Communism- How did it happen?

Author: Richard R. Tryon

Chapter three

Can anyone be lured back to communism? or to God?

Many or most Americans may think that both God and Communism are dead! Neither idea is true!

But first, we need to know how man can be lured again to accept the Siren-song of the communist? It is the contention of this writer that 'Satanic like' forces are always at work and we are almost unable to guard against them. They come at us by surprise. This force is not generated by a being that has physical characteristics named Satan, but by the absence of the force of good which comes from God. We make 'free-will' decisions to let down our guard. To establish the point:

Almost everyone knows that back on Dec. 7, 1941 the U.S. was attacked by forces from Japan at our Naval base called Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. True, there are many who do not know why or how the surprise attackers were able to avoid being driven away by an alert and well prepared defense. As a nine year old boy, this writer was doubly surprised that his nation was not better prepared and able to stop such an attack for several strong reasons: One, a week before it happened, he was witness at the home of a friend to a radio broadcast that told of the attack! (One of about six such false alarms) Secondly, he was certain that the giant nation, of which he was a part, was much stronger than that tiny collection of Pacific Islands called Japan, where ‘yellow skinned’ people of smaller stature lived in a way thought to be inferior to our own.

Everyone responded to that tragic event in U.S. history with surprise and anger. The collective attitude of wanting to be isolated from the European and Asian wars was reinforced by the physical distances and the comfortable feeling that two great oceans separated us from those crazy enough to fight wars over land, a commodity of which we had plenty. But, a ‘sneak’ attack hit upon our sense of national honor and the response was immediate and overwhelming to the government’s need to organize and build up our military forces.

It took forty years for the writer to discover the truth about why we we were caught with our pants down’ as a nation by the Japanese aviators who flew from aircraft carriers from a point north of Hawaii and bombed and sank almost all of our Pacific fleet’s major battleships and destroyed most of our fighter planes on the ground where they were neatly parked in rows on that fateful Sunday morning.

What does this story have to do with the subject of Communism? Wasn’t the event of Pearl Harbor that dragged the U.S. into WWII a war against Fascism and the dictators- Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini? Yes, this is true. It is also true that the dictators of the world come in two flavors, from the political right or the left, and they use the same methods to promote themselves as powerful leaders bent on building one form of Statism or the other, which we learned to label as Fascism or Communism.

In a sense the world dictators of history before WWII were all men who came to their positions of power via one form of fascism or another. It was not until Karl Marx wrote “Das Capital” that the stage was set for ideological wars. Hitler, author of "Mein Kamp", led the Western world and then the entire globe into WWII, a battle between those who wanted democratic freedom vs those that wanted State control of our minds, bodies, and lives. Hitler always knew that his greatest enemy would be the Marxist of the Soviet Union, both in size and tenacity to a competing ideology. Most of us thought he was fighting to conquer the globe to promote a German economic empire to replace those of the past like the British Empire or the Roman Empire in terms of grandeur and wealth for the leaders from Germany. We didn’t see very well that he was also fighting against the communist ideology, but for something that resulted in a very similar and complete state control of the individual life.

That struggle compelled him to arrange a NAZI led AXIS of powers that took in the Italian dictator Mussolini, whose army was almost defeated by the handful of spear throwing natives of Ethiopia; and the Japanese, with a far more formidable military approach to providing for the destiny of Japan. Hitler’s foreign service leaders tried hard to get the Japanese to agree to attack the Soviet Union from the East at the same time as Hitler came from the West. His goal was to eliminate the communist threat to his vision of humanity and from a military point of view, if the Japanese had cooperated, he might well have split the Russian armies to the point where they would have lost the chance for the time to let the winter and American lend-lease to save them.

Japan’s cooperation was lost because the American President and the British Prime Minister both told the Japanese that they must abandon their conquest of China. If they could have kept Manchuria for raw materials, Japan could have been content for a while to evacuate the wasteland of China and let someone else deal with it. But, in typical democratic fashion, the western leaders wanted unconditional surrender! So, Japan decided to go for the oil in the Dutch East Indies, known today as Indonesia and the rubber of Burma to supply the additional raw materials needed to be an modern industrial super-power.

How ironic that, if we had recognized the future threat of communism, we might have enlisted Japan to fight against Russia. But, of course, we didn’t take the Russian threat seriously, and we did not want to see the Axis join and conquer all of China ruled by the friendly developments of Sun Yat Sen and then Chiang Kai Shek. As history tells, however, the Japanese should not have attacked the U.S. and it led to their losing the war that for them started in 1931 in August of 1945, three months after the Germans surrendered in May and almost two years after the Italians had murdered Mussolini and hung him upside down in Northern Italy.

This led to the joyous days of victory and to the rebuilding decade of peace in the 50’s for the U.S. Most of us paid little attention to the details of the rebuilding of Europe or the new “Gathering Storm” predicted by the author, Sir Winston Churchill of the book of the same name. His speech in Missouri coined the term “Iron Curtain”. What did it predict?

Far more than Sir Winston feared. Having been born into the age when the British Empire was at its zenith, he understood very well how and why his class was so privileged. He, however, had no qualm about his majestic position (which had experienced failures as well as success) being a right and proper one.

In a real sense he feared the Russians and did not want to trust Stalin. Roosevelt, somewhat influenced by his State Department and perhaps more by his loving wife Eleanor, who was willing to put her dismay at his infidelity aside, as long as she could influence the American political scene, came to embrace Stalin and support his mighty need for help. It bothered her that we avoided taking an official side in the Spanish Civil War between the Franco Loyalists and the Communists in 1937. Hitler's action to make war on Russia made Russia an immediate ally of the Western democracies.

But, after all, the Russians suffered more battle losses to Hitler than the U.S. and Britain combined. Stalin begged for the new third front of battle for two years while Roosevelt let the U.S. Army work its way up through Italy while Churchill hoped to attack through the SE European route that he favored in WWI when the disaster of Gollipoli overcame the plan. He may well have wanted to be vindicated and hoped that a second chance would work better. Finally the allies agreed to the channel crossing and it happened on June 6, 1944. Less than a year later the war in Europe was over on May 8, 1945.

The war in Asia was ended with the Japanese surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri in the Bay of Tokyo, Japan on Aug. 14, 1945. It took two of the three atomic bombs built that year to get Hirohito to understand that the invincible Japanese Army and Navy had been defeated and that surrender was the only option left.

All of this war was fought by Americans, save a few involved before Pearl Harbor, who were brought into it as a result of that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. That was our introduction to the idea that our lives, families, and homes were in danger of being taken over by a trio of dictators called the Axis Powers. Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo were the main leaders of this conspiracy for global conquest in the name of fascism.

But, the other end of that political spectrum, the communists were at work with the same goal in mind. They got their start with the acts of stealing the revolution in Russia in 1917 and they were working for the future spreading of their Ideal before, during, and after WWII. Not very many Americans in the 30's knew what David Horowitz and his father knew. One day the communist ideal would capture and gain control of the world.