I was thinking the other day: what do we call something which is in constant motion, but whose motion is precise, predictable, and programmable? Answer: a machine.
What is the goal of the Communists? The eradication of personal difference. Of stable personal identity which is separate from the State.
Ponder what was done, especially, by the Chairman Mao Obama’s short term Ministry of Propaganda Director Anita Dunn found so attractive. They took people away who objected, say, to Communist Party officials taking bribes, or abusing their position for sexual favors, or who insisted on the right to free speech, or the right to bequeath their possessions to their children, or who objected to the mass murder of supposed “bourgeoisie” by Communist Brownshirts. Think of all the things you don’t like about your boss, or community, or church, or neighbor, or the local cops and make speaking out about it a criminal offense.
They ship you off to a camp which literally tries to reprogram your mind, as if it were a machine. They developed very well tested techniques, which included mild starvation, hard labor, chanting slogans, and confessing your “crimes” in front of others, and begging for forgiveness. What was the goal of the whole thing? To make of society a machine, which would perform whatever task the leaders wanted, when they wanted it, without question.
If you erase all qualitative differences–say that of Christian versus Jew versus agnostic, versus atheist, versus athlete versus bookworm, versus introvert versus extrovert, versus Italian versus Irish versus political versus apolitical, etc–then what do you have left? Seriously: what do you have left? What holidays do you celebrate and why? Is there somewhere to go on Sundays to build community?
What the revolutionaries will tell you is that they will build holidays for you. That the church that matters is that of the “revolution”. Yet, none of this is organic. Nobody gets to choose it. If you don’t like it, then you are force fed the doctrine until you accept it, or they kill you. How is this compatible with anything good in human life?
The simple reality is that human communities are creating constantly. We are constantly building, in an organic way, sustainable cultural forms that people can live with. Socialists reject all of this. All that NEEDS to happen is non-interference, but what does happen is that any and all claim truth claims that anyone wants to make are rejected, if they differ at all from the Party line.
Fundamentalism, for example, is always something that looks forward. It looks like it looks to the past, but what is it, really? It is a solution for the present, based on what seems to have worked in the past. It looks forward.
In my view, there is no more fundamental evil or cruelty than attacking people’s sense of meaning. This is something that is, invisibly, in a constant process of renegotiation, throughout our lives. As something that attacks, explicitly, people’s sense of self and meaning, Communism is the most atrocious, horrible doctrine ever invented in human history.
The Nazis just killed people they didn’t like. The Communists killed far more, numerically, but worse still in my view (I believe in survival of death) were their efforts to derange the minds of ordinary people, to sap their sense of self, of personal will, and all the comforts that identity can provide.
Communism is a form of Satanism, where Satan is a symbol of that force in human life that conflates creation with destruction, and which exalts in the inflicting of pain.
I have probably said this, but Sade was consistent in choosing, mainly, to inflict pain through books. He was, of course, largely constrained from realizing his demented desires by lack of money, and by spending most of his life in jail. At the same time, the deepest, most profound cruelty is that of attacking people in their moral sensibilities. I do believe in Hell–I have seen it–and feel that it’s most horrible depths are reserved for people like him.
Only slightly less culpable are those who should have seen him and his ideological descendants, like Sergei Nechaev, for what they are, and chose not to.