History does not simply repeat itself, wrote Karl Marx. It often happens that a phenomenon’s first round is a tragedy; the second round is a farce. So is it today as thousands of young people devote themselves to extreme left-wing causes, including the destruction of their own countries, democracy, and liberty, all in the name of some utopia that will never be attained and in a struggle that will make human life worse.
Here is how, Bertram Wolfe, one such person of that earlier first-round generation later wrote of his infatuation with Communism in the 1920s and 1930s:
“Dreams of cosmopolitanism and internationalism…in an ever more open society, dreams of…curbs upon dictatorial power and autocratic power, dreams of the final abolition of serfdom…of a greater respect for human life and human dignity, of gentler and juster laws, equal for all and binding on all, dreams of liberty, equality and brotherhood and of a new humanity, free in spirit and intelligence, free in critical inquiry mastery to an ever greater extent of nature, of man’s own nature, and his social institutions.”
He continued:
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For me, as for most sensitive persons, the existing society had many obvious defects…shortcomings from our dreams of perfection. One felt superior when he noted and criticized these imperfections and offered a learned-sounding…remedy that cured everything at once….How nice to think that one had answers to all problems, cures for all ills, a simple, certain, manifest remedy backed by books of enormous learning….And how wonderful, when one did not understand the past or the present, to be so certain of the future.“
After twenty years devotion to the cause–he and his wife even choosing not to have children in a misguided effort to devote themselves to the world’s betterment–Wolfe broke with Communism over his disgust at the 1930s’ Soviet purge trials that framed and murdered the very leaders who had made the Russian Revolution. But it took him almost another decade for him to repudiate Marxism and understand where he’d gone wrong.
Typical of the radical in transition, he at first berated his foreign hero–in this case, Stalin–for letting down the cause, telling a 1938 rally:
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“He has made infinitely harder the task of those of us who love the Soviet Union and would make the world understand its wonders of achievement, of those who would defend it against attack from the ruling class of all lands.”
But then he came to comprehend that this was no miscommunication but the fundamental evil of the cause to which he’d devoted his life. He was horrified to discover that he had been helping tyranny when he thought he was helping to create a better society.
Then, Wolfe crossed the line from having been almost always wrong to being almost always right. The cause of that transition was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the September 11 for that generation.
Wolfe’s background had equipped him to comprehend what few others saw: the Allies would win the war but afterward the USSR would be Europe’s most powerful country and would extend its empire ever further westward. If Stalin wasn’t stopped, the result would be another terrible war.
Wolfe could find no one willing to publish these ideas until May 1943 when a small magazine accepted such an article. Wherever Wolfe spoke, Communists disrupted the lectures. Hecklers called him a Fascist and Trotskyite, but ultimately, due to the USSR’s own actions, America woke up and understood that this analyisis was right. Wolfe’s book on the USSR explaining his views, Three Who Made a Revolution, sold just one hundred copies the first year, 1948. By 1970, it had sold 300,000.
All of these things, along with the USSR’s repressive, dictatorial nature may seem obvious today (for the relatively few who still remember them) but they were barely known in 1948, the year that the Communist-front Progressive Party ran a serious, though ultimately failed, presidential campaign. In theory, the United States might have had a soft-line, basically pro-Communist president in the midst of the Cold War.
How much would that have changed history, how far might the United States have been fundamentally transformed! But the Progressive effort then was far less sophisticated and the identity of the enemy abroad and at home was becoming increasingly clear. Of course, too, back then the Progressives neither captured the Democratic Party (which is why they had to run separately) nor intimidated America’s great liberal leaders, among them the incomparable Harry Truman.
Wolfe’s task was both easier and harder than that of his spiritual successors. A single ideology, party, and model country exercised a stronger pull and discipline in his time, but it also was an idol more easily shattered than the varied ideas, loyalties, and groups that characterize what I call today’s “third left” (after that of Communism and the New Left).
In Wolfe’s time, Robert Minor, editor of the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, publicly declared, “Honesty is a bourgeois virtue.” Today, hundreds of mainstream media journalists and editors implicitly accept that they should report only what supports their political views and use their positions to attack those holding different ones.
How little has changed in essentials, how little has been learned from that past. It is vital today to understand the story of Communism: its big promises based on humanitarianism and its very different performance; the power it exercised in intellectual circles in the West despite being deeply wrong both morally and in terms of its prescriptions; the fellow travellers and well-meaning fools who slandered opponents and silenced critics; the culture of lying on behalf of a “good cause.”
Yet where in our schools and universities, in our public debate, are the lessons of Communism taught? How are people being inoculated against an “idealistic” ideology that did so much harm in the name of doing so much good, of apologists for foreign states and movements, of the concealing of crimes, the foolishness of the intellectuals, the belief that the more government control the better, the failure to understand that the far left was as much an enemy of liberalism as the far right, and of all the other mistakes involved in that experience?
But it is more than that. There can be no better explanation of the left-wing fellow travellers with revolutionary Islamism or the Multiculturalist and Political Correctness advocates with reactionary Third World regimes and cultures than Malcolm Muggeridge’s critique of fellow travellers with Stalin’s USSR:
“There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive [secret police] headquarters with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity of a one-party dictatorship was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through anti-God museums and reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature [Today it is the exact reverse! –BR], earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across the Red Square and bombing planes darken the sky, earnest town-planning specialists who stood outside overcrowded ramshackle tenements and muttered: `If only we had something like this in England!'”
And what better remark on how Western apologists for Islamic and Arab nationalist tyranny function can there be than what Wolfe wrote in response to the report of a 1952 British mission about how wonderful life was in the USSR:
“Mr. Cadbury is slandering the Russian people by saying that they are `content’ with the way in which they live. The hundreds of thousands that have died in purges [or been]…sent to concentration camps demonstrate that the Russian people are not the ignorant cattle that Mr. Cadbury suggests they are. So do the hundreds of thousands of…escapees testify to the fact that this people like any great people knows what freedom is and what slavery is.”
Anyone care to substitute the word “Iranian” for Russian?
Quotations from Robert Hessen, Breaking with Communism: The Intellectual Odyssey of Bertram D. Wolfe.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
Hi Max. Its your turn. I have given you a lot of space to expond on your theories of the super rich etc. No more Israpundit is not an economics blog. It is about Israel and Jews. So please confine your remarks to these topics or at least stop writing about the super rich.
Part 2 got through , part 1 did not as yet anyway.
Part 2
The only place right now where capitalism is flourishing freely in the world is , quite absurdly , Communist China – though I don’t think it will last long.
Of course capitalism creates prosperity, it’s just that in America, Capitalism is long dead and it will remain dead until the wealth , power and monopoly of the American Superclass is broken and replaced with a meritocracy with limits on personal wealth and power.
Wealth limits will still allow prosperity and restore capital and competition back into the system. The wealth of the elite can be recycled back in to the system without being accumulated bey either government elites or private elites.
The understanding of many people here comes ony from listening to various propagandas – this is the problem – you people do not have any source of accurate information or any honest authority dispensing information about your system. All your “knowledge” comes from various propagandists working in the system and fragments of information twisted by the Superclass’s MSM.
The real information about your society is closed to you and to most people – you never investigate it and you don’t know how. Only those exposed to academic sociology get on the right path – except that most sociologists end up working for the Superclass – so how can any citizen know the truth about their society when all information channels are owned and used by the Superclass?
This is the problem.
lol – Obvious Superclass propaganda. It’s such a cartoon – The American Superclass and it’s system of fascist monopolizations is afraid of any reformers – reformers are all bogymen “commies” -anyone that would take their hoarded and stolen wealth from them is an “evil socialist.”
r
lol – a system of absolute economic fascism is euphemistically labeled “shortcomings”.
More than 40 percent of the American population have less than 1 percent of the wealth and have no future , no hope of having homes, careers , higher education -a only a life of serfdom and them to be dumped to die with out social services or Healthcare. Virtually all family , small and middle sized businesses have been killed by the monopolists – this is not capitalism, when the population is not sharing in the capital.
The guy who wrote this propaganda works for Superclass corporations , not only that his whole career is based on promoting the Superclass. – he is bought and sols by them. This is the problem – the people who know about society – who have studied sociology and economics in university – they get careers with salaries paid by the superclass.There is no way for Americans to find out about how their society actually functions.
I used to think that Israpundits or Zionists were simply using Republicans and Republican Superclass Propaganda because their platform might be beneficial to Israel. But now I think from the absurd distribution of these cartoon propaganda stories that actually it is the Superclass Republicans that are using Israpundits for their manipulations.
Apparently it is a two-sided using – unfortunately everyone in America who is not the Superclass – loses – and actually the Superclass will not fully help Israel – they will use her and dispose of her like they do their own citizens.
lol – Obvious Superclass propaganda. It’s such a cartoon – The American Superclass and it’s system of fascist monopolizations is afraid of any reformers – reformers are all bogymen “commies” -anyone that would take their hoarded and stolen wealth from them is an “evil socialist.”
r
lol – a system of absolute economic fascism is euphemistically labeled “shortcomings”.
More than 40 percent of the American population have less than 1 percent of the wealth and have no future , no hope of having homes, careers , higher education -a only a life of serfdom and them to be dumped to die with out social services or Healthcare. Virtually all family , small and middle sized businesses have been killed by the monopolists – this is not capitalism, when the population is not sharing in the capital.
The guy who wrote this propaganda works for Superclass corporations , not only that his whole career is based on promoting the Superclass. – he is bought and sols by them. This is the problem – the people who know about society – who have studied sociology and economics in university – they get careers with salaries paid by the superclass.There is no way for Americans to find out about how their society actually functions.
I used to think that Israpundits or Zionists were simply using Republicans and Republican Superclass Propaganda because their platform might be beneficial to Israel. But now I think from the absurd distribution of these cartoon propaganda stories that actually it is the Superclass Republicans that are using Israpundits for their manipulations.
Apparently it is a two-sided using – unfortunately everyone in America who is not the Superclass – loses – and actually the Superclass will not fully help Israel – they will use her and dispose of her like they do their own citizens.
The problem is that Americans not have any honest source of information by which to evaluate their society. They have no sources and they are deflected from every turn at finding out anything at all about how the economic and political structure is run. There are people – a majority it seems – who do not even know what the Superclass or power elite is although every aspect of their lives is run by them through their businesses and corporations. .
I think that the point is not for people to listen to Socialist propaganda or Democratic propaganda or Superclass propaganda but to actually find out what is relay happening. If they can find out what is really happening then they can make decisions and judgments for themselves.
The MSN all belongs to the Superclass, so they have no hope of discovering what happens in their society through that source.At the present there is absolutely no openness about the activities of the Superclass or the relationship between the Superclass and the politicians they have nurtured in their political machines .
Americans cannot be free until there is a free flow of information available to them.
I wrote a rebuttal to this propaganda piece. It is caught in the spam catcher.
What in the God’s name the difference between “progressive” and socialists/communists? They spout the same garbage and want you to pay for everything
That’s a good line, keelie, capturing the essence of modern liberals. To impose their will they create problems for which they must be empowered, and enriched, to solve.
The failure of current political leadership is the failure of rational thinking. Teachers and professors do not know what rational thinking is. This is what it is: One starts with basic principles, look at the logical consequences, and compare with empirical evidence. If evidence contradicts the logic, we then have to modify the principles. This is how science advances. See the new book, “Rational Thinking, Government Policies, Science, and Living”. We need to focus on proper education in the world.
The current bunch of cattle – or is it sheep – don’t have the intellectual or moral fortitude to think past, let alone repudiate, what their equally robotic university professors serve up to them every day.
And if you have more answers than problems, create some more problems…