THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Rule One in dealing with Ancient Civilizations is essential to every kind of huckster. When Houdini went to seances to expose the frauds, every one of those frauds demanded that everyone be silent and respectful during the ceremony.

Laughing out loud at unbearable silliness is a sure sign of Heresy. I laughed out loud in class when I heard the professor read the preamble to the Soviet Constitution for the first time.

Let us remember who wrote that Constitution. The outstanding characteristic of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and every other leader and theorist of the Workers' Revolution was that not one of them had ever done an hour's actual labor in their entire lives.

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson worked on their farms when they were boys. They were experts in real planting. And if George Washington didn't actually chop down the cherry tree it certainly wasn't because he didn't know how. Ben Franklin was a journeyman printer among many other things.

But no champion of the working class knew how to do anything useful.

Let me make it clear to you how silly this situation is. Let's say that you and I are listening to some children setting up a game. The child proposing this game says, "OK, here's how it goes. Jimmy will do all the digging in the dirt. Billy will do the heavy lifting. Tommy will do the fighting."

So Billy says, "So what are you going to do?"

The kid setting up the game says, "I'll do the thinking and I'll give all the orders."

We would laugh out loud because you and I know that no small child, smart or not, is going to fall for that.

So when the Leaders and Theorists of the Working Class sat down to write a preamble to the Soviet Constitution, how did they set it up? Here it is

"The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is made up of farmers, workers, soldiers and intellectuals."

It said that these people would do all the farming, this group would work the factories, that group would do all the fighting. So the intellectuals do all the thinking and give all the orders and do nothing else.

I was only a teenager, but I laughed out loud at the obvious absurdity of the thing. No one else had ever laughed at this. If anyone had, it could have saved a hundred million lives.

The hucksters took over Russia. They also rule our universities today.