Reading an essay by Jewish-American author Dmitri Orlov, a man born in the Soviet Union who then migrated to the United States, I was intrigued by his use of the phrase "collapse" to refer to the end of the Soviet era. Indeed, as do many other leftish thinkers, Orlov tends to speak of the "collapse of communism" rather than of the Russian people's painful recovery from it.

Socialist semantics - calling a recovery a collapse - has left a great imprint on the Western public's understanding of what communism really was, and is, namely: a state of economic panic. Communism occurs when economies die. It is a catatonic state of society in which the state body must attempt to keep its brain and its heart alive by letting its limbs die off.

Imagine What It Would Be Like

Imagine the United States had collapsed into communism. One day, you receive a letter requesting to renew your library card. The letter states you must show up in person to pick it up, and if you won't within a week, there shall be a $20 penalty.

You think the tone is a bit strange but you don't suspect anything problematic. All you're thinking of is avoiding that $20 fine. The following morning, you go over to pick up the new card on your way to work.

At the counter, a female clerk with a beautiful smile briefly reviews your case, then asks you to walk into a small office with her. Just as you go in, three men wearing black leather raincoats club you over the head from behind, knocking you out.

You wake up in a dimly-lit prison- you're going to be tortured for the next 72 hours, no explanation given. Once the officials have broken your will, they demand you sign a document accusing your wife and two daughters of being capitalist spies. You refuse but there are ways of making you.

Deprived of sleep and water, you reluctantly sign the paper.

Two hours later your family is dead.

From Collapse to Recovery

That's how communism will be when it arrives at America's shores. All who are deemed economically inefficient citizens shall be burned to heat the homes of high-ranking officials.

People don't start communist societies for fun. They start them because unforeseen catastrophes already set off a chain-reaction of events that forces people to sell their freedoms in exchange for a very limited chance at survival.

Communism happens when a state has nothing left to barter with the world but its own children. Call it economic hypothermia or financial asphyxiation. As such, the state body cannot 'collapse' back to life. It can only painstakingly try to recover itself from a near-death experience. The Russian people did, though it took them 74 years to do it.

The 1917 Russian "revolution" was really the collapse of a better society into something far worse. The 1991 so-called "collapse" of the Soviet Union was really a recovery back to a better life.

After the Russians had seen their religions erased, their minds obliterated, their children uprooted from their family farms, the Russians ultimately found out what it was like to think for themselves again. Their freedom was won through great sacrifice.

How the American Collapse Will Go Down

What may Americans in particular, and Westerners in general, expect when their societies collapse into a state of catatonic communism?

Imagine a society in which the sickly outnumber the healthy, the weak outnumber the strong, the lower classes outnumber the middle class, the ugly the beautiful, the puny the great, the jealous the magnanimous, the hateful the loving, and the atheist the godfearing.

If you're on the wrong side of this affair, a rancorous horde shall stampede you to death, for hatred of things that are good knows no bounds among evil men.

From the very first day, the "privileged class" shall come under attack. If you possess any wealth at all, it shall be taken from you but not before your wives and daughters are beaten so often their wombs fall out. Your sons shall be thrown into bakery ovens to be burned alive. White men - the objects of hate - shall suffer indescribably tortures no man has lived to write about.

The new communist leadership shall not be of Anglo-Saxon but of some racially alien stock that treats human beings as though they were cattle. Up to half or more of Western peoples shall be designated 'inefficient', subsequently killed off in death camps. As the upper classes flee the nation, members of the middle classes shall be stripped of all freedoms and made society's slaves.

The establishment of a 'definite class', the working class, shall become the grand ideal of the new communist society. It means that the state shall effectively seize all private property, and only state officials may decide how to distribute food, clothing, housing, transportation, and wealth to people - but primarily to themselves, for communist economies exist, first and foremost, to preserve the core apparatchik.

Citizens without rank shall be made into human mules. Christianity shall be erased. As in the Soviet Union, churches shall be burned to the ground, whereas, contrary to official atheist policy, Islamic mosques shall still be allowed to be built, and synagogues shall be defended.

However, Christians who dare to cling to their religion shall be sent to death camps. Declared unpersons, Christians shall have no access to the financial system. They shall have no access to bank accounts. The survivors of the many pogroms and purges shall have to live in shanty towns and barter for their health.

How the West May Recover

Perseverance.

It took the Bulgarian people five-hundred years to free themselves from the yoke of a Turkish colonial oppressor. It took the Hungarians almost 150 years to free themselves from their Islamic conquerors. It took the Russian people three-quarters of a century to recover from communism. But they all did because they persevered.

Solzhenitsyn describes tribes of people deported to Siberia, left to die without any means of subsistence. Though the great majority of these deportees died of cold and hunger, some lived. And not only did some manage to survive the horrors of a frozen, dead world, some learned to thrive.

And so, the Western peoples of Europe and of the United States, too, shall find the strength within to free themselves from the communist yoke - even if it must take 5,000 years to achieve it.