Cumberland Clark, writes Dalrymple, was
an early and ferocious critic of communism.
His
Curse of Communism was vastly more perceptive than many an apologia published at the time.
If he harped with uncomfortable insistence on the proportion of early Bolsheviks who were Jewish,
he was right about the new kind of evil that the Bolshevik state represented.
Dalrymple points out that Clark was more prescient about communism than many a celebrated Western intellectual. Clark wrote:
Wherever a dictatorship of the proletariat is set up, there will inevitably be a Tcheka, crushing freedom and happiness and living on terror and death, overriding the workers’ soviets and concentrating power in its own hands.
Cumberland Clark (1862-1941)
Clark was aware, Dalrymple says, of all that Bolshevism from the first instituted, viz.
- terror
- mass executions
- famine
- wanton destruction
- lying propaganda
- tyranny
- universal spying
Dalrymple notes that Clark was clear on the means by which the Bolsheviks deceived foreign guests, much clearer than many of the guests themselves, then and for many years afterwards. Clark wrote:
They are given a cordial welcome, and special trains, luxurious lodgings, and magnificent banquets are prepared for them. They are conveyed in comfortable motor cars and attended by courteous guides, who act as interpreters. These interpreters . . . are none other than members of the Tcheka, and it is absurd to believe that a Russian would speak of his miseries to a stranger with one of the dreaded Inquisition to translate his complaint. Even were he fool-hardy enough to do so, the translation would bear a very different complexion from the original remark. . . . The Bolshevists have brought the fooling of the Socialist visitors to a fine art.
Dalrymple points to Clark’s descriptions of
the Potemkin institutions that the willingly duped visitor was shown — the technique that I observed in Albania and in North Korea more than sixty years later.
