The Undead Again
The Undead Again
by J. R. Nyquist

Writing in the Dec. 20th Wall Street Journal, Robert Kaplan tells us that Nepal “could be the first country since the fall of the Berlin Wall where communists emerge triumphant.” In saying this, Kaplan glosses over the finer details of South African, Venezuelan and Brazilian politics. He forgets the triumphant communist revolution in Congo and the red elephant “hidden” in the back room of German politics. Because we are not allowed to say that communism is alive and well, every instant of communist victory is without larger significance. We must not interpret acts of subversion or agitation, however blatant, as coordinated or inspired by the apparatus of the old communist international. We simply mustn’t!

The peace movement, anti-Americanism, labor unrest, campus radicalism, international terrorism, and every other form of revolutionary protest was, at one time, encouraged by communist outlets (like the Communist Party USA). But now it seems that nobody is watching the communists. Nobody thinks they are capable of making trouble. Indeed, we no longer seem interested in attaching the “communist” label to those inspired by Karl Marx or his latter-day followers. It isn’t polite to remember that communists have always portrayed themselves as agrarian reformers, populists, democrats and social democrats. And so we accept the deceptive labels that men like Fidel Castro, Lula da Silva and Evo Morales employ. Meanwhile, a renewed and extended communist bloc is emerging – tied to Beijing and Moscow. But why take alarm? After all, everyone knows that “communism is dead.” And besides, a country like Nepal is unimportant. Who cares about Nepal? The Bush Administration, according to Kaplan, “has bought into popular abstractions about how to best implant democracy while ignoring the facts on the ground.” And so the communists will win.

the beginning of the Cold War to its supposed end, the communist bloc excelled at espionage, subversion and psychological warfare. With a tradition of feigned retreat and reform, Soviet Russia engaged in a great peace offensive in the late 1980s. This offensive was coupled with far-reaching domestic reforms. Under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow exchanged a bloated neo-Stalinist façade for an autocratically managed democracy. The change was deceptive.

Last March 6, ][/B]Washington Times columnist Bill Gertz reported on a meeting of U.S. intelligence officials in Texas. According to Gertz, CIA official Barry Royden revealed that the “Russian intelligence services are targeting U.S. troops in the Middle East for recruitment as agents, as well as seeking recruits among Americans in Russia.” Royden said that Russian intelligence officers were using “very aggressive actions,” like entrapment and blackmail to recruit American citizens and servicemen. As for the Chinese communists, a senior FBI counterintelligence official told Gertz that “Chinese activities are a major threat – specifically Beijing’s covert targeting of U.S. weapons technology.”

Now why would the Russians and Chinese – our dear friends – engage in such activity?

Several months ago a retired Cold War spy sent me a note. He characterized the situation in Eastern Europe as follows: “The communist forces have reorganized themselves under new ‘name tags’ but their goals are still the same: to dominate the world and to destroy the enemies of their wicked ideology. I am not naïve,” he added. “I don’t believe in political declarations and slogans. I am trying to follow up facts of life. And these facts are more and more alarming. The foreign policy of G.W. Bush is irresponsible…. The United States are unable even to control Iraq, not to speak of the world. [The] Russians and Chinese are quietly building up a huge first strike and destruction capability, deceiving the U.S. and Europe. The scheme is emerging more and more clearly. The NATO alliance is becoming more and more weak and downgraded by the NATO members themselves.”

Another Cold War spy, KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, predicted this would happen in a 1984 book titled New Lies for Old. Golitsyn was a senior analyst in the NATO section of the Information Department of the KGB. He defected in December 1961 and ended up working for the CIA in the 1960s, becoming closely associated with CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. By the mid-1970s Golitsyn and Angleton’s views on Soviet strategy were decisively rejected by the CIA, and both were sent into retirement. By 1975 the leaders of U.S. intelligence had dismissed Golitsyn’s analysis as “sick think.” Sick or not, Golitsyn accurately predicted the collapse of communism more than five years before it began. He predicted that a younger, more liberal Soviet ruler would soon appear and a period of reform would be initiated. Golitsyn’s 1984 book carefully outlined the types of changes to be expected in the East Bloc; he emphasized that the changes would be initiated “from above” and that they would be deceptive. Golitsyn’s key predictive assertion occurs in the following passage: “The dialectic of this offensive consists of a calculated shift from the old, discredited Soviet practice to a new, ‘liberalized’ model, with a social democratic façade, to realize the communist planners’ strategy for establishing a United Europe. At the beginning they introduced a variation of the 1968 Czechoslovakian ‘democratization.’ At a later phase they will shift to a variation of the Czechoslovakian takeover of 1948.”

A very simple question follows: From everything we know today, is the above paragraph a description of what is now happening in Europe, or is it entirely mistaken? Does it describe the progress of communism is Latin America – in Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil? One should not hesitate to list Nepal in this larger context

Furthermore, it is an indisputable fact that a KGB clique, led by President Vladimir Putin, governs Russia. At least one Western intelligence agency has concluded that Putin has secret “advisors” who cannot be identified. Who are they and why are they secret? At the same time, outright communists are still governing former Soviet republics and satellite countries. Czech activists like Hana Catalanova warn that the Czech Republic is dominated by hidden communist structures. In Poland, journalists like Tomasz Pompowski and Dariusz Rohnka (author of “The Fatal Fiction”), have explained that the communists are manipulating Poland’s government and economy. And then there’s the case of Romania. We have no greater authority for what happened in Romania than Andrei Codrescu, author of The Hole in the Flag. His account is a decisive clarification, from a major writer, of what really happened to communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. From Chapter 11 of Codrescu’s book, titled “The Mysteries of Sibiu,” we read: “Last night … I had gotten up, seized by thirst. Before going to bed, I had consumed a goodly amount of Stolichnaya with a Soviet journalist who’d been in Sibiu for a week. He had also been in Timişoara and told me a number of interesting things, including the fact that on December 10 – five days before the protest in front of Reverend Toke’s house – there were nearly a dozen TASS correspondents there. When I asked him why, my friend winked. His wink troubled me. ‘What were nearly a dozen TASS correspondents doing in a remote Transylvanian town, many days before anything started to happen?’ I insisted. He winked again.”

But when Golitsyn’s detailed predictions about the future democratization of the communist bloc came true, the conservatives tumbled over one another to declare victory and assign the credit to Ronald Reagan. Among intelligence historians, it was only Mark Riebling who noticed: that “of Golitsyn’s falsifiable predictions, 139 out of 148 were fulfilled by the end of 1993 – an accuracy rate of nearly 94 percent.” The reaction of William F. Buckley to this accuracy rating was to denounce Golitsyn as a paranoid in the pages of National Review.

With the crushing force of a hot-air hurricane, post-Cold War American opinion blew toward the isles of optimism. In place of the Seven Cities of Gold and the Fountain of Youth, the new Conquistadors found the “peace dividend” and elected “cheap hawk” conservatives like Newt Gingrich to lead the U.S. Congress. From this imaginary “peace dividend” flowed economic exuberance like milk and honey. Defense spending was slashed. Technological secrets were allowed to slip, ever so carelessly, into Russian and Chinese hands. The intelligence services put many Cold Warriors to pasture. It was time to make money and forget the horrors of Mutual Assured Destruction. The great and influential School of Insincerity finally took the West’s intellectual and political culture by the throat. To describe this “school” I quote the words of British historian William Lecky: “Its end was not truth, but plausibility.”