"But ..."

This is the most slippery of words, uttered by the most slippery of people as they try to turn our eyes from the charnal house of their philosophy.   

Sure, 50 million babies are dead from abortion since Roe v. Wave, but women now have the right to choose.

Sure, millions are jailed in the War on (some) Drugs, but we think that maybe we've kept someone from getting addicted.  Maybe.

Sure, Stalin killed millions in the Gulag, but he saved the Glorious Revolution.  Didn't he, Comrade?

Moldbug is at it again, about how the USA is a Communist Country.  I actually agree with him (I think, in the main), but am digesting his post - as indeed all his posts require digesting.  In the mean time, we need to be unflinching in how we view the World, and its history.  Unlike so many Progressives, we need to shun the slippery but, to see the past - and its actors - for what they truly were.  Even such a pretty Philosophical Construct as Soviet Communism.  Moldbug quotes Fyodor Mochulsky's memoirs, Gulag Boss:

For his decisive action, he was offered a transfer to a new job. At this new job, he would be carrying out "special commissions," that is, he would work as an executioner, shooting the enemies of Soviet power. He agreed to the transfer, and after some special training, he was sent with his new specialty to the ancient Russian city of Uglich.

For days at a time, he said, from mission to mission, he sat around doing nothing. He rested. Then, when the prison had accumulated a large number of condemned prisoners, the authorities would set an execution date. A specially trusted group from the security department of Uglich's prison was then sent out to carefully select a place in the woods and dig a pit. The pit was guarded until the executions took place. Starting at night and working until the morning, the prison officials would transport the condemned prisoners in a closed truck to this pit. Besides the security men and the person who would ensure that the executions took place, he said, there was always a doctor on hand. It was his duty to certify the death and write up the necessary documents.

One at a time, they led a condemned prisoner from the truck to the edge of the pit, and forced him to get on his knees with his face toward the pit. The executioner than shot him in the back of the head, and the dead man fell in. From the blow to the head, the executioner told me, the body would turn over facing up, and straighten up on the bottom of the pit. The doctor then went down into the pit and certified that the body was dead. Then they went to retrieve the next condemned prisoner.

He told me that from time to time, there was a prisoner who would not do what he was told and go submissively to the edge of the pit. In these cases, the security guys had to help out, and the job for the executioner would be more complicated.

When the mission was finished and the pit was filled, they covered it with soil and tried to make it look unobtrusive. After every mission, he told me, he got drunk and tried not to think about what he had done until the next time they called. For a long time, though, he was convinced that his job was important and honorable, because he was destroying the enemies of Soviet power. He believed that not everyone could be as trusted as he was with such a job.

But then one day, he had to shoot a fourteen-year-old girl. The executioner was told right before he had to kill her that not only was she the daughter of an "enemy of the people," she was also a "German spy." Suddenly and involuntarily, questions sprang to his mind. He was to kill a fourteen-year-old girl in an ancient Russian small town far from the front, in a place that had no classified establishments? Where had this adolescent girl done her spying, and for whom?

When they brought her to the execution place, she held herself up firmly and was silent. But when they led her to the pit, she spoke up. She said that she did not understand why they were depriving her of her life. "Even Stalin said that children do not answer for their parents, so why me?" she asked. She was unaware, he added, that she was also accused of being a "German spy."

In the words of my unit boss, after this execution he drank himself into a stupor so profound that he felt nothing.

The next time some leftie rolls out the slippery but to you when the subject is the murders performed by the Left, mention this.  Mention Arthur Keostler's Darkness At Noon, and listen to the leftie spew contemptuous dismissal.  No slippery but there.

Scientific Socialism.  Progressive.

Ooooh kaaaay.  Hey Lefties: Sitting Bull called.  He wants his tribal thinking back.

And I for one am unwilling to consider someone my intellectual and moral superior when he talks about the State murder of a 14 year old using that slippery word.

... but ...

A stupor so profound that they feel nothing. There's a metaphor for you.