Communism American Style; B. Moreell

Like most Americans, I began by hating Russian communism be cause it is an evil thing which wars against the best in human nature. Its followers invented a new code of morality which ele vates lying, murder, and treason From Admiral Moreell's acceptance speech for the Freedom Award of the Order of Lafayette, Washington, D. C., May 27, 1967. 558 into primary virtues, whenever these are thought to further their goals. They would deny our re ligion, trample on our political liberties, and put our economic activities in a strait jacket. They would stratify society into an elite of brutality riding herd on the rest of us. History shows that wherever communists achieve power they institute secret police, slave labor camps, and despotic control of every phase of human life. Recently, I undertook a study of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, to determine whether these evil practices are an integral part of their basic creed. That study led to two important discoveries: first, that the cruel methods and despotic practices of communism are essential to make their sys tem function; and second, that there is a remarkable parallel be1967 COMMUNISM-AMERICAN STYLE 559 tween the ten planks of the Mani festo and the things we have been doing to ourselves during the past half century! From my studies, I concluded that since Marx ex pounded his doctrine 119 years ago, we Americans have adopted, in some degree, every plank of his platform; and this process has accelerated markedly in recent decades!

Communism with a "made in Moscow" label is not popular in America. It doesn't need to be, if only we can be induced to ac cept Marxism under some other label. This we are now doing. Similar things have happened be fore as the great churchman, Dean lnge, warned us: History seems to show that the powers of evil have won their great est triumphs by capturing the or ganizations which were formed to de feat them, and that, when the devil has thus changed the contents of the bottles, he never alters the labels. The fort may have been cap tured by the enemy but it still flies the flag of its defenders. We Americans have been run ning away from the spirit and principles of our own Revolution in order to embrace an alien pro gram saturated with Marxism. We are under the delusion that there is some safe middle ground be tween the idea of freedom, on the one side, and communism on the other. But the danger of the "mid dle-of-the-road" position, as form er President Hoover once re marked to me, is that "you get hit by the traffic in both direc ti ons." If we are really opposed to Marxism, there is only one place to take a stand and that is with freedom, which makes no compro mise with communism, however it may be disguised!

The great political scientist, Wilhelm Roepke, architect of the economic renaissance of West Germany, stated: We should stand for a free eco nomic order even if it implied ma terial sacrifice and even if socialism gave the certain prospect of material increase. It is our undeserved luck that the exact opposite is true. More important, the free economic order is indispensable as the prerequisite of liberty, human dignity, free choice, and justice. That is why we want it, and no price would be too high for it, even if the communists would make bigger and better washing machines. A National Tragedy It is tragic that we Americans are so divided on this issue. Many of us have failed to weigh the philosopher's question, "If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves ?"

560 THE FREEMAN September We have casually surrendered liberty in the economic sphere, forgetting the old adage, "Whoso controls our subsistence controls us." "Economic control," said the economist Hayek, "is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is control of the means for all our ends." Slavery is commonly thought of as ownership of one man by another. But no slaveholder would quibble about owning the man if he can own the products of the man's labor. A slave is a person to whom economic freedom is de nied. From this premise, the de nial of all other freedoms follows. The total tax "take" by all levels of government is now in excess of 40 per cent of the national earned income! This is a valid measure of the erosion of our freedoms. If the increasing power of the centralized state does not frighten us, then we get our ulcers from some of its by-products: corrup tion in high places, the growing crime rate, juvenile delinquency, indifference to our time-tested spiritual, moral, and cultural val ues, oppressive taxation, and a succession of foreign crises from each of which America emerges bearing the onus of another "de feat by appeasement."

It is pertinent to recall the prophecy of the great English statesman, Macaulay, in 1857. Ad dressing himself to America, he said: Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twen tieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth-with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who rav aged the Roman Empire came from without, while your Huns and Van dals will have been engendered with in your own country and by your own institutions. Recovery 01 Moral Values Is there a way ahead which will take us out of this morass? Is there a way to recover the sanity and balance which once marked our life? I believe there is. But it is not by means of political legerdemain. It has been pointed out by Dr. Ralph Hutchison, form er President of Lafayette College: Our common ideal is that these laws of God, these rights of man, these responsibilities of the individual to the social order should be preached and taught, but not otherwise forced upon the minds and consciences of the human race. "Go ye into all the world and teach all nations," was the last command of the Master. To force men into ways of righteousness by police powers, to legislate them into social progress by laws, to brain1967 COMMUNISM-AMERICAN STYLE 561 wash them from their evil ways, to torture men to the confessional, to hypnotize the social order with mass psychiatry, to terrorize them into discipline, was never the Creed of ~piritu.a.\ A-rner"i.ca. Education b-y con viction has been our ideal. The teach ing, persuading mission, we believe, is the way of social reform.

I do not imply that there are no problems peculiar to the eco nomic and political levels. But if men are not right at the deeper level, in their understanding of the nature of the Universe and man's position therein, they can tinker with economic and political problems from now until dooms day and still come up with the wrong answers. It is a case of putting first things first, and the very first thing is a rehabilitation of those spiritual values which are basic to the American dream. "The God who gave us life," Jefferson observed, "gave us lib erty at the same time." We cannot defeat the forces of evil if we feel compelled to adopt their practices even though this be done gradually, in increments too small to arouse suspicion. The final battle will be fought in the arena of spiritual realities. The forces of self-disciplined, morally responsible individualism will be arrayed against those of atheistic, coercive collectivism. It is my prayer that, in this Arma geddon, Americans will be found fighting on the side of a just and merciful God. ~ Human Resources BUREAUCRATS speak of developing "human resources" as if the abilities of human beings were the property of the state. The state, however, is the creature of human beings and exists for the convenience of man, not man for the state. Rather, man is the creature for which everything else is a resource. As the Scripture says, "Thou hast put all things under his feet .... " (Psalm 8:6) JAMES C. PATRICK Decatur, Illinois THE FRUIT OF COMMUNISM: S~o CIALiS TIC REDISTRIBUTIO FRANCIS E. MAHAFFY THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION is spreading apace over Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East, and even our own land. This has stimulated effective oratory and well-documented books aimed at alerting our citizenry to the god lessness of the philosophy and the bloodiness of the revolution at the core of communism.