Written 2007 For Country Above Self
Just thinking about the title will provoke your perspective's concept or image of what you are sure a communist looks like. It said portrait, after all.
But like so many other things, this use of the term 'portrait' is not a drawing, an oil painting or a brain image of the hobbled, bearded, Karl Marx. (OK, so I gave concept up.)
Not really. I can't see an image in my head until I fall asleep, and then the drat advantage of a short-term memory, turns into the curse it really is. I can't remember a dream past the literal last time I thought of it, and since dreams are the result of your brain when your senses are not providing anything else to do, the concoctions they make are a fictional reality. Something not rooted in reality can never be real, let alone something that means anything. Sometimes they are, but that does not mean they always are. And in the case of dreams, they are mostly (by a far margin) fictional and should be viewed as self-entertainment.
Karl Marx is the 'concept' I have of a communist. I studied the socialism issue many years ago and deduced from it what it really is and what I see today sure fits, even if it doesn't have a beard. It would still have to be as deceptive and dishonorable as Marx was. It would just not show it the same way. There is nothing less honorable than to conquer without winning. Think about that.
A communist leader today though, knows the same thing all communist leaders have always known. Communism is the exact same thing as feudalism. It varies only in the way a people are conquered. Not on the battlefield, like the kings gained power; not in the trenches and pits of Europe, as the Nazi's tried; not the marshes and rice fields of Asia, as Japan once tried: completely through subterfuge. Clandestine, peaceful, yet deadly nonetheless, just as the wannabe king fought, but totally without the honor.
Followers of socialism are always willing victims as what they want is promised without 'cost' when in reality, the cost is their very souls.
A communist leader today would be a business-person, a well-off, perhaps self-made individual. A person who does not know what communist leaders have always known, falls easily for the ruse of the commonality of a people leading to nirvana. The utopia-state desired by people with big-hearts, grateful, in return of favors to society, beneficial and cuddly. That is the one 'class' of human-being Karl Marx did not have and dearly needed in order to recruit co-conspirators. It took Lenin to bring it to fruition. The person behind the shadow cannot be seen, as the shadow only exists when it is shown.
If Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had a willing and quite useful recruiting force in the very people the communist leader despises the most, (not because they have wealth, but rather because they have potential power) some force of universal appeal that could generate its own new money, (almost always a power high) there would be no need for weapons. There would be no need for a central conspiracy of a tight-nit group of trusted members of S.M.E.R.S.H. No 'double-oh' could crack the lair and jump over cranes (even if Daniel Craig played the part!) to foil that plot. No one would know it existed.
Today's communist would wear suits, designer clothes and have 'people'. They would gleefully play the parts their usefulness rewarded them with. With each speech or obnoxiously childish Huffington Post blog entry, they would raise the issues that if only solved, would bring peace, brotherhood and love to the masses and that would be beautiful and seem so much more fair than the free enterprise system.
But communism is nothing more than a people being ruled by a central committee, giving everything they have to 'help those who need', controlled by the government and given what their individual needs are based on their worth to 'those who need': namely the communist leaders.
Communism is nothing more than the king, ruling over the serfs and collecting the taxes he did to extract the worth of each subject. But instead of living in squaller, the person captured by communism could live like all the other persons captured by communism and after a while that similarity would drive the people deeper into a state of drone and the regime would maintain its kingdom.
It just seems so wrong to me to even consider conquer without sacrifice, rule without charity and control without strings.
It completely changes the balance of things. A term like 'balance' is far harder to conjure up a perceptional image or concept which is why a rather interesting day, gives the otherwise intelligent meteorologist a curve ball they gladly catch.
With apologies to Merriam-Webster, the definition of the equinox is "either of the two times each year (March 20 this year) when the sun crosses the equator and day and night are everywhere of equal length".
Excuse me. Didn't we dispense with that whole 'sun goes around the earth' thing a long time ago? I thought so. The sun can't cross the equator. The earth is the thing moving. The whole concept of 'equality' as most people understand it, it simply their definition of what would make them feel equal.
Equality is balance. It is not whatever process is required to reach balance. It is not repaying a former imbalance. It is the state of the same thing on both sides, even if they are daylight and dark-night.
The easy process to allow such a complete refutation of knowledge, in order to come to an easy to say explanation, regardless of how technically and disgustingly wrong it may be, is called inductive logic. Kings did not have to rely on that. Not many people in the time of kings were like the Muslims of today, destitute and unable to comprehend personal potential. To be a king in a modern society you cannot wear your armor on horseback.
Applying 'deductive' logic to a well known problem would result in a potential, relatively good idea. If any Presidential candidate is working on a comprehensive health care platform position, I would like to request the inclusion of this one: Require every blood donation given to be tested for the diseases blood tests can test for. Funding that program would not be socialized medicine. It would result in more people giving blood, as no charge would be made to the donor and it would result in the identification of illnesses, many at the stages where modern medicine could actually do something about them. That early intervention, in the population that is most likely not to have health insurance, that would be covered by Medicare or Medicade would stop illnesses before they became overly expensive and would reduce the cost of health care, reduce the rate of illness and be a worthwhile addition to any health care plan. It is dealing at the source of a problem, something inductive reasoning can never address. It takes inductive reasoning to fall victim to socialism's promise of what you need, when you need it.
Communism rule and socialism foolery are appeal able to those who want to help, who want to give back, who want to right wrongs. Fixing a problem by making it go away is no different than stopping a war by leaving it. What would happen if they gave a war and nobody showed up? Whomever gave the war would be the winner. The reason the enemy never showed up to fight that war, could only be, because the enemy did not know it was.