The Mummy Lives – Careers for Communist Dead Heads

“He took care of all North Korean people with his warm love.”

                                                                                        Kim Jong IL on Kim Jong IL

The body of Kim Jong Il now like that of his father, Kim Il Sung, has been suitably embalmed and ready for a post-respiratory career as a venerable mummy.  The current speculation is that the National Palace will soon become a unique historical site where visitors will be able to gaze upon the corpses-in-repose of both the Father and the Son, Kim Sr. (“our Fatherly Leader” as he was affectionately called by his hungry and malnourished subjects) and Kim Jr., who made it through sixty-nine years, it is reported in the official obituaries, never having to defecate, immaculate in his own special way.

Should the North Korean people enjoy the beneficence of a long-lived Kim Jong Eun, a mere chubby-faced lad with many years ahead to enhance the paradise bequeathed by his elders, he will no doubt have performed many miracles of his own, maybe an even longer feces-free existence than his father.  Perhaps someday the National Palace will host for the curious to behold a rosy communist Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy --- well … expectations will no doubt be high for Kim III.

All of this must be somewhat disconcerting for the keepers and groomers of Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh – but perhaps not.   How many mummies mounted in gaudy mausoleums, after all, does a properly functioning communist dictatorship need to maintain?  How many can one afford?   In China, Mao, 36 years expired, is ubiquitous.  His visage decorates the currency.  His face is everywhere, on buildings, posters, tee-shirts, ties.   Long lines of Chinese still form to stroll past his bier in the gigantic hall.  Lenin, who died at fifty-four, is only two years shy of ninety years of mummy-hood.  He gets an occasional chemical bath, I have read.  One does wonder.

One also wonders if Raul Castro might be thumbing through the Greater Havana Yellow Pages under the heading "embalmer," readying himself to appoint soon The Master to prepare hermano mayor for eventual display.  El Lider Maximo is old and looking mighty peeked.  Pedro Ara, the Spaniard who did the nice work on Eva Peron’s mortal coil is himself long dead, unfortunately.  Unlike Moscow or Pyonyang, Havana, however, is really warm year around.   How much spare electricity on this island of notable basic scarcities will it take to keep Fidel’s withered cadaver looking, uh, revolutionarily fit?

The communist affinity for mummification of the Leader has become a comically symbolic gesture that speaks emphatically to the false and delusional nature of the system, a system that consists of everyone at every level pretending.  The Party pretends to believe in the perfection of the departed Chief, making even his corpse into an uncorrupted object for eternal contemplation and edification.  The people pretend to grieve and everyone pretends that the misery and depravation they experienced daily never ever happened under the rule of the Dearly Departed.   All is sweetness and light in the magic kingdom where the handsome Prince reigns over his happy and prosperous subjects. The mausoleum that holds his remains is constructed to remind everyone that visits of the vast goodness and unfathomable virtue of the Departed that never actually existed. 

This weird deification rite of passage for the Dead Heads was born in desperation.   In 1924 when Lenin’s brain hemorrhaged its last, the regime he imposed was floundering.  The Russian people were not happy with the progress of communism. The peasants were starving and the workers were worse off than ever.  At this moment of crisis, Lenin’s determined disciple, Stalin, needed a religious-like relic, a physical, personal object of grief for the peasants and workers who had not yet grasped the impersonal nature of Marxian dialectics.  It seemed to work, and the mummy in the glass box has become one of the more curious and ironic elements of “communist culture.”

  

Much of the outside world now contemplates the ghastly and hideous death rituals of the North Koreans dictators with macabre amusement and scorn.  There are notable and depressing exceptions.   In a letter of personal condolence to Kim Jong Eun, our very own Fatherly Leader, Jimmy Carter, wished the new dictator “every success as he assumes his new responsibility of leadership, [and was] looking forward to another visit [to   North Korea ] in the future.”   It would be enlightening, no doubt, to know how Mr. Carter imagined the new Kim might parse these well-wishing words.   

Where’s My Omelet? Or, Lenin versus Kant

“Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.”

                                                                  Immanuel Kant

“He [Lenin] was the only member of the local intelligentsia who not only refused to participate in the aid for the hungry, but publicly opposed it.  As one of his friends later recalled, ‘Vladimir Illich Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, particularly in the appearance of a new industrial proletariat, which would take over from the bourgeoisie… Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the state that necessarily followed capitalism. Famine would also destroy faith not only in the tsar, but in God too.’” 

                                                                     Black Book of Communism

In attempting to understand the savagery and ultimately the nihilism of Communism’s twentieth century global career, it might be helpful to juxtapose the Enlightenment’s sublime moral voice, Immanuel Kant, with the profoundly cynical calibrations of Vladimir Lenin, once he had power over the lives of others.  Lenin was Karl Marx’s supreme Man of Action, the arch revolutionary who did what Marx only dreamed of – he put the Capitalists out of business.  After that, so the theory went, life would be much better.  Well, except if you were a part of the bourgeoisie hoping for something to eat or inclined toward stupidities like faith in God.

It is difficult to conceive of a more startling juxtaposition of polarity of moral and human vision.  From Kant’s formulation of his categorical imperative each and every human being emerges not as an abstraction but as a unique person inviolate and irreplaceable, a creature whose very nature morally forbids that he become merely a means for the designs and ambitions of another.  To use another human being as a pure means is to de-humanize him, to turn him into matter.  As Kant saw it, human beings as rational creatures were bound by a moral law whose validity was tested by its universality, transcending the particularity of groups, classes, tribes, or race.  Everyone from the King to the servant was bound by the moral law, even God himself.  

Kant’s moral philosophy was one of the crowning achievements of the Enlightenment with its universality of reach and application across a rapidly emerging modern world where individuals from the entire spectrum of humanity would be becoming in some way connected with each other and in need of a moral vision that moved beyond the tribe.  Kant’s notion of an inviolate human core was articulated by Thomas Jefferson in theistic terms:  “All men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”  

For Lenin by contrast human beings were nothing but means, things to be used, not persons. They were material, waste products in fact if they were obstacles to his plans to elevate humanity and realize his utopian abstraction – they were to be assigned to the “dust bin of history” as his colleague, Leon Trotsky, put it.  Lenin was particularly fond of de-humanizing “disinfectant” terminology when speaking of his political opposition – liquidation, extermination, etc. – applied to “insects,” “vermin,” “leeches,” anyone basically who did not embrace his transformational vision.  Human beings were not for him individuals but disaggregated pieces of warring social classes that grind against each other and produce winners who rule and losers who conform to the winners’ will or die. 

Kant understood that morality is universally binding.  Morality forces one to concede the presence of boundaries of reality that may limit or frustrate specific desires and aspirations, sometimes very powerful ones.  Lenin eschewed any limitation to his action -- “Unlimited power above all law,” as he succinctly put it.  Fiercely atheistic, Lenin wanted to be God and craved unlimited power so as to remake humanity.   Almost un-human in his intellectual self-regard, his absolute self-certainty and conviction of omniscience rendered him unable to view those who opposed or resisted him as anything but human garbage to be swept aside and dumped into an abyss.  

Kant late in his life had reflected: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”  Kant’s frame was bowed and humbled by the vast reach of the universe and the deep mystery of the human heart.  Lenin, it is safe to surmise, was never awed by anything.  He was the Supreme Knower, absolutely convinced that he possessed the blueprint to restructure humanity and bring it to perfection. Kant for all the great power and breadth of his mind was intellectually and spiritually humble. Lenin was astonishingly arrogant with not a trace of humility, and his arrogance made him into one of the most ruthless individuals to ever walk the earth.  Only someone with such fanatical self-conceit could welcome a famine to sweep his land and enthuse over its “positive” effects.  This was a crisis that would not be wasted. Equally remarkable and appalling is the report of Lenin’s friend speaking of Lenin’s “courage” in announcing his pleasure over contemplating the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people.  The moral universe of the Bolsheviks was completely upside down, inhabited by men and women of the deepest immorality.      

Lenin’s had many disciples.  Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot were all cast from Lenin’s mold, supreme knowers, dedicated to the making the abstraction they called the Revolution into a lethal reality.  They excelled in breaking millions of eggs, but the omelets that were supposed to follow somehow never made it to the dish plates. Lenin was succeeded by Stalin, the consummate Leninist. It was Stalin, contrary to the wishes of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who decided to turn Lenin’s corpse into a mummy, to make the man who served the impersonal forces of history into a very personal piece of material for his own purposes, a Communist relic for the faithful to see and remember.    

After Stalin came Khrushchev, then Brezhnev.  Murder and extermination gave way to corruption and stagnation -- from Lenin, the fanatical believer to Brezhnev, the alcoholic pretender.  Finally, the urbane, well-educated Gorbachev.  Gorbachev’s impossible task was to extract from the nihilism that inevitably engulfed a land ruled by liars and frauds a pristine, original Leninism somehow forsaken by Stalin and his progeny that might rescue the Party and produce the long promised omelet.  Alas, the only thing to be had from Vladimir Illich Ulyanov was his mummy, bequeathed by Stalin, after decades still moldering away.       

The Style of Twenty-first Century Stalinism

Nation columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel (she will never be taken for a NASCAR follower) was in an exceptionally high dudgeon just the other day. (November 30, 2011) “We need a transformational presidency, able to smash the failed, entrenched and corrupt politics of the center. That standard isn’t some perfectionism perennially demanded by disappointed liberals. It is required by the times. And what this nation desperately needs isn’t partisan unity, but a fierce and growing movement that will challenge not just the wing nuts of the right, but an establishment in both parties that has failed the country.”

I was struck by the Stalinist style, particularly her call for someone to “smash” the old, corrupt capitalist order.  Well, she did not say “capitalist” but perhaps that was an oversight.  After all, she is writing for The Nation.   What a moralizing Pharisee this woman is.   “We need… this nation desperately needs…..”   Who exactly is the “we”?  It’s all of us, I suppose.  But only a cognitively gifted few can comprehend how really ugly things are, and more importantly, who is responsible for the mess and what action “is required by the times.”  Ah yes, she will have us know that she is not one of those whiny, disappointed, self-deluded liberals.  She has firmly grasped what is “required” (What is to be Done? as Lenin put it).  The Nation scribblers are among those immaculate few who stand far above the corruption, the greed, the failure, in sum, all that unpleasant, unnecessary stuff that you expect to accumulate when the right wingers and the centrists end up in charge.  If only they were.

What then is it that she thinks we all “desperately” need?    Someone, actually, a President, who is up for some serious smashing, a “transformational” sort of guy or gal.  The idea of a “smasher-in-chief” might make a good portion of the electorate inclined toward the “wing nuts” a bit nervous as they try to guess exactly who is going to get smashed and what it might feel like.   Many of the unenlightened might be quite happy with a modest improvement of the status quo, better employment opportunities, for example, but Ms. vanden Heuvel wants  a fierce and growing movement.”  To do what?   Challenge a failed establishment. 

Transformation” is 21^st century Stalinese for “revolution.”  The old order as she notes is entrenched.   It must be overthrown, smashed, transformed.   The premise embedded in this screed is that politics is war.   One does not argue with, respect, or engage the opposition.  It is corrupt and cannot be  redeemed. This premise has always been the foundation of Bolshevik intellectuals.

Crime and Punishment

Capital punishment has always been for me a subject of intense interest. Fifteen years ago, a close friend of mine ended up on Death Row in Florida (For an account of this see “Deceitful Above All Things” on my blog, Declarations, Explanations, Execrations) for murdering his ex-girlfriend.  She was not the first woman he had killed.

The reading of a newspaper article some years ago, however, had a profound and permanent influence on my feeling and thinking about this topic.  It was a short piece about two young men who had been apprehended after slaying a ten year old girl.  They had kidnapped her, raped her and then stuffed her panties down her throat thus chocking her to death.

After experiencing what I think would be the intense levels of revulsion and anger of most normal people at contemplating such a staggering piece of sadism, I began to think about what should be done with these men, what likely would be done with them and the vast disparity between the two scenarios.

I attempted a thought experiment and tried to imagine what might have followed a crime like this 100 or 150 years ago in an age of simpler jurisprudence.   Upon apprehension it seems likely that these two men would have been brought before a judge, given a quick trial, within days, and then hanged. No psychologists to consider their psychological limitations and produce relevant psychometrics, no psychiatrists to opine on their sanity and no social workers to lament their miserable family histories.  No one then would be much interested in learning about how bad their childhoods were.  Many people have rough childhoods.

Also, in this earlier time there would be few if any delays and no protracted system of appeals. The hideous crime and the harsh penalty would have occurred in very close succession creating a strong association of moral causality between the particularly brutal murder and the severe and swift punishment.

The child’s family would never forget or fully recover from the event, but, and this is a very big “but,”… they would not have to think about or occupy themselves with the future of the monsters who had done this to their daughter.  That part was quickly taken care of and done in a way that clearly, and some might say, appropriately, symbolized both the revulsion of the community with the crime and the importance of the victims and their terrible, unrelenting suffering.

Now the future for the two murders and the family of the victim would be quite different.  From beginning to end everything would be more civilized, more humane. Or would it?  Months, possibly years would pass before the trial took place. Between the conclusion of the trial and the sentencing, weeks, more likely months, would pass.  The sentence would be followed by a long, protracted review with appeal after appeal unfolding and lasting years, decades.  The process would crawl haltingly along and the victim’s family would follow the deliberations and decisions, relive the horror and feel the pain, over and over again.  The murder for them would remain for many years constantly in the present tense. Knowing that the men who inflicted this senseless horror on their daughter are alive, and, that their fate is still uncertain would arouse the worst sort of anger and confusion: how, remembering what they had done to an innocent, defenseless child, could these men be so wrapped in so many procedural and forensic layers of consideration and protection?

Also it is highly probably that the child torturers would have little or no money and so the state would bear the costs for the attorneys to represent them, a cost that would persist for many years as they make their way through the system of appeals.  Also the tax payers would bear the expenses for all of the psychiatric evaluations and examinations.   In fact, prior to the murder these two men would have never had so much attention paid to them and so many resources expended on their behalf. When, if ever, they finally faced an executioner, outside the prison there would be a vigil conducted by people protesting the execution and lamenting the death of the child slayers.

Is this modern way a better one to deal with people who do unspeakably horrible things to other people?  I have an observation which I believe points to a deeply disturbing pathology in our criminal justice system.

Consider the torture the families of the victims undergo as they wait endlessly and helplessly for the criminal justice “system” to hold the murderers of their love ones to account.  The state of Ohio just recently (November 2011) executed a man who had shot his three sons to death while they were sleeping in 1982.  So it takes three decades to execute a man who kills his sons.  What kind of a system puts the loved ones of a victim of a crime like this through decades of misery and anguish?  It is in my opinion a barbaric and cruel one, created and maintained by those who can no longer comprehend an act of depravity and evil and can no longer make a moral separation between real victims and those who made them into victims.     

Criminals have increasingly come to be viewed as ill rather than bad and as such fall under the care and supervision of mental health professionals. You do not punish sick people, you diagnose the illnesses. Diagnosis and punishment are in any practical setting incompatible activities.  You feel sympathy for people who are ill and excuse or at least consider their limitations; you punish people who are bad.  And when they are really bad, as those two mentioned above, you punish them severely not because you love to punish but to show the world how seriously you view the suffering of their victims.  But you cannot do both. Our system tries to do both and that is why it takes twenty or thirty years to execute an unrepentant mass murderer.

Thinking About the Twentieth Century

I have proved by my life that I am more competent than the dwarfs, my predecessors, who bought this country to destruction.” 

                                 Adolf Hitler, 1938

 

The mass-murdering, war-ravaged twentieth century now rapidly recedes in its temporal distance from present times.  Those salient moments and events that are destined to be the era’s distinctive historical moments occupy the living memories of a daily diminishing few individuals.  The World War I veterans are all dead. The youngest soldiers who fought in World War II still alive are in their 80s. They are a fading, frail handful. The shots from Lee Harvey Oswald’s thirteen dollar Mannlicher-Carcano at the motorcade in Dallas, Texas that slew President Kennedy and wounded  Governor Connelly were fired nearly a half century ago. A minority now of Americans can recall that dark and horrible day.  The adolescent experience and perspectives of American university students are largely shaped and informed by the “big” events of the early, media-soaked twenty-first century – 9-11, the great recession of 2008, and the election of the first black American to the Presidency, Barack Obama.

  Relatively soon the twentieth century will be a fully completed historical epoch with all the living witnesses extinct. The vast recorded documentation, however, will remain. It will be the material culled by historians to catalogue the horrors, build their own interpretive narratives, recalculate the millions of victims, and contemplate the careers of the criminal-despots who made destitution and death the order of the day for millions across the globe. 

            The twentieth century as a historical tableau offers considerable advantages over previous periods. The extensive multi-media documentation that now exists and the tools of contemporary information technology are so much more powerful in compiling, analyzing, storing, and rapidly retrieving and delivering material from the source documentation.

            The twentieth century dawned with an abundance of optimism and confidence. Quickly it descended into chaos. August 1914 began an unfathomable, titanic conflagration.  The war, blundered into by the diplomats of the great empires, smashed a self-confident, world-dominating European civilization into pieces. It ended with millions of dead and crippled young soldiers, dismantled empires, hungry and disillusioned people and ravaged economies.  The conclusion was a mere interlude. The Great War would soon become the first World War.  No one had anticipated the magnitude of the death and destruction.

World War I also spawned two virulent ideologies. It brought to the world stage and gave vast power to some of the most brutal and despicable men who have ever walked the earth. To contemplate fully the volume of misery they created and the vast range of their destruction and to comprehend the meaning of it would test the powers of a God.  

These ideologies and the recollection of the men of great resentment who crafted and unleashed them still inflame the polemics of contemporary political debate. Their legacies and memories continue to haunt us.  Nazism and Communism were as the French historian François Furet observed, “children of World War I.” [Francois Furet, Passing of an Illusion: the Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Chicago, 1999, 19] 

The  seizure of power by the Bolshevik’s in the world’s largest country in October 1917 stunned the outside world and immediately aroused fear and loathing. Then there followed violent opposition and reaction.  Winston Churchill, wrote David Lloyd George, then British Prime Minister, “had no doubt a genuine distaste for Communism. He was horrified, as we all were, at the savage murder of the Czar, the Czarina and their helpless children.”[David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, New Haven 1937, Volume I, page 214]  The anti-Communism of Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, makes that of Joseph McCarthy, decades later seem restrained. He rounded up 10,000 “Reds” in the U.S. whom he then attempted to deport.  The Bolsheviks were “maggots” on the carcass of Russia, as one of the generals of the German High Command remarked when negotiating with Leon Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk.

The world, really, had never seen anything quite like the Bolsheviks with their sheer audacity, their messianic sense of entitlement to power, fanaticism and enmity for the old order.     “The urgency of Bolshevism created an urgency for anti-bolshevism,” wrote Furet.  [Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 23] Indeed, these Russian Communists openly and vehemently proclaimed their intentions to take their “revolution” to the rest of the world. The captains of industry were put on notice.  Capitalism was rotten, they confidently affirmed, and ready to be toppled.  Russia was merely the beginning, the “weak link” in the capitalist chain. The vast ambitions, fanatical determination and ruthless methods of history’s first successful Communist revolutionaries could not help but provoke an extreme reaction and a counterbalancing fanatical opposition.  Fanatics – people who need people.  They always find each other.  They feed off of each other.

Nazism, the other virulent post-World War I ideology, was cobbled out of the festering resentment of German humiliation and defeat by embittered, disillusioned German war veterans – from generals to corporals – who sincerely believed that they had been “stabbed in the back” by German Jews and Socialists.   It was richly and intensely anti-Bolshevik even as the National Socialists imitated and admired the methods and resolve of the Russian Communists.   The Communists and the Nazi’s studied and learned from each other.  Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives impressed the always observant and calculating Stalin and perhaps provided the model for his own carefully orchestrated purges of his old Bolshevik colleagues in the wake of the Sergei Kirov murder in December 1934.  Hitler was able to take care of business with his old close associate, Ernst Röhm, and selected other inter-party rivals in the SA. Neither Stalin nor Hitler had the slightest qualms over disposing of close friends and working partners if they suddenly became suspect or obstacles to their ambition.  Neither Hitler nor Stalin ever let a crisis go to waste. 

 Communists and Nazis fed off of and stoked the violent fanaticism of one another.  Nazis and Communists fought each other, at times collaborated with each other, and copiously imitated each other.  They claimed, as Furet points out, the same enemy – bourgeois democratic liberalism – that they disparaged for different reasons. [Fascism and Bolshevism were: interdependent, were mutually declared enemies, were colluding enemies, had the same enemy, rejecting that enemy for different reasons but with equal radicality.  Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 24]

It is worth stressing that the Fascists dictators in the 1930s learned a great deal from the Bolshevik chiefs. Stalin and Lenin were role models and mentors for Mussolini and Hitler.  The historian Stanley Payne observed and noted the four major precedents set by the Bolsheviks that the Fascists took over: a massive manipulation of crowds with extreme and irresponsible demagoguery based upon sweeping falsehoods; a rejection of all political alternatives; a one-party dictatorship with control of all institutions; and a dictatorship based upon total opportunism. [Stanley G. Payne,  “Soviet Anti-Fascism: Theory and Practice, 1921-1945” in Totalitarian  Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 1-62, p. 2-3, italics added]   Over the course of time Nazis and Communists became increasingly indistinguishable from each other in their affinity for violence, disdain for the rule of law, the unscrupulousness of their methods and the cruel and brutal conduct administered to those they perceived as their opposition.      

Nazis and Communists organized, carried out and ideologically rationalized extensive programs of slave labor, expropriation of private property, forced deportations of entire peoples, genocide and mass murder. They physically destroyed their political opposition.  Against their own populations they practiced a pitiless terror.  Unrestrained by custom or law, they conducted mass shootings of innocent people, and bundled millions of people including women, children, the old and infirmed into concentration camps and forcefully extracted whatever labor they could from those whom they did not immediately kill. 

The twentieth century was an orgy of mass murder, human experimentation by monsters with vast power, guided by poisonous ideology.  The twenty-first century promises to be no different.

Thinking About the Victims

November 16^th, 2011  Dayton Daily News

Father Who Killed his 3 Sleeping Sons is Executed

“Mental Competency Claim Denied”

“Lucasville, Ohio – A man who fatally shot his three sleeping sons in 1982, shortly after his wife had filed for divorce, was executed Tuesday with each of hands clenched in an obscene gesture…. Sister Helen Prejean, a nationally known advocate for ending the death penalty, attended a Tuesday vigil outside the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.”

In the “Local” section of the newspaper was this brief account of the grotesque departure of Reginald Brooks, age 66 from this world.   The short, back page article is another bleak and depressing commentary on the current state of American justice.  According to the law Brooks was supposed to die for what he had done.  But the law kept him alive for a very long time. Herein lies a massive moral and legal confusion.

Within the story are the seeds of an argument, but to what conclusion?   For one inclined toward lex talonis the conclusion is that a criminal justice system that takes almost thirty years to carry out its sentence is all system and no justice.

Consider for just a moment the Kafkaesque name of the place where Mr. Brooks resided for twenty nine years, then died: The Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.  It would be enlightening no doubt, to hear the Ohio overseers of this ghastly and costly dormitory delineate the “correctional” progress of Mr. Brook during his long stay, or, for that matter of any of his colleagues awaiting a similar means of departure. Given Brooks’ goodbye posture, I think is safe to conclude that he left this correctional facility with the same…perspective, he had on the day he entered.     

For those who like Sister Prejean, conduct the vigils, carry the candles and weep for the condemned, the system itself is criminal. Death Rows are living hells designed to torture the pathetic, broken (mostly) men most of whom never had much a chance to start with in life. Executing them solves nothing and does nothing to relieve the anguish of the pain they inflicted on their way to holding cells -- killing added to killing.

The sad reality is that the death penalty as a piece of the U.S. criminal justice system serves no defensible purpose and it wreaks of disfunction.  It is very unlikely, given the completely arbitrary application and long delays in finishing it, that it deters anyone anywhere.  The families of the murdered victims like the convicted murderers twist in the wind for decades waiting for the lawyers, the courts and the psychiatrists to jump through the procedural hoops and fill out the paper work.  A sentence for a hideous crime that is carried out after a twenty-nine year delay is not an application of justice – it is a travesty, a mockery of justice.      

Should someone like Brooks have been executed?  In my view, yes.  But only after certification of mental competence?  If it takes ten, twenty or thirty years to answer this question, then I doubt that it is a question that will ever have a satisfactory answer.  Rightly or wrongly criminals have increasingly come to be regarded as subjects of medicine, patients, if you will, under the supervision of physicians as ill or impaired.  When this transition to patienthood is completed, and I believe that it will be soon, the death penalty will be gone. Doctors do not deliberately kill their patients.    

Whatever one’s view of capital punishment, however, it is deeply lamentable that an appreciation for the innocence and suffering of the victims has been lost or at least intolerably diminished. When we think of murder in this country, how depressingly common it is, how endlessly and pervasively it is featured as a theme of popular entertainment, how extremely protracted and arbitrary the legal process is for determining and exacting punishment, a perverse and ignominious social equation seems to be apparent: the victims lose their lives and the families lose their loved ones; those that take them are the recipients of vast amounts of time, attention and resources.    

The story of Mr. Brooks is a perfect case in point. There is a single mention of his “wife” whose sons he killed after she attempted to divorce him.   It is difficult to fathom the anguish and horror of her life after what he did.  Did she even survive?  The grandparents – how did they fare? From this report, we do not know. None of these human beings seem to be highly relevant to the way these things are discussed.  The story is in fact all about Brooks.  And, it has been all about Brooks since he destroyed the lives of his sons.  How much time (hours, days, months) from lawyers, social workers, mental health workers have been expended for him?  How much care and attention has he gotten?  And yet for all of it he leaves the world his three murdered children, shattered lives, giving everyone around him the finger.    Bon voyage, Mr. Brooks.

The Insanity of Anti-Communism

HISS.  Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?

CHAMBERS.  Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.

               
(Hearing:  Special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities)

Stalinism has always exhibited an absolutism and dogmatism.  Stalin, Mao, Castro never appeared uncertain about anything. Self-doubt, a sense of fallibility, openness to other points of view—these were not part of the universe they inhabited. Whatever one might say about Stalinists, then and now, never have they been humble.

 Of course, no one but fanatically certain men could apply the kind of massive coercion that they did with its disruptive and lethal consequences to the millions of souls in Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Cuba. This kind of collective, ideologically justified misery could only be inflicted by individuals devoted to the mindless celebration of their own genius and moral perfection.

These were individuals for whom ideological abstractions and utopian fantasies were more real than the actual incalculable suffering and misery of those on whose behalf they took power and ruled over.  With their conviction of intellectual infallibility these egotistical “wrecking balls” would not only pulverize any active opposition, but also pressed down very hard on anyone who seemed remotely unenthused about life in the paradise under construction.  For whoever failed to fall in line and cheer…abuse. Those who administered it were justified; those who felt it deserved it.               

A special form of abuse, a medical ad hominem disqualifier for dissidents, was developed by Brezhnev and his gang during their own step down to a softer, gentler Stalinism.  Instead of simply shooting or jailing dissenters, as J.S. and Lavrenti did prior to 1953, after the Great Oarsman’s passing, the authorities would arrange for State psychiatrists to certify the uncooperative and unenthusiastic as “mentally ill.’  They could then be locked away, drugged and dismissed as “sick.”

This was a move away from the early and primitive days of the “merciless extermination of the opposition-Stalinism” that built and populated the Gulag and staged the Show Trials.  It was a feint toward both the prestige and authority of scientific medicine and procedural legality.  The authorities were simply applying the expertise of modern medicine to deal compassionately with sick people and in accordance with the law to protect them from themselves and others. 

So in the later half period of the Soviet Union, psychiatry came into alignment with the coercive organs of the Soviet state and Soviet citizens who were in any way perceived to be critical of the government found themselves as psychiatric patients incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals.

A person who is certifiably mentally ill or deranged, of course, has no credibility and is subject to the intrusive and coercive measures characteristic of prisons but in many ways worse.  A crazy critic is not a critic at all. A mentally ill person is completely at the mercy of his physician.  But when the physician is owned and operated by the State the “patient” can expect a certain kind of “treatment.”   

Once the doctor affirms the diagnosis, the patient no longer has an independent voice. No one should or will take what a mentally ill person says seriously other than as a measure of his own pathological severity. A medical label is a particularly potent form of disqualification because it carries the authority of modern medical science. What the patient thinks, says or does is in the exclusive domain of experts.  One does not reason with, refute or polemically engage with the mentally ill.  Except for the doctors who have them in their charge, they are ignored.    

            In the early 1970s two Soviet dissidents, a historian and a biologist, Roy and Zhores Medvedev wrote a book entitled, A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In it the Medvedevs related how the Soviet authorities used psychiatry as a way to punish individuals of whom they simply disapproved. “[P]ersons who aroused the displeasure of the authorities without actually breaking the law could suddenly be made to undergo psychiatric examinations.”

An extraordinarily stunning application of the political-ideological use of psychiatry was attempted in the U.S. during the second trial of Alger Hiss in 1950.  This was not a run-of-the-mill legal proceeding. The Alger Hiss—Whittaker Chambers, mid-century trials were nothing less than a head on collision of world-stage ideological forces.  For decades, the Hiss-Chambers confrontation was a polemical fault line of America’s Left and Right.  

  Hiss’s attorney hired a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Binger, who personally observed Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, during the two trials and subsequently testified as a defense witness in the second one with the aim of discrediting Chamber’s testimony.   Chambers, Dr. Binger claimed, was a mentally unbalanced man. (Dr. Binger on the witness stand:  “I think Mr. Chambers is suffering from a condition known as psychopathic personality, which is a disorder of character, of which the outstanding features are behavior of what we call amoral or asocial and delinquent nature.”)  [Thomas Murphy’s Cross-Examination of Dr. Carl. A. Binger in U.S. vs Alger Hiss (Hiss II, Minnetonka, MN: Professional Education Group, [1987], 45.]  

Hiss’s strategy in this trial early on in the Cold War came to be used frequently by anti-anti-Communists to discredit anti-Communism. Anti-Communism was unmasked by doctors of psychiatry as a mental illness or derangement. The Frankfurt Marxist, Theodor Adorno, at around this time had published a much ballyhooed, now disregarded book, The Authoritarian Personality that rendered as pathologic anyone who might be considered conservatively political. Chamber, as Dr. Binger had hoped to convince the jury, was to be dismissed as a psychopath, a social misfit who was striking out irrationally at a prominent figure in order to get attention and act out his anti-social impulses.

            Thomas Murphy, the government prosecutor, however, routed Dr. Binger under cross-examination.  Binger comes off as a fool. Murphy’s masterful cross-examination remains as a textbook illustration for how to impeach the testimony of an “expert witness.” Still, Binger’s clinically fabricated defamation of Chamber’s character and personality became a model for the Left to use to hammer their critics.  From the “proof” of the pathologies of their personalities flows the automatic nullification of their ideas and their arguments.  Hiss we know now falsely denied his guilt and over the decades persisted to the end with the lies.  The dumpy, frumpy, fat, anti-Communist Chambers, bad teeth and all, was the truth-teller. The urbane, Ivy league, elegant, Hiss, protégé of Felix Frankfurter and liege man for FDR, was the liar, and a traitor.

Throughout those years Hiss’s partisans continued the assault on Chamber’s character and continued to deny the fact of Hiss’s guilt.  The Leftist U.S. journal Nation for forty years insisted on the innocence of Hiss. When finally, Hiss’s guilt was no longer in question, the response was altered to say that it did not really matter. Victor Navasky, the Nation’s editor for many years and professor of journalism at Columbia University, shifted the entire moral proposition that had been in play for decades: “Espionage, is it really so wrong?”

 [Quoted from: Lawrence Helm, “The Alger Hiss Chair at Bard College,”

 www.lawrencehelm.com/2008/12/alger-hiss-chair-at-bard-college.html]