To Coin Neocommunism

As a JFK Republican myself, I agree with Ronald Reagan, who started as a liberal Democrat and became the greatest conservative leader in the 20th century. "As he said so often, he didn't leave the Democratic Party -- it left him."

There is a new animal lurking in the city streets. Or is it an old animal dressed in new clothes? The animal's name, Neocommunism.

Neocommunism

A post-USSR Marxist ideological movement with the supposed goal to create Paradise on Earth by overthrowing democratic capitalism and traditional moral and other standards, but the actual goal to enable the rise of a new ruling class of Marxist intellectuals with huge power over ordinary people.

Stalinism, Communism, Marxism reforged in the flame of Political Correctness

"Communist" has been expelled from the Politically Correct lexicon -- which tells us a lot about the Commissars of the PC. They bear the most amazing resemblance to the old Commissars of (deleted) who killed 60-100 million people in the 20th century. (And Kim Jong Il, not to mention Red China, are still doing it....)

Mikhail Gorbachev, who should know them when he sees them, recently warned about a "resurgence of Stalinism" in Russia and Eastern Europe. The history of Communist crimes was being erased, he said. Well, he was right.

But resurgent Stalinism is not limited to those countries. It's in the US and all over the world, as David Horowitz, another former radical, continues to document in great detail. The Boomer Left is simply filled to the gills with those who used to be called Commies, but who are now "progressives." (source)

Note that Hillary Clinton calls herself a progressive. As she clerked for the lawyer of the Communist Party of the USA after Law School and has always spouted Marxist and class-struggle rhetoric this should not surprise anyone.

Today's Neocommunists prefer to call themselves Marxists, which has again become a respected word on college campuses. But Marxism is Communist ideology. What else could it be? If you read carefully, Neocommunism is really out there, only slightly disguised. Just as Soviet propaganda insisted America was rotten to the core, so does the Hard Left and the institutions it controls parrot the line. The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, now a favorite history textbook in the colleges, is proud to "revise" everything we think we know about America, from the true people's point of view. (source)

James Lewis had two recent articles in the American Thinker about Neocommunism

• Neo-Cons and Neo-Commies
• The evidence for Neocommunism

From The evidence for Neocommunism

Today the voters have not yet caught on to the real radicalism of the Left. If they do, Democrats will once again have to choose between the totalitarian impulse and being small d-democrats. Because our Democrats are emphatically not small-d democrats. They will use and manipulate their voters, but they don't listen to them. Whenever possible, they accomplish unpopular policy initiatives through the courts, our least democratic government mechanism, one never designed to lead in formulating social policy.

The NeoCommies may not be conspirators, but they are heirs to an international political movement that was built on conspiracies.

We now have a great deal of factual evidence about the Communist conspiracies that were part of longest struggle against totalitarianism in the 20th century, much longer than the war against the Nazis. The struggle against Soviet Communism was a seven decade Long War. There was ample time to develop covert networks.

The new evidence comes from Communist archives that were opened after the fall of the Soviet Empire around 1990. It shows that the anti-Communist Right was quite accurate in its diagnosis of the disease. Former Communists like George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers were telling the truth.

Today, former Boomer Leftists like David Horowitz are giving us the same bad news. They are the most reliable sources we have, because they are the most intimately familiar with the disease. There are political, intellectual, and spiritual descendants in positions of power and influence. It's just that most of us don't really want to believe the bad news.

Yes, there really was an international Communist conspiracy, controlled by Lenin and Stalin and their successors, with tens of millions of sucker-followers in the West. Today the average liberal is not a knave, but a sucker; but there are knaves aplenty on the Left. We can see them acting out in the noisiest way.

The KGB and its predecessors really were incredibly successful in penetrating American and European academia and government. Harry Hopkins, FDR's right-hand man, really did report at times to Soviet agents, riding in a car so they couldn't be bugged. Harry Hopkins was perhaps under the illusion that he was doing that in good faith to FDR and the country. The human capacity for self-delusion is very great, and among liberals it becomes fathomless. But Alger Hiss is now widely acknowledged by historians to have been a Communist spy in the State Department, just as William F. Buckley and Whittaker Chambers said in the Fifties.

Senator Joe McCarthy may have been a demagogue who took advantage of alarm about the Stalinist danger. But Joe McCarthy flourished in an atmosphere in which Stalin had conquered half of Europe, had exploded his first A and H Bombs, and possessed vastly greater armies than the West. Stalin did have agents all over the West and was helped immeasurably by millions of Leftist dupes. After all the immense US sacrifices of World War II, no wonder Americans were outraged by the Stalinist threat. They were absolutely right to be angry.

Many of the people who were called to testify before Congress were Communists, as they boasted long afterwards, and yes, it's true, they really were taking orders from the local Party bosses, who were taking their orders from Moscow. We all wish it wasn't so. It was a nasty, dangerous time. But wishing doesn't make the truth go away.

For just one alarming example: nuclear bomb secrets really were stolen from the Manhattan Project by Klaus Fuchs, who was rewarded for it by a high position in the East German Communist government. American Leftwing scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of the Manhattan Project, were incredible suckers, allowing gaping security holes, and ended up giving Stalin the Bomb -- much to the surprise of the CIA (natch).

In the Post-Soviet world, of course, things are very different. There are no puppet masters in Moscow. But still, the parallels and resonance with what's going on today are chilling.

From Neo-Cons and Neo-Commies

During the heroic period of American liberals, the Communists were thrown out of the Labor movement, and to some extent out of academia. They came back with the Boomer Left, inspired by the call to conduct a "Long March through the institutions." That call came from Gramsci, who was, you guessed it, a famous Communist Party hack in Italy. (The Long March he referenced was Mao Zedong's mytholigized march to power in China, which led to, oh, at least 40 million deaths.) The Boomer Lefties who are now getting old simply stacked all the American institutions they could, from the schools to the courts. (See Hillary's youthful infatuation with Saul Alinsky.)

And yes, they are not patriotic, because they are internationalists. That means they want to submerge this country under the control of a Left-ruled imperium. They say it out loud, when they don't think you're listening.

So the bright line that was once drawn between democratic liberals and totalitarian Communists has simply been erased.

H/T: The ever reliable Dissecting Leftism

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, , The Random Yak, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, High Desert Wanderer, and Conservative Cat, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.


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