Never underestimate the power of ideas. Ever. Philosophical geeks like me that have a strange fascination with the power of ideas know that ideas can enrich humanity immeasurably or transform free societies into genocidal nightmares that are cruel beyond human comprehension. I logically follow ideas where they lead, turning over every stone, trying to comprehend how simple thoughts and opinions transform lives and nations.
The twentieth century demonstrates, through cause and effect and experiential contrast, the power ideas have to shape the world. The century was a conundrum as the people of the West thrived in prosperity while those living in Marxist nations suffered under unimaginable conditions. The prevailing ideology of your country, the ideas your leaders embraced determined your fate, whether you lived life in relative comfort or faced genocide. The lesson? Ideas create peace or unimaginable suffering. They can cause ordinary people to improve their circumstances or become extraordinary monsters. They are the ultimate force shaping humanity and the fate of nations.
Ideas give, and ideas take away. Pursuing freedom and liberty created immeasurable prosperity and security for the West, lifting more people out of poverty than any other ideology the world has ever known. But ideas aren’t always so kind. While the West has enjoyed safety and security, Marx’s theory of exploitation and equity led his disciples to starve tens of millions in order to gain control of societies. Famines became powerful tools to subdue populations. Stalin and Mao used hunger and death to force compliance with communist philosophy, and the results were horrific. Famines were intentionally protracted, becoming a valuable tool to break people’s will, and force them into submission. The pain of hunger became so unbearable that people resorted to eating their children. During the Holodomor, the great famine that resulted from Stalin’s collectivization of Ukrainian farms, Soviet posters kindly reminded people, “To Eat Your Children is a Barbarian Act.” The Soviets forced starvation upon millions yet dared to chide people about resorting to the unthinkable because the pain of hunger pushed them beyond the limits of humanity.
Mao Zedong used similar tactics to reorganize Chinese society to conform to Marxist principles during the period known as “The Great Leap Forward,” starving tens of millions to death. He knew of the horror, yet he pushed forward; suffering was necessary because the ends always justified the means. Marxists achieve their utopian visions, regardless of the cost. People resorted to cannibalism, and parents were forced to murder their children when hunger drove them to scrounge even the tiniest scrap of excess food. Such self-preservation violated the Marxist virtues of economic equity. They had to pay, and parents were forced to execute their children for their “disobedience.”
Most Americans are unaware that these nightmares occurred throughout the twentieth century. They tend to think humanity had progressed beyond this kind of barbarism, and the prospects of genocide ended with the Holocaust and the defeat of the Third Reich. It wasn’t true; cruelty was alive and well. Historians generally agree that Marxist atrocities led to the murder of over one hundred million people in the twentieth century in their pursuit of a utopian society. Still, we will never know the actual number. Genocide was a constant plague upon the world even after World War II. The worst of Mao’s atrocities occurred between 1958 and 1962 – the end of the Eisenhower and the beginning of the Kennedy administrations.
Consider the contrasts.
On the other hand, for those who lived under the protection of the ideology of the West, the twentieth century was a gilded age of prosperity and relative safety unlike any the world has known. Yet, the twentieth century brought horrors that neither you nor I even want to try to imagine to people living under Marxism. They died by the tens of millions. In 1959, our grandparents were basking in the mythical aura of Eisenhower’s America while Lennon and McCartney began to take flight in the Quarrymen. In that same year, the people of China were faced with the pain of hunger so maddening that they chose to eat their neighbors, while many were forced to murder their children who gleaned spilled grains of rice from fields trying to survive.
America and the West remain blissfully unaware.
One of the things I learned while overturning intellectual stones is how we are dangerously unaware that genocidal ideas, masquerading as platitudes, wreaked havoc all over the world. At the same time, we lived in the comparative safety and comfort of twentieth-century America. We didn’t know – or want to know – that toxic ideas in the hands of madmen destroyed nations and incited universal madness among their people, during the same gilded age of America and the West. Our public schools and universities failed to tell you and me that Soviet people were dying in gulags and the Chinese were eating their neighbors, killing their children during the golden age of 1950s America. We didn’t know such genocide was happening during America’s heyday. Our ignorance led us to believe that Marxism was buried under the rubble of the Berlin wall and never was a legitimate threat. We created the convenient myths that genocidal ideas no longer roamed the earth seeking whom they could destroy and that American exceptionalism protects us from within. We think this can’t happen here. America is bulletproof. We don’t have to worry. We can continue with our God-given destiny, enjoying unparalleled comfort and prosperity without the inconvenience of getting involved in protecting and preserving the unique ideology of America and the West.
We aren’t immune; America is vulnerable. Variants of Marxism, the ideological tradition that created the horrors for the Soviets and Chinese, are now the moral paradigm of the Progressive Left. They’re advancing through our institutions, transforming America from within. The ideas that caused Ukrainians to eat their children have come to America. The days of blissful ignorance and detached hubris for conservatives have ended. We’ve ignored school board elections to our kid’s peril and conceded so much cultural ground that America is becoming unrecognizable. All because, in our ignorance, we didn’t understand the power of ideas, wanting to believe that America was immune. We desperately want to believe that the things we didn’t know were happening during America’s gilded age could never happen here.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winner who survived a decade in Soviet gulags, reminds us that such hubris is deadly.
“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There is always this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.”
Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” (The Gulag Archipelago, Introduction to the abridged version)
Ignorance and hubris only increase the opportunities for bad ideas to take root in our backyard. The Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and Cambodians all believed the myth we believe today – it’s not possible where we live. And yet we see Marxism rising as the new moral vision for the Progressive Left and America. Take the Marxists at their word and Solzhenitsyn at his, “Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” Which means our backyard.
Enjoy comfort and security, but never underestimate the power of ideas. They can make you rich and make you eat your children, even in America.
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