Our Second Civil War: Communism Collapsed Only to Revive - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Our Second Civil War: Communism Collapsed Only to Revive
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Civil War weaponry (YouTube screenshot)

Now for a few thoughts on the coming second civil war and why the first Fort Sumter shots may have already been fired.

Stupid us back in the late 1980s and in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved and we thought Marxism had finally been defeated. Marxist promises of an earthly paradise for workers had been thoroughly exposed as lies. Marxism gave the world the most bloody, brutal, murderous, and impoverished regimes the world had ever seen.

The polls so far show that the Democrats, a party extremely heavily influenced by Marxism and the doctrine of state control, is about to take control of the federal government.

Russia, which was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had turned into a vast killing ground. The repression of the Russian people under the Tsars was a picnic in a park compared with the immense murder state that the USSR became.

Stalin and Mao became history’s worst mass murderers, far surpassing the unimaginably cruel Adolf Hitler. Communism, which yielded only miserable poverty for the great mass of its captives, could only be sustained by endless terror wars against the citizens of the communist state, whether that was Russia or Ukraine or China or North Korea or Cambodia.

One of history’s greatest men, Mikhail Gorbachev, chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR, recognized the colossal failure of Communism in Russia (USSR) in 1988 and began dismantling the Soviet State. More than a dozen new countries were spun off as independent nations after the USSR ended. There was an attempt at a counter-coup in 1991, but it failed, and Russia continued to not be the USSR.

In recent years, Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, has turned Russia back into a murderous dictatorship, but it’s still party-hearty compared with the USSR in Stalin’s day.

Anyway, we in the USA thought that the clock had irrevocably turned past midnight and a new dawn for freedom was breaking out all over the world.

I, your humble servant, got to ask Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin (soon to be his successor) if communism would ever work anywhere. “It might have been best to try it in a small country at first,” or words to that effect, they answered me in a globally broadcast news conference.

But how wrong we were to be dancing a jig at the collapse of the USSR. First, of course, Red China, a far larger and far more dynamic state after Nixon’s visit there in 1972, remained a communist dictatorship. Yes, it had a large and extremely successful private sector, in which many Westerners, and even Taiwanese, invested heavily. But the political end was totally controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and still is.

But far more dangerous, the wicked appeal of Marxism, its powerful shout-out to the worst in human nature, namely, envy, was working its evil magic through the power elites of the West. The media in particular, always a haven for envious ink-stained wretches, came to be influenced, and then dominated, by sympathizers with communism.

In the academy, teachers, perpetually envious of men and women with more money and more glamour, appealed to the seemingly spiritually peerless appeal of a society of equality — even if that equality had to be enforced by theft and repression at gunpoint — and even if that “equality” were totally fictitious. (In the Marxist state, the luxurious lifestyle of the apparatchiks, the high party officials, set them dramatically apart from the masses for whom the state presumably existed.)

Despite the utter failure of communism, despite its unique cruelty, it still had admirers from all over the media and the academy. These taught their students and their readers and viewers the nauseatingly untrue dogma that free societies, especially free enterprise societies, were inherently racist and ridden with theft. Persons in high office who severely criticized communism and communists were smeared as warmongers and lunatics. (See, McCarthy, Joseph R.)

Now, 30 years after even the Communist Party of the USSR admitted to the world that socialism did not work, the most successful free society in history, the most successful nation in history under the banner of freedom, our own magnificent USA, is about to have an election. At stake are the presidency and the Congress. The polls so far show that the Democrats, a party extremely heavily influenced by Marxism and the doctrine of state control, is about to take control of the federal government.

Under the guise of fighting racism, a largely fictitious problem among white people, freedom of speech has already been abolished. Under the guise of fighting to protect the environment, much of the rights of private property — the bedrock of a free society — will be abolished.

The right of the citizens to own firearms, a right that dictatorships always have to abolish, will be attacked ruthlessly. In the end, only the criminals and the state will be armed.

But there is a deadly catch: the Left in this country is not unopposed. There are tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people who like the free society, just as it is. There are millions of people who are well armed and who do not like the idea and the reality of a federal government that will (in a Biden–Harris administration ) openly side with the rioters and the looters and the people who shoot police officers.

These people, like all people, do not like being pushed around. Black people do not like being pushed around. Hispanics don’t like being pushed around. What the media always forgets is that white people don’t like being pushed around either. The day will come, perhaps, when people will stop cowering when BLM marchers parade down their streets, setting everything nearby on fire. The day may come when police get sick of being the punching bag for liberals and certain ethnic trouble-makers.

This great country, which is the miracle story of humankind, runs because most people get along with other people. But there are limits to how much people can be pushed around. In some parts of the nation, like Seattle and Portland, those limits may have already been reached. I hope they never are in the greater society. But in 1850, no one thought the bloodiest conflict in the history of the Western hemisphere would start 11 years later because a government that claimed moral superiority, and threatened action on it, took office in Washington, D.C. I pray we never reach that stage again. But every day’s headlines tell me we are racing towards it. The awful truth that the leaders of the Democratic Party of 2020 refuse to condemn violence in the streets is, as the saying goes, “A fire alarm in the night.”

Ben Stein
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Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He writes “Ben Stein’s Diary” for every issue of The American Spectator.
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