One Hundred Years of Communism

Posted By Jef Costello On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

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[1]Tuesday, November 7th, marked the one hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (called the “October Revolution,” since in the Julian calendar it took place on October 25th). But you would never know it.

Vladimir Putin declared last year that discussion of the Revolution should be left to professional historians—and this year, despite the momentous hundred-year landmark, he said and did nothing. Asked about whether there would be any events commemorating the anniversary, spokesmen for the government simply said that they didn’t see any point in that. Yes, there was a parade on November 7th. But it was a re-creation of a 1941 military parade Stalin insisted on holding as an act of defiance against German forces, who were approaching Moscow at the time.

Yes, there was a demonstration in Moscow on Tuesday of Communist stalwarts, waving red flags and carrying portraits of Lenin and Stalin. But according to the U.S. media it attracted only “a few thousand” (which—who knows?—might actually mean a thousand or fewer). And this is no surprise. In a poll conducted just last month, only 6% of Russians said that they thought the Revolution was something to be proud of. The Russians saw firsthand the devastation wrought by communism, and they are still recovering from it.

Let us contrast the sensibleness of this long-suffering folk to the wooly-headed ignorance of our American “millennials.” In a poll published just three days before the anniversary of the Revolution [2] 58% of American millennials (that is, the generation born between the early eighties and mid-nineties) said that they would prefer to live in a socialist, communist, or fascist society. Communism and fascism each got 7%, whereas socialism got 44%. But one wonders how these young folk (who are often astonishingly ignorant) understand the distinction between (Left-wing) socialism and communism. One also wonders if the distinction matters at all. Such a poll result must be deeply puzzling to Russians and others who have actually lived through the horror show that was socialism/communism (hereafter referred to just as “communism”).

The mainstream press in the U.S. has also said little about the anniversary. This ought to be surprising (though I will cover in a moment why it is not). After all, is this not a tremendous historical landmark? It was one hundred years ago that the most revolutionary political philosophy in history was put into practice, taking control of the largest nation on earth. And isn’t it genuinely remarkable that this was all the result of the turgid prose of a poverty-stricken German-Jewish philosopher, scribbling away in a cubicle in the British Museum? Marxism then took hold of other countries, radically changing the lives of everyone touched by it—overturning the old order and ending thousands of years of tradition. The states inspired by old Karl then became locked in a decades-long “cold war” with the West, on which billions of dollars and many, many lives were expended. The Russian Revolution, in short, changed the world in incalculable ways. And it continues, directly or indirectly, to shape the world we live in. It continues to affect—again, directly or indirectly—the lives of all of us, no matter where we live.

So, you would sort of think—wouldn’t you?—that there would be a whole hell of a lot of attention devoted to the fact that we’ve now been living with communism for a solid century. You would think there would be countless news stories, commemorations, and academic conferences galore, devoted to considering the legacy of communism.

Yes, you would think that—but it’s not happened, and is not going to happen. And the reason is simple and obvious: the Left knows that if we paused at this significant juncture in history and took honest stock of what communism has wrought, the result would be devastating for them. Let us defy them and take stock, if only briefly, of why communism is the worst disaster ever to befall the human race since the Black Death:

And consider this grab bag of Communist infamy (in no particular order):

[17]

St. Grand Duchess Elizabeth, buried alive by the Bolsheviks

Did I miss anything? Yes, indeed. There’s a whole lot more that could be mentioned. Including the complete suppression of freedom of expression in communist countries, and the complete control of all aspects of public life—and much of private life. The drab dullness of life under communism. The long lines for bread. The shortages. The alcoholism. Children encouraged to rat on their parents. Artists and writers systematically broken in prisons, with the intentional aim of destroying their creative spirit. Houses and apartments bugged. Attempts by secret police (notably in East Germany) to “gaslight” dissidents. Science corrupted by ideology (notably, biologists in the Soviet Union were under pressure not to support hereditarianism). And still there is more.

When one sums it all up, it is difficult for even the most hard-bitten cynic and misanthrope not to feel intense moral outrage, and to see communism as a human disaster really without parallel in history. And yet, strangely, much of what I have cited above would be news to most Americans. Try the following experiment: ask normies who the greatest mass murderer in history was. They will almost invariably say “Hitler.” Treat them to the fact that it was Mao, who killed ten times as many and you will receive looks of shocked incredulity (and an occasional “Who’s Mao?”). I have actually done this, and to their credit a lot of the incredulity has to do with folks wondering why they’ve never heard this before—why it was, in effect, concealed from them. And it has been concealed, by omission. The Left does not want the facts about communism to be generally known: it does not want people to realize that it is in fact the Left—not the fascists or the Nazis—who are the greatest mass murderers and tyrants in history. Don’t expect to see any major movies accurately depicting the horrors of communism. Instead, it’s going to be Hitler, Hitler, Hitler from now till doomsday. But in terms of sheer quantity of murder and terror, Hitler and the Nazis were rank amateurs compared to the communists.

However, as many of you have already discovered, the Left has a ready answer when The Black Book of Communism gets opened: “that wasn’t real socialism” (they will seldom say “that wasn’t real communism,” for even they recognize how tainted that term is). “Real socialism has never been tried,” they will say. This response is quite simply obscene, and for two reasons. First, it implicitly diminishes the suffering and death caused by communism, by refusing to explore whether there is any relation between that suffering and death, and repeated attempts to create “real socialism.” Second, it is obscene because it is intellectual dishonesty of an extreme and unforgiveable variety.

Consider the following analogy, which I have actually used on Leftists. Suppose there was a game that people played—a competitive sport, call it Obstacle Golf—which was so dangerous that every time a match was held, every member of both teams would be killed. Suppose that people had been playing Obstacle Golf for, say, one hundred years. Suppose matches had been held all over the world, by different peoples in different countries. And the result is always the same. Suppose that those organizing the matches recognized that this was a little bit of a problem and so tried to learn from the mistakes of the past and to tweak the rules, as well as other aspects of the game. But that doesn’t do the trick: the result of playing the game is still disaster.

Now suppose, further, that you confronted an ardent fan of Obstacle Golf—one of those male sports fans who’s got every fact and statistic in his head. Suppose you suggested that given the carnage it might be time to give up on Obstacle Golf. And suppose he looks at you and says “Well, they just haven’t been playing the game properly. So, we need to keep trying.” Needless to say, no reasonable person would come out with such an answer, and no reasonable person would accept it. But this is precisely the sort of position taken by Leftists.

Of course, one has to make distinctions in dealing with Leftists and to realize that their position has changed in certain significant ways. But what is also important, and striking, are the ways their position has not changed. Very few Leftists in the West today are devoted to championing the plight of the proletariat—the working class, of whatever ethnicity. No, it’s sort of obvious to everyone that that didn’t work: the proletariat didn’t want to be liberated. They wanted bigger, nicer cars in which they could safely drive the wife and kids to the mall. So, the Left searched around for a different group to liberate, and it became non-whites. With the oppressed other now identified by racial category, the identity of the oppressor had to change: no longer bourgeois, but white. They have continued to discover—with undisguised glee—other groups to liberate: women, gays, “transgenders,” and now all signs indicate the next oppressed other will be pedophiles. But non-whites remain the gold standard in oppressed otherness, and the main focus of today’s Leftists.

The pattern is the same. In all cases, the Left seems moved by self-hatred: the self-hatred of bourgeois Leftists (most Bolsheviks came from middle-class backgrounds), or the self-hatred of white Leftists. They set upon an “other” to be liberated—whose liberation would scandalize and even imperil their own family’s group, whether bourgeoise or whites. This “other” is romanticized and invested with unlimited fantasy potential. When liberated, they will hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, without ever becoming hunters, fishermen, herdsmen or critics (to quote dear old Karl—God, if only he had been Groucho!). Hell, that’s thinking small: they’ll all be composing symphonies and building rocket ships to Mars. Once liberated, the other will then liberate the Leftist liberators: the earthy proles/non-whites, brimming with authenticity, will teach the cold, uptight Leftist bourgeois/whites how to feel, how to dance [18], how to screw, and (most of all) how to plumb the depths of their souls in a merciless quest to eradicate the last vestiges of their bourgeoisness/whiteness. And the cherry on the cake is that mom and dad are really going to be pissed.

Certain other things also remain exactly the same. One is the Leftist intolerance of dissent. So that we now see calls by Leftists to limit freedom of speech—something they have already succeeded in doing in Canada, the U.K., and Europe. “Racists” and “sexists” are counter-revolutionaries who must be destroyed: they must be imprisoned (if possible), and their lives and careers destroyed. Even their families and others who associate with them must be ruined. And if legal means fail, violence against the counter-revolutionaries is acceptable: something which, as you are doubtless aware, the Left is again openly advocating in the West. Another constant is the tendency of the Left to eat itself. The war against the bourgeoisness/whiteness in their souls can never end: deeper and deeper layers are discovered, and more and more must apologize for their privilege, for the very fact of their existence. Just being born bourgeois/white is original sin enough for condemnation—and all must rush to self-condemn or be branded counter-revolutionary.

Another constant is opposition to the aforementioned “hereditarianism”: the idea that heredity plays a significant role in making us who we are. This is actually MUCH more fervently opposed by today’s Leftists than it was by the Soviets. With the focus switched from class to race, but the clarion call still “Equality! Equality!” facts about genetic differences between the races must be ruthlessly suppressed, for the simple reason that science doesn’t support the myth of natural equality. This ban on biological fact applies also to the case of the sexes: in the name of “equality” Leftists now demand that we pretend we do not know that the sexes are biologically different, and that male and female prototypicality is determined by such things as different brain structure, and differing hormone levels. The whole idea of “social construction” would really have been too much even for Stalin, who no doubt would have thought it absurd. Yet there is a case to be made (too complex to fully make here) that the absurdities of today’s Left are a logical development or extension of the principles with which Bolshevism began one hundred years ago. Once we set up equality as our god, we must deny larger and larger swaths of reality: for nothing and nobody in life and in reality is equal.

Much more could be said about the constants of Leftism, put the point I have just now made leads me naturally to one final, perennial element of Leftism: hate. As I have said before many times, the central thing about Leftism is that it is a philosophy in revolt against life and reality. This revolt has many sources, but certainly one of the major ones was identified long ago by Nietzsche: ressentiment. Envy. Hatred of the good for being the good. Hatred of the successful, the noble, the physically and spiritually strong. As those in our set have often observed, the physiognomy of our enemies says it all: the fat, the ugly, the physically weak, the sexually stunted and perverted are out in force whenever and wherever Leftists rally. Feminism too is ressentiment: hatred by a minority of high-testosterone, frustrated, crypto-lesbian females against the men who built a world in which they enjoy unparalleled safety and luxury. And the feminist rebellion against “oppressive standards of beauty” is almost always led by women who would never be mistaken for beautiful, no matter what standard was employed.

In a recent article for American Renaissance [19], Ilana Mercer writes:

[Black journalist Keith] Richburg believes that on the Dark Continent, tribal allegiance trumps political persuasion and envy carries the day. He cites the fate of the Tutsi—an alien, Nilotic African people, who formed a minority in Rwanda and Burundi—among the Hutu who are a Bantu people. The Hutu have always resented the tall, imposing, attractive Tutsis, who had dominated them on-and-off since the 15th century. When Hutus picked up machetes to slash to bits nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, they were, on a deeper level, contends Richburg, “slashing at their own perceived ugliness, as if destroying this thing of beauty, this thing they could never really attain, removing it from the earth forever.”

As terrible as is the envy of black groups against each other (think of the resentment directed at lighter-skinned blacks) their envy of us is positively ferocious. We see it now unleashed in South Africa, and elsewhere on the Dark Continent, against white farmers, who are being hacked to death on a daily basis. It is this fury of the darker races against the white that white Leftists now want to unleash in the West, all out of hatred of their own. Hatred of their own group, because they can never measure up to the best our race has to offer. Hatred of those who are taller, thinner, healthier, richer, smarter, blonder, handsomer, more talented, more socially functional, more normal in the sex and sexuality department.

Of course, most of what I have said so far applies exclusively to gentile Leftists. While it’s true that Jewish Leftists are motivated by ressentiment, they also champion communism as a vehicle for their ethnic interests. I should mention that I don’t buy the claim that communism is nothing more than a Jewish plot foisted upon the naive goyim. That so many of our people have been receptive to it makes this a far more complex and nuanced issue (more complex and nuanced than I can do justice to here). And, of course, the treatment of communism as a Jewish conspiracy completely fails to explain how communism got such a strong foothold in the Far East.

Let’s not quibble about terminology: at its core, Leftism or liberalism is communism. This philosophy has been proven to be—time and again—deadly. It means hatred and intolerance and famine and war and the destruction of everything that is upright and noble and beautiful. This is a philosophy, again, in revolt against life. It has a will towards death and destruction. And the miserable, twisted fuckers who advocate it just will not go away.

Give them no quarter: remind them, ceaselessly, of the evils wrought by their ideas. And don’t just speak to them, for there usually is no converting these people. The way to deal with them is to defeat them, not convince them. So, speak to others. Tell them about how Mao outclasses Hitler so far as killing goes. Tell them the story of Katyn. Tell them about how Marxists have suppressed science. Tell them how, everywhere they have ruled, Leftists have suppressed speech and punished and even killed people for asking the wrong questions. Those who have open minds must be made to see, over and over again, that it is the Left that is the party of intolerance, hatred, violence, and oppression.

We must never forget—or allow anyone else to forget—the horrific legacy of communism. The Leftists have tried to intimidate all those who would advocate for whites and for the West with the specter of Right-Wing crimes. Let’s take a page from their playbook and do the same thing to the them.

Let’s make sure that in another hundred years, communism will long have been extinct.