The Left and Its Enemies

We will merciless destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, by his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!*

                                                          Joseph Stalin, November, 1937

We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us…**

                                                    President Obama, October, 2010

From Karl Marx to the present day the modus operandi of the Left, whenever and wherever it competes for power, is not compromise with the opposition or even the defeat of the opposition, but its elimination.  Power is to be completely owned, not shared.  The ideology of the Left always drives its practitioners toward total monopoly.  Competition when it exists is disdained and when possible, disallowed.  Lenin defined the rules of political engagement from his earliest days – “Everything that is done in the interest of the proletarian cause is honest” ***– which was a remarkably honest declaration of the Leninist determination not to be bound by any rules, and in effect makes politics into a theater of total war with no quarter given to the enemy.   Lenin’s prescription of politics as war still holds for his progeny.

             The Left’s quest for a monopoly of power is and always has been inevitable because it derives from the foundational premise that every social evil comes into being and persists because the wrong people are in power. What these “wrong people” believe is delusion. What they say is false.  What they do is self-serving. What they own is undeserved.  All that matters is that they are removed: whatever means that accomplishes this is permitted.

“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles,” as we remember from the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.  The “final” struggle puts the right people, the proletariat, in charge, people free of false-consciousness, above personal and class interest, dedicated to creating a just society where everyone will have what they need and deserve what they get.

Opposition to the Left is defective in two fundamental regards. The first is intellectual.  Those in opposition do not recognize their own ignorance and responsibility for the corrupt status quo that produces the misery of those they exploit.  The second defect is moral.  Their ignorance lives and grows through a rationalization of their self-interest which supports their false and pernicious views of the world.  Phony, greedy and mean-spirited, not only do they benefit undeservedly from the status quo, they hypocritically rationalize it and defend it.  

            The Left in stark contrast is both intellectually and morally superior.   They see through the rationalizations and delusions of the opposition and understand the world as it really is. With the audacity of hope they do not “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment….”  Rising above naked self-interest, religious and ethnic bigotry, and sectarian small mindedness, their moral superiority comes from the altruistic purity of their motives, their unlimited benevolence and empathy for the oppressed, and the nobility of their aspirations.   

            This sense of vast superiority explains the Left’s monopolistic impulse for control – the opposition is unfit for power and should not be permitted to compete for it.  Thus, when the Left does have to compete for power they regard the opposition not as worthy opponents to engage in a respectful rule-governed contest and defeat by showing the deficiency of their ideas and programs.  Rather, they regard them as enemies and move against them as enemies.  The character, motives and personalities of the opposition are the focus of attack, a relentlessly ad hominem barrage.  The ideas and programs of the opponents of the Left do not even have to be seriously considered because they are formulated and advanced by people who are intellectually primitive, morally suspect and at times clinically deranged.    

            No norms or protocols of mutual respect, civil debate or procedural fair play will be observed by Leftist political strategists because they have no respect for those who do not share their ideological convictions or enthuse over their programs. There can be no serious debate about alternative ideas or approaches or perspectives because the truth is already settled and grasped only by those who lay claim to the gnosis of the Left.  Those who dissent or disagree are stupid and simple minded.  Or, their opposition comes from the corruption of their character and personalities. They are motivated by greed and full of hatred for those not like them.  “Republicans want dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health care,”**** remarked President Obama recently.  Of course they do.  They are the wrong people – morally bankrupt, heartless and uncaring, servants of the rich.  They are the enemy and if they think that they will ever be treated otherwise, they are hopeless amnesiacs. 

*Quoted from Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia, Atlas, 2008, 272.

**http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/in-appeal-to-hispanics-obama-promises-to-push-immigration-reform/

*** Quoted from: Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, New York: Random House, 1994, 275n.

****http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/10/17/obama_gop_wants_dirtier_air_dirtier_water_less_people_with_health_insurance.html

Personalism & the Medicalization of Morality*

If every action which is good or evil in a man of ripe years were under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise should then be due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?

                                                                                          John Milton

Personalism is both a modern attitude and an implicit ideology that enthusiastically advances the liberation of the individual self from traditional institutional and conventional constraints. Liberation of the self from the constraints of convention necessarily involves an abandoning of self-restraint. Self-restraint has long been encouraged by ancient and modern moralists: the personalist, however, equates self-restraint with repression and judges it to be unhealthy.

With the increasing bureaucratization and rationalization of modern life and its resulting fragmentation, the appeal and attractiveness of personalism has intensified over the last two hundred years. Personalism has relentlessly expanded its reach and both broadened and refined its applications.  It permeates our thinking and conditions many if not most of our assumptions about how we should give order to our lives, discharge our obligations, and develop our expectations of ourselves and others. It has deeply affected in numerous ways many or most of our social institutions.

Personalism has also altered the premises of our moral conversations. We talk in a different way, and thus ultimately think about ourselves and our action, specifically about our personal accountability for the things that we do and the kinds of people we want to become. The shift in vocabulary is an important measure of a basic transformation in the way we think about what principles we should live by, in the assumptions we make about how we ought to act as human beings and as members of communities bound by moral obligations. Our ethical figures of speech, our basic tools of moral articulation, if you will—applied to matters of individual accountability and moral character—have changed remarkably over the last fifty years and reflect what is a relatively new but increasingly dominant perspective of human conduct in our society. 

This perspective is one of the most distinctive marks of our age. It rests upon an understanding of human behavior that regards conduct considered by our predecessors to be vicious, immoral or sinful, as a manifestation, more precisely, a “symptom” of sickness, illness or disease. That view of behavior reflects an important, perhaps the most important, of the many twentieth-century revolutions :the medicalization of morality.

This view is revolutionary because the entire sphere of human conduct to which moral evaluation and judgment have been applied (that sphere of human conduct in which the freedom of an individual to make choices and to be held accountable for those choices), has increasingly become subjected to evaluation by experts who employ a normalcy-pathology perspective of behavior. Human conduct under a medicalized view is regarded as a causally determined phenomenon: the method for dealing with problematic conduct, given this view, is a therapeutic one. The science of medicine and the related practice of the therapeutic arts have been applied to problems of human conduct once considered as moral ones engaged in by beings once considered morally responsible and personally accountable. Thus, the sorts of deeds that traditional moralists have been usually disposed to consider as “immoral” conduct are now understood as the behavioral effects of pathologically induced causes. As the medicalized perspective of moral conduct comes to dominate our thinking, the notion of immoral or sinful conduct upon which blame is properly directed and upon which punishment is justly applied must give way to the recognition that human wrong doing is ultimately a symptom of mental illness to which treatment must be given.

The medicalizing of morality is a most important late-twentieth-century social phenomenon with far reaching consequences for our everyday lives. Viewing the moral core of our lives differently than we once did means that we begin to act differently than we did before. Medicalizing the assumptions about human behavior de-moralizes our notion of moral conduct. This de-moralization process is captured in a vocabulary in which important moral words that have been traditionally applied to human wrong doing—immoral, evil, reprehensible, blameworthy—are conspicuously absent. The removal of the words that prescribe blame and punishment for wrong doing brings the disappearance of the notions behind the words. Then there follows the decline of the practice of blaming or punishing people for wrong doing. A medicalized approach to morality prescribes treatment rather than punishment for people who do things that they are not supposed to do. Punishment deliberately inflicts pain. Treatment, on the contrary, attempts to minimize pain and to change behavior that we disapprove of into behavior we approve of: so why intentionally inflict pain when it is unnecessary to do so?  Such is the logic and the ethic of medicalization.             

The medicalization of morality creates a dramatic turning away from our traditional moral practice of holding individuals accountable for their actions and the kinds of people that they become. This turning away is a turn toward personalism.  One important and specific concrete measure of the extent to which the medicalization of morality has been successful in transforming our attitudes towards certain kinds of behavior and our practical responses to them can be seen with the passage by Congress of The Americans for Disability Act of 1990, a milestone in civil rights federal legislation signed into law by President George Bush. The ADA put the official and legal stamp of medical “disability” on many kinds of behavior that used to be commonly regarded as vices under the old nomenclature, such as habitual drunkenness and gluttony—now alcoholism and eating disorders—along with a whole host of other addictive and compulsive “disorders” such as drug addiction and compulsive gambling. Institutions are responsible now not only for relinquishing any attachment to “judgmental” or moralistic views of these sorts of behaviors but, more importantly, must provide those who “suffer” from them with what the law makers have called “reasonable accommodation.” Sorting out the meaning of the highly disputable “reasonable” in a society already immersed in moral subjectivism and relativism and its implications for the obligations imposed upon institutions, of course, must ultimately be done by means of litigation with all of the attendant social and financial costs and with an enormous shift of formal power to the adjudicating legal system.
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*Excerpted from Stephen Paul Foster, Desolation's March: the Rise of Personalism and the Reign of Amusement in 21st-America, Bethesda, Md. Academica Press, 2003.
   Complete electronic copy free on demand.

I am the Immaculate Deception: The Dying of Dictators

“He needed to defecate…Stalin got out of the car and asked ‘whether the bushes along the roadside were mined .  Of course no one could give such a guarantee…Then the Supreme Commander-in-Chief pulled down his trousers in everyone’s presence.’  In a metaphorical commentary on his treatment of the Soviet people, and his performance as military commander, he ‘shamed himself in front of his general s and officers… and did his business right there on the road.’”  Stalin on the way back from the Front, 1943.

 (From: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tzar, New York, Random House, 2003, 652)

The grief-extravaganza that engulfed North Korea following the recent demise of Kim Jong-Il, the first and only Communist boss to inherit from his father his own personal dictatorship and cult of personality, displayed for the outside world a curious and bizarre array of death rituals traceable back to the collective insanity in Russia that ensued after J.V. Stalin took his last breaths on March 5, 1953. 

Kim Jong-Il, like Stalin and like Mao, descended from ordinary folks but during his revolutionary travails acquired superhuman attributes – virtue, wisdom, selfless devotion – beyond the likes of any other in his midst.

Stalin, Mao, Kim – these Marxist Übermenschen ruled over lesser mortals as near perfect beings.  They are not supposed to die. But die they do, which comes as a jarring and untimely reminder of their ordinary fleshly composition.  Breathless and cold they are now just like all of those millions who were made to perish under their benevolent watch – food for the worms.  Thus the fiction of their perfection must be affirmed, first by an elaborately choreographed theatrics of universal despair and grief, with a cast of distraught thousands. Then the worms must be denied.  From the embalmer’s table the grayish corpse, transformed, moves to center stage, a rosy colored, death defying shrine. “I am the immaculate deception.”  The leader in death lives forever as an object of veneration.

The passing of a creature such as Kim Jong-Il is the kind of event that perhaps more than of any other exposes and dramatizes the absurd and fraudulent nature of Communism, an ideology whose enthusiasts have always been pleased to have us know speaks to the modernizing, progressive impulses of humanity and moves relentlessly toward the calculated improvement of the human condition.

The highly demonstrable, wide-spread grief that we see emanating from the throngs of people, crying, wailing with their faces contorted in the pain of sorrow and loss.  Why are they so distressed?  Is it genuine or feigned?    Both probably, but this hedge of an answer only serves to underlie the difficulty making sense of the collective outpouring of grief for the tyrant-turned-cadaver.   This difficulty, however, can be addressed with the maxim that: communism is the highest form of pretending.  The greatest communists are the greatest pretenders.  “Dizzy with success,” was how Stalin in the 1930s described the efforts his party underlings as they completed the forced extraction of the grain harvest from the Ukrainian farmers and then watched them starve by the millions.

  

These grief rituals for the passing of the communist bosses are the crowning absurdity of the cult of personality, the consummate achievement in the art of pretending.  They bring to culmination the life of the Dear Leader which has been long imaged to mirror the exact opposite of reality – criminality masquerading as glory, ruthlessness celebrated as genius.  The wisdom of the Leader has been folly; his benevolence, unspeakable wickedness.  Progress has been nothing more than stagnation and corruption.  The people’s highly visible anguish for the loss of the Leader is sublimated relief.  Is he really, finally dead? Everything in the worker’s paradise is the opposite of what it appears.

 

Stalin’s death was consistent with his life as a supreme communist ruler.  For the world to contemplate, his funeral in the middle days of March 1953 was a massive production out of which emanated the love, devotion and worship of the millions of Russians.  The circumstances of his death on March 5^th , observed only by his family and underlings, were desperate, sordid and disgusting.  Death came from a stroke that left him lying on his bedroom floor, speech impaired, soaking in his own urine.  His assistants, terrified of him, were reluctant to call the doctors. Stalin distrusted doctors, especially Jewish doctors.  His devoted henchman – Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov – deserted the deathwatch, fled to the office to destroy the Boss’s papers and the evidence of their criminality.

Fidel tarries.  The embalmers are anxious.