Communist America Part 1 – Introduction

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Written By Roderick T. Beaman

History has shown that the greatest danger to most nations, movements and organizations has always been from within, rarely from without. Oh, there are often cases when the finishing touches are given by some outsiders, such as the sacking of Rome but the decay has always been at work for decades, even centuries.

The Soviet Union collapsed because of its erroneous assumptions about the nature of man. The country was rotting at its core for decades until it simply imploded. It’s odd that many, including William F. Buckley Jr., noted the similarities between its constitution and ours.

It is probably the fate of most human institutions. They contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction which others will exploit in the furtherance of their own goals. Historically, it seems to be the fate that awaits those institutions that compel membership and submission, such as countries and movements.

I fear the same fate awaits The United States of America and for many of the same reasons. It’s rotting at its core. Enemies are exploiting weak spots and contradictions and using them for their own purposes. This nation ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’, will soon be delegated to the trash heap of history. I believe this is inevitable.

There can be no philosophy more antithetical to American values than communism. Yet it has taken hold of this country. Our nation is in its clutches and this has been accomplished through a constellation of people many of whom are unaware of exactly where they fit into this grand scheme. It has been done without firing a shot.

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation without knowing how it happened.” This quote, widely attributed to Norman Thomas, the six time Socialist Party candidate for president, may never have been uttered by him. Snopes.com  states that Thomas probably never said it.

Like many other apocrypha, however, it illustrates a fundamental truth. Socialism has been accepted in this country by stealth; a little here and a little there.

When I did the web search on Norman Thomas, I also came across another ‘quote’ by him. It was to the effect that the Democratic Party accepted socialism without problems but the Republicans did so, reluctantly.

Ensuring accuracy is becoming more and more of a problem in this age of instant information via the internet. Things dubious have a way of assuming lives of their own.

That said, I can discern little difference between Karl Marx’s agenda and the platform of the Democratic Party . Does that make the Democratic Party communist? I will leave it to the reader to answer that question.

Liberals, leftists and progressives all rail at any implication that they may harbor communist views. In the 1950s, famed columnist Walter Winchell had a feud with James Wechsler, the editor of The New York Post. One of my high school teachers said that Wechsler had sued Winchell for actually calling him a communist. I was unable to confirm that in a web search although there certainly was acrimony between them.

For his part, Wechsler had been a communist at Columbia University in 1937. Later he left the movement and after the war, he became an anti-communist liberal, a group that emerged post-war and included honorable people like Hubert H. Humphrey.

The New York Post, at that time, was one of the most liberal newspapers in the country, a far cry from its current politics, driven by Rupert Murdoch. Its Op-ed pages were showcases for contemporary liberal columnists. Max Lerner and Murray Kempton spring to my mind as among its luminaries. William Buckley once introduced the former on his TV show, Firing Line, by noting that it would have been difficult for anyone ‘to have read as many books as Max Lerner has written.’

Even today, under the continuing Zeitgeist, it is virtual intellectual suicide to say that anyone is a communist or to impugn him by raising any such comparisons. It likely will result in a lawsuit. Such an observer would be charged with McCarthyism, a dishonoring of the name of a great American. It’s interesting that little opprobrium and hesitation attaches to the labeling of anyone who disagrees with a liberal as a racist or fascist, a happy habit of those on the Left. The New York Times has done it for years, once calling James Buckley’s followers ‘night riders of the right.’ So much for sober discussion.

Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto would seem to be the best starting point to assess what is communism and what makes one a communist. Published in 1848, it is hailed as the most widely read political pamphlet in history.  

Few Americans have read The Manifesto but all should and become familiar with it. It is available in any library or book store.

The pamphlet itself is 36 6″X9″ pages, in my edition. It has a foreword by Frederick Engels and a brief introductory page by Marx himself, with the meat of it another 30 pages. The text is divided into four parts. It is not enjoyable reading but a rambling screed. Every time I browse through it, I have to force myself to pay attention. Sentences often are confusing, oxymoronic and nigh impossible for me to make any sense of.

In the second section entitled “Proletarians and Communists” is this telltale statement. “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.” That comports with everyone’ impression and is from the horse’s mouth, Karl Marx himself, the founder of communism.

Further in that second section is the following:

“Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc. ”

Note, Marx admits that despotism is necessary and that the initial inroads may appear economically insufficient and will necessitate even more later. I can only conclude that Marx foresaw an eternal struggle thought it likely the goal would never be achieved!

Many of these provisions seem to be desirable but are actually tools for government to subvert and destroy individuality, the essence of Americanism. They mean government control. Some have been done by the well intentioned, some by the less so. All compromise our freedom.

(This is the first in a series of articles that I plan on each of Marx’s recommendations. I have no idea how many there will be nor how often the reader should expect them, if anyone actually thinks they may be worthy of their attention.

I will be using the terms like socialism and communism interchangeably since, in socialism’s fullest expression, it is communist. That is evidenced by the fact that Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev both called themselves socialist.)

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Related articles:

COMMUNIST AMERICA   PART 1 – INTRODUCTION

COMMUNIST AMERICA – PART II -REREADING THE MANIFESTO

COMMUNIST AMERICA – PART III -THE FIRST PLANK

COMMUNIST AMERICA – PART IV – MORE PLANKS

COMMUNIST AMERICA – PART V -MORE PLANKS – THE FINAL FOUR

COMMUNIST AMERICA – PART VI -MORE PLANKS – WALKING THE PLANKS

 

Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”

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