January 13, 2024

The timeline of what happened to the DEI-intoxicated Harvard president is well-known. However, the question of why it happened somehow eluded the commentariat. To answer the “why” question requires a deep dive into the fundamental issue of private property and its theft.

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While conservatism and leftism do not touch the subject (it is considered a secondary, not a primary dispute), for the proletarianized strain of leftism – Marxism — it is a fundamental, existential core belief. Since the Marxists’ takeover of the Ivy League institutions at the end of the last century, detailed analysis is impossible without an excursion into Marxist tenets.

Victorian Marxism postulated that private property would dissipate after the proletarian revolution. Along with that, the government would gradually wither away because it is no longer needed: there is no more private property to protect. Unfortunately, that simplistic thesis managed to brainwash millions.

While compulsory property reshuffle has been condemned since pre-Biblical times, orthodox Marxism offered one notable exception: the confiscation (expropriation, theft, robbery, embezzlement) of property from the “oppressor” and its allocation to the “oppressed.” Thus, Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth around” motto has a deeply-rooted tradition in left-wing circles. He was not acting alone: during the Cold War, intellectual property (IP) theft was, for all practical purposes, legalized and normalized by the International Left.

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At the heart of Soviet intelligence activities lay a quest for strategic advantage; thus, IP poaching became a significant aspect of their efforts.

In Soviet hands, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress became a Tupolev Tu-4 bomber. The first Soviet atomic bomb, RDS-1, modeled after the third American nuclear device nicknamed “Fat Man,” was dropped from the Tu-4. (So, one replica launched another.) The German V-2 rocket evolved into the R-1 rocket, a precursor to Soviet ICBMs. At the same time, the Ford Mainline was known in the Soviet Union as the Volga GAZ-21. The passenger car, Moskvich-400, was an exact duplicate of the German Opel Kadett K38. The famous Kalashnikov machine gun, AK-47, is a cheap imitation of Germany’s STG-44. Its designer, Hugo Schmeisser, was brought to the USSR after World War II in a Soviet version of “Operation Paperclip.”

That “spread the IP around” was not bound to technologies. There are numerous examples, like Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree by Disney, which has its corresponding rip-off version in Russian. Doctor Dolittle has its Soviet, politically correct equivalent. Pinocchio got his own name in the USSR and acquired a class-warfare background. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has a one-to-one equivalent in Russian, too. Add the Three Stooges to the list of Soviet plagiarism, all without attribution to the original authors. The list continues: popular tunes, movie plots, cartoons, art, and even fairy tales were meticulously copied by Soviet communists.

Soviet borrowings are especially remarkable for their enormous scale and astounding cynicism. The vast majority of items were replicated: from huge factories, cars, tanks, planes, and missiles to cameras, household appliances, and children’s toys. It is understood that the lion’s share of the former Soviet Union might be an industrial-scale IP steal.

According to the Soviets, “public property” already belonged to the people, so it was not necessary to pay for it. It was not uncommon for Soviet left-wingers to print Western bestsellers in millions without getting formal permission from copyright holders.

Plagiarism on the International Left was a state-sponsored enterprise; it flourished in the Soviet Union. After its dissolution, China took over. Communist China catapulted ideology-induced IP thievery to an unprecedented level. They added computer hacks to their arsenal. One of the Chinese cyber operations is “Operation CuckooBees.” It siphoned a wide range of proprietary data and cutting-edge technologies, estimated in trillions of dollars.