annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party and the Soviet Government. Here we see no wisdom but only a demonstration of the brutal force which had once so alarmed V.I. Lenin. . . .
      It was determined that of the 130 members and candidates of the party’s Central Committee who were elected at the 17th Congress, 98 persons, i.e., 70 percent were arrested and shot [mostly in 1937-1938].
      Stalin had many remarkable achievements, and his extermination of 70 percent of the Central Committee which elected him General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union must rank as one of his greatest. Two questions need answering: how did he do it? and should he have done it?
      To answer these questions, it is necessary to explore the basic doctrines of Communism. Marx taught that a great class war was being waged for the destiny of mankind. This war was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and it was both national and international.
      As devout Marxists, the Soviet Communists believed that they had the responsibility of leading and guiding the troops of the proletariat; both nationally and internationally.
      The forces of the bourgeoisie were powerful and devious. They were active in the Soviet Union and worldwide, striving

to infiltrate the Communist Party and contribute to bourgeois victory. The Party must be diligent in detecting and destroying these enemy agents.
      Universal suspicion must be the order of the day. When Czarism had ruled Russia, a Secret police organization known as the Cheka had existed. When the Bolsheviks had prevailed, they had organized a much larger Secret Police force to hunt down alleged enemy spies and agents. Lenin’s slogan was, “Every Comrade a Chekist.” Every Communist must look for spies everywhere.
      Under Lenin, the Secret Police grew exponentially and was constantly renamed. It became the NKVD, the MVD, and later the KGB. Included in its duties was to keep every Communist leader under observation, to record any suspicious associations, statements or deeds, and to investigate any accusations.
      To whom did the Secret Police submit their reports? To the Secretary General, of course. Thus, Stalin had a secret file on every member of the Central Committee. He controlled the agenda of the meetings of the Politburo where final decisions were made. He provided the information gathered or fabricated by the Secret Police on which decisions were based.

(Conclusion of “Stalin” next month)

Drug flights over Cuba Increase
by Tom Carter (The Washington Times, July 26, 1998, p. A1)

      Colombian drug traffickers are increasingly flying their contraband-laden aircraft across eastern Cuba in a bid to avoid detection and interdiction by the United States, drug enforcement officials say.
      Maps produced by the Joint Interagency Task Force East show that during the last six months of 1997, half of the airplanes flying drugs out of Colombia flew across eastern Cuba, dropping their cargoes in coastal waters to be picked up by waiting speedboats.
      The task force, based in Key West, Fla., is made up of officers from the U.S. Customs Service, Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Administration and Pentagon.
      Cuba says it is doing everything possible to stop the flights, but critics charge that the traffic has President Fidel Castro’s tacit, if not direct, approval.

      “It is ironic that the Cuban military can scramble MiGs to shoot down American civilian aircraft but cannot scramble its MiGs to defend its airspace from narcotics,” said Rep. Robert Menendez, New Jersey Democrat.
      “I think the Castro government receives money for permitting the overflights and the use of its territorial waters,” he added.
      He was referring to the downing of two aircraft flown by Cuban-Americans over the Florida Strait in February 1996.
      Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican and vehement Castro critic, agreed.
      “Castro is a willing participant in allowing Cuba to be used as a drug transshipment point as a way to evade U.S. law enforcement,” she said yesterday.
      “It is difficult to prove [Castro’s] direct participation, but common sense says that nothing enters or leaves Cuba without the approval of the dictator himself. . . . He’s in cahoots with the drug traffickers,” she said.
      Cuba says the charges are outrageous, pointing to U.S.-Cuban cooperation in the 1996 seizure of 6.2 tons of cocaine on the merchant vessel Limerick. In that case, using U.S. intelligence, the Cuban government made the seizure.

      “We are against any use of our territory or airspace for this type of activity,” said Luis Fernandez, spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington Wednesday. “Maybe it is possible that some can pass through, but it is not allowed.”
      Blaming the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba, he said: “We have a problem with our resources and cannot always detect these things.”
      Mr. Fernandez said he did not know whether Cuban authorities had arrested any traffickers in Cuba in 1997 or 1998 but noted that the 1998 State Department report on drugs “recognized our efforts against drug trafficking.”
      Data prepared by the interagency task force shows that in early 1997, the drug traffickers generally flew up the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Central America before dropping off their cargoes. But in late 1997, the flight path changed.
      Out of 39 “detects” in which U.S. agencies identified drug planes flying out of South America, 16 flew directly over Cuban land. Four more went over water but inside Cuban airspace.
      The agency did not provide information on drug “detects” for this year.
      According to enforcement agencies, the planes fly through Cuban airspace and drop the drugs in Cuban waters

along the north shore, where “go-fast” boats retrieve the drugs and speed them to U.S. shores.
      “In the second quarter, the dealers began testing the route [through Cuba]. They found it worked, and by the last quarter [of 1997], it looked like a highway flying out of the Guajira Peninsula,” said a congressional staffer involved in drug legislation.
      The lack of relations between the United States and Cuba, coupled with an economic pinch that makes it hard for Cuba to police its own territory, apparently has helped make Cuba a haven for drug smugglers.
      The DEA acknowledged that Cuba has become a concern.
      “Cuba’s role in the cocaine trade as a transshipment point is not as significant as many other island countries in the Caribbean,” said a DEA official in Washington Tuesday on the condition of anonymity.
       “It is Cuba’s potential as a cocaine and heroin transshipment country, rather than its current status, that is most relevant. . . . South American drug traffickers do, however, exploit Cuban airspace and territorial waters in order to avoid interdiction by U.S. and Caribbean law enforcement assets.”
      The CIA’s 1997 World Factbook describes Cuba as a “lesser transshipment point for cocaine bound for the U.S.”

Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and Jacques Ellul, part 4
by Dr. Michael Bauman

      Last month, Dr. Bauman examined Ellul’s faulty New Testament hermeneutic and explored the dangerous consequences of his anarchistic philosophy.

      All this [Ellul’s anarchism] flies in the face of historic Christian wisdom, both ancient and modern, and it ignores the fact that Christianity is, as it were, a reality game. The Bible deals with real people in a realistic fashion. It stares directly upon human nature and does not blink. Jesus, as C. S. Lewis rightly perceived, was a thorough-going realist, though he is seldom given credit for being so. Augustine, while he understood perhaps better than anyone that the City of Man could never become the City of God, never slid from anti-utopianism into anarchism. Thomas Aquinas, far from being an anarchist, was an ardent proponent of the respublica Hominum sub Deo. He believed that the proper purpose of human law was to propose and uphold the ideal of good conduct and to help habituate men toward its 

performance. However, by doing so, Thomas was not therefore an idolator of the state, contrary to Ellul’s scathing verdict on those who hold such a view. Thomas knew that “no matter what high ideals, how fine the structures and laws, how good and beneficent the ruler, the political community is no substitute for . . . religion.” and that “politics is not a way of salvation.” He also knew that “for the Christian, politics is neither all-important nor unimportant.” In short, Aquinas understood what Ellul does not: the Christian “cannot let politics fall to the perverters by default.” Even Dante, perpetually abused as he was by government, argues to subject the world to one state; Ellul (by contrast) unrealistically argues to eliminate political power altogether. Calvin, too, understood the realism and practical wisdom of a God who works in our world on our behalf, and therefore he set about actively trying to bring the revealed will of God to bear upon the political and social concerns of Geneva.
      Ellul’s is just the sort of impracticable and unbiblical political philosophy that Karl Rahner criticized for mortgaging the present for the sake of a generation of people who were never born and who never will be. As the old maxim indicates, politics is the art of the possible. It is not an impractical affair disconnected from human reality. Christian political theory, to paraphrase Algernon Sidney, does not seek for that which is 

perfect, because it knows that such a thing is not to be found among men. Rather, it seeks that form of government that is attended with the fewest and most pardonable shortcomings, and it knows that anarchism is not that form. Christian political theory deals with possibilities, not with unreachable goals or speculations about the politics of the eschaton, at least as we imperfectly anticipate them.
      Furthermore, simply because human government is imperfectible, Christian political theorists and politicians do not relegate politics and the state to the secularists and to the secular, as does Ellul, who writes that we do not “have to work out a Christian doctrine of the form of government or the economy,” and that “another way that is closed [to Christians] is that of wanting to christianize society or the state. The state is not meant to be Christian. It is meant to be secular.” To Ellul, participation in politics and in the structures of “the powers that be” forms no necessary part of Christian life and faith. “In fact,” writes Ellul, “no directly biblical or theological argument seems to support participation.”
      The proliferation of views like Ellul’s has had a disastrous effect. Partly because Christianity is made to seem not only unpolitical but antipolitical, most universities feel free to construct an entire curriculum in political theory that operates as if Christianity were either nonexistent or else an accumulation of merely irrelevant data that can be safely ignored. Theology seems to them to have no bearing upon the integrity or content of the discipline of political science. Yet, Ellul appears not to understand that, because they are the chief mechanisms of providing and preserving liberty, peace, and prosperity, the state and political power cannot be considered a matter of indifference by responsible Christians, or as something from which Christians can detach themselves with moral impunity, as if such institutions and concerns were theologically neutral or somehow fell outside the scope of necessary Christian action and reflection. Ellul does not understand that, while the political considerations surrounding life, liberty, and property (to invoke the Lockean triad) are not of ultimate or transcendent importance, they have a genuine significance that cannot be downplayed or made to appear as falling somehow beyond the purview of Christian revelation and theology. That such considerations are not ultimate concerns should lead us to advocate a limited state, not no state whatever. Ellul has not come to grips with the fact that not one shred of evidence exists that demonstrates that the anarchist principles he advocates would make the world more free, more prosperous, or more

secure. To procure these desirable political and economic conditions requires “the active presence and participation of the Christian in the affairs of state and society,” not the radical secularization of all political endeavors. Secularization is the enemy of modern Christianity, not its political ally.
      As John Stuart Mill once chided Jeremy Bentham, the cardinal error in most misguided political theories is the belief that politics can be reduced to a few simple, overarching formulas, a reduction that leads to an inflexible (and often universal) misapplication of half-true truisms, much to the distress and disadvantage of those upon whom they are imposed. Ellul’s anarchism is just such a simplistic theory. What he does not seem to understand about his call to abolish all power is the self-stultifying fact that the abolition of power can be accomplished, imposed, and maintained only by means of power, for, as Montesquieu observed more than two hundred years ago, it takes a power to check a power. Freedom never was, is not now, nor ever shall be (so far as we have evidence to tell) possible without political power.
      Freedom and political power are not antithetical realities in a fallen world. Ellul seems not to recognize that there can be no freedom without justice and that in a fallen world there can be no justice without power. He seems not to understand that while freedom is in most cases a desirable political condition, anarchism is simply freedom gone to seed. It is freedom improperly extended beyond the boundaries of political wisdom and foresight, the two indispensable characteristics of any good political theory. There is no freedom without order, and there is no order without law and law enforcement. As Goethe has observed, only law can give us freedom. Freedom without law endures as long as a lamb among hungry wolves. Therefore, because order is a political requirement of the first rank, if anything in politics is demonic, it is not Caesar or money (as Ellul says); it is that spirit that cannot bear authority and seeks to destroy it utterly.
      In that light, I am reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s politically illuminating tale, “The Yellow Bird,” in which the zealous Russian, Professor Ivanhov, the author of an intoxicating tract for the times entitled The Psychology of Liberty, “emancipates” a fish by smashing its bowl and “liberates” a canary from its cage–only to see the bird torn to pieces in the nearby woods.

(continued next month)

The New York Times Manifesto
by David Horowitz (Heterodoxy, April 1, 1998, pg 1)

      It has been hardly a decade since the statues of Lenin were toppled throughout the Soviet empire and the head of Karl Marx was severed once and for all from  any connection to the body politic. Yet the lips of the severed head continue to move.
      In the West leading intellectuals—many who would not allow themselves to be called Marxists—profess to hear a message they insist is relevant to our times. Thus the rush to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the only text that most of the millions of soldiers in Marxist vanguards around the world ever read.
      The Manifesto was an incitement to totalitarian ambitions whose results were far bloodier than those inspired by Mein Kampf. In it Marx announced the doom of free market societies, declared the liberal bourgeoisie to be a “ruling class” and the democratic state its puppet, summoned proletarians and their intellectual vanguard to begin civil wars in their own countries, and thereby launched the most destructive movement in human history.
      Yet this birthday celebration in the commanding heights of our political culture is marked not by judgements of its historical malevolence or even by cautionary admonitions to potential disciples, but by fulsome praise for its brilliant analysis and even more preposterously for its analytic profundity and prescience. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, not to mention the usual suspects like The Nation, have embarrassed themselves by asserting the indispensability of this tract for understanding the failings of the very system which brought Marxism to its knees—capitalism.
      We might expect this of a former Communist and present-day Marxist like Eric Hobsbawm, who contributed the egregious introduction to an anniversary edition of the Manifesto published by the New Left Review’s Verso Press. But it is passing strange to be presented with so historically unconscious a statement from the New York Times. Given the current state of the intellectual culture, it is no doubt then appropriate that the Times would pick a professor of English literature for the task (English departments being virtually the

last redoubts of the Marxist faith this side of Havana). But it is ironic that the professor, Steven Marcus, should be a protégé of Lionel Trilling, one of the most perceptive liberal critics of Marxism. For Marcus has written nothing less than a birthday ode to the irascible and demonic genius from Trier, under the title “Marx’s Masterpiece at 150.”
      According to Marcus and the Times: “The Manifesto was and is a work of immense autonomous historical importance. It marks the accession of social and intellectual consciousness to a new stage of inclusiveness. It has become part of an integral modern sensibility . . . and it remains so, after the demise of Soviet Communism and its satellite regimes, the descent into moribundity of Marxist movements in the world and the end of the cold war.”
      To be sure, on America’s benighted college campuses, unfortunately and deplorably, this description of Marxism’s currency is accurate. Marxism, or some kitsch version of it, has indeed become “part of an integral modern sensibility.” But what about the real world, outside the ivory tower?
      Of even more consequence is the Times’ endorsement of this degeneration of intellectual life—what should properly be regarded as a social disaster. Instead of digesting the lessons of the Communist holocaust, closing the Marxist tent, throwing the Manifesto in the intellectual garbage bin where it belongs, dusting off the volumes by Von Mises and Hayek, which actually predicted the Communist fall and—for the first time in one’s life—thinking about how to make bourgeois democracy work, the Times apparently would like its progressive readers to believe that none of this sordid revolutionary history has any relevance to the important and present task of continuing the civil war the Manifesto first incited.
      A decade after those world-historical occurrences, the Manifesto continues to yield itself  to our reading in the new light that its enduring insights into social existence generate. It emerges ever more distinctly as an unsurpassed dramatic representation, diagnosis and prophetic array of visionary judgements on the modern world . . . . A century and a half afterward, it remains a classic expression of the society it anatomized and whose doom it prematurely announced.
      Prematurely! Are we to understand by this that the Times thinks the bloody apocalypse Marx gleefully hoped for is yet to come? The answer is obviously yes if the Manifesto has “enduring insights” into capitalist economy. And what exactly is it that the Manifesto is alleged to have diagnosed? This, after all, is the decisive issue. Is the Manifesto correct

in what it says about “social existence”?
      In fact, the Manifesto is so self-evidently wrong in its fundamental analysis and judgements that its author could not begin to explain how the article praising his bankrupt and discredited war cry could appear in the Times at all. How is it that the leading institution of the “ruling class” press, in the principal bourgeois nation on the planet, could feature such Marxist tripe? Nor is this question incidental to the core problem of a text whose principal thesis claiming to analyze complex societies on the basis of a single structure—economic class—is announced in its very first line: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”
      This hypothesis is really the essence and sum of the Manifesto which is not a call to thought, but—and this should never be forgotten—a call to arms. The striking (and reprehensible) thesis of the Manifesto is that democratic societies are not really different in kind from the aristocratic and slave societies that required revolutions to overthrow. Despite surface appearances, despite the fact that in contrast to all previous societies, democracy makes the people “sovereign”—democratic capitalism is “unmasked” by Marx as an “oppressive” and tyrannical society like all the rest, and therefore requires extra-legal and violent means to liberate its victims from its yoke. That is why those who have been inspired by the Manifesto have declared war on the liberal societies of the West and have spilled so much blood and spread so much misery in our time.
      The meaning of the first sentence of the Manifesto, then, is this: All (non-socialist) societies are divided into classes that are “oppressed” and those who oppress them. Capitalism is no different, even though its revolutions may have instituted democratic political structures designed to enfranchise the “oppressed.” For the very idea of democracy in a society where private property exists, according to the Manifesto, is an illusion: “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In other words, democratic elections are a sham. Civil war is the political answer to humanity’s problems: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” The solution to all fundamental social problems—to war, to poverty, to economic inequality—lies in a conflict that will rip society apart and create a new revolutionary world from its ruins. This is the enduring and poisonous message of the Manifesto, and why its believers

have left such a trail of human slaughter in their path as they set about to create a progressive future.
      Almost every important analytic thesis of the Manifesto—including its opening statement—is patently false. History is not the history of class struggle, as defined by Marx, i.e., the struggle of economic oppressor and oppressed. Not even the historical event which provided the basis for Marx’s theoretical model, the French Revolution, is explicable in these terms. Historians like Simon Schama and Francis Furet have established, beyond any reasonable doubt, that capitalism was already thriving under the monarchy, and it was the nobility, not the bourgeoisie, that upended the ancien regime. When we look at the twentieth century, whose course has largely been determined by forces of nationalism and racism, which Marx utterly discounted, the hopeless inadequacy of his theories becomes impossible except for those blinded by faith—to ignore.
      According to Marx, the bourgeois epoch possesses a distinctive feature: “It has simplified the class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” But, of course, it hasn’t. Which is one reason why Marxism has failed, as a program, in all the industrialized countries.
      In fact, much of the Marxist critique of capitalism reflects nothing so much as a romantic longing for a feudal past in which social status was pre-ordained and irrevocable, and stamped every individual with a destiny and a grace.
      The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
      Of course, it has not exactly done this either. More likely it has turned physician, lawyer, scientist, and poet into entrepreneurs themselves. In the open societies created by capitalist revolutionaries, they can set up as independent contractors; they can incorporate themselves, and they can move up the social and economic scale to heights undreamed of when their status may have been “reverential” but where it was also fixed by the immutable relations of an authentic “class society,” which bourgeois society is not. The complexity and fluidity of class structure in developed capitalist societies has made a mockery of the core principles of Marxist belief.

Beginning of an end for China’s masters?
by Arnold Beichman (The Washington Times, July 13, 1998, p. A17)

      Having seen what happened to the former Soviet Union in 1991, we’ll learn in the next five years (or less) whether or not Alexis de Tocqueville’s “law” can predict the political future of Communist China. De Tocqueville’s “law” reads:
      “Experience suggests that the most dangerous moment for an evil government is usually when it begins to reform itself. The sufferings that are endured patiently, as being inevitable, become intolerable the moment it appears that there might be an escape. Reform then only serves to reveal more clearly what still remains oppressive and now all the more unbearable; the suffering, it is true, has been reduced, but one’s sensitivity has become more acute.”
      There is plenty of contemporary evidence to support De Tocqueville:
      •Stalin died in March 1953. East German workers rose up in revolt on June 17, 1953.
      •The post-Stalin Soviet leadership began to ease up on its subjects; the word “thaw” began to be heard from the Kremlin. Workers in Poznan, Poland in June 1956 and workers in Hungary in October 1956 rose up in revolt.
      •In 1968, Alexander Dubcek proposed communism with a human face for Czechoslovakia. Soviet occupation followed.
      •Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985 on began “democratizing” Soviet communism to a point where it committed suicide in 1991.
      From the Shah of Iran in 1978 to Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 to Mr. Gorbachev in 1991 to Suharto in 1998 and in between–if an oppressed people thinks there’s a chance of toppling their oppressors, they will take risks they would otherwise shun.
      De Tocqueville could not have foreseen another possibility which could inspire a people to rise up against a domestic dictatorship–international support by the democracies. African anti-colonial leaders in the 1960s and Russian dissidents in the 1970s and ’80s found allies in Western countries, most notably in the United States. So today the U.S. and the West, whether President Clinton wills it or not, have emboldened the peoples of mainland China, not yet to the point of outright counter-revolution–but then

>who knows what lies ahead?  
      De Tocqueville was not necessarily predicting success by a recalcitrant citizenry against its rulers. After all, they commanded armies and weaponry and thus could contain an uprising. The Kremlin did that in Hungary and in Poland in 1956 and they built a wall around Berlin in 1961. In 1989 Communist China did that in Tiananmen Square. Today a dictatorship which is prepared to use force against “counter-revolutionaries” and promote a return to centrally-planned poverty and isolation is one which has declared that it is both backward and doomed.
      In 1978 Deng Xiaoping announced that Marxism didn’t have all the answers. The Chinese leadership then began to move away from the failing Soviet-style centrally planned economy to an economy with market characteristics, but still under monolithic Communist control. The Party replaced the old collectivization with a system of privatized responsibility in agriculture. It increased the decision-making power of local officials and plant managers in industry, closed uneconomic government-owned factories with consequent unemployment, permitted a wide variety of small-scale enterprise in services and light manufacturing, and opened the economy to foreign investment and modern production methods.
      Socialism in China is a disappearing entity. It is becoming clear that more than half of China’s economy “is no longer in state hands,” to quote the London Economist, “and the private share of the economy has been growing rapidly.” The entrepreneurial Chinese people are enjoying the benefits of a decentralizing governmental system. While Russia and other Commonwealth countries are struggling to adapt to market mechanisms, China has already done that to a far greater degree than have the USSR’s successor states.
      “We recognize nothing private,” Lenin thundered in 1919 and Soviet communism acted on that principle. While Communist China still follows that Leninist dictate–its rule on abortions and forced labor, for example–it has introduced freedom in the job market. Jiang Zemin and his comrades think Communist China will prosper as a market economy with an authoritarian carapace. They may be right. The Chinese people are a practical people. They would, I think, agree with George Orwell who in defending the “materialism” of workers said: “How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time.”

q   Several weeks ago, as you may recall reading in this newspaper, Jane Fonda came to town at the invitation of the National Press Club. Here, she spoke her mind about everything from sex education (which she says isn’t as good as it should be) to the Christian Coalition (which in her opinion doesn’t care about children that aren’t white, middle-class Christians, but then again, they can always be eliminated).
      Larry P. Arnn, president of the Claremont Institute in Claremont, Calif., now writes to Inside the Beltway that he knows, “by long and friendly acquaintance, the people of whom she speaks. But a personal association is hardly necessary to know that her words are a vile slander.”
      “Consider especially that last comment: ‘As far as they’re concerned, others can be eliminated.’ It is well to remember that in 1972, Ms. Fonda traveled to Hanoi to broadcast communist propaganda on behalf of an enemy in war, a brutal dictatorship.
      “She was photographed, smiling, in a Vietnamese

anti-aircraft gun–a weapon used to eliminate, in fact, American servicemen. As Ms. Fonda worked to destroy the morale of her own country, American prisoners of war were being tortured by her enthusiastic hosts,” he recalls.
      Mr. Arnn notes that today, Ms. Fonda “is married to one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the nation. She is a celebrity, friend, and guest of the first couple. She is pleased to publicize her opinions as a prominent liberal. But her blessings have not made her gracious; nor grateful to the principles of the country that has provided her so much.
      “In 1790, George Washington wrote: ‘All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. . . . For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.’”
      John McCaslin, The Washington Times, July 16, 1998