The problem with socialist visions, is that Jack always takes over the island.
My ninth grade social studies teacher, an earnest Communist, enthusiastically regaled us with his summer vacation to dreamy, utopic China.
He wasn't good with numbers.
A few years earlier, Mao had promised China unbounded prosperity in a massive economic overhaul, which instead produced mass starvation. When a young boy in Hunan village was caught by a Communist official gripping a small measure of grain in his hand, his father was forced to dig a hole and bury him alive. Conditions were so desperate elsewhere that some families resorted to cannibalism -- the details of which I will spare you. Tens of millions starved to death during the The Great Leap Forward.
Over and over, the outcome has everything to do with the core doctrine itself. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Gulag survivor and Nobel Prize winning author noted: "It was not a good idea that somehow went wrong... It was a bad idea from the outset, and one forced into life... with barely imaginable self-righteousness... and horror."
During a 1922 famine in Russia, the Orthodox Church offered all of its non-liturgical treasures to help alleviate the crisis. But Lennin saw this as an attack on the state's supremacy, responding with:
"It is precisely now... when the starving regions' people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we (must)... carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy... and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades."
Several of the church's leading patriarchs were then shot.
And over half a century later, another Lennon fawned over the ideal of a world with:
"...no religion too! Imagine all the people..."
Imagine all the victims.
Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Karl Marx, and their 100,000,000 or so dead. They were not, strictly speaking, contemporaries. But all three were born to well-to-do families, attended prestigious schools, hailed from religiously pious bloodlines, but seemed embittered by their own "failure to launch" as young men, spending their daddies' money.
When the prophesied underclass revolution was not forthcoming it was their ilk, not the proletariats, who sparked revolt. As Martin Amis points out: "The revolution came from above -- a coup underscored by machine guns -- the tragedy was experienced from below."
Even higher-born Tolstoy spun his birthright in to unbounded literary success, only to slide in to a profound nihilistic depression - which nearly killed him. He eventually concluded that the closest thing to a meaningful life might be found in observing those same toiling classes, but his admiration inspired self-reflection, not anger: "... in our circle... the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction... (workers) were content with life... (and bore) illness and sorrow... with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good... If I wish to understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a parasite, but must live a real life."
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet boss, shrugged off the socialist disaster with: "We tried."
As Alan Kors notes, there's as an "unforgivable double standard" here.
"We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons... (but) there never has been and never will be a similar 'de-Communization,' although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater."
I still can't imagine why.
Mark Ryan is an investment advisor with RBC Dominion Securities Inc. (Member-Canadian Investor Protection Fund), and these are Mark's views, and not those of RBC Dominion Securities. This article is for information purposes only. Please consult with a professional advisor before taking any action based on information in this article. See Mark's website at: http://dir.rbcinvestments.com/mark.ryan.
