The Liberal’s Dilemma
by Dr. Fred C. Schwarz

Motherhood is gathered in its beauty and its purity, desperately concerned because of the increase in juvenile delinquency due to the prevalence of organized vice in the district.  So widespread is juvenile delinquency becoming that the very foundation of the family itself is in danger.  The mothers are determined that something must be done to eliminate organized vice.
      It is decided to form a Committee of Maternal Purity.  The meeting is called, and a woman of great liberal outlook is installed as temporary chairman.  She calls for nominations from the floor for the position of permanent chairman of the committee.  To everybody’s astonishment, the name of Madame Vice, madame of the local brothel, is nominated for the position.  The chairman looks startled, then says, “I hear the name of Madame Vice nominated for the position of chairman of our Committee of Maternal Purity.  Does anyone wish to speak on this motion.”
      An indignant voice cries out, “But that’s ridiculous!  She’s the cause of most of the trouble!  She’s a prostitute and a keeper of a house of prostitution.”
      “These are serious charges,” the chairman say.  “They must be supported by unimpeachable evidence.  Anybody who can rise and say that they have first hand evidence that this woman has indulged in these alleged practices, please rise and speak.”
      Nobody moves.
      The chairman says, “Since there is no evidence, apparently, to support these charges, I’ll ask the woman herself.  Madame, are you, as alleged, a prostitute and a keeper of a house of prostitution?”
      The fur clad figure indignantly rises, “I ain’t going to answer that question!  You have no right to ask it!  I ain’t going to incriminate myself.”
      “Yes,” says the chairman, “that is your privilege.  Certainly no inference can be taken from that reply.  There is no evidence to support these charges.  From the woman’s own words we can get no indication of their truth or falsehood.  I have but one last recourse.  Has this woman been indicted and convicted in a court of law?”
      Silence again prevails, and the voice of liberal learning, rich and mellow, is heard.  “I accept the nomination of Madame Vice as the Chairman of the Committee of Maternal Purity of this city.”
      By the same process, it is easy to conceive the election

of Al Capone as Chairman of the Committee for Public Security of the Chicago of 1920.  Such ridiculous situations become possible when a provision of the Constitution designed solely to grant immunity from legal punishment is projected into the realm of normal life which involved privilege and responsibility far removed from legal punishment.  This is the error which is made by the pseudo-liberals who fail to see the basic malignancy of Communism and thus become a zone of protection behind which the Communist conspirators pursue their evil schemes.
      Surrounding the zone of pseudo-liberals is the zone of dupes. In this zone are to be found the genuinely patriotic American citizens from a great variety of walks of life.  They have simply been deceived.  Many solid citizens are astonished when they discover the trap into which they have fallen.
      Consider the hypothetical case of a successful businessman whose name appears on the letterhead of a Communist Front.  He is whole-heartedly against Communism but is also exceedingly busy.  He wished to help good causes and will support them financially and with the use of his name.  However, it must be remembered that he has many pressing demands upon his time and he cannot attend meetings or participate in the day to day activities of the organization.  That task he must leave to others.  In this manner, the Communists have successfully utilized the money and the prestige of many of their most fervent opponents.
      The essential purpose of the Communist Front must be camouflaged with an alleged purpose of wide popular appeal.  The Communists are very well aware of what the true objective is, while most of the Front members see only the camouflage.  A permanent Communist objective is to shift the balance of world military power in favor of Communist military strength.  Wherever they can weaken the military strength of any free country, they help to achieve this purpose. One basic objective, then, is to weaken militarily all those countries opposed to Communism.  Obviously if that real objective were proclaimed, it would not recruit many people in those countries.  An organization which had the announced purpose of weakening America militarily so that Communist conquest would be easier would rally few supporters.  Therefore there must be an announced objective which will accomplish the same purpose, but which will present itself in a totally different guise.  One announced purpose could be the preservation of peace in the face of the possible horrors of a thermo-nuclear war.  This is the basis of the array of unholy peace movements spawned by Communism.
      Communist personnel are allotted to set up the

organization of the Front.  They enlist a few fellow travellers and together they decide the precise nature of the organization to be formed.  The purposes are clearly designated, the basic executive officers are selected, mostly from the ranks of Communists or fellow travellers, and the slogans which are to recruit the people are formulated.  When these preparations have been made, the fellow traveller approaches the sympathizer.  The Communist himself does not customarily approach the sympathizer, for the sympathizer has certain qualms about the Communists.  He knows that they cannot always be trusted.  But the fellow traveller is able to assure him that he is not a Communist, and thus can make the approach with every hope of success.
      He outlines to the sympathizer the objective, namely, the preservation of peace in the face of the desperate threat of war and annihilation that hangs over us all.  He describes the demands for disarmament which are to be made, to Communist and non-Communist countries alike.  He does not point out, of course, that these demands cannot possibly have any effect in Communist countries because there is no public opinion there that they can influence, and that the people of the Communist countries cannot even find out about these demands unless the Communist Party decides to tell them.  He does not indicate that the real purpose is to influence public opinion in free countries where the government is elected and controlled by the people.  The sympathizer, satisfied when these demands are nominally extended to all countries, is sold on this magnificent idea and is enlisted in the cause.
      The sympathizer then approaches the pseudo-liberal who thinks it a wonderful idea.  He would not be happy to participate in a Communist plan, but he knows the sympathizer is not a Communist.  He is aware, maybe, that the sympathizer has some radical ideas, but he, unlike most other people, is open-minded, and does not hold that against him.  Obviously the idea is an excellent one and merits his support.  Thus the pseudo-liberal becomes the spokesman who approaches the dupe, the patriotic businessman who will supply the finance and the respectability.  At the periphery, then, the patriotic businessman is approached by an anti-Communist liberal for a worthy objective.  The money is provided, names are written on the letterhead, a public relations department is established, the propaganda is proclaimed, and the organized Communist Front goes into operation.  Superficially, it appears to be the work of patriotic businessmen, educators, scientists and others of repute, but behind these dupes are the pseudo-liberals; behind them are

the sympathizers; and behind the sympathizers, at the very center, are the unseen Communists and fellow travellers who are in control of policy and program.
      Fronts such as this have been formed a thousand times and in a thousand ways.  They have recruited many well-meaning anti-Communists into the service of Communism.  Thus is Communist science applied whereby the organized few multiply their effectiveness by organizing a mass movement that, on specific issues, can sometimes make and break democratic, anti-Communist governments.  Again the conclusion is clear that an understanding mind and an alert attitude is the only protection the individual has against involuntary involvement.  Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
      Communist Fronts have been organized to exploit labor, religion, art, civil liberties, culture and nationalism.  The Fronts that proclaim Peace and National Liberation have been particularly effective.  In addition to these specially organized Fronts, the Communists make use of organizations that have been in existence for long periods.  Frequently, these organizations were formed by non-Communists for non-Communist purposes, but nonetheless they become captives of Communism.  This is made possible by the Communists’ willingness to work hard at unpleasant tasks in the interests of such organizations.  In every organization, there is a certain amount of routine work to be done, work that is not spectacular or interesting, and therefore not very appealing to most people.  When the Communists join the organization, they work hard.  They are available for dull and menial tasks.  They write the letters, they wrap the packages, they prepare the mimeographed materials.  Very often they are the finest workers that the organization has.  When election time comes round, nothing is more natural than that they should be elected to executive office.  Thus the Communist, by reason of their clarity of purpose, their drive towards an objective, and their hard, dedicated work, take over institutions that have been created with the money of Capitalist enterprise and use them to destroy liberty.
      The Communists are magnificently organized.  They have dedicated personnel and they have acquired vast experience.  Only on a basis of understanding, organization and dedication can we hope to meet and defeat them.  To hate them is futile.  Some of their most effective servants have been their bitterest enemies.  Eyes that see and minds that think must merge with hearts that love freedom, to meet this challenge.

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      To the extent that they have permitted this banishment, even welcomed it, they are guilty of dereliction of duty and of unfaithfulness to Christ as the Lord of the universe and all that is within it.  Because he is the Lord of all things, both great and small, nothing is properly secular.  Anything pursued in a secular fashion is therefore at least partly, if not wholly, mispursued.  The modern world needs desperately to know that Christ is not someone in addition to culture or politics; He is someone in relation to them.  All things find their proper role, identity, and function only when they relate properly to Him.  That is the task that falls to us in this essay and those that follow it, namely to relate Christianity to post-modern and post-Christian political thought.  What we tell our age about God and politics should include, but is not limited to, the basic tenets of governance, and they are our concern in this Schwarz Report series, the first of which focuses on our sinfulness and its political effects.

Human depravity
Realistic political theory always begins by considering things as they are, not things as we would like them to be.  Good political theory is based upon careful observation of the world around us, not upon speculations about a world we desire but that might never be.  Good political theory is based also upon the fundamental and unchanging principles of morality, which come only from God Himself.  His principles are imperative.  They imply that we are not free to do as we please but are obligated to do as we ought.  The dual process of careful observation coupled with obedience to the moral imperative, I am convinced, leads one away from what is perhaps the greatest political heresy of our time — what Jeane Kirkpatrick once labeled “the fallacy of misplaced malleability,” by which she meant treating complex political and social institutions as though they can be restructured on demand to fit some master plan inside our heads.  What modern changemongers do not understand is that human institutions arise from human action; that human action arises from human nature; and that human nature cannot be fixed by political tinkering.
      The most important and most enduring problems facing government almost always derive from human nature.  Good government cannot ignore human nature, which means that wise political theory must take account both of human depravity and human difference.
      One of the Christian doctrines most easily demonstrated is that concerning human depravity.  Nearly every major news story we read or hear is a lesson in, or a variation upon, that theme.  Good governance, therefore, establishes policies and laws built upon the fact that human beings cannot always be trusted to do the right thing, that they are not governed only (or even largely) by reason, but also by twisted and sometimes untrammeled personal appetites and

passions.  While human beings are capable of reason, they are rarely reasonable.  Some type of control must be set over human appetites, desires and actions, which is why Edmund Burke said that the moral state of mankind sometimes filled him with dismay and horror. 
       Our pervasive and persistent depravity cannot be removed by legislation or by revolution.  Pride, ambition, greed, deceitfulness, appetite:  These — and not merely inefficient or allegedly underfunded public programs — are the vices that cause most of the world’s turmoil, trouble and suffering.  Evil is not merely, or even primarily, systemic; it is systemic and much more.  That “much more” is we ourselves, which is why Burke also insisted that politics ought to be adjusted not to human reason but to human nature, of which reason is but a part, an oft-neglected part.
      The statesman, therefore, must know more than philosophy, economics or political science; he must know human nature.
      Because the improvement of human nature lies outside the competence of the state, and because human nature is itself the fountain of such a significant portion of our ills, one must conclude that many of our current problems have no political solution.  Ignorance, bigotry, divorce, disease, homelessness, poverty and crime can never be eradicated by the state.  The finest, most enlightened, most humane governments in the history of the world, governments guided by people at least our equal in wisdom and intention, unanimously have failed to make anything more than merely minor progress with these problems by means of positive public policy.  Rather, many of the policies that these relatively good governments have instituted have actually succeeded only in making such matters worse.  Yet today we arrogantly imagine that we shall succeed where all previous generations and policies have failed.  We make this error because we ignore the historical record and because we are unwittingly swept away by our own hubris, which itself is a manifestation of the fallenness we all share — policy makers included.
      Rather than aid in the proliferation of ineffective and counter-productive policies, we must humbly and realistically confess that most human difficulties are not susceptible to state-sponsored solution. To formulate public policy on any other basis than the intractibility of human nature is to fight against reality itself.  In most cases, therefore, public policy ought to be modestly conceived and executed.  If we try to do what cannot be done, we do harm, not good, because we have allocated scarce resources for impossible ends and thereby created new problems to go along with those we already face but did not solve.  Modest amelioration, not cure, is perhaps all that can be accomplished on most fronts.  A circumspect skepticism about state intervention will be more advantageous to a nation than trying foolishly to remake human nature or else acting as if human nature were of little concern to prudent public policy.

      Being properly aware of the intractability of human fallenness, the wise statesman concludes that most of the enduring ills that plague us have no real or final political solutions, that we almost always are forced to choose between greater and lesser evils, or greater and lesser goods.  To most political problems, there are no perfect answers, political or otherwise.  Goverment cannot change human nature; it can only take human nature wisely into account when it contemplates and enacts public policy.
      Little, if anything, that governments have ever done — or ever could do — has actually succeeded in making people better people, or in elevating basic human aspirations.  As a result, most political reforms are destined to be, and in fact have proven to be, only marginally successful, if not counter-productive.
      This is by no means a counsel of despair, but of prudence and realism, the twin hallmarks of all good political theory and public policy.
      Such prudence liberates us from government-imposed bondage to wasted money, wasted effort and wasted lives, all of which inevitably result from trying to do what can never be done.  Properly and humbly to acknowledge the truth about human nature and its invulnerability to wholesale improvement by government programs is the first step to a more proper stewarding of scarce resources in a fallen world.  Rather than wasting those precious resources on attempting the impossible, we are free to focus on investing those resources in doing better and well those things that ought to be done by government.
      The fact of enduring human depravity implies an equally enduring human ignorance and foolishness, a curse from which none of us is exempt, including bureaucrats, policy makers and office holders.  A human being cannot be depended upon to live uprightly or successfully on the basis of his own private stock of reason, because his stock of reason is small, no matter how smart he is.  As wise political thinkers have long and properly insisted, individuals and governments do far better to avail themselves of the great and general store of wisdom found in the insights of tradition built up over the centuries.  Apart from the lessons of history and the hard-won insights of the great minds of the past, we remain predictably foolish.  This foolishness is the political consequence of what the theologians call “the noetic effects of sin,” something about which modern politicans never speak, but the truth of which they repeatedly demonstrate.

The Greens
by John Fulton Lewis

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the strategic retreat of the Communist Party of Russia, the hard line message to the Left, worldwide, has been “we live to fight another day.”  And one of the most promising “covers” for doing so is to penetrate and identify with international environmental activists, many of whom hold prominent positions in Europe’s increasingly socialist, Green Party, governments.  The same applies to many office holders and regulatory bureaucrats in the U.S.A.
      In March, 1995, Carl Bloice, one-time Associate Editor and Moscow correspondent for the U.S. Communist Party newspaper, People’s Daily World, was quoted as having proclaimed that “the environmental movement promises to bring greater numbers (of people) into our orbit than the peace movement ever did.”  In 1972, not long after the launching of Earth Day in America, the head of the Communist Party USA, Gus Hall, declared: “The key factor will be the leadership of the struggle of the working class...masses who after all are the power of any revolution...This is true in the struggle to save the environment.  What is new,” Hall asserted boldly but prematurely, “is that the knowledge of the point of no return gives this struggle an unusual urgency...We must be the organizers, the leaders of these movements.”
      In 1980, in his book Entropy, Jeremy Rifkin declared: “The chic upper-class ecologists, with their hot tubs, their quarter-million-dollar homes, their designer clothes, and their Mercedes Benzes, had best realize that their calls for clean air must be accompanied by meaningful actions that will lead to a redistribution of their own unwarranted economic abundance.  If they do not voluntarily begin to make this economic adjustment, then others will make it for them.”  His message sounded like a Communist manifesto against the rich.  Many thought it was.
      By 1989, in a further printing of Entropy, Rifkin deleted this paragraph for by now he was viewed as the inspiration for Albert Gore’s forthcoming book, Earth in the Balance.  Some of those elitists Rifkin described were now financially supporting environmental extremism’s (and Al Gore’s) agenda.  In 1992, the Communist Party USA formally declared:

      “Socialism makes the change in property relations which provides a sound basis for bringing the production system into harmony with nature.  Socialism can end both the exploitation of labor and the exploitation of nature.  It can make possible the planning of production for the needs of the people and for sustainable ecosystems in a sustainable economy...(T)he environment that sustains us can be saved only by changing our economic system... The Communist Party of the United States sees the capitalist ruling class as the enemy of both workers and the environment...(thus)...we need socialism.”  One could go on citing quotable endorsements from Leftists out to infiltrate, take over or identify with, the international environmental movement.  However, it should be enough to recall the first reference in this article, Bloice has long been a friend and associate of Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet President (1985-91) who stepped down from the Kremlin post to world applause and then mounted to celebrity status in an entirely new role in the U.S.
      Gorbachev, with no significant mea culpas that we ever heard about his lifelong career as a Soviet die-hard communist leader, lost little time moving from the Kremlin hierarchy to join the Green Movement.  He helped to establish an international organization called the Green Cross International.  The U.S. Chapter is named “Global Green,” and is dedicated to influencing and directing a “global culture” which, ultimately, might direct or redirect global society.
      It should be remembered that as chief of the power structure of the Soviet Union for six years, Gorbachev headed one of the top two or three most polluted and environmentally backward nations in the world, others being Communist China and socialist-democratic India.
      And it is worth noting that four months before the carefully orchestrated coup, which resulted in his overthrow and replacement by Boris Yeltsin, “papers for the Gorbachev Foundation were filed with the California Secretary of State in April ‘91...,” according to the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor of March 1995.
      Now, with this background, prepare for a real shock, disturbing if not alarming.  Earlier in the 1990s Library of Congress Associates began publishing a quarterly magazine called CIVILIZATION.  It seemed to be directed at the serious scholarship to reflect the values contained in the nation‘s foremost repository of knowledge. This writer was a charter subscriber but after a time the magazine ceased coming, until, 

The Rehabilitation of Communism

Ten years after the Berlin Wall fell, cracking open the door on Soviet and Eastern European archives that document almost 75 years of communist crimes, it remains a bizarre fact that communism itself enjoys a forgiving ambiguity in its depiction in Western lore–i.e., popular culture.  Even Jacob Weisberg of the online magazine Slate acknowledges this, deep in a New York Times Magazine cover story titled, “The Rehabilitation of Joseph McCarthy,” an analysis of the American legacy of communism.  Citing a recent A & E movie about Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, a veritable Red Valentine, and the outrage of the intelligentsia over Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar earlier this year, Mr. Weisberg writes that “Conservatives have made few inroads against the notion that McCarthyism did far more harm to America than communism:–a notion with which Mr. Weisberg seems to be in accord.
      Why this strange cultural fact should be so is a fascinating topic–but not of the article in question.  Mr. Weisberg is more interested in exploring why anyone, and, particularly, why any anti-communist, still cares, That is, the Cold War is over, he writes, communism is dead: What accounts for the “obsession” of scholars and critics who continue to fight Cold War-style battles over communism’s legacy?  “The deeper you delve into such battles,” he writes, “the greater the feeling grows that these are not primarily arguments about historical fact at all.”
      This is a breathtaking statement.  “Such battles” have always been about historical fact, and they still are: whether, to take only the most famous examples, Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy (yes), whether the Rosenbergs were guilty (yes), whether the American Communist Party was taking its orders from Moscow (yes).  Now that archival documentation from behind the Iron Curtain is gradually and thrillingly becoming available in the West to corroborate (and expand) such claims–long denied by the left–it is no wonder that scholars and critics, overwhelmingly on the right, are renewing their studies, revisiting old battlegrounds armed with sharp, new facts.
      But Mr. Weisberg has another theory–or, as he puts it, feeling.  As he sees it, all too many of these Cold War historians are motivated by something deeper, something

personal–something “Oedipal.”  Singling out for example Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz, courageous and eloquent anti-communists whose political odysseys began on the communist left, Mr. Weisberg’s tale takes a dubious psychological turn into what he calls the “unresolved feelings of personal betrayal and the Oedipal conflicts of red-diaper babies.”  We hear of Mr. Horowitz’s tortured relationship with his communist father; and Mr. Radosh’s “anger” at his communist parents.  The condescending and even outrageous implication is that such family matters have superceded the historical import of their work.
      Notably, Mr. Weisberg offers scant similar treatment of the communists and communist sympathizers he features–despite intriguing questions raised by some of their intransigence in the face of compelling, even overwhelming documentation.  One has to wonder, for example, what deep, personal motivation Mr. Weisberg might have unearthed behind leftist historian Ellen Schrecker’s outré belief that American communists didn’t spy because they were traitors, but rather because they “did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism.”
      Of course, Mr. Weisberg didn’t really have to probe the recesses of the conservative mind to find exotic inspiration for the continuing study and pursuit of historical truth.  As Mr. Weisberg himself seems to understand, the Western intelligentsia, from art to letters, still harbors a distorted view of communism and anti-communism; the former is tolerated as naive and well-meaning, the later is still seen, at best, as an embarrassment, or anathema.  The archival documentation just now beginning to become available offers dispassionate confirmation–facts, not feelings–of the evils of an ideology that once repressed much of the world, evils that were once considered unresolvable matters of heated debate.  (Imagine the spate of research and debate that would ensue if Nazism had been vanquished long ago, and the documentation of the Holocaust were just now coming into circulation.)
      Mr. Weisberg would welcome a version of “the story of American communism [told] in a less judgmental fashion.”  After all, as he points out elsewhere in the article, American communism was never murderous like its counterparts overseas.  The fact is, however, too many American communists denied, supported and condoned such murder, and it is difficult not to be “judgmental” about that.
      The Washington Times, December 1, 1999, p. A 16