[RightNow] VANGUARD: May Day

Liberty (liberty@vaxxine.com)
Sun, 03 May 1998 21:14:29 -0400 

>Subject: [RightNow] VANGUARD:  May Day
>
>                              MAY DAY
>                            May 1, 1998 
>
>                    Copyright 1998, Rod D. Martin 
>
>                    "Vanguard of the Revolution"
>                          National Edition 
>
>You would have never heard of Karl Marx had it not been for V.I. Lenin.  
>Marx was neither terribly successful nor terribly important in his own 
>right, and had it not been for a revolution carried out three decades 
>after his death, he would be a footnote at best.
>
>But on this May Day, the high holy day of Communism and Socialism, it is 
>important that we remember.
>
>As a student, both in England and America, I often heard the refrain -- 
>even from conservatives -- that "communism wouldn't have been so bad if 
>it had been carried out like Marx suggested, without all that junk from 
>Lenin and Stalin."  It still amazes me the degree to which this leftist 
>propaganda can be passed off as true.  It shows that the speaker has 
>never read much (if any) Marx or Lenin, and, usually, that he wants to 
>sound "intellectual".  It also shows that socialists, whether of the 
>national socialist (Nazi) or of the international socialist 
>(Communist/Socialist) stripe, have been very successful in employing Herr 
>Goebbels' doctrine of "the big lie."
>
>In fact, Marx never produced a political program at all.  The entirety of 
>his plan for his new world order was contained in ten short points -- 
>nothing more than slogans, really -- in his very first "book", the 
>Communist Manifesto.  He never defined them further.  He never saw a 
>need.  Marx had grander work in mind.
>
>He was producing a religion.
>
>Marx, the anti-Semitic Jew, the hater of Christianity and all it stood 
>for, created an entire atheology.  It was, in the words of James 
>Billington, "fire in the minds of men."  Marx sought to turn the old 
>order on its head, to regenerate mankind through chaos.  He preached a 
>dialectical view of history which seemed to derive from Fuerbach but 
>really just represented ancient dualism.  He propounded a materialism 
>which he said "turned Hegel right-side up," and which said that no person 
>was anything more than a mechanistically determined automaton, "matter in 
>motion."  He wedded to this a naively classical interpretation of the 
>labor theory of value to produce his economics, and a utopian view of the 
>state that said man, who was morally neutral and therefore perfectible, 
>could be utterly re-made -- regenerated, or "saved" -- by a state or 
>party which completely controlled and molded his environment.  
>
>To all of this he added an eschatology of victory, a certainty of success 
>which was raised to the level of first principle, of dogma, of 
>prerequisite faith.  It is eternally worth noting that Whittaker 
>Chambers, even when he embraced freedom, believed without question that 
>he was abandoning the winning side.  The contagiousness of the Communist 
>faith was such that virtually everyone at the time agreed.
>
>The tenor of the "worker's paradise" to come was already apparent in 
>Marx's own leadership of the International Workingmen's Association, 
>which was nothing if not dictatorial.  Once in the hands of a state, 
>however, Communist atheology became truly consistent with its 
>presuppositions.  Since the individual man was just a biological machine, 
>he could be discarded at will.  Since good and evil were entirely 
>relative, they could be defined entirely by the party and therefore by 
>the state.  Since the state/party could and must regenerate man and build 
>the paradise to come, it's power must be absolute and unquestioned.  
>
>And since victory was inevitable, millions gave up their individuality, 
>their families, even their lives, without a fight.
>
>Marx's atheology created the greatest idol of all, the idol of the 
>omnipotent state.  This idol appealed to men more than any other in 
>history, because it made all morality relative and it gave ambitious men 
>the means to become gods themselves.  But it also appealed precisely 
>because it was not an idol of stone or wood, but an idol of power:  
>prayers to it could be answered, needs and greeds fulfilled.  And because 
>it indulged all of man's basest instincts while ever appealing to his 
>noblest motives, it was exactly the sort of god man wanted to create, a 
>god in his own image.
>
>Marx's work was nothing new -- it was the logical conclusion of left-wing 
>Enlightenment humanism, and had roots as old as Pharaoh -- and it was 
>left to others -- Lenin, Stalin, Mao -- to carry out his work.  Yet 
>Marx's idol was and remains in many ways the most successful false god of 
>human history.  In its heyday enslaving more than half the world (and 
>nearly taking the rest), its presuppositions still remain the dominant 
>faith of the ruling elites of most of the western world.  That is itself 
>a terrifying thought.  Marxism in this century killed a hundred million 
>people, and sent probably two billion to hell.  It withered whatever it 
>touched, and it frankly touched us all.
>
>If Lenin's minions were the "vanguard" of the old revolution, we must 
>surely be the vanguard of the new.  Nothing has taught us better than 
>Marxism the danger of holding false theological presuppositions, even in 
>the absence of a clear political program.  Mankind may embrace the truth, 
>or he may embrace a lie.  The difference between the American Revolution 
>and the Russian is instructive in the extreme.
>
>
>Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 1 May 1998