The Making of a Communist
by Dr. Fred Schwarz

INTELLECTUAL PRIDE
      A third factor in the making of a Communist is intellectual pride.  The student of eighteen or nineteen years of age is beginning to feel the freedom of his new intellectual environment.  He is just beginning to realize how little his parents know.  For sixteen or seventeen years the truth of their backwardness and ignorance passed him by, but now the light is dawning.  He has come to realize the sordidness of the traditions of his own country and to discover that national heroes, even men like Washington and Lincoln, were motivated by personal, selfish greed.  Becoming disenchanted with his family and national heritage, he is ripe for conversion to Communism.  Convinced of his intellectual brilliance, he sees himself as master of the situation, as one who is entitled, because of his superior intelligence, to be the executive of the great program for the regeneration and perfection of all mankind.  Mankind certainly needs changing, and he is just the man to do it.

UNFILLED RELIGIOUS NEED
      The fourth factor in the making of a Communist is unfilled religious need. “Man shall not live by bread alone.”  Life needs a purpose.  Man is born with a heart to worship God, to reach out for something bigger and beyond himself, to seek some noble vision for which to sacrifice, some purpose for which to live and die.  When denial of the existence of God deprives him of his natural fulfillment, Communism provides a substitute.  It gives him a sense of purpose and destiny, gives meaning to life, and provides a motive for sacrifice.
      People are mystified when a man born to great wealth and social position becomes a Communist, spends his fortune for Communist purposes, and even goes to jail in the interests of the Communist cause.  To many people, this does not make

sense.
      Let us try to put ourselves in his position.  As a child he has the finest tutors.  He is very intelligent.  Very early in life he learns that there is no God, that the idea of God is for dull and second rate minds, and that he, in the purity and perfection of his intellect, has no need for God.  He accepts the Darwinian hypothesis concerning the origin of man, and the Marxian hypothesis concerning the origin of civilization, culture, morality, ethics, and religion.
      As a young man he sits on the mount of learning and watches the progress of the animal species from the jungles via savagery and barbarism to civilization.  He watches the productive forces as they operate on the human species dividing it into nations and classes, creating cultures, civilizations, moral codes, educational and political institutions and religious faith.  He sits above it all, and beyond it all.  He is lost in lonely isolation.  Life is devoid of meaning, purpose, and objective.  Yet he is a young man with all the idealism and emotional urgency of youth.  Where can he find fulfillment?  Some seek it in sporting life; some in the life of a playboy.  These outlets have little appeal for him.
      Suddenly he hears a whisper on the breeze that history in the goodness of its heart is calling unto itself a few of its finest and its best—superior intellects, courageous characters with an insight into its mind and its purpose, and a knowledge of historic law and historic will; that it is uniting them into its finest organization and giving them the destiny of conquering the world and regenerating mankind.  It comes as a vision of glory.  It sets a song singing in his heart.  It leads him forward to live and, if necessary, to die in the Communist cause.  In it he finds a religious refuge for his godless and unbelieving heart.
      Communists are not born; they are made.  They are being formed constantly on the campuses of the world.  As long as youth is disillusioned, materialistically oriented and spiritually unfulfilled, there will be no dearth of Communist recruits.  Herein lies our greatest challenge.

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      In other reports, Amnesty International mentioned imprisoned poet Armando Valladares, who noted that Cuban officials used pro-Castro statements of American clergy to torment prisoners.  “That was worse for the Christian political prisoners than beatings or the hunger,” Mr. Valladares wrote.  “Incomprehensibly to us, while we waited for the embrace of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our tormentors.”
      In 1980, the NCC published a book claiming that “Cubans are the only Latin Americans who have broken with dependent capitalism and its accompanying dehumanization of the common people.”  Further, the efforts of the Cuban government “affirm that the gospel’s command to feed the hungry and preach good news to the poor is being fulfilled.”
      That is the ethos of the current NCC leadership, which also supports lifting the U.S. embargo.  Family reunification has nothing to do with it.  The NCC leadership believes that Elian Gonzalez will be better-off under socialism in Cuba, better-off without the right to free speech, free association, and freedom of movement—the bourgeois capitalist vices that the NCC believes dehumanize people.
      Cuba confirms that nations that are barren of liberties are also barren of groceries.  But the NCC believes Elian will be better-off under a regime of shared scarcity.  The Council’s stand can only be described as loathsome, the direct opposite of the most Christ-like figure in this episode, Elian’s mother.  She died that her son might be free.
      That heroic sacrifice should be respected and Elian Gonzalez should stay here.  Meanwhile, the National Council of Churches should drop its religious affiliation and register as an agent of the Cuban government.

Washington Times, January 10, 2000, p. A15

Why is the National Council of Churches pushing to have Elian sent back to Cuba?
      Because the NCC is a leftist organization that has always supported Castro.  Like many others on the left, liberty is not a big deal to the NCC.  For example, it values literacy over liberty— “Thanks to Castro, people can now read in Cuba”—as if it is more important to read than to be free.  Over the last generation, the NCC has consistently supported anti-Western despots.  It is a scandal that the media, which always label conservative organizations as conservative organizations, never refer to the National  Council of Churches as a leftist organization.

The Prager Perspective, January 1, 2000, p. 4

China Scandal
by Kenneth R. Timmerman

      Investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, now believe that manufacturing problems in Communist China caused the crash of an MD-83 airliner in January, killing all 88 Americans on board.  If their suspicions are borne out, Alaska Air Flight 261 could become a powerful symbol for all that has gone wrong with Bill Clinton’s failed policy of appeasement toward Communist China, as well as a tragic monument to the shortsightedness of major U.S. exporters such as Boeing, who have shipped jobs overseas relentlessly in pursuit of the phantom Chinese market.
      Shanghai Aviation Industrial Corp. manufactured the defective horizontal stabilizer for all MD-80 and MD-90 series aircraft as part of a massive offsets agreement negotiated with McDonnell Douglas more than a decade ago.  Boeing since has purchased McDonnell Douglas.  Under the agreement, which opened the way for the sale of MD-80 aircraft to China, McDonnell Douglas agreed to help Chinese aerospace companies manufacture parts that would be incorporated into all similar aircraft sold by McDonnell Douglas worldwide.  The agreement was roundly protested by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers because it meant closing U.S. production lines for those parts and exporting the jobs to Communist China, but neither President Bush nor President Clinton paid heed to the unions.   Since then,  dozens of U.S. aerospace plants have been closed, including an F-14 plant in Glen Arm, MD., as their manufacturing equipment has been sold off to Communist China, where more often than not it has been used to produce combat jets and missiles as well as civilian airliners.
      I first began investigating the sell-off of U.S. defense-production equipment to Communist China in 1994 for Time magazine.  U.S. government sources provided me with documentation detailing how a Chinese military-manufacturing company, CATIC, was seeking to buy advanced machine tools from a McDonnell Douglas plant in Columbus, Ohio.  Customs inspectors and Defense Department analysts raised concerns from the outset because the Columbus plant had been used to produce the B-1 bomber and the C-17, the largest military jet cargo plane in the world.  The equipment and the manufacturing processes used in the plant were considered critical military technologies and were safeguarded by strict export controls until Clinton came around.

Insight, March 20, 2000, p. 44

Harry Hopkins: Soviet Traitor, Not an American Hero
by Reed Irvine

      Each of the panelists on CNN’s “Capital Gang” has to come up with an “Outrage of the Week” at the end of the program.  One of those panelists, Al Hunt, a liberal columnist for the Wall Street Journal, recently committed the outrage of the century in his final column for 1999.
      In that column, Hunt listed his choices of the 20th century’s best American government officials and included Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest adviser, as one of the best presidential aides of the century.
      In selecting Hopkins, Hunt revealed his ignorance of what has been learned about Soviet espionage in recent years.
      Someday, historians will have to acknowledge that Harry Hopkins was the greatest traitor in American history, overshadowing Benedict Arnold by far.  Arnold, at least, was open in his betrayal, and his potential for damaging the American cause was small by comparison.
      Hopkins was a Soviet agent who pretended to put America’s interests first while secretly advancing the interests of Stalin.
      In his 1990 book KGB: The Inside Story, Oleg Gordievsky, a high-level KGB defector, reported damning information about Hopkins he heard from Ishhak Akhmerov, an undercover spymaster who controlled the KGB’s “illegal” agents in the United States during World War II.
      He said that Akhmerov had described Harry Hopkins as “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States.”  He said that other KGB officers in the directorate in charge of illegals and the U.S. experts in the KGB’s code section “all agreed that Hopkins had been an agent of major significance.”
      Gordievsky’s co-author, Christopher Andrew, was not comfortable in publishing this charge.  He said Gordievsky had gradually come to believe that Hopkins was an “unconscious” agent, meaning that Hopkins did not realize that Akhmerov was a Soviet spymaster.
      Akhmerov, who served as a liaison between Hopkins and Stalin, had no open connection with the Soviet embassy or any official Soviet organization in the U.S.  His cover is believed to have been running a clothing store in New York.  He used at least three different aliases in dealing with the agents under his control.

      Hopkins was not so naive as to think that a small businessman who could deliver and receive messages from Stalin was anything other than a high-ranking Soviet intelligence agent.  Hopkins never told anyone about this strange little man who was in close touch with the Soviet dictator.  He didn’t ask the FBI to investigate him because he knew he was dealing with a Soviet spy.
      Further confirmation of Hopkins’ conscious collaboration with the KGB came with the 1999 publication of The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive.  This was based on copies of KGB files spirited out of Russia by retired KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin.
      One of them disclosed that Hopkins had informed the Soviet embassy that the FBI had bugged a secret meeting between Steve Nelson, a member of the U.S. Communist underground, and a Soviet embassy official.
      The official had gone to California to give Nelson money to finance his espionage operations.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed Hopkins in writing that the FBI had planted bugs in both Nelson’s home and in the Communist Party headquarters in New York City.
      In passing this information to the Soviet embassy, Hopkins proved that he put the interests of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics above those of the United States.
      Further confirming Hopkins’ treachery, Akhmerov said that an agent identified as “19” reported a conversation between Roosevelt and Churchill.  An endnote in the Mitrokhin book says that “it is probable almost to the point of certainty that Hopkins was ‘19’.”
      Over strong opposition, Hopkins persuaded the ailing Roosevelt to go to Yalta, where the fate of Poland and other countries under Soviet occupation was sealed.
      Hopkins said the Russians had been “reasonable and farseeing.”  Robert Sherwood, a Roosevelt speechwriter, called Yalta “a monstrous fraud.”
      Hopkins had been instrumental in our supplying, with no conditions, the arms that enabled Stalin to defeat the Germans.  He helped seal their control of Eastern Europe, and he is suspected of having authorized shipments of uranium that helped them develop their A-bomb.
      No wonder Akhmerov considered Hopkins his most important agent.  According to Gordievsky, the KGB believed he helped it triumph “over American imperialism.”
      Hero of the Soviet Union? Yes.  American hero?  No way!

Reed Irvine, Internet Vortex, February 2000, p. 29

Communism’s Bloody History
by Stephen Goode

      It was a best-seller when it came out in France in 1997, selling nearly 200,000 copies in its hardback edition.  That is a very large sale for a book almost 900 pages long that gives a blow-by-blow description of the crimes of communism, beginning with the Russian Revolution and running through China, Eastern Europe, Cuba and the war in Afghanistan.  Now The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is available in English, thanks to a stellar edition from Harvard University Press that appeared late last year, with an excellent introduction by Martin Malia, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.
      Already this book has aroused a sensation in the United States and Great Britain.  Why?  Because The Black Book shows that violence, extreme terror and murder were part of the character of communism from the very beginning, established personally in the early days of the revolution by Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks.
      That’s an uncomfortable notion because many liberal and academics sympathetic to Marxism like to blame Josef Stalin as the man who turned a well-meaning revolution begun by Lenin into a monstrous, evil aberration of what communism should be, and that without Stalin the history of communism would have been much milder and far less bloody.
      But far more controversial and politically incorrect for many liberals and academics is the contention of Stephane Courtois, the French scholar who headed the group of six experts who wrote The Black Book, that the world must come to see that the evils of communism are at least equal and in some ways surpass (in body count, for example) the evils of Nazism, which usually is awarded the title of the chief evil of the 20th century.For many liberals and academics this is heresy because Nazism is the one true, unadulterated evil of the last 100 years, while communism, which might be accused of a few excesses, must be forgiven because at least its goal was the creation of a just society for all, which never was the aim of Nazism.
     The Black Book's indictment of communism is all the more powerful for many readers because its six authors once were Communists or fellow travelers.  They now regard themselves as liberals and are researchers, professors and journalists associated with the Paris-based Center for the Study of History and Sociology of Communism.  Courtois is editor of the review Communisme.

      It’s their conclusion that, all told, communism during the first 70 years of its existence was responsible for 85 million to 100 million deaths worldwide, while Nazism can account for 25 million deaths.  Here’s how the totals break down:

•     U.S.S.R: 20 million deaths
•     China: 65 million deaths
•     Vietnam: 1 million deaths
•     North Korea: 2 million deaths
•     Cambodia: 2 million deaths
•     Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
•     Latin America: 150,000 deaths
•     Africa: 1.7  million deaths
•     Afghanistan: 1.5  million deaths
•     The International Communist Movement and communist parties not in power: about 10,000

      The figures are presented soberly and the way the authors arrived at them clearly is explained.  But despite the rich scholarship of the book, Malia warned in his introduction that many academics and others will find these numbers very difficult to swallow, denounce The Black Book and its findings as “right-wing anti-Communist rhetoric” and do their best to relegate the book to the realm of misguided and wrong-intentioned works that no one need seriously consider.
      This is precisely what has happened, though there have been a few exceptions.  Columnist Diana West, writing in the Washington Times, Nov. 19, 1999, congratulated Courtois and the other authors on breaking “a political taboo” by showing the moral equivalence between communism and Nazism rather than writing about a nonexistent moral equivalence between communism and capitalism “so long in vogue among intellectuals.”
      And writing in Canada’s National Post on Jan. 6, Terence Corcoran wrote that after reading The Black Book “it is impossible to contemplate the past 100 years without acknowledging the rise and fall of the institutionalized totalitarianism that was communism as perhaps the most important development of the century.”  Corcoran went on to warn “Canada’s loyal band of Castro backers” that they wouldn’t like The Black Book section on Castro, which shows him for the tyrant he is.
      But West and Corcoran were exceptions among a horde of reviewers who found themselves intensely uncomfortable with the notion that communism might be called evil and ranked alongside Nazism as one of the great wrongs of the very-bloody 20th century.

      More characteristic were three reviews that appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times and The Times of London.  Each acknowledged that The Black Book has good qualities, but then refuted any compliments concerning the book by claiming the authors (and Courtois, most particularly) are terribly off base.
      Ohio University history professor Jeffry Herf, reviewing for the Washington Post on Jan. 23, for example, could write, “Courtois has a point: In Western academia, scholars who chose to focus on the crimes of communism were and remain a minority and face the career-blocking danger of being labeled right-wingers.”  But then Herf turns the tables by charging that it’s not fair to compare those dead from Nazism with the number dead from communism because communism lasted eight decades while Na-zism existed only for 12 years, and if Adolf Hitler had endured longer he would have killed perhaps 30 million more.
      It’s almost as though Herf exonerates the Communists because they killed over a longer period of time and weren’t as efficient as the Nazis.  But what’s oddest about the otherwise liberal Herf’s claim is that it could be used as an argument that the West should have stepped in sooner to stop Communist slaughter, just as it stepped in to bring an end to the Nazi menace.  If World War II prevented Hitler from killing tens of millions more, just think how many lives would have been saved if Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung or Pol Pot had been stopped sooner?
      For Oxford University professor Alan Ryan, whose review appeared in the New York Times on Jan. 2, The Black Book’s condemnation of communism is long overdue: “This is the body count of a colossal, wholly failed social, economic, political and psychological experiment.  It is a criminal indictment, and it rightly reads like one.”
      But Ryan quickly moves on to argue that Lenin (had he lived longer) and Leon Trotsky (had he not been driven from power by Stalin) “probably” would have come to understand that mass terror and murder only caused people to hate them and would have stopped government-sponsored terror.  But Stalin, who was “thought by Trotsky to be a paranoid maniac, and may well have been so by the end of his life,” says Ryan, didn’t end mass murder because he was...crazy.

      Even more amazingly, Ryan claims that “so long as a shred of Marxist intelligence remained to Communist practice, it was not in itself an exterminationist project.”  What he seems to be saying is that communism in the 20th century simply wasn’t true to its Marxist roots and, if it had been, it never would have turned violent– a claim that ignores Karl Marx’s own often violence-laden rhetoric and his championing of such events as the French Revolution and the Paris Commune.
      More specious is Orlando Figes’ argument in his review of The Black Book in The Times of London on Nov. 25, 1999.  “The Germans killed the Jews for no other reason than they were Jews,” a statement with which no one could disagree.  But then Figes, whose specialty is the Russian Revolution, goes on to write that we must regard the victims of communism as facing less evil than the victims of Nazism because “the victims of the Communists were killed as an effect of disastrous policies or murdered in the rush to achieve the goals of a misguided revolution.”
      It’s as though Figes is arguing that the 100 million victims of communism would have had totally justifiable deaths if they had been the victims of successful (rather than “disastrous”) government programs or if they had been murdered in “the rush to achieve the goals” of a revolution whose aims were carefully guided (rather than “misguided”).
      For Figes, the evils of Nazism and that of communism don’t equate because under communism “there was no class genocide to equate with the destruction of a race.”  For him, the “Holocaust was something else, something that defies all human values.  That is why we shall always see it for the unique form of evil that it was.”
      For the authors of The Black Book, communism is a unique evil, too, that defies all human values and deserves our condemnation along with Nazism, but it may be a while before this view widely is accepted.  As Malia writes in The Black Book’s introduction: Seekers “after historical truth should gird their loins for a very long march indeed before communism is accorded its full share of absolute evil.”

Insight, February 28, 2000, p. 24, 25

PLA Revises the Art of War
by J. Michael Waller

      Should U.S. financiers whose trading adversely affects Chinese “red-chip” companies be assassinated?  China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, is discussing the concept.  Should Beijing covertly fund political-influence operations in the United States?  A new PLA book openly asks the question.  Facing a potentially huge nuclear-weapons buildup as well as an even bigger high-tech conventional-arms race to reach parity with the United States and Russia, members of the echelon of senior colonels, who will be among tomorrow’s PLA flag officers, are looking beyond the nuclear age to a new and more stealthy form of war.
      The book, titled Unrestricted Warfare, is part of a larger effort within the PLA to develop a means of challenging the United States through “asymmetry”–not by trying to match the United States missile for missile, but by turning the strength of China’s adversaries against themselves as a judo artist subdues a larger, stronger foe.  “Understanding and employing the principle of asymmetry correctly allows us always to find and exploit an enemy’s soft spots,” PLA senior Cols. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui write in their 1999 book.  They say they got the idea for  the book during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis when Beijing stood by helplessly as two U.S. aircraft-carrier groups made a show of force during Beijing’s mock missile attack on Taiwan.  Insight has obtained a CIA translation of the volume.
      Unrestricted Warfare, according to a CIA commentary, “proposes tactics for developing countries, in particular China, to compensate for their military inferiority vis-a-vis the United States during a high-tech war.”  Accordingly, “Hacking into Websites, targeting financial institutions, terrorism, using the media and conducting urban warfare are among the methods proposed.”  In an interview with the official daily of the Chinese Communist Party youth league, the 44-year-old Qiao said, “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”  The book implies that the infrastructure for such warfare should be built and in place well in advance of any possible military confrontation.  “From this point on, war will no longer be what it was originally,” the colonels write, but will be unrecognizable as it is waged in the heart of American society.  “Does a single hacker attack count as a hostile act or not?  Can using financial instruments to destroy a country’s economy be seen as a battle?  Did CNN’s broadcast of an exposed corpse of a U.S. soldier in the streets of Mogadishu shake the determination of the Americans to act as the world’s policeman, thereby altering the world strategic situation?”
      The colonels have laid an intellectual framework for such

warfare with high-level sponsorship in the Chinese military and the ruling Communist Party.  “The PLA has placed special emphasis on the modernization of its info-war capabilities in accordance with the emphasis on information dominance in the classic book Art of War by Sun Tzu,” according to Al Santoli, editor of the China Reform Monitor bulletin.  “The rationale for this approach,” Santoli says, is articulated in Unrestricted Warfare.  “The PLA decided it cannot match the United States in conventional weapons.  Instead, it is emphasizing development of new information and cyber-war technologies and viruses to neutralize or erode an enemy’s political, economic and military information and command-and-control infrastructures,” according to Santoli.
      Much of the debate is out in the open.  The PLA is encouraging officers to think more about unrestricted warfare in general and information warfare in particular.  Last year it also published a companion work, Introduction to Information Warfare, “as part of its integrated combined operations for fighting future wars,” Santoli says.  The book “was approved by the PLA General Staff Department and the powerful Central Military Commission,” and was recommended for reading by the PLA newspaper Jiefangjun Bao.
      The PLA authors are explicit in Unrestricted Warfare, arguing that China can outmaneuver U.S. high-tech sensors, electronic countermeasures and weaponry by employing different methods entirely.  “If the attacking side [i.e., China] secretly musters large amounts of capital without the enemy nation being aware of this at all and launches a sneak attack against its financial markets,” they write, “then after causing a financial crisis, buries a computer virus and hacker detachment in the opponent’s computer system in advance, while at the same time carrying out a network attack against the enemy so that the civilian electricity network, traffic-dispatching network, financial-transaction network, telephone-communications network and mass-media network are completely paralyzed, this will cause the enemy nation to fall into social panic, street riots and a political crisis.”
      Or so the PLA hopes.  Unrestricted Warfare calls for widening the very idea of warfare to nearly every aspect of political, economic, cultural and social life in Western countries.  The elegant CIA translation reveals an extremely well-reasoned approach and a profound understanding of the U.S. military, the U.S. political and economic systems and American popular culture.
      Unrestricted warfare, the PLA colonels write, “means that all means will be in readiness, that information will be omnipresent and the battlefield will be everywhere.  It means that all weapons and technology can be superimposed at will, it means that all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and nonwar, of military and nonmilitary, will be totally destroyed.”