IS
COMMUNISM REALLY DEAD? HOW DEAD?
Communism
as an ideology is supposed to be dead: Marxism, we are told,
has been totally discredited, intellectually as well as politically,
but this is another one of those bromides passed off as received
wisdom that is utterly false. While the Leninist tradition
may be moribund, for the moment, the Bolsheviks were never
really anything but a schismatic sect that broke away from
mainstream Marxist orthodoxy, a random mutation that took
root in Russia and metastasized into the international Communist
movement. But Bolshevism was never the thickest and oldest
branch of the Marxist family tree. The Third International
of Lenin and Stalin may be gone, but the Second International,
the Social Democracy, is alive and well, thank you.
MARTOV'S
REVENGE
The
original name of the Russian Communist Party was the Russian
Social Democratic Labor Party, and the party split, before
the 1917 Revolution, between the Bolsheviks (Russian for majority)
and the Mensheviks (or minority) over the question
of Leninism: who was really a member of the Party? The Bolsheviks
favored the tightly-organized activist concept, that limited
Party membership to the cadre or hard core. The Mensheviks
had a more liberal concept of Party membership, one that included
sympathizers, part-timers, and fellow-travelers, and so the
two factions split into rival parties. In Russia, the Bolsheviks
won out, established a dictatorship, and jailed their Menshevik
former comrades. Today, however, in the West, the heirs of
the Mensheviks, the contemporary social democrats of the European
Blairite-socialist-Clintonian parties, are triumphant. The
body of Lenin is being buried, disinterred from its mausoleum,
and his old rival Martov is having the last laugh.
WAR
AND REVOLUTION
And
more than that: in its social democratic incarnation, the
spirit of Karl Marx not only lives on, but is poised to take
power on a world scale. In Germany, France, Great Britain,
Italy, and throughout Eastern Europe, the parties of the Second
(or Socialist) International, founded by Karl Marx's most
orthodox disciples, are already in power and they mean
to extend it. The conservative Marxists of the German and
French social democratic parties long ago explicitly rejected
the necessity of a revolutionary upheaval: the imposition
of socialism would come about, they theorized, as the end
result of a natural evolutionary process. Now this process,
although inevitable, can be hurried along quite a bit by human
intervention and especially by means of war, which
is, in a sense, a revolution, in that it is organized violence
that results in considerable social upheaval. In lieu of a
revolution, the socialists of the new millennium have discovered,
a war is just as good if not better.
THE
TALE OF THE BEGGAR
In
a free society, the State is small and shrunken, perpetually
starved for funds and begging for an authority it is nearly
always denied. But in wartime, the position of the State in
relation to the people is reversed: the State is bloated beyond
all recognition, as it feeds gluttonously at the public trough
and it is the private citizen, and not his government,
who has that starved look about him. In wartime, the State
does not beg for authority, but simply usurps power
and, as the history of the U.S. since at least the Civil War
shows, the State retains this newly-acquired power long after
the wartime "emergency" is passed.
NATO
AND THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
In
wartime, the State takes what it wants, and does what it wants
and this is an operational definition of socialism.
And so please don't anyone tell me how "surprising"
it is that the "peace movement" of yesteryear
the Tod Gitlins of this world have turned into the
most rabid advocates of US military intervention from East
Timor to Kosovo. They were all socialists, after all, Marxists
of one sort or another eager to enforce their egalitarian
visions with the mailed fist of the Proletariat. But as socialist
parties have come to power, in nation after nation in the
developed West, this has translated into the mailed fist of
NATO. And while the style and spirit of the Second International
has certain differences with the dead-and-buried Third, these
turn out to be mostly rhetorical: in reality, the same totalitarian
mindset is at work, spinning its web of propaganda and waiting
for the right moment to strike.
THE
NEW SOCIALIST INTERNATIONALISM
In
a political and military alliance with their American co-thinkers,
these prophets of the Third Way have seized power in the West
and they mean to extend that power internationally.
Kosovo was their war, a test case, an incubator of the new
totalitarianism that is the legacy of Marx's heirs
not Mikhail Gobachev, Deng Xiaoping, and the remnants of Russia's
Communist party, but the "New Labour" of Tony Blair,
Jospin in France, Germany's Schroeder, and, last but hardly
least, our very own Bill Clinton.
THE
INCUBATOR
Headquartered
in the US and Great Britain, a new totalitarianism is slowly
incubating, one that is far more dangerous than any that have
afflicted the earth in the past, including Stalinism and National
Socialism. More dangerous, and monstrous, precisely because
the internal regime is relatively free. But
externally, out in the provinces, it is quite a different
story. On the frontiers of the Empire, and especially in the
Balkans, we have a glimpse of what our rulers have in store
for us: here is where the nature and ideology of the NATO-crats
comes to the fore, and the masks come off. The naked face
of NATO was revealed in a recent New York Times story
about a "media conference" sponsored by the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, held at a resort in
Montenegro and for one moment, at least, it was possible
to see the totalitarian reality behind the "democratic"
and "multiethnic" façade.
CONFESS!
The purpose of the conference,
according to the Times, was meant as a forum for Serbian,
Montenegrin, and Albanian journalists to "discuss their
coverage of NATO's bombing war over Kosovo, its causes and
aftermath." The account of the conference given by Serbian
journalists quoted in the story is horrifying: far from being
given a forum to discuss coverage of the war in general, including
the conduct of the Western press, the Serbians, it was made
plain, were being summoned by a judge and jury, with only
one possibility open to them confess!
RAH
RAH JOURNALISM
You
might ask: confess what? After all, Serbian media were subjected
to government censorship, but the independent media continued
to report the news during the Kosovo war as best it could
which was in many cases far better than the lockstep
pro-NATO rah-rah war propaganda churned out by the "free"
media of the West, whose typical stories consisted of a Pentagon
"briefing" spiced up with KLA press releases printed
verbatim.
JOURNALISTIC
VANGUARD OF THE WAR PARTY
Instead
of skeptical reporters challenging the official line, as in
the Vietnam war, the Kosovo war saw the English-speaking media
(at least) as the instrument and enforcer of the official
government line that this was a war for "justice"
and "human rights." Indeed, instead of questioning
the morality of a war in which innocent civilians were bombed
from 30,000 feet, journalists were the vanguard of the War
Party and often its most militant and persistent spokesman.
They cheered when their Serbian fellow journalists were bombed
repeatedly, and at press conferences they pestered the Pentagon
continually about the question of ground troops: when, they
wanted to know, were we going to get serious and send in the
troops on the ground?
DEJA
VU
In
style and spirit, this OSCE media conference resembled nothing
so much as the propagandistic gatherings of Stalin's Comintern,
where heretics were upbraided and bombastic rhetoric permeated
the political atmosphere. "The organizers wanted to waken
our consciences," said Veselin Simonovic, editor of Blic,
an independent Serbian newspaper, "and force us to question
ourselves about our conduct and morality. And this was put
to us pretty directly, they made it clear we should be proclaimed
as accomplices in crime, with ready-made slogans and clichés,
and they tried to force us to justify ourselves and say that
we weren't quite as criminal as they said." The Serbs
were put on trial, in effect, and to their credit they walked
out. But perhaps, some day, they will not be allowed to walk
out. . . .
A
PREMONITION
Like
the Stalinists of old, who forced their victims to denounce
themselves and sign confessions before they put them up against
a wall and shot them, the NATO-crats demand a similar ritualized
self-abasement. This is a foretaste of what they have
in mind for the entire Serbian people and they have
the nerve to speak of "war crimes"! What hypocrisy!
What a brazen perversion of justice!
A
SINISTER PROVOCATION
The
ideological veneer of the "jurors" was stripped
away, for a moment, when one of the conference organizers,
Natasa Kandic, said: "They pay you and have the right
to question your conduct during the war." Simonovic,
who accepts no money or editorial control from any government
entity, walked out of the conference, along with several others,
in protest. That this Quisling Kandic should demand obeisance
to her Western paymasters so openly was meant as a deadly
insult to the Serbian attendees, and deliberately compromised
them in the eyes of their readers. For the clear implication
is that they are all in the pay of Serbia's avowed enemies
surely an accusation that has ominous implications
for their ability to live, let alone continue as journalists.
KANDIC
THE QUISLING
Kandic
is the director of Belgrade's Humanitarian Law Center, which,
according to the Times, is a recipient of Western financial
aid: she is the chief theoretician and publicist of the Serbian
"collective war guilt" theory, pushed by The
New Republic and the more rabid wing of the War Party,
which equates the Kosovo war with the Holocaust, and, even
more incredibly, demands the "de-Nazification" of
the Serbian people and society starting, apparently,
with the media.
NATO'S
DOMINATRIX
Rather
than publish newspapers like Blic and Vreme,
two leading independent media centers, Ms. Kandic demanded
to know why the editors didn't do the "moral" thing
and simply close up shop! This is naturally the position
that a paid shill and foreign agent like Kandic would take:
given that the NATO-crats aim at the conquest of what is left
of Yugoslavia and the "reeducation" of its population,
there can be no room for an indigenous independent media.
Since all Serbian society, according to this demented and
sinister theory of "collective guilt," is responsible
for the excesses of paramilitaries in Kosovo, the Serbian
media is especially tainted and must expiate itself
preferably on its knees in front of Ms. Kandic, the designated
dominatrix of NATO's "humanitarian" mission..
DRESS
REHEARSAL
Backed
up by US tax dollars and government officials, Ms. Kandic
conducted her trial of the Serbian media a dress rehearsal
for the show trials to come, should the NATO-crats resume
their war on Serbia and, one day, march down the streets of
Belgrade. "The West failed to create a multiethnic Kosovo,
creating anti-American feeling in Serbia instead. Westerners
now need someone to blame," says Simonovic. "The
civic sector, the Serbs, the press everyone, to them,
is a collaborator."
THE
GRAND INQUISITOR
If
anyone in this picture fits the description of a collaborator,
then surely it is Ms. Kandic who is auditioning for the role
of Grand Inquisitor, the Quisling bureaucrat to be placed
in charge of the media, with her edicts enforced by NATO soldiers
carrying out the "de-Nazification" process.
STALIN'S
GHOST
In
style and spirit, the strategy and tactics of the militant
Mensheviks are not much different from their Bolshevik brothers-in-spirit:
ideological browbeating, public confessions, show trials,
Tribunals, talk of "war criminals," the need for
"reeducation," and the ugly irrationality of a concept
such as "collective guilt," the obsession with maintaining
control of the media under the guise "democracy"
and "diversity" it is as if the old Comintern
was never disbanded by Stalin after World War II, but lives
on at NATO headquarters. It is the same preening dogmatism,
with its shrill self-righteousness and arrogant indifference
to the fate of individuals in the name of some Gnostic concept,
be it egalitarianism, multiculturalism, or whatever demonic
dogma happens to possess the new masters of the civilized
world at any given moment.
THE
HEIRS OF MARX
If
the style of the neo-Marxists is quite similar in some respects
that of their late and unlamented Leninist cousins, it would
be simplistic to simply equate them with old-style Communists
and be done with it. While they are, indeed, the only surviving
heirs of Marx, these Mensheviks of the second mobilization
emphasize the evolutionary aspect of Marxist doctrine, which
sees capitalism as progressive in the sense that it bears
within it the seeds of its own undoing. Thus they have no
trouble with ideological anomalies such as "market socialism."
Marx and Engels both applauded the victories of the capitalist
nation-builders over the feudal and monarchist parties of
Europe, because they saw the motor of capitalism as the driving
force of a movement that would eventually result in the overthrow
of the market economy and the ultimate triumph of socialism
on a world scale. So, too, the New Labourites and their European
and American imitators see contemporary capitalism, i.e. state
capitalism, as the motor of a new rebirth of socialism internationally.
And the spark that sets this motor to running, the impetus
for the growth of the State at home and the extension of its
power abroad, is the new policy of global intervention by
an alliance of those states in which the party of the Third
Way has come to power.
SOCIALISM
TRIUMPHANT
How
is it that Communism is "dead" but the age-old
Marxist dream of a one-world socialist government is not that
far from becoming a reality? Think about it: Virtually the
entire Western world is, today, ruled by socialist or social
democratic parties: the foreign policy of these nations, as
exemplified in their accelerating wars of conquest from Kosovo
to East Timor to Iraq, is militantly interventionist. It might
even be said that the spirit of socialist internationalism,
far from expiring with the death agony of the old USSR, was
not only preserved but also to a large extent fulfilled by
the international social democracy. Newly aggressive, and
scenting the final victory, the new totalitarians are on the
march, and they are not shy about their sinister blueprint
for the future.
OH
BRAVE NEW WORLD
In
the brave new world of the NATO-crat's dreams, all the conquered
peoples will have their Natasa Kandics, fanatic traitors whose
obsessive devotion to the destruction and ritual humiliation
of their own people is more psychopathological than political.
But in the inverted moral universe of the NATO-crats, where
bombing civilians is an act of "humanitarianism,"
madness reigns supreme, and the Kandics are on the top of
the pyramid. Can a more nightmarish dystopia be imagined,
even by Orwell in one of his blackest moods?
THE
MONSTER LIVES
This
is the world your tax dollars will pay for, and your children
may die for this is the future the NATO-crats have
planned not only for the Serbs but also for their own people.
A world where opposition to racial collectivism and racial
preferences is a "hate crime," and any attempt to
organize against the new order is "hate speech"
and therefore banned. A world where "free trade"
unites an international confederation of socialist nations,
with one currency, one army, and one international directorate
that runs it all in the name of "social justice,"
of course. Communism is dead yeah, sure, but the age-old
dream of Marx and his sidekick and sugar daddy Engels is more
monstrously alive than ever. Go figure.
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