Communism Never Died, It Was Cleverly Repackaged for the Historically Impaired and Useful Idiots

“For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”   Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn



Eugene Lyons
Photo: Wikipedia

In 1950 Congress passed the Internal Security Act and, four years later, the Communist Control Act. It condemned communism and the Communist Party of the United States. Today a sizeable portion of Congress actually belongs to the Communist Party U.S.A. or is sympathetic to it. In a recent poll, 40 percent of Americans prefer communism to capitalism.

In 1954 Congress delineated penalties for anyone belonging to a party or a group calling for the violent overthrow of the United States. Just being a member, however, was not enough reason for arrest or penalty.  Today members of Congress, public citizens, and illegals call for the overthrow of our government without any penalties.

The Internal Security Act of 1950 is known as the Subversive Activities Control Act or the McCarran Act, after its principal sponsor, Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nevada).  Congress enacted this federal law over President Harry Truman’s veto who was concerned about the fact that it curtailed the freedom of speech, press, and of assembly.

This act required communist organizations to register with a subversive activities control board; investigations were made of suspected persons who promoted a “totalitarian dictatorship,” either fascist or communist.  If persons were members of such groups, they could not become citizens or enter/leave the U.S.

If found in violation of the McCarran Act, a person could lose his/her citizenship for five years. There was an emergency statute that gave the President the power to “apprehend and detain each person as to whom there is a reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage.”

The McCarran Act strengthened “alien exclusion and deportation laws” and, in times of war, allowed for the detention of dangerous, disloyal, or subversive persons. Picketing a federal courthouse was a felony if the intention was to obstruct the court system or influence jurors or other trial participants.

The House overrode Truman’s veto without debate by a vote of 286–48 the same day. The Senate overrode his veto the next day after "a twenty-two hour continuous battle" by a vote of 57–10. Thirty-one Republicans and 26 Democrats voted in favor, while five members of each party opposed it. (Trussel, C.P. September 24, 1950. Red Bill Veto Beaten, 57-10, By Senators.” New York Times)

Hollywood and the press dubbed this period of time the Red Scare and McCarthyism even though Sen. McCarthy, a war hero, was vindicated recently through the release of the Venona papers - there were people in Hollywood and other fields who were communist spies and sympathizers.

The Communist Party U.S.A. continues to exist today despite the claims from the left that the Red Scare had run its course. Communist-leaning organizations like the ACLU, labor unions, and NAACP are now an important part of the American political milieu. According to the left, “a more liberal Supreme Court began to chip away at the immense tangle of anticommunist legislation that had been passed during the 1940s and 1950s. Today, the Communist Party of the United States continues to exist and regularly runs candidates for local, state, and national elections.”

Today’s large percentage of the American public who think that it would be a great idea to live under communism as opposed to capitalism, are not unlike Eugene Lyons who wrote “Assignment in Utopia” in 1937, describing his communist activism and journalism in America and his journey to Russia where the reality and harshness of Bolshevism hit him squarely in the face.

Lyons was shocked to meet hundreds of Bolsheviks barking orders to ordinary Russians "in whom suffering seemed to have burned out all emotion." Only the charred husks of their character remained.” (p. 56)

In a mood of romantic anticipation, Lyons arrived in the “land of proletarian dictatorship,” expecting a country of milk and honey with beds of roses. What he found was a forlorn-looking station; “nor cold nor darkness could douse our high mood of expectation.”  It was a thrill to find his private, misguided, and misconstrued esoteric symbols of what he perceived to be Utopia on earth.

Negotiating a permit, a propusk, Lyons realized that the word loomed “gigantic on Russia’s horizon.” Russians needed a permit for everything. “It allowed me to enter the musty old building, to follow my secretary through a maze of dark corridors, and finally to meet the censors. As a correspondent dubbed “sympathetic” and “friendly,” Lyons was shocked that he could not see President Kalinin. Comrade Rothstein, his handler, raised his eyebrows at this American’s temerity. 

“Would a foreign correspondent arriving in Washington, have the nerve to ask to see President Coolidge," Rothstein asked.  Lyons realized that communism operated under a “barbed-wire of inaccessibility.” No press conferences twice a week, no press secretary, no questions taken from the media like in America. The Russian communist president was king, no consultations with his cabinet members or his Secretary of State.

Even an idealist like Lyons eventually realized that the Bolsheviks, “the newly powerful, like the newly rich, are on the alert against any slight to their dignity” and this dignity was boundless.

Lyons found the Soviet’s capital intensely cold, with frequent blizzards and snowstorms, and “the night that comes so soon after noon make it an aloof and forbidding place.”  Russians called Moscow “the largest village in their land.”

Prior to Bolsheviks taking power, “until food stringency and growing political fears put a damper on such things, Moscow was a city of endless parties.” The cobbled streets and broken side-walks were quite dangerous under tightly packed snow. “A few well stocked shop windows seemed ill at ease in their embarrassing prosperity among the dusty windows filled with debris and emptiness.” Such was the grim and dingy life of Russian communism. (p. 58)

In his ardent idealism and longing for the communist utopia, Eugene Lyons illogically gave the Russian revolution credit for everything cultural, art, opera, theater, parties, fun, which the country had actually inherited from the tsarist era.  Idealist rebels like Lyons did not notice the misery and shortcomings surrounding him or glossed over them.

Living in the Lux Hotel, an overcrowded tenement of cabbage odors of all nations, colors, and tongues,  Lyons described the tenants as “the international communist type – if not the same features, at  least the same negligent dress, unkempt hair, and the same expression of anxious devotion.”

Lyons said, “Never before had I witnessed so much naked, unashamed sycophancy and career-building concentrated under one roof.” And Uncle Kremlin was protecting them with police, was shadowing them with Russian spies, made sure they stayed in their communist graces. One wrong move or sentence and they were out.  Uncle Kremlin was “suspicious of his foreign nephews and nieces” who “might forget themselves and play with those horrid Trotsky brats.”

After six years of living in Moscow post Russian Revolution, Lyons realized that equality of communism was just an illusion. He was infected by the disease of economic change, from capitalism to communism. He said, “I was ready to liquidate classes, purge millions, sacrifice freedoms and elementary decencies, arm self-appointed dictators with a flaming sword – all for the cause. It was a species of revenge rationalized as social engineering. Then I saw these things in full swing and discovered that the revenge was being wreaked on the very masses that were to be saved by that cause.”

To say that today’s youth have learned nothing from history is an understatement. It is obvious in the Bolshevik and Stalinist cultural purge the BLM, a racist organization, and ANTIFA, a fascist organization, engage in largely undisturbed. No historical monument or statue seems to stand in their way of violence and destruction.

The New York Times published a sympathetic piece about communism, “When Communism Inspired Americans.”  At the time, it was a misguided fringe of deluded proletarian activists perhaps who worshiped at the foot of Soviet Bolshevism.

Vivian Gornick wrote, “I was 20 years old in February 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20^th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalin’s rule. Night after night the people at my father’s kitchen table raged or wept or sat staring into space. I was beside myself with youthful rage. ‘Lies! I screamed at them. Lies and treachery and murder. And all in the name of socialism! In the name of socialism!’  Confused and heartbroken, they pleaded with me to wait and see, this couldn’t be the whole truth, it simply couldn’t be. But it was.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/when-communism-inspired-americans.html

It seems that a whole lot of Americans today, influenced daily by the main stream media and Hollywood, are “inspired” by Venezuela’s bankrupt and starving socialism, Castro’s murderous socialist regime, Che Guevara’s revolutionary and chic hat, North Korea’s “rocket” mad man who is starving his own people, and Mao’s Chinese Marxist model.

Useful idiots in America, fat and happy on capitalist food and goods, are deaf and ignorant of the words of Heinrich Heine who said, “Communism possesses a language which every people can understand – its elements are hunger, envy, and death.”

We don’t see any wannabe communists, actors, professors, and journalists rushing to turn in their American passports to move to those dictatorial countries although they threaten us plenty that they will leave America because they irrationally loathe the capitalism that gave them a good life, success, and wealth, and  President Trump, a supporter of freedom, sovereignty, and economic prosperity.