Happy New Year. Today our good friend Mr. Tom Hafer is going to present us the stories of the red scale. Good afternoon Mr Hafer.
And Dr Liu, welcome back from your Christmas vacation. Today we're going to talk about the Red Scare. What was it? Was it real and is it still happening?
So as Glinda the Good Witch of the North remarks "it's always best to start at the beginning". What is communism? Communism is a system in which the state that is to say the nation, owns all the property and the economy is centrally planned. So it is planned by Committees of experts at the top, and then push down through the general population.
It's based on the manifesto of the Communist party, which was written by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848.
Within communism only one political party is allowed, no other parties are legal and the party is supreme. It is more important than any other thing specifically more important than the individual rights of the population. And in practice it has turned out to be an imperial form of government been on converting Every Other Nation through Revolution, which it exports both ideologically and in terms of weapons of war.
So one of the alternatives, what else can you have besides communism? Well, long ago feudalism was the philosophy that governed most of the world. There the land is owned by the aristocracy but is worked by The Peasants, sometimes called Serfs, who may be bound to the land. In other words, if the land is sold then they go with it. And who must provide much of their product, the agriculture, the animal husbandry, whatever to the owners of the land.
A bit after that came mercantilism, which is somewhat like an early form of capitalism, except that it assumes that Global wealth is static. In other words, that it doesn't increase or decrease, and that states or nations must maximize their imports and minimize their exports in order to maximize their own money supply. And it also encourages colonialism for raw materials and labor and protectionism. So that you favor your exports in disfavor imports from other nations.
There's capitalism. Capitalism assumes that overall economic progress is maximized through private ownership of most property, and through individual entrepreneurship. The functions of the state are to provide for the National Defense to provide the legal setting for running the economy, and for adjudicating the rights of individuals.
And then there's socialism, which is the small cousin of Communism. In which the state owns the means of production action but private property is allowed.
So those are most of the Alternative forms of government and of course there are hybrids of these.
Yeah, absolutely then Capitalism is the best way to protect a private property and the private rights compared to other form. But our young Generation are so fond of socialism, event Marxism.
I think we'll see why. Part of it is understandable in the context of this next slide, where I talk about the first Red Scare, which was essentially from 1918, when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia to the beginning of World War II.
So here's the history behind that, there were no communist countries prior to 1918, but in June of 1918, the Bolsheviks assassinated Czar Nicholas II and his entire family. And in fact, the American expeditionary Force sporadically fought against the Bolsheviks between 1918 and 1920. But the Bolsheviks won.
And in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist republics was formed, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and a nation called Transcaucasus. So these were theoretically independent nations, but in reality ruled from Moscow.
By 1928 the USSR had expanded to include Georgia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Moldava, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. So it was an Empire that covered a very large area in Europe and Asia. And in 1939, the Russian German non-aggression pact was signed between Hitler and Stalin, which seemed to guarantee that Germany would not attack Russia and vice versa.
However, in 1941 Hitler did attack Russia, and so uh unusually Russia became an ally, so-called of the western Powers. Simply because we were fighting a common foe.
So what happened in the United States in the period between World War I and World War II to cause the Red Scare? Why were people fearful of what was going on?
Well in 1919, immediately after World War I, there was extensive leftist unrest in the U.S.. There were more than 3,600 strikes across a wide variety of Industries and even the Boston police. And they were portrayed in the press as radical threats to American society. Also in 1919, a bomb plot fostered by leftists was discovered against a number of prominent Americans. There were 36 bombs that were mailed, eight of which exploded and two people were killed. In 1920, Wall Street was bombed by leftists. This was much more devastating, 38 dead 141 injured.
Meanwhile in Russia, the secret police called the cheka had been formed, and they executed hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens. Not necessarily because they had committed any crimes, simply because they were members of the middle class. And Russia wish to extinguish the middle class, the bourgeoisie. Here's a quote from the head of the cheka, "We are not fighting against single individuals, we are Exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class." So if you are a successful Russian, you are a target of the Cheka, and you could be imprisoned or killed.
Well, uh an impression I got is those left revolutions were so bloody.
We didn't have the internet back then, and people were somewhat enamored of the idea behind socialism and communism, because they hadn't been tried yet there was no history in 1919. People didn't know what was going to happen, and certainly there were inequities in capitalism. And in particular in 1929 and prior to that, in some parts of the world, when the Great Depression started, many people questioned the fundamental benefits of capitalism. And you can understand why there was great poverty and Desperation. And desperate people will believe leaders like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who say that they can make things better. And so that's why the world turned increasingly toward totalitarianism, and in some cases to Communism and socialism.
Yeah when people face a crisis, they wanted a change, but it's not necessarily means every change the society brought up leaded us to a successful future.
That turned out to be true, but people didn't know that at the time, and so there were quite a few both working people and also intellectuals, who thought that the promise of Communism seemed very great. And many Americans uh even educated Americans went over to Russia to help out with the Revolution and to build things. Many of them turned out to be not merely disillusioned, but in many cases actually imprisoned. Because they still believed in individual liberties and individual rights, and the Russian government did not.
In any case during that time, many communist parties were established in various Nations across the world, almost all directly under the direction of Russian government officials. And extensive spy networks were formed, particularly in China, in the United States, Germany, the UK, and many many other countries. And the only reason that the Red Scare abated was because, in 1941 Russia suddenly became our reported ally against Germany. And Stalin became portrayed in the press as Uncle Joe. But the fact is that, spying and subversion accelerated during this time. We just didn't talk about it and didn't want to know about it. So what happened after that?