Several months back, J.R. Nyquist sent a sobering shot across the bow of sleepy-eyed Americans, who are still triumphantly patting themselves on the back for "defeating" the USSR nearly twenty years ago. In "Warning to the West," Russian historians, former KGB, and other academics warned that America is being lulled into a false sense of security.
While President Obama advocated unilateral disarmament during his campaign and again almost literally while North Korean test-missiles flew over the Pacific, the Russians are working with America's worst enemies to destroy us from without, while the president and his progressive cohorts in the media and academia do their damage from within. The arms control talks between Russia and America under Obama illustrate our primrose path to hell very well. While Obama is allowing the Russians open access to our nuclear stockpiles, the START treaty that gave our analysts and inspectors access to nuclear weapons sites in Russia has expired.
Then there is the matter of nuclear weapons development. From the Wall Street Journal:
At issue is whether the U.S. will continue to have access to Russian missile-flight data. The U.S. is no longer developing new long-range missiles, so the Russian negotiators aren't pressing the point. The Russians, on the other hand, are trying to develop new missiles to replace Soviet-era SS-18s and SS-19s.
What is the reason for our unwillingness to match a dangerous foe like Russia in nuclear weapons' capability? An excerpt from the Epilogue of the memoir of KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov Comrade J explains our national delusions about Russia and its intentions:
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and Russia entered into what was supposed to be a new era of cooperation. The Cold War was behind us. We could become friends. Many in the U.S. believe today the old Spy-versus-Spy days are finished. The September 11 terrorist attacks shifted the American public's attention away from Russia toward international terrorism, especially Islamic fanaticism. Russia was suddenly, and is today viewed as, an ally, even a friend of the U.S..
In speaking out, I hope to expose how naive this is. During the Cold War, in the Soviet military doctrine there was the definition of the MAIN ENEMY, which was also used by intelligence as a basic guiding principle. It was the United States, followed by NATO and China. What is the official guiding line for the modern SVR today? The terms have changed. It is now called the MAIN TARGET. But it is exactly the same: the United States, followed by NATO and China. Nothing has changed. Russia is doing everything it can today to embarrass the U.S. Let me repeat this. Russia is doing everything it can today to undermine and embarrass the U.S. The SVR rezidenturas in the U.S. are not less, but in some aspects even more active today than during the Cold War. What should that tell you?
History is non-coincidentally repeating itself, and we are facing a redux of the Cold War when many in academia loathe America so much that they dismiss the hostile intentions of our enemies. We will focus on the track record with the former Soviet Union, its links to pro-communist movements in America, and now our inexplicable national security stance toward Russia.
An excellent book detailing the history of the blind mentality of America's intellectual leadership is In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage by Haynes and Klehr. The book documents and details the stunning inability of communists, socialists, and progressive fellow-travelers to admit that their conceptions about the former USSR were completely bogus. It also provides specific linkages between the former NKVD and KGB First Chief Directorate (now the SVR) drawing on Russian archives (Comintern and CPUSA world HQ) with literally millions of documents.
What comes out of In Denial that seems to me to be the most dangerous is that academics, those who train our best and brightest in their formative intellectual years, are willfully blind to any damning information about America's enemies and even bitterly opposed to everything about America itself! This may seem self-evident, but to read it documented, page after scathing page, is an experience that anyone outside of academia must have. People would be shocked to learn that the presidents of prestigious national historical associations and political science associations have been and often are self-avowed communists! The academic and intellectual climate in the U.S. is akin the former KGB's wet dream, as well as that of the current Russian intelligence services [they were ostensibly split up under Yeltsin into the FSB (internal), SVR (external), and a host of other agencies]. So what happened to our willingness to stand up for and defend ourselves?
Drawing on In Denial and a few outside sources, let's do a basic reconstruction of the recent intellectual history of the pro-communist left.
The entry-point into American politics were the labor unions, with socialists arising in the labor movement in the late nineteenth century. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the socialist Eugene Debs ran for president several times, losing resoundingly each time. During the 1930s, communist recruitment really picked up, as Moscow archives show not only KGB (and relatedly, Comintern) funding for the CPUSA (Communist Party USA), but the Great Depression also soured many on "capitalism." The CPUSA in the 1930s was mainly led by Earl Browder, a Soviet contact who took over for William Z. Foster in 1932. Browder would lead a "Popular Front" of "liberals," (see socialist Norman Thomas' quote), socialists, and "progressives" in common cause against "fascism." "Fascism" was defined by Joseph Stalin and through missives sent out through the Comintern (Communist International) wielded as a weapon against any collectivist regime that deviated from the Soviet line (see Goldberg's Liberal Fascism for more on this).
But the CPUSA, after being largely tolerated by the American public throughout the Great Depression, was ostracized by the news in August 1939 that Stalin and Hitler had concluded a "Non-Aggression" (more accurately, a partition of Poland) pact just prior to Hitler's invasion of Poland. The communists needed a new strategy to become more accepted in the United States. The communists devised verbal tricks (such as changing the references for their Marxist ideology) to mainstream themselves in American life.
From In Denial:
In 1946, Communists and their allies attempted to seize leadership of American liberalism by creating the Progressive Party and backing former vice president [under FDR] Henry Wallace for the presidency. But Wallace's defense of the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and his repeated excuse making for Stalin's actions, as well as exposure of the Communist Part's secret role in the Progressive Party, doomed this effort. As the Cold War intensified, and particularly during the Korean War, when American troops were directly engaged with Communist forces, the CPUSA became the pariah of American society (28).
By 1953, Stalin was dead and the American economy was beginning to pick up after a post-war slump. The new freedom for socialists and communists meant the potentiality of developing a new strategy, one that would avoid the obvious resiliency of the American economy and attack from a different front. This new grand strategy, hatched by the Frankfurt School and brought to the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University,was termed "cultural Marxism" and developed the idea of critical theory. Critical theory is the approach where communists form a myriad of movements and fronts critical of the United States and capitalism, but actually espouse very little in terms of formal theory, so that communists can remain "formless" in the culture. See Sun-Tzu, a favorite in the Russian intel services:
“Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.”
And:
“Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” (Ironically, "Barack" in Ancient Aramaic means "falling thunderbolt.")
The neo-marxists of the Frankfurt School drew on the writings of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci to develop a plan to march through the educational, social, cultural, political, and legal institutions of the country to develop socialist "ideological hegemony." This "long march" would mean first placing university professors; training journalists to shape prevailing attitudes; revising history to fit socialist narratives, especially "class struggle"; funding and corrupting the arts; infiltrating acting associations, like the Screen Actor's Guild; corrupting music (see Theodore Adorno); sexualizing youth to cause them to rebel (see Gyorgy Lukacs); demonizing all those opposed to communism as McCarthyites and "red-baiters"; and eventually, even propagating new passive or submissive national security strategies in academia like "containment," and "peaceful co-existence" (detente was a bit different because the strategy was to get Russia and China to turn on one another).
By the end of the 1960s and 1970s, the country was thoroughly radicalized. Feminists, black radicals, peaceniks, environmentalist extremists, and other "critical theory" groups (not always self-consciously so) were combating American culture, preaching retreat in Vietnam (which would demoralize the American military and lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese) and condemning American "imperialism" (a favorite, but obscene, charge by the left).
One of the primary groups that led the way in these movements was the SDS or Students for a Democratic Society, effectively led originally by Tom Hayden beginning in 1962. In 1969, the SDS effectively infiltrated the American Political Science Association, and had quite an impact on academia, but would splinter into a more "peaceful" wing and a more violent wing - the Weatherman. While the SDS types would go on to be inspired by obvious communist "social activists" like Saul Alinsky (an ideological mentor to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), the Weatherman (later the Weather Underground) were inspired by terrorists like William Ayers, who later befriended Barack Obama (despite media spin to the contrary).
After a generation of aggressive infiltration of the education system (since 1969), the Berlin Wall would fall twenty years later, in 1989. This event further discredited communism to the majority of Americans, despite academics' best efforts, but shook the faith of very few true believers in communism. The former open communists (who were emboldened over the years through gathering strength in the universities) would again regroup under critical theory guises like "environmentalism" (specifically global warming), "radical feminist theory," African-American studies, and other Marxist front movements, which are now firmly embedded in academia as university departments. The professors of these departments would mold a new generation of thinkers; finally in 2009 (see KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's chilling estimate of 15-20 years to "brainwash" a generation), their man, Barack Obama, would take the highest office of president of the United States.
It is no coincidence that since taking office Barack Obama has backed down on the ABM defense shield in Europe; quixotically, and dangerously for U.S. national security, has proposed a world without nuclear weapons; has refused to confront the Russians on their assistance of Iran's nuclear weapons (sic) program; and has had nothing critical to say about Vladimir Putin whatsoever. This is how countries are defeated before a potential war even begins - they are psychologically and then materially disarmed. Again Sun Tzu:"Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." If Obama were an agent of subversion, he would be the most highly decorated in Russian intelligence history.
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