Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Celene Thompson (July 9, 1893 – January 30, 1961) was an American journalist.

Quotes

He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. … His movements are awkward. There is in his face no trace of any inner conflict or self-discipline.
And yet, he is not without a certain charm. But it is the soft almost feminine charm of the Austrian! When he talks it is with a broad Austrian dialect. The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroidic, they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.
- About Adolf Hitler, in "I Saw Hitler!" in Cosmopolitan (1931), later in I Saw Hitler! (1932)

As far as I can see, I really was put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. … My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. This is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says that Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people — an old Jewish idea. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are German you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen to one.
- Statement of August 1934, after being expelled from Germany, quoted in Dorothy Thompson : A Legend In Her Time (1973) by Marion K. Sanders, p. 199

No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument — the Incorporated National Will. … When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him "Führer" or "Duce." But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of "O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"
- Statement of 1935, quoted in Watchdogs of Democracy? : The Waning Washington Press Corps and How it Has Failed the Public (2006) by Helen Thomas, p. 172, and Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals, and Transgenders (2009), p. 450

It is true that the techniques of war are constantly "improved" as the genius of an age of invention is put in the service of the war machine. But that is not what is most disturbing. What is revolutionary is that the minds of men, women and children are being deliberately trained, directed, distorted, by every conceivable instrument of education and propaganda, to make them tolerant of war, receptive of war, prepared for war, lovers of war. The greatest menace in the world is not poison gas. There are gas masks against that. The menace is poisoned words, poisoned ideas.
- "Dilemma of a Pacifist"(1937)

I know now that there are things for which I am prepared to die. I am willing to die for political freedom; for the right to give my loyalty to ideals above a nation and above a class; for the right to teach my child what I think to be the truth; for the right to explore such knowledge as my brains can penetrate; for the right to love where my mind and heart admire, without reference to some dictator’s code to tell me what the national canons on the matter are; for the right to work with others of like mind; for a society that seems to me becoming to the dignity of the human race.
I shall pick no fight, nor seek to impose by force these standards on others. But let it be clear. If the fight comes unsolicited, I am not willing to die meekly, to surrender without effort. And that being so, am I still a pacifist?
- "Dilemma of a Pacifist"(1937)

Having first robbed the Jews, the Nazis are beginning to rob the Church, and later will almost certainly expropriate what is left of the bourgeoisie property.
- “On the Record,” Harrisburg Telegraph (Harrisburg, PA) (March 6, 1939)

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
- “Who Goes Nazi?” Harper’s Magazine (August 1941)

I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.
- “Who Goes Nazi?” Harper’s Magazine (August 1941)

It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of ‘Who Goes Nazi?’ And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities. Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
- “Who Goes Nazi?” Harper’s Magazine (August 1941)

To have felt too much is to end in feeling nothing.
- A comment regarding her divorce from Sinclair Lewis, quoted by Vincent Sheean in Dorothy and Red (1963)

What was once Sinclair Lewis is buried in no ground. Even in life he was fully alive only in his writing. He lives in public libraries from Maine to California, in worn copies in the bookshelves of women from small towns who, in their girlhood, imagined themselves as Carol Kennicotts, and of medical men who, as youths, were inspired by Martin Arrowsmith.
- On her former husband Sinclair Lewis, "The Boy From Sauk Center" in The Atlantic (November 1960)

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
- In Ladies Home Journal, May 1958

"The New Russia" 1928

Dorothy Thompson, "The New Russia", New York: NY, Henry Holt and Company, (1928)

Private shops [in Soviet Russia]. . . are taxed higher than co-operatives, are granted less favorable concessions, and enjoy a grudging legality. Nevertheless, their owners often make a great deal of money. The only explanation for it is the shortage of goods and the hunger for them. When one asks for the explanation of such a phenomenon in an agricultural country one is told: The government is exporting grain, the milk or egg price is too low and the peasants are holding back.
- p. 23

In these ten years urban Russia having destroyed, exiled, or reduced to the most abject misery all representatives of that previous civilization, is without most bourgeoisie amenities.
- p. 24

The hotels are entirely run by the Moscow Soviet, which seems to have picked its employees rather for their political reliability than for their experience or cleverness at hotel management.
- p. 25

Every play which is produced—and for that matter, every book that is published, every picture which is exhibited, every film which is turned—is subjected to the Board of Censors… Romantic love in even its purest phases is not thought to be a fitting subject for consideration of citizens of a communist state;. . . the sex play is unknown in modern Russia… There remains as the ubiquitous theme for plays: revolution, with all the patriotic and nationalistic connotations which have grown up around it; heroism, sacrifice for the nation and class; consciousness of solidarity with one’s fellow proletarians; common suffering; great adventures with new ideas; great prospects for future machine age which is to be a sort of Russian-communist Americanism.
- pp. 27-28

Indeed, gaiety is singularly lacking everywhere in Russia. What is intense and joyful goes into pioneer work and not into amusement. Only in the company of young communists and artists can one find stimulation.
- p. 32

"I Saw Hitler" 1932

Dorothy Thompson, "I Saw Hitler", Farrar and Rinehart, (1932)

The people were to ‘awaken’ and Hitler’s movement was going to vote dictatorship in! In itself a fascinating idea. Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.
- p. 4

[Hitler] was lofty and remote from all foreigners. Germany for the Germans. Scorn for Americans, the dollar-chasers, the money-grubbers, the profiteers.
- p. 5

[Hitler] is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and slightly retreating forehead. The back head is shallow. The face is broad in the check-bones. The nose is large, but badly shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified and most un-martial. There is in his face no trace of any inner conflict or self-discipline.
- pp. 13-14

And yet, [Hitler] is not without a certain charm. But it is the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian! When he talks it is with a broad Austrian dialect.
- p. 14

The interview was difficult, because one cannot carry on a conversation with Adolph Hitler. He speaks always, as though he were addressing a mass meeting. In personal intercourse he is shy, almost embarrassed. In every question he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus in some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance. He bangs the table.
- p. 16

Millions of Germans follow Hitler because he has proclaimed war upon the banks, upon the trusts, upon ‘loan-capital.’ He has asserted time and time again that he will abolish the rule of one class by another.
- p. 17

Hitler intends he told me to house as many of the unemployed as possible in barracks… and employ them in the service of the state at soldier’s wages, of something like six cents a day with room and keep. This will serve two ends: re-begin general military training and raise a force of road-builders, etc. He intends to break up such great estates as are not now being cultivated by their owners and carry on an extensive colonization plan. This, however, is already being done by the present government.
- pp. 17-18

On the subject of the constitution Hitler was more explicit, though there again, I had to interrupt an address to an unseen gallery. ‘I will get into power legally. I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.’ So that’s that for the Republic.
- p. 18

Anti-semitism became equal to anti-Republicanism. And Hitler went to the peasants with a campaign of anti-capitalism.
- p. 28

The capitalism which Hitler fought was so-called ‘loan capitalism.’—Finance, and the great trusts and cartels depending upon the banks. Department stores were included because, as it happened, many of them had Jewish owners. Expropriate Department Store Owners! Nationalize the trusts and the banks! Break up the Great Estates!’
- pp. 28-29

Above all, [Hitler] appeals to the invisible realities, to the emotions, to faith rather than reason. His speeches are full of talk about Honor, Folk, Fatherland, Loyalty, Family, Sacrifice, Revenge. ‘He begins,’ says a writer who has often heard him, ‘in a gentle tenor voice. It is usually fifteen minutes before the miracle happens. Then it comes. Literally, it seems. ‘the spirit enters into him.’ He is possessed. Phrases come to his lips with are artistically perfect.
- p. 30

Patriotism is the cheapest form of self-exaltation. If one is in debt, if one has not made a success of life—still, says Hitler, one belongs to the RACE. ‘All that is not Race, is dross!’ is one of his exclamations. The Germanys are a superior race and it is ordained that this superior race shall conquer the earth.
- p. 32

Once in power, will [Hitler] want to risk another French invasion? What, becomes, then, of his sonorous calls to arms? He will have to maintain law and order. What becomes then, of his promises to a revolutionary working class?
- p. 36

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)

Stackpole Sons, New York, 1938

Fascism, Nazism, and Communism are all Collectivism. In this respect they are all alike.
- p. 14

The communist theory is that a world war is inevitable; that in that war, if they play their cards well, the democracies will be lined up against the fascist dictatorships, and that the result of the war will be the triumph of Communism all over the world. Their chief program now is to get the democracies so lined up.
- p. 17

The production of wealth by private enterprise is called Capitalism. It is hard to call Capitalism one of the isms, because Capitalism is not a creed at all. Capitalism was not ‘invented’ by any sociologist or philosopher. Capitalists never called themselves that. The word was invented by socialists to describe what they hated.
- p. 25

Capitalism is the use of wealth in private hands to create more wealth. It is the existing world-wide modern system of organizing production and trade by private enterprise, free to seek profit by employing human labor. Its defenders argue that never, since the beginning of history, has there been such a thing as perfect equality and harmony;… and every know period of history had rich and poor, and that actually modern technology, plus liberal democracy, plus an increased social sense, plus Capitalism, have created the modern world, and that as far as the standard of living of the average man is concerned the modern world surpasses all previous epochs of history.
- p. 26

[P]rivate enterprise and initiative, willing to take risks in the hope of gain, allowed to function in freedom, have produced the greatest wealth ever known in the history of mankind. And that if you stop this process and turn everything over to government, the activity will slow down, inventiveness will cease, and we shall get not equalization of riches, but equalization of poverty.
- p. 27

It became the fashion a few years ago to say that civil liberties meant nothing to the average man; that his freedom was just freedom to starve. But it also happens that the ‘free’ countries are those which the underprivileged are best fed.
- p. 29

A great many people say that there is a great battle going on in the world: between Fascism and Communism. Fascism is represented as Capitalism in its ultimate and final form, when it controls the state wholly. Communism is represented as the final expression of democracy. But this theory was invented by fascists and communists. To a democrat, looking on, it seems like a sham battle.
- pp. 29-30

We see Russia developing into a strongly centralized, highly nationalistic, intensely militarized state, subjecting policy and public welfare to national and military aims; and we see Benito Mussolini nationalizing more and more enterprises, restricting private initiative more and more, while the economic dictator of Germany becomes, not the capitalist representative, Dr. Schacht, but General Goering, who is a soldier and aviator and who believes that the chief business of Capitalism is to produce more cannons.
- p. 30

Democracy for most of us is not an ism. It is a way of life. It does not represent any rigid form of state or national organization. It is something constantly developing and unfolding, changing from day to day, making mistakes, advancing in this direction and retreating in that, but always animated by a few fundamental ideas: that men have a right to live their own lives, provided they don’t tread too heavily on other people’s toes;…
- p. 31

All my life I have been a pacifist. All my life I have hated war and loved peace. I have contributed to peace societies, written for peace, spoken for peace, paraded for peace. But today I seriously question whether our ways of seeking peace are not playing directly into the hands of those who love war and intend to pursue it.
- p. 33

I see the nations of the world arming in ways that have never before been known in the modern world. I am not speaking of new forms of poison gas, heavier or swifter bombing planes, or parachutes to land brigades of soldiers… What is revolutionary is that the minds of men, women and children are being deliberately trained, directed, distorted, by every conceivable instrument of education and propaganda, to make them tolerant of war, receptive of war, prepared for war, lovers of war. The greatest menace in the world today is not poison gas. There are gas masks against that. The menace is poisoned words, poisoned ideas.
- pp. 33-34

I have seen a German youth camp, housing six thousand children around the age of ten, display in tree-high letters the words: ‘You were born to die for Germany!’ I have seen babies of six and seven, black-shirted and belted, march in Italy in military drill. I have seen children in Russia kindergartens taught how to adjust gas masks and the strategy of trench warfare.
- p. 34-35

Today in Germany the winner of the last Nobel peace prize is considered a traitor, and to attend any peace meeting would make one a candidate for a concentration camp. Today in Italy there is only one morality: the power and glory of Italy. Today in Russia all children are brought up to despise and hate ‘the class enemy.’
- p. 35

It takes two to reach an agreement,’ says Hamilton Fish Armstrong in his gallant little polemic against dictatorship, called We or They, ‘but it only takes one to make a war.’
- p. 36

The attempts of some of our school authorities to prevent students from learning anything about Communism, for instance, are futile. Newspapers exist; correspondents report; people travel. It is quite impossible to act as though Russia did not exist, or were as inaccessible and mysterious as Mars.
- p. 42

The New Deal has enormously increased the sense of awareness; it has contributed radically to the breakdown of confidence in the forms and procedures of yesterday. But it has offered us no comprehensible picture of a future in which we can believe. We cannot believe that this vague eleemosynary humanitarianism, coupled with ruthless aggrandizement by politicians, is a picture of a new heaven and a new earth.
- p. 46

Our children, it seems to me, learn the history of events, but are woefully unversed in the history of thought… The result of this kind of teaching is to diminish all respect for intellect, reason and experience.
- pp. 48-49

The architects of the Constitution had the intention of making a republican and federal government which would endure with stability, insure justice, promote the general welfare and be proof against usurpation, either by the few and the rich or by the poor and the many. For the founding of a republic they had guides. For a federal system they had none. But they thoroughly believed that help could be found in the successes and failures of the past. They knew all about the ‘class struggle’—so, for that matter, did the Greek philosophers, although you would think from our young socialist friends that Karl Marx was the first person ever to notice it. They knew all about Fascism and its causes, although they called it by another name.
- pp. 52-53

The word ‘Liberal’ has now become so variously interpreted that few people know what it means. Those who use it most precisely today are the Fascists and the Communists. They know what Liberalism is, and they are against it. For these people are collectivists.
- p. 58

The Communists and Fascists are engaged in a sham struggle of ideas. The actual forms of government under which Fascists and Communists live are almost identical. One claims to abolish private property and attacks the other as its defender. But the property of Russia is not controlled by the people, but by the bureaucracy, operating in the name of the people, just as it is in Germany, where you get your head cut off if you try to hold your property in gold or in anything except German paper.
- p. 62

What confuses the mind of the average American is that the American collectivist calls himself a Liberal, and has pre-empted a word which has a totally different philosophy behind it. The Fascists and Communists know that Liberalism is the enemy. But the American collectivist, who calls himself a Liberal, believes that he can have the better of two worlds.
- p. 62

To be a liberal means to believe in human freedom. It means to believe in human beings. It means to champion that form of social and political order which releases the greatest amount of human energy; permits greatest liberty for individuals and groups, in planning and living their lives; cherishes freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of action, limited by only one thing: the protection of the freedom of others.
- p. 64

The American Revolution of 1776 was a great liberal revolution. The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, more than any documents on earth, embody the fundamentals of liberalism. These documents assert the essential equality of human beings. This does not mean, and never did, that one man is as talented, or wise, or good as another, or that each person is entitled to the same rewards. It does mean that every human being has a right to his own life; that no man may be forced to labor against his will, or to assert beliefs contrary to his conscience, or be relegated to one class of society.
- pp. 64-65

The rise of liberalism was accompanied by immense technological progress; by the industrial revolution; by the division of labor which ensued, and which suddenly, and prodigiously, accelerated the efficiency of production; and by the conception of economic life governed by the market. In other words, of economic life governed by the buyer, not the seller. This was a brand-new and wholly revolutionary idea.
- pp. 65-66

Pre-eighteenth century economics were governed, not by consumers, who determined what should be produced by what they were willing to buy in a competitive market, but by producers who enjoyed special privileges in return for the most stringent kind of state regulations. Mr. Walter Lippmann, in his book, The Good Society, points out that in the days of Louis XIV the manufacturers of France were told exactly what to produce and exactly how to produce it. Industry and agriculture were governed by codes more complicated than anything ever invented by the NRA or Mr. Wallace.
- p. 66

The easiest way to simplify society is to reduce it to a military organization. That is the most primitive form of social organization. And that is precisely what is being done. The unit of communal life shrinks. Wealth, prosperity, inventiveness, choice, demand are subordinated to simplified nationalistic aims. The very mind which created the liberal universe becomes atrophied through disuse.
- p. 72

Liberalism is not being killed by dictators. Liberalism is committing suicide—out of despair and a bad conscience. What liberalism needs is a revival, in the evangelical sense of the word. It needs to admit its sins, as the basis of renewing its life.
- pp. 73-74

The object of liberty is to give men and women a chance to be their best selves. That is its first and last purpose.
- p. 77

A slave has no morality, because he cannot choose between good and evil. He has only a derivative morality—that of his masters.
- p. 78

William Penn summed up the ideal of human liberty in the remark: ‘Men must either be governed by God or they must be ruled by tyrants.’
- p. 79

Radicals and Conservatives are not at all unlike, temperamentally. They want order, organization, efficiency, perfection. The Conservative or Reactionary thinks these can be best obtained by putting and keeping the power in the hands of a small class. He is afraid that an extension of democracy will destroy form and tradition, which he believes are essential to holding any society together. The Radical is so obsessed by the obvious faults of society that he wants to pull everything up by the roots and start all over again, and build a perfect society according to a blueprint. It is interesting that when the extreme Radicals triumph—in a revolution, for instance, as in Russia—they immediately become rigidly conservative, and punish all deviation rigorously. The worst fundamentalists in the world today are the Russian communists.
- p. 86

The Liberal is distinguished from the Conservative and the Radical, not only by his basic philosophy but by his methods. Never does he believe that a good end justifies and evil means. He seeks to find everything that binds men together, rather than what divides them, for he loves persuasion and detests coercion.
- p. 90

[T]he object of mankind is not to live in a perfectly functioning universe, but to live in a tolerable universe, which means one suited to the nature and aspirations of human beings.
- p. 92

It is intolerable that a whole race should be indicted and banned— each individual, good, bad and indifferent, lumped into one category—as the Jews are in Germany. It is intolerable that we should accept the principle that there is a permanent, irreconcilable and even necessary hostility between workers and the men who employ them—as is positively implied in this country, in the National Labor Relations Act.
- p. 95

Someday, when women realize that the object of their emancipation is not to make them more like men, but more powerfully womanly, and therefore of greater use to men and themselves and society…
- p. 96

The fathers of American Democracy had no exaggerated respect for the State, because they were pre-eminently men of reason and common sense. They never, for instance, identified the State with the People. They knew that the State is, by very definition, an instrument of oppression and coercion, and their idea was to make it strong enough to keep order and ward off enemies, and limit it otherwise very strictly.
- p. 102

The idea of the State being a sort of apotheosis of the People, their ultimate expression and good, was invented for the modern age by the German philosopher, Hegel, and both Karl Marx, the father of Communism, and Mussolini, the inventor of Fascism,…
- p. 102

"Let the Record Speak" 1939

Dorothy Thompson, "Let the Record Speak", Boston: MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1939

Unity, in Fascist terms, means uniformity; freedom of conscience means insubordination; co-ordination means coercion.
- p. 20 (newspaper column: “Political Dictionary,” March 19, 1936)

A Frenchman who is in close touch with the situation at home told me this week, ‘We would have Fascism in France already if Germany and Italy had not done it first.’
- p. 127 (newspaper column: “The French Crisis and Its Meaning for Us,” February 2, 1938)

For Hitler first hatred was not Communism, but Austria-Hungry. . . And he loathed it for what? For its tolerance! He wanted eighty million Germans to rule with an iron hand an empire of eighty million ‘inferiors’—Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Jews, Serbs, Poles and Croats.
- p. 136 (newspaper column: “Write it Down,” February 18, 1938)

For it is no longer possible to regard Fascism as the friend of Christianity. And in making a cultural treaty with Hitler, Franco has laid Spain wide open to the penetration of Nazi ideology, which has been repeatedly denounced by the Pope himself as anti-Christian.
- p. 287 (newspaper column: “Spain and the Catholics,” January 27, 1939)

The Vatican newspaper in Rome, Osservatore Romano, said of National Socialism, ‘It is the most inhumane of all heresies. Hitler is true to his role of anti-Christ.’
- p. 287 (newspaper column: “Spain and the Catholics,” January 27, 1939)

And now the beginning of the expropriation of church lands in Austria, have all revealed the true face of National Socialism, which more and more among pious Germans is called, under their breaths, ‘the brown Bolshevism.’
- p. 295 (newspaper column: “Pius XII—the former Diplomat,” March, 6, 1939)

The contribution of Communism to the nihilism of democratic despair has been to shear humanism off democracy, to reduce the concept of democracy to crass materialism, to interpret life in terms of bread alone. The Nazis, as anti-humanistic as the Communists, have elevated the Communist Have-Not doctrine into a war cry for the Have-Not states.
- p. 353 (newspaper column: “As Litvinov Goes,” May 5, 1939)

This kind of thinking is taking a long view, in which one must also count the imponderables, such as the effort of prolonged depression upon restless social forces; the inevitable necessity for National Socialism to move very far to the Left, the possible revolt of the people everywhere against dawdling tactics of their leaders.
- p. 355 (newspaper column, “As Litvinov Goes,” May 5, 1939)

For already the myth is being carefully built up. Hitler is to be the Messiah of organic evolution—the anti-Christ of the will to power, which is not a will to national power but a will to power per se, the liberation of the lustfully destructive from any inhibitions whatsoever.
- p. 358 (newspaper column: “The Revolution of Nihilism,” May 8, 1939)

The education of the Nazi elite, it turns out, is the education of super-racketeers and gangsters from among the biologically superior. The concept of ‘noblesse oblige’ is transformed into its polar opposite;…
- p. 359 (newspaper column: “The Revolution of Nihilism,” May 8, 1939)

“The Truth about Communism” (1948)

Public Affairs Press, Washington D.C., booklet 1948

The American Communist Party is not an autonomous body. Its members, who claim their rights under the American Constitution have already relinquished every personal right to an international, actually Russian, body. Their claim to participate in the political life of America is as preposterous as would be the claim of the Jugoslav Communist Party to participate, because the American, Russian, Jugoslav, Bulgarian, etc., parties are all the same organization.
- p. 2

All Communists speak of the Soviet Union as their ‘Fatherland.’ At this seventh Congress, Marcel Cachin, one of the French delegates, said, ‘Comrades, all the parties of the Communist International have never been more attached than at the present time to their Fatherland, the Soviet Union.’
- p. 8

[The Communist’s] objective is not to secure ‘agreements’ or ‘compromises,’ but to use the tribunes of governments for disruptive agitation, and destroy the representative system from within… Any Communist, sitting in any ‘bourgeoisie’ government, represents only the Communist International.
- p. 9

To say that it ‘unconstitutional’ to outlaw and prosecute such a movement is merely to admit that democracies can devise no legal means to protect themselves.
- p. 10

The publicly propagandized aims of communism are vaguely liberal. One can read the Daily Worker every day for a year without finding any clear exegesis of Communist principle. Like Hitler, Communists, outside their own ranks, promise all things to most men, denouncing only ‘monopolists’ ‘imperialists’ (and failing to provide a glossary for their meaning of these terms), opposing race discrimination, child labor, etc.
- p. 10

Thus, the Communists program for agriculture, universal for all countries, would expropriate entirely all farmers living above subsistence or its margin, who are eventually to be collectivized.
- p. 12

Russians would be, or are, willing to agree to a partition of the world into ‘orbits’ or ‘spheres of influence,’ along familiar lines of power politics. Those who hold this hope have been confusing Stalin with Hitler. Hitler was for the partition of the world, and tried to sell that idea to the British. But Stalin is a Bolshevist—that is, a totalist.
- p.12

A continually reaffirmed thesis of communism is that its objectives cannot be realized without ruthless violence nor within the framework of a constitutional order.
- pp. 14-15

Communist parties are both legal and illegal, and the illegal structure governs the legal. But legality is an enormous aid to the illegal conspiracy. It prevents forthright action against the chief criminals; it leads to roundabout persecution; it enables the Communist to deceive simple, generous-hearted, and gullible citizens, and it leads to dubiously legal actions from the government itself. The present half-legal, half-persecuted position of the Party and its members is not justice. It operates to eliminate one evil with another, both evils containing dangers to the Constitutional order.
- p. 15-16

Merely to ban the Communist Party as such would be useless. It would revive, as it did in Canada, under another name.

No citizen should be permitted to become a member of or contribute to any organization whose members are pledged, or have ever been pledged, to tender prior loyalty to any state other than the United States, or to defend any state other than the United States in case of war, except as in such a war the United States might formally be allied with another power.
- p. 16

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