The Way They’ll Do Your Life
July 14, 2019 Leave a comment
The Left’s dalliance with Socialism, redolent with wooing – “Money is in the wrong hands”, “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker”, “Workers of the world unite! A future to believe in!” – is not a relationship with socialism’s destructive life-wrecking persona as history accords. Rather, the Left speaks in highly charged (and romanticized) words of a life-saving relationship with socialism using the likes of the moral sounding “From each according to his ability; To each according to his needs”. The match-makers of the Left hype the ‘good-side’ of socialism to their ‘clients’ as one of REVOLUTION! CHANGE! EQUALITY! These beguiling words and many more are enticements for a marriage to politicized envy. They are words of an appeal to dance with the devil (and his details). Millennials who court socialism don’t realize the monster they are dating.
The reality: “From each to the State. Your needs are subject to the State.” Democratic socialism: Pull a lever and vote for socialism; Pull the lever and vote your will; Pull the lever and your needs and your will are submitted to the State.
Personal histories, as in the podcast below, expose “for the people” ideologies and economic systems. As you will learn, socialism dehumanizes the people… “for the people”. Here’s the intro to the podcast from the post She Survived China’s Forced Labor Camp. Now She’s Urging Americans to Reject Socialism.
Jennifer Zeng grew up admiring the Communist Party of China and adhering to its stringent rules. But her life changed forever when she embraced religion and was swept up in a government crackdown on Falun Gong. Arrested four times as a young adult and held in as a prisoner in a labor camp, she quickly woke up to the horrors of living in a socialist state. After being subject to brutal torture, Zeng managed to escape China and now tells about the evils of socialism and communism.
At a time when more Americans are embracing Karl Marx’s teachings, Chris Wright has helped Zeng share her story as part of a network called the Anticommunism Action Team. They recently spoke to The Daily Signal along with Darian Diachok, who escaped from Soviet-era Ukraine as an infant and has helped former Soviet satellite states democratize and overcome their failed communist systems.
The goal of socialism is communism. Vladimir Lenin
The legacy of socialism is one of devastation “for the people”. Beside the accounts in the podcast, personal stories via literature recount the actual eye-witness history. They have the greatest impact on the reader and certainly over myriads of facts. (I will write about the Left’s selective memory in a future post The Mau-Mauing of History.)
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
-Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Required reading w/quotes. These are first-hand personal accounts of life under the heavy fist of socialism:
“Apart from the massacres, deaths and famines for which communism was responsible, the worst thing about the system was the official lying: that is to say the lying in which everyone was forced to take part, by repetition, assent or failure to contradict. I came to the conclusion that the purpose of propaganda in communist countries was not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate and emasculate.”
― Anthony Daniels, The Wilder Shores Of Marx: Journeys In A Vanishing World
Three books by Alexzander Solzhenitsyn reveal the grizzly details of Life under Communism via his experience. (I read the complete volumes of Gulag and the The Life… in the 80’s. I just finished reading the stories of Apricot Jam:
The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged version)
“My life is over, a little early to be sure; but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die – now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, an so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.”
~~~~~
“The separation of church and state was so construed by the [Soviet] state that the churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was installed in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was that which … lay within the heart.”
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
“A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o’clock already.
“It’s sure to be twelve,” Shukhov announced. “The sun’s over the top already.”
“If it is,” the captain retorted, “it’s one o’clock, not twelve.”
“How do you make that out?” Shukhov asked in surprise. “The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime.”
“Maybe it was in their day!” the captain snapped back. “Since then it’s been decreed that the sun is highest at one o’clock.”
“Who decreed that?”
“The Soviet government.”
The captain took off with the handbarrow, but Shukhov wasn’t going to argue anyway. As if the sun would obey their decrees!”
~~~~~
“He ate his supper without bread. A double helping and bread–that was going too far. The bread would do for tomorrow. The belly is a demon. It doesn’t remember how well you treated it yesterday; it’ll cry out for more tomorrow.”
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories
Added 7/15/2019:
Here’s Democratic Socialism in action – mandatory action on your part. You must submit your will:
Venezuela calls for mandatory labor in farm sector
“Trying to tackle Venezuela’s severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, in a statement.
“the right to be unhappy”
January 24, 2021 Leave a comment
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,” he said.”
This conversation between John the “savage” and Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, takes place in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian science fiction novel Brave New World.
Mond had explained to John the World State’s system of castes, control and consumerism established to create order, stability and happiness. Under the World State the world’s population, economy, technology and culture are made to serve the mission statement: “Community, Identity, Stability”.
John, reared on the Savage reservation and raised on Shakespeare, rejects Mond’s world as described here:
What brought this novel to mind is the Left’s concerted effort to produce a similar globalist World State via the Great Reset. The “public health crisis” and the (illegitimate) 2020 election are the Left’s “gain of function” mutation of our rights and laws to bring about a World State.
Leftist professors, politicians, media provoking agents, Progressives, and even the Pope would have us believe that differences of class, race, income or XYZ can be resolved and that equality and freedom can be won by “A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.”
The Pope after the 2016 election:
So, are we to believe that communists think like Christians (based on the communist seizure of Acts 4:32)?
Are we to choose to live under a flag of “Community, Identity, Stability”, where the people, the poor … achieve equality and freedom, and then (theoretically) be free of worry, material want, hate, isolation, disease, and would then be happy!?
I have tried to understand the heuristic behind those choosing freedom and those choosing to be free of freedom and desirous of living in a communist state. The Brave New World suggests to me that there are those who choose fail-prone freedom over happiness and those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom. These two views are at odds. I see the difference going to the very nature of what it means to be human.
As we heard in John’s response above and from your own experience, you know that freedom involves choice. And, being able to choose goes to the very essence of being human, does it not?
A material object cannot choose. Artificial Intelligence cannot know the sense of adventure and surprise inherent in the act of choosing. Objects and AI cannot know a sense of failure or of happiness or of worry or of hope that a choice may bring about.
For those who choose fail-prone freedom, life is tragic, romantic and the sum of all human potentialities. Value is created through freedom and choice: love, goodness, charity, etc. These, taking the initiative freely, will say, “I see what needs to be changed, and it starts with me.”
(Now, you don’t want to make the same choices John “the savage” did. You’ll end up in a very dark place. But you get the gist of what I am saying.)
Those who choose fail-safe happiness over fail-prone freedom, it seems to me, trade their freedom and choices for a doled-out life of (theoretical) material security and certainty. These lay the burden of responsibility for their happiness on the World State. You can see this in the growing welfare state.
These seek to avoid pain and suffering and any effort that might bring about pain and suffering inherent in a choice. These seek the material comfort and surety promised by socialism’s “workers’ paradise.” These, lacking the initiative to choose, will say “I see what needs to be changed and it starts with you.”
For, those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom, in order to obtain fail-safe happiness, go on to coerce, cancel and control the lives of those who do not conform to the manifesto of the World State of Happiness.
Tragically, fail-prone freedom outliers are considered less than human by the World Staters and are sent to internment camps. You either live in the ‘civilized’ World State of the ‘enlightened’ ‘real’ people or you live as barely human on the Savage Reservation.
There are no families and no religion in the World State. Babies are engineered and hatched in the World State. Babies occur naturally within families on the Reservation. There is a syncretic religiosity on the Reservation. Those of the World State voyeuristically watch the savages and worship the assembly line developer Henry Ford.
When the World State requires you to give up your freedom along with your rights and your property so that it can mete out happiness in the form of physical well-being and solidarity with others in similar chains, what will happen to you? Years ago, I wanted to understand the World State of Happiness, aka, communism, and the threat it imposed on humanity.
During the early eighties I read the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s’ The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (I doubt that Pope Francis has ever read these accounts of the devastation to human beings under communism. He prefers messaging that affirms his Marxist World State religion.)
As I learned from my reading, communism dehumanizes. And, as humans are wont to do, Solzhenitsyn rebelled against the imposition of inhumanity – a communist rule. The rule had begun as an ideology to put things right and ended as an institution of purges, mass murders and gulag camps.
What is certain if you choose fail-prone freedom over happiness is that you are “claiming the right to be unhappy.”
What is certain if you choose fail-safe happiness over freedom: your claiming the right to be happy will not be heard. For, you will have been “reduced to matter”. Your human nature will be eradicated in your quest for security and stability, aka, happiness.
Further reading:
George Orwell’s 1984, Animal Farm
C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength
Theodore Dalrymple’s The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World
Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs: A Last Look At A Remarkable Presidency – Issues & Insights
Added 1-25-2021:
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Filed under 2021 current events, cultural Marxism, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, socialism, Solzhenitsyn Tagged with Communism, cultural Marxism, freedom, politics, Pope Francis, progressivism, socialism, The Brave New World, The Great Reset