The lust for destruction is at the root of Marxism. In Marx's apocalyptic mindset, catastrophe gives rise, ultimately, to a new, perfect world. And so it is no surprise that Marx often invoked, as he did in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon, a dictum of Goethe's devil: "Everything that exists deserves to perish." Marxism, of course, did not disappoint in that part of its promise, earnestly wreaking the mass death and destruction its architect intended. It is this same dreadful formula of thought that led to the Left's post-9/11 attraction to the ruins of Ground Zero.
While he dreams of destruction, the believer compensates for his lonely madness by telling himself that he is not estranged, but is actually a member of a vast community. The reality, however, is that all of his supposed friendships are with other estranged people, and he establishes no genuine, intimate ties outside the politics of the radical faith. Indeed, believers' friendships are seldom based on what they might actually like about each other as human beings; they are based only on how their political beliefs conform to one another's. As Che Guevara, Fidel's executioner, stated: "My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically." This is why believers so readily accept the fact that their "friends" may be eliminated for the idea if they are deemed to stand in its way. . . .
The political faith, therefore, is not at all a search for the truth. It is a movement. For the believer, consequently, changing his views becomes nearly inconceivable, since doing so means losing his entire community and, therefore, his personal identity: he is by necessity relegated to "non-person" status. Even so, many believers have gathered the courage to abandon the movement. The believers who have walked through this leftist valley of membership death include, in our time, David Horowitz, Ronald Radosh, Eugene Genovese, Phyllis Chesler, and Tammy Bruce.
(Jamie Glazov, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror [Los Angeles: WND Books, 2009], 8-9 [italics in original; ellipsis added; endnotes omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 