The impending death at age 87 of self-appointed President-for-life Josip Broz Tito gives us a chance to review the weaknesses of the Communist system and the continuing folly of the Western world.
The Communist ideology, which is totally materialistic and rejects the notion of life after death, cannot face up to the inevitability of death for each of us. A Communist ruler will not appoint a successor because he cannot bring himself to contemplate the awful nothingness which his doctrine tells him awaits him after death.
Tito spent his life enjoying sensual pleasures to an excess that makes the Bourbon kings look austere. No sharing the poverty of the proletariat for Tito! Yet, his iron dictatorship was so tight that no one dared to criticize him even after his own wife mysteriously disappeared.
Since Communism is a system in which the one who kills the most people rises to the top, Communist rulers know it might be dangerous to their health to appoint a successor. He might try to hasten the day of his takeover. So the death of a Communist ruler usually means a power vacuum and a power struggle.
Tito, the world’s senior Communist, established himself in power not only as a result of his own murders, but with the active assistance and intervention of Britain and the United States. During the crucial two years of 1944-46 when the fate of Yugoslavia hung in the balance, the London BBC and the Voice of America converted themselves into propaganda agencies for Tito and against the Yugoslav patriot, General Drazha Mihailovich, who had led the resistance against Hitler.
Pro-Communist publicists in the United States peddled the party line that Tito would bring “democracy” to Yugoslavia. Britain and the United States gave the Tito faction 95 percent of the supplies they received from outside the country.
After Tito’s minority movement, dominated by the Moscow Communists and hostile to Western democracy, got the upper hand, Tito inaugurated a manhunt to track down and capture Mihailovich. Tito then staged a typical Communist “trial” — an obscene parody on justice — complete with forced confessions and a denial of all rights.
A group of American airmen who had been rescued by Mihailovich during World War II sought to go to Yugoslavia to testify in his behalf. Tito stooges dragged a drugged Mihailovich into court to say he did not want the Americans to come. Two days after the end of the trial, on July 17, 1946, Tito had Mihailovich executed.
Winston Churchill later admitted his mistake in backing the pro-Communist Tito over the pro-Western, anti-Communist Mihailovich, but the American liberals never did. They continued to make believe Tito was our friend and to accord him all honor when he made a state visit to the United States.
Tito was undoubtedly cleverer than most Communist rulers. Faced with the typical economic failure of the socialist system, he devised a way to funnel free-enterprise dollars into his ailing country. In 1948 Tito declared his “independence” from Moscow, and the United States dutifully responded by starting a steady flow of U.S. dollars.
In the next 20 years, the American taxpayers gave Tito $2 billion in aid plus $700 million in military-aid grants. Tito’s independence of Moscow was always a fraud; in every world crisis, he stood with Moscow and against the United States.
The U. S. liberals have had a 40-year record of being conned by the Communists into peddling the line that they are merely “agrarian reformers,” “Jeffersonian democrats,” and advocates of “democracy.” That is the way the American public was sold on such hard-core Communists as Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro.
When they turn out to be Communists after all, the U.S. liberals just shrug their shoulders and say “everybody makes mistakes.” But, funny thing, the U.S. liberals never seem to make a “mistake” that helps an anti-Communist ruler come to power.
When it comes to doling out American foreign aid, the U.S. liberals demand that anti-Communist rulers (such as Chile) practice Western-style democracy and civil rights. But Tito, who received more than $2 billion, never allowed a single election during his entire reign.
