Hardly has a person heard of John Basil Barnhill, but if history repeats itself – and our failed and enlightened human nature assures it does – his thinking is worth reviewing. Why? Because Barnhill (1864- 1929) debated vigorously for freedom and against socialism as early as 1914 – and won.
Debating a prominent Socialist, Henry M. Tichenor, his words entitled “Indictment of Socialism.” It foreshadowed the Bolshevik Revolution (three years later), a violent “Soviet Socialist” takeover of Russia, followed by 70 years of oppression, murder, and atheism – for socialism.
Around the world, the concept of centralized control to redistribute wealth – stealing it from those who made it, the “bourgeoisie,” and giving it to the miserable poor, the “Proletariat” was afoot.
The big difference between republican, American freedom and socialist, Soviet oppression was that the individual in socialism has no rights, whereas the American Bill of Rights recognizes individual rights as God-given, not to groups and not to elites.
Self-government – codified by our history-changing Constitution – means government at all levels is only and always accountable to “We, the People.” We – not the elites – have all the power, our rights protected by a process to peacefully replace any leader or leaders, because the rights are ours.
Barnhill’s words – and the time surrounding them – are only partially preserved, but his sentiment is clear. Among his thoughts, a sobering one – since Socialism rears its ugly head every few generations – was this: “Having held over 300 debates with the leading American Socialists…” they are “sincere,” by which he seems to mean determined to win and convinced of their ideology.
He continues: “After paying them this tribute, I feel justified in proceeding with brutal frankness to the destruction of all their most cherished dogmas.”
Quoting a leading Socialist of the time, he says Socialism is: “The Alpha and the Omega of Socialism is the transformation of private and competing capital into a united, collective capital …”
Says the Socialist: “In place of private capital and competition, we should have a state-regulated organization of national labor into a social labor system, equipped out of collective capital; the state would collect, warehouse, and transport all products, and finally would distribute them …”
As he undertakes to unpack the many ways in which the Socialist, or Utopian, or Communist way of thought fails, both in theory and in practice, he notes that a robust debate must be premised on a “sincere” exchange of views, and that is the “Promethean spirit” he approaches things with.
In other words, a bold and truth-seeking spirit, like Prometheus “who stole fire from the gods for humanity,” must be how we debate, nothing timid or accommodating for what must be confronted.
He wandered through analogies to “Elizabethan” and “Greek” drama to make points, a way of thinking that mattered then and would be lost now. Who recalls Thucydides and Shakespeare?
Yet it was Thucydides who said, “The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.” And it was Shakespeare, in All's Well that Ends Well, who said: “What can be happier … than a man, conscious of virtuous acts, and content with liberty…?”
Says Barnhill: “The concentration of power in a few hands – and without that Socialism could not possibly succeed – has always proven the fatal toboggan slide down which the nations of the past have glided into inevitable hell.”
He then takes apart, by examples, the way in which Socialism inevitably fails, both theoretically and operationally, but for me his best quote – over his many years defending freedom against Socialism – is about the simple way Socialism defeats the rights of individuals, and does so with fear.
Wrote Barnhill, the one quote for which he is best remembered – by the few that do, and perhaps now that is you, was this: “Where the people fear government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.”
If we can remember just that, then ask ourselves what is happening around us – now more than 100 years after Barnhill penned that truism, we may yet win as he did, and halt the rise of Socialism.
About the author
Robert B. Charles
Contributing Writer
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