The communist fantasies of Western intellectuals

Communism and Western Intellectuals

by Michael Bauman

When debating communism, I often encounter those who do not know exactly what it is. My answer is the one known by millions and millions: arrest, purge, gulag, and death. That’s communism.

But the knowledge of communism gained by those who live under it (that is, those whom communism has not murdered) is vastly different from the communist fantasies of Western intellectuals. While millions under communism’s icy hand starve and die, Western intellectuals tout it as a laudable alternative to the system under which they now exist and flourish -- as if Lenin, Stalin, and all who follow in their train did not hate intellectuals; as if nothing horrible ever happened to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- whom Western intellectuals despise as often as do their communist idols.


Intellectuals are not valued by communism even though some intellectuals ridiculously and inexplicably value it. “Intellectuals,” Lenin said in a letter to Maxim Gorky, are not the nation’s brains, “They’re its shit.” For that reason, Lenin drew up lists of intellectuals who were suitable only for deportation, internal exile, or death. To lose them, Lenin deduced, was to lose almost nothing at all. Despite all their boot-licking toadyism, the intellectuals fared no better under communism than the kulaks and the Cossacks, who perished for no better reason than that they simply fell afoul of the sinister policy called “death by quota.” Communism dealt death so often that one of Stalin’s most stunning and disgusting achievements might be called “the necropolis,” or city of death, meaning mass graves for 100,000 to 200,000 persons all at once. As Stalin himself said on so many occasions: “Death solves all problems.”

Intellectuals are not held in high esteem by communism because communism knows that, by and large, intellectuals are what Lenin called “useful idiots.” Those “idiots” are “useful” because they seem never to notice that communism everywhere and always must be a conspiracy to violence.
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