When States Turn Evil

Evil states aren’t suddenly thrust upon a people, with a madman declaring his intentions to brutally enslave the populace. Although evil states don’t appear announced, there are warnings that such regimes are impending, despite all propaganda slogans of the party’s admirable intentions.

One can tell that a state is becoming evil when there is a moral separation of means and ends. If evil acts are advocated by a major party to accomplish the utopian good, and there is insufficient political opposition, then events are put into motion that lead inexorably to misery and even bloodshed on a massive scale.

The historical examples of ruthless parties attaining dominant power through the use of genuinely benevolent slogans are legion. The Bolsheviks, who murdered tens of millions of people, came to power touting “Bread, Land, and Peace.”

Instead of Bread, the Russians would experience famine in the 1930s, and the Ukrainians would even be purposefully starved under Stalin, leading to millions of deaths.

Instead of Land, farmland was stolen from the people and made state property through collectivization, expropriation, and arbitrary redistribution, along with the extermination of kulaks or petty landholders.

Instead of Peace, the ending of the war with Germany, on unfavorable terms at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, commenced a new war against the Russian people themselves to force them under the Soviet yoke.

Instead of “Freedom for oppressed nationalities,” as was promised to the Soviet people, the Georgians, Ukrainians and other minorities were slaughtered by the former Commissar of Nationalities Joseph Stalin.

All the while, the Soviet people were indoctrinated into the Bolshevik version of “class warfare,” presumably justifying such massive bloodshed. It should be noted that the United Nations allows no definition of genocide for such mass slaughter if it is carried out on class warfare grounds.

The Maoists also had their fair share of blowing sunshine up people’s rears before sticking a boot in them. The slogan “Serve the People” or “Service for the People” (more accurately, “Service the People”) became popular in China prior to the “Great Leap Forward” (off a cliff). The Serve the People slogan would later become adopted by The Black Panthers and aspiring yuppiecrats across America’s fruited plain during the 1960s and 1970s.

The Nazis, for their part, even had their kindler, gentler side, when they weren’t deriding the evils of “the Jews.” The slogan “Strength through Joy” was adapted by the Hitler Youth, a vigorous expression of the “Let’s Move!” variety.

The Nazis were also staunch anti-smokers and health nuts, following the arbitrary preferences of the Germans’ eccentric diktator Adolph Hitler. The Nazis had universal healthcare, following the practice of Otto von Bismarck; and though it is not being alleged that the institution of universal healthcare causes unfettered warfare and genocide, it cannot be denied that it is an institution of state-collective control.

The Italian fascist ruler Benito Mussolini once wrote, “For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism, it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and, hence, the century of the State.”

The connection between the state and collectivism is inextricable; as the State uses collectivism to achieve its ends, collectivism feeds a warped logic that sees human beings as disposable – that is collectivism’s ultimate and most radical conclusion. It can be summed up no better than the Leninist regime Khmer Rouge: “To keep you is no gain, to destroy you is no loss.”

Socialism, communism, fascism — the only substantive difference between these ideologies is the scope of their purveyors’ collectivist ambitions. Communism is fascism taken worldwide. The end of socialism is communism.

It’s all evil, no matter what you call it. And there’s no justification for it.

The antidote to state-sanctioned evil is two-fold. The first is individualism, which is the creed that every human being has the right to defend himself, to support his own life, and to act and speak in accordance with his own conscience, provided he does not infringe on the rights of others.

The second is a code of conduct holding that moral means are commensurate with moral ends. There is no “higher cause” that calls one to commit an act of evil against his fellow man. The way to spread good is by being good.

It should be noted here that the ideology guiding the current administration is, tacitly albeit obviously, Alinskyite. Both President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are self-admitted Alinsky disciples. Why is this important? Because Alinsky taught the ends justify the means; and even more disturbingly, that the end is power.

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