We ended part 1 in the middle of the 20th Century, a century dominated by the struggle with the Left. The Russian Revolution created a base for global Leftism, which expanded to Eastern Europe after Roosevelt and Churchill ceded that territory to Josef Stalin. (World War II has been lionized by Hollywood and by the Marxist historians as “the good war,” and it did destroy the evil of Nazism, but it also greatly aided the communists.)
Four years later, Mao Tse Tung conquered China for communism, largely because Leftists within the bureaucracies succeed in preventing America from providing military aid to Chiang Kai Shek and the anti-communist Chinese. Over the next four years, 38,000 American servicemen would die saving not China but merely the southern half of the Korean peninsula from communist aggression.
I’m going to take a moment to skip to the end of the China story, because our failures during the late 1940s are now more consequential than ever; as I said in part 1, the question “who lost China?” is as relevant today as it has ever been.
In 1949, China was a wretchedly poor backwater, of little importance to anyone other than the Chinese. Today, after four decades of offshoring American manufacturing—a project that accelerated in 2001, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization—China has become a super-power.
Trillions of dollars of American manufacturing were sent to China, where labor can be had for a tiny fraction of an American wage. This made great sense to Wall Street since, because of much higher American wages, most items could be manufactured in China and shipped to America much cheaper than they could be produced here.
But the Great Offshoring handed China hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American trade secrets and other intellectual property. China has stolen further hundreds of billions in trade secrets through espionage, often using the many thousands of Chinese students at American universities, who are forced to spy on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
Now enormously wealthy, China has built a modern army and air force, and a true “blue water” navy with three aircraft carriers and several nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarines. Communist China has re-absorbed formerly free Hong Kong, and within the next few years, will likely invade Taiwan—the island to which Chiang Kai Shek and his anti-communist forces retreated in 1949 after Mao’s victory. This will create a crisis, because Taiwan, free China, manufactures almost all (90%) of the advanced microchips used in smart phones, automobiles and much else, and either Taiwan or the U.S. will destroy those factories before allowing them to fall into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
While we were making China rich, we were destroying America’s working class. Life expectancy for white, high school educated Americans has substantially declined in the past 25 years. Deaths of despair—suicides and drug overdoses—have sky-rocketed in places that were once the center of America’s manufacturing. In 2023, more than 87,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, 72,000 of which involved fentanyl.
Like almost all other pharmaceuticals used in America, the active ingredients in fentanyl are manufactured in China. So America’s governing elites made an intentional decision to send the jobs of the white working class to China, and is now literally killing that working class with Chinese drugs.
What remains of Christendom will, for the foreseeable future, be dealing with the consequences of the astonishing decision—intentional, premeditated, and long-planned—to turn a poverty-stricken communist nation with over a billion people into the world’s factory, and hence inevitably into a wealthy super-power. When that fateful decision was made, strongly supported by both American political parties, many among our ruling elites hoped that the integration of China into the international trading system would lead to the overthrow of the communist government. As it has turned out, nothing of the sort happened; the Chinese Communist Party is still very firmly in control of the 1.2 billion Chinese.
In fact, the opposite happened: the Chinese Communist Party has influenced the West far more than the West has influenced China. China’s totalitarian control of its people, heavily aided and implemented by technology and the Internet, is the envy of Western rulers, and is being implemented in the West as fast as possible, through hi-tech companies such as Palantir. Palantir expands government surveillance by integrating artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology (if you have returned to the U.S. from overseas recently, you will have noticed that if you walk through a facial recognition portal, you are not even asked to show your passport.)
The Orwellian surveillance state is being implemented fastest in the formerly great Britain; in 2023, 12,183 people were arrested by Keir Starmer’s Labor government for social media posts, about 33 arrests per day (but it isn’t just Labor; in 2019, the Tory government arrested 7,734 people for thought and speech crimes). Starmer is now strongly pushing a digital ID, reviving the digital passport idea pushed during the Great Leap Forward (for Leftist totalitarianism) of the Covid era, further cementing Britain’s bleak totalitarian future. China’s social credit system will be implemented piecemeal in the West, and eventually combined with the digital ID, because Western leaders want a fast and efficient way to seize bank accounts and cut people off from the economy, as was done in Canada to those who gave money in support of the protesting truckers.
As we look back, it is clear that those hard-Left FDR holdovers who were burrowed in at State in the late 1940s, by seeing to it that no effective aid reached Chiang Kai Shek, and that Mao won, saved the entire Leftist experiment worldwide. Because had Chiang won, then, after the Soviet Union went out of business in 1990, there would have been no base for world Leftism. Leftism would have been an ideology without a powerful nation-state to support it anywhere in the world.
In the event, however, Mao did win, but despite the Chinese Communist Party’s control of China, the Western elites nevertheless decided to make China the world’s factory—and now wealthy communist China is re-making the West in its own totalitarian image.
Latin America
The Cuban Revolution of 1958-59 followed the French Revolutionary model closely: corrupt Roman Catholic state provokes atheistic backlash. Fidel Castro, a young man from a wealthy family who was radicalized at the University of Havana, led guerilla forces in the overthrow of the authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista, and the establishment of a communist dictatorship. Many thought that Castro could be overthrown, but all attempts to remove him, beginning with the Bay of Pigs landing, failed miserably. His communist regime is still in power after 67 years.
Forty years later, in 1999, Hugo Chavez took Venezuela down the path of Leftism, and after Chavez died, Nicolas Maduro has kept Venezuela on that road. Having lost its main sponsor in the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba would likely have rejoined the free world had it not been for Hugo Chavez and oil-rich Venezuela stepping in to replace Russia as Cuba’s benefactor. (This fact explains why Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the child of Cuban refugees, is trying to coax, flatter, and cajole President Trump into an unprovoked, unjust war against Venezuela.) Columbia, Brazil, Mexico and several other Latin American countries are also currently leaning Left, but Argentina, with the election of Milei, has gone in the opposite direction, opting for a more open, free enterprise system.
Anti-Communist Successes
The Marxists were not everywhere triumphant during the 20th Century. The Left lost the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)—a typical Left/Right conflict: atheistic/socialist/communist Leftist totalitarians vs. Roman Catholic authoritarians —to the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco, who in his later years guided Spain back toward a constitutional monarchy. After Franco’s death in 1975, Spain transitioned back to a representative form of government.
In Greece, the ancient birthplace of Western Civilization, a civil war between communist and anti-communist forces that began shortly after the Germans were driven out of the country at the end of WW II was won by the anti-communists in 1949. The Berlin Airlift of 1948-49 kept West Berlin free. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed to counter the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of Soviet Russia and its communist satellites in Eastern Europe, and successfully kept communism out of Western Europe. (The recent perversion of NATO into an enforcer of Leftist ideology might also be worth discussing at some point.)
The British successfully put down a long-simmering Marxist insurgency in Malaysia between 1948 and 1960. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was peacefully defused by the Russians agreeing to remove all nuclear weapons from Cuba; in return, the U.S. removed its nuclear missiles from Turkey.
Vietnam and Cambodia
After the end of WW II, France tried to reconstitute its colonial empire, including French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Their chief opponent was Ho Chi Minh, who had studied communism in France and in the Soviet Union, and in 1930 established the Vietnamese Communist Party. Ho’s Viet Minh fought against the Japanese and then against the French. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, an agreement somewhat like the Korean arrangement was reached to divide Vietnam into a Marxist north and a free south.
Just as in Korea, the communists had no intention of honoring the agreement, and immediately set about destabilizing the non-communist government in the south. With Soviet help, Ho Chi Minh set up a guerrilla force in the south called the Viet Cong, which would later be supplemented with North Vietnamese Army troops. It became clear that South Vietnam would eventually fall without American help.
American aid to South Vietnam began with military advisors under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, but in 1965, President Johnson sent regular American ground troops into the country; the American military force eventually swelled to 550,000. The large U.S. military presence allowed Ho Chi Minh to characterize the communist assault on South Vietnam as a continuation of the struggle against foreigners: the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans. The United States was losing the propaganda and morale war with the Vietnamese people.
In January, 1968, the “Tet Offensive” was resoundingly crushed by American forces, but that victory notwithstanding, the fact that the communists had been able to mount such a large-scale attack convinced many American opinion leaders that the war could not be won. Public opinion in America began to turn against the war in Vietnam.
Richard Nixon became president in January, 1969, and began drawing down American troops in June of that year, pursuing a policy of “Vietnamization” of the war. By January, 1973, when Nixon was finally able to negotiate an end to American involvement, and free the American prisoners of war, the U.S. had lost over 58,000 killed.
Although Nixon had promised South Vietnamese leaders continued military aid, after he resigned from office amid the Watergate scandal of 1974, the Democrat-controlled Congress refused to approve further aid. In April, 1975, the North Vietnamese Army rolled into Saigon, and the U.S. evacuated their Vietnamese friends and allies by helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy.
Anti-war activists long ridiculed the “domino theory” which held that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, the rest of French Indochina—Laos and Cambodia—would also fall, like dominoes. But in the event, that was exactly what happened. In April 1975, the same month that Saigon fell, Cambodian communists, called the “Khmer Rouge”—the Red Cambodians—rolled into Phnom Penh.
The Khmer Rouge were some of the most savage, merciless, murderous communists in the appalling history of communism. They disapproved of cities and city dwellers, considering cities the source of inequality; they forcibly evacuated the entire city of Phnom Penh, leading its population of over two million on a death march.
The former city dwellers were forced to work in rural farms growing rice, which was then sold to China in exchange for arms and ammunition, an echo of Stalin in Ukraine. Thousands starved to death; many were reduced to eating beetles, worms, and snakes. Anyone who had been in the military or who had otherwise worked for the government of Lon Nol was murdered. Landlords and people sophisticated enough to wear watches or eye-glasses were murdered. Torture and mass murder ruled the day.
In 1979, the less insane Vietnamese communists took pity on their neighbors and drove out the utterly insane Khmer Rouge, allowing the people to re-populate Phnom Penh. But during their four years of catastrophic misrule, the Khmer Rouge managed to kill an estimated two million people, almost one third of the population of Cambodia.
Stay tuned for Part 3