The Molding of a Communist
by Dr. Fred C. Schwarz

      Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were the authors of the basic philosophic and economic Communist doctrines.  They lived and wrote from about 1840 to 1890.  During their lives, many movements were formed to advance Marxist teachings.  A Marxist party was finally formed in Russia under the name of the Social Democratic Labor Party.  The individual largely responsible for its formation was a man called Plekhanov.
      In 1903 a conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was held in Brussels, Belgium.  The police, objecting to this international gang of racketeers and revolutionaries meeting in their fair city, asked them to move, whereupon they went across to London, England, the historic haven of refugees.  This congress in 1903 is one of the most significant events in world history.
      A young man named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin came to the congress with very definite ideas about the type of organization that was necessary to achieve basic Marxist objectives.  Lenin desired a party organized on military lines, composed of professional revolutionaries subject to maximum discipline and indoctrination.  He desired a party of total obedience and submission that would operate with a single mind and will.  At the congress, he introduced a motion to implement his ideas concerning the nature of the Party.  He moved that no one be accepted as a member of the Party unless he served in a disciplined capacity in one of the Party organizations.  A man could not come and say, “I approve the doctrines, the aims and the methods of your Party, I’d like to join.  I’ll pay my membership dues, I’ll abide by the rules, Sign me up.”  This was not the way it was to be done.  Lenin declared that if a man wished to join the Party, he should first link up with one of its working units.  The Party operated through multiple local organizations.  Some of these units met in neighborhoods, others met in factories, while still others met in the military forces.  Having joined one of these units, the individual could prove himself by working within it in a disciplined, obedient fashion.  Only in this way should he come into Party membership.
      Lenin’s motion was opposed by Martov, who approved

the idea in principle, but who thought it a little too extreme.  He pointed out that there were certain important individuals who would be embarrassed if they had to serve in a humble, disciplined capacity in one of the Party organizations–such people as members of the aristocracy, important businessmen, leading government servants, university professors.  Many of these people approved of the Party and were willing to support it, but they would be embarrassed if they had to join a street corner group and engage in its activities.  Therefore he suggested a special clause that would allow general membership for special people who could come into membership without joining one of the working units.
      Lenin, however, stood firm, insisting that they did not want such people.  They needed a party of unity, discipline and obedience, with every member under observation and control.  Those willing to join on these conditions could become sympathizers and helpers, but they must remain on the outside.  The Party wanted no member who was not totally subject to Party discipline.
      The vote was taken and Lenin obtained a majority.  The Russian word for majority is akin to “bolshevik; and the word for minority is akin to “menshevik.”  The follows of Lenin became known as the Bolsheviks, and those of his opponent, Martov, were known as the Mensheviks.
      It was a seemingly unimportant difference of opinion concerning Party membership, but the cleft that it caused has become the determinant of the destiny of the world.  Neither Lenin nor Martov realized its depth and significance.  They held unity conferences periodically, but there were quarrels and the cleft widened.  In 1917 the division became formal and final.  In that year, Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Geneva, Switzerland, after the revolution that had overthrown the Czar, and renamed the Bolshevik segment of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party the Communist Party of Russia (Bolshevik).  From that tiny fragment, the entire world Communist movement has developed.
      There has never been any growth like that of the Communist Party in the history of mankind.  Some measure of its growth is revealed by the fact that, in one generation, the Communists have conquered more people than Christians have even told about Christ after nearly two thousand years. 

Some measure of their progress is indicated by the fact that today there are five children in school learning in detail the godless doctrines of Communism for every one child in school learning anything about Christ.  The success of the Communist Party has been due to the ceaseless activity of this Leninist organization.
      The first step is the recruitment of an intellectual elite to be the core of the Communist Party.  The idea is not to recruit great masses of people.  The concept is that of a disciplined and dedicated minority who conquer the masses by reason of their superior knowledge and organization.  Some of the influences that lead to the recruitment of the intellectual have already been discussed.  It is no light thing to join the Communist Party.  The membership price is very heavy.  It is yourself.  Everything you are and everything you hope to be is given utterly to the Communist Party.  Some idea of the concept that the Communists have of their role and destiny is given by the speech of Joseph Stalin on the death of Lenin.

Comrades, we Communists are people of a special mould.  We are made of a special stuff.  We are those who form the army of the great proletarian strategist, the army of Comrade Lenin.  There is nothing higher than the title of member of the Party whose founder and leader was Comrade Lenin.  It is not given to everyone to be a member of such a party.  It is not given to everyone to withstand the stresses and storms that accompany membership in such a party.  It is the sons of the working class, the sons of want and struggle, the sons of incredible privation and heroic effort who before all should be members of such a party.  That is why the Party of the Leninists, the Party of the Communists, is also called the Party of the 

working class.
      Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to hold high and guard the purity of the great title of member of the Party.   We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we will fulfill your behest with credit.

      In his book, How to Be a Good Communist, Liu Shao-chi, President of Communist China, outlines the qualities demanded of a Communist.

      Whether or not a Communist Party member can absolutely and unconditionally subordinate his personal interests to the Party’s interests under all circumstances is the criterion with which to test his loyalty to the Party, to the revolution and to the Communist cause.
      To sacrifice one’s personal interests and even one’s life without the slightest hesitation and even with a feeling of happiness, for the cause of the Party, for class and national liberation and for the emancipation of mankind is the highest manifestation of Communist ethics.  This is a Party member’s highest manifestation of principle.  This is the manifestation of the purity of proletarian ideology of a Party member.

      The demand is for absolute and unconditional subordination of personal interests to the Party’s interests under all circumstances.  The Communist must not only be prepared to die for Communism, but he must feel happy while he is dying.  Lenin defined Communists as “dead men on furlough.”  The Communist dies to self, and gives the Communist Party his life.

MISSION TO KIEV, UKRAINE

      I want to take a few paragraphs in this Report to share with you an opportunity that has significant consequences for the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.  As some of our longtime readers know, the Crusade has supported mission projects in Africa and India for many, many years.  These include orphanages and schools along with a preaching and teaching ministry.
      There is now a mission project in the Ukraine that I am directly involved with, and would love to interest some of our Crusade family to help bring this particular vision to reality.  Our textbook Understanding the Times (abridged edition) has been translated into Russian and I have been to Russia and the Ukraine in the last few years teaching grade school and high school teachers how to teach their students to discern and develop the Christian worldview, contrasting it with the Communist worldview.  The acceptance of this approach has been overwhelming.  A Christian university in St. Petersburg and Campus Crusade for Christ ministries in Russia are presently using our textbook.
      We have a wonderful opportunity in Kiev, Ukraine to establish a headquarters with enough room to educate hundreds of teachers from around the area (including the Baltic states).  The property and its unfinished building can be purchased for $47,000.  It will take some further work to complete the building, but we need to purchase the property before we lose it.  A foundation in Colorado Springs has given $10,000 and two other sources have pledged $7,000 more.  We need 30 of our Crusade friends to give $1,000 and we can proceed to buy it.
      If you are interested in helping us please send me your name and address and express your interest in this project.  Do not send money until I contact you.  Write: David A. Noebel (Kiev Project), P.O. Box 129, Manitou Springs, CO 80829.

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Major Owens, Rep. Nydia M. Velazquez, Rep. Charles Rangel, Rep. Maurice Hinchey, Rep. John LaFalce, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Rep. Louis Stokes, Rep. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Elizabeth Furse, Rep. Peter A. DeFazio, Rep. Chaka Fattah, Rep. William Coyne, Del Carlos A. Romero-Barcelo, Rep. Robert C. Scott, Rep. Bernard Sanders, Rep. James A. McDermott

Organizations:   Earth First!, National Lawyers Guild, American Civil Liberties Union, Children’s Defense Fund, NAACP, NEA, People for the American Way, National Organization for Women, Democratic Socialists of America

Institutions:    MALDEF, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Asner Family Foundation, Emily’s List, Feminist Majority Foundation, Institute for Policy Studies

Ideologues:   Noam Chomsky, Betty Friedan, Catharine MacKinnon, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cornel West, Howard Zinn

Academic Bases:         Women’s Studies Programs, English Departments, Black Studies Departments, Critical Legal Theories, Cultural Studies, Modern Language Association, American Association of University Professors

Causes:   Free Mumia!, Free Geronimo Pratt!, Defend Race Preferences, End the “Prison Industrial Complex,” Comparable Worth,  A Living Wage

Magazines:          Z Magazine, The Nation, Covert Action, Village Voice, Harpers, Social Text, Transition, In These Times, New York Review of Books, Dissent, Science and Society, Signs, American Historical Review, Monthly Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Kirkus Reviews

Castro’s American Left Collaborators
by Kate O’Beirne

      In the past months, plenty of politicians, including Gov. George Bush and Sen. John McCain, urged Juan Miguel Gonzalez to come to America where he could “breathe freedom” before deciding Elian’s fate. Well, Juan Miguel is finally in the States, but Castro’s stench has followed him north.
      Since he arrived, Elian’s father has been exclusively in the company of Castro’s American allies.  With his Cuban handlers hovering nearby, he met privately at Justice Department headquarters with Janet Reno and Doris Meissner, two of the top US officials who are irrevocably committed to returning Elian to Cuba.  At his Cuban host’s home in Bethesda, there has been a steady stream of visitors sympathetic to Castro’s demand for the boy’s return.
      One American visitor, from a town in Wisconsin that has a sister city relationship with a Cuban village, reported that Mr. Gonzalez was most anxious to get his son back home.  She helpfully explained, “He knows in Cuba that Elian will have a lot of educational opportunities that, because of the cost here, he might not have.”
      This needless to say, is a joke.  If Mr. Gonzalez’s US attorney, Gregory Craig, were really worried about his client’s

interests, he would be offering to represent the father of the most famous child in America in making all the lucrative deals that await him.  How do you say “Who Wants to be A Millionaire?” in Spanish?  Juan Miguel is no doubt unaware that the Cuban-American exile community has not just been demonstrating, they also have raised tens of thousands of dollars to finance Elian’s legal defense.  The family’s relocation to the States would be generously subsidized.  But it’s a safe bet that no one who is allowed to get anywhere close to Mr. Gonzalez will straighten out his misunderstandings and point out his real choices.
      Congress might not have a legislative remedy to prevent the injustice being done to Elian and his father, because a vote on residency might well fail–and thus provide yet more fodder for the Elian-deporters.  But members can certainly demand that Mr. Gozalez not be at the mercy of Fidel Castro while residing in the shadow of the US Capitol. So here’s something useful (and splashy) that Congress can do: Dispatch the Capitol Hill police to provide an escort to the Hill for Mr. Gonzalez, his wife, and baby for a meeting with congressmen who could freely explain his many, attractive options–outside of earshot of Cuban agents and their American collaborators.
      It will be a disgrace if Trent Lott, Dennis Hastert, and Dick Armey allow Elian’s father to return to Cuba without getting at least one breath of the freedom his first wife died seeking.
      National Review Online, April 10, 2000

The French Communist Party
by Julian Coman

      Europe’s last major Communist party finally will admit this week that the philosophy from which it takes its name has been a complete failure.
      France’s Communists have shied away from introspection since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
      In Italy, the former Communist Party is now in government, having dropped its old name and embraced free markets.  The Communist Party of Great Britain changed its name to Democratic Left and then abandoned being a political party altogether.
      But the members of the Parti Communiste Francaise (PCF) had looked history in the eye and refused to concede defeat, despite a plummeting share of the vote, the disintegration of the Soviet empire and a crushing weight of evidence pointing to Stalinist atrocities.
      During what is certain to be a raucous PCF congress in Martigues this week, the party elite has decided to make a formal admission of nearly a century’s worth of political mistakes.
      More than 200 delegates will be asked to vote in favor of an extraordinary two-page condemnation of the party’s 80-year history. Titled “Has communism been a failure in the 20th century?” the text goes on to answer its own question

with a resounding “yes.”
      The document, which has caused uproar among party stalwarts, states that communism “did not liberate humanity” but led to the “oppression of the individual, a tendency to see different opinions as deviation or betrayal, and practices which in all too many cases bordered on the criminal.”
      French Communists were guilty of “preferring to keep quiet about the suppressions of freedoms in the various socialist states,” as well as failing to realize “the scale and the consequences” of events in Eastern Europe, including the Stalinist purges and the suppression of liberal revolutions in satellite Soviet states such as Czechoslovakia.
      Obsessed by the ideas of revolution, comrades from Paris to Marseilles also failed to see the value of the rule of law and democracy.  These ideas were wrongly fought against as “bourgeois concepts.”  Postwar party leaders were “blind, error-ridden and behind the times.”
      They conclude that “the end can never justify the means,” and that if the party is to have any future in the 21st century, its members must “move on completely from the old mentality.”
      Georges Barthelemy, a pensioner activist, said, “It’s not the party that needs to change, it’s the rest of society.”
      But one member of the Paris party hierarchy, who did not wish to be named, said: “This needed to be done.  It’s time to move on and leave all those old ideas behind. They didn’t do us any good.”
      Washington Times, March 20, 2000, p. A 13s

More than 60 years after Josef Stalin helped Hitler to help himself to Europe and nine years after communism fell in the Soviet Union, the French Communist Party is coming to grips with its founding philosphy’s shortcomings.  In its party conference in Martigues this week, Europe’s last major communist party is being asked to vote in favor of a two-page apology titled:  “Has communism been a failure in the 20th century?”  The apology not only says that it has been, but that it caused “oppression of the individual, a tendency to see different opinions as deviation or betrayal, and practices which in all too many cases bordered on the criminal.”
      Such an admission, should it be approved by the 200 party members is warranted, even if it is as belated as it is unexpected.  But the question remains:  In a country where the left is considered sacred ground, is such an apology meant to revive a party on its way out, or dissolve it altogether?  The latter seems the only viable choice if party members believe the words of the confession, which said communism “did not liberate humanity” and that post-war 

party leaders were “blind, error-ridden and behind the times.”
      Indeed, the French Communist Party has had to face its weakness countless times from its inception after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.  Serving as a mouthpiece for Stalin, the French communists campaigned against the Nazis but then acquiesced and helped them to power when faced with the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.  They were then outlawed in France, but revived after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in 1941.  They also enjoyed a period of peace with President Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist in the early ‘80s, but soon were weakened by the fall of communism in Eastern Europe as well as by inner-party tensions.
      An apology for how the party has failed its country and its allies through those years can only be complete with its disintegration.  As even a member of the party hierarchy admitted to the London Sunday Telegraph recently:  “It’s time to move on and leave all those old ideas behind.  They didn’t do us any good.”  That is the understatement of the century.
      Washington Times, March 25, 2000, p. A 12

To Cuba With Love
by Marc Tooley

      After nearly a decade of leading America’s most famous (or infamous) ecumenical coalition, Joan Brown Campbell has finally called it quits at the National Council of Churches.  But she is not leaving without a splash.  Although her controversial term as secretary general ended at the end of last year, Campbell has since immersed herself in a new round of publicity, going out of the organization as she ran it for several years– by codling a dictatorship.
      Campbell’s valedictory came with the Elian Gonzalez case.  Evidently aware of Campbell’s strong ties with Fidel Castro, her successor appointed her to spearhead the NCC campaign to return the six-year-old boy to communist Cuba.  In a flurry of activity, Campbell has traveled to Cuba to meet Elian’s father (and with Cuban officials, of course), offered herself to a host of media interviews, convened press conferences, returned to Cuba to personally fetch Elian’s grandmothers in a chartered jet, organized another round of publicity events, met with Attorney General Janet Reno, met with sympathetic members of Congress who support Elian’s return, and condemned the bad, old right-wing congressmen who wanted to keep little Elian away from his father.
      Campbell has also done her part in the propaganda campaign by criticizing Elian’s mother for risking his life in a dangerous escape from Cuba by sea and assuring everybody who is willing to listen that all of Elian’s relatives who are back in Cuba are desperate to have him back with them.  That Elian’s mother and many others are dead because Castro will not let his people travel freely seems not to have occurred to Campbell.  And that Elian’s family in Cuba might be reluctant to speak frankly either to the media or a left-wing church leader from the United States also seems not to be a possibility to her.
      It’s been the richest gush of publicity for the National Council of Churches since the hoax about the torching of black churches in 1996.  And it’s an appropriate epilogue for Campbell’s reign, during which the NCC pursued high profile, largely left-wing causes, while sliding into irrelevance among its own church constituency accelerated.  For the last nine years Campbell has been defending Castro and the world’s dwindling number of other communist despots, creating dangerous myths about racial violence, lobbying for socialized medicine, fighting for gun control, touting gay and abortion rights, supporting campaign finance “reform,” opposing the U.S. war and subsequent sanctions against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, condemning organized school prayer, defending President Clinton in the wake of the sexual scandal, and ignoring the plight of persecuted Christians around the world.
      Meanwhile, the NCC at the end of Campbell’s tenure has

been crippled by huge deficits and staff reductions.  For the typical local church, the Council has simply become an embarrassment.  Even stalwart liberals within the NCC’s own member denominations are now openly calling for the organization’s closure.
      Created in 1950, the National Council of Churches was supposed to represent the future of American Christian unity.  When recently attempting to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the NCC found itself floundering amid budget shortfalls and internecine strife.  Campbell had no apologies.  Arguing that the NCC’s heart is “too empathetic” not to be in debt, she defiantly declared: “You are right that I value courage and imagination more than caution and efficiency...Our deficit is not in dollars but in our failure to see in one another the moral force that ends poverty as we know it and that challenges racism.”
      Thanks in part to Campbell’s lack of leadership, the NCC’s celebration was overshadowed by its special pleas to its leading member denominations for millions of extra dollars.  The NCC also had to further milk its relief and social service arm, Church World Service, for more “overhead” funds.  And the Council’s Burned Churches Fund–its last great fundraising bonanza–likewise seems to have been sucked dry.  (Although the NCC raised more than $9.1 million in cash for the fund, it was revealed without comment that only $6.4 million was spent on actual church reconstruction, with the rest going to overhead and programs aimed at the “root causes” of racism.)
      At a special 50th anniversary celebration for the NCC at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Cleveland, Jesse Jackson praised Campbell’s tenure at the NCC and remembered that he and Campbell had jointly traveled to Serbia last year to free captured U.S. airmen.  “We are winners,” he enthused as he hoisted Joan Campbell’s hand high in the air, convention style.  Most of the NCC celebrants responded with only polite applause, and Campbell acknowledged the somber mood without acknowledging her own part in creating it. “We’re like an aging city with a crumbling infrastructure,” she admitted in her farewell remarks to the NCC.  “The infrastructure is sadly in need of repair, and it is not cheap to repair it.”  When mainline churches catch a cold, the NCC gets pneumonia, she explained, foisting the blame on others.
      Campbell’s tenure began with some reason for optimism.  She was a liberal 1960s-era activist, but she did not seem to be a doctrinaire left-winger who would continue the NCC’s historic dalliances with totalitarians abroad and Blame America First extremists at home.  She even admitted the Council’s mistakes in getting too cozy with the old Soviet bloc.  “We did not understand the depth of the suffering of Christians under communism,” she confessed in 1993.  “And we failed to really cry out against the communist oppression.  I do give credit to people who called for that and did not get a response, at least from us.”

      At that time Campbell said she wanted to re-orient the NCC towards “family issues,” like fighting pornography, which would unify rather than divide the organization’s constituents.  “The press really has tagged us as left, liberal,” she accurately observed.  “When I came my determination was to speak to a broader group of people.”
      It never happened.  Promoting Big Government at home and socialism abroad won out over fighting the small battles that would have perhaps made family life healthier in America.  Campbell has justified her crusade to return Elian to Cuba by saying it is about “family values.”  But under her guidance, the National Council of Churches’ record on social issues is closer to the National Organization of Women than to any recognizable pro-family group.
      In determining Campbell’s legacy, it is likely that the role of the religious left, which she engineered, in the alleged burnings of black churches will loom large.  It was a psuedo-event.  There was no evidence in 1996, nor has there been since, to show that black churches were specially targeted for arson attacks.  (White churches were far more at risk.)  And of the small number of black church burnings, only a fraction were the work of racists.  The most prolific arsonist, it turns out, was a practicing Satanist. 
      But fighting the Devil did not interest the NCC.  Claims of an upsurge in racist violence were more likely to grab headlines and raise dollars.  The hysteria the Council ginned up netted more that $9 million in contributions.  The windfall helped to postpone an inevitable financial crisis for the declining organization.
      Working in lockstep with the White House on many campaigns, Campbell obligingly defended President Clinton during the exposure of his sexual escapades.  But it was the glamour of involvement in foreign policy that captivated her most.  The National Council of Churches generated a “foreign policy” under Campbell, and it was shamefully unable to criticize communist and radical Islamic regimes.  The NCC first opposed and then fought to water down congressional legislation that would facilitate a cut-off of U.S. aid to oppressive governments.  Campbell has used her figurehead status in the church community to minimize concerns about persecuted Christians around the world.  A special focus on religious liberty (to the exclusion of economic rights) and on Christians in particular made her uncomfortable.  “If you look at the Nazi regime, you can see in it the philosophy  of Christian superiority,” she once remarked.
      Just as the NCC averted its glance when the old Soviet Bloc persecuted religious believers, so now does the NCC remain largely silent about the restrictive religious policies of communist regimes in China, North Korea, and Cuba.  Campbell earned the role Castro allowed her to play in the

Elian Gonzalez affair by her long praise of Cuba for having made a “priority of caring for the poor.”  Last year, with Castro listening appreciatively, Campbell apologized for U.S. policies towards Cuba before an applauding crowd of 100,000 in the infamous Plaza of the Revolution in Havana, Cuba.
      “We ask you to forgive the suffering that has come to you by the actions of the United States,” the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell implored.  “It is on behalf of Jesus the liberator that we work against this embargo.”
      A banner across the stage read “Love, Peace, Unity.”  The event was intended to crown a month of government-sanctioned celebration by Protestants in Cuba, where about 50 denominations are represented.  But some crowd members confessed to the Associated Press that they had no specific religious belief but were pressured to attend by their communist neighborhood watch group.
      Cuban Christians still endure obstacles to free worship.  According to Open Doors International, an advocate for persecuted Christians, the Cuban government routinely denies permits for new church construction.  Repairs to existing churches are heavily restricted.  Church property is still vulnerable to seizure.  Public evangelism is illegal.  Church leaders are still monitored, interrogated, and threatened with arrest.  House churches and parochial schools are forbidden.  Bible distribution is limited.  Yet after a 1995 meeting with Castro, Campbell enthused, “The churches now are able to carry out all the work of the church, that is the training of pastors, Sunday school teaching, evangelism, and service to the society.”
      When she returned to the United States from a pilgrimage to Havana last year, Joan Campbell claimed that ending the U.S. trade sanctions was especially urgent now that Cuba has shown “it does allow people to express their faith freely.”  With such comments, who can blame Castro for commenting in a meeting with Campbell several years ago:  “We see in you and your actions the expression of the best values and intentions of the American people.  We love you very specially, and always welcome you to our country.”
      These words are no doubt in Campbell’s mind as she shuttles back and forth in her crusade to return little Elian to Cuba, her chartered plane paid for by the NCC dollars it supposedly does not have.  But more than a few mainline church members are praying for something else altogether during this exercise in propaganda.  They are hoping that Joan Campbell’s departure from the National Council of Churches marks the end of the betrayal of Christian ecumenism by party hacks and political ideologues.
      Heterodoxy, January 2000, p. 4, 5