https://pjmedia.com/trending/dr-crankleys-not-so-great-grandchildren-diana-west-analyzes-why-the-anti-trump-putschists-persist/
A review-essay of the new monograph The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West.
“Running like a red thread through Communist teachings from the very inception of the movement is the note of total hostility to our form of government.”– from The Communist Party Of The United States Of America: What It Is. How It Works. A Handbook For Americans,” at a hearing by the Subcommittee To Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, December 21, 1955, P. 16. Strident never-Trumper Max Boot, quoted in a 3/2/2016 NY Times article, infamously encapsulated his unhinged vacuity on the subject of then-leading GOP Presidential contender Donald Trump by belching forth: “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump.”
Forgive the gentle, attentive reader of Diana West’s uniquely insightful, painstakingly researched new monograph, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, for pausing to re-consider whether Boot’s sneering utterance was pure hyperbole.Whittaker Chambers, apostate from the Communist religion of immoralism, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto with a thoughtfully acid February 23, 1948 Time essay on Karl Marx and his legacy entitled “Dr. Crankley’s Children.”
The essay’s title derived from a pseudonym, “Dr. Crankley,” Marx adopted in a March 3, 1865 letter to his daughter. Chambers recounted Marx’s triumphal hypocrisy, producing a publication that declared itself an “organ of democracy” while admitting the “reality” that it “was nothing but a plan against democracy.” This behavior segued to “the first Party purges,” conducted by a man who despised “sentimental socialism” and was described by a contemporary thusly: “Baring his teeth, Marx will slaughter anybody who blocks his way.”
The inevitable progression of such dogma, and behaviors, observes Chambers, was Marx’s conclusion that he must “capture” the state with police power and establish his dystopian “dictatorship of the proletariat.” “Written down,” Chambers averred, “it was to become an extension of his own tyrannical political methods, the excuse for the most pitiless tyranny the world has ever seen.” Assessing what Marx bestowed through his ideological progeny, Chambers characterized three classes of Dr. Crankley’s children. Those Chambers dubbed the “children of pity,” epitomized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, concurred with Marx’s indictment of capitalism, but believed in an inexorable “steady bicycle ride toward socialism.” Benito Mussolini was Chambers’ archetype for the “children of hate,” who “put the machines and classes to work for war.”The third class of Dr. Crankley’s children “inherited the cold disciplined logic necessary for the serious pursuit of power.” Embodied by Lenin, who, “like Father Marx, knew what was best,” they were (and remain) the “most important and the most terrible of the Marxist brood.” Lenin, Chambers reminds us, “snatched away” democracy, “organized, as Marx had taught, a dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., a disciplined gang of power monopolists,” and his acolytes “smashed men freely.”With meticulously researched detail, and fearless, extraordinary originality of thought, Diana West’s remarkably compendious The Red Thread introduces us to key (not-so-) great-grandchildren of Dr. Crankley. Their continuing machinations amount to nothing less than an anti-Trump putsch.
