Tag: communism

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At Large Opinion

Commie!

Mikhail Gorbachev in 1992 (Photo: Konstantin Gushcha | Dreamstime)

Look, comrades, I grew up at a time in this country when the thing we kids were taught to fear more than anything else in our little Midwestern lives was COMMUNISM! 

Communist Russia — the USSR — was the big, scary enemy, a country led by authoritarian leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who were attempting to take over the world and destroy democracy and the American way of life. They were the commies, the pinkos, the red menace — a nuclear-armed adversary who was also our rival in space, with their cursed Sputnik satellites. The Russians were so bold they even propped up Fidel Castro in a communist state 90 miles away from Miami. Russia, we were told by our teachers and parents, was determined to force everyone in the world to live in a commune and toil under communism, a fate presumably worse than death. 

In our schools, we had two kinds of drills: fire drills, in which at the sound of a long bell, every student high-tailed it “single file” down the stairs and out the doors onto the schoolyard lawn, goose-assing and laughing all the way. (If you were lucky, you attended a school that had one of those cool fire-escape slides out a third-story window, which livened up the process.) But the real serious stuff took place during the air-raid drills, where, at the sound of a keening siren, we had to “duck and cover” under our desks, which, as everyone knows, will protect you against nuclear holocaust. Mainly, of course, it just scared the crap out of us and traumatized a couple generations.

This went on through the 1980s, at which point, President Reagan had turned standing up to Russia into performance art (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). It turned out to be a surprisingly effective gambit, or at the worst, Reagan’s timing was spot-on. The Soviet Union’s economy was collapsing during the 1980s, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and lending a measure of stature to Reagan’s latter years in office.

If there was one benefit of this strange, decades-long international game of Russian roulette, it was the fact that we were actually taught what communism is. We learned most of Karl Marx’s greatest one-liners, including the scariest one: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” which we Americans were taught to see as the mantra of a system that destroyed ambition and the drive to succeed that American capitalism was built upon. I think that’s simplistic, but it’s also mostly true. Living on the dole is living on the dole. All communism does is narrow economic opportunity to oligarchs. Everyone else? Pass the beans and borscht and keep your head down, comrade.

The fact is that communism has proven to be a horrible system of government, one that concentrates power under an authoritarian rule, censors books and newspapers, offers only rudimentary education for the poor, discriminates on the basis of gender and race, and controls healthcare. In communist countries, posters of the authoritarian Dear Leader are plastered on every open space. Flags with his image are flown in every public square. 

That’s why it seems so absurd to me to hear MAGA types — and Donald Trump himself — call Kamala Harris and Democrats “communists.” It sounds like you’re being tough when you call someone a communist, but they literally appear to have no idea what a communist is. 

Think of the two major American political parties: When it comes to a cult of personality, one that features posters of Dear Leader, flags, religious iconography, clothes, and even tattoos, which party comes to mind? Which party has come out in support of banning books? Which party wants to give public tax dollars to private schools? Which party openly demonizes LGBTQ Americans and people of color? Which party wants to centralize power and give it to an authoritarian who will “be a dictator on day one”? Which party wants to control the healthcare decisions of the country’s females? Which party literally rejected democracy in 2020? 

If your answer to those questions is anything other than the Republican Party, you’ve gone down into a scary rabbit hole, a place where the light of the obvious won’t penetrate. It’s like you’re in a permanent duck-and-cover drill. 

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Opinion Viewpoint

A Giant Is Lost

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead, and the world is a far poorer place. He was a giant of the 20th century. He stood up unarmed but fearless and defied the mighty Soviet Union until it had no choice but to spit him out into exile.

Amidst all of the well-deserved eulogies he has received, the greatest compliments were paid to him by the Communists. They hate him still and vomited vitriol when they heard the news of his death. The Communists, at least, recognize the man who did more than any other one man to kill their empire and expose their philosophy for the poison that it is.

After Solzhenitsyn’s exposure of the gulags, not even the most cynical American Marxist could get away with the same old lies that there were benevolent things in the communist system and that Josef Stalin was anything but a paranoid killer with more blood on his hands than Adolf Hitler.

Solzhenitsyn can be best appreciated in context. He was born in 1918. His father died before he was born, and his mother raised him in Rostov-on-Don, an industrial city in southwest Russia. He graduated with a degree in mathematics and went into the army when the Germans invaded in 1941. He was a captain in the artillery. Stalin’s secret police snatched him out of the front lines and arrested him for having written some unflattering things about the dictator in a private letter to a friend. He was sentenced to eight years in the labor camps.

He developed cancer, and before his sentence was complete, he was sentenced further to permanent exile. After Stalin’s death, he was able to teach and continue his writing, which he had done secretly in the camps. A brave Russian publisher got his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in print, but the Communists immediately clamped down.

He was a leading dissident and resorted to private printings and to slipping his manuscripts out of the country. In 1973, The Gulag Archipelago, his graphic description of the prisons and Soviet tyranny, was published. The following year, he was arrested for treason and exiled.

He lived in Cavendish, Vermont, from 1975 to 1994, when he ended his exile. While in the U.S., he made several stinging criticisms of the West’s weaknesses and what he saw as capitulations to tyranny. This did not endear him to the American establishment.

Solzhenitsyn’s great mind and his complex thoughts can’t be summarized easily, but he is certainly worth reading. His criticisms of our Western culture were valid. He never criticized the American people but aimed at the elite who, at that time, were compromising with tyrants all over the place and spouting a materialistic philosophy.

Jimmy Carter practically dismantled America’s defenses, pardoned draft dodgers, betrayed American allies, and seemed to embrace leftist guerrillas.

One part of history Americans need to know is how much material aid was given to the Soviet Union by America. The largest truck factory in the world, located in Russia, was financed by Western banks. All kinds of aid, financial and political, helped to prop up Stalin’s regime.

The key to understanding Solzhenitsyn is that he was a devout Christian. That never got much play in the American press, but he never played the part of a professional Christian. Nevertheless, his Christian beliefs were deep and are at the root of his thinking.

He was an admirer of Vladimir Putin, as I am, because he recognized that Putin was saving Russia from disintegration. Solzhenitsyn believed in a moral and spiritual regeneration. Read some of his books, and I think you will see that he well deserved the Nobel Prize that he received.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Long Night

Have you ever wondered how human beings can be so cruel? And how cruelty crosses all the boundaries — national, racial, and ethnic? I have. Rereading an autobiography published in 1941 by a communist agent reminded me of the dark side of human nature.

The book, Out of the Night, was written — under the pseudonym “Jan Valtin” — by a German who lived through the chaos of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. Broken by Gestapo torture, he ended up being pursued by both the Nazi and the communist manhunters and killers.

Murders by these two forms of socialism are measured in the millions during the 20th century. That alone should warn all people off any form of collectivism, because all of those millions, in the minds of their killers, were sacrificed “for the greater good.”

They — flesh-and-blood individual human beings — were all murdered in the name of an abstraction, a stupid theory of how society should be organized. I doubt if the head thugs on both sides actually believed the theories. What they really believed in was power over their fellow man.

If you look at the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution, the message is clear: Intellectuals and the common people together can produce a blood bath. Latching on to some “ism” for justification, their greed for power and desire for revenge can run amok. Butchering women and children because they were born into the “wrong” class is surely insane.

In our time, when people are saying we must sacrifice liberty for security, that scrapping the Constitution is necessary to win the “war” against terrorism, I would suggest that you take your choice of genocides in the past 100 years and remind yourself what happens when people buy into the false proposition that the end justifies the means. People who preach that are always more interested in the means than in any end.

The only safe environment for a human being is under a weak government with very restricted powers. Normal people don’t need much to be happy: food, shelter, dignity, and freedom from marauders. They need a rule of law that applies to everyone equally and at all times and in all circumstances. In established societies, legislators should meet rarely — perhaps once every two or three years — because a continuing cascade of new laws will eventually drown freedom.

The Founding Fathers, whether through luck, wisdom, or divine guidance, gave us an almost perfect form of government, and we’ve been busy ever since trying to take it apart. Human beings are dangerous predators and cannot be trusted with power over their fellows. Many Americans have forgotten that the power of government comes out of the barrel of a gun. Governments coerce; they don’t persuade.

There are people living among us at this very moment capable of the cruelty so evident in the Holocaust. All they are waiting for is the opportunity. No greater opportunity exists than when a government enlists such people and says whatever you do is now justified for the sake of the “greater good.”

Who would have guessed that George W. Bush, who seemed to be a genial good old boy, would turn out to be a tyrant, launching wars of aggression, arresting and confining people without charges or access to a lawyer, condoning torture, and lying to the American people?

A government that can without trial destroy you by simply putting on a list your name or the name of an organization with which you are associated is a tyranny. A government that invades other countries and that feels free to murder people in any country it chooses is a tyranny.

Americans are on the edge of a long night. We had better wake up and step back before it’s too late.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.