By Paul Bremmer
Don’t just beware of the communists – beware of communist dupes, political science professor Paul Kengor is warning.
“A dupe is really an innocent,” Kengor recently told an audience at the Institute of World Politics. “A dupe doesn’t have malicious intent. A dupe unwittingly aids and abets the enemy, and if you think about it, that’s an especially dangerous situation, where you have people aiding and abetting, in the case of Soviet Communism, evil. And they don’t even realize that they’re doing it.”
Kengor has built his academic career on exposing the motivations and tactics of the radical left. His latest book, “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage,” examines how the left is using same-sex marriage as a vehicle to destroy marriage and the family. But his 2010 book, “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century,” formed the basis of his lecture at the IWP.
To term someone a “dupe” is not simply name-calling, according to Kengor. The word was commonly used during the Cold War when communists referred to those they hoodwinked as “dupes.”
The professor explained that communists mostly targeted liberals and progressives as potential dupes, because they were already close to communism on the ideological spectrum.
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“The Soviets were masters at this,” Kengor said. “They were masters at manipulation, of agitation and propaganda. They really sought out to do this, unlike any other group that I could think of. I mean, men sat around and tried to think of ways to mislead people.”
In the United States, Communist Party membership never climbed too far above 100,000 in the 1930s, according to Kengor. So, if the communists wanted any influence, they needed to widen their circle by drawing in non-communists who didn’t realize they were being recruited to the cause.
Russian Revolution leader Vladimir Lenin referred to such people as “useful idiots.” Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy who later renounced communism, said the goal was to “flatter them to their faces” but privately “treat them with sneering contempt.”
As part of the effort to fool Western progressives, the Soviets built fake “Potemkin villages” for the sole purpose of making life under communism appear better than it actually was. Kengor noted Soviet officials were pleasantly mystified by their naïve Western visitors.
“You should read some of [the Soviet officials’] accounts,” Kengor urged his audience. “They couldn’t believe how easy it was to mislead Western progressives. They were stunned. They were like, ‘This is really easy. Maybe we need to throw these people in the gulag. Maybe they’re spies.'”
The Soviet regime was not the only one that used Potemkin villages; North Korea’s communist dictators have used them, too. In fact, Kengor said Jimmy Carter was fooled by a giant Potemkin village when the former president visited North Korea in 1994.
Kengor excerpted Carter’s words:
People are busy. They work 48 hours a week. Rosalynn and I found Pyongyang to be a bustling city. The only difference is that during working hours, there are very few people on the street. They all have jobs or go to school. And after working hours, the North Koreans pack the department stores, which Rosalynn visited. I went in one of them. It’s like Wal-Mart in American stores on a Saturday afternoon. They all walk around in there, and they seem in fairly good spirits. Pyongyang at night looks like Times Square. They are really heavily into bright neon lights and pictures and things like that.
Carter also wrote that North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung was “very friendly toward Christianity,” even though he ran an atheistic communist regime that persecuted religious believers. But Carter saw what he was meant to see, according to Kengor, and by writing such a glowing account of life in North Korea, he painted the exact picture Kim wanted the West to see.
Carter was not the only high-profile liberal to be duped by communists. Legendary progressive educator John Dewey also inadvertently helped further the Soviet regime’s goals, according to Kengor.
“One thing that they don’t teach about Dewey is that the Bolsheviks absolutely adored his educational work,” the professor revealed. “They began immediately translating his work into Russian as quickly as they could. They said, ‘Here in these writings of this would-be founding father of American public education is a blueprint for what we want to do in the Soviet Communist totalitarian system.'”
Dewey was not alarmed that the Bolsheviks loved his work. On the contrary, he was flattered. He admired the Soviets as well. In 1928, he joined a delegation of 25 American educators on a trip to the Soviet Union to observe life in the relatively new nation.
Dewey scoffed at the idea the Russians were only setting up fake villages to impress foreigners. He believed the ones he saw might have been “the best of their kind” because they represented what the new regime was trying to do. In a series of articles he wrote for the New Republic after returning home, Dewey said he was impressed by the restoration of the Russian Orthodox churches, meaning he was unaware of the Bolsheviks’ hatred of religion. The educator also praised the “orderly and safe character of life in Russia under Stalin.”
“In spite of secret police, inquisitions, arrests, deportations… despite the exiling of party opponents, including divergent elements in the party, life for the masses goes on with regularity, safety, and decorum,” Dewey wrote, according to Kengor. “There is no place in all of Europe, in fact, where the external routine of life is more settled and secure.”
By his third New Republic article on the subject, Dewey had declared the Bolshevik Revolution a “great success.” He was especially impressed by the Soviet education system. In fact, he urged the United States to move closer to the USSR.
“Political recognition of Russia on the part of the United States would bring about the kind of relations that are in the interest of both countries and of the world,” Dewey wrote. “I went to Russia with no conviction on that subject.”
Said Kengor: “In other words, Professor Dewey did exactly – exactly – what Stalin wanted. It worked beautifully.”
Legendary birth-control activist Margaret Sanger also journeyed to the Soviet Union, in 1934, to see what the Soviets were doing with birth control. The Bolsheviks had legalized abortion in 1920, and by the time Sanger visited, they had an abortion rate never before seen in the history of the world, according to Kengor.
Even Sanger, who founded the organization that evolved into Planned Parenthood, was appalled by the number of abortions in the USSR. However, a number of Soviet officials assured her that as soon as the country attained its economic and social goals, neither abortions nor contraception would be necessary anymore. Sanger bought the line, and her willingness to believe reveals a lot about progressives, according to Kengor.
“You see the progressive belief in utopia,” Kengor said. “Once you fully get the state doing everything and all the wondrous things that the state needs to do – every progressive and leftist believes that they simply haven’t had enough power yet to really do what they want. But when they really can truly really, really, really do what they want, it’ll all work out.”
As for other forms of birth control, Sanger praised the Soviet Union for granting easy access to them.
“Theoretically, there are no obstacles to birth control in Russia,” she said. “It is accepted on the grounds of health and human right. We in America could well take example from Russia, where there are no legal restrictions, no religious condemnation, and where birth control is part of the regular welfare service of the government.”
That last part should sound familiar to Americans, Kengor told his audience.
“That’s where we are in America now, where birth control is part of the regular welfare service of the government – the Obama HHS mandate,” he said. “And if you disagree with it, you favor a war on women, you hate women. Period.”
