Could Not Have Been More Wrong
A most interesting conversation has gripped the Wright household this past week, and I am pleased that my lovely wife, unfortunately raised by ultrafarleftwing Reagan-haters, has finally managed to shake herself free of some of the deeper impressions left over from her upbringing.
Yes, Virginia, there are Communists, and they mean to do exactly what they say they mean to do, starting with lies and propaganda and ending with death camps and genocide, all the while promising free health care.
Their purpose is to make you afraid of anticommunists, like McCarthy, while dismissing all fears of communists, like Mao, as paranod absurdity. Except that every single soul accused by McCarthy, Soviet records released to the West now show, was in fact a paid Soviet spy, and McCarthy killed no one, harmed no one, robbed no one. On the other hand Mao killed more people than live in the United Kingdom plus live in Portugal (circa 79 million). The cash value of how much property and labor was extorted by force from the Chinese people under Mao’s reign no historian has calculated.
And … the Left are afraid of McCarthy and people like him, but not afraid of Mao and people like him.
Hmm. Another miracle of modern state-mandated education, I suppose.
(In health ed class do they teach that AIDS is good for you, and chaste sex between a couple both virgins until the wedding night is evil, sick and wrong? In chemistry, do they teach that gunpowder cannot explode but butter often does?)
The degree of fantasy land thinking involved in denying the overwhelming testimony of the facts of the Twentieth Century is something I continue to find astonishing. It is not as if the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions and their surrounding atrocities happened in a cave.
In any case, my wife has suffered a recent epiphany concerning these and related matters, and write an article most illuminating on the topic:
http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/04/12/6231/
In high school, one of the most chilling things I learned about was the Red Scare in Hollywood. I had a mental picture of Communists sympathizers as sweet helpful souls who wanted to help the less fortunate. I figured artists and actors are often taken in by such things, and thought that the blacklisting of Communists in Hollywood was one of the most terrifying things I had heard of…because I saw myself likely to be part of the blacklisted group.
Because I thought that the actors were just innocent dupes, I figured the other people targeted by the Senate UnAmerican Activities Committee were probably equally innocent or unimportant.
After all, it did not say otherwise in anything I read in school.
Later, I heard that when the KGB opened their documents, the people called before the Senate UnAmerican Activities Committee were actually Communist Party members, many in the pay of the Soviets—actually working for the downfall of America.
I guess, at some level, I had not actually believed it. Or I had pictured them as ineffective intellectuals with glasses sitting around a table somewhere discussing politics and accomplishing nothing.
When I thought of the Communist Party, I pictured, basically, the Libertarian Party. A small party of idealistic intellectuals, devoted to a cause on principle and tirelessly working toward it despite very little success.
I could not have been more wrong.
Bella Dodd was an Italian-born American (she was an American accidentally born in Italy, who grew up there until she was about six,) who went on to become a teacher. Influenced by the young free thinking teacher at her college (who later committed suicide, so empty was her life), Bella became interested in labor rights and was targeted by the Communists.
To my utter astonishment, at that time, the Communists were a huge, well-organized group with fingers in every single pie.
Because they had many of their members stay secret, not reveal that they were actually Communists, they could be members of every group. They formed Fragments, as I think they called them, in every political party, every labor union. Because if this they knew what all the different parties and groups were up to, and could organized coordinated attacks to get their policies across.
In the various teachers unions, their main goal was getting schools to 1) accept federal aid and 2) emphasize separation of church and state.
They had as an avowed goal: designing public schools so as to break up the family and make the children idea future Communists.
The Communists attacked the Church, demonized it, and tried to separate workers from their priests at every turn. Bella saw this over and over and gave some examples. She also admitted to helping over 1,100 communists get into the Roman Catholic Church, with plans to alter and destroy it from within.
They also attacked race harmony in America. Word came from the Soviet Union that America’s racial peace and its morality were its strength, so these things had to be destroyed.
All these things, these things we all complain about but think is just ‘part of life’, this highly-organized, secret group were deliberately attempting to orchestrate.
And they were really clever at it. Whenever anyone came up with a logical argument to make the bad thing sound like the moral high ground, they quickly shared it. Suddenly, that argument was the accepted view.
Read the whole thing: http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/04/12/6231/
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
