In 1936 I was 10 years old starting the 4th grade at Corpus Christi School in Dayton, Ohio. I sang in the choir and was an altar boy. I looked at the world through rose-colored glasses even though we were in the middle of the Great Depression that had cost my father his job and our family its nice house. The depression left my father scampering to support the family in a succession of short-lived dead-end jobs. We moved at least once every year in my childhood because we could not afford to buy a house and had to make do renting houses that the bank had foreclosed on. The bank, probably not unlike today, was trying to eke out a few dollars while they had the houses up for sale. Every time a potential buyer would come to see our latest home, my sister and I tried our best to highlight the house’s tragic faults. It never seemed to work. Nevertheless my sister and I survived the great depression and had a childhood (for the most part) free of want, free of fear, free of persecution and often (not always) full of fun. We were reliable Catholics and Roosevelt democrats. Money and sports were constant topics of conversation and dispute at our house, but never politics or religion. My favorite subject in the 4th grade was geography.
In 1936 I could find Russia on our classroom maps (the Soviet Union on our newest maps), but I had no notion what it was like there. I discovered much later that it was in 1936 that Josef Stalin launched the Great Terror. From 1936 to 1938 (while I was moving up to the 6th grade where my favorite subjects were arithmetic and poetry) Stalin personally signed death warrants for 39,000 people, many of them old acquaintances and some of them prominent Bolsheviks who had helped him gain power in the 1917 Revolution. Scholars say that at least one and a half million Russians were shot in the next two years, all on orders from Stalin. One of the most chilling of the stories of the 1930s is told by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich in his memoir, TESTIMONY.
“Since time immemorial, folk sings have wondered along the road of the Ukraine. They’re called Lirniki … They were almost always blind men-why that is so is another question that I won’t go into, but briefly, it’s traditional. The point is, they were always blind and defenseless people, but no one ever touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man-what could be lower? And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki was announced, and all the folk singers have to gather and discuss what to do in the future. ‘Life is better, life is merrier,’ Stalin had said. The blind men believed it. They came to the congress from all over the Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. There were several hundred of them at the congress. It was a living museum, the country’s living history. All its songs, all its music and poetry. And they were almost all shot, almost all of those pathetic blind men killed.”
There follows Part 2: THE RISE OF COMMUNISM from our new program WHAT’S TO BE DONE? A 10-part Guide to the 20th century Cold War and what it can teach us in the 21st century wars against radical Islam.
Part 2: The Rise of Communism
To understand the Cold War we need to go back not forty-three years, but at least one hundred and sixty years. In the middle of the 19th century the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism were rapidly making countries of Western Europe and North America the richest and most powerful nations on earth.
Workers, farmers and families of 19th century Western Europe and North America were richer, healthier and had longer lives than peasants, slaves and servants of all previous centuries. Many workers, however, were also more alienated from their work and their world. They could see more clearly now the gulf between their lives and those of the wealthy industrialists who owned and managed the new factories, mines and sweatshops. This combination of new wealth and new freedom coexisting with a breakdown of traditional religions and cultural values, newly perceived poverty and rampant exploitation paved the way for revolutionary change.
The most important catalyst for this change was a brilliant German scholar named Karl Marx. He wrote an influential book, Das Capital, in which he claimed to have discovered the scientific meaning of human history. Capitalism, he wrote, was the most powerful economic theory ever invented. And capitalism along with the industrial revolution was responsible for the greatest leap forward in human wealth in all history.
But history, Marx claimed, is a story of class warfare. In capitalism the new wealth is concentrated in a few hands, the owners of industry, the bourgeoisie. The workers, the proletariat he called them, are wage slaves. They would, his analysis showed, sink deeper and deeper into poverty until they rebelled and took power for themselves. They would then (with the leadership of the communist party) establish true socialist utopias where there were no longer any classes and where the means of production were owned by the workers. Production then will not be for profit, but for the welfare of all.
Marx along with a rich English industrialist partner, Frederick Engels, produced one of the most influential pamphlets ever written, The Communist Manifesto. The last paragraph of this pamphlet promised …
“The communists disdain to conceal their views. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, Unite!”
Thus did Marx and Engels set the tone and the bible for what some would call a new secular religion–communism. Marx did not call communism a religion. To him all religions were “the opiate of the people.” But communism, for its true believers, was indeed very like many religions of the past.
“I had the feeling,” wrote the famous Russian communist Leon Trotsky, “I was joining a great chain as a tiny link.” The infamous Russian dictator Stalin said that his communist faith “was not only a theory of socialism: it’s an entire world view, a philosophic system.” The British Marxist historian, Raphael Samuel put it this way: ” The ambitions of the Communist Party were unmistakably theocratic … Reports were handed down with all the majesty of encyclicals and studied as closely as if they were bible texts.”
This new scientific religion would solve once and for all the age-old problems of wealth and poverty, of health and disease, of crime and exploitation, of peace and war. It would replace the vicious world of greedy capitalists, exploited workers, hypocritical priests and phony democracies with true “people’s” democracies. Instead of sin and penance and “pie in the sky when you die” it would produce a new man and a new woman who could live happily ever after in an earthly socialist paradise. That was the theory.
The only catch is that to get to this paradise it will be necessary, as the Manifesto says, to “overthrow all existing social conditions.” And this overthrow will require violence. As it turned out, the quest for a new earthly paradise did lead indeed to more violence than even Marx or Engels ever imagined.
In the late 19th century the communist vision was a powerful and exciting one that made many converts. The new Marxist vision (religion) was also soon splitting into many variations. Like the split in Christianity a few centuries before called the Protestant Reformation, there was more than one Marxist faith. Some followers became known as social democrats who believed socialism could arrive through peaceful democratic means. These social democrats (and there were many varieties) were one of the founding fathers of modern welfare states in Western Europe and North America.
Another offshoot, actually a small minority of Marxists led by a stern Russian named Vladimir Lenin, preached a much harder line. “To belittle the socialist ideology in any way” wrote Lenin,” to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.” In an influential small book published in 1902, WHAT’S TO BE DONE,” Lenin laid out his belief that the socialist vision demanded leadership by a tightly organized communist party that would not flinch at the necessity for violence in order to destroy bourgeois capitalism and its phony democratic veneer.
In the 20th century it was this most extreme form of the Marxist faith, Marxist-Leninism, that gained real power. In the wake of the First World War in 1917 dedicated followers in Russia led by Lenin, Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky used guile and violence to overthrow a newly formed democratic government and proclaim the world’s first Communist state in Russia. They called it the Soviet Union. In one of his first speeches to the newly assembled Soviet parliament (which lasted just one day, to be replaced by a dictatorship the next day), Lenin kept it simple: “We will now proceed to construct the Socialist order.”
From the beginning Lenin was clear about the methods to be used. It was to be a dictatorship of the proletariat. “The scientific term dictatorship,” Lenin wrote, “means nothing more or less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unstructured by any rules whatsoever, based directly on violence.”
And so it was. Over the next 75 years the Soviet Union set records for radical social engineering, for totalitarian power, and for ruthless no-holds-barred deadly violence. In addition to violently assaulting “social conditions” in the Soviet Union itself, leaders like Lenin and Stalin created an international unit to support communist revolutions in all countries of the world.
In many countries they succeeded. Dedicated communists in China, in Korea, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia and in other countries of Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia were able to take power in the 20th century with the aid of Soviet Union money, arms and propaganda–often with the aid of the Soviet army as well. These new communist dictatorships like their Soviet model proceeded to act with effective violence to overthrow existing social conditions. By the middle of the 20th century communist governments controlled over one third of the world population. To many observers, communism seemed well on its way to conquering the entire world population as Marx and Engels had confidently predicted.
Reliable estimates are difficult because communist regimes were always very good at lying, at controlling the press and thus at concealing crimes against their own people from their own people, as well as from the outside world. The consensus among scholarly researchers today, however, is that the pursuit of a socialist utopia in the Soviet Union alone cost at least 60 million Soviet citizens their lives. These deaths came from political assassinations, government-sponsored massacres, government-induced famines, and forced labor in slave-labor camps (gulags) under such inhuman conditions that early and painful death was the inevitable result.
In addition to these Soviet crimes, Communist regimes in China led by Mao Zedong murdered at least 40 million Chinese citizens. Scholars today say that number jumps to considerably over 100 million if you count deaths caused by two ill-fated utopian programs launched by Mao, the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution.”
Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and many countries of Eastern Europe also proved to be deadly to their own citizens-and to existing “social conditions” like private property, private businesses, religions, privacy, scientific, social and philanthropic associations, and even sports, hobby and arts groups. Perhaps the small country of Cambodia must take the prize as the most murderous of all. Under the Communist leader Pol Pot, his Khmer Rouge partisans brutally slaughtered 2 million Cambodians. That is 2 million out of a total population of 7 million!
These horrendous totals, notice, are larger than the total battlefield and civilian casualties, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima, of all countries in the First and Second World Wars combined. That gruesome total was “only” 33 million!
Note too that these almost unbelievably large casualties due directly to government-caused crimes to their own citizens in the 20th century communist world-well over 100 million human beings-are at least twenty times as large as the well-known genocide of 6 million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and handicapped people in the Holocaust carried out by Hitler’s Fascist regime in Germany.
Many intelligent and well-meaning people in western democratic countries were taken in by this new “scientific” religion of Communism. France and Italy after the 2nd World War, for instance, had large communist parties with prestigious intellectual leaders like the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and world famous artists like Pablo Picasso. Those communist parties in both France and Italy came close to winning post-war elections and taking power.
In the United State and Canada communist parties were always small. Only a tiny minority of intellectuals, politicians and workers were dedicated communist party members. However, a much larger group of intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, academics, business and union leaders, movie-makers and ordinary citizens were “fellow travelers.” That is, without belonging to the party, they were sympathetic to its goals, forgiving as to its means and dependable supporters of its actions.
With this background in mind, what actually happened in the second half of the 20th century during what is called the Cold War? And what relevance, if any, does this Cold War have for our 21st century challenges?
Stay alert next week for Part 3: The Cold War: Truman, Stalin and Korea
In the meantime you might want to check out CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY, RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY and SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY. See the review below from School Library Journal.
Capitalism and Democracy (Democracy: The Basics Series). DVD. 50 min with tchr’s. guide, quiz. Hawkhill Assocs. 2008, 2009 release. ISBN 1-55979-222-1. $109.
Gr 9 Up-While many individuals may assume that capitalism and democracy are only possible when mated with each other, this well-crafted program presents a comprehensive examination of the relationship between the two theories. Consisting of two distinct divisions, the nicely paced and superbly narrated film reviews the historical development of both the economic theory of capitalism and the governmental concept of democracy and explains how capitalism and democracy are connected today. The historical account begins at the earliest stages of human society and smoothly progresses to today’s complex world with hints at what might occur in the future throughout the world. A rich variety of artwork, video, and photographs help illustrate the connections between capitalism and democracy and enhance the impact of the presentation. New terms are subtitled as they are introduced. There are two interactive review tools for post-viewing use. The guided questions option reviews key points to generate discussion, while the mastery quizzes focus on essential topics and themes from the program. While most teachers will find these assessment devices lacking in substance, their inclusion is a nice bonus. A valuable resource.-Dwain Thomas, formerly Lake Park High School, Roselle, IL
Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill
P.S. Our giant 2010 sale is still on! Seventy percent discount on all DVDs, ninety percent discount on remaining VHS tapes. See our web site: www.hawkhill.com