Mark Crispin Miller Sent Me An Email Translating For Me Why "Communism" Does Not Land On Many American Ears As A Measure Of Evil But Rather, An Old Weapon Word
I appreciated it, and asked if I could publish it
“The charge of "communism" for what's going on today makes people flinch not necessarily because they're soft on Bolshevism (though many are), but because that accusation was so viciously deployed, from 1947 on, to shatter labor unions, stigmatize consumer protections, overthrow democratic governments and otherwise promote the interests of (what we once called) Big Business.
“The post-war red-baiting, which seemed to last forever (and which, born when you were, and living where you lived, you missed), was really not at all about relieving the oppression of the people living under communism Over There, but ONLY about chilling dissidence and wiping out domestic activism Over Here. (On this subject I strongly recommend The Great Fear, by David Caute, a must-read history of that terror---and it was indeed a terror---under Truman and Eisenhower.*)
“And there's another thing to bear in mind about all this. Post-war "anti-communism"---by which I mean the ideology, not righteous opposition to the Soviet colossus---was so heavily imbued with anti-semitism that the two were actually inseparable. This was unmistakable, and inescapable, from the end of WW2 on through the Sixties. That communism was Jewish, and that Jews were Reds at heart, was a (Nazi) notion so widespread and so virulent in the US throughout that period that one could not entirely get away from it; and that, in part, is why the cry of "communism" at this moment sets some people's teeth on edge, and just seems wrong, even though it's technically quite apt (as in your Substack.)
“In short, that hateful and reactionary use of "communism" as a social cudgel and a means of thought control was (to put it bluntly) traumatic.”
* After Eisenhower's day, the force behind that terror also killed the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X, Dag Hammarskjöld, Patrice Lumumba, Fred Hampton, Thomas Merton, Allard Lowenstein and all too many others.
—Mark Crispin Miller, (email to Celia Farber, March 17, 2023)
Reading List:
Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution
That volume is included in Sutton's Wall Street Trilogy. His massive
Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development demonstrates
in great detail that Stalin was utterly dependent on (mainly) US
industrial output.
(For his heresy vis-a-vis the Red Menace, Sutton was eventually
thrown out of the Hoover Institution, as this bit from Wikipedia notes:
In 1973, Sutton published a popularized, condensed version of the sections of the forthcoming third volume relevant to military technology called National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union, after which he was forced out of the Hoover Institution.[7][better source needed] His conclusion from his research on the issue was that the conflicts of the Cold War were “not fought to restrain communism” but were organised in order “to generate multibillion-dollar armaments contracts”, since the United States, through financing the Soviet Union “directly or indirectly, armed both sides in at least Korea and Vietnam.”[8][non-primary source needed]
Richard B. Spence, Wall Street and the Russian Revolution
Jim McGregor & Gerry Docherty, Prolonging the Agony: How the
International Bankers and Their Political Partners Deliberately
Extended World War I
Also:
Guido Giacomo Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America
Made the Third Reich
——
I fully accept what Mark is saying, and the way he said it was an example of how to communicate ideas in such a way that the recipient can “hear” it.
Now let’s go to the other side of the dialectic.
I would like to add two books to my own recommended reading list on this matter: Koba The Dread: Laughter and The 20 Million by Martin Amis, and Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity by Vladimir Bukovsky.
This oratory by Jordan Peterson on a very belabored subject (so-called communist apologia, never, ever expressed by citizens of nations once under communist rule) is, I have to say, brilliant as well as bitterly funny, though the subject sure isn’t.
(I don’t trust or particularly like The Daily Wire, but that’s neither here nor there.) The way Peterson ends this, by invoking the off the charts arrogance of those who would insist “real communism” never got a chance, as a potential sin against the Holy Ghost, is arresting.
Much respect to professor Miller, but I think there is a blind spot amongst many - one you don’t have and one that if we don’t shine a light on, it’s game over.
https://www.atlassociety.org/post/can-there-be-an-after-socialism
No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into." Until that happens, there is no "after socialism."
The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. We insisted upon "de-Nazification," and we excoriate those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never has been and never will be a similar "de-Communization," although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, and although those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down ninety-year-old men because "the bones cry out" for justice. In the case of Communism, we insisted on "no witch hunts"—let the dead bury the living. But the dead can bury no one.
It’s absolutely astounding how few people know about the left wing, Bolshevik political violence in Germany during the early 1900’s, such as the German (November) Revolution of 1918, the Spartacist uprising of 1918, and the general violence and political assassinations occurring on the streets of Germany from 1918-1933.
This, AFTER the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Monarchy and murdered the Romanov family, in 1918, and then the Holodomor starting in 1932.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was correct,
“You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.”