The Bolshevik Revolution Reveals Six Phases From Freedom To Communist Misery
In a nutshell, communism enforces a privileged elite’s centralization of power. This means it always puts too much power into the hands of too few people. They tend to weasel their way into power as their ventriloquized agitators use talking points like “justice” and “equality” while promoting a false illusion of public support.
So, how would it ever be possible for a free society like America to succumb to such tyrannical forces? I think we’ve spent precious little time trying to dissect and understand this process. So, in this three-part series, I hope to map out six stages that lead us into this dangerous direction. Within each phase, several trends take hold. I’ll discuss the trends in more detail in parts II and III.
There is a lot of overlap among the phases, but I think they can be roughly identified as: 1.) Laying the groundwork; 2.) Propaganda; 3.) Agitation; 4.) State takeover of society’s institutions; 5.) Coercing conformity; and 6.) Final solutions. But first let’s look a bit more closely at what communism really means for human beings.
‘Power Kills. Absolute Power Kills Absolutely’
Thousands of texts examine and analyze communism ideologically, historically, economically, and so on. It always amounts to a bait-and-switch scheme hatched by egomaniacs who want to dictate to everybody. Why? Because it’s all about the consolidation of power by a tiny elite—in Vladimir Lenin’s words, “the vanguard”—who claim to promote equality and justice and blah, blah, blah.
But once communism gets its foot in the door and you don’t get with their program, it promises you death in a variety of forms: economic death, social death, and literal death. That’s predictable whenever you put too much power into the hands of too few people. And that’s why we should always firmly oppose any system that demands the consolidation and centralization of power.
Although communist and socialist governments murdered well more than 100 million people in the course of the twentieth century, that number spikes even further when you include the practical bedfellows of communism, like Nazism and fascism, for example. According to the calculations of Professor R. J. Rummel, author of “Death by Government,” totalitarian regimes snuffed out approximately 169 million lives in the twentieth century alone. That number is more than four times higher than the 38 million deaths—civilian as well as military—caused by all of the twentieth century wars combined.
As Rummel states: “Power kills. Absolute power kills absolutely.” The common thread that runs through communist and fascist ideologies is their totalitarian nature, which means they control people by breeding scarcity, ignorance, human misery, social distrust, the constant threat of social isolation, and death to dissenters. All in the name of justice and equality.
They cannot abide any checks or balances, particularly checks on government power as reflected in the U.S. Bill of Rights. They fight de-centralization of power, which allows localities and states true self-governance. Such restraints on the centralized power of the state stand in the way of achieving the goal of communism: absolute state power over every single human being.
Lenin’s Blood-Soaked Legacy
It should astonish us to realize that the obsessions of a few wild-eyed revolutionaries can blue-pill whole populations of peaceful citizens. But it’s all a matter of conjuring up illusions and mass delusions, no matter the brand of totalitarianism. Lenin was a fiery orator of propaganda, as was Adolph Hitler.
To achieve absolute power, Lenin focused on fomenting a class war, while Hitler set his sights on a race war. Either way, the divide-and-conquer modus operandi of fascist and communist demagogues is pretty much the same, no matter what each side might claim about the other. Their propaganda content may differ, but not so much their divide-and-conquer methods. Attitudes of supremacy come in a virtual rainbow of flavors and colors.
As Saul Alinsky taught and the agitprop of groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center illustrates so perfectly, the goal of all such radicals is to seize power by fueling resentment and hatred among people through various forms of “consciousness”—particularly class and race consciousness. That’s what identity politics is all about. That division is a key tool for totalitarians in their conquest of the people. Once their organizations breed enough ill will, the “masses”—made up of mostly alienated individuals—can be baited and mobilized to do the bidding of power elites, with a rhetorical veneer claiming justice and equality.
Most of today’s enlisted rioters—groups that call themselves things like “Indivisible,” “Anti-Fascist,” “Stop Patriarchy,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Refuse Fascism,” or moveon.org—are pretty much unabashedly communist (or just plain fascist) in their goals and aims and tactics. The chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA, for example, founded Refuse Fascism. It’s a pro-violence group that planned street theater on November 4, with the stated goal of overturning the 2016 election and taking out the Trump administration.
If you’re a true student of history, you can see that this is an old movie: mobs of disaffected, alienated people being exploited and mobilized by power elites. Unfortunately, very few Americans today, especially younger generations, are inquisitive students of history.
Certain sports figures, for example, claim to be exercising their First Amendment rights by showing hostility towards the American flag during the national anthem, based on a superficial understanding of history. They don’t realize the net effect of their actions is to show hostility against the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, for which the flag stands. Perhaps they don’t understand how their actions are easily exploited by those who would ultimately deprive everyone, including themselves, of all freedom of expression. Without freedom of expression, we all become slaves to the forces of tyranny. Sadly, using freedom to destroy freedom is an old tactic of all totalitarians.
Six Phases to Unfreedom
Many of the social trends we see today point to dangerous conditions in which a totalitarian system like communism can rear its ugly head again. If enough folks don’t push back against these developments, tyranny can secure a foothold. So let’s try to clarify some of these patterns so we might better confront them and preserve freedom for everybody.
At least two dozen major trends have unfolded over the years and continue to unfold that indicate an erosion of human freedom and the growth of a centralized power. I’ve grouped them into six different phases, even though there is a lot of overlap. I’m sure you can add many more major developments to the list. Below are summaries of the phases as well as the trends within each phase, as I see them.
1. Laying the Groundwork
This is usually a generational or decades-long process, in which minds can be closed to reason and more influenced by emotion and propaganda. This happens in many ways: through the mass bureaucratization of life that allows for policies that promote polarization, dependency, and human isolation; through disabling independent thinking by educational fads that actually cultivate ignorance and shun content knowledge; through the attack on the humanities in both K-12 and higher education; and through the lack of general knowledge about how mass psychology works.
All the while, as new communications technologies develop and proliferate, they are embedded into the groundwork that promotes tyranny over liberty. Through the effects of these trends, people become less open to logic, and more persuaded by the proliferation of images and emotional appeals, cemented by groupthink.
2. Manufacturing Propaganda
Propaganda has always been with us, and always will be. But as people become less able to discern fact from fiction, propaganda feeds on itself more intensely. As emotions trump facts, propaganda tends to become more forceful and more focused on driving people to agitate for collectivist agendas. It takes a multitude of forms, but the Orwellian manipulation of language is always the key to thought reform.
Then, journalists increasingly become propagandists, and promote illusions of alternative realities. This includes the revision of history, as well as trends such as gender ideology, which pushes to de-sex everybody in the eyes of the law. As propaganda takes the form of political correctness, it threatens people with social rejection if they don’t conform to the politically correct agendas. In this way, it induces self-censorship and preference falsification to create the illusion of public opinion support for its agendas. Political correctness is the sort of agitprop that can grow a cult mindset in the population.
3. Agitating the Masses
Once the groundwork has been laid and propaganda absorbed by enough people, agitation can proliferate. As Lenin made clear, agitation and propaganda go together and are absolutely essential to communist revolutions. As that sort of agitation becomes more prevalent in public life, there’s more speed on the road to totalitarianism.
Agitation can involve protests, parades, marches, and demonstrations. It also involves organized shout-downs of legislators and a hundred other means of trying to affect public policy by influencing public opinion. During this phase, imitative behaviors proliferate (such as we’ve seen among NFL players during the national anthem). It seems that hatred and frustration are more palpable everywhere in the society.
Indeed, the media, Hollywood, and academia—and the Southern Poverty Law Center—would have us focus on nothing else. We see iconoclasm in this phase, as in the defacing of public statues and national monuments. The education establishment becomes involved in politically agitating children, creating confusion and frustration, and even cultivating hostility towards their parents if they aren’t with the program.
4. Consolidating the Takeover of Society’s Institutions
About 100 years ago, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci introduced his theory of “cultural hegemony,” which cast cultural institutions as the enemy, claiming they were used to maintain power. So the key to achieving communism in the West was through destroying its culture, not through promoting socialist economic policies that had little appeal in the West. This would require a “long march through the institutions” of society, destroying them from within so communism could fill the vacuum.
Radicals of the 1960s like Herbert Marcuse and Alinsky picked up on this theme, noting that “the system” (i.e., American freedom) could only be destroyed from within once radical operatives had control over society’s institutions. The deep state is one example that’s been building through decades of bureaucratic bloat, with operatives embedded throughout the government, including in the military and intelligence agencies. And, of course, the cultural takeover of the media, academia, and entertainment is both broad and deep.
But, most importantly, the mediating institutions have been relentlessly attacked. Those are the institutions that protect the individual from encroachment by the state, particularly the family, the church, and all voluntary and civic associations. We can see and feel especially how the family has been eroded today. All of these institutions have been deeply affected by statist forces, rendering them more vulnerable than ever to total absorption by the mass state, a prerequisite for communism.
5. Forcing Conformity
This is perhaps the most unsettling phase, when otherwise discerning people who have been duped by the rhetoric of social justice finally awaken to the deceit within the agitprop. This is the stage in which you are told to conform and convert—or else. We see small shop owners threatened with financial ruin if they don’t disavow their faith. We see Catholic nuns, like Little Sisters of the Poor, threatened for not disavowing their faith. We see echoes of Maoist-style “struggle sessions”—otherwise known as sessions of criticism and self-criticism—as college students are forced to admit to white privilege simply because they had happy childhoods.
False confessions proliferate, along with apologies and recantations for showing even the slightest hint of a politically incorrect viewpoint. A surveillance state can grow with new technologies being used for data mining. At the same time, human resources departments start telling employees to report for discipline any politically incorrect private conversation that they might overhear.
Millennial celebrity Lena Dunham modeled a Soviet-style surveillance state by tweeting to American Airlines that she overheard two flight attendants having a “transphobic” conversation for which they should be punished. The practice of ritual defamation—smears such as “bigot,” “racist,” “KKK”—become commonplace. And, perhaps most chilling, psychiatry is used as a political weapon.
6. The ‘Final Solutions’ Phase
Of course we aren’t there. Not yet, anyway. But perhaps you’ll agree that we should always be aware of the lessons of history if we don’t want to repeat its more unsavory chapters. In the last phase, which is fast and furious, totalitarian elites let loose their inclination to brutally eliminate their perceived enemies.
It happens in what Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov identified as the “normalization” stage, after subversion of a nation is complete. It’s as though they can’t do anything but eliminate their perceived enemies because they just don’t know how to do anything else. The body count in the Soviet gulag state, including reigns of terrors and purges intended to rid the country of counter-revolutionaries, was in the tens of millions.
In this phase, violence is considered simply a necessary means to achieving the goal of centralized power. There is not even a pretense of due process or respect for free speech. Yet there are pretexts given for eliminating perceived enemies, excuses that have the perpetrators projecting their own intentions upon their victims. That’s an old and tragic story.
‘Confirm Thy Soul in Self-Control, Thy Liberty in Law’
America is still a free nation with laws on the books that protect individuals from abuses by the state. But we should be very disturbed by the emergence of trends that, if left unchecked, would lead to the consolidation of centralized power by elites who would abolish the Bill of Rights. Communism, as well as fascism and all such forms of totalitarianism, is the natural product of such unchecked trends.
So when people disrespect the American flag “because oppression,” they tend to be clueless that their freedom to do so is extremely fragile. Freedom must be fought for, tooth and nail. Then it must be appreciated and nurtured, never taken for granted. Freedom must be fought for, tooth and nail. Then it must be appreciated and nurtured, never taken for granted.
We are still in the fight to preserve freedom. But when we review the preponderance of trends that point us in that direction, we ought to pay attention to the symptoms and work to reverse those trends. We ought to be looking hard for a cure, or at least a path to sanity and balance.
This means filling the vacuum of ignorance with knowledge and teaching students how to dispassionately assess information and process it on their own rather than rely on emotion and groupthink—and finding a way to do so quickly. It means cultivating respect for reality over pseudo-reality. It means reaching out in goodwill to others, no matter their political persuasion, to de-fang the polarization causing so much alienation and unhappiness in our society.
All of these trends, which I’ll explore in more detail in Parts II and III, will lead to absolute power, if left unchecked. Centralized power, as crystallized in the political system of Communism, has always led to scarcity, distrust, death, and just plain human misery. It really does deserve to be buried in the ash heap of history.
As we try to stem such tides, I hope we can take to heart these lines from the second verse of Katherine Lee Bates’ grand hymn, “America the Beautiful”: “America, America, God mend thine every flaw. Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.”
Individual freedom cannot survive if it isn’t balanced with a widespread sense of personal responsibility, self-regulation, self-governance, and the rule of law that allows for dispassionate due process is critical to preventing the loss of liberty that comes via its abuse. In the overall pattern of human history, this is the road less-traveled. But as America has proven, it is the only road that allows for mending flaws and the pursuit of happiness.
The First 3 Phases Of The Downward Slope From Freedom To Communism
November 7 marks the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. There are many reasons beyond the historical to ponder the legacy of communism. Ever since Vladimir Lenin overthrew Russia’s nascent parliamentary democracy in 1917 to establish a brutal dictatorship, many other nations have fallen for the bait-and-switch scheme called communism, and often labelled socialism.
Communism promises equality but delivers scarcity for all but the elites in its apparatus. It pitches social justice and delivers mass enslavement, widespread misery, social distrust, and severe punishment for all who might dissent. We’ve seen these phenomena happen all over the world, in China, North Korea, Southeast Asia, post-World War II Eastern Europe, Cuba, Central America, and perhaps most notably visible today in the starvation and chaos of Venezuela.
During the twentieth century—and let’s remember this is recent history—communist regimes murdered more than 100 million people. This sort of astounding cruelty is in the very nature of the beast called communism. It happens when too much power gets concentrated into the hands of too few people.
Yet Americans have a sad history of flirting with this disaster and many American elites, from 1930s intellectuals to 1960s radicals, have accepted it completely. We’re seeing another revival today: Bernie Sanders is a self-professed socialist, and The New York Times recently ran an article doting on the good old days when communism inspired so many in America.
So, the questions Americans might best ask themselves today are as follows: How might a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” ever buy into the lies of communism, a system tailor-made for state mass murder? How might a free people ever allow the abolition of a Constitution that guarantees individual rights, the rule of law, due process, and is designed to thwart elites from gaining absolute power over others? Why would anyone, except an advocate of slavery, throw away a document designed from its very inception to abolish slavery in all of its forms?
In a recent article, I sketched out six phases on the road to communism, and summarized the trends in each phase: 1.) Laying the groundwork; 2.) Propaganda; 3.) Agitating the masses; 4.) Consolidating control over society’s institutions; 5.) Coercing conformity; and 6.) Final solutions. This follow-up article will examine the trends in the three earlier phases. The third article in this series will examine the trends most associated with the three latter phases.
Several of these phases, which are roughly sequential, overlap a lot. But I think it’s useful to at least try to understand how a phenomenon that can cause so much human misery and mass murder can possibly gain a foothold in a free nation. If we can dissect it and study it all more closely, perhaps we can sidestep some of the pitfalls that drag us down communism’s path of human cruelty and evil.
Phase 1: Trends that Lay Groundwork for Tyranny
The first phase towards tyranny in a free society is a generational or decades-long process. It’s a period in which minds can be closed to reason and more influenced by emotion and propaganda. Even at institutions of supposedly higher learning, students start to lose their capacity to think independent thoughts. We might summarize this as the conditioning phase—maybe the “programming” stage—that paves the way for groupthink to solidify. Below I list some of the trends in this phase.
Creep of social policies that promote polarization, dependency, and human isolation. All so-called progressive policies cause division and isolation among people. For example, economic policies that promote dependency create more class divisions and hostility. When we codify policies that bow down to identity politics, we fuel divisions by race, class, sex, religion, and so forth. All such policies tend to wreak havoc on personal relationships.
The metastasizing of the welfare state under President Lyndon Johnson caused a lot of dependency. Some of its offshoots, such as “Aid to Families with Dependent Children,” perpetuated family breakdown with a carrot-and-stick effect that rewarded single motherhood then financially punished the family if the mother married.
The list of policies that breed human isolation goes on: Policies that promote the sexual revolution discourage bonds of marriage and family; No-fault divorce promotes the separation of spouses. Policies that punish married parents and reward single parenthood promote the separation of children from their parents. Also, no matter how you feel about abortion, you can’t deny that it erodes the social value given to the mother-child bond.
Broken families lead to broken communities. We can see how those earlier policies that promoted isolation continue to proliferate today, from the threat of rationing from state-run health care to euthanasia as a byproduct of abortion on demand. The effects of such policies include the loneliness epidemic we’re seeing today, demoralization, and social chaos.
Disabling of independent thought. Nothing is more threatening to petty dictators than a citizenry’s widespread ability to think clearly and independently. Radical education reformers have sought for generations to drum the capacity for independent thought out of students. “Critical thinking” has been made into a garbage term for fads that have students doing anything but gain content knowledge.
Most college students today probably could not answer even a fraction of the questions on an eighth grade general knowledge exam from 1912. Without core knowledge, people have a difficult time putting any knowledge into its proper context. After decades of such politicizing reforms, you can end up with college students so muddled in their thinking that they need “trigger warnings” before reading anything that might conflict with the social and emotional programming they’ve experienced. In the propaganda phase, we’ll see how political correctness compounds this problem by cultivating the fear of rejection for expressing one’s thoughts.
Ever more bureaucratization. Human freedom is inversely proportional to the bloat of the administrative state. I’m not sure who should be credited with first making this observation. It resounds in the work of the American Founders, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Hayek, and even the psychiatrist Carl Jung, among many others. But the piles of regulations that put businesses, as well as personal lives, into straitjackets attest to this destabilizing trend for human freedom.
You can trace this back quite a ways, particularly with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs put into place to address the Great Depression. But it certainly helped put into high gear the bloat we see today. Compounding the problem is the notion that immigration should be limitless and the nation borderless, despite a national debt of $20 trillion. The metastasis of bureaucracy is a huge indicator we’ve been on the path to centralized power that feeds corruption and lays groundwork for communism.
Erasure of collective memory. Another crime of radical education reform is its attack on the study of history, civics, and the classics of literature. Today we can see the bitter fruits of such 1960s radical education reform, which has roots going back to 1920s with John Dewey. If we are no longer able to place ourselves and society into the context of historical events, our vision going forward will be blurred at best.
It gets even worse if we don’t learn how our form of government functions. Today fewer and fewer college students have the capacity to understand that the First Amendment serves as a buffer against totalitarianism, not something to be abolished under the pretext of “hate speech.” And depriving students exposure to literary classics like Shakespeare (based on the charge that such works are “Western” and therefore ethnocentric) prevents them from discussing the universal human condition and our common humanity.
Instead, students are increasingly fed grievance studies and identity politics. As universities go this route, it trickles down to K-12 education. As a result, we are losing the social glue of our common traditions and heritage—not just as a nation, but as human beings. This cultivation of ignorance by the education establishment over the years compounds the isolating effect on people. It makes youth especially vulnerable to becoming fodder for power elites.
Hoarding of knowledge about group dynamics. Are you tuned in to how the laws of social psychology drive your behavior? Or how the manipulation of the primal human fear of being isolated and rejected allows for PC-induced self-censorship that fuels conformity? How groupthink affects us? Probably not.
Thirty years ago, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing wrote about this deficit in general knowledge. In her book, “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside,” Lessing theorized that power elites have actually hoarded knowledge of mass psychology so they can better control the masses. Her thesis makes sense: If everyone understood the manipulators’ game, the game would be over for them.
Phase 2: Manufacturing Propaganda
Propaganda is not so much a phase as an ever-present nuisance. But once its groundwork has been laid in the minds of men, propaganda’s intensity and effectiveness increases in direct proportion to the ignorance out there. You’ll find many definitions of propaganda, but my definition goes like this: Propaganda is the process by which power elites condition individuals through psychological manipulation to adapt to an agenda. Some of its trends are as follows.
Language manipulation. The whole point of the totalitarian abuse of language is to prevent independent thought, the subject of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” When people accept the abuse of language, and incorporate it into their own vocabularies without thinking about it, they can be easily ventriloquized by power elites.
Victor Klemperer addressed this phenomenon in his book “Language of the Third Reich.” His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis. He writes, “They found it difficult to think about life and morality in any other way. . . .Words are like tiny doses of arsenic, swallowed unnoticed, and then after a while the toxic reaction sets in.”
Consider all the weaponized memes and slogans we swallow today that shape how we think: “woke,” “bend the knee,” and “cisgender” are just a few. All are meant to modify our thoughts and behaviors in everyday life. An especially aggressive abuse of language are new laws that enforce strange pronoun usages that destabilize the structure of our language. By passing laws that punish the “misgendering” of someone as “hate speech,” we veer into kangaroo court territory, as well as force unnatural changes in our language.
Revising history. A byproduct of watering down of the study of history is the revision and mockery of history, such as is evident in the late Howard Zinn’s textbook, “The People’s History of the United States.” His basic thesis appears to be that our constitutional system of checks and balances needs to be replaced by an oligarchy of dictators such as himself who know better. It seems to teach students that everything that ever happened at the founding of America is bad, bad, bad. Such revisionism also serves to perpetuate identity politics that stokes resentments rather than building any sense of unity among Americans.
Journalism becomes propaganda. There was once a quaint notion that reporting should be objective and fact-based rather than biased and opinion-based. Journalists tend to view themselves as watchdogs, yet over the years have become increasingly unaccountable to anyone. As the profession’s political shift to the Left has crystallized to beyond 90 percent, it’s now so monolithic in its perspective that it can hardly help but churn out propaganda.
When I wrote a Federalist article entitled “How Journalism Turns into Propaganda,” I focused on the story “Angi Vera,” from a Hungarian film. It revealed how the communists in Hungary, once they seized power in 1947, used education camps to develop a compliant class of leaders to replace the old order. The title character quickly learned the art of propaganda compliance, with all of the subtle backstabbing it entailed, and she was rewarded by the authorities with a lifelong career in journalism.
New technologies promote political correctness and cult-like mindsets. In 1962, when Daniel Boorstin published “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” he warned how glomming onto new technologies like television was making us more susceptible to accepting images as reality. We were losing our ability to thoughtfully deliberate about ideas and events. He anticipated this would get worse as then-yet-to-be-invented technologies would shift us even more quickly into substituting pseudo-reality for reality.
Wow, was he ever right. No doubt the Internet, cell phone technologies, and social media endlessly present illusions in place of reality. At the same time, they solidify political correctness. And since the main purpose of political correctness is to achieve conformity of thought, we ought to ask: Where does conformity of thought takes us, if left to its own devices? It’s a dream-come-true for totalitarians who no doubt hope for a conformity that would allow them to remake the world in their own image.
Such conformity would morph into a globalized cult mindset that crosses through all segments of society: politics, education, medicine, the media, and the corporate world, to name just a few sectors. Psychiatrist and cult expert Margaret Thaler Singer called this “the psycho-technology of thought reform,” and warned it was very real and not going to go away, adding that “Education, information, and vigilance are needed to keep us and our minds free.”
Phase 3: Agitation and Mass Mobilization
The whole point of propaganda is to drive people to action, according to Jacques Ellul, author of the 1962 classic “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.” Such action isn’t about freedom of peaceful assembly, which is an American tradition as well as a First Amendment right. From the suffragettes of the early twentieth century to the civil rights marches in the 1960s to the March for Life that began in 1974, Americans tend to gather with those of like mind to march against injustice. But today we can see growing trends towards something very different: street theater that actually serves to shut down freedom of expression. Trends in agitation including the following.
Cultivation of hate and frustration. Can you feel it? There’s a lot of frustration and alienation out there, thanks to groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center who seem deeply invested in perpetuating hate and resentment. Americans are traditionally a big-hearted and happy people, filled with enthusiasm over innovation and goodwill towards all. In part, that’s exactly why the SPLC’s propaganda has worked in the past: because it fulfills the Saul Alinsky rule of using people’s goodwill against them to gain political power.
Alinsky also advocated for the intense polarization we see today, telling “community organizers” to rub victims’ resentments raw, to cultivate intense anger against their perceived oppressors in order to energize mob action. Of course, such power elites who strive for totalitarian rule have always been invested in maintaining a large underclass of people who are kept dependent and ignorant since that builds a sense of frustration and alienation that can be channeled into mobilizing them into mob action.
Mass mobilization. This is the craft of getting the alienated and frustrated masses, programmed by propaganda, to do the bidding of power elites. We saw it happen in Charlottesville, as well as in Berkeley, at Middlebury College, and Dartmouth and many other places. Today the goal is to shut down speech and real conversation. Such mobs generally make a lot of noise and create a lot of action so that they get their way, even if they represent a small minority.
The history of the recent twentieth century is filled with mass action that led to totalitarian dictatorships. Peasants and workers were mobilized to respond to Lenin’s mantra for “peace, land, and bread” as Russians suffered during World War I. It happened as Germans took part en masse to participate in rallies for the Third Reich. Always the Enemy was invoked, whether a class enemy, a race enemy, or any other sort.
Today the term of choice is “white supremacist.” Demagogues stoke resentments until lawlessness and mass violence became the order of the day. But let’s also consider a smaller but significant American example of mob action from 2015: after former governor Mike Pence signed into law Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, mobs of protesters were mobilized to show up and shout his action down, as though they represented majority opinion, when they most certainly did not. Corporations pressured Pence as well.
Sadly, that organized mob action worked, and Republican leadership including Pence altered the bill to suit the protesters. America is now seeing a lot more street theater and violent riots aimed at shutting down conversation on college campuses as well as shutting down law enforcement in cities suffering from high crime rates.
Iconoclasm. The attack on historical monuments may seem to have started with Confederate statues. But it is certainly not ending there. From World War I monuments to statues of Abraham Lincoln and memorials to George Washington, just about any historical monument these days is subject to attack or defacement by agitators induced to action by propaganda. It’s another trend that hastens the erasure of national memory and social cohesion.
Enlisting and confusing the youth. Statist youth leagues have always been a staple of dictators who wish to eliminate family loyalties and religious influences. Although we may not see a Soviet-styled Komsomol in America just yet, there has been an ongoing attack against youth programs that promote self-reliance, independent thought, and the integrity of the family. It’s not just that the Boy Scouts have gone soft. School boards in major districts across the nation are pushing curricula and policies that force children to cater to identity politics, environmentalism, transgenderism, and so much more than children should ever be forced to grapple with.
As children attempt to navigate the perceptions of their peers and the authorities, they learn how they can score points and avoid rejection if they agitate for those agenda items. Children tend to imitate. They will playact various personas at the expense of developing unique personalities, if they are led to believe that is how to gain peer acceptance. Likewise, in higher education students participate in mob action—in particular, shutting down the speech of the politically incorrect—so they can don the persona of “social change agent” or something else the authorities deem acceptable.
All of the above sets the scene for the latter phases in the road to communism and other forms of totalitarianism. Those phases are: consolidating the takeover of society’s institutions; forcing conformity; and final solutions. To be continued.
The Final 3 Phases In The Slide From Freedom To Communism
As we mark the 100th anniversary of the communist takeover of Russia on November 7, 1917 (October 25, according to the old Russian calendar at the time), it’s worth pondering how the road to communism is paved. After all, its legacy is the murder of more than 100 million victims in the twentieth century alone. What mileposts or trends might we identify on the twisted road to communism?
Obviously there are different factors at play in different cultures and eras. Russia at the time was on a path to great economic and social reforms. But the instability and suffering caused especially by Russia’s involvement in World War I created a window of opportunity for violent overthrow. Vladimir Lenin seized upon this immediately when he arrived out of exile in April that year to fire up the crowds in Saint Petersburg.
Once communism gained a foothold in Russia, it doomed its citizens to lives of scarcity, misery, social distrust, terror, and mass murder. The same goes for China. Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, the Castros, Che Guevara, Joseph Stalin, the Kims of North Korea—all of them were brutal dictators enabled by a system that always places too much power into the hands of too few people. It’s a corrupt and cruel system that allows an elite oligarchy—which Lenin called a “vanguard”—to enslave the entire population.
But what about a nation like America, which was built on the idea that every human being is endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We have a Constitution that guarantees these rights and separates the branches of government, placing restraints on government so individuals may live freely. Furthermore, this document intentionally contained the seeds of slavery’s destruction. Americans shed a lot of blood to protect the freedoms enshrined in that document for us and for our posterity.
So is it possible that we, a free people, could ever throw it all away? Could we sell ourselves into the slavery called communism? Sadly, of course we could. Anyone who forgets his birthright is more likely to squander it. And there has been a lot of forgetting. As Ronald Reagan warned, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
This is the third in a three-part series that attempts to parse the conditions and trends that might lead a free people to succumb to totalitarianism. In the first article, I sketched six basic phases, or processes, on the road to communism, and summarized the trends of each: 1.) Laying the groundwork through the cultivation of ignorance; 2.) Propaganda; 3.) Agitating the masses; 4.) Consolidating control over society’s institutions; 5.) Coercing conformity; and 6.) Final solutions.
In the second article, I identified in more detail the trends of the three earlier phases. In this I will try to identify trends associated with the three latter phases. Of course, there is a lot of overlap, and I’m sure readers can add many trends, including major ones, to the list. My goal is simply to build some sort of a reference list that helps identify with some specificity the conditions through which totalitarianism can root itself into an otherwise free society. My hope is that we might be better able to see—then work to remove and reverse—some of the roadblocks to freedom that lead us, unwittingly or otherwise, into communism’s path of human cruelty and evil.
Phase 4: Taking Over the Institutions of Free Society
A free society has numerous and diverse institutions. Aside from the political and the military, there are economic, social, and cultural institutions that allow for a vibrant social life and the cross-pollination of ideas. A communist society, on the other hand, cannot allow any institution to be autonomous. They all must be absorbed by the state and serve the state.
The institution of family is an especially sharp thorn in communism’s side, since it allows parents to influence future generations. Edmund Burke aptly wrote that families are the “little platoons” of society. In the eyes of totalitarians, then, autonomous families are viewed as subversive cells. Activists for big government have placed enormous focus on undermining the family, as well as other mediating institutions of society such as the church and voluntary civic associations.
Consolidating the takeover. Nearly 100 years ago, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci declared that the key to achieving global communism was through culture, not promoting socialist economic policies that had little appeal in the West. This would require a “long march through the institutions” of society, destroying them from within so communism could fill the vacuum.
Radicals of the 1960s like Saul Alinksy picked up on this theme, noting that “the system” (i.e., American freedom) could only be destroyed once radical operatives had secured control over society’s institutions. The deep state is one example of institutional takeover that’s been building through decades of bureaucratic bloat, with operatives embedded in the military and intelligence agencies. The cultural takeover of media outlets, academia, and entertainment is both broad and deep today, after decades of creep.
But it is the mediating institutions have been most relentlessly attacked—family, church, and voluntary organizations—because they serve as buffer zones of influence that help shield individuals from abuses by the state. Today they are more vulnerable than ever to total absorption by the Mass State, a prerequisite for communism.
State takeover of family. We should now understand that agendas like “marriage equality” are not really about social inclusiveness, no matter how people feel. The main effect of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision is abolishing any legal recognition of marriage as an institution that unites a man and woman, with any potential offspring, into an autonomous family unit. That opens the door to a Pandora’s Box that allows more state intrusion into family life.
Most folks weren’t even aware that transgenderism was such a big part of the package until the Obergefell decision was secured. As LGBT activist and journalist Masha Gessen accurately proclaimed in 2012: The goal was not gay marriage, but marriage extinction. That naturally means state control over families, and by extension, all personal relationships.
We see this happening in large school systems that dictate what parents must allow their children to be taught about sexuality and when. It happens as judges demand small business owners disavow their faith or face financial ruin. It happens when a voluntary association like the Boy Scouts denies its very name by bowing down to gender ideology. These are not so much changes in the institutions themselves, as signs that the state is absorbing those institutions.
Destruction of childhood. Radical education reformers are pushing for a national curriculum that focuses on “social emotional learning” (SEL) as the supposed path to better academic learning. It is a monolithic curriculum in which a group called the Consortium for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) aims to dictate exactly how children should feel and relate to other people.
Data mining and universal mental health assessments are part of the program. Identity politics feeds the curriculum. CASEL’s proposed programming of children demands 100 percent compliance with its methods, content, and monopoly, so it leaves virtually no room for the healthy development of independent thinking and unique personalities.
Attacks on church doctrine from within. The Catholic Church has long been infiltrated by socialist and communist clergy, as Bella Dodd attests in her memoir as a former member of the Communist Party USA. We see it in liberation theologies that date back to the 1950s in Latin America.
The biblical doctrine that seems most under attack today is God’s creation of humanity as male and female and God’s sanctioning of their union as one flesh in the sacrament of marriage. The LGBT agenda took over in the Episcopal Church more than 20 years ago, though clergy like Bishops James Pike and John Spong pushed it along in the 1960s and 70s. We now see a proliferation of what I call the “headgear brigade” of various rainbow-clad “clergy” and their lay activist allies working hard to plant the LGBT rainbow flag onto all places of worship.
By undermining the theology and doctrines within the churches themselves—with the double whammy of undermining family at the same time—the path to totalitarianism becomes even clearer.
Phase 5: Forcing Conformity
This is the phase in which people start waking up—late—to the many deceptions on the road to totalitarianism. This would include many who actually bought into the lies. When a free person actually sees what the enforcement of conformity looks and feels like, he or she starts to reassess and perhaps switch sides. This is why the enforcement is ironclad, fast, and furious. Its trends are as follows.
Ritual defamation. Laird Wilcox, a scholar of extremist movements, wrote up an excellent explanation of “The Practice of Ritual Defamation.” Read it to gain insight into some patterns of totalitarian operation. Wilcox writes that ritual defamation is “accomplished primarily through the manipulation of words and symbols. It is not used to persuade, but to punish. Although it may have cognitive elements, its thrust is primarily emotional. Ritual Defamation is used to hurt, to intimidate, to destroy, and to persecute, and to avoid the dialogue, debate and discussion upon which a free society depends. On those grounds it must be opposed no matter who tries to justify its use.”
We can see a growing trend towards ritual defamation, from hurling the epithet “racist” against scholars like Charles Murray on college campuses to tarring mothers as “transphobics” when they object to the teaching of transgenderism to their kindergarteners and must be interviewed incognito to protect them from social assault. (Here’s looking at you, Southern Poverty Law Center.)
Psychiatry as a political weapon. There is a history behind the weaponization of the profession of psychiatry to solidify compliance in communist societies. Most notorious was the confinement of political dissenters to psychiatric wards in the Soviet Union. Many of those abuses came to light in the 1979 book, “A Question of Madness: Repression Through Psychiatry in the Soviet Union,” by Zhores and Roy Medvedev.
Although such widespread abuse is not the case in America today, we can see signs that the political weaponization of psychiatry is growing. Consider the LGBT lobby’s drive to outlaw any conversations in a therapist’s office that do not enforce the LGBT agenda, including imposing transgenderism on any child who claims to be transgender. Laws that have been enacted against reparative or “conversion therapy” aim to prevent people from changing their minds about living out a homosexual orientation or a transgender identity.
But those laws don’t seem to apply when someone wants to move in the other direction, so they do seem to allow and encourage conversion in one direction only. Meanwhile, CASEL’s agenda of Social Emotional Learning aims to conduct mental health screenings on all children without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Several legislators would like to have mental health screenings conducted on anyone who buys a firearm. And, of course, there’s a concerted effort by various politicos and psychiatrists, with petition drives, to declare President Trump mentally unfit to hold office. The list goes on.
“Struggle sessions.” Chinese communist leader Chairman Mao was a big fan of communists getting together for “sessions of criticism and self-criticism,” supposedly to keep the party pure and active. During the murderous era of the Cultural Revolution, these sessions were very common.
The struggle sessions, however, were basically data-mining operations meant to expose participants’ private thoughts that could be used as ammo against them later, and to publicly humiliate as well as incriminate others in the session. The film “Angi Vera” shows how such sessions cemented social distrust and fear when the communists took power in 1940s Hungary.
Can we hear echoes of such “sessions of criticism and self-criticism” in the so-called “white privilege” workshops proliferating on college campuses? In them, students are directed to admit guilt and spill their guts about attitudes they may or may not have held that contribute to their “privilege” in society. Basically, they’re supposed to apologize for having happy childhoods and strong relationships. What misery.
False confessions. Regarding political correctness, we’re a society of wimps. Whenever a celebrity issues an apology for saying the “wrong” thing, I can’t help but think about the communist use of recantations to enforce strict conformity. The victims tend to hold out hope for “rehabilitation” and the relief of not becoming a non-person if they recant.
As long as they issue enough mea culpas, they tend to be allowed some penance, though now owned through extortion. This is what the enforcers are really looking for to build conformity with their agendas. However, when Mozilla honchos took CEO Brendan Eich to task in 2014 upon discovering his private contribution to California’s Proposition 8 in 2008—supporting the definition of marriage as a male-female institution—I believe they were invested in Eich giving a major mea culpa. Instead, Eich simply stepped down, which is refreshing given our PC culture. (By the way, Eich has since developed a new web browser that does not track you like Google does. It’s called Brave, and I recommend it.)
Surveillance society and cultivation of social distrust. The secret police in East Germany made a point of invading the private spaces of its citizens, as superbly illustrated in the film “The Lives of Others.” Despite the Internal Revenue Service’s abuses against conservative groups or the data mining of kids in public education, we still aren’t living in 1980s East Berlin. But consider how celebrities like Lena Dunham seem intent on leading us there.
For example, in August she modelled on Twitter how to eavesdrop and snitch on private citizens having conversations about personal matters. She reported two American Airlines flight attendants she claimed were having a transphobic conversation at a terminal in JFK airport. She later made a point of telling everyone that she would continue to listen for signs of politically incorrect talk in private conversations.
The idea, of course, is to dictate what we are allowed to say even in private. There’s a lot of relational aggression and invasion of privacy here. In the meantime, human resources departments direct employees to report overheard conversations that are politically incorrect.
Phase 6: Final Solutions
Communists, like Nazis and other totalitarians, will never give up power without a fight. This is argument enough for not allowing their foot into the door in the first place. Despite all of the mockeries of anti-communism that come out of the media and pop culture, the reality is that communism’s history is bloody because it is in a constant fight against people’s right to live freely. This impulse against others’ freedom tends to be ingrained in people who have a stubbornly materialistic or atheistic outlook on life. What else is there besides power?
Dehumanization leads to flimsy pretexts for eliminating the “other.” Totalitarians use all manner of pretexts to get their way. Their calls for “equality” and “justice” tend to morph into demands for removal of their enemies “by any means necessary.” As the slogans and memes of dictators get internalized by the populace at large, groupthink solidifies. This gives power elites greater and greater latitude in eliminating perceived enemies.
Especially interesting is how murderous dictators in history tend to project their own intentions onto their perceived opponents. (That observation is brilliantly made in the Learning Company’s course “Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century.”) For example, when Stalin forced the collectivization of agriculture, he accused the farmers in Ukraine of trying to starve the nation. He then starved out and murdered some seven million of them in the winter of 1933-34.
In like manner, Adolph Hitler accused the Jews of trying to destroy the Germans, then killed more than six million Jews. In the 1990s the Hutus in Rwanda ran an intense propaganda campaign accusing the Tutsis of being devils who had it in for the Hutus. Surprise: half a million Tutsis were slaughtered, answering the Hutu propaganda campaign by chopping up their Tutsi neighbors with machetes. As the granddaughter of Armenian genocide survivors, I’ve concluded that genocide always begins with groupthink.
Officially ending even the pretense of due process or free speech. We’ve been moving in this direction for a long time. When college administrators decide to consider any allegation of rape a de facto conviction, no trial necessary or allowed, we are well on our way to dispensing of due process, the right to face one’s accuser, or such quaint ideals as innocent until proven guilty. By the same token, the First Amendment is being attacked under the guise of preventing “hate speech.”
Growing justification of violence. Once communism is established, the dam breaks on the use of violence and murder to quell dissent. But prior to the consolidation of power, we see a growing justification for using violence as a means to social justice. The use of riots and violence to effect political change has not just increased, but some mainstream commentators are getting a lot less squeamish about promoting violence as the only means to achieving justice. Consider this passage from Ezra Klein’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who cannot shake his bitterness over the existence of evil in the world:
When he tries to describe the events that would erase America’s wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror. ‘It’s very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don’t tend to happen peacefully.’
For readers unfamiliar with the French Revolution (since they weren’t taught about it in school), it was basically a time of revenge killings, mob violence, and guillotine executions, all promoted through groupthink. People actually marched through the streets of Paris with the heads of their perceived enemies on pikes. Thomas Jefferson was appalled, but since he was a slave-owner who helped put together a self-correcting system that would abolish slavery in all of its forms, the French Revolution mentality would have him discredited, his memorial in Washington dismantled, and perhaps even have his grave desecrated as well.
Let’s also note how the SPLC’s “hate map” motivated a gunman to enter the Family Research Center in Washington DC, and open fire with the intent of killing as many people as he could. Another gunman inspired by the SPLC was James Hodgkinson, who on June 14 attempted to assassinate several Republican congressmen when he opened fire on a baseball field where they were practicing. Nearly fatally wounded was House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. It’s interesting how quickly the media dropped the story. Another consideration on the subject of violence is philosopher Hannah Arendt’s thesis that “the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater the attraction of violence.”
Hostility towards religion and prayer. It’s never enough for communists to dictate the personal relationships in society, whether between co-workers, within families, between spouses, or any other type of relationship. They inevitably make atheism a state religion, which means you aren’t even supposed to pray or have a private relationship with God.
An interesting off-shoot of this mentality is the religion of transhumanism, which is the idolization of technology (another very old story going back to the Golden Calf of the Old Testament). Transhumanism seems very modern, of course, because it’s all tied in to artificial intelligence, melding humans with machines, thereby causing immortality and becoming our own gods. Transhumanists tend to feel they’re in a race against time to achieve immortality, so they seem likely to view as a deadly threat anybody who might stand in the way of the transhumanist agenda.
But ultimately, without faith in a Creator, we can’t look beyond ourselves and see others as human because we inevitably end up succumbing to the eternal temptation to play God. And playing God is always at the root of the quest for raw power.
Communism Means Never Having to Say You’re Happy
There’s no way to underestimate the misery that totalitarian systems inflict on their victims. I think those who manage to make peace with the monolithic bureaucracies endemic to communism are in it for the numbing effect. When merit is a dirty word and mediocrity rules the day, you can coast on inertia. When we absorb the propaganda of identity politics, there is a tendency to pat ourselves on the back for being on “the right side of history.” That’s perhaps one way to cope with the scarcity and the loneliness brought about by systems that cultivate social distrust, alienation, ignorance, and mass violence.
I listed six phases leading to communism (and all forms of totalitarianism) simply to try to understand how we can get from there to here. How did we go from a nation devoted to self-correction of our sins to one that seems ready to accept totalitarian thought policing and violence against people we don’t even know—because identity politics does not even allow us to look at one another as unique individuals?
Let’s remember that building freedom actually doesn’t begin in the media or Hollywood or academia. It begins in the “hidden sphere,” as explained in Soviet-era freedom fighter Vaclav Havel’s essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” This means that the nucleus of human power lies within us as individuals, in our personal relationships and private conversations. If you haven’t noticed, the hidden sphere is the clear target of totalitarian weapons like political correctness. It is designed to evoke self-censorship and destroy your ability to reach out and express yourself with others. It’s anti-friendship to its core.
So our task should always be to reach out to others—one on one and face to face—to actually get to know them and to help them get to know us. This is the best way to show our common humanity and to dispel the loneliness, misery, and lies that infect our society as a result of the many trends enumerated above. It’s those personal relationships that create a ripple effect that will return us to the freedom and goodwill breathed into America by its founding documents.
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