Overview: it should not be that hard to stop Marxist or Islamic thugs around the world. Relatively speaking they have little power, and their myths of superiority have been shown to be bankrupt and have been rejected by large parts of the world. Moreover, the thug chieftains are often cruel, sadistic, and evil men. So stopping the thugs should be relatively easy for a sane and mighty civilization. However, our own elites fawn over these evil men and their bankrupt ideologies. How do we stop this enemy within from getting us killed?

Lee Harris in TCS discussed the persistence of socialism, despite its gross and manifest failures, and the continued rule of awful men who are its leaders, like Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. Harris sees these strongmen as reaching motivations and desires “deeper and more primordial than mere reason and argument” in the people than their rational self-interest; hence reason is always in danger of being overpowered. Capitalism, he argued, has no comparable powerful myth, and this is a persistent weakness. We were instantly put in mind of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s “Convergence “ plan, and the capable commentary by Caroline Glick, Richard Baehr and Wretchard. Olmert’s solution, whatever its particular merits or deficiencies, is an attempt at a rational solution to an irrational problem. The Marxist world and the Islamic world have in common that they have political systems that create poverty and slavery, so the totalitarian model must have some appeal, as Harris says.

The totalitarian model grips the human imagination from time to time, despite its flaws. It’s a story as old as tribal man himself. Men are drawn to the strong horse, who is often the authentic man of violence. In primitive societies, a man of power and violence can be a good protector. So much the better if he cloaks his cruelty in Utopian rhetoric or service to the gods; one of the greatest empowering devices of man is to do violence in the name of good (see Henninger today).

It is interesting to us that so many people in the West shield themselves from the truth about the totalitarian leader: often he enjoys the murder, the violence, the mayhem, the power to destroy and to grant life. Cruelty and blood are not a cost of doing business, they are a dividend of the business. They are among the usufructs of power. Can there be a greater narcotic or aphrodisiac than such power? We observe a love of such evil from Hitler to Stalin to Mao to Khomeini. (Indeed, we note that militant Imams often appear to be channeling the Freudian id more than anything authentically godlike.) The royal bloodline of the modern strongman is his claim of victimhood, with which he rouses the rabble, and justifies every form of cruelty he seeks to inflict on his “oppressors”. Yet, for all their temporary and real power, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and their systems are gone from most of the world, and Islam has been turned back many times.

To sum up, the totalitarian model and the totalitarian leader tug at humanity from our tribal past. Such Utopian dreams and strongmen have emotional power, it is true. But there is no reason for such a primitive model of human society to win, if our own civilization stands up for itself.

Defeating such evil men should be a relatively easy task for a mighty and sane civilization. For starters, their myths are not universally persuasive. The case of China stands out in this regard. China’s 1.4 billion people are having their lives improved by the dream of capitalism, and it has created a middle class of 70-100 million people so far and an unprecedented 20 years of over 9% annual GDP growth. India provides a lesser, but similar, example.

It seems to us that some Utopian myths would be reduced to irrelevancy, were it not for the active complicity of Western elites. Our media and academic elites feel guilty; they do not feel that they have earned or deserve the luxurious lives they lead (as we have written) and they are determined in their misplaced guilt that we all should pay a price. In their narcissism, little do they understand that, were their heroes to succeed, they would be the first ones whose heads would be sawed off.

The myths that the strongmen ride to power are pathetic: Aryan or Muslim supremacy, dictatorship of the masses, etc — in each case they are ludicrous, laughable, belied by the facts, and demonstrably lead to slavery and poverty. The enemy without is in some ways trivial; Ahmadinejad and Iran’s thug-theocracy could be put out of business in short order, given a minimum amount of political will. The real problem is the enemy within, our elite narcissists who objectively ally themselves with most evil, ruthless and cruel men on the planet.

What will it take to change their minds or end their power? How can our elites, who empower these cruel thugs around the world, be stopped?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 5th, 2006 at 5:24 pm and is filed under General, Religion, War, art, culture, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.