Is the Next Step for the Left to Liquidate Its Enemies?

Ludwig von Mises, of course, said it best when he described the ultimate end of all variants of socialism, whether communism, fascism, or interventionism:

Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends’ unrestricted omnipotence. He refuses to convince his fellow-citizens. He prefers to “liquidate” them. He scorns the “bourgeois” society that worships law and legal procedure. He himself worships violence and bloodshed. (Planned Chaos, p. 52)

Are we there yet? I hope not.

In the United States in the 1960s, we had violence and bloodshed (bombings, kidnappings, murders, the burning of buildings, and other wanton destruction of property), with considerable rhetoric from the New Left about revolution, though what they really wanted was a putsch.

But that 1960s violence and bloodshed receded after naïve students who constituted the New Left’s rank-and-file followers realized they could get shot (at Kent State).* The leaders of the New Left then either crawled back into their holes, or became politicians and tenured professors.

Violence today still occurs: shutting down speakers and plays, wanton destruction of property, and the fueling of spectacular Nazi-style fires with everything except books.

And there have been assaults and batteries and an abundance of intimidation and threats. Hostility and aggression are used against whomever one disagrees with and both are openly encouraged against prominent members of the Left’s opposition.**

Today, however, the Left’s tactics, as opposed to those used in the 1960s, are different, the preferred one being deception and trickery, also known as fraud. The goal of the Left (it’s no longer “New”) is to shut down disagreement through censorship and by securing the removal of influential people in prominent positions of universities, business, entertainment, and the media.

Facts don’t matter, so in our Postmodern Age of updated Marxist polylogism, Leftists use the word “narrative” to come up with whatever they want. The word “narrative” means “story” or “fiction,” so let’s substitute fiction to state what is promoted today as sophisticated thought.

“You have your fiction, I have my fiction, everyone has his or her own fiction. Reason, logic, objective truth, and objective reality are out. We can say whatever. And whoever shouts the loudest and longest wins.”

The law? Please. It’s malleable according to the judge’s ideology, and many laws, especially in the Federal system, are so vague and overly broad that prosecutors can and do find laws to jail anyone.

Sound familiar from history? Oops! I shouldn’t bring up history. Militantly evasive, as well as actual, ignorance of history, is flaunted everywhere. I am referring to Stalin’s secret police chief, Levrenti Beria, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

Are we there yet?

And then there’s the sheer quantity of laws on the books that I have to say, as I have said before (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83), we are approaching “dictatorship by excessive law.”

Mises would be embarrassed if he knew what passes today for the rule of law and legal procedure—though perhaps not, as he knew well what went on in Russia, Italy, and Germany.

Mises knew, because one magnum opus that he wrote was Socialism, in 1922. The essence of socialism, he says, is destructionism. “It does not build; it destroys. . . It produces nothing; it only consumes . . .” (p. 458).

George Reisman describes socialism as “simply an act of destruction” (emphasis in original), because it destroys property rights, the profit motive, and the price system. It is not another economic theory; it is “a negation of the system based on private ownership” (emphasis in original, The Government Against the Economy, p. 151).

Socialism destroys whatever prosperity has been created by capitalism, resulting in chaos the likes of which we see in modern-day Venezuela—where citizens must stand in line just to get a roll of toilet paper.

Along the way to today’s Leftist paradise, a few eggs, as in the twentieth-century utopias of Russia, Italy, Germany, China, Cuba, and Cambodia, may have to be cracked and destroyed—or should I say, “liquidated”?

Are we there yet?


* If memory serves, this observation about the Kent State shootings was attributed to Ayn Rand. Protesting students in the ‘60s, many of whom I came in contact with, displayed this brilliant stroke of independence: “Hey, grab a beer. Let’s join the demonstration!” Sidney Hook (Out of Step, chap. 33) describes the spinelessness of New York University during its building occupations and malicious destruction of property in 1969 and ‘70. When the administration finally found spine enough to call the police, they informed the students who immediately vacated the buildings. (On recent revelations of FBI-withheld information about Kent State, see this.)

** Fortunately, though much belatedly, the House Minority Leader finally denounced the violence of Mussolini-clad blackshirts, absurdly known as the “anti-fascist” organization, Antifa. And the Senate Minority Leader recently, also finally, spoke out about “un-American” calls for in-your-face hostile and aggressive harassment of political opponents. Will the press ever speak out against violence and bloodshed??

The Communist Era and Capitalism vs. Democracy

Sidney Hook’s 600-page autobiography Out of Step provides a wealth of information about New York intellectual life in the twentieth century, especially the communist era from the 1930s to 1960s.

It also indicates that the main debate today is not, or should not be, capitalism vs. socialism, but capitalism vs. democracy.

As Marxist scholar, communist fellow traveler, anti-Stalinist, pro-Cold Warrior, anti-New Leftist, and adamant defender of democracy, Hook knew or was acquainted with nearly all of the players of the communist era.

The difference between Hook and his Communist Party colleagues is that he actually read and thoroughly understood Karl Marx, so if he had been a professor in a USSR university in the 1920s and ‘30s, he, like others before him, certainly would have been purged.

The names of many of these players should be familiar to anyone who has read about or lived through any portion of the communist era, for example, playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was worshipped by my 1960s New Left professors, and journalist Whittaker Chambers. Hook has stories about all of them.

Brecht, one day in Hook’s apartment in 1935, made a casual remark about a Stalin-assigned assassination: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook showed Brecht the door and never saw him again.

Chambers was a Stalinist spy in the 1930s who, when he came in from the cold, was immediately hired by Time magazine. Chambers later testified against Alger Hiss, accusing the high-level State Department official of also being a former spy. Hiss was subsequently convicted of perjury and went to his death denying it all. Hook concluded the evidence was against him.*

Never a card-carrying Party member, Hook became anti-communist after the Moscow Show Trial revelations of 1936-38. He supported US entry into World War II against the Nazis while Party members, who took their orders from the Kremlin, opposed any support for the evil capitalist regime of the United States.

During the Cold War, when communist apologists were advocating unilateral disarmament on the part of the US and saying it was better to be red than dead, Hook supported a strong defense and pushed the slogan “better free than slave.”

His chapter on the New Left’s spring 1969 uprising at New York University, that is, its occupation and disruption of academic life, is detailed and alarming. His description of the corresponding spinelessness of the school’s administration is equally detailed and alarming.

Not a friend of the New Left in the 1960s, Hook declared its campaigners “anti-intellectual” and “barbarians of virtue.”

And to set the record straight on whether or not, in earlier years, Communist Party members had infiltrated US educational institutions—the New Left had rewritten history to say otherwise—Hook cites Communist Party instructions to its members to teach Marxist-Leninism in every class without being caught or exposed. This confirms what I once heard Ayn Rand say, this time in Hook’s words: the duty of card-carrying communists was “to deceive and to cheat.”

The main political debate throughout Hook’s life, especially as stated by him, was democracy vs. totalitarianism. Nazism, fascism, and Soviet communism represented the latter, but as a lifelong socialist—on moral, not economic, grounds—the former meant democratic socialism.
   
For Hook and his socialist colleagues, socialism is the ultimate end of Jeffersonian democracy and the Bill of Rights. This is sometimes called social democracy, though more often in the US its close cousin is social or progressive—as opposed to classical—liberalism. Social liberalism is an alleged improvement on the classical type.

At the end of his life (and book), Hook acknowledged that collective ownership of the means of production—the socialist state as giant post office, to use Lenin’s metaphor—does not work. Thus, he describes himself as “an unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax.” Interventionism, in other words, with a strong leftward bias.

Although he spent many of his last years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and was awarded the  Medal of Freedom in 1985 by President Reagan, Hook was no conservative. He was a secular humanist (and naturalist), which means he was a lifelong atheist and ardent supporter of science and scientific method.**

Democracy for Hook, however, was primary. He and nearly everyone else in the world today, including the Marxists and communists, seem to advocate democracy. So what does Hook mean by it?

In the absence of genus and differentia, he gives descriptions, such as “free discussion,” “freely given consent,” “voluntary [consent], not subject to coercion,” and, most importantly, the absence of economic obstructions to that consent and to the pursuit of education, jobs, and happiness.

Hook’s moral basis for being a socialist was, of course, his unexamined assumption that capitalism exploits workers. Socialists are more moral because they are “nicer” (meaning more altruistic, though Hook does not use the term) than the capitalists who are mean and selfish. Therefore, a crucial prerequisite of modern democracy is that economic power must be put under political control.

I say the main debate today is, or should be, capitalism vs. democracy, rather than vs. socialism, because of the near-universal endorsement of democracy and equally near-universal failure to define it. Hook’s somewhat muddled understanding is how most currently see it.

Socialism, to be sure, still needs to be refuted, though Ludwig von Mises did it thoroughly in 1922. And telling a naive voter that the government often abuses its legal monopoly on the use of physical force is likely to produce a “but we are the government and we can change it” response.

What percentage influence does a voter have in a typical US presidential election? Less than a millionth of a percent!

As I suggested in an earlier post, the vote is not unimportant in a free society, but it is neither primary nor fundamental. Hong Kong, after all, did quite well for decades with no general elections. What it did have was the English constitution and legal system.

This means that if democracy is a term to be endorsed at all, it must be defined as voting restrained by individual rights and those rights must be clearly distinguished from the collectivized versions of the social liberals. Individual rights are freedoms to take action, not entitlements to things, that is, to food, shelter, clothing, education, jobs, and happiness.

I’m tempted to say that democracy should be tossed entirely in defenses of the free society. If capitalism is understood as a social system, not just economic, it can be put where it belongs—in philosophy—and therefore cannot be dismissed as “just economic,” which most opponents and the ignorant alike do when the term comes up.

Discussions of social systems come from the fourth branch of philosophy called social (or political) philosophy. Social philosophy defines the nature and proper function of government, which brings rights and ethics into the discussion of capitalism, which means egoism should also be brought in, as well as a theory of human nature, and a theory of consciousness and universals, among other fundamental issues of epistemology and metaphysics.

Sidney Hook was a philosopher who knew about discussions of this sort, at the fundamental level, and used fundamentals to defend Marx and socialism. He was an advocate of Enlightenment values: reason, science, technology, freedom, and, of course, rights and democracy, as most socialists of his era were.

Defenders of the free society cannot just say they are advocates of the Enlightenment values of reason, science, technology, freedom, rights, and democracy . . . and expect to win arguments.

What is required today for a proper defense is the elevation—that is, the boosting, heightening, raising up—of discussion from our current concrete-bound, trivial, and disconnected mess to universal and fundamental principles.

Socialism was a moral ideal in the 1920s, ‘30s, and, according to Ayn Rand, until the end of World War II. As a practical ideal it died with the USSR collapse in 1991, yet its flotsam lingers in 2016 to obstruct passage to a genuinely free society.

It lingers by default because of the lack of principled opposition.

Sidney Hook was a significant member of the generation that sought to promote a moral ideal. His book provides lessons for anyone in 2016 who wishes to do the same, this time, one would hope, promoting the ideal of laissez-faire capitalism and all that it rests on.


* Chambers became a neoconservative and wrote the infamously sleazy review of Atlas Shrugged in William Buckley’s National Review. “From almost any page,” says Chambers, “a voice can be heard . . . commanding: ‘To a gas chamber–go!’” Chambers was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1984 by President Reagan.

** F. A. Hayek, in “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” points out that conservatives are not averse to using coercion to achieve their goals and he even suggests that coercion is the common denominator uniting “repentant socialists” (like Whittaker Chambers) and conservatism. True (classical) liberalism, says Hayek, supports liberty over equality or democracy.

Why Don’t Facts Matter?

In several previous comments I have in one way or another attempted to answer the question that titles this post.

My first encounter with the issue occurred when I complained to a colleague about other associates whose selective memories seemed beyond the pale, because I had assumed it was impossible for the latter to have forgotten what was said in a meeting not too long before the immediate incident.

The colleague gave me a dead serious glare and said, “Facts don’t matter!” I briefly responded with an embarrassed “you can’t be serious” chuckle, but soon realized that the glare was not going away.

Naiveté aside—I am aware that there are dishonest people in the world—I nonetheless have a hard time understanding those who seem to be honest, yet clearly are not sticking to the facts.

In 2006 I wrote an academic paper about Harry Frankfurt’s little book On Bullshit, in which Frankfurt distinguishes liars from BS’ers. Liars care about facts in order to say the opposite. BS’ers, however, don’t care because their goal is to impress and sway whether or not what they are saying is true. Are BS’ers dishonest?*


In my paper I argue that there are a couple of continua operating here, the relevant one ranging from the deliberately dishonest to sloppy thinkers who are unware of their premises or where the premises came from.

This may somewhat account for those who seem to be decent people but at the same time are habitual hyperbolizers and habitually selective rememberers. But where do these habits come from?

In a 2008 blog post I make the not too original point that we learn—that is, pick up habits—from our parents, teachers, and significant others, which means our significant others learned from their significant others who learned from theirs, etc. In the absence of an infinite regress, however, someone somewhere along the line had to have chosen to embellish his or her statements and selectively ignore certain facts. Why?

Free will, of course, dictates that anyone in the present, or past, can choose to ignore facts. Is that it? Isn’t there more to the sloppy thinking that many seem to exhibit?

Consider the following cases.

1. Philosopher Sidney Hook describes two instances from his travels in the mid-twentieth century (Out of Step, pp. 585-88). In Japan, Hook relates, he was confronted by his academic hosts and the Japanese press with nothing but complaints about the US bombing of Hiroshima, yet not a single word was said about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In India, the conversation centered on US race discrimination—without mention of India’s caste system. Near the end of his stay, Hook invited an academic host to dine with him at his hotel, but the host, after several evasions, finally admitted that he could not accept—because the waiters at the hotel were Muslim and the host was Brahmin.

Hook does not provide an explanation for the stark logical disconnects in either instance, other than to imply differences between Eastern and Western cultures.

My conclusion would have to specify the lack of Aristotelian logic in the East and its presence in the West. Most westerners, however precariously they may do so, cling to the notions of non-contradiction and non-fallacious thinking, which means they maintain some respect for facts that apparently the educated in the East do not.

Respect for logic means respect for facts.

2. Anthony Watts, former television meteorologist and current climate change doubter (to use the Associated Press’s preferred moniker for global warming skeptics), blogs on wattsupwiththat.com, a site that enjoys three to four million page views per month. Several highly qualified guest climatologists also regularly post their thorough, technical analyses of “climate change” issues.

Last June, Watts reported the details of a meeting he had with journalist, ardent environmentalist, and staunch global warming supporter Bill McKibben. Instead of fireworks and hostility between the two, Watts described their discussion as civil and friendly. They discussed their respective agreement and disagreement on numerous climate and environmental issues.

Concluding his report, Watts said, apparently to challenge strong opinions within the denier community, “I don’t think Bill McKibben is an idiot.” He then added, “But I do think he perceives things more on a feeling or emotional level and translates that into words and actions. People that are more factual and pragmatic might see that as an unrealistic response.”

Why don’t facts matter according to the scientist Watts? Because emotion sometimes trumps facts.

3. Ayn Rand in her article “To Dream the Non-Commercial Dream” (The Ayn Rand Letter, January 1, 1973, reprinted in The Voice of Reason) emphasizes the significance of emotion trumping fact. She says this about “impassioned advocates” of altruism and collectivism:

They are not hypocrites; in their own way, they are “sincere”; they have to be. They need to believe that their work serves others, whether those others like it or not, and that the good of others is their only motivation; they do believe it—passionately, fiercely, militantly—in the sense in which a belief is distinguishable from a conviction: in the form of an emotion impervious to reality. (Emphasis in original.)

Deep down, in their psychologies, it is emotion that dictates to these “sincere” people what is true. Facts don’t matter because emotion says otherwise. Altruism and collectivism have become their entrenched beliefs.

Rand adds that this “depth”—the “deep down” part of these unexamined psychologies—can be “measured by distance from reality” and that there exists a continuum, based on the distance, that runs from “sincere” to totalitarian dictator.

Rand puts “sincere” in scare quotes, which probably means she is not entirely endorsing the term, but I still have to ask: are those on the “sincere” end of the continuum . . . sincere? And honest? Who, really, after all is a bad dude?

Rand goes so far as to acknowledge that the “butcher of the Ukraine,” Nikita Khrushchev, was compelled to believe the “truth” (my quotes) and magical ritual of dialectical materialism. He had to, she says, lest he “face something more frightening than death” (Rand’s quotes).

This comment on Khruschev takes me back to The Criminal Personality by Yochelson and Samenow. Criminals certainly are bad dudes. They lie (and BS) as a way of life and enjoy getting away with the forbidden. (“If rape were legalized today . . . I would do something else,” one offender told the researchers.)

And criminals, like Khrushchev, don’t have much deep down, that is, they are considerably deficient in self-esteem. What is there, as Rand puts it, is distant from reality. “I am a nothing, a zero,” several criminals confessed, but added that if they routinely thought that way, they would have to kill themselves. So they live by substitute thoughts, or rather rationalizations. Their accumulated mental habits have taught them to believe and say: “that guy deserved it” or “everything in the store belongs to me” or “she really wanted me.”

Khrushchev substituted the communist mantra.

So how can these bad dudes seem “sincere”? This brings me back to the liar and BS’er. The goal of the liar and BS’er is to sound good. Most criminals are con artists, which means they are consummate liars and BS’ers to make what they say sound good.

The same applies to dictators. Many have been charmers at cocktail parties. Hitler was.

So would I want to be friends with someone on the “sincere” end of Rand’s continuum?

Sidney Hook and Anthony Watts did not seem to find offensive the disagreements they had with their associates, but those associates were presumably not on the extreme end of Rand’s scale.

I would say that friendships, whether professional or personal, depend on how distant one’s contact is from reality. That is to say, on a scale of decency—by adapting Rand’s continuum—honest, fact-oriented people are at the top, scummy criminals and Khruschevs are at the bottom, but most decent people, the “sincere” ones Rand was talking about, fit into the middle to upper tiers.**

The difficulty in forming professional and personal friendships is in understanding the other person’s psychology and discovering that distance from reality.

Facts do matter.



*Frankfurt thinks BS’ers are worse than liars—and more likely to be found among the highly educated because of their facility with language.

**In Rand’s article she was talking about a retired editor of the New York Times.