The reality of magic is a funny thing. Magicians are real but they don’t actually do real magic, just illusions: tricks. Real magic, however, isn’t real and can’t be; it’s impossible. Fake magic, it turns out, is as real as it gets.
Now imagine if someone told you that, sure, magicians only do tricks, but that doesn’t prove magic’s not real. Real magic is totally possible, they insist, it just hasn’t been done. Yet.
When you question that wild statement, they come up with a list of excuses for why real magic hasn’t been demonstrated before. For example, they blame the conspiracy of magicians for removing the market for real magic by selling their cheap tricks so cheaply. The only way we could ever have real magic, they claim, is if we first kill all those fakes who dare call themselves magicians! Real magic requires blood sacrifice.
I would expect that, around this time, you’d be writing off such a person as insane. Fortunately, they are entirely hypothetical. There is, however, a similar form of insanity that you’re much more likely to encounter; more on this later.
The reality of communism is a funny thing. The communism that communist nations have implemented isn’t real, in that it doesn’t live up to Marx’s promises of a workers’ paradise. It’s just murderous totalitarianism justified by far-left rhetoric.
Real communism, which Marx wrote about at great length, isn’t real and can’t be. The reason it can’t is that nobody knows—or has ever known—how to make it. There’s no reason to think that it could ever be made and much to conclude that it can’t.
The truism is that Marx was an excellent diagnostician but a poor clinician. He was great at explaining how capitalism can be bad, but utterly worthless at offering a viable alternative. He characterized how the ideal might appear but offered no workable instructions for how to achieve it. In other words, he provided a description of a delicious dish, without a recipe.
“If you ever run into communism, here’s a vague sketch of what it’ll look like. Good luck finding it, though, because I haven’t a clue, and also, I’m long dead.” – Karl Marx probably
People have tried to cook this dish many times now but the result has always been tragedy. By all evidence, you simply cannot create it with any ingredients, no matter how you try. We know this because no attempt at communism has even come close to succeeding, even on its own terms. And communist states don’t just fail, they fail big, to the point where modern adherents often hide behind “socialism” or “anti-capitalism” to avoid being associated with the tarnished brand.
“Insanity”, quipped Einstein, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” On this basis, modern communists are literally insane, and that insanity manifests through paranoid delusions and rationalizations.
Why did communism fail? Wrong question, comrade! Communism cannot fail; it can only be failed. There must be someone to blame.
So let’s blame the capitalists, who “inexplicably” refused to foster the rise of communism. After all, communism is like a delicate little flower that cannot grow in the presence of more robust economic systems. Like Tinkerbell, everyone has to believe or it will die.
The only way to get real communism is to first murder capitalism, along with any filthy capitalists who stand in our way! If we do that, then this time communism will be totally different; this time, it will actually work somehow. Source: Trust me, comrade.
There was a time when communism wasn’t insane, just idealistic and doomed. People had been trying to create communism even before Marx, such as Robert Owen’s (failed) paternalistic socialist mill in New Lanark, Scotland in 1800, George Rapp’s (failed) utopian community of Harmony, PA in 1804, and John Humphrey Noyes’ (failed) utopian free-sex community in Oneida, NY in 1848. The pattern of successes speaks for itself.
Communism as we understand it today, however, comes from the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1867, and it led directly to bloodshed. Twenty years later, Vladimir Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, tried to assassinate the Tsar in the name of socialism and was executed. A larger revolutionary attempt was made in 1905, but failed. Then, in 1917, Germany decided to sabotage the Russian war effort by helping Lenin come home.
It worked: through a complicated sequence of bloody uprisings, the glorious communist revolution recreated the Russian Empire as the totally-different and much-improved Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Workers of the world, celebrate!
It called itself socialist, not communist, but as Lenin explained, “the goal of socialism is communism”. In other words, he admitted that nobody knew how to make communism, but the USSR was gonna give it the old Russky try. Lenin’s recipe for communism was called Marxism-Leninism, although you might say that it was a bit heavy on the Leninism and light on the Marxism.
It was also heavy on the bloodshed, because that was Lenin’s personal brand: he murdered over 8 million of his own people by starvation, torture, and summary execution. If you want to make a communist omelet, you gotta break millions and millions of eggs, by which I mean people. Lenin’s recipe drowned Russia in a thick, red soup that could not be mistaken for borscht.
Putting aside all this blood, perhaps—at that particular moment in time—people could be forgiven for thinking that this was the culmination of Marxist prophecy, proving that the magic of communism was real. But by 1947, the illusion had worn thin, and American socialists came to understand that Russia was an embarrassing disaster. And in 1991, it mercifully collapsed under its own weight, leaving behind a totalitarian regime that was unburdened by the need to pretend to be true to Marxism, even though it was still beloved by nostalgic commies worldwide.
There were other attempts in other places and all of them ended poorly. Every. Last. One. Right now, we are long past the optimistic days of early-stage socialism, when there was still some reason to hold on to the hope that communism could actually work. We are firmly in the depressing days of late-stage socialism, when we have learned the hard way that communism will always fail, and always do so in the worst possible way, while hurting the most people in the process.
But the delusions of the insane are, by definition, impervious to evidence. Today, online Marxists gleefully post their images of guillotines and are quick to play the No True Communism card, insisting that the forms of communism that have been tried and failed all over the world weren’t the one true communism, so they don’t count. They’re still holding out for the real thing.
Of course, just like magicians, whose fake magic is as real as it gets, the “fake” communism that’s been tried is also as real as it gets. Only, unlike the magician’s scantily-clad assistant, when someone gets cut in half by a guillotine during the gory revolution, it’s no illusion. Real communism requires blood sacrifice. They even sing about it:
The people’s flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts’ blood dyed its ev’ry fold.
Vladimir Lenin was no magician; he could not make Marx’s vision a reality any more than anyone else could. He was just a butcher in tailcoat and top hat. And, today, another Vladimir who rules Russia is butchering his formerly-Soviet neighbors, all while the desperately-online cosplay socialists make excuses for him.
This naked imperialism is entirely consistent with a rejection of the original Soviet ideal of national socialism and a return to the purer Marxist notion of world revolution, aka domino theory, which claims that communism will only work when it takes over the world bit by bit. Essentially, a system that hasn’t worked anywhere will somehow work everywhere. Einstein would roll over in his grave if he heard this.
Meanwhile, these fucking tankies blame “capitalism” for literally everything. If it rains, that’s “capitalism” for you. If it shines, also “capitalism”! Thing is, economics is called the dismal science for a reason: it describes a world of scarcity and tough decisions. None of this is specific to capitalism, it’s just harsh reality.
To these latter-day communists, the Bad News of economics is always ascribed to “capitalism”, not the cruelty inherent in having only finite resources. “Capitalism”, in other words, has become a generic slur for the undesirable economic facts that dare stand in the way of the inevitable Marxist utopia, and subsequently an excuse to burn it all down so that paradise may come sooner.
“Why can’t we all have mansions and yachts? Fucking ‘capitalism’ is why! If we burn all the mansions and sink all the yachts, then there’ll be mansions and yachts for everyone, somehow.” – Modern_Marx_Enjoyer_4488 probably
There’s another historical lesson we can learn from the endless failures of communism that’s all too relevant today. In 1931, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which was a Soviet puppet, intentionally enabled the rise of Hitler. Following Stalin’s doctrine of “social fascism“, they claimed that the moderate social democrats were just as bad as—”twins of”—the Nazis because they, too, rejected communism. Both sides!
Under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann, the KPD decided that it would be strategically useful to help the Nazis take power, since that would crush the moderates, leaving the way clear for the glorious communist revolution ™. His internal slogan for this was the now-infamous: “After Hitler, our turn”.
The German communists did get their turn, but only in a sense: the Nazis rewarded tens of thousands of them with a one-way trip to the death camps, and Thälmann himself was shot on Hitler’s personal orders, in Buchenwald. Meanwhile, Stalin enabled Hitler further by making a pact with him to divide up Europe, and was betrayed for his trouble. It’s almost like these stupid communists never learn that you can’t trust Nazis and using them towards your own goals is sure to backfire.
The parallels are painfully obvious, and I am far from the first to recognize how Bernie Sanders and his late-stage socialists gave us Trump. Sanders has consistently equated Democrats and Republicans for over 40 years, just as Thälmann did the social democrats and the Nazis. Sanders is a Russophile and a socialist, like Thälmann. Sanders received aid from Putin, much as Thälmann did from Stalin.
Sanders viciously attacked the liberals and sold his followers on a pipe dream of Marxist populist purity. This led to a quarter of his butthurt supporters going bust; half of those by voting for Trump, the rest by throwing their vote away. And it happened in sufficient numbers in the right places to make all the difference.
Sanders was hardly unaware of the historical parallels but this did not deter him. He is, in fact, a student of history. He wrote a book entitled “Our Revolution“, which was a (wink wink, nudge nudge) nod towards Leon Trotsky’s “Our Revolution“, and then used the name again for his PAC, “Our Revolution“. In a typically tone-deaf move, he released the book a week after Trump’s victory, utterly indifferent to his role in it. Meanwhile, his wife tweeted that all that mattered was that you voted, not who you voted for.
Perhaps Sanders thought, “after Trump, our turn”, but his turn will never come. This is small consolation for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died needlessly as Trump bungled the COVID response, much less to the women dying from treatable pregnancy complications today because of Trump’s Supreme Court.
Sanders greased the slide towards fascism and gave us a shove down the chute to hell, all to feed his ambitions of leading the glorious revolution. Real communism requires blood sacrifice, after all, and Sanders has gutted America on the altar of Marxist millennialism. The fact that he got nothing for it, besides another house or two, does not make him any less the villain. All Thälmann got was a bullet in the head, and it was still better than he deserved.
Sanders is an old man. He will die soon enough without any help, but truly bad ideas never go away for good. The fallout of his aborted revolution will linger and cause more harm. Sanders will go down as America’s Thälmann, as surely as Trump is America’s Hitler.
I could go on, but perhaps now you see why I have so little patience with those online socialists and their #anticapitalism and #gullotines-2024 tags, as communism once again ushers in fascism.
History doesn’t have to repeat itself. We don’t have to die in the name of slogans that have proven themselves to be lies. This didn’t have to happen, but it happened, and now all we can do is fight again to break free of the cycle of history before millions more die.
If a vengeful, unrepentant Trump sneaks into the White House again, nobody will be safe. Not even multimillionaire Sanders, in any of his three houses. And this will be the least of the damage caused by Sanders’ betrayal of American democracy.