LOOMING DISASTER

5 MARX’S GHOST
A recent Rasmussen poll showed that only 53 percent of Americans
preferred capitalism to socialism. 1 Why would so many citizens of
the U.S., which restored capitalist freedom to Europe, now succumb
to the noxious socialism that America spent forty-four years of Cold
War to defeat?
Just before he died, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who
claimed he had broken with Marxism but confessed to still being
choked with emotion whenever he heard the Internationale (the
traditional anthem of the socialist movement), reminded us that
the first noun in Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” is “specter”: “A
specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.” According
to Derrida, Marx began “The Communist Manifesto” with “specter”
because a specter never dies. 2
Evidently, Derrida was on to something. In 1915, Alfred Mosley,
one of Europe’s most celebrated economists, stated: “Of only one fact
do I feel certain, and it is that no thinking man can imagine that the
ultimate result of the Great War can be anything but disastrous to
humanity at large.” 3 Mosley was prophetic. Marx’s specter has risen
from its grave in ever-new corners of the world after every long war.
The Great War brought Marx’s specter to life in the shape of
the Soviet Union, which made stealing a national policy. The Soviet
leaders confiscated the wealth of the imperial family, seized the land
owned by rich Russians, nationalized Russian industry and banking,
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