The Center of Cultural Rot Is The Left

I start this series of posts on the nature and origin of the Left because while the Left is not the real problem, it must be understood that most of the cultural rot emanates from the Left.  I believe that the reason for it is because the United States as founded* stands as a rebuke to the Left.  Understand that while the United States has never lived up to its founding, the aspirational nature of the Constitution and the self correcting nature of its framework are the opposite of any other governing system ever devised.  We are not now following the Constitution;  if we did, we would not be in our current dire straits.

The origin of the political Left and by extension, the political right was during the French Revolution. In 1789, as the assembly seeking to write a constitution met:

One of the main issues the assembly debated was how much power the king should have, says David A. Bell, a professor of early modern France at Princeton University. Would he have the right to an absolute veto? As the debate continued, those who thought the king should have an absolute veto sat on the right of the president of the assembly, and those who thought he should not — the more radical view — sat on the left of the president of the assembly. In other words, those who wanted to hew closer to tradition were on the right, and those who wanted more change were on the left.

The writers of the article above are perhaps a little to kind to the Left. The people on the Left were the radicals. The people on the right in France were monarchists, which is no better, unfortunately. But as an aside, the "right" in Europe tends to be monarchist. In the United States, the right is not monarchist. The right in the United States is trying to conserve the Constitution as a framework for the Federal government. I would argue that those in favor of Constitutional governance are actually the middle, because they recognize the need for some government, but insist that government be limited to its role of protecting peoples' God given rights.

The problem with the French Revolution is that it wasn't based in the principles that undergirded the American revolution.  The French revolution was many things, but at heart it was about revenge for all the terrible things the monarchy had visited on the French people.  Unfortunately, the monarchy and the aristocracy viewed the French people rather as Marx did, as masses, interchangeable parts in a machine that served them.  The French revolution devolved into the Rein of Terror, with blood literally flowing in the streets.  But this is how most revolutions go.  A monarchy or dictatorship is overthrown, only to install another monarchy or dictatorship.  Nothing really changes except the people in charge.
 

Fast forward to 1848 and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Marx was the quintessential radical living figuratively in his parents basement, and never accomplishing anything of value. Engles was the son of a rich self made man who probably felt he didn't deserve his station in life.  Remind you of anyone (cough...60s radicals?...cough?)

The philosophy itself was a spiritually desiccated idea that the center of life is economics. As befitting a philosophy, he introduces a bunch of new terms which people seem to have taken seriously. For instance, the way that business has been conducted since time immemorial suddenly became "capitalism." Capital and capitalism became the enemy. I have noted before that the Left always needs an enemy.   And of course the best enemies are those who can't fight back.

The people operating the capital enterprises were termed the "bourgeoisie."  Really they were just middle class entrepreneurs who gave jobs and a living to others.  Of course, then the heroes of the story became the "proletariat." The proletariat were the people who were often exploited by the bourgeoisie. The proles of course were not individuals, with individual dreams, loves, hopes for their children. No, these were viewed as the "masses" and were thought of as having the identical interests, indeed as widgets in a machine.  That is why I say Marxism is a desiccated philosophy devoid of anything contributing to life.  People are individuals, and are properly seen as such.  What Marxism was, and is, is a way to power.

Lenin recognized the ideas in Marx as a way to power, and in 1917, as the Russian monarchy was distracted by World War I, took advantage of the unrest in the country, and the Bolshevik revolution, to initiated the Russian revolution and put himself in power  Like the French revolution, the Russian revolution involved numerous purges, and these continued under Stalin.  You can read a sanitized version of mass killings here. The Russians showed the way for every tin horn dictator since. Whether it was Mao in China, or Castro in Cuba, or Pol Pot in Cambodia, or Chavez in Venezuela.  And of course one must also acknowledge  Mussolini in Italy or Hitler in Germany because these regimes were socialist.  When these regimes are referred to as "right" we are using the Lefts preferred terminology.  They can only be considered right in respect to Communist regimes.  

I have noted elsewhere that the Left always needs enemies.  Usually, these enemies are internal, because it is much easier to go after relatively unarmed and unorganized civilians than to take on another county's army. How brave of them. In the Soviet Union, the enemies varied.  In one case, the Holomor, Stalin starved to death 3.9 million people in an effort to collectivize farms in Ukraine. In Nazi Germany, the enemies included Communists and of course the Jews.  Right now, the enemies include "white supremacist," "domestic terrorists," and Trump supporters.  Of course, the so called "white supremacist" are a vanishingly small number.  Most domestic terrorists are actually on the Left, but these people get a pass.  And of course the "Trump supporters" including a large number of gun owners, who are being targeted not because they have committed any crime but for perceived political opposition to the regime.  But know this: if you are not targeted now, you can be at any time the Left needs to find new enemies.

With the possible exception of Mussolini, the Left universally goes after religions.  In the Soviet Union, the New Soviet Man was Atheist.  Except, of course, that what the Soviet regime actually wanted was for the masses to worship the State.  You can read about Soviet "militant atheism" and the effects here:

In elementary schools, children were taught to denounce parents who held onto their Faith. After 1964, university students were required to take a course titled “Fundamentals of Scientific Atheism,” although few students were genuinely interested in it. Throughout the existence of the Soviet Union, several antireligious campaigns were carried out in order to eliminate religion from the public square. One of the worst of these was the antireligious campaign carried out under Nikita Khrushchev, who revoked the parental right to instruct children in the Faith.

...snip...

An organization called the League of Militant Atheists, which boasted a membership of 5.6 million persons in 1932, sent out atheist missionaries to convert Soviet citizens located in rural parts of the country. Atheistic literature numbering a total of 800 million pages was distributed throughout the USSR. To those who did not warmly receive its message, the League of Militant Atheists resorted to implementing a bloody approach on these innocent believers, by imprisoning clergy and laity or placing them before firing squads. Sister Anna Abrikosova, foundress of the Religious Sisters of the Third Order of St. Dominic, was arrested by the OGPU (Obyedinyonnoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye, commonly referred to as the Joint State Political Directorate, however, the predecessor of the NKVD and the KGB), spent several years in prison, and toiled in a labor camp for eight years before perishing on July 23, 1936. She is now recognized as a Servant of God by the Catholic Church.

The Chinese are currently committing genocide on Uyghurs because of the Muslim faith, and the Falun Gong. The Falun Gong also called the Falun Dafa doesn't seem to threaten the CCP in any way, yet the Chinese Communist Party must go after them because the State must always take center stage in everyone's hearts.

Finally, one must realize that the Left lies as a matter of course. They lie about everything all the time. They lie like a fish swims, like an eagle flies. It is what they do. And they do it so well. The lies the Soviets told their own citizens are legion. Hitlers propaganda minister Joseph Goebbles promoted the idea of the "Big Lie," a lie told so often and by so many people that it literaly became the "truth" that most people believed. At The Federalist today there is a good article on this very topic by Jesse Kelly entitled The First Step Towards Righting America Is Refusing To Believe the Left About Anything. The Left lies by creating "narratives," story lines that they then rigidly follow, and ignore any evidence that contradicts the narrative:

This is also why it is so critical to ensure the general public gets an accurate narrative. Otherwise, if the base set of publicly believed facts is wrong, every step after that will also be incorrect. It’s like getting swallowed up by an avalanche and digging ferociously in the wrong direction.

The weakness and stupidity of America’s right has allowed false narratives to cement in the minds of the public. It’s killing our freedoms. It’s killing our jobs. It’s killing our families. It’s killing our schools. It’s killing our nation.

* As founded means including all amendments. The Constitution includes twenty-seven amendments, proving that while it is difficult to amend it, it is not impossible. One of these amendments, for instance, made it illegal to possess a person as a chattel slave. The Left yaks on and on about how the 3/5 provision in Article 1 section 2 meant that individual blacks were considered only 3/5 of a person.  This interpretation misses the point.  The  provision in the original Constitution was a compromise to reduce the power of slave owning states so that slavery could eventually be abolished. That it too a civil war is appalling, but perhaps necessary. God works in mysterious ways.