When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were springing on the human race.  Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, a New Man, as the Bolshies called it, one that would overcome “the antinomies of subjective and objective, body and spirit, family and party.”  Leave it to a horror like Lenin to design a new human being—Yakov Sverdlov for example, the sadist who ordered the murder of the Czar and all his family, and the family’s dogs hanged.

We hear a lot about Nazis nowadays, but very little about the monsters Lenin and Sverdlov and their enablers.  And if anyone copied Lenin’s methods of winning big through terror and murder it was Hitler and Goebbels.  But let’s forget for the moment about the fierce persecution of the aristocracy by the Bolsheviks, the destruction of an entire class, the chilling tales of looted palaces and murders of millions.  Let’s stick to the creation of the New Man.  This was a communist invention, an unyielding robot-like servant of the party, devoid of feelings except where the party was concerned.  The New Man became the butt of many Hollywood comedies of the 30’s.

What was Lenin thinking?  That’s an easy one.

He needed to create transparency between the individual and the collective in order to accumulate power.  The bourgeois family had to be erased from one’s consciousness, as were family attachments and things like domesticity, wives, and children, and whatever else pre-Lenin humans used to indulge in.  The party replaced one’s family; nothing else mattered.  Lefty intellectuals concurred, many of them Brits like the Webbs and Bertrand Russell; a stain academics defend to this day—more vigorously than ever, come to think of it.  When Robert Conquest first published his reassessment of the Great Terror and counted tens of millions dead, he was ignored by that very same academy, and instead of being awarded a dukedom for his work, he was more or less ostracized by lefty professors and the so-called elite.  Ditto Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was booed during lectures at American universities for pointing out the vacuity of the consumer society.

After Lenin croaked, that nice guy who succeeded him requisitioned grain from peasants who starved in order to fund industry in the cities.  Many millions died from that alone.  Still, true Bolsheviks remained loyal to the cause, fathers giving up daughters to the dreaded secret police, sons betraying mothers, and so on.  Social engineering began with Bolshevism, and I must admit that it worked, at least where intellectuals are concerned.  The Soviet project has successfully polluted the academy the world over, and continues to this day.  Which brings me to what took place at my old alma mater, the University of Virginia, at Charlottesville.

The brawl was between extremists on both sides, the difference being that among 320 million Americans, I’d say there are probably one, two, perhaps three thousand so-called neo-Nazis, and about the same number of white supremacists.  In fact not even that, because the two groups overlap.  But we don’t dare look at the other side, the “Antifa” that opposes them.  Most of the students I meet in America today are Antifa in spirit, to put it in plain English.  They do not allow conservative speakers to address conservative groups on their campuses, interrupt any meeting that does not adhere to political correctness, and have gone as far as to demand that white students leave campus for three days in order to cleanse it from past white crimes and thoughts.  In other words, there is no free speech in American universities today.

Encouraged by the media, the extreme left now decides who speaks on campuses and, of course, who appears on television.  FOX News has become the equivalent of the “enemy of the people” during Bolshie time.  In my very own creation, The American Conservative, one Rod Dreher attacks Pat Buchanan for writing the following: “Looking back over the history of Western Civilization, were not the explorers who came out of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England all white supremacists?”  For God’s sake, as late as 1955, Winston Churchill was urging Brits to “Keep England white.”  Belief in one’s superiority, I believe, is no crime.  Many whites like myself are proud of a heritage that makes us feel superior as Europeans, because of what dead white Europeans gave to this world.

Like the New Bolshie Man who would betray his family for the party’s good, today’s globalist elite label as neo-Nazis and racists anyone who refuses to go whole hog for political correctness.  Sixty-two percent of Americans do not wish for Confederate statues to come down.  Yet this clear majority is either ignored or maligned by the New York Times and other such New Man house organs.  The burning of books by the Nazis was the forefather of p.c.  The New York Times is P.C. Man’s Mein Kampf. 

A version of this article appeared in The Spectator.