THE COMMUNIST PARADISE, FORGED - How the Party-State Counterfeited Liberation and Why Its Damage Was Maximal

Abstract

Abstract The twentieth century’s communist states did not present themselves as tyrannies. They presented themselves as the fulfilment of every hope of human liberation. They had constitutions that guaranteed freedom of speech, elections with near-unanimous results, councils in the name of the workers, courts in the name of the people, and a science and a morality said to be at last free of exploitation. This paper argues that these were forgeries in the exact sense the Philosophy of Virtues has developed: forms conserved, their origin substituted, and the substitution made undetectable within the mode in which they were presented. Leninist communism was a forgery of emancipation. The forgery was paid for in lives, in virtues and in freedom. In lives: the communist party-states, which called themselves socialist, caused deaths counted in tens of millions. Famine made by policy killed about 5.5 to 8.7 million people in the Soviet Union in 1932–33 and between about 15 and 45 million in China in 1959–61; the Great Terror shot some 680,000 to 750,000 people in two years; the Khmer Rouge destroyed a fifth to a quarter of Cambodia’s population; and the documented episodes in six countries alone, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, Cuba and Vietnam, add up to about 27 to 64 million deaths, a floor beneath wider estimates that approach 100 million. In virtues: these states taught denunciation as loyalty, punished truthfulness, rewarded the performance of conviction, and left behind a trust between persons that was still measurably lower after they fell. In freedom: they abolished free speech, free elections, free worship, free inquiry and free movement, and walled their own citizens in. These deaths rank with the Second World War among the greatest destructions of human life by political decision in history, and few systems of government have suppressed freedom over so much of humanity for so long. The paper establishes five results. First, the forgery ran through four domains at once (D1). It forged the people, in elections and constitutions. It forged truth, in the official statistical record, in science and in history. It forged virtue, as when denouncing one’s own father was taught as loyalty. And it forged the person, in the confessions of the show trials. Second, these regimes abolished the verifier (T1). They destroyed every independent means by which a forgery could be detected: a free press, independent courts, a legal opposition, and free prices. By the Competence Theorem, a forgery does its maximum damage when verification falls toward zero. The regimes did not abolish knowledge: many people knew the record was false. They abolished the transmission of that knowledge to the decisions taken on the record. And intensified surveillance made matters worse, because by destroying trust between persons it can reduce what a regime knows (D2). Third, a state that allocates by a forged record converts the forgery into deaths (T2). When grain is procured according to reported harvests, and the reports are inflated, the procurement falls on grain that does not exist. Once the inflation passes a threshold the paper derives, famine follows. Below the threshold, the inflation removes the buffer against a bad harvest. And a record that must report the planned target is most inflated exactly in the worst years. This is the mechanism of the Great Leap famine, and economic history already documents its core. Fourth, the substance of virtue cannot be forced (T3). The project of the “New Man” tried to produce virtue by compulsion. By the programme’s Inversion Theorem, it produced the contrary of virtue: obedience, denunciation and the performance of conviction. Fifth, the signature tracks the abolition of verification, not economic doctrine (C1, C2). Democratic socialist governments that left their verifiers intact do not carry it. Fascist and National Socialist regimes, which abolished theirs, do. The thesis therefore concerns the monopoly of power and the destruction of the means of checking it, not the left as such. The paper concedes priority to Havel, Miłosz, Orwell, Arendt, Kołakowski, Kuran, Wedeen, Sen, Hayek and O’Donnell, and states what is the programme’s own. It registers two tests, neither yet run. Keywords: communism; totalitarianism; forgery; emancipation; Leninism; ideology; preference falsification; famine; Great Leap Forward; Holodomor; propaganda; verification; free press; Philosophy of Virtues; social credit. Highlights · Communism in power, the party-states that called themselves socialist, killed tens of millions of people through famines made by policy, terror, camps and mass killings, about 27 to 64 million in the documented episodes of six countries alone: among the largest destructions of human life by governments in peacetime in history. · It destroyed the virtues it named, teaching denunciation as loyalty and punishing truthfulness, and it abolished the freedoms of speech, election, worship, inquiry and movement for a third of humanity. · Leninist communism forged every form of human liberation, the people’s power, truth, virtue and the person, while substituting the party for the person as the origin of each. · These regimes abolished every independent verifier (a free press, courts, an opposition, free prices), which is the condition under which a forgery does its maximum damage. · A state that allocates by a forged record converts the forgery into deaths: inflated harvest reports became the largest famine in history, and the record was most inflated in the worst years. · The regimes did not abolish knowledge but its transmission to decisions; and the harder they watched their citizens, the less they could see. · The substance of virtue cannot be forced: the project of the “New Man” produced obedience and denunciation, the contrary of the virtues it named. · The signature follows the destruction of verification, not economic doctrine: democratic socialism lacks it, and fascism carries it. · Today’s scoring states and data-driven governments face the same choice: preserve the verifiers or repeat the forgery at digital scale. Relevance More than a third of humanity lived, at some point in the twentieth century, under governments that called themselves liberators. Tens of millions died under them, in executions, camps and famines made by policy. The question of how a movement that promised freedom produced the opposite is not only historical. It decides what a society must protect if it is not to repeat the outcome. The answer this paper gives is precise. The catastrophe did not come from the promise of equality. It came from a specific structure: the forms of liberation were kept, their origin was taken by a single party, and every means by which a free people could have detected the substitution was destroyed. A free press, independent courts, a legal opposition and free prices are not luxuries of prosperous democracies. They are the verifiers without which no form, of virtue, of truth, or of the people’s will, can be told from its forgery. The answer also bears on the present. China’s social credit system scores the performed forms of citizenship. Digital governments can now read and rank the conduct of whole populations. Artificial systems produce fluent forms whose substance cannot be checked. Each faces the same question the communist states answered wrongly: whether to preserve the independent verifiers, or to replace them with a record the power itself controls. And the virtues the paper defends are those the forgery could not counterfeit for long: the truthfulness of the person who refuses to live within a lie, the courage of the one who keeps an inner life against the official one, and the freedom without which no act is anyone’s own.