(Minghui.org) Two books from journalists helped shape Western society’s opinions toward communism in the wrong way. One of them was Ten Days That Shook the World from John Reed in 1917, and the other was Red Star Over China from Edgar Snow in 1937.
Documents revealed Reed was one of the organizers of the Communist Party of the United States. He was also a participant of the October Revolution. His active support of communism was praised by Vladimir Lenin, who recommended Reed’s book: “Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages.” He was buried at Kremlin Wall Necropolis, a graveyard of elite pro-Bolshevik activists.
Snow, on the other hand, depicted Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party as a representation of a new, democratic system. It was not until 1989 that his wife Lois Wheeler realized the mistake. “It just woke me up,” she said in an interview. Since then, she has condemned the Tiananmen Square Massacre and criticized the CCP’s human rights violations. When she visited Beijing in 2000, police officers stopped her from meeting with an activist whose son had been killed in the massacre.
The United States was established on faith. As a beacon of hope for the world, the U.S. was referred to as “a city upon a hill.” “One Nation under God” is part of the Pledge of Allegiance, and “In God We Trust” is printed on U.S. banknotes. Therefore, the U.S. has played the role of a guardian of principles and social order instead of seizing power. This is similar to the concept of “following the heavenly law” in traditional Chinese culture.
The Great Depression in 1929 weakened the American economy. Meanwhile, journalists such as Walter Duranty sugarcoated the Soviet system, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Then president Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the New Deal in 1933 to expand various programs toward a big government like the planned economy in Soviet Union.
It was not until 1990 that New York Times admitted that the articles from Duranty, its Moscow bureau chief at the time, distorted the Great Famine in the Soviet Union and were “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” The influence of the New Deal, however, was deep and long-lasting.
“This was the crucial period in American history — the period in which Americans abandoned the principles of economic liberty on which our nation was founded. For it was during this time that the welfare-state, planned-economy way of life replaced the private-property, market-economy way of life which had existed up to that time,” wrote Jacob Hornberger, former law and economics professor and founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
In 1964, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson announced the War on Poverty as part of the Great Society. Its proposals, surprisingly, coincided well with those advocated by the New Program of the Communist Party USA that was published in 1966.
Destruction of Western society by communism was not just limited to the economy. In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution that lasted a decade, nearly wiping out all traditional values of Chinese culture. Across the ocean, hippies and counter-culture groups and thought dominated the U.S. They challenged authority and defied traditions while advocating drugs and sexual freedom.
Unable to launch a Chinese-style cultural revolution, some of these young people kept spreading socialist ideology, though under the guise of progressivism, as they graduated from colleges and graduate schools and went on to work in education, news media, politics, and business. This infiltration of socialism in American society is a non-violent revolution that has lasted decades. In the process, various forms of socialism and Marxism have popped up and kept propagating.
“The goal of socialism is communism,” declared Lenin in 1917. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concurred with his statement. Karl Marx also proposed six steps toward communism, with socialism being the fifth step.
But few people realized socialism and communism's corrupting influence and grave danger. Socialist thought had occupied major media outlets, universities, and Hollywood by the 1970s and 1980s. Despite its short-term setback under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the socialism movement regained its momentum in the 1990s, reaching its peak in recent years.
The divine rewards hard work, and you reap what you sow. These are traditional values that have inspired human civilizations for thousands of years. Through the lens of socialism, however, wealth should be evenly divided among people, unconditionally. With little exposure to the communism in the Soviet Union and Communist China, many young people in the U.S. advocate socialism and aim to steer our society in that direction.
In the past century, Western society has encountered numerous challenges, including two World Wars, terrorism from fascism, and brutality associated with communism. Even today when communism ideology ravages the globe, the U.S. is still one of a few countries with the least centralized power, and it is playing a major role of maintaining social order while safeguarding the free world.
Had American society been replaced with the egalitarianism of high taxation and high welfare, in conjunction with giving free reign to abortion and homosexuality that deviate from traditional values, where would the world be heading?
French prophet Nostradamus once predicted that Mars (Marx) would one day rule the world in the name of providing people with a better life. With this trend toward a welfare state, what would come next to the Western world is the same communism.
President Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.”
Many conservatives are worried about the future of the U.S. and the world. Under the disguise of socialism and liberalism, communism has gradually infiltrated America to the bone. Few people, including past U.S. presidents, dared to challenge the complexity or touch the line of political correctness.
All content published on this website is copyrighted by Minghui.org. Minghui will produce compilations of its online content regularly and on special occasions.
Category: News Commentary
