All Those Wasted Years

All around that dull, gray world,

From Moscow to Berlin,

People storm the barricades

Walls go tumbling in.

The counter-revolution,

People smiling though their tears,

Who can give them back their lives?

And all those wasted years...

--Heresy, by Neil Peart

I have been accused of 'whining about totalitarianism.' A comment to the blog I wrote a few days ago said:

"All your whining about totalitarianism completely ignores the fact that objective government would have a clear check and balance: the facts."

Now, I have been known to whine now and then, as I am sure we all have.

To me, 'whining' implies having a little pity-party about some minor inconvenience. I see it as complaining about a triviality, something that is not very important, which is why it grates.

So I was somewhat surprised that the term 'whining' was used to avoid actually countering an argument I was making that suggested that equating religious education of one's own children with child abuse, and making it illegal was step in the direction of totalitarian rule. What I actually said was this:

"As for your poll-test, it sounds a good deal like the forced "political education" that friends and relatives who survived the Nazis and the Soviet Totalitarian State have told me about. I think I'll pass. They escaped to America (ed.sp.) for a reason, and I will not waste their sacrifices for my freedom."

Whining? That's something you do when you hit all the red lights on the way home from work on a hot August night, and the air conditioning in the car is not working well.

Mourning. Weeping. Gnashing of teeth. That is what you do when you are dealing with the loss of tens of millions of lives and the destruction and deformation of millions more.

Now I have no clue who the commenter is, nor do I know how old he is. But either he is ignorant of the bloody history of totalitarian states in the 20th century, or he has no respect for the lives that were lost, destroyed or deformed in those places in those times.

So just in case our commenter is ignorant of the cold, hard facts, I thought I'd present a few, selected ones here.

The Russian Revolution in 1917 resulted in a civil war between the Bolsheviks ('reds') and Mensheviks ('whites') that lasted until 1921. In that time, between 7 and 9 million people were killed, countless more suffered severe privation due to loss of property, interruption in the food supply, disease and injury. As we know, the Bolsheviks won this war, and began ruling a Marxist-Leninist state, the Soviet Union, which was totalitarian in nature.

Soviet rulerJosef Stalin is known to be one of the world's most ruthless dictators. In 1932, a famine (Holodomor) was engineered by Stalin and the Soviet government in order to forcibly collectivize the farms of the free-holding Ukranian peasants. The death toll alone is estimated to have been between 2.6 million and 3.5 million people. Many more people suffered terrible privation, loss of opportunities, and loss of home and property.

Also under Stalin, tens of millions of ordinary Soviet 'citizens' were arrested and either killed outright, or imprisoned in labor camps--the famous Gulag--where the liklihood of death was very great. These were the Stalin era "purges" intended to enforce political orthodoxy, and destroy the social networks of the old Bolshevik elite, engineers and scientists, and the social and religious communities of ordinary Russians and Kulaks (free-holding peasants).

Moving elsewhere in Europe, consider the genocide conducted by the Nazi government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. It is estimated that between 15 and 21 million civilians were murdered by the Nazi totalitarian state. This number includes the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. All told, it is estimated that between 40,000,000 and 72,000,000 people died as the result of World War II; a war brought about by a totalitarian regime.

I have not even gotten to the middle of the 20th century, and the numbers of deaths brought about by totalitarian is already beyond imagination. We could add the deaths in China during the Cultural Revolution (27 to 72 million), and there is also North Korea, and Laos, and even Cuba--all totalitarian regimes. If we consistently take the lowest estimates from only the murderous totalitarian government-sponsored events listed thus far, we get: at least 77 million deaths, not including the Stalin era purges.

The number is hard to fathom. Each of these deaths represents the precious and irreplacible life of a human being. Someone with hopes, dreams, and talents; someone with mother and father, siblings, cousins, and friends. Someone who could have contributed something to this world, but that his life was ripped away.

The number are so great that even a lifetime is not long enough to remember them, to meditate on what was lost to us all.

"Wherever I go, I hear footsteps:

My brother on the road, in swamps, in the forests,

Swept along in darkness, tembling from cold,

Fugitives from flames and terrors.

Wherever I stand, I hear rattling:

My brothers in chains, in chambers of the stricken.

They pierce the walls and burst the silence.

Through the generations their echoes cry out,

In torture camps, in pits of the dead.

Wherever I lie, I hear voices:

My brothers, hearded to slaughter

Out of burning embers, out of ruins,

Out of cities and villages, altars for burnt offerings.

The groaning in their destruction haunts my nights.

My eyes will never stop seeing them

And my heart will never stop crying "outrage";

Every man will be called to account for their deaths.

The heavens will descend to mourn for them,

The world and all therein will be a monument on their graves."

--Shim Shalom

And that is only a partial toll of the dead.

Many more than we can count.

Murdered by totalitarian government.

There are those who survived, stunted. Lost. Sick and failing.

And there are those who lost everything. Lives. Families. Neighbors.

Precious keepsakes and ordinary, everyday utensils.

The things of life that say that a person exists here.

And there are those whose dreams were shattered and whose hopes were never realized.

Forbidden to get an education. Forbidden to work. Or made to work at slave labor for the benefit of nameless, faceless others. The opportunity costs are incalculable.

And then there are lost cities and irreplacible art. Monuments and temples. Mansions and small houses. Even the trees in the garden, the land, and the waters.

All of this and more destroyed at the behest of tyrants. Tyrants who had an objective plan to use the coercive force of the state to enforce their own ideas upon people who did not agree with them.

Whining? I don't think so.

Weeping. Wailing. Mourning losses that cannot be adequately mourned in a thousand years.

And this commenter, this one who called my objection to totalitarianism "whining" did not not make this statement in isolation.

He said: "...I consider religious education to be a serious form of child abuse."

And:

"Therefore it should be expressly against the law to teach children a curriculum that so blatantly and directly contradicts science–even and especially in private."

And:

"A case can also be made that to the extent home schooling attempts to undermine the principles of consensus science...it should also be expressly prohibited."

And:

"And I'd love to see all the creationist propaganda confiscated."

Since parents, even parents of schooled children, teach their kids their own values in their own homes, this is a program for the censorship of citizens in the private sphere. No matter how much one may disagree with what a parent might choose to teach a child in the home, one may not dictate to private citizens what they may speak in public or private. One may not force upon others one's own ideas, no matter how reasonable or "objective" they may appear. One may not do this in a free society, even should one be able to prove that this would be good for those people whose rights are being violated, and further prove how good it would be for society to violate those rights, one may not. For to do so, is to violate the Constitution and make the law discriminate among persons. A person who is a Christian, a person who wants to pass his religious beliefs to his children, a person who questions "consensus" in science, all would be treated differently under the law than others.

This commenter, on his own blog, has used the concept of a social contract. The social contract that citizens of the United States have is defined by the Constitution. The Constitution expressly limits the use of force by the servant government to that needed to protect the rights of the individual citizens. Everything that this person has said above (and much more) indicates that he is in favor of removing those rights from people who do not bow to his ideas about religion and science. Even scientists who do not accept the "consensus" of the government, but who wish to deal with the empirical evidence, would be censored.

In order to enforce all of this, a totalitarian state, one that spies on citizens in their private lives, and requires the use of informers, would be required. There would be no other way to make this "objective" Utopia happen.

And of course, those who disagree with this fascistic plan, as I do, are said to be "whining" and worse.

Whining about totalitarianism. The cause for more human deaths, more destruction of lives and property in the past century than can be enumerated.

I said at the beginning that this person must either be ignorant of those facts listed above, or he has no respect for the lives and property of the people he must trample over to get his way and "save our democracy" by using the force of law to coerce others into his "objective" Dystopia. Even if this particular Anointed One were educated in the public schools, it is hard to believe that he is ignorant of the bloody, destructive record of totalitarian states.

Reading between the lines of his comments, it is possible to surmise that he may believe that only theocracies are capable of such bloody terror. But if he claimed this directly, that would also be hard to believe, since the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao, were both militantly atheistic states.

Finally given some of the confusion inherent in his comments, one could also posit that he made this grand statement about forbidding American citizens from religiously educating their children in private without consideration of the consequences that would likely devolve on every citizen with respect to their natural rights. From his comment I gleaned that:

1. He has a plan that should be followed but that he doesn't know how to solve the problem.

2. That he wants the government to forbid religious education of children and at the same time, he wants to strengthen the separation of church and state.

3. He respects the Constitution but he wants to have the government confiscate creationist literature--a clear violation of the First Amendment.

I would think this last assessment of his motives is most likely, except for the "whining about totalitarianism" remark. That indicates a callous disregard on the intellectual level (at least) for the lives, liberty, and property of millions of human beings. Their lives, their happiness appear to be only a means to his end of an "objective" state ruled by science.

I am a scientist. I am proud of the many and varied ways that science has brought to humanity greater understanding of the universe, and has also bettered human lives. And there are times when I have been deeply ashamed of the evil uses to which scientists have put their scientific expertise. This happens because we are prone to forgetting that science generates no ethics and no politics. It is simply an empirical examination of the physical world. Nature does not have morality and cannot do evil. Humans beings do and can. When scientists have forgotten this, and impose upon others their own desires in the name of science, and then use it to coerce others, they have done great and lasting harm. Think about the roles of scientists in the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, and in the manufacturing of drug-resistant anthrax for biological warfare during the Cold War...and the list continues.

Whining about totalitarianism?

All I can do is weep for all those wasted years.

"All around this great big world,

All the crap we had to take:

Bombs and basement fall-out shelters,

All our lives at stake.

The bloody revolution,

All the warheads in its wake,

All the fear and suffering,

All a big mistake.

All those wasted years,

All those precious wasted years,

Who will pay?"

--Heresy, by Neil Peart

Note: I have embedded a You-Tube Video called the Cold War, in which the song Heresy is used with stills of the major events of the cold war. There was quite a lot there that I remember, being somewhere around 30 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. You can also click here for the link.

Note: I have edited this piece for the following reasons:
1) to fix spelling typos
2) to change a mistake in reporting of numbers. The number of people estimated to have been killed in WWII is 40 - 72 million, not 40 - 72 thousand.
3) to change the capitalization on the word objective from upper case to lower case.
The claim made by the troll is for an "objective" government, not an "Objectivist" government. Objectivism (capital "O")is a philosophy that would repudiate the use of force by government to control the minds of citizens in any way. For more information, see Rational Jenn's note. She is an Objectivist and an expert on the issue. I am not.