United For Death

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President Ahmadinejad, unlike Rafsanjani, is no moderate. How can sanctions frighten him if he is not afraid of exposing Iran to nuclear retaliation? Like Hitler, Ahmadinejad doesn’t care how much damage he will do to his own people if that’s the price he has to pay to act out his insanely murderous plans.

Hitler, as we have seen, eliminated Jewish musicians and music by composers of Jewish ancestry, but he did not hate music per se. Stalin attacked Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian for composing music that was bourgeois—whatever that means—but he did not hate music per se. On the other hand, as Glazov informs us, “The Taliban illegalized music completely in Afghanistan, and Ayatollah Khomeini banned most music from Iranian radio and television.”10 Lenin did not ban music, but he wouldn’t listen to it. “It makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.”11 During Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the only musical works that could be performed were eight revolutionary operas selected by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. The idea of limiting and censoring music is at least as old as the 4th century B.C.E., when Plato wrote that in the Republic he envisioned, the flute and other instruments “capable of modulation into all the modes” would be banned.12 We don’t think of Plato as a totalitarian, but he shared the totalitarian rulers’ fear of the power of music to unleash the human spirit.

Plato expressed an idea that is related to thought control: he called for the Noble Lie, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. In particular, he said that the people should be taught that Rulers were made with gold, Auxiliaries with silver, and craftsmen with iron and brass.13 Chairman Mao also divided people into three categories. The first was Mao himself; the second was the Party; the third was the laobaixing, the ordinary people (literally the “old 100 surnames”). When I was teaching in China in 1989, during Beijing Spring, passers-by approached me and asked questions, often in Chinese. One man asked me whether, if Plato were alive today, he would consider Chairman Mao an example of the Philosopher King. My Chinese is not very good, but the man was very patient and made sure that I understood his question. Since I disapprove of the politics of both Plato and Chairman Mao, I said yes. The question led me to understand that it was no accident that Mao and Plato both wanted to ban certain kinds of music.

Plato said that literature should be altered so that people should not fear death: “The poets must be told to speak well of that other world. The gloomy descriptions they now give must be forbidden, not only as untrue, but as injurious to our future warriors.”14 We are reminded of the perpetrators of 9/11, who willingly died so that they could kill, even though their dramatic and well-coordinated plan could not in any conceivable way have helped the cause of Islam. And as Glazov writes, “Palestinian children blew themselves into smithereens while their parents celebrated, proud that their offspring had become shahid (martyrs).”15 Totalitarians love death, unlike Jews, which may be another factor in explaining why totalitarians are so anti-Semitic. “Two of the most outstanding Jewish characteristics are the love of life and the enduring struggle to survive. For Islamists, as for Nazis and communists, this is an egregious transgression against their faith.”16

Genocide was Hitler’s primary goal. Stalin engineered a famine in his war against the kulaks that killed millions. Mao caused the greatest famine in all human history. Pol Pot killed about a third of his own people. The Kim Dynasty has caused years and years of starvation in North Korea. Ahmadinejad is looking forward to fighting a nuclear war against Israel. Totalitarianism is about death. Life is about learning more every day. Those who fear learning also hate life. As Glazov shows us, that is why totalitarians are united in hate.

Notes:

1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt, 1951.

2. Glazov, p. 209.

3. Ibid., p. 214.

4. “Nasrallah’s Nonsense,” editorial, The New York Sun, March 11, 2005.

5. Glazov, p. 211.

6. “Johannesburg Journal: A Vibrant Battler of Apartheid Keeps her Vibrancy,”
The New York Times, May 10, 2002.

7. Glazov, p. 65.

8. Ibid., p. 79.

9. MEMRI Special Dispatch 325.

10. Glazov, p. 141.

11. Ibid., p. 18.

12. Plato, Republic, Book III: 398-400.

13. Ibid., Book III: 414.

14. Ibid., Book II: 383-387.

15. Glazov, p. 106.

16. Ibid., p. 105.

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  • PhillipGaley

    "Totalitarianism is about death." While I think that, this article presents in too many generalizations—philosophical generalizations, and conceptional generalization—I think that, it can serve as a broach.

    For a short time when I was a boy, among the adults, the trial of Adolf Eichmann was big news. In her interview with Eichmann, Helen Arendt asked him how it was that, with so little left of specific written detail, how it was that, they (the NAZI machine) was able to accomplish so much, the thing proceeding so smoothly, Eichmann responding that, it was through the simple expedient of use of language.

    Then, I think, it may be in Ingo Muller's "HITLERS JUSTICE: THE COURTS OF THE THIRD REICH" in which the author tells the reader about how NAZI's systematic reduction of womankind—but if not in Ingo Muller's book, that fact is available from many other sources.

    I not these to things in order to say that, any fair treatment of Islamic totalitarianism alone, or, in connection with those former experiences of recent times, should commence with analysis in consideration with the primal elements of human existence which sex, food, money and language, are.

    Just as the Hitlerian view of things successfully dealt with the perennial difficulty which Leftists have with the female of our kind, for this modern age, the world round, Islam promises basically the same answer.

    And in all—whether of sex, food, money or language—the unitary item of identification manifests in maintenance of utilitarian class structure through deprivation in freedom of choice, and for the benefit of the perpetrators—bad men, . . .

    In the Islamic/Hitlerian mindset, of course, use of language occupies a special place, for, that is the conduit or foundation for the rickety governmental structure, and by which through dissimulation, simulation and dissembling, plausible deniability is institutionalized and made to be pervasive as a currency for medium of exchange, . . .

  • Ben

    Dodgy minorities on the small pieces of land who prefered not to fight but trade are the roots of contemporary capitalism that is hated just as this minorities.Globalization united the billions against this small but powerful groups. Religious fundamentalism,racism,socialism combined by biological hysteria of over-population are aimed against this new international "West".

  • evy

    The quote from Plato is telling. Immediately one's mind goes to the jihadist and his make -believe afterlife. One of the attributes of true Jewishness, that attracts me to that nation, though I am not of it, is the value placed on one life, to the extent where one is exchanged for many enemies (despite the potential for sometimes disastrous consequence). That the left is as deluded as the hapless Muslim, in no great surprise, for they share the same father. ( One day though, "Isa 32:5 The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said [to be] bountiful." Authorized, KJV1611 )
    Despite the best attempts at global totalitarianism, Israel will survive. This we know, this despite the storm of impending storms on the horizon. Can the west? Cliff hanger? No, not really; it is all in The Book.

  • WilliamJamesWard

    Totalitarinaism and the psychological underpinnings of mind control through bribery,
    force and terror make for a good argument supporting a view of secular free life
    in dangers way. For my vision and understanding of a Godly World view we have
    the ongoing war of good vs. evil and evil manifests itself in destructive activity
    against mankind in which Jewish and Christian believers trace scripturally back
    the beginnings of evil after creation. The evil of today is the same, the players
    are also the same, the game and rules vary but either you are of the light or of
    the dark side and if evil wins the freedom to be secular or religious ends, believe
    what you want but what you think and believe is on the line in this war against
    leftist/Socialoist totalitarianism. I like freedom enough to fight for it………Williiam

    • Cuban Refugee

      Bravo!

  • http://perryjgreenbaum.blogspot.com/ Perry J Greenbaum

    Prof Jochnowitz: Great review–a much needed antidote to what ails many. Totalitarian thinking is a denial of modernity, imagination and individual liberty. It is also a denial of humanity if you think about it.