'Don't worry. No one's gonna get killed. I promise you.'
Raise your hand if you think a calm, joyous, unanimous socialist utopia is just around the corner!
The Soviet Union was literally a murder cult, and it wasn’t funny at all. The Death of Stalin makes fun of it, though, and it was one of the funniest movies of 2017. If you haven’t seen it, you should.
According to the real Soviets, the Bolshevik Party was on a sacred worldwide crusade, promising a “utopian future at the conclusion of linear time, in which equality, harmony and an end to suffering await humankind.” To help Russia get there, the Cheka secret police murdered some 100,000 people — just between 1917 and 1922! — and the chief of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, said the victims were sacrificed “to shorten up the road to salvation for others.”
Bolshevism was/is a political religion, and when Stalin took over, any “lack of faith” in the Party — “which could consist of the mere suspicion of inappropriate thoughts, rather than actual subversive action” — was grounds for the death penalty. This is a recurrent theme in The Death of Stalin, and the actors execute the script to hilarious effect.
Unfortunately, America is living her own version of the movie, in which the highest positions in business, government and academia are occupied by people who must profess a litany of sacred truths and pretend to believe everyone else’s lies. And although no one will be killed for their lack of faith — commie pinky promise! — a recurrent theme in our movie is that lack of faith is grounds for professional cancellation.
In America’s political religion, the truths and lies are changing so fast no one can be certain of professionally surviving the next five minutes. For instance, the mob is definitely coming for you if you don’t simultaneously believe gender is non-binary and everyone is either oppressor or oppressed. Ditto if you deny people are going hungry in inner-city “food deserts” and too much farming is destroying the planet.
The latest truth is that Israel is akin to a new Third Reich and you’re a Fascist if you don’t call for death to Israel and America.
In this climate of fear, every promise has an expiration date. So yeah, if America continues to embrace this intolerant and openly hostile political religion, lots of people are going to die — because believers are obligated to legitimize the faith even when the official version of the world is wildly different from the facts of everyday life.
In 1907, Anatoly Lunacharsky — the USSR’s first Commissar of Education — wrote that “scientific socialism is the most religious of all religions, and the true Social Democrat is the most deeply religious of all human beings.”
Today, Democratic Socialists are among America’s leading anti-Semites, and to maintain enthusiasm for “bettering themselves and creating a new kind of society” they need to offer some spiritual beliefs to their followers. After all, as Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce argued, “religious belief [is] fundamental to human existence and … when formal religion is suppressed, people will try to form a religion of their own.”
But their self-constructed echo chamber is crashing down around them, and the only way to save it is to double down on their rituals — massive, violent, street parades, accompanied by endless lies: that the border is secure; that racism will not divide us; that resistance is not terrorism, but the only path to freedom; that they are not waging war against individual persons, but exterminating the Zionists.
If you believe that, then you might have eagerly joined the chairman of the Eastern Front Cheka, who said in 1918, “We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.”
And if you still think a new kind of ultra-moral human being will emerge from the united marching, united action, and united struggle of the Democratic Socialists, then you will believe anything.
Raise your hand if you think a calm, joyous socialist utopia is just around the corner! Annnnnd … it’s unanimous!
"Raise your hand if you think a calm, joyous socialist utopia is just around the corner! Annnnnd … it’s unanimous!"
It's unanimous when all those who dissent are rounded up, imprisoned, re-educated, or executed. It's as simple as that! And BTW, some ARE more equal than others!