When you are dealing with abstract problems, the abstract solutions can be suffused to overflowing with emotion, drenched in it, composed with it, but expressed in such a way that they seem rational.
What else, to take obvious examples, could the obsession with Jews the Russians had be composed of? Lenin created the process of what might be termed “classicide”, and all Hitler did was take that same “logic”–which indeed predated both Lenin and Hitler–and apply scientific efficiency to it.
One can indeed speculate that if Russians were built psychologically more like Germans, if something like a Final Solution might not have been implemented with regard to the people the Communists disliked.
On consideration, though, no. Communism is very different from Nazism. The narcissism and inward-looking of the Nazis had content. There was in fact a German nation, a German history, a German language, a German culture. When Hitler said “German”, there was a concrete, if idealized, referent.
When Communists refer to “the workers”, there is no referent. Russia in 1917 was an agricultural nation, where something like 10% of the economy or less was industrialized. The entire coup by the Bolsheviks was a sham. It was based on the lie that people who knew nothing about a class which was in any event nearly non-existent within their domain could speak for them, work for them, build for them, better them.
And historically, the oppression fell first and hardest on the very workers in whose name what they disingenuously called “The Revolution” was conducted.
But there is never any there where Communists are concerned. This means they never actually agitate FOR anyone, not even themselves, at least consciously. It is a confusion, a mental illness, a sort of schizophrenia, where whatever needs to be true for them to retain some semblance of psychological structure is treated as if it were true.
And the Big Lie upon which all Communists rest their sense of self is that the project is intended to improve humanity as a whole. Not some segment of it, which was the Nazi’s project, but all of it. All of us are supposed to be made better by their obsessions.
This means logically that conscious mass murder is anathema. It is acting as if they were not the saviors of the world, not the creators of a mass utopia. It is rejecting people in principle who would love them if they only understood them as liberators.
And if you look at Communist death counts, the vast bulk of them are from famine. Stalin used the Holodomor to bring the Ukraine under control, yes, but I think he also needed the food to feed his loyalists, since his system was failing already everywhere. Mao thought the peasants–and they were peasants under him too–were hiding food, and that reports of the failure of his crop seeding ideas, which he thought were genius, were lies. In Ethopia, their state of delusion was so complete that they thought moving people from one place where farming worked, to some other place where it did not, would be effective policy simply because miracles happen, and whatever they needed to believe to protect their own psychological integrity HAD to be true.
Thus, I would argue the true crime of Communism as an ideology is not the death count, not the genocides which it plainly has committed, but rather the pervasiveness of what I called Psychicide, the manic need to destroy human souls, human spirits, in order to protect the psychotic impulses of people who have used abstraction to manage emotional excesses which they have hidden from their conscious awareness and thus conscious control.
Reading this, I see there is a connecting thought I have not fleshed out, but for students of history, or any long term readers of my blog, the pattern should be clear enough. We should not excuse the Cubans, as one example, simply because their version of Communism did not result in the deaths of large numbers of Cubans. Their project–their continuing project–has been to convince the Cuban people that they love their leaders, that they love mass incarceration, humiliation, and poverty. Their continuing project has been to enslave the minds of their people, to facilitate their physical enslavement, which is made in the minds of Communists liberation, because that is what they need to believe. Ah, I’ll leave it there.
I am quite capable of delivering sermons like this face to face, but do not presently know anyone who would listen. Still, I feel better. I’m going for a walk, then to get something to eat.