Kalistan

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Editorial: International Communism:  The False Promise of "Revolution"
How a pernicious lie has infected millions, yet Kalistan remains immune
Eveari, Grand Duchy of Ananto
November 5, 5719


Despite being called "The Red Empress", Her Imperial Majesty slams International Communism at Nationalist banquet

Editorial Note:  The following is a speech given by Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Carolina II Ananto to the Eveari Nationalist Club.  She was welcomed to the Club for their annual Autumn Banquet, where she was asked to present a speech about the dangers of Communism in the modern world.  This is the transcript of her Key Note Speech.

International Communism:  The False Promise of "Revolution"
How a pernicious Lie has infected millions, yet Kalistan remains immune
By Carolina Ananto-Connor
Empress, Ananto and Kalistan

Communism:  Around the world, this ideology claims to be a vehicle for nominally left-wing movements to obtain power.  It really doesn't matter what adjective you put in front of it, the Metz-inspired ideology is a fundamentally revolutionary force aimed at inspiring masses of people to rise up against and throw off traditional authority.  They do so not organically, of course, but almost always at the instigation of some elite-dominated Party or faction, often referring to itself as a Vanguard, and may obtain power by manipulating an electoral system in a liberal democracy, or opening a military front and acquiring power by violent means. 

And then, predictably, upon seizing the reigns of the government, the Communists become the government, and like the evil capitalist system before them, they need to pass legislation to employ their people, fund their new revolutionary structures with taxes, incentivize businesses and producers, engage in trade and foreign relations and police crime.  Within a very short time, after the orgy of "revolutionary" violence and disruption has passed, if you put a communist government next to a liberal government, it is quite impossible to tell them apart in terms of their functions and institutions.

It sort of makes the "revolution," such as it were, look a bit ridiculous and utterly unnecessary.  Instead of actually changing anything, the communists simply reorder the seats at the dinner table, and put themselves in charge of the very same system today that they spent yesterday condemning as inhumane and immoral.  In the process, more often than not, their takeover of power involves death, destruction and the ruination of countless lives.  And for what?  So they, claiming to represent "the people" can take control and repress their enemies?  What people do they represent?  Have they asked "the people" if the people want violent or dramatic upheaval in their personal lives, only to end up with essentially the same thing as they supposedly overthrew?  Did these "people" ever give them an intelligible and externally coherent and cogent answer?  Did they bother to listen, or was the "asking" just for show?

At the end of the day, if you're just going to put a different gang of thugs into control of the same system, and not change the actual system, why waste the time, resources, and human life to do that?  In short, why is "revolution" even necessary if the result is just pain, suffering and death, only to ultimately replicate the system you just claimed to overthrow?

More importantly, why is communism so attractive to people worldwide?  How is it that cliques, almost exclusively made up of elites out-of-power, are nonetheless able to seduce the masses, even if its a minority group, into supporting this movement when if has very little to offer anyone in terms of actual human progress beyond the coercive apparatuses of the state?  It appears, in the final analysis to be just another cynical movement of out-of-power elites who will stop at nothing to become in-power elites, even using demagoguery or violence to hoodwink segments of the population to support them.  Their economies are still governed by international capitalism, along with their trade.  Their domestic policies are identical to the polices necessary of any government:  Providing public goods to the citizens and creating opportunities for individuals and firms to create private goods to fill in the gaps.  So why do millions foolishly turn to the siren song of the Communists, whether in Seleya, or Keris, or Dovani, or any place that misrepresented and misrepresenting ideology decides to pop its head up?

And finally, why has Kalsitan been so successful at avoiding communist movements?  Any Communist movements that historically appeared in Kalistan have, as a rule, been very short lived.  Why does communism find such fertile soil in some places, where it easily drops rhizomes and spreads around like a weed, while in Kalistan, it only finds hostility?  Are those countries who are currently under the sway of communist demagoguery really so incapable of realizing what the Communists are really doing? 

We can't begin to say what the problem with other nations is.  Communism in its current form, is a lie, at its core.  It's not revolutionary, in so far as the need to institutionalize the revolution following the overthrow of the former regime, the need to "make the government work now that you are in control of it", is ubiquitous.  But under no circumstances have Communists accomplished, let alone, even attempted to, abolish the concept of Government or state anywhere--in all cases they use it, and in some notable northern cases, they wallow in the apparatuses of the state in order to prevent their authority from being subverted institutionally.  Metz claimed that the end of Revolution is to create a stateless society, in which compulsion of the economic structure of capitalism gives way to happy free workers governing everything in their own naturally aligned and fully understood interests.  Which states who have succumbed to communism have even attempted to do that?

We don't understand why so many millions are so easily tricked by communists.  Perhaps the lack of critical thinking is endemic to the liberal or illiberal societies that the communists are rebelling against.  Perhaps people imagine that the promise of the communists, that the old overlords and authority will this time for real be abolished by the Communists, will actually come true.  It is hard to say.  Kalistan is not in the habit of discussing the merits of Communism with the people living under the lie of communist regimes.  We trade with communists.  We do not invite them to teach our children.

What we can say is that Communism never took root here in Kalistan because it is our national obsession to abolish human need.  One could argue that Kalistan is a socialist nation:  If this is the case, we have always been a socialist nation.  Our society is designed to be run for the benefit of our society rather than a single segment of it, hence "socialism".  There are always small parts of our society which would prefer an organization which would favor them more as individuals than the current structure does, but our structure, with its institutions in place, supported, and constantly maintained, does offer some benefit to nearly everyone all the time, to the point where nobody experiences the sort of that scarcity and mismanagement of other nations which may lead them to be seduced by the promise of fake populists and leftists among the communists.

We have abundant food that is practically free.  We have carefully controlled rents that give people the hope for a safe and secure home.  We have a generous, publicly owned and tax payer supported public health system that gives everyone access to promote actual health and wellbeing.  We guarantee all a means of living, and a modest universal basic income.  We provide people with ample opportunity to fully realize themselves without hurting or impoverishing themselves in the process.  People have the security to start businesses if they are so inclined.  They have the material wherewithal to become artists if they are so moved to do so.  Or they can return to school to learn a new skill.  And all without financially hurting their family or themselves.

We have gotten rid of the social conditions in Kalistan that communists frequently exploit in their attempts to acquire power for themselves.  Workers have the upper hands in their workplaces, and managers are properly in their role of managers, not hiring and firing agents.  They have the confidence of their fellow workers, because they themselves are workers.  CEOs do not have to choose between profitability for shareholders and food for their workers, due to the Nationalized workforce.  Nor are they able to force our working class to compete against one another for lower wages, because of National Service and Nationalization.  We do not have people starving in our streets due to the National Food Bank.  We do not have people freezing and dying behind our churches, synagogues and hospitals because of our national shelter system and Housing First attitudes.  In short, those things Communists use to trick people into supporting them are simply not present in Kalistan.

Do we have hunger?  Sure.  Do we have homelessness?  Regrettably, yes, we still do.  Does capitalist exploitation still exist in Kalistan?  We believe that it would be impossible to have private sector, or any measure of market based production and not have some degree of exploitation.  All of those things still exist in Kalistan, and we cannot claim to be perfect.  But the difference is that not only is their incidence far lower than in most incorrectly organized societies across the globe where Communism tends to appear, but our single greatest strength, our Imperial Regime allows us to more easily manage those issues, and keep them on a truly individual basis rather than allowing them to become systemic problems.

We can say for sure that liberal systems absolutely require those things to be present, those things that Communists complain about and organize around, for that system to work properly:  Things like racism and sexism are impossible to manage as long as you maintain a dogmatic and unreasonable adherence to the principles of majority rule.  You essentially guarantee in-group vs. out-group competition, and frequently, the out-group become the scapegoats for the in-group's failures.  It is the natural consequences of creating a society based on division along identity lines and forced competition for limited resources and political power.  And you cannot address those sort of social ills, or any social ills that are based in the domination of one large group over a slightly smaller group while you preserve the sort of regime that requires it and generates it.  Resolving the racism or sexism without first dealing with the system that thrives because of these will just lead to them appearing again.

But Communists feed off that division, and they exploit it just like liberalism does.  Communism is about taking the ideas of the clique and claiming that they are the ideas of the entire society, while that claim is itself fundamentally absurd.  Communism grows and spreads in a place where it is easy to say "You are the out group.  Follow us and we will help you take revenge on your enemies, the people with the boot on your throat."  That lure, incidentally, is the same lure that fascists use as they organize.  And people, especially desperate people bite:  they follow the Communists right into a new version of the same system but just one with Communists wearing the boot now because what alternative do they have when they live in a broken system and cannot possibly imagine any other way to organize their society?

Kalistani society, on the other hand, shows itself to be immune to that sort of call, because though these sorts of social ills do exist in places, 1) they are not definitive of the system the way they are in liberal societies, and 2) since they are not ubiquitous and baked into the structure of our society, they can easily be identified as aberrant and what is not dealt with through informal social pressure and normative correction can easily be obliterated by mere policy action.  The Kalistani system is uniquely adept at handling the permissive conditions that cause viral communism to communicate around the rest of the globe.

But one may correctly point out that people have had to surrender political power to an actual and explicit political elite in the Empire.  One may call us hypocrites for this.  Our answer is that we do not pretend to be democratic.  Of course we are elite-led--In and of itself, elite leadership is not a problem, but pretending to be anything otherwise when you are just another elite movement, as the Communists do, is dishonesty.  Of course every single aspect and institution in this nation is controlled by elites, exercising democratically unchecked authority.  Of course elections do not mean anything here in Kalistan except as a way for individuals to ratify the Legislature, and indirectly to give consent to the Imperial Fiat in doing so.  Of course all this is true.

The difference is that we never claimed anything otherwise.  Communists do.  They claim to be putting the people in charge, but at the very best, under a Communist Government, the people are in exactly as much charge of their government as they are in the sham democracies of Liberal states.  In a liberal democracy, no individual's vote matters at all.  One person can change their vote and it will not alter the outcome of important elections one bit.  The only thing that matters is the aggregate, and in a place with 50 million voters, one, or even 10 thousand votes do not affect the aggregate totals at all.  Especially in a winner take all system.  Not one iota.

Yet, Communists, like liberals, claim that they are governing in the name of the People.  In liberal society, only those who voted for the government are counted as "the people".  In Communist societies, the people are considered to be an undifferentiated mass, all with the same exact interests and class consciousness.  All are "workers" except of course the revolutionary vanguard, whose job it is to lead the "workers" to a brighter communist future where money disappears, and the state whithers away.  Ok.  And if you disagree with this?  Well, its often not pretty for those who disagree with communism.

In Kalistan, we have not been a Republic for centuries.  We do not claim to be about the People's business.  We are in the businesses of Good government.  There is no room for debate among 50 million individuals when it comes to Good government.  Objective Goodness of policy cannot be decided by a popular vote.  We have not argued anything other than that.  We have not claimed to govern in the Name of "the People", or asked the people what they think we should do.  Instead, we have freed them to do what they want to do, which clearly is not trying to do something they are not in the first instance the least bit qualified or trained to do, which is self government.

In Kalistan our people understand that the opinion of ten million men doesn't mean anything if those ten million men do not know what they are talking about.  In liberal states, they promote the idea that ten million diverging viewpoints on a matter is laudable.  And in a Communist society, the Communists claim that there is really only one opinion, and the Communists are the ones to say what that opinion is.  Communism can't take root in Kalistan because our system does not permit a clique of out-of-power elites to misrepresent itself to become the in-power elites, using the votes of tens of millions of untrained and under educated commoners to obtain that power.

These are but a few of the reasons for our hostility toward Communism in this Nation.  But we see we are running out of time.  The short answer is, Kalistan is functionally a small-s socialist nation, in that it is run explicitly for the benefit of the society.  All of our institutions are directed toward serving the need of society, which includes, but is not restricted to our people, as best as we are able.  Does that make us the intermediate stage toward a stateless society, as Metz predicted of socialist nations?  No, absolutely not.  Because Kalistanis also value order, abhor the sort of violence and revolutionary chaos you tend to see in other parts of the world where revolutionary movements are active, and support our institutions above all else.  Finally, Kalistan is immune to the false allurements of the Communist demagogues because we are correctly ordered.  We are much of what the Communists claim to want, and we accomplished it all without the resort to communism.

We believe that that's the summary of all of this.  Kalistan is an honest nation, and we have very little tolerance for the lies and false promises of leftist populism or the cynicism of the entrepreneurs who use that as a tool to get the people to help put them into power.  Communism will not take root in Kalistani soil, or in the mind of the Kalistani Citizen, because the values of Kalistan and all of its people are fundamentally hostile to the necessary conditions that allow Communism to exist and thrive.  As long as we live and breath, Kalistan will not ever ever host a communist movement, or anything remotely resembling it.  Though it easily finds nations and people gullible enough to allow it to proliferate elsewhere, it shall only find hostility in Kalistan.

We thank you for inviting us to speak and look forward to continuing to observe the remainder of your Organization's program this evening.

The Empress' speech was met with a resounding ovation, to the point where Nathan Rogers and Dame Donna Handley had to eventually ask the crowd to be seated and stop clapping so they could finish the agenda for the evening.  She welcomed the applause gracefully, and saluted several individuals in the crowd with a raised glass of brandy.  The meeting was also attended by Chancellor of the Empire Lady Melanie Alvarez-McLinn, a long time member of the Kalistani Nationalist Organization, whose local Eveari Chapter hosted the banquet.

@TheNational