The Beast is not Right Handed or Left Handed- Its The Beast

I have had an email question that presumes a great deal more about The Beast than I am willing to assume. It reads in part:

I respect and identify with your experience. I'm glad you are mounting a personal campaign to warn all the complacent people. It's badly needed, and I wish you all the success in the world.

However, don't think you are EXPLAINING why the Left doesn't reject its violent past. The most obvious one seems to be that the Left is simply allowed by the media to evade and rationalize it. People who care about historical accuracy haven't rubbed their noses in reality, because they have been shut out of the MSM.

So the only answer in sight is the New Media, including your blog. Just as we haven't stopped asking, "What about Hitler?" we should ALSO keep asking, "What about Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam, the Sudan regime, Ahmadinejad, and all their enablers in the intellectual elites?"

"Never Forget" should apply to all genocides and all genocidal fantasists.

I answered him that I have not set out to explain why the left does not renounce its past (and present) barbarity because I despair of getting any ideology to take responsibility for the totalitarianism committed in its name. Perhaps its just an artifact of my being a Jew, but as a member of a religious group that has been subject to uninterrupted centuries of condescending tolerance, implacable hatred and occasional outbursts of savage genocide at the hands of nearly every political party, religious group, chowder society and social club on the planet, I am less concerned with the ideological orientation of the perpetrator than I am with the fearful mechanism by which intelligent people who kiss their babies goodnight and pat their dogs lovingly become capable of lining other human beings up beside trenches and shooting them in the head (the Nazis) or hacking them with machetes (the Hutus, the Khmer Rouge and the TonTon Macoute)or putting explosive jackets on their children and setting them loose on innocent civilians (Palestinians) or flying airliners loaded with passengers into skyscrapers filled with white collar workers(Al Quaeda). The perpetrators of these and so many other horrors are blind not simply because of the ideology they profess. Of course, their beliefs are idiotic, but that’s not the point, all totalitarian systems are based on nonsensical ideas. Approached ideologically, there is only a tautology- they don’t see because of their blindness; they are blind because they are convinced of something that is impossible and they are so committed to that idiocy that anyone who is not part of their system, especially one who that sees the stupidity of what they believe, is a threat to their entire universe of denial.

That is what Totalitarianism is.

I have always been haunted by a conversation I had with a co-worker at a Cambridge think-tank back in the seventies. John was a communist. I had become friendly with him on the basketball court where conversations ran to jump shots not politics. He had a fine jumper and he was a good team mate we never talked politics at work. My wife and I joined him and his wife for dinner one night and the after dinner conversation got quite bizarre. I asked the basic question one always asks of someone who advocates forcible redistribution of wealth- What about resistance from high producers? How do you convince them to give up what they have and continue producing at a high level when what they produce will go into the communal pot? His answer was chilling. “They have to be forced to do it. It’s for their own good.” Then I pointed out the great wave of starvation set off by Lenin’s NEP and the totalitarian regime that had followed. His answer was that some blood would always have to be spilled for the common good. He added for good measure that Russia had strayed from the path and that it was not working out there because that wasn’t “true” communism.

I think this pretty well sums up the easy way in which the left avoid responsibility for The Gulag and the killing fields. “Oh, that’s not what we mean by Communism (or Socialism or Baathism etc…),” they will chuckle. “Stalin was a power hungry thug (or Pol Pot was a savage aberration). Force and blood would only be necessary to get the process started if the ideas a re applied correctly…,” In a perverse way they are right. By virtue of the merciful fact that they themselves have never actually attained the power to persuade, cajole, intimidate and, finally, forces the ungrateful masses to conform to their ridiculous ideas, they are innocent.

I do not think it is possible to defeat the mistaken thugs on either end of the political spectrum by appeal to the failures of history. I only hope to expose The Beast of Totalitarianism and Terror and to help thwart its aims.

I am not an ideologue, part of me wishes that the theory behind communism could work- even though I know it is totally out of sync with human nature. My opinion is that, deprived of its weapons of terror, isolation, force and coercion, the national socialist states, Islamist sheikdoms, personality cults, fascist states and communist systems would dry up and blow away of their own accord. In the final analysis, the only ideology that I have reliance in, outside of my Jewish faith, is the great constellation of principals on which the United States Constitution is founded, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I believe in it not blindly but because it has given rise (even with all its human flaws) to the finest, freest, most prosperous nation in the history of mankind.

The Soviet Union is a case in point. We didn’t win that one through argument, President Reagan simply increased our defense spending to the point that their bungling, broken-down jalopy of an economy just fell to pieces on the road while trying to keep up. Thus, I think we can only win by either defeating them on the battlefield as with the Nazis and Imperial Japan or by so disrupting their isolated incompetent system of internal terror and brainwashing that it falls of its own weight. So to, me, totalitarianism is not just the real enemy; it is the most vulnerable weakness of the enemy too. It must be exposed, recognized and defeated- not because it follows Marx or Hitler or the mullahs but because its seeds are in all of us and the power to destroy it is in knowledge and courage that we all possess.

Islamofascism by the way is a tough one only because we are funding it with our Oil Addiction. We are going to be hard put to finish it altogether until we solve the energy problem. The largely unacknowledged truth is that the Arab world is sitting on a vast supply of easy money that creates the idle useless lives that are so easily turned to Jihad. It is an inexhaustible supply of lucre, which does not have the value of having been earned. It is wealth totally without a comprehensible purpose. It has created a class of parasitic plutocratic rulers whose sole concern is to maintain the control of that stupendous river of capital. It is a double edged sword. When you are that rich, everyone wants what you have. As they sit on their caliphate thrones looking down on the turbulent Arab Street. Their thoughts are not on improving the conditions there but on diverting the turbulence and rage outward from their kingdoms and despotisms. From the Himalayas to the Mediterranean there stretches a belt of terror, misogyny and repression interrupted only by one tiny island of sanity. Those sheiks of petrodollars have made it their entire career to blame the west and especially that little thorn in their side, Israel, for the misery and turmoil in the street. The measures they take to secure their own position they project outward on the Israelis and the U.S...

We have to realize that every time we fill up the car or turn on the air-conditioner we are paying our subscription fee to a kind of Terrorist Attack-of-the-Month-Club. It is a nightmare scenario where our money goes to Gaza and the West bank to be lobbed into Israel as Qassams or comes back here in suitcases, and cargo containers to plan more mass assaults.

Send me your stories- encounters with The Beast are the best way to teach each other to defeat it!