Deviations from dogma (i.e., “heresies”), need to be suppressed. For Marxists, things associated with the two great heresies, traditional religion and capitalism, were banned and demonized. Traditional religion (read: Christianity and Judaism), the “opiate of the masses”in Karl Marx’s famous phrase, had to be abandoned in favor of the foresight and “five year plans” of state- controlled hierarchies. Orthodox Marxists had meticulously to avoid such “sins” as expropriating “surplus value” from an army of oppressed workers, preaching rewards in an afterlife to the proletariat, or settling into the life of a conspicuous consumer removed from the struggles of workers. The wayward were corrected in mandated “reeducation”camps; those found intractable to correction were frequently subjected to excommunication from the party, exile, and even execution. Lucky for Juan, we're not there yet!
There was even a Marxist eschatology (see if this sounds familiar): After the earlier evolutionary stages of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the “end times” would come, characterized by a new state of consciousness in “communist man,” who would live in a cooperative, crime- free, international community, without any vestiges of dehumanizing labor; and a hagiography, which included generally accepted revolutionary saints, such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as well as some venerated by select or local groups such as Bakunin and Trotsky.
Now, in the twenty-first century, there are many people working for social justice, human rights, international solidarity, Muslim rights (note that this is the only religion embraced, protected, and defended by the Left), and other causes commonly regarded as liberal without an ardent or unbending ideological commitment. But there are also those for whom their political views have become a life commitment (i.e., those on the Left), held to with the same ardor and faith as Marxism was for its strongest adherents. These men and women of the Left do not have an obligation to spread Christianity through faith in Jesus Christ, or want human beings to believe in ethical monotheism by following Judaism, or become communist by reading the works of Karl Marx.
Today’s Left relies on political correctness to further an array of race, gender/sex, cultural, political, and ideological agendas pursued in the name of such concepts as “tolerance,” “diversity,” “equality,” “peace,” and “human rights” among others. Religious Jews and Christians as well as “religious” Marxists and leftists share and have shared two things in the twentieth century: a platform to push their agendas and the means to do so. What they have not shared is the same mode for producing converts.
Obviously, no one on the Left in Western society specifically looks to Lenin as the founding guru of politically correct doctrine. For example, they would see it as incomprehensible that they were “intolerant” because they see themselves as fighting intolerance. But what one claims to be doing and the tactics used to attain such a goal do not always match. This is true with those who were outright followers of Leninist doctrine and those who would deny any comparison to him. I'm arguing that although there are obvious differences in consequences between Lenin, Stalin, and Maoist leadership and that of Western Leftist academics and intellectuals, there are eerie similarities between them that resemble within a different context some of the impulses that existed in Leninist doctrine guised in the name of political correctness.
On Monday's O'Reilly Factor, Juan Williams became a Scab when he crossed the heavily-guarded, politically correct line of leftist orthodoxy. Punishment for his heresy, and for the purification of the progressive church, Williams has been excommunicated by the liberal clergy of saints, the church elders, and the protectors of their faith. Who's next?
From Monday:
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As my last paragraph mentioned--before I saw the below response--about Juan crossing "the heavily-guarded, politically correct line of leftist orthodoxy," during Juan's response here, he says the NPR executive in charge of firing him said this: "That crosses the line." Indeed it did. Repenting is not enough for these liberal puritans.
From today (Thursday):
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