A Blueprint for a Communist Take-Over

I spend much time on my blog and on the air (“Facts Matter” Sundays, 11 am-1pm on KSCO Santa Cruz 1080 AM) debunking conspiracy so-called “theories.” (They are never real “theories.”) My main point is that any 26-year old upstart with a blog, any graduate of a third-rate college, even any alert janitor, can earn fame an fortune by revealing any half-way serious conspiracy. But, but, as I have noted before, there are tacit conspiracies. They are not really conspiracies in the usual sense but shared cultural understandings of how the world world and specific shared goals. To put it another way, four horses don’t have to confer to pull together. Somehow, this reminds me of communism.

A reminder: Communist parties and authoritarian Marxist movements under various other names have generally taken power guns in hand or thanks to the guns of others. There are two exceptions: the Czechoslovak Communist Party between 1945 and 1948 and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979-1980. I leave the latter example mostly aside for the time being although it’s well worth reading about it. 1948 Czechoslovakia was the most literate, the most developed and the most industrialized of all the countries that fell to communism. Please, make a mental note of this.

The story of the Communist take-over of Czechoslovakia is interesting as a non-military scenario. I am completely sure that no American communists under any name, will take over the US through a military putsch. This country’s armed forces comprise people who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, not any particular President or any particular Congress. There are only reasons to believe that they take their oath seriously. Unlike the case in military coup-type countries, the US rank-and-file are neither hapless draftees nor the sons of starving peasants who can be trained like fierce attack dogs. Instead, they are better educated, mentally healthier, and more religious than the general population.

So, the relevant intellectual exercise is this: How would a small, radical group with a collective ideology go about implementing a Czechoslovak kind of take-over of this country? I mean by using the conventional political process, including formally valid elections.

Here are some of the things such a small group of revolutionaries would do:

First of all a small group of dedicated revolutionaries would have to practice “entrisme” successfully. This French word refers to the practice of softly entering into a variety of non-political organizations in order to take control of their levers of command. Trotskyst groups everywhere have been using this strategy to gain an influence extremely disproportional to their tiny numbers. (A French Prime Minster for several years was a “former” Trotkyst. Similar infiltrations took place in Germany.)

Leftist entristes are opportunistic. They will grab anything they can, even the Little League if need be. In this country, you would expect their chief targets to be: labor unions, quasi-religious mass movements with ill-defined beliefs and goals (such as many environmentalist groups); some churches, and voluntary associations intended to relieve various forms of human misfortune. The latter constitute especially attractive targets because they are chronically short of funds to do all the good they sincerely wish to do. They can thus be bought with small government largess and at the cost of few pangs of conscience.

It would use legal means and nearly-legal means to erode popular attachment to constitutional government. It would do so by means of myriads of small breaches that would generate tolerance much the way one can develop a tolerance for bee venom and other poisons. It would do so also by bribing a fraction of the population with arguments of the following form: Whether it is completely constitutional or not, many people, including yourself, find themselves immediately better off thanks to this government measure.

It would use, annex and exploit the existing national culture. It would produce, groom. construct a savior resembling something in the culture. If this took place in India, the providential leader would seem like the avatar of a beloved and familiar Hindu god. If it took place in Russia (again), the providential leader would remind one of Peter the Great, a somewhat brutal but effective ruler. If it happened in a genuinely Christian country such as the US….

It would exploit the national culture in another, more refined way. It would use indubitably shameful aspects of the national history to mute the criticality of many in the educated classes, beginning with academics. A fraction of the upper strata (which have generally more formal education than the rest) would thus support the radical group out of a sense historical shame.

It would develop and apply quickly economic policies designed to turn large numbers into government dependents. Government social services in general achieve this end. Services the provision of which induce mass impoverishment do it faster. Creating a large new entitlement that the country cannot afford generates masses of government-dependent people in three ways. Directly: what the government gives it can take away. Indirectly because shrinking real incomes make people feel vulnerable and more desirous of government help. Directly again: In a poor economy offering little opportunity for personal success, government jobs look more appealing than they do in a booming capitalist economy.

It would intimidate economic groupings and associations that oppose the take-over with threats of precisely directed tax hikes and massive fines.

It would prepare the general population to tolerate large-scale, extra- judicial repression by trumpeting the small deeds and alleged seditious intentions of tiny and insignificant fringe groups, armed groups if possible. It would actively infiltrate such fringe groups. In some cases, it would create them. (In every society, there are small numbers of excitable individuals who can be incited fairly easily.)

Finally, if the target country were a superpower as the US is, the leadership would do its best to ensure that it’s less feared and less respected internationally.

Here are more government actions typical of attempts to socialize an economy not limited to communist coups:nationalizing segments of the production apparatus and gaining control over banks and other financial institutions.The GMtake-0ver does not amount to much economically but it opens the way for the crucial idea of government-owned industries.Bailing out failing banks plays the same role.

This program for dictatorship would be the all the more successful if the revolutionaries had media support. I means media as in newspapers, conventional television networks. and the movie industry.

Do I suggest that President Obama is the leader of a communist revolution? I am less and less willing to say categorically “No.” That’s in part because he seems to have come from nowhere, as if he had been invented by central casting. There are important parts of his biography that don’t ad up. As a retired university professor, I am especially perplexed by his unwillingness to divulge his undergraduate grades. What if he had a C- GPA at 22, like both Pres. Bush and Senator Kerry? Would anyone really care? For how long would it be news? Those who are inclined to think so already know he is an affirmative action wonder. What is the real reason for this stubborn dissimulation of presumably trivial facts? I can’t stop wondering.

Yet, the President does not appear intelligent enough or well educated enough to play the part of a Lenin. (The leader of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution was both very intelligent and very cultured.) But he might just be a fairly moderate figurehead manipulated by a small group of well financed extremists with a well understood agenda. Lenin called people like Obama “useful idiots.” Large numbers of mild liberals would follow stupidly because their power of analysis and their mental habits do not incline them to criticality. Also, many are cowards. When the Red Army put the German communist party in power in East Germany, the local social democrats followed like sheep. (German Social Democrats in 1950 were pretty much like the core of the current Democratic Party in this country today.)

Note: The claim that President Obama is not very cultured is not a gratuitous insult in the mold of  the old Bush Insanity Disorder on the left. I reached this evaluation after listening to many of the President’s speeches (too many). It’s obvious that he often stumbles on ordinary words, like someone who never read beyond the assigned reading. On a recent occasion, I heard him repeatedly refer to Navy “corpsemen, ” as if the Navy had personnel specializing somehow in corpses, in cadavers. The fact that it happened several times, that he never caught himself, also does not speak well of his intelligence.

Paradoxically, the scenario above makes sense in Marxist terms. (Like nearly anyone who has read Karl Marx beyond the few easy pages of the Communist Manifesto, I am not quick to dismiss Marxism as a mode of analysis.) Marx never anticipated that a communist revolution would first explode in backward countries like Russia and China. He was thinking more in terms of Germany, and even of Great Britain, the USA of their time. It’s notable that the few Marxist analysts of the failure of communism everywhere argue precisely that it was never intended for poor and backward countries. Face-to-face, at scholarly meetings for example, they will tell you that communism has not failed because it has never been tried. It’s a program for an advanced, rich country, they claim.

Health Care Reform: Paradise Lost

I have been struggling for three days to swim back to the surface and breathe again. Since the monstrous health care bill reform passed on Sunday, furor and something approaching despair have made me numb and mute. As people begin actually reading the 2700 pages, bad news cascade after bad news. I have been looking for the silver lining and found only one: It looks like the portability of health insurance will become a fact. That’s good. It was intolerable that people stayed in jobs they hated and refrained from entrepreneurship because they were too afraid to lose their health coverage. I think that’s all.

The rest of it is a disaster for our future. Note that every other political defeat does not make me feel the way I do now. Alternance in power is a good thing. When the other guys get their way with something I don’t want, I figure it’s the price I pay for stable and peaceful government. Certainly, I don’t want to live in a country where the losers routinely stage coups or start revolutions.

I don’t like most of what I know is in the law. I fear what else is in there that I will only discover later. I am sure the cost of the programs the law creates will undermine severely our future economic development. I suspect hardly anyone one will benefit. Instead, the overall quality of health care will decline. Most of all, I am aggrieved by the process by which the law became law, against clearly expressed majorities of opinion. The process smells of fascism and of the twisted parliamentary (ostensibly legal) methods by which the Communist Party gained control of Czechoslovakia in 1948.

My near-despair is rooted in two stream of personal experience: First, I saw it coming because I have inside track information, not secret information, mind you. President Obama is a second-rate academic. I know such people well. I have known them for more than thirty years. Improvements in our national health care delivery system based on market mechanisms were never in the cards. Few academics except economists know much about the market. Hardly a handful has read Adam Smith. They learn early in their careers that the idea of a market is a tricky myth designed to deceive the great unwashed masses. Then, they never give is another thought.

Academics in general are both intellectually limited and presumptuous. They know what they know and they don’t know what they don’t know. Successful academics, the minority who play the scholarship game, often become cured in time of heir presumptuousness. Anonymous scholarly peer review takes care of it. There is nothing like seeing the work of several years trashed from three different sides by strangers, and realizing that they are mostly right, to teach you humility. Barack Obama never had this salutatory experience. He never published anything scholarly, even when he was superbly placed to do so. Barack Obama had never accomplished anything in his life until last Sunday. He knows less about markets than a good undergraduate with three economics courses under his belt. Naturally, he and his ilk can only think of bureaucratic, and therefore, coercive and wasteful solutions.

The second root of my near-despair is the also the deepest: I have been there before. In 1981, Francois Mitterand, the head of the Socialist Party was elected President of France. His election inaugurated fifteen years of French decline and missed growth. After a decade of brisk economic development under conservative leadership, the country slowed down to very little. Nothing increased except government employment. The country went from one kind of decline to another. Unemployment remained around 10% , much of it long term and very long term unemployment. A whole generation of young French people grew up without the notion that work is normal. The bulk of the French educational system dropped from fairly good to quite bad. (Nearly everyone agree it’s bad now.)

The most interesting aspects of French decline under socialist administration are almost intangible, difficult to describe. Fortunately, I can depict them a little, even if in subjective terms because I knew the country well before and after. (I was born and reared in France. I know the language perfectly. I have spent much time in my native country before and after the Mitterrand regnum. )The public mood and the mood of ordinary people in the street became universally sullen. Socialist rulers claimed they gave he French more security but they killed their joie de vivre. Even more curiously, the advent of Socialist Party rule coincided with a massive dying-off of French cultural creativity. Things have improved some in the Sarkozy years but if you had visited France ten years ago, you would have found a cultural desert. There was no painting except hackneyed, inferior copies of 100-year old Impressionists. There was little fiction and it comprised mostly thin dry near-stories, stuff I had to force myself to read because it was boring. During the period, the French motion pictures industry went from one of the most productive in the world (though behind the American and the Indian) to one that turned out one or two good movies in five years at best. Most strikingly, there was no music of any interest produced in France except that of immigrants from North Africa, rai. (Of course, I joked that the French had become so lazy that they let immigrant workers do not only the menial work and the manufacturing work but even their popular music work!) In the socialist period, the French acquired many so-called “rights” and they lost their taste for living.

What we are facing in this country is worse than anything the Socialists were able to dish out in France. Mitterand had to govern most of the time without a majority in parliament. He had to compose and compromise with political coalitions opposed to his programs. Also, the powers of a French Presidents are somewhat less broad than those of an American President.

I think I have lost the country to which I emigrated forty years ago. I am in mourning for the vigorous, creative, free America I loved. I have never hoped to be wrong more than I am today. I hope someone will write and point out the errors of my analogy.

Watch this blog for more analysis and for calls to action.

How bout Communism? (Part 2 of Essay on Fascism)

This is the short second part of an essay on Fascism I posted on May 27th 09.

Note: Most of my adult life and all of my childhood were dominated by the threat of Communism. People of my generation who wanted to know understood well the horrors of Communist societies. We knew of the slave-labor camps, of the mass executions, of the constant spying on ordinary citizens by the secret police, of the betrayals of friend by friend that were everyday life in Communist countries. We were well aware also of the grinding poverty in those countries.

I am concerned that thinking individuals who are in their twenties and even in their thirties now might know little about the reality of Communism as it was practiced. It seems to me that no one asked them to study the matter. A Russian friend of mine is going back to Russia this summer for a couple of months. If a few readers ask, I will request of my friend that he contribute to this blog from there, drawing on the memories of older friends and relatives who survived the Soviet period.

There was once a “Communist” movement whose followers were often motivated by generous impulses and by economic ignorance, in more or less equal parts. There has never been a Communist state, whatever that would be. Historically several Communist parties did achieve political power. None did so through democratic means, although the Czechoslovak Communists may have come close, in 1948. We will never know because the presence of a large contingent of the Soviet Red Army in the country forever mars the analysis.

Every Communist party that ever reached power proceeded to establish a variety of fascist state, soon indistinguishable from its nominally “Fascist” counterparts and sometimes enemies. The flexibly fascist so-called “People’s,” so-called “Republic” of China may yet constitute an exception to the generalization that fascist governments only bring economic misery. It looks today like an economically successful fascist country.

In countries, such as Italy and France, where nominally fascist and communist parties exist side by side and where it is possible to conduct analyses, it turns out that the two recruit largely from the same social groups. People who don’t like the free exercise of democracy will join any collectivist movement. Stickers do not seem to matter much.

I think it’s not an insignificant coincidence that the most dramatic and best studied fascist movement called itself, “Nazi.” The word is a contraction of the real name of the party, “National-Socialist.” Hitler ranted regularly against the Communists, whom he called “Bolsheviks,” by their old, pre-1917 name. Yet the kinship of their action with what he was trying to accomplish did not escape his attention. Mussolini, the inventor of political fascism, of Fascism as an ideology, was formerly a Socialist journalist.

Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary is replete with examples of leftists activists who joined and even helped grow explicitly fascist parties as soon as those became available. (Note: Victor Serge was an Anarchist who first supported the Soviet Revolution and then, denounced it in vigorous and well-informed terms. His book makes a good reading and it’s a wonderful introduction to the revolutionary history of the first half of the 20th century. Victor Serge was an intellectually honest leftist, in my estimation.)

Every Communist Party upon coming to power immediately implemented a foreign policy difficult to distinguish from that of Hitler, although usually less successfully. (Not every fascist dictator has the luck to work with Germans as a raw material.) Thus, the Chinese Communists invaded Tibet within only one year of achieving power over China.

A casual study of the life and death of the Romanian dictator Nikola Ceausescu illustrates well the idea that communism is simply a variety of fascism, often, a variety by name only. In 1974, Ceausescu came to power from within the Communist Party, as a reformer and amidst general rejoicing.  In December 1989, he was forced to flee from  a speech he was giving in the Romanian capital by popular acclamations. On Christmas Day 1989, he was shot on television after a brief summary trial. (Note: A short video of his last speech is available on YouTube.)</span