It’s 4:00am, so time to rant!!
At Air Force Officer School the commanding officer used to have us fall into formation for our morning run at 5:00 am. He always had some words of wisdom for us “spoiled sissies” prior to and during our run. One of my favorites was: “you’ll get plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead!”
That said, it’s time to rant!!
I used to hear this term “benevolent dictatorship” growing up. And people would complain that such a person has never existed. I would often wonder why this was the case.
Then I picked up a book by one of history’s greatest economists, Friedrich Hayek. The title of the book was “The Road to Serfdom”.
Now Mr. Hayek was a German economist who wrote this book during the early 1940’s. The previous decade was the time period when Hitler was solidifying power in Germany. So obviously Mr. Hayek might know a thing or two about dictators and the acquisition of power.
One of his chapters in this book deals with the question: “Why is it that the worst among us rise to power in dictatorships?”
I’ve often ruminated on this very topic, and I’ve never come across anyone who explained the rationale for this better than Mr. Hayek.
The explanation goes like this: (in my words) Only the worst among us are willing to do what is required to rise to the top of a dictatorship. In other words, a righteous man is unwilling to implement the steps required to acquire 100% of the power.
In a dictatorship, only one person or a very small cadre of people can be in control. They exercise the power to tell everyone else what to do.
People generally don’t like being told what to do. The desire for freedom is built into every human heart. Therefore, force must be applied to ensure that the “requested” action be taken.
To get to the top of such a system requires a ruthlessness that the average person simply does not possess. It requires a willingness to remove all opposition by any means necessary. The acquisition of power is a religion for this person, and that also becomes the key operative principle. All other principles are subservient to this one. The acquisition of power becomes morality itself.
Since the guiding principle is power acquisition for this person, all other moral principles are useful only when they serve the acquisition of power. These people will invoke moral principles when it is useful for the acquisition of power. And then discard those same principles when it is expedient to do so.
Hence Lord Acton’s timeless axiom: “Absolute power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Once you understand Lord Acton’s axiom, it becomes clear why dictators have historically ruthlessly killed any and all opposition, intentionally starved entire populations, signed treaties with foreign powers with zero intention to perform on those treaties, and started wars without any provocation whatsoever.
But ruthlessness alone is not enough. To make it to the top of the pyramid also requires the skill of cunning and conniving on a level unimaginable to the average person.
Consider this fact: In the decade prior to Hitler’s rise to the top of the Third Reich, he was couch surfing with friends as a means of survival. He was a down and out dispirited WWI corporal. Yes, he was ruthless. Yes, he was evil. But he was also cunning.
I believe there is value in crawling into that dark space where monsters like Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Vladimir Lenin are created. We are better able and willing to build and man the moral, constitutional, and armed walls necessary to defend ourselves when we have a deep understanding of just what we are guarding against.
Western democracies are making the mistake of assuming that the only enemies it has to worry about are those that arm themselves with nuclear weapons, fighter aircraft, and battleships. There is also a war of the mind that is constantly being waged with the weapons of ideology and morality. The military weapons are of no use if you haven’t first won the war of ideology and morality.
That said, let’s take a walk on the dark side to learn about the development of arguably history’s greatest monster. Certainly in the top 3 of any list one could create. That would be Joseph Stalin.
We’ll begin with some Stalin personal life factoids before moving to his public life. (the public ones are much more well known)
Here are some Stalin personal factoids:
He was born in 1878 to a violent and drunken father who beat him ruthlessly. His mom was a seamstress.
His dad was a cobbler who initially had a successful business. But he began to drink heavily and to beat his wife and children while in a drunken rage. This of course led to business failure and a life of poverty. The father abandoned his family and moved to another city when young Joseph Stalin was about 6 years old.
After becoming an adult, Stalin only saw his own mother once in 40 years. He referred to her as “an old whore”, and didn’t even bother to attend her funeral.
One of Stalin’s sons, Yakov tried to kill himself for love, because his father did not agree with his engagement to a Jewish woman of questionable reputation. The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, leading Stalin to comment: “my son is not even able to commit suicide.” He is also reported to have said: “He can’t even shoot straight.” Nothing like fatherly love.
Yakov later became a prisoner of war in the fight against Germany in WWII. When the Soviet Union captured Hitler’s nephew, the Nazi leader wanted to exchange him for Yakov, but Stalin, again showed little regard for his son. His rationale? Why trade a lieutenant for a field marshal? It doesn’t get any more cold blooded than that.
Later Yakov was reported to have died attempting to escape, but it is thought that he committed suicide by voluntarily electrocuting himself on the prison fence. This may have been a reaction to one of his father’s atrocities known as the Katyn massacre. Of course, Hitler was only too happy to provide a photograph of Stalin’s son hanging dead on the electric fence. (The 20th Century was truly an amazing century; it gave us Hitler AND Stalin at the same time!!)
As a result of Yakov’s imprisonment, his wife Yulia was mistreated, which was common for the families of POWs at that time in the Soviet Union.
Stalin is known to have said, “There are no prisoners of war, only traitors to their homeland,” and families were treated accordingly.
Yulia’s children were taken away from her and spent two years working in a gulag. It is thought that her poor treatment may have been compounded by the fact that she might have encouraged Yakov to surrender to the Germans, but it is not certain.
Vasily Dzhugashvili was the dictator’s second son, and though not as despised by his father, also suffered much misfortune.
His mother committed suicide when he was 11 years old, and his father said of him that he was a “spoilt boy of average abilities, savage, not always honest.”
He spent the rest of his life in and out of prison for various offenses but was eventually released and exiled to Kazan due to his poor health. He died in 1962, a few days shy of his 41st birthday, due to the effects of a lifetime of alcoholism.
Then there was Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Stalina. She was only 6 when her mother, also Vasily’s mother, committed suicide, but she did not learn the truth until she was a teenager, having been told at the time that her mother died of appendicitis.
According to the New York Times, Svetlana’s father tightly controlled her life. When Stalin learned that Svetlana’s first love was a Jewish filmmaker, he sent the suitor to Siberia for 10 years.
When she married another man, also Jewish, Stalin refused to ever meet him and even slapped her when she told him. The couple divorced in 1947.
When she fell in love with an Indian communist she was not permitted to marry him by Soviet officials, but after he died in 1967, they eventually agreed to let her return his ashes to India.
That concludes the personal life. (charming) On to the public stage.
The first act that thrust him onto the national stage was an armed bank robbery. He did this to raise funds for his revolutionary movement. He killed as many as 40 people and a number of stagecoach horses. He was able to raise roughly $3M in today’s dollars to support his cause.
His first true political rival was Leon Trotsky. It wasn’t enough to send Trotsky into exile. He sent his assassins overseas where they found Trotsky in Mexico and dispatched him with an ice pick to the head.
He ordered landowners (known as Kulaks) to turn over their land to the state. In fact, 80% of the population lost everything that they had. The Ukrainians resisted the theft of all they owned. Stalin responded by sending the military to the Ukraine to conduct house to house searches. The Kulaks were declared enemies of the state. He closed off all roads to the Ukraine so no one could enter or leave. He removed all grain from the land. No food allowed in, and he confiscated any food grown and shipped it to the cities. This resulted in a mass starvation where about 6 million died.
He kept his wife in the dark about his treatment of the Ukrainians. When she went to engineering school some of her fellow students told her of his abuse of the Ukrainians. Of course, she was horrified by his behavior. He was furious that the students had informed her of his Ukrainian policy. Of course, the students disappeared, never to be heard from again. (almost certainly they were executed)
Almost immediately upon acquisition of power, he declared the Russian Orthodox Church an enemy of the state. He ordered all religious imagery destroyed. He had his military enter into every Russians home and forcibly remove any and all icons. He ordered that all icons be replaced with his photograph. Of course, anyone caught with religious iconography of any kind were either shot on the spot or sent to the Gulag. (more on the Gulag to follow) Priests were shot, hung, burned at the stake, beheaded, well….I guess it doesn’t really matter the methodology does it? You get the picture.
His 17th Congress elected Sergey Kirov as Secretary General. Kirov was extremely loyal to Stalin. But he committed the extreme offense of being more popular than Stalin himself. So Stalin had him assassinated. And just to make sure that everyone got the message, he had 90% of the 17th Congress assassinated as well. Why you ask? Because the Congress voted for Kirov. Since there was no way to know who voted for Kirov and who did not, he assassinated all of them. That way you can be sure. (you cannot make this up!)
He had 1,100 Party members assassinated, or sent to the Gulags. Remember, the party members are the most loyal group. You can imagine what happened to the non party members.
But the true evil genius with Stalin was his spy/terror system. It is with this program that he sets himself apart from his rivals for the crown of the worst man to have ever lived. This is where we see the true evil genius of Stalin.
The spy/terror system worked like this: Stalin would send his NKVD (secret police) to a village. They would go to each block in a town. They would ask each person to name 5 people from your block who were spies. If you didn’t name 5 people, you were either shot on the spot, or sent to the Gulag. So in order to save yourself and your family, you would name 5 innocent people in your block. Now remember, everyone is doing this. Imagine the terror this would invoke. A simple slip of the tongue from a 5 year old could result in the execution of mom or dad.
Of course in this fashion, freedom of speech was completely eliminated. There could be no opposition under these circumstances. No system in human history has resulted in so complete a terror as communism. Galley slaves of the 13th century, biblical era Hebrew slaves, and 17th century North and South American slaves all had freedom of the mind. Only communism resulted in 100% enslavement, mind and body.
In a 1 1/2 year period, 2 million people were executed in this fashion. And remember, Stalin was a personal participant in this terror. He would sit and sign death warrants all day long, day after day. It was reported that he once signed 366 death warrants resulting in the execution of 444,000 people in one sitting.
Then there were the Gulags themselves. Remember, the Gulags were normally located in distant Siberia. This meant a 3 month, 3,000 mile train ride in an unheated cattle car. Thousands who started the trip to the Gulag never arrived. And they were the lucky ones.
The Gulags were really slave labor camps. Most of the victims were simply worked to death.
One of the worst of these was the Gulag at Kolyma. A brief description of a shift of work at Kolyma is as follows:
Each inmate was assigned to move 100 carts of rock per day. To fail to make the quota meant an extra shift of work that same day. Additionally, the already meager ration of the individual who didn’t make the quota was reduced even further. Remember, a “meal” consisted of a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. All while doing heavy labor in sub-zero temperatures. It is reported that 3 million died at Kolyma alone.
Then there was the incident at the Katyn forest. In April of 1943, German troops occupying Poland found the mass graves of over 22,000 Polish army officers and intellectuals. Hitler of course gleefully reported that the “evil” Stalin had been murdering Poles. (never mind what he was doing to the Jews, but remember what I said earlier about the use of principles for those who possess no morality?) Of course Stalin blamed Hitler, and Hitler blamed Stalin. All evidence is that Stalin ordered the execution of the Polish leadership to eliminate any competition to his dominance when he would eventually take over Poland.
Well, that’s probably enough on “Uncle Joe”. (yes, that’s actually what the American media called this man!)
So dad, what’s the moral to the story?
We circle back to CS Lewis and Lord Acton:
“Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellow man”. C.S. Lewis”Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Lord Acton
Our defense against Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Attila the Hun, Ghengis Kahn, Chairman Mao, Timur, and Nicolae Ceaucescu lie in the following concepts:
a) Moral underpinnings to check against the development of monsters. (Delivery system: Family & Church, Judeo-Christianity)b) A constitutional republic that forces cooperation across multiple factions and minimizes the ability for power to concentrate in too few hands. (Delivery system: Constitutional Republic, Jeffersonian)c) Free exchange of goods, services, and ideas. (Delivery system: Free Market Economics, Adam Smith)
Read the following excerpts from Friedrich Hayek in light of current events. It should give you pause:
* Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.* We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.* From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.* I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.* Intellectuals whose desires have outstripped their understanding.* A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.
Given current events, is it not stunning that this man wrote this over 80 years ago? As that prophet observed in the book of Ecclesiastes 1:9, in about 250 BC, “nothing is new under the sun”.
Watch the link below entitled: “The Road to Serfdom in 5 minutes”
Peace,Dad
EXPERTIZS
The Crazy Conspiracy Theory?
The Crazy Conspiracy Theory?
We’ve been talking a lot about communism and socialism lately. One of the questions that has come up has been: “Why would people willingly go along with such a disastrous policy?”
The vast majority of people will not vote for communism once they really understand what it means.
Historically whenever it’s been implemented, the country in question has been enmeshed in a financial/economic crisis, or is emerging from a ruinous external or even civil war. Uh oh….another history rant!! Here goes:
Let’s start with the mother of all revolutions: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Here is the brief back story: Russia had been ruled by the Czars for over 300 years. The Romanov Dynasty lived in opulence. The Russian peasant class lived in grinding poverty.
In 1905 Czar Nicholas (who may have been the most obtuse ruler in history) engaged in a Naval war with emerging Japan. At the Battle of Tsushima Strait, the Japanese scored the first victory of a non European power over a European power. It was a humiliating defeat for the Czar and really the beginning of the end for the Czar.
Then in 1914, he plunged his poverty stricken and demoralized country into WWI vs. Germany. After a string of humiliating defeats, the Russians negotiated peace with Germany, losing vast amounts of territory. By now you have massive breadlines, food shortages, and unemployment. Combine that with millions of boys not coming home. The perfect soil to sell a crazy ideology.
Along comes Lenin with a great sales pitch. All hat, no cattle as they say in Texas. But a desperate people will buy anything.
The result? A civil war, the abdication of the Czar Nicholas II, followed by his brutal execution and that of his entire family. In addition to the 1.7 million lives lost in WWI you now add the 7-12 million more lost in a civil war to implement Marxism. (we have NOTHING in the American experience to compare to these numbers.) In the American Civil War, roughly 600,000 lives were lost. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Russian experience
Every country that has imposed communism on its people did so under similar circumstances. So how is that relevant to America today?
Americans would never accept such a system willingly. Why make that change when you have a booming economy and the wealthiest country in the history of the world? For those who want this system, American success is a disaster. That cadre at the top seeking power need an economic catastrophe to occur. That’s the only way to sell slavery. (Which is what communism is). Back in the day the slogan was “Better Red than Dead”. That’s the mentality of slaves. How does that compare to “Give me liberty, or give me death?”
So for the past 40 years the left has been working overtime to undermine the moral legitimacy of the founding using the black experience as their weapon of choice. Just like Lenin really didn’t care for the proletariat he claimed to love, the American left doesn’t care about the plight of poor blacks. The evidence for this is right before your eyes. If Lenin cared so much for the proletariat, why did he kill upwards of 100 million of them? Similarly, if the American left cares so much about Black Lives, why are Democrat run cities such as Chicago economic disasters for the black community? Why is crime out of control in these cities? Why do these police shootings keep happening in Democrat run cities? If they REALLY cared about black people, they would have solved these problems by now. It simply doesn’t compute. But it DOES compute if you understand the true objective.
For the left, the objective is now very clear. The perfect mix would be a country lacking a belief in its moral legitimacy combined with an economic collapse. That would do the trick. They had made great progress on the destruction of the moral legitimacy. But Trump absolutely ruined the economic collapse issue with a booming economy punctuated by historic lows in unemployment with blacks, hispanics, and women. Then came along came Covid. The left has been in an absolute frenzy to turn Covid into the bubonic plague of the 14th century. They’ve turned a bug that is essentially like the flu into a “pandemic”. They’re clearly attempting to collapse the economy to create an American version of Russia’s 1917.
Well dad, that sounds like a silly wild assed conspiracy theory! In 1910, that’s what people thought about this guy named Lenin. In 1925, people thought an ex-German Army corporal who was so broke he was couch surfing & preaching in bars about socialism should not be taken seriously. Fourteen years later that corporal named Adolf Hitler plunged the world into WWII. The story of Cuba’s Castro, N. Korea’s Jung, China’s Mao, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot are all pretty much the same.
This sports fans is why you MUST learn history. To not know it dooms us to repeat it. Every since Adam & Eve made a really bad decision, evil has been with us. You have to know in your bones that Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot are among us. They just need the right circumstances so that people will give power to them.
Remember always that Germany was probably the most advanced civilization besides Britain in 1939. That a nation that produced the likes of Beethoven and Bach, Mendelsohn and Brahms, Albert Einstein and Werner Van Braun, Johannes Kepler and Robert Oppenheimer could sink so low as to condone the mechanized slaughter of millions because of their religion defies imagination. But it happened only one generation ago. But we are most certainly no better than they were. We too are human beings with the same character flaw passed down to us by that unfortunate couple in the garden.
Know that there are Stalins, Hitlers, Pol Pots, and Castros seeking to reproduce the circumstances of Russia’s 1917 in America in 2020. Don’t believe me. Look at the evidence and decide for yourself. I believe it is as plain as the nose on your face. As they say on the left, moving forward “silence is violence.” There is no longer a middle ground.
Suileman the Magnificent didn’t give Pope Pius V a middle option in 1571. (of course, you KNOW a history lesson is coming on that topic!)
Hitler didn’t give Churchill a middle option in 1939.
The left isn’t giving you a middle option in 2020. And at the end of all this, God isn’t too interested in a third option either.
No choice IS a choice. So choose wisely….