When I grew up in the sixties and early seventies, there were two worlds - the United States and the Soviet Union. Europe and the UK were sort of in, sort of out with their various flavors of "democratic socialism" and China was a third world backwater, so never really a factor in our thinking.
It was really about the two major land masses that had the most nukes and the methods to deliver them over sufficient distances.
There was a clear line between freedom and autocracy, and the demarcations between the systems of free enterprise and communism were distinct. We had borders, walls and fences to keep people out, they had borders, walls and fences to keep people in.
That world still exists today, except those same divisions and differences from my childhood are now here inside the United States.
Like the old horror movie dialog goes, “The call is coming from inside the house!”
A couple of years ago, I wrote how in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev uttered the oft misunderstood quote “We will bury, you!” speaking of the eventual defeat of democracy and capitalism. On August 24, 1963, Khrushchev himself remarked, “I once said, ‘We will bury you,’ and I got into trouble with it. Of course, we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.” – a reference to the Marxist saying, “The proletariat is the undertaker of capitalism”.
Ole Nikki was wrong, and badly so.
The working class isn’t burying America. It’s the laptop bourgeoise.
Rather than people who put on gloves and grab a shovel, a hammer, or a cutting torch to work in factories, farms, construction, energy, and small businesses, it is the giant corporations and a college educated managerial class that make up an authoritarian bourgeois. The revolutionaries are not waving shovels and pitchforks, they are waving keyboards and diplomas from Harvard.
Look around. There is a significant Marxist movement, that much is true – but it largely consists of the strangest union of anarchists, reverse racists, and the laptop class (a large group of people made up of bureaucrats, academicians, lawyers, and people in the tech/service/information industries). Eighty percent of the BLM protests looked like people from accounting and law firms.
We have been so distracted by the forever wars since 9/11 that we allowed communism to infiltrate our academic institutions, our government, and the bureaucracy. It came in on tiny little cat’s feet.
One wonders if one of Mussolini’s favorite economists, Robert Michels, was right when he promulgated his “Iron Law of Oligarchy”.
In his 1911 book, Political Parties, Michels, the German syndicalist, sociologist and fascist, claimed rule by an elite, or “oligarchy “, is inevitable as an “iron law” within any democratic organization as part of the “tactical and technical necessities” of organization. He used anecdotes from political parties and trade unions, all that supported democratic reforms to build his argument. Michels particularly addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, stating:
“It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.”
Michels noted while the socialist parties of Europe of the times, despite their democratic ideology and provisions for mass participation, paradoxically seemed to be dominated by their leaders, as did the traditional conservative parties. The conclusion he drew was that the problem lay in the very nature of organizations – a more liberal and democratic modern era allowed the formation of organizations with innovative and revolutionary goals, but as such organizations become more complex, they became less and less democratic and revolutionary.
Back in the 50’s and early 60’s, we were concerned about that infiltration, but today open communists get elected, and it won’t be too much longer until they get their own day, week, or month of “visibility”.
Joe McCarthy was right.
Most, if not all of the people who were blackballed for being communist during the McCarthy Era were in reality, true communists.
Ann Coulter's book also exposed that McCarthy was partly right. His error being an underestimation of the level of communist infiltration. The useful
Idiots still abound.
When the wall came down I remember people saying that communism was dead, and the massive cuts the military underwent in manpower. At the time it seemed that nobody had read the history books to see how that had played out in the past. It seems our enemies read theirs, the call is definitely coming from inside the house.