Senator Bob Corker and His Own People, by Marc Dion

Soviet-era chronicler of misery Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out that, to kill tens of millions of people, you have to have ideology. You can shoot another man over a $10 drug deal and have no ideology at all but you can't push six million people into ovens without really believing in something greater than yourself.

And that's why Sen. Robert Corker, R-Confederate States of America, fought so hard to keep the United Auto Workers out of a Tennessee Volkswagen plant.

Corker isn't a mean man, nor is he a cruel man. He does not want to go to the houses of individual workers and snatch food off their tables. He does not want to look people in the eyes and tell them he doesn't want them to have the choice a union brings, the job protection, the democratic freedom. He does not want to do anything terrible to any individual person.

What he wants, what Stalin wanted, what Hitler wanted, what Lenin wanted is to impose the power of an idea on his own people, to make them see that their poverty, their powerlessness, their lack of security and even, if necessary, their deaths, are, in fact, nothing personal.

What Corker wants to do is serve the idea, to push the ideology to its logical conclusion, to find out what is right and then pursue it relentlessly, to find the mold that everyone fits and to then force everyone into the mold until you can hear their spines crack.

If a majority of Corker's own people sign union cards, he will "re-educate" them, like Pol Pot used to do, like Chairman Mao used to do. Out with the bad ideas, in with the good. If you're not smart enough to think the "right thing," then, by God, you can be made to think the "right thing."

You can be threatened. You can be bullied. You can be lied to. You are his own people and you must acknowledge the great gift of the idea.

The idea says unions are bad. The idea says you should be grateful to have a job. The idea says you should take what they're paying and shut up. The idea says all you really need is Bibles and guns, and the idea will make damn sure you get plenty of both and as little as possible of everything else.

So Bob and some outside agitators (remember when the South hated outside agitators?) threatened to take tax incentives away from the plant, and lied and said Volkswagen would move the plant as soon as the first contract was signed. Bob knows it's not a sin to lie if you're doing it for the idea, the good idea, the free market idea, the Jesus and handguns idea, the no-political-correctness idea, the no-affirmative-action idea, the whole stinking, dipped-in-dung, patriotism idea that says poverty is holy and stupid is good.

He did it to his own people. His own people.

I couldn't live with that.

But then again, I have no ideology.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Marc Munroe Dion's books, "Between Wealth and Welfare" and "Mill River Smoke" are available for Nook and Kindle and are now on amazon.com .