Anti-Communism, a Call for the Return**

An Anti-Communist is a dog. I don’t change my views on this, I never will.

                                                                   Jean-Paul Sartre

One would have to beat the briar patches hard these days to chase an anti-Communist out of the brambles. Sartre would not now find himself pressed to change his views; no one would suggest otherwise.  Anti-communism has been out-of-vogue for many years and for many reasons. Volumes could be written to explain why, but one obvious reason is the steady Left-ward drift of American culture since the mid-twentieth century. The Kulturkampf of the 1960s pushed America to the Left, and turned anti-Communism into a retreat for closed-minded, parochial hicks who couldn’t grasp the intricacies of French Existentialism or appreciate the new Cuba of Fidel’s making.

Communism is the Left at full throttle, at its “best.”  Communists of the twentieth century in large portions of the world had complete power over tens of millions of people.  They did what they said they would do – throw out the Capitalist exploiters. They ruled for decades over fiefdoms of equality and plenty that no one was allowed to leave.  The non-Communist Left has not only evinced no sense of shame for the history of their high-achieving Leftists cousins – Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, even Fidel – but actively and enthusiastically sang their praises all the while they were erecting the gulags, torturing and murdering the opposition, and eviscerating their economies.  The New York Times’s Walter Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer (never withdrawn) for his dishonest reporting of Stalin’s famine-handiwork; the truth-telling Malcolm Muggeridge was blackballed.  The abundant evidence of their monstrous cruelties notwithstanding, our high-culture sophisticates still prefer to ignore, downplay or rationalize them.  They remain enamored with the bearded German prophet, decrying the rapacity of profit-seekers and defending Communism’s humanistic “idealism.”  It was just that the wrong people tried to implement it.  Yale University Press recently published Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton, a book of no less than 258 pages, classified by the Library of Congress as social science, not fiction or humor.  Eagleton is not an economist, philosopher, political scientist or historian, but as one might guess, an English Professor, a “Distinguished” one according to his official title from the University of Lancaster. This book, its publisher and its author, taken altogether are a perfect illustration of why the humanities has become completely irrelevant outside the walls of academe.

Another reason for anti-Communism's decline is the gradual but seemingly inevitable secularization of American society. Anti-communism moves those with an affinity for the transcendent:  communists abhor the notion, the possibility that human beings might be something more than complicated configurations of molecules, understandable given the millions of living souls they made into dead bodies. But secularism tilts away from the transcendent and is much more compatible with the materialist orientation of the contemporary Left and its disdain for traditional religion. 

One is struck by the profound change in the softening of attitude of the American people over the course of the last fifty years toward Communism.  One of the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates proceeded with these comments from the standard bearers.

Senator John Kennedy: We set a very high standard for ourselves. The communists do not.  They set a low standard of materialism.  We preach in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, in the statements of our greatest leaders, we preach very high standards; and if we’re not going to be charged before the world with hypocrisy we have to meet those standards.

Vice-President Richard Nixon: Also as far as religion is concerned, I have seen Communism abroad. I see what it does. Communism is the enemy of all religions; and we who do believe in God must join together.

These words, forming part of the political conversation in America, near the end of 1960 must have resonated strongly with the American people. No main stream politician after 1970, with the exception of Ronald Reagan on a few occasions, would or could talk like this. Consider their striking contrast with the autobiographical musings of a current national politician:

President Barak Obama: To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets….  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated." [From, Dreams from my Father, 100-101]

Whatever one might think of Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, neocolonialism and Eurocentrism, it is indisputable that the Cold War-revulsion with communism in the West has disappeared.  Still, it is remarkable that such an angry and bitterly tinged confession of Communist infatuation expressed above by our President as a young man (never apparently regretted or retracted) would never be considered as a serious issue by the electorate.    

But there are many other things now to fear and reprobate besides our President’s youthful, Marxist dyspepsia.  Still, I think, it is worthwhile to reconsider our kinder-gentler posture toward an ideology that ravaged a good portion of the planet and its people during the twentieth century.

I propose that there are at least three good reasons to launch a militant anti-Communism for the twenty-first century.  First, for much of the latter half of the twentieth century, it has been difficult to know the extent and ferocity of the slaughter conducted by Communist regimes.  Because of the vast disparity between the promises and the performance, Communists became masterful at both hiding the enormity of their iniquities and pretending to be virtuous.  Recent access gained to archives that have long been inaccessible to outside researchers has confirmed what mid-twentieth century anti-Communists knew, that the Reds in China and Russia were shooting and starving their people by the millions.*   Those who were under them suffered deeply; those who were not rightly loathed and feared them.

In spite of a century of mass-murder with its extensive documentation the self-infatuated monsters responsible for it have never been fully execrated.  The tens of millions of their victims deserve the solemn acknowledgement of their innocence and suffering.  The perpetrators richly deserved to be remembered for all that they did and be showered forever with ignominy.  

The second reason is to demolish the phony, self-glorifying rhetoric of Communism’s “anti-Fascism.”  Stalin defeated Hitler only after he colluded and connived with him and then only after he collected the generous assistance from England and the U.S. – Lend-Lease, Studebaker trucks, and a second front.  As long as we allow the bogus argument to persist that Communists have courageously advanced the values that Hitler eschewed – equality, tolerance and world peace – they will continue to peddle the howler that they are the avatars of moral rectitude and human progress.

The third, and perhaps most important reason, is the persistence of communism.   Hitler is long dead and wholly execrated by the German people. Holocaust deniers in Germany and Austria are thrown in jail.  No one pays homage to dead Nazis. However, Mao and Lenin still molder away in their mausoleums and receive veneration.  Daniel Ortega was given a second chance in Nicaragua.  Communist governments, parties and movements abound, and in some places thrive. 

Anti-Communism is needed as a counterpoise to the ambitions of the twenty-first century Marxists and their friends. They never cease to believe that with the same political ideology that shaped and inspired Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, unlike them, they can make a peoples’ revolution that is a happy-time for all, a dream rather than a recurring nightmare – Socialism with a Human Face.   

*See:

Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine, Free Press, 1996,

Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, a Reassessment, Oxford, 2007,

Frank Dikotter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most

Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62, Walker & Co, 2010.   

**Dedicated to my friend, Mike Burton, who fought the communists in Vietnam.

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Ideologues versus philosophers – Lenin versus Russell

“The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true.”

         V. I. Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism

How does one distinguish an ideologue from a philosopher?  The question is complicated somewhat by the fact that our most “accomplished” ideologues have employed the work of philosophers and passed themselves off as philosophers.  Lenin, of course, immediately jumps to mind.  His entire mental universe was built on the centerpiece of late nineteenth-century German metaphysics, the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx.  Lenin ‘s venture into technical philosophy, his book, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, was conceived, in his own words, “to seek for the stumbling block to people who under the guise of Marxism are offering something incredibly baffling, confused and reactionary.”* 

 Written in 1908 nearly a decade before Lenin’s Bolshevik party had overthrown the Provisional Government, his sectarian impulses for this philosophical production are clearly evident in this concise delineation of his authorial motives.  Here we have the priestly, pastoral Lenin guiding his vulnerable flock, steering them away from the precipices of alluring, but false doctrine, and ultimately, the chasm of … reactionary thinking.  He alone could navigate the narrow path of true Marxism and steer away from the baffling and confused detours into its perversion.   Lenin from his earliest moments could always sniff the odors of Marxist heresy that marked the reactionaries and their enablers.

From this also it is not difficult to parse evidence of the two connected core elements that compose the soul of the ideologue; Lenin’s likely being the purest of them all. First, the ideologue is “the knower”**, but a knower of rare and remarkable powers.  He has penetrated a reality hidden from others, resisted even.   Moreover, that knowledge confers an entitlement of a very special kind, an entitlement to exert an unrestricted power over others.  Thus, the second core element of the ideologue’s soul – a relentless quest for power over the lives of other people.  

The entitlement claim to power is derived from the “hidden” nature of what the ideologue knows.  Which in its simplest form is:  the wrong people are in charge. They exploit. They oppress, and they pretend to be entitled to their privileges.  However, this ugly reality is largely hidden from view. The power possessed by the exploiters has long been legitimized by a false knowing, a “false consciousness”, as it is commonly expressed, which embraces the entirety of the society’s cultural heritage.   The laws, religion, art, science altogether compose a vast superstructure that represents both the natural and social world in ways that makes the undeserved power and privilege of ruling class appear natural, reasonable and acceptable.  This hidden knowledge as well is a repudiation and rejection of the wisdom and experience of the social order that is in place.         

         The ideologue-knower is thus entitled to power because (a) unlike most others, he sees through the false rationale of legitimacy that supports the wrong people who are in charge, and (b) by virtue of this knowledge he represents the people who should be in charge.  Resistance to the ideologue-knower is immoral because he alone is determined to transform the status quo of corruption and misery into a new era of virtue and happiness.

Compare, however, the ideologue, Lenin, to a philosopher, Bertrand Russell.  Russell, like Lenin, was also a man of the Left and a critic of capitalism.   Bertrand Russell traveled to the Soviet Union in 1920 during the early days of the Bolshevik consolidation of power with a group of British socialists to observe the progress of socialism which they hoped would be a more humane and equitable system than capitalism.  Russell was, so to speak, “a friendly critic.” Upon his return he wrote a short but amazingly insightful book about his experience and encounters with the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin. This short book, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism wonderfully illustrates the difference between an ideologue and a philosopher.

  While sympathetic to the goals of the revolution in Russia, Russell, unlike Lenin, never claimed to be a “knower.”   Russell captured in his own inimitable style, Lenin, The Knower:  “He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory…. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree….  I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat.“***

Two items stand out in Russell’s picture of this “embodied theory” of a man:  his fury with those who might disagree or dissent from his opinions, and his general loathing for the bulk of humanity. Lenin could not begin to conceive that what he believed about the unfolding of history, the emerging modern world, and how a society should be ordered might be mistaken or confused -- thus, the fury with dissent and the disdain for the “great many people” unable to comprehend the gnosis that he had long ago intuited and that defined his entitlement to rule over demos and reorder their lives. Lenin lived in a rigidly dichotomous world populated by the self-appointed clique of illuminati (historically destined to rule, they asserted) and all the rest of humanity who would do what they were told.        

In his preface Russell states the profound difference he sees between himself and with Lenin and Bolshevism.  “Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures.  When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Lenin. He [Lenin] is a man who entertains a number of elaborate and dogmatic beliefs … which may be true, but are not, to a scientific temper, capable of being known to be true with any certainty.  This habit, of militant certainty about objectively doubtful matters, is one from which, since the Renaissance, the world has been gradually emerging, into that temper of constructive and fruitful scepticism which constitutes the scientific outlook. I believe the scientific outlook to be immeasurably important to the human race.”***         

Russell here captures the atavistic and primitive features of Lenin’s intellectual universe.  “Militant certainty about objectively doubtful matters” was the essence of Leninism.  Lenin was above all else a ferociously driven fanatic, convinced of his omniscience, obsessed to rule over others --   Unlimited“ power above all law,” as he himself put it.

         The obsession with power is what distinguishes an ideologue from a philosopher.   Russell’s embrace of the “scientific outlook” with its premise of skepticism suggests a suspicion of power. Ideologues crave power: power makes philosophers nervous. Russell recognized in 1920, a mere three years into the failed seventy-four year Soviet experiment, that the Bolsheviks were deluded about what they were and what they thought they could do.  “They think themselves utterly free from sentiment, but, in fact, they are sentimental about Communism and about the regime they are creating; they cannot face the fact that what they are creating is not complete Communism…”*** Russell mentions one of Lenin’s first “initiatives” – the CHEKA and its unlimited power. “It has spies everywhere, and ordinary mortals live in terror of it.”***               

       Lenin, as noted above, was a fanatic. Leninism was fanaticism institutionalized and operationalized across the planet throughout much of the twentieth century by men – Stalin, Mao, Castro, and others – who like Lenin were ideologues, men who claimed unlimited power over others because they “believed that they knew.”   

*V. I. Lenin,  Selected Works,  v. 11, 90.

**“Lenin does not know that he believes. He believes that he knows.” From: Alain Besancon, The Rise of the Gulag: Intellectual Origins of Leninism, New York, Continuum, 1981, 9.

*** Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 1920, 19, 5, 37.

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