Terror murders as bumps on the road

In his self-excoriating memoir of his years as a Communist, The Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler recalled a journey he took through the Soviet Union in 1932, during which his belief in the socialist utopia was challenged by the devastation he saw with his own eyes. As Koestler confesses, ideology won out over reality, and made him literally not see what he was seeing, including the deliberate killing by starvation of millions of people:

Only slowly does the newcomer learn to think in contradictions; to distinguish, underneath a chaotic surface, the shape of things to come; to realize that in Sovietland the present is a fiction, a quivering membrance stretched between the past and the future.

The Communist ideology is not judged by its actual results, but by its hoped-for goals. The actual evils brought on by that ideology were seen as a mere transitional stage on the road to the perfection of mankind.

Sadly, such ideological self-blinding has not been limited to the Marxist left. Consider this headline and subhead from the Bush-adoring website Lucianne.com:

Twin Attacks in Iraq Kill at Least 21
On the long, bloody road to freedom

In fact, the ongoing nightmare of mass terrorist killings was made possible by our ideological insistence on “liberating” Iraq in order to “democratize” it, instead of doing what sensible people would have done, which was to defeat the enemy, subdue the country, and impose order on it before we even thought about democracy. Bush’s mad ideology of democratism has sent Iraq, or large parts of it, to a hell they had not experienced under Saddam Hussein. But for the editors of Lucianne.com, those true believers in the Judeo-Christian religion of Americanism, of which Bush is the Prophet, the endless mass killings of Iraq are just bumps on the road to the democratic paradise.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 24, 2005 11:00 AM | Send