How Soviet Propaganda Shaped Liberal Views in the U.S
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How Soviet Propaganda Shaped Liberal Views in the U.S. <.B>
1994.
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For many decades the Soviet Union promoted the philosophy of economic
egalitarianism, atheism and other "socialist" ideas, and often financed
those in Western countries who advocated such ideas. This ideological
intervention was undertaken both secretly, by funding Communist parties in
the West, and openly, through radio broadcasts, dissemination of
publications, and support for some of the "progressive" intelligentsia in
the West. If the KGB archives are fully opened some day, we will learn more
about the methods and scope of such intervention and, no doubt, there will
be many surprises.
Ideological warfare in the world took place for seventy years, and started
long before the term "Cold War" came into being. The Soviet Union spent
billions of dollars brainwashing its potential supporters and disseminating
anti-Western and anti-capitalist ideas. The United States also invested huge
resources in that war. Many people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
are now grateful for the enlightenment they enjoyed thanks to Radio Liberty,
Voice of America and books on democracy smuggled into the Soviet Union.
Before Its Collapse, the "Evil Empire" Succeeded In Poisoning Our Society
Despite substantial financing of the ideological Cold War, the U.S. was not
successful in resisting massive Soviet propaganda on its own territory. We
have a democracy, and that democracy was ill-used by the promoters of class
struggle. For the most part, the U.S. lost the ideological war; Soviet
propaganda managed to shape the liberal ideology of this country.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the impact of its propaganda did not
stop. On the contrary, the ideology shaped by Soviet propaganda in the West
is becoming more and more widespread as it is partially accepted by liberal
judges and leftist Democrats (perhaps one should say socialists). In a
perversion of the concept of human rights, they promote such "rights" as the
"right" to go unpunished after committing a crime and the "right" to amass a
share of the country's wealth without working. Thousands of school teachers
and college professors, paid by us, continue to poison our children with
anti-establishment propaganda, moral relativism and the denial of personal
responsibility for one's decisions and actions. In an attempt to undermine
traditional culture (thanks to which this country was built and prospered)
they teach future teachers the socially dangerous myths of the equality of
cultures and society's responsibility for one's personal wrongdoing, and
Marxist myths about the capitalist exploitation of workers.
The Soviet Union collapsed because it was built upon an erroneous ideology,
yet before this monster died it managed to contaminate the world with many
of its poisonous ideas -- against which our society apparently lacked
immunity. Still, there is an irony here which is not noticed by our
left-liberals. The Soviets often failed to follow their own propaganda; they
knew that it would unleash dangerous social tendencies. For example, they
taught that society is responsible for the criminal behavior of offenders,
but the Soviets themselves placed those offenders in prison with no concern
for overcrowded conditions there.
The Soviet Union no longer exists, but those who were supported by it in the
West are still here, as are their books, ideas and students, many of whom
are now professors. The massive ideological poisoning of the West by
Communist ideology will not disappear overnight; on the contrary, the poison
remains, continuing to weaken us and preventing us from solving our growing
social problems in a reasonable fashion.
The main goal of Soviet propaganda was to promote economic egalitarianism
and cultural nihilism in an attempt to undermine capitalist initiative and
destroy the traditional cultural environment. To some countries in Western
Europe this poison was administered directly, through active Communist
parties there. The U.S. was affected to a large extent through Western
European ideological trends. This does not mean, however, that the damage to
the U.S is less serious as a result of this war; we have sharper internal
contradictions in society, including racial tensions. Communist sympathizers
actively use these social contradictions to undermine the traditional moral
values of American society. They may not label their political stance
Communist or Marxist (for political reasons, or out of ignorance), but the
main components tell all: economic egalitarianism, hostility towards people
of property (as demonstrated by militant environmentalists, among others),
and denial of personal responsibility for one's decisions and actions.
Subversive Activity Instead Of World Revolution
After 1917, there was hope among the Bolsheviks for a worldwide proletarian
revolution. In fact, the orthodox Marxists believed that Russia would have
to wait to build socialism until the rest of the strong capitalist countries
joined them. Through Communist International, Russian Bolsheviks tried to
support revolution in Germany in 1918, even as they struggled for their own
survival. This attempt failed, leaving Lenin's pupils in the dark as to what
to do next, since the world revolution promised by Marx was not coming.
During his power struggle with Trotsky, Stalin introduced the thesis that
socialism could be built in a separate country. The slogan of world
revolution was abandoned in theory, but the Soviets did not actually stop
their subversive activity in the West and in the Third World; it was clear
that Communists outside the USSR could be valuable allies in any
geo-political struggle. This was a cool, pragmatic calculation, and it
worked very well for the Soviets, especially when the USSR became a world
power.
After the Second World War, communist parties in France, Italy and a few
other countries, as well as communist ideologists and sympathizers, gained
great popularity. The Soviets pumped their support into these parties.
Instead of articulating the classical belief in revolution, hopes were
expressed during the Khrushchev era for parliamentary ways to achieve
socialism in Western countries. As the uses of an ideological war proved
themselves more valuable, the methods of this war became more and more
clever. They were no longer limited to merely supporting communist parties,
or disseminating propaganda among workers for strikes and revolution; a
massive attempt was mounted to influence those who shaped public opinion in
the West, beginning with the left wing intelligentsia. The goal was to
undermine traditional culture and destroy the traditional moral values of
Western societies. In addition to this, soon after the War, the Soviets
organized the peace movement, aimed at agitating the European public against
American involvement in NATO. (Public agitation against the Vietnam War was
a very complex social movement, but we should remember that pro-Soviet
"pacifists" set the tone.)
As the arms race continued, there was constant propaganda among European
and, later, American intellectuals against the American presence in Europe,
for a nuclear freeze, and so on. Judging by the zeal of the pacifist
demonstrations, there was a time when it was hard to say which many
Europeans feared more: Soviet intervention or American defense.
Where Are Those Pacifists Now?
All this communist and pacifist propaganda developed in conjunction with the
constant glorification of the achievements of the Soviet Union in social
equality. Even during Stalin's terror, when millions were kept in prison
camps, the Soviet Union was held up as a model country by leftist
intellectuals in the West. Books by and ideas of those who licked Stalin's
boots for tangible gain or purely for ideological reasons, are still quoted
and studied by students. As result, two equally evil regimes of the 1930s --
Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany -- have received unequal treatment by
the Western intellectuals who teach our children: Nazi sympathizers are
deservedly labelled as such; those who supported Stalin are still praised as
progressive.
Even in the 1970s, when the evil nature of the Soviet regime was exposed by
Soviet dissidents and by Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, many in the West
claimed that the dissident movement was organized by the CIA, and a peace
movement orchestrated from Moscow was still blossoming. Where are those
people now who demanded a unilateral nuclear freeze at a time when President
Reagan was promoting the Strategic Defense Initiative? Where are those who
quickly labelled that initiative "Star Wars" and accused Reagan of
attempting to break the balance of power with a progressive country? Do they
now understand that the SDI was a great tool for Gorbachev which helped him
persuade his hard-line colleagues in the Politburo that the Soviet regime as
it was could not compete with the free economy of the USA, and helped him
bring an end to the evil empire?
Was the pacifism of these so-called progressives a sincere opposition to the
spilling of any blood and use of violence? One could easily understand such
a philosophy. If so, where are those pacifists now? Do they try to interfere
whenever blood is spilled in the world? No, they aren't interested in
putting an end to bloodshed in Bosnia, Tajikistan or Rwanda; they were
pacifists only to defend their socialist Big Brother, the source of
inspiration in their war against the American way of life.
Should one call for vengeance, public hearings or trials? Nothing of the
sort should be done. The left-liberals did not violate the law. They had the
right, under our Constitution, of freedom of speech and, thank God, the
Constitution does not prohibit people from saying the wrong thing. But
Americans should not forget that there are people among us who, during the
Cold War, were on the other side! And we should keep an eye on them to see
what they are up to now, and which new methods they will endorse to
undermine our constitutional freedoms and poison the thinking of children in
our schools. They are still among us, and they are not the kind of people to
say "we were wrong." They struggled against the American republic as we know
it and they will continue this struggle.
Their goal is to replace our democratic capitalism with socialism, to
replace individual rights with group rights, and to replace legal equality
with privileges for particular groups; to destroy the traditional federalism
of this country, replacing it with an empire-like rule of the federal
government. They have been quite successful in this, as well as in ruining
the traditional moral values of this country and replacing them with moral
relativism and permissiveness.
For these people, the ends justify the means. If they need to let violent
criminals go free of punishment in order to keep American society in fear,
they do it and will continue to do it with a clever ideological
justification (and no cosmetic crime bills will change this). The
traditional culture of American society is their enemy, and in order to ruin
it they are ready to provoke war between social and racial groups, between
children and parents and between husbands and wives. For each of these wars
they have developed slogans and ideological bases.
They often look naive, harmless and full of good intentions. Taken
separately, some of them can be quite likeable, but as a social force they
are a deadly weapon used by the ghost of communism to destroy our values and
our social order. The name of the game is class struggle, the same game that
brought about seventy tragic years in poor Russia, and brutal communist rule
in Eastern Europe.
Socio-Economic "Rights"
During the ideological war with the West, the Soviets knew better than many
of our guru-economists that the forced redistribution of wealth would weaken
the Western economy by undermining active people's initiative. In orthodox
Marxist theory, redistribution of wealth is supposed to be achieved via a
proletarian victory in the class struggle. The convenience of using
democratic freedoms transformed the methods of class struggle in the West.
No need for bloody revolution here, if Marxist goals could be achieved by
legal means like forcing Congress to take from the hard working people, be
it blue collar workers or energetic entrepreneurs, and give to the idle
have-nots. No need to destroy capitalist enterprises if they could be
heavily taxed to achieve wealth redistribution.
One of the tools of this peaceful intervention of socialism is the idea of
socio-economic rights, actively promoted by the Soviets after the war, when
the United Nations tried to codify human rights in the International
Covenant. The Soviet position of mixing fundamental civil and political
rights with guarantees of work, apartments, medical help, education, and so
on was, at that time, unacceptable to Western countries. As a compromise, a
separate Covenant on social and economic rights was adopted by the U.N. in
1966. Since then, this purely socialist set of "rights" has become a slogan
for many Third World countries, to justify their violations of fundamental
human rights. They accepted the Soviet idea that socio-economic rights are
the number one priority and that these rights are what people really want.
In a socialist society socio-economic rights make some sense -- as a list of
minimal guarantees of what the government should do in exchange for
forbidding people from exercising their rights to take care of themselves.
Where there are no private landlords, no freedom of enterprise, no
independent universities, etc. -- because these activities are prohibited
and, often, punishable as crimes -- the government must provide some minimum
of care for its citizens. But in countries with a privately run economy
these "rights" make no sense at all. Since the government is, generally, not
a landlord and not an entrepreneur, it cannot guarantee shelters or jobs.
What is really happening, and we are witnessing it in this country more and
more, is that the government is forcing some people to assume the burden of
providing for the "socio-economic rights" of others. In addition to the
entire population being heavily taxed to help the poor (and to feed those
bureaucrats involved in organizing this help), private enterprises are
heavily taxed and, in addition, are forced to give all sorts of privileges
to employees; these privileges are then labelled "rights". And this is done
not on the basis of a contract between workers or their labor union and the
entrepreneur, which would be in the spirit of capitalism, but because of a
discriminatory law that treats entrepreneurs as government providers, in
gross violation of the freedom of contract between employer and employee.
Once begun this process will, doubtless, go on and on, since from a liberal
point of view there are plenty of rich class enemies in this country. In
reality, active captains of our economy and all hard-working people may be
pushed so far that they lose their taste for running the economy.
Alliance With Violent Criminals
The main thesis of Soviet propaganda in criminal justice is that criminals
are socially akin to workers, and that the bourgeois society is actually
responsible for these lost souls' criminal behavior. Before the revolution,
Bolsheviks were literally akin to criminals, using Stalin's organizational
skills to associate with criminals and rob banks to supply money for the
Party. During the revolution, prisons were opened and many criminals were
recruited to fight on the Bolshevik side. Despite these feelings of kinship,
after the civil war Bolsheviks had to keep common criminals in prison, but
throughout the entire Soviet rule theoreticians of criminology continued to
declare that capitalist society, or its legacy in the USSR, was responsible
for criminal behavior and that crime in the West was a result only of
poverty and government persecution of workers.
This shameless lie is used by liberal judges as a powerful tool to disrupt
normal life in this country. Increasing numbers of violent criminals are set
free for the reason that it was their first offense (let's wait until he
kills someone), that the community itself would rehabilitate his or her
violent tendencies, or that there was not enough space in the prisons to
accommodate criminals in proper comfort. We might suspect overly liberal
college professors of abandoning logic for the sake of enriching their
feelings, but liberal judges must understand what they are doing: they are
keeping society in fear -- one quarter of all households in the country were
victimized by theft or violent crime in 1989! What is the liberal goal for
such subversive activity? None other than to terrorize society and force
government to pump increasing amounts of taxpayers' money into feeding the
economically deprived, since presumably poverty is responsible for crime.
The hypocrisy of these leftist liberals goes further. Since many of these
criminals are not white, the marketable political idea that we should be
nicer to minorities that have previously been discriminated against is
invoked. But in actuality it is those very minorities who suffer the most
from criminals insufficiently punished by judges. It is precisely those
minorities who are victimized most frequently by their brothers.
We must understand that liberals are crying for help for historically poor
minorities in order to get their votes. If their desire to help were
sincere, they would devise ways to free our inner cities -- populated by
minorities -- from the terror of crime which is keeping the poor people who
live there in fear. They would advocate building more prisons and
lengthening prison sentences for violent criminals and those who sell drugs
to children. They would advocate building more reform schools to free
aspiring minority children in inner city schools from violent teenagers who
terrorize other young people trying to get an education.
Instead, liberal judges find many reasons to let violent offenders go free,
forgetting that the main goal of criminal justice is to protect society. And
that is exactly what society does not get from our justice!
As a result of the subversive behavior of our judiciary, the Soviet
propaganda myth of the responsibility of society for crime is --
perversely -- becoming truth. Because we tolerate government's refusal to
punish criminals, we really are becoming responsible for the increasing
development of crime.
There is not enough money in the world to rid our cities of ghettos and
ghetto psychology unless the residents are defended from violent criminals
and those who sell drugs to minors. The only way to do this is to keep the
offenders in prison.
The hypocritical political fear that if justice were done there might be a
larger percentage of minorities in detention should not be taken into
account. It is not justice if the court pays attention to the color of one's
skin instead of to one's danger to society. Proper justice would free
minorities from fear and open the doors of inner cities to social
development which would, in the future, result in a decrease in the
percentage of those minorities in conflict with the law.
There is an absurd misconception, even among well-intentioned liberals, that
any defense of human rights must be directed against the government in order
to shield the individual, no matter what that individual has done to
society. But human rights means the rights of humans, and violations are
committed not only by government; every criminal act against a man, woman or
child is a violation of the victim's human rights. And, judging by the
cruelty of many of our criminals, these violations are, in most cases, far
more brutal and life-threatening (or life-terminating), than the typical
government violations of human rights. Yet the champions of human rights are
proud of attacking the government and do not speak or act against criminals
who violate human rights.
Leniency toward violent criminals is alive and well among liberal judges and
politicians, despite the fact that the people of this country are getting
more and more irritated with the terror imposed by violent criminals. The
recent so-called Crime Bill pays lip service to the idea of toughening
criminal punishment, but in fact this bill is based on the same old leftist
view that social reforms will reduce crime. We throw money away to provide
midnight basketball in our cities instead of spending funds on building more
prisons. Is this an evil conspiracy of leftist politicians to terrorize
society, or do they really believe that criminals might just decide to play
basketball in the middle of the night instead of robbing and killing?
Undermining the Culture
The Soviets knew that their success in the war against the mainstream of
Euro-American culture would poison the souls of some of the people and would
result in moral relativism among at least part of society. This moral
relativism was justifiably viewed as a precondition for further changes in
Western countries. Traditional morals are the foundation of society; all one
needs to ruin the building is to damage the foundation.
In achieving this goal the Russian Communists were very clever. Immediately
following the revolution, being too weak and primitive to struggle against
the West and the mainstream of Western culture directly, they raised the
flag of anti-colonialism. They framed this slogan in 1918, when they fought
the civil war not only to survive, but in order to return Russia's own
colonies to Moscow's control. They were ready to support anti-colonial
movements in any corner of the world and did so very actively after the
Second World War. Colonialism (other than Soviet) was dying by then, but its
death would have been more peaceful and orderly without Soviet involvement.
As creative pupils of Marx and Lenin, the Soviets actively exploited not
only class, but racial and ethnic tensions in the world as well. The Soviet
anti-colonial war against the West promoted the ideology of cultural
egalitarianism. This was touted by cynical Russian Communists who exercised
brutal discrimination at home, undermining the ancient Muslim cultures in
Central Asia, forcing the nomadic Kazakh people to settle, imprisoning
shamans in Yakutia and suppressing Buddhists in Siberia. Russification was
imposed upon the entire Soviet Union. Yet the Soviets managed to combine
with this the pretense that they accepted the equality of cultures and that
the promotion of the so-called people's culture served the purpose of
turning people away from "bourgeois" culture (a label used for any cultural
achievement in the world disloyal to the idea of class struggle or
anti-colonialism). The message to colonial nations was simple: there is
nothing to learn from dirty colonialists, throw them out, you are cultured
enough and will manage to rule your country by yourself (besides, your
soviet brothers will help you!). And many believed it. Instead of an orderly
transition from a colonial administration to a native one, they covered
their land with the blood of civil wars, border fights or acquired Marxist
regimes, becoming puppets of the Soviet empire.
It is shameful how this tool of the Cold War -- cultural egalitarianism --
has now become so fashionable in American colleges. Western culture has
always been open to other cultural influences. Western countries accepted a
religion which came from Israel. The Renaissance was produced by the
discovery of Greek and Roman culture. It was, in a sense, another
Renaissance when Europe acquired the knowledge of Chinese art in the
eighteenth century, or Indian philosophy and Egyptian antiquity in the
nineteenth century. Those who built and enriched Western culture were
celebrating world culture and generally had no intention of promoting the
idea of a cultural hierarchy for any political reason. In an impartial
evaluation of the influence of different cultures on the world in general,
one cannot help but notice that the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian and, later,
Euro-American influence is stronger than the stone- or iron-age culture of
some tribes. If this were not so, we would be compelled to say that there is
not much reason for cultural development beyond prehistoric times.
Recent multi-cultural approaches have had some limited value for minorities,
since they can make them feel better about their ancestors and their
cultural achievements. But this approach can do a great deal of harm, as it
divides the culture of mankind into ethnic cells and unavoidably raises, for
some people, the question: "Why do I have to acquire the culture of another
race or ethnic group?" This is a way to develop cultural nihilism. There is
no logic in this approach.
There are no national borders in the body of world culture. The ideas of the
American forefathers, for example, are part of the culture of many freedom
fighters around the world, just as any piece of culture belongs to all of
those who acquire it. The poet Alexandr Pushkin was part of European culture
too, despite his partially African blood, long before the myth of
Afro-centrism was born. The opposing view was held by the Nazis, who
condemned the "Jewish physics" of Albert Einstein, and by Stalin and Lysenko
who started the war against "Western bourgeois" genetics. Did our
"politically correct" liberals overlook this historic experience?
The myth of the multi-cultural approach is also a tool to promote
anti-democratic ideas. The richness of the culture of the Aztecs or some
African tribes in the areas of monument design, music or folklore should not
be used as a reason to promoting the strict dictatorial types of social
order which historically were usual for those nations or tribes, as opposed
to Western democratic ideas.
The traditional anti-democratic tendencies of many non-Western cultures come
in pretty handy for leftist activists, fitting in neatly with their
preference for political centralism instead of the old-fashioned federalism
of this country. We are witnessing not only the growth of federal
involvement in our lives, but involvement of a brand that is none other than
socialist.
There could be another reason for such multi-culturalism, though. If a given
stone- or iron-age culture is equal in value and depth to the Euro-American,
it is easier to teach and to learn: there is no reason to dig deep into the
paradigms of German philosophy or English common law or American theories of
democracy. Just mention these topics together with African myths, show
videotapes of dancing medicine men and spend time discussing how the
students feel about it.
This is not a joke, unfortunately. The decline in the quality of American
education is well documented. Whatever is taught in public schools is
obviously not good enough if many students can hardly read; and what is
taught in colleges is often not enough to justify the cost to parents or
government. We hear about such innovative courses as women's studies or
homosexual culture, and techniques of relaxation or wine tasting.
Sadly, practice in feeling and in learning to express one's feelings, though
important in itself, is soon going to replace the valuable process of
acquiring knowledge, the old-fashioned commodity upon which our civilization
was built. Perhaps colleges should indicate in their promotional material
that they provide not knowledge but Liberal Feelings. With all due respect
for academic freedom, we fail to understand why taxpayers' money should be
used to finance such "education". In a country with a huge national debt it
may be time to think about limiting public support for education when it
does not produce marketable skills. If professors teach students only to
feel, perhaps they should be rewarded not by a salary, but instead by the
positive emotions derived from this activity.
In the contemporary United States, promotion by leftist scholars and
political activists of the thesis of equality of cultures serves not the
goal of enriching the culture of American society, but actually serves the
same purpose as Soviet anti-colonialist propaganda: to convey the message to
minorities that "white" culture is not for them, that all ideas of Western
democracy, capitalism and self-reliance are alien to them and not worth
acquiring. It is, in plain fact, racist, and a particularly dirty playing of
the race card by cynical or misguided politicians, as racial tensions rise
in this country due to reverse discrimination.
We can be accused of some simplification in this discussion of the
multi-cultural approach, but often simplification is needed to show the
essence of politicized theories buried under a torrent of scholarly
eloquence. Alas, lying is easier for those who command sophisticated
language.
Political Correctness Or Freedom Of Speech?
Those liberals who were ready to quote the Constitution to defend federal
financing of a work of art that placed a religious symbol in the artist's
urine, learned a great deal from the Soviet system about violating the
freedom of speech of their political or cultural opponents. The uproar over
"politically correct" expressions or scholarly research is an example of
Orwell's double talk. It would appear that some of these intellectuals are
sorry to have lost the chance to live under a totalitarian regime of
hypocritical egalitarianism. "Politically correct" has a hidden meaning: no
matter what one thinks, one must say only what is permitted by colleagues or
the editors of the media (read: voluntary public censors). Apparently many
of our students and intellectuals miss Soviet-like limitations of freedom of
speech, so they have organized their own witch hunts with occasional
demonstrations against professors who try to swim against the current. They
are too clever to discriminate openly against those who say "politically
incorrect" things, but there is widespread activity of strong "progressive"
censorship and the obvious existence of ideological discrimination in
education and the press.
Soviet dissidents were suppressed precisely for speaking or teaching in a
"politically incorrect" fashion -- this is the exact phrase used by the
Soviet authorities! It would appear that many of those entrusted with the
teaching of American children are dreaming of building a mini-Soviet regime
right here among those who naively praise themselves for winning the cold
war.
These "politically correct" people will not put anyone in prison for a
risquĊ½ joke or a courageous article (not yet, anyway). But make no mistake:
they may very well ruin your career, block your article or make you nervous
by labelling you a sexist, a bigot, a homophobe or even worse. But the worst
thing they can do is to make you a slave to their double talk without asking
you how you feel about it. And gradually, if not stopped, they will spread
this ideological terror throughout society via indoctrination, in the guise
of education, of children.
Do we need to pretend that we live in a genderless and colorless society? Do
we need to distort the results of scholarly research to avoid contradicting
liberal theories about social innovations? We have our freedom of speech,
after all. We recognize equality of rights under the Constitution, which
does not say or force us to say that we are all the same! The freedom to
notice our differences needs urgent defense from massive attacks of
progressive hypocrites.
Affirmative Action
How can a multi-ethnic empire maintain itself in accordance with its
proclamations in support of the self-determination of nations? The Russian
Bolsheviks faced this challenge during the first years of the Soviet Union.
Through violence and massive repression the Bolsheviks suppressed the voices
of national patriotism, demanding that it be replaced by loyalty to the
socialist union ruled from Moscow. The Russian language was reinstated as
the official language, as it had been during Czarist times; and all school
and higher education curricula were censored to assure that students would
learn not only politically correct Marxist views, but would also be taught
in the spirit of devotion to Russian domination. Yet the official slogans
declared the equality of nations, and anti-colonial propaganda abroad
displayed the cultural success of non-Russian ethnic groups in the workers'
paradise.
The solution was found in a policy suspiciously similar to what we in
America call affirmative action. Non-Russian ethnic groups received an
artificial push towards cultural development which, in reality, was a pure
drive for statistical achievement that had nothing to do with culture. From
time to time leaders reported to the country and to the world the
spectacular growth of "national cadres", more and more graduates of higher
education and doctorates among ethnic minorities. The implication was of
great socialist achievement, that this was a change from the old Russian
empire that had not admitted minorities freely into higher education.
The numerical task was easy to achieve. All educational institutions (and
all other institutions) in the USSR were owned by the state and controlled
by the Communist Party. Some Russian educational institutions and local
universities in the non-Russian republics had a required quota of minorities
that had to be accepted and turned into "scholars" and "scientists" with
degrees. The quality of both the education provided, and the scholarly work
accomplished by the recipients of this affirmative action, was not a
consideration, as long as the subjects were loyal to the Party and the
leadership. By lowering the standards of higher education and the
requirements for doctors' degrees as far as minorities were concerned, the
Soviets shamelessly created an illiterate "intellectual elite" in some
regions of the Soviet Union, especially among the Muslim and Siberian
minorities.
Notwithstanding a few highly educated and able individuals among these
minorities, a serious problem was created by this non-merit policy: many
members of the phony intellectual elite came to occupy key posts in the
institutions of higher education in their regions, thereby lowering
standards even more through their own poor pedagogical attempts. They
acquired a vested interest in preventing their better educated compatriots
from filling important positions in local cultural life. The former Soviet
non-Russian republics that became independent will suffer the consequences
of this affirmative action for decades to come. It is already a disturbing
problem for the economies of some Central Asian countries that Russian
scientific and engineering personnel are leaving for Russia in fear of local
nationalism; locals do not have the necessary skills to manage jobs
previously held by these ethnic Russians. This is the tragic result of
Soviet misrepresentation of statistical achievement. People now see that
Soviet affirmative action hurt not only the victims of reverse
discrimination when preference was given to members of minorities, but also
the cultural and economic potential of minorities themselves by producing a
poor quality intellectual elite.
The origin of affirmative action in the U.S. is somewhat similar. Although
it grew out of the quite legitimate desegregation movement, the moral nature
of special preference and quotas is the same as in the Soviet Union: to
correct the alleged unfairness of the past and correct it with a drastic
emphasis on statistics, not on real achievement, by lowering standards of
acceptance for minorities in colleges and lowering standards for graduation.
We are already witnessing how colleges invent intellectually meaningless
courses, like women's or homosexuals' studies, or wine tasting or relaxation
techniques, for example, in order to assure graduation for those who are not
able or don't want to be involved in hard study. Graduates of those
colleges, who have not learned proper intellectual skills, will be eligible
to teach children and college students. They will be lowering teaching
standards for generations. The results are and will be for a long time the
same as in the Soviet Union: the victimization of some people through
reverse discrimination and a lowering quality of the intellectual elite and
higher education in general. The important difference is that in the Soviet
Union the children of affirmative action -- those illiterate scholars,
lawyers and doctors with undeserved diplomas -- went primarily to their own
regions to hurt the cultural level of people of their own ethnicity. Here,
lowering standards means lowering them across the entire country.
There is also an important difference from the Soviet practice due to our
freedom of speech. The Soviet public saw what was happening, saw that the
"triumph of socialist nationality policy in education" proclaimed by
propaganda was phony and artificial, but there was no opportunity for public
discussion; the press was controlled by the government. Here, we can freely
analyze the unconstitutional practice of affirmative action and its
results -- well, freely as long as we are free of self-imposed politically
correct censorship of academia and mainstream media. And when we analyze the
question freely, we see not only the effect upon our educational standards
but upon the standards of our judicial process; courts must employ all kinds
of feats of logic to justify the unconstitutional use of discrimination and
still pretend that they are not violating the Constitution.
We hear that racial preferences are being permitted as a temporary measure.
Isn't this bending logic? Is it permissible to violate the Constitution for
a while, yet still hold this document as the basis of our legal structure?
If so, why not let the government violate our freedom of speech, just
temporarily, until we learn to stop criticizing the government? Or why not
violate the due process clause and imprison without trial all suspicious
characters in order to reduce our alarming crime rate? Just temporarily.
Alas, any temporary deviation from the letter and spirit of the Constitution
unavoidably causes the erosion of our constitutionality in general. We have
seen it already: after racial privileges were granted as a remedy for past
discrimination against blacks, accompanied by guilt-inducing talk of
slavery, segregation and so on, other minorities stepped in to demand
similar privileges, despite the absence of slavery or segregation. Then we
heard about another suppressed group, albeit a majority one: women, who
wanted to share privileges also. Now there is talk of privileges for
homosexuals. What will be next?
Unfortunately, there is no logical limit to the bending of legal logic.
Privileges in college admission are followed by privileges in hiring,
admissions to private clubs, and so on. Once the legal system begins to
permit the application of different standards for different groups of people
there is no way to stop, except by returning to the previous requirements of
equality.
The concept of a remedy for past discrimination was developed as a
justification for constitutional deviation, with group rights and group
guilt in mind. There is no way to establish the individual effect of damages
allegedly inflicted by past discrimination, and there is no way to seek
damages from individuals who may have profited from practicing
discrimination. To justify this legal paradox, a diffused burden upon the
non-privileged population was deemed acceptable. The burden is indeed
diffused. For example, as Jeffrey Rosen noted in The New Republic, the
University of Texas has to pass over 1,000 whites for every black applicant
that it admits under its substantially lower standards set for blacks. What
a brilliant concept! Following this new legal justification of wrongdoing,
one might postulate that stealing one dollar from each of a million people
is more justified than stealing a million dollars from one person -- but
only for a good cause, of course.
Treatment of blacks was the central theme in Soviet propaganda when it
criticized U.S. social performance. By assuring equal rights the United
States has, during the past few decades, corrected the injustices of the
past. But, under pressure from socialist forces inside the country, we have
gone too far along the road prescribed by Soviet propaganda: we have started
producing a phony intellectual elite, whose role in the future will be
damaging to society as a whole and to the corresponding minorities in
particular -- just as it was in the Soviet Union.
By legitimizing group thinking, our courts have chosen a dangerous path for
legal development. This path is socialist by definition; socialism defers to
group interests, as opposed to individual interests and rights. This group
think goes hand in hand with a general left-liberal denial of individual
responsibility.