Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Communism

  • Solzhenitsyn on Gulag Interrogation

    Here are some passages from The Gulag Archipelago that everyone should read.  A sample: If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would…

  • Reading Now: Lev Kopelev on the Horrors of Communism

    While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me…

  • Communism and Christianity

    Communism is a 'religion' refuted by experience. It delivered not paradise, but the gulag and the torture chamber. Its attempted redemption by blood succeeded in spilling oceans of it but achieved no redemption. It is only the spilling of the God-Man's blood that can achieve the redemption of man. Man cannot save himself. That is…

  • Trotsky’s Dream

    Here we find: Socialism, when it comes at long last, will conquer the hideous inequality of capitalism, but the groundwork, as it were, will have been done by capitalism’s destruction of feudalism and slavery.  We may allow ourselves to dream, with Leon Trotsky, that under socialism, “[m]an will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his…

  • Berdyaev: Communism as a Form of Idolatry

    David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Touchstone, 1997, p. 55: After the Russian Revolution of 1905, the philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev analyzed communism as a form of idolatry in a way that proved to be prophetic. Berdyaev traced the origins of what he called the Marxist “heresy” back to the tower of Babel. In that…

  • Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment

    Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire…

  • The Fall of the Wall

    Thirty years ago, today. Here we come face to face with the fundamental reason for the collapse of European Communism. For all of the sophisticated “structural” and “materialist” analyses of the Communist world, it comes down to the simple fact that the European Communist rulers—most of them anyway—lost the will to shoot their own people…

  • Trotsky’s Faith in Man

    On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own. …………………………………………. The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime…

  • Catholics Defending Communists!?

    Hats off to Rod Dreher for condemning the Jesuit magazine America for publishing an article defending commies.  Excerpt: Wait a minute. No fair-minded and intellectually curious person could object to an essay in a Catholic magazine criticizing the excesses of capitalism. It’s also easy to see the justification for publishing an essay defending democratic socialism…

  • On Securing a Toilet in the Soviet Socialist Craphole

    Yet another reason why you don't want the U. S. to become the S. U.  Bernie Sanders take note! Rod Dreher reports that a Russian friend visited him and recounted the following story: Vladimir told a great one about how his father, during Soviet times, solved the family’s toilet problem. When the family’s toilet bowl…

  • Why Did Communism Fail?

    Richard Pipes, Communism: A History, Modern Library, 2001, p. 154: In sum, Communism failed and is bound to fail for at least two reasons: one, that to enforce equality, its principal objective, it is necessary to create a coercive apparatus that demands privileges and thereby negates equality; and two, that ethnic and territorial loyalties, when…

  • The Rosenbergs: Still Guilty After All These Years

    On this date in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death as atomic spies for the Soviet Union.  They were most certainly guilty as we now know. But no amount of proof of their guilt will stop the Left from lying about them as victims of  American 'fascism.' In those days we weren't…

  • Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

    I must have written this in 2004. It makes good on yesterday's promise to say more about why greed is not the origin of capitalism. …………………………………………….. The C-Span Washington Journal of 31 May 2004 with Steve Scully at the helm was particularly excellent.  One of the guests was a sweet old lady by the name of…

  • Stalin on Philology

    For insight into the depredations suffered by science and scholarship in Stalin's USSR, I recommend Chapter 4 of Volume III of Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1978). It is astonishing what happened to literature, philosophy, economics, physics, cosmology, and genetics in the Workers' Paradise. Not even philology was spared. Kolakowski, pp. 141-142:…

  • Dissecting Leftism

    John Jay Ray blogs on year after year and takes no prisoners.  I went on ego surfari at his site and pulled up a quotation and a reference for which I thank Dr. Ray: Good comment from Bill Vallicella: "It is difficult to get lefties to appreciate the moral equivalence of the two totalitarian movements…