History usually repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance of seeing that re-enactment with your own eyes. In 1978, I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people rid themselves of their Marxist dictatorship, carefully disguised as socialism. Thirty years later I witnessed how the same Marxism, camouflaged as socialism, began infecting the shores of my adoptive country, the United States, which had just won a 44-year Cold War against Marxism and against its earthly incarnation, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
In a 2008 column titled “Big Political Shifts Are Underway,” Joelle Fishman, chairman of the Action Commission of the Communist Party USA, strongly endorsed the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, appealing to all working people in the United States to back Senator Barack Obama, in order to provide “a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right.”
That new alliance between the Democratic Party and the Communist Party was a first in the history of the United States, the world’s headquarters of democracy and free enterprise. In November 2008, over 65 million Americans who were unable to identify the stealth virus of Marxism that was infecting the Democratic Party voted to give this party the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Although we now live in an age of technology, we still do not have an instrument that can scientifically measure to what extent the Communist endorsement of the Democratic Party influenced the results of the 2008 election. But if there had been any doubt in my mind that the Democratic and the Communist parties had secretly joined forces, that doubt was erased in 2009, when Van Jones, part of a left fringe of declared communists, became the White House’s green jobs czar. Soon after that, the White House and the Democrat-controlled Congress began dutifuly following in Marx’s footsteps by redistributing our country’s wealth and putting under government control a part of its health care, banking system, and automobile industry.
Today it is considered bad manners even to mention the word Marxism, a doctrine that killed some 94 million people and transformed a third of the world into feudal societies in the middle of the 20th century. Nevertheless, there is an old saying: If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Let’s try to stand the heat for a few minutes, and poke our noses into Karl Marx’s kitchen.
In his Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx urged his followers to replace capitalism with communism via a “socialist redistribution of wealth,” which “should displace capitalism and precede communism.” Marx advocated ten “despotic inroads on the rights of property,” and he called them the ten planks of communism. The most important are:
- A progressive or graduated income tax;
- Abolition of rights of inheritance;
- Centralization of credit in the hands of the state;
- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state;
- Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.[iii]
On August 3, 2011, the CPUSA again threw its support to the Democratic Party. “It may be early in the campaign season, but the Communist Party USA already has seen fit to endorse Barack Obama for the 2012 election,” stated Sam Webb, chairman of the Communist Party, in an article published in the People’s Weekly World, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA. Webb explained (emphasis as in the original):
Despite the many frustrations of the past two years, the election of Barack Obama was historic and gave space to struggle for a people’s agenda. If, on the other hand, the Republicans had been victorious in 2008, the character of class and democratic struggles would have unfolded very differently. Our movement would have been on the defensive from Day One, the Democrats would be running for cover, and the Republicans would have an unfettered hand in their efforts to liquidate the welfare state, roll back the rights revolution of the 1930s and 1960s, and crush the people’s movement – labor in the first place.
In November, the United States will indeed face one of the most important elections in its history. On the surface, the voters will decide which of our two main political parties will control the White House and the U.S. Congress. In fact, the voters will chose between keeping the country the leader of the Free World, or allowing the United States to be further infected by the virus of Marxism.
It seems that Artur Davis, former co-chairman of President Barak Obama’s presidentail campaign, who seconded his official nomination at the 2008 Democratic Convention, has seen the light. Davis was the sole member of the Congressional Black Caucus to vote against Obama’s health-care legislation in 2010. A couple of days ago, he resigned from the Democratic Party. “Wearing a Democratic label no longer matches what I know about my country and its possibilities,” Davis said. “Frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country. I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured.”
“Communism is dead,” people shouted in 1989, when the Berlin Wall began to come down. Soviet communism is indeed dead as a form of government, but Marxism is on the rise again, and people are not paying attention. A few conservative luminaries, like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly, have warned that Marxism is infecting the United States, but neither the Tea Party’s “Contract from America” nor the Republicans’ “Pledge to America” called attention to the looming dangers of Marxism. Why not? Because our well-meaning conservatives do not seem to be familiar with the undercover forms of Marxism that we are facing today.
Hiding the ugly face of Marxism has become a real Marxist science. This science was conceived by Lenin, who coined the term “useful idiots” to describe those in the West who naively promoted Marxism without knowing what it really was. Stalin perfected this Marxist science. At his request, all East European countries “liberated” by the Red Army at the end of World War II began their march toward Marx’s communism by donning socialist masks. Just a few months after the Red Army “liberated” the Kingdom of Romania, Stalin merged that country’s Communist Party with the Social Democratic Party, producing the Workers’ Party. At that time communism was a kind of scarecrow, so from one day to the next Romania no longer had a Communist Party.
East Germany went the same way. Overnight, the old Communist Party, which had become infamous after being accused of setting the Reichstag on fire in 1933, was renamed the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The Hungarian Communist Party, which had created the shortlived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, was quietly rebaptized as the Hungarian Working People’s Party. Most East European governments similarly concealed their road to communism by posting innocuous nameplates at the door, such as People’s Republic or Popular Republic.
The 1963 missile crisis generated by Cuba gave the socialist mask of Marxism a dirty name in the West, and few Marxists wanted to be openly associated with socialism anymore. They therefore began hiding their Marxism under a new cover called “economic determinism,” which became all the rage among leftists who no longer wanted to be labeled socialists.
Economic determinism is a theory of survival rooted in Marx’s Manifesto (another theory of survival), but it pretends that the economic organization of a society, not the socialist class war and the socialist redistribution of wealth, determines the nature of all other aspects of its life. Over the years, economic determinism has assumed different names. Khrushchev’s dogonyat i peregonyat (catching up with and overtaking the West in ten years) and Gorbachev’s perestroika are the best known.
I wrote the script of Ceausescu’s determinism, which was hidden behind the nickname “New Economic Order.” Most Americans, who are not used to dealing with undercover Marxists, have problems recognizing one. In April 1978, President Carter hailed Ceausescu as a “great national and international leader who [had] taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community.” At the time, I was standing next to Ceausescu at the White House, and I just smiled.
Three months later, I was granted political asylum in the United States, and I informed President Carter how Ceausescu had been feeding him a pack of lies. The admiration for Ceausescu’s undercover Marxism had, however, taken on such a life of its own that the U.S. Congress, dominated by President Carter’s Democratic Party, brought the United States a sui-generis version of Ceausescu’s economic determinism. That move generated double-digit inflation. The U.S. prime rate hit 21.5%, the highest in U.S. history, and people had to spend long hours in line waiting to buy gas for their cars.
I am grateful to President Carter for signing off on my political asylum, but it was he who laid the groundwork for the Democratic Party’s disastrous flirtation with the undercover Marxism that has now gained a stronghold over the party. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton and later an economic adviser to President Obama, has kept that undercover Marxism alive in the U.S. She even wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the merits of the allegedly “mixed” socialist-capitalist economies in Ceausescu’s Romania and Tito’s Yugoslavia. Two American presidents went to Bucharest to pay tribute to Ceausescu’s economic determinism — none had ever gone there before.
When economic determinism lost credibility after the devastating economic crisis in Greece, our Democratic Party began replacing it with “progressivism,” which has became the latest cover name for Marxism. The Progressive movement was born after the U.S. financial crisis of 1893, which it tried to solve by redistributing America’s wealth. The progressives pushed through the first federal income taxation, and they created a string of labor standards that opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess that generated the Great Depression. A new progressive movement, dubbed the New Deal, produced steep top tax rates, strict financial regulations, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, eventually generating the current economic crisis.
Today’s progressive Movement was born in New York’s Zuccotti Park. It was first known as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which advocated the abolition of “capitalist America.” The Democratic Party strongly embraced the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, and made “progressive” its new byword. “God bless them,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about the Occupy Wall Street movement. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” Representative Barney Frank, at that time minority leader of the House’s Financial Services Committee, welcomed “the Wall Street energy” and expressed hope that it would be “translated into political activity.”
Former White House “green jobs” czar Van Jones also announced his support for Occupy Wall Street, which he believes is the start of an “American Autumn.”
Marxism is a malignant tumor on the body of any country. This is another thing I learned during my years at the top of Marxist Romania. Marxism, like any cancer, works silently–you can feel it only after it has spread throughout the whole body, and then it is usually too late. The sudden, almost overnight, collapse of the almighty Soviet empire is incontestable proof to that.
I was 25 years old when the doctors advised my mother to have a just-discovered malignant tumor surgically removed as soon as possible. “What’s the rush, if it doesn’t hurt?” my dear mother kept asking me every time I tried to take her to the hospital. One year later I was kneeling at her grave.
I lost my mother to cancer, but I learned my lesson: if you have cancer, get rid of it any way you can. On Christmas Day 1989, the president of the undercover Marxist Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, was executed at the end of a trial whose main accusations came almost word for word out of my book Red Horizons. From one day to the next, my native Romania became free of cancer. Now it is a flourishing country again.
The United States of America is a unique country of freedom, built by generations of entrepreneurs who came to this land of opportunity in search of religious, economic, and personal freedom. Most Americans are still independent people who do not believe that the government is a boon bestowed from on high, and who will never allow themselves to become puppets of Marxism. Our country became the leader of the world because it is a successful capitalist country, and we Americans will do our best to keep it so.
On “Say No to Socialism,” I will expose the real convictions of the Democratic Party, which is using undercover Marxism in order to transform the U.S. into a monument to itself. I am humbled and honored to be a part of PJ Media.
There are many people in this country who know how to accomplish this task much better than I do. Nevertheless, in my other life I was involved in the process of spreading the destructive virus of Marxism disguised as benign economic determinism, and I have a few thoughts about how that veiled virus can be stopped from further infecting the United States. American essayist George Santayana, an immigrant like me, used to say that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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