He has a bit of the problem that most sufferers of cognitive dissonance face - once he snapped and faced reality he became very angry at the people who had pushed the false worldview onto him. While everything he says in that article is absolutely 100% undeniably true, the left will still deny his writings based on his "hateful, unreasonable" tone.
They've done the same thing with Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" - as if the fact that Jonah uses some more colloquial language in parts somehow invalidates his thoroughly researched and documented points.
Of course, perfectly dispassionate books that also repudiate their beliefs don't bother leftists either; they simply refuse to acknowledge they exist.
I'm proud that I've always been broadly pro-liberty and pro-free market, but I've come to believe (not only because of this) that I haven't been forceful enough. That I should have held "progressives" accountable sooner for the 100 million civilian deaths under communism in the 20th century. I could wish I had read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn sooner.
In principle I'd like to see Solzhenitsyn and some of the more accessible economists on the reading lists in public schools, but that may not be realistic given the victory the left has won there. It may be necessary to get the word out in other ways.
It's a fantasy, one which the Left has thoroughly bought-into, submerged, and cannot escape - all they have left is tonality, not vision. That's why they attempt to repeat the "experiment" again and again and again - they have no History and are lost.
Without wishing to insult the many good people who hold religious beliefs, I think that you need to look at Communism in terms of religious fanaticism.
Facts don't matter - they BELIEVE that their model of the world is the correct one, they FEEL that anyone who disagrees with them is at best misguided, at worst wishing to deny people "progress" (progress towards what, exactly?).
And just like the worst excesses of religious fanaticism, the heretics need a helping hand in being dispatched to Hell (on earth).
At least the religious fanatics believe that sometime after death, their God will judge them and therefore have some restraint on their behavior (no matter how limited that restraint may be). The Communists simply do not. And this view of the religious aspect also helps us to understand why they hate religion ("Thou shalt have no other Gods before me").
Horowitz (IMHO), although high up in the organization was not sufficiently trusted to gain full admission to the top levels.
Had he been so admitted, then he could have summarised communism up in one simple and easily understood sentence.
"Communism is a small group of professional revolutionaries seizing power and taking over a country for their own benefit".
All the other stuff such as the abolition of property, political correctness, top down planning etc. is the realisation of the group gathering ALL power to themselves.
Geoffrey Fairbairns "Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare in the Countryside" has a chapter on Leninism which is the most succinct explanation I have read. It contains the quote above (which I am quoting from memory) and an excellent bibliography for further study (and it shocked me to find out that I had quite a percentage of the books he refers to on my bookshelf - not I hasten to add, because I'm a communist but tracking down the exact quotes to refute these vile people lead me to acquire and read them).
In Grodno, I met a young man who proudly showed me a statute of Lenin as a tank commander, and said "He was our greatest poet, who we listened to for 70 years"
It is possibly the one of the most elegant explanations I've ever heard of Communism... and slightly chilling, realizing the risks that he took saying such things...
Every of these damn idiot wanna-be communists should go spend some time in a Soviet dictatorship as a "normal" person, and see if it wakes them the hell up... Or, they learn they're the type who go willingly into the cattle cars...
Note:
All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost;
references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>
JS-Kit/Echo comments for article at http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2008/08/quote-of-day_19.html (6 comments)
Tentative mapping of comments to original article, corrections solicited.
I've started reading it, but that edge-to-edge and double-spaced layout is painful.
He has a bit of the problem that most sufferers of cognitive dissonance face - once he snapped and faced reality he became very angry at the people who had pushed the false worldview onto him. While everything he says in that article is absolutely 100% undeniably true, the left will still deny his writings based on his "hateful, unreasonable" tone.
They've done the same thing with Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" - as if the fact that Jonah uses some more colloquial language in parts somehow invalidates his thoroughly researched and documented points.
Of course, perfectly dispassionate books that also repudiate their beliefs don't bother leftists either; they simply refuse to acknowledge they exist.
That's powerful stuff.
I'm proud that I've always been broadly pro-liberty and pro-free market, but I've come to believe (not only because of this) that I haven't been forceful enough. That I should have held "progressives" accountable sooner for the 100 million civilian deaths under communism in the 20th century. I could wish I had read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn sooner.
In principle I'd like to see Solzhenitsyn and some of the more accessible economists on the reading lists in public schools, but that may not be realistic given the victory the left has won there. It may be necessary to get the word out in other ways.
It's a fantasy, one which the Left has thoroughly bought-into, submerged, and cannot escape - all they have left is tonality, not vision. That's why they attempt to repeat the "experiment" again and again and again - they have no History and are lost.
Without wishing to insult the many good people who hold religious beliefs, I think that you need to look at Communism in terms of religious fanaticism.
Facts don't matter - they BELIEVE that their model of the world is the correct one, they FEEL that anyone who disagrees with them is at best misguided, at worst wishing to deny people "progress" (progress towards what, exactly?).
And just like the worst excesses of religious fanaticism, the heretics need a helping hand in being dispatched to Hell (on earth).
At least the religious fanatics believe that sometime after death, their God will judge them and therefore have some restraint on their behavior (no matter how limited that restraint may be). The Communists simply do not. And this view of the religious aspect also helps us to understand why they hate religion ("Thou shalt have no other Gods before me").
Horowitz (IMHO), although high up in the organization was not sufficiently trusted to gain full admission to the top levels.
Had he been so admitted, then he could have summarised communism up in one simple and easily understood sentence.
"Communism is a small group of professional revolutionaries seizing power and taking over a country for their own benefit".
All the other stuff such as the abolition of property, political correctness, top down planning etc. is the realisation of the group gathering ALL power to themselves.
Geoffrey Fairbairns "Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare in the Countryside" has a chapter on Leninism which is the most succinct explanation I have read. It contains the quote above (which I am quoting from memory) and an excellent bibliography for further study (and it shocked me to find out that I had quite a percentage of the books he refers to on my bookshelf - not I hasten to add, because I'm a communist but tracking down the exact quotes to refute these vile people lead me to acquire and read them).
In Grodno, I met a young man who proudly showed me a statute of Lenin as a tank commander, and said "He was our greatest poet, who we listened to for 70 years"
It is possibly the one of the most elegant explanations I've ever heard of Communism... and slightly chilling, realizing the risks that he took saying such things...
Every of these damn idiot wanna-be communists should go spend some time in a Soviet dictatorship as a "normal" person, and see if it wakes them the hell up... Or, they learn they're the type who go willingly into the cattle cars...
Note: All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost; references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>