Thank you for the book recommendation; it’s been added to my reading list.
It is fabulous and an eye opener. I’m sure you will enjoy it.
But this is as I said, evil of a different degree, not of a different kind. There were not millions of Carthaginians to starve, else Rome would have done so. The Mongols dealt with Ukraine in much the same way as the Soviets – but there were only thousands of people in Kiev to starve, not millions.
I beg to differ. It is an evil of a different kind. The Ukrainian peasants were held up by the Bolshevek Revolutionaries as the epitome of the ‘oppressed’ working class. In Stalin’s persuit of foreign currency, the Ukrainian grain harvest was compulsorily taken on behalf of the state, year after year, until finally, to meet the quota set by Stalin and his Politburo, the Ukrainians had to hand over their seed grain. That, of course, reduced plantings the following year. When the supply of grain fell, Stalin introduced collectivisation to increase efficiency and of course, to obtain the communist ideal of state ownership of the means of production. The peasants then had their land taken from them. Eventually, the possession of any grain by the starving Ukrainians was a crime against the state, because the state (Stalin) decreed that the grain was state property and if it had not been handed over, it was stolen. The peasants then were made enemies of the working class, because they were attempting to steal food from them!! When the Ukrainian population dropped dramatically, threatening a labour shortage, Russians were moved in. They suffered the same fate. Then, the loyal Communist party apparatchiks failed to gather even more grsin, they were classed as enemies and taken away and shot. The peasants, once the excuse for, and even heroes of, the revolution, became a shunned and criminal class because the amount of grain they provided to the state went into decline. Stalin turned heroes into criminals and starved them to death. His own convoluted logic, supported by sycophants in the Communist Party, as described by the author, is just mind boggling to behold.
The point of my original post was not the violence per se, but the decline in morality, the suspension of morality and the rationalising away of even common sense all in the name of an ideology that had immorality as its foundation.
We have more evidence about modern brutality than ancient brutality, yes, but let’s not privilege our place in history in this regard based only on this.
Enemies destroying enemies with violence is one thing. Turning heroes and the very reason for a revolutionary social change into enemies through the abandonement of morality, logic and all common human decency is another.
This kind of evil has little to do with “subjectivism” and an “objectified ideal.” Many people furthering the Third Reich and in the other societies engaged in genocide thought they were serving an objective ideal of some kind. You named one yourself, “socialism.”
And there, in one paragraph you have identified the problem. Things like “socialism” and “communism” are humanist ‘ideals’. The objectification process can go no further than the human mind itself and what it desires. The humanist mindset is that there is no higher authority than the human mind and what it conjures up and so yes, a thing such as “socialism” comes to be objectified. However, to realise this objectified construct, morality had to be abandoned. Therefore, a truly discerning mind would have realised that the object had no moral foundation whatsoever. However, objectifying something is not quite the same as seeking out, through reason, truly objective truths. To do that, man’s mind must be open to truths that are universal, which lie outside the mind itself and yet can be percieved through reason. Socialism and communism were constructs of the mind and not something discerned as being objectively knowable.
