Zombie culture, collectivism and joining the herd by "castrating your own thoughts" in order to be eaten last.

"As an ex-communist, I can tell you with certainty that collectivism -- in all its forms and despite all its various lies wrapped in noble-sounding excuses -- is nothing but the appetite of a self-appointed 'elite' for other people's liberty, property and lives. As potential collectivist food, then, you cannot successfully negotiate with an appetite. You can, however, if you wish to remain alive and free, kill or cage the hungry sonsabitches as they appear, before you, your family, your friends and your country are eaten." -- Mike Vanderboegh, email to a Sipsey Street reader, 2009.

"There's a common tendency among this generation to castrate their own thoughts. They automatically don't think about negative or complicated thoughts. They're factory farmed, like chicks in a chicken farm. After birth, their lives are regulated like that, and some boundaries can't be crossed. As long as you don't cross them, you will live very happily." -- 36-year-old Chinese graphic novelist Xie Peng.

On Saturday morning I was driving back to the used tire store for a poor man's alignment on Rosey's Toyota, when I heard the words above in an interview on National Proletariat Radio. Xia Peng, speaking from his own experiences with young Chinese, has identified the principal way that all collectivist dictators in all times and places are able to get away with their tyranny. Whether out of simple moral cowardice or the urge to belong and conform inherent in "Groupthink," tyrants count on on the masses to do nothing to hinder them. Groupthink, for the uninitiated, is defined thusly:

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.

Loyalty to the group requires individuals to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions, and there is loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. The dysfunctional group dynamics of the "ingroup" produces an "illusion of invulnerability" (an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made). Thus the "ingroup" significantly overrates their own abilities in decision-making, and significantly underrates the abilities of their opponents (the "outgroup"). . .Irving Janis pioneered the initial research on the groupthink theory. He . . . coined the term by analogy with "doublethink" and similar terms that were part of the newspeak vocabulary in George Orwell's novel "1984". -- Wikipedia.

Doing what I do -- what I have done as best I could for the past twenty years -- in resisting collectivism as it has appeared at all levels of government in my own country has caused me to be regarded by the willing members of the herd who are my neighbors and casual acquaintances as everything from endearingly foolish to hopelessly naive to inexplicably insane.

From their point of view, they're right. These are people who, when you distill down their politics, believe that it is only logical that when a monster appears on your street that you should feed it with their friends and neighbors on the theory that they will at best be ignored as harmless and inoffensive and thus be spared or -- at worst -- at least be eaten last. They "castrate their own thoughts" to use Xie Peng's phrase, because they truly believe that "Resistance is futile." They understand that humans can indeed become the worst of monsters -- collectivist zombies if you will -- and the best thing to be done is to join the herd and be assimilated. You have to obey, but at least you get to live for a while. If, of course, you call submission to tyranny "living."

In his book, Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens commented on this human-monster transmogrification, and its use as allegory in books and film:

"Jean-Paul Sartre . . . once made a telling point about fictional and science-fictional monsters. What we fear, he said, is a creature of great cunning and energy, quite devoid of any moral or mammalian scruple. This, he went on to say, is an exact description of our very own species in time or war or scarcity." -- Page 136.

"A creature of great cunning and energy, quite devoid of any moral or mammalian scruple." I can think of no better description of collectivism and its penchant to stack up bodies on the altars of its lies. I have searched for the original Sartre quote to which Hitchens refers without success, but I did find this:

"Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn’t exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn’t possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey." -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps Modernes, 1961, p. 184.

Yes. Exactly. Collectivist states are the worst sort of monsters and they produce acts of uncommon bestiality. Which brings us to the current monsters-as humans-transmogrified allegory: zombies. As John Hayward recently observed:

"George Romero once used the zombie to satirize consumerism, but they work equally well as a metaphor for the appeal of collectivism: no decisions to make, not a care in the world, do what the herd does, and you're always hungry." -- Breitbart, 25 Jun 2013.

Recall my own observation at the top that collectivism is "the appetite of a self-appointed 'elite' for other people's liberty, property and lives." Does this not define what a zombie is? With fictional zombies it is all appetite, and no negotiation. Those who do not wish to be eaten must destroy the zombies or be steak tartare.

The power of collectivism encourages -- indeed, counts upon -- the timidity of the herd who only wish to hide and live and do so by castrating their own thoughts. Yet, in the end, whether they resist or not, all will be eaten if the zombie collectivist state has its way. The only sane strategy for dealing with that unpleasant truth is to risk all and fight back. Unless, of course, you wish to trade your liberty for the privilege of being on the last boxcar of the last train that passes under the sign that says "Arbeit Macht Frei" on your way to the last "shower."

Collectivism's timeless appetites for liberty, property and life -- undeniable, insatiable, non-negotiable -- can only be defeated. Fight or die. Resistance is not futile, despite what the little tyrant behind the curtain would have you believe. It is, in fact, the only survival strategy that works with zombies -- communist or not.