Chapter Five, Part I: Infiltrating the West (UPDATED)

Chapter Five, Part I: Infiltrating the West (UPDATED)
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The Epoch Times is serializing an adaptation from the Chinese of a new book, How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World, by the editorial team of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Communism via Violence and Nonviolence
2. War of Espionage and Disinformation
3. From the New Deal to Progressivism
4. The Cultural Revolution of the West
5. The Anti-War and Civil Rights Movements

Introduction

The 2016 US presidential election was one of the most dramatic in decades. The campaign trail was full of twists and turns that persisted long after the election. The winner, Republican nominee Donald Trump, was besieged by negative media coverage and protests in cities around the nation. The demonstrators held signs emblazoned with slogans such as “Not My President” and declared that Trump was racist, sexist, xenophobic, or a Nazi. There were demands for a recount and threats of impeachment before he even assumed office.
Investigative journalism has revealed that many of these protests were instigated by certain interest groups. As shown in America Under Siege: Civil War 2017, a documentary directed by Florida-based researcher Trevor Loudon, a significant portion of the demonstrators were “professional revolutionaries” with ties to communist regimes and other authoritarian states, such as North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, or Cuba. The film also highlighted the role of two prominent American socialist organizations: the Stalinist Workers World Party and the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization. [1]

Loudon, having researched the communist movement since the 1980s, determined that left-wing organizations have made the United States their primary target for infiltration and subversion. The fields of American politics, education, media, and business have increasingly shifted to the left under the influence of well-placed individuals. Even as people around the globe cheered the triumph of the free world after the Cold War, communism was stealthily taking over the public institutions of Western society, in preparation for the final struggle.

Communism manifests as totalitarian governments in Eastern countries such as the Soviet Union or China, where it conducts mass killing and destroys traditional culture. However, it also has been silently and steadily gaining control over the West through subversion and disinformation. It is eroding the economy, political processes, social structures, and moral fabric of society to bring about humanity’s degeneration and destruction.

America is the light of the free world and is tasked with the divinely given role of policing the globe. US military intervention proved instrumental in determining the outcomes of both world wars. During the Cold War, facing the menace of a nuclear holocaust, the United States successfully contained the Soviet bloc until the disintegration of the Soviet and Eastern European communist regimes. The success of the American experiment with liberty and enlightened governance has spared the world from mass destruction and domination by tyrannical regimes.

America’s Founding Fathers applied their knowledge of Western religious and philosophical traditions to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. These documents recognize as self-evident the rights bestowed upon man by the Creator — starting with the freedoms of belief and speech — and established the separation of powers to guarantee the republican system of government.

The freedom of the West runs directly counter to the goal of communism. While masking itself with beautiful visions of a collective, egalitarian society, communism aims to enslave and destroy humanity.

As communist parties did not directly take power in Western countries, the specter aims to conquer the West through subversion, having its supporters infiltrate all organizations and institutions. There have been at least five major forces driving communist and left-wing subversion in the West.

The first force of subversion was the Soviet Union, which founded the communist Third International (Comintern) to spread revolution worldwide.

The second was local communist parties, which worked with the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern.

The third was the economic crisis and social upheaval that encouraged many Western governments to adopt socialist policies in the past few decades, resulting in a steady shift to the left.

The fourth was those who sympathized with and supported the Communist Party and socialism. These fellow travelers have served communism as a fifth column of “useful idiots” within Western society, helping to destroy its culture, sow moral degeneracy, and undermine legitimate governments.

The Chinese Communist Party is a fifth force. After the Chinese communists implemented economic reform, which started in the 1980s, the CCP established political, business, and cultural exchanges that gave it an opportunity to infiltrate the West.

Given the sheer complexity of the communist specter’s arrangements, it is beyond the scope of this work to provide a comprehensive account of its infiltration in the West. However, by understanding the broad strokes, readers can gain some awareness of how the devil operates and learn to see the common threads in its many layers of deception. For the sake of brevity, this chapter offers a general overview of communism’s reach in the United States and Western Europe.

1. Communism via Violence and Nonviolence

In the popular imagination, the Communist Party is synonymous with violence, and with good reason. The fact that the communist regimes of Russia and China took power through violent revolution and used violence as a tool of repression drew attention away from communism’s less visible forms. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” [2]

According to Marx, communist revolution would begin in advanced capitalist countries, but Vladimir Lenin believed that socialism could be built in Russia, which was comparatively backward in its economic development. Lenin’s other significant contribution to Marxism was his doctrine of party-building, which consisted of adopting the techniques of coercion, deception, and violence found in criminal organizations and animating them with Marxist socioeconomic theory. According to Lenin, the working class is incapable of developing class consciousness or demanding revolution on its own and thus must be rallied to action by an external force. The agents of revolution would be organized in a highly disciplined proletarian “vanguard” — the Communist Party.

The British Fabian Society, founded in 1884, a year after Marx’s death, took a different path in the struggle to impose socialism. The society’s original coat of arms depicted a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and its name is a reference to Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, the ancient Roman general and dictator, who earned fame for his delaying tactics in the war against Carthage. The first pamphlet produced by the group included a note that read, “For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.” [3]

To gradually bring about socialism, the Fabian Society invented the policy of “permeation” to infiltrate politics, business, and civil society. The society encourages its members to advance socialist aims by joining suitable organizations and ingratiating themselves with important figures, such as cabinet ministers, senior administrative officials, industrialists, university deans, and church leaders. Sidney Webb, a core member of the society, wrote:

As a Society, we welcomed the adhesion of men and women of every religious denomination or of none, strongly insisting that Socialism was not Secularism; and the very object and purpose of all sensible collective action was the development of the individual soul or conscience or character. ... Nor did we confine our propaganda to the slowly emerging Labour Party, or to those who were prepared to call themselves Socialists, or to the manual workers or to any particular class. We put our proposals, one by one, as persuasively as possible, before all who would listen to them — Conservatives whenever we could gain access to them, the churches and chapels of all denominations, the various Universities, and Liberals and Radicals, together with the other Socialist Societies at all times. This we called “permeation” and it was an important discovery. [4]

Both the Fabian Society’s nonviolent communism and Lenin’s violent communism had the same ultimate aim, and Lenin did not reject nonviolent means. In his book “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin criticized the communist parties of Western Europe that refused to cooperate with what he called the “reactionary” labor unions or to join the “capitalist” national parliament. Lenin wrote in his book: “For a Communist, with a correct understanding of his own ends, the art of politics lies in correctly calculating the conditions and the moment when the proletarian vanguard can take over power successfully. He must decide when, after this assumption of power, that vanguard will be able to obtain adequate support from sufficiently inclusive strata of the working-class and non-proletarian laboring masses, and when it will be able to maintain, consolidate and extend its supremacy, educating, training and attracting ever widening circles of the laboring masses.” [5]

Lenin repeatedly stressed that communists must hide their real intentions. In the pursuit of power, no promise or compromise would be ruled out. In other words, to achieve their goals, they must be unscrupulous. Both Russia’s Bolsheviks and the Chinese communist movement made liberal use of violence and deception on their way to gaining power.

The brutality of the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes has drawn attention away from the nonviolent communism found in the West. The Fabian Society specialized in disguise. It chose Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, to put a prosaic spin on the true aims of nonviolent socialism with prosaic rhetoric. Shaw wrote, on the final page of his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism: “I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner.” [6]
Just as a Leninist regime may sometimes find it expedient to scale back the overt brutality of its rule, Western communist parties and their various front organizations are not above employing violence and other criminal acts when doing so advances their political agenda.

2. War of Espionage and Disinformation

Communism holds the nation to be an oppressive construction of class society, so it aims to do away with the concepts of patriotism and national loyalty. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels proclaim that “working men have no country.” The manifesto ends on the note, “Workers of all countries, unite!”

Under Lenin’s leadership, the Bolsheviks founded the world’s first socialist regime and immediately established the Comintern to instigate socialist revolution around the globe. The goal of the Soviet Union and the Comintern was to overthrow the legitimate regimes of every nation on earth and establish a socialist world dictatorship of the proletariat.

Communist parties around the world sought guidance from the Comintern and accepted its funds and training. With the resources of a vast empire at its disposal, the Bolsheviks recruited activists worldwide and trained them to carry out subversive operations in their own countries.

Founded in 1919, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was one such organization that followed the Comintern and the Bolsheviks. Though the CPUSA itself never became a major political force, its influence on the United States was nevertheless significant. The CPUSA colluded with activists and activist organizations to infiltrate workers’ and student movements, the church, and the government.

In the late 1950s, Fred Schwarz, a pioneer of American anti-communist thought, told the US House Un-American Activities Committee: “Any attempt to judge the influence of Communists by their numbers is like trying to determine the validity of the hull of a boat by relating the area of the holes to the area which is sound. One hole can sink the ship. Communism is the theory of the disciplined few controlling and directing the rest. One person in a sensitive position can control and manipulate thousands of others.” [7]

It is now known that Soviet operatives were active within the US government during World War II. Despite the anti-communist efforts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the facts were hidden or obscured from the public by leftist politicians, academics, and the left-wing media.

In the 1990s, the US government declassified the Venona files, a collection of Soviet communications that were decoded by American intelligence during World War II. These documents showed that at least three hundred Soviet spies were working in the US government, including high-ranking officials in the Roosevelt administration who had access to top-secret information. Other agents used their positions to influence American policymaking and statecraft. Among those found to be Soviet spies were US Treasury official Harry Dexter White, State Department official Alger Hiss, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the couple who were executed by electric chair for transmitting military and atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

The communications intercepted and decrypted by the Venona project were just the tip of the iceberg; the full extent of Soviet infiltration into the US government remains unknown. As high-ranking American officials, some of the Soviet operatives had opportunities to influence important political decisions.

Hiss, who served as the director of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs, played a key role as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s adviser during the Yalta Conference at the end of World War II. He helped determine postwar territorial arrangements, draft the United Nations Charter, decide prisoner exchanges, and the like.

White was a trusted aide to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. He helped create the 1944 Bretton Woods international financial agreement and was one of the architects of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. White encouraged the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) to appoint underground CCP member Ji Chaoding to a high rank in the Republic of China’s Ministry of Finance. Taking up the post in 1941, Ji was the architect of disastrous currency reforms that damaged the Kuomintang’s reputation and benefited the CCP’s rise. [8] Some historians argue that the influence of Soviet spies and their left-wing sympathizers in US foreign policy led the United States to end military aid to the Kuomintang during the Chinese Civil War after World War II. Mainland China was consequently lost to the CCP. [9]

Whittaker Chambers, a Soviet informant and CPUSA associate who later defected and testified against other spies, said: “The agents of an enemy power were in a position to do much more than purloin documents. They were in a position to influence the nation’s foreign policy in the interest of the nation’s chief enemy, and not only on exceptional occasions, ... but in what must have been the staggering sum of day to day decisions.” [10]

Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent who defected to the West in 1970, discussed Soviet methods of subversion in his writings and interviews. According to Bezmenov, the James Bond-style spies of popular culture who blow up bridges or sneak around stealing secret documents couldn’t be further from reality. Only 10 to 15 percent of the KGB’s personnel and resources were allocated to traditional spy operations, with the rest going to ideological subversion.

Bezmenov, alias Tomas Schuman, said subversion happens in four stages: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and “normalization.” The first stage, lasting for the period of time needed to raise a generation, is to demoralize and subvert public perceptions of reality in the enemy country; the second focuses on throwing society into chaos; and the third instigates a crisis that leads to a civil war, revolution, or foreign invasion. These steps culminate in the fourth and final stage of “normalization” — that is, bringing the country under communist control.

Bezmenov listed three fields of subversion, or demoralization, under the first stage: ideas, structures, and life. Ideas cover religion, education, the media, and culture. Structures include government administration, the legal system, law enforcement, the armed forces, and diplomacy. Life encompasses families and communities, health, and relations between people of different races and social classes.

As an example, Bezmenov explained how the concept of equality was manipulated to create unrest. Agents would promote the cause of egalitarianism, making people feel discontent with their political and economic circumstances. Activism and civil unrest would be accompanied by economic deadlock, further exacerbating labor and capital relations in a worsening cycle of destabilization. This would culminate in revolution or invasion by communist forces. [11]

Another defector, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer to defect from the Soviet bloc, escaped to the United States in 1978. He further exposed how communist regimes adopted strategies of psychological warfare and disinformation against Western countries to bring about the first stage. According to Pacepa, the purpose of disinformation was to alter people’s frame of reference. With their ideological values manipulated, people would be unable to understand or accept the truth even when presented with direct evidence. [12]

Bezmenov said the first stage of ideological subversion usually took fifteen to twenty years — that is, the time needed for the education of a new generation — while the second stage took two to five years and the third stage, only two to six months. In an interview he gave in 1984, Bezmenov said the first stage had been accomplished to a greater extent than even Soviet authorities had expected.

The accounts of many Soviet spies and intelligence officials and declassified documents from the Cold War suggest that infiltration and subversion tactics were the driving forces behind the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

In 1950, McCarthy began to expose the extent of communist infiltration across the US government and society. But four years later, the Senate voted to censure him, and the government’s initiative to rid itself of communist influence was brought to a halt. Today, McCarthyism is synonymous with political persecution — an indication that the left wing has successfully established dominance in the ideological struggle.

Communist infiltration hasn’t lessened since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The left wing fights tooth and nail to protect adulterers, abortionists, criminals, and communists, while supporting anarchy and opposing civilization.

3. From the New Deal to Progressivism

On October 24, 1929, panic set in at the New York Stock Exchange and a record 12.9 million shares were traded. The crisis spread from the financial sector to the entire economy, and the ensuing Great Depression spared neither the industrialized nor the developing nations of the world. The US unemployment rate, which was three percent in 1929, shot up to a quarter of the labor force by 1933. Industrial production in major industrial countries, apart from the Soviet Union, dropped by an average of 27 percent. [13]

In early 1933, within one hundred days of Roosevelt’s inauguration, many bills were introduced around the theme of solving the crisis. The policies increased government intervention in the economy, with Congress passing major reforms, including the Emergency Banking Act, Agricultural Adjustment Act, National Industrial Recovery Act, and Social Security Act. Though Roosevelt’s New Deal essentially petered out upon the outbreak of World War II, many of the institutions and organizations that emerged during that period have continued to shape American society to the present day.

Roosevelt issued more executive orders on average per year than any other US president. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate in the United States did not fall below the double digits until 1941 and the war was underway. The New Deal’s real effect was to set the US government on a trajectory of high taxation, big government, and economic interventionism.

In his 2017 book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, conservative thinker Dinesh D'Souza argued that the National Industrial Recovery Act, which formed the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s New Deal, essentially meant the end of the US free market. [14]
According to FDR’s Folly, a 2003 book by historian Jim Powell, the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression rather than ending it: The Social Security Act and labor laws encouraged further unemployment, while high taxes encumbered healthy businesses, and so on. [15] Economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Milton Friedman praised Powell’s work, saying: “Truth to tell — as Powell demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt — the New Deal hampered recovery from the contraction, prolonged and added to unemployment, and set the stage for ever more intrusive and costly government.” [16]

President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed office after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, declared an “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment” in his 1964 State of the Union address and then launched the Great Society domestic programs. In a short period of time, Johnson issued a series of executive orders, established new government agencies, reinforced the welfare state, raised taxes, and dramatically expanded the government’s authority.

It is interesting to note the similarities between Johnson’s administrative measures and the goals outlined in communist literature at the time. Former CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall said: “The Communist attitude towards the Great Society can be summarized in an old saying that two men sleeping in the same bed can have different dreams. ... We support these measures because we dream of socialism.”

The CPUSA may have supported the Great Society initiative, but its intentions differed from Johnson’s; while the Johnson administration aimed to improve the United States under the democratic system, the Communist Party sought to ease the United States into socialism.

The most serious consequences of the Great Society and the War on Poverty were threefold: They increased dependence on welfare, discouraged people from working, and damaged the family structure. Welfare policies favored single-parent families, thus encouraging divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. According to statistics, the rate of out-of-wedlock births in 1940 was 3.8 percent; by 1965, this figure had increased to 7.7 percent. In 1990, twenty-five years after the Great Society reform, the figure was at 28 percent and subsequently rose to 40 percent by 2012. [17] These policies disproportionately affected minorities, particularly African Americans.

The weakening of the family had far-reaching consequences, such as generational poverty, soaring crime rates, increased financial burdens for the government, the decline of household education, and a mentality of entitlement, which led to a higher rate of voluntary unemployment.

A quote attributed to Scottish historian and jurist Lord Alexander Fraser Tytler says: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers that it can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.” [18] A form of this quote is also sometimes attributed to French historian Alexis de Tocqueville.

As the Chinese saying goes, “From thrift to extravagance is easy; from extravagance to thrift is hard.” After people develop a dependence on welfare, it becomes nearly impossible for the government to reduce the scale and types of benefits. The Western welfare state has become a political quagmire for which politicians and officials have no solution.

In the 1970s, the extreme left gave up the revolutionary terms that kept the American people on guard and replaced them with the more neutral-sounding “liberalism” and “progressivism.” People who have lived in communist countries are no strangers to the latter, as “progress” has long been used by communist parties as a quasi-synonym for “communism.” For example, the term “progressive movement” referred to the “communist movement,” and “progressive intellectuals” referred to “pro-communist individuals” or underground members of the Communist Party.

Liberalism, meanwhile, is not substantially different from progressivism, as it carries the same connotation of high taxes; expansive welfare; big government; the rejection of religion, morality, and tradition; the use of “social justice” as a political weapon; “political correctness”; and the militant promotion of feminism, homosexuality, sexual perversity, and the like.

We do not intend to point fingers at any individual or political figure, for it is indeed difficult to make correct analyses and judgments in the midst of complex historical developments. It is clear that the specter of communism has been at work in both the East and the West since the beginning of the twentieth century. When violent revolution succeeded in the East, it spread the influence of communism to the governments and societies of the West, shifting them ever leftward.

In the decades since the Great Depression, the United States has adopted increasingly socialist policies, and atheism and materialism have eroded the moral fabric of American society. People have grown distant from the divine and from traditional morality, weakening their resistance to deception.

4. The Cultural Revolution of the West

The 1960s, a watershed moment in modern history, saw an unprecedented counterculture movement sweeping from East to West. In contrast to the CCP’s Cultural Revolution, the Western counterculture movement appeared to have multiple points of focus or, rather, a lack of focus.

From the mid-1960s to mid-‘70s, the mostly young participants of the counterculture movement were motivated by various pursuits. Some opposed the Vietnam War; some fought for civil rights; some advocated for feminism and denounced patriarchy; some strove for homosexual rights. Topping this off was a dazzling spectacle of movements against tradition and authority that advocated sexual freedom, hedonism, narcotics, and rock ‘n’ roll music.

The goal of this Western Cultural Revolution was to destroy the upright Christian civilization and its traditional culture. While apparently disordered and chaotic, this international cultural shift stemmed from communism. Many participants of the movement revered “the Three M’s” — Marx, Marcuse, and Mao.

Herbert Marcuse was a key member of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research, first established in 1923 at what was then the University of Frankfurt. Its founders used the concept of “critical theory” to attack Western civilization and apply Marxism to the cultural sphere.

One of the Frankfurt School’s founders was Hungarian Marxist György Lukács. He stated the school’s purpose was to answer the question “Who shall save us from Western civilization?” [19] Elaborating on this, he deemed the West guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization and culture it had encountered. American and Western civilization, according to Lukács, are the world’s greatest repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, fascism, and narcissism. This intellectual narrative paved the road to the “political correctness” in today’s West.

In 1935, the Frankfurt School Marxists relocated to the United States and became affiliated with Columbia University in New York. This gave them an opening to disseminate their theories on American soil. With the assistance of other leftist scholars, they corrupted several generations of American youth.

Combining Marxism with Freudian pansexualism, Marcuse’s theories catalyzed the sexual liberation movement. Marcuse believed that repression of one’s nature in capitalist society hindered liberation and freedom. Therefore, it was necessary to oppose all traditional religions, morality, order, and authority in order to transform society into a utopia of limitless and effortless pleasure.

Marcuse’s famous 1955 work Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud occupies an important place among the vast number of works by Frankfurt scholars for two specific reasons: First, the book combines the thought of Marx and Freud, turning Marx’s critiques on politics and economy into a critique on culture and psychology. Second, the book builds bridges between Frankfurt theorists and young readers, which enabled the cultural rebellion of the 1960s.

Marcuse said that the counterculture movement could be called “a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society.” He continued: “There is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended. These ideas are old-fashioned. ... What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.” [20]

Few among the rebellious youth could grasp the arcane theories of the Frankfurt School, but Marcuse’s ideas were simple: Be anti-tradition, anti-authority, and anti-morality. Indulge in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll without restraint. He even coined the phrase “make love, not war.” As long as one said no to all authority and societal norms, he or she would be counted as a participant in the “noble” revolutionary cause. It was so simple and easy to become a revolutionary, it’s little wonder that so many young people were attracted to the movement at that time.

It must be emphasized that although many rebellious youths acted of their own accord, the most radical student leaders at the forefront of the movement had been trained and manipulated by foreign communists. For instance, the leaders of the US student activist organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were trained by Cuban espionage agents, according to FBI reports.

The anti-war student protests were directly organized and instigated by communist groups. One of these groups was the far-left organization Weather Underground, which stepped in when SDS collapsed in 1969.

In a statement that year, Weather Underground used the following quote: “The contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world. The development of this contradiction is promoting the struggle of the people of the whole world against US imperialism and its lackeys.”

These were the words of Lin Biao, then the second-most powerful leader of communist China, from his series of articles “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!” [21]

Just as the Cultural Revolution wrought irreversible damage upon Chinese traditional culture, the counterculture movement caused a titanic upheaval in Western society. First, it normalized many subcultures that belonged to the lower fringes of society or were deviant variations of mainstream culture. Sexual liberation, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll rapidly eroded the moral values of the youth and turned them into a corrosive force that was against God, against tradition, and against society.

Second, the counterculture movement set a precedent for chaotic activism and fostered a wide range of antisocial and anti-American ways of thinking, setting the stage for the street protests and culture war that would follow.

Third, after the youth of the 1960s ended their activist lifestyles, they entered universities and research institutes, completed their master’s degrees and doctorates, and moved into the mainstream of American society. They brought the Marxist worldview and its values into education, media, politics, and business, furthering a nonviolent revolution across the country.

Since the 1980s, the Left has largely taken over and established strongholds in the mainstream media, academia, and Hollywood. The presidency of Ronald Reagan briefly reversed this trend, only for it to restart in the 1990s and reach a peak in recent years.

5. The Anti-War and Civil Rights Movements

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the four main Oceanian ministries is the Ministry of Peace, which oversees the Party’s military affairs. The inverted meaning of its name reflects a strategy often employed by communists: When one’s strength is inferior to that of the enemy, proclaim one’s desire for peace; extending an olive branch is the best way to hide an imminent attack.

The Soviet Union and other communist countries proved adept practitioners of this strategy, which is employed to infiltrate and disarm the West. Directly after the end of World War II — with the United States still the only country to produce and deploy the atomic bomb — the World Peace Council was formed. Its first chairperson was French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a member of the French Communist Party.

Having suffered huge losses in the war, the Soviet Union aggressively promoted world peace as a stratagem to stave off pressure from the West. The World Peace Council was directly influenced by the Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace, an organization affiliated with the Soviet Communist Party. The council ran a worldwide campaign proclaiming that the Soviet Union was a peace-loving nation and condemning the United States as a hegemonic warmonger. The “struggle for peace,” a catchphrase promoted by high-ranking Soviet official and ideological leader Mikhail Suslov, became a fixture of Soviet rhetoric.

“The present anti-war movement testifies to the will and readiness of the broadest masses of the people to safeguard peace and to prevent the aggressors from plunging mankind into the abyss of another slaughter,” Suslov wrote in a 1950 propaganda tract. “The task now is to turn this will of the masses into active, concrete actions aimed at foiling the plans and measures of the Anglo-American instigators of war.” [22]

“World peace” became one of the communist frontlines in the public-opinion war against the free world. The Soviet Union sponsored a multitude of organizations and groups to push communist aims, such as the World Federation of Trade Unions, Women’s International Democratic Federation, International Federation of Journalists, World Federation of Democratic Youth, and the World Federation of Scientific Workers.

Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent Soviet dissident, wrote in 1982: “Members of the older generation can still remember the marches, the rallies, and the petitions of the 1950s. ... It is hardly a secret now that the whole campaign was organized, conducted, and financed from Moscow, through the so-called Peace Fund and the Soviet-dominated World Peace Council.” [23]

Hall, the former CPUSA general secretary, said, “It is necessary to widen the struggle for peace, to raise its level, to involve far greater numbers, to make it an issue in every community, every people’s organization, every labor union, every church, every house, every street, every point of gathering of our people.” [24]

The Soviets pushed the “struggle for peace” movement throughout the Cold War. Stanislav Lunev, a former officer of the Soviet GRU (military intelligence) who defected to the United States in 1992, said that “the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad.” [25]

Ronald Radosh, a former Marxist and activist during the anti-Vietnam war movement, admitted, “Our intention was never so much to end the war as to use anti-war sentiment to create a new revolutionary socialist movement at home.” [26]

The last major anti-war movement pushed by the Soviets took place during the early 1980s, when the United States deployed intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Anti-war protesters demanded that both the United States and the Soviet Union limit their nuclear arsenals, and in 1987 the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was created. Given the lack of free speech and political transparency in the Soviet bloc, the treaty’s terms could only be effectively guaranteed in the democratic West. Following the Cold War, organizations with communist or radical left-wing ties continued to play a major role in steering the US anti-war movement, particularly after the start of the War on Terror. [27]

Communists also made efforts to hijack the American civil rights movement. As early as the late 1920s, the Communist Workers Party of America believed there to be great potential for revolution among black Americans. [28] A communist propaganda handbook published in 1935, The Negroes in a Soviet America, proposed a racial revolution in the South, including the establishment of a Negro Republic, to be combined with the overall proletarian revolution. [29]

In the 1960s, elements of the civil rights movement received support from the Soviet and Chinese communist parties. The extremist Revolutionary Action Movement and the Maoist Black Panther Party were supported or directly influenced by the CCP. In the summer of 1965, several American cities were torn by race riots. After Leonard Patterson withdrew from the CPUSA, he testified that those leading the violent African-American organizations enjoyed the Party’s strong support. Both he and Hall had received training in Moscow. [30]

Whether in terms of its organizational structure or ideological program, the Black Panther Party looked up to the CCP as its role model, using slogans such as Mao’s “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “all power belongs to the people.” Mao’s Little Red Book was a must-read for all members. Like the CCP, the Black Panthers advocated violent revolution. One of the party’s leaders, Eldridge Cleaver, predicted in 1968 a wave of terror, violence, and guerrilla warfare. At many Black Panther gatherings, participants waved the Little Red Book, mimicking the Red Guards who were doing the same thing in China. [31]

The civil rights movement successfully brought race relations into public discussion and helped Americans heal some of the nation’s deepest divides through peaceful means, such as legislation, demonstrations, boycotts, and education. However, left-wing revolutionaries have continued to use racial conflict as a springboard for their radical agendas. [32]

Updated October 12, 2020

References

1. Joseph (Jake) Klein, “An Interview With Trevor Loudon,” Capital Research Center, February 24, 2017, accessed on April 16, 2020, https://capitalresearch.org/article/an-interview-with-trevor-loudon.
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx & Engels Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. Andy Blunden (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed April 17, 2020, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm.

3. “Our History,” Fabian Society, accessed March 6, 2020, https://fabians.org.uk/about-us/our-history.

4. Mary Agnes Hamilton, Sidney and Beatrice Webb: A Study in Contemporary Biography (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1932).
5. Vladimir Lenin, ‘Left Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), 47.
6. George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (New York: Brentano’s Publishers, 1928), 470.
7. US Congress, House, Committee on Un-American Activities, Communist Legal Subversion: The Role of the Communist Lawyer: Report, 86th Cong., 1st sess., February 16, 1959.
8. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 138–145.
9. M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012).
10. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952).
11. Tomas Schuman (Yuri Bezmenov), Love Letter to America (Los Angeles: Maxims Books, 1984), 21–46.
12. Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak, Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism (Washington, DC: WND Books Inc., 2013).
13. Bureau of the Census, “Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2,” accessed on April 16, 2020, https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/1930-39unemployment.pdf
14. Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017).
15. Jim Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (New York: Crown Forum, 2003).
16. Milton Friedman, as quoted in Powell, FDR’s Folly, back cover.
17. Nicholas Eberstadt, “The Great Society at 50: What LBJ wrought,” American Enterprise Institute, May 9, 2014, accessed on April 16, 2020, https://www.aei.org/articles/the-great-society-at-50.
18. Elmer T. Peterson, “This Is the Hard Core of Freedom,” The Daily Oklahoman, December 9, 1951.
19. William S. Lind, ‘Political Correctness:’ A Short History of an Ideology (Washington, DC: Free Congress Foundation, 2004), 4–5.

20. Ibid., 10.

21. Lin Biao, “Defeat US Imperialism and Its Lackeys by People’s War,” in Long Live the Victory of People’s War! (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1965).
22. Mikhail Suslov, “The Defense of Peace and the Struggle Against the Warmongers” (New Century Publishers, February 1950), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed April 17, 2020, https://www.marxists.org/archive/suslov/1949/11/x01.htm.
23. Vladimir Bukovsky, “The Peace Movement & the Soviet Union,” Commentary Magazine, May 1982, accessed April 17, 2020, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-peace-movement-the-soviet-union.
24. US Congress, Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates, 88th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 109, Part 1, January 9, 1963–January 30, 1963.
25. Stanislav Lunev and Ira Winkler, Through the Eyes of the Enemy: The Autobiography of Stanislav Lunev (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1998).
26. Ronald Radosh, as quoted in Robert Chandler, Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, the Global New Left, and Radical Islam (Washington, DC.: Regnery Publishing, 2008), 389.
27. “AIM Report: Communists Run Anti-War Movement,” Accuracy in Media, February 19, 2003, https://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-communists-run-anti-war-movement.
28. John Pepper (Joseph Pogani), American Negro Problems (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed April 17, 2020, https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1928/nomonth/0000-pepper-negroproblems.pdf.
29. James W. Ford and James S. Allen, The Negroes in a Soviet America (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1935), 24–30.
30. Leonard Patterson, “I Trained in Moscow for Black Revolution,” Speakers Bureau of the John Birch Society, YouTube video, posted by Swamp Yankee, August 20, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXQjk4zhZs.
31. G. Louis Heath, ed., Off the Pigs! The History and Literature of the Black Panther Party (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976), 61.
32. Thurston Powers, “How Black Lives Matter Is Bringing Back Traditional Marxism,” The Federalist, September 28, 2016, http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/28/black-lives-matter-bringing-back-traditional-marxism.