The God That Failed
America is beset by the children of a failed god - communism.
The God That Failed is a 1949 collection of six essays by Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright, the common theme of the essays is the authors' disillusionment with, and abandonment of, communism.
In the mold of C.S. Lewis's idea that "No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good", Richard Crossman, the editor of "The God that Failed", wrote:
“But no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents, can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.”
It has been said that the impulse of the left is totalitarian. An honest review of the historical performance of the left indicates that statement is more than mere words.
Totalitarianism and authoritarianism are not symptoms of the politics of the left, they are essential components of their anti-individual, anti-liberty - and in American, anti-constitutional and anti-white agenda. As the critical examinations of all forms of collectivism note, the central tenet of of collectivism (socialism, Marxism and communism) is central planning and central control of all economic activity - and that control requires coercion to prevent actions different than those planned.
Since economic freedom and individual liberty are inexorably linked, coercive control over economic matters implies coercive control over the individual.
Anyone who has even the faintest acquaintance with books like “The Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn, “The Road to Serfdom” by Hayek, “The God That Failed”, or “The Trial” by Franz Kafka can recognize this impulse made real in today’s postmodernist progressive Democrat Party.
At least half of America has succumbed to what Daniel Boorstin, the noted American historian, described when he wrote in 1962:
“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.”
That "we" applies to the psychologically damaged and abused left, the children of the God that failed, and continues to fail every time it is tried.
Prefecy and succinctly said. The appeal of Leftism baffles me. It rewards incompetence, restricts freedom and always, always, always leads to totalitarianism.
And the central conceit of the progressives and globalists is that they conceive of themselves as becoming a sort of Godhead. That of course explains their utter hatred of the Judeo-Christian idea of God.