Highways to Hell Paved With Utopian Dreams Book Review by By Andrew Harrod, PhD.
In an era of resurgent collectivism, Religious Freedom Coalition founder William J. Murray “stands athwart history yelling ‘stop’” with his new book Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning. Therein he provides a valuable primer into mankind’s rogue gallery of radicals who have ravaged humanity from antiquity to the present with interrelated utopian delusions both authoritarian and hedonistic in nature.
The born-again Christian conservative Murray brings unique personal perspective to his intellectual subject matter as a self-professed “‘Red diaper’ baby.” His family attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1960 and as a teenager he met Communist Party USA chairman Gus Hall, among other leftist luminaries. Murray has thus “served nearly equal periods of my life on opposing sides of reality.”
Murray surveys the collectivist thought of intellectuals from Plato, born in 429 B.C. in Athens, to Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 socialist paean Looking Backward, and President Woodrow Wilsonadvisor Edward Mandell House. “If Plato had lived in the early nineteenth century, he would likely have become a dedicated Marxist,” Murray interestingly reveals. Plato’s Republic, for example, envisioned a society that denied medical care to the chronically ill who had no value to the state.
Likewise English statesman Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia described a totalitarian government that offered free medical care but urged gravely ill persons to commit suicide. Utopianism’s namesake fictional writing “had great influence on the collectivist leaders of the twentieth century,” Murray notes. Vladimir Lenin “championed More’s Utopia as worthy of honor in his newly created worker’s paradise of the Soviet Union.”
Statistics cited by Murray attributing almost 100 million deaths to Communist regimes bear witness to Marxism’s harsh reality. “This is the legacy of utopian thinking: people die by the millions,” he writes, and quotes William Bradford’s seminal 1623 recounting of the Pilgrims’ experiment with collective agriculture. Struggling for survival in a harsh, infant New England colony removed from intellectual thought experiments, the Plymouth governor noted that the Pilgrims experienced the
emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.
Given Murray’s analysis of the notorious characters of prominent totalitarians, their allure is surprising. Marxism’s namesake theoretician “Karl Marx was by all accounts a complete failure as a husband, father, and provider for his children…he was arrogant, hateful, foul-mouthed, unclean, and violent.” Responsible for some 65 million deaths, Chinese Communist dictator Mao Zedong’s “brutal actions make Hitler’s slaughters meager by comparison” and combined with “disgusting personal habits and unrestrained personal lusts.” This “embodiment of pure evil…refused to bathe or brush his teeth for years at a time and used hundreds of peasant girls for his sexual pleasure, passing along numerous venereal diseases to them” during “Hugh Hefner-like sex orgies.”
Ironically, radicals often combine totalitarian tendencies with individual hedonism. “Freedom of speech and freedom of religion must be controlled in a centrally planned utopian society, but sex, as in Brave New World, is abundant,” notes Murray in his analysis of Aldous Huxley’s classic 1932 dystopian novel. “The logic is clear if flawed: if everyone gets to have lots of orgasms and have no children to bother with, they will not notice that all of their other freedoms are repressed.”
Paradigmatic for this phenomenon is Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a “product of an openly antireligious household headed by a rather unindustrious father.” Sanger found her “calling…to destroy biblical morality by promoting uninhibited sexual promiscuity” and her racist eugenics foreshadowed Planned Parenthood as a “minority-killing machine, relentlessly aborting minority children.” She “is in large part responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn babies, the normalization of premarital sex, the creation of generations of unwed moms who spend much of their lives on welfare, and the rampant spread of venereal diseases.”
Sanger’s fellow inhibition breakers include narcotics advocate Timothy Leary, a scientist who “did not lack intelligence—just common sense,” Murray notes. “Leary’s utopian dream of ‘living well through better chemistry’ has been a continuing nightmare” as his vaunted LSD and other drugs have ravaged societies. Meanwhile Communist homosexual Harry Hay extended the sexual revolution to “gay rights,” including his support for pedophilia and the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).
Radicalism extended to American law and education as well under American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) founders Roger Baldwin and John Dewey, the “father of modern, progressive education,” Murray observes. For the ACLU, the “goal is the destruction of all moral norms and the establishment of a genderless, classless, and godless society.” The “Red diaper baby” Baldwin and “fervent Communist” Dewey both wrote books supporting the Soviet Union after touring there in the 1920s.
“Currently the United States seems to be incubating and hatching utopian tyrants at an alarming rate,” Murray worries. Among them, “George Soros is a billionaire atheist who has openly admitted that he has a ‘god-complex’ about his role in refashioning the world in his image.” Leftists in government like President Barack Obama and his Supreme Court appointees Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor believe that the “Constitution is an Etch A Sketch toy that can be used to mean whatever they need it to mean for their current purposes.” Obama’s wife Michelle and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg appear to Murray as “Food Nazis” for their dietary edicts. Government threatens liberties in democracies abroad as well, as shown by Canada where “television is so censored by the government that Christian programming made in the United States often cannot be shown there.”
Environmentalism in the United States and abroad provides new means of collectivization. Murray describes “Watermelons,” people who are “Red (Marxist-Leninist) on the inside, but are using the Green movement on the outside to promote totalitarian central-planned government.” He recalls the 1962 bookSilent Spring by Rachel Carson, the “female version of Al Gore, with her apocalyptic vision of a world without songbirds chirping in the trees.” “Thanks to Carson’s hysterical book, DDT was banned, which has since resulted in the needless deaths of an estimated 30 million people from malaria and yellow fever in tropical countries,” Murray writes.
Another useful tool for collectivists of all stripes are the United Nations (UN), termed the “Utopian Nations” by Murray, an entity “engaged in what can be called an open conspiracy against human freedom.” In particular, “Islam, of course, is the favorite religion in the UN.” “Almost one-third of the UN member nations are repressive Islamic states. These nations are leading the charge, along with the cowardly secularists of Europe, to criminalize worldwide any criticism of Islam,” he warns. “Islam…is becoming the dominant totalitarian system in the world today,” a product of the faith’s prophet Muhammad who “created a vengeful ‘god’ out of his own mental torment.”
By contrast, history’s great totalitarians have often despised Judeo-Christian faith, as indicated by the fascination for the occult among Adolf Hitler and other Nazis. The late Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand’s book Marx and Satan documented in detail satanic influences upon Marx, Lenin, and Joseph Stalin. While being tortured by Communist dictatorship authorities in his native Romania, Wurmbrand’s “persecutors often as much admitted that they were motivated by a satanic hatred of Christianity,” Murray notes.
This hatred is thoroughly understandable given Murray’s analysis of the antithesis between totalitarian thought and Judeo-Christian belief. Herein “[g]overnment is not God; human rights come from heaven; and governments are to protect those God-given rights.” Additionally, in a fallen, imperfect world “[n]o system devised by man can eliminate all poverty, all hunger, all fear, all inequalities, and all wars.”
As the word utopia (“nowhere” in Greek) indicates, the “only reality about a utopian society is that one can never really be expected to exist,” Murray rightfully concludes. “On this earth, the closest thing to ‘utopia’ is a society that respects individual freedom, punishes wrongdoers, embraces a free enterprise system, allows private property, and encourages independence and self-government.” America’s Founding Fathers, the “antiutopians of their time,” held this vision, something the sober lessons of Murray’s book should help revive.
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