In November 2015, the legendary Harry Crocker, whose name I’ve long held synonymous with Regnery Publishing, asked me if I would consider writing a Politically Incorrect Guide® to Communism to be released in 2017, the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution that unleashed the global monster that is communism. The offer was too delicious to pass up.
I had read other books in the Regnery series of Politically Incorrect Guides®, including Robert Spencer’s Politically Incorrect Guide® to Islam and Anthony Esolen’s Politically Incorrect Guide® to Western Civilization. A number of people over the years have urged me to write a similar such book on communism, a subject that I teach, including in a full course on Marxism at Grove City College (and to some degree in all of my courses). As I noted in this book, for years I have traveled to colleges nationwide giving a lecture titled, “Why Communism is Bad.” I’ve discussed communism and its consequences and horrors on countless talk shows. I have published hundreds if not thousands of articles on communism. I have written numerous books on the subject, many of them related to Ronald Reagan and the collapse of communism, several of which have been translated into foreign languages by international publishing houses. These included books with politically incorrect titles such as Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage; The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor; Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century; and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.
I’ve also written many forewords, prefaces, and chapters in books on communism and the Cold War, including for the outstanding and very important work, Disinformation, by Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ron Rychlak. I’ve done reports on communism, surveys, white papers, journal articles. I had a fun “Commie Watch” column for the print edition of The American Spectator, which I continue for the online version.
None of this, I promise, is to toot my own anti-communist horn or puff up myself. Quite the contrary, it reveals a lot of time delving into the darkness. It is, frankly, pretty damned sad and depressing. It isn’t fun. Believe me, I’d much rather write books about, oh, say, baseball. The point is that I’ve spent a lifetime suffering the lamentable occupational hazard of studying this stupid and genuinely evil ideology. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather II, every time I try to get out from the communists’ nightmare, they pull me back in. And alas, that’s probably why I haven’t stopped writing about this pernicious ideology: I feel a duty to warn the world not to repeat this horror show.
As I said, friends and colleagues have urged me for years to write some sort of politically incorrect critique of communism. Thus, when Harry Crocker suggested I consider writing precisely such a book as part of the world-renowned and witty Regnery Politically Incorrect Guide® series, how could I say no?
Not only did I feel I was the guy to write the Politically Incorrect Guide® to Communism . . . I basically am a Politically Incorrect Guide® to Communism.
I promised Regnery a “deliciously politically incorrect treatment of the subject.” I hope I did not disappoint.
As for the good folks at Regnery, they have been terrific all along. I have not seen the faces or even caught the names of all of those involved in this manuscript, of which I’m sure there have been many, but I’d especially like to thank Elizabeth Kantor, my editor, who did a tremendous job with an initial manuscript that was too long. She took it under her wing and shaped it splendidly. She did a lot of moving, arranging, framing, labeling, and much more. She did excellent work, and she was always cheerful and so easy to work with. I am also grateful to Nancy Feuerborn for a fine copy editing job and Jason Sunde for the striking jacket design.
I would like to thank several Grove City College students who helped me with research on this book. Hannah Lutz and Ian Worrell were my go-to crack researchers anytime I needed something quick. They were my top assistants. I thank Lorenzo Carrazana, whose family of freedom fighters escaped the Castro dungeon that is modern Cuba. Hannah Wright provided an excellent compilation on women in Soviet prisons by distilling for me some of the heart-wrenching portions of Veronica Shapovalov’s painful book. I thank Anthony Maniero for his assistance at the Tamiment Library in searching the files on Lovett Fort-Whiteman. I’m also grateful to Drew Brackbill and Annabelle Rutledge. And from outside of Grove City College, kudos two current homeschoolers, David Williams and Michael Williams, for digging up a bunch of funny (and yet not-so-funny) communist jokes.
Finally, I would like to finish with a nod to my wise nine-year-old son, John Dominic, who summed up the subject of this book best one Sunday evening in late November 2016. As I typed away at my keyboard, writing, adding, cutting, editing, John peered over my shoulder and read some of my lines and chapter titles and puzzled. The deluge of insanity before him overwhelmed him. “What kind of psychopath book are you writing?” he asked in disturbed bewilderment.
It was a perfectly reasonable question with a perfectly reasonable answer: “A book on communism, Johnny,” I replied. “That’s about as psychopath as you can get.”
This book is for all the little Johns (and Janes) out there today, in the hopes of teaching them the truths about communism they will not learn in our wretched public schools and especially in our lousy, stinky universities. Here’s to all the souls that can still be spared from the clutches of the false god that failed.