THE TRAGEDY OF THE IDIOTES: Keywords: Communism in America, double-speak, Max Eastman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mises, Hayek, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, The Great Purge, Soviet Revolution, John "Jack" Reed.

Vintage poster of Lenin as leader of the Soviet Revolution

THE TRAGEDY OF THE IDIOTES

A meditation about the new rise of communism

By Xuan Quen Santos

 

“Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that in our endeavor

consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals

 we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite

 of what we have been striving for.”

 

 “The Road to Serfdom” (1944), Friedrich A. von Hayek 

 

THE YOUNG MOBS ARE OUT

Their slogan tells it all: “It is out time!”. They self-identify as DSA, Democratic Socialists of America. Has the time come to tear down the republic, and throw away our freedoms to implant communism through the front door of the electoral process?

Demonstration in New York in 2025

Critics tell me what is happening is only a trend to a better managed middle-way led by reasonable government experts who will curb the excesses of capitalism by re-directing the private economies of the people towards more social justice with the guidance of data-driven science. Compromise, reasonable, experts, social justice, driven by science… All the proper words that have been introduced by the experts in language manipulation for us to believe in the big lie that has cost the lives of more than 200 million people during the past two centuries.

More honest but naïve political agitators call this socialism. Many labels have appeared to mask what it really means. Among them Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, and Socialist Market Economy. A century before was called Progressivism and the Labor Movement.

During the last two decades, socialists have again come out from the dark corners of the college watering holes. From pretending to be community organizers they have taken their masks off and admit they are political agitators. It coincides with the biggest decline in educational standards at all levels, led by the formerly respectable Ivy League centers of academic snobbery. The useful idiots are out led by influencers on Tik Tok. To my dismay, they have been able to make a crack, not just a dent, on public opinion only because the language used for political discourse has been altered. It is a plan. I use the word “idiots” as in the classical Greek idiōtēs, meaning those who participate voting irresponsibly in total ignorance and may even exchange their votes for a pittance. The adjective “useful” was added by Lenin who used the Russian word for “simpletons” (prostaki). Other communist leaders used the word “innocent” meaning naïve or sucker in American English. The tragedy is that many of the young minds invested in this futile but dangerous experiment are the most brilliant but wasted intellectuals of their generation.

DOUBLE-SPEAK AT PLAY

Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), the Fabian socialist “Father of Double-speak” who himself wore a mask as George Orwell, said it clearly: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give appearance of solidity to pure wind” (Politics and the English Language, 1946). He was the expert. He had been an ardent supporter of Soviet communism after WW I until he saw and experienced the violence and brutality of its actual operation. Young Americans were also lured into the political activism that the Soviet October Revolution of 1917 invited. You are likely familiar with the names of Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck. Are you aware of their dedication to spread socialism through their writings?

Cover of The Masses monthly magazine of
Communist propaganda

You may not be familiar with Max Eastman, close friend of most of the ones just listed, called by many in his early days “a journalist of journalists”. He was an active participant in many public causes, such as the founding of the ACLU and a supporter of women’s rights. He was editor of the communist propaganda magazines “The Masses” and “The Liberator”. As editor, he sent his close friend John “Jack” Reed to report about the Soviet Revolution. Reed wrote about it in his book “Ten Days That Shook the World” (1919) that spread like a firestorm. He even joined the Red Guards and took arms in 1918. He had hoped for a similar communist revolution in the United States, and was one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party of America. Reed died of Typhus in Moscow two years later, like the fleas and lice that contaminated him. His short revolutionary life was fantasized in Warren Beatty's communist propaganda movie “REDS (1981); it is the “heroic” story of one American idiote as portrayed by another three generations later. Eastman also joined the revolution after Reed died, but he lived a long life of contradictions.

Cover of the book financed by THE MASSES

Near the end of the XIX century, the re-writing of American history under the Marxist lens had begun spreading in academic circles, fitting the selected facts with the new language into the mold of socialist dialectics. From one generation to the next, the Giant Captains of Industry became the Robber Barons; the American Gilded Age became the age of capitalist monopolistic exploitation. Revolution became a popular mantra, not only in the labor movement, but among faculty and students in the leading colleges and universities.

VERY FEW DARE TELL THE TRUTH

One of them was Max Eastman (1883-1969), a brilliant young American agitator before and after WW I. He was a radical writer and editor of communist propaganda magazines. An admirer of the Soviet Revolution, he traveled to Russia and participated in the political turmoil taking place after Lenin’s death from 1922 to 1924. He devoted his time travelling the countryside to learn Russian and studying in the Marxist academy. He had already become known to the Soviet elite from his American supportive publications which allowed him contact with the upper levels of the power struggle taking place between Stalin and Trotsky after Lenin’s death. As a result of the Great Purge and the militarization of the high levels of power, he witnessed the transformation of the Soviet Union into totalitarianism. Eastman became highly critical of Stalinism, but it took him another 20 years to finally recognize the fundamental errors of communism and socialism in general. It was not until 1941 that he publicly acknowledged his own errors in “The Word Socialism-Its Strange Adventures” and “Socialism and Human Nature”, two articles published in the very conservative Reader’s Digest magazine.

Original cover of Eastman's report on the Soviet crisis of succession

For the next decades, until his death, Eastman denounced the fundamental flaws of socialism in general and discovered serious authors that as trailblazers had begun to receive recognition for their foresight but had remained ignored during the war. He cites the works of the Swiss German Wilhelm Roepke and the policies of Ludwig Erhard who became recognized as responsible for the German Economic Miracle during the post-war occupation by the allies. He met economists that had moved to the United States and started teaching and publishing in English, such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. In 1955, Eastman published a collection of his essays that reflect his change from a radical Marxist supporter of revolution to a critic of what inevitably degenerates into the horrors, violence and poverty that socialism has spread wherever it has taken a foothold. The collection has been re-published by the Mises Institute with the title “Reflections on the Failure of Socialism”. If you have inclinations to become a revolutionary, or have already been seduced by the false promises of the self-proclaimed “scientific” Marxist economic construct, or have already committed crimes by participating in “the resistance” movement, I highly recommend Eastman’s book.

“The idea of Socialism is at once grandiose and simple. We may say, in fact, that it is one of the most ambitious creations of the human spirit; so magnificent, so daring, that it has rightly aroused the greatest admiration. But if we wish to save the world from barbarism, we must refute it.”

“Socialism” (1951), Ludwig von Mises

THE TRUTH HURTS

Eastman was a serious intellectual and took his own path searching for the truth after discovering how wrong he had been about his support of the socialist movement. From Soviet Russia he smuggled the text of “Lenin’s Testament”, an explosive accusation of how the communist regime was evolving and a repudiation of Stalin. He also translated some of Trotsky’s writings and had them published in the west. As a communist propagandist and agitator, he explained the methods of recruiting young minds. He published the following diagnostic in “Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism” (1940): “The socialist ideal appeals to three essentially contradictory types of people. First, the rebels against oppression, in whose motivation the concept of human freedom formed the axis; second, those yearning with a mixture of religious mysticism and animal gregariousness for human solidarity -the united brotherhood pattern; third, those anxious about efficiency and intelligent organization -a cerebral anxiety capable of a blind passion for a plan in times of crisis. This versatility of the socialist ideal, so advantageous in the days of propaganda, was the principal cause of the confusion prevailing among socialists when they are confronted with the result of their ideal.” For each group, the propaganda offered what they were looking for. Reality would eventually exhibit the truth. Their visions could not be reconciled.

Years later, a former Russian soldier who fought for the Stalin regime during WW II wrote a similar description. He found the truth in a Siberian prison he was sent to after the Red Army censors read his letter with some criticisms of the regime. In “Warning to the West” (1975), Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about the “versatility” that is used to describe socialism:

“There is not even a single precise definition of socialism that is generally recognized; all we have is a sort of hazy shimmering concept of something good, something noble, so that two socialists talking to each other about socialism might just as well be talking about completely different things…But socialism defies logic. You see, it is an emotional impulse, a kind of worldly religion, and nobody has the slightest need to study or even to read the teachings of the early prophets…Socialism is defended with a passionate lack of reason.”

Eastman was a prolific writer with an aesthetic approach to his own life. His early work is beautifully written basic communist propaganda. His poetry is a mixture of personal insights, rarely touching on politics. Once he began to tell the truth, he stopped being a welcome celebrity in the journalistic, academic, literary and intellectual circles he had frequented. He was shunned by his friends. He became a pariah and had difficulty finding work. He had trouble publishing his criticisms of communism until the truth about the Soviet regime became known during WW II.

Solzhenitsyn received as a hero, used by Putin for propaganda. A second betrayal

Once the Cold War changed the stage for world relations and the US found itself a lonely defender of Western Civilization, appreciation for Eastman’s work increased. He died in Barbados in 1969. A parallel experience with a different ending was the life of Solzhenitsyn. During the Cold War, many Russian dissidents that survived the “re-education camps” of the Siberian Gulags managed to obtain refuge in the West. One of them was Solzhenitsyn. He became a prolific writer of the dark chapters of the history of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature and toured the world. He lived in the US but returned to Russia once the Soviet Union imploded, only to die after seeing the change of mask, brand and flag. Behind them was the same totalitarian regime, this time under Putin. His family stayed in Vermont.

THE BROKEN PROMISE OF SOCIALISM

In 1876, Engels wrote to an infirm and secluded Marx what he described as “an encyclopaedic survey of our conception of the philosophical, natural-science and historical problems.”  At that moment, Marx and Engels’ works had been anti-capitalist propaganda and labor agitators’ fodder. Their work “Das Kapital” had been their first attempt to present an economic synthesis of their ideas. By then, other political movements with the socialist label had become active in the political scene in Europe. Engels was already involved in organizing what they considered the political and economic theory that corresponded to their vision. The document was expanded with Marx’s comments and appeared serialized in the press. It was also printed in book form and has become known as the “Anti- Dühring”. It was written as a defense of their ideas against the criticisms published by the University of Berlin Professor Eugen Dühring in his book “Revolution in Science”. Dühring had become a major influence among the German socialists that eventually merged into what they called the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Three chapters were translated in 1880 into French and other languages under the name of “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”. In it, Engel’s appropriated for them the scientific adjective and insulted the others with terms of utopian, romantic or mystic (religious). In the age of science, this strategy created the brand that separated their intellectual construct from others and legitimized its life in the academic world, even if it was in the dark basements of the libraries or the dark corners of the college watering holes. 

The fundamental promise of Marxism appeared in the “Anti-Dühring”: “As soon as there is no longer any class of society to be held in subjection…there is nothing more to be repressed which would make -the state- a special repressive force necessary. The first act in which the state comes forward as the representative of society as a whole -taking possession of the means of production in the name of society- is at the same time its last independent act. The state power becomes superfluous, and then ceases to exist of itself. The government of people is replaced by the administration of things and the directing of the processes of production. The state is not abolished, it withers away.”  It is against that promise, that “scientific prediction”, that socialism must be judged with the evidence of more than a century of practice, a century of failures and the cost of more than 200 million victims of “a scientific error”.

Max Eastman, during a debate on the radio on June 19, 1942, with Harry Laidler, then Executive Director of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), explained the absurdity of the Marx-Engels’ fundamental promise.  LID began in 1905 as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society by communists to infiltrate the academic institutions to bring "education for the new social order". The name was changed in 1920 to broaden appeal when the socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas became director. This was Eastman’s response to the idea that the socialist state would spontaneously “wither away” and how easy the administration of the economy would be without it: “The size and complexity of the administrative problem gives rise to an enormous bureaucracy, and the power and privilege involved in governmental status becomes so unique and so vital that this bureaucracy is impelled by the basic drives or tendencies in human nature to crystallize into a ruling class. It becomes a ruling class with a power over the lives of the masses that few, if any, ruling classes ever had before. Its power over the workers is particularly despotic, because it combines in itself the characters or all three of the chief enemies of the labor struggle. It is at once its only employer, it is the strike-breaker squad, and the persecuting police.”  The evidence of history supports the easy to understand, common sense conclusion the former communist propagandist presents to today’s young useful idiots.

Russian victims of the Great Purge that consolidated Stalin's power