Ezra Taft Benson Quotes

The letter was widely published. There were few left wing intellectuals who would take Lenin on at the time but Gorter was one. The immediate quotation shredded a brochure that Lenin had produced for world wide communism where he was critical of other left wing movements.

Most Americans looked at anarchists as communists. They generally were not, and opposed state communism as much as state capitalism. In many ways they distrusted government the way some modern libertarians do.

The Red Scare had already reached most conservatives and Truman and most others had not yet been affected by the fear of Communism that so many people had through the 1970s.

In the 1970s both England and America had a red scare here some ultra conservatives actually feared that their populations would adopt and vote for communism. The intelligence was so bad that the more the Soviet Union was financially and politically collapsing, the more they were feared.

At the time, the CIA was covertly financing and organizing opposition to Allende. Nonetheless, he won the election but the CIA organized a coup d’etat and removed him.

Historically, with the exception of military coups, in most revolutions and civil wars the dissident anti-government troops have a deep hostility toward the established government.

For years the Nationalist Military under Chiang Kai-shek and other Generals like Ma Hongkui had murdered suspected communist politicians, and in the Civil War with the communists rarely took any prisoners. The Communists in turn, “tried” and executed landlords and other major capitalists who had previously in their view treated the peasants badly and were responsible for much starvation. Neither side had any scruples about ignoring human rights and committing war crimes.

The reason that this quotation is important is that most Americans from the 1920s on concerned with Marxism and communism in the United States, conflated Marxism with Anarchists as if Marxists were anarchists who were bent on violence. In reality, to most Marxists, anarchists were more their enemy than the capitalists. Stalin was then only 28 years old and the Russian revolution was 9 years in the future.

Cuba was not Communist under Castro in the Russian style of Communism. However, Castro operated Cuba with many of the key Marxist & Leninist Communist Principles {636672} (some of which the Russians were hypocritical about). Cuba was very much a Marxist, Socialistic State with few of the democratic reforms that characterized European Socialism. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian Communist aid propped up the Cuban economy, and that was another motivation for Castro not to criticize Russian Communism so he often appeared to be in agreement with Russian Communism even when he wasn't.

Immediately after the Russian Revolution, the provisional government appointed him as Ambassador to the United States. However, the provisional government was supplanted when the Bolsheviks took over. Not enamored of Communism, he stayed in the United States with many other Russian refugees.

Moody was an avid Protestant Evangilical. The reference to the "reign of terror" was not to the French Revolution per se but to a national calamity of the severity and magnidute of the French Revolution sd God's wrath would be triggered if more AMericans were not Evangelized. What is particualry interestting is by 1886 Communism had already developed a bad reputation in the part of many religious fundamentalists and considered a sin of the first order such as adultery. The red scare was alive and well. Ironically, Moody and most other anti-communism evengelicals were not hostile brecause of Karl Marx's economic or historical views and theories, but rather Marx's, Engels', and other early Communitists hostility to organized religion was the main casue. The economic adn political opponents of Communism enlisted the aid of as many religious people was possible by emphasing "Godless Communism" and the vast majority of Americans at the time, if they knew anything about Communism at all, it was that the communists were hostile and opposed to religion.