One of Marx’s disciples, Stalin, killed more than 20 million of his own citizens in peacetime. Further millions more were kept in Siberian prisons for opposing Marx. Stalin is the second greatest mass murder in history, only Marx’s Chinese disciple Mao would manage to kill more, but many Democrats and Atheists would somehow find a way to compliment both Stalin and the political system he represented. Here are a few whose leftist politics and metaphysical assumptions made them useful idiots to Stalin.
After Stalin played Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) like a fiddle and all of Eastern Europe was brought under the Communist boot, there was one man brave enough to call out the tyranny. Winston Churchill gave the Iron Curtain speech to alert the world to the challenge this perverse leftist ideology posed. For his troubles, Churchill got to hear from Eleanor Roosevelt that he was “desecrating the ideals for which my husband gave his life…Perhaps it’s just as well that he is not alive today to see how you have turned against his principles.”
What were these principles? FDR thought Stalin was a good man. This good man’s atheist army imposed tyranny and raped 2 million women in Eastern Germany. Further, a system designed to bring equality and prosperity only succeeded in keeping Eastern Europe in oppression and absolute poverty.
Why was Eleanor criticizing Churchill? May be it had something to do with the fact that Churchill could see clearly what FDR could not. Both FDR and Eleanor were blinded by the assumptions they shared with Marxism. That assumption is that experts in government increase individual freedom. Democrats, Socialists and Communists say that government experts are more intelligent than individuals. Because experts can ‘follow the science’ and the government can throw unlimited money at problems, intellectual disciples of Marx believe that (while they may limit individual freedom in the short term) they can increase collective freedom in the long term. Every promise about the wisdom of experts routinely made by the Left is a deception used to gain control of your life and freedom. C.S. Lewis once pointed out that experts should be listened to when it comes to their area of expertise. But too often, intelligent experts overrate their intelligence and move well outside their areas of expertise into the realm of government and economics. Scientists should tell us what they know with regards to science. However when it comes to questions such as what is good for man or best for him economically and politically, a scientific training provides no greater insight . Like FDR with the New Deal, the Communists too had experts who were perfecting the problems of ‘society’ scientifically. Here was the end result.
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 determined to modernize both the economy and the political system without overturning either. “We knew what kind of country we had,” he would say. “It was the most militarized, the most centralized, the most rigidly disciplined; it was stuffed with nuclear weapons and other weapons.” An issue that infuriated him when he came into office—women’s pantyhose—symbolized to him what was so wrong. “We were planning to create a commission headed by the secretary of the Central Committee … to solve the problem of women’s pantyhose,” he said. “Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government .”
The Mikhail Gorbachev quote can be found in The Quest by Daniel Yergin
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