Among the most amazing aspects of the accelerating American submission to the state are 1) how matter-of-fact we are in contemplating massive government interventions such as President Obama’s latest stimulus “jobs” plan, and 2) how virtually no one notices the blatant Marxist overtones. When someone does, a la “Joe the Plumber” at the end of the 2008 campaign season, he is mocked off the stage.
Obama demonstrated how this is done in January 2010 when, during an unusual White House meeting with congressional Republicans about his pending health care legislation — another massive government intervention into the private sector — he declared:
“If you were to listen to this debate and, frankly, how much some of you went after this bill, you’d think this thing was some Bolshevik plot.”
Would that some Republican, any Republican had replied: “Not necessarily a `plot,’ Sir, but a program that is indeed `Bolshevik’ in design and purpose. Government control of private sector activity is aptly described as “Bolshevik” — or Marxist, socialist, collectivist, statist and, for that matter, fascist, too. Indeed, nationalized health care was one of the first programs enacted by the Bolsheviks after they seized power in 1917.”
But no. Among the many psychological factors repressing such a response is historical ignorance. This isn’t entirely our fault. The truth about Bolshevism and related creeds barely makes it into our curricula — another Bolshevik plot, if you ask me.
Indeed, the history of communist plotters who secretly sabotaged our government barely dents our understanding of events long after secret archives in Moscow and Washington partly opened in the 1990s to disgorge proof of Soviet agents operating in the highest reaches of power.
But if nationalized health care is a Bolshevik program, “stimulus spending” is what you might call a Bolshevik plot. Why? One of the Kremlin’s greatest agents you probably never heard of played a leading role in introducing stimulus spending as a macroeconomic policy for the first time in U.S. history during the Franklin D. Roosevelt years.
The agent’s name was Lauchlin Currie, and, as M. Stanton Evans writes in his indispensable “Blacklisted by History,” he ranks “among the most influential Soviet agents ever in the U.S. government, if only by virtue of his portfolio in the White House dealing with affairs of China.”
Currie, an administrative assistant to FDR, was instrumental in the U.S.-governmentwide communist plot to turn China Red.
But that’s not all he did. From U.S. and Soviet archival sources that began opening in 1995, we have learned that Currie passed secret documents and intelligence to Soviet spymasters.
Currie also used his stature as a White House aide to stop investigations into the activities of other American traitors operating inside government.
How does stimulus spending sound now on discovering that this bona fide Soviet agent was its leading proponent? In “Roosevelt, the Great Depression and the Economics of Recovery,” Elliott Rosen, professor emeritus of history at Rutgers, writes:
“The initial rationale for public expenditure as a stimulus to the economy was provided by Currie, who won a wide and influential audience in the Roosevelt administration.”
As assistant research director for the Federal Reserve, his position before moving to the White House, “Currie provided an economic rationale” for deficit spending. “Wartime aside,” Rosen writes, “no precedent existed for budget unbalance.”
Not surprisingly, another Currie project was to push for the “abandonment of the concept of annual budget balance.”
So that’s where balanced budgets went, and stimulus spending came from. Think of it: One agent of communist influence in high places and the U.S. economy was revolutionized.
If only Americans could learn to recognize a Bolshevik plot when they see one.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
