Our children are the Guinea Pigs. By Christopher Rufo. First Things Magazine |

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists desired not only to remake the world of politics and economics, but to reshape human nature according to the dictates of left-wing ideology. “And so,” he continued, “I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.”

This concept—the ruthless application of politics to the most intimate recesses of the human spirit—would drive the communist regimes for the middle part of the twentieth century. The Soviets had their artists. The Chinese had their propagandists. The Third World armies had their pedagogists. All were committed to the creation of the New Man…

In 1975, the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke to a coalition of labor leaders in New York City and denounced the American radical Angela Davis, who had become a symbol of international communism and violent revolution against the West. During this period, the Soviet government had churned out propaganda celebrating Davis as a world-historical figure and instructed millions of schoolchildren to send her cards and paper flowers. “In our country, literally for one whole year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis,” Solzhenitsyn said.

But this campaign was based on a lie. The Soviets had created a global slave state, with a network of gulags, dungeons, and prison camps extending from Vladivostok to Havana; Solzhenitsyn himself had spent eight years enduring imprisonment, torture, and forced labor. Davis, however, followed the propaganda line. During a publicity tour of the Soviet Union in 1972, she praised her hosts for their treatment of minorities and denounced the United States for its oppression of “political prisoners.” But during an unscripted encounter, Solzhenitsyn said, a group of Czech dissidents approached Davis with a plea:

“Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?” Davis responded with ice: “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.”

For Solzhenitsyn, this moment revealed everything. Davis embodied the spirit of left-wing revolution: sacrificing the human being in service of ideology. Her commitment to the great abstractions—liberation, freedom, humanity—was a ruse. “That is the face of Communism,” he said. “That is the heart of Communism for you.” — Continue