No. Those murdered by Mao and the Communists in China didn't die for the right reason. No more than those murdered by the Imperial Japanese invaders did in the decades before or those murdered by Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini in the same period. Or those murdered in the conquest, occupation and theft of the Americas or Australia or any others.
The mountains of corpses in that horrific mountain range identify those ideologies as being morally equivalent. The contention that "Mao made life in China better" for those he didn't kill is exactly the same argument that Hitler made, that murdering those the Nazis scientifically identified as inferior would make life better for the survivors of that mass murder. It's exactly the same argument the apologists for Stalin made or those, such as Winston Churchill who pooh-poohed the genocide of the inhabitants of North America and Australia as a beneficial ethnic cleansing, even as he was setting himself up as the heroic opponent of a man who held similar views.
You don't seem to imagine the possibility of a left that isn't based on that kind of mass murder. You wouldn't seem to be alone in that, whenever I bring these things up, no matter how much I point out my motives are the rock solid foundation of traditional liberalism, absolute equality and a decent life for everyone in a sustained environment, including the leveling of incomes to avoid the inevitable despotism and corruption that comes with inequality, someone inevitably accuses me of having gone over to the far right.
It would seem that you can't imagine a line drawn differently from the traditional one that puts the Communists on the opposite end from the Nazis. A different line which takes the creation of those mountains of murder victims as, clearly the most significant defining feature of an ideology that kills them. Certainly committing tens of millions of murders is more significant than how the murderers claim that they're going to make the economy run more efficiently. Though not in the currently accepted academic definition of things in which economic matters are considered more important than the lives and deaths of scores of millions of people. Ain't enlightenment just great.
As I began this blog with a post criticizing the construction of geometric figures as simple as a straight angle, in a pseudo-scientific reduction of extremely complex aspects of human life and experience, especially politics, it didn't occur to me that maybe the problem is that that line with a right and a left extending from a pretended center should be entirely junked. I wanted to define a new left, but the "left" I'm looking for isn't one that deals in that economic analysis, it's one that takes human beings and life entirely out of the realm of commerce, trade and estimates of value. At the very least the line should be replaced with a two dimensional figure, a y axis that goes straight up, judging the virtue of a political system with how seriously it takes life and how far it removes human beings and all of life from that homicidal, demented dialectic which is our present habit of thought. I can't expect that such a novel idea as politics in which life and death really matters and is the real defining consideration will be adopted, the present system with all its massive and putrid dishonesty serves lots of people with lots of power and money and academic prestige to protect, but their system is clearly one which can't escape the idea that "our" murders are good and "their" murders are bad.
A comment on another website argued the death penalty was okay because it provided retribution for crimes, and even if innocent people were executed, society benefited because justice was seen to be done, so that's the price we pay.
ReplyDeleteI told him he should go next, since it didn't matter who the innocent who died were, so long as society was served.
So my response to someone who says "those deaths were for the right reason" is: you go next. I promise we'll say your death was for the right reason. That should be enough comfort for you, right?
Don't know why it wouldn't be.....
I remember back in the short Supreme Court mandated moratorium on state murder, William F. Buckley and the truly ghoulish Olin family import, Ernest van den Haag, making that argument, that innocent people being murdered by the state being an acceptable price. I recall it was my first intimation that in order for fascism to be imposed here it would be necessary for them to reestablish state murder.
ReplyDeleteI was truly floored when I read Pollitt in 2008 was arguing that the Maoist Progressive Labor Party was good and implying it was idealistic, a party and ideology that championed one of the most ruthless murderers in human history and, I can almost guarantee you, almost none of the lefties and liberals who had read that article had that occur to them. How that is different than saying that the American supporters of Hitler were idealistic and good is something I'd like someone to explain to me. I'd really love to hear the knots they had to twist reality into to come up with that assertion.