A lively debate with Julian Assange in the middle. Horowitz talks sense as usual while Zizek appears to be off his meds.
Horowitz: "The natural state of mankind is war." Of course. Lefties would understand this if they weren't in a permanent state of self-colonoscopy.
16:00 Horowitz on religion and leftism as ersatz religion.
18:04 Horowitz: "Peace occurs only when there is a concert of powers, or a single power, that can intimidate would-be aggressors. Now I ask you, who would you like that power to be, other than the United States?"
26:06 Horowitz: "I have to go to universities with body guards because of the fascist Left in this country."
This is a revision of an entry originally posted on 11 February 2010.
Ernst Bloch, like Theodor Adorno, is a leftie worth reading. But here are two passages replete with grotesque exaggeration and plain falsehood. Later, perhaps, I will cite something from Bloch that I approve of. The offensive passages are from the essay, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse" in Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Herder and Herder, 1970, p. 32. The translation is by E. B Ashton):
. . . the law as a whole, and the greater part of the criminal law as well, is simply an instrument by which the ruling classes maintain the legal standards that protect their interests . . . If there were no property, there would be no law and no need for its sharp-edged though hollow categories.
No property, no need for law? That is plainly and inexcusably false. Obviously, not all crimes are crimes against property; there are also crimes against persons: rape, assault, battery, murder. Even if the State owned all the cars, there would still be drunk driving. And so on. So even without private property, there would still be the need for laws.
Laws reasonable and just are the positive expressions of (some of) what we believe to morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory. As along as there is a gap between what people do and what they ought to do and leave undone — that is, as long as people exist — there will be need for positive law, the law posited or enacted by legislatures. And since laws are useless unless enforced, there is need of agencies of enforcement, which are state functions.
But of course the very notion that a society in which no one owned anything would be desirable is ludicrous as well. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. When the State owns everything and I own nothing, then concretely speaking my liberty is nonexistent. But of course, Bloch, leftist utopian that he is, thinks that the State will wither away:
Though for a time it may continue to function in a bolshevist form, as a necessary transitional evil, in any socialist perspective a true conception of the State demands its withering away — its transformation into an international regulator of production and consumption, an immense apparatus set up to control inessentials and no longer containing, or capable of attracting, anything of import. (p. 33)
Sorry, Ernst, but this is just nonsense. The State cannot both "wither away" and be tranformed into an "immense apparatus" that regulates production and consumption. But even apart from this incoherence, no State powerful enough to establish socialism — which of course requires the forcible redistribution of wealth — is going to surrender one iota of its power, no matter what socialists "demand." Power always seeks its own consolidation, perpetuation, and expansion. That is one thing that Nietzsche got right.
This brings us to the fundamental contradiction of socialism. Since forcible equalization of wealth will be resisted by those who possess it and feel entitled to their possession of it, a revolutionary vanguard will be needed to impose the equalization. But this vanguard cannot have power equal to the power of those upon whom it imposes its will: the power of the vanguard must far outstrip the power of those to be socialized. So right at the outset of the new society an inequality of power is instituted to bring about an equality of wealth — in contradiction to the socialist demand for equality. The upshot is that no equality is attained, neither of wealth nor of power. The apparatchiks end up with both, and their subjects end up far worse off than they would have ended up in a free and competitive society. And once the apparatchiks get a taste of the good life with their luxury apartments in Moscow and their dachas on the Black Sea, they will not want to give it up.
The USSR withered away all right, but not in approved Marxist fashion: it just collapsed under the weight of its own evil and incompetence — with some helpful kicks from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.
Communists are not against religion. We are against capitalism.
A communist who is not against religion would be like a Catholic who is not against atheism or a teetotaler who is not against drinking alcoholic beverages.
What we have here is further proof that truth is not a leftist value.
Leftists, like Islamists, feel justified in engaging in any form of mendacity so long as it promotes their agenda. And of course the agenda, the list of what is to be done (to cop a line from V.I. Lenin), is of paramount importance since, as Karl Marx himself wrote, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach). The glorious end justifies the shabby means.
As for Islamists, their doctrine in support of deception is called taqiyya.
Islamism is the communism of the 21st century.
You should not take at face value anything any contemporary liberal says. Always assume they are lying and then look into it. Obama, of course, is the poster boy for the endlessly repeated big brazen lie. It is right out of the commie playbook. "If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan."
Our friend Mike provides us with an accurate overview of this pernicious Weltanshauung and rightly points out that it is by no means dead but (as I would put it) enjoys a healthy afterlife in those leftist seminaries called universities, but not only there:
I am convinced that ML [Marxism-Leninism] is alive and well in spite of the death of the Soviet Union. It has assumed new forms, discarded some ideas, taken some new ones on, but its spirit is healthy. Its spirit is essentially a collectivist one that does the following: It affirms that Man is infinitely malleable rather than limited by his nature, it denigrates individualism for the sake of collectivism, it de-emphasizes personal responsibility by making our behavior depend on things outside of our control, it relatives truth and morality by making them functions of group membership, it corrodes liberty for the sake of equality of results, it advocates the silencing of political opponents, and it is virulently anti-American (and anti-Israel, for that matter).
Many characteristics of ML are present in vibrant abundance among a large number of political movements, particularly its hatred of capitalism and its emphasis on ‘imperialism.’ These political movements include the environmentalist movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the sustainability movement, the social justice movement, the social equity movement, the discipline of Sociology, nearly any academic discipline with the word “Studies” in it, and so on and on. ‘Political Correctness’ is a phrase that we rightfully use disparagingly to refer to any number of aggressively Leftist movements and tendencies that threaten the value of liberty.
Or, as I like to say, PC comes from the CP. Valle goes on to ask why Marxist-Leninist ideas retain their appeal and concludes with four important truths:
You may well reject my path, but what is most important is that you do not abandon these four beliefs: There is objective truth, there is an objective morality to which you are bound, human freedom is real, and we must all be held personally morally accountable for our actions. These four beliefs will inoculate anyone against the twin poisons of collectivism and postmodernism.
Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. This is one of the reasons why I am interested in the history of Communism. I want to understand PC, and to understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.
In her fascinating memoir, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (Oxford 1990), Healey mentions the tendency leftists have of purging one another on grounds of insufficient ideological purity: it is almost as if, for a leftist, one can never be too far left. Healey writes:
The great irony of the McCarthy period is that we did almost as much damage to ourselves, in the name of purifying our ranks, as Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and all the other witch-hunters combined were able to do. One of the most catastrophically stupid things we ever did was to choose this moment to launch an internal campaign against white chauvinism. (125)
'White chauvinism' was the term used in the '50s in CPUSA circles for racism. After singing the praises of the Party for its commitment to racial equality, Healey continues:
However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. Thousands of people were caught up in this campaign — not only in the Party itself, but within the Progressive Party and some of the Left unions as well. In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner. (p. 126 emphasis added.)
Healey goes on to describe how she herself was brought up on a white chauvinism charge, was forced to admit guilt, sign a statement, etc. She details how it was impossible to criticize even the most incompetent of Black party members. (pp. 126-129)
Not much has changed in this regard. There is nothing a liberal fears more than to be labeled a racist, and, like 'fascist,' 'racist' is a term they apply indiscriminately to their political opponents as an all-purpose smear word.
As the USA drifts daily farther in the direction of leftist totalitarianism, the words of Solzhenitsyn ought to be considered. Excerpt:
. . . the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies.
In partial answer to a reader's query, here are some good books about Communism. These are 'second-tier' books. First read Whittaker Chambers, Witness; Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (three vols.); Cszelaw Milosz, The Captive Mind. What follows is a 1 August 2004 post updated and expanded from my first weblog.
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I like reading books by and about Communists and former Communists. One reason is that I think it will give me some insight into the related phenomenon of Islamism, which would not be badly described as the Communism of the 21st century. Here are some out-of-the-way titles I have dug up recently. I have found them both enlightening and entertaining. Being ‘fair and balanced,’ as everyone knows, I read materials both sympathetic and hostile to Communism.
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Consists of sympathetic biographical sketches of numerous American communists. A very enjoyable read for those who enjoy psychology and biography.
Aileen Kraditor, “Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930-1958 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). An academic sociological study by a former commie, and Boston University professor “written from a conservative standpoint.” (Preface) Strongly recommended, and of course ignored by leftists. Note that I didn’t say,‘suppressed by leftists,’ because that is the silly way they talk. To ignore something is not to suppress it, any more than to refuse to sponsor or subsidize something is to censor it. Especially egregious is the use of 'voter suppression' by leftists to refer to common sense polling place requirements such as government-issued photo ID.
Bella V. Dodd, School of Darkness (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1954) Bella Dodd’s idealism swept her up into the Communist Party, as did Whittaker Chambers' and and the idealism of so many of the best and brightest of their generation. But after wasting years of her life in the CPUSA, it spit her out. Disillusioned, she turned to Catholicism, taking instruction from none other than Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in New York City. She had come to the conclusion that the brotherhood of man is possible only under the fatherhood of God. Her book is available on-line here.
Ron Radosh, Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left, Encounter, 2001. There are some juicy revelations about Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, on pp. 39-40. But I am too lazy to type them up. But I'm not too lazy to link to this great PP & M tune.
There are four new philosophical-political posts at Mike Valle's infrequently updated weblog that I recommend. Start with Marxism-Leninism and Islamism and scroll up. Excerpts with some comments of mine:
One thing that people got wrong with the communists, and they get wrong with the Islamists, is that they think that people can’t really believe this stuff. They think these people think that they are acting from these ideas, but they are really reacting to oppressive conditions, and these crazy ideological ideas are only an indirect way of expressing their frustration with their conditions.
What Bochenski argues for communism, I also argue for Islamism: Yes, they really do believe this stuff, and we insult not only reality but those very people themselves by suggesting that we know more than they do about their own motivations. Yes, an Islamist does, in fact, believe that Allah will reward him for his violent martyrdom. He believes it in the marrow of his bones. Not only that—he will believe it even if he is no longer oppressed, lives in a big house, has a great job, has a university education, and the rest of it. Throwing money at Islamists does not kill ideology. Ideology is more powerful than wealth. Just as with communist terrorists, the Islamist terrorists are quite frequently well-educated and, by the standards of history, not particularly oppressed. They are ideologues.
Mike is on the money. What's the best test for belief? Action! By their fruits shall ye know them. What people believe is manifested by their actions in the context of their verbal avowals. People who think that Communists and Islamists don't really believe what they say they believe are probably just engaging in psychological projection: "I can't believe this stuff, so you can't either."
But the fact that I can't bring myself to believe in, or even entertain with hospitality, any such nonsense as a classless society or the dictatorship of the proletariat or post-mortem dalliance with 72 black-eyed virgins as recompense for piloting jumbo jets into trade towers, or that the USA is permeated with 'institutionalized racism' – cuts no ice. People believe the damndest things and they prove it by their behavior, and the fact that other people can't 'process' this at face value means nothing. People really do believe this crap.
We all seek a transcendental meaning to our lives, except for those few of us who live as animals. National Socialism, Communism, and Islamism give people that meaning, and having such a meaning is, for many people, far more important than material comforts and wealth. I think this is fine, as long as one’s transcendental purpose isn’t murderously evil, of course.
Mike here touches upon the problem of misplaced idealism.
It is not enough to have ideals, one must have the right ideals. This is why being idealistic, contrary to common opinion, is not always good. Idealism ran high among the members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schuetzstaffel (SS). The same is true of countless millions who became Communists in the 20th century: they sacrificed their 'bourgeois' careers and selfish interests to serve the Party. (See Whittaker Chambers, Witness, required reading for anyone who would understand Communism.) But it would have been better had the members of these organizations been cynics and slackers. It is arguably better to have no ideals than to have the wrong ones. Nazism and Communism brought unprecedented amounts of evil into the world on the backs of idealistic motives and good intentions. Connected with this is the point that wanting to do good is not good enough: one must know what the good is and what one morally may and may not do to attain it.
It is therefore a grotesque error, one that libs and lefties have a soft spot for, to suppose that being idealistic is good in and of itself. The question must follow: idealistic in respect of which ideals? No doubt John Lennon in his silly ditty "Imagine" expressed lofty ideals; but his ideals are the utopian ideals of the Left, and we know where they lead. It is not good to be idealistic sans phrase; one must be idealistic in respect of the right ideals. Only then can we say that being idealistic is better than being a common schlep who serves only his own interests.
Bochenski was right about communism. Too many are still in denial or ignorance of the destructive and evil nature of communism (as were so many of my professors), just as too many are hopelessly naïve about the power of Islamist ideology (as are so many “intellectuals”).
I would add the following. Communism is not dead. it lives on in those leftist seminaries called colleges and universities. To understand the Left and its political correctness, you must study the history of Communism. As I have said more than once: PC comes from the CP!
A related point is that Islamism is shaping up to be the Communism of the 21st century. Which is another reason to study Communism.
Dr. Edith Bone was another of those who early on looked to Communism for a solution, but by the end of her life had seen through its false promises. In 1956 she was was released from a Hungarian jail after seven years of political imprisonment.
Another old post from my first weblog, written 16 August 2004. I'd best capture these old posts before Google pulls the plug.
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My tendency as a conservative is to see moral equivalence between Communism and National Socialism. This equivalentism is reflected in my occasionally calling Communists ‘Commies.’ This offends some, but if National Socialists may be called ‘Nazis,’ then fair play would demand that Communists may be called ‘Commies.’ Note also that if one calls National Socialists ‘Nazis,’ one obscures the fact that they are socialists – which is precisely something they have in common with Communists. Both systems are totalitarian and tend to dissolve the individual into the social whole. And both systems confuse this dissolution with salvation. Genuine salvation, however, is salvation of the individual in his unique individuality, not salvation from the individual by dissolution into the collective.
Slavoj Zizek, who is most decidely on the Left, denies the moral equivalence of the two movements. In On Belief (Routledge 2001, p. 39), we read:
…the Communist project was one of common brotherhood and welfare, while the Nazi project was one of domination. So when Heidegger alluded to the ‘inner greatness’ of Nazism betrayed by the Nazi ideological peddlers, he attributed to Nazism something that effectively holds only for Communism: Communism has an ‘inner greatness,’ an explosive liberatory potential, while Nazism was perverted through and through, in its very notion: it is simply ridiculous to conceive of the Holocaust as a kind of tragic perversion of the noble Nazi project – its project WAS the holocaust.
The obvious response to this is that there is no difference that makes a moral difference between a movement that calls for genocide –- the extermination of Jews and non-Aryans generally –- and a movement that calls for ‘classicide,’ the extermination of an entire class of people, the bourgeoisie. Extermination is extermination: you are equally dead if you are murdered for belonging to an ethnic group or to a socioeconomic class. Contra Zizek, the Communist project was not one of “common brotherhood” but of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – a notion that expresses a desire for domination just as surely as Nazi racism does. It is certainly clear that in practice Communism did not promote “common brotherhood” – unless you think that brotherhood is compatible with the murder of 100 million people. (This is the standard figure given for the number of those murdered by Communists in the 20th century. See The Black Book of Communism.) But my main point is that, regardless of practice, Communist theory does not aim at “common brotherhood,” but at the extermination of all who oppose Communist ideas. There is nothing liberal – in the classical sense –about Communism: they will not tolerate a diversity of views, but send you to a gulag for ‘re-education’ – or liquidation.
Zizek is aware of something like this objection and addresses it in an endnote which I reproduce verbatim:
So what about the ‘revisionist’ argument according to which the Nazi elimination of the racial enemy was just the repetitive displacement on the racial axis of the Soviet Communist elimination of the class enemy? Even if true, the dimension of displacement is crucial, not just a secondary negligible feature: it stands for the shift from the SOCIAL struggle, the admission of the inherently antagonistic character of social life, to the extermination of the NATURALIZED enemy which, from outside, penetrates and threatens the social organism.” (On Belief, p.154, n.34)
Slicing through the obfuscatory Continental verbiage, we may take Zizek to be saying that the moral difference between Commies and Nazis is that the former see the fundamental struggle as a class struggle within society, while the latter see it as a struggle between society and an external natural threat. But this does nothing to show the moral superiority of Commies to Nazis; all it does is reiterate a well-known non-moral difference between the two. Explaining how the two totalitarian systems differ does nothing to show that one is morally superior to the other.
The plain truth of the matter is that both totalitarian systems are morally reprehensible. That they are reprehensible in different ways and by different methods is entirely consistent with their moral equivalence. Zizek is committing the elementary mistake of inferring a normative difference from a non-normative one. But our Continental brethren are not known for their clarity of mind.
It is difficult to get lefties to appreciate the moral equivalence of the two totalitarian movements because there is a tendency to think that the Commies had good intentions, while the Nazis did not. But this is false: both had good intentions. Both wanted to build a better world by eliminating the evil elements that made progress impossible. Both thought they had located the root of evil, and that the eradication of this root would usher in a perfect world. It is just that they located the root of evil in different places. Nazis really believed that Judentum ist Verbrechertum, as one of their slogans had it, that Jewry is criminality. They saw the extermination of Jews and other Untermenschen as an awful, but necessary, task on the road to a better world. Similarly with the Commie extermination of class enemies.
William Voegli claims that the phrase first entered the American vocabulary in 1991. I don't know about that, but I do know that the concept is much older: PC derives from the CP, as I explain in Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness.
Poor Woody Guthrie. He never expected to see the day when the newsmen, the photographers, the media as a whole would proclaim singers like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, and Ry Cooder geniuses because they are leftists, and although like all good millionaires and billionaires, they use their money as Bruce Springsteen does — to buy homes all over the world and race horses for his daughter to compete with. If Woody was alive, he at least would be honest, and would have squandered his money and given it to the CPUSA.
So go and honor Woody — he was in so many ways a bard of those who were dispossessed and down under in the years of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and in his best works, he echoed their concerns and their lives. In his worst, he became a prisoner of the Communist movement he joined, who forced him to adopt political correctness on behalf of evil causes, and to write songs on their behalf better forgotten.
Remember this if you’re attending any of the concerts coming up. And if Tom Morello sings and I’m there, I’ll remain sitting, won’t applaud, and if you hear someone booing, it might just be me.
