    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.)

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