PrintMay 23, 2008
How crypto-Marxism won the Cold War
Today, for the first time in American history we have two --- count 'em, two --- hard-core Leftists running for the Democrat Party nomination. The Left hasn't had this kind of chance for power since Truman defeated Henry Wallace in 1948. Hillary and Obama are Marx twins who only differ in race and gender.
All the media tell us is how great it is to have a woman and a black man running for president. What those two really believe, where they learned their quasi-religion, where they derive their support, who else they want to raise to power, and what they will do if they get there --- all that doesn't even get discussed. All over the world, Leftist hearts are leaping at Hillarybama. What exciting progress!
Wait a minute. Marxism lost the Cold War, right? The Soviet Empire came down, Eastern Europe was liberated, China is now semi-capitalist, and post-socialist countries like India are thriving like never before. More of the world is prospering, because economic and political freedoms have spread since the USSR crumbled. Even Russia has a low, flat tax to encourage free markets. Indigenous talents and enterprise are finally being liberated, and the results are wonderful for hundreds of millions of people.
Liberals are upset today because free-market economies are growing too fast, and are therefore polluting an unsullied Mamma Earth. Tens of millions of ordinary people in China and India are doing too well. The elites seem to yearn for the good old days --- the famines in India, the massacres in Russia and China --- and that wonderful sense of being in charge of human progress.
And yet ... in spite of years and years Leftist catastrophes, our organs of propaganda are still tilting drunkenly to the Left. Crypto-Marxism, a barely disguised revival of the old farce, is flourishing in our chattering classes. The prestige that Marxism lost in the real world soon came back in fantasy. Oh, if people only loved one another! Oh, if people only cared! Oh, if we only had real solidarity with the wretched of the earth! That's the feel-good story. But the real yearning is for power: Oh, if only people like us were in charge of everything.
In Britain, under the daily pounding of the Bolshie Beeb, the most admired "philosopher" of all time is now ... blood-dripping old Karl Marx. Freedom is routinely trashed; thieving tyrants like Hugo Chavez are celebrated.
"Crypto Marxism" --- crypto meaning "hidden" --- is a useful word to describe what's happened in the last twenty years. Because as soon as the Soviet Union crumbled, a host of barely disguised post-Marxist ideologies grabbed the microphones: the Green Movement, now furiously peddling global warming fraud; Third Way socialism in Europe, trying to hitch the welfare wagon to free markets; the European Union, a new autocracy of unelected committees, exactly what the USSR used to call "workers' Soviets"; the unbelievably corrupt, bigoted and self-serving United Nations; and all over the academic world, an explosion of anti-Western and anti-democratic fads like Post-Modernism, Multi-Culturalism, Deconstructionism, Feminism, anti-Zionism, Black Liberation Theology and other repackaged Marx imitations. It was a triumph of image-making and marketing.
Today, crypto-Marxism dominates our political discourse. It's wild --- just as if Nazi goose stepping had became a popular sport after World War Two, instead of the hula-hoop. The Nazis were horrific in their thirteen years in power. The Marxists had seventy years in the Soviet Union, and managed to kill 100 million people according to Marxist historians themselves. But here we are, twenty years later, and all that is deliberately wiped from our minds.
So --- who won the seventy-year struggle of the Cold War? We did in reality. The good guys really did triumph, and in the most profound way, going by Sun Tzu's Art of War --- not by waging a mega-war, but by constant political pressure, by far outrunning Marxist regimes economically, and by a spontaneous revulsion from within the Soviet Empire itself. Yet we fought many small wars --- and two large, bloody and unpopular ones, in Korea and Vietnam. The United States and a few allies faced down numerous Marxist threats in a very determined way. It was a huge test of our will to live and win.
And yet, today the New York Times makes a boutique specialty out of writing loving obits for flaming Old Reds, when they finally sputter out and die. No one on the American Left has ever expressed public sorrow for the estimated 100 million people killed by Marxist murderocracies; after all, they were murdered for "idealistic" reason. The crumbling of the Soviet Empire simply made it possible for the Left to walk away from Darth Vader and the Evil Empire. Soviet Union? Never heard of it.
As Rush Limbaugh often says, conservatives stopped teaching when the Soviet Union fell. Marxists, on the other hand, just accelerated their propaganda. Privately they mourned the "idealistic" experiment of the Soviet Union --- never confessing their own, whole-hearted participation in unrelenting evil. The Boomer Lefties rose to power in the 1970s, and they were not going to sacrifice their religiomania just because all the Marxist nations walked away from Marx. (Except for North Korea, which is still as murderously Stalinist as ever.)
In fact, without the Soviets our hard-core Leftists were no longer agents of a foreign power --- as the KGB archives showed that many of them were during decades of Moscow's control. So they could pretend to be running different "idealistic" movements: Red changed to Green, but that was it. The mainstream media learned to peddle that old Daily Worker agitprop instead of real news, until talk radio and the web broke the media monopoly, and conservatism revived. In Europe this is only barely beginning to happen.
Since 9/11 the Left has been telling itself how really patriotic it is --- providing that you redefine patriotism as internationalism, just like the old CP USA. And of course, the vitally important history of the Cold War is being written by the hard-core Left. It's just as if the Confederate South controlled the history of the Civil War.
Senator Joe Lieberman's fate shows what has happens to centrist Democrats: They are all but thrown out for deviationism, which is exactly what Josef Stalin used to do with the CP USA.
Both Obama and Hillary grew up on the Alinsky Left, which only a theologian can tell from orthodox Marxism. Coming out of Yale Law, Hillary joined a crypto Marxist law outfit in Oakland, California. David Horowitz, who was part of that world until he recovered his moral center, has been pretty clear about the real roots and goals of that Greater Berkeley network.
The triumph of crypto-Marxism is not just weird, it's dangerous. The Reds haven't changed. They have just metastatized: That is why we are now so vulnerable to the next wave of totalitarianism, the Islamofascist kind. The long struggle of Western civilization against bloody tyranny is being covered up. The very real danger of new totalitarianism is being dismissed.
We have to start teaching again from scratch.
Well, that's how it is.
Note to conservatives: You don't win a war until the histories are written.
Roll up your sleeves and go to it. There's work to do.
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com
