If you are a baby boomer it may seem to you, as it does to me, that your kids and grandkids are oblivious to the insidious nature of communism. I’ll bet you’ve seen that ‘What’re you talkin’ about, old man?’ look. The one we all get when we mention communism. What that look means is that they want you to grow up. The bogeymen you fought in Korea or Viet Nam were never real. Your government made them up so that they could get you to go off and fight for oil or rubber or whatever the hell their indoctrinators are telling them this semester. They can’t believe you would shoot people or drop bombs on them simply because they held political beliefs that differed with yours. It wasn’t like they were polluting the air or wearing fur or something.

It is an unfortunate truism that in war it is the flower of a nation that gets killed off in the fighting. While the best of my generation were getting shot up in Viet Nam the sluggards of my generation were taking over our educational system. Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill and shallow minded egotists of their type by the hundreds infiltrated our schools to indoctrinate our kids in communism and anarchy. They told them that communism was simply a political and economic system with extraordinarily high ideals. Which is true. But they only taught about the utopian dream and never the truth that only human butchery and dictatorships have ever flourished in the name of the communist dream. They never mentioned that slaughter and oppression have gone hand in hand everywhere communism has reared its head. They scrupulously avoided any mention that communism requires the masses to become drones of the State and that the very children sitting in their classes were being molded by their teachers to become those drones.

Real communism and its dangers have not been taught in our schools because we, The People, have failed to demand it. Already more than a full generation of indoctrinated graduates have flooded into the media with disastrous effect. Few of them would know the difference between a communist and the good fairy. They are incapable of seeing the dangers of communism which makes it impossible for them to report on those dangers. It is up to us, the parents, the adults who’ve lived and seen the reality, to teach our children and grandchildren the things that the schools will not teach them about communism. We must do that, first of all, in our homes. But just as importantly we must extend that information across the internet where millions of other young people can see it. I will begin doing that with this post and intend to follow up with additional perspective.


Communism; The Fantasy

Unless you are an anarchist you instinctively understand that governments are essential for the preservation of order in a society. Two types of government, along with hundreds of variations on their themes, have been most notable in history. First and most prominent is the “big man” style of leadership. They include chiefs, princes, dictators, kings and so on. Next would be the participatory forms of government in which the People have a voting interest or other means of direct representation. Parliamentary and democratic governments fall into that category.

Both of these systems have their ideal models. In the big man system we dream of the perfectly wise and benevolent leader whose only concern is for the good of his People. We only find ideal kings like that in fairy tales and the Bible. Admittedly the big man system occasionally does produce decent leadership but just as often it produces brutes and thugs who make no attempt to relate to the conditions of the People they are supposed to be serving.

The nearest to an ideal participatory form of government yet devised is the American Constitutional Republic. But it has proven, just as it founders predicted, to be vulnerable on a number of points. Self-interest, greed, incompetence and lust for power have all taken their toll in undermining the ideal of “democracy”. In fact one of the most debilitating factors in the decline of our republic is that it is sliding into a full out democracy. Everyone in a democracy is allowed to vote without qualification. The founding fathers understood that a pure democracy in which everyone is allowed to vote could not survive. We are now in the process of demonstrating to history how right they were. More will be said on that later.

Most of us think that communism is a form of government. It isn’t. It is a system of economics. The reason we think of it as a form of government is that it can only exist under the control of a centralized governing system. In the ideal communist system every citizen works for the common good. In other words everything that a citizen produces is collected by the central authority – the State. The State then decides how all of the wealth it has collected will be redistributed to the People. The goal of this utopian dream is to rid its society of all class distinctions. Every member of the community would receive an equal share of the national wealth. And if his needs exceeded his fair share those needs would be tended to as well. It is a system that would at last achieve the age-old quests for human equality and freedom from want.

Sounds reasonable. Sounds simple. Sounds wonderful. Why, then, has communism never achieved anything like its promise of Nirvana? It never has and never will achieve Utopia because its principles are faulty and failure is built directly into the philosophy. Off the top of my head I can name four absolute contradictions to fact and human nature that are built into the communist philosophy and make it an impossible dream. I’ll address one of them here and the others in future posts.


Failure #1: Equality vs. Freedom

The seeds of the communist philosophy were planted during the French Revolution. The revolution occurred under conditions heavily influenced by three factors. First the American Revolution had just succeeded - giving the French a thirst for their own self-determination. The second factor was that the Age of Enlightenment was underway and philosophical and political ideologies were developing in their infancy. The third factor was that the French People were living in abject poverty within an atmosphere of class oppression. Powder kegs were everywhere and the sparks were flying.

This peculiar mix of influences caused a very different sort of political/economic philosophy to develop than what had developed in the American colonies. Where freedom, especially economic freedom, had been the number one priority in the American Revolution the first concern of the Frenchman was class hatred. They didn’t just hate the upper class. The hated the notion that classes should exist at all. They took the American affirmation that “all men are created equal” a major step further. Men were not simply CREATED equal but they were entitled to equal economic status throughout their lives. No man should be better off than the next man. In short class distinction had to be eliminated and that could only happen in the establishment of individual economic parity.

This concept was never formalized during the course of the revolution but the ideology behind it always lingered in the gun smoke and was carried on the banners that demanded; “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality”. The structure for a classless society would not be formalized until Marx and Engels put it on paper in “Das Kapital”. And, sure enough, their vision contained the glaring contradiction carried on the revolutionary banners that had recently inspired the mobs of Paris. The Marxist formula demanded the impossible. It demanded both freedom and equality.

You can have freedom in your government or you can have equality, but you cannot have both. If the government insists that I must share everything that is mine with others who have not earned their own – I do not have freedom. If the government tells me I cannot achieve higher financial status than my neighbor – I do not have freedom. If, on the other hand, the government grants me true freedom I will achieve things my neighbor would never attempt and I will keep my gains for myself and so much for equality. Marx, therefore, clearly insisted on the absolute contradiction that his system could provide both freedom and equality. A century and a half later hardly a soul has noticed this glaring contradiction.

All of Europe continues to labor under the belief that it is government’s responsibility to equalize the economic standing of the individual. Europeans are willing, up to a point, to share the greater portion of their earnings in order to minimize class disparity through redistribution. They call it noble. I call it misguided. It isn’t communism, of course, it’s only socialism. But like communism, socialism denies the true nature of humankind and stays to the path of social destruction. We are on that path in America now ourselves. The point of no return is nationalized health care.