Germany and later, in the US—aimed at a full-scale critique and
transformation of Western civilization.
More important in recent years has been the work of French philosopher
Jacques Derrida, leader of the postmodernists, who came into vogue in the
late 1970s. Derrida described his own ideas as a radicalized form of
Marxism. Marx attempted to reduce history and society to economics,
considering culture the oppression of the poor by the rich. When Marxism
was put into practice in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and
elsewhere, economic resources were brutally redistributed. Private property
was eliminated, and rural people forcibly collectivized. The result? Tens of
millions of people died. Hundreds of millions more were subject to
oppression rivalling that still operative in North Korea, the last classic
communist holdout. The resulting economic systems were corrupt and
unsustainable. The world entered a prolonged and extremely dangerous cold
war. The citizens of those societies lived the life of the lie, betraying their
families, informing on their neighbours—existing in misery, without
complaint (or else).
Marxist ideas were very attractive to intellectual utopians. One of the
primary architects of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan,
received a doctorate at the Sorbonne before he became the nominal head of
Cambodia in the mid-1970s. In his doctoral thesis, written in 1959, he argued
that the work done by non-farmers in Cambodia’s cities was unproductive:
bankers, bureaucrats and businessmen added nothing to society. Instead, they
parasitized the genuine value produced through agriculture, small industry
and craft. Samphan’s ideas were favourably looked upon by the French
intellectuals who granted him his Ph.D. Back in Cambodia, he was provided
with the opportunity to put his theories into practice. The Khmer Rouge
evacuated Cambodia’s cities, drove all the inhabitants into the countryside,
closed the banks, banned the use of currency, and destroyed all the markets.
A quarter of the Cambodian population were worked to death in the
countryside, in the killing fields.
Lest We Forget: Ideas Have Consequences.
When the communists established the Soviet Union after the First World
War, people could be forgiven for hoping that the utopian collectivist dreams