High Ideals

by Revilo P. Oliver

JOHN REED (pictured with Louise Bryant in 1916), a crackpot and perhaps a mattoid, was born in Oregon in 1887. He is the subject of several laudatory biographies, but I have never thought it worthwhile to ascertain his ancestry or follow his career. I do not know whether he became a Communist before, during, or after his years at Harvard, from which he was graduated in 1910. In the following year he began to compose bait for stupid proletarians as the foremost contributor to a periodical bucket of garbage called The Masses. Having thus proved himself, he was, as one would expect, employed as a “distinguished” foreign correspondent by the Jews’ New York Times.

It was in this capacity that he was in St. Petersburg and Moscow when the Masters of Deceit captured Russia in 1917-1918. He witnessed, of course, the Bolshevik seizure of power by terrorism, and his vicious mind doubtless gloated over the slaughter of civilized Russians. Exalted by the savagery of the Judaeo-Communists, he wrote a paean of praise for the glorious victory of the proletariat and the triumph of “human rights” and “social justice,” which was published in New York and London in 1919 under the title Ten Days that Shook the World.

As one would expect, the poisonous book was fulsomely extolled as a revelation and new gospel by our domestic enemies, who used it to confirm and activate the faith of the simple-minded dupes of Marx’s pseudo-atheistic reformation of Christianity. Even today, Reed’s filthy concoction is often described, even by people who must know better, as “the best eyewitness account of the revolution.” It thus serves to obscure and discredit veracious accounts of what actually happened. (1)

(footnote 1. I have looked at two standard reference works. Webster’s Biographical Dictionary and the Columbia Encyclopedia. Both devote a generous amount of space to Reed and ignore Robert Wilton, an honest journalist, who faithfully described what he saw happen in Russia, and whose report of the sadistic murder of the Russian royal family by a pack of Jews has now been fully verified from the Soviet archives that have been opened by Yeltsin.)

The nest of Sheenies in Hollywood naturally produced a cinema version of Reed’s book, entitled Reds, in which the part of the late John Reed was taken by an actor named Warren Beatty. Louise Bryant, Reed’s rather beautiful mistress, was, of course, the heroine of the film, which was, equally of course, blatant Communist propaganda colored and flavored to suit the degree of fatuity that had been thus far induced in the American public.

Even writers who admit that Reed’s book was a fraud on the public continue to credit him with a noble soul and “high ideals,” and to attribute his lies to misinformation that he accepted because he was blinded by his high-minded passion for “social justice” and similar nonsense. He was, we are assured, mistaken, but righteously so, given his lofty inspiration of love for “the poor” and the downtrodden masses.

Now Boris Yeltsin, the clever actor who is currently playing the stellar rôle in the comedy that convinces gullible Europeans and Americans that “Communism is dead,” instead of being more deadly than ever behind its new mask, shrewdly helps create the desired illusion by opening the archives of the Kremlin to expose the deeds of the Soviet régime that has supposedly been supplanted by lovely new freedom and light. He accordingly instructed the Russian historian, Rudolf Pikhoya, to go through the secret archives and turn up data that will impress the credulous West.

The file on John Reed and Louise Bryant discloses that in 1917 Lenin’s Bolsheviks paid Reed the equivalent of $1,500,000 in current American currency to write Ten Days that Shook the World. Reed’s vaunted idealism did indeed come high. (2)

(footnote 2. For the information about Yeltsin’s disclosure of Reed’s venality I am indebted to the July-August issue of Hilaire du Berrier’s H du B Reports.)

Reed was Lenin’s apologist and hired liar. He returned to the United States to promote his book and plant Communist cells, enlisting the usual assortment of idealistic nitwits and blood-thirsty misfits driven by organic hatreds. Protected by powerful influences within Woodrow Wilson’s government, he escaped prosecution as an enemy agent and returned to his employer in the Kremlin. He died, reportedly of typhus, in 1920 and was given a spectacular funeral and burial in the wall of the Kremlin as a great “hero of the revolution.” (3)

(footnote 3. M. du Berrier’s article includes his reminiscences of Louise Bryant, whom he “inherited” in Paris in the “early 1930s,” after her marriage and divorce from William Bullitt, who became Roosevelt’s ambassador to Russia and later to France and helped his master arrange the catastrophic war that began in 1939. She had become an alcoholic, and M. du Berrier tells us how “she tossed down double gins on the terrace of Le Select,” while he drank hot chocolate to avoid immobilizing himself. When sufficiently inspired by gin, she often confided to him that Reed had intended to break with Lenin, who accordingly disposed of him by having him infected with typhus and then giving the heroic liar a state funeral. When sober the next morning, Louise denied what she had said when enspirited. In spiritu frumenti veritas? It is not impossible that Reed became discontented, and it is, of course, normal procedure in Judaeo-Communist circles to discard worn-out tools.)

So we at last see that Reed was a worthy precursor of Walter Duranty, another “distinguished foreign correspondent” of the New York Times, who was, in the terms used by his latest biographer, “Stalin’s apologist” and whose systematic and rhetorically embellished lies are credited with having facilitated Franklin Roosevelt’s treason in imposing on the United States diplomatic recognition of, and lovey-dovey relations with, the Soviet that was ruled by his collaborator and fellow conspirator, Stalin. Duranty’s achievements as a liar won him a Pulitzer Prize for excellence as a journalist and the reward of being able to indulge his psychopathic urges securely in Russia, but he was also well-paid by Roosevelt’s dear “Uncle Joe,” (4) Perhaps Yeltsin will soon let us know just how much the scoundrel received.

(footnote 4. See Liberty Bell, February 1991, pp. 10-11, where I cite S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist (Oxford University Press, 1990).)

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Source: Liberty Bell magazine, November 1992