Repudiating Genesis

When the quarantine against the unwalled capitalists literally crumbled in 1989 and the walled-in workers fled their paradise in droves, Western analysts were confounded. Wasn’t history supposed to move leftward? Some resorted to the “it wasn’t real socialism” escape clause, others applauded. Most, if not all, were reluctant to abandon seductive determinist theories of history that offered such comforts akin to religion. Whether neo-Marxist or postmodern scientistic, the millenarian narrative is hard to resist. And everyone hopes for progress.

It is the job of historians, however, to listen to evidence – as does Russia scholar Sean McMeekin in his fine new book To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Yet even he concedes that he approaches his subject today “with a greater sense of humility than I might have done in those heady early ears of the post-Communist era.” Man having been created with a humility-deficit, its cultivation must be life-long. The hubristic illusion at Babel (Genesis 1.8), that human beings could plan their way to establish a perfect society and abolish discord, has grown with technological advances. The prophets of Communism deftly capitalize on that primeval impulse, arguing that the enlightened can grasp history’s laws, which lead to inevitable utopia.

At least, that’s the justificatory veneer of a darker reality. Examining the facts, McMeekin came to understand the truth behind the dialectic: “The real secret of Marxism-Leninism, as the reigning doctrine of Communism was called after 1917, was not that Marx and Lenin had discovered the immutable laws of history driven by ever-intensifying ‘class struggle,’ but that Lenin had shown how Communist revolutionaries could exploit the devastation of war to seize power by force.” Violence both establishes and later keeps such a system in power. Behind the rhetoric was a simple, fatal instinct to overthrow the world.

McMeekin had his title but no explanation. Considering the incalculable devastation caused by this doctrine, measured in hundreds of millions of lives, what explains even the rise, let alone the “surprising non-death[,] of Communism”? Idealism, perhaps; fellow-feeling cloaked in high-minded language. “As long as people dream of brotherhood between men, … or, in the current jargon, of ‘social justice,’ some version of Communism will retain popular appeal,” easily stoked by demagogues. To illustrate its sinister record, McMeekin embarked upon writing its history.

He begins with Plato’s Republic, a blueprint for the best-governed city (polis). Each socio-economic class being bred and groomed for a specific function; Plato’s polis is rigidly hierarchical. Private interests are fully subordinated to the res-publica. While the abolition of private property is never suggested, materialism is shunned. The ruling philosopher-kings, for example, have neither wealth nor families. Shared pleasures and pains “bind the city together,” the political organism taking precedence over its individual components.

Skipping over the complex transition from Greek paganism to Christianity through Rome (Judaism remains unmentioned), McMeekin notes that Jesus, albeit from an individualist rather than collectivist perspective, also urged his followers to sell their possessions and give to the poor. Gradually, the increasingly corrupt and wealthy government-aligned Catholic clergy would be repudiated by protestants. Some aligned with poor peasants against the greedy property owners, rejecting materialism though not necessarily, as in the case of Martin Luther, state power.

The Scientific Revolution simultaneously ushered in a new era of seemingly limitless human dominion over the world. A hybrid, “secularized Christian eschatology, establishing a kind of European religion of social progress,” would inspire Jean-Jacques Rousseau to advocate for a radically new political and economic system. Like Plato, he believed an ideal state should implement the commonwealth’s General Will that transcends individual egoism.

Egalitarian dreams webbed and flowed. McMeekin proceeds to describe various socialist schemes throughout the nineteenth century. Eventually, the Invisible Hand was no longer attributed to History, nor to either Nature or God. Accusing religion of being “the opium of the people,” designed to sap their strength against overthrowing capitalism, Karl Marx demanded its abolition. In History’s final stage, the triumph of the poor “proletariat” over greedy/rich “capitalists” would mean the eradication not only of every “particular wrong but of wrong in general.” Ethics itself would be abolished. At last, beyond good and evil, the new man would prevail.

Whether he would still be human was left unanswered.

Preposterously simplistic, Marx’s emotionally charged rhetoric obscured his utter lack of familiarity with, let alone concern for, actual workers. (Nor anyone else for that matter, including most of his own family.) By 1847, he openly endorsed “total revolution which required political violence.” The end would be “combat or death: bloody struggle or extinction,” possibly both. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin condemned Marx’s vision of the utopian future as incontrovertibly totalitarian. Post-revolutionary polity had to “concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require supervision,” he wrote in 1873.  Logically, it could function only “by means of the dictatorial powers of this learned minority, which supposedly expresses the will of the people.” Their goal, he wrote, was “to overthrow existing governments and regimes so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins.” It would take another few decades for Bakunin’s clear-eyed prophecy to be confirmed. Capitalizing on the Russian aristocracy’s corruption and myopia, V. I. Lenin’s political genius, together with the tactical virtuosity of Leon Trotsky (later exiled and eventually hacked to death), accomplished the overthrow of tsarism. After inciting the army away from fighting foreigners and turning it against its own leadership, the Bolsheviks seized power from the clueless moderates in the Provisional Government, then turned to slaughter. The Red Apocalypse had commenced. Already in August 1918, Central Executive Committee's Yakov Sverdlov would announce the launch of “merciless mass terror against the enemies of the revolution.”

The litany of horrors that immediately followed went virtually unreported. The few voices of exiles and Western journalists who dared to ask questions when paraded on official tours “were drowned out by the pleasing lies of Stalin-friendly journalists such as Walter Duranty of The New York Times.” Censorship and lies allowed gullible Western intellectuals to imagine that the USSR was the Eden of their dreams. Nothing was said about the myriad concentration camps known as the Gulag Archipelago that tortured people with unbearable cold, starvation, and brutally hard labor.

Soviet spies, “fellow travelers,” and sympathizers penetrated the U.S. and British governments at the highest levels. They persuaded the Roosevelt administration to approve a program known as Lend-Lease which, unbeknownst to Congress, assisted the Politburo with food but also with warplanes, tanks, and trucks. There was to be no payment up front. Instead of collapsing from within because of Stalin’s appalling economic and political policies into a wasteland, the USSR emerged triumphant. 1945 saw Communism’s resurgence in Europe and beyond.

Duly breaking promises of respecting their elections, Moscow quickly purged each country’s winning party in favor of all but Soviet-controlled Communists. By 1949, the European satellites had “nearly identical secret police forces, all thoroughly penetrated by and loyal to their Soviet handlers…. [Their] production targets and mandatory trade quotas coordinated by Gosplan in the USSR,” amounting to an Ottoman-style tribute. Only Yugoslavia’s Tito was denied admission, despite his Stalinist views, and was punished for insubordination. Lucky he.

Those of us stuck inside the colonized Republics, variously known as People’s, Democratic, or Socialist, watched the new mandarins move into the old mansions, with access to special hospitals and shops. Equality indeed. As shortages of everything worsened by the day, hardly anyone believed a word of the absurd propaganda anymore. It was the same throughout the Soviet Empire.

McMeekin’s command of facts about this era is impressive. He recounts, for example, the little-known story of how Romanian Jews were literally sold by President Nicolae Ceausescu in the 1960s, charging as much as $250,000 for the highly educated. Maybe my own family had been bartered. We left in 1961 after attempting to leave for nearly 17 years, hoping to join our relatives in the U.S. and escape Communism, presumably because Jews were allowed to reconnect with displaced families. In fact, antisemitism flourished while emigration was practically impossible.

Still, the Jews who could leave were far more fortunate than Ceausescu’s ethnic brethren, whom he starved and froze while expecting North Korean-style adulation from everyone. But dollars being dollars, he also sold Transylvanian Saxons. As he told Securitate (Secret Service) General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who later defected to the U.S.: “Oil, Jews and Germans are our most important export commodities.”

So they were, as American politicians eager to claim promotion of “human rights,” pleased by the release of a few emigrants, which they interpreted as proof of Ceausescu’s “independence” from Moscow, rewarded the brutal dictator with trade concessions in 1975. They had fallen prey to a wily “active measures” operation code-named Red Horizons, revealed by Pacepa in 1987.

However brilliant, the success of such deception operations was undoubtedly enhanced by the widespread assumption among Western elite circles that Communism could be liberalized. American naivety and wishful thinking had been reinforced for decades by the Soviet bloc’s highly trained and ruthless secret police network’s deft infiltration of the academy, media, and political institutions.

Among the most effective instruments of sabotage were Moscow-funded front organizations, notably the World Peace Council, whose Western sympathizers took its “peace on earth” slogan as genuine. “The purpose of the Soviet peace campaign was to lull Western Europeans to sleep as Moscow deployed a new arsenal of mobile, medium-range missiles targeting their capital cities,” writes McMeekin. That millions showed up in October 1983 near NATO headquarters to protest, instead of their ruthless enemy, against the one government trying to defend them, the U.S., speaks volumes.

The same stupidity prevented Westerners from grasping the no less brutal form of Communism imposed by the psychopathic Mao on his long-suffering people. The exact Leninist blueprint led to even more immense destruction: expropriations, total censorship, forced labor, and murder of countless “counter-revolutionaries” or “class enemies.” “Hate America” was standard Chinese agitprop, like everywhere else in the Communist world: besides Asia, in Africa and Latin America, notably Cuba.

But worse was yet to come, in Cambodia’s infamous Killing Fields, a genocide that exterminated an estimated 3.5 million souls, half its population. “Here Communism was reduced to its essentials, as a negation of everything existing… a social leveling of society down to equality in abject poverty and misery,” writes McMeekin. Forget happy talk - Pol Pot murdered unencumbered by euphemisms. “The coercion itself was the point, the reduction of free-willed humans to animals.” It was the inversion of creation itself. .

But Pol Pot was only a more deranged member of the Communist dictator quasi-human subspecies. McMeekin’s history of Communism implicitly refutes his original presumption of an idealist motivation. Though not explicitly, his book offers evidence for an altogether different reality: the effectiveness of ruthlessness and deception. Manipulating hope and ignorance with promises of harmony and justice, elites convince themselves and others of benevolent intentions all the way to hell.

Perhaps instead of “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism,” a more apt, if less catchy, subtitle would have been “The Uses of Communist Rhetoric in Power Politics.” After all, he had conceded up front that today, “Russia may no longer be Communist, but it is ruled by Vladimir Putin, a proud and unrepentant former KGB officer.” The same goes for other dictatorships, whatever “ism” is used as camouflage. “What made the USSR ‘Communist’ is the same thing that defines the current governments of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba,” writes McMeekin: “rule by a single-party dictatorship… that blankets society with all-encompassing rules and regulations, and that hectors, monitors, and surveils the people in whose name it claims to rule in minute detail.”

He could certainly have added Iran, Turkey, and other regimes whose Islamist rhetoric has been deftly grafted onto the classic oppressor vs. oppressed, or if you prefer, decadent/secular/rich class against “the people.” Ivy League ideologues groomed in Western guilt nod sympathetically. “Who are we to argue that we know better than they do?” asks McMeekin sarcastically on their behalf.

We do know better, surely. But too many of us have lost the ability and willingness to defend the individual freedom most covet. Consider how meekly the COVID lockdown was accepted, despite its “reversing decades of progressively more humane – and scientifically sound – policies on mitigating disease outbreaks”. Nor is there any excuse for campus protestors applauding barbarians butchering babies and grandmothers, attacking Jewish colleagues, and burning American flags.

It is hard not to conclude that it is this facet of Communism that most concerns McMeekin. For in the Epilogue, he admits to being alarmed by the presence, “[i]n the social and intellectual sphere,” of too many “echoes of Cultural Revolution-style” tactics that undermine our society’s resilience and self-confidence. He blames this in part on “modern-day thought commissars,” fearing that “new Western methods of social control may be more insidious than the cruder methods of physical intimidation and violence” his book has so capably exposed.

Like most immigrants who love America as a beacon of hope, and having seen how much ordinary people throughout the world love freedom, I am more optimistic. But a liberal democracy is fragile. We are responsible for recognizing Big Lies for what they are, exposing them, and defending against them with all the courage we can muster.

Juliana Geran Pilon is Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Her latest book, An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left, has just been published.