The great and overpowering tragedy of Communism is that at no stage or time has it ever been the shining Utopia that hypnotizes the credulous common man and woman and some of the dreamers in high places in our own government. It would appear that neither Marx nor Engels understood human psychology or analyzed intelligently the lessons of history, for Socialism, in suppressing individual initiative, inevitably leads to I-Don’t-Care-ism. An economy based on share-and-share-alike, without regard to individual effort, failed in Russia because it put a premium on mediocrity and deprived man of the fruits of his own labor. It had to be replaced with “Stakhanovitism,” or piece work, which the American labor unions have fought constantly in their march toward Socialism. The Russians found that the only way to make men exert themselves without the incentive of reward was through fear of punishment. Thus Socialism has to be enforced by police methods to be at all effective. What is this but dictatorship? Socialism, Communism, Stateism—these can no more be separated from each other than can the component parts of homogenized milk. Communist leaders, motivated by the promise of power, insist that world revolution is inevitable. The Chinese Communists, for many years, repeated an ancient legend. They said: “The Mongols still are waiting in their felt tents, for the issue to be decided. They are gathering around their yurt fires and chanting together: ‘When that which is harder than rock and stronger than the storm winds shall fail, the Empires of the North Court and the Empires of the South Court shall cease to be; when the White Tsar is no more, and the Son of Heaven has vanished, then the campfires of Genghis Khan will be seen again, and his empire shall stretch over all the earth’.” That prophesy is being fulfilled. CHAPTER V _Communist Propaganda_ Propaganda, thanks to a better understanding of mass psychology, has become in the past few years almost an exact science as well as an art In the hands of the Communists it is a powerful weapon, so subtle that, as in shadow boxing, one cannot judge the exact position of the enemy. With wily cleverness, it has perverted the meanings of cherished words, so that great national masses of people are no longer aware of their rightful connotations. We, in the United States, for instance, think of Democracy as the dictionary defines it: “Government in which the supreme power is retained by the people.” The Communists have distorted this by adopting the term “New Democracy,” to represent a Communist controlled state, that is, a dictatorship.