Intellectual
Roots of Terror
by James Ostrowski
As zebras are fascinated by lions,
libertarians are fascinated by communists, their polar opposites and sworn
enemies for the last 150 years. If one believes that society should function
with an absolute minimum of governmental coercion, one is curious to know the
results of a philosophy which places its faith in the maximum possible use of
governmental coercion, force, and violence, to achieve its goals. If communism
worked, we libertarians would be forced to check our premises and watch our
backs.
Can the laboratory of communism also
shed light on the viability of a related political philosophy, which also relies
on centralized governmental coercion to achieve its goals: modern liberalism?
The communists did all at once what stealthy left-liberals apparently intend to
do piece by piece while we sleep. We just lived through a century in which
liberals enacted several recommendations of the Communist Manifesto and
transformed a night-watchman state into a welfare/warfare state with a
continual flow of "progressive" legislation and various
"Democrat wars" and crusades with the result that no one in my law
school class in 1983 could identify, in response to Professor Henry Mark
Holzer's query, any aspect of life that was not in some way regulated or
controlled by the state. Seventeen years later, are they through?
Has liberalism closed up shop? Will
they ever be through? Not until they have established an egalitarian utopia
where virtually all responsibility for living has passed from the individual to
the state. In the liberal utopia, if I may pilfer Paddy Chayefsky's words,
"all necessities [will be] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all
boredom amused."
If you think I exaggerate, consider
that liberals and communists share five critical premises: egalitarianism,
utopianism (the use of impossible "ideals" as a guide to policy), the
efficacy of force in accomplishing positive goals, hostility to civil society
(nonstate institutions, e.g., Boy Scouts, private schools), and the
individual's inability to govern himself.
In light of the recent attempted
coup d'élection, I am tempted to add a sixth similarity — willingness to win
political fights at all costs. Further evidence of some basic affinity between
communism and modern liberalism is the latter's frequent coverups and apologies
for the former. Finally, communists and liberals share a tendency to expressly support
"mass democracy" while they in practice concentrate power in
secretive elite bodies such as politburos and appellate courts.
The Black Book
In that spirit of fascination with
the enemy, I recently read The Black Book of Communism, a clinical and relentless
dissection of the crimes of communism in the 20th century — defined by
"the natural laws of humanity" — written by several ex–fellow
travelers led by Stephane Courtois.
It is not a book to be read before,
during, or after a meal. You would not want to spoil a good meal with the image
of Bolshevik troops throwing live human beings into a blast furnace. The Black
Book is a story of mind-numbing and mindless brutality. Mao Zedong, one of the
stars of the book, said, "political power grows out of the barrel of a
gun."
One wonders, after reading this
book, whether political power actually grows out of the depraved minds of
solipsistic, megalomaniacs like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. It seems that if you
hypnotize yourself into discarding all known ethics and morality, and are
willing to use any and all ruthless means to achieve power, then you can have
it. A Bolshevik newspaper wrote in 1919, "Our morality has no precedent …
everything is permitted … Let blood flow like water." And it did.
The Rap Sheet
When Khrushchev said, "We will
bury you," he meant it. Communists buried 85 million people in the 20th
century, give or take the number of people who live in New York State. What is
really interesting, however, is not the sheer number of victims. After all, as
Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a
statistic." And what a statistician Stalin proved to be.
But even more awesome is the
incredible variety of their murderous means. In pursuit of utopia, the
communists were forced to outdo themselves in continually discovering ever more
ways to separate the bourgeoisie from their souls. They murdered people by
hanging them, whipping them, slitting their throats, carving them up with axes,
boiling them, crucifying them, beheading them, drawing and quartering them,
stoning them, forcing them to fight to the death against other prisoners,
massively drowning them, throwing them from helicopters, asphyxiating them,
starving them, poisoning them, burying them alive, and making life unbearable leading
to mass suicides. When creativity was absent, the communists fell back on their
old standby — the banal bullet to the base of the brain.
