This is the latest in a series of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor at Grove City College, on his latest work, Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, based on a shocking volume of declassified materials from Soviet and Communist Party USA archives and FBI files. Dinesh D’Souza calls Dupes “a significant addition to our historical understanding of the past hundred years.” Big Peace’s Peter Schweizer calls it the “21st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.
Big Peace: Professor Kengor, you’ve been commenting (click here and here) on the debate over defunding Planned Parenthood. Democrats refuse to defund. Most interesting is how you link this to a trip to the Soviet Union by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Our readers may be shocked.
Kengor: Let me back up to the larger context of the 1920s and 1930s. In Dupes, I profile what I call “Potemkin Progressives.” These were progressives who travelled to Lenin’s and Stalin’s USSR thinking they were embarking upon a Brave New World. And just in case they weren’t entirely sure, Soviet handlers manipulated them with phony Potemkin village tours, where they were duped with stunning success. Among the suckers was George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, ACLU founders Roger Baldwin and Harry Ward, faculty from Columbia and other universities, an endless line of Religious Left “social justice” pastors, the venerable John Dewey, and on and on. By the way, we need to do one of these “Big Dupes” interviews specifically on John Dewey.
Big Peace: You have three chapters on John Dewey in Dupes.
Kengor: Yes. This icon of American public education had a mutual admiration society with the Bolsheviks, who rapidly translated his writings into Russian to help develop their educational system. The Soviets invited Dewey to the USSR, where he took enthusiastic notes about the wondrous “Great Experiment” he observed in the Motherland.
Big Peace: And you say that Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, did the same?
Kengor: Margaret Sanger got there in 1934, at the start of Stalin’s Great Purge. Her pal at the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, had preceded her. He was smitten with the “liberty” he discovered, writing a book called Liberty Under the Soviets. Among the “liberties” he extolled were those for Russian women. It was these “rights,” such as birth control and abortion, which drew Margaret Sanger.
Big Peace: The Bolsheviks had already legalized abortion?
Kengor: Oh, yes. The Soviets were way ahead of our liberals. It took liberals longer to “progress” there. Key to the Bolsheviks’ embrace of abortion was their secular atheism and disregard for the sanctity and dignity of human life. Margaret Sanger herself repeatedly observed (approvingly) that the Soviets were free of “religious condemnation” or “religious restrictions” to abortion. Gee, if only America could be so enlightened.
Well, it took America a while to get there. What our liberals needed was enough duped moderates and traditional Democrats to vote for secular progressives, who gravitated to the Democratic Party. Traditional “God and gun” Democrats obliviously pulled the lever for the likes of the Clintons, Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Obama, etc. These folks are the unwitting handmaidens of the Death Culture; they’ve enabled their party to become the Party of Death.
Big Peace: America has averaged over a million abortions annually since Roe v. Wade. You say the Soviets hit those levels from the start. Worse, you quote Margaret Sanger predicting that abortions would vanish in the USSR rather than rise.
Kengor: That’s one of the most fatal erroneous predictions I’ve ever encountered. Sanger acknowledged the Soviets were already doing 100,000 abortions annually in Moscow alone, but assured this would soon end once the communist system was in full fruition.
Here’s the exact quote from Sanger, writing in her publication Birth Control Review, June 1935: “All the [Soviet] officials with whom I discussed the matter stated that as soon as the economic and social plans of Soviet Russia are realized, neither abortions nor contraception will be necessary or desired. A functioning Communistic society will assure the happiness of every child, and will assume the full responsibility for its welfare and education.”
Now that’s pure progressive utopianism. Behold the blind faith in central planning.
Big Peace: Did abortions soon disappear in the Soviet Union?
Kengor: They skyrocketed to over seven million per year. Margaret Sanger couldn’t have been more wrong. But that’s what happens with progressives. They can’t tell you where the goalpost is, or what their ultimate objectives are, or where they expect their policies to end up. You know when you get there.
Now, they’re suddenly telling us it isn’t enough to have legalized abortion in America. Now they want us to pay for our neighbors’ abortions with our tax dollars, and to bailout Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. And when anyone dares to object, including current Republicans, liberal members of Congress accuse them of a “war on women” and drawing a “bull’s eye” on the chest of women. It’s madness.
Big Peace: Tell us what some Democrats have said.
Kengor: Harry Reid said Republicans have placed a “bull’s eye on women in America.” Barbara Lee claimed, “This is a war on women.” Dianne Feinstein insisted that defunding efforts were “nothing more than an opportunity for the right wing in the House to sock it to women.” Barbara Boxer called it a “vendetta” against women. I could go on and on.
Big Peace: You say that funding of Planned Parenthood has become the Democrats’ “Holy Grail.”
Kengor: Remember when Barack Obama called “tax cuts for the wealthy” the Republicans’ “Holy Grail?” Well, taxpayer funding of America’s largest abortion provider is apparently the Democrats’ Holy Grail.
Big Peace: You wrote in one article: “As Obama and Republican Speaker John Boehner battled over a budget compromise, Obama drew a line in the sand on Planned Parenthood, snapping: ‘Nope. Zero. John, this is it.’ The room fell silent. Obama had hoisted the Holy Grail.”
Kengor: Yes, Obama had hoisted the Holy Grail: Planned Parenthood funding. The cup overfloweth with blood money. Margaret Sanger would be proud.
By the way, I should point out–since liberals won’t–that Sanger launched Planned Parenthood for the purpose of what she called “race improvement.” She wanted to rid America of “human weeds.” She also had a “Negro Project” and spoke to a 1926 KKK rally in New Jersey.
Big Peace: Can you imagine if conservatives had a hero with a background like that?
Kengor: The hero wouldn’t be a hero. And the hero’s organization would be dead. It would cease to exist. The liberal media would ensure it.
Big Peace: Wrapping up, tell us how Margaret Sanger’s conclusion about Stalin’s Russia applies so eerily to Democrats today.
Kengor: Sanger concluded her article, “Birth Control in Russia,” by writing: “Theoretically, there are no obstacles to birth control in Russia. It is accepted … on the grounds of health and human rights…. [W]e could well take example from Russia, where there are no legal restrictions, no religious condemnation, and where birth control instruction is part of the regular welfare service of the government.”
That’s where our liberal/progressive Democrats have arrived. Think about it. Their hysterical reaction to Republicans wanting to defund Planned Parenthood shows that they see “birth control instruction [as] part of the regular welfare service of the government.”
Liberals/progressives have at long lost arrived where racial-eugenicist Margaret Sanger and murderous-atheist Bolsheviks found common ground a century ago. And if they don’t like me pointing that out, then maybe they ought to step back and assess where they’ve progressed.