Stalked by
Socialism
An Escapee
From Communism Shows How We’re Sliding Into Socialism
by Jana
Kandlova & Foreword by Jim Vicevich
Softcover $13.99
Hardcover $26.99
222 Pages
Jana Kandlova,
author of Stalked by Socialism, has written a necessary book that raises
the question: Are we here in the United States attempting to crawl back into
the shed skin of totalitarian socialism?
History, which
proceeds in baby steps, has taught us that the road to totalitarianism is paved
with emotionally attractive socialist intentions, but there is a vast qualitative
difference between intent and accomplished ends. That is the lesson bitterly
learned by those in Western Europe who first were overrun by Nazism and later
lived for decades under communism. All the important, autocratic totalitarians
of the 20th century, among the bloodiest and most spiritually racked
centuries in world history – fascists Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, communists
Joseph Stalin, “breaker of nations,” and Chairman Mao of China -- were
socialists before they became totalitarians.
The Road To Serfdom, first published in 1944, Friedrick Hayek
writes, was offered “as a warning to English socialists” when Hayek was
teaching in London. The precursor to socialism, Hayek warned, is “planning on a
national scale,” which must of necessity be both arbitrary and anti-democratic.
And those who naively believe that democratic forms alone are a bulwark against
anti-democratic socialism have misread the times: “There is no justification
for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it
cannot be arbitrary; it is not the source, but the limitation of power which
prevents it being arbitrary. Democratic control may prevent power from becoming
arbitrary, but it does not do so by its mere existence. If democracy resolves
on a task which necessarily involves the use of power which cannot be guided by
fixed rules, it must become arbitrary power.”
In the
pre-and-post-World War II era, Hayek and other unheeded 20th century
Cassandras – one thinks of Robert Conquest, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler,
Whittaker Chambers and many other writers of distinction – sounded loud,
clanging warning bells commonly disregarded by policy makers and the tribunes
of the people who, burrowing into the moment, rarely had a clear view of the near
future.
Like so many
post-World-War-Two survivors of iron-fisted totalitarianism, Kandelora is
an escapee and an immigrant to the United States. Her memoir of her years under
the jackboot of socialist totalitarianism provides us with a view from inside
the communist leviathan. And the subtitle of her book, “An Escapee From
Communism Shows How We’re Sliding Into Socialism,” is a timely warning to the
United States, a palace of security and comfort to the offscourings of a
socialist inspired communism now prowling the byways of the nation that
welcomed her and others like her, still lifting the torch of liberty beside the
golden door and offering to the dispossessed a refuge against the often
arbitrary rule of “men like gods.”
Kandelova recounts
her years in communist occupied Czechoslovakia in the first three chapters of
her book, a captivating, painfully written but easily read personal
reminiscence. Here we meet her brave grandparents and parents. Her mother
describes in a single line the made-in-Russia, communist planned economy of
Czechoslovakia, intermittently free after World War I and during the
short-lived Prague Spring, before Russian tanks arrived in the country to
suppress an organic revolution.
“We pretend to work,
and they pretend to pay us,” her mother, a true Czech used to say.
Uncomfortable with
socialist serfdom, Czechs in whom the fire of liberty had not yet been entirely
snuffed out well knew that communist tyranny is the perfection of socialism,
its logical endpoint. But the totalitarian mechanism, perfected in Russia and
imported everywhere during the Stalin years throughout a war-racked Eastern
Europe, was nothing if not an inhuman machine of spiritual destruction. The
universal “equality” heralded by academic socialists very quickly became an
instrument of oppression. The planned state can only be implanted in countries
through intimidation, terror and remorseless force. The omnipotent and
omnipresent state portrayed by Orwell must
crush organic freedom, because liberty, natural to humans, is unalterably opposed to
mechanized force.
Kandlova arrived in
the United States when she was 18 years old. As had so many other immigrants
fleeing the oppressions of the Old Word, she was delivered from the iron jaws
of socialist communism by an inborn resistance to tyranny -- that and the kind
of serendipity in which Christians sometimes detect the moving finger of God.
It began when she
and her younger sister Eva “got into collecting anything we could find that was
Western: empty tennis ball cans, chewing gum wrappers, even empty Coke cans.
All of these had once held products that weren’t available to us… It was all
just stuff that belonged in the trash can, but back then, these things
represented the U.S. to me, which was sounding better and better all the time.”
The “dreary, hyper-controlled environment” of liberty-deprived Czechoslovakia
had turned Kandlova into “a dreamer.” She had already been exposed to
intimations of liberty by listening to The Voice of America. Her father, an
ingenious technician, had built himself a ham radio and, through this media,
the wider world was presented to Kandlova’s all too human imagination.
And then, of course,
there was David, a friend whose family had attempted twice, unsuccessfully, to escape
communist Czechoslovakia. Reprisals were quickly visited upon David’s family. A
dozen years after their attempts to escape had been frustrated, “his family
tried it again, this time going from Czechoslovakia to Italy, then attempting
to immigrate to Australia (but being refused) and finally going to the U.S.,
where they settled in Hartford, Connecticut.
Having only seen David twice -- the two had a pen-pal relationship -- David invited Kandlova to visit him in Connecticut. It had been astonishing easy for 18 year-old Kandlova to get her Visa in order. “I guess the officials thought,” Kandlova writes, “a young girl like me, traveling alone, was sure to come back… I was scared to death to make this huge, irreversible move and told just about everyone I knew that I was going, hoping someone would stop me. The one person I didn’t tell was my father, who definitely would have put a stop to it but never got the chance because he was on a business trip when I left. My new, free, independent life was suddenly within my grasp.”
It is the burden of Stalked by Socialism to trace in great
detail the ruinous socialist path, rejected by Eastern Europe after the
shedding of much blood, sweat and tears, that has now gained a foothold in the United
States, a Westernized socialism re-presented to a new generation of Americans
as a native grown liberation movement.
Part two of Stalked by Socialism, “Reflections on
Liberty and Liberty Lost,” twelve short chapters, is devoted to an examination of
the modern day menace as seen through the eyes of a European socialist ex-serf who’s
been there, seen that.
Through a lucid analysis
of the modern iteration of “socialism with a human face,” Kandlova emerges as
her mother’s child, a master of concision – “We pretend to work, they pretend
to pays us.” If the note sounded throughout is that of a wise, cautioning, contrarian
libertarian, it is because libertarianism is the best defense against socialist
tyranny, especially that smiling tyranny slipped under the door of a free market
system by socialists with knives in their brains.
In chapter fourteen, “The Freedom
Spectrum: Trending towards Red,” Kandlora asks, “How can you determine where we
currently land on the freedom-verses-socialism spectrum?... Here’s an easy,
three-step way to gauge it: 1) The more money you’re required to give to the
government, 2) the more enforced contact you have with the government, and 3) the more your
everyday behavior is dictated by the government, the higher the level of
socialism in your society and the less freedom you have.”
Stalked by Socialism places Kandlova in the same theatre of
resistance once occupied by the Cassandras mentioned early in this review. Here
is an escapee who, to deploy a phrase used by André Malraux of Whittaker
Chambers in 1952, has not “come back
from hell with empty hands.”
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