Free Republic

From Lenin and Stalin to today’s radical left, the history of communism reveals a recurring pattern of false promises, political repression, and revolutionary violence. Marxists have long used verbal and historical misrepresentations to convince non-communists to support them and their positions. As Vladimir Lenin reportedly said, “there are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.” An early master of disinformation was a young German, Willi Münzenberg, who led the Communist International’s (Comintern’s) propaganda effort in the West in the 1920s and early 1930s. Münzenberg called the deceptive organizations he created to advance Soviet interests “Innocents’ Clubs”—for the gullibility of...

Why is it that liberals, progressives, leftists, humanists and the like seeking a brave new world for the rest of us often resort to lying or cheating to turn their vision into reality? Upton Sinclair was the socialist author of The Jungle in 1906. He meant his book as an attack on what he and other socialists termed “wage-slavery” but the book’s main claim to fame was as an exposé of unsanitary practices in the meat processing industry. It was Sinclair’s sort of writing that President Theodore Roosevelt termed as “muckraking.” Sinclair also wrote The Profits of Religion, a non-fiction...