Conflation and "Inspiration": The Plot Against Civilization pp. 327-332

 

In Gary Allen’s “None Dare Call It Conspiracy” he explains that if you ask the average person what Communism is, they’ll give some answer about Russia. If they’re an academic, they’ll probably talk about the differences between Socialism, Marxism, and Communism. None of those, according to him, are correct, because Communism is something else. His view, and that of the John Birch Society as well as the current presidential administration is that COMMUNISM (Allen does all caps for this) is just a word for whatever they don’t like. Usually this is anything that is progressive or liberal. Increase taxes on the ultra-wealthy an extra 1%? COMMUNISM! Make law enforcement accountable for their actions? COMMUNISM! Etc.

It’s all very stupid because the word has no meaning. What I didn’t know when I covered Gary Allen’s book was that he blatantly stole this framing from Webster, “In the same way the word ‘Communism’ has a double meaning.”

She goes on to explain that the average person has no idea what it is but that the evangelist for Communism knows that it fails every time it’s been tried. She’s writing this in 1919-1920; how many times has it been tried? Never. Communism is the seizing the means of production by the government for the people (in an ideal world). The Soviet Union has just formed; there isn’t even a Soviet Bloc yet. The US Government hasn’t even declared them an enemy, and the Rockefellers are going to invest in the Soviet Union. It’s been tried once and so far (as far as Webster knows) it is kind of working. The Soviets are ironing out the kinks with a small civil war and experimenting with the elimination of currency. We know that the Russian experiment will fail, but we she will die never knowing that.

She has the example of Communal religious groups, but these are quite different than the Communist political system. The religious groups are not Communist so much as Socialist. She can’t say that because that would disrupt the thesis of this book. She tries to keep the mistake going by making a further mistake, “the fact which makes this possible is that they (religious communal groups) are composed of people who have renounced all interest in earthly things and centre all their thoughts and desires on the Kingdom of Heaven. Secular Communism, by its insistence on materialism, eliminates the only factor that makes the system feasible – belief in God and Hereafter.”

I would hypothesize that the difference between these groups and the political ones is scale. It’s like with Adam Smith and his focus on the market work for Adam Smith because the business owner, the market, and the customer are literally on the same street. Once you scale up to something like Apple the normal free market system no longer works. The laptop is built in China from parts all over the world. It’s not sold on the same side of the planet that it was made. A communal monastery functions as an ideal socialist utopia because there’s twenty people living there who do not have to fight over resources. There aren’t the many different problems that would exist with say 50,000 people in a town in Eastern Russia. I’m just spit balling ideas here, but materialism isn’t the issue.

Further, she’s making a common mistake that the philosopher in me cannot ignore. The materialism of Communism and the materialism that the religious people ignore are different materialisms. The latter is the abandonment of material goods. Religious communes are ascetic in that they don’t crave gold or riches rather just what they need to function and be comfortable. Communists are materialists in that they don’t believe in the supernatural. This much Webster is correct. The mistake she’s making is in thinking that if the Communists just believed in god it would work; but it’s not belief that makes the religious commune work. It’s a nuanced difference which is why she doesn’t quite understand the mistake she’s made.

Then we are treated to the second “inspiration” for Allen’s book. Allen titles his second chapter “Socialism—Royal Road to Power for the Super Rich.” This is where we get his strange definition of COMMUNISM. Allen describes that Socialism is merely a tool by people like the Kennedy and Rockefeller families to enrich themselves. They raise taxes on the poor but keep their own money.

I find this to be an interesting attack on the rich because what he’s arguing for is a system where everyone pays their fare share—progressive taxation and not a system that allows hyper capitalists to “win” at hording wealth. If we look at Webster she writes, “In this case the so-called war on capitalism is simply a war in favour of capitalism, of ruining all small holders of wealth or property in order to enrich a ring of multi-millionaires.”

What is it that she wants? This is what happened and how we are at our present system. Except it wasn’t Socialists that did it, it was capitalists who bought and wrote the laws. The capitalist system allows this but people like Webster can’t admit that their favored system is sowing the seeds of our own destruction. She blames socialists and Jewish financiers who use Communism to allow for this kind of wealth hording. This is the kind of thing that Adam Smith warned about. It’s using capitalism to reinstate mercantilism as an economic policy with the shield that if you criticize it you’re the enemy.

Allen blames the Soviets and Communist infiltrators (of which the Kennedy and Rockefellers were tools of). Webster is stranger. She points out that if you made this plan obvious the workers wouldn’t stand for it (except they would if you fomented racism as a distraction for why their lives are miserable), they would revolt. So why don’t they—because ze German army is there to stop them: “But this is where the role of the German armies comes in.”

Prussian militarism will keep the people in line. I’m almost positive that she means this metaphorically but I’m not sure. She spends some time warning of German resurgence (which, to be fair, broken clock time) at the hands of the Jews who are using anti-Semitism in Germany as a way of keeping power in Germany. I’m not sure what she means here but it’s all over the place.

Also, she spells “maneuver” in the English way, “manoeuvre” which I find infuriating.

And thus, the chapter ends. The Jews and the Germans are to blame for Socialism which is just a way for the really rich to become even more rich. I agree that the last part is the problem we face today if only she would just admit that the problem is that we don’t regulate industry, business, or people in a manner that makes sense and if you propose that we do—she would call you a Communist.