RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/socialism-as-a-hate-crime-9746?utm_source=The+New+Criterion+Subscribers&utm_campaign=432f5ac8d7-Most-Read_dispatch_2019_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f42f7adca5-432f5ac8d7-104843169
On the human cost of a persistent and pernicious political doctrine.
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.–Joseph Stalin

It is a great irony that at a time when Facebook and Twitter are closing accounts of conservatives for allegedly promoting “hate,” and conservative speakers are banned from college campuses for (as it is charged) “peddling hate,” opinion polls suggest that socialism is more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, is the most popular figure among progressive Democrats, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emerged from the Bronx as the newest socialist celebrity and is traveling the country singing the virtues of socialism, as if no one has heard those songs before.

Which raises the question: given our loose standards on the subject, why isn’t socialism a “hate crime”?

After all, the evidence for its malignant effects is obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to look at the historical record. The socialist movement has been responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and torture of many millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of innocent people during its heyday in the twentieth century. That history of murder and tyranny continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the misfortune of socialism—for example, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and (more recently) Venezuela.

How do socialists escape the indictment that, in view of the historical record, they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder? Many deny that Stalin, Mao, and the others were true socialists and, indeed, that socialism has never really been tried—a manifest absurdity. Senator Sanders and others claim that they are for something called “democratic socialism,” a popular and peaceful version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and Castro said until they seized power and immediately began to sing a different tune. Democracy and diversity are what they say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power. That is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements.

Democracy and diversity are what socialists say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power.

The late R. J. Rummel, a noted scholar of political violence and totalitarian movements, coined the term “democide” to describe large-scale government killings for political purposes—in other words, politically motivated murder. While communists and socialists have not had a monopoly on democide, these movements (Rummel says) have been responsible for far more political killings in the modern era than any other political movement or form of government.

He concludes that

“[i]n sum the communists probably have murdered something like 110 million, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course the total itself is shocking. It is several times the thirty-eight million battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone—one communist country—well surpasses this cost of war.”

Rummel suspects that the estimate of one hundred ten million killed may be too low, and in fact that the death toll from socialist democide in the twentieth century may be as high as 260 million.

One is supposed to begin the new year imbued with optimism, so accept my apologies for the long face and grim tidings. I hear very little debate about about the most pressing issues but many war cries from the new tribalists. Folly, I fear, isn’t marching, it’s galloping.

I am pretty sure that Donald Trump was unfazed on hearing that new Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib had promised to “impeach the motherf****r.” She’s the first Palestinian Muslim elected to Congress. She draped herself in the Palestinian flag after winning the Democratic primary last year. She ain’t no friend of the Jews or of Israel. She supports the BDS campaign and also a one-state solution. Goodbye, Israel, a pity about the ensuing slaughter. She was joined when being sworn in by Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, another piece of work. Weep for the times.

For form’s sake, Tlaib’s comrades dutiful demurred on her language but admired her authenticity. Anything is forgivable, even a likeness of his decapitated head held aloft, if Trump is the target. Two things strike me.

The first is that the times are changing for the worse before our very eyes. Islam is becoming part of the fabric of our societies while Islamic societies are busy marginalising and driving out minorities, particularly Christian ones. This isn’t something which is creeping up all unbeknown. Muslims are populating the West, bringing with them a scriptural guide which has inspired barbarism down the centuries.

The Left’s love-in with Islam is locked-in. But, please, please save us from conservatives who explain that most Muslims are peaceful and moderate. Blind Freddy knows that. However, those of us with our common sense still intact also know that the immutable, irredeemably nasty scripture, wielded by rabble-rousing imams, ever lurks in-waiting to corrupt Muslim minds.

Now I understand and applaud efforts to reach out to Muslims. Once resident, Muslims must be treated as kindly as everyone else. But it is a numbers game. There is far more chance of Enlightenment values being universally shared if those not steeped in them, more particularly, if those whose values are antithetical to them, do not form larger and larger proportions of the population. This is a general proposition, by the way, when it comes to shaping immigration and deciding who should be invited in and who shouldn’t.

Of course, this is silly of me, we all know that bad things don’t really happen. We need to celebrate unlimited diversity and multiculturalism and why not throw in abortion on demand and gay marriage. And, while we are at it, a “Two Minutes Hate” session directed at white men (and white women) is cathartic for the ever-growing victimhood.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. (1984)

Trump recently gave press conference with three representatives of border patrol standing behind him. The event was mocked by Joe Scarborough and company on MSNBC because the three guys were bald (which I take personal offence at and am seeking a safe space) and because they were white. “This wall is not a wall, it is a let’s keep America white again.” The only problem: two of the guys were Latino but obviously not unwhite enough for ‘Morning Joe’. In California, a Women’s March was cancelled in December because those participating would have been predominantly white – hang the content of their characters. Just two examples of many.

The second thing that strikes me, also for the worse, is the way enough voters to win the day occupy a policy-free political mind space. At least when it comes to policies which are general in their effect. For example, those critical of Trump as man seem oblivious to the effect his policies have had in producing record low Hispanic and black unemployment. They simply couldn’t care about that. Similarly, Corbyn could well be elected in the UK despite having the kind of socialist policies which have always created unemployment and misery. Shorten is likely to be elected this year despite having taxation and renewable energy policies which are bound to kill jobs.

It’s a fair bet that few voters would specifically vote for fewer jobs. Yet, the relevant policies, which alone tell the tale of job creation, make up very little of the political debate. It is true that tribalism and personal likes and dislikes have always counted in the minds of voters but now they seem to count for everything. It seems likely to be a product of identity politics; of which, of course, targeting despised whites is a part.

If people segment themselves on the basis of their sex, their sexual orientation, their skin colour, their indigenousness, their ethnicity, their religious/cultural affiliations, it lessens the focus on policies which impinge on people across the board. Of course, policies which impinge on particular groups (e.g., the LBGT community) get a run. Forget it otherwise; it’s back to raw emotions, epitomised by Congresswoman Tlaib’s gutter language.

I tuned in to CNN after Trump’s Oval Office address on border security. Leaving aside the visceral hatred of Trump, it was all superficial politics. Had Trump moved the political needle? Not once, did I see an attempt to grapple with the substance of whether more and better physical barriers were required. In fact, the need for physical barriers used to draw support across the aisle – which is why lots of fencing is already in place. But that was when policy had a more prominent place in political contests.

Are there any underlying economic, social or political trends which are promising?

https://www.city-journal.org/jazmine-barnes-murder

Anti-cop activist Shaun King says that his involvement in the campaign around the Jazmine Barnes murder was not driven by reports that a white man had killed the seven-year-old girl, who was gunned down in Houston on December 30. According to Barnes’s mother and 15-year-old sister, the white driver of a pickup truck had pulled up next to the family’s car before opening fire. The accusation set off a frenzy of hate-crime allegations and blanket coverage by the New York Times. King offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who located the suspect.

As it turned out, Jazmine Barnes was killed by two black men, who opened fire on her mother’s car because they thought that they were targeting enemies of their gang. King passed along a tip about the real killers to the Houston police, and now says that he merely “internalized the pain of the family and tried to search as if it were my own child who was killed.” Race, in other words, had nothing to do with his activism.

It’s worth remembering, though, the many other black children who have been victims of drive-by shootings without leading King to launch a national crusade.

A sampling: in March 2015, a six-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting on West Florissant Avenue in St. Louis, as Black Lives Matter protesters were converging on the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department to demand the resignation of the entire department. In August 2015, a nine-year-old girl was killed by a bullet from a drive-by shooting in Ferguson while doing her homework in her bedroom, blocks from the Black Lives Matter rioting thoroughfare. Five children were shot in Cleveland over the 2015 Fourth of July weekend. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago that same weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In Cincinnati, in July 2015, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings. In Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September 2015, leading the black police chief to break down in tears and ask why the community only protests shootings of blacks when the perpetrator is a cop. In November 2015, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. All told, ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore in 2015; twelve victims were between the age of ten and seventeen.