Socialism's Psychopathology of Death and Destruction

I'm heading up to Los Angeles a little later to cover a "teach-in" sponsored by the neo-communist ANSWER Coalition: "WHY WE MUST END THE WAR NOW!"

I'm sure some folks have long asked why I spend so much time on these people -- why dovote so much energy to what many consider to be an extremist fringe?

Well, frankly, as I've shown here repeatedly, the views of the ANSWER cadres aren't actually fringe. As we saw at the Adam Schiff town hall in August, the Democratic-left has allied with the full spectrum of hardline antiwar and state-socialist contingents. And as we saw this week, White House communications director Anita Dunn recently boasted that mass-murderer Mao Tse-tung was one of her favorite "philosophers." As a professor, I'm routinely approached by students who are bewildered by the communist indoctrination they're getting in their classes -- indeed, the latter development is perhaps most bothersome: the destructiveness of communist-chic culture and how it's wreaking havoc on the minds of so many youth today. From the Democratic Party and its SEIU thugs, to the netroots hordes, to the tenured-radicals hammering home Weather Underground talking points to their charges, society's infiltration with communist ideology is more pronounced than is appreciated outside of the enlightened right.

In any case, I'm reading Stefan Aust's, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. The parallels between the left's terrorist campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s to events on the global left today are striking. There's a passage on pages 38-39, reciting RAF attorney Horst Mahler, that's truly creepy in its presentation of the communist-left's pyschopathology of destruction. Aust notes that Mahler's defense of Andreas Baader on arson charges included Steppenwolf mythmaking, drawing on the surrealism of Herman Hesse. Summarizing the psychology, Aust quotes Mahler discussing the conclusion of the novel:

They are shot down like game animals, perishing with those inside them ... In this struggle there is certain enjoyment in killing, albeit killing out of despair ... They know that their actions cannot succeed in real terms. The others are stronger ... But they also know they have no choice .... Above all, one must take action ... and in the end, yes, there is guilt, but it is the world that is guilty. They have killed human beings for the sake of humanity.

Aust remarks that "Hardly ever did a member of the RAF pin down the psychopathology of the group as precisely as Horst Mahler ..."

I'm also reading Jamie Glazov's, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. That book's thesis overlaps with Aust's commentary above. Here's Glazov speaking of the emergence of America's New Left, which was coterminous with Germany's Red Army Faction:

Ungrateful for being the luckiest generation in world history, sixties New Leftists agonized about how affluence and security created "empty human values," and, worse still, competitive individualism. To be matierally comfortable meant to be empty and selfish. And because believers themselves were among those who were materially comfortable, they became plagued by guilt, which they attempted to assuage by working toward a solution that would rid the world -- and themselves -- of the system that gave them the luxurious time to think up everything they hated about it.

In any case, I should have a photo-essay report of the ANSWER teach-in late tonight or early tomorrow. Meanwhile, the video above is care of Gateway Pundit's post, "The Accolades Keep Coming In ... Castro Praises Obama's Nobel Prize," and especially the link there, "The Infamous Firing Squad."

P.S. Comment moderation is enabled again ... sorry for any delays in getting comments approved. I've got that idiot "(MASS)KED MEDIA" spamming the comments again. I'll go to the Glenn Reynolds' model if I have to, so hopefully these jerks will get the message that I don't scare easily and I won't back down in highlighting their murderous insanity.