On Kim Jong-Il and Idiots

A brief missive from the blogging wilderness:

Today is a special sort of a day. Today you may get incontrovertible proof that some people you know are total idiots. Because today some people, in the wake of his death, may feel lead to defend Kim Jong-Il. They may well feel that he represented some sort of realistic alternative to the capitalist liberal democratic model of statehood dominant in much of the rest of the world. If they believe this, then they have fallen foul of the empty politics of symbolism. They see problems in capitalism, yet are unthinkingly embracing an alternative that is far, far worse. If they defend him, then they have shown their commitment to evidence free idealism over actual engagement with reality. In short, they have shown themselves to be absolute idiots.

Because Kim Jong-Il really was a vile human being. He exploited his father's personality cult to propagate a regime that is virtually at war with its own people. He led the world's sole remaining Stalinist regime committed to an experiment with a whole nation that not only failed, but failed decades ago - leaving many starving and a whole people brutalised and brainwashed. If this is the socialist future, then we'd be as well to consign it to the past as soon as we possibly can.

In short: Kim Jong-Il is dead. While it is impossible to say what happens next, at this point the only appropriate response is good riddance to bad rubbish.

May I be the first to say "couldn't happen to a nicer person":

North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, is suffering from life-threatening cancer of the pancreas, South Korean television reported today. It is the latest indication of a leadership crisis in the isolated and nuclear armed dictatorship.

You can measure your success or failure as a political leader using many different parameters. Kim Jong Il can be defined whole-heartedly as a failure since I know I am not alone, as harsh as it might sound, in keeping my fingers crossed that the "Dear Leader" does indeed pass on. Because his death may be the best hope for that poverty stricken, abused and beleaguered nation. 

You can take your Marxism and you can shove it right up your...

… well… you can probably guess the rest.

One of the many negative aspects to this economic downturn is the rush of people towards socialism and the big daddy of socialist morons, Karl Marx himself. And what is even worse than people trying to register support for ol’ Karl is people trying to be funny about their suddenly vaguely fashionable Marxist tendencies. As this article proves.

I could do a detailed fisking of that article, but holy Jesus, I have better things to do with my ever diminishing life. The author tries and utterly fails to be funny repeatedly, at the same time as revealing his ignorance of the very ideology he is championing. A word to the not-so-wise; if you are going to pursue an ideology, make sure you actually know the details of whatever it is you are meant to be defending and advocating.

However the rush towards Marx, and the constant veneration of odious Marxists like Che Guevera by some, reveals a deeper ignorance of an ideology that is deeply destructive. Yeah, Marx got some things right. He reckoned that boom and bust are natural parts of capitalism. But most economists would recognise that. He also had some interesting theories about alienation of labour – ideas that still have some relevance today. But for a man who wrote as prolifically as Karl Marx, getting something right at some point was inevitable. Just as that infinite number of monkeys at those typewriters could, in theory, come up with the complete works of Shakespeare.

Yet in so many different ways, Marx was utterly wrong. And his errors are so numerous that it would almost be compelling, if they weren’t so dangerous. None more so in his conclusions about where his spurious theories of society would take us all. As counter-culture and cool as it might be to support Marx during this (perfectly natural, even according to Marx) downturn in global capitalism, I think everyone should be very clear about supporting Marxism means. It means you support violent revolution. It means you support dictatorship. It means you support the collapse of the society we live in, and handing over absolute political power to violent revolutionaries who are going to divine some sort of better society for all from a non-existent blue-print. You can claim that Marx’s ultimate intent was utopian; the practical ends of his ideology are thoroughly dystopian.

Marxist theorists (for, believe it or not, they do still exist) will argue that we have never had an actual application of Marx’s ideas. Well, bollocks to that. The Stalinist state, the Maoist state, the regimes of Pol Pot and Kim Jong Il are all examples of the deluded, insane and deeply destructive implementation of Marxism. The problem isn’t that Marxism has never been correctly applied; the real problem is that Marxism is a deeply flawed political ideology that advocates dictatorship and sees people in general as largely bovine and in desperate need of firm guidance from portly, disconnected from reality philosophers such as Marx. The end result of Marxism is the Soviet State, pure and simple.

The recession will have come as a shock to many, and will cause some to review their political beliefs. That’s fine – it is a healthy thing to review what you think in light of events (something Marx himself wasn’t that good at). But the answer to any review of ideology should not be Marxism. Marxism doesn’t work; if you try to force Marxism on societies, then your utterly, utterly destroy those societies. Applying Marxism to countries damaged by the recession will lead to the death of democracy in those countries, and the complete stagnation of their economies.

You might ask the question about what we need to do in the face of the credit crunch. The answer is not turn to Karl Marx.