WHY “THE WORST” RISE TO THE TOP UNDER SOCIALISM
Perhaps the defining characteristic of socialism is the governmental imposition of one plan for all of society. Socialism is nothing if it is not “planning.” This is not to say that socialism introduces the idea of planning into society. Every human being plans his way through life, day in and day out. We all plan our family lives, our work days, our education, our career paths, our children’s future. Socialism is the forceful substitution of governmental plans for individual plans. Hence, it does not really matter if it is imposed on a society by a majority-rule democracy or a totalitarian dictatorship. In either case everyone in society is subjected to the coercive forces of the state in enforcing its plans for the whole society. “Obamacare” will have the same effect on American society whether it was imposed by democratic politics or by a dictator.
In his classic book The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek explained that because “collectivism” of all kinds, including socialism, necessarily involves the coerced imposition of some governmental plan (or plans) on the population, such a system attracts as its political leaders some of the most immoral and unethical people in society. For once the governmental plans are in place and begin to fail, as they inevitably will because of all the inherent economic weaknesses of socialism that we’ve already touched on, then “the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans” and admitting failure.1 He would “soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful” in a socialist society seeking to impose government planning of more and more aspects of its citizens’ lives.2
Those with the least qualms about depriving their fellow citizens of their civil liberties, or even brutalizing and abusing them, will rise to the top of such a society. This was in fact the history of twentieth-century socialism all around the world. Socialism, wrote Hayek, inevitably led to “the suppression of democratic institutions” and the movement toward a more dictatorial or totalitarian government.
Democratic socialism is, then, something of a non-sequitur. Socialists might be elected democratically, but their entire government program relies on government displacing the authority of individuals or families or private institutions or even constitutional restrictions on government power. A significant movement in this direction has already taken place in the United States with the expansion of federal executive powers, the proliferation of “executive orders” by presidents, and the creation of dozens of presidentially appointed “czars” to plan and regulate everything from air travel to energy to weapons of mass destruction.3 How appropriate that these largely unaccountable presidential appointees (the “czars”) with immense regulatory powers are named after the notoriously repressive and authoritarian Russian monarchy (that was, of course, displaced by the even more totalitarian Communists).
Because of the inevitable failure of socialist bureaucrats to “plan” an economy and a society better than the millions of individuals comprising the society can, there will be “dissatisfaction with the slow and cumbersome course of democratic procedure which makes action for action’s sake the goal,” wrote Hayek.4 “It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough ‘to get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal” to the public.5 The public demands a “strongman” (or strongwoman) “who can get things done”—even if it means the abandonment of democracy. Writing in 1943, Hayek was obviously referring to the national socialist “strongman” Adolf Hitler, but there have been many other examples, especially in Latin America.
Once such a leader is empowered, he will want to surround himself with “a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that totalitarian discipline which they are to impose by force on the rest.”6 The history of socialism in the twentieth century, Hayek reminded his readers, demonstrated that only the “ruthless ready to disregard the barriers of accepted morals” could execute the socialist program of pervasive governmental “planning.”
Moreover, the socialist regime is likely to be populated by “the worst elements of any society,” warned Hayek. Political demagogues (and socialists are always demagogues) have long understood that it is easier for the masses to agree on a negative program—a hatred of an enemy or “the envy of the better off” than on any positive program.7 In Bolshevik Russia, it was the capitalists and monarchists and Christians and independent farmers and aristocrats who were the enemy, and against whom the masses could be swayed, and against whom violence could be inflicted in the name of “the people.” In the Europe of Hayek’s day it was the plutocrat and “the Jew who became the enemy. . . .”8 “In Germany and Austria the Jew had come to be regarded as the representative of capitalism,” and hence became the target of extreme hatred.9 In America, political demagogues target “Wall Street” and the wealthy “one percent” as the objects of their hatred.
Hatred and violence, especially for the young, is justified in the name of idealism, however perversely understood. To a socialist, the ends justify the means (which is the reverse of traditional morality) and can justify any action desired by a socialist. To a socialist, said Hayek, there is nothing “which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole.’”10 This socialist mindset accepts if not celebrates “intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent,” and “the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual,”11 because the “selfish” individual does not matter; the socialist will argue that what he does is “for the good of the whole.”
In a socialist society, said Hayek, the only “power” worth having is political power, and to consolidate that political power government relies on propaganda, intimidation, and government domestic spying to discredit, bully, and eliminate possible opposition.
Socialism can lead to “the end of truth,” as Hayek called it, because socialists believe in indoctrinating people into “The Truth.” This is why socialist regimes have made us familiar with “reeducation camps” and rigid, totalitarian ideological conformity. Socialists believe that there are no legitimate, alternative viewpoints. Socialist propaganda must dominate the educational system and the mass media so that, in Hayek’s words, “a pseudoscientific theory becomes part of the official creed” which “directs everybody’s actions.”12 Under socialism, “every act of the government, must become sacrosanct,” while minority opinions—or even majority opinions at odds with the official ideology—must be silenced and are demonized.13 This all sounds like a perfect definition of the “political correctness” that plagues American colleges and universities and which has gone a long way toward destroying academic freedom both for students and professors.
“Truth” in a socialist society is not something to be debated; it is mandated and enforced by the Socialist regime, from which there is no alternative and no appeal. Once socialist ideology takes over and respect for actual truth is destroyed, wrote Hayek, then all morals are assaulted because all morality is based on respect for the truth.
THE WORST OF THE WORST UNDER SOCIALISM
To young people, the Cold War seems like ancient history; and they are increasingly unaware that Communist regimes deliberately killed tens of millions of their own citizens. These are not war deaths, but deliberate acts of mass murder of civilians by their own governments. These crimes were catalogued in The Black Book of Communism, edited by several French intellectuals and published by Harvard University Press in English in 1999.14 Their summary statistics include the following death counts:
USSR: 20 million deaths
China: 60 million deaths
Vietnam: 1 million deaths
North Korea: 2 million deaths
Cambodia: 2 million deaths
Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
Latin America: 150,000 deaths
Africa: 1.7 million deaths
Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths
The total estimated number of people murdered by socialist regimes in the twentieth century is nearly one hundred million. Among the techniques employed by socialist regimes were: “firing squads, hanging, drowning, battering . . . gassing, poisoning or ‘car accidents’; destruction of the population by starvation, through man-made famine, the withholding of food, or both; deportation, through which death can occur in transit . . . or through forced labor (exhaustion, illness, hunger, cold).”15 The Soviet Union’s “experiment” with socialism included what these authors call “its venture into planned, logical, and ‘politically-correct’ mass slaughter.”16
Although fascism will be discussed in the next chapter, it is worth pointing out here that fascism was a type of socialism. The Nazis called themselves “national” socialists, to distinguish themselves from their fellow socialists in Russia who labeled themselves international socialists. The German national socialists of the early twentieth century murdered approximately “21 million men, women, handicapped, aged, sick, prisoners of war, forced laborers, camp inmates, critics, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Italians, Poles, Frenchmen, Ukrainians. . . . Among them were 1 million children under eighteen years of age,” according to sociologist R.J. Rummel, who spent his entire academic career documenting “democide,” or death by government.17
Socialist “ideology and absolute power are the critical variables in Soviet democide,” wrote Hummel. “They explain how individual communists could beat, torture, and murder by the hundreds, and sleep well at night. Grim tasks, to be sure, but after all, they were working for the greater good,” he wrote sarcastically, echoing Hayek.18
Russia’s “international socialists” were very egalitarian in their mass murdering of any and all who might be suspected of having doubts about the glories of their socialist Nirvana. As Rummel explained:
Some [of the socialists’ victims] were from the wrong class—bourgeoisie, landowners, aristocrats, kulaks. Some were from the wrong nation or race—Ukrainians, Black Sea Greeks, Kalmyks, Volga Germans. Some were from the wrong political faction—Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries. Some were just their sons and daughters, wives and husbands, or mothers and fathers. And some were in lands occupied by the Red Army—Balts, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians. Then some were simply in the way of social progress, like the mass of peasants or religious believers. And some were eliminated because of their potential opposition, such as writers, teachers, churchmen; or the military high command. . . .19
The Soviet government actually had a system of quotas handed down to its functionaries and henchmen. Rummel quotes Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet spy who defected in the 1950s, who revealed a written order once given to him saying: “You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal.”20
When the Soviets weren’t committing acts of mass murder, they were involved in the sadistic torture of those suspected of being potential political dissenters. One Polish citizen who was imprisoned by the Soviets wrote in his memoir of how he was beaten with a hard-rubber truncheon, whipped, had his hair torn, endured cigarette burns, had his fingers burned, was deprived of sleep for nine days, and worse.21
Torture and murder were the foundations of government power in the socialist Soviet empire. Things were even worst in Mao’s China. The Chinese Communists killed three times the number of people killed by the Soviet Union—and again, these were China’s own people, the eggs that allegedly had to be broken to make the Communist omelet. How remarkable it is that to this day, self-proclaimed socialists in academe claim to occupy the moral high ground. The ideology that is associated with the worst crimes, the greatest mass slaughters, the most totalitarian regimes ever, is allegedly more compassionate than the free market capitalism that has lifted more people from poverty, created more wealth, provided more opportunities for human development, and supported human freedom more than any other economic system in the history of the world.
Socialism has not yet reached a critical stage in the United States, but the more a society moves in the direction of socialism, the more it relies on the coercive powers of the state. As such coercion becomes justified, it tends to expand at the expense of individual freedom and individual conscience. Government plans replace individual plans; the government claims a greater share of private wealth to distribute money as it sees fit; ideological propaganda becomes more pervasive from government institutions, especially in the schools; and the economy becomes progressively more lethargic, increasingly strangled by governmental edicts, regulations, and bureaucrats. Government becomes more and more a government of the worst, by the worst, and for the worst. That’s what socialism delivers.