O romanticismo do mal

May Day: The Conspiracy of Silence Around the Romance of Evil

MAY 1, 2010

tags: Communism, May Day

by Michael Strong

“The Soviet system, according to Malcolm Cowley, the American writer, ‘was capable of supplying the moral qualities that writers missed in bourgeois society: comradeship in struggle, the self-imposed discipline, the ultimate purpose . . . the opportunity for heroism and human dignity.’ Leon Feuchtwanger, the German writer, rejoiced in the ‘invigorating atmosphere’ of the Soviet Union where he found ‘clarity and resolution.’ John Dewey compared the ethos prevailing in the Soviet Union to ‘the moving spirit and force of primitive Christianity,’ and Edmund Wilson confessed that ‘you feel in the Soviet Union that you are on the moral top of the world where the light never really goes out.’ J.D. Bernal, the British scientist, found ‘sense of purpose and achievement’ and was persuaded that ‘the cornerstone of the [Soviet] Marxist state was the utilization of human knowledge, science and technique, directly for human welfare.’”

–Paul Hollander, “Judgments and Misjudgments,” in Lee Edwards, The Collapse of Communism

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul.  Lo-lee-ta:  the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo.  Lee.  Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.  She was Lola in slacks.  She was Dolly at school.  She was Dolores on the dotted line.  But in my arms she was always Lolita.

–Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Romance is no excuse for evil.

The slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” stimulates our atavistic moral impulses much as the sight of a woman’s body stimulates a man’s primitive reproductive impulses. Both impulses can be perverted.

Marxism conflated the desire to help those in need with an intellectual system and political agenda based explicitly on violence and deceit. This redirection of primitive moral desire towards an evil end is just as much a perversion of human nature as is the redirecting of sexual desire towards a child. Romantic illusions, such as

“you feel in the Soviet Union that you are on the moral top of the world where the light never really goes out”

or

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul.”

are not an excuse for evil.

The lingering effects of this romance corrupt the intellectual world to this day. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I should not need to remind readers that communism explicitly celebrated the idea of violent revolution leading to a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and according to which most known forms of morality, including human rights and justice, were dismissed as merely “bourgeois morality.” Respect for human life was regarded as a bourgeois prejudice that could be overcome for the Marxist cause at any time, as Lenin stated explicitly in a speech published in Pravda in 1920:

“We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society.”

MAIS