by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

The basic struggle today is not between individualism and collectivism, free enterprise and socialism, democracy and dictatorship. These are only the superficial manifestations of a deeper struggle which is moral and spiritual and involves above all else whether man shall exist for the state, or the state for man, and whether freedom is of the spirit or a concession of a materialized society. It has not been given to every age in history to see the issue as clearly as it has been given to our own, for we have a double incentive to work for the peace and prosperity of the world: the first is the Gospel in its fullness, the second is the communism of Soviet Russia. The first teaches us that happiness comes from living rightly; the second, that misery comes from acting wrongly.

1. Communism no longer comes for your property. It comes for your reality. The West still pictures bread lines and gulags, a failed economic theory safely buried in 1989 – that was only ever the surface symptom. Leftism-communism is the most insidious destructive force in our world today, and it survives every empirical refutation for one reason: it was never really an economic theory. It doesn’t care about the truth. It only seeks power.

2. At its core it is a civilizational cancer – a machine for distorting reality through constant lies, rewritten history, and the systematic corruption of truth. It practices negative selection: it promotes the ambitious sociopaths, the ideologues, and the conformists, while the honest and the competent are sidelined or destroyed. Talent, integrity, and productivity become liabilities. The body count runs to roughly a hundred million. But the deeper kill is spiritual – trust eroded, excellence punished, reality itself subordinated to raw power.

3. What has changed is the method, not the logic. Tanks and gulags were crude, visible, self-defeating. Today it does not confiscate – it destabilizes. Chaos is the new collectivization. Every manufactured crisis follows the same structural logic: disorder is produced, fear is maximized, and in the panic that follows, transfers of power occur that would have been politically impossible in calm times. You do not notice the expropriation, because you are too busy surviving the emergency they built for you.

4. The fuel running this engine is the Systemic Lie – not ordinary propaganda, but a managed reality in which the categories of thought themselves are corrupted. Productivity is renamed exploitation. Order is renamed fascism. Resistance is renamed hate. A population that cannot name extraction cannot resist it – that is the design, not a side effect. Polish has a word for what results: zakłamanie, a society so saturated with lies that truth becomes almost inaccessible. Obłuda is the mask of falsehood worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

5. This is why the ideology did not die in 1989. It mutated, migrated, and entrenched itself inside the institutions of the civilization it had set out to destroy. Under a system of institutionalized lying, the loyal are promoted and the honest are pushed out, until the institution fills, top to bottom, with people selected specifically for their unreliability. That is not inefficiency. That is institutional rot at the genetic level. People learn to say the words, attend the meetings, sign the statements – and inwardly check out entirely.

6. The damage was never only in the ideology. It was in the people – the habits of mind that decades inside a system of lies produce, habits that do not evaporate with a change of government. The decisive terrain now is institutional: the schools, the media, the corporations, and above all the artificial intelligence systems being trained at civilizational scale on values that half the civilization never chose and was never consulted on. Whoever writes the values into the machines will have more influence over the next century than any election result.

7. This is where civilizations are actually won and lost – not in grand gestures, but in millions of daily, invisible decisions about whether to say what you actually see. Every person who refuses to perform the lie one more time is doing something larger than they know. Name the chaos. Name the lie. The naming is the resistance.

Tell the truth, have courage, and build.