Ron Collins
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

probably familiar with most of it already.

Truthfully, I wasn’t. I had read Svetlana’s autobiography a long time ago, and I think I may still have a copy buried in one of my yet-unpacked boxes I’ve been schlepping around for years. I did remember how she had described her brother’s attempted suicide and how their father had mocked him for it, but the rest of this lurid tale is mostly new to me. Though not surprising.

One thing I have learned about moralists, is they tend to be towering hypocrites in their own lives versus what they preach as the Right Way for everyone else. I happen to have emerged from a religious setting that has an international reputation for its excess of moralistic prescriptions. Just say “Southern Baptist” around anyone who ever left the house three times in their life, if you want to get an extemporaneous eye-rolling treatise on moralism.

But here’s the weird thing about my own experiences among both Southern Baptists and conservative Americans generally: the reputation they carry as Bible-thumping puritans hardly ever tends to square with what I can observe of regular ordinary folks who align with either or both of those camps. I would even say that both Baptists and conservatives I have known personally for a lifetime, have been right models of tolerant interpersonal conduct and an ethos of keeping their judgments of others to themselves. People who actually do live up to the hyperbolic reputation, stand out among such folks as to appear almost ridiculous, and tend not to be trusted, liked or included.

One of the things, in fact, that I find so easily familiar among the sort of folks I proudly call neighbors now, here in a churchy little Red-state cow town where SJWs fear to tread, is how often and how reflexively somebody will change the subject or make a sort of neutralizing remark, if anyone ever starts to wander into making moralistic pronouncements of parties not present. Even religious piety among these folks is reacted to as sort of a “let’s just not go there” area of interactions, and usually somebody will interject a remark about crops or weather or grandkids to divert the conversation away from it.

All that to say, that moralism in any arena and flying any flag, is many things but rarely what it might appear on the surface to be. When you provide contrast between a Stalin and a Brezhnev, for instance, it sort of reminds me of the extreme contrast between an everyday evangelical farmer or business owner, and a firey-eyed mouth-foaming TV preacher hustling old ladies out of their pensions. The farmer or shopkeeper might personally hold some views or doctrines deep in his heart that if articulated might seem fanatical, but has little need to articulate them and would rather do his best to live by them instead and let that result preach for itself. He would have as much antipathy toward the TV preacher for making a fraud and a mockery of his deeply-held convictions, as some campus-leftist would have who looks at the TV hustler and takes comfort from assuming that he typifies everything about evangelicals and that’s all one needs to know about them.

Indeed, it was this extreme phenomenon of things and people just not living up to the damning cliches about what they appeared to believe in, that had got me started trying to decode this whole business of communism and the Cold War in the first place. It was around the time that Ronald Reagan had tilted the scales in the 1980 election by drawing off enough southern evangelical voters out of the old Democratic, and deeply conservative, South I had grown up in, that I looked on incredulously and thought, “how can these people be falling for this two-bit charlatan? He’s no Christian, he’s no evangelical, he’s no family man, and he’s no god-damn conservative….”

Turns out Reagan had some skeletons too on the “family values” front. He was the first divorcee ever to hold the high office, and even as he served in it things kept coming out, from or about his children, about just what sort of man he was around the house. I don’t know about the savage-beating level of familial piety in Reagan’s case, but on the family front he probably had more in common with Josef Vissarionovich than most US presidents ever did.

But oh, wasn’t he just the shining beacon of America Needs to Get Back To Church, of We Need to Restore the Family, et cetera ad nauseum? That turncoat who first served as an FBI informant steadily fingering his own people while president of the most liberal union in the land, then abandoned his longstanding membership in the Democratic party because GE made him an offer to be their spokesman and wanted a Republican who looked dashing in a suit.

Reagan was never the monster Stalin was in terms of net results delivered in monstrosities, but given the circumstances I think he might have been. Both men serve as enormous archetypes of the hypocritical moralizer, Reagan the opportunistic pitchman who’d turned out to be not much of an actor and turned to politics instead to satisfy his grandiloquent exhibitionism, and Stalin the failed priest-candidate who turned to revolution to satisfy his urge to moralize everyone else so he could ignore the stunning hypocrisies of his own personal life.

I never doubted that during all the years of the USSR, that the “grey people”, the Party hacks who lived to micro-manage and denounce and obfuscate everyone else’s life, must have been the extreme exceptions and not the rule at all. Just as the Bible-thumpers and the daughter-cloisterers among evangelicals are the extreme and irritating and discrediting exceptions to an otherwise mundane and everyday means of going about one’s business.

If communism is indeed a religion, the reasonable view is that like all religions, its nominal adherents (I think one such is a doctor you play chess with….) only took it as seriously as they needed to, to keep up appearances, and otherwise just pulled those pants on one leg at a time and headed off to work every day, and came back home to lives as ordinary and bittersweet as anyone else’s.

So Stalin was neither any communist nor any family man, and appointed himself the megalomanic task of preaching as the voice of final authority on both matters. I can easily absorb that, just as Reagan was no conservative and no Christian-nation evangelical, and yet to this day is held up by both, as if He Personally had held the line against the evil left and saved the nation.

The conclusion to be drawn is so simple as to be laughable:

Politics is pure bullshit, and the biggest bullshitters rise right to the top because decent people wouldn’t dream of soiling their hands with it.

(Exactly like religion. The two are almost identical, which may be why the world over, to bring up “politics and religion” around one’s loved ones and friends, is considered as among the worst of bad manners.)

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s