Communism- How did it happen?

Author: Richard R. Tryon

Preface:

When did the world invent 'Isms'?

Although "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith came to be the definitive text on Captitalism in 1848, the same year that Carl Marx wrote "Das Capital", the world had not yet started to think in terms of various alternative forms of government for the organization of society with the alternative concepts to be defined as 'something ism'. We knew of kingdoms and empires, but various socio-political-economic structures were not yet often thought of in terms of words to which we could add the ism suffix.

Since the time of recorded history we are told that starting with cave dwellers, man has been struggling just to survive against plagues, disease, fire, flood and war for reasons of lust, envy, or territorial control. Not until the last 5,000 years has man had time to make war to conquer others, while leaving women and children at home, for the purpose of providing new slaves or lands to occupy; or to ‘get-even’ for wrongs real or imagined by the enemy on any large scale. It is not known when the first 'band' of two or more men and or women were organized into an 'army' for the purpose of defending or attacking other groups, but it must have preceded the Bible or any other equally old documents of history and no doubt even art work on cave or other rock walls.

Only in the last 3,000 years have armies been organized to plunder across vast reaches of territory. Ghengis Kahn, Alexander the Great and Napoleon come to mind as examples. Their wars were not really based upon an ideology being forced upon those conquered. That concept probably started with the Crusades, although some might say that the armies of the Roman Caesar or even the Greeks did have an impact upon civilizations as a purpose for their invasions. Chinese history predates western history, but its records show a similar pattern. No matter, someone was first to organize an army a long time ago.

WWI was claimed to be the "war to end all wars". Yet it lacked an ideological dimension beyond simple freedom and was limited to who was to rule Europe and have the greatest influence with Empires throughout the world. The American involvement not only broke the stalemate in the military sense, it also gave impetus for the League of Nations. But, few were ready to make the League work and the U.S. Congress torpedoed the idea of Wilson being able to compromise American independence and power.

It was not until WWII that a global war was fought more in a more focused way over the issue of individual freedom vs Statism, that we began to experience such a warlike struggle for the minds of men and women. Hitler dreamed of an Aryan race and a system of' thought control' policed by the Gestapo. Stalin took the concepts of Lenin, who took them from Marx, and created a new war for the minds of people. Millions died in the ensuing civil war and many millions more in the war against Hitler and fascism before the 'cold-war' began.

The western allies in WWII were fighting for democracy and freedom, not for capitalism. The Soviet Union, was able to avoid that fight for an extra two years thanks to the Molotov-VonRibbentrop Pact between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Thus the battle between Fascism and Communism was delayed while Hitler fought to control Europe. He had hoped to keep the U.S. out of the conflict and worked hard to encourage the German-American Bunds as organizations to promote peace and friendship between the two nations.

Had America figured out that it should have gone to war against both isms, Communism and Fascism, even by the time that we had allied successfully with the communists to stop Hitler, world history could have been very different.