Nothing new under the sun. A little trip down memory lane that the neo-collectivists (or those inclined to make excuses for them) might find instructive.
In my insomnia last night, I pulled down Whittaker Chamber's Witness. I often return to Chambers for inspiration, particularly before traveling to go make trouble for the collectivists somewhere. Chambers reminds me that many have risked far more in this struggle with evil, and his writing is also suffused with his faith in God that sustained him. Witness speaks to me in a way that no other book written by man does.
I have a dog-eared hardback of the 1952 Random House first printing that used to belong to the East Ensley branch if the Birmingham Public Library. I probably paid a quarter or fifty cents for it years and years ago after I came to Birmingham. There is a note on Page 60, an asterisk to this quote which begins on page 59:
The Communist Party, despite occasional pious statements to the contrary, is a terrorist organization. Its disclaimers are for the record. But its record of kidnappings, assassinations, and murders makes the actions of the old Terror Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party look mere romantic.*
The note below it reads in part:
The Terror Brigade, the underground section of the Socialist Revolutionary party, made no secret of its purpose and methods. It organized and carried out the assassinations of the Russian Prime Minister von Plehve, the Grand Duke Sergei, and others. The Brigade was headed at one time by Yevno Asiev, the classic type of the double agent. As head of the Terror Brigade, Asiev planned and executed political murders. As a lifelong police agent, he constantly betrayed the terrorists to the police.
Hmmm, I thought, now doesn't that sound familiar in the present context? Chambers got the spelling of Azev's name wrong, but he was correct.
See the Wikipedia citation for Yevno Azef.
Yevno Azef (Russian: Евгений Филиппович (Евно Фишелевич) Азеф, 1869–1918, also transliterated as Evno Azef), was a socialist revolutionary who was also a double agent working both as an organizer of assassinations for the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (also known as SRs or Esers) and a police spy for the Okhrana, the Imperial secret police. He was an agent provocateur, carrying out acts of terrorism, which justified the police's arresting his accomplices.
Go ahead and read the entire citation. It is a little trip down memory lane that the neo-collectivists (or those inclined to make excuses for them) might find instructive.
2 comments:
I never understood one of my teacher's love for communism. It got to the point where I had to tell him:
"You're a teacher and a part-owner of a private school. Given the history of communism, which batch do you think you'll be killed in first? The business owners, or the teachers? As both of those groups have been killed in numbers that now reach into the millions by communists around the globe!"
How anyone with more than 2 firing braincells can follow that lunacy from that madman is beyond me...
I've actually read the Communist Manifesto. It was Marx's never-ending disdain for "Emigrants and Rebels" that really woke me up and got me thinking.
If someone is leaving your "Worker's Paradise", and you therefore have to punish them, then something is wrong with your system.
If your system is so great, you should be offering an emigrant free one-way ticket to a capitalist hellhole of their choice with the promise to never return.
Not to mention: "Equal obligation of all to work..." How about this: I just want to live in my truck, and do some odd jobs that I can get every now and then for s little extra spending cash, and that's how I want to live me life? In America, one can do that. In the USSR, doing that will get you sent to the gulag because you'll be forced to work at gunpoint.
I can see why someone would want to emigrate the hell away from a system like that...
If one just sits down, and takes a few hours to actually critically read the Communist Manifesto, (critically meaning: Always ask "Why? Why does Marx use the terms he is using? Why does Marx not seem to like emigrants?" Why...? Why...? Why...?) and you'll come away with a bad taste in one's mouth.
You'll look at the history of the 20th century in a whole new light.
You'll look at the photos of human skulls and bones stacked on top of each other from the Khmer Rouge and realize:
"That is the legacy of Marx..."
Whatever legitimate first-hand accounts and intel Chambers might have been able to provide on Soviet Russia will forever be undermined by his hatchet "review" of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (published by the original neocon Wm effing Buckley).
Chambers later admitted to never reading the book, but saw fit to write, "from almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!”
This is the choisest lines amongst many in his so-called review, which was solicited by the National Review and published with the title, "Big Sister is Watching You."
The full "review" by Chambers can be accessed here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/222482/big-sister-watching-you/flashback
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