I also still have a copy of "The Gravediggers" by Phyllis
Schlafly and Rear Admiral Chester Ward, 1964. It starts out
with the same Lenin quote. Some chapter headings: "Who
WIll Bury Us?", "Our Enemy's Secret Weapon" ("conquest
by psychological warfare") "Crawling to Moscow", etc.
But one of the most memorable bits of writing for me at the
time, was a story by James Clavell, 1963, which ran in The
Ladies' Home Journal and Reader's Digest, called "The
Children's Story" ("This is fiction - a horror story- but the
scene it describes has taken place in Cuba,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, East Germany. Could it
happen here?") It's about an elementary school, where, one
day, the beloved teacher is taken away and replaced by a
New Teacher. Within the course of the first day, she gently
charms them into tearing up the flag and throwing it out the
window, to realize the the pledge of allegiance is silly, to
realize that if you pray to God for candy nothing will happen,
"Instead of saying 'God', let's say 'Our Leader'. Let's pray to
Our Leader very, very hard for candy and don't open your
eyes till I say" (and she puts a piece of candy on each
desk.). The kids also ask her why she wears "those clothes-
it's like a uniform" Teacher says uniforms are good- you
won't have to think about what to wear to school. You'll all be
the same." In the end, she even wins over the smart,
skeptical kid. It ends with: "The teacher looked out the
window. This at last had been what she had been trained
for. She knew that she would teach her children well. She
was warmed by the thought that throughout the school and
throughout the land all children, all men and women were
being taught with the same faith, with variations of the same
procedures. Each according to his age group. Each
according to his need."
This story was seriously read to us in the sixth grade. It
made quite an impression. There was quite a blast of this
stuff around the time of the Goldwater campaign, of course.
Suzanne King