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.

 

#Resist, a Global Commie Totalitarian Movement

The leftist hordes of a communist political culture are on the march around the globe, in alliance with Islamofascism. These young people are shaped by universities, the media, Hollywood with their trashy productions and vile behavior, corrupt politicians with allegiance only to their own pockets, the multi-nationals, the corrupt judiciary, unions, and non-profits with billions and billions of dollars of funding from elitist billionaires such as George Soros who fancy themselves the social engineers of one world government and of the climate change industry.

What happened to American universities since the early 1970s has finally reverberated around the world, like a wave created by a small stone thrown on a placid lake. It has now become a tsunami of #resist anarchists and drones around the western world. They are now resisting authority, law and order, and the capitalist system that had made their parents successful in the first place. Marching under the banner of feminism and equality, asking to be Muslims, and promoting the subjugation of women in western societies, violent millennials are bullying anybody who is a Christian and a nationalist.

Campuses have become bastions of leftism and anti-Americanism. According to David Horowitz, the schools of education are now training teachers for social justice in every major.  “An entire series of texts designed for teacher instruction and published by Columbia Teachers College is devoted to ‘teaching social justice’ in mathematics and other unlikely subjects. Its editor is Obama collaborator and unrepentant terrorist William Ayers.” (David Horowitz, “Big Agenda,” p. 117)

Even in former Soviet-bloc countries the curriculum at all levels has been diluted by inconsequential studies that add nothing to scholarship or knowledge: ethnic studies, women’s studies, islamophobia studies, intersectionality, mixing biology, sex, religion, age, caste, nationality, race, and other bizarre criteria as systems of domination, discrimination, and oppression – all because the left finds social inequality and injustice everywhere.

Universities are no longer places of scholarship, invention, discovery, divergent opinions, peaceful discussion, but places of miseducation, indoctrination, and brainwashing. What these academics have achieved in a few decades, the totalitarian communists could only dream of. Inadequate graduates, who should have never been admitted to college in the first place, are now vessels of little knowledge who were told ad nauseam what to think, not how to think.

Radicals have crawled from the underground, spurred on by eight years of a radical American president who stoked the culture and racial wars non-stop, bringing America and its economy to its knees. The rest of the world watched in horror and disbelief the fall of the once great nation while dealing with their own problems brought on by a planned refugee invasion of Europe of millions of unvetted refugees from Middle-Eastern and African countries that harbor camps of Islamists fighting a holy war against Christianity.

Angela Merkel of Germany has managed to destroy her own country and many other countries in Europe who were forced to accept this flood of mostly single young Muslim men. And allegations are floating that she did it in order to save face, for optics, as the media would have gone berserk watching women and children being stopped at the border. For the sake of Merkel’s optics, Europe has become a safe-haven for terrorists and savages who slash and burn their way across many European countries with generous welfare states and no backbone to say no because it contradicts their multiculturalist generosity and Fabian socialist values.

It is not just the European youth who want to stay in college forever at the expense of government, with no idea as to what kind of taxes the rest of society must pay for all the welfare. Millennials are learning from their European counterparts that they deserve everything for free simply because they exist. The elderly in the former Iron Curtain countries are longing for the “simple days of communism.” And the young, who have no experience or idea what communism was like foolishly vote and demonstrate to bring about neo-communism.

The youth of Macedonia are involved in #resist and are active in trying to destabilize their center-right government, using anarchist advice from a translation into Macedonian of Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, and money from the many radical NGOs in the west, allegedly including the Open Society Foundations.

Much of the youth in Romania who demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands for days, resisting (#resist) against an imaginary oppression, did not bother to vote because the government was not giving them discounts to go by bus to vote, only to those who had to go by train. According to my friend Darius, who lives in Romania, the Social Democrat Party’s (PSD) hard-core senior supporters threatened their grandchildren if they went out to vote.  The elderly nostalgia for communism included the PSD promise of higher pensions. It did not matter to them that the PSD leader, Liviu Dragnea, was a “convicted criminal.” “Dragnea appointed a Muslim woman as Prime Minister. President Klaus Johannis rejected his PM choice as her husband’s ties to Syria came to light.”

Twenty-seven years after the theoretical fall of communism, Romania still struggles with the scars left by decades of totalitarian rule under a brutal communist dictator. Lacking the Romanian version of the American dream, most people put in positions of power use their authority to enrich themselves and their friends because stealing was a way of survival under communism and it remains “glorified” today. People vote for corrupt and often uneducated leaders because they sell their votes for a disposable cell phone or a 15 euro bribe. Then they complain when nothing changes. Corruption is a way of life, including the expectation and acceptance of bribes.

Poor Romanians, who fell through the cracks of EU development funds, still live the same deprived lives. They may find more food but cannot afford it, nor are they able to bribe doctors under the socialized medical care system. Unable to afford private insurance premiums, such superior care remains a luxury service. Consequently, many die of treatable conditions while waiting their turn  in numerous lines to be seen by socialized medicine government doctors.

Communist rhetoric of equality and social justice entices and mesmerizes well-fed and clothed American millennials who are surrounded by wealth, food, proper medical care, good housing, transportation, college education paid by Pell grants, electronic gadgets, their Starbucks lattes, heating, cooling, clean streets, cars, and malls. They have no idea what communist life was and is like. Few visit Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea to see how people actually live under communist oppression. Thoroughly brainwashed, millennials dismiss as propaganda all testimonials of those who had lived under communism, survived and escaped to the west.

As Eugene Lyons wrote in his 1937 book, Assignment to Utopia,  ”The Russian Revolution, in March, 1917, was, for most of the boys in my college freshman classes, just one more headline in a time replete with startling news.” They understood it as the initial stage of the world revolution, the fight against capitalists in America, the very capitalism that gave new American arrivals an opportunity to a better life.

“Anarchists, socialists, American lumberjacks, Jewish clothing workers, Russian intellectuals, Italian terrorists, Hindu nationalists, even liberals with creases in their pants and Harvard accents” were part of the radical movements during Eugene Lyon’s youth.

Not unlike today, the rabid anarchists of the turn of the twentieth century were brainwashed in college and on the streets to fight against the “capitalist injustice.” Their simpler motives were greed and envy. The sweat shops of the have nots and the opulence of the haves were infuriating the anarchists, many of whom were either coming from a working class background or were well off and ashamed of their creature comforts, yet were unwilling to give them up.

The shackles binding the people of the world to oppression were the shackles fashioned by communist revolutionaries and Bolsheviks who had a huge following of college-age anarchists. Crafty and sly, the commies sugar-coated empty and deceptive promises of egalitarian utopia, passing on clever euphemisms to new generations, including today’s oblivious global citizen youth who have no clue what they are dreaming of and demanding in their #resist demonstrations and riots.