Making a Killing With Nikita
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MAKING A KILLING WITH NIKITA
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
First of all, as has been explained to me in reference to the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not kill” should be translated “Thou shalt do no murder.” Killing someone at random just to suit man’s nature as a natural-born killer is murder.
I had seen newsreels of Nikita Khrushchev at the movies in Oklahoma and Kansas, and I had gone to Sunday School. He had a religious upbringing but became an atheist. As for me, I believed Christians were lying when they said, “Jesus loves you.” When God is dead, political religions are fought for. Maybe there is something wrong with me because I have never had one, and idiotologists strike me as idiots.
Khrushchev drank too much potato vodka with the Kommunist Kool Aid. He diverged from the hardline and sincerely believed that, if socialists and capitalists coexisted peacefully for long, socialism would eventually become the preferred order without violence because the masses would gradually realize that socialism provides for a better distribution of the gross product including but not limited to vodka and potatoes. Sad to say, as we behold Russian and China today, capitalism, whether public or private or a synthesis of the two, does not solve the basic problem we have with each other: Individualism.
Unfortunately, I did not have the background and opportunities young Nikita had, to become a member of a revolutionary criminal organization, overthrow the government, become godfather of the legalized criminal organization, and live like a king, no less. Nevertheless, I was told in the second grade that any boy can become president of the United States if he can put up with his parents long enough.
Indeed, I would probably be writing this in the White House today if only I had not run away to Chicago when I turned thirteen years of age. I only wish I had learned before I arrived to conduct myself wisely, more or less like Khrushchev, the unmannerly man I admired, for then I would not regret hurting people for the sake or progress instead of being squeamish like I am. My greatest reservation against assuming the Presidency would be that legitimate presidents have to kill many people, since all great nations rest on slaughter. I have not killed anyone yet, let alone thousands or millions of people, and the notion of doing so is revolting to me, so maybe I am too cowardly to be a great leader.
Of course I had a toy gun and toy soldiers when I was a boy, and, yes, I ran around imagining that I was killing krauts and cowboys and Indians. I was a street punk to begin with; Combat and the Untouchables were my favorite TV shows; when President Johnson came on between programs to announce the police action in Vietnam, I turned to my wife and said, “I’m going to Nam to kill some gooks.” I did not know what a “gook” was at the time, but it sounded tough, and I knew “kraut” would not do. My real motive was that I could not find a job for several months, and I knew a man must support his family. I married and had kids by the time I was sixteen because I had always wanted my own family though I did not know how to be a good family man. I believed a good man does not beg or go on welfare after watching outlaw movies and listening to the song about Jesse James, who had a wife and stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and hearing how Robin Hood was feared by the bad and loved by the poor. I also learned that a hero might kill enemies for a legitimate living, I did not have a gun to rob a bank, so I went to the recruiter and signed up for military duty, and went back home. My poor family had no food at the time, so I went out at midnight, broke into a grocery store, and loaded up all the groceries I could carry.
Dumber than dumb. A police cruiser caught me in its headlights running across the very wide, main boulevard. Busted. Somehow I got off without doing time or probation. All I remember of that now is being photographed at the police station with the pile of groceries on a table; my lawyer making grandiloquent pleas to Your Honor; and being in the elevator with one of the guys who murdered the Clutter family. The recruiters came to see me in jail and shook their heads sadly as they looked through the bars at me. I was accordingly classified as unfit to serve, a classification that served me well after I read The Ugly American, smoked lots of pot, tried opium, demonstrated against the war in Vietnam and got tear gassed at the armory up in Chicago.
Maybe the marijuana messed with my hormones. I was told smoking weed caused men to grow breasts, but that did not happen. It has been many years since I smoked it, so I have stopped inspecting myself in the mirror every day. And then there was LSD and Khrushchev waving his shoe, maybe banging it on the table or hitting his arm on the table without actually touching it with his shoe. I did not want to even kill a flea although I imagined stomping on a couple of Yuppies at the pub because they were wearing suits and ties and cheering the massive bombing of Baghdad.
All right, call me a coward if you will because men are supposed to kill one another for the greater good. The only animal higher than a cockroach I have personally killed was a frog, and that was by accident. I told Steve Resnick, the owner of Tweeds in New York about it, and he put a label on the jukebox, ‘David Walters Kills Frogs,” for the theme song to 2001 Space Odyssey. Oh, yes, there was that big fish I caught at Shawnee Lake on a Cub Scout trip and my confusion when I got home with it and grownups praised me for my catch; I do not like to eat other animals, to tell you the truth, especially chickens and lambs, and cows, either, unless they are ground up into hamburger. I do not get enough protein.
A veteran told me, “You are not a man until you kill a man.” So should I kill someone at random today on the beach to prove myself a man, as was once customary for a certain Hawaiian chief passing by in his canoe to do and wind up king of all the islands? No, for first of all, as has been explained to me in reference to the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not kill” should be translated “Thou shalt do no murder.” Killing someone at random just to suit man’s nature as a natural-born killer is murder. On the other hand, killing in self-defense in order to survive is okay unless you are weird like some religious fanatics have been. It seems to follow that the preemptive homicide of perceived enemies is not murder in cases of war. Of course, modern warlords should have to have a system of leading ideas or an ideology to justify mass slaughters.
Khrushchev helped Stalin kill lots of people, particularly in Ukraine, his Mother Russia country, the very reason Ukrainians initially cheered the Nazis as liberators, although many soon regretted the occupation for the same reason they hated the Communists. Khrushchev headed the Communist Party of Ukraine from the late 1930's to 1949. In 1954, as First Secretary of the Communist Party, he saw to it that Crimea was transferred from the Russian to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic. The Tsar had annexed Crimea in 1783. The transfer between republics celebrated the reunification 300 years prior, under the Treaty of Pereyaslav, because, it was said, Russians historically loved Ukrainians. It seems Vladimir Putin loves them all the more in 2023.
Yes, it seems that an effective leader should have a reason to kill lots of people and stick with it if need be. A man is deemed prudent when he changes his clothes to suit the weather. However, when he is deemed a hypocrite for changing his ideology, he tends to cling to it come hell or high water. If he so happens to contradict his professed ideology, he might deny the contradiction until hell freezes over, perhaps because he believes his natural tendency to hypocrisy, the crisis between the real and the ideal, is the worst offense of all. It is as if he is damned for being insincere no matter what he does or does not do. In modern times ideologies serve as tooth and claw in the war of words that seem to inevitably lead to yet another foregone conclusion: mutual slaughter.
Religions have been blamed for wars, but who really needs a god for war? Upon the alleged death of god in Russia theologies were traded for ideologies; people in want of omnipotence are not about to give up the ritual worship of Power and the politics of warring for its distribution. Political creeds have justified the belligerent display of instinctive aggressiveness in the forms of some of the most vicious onslaughts in human history. Those creeds, supported by their respective religious and political theologies, have provided sufficient dogmatic justification for the usual violent upheavals that are on the whole a self-destructive revolt of mankind against mankind.
Otherwise, homicide might be said to be determined economically. We must eat and have shelter to survive as a nation, and that can entail following Moses’ sacred advice to impound someone else’s land, kill everyone on it, and destroy their property so we can have our own things. If that had been done more thoroughly by his Chosen People, we probably would not be having problems with Palestine to this very day. History seems to prove it would be a mistake to do otherwise, for the rule of advancing civilization is to kill or be killed. The wheel cannot roll forward without resistance. Sides must be taken, and the Gita advises us to kill our own family members if they happen to be on the other side. But why terrorize, rob, and kill people when a bundle can be made for everyone concerned by treating them rightly? Better said than done; greed is called a sin for good reason, but the economic or material motive is not the root of all evil. Humans make war for nothing, destroy everything until there is nothing left, and start all over again, using some of the tools invented to kill each other to prosper peacefully.
I am convinced that the economic motive is not the fundamental cause of mass violence. Private capitalism has not freed the people of China and Russia from oppression although many millions feel free for want of a difference, nor has public capitalism freed the peoples of the West. Neither private nor public capitalism will prevent people from being at odds with one another and engage in hostilities. Yes, economics is a factor, as are human geography and traditional culture, but they are secondary to the first cause of human violence. We are rebels, successful losers born to lose. We are natural born juvenile delinquents, some more than others, wherefore a god had to be invented to keep god’s children in line when father was working or at war.
As I have confessed time and again, I was a “juvenile delinquent,” so called by authorities with whom I naturally had a conflict. If I had been present in Russia, Stalin would have included me in his “Enemy of the People'' category for calling him one of the greatest mass murderers who ever lived, and then Khrushchev would have me released from prison after making his secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Party when I was ten.
Are we not the Enemy of the People? Will we be released to run havoc again?
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