The year was 1926, a momentous year in the surge and sweep of evolutionary modern China. It was a landmark year in which the revolutionary Nationalist movement under the leadership of the Kuomintang formally broke away from the talons of Soviet Russia in her aim to vassalize China.
It was also the year in which I had had several notable conversations - interestingly long and ingenuously revealing, on the nature of Communism with Mikhail Borodin. Thinking back and collating what was expounded by him in much detail, the technique of action has proven not only that it is the overall blueprint of Russian Communist global imperium but how well and closely the U.S.S.R. and The Third International have achieved their aspirations thus far in their dominance, applying at times stark brute force, at other times a technique so deft in its vitiation that it is often imperceivable except to the practiced eye and mature judgment.
In this connection, let me recall to memory some idea of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' success in geographic expansion alone. An article in the U.S. News & World Report of March 29, 1976, with a pictogram graphically illustrating "Russia's Drive for a Global Empire" since 1939 reads:
"All told, the Soviet empire, run by Moscow, controls, dominates or has strong influence over 425,400,000 people - or 10.7% of the world's population. The area of 9,986,952 square miles in that empire represents 18.9% of the world's total land mass."
Since 1939, Russia has absorbed three whole countries as well as parts of six others in Europe and Asia. She controls six East European countries and Outer Mongolia, and has placed five Asian and African countries, besides Cuba, under strong Soviet influence. To put it in another way, from November of 1917 until the latest conquest of Laos in 1975, seventeen countries have been Sovietized or come under Sovietizing over the years.
The Leninist-Stalinist brand of le bonheur commun with its alternating use of force, deceit cumcunning psychology upon individuals and upon people-en-masse, totaling up its results, is a phenomenal success.
In the winter of 1926 my mother, eldest sister, Madame K'ung, and I left Shanghai for Hankow to visit our brother T.V. and our other sister. Hankow and Wuchang, the twin cities in eastern Central China, often shortened to the acronym Wuhan, made ever famous in Chinese history and folklore by the tales of the Three Kingdoms, are situated on the opposite banks of the Yangtze River. Wuchang in that year became the provisional situs of the Nationalist Government while Hankow was where most of the executive government offices were located. For those who were yet unborn or who are too young to remember or know much about that period, let me give you a little background on Mikhail Borodin - Borodin being his nom de guerre (surname Grutzenberg). Mr. Borodin was Dr. Sun Yat-sen's adviser-in-chief, sent by the U.S.S.R. after Joffe's famous meeting with Dr. Sun in Shanghai to help China unify herself and throw off the scourge of warlordism and the yoke of extraterritoriality which meant that foreign nationals in China were not governed by Chinese laws. Extraterritoriality meant enjoying special privileges through unequal treaties imposed upon China during the prerevolutionary period under the Manchu Emperors. Upon Dr. Sun's passing in 1925 in Peking, Borodin who had come with the credentials of representing the U.S.S.R. Politbureau and as a high functionary of The Third International, became the chief adviser to the Nationalist Government in Canton, and in this capacity he virtually became Russia's pro-consul in Nationalist China.
Known to family
Both Mr. and Mrs. Borodin were known to our family for all the years they were in China, and if I am not mistaken, Mrs. Borodin was related to the old-time Hollywood comedian Buster Keaton. For one who is unfamiliar with that era, one may well ask: How come that Mr. Borodin became Dr. Sun's adviser from Russia. The answer is, Russia was the only country which heeded Dr. Sun's call for China's national resurgence. All other countries turned a deaf ear to his call. As children of a revolutionary family whose father was a close associate of Dr. Sun, we saw much of the Borodins, be it in Peiping (then called Peking), during Dr. Sun's last illness in that Northern city or in Canton when it was the center of the Nationalist movement and government, or still later in Wuhan of which point in time I shall be writing.
It was in Wuhan where we spent some three months that the divergencies between our National policy and the policy of The Third International became most apparent. These cleavages soon developed into gaping chasms due to the pervasive excesses of Communist cadre when they preempted in knee-jerk fashion the functions of local governments from local functionaries by indiscriminate arrests, public lashings, illegal searches and seizures, kangaroo courts and executions, and the recruitment and the building up of their local private armies. The chaos purposely accelerated and exacerbated by the Communists over Nationalist controlled territory and the surfacing of the Communists within our Party to subvert the Kuomintang, and an overt seizure of power in spite of their earlier public avowal and oath to subsume Communism and abide by the discipline of the Kuomintang for the heartwhole re-building of China - these made the sunder all but irreparable.
Parting of the ways
This open parting of the ways came about when Russian advisers, military and political, under the guise of helping China in the completion of her revolution, were ordered by The Third International to surreptitiously hamper and hinder us wherever and whenever possible and at the same time organize armed insurrections to do their bidding. The quickened pace of alarm on the part of The Third International was prompted by events in that in a period of about nine months the Northern Expedition of the Nationalist Army under the leadership of its Generalisimo Chiang Kai-shek had traversed from Kwantung to Kiangsu province of China - where the first metropolis, Shanghai, is situated. Furthermore, the Nationalist forces had vanquished and disarrayed the main armies of the warlords in the most populous coastal provinces of China and arrived in Nanking, the designated capital-to-be of the National Government. This swiftness of accomplishment was too brilliantly executed to suit the Communist nonce. The time schedule of advance both surprised and dismayed the Russians. Even their military advisers had not counted on it in their most "generous" estimate. It was of a speed that not only would inhibit greatly their plans for the takeover of China by Communism in an overnight coup-de-main way when they were good and ready. Therefore they must proceed post-haste to reverse matters.
As I recollect, even now I can see Mr. Borodin in my mind's eye in his pearl grey, blue serge, green-magenta, light or dark brown Sun Yat-sen tunics (now suddenly fashionably called Mao tunic by those who are doing their level best to please) on different occasions, pacing to and fro in my brother T.V.'s apartment living-room. (The building was formerly the Russo-Asiatic Bank of Hankow.) Ponderously or swiftly, slowly or quickly as his mood of discutation changed, he spoke with his inveterate cigarette dangling between his index and middle finger of his left hand, with the British-made Garrick or 555 brand cigarette smoke curling up to further stain his fingers as he proceeded to propound the Russian game plan for China and for world-wide Communism. Oftentimes his right hand would be gripped into a fist close to his tunic chest buttons, moving downward heavily or quickly to stress the points he was making, or again lifting up his clenched fist swiftly and deftly suspending in air as a punctuation in time in preparation for his next downward movement' of the fist for emphasis. At intervals he would turn upward the palm of his left hand while still holding his cigarette and use the palm as a landing surface for his right fist. Seldom would he sit down during his perorations for any length of time although now and then he would to chain-light another cigarette and dexterously permitted his cigarette ash to lengthen until it was almost ready to fall onto the floor when he would flick it away just in time into one of the several ash trays on his pacing route without giving the cigarette a glance. I mention this little portraiture of the man in that from these several tableaux of behaviorism in smoking it showed that his was the practiced mannerism of a man attuned over the years to talking, expounding, elucidating, guiding, evangelizing policies, strategy or tactics to the cadre before their being sent or returned to various stations and posts around the world. Furthermore, it mirrored a man who was accustomed to working under furtive pressure of surreptitious assemblage with floating meeting places, with the barest of tables, chairs and ashtrays, yet still glued to smoking cigarettes with neat habits. This behavioristic pattern contributes to an insight in gauging the measure of the man, for from early childhood I had heard and had occasions to observe with fascination how revolutionists instinctively behave from force of habit and, interestingly enough, Borodin fell into that certain modality.
In person he was of a tall, commanding presence with a leonine head, with a shock of neatly coifed, long, slightly wavy dark brown mane that came down to the nape of his neck, with an unexaggerated but ample moustache that French generals of that time feigned. He was rather heavyset with strong regular features. When he talked at times an officious serious mien would cross his face, at other times his eyes would have that certain bland look which I detected hid his dissembling words and masked his true thoughts most competently. Speaking in a resonantly deep, clear, unhurried, baritone voice of mid-America intonation without a trace of Russian accent, he lowered still more his voice into a slow basso profundo when emphasizing the importance of a certain point he was making. He was a man who gave the impression of great control and personal magnetism. But it was his unfolding of the Communist Weltanschauung, its plans of procedure and actions that were both so grippingly provocative and dispassionately revealing. No one could deny they were well thought out and obliquely educational, all be it Mephistophelian and savagely insensitive to humanity and human aspirations.
Subversion and negation
In my discussions with Borodin, he began to subvert quietly and negate subtly my political philosophy and beliefs by reviewing the Platonic definition of democracy as anarchy or polyarchy. Anarchy by definition signifies that there is no one element that is dominant in the governance of the state. It can also be polyarchy with many elements dominant simultaneously, which is equivalent to anarchy. Thus there is an inbuilt conflict in itself since dominance presumes the preeminence of one. Alternatively, it is a hydraheaded being that, when translated, because of its multiheadedness can only equate itself to anarchy. Democracy to Plato is like an embroidered robe "spangled with all manner of characters," "a medley of types," "a bazaar of constitutions."
Plato, in his Republic, calls democracy the Third Corruption after Timocracy and Oligarchy. The better form of government is a Republic and democracy its degenerate form, and the best form of government is government of a philosopherking. As for Aristotle, he too regards democracy as the perverted form of government which he calls "Polity. "
For my part, I did not dispute with political theorists and historians that democracy was easier to function in Greek city-states because of its small population and its homogeneity with a simple life style and the shared common interests. True, in a city-state the people could discuss their communal business in the Agora or some other forum. However, this does not stand to reason that what is successful in microcosm will necessarily fail in macrocosm. Borodin continued by drawing attention to the fact that the Roman Republic which was proclaimed five centuries before the Christian era was possible only because it, too, was governmentally comparatively small and administratively uncomplicated. And that in the latter days of the Republic under Caesar and Pompey they saw to it that only those who voted as they directed should receive the corn dole. History proved that they had a political machine more efficient and corrupt than Tammany Hall during Boss Tweed's reign in New York City.
U.S. history debunked
He continued by citing that the Magna Carta, often spoken of as one of the earlier exemplars for democracy, was no more than the coming to terms between John Lackland and the obstreperous and recalcitrant Barons at Runnymede. The purpose of this compact was not to militate to the benefit of the common Englishman as it was to strengthen the bondage of the ordinary man to his liege lord. Even the much-touted gain of the right of juridical judgment by one's peers and the habeas corpus were intentioned primarily for the benefit of the aristocracy - the landed class. What redounded to the common man was happenstance, not by explicit design.
As regards the United States, he opined American history books taught at schools are replete with hold-faced prevarications of the truth. For in reality:
1. In 1776 half of the Americans in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey were loyal to George III. Independence to a vast majority of the colonists was regarded as a Presbyterian plot.
2. By 1776, although Americans were the richest people in the world, they paid the lowest taxes in the Western World. Englishmen in England were required to pay the same taxes which the colonies refused to pay. Therefore the colonials' claim that they were mistreated was fabrication that suited the purpose of a few recalcitrant leaders who bore England a grudge.
3. The so-called Revolutionary War, fought almost entirely outside New England in the Middle Colonies and the South, was more of a civil war than a revolution in that at least half of the people were quite satisfied to be ruled by George III and the British Parliament.
Heroes held up to ridicule
He continued to give off more historical facts: The Stamp Duty Act was levied for the defraying of costs of English troops stationed in the new world which the colonists requested for their own protection against the marauding Indians and the French in Canada. Yet demogoguery of the purposed called the revolt a rebellion against tyranny. The greatly dramatized Paul Revere ride from Cambridge to Lexington presumably to warn of the coming of the Red Coats (British soldiers of that day wore red coats, hence the name Red Lobsters or Red Coats) that is taught in grade school textbooks was not successfully completed by Revere. The often quoted "shot heard around the world" as heralding the commencement of the American Revolution began in a desultory on-and-off fashion. The men of the famed Boston Tea Party who threw overboard the tea must have wished to put the onus on the innocent Indians by donning feathers, buckskins and war paint, and Patrick Henry, remembered for his memorable ringing words "Give me liberty or give me death," was a successful dry goods merchant who found the British Customs imposts were cutting too deeply into his profits to his liking and therefore the mother country became intolerable. And Tom Paine, the pamphleteer, famed for his fiery rabblerousing writings in "Common Sense" and "The Crisis," lacking in common sense to keep in order his own affairs, was a bankrupt. He did not do well in Lewes of his native England. Paine's original name was Pain and he was regarded by the loyalists as a real pain in the neck. His was a cantankerous nature which could get along with few people; besides, his own private reputation was far from savory. And Betsy Ross who, legend has it, made the original flag of the Thirteen Colonies from her skirt, did nothing of the sort. It must be remembered there were also active protesters to independence. Initially it was John Dickinson of Pennsylvania who stood before the Second Continental Congress and made his last protest against the Declaration of Independence authored by Thomas Jefferson and at the time the document was only signed by John Hancock while others felt that discretion was the better part of valor, held back and only affixed their signatures much later in time to this "seditious document." Hancock had his good and sufficient reason to turn against the British Crown as he was caught smuggling a cargo of madeira with the seizure of the ship Liberty by the Colonial Customs.
As for Jefferson, Adams, Madison and others of the Pennsylvania House of Burgesses, while declaiming to high heaven the inalienable equal rights of all men as proclaimed in the concept of democracy, they were large plantation owners who found no contradiction and no pangs of conscience in keeping negroes in bondage as slaves to be bought and sold as chattel. Would it not be nearer the truth to label the Founding Fathers of America as real and great hypocrites?
Historians of repute on both sides of the ocean have recorded that the revolt of the American Colonies was not inspired by a belief in certain political principles and social equality of persons although it ended with a form of government that took on the semblance of a republic and therefore its facade. For essentially the American Revolution was but the manifestation of the dissatisfaction of a comparative few of the haute bourgeoisie who became the leaders together with a sizable number of the minority who followed the shepherds. It is also a matter of historic fact that many, very many, of the leaders had no faith in or belief in the principles of democracy and no love for its interfacial implications. Their attitude was that any instrument, be it material, polemic or syllogistic, that came to hand was a good means to further their life style and ambience.
This is why Communism sees through the shards of hypocrisy and is amused at the little games those eighteenth century liberals played but later apotheosized in American history books. It would be nearer the truth for American children to be taught that American liberals as a breed were intellectually both corrupt and corruptors. They were corrupt in that they fantasized and manipulated ideas at will to suit their purpose of the moment. They corrupted themselves by justifying their thinking. They were corruptors when they influenced others to adopt their specious thinking. Enamored of themselves to different gradations of conceit, these eighteenth century liberals produced instant reasoning to attack or support a position, be it perverse or impractical. Their ideas could often be so paradoxical to their previous postulate that they could be in serious ideological conflict with or within themselves. Knowing this all too well, they mounted arguments either with colossal Jesuitical casuistry or by outright bold-faced denials or feigned misquotations or misunderstandings or by adopting the "propositional function" in logic of being neither true nor false. In other words, it was a denial of a material assertion - material in the sense of total relevancy since in the interplay of ideas, polemicists could fashion, distort or diminish true ideals and perspectives. But is talking, doing? Can talking be equated to tangible results of doing?
Lenin's policy defended
A coup d'oeil, the above posits of close reasoning by Mr. Borodin were devastating indictments of the Founding Fathers and of eighteenth century democracy and its motivating forces of liberal socialism. I well understood his long diatribe was "put down" tactics with regard to nationalism and democracy as well as political salesmanship of an experienced mind. It is what is known in today's language as "psyching up" to make his points, and the facts he recounted were nothing new to me. Borodin on the other hand conceded to the essentiality of liberal participation in the Communist plan. He professed that were it not for historicity and the firmer and greater liberal influence and power in key parts of the world which were not Communist (as Communism then was aligned in most people's minds with the nihilistic extremes), and were it not for the intercession of the millionaire German Socialist Godfather Parvus (Alexander Helphand), the deus ex machina in the transforming of Vlademir Ilyich, the bedraggled, obscure expatriate and fugitive, into the great Lenin, the German General Staff in conjunction with Wilhem II and Zimmerman of the Foreign Office would not have sent Ulyanov alias Lenin and his associates in a sealed train to Russia via Sweden to take Russia out of the war and to alleviate the Russian hate sentiment for the Germans after the disastrous serious of defeats Imperial Russia suffered from 1916 onwards. In 1917 in East Prussia alone, Germany captured one hundred thousand Mujiks as prisoners of war. Thanks to the bickerings of the Kadets, (In Russian politics, members of the former Constitutional Democratic Party) the Centralists, the other Socialists of the right and left, together with the various shades in between in the Duma and, above all, the vacillations of the various Soviets and the democratic qualms of Alexander Kerensky - "I shall not become the Marat of the Russian Revolution" - as well as the in-fighting at crucial moments among the Mensheviks, the minority who were really in the majority while the Bolsheviks, the majority, were in the minority. He admitted that had the Mensheviks succeeded with temporizations the "great Russian Revolution of Communism" would have been compromised.
He defended Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) which was in truth a policy of retreat and a compromise of his avowed policy, as re-grouping and consolidation in order to launch a yet greater advance. As Lenin said, the true revolutionaries are those willing to use all sorts of strategems, artifices, illegal methods, evasions and subterfuges. He added that historians interested in researching that period could rightfully ask: How is it that you who were in the minority call yourselves Bolsheviks? This was because we understood one sliver of human psychology of what is known as wishing-to-belong, to belong to the winning side. Except for those comparative few with strong and definite convictions, the world is full of ambivalents, the jump-on-the-wagonites. We accommodated them by becoming the real majority (Bolsheviki) although we were numerically actually in the minority (Mensheviki).
Communist opportunists
For those of us who were "all outers," being on the winning side was important but less important than maintaining our Communist principles. We believe that if we were fated to lose we might as well lose with our ideological passion intact. This is what martyrs are made of. This is a passion that 99 per cent of intellectuals can rarely understand, much less suffer for it.
We were also quick in perceiving and adapting opportunities to our needs. When the Socialists under Kerensky cast off the hated Czarist secret police, the Okhrana, as if at last shedding some contagious disease, Lenin quickly took them into his fold with open arms to serve our purpose and used them more widely and effectively than before. They were permitted latitudes of which the Czars were so chary and queasy. Again, after the Treaty of Versailles when the Weimar Republic of Germany was disallowed to have an army of over one hundred thousand men, we had the foresight to invite over the German General Staff officers to collaborate with us in large-scale corps-size autumn maneuvers with our troops in Russia. We sent our staff officers to Germany for staff officer coordination training. New German weaponry which was not permitted to be manufactured and tested in their own country was given tests under simulated battle conditions of weather and efficacy in Russia. We recognized the Germans were better at planning, training and in warfare, therefore we did not let ideology stand in our way to affect our needs and our ends. We did not detest or hate the German General Staff mentality because they existed and we needed them and we made use of them.
Doctrinal turncoats
Borodin noted too that within the Socialist confused and conglomerate ranks there have been many doctrinal turncoats in the world. The Socialist leaders of England, France, and other European countries with party appellations such as Socialists, Christian Socialists, Radical Socialists were anything but Socialists. English Labor's Ramsey Macdonald (Macdonald, when he became Prime Minister in 1924, exulted by saying, "Tomorrow all the Duchesses in England will want to kiss me") and France's most eminent Socialist politician and leader of the time, Leon Blum, dressed, thought and lived a life style no different from dyed-in-the-wool capitalists. They gloried in being written up as aristocrats consorting or comporting with aristocracy. Even Mussolini with his Socialist beginnings soon turned against all the hallmarks of Socialism with a vengeance while the nascent stirrings of National Socialism in Germany which at core was Socialistic were beginning to show signs of anything but Socialism.
Although denouncing Fascism and incipient Hitlerian Socialism as betrayors of Socialism Borodin asserted that they who have turned their backs on Socialism have their well-founded and shrewd reasons. For even Socialism elsewhere in the world in the 1920s has become different from the Socialism of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Men like Macdonald and Blum and generations of many other Socialists, together with the parties they lead and their own reputations would naturally enough not disavow the platforms and postulates which had brought them fame, leadership, success as well as titillation to their egos. Yet from what I (still Mr. Borodin speaking) come to see and know, the Socialists in their heart of hearts are well aware that their brand of Socialism in the long run is unworkable and will gradually and tangibly minimize and diminish their following and influence in the countries they rule. Only Mussolini with his exaggerated self-confidence and heightened sense of patriotism, inspired by the Garibaldean slap-dash adventurism, the amalgamating statesmanship of Cavour, his own instinct of the theatrical and militant make-up, decided upon a clean break from inane Socialism and became a twentieth century dictator with a flair of a poseur. It must be said that Socialists are not the only culprits, for Liberals are also corrupters in that capitalizing on human nature's insatiable avarice, they nurture these human frailties by turning it to their advantage for votes and more votes with promises and yet more promises to get themselves installed in power. By keeping alive the lorelei-like lure with attractive but impossible prolix of deceit the Socialists continue to fool the people. This is why, where and when Communism comes in to rectify the hypocrisies, dry rot, decadence and abuses of democracy.
The proof can be found in what Lenin wrote in Iskra (Spark) and Zarva (Dawn) in 1914: We desire a Great Russia, proud, republican, democratic, free and independent which, in her relations with her neighbors, will be based upon the human principle of equality, not on the feudal principle of privilege. But by 1917 Lenin was openly adjuring his followers in extremely positive writings and speeches to refuse support to the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov and later of Alexander Kerensky, his fellow provincial from Simbirsk. This presumed change in Lenin's thinking all came about within the period of three years. Lenin the "great ultimatist," the progressive revolutionary, became more and more convinced of the unworkability of democracy and pronounced his change of heart openly.
In order to achieve a reversal of the declension of peoples under Western Socialism and Liberalism, and to achieve universal Communism, our methods are to work with religious organizations and with men and women who are of the leftist bent. For they are least suspect and can best serve as our advance troops.
Much is made of our atheism. We are anti-religion not only because we are atheists but because religion prohibits people from what we foundly wish them to accomplish. The priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were especially obnoxious when they betrayed their trust by giving information gathered from mothers and wives of revolutionaries - information from "Confessions" to the Czarist Secret Police. Many of our valued comrades were apprehended because of the unscrupulous behavior of the priests. Furthermore since we hold no brief of the fact that we do not believe in God, all religions in the world are against us, but fortunately, because of religious superficiality in belief, greed for money, hierarchical concept and worldly vanity, they were, are and will be ineffective in countering us and in time we shall overcome all religions from within. They will be our willing tools some day. We must in our zeal be an anti-God Jesuit order in dealing with the monolithic Catholic Church. As for the Protestant Churches, since they are divided into many denominations and not politically as sensitive or as active as the Catholic Church, they are much easier to cope with than the Vatican or Mecca. But what is really dangerous to Communism is not the Christian concept of love, for even the teaching "love the enemy" is not potentially as dangerous because one can love and still be on the qui vive. Moreover, we Communists can also love, even love our enemies when necessity dictates. What we regard as truly dangerous is the teaching of "Forgiveness" in Christianity.
Forgiveness the spoiler
Marx said that religion is the opium of the people. This catch phrase in time could demolish religions, and people would come to look upon our Communism for spiritual comfort taking the place of religions. Under emotional stress people go for maudling sentimentalities, hence they draw spiritual strength and comfort from this nebulous something which supposedly has super and natural powers, namely religion. Therefore Forgiveness, from our Communist point of view, is a cursed spoiler.
Islam is less difficult to contend with because it is comparatively simplistic in composition and rigid in thought. As a religious influence, it is less important for many years to come. What is the urgent problem is that we must find ways and means to either deal with, neutralize or expose Judeo-Christian thought as a phony, a bogus belief designed to make people resign to their fates in life. Politically, Judeo-Christianity is dangerous because it governs much of the Western World and permeates the two great imperialist anti-communist citadels, namely, the British Empire and the United States of America.
We must also work to extinguish the competitive instinct as well as the incentive bribery scheme in the capitalist world. We must terminate the highly industrialized and complex economic swindle systems of banks, factoring institutions, savings and loans associations, stock and commodity exchanges, postal savings, and turn back to the street bazaars. This determination may sound drastic backwardation, but we think it is necessary to administer a strong purgative to a capitalist society in order to cleanse the inside of the putrid body polity of a democracy. We believe that capitalism in a democracy as in America is only encouraging people on to the road of more sinister cupidity, and greater dishonesty.
Difficulties in Europe
We of the Communist Party in Russia now realize that after the elan of the short-lived Hungarian Communist experience of Bela Kun and the Spartacus League in Germany - and indeed Germany even before World War I was more advanced in Socialist thinking than all of Europe and America - Germany was regarded as the fountainhead of Socialist thinking and Russia was the most backward. Still it is extremely difficult for Communism to come within the next 50 or 75 years in Europe, especially in France and England; more so in France because of Gallic characteristics, unless due to some presently unseen turmoil or chance revolution. Marx was correct in gauging England's ripeness for Communism not only because of her sweat shops and general conditions of despair of the working class, but because a huge number of acreages in Great Britain is owned by the landed class - the aristocracy - who are very caste conscious as well as land conscious, while property ownership instinct is not strong among the proletariat or with the large blue-collar class in England. Ironically, England should have been fertile ground for Communism except that the characteristics of the people and the confluence of events dictated otherwise. The total physical exhaustion and the crushing spiritual defeat followed by despair suffered by us in World War I and the extremely active cellular Communist Party within the country and Lenin's clarion call of hope made us the first country to turn to Communism. In more ways than one Russia has become the pioneer in actual practice as well as the laboratory of the world for Marxian pragmatics.
In our giving cognizance of the difficulty of communizing the two staying bulwarks of England and France in Europe, we have devised seemingly innocuous yet potent measures to be instituted as opportunities afford themselves in the governments and societies of those countries. Through our Socialist and Liberal friends we have used the legislative route - Parliament - to turn the countries in the direction we wish them to go by encouraging more socialistic legislation with spend, spend, spend as the motto. This would enable the national economic policy of the country to be acclimated to deficit spending, thus benefitting the masses of people who would not have benefitted otherwise. True it will make them more dependent on handouts but it will achieve three cardinal purposes: (1) By diluting the money we are taking away money from the rich and giving it to the poor; (2) By creating inflation, we create a climate favorable to our goal; (3) By accustoming the people to look to the government for solutions and not depend on their own initiative - the Horatio Alger complex, we accustom them to the use of government as a crutch.
Liberal contradictions
In the private sector, again wherever possible, we encourage and help in the proliferation and growth of trade or workers' unions wherever we can. These need not be Communist affiliated or Communist motivated nor need the union officials feel beholden to us for our help. We encourage these organizations to demand higher and even higher wages and peripheral benefits and fewer and fewer working hours which is always welcome to all workers. We help them financially sub-rosa whenever we can so that they could strike and go on striking.
Throughout the ages and from our experience and associations with the Liberals around the world, we find that by and large because of their manifold ideas vectored in whichever direction, they cannot or will not follow a goal to a logical end. Call them fertile of mind, if you will, but having so many ideas they become self-contradictory in their thinking and the many goals they wish to achieve so that they are automatically and mutually self-destructing. Therefore in training our cadre we forewarn them of Liberal foibles.
Furthermore, Liberal intellectuals have the fatal desire to individually outshine their confreres. They will irrepressibly carp, cavil, criticize, in a hair-splitting manner their comrades and associates. Yet more probably than not, they will miss the broad sweep of the momentous while entangled in niggling picayunes of irrelevance. In such a situation they invariably offer no contribution to a cause, let alone a constructive and workable solution.
Liberals can be clever
We have also found that in our cooperation with Liberals all over the world they distort or diminish their effectiveness to a cause since they oftentimes in the spur of the moment wish to add to or subtract from a preagreed plan of operation. Yet let it not be misunderstood for a moment that Liberals are all clumsy blunderers and maladroits. In fact they are often very clever and ingenious; certainly they are necessary forward troops attired in camouflage to achieving success in world revolution. They are all-important, too, in (1) laying the groundwork, and (2) clearing the minefields, so to speak, and (3) generally softening up resistance and prejudice against Communism. In the words of Lenin, Socialism is impossible without democracy. In other words, Liberalism must be made the spearhead for Communism. Witness again what Martov, Kerensky, the Liberals, the Mensheviks et al did for us in the initial stages of completion of our Revolution internally in 1917. We are strongly convinced that the Liberals of the world are and will continue to be useful and even of greater use to us in the evolvement of World Revolution. Personally I (Borodin speaking) find them most attractive in their Hamlet-like equivocations and provocative intellectual gymnastics. I do not regard them as only good for the "elegant sneers" as most Leninists do.
Now the pursuivant question is: What follows after stating Communism's goal of World Revolution? The answer is action, fomenting first, discontent, cleavages in thought whenever and wherever opportunity affords. This is to be followed by small and large social upsets, demonstrations and the spreading of dissatisfaction and dissension on a nation-wide scale. This sounds futile and nihilistic, but it must be constantly realized that revolution means to revolute, to turn the wheel 360 degrees around, and anything that revolves 360 degrees to travel all the way from its original point of departure is by its very nature drastic. Being thoroughly drastic, it involves the purging of the whole body politic as well as whole society and its various stratum from top to bottom. Regrettable and paradoxical as it may seem, CHAOS is the key to revolution. For chaos brings purification and it is through chaos, the cleaning and rinsing processes, that Marxism-Leninism can bring order and sanity into society - a self-purification process. In other words, to build anew the new order in society requires a freedom to destruct, unfettered by past fetishes of stultifying mores and referrals to old traditionalism. The past is to be obliterated to make Russia a nation not of Nitzschean Supermen, but of Russian Communist Supermen. While remoulding our own country we will turn evangels in the world either through sending out our missionaries to preach the Communist Gospel, by making converts in the indigenous countries or by getting their people to come to Russia to be educated. This is not to say that we do not realize that our missionaries and converts of the first generation are all men of impeccable quality, zeal or convictions, but we plan to quickly improve with time. Secondly, we are not unaware that human nature, being ingrained with thousands of years of selfishness, avarice and conceptualized ways of thinking with their stunted petrified modus operandi, is all so antithetical to Communism. As the saying goes, Rome was not built in a day, and it will be far from easy to remould human nature, but we shall have all the courage and patience needed to guarantee that all humanity will turn into a Civitas Communismus - and that it will not turn into an Augustinian Civitas Dei - City of God (sic!) - which has proved to be representative of privileges for the comparative few and the oppression of imperialism to the conquered!
Human weaknesses
The next question that will surely come to mind is: How to achieve the Communist Nirvana on Earth? We must correct human weaknesses. They are: (1) gullibility, (2) emotionalism - at the wrong time or on the wrong issues, (3) apathy, (4) moral and/or physical cowardice, (5) excitement-seeking syndrome, (6) griping and dissatisfaction, (7) vain self-gratification, (8) competitive cruelty, (9) greed and intrigue, (10) jealousy, (11) a desire to belong to the old order of things, (12) insecurity and anxiety, (13) a need of recognition of every success, and (14) vacillation. These are human instincts which are inborn and have been fostered by circumstances to varying degrees in all civilizations, cultures and subcultures. These frailties exist even among the cannibals and headhunters in the remotest corners and jungles of the world. With these parameters of insights, we can correct these human deviations through Communism. Of these frailties, amazingly enough, the Intellectuals are the worst offenders to a high degree. However, in a larger sense, it must be said of Intellectuals, once they are committed to us, 99 per cent stay committed for the very good reason that they are too proud or too intellectually fearful to admit that they want to backtrack or that they were "intellectually bought" by Communism. The most obvious attribute among the other attributes of an Intellectual is his heavy investment in his own ego. The fact that he, an Intellectual, had come to espouse a faulty idea, let alone a dynamic doctrine such as Marxism, without going through a prolonged process of arduous and weighty thinking, would be tantamount to accusing him of most heinous crime of being a fake, a numbskull, or a confused intellectual nonentity. For him to own up to his mistake would be almost as agonizing as a tortured death itself. It is the gravest insult with which one could possibly accuse an Intellectual or a self-anointed Intellectual. It is also the cause of many a hatredladen terrible denunciation and heated polemics that Intellectuals are embroiled in interminably. It poisons the air and engenders such venom which ironically oftentimes redounds to our advantage. It is interesting to watch on the sidelines the bulldog-like never-let-go fights with never-ending vituperations and insolent reciprocating accusations between two Intellectuals.
Through the technique of propaganda first used to great advantage by the religions of the world, especially by the Catholic Church - the Congregation of Propaganda - from which came the best features we adopted eclectically for our use, we honed our own propaganda machinery accordingly. Propaganda, like bread or rice, serves the need of the people who throughout history want to be guided, solaced and led by the hand. We and we alone provide these needs. And it is in a democracy where free speech abounds that intellectualism flowers best with its many hues and subtle shadings and layers of nuances which are mostly self-serving or self-negating in their own circle, ideas which cancel out other ideas. In the meeting and melding with other streams of ideas that come splattering down helter-skelter into the torrents of the intellectual river, theirs are lost into a sea of ideological confusion even before reaching the end of their intellectual journey. As for example, after an attempt was made on Lenin's life on August 30, 1918, by a socialist revolutionary, Dora Kaplan, we used the opportunity to systematically ferret out and clean up sizable numbers of intellectuals and bourgeois of all types. Unfortunately, it was misunderstood and referred to abroad as the "reign of terror." From our point of view it was to serve notice to the whole world that this was necessary in order to stem all opposition to the work that Lenin and our comrades were accomplishing for Russia and laid out for the world.
To achieve the greatest possible dissemination of our ideology, we have to rely on the news media of the world. We gradually channel our sympathizers to think our way by first putting up with their inaccurate thinking, idiosyncracies and complexes, and then swiftly but gently through persuasion, quid pro quos, lead them to work with us for the common cause. We have observed happily that gradually the mass media of the press and the radio in Europe and in the United States are beginning to come around and become "us oriented." Some are even more openly radical, which is as it should be. But as Communists, what we must always beware of is when they start protecting their own pet little interests and turf. They often defend them with fierce rabidity, tooth and nail. This is taboo with us because it brings out to the fore selfish interest and it develops into personal vendettas, losing sight of the great issues at stake. We do not want them to be feuding within our discipline. As to the postulate that basically most Intellectuals have an innate sense of intellectual honesty, we are on very moot ground.