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communist designation of the political enemy as "devils," and Castro's
preference to call his enemies "worms"-such terminology is a precon–
dition of the brutalization and extermination of large numbers of people.
Communist regimes also claimed that their official values and theo–
retical guidelines were "scientific," that their goals were rational and the
outcomes of their policies predictable-arrived at by the careful delib–
eration of enlightened leaders guided by an invincible theory. Relying on
it guaranteed that nothing in human beings or the social world would
be unknowable; the leaders firmly grasped the laws of history, politics,
and sociology; the idea of unintended consequences was foreign to sci–
entific socialism and its most qualified interpreters. This vastly increased
the self-assurance of the leaders and the regimes in question and
removed hesitation when suffering had to be inflicted in the service of
the great, scientifically determined goals.
Admittedly, the crimes of communism could not have been commit–
ted and the heights of brutality could not have been scaled by human
beings obeying the commands of these systems without the human
potential for evil, an old-fashioned idea to be sure. These systems
excelled in mobilizing and harnessing
to
their goals the darker sides of
human nature because it was done in the (alleged) interests of huge, ide–
alistic projects of social, economic, and political transformation.
If
anything can be learned from these crimes it is that they are most
likely
to
be committed when prompted and justified by ideas which
promise ultimate and total liberation from all known burdens and
deprivations of mankind, to end injustices and scarcities of every
description, including those of solidarity and empathy. The magnitude
of the crimes was proportional to the political-ideological aspirations
and their unattainability. Only when good intentions are single-mind–
edly pursued by human beings who have seized uncommon amounts of
power will crimes be institutionalized on the scale we have witnessed in
communist states.
Paul Hollander
