The Real Oppressors
NOTE: The following is protected by federal copyright law and is an excerpt from the book Marxianity written by Brannon Howse and is not to be published online. The footnotes that document the content in this article are found in the book Marxianity or the eBook.
Capitalism and the associated free market principles derive from the second-generation Protestant reformers. They understood individual responsibility: the work ethic, “putting your hand to the plow,” and building wealth over time. The ideas took root here in America quickly, but not without trying out alternative approaches.
William Bradford, leader of the Pilgrims, is the best-known early leader to see how socialism would work for his people. It didn’t. After trying a system of common work and sharing of goods, the group was on the verge of dying out. He shifted to a system of private ownership and individual responsibility, and productivity soared. The small colony survived.
Christianity and capitalism are tied together because of what the Bible says about private contract and work ethic. To paraphrase the Apostle Paul: If you don’t work, you don’t eat. In addition, the Bible supports capitalistic principles with its admonitions against stealing, coveting (socialism is based on wanting what someone else has earned), cheating, and lying (think: “dialectical deception”). Wealth isn’t evil. Money isn’t evil. Only “the love of money” is condemned in Scripture. Love of money is a form of idolatry.
Although white capitalists—especially male white capitalists—are cast as the bad guys in the cultural Marxist script, the Marxists themselves have created this race-based (i.e., bigoted) view. The reality is that people of different pigmentation, skin color, and ethnicity are regarded in the Bible as belonging to only one race: the human race. Acts 17 says that there are not many races. There’s only one.
Despite a great deal of political spin to the contrary, black Americans have not actually suffered due to the free market system. Looking at the last half-century; they have actually fared worse under the socialistic policies of President Obama. In a July 25, 2015 article entitled “Under Obama, Blacks Are Worse Off, Far Worse” at TownHall.com, Larry Elder (a black political observer) explains why: “In 2009 when Obama took office, the black poverty rate was 25.8 percent. As of 2014, according to Pew Research Center, the black poverty rate was 27.2 percent.” Thomas Sowell, also a black conservative, draws a similar conclusion in his September 27, 2016 article entitled, “Favors to Blacks:” “In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.”
So, the Marxists are winning the war among blacks. As planned, the demise of the family and the intrusion of the government go hand in hand. When you had a two-parent home, what did you have? Low unemployment, low welfare. Families thrived with two-parent homes. Even the crime rate was lower because a father was there to raise, disciple, and train his children. Family breakdown resulted in a shocking increase in crime which further encouraged the desire for a bigger government.
The truth is that socialism enslaves people. As more socialist policies and their lack of morality are implemented, you see more suffering and oppression. In its most virulent form, Karl Marx’s Communism, we have seen more than a half of a billion people killed during the past century in “socialism gone wild.”
Examples of socialistic enslavement abound today. Venezuela, for instance, with its managed economy has seen an inflation rate of 2,100 percent in 2017 alone! An inflation rate like that creates massive economic suffering for everyone, not just a few “oppressed” classes of people.
In a prescient book, Please Stop Helping Us, Jason Ripley echoes the theme of Thomas Sowell and Larry Elder. The subtitle is clear on the source of the problem: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Ripley explains: “Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries? And please stop helping us.” He examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are, in fact, holding black Americans back. Minimum wage laws, for example, may lift earnings for people who are already employed but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than might otherwise exist. And so it goes, with everything from being soft on crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools which most low income students attend. Ripley concludes: “In theory, these efforts are intended to help the poor, and poor minorities in particular. In practice, they became massive barriers to moving forward.”
Disturbingly, research demonstrates the effectiveness of cultural Marxism in winning the sound-bite war among the general population, as well. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, 58 percent of millennials believe it would be good to live under some type of socialist system—socialism, communism, or fascism. And how has this dismal statistic come to be? It’s because the Frankfurt school openly targeted American education and media in order to change our worldview. We have gotten where we are today due to an information operation begun by the displaced Frankfurt minions in 1933.
By the 1940s, American education had become so poor at teaching traditional values, economics and the benefits of a Constitutional Republic, that the POWs in the Korean War could not withstand the Communist propaganda fed to them by their captors. In fact, many POWs succumbed to brainwashing and gave up their will to live. My friend, John Stormer, writes about this in his excellent book None Dare Call It Treason. He says that a good percentage became so downcast due to the propaganda that they couldn’t fight it off. Instead of helping their sick soldier friends with dysentery, some were so despondent that they put fellow prisoners out in the snow where they would freeze to death.
As a result of its concern about the Korean War POW situation, the U.S. government commissioned a study of the issue. Headed by Major William E. Mayer of the United States Army, the commission released a report called, “Brainwashing, The Ultimate Weapon” on October 4, 1956. This report stated that American POWs did not know enough about American history and the facts about our founding, the reasons we believe what we believe, and the reasons we have the governmental system we have—our branches of government, checks and balances, and a Constitutional Republic. As a result, they couldn’t defend our history and heritage and were taken in by the lies of the communists.
The problem continued, though, and the tactics of the enemy became even more sophisticated in the 1960s. During the Vietnam War, another information operation effectively turned the hearts of Americans against fighting the communists and winning the war in Vietnam. Stanislav Lunev, a former colonel in Soviet military intelligence (the GRU), defected to the United States in 1992 and wrote a book called Through the Eyes of the Enemy which exposed the deceptions that had been foisted on American citizens. He explained the basic Communist strategy against the U.S. war in Vietnam:
What would be a great surprise to the American people is that the GRU and the KGB had a larger budget for anti-war propaganda in the United States than it did for economic and military support for the Vietnamese. The anti-war propaganda cost the GRU more than one billion dollars, but as history shows, it was a hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost. The anti-war sentiment created an incredible momentum that greatly weakened the U.S. military. (emphasis mine)
The USSR spent more than a billion dollars to produce, pay for, and distribute anti-American propaganda here in the United States through education and the media.
As with many criminal successes, communists and socialists from elsewhere have also benefitted from the help of those willing to do an “inside job.” An array of anti-American, anti-Christian, globalist, statist, socialistic, progressive foundations have been at work funding the same ideological spin from inside the United States, and this, too, has been going on a long time. In 1954, Congressman B. Carroll Reese from Tennessee headed up the Reese Committee. His report revealed that some wealthy American foundations were spending millions of dollars to influence the writing of American textbooks and to promote the concept of collectivism, not the ideals of individual responsibility and rights.
Years later, President Ronald Reagan commissioned yet another report intended to sound the alarm about the spurious influences on our culture. His 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” claimed that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
In the end, our enemies have been destroying us from within, and the result is the alarming percentage of millennials who want to live under some form of communism. Even the Washington Times has noted the disturbing reality. In a November 4, 2017 article entitled “Millennials Would Rather Live in Socialist or Communist Nations Than Under Capitalism,” the report observes that “the majority of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation, rather than a capitalistic one.” The background our education and media are feeding to the American people today is far worse than it was 60 or 70 years ago, and we have to admit that the Frankfurt School has done its job well.
