15
p eople better or to alleviate their misery.  It is to increase the power of
one man or group of men against the power of another man or group
of men.  Morgenthau says our enemies are never as bad as we make
them out to be, and we are never as good as we think.  We're
convinced we're moral.  And we know damn well that our enemy is
only out for power and resources, but has no morals at all.  Yet we, too,
are out for power and resources.  And our enemy, like us, has a moral
sense.  He uses that moral sense just as we do, says Morgenthau, to
narrow the aperture of his consciousness and ignore his lust for
power.23
Hidden by the positive attributes of political and religious
movements is the rapacious desire to redistribute resources, removing
a chunk from their superorganism and adding it to ours.  Marxists
have a slogan: "Property is theft."  They explain that capitalism is an
excuse for plunder.  It allows the property-owning classes to rob the
workers of the fruits of their labor.  But under Marxism's sophisticated
arguments about the dialectic principle in history lies another form of
thievery.  For Marxism's implicit message boils down to something like
this: the dirty capitalists have cornered all the goods.  They hoard the
tools of production, and they end up with most of the riches that result
from industrialization.  Those filthy bastards, let's knock them off their
sacks of greenbacks and divvy up the loot.*
Marxists deplore imperialists.  But Marxist revolution and
Imperialist conquest share something very strong in common.  They're
both the expropriation of someone else's property by violent means.
                                                          
     *  Some are under the impression that Marx called for compassionate social
justice--an equitable redistribution of wealth.  However the founding father of
modern Communism made it clear that this was not what he had in mind.  In his
Communist Manifesto, he attacked socialists who "want to improve the condition of
every member of society...[and] wish to attain their ends by peaceful means."  Marx
vilified these moderates as "fantastic...reactionary...fanatical and superstitious,"
dismissing them as creators of "castles in the air."  (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The Communist Manifesto, Penguin, London, 1967, pp. 116-117.)
<<  <  GO  >  >>