Someone else gets it – leftist dream will never die, it is a religious conviction

And one that is inveterately hostile towards Christianity.  Leftism – or the Revolution – came into being specifically as an attack against Christianity.  It is a manifestation of man’s pride, envy, and sensuality. Leftism doesn’t care about other religions, and will likely mutate into a form that would gladly accept seemingly incompatible religions like islam, because the Revolution is a reaction against, and a form of distilled hatred towards, the Church. I’m reading a quite good book on the subject now, Revolution and Counter-revolution by Plinio Correa de Oliveira.

Yes there are more moderate forms of leftism, but as we see around so much of the world today, even after the ostensible fall of communism, in reality, leftism is advancing on many fronts, especially in this country.  In fact, it is when it appears to be held in check or in “remission” that leftism/the Revolution often makes enormous gains through insidious penetration of men’s minds.

Think on the experience of the Church – it appeared Pius X crushed modernism (a religious manifestation of leftism) so that attention towards this heresy foolishly lapsed, but decades later it re-emerged far more powerful and energetic than before, because so many of its tenets had, through some process of silent infiltration, been absorbed into the minds of so many souls.

Polish philosopher  Leszek Kolakowski wrote one of the best critical analyses of marxism in the late 70s.  He saw quite correctly that leftist views of a humanist paradise on earth are simply a substitution of, or redirection from, the Christian aspiration towards eternal bliss in the afterlife.  Really, they have fallen for satan’s oldest gambit, tricking men into believing that they themselves are the “gods” they seek.  Kolakowski:

Communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, not the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was very real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century, and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just human stupidity. The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life…….

There are no rational means of predicting the ‘future of humanity’ over a long period or foretelling the nature of ‘social formations’ in ages to come. The idea that we can make such forecasts ‘scientifically,’ and that without doing so we cannot understand the past, is inherent in the Marxist theory of ‘social formations;’ it is one reason why the theory is a fantasy, and also why it is politically effective. The influence that Marxism has achieved, far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. [A worldly, materialist one that makes human hope for a better life after death seem quaint, and, more importantly, “frees” souls from all those no fun, limiting, hidebound Christian rules about morality.] Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects: for it is certainty not based on any empirical premises or supposed ‘historical laws,’ but simply on the psychological need for certainty. [“certainty” absent, and opposed to, Christianity, which is the ONE thing leftists simply will not cotton to] In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be. . .[We have whole rows of books of libraries full of data regarding the utter failure of almost all the Revolution’s false promises (you will be as gods), and even worse, the unspeakable evils the Revolution always unleashes in its train.  Regarding communism alone, communism was directly responsible for 100-150 million deaths in the 20th century, and yet polls indicate most people 18-29 think communism just might work.  They’ve been brainwashed into believing that, but reading just ONE decent history of the 20th century ought to explode that kind of myth forever. But it doesn’t, no amount of evidence does, because leftism is not based on data or reason, but on faith. Faith in a better human future WITHOUT GOD]

At present Marxism neither interprets the world nor changes it: it is merely a repertoire of slogans serving to organize various interests, most of them completely remote from those which Marxism originally identified itself.

If you think I exaggerate, an increasing number of pseudo-scholarly popular books have advocated giving communism just one more try in recent years.  It’s always one more try, we just needed a bit more time, they didn’t do it right, we’re way better informed than they are.

Leftism is a system of pride, envy, and hatred, envy of anyone who might have more (especially the benighted hoi polloi lacking a background at Andover and Brown), or be happier, and hatred of that one indestructible source of happiness and truth, God.  I know this is largely speaking to the choir, but even so many Catholics – even the institutional Church into this country – accept a great deal of revolutionary thought.  They’ve never known any different.  Much of the time they have no idea it is revolutionary.  And yet their revolutionary beliefs are the most corrosive acid eating away at the Church today.

To turn things around, we’re going to have to start calling people on it, and trying to start to educating them in the vast gulf that exists between the culture (and Church) of today, and that which existed 200, 400, 600 years ago.  Not an easy row to hoe, I get it, but sometimes even pointing out little errors here or there can start someone down the path towards understanding that maybe, just maybe, enlightenment liberal republican government isn’t the best form of government for the good of souls and society at large.