What goes around comes around. History does not repeat itself . . . it rhymes. Choose the phrase, but understand that when it repeats itself, it does so in opposition to its previous self. For instance, at one time the FBI hunted down Communists. Hollywood instituted a Blacklist to name them. The CIA and the U.S. Army fought international Communism. There was also institutional racism used by white people to keep blacks down.
Today the FBI hunts down Right-wing Republicans, particularly President Donald Trump and his supporters. They arrest them with pre-dawn raids, handcuff them, “frog walk” them before cameras they have arranged with the liberal media to be there, to embarrass and destroy them.
Today Hollywood is the propaganda arm of what might be called “international Communism,” but is really “cultural Marxism.”
Today proxy arms of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street claim, in the name of fighting “racism,” that it is imperative not to mention easy, to shut up, to silence, to name, to shame and discredit, to cancel conservatives white and black.
Today the CIA is in bed with liberal media organizations and the entertainment industry to promote a “woke” agenda.
Today the Army is not fighting Communism, but rather promoting climate change, trans-gender soldiers, gay unions in the military, while “fighting” that old trope, white supremacy in our Armed Forces . . . otherwise known as the white boys who defeated Adolf Hitler (Dr. Michael Savage always said he loves the History Channel because it shows just that). To bc a white Christian in modern America is to be fair game.
But to lump all this under “Communism” is ineffective. The . . . Communists label us “conspiracy theorists.” To understand what we are up against, we need to study the past. So what is Communism?
On the one hand this is fairly easy. It is a political ideology promoted by the writings of Karl Marx and put into practice by the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1991, when it collapsed at the end of the Cold War. Other nations, namely Red China and Cuba, adopted this ideology, but are they still practicing it today?
No, they are not. The primary idea of Communism was that the state was the sole engine behind the means of production, and that all workers and citizens would share equally in the fruits of their collective labor. The U.S.S.R. began in 1917. By 1921 it was obvious the system as described was a failure, and ironically the United States had to send in emergency food shipments as a humanitarian gesture. Five-year plans were instituted, each failing. By 1930 millions were dying of starvation because it was not an effective way for people to live or for governments to oversee people.
Had World War II not been fought, Communism would have died, but the Soviets became American allies, thus sharing the bounty of victory. Communism also became identified as the ultra-enemy of Naziism. Therefore, how bad could it be?
Whereas Communism was thought by many to be an amorphous economic concept, Naziism was pure evil on its face. They said they wanted to kill all the Jews and set about, quite efficiently, to do just that. They said they wanted to conquer the world and sure did try to do that, too. They were Norse mythologists who killed outspoken Christians, seeking out the occult in a brazen attempt to get Satan to help them win. They killed the lame and the homosexual. They practiced human experiments on the living. They put it all in writing and left detailed reports for the Allies to read and use to prosecute them in war crimes tribunals.
Yet the Communists were worse than the Nazis, and in many ways just the same. They were not as efficient, or as smart, but that has not stopped Communism from murdering 120 million human beings to date. 11 million died in the Holocaust, five to six million of them Jews. Joseph Stalin probably killed as many Jews as Hitler, but there were no Allied camera crews there to record it. The gulags were paved over into shopping malls.
Communism and Naziism are exactly identical in many ways. In fact, Hitler admired Stalin and used his methods to consolidate power through terror and murder. Both are big government cradle-to-grave Socialist entities (hence National Socialism). Liberals call conservatives Nazis, which is ludicrous, as if to say what William Buckley and Ronald Reagan really liked about Hitler was how he instituted free market capitalism promoting rugged self-individualism mixed with small government that stayed off people’s backs; the essence of conservative principles.
But Communist countries do not employ Communist principles, at least not in Red China, the largest “Communist” nation still standing. As mentioned, the failure of Marxist economics was plainly spelled out by the 1930s, but what these countries did learn, from Hitler’s Germany to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, is something called authoritarian capitalism, or just plan Fascism.
Both Red China and Russia are free traders, completely mixed in with the global economy. They depend on capitalism and capitalism has come to depend in large part on them. What they discovered, what would horrify such free-market thinkers as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who believed capitalism was uniquely identifiable with individual freedom, would in fact promote it worldwide, is that at least so far, capitalism can work for tyrants, mob bosses, drug cartels and ponzi schemers, too.
So why do conservatives still think of liberals like Barack Obama as Communists? Doesn’t he live on Martha’s Vineyard and make millions off book and media deals? Of course he does. But make no mistake about it, the Left is very much Communist to the core. They are, however, a new kind of Communism, something that emerged after World War II. Something planned by the Communists a century ago.
Today it is cultural Marxism, and again to understand it requires a history lesson.
Communism’s plan
One of the best primers for Communist indoctrination came in a 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair called Oil! While this was the premise for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood, the politics of the book are not in the film.
Sinclair wrote a book after the turn of the century called The Jungle, exposing the dangers and inequalities imposed largely upon immigrants working in a meat-packing plant. This book was the genesis for the union movement in America, quickly appropriated by the Reds.
But Oil! told the inside story of how the Communists recruited Americans and other Westerners to their side. In the book the son of a wealthy, corrupt oilman based on Edward Doheny attends Southern Pacific University, a stand-in for the staunchly conservative University of Southern California. There the son meets a Jewish woman with frizzy hair who makes no attempt to beautify herself like all the blonde shiksas looking for husbands from wealthy families. But she does lure the young man with the notion of “free love.” This comes in the form of running naked on the beach and engaging in a “swinger” lifestyle in which old Christian notions of morality are considered part of the past.
Once hooked by the allure of this kind of life, she works on the young man’s conscience, saying he has no right to the riches he will inherit from his family because he has not earned it. The money has been made on the backs of the working poor, who are the ones who are owed the money. Once he is made to renounce his life and place in society, including his father, the young man engages in a conspiracy to rob the company from his father and give it to “the poor,” which is really a front for Soviet Communism operating in the U.S.
In studying the tactics of the KGB, especially prior to World War II, we come to find international Communism did not desire to conquer and occupy America, thus instituting Marxist economic principles which they knew would not work. They knew there were too many patriots, especially patriots with guns, who would not allow the Soviets to send an army onto our shores and take over. No, they needed American citizens to take over our institutions from the inside, through subversion, blackmail and propaganda. They sent spies, agents and moles, but knew these operatives alone could not take over the country. What they needed was an army of young Americans, not to mention young English, young French, young Canadians, and others, who would not do their bidding by means of blackmail or even financial temptation, but rather would grow up and of their own free will adopt the politics of our enemies as their politics.
This is what we see today. The politics of Obama, of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of Bernie Sanders, of BLM, is not based on an economic model of Marx, but rather a sense of victimhood popularized by Obama’s idol Saul Alinsky in the 1960s; of accusations of racial oppression, and propaganda over decades meant to debase the initial American ideals. Alinsky was succeeded by Obama’s patron, George Soros.
Orders from the Kremlin in the 1930s spelled out their plans. They were staunchly opposed to homosexuality in the Soviet Union, particularly in the military, as they found it “inimical to good disciple,” but promoted it amongst our enemies (see America: Hollywood) knowing it would debase the moral structure of the U.S. While family loyalty and manliness were promoted among the Soviets, they desired to break down the family structure in the West (see: the black family, post-Great Society).
Or worse, kill our family units by the millions before they are born (see: abortion, originally designed by racists to kill black babies en masse). This was adopted by liberal social workers of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s as easy advice to African-American women.
The family
To put a face on what our enemies were trying to do, take for instance a typical American post-World War II suburban family. This family consists of a husband, his wife, and their two sons. The husband fought with distinction in World War II. He lost many friends, almost all of whom were white. He survived and came home to his girl, who he married.
He started a business and became a success. He bought a house. His wife stayed home. The husband was not terribly impressed with black civil rights marches, noting that he served with a lot of white boys who died by the bushel. He knows a few blacks fought, but he never saw any of it.
He and his wife have two sons. The eldest son grows up idolizing his father. His goal in life is to be just like him. His dad was a war hero. Now he is a good husband and father. He was just named Man of the Year by the suburban Rotary Club where they live. He is admired and loved.
The eldest son knows he can never be as great as his old man, but he can try. He joins the Army and serves a few years, but does not see any action in the peace time service. He comes home and goes to college on the G.I. Bill, graduating. He goes to work for his dad. He finds a wife “just like the girl who married dear old dad.” They have kids.
What do the Communists think of the eldest son? This can be found in the song “Little Pink Houses,” first sung by Woody Guthrie, later made into a catchy hit by the Leftist John Cougar Mellencamp. The song, especially in its original form in the 1930s, refers to people like the man and his wife and his son and his wife. They live in “little pink houses,” live boring little lives, have kids who live their boring little lives, who have kids who live their boring little lives, all in “little pink houses.” They are according to the Communists and the artists who play these songs, treading along without going anywhere, pursuing an “American Dream” that does not exist.
Getting back to Guthrie, listen to his song “This Land is Your Land.” This is even considered a patriotic American anthem, sung by families on road trips. It is not. The song refers to the concept of “land” which in their view is neither “private” nor “owned” by the landowner, but rather is owned by the collective, as in “you and me.”
We see this view of private property in Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, in which the doctor returns from World War I to a Moscow now controlled by Communism. His luxurious home is now occupied by hordes of undesirables, but he knows if he complains he will be shipped to Siberia. He simply maintains the new condition is “more just.”
All of this is subversion going back to Communist plans to control the arts starting in the 1930s. V.I. Lenin himself said “of all the arts film is the most powerful.” Hitler agreed.
Why did Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung try to assassinate John “Duke” Wayne several times? Because he was exposing this. But so subversive are these messages that Mellencamp’s version of “Little Pink Houses” was allowed to be played during John McCain’s 2008 Presidential campaign. That same year a film called Revolutionary Road was released, starring the liberal Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. It very much mirrored “Little Pink Houses,” portraying a young, attractive couple utterly unable to find happiness pursuing the normal conventions of career, family and morality. The American Dream? Forget it.
Hundreds of films, plays, and artistic depictions convey this very message. Take for one very obvious example John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a veritable Communist manifesto idealizing one-world government with “no countries, and no religion too” (note the New Testament healthily promotes the idea of “many nations”). Yet nobody is saying that Mellencamp, DiCaprio or Lennon, not to mention many other liberals in the arts, are getting their orders from Moscow (Guthrie may actually have been in his day, as did most of the Hollywood Ten). These people adopt these misanthropic views of the country that gives them opportunity, of their own free will. They happily depict a country in which homosexuality is the preferred moral choice; Republicans are racist; capitalism promotes “global warming”; and much more.
Which brings us back to the younger son. He like the older son worships his father. He idolizes his older brother. Then around his sophomore year in high school he tries out for the football team. Whereby his brother was a star, he lacks talent not to mention drive, and gets cut. He starts hanging out by the tennis courts smokin’ dope.
Unlike his older bro who graduated with honors, he barely makes his grades. He has no desire to join the military and enters college, paid for not by the G.I. Bill but by his father. He drops out because it requires too much work. He becomes a failure. His parents get on him, urging that he “take the bull by the horns” and get with the program. The older brother loans him some money but feels sorry for him. This causes the younger bro to despise his brother.
Instead of graduating, finding steady employment, maybe joining the family business, finding a wife and starting a family, the younger brother becomes a drifter. He is a loser, but admitting that he is a loser is too hard. There must be another answer.
The answer in his mind, promoted by movies, by academics, by Left-wing culture, is that pursuit of these goals, of “Little Pink Houses,” is a waste of his time. After all, he says, his father was not really a hero. He was a war monger and racist who killed “the Japs” in the war and did not sympathize with blacks at home. He is not a good husband and father. He once cheated on his wife with his secretary. He is not a “good Christian,” he is a hypocrite. He is not a pillar of the business community; he did land deals with a drinking buddy of his on the planning board, cutting corners.
The older brother emulating his father is pursuing a false dream. His hero has clay feet.
The younger bro makes up these stories, reinforcing them in order to convince himself he is not a loser, his failings are not his fault, he is a victim of a society stacked against him, and to top that off, people with his skin color are inherently racist and immoral, so there, he is born that way. He hates himself and discovers the rest of the world happily joining in.
On top of this being the Biblical fable of Caen and Abel, it is also the story of conservatism (the older brother) and liberalism (the younger brother). Enemies of this country promote the “younger brothers” of America to unearned power (the “first liberal,” by the way, was Judas Iscariot, who got mad at Mary Magdalene for buying oil to anoint Jesus’s feet instead of giving it to “the poor,” who Jesus most presciently explains “will always be with us”).
What has been wrought
Getting back to “global warning,” this is happily demonstrated by the Left as an example of capitalist immorality. Meanwhile our enemies, namely Russia and China, could care less about “global warming.” They spew their pollution in a vicious search for profits they hope will some day give them the upper hand over the West.
Red China will not send armies to our shores as in the John Milius classic Red Dawn. Their plan is to dispirit us, to demoralize us into not believing in God, worshipping false idols like “climate change” and trans-genderism, until our military, our police, and our fighting spirit has been sapped, weakened forever.
Eventually limp atheists willing to do what they want will be in charge of our most sacred institutions. Obviously, this is already happening (see: Obama). It has been promoted by Hollywood at least since the 1940s, which at the time towed Moscow’s line. Today nobody needs to be blackmailed or bribed into promoting American racism and immorality; it is the politics of the Left, and of the Democrat Party. There are no “smoking guns, no “pumpkin papers” showing the orders Alger Hiss received from his handler. There are only the “younger brothers” of the above tale, promoted to positions of authority by a corrupt new world of incompetence, of the second-rate and the unimpressive; a world to be inherited by our children.
This future is like the water the live lobster is thrown into down at Fisherman’s Wharf. At first it feels cool and safe, until the heat overwhelms the lobster, he faints and dies in the boiling vat.
The prophet General Walker
This future was seen after World War II by a man named General Edwin Walker. Walker was depicted in a number of films. The Brad Pitt character in Inglorious Basterds is based on Walker, as was the 1968 movie The Devil’s Brigade. Walker led dozens of “suicide missions” behind enemy lines in France and Italy, practically winning World War II single-handedly. He was idolized by his troops, who would happily have followed him to the gates of hell.
But he was also caricatured by Burt Lancaster in Seven Days in May (even mentioned in the dialogue) as well as by Sterling Hayden (although he possibly was supposed to be Curt LeMay) in Dr. Strangelove.
When black students attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, General Walker reluctantly followed President Dwight Eisenhower’s orders to carry out integration. He believed such “social politics” should not be left up to the military.
But what really disturbed him were soldiers captured by the North Koreans and “brainwashed.” General Walker saw up close the techniques the Communists used, and how it was spreading to the wider American population via movies and pop culture. He also saw up close how the Communists used the Civil Rights Movement to inflame passions, to divide and conquer.
When John F. Kennedy took office he was further disturbed at the leftward tilt in government after the Bay of Pigs disaster. He began to indoctrinate his soldiers on the American Way, warning them of Communist techniques, of the subversion and immorality of Hollywood. This came to the attention of liberal factions now in power, leading to JFK’s firing of Walker. This made Walker a national hero much like Harry Truman firing Doug MacArthur mythologized him.
But he was tar-brushed as a “Right-wing extremist.” Still a Communist attempted to assassinate Walker further embellished his patriotic credentials. When Kennedy was killed many blamed Walker, though there was no evidence then or now of his involvement.
Eventually Walker ran for Governor of his native Texas but was defeated by John Connally. He became the face of the John Birch Society, but when the conservative movement shifted to Orange County and the more sanguine shores of sunny California, his brand of Southern fire breathing was overwhelmed by the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
He has faded from memory and is understood by few, even on the Right, but as long as our military is undermined by the likes of General Mark Milley, who promotes the idea that “white supremacy” is alive and well in our Armed Forces, it is imperative that a modern General Walker be found and given power.
This seems a long shot. God help us.
Steven Travers is a former Hollywood screenwriter who has authored over 30 books including Coppola’s Monster Film: The Making of Apocalypse Now (2016). One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation (2007) is currently under film development. He is a USC graduate and attorney with a Ph.D who taught at USC and attended the UCLA Writers’ Program. He played professional baseball, served in the Army JAG corps in D.C., was in investment banking on Wall Street, worked in politics, lived in Europe, and was a sports agent before finding his calling as a writer. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, L.A. Times, StreetZebra, Gentry magazine, Newsmax and MichaelSavage.com. He lives in California and has one daughter, Elizabeth. He can be reached at USCSTEVE1@aol.com or on Twitter @STWRITES.
