Marxists, Deception, And Violence

American Thinker 

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 their members. Such people became known as useful idiots or naïve dupes.

Exploiting such people, the Soviets for decades deceptively promoted themselves as advocates of “peace” while maintaining a huge military, building armed so-called progressive forces abroad that would fight the revolutionary uprisings they planned, and demanding that Western states unilaterally disarm.

Bolsheviks like Lenin made no effort to hide the fact that they sought to foment violent foreign revolutions and that the “democracy” they espoused was a dictatorship of a vanguard communist party—themselves. But they built Potemkin villages that regularly fooled political pilgrims who traveled to the USSR to witness its purported socialist wonders. Many Americans also bought the Soviets’ deceptive “peace” line.

These deception campaigns remain relevant today, given the surge in support for the Marxist, self-styled “Democratic Socialists of America” (DSA), many of whom claim to be progressives seeking only social justice. They, too, seek to deceive (and recruit) naïve dupes.

But confidence breeds candor, and, reflecting their growing strength, in mid-2026, the DSA overtly proposed to radically reform American government without explaining how they intended to do so. Given that they may be on the cusp of significant power within the Democratic Party, Marxists’ record of violence in power also merits consideration. No Marxist regime has ever taken power without using extralegal violence against its citizens, claims of Marxism’s “peaceful” nature notwithstanding.

Lenin wanted Russia to lose World War I, expecting it to trigger a civil war he planned to win. His first intelligence service, known as the Cheka, killed tens of thousands of people, possibly more, extrajudicially during the civil war before even Lenin recognized its excesses and reorganized it in 1922.

Lenin’s successor, Stalin, after consolidating his power, by the late 1920s built what was called “the Gulag,” a massive complex of forced labor camps that housed tens of millions of people over decades. Millions died from murder, exposure, exhaustion under horrible working conditions, and poor medical care.

In 1936–1938, reflecting paranoia and simple viciousness, Stalin launched what has been called the Great Purge or Great Terror, which killed as many as one million people, including many loyal communist party members, senior military officers, intelligence officials, and diplomats.

After the Red Army conquered much of Eastern Europe in 1944–1945, the Soviets established puppet “people’s democracies” that ran purges in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As ostensible war reparations, Stalin kidnapped many East European civilians who had nothing to do with Hitler’s Germany and shipped them to the Gulag. After a Soviet-sponsored communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, purges followed there, too.

Other communist countries acted similarly. Soon after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, Mao Zedong ordered party cadres to execute one out of every one thousand people nationwide—to show who was in charge. Courts were unnecessary. In the first decade of the People’s Republic of China, the CCP killed at least five million civilians, including two million “landlords,” according to Frank Dikötter, a prominent historian of China.

Mao also established a version of the Soviet Gulag, which soon held many millions of “enemies of the people” and still holds political prisoners, including Falun Gong believers.

After the Socialist Republic of Vietnam took power in northern Vietnam in 1954, it executed about 50,000 people. After conquering the South in 1975, Vietnamese communists executed a disputed number of people and put hundreds of thousands into so-called re-education—that is, prison—camps.

In Cambodia, from 1975 to 1979, communists killed about two million people, over a quarter of the country’s population, to “purify” the country ethnically and ideologically. After Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, his communist regime shot at least 1,000 “counterrevolutionaries.”

The Marxist American Left also has a paramilitary “anti-fascist” force in place, known as Antifa, which is explicitly dedicated to committing physical violence against ideological enemies. Antifa is a descendant of the armed force the German Communist Party created around 1930 to fight German fascists.

Contemporary “anti-fascism” is, according to Antifa-supporting professor Mark Bray, “pan-revolutionary left politics applied to fighting the Far Right.” The “Far Right” seemingly is defined as anyone who disagrees with Antifa.

Falsely claiming to be merely a culture or a movement, Antifa is organized in chapters that have formal training, doctrine, and security measures. They gather intelligence, run educational programs, publicly shame enemies, and coordinate with other Marxist groups, including the DSA and Black Lives Matter. Antifa street activists wear all-black uniforms. Its chapters are linked by what has been known since 2013 as the Torch Network.

In recent years, Antifa activists have taken low profiles, shouting down “fascist” speakers on campuses, for example. But in March 2026, nine members of the North Texas Antifa Cell were convicted of rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction, and attempted murder of a police officer at the Prairieland, Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Center on July 4, 2025. They drew long prison sentences.

As Antifa appears to be growing, numerous polls indicate that young Democrats, indoctrinated by academic Marxists, support the use of violence to settle political differences more than older people, independents, or Republicans.

It has gone further. In September 2026, University of California Santa Barbara professor Butch Ware declared, “The Democrats cannot be reasoned with. They must be destroyed.” DSA members Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed are not Marxist enough, he asserted. People should prepare for “war in the streets.” Such people seem to be among the “progressive forces” the Soviets expected to be the muscle behind the revolutions they hoped to stimulate in the West.

Given the history of Marxist lies, deception, and other disinformation in pursuit of power, and their use of violence in power, it is reasonable to wonder how the DSA plans to achieve its radical revision of America. It also is prudent to assume that many Americans, now primed for political violence and with an appreciable paramilitary force already built, will eventually try to actualize their faith in revolutionary Marxism.