Sunday, August 26, 2007

A Communist has Second Thoughts

The great historian professor Eugene Genovese was an open Marxist for much of his career. By the mid 90s, however, he was having his doubts. He writes,
[QUOTE]
Having scoffed at the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount we ended a seventy year experiment with socialism with little more to our credit than tens of millions of corpses. HOw could we have survived politically were it not for the countless liberals who, to one extent or another, supported us, apparently under the delusion that we were social reformers in to big of a hurry--a delusion we ourselves never suffered from.

The horrors did not arise from perversions of a radical ideology but from the ideology itself. We were led into complicity with mass murder and the desecration of our professed ideals not by Stalinist or other corruptions of high ideals...but by a deep flaw in our understanding of human nature--its frailty and possibilities--and by our inability to replace the moral and ethical baseline provided by the religion we dismissed with indifference, not to say contempt.[/QUOTE]

[U]The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History[/U], p.161

1 comment:

Heidi said...

The religion dismissed with indifference is the only ideology that does provide a correct understanding of human nature, 'its frailty and its possibilities'. I'm so glad that its redeemed possibilities are as vivid as the 'frailties' -- such as the propensity to generate millions of corpses.