Submitted by Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle, Aug 31, 2007 11:43

While Seeger is to be commended for his belated admission of remaining silent about Stalin's horrors, read more carefully, he seems to be remaining true to the broad Marxism dogma and placing blame in all the wrong places. Notice where he placed the blame in that letter. First on Stalin. The Soviet party did that in the mid-fifties, the so-called "cult of personality." Seeger is a bit late in that admission, a half-century in fact. Imagine an elderly German just admitting the Hitler wasn't that nice a guy and you get the point. Second, he puts the blame on everybody, or more precisely, the majority of people, which is little different from refusing to blame anyone or anything specifically. I quote: He acknowledged that he underestimated, and perhaps still does, "how the majority of the human race has faith in violence." The problem with communism wasn't that a majority of the populations of the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Vietnam after the war, Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, or today's Cuba and North Korea wanted the gulags and mass killings. They didn't. The problem was that whenever and wherever communism has taken power, the majority of the party's leadership turns eagerly, aggressively, and without exception to violence on a massive scale. Yes, this is an extension of the one Judeo-Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable--humanity's deeply ingrained propensity to sin. But it is a particular application of it that needs to be treated with proper care. We shouldn't blame a humanity that's more likely to turn to cowardice than violence when the real blame can be more specific. The problem with communism was, is, and forever will remain the communist ideology itself whenever it is applied at the State level and not at the modest level of voluntary Shaker-like or Israeli kibbutz communities. (I lived for six months on the latter.) And the problem is inherent to the ideology. Power corrupts in any society. But in any state run along Marxist/communist lines, the power of the State becomes absolute and thus the corruption is total. Marxism by its very nature doesn't recognize economic freedom--all economic power must reside in the State. Marxism by its very nature doesn't not recognize any God standing above it as a judge, so it and only it determines what is right and what is wrong. And finally, Marxism, by its Hegelian, deterministic view of history, fails to recognize human freedom, the doctrine with which Christianity balances human depravity. People not only have a bent to evil, they are responsible for altering that bent.) And the very fact that Marxism thought it was the future was why it was willing to do anything to bring about that future. In the end, Marxism/communism shares, in an extreme fashion, what G. K. Chesterton called the chief characteristic of the atheistic or materialistic world view. It regards people as things, without souls, without the ability to think and make choices that really are their choices. In communism, everything is reduced to economics, people are tools of things like "the iron law of wages," much as in Nazism they were tools of the race. And reducing people to tools, agents of some form of historical determinism, is to turn them into things that can be manipulated or destroyed when necessary. Capitalism at its worse behaved similarly, but Capitalism's evil was self-limiting. Capitalism could be reformed because it lacked an overarching ideology that encompassed every aspect of life--past, present and future. It was just about money--more and more money. Even the ugly Social Darwinian variety wasn't that all encompassing. It didn't, for instance, declare that God was a mere drug. It didn't envision a future in which every business would be owned and run by a Rockefeller (just oil production and distribution). The horrors of Capitalism were self-limiting by their very nature. Those of Communism were not, as the history of the past century has amply demonstrated. Sadly, for I love some of his music, Peter Seeger remains a long way from making the sort of admission he should make, that the communistic agenda he served with his music for most of his life is utterly and completely evil at its very core. Until he does that, he continues to share the blame for all its horrors, horrors I might add that still continue to exist in unpleasant little corners of the world. --Michael W. Perry, Seattle Editor of Chesterton on War (soon out)

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