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.
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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
Stella
Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.