The Heart, Mind and Soul of Communism
by Dr. Fred Schwarz
the last in a continuing series

WHAT CAN I DO?
      Always there arises the question, “What can I do? I would like very much to help in this great battle, but I seem so inadequate. The issues are beyond me. When the problem defies the masterminds of state, college, and church, what hope have I of making any significant contribution?” There is something everyone can do and it consists of four things: knowledge, courage, faith, and consecration.

KNOWLEDGE
Whenever the medical profession endeavors to combat a serious disease, the first essential is a vast program of research into the nature of the disease, its causes, the laws of its development, the conditions favorable to its spread, and wherein its weakness — its “heel of Achilles”—lies, so that it may be attacked and defeated. Understanding is the irreducible minimum of effective counter-action. Ignorant opposition is frequently valuable assistance to the Communist cause. The quality of ignorance and misunderstanding, at all levels of intellect and education, of the nature and mind of Communism is startling. I could amplify this article with illustration after illustration of the most pitiable ignorance revealed to me personally by high military officers, university professors and ministers of religion. Such statements as the following we hear every day, and they reveal total incomprehension of the nature of Communism. The first statement is, “We must acknowledge the good in Communism and realize it is primarily a reaction to the evils of Capitalistic Society.” The good in Communism is like the “good” in tuberculosis, unappreciated by the victim. Again we hear “It is possible to preserve peace with Communism”  when the Communists’ very thought processes define the existing state as class war. Or yet again we hear, “We must eliminate social abuses so that Communism may not flourish.” Cancer was never cured by improving the general health. Knowledge is the first weapon in our arsenal of defense. The basic Communist texts are available and these should be studied so that we have an understanding of the Communist laws of thought and their blueprint of conquest. Knowledge is power.

COURAGE
      What we discover when we investigate Communism is terrifying. The vastness of the danger oppresses us. We may react in one of two ways. The knowledge may be a “savor of death unto death or life unto life.” We may become oppressed and throw in the towel, or we may gird ourselves for the battle, realizing how terrible it will be. Many individuals have to face situations of this nature. They visit their physician to be told they have the dread disease of cancer. They may react in one of two ways,— a defeat or a challenge. Some say, “All is finished, life is over,” and in despair throw themselves under a train. Others say, “This is grim news, but I will do my best to overcome it,”  and they make the decisions required courageously, rearrange their life routine, submit to the drastic surgery necessary, pay the heavy cost, and come through triumphantly. Courage transforms the dread knowledge into a challenge, a matchless sacrifice, a heroic endeavor and a glorious triumph.

FAITH
      The Communists say, “There is no God.” We know, “In the beginning, God.” God has not abdicated from the throne of the universe. He is an active agent in history and makes even the wrath of man praise Him. We have His promises. “When the enemy shall come in like a flood; then will the Spirit of the Lord lift up a standard against him.” If we will pray, live righteously, and trust in Him, He will not fail in our hour of need: “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

CONSECRATION
      Communism has been able to mobilize the loyalty, discipline, and willingness to sacrifice even unto death of countless millions. In the final analysis faith can only be matched by faith, devotion by devotion, and consecration by consecration. Are we who name the name of Christ prepared to make equal sacrifices, to serve with equal unselfishness, to manifest like loyalty and devotion as those who name the name of Lenin?

Rise up, O Men of God,
Have done with lesser things.
Give heart and mind and soul and strength
Unto the king of Kings
Rise up, O Men of God!

continued from page 1

      Marxism appeals because it undermines the legitimacy of all forms of social power, other than the power of the intellectual.  Contemporary Marxoid sects are likewise devoted to undermining things: in particular those things that create the normality of the surrounding social order.  This is why feminism has adopted so many of the Marxian concepts.  In place of the bourgeois (property-owning) class we have men; in place of the proletariat, women; instead of bourgeois ideology we have patriarchy and its insidious fashioning of the social world; in place of the class struggle we have the “struggle” of women to affirm their identity.  And so on.  Any number of other identity movements follow this model, seeking to “liberate” racial minorities, homosexuals, conquered peoples, even animals, from the “oppression” of some ruling group that supposedly marginalizes and mistreats them.  The aim is always to deconstruct the old culture, the old institutions, to be in the vanguard of the struggle on behalf of the oppressed.
      The survival of the Marxian agenda goes with a virulent hostility toward all conservative, “right-wing” or reactionary thinkers.  Guilt by association is the fate of any artist or thinker who has not displayed his left-wing credentials on his sleeve; recent victims include Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ernst Junger, even Igor Stravinsky.  A vast academic industry is devoted to showing that these cultural figures are tainted by the brush of imperialism, reaction or, notably, “fascism.”  The crimes of Hitler are often laid at the door of Richard Wagner.  Even though Marxism is transparently untenable; even though the whole revolutionary project has been a disaster and the source of untold misery and crime, you must not criticize the agenda.  To do so is to betray the sacred mission of the priesthood.
      No parallel treatment awaits the intellectual of the left, and even those who have justified terrible atrocities–Sartre, for example, or the poet Louis Aragon, or Bertolt Brecht–are forgiven by their intellectual judges.  What matters is not truth or beauty but the shared agenda.
      Hence crime, on however large a scale, arouses little or no revulsion among leftwing intellectuals, provided that the goal is social equality–the pulling down of those on top, or the raising up of those below.  The Peterloo Massacre, for example, in which a handful of trade-unionists were killed

near Manchester in 1819, stands far higher in the list of recognized crimes than Katyn, where the Soviets murdered many thousands of Polish officers in cold blood, and certainly higher than the mass murders of priests by the Spanish Republicans or the more recent murders of industrialists by the German Red Army Faction.  Wealthy, successful and powerful people do not enjoy the sympathy of the left-wing intellectual, since it is assumed they do not deserve, and could never deserve, to be where they are.

Murderous Rhetoric
      The asymmetry of blame extends also to the “paper deeds” of the intellectuals themselves.  To stir up hatred in the name of equality is never a crime: Murderous rhetoric of the kind put about by Marx, Sartre and Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, is regarded with warm approval, because the target is the one on top–the capitalist, the bourgeois, the one with power.  The same dispensation is accorded to identity-politics polemicists, like the feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, whose hate-filled prose is regarded with smiling complicity by so many academics in America.  For once again the target is the one on top, and the goal is to rescue the one beneath him.
      The effect of all this is most easily observed in the universities, where ordinary decencies are driven from the curriculum.  Henceforth, until the habit of reading has been destroyed, students will be taught not only to sneer at their cultural and moral inheritance but also to look with compassion on those who have committed the worst crimes against it.  Marx is not responsible for this: He merely provided the tools of the trade.  Later thinkers refined the tools: Foucault generalized the theory of ideology so that all forms of social power, other than the power of the critic, lose their legitimacy.  Jacques Derrida invented a special gobbledygook with which to “deconstruct” the old authorities by smothering their words with nonsense.  And the feminists, gay activists and assorted provocateurs are now hard at work on the new curriculum, which will show how everything is permitted to the excluded and nothing to the culture that excludes.

The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 1998, p. W13

An Old Cold Warrior
by Arnold Beichman

      Twice last week I was chided about behaving like an “Old Cold Warrior,” (or OCW).  One of my critics was not particularly political, the other was a left liberal.
      It struck me as peculiar that nobody ever calls anybody who writes articles or books about the Holocaust an “old hot warrior” or an “Old Anti-Fascist.”  Without minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust, let us recognize that Lenin, Stalin & Co were guilty of the deaths of scores of millions of their own peoples.  Had Josef Stalin, who died in 1953, lived just another year, most Soviet Jews, if they were lucky, would have been exiled into a Siberian wasteland.
      Even more peculiar about this OCW bit is that while Western governments still hunt down Nazi concentration camp commandants and even lowly guards for trial, revocation of citizenship and deportation, not a single Soviet Gulag officer, let alone KGB torturer, has been put on trial for any of his past crimes, in some cases unspeakable crimes, against his fellow-Russians.  Even though the Cold War ended with dramatically fewer deaths than World War II, you would think that OCWs like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, let alone President Reagan, would be honored for having won a war against a dangerous totalitarian aggressor with almost no loss of life or treasure.  The great U.S.-Soviet tank “battle” of the Cold War occurred at Checkpoint Charlie in 1962 after the Berlin Wall went up and where after a few hours of sitting around, everybody went home for chow.
      The once-secret Soviet archives, some of which have been opened, have documented the infamies of Soviet totalitarianism.  To write about these events or to go into the treasonable behavior of some American government officials is being an OCW, especially among academicians.
      The reason I was being criticized for behaving like an OCW is that I have said rather loudly that the recently shown Ted Turner CNN television documentary on the Cold War is pseudo-history.  Ted Turner wants his film and the accompanying textbook to be used by high school students so as to create a “moral equivalence” consciousness.  In the film’s view, both sides, the Free World, led by the United States, and the Soviet Union were equally guilty in starting and continuing the Cold War, an unnecessary conflict.  You know, they had Stalin and we had Joe McCarthy, they had the Gulag and we had Kent State. It’s the old left-liberal trick

of making the episodic morally equivalent to the systemic.  To disagree with Ted Turner is in the eyes of left liberalism to be acting like an OCW.
      More than a half-century later, books are still being written and published about the horrors of Nazism, about Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, about the Holocaust.  When it comes to Hitler and Nazism, nobody is saying, “Oh, come on, let bygones be bygones.”  How many books have you seen published about the Gulag, about the horrors of Marxism-Leninism or Stalinism?  Few and getting fewer.  The story of a Nazi police battalion involved in the Holocaust published two years ago became a controversial international best seller.  When was the last best seller on Stalinism?  Surely communism was as bad as fascism, no?  In the eyes of the liberal-left, no, communism was not as bad as fascism. 
      “Schindler’s List” was a great movie about what Hitler did to the Jews of Europe.   But no Hollywood producer has announced plans to do an epic about the Gulag or about intrigue in the Kremlin.  Or about that fantastic night 10 years ago come Nov. 9 when the Berlin Wall came down, foreshadowing the fall of the Soviet empire a few years later.  Charlie Chaplin made a great movie about Hitler and Mussolini in “The Great Dictator.”  Wouldn’t a film about Lenin and Stalin also make a great movie?  But it won’t be made because to do so would mean you were an “Old Cold Warrior.”  We condemn Holocaust-deniers but Gulag-deniers prosper in the academy.  Gulag-affirmers are— right— Old Cold Warriors.
      When World War II ended, the Nazi Party ended.  Today in Germany as in the rest of Eastern Europe trying to organize a Nazi Party would be a crime.  Skinheads, like their avatar Adolf Hitler, are regarded as disreputable relics of a horrible past.  But not the well-funded Communist Parties in Russia and in Eastern Europe whose crimes in their pre-1991 heyday exceeded that of the Nazis simply because communism lasted for so many more decades than did Nazism.
      In the New Criterion magazine (October 1996), Anne Applebaum wrote:
      “Most educated people know that Stalin killed, by means of mass murder and concentration camps, at least twice an many innocent people as Hitler.  And yet almost no one in the West feels their crimes to have been evil in the same, visceral way that they feel Hitler’s crimes to have been evil.”
      To sum up, to lump Stalin with Hitler is to be an Old Cold Warrior.  So be it.

The Washington Times, May 21, 1999, p. A 15

Don't Reward China 
by Gary Bauer 

      Today, on the 10th anniversary of the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, President Clinton is asking Congress once again to grant most-favored-nation (MFN) trade status to China. The request shows that despite its spectacular failures, the administration is intent on continuing its dangerous and morally bankrupt policy of placing trade above all other factors in foreign policy. 
      America is a country built by the ingenuity and hard work of entrepreneurs. Business, in our free-market system of democratic capitalism, will always play a critical role in our national life, including our foreign policy. But when trade ceases to be one of many tools of our foreign policy and instead becomes the end of foreign policy, America's overall national interests are poorly served. 
      This is because commercial interests in foreign policy are one-dimensional in nature. Instead of balancing a broad range of factors–including respect for human rights, our national security and America's long-term economic interests–business interests tend to want us to forge a foreign policy helpful to their bottom line. The problem occurs when the nation's overall interests and the narrow interests of business's bottom line are not the same. 
      Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Thomas Donohue's call this week for China's admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the granting of permanent MFN trade status to Beijing. The call was notable for its timing–coming in the shadow of three of the most troubling events in the U.S.-Chinese relations in recent decades. First, the 10th anniversary of the brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square. Second, the release of the Cox committee report showing that China has stolen American weapons technology which can enable it to modernize its nuclear arsenal. And third, the de-facto siege of the American Embassy in Beijing by a government-sponsored mob. 
      Corporate America justifies its support for China's entry into the WTO and permanent MFN by claiming that trade will change conditions in China and encourage it to act more responsibly on the world stage. But these claims are belied by events of recent weeks. Moreover, this approach could actually prove damaging to our national security as China has proven adept at using unrestricted trade with the United States to advance its own strategic military and geopolitical interests. 
      This might not be as big a problem if China were a democratic country dedicated to international peace, regional stability, human rights and the rule of law. But the fact of the

matter is that the communist regime in Beijing is brutally oppressive, regionally ambitious, resentful of the United States and is rapidly arming itself with advanced weapons. 
      Much is being made of China's groundbreaking market access commitments in WTO negotiations. But these commitments are just that: commitments. To understand the true value of these concessions, we only need to look at China's commitments on weapons proliferation. At the October 1997 summit meeting in Washington, Chinese President Jiang Zemin committed to stop helping Iran with its nuclear program. But by early 1998 China was caught red-handed making a deal with Iran to break that commitment. This was only one of a handful of nonproliferation promises that Beijing has violated in recent years. The lesson is clear: When it comes to dealing with the Chinese government, promises are not enough. 
      Equally disturbing is the contention that the United States either cannot or should not influence human rights in China. We are told that we should understand that Chinese culture is different from our own and that with the world's largest population, we should not expect China to adopt American values. 
      This passive vies of our role in improving conditions–which is cloaked as respect for the ancient culture of China–is patronizing toward the Chinese people. It also lets big business off the hook, leaving it free to feather its own nest without feeling any guilt over the suffering of the Chinese people. 
      The answer to this argument is best made by the thousands of dissidents who flooded Tianamen Square 10 years ago this week. Those students were not rejecting Chinese culture. They did not make papier-mache models of our Statue of Liberty and embrace our Declaration of Independence because these things are American but rather because they represented universal truths. America was important to those students because it was the first country founded on the idea that all men are created equal, in China and everywhere else. 
      These ideas, and our preparedness to defend them, must never take a back seat to the dubious prospect of short-term profits. U.S.-China relations are at a critical point. Beijing appears to be setting on a course for confrontation with the United States. It is a course that is not in the best interests of either country. It is not too late too convince China to change direction. But doing so will take tough-minded diplomacy and the determination to deal from a position of strength. Rewarding Beijing's recent behavior with admission into the WTO and surrendering important leverage by granting permanent MFN status is exactly the wrong signal to send at this time.

The Washington Times, June 4, 1999, p. A19

The Socialist Revolution 
by Richard L. Sullivan

      The Berlin Wall has fallen. Where the Soviet Union used to be is now an ever increasing group of national entities wanting to be free from their former oppressor. The names of these nations and ethnic groups have been in and out of the news media since 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed. 
      In the United States, an instant state of mental relaxation followed the removal of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War is over! Communism is no more! The things that have worried and badgered us for a half a century are no longer a threat! Peace has come to the world!
      The reality is that the driving force behind Communism is still with us. In fact, it is in many ways more dangerous than it was under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and all the other leaders of Soviet Imperialism. 
      What was this driving force? Why Socialism, of course. 
      Many people do not stop to think of the fact that the Soviet Union did not call itself the Union of Soviet Communist Republics. It was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. There was and is a reason for this. It lies in the definitions and beliefs of the very founders of what we faced as Communism in the Cold War.
      The writings and statements of the Communist revolutionary leaders indicate that they were moving to create something. What they wanted to create was a classless, stateless society. This could only be brought about by the actual removal of all class structures in the societies of the world. Until these classes were removed or

liquidated, Socialism had toprevail. The Communists considered themselves the elite, the leaders, the only people who had the foresight and knowledge to understand how to bring this all about. 
      Socialism was the base. Communists were the leaders. The rest of the world was the enemy. 
      If the enemy could not be brought into the Socialist camp by persuasion, force had to be used. The result was the Cold War. 
      Because of the fact that the very foundation of Socialism involves control by government and very limited personal freedom, coupled with vast waste, corruption and inefficiency, made the outcome of the Cold War all but inevitable. 
      This inevitability is summed up in the simple axiom, "Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free." Socialism wants us to believe that is people are forced to be equal they will then be free. It didn't work for the Communists and it will not work for the Socialists. 
      So, what this all means is, that even thought the names Communist and Communism have faded somewhat in significance, the real political and economic enemy of freedom loving people throughout the world, Socialism, did not go away with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is still with us and has, if anything, intensified. 
      What is one of the major instruments of the Socialist movement in the United States? The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). There is even a network of more than 50, yes, 50 progressive members of the US House of Representatives working in conjunction with the Democratic Socialists of America to bring about Socialism in America. More about them next month.

q   "Whether Wen Ho Lee should have kept his top-secret clearance at Los Alamos years after being fingered as a spy misses the point. It is not Mr. Lee; it is this White House that has become an acceptable national security risk for the United States.
      "Not even during the Red Decade and World War II, when Josef Stalin's spies and traitors looted the Roosevelt administration at will, were U.S. security secrets under less competent stewardship. But there is this difference: Half a century ago, America was a serious nation. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were unmasked as atomic spies, they were marched to the electric chair. Now, yawns greet the news that Beijing has stolen every atomic weapons secret America has and acquired, through our Fortune 500 companies, the ability

to rain down multiple warheads on the United States.
      "In the Reagan era, when we learned Toshiba had transferred silent propeller technology to Moscow, America was enraged. Yet, the report that China in 1997 stole U.S. radar satellite technology, enabling it to track and kill American subs underwater, was buried in a New York Times story whose front page told of the president's lastest apology for mistakenly hitting China's embassy in Belgrade.
      "As our 'strategic partner' bused mobs to our embassy to hurl bricks, the White House fretted that the trashing might impede plans to chaperone Beijing in the World Trade Organization. No wonder the Chinese despise us; our groveling is despicable. To see China heap abuse on us, even as our president burbles his apologies, proves again the old 

adage: It is the whimpering dog that gets kicked."
      Pat Buchanan, The Washington Times, 5/25/99/, p. A23

q   "In a blurring of commerce and intelligence-gathering, China clandestinely controls several thousand U.S. 'front companies' to obtain American technology for military purposes, a congressional report says.
      "The report also concludes China has diverted civilian technology—from high-speed computers to missiles for launching satellites—to improve its military weapons programs, congressional sources familiar with the study said Monday.
      "The findings of the 700-page document will be released today by a special House committee investigating espionage and U.S. technology losses to China. Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., is the panel's chairman.
      "The report, about one-third of which remains classified, will characterize a voracious appetite by China for American know-how—from nuclear secrets at U.S. weapons laboratories to satellite and computers technology it obtained through business and academic contacts.
      "The report describes a 'blurring of commerce and intelligence operations' by China that poses an unprecedented challenge to U.S. efforts to keep China from getting America's military-related secrets, said congressional sources quoting from the document.
      "The bipartisan panel, known formally as the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, has been looking into China's technology gains for about a year."
      The Colorado Springs Gazette, May 25, 1999, p. A1

q   "It looked like a setup. There, on the cover of the New York Times' 'Home' section, was a story, a regular 'At Home with so-and-so' feature, this one slugged, 'At Home with Tony Hiss.' At Home with Tony Hiss? 'A Son's Debt of Honor,' ran the headline. Was this some kind of joke? Beside a tiny photo of a khaki-clad, bespectacled man in shirtsleeves, a caption read, 'Tony Hiss in the courtyard of his apartment, where everything is as it was when his father lived there.' This was no joke.
      "On the contrary, this was a straight-faced feature about the Greenwich Village apartment Tony's father, the notorious Soviet spy Alger Hiss, had rented with his wife, Prossy, in 1947. It has been preserved to this day by their only child, Tony—at 57, a child no more—as a veritable shrine. A two-bedroom walk-up on East Eighth Street, it still overlooks the same courtyard filled with the same ornamental crabapple trees—'frothing', as Alger Hiss remembered them. The furnishings are virtually unchanged—same desk, sofa, piano,

chair toilet—'this toilet belongs in the Smithsonian,' an indignant Tony Hiss and his wife, Lois Metzger, wrote the building's super when he tried to modernize the plumbing. Then there's the green enamel kitchen table where an 11-year-old Tony once read his father's letters from prison.
      "That would be the Federal pen in Lewisburg, PA., where Alger Hiss spent nearly four years between 1951 and 1954 after a Federal jury in New York City found him guilty of two counts of perjury. That verdict vindicated the work of Whittaker Chambers who had testified that Hiss, his erstwhile comrade in a Soviet spy ring in the 1930s, had betrayed the nation while serving as a high official in the State Department. Since that time, and particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, testimonies and archive sources have only bolstered Mr. Chambers' story, confirming that he was indeed telling the truth, that Mr. Hiss had lied and continued to lie up until the day he died in 1996.
      "Not, of course, that the New York Times deigned to tell this to its readers. That would detract too much from the frothing crabapples and the 'tiny victories of prison life,' as the writer referred to a small oil painting that had slipped by prison censors. Instead, the newspaper cloaked the historical record in perfidiously ignorant ambiguities—'Did Whittaker Chambers make up the whole story about Hiss' passing government secrets? Did the government and an ambitious young Congressman, Richard M. Nixon, railroad Hiss with questionable or manufactured evidence? Or was Hiss a Soviet spy, with a hefty bank account hidden in Switzerland?'
      "Tony Hiss has collected the 445 letters his father wrote in prison and is publishing them next month in a book called—steady, now—'The View From Alger's Window.' And what do you know? As Tony put it, 'In all these letters, there is not one that even hints at any admiration for anything Communist. Marx never comes up. Would someone who could write these letters be the evil spy his enemies painted him as?'
      "Preposterous question. Preposterous interview. It might be edifying for all concerned to consider another body of correspondence that has recently been made public, the Venona cables–the thousands of Soviet messages detailing the espionage operations of the Soviet Union against the United States and its allies–which include still more confirmation of Alger Hiss's role as a Soviet agent, even beyond the period attested to by Whittaker Chambers.
      "How the New York Times' decorating section presents history may appear to be of little consequence. However, it does indicate how a significant cross-section of the apparently literate public perceives history.
      "Sadly, it reveals the extent to which the bitterly won truth has failed to penetrate the cultural consciousness.
      The Washington Times, 5/29/99, p. A12