The Stealth Emergence of Neo-Communism in the U.S.
by Jaroslaw Martyniuk
19 June 2014
Introduction
The theme of my presentation, ‘The Stealth Emergence of Neo-Communism in the U.S.’ is a very serious subject. But before I tackle it I want to tell you a few anecdotes and jokes told by Soviet citizens about life under the Communist system.
Humor and jokes are a good way to learn what life under Communist was like. It was a coded way of speaking the truth about the reality of socialism in its perfected state: communism. Joke-telling became an art form, but one had to be very careful with whom one shared a joke because even an innocent joke could lead an arrest, imprisonment and land you in the Gulag.
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--- So, Karl Marx was resurrected and came to the USSR. He was shown factories, hospitals, cities and villages, etc. Finally, he requested to be allowed to make a speech on TV. The Politburo hesitated as they were afraid he might say something they wouldn’t approve. Marx promised he would say only one sentence. Under this condition, the Politburo agreed. Karl Marx uttered the following sentence:
“Workers of all countries, forgive me.”
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And of course we all heard what that socialism is a stage comes before true communism. But many asked what comes after communism has been achieved?
And finally one that some of you may have heard:
In the Communist system we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
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What I’d like to turn to now is a more serious assessment of what Communism was and is about using the words of Alan Charles Kors, [Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania] on the occasion of the dedication of the Victims of Communism memorial in 2007. Prof. Kors pronounced one of the most devastating condemnations of Communism I have even heard. I take the liberty of reading only the introductory paragraph:
Above all else, there are the bodies, and one cannot discuss the past, present, or future while they lie there unacknowledged.
We are surrounded by slain innocents, and the scale is wholly new. This is not the thousands of the Inquisition; it is not the thousands of American lynching. This is not the six million dead from Nazi extermination. The best scholarship yields numbers that the mind must try to comprehend: scores, and scores, and scores, and scores of millions of bodies Shot; dead by deliberate exposure; starved; murdered in work camps and prisons meant to extract every last fiber of labor and then kill them.
No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than red Socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead, including that of Hitler’s National Socialism. They are all around us. No one talks about them. No one honors them. . . . No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be held accountable.”
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We now know that this inhumane system that existed in the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Unfortunately we are living with its consequences to this day. A timely example of the consequences of Communism is the civil war in Ukraine taking place as I speak. The conflict is a direct result of Ukraine’s subjugation by a system imposed on them against their will for three-quarters of a century by mostly Russian Communists.
Allow me explain this using the words of the historian Angelo Codevilla that “the enmity between the Ukrainians and Russians may have something to do with the fact that over the years the Russian communist regime killed Ukrainian by the tens of millions,” and there is hardly a family in Ukraine today that was not touched horrors of communism. I could talk about this topic at length but where I’d like to begin is to tell you how my family suffered under communism, a real story as related to me by those who survived.
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I am a refugee from Communism in the sense that as a young boy, I narrowly escaped being a victim of Communism in Ukraine. At the end of WWII my family fled west and eventually we ended up in a camp for displaced persons in Bavaria. In 1949 we had the good fortune to emigrate to the U.S.
The greater part of my family, however, remained in Ukraine and I’d like to begin by telling you the story of their ordeal in Communist concentration camps called the Gulag.
It is my belief that our government is slowly and imperceptibly drifting towards a centralized authoritarian state with features resembling the collectivist regime that existed in the Soviet Union. This trend began some time ago, but during the presidency of Obama it accelerated:
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But before I tell you my family’s story, allow me to share with you the results of a sociological experiment I conducted with a group of 25 hikers during a walk along the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. The majority were young people, college graduates and professionals mostly under thirty.
As a retired sociologist I am always curious to find out what young people think and know, so I made it a point to talk to a number of them about a subject that was on my mind at that time, the Soviet Gulag. Delicately I asked hikers two questions.
I should not have been shocked. Given an academic environment permeated with post-modernist cultural relativism where teaching of history has been marginalized and replaced by social theorizing that denies the existence of truth, I am not surprised that a generation of students has grown up not hearing about the Gulag or about life under Communism. I was not surprised because I’m aware that “progressive” educators at our schools and universities still believe that Marxism failed only because it was not “properly” implemented.
I am tempted to repeat the words of the American essayist George Santayana, an immigrant like me, who used to say “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but because history never repeats itself in the same way, I prefer Mark Twain’s quote “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.”
Today history seems to rhyme perfectly. From the mouth of our President we get a barrage of great-sounding collectivist slogans, “fairness, equality, social justice,” and, of course, my favorite—“you didn’t build that, they did”…..all of which boils down to Karl Marx’s dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
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The Gulag was an efficient “killing machine” developed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Soviet secret police, and was later used as a model for Hitler’s concentration camps.
It’s practically impossible to say how many perished in the Gulags of the Soviet Union or the Laogai of China. We know that the Gulag was immense. We also know that during its existence between twenty five to thirty million people passed through this massive system.[1]
It was a hidden system. Anne Applebaum, author of “Gulag,” notes that “it's extremely difficult to estimate the total number of victims of this notorious Labor Camp system because reliable archives do not exist and Stalin personally directed the constant and relentless purging of the archives, a practice that continued after his death.
Let me give you an example of how the Gulag was camouflaged from Western eyes is the case of Henry Wallace. In April of 1944 President Roosevelt sent his vice-president to inspect Magadan and Kolyma. He was completely bamboozled into reporting that he witnessed was “a well organized labor camp, roughly comparable to the Hudson Bay Company or the T.V.A.”]
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I met uncle Teodozij Fifteen years ago, in Crimea. He was the youngest brother of my father Roman and we called him Dozyk. Dozyk was a Kolyma survivor. For those of you who have not heard of Kolyma, it was a Death Camp on the Arctic Circle in the northeastern corner of Siberia across the Bering Strait from Alaska. It was not one camp, but rather a system of hundreds of camps. Many people have heard of Dachau, Buchenwald and Treblinka, but in the Soviet Union there were hundreds of Dachaus, hundreds of Buchenwalds and hundreds of Treblinkas spread across the wastes of Soviet Siberia.
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When the Red Army returned to Western Ukraine on July 1944 the ten-member Martyniuk family was broken apart: Two brothers fled west and two stayed behind. Of the two that stayed behind, the older Petro changed his identity and went underground; the younger, the twenty year-old Dozyk, joined the UPA, the Ukrainian (Partisan) Insurgent Army.
In February 1945, Dozyk was engaged in a firefight with the NKVD. He was shot in the abdomen and with his guts literally spilling out, interrogated and sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Siberia.
First Dozyk was sent to Karaganda in Kazakhstan, then in 1948 to Tayshet, near Lake Baikal, where he worked on the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway, known as BAM. Dozyk slaved on the BAM for one year, always moving in the easterly direction until in 1949 he ended up in Kolyma.
Kolyma (1949-1953)
There is a famous refrain from a song about Kolyma that reflected the black humor of the prisoners:
Kolyma, Kolyma,
That miraculous planet
Twelve months winter,
And the rest summer (ostalnoye leto)
When Dozyk learned that he would be sent to Kolyma he became distraught. The word was that no one ever returned from Kolyma.
Kolyma is known for its gold and other metals, but gold was the driving force behind Kolyma.” This was the metal Stalin needed the most to purchase new technology and machinery from abroad. These resources had to be exploited at all costs using slave labor on a gargantuan scale.
In Kolyma Dozyk was first assigned to a backbreaking logging operation, which meant felling and cutting of trees at temperatures as low as -40 degrees C which coincidentally translates into -40F.
After about a year on the logging site, the camp administration discovered that Dozyk was a skilled metalworker-- a revelation that literally saved his life because it meant that he would not have to descend into the mines where prisoners expired within weeks.
All camps near the Arctic Circle had high death rates but Kolyma was the deadliest. Although the production of gold was important, the central aim of this Gulag was to kill off prisoners.[2]
In Kolyma alone some estimates suggest that up to three million prisoners may have perished, but - like with the mass starvation of Ukrainians in the Holodomor, the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932/33, we will never know the exact number.
My Grandmother, the 64 year old Maria Martyniuk was the only member of the family that remained in the village. Eventually the NKVD got around to interrogating her and she as well as half a dozen other families from the village were deported to the Gulag at Vorkuta. There, in a place called Lemiu, she died of inadequate nutrition, exhaustion and cold.
Three million prisoners passed through Vorkuta’s prison camps and local historians estimate that there are a quarter of a million political prisoners buried in the permafrost mostly in unmarked graves. One of them is the grave of my grandmother who was buried there in 1949.
One of the most fascinating stories I came across in my research was that of Maria and Ivan Honchar, Dozyk’s in-laws, and their incredible escape from a Gulag near Krasnoyarsk.
Maria and Ivan, were arrested, put on a cattle train and dumped along with 300 hundred other prisoners in a forest somewhere north of Krasnoyarsk. They were given an ax and a shovel and told to prepare for the winter.
Very quickly they realized that their chances of survival were extremely slim and made a bold decision to escape. Knowing that they were not too far from the Trans-Siberian Railway, they decided to head for a nearby junction where they jumped on one of the military trains moving in the westerly direction and eventually made their way back to their home village in Volyn’ in Western Ukraine.
In the spring of 1947 Ivan died and Maria Kuzmivna, his wife, was discovered by the NKVD, rearrested, interrogated and sentenced again to permanent exile in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, against incredible odds, Maria came across a woman named Marta, the sole survivor of the group that had been dumped in the forest near Krasnoyarsk in 1946. She told Maria that the winter was exceptionally severe and every other member of that group of 300 perished of cold and starvation. Marta was the only survivor and witness to this tragedy.
Part Two: Similarities and Parallels between the U.S.S.R. and Current Trends in the U.S.
In three years the Communist “nostalgiacs” will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, an ideology that caused untold grief to nearly one third of the world. The Black Book of Communism estimates that 100 million victims perished in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Eastern Europe etc.
Having been born in a Communist-occupied country, and having lived in a Socialist state (France) and in a democratic welfare state (Germany) and having spent the better part of my life in the Capitalist United States, I have an appreciation for each of these systems. While I can spend a lot of time discussing the differences between Socialism and Communism they are mainly differences in the degree of control and ownership of industry and means of production. Without listing all of the relevant criteria side by side, a simple way to picture the difference between the two is that Communism is Socialism with power or stated in another way Communism is Socialism on steroids.
However, to approach this question in a more analytical way, I’ve identified ten core characteristics common to totalitarianism Communist societies. I will then examine these characteristics or signs one by one to see to what extent they already exist in the United States.
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Before uncle Dozyk passed away in 2001 he shared with me a few profound words of wisdom: “If one is forced to choose between freedom and bread, and you chose bread, you will have neither.” These words made me ask the question “could we in the U.S. be gradually losing freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution?” I fear the answer is yes. I also fear that the U.S. is slowly and imperceptibly drifting toward some kind of socialist model, perhaps even something resembling Communism and I want to share with you some reasons why I feel this way.
Let’s begin with the first Amendment.
1. First Amendment
In the 1980’s when I worked with Soviet citizens I picked up an anecdote about two Soviet newspapers, the Pravda and the Izvestia. As some of you might be aware, Pravda in Russian means “truth” and Izvestia means news. The popular joke was that in Pravda there is no truth and in Izvestia there is no news. Although still not as bad as Pravda and Izvestia, I feel that some major news outlets in the U.S., such as the New York Times or MSNBC hold roughly comparable positions. Today, the Big Brother’s surrogates would like to silence all media critical of Obama and his policies.
Free speech is the cornerstone for every other freedom. When you restrict free speech you endanger all of the other freedoms and taking them away becomes easier and less complicated.
In the United States free speech is being limited in various ways. In recent times it has been increasingly restricted by the dogma of Political Correctness. It is a particularly insidious form of speech and thought control because it hides behind the righteous cloak of “sensitivity” towards others. It forces the public to think in a certain “approved” way and is the equivalent of silencing criticism. George Orwell, who in 1949 wrote the classic 1984--which I urge you to read or reread--saw it all coming over sixty-five years ago. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” (1984, First Signet Classics Printing, July 1950, p. 249).
George Orwell also writes about “memory holes.” It refers to the chilling totalitarian practice of rewriting politically inconvenient history – even as it is happening. As we speak, we see it plainly in the administration’s clumsy cover-up of the causes behind the September 11, 2012 attack on the American mission in Benghazi where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed. The administration falsely blamed the incident on a video by a Coptic Christian maker that purportedly slandered the prophet of Islam.
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Let me share with you another story that illustrates how PC thought control in the U.S. today is practiced in exactly the same way it was practiced in the U.S.S.R., an analogy that very few of you may have considered.
You may recall the case of Juan Williams, NPR journalist who was fired for saying that “he gets nervous when he sees people in ‘Muslim garb’ on airplanes.” After the incident, Vivian Schiller, the NPR CEO rubbed salt into the wound by saying that “Juan may be in need of psychiatric help.” NPR fired Williams for speaking the truth and Schiller’s comment created such a stir that she was forced to resign, but it was sufficient to illustrate the mindset of elitist media and their attempt at mind control.
The Juan Williams incident eerily reminds me of the case of Leonid Plyushch, the Ukrainian intellectual, mathematician and dissident who in the early 1970s was forcibly locked up in a psychiatric hospital for criticizing the Communist Party. While in the hospital called psykhushka in Ukrainian, he was tortured and treated with injections to the point where he broke down psychologically and turned into a vegetable. I know this story well because Leonid was my friend at the time I lived in Paris.
While the details may not be the same, the principle at play is identical. If you don’t follow the PC party line there must me something wrong with you psychologically, and like Juan Williams, you are obviously in need of treatment.
We may not yet have reached at the stage where people are forcibly incarcerated in mental hospitals for not toeing the party line, but in our universities anyone not adhering to the PC guidelines is ostracized, marginalized or not allowed to speak. Ask David Horowitz or Ann Coulter if you have any doubts, or more recently Condi Rice, Ayan Hirsi Ali or even Christine Lagarde.
Similarly, you may lose your job if you stray outside political correctness in the workplace, or you may find yourself ostracized and thrown out of clubs and associations. For example, Obama has made no secret of his willingness to compromise the First Amendment by working in concert with the largest international Muslim entity, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, to effectively criminalize any criticism of Islam.
This means that we are well on our way to emulating the European speech codes. A noted Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and a Gulag survivor now living in London said that “while we may not yet have a Gulag, Europeans have in effect imposed an intellectual Gulag on its citizens in the form of PC.”
During the past ten years a number of high profile individuals in Europe have been arrested and prosecuted for so called “hate speech.”
Oddly, in the U.S. PC works in strange ways. Christians, Mormons and other religions can be insulted in the most vulgar and crude manner with absolutely no consequences. Thus we can display a Christian cross in a jar of urine or a Madonna smeared with feces in museums and galleries and call it art, but a cartoon or video about Mohammed is a hate crime which will land you in jail. The level of hypocrisy is not only mind-boggling, but a serious threat to our freedom of expression.
2. The Second Amendment: the ultimate guardian against tyranny
One of the first acts every authoritarian leader undertakes is to take away weapons from the citizens, because it removes serious resistance to any coercive actions he may wish to pursue. Let me cite a few examples from 20th century history.
In Ukraine, the country where I was born, one of the first things the Communists did was to take away any weapons the population may have possessed. At the end of WWI Ukraine was awash in weapons leftover from the civil war. In addition, there was a long proud heritage of free and independent Ukrainian kozak struggle with tyranny dating back to the 16th century.
In 1925 Stalin issued an order to confiscate all weapons in the hands of the peasantry. By 1929, on the eve of collectivization, all of the weapons were in the hands of the Bolsheviks.
A contemporary Ukrainian historian Stanislaw Kulchytsky writes that beginning in the mid-twenties, cadres of Chekists began to carry out deep searches of villagers and took away all weapons left from the civil war. This was the first step toward implementing forcible collectivization that today we know resulted in six to ten million victims, most of whom starved to death because in 1932 every last grain and morsel of nourishment was taken away and sold abroad or left to rot in warehouses, or as recent evidence shows, shipped to Russia. This is a stark example of how a small group of armed activists can subdue a nation because they have all the weapons. When the people realized what was happening, it was too late. All the guns were in the hands of the Chekists.
This demonstrates how only 25,000 Bolshevik activists with guns were able to intimidate and subdue 25,000,000 helpless peasants whose weapons were taken away several years before.
Let me emphasize: the only reliable guarantor against tyranny in the U.S. is the Second Amendment, the right of citizens to bear arms. Our founding fathers knew this instinctively because of their own experience with the English King. Yet, the current regime is determined to take away this right. They have not yet succeeded but if they ever do, history suggests that it’s one step closer to tyranny.
History repeated itself in the 1930s in Germany and Austria when the Nazis confiscated weapons civilians may have possessed. After the weapons were in the hands of the Gestapo, the Nazis had a free hand to pursue their devious agenda.
But the story I like most is about armed citizenry in Switzerland at the beginning of WWII. After France fell in 1940, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop went to Basel and asked his Swiss counterpart “what would the Swiss think if next week one million men of the Wehrmacht walked into Switzerland?”
Keep in mind that the Swiss at the time had half-a-million well-trained citizen reservists under arms. The response was swift and categorical: “it will take every Swiss sharpshooter two bullets to stop the Germans.” The bluff worked. Germany did not invade Switzerland.
Lastly, I’d like to relay a more recent example that vividly illustrates the same point: In March of 2009 I was in Yerevan Armenia during the Novruz, the Persian New Year. Every year thousands of young Iranians flock to Armenia to celebrate their New Year with music, dancing and wine, something the Mullahs in Teheran don’t take to very kindly. While talking to a group of young Iranian professionals in a Jazz club I asked them a provocative question: “tell me, why do the people not rebel against the mullahs?” They gave me a puzzling look and replied in derisive tone: “you don’t understand . . . the Mullahs have all the guns.”
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It is clear that President Obama would like to emulate what Stalin, Hitler and Ayatollahs did by confiscating weapons in the hands of citizenry. This was already evident from his talk at the University of Chicago when he said: "I don't believe people should be able to own guns," [3] and in 2008 he reiterated this sentiment when he inadvertently pronounced that now famous sentence about: "bitter Americans who cling to their guns and religion.”
But history is full of examples of how democratically elected demagogues, once in office, abused democracy to instill tyrannical regimes. Hitler’s democratic elections in 1933, Morsi’s election in Egypt and the recent reelection of Erdogan in Turkey are but three.
3. The Growth of a Police State
In the Soviet Union the main instrument of repression was the KGB or its predecessors the Cheka, NKVD and MVD. Today in the US we have in place “soft” versions of these instruments in the form of the IRS, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and the NSA, all involved in targeting US citizens and organizations that disagree with statist policies or that the regime considers dangerous.
The President would like us to believe that these measures are necessary to pursue the “war on terror.” I frankly think that this is only a pretext, because there are more sensible and efficient ways to find terrorists, like for example, profiling and targeting likely Jihadists, something the Israelis do with great success. Instead the new anti-terrorist laws have turned average Americans into suspects.
The real reason for gathering massive databases on American citizens is broader and more devious: to identify those individuals and groups who might criticize or resist his leftist agenda. If there is any doubt about that we have the egregious transgression of IRS and the disappearance of Lois Lerner’s emails to prove it. Yet, the President of the U.S. dismisses the IRS scandal as a phony issue.
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These tactics are strikingly reminiscent of the KGB or Stasi methods during the Soviet period, to persecute and harass those with dissenting views, or those who fail to toe the party line.
The German minister of justice called NSA’s tracking of communications “deeply disconcerting.” And Markus Ferber, Merkel’s ally from Bavaria said that a society that monitors, observes, and controls its people is not free. A member of the European Parliament was even more blunt: he accused the Obama administration of using “American-style Stasi methods.”
4. Downplaying Liberty
After hearing my uncle’s story of his Kolyma ordeal, I took away a fresh appreciation for freedom and liberty. In this respect I have some distinguished company: the Founding Fathers who proclaimed that a principal reason for establishing the federal government is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” A century later the French author and conscience Victor Hugo, defender of the oppressed, proclaimed that “the most important thing in life is liberty and it’s worth dedicating one’s life in its defense.”
I find it curious that President Obama’s speeches rarely contain the word “liberty.” Instead, his speeches are barrage of slogans about fairness, equality, socio-economic justice, collective effort etc., but liberty seems to be conspicuously missing. He downplayed liberty when he said “we should be ready to give up some liberty for the interests of the collective.” To him the collective is more important than the individual and this is an obvious license to attack freedom, and this brings me to the fifth very crucial sign.
5. Promotion of a Collectivist Mentality
In the Soviet Union the individual did not count. The collective is what mattered. Obama and his kind share this view. He would like us to cast aside individualism and replace it with collective idealism. This emphasis on a collectivist approach is disturbing. In modern times, collectivism has become synonymous with the political culture and system of the former Soviet Union, specifically the ideologies of Marxist-Leninism. It is the essence of communism. Thus Obama could not have been clearer when he pronounced: “We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”[4] Collective action and collective institutions sounds reasonable, even desirable. Most people, however, do not take the time to reflect what he means by collective action, because collectivism is a tricky word. Collectivism could be horizontal or it could be vertical. Let me explain:
Horizontal collectivism does not require a government or political system to exist. These are small collectives that form naturally and voluntarily within a society may be positive phenomenon. Horizontal collectivism stresses collective decision-making among equal individuals, and is thus usually based on decentralization, volunteerism, and egalitarianism. [5]
What Obama had on his mind is vertical collectivism based on hierarchical structures of power and on moral and cultural conformity, and is therefore based on centralization and hierarchy.
Anyone who has lived under Communism knows the power of vertical collectivism. It stifles individuality, diminishes freedom and leads to totalitarian thinking and centralization like we’ve seen in the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. That is why we must never forget the lessons of vertical collectivism, as in the case of collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and China in the late 1950s, both of which ended in mountains of starved unburied corpses scattered across a bleak countryside.
6. Disparaging Individualism
While promoting collectivism Obama, at the same time, has been denigrating individualism. This two-sided maneuver runs counter to the American spirit and disavows the central tenet of what made this country great. “You did not build that” says it all. These are the words of a community organizer who:
1. Never invented or created a thing in his life;
2. Never ran a business or met a payroll; and
3. Has no idea how to meet or balance a budget.
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Professor Emeritus Kenneth Minogue, a highly regarded thinker and political philosopher at the London School of Economics argues that individualism is in fact the essence of freedom. Minogue postulates that modern European states differed from other cultures by the moral practice of individualism. Non-European societies not based on individualism led to models such as the Hindu caste system, the Muslim Sharia and the hierarchies of the Middle Kingdom of China and every other order right down to tribal cultures. What accounted for these conspicuous differences between European and other cultures, Minogue argues, is individualism.
7. Advancing Centralization
Over the centuries America’s strength lay in its decentralized power structure. Power has been split equally between the three branches of government and balanced between the center in Washington on the one hand, and the states and local municipalities and administrations on the other. This balance is being fundamentally challenged. At every opportunity Obama’s administration promotes a policy of centralization while at the same time taking power from the states.
While we may not yet have the rigid top-down central planning of Soviet five-year plans, Obama’s people are scrupulously working on taking us there, particularly in implementing ObamaCare’s system of subsidies, wealth redistribution and social and economic central planning. I might add that in industry the takeover of General Motors suggests that we may be going in that direction. GM has been derisively labeled as Government Motors.
We also see government’s heavy hand in every sphere, from economic planning and energy policy to education and housing and everything in between. The examples are too numerous to mention here, however, it is obvious that the system Obama is trying to put in place resembles more and more the centralized bureaucracy of the EU in Brussels, which Vladimir Bukovsky equates with the Politburo during Soviet times: an unelected clique of self-appointed bureaucrats, accountable to no one except themselves.
8. Escalating Use of Authoritarian Methods
Obama is obsessed with aggrandizing power, because he knows that without complete control of reins of government he will not achieve his agenda. Signs of this are: (a) Obama’s increasingly authoritarian tactics in running government by decree. (b) He audaciously rejects the rule of law by choosing which laws to enforce, which to ignore, and which to rewrite. (c) Publicly denigrating the Supreme Court’s authority on constitutional issues when he disagrees with its rulings. This, according to Judge Napolitano, presents a clear and present danger to freedom with fatal consequences for all Americans.
Obama’s creeping authoritarianism and aggrandizement of power appears to be voracious. Last July, in his addresses in Jacksonville, Fl. and Galesburg, Ill. he clearly stated his intent to usurp Congressional authority by promising that “where I can act on my own I won’t wait for Congress.” The U.S. has a system of checks and balances but Obama is granting himself unilateral authority to upset that delicate and time-proven balance.
9. Denigrating Capitalism
Obama dislikes free markets; he denigrates capitalism and interferes with the private sector with the heavy hand of government regulation not seen heretofore in the history of the U.S. The President of the U.S. made this very clear in December 2011 when declared that capitalism and the free market "have never worked," demonstrating a shocking ignorance and contempt for the free enterprise system, the principal vehicle of economic growth and engine of prosperity.
President Obama is a master at double-talk and to prove that he is not a socialist, he reversed his stand by saying that he “actually believes in the free market.” This is an old Leninist tactic: two steps forward but when you encounter resistance move one step back. As the American people are belatedly beginning to realize it is hard to pin down what the President is saying because he is talking from both sides of his mouth.
10. Promoting Class Warfare and Redistribution of Wealth
Obama’s class warfare rhetoric is vintage Marx 101. He advocates redistribution of wealth on a massive scale. He inadvertently revealed this when he told Joe the Plumber: “I think when you spread the wealth around it’s a good thing.” This of course reflects Karl Marx’s infamous dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need.”[6]
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By themselves any one of the above ten signs and policy directions would not indicate that anything alarming is happening. But, when you consider the vast scope of these actions and the fact that they are all occurring during the term of a radical-left president with a lifetime of Marxist roots and associates, does any astute observer with rudimentary knowledge of history question where we are heading?
We are drifting not only towards a European-style welfare state, but towards an authoritarian state resembling either the totalitarian Socialism that existed in the Soviet Union or the corporate fascism of pre-World War II Italy and Germany. Although we are still in the early stages of this process, the patterns and similarities are striking and indisputable.
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To conclude, I’ve been talking mostly about President Obama and his administration’s drift to the extreme left, but we must be aware that that his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is cut from the same mold. They are both products of the Frankfurt and Alinsky schools of thought and whatever I said about Obama applies equally toward Hillary, the likely Democratic candidate for president who will steer America in the direction of socialism just as Obama has done for the last six years. Americans, therefore, must be vigilant of this drift and if the United States is to remain “the land of the free and the home of the brave” this trend must be reversed at all costs.
The Great Paradox
Finally, I ask the question: why do people here and elsewhere else believe the promises and slogans of leftist demagogues who advocate socialist policies? This is one of great paradoxes of our age. The socialist ideology seemingly refuses to die, despite the fact that Socialism in power produced, everywhere, scarcity, murderous inefficiency, arbitrary inequality, cronyism, enslavement, concentration camps, torture, terror, the destruction of civil society, ecological disasters, brutal secret police, and systemic tyranny.
To be sure, very few of these believers still call themselves Communists. The ideology has been so thoroughly discredited that even the Socialist label, Communism’s relative, has become tarnished and replaced by brands like Progressivism or Liberalism, labels that camouflage their collectivist nature and authoritarian tendencies. As the saying goes, no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig, it’s still a pig.
One of the main reasons Socialist ideas are still alive is that Socialist thinking is being promoted at our institutions of higher learning. American Universities have nothing to say about life under the “perfected” form of Socialism. No mention of its deprivations, its horrors or Gulags. I dare say that there is not one elite university in the U.S. that offers a course on concentration camps of the Gulag.
Yet, courses on Revolutionary Marxism, Marxist Theory, and The Future of Socialism [7] are available for credit at most major university where neo-Marxists enjoy a veto over curriculums, careers and advancements. In these courses apologists are likely to ignore Communism’s murderous past. Ignorant of its history of blood and terror, young idealists are especially susceptible to its false promises.
Communism continues to stay alive because Communism has never been fully discredited like Nazism. In some Western elite circles the Socialist/Communist cause remains respectable, because the “idea was and is noble.” American universities in particular have been complicit not only in masking and sanitizing Communism’s past but promoting its core beliefs.
There was always a sizable contingent of leftist and Marxists in American Universities but today they dominate the academic world to an unprecedented degree. Conservative professors constitute a small minority, perhaps no more than 10 percent on average, of the teaching faculties. Leftist professors have a free hand to brainwash young students with revisionist history scrupulously avoiding the black deeds of Communism. The end result is a deplorable ignorance of Communism’s true legacy.
The disciples of the Frankfurt school have achieved their aim. Its leading proponent, a Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, believed that if Communists could slowly subvert a culture by gaining control of the organs of culture —education, newspapers, film, magazines, the electronic media, serious literature, music, the visual arts, and so on —they will win.
Only those who have suffered under Communism are capable of deciphering the slogans of the demagogues. They are the only witnesses able to see through the fog of promises and detect the signs of rising tyrants. Unfortunately, as we move away from the history of Communists atrocities and experiences of the Gulag, the number of those who remember and are willing to speak out is getting smaller and smaller. Solzhenitsyn who saw it all coming was right when he said: “It is as if the West does not want to know the truth, until the moment when this knowledge has ceased to be of use.”
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Bio:
Jaroslaw (Slavko) Martyniuk is a retired sociologist whose career encompassed a variety of positions in the private and public sectors. Born in Ukraine, Slavko’s family fled Communism and ended up in Chicago, Illinois. Over the years he worked for Amoco Oil, the International Energy Agency in Paris, and Radio Liberty in Munich. He is fluent in Ukrainian, French, Polish, Russian and Belarusian.
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[1] The number varies and depends if you include only gulag prisoners or those who were merely exiled.
[2] Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, p. 17
[3] In his book, At the Brink, economist and author John R. Lott Jr., recalls conversations with Barak Obama regarding gun laws they had while working at the University of Chicago. In Chapter Three, Mr. Lott discusses gun-control and takes the reader back to his time at the University of Chicago, where he and then-professor Barack Obama spoke on numerous occasions about guns in America. "I don't believe people should be able to own guns," Obama told Lott one day at the University of Chicago Law School.
[4] Consider a comment Obama made during his first campaign for office in 1995. Obama was teaching classes in community organizing for ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons. A reporter for the Chicago Reader sat in on one of his New Horizons classes and heard Obama say:
“In America we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”
[5] Professor Emeritus Kenneth Minogue, a thinker and political philosopher at the London School of Economics
[6] Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. In German, "Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!"
[7] Portland University, Kent State, New York University, UCLA, UC Riverside, UMass Amherst, and University of Utah all have courses in Marxism
by Jaroslaw Martyniuk
19 June 2014
Introduction
The theme of my presentation, ‘The Stealth Emergence of Neo-Communism in the U.S.’ is a very serious subject. But before I tackle it I want to tell you a few anecdotes and jokes told by Soviet citizens about life under the Communist system.
Humor and jokes are a good way to learn what life under Communist was like. It was a coded way of speaking the truth about the reality of socialism in its perfected state: communism. Joke-telling became an art form, but one had to be very careful with whom one shared a joke because even an innocent joke could lead an arrest, imprisonment and land you in the Gulag.
_________________
--- So, Karl Marx was resurrected and came to the USSR. He was shown factories, hospitals, cities and villages, etc. Finally, he requested to be allowed to make a speech on TV. The Politburo hesitated as they were afraid he might say something they wouldn’t approve. Marx promised he would say only one sentence. Under this condition, the Politburo agreed. Karl Marx uttered the following sentence:
“Workers of all countries, forgive me.”
____________________
And of course we all heard what that socialism is a stage comes before true communism. But many asked what comes after communism has been achieved?
- ‘Alcoholism'
And finally one that some of you may have heard:
In the Communist system we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
__________________
What I’d like to turn to now is a more serious assessment of what Communism was and is about using the words of Alan Charles Kors, [Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania] on the occasion of the dedication of the Victims of Communism memorial in 2007. Prof. Kors pronounced one of the most devastating condemnations of Communism I have even heard. I take the liberty of reading only the introductory paragraph:
Above all else, there are the bodies, and one cannot discuss the past, present, or future while they lie there unacknowledged.
We are surrounded by slain innocents, and the scale is wholly new. This is not the thousands of the Inquisition; it is not the thousands of American lynching. This is not the six million dead from Nazi extermination. The best scholarship yields numbers that the mind must try to comprehend: scores, and scores, and scores, and scores of millions of bodies Shot; dead by deliberate exposure; starved; murdered in work camps and prisons meant to extract every last fiber of labor and then kill them.
No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than red Socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead, including that of Hitler’s National Socialism. They are all around us. No one talks about them. No one honors them. . . . No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be held accountable.”
________________
We now know that this inhumane system that existed in the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Unfortunately we are living with its consequences to this day. A timely example of the consequences of Communism is the civil war in Ukraine taking place as I speak. The conflict is a direct result of Ukraine’s subjugation by a system imposed on them against their will for three-quarters of a century by mostly Russian Communists.
Allow me explain this using the words of the historian Angelo Codevilla that “the enmity between the Ukrainians and Russians may have something to do with the fact that over the years the Russian communist regime killed Ukrainian by the tens of millions,” and there is hardly a family in Ukraine today that was not touched horrors of communism. I could talk about this topic at length but where I’d like to begin is to tell you how my family suffered under communism, a real story as related to me by those who survived.
*******
I am a refugee from Communism in the sense that as a young boy, I narrowly escaped being a victim of Communism in Ukraine. At the end of WWII my family fled west and eventually we ended up in a camp for displaced persons in Bavaria. In 1949 we had the good fortune to emigrate to the U.S.
The greater part of my family, however, remained in Ukraine and I’d like to begin by telling you the story of their ordeal in Communist concentration camps called the Gulag.
- I want to tell their story because I feel I owe it to my family as well as to the 100 million victims of the most monstrous experiment in social engineering in the history of mankind.
- At the same time, I’d like to raise public awareness to some parallels between the system that existed in the Soviet Union and trends and developments taking place in the U.S. today.
It is my belief that our government is slowly and imperceptibly drifting towards a centralized authoritarian state with features resembling the collectivist regime that existed in the Soviet Union. This trend began some time ago, but during the presidency of Obama it accelerated:
- The Constitution, and in particular the Bill of Rights, is being undermined and our freedoms, once the hallmark of our society, are under siege. This, by the way, reflects President Obama’s view that the Constitution is a flawed document from which we must break free.
- The system of "checks and balances" that served us well for over 200 years is abused and corrupted. The distribution of authority once equally balanced among the three branches of government as well as between the federal and state governments, is no longer working
*****
But before I tell you my family’s story, allow me to share with you the results of a sociological experiment I conducted with a group of 25 hikers during a walk along the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. The majority were young people, college graduates and professionals mostly under thirty.
As a retired sociologist I am always curious to find out what young people think and know, so I made it a point to talk to a number of them about a subject that was on my mind at that time, the Soviet Gulag. Delicately I asked hikers two questions.
- Do you know what the Gulag was?
- Do you know what the Holocaust was?
- “Gulag, isn’t it some sort of African food?”
- “Gulag, yes that was a Nazi faction.”
- “Wasn’t it a political party in the Soviet Union?”
- Another hiker confused Gulag with “Gugul,” a Himalayan medicinal root.
I should not have been shocked. Given an academic environment permeated with post-modernist cultural relativism where teaching of history has been marginalized and replaced by social theorizing that denies the existence of truth, I am not surprised that a generation of students has grown up not hearing about the Gulag or about life under Communism. I was not surprised because I’m aware that “progressive” educators at our schools and universities still believe that Marxism failed only because it was not “properly” implemented.
I am tempted to repeat the words of the American essayist George Santayana, an immigrant like me, who used to say “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but because history never repeats itself in the same way, I prefer Mark Twain’s quote “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.”
Today history seems to rhyme perfectly. From the mouth of our President we get a barrage of great-sounding collectivist slogans, “fairness, equality, social justice,” and, of course, my favorite—“you didn’t build that, they did”…..all of which boils down to Karl Marx’s dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
*****
The Gulag was an efficient “killing machine” developed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Soviet secret police, and was later used as a model for Hitler’s concentration camps.
It’s practically impossible to say how many perished in the Gulags of the Soviet Union or the Laogai of China. We know that the Gulag was immense. We also know that during its existence between twenty five to thirty million people passed through this massive system.[1]
It was a hidden system. Anne Applebaum, author of “Gulag,” notes that “it's extremely difficult to estimate the total number of victims of this notorious Labor Camp system because reliable archives do not exist and Stalin personally directed the constant and relentless purging of the archives, a practice that continued after his death.
Let me give you an example of how the Gulag was camouflaged from Western eyes is the case of Henry Wallace. In April of 1944 President Roosevelt sent his vice-president to inspect Magadan and Kolyma. He was completely bamboozled into reporting that he witnessed was “a well organized labor camp, roughly comparable to the Hudson Bay Company or the T.V.A.”]
*****
I met uncle Teodozij Fifteen years ago, in Crimea. He was the youngest brother of my father Roman and we called him Dozyk. Dozyk was a Kolyma survivor. For those of you who have not heard of Kolyma, it was a Death Camp on the Arctic Circle in the northeastern corner of Siberia across the Bering Strait from Alaska. It was not one camp, but rather a system of hundreds of camps. Many people have heard of Dachau, Buchenwald and Treblinka, but in the Soviet Union there were hundreds of Dachaus, hundreds of Buchenwalds and hundreds of Treblinkas spread across the wastes of Soviet Siberia.
*****
When the Red Army returned to Western Ukraine on July 1944 the ten-member Martyniuk family was broken apart: Two brothers fled west and two stayed behind. Of the two that stayed behind, the older Petro changed his identity and went underground; the younger, the twenty year-old Dozyk, joined the UPA, the Ukrainian (Partisan) Insurgent Army.
In February 1945, Dozyk was engaged in a firefight with the NKVD. He was shot in the abdomen and with his guts literally spilling out, interrogated and sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Siberia.
First Dozyk was sent to Karaganda in Kazakhstan, then in 1948 to Tayshet, near Lake Baikal, where he worked on the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway, known as BAM. Dozyk slaved on the BAM for one year, always moving in the easterly direction until in 1949 he ended up in Kolyma.
Kolyma (1949-1953)
There is a famous refrain from a song about Kolyma that reflected the black humor of the prisoners:
Kolyma, Kolyma,
That miraculous planet
Twelve months winter,
And the rest summer (ostalnoye leto)
When Dozyk learned that he would be sent to Kolyma he became distraught. The word was that no one ever returned from Kolyma.
Kolyma is known for its gold and other metals, but gold was the driving force behind Kolyma.” This was the metal Stalin needed the most to purchase new technology and machinery from abroad. These resources had to be exploited at all costs using slave labor on a gargantuan scale.
In Kolyma Dozyk was first assigned to a backbreaking logging operation, which meant felling and cutting of trees at temperatures as low as -40 degrees C which coincidentally translates into -40F.
After about a year on the logging site, the camp administration discovered that Dozyk was a skilled metalworker-- a revelation that literally saved his life because it meant that he would not have to descend into the mines where prisoners expired within weeks.
All camps near the Arctic Circle had high death rates but Kolyma was the deadliest. Although the production of gold was important, the central aim of this Gulag was to kill off prisoners.[2]
In Kolyma alone some estimates suggest that up to three million prisoners may have perished, but - like with the mass starvation of Ukrainians in the Holodomor, the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932/33, we will never know the exact number.
My Grandmother, the 64 year old Maria Martyniuk was the only member of the family that remained in the village. Eventually the NKVD got around to interrogating her and she as well as half a dozen other families from the village were deported to the Gulag at Vorkuta. There, in a place called Lemiu, she died of inadequate nutrition, exhaustion and cold.
Three million prisoners passed through Vorkuta’s prison camps and local historians estimate that there are a quarter of a million political prisoners buried in the permafrost mostly in unmarked graves. One of them is the grave of my grandmother who was buried there in 1949.
One of the most fascinating stories I came across in my research was that of Maria and Ivan Honchar, Dozyk’s in-laws, and their incredible escape from a Gulag near Krasnoyarsk.
Maria and Ivan, were arrested, put on a cattle train and dumped along with 300 hundred other prisoners in a forest somewhere north of Krasnoyarsk. They were given an ax and a shovel and told to prepare for the winter.
Very quickly they realized that their chances of survival were extremely slim and made a bold decision to escape. Knowing that they were not too far from the Trans-Siberian Railway, they decided to head for a nearby junction where they jumped on one of the military trains moving in the westerly direction and eventually made their way back to their home village in Volyn’ in Western Ukraine.
In the spring of 1947 Ivan died and Maria Kuzmivna, his wife, was discovered by the NKVD, rearrested, interrogated and sentenced again to permanent exile in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, against incredible odds, Maria came across a woman named Marta, the sole survivor of the group that had been dumped in the forest near Krasnoyarsk in 1946. She told Maria that the winter was exceptionally severe and every other member of that group of 300 perished of cold and starvation. Marta was the only survivor and witness to this tragedy.
Part Two: Similarities and Parallels between the U.S.S.R. and Current Trends in the U.S.
In three years the Communist “nostalgiacs” will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, an ideology that caused untold grief to nearly one third of the world. The Black Book of Communism estimates that 100 million victims perished in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Eastern Europe etc.
Having been born in a Communist-occupied country, and having lived in a Socialist state (France) and in a democratic welfare state (Germany) and having spent the better part of my life in the Capitalist United States, I have an appreciation for each of these systems. While I can spend a lot of time discussing the differences between Socialism and Communism they are mainly differences in the degree of control and ownership of industry and means of production. Without listing all of the relevant criteria side by side, a simple way to picture the difference between the two is that Communism is Socialism with power or stated in another way Communism is Socialism on steroids.
However, to approach this question in a more analytical way, I’ve identified ten core characteristics common to totalitarianism Communist societies. I will then examine these characteristics or signs one by one to see to what extent they already exist in the United States.
*****
Before uncle Dozyk passed away in 2001 he shared with me a few profound words of wisdom: “If one is forced to choose between freedom and bread, and you chose bread, you will have neither.” These words made me ask the question “could we in the U.S. be gradually losing freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution?” I fear the answer is yes. I also fear that the U.S. is slowly and imperceptibly drifting toward some kind of socialist model, perhaps even something resembling Communism and I want to share with you some reasons why I feel this way.
Let’s begin with the first Amendment.
1. First Amendment
In the 1980’s when I worked with Soviet citizens I picked up an anecdote about two Soviet newspapers, the Pravda and the Izvestia. As some of you might be aware, Pravda in Russian means “truth” and Izvestia means news. The popular joke was that in Pravda there is no truth and in Izvestia there is no news. Although still not as bad as Pravda and Izvestia, I feel that some major news outlets in the U.S., such as the New York Times or MSNBC hold roughly comparable positions. Today, the Big Brother’s surrogates would like to silence all media critical of Obama and his policies.
Free speech is the cornerstone for every other freedom. When you restrict free speech you endanger all of the other freedoms and taking them away becomes easier and less complicated.
In the United States free speech is being limited in various ways. In recent times it has been increasingly restricted by the dogma of Political Correctness. It is a particularly insidious form of speech and thought control because it hides behind the righteous cloak of “sensitivity” towards others. It forces the public to think in a certain “approved” way and is the equivalent of silencing criticism. George Orwell, who in 1949 wrote the classic 1984--which I urge you to read or reread--saw it all coming over sixty-five years ago. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” (1984, First Signet Classics Printing, July 1950, p. 249).
George Orwell also writes about “memory holes.” It refers to the chilling totalitarian practice of rewriting politically inconvenient history – even as it is happening. As we speak, we see it plainly in the administration’s clumsy cover-up of the causes behind the September 11, 2012 attack on the American mission in Benghazi where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed. The administration falsely blamed the incident on a video by a Coptic Christian maker that purportedly slandered the prophet of Islam.
*****
Let me share with you another story that illustrates how PC thought control in the U.S. today is practiced in exactly the same way it was practiced in the U.S.S.R., an analogy that very few of you may have considered.
You may recall the case of Juan Williams, NPR journalist who was fired for saying that “he gets nervous when he sees people in ‘Muslim garb’ on airplanes.” After the incident, Vivian Schiller, the NPR CEO rubbed salt into the wound by saying that “Juan may be in need of psychiatric help.” NPR fired Williams for speaking the truth and Schiller’s comment created such a stir that she was forced to resign, but it was sufficient to illustrate the mindset of elitist media and their attempt at mind control.
The Juan Williams incident eerily reminds me of the case of Leonid Plyushch, the Ukrainian intellectual, mathematician and dissident who in the early 1970s was forcibly locked up in a psychiatric hospital for criticizing the Communist Party. While in the hospital called psykhushka in Ukrainian, he was tortured and treated with injections to the point where he broke down psychologically and turned into a vegetable. I know this story well because Leonid was my friend at the time I lived in Paris.
While the details may not be the same, the principle at play is identical. If you don’t follow the PC party line there must me something wrong with you psychologically, and like Juan Williams, you are obviously in need of treatment.
We may not yet have reached at the stage where people are forcibly incarcerated in mental hospitals for not toeing the party line, but in our universities anyone not adhering to the PC guidelines is ostracized, marginalized or not allowed to speak. Ask David Horowitz or Ann Coulter if you have any doubts, or more recently Condi Rice, Ayan Hirsi Ali or even Christine Lagarde.
Similarly, you may lose your job if you stray outside political correctness in the workplace, or you may find yourself ostracized and thrown out of clubs and associations. For example, Obama has made no secret of his willingness to compromise the First Amendment by working in concert with the largest international Muslim entity, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, to effectively criminalize any criticism of Islam.
This means that we are well on our way to emulating the European speech codes. A noted Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and a Gulag survivor now living in London said that “while we may not yet have a Gulag, Europeans have in effect imposed an intellectual Gulag on its citizens in the form of PC.”
During the past ten years a number of high profile individuals in Europe have been arrested and prosecuted for so called “hate speech.”
- Orianna Fallaci an Italian journalist and author, who had an arrest warrant issues for inciting racial hatred and defaming Islam;
- Brigitte Bardot, convicted five times for inciting racial hatred against Muslims;
- The Danish court found Jesper Langballe, a Danish politician and Member of Parliament, guilty of hate speech for pointing out that honor killings and sexual abuse take place in Muslim families;
- In Austria Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff faced a three year prison sentence for "incitement of hatred" and "denigrating religious teachings" after giving a series of seminars about the dangers of radical Islam;
- In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician and Member of Parliament, faced five charges for inciting racial and religious hatred for criticizing Islam.
- In June of 2013, European lawmakers stripped French National Front leader Marine Le Pen of her parliamentary immunity to face charges over anti-Muslim comments.
- In Poland, a national committee devoted to fighting hate speech and other crimes filed a complaint accusing Lech Walesa of promoting a "propaganda of hate against a sexual minority", after the Nobel peace prize-winner said gay people had no right to a prominent role in politics.
- Ayan Hirsi Ali who was hounded out of the Netherlands for her strong views regarding Islam.
Oddly, in the U.S. PC works in strange ways. Christians, Mormons and other religions can be insulted in the most vulgar and crude manner with absolutely no consequences. Thus we can display a Christian cross in a jar of urine or a Madonna smeared with feces in museums and galleries and call it art, but a cartoon or video about Mohammed is a hate crime which will land you in jail. The level of hypocrisy is not only mind-boggling, but a serious threat to our freedom of expression.
2. The Second Amendment: the ultimate guardian against tyranny
One of the first acts every authoritarian leader undertakes is to take away weapons from the citizens, because it removes serious resistance to any coercive actions he may wish to pursue. Let me cite a few examples from 20th century history.
In Ukraine, the country where I was born, one of the first things the Communists did was to take away any weapons the population may have possessed. At the end of WWI Ukraine was awash in weapons leftover from the civil war. In addition, there was a long proud heritage of free and independent Ukrainian kozak struggle with tyranny dating back to the 16th century.
In 1925 Stalin issued an order to confiscate all weapons in the hands of the peasantry. By 1929, on the eve of collectivization, all of the weapons were in the hands of the Bolsheviks.
A contemporary Ukrainian historian Stanislaw Kulchytsky writes that beginning in the mid-twenties, cadres of Chekists began to carry out deep searches of villagers and took away all weapons left from the civil war. This was the first step toward implementing forcible collectivization that today we know resulted in six to ten million victims, most of whom starved to death because in 1932 every last grain and morsel of nourishment was taken away and sold abroad or left to rot in warehouses, or as recent evidence shows, shipped to Russia. This is a stark example of how a small group of armed activists can subdue a nation because they have all the weapons. When the people realized what was happening, it was too late. All the guns were in the hands of the Chekists.
This demonstrates how only 25,000 Bolshevik activists with guns were able to intimidate and subdue 25,000,000 helpless peasants whose weapons were taken away several years before.
Let me emphasize: the only reliable guarantor against tyranny in the U.S. is the Second Amendment, the right of citizens to bear arms. Our founding fathers knew this instinctively because of their own experience with the English King. Yet, the current regime is determined to take away this right. They have not yet succeeded but if they ever do, history suggests that it’s one step closer to tyranny.
History repeated itself in the 1930s in Germany and Austria when the Nazis confiscated weapons civilians may have possessed. After the weapons were in the hands of the Gestapo, the Nazis had a free hand to pursue their devious agenda.
But the story I like most is about armed citizenry in Switzerland at the beginning of WWII. After France fell in 1940, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop went to Basel and asked his Swiss counterpart “what would the Swiss think if next week one million men of the Wehrmacht walked into Switzerland?”
Keep in mind that the Swiss at the time had half-a-million well-trained citizen reservists under arms. The response was swift and categorical: “it will take every Swiss sharpshooter two bullets to stop the Germans.” The bluff worked. Germany did not invade Switzerland.
Lastly, I’d like to relay a more recent example that vividly illustrates the same point: In March of 2009 I was in Yerevan Armenia during the Novruz, the Persian New Year. Every year thousands of young Iranians flock to Armenia to celebrate their New Year with music, dancing and wine, something the Mullahs in Teheran don’t take to very kindly. While talking to a group of young Iranian professionals in a Jazz club I asked them a provocative question: “tell me, why do the people not rebel against the mullahs?” They gave me a puzzling look and replied in derisive tone: “you don’t understand . . . the Mullahs have all the guns.”
*****
It is clear that President Obama would like to emulate what Stalin, Hitler and Ayatollahs did by confiscating weapons in the hands of citizenry. This was already evident from his talk at the University of Chicago when he said: "I don't believe people should be able to own guns," [3] and in 2008 he reiterated this sentiment when he inadvertently pronounced that now famous sentence about: "bitter Americans who cling to their guns and religion.”
But history is full of examples of how democratically elected demagogues, once in office, abused democracy to instill tyrannical regimes. Hitler’s democratic elections in 1933, Morsi’s election in Egypt and the recent reelection of Erdogan in Turkey are but three.
3. The Growth of a Police State
In the Soviet Union the main instrument of repression was the KGB or its predecessors the Cheka, NKVD and MVD. Today in the US we have in place “soft” versions of these instruments in the form of the IRS, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and the NSA, all involved in targeting US citizens and organizations that disagree with statist policies or that the regime considers dangerous.
The President would like us to believe that these measures are necessary to pursue the “war on terror.” I frankly think that this is only a pretext, because there are more sensible and efficient ways to find terrorists, like for example, profiling and targeting likely Jihadists, something the Israelis do with great success. Instead the new anti-terrorist laws have turned average Americans into suspects.
The real reason for gathering massive databases on American citizens is broader and more devious: to identify those individuals and groups who might criticize or resist his leftist agenda. If there is any doubt about that we have the egregious transgression of IRS and the disappearance of Lois Lerner’s emails to prove it. Yet, the President of the U.S. dismisses the IRS scandal as a phony issue.
*****
These tactics are strikingly reminiscent of the KGB or Stasi methods during the Soviet period, to persecute and harass those with dissenting views, or those who fail to toe the party line.
The German minister of justice called NSA’s tracking of communications “deeply disconcerting.” And Markus Ferber, Merkel’s ally from Bavaria said that a society that monitors, observes, and controls its people is not free. A member of the European Parliament was even more blunt: he accused the Obama administration of using “American-style Stasi methods.”
4. Downplaying Liberty
After hearing my uncle’s story of his Kolyma ordeal, I took away a fresh appreciation for freedom and liberty. In this respect I have some distinguished company: the Founding Fathers who proclaimed that a principal reason for establishing the federal government is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” A century later the French author and conscience Victor Hugo, defender of the oppressed, proclaimed that “the most important thing in life is liberty and it’s worth dedicating one’s life in its defense.”
I find it curious that President Obama’s speeches rarely contain the word “liberty.” Instead, his speeches are barrage of slogans about fairness, equality, socio-economic justice, collective effort etc., but liberty seems to be conspicuously missing. He downplayed liberty when he said “we should be ready to give up some liberty for the interests of the collective.” To him the collective is more important than the individual and this is an obvious license to attack freedom, and this brings me to the fifth very crucial sign.
5. Promotion of a Collectivist Mentality
In the Soviet Union the individual did not count. The collective is what mattered. Obama and his kind share this view. He would like us to cast aside individualism and replace it with collective idealism. This emphasis on a collectivist approach is disturbing. In modern times, collectivism has become synonymous with the political culture and system of the former Soviet Union, specifically the ideologies of Marxist-Leninism. It is the essence of communism. Thus Obama could not have been clearer when he pronounced: “We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”[4] Collective action and collective institutions sounds reasonable, even desirable. Most people, however, do not take the time to reflect what he means by collective action, because collectivism is a tricky word. Collectivism could be horizontal or it could be vertical. Let me explain:
Horizontal collectivism does not require a government or political system to exist. These are small collectives that form naturally and voluntarily within a society may be positive phenomenon. Horizontal collectivism stresses collective decision-making among equal individuals, and is thus usually based on decentralization, volunteerism, and egalitarianism. [5]
What Obama had on his mind is vertical collectivism based on hierarchical structures of power and on moral and cultural conformity, and is therefore based on centralization and hierarchy.
Anyone who has lived under Communism knows the power of vertical collectivism. It stifles individuality, diminishes freedom and leads to totalitarian thinking and centralization like we’ve seen in the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. That is why we must never forget the lessons of vertical collectivism, as in the case of collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and China in the late 1950s, both of which ended in mountains of starved unburied corpses scattered across a bleak countryside.
6. Disparaging Individualism
While promoting collectivism Obama, at the same time, has been denigrating individualism. This two-sided maneuver runs counter to the American spirit and disavows the central tenet of what made this country great. “You did not build that” says it all. These are the words of a community organizer who:
1. Never invented or created a thing in his life;
2. Never ran a business or met a payroll; and
3. Has no idea how to meet or balance a budget.
*****
Professor Emeritus Kenneth Minogue, a highly regarded thinker and political philosopher at the London School of Economics argues that individualism is in fact the essence of freedom. Minogue postulates that modern European states differed from other cultures by the moral practice of individualism. Non-European societies not based on individualism led to models such as the Hindu caste system, the Muslim Sharia and the hierarchies of the Middle Kingdom of China and every other order right down to tribal cultures. What accounted for these conspicuous differences between European and other cultures, Minogue argues, is individualism.
7. Advancing Centralization
Over the centuries America’s strength lay in its decentralized power structure. Power has been split equally between the three branches of government and balanced between the center in Washington on the one hand, and the states and local municipalities and administrations on the other. This balance is being fundamentally challenged. At every opportunity Obama’s administration promotes a policy of centralization while at the same time taking power from the states.
While we may not yet have the rigid top-down central planning of Soviet five-year plans, Obama’s people are scrupulously working on taking us there, particularly in implementing ObamaCare’s system of subsidies, wealth redistribution and social and economic central planning. I might add that in industry the takeover of General Motors suggests that we may be going in that direction. GM has been derisively labeled as Government Motors.
We also see government’s heavy hand in every sphere, from economic planning and energy policy to education and housing and everything in between. The examples are too numerous to mention here, however, it is obvious that the system Obama is trying to put in place resembles more and more the centralized bureaucracy of the EU in Brussels, which Vladimir Bukovsky equates with the Politburo during Soviet times: an unelected clique of self-appointed bureaucrats, accountable to no one except themselves.
8. Escalating Use of Authoritarian Methods
Obama is obsessed with aggrandizing power, because he knows that without complete control of reins of government he will not achieve his agenda. Signs of this are: (a) Obama’s increasingly authoritarian tactics in running government by decree. (b) He audaciously rejects the rule of law by choosing which laws to enforce, which to ignore, and which to rewrite. (c) Publicly denigrating the Supreme Court’s authority on constitutional issues when he disagrees with its rulings. This, according to Judge Napolitano, presents a clear and present danger to freedom with fatal consequences for all Americans.
Obama’s creeping authoritarianism and aggrandizement of power appears to be voracious. Last July, in his addresses in Jacksonville, Fl. and Galesburg, Ill. he clearly stated his intent to usurp Congressional authority by promising that “where I can act on my own I won’t wait for Congress.” The U.S. has a system of checks and balances but Obama is granting himself unilateral authority to upset that delicate and time-proven balance.
9. Denigrating Capitalism
Obama dislikes free markets; he denigrates capitalism and interferes with the private sector with the heavy hand of government regulation not seen heretofore in the history of the U.S. The President of the U.S. made this very clear in December 2011 when declared that capitalism and the free market "have never worked," demonstrating a shocking ignorance and contempt for the free enterprise system, the principal vehicle of economic growth and engine of prosperity.
President Obama is a master at double-talk and to prove that he is not a socialist, he reversed his stand by saying that he “actually believes in the free market.” This is an old Leninist tactic: two steps forward but when you encounter resistance move one step back. As the American people are belatedly beginning to realize it is hard to pin down what the President is saying because he is talking from both sides of his mouth.
10. Promoting Class Warfare and Redistribution of Wealth
Obama’s class warfare rhetoric is vintage Marx 101. He advocates redistribution of wealth on a massive scale. He inadvertently revealed this when he told Joe the Plumber: “I think when you spread the wealth around it’s a good thing.” This of course reflects Karl Marx’s infamous dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need.”[6]
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By themselves any one of the above ten signs and policy directions would not indicate that anything alarming is happening. But, when you consider the vast scope of these actions and the fact that they are all occurring during the term of a radical-left president with a lifetime of Marxist roots and associates, does any astute observer with rudimentary knowledge of history question where we are heading?
We are drifting not only towards a European-style welfare state, but towards an authoritarian state resembling either the totalitarian Socialism that existed in the Soviet Union or the corporate fascism of pre-World War II Italy and Germany. Although we are still in the early stages of this process, the patterns and similarities are striking and indisputable.
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To conclude, I’ve been talking mostly about President Obama and his administration’s drift to the extreme left, but we must be aware that that his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is cut from the same mold. They are both products of the Frankfurt and Alinsky schools of thought and whatever I said about Obama applies equally toward Hillary, the likely Democratic candidate for president who will steer America in the direction of socialism just as Obama has done for the last six years. Americans, therefore, must be vigilant of this drift and if the United States is to remain “the land of the free and the home of the brave” this trend must be reversed at all costs.
The Great Paradox
Finally, I ask the question: why do people here and elsewhere else believe the promises and slogans of leftist demagogues who advocate socialist policies? This is one of great paradoxes of our age. The socialist ideology seemingly refuses to die, despite the fact that Socialism in power produced, everywhere, scarcity, murderous inefficiency, arbitrary inequality, cronyism, enslavement, concentration camps, torture, terror, the destruction of civil society, ecological disasters, brutal secret police, and systemic tyranny.
To be sure, very few of these believers still call themselves Communists. The ideology has been so thoroughly discredited that even the Socialist label, Communism’s relative, has become tarnished and replaced by brands like Progressivism or Liberalism, labels that camouflage their collectivist nature and authoritarian tendencies. As the saying goes, no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig, it’s still a pig.
One of the main reasons Socialist ideas are still alive is that Socialist thinking is being promoted at our institutions of higher learning. American Universities have nothing to say about life under the “perfected” form of Socialism. No mention of its deprivations, its horrors or Gulags. I dare say that there is not one elite university in the U.S. that offers a course on concentration camps of the Gulag.
Yet, courses on Revolutionary Marxism, Marxist Theory, and The Future of Socialism [7] are available for credit at most major university where neo-Marxists enjoy a veto over curriculums, careers and advancements. In these courses apologists are likely to ignore Communism’s murderous past. Ignorant of its history of blood and terror, young idealists are especially susceptible to its false promises.
Communism continues to stay alive because Communism has never been fully discredited like Nazism. In some Western elite circles the Socialist/Communist cause remains respectable, because the “idea was and is noble.” American universities in particular have been complicit not only in masking and sanitizing Communism’s past but promoting its core beliefs.
There was always a sizable contingent of leftist and Marxists in American Universities but today they dominate the academic world to an unprecedented degree. Conservative professors constitute a small minority, perhaps no more than 10 percent on average, of the teaching faculties. Leftist professors have a free hand to brainwash young students with revisionist history scrupulously avoiding the black deeds of Communism. The end result is a deplorable ignorance of Communism’s true legacy.
The disciples of the Frankfurt school have achieved their aim. Its leading proponent, a Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, believed that if Communists could slowly subvert a culture by gaining control of the organs of culture —education, newspapers, film, magazines, the electronic media, serious literature, music, the visual arts, and so on —they will win.
Only those who have suffered under Communism are capable of deciphering the slogans of the demagogues. They are the only witnesses able to see through the fog of promises and detect the signs of rising tyrants. Unfortunately, as we move away from the history of Communists atrocities and experiences of the Gulag, the number of those who remember and are willing to speak out is getting smaller and smaller. Solzhenitsyn who saw it all coming was right when he said: “It is as if the West does not want to know the truth, until the moment when this knowledge has ceased to be of use.”
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Bio:
Jaroslaw (Slavko) Martyniuk is a retired sociologist whose career encompassed a variety of positions in the private and public sectors. Born in Ukraine, Slavko’s family fled Communism and ended up in Chicago, Illinois. Over the years he worked for Amoco Oil, the International Energy Agency in Paris, and Radio Liberty in Munich. He is fluent in Ukrainian, French, Polish, Russian and Belarusian.
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[1] The number varies and depends if you include only gulag prisoners or those who were merely exiled.
[2] Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, p. 17
[3] In his book, At the Brink, economist and author John R. Lott Jr., recalls conversations with Barak Obama regarding gun laws they had while working at the University of Chicago. In Chapter Three, Mr. Lott discusses gun-control and takes the reader back to his time at the University of Chicago, where he and then-professor Barack Obama spoke on numerous occasions about guns in America. "I don't believe people should be able to own guns," Obama told Lott one day at the University of Chicago Law School.
[4] Consider a comment Obama made during his first campaign for office in 1995. Obama was teaching classes in community organizing for ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons. A reporter for the Chicago Reader sat in on one of his New Horizons classes and heard Obama say:
“In America we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”
[5] Professor Emeritus Kenneth Minogue, a thinker and political philosopher at the London School of Economics
[6] Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. In German, "Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!"
[7] Portland University, Kent State, New York University, UCLA, UC Riverside, UMass Amherst, and University of Utah all have courses in Marxism