I am many minded and so my socio-economic development was limited by idealism and my deeply felt need to not be dancing with the devil. I was thinking only yesterday that the power elites of the Democrats today I knew in 1987. From 1984 to 1987 as a student intern at the UC Student Lobby I worked in Real Politik for college credit and no pay. Then after deciding at 30 to move to SF in 1987 to perhaps go to law school or perhaps become an entrepreneur I canvassed door to door and got on the phones to fundraise to stop Contra Aid.
The funny thing was I was not pro-Sandanista but pro peace. I was aware of the evils of communism and the evils of fascism American style.
I also knew floating above the strife to focus on financial freedom and security was a lost cause. I hedged my bet by hanging out in college hoping to meet others like minded. I didn’t. This was Sacramento, not Berkeley but even there community was hard to find. In retrospect of course a State government center with major military installations would be unlikely to educate for freedom.
Objectivity, hatred and boredom
How to remain objective when describing a phenomenon as monstrous as communism? Sovietology demanded that anti-communist invectives against the godless be abandoned and replaced with cold analysis. But is it possible to describe evil without calling it evil? The evils of communism have a strange tendency to disappear under the magnifying glass of cool Sovietological analysis; in the old days they were replaced by an "alternative economic system" or a "different way of social development" or even "the specificity of Eastern Europe" - today real-politik or polit-correctness. (In our time, of course, there is no Sovietology, because according to former Sovietologists, Soviets do not exist, but political correctness does not allow to see and call evil by its name.) How to talk about the starvation of millions of people, apart from evil? How to describe the gulag and collectivization, renouncing the “emotional language of anti-communism”? Thus, Sovietologists simply kept silent about the inherent evil of Bolshevism, preferring to leave such argumentation to discredited (in their opinion) anti-communists.
Bałżewska perfectly analyzes the problem:
Mackiewicz's reflections on communism are characterized by a penetrating and multidimensional view. On the one hand, its holistic perspective, depending on the issue under consideration, often combined various plans: political, historical, psychological, sociological, linguistic, ethical, cultural and even metaphysical, which undoubtedly made the argumentation itself very attractive and powerful. On the other hand, Mackiewicz's total abomination towards communism and all its mutations exposed him to constant criticism.
He calls Mackiewicz's attitude "a knee-jerk aversion to the anti-human nature of ideology." His revulsion "shattered the prestige envelope of the ideology" of communism. The hatred was instinctive, but not ill-considered, it had a clearly set goal - it was to maintain the attitude of resistance and fight - so it was not the helpless hatred of a slave, so familiar to us from the everyday life of the Polish People's Republic. One of the reasons for his hatred of the system was the all-encompassing boredom of Soviet life. The author aptly calls boredom “ differentia specificatotalitarian regime." He then distinguishes between doctrinal boredom (that is, the gibberish of Marxism-Leninism) and existential boredom resulting from being forced to vegetate under a communist knut. He also touches on the caricature dimension of communism - the ability to distort reality - about which Dariusz Rohnka once wrote in an interesting way wydawnictwopodziemne.com/2012/02/05/rub… .
Bałżewska talks about the "fervent fanaticism of the supporters", about the inverted theocracy and the "quasi-religious fervor of the communists" in order to "fortify the myth".
Applying sacred language to the interpretation of reality and relations prevailing in the Soviet macrocosm, it is relatively easy to see the inverted semiotic "game" of party apparatus borrowings parasitic on ritual and catechetical patterns originally formed within the community of the Catholic church. This practice, although limited only to the adaptation of the external rite of Christian ceremonies, and not their spiritual "substance", fully exposed the imitation of ideology at the formal level. Communist incantations unintentionally revealed the "nakedness" of the doctrine, which, having reduced its authority to the level of tiresome hoots coming from the mouths of public preachers,
As true as the above words are, I cannot help but feel that they stem from a post-Marx analysis, according to which a healthy, materialistic and scientific communism, under the leadership of the great Soso, has descended into some paper caricature of religion, in which confession has been replaced by self-criticism, procession by procession. May Day, the Holy Devotion manifestation, and the Articles of Faith imposed doctrine. This kind of criticism denies the authentic reality of all manifestations of the sacred, every transcendence, and reduces them to "social phenomena" or "phenomena of the sick psyche". (Bałżewska cites many similar opinions, including Miłosz's that "faith is a psychophysical phenomenon", which is a formulation of orthodox reductionism.) God forbid, I do not claim that this is the author's opinion, but it is hard not to notice that the classic, XX The eternal critique of religion informs its analysis to some extent.
Bałżewska is aware that the quasi-religious language and pseudo-ritual staffing of communism were only one of the components of doctrinal boredom. They were complemented by "a crude style of speech and stiff language (the so-called stiff speech, or grass speech), which the communist prominents liked".
Communism as an "idolatrous ritual" of a secular religion embellished with numb speech, it's all true, but it's not boring yet! This does not exhaust the nightmare of living under the communists. Doctrinal boredom translated into the dull monotony of "life not worth living", creeping into everyday activities, drowning human existence in a dull gray goo, and dulling, thereby accelerating Sovietization, because it is easier to control "a bored and frightened mass of people than a defiant crowd." The author's analyzes seem to me to be very accurate, and sometimes sensational, but still, the difficulty remains.