Dear Friends,
It seems to me, socialism requires authoritarianism. There is no other way socialism can work. This is because socialism requires taking from some and giving to others. To do that the takers must have authority to do it. A government limited in power lacks that authority. Only a government with the authority to seize the assets of one and redistribute it to another can do so legally. Therefore, socialism requires authoritarian government. While this is true, it is not widely advertised by socialists. For obvious reasons, they only want to portray socialism as candy and pillows. They count on us seeing the candy as a treat not something to rot our teeth, and a pillow as something to rest our heads upon not to smother us. Moreover, history pulls no punches at the results of socialism.
Even with totalitarianism, socialism has uniformly failed. The Soviet Union put diligent effort into proving socialism could work. They failed. Pol Pot thought all he needed to do was exterminate a class of people and socialism would naturally flourish. He gave permission to murder millions of people. The CCP had to give up on pure socialism and turn to fascism instead. Socialism is a failed economic system. The Twentieth Century proved that. You can’t argue Mao, Stalin, or Pol Pot were hamstrung by politics or the people’s self-interest. They wielded absolute power. Yet even with despotic power they couldn’t get socialism to work. Socialism has its attraction, however. Those who would be the despotic rulers have an affinity for it, as do those who ignorantly think they will get the largess.
Intellectuals, especially overly educated unemployed mid-wits, love the power socialism gives them. In their stupidity, they fail to understand that even the smartest people who ever lived are incapable of running the world single-handedly. But true to the Dunning-Kruger character of mid-wits, they think they can. Many earnestly want to improve the lot of mankind. They diligently work to that end… and create humanitarian disasters. Not because they are evil, but because they don’t know what they don’t know, while assuming they know it all. Someone said that all communist revolutions are captained by the overly educated unemployed, and manned by peasants. Both are required for a communist revolution. Today our universities turn out a plenitude of pre-authoritarian unemployable mid-wits.
Peasants are told they will get the wealth from the rich. This is effectively the mid-wits giving others permission to steal. That message resonates with people who have nothing to lose. It falls on deaf ears with those who have something they worked hard for, that can be stolen. If there are enough peasants, whether native or imported, that message of free money will garner votes to socialism. With socialism, democracy is one and done. You can vote it in but you have to fight your way back out. Because authoritarians don’t peacefully give up power. It’s not in the nature of someone who seeks despotic rule. That is where the candy rots the teeth and the pillow smothers. There are those who prefer to live under a strictly ordered system, like that of totalitarianism.
One draw of totalitarianism is the order. Under it, everyone has a place, and they stay in it… or else. A member of the Geheime Staatspolizei has order in his or her life. They care not that the order is imposed by a jack boot… nor that they are that jack boot. The peasant who gets a pittance from the government is violently protective of it. Meanwhile, the bureaucrat who abets the mundane evil that accompanies authoritarianism is in the top one percent. Such a system is by nature extractive until there is nothing left to extract, then it implodes. Socialism sounds like a great thing to many people, who will willingly vote it in and participate in its “Banality of evil.” The rest of us go along out of ignorance or mesmerized by the glittering promises. Remember this though, socialism is despotic government.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
