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Quote of the Day: God and Communism
“One thing I knew: I was no longer a Communist. I had broken involuntarily with Communism at the moment when I first said to myself: ‘It is just as evil to kill the Tsar and his family and throw their bodies down a mine shaft as it is to starve two million peasants or slave laborers to death. More bodies are involved in one case than the other. But one is just as evil as the other, not more evil, not less evil.’
“I do not know at just what point I said this. I did not even know that with that thought I had rejected the right of the mind to justify evil in the name of history, reason or progress, because I had asserted that there is something greater than the mind, history or progress. I did not know that this Something is God.”
Whittaker Chambers
A few days ago, I finished reading the book, Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, and I am still reeling from his story. For a brief summary of the book (which doesn’t begin to do it justice), Chambers had joined and then eventually broke with the Communist party in the United States. (We could debate the morality and foolishness of his decision to join, but that’s another post.) When he quit the Party, his decision likely put his life at risk, and he also believed he had the obligation to call out Alger Hiss, who was not only a member of the Party, but who had also infiltrated several departments in the U.S. government as well as international organizations. Chambers determined that although Hiss’ ability to operate without ever being caught up to that point was nearly impossible to imagine, the fact remained that he had operated freely and had to be stopped. Chambers was well aware of many of Hiss’ actions over the years, since the two at times had worked closely together and, in a sense, became friends.
I was shocked by Chambers’ assertions in the quotation above for many reasons. In spite of his uneasiness that developed over time in working with the Communists, he felt through a kind of spiritual realization that he was compelled to leave the party. It was the specter of the massive evil that had been committed in the name of the Party, and he realized he had been complicit in that evil through his own choices and actions. By making that decision to quit, however, he knew that he would effectively be destroying his own life and that of his family.
Today, however, people are free to join the Communist Party; members of Black Lives Matter boast of their training and membership. But they have no idea about or interest in learning how depraved their participation is. They don’t care that millions of people died not so long ago in the name of Communism. They have dedicated their lives, not to a great cause, but to empty ideas, racism, a wicked religion that not only cares nothing about the people it is supposed to represent, but ridicules them for their foolishness. There are no guiding principles that unite the people who follow Communism in the United States, but only commitment to duplicity and betraying this country. BLM has spent millions of dollars on California and Canadian estates, ignored the payment of taxes on the properties, and claimed ignorance of tax law; the full scope of their illegal acts has yet to be determined.
In a state founded on Judeo-Christian principles, there is no room for an ideology that mocks the people it is supposed to serve and denigrates G-d and the religions on which this country is founded. If it is allowed to thrive, we will all suffer.
Only time will tell whether Americans like Whittaker Chambers have an awakening that brings them back to their Source and inspires them to follow that which is greater. May we all be prepared also to inspire each other and prepare to make sacrifices to save our great country.
Published in Group Writing
This thread seems to have gone a bit off track.
It may be that when Whitaker Chambers was quoted as saying that “It is just as evil to kill the Tsar and his family and throw their bodies down a mine shaft as it is to starve two million peasants or slave laborers to death”, some people misinterpreted this as him contrasting Bolshevik evil and Tsarist evil. In reality, Chambers was contrasting one kind of Bolshevik evil with another kind of Bolshevik evil.
Thus, the references to Tsar Nicholas II as a “bloody tyrant” ring oddly in my ear. The words usually associated with him are things like: weak, well-meaning, ineffectual, easily led. I was amused to read that his advisers browbeat him into getting into the war with Germany by threatening that the Russian people would overthrow him if he didn’t. A little ironic, in the light of later events — but then war always looks more attractive in prospect than retrospect.
Indeed, he was not deposed because of any supposed tyranny, but because the war was going so badly. Clearly the Russian military had learned nothing from its defeat by Japan in 1905.
R.J. Rummel himself admits that his fatality numbers for Tsar Nicholas’ reign are not reliable. They seem to be mostly from colonial wars.
I wouldn’t go as far as the Orthodox Church, which has canonized Nicholas and his martyred family; but compared to what followed him he does look pretty good.
Thank you, Taras. Since we can’t read Chambers’ mind, I think your understanding makes sense.
So here is my take, Tsar lives matter. In materialist Communism, killing the Tsar and his family doesn’t matter because nobody has a soul. Once you accept that, it’s really easy to accept killing Jews* and Ukrainians for the greater good. Then any Russian who disagrees with you. Then any Russian that might disagree with you.
But if G-d makes your daughter’s ears then all life is sacred and you can’t go around murdering anybody. When G-d loves everybody your options are limited.
*My comment has nothing to do with Jewish theology or Susan’s religion but my dislike of how anti-semitic Russian literature. (And I really like Russian literature.)
Why is that more likely? One contrasts difference, not the same thing.
And so? The Soviets could dismiss the Holodomor as a ‘colonial issue’ (like the British did the Bengal famines) but that doesn’t diminish their responsibility for it.
Sure, but antisemitism was a formal policy under the Tsars. That’s when the word pogrom gained its current meaning and when centuries of pogroms took place.
It continued to lurk in Russian and Eastern European societies and was then used by Stalin, but Lenin’s Govt was the first Govt in Russia that specifically repudiated antisemitism.
Of possible interest:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/vladimir-lenin
And perhaps a bit edgier, but an interesting take on why the Tsar’s govt encouraged antisemitism:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/lenin-anti-semitism.pdf
The point is blurred when we project our current political stances back onto history, but there was a lot about Tsarist Russia that was rotten – and that included state endorsed antisemitism.
Please prove that the British directly caused the Bengal famines.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bengal-famine-of-1943
Kind of a mixed record, actually:
The government of Nicholas II formally condemned the [Kishinev pogrom] rioting and dismissed the regional governor, with the perpetrators arrested and punished by the court. … Leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church also condemned anti-Semitic pogroms. Appeals to the faithful condemning the pogroms were read publicly in all churches of Russia. … In private Nicholas expressed his admiration for the mobs, viewing anti-Semitism as a useful tool for unifying the people behind the government; … however in 1911, following the assassination of Pyotr Stolypin by the Jewish revolutionary Dmitry Bogrov, he approved of government efforts to prevent anti-Semitic pogroms. Wikipedia, “Nicholas II of Russia”.
The Soviet Union had two severe outbreaks of antisemitism, first during Stalin‘s bromance with Hitler, when a lot of Jewish writers and intellectuals were put to death; and then a few years later when the state of Israel was founded and Soviet Jews’ loyalty to the USSR was no more guaranteed by their having no place else to go. According to an Orthodox Jewish friend, the only thing that prevented a second Holocaust was Stalin’s timely death.
The Britannica article actually says:
According to the Indian economist Amartya Sen, who himself witnessed the famine as a nine-year-old boy, the famine was the result of an entitlement failure. In other words, the distribution of the food supply throughout Bengali society was hindered primarily by economic factors that affected the ability of certain groups of people to purchase food.
Not that the article lets the British completely off the hook, as some wartime measures contributed to the shortage, even as a vast British relief effort fell short of what was needed.
R.J. Rummel’s stats on the reign of Nicholas II allege no such episode. On the other hand, mass starvation was a pretty routine occurrence in Soviet history.
By colonial wars I mean that they were part of Russia’s imperial program that had been going on for centuries before the birth of Nicholas II. Could he have broken with many generations of his forbears and stopped it? Probably … not. I think he would have been set aside from the succession as an obvious lunatic if he had tried.
Also, when you’re dealing with wars, you can’t always blame all the casualties on one side; as when the Soviets helped start the war that eventually killed so many Soviet citizens.
Obviously the Soviets would never call the Holodomor a colonial issue, as that would require them to admit Ukraine was a colony. For that matter, they never admitted the Holodomor ever happened. For a while at least Russia admitted it; but with the rise of Putin I think they unadmitted it again.
One of those economic factors was the British stockpiling and exporting rice to feed their armies elsewhere after they lost Burma to the Japanese. What did they think the people would eat?
It wasn’t malicious, it was like the Potato Famine in Ireland that way.
Here’s the heart of colonialism in a nutshell: Ships risked German blockade to get food to England during WWII so the English wouldn’t starve. The same Govt exported food out of India during WWII, even though the famine that caused in India was completely predictable.
Also, Britain was an imperialist monarchy.
Yes and no. By this time, the monarchy was purely decorative. “Imperialist parliamentary democracy” is probably more accurate.
While the Left uses “imperialist” as a swear word, a realist will note that it can improve the lives of ordinary people — even as it puts the noses of native elites out of joint — if they are living in primitive tribal societies or under feudalism (as in India).
In light of such considerations, Ludwig von Mises, probably the greatest of the Austrian School classical liberal economists (Hayek was his student), made a distinction between British imperialism — and all the others.
You are, of course, free to argue with Britannica, and with Amartya Sen, who agree that there was enough food but it was not being distributed as it was needed.
This was also what the British government was being told, 8000 miles away. Which I learned the last time we talked about this!
On the other hand, the great mistake behind the Irish potato famine was when the well-meaning British government announced it wouldn’t allow the price of grain to rise. As a result, whole fleets of grain ships that were being diverted to Ireland to profit from the high prices went back to their original destinations.
Some Irish historians accuse the British of indifference and racism. I think they might have more of a point than the Indians.
Lol! As if India wasn’t still feudal when the British departed in 1947. If the British had been genuinely popular in India it wouldn’t have mattered what the elite thought – they’d have had popular support and they could have kept that empire.
Why weren’t they popular? Because colonialism in places like India was about extracting economic surpluses for the colonial power’s benefit.
This is how it worked for the British in India, first in the form of the East India Company. In 1776 (approx) the Company won a few large battles with the Mughals, the outcome of which was that the Company was given the right to collect taxes in Bengal, Orissa and Bihar (about a third of North India). They raised taxes, spent 2/3ds of them of running their local administration and used 1/3rd of them to buy products from India which they then sold for profit. Breaking it down, that one third of taxes was the region’s economic surplus.
This went about as well you would expect, with the Mutiny bursting out in 1857. The British Govt dissolved the Company to rule India directly.
Of course Her Majesty’s Govt didn’t directly engage in vulgar trade, so the extraction mechanism had to change. If somebody in (for eg) Germany wanted to buy South Indian silk, they needed Indian Rupees. To get these, the Germans would need to pay London (gold or whatevermarks etc.) and in return get a promissary note. This promissary note was then given to their Indian supplier in exchange for the silk, the supplier took the note to a central bank in India and was paid in Indian Rupees.
Where did these Indian Rupees come from? The Raj taxed India (hard), spent two thirds of what they collected on local administration and the remaining one third on redeeming these promissary notes. So the same basic skimming process. The difference being that India’s economic surplus moved from accummulating in the Company’s coffers to accummulating in the British treasury directly.
That’s also how the railways worked. In British India they were backed by Government bonds sold in London – very popular, because of the very high rate of return they promised. Of course the railways returned no such profit, so the bond holders were then paid by raising taxes in the areas the railways passed through. Another way of extracting surplus. It will not surprise you that a mile of train track built in India at that time cost five times what a mile of train track built in North America did – all backed by the Indian tax payer.
Colonialism = almost 200 years of this.
Britain still had a monarch, and I’m just American enough to despise monarchy. Britain doesn’t get a pass.
@zafar — Remember, economics is not is zero-sum game. That one party is making a profit does not rule out a benefit to the other party, even if the first party is taking what we may consider an unfair advantage.
For example, the United Auto Workers made American cars shoddier and more expensive than they otherwise would have been, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t valuable and improving at the same time.
In any case, we’ve already discussed how the population of India grew very substantially under British colonialism, testifying to an increase in overall well-being.
Looking at the Indian economy directly:
From 1850 to 1947, India’s GDP in 1990 international dollars grew from $125.7 billion to $213.7 billion, a 70% increase or an average annual growth rate of 0.55%. This was a higher rate of growth than during the Mughal era (1600-1700), when it had grown by 22%, an annual growth rate of 0.20%, or the longer period of mostly British East Indian company rule from 1700 to 1850 where it grew 39% or 0.22% annually. …
The British Raj invested heavily in infrastructure, including canals and irrigation systems in addition to railways, telegraphy, roads and ports. … The Ganges Canal reached 350 miles from Haridwar to Cawnpore, and supplied thousands of miles of distribution canals. By 1900 the Raj had the largest irrigation system in the world.
(Wikipedia on “Economy of India under the British Raj”.)
One of the worst legacies of British colonialism in India was Socialism. There is an interesting chart of how economic growth was very slow until after the market reforms of the 90s, at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/gdp-per-capita
Explain to me how me paying you for your products with your own (high) taxes means that you’re anything but exploited.
Where’s your profit? Oh that’s right, I taxed it. What are my expenses? Oh that’s right, you paid for them with your taxes.
If increased productivity means increased general consumption you may have a point. But in colonies it didn’t mean that.
They taxed the population at a very high rate to pay for infrastructure that was five times more expensive, train track mile for train track mile, than the exact equivalent in North America at that time.
‘Investment’? Scam? Both? You tell me.
The British Raj was not a good thing imho. No matter how much non-elite opinion in the West desires to dress a sow’s ear as a silk purse (and why). I was formed by the aftermath of the Raj, arguably I benefit from what good it did – but it would be dishonest of me to ignore the overly high price the country as a whole paid.
Do you have any evidence that the Mughals would have been better? We are talking in general here and not everything the British Raj did.
Better at what, Henry? The issue isn’t that British were British, it’s that they exported India’s economic surplus for almost two centuries and they paid for that by taxing Indians themselves – there was no returning flow of investment or profit at a national level. It’s like India invested, by way of its taxes, for the benefit of Britain.
“No returning flow of investment”? It’s remarkable that you can still say that after reading the following, repeated from above:
The British Raj invested heavily in infrastructure, including canals and irrigation systems in addition to railways, telegraphy, roads and ports.
But perhaps you misunderstood. Just to clarify, these are canals, irrigation systems, railways, telegraph lines, roads and ports that the British built in India. And left behind when they left.
Let me go over this again. Infrastructure in British India was funded by bonds which were sold in London. The bonds promised an unrealistically high return on the investment, guaranteed by the British Govt – so when ticket sales or goods charges, for example, failed to provide the “expected” return the balance was made up by taxing Indians. This made the infrastructure extremely expensive – five times more expensive (with the railways) than identical infrastructure that was being build in North America at that time. All of this had an impact in terms of opportunity cost for the people (Indians) who were taxed so heavily to ensure the bond holders’ profits. It was not good deal, it was a bad deal.
To clarify: why did it ‘cost’ five times as much in India to build a mile of train track as it did in North America?
The additional cost wasn’t because it was five times as difficult to build a mile of train track in India, or because that mile of train track in India was five times as good as the one in North Americal. The additional cost was the guaranteed profit to the bond holders.
Why did Indians agree to this disadvantageous bond rate? I hear you wondering.
Because they had no choice about it. It’s another illustration of the corrupting evil of taxation without representation. The train tracks weren’t built to benefit India, they were build to benefit British bond holders. There was no balance between the two because one side wasn’t there to argue for itself or make decisions for itself.
There’s an assumption in your comment (and perhaps in your source, wikipedia?) that all else being equal it’s better to have those miles of train track than not. But all else isn’t equal. Would Indians have been better off with less train tracks, albeit costed more realitically, but a century of being able to invest more in their own industry or agriculture? That’s the route North America took because it was free and was able to. Compare and contrast the results.
Edited to add: here’s a weird fact – the average rate of growth for the Raj was about 1.2%. As soon as the British left India, despite the chaos of Partition, the growth rate jumped to 3.6% (still not very impressive) and stayed there for decades. That was the immediate impact of economic surplus no longer being siphoned out of India to Britain.
I’m with you. It’s strange that some people will celebrate America’s Independence Day and yet not see a connection to other peoples colonized by the British.
For some reason North American Conservatives – to grossly generalise – have internalised a view of America as the civilisational, if not de jure, successor polity to the British Empire.
So if America’s success is the natural result of upholding Judaeochristian (really Northern European) values, then so was the Empire’s.
If America’s impact on the world is good, then so must the Empire’s have been.
And if you question the British Empire’s mechanisms and motivations, then it’s the equivalent of questioning America, or even the self-evident benefits of Judaeochristian values.
That’s the only thing I can see that drives this ideological blind spot.
Or…it could just be Ricochet argumentativeness, which I sort of guiltily enjoy.
For some reason non-Americans think that they can think like Americans.
The part that you overlook was the chief bone of contention between the US and Britain until WWII. Military exercises in the United States focused on the threat of domestic invasion by the British Empire, combining attacks from naval sources along the seaboards and invasion by combined forces in the Great Lakes region. American leadership remembered their origins and as American influence waxed in the course of WWII, FDR used many levers to secure the independence of India and other holdings of the Empire. The correspondence between FDR and Churchill could be quite contentious on the topic. Churchill comes across as genuinely convinced of the British contribution to the welfare of the Indian people and FDR provided some sharp rejoinders. What study I’ve made of it suggests that FDR had the better case. It makes for interesting reading. The connection was quite clear to FDR, and many other Americans. Today, those with any exposure to British Commonwealth issues gets cricket scores, rugby rivalries, and stories about tensions arising from the liberal policies toward migration within the Commonwealth. For my part, I once purchased and tried to tackle a phone book size history of India and must shamefully confess that I found the long, bouncy names more challenging than a Russian novel. I was utterly defeated, but if someone has a recommendation I can try another.
I would also note in passing my Indian friend some decades ago who just wanted to clarify, in passing, that he despised Democracy and much favored a more authoritarian arrangement. I wonder if the current guy meets with his approval. We had incompatible political views, but we played chess for years.
Are you truly so mysterious?
What was FDR’s (America’s) interest in breaking up the Raj? It was there, certainly, but what was the motivation?
Outcomes after WWII include the independence of India/Pakistan, certainly, but they also include Bretton Woods and the complete dominance of the US dollar in international commerce (replacing Sterling).
The names are very long. A history of India? Indian history is very long. Do you want an overview of the whole thing, or? The British, and even the Muslim, rulers only covered a small portion.
If he liked the authoritarian he might well approve of the current guy, though if he liked authoritarian Leftist he might not.
Apparently, if it is a common conceit that we see ourselves as an empire.
Do you want to buy any of our products? Cool. Let’s talk.
Do you have any neat stuff we might like to buy? Cool. Let’s talk.
Neither of those conditions pertains? Ah, well … have a nice day then. Now if you’ll excuse us, the trade delegation from Whogivesastan is outside waiting to speak to us.