Communism
first requires a vigorous program of preparing people to absorb its rhetoric,
through laying groundwork in education, propaganda, and agitation.
November 7
marks the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. There are many
reasons beyond the historical to ponder the legacy of communism. Ever since Vladimir Lenin
overthrew Russia’s nascent parliamentary democracy in 1917 to establish a
brutal dictatorship, many other nations have fallen for the bait-and-switch
scheme called communism, and often labelled socialism.
Communism
promises equality but delivers scarcity for all but the elites in its
apparatus. It pitches social justice and delivers mass enslavement, widespread
misery, social distrust, and severe punishment for all who might dissent. We’ve
seen these phenomena happen all over the world, in China, North
Korea, Southeast Asia, post-World War II Eastern Europe, Cuba, Central America,
and perhaps most notably visible today in the starvation and chaos of
Venezuela.
During the
twentieth century—and let’s remember this is recent history—communist
regimes murdered more than 100 million people. This sort of astounding cruelty
is in the very nature of the beast called communism. It happens when too much
power gets concentrated into the hands of too few people.
Yet Americans
have a sad history of
flirting with this disaster and many American elites, from 1930s intellectuals
to 1960s radicals, have accepted it completely. We’re seeing another revival
today: Bernie Sanders is a self-professed socialist, and The New York Times recently ran an article doting
on the good old days when communism inspired so many in America.
So, the
questions Americans might best ask themselves today are as follows: How might a
nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created equal” ever buy into the lies of communism, a system tailor-made for
state mass murder? How might a free people ever allow the abolition of a
Constitution that guarantees individual rights, the rule of law, due process,
and is designed to thwart elites from gaining absolute power over others? Why
would anyone, except an advocate of slavery, throw away a document designed from its very
inception to abolish slavery in all of its forms?
In a recent article, I
sketched out six phases on the road to communism, and summarized the trends in
each phase: 1.) Laying the groundwork; 2.) Propaganda; 3.) Agitating the
masses; 4.) Consolidating control over society’s institutions; 5.) Coercing
conformity; and 6.) Final solutions. This follow-up article will examine
the trends in the three earlier phases. The third article in this series will
examine the trends most associated with the three latter phases.
Several of these phases, which are roughly sequential, overlap a
lot. But I think it’s useful to at least try to understand how a phenomenon
that can cause so much human misery and mass murder can possibly gain a
foothold in a free nation. If we can dissect it and study it all more closely,
perhaps we can sidestep some of the pitfalls that drag us down communism’s path
of human cruelty and evil.
Phase 1: Trends that Lay
Groundwork for Tyranny
The first phase towards tyranny in a free society is a
generational or decades-long process. It’s a period in which minds can be
closed to reason and more influenced by emotion and propaganda. Even at institutions
of supposedly higher learning, students start to lose their capacity to think
independent thoughts. We might summarize this as the conditioning phase—maybe
the “programming” stage—that paves the way for groupthink to solidify. Below I
list some of the trends in this phase.
Creep of social policies that
promote polarization, dependency, and human isolation. All
so-called progressive policies cause division and isolation among people. For
example, economic policies that promote dependency create more class divisions
and hostility. When we codify policies that bow down to identity politics, we
fuel divisions by race, class, sex, religion, and so forth. All such policies
tend to wreak havoc on personal relationships.
The metastasizing of the welfare state under President Lyndon
Johnson caused a lot of dependency. Some of its offshoots, such as “Aid to
Families with Dependent Children,” perpetuated family breakdown with a
carrot-and-stick effect that rewarded single motherhood then financially
punished the family if the mother married.
The list of policies that breed human isolation goes on: Policies
that promote the sexual revolution discourage bonds of marriage and family;
No-fault divorce promotes the separation of spouses. Policies that punish
married parents and reward single parenthood promote the separation of children
from their parents. Also, no matter how you feel about abortion, you can’t deny
that it erodes the social value given to the mother-child bond.
Broken families lead to broken communities. We can see how those
earlier policies that promoted isolation continue to proliferate today, from
the threat of rationing from state-run health care to euthanasia as a byproduct
of abortion on demand. The effects of such policies include the loneliness epidemic
we’re seeing today, demoralization, and social chaos.
Disabling of independent
thought. Nothing is more threatening to petty dictators than a
citizenry’s widespread ability to think clearly and independently.
Radical education reformers have
sought for generations to drum the capacity for independent thought out of
students. “Critical thinking” has been made into a garbage term for fads that
have students doing anything but gain content knowledge.
Most college
students today probably could not answer even a fraction of the questions on
an eighth grade general knowledge
exam from 1912. Without core knowledge, people have a difficult time
putting any knowledge into its proper context. After decades of such
politicizing reforms, you can end up with college students so muddled in their
thinking that they need “trigger warnings” before reading anything that might
conflict with the social and emotional programming they’ve experienced. In the
propaganda phase, we’ll see how political correctness compounds
this problem by cultivating the fear of rejection for expressing one’s
thoughts.
Ever more bureaucratization. Human
freedom is inversely proportional to the bloat of the administrative state. I’m
not sure who should be credited with first making this observation. It resounds
in the work of the American Founders, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Hayek,
and even the psychiatrist Carl Jung, among
many others. But the piles of regulations that put businesses, as well as
personal lives, into straitjackets attest to this destabilizing trend for human
freedom.
You can trace this back quite a ways, particularly with President
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs put into place to address the Great
Depression. But it certainly helped put into high gear the bloat we see today.
Compounding the problem is the notion that immigration should be limitless and
the nation borderless, despite a national debt of $20 trillion. The metastasis
of bureaucracy is a huge indicator we’ve been on the path to centralized power
that feeds corruption and lays groundwork for communism.
Erasure of collective
memory. Another crime of radical education reform is its attack on the
study of history, civics, and the classics of literature. Today we can see the
bitter fruits of such 1960s radical education reform, which has roots going
back to 1920s with John Dewey. If we are no longer able to place ourselves and
society into the context of historical events, our vision going forward will be
blurred at best.
It gets even
worse if we don’t learn how our form of government functions. Today fewer and
fewer college students have the capacity to understand that
the First Amendment serves as a buffer against totalitarianism, not something
to be abolished under the pretext of “hate speech.” And depriving students
exposure to literary classics like Shakespeare (based on the charge that such
works are “Western” and therefore ethnocentric) prevents them from discussing
the universal human condition and our common humanity.
Instead, students are increasingly fed grievance studies and
identity politics. As universities go this route, it trickles down to K-12
education. As a result, we are losing the social glue of our common traditions
and heritage—not just as a nation, but as human beings. This cultivation of
ignorance by the education establishment over the years compounds the isolating
effect on people. It makes youth especially vulnerable to becoming fodder for
power elites.
Hoarding of knowledge about
group dynamics. Are you tuned in to how the laws of social psychology drive your
behavior? Or how the manipulation of the primal human fear of being isolated
and rejected allows for PC-induced self-censorship that fuels conformity? How
groupthink affects us? Probably not.
Thirty years
ago, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing wrote
about this deficit in general knowledge. In her book, “Prisons We Choose to
Live Inside,” Lessing theorized that power elites have actually hoarded
knowledge of mass psychology so they can better control the masses. Her thesis
makes sense: If everyone understood the manipulators’ game, the game would be
over for them.
Phase 2: Manufacturing
Propaganda
Propaganda
is not so much a phase as an ever-present nuisance. But once its groundwork has
been laid in the minds of men, propaganda’s intensity and effectiveness
increases in direct proportion to the ignorance out there. You’ll find many
definitions of propaganda, but my definition goes like this: Propaganda is the
process by which power elites condition individuals
through psychological manipulation to adapt to an agenda. Some of its trends
are as follows.
Language manipulation. The
whole point of the totalitarian abuse of language is to prevent independent
thought, the subject of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English
Language.” When people accept the abuse of language, and incorporate it into
their own vocabularies without thinking about it, they can be easily
ventriloquized by power elites.
Victor
Klemperer addressed this phenomenon in his book “Language of the Third Reich.”
His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means
of turning all German people into Nazis. He writes, “They found it difficult to
think about life and morality in any other way. . . .Words are like tiny doses
of arsenic, swallowed unnoticed, and then after a while the toxic reaction sets
in.”
His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s
abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into
Nazis.
Consider all
the weaponized memes and slogans we swallow today that shape how we think:
“woke,” “bend the knee,” and “cisgender” are just a few. All are meant to
modify our thoughts and behaviors in everyday life. An especially aggressive
abuse of language are new laws that enforce strange pronoun usages that
destabilize the structure of our language. By passing laws that punish the
“misgendering” of someone as “hate speech,” we veer into kangaroo court
territory, as well as force unnatural changes in our language.
Revising history. A byproduct
of watering down of the study of history is the revision and mockery of
history, such as is evident in the late Howard Zinn’s textbook, “The People’s
History of the United States.” His basic thesis appears to be that our
constitutional system of checks and balances needs to be replaced by an
oligarchy of dictators such as himself who know better. It seems to teach
students that everything that ever happened at the founding of America is bad,
bad, bad. Such revisionism also serves to perpetuate identity politics that
stokes resentments rather than building any sense of unity among Americans.
Journalism becomes propaganda. There
was once a quaint notion that reporting should be objective and fact-based
rather than biased and opinion-based. Journalists tend to view themselves as
watchdogs, yet over the years have become increasingly unaccountable to anyone.
As the profession’s political shift to the Left has crystallized to beyond 90
percent, it’s now so monolithic in its perspective that it can hardly help but
churn out propaganda.
When I wrote
a Federalist article entitled “How Journalism Turns into
Propaganda,” I focused on the story “Angi Vera,” from a
Hungarian film. It revealed how the communists in Hungary, once they seized
power in 1947, used education camps to develop a compliant class of leaders to
replace the old order. The title character quickly learned the art of
propaganda compliance, with all of the subtle backstabbing it entailed, and she
was rewarded by the authorities with a lifelong career in journalism.
New technologies promote
political correctness and cult-like mindsets. In 1962, when Daniel
Boorstin published “The Image: A Guide
to Pseudo-Events in America,” he warned how glomming onto new technologies like
television was making us more susceptible to accepting images as reality. We
were losing our ability to thoughtfully deliberate about ideas and events. He
anticipated this would get worse as then-yet-to-be-invented technologies would
shift us even more quickly into substituting pseudo-reality for reality.
Wow, was he ever right. No doubt the Internet, cell phone
technologies, and social media endlessly present illusions in place of reality.
At the same time, they solidify political correctness. And since the main
purpose of political correctness is to achieve conformity of thought, we ought
to ask: Where does conformity of thought takes us, if left to its own devices?
It’s a dream-come-true for totalitarians who no doubt hope for a conformity
that would allow them to remake the world in their own image.
Such
conformity would morph into a globalized cult mindset that
crosses through all segments of society: politics, education, medicine, the
media, and the corporate world, to name just a few sectors. Psychiatrist and
cult expert Margaret Thaler Singer called
this “the psycho-technology of thought reform,” and warned it was very real and
not going to go away, adding that “Education, information, and vigilance are
needed to keep us and our minds free.”
Phase 3: Agitation and
Mass Mobilization
The whole
point of propaganda is to drive people to action, according
to Jacques Ellul, author of the 1962 classic “Propaganda: The
Formation of Men’s Attitudes.” Such action isn’t about freedom of peaceful
assembly, which is an American tradition as well as a First Amendment right.
From the suffragettes of the early twentieth century to the civil rights
marches in the 1960s to the March for Life that began in 1974, Americans tend
to gather with those of like mind to march against injustice. But today we can
see growing trends towards something very different: street theater that
actually serves to shut down freedom of expression. Trends in agitation
including the following.
Cultivation of hate and
frustration. Can you feel it? There’s a lot of frustration and alienation
out there, thanks to groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center who
seem deeply invested in perpetuating hate and resentment. Americans are traditionally
a big-hearted and happy people, filled with enthusiasm over innovation and
goodwill towards all. In part, that’s exactly why the SPLC’s propaganda has
worked in the past: because it fulfills the Saul Alinsky rule of
using people’s goodwill against them to gain political power.
Alinsky also advocated for the intense polarization we see today,
telling “community organizers” to rub victims’ resentments raw, to cultivate
intense anger against their perceived oppressors in order to energize mob
action. Of course, such power elites who strive for totalitarian rule have
always been invested in maintaining a large underclass of people who are kept
dependent and ignorant since that builds a sense of frustration and alienation
that can be channeled into mobilizing them into mob action.
The history of the recent twentieth
century is filled with mass action that led to totalitarian dictatorships.
Mass mobilization. This
is the craft of getting the alienated and frustrated masses, programmed by
propaganda, to do the bidding of power elites. We saw it happen in Charlottesville, as
well as in Berkeley, at Middlebury College,
and Dartmouth and
many other places. Today the goal is to shut down speech and real conversation.
Such mobs generally make a lot of noise and create a lot of action so that they
get their way, even if they represent a small minority.
The history
of the recent twentieth century is filled with mass action that led to
totalitarian dictatorships. Peasants and workers were mobilized to respond to
Lenin’s mantra for “peace, land, and bread” as Russians suffered during World
War I. It happened as Germans took part en masse to
participate in rallies for the Third Reich. Always the Enemy was invoked,
whether a class enemy, a race enemy, or any other sort.
Today the
term of choice is “white supremacist.” Demagogues stoke resentments until
lawlessness and mass violence became the order of the day. But let’s also
consider a smaller but significant American example of mob action from 2015:
after former governor Mike Pence signed into law Indiana’s Religious Freedom
Restoration Act, mobs of protesters were mobilized to show up and shout his
action down, as though they represented majority opinion, when they most
certainly did not. Corporations pressured Pence as well.
Sadly, that organized mob action worked, and Republican leadership
including Pence altered the bill to suit the protesters. America is now seeing
a lot more street theater and violent riots aimed at shutting down conversation
on college campuses as well as shutting down law enforcement in cities
suffering from high crime rates.
Iconoclasm. The
attack on historical monuments may seem to have started with Confederate statues.
But it is certainly not ending there. From World War I monumentsto
statues of Abraham Lincoln and
memorials to George Washington,
just about any historical monument these days is subject to attack or
defacement by agitators induced to action by propaganda. It’s another trend
that hastens the erasure of national memory and social cohesion.
Enlisting and confusing the
youth. Statist youth leagues have always been a staple of dictators who
wish to eliminate family loyalties and religious influences. Although we may
not see a Soviet-styled Komsomol in America just yet, there has been an ongoing
attack against youth programs that promote self-reliance, independent thought,
and the integrity of the family. It’s not just that the Boy Scouts have
gone soft. School boards in major districts across the nation are pushing curricula and policies that
force children to cater to identity politics, environmentalism, transgenderism, and
so much more than children should ever be forced to grapple with.
As children attempt to navigate the perceptions of their peers and
the authorities, they learn how they can score points and avoid rejection if
they agitate for those agenda items. Children tend to imitate. They will playact
various personas at the expense of developing unique personalities, if they are
led to believe that is how to gain peer acceptance. Likewise, in higher
education students participate in mob action—in particular, shutting down the
speech of the politically incorrect—so they can don the persona of “social
change agent” or something else the authorities deem acceptable.
All of the above sets the scene for the latter phases in the road
to communism and other forms of totalitarianism. Those phases are: consolidating
the takeover of society’s institutions; forcing conformity; and final
solutions. To be continued.
Stella
Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.
