Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley says
he is interested in theory. This past week he defended teaching critical race
theory in U.S. military academies because he thinks our troops should
understand “white rage.” He said that he himself wants to understand why the
American families who send their children to serve under him are angry. And so
he believes that it’s a good thing to read books by authors like Robin DiAngelo
and Ibram X. Kendi that call white Americans racist. He says it’s good for the
military and the country, but in fact it’s just good for Mark Milley and the
rest of the senior officer class that is making its retirement plans.
Milley told the committee that he’d
read Marx, too, but that doesn’t make him a communist. He’s right, but it
signals his ambition clearly. Outside of the faculty lounges of American
universities, no one reads Marx because Marx is unreadable. You could fit
everyone who has read all three volumes of Marx’s masterwork, “Capital,” into a
small prison cell.
Milley said he reads to understand what
other people think, but people who boast of having read Marx are trying to
shape what other people think about them. He is addressing the kind of people
who think reading Marx is part of the foundation of a well-rounded education.
In America, these are the men and women of the establishment left who not
coincidentally sit on the boards of big corporations and decide who gets to
earn a million-dollar paycheck simply by occupying the board seat next to them.
Saying you’ve read Marx shows that you’re ok, even if you’ve spent your career
with an American flag on your shoulder.
Milley said he reads to understand what
motivates people. But no one in the communist world, neither its politburos nor
its proletariats, have ever been motivated by Marx, regardless of what they’ve
written in their memoirs or on the walls of their prison cells.
Understanding Marxist doctrine was no
help explaining the actions of Soviet leaders during the Cold War. The U.S.
intellectual class said it was important to figure it out because they wanted
to be paid by the federal government to read and write so they said they were
on the front lines in the War of Ideas.
Had the Cold War really come down to a
War of Ideas, America would have lost. For all the social realist garbage that
communism produced—as intellectually vapid and morally vulgar as DiAngelo and
Kendi and other work prized by the class Milley seeks to impress—the Soviets
also promoted great art, like Russia’s great ballet troupes and filmmakers like
Andrei Tarkovsky.
Even in the West most of the top
writers and thinkers of the time enlisted on the other side. For instance, Jean
Paul-Sartre, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century,
endorsed communism, revolutionary violence, and for a time Josef Stalin.
Sartre mocked the Midwestern farm-boys who
manned the Fulda Gap to protect him and his friends in the cafes of Paris, but
America still won the Cold War because it had nothing to do with the War of
Ideas. Rather, it was because the families of those boys stationed in Europe
constituted the core of the middle class, which has always been the engine of
productive economies. The Soviets lost because as with all communist regimes it
had looted the wealth that its middle class created.
In short, those who read Marx are among
those least informed about the nature of communism. On the other hand,
Americans who have suffered the depredations of the elites that Milley is
courting have a better grasp of communism than any university professor.
Indeed, what we have learned about communism the last several years requires us
to re-interpret the historical account.
Communism has nothing to do with
ideology. Ideology (lifting the masses out of poverty, making all people equal,
etc.) is just cover for class war. But the class war is not, as Marxists
describe it, between the proletarian masses and the bourgeoisie. Rather, the
proletariat is simply the instrument that the oligarchic elite—known in the
Soviet Union, for instance, as the nomenklatura—uses to keep the middle classes
at bay while they steal their wealth.
After watching the serial operations to
destroy the leadership of the America First movement—from Russiagate through
the second impeachment of Donald Trump—the COVID-19 lockdowns, the George Floyd
riots, and now the effort to categorize Trump voters as domestic terrorists, we
do not need a theory to understand the nature of what has historically been
called “communism” to obscure the fact it is nothing but the power-grab of an
oligarchic elite. We are living it.
Nor does Gen. Milley need critical race
theory to understand why the middle-class Americans who send their children to
serve under him are mad at the elites he flatters by promoting their ideas.
He’s just not asking the right questions, which are these:
Why are they mad we exported their jobs
to China? Why are they mad we send their children to kill and die in
strategically pointless foreign wars that advance only our interests? Why are
they angry we denigrate their symbols and their monuments, their heroes, and
their history? Why are they mad we destroyed their businesses and kept their
children from going to school? Why are they mad we didn’t let them visit their
loved ones in nursing homes and hospitals as they lay dying? Why are they mad
we tell them they are racist, and their country will be remade in the image of
those we encourage to cross our borders illegally, and the criminals we send to
the streets to kill them? Why are they mad when we tell them that there is no
place for them in the new country until they confess to the evil they have done?