LOOMING DISASTER

The Art of Concealing Marxism
Romania, that country’s Communist Party merged with the Social
Democratic Party, producing the Workers’ Party. East Germany
went the same way. Overnight, Germany’s old Communist Party,
which had become infamous after being accused of setting the
Reichstag on fire in 1933, was renamed the Socialist Unity Party of
Germany. The Hungarian Communist Party, which had created the
short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, was re-baptized the
Hungarian Working People’s Party.
The 1963 missile crisis generated by “socialist” Cuba gave the
socialist mask of Marxism a dirty name in the West, and few Western
Marxists wanted to be openly associated with it anymore. They
therefore began hiding their Marxism under the cover of “economic
determinism,” which became all the rage among leftists who no longer
wanted to be labeled socialists. Economic determinism is a theory of
survival rooted in Marx’s “Manifesto” (another theory of survival), but
it pretends that the economic organization of a society, not the socialist
class war, determines the nature of all other aspects of its life. 2
I was among those who wrote the script of Romania’s President
Ceauşescu’s determinism, which was hidden behind the nickname
New Economic Order and was highly endorsed by President Jimmy
Carter. Over the years, this bit of prestidigitation called economic
determinism used different names. Khrushchev’s slogan dogonyat i
peregonyat (catching up with and overtaking the West in ten years)
and Gorbachev’s perestroika were the best known. Both wrecked the
Soviet economy even more than “classical” communism did, and both
eventually cost the West many billions of dollars to clean up after.
In the early 1980s, Marxism became glasnost. Unless you read
our book Disinformation, you probably think Mikhail Gorbachev
invented glasnost to describe his effort to lead the Marxist Soviet
Union “to democracy, to freedom, to openness.” 3 Don’t worry,
you’re not alone. All of the Western media and most Western experts
believe that too – as does the committee that awarded Gorbachev
the Nobel Peace Prize.
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