“..they were to attack and destroy the old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. Anything and everything that came before the communist state was to be eliminated.” Sound familiarly woke, no?
In 1984, I was privileged to write the US government’s original document on the revolutionary Marxist government of Granada, all drawn from the original cache of records and papers recovered by the US Marines, Army Rangers, and CIA after the rescue of Granada in 1983. Since then, I’ve continued writing extensively on the radical left, its victims, internal motivations, machinations, and contradictions.
Yet after these forty years, the lure of Marxist doctrines’ irrational presuppositions and never realized promises has not waned. Worse, it seems to be the predominant political theory – camouflaged often with the label of “democratic socialism” – emerging from Ivy League universities down through the educational pipes even to the high school level. Its historically obvious intrinsic evil is ignored, excused, or celebrated.
Frequently I’ve been scolded when I write about the link between Marxism with the modern left in the US and Europe. Its supporters will always argue emotionally about its supposed sensibleness and nobility of the promised equality of socialism. Others take me to task and assert that China and Russia are no longer even “communist,” proven by the fact that they allow certain levels of a free market or capitalist economics.
These arguments are to misread or misrepresent Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Mao, Alinsky, and the long, long line of excruciatingly boring “intellectuals” who have mapped out the long arc to the “scientific” collectivist world order.
The gap between so-called “democratic socialism” and other stages of totalitarianism exists primarily in its publicists’ minds. (One could include Fascism as practiced by Antifa and BLM, where ethnic identity, antisemitism, and manufactured public violence merely replace class warfare – a bait and switch play on Marxist dialectics.) The only certainty of the “socialist” ideal is its failure and, left unattended, its turn to totalitarianism.
Marx and Engels intended to lay out “scientific” analysis and theory that would be the archetype philosophical concepts that would lead to the collapse of capitalism, the abolition of private property, and the rise of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The operational mantra then and now remains a stateless and classless world stripped of a ruling class, and by default, individuals of individualism.
Under the umbrella of Marxist doctrine, the modern radicals worldwide share a core ideology based on absolute political, social and cultural power, obtained by economic control by proxy, law-fare, or outright confiscation. And they all share a fixation on death – first crushing the soul of life, then inevitably taking the breath of life – as a tool for social and political order.
Marx’s original work dealt with economic theory or political economy, seen through the lens of economics and its presumed social-historical creation determining economic outcomes, not a set of economic laws. In this view eliminating private ownership, as an example, would allow for the equal distribution of wealth as an economic outcome – eliminating the social-historical political and legal apparatus that maintained capital created by private property.
[In his book “Intellectuals” (here), the British historian and author Paul Johnson examine the personal life of Karl Marx and his “sheer loathsomeness and shameless fakery.” Even though he was born to wealthy Jewish parents who later converted to Christianity under state pressure, “he was a virulent racist and anti-Semite with a vicious temper.” Mr. Johnson reminds us that Marx not only stole his most famous lines on religion and workers from other authors, but he “never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or industrial workplace in the whole of his life.” He rejected “invitations to do so, and denounced fellow revolutionaries who did.”]
But neither Marx nor Engels described the process that would accomplish the desired economic outcomes. It would take the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to annex his political concepts to Marxism as a working system – and crucial to that was total political control.
The merging of Marx’s scientific-economic outcomes with Lenin’s political control – Marxist-Leninism – would become the twentieth century’s monstrous murder machine – taking a hundred million lives or more. It could not be otherwise. Marxism as a self-anointed scientific certainty and the Leninist paradigm of absolute and exclusive political power demand conformity and submission that only totalitarianism can enforce. And that in turn demands that faith or trust in anything but the state must be destroyed.
More than anything else, the collective hatred of God motivates the modern radicals, as it did Marx and his contemporaries. There is no greater threat to the core of Marxist thought than the Judeo-Christian ethos that birthed the determination for human freedom. Marx, a rabid atheist, had his Ten Planks to replace the Ten Commandments, and it’s no coincidence that a primary goal of Marxism has always been the corruption and final destruction of religious faith.
Recently, the world-famous Israeli Professor, author, and close confidant of Klaus Schwab of World Economic Forum and “Great Reset” fame, Yuval Harari, prominently made the hatred of God a central fixture in the Reset. Harari, also a well-known advocate for “transhumanism,” mating men and women with AI software, wrote, “History began when humans invented gods and will end when humans become gods.” Claiming God and Jesus are “fake news,” his new book, Homo Deus or man-god (here), proclaims, “The era of free will is over.”
This brings us to China, the wolf in wolf’s clothing. It is the world’s mortal threat to peace and security. It stands as the vanguard for the godless. It’s the envied model of the new world order.
If you are of a certain age, you may have the lingering halo of what one might call the cultural “romanticism” of China. It was planted in the culture primarily by Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Good Earth, and watered by Hollywood in the 1930s. Mrs. Buck’s early writing and Hollywood’s adaptations of life in rural China created a deep reservoir of public sympathy and brilliantly exposed Americans and Europeans to an ancient culture with near-biblical thematic dramas.
While perhaps up to 90% of the Chinese population up until the last century have been agrarian laborers, actual power in China was always dynastic or wrought from the land by warlords. Wave after wave of invasion and invading has been more of a pattern than an exception. (Including six world powers, including the US since 1839 and the first opium war with Great Britain, which the Chinese stylize as the “century of humiliation.)
Mao Zedong created modern China. After a protracted civil war from 1927 until 1949 (in which perhaps six million Chinese died), intertwined with the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, followed by WWII, a series of post-war attempts to form a coalition government failed. During the breach of negotiations, Mao’s Communist army marched on and won control of first Peking and then Nanking. The Nationalist army led by General Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island of Formosa, now known as Taiwan, sitting one hundred miles off the mainland and the Taiwan Strait.
Finally with total power Mao (who had come from a wealthy family, became radicalized at an early age, and was educated primarily in France), and his minions proved unable to produce anything but chaos. By 1958, what little of China’s pre-1949 economy remained began unraveling because of total incompetence. Mao’s answer was the Great Leap Forward. This “re-imagined” collectivization program doubled down on the errors of ignoring the fundamental laws of economics that led to the country’s failures in the first place. Its primary objective was to solidify Mao’s slipping power through purges and more mass executions.
Through 1960, depending on whom you consult, 20 to 45 or more million Chinese were purposefully starved to death or murdered, in addition to the murders that had taken place in Mao’s first decade in power. Yet the killing wasn’t finished. Not even close.
By 1966 Mao again faced economic and internal challenges to his power launched the Cultural Revolution, calling on a return to Marxist “purity,” making the audacious claim that this was the cause of the past economic failures.
Mao unleashed China’s young communist students from the universities and schools, who formed the Red Guards, to” transform” China by eliminating, once and for all, the “Four Olds.”
His orders were unambiguous; they were to attack and destroy the old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. Anything and everything that came before the communist state was to be eliminated. And, for those who wouldn’t comply, there was public humiliation known as “struggle sessions,” torture, and execution. It turned into a crazed, frenzied orgy of terror where no one and no idea was safe.
Libraries were destroyed, books burned, and temples and statues were torn down. Historical sites were turned to rubble, including some of China’s most famous sites. Buddhist priests were forced at gunpoint to destroy their monasteries.
By 1968, as the economy further collapsed, Mao closed urban schools and sent nearly 20 million students to rural farms to “receive re-education from poor and low middle-class peasants.”
Between one and two million more Chinese became a part of Mao’s human sacrifice to the idol of his brand of Marxist communism. Countless more were imprisoned without trials, property seized, and families dispersed.
After Mao died in 1976, three leaders were “elected” by the Communist Party of China (CCP) up to the current leader, Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012. (Since he eliminated the term limits, it seems likely that Xi will die in office.)
Now the wolf is all grown up.
