By Stella Morabito
Monday, November 06, 2017
Scarcity, terror, and the mass murder of more than 100
million victims are communism’s main contributions to human history. As we mark
the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia on November 7, we should
never forget that legacy. Communism is a fount of human misery and death. Few
today really understand what that system of so-called government is all about.
In a nutshell, communism enforces a privileged elite’s
centralization of power. This means it always puts too much power into the
hands of too few people. They tend to weasel their way into power as their
ventriloquized agitators use talking points like “justice” and “equality” while
promoting a false illusion of public support.
So, how would it ever be possible for a free society like
America to succumb to such tyrannical forces? I think we’ve spent precious
little time trying to dissect and understand this process. So, in this
three-part series, I hope to map out six stages that lead us into this
dangerous direction. Within each phase, several trends take hold. I’ll discuss
the trends in more detail in parts II and III.
There is a lot of overlap among the phases, but I think
they can be roughly identified as: 1.) Laying the groundwork; 2.) Propaganda;
3.) Agitation; 4.) State takeover of society’s institutions; 5.) Coercing
conformity; and 6.) Final solutions. But first let’s look a bit more closely at
what communism really means for human beings.
‘Power Kills.
Absolute Power Kills Absolutely’
Thousands of texts examine and analyze communism
ideologically, historically, economically, and so on. It always amounts to a
bait-and-switch scheme hatched by egomaniacs who want to dictate to everybody.
Why? Because it’s all about the consolidation of power by a tiny elite—in
Vladimir Lenin’s words, “the vanguard”—who claim to promote equality and
justice and blah, blah, blah.
But once communism gets its foot in the door and you
don’t get with their program, it promises you death in a variety of forms:
economic death, social death, and literal death. That’s predictable whenever
you put too much power into the hands of too few people. And that’s why we
should always firmly oppose any system that demands the consolidation and
centralization of power.
Although communist and socialist governments murdered
well more than 100 million people in the course of the twentieth century, that
number spikes even further when you include the practical bedfellows of
communism, like Nazism and fascism, for example. According to the calculations
of Professor R. J. Rummel, author of “Death by Government,” totalitarian
regimes snuffed out approximately 169 million lives in the twentieth century
alone. That number is more than four times higher than the 38 million
deaths—civilian as well as military—caused by all of the twentieth century wars
combined.
As Rummel states: “Power kills. Absolute power kills
absolutely.” The common thread that runs through communist and fascist
ideologies is their totalitarian nature, which means they control people by
breeding scarcity, ignorance, human misery, social distrust, the constant
threat of social isolation, and death to dissenters. All in the name of justice
and equality.
They cannot abide any checks or balances, particularly
checks on government power as reflected in the U.S. Bill of Rights. They fight
de-centralization of power, which allows localities and states true
self-governance. Such restraints on the centralized power of the state stand in
the way of achieving the goal of communism: absolute state power over every
single human being.
Lenin’s
Blood-Soaked Legacy
It should astonish us to realize that the obsessions of a
few wild-eyed revolutionaries can blue-pill whole populations of peaceful
citizens. But it’s all a matter of conjuring up illusions and mass delusions,
no matter the brand of totalitarianism. Lenin was a fiery orator of propaganda,
as was Adolph Hitler.
To achieve absolute power, Lenin focused on fomenting a
class war, while Hitler set his sights on a race war. Either way, the
divide-and-conquer modus operandi of
fascist and communist demagogues is pretty much the same, no matter what each
side might claim about the other. Their propaganda content may differ, but not
so much their divide-and-conquer methods. Attitudes of supremacy come in a
virtual rainbow of flavors and colors.
As Saul Alinsky taught and the agitprop of groups like
the Southern Poverty Law Center illustrates so perfectly, the goal of all such
radicals is to seize power by fueling resentment and hatred among people
through various forms of “consciousness”—particularly class and race
consciousness. That’s what identity politics is all about. That division is a
key tool for totalitarians in their conquest of the people. Once their
organizations breed enough ill will, the “masses”—made up of mostly alienated
individuals—can be baited and mobilized to do the bidding of power elites, with
a rhetorical veneer claiming justice and equality.
Most of today’s enlisted rioters—groups that call
themselves things like “Indivisible,” “Anti-Fascist,” “Stop Patriarchy,” “Black
Lives Matter,” “Refuse Fascism,” or moveon.org—are pretty much unabashedly
communist (or just plain fascist) in their goals and aims and tactics. The
chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA, for example, founded
Refuse Fascism. It’s a pro-violence group that planned street theater on
November 4, with the stated goal of overturning the 2016 election and taking
out the Trump administration.
If you’re a true student of history, you can see that
this is an old movie: mobs of disaffected, alienated people being exploited and
mobilized by power elites. Unfortunately, very few Americans today, especially
younger generations, are inquisitive students of history.
Certain sports figures, for example, claim to be
exercising their First Amendment rights by showing hostility towards the
American flag during the national anthem, based on a superficial understanding
of history. They don’t realize the net effect of their actions is to show
hostility against the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, for which the
flag stands. Perhaps they don’t understand how their actions are easily
exploited by those who would ultimately deprive everyone, including themselves,
of all freedom of expression. Without freedom of expression, we all become
slaves to the forces of tyranny. Sadly, using freedom to destroy freedom is an
old tactic of all totalitarians.
Six Phases to
Unfreedom
Many of the social trends we see today point to dangerous
conditions in which a totalitarian system like communism can rear its ugly head
again. If enough folks don’t push back against these developments, tyranny can
secure a foothold. So let’s try to clarify some of these patterns so we might
better confront them and preserve freedom for everybody.
At least two dozen major trends have unfolded over the
years and continue to unfold that indicate an erosion of human freedom and the
growth of a centralized power. I’ve grouped them into six different phases,
even though there is a lot of overlap. I’m sure you can add many more major
developments to the list. Below are summaries of the phases as well as the
trends within each phase, as I see them.
1. Laying the Groundwork
This is usually a generational or decades-long process,
in which minds can be closed to reason and more influenced by emotion and
propaganda. This happens in many ways: through the mass bureaucratization of
life that allows for policies that promote polarization, dependency, and human
isolation; through disabling independent thinking by educational fads that
actually cultivate ignorance and shun content knowledge; through the attack on
the humanities in both K-12 and higher education; and through the lack of
general knowledge about how mass psychology works.
All the while, as new communications technologies develop
and proliferate, they are embedded into the groundwork that promotes tyranny
over liberty. Through the effects of these trends, people become less open to
logic, and more persuaded by the proliferation of images and emotional appeals,
cemented by groupthink.
2. Manufacturing Propaganda
Propaganda has always been with us, and always will be.
But as people become less able to discern fact from fiction, propaganda feeds
on itself more intensely. As emotions trump facts, propaganda tends to become
more forceful and more focused on driving people to agitate for collectivist
agendas. It takes a multitude of forms, but the Orwellian manipulation of
language is always the key to thought reform.
Then, journalists increasingly become propagandists, and
promote illusions of alternative realities. This includes the revision of
history, as well as trends such as gender ideology, which pushes to de-sex
everybody in the eyes of the law. As propaganda takes the form of political
correctness, it threatens people with social rejection if they don’t conform to
the politically correct agendas. In this way, it induces self-censorship and
preference falsification to create the illusion of public opinion support for
its agendas. Political correctness is the sort of agitprop that can grow a cult
mindset in the population.
3. Agitating the Masses
Once the groundwork has been laid and propaganda absorbed
by enough people, agitation can proliferate. As Lenin made clear, agitation and
propaganda go together and are absolutely essential to communist revolutions.
As that sort of agitation becomes more prevalent in public life, there’s more
speed on the road to totalitarianism.
Agitation can involve protests, parades, marches, and
demonstrations. It also involves organized shout-downs of legislators and a
hundred other means of trying to affect public policy by influencing public
opinion. During this phase, imitative behaviors proliferate (such as we’ve seen
among NFL players during the national anthem). It seems that hatred and
frustration are more palpable everywhere in the society.
Indeed, the media, Hollywood, and academia—and the
Southern Poverty Law Center—would have us focus on nothing else. We see
iconoclasm in this phase, as in the defacing of public statues and national
monuments. The education establishment becomes involved in politically
agitating children, creating confusion and frustration, and even cultivating
hostility towards their parents if they aren’t with the program.
4. Consolidating the Takeover of Society’s
Institutions
About 100 years ago, the Italian communist Antonio
Gramsci introduced his theory of “cultural hegemony,” which cast cultural
institutions as the enemy, claiming they were used to maintain power. So the
key to achieving communism in the West was through destroying its culture, not through
promoting socialist economic policies that had little appeal in the West. This
would require a “long march through the institutions” of society, destroying
them from within so communism could fill the vacuum.
Radicals of the 1960s like Herbert Marcuse and Alinsky
picked up on this theme, noting that “the system” (i.e., American freedom)
could only be destroyed from within once radical operatives had control over
society’s institutions. The deep state is one example that’s been building
through decades of bureaucratic bloat, with operatives embedded throughout the
government, including in the military and intelligence agencies. And, of
course, the cultural takeover of the media, academia, and entertainment is both
broad and deep.
But, most importantly, the mediating institutions have
been relentlessly attacked. Those are the institutions that protect the
individual from encroachment by the state, particularly the family, the church,
and all voluntary and civic associations. We can see and feel especially how
the family has been eroded today. All of these institutions have been deeply
affected by statist forces, rendering them more vulnerable than ever to total
absorption by the mass state, a prerequisite for communism.
5. Forcing Conformity
This is perhaps the most unsettling phase, when otherwise
discerning people who have been duped by the rhetoric of social justice finally
awaken to the deceit within the agitprop. This is the stage in which you are
told to conform and convert—or else. We see small shop owners threatened with
financial ruin if they don’t disavow their faith. We see Catholic nuns, like
Little Sisters of the Poor, threatened for not disavowing their faith. We see
echoes of Maoist-style “struggle sessions”—otherwise known as sessions of criticism
and self-criticism—as college students are forced to admit to white privilege
simply because they had happy childhoods.
False confessions proliferate, along with apologies and
recantations for showing even the slightest hint of a politically incorrect
viewpoint. A surveillance state can grow with new technologies being used for
data mining. At the same time, human resources departments start telling
employees to report for discipline any politically incorrect private
conversation that they might overhear.
Millennial celebrity Lena Dunham modeled a Soviet-style
surveillance state by tweeting to American Airlines that she overheard two
flight attendants having a “transphobic” conversation for which they should be
punished. The practice of ritual defamation—smears such as “bigot,” “racist,”
“KKK”—become commonplace. And, perhaps most chilling, psychiatry is used as a
political weapon.
6. The ‘Final Solutions’ Phase
Of course we aren’t there. Not yet, anyway. But perhaps
you’ll agree that we should always be aware of the lessons of history if we
don’t want to repeat its more unsavory chapters. In the last phase, which is
fast and furious, totalitarian elites let loose their inclination to brutally
eliminate their perceived enemies.
It happens in what Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov
identified as the “normalization” stage, after subversion of a nation is
complete. It’s as though they can’t do anything but eliminate their perceived
enemies because they just don’t know how to do anything else. The body count in
the Soviet gulag state, including reigns of terrors and purges intended to rid
the country of counter-revolutionaries, was in the tens of millions.
In this phase, violence is considered simply a necessary
means to achieving the goal of centralized power. There is not even a pretense
of due process or respect for free speech. Yet there are pretexts given for
eliminating perceived enemies, excuses that have the perpetrators projecting
their own intentions upon their victims. That’s an old and tragic story.
‘Confirm Thy Soul
in Self-Control, Thy Liberty in Law’
America is still a free nation with laws on the books
that protect individuals from abuses by the state. But we should be very
disturbed by the emergence of trends that, if left unchecked, would lead to the
consolidation of centralized power by elites who would abolish the Bill of
Rights. Communism, as well as fascism and all such forms of totalitarianism, is
the natural product of such unchecked trends.
So when people disrespect the American flag “because
oppression,” they tend to be clueless that their freedom to do so is extremely
fragile. Freedom must be fought for, tooth and nail. Then it must be
appreciated and nurtured, never taken for granted.
We are still in the fight to preserve freedom. But when
we review the preponderance of trends that point us in that direction, we ought
to pay attention to the symptoms and work to reverse those trends. We ought to
be looking hard for a cure, or at least a path to sanity and balance.
This means filling the vacuum of ignorance with knowledge
and teaching students how to dispassionately assess information and process it
on their own rather than rely on emotion and groupthink—and finding a way to do
so quickly. It means cultivating respect for reality over pseudo-reality. It
means reaching out in goodwill to others, no matter their political persuasion,
to de-fang the polarization causing so much alienation and unhappiness in our
society.
All of these trends, which I’ll explore in more detail in
Parts II and III, will lead to absolute power, if left unchecked. Centralized
power, as crystallized in the political system of Communism, has always led to
scarcity, distrust, death, and just plain human misery. It really does deserve
to be buried in the ash heap of history.
As we try to stem such tides, I hope we can take to heart
these lines from the second verse of Katherine Lee Bates’ grand hymn, “America
the Beautiful”: “America, America, God mend thine every flaw. Confirm thy soul
in self-control, Thy liberty in law.”
Individual freedom cannot survive if it isn’t balanced
with a widespread sense of personal responsibility, self-regulation,
self-governance, and the rule of law that allows for dispassionate due process
is critical to preventing the loss of liberty that comes via its abuse. In the
overall pattern of human history, this is the road less-traveled. But as
America has proven, it is the only road that allows for mending flaws and the
pursuit of happiness.
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