Barack Obama -- the Perfect American Stalinist

"If they bring a knife, we'll bring a gun"

                                   Barack Obama

 

The ignominious American decampment from Vietnam and the subsequent collapse of the South Vietnamese government and capitulation to the Communists coincided with the death of anti-Communism in the U.S. The parallelism is striking—military withdrawal abroad; cultural surrender at home. The many Marx-quoting, Castro- and Mao-admirers who occupied chairs in America’s best universities (e.g. the “Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies,” Bard College) made careers out of pooh-poohing the supposed evils of Communism and smearing anti-Communists. Whitaker Chambers was a psycho, the Rosenbergs were framed, McCarthy’s Communists-in-the-State-Department was a paranoid fiction, and Ho Chi Minh was the George Washington of Vietnam. Anti-communism was now the accoutrement of rubes and crackpots bearing all the marks of unsophistication, narrow-mindedness and chauvinism, and could be responded to with simply a shrug, a sneer or mockery. Anti-Communism was a failure to comprehend the profound dimensions of America’s own moral shortcomings. Communism, of course, had fallen short of its egalitarian, humanistic aspirations, but America needed to be called to account for the growing recognition of the multitude of its past transgressions – especially slavery and segregation.

Because the Communists excelled at pretending to be virtuous and at hiding their iniquities, it came as a big shock to the sophisticates in the West with all of their admiration for central planning when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed in the early 1990s partly under its own dead weight of stagnation, corruption and incompetence and partly pushed by Ronald Reagan and Star Wars. Seventy plus years of Marxist-Leninist rule had turned Russia into a third world slum and thus revealed the essence of Stalinism – utopian promises; dystopian reality – a “Socialist Workers Paradise” whose vodka-besotted workers could not even produce a decent pair of shoes or blue jeans that anyone wanted to wear.

A Stalinist world is a universe of posturing and pretending where everything is the opposite of what it is officially declared to be. “Plenty” in reality was penury. The promise of liberation from exploitation unfolded in the Gulag and the creation of a massive system of lethal forced labor. The reality of equality became a caste system with the Party apparatchiks and bosses exempting themselves from the burdens and reserving the best of everything for themselves. Stalin’s much vaunted anti-Fascism was no less than a mirror of Hitler’s genocidal mass murder, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and brutal secret police. From Moscow to Beijing to Havana to Pyongyang it was the same, depressing storyline, a self-glorifying Stalinist proclaiming the perfection of his reign, while the people he ruled over were poor, hungry, scared and longing to escape.          

With the collapse of the Soviet Union America enjoyed in the aftermath an illusory sense of triumph over Communism. The U.S. Cold War “victory” over the Soviets was completely overblown. The economic and technological superiority of the U.S. was vindicated, but culturally the story was much different. American institutions had “flipped”, so to speak. A conceptual framework and vocabulary absorbed from Marx and Rousseau by America’s intelligentsia had been imperceptibly positioned as a filter that altered the basic perception of American history and American society. Institutions came to be viewed not as civilizing, ameliorating forces that helped to keep destructive human impulses in check and to provide large spheres of personal freedom, but rather as instruments of repression, domination and exploitation. 

Such instruments thus had to be dismantled, a process that required “consciousness raising,” on behalf of the exploited and dominated, helping them recognize their plight through an “unmasking” of the beneficiaries of the repressive order. Universities, schools, mainstream churches, the entertainment industry, all embraced a poly-thematic program that focused on the grievances of various “victim-populations”, on the promotion of subjective self-realization through escape from the confines of traditional norms, and the need to permanently atone for the un-erasable guilt of slavery and segregation. Social fragmentation and atomization followed with the explosion of divorce and single parenthood, the normalization of soft-core pornography, rampant drug trafficking and abuse, and a thorough coarsening and vulgarizing of the popular culture.

Eight years into the 21^st century, only 17 years after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, the country that fifty years earlier loathed the very notion of a Communistic-ruled society with its militant atheism, collectivism and unconstrained, ubiquitous secret police, elected as President a man whose personal history, instincts and aspirations are Marxist. As early as twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that an individual with such extensively documented antagonism and hostility toward the history and institutions of the U.S. would be seriously considered for any national, high office, much less the Presidency.

Obama’s autobiography is a study in self-absorption, self-pity and racial resentment with no detectable appreciation or affinity for anything distinctively or uniquely American. His life’s influences, both personal and intellectual, cited and acknowledged by Obama himself, or undeniably obvious, are all Marxist – Frank Marshall Davis (Dreams from My Father), “Marxist professors,” “Frantz Fanon” (Dreams from my Father), Jeramiah Wright (Obama’s twenty year pastor and mentor), Bill Ayers (Obama’s colleague on the Chicago Annenberg Exchange and suspected ghost-writer of Dreams of My Father). Obama’s influences and associations were all brought up by his critics and opponents during the 2008 campaign but the revelations made no impact. Why? Well, because Communism as a benign, well-intentioned system of social order had become a reflexive, mainstream attitude. While generations of school children had learned all about the Jewish Holocaust, Ann Frank and Hitler’s racism, very few ever heard about the three to five million Ukrainians starved by Stalin, his order for the murder of 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn, Mao’s Great Leap Forward that killed tens of millions of Chinese or Pol Pot’s murder of as many as a fifth of the Cambodian people. Americans were inundated with movies, books, articles and documentaries on the evils of the Nazis but the far more vast crimes of Communism drew little attention. The slant on Communism from the likes of the New York Times has been its idealism and humanism and the heroics of its “anti-Fascism.”  When Fidel Castro finally expires, his New York Times obituary will go on for pages about universal health care in Cuba, ignoring the fact that for decades that while many people have died trying to get out of Cuba, no one has died trying to get in.

When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in a speech in 1983 the outrage from the intellectual class was clamorous and predictable. Eight years later Reagan was vindicated as the Poles, Baltic peoples, East Germans and other countries long subjugated by the Soviets ecstatically threw off the yoke. Reagan’s critics were aghast at the “amiable dunce’s” (courtesy of Clark Clifford) anti-Communism, but people who actually had to live under Communist rule acted out the truth of Reagan’s charge.  Even the suggestion that any of the many aspects about Obama’s past radical associations and perspectives elicited scorn and incredulity from the mainstream media and the opinion makers.     

Obama’s assent to power was neither a fluke nor an accident. His election was inevitable, a consequence of the cultural triumph of the soft Marxism that had been seeping into the corners of America for decades. By 2008 America’s dominant culture-shaping institutions – the schools and universities, the popular culture and entertainment complex, the main stream media and the news syndicates – were solidly Left wing propaganda outlets that: (a) peddled an amoral hedonism steeped in a patois of multiculturalism and moral relativism, and, (b) relentlessly promulgated the rationale for a system of moral blackmail that made white America permanent hostage to the guilt of slavery and de jure segregation. Racism was transformed into something far more complex and multi-faceted than it was originally understood to be, a bigoted belief in the in the innate inferiority of members of a different race.  Racism now permeated every crevice of American society. Protean and ubiquitous it could be direct, indirect, overt, covert, systemic, institutional and only practiced by white people.  Moreover, racism was the only offense such that the mere accusation alone was sufficient to convict. Denial is just more evidence of racism’s invincibility. In 1973 “micro-inequities” were discovered by a Ph.D. from MIT, defined as “as “apparently small events which are often ephemeral and hard-to-prove, events which are covert, often unintentional, frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator, which occur wherever people are perceived to be different.”

One can look back to the 1960s and observe the unfolding of an ironically perverse inverse social dynamic: as the practices of racial discrimination dropped away and attitudes of racial bigotry and white supremacy atrophied and diminished, racism eventually elbowed out every other social malady, becoming ubiquitous, defining America’s character and dominating its history.  The “white man’s burden” had become “white privilege.”         

The ubiquity of American racism gave birth to a new industry comprised of well compensated individuals who are experts in helping make our institutions and work places, as they say, “more diverse,” the main obstacle of which is racial prejudice and bigotry. Some are appointed to multicultural or diversity vice presidencies at universities or companies where they mandate and supervise “sensitivity” training programs and search for “microaggresions”. Others, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are more ambitious free lancers, consummate publicity seekers who show up anywhere there is a likelihood of spinning a “hate crime” or exploiting racial tensions and make incendiary speeches. Their reputations and livelihoods have flourished by intimidating white people with their racial accusations and extorting apologies and concessions. The America they like to portray is permanently frozen in the early 1960s and every county sheriff is Bull Connor. Every career incentive and motivation for their ilk is for America to be viewed as it was in 1963 because in America 2014 there is no need or demand for people with their “talents”.         

Obama was the right candidate at the right time.  First, he was black and as such a candidate of redemption offering white voters the opportunity to prove, finally, that they were free of racism, a deep moral shame that for decades they had been constantly reminded that they had made and perpetuated.  Second, and equally important, he was a black man of the Left, which made him an immediate object of adoration by the elites who inhabited those spheres of influence in the media, political commentary and opinion shaping, and the entertainment industry.  He was proclaimed by these supposedly mature observers as “a sort of God,” a “Lightworker”, a “genius,” etc. Obama’s political assent unfolded rapidly into a cult of personality, which was particularly remarkable given his utter lack of executive experience and political accomplishments, his record of trimming and going-for-the-groin Chicago-style politics. Certainly, there were plenty of highly successful, articulate and brilliant black Americans of conservative pedigree, but they did not fit the right profile and convey the message of American guilt.  These Americans were marginalized and ridiculed not because of their skin color but because they did not reside on the ideological plantation run by the Leftist overseers.                 

Obama’s 2008 campaign was a masterpiece of 21^st-century Stalinism in its pretending and posturing, a gigantic head fake toward the middle of the road largely a-political block of voters, a wholesome non-threatening change agent spouting clichés no one could disagree with – his administration would be the most transparent, competent, smart, accountable, compassionate, etc., etc. – and a projection of cerebral self-control and GQ cool.  He was also lucky to have an aging harridan and an over-the-hill incompetent as his major opposition in the primary and fall election.   

Now some years after the launching of "Hope and Change" it is obvious to all but the blindly partisan that Obama has turned out to be the polar opposite of what he promised he would be. The post-racial, post-partisan miracle man of 2008 was a mirage. Racial tensions and political polarization are the worst since the Vietnam War. Shortly before the 2010 congressional elections, Obama, dropping his ‘g’s’ told a Univision audience, “We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” spoken like a true street organizer with a brass knuckles view of politics. His 2012 campaign, a work of pure character assassination, was the real, “If they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun” Obama.

Obama’s Presidency is the consummation of 21^st century American Stalinism. First for him politics is war, the object being not to electorally defeat the opposition but to discredit it, to destroy it. This approach is rooted in the foundational premise of Marxism, “All history is the history of class struggle.” For Obama, the opposition is a corrupted class of exploiters, characterized primarily by their greed and racism.  Such morally benighted types are not the kind of people with whom you can share power. And so the second Stalinist feature of the Obama Presidency, abuse.  Stalinists, self-perceived, are the “good guy”, the virtuous ones, the smart ones.  Those who oppose and disagree are corrupt and/or stupid, and as such deserve to be reviled.  Republican’s from the beginning of Obama’s first term were, as he called them, “the enemy.”  He routinely attributed the basest motives for their politics and policies. They wanted “dirtier air and polluted water.”  In a speech early in 2013 Obama said:

“They [The Republicans] have a particular vision about what government should and should not do, so they are suspicious about government’s commitments, for example, to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research. So they’ve got a particular view of what government should do and should be.”

This is just one of many examples of the politics of character assassination. As Peter Wehner wrote in Commentary. “During the 2012 election, Obama’s vice president said Republicans want to put African-Americans “back in chains’ while Obama’s top aides and allies implied Governor Romney was a felon and flat-out stated that he was responsible for the cancer-death of a steelworker’s wife.”

The third Stalinist feature of Obama’s Presidency is the flagrant dishonesty. Remember, Stalinism is a pretend-world where what is proclaimed and promised is the opposite of reality. In the fall of 2013 this was dramatically illustrated during the roll out of ObamaCare as thousands of Americans were being dropped from their health insurance policies and the promise of Obama was seen for what it was, a deliberate lie, calculated to ensure his 2012 re-election.  President’s weekly address, June 6, 2009: “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.  If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too.  The only change you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold.”  There were at least 37 documented instances where the President or his top aides made similar promises, yet when the reality of the rollout in late 2013 exposed the gross deception, Obama then lied about the lie he had told.  On November 4, 2013 he said, “We said was, you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”     

Anyone who paid close attention to Obama’s past in 2008 could have seen all of this coming. Unfortunately, his own party had long embraced his ideological agenda, and the mainstream media smitten with his 2004 Democratic Convention speech and delirious with prospect of a "progressive" black man in the White House seem to have decided that his personal history and his political track record really did not matter.  Obama’s 2008 election was a con job – shame on him.  His 2012 reelection was a hatchet job – shame on us. He will be gone soon; his damage will remain with us for a very long time.

THE STALINIZATION OF THE AMERICAN LEFT -- JOHN KERRY

ce, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.  (John Kerry)

n Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

    Remarks before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971

   

John Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

Joseph Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, most likely from a stroke, stricken late during the night in his sleep. In his dotage and pathologically suspicious of doctors, Stalin’s cowering associates hesitated to call for medical assistance fearing his wrath. So he lay helpless for some time, unable to speak or otherwise communicate, soaking in his own urine before his final exodus. When his closest henchmen, Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin, confirmed that “the Boss” was finely and safely dead, they scurried off to the Kremlin offices to clean out the files and papers that might document their extensive complicity in Stalin’s long reign of terror and criminality.  

The Georgian Bolshevik was seventy three years old.  As the undisputed God of the Communist world his passing unleashed paroxysms of grief in the Socialist Workers Paradise of his making and regions elsewhere under the banner of the hammer and sickle. The CPSU bosses set his embalmed corpse next to Lenin’s in the Red Square mausoleum. Eight years later he would be quietly evicted by the ‘kinder, gentler’ Nikita Khrushchev after he began to ponder with his colleagues at the 20^th Party Congress the “imperfections” of the reign of the General Secretary, his long-time mentor and father of the world’s first modern terror-command state, and what they might signal for his own political fortunes.                                 

Stalin’s legacy was not just two and a half decades of repression and mass murder. He also left posterity the gift of Stalinism, a unique form of tyranny that combined systematic terror with an ideology at once rigid yet flexible and adaptable, held together with a mindless cult of personality. The ‘mold’ of J.V. Stalin stamped out a number of working copies – ambitious, overachieving Stalinists wielding vast power in many places. An assortment of vicious, self-infatuated monsters such as Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Communist chiefs of the Eastern block countries, like the Master, devoted their waking energies to the celebration of their self-perceived genius and the wreckage of the millions of lives of those under their domination. The authors of the Black Book of Communism estimate that Communist rule snuffed out the lives of some 100 million people during the 20^th century.     

Stalinism survived Stalin – survived and flourished in fact. In the 21^st century its practitioners have cleverly adapted themselves to the changing world but, like the Bolsheviks from the early days, continue to embrace Stalinism’s core conviction – that they, the Stalinists, alone possess a cognitive and moral superiority that entitles them to wield whatever power they need to smash the old, corrupt order and micromanage the lives of others. The old guard Stalinists were open, confident and ardent about what they intended to do to their real, and imagined, opposition; the 21^st- century ones tend to hide behind the customs, institutions and traditions they loath and surreptitiously work to destroy. Twentieth-century Stalinists were about Revolution: twenty-first-century Stalinists promise “transformation.”

After WWII the Stalinists of note in the U.S. could be found undercover high up in FDR’s government—Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins being some of the better known, as we now know from the Venona decrypts. The America’s mainstream, however, for a season disdained every feature of Communism. During the Cold War, particularly in the early years, most Americans were appalled by the grim spectacle of Soviet imposed helotry in central and eastern Europe and the murderous fanaticism unfolding in Mao’s China, Stalinism with an Asian accent. Americans were also threatened by the Communist self-confident assertions of their superiority and inevitability. “We will bury you!" ("Мы вас похороним!") predicted Nikita Khrushchev while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.

Reflecting the sentiments and convictions of the American people post WWII, both the Republicans and the Democrats at least appeared resolutely anti-Communist. Joseph Kennedy Sr. was close to Joe McCarthy, and early in his career Bobby Kennedy worked for the Wisconsin senator before the American Left accomplished it’s most successful and enduring smear. Nixon of course launched his political career combating Communism in America, defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate race.  Nixon dubbed her as “the pink lady … red down to her underwear.” President Kennedy warned the country of domino threat of Communism to Southeast Asia and following General Maxwell Taylor’s counsel, sent 8,000 troops to Vietnam to support the Catholic, anti-Communist, South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm.

Vietnam, as we now know, was a disaster for the Americans, fifty-seven thousand soldiers who perished fighting there, and, of course, for the Vietnamese all of whom ended up living under a repressive Communist regime. The Vietnam War marked a major turning point for Americans in their engagement with Communism. Rife with political assassinations, race riots and radicalized universities during the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. hard-turned to the Left. Vietnam became for the Left a propaganda fulcrum used to de-moralize America, its traditions, history and promises, all exposed as a various elements of false consciousness that disguised its essential character – a viciously, hopelessly racist, rigged system propped up with a phony, exploitative Christianity and Horatio Alger mythology.

America, John Kennedy in his 1961 inauguration speech promised would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty”. Liberty-Schmiberty, throw away lines for the naive and the dummies. Such sentimental schlock was quickly turned upside down by our adversarial intellectual class who were busy polishing their favorite Marxist leitmotifs and disseminating a view of American history (Charles Beard comes to mind) that that read exploitation and oppression into the country’s foundational fabric. 

Southeast Asia refracted through the hermeneutical Marxist lens became a theater of imperial aggression fought with conscripts extracted from America’s underclass – poor and minorities dragooned and dropped into rice paddies half way around the world to bomb, napalm, and devastate a colonialized third world people. The American presence in Vietnam stripped of anti-Communist rhetoric was shown to be in essence about its true core, aggression and racism: the white imperialist descendants of American slave owners were conscripting young, black Americans, discriminated against and marginalized from the slums at home, to wage war on Asian people whom they (the leaders) viewed as racially inferior, culturally insignificant and physically expendable. American foreign policy particularly in all of its ugly Vietnamese contortions became an external (international) reflection of its fundamentally racist internal (domestic) character and its chauvinist history.

One especially notable indictment of American racism in Vietnam came from none other than the future Massachusetts U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, John Kerry, who had returned home from active duty to throw away his service medals and help organize the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Among other symbolic gestures of condemnation of the U.S. government prosecution of the war, Kerry carried a North Vietnamese flag in a protest march. His book, The New Soldier denounced the architects of the war as racists hiding behind a phony vale of anti-Communism. “We are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism…  [W]e watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.”

It would not be quite correct to say that Kerry was opposed to the war.  It was far more than that. The war itself was a manifestation of something much worse for him. “The country doesn't realize it yet but it has created a monster in the form of thousands of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.” It is difficult to know what to make of this sweeping, slanderous verbiage, a poisoned cocktail of vituperation and nihilism that one might expect to hear from a raging anarchist on a street corner, not from a decorated veteran testifying before Congress. This “monster” was made up of his comrades in arms some of whom had died believing, perhaps, that they were about more than dealing and trading in violence. Kerry’s personal history and ascendance to high office—from a 1960’s anti-war radical, communist sympathizer to high establishmentarian is a splendid prototype of the political trajectory of many of our current elites and helps to explain why American political and social institutions now bear scant resemblance to what they were a generation ago.

Thus: many years later when he appeared before a national audience to accept the Democrat Party’s nomination to run for the Presidency, Kerry opened his speech with a snappy salute and announced that he was “reporting for duty”, apparently having calculated for purposes of garnering votes that the “biggest nothing in history” he had fought in and subsequently with great fanfare denounced as an enterprise concocted and conducted by war criminals was now an illustrious entry in his autobiography. And so, from John Kerry, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” as he put it in his testimony before Congress … to John Kerry, the proud war hero! This was the sort of amoral reversal that reminds one of an earlier volte-face from a cynical power monger, Joseph Stalin: Stalin was for Hitler (Mototov-Ribbontrop pact 1939) until he was against him (1941-1945). Kerry’s opportunistic affinity for Stalin-like switcheroos was captured in his risible, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion [for the Iraq war] before I voted against it." Needless to say, Kerry did not during his Presidential campaign bring up the authorship of The New Soldier and his characterization of the U.S. effort in Vietnam as he so delicately put it, “a filthy obscene memory.”

Kerry's ambition to be President in 2004 was foiled in part by emergence of his former naval Swift Boat comrades from the Vietnam days who had served with Kerry and told the voters the truth about his self-exaggerated war heroics and reminded the voters of his sweeping condemnations of the American military in which he served. For their efforts they were smeared by the Left for doing what Stalinists most resent from those who oppose them, telling the truth.    

From Steel to Velvet: The Stalinist Style in the 21st Century

From Steel to Velvet: The Stalinist Style in the 21^st Century

Everybody knows the boat is sinking,

Everybody knows the captain lied.

                                        Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”

Stalinism survived Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953.  It survived Khrushchev’s denunciation of the personality cult of Stalin at the 20^th Party Congress in 1956, and the disintegration of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991. 

Stalinism has been resilient, highly adaptable and irrepressible.  It has assumed a more subtle and insinuating form suitable for the twenty-first century; it is still with us.  The fundamentals, however, remain unchanged from its inception:  the relentless dishonesty, the abuse of those who dissent from or oppose the understood orthodoxy, the reflexive resort to coercion, the moralistic repudiation of a caricaturized old order presented in a narrative of the demonized oppressor and the virtuous oppressed. 

Stalinism was unleashed in its initial coercive form with the hardness and unyieldingness of steel. “Stalin” (сталь) is the Russian word for “steel”.  Repression and coercion were overtly and overwhelmingly physical and material.  People in mass by the tens of millions were shot, starved, deported, enslaved and imprisoned. 

In contemplating the history of Communism in the twentieth century, one often begins by contemplating the most elemental conditions of human existence – food.  Thirty-eight years after Castro took power in 1997, the Cuban people lived on a ration of five pounds of rice and one pound of beans per month; four ounces of meat twice a year; four ounces of soybean paste per week; and four eggs per month. [Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand,July112005 The New Republic ]  The Communist “new man” promised by Fidel and Che was, if nothing else, a lean and hungry man.

Food was turned into a weapon by the rulers against the ruled.  Lenin, Stalin and Mao deliberately took grain away from the peasants who need it to eat and sold it on foreign markets to capitalize their economies. With a Communist revolutionary takeover of power, agriculture was almost always the first application point of massive, concerted coercion.  The new bosses came at the farmer-peasants and forced them into collectivized farms. They expropriated the food that they produced.  Masses of individuals with deep social communal roots were moved against their will and the products of their labor taken from them – human beings reduced to soulless material. No legal protection, no human consideration for their plight, no regard for them as human beings. Their lives had to be completely rearranged to match the blue prints of the new social designers who suddenly found themselves in charge.

Hunger was a major tool of the mid-twentieth century Stalinists. Both Stalin and Mao deliberately used massive famines to kill millions of their own people in order to bring their resisting peasants to heel and to completely reorder the countryside in conformity with their five year “plans” that were in reality utopian fantasies masking disaster. Unlike the holocaust of the Jews, the direct attribution of responsibility to Stalin for the deliberate starvation of the peasant Ukraine was not immediately forthcoming. “The basic facts of mass hunger and death, although sometimes reported in the European and American press, never took on the clarity of an undisputed event.  Almost no one claimed that Stalin meant to starve Ukrainians to death; even Adolf Hitler preferred to blame the Marxist system.” [Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York, Basic Books, 2010, 56]

Food, as it turns out, wonderfully served the coercive and reductive nature of Communism.  First, those deprived of it become weak, thus rendering them compliant and incapable of resistance.  Further deprivation transforms that weakness and dependency into something much worse. The descent into mass starvation strips away everything human. People do things that are inconceivable.  They eat things no normal or sane person could eat. They lose their connections with each other.  

            The style and approach, but not the fundamentals, of twenty-first century Stalinism has changed.  No longer is the coercion and repression overt and physical.  Steel has given way to velvet.  The use of terror and physical force are high cost, wasteful and more difficult to control, excuse or cover up permanently. Twenty-first century Stalinists are no less intellectually self-regarding and loathing of the status quo, but are more educated, sophisticated and polished than their progenitors.  They employ more refined instruments of propaganda and less brutal and overt measures to intimidate, subdue or remove the resisters, to tarnish the skeptics, to target opponents with abuse, and to perpetuate their distortions and lies.  Today’s Stalinists don’t need or want to kill off the opposition:  they are content to disparage, plunder, and rule over them.  

            Twentieth-century Stalinist regimes ascended to power through the disruptions created by war, civil war and military conquest, which in part helps to explain their affinity for physical brutality and the explicitly violent character of the regimes that they imposed and maintained.  WWI, not the collapse of capitalism, created the opening for the Bolsheviks – always the opportunists -- in Russia and made it possible for Lenin and his party to stage their successful coup. The German high command deserves some of the credit since they arranged the transport for Lenin back to Russia and the financing for his efforts to overthrow the Provincial government in St Petersburg. The Bolsheviks extended WWI into a protracted civil war that they eventually won.  WWII enabled Stalin, using the Red Army, to force the people and countries of Eastern Europe to submit to Communist domination.  Civil war in China enabled Mao to take power. China, like Russia, was not a mature capitalist society.  Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took power in war torn Cambodia.  Much of the resistance to Batista prior to Castro’s ascent came from the Cuban professional and middle classes.  Few if any of the Communist revolutions that succeeded unfolded in a way that looked remotely like what Marx had predicted. 

Twenty-first century Stalinists, however, have acquired their power much differently. Through soft wars and subversion, they have waged cultural, political and legal assaults on social institutions – political parties, unions, the universities, the courts, churches, and the arts and entertainment communities, particularly within the organs of popular culture.  The West near the end of the twentieth century had handily defeated Communism both economically and militarily. However, Western society has been vanquished culturally by a massive infusion of soft and insidious Leftist ideology with its essentially Marxist view of social struggle and the primacy of exploitation cloaked by “false consciousness.” The original Marxist template of the oppressed and oppressor classes as represented by the Proletariat and Capitalist was expanded in the latter half of the twentieth century to create useful variations of the original conflicting duo but with the same essential dynamic and theoretical underpinning.     

Stalinism’s moralizing narrative, as indicated above, derives its appeal always by identifying and caricaturizing an oppositional class that is not only an obstacle to progress and the ultimate, historically ordained triumph of an oppressed class, but whose overall collective character is so thoroughly benighted and atavistic as to make its members humanly and morally unredeemable.  Stalinists do not consider opposition to be legitimate or principled.  They view those in opposition as a hostile force with no legitimate standing, and so they do not tolerate opposition; they respond with defamation and abuse. They destroy it when they are able.   

This oppositional class, however, is not actually made up of real people; it is an abstraction, an elaborate construct of a morally benighted set of practices (exploitation, domination, degradation hidden behind false-legitimizing rationales) that defines a “privileged” group or class.  This favored, privileged class is destined historically to give way to the oppressed class, which is also an abstraction.  The narrative actually operates with two highly abstracted, mutually dependent morally-polar entities that find themselves engaged in a power struggle.  The final outcome results in a moral transformation.  A new society emerges completely unlike the old one.  The inequalities, pathologies and abuses of the old order will have died with the oppressor class.  

The Stalinist moralizing narrative and skillfully wielded thus constituted confers an enormous power to inspire and mobilize both individuals and groups. The highly charged narrative is used to connect real people, actual contestants for the many social goods and benefits of modern society to the theoretically-posed abstractions with stark morally contrasting properties.  This connecting process is Stalinism in practice in its twenty-first century form. The specific roles, characteristics, and actions of the contestants are suitably adjusted so that the essential moral-immoral qualities are always in place and the moralizing direction of the narrative unfolds as predicted no matter what the actual circumstances are. Stalinism offers a flexible moral template into which any contemporary set of grievances can be inserted, tweaked and suitably generalized to reveal an oppressive, exploitive social configuration that has been structured, obscured and perpetuated by a “privileged” group.             

            The 1960s became the decisive period of unprecedented cultural conflict in the West and specifically in the U.S.  This conflict came to be shaped by several major events – the Cold war, the Vietnam conflict and the tortured history and plight of Black America – all of which enabled the Left to craft a narrative that redefined American institutions and American cultural practices as instruments of domination and oppression and American history as a severe indictment of the society itself. Collective guilt was turned into a powerful political “weapon of the disadvantaged.”  “See the suffering and devastation your people have laid upon my people.”  This newly recognized oppression-caused “devastation” would then become the moral premise for a “non-negotiable” set of new power relationships involving a scripted self-criticism of the oppressor class and compensation for past wrong doings.  First came the coerced admission of collective guilt then followed the collective atonement.  The basic Stalinist template – Oppressor-Oppressed, with its powerful and compelling moral challenge – was in place and came to be widely employed.

            The Cold War thus produced two distinct and very different outcomes.  As the two major combatants moved toward the end of the 20^th century, the U.S. had extended significantly its military and technological superiority over the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy and its pervasive political corruption had rendered it increasingly inefficient and uncompetitive in relation to the West. The aging Bolsheviks leaders could not reform their system without giving it up completely. They were bogged down in a feckless war in Afghanistan and pushed to edge by President Reagan with SDI. The USSR could not both continue its decades-long manic pace of armament building and its high investment with modern weaponry and provide its citizens with a standard of living that did not resemble a hard-scrabble, third world grind that would completely demoralize and alienate its workers.  In its capacity as a military colossus, a modern economic engine with a productive citizenry, and a world power, one might say, the Soviet Union had abysmally failed. The Soviets were the clear losers of the Cold war. They knew it.     

            However, viewed as a cultural battle, a struggle of ideas, aspirations and visions, the U.S. lost the Cold war. Culture trumped economics and arms.  The irony could not be more acute. In Communist countries no one any longer took Communism seriously. Why should they have? How could they have?  In the West Marx came alive.  Virtually all of the West’s institutions over the last fifty years have marched dramatically leftward. The two bedrock bourgeois institutions of marriage and religion (the “opiate of the masses”), both despised by Marx as cornerstone elements of bourgeois fraud, have gone into a major decline since mid-century, the latter now openly scorned and ridiculed by the secularist elites who dominate the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry, the former now virtually abandoned by the lower middle-classes who benefit most from its stabilizing, normalizing effects.  Engels’s comment on marriage over a century ago captures the cynicism and disdain of Communism for the institution and sounds very much like the commentary of Western feminism a century later. “Matrimony differs from prostitution in that the first is transacted through purchase, the latter through rent.” [Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Pasionaria y los Enanitos, 45]

The Vietnam War was a central causal force in this profound ideological mass migration. At its inception the incursion into Vietnam was articulated to the American people by President Kennedy as an anti-Communist enterprise, justified as an attempt to prevent Communist insurgencies from taking control of the entirety of South East Asia.  Very quickly the picture of the war, including the attributes of the major players, was turned completely upside down by America’s own internal critics as well as those abroad in the lands of its supposed allies. The malefactors in this altered picture became the Americans, who were launching a war of imperial aggression fought with conscripts extracted from its underclass – poor and minorities, pitted against an exploited third world people. The veil of anti-Communism was torn away and American action was shown to be in essence about imperialism and racism: the white imperialists were conscripting their own oppressed black young Americans to carry out their intention to plunder and colonize Asian people whom they viewed as racially inferior, culturally insignificant and physically expendable. American foreign policy particularly in its Vietnam manifestation became an external (international) reflection of its fundamentally racist internal (domestic) character and its chauvinist history.

The copious dishonesty and arrogance of the leadership – President Johnson’s manipulation of the Gulf of Tonkin events and Robert McNamara’s hubristic overreach –  also served eventually to discredit the effort.  The rapidly diminishing credibility of the Government’s case for American involvement in Southeast Asia and the first television-covered war where Americans could sit in their homes and watch their sons, brothers and husbands killing and being killed not only provoked widespread revulsion with it and its leadership but created a deep and permanent erosion of confidence in American institutions and a withering cynicism applied to its traditional ideals.  Americans then finally grimly watched the forced and desperate evacuation of their troops on television after Congress voted to stop the funding and let the country that Americans had fought for and bled for over a decade to save fall to the Reds.  Also abandoned by the Americans at the same time were the people of Cambodia who to their lasting sorrow fell under the care and supervision of Brother Number One, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.  In just four years Pol Pot and his followers managed to kill twenty percent of their fellow Cambodians, targeting and butchering in particular people with education, property and skills.  Cambodia’s beautiful Buddhist temples were destroyed, and, of course, the priests.  Demographically, it was the most brutal of the twentieth century Communist revolutions. [FN Robert Service, Camaradas, 566]  Pol Pot’s vision of Communist utopia for Cambodia was as a primitive, city-less agrarian commune.  As Robert Service notes: “Not even Mao eliminated his city dwellers.  Pol Pot was unique in the Marxist tradition of treating the urban life not as a requisite for Communist progress, but as an iniquity that had to be eliminated.” [Robert Service, Camaradas: Breve Historia del Comunismo, 2007, 564]    

The Communists had prevailed in Southeast Asia, not because of their military superiority but because they mastered the message and the West was choking on its imperialist guilt.  The Americans like the French before them left in sorrow and frustration with a sense of shame and defeat.  Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers had perished on Asian soil; and for what?  Veterans returning from Vietnam were accosted and spit on by protestors from America’s elite universities.  “Fascist,” “Nazi,” “perpetrator of Genocide” were labels some Americans attached to other Americans.  President Nixon had earlier invoked the final and most cynical of Vietnam era euphemisms – “Peace with honor.”  Riots in the major U.S cities, widespread demonstrations on university campuses, political assassinations, Watergate and the culminating humiliating military retreat from Vietnam helped made U.S. institutions particularly vulnerable to a Marxist interpretation of reality in which domination and exploitation is the core reality. 

Vietnam opened a Pandora’s Box out of which emerged the continuing denouement of American domination, starting with the war itself – the capitalist-imperialist superpower, America, subjugating an exploited and colonized people of color. Bill Ayers, President Obama’s colleague from his days on the Board of the Annenberg Challenge, in his memoir Fugitive Days, expressed it this way:  “We had always been insistent in our anti-Americanism, our opposition to a national story stained with conquest and slavery and attempted genocide….  What kind of a system is it that allows the U.S. to seize the destinies of the Vietnamese people?” [Quoted from Dinesh D’Sousa, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Regnery, 2010, 135]  One might pause here and ask: who exactly is the “we” Ayers refers to? Clearly, he is speaking on behalf of a cognitive elite, the new Leninists who discovered the true exploitative character of American society.  Indeed, they had been insistent in their anti-Americanism and had taken it from the streets into the schools.

Ayers, radical and lawless in his youth, remained unchanged and unrepentant over the decades. His book, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, published in 1974, he dedicated to the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, among others.  He was permitted, encouraged even, to take his Marxist grievances and indictments from the streets into an American university classroom and was rewarded with esteem and approbation of the elites and the ultimate academic prize – lifetime job security in the form of tenure. Here was a man who spent his life navigating and exploiting a system he vehemently professed to abhor never suffering consequences for his “principled” opposition.    The America he loathed shielded him from criminal responsibility, gave him a coveted sinecure and provided his life of comfort. In his view, America like Hitler’s Germany, was a nation engaged in genocide. America’s sins he continues to this day to argue justified his own criminal actions and his lawless acts were those of a hero.  America’s crimes were the outcome of its intrinsic racist character; his were morally justified acts of civil disobedience.  American society was corrupt. Ayers was by his own estimation immaculate, one of the cognitively gifted few who recognized his country’s profound malignancy and deemed himself exempt from the reach of its obligations and laws.  It is worth noting that in spite of his vehemently-expressed moral revulsion with his own society, the legal system he so despised protected him from punishment. As stated above, he was embraced in the U.S. regions of academe, prospering, and retiring from a university in the country he loathed as a full professor.

The racism that was increasingly asserted, as we see with Ayers, as the force underlying the Vietnam conflict also was used to underscore America’s history of slavery and the aftermath of racial segregation following the Civil War.  Racism as white privilege was exposed and came to be understood to be at the core of American social reality.  Racism was the definition of the American experience linked both to its economic system, capitalism, and its dominant religious tradition of Christianity.

There is no reason why American should not one day attempt against their blacks what the Germans, another white, Christian nation, attempted against the Jews….  Baldwin had glimpsed here a terrifying truth: just as pogroms were no accident in Jewish history, but the sign of an endemic disease, exacerbated and coming to head, so lynchings, hangings and bonfires are the final explosion of true sentiments of the white man with regard to the black man. [Albert Memmi, Dominated Man, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969, 23]

This grim portrait of race in America was written in 1969 by Albert Memmi a Tunisian-born French intellectual, read and admired by President Obama.  The French intellectual class, post-WWII, it would seem, had ably risen to its self-appointed role as America’s most ferocious moral critics. The French illuminati possessed the best grasp of American iniquities and were relentless and unremitting in their elaborations of them, able to divine the “true sentiments of the white man.”  Read forty years later one is struck by the rancorous libel and profound dishonesty of these words. This “terrifying truth” of an impending holocaust of American blacks was a crude Stalinoid invention, a smear intended to suggest that there was nothing redeemable in the American character, nothing that might help us understand why the gas chamber-showers had not yet been built and put into twenty-four-hour-a-day production.   For Memmi the only moral difference between the Nazis and the American whites was that the former had actually carried out the mass killings.  Racial hatred and murder was rooted deep in the core of the white Christian American soul.

Of course, the holocaust never occurred and never will. Predominately white America with all of its supposed affinity for and resemblance to the German SS had already been moving to dismantle Jim Crow and make atonement for the sins of its Fathers. White Americans marched and demonstrated in protest against racial segregation and Jim Crow.  A white President, Harry Truman, had ordered the desegregation of the U.S. Army 21 years before this was written.  A white President, Dwight Eisenhower, had sent Federal troops into the South to desegregate the schools 13 years before this was written.  A white American Congress had passed Civil rights legislation under the leadership of a full blown Cracker President from the deep-south, Texas, five years before this was written. And, of course, one generation after this was written a predominately white America helped elect a black man to be their President, perhaps the “final explosion of true sentiments of the white man with regard to the black man.” 

             Yet this picture with its howling condemnation and slanderous accusations became, post-Vietnam, a motif favored by an influential portion of America’s intellectuals, now, a staunchly adversarial class, unified by a loathing of traditional America, its people, its religion, its customs. Susan Sontag’s comment: "Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history" became standard fare.  In almost any American university professors could easily be found expounding, publishing and teaching variations off of this theme.  This agonized, malignant view of American society became from the 1960s on the America that the American Left (like Ayers) believed in, the America that many in the professoriate presented and continue to present to their students.  Bard College established the position of “Alger Hiss Professor of Social Science” in 1998 long after Hiss’s treason and his subsequent perjured testimony about it was established.  The University of Colorado gave tenure to Ward Churchill, an Ethnic Studies professor, who in 2005 characterized the three thousand 9-11 victims as “little Eichmanns” deserving of their fate.  The professoriate rushed to defend the “academic freedom” of this man whose entire career was a fraud. 

The American picture of domination and exploitation was not, however, simply one of race.  Traditional American history with a capital “H” was exposed (“unmasked”) as a phony piece of triumphalism, a lie that silenced the voices of many histories.  So many other silenced narratives of domination had been being played out but the injured players never permitted their “voices”.   Men had constructed “social reality” so as to keep women in permanent subordination.   Indigenous peoples, gay people, animals, the earth – all were victims. All had been systematically violated and exploited.  The Left had advanced far beyond the moral bi-polarity of Marx’s exploited-proletariat/capitalist world and now possessed an enormous repertoire of “systems of oppression” with which to maximize their leverage of guilt and to demand power to force confessions, apologies, self-flagellation and to redress the wrong done.   With the discovery of each new exploitative relationship firmly embedded in the fabric of social reality, Marxism as a deep explanatory model was ubiquitous, always available to articulate and fuel the moral outrage and unmask the deep and systemic “privileging” that the norms of white western European culture had imposed on the rest of the world.  

Each of these many “practices of domination” arose out of relationships founded on inequalities of power and a masking of that power differential with a false construction of reality that rationalized the many structures of inequality as normal or natural. These practices of domination were deeply imbedded in the traditional social institutions.  These institutions could never be reformed. They had to be overturned.  “Revolution” was the means to undo them, and revolution on a grand scale took place in America in the second half of the twentieth century.