Sunday 29 July 2012

Free Thinking.

Let me say at the outset that I’m not a communist. I’m not an anything-ist. I have no doctrinal affiliations whatsoever. Maybe that’s why I always found it incomprehensible that Americans especially, and Europeans to a lesser extent, allowed themselves to be brainwashed into believing that communism was inherently evil.

There is nothing inherently evil about communism; it’s just a different approach to the business of living together in groups. It harks back to the days when life was simpler – when small communities pulled together in a common cause and shared the bounty. But everything changed when the working classes were enfranchised and capitalism extended its reach beyond the merchants, the mill owners and the landed gentry. Capitalism is about competition; it’s about winners and losers; any nod of the head towards notions like shared effort and shared reward had to be scotched (except when a war came along, of course, and it benefited the system to temporarily encourage such notions.)

And so the brainwashing began. Before long, terms like ‘commie bastard’ and ‘dirty commies’ became common currency; and McCarthy had his day. When the Bishop of London famously said in the 1960s that Christianity was more akin to communism than capitalism, he was howled down. The brainwashing had worked, and it continues to do so.

The term ‘do-gooder’ arrived a few decades ago. ‘One who does good.’ It was coined deliberately to be pejorative, and it still is. The latest casualty is ‘welfare.’ Welfare is now a dirty word, and all to keep the system rewarding the rich and marginalising – if not actually punishing – the poor.

Please understand that this is not a politically-motivated post. I’m not political in the commonly received sense. It’s just a plea for reason and free thinking.

2 comments:

andrea kiss said...

Great post. Also, the word socialist is being thrown around a lot these days and people are 'accusing' the president of being a socialist. It really pisses me off... very few of those who throw the words socialism and communism around these days even know what socialism and communism even are.

JJ said...

I know. Socialism is the pink form of communism.

The point is well made, I think, and it's what I was getting at here.

When people hear a word like 'socialist,' they don't hear a word with a meaning that's open to honest consideration. They just hear a sound to which they've been conditioned to react adversely. And that's the very defintion of bigotry.