That Unreal Communism

I suppose it’s not unlike when people say, in an offhand way, “Oh, communism is a good idea; it just doesn’t work in practice.” In fact, communism, in all its iterations, is a monstrous idea, a nasty moocher’s fever dream, the psychology of which is pathological – hence the number of narcissists and sociopaths attracted to it – and the practical implications of which are obscene.
Now seems a good time to quote a bit of an earlier post, from the last four paragraphs here:

There are of course those who read Marx and Engels while somehow ignoring the salacious references to “revolutionary terror,” the “murderous death agonies of the old society” and the “complete extirpation” of “reactionary peoples” – i.e., thee and me – as if the horrors that followed had nothing at all to do with the urges to which they give intellectual license. An abstracted, sanitised belief in Marxism – detached from its consequences – isn’t just an oversight. It requires colossal bad faith, especially among the intelligent.
To read Marx and Engels – to say nothing of Trotsky and his enthusiasm for guillotines and the prospect of beheading people who didn’t wish to be communists – to read such material and somehow not grasp where that thinking goes isn’t just a failure of critical wherewithal. It’s a contrivance. Just as some contrive an indifference when faced with Engels’ eagerness to see “the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples.” A global class genocide that would be, in his words, “a step forward.”

The Dalrymple piece on Eric Hobsbawm, via the link above, is also worth a squint.

Any political system that can’t work unless the initial conditions are exactly right will inevitably fail; not least because nobody knows what the right initial conditions for tomorrow morning will be.

“…Marx’s appalling behaviour and personality in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals. And there’s an essay by Thomas Sowell, Marx the Man, which I think is collected in the Thomas Sowell Reader.”
Yes indeed. Both are excellent sources.

I trust I didn’t miss anything.
Act casual. Say nothing.

One more time.

Because it’s probably wise to remember these things.

And what’s this reference to the “Champagne Room” and associated “entertainment!?!”
Ah yes, the two-hour lingerie and tickling package.

humans can give their loyalty to ever larger groups

.
Yep, I’ve heard that one. Always mouthed by people who (in actual practice) reject loyalty to anything but “cause”; as cover for the fact that they’re fundamentally disloyal, down to the ground. “Oh, I have a loyalty, but she’s in Canada. You haven’t met her”.
And of course those larger loyalties require some middling level of mutual trust (even loyalty!) on the local level to actually function, otherwise Rome…

I’ve spent many an hour on the Grauniad website quarreling with Marxists. Three observations:
1. They will quibble endlessly over definitions.
2. They are the world’s biggest excuse makers.
3. Evidence means nothing to them. They are the polar opposite of empiricists.
I sometimes take the approach of asking them “Given the catastrophic history of attempts at socialism, how many more millions must die before we get it right? We deserve an answer to that before trying again.” That cuts through at least some of their B.S.

Loyalty to self-flattering ideas
Vanity trumps all else. It’s the egalitarian way.

That.
Advocates of communism – usually as an absurdly sanitised ideal, and from a position of safety in a rich, liberal society – often count on the rest of us not having read the biographies and correspondence of its originators.

“Within a week of Kaplan’s attack on Lenin the Petrograd Cheka shot 512 hostages, many of them former high ranking tsarist officials. In Kronstadt, soldiers killed 400 hostages in one night. Soon the killings spread to the provinces. No regard was made to personal guilt or responsibility; the victims were selected on the basis of their class or profession. “Never had a modern society killed its people so readily” the historian W. Bruce Lincoln observed of the Red Terror. To the Bolsheviks, believers in Marx’s notion that the death of the bourgeoisie was a historical inevitability, doing away with the ruling class was simply an act of Euthanasia. “There is nothing immoral” Trotsky coldly affirmed, “in the proletariat finishing off a class that is collapsing: that is its right”
Former People by Douglas Smith

And let’s not forget this:

A couple of years ago, the then minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was “not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans.

As noted previously, the left’s self-imagined radicals have little to gain from successful, independent people. Because success and independence – independence of them – makes you the enemy.

So much that.
And this is framed as altruism, as caring, the measure of virtue. To me, heathen that I am, it looks more like a desire for mastery over livestock.

Let us not forget Bill Ayers, friend of former President Obama:
In No Place to Hide, Grathwohl explains that the Weathermen actually believed that they would be successful in overthrowing the U.S. government and that, with the help of the Cubans, Chinese, Russians, and North Vietnamese, they would occupy America. Americans would have to be “re-educated” in camps, similar to what the communists did in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and other countries they had taken over. Here is one of the chilling revelations Larry Grathwohl made in the film:
I asked, “Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.
And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.
And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.”
Twenty-five million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.
Source.

Slightly off topic, but here is Ronan Deasy on Ken Loach’s cognitive dissonance. Thurston Moore and Roger Waters also get a bit of a shoeing from Mr. Deasy, who comes across as a splendid chap.

“I got more millionaire lawyers than you know what to do with you stupid bitch.”
And yet he can’t afford his own cigarettes? Not sure what the lead in to all that was but I’ve only been to Savannah a couple times. Never did it occur to me that police officers there would gladly dispense cigarettes to those who ask. But then again, I don’t smoke cigarettes so how should I know? Never mind…

After viewing The Truth About Karl Marx I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole rotten history of communism is an attempt at justifying terrible behavior.

Here’s something making the rounds, originally from Reddit and posted by “Bob the Cheesemaker”:

I won’t be repeating it. My wife and I sold our wedding and engagement rings to buy guns and gun training courses. We won’t let Trump take our ethnic neighbors. Some day we all need to train ourselves to protect our democracy before it’s too late. It sucks that I wake up crying every day now because this is our world. I wasn’t meant to be a soldier I was a cheese maker. I made fucking cheese but now I’m a soldier thrown into some Hitler remake god it’s awful.

9.4/10, needs more “genderqueer siblings of color”. Still, this is a very ripe and well aged hysteria that will only get better with time in the pantry.