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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 1997)
PAGE 12 74 YEARS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD FROM THE PREVIOUS PAGE Marx thought he had correctly analyzed the inequality between capital and production, and believed he had remodeled human destiny through a prism of dialectical materialism impos sible to dispute. The central flaw in Marx was the same as in every ideology — the unpredictable human beings who rule in the name of ideology. Such overreaching is not exclusive to communists or dictatorships but also by the managers of propertied democracy who claim capitalism as its foundation. The United States Constitution, after all, was promulgated in secret meetings by wealthy merchants, large landowners (many of them slave holders) and lawyers, and was not ratified by popular vote but by state legislatures composed of men of privilege and power. The Bill of Rights, vtfiich is considered the USA's fundamental dialec tic of democratic ideals, was an afterthought conceived by men worried that the Constitution did little to protect or enforce the rights of the populace, and every subsequent amendment allow ing for political and social equality, equal justice and minority rights was hardwon through disputation, struggle and often bloodshed, which included our own costly Civil War. It has been said that every liberty won through long and arduous strife in the United States and Europe, such as the suffrage of labor and women, civil rights and legal justice for racial and economic minorities, has been raw Marxism. (Gunnar Myrdal wote in 1942 that America is "conservative in fundamental principles... but the principles conserved are liberal, and some, indeed, are radical") Eighty years ago John Reed, Oregon's most prominent offering to history, invented 20th century documentary journal ism wth his chronicle of the dramatic grasp for power by the Bolsheviks in October/November 1917, Ten Days That Shook The World. Then he went home and became a founder of the American Communist Party ("fueding twin" to the Communist Labor Party of America, established at the same time) filled wth the passionate conviction that the exploited American lower classes finally possessed the instrument to successfully rise up against the reigning industrial plutocracy. (Ironically, while Reed was 'present at the creation' of the USSR, another former Ore gon journalist was present at its disintegration Bill Keller, the new managing editor of The New York Times.) Ideas of communism in the USA were especially power ful in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Southern and eastern European immi grants in particular turned to socialist and anarchist notions in reaction to harsh exploitation in mills and factories in vtfiich they were the majority of unskilled laborers — they had, in fact, been allowed to immigrate because of the desperate need for their labor as a result of the rapid expansion of American industry. The Italian-American anarchist/communist Luigi Galleani, who listed among his admirers Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Van zetti, rejected entirely the idea of the State and ownership of property. "When we talk about property, State, masters, govern ment, laws, courts and police," he declared, "we say only that we don't want any of them." At the same time the Socialist Soviet government under Stalin was mercilessly purging merchants, landowners, prosper ous peasants (kulaks), political parties and every form of free expression (also the usual pogroms against Jews) —as well as starving millions and "relocating" millions of others to Siberian wxk camps — the U.S. government's reaction against any group that opposed the status quo was censorious and brutal (though not as monumentally murderous as Stalin's), and all were lumped together as communists ("Bolsheviks" was the popular rubric, and also "anarchists," by vtfiich was meant the same thing) whether they were or not From Attorney General Palmer and his infamous "Red Squad" raids against anyone suspected of liberal, leftist or union sympathies; which included deportation of "aliens" — to Senator Joseph McCarthy's bogus JANUSZ KAPUSTA lists of purported communist sympathizers in government and the House Un-American Activities purge of the entertainment industry in the early years of the Cold War — repression in the form of witchhunts, character assassination, blacklisting and imprisonment was unyielding, and for a time at least, politically and publicly popular. American political reaction to communism long before the Cold War was summed by Don Whitehead in his book The FBI Story. He wrote that as early as the 1920s "communist crusaders" like J. Edgar Hoover had discovered in communism "a conspiracy so vast, so daring that few people at first could even grasp the sweep of communist vision. It was a conspiracy to destroy totally and and completely the religions, governments, institutions and thinking of the Judaic-Christian world, the Buddhist world, the Moslemic wjrld, and all religious beliefs." Communism was "the most evil, monstrous conspiracy against man since time began " Most labor unions, liberal and alternative political parties and organizations, and of course the Communist Party USA, were infiltrated by police and intelligence agents who often staged illegal acts to turn public opinion against any and all challengers to the established order: -The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which had great success organizing Pacific Coast loggers before World War I — Dump the bosses off your back, was a slogan 'Wobbly' organizers used in the wxxis; the preamble to the famous IWW Little Red Book states unequivocally that the wjrking and capi talist classes have absolutely nothing in common -The International Longshore & Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), which joined with maritime unions to stage the Great 1934 Strike and shut down most West Coast ports for months. -The United Auto Workers, who invented the sitdown strike in the 1930s and were attacked by hired "goonsquads" armed with clubs and guns. -The shooting of striking miners in the South and West by state militias. -The killing of striking steelworkers by police on Memor ial Day 1937. The savage and persistent persecution of the American labor movement was justified by accusation that the unions were communist inspired and part of the "international communist conspiracy" that was determined to destroy the American Way of Life Such maledictions of Kremlin infiltration were also declared against the Civil Rights Movement to support the use of clubs, dogs and firebombs to keep Jim Crow alive; similar accusations and methods were used against Vietnam antiwar activists in the 1960s, many of whom did flirt wth Marxist, Trot skyite, Maoist and socialist ideas. Communism inspired fear and hatred throughout the Western world. Proxy wars between the conflicting ideologies of communism and capitalism were fought in faraway places, peasant armies against peasant rebels (a few of whom were Marxists), often accompanied by brutal massacres of civilians; more than 100,000 suspected communists were murdered in Indonesia alone. Such was the dread of Marxist-Leninism that Adolf Hitler gained considerable support on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for his claim as the potential slayer of the Red devil. At Nuremberg in 1934, during one of his massive rallies, Hitler said, "Only brainless dwarfs cannot realize that Germany has been the breakwater against the communist flood, which would have drowned Europe and its culture." British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's concessions to Hitler at Munich in 1938 were in the hope the Nazis would expand eastward into Russia and leave the West alone. At the same time, England and France rejected Stalin's hopes for a tripartite resistance to Germany. Aware of Western antipathy toward him (the mirror of his own reciprocal hatred for the "running dogs of capitalism"), Stalin, who had critically weakened his armed forces with purges of top officers, sought to appease the Nazis. He made an exped ient alliance with Hitler, himself willing to postpone in the interest of the moment his desire for lebensraum, the plan to depopulate the great Russian heartland for German settlement. (Contrary to Chamberlain's hopes, Hitler planned to mop up the West and neutralize it as a threat before invading the USSR.) Self-preservation from the ravages of an ancient enemy was not Stalin's only agenda. He spread his tentacles into east ern Poland after the Nazis broke its back in the west, and he sent his purge-impaired army into Finland, at first thwarted by a heroic defense, then got his way by overwhelming force of numbers. (Stalin used his armies as "prolifigately as Asians" throughout the war, with a reckless fatalism "no other European army could afford or was psychologically capable of," William Trotter wrote in Winter Fire). In the meantime he seized the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Hitler betrayed the "unholy" pact by invading Russia in June 1941. Only after a titanic effort that cost more than 20 million Russian dead (and millions of Germans), the Nazi war machine was destroyed by the defenders of 'Mother Russia'. (Stalin knew communism had few defenders and wisely called for saving country rather than party.) The wartime alliance with the Allies that resulted from the Nazi invasion also made Stalin (a greater murderer than Hitler) a popular figure in the United Sates. War propaganda made him into a cuddly "Uncle Joe" for the duration. The 'Great Patriotic War1, as the Russians called their incredible struggle against the Nazis, was the peak of the communist "revolution," though the Soviets inherited an empire as spoils of the war and waged a Cold War against Western Europe, the United States and satellites for nearly half a century. The war fatally weakened the infrastructure of the United Social ist Soviet Republic even as it expanded into an empire, billowing like a red star before collapsing inward upon itself In particular its bloated military combined with increasing internal corruption and social paralysis were as fatal as syphilis to Russian com munism. ignored for decades until insanity and death. World War 2 ended European hegemony and broke up the great colonial empires. The Soviets quickly took advantage of their tremendous victory and moved first into Eastern Europe and with brutal use of power (which included murder and deport ation to Siberia) installed puppet regimes which were kept in tight rein for decades, dispatching soldiers and tanks into East Berlin (1949), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Poland (1979) to quell outbreaks of revolt The U.S. and USSR spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing nuclear arsenals, each posing the threat of the other to continually escalate the race at the same time they raced through generations of nuclear weapons Each claimed to be defending humanity against the darkness the other would plunge it into, and the contradictory idea of "preventive war” — starting a war to prevent war — was a common rationale for threatening world obliteration. Nations polarized willingly or reluctantly into an East/West Cold War characterized by nuclear terror and Imported Beer On Tap Fish & Chips WE RE NO.1 ON 2 ST. ASTORIA • 325-0033 ASTORIA COFFEE HOUSE «& BOOKS) 1154 COMMERCIAL # 325-7670 1
