I look at all the horror of the 20th Century, and cannot but be struck by how UNNECESSARY it all was. As far as that goes, most of the violence and terror of human history were likewise unnecessary.
The defining characteristic, I think, of the rejection of freedom is the rejection of time, of gradual change. All a “revolution” was–in France, in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, in Vietnam–was an effort to transpose a new static image in the stead of the old static image. Instead of a “class structure”–in reality, of course, endlessly complex, and filled with benefits for all involved on many levels–you have, supposedly, NO class structure. That one set of autocrats was replaced by another is normally lost in this analysis.
But always: cartoons, there on the page. Motionless, even if evocative. Unreal, even if they feel larger than life.
I read that in some quarters Marxism is on the rise again. How? Why? To the extent anything Marx wrote was non-cartoonish, it was falsified by history. His “science” was manifestly wrong.
What is his allure? He pacifies the free, in the hope that they will one day be relieved of the burdens of truth-telling and choice.