For as long as Marxists continue to evade responsibility for the atrocities that their own atrocious opinions unleashed upon this planet during the twentieth century, then for so long will be necessary and desirable for anti-Marxists to go on attacking Marxism. For as long as it is seriously being argued that Marxism was innocent, or worse, that it should even be encouraged to rise again from its grave, then the rest of us should continue to stamp on that grave.
One of the best such stampings I’ve recently read – although it is more of an elegant and civilised application of the light roller, as if at a cricket match – is a piece by Anthony Daniels in the October 2003 edition of New Criterion, entitled History by other means.
His reflections are provoked by a trip to Cambodia, and by the uneasy feeling that all that charm and grace might merely be a mask for the horrors that erupted during the ghastly reign of Pol Pot. He reflects upon a writer called Vickery, who plays down the Marxist aspect of what happened in Cambodia, and plays up the Cambodian aspect of it all he can. Observes Daniels:
Perhaps not surprisingly, Vickery’s estimate of the numbers of excess deaths in Pol Pot’s four years of power is lower by a million than that of other writers. But what he is really trying to do (for when numbers are so large, the exact figure hardly matters from the moral point of view) is to exculpate an entire ideology: the Pol Pot episode was merely the continuation of Khmer history by other means, and thus had nothing, or nothing much, to do with ideology. “The Cambodian revolution. was in contrast to any variety of Marxism, classical or revisionist.” …
Ha! Daniels continues:
… As also were the Russian, Chinese, Albanian, North Korean, etc., revolutions. So Marxists can sleep easy in their beds – Marxism is responsible for nothing, certainly not mass killing and starvation.
An atrocious lie of course.
Most writers, though, take the view that without ideology, without the ideas that Saloth Sar (later Pol Pot) and his small group of associates picked up in Paris in the early 1950s, the history of Cambodia would have been very different and much less brutal. True, Cambodians have a record of brutality, perhaps even brutality of a particular kind – but is there any people that has not? Ideology raises brutality to a new level, and surely it isn’t very difficult to see threads that connect Pol Pot’s regime to other Marxist regimes, as well as to Marx himself.
It shouldn’t be, should it?
And that’s good news if you want to enjoy the company of Cambodians now. Daniels ends his piece thus:
This being the case, the visitor to Cambodia can begin to relax again. Maybe the Cambodian tradition has its flaws, maybe the country is not a full democracy and never will be; no doubt it is a very unpleasant thing to fall into the hands of the Cambodian police, who do not behave as they should. Maybe corruption is rife and the rule of law as we know it hardly exists. But the Pol Pot years really were different in point of brutality from all that preceded them, and were not the logical or inevitable outcome of purely Cambodian phenomena or developments. The charms of the Cambodian people are real charms after all, they are not a front for something else, they are not a screen for an unquenchable fire of hatred or a mask for national sadism. You can enjoy these charms for what they are, without having to agonize over their incompatibility with what happened twenty-eight years ago.
Or agonize about whether it really is charming, or just a front behind which yet more horrors hide. One of the nasty little things about Marxist regimes, along with all the nasty big things about them, is how even the charmingness of their people become insidious little weapons in their disgusting power struggles. For how could people as charming as this possibly wish us ill, still less be doing horrible things to themselves? How often did we here that asked of some tremendously charming Soviet Russian of the Cold War era?
I recently stumbled upon an extraordinary contemporary example of this phenomenon, from North Korea, commenting briefly on it here. It took me a while to spot the “North” bit, my unconscious reasoning being that clearly nothing this nice could possibly be happening in a place as horrible as North Korea is now. Because it is truly nice, I think.
Let us hope that the Twenty First Century will be a time when, on the whole, humans being charming doesn’t have a hidden agenda to it, but just means that humans are being charming.
The Marxists (Marxtwits?) will continue to evade responsibility because they do not care one whit about all the people killed. Marxism has become a psychological trapping; it is a way for people who want to be vicious elitists to garb themselves in the mantle of do-gooderism. They convince themselves that they are “for the people”, simultaneously looking down on “the people” as needing to be controlled and led.
Marx’s greatest crime is not his philosophy, but that his philosophy has proved unbelievably effective in masking the true intentions of those who promote it. Before Marx, a tyrant was a tyrant and didn’t try to pretend to be anything else. After Marx, many tyrants were “leaders” or “party heads” or whatever else they could come up with that wasn’t “dictator for life”. Pretending to have a philosophy while actually just taking power gives them the support of useful idiots the world over.
Thank you very much, Karl, you asshole.
Coincidentally I’ve just been spending the morning reading through an archive of his pieces here. I think he may be rightly called the Orwell of our times.
Has he given up using his nom de plume, Theodore Dalrymple?
Interesting article, but I don’t know if I buy into the author’s thesis that when kids get fat they become despicable subhumans. I mean, if being “gracile” means having to labor in the rice fields 24/7, then pass me the pork rinds.
As recently as two weeks ago, a professor responded to my assertion, in an essay, that Marxism was a thoroughly discredited way of organizing society by retorting that “This assumes it has ever been tried.”
Anybody who thinks the problem with the bloody history of Marxism is that its practitioners have not been “pure” enough in their ideology is living proof that “never again” is a wishful fantasy.
No word yet on whether this same professor thinks capitalism has ever really been tried.
I’m pleasantly surprised that no-one in this thread has so far asserted that socialism = marxism and therefore all socialists are as bad as Pol Pot.
Let’s keep it that way…
Alfred: Marx’s greatest crime is not his philosophy, but that his philosophy has proved unbelievably effective in masking the true intentions of those who promote it.
If the ones your refer to as those who promote it are the numerous dictators & terror régimes who labelled themselves as communists, then your assertion is a sheer anachronism to the extent that Marx (Trèves 1818 – London 1883) has probably never come across any of them. Besides, why not mention premarxist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (private property is theft), Giuseppe Mazzini (Giovine Italia, Marseilles 1831 – Giovine Europa Berne 1834 – Roman Republic in 1849), Mikhaïl Bakounine, Ludwig Feuerbach (materialism) & Germany’s Ferdinand Lasalle innovating with Prussian Otto von Bismarck to create the first European Social Security, still in force today in France (Alsace region + Moselle département).
The concept of luttes des classes was pre-existing Marx: see French historians like François-Auguste Mignet (1796-1884) –author of the lutte des classes phrase coined in 1824, Augustin Thierry (1795-1856) –author of Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (1825), F.-P.-G. Guizot (1787-1874) –recycled Mignet concept as early as 1828, Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) –the infamous executioner of La Commune de Paris.
But hey Alfred, thank you nonetheless for having trolled…
The article by Daniels is interesting, yet failing to face reality: the Khmers Rouges DID commit a genocide in the name of a vicious, wicked, racist ideology*. Marxist or not, they put up collective prisons, work & extermination camps, & denied Humanness, let alone elementary Human rights, to any individual who had the misfortune to be within their reach.
*they deemed their victims to be Khmer bodies nurturing Vietnamese minds !!!
Flat apologies to Admin for the italicisation.
I hope this will stop it.
Maybe socialism isn’t equal to Marxism, but I have yet to find a major policy or philosophy on which they disagree. In America, communists evolved into socialists when the historical baggage became a little too difficult to carry around. Most have now become “progressives.” They change their names often, like someone who writes bad checks for a living, and for much the same reasons.
Socialism = marxism and therefore all socialists are as bad as Pol Pot.
Libertarianism = bushism and therefore all libertarians are as bad as George Bush.
Amen.
Tim Haas:
Dr Daniels has beeen doing travel writing for many years, and he does book reviews too.
The identity of Theodore Dalrymple is very widely known. But it’s one of those things that’s common knowledge in medialand, and the farthest reaches of Blogistan, while notionally secret. [Like the story about Prince C— —— —— ——, the other one about Mr B—– the footballer, etc. …. but true.] For someone employed in the health service and prison service to write so critically about public policy under his own name would never do, hence a pseudonym is required.
Socialism is simply a layby on the Road to Serfdom.
First of all, I’m thrilled to learn that there is someone else in this world reading The New Criterion besides me. Great!
Secondly, the denial that socialism/communism never happened in the Soviet Union, China + every other obscure place on earth is wrong. It did happen, it did not work, and it was messy.
Anyone who are attracted by Marxism are (terrible) egoes. To lend the words of Robert Conquest:
“the notion that Marxism is a basic universal science leads to the condition in which many people professsing it feel that they are already fully educated and, in effect, capable of judging any subsidiary studies without adequate humility or effort. Hence, perhaps, part of its attraction.”
(Conquest, R. “Reflections On A Ravaged Century”, p. 52)
This is closely linked to the tendency of marxists (and all the other incarnations of it) to think that they know the best – again, it does a lot to your ego knowing that you know what’s best. When they fight for the power, this drives them; when they have power, they enforce this through a State; and when they notice that other people disagree, they kill them all. It is all a terribly bad egotrip.
(Note: I do not think all aspects of egoism is bad – taking care of ones private property and so forth is good)
Yes.
Cults, religions and, to some extent, political movements essentially ride the collective ego of their constituents, their need to believe that they know better, that they belong to the better part. That everybody else is wrong and stupid. And for some disturbed individuals, the smaller the group, and the more people are claimed to be wrong or ignorant of the grand conspiracy that rules the world, the more attractive the ideology.
Thankfully, many have enough self-esteem – as opposed to mere ego – to feel insulted by such crass appeals to the crowd’s emotional side.
Thinking for oneself is hard. Bowing to peer pressure is the path of least resistance.
Lately, I am finding political parties to be no more than modern churches. The liturgy, the masses, the rituals, the dogma you can’t stray from, the conformism, threats of excommunication, the way opponents are dismissed before they’ve even spoken and no matter what they say, the organization, the conspicuous and sometimes state-supported proselytism, the occasional witch hunts and shaming of heretics to the faith, and, of course, the claims of moral authority, the rulings on what to think, believe, eat and do.
It’s as if being secular allowed these organizations to behave even more religiously than the real thing.