Saving the Republic

The left loves to confiscate. It stems from its basic belief that individuals do not and should not own anything. In their view, only the state, the acquisitive state, should possess. Socialists, communists, and yes, even fascists all believe the state alone has the right and should, therefore, exercise its power to take anything from anyone in order to further its mission. And what is that mission? To exercise total control over the population, because that's the only way totalitarianism can survive. When all power resides in the state and a people is dispossessed of everything, that same people can do nothing. Of course, we see an example of this with so-called "gun control," a policy that ultimately aims at gun confiscation. An unarmed public is far less threatening to those in power than one which possesses millions of weapons. This, then, is the theory under which the acquisitive state operates.

We saw signs of this in England and elsewhere when landowners and even small property owners were attacked both politically and financially. But the signs became very real during the twentieth century when the Soviet and Chinese Communists, along with their less influential proteges, blatantly confiscated all productive property. In response, the United States government openly condemned the violent and terroristic approach of these nations. And yet, despite the condemnation, our government's policies tended push our nation and its people in the same leftward direction. The New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, Globalization, Obamacare, the Green New Deal, and many other doctrines and programs moved our nation and its people away from personal freedom and toward increased governmental control of all aspects of their lives.

Although most of these doctrines were hatched in the political incubators of the Democrat Party, the Republicans did little to slow the process. Under Republican administrations we experienced the establishment of many intrusive agencies and recent Republican presidents have expanded government spending by huge amounts, doing very little to slow the advance of an unelected bureaucracy to power. It would seem many Republicans have decided to continue along the same leftward path, but to do so more slowly and less conspicuously. At the same time, they declare the welfare state is doomed, that it will eventually collapse. One is reminded of Margaret Thatcher's famous line: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." Perhaps, but that can take a long time so long as those "other people" willingly provide the funds.

Free-market economies not only offer economic freedom and opportunity, but also encourage political freedom. But it's important to remember that socialist regimes like Communist China have been able to remain in power, even though they reject the true economic freedom and productive benefits of capitalism. They've stayed in power because they use the technological advancements of capitalism, technology they acquire through both trade and thievery.

The Communist Chinese have learned much from the earlier mistakes of the Soviets. Personally, I don't believe they are about to collapse, at least not in the near term. Such regimes, which rely heavily on terror, will manage to survive so long as capitalism still exists. I suspect they can last even longer through the ready use of force and other means of coercion. Force, especially when it is applied brutally, can overcome a people's desire to achieve the material benefits of a free economy.

If we truly want to save our Republic from morphing into just another form of totalitarianism, we must take a totally different approach, less political and more spiritual, more religious. We must openly address the moral inhumanity of all forms of socialism. Socialism aims to deprive the individual of the gift of his humanity since it views people as mere statistics, thereby demeaning them all. It denies the person the ability to exercise the freedom to choose how he lives and deprives him of responsibility for his future and for the well-being of family and community. Only by focusing on moral and spiritual means and ends can the plague of socialist totalitarianism be defeated. It demands more than individual, family, and community prayer. Prayer is necessary, but we must also act. We must courageously address our civilization's and our nation's moral and spiritual foundation, ensuring that those who follow will continue the fight for the freedom God wills for us. We must accept that we are not fighting an economic or social war, but rather a spiritual war. No other approach can succeed.

Future Gulags

In a recent post I offered a brief description of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic examination of the ruthless and brutal persecution of the Russian people perpetrated by the communist authorities after the revolution of 1917 -- The Gulag Archipelago (hereafter abbreviated as GA). Millions were killed, imprisoned, or exiled during the decades that followed and Solzhenitsyn, as one of the survivors, had the passion and the spirit to conduct the difficult research in complete and necessary secrecy, and the courage to tell the story.

I also included just a sampling of some of the recent comments made by those on our political left, comments that are reminiscent of the attitudes that drove the thinking of the communists who so fervently slaughtered and imprisoned so many Russians. How sad that those on the left seem to despise the protections of religion, speech, and press, among others, provided by our nation's Constitution.

In truth, there's little difference between the totalitarians of either left or right. They both believe the state should control all aspects of people's lives -- they are, after all, totalitarians -- but there are some differences in practice, particularly related to the way they view and handle a society's means of production. Communists despise the idea of private property and corporate ownership and believe the state should own pretty much everything. Of course, once government bureaucrats take over an industry, thus eliminating all competition and any incentive to succeed, the industry descends into gross inefficiency and chaos. Fascists are actually a bit (but only a bit) smarter since they realize total government control would likely destroy any industry. They, therefore, allow private companies to run their businesses efficiently but demand subservience. Adolph Hitler, for example, didn't have to nationalize Krupp, I. G. Farben, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, and so many others. All he had to do was threaten them and they willingly did his bidding. Armed troops outside the front door of a business or a home can be an effective motivator.

We're starting to see signs of this among our hi-tech giants who do the bidding of the liberal establishment by "canceling" those who disagree with the prevailing ideology. The threat? Be good or the first thing we'll do is repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and allow anyone to sue you for what someone else says about them on one of your platforms. Oh, yes, we can also apply a host of anti-trust legislation and break your big company up into a slew of smaller, more easily controlled firms. There’s so much we can do to you.

Are the "leftists" who have infected Congress, government agencies, academia, big business, and the media really on the political left, or are they more closely aligned with the far right? It actually makes little difference since both extremes have similar ends -- control of others through the expansion and application of power -- and use similar means to achieve them. Solzhenitsyn makes this point often enough when, for example, he compares the ruthless application of power by both Hitler and Stalin, and their minions.

In writing the truth about what his country and its people endured, Solzhenitsyn offers us many prophetic insights. I certainly don't intend to relate them all, but hope only to show that the disturbing things we are experiencing and hearing now are nothing new. We must be wary, or this "one nation, under God" could easily lead to the end visualized by James Burnham in his 1964 book, Suicide of the West.

Let me conclude this post with a comment by Solzhenitsyn in which he describes the legal means put in place and implemented by the Soviet communist government, a new form of justice necessary if they hoped to carry out their brutal persecution:

"And so an entirely new form was adopted: extrajudicial reprisal, and this thankless job was self-sacrificingly assumed by the Cheka, the Sentinel of the Revolution, which was the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict" GA...p. 28.

It was called “reprisal” because it’s primary purpose was to rid the society of real and potential political opponents of the Bolsheviks. It was a form of political cleansing driven as much by revenge as by necessity. Sound familiar? And when I hear of the secrecy and obvious extra-legal actions of federal law enforcement and its involvement with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, I can’t help but think that perhaps we’ve taken a first step toward the “extrajudicial” approach taken by those communist revolutionaries. 

In my next post I hope to show how that which began in Russia a century ago merely foreshadowed some of what we are witnessing today.

Gulags, Past and Present

Note: This post is the first of several that will address a book first published almost 50 years ago and its author's prophetic insights into our world today.  

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As usual, I’m involved in re-reading a book I first read years ago. It’s one of those books that many people bought because it received so much publicity when it first appeared, and they thought it would look good on their bookshelves. Written by a Nobel laureate, it was, however, non-fiction, quite long, and filled with pages of tedious, highly disturbing facts...so most of those who bought it never actually read it. This is a shame since it offers a detailed description of the blueprint followed by totalitarians of the left and the right once they take the reins of political power. 

The book? Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Its three volumes have been published in paperback editions, but the first two volumes are also available in a single hardcover. For those who might balk at reading this long work in its original entirety, an authorized abridged edition has been published. My copy Is the hardcover edition containing the unabridged Volumes 1 and 2, which I purchased shortly after it was first published back in 1973. Just an FYI: here’s a link to a used copy of the edition I own: The Gulag Archipelago. I’m sure you can find other, newer, and less expensive editions.

Before he turned his talents to researching and documenting the history of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union’s brutal treatment of its own citizens by Lenin, Stalin, and their toadies, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was already a highly respected best-selling novelist. His One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) gives us a glimpse of the horrors of the Siberian Gulag by telling the story of one man's struggle against the dehumanizing evils of Soviet communism. Among his other novels, I managed to read In the First Circle (1968), Cancer Ward (1968), and August 1914 (1971). As I recall, I read all of these novels while at sea during my Navy years. There was no TV aboard ship and certainly no Internet in those days, so when I wasn’t working, flying, sleeping, or eating, I could usually find an hour or two to read.

But it was Solzhenitsyn's great non-fiction work, The Gulag Archipelago, that for me had its greatest impact. It's one thing to read a work of fiction, even one based on and reflecting historical realities, but it's quite another to encounter the lives and deaths of thousands of real people with real names and real families, human beings devoured by a system of almost unspeakable evil. 

Both historian and prophet, Solzhenitsyn’s painstaking research presents his readers with the reality of communist ideology brought to life...or, perhaps more accurately, to death. He pulls no punches, and as we read we encounter the logical consequence of atheistic materialism, the culmination of a socialism that denies the sanctity of life and deifies the state. Solzhenitsyn bares the truth of the communist state as a cruel, demanding, capricious, and unforgiving god. In 1985 he summed it all up:

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then, I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by the upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as precisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

To read The Gulag Archipelago is to come to the undeniable conclusion that communism is nothing less than Satanic. And the sad truth is that so-called “democratic socialism” too often chooses to follow a similar path because to maintain its grip on political power socialist governments demand universal acceptance. Those who disagree must be silenced, one way or another.

I was led to turn once again to Solzhenitsyn's book after listening to some rather shrill comments made by Biden administration folks, some members of Congress, media pundits, and others who seem to have embraced rather unsettling approaches to dealing with their political opponents. Some examples:

• President Joe Biden seemed to dismiss the Islamist terrorism that has threatened our civilization over that past few decades, and decided to focus instead on "domestic terrorism" by means of executive order. By this, of course, he doesn't mean the months of destructive attacks, the riots, and the deaths perpetrated by far left groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter. No, the president is focused on supporters of his predecessor, Donald Trump...you know, that collection of a few hundred January 6 wackos accused of trying to overthrow the government by means of an unarmed insurrection. Interestingly, beginning the day of his inauguration, Antifa and its allies have been rioting every night, continuing to work their destructive ways in our cities, but we hear not a word about it from the Biden administration. One gets the impression that the only folks deemed to be "terrorists" are conservative political opponents of Joe Biden.
  

• David Atkins, newly elected as a California member of the Democratic National Committee, told his Democrat colleagues to "start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan" so that we can "deprogam 75 million people" -- presumably speaking of Trump voters. Of course, such deprogramming can succeed only if its targets (victims?) are denied access to their usual sources of news and information. In other words, deprogramming demands a significant degree of censorship and the elimination of the Constitutional rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, among others. 

• Shortly before election day, Keith Olberman, former MSNBC anchor, let loose with another of his mindless rants:

"Trump must be defeated...and his enablers, and his supporters...must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society." 

Heavens! All 75 million of them? He advocates prosecuting American citizens for supporting and voting for a particular candidate. Olbermann’s a very scary guy, but fortunately I don’t think too many people actually listen to him...one hopes.

• Washington Post columnist, Jennifer Rubin, a "Never Trumper" who labels herself a Republican, used Twitter to tell the world that any of those Republicans who challenged the 2020 election results must be disqualified from public office and ostracized from society:

"Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into 'polite' society."

Personally, I really don't think I'd want to be accepted into Rubin's idea of polite society. It sounds horribly impolite. It also begs the question: What about all those Democrats who rejected the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections? How about it, Jennifer, can we eject them from your polite society too? Oh, wait a minute...that would probably include you.

• Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) believes that all Trump voters should automatically be suspects for a domestic terrorist attack and should be looked at by law enforcement. Cohen was especially concerned about all those National Guardsmen who probably voted for Turmp and were assigned to protect the Capitol. Can you imagine? We must protect the nation from all those conservative, patriotic, military folks who risked their lives to protect Steve Cohen and the rest of us from the global terrorist threat because...well, they might morph into domestic terrorists.  

• And then the nation — OK, just a tiny slice of the nation — watched Katie Couric (I really didn’t know she was still around) on Bill Maher’s HBO show as she jumped on the “deprogram the conservatives” bandwagon: 

“I mean, it’s really bizarre, isn’t it, when you think about how AWOL so many members of Congress have gotten. But I also think some of them are believing the garbage that they are being fed 24/7 on the Internet, by their constituents, and they bought into this big lie...And the question is how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump.” 

For Katie and her friends, to disagree with them on policy or candidates is to commit a political mortal sin, one that demands repentance and conversion, apparently by interventionist means if necessary.

• Finally, we have Michael Beller, a staff PBS attorney, who not only suggested tossing Molotov cocktails at the Trump White House, and added:

“We go for all the Republican voters, and Homeland Security will take their children away...We’ll put them into the re-education camps.” 

His comments, which were recorded and leaked by a conservative group, were so over the top that PBS actually fired him...at least for now.

I could offer dozens more, but these suffice to make my point. Reading them calls me back to Solzhenitsyn as he describes many of the attitudes that led to the horrific reality of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. More on that in my next post.