Communism Then and Now

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.” – Chris Hedges

“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the way of achieving the same ultimate goal: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism by voting. It’s the same difference between murder and suicide.”  - Ayn Rand

The grocery store from the communist era is still standing.
Photo credit: Ileana Johnson 2012

A pamphlet published by Alfred G. Meyer at Harvard in 1953, and designed to teach young people about the subversion and evils of communism, revealed that “communists in disguise have slipped into influential places in our country.” At that time, the movement was modest, with little influence, and a membership of 35,000 people, about 1/50 of one percent of the population. At its membership height, there were around 200,000 communists in the U.S. It is hard to estimate a number today, however, judging by those who are constantly in the limelight and voting for communist policies, the numbers are growing.

Membership and influence are growing because the New York based Communist Party USA’s rhetoric appeals to the lowest denominator, to those who are already on welfare, illegal aliens, and permanent residents coming from third world dictatorships, and union members who are controlled by communist leaders. A constant and highly successful propaganda is waged by the Democrat Party and progressive elites, using the communist slogans of “hope and change,” “forward,” “social justice,” “environmental justice,” “white-privilege,” and “income inequality.”

Communists appear so successful because Americans have a short collective memory, short attention span, and know, thanks to a socialist academia, very little of their own non-revisionist history, and even less world history. College graduates are hard pressed to answer correctly basic questions about history, geography, and government. Yet they know what the latest Hollywood celebrity ate for supper yesterday. The MSM, academia, and Hollywood are the main propaganda arm of mass indoctrination, comprised of “useful idiots,” a term coined and used by Stalin.

Saul Alinsky described in his book, Rules for Radicals, the eight levels of control necessary to create a socialist regime. Healthcare, welfare (food, housing, income), and education must be controlled by the state. Religion must be made irrelevant by removing it from government and schools.  Guns must be confiscated in order to create a police state. Create as much poverty as possible. Poor people are easier to control. Explode national debt to unsustainable levels by out of control spending fueled by new and suffocating taxes that create more poverty. Use escalating class warfare rhetoric to fuel the division between “rich” and “poor,” causing discontent. Malcontent would then drive the welfare poor to rebel against the “greedy rich” who “do not pay their fair share,” and to demand that they be taxed more.

How did people get ahead under the former communist Soviet-ruled Iron Curtain?

They became members of the communist party and their sympathizers, and displayed their loyalty by copying and emulating everything Marxists did. They made themselves useful by spying on other people, on their own relatives, on their own immediate families, reporting to the thought and economic police on their activities, and through loyal nepotism.

How did people get ahead in our former Constitutional Republic? Americans excelled through hard work, long hours, study, sacrifices, risk-taking through entrepreneurship, and education.  Now they get ahead through crony capitalism, nepotism, corruption, strict adherence to the Democrat Party platform, race baiting, claiming faux discrimination, invoking the manufactured and non-existent “white privilege,” using oppressed minority claims, lawsuits, socialist and environmentalist brainwashing in public schools, and radicalism wrapped in extreme feminism and homosexual rights.

Karl Marx wrote about capitalism as a conflict between the wealthy factory owners (the capitalists) and the proletariat (workers who had to toil for the capitalist in order to survive). Marx, a leech himself, wrote that capitalists took advantage of the proletariat. He attempted to explain that “as long as capitalism existed, the misery of mankind would grow greater.”  To solve this problem, “workers would rise and start a revolution that would bring comfort and control over their lives and jobs.” We know this took place across the former Soviet-led communist countries with disastrous results – the workers became much poorer, more miserable, more oppressed, living in a totalitarian regime, while their communist handlers became richer by stealing “communal property.”

The followers of Marx (a bum supported financially by rich friends) split into two camps: the socialists (those willing to reform capitalism) and the communists (those willing to destroy capitalism). The “soft Marxists,” called in Russia “Mensheviks,” preached for a slow pace to learning self-governing. The “hard Marxists,” Bolsheviks/communists led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, believed men were not disciplined enough to grow, they had to be forced into revolution. Lenin is considered the first Soviet dictator, and Joseph Stalin, who came to power after Lenin died, the second dictator.

After bloody struggles such as the Civil War in Russia, 1918-1921, the rebuilding and arguing period, 1921-1928, the first five-year plan, 1928-1932, and unprecedented progress in building a modern industrial empire between 1932-1953, Russia became a country admired by “people in India, Africa, and China.” (Alfred G. Meyer, What You Should Know About Communism, p. 23)

Having lived under socialism/communism, I know from first-hand experience that five-year plans were a joke. We constantly struggled to find basics because not enough finished goods and food were produced to satisfy demand. For example, a Soviet factory that was scheduled to produce 50,000 tractors in 1930, managed to build only 3,000. The factory received the “Order of the Camel” for “breaks in the plan and wastage.”

The important questions about communism are:

1.      Was there equality and democracy under communism?

2.      Did everyone experience the same and equal quality of life and the “the good things of life?”

3.      Was the struggle between classes non-existent?

4.      Were classes abolished forever?

The short answer to all of the above questions is no. The complex answer is that communist countries were ruled by the Communist Party Presidium. There was no middle class, only the proletariat and the ruling communist elite. Everyone worked for equally meager pay (regardless of skill, training, or education) for the government which was staffed only with communist party leaders.

The Five-year Plan was draconian, covered the entire communist nation, and the workers were either not equipped, did not have enough resources, skill, machinery, were wasteful, or not sufficiently trained or paid to meet the outlandish demands. If the plan was not met, the worker’s pay was cut drastically. If waste and fraud were found, the person in charge who did not necessarily commit the crime, went to jail for economic failures of duty. If the worker exceeded the Five-year Plan requirements, large bonuses were given, but the standards were raised, making it impossible to meet them again. To get materials in the attempt to fulfill the plan, people resorted to theft, black market deals, swindles, and bribery, making the Five-year Plan rather “disorderly” and mismanaged.

As a police state, there were three organizations that ruled any communist country: administrators who ran the affairs of the country, the Communist Party who gave directives for national policy and publicity from its centralized position, and the political police who watched over the communist loyalty and compliance of the citizenry.

If you think such a practice of loyalty watch and speech compliance is dead, consider the city of Barcelona, from the state of Catalonia, Spain, who created recently the “Anti-rumor Agency” and certified 436 “anti-rumor” volunteer agents to catch and punish those whose beliefs are not in line with the “consensus,” with “groupthink.” “The agents will patrol the streets, butt into certain conversations, and spread politically correct information.” http://mas-ediciones.e-noticies.es/barcelones/agentes-antirumores-contra-el-racismo-58588.html

“Groupthink” is the “consensus” established and highly publicized through MSM by self-appointed moral know-it-alls, suppressing any evidence that might question the “consensus,” stereotyping, demonizing, and denigrating anyone with a divergent opinion or view.

Anyone who questions and disagrees with the global warming/climate change or any other “consensus” is a “denier,” “flat-Earther,” “creationist,” “xenophobe,” “homophobe,” “bigot,” “racist,” or “fascist.” Charles Krauthammer reported in his “Thought Police on Patrol” how 110,000 individuals signed a petition to “his newspaper not to carry any more articles questioning the fact of man-made global warming.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10853279/Sinister-groupthink-powers-the-modern-world.html

Professor Henrick Moeller, researcher in acoustics, was fired by the University of Aalborg, Denmark, for holding the opinion that wind farms are harmful to people living nearby and for arguing that insufficient protective buffer zones were established by authorities. His research dared to contradict the university that “conducts million-dollar research for wind turbine manufacturer Vestas.” http://www.metal-supply.dk/article/view/41295/samarbejde_mellem_vestas_og_aalborg_universitet_fordobles#.U4yJ7IzD_IW

In 1953, the Assistant Director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, Alfred G. Meyer, advised Americans how to fight world communism as an existential threat. The first threat was the “powerful war machine.” The second threat was “the possibility that communist propaganda will convert people of the free nations to the Marxist cause.”

Sixty years later it appears that the world communist movement is taking roots in the U.S. quite nicely from within, lured and supported by the constant MSM propaganda machine. (How We Can Fight Communism, chapter VII, p. 42)

Alfred Meyer posed an interesting question in 1953 which rings true today in light of developing “thought police” around the world. “How does the attempt to silence ideas by punishing people who hold them square with the American traditions of civil liberties? How can we remain democratic if any set of ideas is declared illegal?” In the latest developments, patriotic, Christian, pro-American, pro-Constitution ideals, ideas, and our freedom of speech have been attacked under the rubric of “hate speech.” Is it really effective to punish and destroy people who hold ideas and ideals different from yours?

Is it not despicable to prey on people’s “feelings” of poverty, economic inequality and insecurity (caused by the administrations’ economic policies) by promoting the utopia of communism as desirable alternative to the “failed and unjust” capitalism?  

People, who are ignorant and frightened every day by the MSM, buy into communist dogma, slogans, and rhetoric. Illegals are an easy sell because they don’t know anything else but tyranny and are enchanted by the generous welfare that, they think, comes from the ever full government coffers. Minorities who are told every day they have been slighted by prejudice and injustice buy into the deliberately deceptive communist rhetoric as well.

Inequality and injustice cannot be wiped out by destroying one successful economic model and replacing it with a failed economic model just because some charismatic promoter says it will succeed this time because the right people are in charge. At the end of the day, communism is still a form of totalitarianism no matter how you slice it.

Author's note: This article is part of my upcoming book, Communism 2.0