VIEW from behind the plow

We continue to read the book, “I Chose Freedom,” by Victor Kravchenko, a former Communist from the Ukraine region of now defunct USSR.

Dr. James Gerber loaned the book to us to read. We hate to complain about such a generous act but we hate the book – so discouraging.

Kravchenko defected to America in 1944 while on a mission to the United States for the Soviet government and wrote the book, which became a best seller in America and Europe, in 1948.

Kravchenko experienced the “glorious communist revolution” and abhorred it because of the misery it created and how little he could do to prevent it.

He related an experience at a rural community in the Ukraine where party leaders in Moscow sent him to make sure the grain was harvested.

He found people starving and too weak to work, as well as starving horses that were needed to pull the harvesting equipment.

He reported that the milk from the local dairy cows was taken to a creamery where butter was made – for export…while local children starved.

He obtained permission from the regional administrator to harvest outside rows of barley in the fields to provide cereal for the people and some oats to feed the starving horses so that they, too, could have the strength to work. He also was able to divert some of the milk for the children.

He lost his billfold which contained the authorization for his actions and related that loss cost him in party advancement for years...during party purges.

Apparently the local leader, who was of peasant stock, understood you couldn’t starve a profit out of livestock and that starving people couldn’t work.

He wrote of an incident where a horse had died and the local apparatchik in charge of the farms ordered it doused with kerosene and lime and to be burned in a pit the next day.

The next morning there was nothing left of the animal to be burned.

The starving people had taken it all.

Kravchenko illustrated the hatred the Communist party had for Christianity with a report that the local church was forced to become a storage building for the crops harvested, much to the distress of the harvesters who saw their last vestige of decency and normalcy defiled.

Later in the book he related the party’s ruthlessness in dealing with the farmers through the words of a party official who claimed that some peasants had protested the communist takeover of their land and thereby threatened the communist’s efforts to turn all means of production over to the state. The official said the harshness was necessary to teach the peasants a lesson. The peasants were threatening the “five-year plan” and it had become a “them or us” situation.

The stories about the removal of the farm population (collectivization) –  either by removing them from the rural areas to forced labor camps, allowing them to starve or executing them – caused us to think that “collectivization” might not have worked if the people had been armed. We are confident there are leftists in America who would gladly employ collectivization in the “fly-over” regions of the U.S. if residents didn’t have guns to prevent it. Once again, the genius of the founders is revealed. They wanted a government where people were free and ensuring their right to own the weapons of self defense provided that.

Armed citizens prevented Japan from invading America during World War II, history relates.

President Donald Trump stated in his State of the Union address that America would “never” be a socialist country.

Yet multiple polls suggest that many Americans, especially younger ones, embrace left-wing ideology in increasing numbers, as more politicians have openly embraced the term.

Despite ample evidence that socialism has failed to bring prosperity and has actually inflicted widespread misery, why does it resonate? And what can be done to stop its spread?

Jarrett Stepman writing in The Daily Signal, quotes clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson about what drives the left in America and how to restore meaning.

Stepman writes:

Peterson explained why he thinks socialism resonates with younger Americans in particular.

“People are unbelievably ignorant of history,” he said, admitting that even he has gaps in knowledge about history before the 20th century.

But young people are working with even less knowledge, Peterson said.

“What young people know about 20th-century history is nonexistent, especially about the history of the radical left. How would they know?” he asked. “They are never taught about it so why would they be concerned about it?” For older generations of Americans, Peterson said, things like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the threat of the Soviet Union are vivid memories. But not so for young people who see it as ancient history.

Yet even today, the examples of North Korea and Venezuela serve as clear evidence of socialism’s failure. Yet the left deflects such accusations, chalking those failures up to political corruption and tyranny.

The reason people are open to socialism is that they don’t understand what it really is, Peterson said. They are “emotionally drawn to the ideals of socialism, say, or of the left, because it draws its fundamental motivational source from a kind of primary compassion, and that is always there in human beings,” so the appeal will “never go away.”

The truth is, Peterson explained, the economic strides of recent decades have been astonishing, with poverty falling around the world and massive improvements being made to the material lives of human beings.

But these stories rarely make headlines, Peterson said, in part because it’s hard to keep up with all the rapid changes and innovations, but even more because “human beings are tilted toward negative emotion. … That makes us more captivated by the negative than the positive.”

Adding fuel to this emotional fervor, Peterson said, is a mainstream media “increasingly desperate for attention” in a shrinking market, doing everything it can to attract viewers and listeners.

Worst of all for polarization, Peterson said, is the rise of a “group identity, associated with a quasi-Marxist viewpoint with the additional paradoxical mixture of postmodernism.”

Postmodernism, Peterson said, questions whether large, uniting narratives are valid.

This is a huge problem because human beings are driven by stories and narratives, so this concept is “unbelievably destabilizing for people,” he said.

Life satisfaction comes when we believe we are making our way to a “valid endpoint,” Peterson said, and this mentality isn’t really “optional,” even for nihilists – who deny all meaning in life – because their misery is what gives them meaning.

“The destruction of the narratives that guide us individually, psychologically, and that also unite us, socially, familially … it’s an absolute catastrophe,” Peterson said. And this reality is the result of the “unholy marriage of the postmodern nihilism with this Marxist utopian notion.”

Despite the philosophical incompatibility of these concepts, they have been combined into a potent stew in the late modern age, where group identity is all that matters and individuals are subsumed to the collective.

The intellectual divide between these concepts and classical western views go “way deeper” than our political divides, Peterson said.

To address the growth of nihilism, it’s important to build the self-worth of individuals so that they can find strength from within, Peterson said. Unfortunately, for half a century, we’ve been teaching people that they are fine just the way they are, he said, but this is a terrible message for those who are “miserable and aimless.”

It is better, he said, to tell people that they are “useless” and ignorant, but that if they actually begin to apply themselves they can become something much greater.

This, rather than platitudes about everyone being perfect, is the path to bringing out the best in people, Peterson said.

This reminds us of the observation by columnist Dennis Prager that communism never was about helping the common man.

We might add that abortion is not about women’s rights.