What do you Believe in?
John leCarré penned the novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963 about a British secret agent named Alec Leamas who undertakes a disinformation campaign to discredit an East German official. As Leamas prepares for his dangerous mission, he meets a girl named Liz Gold at his job in a library.
Liz is a lonely Jewish girl and falls for Alec right away. Alec picks up that she has strong opinions and a high level of idealism. As they bask in the glow of new love, she picks up that Alec has a deep faith of some kind; so she asks him what he believes in. Alec answers facitiously that "I believe the Number 11 bus will take me to Hammersmith. I do not believe it is driven by Father Christmas."
But the facetious answer should not delude the reader that Leamas believes deeply in a civil society, where duty-bound people make life in England predictable and orderly. Alec then asks Liz what she believes in. She has evidently conducted confrontational conversations like this before and answers readily "I believe in history."
Leamas is confused for a moment, then blurts out, "Oh, no! Liz, you're not a bloody Communist!"
As a British secret agent, he knows the "bloody Communists" inside-out; so he laughs with a bitter irony that he should fall in love with one. It is interesting that he guessed the intention in Liz's use of the word "history" so quickly.
Karl Marx believed that the natural movement and direction of history favored the development of Communism, as the consequence of conflict between the workers and the ruling-class's control of the "means of production". Marx believed that Communism would alter history forever, and he was right! But mostly not for the reasons he imagined. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to see the consequences of Communism. They might have changed his perspective forever.
On the other hand, informed people of the present have ample perspective of Communism, enough to judge its faithful not guilty by reason of insanity. Although the Soviet Union, to use an important example, had a merely dictatorial regime in the beginning, it already exuded sinister tones, as the various factions within the regime fought for control, enough to suggest mutual hostility, followed by crippling purges, then by unbelievable atrocities against its own people and those in neighboring countries.
Not surprisingly, the American Communist Party's own factionalism and mutual hate corresponded to the Soviet model. The factionalism left behind disillusioned victims, who were themselves loyal Communists. They switched sides and went to work for the Voice of America or the CIA, while the faithful few remained behind to justify, however they could, the brutal suppression of the revolt in Hungary against the Soviet regime in 1956, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the murder of fugitives from that country, and finally the suppression of the "Prague Spring" in 1968.
Throughout this time, as the historical events remained in the engaged-phase of public memory, the number of Communist true-believers dwindled, while the number of nimble but less-engaged Soviet sympathizers increased. The remaining true-believers had to encounter skeptical Americans over how they could justify such cruelty and injustice. The last challenge to the true-believers occured during the Soviet-style administration of Pol Pot, the leader of the Kmer Rouge in Cambodia. Communist Party leaders in America could only haplessly try to justfiy Pol's genocide as a normal exercise in "cleaning house". Present-day Communists must invent new terms to escape the legacy of Communist rule, and mute any talk about Karl Marx's historical perspective.