The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long supported terrorist activities abroad, including those of Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat. Helping to pioneer the tactic of hijacking commercial airlines, Arafat targeted U.S. forces and became an inspiration for Osama bin Laden.
The CCP’s Support of Yasser Arafat’s Terrorist Activities
Arafat started the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (FATAH) in 1959 and established the state of Palestine in November 1988. Until his death in 2004, he was the leading figure of various Palestinian militant organizations. Arafat was likely the CCP’s favorite Middle Easterner. He visited China fourteen times and met nearly every Chinese communist leader, including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin.
In 1964, Arafat established al-‘Asifah (“The Storm”), FATAH’s military wing, after which he immediately went to Beijing to meet with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou reminded him to pay attention to his strategy and not to use counterproductive slogans such as those calling for the complete destruction of Israel.
Besides providing weapons and financial support, Beijing often guided Palestine on how to wage conflict with the United States and Israel while expanding its influence on the international scene. The CCP also invited Palestinians to receive training in China. In January 1965, Arafat declared war on Israel in north Palestine using his guerrilla organizations. In May 1965, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) set up an office in Beijing. In an unprecedented move, China afforded the PLO office diplomatic treatment and openly supported the PLO in various international events.
In November 1988, the nineteenth session of the Palestinian National Council announced the independence of the Palestinian state. Beijing immediately acknowledged it and established diplomatic relations on Nov. 20.
Arafat and the then-CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin visited each other in 2000 and 2001, a time in which bloody conflicts broke out on a large scale between Palestine and Israel. Israel repeatedly condemned Arafat for his role in the violence. With the CCP’s support, Arafat was able to contend with the United States and Israel while further damaging the stability of the Middle East.
The PLO and FATAH were involved in various open and underground militant terrorist activities. They claimed that violent revolution was the only way to liberate the country, an ideology that follows the same doctrine of communist movements. Arafat was very close to other communist countries. He was a member of the Socialist International, and FATAH was an observer in the Party of European Socialists (PES).
The United States and Israel have marked Arafat as the man behind a number of terrorist attacks in the Middle East. The White House identified FATAH and the PLO as terrorist organizations and closed the Palestine Information Office in 1987.
In 1970, FATAH planned and carried out the unsuccessful assassination of Jordan’s King Hussein bin Talal. In September that year, FATAH hijacked three commercial planes from Britain, Germany, and Switzerland in front of the television cameras. The terrorists claimed that hijacking a plane had a greater effect than killing a hundred Israelis in battle.
In 1972, the terrorist group Black September, a militant faction of FATAH, carried out a terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. The person who planned and carried out this massacre was Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat’s head of security and director of FATAH intelligence. In addition to the eleven Israelis killed in the attack, a West German police officer also died. Arafat was one of the first militants to target innocent civilians in his operations.
Chmn. Deng Xiaoping, (L), w. PLO Chmn. Yasser Arafat, during mtg. in Beijing, China. (Photo by Forrest Anderson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)
Qutb’s writings influenced many young Arabs, including the Palestinian scholar and later one of the founders of Al-Qaeda, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. The 9/11 Commission Report outlined Qutb’s influence on bin Laden’s worldview, and also referred to Azzam directly as “a disciple of Qutb.”
Muhammad Qutb, Sayyid Qutb’s younger brother, was also one of the primary transmitters of Qutb’s views. Muhammad Qutb later went to Saudi Arabia and became a professor who conducted research on Islam, and at the same time, was also responsible for editing, publishing, and promoting his late brother’s theories.
Bin Laden read Qutb’s books when he was a student, and he was familiar with Muhammad Qutb, regularly attending the latter’s weekly public lectures. The former CIA official who oversaw the group in charge of bin Laden, Michael Scheuer, also senior researcher at The Jamestown Foundation, described Muhammad Qutb as bin Laden’s mentor.
The aforementioned Al-Qaeda second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is also a fanatical disciple of Sayyib Qutb. When he was a youth, Zawahiri repeatedly heard from his uncle about Qutb’s character and how great he was to suffer in prison. After Qutb’s death, Zawahiri wrote in his memoirs: “The Nasserite regime thought that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb and his comrades, but the apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern Islamic jihad movement in Egypt.”
In the year that Qutb was hanged, Zawahiri, then 15, helped form an underground militant cell determined to “put Qutb’s vision into action.” After that, Zawahiri joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and later became bin Laden’s mentor and an important member of Al-Qaeda. After bin Laden was killed, Zawahiri became the leader of Al-Qaeda.
Glenn E. Robinson, the Middle East expert quoted above, said that in the Sunni Muslim world, Qutb is the most important thinker who emphasized violent jihad. Virtually all the concepts and innovations of the Sunni jihad groups can be found in Qutb’s books. Although the various jihadi groups may differ in form, they all share one point in common, namely, the use of violence under the banner of Islam to realize their political aims.
The 1981 assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and the Egyptian terrorist group al-Gamma al-Islamiyah’s attacks against government officials, secular intellectuals, Egyptian Christians, and tourists in the 1990s are all steps in the campaign to bring about Qutb’s vision.
The radical jihadi groups that pursue Qutb’s ideology are categorized as Salafi jihadi terrorists. Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia, called Qutb the “father of Salafi jihadism” and the “forerunner of the Islamic State.” In his book The Mind of the Islamic State: ISIS and the Ideology of the Caliphate, he wrote: “Fifty years after Sayyid Qutb’s execution, this is what the tradition of Salafi jihadism, the mind of the Islamic State, has become. There are no more milestones to pass. We have finally reached the gates of hell.”
The report A Persistent Threat: The Evolution of al Qaeda and Other Salafi Jihadists by the Rand Corporation in America outlined Qutb’s influence on Salafi jihadis, and at the same time listed more than 40 Salafi jihadi groups. They are active across almost all continents.
Looking at the various extremist Islamic organizations in existence, although they lack a united vision and are given to ideological infighting, there is one trait common to the overwhelming majority of them: Qutb’s aggressive form of jihad. They have essentially inherited Qutb’s work, which is communist revolution in a different form.
Class struggle is another Marxist idea central to Islamic extremism. Karl Marx spent his whole life trying to incite conflicts between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in order to amplify these conflicts to the point of no return and finally “solve” the conflict through revolution. The Islamic extremists operate in much the same way.
Did destroying the World Trade Center in Manhattan do anything to help realize the united Muslim world that Qutb wanted? Absolutely not. It was merely a means of exacerbating the conflict between the Western and Muslim worlds. In the West, the terrorist attacks incited hatred of Muslims, and vice versa in the Muslim countries. Their method is the same as the conflicts between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie promoted by Marx and Lenin in order to create the conditions needed for launching revolution.
It is no exaggeration to say that Qutb’s theories bear greater resemblance to communism than to traditional Islam. While the Islamic extremists profess a religious opposition to communism, in fact, they absorbed the pure essentials of communist revolutionary doctrine. As one scholar has noted, “The arguments made here are that the real enemy confronting the free world remains Communism and that radical Islam is nothing more than Communism cloaked in the traditional garments of Islam.”
It is not only in the Muslim world where violent extremism has been introduced. The Western counterculture movement spread leftist ideology around the world, and with it Lenin’s terrorist teachings. Finnish political historian Antero Leitzinger believes that modern terrorism was born between the years of 1966 and 1967, developing at the same time as the international communist movement. According to Leitzinger, this is no coincidence. In the 1960s, as radical student movements ran amok in the West, many foreign-exchange students from the Muslim world became connected to leftist thought and brought leftist concepts such as violent revolution back home with them.
In 1974, Abdallah Schleifer, professor in media research at the American University in Cairo, met Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later became second in command of Al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri, who was studying medicine at Cairo University at the time, boasted that Islamic extremist groups recruited the most members from elite institutions, such as medical and engineering schools. Schleifer replied that he was not surprised: During the 1960s, these schools had the highest concentrations of young Marxists. He noted that Islamism was simply a new trend that developed in the student revolts of the 1960s.
Schleifer recalled: “I said, ‘Listen, Ayman, I’m an ex-Marxist. When you talk, I feel like I’m back in the Party. I don’t feel as if I’m with a traditional Muslim.’”
It is curious that many associate Islamic extremism with fascism (Islamofascism), and for various reasons, fail to mention its communist origins. Fascism is a form of nationalism and has no particular religious background. When considering Islamic extremism in terms of its overall approach and doctrine, it becomes apparent that it shares more in common with communism.
Qutb’s writings are replete with vocabulary familiar to students of Marxism-Leninism, such as “vanguard,” “state,” “revolution,” and the like. The situation and challenges Lenin faced at the time of writing his pamphlet What Is to Be Done? mirrors the circumstances faced by Qutb as he formulated his own radical ideology. Lenin placed all hope for a successful revolution on a proletarian vanguard party. Qutb copied this theory and replaced the Leninist political party with Islamic extremist organizations.
Lenin puts heavy emphasis on the importance of organization and the vanguard. He identifies a clear distinction between spontaneity and consciousness, and coined the idea of party-building. According to Lenin, with only spontaneous action, workers can only make superficial demands, such as pay raises and eight-hour work days, but they lack the consciousness needed to liberate mankind.
Lenin believes that external vanguards (usually bourgeois intellectuals, who have the privilege of education) are required to incite and indoctrinate the workers, so that they realize that revolution is their only way out, and reach the understanding that only by liberating the entire mankind can themselves be liberated. In order to fully utilize the vanguard, a tightly knit political party is needed to totally arrange their activities and provide them with opportunities for underground work as professional revolutionaries. This political party, the proletarian political party, is the proletariat vanguard.
Glenn E. Robinson, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and Research Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California–Berkeley, said of radical Islam: “Although for obvious reasons jihadi ideologues do not cite Lenin as an inspiration, their concepts and logic, especially Sayyid Qutb’s, betray this influence. Having been educated in Egypt in the 1940s, Qutb would certainly have been exposed to Lenin’s writings. Two key concepts from Qutb come straight from Lenin: jama’a (vanguard) and manhaj (program).”
Drawing from the essence of Leninism, Qutb advocated the organization of a Muslim version of the Leninist vanguard party.
“Qutb made precisely the same argument for the Muslim world,” Robinson wrote. “The vast majority of Muslims were too caught up in and corrupted by the system of unjust and anti-Islamic rule to know how and when to take up arms against the state. A dedicated vanguard of jihadi cadres was needed to organize direct action against the state.” Also, “Lenin’s insistence on the centrality of the vanguard’s having a detailed and coherent program for undertaking and then consolidating the revolution was likewise echoed, with an Islamic tone, in Qutb’s writings.”
To Qutb, this vanguard, which consists of what he calls “true Muslims” — or extremists — has the revolutionary mission of liberating all Muslims and the whole of human civilization. The vanguard must strike hard on false Muslims, follow Islamic ideology as determined by Qutb’s interpretation, establish a new nation based on Islamism, and use violence to impose Islam on the rest of the world.
In addition to the vanguard, Qutb’s theory also includes rhetoric advocating “social equality,” elimination of classes, anti-government activity, and the liberation of mankind. All these points echo the stated aims of communism.
After Qutb’s death, his brother Muhammad Qutb continued to publish his books. The book Ma’arakat ul-Islam war-Ra’samaaliyyah, published in 1993, again exposes Qutb’s communist inspiration. Qutb blatantly states that Islam is a “unique, constructive and positivist aqidah, which has been moulded and shaped from Christianity and Communism together, [with a] blending in the most perfect of ways and which comprises all of their (i.e. Christianity’s and Communism’s) objectives and adds in addition to them harmony, balance and justice.”
Qutb copied (Lenin’s)this theory and replaced the Leninist political party with Islamic extremist organizations.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, heralded a major shift in world affairs. Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda took front-page news as the threat of Islamic extremism gained prominence.
For the vast majority of people around the world, 9/11 came as a shock and a tragedy. But in China, under the CCP’s censorship, reactions were quite different. From internet forums and chat rooms to university cafeterias, large numbers of people rooted for the terrorists, with comments such as “good job!” and “We strongly support the acts of justice against the United States.” According to a survey of 91,701 people on NetEase, a major Chinese website, only 17.8 percent of respondents expressed strong opposition to the terrorist attacks, while a majority of people chose “opposition to the United States” or “the best is yet to come” in regard to the catastrophe.
The Chinese who cheered the terrorist attacks had never met bin Laden and his ilk, but the roots of their toxic thinking were the same. The Chinese have been poisoned by communist propaganda and Communist Party culture since childhood. Logically, however, one would wonder what connection this could possibly have with bin Laden, who had fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The ideological source of bin Laden’s Islamic extremism can be traced back to Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian pioneer of Islamic terrorism, a man who could be described as the Marx of Islamic jihad and who is often referred to as the “godfather of modern jihad.”
Sayyid Qutb: The Marx of Islamic Extremism
William McCants, counter-terrorism expert and former researcher at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, has observed that Islamic extremists often refer to Qutb’s teachings when explaining their motivations, and that many of them regard themselves as his successors. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al-Qaeda following the death of bin Laden, regarded Qutb’s thought as being the spark to ignite the fire of jihadi extremism.
In 2016, Middle East expert Hassan Hassan published a report with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called The Sectarianism of the Islamic State: Ideological Roots and Political Context. Toward the end of the report, Hassan quoted a popular summary of the Islamic State’s essential doctrine: “The Islamic State was drafted by Sayyid Qutb, taught by Abdullah Azzam, globalized by Osama bin Laden, transferred to reality by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and implemented by al-Baghdadis: Abu Omar and Abu Bakr.”
Bin Laden and later the Islamic State (ISIS) adopted and expanded on the ideology of Qutb. In a nutshell, Qutbism is the pursuit of violence to destroy the rotten old society, or “jahiliya,” calling upon jihadis to lay down their lives for an ideology that will supposedly usher in human liberation.
This bombastic style calls to mind the writings of Marx and Lenin, and with good reason: Qutb was a member of the Communist Party in his youth, and his ideas were steeped in the rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism. Robert R. Reilly, a senior fellow at the U.S. Foreign Policy Committee, has said that Qutb was actually a Communist International liaison for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Communist Party of Egypt.
Born in 1906, Qutb studied socialism and literature in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, he had already studied abroad in the United States for two years, and joined the Muslim Brotherhood after his return to Egypt. Qutb had always had contact with army lieutenant Gamal Abdel Nasser, leader of the socialist-leaning Free Officer Movement.
In 1952, Nasser launched a military coup overthrowing the Muhammad Ali dynasty, a pro-Western monarchy. It is said that this socialist-revolution coup was planned by Qutb and the Brotherhood together with Nasser. However, while Qutb hoped Nasser would establish an Islamic regime, Nasser instead took the path of secularization, and in 1954 began suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood.
Qutb and the Brotherhood prepared to assassinate Nasser. The plot failed, and Qutb was accused of attempted murder and imprisoned. During his three years in prison, Qutb suffered severe torture. Later, conditions became more lax, and he was allowed to write. He wrote his two most important works while in prison — In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones. These two books, covering his views on the Qur’an, Islamic history, Egypt, and Western society, laid out in full his advocacy of anti-secular, anti-Western extremism.
Qutb was once briefly released from prison. He did not take the opportunity to leave Egypt and was jailed again. In 1966, Qutb was convicted of his involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate President Nasser and was executed by hanging.
Qutb’s subversive thinking bestowed the Islamic concept of jihad with a new interpretation. Upon mention of jihad, many immediately think of “holy war.” In Arabic, jihad simply means to struggle or to fight. To mainstream Muslims, it can be taken to mean internal conflict (self-perfection) or defensive jihad. Qutb extended this definition to include proactive and unbridled use of violence in the holy war of jihad and laid out its theoretical foundations. Qutb took pride in walking up to the gallows and becoming a religious martyr.
Qutb’s philosophy held that any social system that abided by secular laws or ethics was an anti-Islamic “old society” — jahiliya (ignorance of religious truth, originally referring to society before the spread of Islam). Even a society that claimed itself Muslim could still be jahiliya. Qutb considered the Egyptian social system in which he lived to be one in which jahiliya was dominant, and therefore it had to be overthrown.
According to Qutb, jahiliya was the greatest obstruction for both Muslims and non-Muslims, preventing them from fulfillment of Islamic values and law. He claimed that the old society had been forced on people and in the process, robbed them of their freedom. These enslaved people — analogous to the working class in Marxism — had the right to wage jihad to overthrow the oppression of jahiliya. Qutb advocated jihad as the means of liberation for all mankind, Muslim as well as non-Muslim. When Qutb’s books became public, many Islamic leaders thought Qutb had gone too far and regarded his ideas as heresy.
Qutb further borrowed the Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” which refers to the ordinary masses’ acceptance of the ruler’s ideals and culture. This consciousness thus prevents them from perceiving their own oppression or overthrowing capitalism in favor of socialism. For Qutb, those living under jahiliya don’t realize they are slaves, which is why they do not engage in jihad to emancipate themselves.
“What is to be done?” as Lenin put it in his pamphlet by that name. Qutb had the same question, so he looked to Lenin for a solution.
Excerpts from How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
(52)
State Terrorism Under Communist Regimes
On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked passenger airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York, as well as the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people. It was the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that the United States suffered a blow of this scale on its own soil. The 9/11 attacks had worldwide impact. The United States launched a global War on Terror, overthrowing the Islamic regime in Afghanistan and the Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
The public has since become familiar with the terrorist movement and its representatives, such as Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Few, however, are aware of the close relationship between terrorism and communism.
The terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” first appeared in 1795 as a reference to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, which laid the foundations for the communist movement (see Chapter Two of this book).
In the modern world, terrorism comes primarily in three forms: state terrorism under communist regimes, terrorist activity carried out abroad by the agents of communist regimes with the aim of spreading violent revolution, and Islamic extremism, which owes much of its ideology and methods to communism.
State Terrorism Under Communist Regimes
The communist century is a century of lies, violence, and killing. Terrorism is an important tool for communists to spread their ideology around the world. The rise of a communist regime, in turn, results without exception in the mobilization of the state machine to impose terrifying brutality. This government-sponsored repression is state terrorism.
Vladimir Lenin relied on terrorism to take power in Russia. In 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin regarded as a revolutionary hero for his role as director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), said plainly, “We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted.”
The Marxist Karl Kautsky, who in 1919 published Terrorism and Communism, gave a comprehensive overview of what would come to pass under the proletarian dictatorship that Lenin sought to establish. Examining the violence of the French Revolution, Kautsky concluded that Lenin’s Bolsheviks had inherited the terrorist character of the Jacobins and would repeat it.
Yuri N. Afanasyev, a Russian historian, blamed Lenin for founding a policy of state terror, violence, and lawlessness: ”Violence is actually our entire history,” Afanasyev said.
Following the creation of the Soviet Union, the communist regimes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Kim Il Sung, and other despots all depended on killing to maintain their power. The violence and barbarism of their state terror has been addressed in previous chapters.
Violence and murder comprise but one component of communism’s terrorist agenda. Even more destructive is how communism uses the combined powers of political and religious fervor to indoctrinate people with communist party culture, planting the seeds of deceit, hatred, and violence to be passed from generation to generation.
Excerpts from How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
(51A)
Prosperity and Peace Can Be Obtained Only Through Morality
Striving for happiness is human nature. A prosperous economy can bring happiness, yet the economy does not exist in a vacuum. When the path of economic development deviates from ethics and morality, an economic crisis may follow. A society that is merely wealthy is not only incapable of bringing joy and happiness, but its prosperity will be short-lived. As the foundation of ethics and morality crumbles, a disastrous outcome may await.
In 2010, People’s Daily reported that despite the economic development, the Gross National Happiness Index has been on annual decline in China. The world’s second-largest economy is plagued with corruption, environmental pollution, and food-safety incidents, making the Chinese people extremely insecure about their lives. In this case, wealth has increased as morality and happiness have declined.
This reflects the fatal flaw in communism: Human beings are not composed only of flesh, but far more of the mind and the spirit. Before man came to the world, God laid down the path that his life would take. The Chinese say “every bite and every sip is preordained,” analogous to how faithful Westerners say grace before dinner to thank God for his providence. People who believe in God understand that wealth is a grace bestowed upon them by God. They have a humble and thankful heart, and hence they are content and happy.
Among those on the Titanic as the ship sank was millionaire John Jacob Astor IV, whose fortune could have built thirty Titanics. Yet when facing death, he chose what he thought was morally correct and protected women and children—he gave his spot to two terrified children. [27] Similarly, Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s department store said, “I will not go before the other men.” His wife also refused to get on a lifeboat, giving her place to Ms. Ellen Bird, their new housemaid. She chose to spend her final moments with her husband. [28]
These people of great wealth chose to put traditional values and faith before the opportunity to save their assets and lives. Their choice of morality and justice manifests the radiance of human civilization and human nature: A noble character is more valuable than life, which is yet more valuable than wealth.
Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Dafa, wrote in “Wealth and Virtue”:
It is the duty of the ruler and officials to bring wealth to the populace, yet promotion of money-worship is the worst policy one could adopt. Wealth without virtue (de) will harm all sentient beings, while wealth with virtue is what all people hope for. Therefore, one cannot be affluent without advocating virtue.
Virtue is accumulated in past lives. Becoming a king, an official, wealthy, or nobility all come from virtue. No virtue, no gain; the loss of virtue means the loss of everything. Thus, those who seek power and wealth must first accumulate virtue. By suffering hardships and doing good deeds one can accumulate virtue among the masses. To achieve this, one must understand the principle of cause and effect. Knowing this can enable officials and the populace to exercise self-restraint, and prosperity and peace will thereby prevail under heaven. [29]
If humankind maintains the aforementioned values for wealth and life, the economic challenges rooted in human beings’ greed, sloth, and jealousy will be reduced considerably. Once mankind suppresses its selfish desires, the ideology of communism will no longer be able to lure the human heart. Then God will bless mankind with high standards of morality. Consequently, we will have the ideal economy for mankind: wealth for the world, calmness in our hearts, and peace in society.
The communist specter has made intricate arrangements to destroy mankind. Its economic arrangements are only one part of the story. To free ourselves from the control of communist “ideals,” we need to unpack the conspiracy, identify the fraudulent messages, and stop putting our hope in this bankrupt ideology. We also need to restore traditional values and recover morality and virtue. Thus, humanity will be able to embrace everlasting prosperity and happiness and have true peace. Human civilization will then radiate with new vitality.
The loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector in the United States is a well-known phenomenon. But many people don’t realize that unions are one of the main culprits. Unions claim to help obtain benefits for the working class, but they do the opposite. How? This is clear by tracking the history of unions and the transformation of their mission.
Trade unions were initially founded by members of the working class with few or no skills, for the purpose of negotiating with management. To a certain extent, a trade union is able to broker and resolve conflicts between workers and capitalists. But communist elements took the union and turned it into a tool to promote communist movements and policies.
Friedrich Engels wrote on the topic: “The time also is rapidly approaching when the working class will have understood that the struggle for high wages and short hours, and the whole action of Trades Unions as now carried on, is not an end in itself, but a means, a very necessary and effective means, but only one of several means towards a higher end: the abolition of the wages system altogether.” [16]
Lenin believed that the formation and legalization of trade unions is an important means for the working class to seize the leadership of the democratic revolution from the capitalist class. At the same time, he believed that the trade union would become the pillar of the communist party and a key force in class struggle. In his speech, Lenin proposed that trade unions become “a school of communism” and a link between the communist party and the masses. The daily work of the trade union was to convince the masses and bring them to the transition from capitalism to communism. “The trade unions are a ‘reservoir’ of the state power.” [17]
In the mid to late 19th century, communist and left-wing forces used trade unions to incite workers to go on large-scale strikes, make harsh demands on capital, and even take violent measures to destroy machinery and factories. The trade unions became a powerful weapon for communism to combat capitalism and carry on political struggle—creating chaos for the world so that it could further its goals.
In October 1905, more than 1.7 million workers in Russia participated in a nationwide political strike and paralyzed the country’s economy. During this time, the Petrograd Soviet, an even more aggressive union organization, was formed. Lenin called it the sprouting of a revolutionary government and believed that it would become the political center of Russia. In other words, the Soviet regime built during the 1917 October Revolution originated from the trade union. [18]
Trade unions in Western and developed countries are also widely infiltrated and used by communist elements. Workers and capitalists are supposed to be symbiotic, yet communists try to provoke, expand, and intensify conflict between them. One of its most important tools is the trade union. Trade unions are used to escalate the bargaining process between management and workers to the level of a struggle between classes. They rationalize and intensify the confrontational side of the relationship and use it to legitimize their own existence. From then on, unions inflame the workers’ dissatisfaction, blame the capitalists for any problems, and provoke conflict between the two. This has been one of the unions’ keys for survival.
Trade unions may be able to bring workers profit in small ways for a short period of time, but from a long-term economic point of view, the biggest victim under the union movements led by communists is the working class. This is because when capitalist enterprises crumble, the biggest losers are the workers, who lose their jobs and livelihoods. On the surface, trade unions are fighting for the interests of workers, but in fact they are undermining industrial competitiveness. There are two reasons for this.
First, under the pretext of protecting workers’ rights and interests, unions make it difficult for enterprises to lay off employees who don’t perform and who achieve little. This gives rise to a culture of laziness. Not only is this unfair to employees who work diligently, but it also makes them less proactive. The most important factor in the growth of a company is its workers, but with the union’s umbrella of protection over employees who fail to perform, enterprises lose their competitiveness.
Second, under the pretext of protecting employees’ welfare (including pensions, health insurance, and the like), unions constantly elevate enterprise costs. In the end, it forces companies to reduce their investment in research and development, also reducing their competitiveness. It also results in companies’ having to increase product prices, which also harms consumer interests. Studies show that this is why companies without unions, such as Toyota and Honda, were able to produce high-quality cars at lower costs, and why American automobile factories with labor unions in Detroit became less competitive. [19]
As Edwin Feulner, founder of the American Heritage Foundation, said of unions: “They function like an albatross around a company’s neck—making it less flexible, less able to react wisely to the demands of a changing marketplace.” [20]
All this is aggravated with union monopolies in the labor market. This then exerts deleterious influence over business decisions and results in numerous unreasonable demands, some of them harsh. Enterprises who fail to meet these union demands are then the targets of struggle, including strikes and protests, which further disable business.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) is the union representing the autoworkers in Detroit. The UAW routinely went on strike. Prior to the financial crisis in 2008, the union demanded $70 an hour in wages and benefits. Consequently, the U.S. automobile manufacturing industry was almost on the brink of bankruptcy. [21]
The loss of job opportunities in the U.S. manufacturing industry is now known to all, but many people don’t know that unions are a key driver of the job losses. Unionized manufacturing jobs fell by 75 percent between 1977 and 2008, while non-union manufacturing employment increased by 6 percent over that time, according to the Heritage Foundation. The situation outside the manufacturing sector is also similar. Take the construction industry for instance. “Unlike the manufacturing sector, the construction industry has grown considerably since the late 1970s. However, in the aggregate, that growth has occurred exclusively in non-union jobs, expanding 159 percent since 1977.” [22]
In addition, labor unions are the tools employed by communist elements to promote egalitarianism in enterprises. The Heritage Foundation notes that unions demand that companies pay wages according to the length of service of the employee (equivalent to years of service in socialist countries), without regard to the employee’s contribution to the company or performance. This has the predictable effect of suppressing the wages of more productive workers and raising the wages of the less competent.” [23]
The idea at work here is the same as absolute egalitarianism under communism, which is effectively the redistribution of wealth among employees within the enterprise. The interference with internal decision-making of enterprises and the monopoly of the labor market is an erosion of the free market.
Unions’ aggressive advocacy for what they describe as workers’ welfare ends up favoring some workers over others and puts a drag on individual companies and the economy as a whole. A survey conducted in 2005 showed that “most union households disapprove of American unions,” and that “the main reason for their disapproval is never openly discussed in union media or addressed at union conventions.” [24]
In all respects, those workers who are truly diligent have become victims, and communism has become the biggest winner. Fundamentally, communists use labor unions to destroy the capitalist free economy, subvert the capitalist system, and undermine the normal life of man in a gradual and step-by-step manner.
Labor unions infiltrated by communism and under the guidance of the progressive movement have evolved into a special interest group, similar to a large-scale for-profit corporation. The leadership has huge personal interests in the enterprise, and corruption is common. [25]
In democratic countries, labor unions have largely become a tool for leftists to fight against capitalism. They single-mindedly demand “social justice” and “fairness,” creating a huge welfare burden on society and industry, and becoming an obstacle for reform and attempts to improve efficiency in the manufacturing, service, and education industries, as well as in government administration. When the time is not ripe, they hide, but when conditions are favorable, they come out and mobilize a social movement to promote their ends. Labor unions have thus become a wedge communism uses to divide free societies.
In all respects, those workers who are truly diligent have become victims, and communism has become the biggest winner.
The Promotion of Economic Egalitarianism: A Stepping Stone to Communism
Under the influence of absolute egalitarianism, there are vigorous calls in the West for “social justice,” as well as minimum-wage laws, affirmative action, equal pay for equal work, and other demands. What lies behind these demands is a desire for an equality of outcome; behind them are elements of communism. If careless about these matters, man can easily find himself falling into a trap.
From the communist perspective, it doesn’t matter whether these vulnerable groups obtain equality or if their social status improves. They are merely pawns for inciting resentment. If communists get what they demand, then they will simply make new demands for equality, and there will be no end to it. If they don’t achieve their demands, they will wage a war of public opinion, incite resentment, strengthen people’s notions about the justice of equality, and turn these notions into a major platform on which to influence public opinion.
Because communism incites resentment in multiple fields and via so many different means, once all the resentment explodes at the same time, social turmoil and perhaps even revolution will be the result. Communists will always be able to find vulnerable groups and then demand financial equality for them, repeating the process until absolute equality is achieved. These demands for so-called social justice become a stepping stone for the path toward communism. Free countries in the West have been eroded by communist ideology — this is simply the reality.
In reality, the implementation of these policies often results in the opposite of what is intended. Those who are supposed to be protected by these policies are instead discriminated against and attacked. Take the minimum-wage law, for example. On the surface, its goal is to protect the rights of workers, but the effect is that many factories simply stop hiring because it is uneconomical for them to do so. As a result, even more workers lose their jobs.
Skills are not gained all at once. There’s a continuous process of progress and elevation of skill, capability, and work ethic. The result of enforcing a minimum wage is that people don’t get trained and socialized in lower-wage jobs and then work their way toward higher-paying jobs. The one-size-fits-all approach also violates economic theory and results in excessive government intervention in the economy.
People also use the excuse of “equal pay for equal work” to demand social revolution. They cite statistics and claim that the average wage of black males is less than the average wage of white males, that the average female wage is less than the average male wage, and that these discrepancies are the result of racism and sexism. In reality, such comparisons are not appropriate.
When comparing apples and apples, the results are different. Some scholars’ research found that for black families where both husband and wife graduated from college or higher, their income is in fact higher than similarly situated white families. [15] Simply because black families of this type are relatively fewer, there are discrepancies between the races overall in income. Making meaningful and accurate comparisons would appear to be common sense, but when communist elements are inciting discord and struggle, people seem to suffer a selective loss of vision.
Communism does not care about the well-being of vulnerable groups. It is simply interested in slogans that drag people down the road to communism and thus destruction.
Under the influence of absolute egalitarianism, there are vigorous calls in the West for “social justice…
Hatred and Jealousy: The Origin of Absolute Egalitarianism
Communism advocates absolute egalitarianism. Superficially this may sound like a high-sounding term, leading many to blindly believe in its rectitude. However, it also evokes hatred and jealousy. One consequence of egalitarianism is that people can’t tolerate the success of others, with others being wealthier, having better lives, easier work, and more luxurious living conditions. Everyone must be equal, in this reading: I should have what you have, and I can get what you get. In such a universe, everyone is equal and the world is alike.
Absolute egalitarianism is reflected in at least two ways. First, when people are not yet equal, they become dissatisfied with their economic status, which is a fast route for evildoers to incite envy and hatred. People come to covet what others have and even seek it through improper or violent means. In extreme cases, they destroy others’ property and even kill to get rich. The worst manifestation of these tendencies is violent revolution.
In order to provoke dissatisfaction, Marx divides society into two opposite classes: those who own the means of production, and those who don’t. In the countryside, this becomes the landlord and the peasant; in the city it’s the capitalist and the worker. The result is to incite class hatred and use the supposedly disenfranchised to carry out violent revolution. The landlords are rich and the peasants are poor — seize their wealth! Why are the landlords rich? Everyone should be rich. Thus, the Chinese Communist Party called on peasants to engage in “land reform”—that is, attacking landlords and dividing up the land. If the landlords refuse to go along with it, they’re to be killed. The Communist Party first incited hooligans to make trouble, then encouraged the peasantry to rise up and attack the landlord class. The heads of millions of landowners fell.
Second, absolute egalitarianism also manifests within groups that have basically achieved a state of “equality”: If there are benefits, everyone gets an equal share. Anyone who stands out is censured. Everyone is treated the same whether one works more, works less, or even doesn’t work at all.
People appear the same on the surface, but each individual’s personality, intellect, physical strength, morality, occupation, role, education, living conditions, extent to which they can endure hardship and persevere, spirit to innovate, and so on are all different, and what one contributes to society is also different. Thus, why should the same outcome be sought for all? In this sense, inequality is actually true equality, while the equality pursued by communism is true inequality and true injustice. The ancients in China say that the way of Heaven is to reward those who work hard, and that Heaven will reward one according to the effort one puts in. Absolute egalitarianism is impossible in the real world.
Under absolute egalitarianism, you get the same outcome whether you do things well or do poorly, whether you are hardworking or lazy. Under the cover of egalitarianism, the lazy benefit, while those who work hard and are capable are penalized and even resented and viewed with hatred. Everyone slows down their pace to match the speed of the slowest. In actuality, this causes everyone to become lazy, to wait for someone else to contribute so that one can take advantage of it and jump on for the ride, gaining something for nothing, or grabbing from someone something that one does not have, resulting in widespread moral decline.
The hatred and jealousy that motivate absolute egalitarianism are the poisonous roots of communism’s economic perspective. Human nature has both good and evil inherent in it. Western faiths refer to the seven cardinal sins, while Eastern culture teaches that man has both Buddha nature and demon nature. Buddha nature manifests itself as kindness, the ability to endure hardship, and consideration of others. Demon nature manifests as selfishness, laziness, jealousy, malice, plunder, hatred, rage, lust, tyranny, disregard for life, inciting discord and creating trouble, creating and spreading rumors, getting something for nothing, and so on. The economic perspective adopted by communism deliberately stimulates demon nature, amplifying people’s jealousy, greed, laziness, and other evil factors, causing people to lose their humanity and forsake the traditional values held for thousands of years. It amplifies the worst in human nature and turns people into communist revolutionaries.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith said that morality is the foundation of mankind’s prosperity. Observing these general rules of morality “is required for the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.” [13]
Lawrence Kudlow, director of the U.S. National Economic Council, believes that economic prosperity must exist alongside morality. He wrote that if the United States can abide by the “foremost principle”—to adhere to the moral values that America was founded on—the development of the United States will be limitless. [14]
The negative consequences caused by absolute egalitarianism in countries around the world are not surprising. Communist egalitarianism uses the authority of the state to plunder private property and wealth belonging to others. On the one hand, this strengthens the authority and power of communist ideology, and on the other, it convinces people that it’s their right to get something for nothing. This is precisely how communism deceives people.
The landlords are rich and the peasants are poor — seize their wealth!
The American anti-communist pioneer Fred Schwartz told the following joke in his book You Can Trust the Communists … to Be Communists about two interviews conducted by a visitor at a Soviet automobile plant first and next at an American plant: [3]
“Who owns this factory?”
“We do,” they replied.
“Who owns the land on which it is built?”
“We do.”
“Who owns the products of the factory when they are made?”
“We do.”
Outside in a corner of a large park were three battered jalopies. The visitor asked, “Who owns those cars out there?”
They replied, “We own them, but one of them is used by the factory manager, one is used by the political commissar, and the other is used by the secret police.”
The same investigator came to a factory in America, and said to the workers, “Who owns this factory?”
“Henry Ford,” they replied.
“Who owns the land on which it is built?”
“Henry Ford.”
“Who owns the products of the factory when they are made.”
“Henry Ford.”
Outside the factory was a vast park filled with every make and variety of modern American automobile. He said, “Who owns all those cars out there?”
They replied, “Oh, we do.”
This story vividly displays the consequences and differences between systems of private and public ownership. Under the system of public ownership, resources and the gains from labor are nationalized. Gone are the mechanisms that motivate individual enthusiasm, striving, and innovation, as with the sense of responsibility conveyed by personal property rights. In name, public ownership means that the wealth of a country is shared by all citizens, but in practice, it means that the privileged class monopolizes resources and looks after itself first.
The ultimate factor in economic growth is people. Public ownership chokes people’s vitality and motivation to be productive. It undermines morale, promotes inefficiency, and causes wastage. From Soviet collective farms to the people’s communes in China—including failed collectivization in Cambodia and North Korea—the system of public ownership brings starvation wherever it goes. Tens of millions of people in China died from a man-made famine.
Private ownership accords with the principle that man works for his bread. On the contrary, collective ownership violates this principle. Both evil and kindness exist in mankind. Private property allows man to develop his kind nature and encourages labor and thrift. Collective property, however, encourages the evil in human nature, promoting jealousy and sloth.
Friedrich Hayek writes that the growth of civilization relies on social traditions that put private property at the center. Such traditions spawned the modern capitalist system and its attendant economic growth. This is an organic, self-generating order that does not require a government for its action. Yet communist and socialist movements seek to exert control over this spontaneously arising order—what Hayek called their “fatal conceit.” [4]
If private ownership and freedom are inseparable, then the like applies to collective ownership, wed as it is to dictatorship and suppression. The system of collective ownership nationalizes resources, degrades economic productivity, and turns people into the country’s servants and slaves. All people must obey the commands of the central party, and any ideas and voices inconsistent with the regime can be shut down through economic punishments. People are then powerless against state intervention.
Thus, the elimination of private ownership and the establishment of collective ownership inevitably leads to totalitarian outcomes. Collectivism is a yoke affixed on the necks of man by a totalitarian state. Freedom is stolen—including the freedom to be kind—and everyone is forced to follow the moral commands of the communist regime.
Some people have said that power must not be privatized, and wealth must not be collectivized, or else disaster awaits mankind. That is indeed true.
The CCP’s economic model has put society in moral freefall, exactly in line with the communist specter’s aim of destroying humankind. The Party’s economic power goes hand in hand with the erosion of morality as it drags people into a bottomless sea of indulgence and eventual annihilation.
Today’s China is inundated with fake goods, poisonous food, pornography, drugs, gambling, and gangs. Corruption and prostitution have become achievements to take pride in, while social trust is virtually nonexistent. The widening gap between rich and poor is accompanied by social strife and abuse of justice. Citizens turn a blind eye to the suffering of their compatriots. In the economy of power, Party officials use their authority to amass wealth. The enormity of corruption increases with rank. The misappropriation of billions is a normal occurrence. There is no government as corrupt or morally degenerate as the Chinese communist regime.
In October 2011, the world was shocked by the death of Yueyue, a 2-year-old girl in Guangdong Province who was hit by a truck. Instead of getting out to help, the driver put his truck in reverse to crush Yueyue again and ensure that she was dead. During the tragedy, 18 people walked by without stopping, and Yueyue later died in the hospital. International media wondered if China had lost its soul. It might be understandable that people are reluctant to come to the aid of others when there is danger involved, such as in an armed robbery, yet Yueyue did not pose a conceivable threat to anyone as she lay dying beneath the tires of a heartless driver. Chinese society has hit rock bottom.
Economic growth without morality is chaotic, brief, and disastrous. Under the inhumane policies of the CCP, social conflict abounds, and the environment is on the verge of collapse. The consequences of moral decay are fatal. China calls itself a strong country, but its strength is an illusion. Its superficial prosperity, built upon the reckless pursuit of wealth, is doomed to collapse in the convergence of moral crisis and social conflict.
There is no good future in store for China if it cannot escape the devil’s snares. The specter of communism has no intention to implement healthy and sustainable growth, as its goal is to destroy China.
Because of China’s rapid GDP growth over the last 40 years, many have come to believe in the superiority of socialist economics. It has made many Westerners, including elites in political and academic circles as well as think tanks, marvel at the efficiency of the totalitarian system. In fact, the economic model the CCP has built cannot be duplicated. On the one hand, the reasons for its economic rise demonstrate the internal instability of the socialist system. On the other, the Party’s model foreshadows an abundance of vices created by its unscrupulous economy of power.
China’s economic growth in the past 40 years draws in large part from the following factors: First, the relaxation of the state-owned economy and the abandonment of central planning, as well as the revitalization of the private sector have given the Chinese economy a powerful productive drive. Chinese people are hardworking and intelligent, but the Party hindered their industrious potential for decades. A desire to alleviate themselves of poverty has rekindled the motivation to do business and unleashed the tremendous economic power of the Chinese.
A second factor was the massive influx of Western capital and technology into China during the reform era. Under the command economy, China’s vast expanses of underutilized land, labor, and markets were like gold for which prices were not yet determined. The combination of capital investment and undeveloped resources ignited the blaze of China’s economic growth. Had it not been for the Party’s totalitarian rule, this fire should have been started decades earlier, and in a much more controllable and sustainable fashion.
The scale of Western investment in China is immense. According to published figures, the direct American investment in China reached nearly $800 billion between 2000 and 2016. The total value of foreign capital entering China from 1979 to 2015 amounted to about $1.64 trillion.
Western countries even gave the Chinese regime preferential trade status along with broad market access. In May 2000, the U.S. government granted China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR). On December 11, 2001, China formally entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) and joined the international market.
The CCP developed its economic power using unethical models of development. Among these include sweatshop labor, the extreme exploitation of workers and peasants, the violent demolition of housing and relocation of the occupants, and the like. For the sake of short-term growth, the CCP ignored environmental destruction and other hazards to squeeze every last drop of profit from its land, people, and resources.
The Communist Party took advantage of Western capital, technology, markets, favorable trade status, and cheap domestic production costs to make vast sums in foreign reserves. The trade deficit between the United States and China rose from about $80 billion in 2000 to over $375 billion in 2017.
Finally, the CCP overturned the conventions of international trade and took full advantage of the opportunities available to it regardless of their legitimacy. It adopted the nationwide strategy of plagiarizing intellectual property in an attempt to overtake other countries in terms of industry and technology. This constitutes the biggest case of theft in all of history.
The 2017 report by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property stated that China’s fake goods, pirated software, and stolen trade secrets cause the United States a loss of between $225 billion to $600 billion every year, a figure that does not include losses due to the theft of intellectual property.
The report stated that over the past three years, US$1.2 trillion was lost due to intellectual theft, the majority of which was from China. A report by the Director’s Office of National Intelligence Service states that 90 percent of cyber attacks on U.S. businesses come from the Chinese government, inflicting an estimated $400 billion in total economic damage every year.
China’s economic growth was fueled by the relaxation of socialist ideology, investment from advanced Western countries, and the CCP’s immoral business conduct. In no way does this indicate the superiority of socialism, nor that the Party is developing on the normal capitalist path. Western observers sometimes describe communist China’s unscrupulous business model as “state capitalism.” This is giving the Party undue praise. Under the CCP’s totalitarian rule, the economy is merely a political instrument. The window dressing of market economics is a superficiality the CCP uses to deceive the world.
The CCP’s economic model utilizes state authority to induce rapid economic development while employing underhanded tricks to be competitive. It has encouraged other countries to adopt heavier state intervention. These countries have made the grave mistake of idolizing the Party’s model as a success while ignoring its human and moral tragedies.
In 2012, The New York Times ran a feature article titled “Profiting From a Child’s Illiteracy,” in which it described the impact of welfare policy on low-income families living along the Appalachian Mountains in the Eastern United States.
The feature described how many impoverished families gave up sending their children to school in order to qualify for aid: “Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.” [12]
“Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way—and those checks continue until the child turns 18.”
This aid program was begun about 40 years ago with the goal of helping families raising physically or mentally challenged children. By the time The New York Times reported on the subject, over 55 percent of qualifying children were categorized as mentally challenged, but did not have any defined condition. Across the United States, there are now a total of around 1.2 million “mentally challenged” children for whose care taxpayers provide $9 billion annually. [13]
Here, welfare and the flaws of human nature feed each other in a vicious cycle. Despite the good intentions of those who advocate and formulate welfare policy, it indirectly aided the communist specter in its goal of bringing down and destroying humanity.
Over a century ago, Tocqueville made the observation that welfare programs do not discriminate among individuals, only poverty thresholds. This makes it hard to allocate aid efficiently since it is impossible to know whether the qualified individuals are actually suffering from circumstances beyond their control or if their misfortune is of their own making. [14]
Welfare abuse doesn’t just tie down public finances; it also affects the futures of children who grow up under its system. Research conducted in 2009 found that two-thirds of people who received welfare as children continued to receive it into adulthood, and will possibly remain on welfare for the rest of their lives. [15]
As a matter of election strategy, the term “disability” is being continually refined to include an ever-expanding part of the population in the ranks of those eligible for welfare. The criteria determining who is entitled to welfare creates an atmosphere of negative reinforcement that encourages the misuse of these benefits. The resultant regression in social morality and economic malaise help the communist specter achieve its aims.
Welfare is an emergency measure to assist those in genuine need, effective in circumstances such as those involving occupational accidents, epidemics, natural disasters, and so on. It shouldn’t become the default form of subsistence, as it is incapable of resolving the dilemma of poverty. As of 2014, in the 50 years since President Johnson launched his war on poverty, American taxpayers spent 2.2 trillion dollars to pay for welfare. [16] Yet, as statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau show, the poverty rate has remained steady for the last 40 years. [17]
According to American economist William Arthur Niskanen, the welfare system spawned a culture of poverty, which in turn feeds into a vicious cycle of dependence on government aid, extramarital children, violent crime, unemployment, and abortion. His analysis of U.S.-wide data for the year 1992 produced estimates on the effects that could be expected from increasing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits by 1 percent of the average per capita income: AFDC recipients would increase by about 3 percent; the number of people in poverty would increase by about 0.8 percent; births to single mothers would increase by about 2.1 percent; and the number of unemployed adults would increase by about 0.5 percent. Abortions and violent crime would become more common as well. [18] Niskanen’s findings suggest that a robust welfare system fosters dependence on the system and discourages personal responsibility.
The disintegration of families is a chief ingredient in the culture of poverty. In a study of historical and contemporary poverty among blacks, economist Walter E. Williams found that 85 percent of impoverished black children lived with teenage single mothers. The welfare system promotes this phenomenon, as it encourages single mothers to live without taking responsibility for their actions. They can get subsidies, housing subsidies, food stamps, and the like from government welfare. Welfare has been instrumental in pushing single parenthood, causing more poverty. [19]
Despite the fact that welfare has been expanding in the last few decades, the gap between rich and poor has been continuously increasing as well: The average wage, adjusted for inflation, increases at a snail’s pace while wealth flows to the most wealthy. A class of working poor has emerged. Armed with these societal issues, the left wing pushes for a bigger government, higher taxation, and more welfare to combat poverty by exacerbating it further.
The Left’s Use of Welfare Policy to Gain Votes
Left-wing politicians often promote more welfare and higher taxes. Using a variety of election slogans to convince voters of their noble intent, they portray themselves as possessing the moral high ground, even though these politicians are not the ones who will be providing the welfare. Their method is merely to seize the wealth of the upper and middle classes and distribute it among the poor. Since the system conceals the relationship between donor and recipient, the politicians nevertheless claim to have played a crucial role in the process. They receive the recipients’ gratitude in the form of votes.
State Intervention
At present, governments in the free world are already practicing heavy interventionism in their national economic systems. One cause of this was the welfare politics, developed under the socialist influence, which expanded the state’s role in wealth distribution. Another impulse for this trend was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Following the crisis, Western society was deeply influenced by the theories of Keynesian economics, which advocates active state intervention and regulation of the economy by using finance.
In a normal society, the government’s role is limited. Only in exceptional situations should the state interfere in the economy, such as during times of natural disaster or some other crisis. But today, Keynesian theory has taken hold around the world. Governments of all countries are racing to take greater control over their respective economies.
When the government plays an active role in the economy, each action has a massive ripple effect on the market. New policies and laws can make or break entire industries, making many businesses and investors reliant on the government’s decisions. The state, which traditionally only passed and enforced laws, has now become a leading participant in the economic arena. Like a referee joining a soccer match, the state has become responsible for controlling and regulating capital in what used to be the privately owned economy, replacing the “invisible hand” with its “visible hand.”
Active financial control combined with high-welfare policies has caused many governments to incur huge debts. According to data from the OECD, more than half of its member states have government debts near or over 100 percent of GDP. Some countries’ debt exceeded 200 percent of their economic output. [20] This presents a major vulnerability for the social and economic future of many countries.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase wrote multiple research papers on the impact of government intervention. In his work, Coase found that interventionist policy almost always produces negative results. He believes that the crisis of intervention has reached the point of “diminishing marginal returns.” [21]
Despite this, the governments of all countries have only become more active in their manipulation of the economy, bringing it more and more under the control of the state.
The Consequences and Reality of Interventionism
There are at least two major consequences of extensive state intervention. First, the power of the state expands in terms of its role and scale. Government officials develop increasing hubris about their ability to interfere with the economy and have the state play the role of savior. After handling a crisis, the government is wont to retain its expanded powers and functions.
Second, interventionism creates more reliance on the government. When the people encounter challenges, or when the free market cannot provide the benefits they desire, they will lobby in favor of more state intervention to satisfy their demands.
As the power of the state increases, private enterprise weakens, and the free market has less space in which to function. People who have benefited from and grown dependent on politicians will increasingly demand that the government take responsibility for allocating wealth and enact laws to enforce this.
In the West, there is a strong political current pushing society toward the Left. This includes followers of the original left wing, including socialist and communists, as well as those not traditionally associated with the left wing, but who have been co-opted by them. The convergence of these disparate forces encourages the government to take greater measures to intervene in the economy and interfere with the functioning of private enterprises. This erosion of normal economic activity appears to be caused by various social movements, but in fact, it is the specter of communism that pulls the strings.
It can be seen that Western governments wield their public authority under the banner of equality and other political excuses to increase intervention and are even enacting laws to make this the permanent state of affairs. There is no doubt that this behavior deprives market economies of their principal arbiters—the free will of the people. The state is essentially expanding its authority over the free market to turn it into a command economy. The long-term implications are that all aspects of the economy and popular livelihood will come under public control. Economic means will be used to consolidate political power, enslaving society and its citizens.
Using policy that looks benign on the surface, but progressively tilts the economic structure toward centralism, the specter is gradually leading humanity into full communism.
......
High taxes, high welfare, and widespread state intervention are manifestations of socialism within the Western capitalist system. Thus, socialism shares the same principal nature of planned economics, as both use the authority of the state to manipulate the economy. The underlying article of faith here is in the omnipotence of the government, which is allowed to play God.
As things stand, the only difference between heavy state interventionism in the West and the planned economies of communist countries is that in free countries, the law and some basic aspects of the capitalist system protect human rights from total government control.
Friedrich Hayek, the prominent Austrian economist and philosopher, cautioned against state-controlled planning and wealth redistribution, saying that it would inevitably tamper with the market and lead to the rise of totalitarianism, regardless of whether the system was democratic or not. Hayek believed that although the socialism practiced in Europe and North America was different from public ownership and planned economics, it would nevertheless come to the same result. People would lose their freedom and livelihood, just in a slower and more indirect fashion. [22]
As has been discussed earlier in this book, Marx, Engels, and Lenin all saw socialism as a mandatory step on the path to communism. A train’s movement toward its destination will not be affected by its stopping at a station platform along the way. Likewise, the specter of communism is the driving force behind a country that is moving toward socialism. Once humanity forsakes tradition, whether in the economic sphere or in other areas, and accepts communist ideology, the pace of development is irrelevant. Sooner or later the destination will be reached.
The destination at the end of this path is not heaven on earth, but the destruction of humanity. In fact, the devil is not concerned with whether “heaven” is realized or not, as it is merely a bait to lure people to their doom.
