"If someone comes to kill you, kill him first.".. Midrash
"If someone kills an Israeli or Jew, fault lies not with the killer but with those who allowed the killing. (Israeli government or Jewish 'leadership')"..Rav Meir Kahane X"L
"It is normal for Arabs to kill Jews, always was-always will be. The Jews must build a wall of Zionism and take what is rightfully theirs." .......
...............Ze'ev Jabotinsky X"L
"If you give mercy to the wicked, then you will be wicked to the merciful"....Midrash
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For Whom the Bells Toll: From Marx to Obama
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Karl Marx was a learned man. But as Nietzsche's adage has it, "Great learning and great stupidity go well together under the same hat." Barack Obama is anything but a learned man, but his mentors were very much influenced by Marxism. This article will show that Nietzsche's adage not only applies to Marx, but it also points to the basic cause of the failure of Communism in the Soviet Union and the collapse of that regime.
Marx believed that man's exploitation of man is rooted not in any defect of human nature but in the poverty of physical nature. Nature simply does not provide sufficiently for human needs. In other words, not egoism but economic scarcity is the original cause of human conflict and servitude, of human misery and inequality.
But with the abolition of private property and the scientific conquest of nature, human exploitation will come to an end. Egoism, which is but a consequence of history, will dissolve, as will morality, which has ever been the morality of the ruling and exploiting class. Henceforth man will be animated by his "generic consciousness," which alone distinguishes human nature from that of mere animals. In other words, what will replace egoism and the restraints of morality will be a spontaneous fraternal disinterestedness. This, for Marx, is the only true humanism, the only true democracy.
Now, the first thing to be noted is that Communism rejects the idea of natural self-preference. It denies the existence of an instinctive and ineradicable preference for one's own, for one's own good. Therein is the supreme and fatal error of Marxism.
The preference for one's own originates with one's own body. A human being does not consist simply of thoughts which he can share with others. Thus, when diverse individuals understand the same mathematical equation—to take the clearest example—they are, in that respect, one. But when your friend is hungry, no matter how much you may sympathize with him, you cannot really feel his hunger.
The inexorable fact that human beings are bodies means that they cannot share their bodily feelings as they can share, in principle, their ideas and aspirations. The body, the ultimately private, is the ultimate refutation of Communism. For the body is the ultimate reason why it is natural to prefer one's own—one's own good—to the good of others. Hence the need for morality to temper natural self-preference. Viewed in this light, Communism is contrary to nature, and this is why it failed and was bound to fail. This applies to Socialism.
The failure of Communism-cum-Socialism is, of course, a failure of Marxism. Marx's anti-empirical denial of natural self-preference on the one hand, and his reduction of moral and religious ideas to "material premises" or "class interests" on the other, made it impossible for his followers in the Soviet Union and elsewhere to develop a body ofpractical wisdom by which to manage economic, social, and political affairs in a competent, let alone, in a just way.
What a cruel irony! For despite its denial of natural self-preference, Communism generated an appalling egoism in the Soviet Union, and it did this by its devastation of religion.
Religion acknowledges natural self-preference but condemns its excesses, i.e., egoism. To combat egoism, religion inculcates morality, which means, to put it simply, that the individual should act out of motives larger than self-interest. Hence religion would impose moral restraints on rulers and ruled alike.
Such restraints on rulers are inconsistent with Communism given its two-fold objective: the abolition of private property and the harnessing of all human energy for the conquest of nature. This task required undivided loyalty to the Communist Party, which in turn necessitated the suppression of religion.
Now, it should be noted that, during the Enlightenment, of which Marxism is a product, the religious question took precedence over all other questions. Religion was modern philosophy's most powerful competitor for the minds of the multitude: "Religion is the opium of the people." The Enlightenment was atheistic and democratic.
But religion, remember, had served as a restraint on egoism. Hence the repression of religion in the Soviet Union liberated egoism despite the contrary intention of Communism, whose denial of natural self-preference was false to begin with.
Egoism, however, is not only an attitude but a doctrine, one that regards all desires, including love, as self-regarding. The only natural good, as Machiavelli taught, is the private good. And as the vulgar say, what is "good" is a matter of personal taste or preference. Enter the doctrine of moral relativism. Nowhere was this doctrine more pronounced than in Sovietized Russia.
The Soviet Union, it should be borne in mind, was the first state based explicitly on atheism. There education was aggressively atheistic from the very outset of the regime. There Communism fostered in the Russian people a moral relativism more corrosive than that found in liberal democracy, where Christianity, though largely secularized, has not been suppressed.
In his monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn attributes the monstrous crimes of the Soviet Union to Marxism. It was Marxism, he claims, that made morality relative—relative to class. He recalls the time, before the Bolshevik Revolution, "when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart."
This moral relativism and its most leveling consequences have been described by the Russian historian, Andrei Amalrik. Amalrik did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, but his little book Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? virtually anticipates that momentous event. There he deplores the impact of Communism on the Russian people for whom "justice" had come to mean that "nobody should live better than I do." "This idea of justice," he laments, "is motivated by hatred of everything that is outstanding, which we make no effort to imitate but, on the contrary, try to bring down to our level."
But now for the denouement. "It is hard to tell," writes Amalrik, "whether ... the bulk of our people possess any kind of moral criteria—such as "honorable" and "dishonorable," "good" and "bad," "right" and "wrong," the supposedly eternal principles which function as inhibiting and guiding factors when the mechanism of social constraint begins to fall apart and man is left to his own devices."
Those who see the failure of Communism as a triumph of democracy should ponder these words of Amalrik. The bells that tolled for the Soviet Union are also tolling for the secular democratic state where atheism and moral relativism are rampant, and which led to the election of Barack Obama, who deplores the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism and wants to bring everyone down to a common level through government-guided redistribution.
The bells are tolling.
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