Today I'm writing because I have two gifts for you. Two fatal flaws of Communism - and Islam. And the striking differences in mainstream response to Communism, Nazism, Islam, and the Jonestown massacre (1978).
Online at: http://elsasblog.com/161218
Plus, at the end, an important petition to protect Canadian free speech rights from allegations of "Islamophobia." Please sign.
Fatal flaw number one. I didn't know about this flaw until a couple of years ago. I knew the (supposed) GOAL of Communism: plenty for all people. This is what many people think of when they hear the word, Communism. No hunger. Medical attention and education available to all. Housing for all. Jobs for everybody. Who could object to that?
But then there's that nasty flaw: the HOW.
Horrific dictatorships have happened, over and over, when Communist forces took over. Russia. China. VietNam. Cuba. Cambodia.
Repression. Censorship. Mass arrests of dissidents. Mass imprisonment without trial. Massacres. In Russia under Stalin: 30 to 40 MILLION deaths, according to more than one source. In the Communist-created famine in the Ukraine (1932-33), 7 MILLION people starved to death. Another source calculates the daily death rate: 30,000 a day (Links online: http://elsasblog.com/161218).
7 MILLION - this is more than the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis. But how many people know the number - know it and shudder with horror at the word, Communism, as they shudder at the word, Nazism?
Then there is Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-1963): 30 to 50 MILLION deaths. Maybe more.
And what about Pol Pot (Cambodia): 2 to 3 MILLION out of a population just over 8 million.
The first fatal flaw: Communism does not have a system of checks and balances that sets limits on those with political power. There's nothing like the Magna Carta, an imperfect document, but one that limits the power of the king. Nothing like the American constitution, likewise imperfect, but it likewise balances power, does its best to limit the power of the government to control the citizens.
Communism has none of this. In other words, it's inherently a disaster waiting to happen.
It may sound good - like a flawed blueprint that comes with a gorgeous-looking drawing of what the end result is supposed to be.
How is this fatal flaw generally hidden? Very easy: it's not mentioned. Instead, I've kept hearing that all the horrors are individual aberrations - this is Leninism not Communism, Stalinism not Communism, Maoism not Communism, Ho Chi Minhism (VietNam) not Communism, Pol Potism (Cambodia) not Communism. Now you see it (the horrors) - and immediately after you're told that the facts are irrelevant, because what really counts is the "real Communism" - which is a fantasy image.
It's as if the GOAL were Olympic level skiers, and the reality was children thrown off cliff edges - along with another reality: the dismissal of the pile of bodies at the foot of the cliff as some aberration, and the quick refocus on the wonderful GOAL.
Another lack: both Communism and the West have shown that they lack, in large part, whatever it would take to acknowledge the inherent flaw.
The second fatal flaw: the GOAL - commune-ism. Great to have enough to eat for all, education and medical care accessible for all. But total commune-ism? No private property? It's a rigid vision - it assumes this is what is best for people - rather than being reality-centered, where we keep learning and adjusting, improving.
What do I advocate? A reality-centered approach that keeps checking what is working and what isn't, in terms of human flourishing. This is my approach overall, including with ethics:http://elsasemporium.com/reality-based-ethics.html
But back to that first fatal flaw.
How is it that one massive atrocity after another is denied and/or explained away as an aberration? I had my eureka moment only a couple of years ago re Communism during a presentation on the Magna Carta. Why did I need to come to this eureka moment when the fatal flaw is utterly obvious once one sees it? Why hadn't I been taught this in grade school, or anyway in high school? It isn't tough to understand: maybe there's a great goal, but there's no means to reach it; instead a common outcome is murderous dictatorship.
One answer: people are so enthralled by the vision of What Is To Bethat they just can't pay attention to millions upon millions of people murdered.
That answer is far from enough. It doesn't explain, for instance, the barrage of positive images of Fidel Castro - instead of stories of his atrocities which add up to 100,000 deaths. (The atrocities are known, but not given much mainstream attention). How many of the people putting out these positive images of Communist leaders have been so brainwashed that they themselves don't see the horrors? What is going on?
Diana West's American Betrayal documents the impact of mass Communist infiltration.
For the impact of brainwashing, a great resource is anything on the Stockholm Syndrome - such as Kenneth Roberts' analysis of the Stockholm Syndrome within Islam, postulated to be Mohammed's greatest discovery: https://www.politicalislam.com/discovery
Another question. Is Islam flawed in a way similar to Communism?
Yes. For non-Islamics, both the HOW and the GOAL are fatally flawed. Islam's HOW: the many varieties of jihad - each and every one of them destructive of non-Islamic societies. Islam's GOAL: a worldwide Islamic caliphate where all must follow Sharia, the dictates of Islam in which there is female subservience, slavery, sex slavery, etc - and any non-Islamics who are allowed to live are dhimmis, utter inferiors.
With Islam even more than with Communism, both the HOW and the GOAL are generally kept out of Western view as fully as possible.
However, there is a major difference as well as similarity. The HOW of Islam was clear from the start: the various forms of jihad. In this way Islam is unlike Communism. On the other hand, Communism generally tries to hide Communist atrocities, and Islam almost invariably insists it is a religion of peace, when speaking publicly to the Western media. So with both Communism and Islam, there is a disjuncture between reality and what one is supposed to perceive.
And now, my third gift to you. The huge differences in general Western mainstream response to:
- the Jonestown massacre (1978 - 909 Americans dead in "revolutionary suicide" via cyanide poisoning);
- Communism;
- Nazism;
- and Islam.
The Jonestown massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org). There was nothing wrong, from my brief look, with the Jonestown goal: some kind of paradise. The problem (as with Communism): the HOW. When things did not work out as desired on earth by the leader, Mr Jones, the outcome was death to all his followers and himself by suicide (or "forced suicide", meaning murder).
The general response: horror. My evaluation of this response: it sounds both sane and natural to me.
In other words, people did not care about the GOAL (some kind of paradise, whether on earth or elsewhere). They cared about the reality - the lives cut short. People didn't just have this response spontaneously, by the way. The media reports encouraged people to be horrified by the mass deaths. Lots of images of dead bodies. The stories were all about the horror.
Another point: the leader was held responsible, not the followers.
In this case, that also seems pretty reasonable to me.
With Communism, as already noted, the GOAL is used to deny the relevance of reality. In other words, the end supposedly not only justifies the means, it makes the means irrelevant - and at the same time, of course, the ongoing reality is generally denied. So the Communist-created famine in the Ukraine (1932-33) in which 7 MILLION people died - this was denied. It isn't as if Communism acknowledged the famine and claimed this was a small price to pay for the GLORIOUS GOAL. This happened over and over. Yet those who denied believed this was a good thing to do, to protect that Great Goodness, Communism. Communist forces massacred 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Again, Communists denied they had done it, until the evidence was just too overwhelming. And even then, a key eye witness who spoke out was murdered. But most people in the West have not turned away from Communism. Instead, as we can see in the many recent tributes to Castro, a dictator responsible for over 100,000 deaths. Somehow the mass murder of dissidents is irrelevant. After all, just think of the wonderful GOAL.
Also we're shown plenty of pictures of smiling Castro - and of glamorous Che Guevara, and earlier there was good ol' "Uncle Joe" (Joseph Stalin), along with Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung looking nobly into the distance. With the Jonestown massacre, on the other hand, we were not encouraged to feel sympathy for Jim Jones.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of the brilliant Gulag Archipelago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, having lived the brutal reality of years in a Communist prison camp, pays attention to that reality in his writings, and then asks WHY the West generally disregards the reality. He gives numbers. Under the czars (generally viewed as repressive brutes) an average of 17 people a year were executed. The Spanish Inquisition destroyed, at its height, 10 people per month. Once the Communists got into power in Russia (1918-1919), the death toll took a dramatic leap: 1000 people per month were executed without trial. By 1938-1939, that had risen to over 40,000 people executed per month. And the czars were the repressive ones??!!! And Stalin was "Uncle Joe"???
The situation is very different when we turn from Communism and Communist leaders to Nazism and Hitler - it's almost the exact opposite, in fact. Was there any positive goal? Hitler spoke of a Thousand Year Reich. What was it supposed to be like? What one sees is the atrocities.
Also, run-of-the-mill Communists - citizens of Communist countries who believed in Communist ideology - are not seen in the same way as run-of-the-mill Nazis. Run-of-the-mill Communists tend to be seen as ordinary people. This isn't the case with run-of-the-mill Nazis. Instead even non-Nazi Germans, at least for decades after World War II, tended to be demonized, seen as evil.
This is a natural human tendency, by the way: the tendency to generalize. Someone is bitten by one dog, and comes to fear all dogs.
But it needs to be noted that this natural human tendency does not emerge in relation to Communists
Also while it's natural to recoil from Nazi horrors (and Jonestown horrors), Communism was even more horrific and again, the natural recoil is missing. Also missing: attention to Western collusion, the West's generally discounting evidence of Communist atrocities and failing to hold accountable known Communist perpetrators of atrocities. For example, at the Nuremberg trials of top Nazis, the key Communist judge - with the accord of the British and the Americans - was known to be a major judge at Communist show trials of dissidents.
And then we come to Islam. While Nazis are judged negatively - and held responsible - for Nazi atrocities, this is totally not the case with Islamics. Islamics are not judged negatively, by the mainstream anyway, for Islam-endorsed atrocities committed by Islamics. Instead, the mainstream is on the lookout for indications of that dire dreadful thing, Islamophobia. Islamic violence, it's declared over and over, has nothing to do with Islam - something one never hears about Nazi-endorsed violence committed by Nazis.
Unlike with Communism, there isn't much attention to the GOALS of Islam (which would make most Western people recoil in horror!!). Instead we tend to be told what Islam supposedly IS: a religion of peace. And we're told about how important it is that Islamics not suffer from prejudice due to violence done by Islamics who are supposedly not Islamics.
The bad guys are the Islamophobes, who violate the prohibition against linking Islam with violence done by Quran-quoting Islamics in the name of Islam.
This is akin to the situation with Communism, where it's anti-Communists who are judged as Red-baiters and McCarthyites.
Once again, a natural horror in response to atrocities - as with the Jonestown massacre and Nazism - is missing.
There's a lot more exploring to be done.
But, in brief, Nazism is connected to:
- one part of Nazi ideology (most of all, that Jews are evil);
- Nazi means (repression of dissent; Holocaust against Jews and others designated evil and inferior);
- and Nazis (7% of Germans) and also Germans in general.
Islam is not connected to:
- Islamic ideology (most Islamic ideology is denied, except that which has been abrogated/rendered null and void 1400 years ago);
- Islamic means (jihad);
- Islamics ("but I know a nice Muslim," "Not all Muslims are like that," etc).
Communism is connected to:
- the Communist fantasy goal (heaven on earth).
Communism, in the mainstream Western media, is disconnected:
- from the means (mass starvation, mass repression of dissent; large scale murders, etc);
- and from Communists (those Communists who are for worldwide Communism domination, including through infiltrating non-Communist political systems with Communist agenda).
With the Jonestown massacre, the focus was on the horror of the deaths - not the splendor of the goal, not the glamor of the leader.
In general, something unnatural seems to going on with Communism and Islam - something that works against the human tendency to be horrified by horror.
And in fact, the general response to Nazism may be a natural child response (one side is all good, the other all bad), but it isn't an adult response that takes way more facts into account:
http://elsasblog.com/161211-new-facts-about-WW-II.html
Here are what may be 2 further parts of the explanation (in addition to infiltration and the Stockholm Syndrome) for the general softness toward Communists and Islamics: humans are very malleable - and with both Communism and Islam, 2 of our greatest qualities are used against people.
The first quality: empathy. Lots of studies show that caring for others makes people happy. You can buy happiness by spending money on other people, according to a very interesting TED talk:https://youtu.be/PsihkFWDt3Y
With both Islam and Communism, through the mainstream media, government, and so-called education, people are encouraged to feel empathy for, care about Islamics (poor them, hurt by Islamophobia) and especially about Islamic refugees (poor poor poor them), and about all the wretched of the earth (Communism promises to give them all plenty). At the same time, there's a lack of attention to the need for self-care (the danger of Islam to non-Islamic societies, the documented dangers of Communism)
The second quality: feeling. All the psychologies encourage us to be in touch with our feelings. Even in school, students are encouraged to express what they feel about something - not what they think. So masses of people have a meltdown when Clinton loses. They haven't learned to seek out information, check into sources. People feel about climate change, not think. People feelabout Communism and cute Che Guevara - not think. People feelabout people with information that shows Islam is a threat: eek, Islamophobes!!
I read somewhere that you can tell a society is in trouble if feeling is put above thinking. Yes!!! it went inside me. Having the capacity to feel and know what we're feeling - vital. But then there's also that other amazing capacity - to think, to take in information, evaluate it, search out more, analyze it. For instance, I've been thinkingabout Communism, Nazism, Islam and the Jonestown massacre.
And that's all for today.
Next time: time to celebrate. A tribute to those of us on the side of truth, human rights and freedom, like freedom of speech.
In the meantime, all the best to all who care and dare,
Elsa
PS. Please sign to protect Canadian free speech rights from allegations of "Islamophobia." What's this about? A recent petition was passed by the Canadian government, aiming to condemn "Islamophobia" throughout Canada. Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the threats to freedom of speech throughout the West knows this is dangerous. For instance, in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, likely the next Dutch prime minister (yeah!), has just been judged guilty for speaking the truth. So please sign:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protecting-canadian-free-speeech-rights-from
PPS. Last time, I wrote that I had 3 gifts for you, and gave the first of the gifts: a revised version of World War II - one that recognizes the impact of massive Communist infiltration. You can see it at:
http://elsasblog.com/161211-new-facts-about-WW-II.html
I got LOTS OF COMMENTS, including one from someone who totally disagreed, and a brief one from Bill Warner of Political Islamwho agreed.
One suggestion: to look at Hal Colebatch's Australia’s Secret War: How Unions Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II:
https://quadrant.org.au/secret-war
Between 1939 and 1945 virtually every major Australian warship, including at different times its entire force of cruisers, was targeted by strikes, go-slows and sabotage. Australian soldiers operating in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands went without food, radio equipment and munitions, and Australian warships sailed to and from combat zones without ammunition, because of strikes at home. Planned rescue missions for Australian prisoners-of-war in Borneo were abandoned because wharf strikes left rescuers without heavy weapons. Officers had to restrain Australian and American troops from killing striking trade unionists.
Whose side were the strikers on? Clearly not on the side of Australia. Most likely not on the side of Nazis. Perhaps they were on the side of Russia. More research needed.
**
MORE RESPONSES:
One of the three most influential books in my life has been Whittaker Chambers' autobiography, "Witness", which if you have not read, you should (lots of fertile ground there for a psychologist, I am sure: Chambers was a brilliant, but tormented, soul).
A letter in I believe the Wall Street Journal some 20 years ago has stuck in my mind. It was written by an American veteran of WWII who participated in the repatriation of Russians back to Stalin's hellhole. A woman who was being repatriated exclaimed to him, "I thought you Americans were good." As a young GI, he had no answer for her then, and had none later in life.
But of course, we all know how the truth must be obscured for the GREATER GOOD when the cause is right . . . In recent years, I have concluded that the American people are not worthy of the democracy that the founders of the USA bequeathed them. I don't know what the solution is, but I think it involves restricting the voting franchise in some manner.
One of the books that lies unread on my bookshelf is a book published in the 1930's by a Russian named something like Tchernavakin entitled, "I Speak for the Silent". The author managed to escape a camp near the Finnish border and published a book in the West about the Gulag. The world was not ready to hear about that until Solzhenitzyn some four decades later. The French Communist Party never recovered from the publication of Solzhenitzyn's magnus opus.
D.L., US
** Can you imagine being able to entertain these ideas (about the enormity of Communist infiltration), just a few years ago? Would you have had an internal censor that would not consider reading that material at all? I'm most interested in understanding how to affect the change necessary to propel people to be willing to read, hear and see truth, without their brainwashing getting in the way. Dorene Weisberg., USMy response: Excellent question! Maybe if we explore our own "de-brainwashing" we will learn a lot about what works best. ** Smedley Butler, summed it all up very well in a small booklet he wrote after WW1, and before WW2, but no one listened. I’ve read the book. It’s title is, War Is A Racket. It’s quite revealing to those who want to know why we fought some recent wars. K.P., US** Did you know that, among his other treacherous acts, FDR knew about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor and did nothing? If you want to read a gripping, short, war-years account of the man who was responsible for getting this info to the Americans, see if you can scare up a copy of "Spy Counterspy" by Dusko Popov. Popov is the agent Ian Fleming based his James Bond character on. And did you know that Hitler unconditionally surrendered a full year before it was accepted, but the Allies carpet bombed the farms, homes, companies, etc. WHY? So that the lending institutions could charge interest on loans to rebuild the country. In other words, while FDR was appeasing Stalin in ensuring the war would continue until Stalin got what he wanted, there was someone / some force even higher than Stalin and FDR - the bankers. Bankers cannot make money unless there are places to lend, at interest.....and war creates a high market for money.Cicero had it right. His words live on: There is much treason from within our halls of power.Also read: Churchill, Hitler and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. By Patrick Buchanan http://www.goodreads.com/ Here's a bit about it: Among the British and Churchillian blunders were: • The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The 1935 sanctions that drove Italy straight into the Axis with Hitler
• The greatest blunder in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939—that guaranteed the Second World War
• Churchill’s astonishing blindness to Stalin’s true ambitions.
Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.
T.L.B., US
**
My biggest response to the people who sent comments: thank you. They stimulate thinking, learning, revising, expanding what we know.
Elsa
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