Neocommies

I saw this column at American Thinker after reading the link Michael posted a few days ago. It is certainly incendiary, but it sure rings true, especially these parts:

There is a compelling factual case to be made that the contemporary radical Left can properly be called "Neocommunist." The Hard Left is grounded in Marxist vision of creating a "new man" under a system led by a vanguard that knows best what the rest of society needs. And Neocommies behave in patterns with startling parallels to Old Communist tactics.

The Neocommies are not members of a Communist Party, and are part more of a movement than a conspiracy. They are utterly different from traditional liberalism in America and Europe. Traditional liberals were democratic -- people like Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson and Harry Truman. They fought passionately against the Totalitarian Left, as Ronald Reagan did when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan started as a democratic liberal, and became the most famous conservative of the 20th century. As he said so often, he didn't leave the Democratic Party -- it left him.

[...]

In the US, of course, the NeoCommunists were the Sixties Radicals who decided to carry on a "Long March through the Institutions." That means the college faculties, the high schools, the media, Hollywood, and government.

[...]

The methods of Neocommunism parallel those of Old Communism to an astonishing degree.

The routine use of orchestrated group lying (so that many different people are suddenly making the same accusation );


The constant use of innocent-sounding front groups like MoveOn.org and Media Matters;

The use of stooges (like military retirees, both real and phony);

The need to whip up the rage of the faithful with constant disinformation about the enemy (i.e., America and conservatives);

The infiltration of media and government. Members of the seventies left are sprinkled throughout these institutions, carrying out the long march. These tricks are all straight out of the old, old playbook. Karl Marx really was a genius agitator and revolutionary plotter, though nothing else. Marx is still the model.

In the Democratic Party, the former radical Henry Wallace wing now controls the Party under a different label, because adopting different disguises is the essence of revolutionary konspiratia. (Konspiratia has been one of the biggest Russian indoor sports since Ivan the Terrible. Americans are just pikers by comparison.)

The worst example of PC re-labeling is what the Hard Left has done to the word "liberal." Our current Left is anything but "liberal." They are not concerned with liberty. They have nothing good to say about John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or Thomas Jefferson. Instead, they impose PC speech control wherever possible, including in the mainstream media. They try to intimidate anyone who disagrees, and have purged professors in universities by accusing them of the current smear labels: Racist, Sexist, Homophobe. A distinguished older scholar I know was harassed some twenty years ago when the PC Police took over his college. His scholarly journals were thrown into the garbage and his office was trashed. He was attacked verbally by radical students in his classes, who were openly encouraged by old-style Marxist professors. My friend ended up resigning from his tenured job, had a heart-attack, somehow survived it and retired. These radicals are not liberals, no matter how much they try to use that label.

There are many similar stories from the Putsch period of the New Left -- starting roughly in the 1970s, when the Boomer Lefties were graduating from the colleges where they had been radicalized. That's when the PC Commissars started to take over, often by simply harassing their enemies.

Today, they're in charge on the campuses. President Lawrence Summers lost his job at Harvard, and was recently blackballed at UC Davis, for offending against Politically Correct Orthodoxy. Larry Summers came to fame as a Clinton Administration official -- a liberal, but not ideologically Stalinist enough for the Hard Left.

The New Left utilized "affirmative action," Black Studies and Women's Studies to bring in new indoctrinated troops, and to drive out objective scholarship from humanities departments. Science and engineering departments tended to be a little more resistant, because they had to deal with facts in the real world. The same seems to be true in business and economics departments. For honest humanities scholarship the Left substituted frauds like "post-modernism," "deconstructionism," and "Critical Theory." Those were just new labels for the old vinegar. While those hot new ideas are now dying of ennui, their true believers are going back to the old Marxist gospel. What's that song about the old-time religion? Well, the Left is going back to the old-time religion of Communism. The best proof is that the very word "communism" is now strictly Verboten by the PC Commissars, who don't want to be exposed.

Wow, does that not sound like the leftists of PARD, the WSU Comparative Ethnic Studies department and the Moscow Civic Association or what? Scary stuff. Read the whole thing.