Socialism is an evil idea: evil in a pure condensed form that deems its virtues vices, and its crimes justice. Because as Mauricio Rojas explains:
“For those who believe they are…creating paradise on earth, the means do not matter…lying, killing…they are morally indifferent…they despise the human being as he is, but love an abstract vision of humanity that allows and even forces them to oppress the concrete human being.”
These revolutionaries are perfect criminals. Covered with the blood of the innocent, they declare themselves to be, and believe they are, virtuous agents of good. Moderate socialists, installed in times of capitalist prosperity, share this moral duplicity by hiding, denying, minimizing, and justifying revolutionary crimes. They believe themselves to be second-row revolutionaries. And they feel thus exculpated of their vices and crimes.
Personally I have insisted that all socialism is ultimately reduced to envious resentment. They hate the wealth of others, which is a form of thinking that always ends in misery. Socialists feel obliged not to separate themselves completely from the dogmatic atheistic religion that, articulating primitive myths, Marx declared the indisputable science of history; because it offers a unique revealed truth, declaring the rest of the world’s philosophies to be lying and evil. It justifies the extermination of “enemy classes,” and seeks to persecute, censor, and destroy whoever they hate. There is no difference between the pedestrian Marxism and the sophisticated Marxism. They share the moral duplicity, raised by philosopher Herbert Marcuse:
“Freedom is liberation, a specific historical process in theory and in practice…tolerance can not be indiscriminate and identical with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed…liberating tolerance would mean intolerance towards movements of the right, and tolerance of movements of the left. As for the objective of this combined tolerance and intolerance…it would be extended to the action phase as well as to discussion and propaganda, to action as well as to word.”
Ultimately, the socialists believe in that double standard, whether they admit it or not. Their manner of presenting this, or disguising it, varies from one to the other.
Recently my friend, the economist and columnist Vanesa Vallejo, received death threats following her analysis of negative effects of the minimum wage. The difference between insult, which is not an illegal matter, and the threat of physical violence (which realized would constitute a crime), escapes the new generation of socialists. Let us clarify that wishing evil upon someone, does not amount to a threat, or constitute a crime. It should not be illegal to say “I hope she dies.” “I will kill her,” however, is another matter.
For the millennial socialist, the threats of criminal violence used by the “good” ones, against those who dare to contradict them “the bad ones” is a “legitimate defense.” Like the southern slave owners in the US that by 1830 had reacted to the peaceful and reasoned Quaker anti-slavery postal propaganda by burning post offices and retreating to their “safe spaces”, they can endure criticism or contradiction. It causes severe emotional crises, with accompanying physical symptoms, to hear any idea or argument against their ideology. And they believe that responding to what “offends” them with unpunished criminal violence, or censorship and government imprisonment, is their “right”.
They classify as “hate speech” everything that contradicts them. And they claim that freedom of expression does not protect such “hate speech”, which requires showing-or inventing-a causal relationship between discourse and violence to justify censorship and persecution. The Soviets justified the ban on jazz by saying that listening to it “led to crime.”
In elite American universities they have done studies demonstrating what was more than evident to the naked eye on today’s campuses. Many of today’s college students, in some of them most, support “censoring and prosecuting any speech they deem offensive.” And they believe in using violence against “offenders.” But they do not claim only that every speech that contradicts them incites violence. Now they affirm that it is direct physical violence to express ideas that annoy or offend them. And before those who only respond with insults. And real physical violence.
Certain academics promote their own ideologies and philosophies by maligning their opponents as advocates of violence: Freud and his followers “diagnosed” their opponents by deeming those who opposed them to be mentally ill. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychologist at Northeastern University, affirms that listening to unpleasant ideas can cause chronic stress for the listener. Journalists and left-wing activists say they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after listening to the so-called alt-right.
They believe that affirming that listening to speech causes physical harm, exempts them from demonstrating that what they want to call “hate speech” inevitably leads those who share it to desire to initiate violence.
It is not limited to mere theory. In the case of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission against Whatcott, the Canadian Supreme Court sentenced an individual for distributing leaflets that did not incite violence against a certain class. Rather, they argued that he was insulting homosexuals as “inferior”, and thus in violation of Canadian law.
Insulting groups protected by the new state religion is already a criminal offense in Canada. Why? If there is no incitement to violence or criminality, such as in the Soviet Union’s absurd characterization of jazz, perhaps they will put forth the argument that certain speech “makes them sick.”
Yes, they are so cowardly that listening to any ideas in contradiction of theirs makes them sick. This, of course, does not authorize them to demand censorship and persecution of people who contradict them. Rather, they require therapy to overcome their pathological hypersensitivity to everything that subjectively offends them.
Being immature and emotionally fragile does not make them harmless, but violent. Very violent. And the theories which they feel legitimize their violence have the potential to turn them into violent criminals: criminals of the type who can seize power and create new hells on earth.