The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

It would be her 1943 novel The Fountainhead that finally put Rand on the map. The theme, as she put it, was “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.”[xiii]

The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting non-political movies—by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories—and to make people absorb the basic principles of Collectivism by indirection and implication.[xvii]

Don’t smear the free enterprise system, industrialists, wealth, American political institutions, independent men, the profit motive or success. Don’t glorify failure, depravity or the collective, or deify “the common man.” Finally, don’t take politics lightly. “Freedom of speech does not imply that it is our duty to provide a knife for the murderer who wants to cut our throat,” Rand insisted.

“I don’t believe the American people should ever be told any lies, publicly or privately,” Rand insisted. “I don’t believe that lies are practical.”

Look, it is very hard to explain. It’s almost impossible to convey to a free people what it’s like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship.

Chesterton had argued that if one came upon a fence crossing the road, it must have been put there for some reason at some point. It is perfectly possible that the reason no longer existed. But until one knew what that reason had been, one should err on the side of maintaining structures which had once served some purpose. They might still be performing some function not entirely apparent.

By 1918, the Bolsheviks’ Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship envisioned a “withering away” of the family itself at some point in the future.[lvi] Preferring one’s children over others smacked of bourgeois values and inequality, both between families and within the family itself. No parent could do as good of a job educating their children as the government could. Indeed, it made perfect sense: the same government was going to educate—if not reeducate—the entire adult population as well. Love for one’s children was “narrow and irrational,” which state educators were not.[lvii]

Not only was the biology of the family open to discussion, but so was the biology of man himself. One communist writer mused that “We do not know whether, during Communism, emotions will disappear, whether the human being will change to such an extent that he will become a luminous globe consisting of the head and brain only, or whether new and transformed emotions will come into being.”[lx]

took until Teddy Roosevelt for a president to leave the United States while in office, and even then it was only to check in on progress in the Panama Canal and to tour America’s new protectorate of Puerto Rico.

Many books were burned, including the works of Descartes, Plato, Schopenhauer and virtually every other philosopher. Marx’s rival Bakunin and the anarchist Kropotkin were prohibited. Leo Tolstoy’s world-famous novels escaped censure, but his non-fiction works advocating Christian anarchism did not. Important books were not entirely destroyed. Kant, for example, could still be found in academic libraries, but could only be given out “under the strictest responsibility of the chief librarians.”[cx]

“The fact is that the Communists are the forerunners of fascism,” she wrote in 1933. “Neither Mussolini nor Hitler have made a single original step. All they had to do is follow and copy faithfully the steps taken by Lenin and Stalin.”

Lenin’s incapacitation led to a major change in Soviet history. He had subscribed to the idea of a worldwide workers’ revolution, country by country. Stalin, on the other hand, envisioned a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—a country where formerly independent states would be subsumed under one new nation, heavily centralized in Moscow.

As Hitler prepared to seize power in Germany for the first time, the Western papers did pretty much all they could to deny and obscure Stalin’s starvation of millions.

In 1932 and 1933, the New York Times was denying that the Soviet government was targeting the Ukrainian rural population with terror and genocide, just as less than a decade later it would obscure the news that Hitler was targeting German Jews.[cxliii]

The problem with communism is that eventually you run out of possible scapegoats for failure—at which point acknowledging or even noticing that something was wrong itself becomes a form of treason.

Those who had owed their appointments to the eight executed generals thereby fell under suspicion. Three of the five marshals of the Red Army were arrested, as well as thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, eight out of nine admirals, fifty of fifty-seven army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, twenty-five of twenty-eight army corps commissars, and all sixteen army commissars.[clxxxvii]

More than a few Black Americans went to live in the Soviet Union as part of Stalin’s outreach. Jamaican engineer Robert Robinson immigrated to the USSR in 1930. Years later he admitted that “Every single black I knew in the early 1930s who became a Soviet citizen disappeared from Moscow within seven years.”[ccii]

What we do know is that the interrogators brought in Kosior’s sixteen-year-old daughter Tamara, and raped her in front of him.[ccxl] That did it. That finally broke Stanislav Kosior. Kosior duly signed the confession that he, an ethnic Pole, had been a Polish spy. His execution was not immediate; he managed to outlive Tamara, who committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Whether Tamara’s death should technically be counted as one of the NKVD’s victims is an academic question. It is unlikely it was she who the New York Times had in mind when they published a 2017 opinion piece explaining “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”[ccxli]

The theory of “the marketplace of ideas” was often unable to compete with the reality of a monopoly of ideology—especially in an era where the flow of information was far more tightly controlled and technologically limited.

In 1948 the Soviet Union became the first country to recognize the newly-declared state of Israel, expecting Israel to be a bulwark against the West due to violent conflict between the Israelis and the British rulers. Months later Stalin saw this would not be the case, and refused to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.

Though Germany was still largely in ruins, local elections were still held in the Soviet Zone in the fall of 1946. Persisting in the narrative that Soviet totalitarianism was completely the opposite of Fascist totalitarianism by every important metric, the German Communists tried to win control through democratic processes. Despite Soviet efforts, the Social Democrats were the clear victors with 49% of the vote in a three-way race. Worse, the center-right Christian Democratic Union came in second. The Communist Party was a distant third, with 20% of the vote. In no district did they come in first, not even the ones where they had had majority support before Hitler’s reign.

As historian Frederick Taylor pointed out, the encased West Berlin was turned into “a bizarre prison in which paradoxically only those locked up inside were free.”[cdxvii]

Simon Wiesenthal made his name as a Nazi hunter, spending decades tracking down those members of the Third Reich who had managed to escape justice by fleeing abroad. His analysis of the East German secret police was a very blunt one: “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people. The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million.”[cdxxii] Roughly 2% of the East German population were informants, an enormously large percentage once one stops to think about it.