Their Hearts Were Pure, Even as Their Hands Were Bloody
This particular passage from the piece Aggie linked to below rings especially true, today as it would have fifty years ago:
The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.
They starved to death in the gulags for the greater good, in other words; instead of in the gas chambers for no good whatsoever. I’m sure that must have been some consolation.
Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder.
Hollander doesn’t come out and say what I will: that these same flaws are evident—prominent!—in liberals today. The tendency on the left to romanticize socialism is disturbingly coincidental with a red-in-tooth-and-claw attitude toward those who might not agree. We’ve heard it ourselves; we’ve reported it here. Orwell did so sixty years ago.
This is not news—but, frighteningly, it is not history either. Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s dark secrets over fifty years ago; Gorbachev repeated the process over twenty. Yet the Russians are more familiar with the crimes of the Soviet Union than we are. In the media and academia, Reagan is reviled, Ted Kennedy lionized. Yet one faced down the abominable monster of Soviet communism; the other would have done anything (and did do much) to accommodate it.
We’ve had our own Khrushchevs and Gorbachevs. Daniel Patrick Moynihan decried the condition of the black family forty-five years ago, a condition hardly changed despite decades of Great Society programs (and which failure has been acknowledged by many blacks across the political spectrum). Former liberals, from Reagan himself to humble Aggie and I, have called BS on our earlier views and comrades, earning pity at best and disgust at worst.
“Communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions”: remember that line forever.
Saul Levy said,
November 2, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
The government OWNS you. Sounds like Obama doesn’t it?
Carol said,
November 2, 2009 @ 9:52 pm
“From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” Ayn Rand demolished this beautifully in “Atlas Shrugged” in the scene where Dagny and Hank meet a survivor of Starnesville where the heirs of an auto company instituted this beautiful ideal. The result is invariably cannibalism. This is why I don’t understand why no one ever talks about the true evil of socialized medicine, which is the enslavement of medical professionals.
Bloodthirsty Liberal said,
November 3, 2009 @ 7:48 am
I recently had the opportunity to wait over two hours for a flu shot in a commercial area where a lot of very sick people were present because there was a walk-in clinic and a pharmacy line, all crowded together with the flu shot people. There were very few chairs, big, nervous crowds, and each shot took about 10 minutes to administer, due to paperwork. Many, many people were turned away because they didn’t have enough vaccine. And for the whole two hours, I ruminated on our future Obamacare. I wonder if this is what it will be like in the future to have a broken bone or to deliver a baby or to wait for treatment for one’s chronic illness.
- Aggie