Post-Charlottesville: We Are on Our Own

We on the right owe something to the leftist mob that, with the assistance and connivance of the state and local authorities, assaulted the lawfully and peacefully assembled protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia last August 13th. Thanks to the Antifas, whatever fleeting illusions or fantasies we may have nurtured about living in a society where there are institutions to protect people who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy have evaporated. Charlottesville was a watershed 21^st century moment revealing that the Sovietization of the U.S. (21^st century style) is nearly complete.

Since the official interpretation of this Virginia riot seems to one of a resurgent fascism raising its ugly head, it may help to remember how the Soviets in their heyday used “fascism” to keep their fact-free storyline intact and tighten the party’s suffocating grip on the throat of even the puniest of opposition. During those days when the CPSU was calling all the shots on behalf of the Russian proletariat, they relied on an impregnable ideology that happened to explain just about everything that needed explaining. Facts, figures, the reality of empirical discovery and confirmation were secondary to the “reality” in the form of a creation myth fashioned by the CPSU philosophers. It was continuously embellished and promulgated to keep the vodka-besotted peons from beginning to realize that things in the promise land were not quite right and that the people in charge were an assortment of liars, psychopaths and criminals.

The myth in a nutshell was that Lenin, Stalin and their ensemble of good guys at just the right moment of history had taken power on behalf of oppressed toiling masses and were building the socialist workers paradise that Karl Marx had predicted eventually would be installed everywhere. On the way, these good guys encountered some very bad guys – Hitler, Mussolini, the faces of fascism and enemies of humanity – who temporarily disrupted the grand march of progress to abundance and equality. For a while the future did not look so good for Stalin’s utopian pretentions, but with the help of a naïve and enfeebled FDR and a cynical Churchill, the General Secretary got to watch Hitler, Mussolini and the fascist world they threatened to impose come crashing down and see himself emerge victoriously as the world’s greatest anti-fascist, pieces of Hitler’s chard skeleton retrieved by the Red Army from the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin as his most prized trophy. Historically, symbolically and politically, fascism was dead, but fascists of a certain sort could now be permanently featured as key performers in the governing ideology, enemies of progress ready to be summoned for duty when they were most needed. Fascism, as it turns out, had never been completely vanquished and whenever and wherever things went wrong, the reincarnated Hitlers and Mussolinis appeared on cue triggering, of course, the resurgence of anti-fascist brigades to stomp them down once again and modestly proclaim their own courage and heroism.

        

If the recent history of the Charlottesville debacle and its frenzied media aftermath were somehow to be dubbed into Russian and tweaked a bit, the entire sorry episode could easily be imagined to have been staged somewhere in Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson who was, now brace yourself and grab a teddy bear for comfort, a slave owner. His famous home, Monticello, is just outside the city. Soon expect him to be thrust into the cultural Marxists’ rouges gallery of once great Americans because his life did not meet the moral standards set by the likes of Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters. Only in a society completely slipped off its moorings and ruled by a mafia-style clique of pretend champions of the oppressed could cretins like Sharpton and the mobs he leads into the streets be seriously attended to by the mainstream media and courted by the power brokers.

Jefferson’s UVA is now a festering academic cesspool of cultural Marxism, about as a hospitable a venue for right-wing protestors as Berkeley, Madison or Ann Arbor. Just thinking the wrong thoughts in places like this can get you assaulted. The “Unite the Right” (UtR) protestors were the perfect patsies in this pathetic “morality” drama. They were set up to be the chief (the only) villains by the power players ranging from Virginia Governor Terry “Mr. Clintonista” McAuliffe, Charlottesville Mayor, Michael Signer, an understudy of Hillary Clinton-handler, John Podesta, and their police stooges who perp-walked the hapless UtR protestors into the teeth of the masked, club-wielding Antifas, who, incidentally, unlike the patsies, had no permit to assemble. The rioting ensued, people were beaten up and a woman was killed by a man, James Fields, in his car attempting to escape the rampaging antifas. Fields, has now experienced an American-style show trial (prosecutor, defender and judge all working in concert) and will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

How then did those who run the opinion-shaping, attitude-adjusting organs of mass media, the major instruments of mediation and interpretation of events like this, explain to the American people what had happened? Predictably, they seemed to have had no inclination to look carefully at the facts and circumstances and raise questions that might have led to more than the usual predicable fascist, racist smear of people who don’t necessarily believe that white racism pulsates from every crevice of American life and justifies the recreational burning down of the cities. This rampant racism, apparently, not only infects people and institutions but stone and marble as well, and the professional grievance mongers and the rabble they arouse are now assaulting the statues and monuments they reckon to be contaminated.

President Trump provoked hysteria from the “virtue professionals” posing as journalists when he refused to parrot the lines from the Pravda-like scripts of the New York Times, Washington Post and the cable news networks rejecting their standard “fascists-evil/anti-fascists-good” trope dating back to the early days of Stalin’s masterful political dramaturgy. His Soviet Union was always locked in mortal combat with fascists of some sort, but who they were depended on whom he had it in for at the particular moment. In the run up to Hitler’s chancellorship they were “Social Fascists” the German Social Democrats who, by playing by the rules of constitutional politics, were obstructing the path to world revolution. When Hitler finished strangling the Weimar Republic, Stalin switched to the Popular Front and the Social Fascists became needed democrat allies in opposition in the face of German rearmament. The British were fascists until the summer of 1941 when Hitler, then Stalin’s partner in the rape of Poland and the Baltic states, double crossed him and launched Barbarossa, after which they became his allies.  How one becomes a fascist, you might say, is situationally dependent on the left’s current priorities.

The fury over Trump’s rejection of the Pravda script and his refusal to sanctify the criminality of masked, armed thugs simply because they were self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” became part of a greater on-going setup, a stepping up of the relentless efforts of the left to de-legitimate his election. Don’t forget: during the 2016 Presidential campaign Trump himself was routinely denounced by columnists in the major outlets, as well as Democrats and Republicans, as a fascist. Post-election, the “resistance” was born; the “fascist” motif never for a moment abates. Trump’s supporters, recall, were consigned by Hillary Clinton late in the campaign to the moral trash heap as “irredeemables” because they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it.” Well, yes, you can probably go on with the naming game for a long time – there is always a new victim group to be identified and cultivated with its own unique “-ism” or “-phobia”, one more target of “hate” – but “fascist” probably captures the generic essence of bigotry that can be manifested in so many recondite forms.  

Charlottesville became the perfect storm and fueled the left’s continuing paranoid fantasy of an impending fascist America. Ignored is the fact that Klansmen, neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists supposedly on the verge of taking over are such a fringe element in American society so far removed from any sources of power and influence that without the left to constantly raise them to the status of a threatening political force they would probably disappear altogether. But the Southern Poverty Leadership Conference needs them to sustain their fund raising and luxury Birmingham, Alabama digs, and the broader left needs them with all of their crude imagery to smear the right and as a fulcrum for their hysterical moral posturing.

The Democrats always burst orgasmic anytime a real live Klansman or neo-Nazi sallies out from the shadows and gets some attention which means they can pretend that hooded lynch mobs are lurking on every corner and that every conservative is Bull Connor or George Lincoln Rockwell. Not to be outdone, the Republican traveling carnival of gelded hacks – Marco Rubio, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and, of course, Mitt Romney – did not hesitate to join the chorus of Democrat trained seals sounding like they had just emerged from a “white privilege” indoctrination session led by Barack Obama. Marco Rubio, the classic empty suit, with no intention of the irony tweeted: “When an entire movement built on anger & hatred towards people different than you, it justifies & ultimately leads to violence against them.” Little Marco, apparently, is unable to grasp meaning of psychological projection.

It is tempting to say that it could be worse, that with a shift in a few tens of thousands of votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin last November Hillary Clinton would be staggering around the White House plotting her revenge on the “basket of deplorables,” another “wise Latina” or a Black Lives Matter savant would be on the Supreme Court, and “hate speech” legislation would be wending its way through Congress. This is not much comfort, however. Trump, whatever his intentions may have been, will never “drain the swamp” and his Presidency is no serious threat to the cultural Marxist hegemon. It is a temporary bump in the road that will probably end very badly before the next scheduled election.  

There is no part of the establishment – the political parties and the Federal behemoth, the courts, the MSM and the entertainment industry, public schools and the universities – that has not embraced the mindless orthodoxy that equates any and all resistance to the cultural Marxists’ program of white guilt indoctrination, with its de rigueur confessional and self-flagellating rituals, as a form of fascism that must be extirpated. There seems to remain no serious institutional, political or legal obstacles to the escalating predations of the left’s shock troops, Black Lives Matter and the Antifas who, like Mao’s Red Guard of the 1960s and 70s are mounting a cultural revolution and marauding with a destructive fury that promises a complete ruination of what is left of traditional America. An avalanche of slander, lies and abuse is raining down from all corners, and a mailed fist in full force is falling on the resistance to it; we are on our own.

Marquette University: the journey from Joe McCarthy to Angela Davis

                                                           

Is it possible to shame whoever is supposed to be in charge at Marquette University – The President, the Board of Trustees, a distinguished, influential Jesuit somewhere in residence, someone, anyone who might know even a little history from the last hundred years or so and understand what Communists do to Christians when they get power?  Not even remotely. The real operatives, the social justice “priests” at this pretend Catholic university apparently have deeply inhaled the same fetid vapors of the cultural Marxism that saturate every molecule of air at the most secular, anti-Christian universities such as Berkeley, or closer to home, the one in Madison.  From the MU website:

The Marquette Forum will host Dr. Angela Davis for a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, March 29 ….  Davis is a scholar, activist and sought-after speaker who has presented at dozens of universities….  This event is part of the Marquette Forum, a yearlong series of conversations inspired by visions of inclusion and a better world emerging from black freedom struggles.

Here is Orwell-inspired, DiversitySpeak perfected – anodyne, flawlessly crafted so as not to arouse suspicion that the foxes now guard the hen house, that the radicals at MU run the show and stage their phony PC-scripted lectures and discussions. No one can object to healthy “conversations”, especially ones “inspired by visions of inclusion.” Who could be opposed to “a better world” or cheering on the “freedom struggles” of anyone? This announcement in both content and style smacks of Soviet era agitprop, the technique of which is to show how morally immaculate you are by wrapping all the right words around yourself – “peace,” “justice,” “freedom,” “democracy.” Communist East Germany (euphemistically, The German Democratic Republic), it might be recalled, was so just, democratic, free and prosperous, that the Stalinists in charge needed to build a wall to keep its citizens from leaving and shot them whenever they tried.

What is omitted in the vapid, banal happy talk about the “scholar, activist and sought-after speaker” is that at 73 years of age, the life-long Marxist, Angela Davis, is not just some intellectually formidable village atheist imported to rattle the sheltered, complacent young Christians on campus.  Neither is she a 1960s-era, hallowed civil rights celebrity who happened to have mellowed out of a distant radical past and embraced American traditions and joined the Rotary Club. Her life’s mission continues to unfold with an unwavering, militant commitment to the destruction of what this 136 year-old Jesuit university is (supposed to be) all about. From Marquette University’s website:

Marquette University Guiding Values

Endorsed Dec. 8, 2014

In accordance with the Catholic, Jesuit mission and vision of Marquette University, we hold that all people and things are created to praise, reverence and serve God in our community and throughout the world, and thus every aspect of the university’s lifeblood and work holds this principle and foundation as its beginning and end. Therefore, we will enact the following values and behaviors in our lives and our work to serve the greater glory of God…

One does not have to be a Jesuit-educated theologian or a philosopher to grasp that nowhere in any country that might have had the misfortune to be governed by this former Black Panther, FBI fugitive and Communist Party USA candidate for Vice President 1980 would any follower of MU’s Catholic, Jesuit mission – praising, revering and serving God – not find his life to be pure misery, assuming that he was not liquidated. Those at MU who extended the “distinguished lecture” invitation to Davis should review the video clip of her remarks in her pilgrimage in 1979 to Moscow where she accepted the Lenin Peace Prize, in her words,  “the esteemed peace prize bearing the glorious name of Vladimir Illich Lenin here on the soil where he led the great October Revolution.”  Sounds very reverential, doesn’t it? And, for a man whose violent hatred for religion could not be matched by anyone.
 

Davis was also feted in 1972 by the East German Stalinist, Erich Honecker, collecting honorary degrees, effusing praise and admiration for the GDR and denouncing her native land for its repression and racism. 

Most of those MU students who had hoped to be “inspired” by Davis’s “visions of inclusion” were likely unaware that after the “great October Revolution,” the “glorious” Lenin’s vision for the millions of Christians in the Russia he was about to turn into a “workers’ paradise” was somewhat less than inclusive.  In a 1922 letter to his ruling Politboro, Lenin outlined his approach to religious diversity in the young regime that was struggling to gain control over those who were somewhat less than enthusiastic about their prospects – show trials, followed by executions, public ones just to make sure everyone got the message.  “The result,” he wrote, “of the trial is to be the execution, by public shooting, of a large number of the Chuya Black Hundreds as well as the shooting of as many as possible from Moscow and other important religious centers…  The more we shoot, the better it will be for us.” [Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 125-26, emphasis added]  Not exactly encouraging for those who wanted "to serve the greater glory of God." Lenin, and then his disciple, Stalin went on to obliterate Russian Christianity with an unprecedented savagery, as well as to persecute Islam.  The pattern was repeated by Communist dictatorships across the world, as in China, Cuba and the Soviet block in Eastern and Central Europe.  

    

That an institution like Marquette University would host and honor a militant atheist like Angela Davis, an implacable enemy of its sacred teachings, its religious faith and aspirations, someone who has made a life-long, worshipful embrace of Lenin’s October Revolution and the failed Communist regimes through out the last century that repressed, tortured and murdered millions of Christians all over the world, is just one more piece of the depressing evidence that resistance to the cultural Marxism that pervades even our once conservative, religious institutions has utterly collapsed.  

One of the curious and largely unnoticed ironies of this debacle is that Marquette University, so eager and enthusiastic to welcome an aging Communist radical peddling all the standard Marxist tropes, is that it is the alma mater of perhaps the most famous anti-Communist of all, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a 1935 graduate of its school of law.  

 It is a safe bet that very few of the current students at Marquette University Law School (MULS) are even aware that Joe McCarthy is an alumnus (LL.B., 1935) of the law school. This unawareness, however, is excusable. The halls, offices, and classrooms of most law schools are teeming with portraits, plaques, and busts of prominent alumni. It is not uncommon for law schools to name buildings, classrooms, courtrooms, professorships, and scholarships after prominent graduates. At MULS, however, Joe McCarthy-undoubtedly the law school's most famous alumnus and a man Lyndon B. Johnson said "will never be forgotten"-is persona non grata. [From, Jeffry S. Kinsler, Marquette Law Review, #2, 2001]

Indeed, even more than ever, Senator McCarthy remains a persona non grata at MU.  However, the irony, of course, is that this most anti- of anti-communists is an embarrassment to the cognitive-dissonant Jesuit Catholics at MU who at the same time roll out the red carpet for a speaker whose long, illustrious CV describes someone who might well be called the perfect American Bolshevik, a life-long apologist for communist butchers (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro) across the globe. Those who refuse to recognize their enemies, especially ones who are so open, consistent and brazen as Angela Davis, are a hopeless, pathetic lot.    

The pattern of philo-communism and PC-enforced, leftist identity politics is not, of course, unique to MU. It is a pervasive feature of higher education. Recently, Young America’s Foundation’s spokeswoman Emily Jashinsky told staff at the National Review “that there has been a “disturbing pattern of suppressing conservativism” on Jesuit campuses, citing DePaul University and Gonzaga University as the most recent instances of conservative speakers receiving significant backlash from university faculty.  

For a parent seeking a Catholic university education for his child – some advice.  Skip Marquette University. Save the money and send the kid to a state university.  There is no difference.  

Communism: The Best Kept Secret

The totalitarian movements have been called ‘secret societies established in broad daylight. ’              

                                                                          Hannah Arendt

One of the hallmarks of Communist practice, that is, what Communists always do when they are in power is to authorize and document their decisions and actions in secret. Secrecy rules: their centers of power are mysterious – remote, inaccessible, protected from outside scrutiny, protean. The policies they create and apply are arbitrary and opaque.

This penchant for secrecy underscores the fact that dishonesty resides at the heart of Communist rule.  Communists are now and always have been monumental liars. They lie to get power. They lie to keep it and they lie about what they do to keep it.  When they hold power their operations embody what is the opposite of what we today call “transparency.” Secrecy and opacity are necessary elements of their self-preservation.  

A liar’s risk of exposure runs much higher if he must perform in a milieu where logic and empirical reality have some basic hold on serious discussion and communication.  Thus, Communist organs of power must be relentlessly secretive in order to preserve the ideological fictions of legitimacy and protect the power-holders and decision makers from the consequences of failure.  Secrecy protects the liars; those who attempt to penetrate it and to know and tell the truth become targets of systematic abuse.  Depending on how morally debased the regime is and how seriously threatened they feel that abuse ranges from slander and character assassination to physical destruction. 

The Soviet officials’ Central Office of Statistics we now know kept two separate and distinct sets of demographic statistics, one for internal use the other for publication.*  Demography measures the essential activities of people, and the practical effect of Communism tends to reduce what demographers measure: in short, Communist rule physically diminishes people and their activities, a sort of living death. They live shorter lives, produce less, have less and reproduce less.  Under Stalin, demography was a hazardous occupation. The secret, true statistics could never be publicized or shared because what they revealed contradicted the official claims of the regime and established its incompetence and failure.    

Hannah Arendt notes in her study of the Stalinist apparatus in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that there were three separate apparati in the Soviet system: The party; the soviet or state appartat; and the NKVD, that is, the secret police that did Stalin’s bidding.+  However, she makes the important point that the more visible the agencies were, the less real power they actually had—the secret agencies such as the NKVD were the real power centers, hence the secret police-state fundamental nature of this regime. “Real power begins where secrecy begins.”+ The “real power” is unlimited power. Police who are secret are unconstrained by law which means that they can do whatever the leaders want them to do to the people they are supposed to protect.

 Stalin also created extensive and obscure labyrinths of bureaucracy in order to occlude the paths of decision-making and deflect the application of accountability. “The multiplication of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence…”+ The organ of the secret police combined the two essential elements of Communist rule, coercion and dishonesty. Secret police are a ubiquitous feature of Communist governments and are a necessary and inevitable result of the regime’s need to shield the operations of the ruling elite from public view.

East Germany’s Stasi, built by Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker may have been the most ubiquitous secret police force ever assembled.  It numbered 91,000 by 1989 compared with Hitler’s Gestapo of 7,000 in 1937. There was one full-time Stasi employee for every 180 East Germans.# The East German Party leaders not only produced the typical propaganda of Communism’s vast superiority and inevitable triumph, but it directed massive amounts of its human resources to prevent the East German people from knowing the truth and to punish those who might attempt to speak it.

          The need for secrecy in the Communist dictatorships would eventually take a toll. What is secret cannot be communicated and the absence of trust worthy communication makes effective decision-making difficult. Of the Post WWII, Eastern European communist states, Stephen Kotkin writes.  “[T]he Communist establishments were often incoherent, riven by turf wars and hyper-secrecy.  Decision making remained a black box even within the upper echelons, while wiretapping and informing were so widespread that elites often hesitated to socialize.”#  

Secrecy and the collateral suspicion made it hard even for the elites to manage and govern.  When no one can tell the truth, or when the truth simply becomes the official propaganda pronouncement of the moment eventually no one can trust anyone. Suspenseful anticipation of the next propaganda shift saps energy and exhausts resources.

The secrecy and dishonesty necessary to perpetuate Communist rule mean that enormous resources must be concentrated on coordinating the constant production of lies, a challenging task because each one of the many lies has a limited and uncertain durability and an unpredictable time-span span of utility.  Since the lies are in conflict with reality, but at the same time crafted and launched to represent reality, they are inevitably tested against reality – which unfolds often in unpredictable, uncontrollable ways – by the lied-to.  The lie must compete with the truth, and even though the competition is blunted by the secretive, coercive party organs, still the lie is at a disadvantage with the truth.  Once launched, the lie at some point falls under scrutiny and invites detection.  The liar, of course, has an investment in the lie, a practical investment with some gain or advantage to be anticipated. The more ambitious the lie, the more is at stake for the liar if the lie gets exposed.  For governments that are built on lies, of course, the investment in them is huge and what is at stake is their existence.  This explains why Communist governments have never been able to continue to function without massive and unrelenting coercion. Communists govern not only in opposition to their own people but against the truth – a perpetual war on two fronts which takes a toll.

Once the coercion is relaxed, the institutionalized lies, long privately doubted, can be publically contested and repudiated as they were all across Eastern and Central Europe in 1989-1991.  Once the lies are openly acknowledged and impossible to uphold, the leaders have nothing left to offer and no authority to govern.  Cynicism and resentment fill the void. They must either resort to force or quit.

The constant lies that were so successful for a good part of the twentieth century in perpetuating the delusion of Communist inevitability and superiority finally no longer convinced even many of those who ruled under its auspices. Secrecy even at is best is porous, fragile and unstable.  Once the secrets lost their coercive protection, disillusionment with Communism set in even in Western Europe where it was popular with the intellectuals.

The Italian Communist Party (PCI), muscular and confident at the end of WWII, by the 1970s had jettisoned its Leninist revolutionary purism in order to pursue power-sharing coalitions with non-Communist parties.  By the late 1980s its membership was in severe decline and the CPI was about little more than a refuge for ersatz revolutionaries.  Similarly the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1946 received 28% of the vote in the national elections. Though bitterly clinging more rigidly and desperately to its doctrinal purity than the Italians, by the late 1980s the PCF had become politically marginal and irrelevant to practical French politics.**   Communism without coercion cannot be sustained. 

The grim, anhedonic Communism that Mao and his Red Guard had imposed on the Chinese gave way to a full embrace of Western-style consumerism. The ugly, unisex Mao suits were finally abandoned.  Thirty years after Mao’s death Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wall Mart and shopping malls began to decorate the Communist Chinese landscape with Mercedes and Lexis autos filling the streets of Beijing and Shanghai.  Starbucks coffee could be purchased at the Great Wall.

The decades-long practice of Communism in large portions of the planet had finally in spite of the torrent of lies, the propaganda and the corruption, revealed the inanity of the theory and the failure of its practice. The satellites of the Soviet Communism Empire rebelled; in Russia the system simply collapsed.  The Chinese Communist overlords opted for schizophrenia.  They tolerated even encouraged capitalist economic practices while still talking like old guard Leninists and monopolizing political power as Leninists always do.  The archives are still closed, the crimes of the Moa era still to be kept secret from the Chinese people. 

Mao remains for his people the revered founder of modern China.  However, the murderous historical reality of his career was horrendous and intrusive enough to force even the ruling elite to the coining of a euphemism that hinted at least hinted at some imperfection in the rule of the Great Oarsman: “Mao was 70% good, 30% bad.”  The Cultural Revolution is now a collective memory of a disagreeable sort and as the vapors of Maoist fanaticism dissipated, chicken McNuggets, burgers and fries from Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds would be clasped in the hands of the youth instead of the Little Red Book.  During the 13^th Party Congress in 1987 the CCP formally changed the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to “people’s democratic dictatorship,” a contradiction or nonsense-phrase that one would usually only associate with mentally ill people or advertising executives.              

                                                ***********

*Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: the History of China’s most Devastating Catastrophe, 158-162, New York 2010, 325

+Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1976, 402, 403, 409

#Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, New York, 2009, 53, 13

** Zbigniew Brezezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Charles Schribner’s Son, New York, 1989 , 205-06

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