Laigle’s Forum

Change you can fall for

By Donald Hank

Change is the hallmark of the revolutionary, and it is not change for the sake of some greater cause. Change is the cause.

When the first red revolutionaries slithered out of the sea, their ideology and agenda revolved around the the worker. The first page of the newspaper Izvestia bore the slogan: Workers of the world unite!

The Left seemed to be about social justice for the worker in his struggle against capitalist injustice.

I say “seemed” because the situation of the worker remained grim throughout Soviet history and the government never tackled this problem in earnest, focusing instead on propaganda painting the West as the author of their ills.

In Soviet publications, gallons of ink were spilled over the plight of the international worker, but the plight of the Soviet worker never changed tangibly since 1917. Soviet workers suffered constant shortages of food and housing. Married couples shared small apartments in the most squalid conditions while the elite partied.

I glimpsed this disparity between attitudes and platitudes while studying at the University of Leningrad in the early 70s with a group of American students. Following our studies, we took a side trip by rail to the Estonian capital of Tallinn.  I sat in a car with our Russian language professor and about a half-dozen other students playing guitar and singing folk songs.

After a while, our tour guide came to the door and invited me to join him in another car with an honored guest who was a Communist party member. You’d have thought party members were in short supply.  I told him I was needed as part of our entertainment. I will never forget his response. Smiling condescendingly, he said “That lady is a mere teacher. You have the opportunity to meet a party member.”

Where was the classless society? If she was a nobody because she was a teacher, what about the factory worker, who was supposed to be united with his international comrades in the glorious future revolution?

I understood at that moment that the “change” the Bolsheviks had wrought was hollow and had been from the beginning. Among themselves, they made no pretense of such idealism. And I suppose they assumed there was no point in pretending in front of me either because, as an American capitalist, I could be assumed to share their disdain for the little guy. The social change, i.e., elimination of class barriers that constituted their platform, was clearly only a pretext for grabbing power from the naive. Now they had it and that was the end of the pretense.

What I am driving at is that the Left does not have a central ideology or platform, as much as they would like you to think they do. They are about destroying the existing order, the status quo, and that is all. Once traditional culture is dismantled, they have accomplished their mission and are done pretending to help people.

Take the example of China’s Chairman Mao and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. These two dictators mouthed the world communist ideology of freeing the worker from oppressive capitalism.

Now, note that both Castro and Mao, like the early Soviet communists, disdained homosexuals. Fidel had them arrested.

Today, however, the Left in Europe, North and South America protects homosexual “rights,” advocating “gay” marriage and promoting the homosexual lifestyle, “protecting” homosexuals against “hate,” particularly on the part of Christian pastors, who have been fined and arrested, even threatened with horrendous jail terms for preaching the biblical viewpoint on homosexuality. There is no more talk of workers and their rights to enjoy the fruits of their labors, even though workers everywhere have recently lost as much as half their purchasing power in about a year’s time. So has the Left changed its agenda? I rather think it never had one and never will.

Now I have spoken with sincere Christians who have expressed the view that homosexuals are victims, born with a genetic makeup that causes them to desire the same sex, and that denying them “marriage” is sinful. Senator Obama has expressed this belief. “Christian” Leftists like him helped birth this absurd and anti-biblical notion.

But isn’t it curious that, say, Hugo Chavez and Brazilian President Lula, who promote homosexuality  and advocate laws that “protect” them by criminalizing free speech, nonetheless seem ideologically compatible with Fidel Castro, who openly hated homosexuals during most of his career? Where have you heard that Fidel and any other Latin American leftist have ever feuded over this ostensibly so vital issue? Where was the debate between these intimate allies on an issue that is so profoundly important to the Left in Latin America that legislation is written based on the absurdity that “gays” are a victim group threatened with extinction?

Or what about the Left in Canada, where the Human Rights Commission rounds up and arraigns pastors and others who oppose homosexuality but at the same time, rushes to the aid of Muslims, by far the deadliest enemies of homosexuals, whenever anyone  –  especially a Christian, opposes that religion?

Where is “workers of the world unite” when we need it most?

So what do you think? Is the Left really unified behind an ideology or agenda or is it unified behind a distorted view of the world that is independent of ideological content?

Olavo de Carvalho, who has studied leftist thought in greater depth than perhaps any other scholar, showed in a recent lecture (unpublished) that Leftism is not an ideology or agenda, but merely a reversal of common sense, a rejection of things normal and natural that rises to the level of a pathology.

The perceived ideologies or agendas they flaunt are nothing but a means to an end, and that end is the end of civilization.

Once they achieve the power they crave, they will no more aid homosexuals or minorities than they now aid the long-forgotten worker.

Contact: zoilandon@msn.com

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