Blueprint for Communism

I just read this book "And Not a Shot is Fired" by Jan Kozak (available free as PDF).

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.

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."

Most of what Kozak describes had been theorized a generation earlier by Italian Communist Party chief 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.

In the West, Gramsci explained, family loyalties, faith in God, and lawful limits on governmental power were thoroughly represented in the cultural institutions.  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 strategy for transforming a parliamentary system of government into a totalitarian
dictatorship involved a giant  kind of "pincer" movement  where "pressure from above" combined 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.  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.

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 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. 

It is quite short (48 pages) and I highly recommend to everyone.