InterestedParticipant
05-05-2009, 12:28 PM
And Not a Shot Is Fired
How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the
Transition to Socialism
and
The Role of the Popular Masses
by Jan Kozak
Translated from the original Czech
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6922376/Kozak-And-Not-a-Shot-Is-Fired
- Introduction -
Thomas R. Eddlem
Appleton, WI
January 1999
ONE MIGHT ask today, years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: "Why would anyone want to read a report by a communist about the revolutionary takeover of Czechoslovakia a country that no longer exists? The Czechs are capitalists now, re- member?"
Such a question reveals a number of erroneous assumptions that this document convincingly refutes not the least of which is the false assumption that the leaders of the former Communist states of Eastern Europe were wedded to ideology. As Jan Kozak and 40 years of brutal Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia so clearly demonstrate, communism was a tactic employed for the assumption of power, rather than a sincere belief. These same tactics, modified only slightly, are being used today. Americans who labor under the false premise that communism is either an ideology or a system of economics that died with the Cold War do so at their personal and national peril.
Most Americans are falsely conditioned to believe today that elective governments are permanently established and practically invincible to destruction, so long as elections are free from fraud and consumers can buy Big Mac hamburgers in the market. And Not a Shot Is Fired authoritatively disproves that myth. This document is a "how-to" manual for totalitarian takeover of an elected parliamentary system of government through mainly legal and constitutional means. Kozak did not pontificate fuzzy theories of how "revolutionary parliamentarianism" might be accomplished. He wrote from personal experience and intimate knowledge of how this seizure of power actually was accomplished. Kozak's manual is especially important for contemporary Americans because most of the same methods described in this book are at work in the United States today, although those methods are not being followed directly under communist ideological auspices. More on that, after a little background.
Origin of the Document
And Not A Shot Is Fired only accidentally made it into the public domain. Written between 1950 and 1955 (and revised somewhat after that) as an internal Czechoslovak Communist Party strategy paper, the two chapters which comprise this document were discussed briefly by Communist Czechoslovak delegates to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in London in the fall of 1957. Kozak was a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee, briefly a member of the government secretariat, and later, official historian for the Czechoslovak Communist Party. A copy of these two chapters, officially entitled How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism and The Role of the Popular Masses, were requested through IPU channels by British delegates to the conference. The word came back from the Czechoslovaks that the just-published manuscript was mysteriously "out of print." It was not until January of 1961 that, according to the original British publishers, "by a mere coincidence, a copy of the report was secured." 1
Once received, Kozak's manifesto was quickly translated into English and published in February of that year by London's Independent Research Centre under a combination of the titles Kozak had given them: How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism and the Role of the Popular Masses. The document became an instant international sensation, and by the beginning of 1962 Kozak's manual was being widely distributed in several languages throughout Europe and the United States. Radio Free Europe (RFE) published its own English translation under the original title, and a committee of Congress reproduced and distributed the RFE translation as well. It is the RFE translation (as published by Congress) which we have reproduced here.
But most Americans who came to know Jan Kozak and his step-by-step program for a totalitarian takeover of a free government read the book under the title And Not A Shot Is Fired, under which the Connecticut-based Long House publishers distributed the original British translation of Kozak's manual. The title of the popular American edition came straight out of the superb introduction by John Howland Snow. Snow explained that Kozak's document is a blueprint of how a "representative government can be made authoritarian, legally, piece by piece. The form remains, an empty shell.... And not a shot is fired." 2
Americans with only a little knowledge of post-war Europe are under the illusion that after the defeat of Hitler, Stalin installed his lackeys in Eastern European governments solely by force of the Soviet Army. This was not the case. Stalin had to pledge at least the appearance of free elections at Yalta, even if the concessions granted by Franklin D. Roosevelt guaranteed the eventual absorption of Eastern Europe into Stalin's orbit. Eastern Europe actually enjoyed a short period of relative freedom after the war, during 1946 and 1947, when there were more or less free elections. Most of the Soviet-occupied countries elected non-communist majorities, despite severe harassment of non-communist parties during the election campaigns. This document explains how, after the elections in Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party insinuated itself into a coalition with Social Democrats and gained control of the Agricultural and Interior ministries.
The value of this book is not that it explained "new" techniques or strategies for taking over free governments. There was nothing original in the strategies and tactics for taking over free governments outlined by Kozak, although many Americans in the 1960s even among those who thought they were well informed regarded Kozak's blueprint as new tactics and ideology. In fact, most of what Kozak describes had been theorized a generation earlier by Italian Communist Party chief Antonio Gramsci. But only Kozak has demonstrated how such a takeover actually was accomplished. And Not A Shot Is Fired has enduring value for several reasons, not the least of which is that the brief treatise is sufficiently straightforward and comparatively free of communistic dialectical jargon that it can be profitably read by the casual reader. That the document was written in a form readily comprehensible by the lay reader can only be chalked up to Communist overconfidence in the inevitable ascendancy of their empire. Kozak boasted that the Communist empire "comprises over 25 per cent of the whole world; 35 per cent of the world's population lives in it and about 30 per cent of the world's industrial output is produced by it." (Page 1) To be sure, Jan Kozak prolifically used communistic patois throughout the manual, drawing from a lexicon that has been alternatively termed "dialectics," "wordsmanship," and "Aesopean language." And the document can be read much more profitably with a thorough knowledge of the Communist Party's dialectic of that time frame. But Kozak's manuscript is one of those rare specimens of totalitarian literature where the main thrust of the document is understandable on its face even without that knowledge.
Ideology as a Tactic, Not a Belief
The one, overriding goal stressed by Kozak was the objective of seizing total power. There is no concern for the lot of the poor, or the conditions of the laborer, or even the wealth of the industrialist evident in this manuscript; power is the one and only goal:
The overall character of the participation in this government was: not to lose sight, even for a moment, the carrying out of a complete socialist coup. (Page 12)
By using these methods, this principle was fulfilled in practice: not to lose sight for a single moment of the aim of a complete socialist over- throw. (Page 18)
[T]he following may and must be carried out successfully ... concentration of all power in the hands of the [communist-dominated] parliament." (Page 38)
In the course of the fight for the complete takeover of all power.
(Page 39)
Its [the Communist Party's] aim was ... the definite settlement of the question of power by consolidating people's democracy into a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Page 46)
There are more passages in the book about how the leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party sought dictatorial power for themselves, but the murderous 40-year reign of this criminal syndicate (a criminal syndicate clothed with the pretended legitimacy of state power) makes further elucidation unnecessary. Kozak was no dreamy-eyed professor embracing a nebulous idea of a future socialist Utopia; he and his confederates were reality-hardened schemers who would use any method available to gain as much power as possible. To power-hungry conspirators like Kozak, Communist ideology was mainly a useful cover for the organizational undertaking of a coup d'etat a tactic, not a belief system. The Communists actually disdained other socialists, such as social democrats, even though they constantly strove to coalesce with and co-opt these democratic parties.
Co-opting Ideological Language
The Communists adapted the language of socialist ideology and the political policies of socialist regimes for their own internal use on several fronts. Many socialist terms were given double meanings sometimes called "dialectics" among Communist revolutionaries for furtherance of their coup. Thus, terms like "proletariat" and "worker's class" can have their plain meaning or be code words for "Communist Party leaders." Or, "people's interest/' "democratic will of the masses" and "decision of the proletariat" could have its ordinary meaning or designate "orders from Party leadership."
The use of dialectic meaning in words was and remains a necessary part of any plan to overthrow free governments. Outright announcement of the goals and motivations of revolutionaries would arouse too much alarm among the people and create too much resistance, resulting in the defeat of the conspirators. The use of such double-meaning terms serves as a means of transmitting, indirectly, an action program to fellow conspirators without alarming the general populace. If confronted with the true dialectical meaning of the terms, conspirators can simply claim that it is merely ideological belief, and that the accuser is simply a paranoid who is falsely reading sinister motivations into the revolutionary's words.
Dialectical speech was not unique to Kozak's Czechoslovak branch of the Communist Party, nor has it been limited to Communism. Mafiosi and other criminal gangs typically have their own language that serves both as verbal handshakes and to communicate without attracting the notice of the law. And like the lingo of gangsters, Communist dialectics changes frequently in order to preserve its esoteric qualities. (Few would think that "wise guys" today would utilize antiquated terms such as "rubbed out," "greased," or "squeezed" anymore, be- cause they have long been in the common parlance.)
In Communist history, dialectical "code-speech" goes all the way back to the beginning. As far back as 1848, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels completed The Communist Manifesto, it was widely condemned as being a conspiratorial document. Few literate men then took seriously Marx and Engels' preposterous claim that the government-power grab which comprised the ten-plank platform in The Communist Manifesto would lead to what the two later promised as the "withering away" of the state.3 To claim that the state withers away when you give it more power requires profound stupidity or brazen dishonesty. And, by all accounts, Marx and Engels were not stupid. The Communist Manifesto, like Kozak's manuscript, is simply a manual of how to take control of a government, the latter having laid out the scheme in both more openly brazen terms and greater mechanical detail.
Tactical "Ideology" for Would-Be Dictators: Socialism
To a Communist conspirator like Kozak, socialist ideology offered advantages beyond mere discreet communication with fellow revolutionaries. Revolutionaries frequently promote socialism because a socialist economy even socialism under a parliamentary system of government heavily concentrates power in the hands of the few people who run the state. Concentration of power in the hands of a few government leaders makes the state easier to seize by a determined conspiracy. To conspirators, socialism serves as a control-the-wealth program, not a share-the-wealth program. Thus, none should be surprised that Hitler and Mussolini took over freely-elected parliaments in their countries legally and constitutionally, as Kozak and his co-conspirators later accomplished only after posing as socialist ideologues of one form or another.
Some may contest the assertion that Hitler and Mussolini arose out of socialism because of popular notions that these dictators stem from the "right" wing of the ideological spectrum. Such illusions have no basis in fact. The very name "Nazi" was almost never used by the Nazis themselves; it was merely an acronym for Hitler's "National Socialist Party" which created such socialist institutions as the government automobile industry. (Volkswagen, which originated as a government program under the Hitler regime, means "people's car" in German.) And Mussolini's deep socialist roots date back to before World War I, with his editorship of the socialist news- paper, Avanti! From a power politics perspective Mussolini's fascism, after being imposed upon Italy, differed only superficially with outright socialism. Mussolini had completely adopted the notion that government should be fully involved in controlling property, even if he did allow nominal private ownership. Il Duce's program that the state would be the "supreme regulator of the relations between all citizens of the state"4 fits hand-in-glove with the political program instituted by Kozak and his co-conspirators after they had taken power for themselves. Economic fascism, which is simply heavy government regulation and control of what is only nominally private property, serves essentially the same purpose for conspirators as outright government ownership under socialism. And fascism is the economic program increasingly being followed in the United States and the formerly socialist nations of East- ern Europe today. Economic fascism offers a number of ad- vantages for the modern conspirator over the socialism used by Kozak but only because fascism is typically called some other nebulous name such as "Third Way" or "public-private partnership," or (even worse) falsely represented as "privatization," or "free trade," or "free enterprise." The fascist economic model does not carry all the public relations baggage of Stalinist socialism, and, over the short term at least, it can be more economically efficient than outright socialism.* Thus, it should be no surprise that the same conspirators who ran the governments of former Soviet "Republics" of Eastern Europe have readily exchanged their Communist Party posts for "elective" posts, or that the brand of state control they are now pushing is called "privatization" and "economic reform."
Pressure from Above, Pressure from Below
*Under fascism, the "private" property owner may be heavily controlled by government rules and regulations, but he is often still under the illusion that he "owns" his property. Thus, he may still strive to improve his property as a property owner would in a laissez-faire system. This is particularly the case when the fascist state, in its benevolence, allows the propertied class to keep some of its wealth or to make some decisions(within government guidelines, of course).
A socialist or fascist economic policy is necessary for dictatorial revolution in an elective government and not simply because socialism or fascism concentrates the physical power of the state in the few who run the executive branch of government. While these policies certainly enable the state to acquire power (and to shift power away from the legislature) their chief role as necessary ingredients for revolution is that they give the state hegemonic control (leadership) over the various non-governmental cultural institutions institutions which may have enough strength to resist and overthrow a political coup d'etat. Kozak uses an excellent example in this text of the hegemonic leadership manufactured by the Communists over agriculture in Czechoslovakia. Farmers and ranchers have traditionally been very conservative, independent, and resistant to tyranny. In a heavily agricultural state such as war-devastated Czechoslovakia, farmers and ranchers would have been a strong counter-revolutionary force. Indeed, Stalin had found fanners to be the chief anti-totalitarian force in pre-war Ukraine.
But in Czechoslovakia, Communist cadres "from below" infiltrated and co-opted the conservative leadership of the agricultural interests, giving the misleading impression that farmers were divided on the revolution or perhaps even supportive of it. Meanwhile, "parliamentary socialism" - the "pressure from above" used the power of the state, under the pretext of yielding to pressure from "farmers" (represented by these Communist infiltrators) to break up the economic base and strength of the independent farmers.
As the preceding example illustrates, Kozak outlined the main thesis of a giant pincer's strategy for transforming a parliamentary system of government into a totalitarian dictator- ship the strategy of combining "pressure from above" with "pressure from below" to effect revolutionary change. In essence, under this plan, the Communist minority in parliament (in coalition with socialist parties) serves the revolution by initiating policies and legislation which strengthen the hand of grassroots revolutionaries and punish threats to the coup (i.e., the Right). Meanwhile, grassroots revolutionaries whip up the appearance of popular support for the legislative program to advance the revolution through strikes, rallies, petitions, threats, and sometimes sabotage. The "pressure from below" by the small number of revolutionaries and their larger number of dupes is then used to "justify" the centralization of power in the hands of the executive branch of the state. Wishywashy politicians are intimidated, and the "pressure from above" intensifies. Each legislative victory results in new demands (the "pressure from below") for even stronger legislation, which is relentlessly pursued by communists and their dupes in parliament who claim, of course, that they are acting in the name of the popular will. The cycle continues until opposition is completely powerless, intimidated, or liquidated and the revolution is a fait accompli.
The theory for using "pressure from above" and "pressure from below" in order to acquire power, explained in this manual by Kozak, first emerged in the writings of an obscure Italian Communist thinker named Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci had plenty of time for contemplating the reasons why his Communist Party had lost Italy to Benito Mussolini, since he spent the last years of his life in Mussolini's jails. Gramsci concluded that in order to capture the power in a state, one must first capture the culture. By culture, Gramsci meant the powerful non- governmental institutions of great influence throughout the nation, specifically: churches, unions, mass media, political parties, universities and educational centers, business organizations, foundations, etc. Gramsci explained that, in hindsight, it was unreasonable to expect the Communists to have seized power in pre-World War II Italy in the same way that the October Revolution had succeeded in Russia. "In [totalitarian, Tsarist] Russia the state was everything," Gramsci explained in his Prison Notebooks. "[C]ivil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed."5
In the West, Gramsci explained, family loyalties, faith in God, and lawful limits on governmental power were thoroughly represented in the cultural institutions. Gramsci wrote that "there can and must be a 'political hegemony' even before assuming government power, and in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solely on the power and material force that is given by government."6 Gramsci argued that without a successful "war of position" for "cultural hegemony" (cultural leadership) within these institutions, a revolutionary power grab even by a well-organized conspiracy is impossible. Ultimately, the Italian Communists were outmaneuvered in the cultural war by Mussolini's black shirts. Belief in God, family, and limited government in the developed nations of the West constitutes a cultural system of "fortresses and earthworks" against revolution, according to Gramsci. A coup d'etat, without having first subverted these "fortresses and earthworks" through the acquisition of political/cultural hegemony, would only be temporary and result in a quick and successful counter revolution. The revolutionaries of today are well aware that their struggle for control of the culture cannot be won overnight. Gramsci follower and Frank- fort school of socialism apostle Rudi Dutschke explained the Gramscian struggle as a "long march through the institutions"7 to win Gramsci's "war of position" over any cultural institutions which would stand in the way of a coup d'etat by a conspiratorial faction.
To revolutionaries like Kozak and Gramsci, all cultural and governmental institutions constitute battlefields. Kozak explained that the Czech Communist Party created "mass organizations" to form that pressure from below, and used the power of the state to take over, eliminate or isolate the old conservative institutions: "[T]he 'pressure from above' was applied in an ever-increasing measure for the direct suppression and destruction of the counter-revolutionary machinations of the bourgeoisie [the middle class]. Let us recall the signal role played in the development and extension of that pressure by the Ministry of the Interior, for instance, which was led by the Communists and the units of the State Security directed by them." (Page 13) As the state passed draconian gun control laws throughout Eastern European countries in the aftermath of World War II, the Communist Party armed itself and together with its control of the police organs of government obtained a monopoly on force in these nations. "The necessity of arming the most mature part of the workers' class for re- pulsing the counter-revolutionary machinations of the bourgeoisie ... has been proved, incidentally, again by the later formation of the workers' militias in peoples' democratic Hungary and Poland," Kozak emphasized. (Page 25) That victorious revolutionaries would need a monopoly on force to consolidate control of a country is an obvious necessity, and it highlights our Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms as an obvious "earthwork" against revolution. But in Czechoslovakia, it should be emphasized, the monopoly on force mainly served a more subtle purpose than a violent over- throw; it created a helpless feeling among the increasingly isolated non-communist opposition. The clash of arms was never necessary.
Many elements of the "pressure from above" and "pressure from below" stratagem explained by Kozak are being used against Americans on a variety of fronts toward the consolidation of power in the hands of the state. Kozak explained that the revolution also "breaks through the onerous circle of intimidation and spiritual terror of the old institutions, the Church, etc." (Page 19) Modern activists and would-be revolutionaries attempt to isolate and outmaneuver those churches that cling to traditional teachings by (for example) using Kozak's tactics to effect change on the issue of birth control and abortion. Both the U.S. government and the United Nations (as well as tax-exempt foundations) fund private organizations such as Planned Parenthood that perform abortions and distribute birth control devices. At the same time, these organizations lobby governments and create the appearance of popular support for government-subsidized abortion on demand and (eventually) coercive population-control programs. The United Nations uses a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) caucus of left-wing organizations to create grassroots (pressure from below) to justify its authoritarian agenda, which (on the population-control front) includes support for China's population-control program of forced abortion. The NGOs, of course, by no means represent the grassroots. But that does not prevent the movers and shakers at the top including the foundation heads and governmental officials who lavishly fund them from representing them as such. There are dozens of other modern examples of how the "pressure from above" has created and funded the "pressure from below," from the environmentalist movement to the international gun control movement, the details of which could fill many pages.
The U.S. Constitution a formidable "earthwork"
The U.S. Constitution by way of contrast with parliamentary socialism/fascism offers a formidable series of barriers to would-be dictators, with its separation of powers, system of checks and balances, reserved rights, delegated powers, and free enterprise-based economy. James Madison explained in The Federalist, #47, that the division of powers in the U.S. Constitution was devised with the following guiding principle of politics constantly in mind: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self- appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
Gramsci strongly felt that "the whole liberal [i.e., classical, laissez-faire liberalism] ideology, with its strengths and weaknesses, can be summed up in the principle of the division of powers, and the source of liberalism's weakness becomes apparent: it is the bureaucracy, i.e. the crystallization of the leading personnel, which exercises coercive power..."8 In other words, Gramsci was saying that revolutionaries can make use of ambitious individual politicians - who need not necessarily be revolutionaries at first - to usurp power and break down the division of powers which limits government in constitutional systems. Madison concurred in The Federalist, #10, that the main problem in free governments was the tendency to faction and ambition among the ruling personalities. "The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice," the Father of the Constitution explained. But the Founders constructed the U.S. Constitution to ameliorate this very problem. As Alexander Hamilton ex- plained in The Federalist, #9:
The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained and its im- perfections lessened or avoided.
How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the
Transition to Socialism
and
The Role of the Popular Masses
by Jan Kozak
Translated from the original Czech
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6922376/Kozak-And-Not-a-Shot-Is-Fired
- Introduction -
Thomas R. Eddlem
Appleton, WI
January 1999
ONE MIGHT ask today, years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: "Why would anyone want to read a report by a communist about the revolutionary takeover of Czechoslovakia a country that no longer exists? The Czechs are capitalists now, re- member?"
Such a question reveals a number of erroneous assumptions that this document convincingly refutes not the least of which is the false assumption that the leaders of the former Communist states of Eastern Europe were wedded to ideology. As Jan Kozak and 40 years of brutal Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia so clearly demonstrate, communism was a tactic employed for the assumption of power, rather than a sincere belief. These same tactics, modified only slightly, are being used today. Americans who labor under the false premise that communism is either an ideology or a system of economics that died with the Cold War do so at their personal and national peril.
Most Americans are falsely conditioned to believe today that elective governments are permanently established and practically invincible to destruction, so long as elections are free from fraud and consumers can buy Big Mac hamburgers in the market. And Not a Shot Is Fired authoritatively disproves that myth. This document is a "how-to" manual for totalitarian takeover of an elected parliamentary system of government through mainly legal and constitutional means. Kozak did not pontificate fuzzy theories of how "revolutionary parliamentarianism" might be accomplished. He wrote from personal experience and intimate knowledge of how this seizure of power actually was accomplished. Kozak's manual is especially important for contemporary Americans because most of the same methods described in this book are at work in the United States today, although those methods are not being followed directly under communist ideological auspices. More on that, after a little background.
Origin of the Document
And Not A Shot Is Fired only accidentally made it into the public domain. Written between 1950 and 1955 (and revised somewhat after that) as an internal Czechoslovak Communist Party strategy paper, the two chapters which comprise this document were discussed briefly by Communist Czechoslovak delegates to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in London in the fall of 1957. Kozak was a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee, briefly a member of the government secretariat, and later, official historian for the Czechoslovak Communist Party. A copy of these two chapters, officially entitled How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism and The Role of the Popular Masses, were requested through IPU channels by British delegates to the conference. The word came back from the Czechoslovaks that the just-published manuscript was mysteriously "out of print." It was not until January of 1961 that, according to the original British publishers, "by a mere coincidence, a copy of the report was secured." 1
Once received, Kozak's manifesto was quickly translated into English and published in February of that year by London's Independent Research Centre under a combination of the titles Kozak had given them: How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism and the Role of the Popular Masses. The document became an instant international sensation, and by the beginning of 1962 Kozak's manual was being widely distributed in several languages throughout Europe and the United States. Radio Free Europe (RFE) published its own English translation under the original title, and a committee of Congress reproduced and distributed the RFE translation as well. It is the RFE translation (as published by Congress) which we have reproduced here.
But most Americans who came to know Jan Kozak and his step-by-step program for a totalitarian takeover of a free government read the book under the title And Not A Shot Is Fired, under which the Connecticut-based Long House publishers distributed the original British translation of Kozak's manual. The title of the popular American edition came straight out of the superb introduction by John Howland Snow. Snow explained that Kozak's document is a blueprint of how a "representative government can be made authoritarian, legally, piece by piece. The form remains, an empty shell.... And not a shot is fired." 2
Americans with only a little knowledge of post-war Europe are under the illusion that after the defeat of Hitler, Stalin installed his lackeys in Eastern European governments solely by force of the Soviet Army. This was not the case. Stalin had to pledge at least the appearance of free elections at Yalta, even if the concessions granted by Franklin D. Roosevelt guaranteed the eventual absorption of Eastern Europe into Stalin's orbit. Eastern Europe actually enjoyed a short period of relative freedom after the war, during 1946 and 1947, when there were more or less free elections. Most of the Soviet-occupied countries elected non-communist majorities, despite severe harassment of non-communist parties during the election campaigns. This document explains how, after the elections in Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party insinuated itself into a coalition with Social Democrats and gained control of the Agricultural and Interior ministries.
The value of this book is not that it explained "new" techniques or strategies for taking over free governments. There was nothing original in the strategies and tactics for taking over free governments outlined by Kozak, although many Americans in the 1960s even among those who thought they were well informed regarded Kozak's blueprint as new tactics and ideology. In fact, most of what Kozak describes had been theorized a generation earlier by Italian Communist Party chief Antonio Gramsci. But only Kozak has demonstrated how such a takeover actually was accomplished. And Not A Shot Is Fired has enduring value for several reasons, not the least of which is that the brief treatise is sufficiently straightforward and comparatively free of communistic dialectical jargon that it can be profitably read by the casual reader. That the document was written in a form readily comprehensible by the lay reader can only be chalked up to Communist overconfidence in the inevitable ascendancy of their empire. Kozak boasted that the Communist empire "comprises over 25 per cent of the whole world; 35 per cent of the world's population lives in it and about 30 per cent of the world's industrial output is produced by it." (Page 1) To be sure, Jan Kozak prolifically used communistic patois throughout the manual, drawing from a lexicon that has been alternatively termed "dialectics," "wordsmanship," and "Aesopean language." And the document can be read much more profitably with a thorough knowledge of the Communist Party's dialectic of that time frame. But Kozak's manuscript is one of those rare specimens of totalitarian literature where the main thrust of the document is understandable on its face even without that knowledge.
Ideology as a Tactic, Not a Belief
The one, overriding goal stressed by Kozak was the objective of seizing total power. There is no concern for the lot of the poor, or the conditions of the laborer, or even the wealth of the industrialist evident in this manuscript; power is the one and only goal:
The overall character of the participation in this government was: not to lose sight, even for a moment, the carrying out of a complete socialist coup. (Page 12)
By using these methods, this principle was fulfilled in practice: not to lose sight for a single moment of the aim of a complete socialist over- throw. (Page 18)
[T]he following may and must be carried out successfully ... concentration of all power in the hands of the [communist-dominated] parliament." (Page 38)
In the course of the fight for the complete takeover of all power.
(Page 39)
Its [the Communist Party's] aim was ... the definite settlement of the question of power by consolidating people's democracy into a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Page 46)
There are more passages in the book about how the leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party sought dictatorial power for themselves, but the murderous 40-year reign of this criminal syndicate (a criminal syndicate clothed with the pretended legitimacy of state power) makes further elucidation unnecessary. Kozak was no dreamy-eyed professor embracing a nebulous idea of a future socialist Utopia; he and his confederates were reality-hardened schemers who would use any method available to gain as much power as possible. To power-hungry conspirators like Kozak, Communist ideology was mainly a useful cover for the organizational undertaking of a coup d'etat a tactic, not a belief system. The Communists actually disdained other socialists, such as social democrats, even though they constantly strove to coalesce with and co-opt these democratic parties.
Co-opting Ideological Language
The Communists adapted the language of socialist ideology and the political policies of socialist regimes for their own internal use on several fronts. Many socialist terms were given double meanings sometimes called "dialectics" among Communist revolutionaries for furtherance of their coup. Thus, terms like "proletariat" and "worker's class" can have their plain meaning or be code words for "Communist Party leaders." Or, "people's interest/' "democratic will of the masses" and "decision of the proletariat" could have its ordinary meaning or designate "orders from Party leadership."
The use of dialectic meaning in words was and remains a necessary part of any plan to overthrow free governments. Outright announcement of the goals and motivations of revolutionaries would arouse too much alarm among the people and create too much resistance, resulting in the defeat of the conspirators. The use of such double-meaning terms serves as a means of transmitting, indirectly, an action program to fellow conspirators without alarming the general populace. If confronted with the true dialectical meaning of the terms, conspirators can simply claim that it is merely ideological belief, and that the accuser is simply a paranoid who is falsely reading sinister motivations into the revolutionary's words.
Dialectical speech was not unique to Kozak's Czechoslovak branch of the Communist Party, nor has it been limited to Communism. Mafiosi and other criminal gangs typically have their own language that serves both as verbal handshakes and to communicate without attracting the notice of the law. And like the lingo of gangsters, Communist dialectics changes frequently in order to preserve its esoteric qualities. (Few would think that "wise guys" today would utilize antiquated terms such as "rubbed out," "greased," or "squeezed" anymore, be- cause they have long been in the common parlance.)
In Communist history, dialectical "code-speech" goes all the way back to the beginning. As far back as 1848, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels completed The Communist Manifesto, it was widely condemned as being a conspiratorial document. Few literate men then took seriously Marx and Engels' preposterous claim that the government-power grab which comprised the ten-plank platform in The Communist Manifesto would lead to what the two later promised as the "withering away" of the state.3 To claim that the state withers away when you give it more power requires profound stupidity or brazen dishonesty. And, by all accounts, Marx and Engels were not stupid. The Communist Manifesto, like Kozak's manuscript, is simply a manual of how to take control of a government, the latter having laid out the scheme in both more openly brazen terms and greater mechanical detail.
Tactical "Ideology" for Would-Be Dictators: Socialism
To a Communist conspirator like Kozak, socialist ideology offered advantages beyond mere discreet communication with fellow revolutionaries. Revolutionaries frequently promote socialism because a socialist economy even socialism under a parliamentary system of government heavily concentrates power in the hands of the few people who run the state. Concentration of power in the hands of a few government leaders makes the state easier to seize by a determined conspiracy. To conspirators, socialism serves as a control-the-wealth program, not a share-the-wealth program. Thus, none should be surprised that Hitler and Mussolini took over freely-elected parliaments in their countries legally and constitutionally, as Kozak and his co-conspirators later accomplished only after posing as socialist ideologues of one form or another.
Some may contest the assertion that Hitler and Mussolini arose out of socialism because of popular notions that these dictators stem from the "right" wing of the ideological spectrum. Such illusions have no basis in fact. The very name "Nazi" was almost never used by the Nazis themselves; it was merely an acronym for Hitler's "National Socialist Party" which created such socialist institutions as the government automobile industry. (Volkswagen, which originated as a government program under the Hitler regime, means "people's car" in German.) And Mussolini's deep socialist roots date back to before World War I, with his editorship of the socialist news- paper, Avanti! From a power politics perspective Mussolini's fascism, after being imposed upon Italy, differed only superficially with outright socialism. Mussolini had completely adopted the notion that government should be fully involved in controlling property, even if he did allow nominal private ownership. Il Duce's program that the state would be the "supreme regulator of the relations between all citizens of the state"4 fits hand-in-glove with the political program instituted by Kozak and his co-conspirators after they had taken power for themselves. Economic fascism, which is simply heavy government regulation and control of what is only nominally private property, serves essentially the same purpose for conspirators as outright government ownership under socialism. And fascism is the economic program increasingly being followed in the United States and the formerly socialist nations of East- ern Europe today. Economic fascism offers a number of ad- vantages for the modern conspirator over the socialism used by Kozak but only because fascism is typically called some other nebulous name such as "Third Way" or "public-private partnership," or (even worse) falsely represented as "privatization," or "free trade," or "free enterprise." The fascist economic model does not carry all the public relations baggage of Stalinist socialism, and, over the short term at least, it can be more economically efficient than outright socialism.* Thus, it should be no surprise that the same conspirators who ran the governments of former Soviet "Republics" of Eastern Europe have readily exchanged their Communist Party posts for "elective" posts, or that the brand of state control they are now pushing is called "privatization" and "economic reform."
Pressure from Above, Pressure from Below
*Under fascism, the "private" property owner may be heavily controlled by government rules and regulations, but he is often still under the illusion that he "owns" his property. Thus, he may still strive to improve his property as a property owner would in a laissez-faire system. This is particularly the case when the fascist state, in its benevolence, allows the propertied class to keep some of its wealth or to make some decisions(within government guidelines, of course).
A socialist or fascist economic policy is necessary for dictatorial revolution in an elective government and not simply because socialism or fascism concentrates the physical power of the state in the few who run the executive branch of government. While these policies certainly enable the state to acquire power (and to shift power away from the legislature) their chief role as necessary ingredients for revolution is that they give the state hegemonic control (leadership) over the various non-governmental cultural institutions institutions which may have enough strength to resist and overthrow a political coup d'etat. Kozak uses an excellent example in this text of the hegemonic leadership manufactured by the Communists over agriculture in Czechoslovakia. Farmers and ranchers have traditionally been very conservative, independent, and resistant to tyranny. In a heavily agricultural state such as war-devastated Czechoslovakia, farmers and ranchers would have been a strong counter-revolutionary force. Indeed, Stalin had found fanners to be the chief anti-totalitarian force in pre-war Ukraine.
But in Czechoslovakia, Communist cadres "from below" infiltrated and co-opted the conservative leadership of the agricultural interests, giving the misleading impression that farmers were divided on the revolution or perhaps even supportive of it. Meanwhile, "parliamentary socialism" - the "pressure from above" used the power of the state, under the pretext of yielding to pressure from "farmers" (represented by these Communist infiltrators) to break up the economic base and strength of the independent farmers.
As the preceding example illustrates, Kozak outlined the main thesis of a giant pincer's strategy for transforming a parliamentary system of government into a totalitarian dictator- ship the strategy of combining "pressure from above" with "pressure from below" to effect revolutionary change. In essence, under this plan, the Communist minority in parliament (in coalition with socialist parties) serves the revolution by initiating policies and legislation which strengthen the hand of grassroots revolutionaries and punish threats to the coup (i.e., the Right). Meanwhile, grassroots revolutionaries whip up the appearance of popular support for the legislative program to advance the revolution through strikes, rallies, petitions, threats, and sometimes sabotage. The "pressure from below" by the small number of revolutionaries and their larger number of dupes is then used to "justify" the centralization of power in the hands of the executive branch of the state. Wishywashy politicians are intimidated, and the "pressure from above" intensifies. Each legislative victory results in new demands (the "pressure from below") for even stronger legislation, which is relentlessly pursued by communists and their dupes in parliament who claim, of course, that they are acting in the name of the popular will. The cycle continues until opposition is completely powerless, intimidated, or liquidated and the revolution is a fait accompli.
The theory for using "pressure from above" and "pressure from below" in order to acquire power, explained in this manual by Kozak, first emerged in the writings of an obscure Italian Communist thinker named Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci had plenty of time for contemplating the reasons why his Communist Party had lost Italy to Benito Mussolini, since he spent the last years of his life in Mussolini's jails. Gramsci concluded that in order to capture the power in a state, one must first capture the culture. By culture, Gramsci meant the powerful non- governmental institutions of great influence throughout the nation, specifically: churches, unions, mass media, political parties, universities and educational centers, business organizations, foundations, etc. Gramsci explained that, in hindsight, it was unreasonable to expect the Communists to have seized power in pre-World War II Italy in the same way that the October Revolution had succeeded in Russia. "In [totalitarian, Tsarist] Russia the state was everything," Gramsci explained in his Prison Notebooks. "[C]ivil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed."5
In the West, Gramsci explained, family loyalties, faith in God, and lawful limits on governmental power were thoroughly represented in the cultural institutions. Gramsci wrote that "there can and must be a 'political hegemony' even before assuming government power, and in order to exercise political leadership or hegemony one must not count solely on the power and material force that is given by government."6 Gramsci argued that without a successful "war of position" for "cultural hegemony" (cultural leadership) within these institutions, a revolutionary power grab even by a well-organized conspiracy is impossible. Ultimately, the Italian Communists were outmaneuvered in the cultural war by Mussolini's black shirts. Belief in God, family, and limited government in the developed nations of the West constitutes a cultural system of "fortresses and earthworks" against revolution, according to Gramsci. A coup d'etat, without having first subverted these "fortresses and earthworks" through the acquisition of political/cultural hegemony, would only be temporary and result in a quick and successful counter revolution. The revolutionaries of today are well aware that their struggle for control of the culture cannot be won overnight. Gramsci follower and Frank- fort school of socialism apostle Rudi Dutschke explained the Gramscian struggle as a "long march through the institutions"7 to win Gramsci's "war of position" over any cultural institutions which would stand in the way of a coup d'etat by a conspiratorial faction.
To revolutionaries like Kozak and Gramsci, all cultural and governmental institutions constitute battlefields. Kozak explained that the Czech Communist Party created "mass organizations" to form that pressure from below, and used the power of the state to take over, eliminate or isolate the old conservative institutions: "[T]he 'pressure from above' was applied in an ever-increasing measure for the direct suppression and destruction of the counter-revolutionary machinations of the bourgeoisie [the middle class]. Let us recall the signal role played in the development and extension of that pressure by the Ministry of the Interior, for instance, which was led by the Communists and the units of the State Security directed by them." (Page 13) As the state passed draconian gun control laws throughout Eastern European countries in the aftermath of World War II, the Communist Party armed itself and together with its control of the police organs of government obtained a monopoly on force in these nations. "The necessity of arming the most mature part of the workers' class for re- pulsing the counter-revolutionary machinations of the bourgeoisie ... has been proved, incidentally, again by the later formation of the workers' militias in peoples' democratic Hungary and Poland," Kozak emphasized. (Page 25) That victorious revolutionaries would need a monopoly on force to consolidate control of a country is an obvious necessity, and it highlights our Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms as an obvious "earthwork" against revolution. But in Czechoslovakia, it should be emphasized, the monopoly on force mainly served a more subtle purpose than a violent over- throw; it created a helpless feeling among the increasingly isolated non-communist opposition. The clash of arms was never necessary.
Many elements of the "pressure from above" and "pressure from below" stratagem explained by Kozak are being used against Americans on a variety of fronts toward the consolidation of power in the hands of the state. Kozak explained that the revolution also "breaks through the onerous circle of intimidation and spiritual terror of the old institutions, the Church, etc." (Page 19) Modern activists and would-be revolutionaries attempt to isolate and outmaneuver those churches that cling to traditional teachings by (for example) using Kozak's tactics to effect change on the issue of birth control and abortion. Both the U.S. government and the United Nations (as well as tax-exempt foundations) fund private organizations such as Planned Parenthood that perform abortions and distribute birth control devices. At the same time, these organizations lobby governments and create the appearance of popular support for government-subsidized abortion on demand and (eventually) coercive population-control programs. The United Nations uses a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) caucus of left-wing organizations to create grassroots (pressure from below) to justify its authoritarian agenda, which (on the population-control front) includes support for China's population-control program of forced abortion. The NGOs, of course, by no means represent the grassroots. But that does not prevent the movers and shakers at the top including the foundation heads and governmental officials who lavishly fund them from representing them as such. There are dozens of other modern examples of how the "pressure from above" has created and funded the "pressure from below," from the environmentalist movement to the international gun control movement, the details of which could fill many pages.
The U.S. Constitution a formidable "earthwork"
The U.S. Constitution by way of contrast with parliamentary socialism/fascism offers a formidable series of barriers to would-be dictators, with its separation of powers, system of checks and balances, reserved rights, delegated powers, and free enterprise-based economy. James Madison explained in The Federalist, #47, that the division of powers in the U.S. Constitution was devised with the following guiding principle of politics constantly in mind: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self- appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
Gramsci strongly felt that "the whole liberal [i.e., classical, laissez-faire liberalism] ideology, with its strengths and weaknesses, can be summed up in the principle of the division of powers, and the source of liberalism's weakness becomes apparent: it is the bureaucracy, i.e. the crystallization of the leading personnel, which exercises coercive power..."8 In other words, Gramsci was saying that revolutionaries can make use of ambitious individual politicians - who need not necessarily be revolutionaries at first - to usurp power and break down the division of powers which limits government in constitutional systems. Madison concurred in The Federalist, #10, that the main problem in free governments was the tendency to faction and ambition among the ruling personalities. "The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice," the Father of the Constitution explained. But the Founders constructed the U.S. Constitution to ameliorate this very problem. As Alexander Hamilton ex- plained in The Federalist, #9:
The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained and its im- perfections lessened or avoided.