The Other McCain

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Godless Commies: The Critical Theory Cult and The Devil’s Pleasure Palace

Posted on | September 1, 2015 | 72 Comments

 

“The greatest difference in the universe . . . is the difference between nothing and something, between an infinity of darkness and a single point of light. . . . It is the difference between atheism and God.”
Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

A decade ago, when my oldest daughter Kennedy was 16, I drove her and her friend Mandy to Creation, a Christian music festival in Pennsylvania. As we were driving along, something inspired me to start talking about Communism, and I mentioned that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, this was a miraculous event that answered the prayers of millions. Then I explained how, growing up a Baptist in Georgia, I learned to despise “godless Commies,” who had persecuted Christians in Russia, China and everywhere else Marxist-Leninist regimes gained power.

“You kids have no idea what it was like,” I said, attempting to explain the constant terror of growing up in the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff with the potential to annihilate humanity. As a boy growing up, I knew that my Uncle Casper fought the godless Commies in Vietnam, and when I was in second grade, the local park in Douglasville was named in honor of a hero in that war:

Robert Gerald “Jerry” Hunter left his native Douglas County to attend the Citadel, where he graduated with honors. He joined the Air Force, became a fighter pilot, and was deployed to Vietnam. On May 25, 1966, Hunter was on his 34th combat mission when his F-105 jet was shot down near the Laotian border. He bailed out — his comrades saw the parachute — and it was initially believed that he had survived. The 25-year-old pilot was listed as missing in action, and the Air Force promoted him from first lieutenant to captain while rescuers searched for him. Hunter’s family, including his young bride Laura, prayerfully waited for word that he had been recovered safely. Seven weeks later, however, the sad news came that his remains had been found in Laos, where he had apparently died of injuries. First Baptist Church in Douglasville overflowed with mourners at his funeral and local businesses closed early that afternoon in honor of Captain Hunter, Douglas County’s first casualty in the Vietnam War.

Kids don’t know that history, and they are fortunate not to live under the shadow of the existential menace of Communism, the bloodiest tyranny in the history of the world. So on that summer day in 2005, I tried to explain to my daughter and her friend why the Soviet Union — the “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan called it — inspired such resolute opposition from Christians. Marxism is an explicitly atheist philosophy, and the Communist is bound by no morality whatsoever. Communists are always deliberate liars, who believe that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” justifies any deception necessary to advance their cause, and Communists kill without remorse, unrestrained by conscience. The disciples of that deadly doctrine were responsible for the deaths of some 100 million people in the 20th century. The collapse of the Soviet Union was achieved only after decades of conflict and tension between the free world, led by the United States, and the International Communist Conspiracy headquartered in Moscow.

This history, and the sense of what it meant to grow up in the Cold War era, was what I sought to convey to my daughter and her friend on that drive through the Pennsylvania countryside. During this improvised lecture — something of a sermon, really — I kept repeating the phrase “godless Commies,” which subsequently became an inside joke between us. My daughter and her husband came to visit us over the past weekend, and her friend Mandy joined us for a family dinner, and I got a laugh out of them when, discussing recent news events, I asked the rhetorical question, “You know what the problem is, don’t you?”

“Godless Commies!” Mandy replied.

Yes, the battlefield has shifted, but the enemy remains the same, and this post-Cold War “twilight struggle” of the Culture War is what Michael Walsh examines in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. Walsh’s choice of the word “subversion” is apt, because the effort by Marxists to subvert the culture of the West did not stop after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Godless Commies are everywhere in 21st-century America — in academia, in media, in Hollywood and in government. It is remarkable that Hillary Clinton, who certainly could be described as what anti-Communists used to call a “pinko” or “fellow traveler,” finds herself challenged for the Democrat Party nomination by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist. Clearly, this is not the Democrat Party I was raised in, because there is a world of difference between old-fashioned AFL-CIO liberalism (my father was a member of the Machinists union) and the neo-Bolshevik radicalism of today’s “progressive” Democrats.

The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is an examination of a subversive worldview that has been variously called “political correctness” or “Cultural Marxism,” which Walsh identifies by its academic moniker Critical Theory. Whatever it is called, this intellectual virus was brought to America in the 1940s by a group of left-wing refugees — including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich — who are generally known as the Frankfurt School because of their former associations with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Embraced by the avant-garde of American academia, the ideas of the Frankfurt School has enormous influence after World War II. One of their key ideas, given a patina of “scientific” credibility by Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, was the belief that the traditional family was a breeding ground of fascism. This provided the Left with a trite pseudo-Freudian explanation of anti-Communism as rooted in neurotic insecurities. The Frankfurt School’s “diagnosis” of conservatism as a form of mental illness was notoriously echoed in 1964, when a left-wing smear offered the consensus of nearly 1,200 psychiatrists that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was “psychologically unfit to be President.”

However, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is not a dry factual history of the Frankfurt Schools ideas and influence. Michael Walsh is a highly literary man — a screenwriter and novelist, and former classical music critic of Time magazine — who seeks to evoke the humane impulses of artistic creativity in opposition to the soul-crushing forces that Critical Theory empowers. Exposing the hostility of this crypto-Marxist ideology toward that which is spiritual in man’s nature, Walsh appeals to the finest traditions of Western culture, deriving his book’s title from Franz Schubert’s first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss. Walsh’s book bristles with references to classical music (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner) and philosophy (e.g., Aristotle, Rousseau, Nietzsche), as well as literature and films, including Casablanca, High Noon, The Wild One, The Godfather and Independence Day. Adding to this arsenal of high culture, however, Walsh also dares to invoke the religious foundation of Western civilization, citing the Book of Genesis to explain the eternal conflict of human history: “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die . . . ye shall be as gods.”

Believing this satanic lie made Original Sin our inherited condition, and human rebellion against God’s sovereignty began with the impudent desire to usurp divine authority — a “liberation” that results in violence, misery and death. Like the serpent in Eden, the godless Commies tempt us to imagine ourselves freed from God’s law, so that law is no longer a matter of transcendent morality, but is instead simply a matter of power. The destruction of religious belief is necessary to the success of this political wickedness, and the all-powerful State must also destroy the family, as Walsh explains:

Like Satan, the modern leftist state is jealous of the family’s preprogatives, enraged by its power, and it seeks to replace this with its own authority; the satanic condition of “rage,” in fact, is one of the Left’s favorite words (e.g., in 1969, the “Days of Rage” in Chicago) as well as one of its chief attributes. The ongoing, expansive redefinition of what constitutes a “family” is part of the Left’s assault. . . .
Soviet Communism . . . understood this well. Destroy the family, seize the children, and give the insupportable notion of a Marxist post-Eden replacement paradise a purchase on power for at least one more generation. American youth who grew up in the 1950s, as I did, heard numerous horror stories of Russian children who informed on their own parents. . . . Probably the most famous was the thirteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, an instantly mythologized Soviet Young Pioneer who informed on his father to the secret police and was in turn murdered by “reactionary” members of his own family, who were later rounded up and shot. Whether the story is actually true — and post-Soviet scholarship suggests that it was largely fabricated — the Soviet myth required just such an object lesson and just such a martyr to the Communist cause.

Nothing is more important to the Left than the political “cause” because no personal loyalty — not even to one’s own family — can be permitted to challenge the power of the total State, which arrogates to itself the authority to direct and control every aspect of our lives. Pavlik Morozov’s betrayal of his “reactionary” parents is a model for how the government school system now requires children to reject the moral authority of their parents. Teaching the child to hate Mom and Dad — to despise his parents as ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic bigots — is the most important lesson of the modern public school, and this lesson is reinforced daily by the educational bureaucrats who are paid with tax dollars to indoctrine children with an anti-religious, anti-family, anti-American ideology. But I’m ranting again, eh?

Godless Commies! We can never hate them as much as they deserve to be hated, nor can we hate them as much as they hate us, because they hate us with a fanatical fury that a Christian cannot even imagine. It would be a sin to hate anyone that much, but the godless Commies don’t believe in sin, and so they are free to indulge their hatred, which is infinite.

The Critical Theory cult promises to create a utopia of “equality,” yet lacks any real creativity, because it is inspired by a spirit of destruction manifested in a limitless lust for power, with which to punish its enemies. Walsh points out how Herbert Marcuse “celebrated ‘polymorphous perversity,’ advocating the liberating power of sex” as a means to weaken “the foundations of the society he sought to undermine.” Yet this attack on sexual morality produced consequences that the prophets of “liberation” failed to foretell, as Walsh explains:

The attack on normative heterosexuality . . . invariably disguised as a movement for “rights” . . . is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory. . . If a wedge could be driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men . . . then that poliitcal party that had adopted Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs. . . .
The result has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work n the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the “hookup culture” . . . to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male “rape culture” hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.

This result was “predictable,’ as Walsh said, to those who understood human nature as a fixed quantity that could not be infinitely molded to fit the theories of godless Commies. Yet if the soul-crushing misery the Left has delivered is nothing like the paradise of “equality” they promised, the cult of Critical Theory has at least kept its promise to destroy the traditional American society that was always the target of the Left’s vengeful hatred. Very little remains of the America that triumphed in World War II and then endured the “long twilight struggle” to emerge victorious in the Cold War. Having captured control of the educational system, the godless Commies have relentlessly purged religious faith from our nation’s schools and colleges, so that no sincere Christian could possibly hope to be hired in American higher education, even if any Christian were willing to work within the satanic pulpits of academia.

Is there any hope at all? Can we defeat these godless Commies and rescue civilization from annihilation by the cult of Critical Theory? Michael Walsh believes there is still reason to hope, if only the American people can summon the courage to keep fighting:

Facing overwhelming odds at Thermopylae, the Greeks under the Spartan king Leonidas responded to Persian demands that they surrender their weapons with these words for the ages: “Molon labe.” “Come and take them.”

We live in an evil age, and are confronted with the infinite darkness of oblivion, yet there is still hope in that single point of light that is the difference between atheism and God.

 

Comments

72 Responses to “Godless Commies: The Critical Theory Cult and The Devil’s Pleasure Palace”

  1. Demonrat Plantation
    September 1st, 2015 @ 4:48 pm

    The only thing worse than a commie is an anarchist

  2. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 1st, 2015 @ 4:52 pm

    I never liked the movie Reds.

  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 1st, 2015 @ 4:54 pm

    Not true. Real anarchists are dangerous fools. Real communists are murderous thugs.

  4. Dianna Deeley
    September 1st, 2015 @ 5:07 pm

    A really excellent essay!

  5. robertstacymccain
    September 1st, 2015 @ 5:15 pm

    Not to worry. The anarchists are always imprisoned or murdered — along with the democratic socialists — as soon as the Communists take over.

  6. Finrod Felagund
    September 1st, 2015 @ 6:00 pm

    I remember a cartoon I saw in 1990. it had two college-age kids talking to each other:

    “What are you taking this semester?”
    “I’ve got Eastern European history, October-December 1989”

  7. RS
    September 1st, 2015 @ 6:00 pm

    This is the reason it is imperative for parents to remove their children from public schools, regardless of the perceived costs.

  8. DavidD
    September 1st, 2015 @ 6:15 pm

    Two comments:

    1.

    “Marxism is an explicitly atheist philosophy, and the Communist is bound by no morality whatsoever. Communists are always deliberate liars, who believe that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ justifies any deception necessary to advance their cause, and Communists kill without remorse, unrestrained by conscience.”

    This sounds an awful lot like taqiyya and would just as well describe Islamists.

    2.

    I find it interesting that Objectivism, which is supposed to be the pure form of Capitalism, is also an explicitly atheist philosophy and considers Christianity as much an enemy as Communism.

  9. WJJ Hoge
    September 1st, 2015 @ 6:50 pm

    Amen, Brother! Preach on!

  10. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 1st, 2015 @ 7:04 pm

    They are the vector that help allow the Communists to take over!

  11. Fail Burton
    September 1st, 2015 @ 7:06 pm

    I’m not convinced. Sounds more like a random perfect storm of stupid than anything else. The more people are urbanized the more they become disconnected from reality. E. M Forester predicted this in his 1909 short story “The Machine Stops.” I honestly don’t see how hysterical trigger warnings advances a Marxist agenda. What’s the end game: to curl up into a ball?

  12. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 1st, 2015 @ 7:08 pm

    Ayn Rand was a knucklehead when it came to religion, but I would not equate Objectivism even remotely with the evils of Communism. At lease Rand consistently promoted freedom of conscious and individualism in her secular faith. While she rejected Christianity (and all religion other than her own) she did not equate Christianity with Communism.

  13. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 1st, 2015 @ 7:09 pm

    Remember the PAX in Serenity?

  14. Daniel Freeman
    September 1st, 2015 @ 7:49 pm

    There’s a reason why anti-SJWs prioritize being anti-fragile. Individual fragility is exactly what authoritarians want, since it makes people vulnerable to their forked, honeyed tongues.

  15. kilo6
    September 1st, 2015 @ 7:49 pm

    I suggest reading The Ayn Rand Cul by Jeff Walker for more information on the dark side of Objectivism.
    As Evi sated, she was a knucklehead regarding religion. The whole “mystics of the mind” and “mystics of muscle” thing in the Ayn Rand lexicon provides some more insight into this–I’d suggest reading Rand’s work too and not just the critiques of her work.
    Her childhood as a young Jewish girl in revolutionary Russia may have played a part in her dislike of Christianity due to ill-behaved nominal Christians.
    Her relationship with her own mother was a bit adversarial by some accounts.
    Some of her opinions, such as being pro-abort, I believe were rationalizations of her personal misbehavior and (perhaps) guilty conscience. She was banging a co-worker Nathaniel Branden when both of them were married to other people–and Branden was half her age. But hey, they logically explained the infidelity to their respective spouses(!) so no big deal. This one facet of her life is similar to anthropologist and well known academic fraud Margret Mead, who was consistently unfaithful in her relationships and then rationalized her misbehavior via “research” in Samoa which “proved” infidelity was a good thing.

  16. mole
    September 1st, 2015 @ 7:55 pm

    I was always under the impression the USSR had the perfect tool to cripple the west, but their own system was so crap it collapsed before they could take advantage of it.

    In what sane country would members of the weather underground be university academics and actually be allowed to formulate education policy?

    The educated classes are a little to removed from the workers, but in a stunning turnaround its more likely to be the workers who see capitalism and family structures as good things.

  17. robertstacymccain
    September 1st, 2015 @ 8:03 pm

    I once gave a speech about media bias at a national Christian homeschooling conference. During the Q&A afterwards, someone asked, “How has your faith influenced your political beliefs?” This rather took me aback — I hadn’t expected such a question — but I began my answer by saying, “Well, I think it has a lot to do with that part about ‘Thou shalt not steal’ …”

    The welfare state’s agenda of economic redistribution violates the Eighth Commandment. It corrupts the morals of citizens, making all of us complicit in organized theft. You don’t need a radical philosophy to defend private property. While I appreciate Ayn Rand’s idea about the primacy of the entrepreneur as the creative force in economic progress, her Nietzschean attack on Christian morality undermines the value of her work. You cannot fight the enemy on ground of his choosing and expect to win, and atheism is the enemy’s preferred battlefield.

  18. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 1st, 2015 @ 8:14 pm

    I am not suggesting you embrace Ms. Rand’s atheism (I don’t), but I do not reject good work and arguments by people who happen to be atheists. For example, I will take atheist conservative George Will any day over supposed leftist “Christians” who are anything but.

  19. smitty
    September 1st, 2015 @ 8:40 pm

    I’m five chapters in. Call it a “more theological reading of Liberal Fascism, by Goldberg”.

  20. Fail Burton
    September 1st, 2015 @ 8:40 pm

    I dunno. My toes curl every time I hear about Cultural Marxism. If only it were so easy to send 4 guys into a nation and subvert it. Of course we destroyed Europe long ago with nothing more than cartoons, Disneyland and modern kitchen fixtures, but I’m just sayin’…

  21. Bob Belvedere
    September 1st, 2015 @ 8:51 pm

    LENIN:
    We’ll ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution?

    Are you for it or against it?

    If he’s against it, we’ll stand him up against a wall.

    Source: Paul Johnson, Modern Times.

  22. RS
    September 1st, 2015 @ 8:52 pm

    The reason Leninism did not take here during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is that although people were poor, they wanted to be rich and believed that they had the chance to be rich–or at least their children did. (Example: Compare middle-class homes built after WWII: Two bedrooms and single car garages. Homes today: Three bedrooms minimum and at least two car garages.)
    What the Progressives have done–slowly–is try to remove the hope of bettering oneself and one’s position. Revolutions only appear when people lose all hope.

  23. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 1st, 2015 @ 10:05 pm

  24. Blue
    September 1st, 2015 @ 10:12 pm

    Not sure if anyone is interested, but this is a lecture given by a former KGB propagandist, and journalist Yuri Bezmenov gave in 1982 explaining that subversion through American universities, and media was 90% of what the KGB did and how it demoralizes the nation. You will be shocked how accurate he is, and now in 2015 how far along to total collapse we are.

    http://youtu.be/SZnkULuWFDg

    That’s the lecture, and then there is a 6 part interview that goes along with it packed with information.

  25. Blue
    September 1st, 2015 @ 10:14 pm

    You’re missing the point. It polarizes people, and turns them against their own society. This effect should be abundantly clear in this social media era.

  26. Jason Lee
    September 1st, 2015 @ 11:13 pm

    That was an an exciting time. I listened to Radio Moscow on my shortwave radio almost every day.

  27. Jason Lee
    September 1st, 2015 @ 11:58 pm

    Objectivism isn’t any kind of capitalism. It’s a philosophical system.

    Ayn Rand had a poor understanding of human nature. Altruism is truly a feature, and not a bug. Some choose to believe that human altruism was programmed by evolutionary pressures while others say that altruism is the product of divine intervention. But it requires a perverse ignorance to deny that altruism is healthy and to insist that it is an evil product of dysfunctional influences.

  28. DeadMessenger
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 12:45 am

    Wow, it’s been years since I’ve heard a cow critique Ayn Rand. A very unexpected mooove on your part. 😀

  29. ripple947
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 12:48 am

    Wilhelm Reich was not a member of the Institute for Social Research, actually. Very interesting, complicated and crazy character who ended up as arguably America’s first neo-con. He was an MD psychiatrist and renegade disciple of Freud who did mix leftist politics with sexual liberation in the Weimar era while at the same time creating his own method of psychotherapy. He got booted from country to country, ended up in the US, got into weird-ass scientific experiences where he claimed to have discovered an essential energy he called orgone, and eventually died in a federal prison at age 60. But along the way he got completely disillusioned with Communism and correctly referred to it as Red Fascism (as opposed to the Black Fascism of Nazi Germany).

  30. DeadMessenger
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 12:50 am

    Speaking of anti-SJWs, I read Vox’s book. Excellent. Helped fill in some gaps for me, and he also quotes Stacy in it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

  31. DeadMessenger
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 12:52 am

    Huh. Sounds interesting then. Anything “more theological” is up my alley. Think I’ll grab it and have it on deck after my current read.

  32. Daniel Freeman
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 1:39 am

    I’m taking it slowly, like I did with Influence by Cialdini. A lot to digest in each chapter.

  33. Fail Burton
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 2:03 am

    First of all, what is “it” and secondly, a case can be made that social media is in and of itself is destructive. What’s wrong with people who go to far off Abu Simbel or the Inca Trail and can’t stay off of the net? Even people who go outside never seem to be truly outside. I think an argument to “normalize” one’s children would be to forbid them any net and tell them why and see how they respond. Go out and play catch – don’t record it. Go climb a volcano – don’t tell anyone.

  34. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 2:03 am

    Even Howard Roark engaged in altruism of a sort with people he cared for.

  35. DeadMessenger
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 3:05 am

    Normally I do that with books or articles that I want to savor. I do it often with TOM blogposts, and I wanted to do it with Vox’s book, too, because I don’t really read much other than non-fiction, and he doesn’t do as much of that. But I’m on vaycay this week, and I couldn’t resist!

    I’m also making an exception to my non-fiction only rule, because I’m starting this book now: Weapons Grade – Ultra accelerated Uranium enrichment and the war about the diffusion equation (Ummanz Thriller Book 1) by Dr. rer. nat. habil. T. Bodan. Yep…no “normal” fiction for me, lol!

  36. robertstacymccain
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 4:01 am

    “Wilhelm Reich was not a member of the Institute for Social Research, actually. “

    No, he wasn’t. However, to quote from p. 394 of Inside the Orgasmatron by Christopher Turner:

    “In 1932 Reich, then at the height of his Freudo-Marxism, had published an article in the first issue of the Institute of Social Research’s journal, and its members followed his lead in grafting together psychoanalysis and Marxism, and acknowledged this debt.”

    While Reich was not a member of the ISR, then, his ideas influenced the Frankfurt School, an influence that may be seen particularly in Adorno and Marcuse.

  37. robertstacymccain
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 4:18 am

    Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver said, and the arrival of the Frankfurt School refugees in America happened at a propitious time. Their ideas found fertile soil. As Walsh points out in his book, American intellectuals had an inferiority complex vis-a-vis Europe, which was viewed as more advanced and “progressive.” Young faculty were very keen to absorb what they saw as the most up-to-date modern ideas. For example, Reich’s reputation had suffered badly in Europe after he was ostracized by orthodox Freudians. Yet upon his arrival in New York in 1939, Reich was surprised to find himself welcomed with open arms and treated like a intellectual celebrity. It’s amazing how much influence Reich had. Alfred Kinsey was an admirer, as were the “Beats” — William S. Burroughs, especially, was a fan.

    Reich’s association of sexual repression with fascism took root in American intelligentsia, and one might argue that this did far more than any economic program to secure the success of the Left in the past 50 years.

  38. Dana
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 5:35 am

    Tell the truth: you left The Washington Times because you just couldn’t be contained by 750 words, right? 🙂

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  40. CrustyB
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 7:09 am

    Communism, like its cousin Socialism, is a system of theft and slavery. Those who would inflict it upon you deserve no mercy.

  41. Lulu
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 7:13 am

    political correctness has done more to transform this nation — its politics, religious beliefs or lack thereof, family structure, military preparedness, and on and on — they controlled thought through language and now any thought that is outside the bounds of their parameters is silenced in the schools and media and government. And thoughts lead to actions…

  42. Ilion
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 8:21 am

    “You kids have no idea what it was like,” I said, attempting to explain the constant terror of growing up in the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff with the potential to annihilate humanity.

    From my point of view growing up in that time, the worst of it was the sure knowledge that our rulers — in both parties — didn’t really believe that we deserved to win and the Soviets deserved to lose. Our rulers are “managing the decline”, rather than trying to turn the tide.

    And then God gave us Ronny the Great.

  43. Grandson Of TheGrumpus
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 8:37 am

    But that’s the thing about Rand.
    She’d say that people get fair exchange in return for altruism: they feel good for their “altruistic doings”. In fact, I read that she did, (but can’t remember where).

    Being of a religious bent, I am not sure I agree… humorously, I can make an argument a similar to Rand’s.

    That is that in obedience to The Lord’s teachings, we’re “paid” twice: once by feeling good for sharing happiness w/our brothers and sisters along w/pleasing Him. The second “payment” is b/c The Lord blesses us for our obedience to Him.

  44. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 8:40 am

    That’s the thing about obedience to God, he doesn’t ask us to do anything harmful to us. In fact, what he asks if for our benefit.

  45. Ilion
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 8:54 am

    Sometimes, obedience to God is “harmful to us” … in the immediate. But that’s because of the other humans who are actively rebelling against him.

  46. Ilion
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 9:03 am

    The reason Leninism did not take here during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is that although people were poor, they wanted to be rich and believed that they had the chance to be rich …

    That’s not really it — that’s just an analysis of the situation on the presumption that Marxism is The Truth.

    Look: I grew up poor, and I expected always to be poor (*), and I *always* hated socialism in all its guises. It wasn’t my expectation of same day being rich that turned me against socialism as soon as I understood what it is, but my love of God and of human liberty.

    It is not Homo economicus who hates socialism with all his being, but rather Homo religiosus.

    (*) So, the fact that I am comfortable, and without even a great deal of effort on my part, is for me an endless source of gratitude.

  47. Ilion
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 9:06 am

    That’s because even Commies know that anarchists and “democratic socialists” are scum. 😉

  48. Quartermaster
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 9:10 am

    Calling Will conservative is a bit of a stretch. He’s more conservative than Hillary, but the bar is pretty low.

  49. Blue
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 9:13 am

    It is “Cultural Marxism”, which can best observed in the grievance culture/identity politics, and political correctness that has overrun news media, academia, literature, etc. In my opinion, gender politics are the most insidious, but at the same time it’s the most trivial form, and accomplishes none of it’s goals toward a more “equal” society. Instead, it just tears men, and women apart, and radicalizes their daily interactions(see gamergate, mras vs rad fems, etc.), and grows the power of the state to control people’s lives. I posted a video above from a KGB defector, and propagandist who explain’s that this kind of “subversion” was the KGBs main activity, and lays out in great detail how it’s the key to turning a democracy into a statist tyranny. Check it out if you’re interested. It’s really eye opening, and frightening how far advanced in this process we are.

  50. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 2nd, 2015 @ 9:26 am

    Commies are like Herpes, they never really go away