The Anti-Communist Manifesto, by Jesse Kelly
A book review
This book is an unoriginal tantrum that somehow manages to be hyper vigilant against a non-issue. It’s a treatise, of sorts, in application of Saul Alinsky's book "Rules for Radicals” in an attempt to sway you, the reader, to be scared of the commies. Don’t like a policy position? It’s the communists. But what if they say they aren’t a communist? Don’t listen, because fear is steeped in red, and you should be seeing a lot of red.
It is an uncritical tirade; a whisky soaked view of politics, lamenting the same tired talking points that have been levied against the Bolsheviks since the October Revolution. If you look on YouTube for any video of a mother bird feeding its hatchlings, that’s what this book is. There’s no real discernible difference in the content that you’re consuming. It’s a regurgitation of once thriving organisms being minced down into some saliva laden codswallop. Your choice, as the reader, is whether that is how you like to consume your nutrients.
I can save you some time in reading this book, and summarize it thusly:
“So, here it is…” (Forward), “…a complete load of nonsense.” (Chapter 1)
There you have it, in Kelly’s own words, no less.
I struggle to take seriously any person who is going to say things like:
“The communist genuinely believes he’s a liberal, or left-leaning, or a Democrat, or an environmentalist, or a civil rights advocate, or a feminist, or any of the other countless labels he applies t himself. He doesn’t realize that he’s a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of communist stretching all the way back to Marx.”
To Kelly, a communist isn’t simply a “subversive, chipping away at the pillars that hold up American society,” it’s simply anyone left of center, with the single unitary mission to “destroy America.”
If you think that you've heard that before, it's because you have. Everyone born and still taking in oxygen since at least 1930 has heard these seem fear mongering comments at least once every four years by some delusional politician or pundit.
I also cannot take seriously any person that praises Joseph McCarthy, or the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC is a stain on America’s history. It was wholly inconsistent with the notions of liberty, or of the first amendment, or any meaningful sense of the word "freedom."
I cannot take seriously any person that is going to write within the first fifteen pages that communism is a religion (it isn’t, in any serious discussion, that is), or allege that Karl Marx – while somehow being, apparently, one of the laziest men to ever live – established secret police, imprisoned dissidents, created death squads, set forth mass starvation, etc. He did none of these things. But if we are to apply this same logic elsewhere, I guess we should blame Jesus for the Crusades. (Absurd, I know.)
Finally, I cannot take seriously a book that pretends to extoll upon the reader a critical rejection of communism by lobbing personal attacks against this model’s two primary philosophers and airing out a laundry list of horrors committed by the communist dictators after they died. In 248 pages, Kelly says that it’s wrong for communists to murder tens of millions of people on the basis of politics and nonadherence to communism, but that at the same time we should feel no shame in having done it to Indigenous tribes (because conquest is good, I guess?), and we should certainly feel no shame in rounding up communists like we did in the 1950’s, whether they were actually communists or not. Near as I can tell, all three are bad option.
Basically, according to Kelly, violence is only bad if the commies do it.
We should just call this book “The Fascist’s Lament,” because the only take away from this book is that all liberals are communists, all communists are violent, and that perhaps we should just round them up. If that’s something that you agree with, then this book is for you. If that’s not something you agree with (even if you’re not a liberal), then this book is not for you.
If you value your freedom to have, and to express, different opinions, ideas, and solutions to problems, or to adhere to any religion you see fit as the constitution suggests you should be able to do, then you should reject this book in its entirety.
I will say this though, I did enjoy Kelly's style of writing, and the burger recipe in the back looks good.
This review was originally published at Goodreads on January 16th, 2024.