The animal that we call Communist is an automaton subject to the manipulation of his party. A man may be a perfectly honest and respectable soul before he becomes a Communist, but once he joins the Communist Party, he is no longer a normal human being, still less a free agent. For his actions and speeches are then governed by the party, and he has to behave in strict accordance with the party line. Henceforth, he will speak like a maniac in a lingo compounded of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and other lesser luminaries in the Communist firmament. He will show no concern for the truth unless the truth happens to coincide with the party line, which it seldom does.
So when he speaks, he speaks in generalities that have the semblance of truths, half-truths or outright falsehood, with the intention to confuse or mislead, or in direct antithesis to what he knows to be true, When he has to prevaricate or to tell the blackest lie, he has no choice but to toe the party line.
Before we go any further, it may be asked why anyone should let himself be dominated by his party. What made him join it in the first place? Why does he not break away after he has found out what he is in for? The fact is that he himself may be a victim of illusion or deception. Or, being a fanatic believer in the Communist ideology, he can see no evil in his party. Or he may have been too deeply involved to extricate himself.
Innumerable cells and headquarters of the Communist Party have been planted all over the world. But one and all, they are subject to control by the Kremlin. Without exception, they work against the interests of the country in which they are located. In some Asiatic countries, they make a pretense of fighting against colonialism, while in effect trying to replace colonialism with Russian totalitarianism. In most other countries, they do not even make such a pretense. There the party frankly works for the downfall of the existing government and paves the way for Russian domination. This being the case, it is to be expected that, in the evaluation of local politics and personalities or of world events, the Communist Party has a standard of its own, and that such a standard may be directly opposed to the views of the local population, a standard that is nearly always detrimental to the national interests of the country in which the party is located. Yet the propaganda line for the Communist Party everywhere is that it is working for the interests of that country and no other. This can be accomplished by twisting the facts. Therefore, the Communists have no qualms about calling black white and darkness light, as they frequently do.
So when the Communists praise a man and call him a progressive or a liberal thinker, one can take it that the man in question is a fellow-traveler, or a Communist working under cover. For the Communists will not build up a man without being convinced that he is working for their interests. On the other hand, when violent charges are brought against a man, when he is called a "running dog of Wall Street," a warmonger, or worse names, he is usually a patriot of the first water.
Among the expressions most frequently used by the Communists are those derived from or compounded with the word "people". There are "the people's republic", "the people's government", "the people's democracy", "the democratic front", etc. This constant play on the word people does not mean that the Communists are preoccupied with the interests of the people. For in all Communist countries, the only manifestation of popular will is when the people subscribe blindly to what their Communist taskmasters have asked them to support. Everyone is supposed to cast a ballot in favor of the Communists. Those who dare to do otherwise will be eliminated. Thus a people's republic is an exact antithesis of what a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" should be. It is a police state run by an oligarchy of Communists in total disregard of the wishes of the people.
The trials as conducted by the so-called "people's courts" on the Chinese mainland illustrate what a mockery the Communists have made of popular will. These trials serve a multiplicity of purposes for the Communists, among which are (1) dramatization of their action and propagation of Communism, (2) seizure and confiscation of the victim's property, (3) eradication of hostile elements, (4) implication of the masses in a crime which would be punishable by the Government on the latter's return.
At such trials, the people present are no more masters of themselves than are the characters in a puppet show. People living within many miles around the scene are required to attend. When one is asked by the Communists to attend a trial, one drops whatever one is doing and simply has to go. It works against one's interests to excuse oneself from such meetings. That also goes for women and children.
Let us suppose that a landlord is being put on trial. When one arrives on the scene, one gathers the impression that some festival is being celebrated. The whole place is decorated with flags and slogans. Schoolboys and girls rend the air with songs. The man to be tried is forced to kneel in front of the people. The presiding Communist will then rise and say that it has been brought to his attention that so and so has been a landlord and has worked against the interests of the people. "Have you any charges to prefer against him"? he asks. An agitator planted in the crowd by the Communists will jump to his feet and shout in the most vehement language that so and so has been cheating the state. He owns 100 mow (1 mow equivalent to 1/6 acre) of land, but he has been paying taxes for only 40 mow. If the accused denies the charge, he will be shouted down by the crowd, whereupon the presiding Communist will pronounce that so and so owes the state 3,000 piculs of rice for unpaid land tax of the last twenty years. This amount is arrived at by figuring what the man should have paid long before the Communists came. No one would dare to question the fairness of the sentence. More charges are inevitably brought against the defendant, but, as likely as not, they are dismissed by the Communist presiding. He realizes only too well that the fine already imposed is sufficient to ruin the man financially. Further punishment is unnecessary until he has paid up. The defendant, to his great surprise, is set free after being told to pay up, if he values his life and the lives of his family.
As is to be expected, he would move heaven and earth to raise the required amount of grain. After he has paid up, he begins to congratulate himself and tries to adjust himself to his reduced circumstances. But soon the Communists would take him before another people's court. This time, if they believe that he still has something salted away, or if they believe some of his rich relations can help, they will clap another heavy fine on him, for they will not do away with him until they have wrung him dry. But if they are convinced that he has coughed up his last cent, some old hag will come up and tell the crowd that while she was working in the defendant's family fifteen years ago, she was attacked by him. As little evidence is needed, all sorts of fancy charges are stacked up against the man. According to "popular will," he is sentenced to death and all his earthly possessions are confiscated.
For the first few times, this kind of trial may appear to be a genuine expression of public indignation against certain individuals. But, sooner or later, the people will find that ridiculous charges are brought against the most respected and beloved persons in their village. And they will regret, when it is too late, that they have unwittingly participated in the crimes of the Communists against innocent people. They will also find that the victims of these trials are not only landlords but include anyone that has incurred the displeasure of the Communists.
At these trials, one does not even have the freedom of silence, for the Communists have ways of forcing people to say what they want them to say. Oftentimes, one is faced with the dilemma of whether to denounce a victim he knows to be innocent, or of being regarded as a reactionary. Whatever choice he makes, he is in danger of losing either his conscience or his life.
This is a good sample of what the Communists mean by democracy. After a farcical trial of this nature, during which the victim is reviled and tortured under the direction of the presiding Communist, the latter will declare that the victim has been condemned by the people, which is of course a barefaced lie and an insult to human intelligence.
The word "people" is not the only one the Communists have abused. Such terms as "democracy", "universal suffrage" and "association" mean one thing for us and quite another for the Communists. Take for instance the associations. In the Communist world, there is no such thing as a voluntary association. All societies and associations are organized under the auspices of the authorities. Or else they must secure the specific approval of the authorities and operate under strict supervision. In either case, they work as a sort of agency for the Communist regime. Branches of the Farmers Association, for instance, represent the regime in the assessment of farm taxes, the requisition of grains, the impeachment aned trial for the infraction of rules, and the mobilization of man- and animal-power.
Another much abused word is "peace". By their repetition ad nauseam of this word, by the pains they take in making gestures of working for peace, Communists apparently hope to make us believe that they are the champions of world peace. Yet the peace they have in mind bears no resemblance to our conception of the word. What they want is Soviet Russia's domination of the whole world. This is what they picture in their minds every time they mention peace. This is what they mean in their peace campaigns, including the so-called Stockholm Peace Appeal. In places where Communist influence predominates, if anyone has the fortitude to refuse putting his signature to the appeal, he will be dubbed a warmonger, or a running dog of Wall Street capitalists - a crime meriting death or the labor camp in the eyes of the Communists.
The Communists in China and other parts of Asia have made much capital of their "land reform" program. Genuine reforms of course are something for the betterment of the livelihood of the people. In Asia, nobody stands to gain from the "reforms" sponsored by the Communists. The Communist motive is not the betterment of livelihood, but the mass impoverishment and enslavement of the farming population. It taxes one's credulity to think that the Communists would want to impoverish an entire population so that each individual will have to undertake the work assigned to him by his Communist masters in order to make a living. But it is quite in keeping with the Communist tradition. The pattern was set by the Russians after the October Revolution when innumerable kulaks were dispossessed and massacred, and when what little land that was given to the landless peasants was finally taken away from them to be incorporated into state farms, where the peasants were compelled to work as serfs.
The characteristic feature of such a program is the dispossession and elimination of the landed gentry without giving counter-balancing benefits to the peasants. On the Chinese mainland, the peasants are each given a tiny plot of land from which it will be difficult to eke out a bare subsistence under the most favorable conditions. But the heavy taxes and compulsory "contributions" exacted by the Communists constitute even a heavier burden than the obligations imposed upon them by the most avaricious landlords. As a result, they have to live on grass, leaves, and the bark of trees in order to turn in the quota of grain exacted by the Communist masters. Writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Hongkong, Mr. Hsu Fu-kwan gives the following moving description of the poor peasants caught in the tentacles of the Communist land reform program:*
"The Chinese Communists' land reforms are carried through by means of several important steps, viz., requisition of food, liquidation of local bosses, reduction of rents, and disgorging of rents. When any district or region has undergone the process of food-requisition, all inhabitants of the place have been rendered stark poor. This has the double effect of both softening any possible future resistance and concentrating all available wealth in the hands of the Communists, so that nothing might actually be gained by the poor men when they come to liquidate the local bosses, reduce the landlord's rent, and force him to disgorge whatever rent he has collected in former years. For it must be realized that all these measures are not meant to give economic compensation to the poor, but to serve as so many items in the Communist program of political struggle. In the midst of these struggles the Communist controlled local riff-raff will give vent to their lowest instincts and heap insults and tortures on their victims until all sense of the dignity of man is destroyed and man is degraded to the level of the beasts. The only material benefits which the riff-raff obtain as a reward for their inhumanity are the odds and ends of a village economy which, at the time of the food requisition, the Communists did not care to carry away for their clumsiness. At the end of such struggles those deep-rooted elements which the Communists regard as their enemies, together with the worth and dignity of man, are exterminated, and everybody becomes part of the social flotsam. But in order to give fixity to their physical being, each of the survivors is allotted, on the principle of leveling-down, a small piece of land of equal size for him to till. They are henceforth identified with their little lots which hang around their necks, so to speak, like a heavy yoke. Sitting astride these beasts of burden, for such they have become, there are the rural administrative agencies composed of pro-Communist elements, the Farmers' Union whose sole function is to look after political struggles, the people's guards armed with a variety of weapons, the children's corps whose little members were originally as innocent as any other children but are now trained by the Communists to become spies on their elders, the all-controlling and all-dominating Communists and Communist organizations, millions of the regular Red Army, security forces, prisons, and concentration camps. This gigantic structure of the Chinese Communist hierarchy is comparable only to the Soviet Russian system, from which, indeed, it is slavishly copied."
All this misery is quite unnecessary in view of the fact that the land problem in China is not impossible of solution. There is usury and there are high rents. But these are not ills that cannot be cured by wise legislation and effective state intervention.
Nor is the evil of land ownership as dark as it is painted by the Communists. For in China there is a characteristic absence of large estates in the western sense of the word. A farm of 100 mow (less than 17 acres) would he considered a fair-sized holding. For centuries the Chinese people have been buying farms as a means of safeguarding their earnings. Land, like gold and silver, was a medium of exchange, something everybody wanted to buy against rainy days. So when the Communists declared war on the landlords, they were, in effect, trying to eliminate at least one-tenth of the population. As China's entire population is estimated at 450,000,000, the land reform of the Communists would call for the elimination of at least 45,000,000 people whose only misdeed is probably no more than that of having spent part of their hard-earned money for the purchase of land, in the permanence and indestructibility of which they and their forefathers had the greatest confidence. After having liquidated large numbers of landlords, the Chinese Communists began to realize the immensity of the task of massacring all the landlords. So they had to discontinue the practice, though the landlords' property is still subject to confiscation. There is, however, nothing to prevent the Communists from eliminating the dispossessed landowners through other pretexts. Therefore, the land reform instituted by the Communists in China, as elsewhere, is a monstrous crime. Let no one, through his ignorance or stupidity, help to glorify this program. Let no one with self-respect allow Communist sympathizers to insult his intelligence by telling him the wonders brought about by the Communist land reform. To adopt any attitude other than that of downright condemnation will be tantamount to condonation of the genocidal acts of the Communists.
The language the Communists employ is as offensive as their vocabulary is deceptive. The Russians, like their Asiatic neighbors, know the advantage of using coarse language in any argument. The Asiatics who are mild by nature would much rather wag their tongues than go into fistfights with their enemy to right a wrong. Therefore, the accuser is usually the aggrieved party, and the degree of the wrong he has suffered at the hands of his enemy is indicated by the vehemence of the language he uses in his accusations.
The Russians have learned well from their Asiatic neighbors. In propaganda, in the conference room, and in international negotiations, they will indulge in the most vitriolic diatribes against their opponents - often for reasons best known to themselves. To striped-pants diplomats of non-Communist countries, they sound like savages. But to many people in the Far East, they have a certain appeal. To these people, they sound as if they are paragons of virtue, or else how can they have so much grievance to ventilate?
The representatives of the satellite countries have proved themselves apt pupils. In any international convention, they never fail to ape their masters in heaping abuses and insults on delegates from non-Communist countries, who have no choice but to sit by the side-line as the Communist delegates under the leadership of the Russians ride roughshod through the convention hall.
In a world that is divided into two camps, it is important that those fighting against Communism should know what their opponents are doing so that they may take appropriate counter-measures. It is hoped that the present article will contribute to such an understanding and help the Free World to map out the necessary counter-measures.
*The Far Eastern Economic Review, Hongkong January 11, 1951