The Death of Lenin and a Century of Crimes Against Humanity - Dr. Mackubin Owens

Thursday, February 01, 2024

Dr. Mackubin Owens, MINDSETTER™

 

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PHOTO: Soviet Artefacts, Unsplash

Just over a century ago, Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party who orchestrated the October Revolution, died. We should not lament his death, for his revolution unleashed a century of crimes against humanity. Yet despite the mountain of corpses that communism has piled up during this time, Boston Globe writer, Jeff Jacoby notes that “communism rarely evokes the instinctive loathing that Nazism does.” Jacoby continues, “To this day, there are those who still insist that communism is admirable and wholesome, or that it has never been properly implemented, or that with all its failings, it is better than capitalism.”

Not to diminish the crimes of the Nazis, but the fact is that communism has killed far more people than Nazism ever did — in the Soviet Union, Communist China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, and Cuba. Yet, although we are never hesitant to describe fascism and Nazism as “evil,” many are reluctant to do so when it comes to communist regimes.

In June of 2016, speaking as part of a Commemoration hosted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VCMF) in Washington, DC, I sought to provide at least a partial answer to why communism tends to get a pass that Nazism never does. I contended that it is the result of a lack of education about communism, or even worse, mis-education. There are courses aplenty on college campuses about the Cold War and the Soviet Union. But while historical treatments of Hitler’s Germany do not shrink from a moral judgment about Nazism, all too often, the Cold War is treated as a confrontation by two morally equivalent superpowers.

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I said that there are two main reasons for this. The first is that communism always gets credit for its promises rather than its reality. Too many in the academy accept its utopian promises — in the abstract — as morally superior to capitalism's mundane reality. In theory, communism promises true equality. All that must be done is to abolish private property. Once that occurs, social classes will disappear, and the state will “wither away.” The result will be heaven on earth.

In the abstract, a communist society is, unlike Nazism, open to all. Jews or Slavs cannot be true Nazis but Jews and Slavs can be communists. Of course, the problem in practice is that human beings are recalcitrant. If they do not see the virtues of abolishing private property and the family, they must be “reeducated,” and if that doesn’t work, killed. Or, as Stalin is reputed to have said, if one is to make an omelet, one must be prepared to break a few eggs. Of course as the history of Soviet Russia, Communist China, Cambodia, and Cuba has shown, it is far more than a few eggs.

This accounts for the vast body count of communism. Nazis only have to exterminate non-Aryans. Communists have to eliminate everyone who does not accept the ideology. Thus the reality of communism is far different than the promise, although it does lead to a sort of equality: equal misery for all. Except of course, if one is part of the nomenklatura or the communist elite.

The second obstacle to teaching about the costs of communism is the triumph of “Cultural Marxism” on college campuses. As Michael Walsh observed in his splendid 2015 book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, it began with a group of intellectuals, including Herbert Marcuse and other members of the “Frankfurt School,” who sought refuge from Nazi Germany in America. But once ensconced in the American academy, the Frankfurt boys proved to be the sort of parasite that eventually kills its host.

The Frankfurt School implemented a program first proposed by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who in the early 20th century stressed the importance of “cultural hegemony” as the means of establishing the conditions for a Marxist revolution. Gramsci is the intellectual godfather of Rudi Dutschke, the German radical who in the 1960s coined the slogan, “the long march through the institutions.”

Marcuse endorsed Dutschke’s approach, describing it as “working against the established institutions while working within them" and, at the same time, "preserving one's own [revolutionary] consciousness." Such Cultural Marxists as Marcuse recognized that the American working class intuitively rejected Marxist ideas. In practice, Communism has always been imposed by force.

So Marcuse and his ilk exploited American intellectuals to achieve Dutschke’s long march through the institutions, especially the academy and popular culture. These Cultural Marxists recognized that Marx’s target, the American working class, would never buy into their argument. Communism had always been imposed by force. So instead, they exploited American intellectuals. This was fertile ground, making it easy for them to effect their “long march.”

The Frankfurt boys understood that revolutionaries would be able to complete the seizure of political power only after having achieved cultural hegemony, or control of society's intellectual life by cultural means alone. This they have achieved with their pernicious and reactionary philosophy of Critical Theory, which has unleashed a swarm of demons onto the American psyche. As George Orwell observed, “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Such is Critical Theory, which having taken root in American institutions, it continues to infect the minds of the young and teaches them to hate America’s liberal constitutional republic. The voices of Gramsci, Dutschke and Marcuse have offered up a utopian illusion that conceals the corpses of untold millions who have died in the communist attempt to found the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Mackubin Owens is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously served as editor of Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs (2008-2020). From 2015 until March of 2018, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. From 1987 until 2014, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. 

He is also a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, where as an infantry platoon and company commander in 1968-1969, he was wounded twice and awarded the Silver Star medal. He retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a Colonel in 1994.

Owens is the author of the FPRI monograph Abraham Lincoln: Leadership and Democratic Statesmanship in Wartime (2009) and US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain (Continuum Press, January 2011) and coauthor of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower (Georgetown University Press, spring 2015). He is also completing a book on the theory and practice of US civil-military relations for Lynne-Rienner. He was co-editor of the textbook, Strategy and Force Planning, for which he also wrote several chapters, including “The Political Economy of National Security,” “Thinking About Strategy,” and “The Logic of Strategy and Force Planning.”

Owens’s articles on national security issues and American politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Security, Orbis, Joint Force Quarterly, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Examiner, Defence Analysis, US Naval Institute Proceedings, Marine Corps Gazette, Comparative Strategy, National Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor; The Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, The Washington Times, and The New York Post. And, he formerly wrote for the Providence Journal.

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