Communist genocide/murder in the 20th century is
only dwarfed Islamic genocide/murder Muslims committed from days of its founder
to the present. Stella Morabito writing for The Federalist says
Communist 20th century regime victims numbered to the rounded number
of 100 MILLION. Bill Warner of Political Islam estimates 270 MILLION jihad victims died in 1400 years at
the hands of Islamic theopolitical Muslims.
Just think! In about a hundred period Communist regimes kill
a little more than one-third the victims of Islam motivated butchery. Keeping
that in mind, November 7 will mark the 100th anniversary of the
Bolshevik Revolution that produced the first dedicated Communist nation.
Morabito has some thoughts about that anniversary.
Read her essay by keeping in mind the modern Communist movements in America
deluding their adherents about Marxist proclivities: Antifa, Refuse Fascism,
Black Live Matter (BLT), New Black Panthers, SPLC to name a few and let’s
include the Democratic Party pretending to care about the poor and American
minorities.
JRH 11/6/17
***************
The Bolshevik
Revolution Reveals Six Phases From Freedom To Communist Misery
A hundred years on from
the Bolshevik Revolution, we’d do well to study the stages and trends that put
free societies on the path to totalitarianism.
NOVEMBER 6, 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 [Blog Editor: I don’t know about you, but I had uncertainty
about the definition of “agitprop.” Here is a definition at the end of
this paragraph next to asterisk (*).]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.
*agitprop:
Noun
1. Agitation and propaganda,
especially for the cause of communism.
2. (often initial capital
letter) an agency or department, as of government, that directs and coordinates
agitation and propaganda.
3. Also, agitpropist.
A person who is trained or takes part in such activities. (Dictionary.com)
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.” [Bold Text Blog Editors]
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.
____________
Blog Editing by John R. Houk
Copyright © 2017 The
Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media, All Rights
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