It is quite amazing how swiftly the Cold War and the horrors that Soviet-style socialism inflicted on half the countries of Europe have faded from the American political consciousness.
What brings this to mind is that it has gone largely unremarked that Bernie Sanders, challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, was—and, judged by his rhetoric, still seems to be—an unabashed admirer of the Soviet system.
Actually, Mr Sanders had such a high regard for the Soviet system that in 1988, he and his new bride joined a delegation to a gritty industrial town just outside Moscow for their honeymoon.
Raising this issue is not an attempt to affect the outcome of the Democratic Party’s presidential primary. It now seems clear Mrs Clinton will be the party’s standard bearer. Nor am I trying to argue Mr Sanders is a bad hat—a sizable percentage of America’s intellectual left has traditionally viewed the Soviet Union through rose tinted spectacles.
The thing that amazes me is that neither the media nor the political establishment—Republican or Democrat; liberal or conservative—seem greatly troubled that a person who had been so open about his attachment to this utterly discredited system could amass such a large following among America’s youth.
After all, a quarter of a century after the fall of the Third Reich—about the same period of time since the collapse of the Soviet bloc—it would have destroyed the political career of any politician had it become public that in 1940 he or she had consorted with Nazis while on honeymoon in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s place in the country.
Indeed, the obloquy of their pre-war association with Nazis dogged Edward, Duke of Windsor, and Mrs Simpson for the rest of their lives. It was one of the reasons why they were never permitted to return as a couple to Britain.
Today, more than 70 years since Germany’s surrender, its Nazi past is still regarded with horror. And rightly so! For 12 terrible years, what had once been one of the world’s most liberal nations fell under the sway of murderous fanatics who brutally subjected first Germany, and then much of Europe and Russia.
By the time the Allies occupied Berlin, much of Europe lay in ruins, and upwards of 20 million people had been slaughtered during the war declared by the Nazis—including six million Jews, gassed, shot, or worked to death in concentration camps simply for the accident of their birth.
Yet the Soviets had been no less tyrannical than the Nazis—and a full 60 years longer. For all of that time the communist regime’s secret police were no less homicidal and their “justice system” no less draconian.
By the time the Iron Curtain came tumbling down, it is conservatively estimated that more than 40 million souls had been done to death in the gulag archipelago. The actual figure is probably rather higher.
More than seven decades of hapless central planning had left its economy in free fall and its industry in tatters. Its population’s life expectancy was declining precipitately—thanks to a veritable epidemic of alcoholism and vastly substandard medical care.
In fact, basic feminine health products had been perpetually in such short supply that post-Soviet Russia was actually was one of the few places in the world where women’s life expectancy was shorter than that of men—largely a consequence of abortion being the primary means of birth control.
This willful ignorance of the dark history of socialism—a euphemism for Marxism in its various guises—is decidedly odd. There is, after all, nowhere in the world where it has been successfully implemented.
China’s experiment with the Maoist version of Marxism, for example, cost upwards of 60 million lives before it adopted its present totalitarian form of faux capitalism.
Much the same is true of Vietnam and Laos, while Cambodia sacrificed a full third of its population on the Marxist altar, and heaven knows how many millions continue to starve in North Korea’s myriad labor camps.
American progressives frequently hold up the Scandinavian countries as examples of socialism’s success—blissfully unaware that both Denmark and Sweden have rapidly been sloughing off the socialist yoke. Even oil-rich Norway is having second thoughts.
How come, then, if the discrediting of socialism is so complete, are so many members of our younger generation apparently so unaware of it they have sworn allegiance to man who has made no secret of his devotion to socialism and his attachment to the idea of a political revolution?
The conclusion can only be that, unlike the horrors of Nazism, the dark history of Soviet socialism and the abject failures of its milder forms are not being taught or even discussed in our high school and universities.
An explanation for this is that the last place on earth where socialism is still revered is within our education system, and particularly in our universities, the faculties of which tend to be dominated by self-described “left-wing intellectuals”—a catch-all for neo-Marxists and their fellow travelers.
And the reason it is held in reverence, I believe, is that it bears a much closer resemblance to a religion—albeit a secular one—than a political system.
Karl Marx was a utopian—a political and economic evolutionist who believed that the system of “scientific” socialism he proposed was, just like the Second Coming of Christ, inevitable.
Humanity, he declared, was inexorably advancing from feudalism, to absolutism, through what he dubbed “bourgeois democracy,” towards a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in which highly skilled workers would seize the levers of power and set about building socialism.
Ultimately this process would usher in “communism”, in which the trappings of the state and the law would fall away and—like an earthly version of pie in the sky when you die—everyone would give according to their abilities and receive according to their needs.
Long ago, back in days of the Soviet Union, I knew an ideologist who worked at the Polish Foreign Ministry. Asked what an ideologist did, he would explain that, like a Roman Catholic dogmatist, he worked out how his superiors could do what their faith utterly forbade them from doing.
Be that what it may, my ideologist friend used to hide his money in the third volume of the communist’s version of the Torah, Marx’s seminal work Das Kapital. “It’s the safest place to keep it,” he explained. “Nobody, not even burglars, read it. If they did, they’d realize what nonsense it is.”
Obviously neither Mr Sanders nor his cohorts on the university faculties have yet bothered to crack the third volume of Das Kapital. While they are not stupid people, this is more than can be said for the “useful idiots” [V. I. Lenin’s words, not mine] who follow them. GPH✠
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