The Continuing Appeal of Marxism

You would think they would stop, wouldn't you? How many times do their little schemes fail, and yet they keep coming back for another try? I am talking about the lefties of our world, the ones who still can't bring themselves to say Socialism and Communism are bad ideas with a long, brutal, and public track record to prove it.

One would have thought that with the inglorious death of the USSR, the Don of The International Marxist Mafia, its foul ideology would have vanished never to blight the planet again. Not so. Granted, with the Soviet demise, international Marxism in the form we knew it for nearly the entire 20th century did die. The forces, however, that fathered and nurtured Marxism did not die, and remain alive and well. Those, of course, are envy, resentment, and fear of competition. Those forces won Obama re-election, and are sweeping through the rest of the western world like a new Black Plague--e.g., see what is happening in France.

The envious, resentful, and fearful of the world found and find in Marxism's pseudo-scientific babel analysis and language an "explanation" for any event. If it did nothing else, Marxism "explained" why nothing was the fault of the envious, resentful, and fearful: the rich were rich, because they made the poor, poor; the successful succeeded because they made those who failed, fail. Old Marxism also fed the egos and provided a way for otherwise frustrated and failed "intellectuals" to pursue Napoleonic dreams. Vast conspiratorial forces oppress mankind; these forces can be exposed and defeated only by and with the leadership of an enlightened elite who will lead the wretched of the earth to the socialist promised land, and then, of course, rule over them to make sure the old habits do not return.

The USSR's end forced the envious, resentful, and fearful and their leaders to adapt, transform, fracture and downgrade a belief system that had "explained" everything into less-satisfying sub-sets, each focused on a particular topic: most prominently, feminism, environmentalism and the rapidly growing one of "international law." Despite their seemingly different concerns, all these sub-sets shared much in common, to wit, at their core lay anti-capitalist, anti-American and increasingly anti-Semitic emotions disguised as analytical constructs. Over the past twenty or so years, we have seen these different strands re-meld into the Anti-Globalization Movement (AGM) and its many subsets, e.g., Occupy Wall Street, and the Democratic Party. While it doesn't have the military force behind it of the old Marxism, nor has it yet formulated a clear vision of the world with which it seeks to replace the current world (there is no AGM Das Kapital), it shares with old-time Marxism a reliance on pseudo-science and a vanguard elite. Also from Marxism come much of its language and tactics, as well as the goals of disrupting economic development of the capitalist kind and bringing down the United States and the global order it dominated until recently--until the US, itself, has joined in the assault.

One particularly interesting sub-set of the AGM with which I have had some personal experience,is the grouping that encompasses "movements" for the "rights of the indigenous."

Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American countries with large "indigenous" populations, I can state that America's "indigenous" cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of years ago: "indigenous" culture today means rural poverty. As the saying goes, "I was born at night, but not last night," so even I understand, therefore, that calling to protect "indigenous culture,"as we see in Ecuador, really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to superstition, disease, and of watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It's a call to keep certain people as an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists.

When I hear these calls, I think, "We don't protect rural poverty in the USA. Western man no longer lives in caves or trees, terrorized by solar eclipses and at the mercy of an unforgiving environment. Why should these people? Why should humans live little better than animals in disease-infested jungles, or exposed on cold, wind-swept plains?" It proves amazing, for example, to see how much effort "pro-indigenous activists," often themselves urban upper-class types or foreigners, expend on "land reform." Instead of working to develop an economy where land ownership does not determine whether one lives or dies, the activists seek to chain the "indigenous" to, at best, a brutal life of scratching out a living on postage stamp-size plots of land. Often land reform involves "giving" the rural poor these plots but without the right to sell or use them to secure loans from banks. The poverty and hopelessness increase.

This segues to one of the great and evil myths promulgated by activists, i.e., the Native Americans' love for the land. As one Minnesota activist told me, "they would rather die than give up their contact with Mother Earth." Really? You can believe that if you want, but everywhere I've gone in Latin America, rural people seek to head for the city, or, even better, the USA. They want medicine, Coca-Cola, TVs, cars, motorcycles, corn flakes, and indoor plumbing -- they want to live like the activists do in Minnesota. Those who stay on the land, in particular the men, do not radiate any particular love for the land, the flora, the fauna, or each other. They fish with dynamite and mercury; burn or cut huge tracts of forest; treat their "sacred lakes" as sewers; drink themselves stupid; and engage in often lethal fights and horrendous cruelty towards women, children and animals. In other words, they behave as uneducated, poor people have throughout all history and all cultures. Note to activists: the "indigenous" are human.

The foreign activists are particularly loathsome; they invent and distort history, introducing distinctly 20th and 21st century concepts into the study of pre-Colombian cultures and their remnants. Worse, these activists seek to manipulate poor people for their own political agenda, and often get them killed in pursuit of "liberation theology" or some other fashionable cliche. They overwhelm and corrupt legitimate "indigenous" activists with money, trips, attention, and promises of fame. In exchange, the once-legitimate local activist becomes a servant of Americas Watch, Amnesty International, etc., required to produce ever more dire stories and accusations. Or they merely make up a leader for the "indigenous"; the most famous being Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu Tum -- virtually unknown inside Guatemala (having lived most of her life abroad); a creation of European Marxists; a tool of Guatemala's Communist URNG insurgency; a pro-Castro hater of the USA; an "author" of a major hoax; and, as you would expect in such cases, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The foreign activists appear like a modern version of the ancient Jewish legend of the Golem to save the people, end up creating havoc . . . and then, went it all comes crashing down they run to their Embassies flashing US or European passports, gaining safety and fame as modern Joans of Arc, leaving the "indigenous" to take the hit.

These same impulses we see at work in the Obama administration and among its envious, resentful, and fearful followers. The motto "You didn't build that!" is quite real for them. They cannot accept that enterprising individuals risk their capital, their health, and their time in pursuit of a dream, and that they earn the rewards that come from that--if and when they come. For the Obamistas, as with the old Marxists of the last century, legitimacy comes from the public sector. It is the government, in the hands of the enlightened elite, that will decide how much we get to keep, on what we can spend it, and, of course, seek to deny us the right to defend ourselves. They want to destroy all independent sources of power and influence, and remove every conceivable limit on the power of the state--as long as it is in the hands of an "educated" elite who knows what is best, and knows how to make irrevocable changes in the social, educational, and cultural fibre of a nation.

Nothing I have seen over the past several months and years can convince me that better times lie ahead. The Marxist virus goes dormant, mutates, and re-emerges.