DEDICATION AND LEADERSHIP TECHNIQUES

1 DEDICATION AND LEADERSHIP TECHNIQUESD ouglas , Gary North, 2006 Table of 1: Need for Utter 2: Linking Theory and 3: Use of Personnel in 4: Value of 5: Controlled Discussion 6: Christian North(December, 2006)This document helps us to answer a question: How did the Communists capture one-third of the world s population by 1950, given the fact that Lenin had only a handful offollowers in 1900? This question raises others. How did the Communists mobilize the support of Western intellectuals, Russianterrorists, and peasants in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did an explicitly atheistic movement gain the degree of emotionalcommitment of its members that had previously been associated only with religiousmovements? How did a movement notoriously hierarchical and centralized enforce itsdiscipline with minimal violence outside those nations in which it gained politicalpower, where the Communist Party ruled only through terror and brutality on ahistorically unprecedented scale?

2 Once we have accurate historical insights regarding the answers to these questions,there is another, highly practical question: What, if anything, can non-violent ideological movements legitimately adopt fromthe Communists program of mobilization? To begin to answer these questions, a five-day seminar was held by the MissionSecretariat of the American branch of the Roman Catholic Church. This seminar tookplace on September 17 21, 1962. It was attended by a small group of priests, nuns, andlaymen. The main speaker was Douglas Hyde, the highest-level Western Communist everto abandon the Communist Party and join the Catholic s spiritual autobiography, I Believed, was published in England in 1950. Thiswas two years before Whittaker Chambers s larger but comparable testament, s major book, DEDICATION and LEADERSHIP , was published by Notre DameUniversity Press in 1966.

3 It remains in print, almost half a century seminar had an agenda: to discuss those aspects of Communist Party training thatcould be adapted by Catholic activists, especially missionaries. Hyde had been a leadingtrainer of British Communists in the 1930s and seminar took place a month before the 13-day October missile crisis began: theshowdown between the United States government and the Soviet Union s hierarchy overSoviet missiles in Cuba. Three weeks after this seminar ended, Vatican II was opened byPope John XXIII. It was closed by Paul VI in 1965. Vatican II launched a monumentaltransformation of the Roman Catholic Church. This was surely a well-timed is a transcript of Hyde s six lectures. A more complete edition of the entireivDedication and LEADERSHIP Techniquesseminar was published by the Mission Secretariat in 1963.

4 It is long out of print. It wasbarely known when it was in print. If you search its title on Google, you will find only afew footnote references. Yet this is a highly useful document for anyone who wants tounderstand the Communist Party s organizational TECHNIQUES in the 1940s. Even moreimportant, the document shows how some of these TECHNIQUES can be applied by modernactivist-ideological the time I got a copy of this transcript, sometime around 1985, the DEDICATION ofCommunist Party members worldwide had been fading for three decades, dating fromNikita Khrushchev s so-called secret speech of 1956, which was highly critical of the 1980s, which would bring of the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union, there were fewtraces of either DEDICATION or LEADERSHIP inside the Communist wrote to Hyde, asking permission to publish this document.

5 He refused. He said thatthe Communist Party s DEDICATION had faded, and that the manuscript would present afalse picture of the state of the Communist movement. He could see that it was on its lastlegs. It was. The Soviet Union folded in a non-violent coup in August of have waited two decades to make this document public. Hyde is dead. The SovietUnion is dead. Communist China has the fastest growing free market economy on Communist movement is dead. It ran out of both DEDICATION and is time to consider carefully how the Communists recruited, trained, and mobilizedmen and women in the West. It is also time to consider the level of DEDICATION that theCommunists maintained from 1917 to about Communists were messianic. They believed in salvation by revolution, as Iexplained in my 1968 book, Marx s Religion of Revolution.

6 (The 1989 update is availablefree here: ) The Party called on its members in the West to devotethe whole of their lives, to quote the title of Communist defector Benjamin Gitlow sautobiography, which appeared in 1948. No human institution can lawfully make such aclaim not church, state, or family. The Communist Party was therefore doomed fromthe beginning. But, in 1962, or even 1988, it was not clear when its day of reckoningwould come, or transcript published by the Mission Secretariat was not well edited. I have editedit for clarity s sake. I have not changed Hyde s words or the book s original italics. I haveadded commas and semicolons in have not re-published the panel presentation from missionaries in the mission field,nor have I reprinted the two appendixes on Communist tactics for the nations targeted bythe missionaries.

7 These are of interest only to historians of the Communist movement,which is surely good news for modern man. Instead, I have stuck with Hyde s originalagenda: to describe those Communist Party recruiting and training TECHNIQUES that can belegitimately adapted and adopted by Christian activist following themes I regard as , Hyde argued, the appeal of communism was not its ideas. It was rather the moralfervor of the Communists, a fervor which appealed to people who were committed to amoral cause greater than themselves. Communists were idealists, Hyde said. This is agreat irony, for Karl Marx dismissed all such appeals to morality as irrelevant at best anddeceptive at worst. He saw all morality as class morality. He identified morality as thesuperstructure of the dominant class, a tool of class dominance.

8 The substructure isfundamental, he said: the structure of economic production. He proclaimed scientificvDedication and LEADERSHIP Techniquessocialism, and he dismissed all rival socialist systems as am convinced that this is equally true of all broad-based ideological movements. Fewpeople join them because their founders developed philosophically persuasive systems ofhistorical cause-and-effect. They join because the movements promise moral upliftpersonally and even moral reform , Hyde told his listeners that a statistically abnormal number of communists hehad met on several continents had this in common: They were lapsed Catholics. Why?Because of their idealism. The Church failed to appeal to this idealism, especially amongyouth. So, they departed into the camp of the , Hyde argued that when organizations make minimal demands on theirmembers, they get minimal commitment.

9 When they make big demands, they get bigcommitment. This theme pervades this course, the Communist movement was always a minority movement. This wentback to Lenin s organizational decision to limit the Bolsheviks to an elite, although Hydedoes not mention this. Hyde was speaking to missionaries: the Church s hardest of hardcore members. The Roman Catholic Church has always allowed religious orders to formon the basis of extreme personal commitment. This degree of commitment is not expectedto be widespread in the membership. This tension between universal appeal mass evangelism and minority commitmentaffects every large organization. The standard rule of thumb is that 20% of the memberswill do 80% of the work. The top 4% (20% of 20%) will be the equivalent of themilitary s field-grade officers, and less than one percent will be the senior decision-makers and innovators (20% of 20% of 20%).

10 Fourth, he insisted that successful long-term LEADERSHIP requires systematic Communist Party was careful to provide such training at all levels. Everyone wastrained to exercise LEADERSHIP in his appropriate , the communists understood that, in order to be an effective leader in the tradeunion movement, a person must be good at his job. If he is a slack worker, he will not betaken seriously by his peers, no matter how good a speaker he is. So, the communistspressured members to become the best workers on the shop , Communist LEADERSHIP was for the sake of the Communist Party s cause. It wasnot LEADERSHIP for its own of these principles can be applied in every organization that is devoted tocomprehensive social we understand the degree of DEDICATION that once energized the CommunistParty, we recognize a secular imitation of the motivation of the early church sevangelism, from the Apostle Paul to the first missionaries to pagan lands.