RICHARD FERNANDEZ ON CHINA, NORTH KOREA, AND THE AMERICAN ACADEMY:
The thing about Communism, at least to the uninitiated, is that it appears to be identical in all respects to a hereditary aristocracy. If one didn’t know better it would seem that the more Communist a country, such as North Korea, the more it resembles a monarchy. In China the children of the Polituburo members are actually called princesses and princes and they gad about in a style that make the current European royalty look like a bunch of low-rent grifters.
How admirable then, that intellectuals like Cornell West, Van Jones and Bill Ayers can go around and seriously sell socialism and Marxism in the name of “equality” and “egalitarianism”. You know, because they are one with the Common Man. Their superior educations must provide a true insight into the nature of Marxist societies because to uninitiated the whole thing looks like a scam to trick people into waging “revolution”, in which a few odd million will be horribly killed, to create a worker’s paradise and Green society. Except all the resulting outcomes we actually examine reveal only societies ruled by an aristocracy no different from, nay more lavish than the Court of the Sun King’s at Versailles. Versailles didn’t even have indoor plumbing.
But at least it had trees and bushes in the garden. North Korea doesn’t. North Korea’s forests have been burned down by the happy peasants to cook their gruel and to keep from dying of cold in winter. Defectors heading south know they’ve reached the Republic of Korea because they can see trees again. In capitalist South Korea. And as for the environment in China … well why do you think the Red Princes and Princesses go to Paris to dance the night away?
Future generations may wonder how it was possible for sophisticated Western intellectuals to actually devote their lives to bringing about Communism as if it were anything more than a swindle.
Today’s intellectual class is a direct descendant of the courtier intellectuals of the Divine Right era. Its skillset still resolves as much around sucking up and playing politics as around producing anything of value. Naturally it would prefer an aristocracy, and tends to despise the bourgeoisie and free markets.