You Can't Trust Those Bolsheviks, Edwin.
Grandma was spot on, it seems
My paternal grandmother, Bertie was a genuine force of nature. She was born Bertie Messinger and raised in Lincoln County, WV to a family of subsistence farmers. She married my grandfather, Ivan Leap and moved to the outskirts of Huntington, WV. They had three son; Darrell and twins, Keith and Karl. (Keith was my father.)
Grandma was a teacher in the days when it only required a certificate, rather than a degree, but she was ever passionate about education, especially reading.
Grandma was devout, and frequented Nazarene and Free Methodist churches; she was fueled by a powerful dose of Protestant work ethic. She read her Bible and prayed diligently. She was kind and gentle, but believed in order and would not hesitate to send us to pick our own switches if the situation required it.
She also paid attention to the times, probably more than my grandfather, who I think was a bit of a melancholy dreamer. He was apt to take off and go to trade shows in Chicago and other cities by train. (I often wondered why the progeny of German men and Irish women was given the name Ivan, Russian for John. I used to smile to myself, imagining that he was an early Russian sleeper agent, doing intel work on US industries.)
Bertie kept a photo of President Reagan in her house for as long as she lived. She was American through and through, having seen Uncle Darrel join the Navy and my father, Keith drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam.
All of this is to say that grandma was simple but also profound. Her wisdom was imprinted on all of us grandchildren who had the good fortune to know her, to hear her laugh and eat at her table. (Upon which I am even now writing…how perfect is that?)
Grandma Bertie wasn’t afraid of much. She wasn’t afraid of the dark or storms. She shook the plants and kept on picking beans when snakes showed up in her garden. She was fearless when she ran her early morning paper-route, alone in her 60s. When a drug-addled man threw a brick through her back window late one night after Grandpa had died. Hee was greeted with the report of a .22 magnum revolver which missed him. Whether she intended to miss I do not know. He stood still until a neighbor and the police arrived. However, one of her few real words of caution was this statement:
‘Edwin, you can’t trust those Bolsheviks!’
Now, she was born in 1907. So she was old enough to hear about the Great War while it raged, to have lost a baby brother to the 1918 influenza epidemic and also to have learned about the Bolshevik Revolution. I am fortunate to have been that close to such events by proximity to her.
In fact, her simple life began before the Russian Revolution, she lived during all the horrors of Lenin, Stalin and the rest of the Soviet era and in she ultimately outlived the Bolsheviks (well, the Russian species). She died in 1993, four years after the the Berlin Wall came down. No doubt it was satisfying to her that her beloved President Reagan, and his VP Bush, were part of that remarkable event.
I suspect the entire Communist era was much on her mind. I still recall my father and uncles reading The Gulag Archipelago, by Nobel Laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Grandma may have as well. It took me a few decades but so did I. Well, most of it. The book details just how terrible life was under the Soviet Communism, the bloody, murderous, possessed, offspring of the Bolsheviks.
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/his-writings/large-work-and-novels/the-gulag-archipelago
I am still surprised when I ask people if they know of the Gulags, the deadly prison camps of the Soviets. Most Americans say ‘no, I’ve never heard of that.’ We know about concentration camps under the Nazis and are properly horrified. But what the Communists did has escaped our public education in a remarkable (and I suspect well planned) way.
What grandma said was more insightful than perhaps even she knew. The contagious blood-lust of the Bolsheviks killed humans (ironically) like a sickle through wheat. In fact, estimates are that communism killed around 100,000,000 people in the 20th century. The numbers aren’t rock solid, but that’s probably as good an estimate as any. Through starvation and outright murder of their own people and others (with a focus on political enemies and religious leaders) communists worldwide made the nazis seem like amateur. The communist death toll was higher and their tenure much longer. Not to mention that their PR departments left Hitler and his team in the dust, Leni Riefenstahl notwithstanding. As a result, American academics and progressives have long had an enormous crush on communism.
To this day, in the free West, you can fly a hammer and sickle flag, organize communist groups, join the communist party, can sport a Che t-shirt to look edgy or you can have a statue of Chairman Mao in your university office. But you had better not show up with a Swastika or someone’s going to complain.
Where am I going with this? Well, first of all, I think Grandma was ahead of her time. And for a woman without a degree, from the hills of rural WV, she really nailed it. The Bolsheviks set off a dangerous era. It doesn’t take a PhD, or world travel, or even the dubious glories of the Internet to show a wise person the truth. (Although maybe Grandpa actually was a sleeper and that’s why she didn’t like Bolsheviks. Right? Nyet...)
Second of all, her belief about this impacted me, as did reading a bit of history. It makes me distrust tyrants. I mean, not just Bolsheviks, but communists, fascists, Ivy League academics, social media CEOs and all the rest. Tyranny forms a circle, and whether you start on the far left or the far right, with reading groups or salons, it all meets in the middle with torture, poverty and death.
This secondarily made me distrust anyone who wants to clamp down on the freedoms Americans enjoy; in particular things like free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion and those pesky ideas that are meant to allow us to dissent.
But most relevant of all, Grandma Bertie’s beliefs remain relevant. What the Bolsheviks started lives on. In the Chinese Communist Party.
This photo is from Nov 14, 2023, when Chinese Communist President Xi Jinping met with President Biden for the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit) in San Francisco.
The flags of the Communist People’s Republic of China were all over the streets. Streets remarkable clear of homeless addicts, scrubbed from the scene so that the world, in particular Xi, wouldn’t be troubled by them. Citizens had been troubled by them for a very long time but their pleas fell on deaf ears as their businesses closed and their city became a wasteland.
Believe it or not, this is germane to me and to my career experiences. Because every day, I deal with the power of Communist China, the inheritor of the Bolsheviks. Because I am surrounded by people afflicted by fentanyl.
Particularly in Appalachia, but all over the country, fentanyl is a plague unprecedented. It is killing young and old, creating lifelong illness and addiction in the shortened lives of those who don’t die, and making healthcare far more complex due to the assorted side effects of the drug and its use. (Including infections from dirty needles.)
According to investigative reporter Jonathan Choe, interviewed on the Humanize podcast (https://fixhomelessness.org/2023/jonathan-choe-on-humanize-podcast-the-crisis-of-our-city-streets/), fentanyl can be purchased in homeless encampments in Seattle for as little as $.50 per dose. That’s why people don’t argue with me for prescription pain pills anymore. Fentanyl is so cheap it isn’t worth asking.
But where does our fentanyl come from? Ah! That’s interesting! Communist China supplies most of the precursor chemicals, which are then used to make the actual drug in Mexico, under the guiding hand of the cartels. https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/15/opinions/fentanyl-is-a-poison-in-the-us-china-relationship-bergen/index.html
(Now, to go a little further afield, some theorize that China sees the fentanyl epidemic as a continuation of the 19th century opium wars, when Great Britain and France fought the Chinese for the right to sell opium…in China. (The US and Russia were tangentially involved as well). I mean, I’d have been angry too. Opium was devastating to the Chinese. I guess, as always, they’re playing the long game and doing it well. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Opium-Wars. I’d hope we could move on.
So let’s move on! Let’s move on to forced labor. China still has forced labor camps. By some estimates about 400 labor camps in Western China, where members of the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group are tortured and indoctrinated in an attempt to stamp out their ethnicity and beliefs.
https://www.state.gov/forced-labor-in-chinas-xinjiang-region/
The progeny of those Bolsheviks just keep on giving.
Even as the polite world is concerned about Gaza, a much larger population of Muslims is oppressed by the existential enemy of the free world, Communist China.
China, land of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. China, land of repression of free speech. China, land of constant surveillance whose citizens languish under a ubiquitous ‘social credit system’
China, which runs TikTok, a social media poison for generations. (Which it wisely restricts its own youth from using.)
China which endlessly engages in industrial espionage and traditional espionage on our shores, and whose Confucius Institutes in colleges have served as indoctrination centers for American college students (who honestly aren’t known for sifting through complicated ideas these days).
China which has a vast Navy as ours gets negligently smaller. China looks hungrily at the Pacific and in particular at Taiwan (which makes 60% of the world’s microprocessors, by the way).
China, which may well harvest organs from minorities; a thing which makes all our sci-fi nightmares seem possible and probably still has Orwell in his grave saying, ‘see, I told you so!’ https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/china-un-human-rights-experts-alarmed-organ-harvesting-allegations
China, from whom we purchase the majority of our pharmaceuticals. https://www.citizen.org/article/china-is-the-top-source-of-us-pharmaceutical-imports/https://www.citizen.org/article/china-is-the-top-source-of-us-pharmaceutical-imports/
This is the same China, the flag of which waved proudly, and in profusion, along the streets of major US city this week with the Stars and Stripes in the minority. A US city arguably devastated, in no small part, by a drug which owes its widespread availability in part to the Chinese Communist Party. Honestly, Xi could almost be imagined as taking a victory lap in San Francisco.
Now, for just a minute try to imagine all of those Chinese flags replaced with Swastikas. Imagine Jews and Slavs, Roma and LGBTQ still imprisoned in a Nazi Germany which survived the war and still exists. For a thought exercise, imagine that our cell phones, solar panels and other assorted tech, as well as our prescription drugs, come from that Germany. A nation successful and influential, populous and ultimately committed to world domination. But one which, until that time, makes quality consumer products on the cheap, which Americans routinely buy, knowing that it’s kind of bad but hey, what can you do?
The Chinese people are amazing, brilliant and yearn for freedom. I’ll even grant that there are many very nice people in the world who call themselves communist or Marxist because they were profoundly (and genuinely) moved by inequality and suffering and those ideologies offered what they think is a construct to bring positive change.
But the Chinese Communist party is dangerous. It is the enemy of America and American freedom. And when we refuse to learn the history of communism and refuse to accept that it continues to commit evil acts of oppression, when we can’t acknowledge that every day we are vulnerable to it and injured by it (if only with every fentanyl death), then we simply give truth to what Grandma Bertie used to say.
‘Edwin, you can’t trust those Bolsheviks.’
Even a lady without a degree, from the backwoods of Appalachia, had enough sense to see it.
The rest of us need to pay attention or the ideological progeny of those Bolsheviks will bury us all.
Spot on. I am doing a series on Marxists. I think I will probably have to add something on the CCP.
https://anailinhisplace.substack.com/p/marxist-terror-special-part-one
Brilliant and timely.