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Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America are claiming surges in interest and membership since the 2016 election and the inauguration of Donald Trump.

To be sure, these claims are according to their self-reporting for what thats worth though these comrades havent made such boasts in a long time. We can take it with a grain of salt. But either way, these are strong claims, and theyre being used to generate still further recruits. Its worthwhile to at least consider what these folks are up to.

Communist Party USA contends that more than 600 people have joined the party in the last two months of 2016, beyond the 5,000 who (were told) joined over the past few years. This is according to CPUSA social media coordinator Joe Sims in an article posted at the partys official website.

Folks want to fight Trump, explains Sims.

But thats not the only reason.

Sims says that communist and progressive groups are seeing their largest upticks in membership since the collapse of the USSR the country to which American Communist Party members so long devoted themselves.

I pledge myself to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious socialism, vowed American communists who joined the party in its heyday some 100,000 members in the 1930s. I pledge myself to remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.

Lincoln Steffens, the popular journalist for The New Republic, famously stated, I am a patriot for Russia; the Future is there. Agreeing with Steffens was poet Langston Hughes, who stated: Put one more S in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA. The American Communist Party general secretary at the time, William Z. Foster, openly advocated a Soviet American Republic as part of a world Soviet Union.

That was the 1930s, when Joseph Stalin ran the Soviet Union a deadly empire, an evil empire that would slaughter tens of millions.

Of course, modern Americans, miseducated as theyve been in our monolithically leftist universities, have learned none of this. To them, communism, like socialism, is as an ideology that believes in sharing and helping ones fellow man.

Indeed, Sims believes that the long wretched history of communist affiliation with Soviet rule is no longer an obstacle to new recruits. Younger people dont carry that baggage, he said.

The baggage thats the memory of millions of lives lost under communist rule.

While the 2016 election revealed that many Millennials have a love affair with Bernie Sanders-style socialism, a recent study by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) found that only 37 percent of Millennials have a very unfavorable view of communism, notably less than preceding generations that experienced the Cold War firsthand. And a shockingly high number believe that George W. Bush killed more people than did Joe Stalin (yes, seriously).

They blissfully call themselves democratic socialists, not even realizing that Lenin, Trotsky, Herbert Marcuse, and countless communists called themselves democratic socialists.

That brings us to the Democratic Socialists of America. Like its commie cohorts, the DSA is also claiming a surge in the wake of Donald Trumps ascendency, as nearly 1,600 new dues-paying online members joined in the six days following the November election an immediate 18% increase in membership, according to DSA deputy director David Duhalde. The organization reports 8,000-plus active members, of which 2,500 have joined since the beginning of Bernies DSA-backed presidential campaign in 2015.

The DSA is more ready than ever to welcome our new comrades, writes Duhalde. In this era of political tension and opportunity, this country needs a socialist vision that mobilizes both grassroots activism and intellectual discourse required to make sustainable economic and social progress.

According to the DSAs Ben Dalton, a Trump bump has motivated thousands to join progressive organizations across the country. CPUSA has placed itself at the center of a loosely affiliated coalition of left-wing organizations calling itself the resistance (sometimes with a capital R). That is, the Trump Resistance.

While disparate in purpose, these organizations are united in opposing the alt-right, fascist, and white supremacist agenda of the Trump administration, with a full-throated emphasis on protecting the supposed jeopardized rights of a long litany of various victim classes, which now prominently includes not just women and African-Americans, but Muslims, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. (Actually, CPUSA has been using the term LGBTQIA community the more victims, the better.)

A new kind of right-wing and authoritarian danger has emerged, one that if unchecked threatens basic democracy, asserts recent CPUSA general secretary John Bachtell. Tens of thousands will die as a direct result of the cruel and ruthless Trump and GOP congressional policies.

Its a rather laughably hollow appeal coming from the head of a political party that for over 70 years carried water for Lenin and Stalin and their mass-murdering minions.

In essence, the resistances inaugural event was the parade of perversity known as the Womens March on January 21, which attracted big numbers to the nations capital and other major cities. Joining the DSA and CPUSA at the March were kindred spirits such as the National Education Association, the National Organization for Women, AFSCME, Planned Parenthood, the NAACP, the Council on American Islamic Relations, Amnesty International, People for the American Way, Code Pink, and oddities ranging from the classy Pussy Hat Project to the Georgetown University College Democrats.

Like the larger resistance movement, the Womens March aimed to capture the entirety of the political left. As one old-time CPUSA activist, Joelle Fishman, explained, the Marchs unity principles interconnect womens rights with human rights with civil rights with union rights with immigrant rights with LGBTQ rights with environmental justice. (Note the forever-expanding list of rights for the left.)

Fishman also emphasized that African American History Month, International Womens Day, May Day, and the Peoples Climate Mobilization all CPUSA-sponsored or touted events will continue to seek to unite various sections of The Resistance. Through these events, in large cities and (they hope) rural towns, the movement is organizing nationwide to resist the Trump administration and lay the groundwork for a major victory in the 2018 midterm elections.

The comrades are focusing on insurgent, grassroots-level tactics and civil disobedience in their fledgling resistance movement. Not surprisingly, many of their anti-Trump demonstrations have turned violent. Communist agitprop strategies are core to the resistance movement, as evident in the so-called Resistance Calendar of upcoming progressive events, which encourages current revolutionaries to Organize. Resist. Repeat. It smacks of an old Marxist maxim: agitate, agitate, agitate.

This was captured well by aging comrade Angela Davis. The infamous female Marxist revolutionary and honorary co-chair of the Womens March declared that the January March was merely the beginning: the next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance: resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music.

And so it goes. Communists, socialists, and progressives, unite!

They are rallying against the nefarious, snarling image of Donald Trump. They are looking to raise some serious discord in the next four years, and some membership rolls.

Its apparently an exciting time to be a commie again.

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His forthcoming book is A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century (May 2017). Joshua Delk has been writer for a number of publications, including The Daily Caller.

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Communists and Socialists Rally Under 'Trump Resistance' - American Spectator

Published: March 30, 2017

Daniel Hannan is an MEP for South-East England, and a journalist, author and broadcaster. His most recent book is What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit.

In 1917, Lenins Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd. Actually, stormed is the wrong word. Despite later portrayals by Soviet iconographers, the beginning of the revolution was banal and tawdry. The Provisional Government, led by a social-democratic lawyer called Alexander Kerensky, was in no position to put up a fight. Kerensky himself had fled the city in a car borrowed from the American legation, leaving a few ministers behind at the deposed Tsars former residence.

Bolshevik militiamen entered the Winter Palace through an unlocked back door and wandered around the cavernous interior until they found the remnants of the Provisional Government in a kitchen. Being illiterate, they forced Kerenskys ministers at gunpoint to write out their own arrest warrants. A secretary described what happened next:

The Palace was pillaged and devastated from top to bottom by the Bolshevik armed mob, as though by a horde of barbarians. All State papers were destroyed. Priceless pictures were ripped from their frames by bayonets. Several hundred carefully packed boxes of rare plate and china, which Kerensky had exerted himself to preserve, were broken open and the contents smashed or carried off. Desks, pictures, ornaments everything was destroyed. I will refrain from describing the hideous scenes which took place in the wine-cellars.

The revolution, in other words, began as it was to continue: with looting. It wasnt long, though, before the looting turned to bloodshed bloodshed on an unimaginable, oceanic scale.

Nothing had prepared humanity for so much slaughter. Perhaps ten million indigenous Americans were killed by European pathogens after Columbus. A similar number of people died in the Atlantic slave trade. The Nazis killed 17 million. The Communists killed 100 million some shot after show trials, some tortured to death, some starved to enforce collectivisation.

How are we to explain murder on such a scale? Lets ask Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the anti-Communists who was lucky enough to die in exile:

Macbeths self-justifications were feeble and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeares evil-doers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

To mark this years centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE) is holding a conference on 7th-9th April, bringing together some of Europes foremost historians, politicians and Cold War veterans. Well be meeting in Tirana and, if youd like to see what Marxism did to Albania, you can join us by registering at http://www.thelibertysummit.org.

Is it truly necessary, a full generation after 1989, to go through these arguments again? After all, the Berlin Wall has now been down for longer than it was up. Are we conservatives conjuring a phantom foe from the past, a sort of reverse Goldstein?

There are two answers. First, as the poet says, the evil that men do lives after them. The Communists took over or banned every voluntary association, emptying the civil space that used to exist between state and citizen. When the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party seized power in 1948, for example, Janos Kdar, as Minister of Home Affairs, abolished over 5,000 independent associations: churches, charities, chess clubs, Boy Scout troops, village bands.

After such vandalism, it was hard to rebuild. A whole generation had been brought up to disbelieve, distrust and dissemble. An ideology that simultaneously atomised and subjugated had drained its subject territories of social capital. Sir Roger Scruton aptly describes this as the great sin that lay at the heart of the Communist system the sin of isolating individuals from their fellows, and then turning the spotlight of interrogation on them so as to watch them squirm.

Yet and this brings us to the second answer people keep falling for Marx. A third of American millennials, according to YouGov, think that George W Bush murdered more people than Stalin did. A fifth would cheerfully vote for a Communist candidate. How often we see some moral idiot wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt. We should react as we would to someone wearing an Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden tee-shirt; but, in general, we dont.

Is it that young people are gullible? Do they insist on seeing the defining ethic of Communism as fairness rather than force? Do they cling to the idea that there is some idealised form of Marxism, one without secret police or shortages, just waiting to be tried?

Or is it the opposite? Is it precisely the pitilessness, the purity, the inhumanity, that attracts them? In every age and nation, some people often young men are drawn to ideologies that promise a completely new way of life, ideologies that make no concession to human frailties, nor to past practice. In this regard, at any rate, the appeal of Communism is not so different from the appeal of Daesh.

Perhaps a form of nihilism is innate in a portion of humanity. To some people, every tradition is a superstition, every authority figure an oppressor, every transaction a swindle. We may not be able to shake these people from their prejudices; but we can at least confront them with where those prejudices lead, namely to gulags.

There are always ideologues who say theyd be happy to break a few eggs in order to make an omelette. These ideologues need to be refuted with the observable data of the last hundred years. Setting aside the vast fact that human beings are not eggs, there has not been a single case of an omelette actually emerging. Communism leaves us with empty eggshells and empty bellies. Every time. This story shall the good man teach his son.

ACRE Albania Alexander Solzhenitskyn Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists Communism Hungary Karl Marx Lenin Marxism Russia Soviet Union

22 comments for: Daniel Hannan: A century since the Communists began their mass slaughter, some still have not learned the lessons

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Daniel Hannan: A century since the Communists began their mass slaughter, some still have not learned the lessons - Conservative Home

NARELLE HENSON

Last updated12:00, March 31 2017

GETTY IMAGES

A statue of Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in Wuensdorf, Germany.

OPINION: Let's meander through the Museum of Marxism today. It's a good time to do it, because the oldest exhibit is 100 this year.

It's just there on the left, in fact where you see Lenin's Bolshevik uprising in 1917. That was where the little child conceived by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first entered the world, and was christened "communism". This baby idea that would soon storm the world is decorated in red flags. Red for the blood of the tens of millions whose lives it demanded in the name of equality, freedom and true justice.

In the Soviet Union alone, as you can see, the bones of 20 million people are piled under communism's smiling face. Those bones were earned through war, through the purging of those with different ideas, or through starvation induced by property and industry reforms. Academics argue over the body count. Communism didn't care enough to chronicle the names of the workers it murdered while claiming to rescue them.

At our next exhibit you can see the hammer and the sickle in the hands of Mao Zedong. He too stands atop a pile of bones taken from 65 million people. With the hammer he destroyed thousands of years of "bourgeois" culture, with the sickle he culled comrades in ways so cruel, and in numbers so great, it would make a normal human cry to think about. And still, communism didn't care to record their names.

Communism also made a move into Cambodia and his lust for blood was still not satisfied. As he had everywhere he went, he killed dissidents, intellectuals, those from different ethnic or political groups and he killed the religious. He claimed around 2 million lives through disease, starvation and torture, out of 8 million people.

In the other exhibits, of course, we find communism calling workers of the world to unite. And they do unite, in every one of the scores of countries in which he is or was present. Under the guise of redistributed wealth he unites them in poverty. Under the guise of equality communism unites workers in some of the most unequal nations. Under the guise of justice, communism unites them as victims of terrible human rights abuses. Under the guise of freedom he unites them in an intellectual and political prison. His hollow-eyed citizens don't even have the energy to laugh any more at the words "equality, freedom and true justice".

There are five nations where the dying man still maintains a firm grip: China, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam and Cuba. Perhaps they are the five points of the communist star, but none shines as a model for freedom or equality.

We have reached the end of our tour for today, and just outside the back door (for they refuse to come in) you will find intellectuals even in New Zealand telling you that old man communism is yet "untested" and may still work under the right conditions. They have never lived in communist states, nor have their families. You will know them by the hammer and sickle on their hats, or the red star on their shirts symbols that, on body count alone, are 10 times more offensive than the swastika.

These intellectuals will say Marx was right, it is just his followers that got it wrong. Ask them how many more they are willing to sacrifice to find out if this is true, and how much more time we will need.

Because, as the Little Black Book of Communism says, the body count is almost at 100 million, making Marx and Engels' ideas the most deadly ever conceived in human history once they were put into action.

Surely it is time to put communism in the museum forever.

-Stuff

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Narelle Henson: 100 years of communist history enough - Waikato Times

Entering East Berlin in 1989, the air was dark and suffused with smog. Unlike the west, the Communist east had no environmental controls not on factories nor on the tinny Trabant cars that put out toxic emissions.

The news of Donald Trump dismantling environmental protections got me remembering that cold day in 1989 when I crossed from free West Berlin to the Communist east.

And saw an unexpected contrast.

The air.

The west was clean and bright, the east darker and suffused with smog.

You wouldnt think it possible for pollution to blanket just half of a city, but that was Berlin.Because of policy.

Unlike the west, the Communist east had no environmental controls not on factories nor on the tinny Trabant cars that put out toxic emissions.

I had rushed to Berlin in November of 1989 when the first reports came of the wall opening a literal crack in the iron curtain of Communism.

It wasn't wide open yet East Germans had been allowed to visit the west a few times, but soldiers with gunspatrolled the top of the wall. And it was an ordeal for westerners to go east.

I finally got papers and transited through four sets of guards at Checkpoint Charlie. It was like going back to 1949, buildingsstill scarred with World War II damage. Signs of Communism's economic failure were everywhere, with long lines at stores and gas stations.

And then there was the polluted air.

Id have thought the west side, with its traffic and skyscrapers, would have been more polluted. But in a democracy, the people have a voice and demand livability.

By contrast, the Communist leaders were totalitarians who tossed aside bothersome environmental standards in a single-minded push for growth.

The impact went beyond smog in East Berlin. Six months after the wall fell, The New York Times reported that Eastern Europe's environment was "ravaged."

"Corrosive soot," theTimes said, "has fouled water and soil, and in blackened industrial cities the air is laced with heavy metals and chemicals. In a world ruled by production targets, there was no pressure to clean up."

Things were similar across much of the Soviet bloc, so bad that it was a big driver of the historic 1989 protests that swept away Communism itself.

I remember that as I planned my trip, I searched for names of the first groups challenging power and one of them was in Bulgaria, and based on the word glasnost, for freedom.The group called itself Eco-Glasnost because what first drove people there to rise up was the ruined environment.

I don't doubt that President Trump thinks his rollback of environmental regulations and carbon standards will help create jobs. And who here doesnt celebrate the way Americas free-market capitalism has been one of historys greatest economic engines?

But one reason for its success is balance.

If pollution had been left uncontrolled in West Germany, would it have been as prosperous?

That day in 1989 showed me clearly that successful economies factor in livability.

And that prosperity comes not just from prioritizing jobs, but theenvironment, too.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7370

On Twitter: @MarkPatinkin

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Mark Patinkin: Communist East Berlin showed that Trump's environmental rollback comes with a price - The Providence Journal

With all that has happened over the past few days, its incredible to suggest that despite the threat to Treasury there is still a much wider and deeper problem. There are few with the insight that the Institute of Race Relations Anthea Jeffery holds, and what she unpacks in the piece below is most likely the final piece in the ANCs jigsaw puzzle. And the key to her summation goes back to the 1950s when she says the ANC was in effect captured by the SACP, which also highlights why President Jacob Zuma went to them firstwith the news he wants to fire Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. Jeffery says the end goal is to ultimately create a Communist state, and its all being achieved under the auspices of the National Democratic Revolution. Another brilliant piece of analysis. Stuart Lowman

UPDATE:Cape Messenger editor Donwald Pressly asked Jeffery how SACP deputy secretary general Solly Mapailas press conference on Thursday fitted in with her analysis. He appeared to signal SACP unhappiness with the axing of Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas. Also the SACP also has a special meeting in April to decide on the road forward with the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance

This is what Dr Jeffery had to say:I think this is just a minor blip.The SACP put Zuma into the ANC presidency in 2007 to help advance the NDR, but now they are concerned that his obvious flaws and close ties to the Guptas are so reducing support for the ANC that the horse theyve successfully ridden into power for two decades might now not win.Hence, theyd like to hold him in check, so as not to turn the electorate still more against the ANC.If they think the ANC has become too hopelessly tarnished, they might perhaps want to distance themselves from the party and they might even seriously consider standing for election in their own right.

But in the end the ANC brand that theyve so assiduously built up for so long is too important for them to jettison, especially as their own electoral support would be very limited. Plus the ANCs growing emphasis on radical economic transformation is exactly what they want. So I expect theyll remain in close alliance with the ANC, no matter how much they might criticise Zuma now (effectively, for weakening the brand). Their key aim will be to influence the succession in favour of someone who can help ensure an ANC victory in 2019 (if necessary, with the help of a deal with the EFF) and who will then continue moving towards the socialist/communist end goal without evoking the public anger that Zuma has unleashed.

By Anthea Jeffery*

President Jacob Zumas peremptoryrecall of finance minister Pravin Gordhan from an investment roadshow in London shows how little Mr Zuma cares about the economy or the plight of the poor.

The president is clearly reckless as to how much his vendetta against Mr Gordhan undermines the countrys growth prospects, pushes up the costs of servicing R2.2 trillion in public debt, or brings closer a ratings downgrade to junk status.

Yet South Africas growth prospects are already very poor. As Africa Confidential reports, South Africa is one of the slowest growing states on the African continent, with a projected growth rate in 2017 of 1.1% of GDP. This is far below the growth rates projected for Ethiopia (8.9%), Cote dIvoire (8.0%), Ghana (7.5%), Tanzania (7.1%), Senegal (6.8%), and Rwanda (6.0%).

Most South Africans are of course rational beings who find it difficult to believe that the government could deliberately undermine the economy and hurt the poor and disadvantaged. Mr Zumas recent conduct shows that his faction of the ANC, at least, has no such concerns.

If the president can act so recklessly against Mr Gordhan at so critical a moment for foreign investor confidence, then expropriation without compensation whether supposedly within the Constitution as now written, or following a constitutional amendment cannot be ruled out.

However, the real problem is much wider and deeper than what Mr Zuma has done this week. Ever since it was captured by the SACP in the 1950s, the ANC has effectively been the junior partner in an alliance aimed at the gradual crippling of the capitalist economy in pursuit of a socialist and then communist order. This is being achieved under the rubric of the national democratic revolution (NDR), to which the ANC plans to recommit itself in December this year and which the SACP openly describes as offering the most direct path to communism.

The ANC has long downplayed this objective, for it knows that any open acknowledgement of this goal would greatly weaken its popular support. Most South Africans have no wish to adopt the flawed ideology and centralised controls that so signally failed in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Rather, they want to retain the political and economic freedoms that the ending of apartheid ushered in.

To disguise their real goals, the ANC and its communist allies have long been masters of propaganda: the constant repetition of a narrative which includes key elements of truth that give it credibility, but which nevertheless profoundly distorts reality. This narrative shifts according to the needs of the time, but it always includes a careful choice of culprits to help deflect attention from the ANCs own agency.

In the ten years (1984 to 1994) of the ANCs peoples war against its black rivals, the key culprits in the narrative were initially Inkatha warlords and impis in KwaZulu/Natal and later a sinister Third Force made up of Inkatha and the South African Police. Both Inkatha and the police were of course to blame for many of the killings in this period. However, the narrative was also utterly misleading in obscuring the ANCs own major role in the deaths of some 20,500 black civilians.

Once the peoples war had brought the ANC to power in 1994, political violence came to an end and the narrative shifted once again. To increase the states control, weaken the economy, and prepare the way for ever more racial scapegoating, the narrative then targeted the commercial farming sector, the mines, the banks, the private health care sector, the supposedly white-owned media, and the many businesses (which despite the huge sums put into BEE and the practical obstacles to its success) had reportedly been dragging their feet on transformation.

Now that ANC/SACP policies have done so much to reduce growth, increase unemployment, and frustrate hopes of a better life for the poor, the ruling party is gearing up to fetter the economy still more firmly. It now wants radical economic transformation to change the structure of the economy. It is also seeking to push the BEE ownership requirement up from 25% to 51%, and is increasingly echoing EFF calls for the nationalisation of land and other assets.

Not surprisingly, the dominant narrative has now shifted once again. Its current targets have expanded from the specific sectors listed above to include racism, colonialism, and white monopoly capitalism. Increasingly, these factors are identified as the key reasons for economic malaise and worsening destitution. Moreover, as so often in the past, there are many commentators outside the ANC who uncritically endorse and echo this narrative and seek to punish those who step outside its limits.

This narrative is helping to prepare the way for ever more state ownership and control. It is also damaging the economy in other ways, by raising racial tensions and eroding the social trust vital to investment. At the same time, it is calculated to play a particularly useful role in demonising the DA and shoring up the ANCs failing support in the run-up to the 2019 general election.

What Mr Zuma has done in recalling Mr Gordhan from London is so obviously damaging that many South Africans will rally to the finance ministers defence. They might even persuade Mr Zuma not to go ahead with his proposed cabinet reshuffle. But the wider threat to the country from the ANC/SACP alliance and its NDR objectives generates little opposition because it is still so little understood.

The current narrative is thus likely to continue unchecked. So too will the impetus towards the radical economic interventions which the narrative legitimates. In time, the weakening of property rights and increased racial scapegoating will help to marginalise or drive out the established middle class. This in turn will greatly weaken the new middle class. It will also (if all goes to plan) culminate in a proletarian dictatorship under the incontestable control of the ANC/SACP alliance. This, as the ANC coyly puts it in its draft Strategy & Tactics document for 2017, will help to usher in a higher form of human civilisation.

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The wider threat still overlooked all roads lead to Communism - BizNews