"Don't Bother Pardoning My Leftist Revenge"

Last night, I dreamed I was a leftist.  

I'm sure it was a nightmare but I was asleep.  Therefore, I was safe from the commies--which, in the dream, were me.  

Like many in the particular niche in my generation--boomers--I became an adult in the years surrounding the antiwar movement's pinnacle: aged 17 when the Kent State and Jackson State massacres-by-soldier occurred, 15 when the police riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1978, and most interestingly, my first year in college was a year of an-all out "Bring The War Home" move by an antiwar movement that was getting nothing but repression from the ever-paranoid Nixon administration.  

I remember when Nixon and his hoodlum henchmen went bonkers enough to steal into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg, all to hide the horrific military abuses occurring in Vietnam.   I remember the Christmas bombing of Hanoi.  Mostly, I remember the something like 1,700 property bombings--mainly draft offices and RNC sales outlets and police stations--and I remember when the Weather Underground managed to spring Timothy Leary out of San Quentin Prison.  

At 18, those events laid down quite an impression with me.  I was becoming an adult, after all, and thus more and more self aware, I had come to realize that the Vietnam war was more about charitable contributions to military contractors and the military-industrial complex than it was even remotely to be associated with defending freedom in Southeast Asia.  In fact, while as a young teenager, I had a map of Vietnam on my bedroom wall, my confusion then today persists in my memory when I laugh at the irony that, next to the map (I'd used pins to mark major battles), a Look Magazine photo of nude hippies dancing around a horse that had been dyed blue regaled the then-mystifying images of what it might mean to reach adulthood in the midst of the Sexual Revolution.  

As the Jefferson Airplane sang, "Wild Times".  

Naw.  The times weren't that wild.  In fact, I remember how much fun it was not to be a slave to The Lawrence Welk Show on TV, something that remains like a rotten fish in my memory as it was the de rigeur ritual at my house every Saturday night as my parents got ready to go dancing at the Elks Club.  I remember how fun it was to blare Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" on Christmas morning after a friend delivered the record album as a gift that day.  I also recall how shocked the adults at my church were when the youth group of which I was a member decided to make posters about Christianity.  This was exciting.  At the time, lots of teens were designing their own florescent posters in addition to those we could buy at Spencer's Gifts at the mall, a place lofting with incense and lava lamps and mystery.  Meanwhile, the TG&Y in White Rock Shopping Center had all kinds of supplies for this, paints, brushes, pens, poster board.  My poster I painted in Day Glo tempera--an image of the globe ensconced like a beautiful jewel in a candle flame.  

"May The Light Of The Spirit Encircle The World" read the poster's caption.  The black poster board added to the bright yellows and reds, and of course represented outer space.   But no moon. Why a new moon?  I really don't know.  Perhaps I wanted my viewers to focus on the Earth.

As a tiny group of teens, we displayed our posters one Sunday after a church service.  We were artists.  At least for a short time.  We felt good about ourselves.  We had accomplished something cool and countercultural by our lights, and that, more than anything, meant a much to me at the time.  I was still a kid.  Feeling all sorts of uncertainty.  And testing limits.  Breaking a few rules.  Questioning authority.  And here I was that Sunday morning, finding acceptance from the adults in the middle of what was termed "the generation gap".  Political agency through art. 

Most of the posters we had made were of rainbows and flowers and even amateur imitations of some of the more well-known images of the day.  A couple of rock stars, the "love is a flower..." bit "that needs to be treated gently", psychedelic designs.  But mine?  It seemed to stick out.  As I lifted my poster for a crowd of adults to see in the recreation hall, I found puzzled, almost alarmed, looks in a number of adult faces.  Why were the adults looking at me with puzzlement in their eyes?  

Wait.  Look at the context surrounding my poster.  The world was on the brink of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).  Everyone, including us us teenagers, was terrified at the face-off between what I today see as a competition between US imperialism and Soviet imperialism.  

Yeah.  Like Wednesday Addams, I'd painted something that looked like the Earth on fire.  Well, in today's terminology, that was the bomb.  

Yup.  The bomb, the bomb, the bomb.  We as humans in the thrall of high technology's eyeless ability to wipe us all off the map as if Mother Earth was shaking off an infestation of lice; we had to live with that possible horror.  All the time.  At any minute we could have been turned into grease spots on green glass.  That would be radioactive shards for 10,000 years.  At least our remains would be pretty for a while. . . 

I've thought a lot about those events many times since they occurred.  I remember reading numerous science fiction novels about nuclear holocaust.  "Alas Babylon", "A Canticle For Liebowitz", "Level Seven": all these come to mind.  Yes, even our finest futurists were scared shitless.  And they were warning us.  We needed temperance.  And prudence.  Possibly a little providence.  None of those seemed to be materializing anywhere.  Not only had the Ban The Bomb protests of the late 1950s and early 1960s been rubbed out by what its proponents called "The Death Machine", people wanted to escape the maw of crazy that was possessing American leadership.  

Today, two things about those wild times come to mind: First, everyone of us kids wanted peace--everyone, that is, adults included, at least adults other than those who were using their power for ominous ends, and everyone really was worried about the potential for nuclear armageddon.  My father was.  As was my mother. 

Let's back up.  When I was smaller, age seven, my family lived in Denver.   My father worked for the government.  At that time, Denver was a manufacturing center for the military because its location far inland would make it harder to hit during an attack.  But by 1962, the advent of the ICBM was Xing that out.  Then the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred.  Yes, terror.  At school, our teachers handed us forms to fill out.  For dog-tags.  As a second grader, I thought that was amazingly cool.  But when I took the form home to be signed by my parents, my mother cried.  The tags, made of of tungsten, would survive a nuclear attack, thus making our identities recognizable in the charred remnants of lunacy brought to us by...well, what exactly? Why were we to be enslaved by that fear?  Even our parents were reticent about obeying some vague dictates we remain fully patriotic during the Cold War.  If capitalism was so superior to socialism, what was the fuss about?  

Throughout that era, the creepy warnings about communist subversion hammered at us constantly like some kind of death knell.  I didn't know any commies.  I was just a kid.  Then the very worst happened in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis: the air raid sirens in the neighborhood went off in the middle of the night.  Crying, my father rushed us all into the basement of our home.  There, we crouched until the sirens stopped.  Yes, it had been a false alarm.  But people were keeping quiet about it.  Later, my dad told me "some beatniks" had broken into Bancroft High School and triggered the alarms as a protest.  

Ban The Bomb. Stop The Death Machine.  

Were those "beatniks" commies?  Or were they people just like you and me?  I'll never know.  the drumbeats about subversion continued.  Subversion...subversion...subversion.  All through the Sixties, into the Seventies, and onward into the Eighties.  Even after the Cold War officially ended some people were still finding that, well, propitious, a means to power via fear tactics.  

Subversion.  And backlash.  Reactionaryism began to rise too.  At the Northwest Shopping Center, at a hardware store, two odd brothers lined their dusty counter-top with tracts and weirdly colored books.  "None Dare Call It Conspiracy" by Gary Powell cost me 75 cents to read, and for a 14-year-old, the contents were indeed scary.  A vast vast conspiracy was underway.  The commies were hiding in America, and they were everywhere.  A vast underground of communists had infiltrated the Democratic Party.  John F. Kennedy had sold his soul to the commies.  Business was not safe.  The revolution could occur any time.  And the peace symbol?  A secret sign gestured by one commie to another.  The white dove--the Communist International's co-optation of the dove of peace.  

Wow.  

The brothers, who looked like what today I'd label "paleoconservatives", dressed in suits.   The expressions on their faces were zombie-like, expressionless, mystified.  I would imagine they believed they were the neighborhood's last bastion of patriotism.  They were members of a creepy organization founded by Fred Koch, Charles Koch's father.  But even then, when they were making noise, as my dad told me, they were "the lunatic fringe".  

Today, the John Birch Society has forced itself into the mainstream--all to spread the same paranoid idiocy it was founded to do.  Today they appear at CPAC, a convention of paranoids and generally reactionary types who, to this day, are waiting for two and only two developments: 

What are the expected developments?  The communist takeover of the United States and the return of Jesus Christ.  What would happen if Jesus turned out to be the leader of the revolution, a hippie friend of mine--Jennifer--once asked me quite coyly.  How could I answer?  This sort of thing was bigger than I was.  How are teenagers supposed to understand all that reactionary garbage?  Or communism?  How were we supposed to get that down?  

Oh yeah.  We could read books about the renewed Red Scare all right

I found J. Edgar Hoover's "Masters of Deceit", another wholly paranoid book profiling subversion in action, right here in the US., I think, on the sidewalk somewhere. No one but J. Edgar Hoover and his black-shoed allies, Hoover claimed, could even detect the subversives.  But they were there, subversives, many of them intellectuals and professors, academics and even high school teachers.  

Sound familiar?  It's not a coincidence that reactionaries always go after intellectuals and academics and artists first.  They always do.  Those are the ones who can actually think.  

Who knows why all that garbage came upon us?  It was a contrast to the rise of a counterculture that, at first, had nothing at all to do with destroying America.  Being young, being filled with life and energy, only naturally we rebelled against the paranoids.  And we rebelled against the warlords pushing us into a state of perpetual war as in Orwell's "1984".  Craziness is putting the entire planet on a nuclear countdown clock for no reason other than some spurious fears over some very deluded people coming to take toys away from all adult Americans.  That's how I saw it.  As a tremendously dumb thing for powerful people to do to the world.  I still believe that.  

Second, I remember that the Sixties Generation was the first generation after World War II that was able to enjoy being alive.  Our parents?  Our parents had endured, first, the penury of the Great Depression, another wholly dumb thing that happened due to the same market speculators that almost caused another one in 2008.  Then they'd endured the war.  Growing up in the shadow of that thing was sometimes depressing to me.  In Denver, as a child, sometimes my father and I would go walking in the darker parts of downtown, and there I'd see old men without arms and legs, men with nothing but a chunk of wood serving as an artificial limb.  Very sad.  And worse: an awful lot of really traumatized human beings.  

We were young, us kids.  We weren't living under those two man-made disasters.  For the first time in over 50 years, we could be free, happy, and unfettered, alive, human, humane, and precocious.  And people were.  I remember the Sixties as a happy period.  Enthusiasm was in the air.  Possibility.  Freedom, liberation, and resistance.  Outside of the house, I was in the midst of a true American awakening.  Our parents, having endured so much at the hands of forces against which they were powerless, weren't so sure.  

Apparently, that was "all bad all the time" to repressed adults who saw the counterculture as a threat to nothing more nor less than their own sense of stability and status quo.  Ridiculous.  As for J. Edgar Hoover's "Masters of Deceit"?  My father called Hoover, "Master of the Seat".  And he probably was.  The ass.  

Hence, in the face of all kinds of creepy "conservative" resistance and bellowing about the need to restore the country "to a semblance of morality", the rebellions began.  Vietnam was sucking up the younger generation like a bone-crushing vacuum cleaner.  Kids would grow up with hope in their eyes only to be doomed after being tossed into something they had no way to resist.  Why be free and happy and alive if some goof is out to send you to a foreign jungle to be killed simply so some military contractors could trot home with lots of cash?

For my older friends, I remember, the implications of the Vietnam war were even worse than a personal sacrifice.  Some had risked their lives as Freedom Riders, people who put themselves against the machine of Jim Crow in a valiant bid to demonstrate to Black men they were not only men but also free.  Suddenly, the same people the Freedom Riders had worked so hard to be convinced by the American Dream were being sent off to Southeast Asia to be killed.  

No one with one lick of sense was down with that military-industrial complex caper.  And it was a caper indeed.  The communist threat wasn't really real.  Sure antagonism between a totalitarian state and a supposed republic were waxing and waning, oftentimes stoked by myopic leaders on both sides of the wall who literally could not see straight.  What good is a Cold War if the goal of keeping people happy and fulfilled is destroyed in the process?  

Hence, protests began.  Protests against public hypocrisy.  Most young people knew it was all a game.  Yes, Soviet imperialism was threatening to the freedoms of millions caught in the maw of that idiotic machine.  Yes, Third World countries, as they then were called, were being victimized by communist agitators and terrorists determined to sell a crazy kind of communism as if it was something that could even shine your shoes.  Yes, many of us intuitively knew as well that the USSR would likely collapse--all by its obvious flaws.  It wasn't going to need any help.  Repressive regimes always crack from the inside out.  Including our own.  That was the rub our elders simply weren't willing to face.  Fear, fear, fear.  It's repression.  And it's oppressive.  

That was then.  Today, the same paranoids who rushed the West into dumb wars over capitalism's dislike for even the ideals of socialism are again rising--again paranoid, again grabby, and again starting up more drumbeats to war, this time as an extreme type of economic competition with the Chinese Communist Party.  Right.  We definitely need one of those.  Yay.  Another Cold War.  Paranoids on the warpath.  But what is the paranoia about?  Why is a political/economic order that is slowly being outmoded in China being challenged as a threat to capitalism?  Those with astute eyes and the ability to do their own research suggest that the Chinese Communist Party is already cracking down on the people of China because they're hanging on by their eye-teeth.  Whatever the truth is to that, it's also evident that authorities are slowly replacing the Marxian pipe dream with a revamped Confucianism.  After all, that tradition order works if the leadership is relatively sane. . . 

So.  What about protecting the one domestically subversive force readily evident in America of 2023?  What about protecting capitalism from some kind of mirage-like subversion?  Why would capitalism need to be protected?  Oh, the paranoids have all kinds of answers for that.  Some in the libertarian camp have even concocted "alternative definitions" of what socialism is.  Here's a stab at what I saw as a boy: My parents fought over money.  Who controls the money?  Lots of emotionally abusive events occurred to my sister and I due to arguments over who controls the products of my father's labor.  I saw the Cold War as the very same thing.  Still dumb, still pointless, still paranoia, albeit on a national scale.  

But wait.  Wait.  Hey, the paranoids are back. . . . 

That's right.   With new, alternate definitions behind them, many fraudulently self-describing "conservatives" are whining that any large government is tantamount to socialism.  If the government is big, socialism is coming to take your shampoo away from you, and no matter how you cry out, you'll never get to wash your mullet again.  Right?  Exactly!  If a government "interferes" with sacrosanct "free markets", it's "socialism".  If the government regulates economic activities and behavior--these are called laws--it's "socialism".  If the government conducts any administrative activities, it's "socialism".  

How could anyone with any political sense come up with an alternative definition of socialism?   People like F. A. Hayek, the reactionary purveyor of sham economics, did exactly that.  He had to redefine socialism to make his idiotic ideas seem to work.  Which they don't.  But never mind all that, it's time to move along kiddies, there's a circus in town.  

In other words, these doofuses are shadow boxing because they're afraid of their own shadows.  Yes, as the Wobblies used to say, "You can run but you cannot hide."  

I've often wondered about this instrumentalization of fear.  Of course, instilling old fears in new minds is convenient for those trying to hack the federal government to pieces.  What's that about anyway?  Some of the wealthier capitalists who practice a type of backlash capitalism I call reactionary capitalism don't want a government big enough to challenge their designs.  They suggest it's entirely appropriate to make the federal government dance like it's 1789--while commercial and economic forces advance into the middle of the 21st Century.  That makes no sense at all.  The paradigm of democracy circa 1787 has shifted to meet the demands of industrialization, and now, financialization.  Both of those were crises for democracy.  Destabilizing events that hurt a lot of people.  Forcing us backwards to a time when life only seems simple to us is absolute Mutual Assured Destruction, a kind of retrograde imperialism turned against the American people by interests not interested at all in democracy.  

I have an absurd pet theory about this.  A sort of thought experiment.  What if the American bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the business community, believes it is so endangered that it needs to foray with an imperialistic "civilizing mission" among the "native peoples" of the United States--namely everyone not involved in gleaning commercial profits--and is thus eating the American Dream alive like a Hostess Twinkie?  

That's not an entirely new angle on what is occurring in the US in 2023.  People who didn't have their souls killed by commercialism, consumerism and commodification of anything that isn't already nailed down, and some things that are, have been warning us of this obsessive compulsion to consume everything.  It's a dark force.  It's like The Beast, a representation of physical necessity paired with an overweaning materialism, from the Book of Revelation.  But do purveyors of storefront religion pay attention to the meaning of Biblical myths and parables?

And then there is what I call "The Cold War Hangover".  Some people are still fighting The Cold War.  It's as if this is all they know.  Possibly they were petrified years ago by all the fear tactics of the Fifties and the Sixties.  Maybe they have a guilty conscience over consuming us all.  Maybe they are beset by their own shadow selves.  Whatever the case, they behave like drunks after the party.  And they're tiresome, cranky and out of control.  After 80 years fighting an ideology, when the Soviets let go of the tug-of-war rope, the silly reactionaries kept backing up and backing up until now the US is so far to the right it's almost not a democracy anymore.  

Is that freedom?  I thought freedom thrives when one is without fear.  

Action and reaction: the laws of thermodynamics are in play.  Look at reaction for example.  Reaction has been long known to be entirely passive, a creature of stasis and the status quo--until it is moved by another force that acts upon it.  Reaction is not inherently active at all.  In fact, for reaction to thrive it has to act against something.  What is that something?  Easy.  A phantom.  Communist subversion.  At least that's one of reactionaryism's scapegoats.  It needs a malevolent actor in order to be moved.  If it is to motivate the passive and apathetic into reaction it has to find Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Marxism, Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros and more and more and more.  You know: to keep the reactionary process going.  

Just for grins, let's add a little spice to the paranoia and reactionaryism.  Let's add Lenin's remark: "To control the opposition, we will lead it ourselves."  Well, that was clever.  There are many ways to lead an opposition--especially a reactionary one. 

That's simple.  Be the scapegoat.  Be the fox the hunters desire to catch and kill.  The reactionaries will chase you to the gates of Hell just to keep their madness alive.  

Perhaps that's the true reactionary mantra: Keep the madness alive!  Everybody?  Just keep shivering.  

OK.  Put your paranoia tinfoil hats on for a second.  They've been brought to you by your sponsor, Kaiser Aluminium.  What if pushing the US into a reactionary position was the commie plan all along?  What if it's so easy to make reactionaries react that if the capitalists are conditioned to do this, they'll begin pushing the government, society, culture, and especially economics into a reactionary pit so deep that the only way out is authoritarianism.  And once the authoritarianism is in place, while no one but the authoritarians is satisfied or in satisfactory emotional and intellectual condition, any resistance will be squelched.  But...once the economy begins to fizzle, and once the wild ride of unrestrained capitalism spins out of control, what's left but anger, disdain, and in the end, revolution?  

Sometimes, if you look at culture war issues in particular, what you may see is almost a call-and-response between two wildly divergent extremes.  The leftists call for culture war: Pop Art co-opting Madison Avenue; New Wave music's "detonation at the point-of-sale" in terms of making anti-commercial buying habits so trendy people almost don't know what they're buying; punk as "combat rock".  I see a lot of what could almost constitute as leftist baiting going on, and it's puzzling how the reactionary right always bites.  Always.  The anti-nuclear crowd militates against nuclear power--and the rightists go all-in for the nuclear family.  All sorts of countercultural gestures point to a push to get America off the modern Liberalism. . . . 

. . . because modern Liberalism, not Ronald Reagan, defeated communism in both Western Europe and the United States.  Karl Marx's observations were observations about economic and political conditions in the mid-19th Century's period of industrialization.  They have little to no bearing today mainly because modern Liberalism took his critique of unrestrained capitalism seriously and did something about it.  That was reform, Progressive and Liberal reform.  Those reforms were successful enough to shut down the rising socialist movement in the US.  In fact, many socialists and Marxian thought leaders today blame modern Liberalism for the failure of socialism.  

It only makes sense to find a way to push Liberalism's head under the water and drown it if you want a socialist comeback in the United States.  And who else can do that other than capitalists who need scapegoats in order to fuel reactionaryism on a vast scale?  Building a giant machine to defeat Liberalism in the US seems to be job number one for these fraudulent "conservatives" who are actually libertarian in their "smaller government, fewer regulations, lower taxes" mantras and talking points.  Yes, they're frauds.  Conservatism is about hereditary rulership, not political governance.  Edmund Burke, in his seminal rant, "Reflections On The Revolution In France", spent more time sucking up to the British monarchy than he did codifying much of anything beyond praising the elite.  And the mob of the French Terror, the one led by ideologues who had no real intellectual understanding of the realities of a revolution of misery?  We hear Democrats and Liberals being called "mob rule" by the very reactionary capitalists who are instrumentalizing fear as if they were Oreo Cookies.  

What's the alternative to the fake "socialism" of 2023?  Libertarianism.  The economization of the political, i.e. interpreting political action as economic preference.  It's silly.  But it's definitely the sort of thing some "eater" might want to swallow.  Consume the eaters.  That sounds like a plan.  Eat the rich.  This phrase was an incendiary one that began to manifest in the early Eighties.  In his book, "Subculture: The Meaning Of Style", Dick Hebdige describes the political meanings behind British punk and New Wave: commercialization of public dissent.  Hebdige describes "revolution at the point of sale".  In the US, we got Tipper Gore trying to put out another countercultural fire with warning labels on New Wave record albums.  Nice try.  Hebdige goes on to observe that anything on earth can serve as a political metaphor.  And using metaphor in a political way is becoming a widespread phenomenon in 2023.  

It's time for a laugh.  Since libertarians won't look askance at anything they can sell, it's almost comedy to see culture warriors of the leftist variety creating saleable revolution right under the noses of the Kochtopus.  And even Clear Channel buying up all the FM radio stations to control content can't really stop this.    

Kochtopussy, the new James Bond flick.  Subversives! you can almost hear on the wind.  Get behind the reactionaries and push push push!  

Interestingly, once the Bolshevik revolution--actually it was a military coup that overthrew the previous 1917 revolution that took place in February of the year of the fabled (hyped) October Revolution--got going, its apparatchiks promised ignorant peasants "liberty" from heavy-handed government interference.  Yup, yup, yup: Libertarianism.  

Even more surprising to those knee-jerk anti-socialists is that left-libertarianism, anti-statist, is called Trotskyism.  Hilarious.  All this time, the libertarian mass movement in the United States, masquerading as either conservatism or classical Liberalism, has been tirelessly working to get the Liberalism out of Dodge once and for all.  

I bet the real Marxists in hibernation as they wait for conditions to change literally love that process.  

OK.  Say I'm a leftist.  Say I saw what FDR and the Liberals did to the socialist mass movement in the US when it waxed in the 1930s.  What if the only way I could see to get around Liberalism would be to defeat Liberalism in a domestic bid to "take the country back"?  What if the entire shebang--letting go of the tug-of-war rope to force a rightward reactionary spin-out, usurping modern Liberalism, amplifying unrestrained capitalism to the point that old-fashioned exploitation and wage slavery and even child labor began to return to disrupt the domestic tranquility the Liberals have fought so hard to create for the American people--was part of some super-secret Marxian plan to simply wait it out?  Wait out until the unrestrained capitalism literally spins out of control?  

Sounds like a plan to me, all you paranoids.  Get right on it, Cato Institute!  

And what if some of the commies all these reactionaries are terrified of have already managed to infiltrate the conservative mass movement?  What if, interestingly enough, what we know as neo-conservatism was a turn by 1930s era Trotskyists into something that would fight-off modern Liberalism?  Actually this is true.  Many early neo-conservatives began as Trotskyites.  

Oh well. Fooled again, paranoids.  Fooled again.  The opposition may be getting itself led around by the nose by the super-secret Marxists, and it's all happening far and wide inside the conservative mass movement.  

Remove government regulations, and suddenly all of capitalism's negative neighborhood effects return.  Remove the government's ability to administer some economic activity, and yup, Liberalism becomes "the enemy", not merely to "conservatives" but to old school socialists.  

Libertarianism: working tirelessly to create two classes satisfactory to conservatism's bid to lead "the mob" with a moneyed elite: bourgeoisie and proletariat, ready-made and waiting for the socialists to come out of hibernation during "night" or "the Ice Age", or "when the moon is down".  

I suppose it's quite easy to lead paranoids around with their kid fears.  Who knows?  Maybe this really is the plan.  Maybe it's been the plan since before Ronald Reagan's entrance on the scene.  He was paranoid all the way--even if he used tactics invented by modern Liberalism to defeat the Soviets.  Or sorta: he went into deficit spending, tripled the debt, and invested heavily in manufacturing and in the commercial sector.  In the real world of historical fact, by 1980, the year Reagan was elected to the Presidency, the USSR was already tottering.  It was going bankrupt, in part due to its iron-fisted control issues, partly due to 75 years of boycotting and embargo.  In fact, interestingly, big Western banks like Chase and Bank of America, and even Goldman Sachs, were all lending all kinds of money to Warsaw Pact members in the years leading up to its 1989 collapse.  

You know why: Because money.  

Wait.  Aren't those New Deal tactics verboten in today's conservative mass movement?  Maybe Reagan was a secret commie.  Maybe the USSR just faked its collapse to make a reactionary movement eat the United States alive.  Who really knows?  These ideas are definitely worth investigating.  But one thing more: Once the "populists" of today's GOP come to the stunning revelation they've been fooled by libertarian propaganda, there is going to be a fury likely never before seen in the US.  Should the upcoming unrestrained capitalism that is returning suddenly spin out of control, those currently in control could find themselves hanging from lampposts and steeples.  

Convenient idiots don't need any subversives to tell them how to eradicate democracy, do they.