PrintJanuary 22, 2011
The Taming of the Masses
One of the most dangerous strategies of the totalitarians in our midst is the deliberate confusion they create around the notion of totalitarianism. Only a fraction of "educated" people know that so-called "right-wing" fascists and "left-wing" socialists historically occupy the same end of the sociopolitical spectrum. The reason most people don't know this is because for eighty years, the "left" has engaged in a campaign to disguise the fact that it is fundamentally a totalitarian movement.
It all started back in the 1930s. While the Soviet communists of that era had a different way of dealing with economic production, their Marxist-Leninist approach to politics, law, civil society, and the masses under their control was for the most part indistinguishable from how the Nazis handled such matters. For both of these totalitarian regimes, it was dictatorship from the top and rigid regimentation throughout the ranks of society -- of what people learned, what people said, and how people lived their lives.
Beginning in the 1930s, at Stalin's direction, communists in the West publicly began to proclaim that they were on the opposite end of the sociopolitical spectrum from what we now call the "fascist" or "right-wing" movements of Europe. In fact, the Fascisti in Italy, the Nazis in Germany, and the Communists in the Soviet Union were all socialists. But the Soviet-backed communists in Europe became embroiled in a deadly power struggle over which socialist party was going to rule the European masses. So they decided to delegitimize the other socialist parties. This was expedited by the simple but effective Orwellian label "counter-revolutionary," which placed any number of socialist groups on the opposite end of the sociopolitical spectrum from the European communists, who by self-anointment became the "true" socialists. To cement this distinction, the Communists started calling themselves "left-wing" revolutionaries and labeled anyone who did not accept their claim to supremacy "right-wing" reactionaries.
Most twentieth-century history books accept the false "left-wing" label propagated by communists and socialists. They teach that European communists of the 1930s were ultimately suppressed by the Nazis and the Fascisti and that the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan thereafter went on the killing spree we call World War II. According to this version of history, the "left-wing" Soviet socialists were attacked by the "right-wing" Nazi fascists, and the Soviet military swung into action in June of 1941 to defend itself from "right-wing" aggression.
This deceptive narrative, however, ignores the fact that in 1939, the "left-wing" Soviet socialists happily joined the "right-wing" Nazi socialists in carving up northern and Eastern Europe into various spheres of influence, on the basis of which the Soviets invaded and occupied Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia. They did this by threats and military might, which is exactly how the "right-wing" Nazi socialists invaded and occupied France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Moreover, the Soviet socialists maintained their hegemony in the conquered lands in the same way as the Nazi socialists -- through force, fear, and repression.
By the time World War II ended, the Soviet Union sat astride nearly half of Europe, and for the next half-century, the "left-wing" socialists in Europe, with the help of Soviet troops, kept tens of millions of people in thrall in the name of socialism. In the West, including the United States, a rational apprehension regarding the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union and its satellite socialist regimes precipitated what came to be called the Cold War. The West's military power was able to stymie the imperialistic ambitions of the Soviet Union and its socialist allies in many parts of the world. But while the West was busy doing that, "left-wing" socialist forces were busy burrowing into the fabric of Western society in a determined effort to destroy the West from within.
In America, starting in 1919, the Communist Party U.S.A. and various allied socialist parties and political front groups operated in lockstep with the Soviet Union. They planted spies and fellow travelers in government, the media, academia, the science community, labor unions, and everywhere else they could gain power and influence. Documents from the Venona Project reveal just how deeply some of these "fifth-columnists" penetrated into the fabric of American society.
But these early Soviet-style socialists were only the first wave of a subversive operation that continues to this day. The second wave began in earnest in the 1960s, and it now threatens to engulf the entire Western world. Its shock troops are cultural Marxists (described here, here, here, here and here). Although they like to call themselves socialists, progressives, or liberals, they belong to the same totalitarian movement as their Soviet socialist precursors, and they seek the same socio-political outcome -- an international socialist government with the power to dictate how people live. Instead of a Soviet-style dictatorship of the proletariat, however, they seek a United Nations-style dictatorship of unelected cultural elites, aided and abetted by a legion of faceless bureaucrats accountable only to them.
Given that their agenda is an affront to the very idea of freedom, it is remarkable how successful the cultural Marxists have been at concealing the totalitarian nature of their ideology. Of course, they hide the truth quite cleverly. They cultivate the historical fiction that they are on the "left wing" of the sociopolitical spectrum, loudly proclaiming their devotion to compassion, equality and social justice, while viciously characterizing those who oppose their shenanigans as selfish and mean-spirited "right-wingers" who care only for their own power and privilege.
But the actions of the cultural Marxists tell quite a different story. They practice identity politics, which is all about "divide and conquer" at the expense of civic harmony. They advocate expanding the control of government over people's lives, which can be achieved only at the expense of individual liberty. They govern by compulsion rather than persuasion. They pretend to value personal initiative, but they routinely discourage it in favor of bureaucratic conformity. Instead of rewarding personal merit, they erect a barrier of institutionalized mediocrity behind which the ruling elite can take shelter from truly independent thinkers. All of these things are done, say the cultural Marxists, in order to fashion a better world. But their rationale rings hollow, for the tactics they use are the ones tyrants have used through the ages in order to secure power.
Taming the masses is the name of the game for tyrants, and they play that game with ruthless determination. For the last sixty years, cultural Marxists have been indoctrinating American students with moral and cultural relativism, spoon-feeding them anti-American propaganda, and depriving them of the knowledge they need to recognize the obsession with power that lies beneath the Marxist mask of cultural sensitivity. Those students now occupy positions of great influence in America, and they are leading tens of millions of kindhearted Americans into a future where people must willingly accept the dictatorial rule of a small group of elites or be forced to pay with their lives and their prosperity. For the people who know the history and understand the threat, the time has come to call out the fraudulent "left-wing" cultural Marxists and show the people of America that beneath the veneer of their rhetoric is the reality of "right-wing" totalitarianism. If it isn't done soon, the people of America will be tamed by the tyrants in our midst, and the Founding Fathers' dream of a free people who can govern themselves in a righteous Republic will come to an inglorious end.
Jed Gladstein is an attorney, author, and educator.
