Once the
groundwork is laid for Communism, it can impose itself by consolidating its
takeover of society’s institutions, by enforcing conformity, then moving to its
‘final solutions’ phase.
NOVEMBER 8, 2017
As we mark
the 100th anniversary of the communist takeover of Russia on November 7, 1917
(October 25, according to the old Russian calendar at the time), it’s worth
pondering how the road to communism is paved. After all, its legacy is the murder of more than 100 million
victims in the twentieth century alone. What mileposts or trends might we
identify on the twisted road to communism?
Obviously there are different factors at play in different
cultures and eras. Russia at the time was on a path to great economic and
social reforms. But the instability and suffering caused especially by Russia’s
involvement in World War I created a window of opportunity for violent
overthrow. Vladimir Lenin seized upon this immediately when he arrived out of
exile in April that year to fire up the crowds in Saint Petersburg.
Once communism gained a foothold in Russia, it doomed
its citizens to lives of scarcity, misery, social distrust, terror, and mass
murder. The same goes for China. Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, the Castros, Che Guevara,
Joseph Stalin, the Kims of North Korea—all of them were brutal
dictators enabled by a system that always places too much power into the hands
of too few people. It’s a corrupt and cruel system that allows an elite
oligarchy—which Lenin called a “vanguard”—to enslave the entire population.
But what
about a nation like America, which was built on the idea that every human being
is endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We have a Constitution that
guarantees these rights and separates the branches of government, placing
restraints on government so individuals may live freely. Furthermore, this
document intentionally contained the seeds of slavery’s destruction. Americans
shed a lot of blood to protect the freedoms enshrined in that document for us
and for our posterity.
So is it
possible that we, a free people, could ever throw it all away? Could we sell
ourselves into the slavery called communism? Sadly, of course we could. Anyone
who forgets his birthright is more likely to squander it. And there has been a
lot of forgetting. As Ronald Reagan warned, “freedom is never
more than one generation away from extinction.”
This is the
third in a three-part series that attempts to parse the conditions and trends
that might lead a free people to succumb to totalitarianism. In the first article, I
sketched six basic phases, or processes, on the road to communism, and
summarized the trends of each: 1.) Laying the groundwork through the
cultivation of ignorance; 2.) Propaganda; 3.) Agitating the masses; 4.)
Consolidating control over society’s institutions; 5.) Coercing conformity; and
6.) Final solutions.
In the second article,
I identified in more detail the trends of the three earlier phases. In this I
will try to identify trends associated with the three latter phases. Of course,
there is a lot of overlap, and I’m sure readers can add many trends, including
major ones, to the list. My goal is simply to build some sort of a reference
list that helps identify with some specificity the conditions through which
totalitarianism can root itself into an otherwise free society. My hope is that
we might be better able to see—then work to remove and reverse—some of the
roadblocks to freedom that lead us, unwittingly or otherwise, into communism’s
path of human cruelty and evil.
Phase 4: Taking Over the
Institutions of Free Society
A free society has numerous and diverse institutions. Aside from
the political and the military, there are economic, social, and cultural
institutions that allow for a vibrant social life and the cross-pollination of
ideas. A communist society, on the other hand, cannot allow any institution to
be autonomous. They all must be absorbed by the state and serve the state.
The
institution of family is an especially sharp thorn in communism’s side, since
it allows parents to influence future generations. Edmund Burke aptly wrote
that families are the “little platoons” of
society. In the eyes of totalitarians, then, autonomous families are viewed as
subversive cells. Activists for big government have placed enormous focus on
undermining the family, as well as other mediating institutions of society such
as the church and voluntary civic associations.
Consolidating the
takeover. Nearly 100 years ago, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci
declared that the key to achieving global communism was through culture, not
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 Saul Alinksy picked up on this theme,
noting that “the system” (i.e., American freedom) could only be destroyed once
radical operatives had secured control over society’s institutions. The deep
state is one example of institutional takeover that’s been building through
decades of bureaucratic bloat, with operatives embedded in the military and
intelligence agencies. The cultural takeover of media outlets, academia, and
entertainment is both broad and deep today, after decades of creep.
But it is the mediating institutions have been most relentlessly
attacked—family, church, and voluntary organizations—because they serve as
buffer zones of influence that help shield individuals from abuses by the
state. Today they are more vulnerable than ever to total absorption by the Mass
State, a prerequisite for communism.
State takeover of family. We
should now understand that agendas like “marriage equality” are not really
about social inclusiveness, no matter how people feel. The main effect of the
Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision is abolishing any legal
recognition of marriage as an institution that unites a man and woman, with any
potential offspring, into an autonomous family unit. That opens the door to a
Pandora’s Box that allows more state intrusion into family life.
Most folks
weren’t even aware that transgenderism was such a big part of the package until
the Obergefell decision was secured. As LGBT
activist and journalist Masha Gessen accurately
proclaimed in 2012: The goal was not gay marriage, but marriage extinction.
That naturally means state control over families, and by extension, all
personal relationships.
We see this
happening in large school systems that dictate what parents must allow their
children to be taught about sexuality and when. It happens as judges
demand small business owners disavow
their faith or face financial ruin. It happens when a voluntary
association like the Boy Scouts denies its very name by bowing down to gender
ideology. These are not so much changes in the institutions themselves, as signs
that the state is absorbing those institutions.
Destruction of childhood. Radical
education reformers are pushing for a national curriculum that focuses on “social emotional learning”
(SEL) as the supposed path to better academic learning. It is a monolithic
curriculum in which a group called the Consortium for Academic, Social, and
Emotional Learning (CASEL) aims to dictate exactly how children should feel and
relate to other people.
Data mining
and universal mental health assessments are
part of the program. Identity politics feeds the curriculum. CASEL’s proposed
programming of children demands 100 percent compliance with its methods,
content, and monopoly, so it leaves virtually no room for the healthy
development of independent thinking and unique personalities.
Attacks on church doctrine from
within. The Catholic Church has long been infiltrated by socialist
and communist clergy, as Bella Dodd attests in her memoir as
a former member of the Communist Party USA. We see it in liberation theologies
that date back to the 1950s in Latin America.
The biblical
doctrine that seems most under attack today is God’s creation of humanity as
male and female and God’s sanctioning of their union as one flesh in the
sacrament of marriage. The LGBT agenda took over in the Episcopal Church more
than 20 years ago, though clergy like Bishops James Pike and John Spong pushed
it along in the 1960s and 70s. We now see a proliferation of what I call the
“headgear brigade” of various rainbow-clad “clergy” and their lay activist
allies working hard to plant the LGBT rainbow flag
onto all places of worship.
By undermining the theology and doctrines within the churches
themselves—with the double whammy of undermining family at the same time—the
path to totalitarianism becomes even clearer.
Phase 5: Forcing Conformity
This is the phase in which people start waking up—late—to the many
deceptions on the road to totalitarianism. This would include many who actually
bought into the lies. When a free person actually sees what the enforcement of
conformity looks and feels like, he or she starts to reassess and perhaps
switch sides. This is why the enforcement is ironclad, fast, and furious. Its
trends are as follows.
Ritual defamation. Laird
Wilcox, a scholar of extremist movements, wrote up an excellent explanation of
“The Practice of Ritual Defamation.”
Read it to gain insight into some patterns of totalitarian operation. Wilcox
writes that ritual defamation is “accomplished primarily through the
manipulation of words and symbols. It is not used to persuade, but to punish.
Although it may have cognitive elements, its thrust is primarily
emotional. Ritual Defamation is used to hurt, to
intimidate, to destroy, and to persecute, and to avoid the dialogue, debate and
discussion upon which a free society depends. On those grounds it must be
opposed no matter who tries to justify its use.”
We can see a
growing trend towards ritual defamation, from hurling the epithet “racist”
against scholars like Charles Murray on college campuses to tarring mothers as
“transphobics” when they object to the teaching of transgenderism to
their kindergarteners and must be interviewed incognito to protect them from
social assault. (Here’s looking at you, Southern Poverty Law Center.)
Psychiatry as a political
weapon. There is a history behind the weaponization of the
profession of psychiatry to solidify compliance in communist societies. Most
notorious was the confinement of political dissenters to psychiatric wards in
the Soviet Union. Many of those abuses came to light in the 1979 book, “A
Question of Madness: Repression Through Psychiatry in the Soviet Union,”
by Zhores and Roy Medvedev.
Although
such widespread abuse is not the case in America today, we can see signs that
the political weaponization of psychiatry is growing. Consider the LGBT lobby’s
drive to outlaw any conversations in a
therapist’s office that do not enforce the LGBT agenda, including
imposing transgenderism on any child who claims to be transgender. Laws that
have been enacted against reparative or “conversion therapy” aim to prevent
people from changing their minds about living out a homosexual orientation or a
transgender identity.
But those
laws don’t seem to apply when someone wants to move in the other direction, so
they do seem to allow and encourage conversion in one direction only.
Meanwhile, CASEL’s agenda of Social Emotional Learning aims
to conduct mental health screenings on all children without their parents’
knowledge or consent. Several legislators would like to have mental health
screenings conducted on anyone who buys a firearm. And, of course, there’s a
concerted effort by various politicos and psychiatrists, with petition drives, to
declare President Trump mentally unfit to hold office. The list goes on.
“Struggle sessions.” Chinese
communist leader Chairman Mao was a big fan of communists getting together for
“sessions of criticism and self-criticism,” supposedly to keep the party pure
and active. During the murderous era of the Cultural Revolution, these sessions
were very common.
The struggle sessions, however, were
basically data-mining operations meant to expose participants’ private thoughts
that could be used as ammo against them later, and to publicly humiliate as
well as incriminate others in the session. The film “Angi Vera” shows how
such sessions cemented social distrust and fear when the communists took power
in 1940s Hungary.
Can we hear
echoes of such “sessions of criticism and self-criticism” in the so-called “white
privilege” workshops proliferating on college campuses? In them, students are
directed to admit guilt and spill their guts about attitudes they may or may
not have held that contribute to their “privilege” in society. Basically,
they’re supposed to apologize for having happy
childhoods and strong relationships. What misery.
False confessions. Regarding
political correctness, we’re a society of wimps. Whenever a celebrity issues an
apology for saying the “wrong” thing, I can’t help but think about the
communist use of recantations to enforce strict conformity. The victims tend to
hold out hope for “rehabilitation” and the relief of not becoming a non-person
if they recant.
As long as
they issue enough mea culpas, they tend to be allowed some penance,
though now owned through extortion. This is what the enforcers are really
looking for to build conformity with their agendas. However, when Mozilla
honchos took CEO Brendan Eich to task in 2014 upon discovering his private
contribution to California’s Proposition 8 in 2008—supporting the definition of
marriage as a male-female institution—I believe they were invested in Eich
giving a major mea culpa. Instead, Eich simply stepped down, which
is refreshing given our PC culture. (By the way, Eich has since developed a new
web browser that does not track you like Google does. It’s called Brave, and I recommend it.)
Surveillance society and
cultivation of social distrust. The secret police in East
Germany made a point of invading the private spaces of its citizens, as
superbly illustrated in the film “The Lives of Others.” Despite the
Internal Revenue Service’s abuses against conservative groups or the data
mining of kids in public education, we still aren’t living in 1980s East
Berlin. But consider how celebrities like Lena Dunham seem intent on
leading us there.
For example, in August she modelled on Twitter how to eavesdrop
and snitch on private citizens having conversations about personal matters. She
reported two American Airlines flight attendants she claimed were having a
transphobic conversation at a terminal in JFK airport. She later made a point
of telling everyone that she would continue to listen for signs of politically
incorrect talk in private conversations.
The idea, of
course, is to dictate what we are allowed to say even in private. There’s a lot
of relational aggression and invasion of privacy here. In the meantime, human
resources departments direct employees to report overheard
conversations that are politically incorrect.
Phase 6: Final Solutions
Communists, like Nazis and other totalitarians, will never give up
power without a fight. This is argument enough for not allowing their foot into
the door in the first place. Despite all of the mockeries of anti-communism
that come out of the media and pop culture, the reality is that communism’s
history is bloody because it is in a constant fight against people’s right to
live freely. This impulse against others’ freedom tends to be ingrained in
people who have a stubbornly materialistic or atheistic outlook on life. What
else is there besides power?
Dehumanization leads to flimsy
pretexts for eliminating the “other.” Totalitarians use all manner of
pretexts to get their way. Their calls for “equality” and “justice” tend to
morph into demands for removal of their enemies “by any means necessary.” As
the slogans and memes of dictators get internalized by the populace at large,
groupthink solidifies. This gives power elites greater and greater latitude in
eliminating perceived enemies.
Especially
interesting is how murderous dictators in history tend to project their own
intentions onto their perceived opponents. (That observation is brilliantly
made in the Learning Company’s course “Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century.”)
For example, when Stalin forced the collectivization of agriculture, he accused
the farmers in Ukraine of trying to starve the nation. He then starved out and
murdered some seven million of them in the winter of 1933-34.
In like
manner, Adolph Hitler accused the Jews of trying to destroy the Germans, then
killed more than six million Jews. In the 1990s the Hutus in Rwanda ran an
intense propaganda campaign accusing the Tutsis of being devils who had it in
for the Hutus. Surprise: half a million Tutsis were slaughtered, answering the
Hutu propaganda campaign by chopping up their Tutsi neighbors with machetes. As
the granddaughter of Armenian genocide survivors, I’ve concluded that genocide always begins with
groupthink.
Officially ending even the
pretense of due process or free speech. We’ve been moving in this
direction for a long time. When college administrators decide to consider any allegation of rape a de
facto conviction, no trial necessary or allowed, we are well on our
way to dispensing of due process, the right to face one’s accuser, or such
quaint ideals as innocent until proven guilty. By the same token, the First
Amendment is being attacked under the guise of preventing “hate speech.”
Growing justification of
violence. Once communism is established, the dam breaks on the use of
violence and murder to quell dissent. But prior to the consolidation of power,
we see a growing justification for using violence as a means to social justice.
The use of riots and violence to effect political change has not just
increased, but some mainstream commentators are getting a lot less squeamish
about promoting violence as the only means to achieving justice. Consider this
passage from Ezra Klein’s interview with
Ta-Nehisi Coates, who cannot shake his bitterness over the existence of evil in
the world:
When he tries to describe the events that would
erase America’s wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his
thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror.
‘It’s very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that
might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition
of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even
attacking the process. I think these things don’t tend to happen peacefully.’
For readers unfamiliar with the French Revolution (since they
weren’t taught about it in school), it was basically a time of revenge
killings, mob violence, and guillotine executions, all promoted through
groupthink. People actually marched through the streets of Paris with the heads
of their perceived enemies on pikes. Thomas Jefferson was appalled, but since
he was a slave-owner who helped put together a self-correcting system that
would abolish slavery in all of its forms, the French Revolution mentality
would have him discredited, his memorial in Washington dismantled, and perhaps
even have his grave desecrated as well.
Let’s also
note how the SPLC’s “hate map” motivated a gunman to
enter the Family Research Center in Washington DC, and open fire with the
intent of killing as many people as he could. Another gunman inspired by the SPLC was
James Hodgkinson, who on June 14 attempted to assassinate several
Republican congressmen when he opened fire on a baseball field where they were
practicing. Nearly fatally wounded was House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. It’s
interesting how quickly the media dropped the story. Another consideration on
the subject of violence is philosopher Hannah Arendt’s thesisthat “the
greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater the attraction of
violence.”
Hostility towards religion and
prayer. It’s never enough for communists to dictate the personal
relationships in society, whether between co-workers, within families, between
spouses, or any other type of relationship. They inevitably make atheism a
state religion, which means you aren’t even supposed to pray or have a private
relationship with God.
An
interesting off-shoot of this mentality is the religion of transhumanism, which
is the idolization of technology (another very old story going back to the
Golden Calf of the Old Testament). Transhumanism seems very modern, of course,
because it’s all tied in to artificial intelligence, melding humans with
machines, thereby causing immortalityand
becoming our own gods. Transhumanists tend to feel they’re in a race against
time to achieve immortality, so they seem likely to view as a deadly threat
anybody who might stand in the way of the transhumanist agenda.
But ultimately, without faith in a Creator, we can’t look beyond
ourselves and see others as human because we inevitably end up succumbing to
the eternal temptation to play God. And playing God is always at the root of
the quest for raw power.
Communism Means Never
Having to Say You’re Happy
There’s no way to underestimate the misery that totalitarian
systems inflict on their victims. I think those who manage to make peace with
the monolithic bureaucracies endemic to communism are in it for the numbing
effect. When merit is a dirty word and mediocrity rules the day, you can coast
on inertia. When we absorb the propaganda of identity politics, there is a
tendency to pat ourselves on the back for being on “the right side of history.”
That’s perhaps one way to cope with the scarcity and the loneliness brought
about by systems that cultivate social distrust, alienation, ignorance, and
mass violence.
The nucleus of human power lies within
us as individuals, in our personal relationships and private conversations.
I listed six phases leading to communism (and all forms of
totalitarianism) simply to try to understand how we can get from there to here.
How did we go from a nation devoted to self-correction of our sins to one that
seems ready to accept totalitarian thought policing and violence against people
we don’t even know—because identity politics does not even allow us to look at
one another as unique individuals?
Let’s
remember that building freedom actually doesn’t begin in the media or Hollywood
or academia. It begins in the “hidden sphere,” as explained in Soviet-era
freedom fighter Vaclav Havel’s essay, “The
Power of the Powerless.” This means that the nucleus of human power lies within
us as individuals, in our personal relationships and private conversations. If
you haven’t noticed, the hidden sphere is the clear target of totalitarian
weapons like political correctness. It is designed to evoke self-censorship and
destroy your ability to reach out and express yourself with others. It’s anti-friendship
to its core.
So our task should always be to reach out to others—one on one and
face to face—to actually get to know them and to help them get to know us. This
is the best way to show our common humanity and to dispel the loneliness,
misery, and lies that infect our society as a result of the many trends
enumerated above. It’s those personal relationships that create a ripple effect
that will return us to the freedom and goodwill breathed into America by its
founding documents.
Stella
Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.