Not To Worry … You Have It in Writing!
We’ve all heard the exculpatory phrase: “communism might not work but it looks good on paper”.
Well, No. It does not.
It looks terrible on paper! In fact the original paper that it’s on consits of the twisted, convoluted, unintelligible pages of a book by a 19th Century German n’ere-do-well bum famously named Karl Marx. It’s title is “Das Kapital” or just plain “Kapital”.
Marx was an intellectual whose words were aimed at overthrowing the greed of money grubbing capitalists and then later turned around by communists to justify the greed of money grubbing communism.
In my humble opinion the book is all but unreadable except maybe to intellectuals. But that’s just me. People who claim they’ve tried reading it, including the few self-professed Marxists I’ve met seem to consider bafflement roughly the same as wisdom.
Check it out at the library if you don’t believe me.
Old Karl was an admirer and follower of another German wizard whose writing was even more dense and impervious to sense by the name of G.W.F Hegel.
Hegel believed that history unfolded in a scientific manner. No, I’m not kidding. He said history could be understood as a science and also known and predicted! Yes! History could be predicted! Scientifically! Thesis, he maintained, generates antithesis and is resolved in synthesis. He called this process the “Dialectic” and according to Hegel, it was what made The State which, to him, was the very culmination of history, actually god. This is yet another fragment of genius that doesn’t look good on paper.
By the time you read Hegel and understand him you will more than likely have become insane.
Doubt me? Here’s just a tiny tidbit of Hegel’s profundity on the subject of gravity:
“Gravitation is the true and determinate concept of material corporeality, which is thereby just as essentially divided into particular bodies, and which has its manifested existence, the moment of external individuality, in movement, which is thus determined immediately as a relation of several bodies.
Did you get that?
Marx condensed his poetic vitriol into a little tract which he titled “The Communist Manifesto” which is probably the only part of his contribution to human wisdom that anybody actually reads. But it served its intended purpose when it fell into the hands of Vladimir Lenin, chief Bolshevik of the bloody Russian Revolution.
Lenin saw that the French Revolution was good at ridding society of aristocrats and the middle class by cutting off their heads and taking their stuff. Revolutionaries since have used the same tactic and have appealed to the lower classes by promising to loot or kill a lot of middle and upper class people and sharing their stuff. I give you Comrade Stalin. I give you Comrade Kim and Comrade Pol Pot and Comrade Chavez and Comrades Maduro and Castro and Xi. This sharing would be directed by The State, of course, which, as Hegel already pointed out, was god. How you got there didn’t matter because the end justifies the means. And the end, don’t forget, is god.
But, wait! If the state is god then why do its vital working parts consist of mere people? The answer is that the people who make up the state are the proletariat and have no choice but to mindlessly fulfill the destiny imposed upon them scientifically by the dialectic to rule everybody. That sort of explanation was what became known in our time as “drinking the kool-aid”.
Kind of like “the divine right of kings” one might imagine.
The never-disclosed little secret behind it all is that the god-state is actually a small gang of thugs, be they kings, Mullahs or communists, who pretend piety to the god-like aims of taking money from rich people to help the poor while stuffing their pockets with money from taxes or given to them by book publishers or rich oligarchs inside the thuggery. That remains the case all over the world today, where people rummage through garbage dumps to find food while their beloved heroes of fairness and social justice selflessly import caviar and Kobe beef, swill the most expensive French wines and wear Rolex watches costing more than a new pickup truck.
However, Kim did make it illegal for any of his subjects to commit suicide.
There probably has never been a time when the masses of ordinary people haven’t been plundered by the few in power. That would seem to be an essential trait in human cultures which we share to some degree with wild animals, notably pack animals such as wolves and apes.
Noble Aspirations and Useful Idiots
Lenin was a crafty, sort of Machiavellian guy who knew that stupid people were gullible and attracted to noble causes like saving the workers from greedy capitalist pigs and equality for all and universal justice. He specifically included intellectuals as being the most susceptible to digesting hogwash and would do the heavy lifting for communism. He referred to them as “useful idiots.” They read Hegel and Marx. They understood.
We’ve come a long way from those dismal early days of class struggle and the guillotine and blood in the streets. Today’s Marxism is no longer economic Marxism but cultural Marxism in which the big shots conspire to destroy western civilization more or less just for the hell of it. However they still fund collectivist schemes and are still making out like the bandits they are and sailing the world in billion-dollar yachts and profiting from war and laughing all the way to the bank and to their yearly little pow-wows at Davos.
What makes Communism really stink is its claim to saintliness. Same for Fascists. Same for Republicans and Democrats. Same for Klaus Schwab and his jackass “New World Order”. Same for those slick, odious TV preachers, flitting around in $35 million private jets and wearing Rolex watches that cost more than a new pickup truck. Same for ex-presidents of the US sweating it out for “the little guy” in multiple seaside mansions. Same for the self-anointed saints of global warming and temperance movements. I could go on but you get the idea. Most of their holier-than-thou sanctimony is hogwash designed to take your money away from you and make you think you’re helping the “poor” or “the children” or, yes, the planet!
Communism, as J. Paul Getty once said of himself wants, quite simply, all the money in the world.
All of it.
Well said!!