Déjà vu

The 2014 Winter Olympics, currently underway in Sochi, Russia, have been the focus of political controversy for months. This is not the first time the Olympics have been politicized, nor will it be the last. Carl von Clausewitz said that war is “the continuation of politics by other means” and if the Olympic Games, in which nations compete against one another in the arena of sports rather than on the battlefield, is a substitute of sorts for war, it must by its very nature, be political and we can expect its political essence to manifest itself from time to time. This is one of those times and the issue, over which the controversy has been raging, is homosexuality, or, to be more precise, the legislation passed by Russia last year which prohibits promoting homosexuality to children.

It is not the issue of homosexuality and Russia’s laws pertaining to it that I wish to address, however. What interests me the most in all of this is the way in which this controversy has caused the powers of the world to align themselves in a pattern that was once very familiar but which has been forgotten in the last twenty years or so. In this pattern, the United States and her allies which include Britain, Canada, and other Western countries form one side while Russia, and the countries in her sphere of influence, form the other.

This was the alignment of the world powers when I was growing up, before the Gulf War of early 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union later that year seemingly brought about a realignment that pitted the United States and her allies against Arab dictatorships and Islamic terrorists. It is a pattern that had been established by the two World Wars in which the great European powers that had dominated nineteenth century geopolitics had sought to destroy each only to find themselves all eclipsed by the rise of two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

The First World War had seen the collapse of the Austria-Hungarian Empire and the fall of the Prussian House of Hohenzollern. More importantly the old Russia, the Russia of the Tsars and the Orthodox Church, the Russia whose successful resistance to the invasion of Napoleon’s armies was beautifully translated into music in the Festival Overture of the Year 1812 by her greatest composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, had been overthrown in a series of revolutions in 1917. While various revolutionary groups were involved in this, it was the Bolsheviks who ultimately seized power in Russia. The Bolsheviks were a gang of thugs, largely consisting of ethnic minorities, that was committed to the revolutionary ideology of nineteenth century German-Jewish philosopher Karl Marx. Their takeover of Russia received a great deal of outside financing, both from the German government which wanted one less enemy and one less front to fight on, and from German and American Jewish bankers who believed that they were alleviating the conditions of Jews suffering from persecution, a belief that might have been justified in the short term but proved to be mistaken in the long run. Securing their hold on power in the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, an officially atheistic police state, in which the Communist Party reigned supreme, in which despised classes like the kulak farmers were made into scapegoats and officially persecuted, in which despised ethnic groups like the Ukrainians were targeted with artificial famines, in which rivals of the Party leadership were given show trials and executed, while dissidents from all walks of life disappeared into the forced labour camps of the Gulag. It was an entirely repulsive regime ab initio and it proceeded to go downhill from there. The only people foolish enough to see anything redeeming in it were university professors, journalists, and other progressive intellectuals.

The Second World War began twenty one years after the first had ended when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Great Britain, embarrassed over the way Hitler had made a fool out of them at Munich two years previously, declared war on Germany. Although Britain nominally won the war, Poland did not thereby become free. Before invading Poland Hitler had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union, which included a secret codicil in which Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide Poland between themselves. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union two years later, the Soviets and the British found themselves fighting the same enemy. Later that year the United States also joined the war, ostensibly because of the Japanese attack on their Hawaiian naval base, but in reality as the result of two years of negotiations between the British and American governments in which the former essentially agreed to cede her leadership of the Western world to the latter in return for American help in defeating the Axis Powers. To better defeat their enemies, the British, Americans, and Soviets co-ordinated their efforts.

For Sir Winston Churchill the alliance with Soviet Russia was born out of wartime necessity. He had more sense than to trust either the Soviet government or its megalomaniacal leader. He had warned against Bolshevism back when it reared its ugly head during the First World War and had entered into the alliance with Stalin with his eyes open and his nostrils pinched tight. These sentiments were shared by such American generals as Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton but not by the American president. These were the days before American presidents were limited to two terms and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been president since 1933. In his first year in office he had granted American recognition to the Bolshevik government. In 1936 he recalled his first ambassador to the USSR, William C. Bullitt, who had gone to Russia with a friendly attitude but had reported honestly about the horrors of the Soviet system. In his place FDR sent Joseph E. Davies, who accepted every Potemkin village the Soviets showed him at face value and sent back reports to Washington that whitewashed Stalin’s purges, show trials, and other atrocities. It was about this time that FDR abolished the U.S. State Department’s Department of Eastern European Affairs and ordered its extensive library pertaining to Russia dissolved. (1) Davies told of his experiences in his 1941 book Mission to Moscow which was turned into a film at the request of the Roosevelt administration. Both the book and the film were Soviet propaganda.

This same naïve attitude towards Stalin and his government showed itself in the way the war was handled. FDR, who had successfully conned the American Republic into voting him in as President four times and who had hornswoggled Winston Churchill out of Britain’s naval bases in return for an armada of decrepit, leaky ships, (2) believed that his powers of persuasion were infallible and that he would be able to “handle Stalin.” (3) An example of his method of “handling” Stalin was the November 1943, Tehran Conference, the first conference between the “Big Three”. Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s invitation to stay at the Soviet Embassy after the Soviets spread disinformation about a German assassination plot. Consequently, he was under Soviet surveillance for the whole meeting. At the Tripartite Dinner Meeting, Stalin insisted that at the end of the war at least 50, 000 German officers be summarily executed. This outraged Churchill but FDR proposed as a “compromise” that they only execute 49, 000. This led Churchill to walk out on the other two in disgust – Stalin coaxed him back to the meeting by assuring him that they had only been joking. (4)

It was Stalin, of course, who was actually the one doing the “handling.” He handled Roosevelt like a puppet master and, since the price of the American entry into the war had been Britain’s ceding her leadership of the Western free world to the United States, Stalin’s ability to manipulate FDR ultimately meant that Allied war policy was bent towards the attaining of the Soviet Union’s goals. Thus, when the war was finally over, the Soviets were able to keep not only all of Poland, the Nazi invasion of which they had been complicit in at the start of the war, but eastern Germany, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania as well. In other words the war ended with the enslavement of Eastern Europe and the Red Army breathing down the necks of the newly liberated Western Europe. As Sir Winston Churchill put it in a speech to Westminster College on March 5, 1946 “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was appropriate that Churchill, no longer Prime Minister of Great Britain having been defeated in the 1945 election, gave these words in Fulton, Missouri from a platform shared by the new American President Harry S. Truman. For the only thing keeping the Red Army on the other side of that Iron Curtain was the military might of the United States of America. The alliance between the USA and the USSR had died with Franklin D. Roosevelt (5) although it lingered on in a kind of zombified state until just after the Japanese surrender, and now the two countries whose influence had been greatly expanded by the war were locked in what James Burnham aptly called a “struggle for the world”. (6)

This “struggle for the world” would continue until 1991 when the Soviet Union officially broke up. It was dubbed “The Cold War” to contrast it with a traditional “hot war” in which the two sides send their armies to kill each other until one side emerges victorious over the other. The struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union could not be fought directly as a hot war, although the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Israeli-Arab conflict, and various revolutions and civil wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America saw the two superpowers duke it out by means of proxy. The reason the American-Soviet standoff could not be fought as a traditional war was that the advancement of the technology of war had made it impossible. As tanks and jeeps replaced horses, machine guns that could fire repeated rounds without having to be reloaded replaced traditional swords and rifles, and the newly invented airplanes were fitted with guns to fight each other and bombs to obliterate targets on the ground, warfare became less and less the trial of strength and courage that poets have sung about since the days of Homer and became more and more a matter of the killing of large numbers of people from safe distances. Then in 1945 the advancement of martial technology took a quantum leap forward with the development of the working atomic bomb. (7) The unconscionable dropping of this device on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, (8) killing approximately a quarter of a million people, brought a quick end to the Second World War and sent the world the message that the United States was now the supreme power. By 1949, however, the Soviet Union which had been working on an atomic bomb of its own for almost as long as the Americans had, succeeded in becoming a nuclear power with the help of secrets stolen by such spies as Klaus Fuchs, Morris Cohen, and the Rosenbergs. The mutual possession of nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union held each in check, preventing either from moving against the other in such a way as to initiate a hot war.

Neither side felt this stalemate to be tolerable and each worked to overcome it by developing its nuclear technology in the hope of attaining a first strike capability in which they could initiate an attack on the other side that would eliminate its ability to retaliate and thus get out from under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. As a result each side developed a stockpile of nuclear weapons with sufficient firepower to blow up the planet. With so much at stake it was inevitable that the question of what exactly all this was about would be asked.

On one level, it could be said that it was simply the old story of the two biggest dogs on the block fighting to see who will be top dog and dominate the other. Russia and the United States had both come out of World War II with their power and influence greatly enhanced in contrast to most other participants in that conflict and so it was natural they would see each other as their primary rivals. Some would insist that this was the whole story, all that there every really was to it. While this view of the matter masquerades as realism I would say that it both underestimates the influence of ideas upon the actions of men and nations and fails to understand the difference and distinction between the real motivations of the leaders in a conflict and the significance of the conflict. It might be true and accurate to say that the governments in a conflict were motivated by a selfish desire for power, territory, and resources rather than the lofty ideals they put forward as justification of their actions. It does not follow from this that the conflict was “really” only about power, territory, and resources. The significance of a war is larger than the motivations of the leaders involved.

Many thought of the larger significance of the Cold War in terms of American capitalism versus Soviet communism. This is not entirely inaccurate and the difference between the two economic systems became particularly important towards the end of the conflict. The Soviet command economy proved incapable of providing the USSR with the resources necessary to beat or even keep up with the USA in the arms race. Therefore, when American president Ronald Reagan stepped up the arms race and announced that the United States would seek to break the deadlock of MAD through further technological advancement, by inventing a shield to correspond to the nuclear sword, the Soviet government, unable to maintain even the pretence of keeping up, began to talk “glasnost” (“openness”) and “perestroika” (“restructuring”) and Reagan and Gorbachev were able to negotiate a treaty in which each side agreed to reduce its nuclear arms.

Capitalism and communism, however, were only the economic aspects of the ideological forces opposed to each other in the Cold War. It would be more accurate to speak of these forces as liberalism, represented by the United States, and the ideology of Marxist-Leninism, represented by the Soviet Union. Liberalism is the ideology the primary beliefs of which are the need for democratic elections of legislative officials, the civil protection of the rights and liberties of the individual, and the maximum social, economic, and political freedom consistent with the rule of law. Marxist-Leninism is the ideology that teaches that private ownership is the cause of social conflict and strife, by dividing people into classes of “haves” and “have nots”, that history moves forward by the “have nots” revolting against and overthrowing the “haves” becoming the new “haves” in the process, and that history is moving towards a future utopian state to be brought about when the Communist Party, representing the last class of “have nots”, i.e., the proleteriat of industrial workers overthrows the last class of “haves”, i.e., the bourgeoisie of capitalist industrial owners, and establishes a classless society, in which property is collectively owned, all members of society are compelled to work according to their ability, and goods are distributed to each according to his need. George Grant remarked that what these two have in common, i.e., that they are both forms of the modern belief in progress and technology, is perhaps more significant than the differences that divide them. Perhaps that is the best way of looking at the Cold War – as a conflict between two different visions of technological progress.

There was also a spiritual element to the conflict that should not be ignored. American writer Whittaker Chambers, himself an ex-communist and former Soviet spy who defected, showed understanding of this element when, in the “Letter to My Children” that he prefixed to his autobiography Witness, said of Communism that:

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. (9)

Chambers was correct in his assessment of Communism, I believe. Marxist-Leninism presented to man an alternative diagnosis of his problem to the traditional Christian diagnosis of Original Sin. It told man that his problem was the social and economic inequality produced by private property and, having offered an alternative diagnosis of man’s problem, it offered an alternative salvation to that which Christianity proclaims to have been given to man in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the salvation of the workers’ paradise of communism future. This alternative, materialistic, salvation appealed to generation after generation of progressive intellectuals who were desperately looking for an alternative to the spiritual salvation offered in the traditional Christian religion.

This appeal only lasted until the reality of Marxist-Leninism broke through. Thus the history of progressive intellectual infatuation with Communism is also the history of disillusionment and disappointment, and of former true believers turning their backs on “The God that failed.” (10) Some, like Whittaker Chambers, found refuge from the destruction of their former materialistic faith, in traditional religions like Christianity. Others, became dedicated anti-communists, of both the Cold War liberal and the conservative variety. Some were lost in the darkness and despair of the nihilism that is the postmodern disillusionment with all metanarrative. There were always plenty, however, who were eager to close their eyes and their ears, and, when someone like Khrushchev assured them that Stalin’s atrocities were atypical of the Soviet regime and a result of the “personality cult”, to swallow these assurances whole and disassociate the horrors which were the reality of Communism in practice from the ideology of Marxist-Leninism, even as the evidence accumulated that Marxist-Leninism brought widespread physical and spiritual death, not just in the Soviet Union but wherever the Red flag was raised. (11)

A fuller assessment of the spiritual element of the Cold War, however, is that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn had been imprisoned at the end of the Second World War for derogatory remarks he had made about Stalin. Sentenced to a labour camp for eight years and to an internal lifetime exile after that, his writings such as the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the three volume Gulag Archipelago brought an awareness of the reality of the Soviet prison camp system to light in the Western world. Having been deported to the West, Solzhenitsyn, who had become a devout and practicing Christian during his experiences spoke out not only against the evils of the Soviet system but against the liberalism of the Western world. Liberalism, the system which the Western world opposed to the Communism of the USSR, was itself spiritually bankrupt. This assessment, most famously offered by Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 commencement address at Harvard University, was a tough pill for progressive and liberal intellectuals to swallow and they resented it heavily, but it was the voice of the older, Orthodox, Russia speaking and more importantly it was the truth. While only a fool or a madman would have wished for the Cold War to end in the triumph of the Soviet Union rather than the United States, liberalism being preferable to Communism by any conceivable comparison, liberalism, to return to the observation of George Grant alluded to earlier, was also a version of the modern materialistic and technological faith in progress, and thus lacked the spiritual resources necessary for its stand against Marxist-Leninism.

Which brings us back to the present. When signs began to appear several years ago of a renewal of tension between Russia and the United States this did not come as much of a surprise. Having long ago read the writings of Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn (12) I had been half expecting a renewal of the conflict for over a decade, although perhaps not in so dramatic a fashion as was humorously depicted in one episode of The Simpsons. (13) There is a big difference, however, between the American/Russian conflict I remember from my youth and that of today. This time around, it is the United States that is promoting Marxism.

In the period between the World Wars, several Marxist intellectuals, brought to a crisis of faith by the failure of Marx’s prediction that when the general European war came the workers would unite across national boundaries against the bourgeoisie rather than fight one another, concluded that it was culture that prevented their revolution from materializing, that culture created the national loyalties that transcended those of class. These neo-Marxists decided upon a strategy in which they would infiltrate the institutions that generate culture – the schools and universities, the arts, the media, and churches. Having infiltrated these institutions, they would change the culture generated so that it no longer promoted traditional loyalties like loyalty to family, kin, and ancestors, to nation and to country, but instead promoted loyalty to groups defined by their victimization, real or supposed, by traditional society, while traditional loyalties were, through a blending of Marxism and psychology, pathologized, i.e., redefined as mental illnesses. This strategy proved very successful and Western institutions, weakened by liberalism as Solzhenitsyn described, proved unable to withstand it, the result being what is known as “political correctness” today. (14)

So now, when we see the United States, turning its vast political and private apparatus of propaganda against its old enemy Russia, in the name of one of the pet causes of political correctness, I am reminded of Tomislav Sunic’s fascinating remark that “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West.” (15)

(1) John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study of Character, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 39-40.

(2) Robert Shogun, Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill's Arm, Evaded the Law, and Changed the Role of the American Presidency (New York: Scribner's. 1995)

(3) In a message sent to Winston Churchill on March 18, 1942 Roosevelt wrote: “I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you I think I can personally handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.” The consequences of this hybris were explored by Robert A. Nisbet in Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship (Washington, D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988)

(4) See Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: F.D.R. and the War Within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 314-315. Fleming points out that Churchill was well aware that the man making this hideous proposal was more than capable of carrying it out, as he had proven in the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940. When we consider what actually happened at the end of the war, do the words of Stalin and Roosevelt seem much of a joke? American Jewish journalist John Sack in his An Eye For an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against the Germans in 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1993) tells of a thousand concentration camps set up in Poland in 1945, administered largely by Jews, in which hundreds of thousands of Germans were imprisoned and tortured, thousands of whom were killed. These camps were set up in Soviet controlled territory by the NKVD. In an earlier book, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989), Canadian writer James Bacque alleged that Eisenhower’s forces had starved about a million German POWs to death. As far back as 1948 Freda Utley had written about these atrocities and the ethnic cleansing of about twelve million Germans that had taken place in Soviet controlled Eastern Europe towards the end of and in the immediate aftermath of the war in The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1948). The Nuremberg Trials, while not the summary executions that Stalin and Roosevelt had joked about, were not the justice they pretended to be either. They violated every principle of Anglo-American justice and resembled nothing so much as the Soviet show trials that Joseph Davies had praised and excused. About the only person willing to point this out at the time was US Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio. You can read about his stand and his reasons for it in the ninth chapter of Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956) by John F. Kennedy and his speechwriter Ted Sorenson. All of this should be kept in mind when we are tempted to think of World War II as “The Good War.” The war may have been necessary but, as Simone Weil pointed out, it is dangerous to confuse the necessary with the good.

(5) Just before the alliance ended the American government followed through on one of Roosevelt’s most gruesome promises to Stalin. Under Eisenhower’s direction, the Allies turned Soviet POWs that had been captured by the Nazis and ended up in the hands of the British and Americans over to the Red Army. FDR’s promise was interpreted very broadly and those from Soviet-controlled territory that had fled Soviet tyranny only to end up in Hitler’s camps were forcibly turned over to the Soviets. See Julius Epstein, Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present(Old Greenwich: Devin-Adair, 1973).

(6) James Burnham, The Struggle for the World(New York: John Day Company, 1947). This was the first of what would become a trilogy of works with The Coming Defeat of Communism (1949) and Containment or Liberation? An Inquiry into the aims of United States Foreign Policy (1953). In his earlier The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World? (1941) Burnham had written that contrary to the predictions of Marxists and liberals alike, a social, political, and economic transformation was underway that would lead to neither capitalism or socialism, but to the rise of a new elite class of technocratic managers, that this was simultaneously occurring in the liberal West, the Axis powers, and the Soviet Union, and that on the geopolitical scale this would be reflected in the reorganization of the world into three large spheres of influence, in North America, Europe, and Asia. In this later trilogy Burnham revised that number down to two, the USA and USSR, argued that the struggle between them was a winner-take-all, zero sum game, and urged that the United States adapt a strategy of liberating Soviet-controlled territory.

(7) I use the language of progress, “advancement” and “forward” quite deliberately here. If the invention of the technology that would eventually be able to obliterate all life on earth – with the possible exception of the cockroach – can be described as an “advancement”, and in the language of technological progress that is exactly what it was, then there is something seriously wrong with the concept of technological progress. Moving forward is not a self-justifying action. Whether it is the right and proper thing to do or utter and absolute folly is determined by the answer to the question of what we are moving forward towards.

(8) It would have been unconscionable under any circumstances but it was also completely unnecessary. The usual justification, that had the bomb not been dropped there would have been more deaths because the Japanese would have fought it out to the bitter end, is false. Japan had in fact been suing for peace for at least a year prior to the bombings. Their peace overtures were ignored because FDR had committed the Allies to the pursuit of “unconditional surrender” at Casablanca in 1943. This was an irrational policy, which Churchill, who heard about it for the first time when Roosevelt announced it to the press, publicly signed on to while privately fuming over its unreasonableness and stupidity. Since the only condition the Japanese had included in their proposals was that they be allowed to keep their emperor – a condition that the Americans agreed to in the end anyway – the dropping of the a-bombs was that much more unconscionable of an act.

(9) Whittaker Chambers, Witness, (Washington D. C.: Regnery Publishing Inc., 1952, 1980), p. 9.

(10) This was the title of a book, edited by British Labour MP Richard Crossman, containing anti-communist essays by several ex-communist intellectuals including Arthur Koestler and André Gide that was first published in 1949.

(11) A thorough collection of this evidence can be found in Le Livre noir du Communisme: Crimes, terreur, repression which was published in Paris by Editions Robert Laffont in 1997. Edited by Stéphane Courtois, it was translated into English by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer and published by Harvard University Press in 1999 as The Black Book of Communism. Its contributors documents the enslavement, state murder, and other horrors of Marxist-Leninism in the Soviet Union from its earliest days under Lenin, as well as in Poland and the rest of central/Eastern Europe, in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan.

(12) Anatoliy Golitsyn is a former KGB agent who defected from the Soviet Union in 1961. His second book, The Perestroika Deception The world’s slide towards The ‘Second October Revolution’ (London & New York: Edward Harle,1995) consists of memoranda he had sent to the CIA warning that the thaw in Soviet relations with the West was all part of a long-term strategy to deceive the West and bring about a second Bolshevik Revolution on a global scale. Published four years after the breakup of the USSR this would seem like paranoid drivel were it not for his first book, New Lies For Old (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1984). According to this book, the Soviets had adopted a long-term disinformation strategy back in the 1950s, before he defected from the KGB, that had several phases which included the disputes and splits within the Communist bloc between the USSR on the one hand, and Yugoslavia, Albania and China on the other, the Romanian independence movement, and the various reforms and political schisms in the Communist countries that Western strategists would attach great importance to and hope to exploit in the Cold War. Golitsyn claimed that all of this was a show put on to deceive the West. What makes this interpretation so disturbing is Part Three of the book, where he describes “The Final Phase” of the strategy. It predicts the rise of a young new leader, the liberalization of the Soviet Union including the return of the exiles and amnesty for dissidents, a restructuring of the Soviet government, the dissolution of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of a powerful, socialist, European Union, and well over a hundred other things that began to come true about a year after the book was published.

(13) The episode, entitled “Simpson Tide”, is the nineteenth episode of the ninth season of the long-running primetime cartoon. In this episode Homer, having joined the US navy, ends up through a series of mishaps, getting an American submarine into Russian territorial waters. This leads to a conversation at the UN in which the Russian ambassador says “The Soviet Union will be pleased to offer amnesty to your wayward vessel” to which the American ambassador responds with “The Soviet Union? I thought you guys broke up”. The Soviet ambassador, with a sinister smile, replies “Nyes, dats what we wanted you to think, bwah hah hah hah”. http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=11391#.Uv1sAxT4AcA

(14) While this strategy is often associated with Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci it was most fully developed by the “Frankfurt School”, i.e., the thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research, which was founded in the University of Frankfurt in the 1920s and temporarily relocated to Columbia University in the United States to escape the Third Reich. Among the intellectuals associated with this group were Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm who represented a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy, sociology and psychology, to literary and social criticm and even musicology (in Adorno’s case).

(15) Tomislav Sunic, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age(Book Surge Publishing, 2007), p. 34.

The Iron Lady Had Class

Baroness Margaret Thatcher, who became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1979, and held both positions until forced from office by an in-party coup in 1990, passed away on Monday, April 8th, 2013. In the days since her passing, leftist politicians and media commentators, progressive bloggers, union leaders, student activists and other leftist riff-raff have been celebrating, rejoicing, partying, and basically making a loud, crude, rude public spectacle of themselves. The song, “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead”, from the 1939 MGM musical-movie version of The Wizard of Oz even made it onto the singles charts due to their efforts. By carrying on in this fashion, the Left has demonstrated the truth of what I have long said about such radical ilk – that those who believe in a classless society have no class.


Lady Thatcher herself, had class.  Sadly, the same cannot be said of all of her supporters.  It saddened me to hear one of her admirers, a media personality in my own country, speak of Britain’s traditional “class society” with the same sneer in his voice that one ordinarily associates with Marxists.   The man in question is no Marxist.  I often agree with what he says, and I agreed with most of what he had to say about the rudeness and ignorance of Lady Thatcher’s detractors and in defence of her ideas and policies.   Yet for some bizarre reason, he chose to turn the death of the great lady into an opportunity for class warfare.

Yes, class warfare.  That is exactly what the talking head in question would have called it, if a union representative, leftist academic, or Marxist politician were to attack the entrepreneurial, business, or middle classes in the name of the manual labour classes or the poor.   He would have been right, too.   Marxists, however, are not the only ones to engage in class warfare.

This man rightly praised Margaret Thatcher as a champion of liberty, economic freedom, and democracy.   She was all that.  He also was correct in saying that she attained the leadership of the Conservative Party and accomplished all that she did in her years in power against the opposition, not only of the Labour Party, but of many of the leaders of her own party.   He insisted, however, on making this into a matter of class differences.   Margaret Thatcher, nee Roberts, was of middle class origins, a grocer’s daughter, whereas traditionally, the leadership of the Conservative Party had been drawn from the upper classes.   The opposition she met from within the ranks of the Conservative leadership, he maintained, was due to snobbery on the part of Tory aristocrats, whereas her success as Primer Minister was due to virtues that arose out of her middle class background.   While there is some truth to both of these assertions, the contempt for the upper classes that was dripping from every word displayed a remarkable affinity with the spirit of socialism.  Lady Thatcher herself, on occasion, had said that sometimes members of the upper classes were susceptible to sympathy with socialism due to misguided guilt over wealth they had inherited rather than obtained through work and entrepreneurship.  Unlike a certain broadcaster, she remained classy in saying so, and did not try to make the upper classes into a scapegoat.   She believed socialism to be bad for all classes of society, and economic liberty to be good for all classes of society.

The media commentator that I am referring to wished to emphasize the differences between Margaret Thatcher and the traditional Tories that he dubbed “the far right” – differences in class, training, and ideas.   While these differences were there, they were perhaps not as large or as significant as some people might think.   In her memoirs Lady Thatcher wrote that “both by instinct and upbringing I was always a ‘true blue’ Conservative.” (1)   She seems to have been speaking both of her party affiliation and personal philosophy.  With regards to the latter, she was both a conservative and a liberal.  A conservative is someone who believes in and defends his community, society, and country, their social, political, and cultural institutions, and the traditions which uphold those institutions.   A liberal is someone who believes in the abstract ideals of individual rights and liberty, the free market, and democracy to the extent that it is consistent with liberty.    While the latter are the set of ideas with which she was most often identified, at least by her North American admirers, she was also a classical conservative.   Consider her treatment of the subject of human rights in the chapter entitled “Human Rights and Wrongs” in her book Statecraft.  She started out by pointing to the religious origin of the idea that “an individual human being has a moral value in his or her own right”, then briefly described how the English concept of rights and liberties had organically evolved over centuries, so that “the English-speaking peoples’ conception of human rights is one that has an institutional context and is the fruit of a living tradition”.  This she contrasts with the “tendency to generalize about natural or human rights which predate and are not contingent upon specific laws” which produces the paradox that “the more ambitious and far-reaching natural rights are taken to be, the more likely it is that in the end liberties are going to be lost”, as is evidenced by the French Revolution.   Therefore it is clear that “the guarantees offered to individuals by habit, accumulated tradition and the common law were a great deal sounder than ‘democratic’ principles applied by demagogues.”  This is a clear enunciation of classical conservative thought. (2)  

Was liberalism more predominant in Lady Thatcher’s philosophy than conservatism, or the other way around?   The quotations in the previous paragraph would suggest that conservatism was predominant, as would her statement elsewhere in the chapter quoted from, that for her “duties precede rights”.  Her oft-quoted remark that “there is no such thing as society” would suggest that liberalism was predominant. (3) 

Ultimately, the answer to the question is not important.  Margaret Thatcher was the right person to lead the United Kingdom because she was both a conservative and a liberal, for at the time Great Britain was threatened, both domestically and abroad, by socialism, the common enemy of both conservatism and liberalism.  Liberals are opposed to socialism because it is an inefficient economic model and because they see it as a threat to individual liberty that leads inevitably to tyranny.   Conservatives are opposed to socialism because of its revolutionary and utopian nature and its threat to things such as property, order, and social institutions.  

The socialism that was killing Great Britain in the 1970s, had its roots in the 1940s, in the Second World War.   Great Britain had emerged from that conflict a victor in the limited sense that the enemy she had set out to defeat, Nazi Germany, had thankfully been vanquished.   Her victory, however, was in many ways a Pyrrhic victory.   The price she paid, for her triumph over Hitler, was her empire, and her place as the leading power of the Western world.   This outcome had been orchestrated by the egomaniacal socialist who was then President of the United States of America, the wartime ally that was to succeed her as the primary power of the free world.   Meanwhile, the country whose liberty she had entered the war to protect, Poland, was swallowed up along with the rest of Eastern Europe, by the Soviet Union, with whom Britain and the United States had been forced to make a wartime alliance in order to bring down the Third Reich.   The territory controlled by the Soviet Union, arguably a greater evil than Nazi Germany, was greatly expanded as a result of the war, and shortly after the war Communism triumphed in China and began to spread throughout Asia as well.

 

If Communism had grown through World War II to become the international threat that it was during the Cold War, domestic socialism was an outcome of the war in the UK as well.  The Conservative Party had been in power, under the leadership of Neville Chamberlain at the beginning of the war.  Sir Winston Churchill took over as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister from Chamberlain in 1940 and led Britain through to the end of the war, at the head of a coalition government.   In the general election in 1945, however, he was unceremoniously thrown out of office when the election returned a landslide victory to the Labour Party, and Clement Attlee became Prime Minister.   Margaret Thatcher, who would have been twenty years old at the time, recorded her thoughts on this outcome: “I simply could not understand how the electorate could do this to Churchill…At the time I felt that the British electorate’s treatment of the man who more than anyone else secured their liberty was shameful.” (4)

What was the reason for the Labour victory?  Duff Cooper believed that it was a response to the policy of appeasement Chamberlain had practiced prior to the outbreak of war.   Evelyn Waugh believed it was due to the obsequious fawning over Stalin and the Soviet Union by the wartime government.  Anthony Burgess was of the opinion that the British soldier, tired of war, yearning for home and family,  voted en masse to turn out of office the man who wished to keep them deployed for years after the war, to defend against the Soviet threat. (5)

Perhaps it was a little of all of these.  Clement Attlee, however, believed that it was do to widespread popular approbation of his socialist ideas.   He did not hesitate to bring in a broad range of sweeping changes.  He nationalized the canals and railroads, the telecommunications services, the coal and steel industries, and the electricity and power companies.   He expanded the social safety net established by the Disraeli Conservatives in the 19^th Century into a massive and expensive Welfare State.  These policies predictably produced exactly that which they were designed to combat – misery.  At a time when Britain was staggering under the debt from the recent war, the Labour Party made things worse by vastly increasing the cost of government, placing a huge tax burden on an economy that was less able to bear that burden due to socialist inefficiency.   The ineffectiveness of the government at administering the industries it had taken over combined with the Attlee government’s maintaining of war rationing well into peacetime brought about shortages and a decrease in the quality of goods produced.  All of this was brilliantly satirized by Wyndham Lewis in a collection of short stories entitled Rotting Hill. (6)

Unfortunately, the belief that the Labour landslide was due to the popular appeal of socialism was shared by the leaders of the Conservative Party. In 1947, they put out a paper declaring their support for the Attlee innovations, and, against the accumulating evidence that these policies were doing more harm than good, maintained that support for most of the next three decades. Historians call this the Post-War Consensus, and Margaret Thatcher dubbed the Conservative leaders who maintained that consensus, “Wet Tories”. Individual Conservatives occasionally spoke out against the Party’s odious policy of providing an echo rather than a choice. The most noteworthy of these was Enoch Powell, the former professor of classical Greek who had become an officer during the war and had returned to take up a career in Conservative politics. Powell, a High Tory who defended the political, social, cultural, and religious institutions of Great Britain on the basis of prescriptive authority, used his eloquence to oppose leftist plans to democratize the House of Lords, to champion free market and monetarist reforms against socialism and the Post-War Consensus, to challenge liberal immigration policies, and to speak out, on the grounds of national independence and sovereignty, against Britain’s joining the European Common Market. The Conservative leadership refused to act on any of these ideas, however, and Powell’s uncompromising stand alienated him from his own Party.

Meanwhile, socialism continued to have a deleterious effect on Great Britain.  Government spending continued to grow, and, unsurprisingly, so did inflation.  Unemployment, which many of the Attlee programs had been intended to prevent, began to rise.   Realizing that Britain was facing an economic crisis, James Callaghan, who in 1976 had succeeded Harold Wilson as leader of the Labour Party, and Prime Minister, attempted to control inflation through caps on pay raises and found himself in conflict with the Trades Union Congress.   This conflict erupted into strikes in the winter of 1978-79.  Things got so bad, that commentators, borrowing a phrase from the opening monologue of Shakespeare’s Richard III, bestowed upon that winter the sobriquet “the Winter of Discontent”.  

That was the last winter of Labour government for almost two decades.  Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, and had broken with the Post-War Consensus, calling for free market reforms.   In the general election of 1979, the Conservative Party won a majority and Margaret Thatcher was summoned to Buckingham Palace where Queen Elizabeth II invited her to form the next government.

The rest is history.   As Prime Minister, she introduced monetarist policies to combat inflation, set out to promote economic growth through deregulation and free market reforms, cut government expenditures, and privatized industries that should never have been nationalized in the first place.  She declared war on the unions, with the purpose of breaking their power, derived from the threat of nation-crippling strikes, to dictate terms to Parliament .  Furthermore, she stuck to her guns.  It took time for the benefits of her reforms to become apparent and in the meantime progressives sought to pin the blame on Thatcher and her economic liberalism for every slightest bit of human suffering they could dig up in Britain.   The reforms worked however.  Inflation went down, and eventually, as the economy grew, unemployment went down too.   She succeeded in breaking the power of the unions as well.

In the international theatre, she helped bring about an end to the forty-year Cold War, by standing with American President Ronald Reagan against the oppression and aggression of Communism.   Progressive intellectuals will, of course, deny that the policies of Thatcher and Reagan had anything to do with the Soviets suddenly becoming more reasonable and the collapse of Communism in Russia, preferring to give the credit, if to anyone, to Mikhail Gorbachev, but as these are the same bloody fool idiots who could not see the terror famines, show trials, Gulag concentration camps, the utter misery of the masses, the persecution of the faithful, and other countless Soviet atrocities going on in their precious workers Paradise through the Potemkin villages, until forced to by the testimony of men like Solzhenitsyn, their opinion is worthless.

By the strength Lady Thatcher displayed in conflicts – whether with Communism abroad in the Cold War, with socialists and unions at home, or with Argentina in the 1982 war over the Falkland Islands, she well earned her nickname the Iron Lady.   Whatever else may be said for and against economic liberalism, her economic policies repaired much of the damage done by three decades of socialism.   She was a champion of democracy, but of democracy grounded in a living tradition, and she was also a supporter of Britain’s other traditional institutions, notably saying with regards to the continuing relevancy of the monarchy that “those who imagine that a politician would make a better figurehead than a hereditary monarch might perhaps make the acquaintance of more politicians.”   Her virtues were such that she won over the support of such hardnosed, traditional High Tory critics as Enoch Powell and Peregrine Worsthorne, who had been highly critical of her in her early years in office, but who wrote and spoke in defense of her in her unsuccessful struggle to retain her leadership of the Conservative Party in 1990.   She displayed the traditional virtues of loyalty, gratitude and honour, against a sea of progressive criticism and hatred, when she came to the assistance of General Pinochet, a man whose support had been invaluable to Great Britain during the Falklands War,  after his 1998 arrest during a visit to Britain. (7)

She was a classy lady and she will be missed. May she rest in peace.


(1) Margaret Thatcher, The Path To Power (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995) p. 28. This is her second volume of memoirs, although the events recorded within it take place prior to those in the first volume, The Downing Street Years, which was published in 1993.


(2) Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), pp. 250-254. In the sentence after the last one quoted, Lady Thatcher quotes from Edmund Burke, the “father of conservatism”.

(3) The conservative view of society and the individual was expressed by Enoch Powell in a 1992 interview with Naim Attallah thus “Society is in the end normative, and politics is about the management and governance of a society. Society is prior (in a logical sense) to the individual; the individual in the last resort is an abstraction. Nobody has ever met an individual, we didn’t start as individuals, we don’t live as individuals, we only know ourselves as members of a collectivity.” (http://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/)

(4) The Path To Power, p. 46.

(5) For Cooper and Waugh’s views, see Christopher Sykes Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1975, 1977), p. 446. For Anthony Burgess’ views see Little Wilson and Big God: The First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (London: Vintage, 1987)

(6) Wyndham Lewis, Rotting Hill (London: Methuen, 1951)

(7) For her own account of this action, see Statecraft, p. 267-274.

GTN Tory Classics No. 3: Twenty Years Later: A Pyrrhic Victory

The term Pyrrhic victory comes from Pyrrhus of Epirus, a 3rd Century BC Greek king who fought against Rome. At the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC, he led a coalition army against a Roman army of about equal strength. The battle lasted for two days and in the end Rome was routed, but Pyrrhus lost a huge portion of his own army in the process. After the battle, Pyrrhus is said to have remarked "One more such victory, and we shall be undone". A Pyrrhic victory is a victory won at a cost so high it means the ruin of the victor as well.

I wrote the essay that followed for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this essay I argue that the West won the Cold War against Communism at the price of becoming Communist ourselves. This essay also argues against the widely held but foolish idea that "Communism in theory" is noble and good and unrelated to the actual experience of 20th Century Communism.


Twenty Years Later: A Pyrrhic Victory?


By Gerry T. Neal
October 20, 2009

This November 9th will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The significance of that historical event cannot be exaggerated. It marked the beginning of the end of the global conflict that had been raging since the end of World War II between the two superpowers that had emerged from that War to take the place of the great European powers that had been decimated by the World Wars. Two years after the East German guards abandoned the check stops and allowed free access through the gates of the wall the Soviet Union was no more.

Did the end of the Cold War mean that we had won and Communism had lost? Or was the “victory” of the West a Pyrrhic victory? In his 2007 book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Post-Modern Age, Dr. Tomislav Sunic pointed out that in Europe some authors had made the observation that “communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West”. Is this in fact the case?

What was or is Communism? It was an ideology and a movement dedicated to bringing about a global revolution on the part of the working class that would establish an egalitarian society. It’s roots lay in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th Century philosopher whose ideas inspired the French Revolution which became the template for revolutionary movements that popped up all over continental Europe in the early 19th Century. One of those revolutionary organizations, the Communist League, commissioned German economist Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels to write a manifesto outlining the aims of their movement. The Communist Manifesto was published for the first time in London in 1848. Less than a century later a party known as the Bolsheviks, dedicated to the ideology of Communism, seized control of the state in Russia, and turned the old Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Under the leadership of tyrants like Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Communist Russia established a brutal system of totalitarian rule. Freedom to worship was severely curtailed by the officially atheist state. Artificial famines were created to inflict mass starvation and suffering upon the Ukrainians. A class of peasant known as the “kulaks” were made the official scapegoat of the Soviet state and targeted for persecution. Forced labor camps were set up all across the USSR. Long before Hitler came to power in Germany the Bolsheviks had set a record for state cruelty and oppression that the Nazis, brutal as they were, would never be able to top. It would, however, arguably be topped by the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong who in 1949 had driven out the Chinese Nationalists and conquered mainland China.

Show trials, Potemkin villages, concentration camps, artificial famines, mass executions of entire classes of people deemed to be enemies of “the people” because of their education, wealth, or religion, these were what Communism looked like in practice wherever it reared its ugly head, whether in Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot or Cuba under Castro. The whole time this was going on, smug, ivory-tower, leftist intellectuals in America, Canada, the UK and Europe stuck their noses in the air at anyone who considered Communism to be a serious threat to human freedom and happiness.

These sort of things, we were told by leftist academics and Hollywood actors, are not what Communism is really about. Communism is really about equality and sharing and being fair to people. Only those with unearned wealth and power which they jealously guard for themselves while unfeelingly leaving other people to suffer could possibly be opposed to Communism.

Alright then. Lets look at Communism in theory.

The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels set forth the ideas and aims of the Communist Party, was a short document. It outlined Marx’s distinct view of history as progressing through a series of conflicts between oppressor classes and oppressed classes and his prediction that the next revolution, on the part of the proletariat (industrial working class), would lead to the abolition of private property (the root of all evil in Marx’s theory) and the establishment of a society where everything is owned in common and people contribute to the best of their ability and in accordance with their needs. In their second chapter, entitled “Proletarians and Communists”, Marx and Engels put forth a 10-point agenda for the Communist movement to achieve its goals.

What is interesting about this agenda is that 3 of the points have been completely accomplished in Western societies. The second point is “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax”, the fifth point is “Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly” and the tenth point is “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc”.

Note that each of these points is a step towards statism. An income tax is a direct tax on the incomes of people that requires people to give detailed information about their employment and income to the government and which cannot be established apart from an intrusive government tax agency that keeps records on people and has the power to audit people like Revenue Canada or the IRS. When that tax is “progressive or graduated” that means that the government is telling certain people they are making too much money and so the government will take a larger share from them than from others. This tax was established in the United States in 1913 and in Canada in 1917.

A central bank is a tool for the government and bankers working in collusion with the government to confiscate everybody’s wealth without them actually coming up to you and saying “you have saved such-and-such an amount of money over the years, we are now going to take it away from you”. The Federal Reserve System was established in the United States the same year as the income tax and the Bank of Canada was established in the 1934.

Universal public education takes the responsibility for and control of the education of the young away from their parents and places it in the hands of the central state. When schools are paid for and controlled by the central government they become instruments whereby that government can undermine the authority of parents, churches, and other social institutions through state indoctrination. As of late, the public schools seem to be doing far more of that, than teaching kids to read, write, and do math, and imparting to them a basic knowledge of the literature and history of their society and of the world at large.

The other seven points of the Marx/Engels agenda have not been fulfilled so conspicuously and completely but with our estate taxes and government bureaucracies like the CRTC and FCC, and the ministries and departments of transport, it can be said of many of them that they are fulfilled in spirit if not in the letter.

The leftist academics might pipe in at this point and say “See, that proves our point, you can have Marx and Engels without the Gulag, and the killing fields, and the terror famine, and the Great Leap Forward”.

Lets take another look around us then. We don’t have apparatchiks but we do have self-important sycophantic bureaucrats galore. We don’t have yes/no elections on candidates from a single party. We get to chose between various brands of the same party so as to get the policies of Jack Layton under the label of Stephen Harper. We don’t have secret police knocking on our doors in the middle of the night and dragging us away because we have written scurrilous verse about our Leader. We do, however, have Human Rights Commissions, which investigate our actions and words to make sure they measure up to official human rights ideology and which summon us to trials where we are not entitled to legal counsel but where we can face penalties of up to $50 000 and life-time gag orders if we are convicted for just posting words on the internet. There are people in jails across Western Europe whose only crime was to question aspects of the historical account of the Holocaust. Instead of re-education we have “sensitivity training”.

What we don’t seem to have any more are the prescriptive Rights of Englishmen under English Common Law, whereby we are free to do whatever we want if it is not a crime clearly proscribed by law. The Common Law Rights of Englishmen further protected us by insisting that we, if detained by the state, have a right to be immediately presented with the charges against us, to have a judge rule on our detainment, to a trial before a jury of our peers, and if convicted to appeal our case up to Her Majesty herself. Apparently “human rights” trump those rights.

These all seem to have fallen by the wayside as our government has pursued the goals of progress, equality and “human rights”. It looks like Communism, whether in its stark, ugly, naked form in the USSR or Red China, or dressed up to look pretty in Canada and the United States, is simply incompatible with the long-standing British tradition of liberty.

If we value that tradition of liberty, maybe it is time we started asking our politicians to give it back to us, and to get rid of all the Communist innovations they have smuggled in over the last century. Otherwise, the West’s victory over Communism of 20 years ago, is a Pyrrhic victory indeed.