The fundamental problem is that human invented ideology is not divine. It's at best an imperfect approximation of the divine plan for life and something that only has value because the approximation is fairly easy to understand and promotes a closer following of God's plan. What God wants is both hard to understand and difficult to follow through on (due to our fallen nature).
When ideology varies from what God wants, inevitably bad consequences ensue and human beings who have bought into the ideology have two choices:
1. go back to the drawing board to tweak the ideology to a better approximation of what it should be.
2. kill people until the critique of the ideology stops.
Both communism and naziism choose option 2 which both serves to lessen criticism and to distract people into a worrying about the details of the killing and how they can personally avoid the human meat grinder that the state has turned into instead of the normal business of politics. The reason that these two ideologies inevitably choose option 2 is that they are such fundamental failures at basic features of a political ideology that if the people were to go through the introspection necessary to go back to the drawing board and tweak, they would be tremendously outraged and tar and feathers would be the best that the nazis/communists could hope for. So in order to avoid a beating at best, or more likely a hanging party, they start killing others early and often.
This isn't to say that the choice is only done by communism and nazism. Every spectacularly failed ideology has killing as an option to giving up the political battle. It's why the procedural safeguards for peacefully transferring power after free elections are so important. They preclude option 2 and the body count that goes with it.
Umm, how can I put this. Religion, the people who believe in a god, have killed a vast number of people for that very reason. As well much carnage has resulted for more peripheral reasons concerning behavior and appearance.
ReplyDeleteIt never ceases to amaze me that there are so many people who somehow know what god wants. I _know_ they just make this crap up.
The Bolsheviks retreated from their first actual, serious attempt at following communist economic planning after only a year. They then started the NEP, which gave them the breathing space to start the Stalinist blood bath. It never really got better. Serious attempts to apply Marx result in large numbers of dead or Marx is quickly abandoned. The same can't be said of Jesus. The peaceful spread of Christ is well documented in a fairly large number of instances. That is the difference. The totalitarian ideologies are surviving because they are good at being attractive when not actually applied and good at violent suppression of dissent when they do get in power. Christians go in and out of power peacefully all the time.
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