Hints of Totalitarianism

by

Gadfly

           What is totalitarianism?  The Oxford dictionary defines it as “a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.  Wikipedia provides a more comprehensive description:

Totalitarianism is a political system or a form of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life.  It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.  Political power in totalitarian states has often been held by autocrats which employ all-encompassing propaganda campaigns broadcast by state-controlled mass media.

  

Examples of autocrats are V. I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro.


           America’s political left wants us to believe President Donald J. Trump is such an autocrat and thus a threat to America and the rest of the free world.  After all, the left (i.e., House Democrats) impeached him without a single Republican vote last night.  No crimes were listed in the charges, just abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.  Technically and more precisely, the obstruction was resistance to the abuse of power by the Democrat Party.  The effort was so overwhelming and compelling, by Democrat standards, that the Speaker is now considering not sending the articles of impeachment to the Republican-controlled Senate unless she and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer can dictate the terms for the trial.  Of course, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the majority of Republicans in the Senate do not find the Democrat case for impeachment to be enough, let alone appropriate, for exercising the power of impeachment.
  

Despite three years of investigations and propaganda by the left, they still believe “the evidence to support what they want to believe is still yet to be found.”  Like true totalitarians, they also believe only one Party should be in control.  As Douglas Hyde (author of I Believed) and other Communist Party members clearly believed, it was the company line that mattered—facts did not need to get in the way.

As most will recall, from day one, President Trump was assaulted by leaks and anonymous sources in series after series of articles critical of his personality and agenda.  This phenomenon is not unique.  It has been tried and tested by ideologues for a long time, especially Marxists.  A former member of the American Communist Party and editor of the Daily Worker, Louis Francis Budenz explained how these tactics were used in his book The Techniques of Communism, published in 1954  Here is a lengthy excerpt (for its historical significance and for the extent of ideological infiltration) from the Chapter, “The Role of the Communist Press” (Note:  Budenz’s mention of “conspiracy” refers to Communist infiltration):

There is one practice of the Communist press which must be known if we are properly to appraise what it is up to.  It is the accumulation of a series of articles around a given subject.  It is used at times in order to cover up the Communist designs in vague phraseology, these being clarified and made definite by articles which follow up on the same topic.  The Communist functionary has this constantly in mind, and of course reads all Communist material as a whole.  It is only by doing as he does that the full content of certain official directives can be intelligently studied.

When in 1936, the American Politburo decided to support Franklin D. Roosevelt for president, the announcement was not made bluntly, and most of the country did not know that this was the Communist policy.  The official Red declarations accomplished this purpose by saying a few words critical of Roosevelt and then assaulting his opponents—the Liberty League and the “Hearst-McCormick-Patterson axis”—as “Fascists” and enemies of American liberties.  In accompanying articles, both in The Communist and in the Daily Worker, rising to higher tones of stridency as the campaign went on, the denunciations became centered entirely on the president’s opponents.  In this wise, concealed Communists in all sorts of organizations did everything in their power for the election of Mr. Roosevelt, swaying hundreds of thousands to favor him.  The sole cause for this attitude was that Moscow had divined that Mr. Roosevelt would be more favorable than his opponents to saving Soviet Russia from the Hitlerite regime which the Communists had helped to create.  But, as is always the Communist custom and as the CIO committees state in their findings against Red-ruled unions, this real object of the fifth column was hidden in a welter of charges against Roosevelt’s opposition on domestic issues.

And so in 1953, the “Resolution on the Situation Growing Out of Presidential Elections,” issued by the National Committee in February and July, 1953, would be almost unintelligible were it not for the articles in Political Affairs accompanying the resolution.  Without those articles, it could be seen that the Communists (taking advantage of the Trojan Horse policy in Moscow) plan to penetrate anew the Democratic and Republican parties.  This could be understood from the conclusion that the two-party system is still strongly entrenched in the United States and that the Communists must recognize this reality.  It could be gleaned from the statements indicating that “McCarthyism” is the main menace and that “pressure” must be exercised on certain politicians to combat this danger to the conspiracy.  It could be caught sight of in the declaration that “the masses” still cling to the Democratic Party, and that the Communists must not remain aloof from “the masses.”  But the official resolution becomes more sharply understandable in reading two concurrent articles, “Labor and the Democratic Party” and “The Anatomy of McCarthyism.”  From the former I must repeat what I have quoted earlier in this chapter: “The left today in any event needs urgently to reacquaint itself with the real situation in the local and state Democratic parties (and in many areas the Republican party).”  There is also instruction for “the left forces in the CIO and AF of L (as well as in independent unions) to explore new possibilities for united labor action in the legislative and electoral field.”  All of this is for the purpose of advancing in a “pro-peace direction” (that is, in the “peace direction” which Moscow desires) and to compel large sections of the Democratic party to speak out “for an all-out struggle against McCarthy and his crowd.”

From the second contribution, we learn definitely: “The immediate and broadest rallying ground in the struggle for democratic liberties in the fight against McCarthyism.  This means the fight against Joe McCarthy the individual, against each and every McCarthyite—the Jenners, Veldes, and McCarrans—and against all manifestations of McCarthyism.”  This fight is to take place everywhere, but particularly “in the political field.”  (For an intelligent examination of this matter, consult Political Affairs for June and July, 1953.)

From these directives, it is plain that the Soviet fifth column in mid-1953 planned to penetrate the Democratic party (especially its “liberal” wing, to which definite reference is made) and also areas of the Republican party.  The objective of this penetration was to halt all effective action against the conspiracy, which is labeled “McCarthyism,” and even to punish anyone who would dare oppose the conspiracy.  How far the Communists plan to go is exemplified by an editorial in the Daily Worker of July 30, 1953, entitled: “Expel the Stool Pigeons.”  This declaration demands nothing less than the discharge from his position of any person daring to testify at Congressional inquiries or elsewhere against the Soviet fifth column.  This bears out the contention that many of those who cry out about “academic freedom” and “civil liberties” in defense of the Communists, in the majority of cases have no interest in these topics.  They are bound by their Communist viewpoint that the civil liberties of all non-Communists must be destroyed.  They are bound immediately by the Daily Worker directives that all those acting against the conspiracy must be deprived of a livelihood.

In addition to the official publications mentioned, the Communists have built up auxiliary magazines and newspapers in the United States, as they do in all other countries.  One of the best known of these in the U.S.A. is Masses and Mainstream, published for the intellectuals at the same address at which Political Affairs is published.  Another pro-Stalinite voice, with considerable influence, is Science and Society, a quarterly devoted to the Marxist interpretation of higher intellectual subjects.  A number of foreign language dailies and weeklies, issued in almost every immigrant tongue, reach out into the “language communities,” and follow the line laid down by the Daily Worker. On the West coast is issued the Peoples World, a localized edition of the Red daily organ published in New York.  The Daily Freiheit, issued in the Yiddish language, is the second largest Red organ in circulation, after the Daily Worker, and is edited and printed in the same building with that paper.

Through these many channels, the Communist Party is able to transmit Moscow’s orders in the most diversified and speediest fashion.  By the uniformity of line which is established, and the readiness with which this line goes out of the Communist press into other journals, the publications under Moscow’s control are among the most powerful in this country.  They have not yet had the effect they had hoped for among “the backward masses,” for the man in the street in this country has shown an instinctive abhorrence for the Communist cause and its line which many others, far better educated, might well have imitated. The strength of the Red press, it must be repeated, lies in moving concealed Communists and their allies to prevail upon non-Communist organizations to speak out for the Kremlin’s position at any given time (pp. 146-149).

There are three major take-aways from this excerpt.  First, unlike the recent impeachment whistleblower, Budenz relates first-hand experience.  Second, Communists clearly backed and campaigned for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ushered in today’s monolithic administrative state (the centralization of power and its extreme control over public—i.e., the emasculation of President Trump—and private life through excessive regulatory control that Trump is working to reduce).  Third, what we know of McCarthyism is more folklore than fact, thanks in no small part to the propaganda campaign waged by American Communists in concert with Democrats.  For more on this, read M. Stanton Evans book, Blacklisted by History:  The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy.  Evans threads together substantial documentary evidence to show significant collaboration between Communists and Democrats to thwart McCarthy’s effort to prove significant Communist infiltration (conspiracy) of American institutions.  American Communists are still at work.  They thrive today, see my article The Socialist Infiltration of America.

One other take-away not obvious from the above excerpt is that, while the centralized Communist line went away with the dissolution of the Communist International in Moscow, the Marxist ideology and its organizational and communications infrastructure are still in place.  The ideology is the organizing principle, much like militant Islamism. 

As I have written elsewhere (see for example America’s Dreyfus Affair), hatred and contempt are critical features of a political movement such as America’s current progressive movement (clearly Marxist by its manifested nature).  The means are in support of achieving ultimate political power.  The left fully expected to win the American presidential election in 2016.  We are learning more and more about the immoral means used to achieve it.  Then, there was the Mueller investigation.  When that failed, the left manufactured another means—impeachment.  I suspect Comrade, correction, Speaker Pelosi never read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.  Arendt explained how the Dreyfus Affair signaled the hatred and contempt that contributed to the conditions for the emergence of totalitarianism.

Many Republicans and the general public (the “backward masses” Budenz cites above) have seen enough over the past three years to truly understand that what President Trump believed, with his Make America Great Again agenda, is the importance of restoring our Constitutional Republic as a critical measure to prevent totalitarian urges by the left.