Guest Post: How Communism Almost Ruined The First Thanksgiving

The Plymouth Pilgrims progressed from the false dream of communism to the sound realism of capitalism.

by Richard M. Ebeling

This time of the year, whether in good economic times or bad, Americans gather with their families and friends and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal together. It marks a remembrance of those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts. What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving is also a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America.

The English Puritans, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping from religious persecution in their homeland. They also wanted to turn their back on what they viewed as the materialistic and greedy corruption of the Old World.

Plymouth Colony Planned as Collectivist Utopia
In the New World, they wanted to erect a New Jerusalem that would not only be religiously devout but be built on a new foundation of communal sharing and social altruism. Their goal was the communism of Plato’s Republic, in which all would work and share in common, knowing neither private property nor self-interested acquisitiveness.

What resulted is recorded in the diary of Governor William Bradford, the head of the colony. The colonists collectively cleared and worked the land, but they brought forth neither the bountiful harvest they hoped for, nor did it create a spirit of shared and cheerful brotherhood.

The less industrious members of the colony came late to their work in the fields and were slow and easy in their labors. Knowing that they and their families were to receive an equal share of whatever the group produced, they saw little reason to be more diligent in their efforts. The harder working among the colonists became resentful that their efforts would be redistributed to the more malingering members of the colony. Soon they, too, were coming late to work and were less energetic in the fields.

Collective Work Equaled Individual Resentment
As Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony explained in his old English (though with the spelling modernized):

For the young men that were able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children, without recompense. The strong, or men of parts, had no more division of food, clothes, etc. than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labor, and food, clothes, etc. with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignant and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc. they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could husbands brook it.”

Because of the disincentives and resentments that spread among the population, crops were sparse and the rationed equal shares from the collective harvest were not enough to ward off starvation and death. Two years of communism in practice left alive only a fraction of the original number of the Plymouth colonists.

Private Property as Incentive to Industry
Realizing that another season like those that had just passed would mean the extinction of the entire community, the elders of the colony decided to try something radically different: the introduction of private property rights and the right of the individual families to keep the fruits of their own labor.

As Governor Bradford put it:

And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number for that end . . . This had a very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted then otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little-ones with them to set corn, which before would a ledge weakness, and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

The Plymouth Colony experienced a great bounty of food. Private ownership meant that there was now a close link between work and reward. Industry became the order of the day as the men and women in each family went to the fields on their separate private farms. When the harvest time came, not only did many families produce enough for their own needs, but also they had surpluses that they could freely exchange with their neighbors for mutual benefit and improvement.

In Governor Bradford’s words:

By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God. And the effect of their planting was well seen, for all had, one way or other, pretty well to bring the year about, and some of the abler sort and more industrious had to spare, and sell to others, so as any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.”

Rejecting Collectivism for Individualism
Hard experience taught the Plymouth colonists the fallacy and error in the ideas that since the time of the ancient Greeks had promised paradise through collectivism rather than individualism. As Governor Bradford expressed it:

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years, and that amongst the Godly and sober men, may well convince of the vanity and conceit of Plato’s and other ancients; -- that the taking away of property, and bringing into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

Was this realization that communism was incompatible with human nature and the prosperity of humanity to be despaired or be a cause for guilt? Not in Governor Bradford’s eyes. It was simply a matter of accepting that altruism and collectivism were inconsistent with the nature of man and that human institutions should reflect the reality of man’s nature if he is to prosper. Said Governor Bradford:

Let none object this is man’s corruption, and nothing to the curse itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them."

The desire to “spread the wealth” and for government to plan and regulate people’s lives is as old as the utopian fantasy in Plato’s Republic. The Pilgrim Fathers tried and soon realized its bankruptcy and failure as a way for men to live together in society.

They, instead, accepted man as he is: hardworking, productive, and innovative when allowed the liberty to follow his own interests in improving his own circumstances and that of his family. And even more, out of his industry result the quantities of useful goods that enable men to trade to their mutual benefit.

Giving Thanks for the Triumph of Freedom
In the wilderness of the New World, the Plymouth Pilgrims progressed from the false dream of communism to the sound realism of capitalism. At a time of economic uncertainty and growing political paternalism, it is worthwhile recalling this beginning of the American experiment and experience with economic freedom.

This is the lesson of the First Thanksgiving. This year, when we, Americans sit around our dining table with family and friends, we should also remember that what we are really celebrating is the birth of free men and free enterprise in that New World of America.

The true meaning of Thanksgiving, in other words, is the triumph of Capitalism over the failure of Collectivism in all its forms.




Richard M. Ebeling is BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He was president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 2003 to 2008.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Anti-Racists Should Think Twice about Allying with Socialism

Modern racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter are embracing the historically false assumption that socialism is anti-racist.

by Marian L. Tupy

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times last August, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, stated that BLM would not sit at the table with President Trump because he “is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country – be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia”.

Trump’s views and actions aside, calling capitalism evil and conflating it with racism is noteworthy. The same goes for the increasing tendency among racial justice advocates to embrace the left-wing economic agenda.

So much so that Ryan Cooper, a columnist for The Week, wrote a column titled, Is Black Lives Matter turning socialist? As Cooper approvingly noted, BLM has adopted a “hugely aggressive – and firmly leftist – economic program”.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Natalie Jeffers, who cofounded BLM in the United Kingdom, urged her followers to: “Fight racism with solidarity. Fight capitalism with socialism. We must organize – dedicate ourselves to revolutionary politic power.”

The Black Lives Matter Movement, a separate British organization, was founded by Gary McFarlane, a representative of the Socialist Workers Party, who writes for the Socialist Review and the Socialist Worker, and claims that, “Capitalism is racist from the top to the bottom”. His cofounders, including Kate Hurford, Harold Wilson, and Naima Omar, have also written for those two publications.

There is, in other words, a growing assumption among racial justice advocates that more socialism would result in less racism and, even, that socialism is, in itself, anti-racist. There is, in fact, no such necessary connection between socialism and anti-racism, as a closer look at early socialist writings amply shows.

Socialists Had a Lot to Say About Race

To start with, it is important to note that the meaning of the word “race” changed over time. Today, most people think of races in terms of color, as in “black” and “white.” Historically, however, race was also a synonym for a nation or, even, a family. In his 1933 book, Marlborough: His Life and Times, Winston Churchill noted: “Deep in the heart of the Prussian state and race lay the antagonism to France.” The English artist Mary Granville, in turn, referred to Churchill’s family as the “Marlborough race” in her 1861 book, Autobiography and Correspondence.

Race was always a part of socialist thought.

But race, whether narrowly (black and white) or broadly (skin color, nation, and family) understood, was always a part of socialist thought. In 1894, for example, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the German economist Walther Borgius. In it, Engels noted, “We regard economic conditions as that which ultimately determines historical development, but race is in itself an economic factor.”

In his 1877 Notes to Anti-Dühring, Engels elaborated on the subject of race, observing “that the inheritance of acquired characteristics extended … from the individual to the species.” He went on, “If, for instance, among us mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every eight-year-old child and in no need of proof from evidence that is solely the result of ‘accumulated inheritance.’ It would be difficult to teach them by proof to a bushman or to an Australian Negro.”

It is noteworthy that Engels wrote those words 16 years before Francis Galton, writing in Macmillan’s Magazine, urged humanity to take control of its own evolution by means of “good breeding” or eugenics. Speaking of which, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were both socialists and eugenicists, bemoaned the falling birthrates among so-called higher races in the New Statesman in 1913. They warned that “a new social order [would be] developed by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese”.

Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary and friend of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, offered his views on race in his 1952 memoir The Motorcycle Diaries, writing, “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”

Karl Marx came close to advocating genocide.

Socialists Are Historically Pro-Genocide

In addition to racism, early socialist writings contained explicit calls for genocide of backward peoples. The toxic mix of those two illiberal ideas would result in at least 80 million deaths during the course of the 20th century.

In the New York Tribune in 1853, Karl Marx came close to advocating genocide, writing, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.” His friend and collaborator, Engels, was more explicit.

In 1849, Engels published an article in Marx’s newspaper, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In it, Engels condemned the rural populations of the Austrian Empire for failing enthusiastically to partake in the revolution of 1848. This was a seminal moment, the importance of which cannot be overstated.

“From Engels' article in 1849 down to the death of Hitler,” George Watson wrote in his 1998 book The Lost Literature of Socialism, “everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist.”

So, what did Engels write?

Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality – the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary.

“The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians,” he continued. “The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”

Here Engels clearly foreshadows the genocides of the 20th-century totalitarianism in general and the Soviet regime in particular. In fact, Joseph Stalin loved Engels’ article and commended it to his followers in The Foundations of Leninism in 1924. He then proceeded to suppress Soviet ethnic minorities, including the Jews, Crimean Tatars, and Ukrainians.

It is unsurprising that Nazi Germany, with its concentration camps and omnipresent secret police, came so close to resembling the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler, who admired Stalin for his ruthlessness and called him a “genius,” was also heavily influenced by Marx. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism,” Hitler said, “as I do not hesitate to admit.” Throughout his youth, Hitler “never shunned the company of Marxists” and believed that while the “petit bourgeois Social Democrat … will never make a National Socialist … the Communist always will.”

Hitler’s “differences with the communists”, argued Watson, “were less ideological than tactical”. Hitler embraced German nationalism so as not to “compete with Marxism on its own ground,” but explicitly acknowledged that “‘the whole of national socialism’ was based on Marx.” It is, therefore, unsurprising that Nazi Germany, with its concentration camps and omnipresent secret police, came so close to resembling the Soviet Union.

How much did the Nazis learn from the Soviets?

In his 1947 memoir Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, Hoess recalled that the Germans knew of the Soviet program of extermination of the enemies of the state through forced labor as early as 1939. “If, for example, in building a canal, the inmates of a [Soviet] camp were used up, thousands of fresh kulaks or other unreliable elements were called in who, in their turn, would be used up.” The Nazis would use the same tactic on the Jewish slave laborers in, for example, munition factories.

Following their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, wrote Watson, the Germans collected information on the immense scale of the Soviet camp system and were impressed by the “Soviet readiness to destroy whole categories of people through forced labor.”

Communist terror continues to be shrouded in ontological fog.

After the war ended, Stalin was deeply worried about what the Germans knew with regard to the Soviet camp system and the crimes that the Soviets committed in the territories they conquered following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He sent Andrey Vyshinsky, the mastermind of Stalin’s Great Purge (1936-1938), to Nuremberg to steer the war crimes tribunal away from inconvenient lines of inquiry.

Today we are familiar with the aggregate numbers of people who died as a result of the socialist experiment, but communist terror continues to be shrouded in ontological fog. As such, the Nazi extermination of the Jews is generally condemned as an example of race hatred. The Soviet extermination of specific groups of people, in contrast, is generally seen as part of a much less toxic “class struggle.”

The Strange Separation of "Race Hate" and "Class Struggle"

The Marxist theory of history focused on class struggle and posited that feudalism was destined to be superseded by capitalism. Capitalism, in turn, was destined to give way to communism. Marx saw himself chiefly as a scientist and thought that he had discovered an immutable law of evolution of human institutions, from barbarism at the one end to communism at the other end. (Hence the idea of “scientific socialism” that Engels promoted after Marx’s death.)

Peoples stuck in feudalism, like the Slavs, “as well as Basques, Bretons and Scottish Highlanders”, could not progress straight from feudalism to communism. They would have to be exterminated – so as not to keep everyone else back! Watson noted, “They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.”

How, then, are we to think of socialism and race, and does the answer to that question have any bearing on the distinction that has been drawn between the Nazi and communist atrocities?

The best that can be said of the socialists is that their victims were more varied than those of Hitler. 

In his 1902 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought, H.G. Wells wrote, “There is a disposition in the world, which the French share, to grossly undervalue the prospects of all things French, derived, so far as I can gather, from the facts that the French were beaten by the Germans in 1870, and that they do not breed with the abandon of rabbits or negroes.”

“I must confess,” he continued, that “I do not see the Negro and the poor Irishman and all the emigrant sweepings of Europe, which constitute the bulk of the American Abyss, uniting to form that great Socialist party.”

Note the ease with which the socialist author of such best-sellers as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds(1898), conflates backward whites and backward blacks.

To Wells, both were primitive and, consequently, unsuited to be the torchbearers of socialism. That’s perfectly consonant with Marx’s theory of history, which was, by definition, universal in applicability. Creation of a socialist utopia, therefore, depended on the extermination of all races, broadly understood, who stood in the way of socialist revolution. As such, it included black “Bushmen” and white Bretons.

In contrast to Marx, Hitler’s utopia was not universal. Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), wanted to create socialism in only one country, Germany. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, for example, was partly rooted in his belief that capitalism and international Jewry were two sides of the same coin. As he once famously asked, “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?”

The old distinction between the crimes of National Socialism and socialism proper seems to be untenable.

To achieve their socialist goals, wrote Götz Aly in his 2008 book Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, the Germans confiscated gold, food, clothing, and machinery throughout the territories they conquered. They also put the conquered peoples to work in German slave labor and extermination camps, and factories.

In conclusion, the old distinction between the crimes of National Socialism (as purely racist) and socialism proper (as lacking a racial component) seems to be untenable. Both the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities (ie, the Germans) and their victims, including the Jews and the Slavs, were white. As such, Nazi atrocities make little sense on the narrow definition of racism (i.e., black versus white). They do make sense in the broader context – the perceived necessity to exterminate all peoples who stood in the way of achieving Hitler’s utopian ideal.

But, the same can be said of communist atrocities. The early socialists certainly toyed with the idea of racial inferiority of the darker races (i.e., narrow definition of racism), but ultimately embraced a program of genocide that was more encompassing. The best that can be said of the socialists, therefore, is that their victims were, in accordance with the universal aspirations of Marxism, more varied than those of Hitler. Let us hope that’s not the sort of inclusivity that Black Lives Matter on both sides of the Atlantic strives for.

Reprinted from CapX

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post - Which Fosters the Spirit of Giving: Free Markets or Socialism?

by Robert Higgs

Christmas will soon be here, and preparations for this holiday are proceeding apace. People are buying gifts for family members and friends and making preparations for great feasts at which family, friends, and other loved ones will gather to share the joy and love of the occasion. Notice how much effort and expense are going into giving to and bringing joy to others. Notice, too, how much of the spending people do during this season would be impossible except for the affluence made possible by the remaining elements of the market society that the government, to date, has failed to destroy completely.

Before one can be very generous, one must have something to be very generous with.

The free-market society is often criticized or condemned root and branch for its alleged dependence on the unsavory human trait of greed. Socialists have always claimed that their system would replace one dependent on greed with one based on compassion and caring for the unfortunate. Both theory and history have shown, however, that socialism cannot produce the wealth that makes possible the highly effective expression of compassion and caring. Before one can be very generous, one must have something to be very generous with.

In any event, the idea that the free-market system rests on greed has always been mistaken, if not an outright lie. The system rests on allowing people to pursue their self-interest, to be sure, but self-interest is quite different from greed and indeed often consists of the very opposite. People in general have an interest in, for example, earning more income, and a major reason for this desire is that they wish to have the wherewithal to give to or take care of others more effectively—their own families first of all in most cases, but hardly their own families exclusively.

The amounts of money, time, and effort that people devote to making others happier or better off—amounts vividly on display during the holiday season—belie the slander of a free market’s dependence on greed. But such transfers also occur throughout the year and amount to an enormous proportion of all the uses to which people in free-market societies put their wealth.

In contrast, the alleged compassion and caring for the unfortunate that many have supposed support socialism are scarcely to be seen. For one thing, the incentives inherent in socialism entail that the socialist society will become or remain lodged in poverty, thereby crippling its capacity for effective compassion and caring in the material realm. For another thing, socialism does not so much eliminate the greed that exists in a population as it alters the forms in which the greed can be directed and expressed.

The opportunity to live in a free-market society—even one as hogtied as ours—is a great blessing.
Leaders of socialist societies have a habit of living lavishly amid the squalor of the system they control and despoil—Mao, Castro, and Chavez provide ready examples. Ordinary people in socialist societies, being deprived of free-market outlets for the pursuit of their self-interest must instead strive to better themselves and those for whom they care by struggling for political power and, often, by diverting resources intended for the general public to their own enjoyment. Socialism does not build the generous character that socialist dreamers have touted; on the contrary.

So, at this time of the year, let us remind ourselves not only of the love and compassion that Christmas calls forth, but also of the systemic economic underpinnings that permit people to express their love and compassion so effectively. The love of family, friends, and others is the greatest blessing, but the opportunity to live in a free-market society—even one as hogtied as ours—is also a great blessing.

Republished from the Independent Institute.

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review.  He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Conservative icon Stan Evans dies at 80; remembered as 'present at the creation'

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 3, 2015. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Conservative icon Stan Evans dies at 80; remembered as 'present at the creation'

One of the founders of the modern conservative movement, M. Stanton Evans, died on March 3, 2015, at the age of 80.

Evans, who lived in Leesburg, Virginia, modestly described himself as a “former newspaper man,” as he had been an editorial writer and editor for the Indianapolis News and other publications starting in the 1950s, shortly after he graduated from college.

He also ran the National Journalism Center, which has trained several generations of young conservative reporters and editors. In college, he was one of the founders of what became the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), which continues to promote conservative ideas on university campuses throughout the United States.

Evans is credited with the formulation: “When our friends get elected, they cease to be our friends” – known as “Evans' Law.”

The Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner interviewed Stan Evans – “I go by Stan,” he said – at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March 2013. That interview has not been published until today.

Worse times
Noting that Evans had been “present at the creation” of the conservative movement, he replied to a question about whether the movement today is more disputatious than in the past, or if it is in an unprecedented crisis.

“Other times were infinitely worse,” he said, “because we didn't have the resources or the positions of strength we have now,” noting the low point of the movement may have been the 1964 presidential and congressional elections, when Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide and the Democrats won their largest majority in Congress since the 1930s.

In contrast to those years in the wilderness, Evans explained, 50 year later “we have a Speaker of the House, a Republican majority in the House. There are 30 Republican governors. We have 24 states that have one-party rule, governor and the legislature of the same party, all Republican,” compared to just 12 states controlled by Democrats.

“The list goes on,” he continued, but cautioned that “we're not using the position of strength we have. We're not fighting hard enough.”

Related to that, in comments as part of a CPAC panel the same day as this interview, Evans said that “the Republicans in Congress should be strongly pro-life, because they are usually in the fetal position.”

'It didn't just happen'
There too much confusion within the conservative movement, he said, which has the appearance of infighting.

“Part of the problem is that we've got people who don't remember what it was like to be really down. I compare it to people who earn money and people who inherit money. People who earn it know what it takes to get there. People who inherit it don't; it's just there.”

This is like “the conservative ascendancy of Reagan,” Evans said. “To some people, that just happened. It didn't just happen. It had to be fought for every inch of the way.”

Asked about how journalism has changed since he started in the profession in the mid-1950s, Evans replied: “A lot, a lot, a lot -- in every which way.”

Still, he added, “it's hard to generalize.”

He said there are “many more alternative media now than back in the day. On the other hand, you've still got an overpowering dominance of liberalism in the mainstream media. That's always been there but now we have a way of responding to it that we didn't have back in '64, for example.”

At the same time, he explained, “we also have problems with this because it's unfiltered. Anyone can put anything up there [on the Web] and it's too much hit or miss and rumor and too much focus on 'what did Obama do yesterday morning' and not the substance of the issue that needs to be addressed.”

Communist infiltrators
On the day of this interview, Evans was autographing copies of his 2012 book, Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government, which he co-wrote with Herbert Romerstein.

The book, he said, was about “Communist infiltration of our government and other governments during World War II and the immediate aftermath and their influence on policy at the Yalta Conference” and other high-level meetings in Tehran, Quebec, and elsewhere.

“I try to show in the book how [the Communist agents] warped American policy in favor of the Soviet Union.”

The final question posed to Evans was whether, when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he could have predicted the end of the Cold War would come ten years later.

“No,” he said. “No, I never thought we would win it in my lifetime. But Reagan knew what he was doing and that was the greatest accomplishment of his life. I was proud to have been a little bit a part of that.”

A video of M. Stanton Evans' remarks about “First Principles” at CPAC 2013 can be viewed on YouTube.

SUGGESTED LINKS

GOProud’s Jimmy LaSalvia talks about CPAC and gay conservatives
Author Paul Kengor talks about Communist manipulation of liberals, progressives
Historian Paul Kengor on Ronald Reagan and the collapse of the USSR - Part I
LNC executive director Wes Benedict takes Libertarian message to CPAC
CPAC bars GOProud; presidential candidate Gary Johnson presciently weighs in

Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/conservative-icon-stan-evans-dies-at-80-remembered-as-present-at-the-creation

'Solzhenitsyn and American Democracy'

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the towering literary figure who gave us the phrase "Gulag Archipelago" and whose life spanned from Lenin to Putin, died on Sunday at the age of 89.

Solzhenitsyn cut an imposing figure. With his curled beard and high forehead, he resembled a cross between a Biblical patriarch and a 19th-century Mormon pioneer.

While he led a brave life, unbowed by the pressures of totalitarianism, he was, apparently, meanspirited personally and loathe to keep friendships alive and active. If there is a photograph of him smiling, I have not seen it -- unless it was taken upon his return to Russia in 1994 after 20 years in exile in decadent Vermont.

In 1978, Solzhenitsyn delivered a commencement speech at Harvard University that was highly critical of Western culture. He condemned freedom and democracy and accused the West of soullessness.

As the New York Times' obituary described him in this context:

His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

The Washington Post's one-time Moscow correspondent, Robert Kaiser, adds:

Living in this country confirmed Solzhenitsyn's worst fears about the West. He deplored the American way of life, and was not reluctant to say so. At Harvard in 1978, he gave a remarkable speech to the graduating seniors with a clear warning that Western civilization was in grave jeopardy. "The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future," he said. "It has already started. . . . A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger." He criticized the reliance on law; he criticized the idea of freedom: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space" by Western civilization, he said.

In his tirade against Western culture, Solzhenitsyn lamented:

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

He also said in this speech (titled "A World Split Apart"):

... the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.

Harvard graduates, then as now, no doubt listened to Solzhenitsyn's harsh judgment on American society and Western values and nodded their heads in silent agreement. In 1978, remember, Americans were in the midst of a "malaise" that many identified as having its roots in the hypermaterialism of the "Me Decade." (That, and the high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment, and gasoline shortages exacerbated by misguided Carter administration policies.) Others, however, were not so sanguine and suggested that Solzhenitsyn, a virtual recluse, was personally clueless about America and the West.

Two years after the Harvard speech, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where I was working at the time as a Georgetown undergraduate, published a collection of essays called Solzhenitsyn at Harvard. It included some of the editorials and op-eds that had been published in reaction to Solzhenitsyn's address shortly after he delivered it, plus six specially-commissioned essays.

On September 16, 1980, the book was launched at a dinner in Washington with two speakers commenting on it: newspaper columnist George F. Will and social philosopher Michael Novak. Their speeches were later collected in a slim pamphlet called Solzhenitsyn and American Democracy. (The pamphlet seems to be no longer in print, while the larger volume is still, in theory, available through Amazon.com.)

In his remarks, Novak -- who contributed one of the original essays to the larger volume -- began by noting:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's commencement address at Harvard might be viewed as a contemporary updating of Pope Pius IX's famous critique of modernity, "The Syllabus of Errors." Solzhenitsyn, like Pius IX, is adept at pointing out the errors, onesidedness, and blind spots in many of the things that we, in a liberal, democratic society, hold most dear. Like Pius IX, he holds up in contrast some of the models of Christian civilization from the past -- their ideals rather than their practices.

Novak suggested that, for all his emphasis on religion and spirituality, Solzhenitsyn failed to see the link between those and liberal democratic values. He continued:

The great novelist, however, in concentrating so singlemindedly on soul, sometimes overlooks its necessary political, economic, and social artifacts. Human soul does not live alone. It is embodied. It is embodied in social, political, and economic systems as well as in its own human skin, tissues, sinews, and organs of feeling and sensibility.

Solzhenitsyn often seems to wish to reject modernity. "Western ideas" -- above all, democracy and all its works and pomps. He sometimes seems to desire a world of soul alone, leaders infused with virtue, peoples astonishingly and simply committed to the evangelical laws of peace, justice, order, and charity. If this were a world of angels, Solzhenitsyn's vision would create a City of Light. Its rulers would be saints, its people willing followers, its constitution the very laws of God. The civilization he envisages would be a heavenly city. The state would wither away. There would be a kind of benevolent dictatorship of, not the proletariat, but the gentle Christian community.

Upon reading that last paragraph, it should come as no surprise that Novak sees a paradox in Solzhenitsyn's thought:

It is stunning, after all, to see how closely the dream of Solzhenitsyn mirrors the dream of his archenemy, Karl Marx, how he has turned Communism inside out as a vision of effortless Christian civilization, populated not by sinners but by the virtuous, organized not by trial and error, checks and balances, separation of powers, and the differentiation of systems (political system, economic system, moral-cultural system, each relatively independent of the other), but by simple righteousness. He guides us to a heavenly city, before we have learned to live in the sinful climes of earth, protecting ourselves against its inevitable tyrannies.

(It may be worth noting that Novak's words in the preceding few sentences foreshadow the central theme of his then-yet-to-be-published book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.)

The utopian vision suggested by Novak's interpretation of Solzhenitsyn's thought has another unintended paradox, one often unrecognized by Rockford Institute-type social conservatives who are wary of individual liberty and free enterprise. Novak goes on to say:

Solzhenitsyn does us honor, though he may not think so, by being so affronted by the awful cheapness, vulgarity, and open sinfulness of our way of life. Any system open to human liberty as it actually is must necessarily abound in visible signs of sinfulness. Not even a coercive regime can repress the sinfulness of the human heart. No more can democracy be sinless than can Communism (committed, as Solzhenitsyn sees it, to systemic lies, immorality, and lust for power) drive out all virtue.

One sentence there bears repeating: "Any system open to human liberty as it actually is must necessarily abound in visible signs of sinfulness." That is a profound insight, related to the fundamental truth that virtue must be freely chosen, else it is not virtue.

As Novak approached his conclusion, he proved to be remarkably prescient. Remember, this speech was delivered in September 1980. Ronald Reagan had not yet been elected president, and there was no certainty that he would be. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other "students" still held American diplomats hostage in Iran. Leonid Brezhnev would be General Secretary of the CPSU for another two years, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire lay a decade in the future. The Cold War had every indication of being a perpetual condition. So what does Novak say?

Yet with Solzhenitsyn's basic message we stand in agreement. The world is, sadly, split apart. World War III did begin in 1945, and the "correlation of forces" is less in our favor now than then, less so than at any time in the history of this republic. We are at an hour of maximum peril.

Yet so, also, is our foe. A system based on lies cannot endure. The world cannot survive half slave and half free. The reckoning rumbles in Poland. Events are picking up speed. The great chapter of our age is drawing toward its climax.

Whether Novak was aiming for dramatic effect or was somehow clairvoyant is up to him to reveal; few commentators in 1980 would have suggested an "approaching climax" to the Cold War except in apocalyptic terms, predicting nuclear war rather than an outcome favorable to liberty and democracy. (To be sure, Novak's prediction is ambiguously shaded. Perhaps it can only be read as optimistic in retrospect.)

For his own part, George Will focused less on the spiritual notions than the practical political ones suggested by Solzhenitsyn's critique of the West. He drew on American history, with a focus on James Madison's theory of faction. Will spoke mostly without notes, except for a long excerpt from Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, and the published version of his speech is based on a transcript from the recording.

Will said:

It is essential to the understanding of America to realize that it was founded by men who sought explicitly to tame and submerge passion, to drain it into commercial undertakings and away from the ideological and religious and political divisions that had turned the Old World into a boiling pot and that could ruin a melting pot. James Madison's great breakthrough in the understanding of democracy was the realization that all previous political thinkers had been wrong in one critical particular. All previous political thinkers had said that if -- and it was an enormous hypothesis -- if democracy were possible at all, it would be possible only in a small, face-to-face society, something like Pericles' Athens or Rousseau's Geneva; in such a society, the people, knowing one another and enjoying a relationship of neighborliness, would not be riven by factions, which were assumed to be the enemy and ultimate destroyer of democracy.

Madison's breakthrough was to turn that idea on its head. He began with a progression like this: The problem of any political system is the prevention of tyranny; they tyranny to which democracy is prey is the tyranny of the majority; the way to prevent that is to avoid having a majority, to have only shifting coalitions of minorities that can never become a stable and oppressive majority. Therefore faction is to be celebrated, and the United States is to succeed through a saving multiplicity of factions, made possible by a complex economic system and a continental expanse.

Continuing, this widely-syndicated newspaper columnist went on to explain:

To find American political thought summarized in two short newspaper columns, read two of the Federalist papers: Number Ten, where Madison celebrates factions, and Number Fifty-one, where he says, "You will see throughout our system the process of supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives." Ours is the first nation founded on the premise that it could get along without anyone having good motives, without anyone being public-spirited; that out of the cheerful maelstrom of factions would emerge something that could be baptized, in a magnificent a priori swoop, "the public interest."

But what of Solzhenitsyn, the reason for this speech in the first place? Will argues that Solzhenitsyn

says that statecraft cannot just be a matter of social control; it must be, to some extent, soulcraft.

(I have to wonder if this was the first time that George Will used the formulation "statecraft as soulcraft," later the title of his 1983 collection of essays.)

Solzhenitsyn, Will says,

is understandably startled by the raucousness of American life. He's not the only one, and it's not just American life. George Orwell made the point, not long before he died, that "all popular entertainments have one thing in common: they seem to aim at the numbing of consciousness." (He said this before recreational drugs, and he never saw American television.)

Recreational drugs, I would note, have been with us since man was still a hunter-gatherer. But I might add that Orwell never saw Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, either -- nor, I suppose, did Solzhenitsyn. Back to George Will:

Solzhenitsyn understands that there is something profoundly disturbing about the sensory blitzkrieg that is part of our social life. He understands the irony of an age in which self-expression is the ultimate -- and some would say the only -- value, yet all the themes of modern literature seem to converge on the fragility of a sense of self.

After quoting historian John Lukacs, who had suggested in his 1978 book 1945: Year Zero that Solzhenitsyn would turn out to be the pivotal figure in the conflict between East and West and (perhaps -- remember, this was 1980) in the collapse of the Communist East, Will concluded by saying:

For two centuries the human race has been assailed by the misconstructions first of physics, then biology, then psychology, more recently sociology, and today biochemistry, all telling us in different ways that man is not free, that he is a creature of vast impersonal forces, and that individuals do not make a difference. Solzhenitsyn's life says, "Not true."

With the perspective of nearly 30 years, we can add a few more individual lives that say "Not true": Lech Wałesa, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, and others. None of them singly but all of them interrelatedly through their individual efforts made the difference between liberty and serfdom for millions of human beings.

For all his faults, and for all his shortsightedness with regard to Western values and achievements, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was very much an individual who made a difference that mattered -- even to those he disdained.

Definition of Irony, Part 342

Isn't it ironic that, just as Cuba is on the verge of freedom after a half century of brutal Communist dictatorship, it has become illegal virtually everywhere in the United States to smoke cigars in public?

I'm just asking.

Gay Victims of Communism

Hunter College Professor Wayne Dynes has a good piece on the gay victims of communism on his blog. Dynes acknowledges that he can only address the topic superficially, because little research has been done (or at least published) on how Marxist regimes persecuted (and continue to persecute) their gay and lesbian citizens.

He offers this historical illustration of Communist attitudes toward homosexuality:

A well documented episode is the visit of the great French writer André Gide to the Soviet Union in 1936. He went as a fellow traveler and returned deeply shaken. He wrote two books about the experience, the first circumspect, the second more outspoken about the social misery and absence of freedom of expression in the USSR. The Communists and their allies turned viciously on him. Some relied on innuendo, speaking of his problems with "morals" and his devotion to young men. The Communist pundit André Wurmser went further, producing a scurrilous article entitled "A Poor Bugger: André Gide." Another role, then, that homophobia played among Communists was to punish those who stepped out of line by advertising their proclivities. Something similar happened when Alger Hiss, after his exposure as a spy for the Soviets, sought to discredit his accuser Whitaker Chambers by talk about his homosexuality—-as if this had anything to do with the matter of Hiss' guilt.

Wayne's discussion of Castro's Communist Cuba and how its treatment of gay men and lesbians contradicts the left/liberal mythology about the Cuban paradise is worth a visit. He recommends a book, Gays Under the Cuban Revolution, by "an honest leftist, Allen Young."