When It Isn’t Working, Just Start Killing

Book Review of 'To Overthrow the World' by Sean McMeekin

The commodification of political ideology is a distasteful phenomenon of the Internet age. Ideologies are embraced and discarded like a pair of shoes. They are status symbols in an online game, disconnected from reality. This is especially egregious with communism. When online users throw on the garb of communism, socialism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc., they erase the real history by positing these ideologies as internet quirks. The real history is erased.

Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World covers the history of communism in real and gruesome detail. Even if one has read extensively about the history of communism before, the grim reality leaps off the page in McMeekin’s clear and engaging historical prose. The book is divided into two parts: communism in theory and communism in practice. An often-repeated adage is that communism is good in theory but hard to do in practice. This is a misconception, imagining that communism just means “sharing” or something like that. Communist theory has always been open about violence and authoritarianism. The proto-communist utopian Francois-Noel Babeuf¹ wrote explicitly about the need for mass violence to establish a propertyless society. Babeuf’s writings inspired Karl Marx, who was also explicit about the apocalyptic violence needed for communism’s arrival.

Violence is perhaps the only part of communist theory that translates well into practice, anyway. Communism economic theory has always been and always will be untenable, completely divorced from reality. Throughout history, every communist regime begrudgingly tolerated private enterprise to some degree. Those regimes that did not tolerate private enterprise either collapsed immediately or quickly changed course.

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Communism in Theory

Karl Marx, the father of communist theory, was influenced by Hegel's understanding of an underlying logic to human development and history. Marx was a lifelong student, living off his parents’ money and discussing philosophy with Hegelians. He believed philosophy needed to be an active force rather than an object of pontification. Marx's first writings about communism were about how the liberation of the proletarian. They would be liberated, he argued, by a philosophically inspired revolution. He had not yet set foot in a factory or interviewed a worker. His "knowledge" about the proletariat was not based on any data but instead just on his how dialectical reasoning that he had written in notebooks. Once he met actual factory workers, he was generally unimpressed. They did not philosophize like he did.

Marx believed communism was the solution to the Hegelian procession of history. Feudalism transformed into Capitalism, and Capitalism would transform into communism. Importantly, this required minimal human intervention. Historical forces mandated this shift, according to Marxist and Hegelian doctrine.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels encouraged all communists to shout their ideas as loud as they could to take over Europe. McMeekin writes with rightfully cynical disdain about Marx's arguments: "In the grand and wholly unsourced style of Hegelian history writing" (47), Marx gave an account of the history of labor and why communism just had to come around. It had little basis, coming instead from a spoiled and unemployed overgrown child’s philosophical musing.

The theory of communism comes down to a single sentence: the abolition of private property by any means necessary. Proudhon, a socialist critic of Marx, warned that Marx's admittedly authoritarian project would result in the abolition of individuality and freedom. Marx agreed with this assessment. He was fully cognizant that authoritarianism and violent suppression of dissent were necessary for communism to work.

Marx wrote his economic theory in Das Kapital. He argued that workers are kept down by the appropriation of supplementary labor-power by the capitalists, who use machines and cheap labor to keep down the good and noble workers. Even if their wages go up, this is only a loosening of their chains, but they are not in control of the situation. Labor is always secondary to capital, and capital will never willingly reduce the exploitation of labor. Marx took on Adam Smith, who argued that increases in labor productivity result in both cheaper products and higher wages, benefitting both worker and employer. Marxist economics is zero-sum, however. The more productive a worker is, the more alienated they become because even more of their product is sold off. Marxist economics was disconnected from reality. His theory evaluates the economy through a prior ideological frame rather than by taking a first principles approach.

Marx’s popularity did not grow from the soundness of his economics, however. His popularity stemmed from the hypnotic allure of his prophesies of an apocalyptic violent revolution that would flip the script. He urged all workers to reject international differences and embrace together their quest to conquer political power. Throughout the 1860s, Marx's influence grew, connecting labor unions across Europe to financing and advice. He evaluated international conflicts based on how they were "supposed" to go in history. He was in favor of the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War, not because of chauvinism or national pride, but because he believed that the defeat of reactionary France was good for the progression of the dialectic.

After Marx died in 1895, German communists fell into ideological civil war. Eduard Bernstein, a faithful disciple of Marx, was the first to realize that his teacher’s predictions for capital accumulation were not coming true. He noticed that economic factors were increasing general well-being and wages. He argued that socialists should advocate for workers’ rights rather than overthrow capitalism. This sober reflection was met with excommunication by the loyal communists. Instead, die-hard communists argued that, as long as their devotion to the cause was religious, they would not fail.

Meanwhile, The Russian Marxist Party had split into two factions. The majority (Bolshevik) faction was led by Vladimir Lenin, with Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky as top lieutenants. Lenin's mistress, Inessa Armand, argued in favor of the tactic of using war to springboard revolution. She and Lenin worked to make the idea of intensification toward civil war part of the communist playbook. During World War I, Lenin critiqued the chauvinism of Russia. He did not critique the Germans or Austro-Hungarians for their chauvinism because the goal was to turn people against their government. This stemmed from his doctrine of revolutionary defeatism: if your country loses a war, you can use its weakened state as a springboard for revolution. The goal was to organize a large-scale mutiny to poison Russia in wartime.

In October 1916, Lenin formulated his military program for proletarian revolution. Soldiers should subvert their own countries. Instead of fighting against other workers, they should turn the gun to the capitalists. He urged women and children to join the fight as well. He was promoting and working toward the global bonfire of violence Marx prophesied in Das Kapital.

On February 23, 1917, the strikes began in Russia. 2 days later, serious violence started. Tsar Nicholas II called in the military to crush the violent strike, but when the soldiers were ordered to fire on protestors and refused, and a soldier shot his commanding officer, mutiny spread like wildfire. Lenin was directly supported by the German government. They supplied his travel and funded the Bolsheviks in Russia, hoping to cripple their wartime enemy. On October 25, Bolsheviks surrounded and stormed the Winter Palace, taking over just after midnight and stopping the clocks. The first communist regime was born, and Lenin encouraged soldiers to overthrow their generals loyal to the previous regime. This was the beginning of communism in practice.

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Communism in Practice

Now, it was time to put theory into practice. Step one was violence, of course. After the Bolsheviks took power, many less radical socialists and Mensheviks resisted, but they were crushed. Many government employees refused to cooperate and walked out. The banks also shut their doors to the Bolsheviks. Most shut their doors entirely out of protest. The slow grind of nationalizing the entire economy began.

The Bolsheviks executed the Romanov family on July 16, 1918. The four daughters survived the initial machine gun fire due to the diamonds in their clothing, so Red Guard troops bayoneted them to death. To hide the evidence, they mangled and destroyed the bodies beyond recognition. They were not positively identified until 1989.

On August 30, 1918, three shots were fired at Lenin. One in his shoulder, the other in his lung. This kicked off the Red Terror, the first of many communist atrocities. Execution without trial became standard operating procedure. In the first two months, 15,000 were executed. Germany was aghast and set out to depose the communist regime they helped create. Lenin responded by ordering general conscription. All allied powers were declared hostile forces. By summer 1919, the Red Army had 3.6 million troops.

Three "White" armies rose against the Bolsheviks to restore the Constituent Assembly. White was a pejorative term used by the Bolsheviks to describe counterrevolutionaries. These armies were mostly crushed in 1920, with the Bolsheviks being the unambiguous victors.

The new government sought to nationalize all industries, which caused widespread unemployment and shortages of fuel as well as other resources. Russia was also cut off from all international trade. The Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) was put in charge of the entire economy. It was renamed to the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) in 1921. Inflation got so bad that they abolished monetary payments. McMeekin states, "In this way, the Bolsheviks, in a kind of communist reductio ad absurdum, tried to abolish money itself -- only to realize that economic activity of any kind was impossible without it." (161) They introduced a new gold-backed currency to stem the bleeding. Every Russian industry crumbled, with output falling to a fraction of what it had been before the revolution.

Filth and famine were rampant, which led to widespread disease alongside a shortage of doctors and medical equipment. In Ukraine, 2.3 percent of the population died from Typhus. In Odessa, the death rate was six times the birth rate. Because everyone was sick, hungry, and dying, the Soviet government began enforcing compulsory labor. It was touted as a great Soviet achievement and a virtue of their country. They destroyed Christian holidays and replaced them with new communist holidays. Marriage by a priest was no longer recognized, made only into a civil contract that could be dissolved at any time with no obligation. With all these achievements under their belt, Lenin and the Soviet government knew they were surrounded by capitalist countries. If they were going to survive, communism must spread outside of Russia.

Due to fighting from the Fins, Germans, and White armies, the Bolsheviks moved their central government from Petrograd to Moscow. They started fomenting revolution in many nearby countries, with limited success. Communist parties in Germany and Italy were made leaner, with only the doctrinally pure remaining. In aligning themselves with Moscow, these European communist organizations were granted access to funding from Moscow, enabling strikes and protests. However, the Moscow-funded uprisings in Germany and Italy floundered. In Italy, the uprising of socialists inspired a quick reaction from Mussolini and the Black Shirts. They reacted with a march on Rome in October 1922 and put the communists in prison.

French and German communists started agitating in Germany, which was already in a rough economic situation. Communist organizations started paying workers not to work, making the situation worse. The German government started doing the same, printing money to fund it. The hyperinflation left Germans angry and looking for a radical anti-communist alternative. This directly fueled the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

In Russia, the workers were revolting. The revolution did not bring liberation; it was a new slavery. Thousands of protestors were killed and executed, and nearly 7,000 were placed in concentration camps. In 1922, the communists brought back money and some private business/exchange. Lenin blamed the economic backwardness of Russia. In Marx's dialectic, the contradictions of capitalism would give rise to capitalism. But Russia had never been capitalist, so Lenin introduced a little state capitalism as a treat. This was the New Economic Policy (NEP).

Lenin implied that they would have to tolerate some private enterprise for some period to help the economy, but after he died, nobody could be sure how long he meant. Bukharin, a Marxist intellectual under Stalin, argued that socialism must grow out of private enterprise and that they must tolerate some private enterprise to learn the secrets of capitalist production. Ironically, the secret itself is private enterprise.

In 1927, farmers were withholding their stock from the economy because money had become so worthless. This ran the risk of causing famine. Stalin began purging competing leaders. He then blamed Bukharin for the private farmers withholding stock and got rid of him as well. On December 21, 1929, Stalin achieved supreme power. To "solve" the farmer problem, Stalin arrested over 2.6 million private traders, which laid the groundwork for the Gulags. Stalin demanded the complete eradication of these private farmers (kulaks) on December 27, 1929. Enslaving kulaks and any other revolting peasants, Stalin pushed for industrialization. Communist Russia boasted full employment and rapid growth. The workers were paid little or nothing.

When production targets weren't met, the regime blamed “wreckers” and saboteurs. The arbitrary production targets were hard to reach because, without the capitalist price system, there was no way to efficiently allocate resources. Instead of allowing for free-flowing prices, Stalin’s regime held show trials for supposedly capitalist spies trying to undermine communism. A fifth of the 35,000 trained engineers were put under arrest.

Between 1930 and 1931, 2 million kulaks were arrested and put into forced labor. This was the start of the Holodomor, in which millions were killed. Kulaks were primarily Ukrainian, so Ukrainians were automatically suspicious. Jews were also persecuted in disproportionate numbers during the 1930s. The 1937 census came in at 162 million people, which was 15 million lower than the regime expected. This provides a rough estimate of the number of people killed during Stalin's first 7 years.

In 1940, the workweek was extended to seven days a week. Gosplan started the strategic reserve the same year, where they aimed to draft a million teenagers for four years of conscripted service in the war industry. It should be noted that the USSR had yet to enter World War II.

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World War II

In the lead-up to World War II, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, but "Hitler's persecution of Communists and other Nazi crimes against human decency, from book burnings to attacks on Jews, offered Communists such a perfect ideological counterfoil that not even Stalin's cooperation with Hitler could ruin it." (226) Concentration camps, forced labor Gulags, the Holodomor, and the Great Terror were all suppressed within and without the USSR. Coverage or condemnation was dismissed or covered only by Stalin-sympathetic Western journalists, like Walter Duranty at the New York Times. Many Americans, communist or not, saw the USSR as the principled opponent of Nazism, despite the comparable atrocities.

Hitler wanted Poland, but Stalin also wanted Poland, so Stalin decided to chop it in half and split it. This deal remained a secret, and international communist propaganda remained vague on the subject. Due to widespread pro-communist propaganda in the West, as well as the downplaying and hiding of Stalin's atrocities, "it was not unreasonable [for Americans] to view Stalin's USSR as a likable protagonist and critical ally against Nazi Germany once Hitler began making his aggressive moves on the European chessboard" (238). Stalin took Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland in 1939. The German Wehrmacht did most of the fighting and destroyed the Polish army, so the Soviets lost fewer than eight hundred soldiers. Stalin attained 13 million new subjects. The Holodomor was started again, with farmland being partitioned by the state and mass deportation into forced labor Gulags. 1.5 million Poles, many of whom were Jews, were placed in Soviet concentration camps.

Despite Stalin's agreement with Hitler, which had granted him nearly 200,000 additional square kilometers and 13 million subjects, the Western powers at war with Germany did not retaliate against the Soviet Union. On the same day that Hitler overtook Paris, Stalin decided to invade Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Communist party bosses were made stewards over the newly invaded territories, and their gold reserves were nationalized. Purges began, and two percent of the Latvian population was executed.

Stalin was surprised Hitler had been so successful against Britain and France and was somewhat worried. Despite their alliance, he did not want Nazi Germany to grow too much in power. Hitler was okay with Stalin's invasion of smaller Eastern European countries but had similar concerns about Russia’s growing power. Stalin made a list of terms for joining the alliance with Japan, Germany, and Italy. The terms included demands that German troops withdraw from Finland and Stalin be able to station troops in Turkey. Hitler recognized Stalin's plans at this moment and started planning for an invasion of the USSR on December 18, 1940, under the name Operation Barbarossa.

In a pure numbers game, the war between Stalin and Hitler should have been decisively in Stalin's favor. He had a significant material advantage. A five-to-one edge in tanks, a seven-to-one edge in warplanes, and a five-to-one edge in artillery, not counting Stalin's artillery reserves, which made the ratio closer to twenty-to-one. But Germany had a superior fighting force. Operation Barbarossa was launched on June 22, 1941. Within hours, the German Luftwaffe decimated the Soviet air force. Their air superiority allowed them to bomb fuel and weapons reserves behind Soviet lines. Germany, along with Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Finland, marched into Russia rapidly, reaching Moscow and Leningrad by October. 3.4 million Red Army troops were taken prisoner in 1940, most of which surrendered.

The tide turned for the Russians thanks to their Eastern reinforcements moving to the German front. Japan informed Russia that they were not going to attack them and would instead attack the United States, so Russia did not need strong defenses in the east. In addition, FDR signed lend-lease aid without the approval of Congress or the public, which supplied resources and weapons to Stalin. Stalin stood his ground in Moscow. The Wehrmacht was unable to pierce into Moscow, and on December 8, 1941, they assumed a defensive position. Through 1945, the Soviets pushed Westward toward Germany. Russian casualty rates were ten times that of the Germans, but the pure numbers advantage allowed them to sustain the offensive until the end of the war.

Stalin's victory came at the cost of 30 million Soviet lives, 16 million of whom were civilians. More Red Army soldiers were killed by their side than British soldiers were killed during the entire course of the war. In May 1945, the hammer and sickle were raised over the Reichstag. Germany was liberated from the Nazis but was now under a new tyrant. Germans were ethnically cleansed in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Many were put into forced labor camps, and the Red Army directly victimized many, leaving 2 million rape victims in their wake. Numbered among those victims were women liberated from Nazi concentration camps. The sentiment, for the most part, especially from Poles and Jews, was gratitude toward the USSR for their liberation. But this gratitude did not last long as looting, rape, and rape-murder by the Red Army spread. The Red Army claimed the mass looting as reparations. Industrial property was seized, and slave labor was used, all in the name of reparations approved by FDR and Churchill.

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Chinese Communism

Communism rose in the East as well. Thanks to careful maneuvering by Staling, he was able to establish Mao as the communist dictator in China. Mao held an imperial procession at Tiananmen Square in front of the Imperial Palace, declaring the formation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949.

In 1950, the PRC invaded Tibet and Korea. The battle between US-backed Korean troops and Chinese-backed armies reached a stalemate at the 38th parallel, which, to this day, is the dividing line between North and South Korea.

In March 1951, a CCP general was assassinated, so Mao began his reign of terror. Mao demanded that, out of every thousand people, one person must be killed and nine must be sent to forced labor camps. Mao estimated that seven hundred executions should be enough to send a message, but once the momentum started, it was hard to stop. By 1954, 800,000 counter-revolutionaries had been killed, and Mao boasted about it. He compared the joy of mass murder to a nice heavy rain. The CCP set up boxes where anyone could report anyone else for thought crimes and get them sent to reeducation or forced labor camps. Taoists and Chinese Catholics were relentlessly persecuted.

One of Mao’s most similar moves was the Hundred Flowers Campaign. He asked for constructive criticism. Anyone who criticized him was then put on a list for thought crimes. Seven hundred thousand were put into reeducation camps. Mao also began hoping for another world war, in which he hoped to kill half of the global population to install worldwide communism.

Mao's Great Leap Forward was an effort to bring Chinese Communist development on par with the rest of the world. He set extremely ambitious goals for output, aiming to triple total output by mobilizing China's 650 million people. Hundreds of thousands died merely digging soil. Mao realized that they would need Western technology to increase industrial output, so he started exporting agricultural output to trade. He starved Chinese citizens to maximize food exports. This led to the largest famine in human history. The death rate peaked at 29 percent in 1960. In the Anhui province, 68 percent of the population died. Conservative estimates say over 32 million people died. Chen Yizi, a CCP researcher, estimated that up to 46 million may have starved during this period, which he published after fleeing the country. The Soviets were aghast and distanced themselves from China. Nikita Khrushchev wrote in 1959 that "there was no excuse for the Chinese to be repeating our own stupid mistakes."

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Cold War Communism

After Stalin died in 1953, Communist inroads into Europe began to decline. Khrushchev established a commission to investigate and condemn Stalin's great terror, which he had participated in. Many communists, including Mao, were very angry about it. Meanwhile, satellites and people began to grow tired of communist rule and started revolting. This led to crackdowns in Budapest, Poznań, and East Germany. While they were repudiating Stalinism in name, it was harder to do in practice while still retaining control.

During decolonization, Khrushchev set his sights on the third world as a new potential domain of influence. European empires were relinquishing control of their territories in Africa and the Middle East, making a golden opportunity for Soviet expansion. By 1964, they had over 6000 economic development projects. Vietnam, Cuba, and Chile were all turned into communist regimes. Chile’s communist dictatorship, however, was quickly deposed by the U.S.-backed General Pinochet.

While the Russian Communists had tempered their violent tactics at home, Mao remained ruthless. Mao's Great Leap Forward caused so much starvation and death that his advisors became critical. He had to purge 3 million commissars and eventually relented, allowing for limited private farming. It was banned again and was going full steam ahead by 1963. Whenever an advisor criticized the Great Leap Forward, he blamed them for whatever they were criticizing about it.

In 1966, Mao invited over a million children and teenage students to Tiananmen Square. He urged them to overthrow all reactionary and bourgeois culture that may exist in China. Ritualized violence ensured. School employees, artists, and anyone with long hair or glasses were surrounded and tortured by the mob. Hundreds died each day. Landlords and their families were slaughtered. Communist foreigners were assaulted as well. Mao's Cultural Revolution deepened the split between Russia and China. Churches and libraries were burned to the ground. Cats were exterminated as well.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot and inspired by the Chinese Red Guard, took over during the Vietnam War, thanks to CCP support. Everyone was deported from the cities, and they were razed. They sought to destroy all man-made structures that held man captive, from parental authority to religion, and remake man as a pure communist being. This meant that every aspect of Cambodian tradition had to be destroyed. Half of the nation's population was forcefully herded out of the cities by illiterate teenage soldiers. The death toll of the Khmer Rouge is still impossible to calculate, but it was doubtlessly genocidal, and the CCP downplays its involvement. Estimates range from one to three million dead, about 40% of the population.

Cambodian communism was an attempt to completely negate existence. McMeekin states that "Pol Pot... scarcely tried to justify [his] methods with happy talk about industrial progress... The coercion itself was the point, the reeducation of free-willed humans to animals, enslaved by robotic, heavily armed children who had themselves been deprived of any kind of genuine education, human warmth, or feeling." (372)

During the Cold War, the Soviets invested considerably in peace propaganda in the West. After Soviet archives were opened in 1991, it was revealed the Kremlin spent nearly $600 million on anti-nuclear propaganda and protests in America and Europe. It was an effort to disarm the West while the USSR grew its nuclear capabilities. The peace campaign was overshadowed, however, by protests in Poland.

As Poles faced unfair work treatment and declining living standards and were emboldened by the new Polish Pope, the Solidarity party rose and boasted 9 million members, and Polish workers went on strike. Pope John Paul II addressed 400,000 in Warsaw, galvanizing millions against Communism. Russia was terrified by this development. They even considered martial law, but the communist-plant prime minister, Jaruzelski, could not get a grip on the situation. Jaruzelski begged the Red Army to invade Poland, but Russia would not because they did not want to damage the peace movement. So, he instituted martial law on December 13, 1981. It was not successful, and Polish communism crumbled.

As the USSR saw increased resistance at home and abroad, Gorbachev saw that the planned economy was not working, but he could not understand why. The Perestroika plan was launched in 1986 to help the Soviet economy recover by introducing more liberalization. China engaged in a similar program.

By the time Mao died in 1976, China was poorer than it was in 1949. Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, focused on appeasing both the US and Russia while improving domestic central planning. After visiting the US and Japan, Deng was awestruck with the economic and technological development of the capitalist world and wanted to imitate it. He established Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to allow private enterprise and investment from Japan and America. He also established a systemic corporate espionage program to steal trade secrets from Japan and the United States. He also instituted the one-child policy in 1980. In 1983, China saw 14 million abortions and 20 million sterilizations.

During Gorbachev's visit to China in 1989, a massive student protest broke out in Tiananmen Square, 1.2 million protestors strong. Deng declared martial law, sending out 50,000 soldiers, but there was a standoff. After a few weeks, he authorized force to restore peace and warned the protestors what was coming. For the next week, protestors who did not leave were mowed down by tanks and machine guns. Democratic reform was off the table in China.

The Non-Death of Communism

In the Epilogue, McMeekin describes the non-death of communism. In 1989, the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan and gave Eastern Bloc countries permission to go their way. Poland, Hungary, and East Germany threw off communist rule. Thanks to Reagan's undermining of the USSR by funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the USSR was unable to continue its extensive foreign policy interventions.

Communism relied on the sword to win, not the ballot box. The USSR crumbled because Gorbachev was unwilling to wield the sword unapologetically like his predecessors. China still had the sword. All communist regimes still allowed some private enterprise, without which they absolutely could not survive. In the rare instances that they did not, they crumbled violently, like during the Great Leap Forward or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

What made the USSR "Communist" is the same thing that defines the current governments of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba: rule by a single-party dictatorship that allows no legal opposition parties, that claims to direct and control the entire economy, that blankets society with all-encompassing rules and regulations, and that hectors, monitors, and surveils the people in whose name it claims to rule in minute detail. Who are we to argue that we know better than they do? (447)

Today, China has the second-highest GDP in the world, competing only with the United States. However, their per capita GDP is five times lower than the U.S. per capita GDP. Chinese communism does not have the same appeal for Western communists that Moscow did last century, with China's human rights abuses out in the open. However, Western economic ties to China run far deeper than ever with the USSR, with many US corporations outsourcing their manufacturing and industry to China. Many Western entities are either controlled by or heavily influenced by China, from Walmart to Google.

Since 1989, American political support for the CCP has been bipartisan. The CCP has been granted access to American markets without having to concede anything, a far cry from the diplomatic and trade agreements once made with the Soviets. Pressure on the communists was let up in the 90's and 00's, expecting that they would Westernize. The opposite happened, with the Western world adopting more of China's social control policies and invasive surveillance methods. Like China, the government meddles with the flow of information to control the narrative, and this was especially highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, where surveillance, physical lockdowns, and narrative control closed the distance between China and the West.

McMeekin warns that we face communist practices from our regimes in the West. These practices come in the form of private/public partnerships that administer cancel culture and narrative control over the population. Thankfully, asset expropriation has not become normal, but Western liberal democracies engage in the same forms of social control as communist regimes, just through far more insidious means.

Communism is a utopian ideology. It aims to establish heaven on earth. All left-wing ideologies share this aim to one degree or another. The unfortunate aspect of utopianism is that it is unrealistic. People will always get in the way, so utopians may have to compromise. But they do not have to. When it is not working, they can just start killing.

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