've always been impressed by the ability of people to overlook the obvious. I lived
here for nine years before I realized that the flat, moss-covered area in my back yard
was actually a stone patio that had been overgrown with weeds and moss. All those
times I went over it with a lawn mower, I never realized there was an actual patio
underneath. I just wasn't paying attention.
That's what's happening in America: people don't realize the moss-covered thing they're fawning over is actually a monstrous ideology. Sure, it looks like a harmless rectangular field of grass right now, but underneath it's something much different.
Like religion, ideology provides a value system by defining a right and wrong. That's why socialism is generally atheistic: it's impossible to have two conflicting value systems at the same time. Ideology puts you in an unreal world where everything that happens fuels your rage. Socialist ideology is the worst. It provides the cover for people to do what they really want to do: express their desire for revenge by stealing and killing.
The only way for that to work is for everyone to be on board, which is why it suppresses freedom of speech. But that only goes so far. Those of us who read communist newspapers and listened to radio broadcasts from communist countries know that socialism creates an imaginary world where everything their enemies say and do is motivated by greed and some mysterious thing called “imperialism.” Oh, how they used to natter on about imperialism.
I guess they still do. Now they tell us that true socialism has never been tried. They're sadly mistaken. We talk a lot about Venezuela and the Soviet Union, but Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge showed us what the purest form of socialism looks like.
Pol Pot's motto—“We would rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live”—was a pure expression of vindictiveness. The Khmer Rouge wanted perfect equality, so they slaughtered all the schoolteachers, doctors, land owners, businessmen, former civil servants, and intellectuals. Then they started slaughtering anyone who showed individual initiative or who was more physically attractive than anyone else. In the eastern part of the country, the Khmer Rouge accused everyone of being “Vietnamese in Khmer bodies” and began systematically exterminating them, starting with militants and young people and eventually including women, children, and any surviving old people. The US CIA estimated that the resulting demographic deficit, which takes into account the precipitous drop in the birth rate, was about 3.8 million people; credible estimates are that nearly half of these were killed outright, primarily by blows to the head or by starvation. Starvation cannibalism occurred, though less prevalent than during China's Great Leap Forward. As historian Jean-Louis Margolin put it, the denial of the humanity of the citizens had a lasting effect:
Those who didn't cheat and steal, died. This lesson has had serious consequences in contemporary Cambodia, creating a cynical and selfish generation and seriously compromising the country's chances of development.
This is almost exactly how Solzhenitsyn characterized the Soviet Union's gulags. The Khmer didn't think of themselves as thugs; socialist ideology defined the parameters of what was right and wrong, and it differed from other Communist states only in degree. In socialism the state and the party are right, everything that challenges it is wrong, and everything that is wrong must be destroyed in order to achieve perfection.
It's fashionable to say that Pol Pot and his followers, like Stalin and Mao, were psychopaths, and maybe they were. But how does it help your case when every single politician who adopts it is a psychopath, and those who adopt it in its purest form are the most psychopathic?
Maybe, as is sometimes claimed, all humans are latent psychopaths, and their derangement comes out when the conditions are right, which is to say when they have something to gain by letting it out. Socialism provides that path. Its purpose is to justify hatred, violence, theft, coercion, and killing.
People talk about diversity, but socialism is the opposite of diversity. In the end, under socialism, everyone looks the same, believes the same, and is equally poor and equally terrorized. Under socialism you keep your head down and pretend to believe. If you're optimistic you look up in the sky hoping to see American B-52s coming over the horizon to liberate you. If you're pessimistic you hope for orange mushroom clouds.
Even communist Vietnam, which once had provided arms and training facilities, was horrified. Forty years ago this Christmas they invaded Cambodia and drove the Khmer Rouge from power. They fought the enemy we should have been fighting. Of course, their reason was not to fight Communism: there were border disputes caused by the North Vietnamese using the Ho Chi Minh trail, a transportation route that went through Cambodia to avoid American bombing, and there were the usual massacres by Vietnamese on Cambodians and vice versa.
Vietnam's ten-year-long occupation of Cambodia was characterized by condemnation of the “Pol Pot-Ieng Sary genocidal clique.” As a result of this conflict, China, an ally of Cambodia, attacked Vietnam. The world learned two things: first, socialist countries hate each other as much as they hate capitalist ones, and second, if true socialism were actually tried, your country would turn into a giant killing field.
Margaret Thatcher once said the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. The real problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people. The purer the socialism, the greater the percentage of their population that gets massacred. So in a sense the apologists are right: pure socialism has never been tried. Pure socialism can only be tried once. After that, humanity will be extinct.
jul 15 2018, 5:52 am
