by Ion Mihai Pacepa
Allow me to begin by apologizing for
having been absent from these pages for a while. My up-coming book Disinformation,
which I have co-written with Professor Ronald Rychlak, became the subject of a
documentary movie to be released in June, and that has monopolized my time.
On March 6, 2013, we celebrate 60
years since the death of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose nom de
guerre was Stalin — meaning man of steel. I deliberately use the
word “celebrate,” because Stalin’s death allowed the first ray of light to
penetrate into one of the darkest and bloodiest disinformation operations in
history: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. Soon after Stalin died,
the curtain shielding his “workers’ paradise” from public view was ripped
apart, and the rest of the world got its first glimpse of the gulag empire that
the Soviet Union really was. According to recent revelations, some 94 million
people were killed during the lifetime of the Soviet empire[i] so as to uphold
the heretical system of socialism, a creed that deprived mankind of the very
motivational forces needed to keep mankind going: private property,
competition, and individual incentive.
In theory, socialism is an idyllic
dream. In reality, it is a phony nightmare, modeled after Karl Marx’s infamous
dictum “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen”
(from each according to his ability, to each according to his need), a social
theory that has destroyed the economy of every country where it has been
applied. To put it into plain English, the socialist redistribution of wealth
is theft, and stealing became a national policy on the day the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics was born. Immediately after the revolution of November
1917, Russia’s new socialist government confiscated the imperial family’s
wealth, seized the land owned by the rich Russians, nationalized Russian
industry and banking, and killed most of the property owners. In 1929, the
Kremlin turned its covetous eyes toward the poorest elements in the country; by
forcing the peasants into collective farms, it stole away their land, along
with their animals and agricultural tools. Within a few years, virtually the
entire Soviet economy was running on stolen property.
In the mid 1930s, the Communist
Party itself became a target for theft. Following a brief period of collective
leadership exercised by the Central Committee and later by its elite, the
Politburo, Stalin personally stole all the top-level positions in the country
and pinned them onto his own chest like war decorations, thereby establishing a
dismal new feudalism in the middle of the 20th century. That is exactly what
occurred later throughout Eastern Europe, when the Soviet socialists took over
after World War II. By the time I said goodbye forever to Socialist Romania in
1978, the list of official positions and titles accumulated by Ceausescu and
his wife could have easily filled a whole page.
The 1991 collapse of the Soviet
Empire signaled a stern warning that in the long run stealing does not pay,
even when committed by the government of a huge country. All socialists who
have ever risen to lead a country have ended up in hell — all, from Lenin to Stalin,
Tito to Zhivkov, Enver Hoxha to Mátyás Rakosi, Sékou Touré to Nyeree. All had
their days of temporary glory, but all ended in eternal disgrace. A few
remnants, like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, are still hanging on, but they
certainly have a place in hell reserved for them. (Update: Chavez (He has
died since the writing of this post.) In this year that Marx’s Manifesto
turns 164 years old and should have long been discredited, there are still some
foolish countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus, Italy, and Spain that
are being devastated by a misplaced trust in its advocacy of “to each according
to his need” and its consequential redistribution of the country’s wealth.
There are myriad reasons why
socialism can never succeed. One is the irrational socialist attitude toward
money. Marx’s socialists always depicted money as an odious instrument of
capitalist exploitation, and they always preached the gospel that in the
utopian socialist society there would be no money, no prices, no wages. Until
that day, however, they admitted that money was unfortunately a necessary evil
that had to be retained during the transition period from capitalism to
socialism — because the socialist leaders were unable to offer anything to
replace it. Nevertheless, in the socialist Soviet empire, money lost its
economic regulatory function as well as its status as a measure of wealth,
becoming merely an instrument for expressing domestic wages and prices.
Irrational, unpredictable and chaotic, the socialist attitude toward money
brought nothing but economic anarchy. I saw that with my own eyes during the 20
years I was involved with Romania’s financial system, as I went from being
deputy chief of the country’s trade mission in West Germany to economic advisor
to the Romanian president.
Thirty-four years ago, when I broke
away from my life in the top circles of the Soviet empire, I paid with two
death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people to stop thinking
of government as a boon bestowed from on high, and to free themselves from the
clutches of socialism. Alas, now I see the socialist plague of “to each
according to his need” beginning to infect my adoptive country, the United
States. On Feb. 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed: “We
Are All Socialists Now.”[ii] That was just what the official Romanian newspaper
Scînteia proclaimed when my former boss, Nicolae Ceausescu, began
changing Romania into a monument to himself. Two years after seizing power, the
socialist nomenklatura of the U.S. Democratic Party produced the same
results as Romania’s socialist nomenklatura did — on a U.S. scale. Over
fourteen million Americans lost their jobs, and 41.8 million people went on
government food stamps. The GDP dipped from 3.4% to 1.6%. The national debt
rose to an unprecedented $13 trillion, and it is projected to reach $18
trillion by 2019.
Scînteia went bankrupt, and Newsweek was sold for one dollar.
But a member of the Democratic nomenklatura representing the
economically ruined state of California in the U.S. Congress — who is
incidentally a stout admirer of and visitor to Fidel Castro’s Cuba — is
preaching that the future of the U.S. oil industry is “all about socializing,”
all about “the government taking over and running all our oil companies.”
In 1948, when the Romanian nomenklatura
nationalized the oil industry, that country was the second greatest oil
exporter in Europe. Thirty years later, when I broke with Marxism, Romania was
a heavy importer of oil, gasoline was rationed, the temperature in public
places had to be kept under 63 degrees Fahrenheit, and all shops had to close
no later than 5:30 pm to save energy.
I have used these examples before,
but I believe we should use them over and over, and over, because they contain
our current drama in a nutshell. The sequestration imposed on the United States
a couple of days ago shows that the Democratic Party’s socialist attitude
toward money and its addiction to the illusory socialist recipe of “to each
according to his need” can generate economic havoc even in a country as wealthy
as the United States.
The fact that the Democratic Party’s
nomenklatura believes it can solve our economic difficulties by again
raising taxes reminds me of my old days in communist Romania. I used to
repeatedly warn Ceausescu that Romania could not afford to keep losing $1 on
every thousand eggs it was exporting to the West. My former boss always assured
me, “We’ll make it up in quantity.”
American essayist George Santayana,
an immigrant like me, used to say that those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it.
[i] Stéphane Courtois, Le Livre
Noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression (Ėdition Robert Laffont,
Paris, 1997), pp. 258-264.
[ii] Doug Mainwaring, “We are all
Tea Partiers now,” The Washington Times,, September 30, 2010, p.1.
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