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Toward Soviet America
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Toward Soviet America is a book written in 1932 by William Z. Foster, the noted satrap of Joseph Stalin who as General Secretary purged the Communist Party USA of anyone dissenting from whatever party line Stalin was promoting that week.
Contents[edit]
The book, as might be expected of a Stalinist work, contains copious amounts of denialism, lies and bullshit, whitewashing the Soviet situation and characterizing reports of unpleasant facts about that country as "lies of the anti-Soviet propaganda campaign."
Of particular interest is the section in which Foster, following the then-current Soviet line, drops the usual pretense that communists consider themselves on the same side as liberals, blasting them and the non-communist left (who had the audacity to suggest that Stalin was some sort of dictator) as being "social fascists," thus anticipating in some measure the later claims of Jonah Goldberg.
In a hilarious passage, the practice of science under communism is described as:
“”The working class ... has no interest to degrade science into a subtle system of propaganda, but on the contrary to give it the freest possible development.
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He also somehow managed to keep a straight face while squawking about non-anthropogenic famines in non-communist countries, while pointedly and repeatedly denying the one his patron created.
Cold War reprinting[edit]
The book was reprinted in 1961 by the House Un-American Activities Committee, with a foreword by its chairman Francis E. Walter,[1] as an "expose of the evil communist conspiracy." However, the book was just a tiny bit outdated by then, with Stalin dead for some years and the Soviet Union in the midst of the Khrushchev Thaw. We're sure that was a totally honest mistake on the committee's part.Do You Believe That?
It appears that two parts of the book's agenda to which the HUAC specifically objected were equality for women and African-Americans.[2]