True Communism has never been properly implemented
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 it was apparent to just about everyone that communism had failed. It simply was not viable as an economic system. In the 1970s and even into the 1980s the Soviet Union appeared to be ascendant. By 1980 it had a population nearly 20% larger than the United States, and when China and a few other nations are added to the total, about a third of the world lived under communism. Western academia and the media had spent over a half century covering up the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and mostly ignoring the USSR’s collusion with Nazi Germany, gulag archipelagos, and brutal conditions for ordinary citizens. As early as 1921 US Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover was criticized for his famine relief efforts in the Soviet Union by people who supported the new Bolshevik regime. Thousands of americans, englishmen, and frenchmen volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, mostly on the republican side (one of those men was George Orwell). The Soviet Union supported the Spanish Republicans fight against General Franco even though they later formed an alliance with his ally German Chancellor Adolph Hitler. The Soviet Union also worked in the 1920s to help train German pilots even though they were banned from having an Air Force by the Versailles Treaty. After Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 the US and UK supported Stalin without reservation and even after the war worked together to carve up Europe. The October Revolution of 1917 would not have been possible had the Germans not smuggled Lenin into the country. By the 1970s many western academics were saying that the US would “be red or be dead” and applauded Nixon’s detente with China. The Media and Academia mocked Reagan’s We Win, they lose Cold War strategy and demanded that the US negotiate with the Soviet Union. Many wanted the US to emulate the Soviet Union's economic system. In the meantime the average Soviet Citizen spent two hours a day waiting in line for basic necessities. Soviet citizens lived seven years less than americans and had a standard of living less than half of what americans had. The Soviet economy did not reward hard work and innovation, and thus produced very little of it. Despite a head start the Soviet Union lost the space race miserably. Between 1969 and 1972 the US had six lunar landings an 12 americans walked on the moon. The Soviets never came close. The US played a pivotal role in the technological advances of aviation, telecommunications, agriculture, and the internet, while the Soviets only excelled in making pale imitations. By the late 1980s it was clear that the Soviet Union was going to break apart and by December 1991 the USSR had entered the history books.
The common refrain from economists, philosophers, pundits, politicians, and historians was that communism just didn’t work. The obvious failure of communism lead to a new global economic consensus, neoliberalism. Tax rates fell, borders were open, trade increased, and the stock market soared. In even the most left wing colleges students today learn that communism didn’t work. But what few people learn is that communism is evil. Nobody ever says that Nazism, Fascism, or slavery just doesn’t work. People acknowledge the slavery is evil, and a slave based economy is evil no matter how much GDP growth is produced. As a result the lesson most westerners have learned in regards to communism is that it didn’t achieve its objectives or it wasn’t implemented properly. Few people realize that communism objectives of a godless, totalitarian, and centrally controlled society are themselves evil.
Today’s schoolchildren learn very little about the Soviet Union and how it operated. Many mistakenly believe that the modern country of Russia is more or less a continuation of the Soviet Union. It’s absolutely not, while Russia might be an authoritarian state, it is in no way communist. Four decades ago Ireland was a Roman Catholic Theocracy and the Soviet Union was an explicitly atheist country that persecuted Christians, as well as Muslims and Jews. Today Ireland is a country that voted overwhelmingly to legalize gay marriage and abortion while Russia is far more Christian than most of Western and Central Europe. What has been lost in all of this is the hunt for the USSR’s true ideological successor.
The most obvious answer to this question would be the People’s Republic of China. Even though China had a brief border war with the Soviet Union in 1969, the country today is governed by the Chinese Communist Party. One must be a member of the party to have any real power. Both countries had extensive surveillance states, imprisoned or killed anyone who spoke out against the regime, persecuted all religions, and try to spread their influence throughout the world. The Chinese flag is even modelled off of the Soviet Flag.
But China also has a lot of differences with the old Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s economy was stagnant, while the Chinese economy has grown 50-fold adjusted for inflation since 1968. The Soviet Union was extremely aggressive militarily going so far as to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off of our shores. The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev screamed that “we will bury you” at the United Nations. American school children practiced hiding under their desks in case the Soviets tried to annihilate us. Instead of sending nuclear missiles, the Chinese send us over a half trillion worth of goods a year and cute social media apps like Tik Tok. Chinese President Xi Xianping has been to the US and has taken pictures with Congressional leaders and even President Trump. No Soviet leader ever set foot on US soil.
Let’s first look at the Chinese economy. It is obviously a state run centrally planned economy just like the Soviet Union, Venezuela, and Cuba. Yet it is undeniable that China has gone from being one of the poorest countries in the world to a middle income country. Because China has a population four times greater than the US it may soon surpass our economy. In recent years the US has struggled to achieve 3% GDP growth while China frequently hits double digit annual growth. This appears to be a conundrum, how can a communist country be so economically viable, when everybody learns in college that communism doesn’t work?
The Soviets lost the Cold War and the Chinese learned from the Soviets mistakes, while the US took away the wrong lessons. One of the biggest issues the Soviets had was that their economy did not incentivize and produce innovation. The Chinese have a solution to this predicament; they don’t need to produce innovation, they can just steal it. The Chinese steal over $300 billion worth of trademarks, copyright, patents, technologies, and business practices from the United States. The employ a vast army of spies in Congressional Offices, the defence establishment, and most importantly our Universities. This solves a major problem that plagued the Soviet economy.
Because the Soviet economy was so much smaller than the US economy when Reagan ramped up defence spending tin the 1980s the soviets couldn’t compete. This is the equivalent of raising the stakes at a poker game until all the other players are forced to fold. The Soviets also launched an ill fated invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that lasted a decade and cost them billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and zapped their morale. China, despite also sharing a border with Afghanistan, did not launch a fruitless invasion of that mountainous forsaken wasteland. Unfortunately the US has been at war with Afghani terrorists for not one but now two decades, at a cost of over 2,400 lives, over $1 trillion, and serious damage to US morale. The US now spends over $1 trillion on a national security apparatus with bases in South Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, and 130 other countries. Despite having an economy almost big as ours, the Chinese spend in between a quarter and a third as much as we do on their military. They don’t even have troops in taiwan which they claim is part of China, much less dozens of other countries. That’s not because China doesn’t dream of global domination, but because they have figured out a better way to do it.
Trade between the US and Soviet Union peaked at $15 billion (adjusted for inflation) win 1979. The US even ran a trade surplus with the Soviet Union. Today America imports over $500 billion a year from the Chinese and exports less than $150 billion. America’s industrial base has been hollowed out and 17 factories a day were closed in the first decade and a half of the new millennium. Millions of american jobs have effectively been shipped overseas and booming factory towns across the rust belt have been devastated by opiates such as Fentanyl, 90% of which comes from Fentanyl. Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, but now that america is more secular than ever, million of young people are turning to actual opium. China knows a thing or two about the devastating effects opium has. In the 19th century British and American businessmen, including Franklin Roosevelt’s grandfather, made millions by smuggling Opium into China. Millions of Chinese became addicted to smoking opium and the Chinese government demanded the British stop this trade. This led to the Opium Wars in which the British prevailed, gained most favoured nation status, and received $21 million from China.
The Chinese also exploit slave labor far more effectively than the Soviets ever did. The Chinese looked at the 20th century and understood that human history is primarily a conflict between different ethnic groups and opposed to a class struggle like Marx believed. 92% of China is Han Chinese and the country has very limited immigration. The Chinese have enslaved their Uyghur minority to make shoes and computers. They even conduct medical experiments on the Uyghurs and steal their organs. Sadly the Chinese may have learned this method of enslavement from the west. Slavery existed for all of human history but the transatlantic slave trade racialized it and the Whitney cotton gin made it super profitable. Before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793 slaves in the United States mostly grew tobacco, did manual labor, or worked around the house. Slaves were an important part of the economy, but cotton made them essential. The US economy boomed in the 19th century on the backs of slave labor and foreigners in France and the UK who bought the cotton even if they opposed slavery. Today China uses slave labor, cheap labor, and a lack of environmental laws to undercut workers in high wage countries such as the US and Europe. American workers simply cannot compete with workers who make $2 an hour.
Another lesson China learned from the West is germ theory. When European first made contact with native americans in the 15th and 16th century they unknowingly brought diseases with them that the natives had no immunity to. Despite a few stories about smallpox infested blankets, the vast majority of germs were spread unintentionally. Nevertheless the native population in the americas plummeted from around 50–100 million to less than 10 million. In 2002 SARS-1 originated in China and spread worldwide. The Chinese government lied about it and tried to cover it up. Fortunately less than 1,000 people died globally and none in the United States. The disease had a fatality rate of 36% but it wasn’t very transmissible. In late 2019 a similar disease started killing people in Wuhan, China. China tried to censor anyone who talked about the outbreak, lied to the WHO saying there was no human to human transmission, and repeatedly downplayed the threat. Meanwhile the Chinese government locked down Wuhan, shutting down all domestic travel in or out of the city. People were locked in their apartments and died, yet the airport remained open for international flights. After reporting 3,000 deaths and kicking out all foreign journalists the Chinese declared the virus over and reopened Wuhan. By Spring of 2020 China was back to normal and the wet market where this allegedly started is operating as normal. The Wuhan Institute for Virology is also still open. By March 2020 most rest of the developed world was in a state of lockdown and by the end of 2020 over 340,000 Americans, 74,000 British, 74,000 Italians, 64,000 Frenchmen, 55,000 Iranians and 50,000 Spaniards, and 1.8 million worldwide were dead. Interestingly the Pacific Rim countries were among the least effected. While China’s numbers can’t be trusted, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam all have death tolls far lower the North America, South America, and Europe. One possible explanation is that this part of the world has some level of immunity to this particular virus. It’s the most likely explanation considering threat these countries have all had much less severe lockdowns than the United States and Europe have had. The virus has also devastated the US economically as millions of businesses have been forced to close and the imports from China have surged. Tens of millions of americans are stuck in their homes, ordering products online from Amazon that were made in China, celebrating Thanksgiving on Chinese linked Zoom, and sharing videos on Chinese owned TikTok.
During the Cold War both democrats and republicans were anti-communist. Most americans recognized the Soviet Union as our enemy. Nobody was rushing to do business with them, and it would have been unthinkable for a Congressmen to sleep with a Soviet spy and remain on the intel committee. China has been very effective at exploiting identity politics. Prior to 2020 it was common place for diseases to named after where they originated, but Senator Harris, now Vice-President Elect, introduced a resolution to condemn anyone calling COVID-19 the Wuhan Virus as racist. Indeed any criticism of the Chinese government could be called racist by our race obsessed media. Many americans hated Trump so much that they were opposed to the Trade War with China even though for decades democrats were opposed to outsourcing american jobs. The NBA will kneel for the american anthem but bend over for China.
In 1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II, becoming the first non-Italian Pope in over 400 years. The following year Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the year after that Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. The three all understood the threat of communism and worked together to defeat the Soviet Union and free it’s citizens from tyranny. Four decades later and the state of affairs is much bleeker. Recently the Vatican made a deal with the Chinese government and a high ranking Bishop said “at this moment, those who best realize the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese." The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was afflicted with the coronavirus and has been preoccupied by the crisis to meaningfully address China. The incoming US President Joe Biden’s son has extensive business dealing with the Chinese that the US media tried to suppress. The lesson we should have learned from the Cold War is that communism is evil. Sometimes evil is effective, we don’t tell children that lying, stealing, and murder is ineffective. We tell them that it is wrong and that there will be severe consequences inflicted on them if they engage in it. Communism is not just an economic system, it’s a way of life, ultimately a religion. That’s why communism must replace all other religions. China is much weaker than the Soviet Union was at it’s peak but unfortunately so are we. China is extremely dependent on us importing their goods and letting them steal our secrets.
The Soviet Union didn’t simply collapse, it was overthrown by its own citizens. with some outside pressure. The citizens of the Soviet Union, like those of China today, were it’s biggest victims. We owe it to the 1.4 billion people living in China to defeat 21st century communism. We can’t just wait until it fails, because communism doesn’t always fail.
