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Afghanistan’s epic history starts when it was an important region of ancient India called ‘Gandhara’. One of its most frequently mentioned cities in the world today is ‘Kandahar’, made infamous by the Taliban. The earlier name of the city was ‘Quandhar’, derived from the name of the region of Gandhara. Erstwhile home to Al-Qaeda today, it was always a strategic site, being on main Persian routes to Central Asia and India. Hence, it has a long history of conquests. Kandahar was taken by Alexander in 329 B.C.E., was surrendered by the Greek to Chandragupta in 305 B.C.E., and is dignified by a rock inscription of Asoka. It fell under Arab rule in the 7th century C.E., and under the Ghaznavids in the 10th. Kandahar was destroyed by Genghis Khan and again by the Turkic conqueror Timur, after which it was held by the Mughals. Mughal Emperor Babur built 40 giant steps up a hill, cut out of the solid limestone, leading to inscriptions recording details of his proud conquests. In 1747 it became the first capital of a unified Afghanistan.Besides early reference in the Vedas, Ramayana and Mahabharata, Gandhara was the locus of ancient Indian-Persian interaction, a center of world trade and culture. It was a major Buddhist intellectual hub for centuries. The giant Buddhist statues recently destroyed by the Taliban were in Bamiyan, one of the important Buddhist cities of ancient times. Thousands of statues and stupas once dominated its landscape.Ancient GandharaGandharvas are first described in the Vedas as cosmic beings. Later literature describes them as a jati(community), and the later Natyasastra refers to their system of music as gandharva. Gupt explains1:“Gandharvas, as spoken of in Samhitas and later literature, had derived their name from a geographical people, the Gandharas… Most likely they belonged to Afghanistan (which still has a township called Kandhara)… It was perhaps at this time that the Gandharas raised the art of music to a great height. This region of the subcontinent at the time had become the locus of a great confluence of the musical traditions of the East and the Mediterranean. The very art, thus, came to be known by the name of the region and was so called by it even in the heartland of India. This name, gandharva, continued to be used for music for centuries to come. In the Vayu Purana one of the nine divisions of Bharatavarsa is called Gandharva.”During the Mahabharata period, the Gandhara region was very much culturally and politically a part of India. King Œakuni, brother of Gandhârî, fought with Pandavas in the famous epic Mahabharata. The battle was fought in Kurukshetra, in the heartland of India. Gandhârî was married to King Dhrtrastra. Exchanges between Gandhara and Hastinapur (Delhi) were well established and intense.Mehrgarh, located in this region and part of the Indus Valley civilization, is the oldest town excavated by archeologists (8000B.C.E) in the world.Gandhara was the trade crossroad and cultural meeting place between India, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Buddhist writings mention Gandhara (which included Peshawar, Swat and Kabul Valleys) as one of the 16 major states of northern India at the time. It was a province of the Persian king Darius I in the fifth century B.C.E. After conquering it in the 4th century B.C.E., Alexander encountered the vast army of the Nandas in the Punjab, and his soldiers mutinied causing him to leave India.Thereafter, Gandhara was ruled by the Maurya dynasty of India, and during the reign of the Indian emperor Ashoka (3rd century B.C.E.), Buddhism spread and became the world’s first religion across Eurasia, influencing early Christianity and East Asian civilizations. Padmasambhava, the spiritual and intellectual founder of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, was from Gandhara. Greek historian Pliny wrote that the Mauryans had a massive army; and yet, like all other Indian kingdoms, they made no attempt at overseas conquest.Gandhara and Sind were considered parts of India since ancient times, as historian Andre Wink explains:“From ancient times both Makran and Sind had been regarded as belonging to India… It definitely did extend beyond the present province of Sind and Makran; the whole of Baluchistan was included, a part of the Panjab, and the North-West Frontier Province.”2“The Arab geographers, in effect, commonly speak of ‘that king of al-Hind…’”3“…Sind was predominantly Indian rather than Persian, and in duration the periods that it had been politically attached to, or incorporated in, an Indian polity far outweigh Persian domination. The Maurya empire was extended to the Indus valley by Candragupta, laying the foundation of a great Buddhist urban-based civilization. Numerous Buddhist monasteries were founded in the area, and Takshashila became an important centre of Buddhist learning, especially in Ashoka’s time. Under the Kushanas, in the late first century A.D… international trade and urbanization reached unprecedented levels in the Indus valley andPurushapara (Peshawar) became the capital of a far-flung empire and Gandhara the second home of Buddhism, producing the well-known Gandhara-Buddhist art. In Purushapara, Kanishka is supposed to have convened the fourth Buddhist council and to have built the Kanishka Vihara, which remained a Buddhist pilgrimage center for centuries to come as well as a center for the dissemination of the religion to Central Asia and China… in conjunction with Hinduism, Buddhism survived in Sind until well into the tenth century.”4“Hiuen Tsang… was especially impressed by the thousand Buddhist monks who lived in the caves of Bamiyan, and the colossal stone Buddha, with a height of 53.5 m, then still decorated with gold. There is also evidence of devi cults in the same areas.”5Shaivism was also an important ancient religion in this region, with wide influence. Wink writes:“…Qandahar [modern Kandahar]…. was the religious center of the kingdom where the cult of the Shaivite god Zun was performed on a hilltop…”.6“…the god Zun or Zhun … shrine lay in Zamindawar before the arrival of Islam, set on a sacred mountain, and still existing in the later ninth century …. [The region was]… famous as a pilgrimage center devoted to Zun. In China the god’s temple became known as the temple of Su-na. …[T]he worship of Zun might be related to that of the old shrine of the sun-god Aditya at Multan. In any case, the cult of Zun was primarily Hindu, not Buddhist or Zoroastrian.”7“[A] connection of Gandhara with the polymorphic male god Shiva and the Durga Devi is now well-established. The pre-eminent character of Zun or Sun was that of a mountain god. And a connection with mountains also predominates in the composite religious configuration of Shiva, the lord of the mountain, the cosmic pivot and the ruler of time… Gandhara and the neighboring countries in fact represent a prominent background to classical Shaivism.”8From 1st century C.E., emperor Kaniska I and his Kushan successors were acknowledged as one of the four great Eurasian powers of their time (the others being China, Rome, and Parthia). The Kushans further spread Buddhism to Central Asia and China, and developed Mahayana Buddhism and the Gandhara and Mathura schools of art. The Kushans became affluent through trade, particularly with exports to Rome. Their coins and art are witness to the tolerance and syncretism in religion and art that prevailed in the region. The Gandhara school incorporated many motifs from classical Roman art, but the basic iconography remained Indian.9Ancient Taxila and PeshawarGandhara’s capital was the famous city of Takshashila. According to the Ramayana, the city was founded by Bharata, and named after his son, Taksha, its first ruler. Greek writers later shortened it to Taxila. The Mahabharata is said to have been first recited at this place. Buddhist literature, especially the jatakastories, mentions it as the capital of the Gandhara kingdom and as a great center of learning. Its ruins may be visited today in an hour’s taxi ride from Rawalpindi (Pakistan).Taxila was strategically located at the 3-way junction of the great trade routes from eastern India (described by Megasthenes, as the “Royal Highway”), from western Asia, Kashmir and Central Asia. Greek historians accompanying Alexander described Taxila as “wealthy, prosperous, and well governed”. Soon after Alexander, Taxila was absorbed into the Maurya Empire as a provincial capital, lasting for three generations.The sage Apollonius of Tyana visited Taxila in the 1st century C.E., and his biographer described it as a fortified city with a symmetrical architecture, comparable in size to the most populous city of the ancient Assyrian Empire. Even a thousand years after Buddha, Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Fa-hsien described it as a thriving center of Buddhism. But by the time Hsuan-tsang visited from China in the 7th century C.E., Taxila had been destroyed by the Huns. Taxila was renowned as a center of learning.During other times, the capital of Gandhara was Purusapura (abode of Purusha, the Hindu name for the Supreme Being), whose name was changed by Akbar to Peshawar. Near Peshawar are ruins of the largest Buddhist stupa in the subcontinent (2nd century C.E.), attesting to the enduring presence of Buddhism in the region. Purusapura is mentioned in early Sanskrit literature, in the writings of the classical historians Strabo and Arrian, and the geographer Ptolemy. Kaniska made Purusapura the capital of his Kushan empire (1st century C.E.). It was captured by the Muslims in C.E. 988.Genocide Part 1: The Conquest of SindAll this glorious past, and Asia’s civilization, changed forever with the bloody plunder of Sind by the Arabs starting in the 7th century:“In 653-4, …a force of 6000 Arabs penetrated… To the shrine of Zun. The general broke off a hand from the idol and plucked out the rubies which were its eyes… The Arabs were now able to mount frequent plunder and slave expeditions as far as Ghazna, Kabul and Bamiyan… Arab raiding continued and was aimed at exacting tribute, plunder and slaves …Slaves and beasts remained the principal booty of the raids, and these were sent to the caliphate court in a steady stream.”10Andre Wink describes that this aspiration to conquer India had existed since the time of the Prophet, as is evidenced by the sacred texts:“… in the hadith collections the prophet Muhammad himself is credited with the aspiration of conquering India. Participants in the holy war against al-Hind [the Hindus] are promised to be saved from hell-fire… Thus also an eschatological work which is called the Kitab al-Fitan (‘Book of Trials’) credits Muhammad with saying that God will forgive the sins of the members of the Muslim army which will attack al-Hind, and give them victory.”11The plunder was also achieved by an ingenious system of leaving the prosperous population alone, so that they would continue to bring donations to the temples, and then the Muslims would loot these temples. In order to save their temple from destruction, many Hindu warriors refused to fight:“An even greater part of the revenue of these rulers was derived from the gifts donated by pilgrims who came from all over Sind and Hind to the great idol (sanam) of the sun-temple at Multan… When Muhammad al-Qasim conquered Multan, he quickly discovered that it was this temple which was one of the main reasons for the great wealth of the town. He ‘made captives of the custodians of the budd, numbering 6000′ and confiscated its wealth, but not the idol itself – which was made of wood, covered with red leather and two red rubies for its eyes and wearing a crown of gold inlaid with gems –, ‘thinking it best to leave the idol where it was, but hanging a piece of cow’s flesh on its neck by way of mockery’. AI-Qasim built his mosque in the same place, in the most crowded bazaar in the center of the town. The possession of the sun-temple — rather than the mosque — is what in later times the geographers see as the reason why the local governors or rulers could hold out against the neighboring Hindu powers. Whenever an ‘infidel king’ marched against Multan and the Muslims found it difficult to offer adequate resistance, they threatened to break the idol or mutilate it, and this, allegedly, made the enemy withdraw. In the late tenth century however the Isma’ilis who occupied Multan broke the idol into pieces and killed its priests. A new mosque was then erected on its site…”12Genocide Part 2: Mahmud of GhazniThe founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty was a former Turkish slave, recognized by the Iranian Muslims as governor of Ghazni (a town near Kandahar). His son Mahmud (ruled in 998-1030) expanded the empire further into India. A devout Muslim, Mahmud converted the Ghaznavids into Islam, thus bringing Islam into the sub-continent’s local population. In the 11th century, he made Ghazni the capital of the vast empire of the Ghaznavids, Afghanistan’s first Muslim dynasty. The atrocities by Mahmud of Ghazni makes the Taliban look benign by comparison. Will Durant explains:13“The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within… For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.”“In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became sultan of the little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew that his throne was young and poor, and saw that India, across the border, was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. Pretending a holy zeal for destroying Hindu idolatry across the frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. Returning to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying “jewels and un-bored pearls and rubies shinning like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates.””“Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied it coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naptha and burnt to the ground. Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known.”“Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few schillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors, Moslem historians ranked him greatest monarch of his time, and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.”Genocide Part 3: Post-Ghazni Invaders.Mahmud of Ghazni set the stage for other Muslim invaders in their orgy of plunder and brutality, as Will Durant explains: 14“In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan invaded India, captured the city of Delhi destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi — an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind — fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “were bestowed by hundreds of thousands and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands.” In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.””“Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi.”“When some Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conquerer of Chitor) had all the males — from fifteen to thirty thousand of them — slaughtered in one day.”“Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to the rebel’s wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were weaned out by their work of dragging” the victims “and putting them to death in crowds.” In order to found a new capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a desert….””“Firoz Shah invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age or eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reached twenty thousand.”“These rulers… were armed with a religion militaristic in operation… [and made] the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving them more deeply into the Hindu soul. Some of these thirsty despots had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, and engaged artists and artisans — usually of Hindu origin — to build for them magnificent mosques and tombs: some of them were scholars, and delighted in converse historians, poets and scientists.”“The Sultans drew from the people every rupee of tribute that could be exacted by the ancient art of taxation, as well as by straight-forward robbery…”“The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Alau-d-din, who required his advisers to draw up “rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion.” Half of the gross produce of the soil was collected by the government; native rulers had taken one-sixth. “No Hindu,” says a Moslem historian, “could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver… or of any superfluity was to be seen… Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment.””“…Timur-i-lang — a Turk who had accepted Islam as an admirable weapon… feeling the need of more gold, it dawned upon him that India was still full of infidels… Mullahs learned in the Koran decided the matter by quoting an inspiring verse: “Oh Prophet, make war upon infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with severity.” Thereupon, Timur crossed the Indus in 1398, massacred or enslaved such of the inhabitants as could not flee from him, defeated the forces of Sultan Mahmud Tughlak, occupied Delhi, slew a hundred thousand prisoners in cold blood, plundered the city of all the wealth that the Afghan dynasty had gathered there, and carried it off to Samarkand with multitude of women and slaves, leaving anarchy, famine and pestilence in his wake,”“This is the secret of the political history of modern India. Weakened by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations… The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.”During these genocides for centuries, a certain portion of the fleeing Hindus reached Europe. Today’s Roma people of Europe (popularly called the ‘gypsies’, a term that they regard as a pejorative) are of Indian origin and have lived as wanderers in Europe for nearly a thousand years. It is believed that they originated in Northwest India, in a region including Gandhara, Punjab, and Rajasthan. In Europe, they survived by being musicians and performers, because European society did not assimilate them even after a thousand years. They have accepted their plight as street people without a ‘home’ as such. Their history in Europe is filled with attempts to eradicate them in various ways.15 (There is much justified criticism of India’s caste system as a way by which diverse ethnicities dealt with each other. However, I have yet to see a comparison with the fact that Europeans dealt with non-European ethnicities using genocide (as in America), or by attempted genocide as in the case of the Roma.)Islamic Scholarship on IndiaThe Arabic, Turkish, and Persian invaders brought their historians to document their conquests of India as great achievements. Many of these historians ended up loving India and wrote excellent accounts of life in India, including about the Gandhara and Sindh regions. Their translations of Indian texts were later retranslated into European languages and hence many of the European Renaissance inputs from Islam were actually Indian contributions traveling via Islam.Many Muslim scholars showed great respect for Indian society. For instance:“The Arabic literature identifies numerous ministers, revenue officers, accountants, et cetera, in seventh- and eighth-century Sind as ‘brahmans’ and these were generally confirmed in their posts by the conquerors. Where these brahmans came from we do not know, but their presence was regarded as beneficial. Many cities had been founded by them and Sind had become ‘prosperous and populous’ under their guidance.”16“Of caste divisions very little mention is made. The stereotype social division is in professional classes rather than a ritualized caste-hierarchy: ‘priests, warriors, agriculturists, artisans, merchants’.”17Of all these Muslim scholars, Alberuni left the most detailed accounts of India’s civilization. In the introduction to his translation of Alberuni’s famous book, Indica, the Arabic scholar Edward Sachau summarizes how India was the source of considerable Arabic culture:18“The foundations of Arabic literature was laid between AD 750 and 850. It is only the tradition relating to their religion and prophet and poetry that is peculiar to the Arabs; everything else is of foreign descent… Greece, Persia, and India were taxed to help the sterility of the Arab mind… What India has contributed reached Baghdad by two different roads. Part has come directly in translations from the Sanskrit, part has traveled through Eran, having originally been translated from Sanskrit (Pali? Prakrit?) into Persian, and farther from Persian into Arabic. In this way, e.g. the fables of Kalila and Dimna have been communicated to the Arabs, and book on medicine, probably the famous Caraka.”“As Sindh was under the actual rule of Khalif Mansur (AD 753 – 774), there came embassies from that part of India to Baghdad, and among them scholars, who brought along with them two books, the Brahamsiddhanta to Brahamgupta (Sirhind), and his Khandkhdyaka (Arkanda). With the help of these pandits, Alfazari, perhaps also Yakub ibn Tarik, translated them. Both works have been largely used, and have exercised a great influence. It was on this occasion that the Arabs first became acquainted with a scientific system of astronomy. They learned from Brahamgupta earlier than from Ptolemy.”“Another influx of Hindu learning took place under Harun, AD 786 – 808. The ministerial family Barmak, then at the zenith of their power, had come with the ruling dynasty from Balkh, where an ancestor of theirs had been an official in the Buddhistic temple Naubehar, i.e. nava vihara = the new temple (or monastery). The name Barmak is said to be of Indian descent, meaning paramaka i.e. the superior (abbot of the vihara).”“Induced by family traditions, they sent scholars to India, there to study medicine and pharmacology. Besides, they engaged Hindu scholars to come to Baghdad, made them the chief physicians of their hospitals, and ordered them to translate from Sanskrit into Arabic books on medicine, pharmacology, toxicology, philosophy, astrology, and other subjects. Still in later centuries Muslim scholars sometimes traveled for the same purposes as the emissaries of the Barmak, e.g. Almuwakkuf not long before Alberuni’s time…”“Many Arab authors took up the subjects communicated to them by the Hindus and worked them out in original compositions, commentaries and extracts. A favorite subject of theirs was Indian mathematics, the knowledge of which became far spread by the publications of Alkindi and many others.”Alberuni leaves no doubt as to the origin of the so-called Arabic system of numbers:“The numerical signs which we use are derived from the finest forms of the Hindu signs… The Arabs, too, stop with the thousand, which is certainly the most correct and the most natural thing to do… Those, however, who go beyond the thousand in their numeral system are the Hindus, at least in their arithmetical technical terms, which have been either freely invented or derived according to certain etymologies, whilst in others both methods are blended together. They extend the names of the orders of numbers until the 18th order for religious reasons, the mathematicians being assisted by the grammarians with all kinds of etymologies.”In Islamic Spain, European scholars acknowledged India very positively, as evidenced by an important and rare 11th century book on world science commissioned by the ruler of Spain19. Its author, Said al-Andalusi focused on India as a major center for science, mathematics and culture. Some excerpts:“The first nation (to have cultivated science) is India. This is a powerful nation having a large population, and a rich kingdom. India is known for the wisdom of its people. Over many centuries, all the kings of the past have recognized the ability of the Indians in all the branches of knowledge.”“The Indians, as known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal (essence) of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are peoples of sublime pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions.”“To their credit, the Indians have made great strides in the study of numbers and of geometry. They have acquired immense information and reached the zenith in their knowledge of the movements of the stars (astronomy) and the secrets of the skies (astrology) as well as other mathematical studies. After all that, they have surpassed all the other peoples in their knowledge of medical science and the strengths of various drugs, the characteristics of compounds and the peculiarities of substances [chemistry].”“Their kings are known for their good moral principles, their wise decisions, and their perfect methods of exercising authority.”“What has reached us from the work of the Indians in music is the book… [that] contains the fundamentals of modes and the basics in the construction of melodies.”“That which has reached us from the discoveries of their clear thinking and the marvels of their inventions is the (game) of chess. The Indians have, in the construction of its cells, its double numbers, its symbols and secrets, reached the forefront of knowledge. They have extracted its mysteries from supernatural forces. While the game is being played and its pieces are being maneuvered, there appear the beauty of structure and the greatness of harmony. It demonstrates the manifestation of high intentions and noble deeds, as it provides various forms of warnings from enemies and points out ruses as well as ways to avoid dangers. And in this, there is considerable gain and useful profit.”Even as late as the 12th century C.E., al-Idrîsî (1100-1166), a geographer and scholar from Spain and Sicily, included the Gandhara region, including Kabul, with India20. The region was famous for the export of its three local products: indigo, cotton, and iron.21The Lessons of HistoryIs the history of Islam in Afghanistan repeating itself a thousand years later? The Arab and Turk atrocities in India, done in the name of Islam a thousand years ago, may be compared to the past ten years in Afghanistan: In the times of Mahmud of Ghazni, India was, relative to other countries, as rich as the United States is today, and hence a comparable target. The Taliban dress code is what earlier Muslim plunderers also enforced in India. The same interpretation of the Koranic verses was used then as is now taught in thousands of madrassas in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The main plunderers then were not indigenous to Afghanistan, but were largely Arabs/Turks; today, again, they are not mainly Afghanis, but tens of thousands of Pakistanis and Arabs with their own agendas.Where does all this history lead us today? First of all, I emphatically believe that history should not be the burden of contemporary society, and this means that South Asian Muslims are not to be blamed for the past, in which they, too, were victims. Germans are taught about Nazism without being made to feel guilty. U.S. schools teach slavery with black and white kids together in class. Suppressing the past evils from history would be irresponsible, and an invitation to unscrupulous political forces to exploit ignorant people.More importantly, Indianized Islam is probably the most sophisticated and liberal Islam in the world, because of its prolonged nurturing in the Indian soil. Islam needs the same kind of Reformation as Christianity underwent in the past few centuries. India, with its long experience of Islam co-existing with other religions, its large Muslim population, and its Hindu-Buddhist experience, is the ideal environment for Islamic liberalization. Islamic majority nations lack the experience of pluralism, democracy, and the Hinduism-Buddhism environment. Western countries have too small a Muslim population, and too recent an encounter, to be incubators. India is the ideal climate for a breakthrough.In the big picture, the struggle is not against Islam, but is about the kind of Islam that emerges. It is also about conflicting identities within Pakistan: Arabization versus Indianization. For lasting peace in the region, Afghanistan should once again become a buffer between Arabic-Persian and Indic civilizations. Pakistan has always been unstable, sandwiched between the two very ancient civilizations of India and Arabia-Persia, and obsessed by the need to differentiate itself from both. What Macaulayism is to elitist Indians, Arabization of identity is to Pakistanis, the difference being that in the latter case it pervades all tiers of society. Pakistan’s complexes, due to its lack of heritage and sense of identity, drive much of its insecure behavior.One would like that the hundreds of media personnel covering the war would be better equipped to explain the history of the region. That they do not know even the fundamentals is not surprising. But what is disturbing is the way SAJA (South Asian Journalists Association), a 500-member association of Indian journalists in North America, has failed to play any role in educating the American public about this region. Is it ignorance, or is it the complex of being seen as too ‘Indian’?Over the past fifteen years, governmental, academic, and private funding agencies sponsored research on South Asia that focused on caste, cows, exotica, sati, and Hindu revolts against Proselytizers, thereby propagating the stereotype of the “Evil/Primitive Hindus”. In the process, they completely ignored vital topics such as Wahhabi Islam and other movements spawned by the ISI. Consequently, few South Asian experts seem to have even rudimentary knowledge of the 39,000 madrassas of Pakistan, some of which were the breeding grounds of the Taliban, or the related religious movements that are the genesis of today’s crisis. These events are about religion, when seen from the perspective of those engaged in terrorism and their vast network of sympathizers worldwide. Yet the academy is ill-equipped to perform its mission to interpret these events and to educate the world about them. After September 11, I wrote privately to the professional association of scholars called RISA (Religions In South Asia), since Afghanistan and Pakistan fall under their definition of South Asia, to suggest that at their November annual conference, they should have a major discussion on Wahhabism-Talibanism in South Asia. Despite being the world’s premier association of scholars who objectively study South Asian religions, they failed to include this topic. Instead, they had a whole panel on how Hinduism textbooks and web sites ignore Islam!Scholars and the media seem afraid to explain that the soil of Afghanistan is historically sacred to Buddhists and Hindus, in the same manner as Jerusalem is to Jews and the Kaaba is to Muslims. Today’s infamous caves were once home to thousands of Buddhist monks and Hindu rishis, who did their meditation and attained enlightenment there. How such sacred geography ended up in evil hands is something I am still trying to come to terms with.Source - How ‘Gandhara’ Became ‘Kandahar’

I can see why you would be curious about this topic. Indeed, Chinese leadership seems to move from strength to strength. Its economy is still growing, its military is gaining strength, and its deep pockets are winning it influence. To many, therefore, the question is not how or why China will replace the United States, but when. But as an intellectual exercise, let us try making a modest substitution in the argument that China will surpass the US by swapping China for the European Union. Continental Europe, excluding Russia and a handful of smaller countries, has a land area of 3.9 million square miles, which is to say larger than the U.S. at 3.79 million. The European Union GDP is roughly $20 trillion (nominal) while that of the United States is around $18 trillion less. Europe had 1,823,000 forces in uniform in 2014, compared with 1,031,000 for the United States today.Where am I going with this? If we add educational and technical levels as well as standard of living, one might be forgiven for thinking that, by the numbers, Europe, not China, was the leading potential challenger to the United States. That of course is what the late Jean-Jacques Servan-Schrieber argued in his immensely popular and influential bit of futurology Le Défi Américan [“The American Challenge”] in 1967. As we all know, however, things didn’t quite pan out that way.And yet, where China appears to be filling a leadership vacuum, there is often less than meets the eye. Climate change is one example. The world’s largest emitter has done much to cut back on its discharge of greenhouse gases, installing more renewable capacity than any other country. Yet its own transparency and accountability over pollution and emissions still falls far short of the openness a world leader on climate change would need to adopt. Meanwhile, common cause between Europe and China has severe limits. As James Kynge of the Financial Times says, China’s push to cut emissions is motivated by an environmental crisis at home, combined with hopes of conquering world markets for renewable energy. Europe wants to save the planet. As for economic leadership, the EU-China relationship again reveals the limits. Mr. Xi pries open markets, but many of China’s own remain closed—and where foreigners may operate, the fear is of technology being stolen. That has led to European frustrations, and additionally, anger is also growing over China’s divide-and-rule tactics in Eastern Europe through its belt-and-road enticements.Part One: OborChina’s signature geopolitical foreign policy deserves close scrutiny. In terms of scale, the Belt and Road (BRI) also known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR) has no parallel in modern history. It is more than 12 times the size of the Marshall Plan, America’s post-World War II initiative to aid the reconstruction of Western Europe’s devastated economies. Even if China cannot implement its entire plan, OBOR will have a significant and lasting impact. And OBOR is not the only challenge Xi has mounted against an aging Western-dominated international order. He has also spearheaded the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and turned to China’s advantage the two institutions associated with the BRICS grouping of emerging economies (the Shanghai-based New Development Bank and the $100 billion Contingent Reserve Arrangement). At the same time, he has asserted Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea more aggressively, while seeking to project Chinese power in the western Pacific.But OBOR takes China’s ambitions a large step further. With it, Xi is attempting to remake globalization on China’s terms, by creating new markets for Chinese firms, which face a growth slowdown and overcapacity at home. So, repeating a mantra of connectivity, China dangles low-interest loans in front of countries in urgent need of infrastructure, thereby pulling those countries into its economic and security sphere. China stunned the world by buying the Greek port of Piraeus for $420 million. From there to the Seychelles, Djibouti, and Pakistan, port projects that China insisted were purely commercial have acquired military dimensions.There is a logic at the core of the Belt and Road—Asia needs more infrastructure—but thanks to jumbled strategic thinking and a suffocating amount of PR fluff, Xi’s flagship initiative looks set to disappoint. Asian and European countries lining up to attract Chinese investment in new roads and bridges will receive less money than the headline figures suggest. China itself will discover that lending money to its more poorly governed neighbors is not always a profitable business. And foreign policy analysts who see the Belt and Road as a Chinese-style Marshall Plan will be disappointed as the bubble of sky-high expectations pops. For the United States, there is little to fear in the Belt and Road. Asia may get some useful new roads, but the region will also see the limits of Chinese power projection, even in a sphere such as infrastructure where China has a comparative advantage.The headline numbers associated with the Belt and Road are impressive, and purposefully so. Asia needs lots of infrastructure and an economic vision. China has an impressive track record building highways and high-speed trains across its own vast territory. With Washington distracted by domestic politics, Beijing rightly sees a chance to set the agenda in Asia. Hence the initiative, which was first launched in 2015, has been repeatedly expanded But the gap between China’s promises and commitments are already being noticed. By some estimates, Chinese construction contracts with Belt and Road-related countries may decline in 2017. Already, officials in some neighboring countries are grumbling about not receiving money. Russia, for example, is miffed that that despite applying for funding for 40 different projects, it has yet to receive a dollar. This is despite the purported partnership between the two countries.And Beijing’s mechanism for spending the money appears as likely to generate enemies as friends. For one thing, though small and medium-sized countries are lining up for cash, the region’s great powers are responding with counter initiatives. India, for example, boycotted the Belt and Road Forum and accused China’s lending program of benefitting Beijing more than its neighbors. Japan is pushing its own “quality infrastructure” initiative, emphasizing inadequacies in Chinese construction. Tokyo is also pushing to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal without the United States, which would give Japan a major role in writing Asia’s trade rules. And Russia, which itself hopes to participate in the Belt and Road, is eying Central Asia nervously. The Kremlin had long hoped it could divide the region, with Russia managing the politics and security, while China helped develop these countries’ economy. But as China’s role grows, that division of labor is looking more difficult to sustain.Even in places where China’s influence is not being countered by other powers, Beijing’s massive cash infusions may still lead to headaches. Consider the over $20 billion Beijing has committed for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, much of it on projects in the transport and energy spheres that are already underway. For Pakistan, this is a big opportunity. The country needs investment, and even though the financing terms and thus the ultimate cost to Pakistan are not clear, Islamabad is desperate for cash. For China, the payoff is primarily geopolitical. Thanks to the project, Beijing is deepening Pakistan’s dependence, while increasing China’s access to the Indian Ocean and its energy trade routes via Pakistan’s port of Gwadar.But will China’s loans to countries such as Pakistan ever get repaid? The history of development lending to countries such as Pakistan is full of disasters, conflicts, and painful defaults. Decades of experience from Western countries and institutions such as the IMF show that making loans is the easy part. It is far harder to ensure that money is used effectively, and more difficult still to guarantee that loans are paid back. Many of the countries receiving Belt and Road financing are not known for performing well on these metrics. Sri Lanka is already struggling to deal with debt from Chinese-backed infrastructure projects. And in a worrisome irony, former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz spoke at the Belt and Road forum emphasizing his experience in office restructuring his country’s foreign debt. That default is unlikely to be Pakistan’s last.Beijing’s foreign policy credibility now depends on extending as many loans as possible. But the more money it lends now, the larger the future cost will be. China has already had to deal with spendthrift client states such as most Venezuela, which is on the brink of bankruptcy and which China has repeatedly granted extensions. In other words, the more lending expands, the less liekly China will be to swallow the cost of defaults.If China tries to force repayment, however, it will lose it new friends quickly (which would rather defeat the point of the entire project). Consider the IMF, which is reviled in many developing countries for demanding austerity measures to enforce loan repayment. Whenever lenders try to force repayment, relations sour, and when they forgive the loans, they incur a large cost. With Belt and Road-related promises reaching around $1 trillion, the sums are substantial, and the losses—Chinese officials privately estimate that certain projects will lose 80% of the money invested—are even bigger. Put simply, China is setting itself up for either significant losses or for painful battles with its neighbors over debt repayments. Notably, only 1% of Belt and Road funding has been extended via institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which actually has credible lending criteria. Instead, the bulk of Belt and Road loans have come through the China Development Bank and the country’s big four state-owned banks, which at times act as slush funds for Beijing’s foreign policy. The financial viability of much of this lending is dubious at best.The risk of non-performing loans at state-owned banks is already clouding China’s future economic prospects. Since reaching a peak of $4 trillion in 2014, the country’s foreign-exchange reserves have fallen by about a quarter. The ratings agency Fitch has warned that many OBOR projects—most of which are being pursued in vulnerable countries with speculative-grade credit ratings—face high execution risks and could prove unprofitable. Xi’s approach is not helping China’s international reputation, either. OBOR projects lack transparency and entail no commitment to social or environmental sustainability. They are increasingly viewed as advancing China’s interests, including access to key commodities or strategic maritime and overland passages, at the expense of others.In a sense, OBOR seems to represent the dawn of a new colonial era: the twenty-first-century equivalent of the East India Company, which paved the way for British imperialism in the East. But, if China is building an empire, it seems already to have succumbed to what the historian Paul Kennedy famously called “imperial overstretch.” In fact, many countries along the Belt and Road are already pushing back. Sri Lanka, despite having slipped into debt servitude to China, recently turned away a Chinese submarine attempting to dock at the Chinese-owned Colombo container terminal. Another example is the stalled Myitsone Dam project in Myanmar. Conceived well before One Belt, One Road, the Myitsone Dam on the Irrawaddy River would have been Myanmar’s largest infrastructure project. When the controversy over the dam was “just” a matter of environmental devastation and massive human dislocation, it looked likely to go forward. But once it became clear that most of the electricity produced by the dam would be bound for China, nationalist outrage exploded.The already underwhelming implementation of the Belt and Road project and the likelihood of unpaid debts is not the only reason to expect that it will disappoint Beijing’s geopolitical goals. China is using the Belt and Road to export its excess capacity in heavy industries and construction. Yet what the world outside of China needs is not more supply of Chinese industries, but more demand from Chinese consumers. If China were to spend more on its consumers, they would buy more from abroad, increasing demand—and thus employment—in other countries. Instead, China is looking to build roads and bridges that will increase demand for Chinese concrete and steel—and which will in many cases be built by Chinese workers. The Belt and Road is as much a welfare program for Chinese industry as for the country’s poorer neighbors.Already, however, other countries are beginning to realize this. President Trump is far from the only world leader complaining about Chinese trade practices. The more that the Belt and Road succeeds in its current form, the bigger this problem—and, likely, the political backlash—will become. Already, neighbors such as Kazakhstan are imposing restrictions on Chinese laborers and investment in their countries to ensure they benefit, too.Getting Old Before Getting RichBut the flaws in the OBOR plan pale in comparison to China’s biggest and least-known domestic crisis: its rapidly aging population. China is graying at a jaw-dropping rate, the frightening scope of which is best expressed in numbers. Today, China boasts roughly five workers for every retiree. But by 2040, this highly desirable ratio will have collapsed to about 1.6 to one. From the start of this century to its midway point, the median age in China will go from under 30 to about 46, making China one of the older societies in the world. At the same time, the number of Chinese older than 65 is expected to rise from roughly 100 million in 2005 to more than 329 million in 2050 - more than the combined populations of Germany, Japan, France and Britain.The consequences for China's finances, foreign policy and future capacity for power projection are profound. With more people now exiting the workforce than entering it, many economists inside and outside China say that demographics are already becoming a drag on growth. More immediately alarming are the fiscal costs of having far more elderly people and far fewer young people, starting with the expense of creating the country's first modern national pension system.Unlike residents of China's prosperous eastern cities, hundreds of millions of peasants and migrant laborers have scant personal savings and rudimentary retirement coverage, if any.When Xi announced in 2015 that he was slashing China's armed forces by 300,000 troops, Beijing spun the news as proof of its peaceful intentions. But demographics provide a more compelling explanation. The number of working-age Chinese men is plummeting. In fact, China's working-age population shrank by 4.87 million people last year alone. As wages go up, maintaining the world's largest standing army is becoming prohibitively expensive. Nor is the situation likely to improve: after wages, rising pension costs are the second-biggest cause of increased military spending, but pensions will not build aircraft carriers, submarines or fighter jets.Awakening belatedly to its demographic emergency, China has relaxed its one-child policy, allowing parents to have two children. Demographers expect this reform to make little difference, however. In China, as around the world, various forces, including increasing wages and rising female workforce participation, have, over several decades, left women disinclined to have large families.But the one-child policy did not, in itself, create this demographics time bomb; it only hastened and exacerbated it. In fact, China's fertility rate began declining well before the policy was introduced in 1978, but for amplifying this effect by an order of magnitudes, the one-child policy should be recognized as one of history’s great political blunders. As a result of its effects, single-child households are now the norm in China, and few parents, particularly in urban areas, believe they can afford a second child. Moreover, many men won't become fathers at all because under the one-child policy, a cultural preference for sons led to widespread abortion of female fetuses. As a result, by 2020 China is projected to have 30 million more bachelors than single women of a similar age, and I don’t think I need to tell you how much trouble 30 million sexually frustrated young men can cause.I personally believe that in another decade or two, the social and fiscal pressures created by ageing in China will force what many Chinese find inconceivable for the world's most populous nation: a mounting need to attract immigrants. And that’s going to be hard if the CCP keeps cracking down as it has been doing ever since Xi came to power.With American baby boomers entering retirement, the US has its own pressing social-safety-net costs. What is often neglected in debates about swelling entitlement spending, however, is how much better America's position is than those of other countries. Once again, numbers tell the story best: by the end of the century, China's population is projected to dip below one billion for the first time since 1980. At the same time, America's population is expected to hit 450 million. Which is to say, China's population will go from roughly four and a half times as large as America's to scarcely more than twice its size.Even as China's workforce shrinks, America's is expected to increase by 31 per cent from 2010 to 2050. This growing labor supply will boost economic growth, strengthen the tax base and relieve pressure on the social security system. At the same time, Americans will continue to enjoy a substantial advantage over the Chinese in terms of per capita income. This advantage in wealth will continue to underwrite US security commitments and capabilities around the world.And that the US is not facing similar population shrinkage is due largely to immigration. America's fertility rate, while higher than that of China and many European countries, is still below the threshold required to avoid shrinkage; about 2.1 children per woman. By keeping its doors relatively open to newcomers, America is able to replenish itself. If the country were to shut its doors, its population would plateau and its median age would climb more steeply. According to the Pew Research Center, immigrants and their children and grandchildren will account for 88 per cent of US population growth over the next 50 years.I don't think it's a coincidence that China's increasingly aggressive stance in the South China Sea comes at a time when its economy is coming under increasing strain and the nation grapples with a rapidly aging, imbalanced populace. Howard French, in his book Everything Under the Heavens, also makes this case, arguing that Xi Jinping is acting so aggressively because he knows that China has only a narrow window of time—10 to 15 years at most—to lock in as many geopolitical gains as it can before China’s demographic crisis knocks it sideways and restricts its ability to project power.Pollution and Other IssuesAside from aging and gender imbalances, China also has a number of other internal issues that inhibit its becoming a superpower on par with the United States, issues that continually demand a vast amount of money and resources. Of these, pollution is probably the most infamous. China’s air is so polluted that it has become hazardous to breathe, as illustrated by the fact that in late December 2015, Beijing issued the second red-level alert warning for smog in its history. China’s aggressive industrialization has come at a staggering cost in human health and lives, and unregulated emissions have led to environmental catastrophe and a decline in the overall health of the Chinese people. China has a shrinking water supply similar in size to Sudan’s, which means it doesn’t have anywhere near enough. The capital intensity of production is very high too: In China, one standard energy unit used fully produces 33 cents of product. In India, the figure is 77 cents. Gradually climb and you get to $3 in Europe and then— in Japan—$5.55. China is poor not only because it wastes energy but water, too, while destroying her ecology in a way perhaps lacking any precedent. But while China’s toxic air and water are well-known—smog alone is estimated to kill anywhere from 500,000 to 1.5 million Chinese every year—what’s even more insidious is the pollution of its soil. While it’s possible to reduce air or water pollution with enough effort, toxins can remain in the soil for centuries and are hugely expensive to eradicate. And China not only has many brownfield sites (contaminated areas near cities that were once used for industry) but vast swathes of polluted farmland, too. In 2014, for example, the government published a national soil survey which showed that 16.1% of all soil and 19.4% of farmland was contaminated by organic and inorganic chemical pollutants and by metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic. That amounts to roughly 250,000 square kilometers of contaminated soil, equivalent to the all arable farmland of Mexico. Cadmium and arsenic were found in 40% of the affected land. Officials say that at least 35,000 square kilometers of farmland is so polluted that no agriculture should be allowed on it at all.Ethnic Tensions, Drugs and Societal IllsAnd then of course there are other issues, such as rampant drug problems and internal ethnic and religious strife such as that between the Han Chinese and the Sunni Islamic Uighurs of Xinjian province, and the ongoing, longstanding persecution and discrimination against Chinese Christians. Such strife is, of course, the foreseeable result of China's repressive domestic policies, and it is only made worse by the even more heavy-handed way in which the Chinese government tries to suppress it. In the U.S. and many Western nations, those who feel victimized or discontented have the ability to voice that discontent publicly and make themselves heard. Even if nothing is done to actually solve the problem, the discontented still have a way to vent their rage and make themselves heard without fear of reprisal. It is a way to relieve pressure and excess steam, like taking a boiling kettle off the stove. China, however, leaves the kettle on the stove even when the water is boiling hot, leading to deep-seated and simmering resentment among many ethnic minorities within its borders, and these tensions have grown so severe that they make similar tensions in Western countries seem almost amicable by comparison.Corruption and ScapegoatingAdditionally, Chinese corruption in high places is as strong as ever. Xi Jinping's vaunted anti-corruption campaigns have been nothing but a sham, a way to remove his political opponents from power and solidify his own power base while looking good doing it. Not to mention that China's military, while large, is still untested, It has never seen real battle and thus lacks combat experience, and despite China's modernization program, the U.S. still enjoys a huge technological advantage. The modernization of the Chinese military may have Western governments wringing their hands, but that modernization ultimately comes at the expense of its own people. Indeed, one could argue--and in fact I do argue--that the amount of energy, money and publicity that China has devoted to its military program serves a more subtle purpose: by keeping the attention of the public focused on an issue that has become synonymous with Chinese national pride, by directing the people's attention outward toward real, perceived or exaggerated threats, and by finding a scapegoat on which to blame all its problems--in this case, the United States--the Chinese government is able to distract the people from the more pressing and dire issues closer to home that it has not been able to fix, and solidify support for its rule thereby. It is a tried-and-true method that has been used many times before. Nicolas Maduro, the President of Venezuela, used the same tactic throughout his term of office. Due to his disastrous policies, his country's economy is going down in flames, the standard of living is plummeting and there are critical shortages of fuel, electricity and food. But right up until the recent Venezuelan elections--elections which saw Maduro and his party ousted from power--he vehemently and consistently blamed vague U.S. conspiracies and plots for the miserable state of the nation. Putin's Russia has been doing the same thing. Iran has been doing it for decades. Indeed, it has become somewhat fashionable to blame America when something goes wrong, no matter how ludicrous or how far-fetched the reasons for doing so may be. And China is no exception.Pushback From AbroadFor that matter, China's behavior on the world stage has already begun to backfire. Despite propaganda efforts to the country, instead of garnering the respect of the world China has gained the reputation of an international bully in the eyes of the global community--a role that, for many, was previously held by the United States. For all its talk of cooperation, China's saber-rattling and aggressiveness has pushed many of its neighbors, including those such as Thailand who might have proven allies under other circumstances, not only into the arms of the United States but also fostered greater, broader cooperation against China, which now finds itself more and more hemmed in by a growing number of economic and military treaties and alliances. Relations between the U.S. and Vietnam, for example, have never been this warm, and the U.S. and India are deepening a defense partnership that would have seemed unthinkable even ten years ago. Even Asian nations with historical enmity have begun to put aside their differences in the face of what they see as the greater threat.And why? Because China has proven time and again that it is duplicitous and cannot be trusted to uphold any accord it agrees or signs on to. Case in point: Xi Jinping promised not to militarize the islands China currently holds in the South China Sea during his visit to Washington, and yet, after an American bomber plane accidentally flew too close, China tripped all over itself to militarize the islands and conveniently forgot about its promise.Furthermore, China has antagonized its neighbors in ways that go even beyond the South China Sea issue. It infuriated Vietnam by towing an oil rig into Vietnamese waters, and just recently Chinese armed destroyers were spotted near the Japanese Senkaku islands in the East China Sea—islands which, like those further south, China also claims as its own, though it has not pressed the issue nearly so hard as it has in the South China Sea. The U.S. and many of the Southeast Asian nations are waking up to this fact: Australia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, the list goes on and on. Because of its aggressiveness, China now finds itself the object of increasing hostility and suspicion both abroad and in its own neighborhood, a situation made worse by the fact that it doesn't have the vast web of treaty alliances that America does, a web which--as I have already stated--is growing steadily larger as a result of China's actions. Beijing's only real military and political ally is North Korea, and even that is coming under increasing strain because North Korea under Kim Jong-Un has proven less and less willing to dance to Beijing's tune, leaving China's leadership increasingly exasperated at Kim's recklessness and stubbornness. For example, in early December, a North Korean girl band called Moranbong was sent to China in an attempt to show solidarity with the Chinese and foster greater friendship between North Korea and China. The band was scheduled to perform for a solid week in the Chinese capital, but its tour was abruptly cancelled due to "communication issues," according to a Chinese press release by Xinhua, the state media outlet. And in 2013, when North Korean jets flew over the Korean peninsula in a show of force, China's response was actually more alarmed than that of the United States. Not only that, but when the U.S. sent its own jets over the peninsula not long afterward as a demonstration of its own, the response from Beijing was surprisingly muted. Both of these incidents are part of a larger pattern that shows how relations between Pyongyang and Beijing have become more and more frayed—now more so than ever in light of North Korea’s nuclear ICBM tests, which have put China in an extremely uncomfortable position on the world stage as it comes under increasing scrutiny for its indulgence of the Kim regime. And while China's tarnished global image does little to deter other nations from trading with China, it also means that even many of those who loathe the United States see the U.S.-led world order as preferable to a world order dominated by the Chinese.MilitaryAs for military strength, well, China has undoubtedly made impressive strides in modernizing its armed forces. But it will be decades, if ever, before it achieves the level of dominance that the United States enjoys today. Take defense spending, for example. In 2016, China’s official military spending rose 7.6 percent. Adjusted for inflation, that’s barely 5 percent. In U.S. dollar terms, it’s barely 3 percent. In real U.S. dollar terms, it’s hardly any increase at all. Put simply, China’s defense spending is essentially flat. Real spending increases of anywhere from 0–5 percent are a far cry from the “insider” estimates of just one year ago, when security experts were confidently predicting double-digit spending increases for 2016 and beyond. Figures as high as 30 percent were mooted as tensions rose in the South China Sea. It is well-known that China’s official budget numbers don’t capture all of its military spending. But then, neither do America’s, or any other country’s. The best analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies concludes that China’s figures are close to real and getting closer. Even if the true total is unknown, the year-on-year increases seem credible. Since the turn of the century, China’s defense spending has bounced up and down between 1.9 percent and 2.1 percent of GDP, according to estimates from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). SIPRI estimates are the highest in the league; the U.S. Department of Defense, the British International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Chinese government itself all give lower figures.To put China’s 2 percent in context, SIPRI’s method gives 3.3 percent for the United States, down from a high of 4.7 percent in 2010 and the UK comes in at 2.3 percent. China may throw around its growing power in a very aggressive manner, but in comparative terms it does not seem to be spending very much on its military. China does have the world’s second-largest military budget, but this seems only natural considering that it also has the world’s second-largest economy, largest population, third largest territory, longest land borders, the largest number of neighbors (many of them hostile or politically unstable) and it has to worry about internal rebellion as well. It must be tough being a Chinese military planner, but unfortunately for those planners, life is about to get a lot tougher. China’s official economic growth has fallen to 6.7 percent, with a target of 6.5 percent for 2017. These are supposedly real rates, adjusted for inflation. But the nominal growth rate for 2016 was 8 percent while China’s inflation rates ranged from 2.1 percent for consumer prices to 5.5 percent for producer prices. Try squaring that circle.But defense spending is not the only way to gauge military power, nor is it the most accurate. In order to be a global power (that is, to wield military influence in places around the world) you need to have the military hardware necessary to deploy in different regions. That means things like aircraft carriers, military satellites, and advanced warplanes, and in every case, the US owns the majority of these weapons, while nations like China or Russia own only a relatively small percentage. For example, the US has more than 70 percent of all aircraft carriers, and its air fleet, with over 6,000 planes, is larger than China’s and Russia’s combined. The United States has more than twice as much tonnage of warship in the water than China and Russia put together, and a list of America’s allies read like a who’s who of the world’s most developed and powerful nations. It has both China and Russia encircled by a vast network of military bases that allow it to deploy military force anywhere in the world at any time. Neither China nor Russia nor Germany have anything that can rival America’s capacity for power projection. In terms of quality and quantity of weapons, the United States is also in a league of its own. Nothing fielded by any of our rivals compares to weapons like the Virginia-class submarine, the F-35 fighter jet or the new Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. According to the Washington DC-based Center for Naval Analyses, the Chinese Navy will have between 265–273 ships by 2020. The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, will reach over 300 ships by the end of that same year, as 80 ships that received funding from the Obama administration are currently under construction.By contrast, of the 1,321 fighter jets in China’s air fleet, only 502 can be called modern. These are 296 variants of the Russian Su-27 (India has a more advanced SU-30 MKi) and 206 indigenously built J-10s that even Pakistan has refused to buy. The remaining 819 fighter planes are mostly J-7s, J-8s and Q-5s, all antiquated models that were designed decades ago. Only about 30 of China’s 54 submarines are less than 20 years old. These submarines are subdivided into 4 classes--Shang, Han, Yuan, and Song--all of which are unanimously considered inferior to American vessels. China also has the 1960s-vintage Mings (Class 035), which are completely unreliable and prone to regular engine failure. Even China’s newest class of submarine, the Type 095, is estimated by American military experts to be as quiet as the Los Angeles-class submarines that were built in the 1980s. In other words, China is about thirty years behind the United States in submarine quieting technology. To be sure, China has made impressive gains in its efforts to modernize its military, but it still has a long, long way to go. For the foreseeable future, America’s military superiority is not going anywhere, nor is the globe-spanning alliance structure that constitutes the core of the existing liberal international order (unless Washington unwisely decides to throw it away).Economic InfluenceIn terms of economic power, China also lags significantly behind the United States. Last year, economists at the International Monetary Fund estimated that the Chinese economy was larger than America’s. That statement made front-page headlines but was somewhat misleading because it used purchasing power parity (PPP), a measure of welfare that is somewhat dubious as an index of power. After all, a country imports oil or engines at the exchange rate, not purchasing power parity. However, even when the Chinese and American economies are equal in size as measured by exchange rates, they will not be equal in economic power. Per capita income provides a much better gauge of the sophistication of an economy, and China’s per capita income is only a quarter of America’s: $8,261 to $57,294 in the United States. And then there’s the problem of capital flight, which has cost China trillion of dollars. The old saying goes that money is a coward, and so it is. All the rich people who can leave are leaving China. In cities across America, thousands of Chinese buyers are flocking to buy homes in cash. Even Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard. Does that imply a high-profile political career for her in China? Probably not. It rather implies a quiet retirement with Xi’s grandchildren over here. American private secondary schools are inundated by Chinese applicants, and American real estate remains the number one choice for Chinese buyers looking to get out of Dodge.As such, any forecast of future Chinese parity with the United States depends on heroic estimates of China's continued GDP growth. Of course, total size matters. Having a large attractive market and being the largest trading partner for a large number of countries is an important source of Chinese power, but that is not the same as equality. For example, although China surpassed Germany and the U.S. as the world’s largest trading nation in 2013, Chinese trade in services is lackluster, many exports have low added value. Moreover, China lacks many global brands. Coca-Cola is universally recognized, but how many people can name a Chinese soda brand? And China’s claims that its GDP grew exactly 6.7 percent in each of the first three quarters of this year came just after Beijing fired the head of its National Bureau of Statistics in January, seemingly for reporting unsatisfactory growth rates. China's new chief statistician is also the vice chairman of National Development and Reform Commission, the organization responsible for setting China's GDP growth targets. Needless to say, this casts doubt on the official growth figures put forward by the Chinese government.Soft PowerBut there’s more to being a superpower than just military prowess. We cannot neglect the importance of cultural power, or “soft” power. Soft power, as defined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye, is just as important as hard power, and in many ways more so. Heck, it helped us win the Cold War. Long before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it had been pierced by American television and movies. Yet few people in those developing nations have fallen in love with China the way they might fall in love with the United States. According to Dr. Nye, whom Chinese officials acknowledge as a guru on the topic, there are three main ways that a country can gain soft power: through its political values, its culture and its foreign policies. But winning on all fronts is not easy. The party knows that its ideology has little chance these days of attracting others. Arguably China’s soft power was stronger in the 1950s and 1960s when Mao, a brutal but charismatic dictator, espoused a socialist Utopia that inspired many people around the world. Nowadays some Chinese academics speak of a “China model”—the winning combination, in their view, of authoritarian politics and somewhat liberal economics (with a big role for the state). But Chinese leaders prefer to gloss over the politics when describing their country to foreigners. In 2008 the opening ceremony of the Olympics Games in Beijing barely hinted at the party or its principles.Instead, China’s soft-power strategy focuses mainly on promoting its culture and trying to give the impression that its foreign policy is, for such a big country, unusually benign. The culture that the party has chosen for foreign consumption is mainly one that was formed long before communism. Confucius, condemned by Mao as a peddler of feudal thought, is now being proffered as a sage with a message of harmony. Since 2004 China has established some 500 government-funded “Confucius Institutes” in 140 countries. These offer language classes, host dance troupes and teach Chinese cooking. China has also set up more than 1,000 “Confucius Classroom” arrangements with foreign schools, providing them with teachers, materials and funding to help children learn Mandarin.But there’s an old maxim that trying too hard to be cool backfires, and this is as true for the Chinese Communist Party as it is for anyone else. China's top-down efforts to expand soft power gained momentum in 2007, when the Party's then-General Secretary Hu Jintao announced that China needed to "vigorously develop the cultural industry" and to "enhance the industry's international competitiveness. In June 2016, Hu's successor, Xi Jinping, criticized the nation's propaganda bureau for failing to reach younger audiences and called on them to be more innovative. The Party's soft power failures are especially visible in the music industry. One of China's most cringe-worthy efforts is a hip-hop music video aimed at millennials abroad, entitled This is China, produced by China's Communist Youth League and the rap group Chengdu Revolution. The video promotes China with rambling lyrics such as, "First things first, we all know that China is a developing country. It has large population and it is really hard to manage," and the gem, "As for scientific achievement, we have [Nobel prize winner] Tu Youyou, who discovered Artemisinin.” The only way Chinese state media could outdo itself on this one is if it were to, say, promote a rap song praising Karl Marx. When Mr. Nye wrote about soft power, he suggested that governments could not manufacture it. He argued that much of America’s had sprung from its civil society: “everything from universities and foundations to Hollywood and pop culture”. The party is distrustful of civil society; its soft-power building has been almost entirely state-led. China has tried to combine elements of soft power with the hard power of its illiberal politics. Far from enhancing China’s global image, this approach has often served to undermine it.Take the Confucius Institutes mentioned earlier, for example. In 2007 a senior party leader described these as “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” But many cash-strapped universities have gratefully supplanted their own language courses with ones led (even funded) by Confucius Institutes. In some places Confucius Institutes have replaced or started up entirely new China-studies programs. Most of them do not actively push the party line, but Confucius Institutes usually skate over sensitive political topics such as the crushing of pro-democracy protests in 1989. As a result, they have attracted controversy. In 2013, McMaster University in Canada severed ties with its on-campus Confucius Institute after one of the institute’s employees was forbidden to follow Falun Gong, a spiritual sect that is banned in China (the institute subsequently closed down). At a European Chinese-studies conference in 2014, the Chinese head of Confucius Institutes worldwide ordered pages referring to a Taiwanese educational foundation to be ripped from each program. Such attempts at censorship only help to reinforce Western misgivings about China’s politics and undermine its soft power.China’s efforts to use its global media to paint a rosier picture of the country also face a tough challenge. Its television networks employ foreign anchors (and plenty of panda footage) to try to win audiences abroad. But foreigners can also see the Chinese state’s heavy hand, such as when it mobilizes pro-China crowds to drown out protesters during visits by Chinese leaders, or when it arm-twists foreign politicians not to complain about China’s human-rights record. It’s hard to accumulate soft power when China holds the dubious distinction of being the first country since Nazi Germany to see a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate die in prison, and the horrors of its “re-education camps” for Uyghur Muslims have made worldwide headlines. And as for China’s message of peace to other countries, many in Asia are far from convinced. Its grabs for territory in the East and South China Seas have fueled widespread resentment. The rapid expansion of its navy and air force, and its build-up of missiles, have sown anxiety in America, too. Money has not, cannot, and will not buy China anything like the sort of admiration and prestige it craves. A year before Mr. Xi took over, just over half of Americans had positive impressions of China, according to the Pew Research Centre. By the end of 2016 that share had fallen to 38% (see chart). Pew found a similar trend in other countries. In 14 out of 19 nations it polled between 2011 and 2013, views of China became less friendly.Thus, it is highly doubtful that China can present a system more workable and universal than democracy and a market economy of the kind you see in Britain and America. For all Trump’s perceived buffoonery, America still has broad appeal because of its enforcement of the rule of law, a free constitutional system with elections, individual freedoms, free speech, checks and balances and the separation of powers. Until these are present in China, Chinese values won’t find a place in the world the way Western values have. Turning the screws on Hong Kong and Taiwan, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and its economic retaliations against South Korea for its decision to install a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system have not endeared China to its neighbors. China defends its moves as being in the national interest, but it can’t be denied they hurt its reputation and image. Soft power cannot be manufactured at will or forced down someone else’s throat; it must be voluntarily accepted.InnovationIn innovation, too, China is encountering difficulties. The major components that enable a country to lead in cutting-edge technology depend on intangible assets, most notably what economists call the forces of agglomeration: systems of property rights and a sophisticated industrial base, full labor markets, an efficient judicial system and flexible organizations, presence of specialized service providers, knowledge spillover and trust embedded within society. Many authors have contended that open societies, like the US, benefit from these trends vis-à-vis their authoritarian counterparts.As noted international relations scholar Ian Bremmer states, “openness is a measure of the extent to which a nation is in harmony with the crosscurrents of globalization—the processes by which people, ideas, information, goods, and services cross international borders at unprecedented speed.” As far as innovation is concerned, this means that it is not what a country can produce, and at what pace, but the underlying ecosystem that tie physical goods to networks, research clusters and command centers. Such ingredients—property rights, social networks, capital markets—constitute the supporting infrastructure and the capacity to absorb that are needed to integrate innovation into an effective and coherent entity.China has clearly been exceptionally gifted at managing low-and medium-cost technologies ever since globalization has contributed to the spread of technology. It is, in fact, leading the world in patent filings. But patent filings are not, in and of themselves, an accurate indicator of a nation’s level of innovation. Closer examination of these figures reveals that about 43% of patent filings in China are for non-inventive patents. Called Utility Models, Petty Patents, or Design Patents, these cover only appearances or structural features. and many of these were filed by foreign inventors, not Chinese. And even when a patent filing is for an actual invention, it’s difficult to classify the value of that invention. Some inventions are trivial (like a slight tweak to making a screw thread) and some are important (like cold fusion). In other words, large numbers of filings don’t prove anything one way or the other about creativity and innovation in China. And alongside poor infrastructure, heavy reliance on foreign technology and lack of top-notch R&D capabilities, China also falls short in human capital and investments and is held back by a bloated bureaucracy. Therefore, the prospect of narrowing the gap is slim—more so now that China is cracking down on VPNs, which might very will trigger another massive brain drain. It will be hard for China to lead in science and innovation, or attract foreign talent, when its scientists and scholars do not have access to the World Wide Web.By contrast, the United States could not have achieved the level of pre-eminence it enjoys today without the pervasiveness of its ideas, products, and image abroad. American popular media and TV stars are everywhere. So are American products, American cars, American fast food chains, and so on and so forth. Even with Trump in the Oval Office, the U.S. is still near the very top of the list when it comes to soft power. This is because the United States, for all its flaws, is quite good at selling its story: a disorganized group of colonies join together in common cause, overthrow the rule of the mightiest empire of the day and go on to enjoy unparalleled success. Whether the U.S. actually lives up to its ideas of freedom and equality is not the point here; the point is that the vast majority of people around the world like those ideas too, and even the most cynical of America's critics still find the idea of America inspiring.The same cannot be said for China. China has values and ideals that are fundamentally incompatible with those of the United States and the world at large, and the global image China has been painting of itself is not a pretty one. It values the collective, not the individual, and for all its talk of reform, continues to suppress expression and the free exchange of ideas in the name of maintaining peace and order. It jails journalists, censors the press and the Internet, stifles innovation and isn't shy about using lethal force, intimidation or prison sentences to silence its domestic critics. It is therefore almost impossible for it to export its ideas abroad in the way the United States has been able to do, because its global audience--barring a few notable exceptions--is not, as it were, interested in buying. No matter how hard Xi Jinping's administration may try, the so-called "Chinese Dream" does not and never will have the same allure and positive connotations of the "American Dream" as long as China remains an authoritarian, non-democratic state. For China's ideas to be accepted by the world at large would require the very ideological fabric of the modern world to be turned on its ear, and that is not likely to happen if history is any indication. The Soviet Union tried to do the same thing for decades during the Cold War. It put out countless pieces of propaganda and made countless efforts to sell its ideology and image, and while it did have some successes, such as in Vietnam, its efforts mostly fell short. I am not at all certain that China will avoid the same outcome.America’s Enduring StrengthsThe United States, on the other hand, enjoys a number of strengths across a broad spectrum. Unlike China, it is not facing population shrinkage, and this is due largely to immigration. America's fertility rate, while higher than that of China and many European countries, is still below the threshold required to avoid shrinkage; about 2.1 children per woman. By keeping its doors relatively open to newcomers even in the age of Trump, America is able to replenish itself. If the country were to shut its doors, its population would plateau and its median age would climb more steeply. According to the Pew Research Center, immigrants and their children and grandchildren will account for 88 per cent of US population growth over the next 50 years. Moreover, the United States has built up a massive scientific and industrial base. China is rapidly enhancing its technological inputs, increasing its R&D spending and its numbers of graduates with degrees in science and engineering. But there are limits to how fast any country can leap forward in such matters, and there are various obstacles in China’s way—such as a lack of effective intellectual property protections and inefficient methods of allocating capital—that will be extremely hard to change given its rigid political system. Adding to the difficulty, China is chasing a moving target. In 2012, the United States spent $79 billion on military R & D, more than 13 times as much as China’s estimated amount, so even rapid Chinese advances might be insufficient to close the gap.America is also blessed with abundant natural resources. When we discuss American power vis-à-vis China, a few key points are often trotted out—and indeed, they will be trotted out here as well. The U.S. economy accounts for just under a quarter of global domestic product, it has a military force without peer in human history, and its economy is not dependent on exports. However, we can now add another item to this list: the United States is now the third largest oil producer in the world, it is less dependent on oil imports than at any point in the past forty years, and it is stealing customers out from under the noses of Russia and OPEC by selling oil at rock-bottom prices. Even a few years ago, U.S. shale producers would have found it hard to make a profit at fifty dollars a gallon, but they are doing it now. In 2013, America exported more oil than it imported for the first time, and it has not looked back since. Crude oil production in the United States has doubled since 2010 and is well on track to beat estimates for 2017. In late 2016, for example, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted that America would produce 8.7 million barrels of oil a day in 2017. New estimates, however, show that America will probably produce somewhere around 9.2 million barrels a day for 2017 and as many as 10 million a day in 2018. Make no mistake: American oil is cornering the market, and the ramifications will be global.ConclusionAll of this leads us to one inevitable conclusion: that China is in no position to become a superpower, and America, far from in decline, is in a rather comfortable position at the head of the pack. To be sure, there is a frantic, almost panicked desire in certain circles to see U.S. power and prestige take a nose-dive because the American people chose Donald Trump as their president. But those pushing this narrative are out of touch. Geopolitical reality remains unchanged, and America remains a hegemonic force: It has the largest and best equipped military that secures peace and prosperity from Europe to the South China Sea, the most prestigious university system, the largest consumer market, the largest economy, and it remains the source of much innovation. It still has a commanding lead in many scientific fields and leads the world in many cutting-edge technologies, such as space exploration and artificial intelligence. Nor has Trump diminished America’s broad appeal, if the most recent numbers are anything to go by. Contrary to many post-election fears, as of this writing both tourism and international student applications to the United States have increased, according to the most recent figures in April and May of 2017, and a recent Gallup poll showed that America continues to be the most favored destination for immigrants around the world. According to the survey, 147 million people worldwide would move to America if given the chance. So take the alarmism and hyperbole with a grain of salt. America is not in decline, and China is not the juggernaut it appears to be.Sources:A. Print Sources:Is the American Century Over? by Joseph S. Nye, Ph.D.A Geriatric Peace? by Mark L. HaasWill China Dominate the 21st Century? by Jonathan Fenby.Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Future by Howard W. French.America Abroad: The United States’ Role in the 21st Century by Stephen G. Brooks and Richard Wohlforth.American Economic Power Hasn’t Declined—It Globalized! Summoning the Data and Taking Globalization Seriously by Sean Starrs.China’s Crony Capitalism by Minxin Pei.American Tianxia: Chinese Money, American Power and the End of History by Salvatore Babones.Human Capital and China’s Future Growth by Hongbin Li, Prashant Loyalka, Scott Rozelle and Binzhen Wu.B. Web Sources:Land Pollution in China Facts that will Scare even the OptimistChina faces resistance to a cherished theme of its foreign policyAre patents indicative of Chinese innovation? | ChinaPower ProjectOne Belt, One Road, No Dice - Geopolitics | Geopolitical FuturesWho Is Winning the AI Race?http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/trumps-migrant-ban-fails-to-stop-tourists-visiting-us/news-story/24c72dffe421d57d72728c68fc439ef3US: international students top 1.18 millionWhy China Is No Climate Leaderhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/tiMr.euter/2017/03/15/survival-of-the-fittest-nations-a-darwinian-case-against-american-decline/#776b833e22ffWhy China Won't Replace The U.S. As The World's SuperpowerChina’s ever-tighter web controls jolt companies, scientistsChina's Bridge to NowhereThe Mystery Of China’s Naval Strategy – OpEdIs China really that far ahead in AI? Survey says "No" - TechNodeUS has regained foothold as leader in East AsiaSorry Veep, America already leads the world in space by a large marginUS: international students top 1.18 millionWhy China Is No Climate LeaderNorth Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal Threatens China’s Path to PowerThe EU's enthusiasm for globalization is being tested by Chinese takeovershttps://www.forbes.com/sites/tiMr.euter/2017/03/15/survival-of-the-fittest-nations-a-darwinian-case-against-american-decline/#776b833e22ffGerman envoy demands answers over China’s internet crackdownVPN crackdown a trial by firewall for China’s research worldSoft Power 30Chinese buying of US residential property hits record highWhy China Lost About $3.8 Trillion To Capital Flight In The Last DecadeTop 10 Reasons China Won't Be The World's Next Superpower - ListverseChina Is Still A 'Poor' CountryAustralia Positioning to Help US Check China’s Maritime ExpansionHas China's Rise Topped Out?Xi’s Marco Polo strategyChina’s Soft Power Offensive, One Belt One Road, and the Limitations of Beijing’s Soft PowerChina’s Soft Power Offensive, One Belt One Road, and the Limitations of Beijing’s Soft Power, Part 2China’s Soft Power, Part 3: Why A Global Rise of Strongmen Won’t Boost Beijing’s AppealWill Liu Xiaobo's death end our China fantasy?G20: Reports of US Decline Greatly Exaggerated | Global Trade MagazineChina’s premature riseChina’s Big Bet on Soft PowerStudy: Top incomes, inequality in China 'massively underestimated'OECD sounds the alarm on China's soaring corporate debtGlobal Balance Of Power 2017 Weighted Heavily Against China-Russia Nexus – AnalysisChina's push to create the world's next Silicon Valley at risk from latest Internet crackdownRobin Beres column: In a war with China, U.S. is still the big dogNorth Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal Threatens China’s Path to PowerRoots of innovation: 45 countries ranked in global IP index - The Next Silicon ValleyMore foreign grads of U.S. colleges are staying in the country to work

Because leftists come in all shapes and sizes. Some are libertarian socialists, some are Marxist Leninists. In the United States Marxism Leninism has been described as “communism.” However, this is a colloquialism.Communism is a society which is moneyless, stateless, and classless. The workers own the means of production and control it themselves. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” By this standard plenty of Marxists (not Marxist Leninists) are technically communists, even though they avoid calling themselves communists because they disagree with Marxism Leninism.Lenin was a Marxist. He adapted socialism as a means of eliminating capitalism while working toward actual communism. China describes itself as a socialist society (with Chinese characteristics) working toward communism. Marxism Leninism is a form of socialist government that promotes a revolutionary vanguard which leads the masses to overthrow capitalism. The Communist Party represents the workers and helps run the economy using central planning and control to repel imperial invasions and stamp out capitalism. Lenin sought to implement Marx’s 10 point plan to transition toward communism.Due to economic crisis resulting from the Russian Civil War Lenin permitted the NEP, which was a limited form of capitalism. This was meant to be temporary. Stalin moved the economy toward a more centralized and less capitalist model. Lenin would have approved.In the U.S. the Soviet Union, Stalin, Lenin, and other Marxist Leninists have received enormous hate from Western propagandists. In reality Stalin was no worse than Churchill.[1] Many of the propagandists are self identified leftists. Many of them will say that the Soviet Union “wasn’t real socialism.” They are wrong. The Soviet Union was socialism. But it wasn’t communism as defined by Marx.The reality is that the Soviet Union made enormous strides in human development. It took an illiterate, poor, peasant agrarian nation and within 40 years defeated the Nazis, became the second largest industrial economy and was leading the Space Race. However, the Soviet Union began a terrible path of decline after Stalin died. His successor, Khrushchev, slandered Stalin, told lies about the past for his own political purposes, and attempted to ditch Marxism Leninism and move toward social democracy. Mao Zedong was horrified by Khrushchev's bungling and his abandonment of socialism. This led to the Sino-Soviet split that nearly led to war.The propaganda against Stalin and the USSR is so immense that it is nearly impossible to even discuss it. You might as well be speaking another language. And, of course, you present facts and receive in reply: “You know Stalin killed a gazillion people, right?” My experience is that it takes people high on the personality trait of Openness to Experience to discuss the matter rationally. Some of the most anti-communist people are “escaped” right wing Russians and Poles. Coincidentally they tend to also love Trump and believe themselves to be the next Steve Jobs or Stephen Miller.Michael Parenti best discusses this matter:“Part opportunism, part careerism, part willful denial (or ignorance) of true capitalist and imperial dynamics, and part attachment to the comforts of being within the respectable fold of “permissible” criticism, Left Anticommunism continues to take a huge toll on the American left. In this comprehensive and incisive essay, Michael Parenti explores the reasons why the Left anti-communist stance must be seen for what it is: a de facto collaboration with the forces defending the corporate status quo. [This selection is from Parenti’s book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights, 1997). It is reproduced here by courtesy of the author. ]”— Patrice Greanville (Editor of Greanville Post)* * *In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.Genuflection to OrthodoxyMany on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about “left intellectuals” who try to “rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements” and “then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn’t lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We’re seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans” (Z Magazine, 10/95).Chomsky’s imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of “communist thugs” who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. In fact, the communists did not “very quickly” switch to the Right but struggled in the face of a momentous onslaught to keep Soviet socialism alive for more than seventy years. To be sure, in the Soviet Union’s waning days some, like Boris Yeltsin, crossed over to capitalist ranks, but others continued to resist free-market incursions at great cost to themselves, many meeting their deaths during Yeltsin’s violent repression of the Russian parliament in 1993.Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power-hungry Reds who pursue power for power’s sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.Adam Hochschild: Keeping his distance from the “Stalinist Left” and recommending same posture to fellow progressives.Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they “weaken their credibility” (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in the Cold-War condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters. Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.Even when attacking the Right, the left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that “when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts.” While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism “both of the Right and Left,” individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous” (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish–while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words).Slinging LabelsThose of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as “Soviet apologists” and “Stalinists,” even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did.Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.That many U.S. leftists have scant familiarity with Lenin’s writings and political work does not prevent them from slinging the “Leninist” label. Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: “Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution [sic] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.” Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power’s sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right.The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern EuropeAt the time of the 1996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: “Lenin said that the purpose of terror is to terrorize.” U.S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was disapproving of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development. He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a successful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists.Lenin constantly dealt with the problem of avoiding the two extremes of liberal bourgeois opportunism and ultra-left adventurism. Yet he himself is repeatedly identified as an ultra-left putschist by mainstream journalists and some on the Left. [Notably Chris Hedges, accused him often of “highjacking the revolution”, whatever that means.—Eds) Whether Lenin’s approach to revolution is desirable or even relevant today is a question that warrants critical examination. But a useful evaluation is not likely to come from people who misrepresent his theory and practice.Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations to be morally unacceptable because of the “crimes of communism.” Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic Party in this country, either as voters or members, seemingly unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist Party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic Party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism. [And the Democrats are full responsible, as integral parts of the imperialist machinery, for all the crimes of the US empire in at least a century of continuous expansion, crimes detailed by many scholars, and compiled—inter alia—in books such as Rogue State (Bill Blum).—Ends]Pure Socialism vs. Siege SocialismThe upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, according to some U.S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party “state capitalism” or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries “socialist” is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world–as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize.First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West [even more so when compared with today’s grotesque compensation packages to the executive and financial elites.—Eds], as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess. {Nor could they transfer such “wealth” by inheritance or gift to friends and kin, as is often the case with Western magnates and enriched political leaders. Just vide Tony Blair.—Eds]The “lavish life” enjoyed by East Germany’s party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the outskirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese electronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and electronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the “lavish” consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy.Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment opportunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India.All of the above were organizing principles for every communist system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States.But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundamentals as to leave little room for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism–not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience–could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? . . . Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life. (Carl Shames, correspondence to me, 1/15/92.)The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe–and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them–all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. . . .These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make]. (Guardian, 11/13/91)To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.Decentralization vs. SurvivalFor a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta),” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency–which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government.The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party. “The time has come,” he told an enthusiastically concurring Tenth Party Congress, “to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it: we have had enough opposition.” Open disputes and conflicting tendencies within and without the party, the communists concluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes.Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the party’s Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolution–like every other–that was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way.By the late 1920s, the Soviets faced the choice of (a) moving in a still more centralized direction with a command economy and forced agrarian collectivization and full-speed industrialization under a commandist, autocratic party leadership, the road taken by Stalin, or (b) moving in a liberalized direction, allowing more political diversity, more autonomy for labor unions and other organizations, more open debate and criticism, greater autonomy among the various Soviet republics, a sector of privately owned small businesses, independent agricultural development by the peasantry, greater emphasis on consumer goods, and less effort given to the kind of capital accumulation needed to build a strong military-industrial base.The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more comfortable, more humane and serviceable society. Siege socialism would have given way to worker-consumer socialism. The only problem is that the country would have risked being incapable of withstanding the Nazi onslaught. Instead, the Soviet Union embarked upon a rigorous, forced industrialization. This policy has often been mentioned as one of the wrongs perpetrated by Stalin upon his people. It consisted mostly of building, within a decade, an entirely new, huge industrial base east of the Urals in the middle of the barren steppes, the biggest steel complex in Europe, in anticipation of an invasion from the West. “Money was spent like water, men froze, hungered and suffered but the construction went on with a disregard for individuals and a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history.”Stalin’s prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, that same industrial base, safely ensconced thousands of miles from the front, produced the weapons of war that eventually turned the tide. The cost of this survival included 22 million Soviets who perished in the war and immeasurable devastation and suffering, the effects of which would distort Soviet society for decades afterward.All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not “make inevitable” the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deportations of “suspect” nationalities.The transforming effects of counterrevolutionary attack have been felt in other countries. A Sandinista military officer I met in Vienna in 1986 noted that Nicaraguans were “not a warrior people” but they had to learn to fight because they faced a destructive, U.S.-sponsored mercenary war. She bemoaned the fact that war and embargo forced her country to postpone much of its socio-economic agenda. As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands–the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib or mercilessly bled beyond recognition. This reality ought to earn at least as much recognition as the suppression of dissidents in this or that revolutionary society.The overthrow of Eastern European and Soviet communist governments was cheered by many left intellectuals. Now democracy would have its day. The people would be free from the yoke of communism and the U.S. Left would be free from the albatross of existing communism, or as left theorist Richard Lichtman [pictured right] put it, “liberated from the incubus of the Soviet Union and the succubus of Communist China.”In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. “Capitalism with a human face” is being replaced by “capitalism in your face.” As Richard Levins put it, “So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay” (Monthly Review, 9/96).Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don’t get it.[2]Footnotes[1] Let’s Be Honest – Stalin Was Less of a Criminal Than Churchill, Truman, and LBJ[2] Left Anticommunism: The Unkindest Cut - Global Research