[continuing from last entry]
Thus, Soviet propaganda went out into the public under the name of a U.S. magazine, misleading Americans. Yuri Bezmenov said that many journalists, actors, and star athletes can be excused for being blinded to the realities while visiting the Soviet Union, but that the behavior of many Western politicians was unforgivable. They wove lies and sought cooperation with Soviet communists for their own reputation and profit, he said, calling them morally corrupt. [17]
In the book You Can Still Trust the Communists … to Be Communists, Dr. Fred Schwartz analyzed why some young men from wealthy families became fond of communism. He listed four reasons: First, disenchantment with capitalism; second, belief in a materialist philosophy of life; third, intellectual hubris; fourth, an unfulfilled religious need. Intellectual hubris refers to the experience of young people at the age of about 18–20 who easily fall prey to communist propaganda due to their partial understanding of history, their anti-authoritarian resentment, and their desire to rebel against tradition, authority, and the ethnic culture they grew up in.
Unfulfilled religious needs refers to the fact that everyone has a kind of religious impulse inside them, driving them to transcend themselves. However, atheism and the theory of evolution instilled by their education make them unable to derive satisfaction from traditional religion. The communist fantasy of liberating mankind takes advantage of this latent human need and serves as their ersatz religion. [18]
Intellectuals tended to be fooled by radical ideologies. Such a phenomenon has drawn the attention of scholars. In his book The Opium of the Intellectuals, Raymond Aron strongly pointed out that on one hand, 20th-century intellectuals severely criticized the traditional political system, but on the other hand, generously tolerated or even turned a blind eye to the dictatorship and slaughter in communist states. He saw the left-wing intellectuals who turned their ideology into a secular religion as hypocritical, arbitrary, and fanatical.
In his book Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Paul Johnson, a British historian, analyzed the lives and radical political views of Rousseau and a dozen intellectuals who followed him. He found that they shared the fatal weakness of arrogance and egocentrism. [19]
In his book Intellectuals and Society, the American scholar Thomas Sowell also gave extensive illustration of the extraordinary arrogance of these intellectuals.
These scholars have based their analysis of communist intellectuals on careful judgment and analysis, but we wish to bring attention to another reason, which they have not covered, that explains why intellectuals can be so easily fooled. Communism is a demonic ideology that does not belong to any traditional culture in human society. Since it militates against human nature, it can never be organically developed by man, but must be enforced and instilled from the outside. Under the influence of atheism and materialism, contemporary academia and education has abandoned belief in gods. Blind belief in science and the worship of so-called human reason make it possible for people to become slaves of this demonic ideology.
Since the 1960s, communism has engaged in a large-scale invasion of American education. Even worse, many young people—bombarded by left-wing media and given a simplified education—indulge in television, computer games, the internet, and social media. They get turned into “snowflakes,” people who lack knowledge, a global perspective, a sense of responsibility, a sense of history, and the ability to cope with challenges. With communist or communist-derived ideologies instilled in them by their parents’ generation, they become indoctrinated and henceforth use a warped framework for evaluating the new facts they see and hear. That is, communist lies have formed a film around them, preventing them from a genuine vision of reality.
To deceive people, the demon has extensively exploited the human weaknesses of stupidity, ignorance, selfishness, greed, and credulity. Meanwhile, idealism and romantic fantasies of a beautiful life have also been taken advantage of. This is the saddest of all. In fact, a communist state is nothing like the romantic fantasies of communist true believers. If they actually lived under a communist regime, instead of simply visiting on a pleasant tour, they might realize this.
*****
The communist specter infiltrated the West in disguise. Only when we transcend concrete phenomena and put ourselves on a higher plane can we truly see the face and goals of the specter.
The real reason the specter could attain its goal is because humans abandoned their belief in gods and relaxed their moral standards. Only by revivifying our belief in gods, purifying our minds, and elevating our morality can we rid ourselves of demonic influence and control. If all of human society returned to tradition, the specter would have no place to hide.
The young and naive Snow was used as a tool…
