lewrockwell--2020-02-24--Marxist Dreams and Soviet Realities

Marxist Dreams and Soviet Realities

The sharp contrast that Alexis de Tocqueville drew in 1835 between the United States and Tsarist Russia— ” the principle of the former is freedom ; of the latter , servitude ” —became much sharper after 1917 , when the Russian Empire was transformed into the Soviet Union .
Like the United States , the Soviet Union is a nation founded on a distinct ideology .
In the case of America , the ideology was fundamentally Lockean liberalism ; its best expressions are the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution .
The Ninth Amendment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the worldview of late eighteenth-century America .
The Founders believed that there exist natural , individual rights that , taken together , constitute a moral framework for political life .
Translated into law , this framework defines the social space within which men voluntarily interact ; it allows for the spontaneous coordination and ongoing mutual adjustment of the various plans that the members of society form to guide and fill their lives .
The Soviet Union was founded on a very different ideology , Marxism , as understood and interpreted by V. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ roots in Hegelian philosophy , was a quite conscious revolt against the individual rights doctrine of the previous century .
The leaders of the Bolshevik party ( which changed its name to Communist in 1918 ) were virtually all revolutionary intellectuals , in accordance with the strategy set forth by Lenin in his 1902 work What Is to Be Done ?
They were avid students of the works of Marx and Engels published in their lifetimes or shortly thereafter and known to the theoreticians of the Second International .
The Bolshevik leaders viewed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ program , as those whom History had called upon to realize the apocalyptic transition to Communist society foretold by the founders of their faith .
The aim they inherited from Marx and Engels was nothing less than the final realization of human freedom and the end of the “ prehistory ” of the human race .
Theirs was the Promethean dream of the rehabilitation of Man and his conquest of his rightful place as master of the world and lord of creation .
Great Wars and Great L ... Ralph Raico Best Price @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Building on the work of Michael Polanyi and Ludwig von Mises , Paul Craig Roberts has demonstrated—in books that deserve to be much better known than they are , since they provide an important key to the history of the twentieth century — the meaning of freedom in Marxism .
It lies in the abolition of alienation , i.e.
, of commodity production , production for the market .
For Marx and Engels , the market represents not merely the arena of capitalist exploitation but , more fundamentally , a systematic insult to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the consequences of Man ’ s action escape from his control and turn on him in malign ways .
Thus , the insight that market processes generate results that were no part of anyone ’ s intention becomes , for Marxism , the very reason to condemn them .
As Marx wrote of the stage of Communist society before the total disappearance of scarcity , The point is made most clearly by Engels : Thus , Man ’ s freedom would be expressed in the total control exercised by the associated producers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it , all of social life .
No longer would the unintended consequences of Man ’ s actions bring disaster and despair—there would be no such consequences .
Man would determine his own fate .
Left unexplained was how millions upon millions of separate individuals could be expected to act with one mind and one will—could suddenly become “ Man ” —especially since it was alleged that the state , the indispensable engine of coercion , would wither away .
Already in Marx and Engels ’ s day—decades before the establishment of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idea of just who it was that would assume the title role when the time came to perform the heroic melodrama Man Creates His Own Destiny .
The most celebrated of Marx ’ s early critics was the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin , for whom Marx was “ the Bismarck of socialism ” and who warned that Marxism was a doctrine ideally fitted to function as the ideology—in the Marxist sense : the systematic rationalization and obfuscation—of the power urges of revolutionary intellectuals .
It would lead , Bakunin warned , to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” which would establish “ the most aristocratic , despotic , arrogant , and contemptuous of all regimes ” and entrench its control over the producing classes of society .
Bakunin ’ s analysis was extended and elaborated by the Pole Waclaw Machajski .
Despite this analysis—or perhaps as a confirmation of it—the Marxist vision came to inspire generations of intellectuals in Europe and even in America .
In the course of the vast , senseless carnage that was the First World War , the Tsarist Empire collapsed and the immense Imperial Russian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small group of Marxist intellectuals seized power .
What could be more natural than that , once in power , they should try to bring into being the vision that was their whole purpose and aim ?
The problem was that the audacity of their dream was matched only by the depth of their economic ignorance .
In August 1917—three months before he took power—this is how Lenin , in State and Revolution , characterized the skills needed to run a national economy in the “ first phase ” of Communism , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to embark upon : Nikolai Bukharin , a leading “ Old Bolshevik , ” in 1919 wrote , together with Evgeny Preobrazhensky , one of the most widely read Bolshevik texts .
It was The ABC of Communism , a work that went through eighteen Soviet editions and was translated into twenty languages .
Bukharin and Preobrazhensky “ were regarded as the Party ’ s two ablest economists.
” According to them , Communist society is , in the first place , “ an organized society , ” based on a detailed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ assignment ” of labor to the various branches of production .
As for distribution , according to these eminent Bolshevik economists , all products will be delivered to communal warehouses , and the members of society will draw them out in accordance with their self-defined needs .
Favorable mentions of Bukharin in the Soviet press are now taken to be exciting signs of the glories of glasnost , and in his speech of November 2 , 1987 , Mikhail Gorbachev partially rehabilitated him .
It should be remembered that Bukharin is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proceed to a standardization of the intellectuals ; we shall manufacture them as in a factory ” and who stated , in justification of Leninist tyranny : The shaping of the “ human material ” at their disposal into something higher—the manufacture of the New Soviet Man , Homo sovieticus—was essential to their vision of all the millions of individuals in society acting together , with one mind and one will , and it was shared by all the Communist leaders .
It was to this end , for instance , that Lilina @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out for the “ nationalization ” of children , in order to mold them into good Communists .
The most articulate and brilliant of the Bolsheviks put it most plainly and best .
At the end of his Literature and Revolution , written in 1924 , Leon Trotsky placed the famous , and justly ridiculed , last lines : Under Communism , he wrote , “ The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle , a Goethe , or a Marx .
And above this ridge new peaks will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his mind , however , by what he had written in the few pages preceding .
Under Communism , Man will “ reconstruct society and himself in accord with his own plan.
” “ Traditional family life ” will be transformed , the “ laws of heredity and blind sexual selection ” will be obviated , and Man ’ s purpose will be “ to create a higher social biological type , or , if your please , a superman.
” ( The full quotation can be found in the article on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suggest that what we have here , in the sheer willfulness of Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks , in their urge to replace God , nature , and spontaneous social order with total , conscious planning by themselves , is something that transcends politics in any ordinary sense of the term .
It may well be that to understand what is at issue we must ascend to another level , and that more useful in understanding it than the works of the classical liberal economists and political theorists is the superb novel of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , That Hideous Strength .
Now , the fundamental changes in human nature that the Communist leaders undertook to make require , in the nature of the case , absolute political power in a few directing hands .
During the French Revolution , Robespierre and the other Jacobin leaders set out to transform human nature in accordance with the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau .
This was not the only cause but it was surely one of the causes of the Reign of Terror .
The Communists soon discovered what the Jacobins had learned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Terror be erected into a system of government .
The Red Terror began early on .
In his celebrated November 1987 speech , Gorbachev confined the Communist Reign of Terror to the Stalin years and stated : But by no means is this the whole of the bitter truth .
By the end of 1917 , the repressive organs of the new Soviet state had been organized into the Cheka , later known by other names , including OGPU , NKVD , and KGB .
The various mandates under which the Cheka operated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by Lenin on February 21 , 1918 : that men and women of the bourgeoisie be drafted into labor battalions to dig trenches under the supervision of Red Guards , with “ those resisting to be shot.
” Others , including “ speculators ” and counter-revolutionary agitators , were “ to be shot on the scene of their crime.
” To a Bolshevik who objected to the phrasing , Lenin replied , “ Surely you do not imagine that we shall be victorious without applying the most cruel revolutionary terror ?
” The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ legalized murder in the period from late 1917 to early 1922—including neither the victims of the Revolutionary Tribunals and the Red Army itself nor the insurgents killed by the Cheka—has been estimated by one authority at 140,000 .
As a reference point , consider that the number of political executions under the repressive tsarist regime from 1866 to 1917 was about forty-four thousand , including during and after the Revolution of 1905 ( except that the persons executed were accorded trials ) , and the comparable figure for the French Revolutionary Reign of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Clearly , with the first Marxist state something new had come into the world .
In the Leninist period—that is , up to 1924—fall also the war against the peasantry that was part of “ war communism ” and the famine conditions , culminating in the famine of 1921 , that resulted from the attempt to realize the Marxist dream .
The best estimate of the human cost of those episodes is around 6 million persons .
But the guilt of Lenin and the Old Bolsheviks—and of Marx himself—does not end here .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ cult was certainly not inevitable.
” “ Inevitable ” is a large word , but if something like Stalinism had not occurred , it would have been close to a miracle .
Scorning what Marx and Engels had derided as mere “ bourgeois ” freedom and “ bourgeois ” jurisprudence , Lenin destroyed freedom of the press , abolished all protections against the police power , and rejected any hint of division of powers and checks and balances in government .
It would have saved the peoples of Russia an immense amount of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him—had not quite so brusquely dismissed the work of men like Montesquieu and Jefferson , Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville .
These writers had been preoccupied with the problem of how to thwart the state ’ s ever present drive toward absolute power .
They laid out , often in painstaking detail , the political arrangements that are required , the social forces that must be nurtured , in order to avert tyranny .
But to Marx and his Bolshevik followers , this was nothing more than “ bourgeois ideology , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ future socialist society .
Any trace of decentralization or division of power , the slightest suggestion of a countervailing force to the central authority of the “ associated producers , ” ran directly contrary to the vision of the unitary planning of the whole of social life .
The toll among the peasantry was even greater under Stalin ’ s collectivization and the famine of 1933—a deliberate one this time , aimed at terrorizing and crushing the peasants , especially of the Ukraine .
We shall never know the full truth of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that perhaps 10 or 12 million persons lost their lives as a result of these Communist policies—as many or more than the total of all the dead in all the armies in the First World War .
One is stunned .
Who could have conceived that within a few years what the Communists were to do in the Ukraine would rival the appalling butcheries of World War I—Verdun , the Somme , Passchendaele ?
But what word to use , then , for what the Communists made of the Ukraine ?
Vladimir Grossman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ famine of 1933 , wrote about it in his novel Forever Flowing , published in the West .
An eyewitness to the famine in the Ukraine stated , The labor camps for “ class-enemies ” had already been established under Lenin , as early as August 1918 .
They were vastly enlarged under his successor .
Alexander Solzhenitsyn compared them to an archipelago spread across the great sea of the Soviet Union .
The camps grew and grew .
Who were sent there ?
Any with lingering tsarist sentiments and recalcitrant members of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , anarchists , priests and laity of the Orthodox Church , Baptists and other religious dissidents , “ wreckers , ” suspects of every description , then , “ kulaks ” and peasants by the hundreds of thousands .
During the Great Purge of the middle 1930s , the Communist bureaucrats and intellectuals themselves were victims , and at that point there was a certain sort of thinker in the West who now began to notice the camps , and the executions , for the first time .
More masses of human beings @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eastern Poland and the Baltic states ; then enemy prisoners of war , the internal “ enemy nationalities , ” and the returning Soviet prisoners of war ( viewed as traitors for having surrendered ) , who flooded into the camps after 1945—in Solzhenitsyn ’ s words , “ vast dense gray shoals like ocean herring.
” The most notorious of the camps was Kolyma , in eastern Siberia—in actuality a system of camps four times the size of France .
There the death rate may have been as high as 50 percent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was probably on the order of 3 million .
It goes on and on .
In 1940 there was Katyn and the murder of the Polish officers ; in 1952 , the leaders of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union were liquidated en masse —both drops in the bucket for Stalin .
During the Purges there were probably about 7 million arrests , and one out of every ten arrested was executed .
How many died altogether ?
No one will ever know .
What is certain is that the Soviet Union has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the whole awful twentieth century , worse even than the one the Nazis created ( but then they had less time ) .
The sum total of deaths due to Soviet policy—in the Stalin period alone—deaths from the collectivization and the terror famine , the executions and the Gulag , is probably on the order of 20 million .
As glasnost proceeds and these landmarks of Soviet history are uncovered and explored to a greater or lesser degree , it is to be hoped that Gorbachev and his followers will not fail to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the part it played in masking these crimes .
I am referring to the shameful chapter in twentieth-century intellectual history involving the fellow travelers of Soviet Communism and their apologias for Stalinism .
Americans , especially American college students , have been made familiar with the wrongs of McCarthyism in our own history .
This is as it should be .
The harassment and public humiliation of innocent private persons is iniquitous , and the US government must always be held to the standards established by the Bill of Rights .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ young Americans of the accomplices in a far different order of wrongs—those progressive intellectuals who “ worshiped at the temple of [ Soviet ] planning ” and lied and evaded the truth to protect the homeland of socialism , while millions were martyred .
Not only George Bernard Shaw , Sidney and Beatrice Webb , Harold Laski , and Jean-Paul Sartre , but , for instance , the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times , Walter Duranty , who told his readers , in August 1933 , at the height of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reporting from the Soviet Union , Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize .
Or—to take another fellow traveler virtually at random—we should keep in mind the valuable work of Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University .
Professor Lattimore visited Kolyma in the summer of 1944 , as an aide to the Vice President of the United States Henry Wallace .
He wrote a glowing report on the camp and on its chief warden , Commandant Nikishov , for the National Geographic .
Lattimore compared Kolyma to a combination of the Hudson ’ s Bay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the influential American fellow travelers was , in fact , legion , and I can think of no moral principle that would justify our forgetting what they did and what they did it in aid of .
In his speech of November 2 , Gorbachev declared that Stalin was guilty of “ enormous and unforgivable crimes ” and announced that a special commission of the Central Committee is to prepare a history of the Communist party of the Soviet Union that will reflect the realities of Stalin ’ s rule .
Andrei @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of “ the entire , terrible truth of Stalin and his era.
” But can the Communist leaders really afford to tell the entire truth ?
At the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 , Nikita Khrushchev revealed the tip of the iceberg of Stalinist crimes , and Poland rose up and there took place the immortal Hungarian Revolution , when they did What would it mean to reveal the entire truth ?
Could the Communist leaders admit , for instance , that during World War II , “ the losses inflicted by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any the Germans could inflict on the battlefield ” ?
That “ the Nazi concentration camps were modified versions of Soviet originals , ” whose evolution the German leadership had followed with some care ?
That , in short , “ the Soviet Union is not only the original killer state , but the model one ” ?
If they did that , what might the consequences not be this time ?
But the fact that the victims of Soviet Communism can never be fully acknowledged in their homelands is all the more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ historical justice , we in the West must endeavor to keep their memory alive .
This essay was originally published in 1988 , by the Cato Institute , Washington , DC .
It is collected in Great Wars and Great Leaders ( 2010 ) , chap .
4 : “ Marxist Dreams and Soviet Realities.
” The Best of Ralph Raico

The sharp contrast that Alexis de Tocqueville drew in 1835 between the United States and Tsarist Russia—”the principle of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude” —became much sharper after 1917, when the Russian Empire was transformed into the Soviet Union.
Like the United States, the Soviet Union is a nation founded on a distinct ideology. In the case of America, the ideology was fundamentally Lockean liberalism; its best expressions are the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution. The Ninth Amendment, in particular, breathes the spirit of the worldview of late eighteenth-century America. The Founders believed that there exist natural, individual rights that, taken together, constitute a moral framework for political life. Translated into law, this framework defines the social space within which men voluntarily interact; it allows for the spontaneous coordination and ongoing mutual adjustment of the various plans that the members of society form to guide and fill their lives.
The Soviet Union was founded on a very different ideology, Marxism, as understood and interpreted by V. I. Lenin. Marxism, with its roots in Hegelian philosophy, was a quite conscious revolt against the individual rights doctrine of the previous century. The leaders of the Bolshevik party (which changed its name to Communist in 1918) were virtually all revolutionary intellectuals, in accordance with the strategy set forth by Lenin in his 1902 work What Is to Be Done? They were avid students of the works of Marx and Engels published in their lifetimes or shortly thereafter and known to the theoreticians of the Second International. The Bolshevik leaders viewed themselves as the executors of the Marxist program, as those whom History had called upon to realize the apocalyptic transition to Communist society foretold by the founders of their faith.
The aim they inherited from Marx and Engels was nothing less than the final realization of human freedom and the end of the “prehistory” of the human race. Theirs was the Promethean dream of the rehabilitation of Man and his conquest of his rightful place as master of the world and lord of creation. Great Wars and Great L... Ralph Raico Best Price: $7.50 Buy New $12.95 (as of 05:45 UTC - Details)
Building on the work of Michael Polanyi and Ludwig von Mises, Paul Craig Roberts has demonstrated—in books that deserve to be much better known than they are, since they provide an important key to the history of the twentieth century — the meaning of freedom in Marxism. It lies in the abolition of alienation, i.e., of commodity production, production for the market. For Marx and Engels, the market represents not merely the arena of capitalist exploitation but, more fundamentally, a systematic insult to the dignity of Man. Through it, the consequences of Man’s action escape from his control and turn on him in malign ways. Thus, the insight that market processes generate results that were no part of anyone’s intention becomes, for Marxism, the very reason to condemn them. As Marx wrote of the stage of Communist society before the total disappearance of scarcity,
freedom in this field can consist only in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.
The point is made most clearly by Engels:
With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and with it the dominion of the product over the producers. Anarchy of social production is replaced by conscious organization according to plan. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which surround men, which ruled men up until now comes under the dominion and conscious control of men, who become for the first time the real, conscious lords of nature, because and in that they become master of their own social organization. The laws of their own social activity, which confronted them until this point as alien laws of nature, controlling them, then are applied by men with full understanding, and so mastered by them. Only from then on will men make their history themselves in full consciousness; only from then on will the social causes they set in motion have in the main and in constantly increasing proportion, also the results intended by them. It is the leap of mankind from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
Thus, Man’s freedom would be expressed in the total control exercised by the associated producers in planning the economy and, with it, all of social life. No longer would the unintended consequences of Man’s actions bring disaster and despair—there would be no such consequences. Man would determine his own fate. Left unexplained was how millions upon millions of separate individuals could be expected to act with one mind and one will—could suddenly become “Man”—especially since it was alleged that the state, the indispensable engine of coercion, would wither away.
Already in Marx and Engels’s day—decades before the establishment of the Soviet state—there were some with a shrewd idea of just who it was that would assume the title role when the time came to perform the heroic melodrama Man Creates His Own Destiny. The most celebrated of Marx’s early critics was the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin, for whom Marx was “the Bismarck of socialism” and who warned that Marxism was a doctrine ideally fitted to function as the ideology—in the Marxist sense: the systematic rationalization and obfuscation—of the power urges of revolutionary intellectuals. It would lead, Bakunin warned, to the creation of “a new class,” which would establish “the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes” and entrench its control over the producing classes of society. Bakunin’s analysis was extended and elaborated by the Pole Waclaw Machajski.
Despite this analysis—or perhaps as a confirmation of it—the Marxist vision came to inspire generations of intellectuals in Europe and even in America. In the course of the vast, senseless carnage that was the First World War, the Tsarist Empire collapsed and the immense Imperial Russian Army was fragmented into atoms. A small group of Marxist intellectuals seized power. What could be more natural than that, once in power, they should try to bring into being the vision that was their whole purpose and aim? The problem was that the audacity of their dream was matched only by the depth of their economic ignorance.
In August 1917—three months before he took power—this is how Lenin, in State and Revolution, characterized the skills needed to run a national economy in the “first phase” of Communism, the one he and his associates were about to embark upon:
The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.
Nikolai Bukharin, a leading “Old Bolshevik,” in 1919 wrote, together with Evgeny Preobrazhensky, one of the most widely read Bolshevik texts. It was The ABC of Communism, a work that went through eighteen Soviet editions and was translated into twenty languages. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky “were regarded as the Party’s two ablest economists.” According to them, Communist society is, in the first place, “an organized society,” based on a detailed, precisely calculated plan, which includes the “assignment” of labor to the various branches of production. As for distribution, according to these eminent Bolshevik economists, all products will be delivered to communal warehouses, and the members of society will draw them out in accordance with their self-defined needs.
Favorable mentions of Bukharin in the Soviet press are now taken to be exciting signs of the glories of glasnost, and in his speech of November 2, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev partially rehabilitated him. It should be remembered that Bukharin is the man who wrote, “We shall proceed to a standardization of the intellectuals; we shall manufacture them as in a factory” and who stated, in justification of Leninist tyranny:
Proletarian coercion, in all its forms, from executions to forced labor, is, paradoxical as it may sound, the method of molding communist humanity out of the human material of the capitalist period.
The shaping of the “human material” at their disposal into something higher—the manufacture of the New Soviet Man, Homo sovieticus—was essential to their vision of all the millions of individuals in society acting together, with one mind and one will, and it was shared by all the Communist leaders. It was to this end, for instance, that Lilina, Zinoviev’s wife, spoke out for the “nationalization” of children, in order to mold them into good Communists.
The most articulate and brilliant of the Bolsheviks put it most plainly and best. At the end of his Literature and Revolution, written in 1924, Leon Trotsky placed the famous, and justly ridiculed, last lines: Under Communism, he wrote, “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” This dazzling prophecy was justified in his mind, however, by what he had written in the few pages preceding. Under Communism, Man will “reconstruct society and himself in accord with his own plan.” “Traditional family life” will be transformed, the “laws of heredity and blind sexual selection” will be obviated, and Man’s purpose will be “to create a higher social biological type, or, if your please, a superman.” (The full quotation can be found in the article on Trotsky in this volume.)
I suggest that what we have here, in the sheer willfulness of Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks, in their urge to replace God, nature, and spontaneous social order with total, conscious planning by themselves, is something that transcends politics in any ordinary sense of the term. It may well be that to understand what is at issue we must ascend to another level, and that more useful in understanding it than the works of the classical liberal economists and political theorists is the superb novel of the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength.
Now, the fundamental changes in human nature that the Communist leaders undertook to make require, in the nature of the case, absolute political power in a few directing hands. During the French Revolution, Robespierre and the other Jacobin leaders set out to transform human nature in accordance with the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This was not the only cause but it was surely one of the causes of the Reign of Terror. The Communists soon discovered what the Jacobins had learned: that such an enterprise requires that Terror be erected into a system of government.
The Red Terror began early on. In his celebrated November 1987 speech, Gorbachev confined the Communist Reign of Terror to the Stalin years and stated:
Many thousands of people inside and outside the party were subjected to wholesale repressive measures. Such, comrades, is the bitter truth.
But by no means is this the whole of the bitter truth. By the end of 1917, the repressive organs of the new Soviet state had been organized into the Cheka, later known by other names, including OGPU, NKVD, and KGB. The various mandates under which the Cheka operated may be illustrated by an order signed by Lenin on February 21, 1918: that men and women of the bourgeoisie be drafted into labor battalions to dig trenches under the supervision of Red Guards, with “those resisting to be shot.” Others, including “speculators” and counter-revolutionary agitators, were “to be shot on the scene of their crime.” To a Bolshevik who objected to the phrasing, Lenin replied, “Surely you do not imagine that we shall be victorious without applying the most cruel revolutionary terror?”
The number of Cheka executions that amounted to legalized murder in the period from late 1917 to early 1922—including neither the victims of the Revolutionary Tribunals and the Red Army itself nor the insurgents killed by the Cheka—has been estimated by one authority at 140,000. As a reference point, consider that the number of political executions under the repressive tsarist regime from 1866 to 1917 was about forty-four thousand, including during and after the Revolution of 1905 (except that the persons executed were accorded trials), and the comparable figure for the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror was eighteen to twenty thousand. Clearly, with the first Marxist state something new had come into the world.
In the Leninist period—that is, up to 1924—fall also the war against the peasantry that was part of “war communism” and the famine conditions, culminating in the famine of 1921, that resulted from the attempt to realize the Marxist dream. The best estimate of the human cost of those episodes is around 6 million persons.
But the guilt of Lenin and the Old Bolsheviks—and of Marx himself—does not end here. Gorbachev asserted that “the Stalin personality cult was certainly not inevitable.”
“Inevitable” is a large word, but if something like Stalinism had not occurred, it would have been close to a miracle. Scorning what Marx and Engels had derided as mere “bourgeois” freedom and “bourgeois” jurisprudence, Lenin destroyed freedom of the press, abolished all protections against the police power, and rejected any hint of division of powers and checks and balances in government. It would have saved the peoples of Russia an immense amount of suffering if Lenin—and Marx and Engels before him—had not quite so brusquely dismissed the work of men like Montesquieu and Jefferson, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville. These writers had been preoccupied with the problem of how to thwart the state’s ever present drive toward absolute power. They laid out, often in painstaking detail, the political arrangements that are required, the social forces that must be nurtured, in order to avert tyranny. But to Marx and his Bolshevik followers, this was nothing more than “bourgeois ideology,” obsolete and of no relevance to the future socialist society. Any trace of decentralization or division of power, the slightest suggestion of a countervailing force to the central authority of the “associated producers,” ran directly contrary to the vision of the unitary planning of the whole of social life.
The toll among the peasantry was even greater under Stalin’s collectivization and the famine of 1933—a deliberate one this time, aimed at terrorizing and crushing the peasants, especially of the Ukraine. We shall never know the full truth of this demonic crime, but it seems likely that perhaps 10 or 12 million persons lost their lives as a result of these Communist policies—as many or more than the total of all the dead in all the armies in the First World War.
One is stunned. Who could have conceived that within a few years what the Communists were to do in the Ukraine would rival the appalling butcheries of World War I—Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele?
They died in hell,
They called it Passchendaele.
But what word to use, then, for what the Communists made of the Ukraine?
Vladimir Grossman, a Russian novelist who experienced the famine of 1933, wrote about it in his novel Forever Flowing, published in the West. An eyewitness to the famine in the Ukraine stated,
Then I came to understand the main thing for the Soviet power is the Plan. Fulfill the Plan….Fathers and mothers tried to save their children, to save a little bread, and they were told: You hate our socialist country, you want to ruin the Plan, you are parasites, kulaks, fiends, reptiles. When they took the grain, they told the kolkhoz [collective farm] members they would be fed out of the reserve fund. They lied. They would not give grain to the hungry.
The labor camps for “class-enemies” had already been established under Lenin, as early as August 1918. They were vastly enlarged under his successor. Alexander Solzhenitsyn compared them to an archipelago spread across the great sea of the Soviet Union. The camps grew and grew. Who were sent there? Any with lingering tsarist sentiments and recalcitrant members of the middle classes, liberals, Mensheviks, anarchists, priests and laity of the Orthodox Church, Baptists and other religious dissidents, “wreckers,” suspects of every description, then, “kulaks” and peasants by the hundreds of thousands.
During the Great Purge of the middle 1930s, the Communist bureaucrats and intellectuals themselves were victims, and at that point there was a certain sort of thinker in the West who now began to notice the camps, and the executions, for the first time. More masses of human beings were shipped in after the annexations of eastern Poland and the Baltic states; then enemy prisoners of war, the internal “enemy nationalities,” and the returning Soviet prisoners of war (viewed as traitors for having surrendered), who flooded into the camps after 1945—in Solzhenitsyn’s words, “vast dense gray shoals like ocean herring.”
The most notorious of the camps was Kolyma, in eastern Siberia—in actuality a system of camps four times the size of France. There the death rate may have been as high as 50 percent per year and the number of deaths was probably on the order of 3 million. It goes on and on. In 1940 there was Katyn and the murder of the Polish officers; in 1952, the leaders of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union were liquidated en masse —both drops in the bucket for Stalin. During the Purges there were probably about 7 million arrests, and one out of every ten arrested was executed.
How many died altogether? No one will ever know. What is certain is that the Soviet Union has been the worst reeking charnel house of the whole awful twentieth century, worse even than the one the Nazis created (but then they had less time). The sum total of deaths due to Soviet policy—in the Stalin period alone—deaths from the collectivization and the terror famine, the executions and the Gulag, is probably on the order of 20 million.
As glasnost proceeds and these landmarks of Soviet history are uncovered and explored to a greater or lesser degree, it is to be hoped that Gorbachev and his followers will not fail to point an accusing finger at the West for the part it played in masking these crimes. I am referring to the shameful chapter in twentieth-century intellectual history involving the fellow travelers of Soviet Communism and their apologias for Stalinism. Americans, especially American college students, have been made familiar with the wrongs of McCarthyism in our own history. This is as it should be. The harassment and public humiliation of innocent private persons is iniquitous, and the US government must always be held to the standards established by the Bill of Rights. But surely we should also remember and inform young Americans of the accomplices in a far different order of wrongs—those progressive intellectuals who “worshiped at the temple of [Soviet] planning” and lied and evaded the truth to protect the homeland of socialism, while millions were martyred. Not only George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, and Jean-Paul Sartre, but, for instance, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, who told his readers, in August 1933, at the height of the famine:
Any report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. The food shortage which has affected almost the whole population in the last year and particularly in the grain-producing provinces—the Ukraine, North Caucasus, the lower Volga region—has, however, caused heavy loss of life.
For his “objective” reporting from the Soviet Union, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize.
Or—to take another fellow traveler virtually at random—we should keep in mind the valuable work of Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University. Professor Lattimore visited Kolyma in the summer of 1944, as an aide to the Vice President of the United States Henry Wallace. He wrote a glowing report on the camp and on its chief warden, Commandant Nikishov, for the National Geographic. Lattimore compared Kolyma to a combination of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the TVA. The number of the influential American fellow travelers was, in fact, legion, and I can think of no moral principle that would justify our forgetting what they did and what they did it in aid of.
In his speech of November 2, Gorbachev declared that Stalin was guilty of “enormous and unforgivable crimes” and announced that a special commission of the Central Committee is to prepare a history of the Communist party of the Soviet Union that will reflect the realities of Stalin’s rule. Andrei Sakharov has called for the full disclosure of “the entire, terrible truth of Stalin and his era.” But can the Communist leaders really afford to tell the entire truth? At the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev revealed the tip of the iceberg of Stalinist crimes, and Poland rose up and there took place the immortal Hungarian Revolution, when they did
high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men’s believing.
What would it mean to reveal the entire truth? Could the Communist leaders admit, for instance, that during World War II, “the losses inflicted by the Soviet state upon its own people rivaled any the Germans could inflict on the battlefield”? That “the Nazi concentration camps were modified versions of Soviet originals,” whose evolution the German leadership had followed with some care? That, in short, “the Soviet Union is not only the original killer state, but the model one”? If they did that, what might the consequences not be this time?
But the fact that the victims of Soviet Communism can never be fully acknowledged in their homelands is all the more reason that, as a matter of historical justice, we in the West must endeavor to keep their memory alive.
This essay was originally published in 1988, by the Cato Institute, Washington, DC. It is collected in Great Wars and Great Leaders (2010), chap. 4: “Marxist Dreams and Soviet Realities.”
The Best of Ralph Raico


lewrockwell--2020-02-24--Gospel Nonviolence and Class Warfare

Gospel Nonviolence and Class Warfare

“ I am convinced that those societies ( as the Indians ) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments .
Among the former , public opinion is in the place of law and community moral restrains act as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere .
Among the latter , European governments , under pretense of governing they have divided their nations into two classes , wolves & sheep .
I do not exaggerate .
This is a true picture of Europe .
If once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ affairs , you , Carrington , and I , and Congress , and judges , and governors shall all become wolves .
It seems to be the law of our general nature , in spite of individual exceptions ; experience declares that man is an animal which devours his own kind , for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe , and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
” “ Class warfare is not , in the first place , a struggle between the haves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little to do with what people in England call ‘ class distinctions , ’ meaning a peculiarly English kind of snobbery .
It is not differences of wealth that cause class differences , but class differences that cause differences of wealth .
The worker by his labor creates a certain amount of wealth , only part of which is returned to him in the form of wages , etc .
The rest is appropriated by the capitalist , so called because his function is to accumulate capital in this way .
The capitalist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extra wealth which they produce but do not need for their subsistence and minimal contentment , and bringing all this wealth together he is able to invest , to provide the conditions under which more work may be done — and so on .
On this fundamental division between worker and employer the whole class system rests .
Amazon.com Gift Card i ... Buy New $ 25.00 The worker is whoever by productive work actually creates wealth .
The employer is not simply anyone who makes overall decisions about what work shall be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one who takes the surplus wealth created by the worker and uses it ( in his own interests of course ) as capital .
Capitalism is the system in which capital is accumulated for investment , in their own interests , by a group of people who own the means of production and employ large numbers of other people who do not own the mean of production but produce both the wealth which they receive back in wages and the surplus wealth which is used for investment by the owners in whatever way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are wealthy and powerful , they are the ruling class , in part because they are better at killing ; the one thing they can not do is carry on forever the fiction that their interests coincide with the interests of most of the community .
They can not forever con people into believing that it is in their own interests and that of their families to work or to die for the profit of the ruling class The wealthy and powerful , the ruling class , are wealthy and powerful in part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the one thing they can not do is carry on forever the fiction that their interests coincide with the interests of most of the community .
They can not forever con people into believing that it is in their own interests and that of their families to work or to die for the profit of the ruling class.
” -Herbert McCabe , OP The Best of Fr .
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

“I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law and community moral restrains act as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, European governments, under pretense of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. If once our people become inattentive to the public affairs, you, Carrington, and I, and Congress, and judges, and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; experience declares that man is an animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington – January 16, 1787
“Class warfare is not, in the first place, a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. It has very little to do with what people in England call ‘class distinctions,’ meaning a peculiarly English kind of snobbery. It is not differences of wealth that cause class differences, but class differences that cause differences of wealth. The worker by his labor creates a certain amount of wealth, only part of which is returned to him in the form of wages, etc. The rest is appropriated by the capitalist, so called because his function is to accumulate capital in this way. The capitalist receives from a great many workers the extra wealth which they produce but do not need for their subsistence and minimal contentment, and bringing all this wealth together he is able to invest, to provide the conditions under which more work may be done — and so on. On this fundamental division between worker and employer the whole class system rests. Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $25.00 (as of 11:14 UTC - Details)
The worker is whoever by productive work actually creates wealth. The employer is not simply anyone who makes overall decisions about what work shall be done and how; he is the one who takes the surplus wealth created by the worker and uses it (in his own interests of course) as capital. Capitalism is the system in which capital is accumulated for investment, in their own interests, by a group of people who own the means of production and employ large numbers of other people who do not own the mean of production but produce both the wealth which they receive back in wages and the surplus wealth which is used for investment by the owners in whatever way they desire. The wealthy and powerful are wealthy and powerful, they are the ruling class, in part because they are better at killing; the one thing they cannot do is carry on forever the fiction that their interests coincide with the interests of most of the community. They cannot forever con people into believing that it is in their own interests and that of their families to work or to die for the profit of the ruling class
The wealthy and powerful, the ruling class, are wealthy and powerful in part because they are better at killing; the one thing they cannot do is carry on forever the fiction that their interests coincide with the interests of most of the community. They cannot forever con people into believing that it is in their own interests and that of their families to work or to die for the profit of the ruling class.” -Herbert McCabe, OP
The Best of Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy


lewrockwell--2020-02-24--They’re Coming to Get You! Build That Bomb Shelter Now!

Right after the installment of MY CORNER of February 14 appeared , it was picked up and published nationally by LewRockwell.com .
It was almost as if some well-placed Intel spook had met with me at “ Rick ’ s Café Americain ” ( remember the film “ Casablanca ” ? )
and secretly revealed what was going to happen .
The “ Russia Hoax ” was going to be fully reborn ( in fact , as I wrote , it had never gone away ) .
Like Dr. Frankenstein ’ s monster it emerged again from our corrupted and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who are beginning to make Inspector Clouseau look like a genius ) and the bowels of the frenetically ideological New York Times ( and those poisoned zombie-brains in Congress , e.g .
Adam Schiff ) .
The Mueller Commission , try as it did , couldn ’ t find anything substantive because there isn ’ t and wasn ’ t anything there , save for the putrid defecation of three years of strenuous Deep State “ investigation.
” But with the crop of Establishment Democrat candidates for president looking increasingly like a lesser @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be found , some additional obstacle , some roadblock to stop “ the Donald , ” and much more dangerously , the counter-revolution that he has ( at times , quite unwittingly ) unleashed .
How better to do this than have the president ’ s own Director of National Intelligence , along with his Deep State ideological “ Intel savants ” ( a true oxymoron ! )
, brief Schiff and top Democrats , and without the president even knowing it !
Ha !
Talk about your own team sabotaging you—anyone remember @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Et tu , Brute ?
” And you also , Brutus ?
But it doesn ’ t take a Shakespeare play to instruct us on what is going on .
As I have repeated too many times to count , President Trump ’ s major problem is that he has surrounded himself with Neoconservative and Deep State minions who diametrically oppose his announced agenda , and they have done everything possible—with some real success , especially in foreign affairs—to stymy and obstruct it .
Left of Bang : How the ... Patrick Van @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 12.13 Buy New $ 14.63 Those once highly regarded agencies—the FBI , the CIA , the NSA—haven ’ t gotten much right since they officiously proclaimed from on high their dogmatic , infallible judgment about “ weapons of mass destruction ” hiding in Saddam Hussein ’ s outdoor outhouse .
Their active immersion in the government-engineered plot to bring down a president—the Steele Dossier , the inveigling of General Flynn , Roger Stone , George Papadopoulos , etc.
, their use of British “ intelligence ” ( the Brits stopped having “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ warnings about unlimited immigration were ignored ) —has revealed for anyone with eyes to see the fact that , at least in the upper echelons , those agencies form an integral part , an active arm of the managerial state apparatus that seeks to strangle any real dissent or opposition to its New World Order designs .
Even so-called “ conservatives ” —the Neoconservatives , whom I often criticize—accept the Russia boogeyman narrative .
But it ’ s not so much Trump who is the target , it seems , but in their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who want to “ destroy our democracy.
” The Cold War , in their pygmy-sized brains , continues unabated , and even the vaunted Rush Limbaugh has very real difficulty distinguishing the Communist Soviet Union and post-1991 Russia .
Flying in the face of subsequent history and fact , he uses the terms interchangeably : true , palpable historical ignorance on parade .
For him and the zealous Neocon interventionists it is still October 1962 and we are still mired in the Cuban Missile Crisis , although now it has been miraculously transposed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bolton ( or the late , unlamented John McCain ) .
The other night I made myself listen to “ Special Report with Bret Baier , ” where the Fox News “ All Stars ” held forth , fully accepting the Hoax—yes , of course , they solemnly declared , the Russians are messing with and meddling in our 2020 election cycle , just like in 2016 .
The Intel folks—whose probity and diligence can not be doubted !
—say so .
And Chris Wallace ( who is by no means a “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Ed Henry on another segment that very simply “ we must take these active threats very , very seriously .
The Russians are AGAIN manipulating our elections.
” I almost regretted not signing up with that contractor who offered to build me a bomb shelter in my ample back yard .
For only $ 125,000 he could construct for me an underground bunker that would withstand those incoming Russian MiGs… .
Suddenly , I was put in mind of that satirical film from 1964 , Dr. Strangelove .
And I wondered if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cinema , the likes of Bolton , Bill Kristol , Max Boot , and those agents of Russophobia who now surround the president and have turned our Intel agencies and Congress into little more than a herd of docile bovines ( with the connivance of all our television networks ) , we would finally see and experience the “ Doomsday Weapon ” ( as in the final scene of the film ) .
Although from somewhat different perspectives and viewpoints , Establishment Conservatism ( i.e , the Neocons ) and the Left have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the major threat by far—very far—is what the actually Communist Chinese are doing and have done .
Adam Schiff doesn ’ t talk about that , and neither do most politicians or major American big name capitalists , because the Chinese Reds already own and dominate so much of this country ’ s infrastructure and business .
And the fact—still mostly hidden from most Americans—that post-1991 Russia has actually turned towards its traditional religious faith and conservative ( especially moral ) traditions doesn ’ t go over well with the transgender-pushing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political parties , both Leftwing AND Conservative , here in the United States .
Recall John McCain bitterly criticizing Vladimir Putin for his “ persecution ” and suppression of lesbians ( i.e.
, “ Pussy Riot ” ) and same sex supporters in Mother Russia ?
This is what Mainstream Conservatism has become : a sordid and decrepit second cousin of the rapidly advancing Leftist juggernaut .
And , once again , I quote Robert Lewis Dabney ’ s apposite words : Political Class Dismis ... Mr. James Ostrowski Best Price : $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a party which never conserves anything .
Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party , and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling , but always acquiesces at last in the innovation .
What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism ; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation , which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity , and will be succeeded by some third revolution , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turn .
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition .
It remains behind it , but never retards it , and always advances near its leader .
This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor : wherewith shall it he salted ?
Its impotency is not hard , indeed , to explain .
It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only , and not of sturdy principle .
It intends to risk nothing serious , for the sake of the truth , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the folly of martyrdom .
It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop , that its ‘ bark is worse than its bite , ’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance .
The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘ in wind , ’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when women ’ s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact , conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed , and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage ; and when that too shall have been won , it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses .
There it will assume , with great dignity , its final position .
As we hurdle on to diabolical moral degradation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the last , even though our masters tell us not to worry and just accept it , our supposed opponents in Moscow , Kazan and Novgorod recover and celebrate their Christian and moral beliefs and inheritance .
What irony !
Is this not a full exemplification of Gilbert and Sullivan ’ s image of “ topsy-turvy ” ?
And for the American traditionalist , for the orthodox Christian , to quote Patrick Buchanan : “ On whose side is God NOW on ?
I pass on the LewRockwell.com issue from February 17 .

Right after the installment of MY CORNER of February 14 appeared, it was picked up and published nationally by LewRockwell.com. It was almost as if some well-placed Intel spook had met with me at “Rick’s Café Americain” (remember the film “Casablanca”?) and secretly revealed what was going to happen. The “Russia Hoax” was going to be fully reborn (in fact, as I wrote, it had never gone away). Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster it emerged again from our corrupted and corrupt Intelligence agencies (those government apparatchiks who are beginning to make Inspector Clouseau look like a genius) and the bowels of the frenetically ideological New York Times (and those poisoned zombie-brains in Congress, e.g. Adam Schiff). The Mueller Commission, try as it did, couldn’t find anything substantive because there isn’t and wasn’t anything there, save for the putrid defecation of three years of strenuous Deep State “investigation.” But with the crop of Establishment Democrat candidates for president looking increasingly like a lesser version the Keystone Kops, something—anything—had to be found, some additional obstacle, some roadblock to stop “the Donald,” and much more dangerously, the counter-revolution that he has (at times, quite unwittingly) unleashed.
How better to do this than have the president’s own Director of National Intelligence, along with his Deep State ideological “Intel savants” (a true oxymoron!), brief Schiff and top Democrats, and without the president even knowing it! Ha! Talk about your own team sabotaging you—anyone remember those words of Julius Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?” And you also, Brutus? But it doesn’t take a Shakespeare play to instruct us on what is going on. As I have repeated too many times to count, President Trump’s major problem is that he has surrounded himself with Neoconservative and Deep State minions who diametrically oppose his announced agenda, and they have done everything possible—with some real success, especially in foreign affairs—to stymy and obstruct it.
Left of Bang: How the ... Patrick Van Horne, Jas... Best Price: $12.13 Buy New $14.63 (as of 08:15 UTC - Details) Those once highly regarded agencies—the FBI, the CIA, the NSA—haven’t gotten much right since they officiously proclaimed from on high their dogmatic, infallible judgment about “weapons of mass destruction” hiding in Saddam Hussein’s outdoor outhouse. Their active immersion in the government-engineered plot to bring down a president—the Steele Dossier, the inveigling of General Flynn, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, etc., their use of British “intelligence” (the Brits stopped having “intelligence” after Enoch Powell’s warnings about unlimited immigration were ignored)—has revealed for anyone with eyes to see the fact that, at least in the upper echelons, those agencies form an integral part, an active arm of the managerial state apparatus that seeks to strangle any real dissent or opposition to its New World Order designs.
Even so-called “conservatives”—the Neoconservatives, whom I often criticize—accept the Russia boogeyman narrative. But it’s not so much Trump who is the target, it seems, but in their version the Russkies are just warmed-over Communists who want to “destroy our democracy.” The Cold War, in their pygmy-sized brains, continues unabated, and even the vaunted Rush Limbaugh has very real difficulty distinguishing the Communist Soviet Union and post-1991 Russia. Flying in the face of subsequent history and fact, he uses the terms interchangeably: true, palpable historical ignorance on parade. For him and the zealous Neocon interventionists it is still October 1962 and we are still mired in the Cuban Missile Crisis, although now it has been miraculously transposed over to Ukraine. Just ask John Bolton (or the late, unlamented John McCain).
The other night I made myself listen to “Special Report with Bret Baier,” where the Fox News “All Stars” held forth, fully accepting the Hoax—yes, of course, they solemnly declared, the Russians are messing with and meddling in our 2020 election cycle, just like in 2016. The Intel folks—whose probity and diligence cannot be doubted!—say so. And Chris Wallace (who is by no means a “conservative” of any flavor) pronounced to Ed Henry on another segment that very simply “we must take these active threats very, very seriously. The Russians are AGAIN manipulating our elections.”
Got that?
I almost regretted not signing up with that contractor who offered to build me a bomb shelter in my ample back yard. For only $125,000 he could construct for me an underground bunker that would withstand those incoming Russian MiGs….
Suddenly, I was put in mind of that satirical film from 1964, Dr. Strangelove. And I wondered if, echoing Peter Sellers in that scintillating cinema, the likes of Bolton, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and those agents of Russophobia who now surround the president and have turned our Intel agencies and Congress into little more than a herd of docile bovines (with the connivance of all our television networks), we would finally see and experience the “Doomsday Weapon” (as in the final scene of the film).
Although from somewhat different perspectives and viewpoints, Establishment Conservatism (i.e, the Neocons) and the Left have made post-Communist Russia their target. Yet, the major threat by far—very far—is what the actually Communist Chinese are doing and have done. Adam Schiff doesn’t talk about that, and neither do most politicians or major American big name capitalists, because the Chinese Reds already own and dominate so much of this country’s infrastructure and business.
And the fact—still mostly hidden from most Americans—that post-1991 Russia has actually turned towards its traditional religious faith and conservative (especially moral) traditions doesn’t go over well with the transgender-pushing, pro-same sex marriage establishment which dominates both political parties, both Leftwing AND Conservative, here in the United States. Recall John McCain bitterly criticizing Vladimir Putin for his “persecution” and suppression of lesbians (i.e., “Pussy Riot”) and same sex supporters in Mother Russia?
This is what Mainstream Conservatism has become: a sordid and decrepit second cousin of the rapidly advancing Leftist juggernaut. And, once again, I quote Robert Lewis Dabney’s apposite words: Political Class Dismis... Ostrowski, Mr. James Best Price: $4.00 Buy New $9.50 (as of 09:20 UTC - Details)
This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance.
The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.
As we hurdle on to diabolical moral degradation in America, each step worse than the last, even though our masters tell us not to worry and just accept it, our supposed opponents in Moscow, Kazan and Novgorod recover and celebrate their Christian and moral beliefs and inheritance.
What irony! Is this not a full exemplification of Gilbert and Sullivan’s image of “topsy-turvy”?
And for the American traditionalist, for the orthodox Christian, to quote Patrick Buchanan: “On whose side is God NOW on?
**********
I pass on the LewRockwell.com issue from February 17.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.


lewrockwell--2020-02-24--Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler?

Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler?

There once lived an odd little man — five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet — who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself .
For all but a few activist insiders and scholars , U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history .
Yet more than a century ago , this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero , celebrated in pulp adventure novels , and then , 30 years later , as one of this country ’ s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and educated in Quaker ( pacifist ) schools , the son of an influential congressman , he would end up serving in nearly all of America ’ s “ Banana Wars ” from 1898 to 1931 .
Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor , he would retire as the youngest , most decorated major general in the Marines .
A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900 , he would later become a constabulary leader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chief of Philadelphia ( while on an approved absence from the military ) , and a proponent of Marine Corps football .
In more standard fashion , he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping , counterinsurgency , and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba , China , the Philippines , Panama , Nicaragua , Mexico , Haiti , France , and China ( again ) .
While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or , as they were sardonically called by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Diplomacy ” operations — that is , military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests — until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine .
The Violent American C ... John W. Dower Best Price : $ 4.39 Buy New $ 9.64 But after retirement , Smedley Butler changed his tune .
He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he ’ d only recently played such a prominent part .
Eventually , in 1935 during the Great Depression , in what became a classic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ titled “ War Is a Racket , ” he wrote : “ I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period , I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business , for Wall Street , and for the Bankers.
” Seemingly overnight , the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era .
Those were , admittedly , uncommonly anti-interventionist years , in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been fringe ideas .
This was , after all , the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “ isolationism.
” Nonetheless , Butler was unique ( for that moment and certainly for our own ) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism .
In the last years of his life , he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer , President Franklin D. Roosevelt , the military establishment , and the interventionist press .
This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler @ @ @ @ @ @ @ later France .
Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind , hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler ’ s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong .
Nevertheless , the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided .
In the wake of America ’ s brief but bloody entry into the First World War , the skepticism of Butler ( and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans ) about intervention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been understandable .
Above all , however , his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today , especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time .
( In the era of the never-ending war on terror , such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable . )
Smedley Butler ’ s Marine Corps and the military of his day was , in certain ways , a different sort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ professionalized armed forces .
History rarely repeats itself , not in a literal sense anyway .
Still , there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today ’ s generation of forever-war fighters .
All of them served repeated tours of duty in ( mostly ) unsanctioned wars around the world .
Butler ’ s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China , whereas today ’ s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia , but both sets of conflicts seemed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by barely concealed economic and imperial interests .
Nonetheless , whereas this country ’ s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler , the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn ’ t produced a single even faintly comparable figure .
Not one .
Zero .
Zilch .
Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture , none of it particularly encouraging .
When Smedley Butler retired in 1931 , he was one of three Marine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff .
Today , with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty , including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone , and with scores of flag officers retiring annually , not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised , remarkably unsuccessful American wars .
As for the most senior officers , the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash , there are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even at the height of the Vietnam War , although the active military is now about half the size it was then .
Adulated as many of them may be , however , not one qualifies as a public critic of today ’ s failing wars .
Instead , the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels , lieutenant colonels , and occasionally more junior officers ( like me ) , as well as enlisted service members .
Not that there are many of us to speak of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and so should you ) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America ’ s forever wars .
The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell ’ s former chief of staff , retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson ; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor , retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich ; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower , retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis .
All three have proven to be genuine public servants , poignant voices , and — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
For better or worse , however , none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques .
Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel .
Obviously , there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn ’ t make general or admiral .
Still , the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders .
In fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star .
And perhaps you won ’ t be surprised to learn that , according to numerous reports , “ the members of this board are inclined , if not explicitly motivated , to seek candidates in their own image — officers whose careers look like theirs.
” At a minimal level , such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers , no less breed potential dissidents .
Consider it an irony of sorts that this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of forever wars when General David Petraeus , then commanding the highly publicized “ surge ” in Iraq , had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee .
The reason : he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel , a protégé of his — future Trump National Security Advisor H.R .
McMaster — earned his star .
Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal , since most of them were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or “ COINdinista ” protégés and their “ new ” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan .
In fact , Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice — once in each country — as did acolytes of his later , and you know the results of that .
But here ’ s the point : it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America ’ s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different ( but also strangely familiar ) tactics in this country ’ s wars .
Imagine , then , how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort , no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers .
At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “ professionalization ” after the Vietnam War debacle .
This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an “ all-volunteer force.
” The elimination of conscription , as predicted by critics at the time , created an ever-growing civil-military divide , even as it increased public apathy regarding America ’ s wars by erasing whatever “ skin in the game ” most citizens had .
More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism , though , the professionalization of the military , and of the officer corps in particular , ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust ( or in retirement at the level @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks .
Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley .
He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own , but typically he ’ s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president .
One group of generals , however , reportedly now does have it out for President Trump — but not because they ’ re opposed to endless war .
Rather , they reportedly think that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enough to military advice ” on , you know , how to wage war forever and a day .
What Would Smedley Butler Think Today ?
In his years of retirement , Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America ’ s imperial war policies .
He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in , the elections he had helped rig , the coups he had supported , and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ this still remains a reality in America ’ s post-9/11 conflicts , even on occasion embarrassingly so ( as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital , Baghdad , in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003 ) .
Mostly , however , such influence plays out far more subtly than that , both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ D. Eisenhower , is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors , a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community .
For all the corruption of his time , the Pentagon didn ’ t yet exist and the path from the military to , say , United Fruit Company , Standard Oil , or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to say about the modern phenomenon of the “ revolving door ” in Washington .
Ghost Riders of Baghda ... Daniel A. Sjursen Best Price : $ 16.67 Buy New $ 16.58 Of course , he served in a very different moment , one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress .
As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections , Butler would have found today ’ s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “ in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives ” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century .
Case in point : the record ( and still rising ) “ defense ” spending of the present moment , including — to please a president — the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space .
Sadly enough , in the age of Trump , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is the only public institution Americans still truly trust .
Under the circumstances , how useful it would be to have a high-ranking , highly decorated , charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours .
Unfortunately , the likelihood of that is practically nil , given the military system of our moment .
Of course , Butler didn ’ t exactly end his life triumphantly .
In late May 1940 , having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion — and demonized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule — he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “ rest.
” He died there , probably of some sort of cancer , four weeks later .
Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist , however , might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end .
Someone of his credibility , character , and candor is needed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure .
In retirement , Butler himself boldly confessed that , “ like all the members of the military profession , I never had a thought of my own until I left the service .
My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups .
This is typical… ” Today , generals don ’ t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement .
And more ’ s the pity…

There once lived an odd little man — five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet — who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.
Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.
A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations — that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests — until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine. The Violent American C... John W. Dower Best Price: $4.39 Buy New $9.64 (as of 05:40 UTC - Details)
But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”
Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.
Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)
Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.
Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.
Why No Antiwar Generals
When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.
Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars.
The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and — on some level — cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.
Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image — officers whose careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.
Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge” in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his — future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster — earned his star.
Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista” protégés and their “new” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice — once in each country — as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.
But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.
At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game” most citizens had.
More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.
One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump — but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.
What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?
In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.
That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington. Ghost Riders of Baghda... Daniel A. Sjursen Best Price: $16.67 Buy New $16.58 (as of 05:55 UTC - Details)
Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment, including — to please a president — the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.
Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.
Of course, Butler didn’t exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion — and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule — he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.
Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical…”
Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…
Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.