Echoes in Eternity

"Here is your political litmus test. Regardless of real amounts, would you rather have the whole population have the same basic income (give or take 5 percent), or would you want seventy-five percent of the people to have twice that amount, and twenty-five percent to have ten times that amount? Which is your ideal?

If the former, then whether or not you are, your worldview is riddled with envy -- and repentance of some sort is in order. If the latter, it is also important to remember that this discrepancy of income is not a problem to be solved, but is rather a description of the solution to the equally distributed miseries created by the levelers and haters who insist on the first option.

Reagan once said that socialism would only work in two places -- in Heaven, where they don't need it, and Hell, where they already have it." - Doug Wilson

This is right on. I've found that when I've debated capitalism with a free market hater, I can usually dig out the root of envy in his political worldview after only a few minutes. It doesn't take long before "I had medical bills that I couldn't possibly cover, so why shouldn't those who are better off help me out?" slips into their argument or something along those lines (though not always from their own personal experience). The basis of socialism (or anti-capitalism) is covetousness.

Few sins have caused more human suffering than envy. It fomented the rise of communism in Russia, it made the Holocaust possible, and enabled the Hutus to wipe out the Tutsis in Rwanda. All because people broke the tenth commandment.

Dalrymple discussed this week in the Salisbury Review the steady decline of British life into a Soviet-like state. It’s pretty sad to see how far they’ve fallen. Lessons for us Americans to learn, no doubt.

It is surprising how often victory turns out not to bring with it the advantages expected and hoped for, or to have an ambiguous and even harmful effect upon the victors. Who would have thought, for example, that within a few years of the conclusion of the Cold War Britain would have undergone so much creeping Sovietisation? No doubt a Soviet military conquest would have brought about a swifter and much more complete Sovietisation than did the crumbling of the Soviet Union; but there is no doubt that in the realm of practical reason the Soviet Union won the Cold War hands down, at least in Britain.

Who would have guessed that, within fewer than twenty years, the British would be more comprehensively surveyed as they went about their daily business than the poor Soviets ever were? That, once they stepped outside the confines of their house, almost all that they did would be photographically recorded? Attending murder trials as I do from time to time as an expert witness, I am astonished by how many of the movements of the accused (and of other witnesses) are recorded on video cameras, for production if necessary at some time in the future. We now live our public lives entirely on camera; every person in the country has his Boswell which is the surveillance camera.

Who would have thought, at the downfall of the Berlin Wall, that a British government would seriously consider recording all telephone calls and monitoring the use of the Internet by all citizens? Who would have thought that it would even dare propose that a centralised dossier on each and every child in the country should be kept? Who would have thought that it would likewise propose an identity card system that enabled the recording of untold information about each and every person, and what is more propose to charge the citizen for the privilege of being thus spied upon? Who would have thought it would have run advertising campaigns to ask citizens to denounce one another if they thought they were cheating on social security, thus introducing into Britain what might be called the Pavlik Morozov conception of truth-telling?

Dalrymple discusses the liberal idea that as long as you're strong in your beliefs, it's irrelevant to what ends you pursue those beliefs.

A recent story in the Guardian confirmed my suspicion of a lingering liberal indulgence toward the former Soviet Union. Headlined ORPHANED BY THE STATE, it consisted of an interview with Robert Rosenberg, the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed by electric chair in 1953 for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Robert was then six, and surely anyone with the most minimal human feeling must sympathize deeply with his account of his bewilderment at the time. The interviewer, Joanna Moorhead, tells us that she had tears in her eyes as he related the story, thereby imparting an element of kitsch to the proceedings.
...
At the end of the interview he says that his parents gave him and his brother Michael “a life in which we can stand up and be ourselves and do the things we believe in.” Earlier, he had drawn a parallel between what his parents did and other people who, even today, commit acts of civil disobedience to further a cause they believe in.

It’s Moorhead’s neglecting to ask Meeropol what he thought of his parents’ cause that makes me suspect her of secret sympathy with the Soviet Union. For suppose that the subject of the interview had been the orphan of a couple executed for spying for the Nazis: would the interviewer then have let the question of what they believed in go without comment?

This is not the place to argue whether the communists or Nazis were worse (for what it is worth, I think the Nazis were worse, but I also respect the Johnsonian view that there is no disputing the precedence of a louse and a flea). What is clear is that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg supported in theory and aided in practice an ideology and a state that they should have known was responsible for some of the worst oppression and mass murder in history.

In its print edition, the Guardian chose to highlight Robert’s statement, “my parents gave me and Michael a life in which we can stand up and be ourselves,” as a callout, thereby forging an unlikely alliance between Stalinism and psychobabble. Whether standing firm for one’s convictions is a good or bad thing depends on what those convictions are. A monstrous cause is not any the less monstrous because people are ready to die for it; if the history of the twentieth century should have taught us anything, it’s that.

I have just begun reading From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, a compilation by Paul Hollander of "personal accounts of political violence and repression in communist states." I actually am still in the introduction, since the intro totals about 50 pages. I am looking forward to this book, as my knowledge of the full ugliness of communism is really quite minimal (much of this due to the fact that the Western world doesn't promote such knowledge). I just came across an overwhelmingly horrible fact in the introduction that I had to share and perhaps tie back to one of my past posts. According to records, possibly 1 in every 10 Hungarian women were raped by Soviet troops during World War II. TEN PERCENT! A few months ago, I linked to a map of Europe which showed the extremely high (20% or higher in some countries) abortion rates in those countries which used to be under Soviet rule. After reading what Soviet troops did to so many of those women, is it any wonder that abortion is so prevalent there today? All their dignity, value, and worth (both for themselves and the generations to come) was destroyed in those couple years of war. How many children were born from those ghastly crimes that felt only disdain from their mothers for the crimes of their fathers? And in turn, how many of those children grew to believe that kids were a curse? When asked whether anything should be done about the rapes and murders, Stalin replied that the troops should be allowed to have their "fun."