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The History of Communism Must Not Be Repeated
To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism
By Sean McMeekin
(Basic Books, 544 pages, $27)
“Political power” — Communist political power — does, as Chairman Mao said, grow “out of the barrel of a gun.” Historian Sean McMeekin’s latest book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, vividly recounts this violent history, as it played out on the world stage through propaganda, the exacerbation of crises, provocation of civil wars, and, finally, putsches.
The publisher is to be commended for giving us this work of real scholarship about a subject that has become dominated by Communist sympathizers.
As he writes in the early pages, “The real secret of Marxism-Leninism, as the reigning doctrine of Communism was called after 1917, was not that Marx and Lenin had discovered an immutable law of history driven by ever-intensifying ‘class struggle,’ but that Lenin had shown how Communist revolutionaries could exploit the devastation of war to seize power by force.”
Communism Through the Years
The 500-page volume expands on the material in Richard Pipes’ slim classic, Communism: A History, published nearly a quarter of a century ago. Unlike Pipes, McMeekin is not sanguine about Communism’s end after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having witnessed Communism’s persistence over the past few decades, McMeekin tackles new sources to provide original insights and buttress existing knowledge.
After briefly recounting the origins of communistic thought among the ancients and early Christians, McMeekin turns to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who are often lumped together in a simplistic mantra of “Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx.”
Rousseau, however, “was not, quite, a Communist.” It was actually Étienne-Gabriel Morelly’s “critique of social inequality” in his Code of Nature that was “made into dogma by Soviet academics” and inspired the French socialist tradition, through François-Noël Babeuf, guillotined in 1797, after his failed putsch. Babeuf’s co-conspirator Philippe Buonarroti’s “memoir-history” memorializing Babeuf’s “Conspiracy for Equality,” sold over 50,000 copies.
Hegel (1770-1831), the second member of the trio did, indeed, influence Marx. However, Hegel channeled Rousseau’s “’general will’ in a more conservative direction,” McMeekin explains. Marx latched onto Hegel’s idea of a dialectical process, but inverted Hegel’s view of Christian historical progression as the “consciousness of freedom” that ushered in “the modern concept of ‘equality before the law’ and the ‘rights of person and property.’” Marx denigrated religion as “opium of the people.” (READ MORE from Mary Grabar: Black Anti-Communists Have Been Memory–Holed)
Although Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) criticized “’the philosophers’” for having “’only interpreted the world,’” and not changed it, Marx himself “came to believe in Communism … not out of real-world experience, but by applying the Hegelian dialectic to his historical studies (mostly of the French Revolution).” Nor was Marx concerned about the working class.
In 1845, during his first trip to Manchester and London with his patron Friedrich Engels, he lobbed charges of “ignorance” at a tailor. His emphasis on the primacy of doctrine arose from the belief that workers lacked intellectual sophistication. Marx is the Marxist revolutionary prototype: a self-deluded, isolated “intellectual” with contempt for others.
But Marx’s seeming ability to simplify Hegel and turn a pithy phrase, along with lucky timing — his Communist Manifesto was sent to the printers in February 1848, “just days before Paris erupted once again in revolution” — led to its success. The original German was translated into French that spring, and then into English in 1850, followed by translations in all the main European languages. It has remained in print ever since.
Similarly, although the thesis in Capital (“about the ever-diminishing bargaining power of labor and the accumulation of capital in fewer and fewer hands”) was “demolished” over the next few decades, Marx’s vague moral critique — “’expropriators are expropriated’” — was “hypnotic,” and his prophecy of “’revolution in France’” seemed to be fulfilled in the 1871 Paris Commune.
Communism, in spite of whiplash-inducing shifts by party leaders, could not tolerate criticism, such as that by Mikhail Bakunin, who questioned the “’dictatorial power of this learned minority, which supposedly expresses the will of the people,’” and Eduard Bernstein, who pointed out in Neue Zeit (1896-1898) that farmers did not want collectivization.
But organizations, such as the International Working Men’s Association that Marx created and then killed off, were turned into legends to inspire future generations. Communists infiltrated and subverted reform parties and unions time and again.
Deceit and old-fashioned violence were the keys to revolutionary success. In 1905, revolutionary instigators capitalized on the Japanese victory over Russia. “Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin of the ‘Bolshevik,’ or majority faction, and Julius Martov of the ‘Menshevik,’ or minority, faction — were in exile when Cossacks and Imperial Guard troops fired into a massive crowd in St. Petersburg on ‘Bloody Sunday,’ January 22, 1905, killing 200 people and wounding another 800.”
Lenin and Martov returned in November 1905 — “after most of the revolutionary drama had played out.” Among the younger activists making “hay on the ground” were Joseph Stalin, “a rough-and-ready Georgian activist who organized a Bolshevik Battle Squad in Baku, and Leon Trotsky, a twenty-six-year-old Menshevik firebrand from Kherson, Ukraine.”
Marxist revolutionaries claimed credit for a spontaneous labor walkout in September that shut down the country’s communications. But the resulting first-ever Russian parliament (Duma) and labor unions did not fit with the revolutionaries’ aims.
The “outbreak of war in August 1914,” however, provided the opportunity for Lenin to transform “’the imperialist war into civil war’” and bring down the government, as Marx prophesied. (READ MORE: FDR and the Democrats’ Unmatched Undemocratic Ways)
Tsar Nicholas’s error of abdicating to his brother Michael, instead of sticking to original orders with loyalist soldiers after violence broke out on International Women’s Day, 1917, aided the effort.
Germany was also eager to help Lenin. Swiss socialist Fritz Platten coordinated Lenin’s trip home from Switzerland and with the Germans “released a cover story, parroted by credulous journalists (and repeated to this day by incurious historians), that Lenin’s train car was ‘sealed’ and would not open its doors while crossing Germany, satisfying ‘extraterritoriality’ requirements, enabling Lenin to deny that Germans had organized his trip.” German funds also allowed Lenin to buy a printing press to print notices encouraging soldiers and sailors to mutiny, and other propagandistic material.
Another strategic error came from Russia’s provisional government leader, Alexander Kerensky: he falsely believed and accused his general Lavr Kornilov of treason, and lost the support of loyal troops.
After winning victory over the Kerensky government and the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks created the “’the Soviet of People’s Commissars’” and abolished “’private ownership of land,’ granted amnesty to Bolshevik prisoners, and ended Russia’s war against the Central Powers.”
Soon came censorship, collectivization, purges, starvation, arrest, imprisonment, forced labor, execution, and cruelties against all class enemies down to children. Such horrors are often glossed over in other histories, but McMeekin does not glance away. Covering the reign of terror from Russia, Eastern European satellites, Spain, China, Africa, Cuba, Central and South America, and Indonesia, he then draws attention to 1970s Cambodia, under China-educated Pol Pot.
The objective of creating the “‘perfect communist country’” (Pol Pot’s “‘year zero’ ambition”) meant, as an escapee recounted, “no schools, no money, no communications, no books, no courts” and constant surveillance. McMeekin describes a veritable Land of the Living Dead: “free-willed humans” reduced “to animals, enslaved by robotic, heavily armed children who had themselves been deprived of any kind of genuine education, human warmth, or feeling.”
Yet, many Westerners presented it as part of the “general tragedy of Indochina.” Reporter Sydney Schanberg, who first broke the story only in 1980, called Cambodia “’a surrogate Cold War battlefield.’” In 2018, Max Hastings, in Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, claimed that “the U.S. and North Vietnam shared responsibility for the tragedy that engulfed Cambodia.”
Communism Survives
By the final decade of the Cold War, Western journalists were more interested in the “spheres of international competition such as the Olympics, the arms race, and the convening of [Soviet-sponsored] ‘peace congresses’ and ‘nuclear freeze’ demonstrations.” Communists continued to disregard the well-being of their people, as evidenced by the doping of Olympic athletes and the persecution of Jews, followed by their “selling” for a bounty to Western governments.
The implosion of the Soviet Union resulted from its governmental and economic system, and Gorbachev’s Kerensky-like bad military decisions — but critically from President Reagan’s outmaneuvering the Soviets with military buildup, encouragement of oil production by Saudi Arabia, and support for the anti-Soviet Afghan forces.
But in China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos, Communist parties continue to rule. China today illustrates the fact that business investments do not change the essential reality of state control of “the means of production.” Western trade has strengthened China’s military power — just as American business investments in 1930s Russia helped arm Stalin for his future conquests.
Kirkus Review’s claim that McMeekin is retreading the ground covered by Pipes and Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009) is without merit. McMeekin’s reading of new German, Russian, and English-language sources — published and archival — uncovers much new information.
For example, about the much-vaunted “Patriotic War,” Stalin was not “surprised” by Hitler’s “betrayal” in June 1941. Like Hitler, Stalin had stepped up war preparations to the point where he had a five-to-one advantage in tanks, seven-to-one in warplanes, and an even greater one in artillery. Yet, the German Luftwaffe nearly destroyed the Soviet air force on the ground.
What was Stalin’s response (besides demanding help from Roosevelt)? To have Red Army soldiers shot for being captured (as about 300,000 Red Army soldiers were during the course of the war), and their wives and children sent to gulags. The great “Patriotic War” was won at the cost of 30 million dead, with half being civilians, and, crucially, with the limitless gifts of Lend-Lease, including enriched uranium and other materials used in Stalin’s atomic bomb program.
McMeekin also provides little-known facts, such as the longtime persecution of Jews; ongoing collaboration with fascist leaders, such as the selling of arms to Franco (used against American volunteers of the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” some 500 of whom were executed by the Soviets); Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito’s Stalin-like crimes.
McMeekin also documents Winston Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s codification of slave labor at Yalta; Churchill’s abandonment of Draža Mihailović for Tito and his shameful invitation to Tito to visit London in 1953; Stalin’s machinations in China, which included helping the Japanese defeat Chiang’s Nationalists; Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 for crimes against fellow Communists; and the promotion of “socialist feminism” for “soft-power appeal.”
McMeekin rightly notes that the “heady moments” of 1989 and 1991 gave false promise “that the fall of Communism would usher in an era of greater civil liberties and freedoms worldwide.” Instead, as the Covid pandemic showed, most of the Western world is willing to follow “a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist governance and social life,” with “Communist-Chinese-style surveillance.”
I would add another aspect: the use of violence to provoke civil war and to silence opposition. Since establishing headquarters in New York City in 1919, Communists have been trying to stoke a war between white Americans and black Americans. They began in the 1920s by proposing a black nation in the American South, which they promoted during the 1930s Depression years and 1960s Black Power years. Black Lives Matter is openly Marxist.
Antifa, a Marxist organization pretending to be “antifascist” (as did past Communists!) is often permitted by government forces to terrorize one party. China is funding violent protests and pro-China curricula. The vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket has disturbing ties to China.
McMeekin warns about the continuing appeal of Communism, with promises of “social justice” for young idealists, and, for politicians, “an all-encompassing state granting them vast power over their subjects.”
The publisher is to be commended for giving us this work of real scholarship about a subject that has become dominated by Communist sympathizers.
To Overthrow the World is the kind of book that should be on everyone’s bookshelf. You will turn to it again and again.
The post The History of Communism Must Not Be Repeated appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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