Here is a video:

You can see their exchange in the following video.

If you have any interest in the history of the Red Scare in North America, you may find Dan Carlin’s most recent Hardcore History episode called Radical Thoughts fascinating. As a red scare history buff, this is right up my alley.

It’s nearly 3 hours. The best way I can describe Dan’s approach to talking about history is by listing a few words: exploratory, contemplative, and analytical. He really tries to get his listeners to “get inside the heads” of the people under consideration and in this episode goes a long way to try to help people understand the fears that were tied to this era.

(This quote comes from the audio of a talk from 2006 on Fyodor Dostoyevski at a gathering hosted by Brian Godawa. Goran is a fellow Serbian and former ACC’er. He used to be a pastor at the former Orange County ACC congregation.  I regard him as being an early member of the Reformed (or Reforming) community within the ACC. I remember listening to a sermon by him on the Perseverance of the Saints, which is a doctrine not preached often in the ACC. I also read some of his articles back in the day and I believe there’s a picture of my brother with him when my family visited California. He’s now a elder/teacher at Glendale Presbyterian Church.  I have tried to preserve original wording on this quote as much as I can, though I might have tweaked it a bit to make it flow in written form.)

“Even those who hate the market, whether they work in it or not, thrive on the wealth it generates. If Marx’s buddy Engels hadn’t been a factory manager, he would have lacked the leisure time needed to help concoct their destructive philosophy.”

Of course, as various communistic histories have shown, once communism destroys its enemies, it becomes very apparent that its enemies were where the freedom and opportunity to bring about change came about in the first place. And so, communist societies self-destruct fairly quickly.  Either they stagnate (because they have eliminated the preconditions to change) or they become  tyrannical (because they’ve lost the preconditions to peace and freedom).

“(The police enjoyed fearmongering about alleged conspiracies; the previous summer they had uncovered a nest of Russian conspirators in Windsor, Ontario, who, they told the newspapers, were at the center of ‘a continent-wide plot to overthrow lawful authority and establish a similar regime to that instituted in Russia by Trozky and Lenine.’)”

– Daniel Francis in Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror

While I’m generally aware of the history around the Red Scare in the U.S., I had been largely unaware of its dimensions in Canada.

Here are a few facts that I had not previously known (and I venture most Canadians under 40 don’t know them either):

• There was a riot called “Bloody Saturday”, with people dying, in Winnipeg in 1919.
• Ribbentrop lived in Canada. Before World War I, Joachim von Ribbentrop (who ended up becoming Hitler’s foreign minister) lived in Ottawa doing business as a wine merchant. During World War I, he fled by train to New York and from there made his way to Germany and joined the German side.
• The Toronto city council voted to fire any employee of German, Austrian, or Turkish background who were not naturalized citizens
• Trotsky stayed in Canada for a while. Leon Trotsky, on his way from exile in New York back to his homeland Russia, was detained in Halifax, Canada by Great Britian and was eventually interned in a prisoner-of-war camp near the New Brunswick border.  And this happened even though Trotsky was traveling on a legal permit/visa and was a citizen of a country allied with Britian.

“It often happens with ‘egalitarians’ that a hole, a special escape hatch from the drab uniformity of life, is created — for themselves.”

– Murray Rothbard in Messianic Communism in the Protestant Reformation (an exerpt from Economic Thought Before Adam Smith)

“…I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation..I believe in the absolute minimum of government.”

“But to destroy [the State] at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, holding down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society”

(Letter from Engels to Philipp Van Patten, April 18, 1883)

In short, they saw state as a coercive, violent tool to protect and perpetuate an act of theft and prevent property owners from reasserting their control of property. This is why Marxism can’t abide no government or even a small government. It needs a big government to keep those nasty individualists and capitalists in check and prevent them from holding on to their stuff.  Some of us, however, would not like to be  “held down” in the manner suggested by Engels.

The idea of using violence to supress property rights is not new, its even illustrated negatively in a parable of Jesus Christ, when he portrays wicked tenants who think they own the owners property and hence attempt, as workers, to take control of the owners property  (Luke 20:9-15).

“In the last days of December the plans were completed, and the warrants went out by the thousands to Department of Justice officials across the country. The target date for the raids was to be January 2.

In Chicago, when the Republican State Attorney Hoyne learned that the Democractic administration was planning a raid, he made ready for his own raid to steal the thunder of the administration. On January 1, state and local officials swooped down in Chicago in 300 separate raids, picking up 200 prisoners. Hoyne complained that they would have had more prisoners except that the Department of Justice tipped off the radicals that the state was raiding.”

from The Palmer Raids 1919-1920: An Attempt to Suppress Dissent by Edwin R. Hoyt

Rudd seems to remain on a similar page politically (as far as I can tell), though he appears to have renounced the violent aspects of his strategy (although, existing forms of socialism imply a certain amount of violence, the violence of the state, and he appears to remain committed to that) .

He said (a few quotes from the full paper, Che and Me):

“I was a Guevarista, a member of the cult of Che.  That meant not only putting up multiple posters with Che’s image on the wall in my room during college, but whole-heartedly accepting the theory that a small armed group could spark revolution by actually beginning military action.”

“One thing we hadn’t stopped to notice was that Che, in October, 1967, using precisely the same strategy that we proposed to use, had already been defeated and killed in Bolivia…Blinded by my love and admiration for ‘the Heroic Guerilla,’ as Fidel had dubbed Che, I didn’t want to see that there was a fatal flaw in the theory.  It didn’t work.”

“This is a tough thing to write, since it puts me close to the camp of right-wingers who have always attacked Che as a murderer and a terrorist, but I believe that by the end of his life, after the years of blood and to-the-death struggles of the Cuban revolution, Che had become both homicidal and suicidal.”

“…personally, I’ve long ago opted out of the cult of Che which I joined over forty years ago. It’s impossible for me to look on Che as the great revolutionary hero anymore;”

I find this interesting, because Mark Rudd was not your run-of-the-mill person who looked up to Che. He was trying to bring Che Guevara’s war to the U.S.A., he was an American Guevarista if there ever was one. The Cuban government even invited him over to visit as a delegate while he was with the SDS.

I’m certainly glad Mark Rudd’s vision was not imposed on America in the 1970s. I’m glad the Weather Underground was a failure and never got very far “off the ground” so to speak. Their case is a perfect example of  how out of touch with reality people can get in their own little subcultures.  Gee… Even the Black Panthers, Vietnam leaders, and Cuban leaders voiced major concerns and some of them warned the Weather Underground not to go ahead with this. And in the case of the Weather Underground, getting “out of touch” meant causing chaos, blowing up things, and becoming fugitives.

I’m also glad that Mark Rudd has lost his ‘rose colored’ glasses about Che Guevara. Now, if only he’d forsake socialism and its inherent violence and also stop dreaming that Obama is going to fix things!  If Arlo Guthrie became a Ron Paul fan, who’s to say Mark Rudd couldn’t come around some day and ditch socialism!