Dupes Read online

  And yet the dupes shrugged off suspicions of funding as “inordinate fear” of Communism, as the latest Red-under-every-bed theory of extremists such as those from the John Birch Society. They refused to concede the possibility that such a nightmare existed under Uncle Sam's nose. In fact, as made clear by documentation that has emerged since the end of the Cold War, the funding was real, it was deep, it was illicit, and it most assuredly proved that CPUSA was an arm of the Soviet regime.

  That financial connection likewise applied to the Daily Worker, the house organ of CPUSA, which received heavy cash infusions from the Comintern from the earliest days of its existence.60 That, too, is no surprise, given that, as the U.S. Congress affirmed, the Daily Worker was “founded in response to direct instructions from the Communist International in Moscow.”61 It was a creature of the Comintern, which exercised control over the publication, either directly or through CPUSA, or both. The editor of the Daily Worker was approved by the Comintern.

  So intertwined was the Daily Worker with Moscow that editors of the American paper ended up as top Comintern officials (Morris Childs, to name just one) and as employees of the official Soviet news agency, TASS (Harry Freeman, among others).62 Quite a few members of CPUSA worked for TASS and were recruited (some successfully) by Soviet intelligence—Samuel Krafsur, Paul Burns, and Beatrice Heiman, to name a few.63

  These Communists served not America but the Soviet Union. Their loyalties were elsewhere. As Lincoln Steffens, the popular journalist for The New Republic, unforgettably put it, “I am a patriot for Russia; the Future is there; Russia will win out and it will save the world.”64

  Herb Romerstein repeatedly stresses this loyalty point: “Communist Party members were loyal Soviet patriots.… Most were not qualified to be spies, but those who were qualified were recruited through Party channels and made available to Soviet intelligence for classic espionage, agent-of-influence operations, or as couriers.” He says that “almost every spy” tapped by the Soviets was a member of the American party.65 CPUSA was a major recruiting ground for Soviet espionage, and some of those American Communists saluted the Red flag and consciously collaborated with Moscow.

  Romerstein clarifies that these individuals in CPUSA “were not the useful idiots,” not the “suckers”—that is, they were not the dupes. Quite the contrary, he affirms: “They were fully aware of exactly what they were doing. They manipulated the useful idiots on behalf of Soviet interests. Trusted Party members in the front organizations controlled them and recruited suckers to promote Soviet interests.”66

  Lenin's Dupes

  Sadly, many Americans, especially liberals, neglected these vital points of distinction. Too often, they defended CPUSA as just another political group with the traditional right to practice civil liberties and form a political party, and dismissed allegations that the party was collaborating with the Comintern. In doing so, the dupes became a huge asset to the American Communists, who covered up the truth about their operations not just out of caution but in keeping with explicit orders from Moscow. While the Communists dissembled, the dupes aided their denials.

  Vladimir Lenin had brilliantly foreseen this assistance by dupes, whom he referred to as “deaf-mutes”—an expression that, in less sensitive times, has been translated as “idiots.” He cynically but shrewdly saw dupes—drawn from the Western cultural elite—as useful specifically on matters involving the Comintern. He stated:

  We must (a) In order to placate the deaf-mutes, proclaim the fictional separation of our government … from the Comintern, declaring this agency to be an independent political group. The deaf-mutes will believe it. (b) Express a desire for the immediate resumption of diplomatic relations with capitalist countries on the basis of complete non-interference in their internal affairs. Again, the deaf-mutes will believe it.67

  They will believe it. Lenin confidently predicted that these idiots—this is the basis for the “useful idiots” phrase attributed to Lenin—would believe the denials and therefore help advance the Communist conspiracy. Added Lenin: “They will even be delighted and fling wide-open their doors through which the emissaries of the Comintern and Party Intelligence agencies will quickly infiltrate into these countries disguised as our diplomatic, cultural, and trade representatives.”68

  In his typical crude fashion, Lenin laughed at these people. He really did see these elites as useful idiots. He held them in greater contempt than did anyone on the right.

  Lenin saw huge potential in America, telling a meeting of activists in December 1920, “Thus we have before us the greatest state in the world.”69 And the “deaf-mutes” were a big part of his plan for that greatest state in the world.

  Murdering the Masses in Moscow

  In the meantime, Lenin and his minions had some killing to do. As American Communists pledged their heart and soul to Moscow, their new gods were gunning down the masses. Those who dared possess property were especially reviled—for Marx had written, “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”70 Landowners like the kulaks were carted off or simply expunged on the spot, and they were merely one category of Lenin's identified “harmful insects.”

  The Soviet slaughter largely credited to Joseph Stalin was begun by Lenin, the man who instituted the gulag labor-camp system and established the secret police, first called the Cheka. By 1918–19, within just months of the October 1917 revolution, the Cheka was averaging a thousand executions per month, without trial, for political offenses alone.71 The Cheka proudly self-reported this number in its documents. In fact, it apologized that its data was incomplete, and boasted that the number was likely much higher.

  In the 1920s, the Cheka introduced a quota method: each region and district had to arrest, deport, or shoot a certain percentage of people who were deemed denizens of several “enemy” social classes.72 Members of certain groups from within the bourgeoisie were targeted in the USSR as Jews were in Nazi Germany—that is, for isolation and liquidation.

  Here are excerpts from three contemporaneous reports on Cheka brutality, filed not by Bolshevik enemies but by Communist officials themselves:

  (1) I have checked up on the events surrounding the kulak uprising in the Nova-Matryonskaya volost. The interrogations were carried out in a totally chaotic manner. Seventy-five people were tortured, but it is impossible to make head or tail of any of the written reports.… The local Cheka leader [said]: We didn't have time to write the reports at the time. What does it matter anyway when we are trying to wipe out the bourgeoisie and the kulaks as a class?

  (2) The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately. Safe in the knowledge that they cannot be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among supervisors.

  (3) It is impossible to get any clear idea of who was shot or why.… Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty.73

  W. H. Chamberlain, the journalist who became probably the first historian of the revolution, said that by 1920 the Cheka had carried out 50,000 executions.74 Historian Robert Conquest, drawing exclusively on Soviet sources, tallies 200,000 executions at the hands of the Bolsheviks under Lenin from 1917 to 1923, and 500,000 when combining deaths from execution, imprisonment, and insurrection.75

  Across the board, the leading Bolsheviks preached the necessity of “mass terror,” from Lenin—in a direct, written order to the Comintern's Zinoviev76—to Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, to G. I. Petrovskii, commissioner of home affairs, to the pages of Izvestia. All of this was prior to the bloodthirsty Stalin. As one historian wrote, “Terror was implicit in Bolshevism from the start.”77 And Vladimir Lenin was its godfather. Page after page of this book
could be filled with bloodcurdling directives that Lenin wrote in longhand, order after order whereby this political gangster requested that various groups and peoples, from kulaks to priests, be hanged or shot.78

  The chief of Lenin's killing machine, the ferocious Latvian Martin (M. Y.) Latsis, explained this early Red Terror with deadly candor in his orders to underlings in the field:

  We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. In your investigations don't look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occupation. These questions define the fate of the accused.79

  We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Like Nazism, Bolshevism was fueled by hatred.

  Defending the Indefensible

  Those who manage to say, even today, that Communism is a good idea in theory, since it allegedly purports to help one's fellow man, are badly deceived, clearly having read no Marx or Lenin.80 Communism was never about love and brotherhood; Communism was built on a specific type of hatred: class hatred. Certain classes were targeted not only for envy and rage but also for genocidal destruction. It was a system constructed on the most wretched vices; it was vicious.

  Over time, most Americans figured this out. Too many, however, were hoodwinked from the start.

  Typical of the bad thinking on the American left was the author, poet, and playwright Langston Hughes, who once joined the Communist side but later abandoned it. Writing in 1934, Hughes captured American Communists’ love for the Soviet Union, their Soviet patriotism, their atheism, their desire to spread the ideology worldwide through the Comintern, and their ultimate dream of remaking America into a Soviet sister state. “Put one more ‘S’ in the USA to make it Soviet,” declared Hughes. “The USA when we take control will be the USSA.”81 Hughes urged his comrades to rise and fight for the “great red flag … of the Internationale.” Or, as he put it in one of his most famous poems:

  Goodbye Christ, Lord Jehovah,

  Beat it on away from here, make way for a new guy with no religion at all,

  A real guy named Marx, Communism, Lenin, Peasant, Stalin, worker, me.82

  As segments of the American Left persisted with this homicidal sophistry, the ideology of global Communism had begun a rampage of hate, violence, and mass murder that would claim at least a hundred million lives worldwide.

  How long would it take for American Communists to wake up and smell the corpses? How long would it take for their fellow travelers on the left to realize the true nature and horrific brutality of the experiment in Moscow? Sadly, in many cases the answer to that question was too long.

  Instead, a parade of Communists and their dupes marched proudly, blindly along after the founding of the Comintern and American Communist Party. And the first target in their sights was a liberal president—no less than a progressive icon.

  WOODROW WILSON: “UTTER SIMPLETON”

  President Woodrow Wilson stands astride history as the progressive's progressive. He advanced a vigorous, activist federal government in both domestic and foreign policy, creating a host of new regulatory agencies, implementing the income tax, establishing the Federal Reserve, and pioneering an interventionist foreign policy—so much so that liberal internationalism is often summed up simply as “Wilsonianism.”

  President Wilson's impact is undeniable. Winston Churchill described Wilson's influence at the end of World War I: “Writing with every sense of respect, it seems no exaggeration to pronounce that the action of the United States with its repercussions on the history of the world depended, during the awful period of Armageddon, upon the workings of this man's mind and spirit to the exclusion of almost every other factor; and that he played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man.”1

  While Wilson is a liberal icon, many conservatives decry his influence. They argue that he excessively wielded—even abused—state power, particularly during wartime.2 They cite his appalling, retrograde views on race and segregation, long concealed by his liberal hagiographers. And, particularly relevant at this current juncture in American history, they see in Wilson the beginning of a long march leftward, of an ever-expanding and ever-more-powerful federal government. In the progressive Wilson, in other words, they see the seeds of groups like today's “Progressives for Obama,” discussed at length later in this book.

  Yet neither Wilson's progressive admirers nor his conservative critics typically take account of a crucial aspect of Wilson's presidency: his response to Communism. It was during his administration that the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, the Comintern was established, and the Communist Party was founded in America. Wilson watched all of this intently, with deep concern. Unlike the liberals/progressives who today uphold his name, Wilson was not an anti-anti-Communist. He detested Marxism-Leninism, and never made excuses for its disciples. He would not denounce the anti-Communists as worse than the Communists. That is because he was an anti-Communist.

  Wilson paid a price for his opposition to the Communists. While many on the Right do not like Wilson, their distaste is nothing compared to the oozing hatred expressed by the far Left—a hatred that few Americans are aware of.

  Yes, Woodrow Wilson was a man of the Left, but he knew that Bolshevism was a very bad thing—and he did not hesitate to say so or to act accordingly.

  Barbarians, Terrorists, Tyrants

  Throughout the 1980s, liberals denounced conservative Ronald Reagan as a paranoid, hysterical, Red-baiting Commie hater. Those critics would be quite surprised that the liberal Woodrow Wilson used language every bit as harsh as Rea-gan's in describing Communism.

  Wilson loathed Communism for its aggression, expansionary tendencies, and denial of basic civil liberties. As the world's foremost voice for democracy, he had opposed the czarist autocracy that the Bolsheviks replaced in Russia. Yet he understood that the Bolsheviks were not a force for democracy, but in fact were the worst of anti-democrats. Perhaps most importantly, the inherent godlessness of the Marxist-Leninist ideology repelled Wilson, who was an extremely religious man—a devout Calvinist who had what biographer Arthur Link described as a “superb command of Reformed theology.”3

  Where Reagan rebuked the USSR as an “evil empire,” the genteel Wilson dubbed the Bolsheviks “barbarians,” “terrorists,” and “tyrants.” He said they were engaged in a campaign of “mass terrorism,” of “blood and terror,” of “brutal force,” of “indiscriminate slaughter” through “cunning” and “savage oppression.” The “violent and tyrannical” Bolsheviks were “the most consummate sneaks in the world,” and Bolshevism was an “ugly, poisonous thing” that “feeds on the doubt of man.” President Wilson used such language openly and frequently, including in remarks to a joint session of Congress. He warned of how the Bolsheviks were “poisoning” (probably his most common metaphor) the Russian people (and people elsewhere) with an “expansionist” ideology that they wanted to export throughout the world and against the United States. They aimed for “the promotion of Bolshevist revolutions throughout the world.”4

  “Bolshevism is a mistake and it must be resisted,” insisted Wilson. “It is wrong.”5 It was wrong, he averred, for Russia, for America, and for the world. “No man in his senses would think that a lot of local soviets could really run a government.”6

  So repugnant were Lenin and his agitating, conspiratorial ilk that Wilson and his State Department refused to engage in diplomatic relations or even try to find common ground with the Bolsheviks. “In the view of this Government,” the Wilson State Department announced in an official statement, “there cannot be any common ground upon which it can stand with a Power whose conceptions of international relations are so entirely alien to its own, so utterly repugnant to its moral sense.… We cannot recognize, hold official relations with, or give friendly reception to the agents of a go
vernment which is determined to conspire against our institutions; whose diplomats will be the agitators of dangerous revolt; whose spokesmen say that they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.”7

  One of the more striking displays of Wilson's anti-Bolshevism was a September 6, 1919, speech in Kansas City. Here he expressed his “abhorrence” of Bolshevism and reiterated his “hope” that “there won't be any such a thing growing up in our country as international Bolshevism, the Bolshevism that destroys the constructive work of men.”8 Ironically, Wilson said this precisely at the moment that American Communists were meeting in Chicago and “growing up” a form of international Bolshevism in their country.

  Wilson was speaking in Kansas City to rally support for the Treaty of Versailles, which was being opposed by isolationist Republicans in the Senate. In the speech, Wilson slyly compared the Republican opposition to the Bolshevik “spirit.” He told his critics to “put up or shut up,” and then stated: “Opposition constructs nothing. Opposition is the specialty of those who are Bolshevistically inclined. And again, I assure you I am not comparing any of my respected colleagues to Bolsheviki; but I am merely pointing out that the Bolshevistic spirit lacks every element of constructive opposition.”9