THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

As always, nobody but me ever notices the most incredible thing about Communism. It is such an enormous elephant in history's living room that no one will ever notice it.

Communism never accomplished ANYTHING. In Russia, an average population of two hundred million people over a period of seventy years did not produce one single thing. After Five Year Plan after Five Year Plan, the Russian economy today is about half the size of the economy of the Netherlands. The Russian economy of 1913 could have competed better in the world than the one Russia was left with when Communism fell.

There is not one single consumer good that anybody wants that came out of seventy years of Communism. Every single one of their "scientific" accomplishments came from their spies in the West.

Liberals hate that. What happened is very simple: a bunch of "intellectuals" like Lenin and Trotsky took over Russia and ran the economy according to "plans" made by people exactly like the leftist professors who rule our campuses today. What happened was what exactly what any rational person would know would happen. It was laughable.

Conservatives hate this. They want Communism to have been a great threat. It was, but not for the reasons a conservative is allowed to talk abut, as I will explain in the next article.

Conservatives need for Communism to have been a great ECONOMIC power. In the early 1950s I was studying economics, and all the CIA reports showed how enormous the Soviet economy and how it was growing. This was Allen Dulles' CIA, there was nothing leftist about it.

A tiny group of economists fought this nonsense. One of them was my professor of Russian economics grad school, Dr. Warren Nutter. When I was there the University of Virginia graduate school was one of the most famous on earth. It was a sanctuary for conservative economists, so they got the best. Nutter was not one of the two in my graduate faculty who later got Nobel Prizes, but he was world famous.

One major reason I did not finish my dissertation was that the new dean who took over when I went off to teach had sworn he would clean out that nest of right-wingers. He did, so my professors went and won their Nobel Prized elsewhere.

But the total, no, the predictable and hilarious failure of Communism, a bunch of dumbass leftist college professors trying to do something, was a secret only we knew.

The CIA error was repeated by everybody. As I explain in detail in Why Johnny Can't Think: America's Professor-Priesthood, the CIA distortion was what liberals wanted to believe, so there were ten thousand professor ready to line up to swear it was true. The left and the right were both solidly behind this nonsense.

The only thing stupider than the left is the middle of the road, and Communism's great economic achievements was truly the middle of the road.

But we slowly won the argument. Even the CIA finally backed down and admitted how laughable Communist "economics" was by 1980. Finally, when the Soviet empire collapsed overnight, we saw the pitiful results.