“To Overthrow the World”- Woke, “Antifascist” Monsters.
Posted by Ed Folsom, February 16, 2025.
“Look, let me tell you something. I’ll take a bit of umbrage here. I’ll speak on behalf of my colleagues. I think I can say we are all willing to work with anyone who’s serious about doing the work of censoring the American people and advancing progress. But they are not serious.”
That was U.S. Congressperson Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) at a recent anti-Trump/resistance rally (Oh, please do click the link, and watch and hear for yourself). How difficult it must be for this proud member of The Squad to work with anyone who isn’t also serious about censoring the American people and moving them along History’s arc of inevitable progress. It must be tough to abide, especially having just come off American Wokeism’s recent high-water mark of censorship and auto-totalitarian control between 2020 and 2023.
Pressley’s remarks are timely for me, having only very recently escaped from that same period of historical madness and having recently finished reading “To Overthrow the World – The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism,” by Bard College history professor Sean McMeekin. McMeekin traces the roots of totalitarian-Socialism and its radical-egalitarian-utopian ideal, from Christianity to Thomas Moore’s “Utopia,” to the Protestant Reformation, to Rousseau, to Robespierre and the Jacobins, to Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, to the Paris Commune, to Marx and the Communist International, to the Bolsheviks and the Socialist European East Bloc and Cuba, to Mao, to Pol Pot, and to modern day China.
It should be required reading for all the kids who are bathed in gauzy ideas of what Socialism is these days. Woke-ists and other leftists have managed to create the impression that Hitler is history’s only significant bad guy and that everything that opposes “fascism” is, by that opposition, good. McMeekin’s recounting of Communism’s history is a strong reminder that the great Communist enforcers of Socialism have used fascism as their foil for a very long time. It has given them a pass on their own perpetration of human misery and mass murder — as long as you’re “antifascist” you must be one of the good guys. Meanwhile, everything that impedes the inevitable advancement of Socialism along History’s arc of progress must be totally eliminated, to make way for the Kingdom of Socialism on earth.
Socialism under Communism in the USSR and East Bloc.
As McMeekin reminds us, within months of taking control of Russia in 1917, the Bolsheviks launched their Red Terror campaign, murdering 15,000 enemies of Socialism in the first two months alone and sending thousands more to concentration camps. Ten years later, in 1927, Stalin ordered the arrest of 2,687,000 people who were engaged in private economic trade and shipped them off to serve as slave labor in his network of forced-labor camps, the Gulag system. These “NEP men” had already served their purpose, breathing some life back into the Russian economy under the so-called New Economic Program (NEP) after the initial Bolshevik economic campaign of “War Communism” and its centralized economic planning caused the economy to collapse into total ruin and famine between 1919 and 1922.
Later, on December 27, 1929, Stalin issued a call for “the eradication of all kulak tendencies and the elimination of the kulaks as a class.” The “kulaks” Stalin targeted were small-landholder farmers. During the collectivization drive of 1930 and 1931, the Soviets arrested 1,803,392 “kulaks” and “kulak-collaborators,” shipping the ones they didn’t summarily shoot to forced labor camps. They seized the “kulak” land. They seized ” kulak” grain. They shipped the grain out of the countryside to feed people in the cities, to feed slave laborers in the Gulag system, and to pay for technology and materials imported from outside the Soviet Union. The result was the 1932-1933 famine known as the Holodomor – the Terror Famine – in which 3 to 4 million peasants were starved to death, with Ukraine especially hard-hit.
Later still, during Stalin’s Great Terror of 1936-1938, groups including Poles, Germans, and Koreans were targeted for arrest, execution, and deportation to labor camps. In one such operation alone, the Soviets arrested 144,000 Poles. They executed 110,000 of them. Soviet records show that between 1937 and 1938 they executed 681,692 people for political crimes, 625,483 of whom were targeted either because of their nationality or because they were “kulaks.” The “kulaks” were primarily Ukrainians. Some 500,000 to 600,000 Jews were also executed along with main architects of the Great Terror, Yagoda, K.V. Pauker, and A.A. Slutsky, who were themselves Jews, as the revolution rolled along, eating its own.
As McMeekin relates:
“In a damning verdict on the first decade of Stalin’s Communist ‘offensive’ and a crude gauge of its lethality, the Soviet census of 1937 came in at 162 million people, 15 million lower than expected. With black humor, Stalin had the census board arrested for ‘treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR.'”
Eventually, the summary executions died down in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), but the repression in the USSR and in its East Bloc satellites continued until Socialism finally collapsed there in 1990-1991. Always and everywhere that Communism’s Socialism has ruled, it has done so by coercion, using a pervasive surveillance state to spy, to censor, and to strictly control the means of mass communication, as it seeks to root out and destroy everything about the old order and to impose a radically new one.
Socialism under Communism in China.
In China, Mao engineered the Great Leap Forward, a forced-labor and industrialization campaign that ran from 1958 to 1962. Mao realized that he needed to import technology and materials to “build socialism,” so he ramped up exports of grain, rice, pork, and nuts to raise the necessary funds, leaving the Chinese people to starve to death. In 1988, the Chinese government admitted that 20 million people died from the resulting famine. Authoritative Chinese researchers have estimated excess deaths during the Great Leap Forward from a low of 32 million to a high of 43 to 46 million.
As McMeekin recounts, later in the 1960’s Mao unleashed the Great Proletarian Chinese Cultural Revolution, turning loose a virtual army of “Red Guards” comprised of millions of school children and teenagers, to “‘strike down all power-holders walking the capitalist road, all bourgeois rightists, all freaks and monsters’ and to ‘destroy all old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes.’” Armed with the ideology of Mao’s Little Red Book, these kids were turned loose to torture and murder anyone who represented the “four olds.” McMeekin reports that the death toll from the Cultural Revolution is estimated at 1.5 to 2 million. Before the Cultural Revolution ended, some 17 million Chinese urbanites were deported to the countryside for reeducation through forced labor.
Communism in Democratic Kampuchea.
In the 1970’s Pol Pot’s Communist Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and named the new nation, “Democratic Kampuchea.” Using an army of children as young as 13 or 14, they drove the residents out of Phnom Penh and other urban areas into the countryside. Roughly half the country’s population of 7 million people were marched off to jungles and rice paddies for forced labor. Vast numbers were beaten to death and drowned. McMeekin tells us the scholarly consensus is that 1 to 2 million people were killed in this campaign to build “the perfect communist country.” As McMeekin puts it:
“What was singular in Cambodia was the all-encompassing ‘year zero’ ambition of the Khmer Rouge. Here Communism was reduced to its essentials, as a negation of everything existing, a war of the young on the old, a social leveling of society down to equality in abject poverty and misery.”
McMeekin sees the West moving toward a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist governance and social life.
Interestingly, it was McMeekin’s experience during “the height of the COVID-19 lockdown” and a discussion that he had at that time with an English historian, that caused him to write his book. McMeekin writes, “I am as astonished today as I was then that our two countries—Nick is English—had so easily and thoroughly surrendered our vaunted ‘Anglo Saxon’ freedoms dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215.” McMeekin observes:
“After heady moments in 1989 and 1991 when it appeared that the fall of Communism would usher in an era of greater civil liberties and freedoms worldwide, most of the Western world is now converging instead on a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist governance and social life. Private (or semi-private) social media and other tech companies are harnessed by the state to track, monitor, censor, and control private communications, speech, and political activity, mostly behind the scenes, although with periodic high-profile crackdowns to scare would-be dissidents into compliance. The CCP’s social credit system, which sees those who fall afoul of the government or social media consensus denied access to schooling, travel, banking, or credit, has already been applied to the ‘COVID unvaccinated’ across the Western world, along with other dissidents. Such restrictions have now begun to extend into the banking system in the West. Funds raised to feed Canadian truckers participating in an outdoor winter protest against COVID vaccine mandates in early 2022, for example, were frozen by Canadian authorities in early 2022. When former Brexit Party chairman and European Parliament member Nigel Farage faced closure of his bank accounts, or “debanking,” in the summer of 2023, he believed it was because of his political views. Similar crackdowns affected British and American journalists critical of the West’s Ukraine policy in 2023.”
…
“Rather than recoiling in horror from the souped-up Communist surveillance state that the US trade policy has helped facilitate, the United States and its allies have instead been “Sino-formed” themselves…With the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020-2022, the model of Communist statist surveillance crashed into Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as once inviolable Western freedoms—of movement, travel, and association, of speech and robust debate over controversial public policies—were abandoned, one by one. Even ‘social distancing,’ the now much-mocked craze of 2020—which, by making it illegal for humans to sit or congregate closer than six feet (in the United States) or one meter (most of Europe), shut down public schools and all but destroyed social industries, from cinemas, concert halls, and theaters to churches, gyms, restaurants, and nightclubs—was a CCP import… ‘[S]ocial distancing lockdown’…originally a military term meaning ‘blockade’ or ‘sealing off’…was a Chinese Communist policy imposed in 2002-2003 in response to outbreaks of avian flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). It was quietly, owing to CCP influence, incorporated into pandemic guidelines by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2004, reversing decades of progressively more humane—and scientifically sound—policies on mitigating disease outbreaks.”
You should make no mistake about the political leanings of the self-declared “anti-fascists” who insisted on this.
And Now?
At this moment, the statist, leftist control freaks who are hell-bent on uprooting all the old stuff and enforcing compliance with the Woke-ist new have been dealt a setback. But they will never go away, and you can bet that they will always denounce everything standing in their way as some version of “fascist.” They’ve been doing it since the days of V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin. It’s just who they are. In the world of leftism, calling everything standing in their way “fascist” means they are the good and the righteous, battling the only real evil—fascist evil—along the arc of History. But the road to their utopian end will look just as much like hell as it has every other time and in every other place they’ve ever been in control. Of course, to suggest out loud what they are up to is apt to get you branded a “conspiracy theorist,” which brings me to something else that McMeekin recounts on his trip through Communism’s Socialism as it ever actually existed.
In early 1917, World War I raged on and V.I. Lenin was living in Switzerland. The Germans were engaged in a two-front war, battling Russia on the Eastern Front. The Germans wanted to use the Bolshevik, Lenin, to stir up antiwar sentiment inside Russia and weaken the Russian foe, so they gave him passage through Germany, toward Finland and ultimately Russia, on a train. Once Lenin was back inside Russia, the Germans provided him with funds equivalent to $12.5 million in today’s dollars, to buy a private printing press so he could pump out antiwar propaganda. While the Germans expected Lenin’s antiwar propaganda to undermine the Russian population’s support for the war, Lenin had his own plan. Lenin hoped to topple the tsarist government and bring about a proletarian dictatorship, by setting off a series of civil wars inside Russia that would eventually lead to wars between “Communist” states and “capitalist-imperialist” states. This would advance Marx’s prophesy of a dialectic struggle inevitably leading to world Socialism/Communism.
These things actually happened. The Germans conspired to insert Lenin inside Russia to weaken Russian war resolve, and Lenin conspired to use the opportunity to set Russia and then the world on the Marxist path to Socialism/Communism through dialectic struggle (war). Germany’s actions and intentions are not a conspiracy theory. Lenin’s actions and intentions are not a conspiracy theory. And yet, if you were to identify any similar scheme at play in politics these days, the scheme’s perpetrators would immediately cause you to be denounced as a “conspiracy theorist” and have you marginalized as a nut. In March of 1918, Germany’s wish was fulfilled when Russia withdrew from World War I, and with the Bolsheviks in power in Russia one of humanity’s great nightmares–Communism’s Socialism in practice–was just beginning.
Many of the world’s worst monsters are “antifascist,” leftist monsters. Over the past several years, many of our present-day leftist would-be-great monsters, and their all-too-willing collaborators among us, were emboldened to step out and bare their teeth. It really helped clarify things.
