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One man who has studied these questions in great depth is Roman David, a Czech sociologist and expert on transitional justice based in Hong Kong. Indeed Mr. David, who was himself a 21-year-old student in 1989, carried out sociological surveys of both ex-political prisoners and former party members and collaborators for his book Communists and Their Victims: The Quest for Justice in the Czech Republic.

When I spoke to him by Zoom, I first asked Roman David what had led him to research and write the book in the first place.

Roman David|Photo: Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University

I had a very interesting inspiration during my doctorate in Brno, where I studied with Professor [Vladimr] ermk, who was a political philosopher and justice of the Constitutional Court.

We had a lot of debates about justice, and I came to the conclusion that to solve the problem of dealing with the past we cant rely on lawyers, because there is no uniform opinion among lawyers.

Law in books is just an illusion, and one lawyer can have a perfectly legitimate opinion and another lawyer can have a perfectly legitimate dissenting opinion.

This realization motivated me to look beyond. I wrote an article for a newspaper which was entitled Two ways of persecuting the crimes of communism.

I outlined two paths that could lead to the prosecution. One was the Czech Republics path through the Act on the Illegitimacy of the Communist Regime, and another was a path advocated by my supervisor, Professor ermk.

Following the publication the leadership of the Confederation of Political Prisoners contacted Professor ermk and asked what he could do with this issue of prosecution.

As a judge he couldnt do anything, but what he did was to call me and said, We need to help these people, somehow.

Then I came to realise that in order to study justice, I need to really ask people what they think about justice, what does justice mean to them and especially to ask the victims of human rights violations.

In your book you say something that for me is so interesting. You say that Czechia was a leader in dealing with the past in post-communist Europe. What did the Czechs get right in that regard, do you think?

Photo: University of Pennsylvania Press

Well, I said we were leaders in terms of outcomes. But we need to see that there were historical conditions for the process of dealing with the past.

Since the Battle of White Mountain, 1918 and the establishment of Czechoslovakia and 1945, dealing with Nazism, we already had some sort of blueprint for dealing with the past.

We know that the new regime deals with the previous regime, that the perpetrators or the protagonists of one regime are damned in the following regime.

There was a whole conceptual apparatus available: words such as restitution, rehabilitation, or denazification at that time. These words were already available in our vocabulary, so that gave us a certain head start.

And what made us leaders is that in 1990, or already in 1989 actually, the first laws were passed in Parliament which started to dismantle the Communist regime.

They included the Confiscation of Communist Property Act, the Rehabilitation of Political Prisoners Act, the Restitution Act and the Act on the Illegitimacy of the Communist Regime.

Monument of Battle of White Mountain (November 8, 1620)|Photo: tpnka Budkov, Radio Prague International

So these acts were fundamental for laying the groundwork. And they were so thorough that they allowed us to progress in comparison to other countries in post-Communist Europe on a massive scale.

They essentially sidelined the judiciary from this process. The judiciary played second fiddle. The most important thing was that the decisions were done on the basis of law, rather than by judicial decision.

If we look at the justice system at that time, in the early 90s, what were the mistakes made in the transition from communism to democracy?

I would need to go the previous question, when you mention what made us leaders. Let me tell you that the process of dealing with the past requires more than legal measures: It requires the involvement of society.

For political prisoners rehabilitation, one of the very important factors is their social acknowledgement.

So for example political prisoners, for their rehabilitation, one of the very important factors is their social acknowledgement. Another important factor is their reception in their neighbourhoods. And there are many other factors which affect the well-being of political prisoners.

Now these factors were pursued informally in the Czech Republic. They were not really supported by the state. But, thanks to the history of the Czech lands, we had the understanding that these are important things to do, so society was dealing with them.

Illustrative photo: Fifaliana Joy, Pixabay, Pixabay

But what is a mistake here, or what is the weakness, is that these social measures of justice were not pursued more systematically.

Another issue was that a whole alternative way of dealing with the past was completely absent.

When you speak about the rehabilitation of people who were imprisoned, say, before 1989, was that carried out well? Were the victims satisfied with how they were rehabilitated, could you say?

It was about half and half. Some of them reported a solid level of rehabilitation. Some of them a lower level of rehabilitation.

The major measures which were approved legally, for example the financial compensation, and the possibility of returning to their former professions, if they were of an age to, were the most important factors in their rehabilitation process.

But then there were a whole range of factors which were not accentuated, because they were not known in the Czech lands. They were factors which were related to alternatives to justice, inspired by the whole process of justice, in a comparative perspective, in countries like South Africa.

And those played a critical role for the rehabilitation of political prisoners.

So when I studied those processes I also included questions about the meaning of truth and truth sharing how important that is for former political prisoners.

There was no formal forum to establish and deal with the past.

I found that if they shared their stories privately, with family members for example, they reported a higher rehabilitation score.

But if they shared their stories publicly the score was negative. That was usually because there was no formal forum to establish and deal with the past.

As a result, truth sharing was done by, lets say, journalists, or by invitations to speak to students at schools. And these are not the best forums for opening up.

Because they require a certain patience, for example when they are dealing with students. But they also require a certain tolerance when dealing with journalists, because journalists need to do their jobs, they need to edit.

And for many former political prisoners, when they have been interviewed they felt that very important parts of their lives were cut, because there are simply always some limitations. But then for them it was not really a positive experience.

Illustrative photo: Post Bellum

One thing Id also like to ask you about is restitution. You say that restitution didnt really deliver for foreign Czechs, Czechs who had left the country, in most cases to escape from communism.

This is a shame. I think this is very unfair treatment of Czech people. Simply some people could not take the risk to return to a transitioning country by giving up the citizenship that they had earned, for example, in the US or many other countries which did not necessarily allow dual citizenship. So they were in a very difficult legal position.

Photo: Czech Television

But what is more problematic is how the Czech government handled it. Why this was handled this way, Im really not sure.

But the outcome is that essentially nationalistic considerations made sure that Communist-era injustices remained unrectified.

What about lustration, or screening. This was a system that was brought in by law in 1990 or 1991, under which people who had had high positions in the Communist Party were barred from important posts in the new democratic system. Was that useful, or effective, as a form of bringing about change for the better?

There were informal processes that were already conducted before the lustration law.

Its a question, to what extent it was useful. There were informal processes that were already conducted before the lustration law was approved. So that somehow diminished the impact of the law.

What were these processes? Were they the lists of collaborators?

No, they were something that was called a vote of no-confidence in the leadership. This was pursued in all state institutions, schools so already in 1989, 1990 there were changes in personnel.

Cibulka's lists of secret police collaborators

That was very important to do, and the lustration law was also brought in to, among other things, legalise these kinds of changes, in terms of saying which changes are allowed, and which changes are not so to put some legal regulations into it, and to prescribe who can and cannot hold certain positions.

This was simply because there was a certain rotation: people were dismissed in one place and then became a director in another place, or another school, and things like that.

But what is important here is to see there are different lustration models. For example the Czech lustration model is exclusive in its nature and is based on dismissals.

In Hungary they approved a model which is more inclusive. It was based on the revelation of background information about an individual who wanted to retain his position in government.

There are different lustration models. The Czech model is exclusive in its nature and is based on dismissals.

In Poland they approved another model of a kind of an inclusive, or kind of reconciliatory, system in which similar to in South Africa the position of a person who wanted to hold office was exchanged for true revelation about his past. So the person needed to make a disclosure, and upon full disclosure he or she was granted a second chance and could hold office in the new system.

In my previous book, I wrote about these systems and I compared their utility. I found out that the Czech system is the best in establishing trust in government, simply because a government without tainted officials is better than a government with tainted officials. That makes perfect sense.

Illustrative photo: Office of Czech Government

But what is interesting is that reconciliatory system, the Polish system based on confession, was also effective. Although here it has to be said that it was three times less effective than the Czech system.

In comparison to the contribution to reconciliation, or to some kind of overcoming the divisions of the past, the Czech system had no effects. The Hungarian system also had no effects, either positive or negative.

But the Polish system had a positive effect. So the people who were confessing their wrongdoing essentially had a positive relationship, or positive standing, in society, in comparison to those secret collaborators who were just disclosed, without anything else.

About secret collaborators, you write in the book also about coercion, that people were very often forced into being collaborators. Does the fact that coercion was so often used mean that its just not fair to point the finger at people who appeared on lists of collaborators?

It depends on who compiles the list. So if this is some kind of a wild list, compiled based on leakage of information, its not fair.

But even assume that the list is correct. Imagine the list is 100 percent correct. Is it fair to point the finger at these people, and blame them, if they may have been forced, in all kinds of ways, to collaborate?

Well, it is fair if a person wants to hold public office. I think it is a requirement of holding a position of trust, that people have information about a persons past.

Imagine that in a police station there are people who used to, lets say, persecute dissidents and they are continuing to police the community. How would the community feel safe about this?

So these types of situations need to be addressed. And I think that transparency is very useful in this aspect.

For me one of the most fascinating points you make is that retributive measures against pre-1989 Communists may in fact have been a kind of block, or impediment, to those people transforming themselves into, lets say, democrats.

Retributive measures inhibit the personal transformation of ex-Communists and inhibit their ability to internalise human rights.

Yes, this is one of the findings: that retributive measures essentially inhibit the personal transformation of former Communists and inhibit their ability to internalise human rights. It can also inhibit generational transformation of former Communists and their offspring.

One of the hypotheses that I was working with is that those retributive measures created an inversion effect: They turned society upside down, and those who were up were now down, etcetera.

So thats partly true. We can say that those retributive measures didnt help to reconcile or overcome those divisions. In fact, they solidified those divisions. They created a situation in which, lets say, a former Communist or a former secret informer gained these type of fixed identities. And there was no escape out of it.

So this is not really something that is useful for society. It creates more divisions, or deepens the existing divisions, rather than overcoming those divisions.

And its good that society is unified about fundamental issues. We can see it, for example, related to the war in Ukraine: We would be better equipped to face the Russian aggression if we were unified, if we had, for example, the former Communists on board.

Clearly now they are not that relevant, because they are out of Parliament, but who knows they may make it back in.

Even now, all these decades later, sometimes I hear people, especially older people, saying that it was a mistake in 1989 or 1990 not to ban the Communist Party. What do you say to that assertion?

I think if we want to have a liberal society, we cannot really use those instruments which are available to authoritarian rulers too often.

I dont say exactly that there should not be possibilities of banning illegal organisations, but I dont think the Communist Party should have been banned.

Simply, it was important to cut it off from its resources, from its property. This happened the property was confiscated. It was important to cut it off from influence on the secret police; the secret police was dissolved.

So suddenly there was no longer a state party but instead a political party, like any other, although still with significant membership and significant resources. But nevertheless it already posed less danger at that time than it did in, say, 1989.

Many former Communist Party members have been involved in Czech politics in the last 30-plus years, including recently Andrej Babi, who was prime minister, Milo Zeman, who was prime minister and later president, and the current president, Petr Pavel. Could it be said that a lot of former Communists have contributed, maybe even a lot, to Czechia over those decades?

Andrej Babi in 1981|Photo: Czech Television

I look at results from my survey, which were not published, because they were not significant but I tried to find out whether movements like ANO or Freedom and Direct Democracy have a significant number of former Communist Party members, or their offspring.

And there is no such significant result. They do not have a concentrated cohort of former Communist Party members. So this is kind of at the kind of grass-roots level.

On the political level, we have the society that we have. We cannot replace people. It takes whole generations to replace, to phase out [laughs], the Communist regime.

So one could say that some people who were members of the Communist Party were contributing to society.

I see the current president, Petr Pavel, who was a member, and he also tried to face this issue openly, rather than running away from it.

President Pavel is a decorated war hero, but its not a bad thing that the issue of his former Communist Party membership stays with him.

Hes a decorated war hero and hes also a skillful diplomat, but its not a bad thing that this issue of his former Communist Party membership stays with him; his steps can be scrutinized, and I think that is only a good thing for politics.

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The aftermath of the Velvet Revolution was justice delivered? - Radio Prague International

Socialism did not kill merely the bodyit sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. As we celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is time to remember and reclaim mans oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of us in His glorious image. Only then can we challenge the so-called wisdom of this world.

At the end of Volume I of his magnificently disturbing Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:

Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurglingthose are prisoners barges moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar. They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in somewhere, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The complains of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to with an inch of their lives. We have reviewed and considered all the methods of delivering prisoners, and we have found that they are all. . . worse. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be . . . worse.[1]

Not confined to the Soviets, such bleakness reigned throughout much of the 20th century.

However one chooses to define ita point that Caldwell made very nicely, noting that many think of socialism as a natural human inclinationnational socialism (also known as fascism) and international socialism (also known as communism) are responsible for the largest mass murders in history. Well, responsible might not be the best word. Perhaps, responsible for the poor and evil ideas that prompted the largest mass murders in history.

Advocates of communism claim it is the opposite of Nazism, and advocates of Nazism claim it the opposite of communism. Each form of socialism, however, is simply the flip side of the same coin.

Take, for example, the ideas of Josef Goebbels, the infamous Nazi butcherer. His diary from the 1920s is full of expressions of sympathy for Communism. In the final analysis, he wrote on October 23, 1925, it would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism. On January 31, 1926, he told himself in his diary: I think it is terrible that we [the Nazis] and the Communists are bashing in each others heads Where can we get together sometime with the leading Communists? It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing. You and I, he declared, are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies.

If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin, wrote T.S. Eliot in 1936. Again, Eliot is worth quoting at length, here from Choruses on the Rock.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards?[2]

Taken together, these two forms of secularism, atheism, and materialism, national socialism and international socialism, led to the murder (yes, murder is the best term here) of nearly 205 million human beings between 1917 and, circa, 1994, in a variety of gulags, holocaust camps, and killing fields. Those murdered were civilians, usually the citizens and residents of the very countries doing the murdering.

To NKVD, Frunze. You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the People. Report results by signalread a not atypical Soviet telegram.

Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood, V.I. Lenin stated. And, again, Well ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution? Are you for it or against it? If hes against it, well stand him up against the wall.

Instead of deluding the proletariat as to the possibility of eradicating all causes of bloodbaths, Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini argued, we wish to prepare it and accustom it to war for the day of the greatest bloodbath of all, when the two hostile classes with clash in the supreme trial.

The socialists of all stripes craved blood with nothing less than vampiric lust.

If we add in the number of soldiersthose fighting on the battle fields in uniformduring the same time period (or, a bit broader time period; encompassing the whole of the 20th century), we add an additional 50 million to the list, thus bringing the total to 255 million killed in the twentieth century. Yet, this is worth pondering. After all, governments killed four times the number of persons war did. In other words, the greatest killer of the twentieth century was not war, it was government.

We can break down these governmental killingswhat demographer R.J. Rummel has labeled democide. Communist China murdered 65 million; Soviet Russia slaughtered 62 million; National Socialist Germany butchered 21 million; and Nationalist China killed another 10 million. Nazi Germany certainly murdered the greatest number in the shortest amount of time, with most of its 21 million deaths taking place between late 1942 and early 1945, a denouement, perhaps, of the life of its wicked and Satanic regime. Cambodia, though, wins when it comes to sheer horror. Between 1975 and 1978, it reduced its own population by nearly fifty percent, with forced de-urbanization and insane re-education camps.

Most historians claim that the liberation of various oppressed groups defines the twentieth century. Such a view is pathetically dishonest. From the standpoint of, say, 2200 AD or 2500 AD, however, the twentieth-century will simply be remembered as one hell of a bloody mess. Lets hope it will be properly viewed as an anomaly rather than as the beginning of a diabolic trend.

An age which advances progressively backwards, indeed.

Yet, it must also be rememberedas Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed in his Gulagthat socialism did not kill merely the body, it sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. In volume one of The Gulag, the great Russian thinker listed ten soul-destroying aspects of socialism.

It has suddenly become vogue again, especially among the younger generation, to embrace some form of socialism. At its extremes, some even willingly and openly wear Che Guevarra and, horrifically enough, in this very room on Monday night, a pro-communist t-shirt. How many millions had to die for one ignorant man-child fool to parade his idiocy?

And, yet, we must also remember that this November 9th is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1953, 1956, 1968, and 1979, Eastern Europeans rebelled vehemently against their socialistthe Union of Soviet Socialist Republicsoppressors, with the United States looking on in willful and convenient ignorance. All of this changed on May 17, 1981, when President Ronald Reagan gave the Commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization, he said, with utter conviction. The West wont contain communism, it will transcend communism. It wont bother to denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

Allied with John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and others, Reagan worked relentlessly to undermine the worlds moral confidence in the Soviet Empire. He knew the struggle was not a materialist one, but a spiritual one, a struggle for the very definition of man.

Though the 200th anniversary of the French Revolutionwhich the Soviets hoped to celebrate through a series of world-wide parades and festivals1989 served as the end of the Soviet Empire, with one satellite country after another falling into the glorious decay of freedom, liberty, and dignity. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland each successfully rebelled against socialist oppression. On November 9, after a series of peaceful protests, East Germany too fell, and 1,000s upon 1,000s of mere Germans tore down the symbol of socialist evil, the Berlin Wall.

Socialism, Whitaker Chambers wrote, is not new. It is, in fact, mans second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: Ye shall be as gods. It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and mans relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of mans mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.[3]

It is time to remember and reclaim mans oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of usand every other human beingin His glorious image. Only then can we challenge the so-called wisdom of this world.

Notes:

[1] Solzhenitsyn, end of Volume 1 of the Gulag.

[2] T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock, in Complete Poems And Play, 1909-1950 (Harcourt, Brace, 1971), 108.

[3] Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952; Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1980), 9.

This essay was delivered as a response to Hillsdale Colleges Center for Constructive Alternatives on Socialism, on November 6, 2019 and was first published here in that same month and year.

The Imaginative Conservativeapplies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politicswe approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please considerdonating now.

The featured image is The Day the Wall Came Down, by Veryl Goodnight, a 1997 statue depicting horses leaping over actual pieces of the Berlin Wall, courtesy of Wikipedia.

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Remember, Remember, the 9th of November - The Imaginative Conservative

WESTERLY The Communist Party of the United States of America was established in 1919, following a split within the Socialist Party of America. An organization which supported common ownership and the absence of private property and social classes, the Communist Party brought forth political devotees and outspoken adversaries.

Joseph Peter Kamp, an educational lecturer, was born in Queens, New York, in 1900. A supporter of right-wing politics, he wrote and distributed pamphlets, booklets, newspapers and other literature for the Constitutional Educational League, which was founded in 1919 and which Kamp joined in 1921.

As part of the anti-communist organization, Kamp prided himself on working to expose Americas enemies. During the fall of 1933, he took his warnings around the country, stopping in Bristol, R.I., on the afternoon of Sept. 13 to address that towns Rotary Club.

Kamps lecture was entitled Communism A Myth or a Menace? He had on hand piles of magazines, pamphlets, leaflets, booklets and even textbooks being handed out by Communists in America and he displayed them to give further weight to his cause. One of the pamphlets was titled How to Defeat the NRA. One leaflet gave instructions on how to incite strikes at places of business. Some of the literature was written for adults, some written for children.

As Kamp addressed the Rotary, he gave examples of how communism was creeping up on America while we werent looking. He talked about the Ford factory riot of March 1932 where four employees were shot and killed by police and over 60 employees injured after a strike occurred under the influence of Unemployed Councils, a project of Communist Party U.S.A.

He talked about the recent factory riot in North Carolina, the closing of 100 American factories in one day and the police force of South River, New Jersey, being held captive for eight hours, all fueled by communist coercion.

To those members of the Bristol Rotary, Kamp talked about Karl Nygard, a Communist mayor, being elected in Crosby, Minnesota, and how Nygards first move after being sworn into office was to abolish the towns police force and close the state prosecutors office.

The dangerous propaganda being circulated and the events it was causing was something that had to be addressed immediately, Kamp announced. If communism was allowed to pick up speed like a snowball rolling down a hill, it would become impossible to stop. And once we allowed the NRA to be defeated, he warned, it was all over all of America would fall.

Kamp explained that the average American was blind to how serious the problem was. He urged the Rotary members to look at the red flag flying over a Communist camp in Westerly where the children of Communists were sent to be brought up under specific political teachings.

Kamp was jailed in 1950 for Contempt of Congress after circulating a pamphlet violently attacking Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, and then refusing to give the names of those who supported him in the endeavor.

If anyone has any knowledge of a Communist camp for children being located in Westerly during 1933, that information would be appreciated.

Kelly Sullivan is a journalist and author who lives in Hope Valley. You can contact her at kjshem77@gmail.com.

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Country Road Chronicles: Communist camp in Westerly in the '30s - The Westerly Sun

We are commemorating this years anniversary of the greatest event in human history the Russian Revolution of 1917 with the launch of the International Marxist Tendencys brand new podcast, Spectre of Communism.

In this special first episode, editor of marxist.com Alan Woods discusses this great event, when workers and the oppressed for the first time on the scale of an enormous nation threw off capitalist rule and took the running of society into their own hands.

You can also celebrate the October Revolution with us this weekend at Revolution Festival 2023, our three-day school of communism taking place from 10-12 November in central London. Grab your ticket today!

7 November (in the New Style calendar) marks the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia.

For communists, the Russian Revolution is the greatest event in human history. But for many right-wing, liberal, and reformist critics of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, it was an anti-democratic catastrophe that condemned Russia to murderous dictatorship. Its time we set the record straight.

The workers and peasants of Russia achieved something that many thought impossible: not only bringing down the hated Tsar Nicholas The Bloody, but going on to overthrow capitalism itself, and to begin the task of building a society free of exploitation, oppression, and want.

The monumental events of the Russian Revolution are rich with lessons for the struggle for communism today.

The first episode of the International Marxist Tendencys new podcast, Spectre of Communism, welcomes Alan Woods author and editor of marxist.com to discuss this remarkable event.

Alan deals with the historic importance of 1917; outlines the role of the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky; answers the lies hurled against the revolution; and explains what communists today can take away from this incredible struggle.

New episodes of the Spectre of Communism podcast will be available every Tuesday. Listen on your preferred platform here.

For those wanting to learn more about the Russian Revolution, we recommend Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution by Alan Woods, as well as Alans six-part series covering the inspiring events of 1917, available now on Marxist Voice or YouTube.

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The Russian Revolution: The greatest event in history - Socialist Appeal

When he was a young social worker in St. Louis, Roger Baldwin was briefly engaged to Anna Louise Strong, who later published more books in defense of the Russian Bolsheviks and Chinese Maoists than any other English-speaking author and ended up buried in a revolutionary martyrs cemetery in Beijing. The reason for their breakup was Annas controlling nature. She tried to make Roger give up cigarettes, drinking, and cards. I love her but I love my independence more, he wrote to a friend. The lovebirds enacted in a few months the same relationship that would play out over decades between the Communist Party and the organization that Baldwin was to found in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union: sweet words, passionate embraces, followed by repudiation in the name of freedom.

There was a time when the ACLU was practically a Communist front group. Its board of directors was stacked with card-carrying party members and fellow travelers. Baldwin himself visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and came back full of praise. When his Harvard alumni committee sent him a political questionnaire in 1935, his answer concluded with the words: Communism is the goal. All that changed around the time of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939. The ACLU purged Communists and sympathizers from positions of leadership with a thoroughness that even its detractors had to acknowledge.

Bill Donohue, famous today as the head of the Catholic League, as a young man obtained his PhD in sociology at New York University with a dissertation on the ACLU, which he developed into the book The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (1985). Naturally, his book is critical of the organization, calling it the legal arm of the liberal-left, but even Donohue concedes that this characterization was not true of the Unions record in the 1940s and 1950s (the ACLU was truly worried about the threat of communism at that time).

The ACLU really did stand for sincere liberalism during the middle decades of its existence, and perhaps for even longer than that. In the 1990s, when New York Citys Ancient Order of Hibernians wanted to keep a gay pride float out of its century-old St. Patricks Day Parade, the local affiliate of the ACLU took the parade organizers side. From the 1980s until recently, ACLU lawyers filed numerous amicus briefs against ordinances that banned protest and prayer outside abortion clinics, even though the organization was institutionally pro-choice and had its own reproductive rights division. For ACLU lawyers, it was a point of pride that they defended the free speech rights of pro-lifers with whom they disagreed.

Recently, something changed. Impartial liberalism is no longer the ruling ideology at the ACLU. The organizations social media accounts now regularly weigh in on matters in which civil liberties either are not at issue or seem to lie on the other side. When Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on grounds of self-defense after shooting three assailants at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the ACLU Twitter account lamented that Rittenhouse was not held responsible for his actions. In a departure from longstanding practice, the organization began making political ads on behalf of candidates, $25 million worth in the 2018 midterm cycle. A million dollars were spent on an ad opposing Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation, not because of his legal views but because he had been accused, on flimsy evidence, of sexual assault.

In 2018, a memo titled ACLU Case Selection Guidelines: Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities formalized the end of the old era. Due to limited resources and the ACLUs need to recruit and retain a diverse staff, its lawyers would now avoid taking clients whose views are contrary to our values. Among the criteria its lawyers would use when choosing cases were the potential effect on marginalized communities and the harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed.

The ACLU had come full circle. The new generation of left-wing woke lawyers is trying to impose on the American justice system the attitude to the law that prevails in Communist countries, where the most important question in any trial is whether a person belongs to a favored class, and where rights such as free speech and the presumption of innocence are derided as bourgeois proceduralism. And they are well on their way to succeeding.

After Donald Trumps election in 2016, the ACLU was inundated with donations. The organization had always done well under Republican presidentsmembership rose by more than 50 percent in the 1980s, dropped by 20 percent during the 1990s, then increased by 50 percent during George W. Bushs first termbut this most recent surge was unprecedented. The combined revenue of the ACLU and the ACLU Foundation in 2017 was more than double the previous years, and donations stayed at that level throughout Trumps term in office. In 2021, revenue was $395 million, more than triple the pre-Trump figure.

The leader who presided over this windfall was Anthony Romero, the first openly gay man to lead the ACLU, the first Latino, and the first executive director in thirty years to come from outside the organizationin his case from the Ford Foundation, where he was director of Human Rights and International Cooperation. He took the money and went on a hiring spree.

The new hires did not always share the commitments of the older generations. They were Millennials and Zoomers, born after 1980, marinated in identity politics. Its no coincidence that many of the gaffes that first alerted the public to the new atmosphere over at the ACLU occurred on its social media accounts. The ACLU Twitter account in November 2018 denounced a new Department of Education rule that would have provided due process protections to college students accused of sexual assault. The tweet charged that the rule promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused. The ACLU later clarified that it did support many of the new protections and the tweet had been an impromptu reaction from a staffer in the womens rights division.

It was not just that the young people cared more about identity politics than their elders did. They believed that identity politics discredited the liberal rights the ACLU used to stand for. First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege, said Dennis Parker, former head of the ACLUs Racial Justice Program. Among the changes in the 2018 case selection memo was the provision that in speech cases raising racial justice issues, at a minimum, staff in both the Racial Justice Project and the Speech, Privacy, and Technology project should be consulted.

The right to refuse medical treatment, which the ACLU had always defended when it was Jehovahs Witnesses refusing blood transfusions, went out the window during the coronavirus pandemic due to concerns about the diseases impact on minorities. The real threat to civil liberties comes from states banning vaccine and mask mandates, two ACLU staffers wrote, counterintuitively, in the New York Times, because mandates protect communities of color hit hard by the disease. The ACLU joined multiple lawsuits against states that had overturned or prohibited mask mandates, including Virginia, Iowa, and South Carolina, on the grounds that those laws discriminated against children with disabilities.

Chase Strangio is a representative example of the new generation of ACLU lawyers. Strangio, who was born a woman and adopted a trans identity in law school, is deputy director of the ACLUs Transgender Justice department. Transgender rights have been a lively field for ACLU litigators in recent years. The ACLU and its state affiliates have sued prison systems across the U.S. to force them to house men who identify as female in womens prisons. The New Jersey inmate who was reported last year to have impregnated two fellow prisoners was housed in a womens facility due to a legal settlement with the state ACLU.

Strangio is more committed to the cause of transgenderism than to old-fashioned rights such as free speech. When Target announced that it would stop selling Abigail Shriers book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Strangio gloated on Twitter. Abigail Shriers book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans, Strangio wrote. We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again. And then in a tweet that was later deleted: Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.

You might say that Romero and his managers should have screened their new hires more carefully to make sure everyone was on board with basic ACLU principles, such as not banning books. But considering the quality of graduates elite law schools are turning out, they probably could not have found any more suitable lawyers than the ones they hired. Students at elite law schools have made headlines repeatedly in recent years for shouting down speakers and calling for the firing of dissenting faculty. When senior lecturer Ilya Shapiro was hounded from Georgetown Law over innocuous comments about a Supreme Court nominee, among the student groups calling for his firing was the Georgetown Law chapter of the ACLU.

In 2022 the American Bar Association voted to mandate that all accredited law schools educate students on their obligation as future lawyers to work to eliminate racism in the legal profession. Many schools already offered courses on critical race theory or included its themes in mandatory courses. One first-year property law professor at Georgetown has slides in her day one lecture that read, Property law must contend with its birth in Native dispossession and the enslavement of African Americans, and Possession is a legal term of art for a settler capitalist society.

Instead of venerating the Bill of Rights, as the old ACLU used to do, the new generation of lawyers denigrates it as a relic of white supremacy and patriarchy. The Dobbs decision in June brought out a round of vituperative left-wing Constitution-bashing. Neither the constitution nor the courtsnor the f*cking illusion of democracyare going to save us, a Yale Law student posted on Instagram. How can we possibly expect a document drafted by wealthy, white, landowning men, to protect those who face marginalization that is the direct result of the very actions of the founders? According to LinkedIn, in the summer of 2022, that student was working as an intern at the U.S. Justice Department.

American anthropologist Inga Markovits was conducting an ethnographic study of the East German legal system when the Berlin Wall fell. On September 6, 1990, she was present at the massive gathering in the city courthouse at which East German judges and prosecutors waited to be told what would become of their careers. The West German justice minister walked in and announced that they would be temporarily suspended from duty until the government could determine each individuals suitability for working in the new system. We cant just take everyone. You must understand, you are coming from an Unrechtsstaat into a Rechtsstaatfrom a lawless regime to the rule of law.

At the word Unrechtsstaat, a wave of indignation runs through the room, Markovits records. As far as the East Germans were concerned, they had the rule of law. They were right. There was no detention without trial under Honecker, East Germanys Communist leader. Laws were written down. The free world might not have liked East Germanys laws against dissent, but those laws had been enacted legitimately and convictions secured under them were not arbitrary but required evidence. In her interviews, Markovits asked the East German judges whether a phone call from a powerful party member had ever changed their verdicts. They were all scandalized by the suggestion. That would have been a betrayal of their duty.

This does not mean that socialist and capitalist justice were the same. Each trial in East Germany had to be observed by a lay assessor, representing the proletariat. In disputes between a landlord and a tenant, or an employer and a worker, the socially disadvantaged party would be favored in matters of interpretation. In order to emphasize the collective over the individual, judges were encouraged to generalize a conflict (einen Konflikt verallgemeinern): interpreting a specific controversy as a symptom of underlying social tensions and finding a solution that would not only right individual wrongs but also address their causes, prevent their recurrence, and thus ensure collective peace.

Entitlements such as the right to a job were given priority over liberal formalities such as property rights. The East Germans looked down on bourgeois rights as hollow, a pretense of neutrality meant to distract people from the fact that capitalism is a rigged game. How can we say that a boss and a worker enjoy equal rights, they asked, if one of them can be fired for speaking his mind? When the statue of Justice outside the Dresden courthouse was replaced in the 1950s, the East Germans made sure to depict her without her former blindfold. The bandage, so we were told, was a deliberate deception of the people by the bourgeois rulers, one lawyer explained.

A justice system like this one is entirely compatible with the rule of law. It could be introduced here in the United States without disturbing any of the procedural safeguards that have existed for centurieshabeas corpus and trial by jury and protection against illegal search and seizure. But the result would be an entirely different kind of legal system. The spirit of equality before the law, which has been the guardian of our liberties since medieval times, would be dead.

We are inching toward such a system already. The civil rights revolution, now well beyond its heroic phase, has made its protected classes into aristocrats under the law. If an aristocrat is disrespected or made to feel uncomfortable, the law demands a remedy. Those groups that do not qualify for protection under these laws are treated as were class enemies under East German law. They can be made to bear any sacrifice, lose any fundamental freedom, for the benefit of the legally protected. This, incidentally, is the real meaning of privilege: private law, different codes for different classes.

The ACLU once stood against this development. The national organization used to consider racial discrimination and reverse discrimination equally illegal. The New York Civil Liberties Union opposed racial quotas for seats on Mayor John Lindsays proposed police review board in 1966. Then, in 1971, the ACLU dropped its opposition to reverse discrimination. It endorsed left-wing theories of disparate impact, and its South Carolina affiliate even sued to have the state bar exam invalidated as unconstitutional because not enough black lawyers were passing it. Now, with its LGBTQ activism, the ACLU is on the front lines of pushing this type of law further.

Even in its best years, when the ACLU was true to its liberal mission, it was still a pernicious force in American life. These were the people who made high-school principals paranoid about the faintest hint of religiosity on school grounds, who hemmed in parochial schools with all kinds of absurd rules about whether parents tax dollars could pay for buses, textbooks, or speech therapists. They once sent someone to follow Congressman Henry Hyde into a Catholic church in order to collect evidence that his pro-life position was a product of his religious beliefs and thus a violation of church-state separation.

But it is no use saying the ACLU was always this bad. It was not. That would be like saying Roger Baldwin was wasting his time purging all those Communists back in the 1940s. As bad as liberals are, Communists are worse.

Is the solution to urge the ACLU to return to neutral liberalism? That seems unlikely. It would be strange indeed for conservatives to take up the cause of liberalism now that its former champions have abandoned it. Even if it were possible to rediscover neutral liberalism as a cross-ideological common groundand it is notconservatives would still be better off pursuing other theories of law based on concepts closer to their tradition, such as the common good.

There is one means of restraining the woke that we all can insist upon, liberals, originalists, and integralists alike, and that is a return to professional standards. Professional standards have nothing to do with politics. They developed at the beginning of our civilizationthink of the Hippocratic oathas a way of compensating for the imbalance of power between professionals and their clients. When a man needs a doctor or a lawyer, he generally needs one desperately at a moment of great personal vulnerability. Once he hires one, he must take the advice he receives on faith, lacking the expertise to evaluate it himself. Professionals therefore find themselves in highly advantaged positions. In order to avoid becoming clerisies or cartels, the professions have developed strict codes of conduct and an ethos of duty.

Liberalism says that everything the state touches must be neutral in every respect. Professional standards say something more modest: that certain actors have a duty to be neutral when acting in positions of trust. The standard legal ethics textbook states, A lawyer is a fiduciary, that is, a person to whom another persons affairs are entrusted in circumstances that often make it difficult or undesirable for that other person to supervise closely the performance of the fiduciary. Assurances of the lawyers competence, diligence, and loyalty are therefore vital. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo put it more poetically:

Wokeness is hostile to this ethos. In 2011, when the Defense of Marriage Act was being challenged in the courts, pressure from gay activists forced the law firm King & Spalding to drop its defense of the law. The partner who wanted to continue defending DOMA, Paul Clement, was forced to leave the firm and provide this defense independently. Representation should not be abandoned because the clients legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters, Clement said in his resignation statement. This would once have been an uncontroversial expression of one of the most basic principles of our adversarial system, that every client deserves representation.

Left-wing hostility to the basic rules of the game culminated in the Dobbs leak. Supreme Court deliberations and decisions have always been protected by the strictest codes of confidentiality. In May 2022, in an unprecedented breach, an unknown person leaked Justice Samuel Alitos draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade to reporters at Politico. The identity of the leaker has not been discovered, but the logical motivation would have been to spook one of the moderate conservative justices into changing his or her vote. A professor at Yale Law told a reporter that he assumed the leaker was a liberal because many of the people weve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing. They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.

Other professions are going the way of the law. Investment firms are smuggling racial quotas into financial decisions, in disregard of their fiduciary duty to their clients. During the coronavirus pandemic, several states began rationing life-saving medical care by race, with Minnesotas black teenagers receiving priority over its white sixty-four-year-olds despite the latters greater risk of hospitalization and death. In 2022, a medical student at Wake Forest University joked on Twitter that a patient had made fun of her pronoun pin, so I missed his vein so he had to get stuck twice. When Fox News did a story on this seeming breach of medical ethics, the school closed ranks around the student. Recently I spoke to a doctor who said that residents at his hospital now regularly make jokes behind the backs of patients who are Trump supporters. In my day, medical ethics meant it didnt matter whether a patient was a drug dealer or a millionaire, you treat everybody the same, he lamented.

Let us make the last two yearssay, between the medical professions absurd posturing during the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and the Dobbs leak in 2022the high-water mark of the woke attack on professionalism. Left-wing doctors and lawyers today are always talking about privilege. Let them pause and examine the type of privilege they indisputably enjoy, that of professionals.

Lawyers refer to one another as brothers or sisters of the bar, an antiquated phrase that reminds them they are all servants of a greater enterprise, the legal system, on which the rest of society depends for its continued functioning. A lawyer who takes a client, like a doctor who sees a patient or a banker who accepts a clients funds, must always remind himself that the client is in a real sense at his mercy. Maybe as a private citizen he has strong disagreements with the client. As a professional, he has a moral obligation to act as his devoted servant. Willingness to subordinate your opinions to your duties is the price you pay for the money, the status, and, most of all, the power over others that come with being a professional.

An appeal to the ACLU to start being good liberals again is not likely to cut much ice, especially when many of us exhorting them are not good liberals ourselves. But we can demand that lawyers act like lawyers. Condemning the Dobbs leak, or any campaign to ostracize a lawyer simply for taking a client, should be the bare minimum required for professional self-respect. If the ACLU believes that transgender rights are an issue within its remit, then by all means it may continue to advocate them. But it should reverse its policy of rejecting unpopular clients due to the organizations need to recruit and retain a diverse staff. If the diverse staff dont like the ACLUs core values of free speech and equality under the law, then they should find a different place to work. And if they dont like the Bill of Rights, they should find a different profession.

When the Communists said that liberal freedoms such as the sanctity of a mans home or his right to free expression were bourgeois ruses, that was projection. They meant that they had no respect for these freedoms but would use them instrumentally in order to bring about their revolution. Liberals really do care about these freedoms, the Norman Rockwell freedoms, the freedoms that allow Atticus Finch to make a courthouse into a little island of equality in 1930s Alabama.

Conservatives care about these freedoms, too. We might not appeal to John Locke and J. S. Mill in order to defend them, but we have our own traditions, going back at least to the Bill of Rights. Some liberal freedoms introduced in the 1960sincluding many championed by the ACLUwere spurious, but we can all agree on equality under the law, over against the Communist belief that rules dont apply to favored classes and rights dont apply to disfavored ones. This is the kind of equality that ACLU lawyers can and should rediscover within their storied institution and impose on their young radicals. Anyone who cannot subscribe to those commitments is not only unfit to work for the ACLU, but unfit to be a lawyer.

Helen Andrews is senior editor at the American Conservative.

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