narcoguerrillas, an 18,000-man insurgency that began decades ago as an offshoot of the local Communist Party and still clings to Marxist-Leninist ideology.
      U.S. policy during the Clinton administration provided Colombia, a country twice as large as France, with the means to combat drug producers and traffickers but deliberately restricted the use of U.S.-supplied military equipment to prevent Bogotá from effectively fighting the FARC. A U.S.-brokered "peace" process helped give the FARC a protected sanctuary the size of Switzerland in the heart of the country. Now, Colombia faces the prospect of disintegration as the cocaine- and heroin-financed FARC gains military ground.
      Economic hard times and the difficult transitions from populist welfare-state regimes to market-based systems are creating hardship and malaise across much of Latin America, including Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member Ecuador and industrial powerhouses Argentina and Brazil. Far-left politicians now run the Western Hemisphere’s most populous cities: Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil. Masked Zapatista gunmen spouting Marxist rhetoric gained political legitimacy last year in Mexico, entering into negotiations with the government and even dictating terms in the name of an oppressed Indian minority in the southern part of the country. Across Mexico, Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos, a swaggering figure in a black ski mask who smokes a pipe, enjoys a cult following of sorts. Tourists even can buy chic Marcos postcards at airport gift shops.
      In Central America, where the Reagan Doctrine stopped Soviet expansionism in the 1980s, the extreme left is working within the political system to take power. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the former communist guerrilla army in El Salvador that tried to shoot its way into power and murdered U.S. servicemen in the process, is now the second-strongest political force in the country. It controls the capital city and dominates the national legislature, and is favored to oust the ruling conservative party. Next door in Nicaragua, polls show former Sandinista comandante Daniel Ortega with a plurality of popular support for the November presidential elections.
      Even in Chile, arguably the most prosperous country in South America after the economic reforms of the Pinochet military regime, the far left is ascendant. "The Chilean Socialist Party, which won the presidency, is the most radical of all the mainline socialist parties in the world," notes Wallace H. Spaulding, a Virginia-based researcher who writes annual reports on the status of the world’s far-left movements. "The president was elected with Communist Party support. In the 1990s the Chilean Socialists signed a declaration in Pyongyang [North Korea] that even half the 

world’s Communist parties wouldn’t sign. More recently, they attended the Belgrade Forum, the broadest and most successful leftist event going, in support of [ousted Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan] Milosevic."
      And so on around the world. Hard-core Maoist guerrillas are poised to take over the Himalayan Mountain kingdom of Nepal. Jungle fighters who unabashedly call themselves communists are waging war on the Philippines. In parts of the former Soviet Union, the Communists also are ascendant. Moldovans recently elected a Communist as their new president. Russian voters have given the Communists dominance of the federal parliament and in many of the country’s 89 regions. And then there are all of those "former" Communists who have shed the C-word and class-struggle rhetoric to form the oligarch classes ruling most of the former U.S.S.R.
      Some of the main Soviet international front organizations that coordinated anti-U.S. "active-measures" campaigns around the world during the Cold War still are around, no longer controlled by Moscow but as independent entities with murky funding sources. The World Peace Council (WPC), which coordinated much of the international "peace" movement against President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup in the 1980s, was nothing more than a near-vacant set of offices staffed by a demoralized skeleton crew when Insight visited its Helsinki headquarters in the weeks following the Soviet collapse in 1991. But, no more.
      Absent the Soviet-enforced cohesion, the fractious left has devolved into a free-for-all among rival factions. "After the Soviet collapse, the North Korean and French Communist parties competed for leadership of the formerly Soviet-backed international communist movement, sponsoring competing systems of conferences and festivals," says Spaulding. In his annual report on the globally organized far left, titled Is the Comintern Coming Back?, Spaulding found that Pyongyang "emerged as the more aggressive purveyor of a Left-Stalinist party line. The French Communist Party is the most conspicuous promoter of international conferences within a parliamentary-democratic framework."
      Spaulding says, "Shorn of its Kremlin subsidies, the World Peace Council shut its doors and began using the facilities of the French peace movement." But squabbling forced the WPC to close again when the French Communist Party sided with the Kosovar Albanians in the late 1990s, prompting the Greek Communist Party to take over the organization and move its headquarters to Athens where it is going strong.
      "Many of the international communist-front organizations are continuing to operate, but they now are hiding behind one level of cover — groups that are in the antiglobalism coalition," a veteran U.S. intelligence officer 

Frankfurt police cruiser that left officer Jurgen Weber disfigured and crippled.
      Though exonerated and released at the time, Fischer is being held responsible in a recent criminal and civil lawsuit by Weber and another officer. Weber’s lawyer says Fischer bears "moral responsibility" for the gasoline-bomb attack, as he allegedly was the "spiritual father" of the violence that led to the bombing.
      Meinhof’s daughter, 38-year-old Bettina Ruhl, agrees. Earlier this year she provided dramatic evidence incriminating Fischer in the street violence following her mother’s suicide and urged Fischer to come clean. Ruhl insisted that on the day of her mother’s suicide Fischer encouraged street fighters to use gasoline bombs against police. She openly urged the public prosecutor in Frankfurt to charge Fischer with attempted murder. One of the other police officers who survived the firebomb attack, Horst Breunig, echoed Ruhl’s plea, saying, "There is no statute of limitations" on attempted murder.
      For years, Fischer tried to conceal his involvement in left-wing extremism. His Website left a blank space in his biography between his childhood and his leadership of the environmentalist Green Party in 1982. He long denied, but ultimately admitted, participating in a 1969 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) solidarity conference in Algeria that called for "a final victory over Israel." And he was forced to admit complicity in January with release of the photos of him beating the police officer. Hauled before Parliament, Fischer admitted, "I was a militant. I threw stones. I got caught up in fights with police officers. I was beaten, but I also hit police officers. … I stand by my responsibility." He denied involvement in the 1976 firebombings and even called himself a strong critic of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, casting himself as the victim: "This is pitiful what you are doing here," Fischer told lawmakers. "Next thing you’ll be asking me if I beat my wife."
      Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the infamous terrorist known as "Carlos the Jackal," issued a written statement from his French prison cell saying he stored automatic weapons and explosives at the commune Fischer ran with fellow radical Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament. Ramirez said Fischer later ordered the weapons removed and they were taken to another location. Fischer denies any knowledge of Carlos’ weapons.
      Amid widespread calls for his resignation, Chancellor Schroeder defended Fischer and his past. "You want to destroy his political career," he told conservative opposition lawmakers.
      But Fischer never really apologized for his involvement 

with terrorism, and he appears to have done nothing to try to undo some of the damage. Even so, he remains one of the most popular politicians in Germany today. Nor has the old East German Communist Party, which renamed itself the Party of Democratic Socialism, come to terms with its totalitarian past. At the time of this writing, with the 40th anniversary of the Berlin Wall imminent, the party was agonizing over how to address the question of the wall and its role in preserving East German totalitarianism. The party has managed to describe the wall as "unjust," but to date cannot make itself condemn the construction out right. Most of its membership is said to oppose condemning the Berlin Wall.
      That hasn’t stopped Schroeder’s Social Democrats and Fischer’s Greens from breaking precedent and embracing the old East German Communist Party. Earlier this summer they dissolved their decade-old coalition with the center-right Christian Democrats to oust the Christian Democratic mayor of Berlin. Now, former East German Communist Gregor Gysi is a serious candidate to govern Germany’s capital city. While he isn’t expected to win outright, Gysi could win in a coalition with the Social Democrats and Greens. And for the first time ever, the old East German Communists run Berlin as part of a Social Democrat/Green coalition.
      Just as Fischer weathered the storm over his hidden proto-terrorist past and his deceitful attempts to cover up, so has French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In June, it was revealed that for years Jospin had been a Trotskyite Communist who had infiltrated the Socialist Party of Francois Mitterrand as a "mole." After burrowing into the Socialist Party, Jospin became its leader. French public opinion quickly forgave Jospin, despite his initial panicked evasions.
      The old revolutionary ideology is chic again. One of the theoretical architects of the new antiglobalism movement is Antonio Negri, an Italian former professor who, with Duke University professor Michael Hardt, coauthored the new book Empire. Harvard University Press, which published the U.S. edition, approvingly calls the book "an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto." Harvard identifies Negri as "an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome."
      Why is he in prison? The New York Times was more illuminating. Negri, according to the Times review, is "a 68-year-old Italian philosopher and suspected terrorist mastermind who is serving a 13-year prison sentence in Rome for inciting violence during the turbulent 1970s." He allegedly is a secret member of the Red Brigades. And even before Negri’s book was published in August, it was on the Amazon.com top-100 best-seller list and was in New York University’s top 10. The free market is speaking: Marxist terrorism is cool.
      —Insight magazine, September 3, 2001

During the hunt for communists in the 1940s, congressional investigators heard hours of secret testimony about how left-wingers in the movie industry were trying to paint Tinseltown red.
      Newly released transcripts reveal the House Committee on Un-American Activities was told that Soviet sympathizers made a science out of seeding films with communist propaganda.
      Actors, screenwriters and producers—mostly friendly witnesses with anti-communist views—testified in Los Angeles in the late 1940s that communists infiltrated trade unions, slipped jabs at capitalism into scripts and schooled young actors on how to inject pro-Soviet doctrine into scenes.
      "Hollywood is one of the main centers of communist activities in America due to the fact that our greatest medium for propaganda—the motion pictures—is located here," actor Adolphe Menjou testified in a closed-door May 1947 hearing. "It is the desire of the masters in Moscow to use this medium for their purposes, which is for the overthrow of the American government."
      It’s been more than 50 years since members of the committee took their anti-communism bandwagon to California and summoned Hollywood figures to testify at public hearings, which led to blacklisting of some of filmdom’s most famous names and ruined hundreds of careers. What witnesses told the committee in executive session has been sealed until now.
      The National Archives released more than 600 boxes of records this month from the committee’s investigations of Hollywood, the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazis, civil rights and anti-war activists, atomic espionage and the case of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of being a communist spy.
      The Klan probe was stopped after the HUAC’s chief counsel, Ernest Adamson, announced the committee did not have enough data to investigate.
      The publicity the committee generated from its Hollywood investigation prevented the Communist Party USA from "raising significant amounts of money to propagandize the American public through an instrument designed for entertainment," Herb Romerstein, an investigator for the committee from 1965 to 1975, said in an interview yesterday.
      Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, a California author who wrote a book that said communists seduced the film industry, agreed.
      "Their ultimate objective was to co-opt the industry. They came close, but they ultimately failed," Mr. Billingsley said yesterday. He said the committee wrongly focused on the content of movies instead of how communists infiltrated Hollywood unions.
      —The Washington Times, August 25, 2001, p. A4

It is well known in British political circles of all stripes that homosexuals wield considerable influence in the cabinet and government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
      In fact, the homosexual activist agenda has provided the impetus for some of Blair’s more controversial political causes. When he successfully instituted a policy accommodating homosexuals in the British armed forces, some of that nation’s top officers resigned in protest, including famed Brig. Gen. Pat Lawless.
      And lawmakers in the Labour Party overwhelmingly backed — three times — a bill to lower the age of consent for "consensual sex" from 18 to 16, spurred on by Blair’s fierce leadership on the issue. In cheering on the successful 263-102 vote last August, Blair claimed he wanted to bring the UK’s laws on homosexuals more "into line with the rest of Europe."
      In that, he is correct. In Malta, Holland, Portugal and Spain, the age of consent is 12. In Austria, Iceland, Italy, San Marino and Slovenia, the age is 14. And in the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Poland, Slovakia and Sweden, the age of consent is 15. It is 16 in Germany, Luxembourg (18 for homosexuals) and Britain. And last fall, Israel also lowered its age of consent from 18 to 16.
      The measure was opposed vigorously in the House of Lords, which had thrown out such a proposal twice before. Home Secretary Jack Straw said that lowering the age of consent for homosexual men was all about creating a British society "free from prejudice."
      Since that time, Blair has altered the House of Lords — and its hereditary privilege — and has instead essentially filled the parliament’s upper chamber with hand-picked people who concur largely with his agenda.
      Blair’s team includes avowed homosexuals: Chris Smith, minister for heritage and Angela Eagle, junior environment minister. Also, Ben Bradshaw, MP for Exeter and Stephen Twigg, MP for Enfield, Southgate. In fact, there are an estimated 40 homosexual Labor members of parliament according to insiders of both parties.
      Bradshaw was recently awarded a House of Commons "Spouse’s Pass" for his "partner," Neil Dalgleish, who now is permitted to use the Commons "Family Room" and to work out in the gym. Bradshaw is also pressing for "travel rights" 

for Dalgleish, including 15 first-class return rail tickets 
between Westminster and the constituency at a cost of 2,000 pounds per annum to the British taxpayer.
      Concerning the influence of the UK’s homosexual activist agenda on Blair, a prominent member of Parliament told WorldNetDaily he personally had opposed the lowering of the age of consent because it "left young and immature men open to the advances of older homosexual men."
      He added, "It would change the law regarding non-homosexuals as well. The dirty old man in the raincoat sitting in the park. It would give an old man the legal right to bugger a young woman."
      Along with lowering the age of consensual sex to 16, the Blair "pink agenda," as it is derisively referred to by some conservatives, had sought to repeal what is commonly known here simply as "Section 28." Passed under the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as part of the 1988 Local Government Act, Section 28 outlaws the "promotion" of homosexuality by local authorities.
      If and when Section 28 is finally overturned — and it is at the top of the homosexual activist agenda in Great Britain — a new sex education guide is ready to be employed in primary schools. Called "A Whole Approach to Sex Education," the new curriculum states flatly: "Children should not be taught that homosexuality is wrong."
      Referring to Section 28’s prohibition of promoting homosexuality, the producers of the sex-education guide claim in it that "the law does not apply to individual teachers or schools and does not limit teaching about the issue. ... Teachers should remember that we all have a ‘sexual career’ and for many this will include homosexual experiences at some time in their lives."
      "A Whole Approach to Sex Education," reviewed by WorldNetDaily, also presents ways "teachers can discuss with children as young as 4, homosexuality and anal sex." It emphatically asks teachers "not to try to promote any type of family or home life as the norm," and urges businesses to hire lesbian and homosexual couples with children.
      This time around, Blair lost the vote to repeal Section 28, as Baroness Thatcher — who, though long out of office, showed up for what she considered an extremely important vote — and 16 Labour ministers rallied behind the Conservative Party in a legislative victory for the Tories. The legislation was voted down 270 to 228 in the House of Lords.
      —WorldNetDaily, January 16, 2001

James Gregor, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, has given us a splendid work of scholarship that is much needed if we are ever to understand the revolutionary movements of the past 100 years.
      "The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century" is based on extensive research and primary sources in Italian, German, English, Russian, and Chinese. Mr. Gregor’s thesis is that communism and fascism are not polar opposites but closely related doctrines with a common origin. His theme is cleverly captured by the two faces of Janus—Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin—on the book’s cover. Readers may find this work to be startling, because our understanding of fascism is primarily a product of Soviet propaganda.
      When the Bolsheviks, a splinter group of Marxists, found themselves in power in Russia, they were soon beset by doctrinal and practical difficulties that they could not resolve. With their Marxist legitimacy threatened by the substantive criticisms of Italian Marxists and their revolutionary leadership rivaled by a nationalistic mass movement on the Italian peninsula, Bolshevik theoreticians declared all revolutionary movements that did not follow the Soviet "internationalist’ line to be "tools of capitalist reaction."
      Because Bolsheviks had power over a large country, they were able to speak for Marxism and to lay down the progressive line followed by so many intellectuals. As Mr. Gregor puts it, "many Western scholars were not concerned with empirical truth or falsity. They wanted affirmation of their visions of the future." Every Marxist who was not a Leninist became by definition a fascist. In our time "fascist" has become an epithet associated with the genocidal policies of the German National Socialists.
      Mr. Gregor is concerned that our limited comprehension of fascism deprives us of insights that we will need if we find ourselves confronting a Russian and/or Chinese fascism in the 21st century—a likelihood that the author does not dismiss.
      In the years before World War I, Mussolini was a notable Marxist intellectual and leader of Italy’s Socialist Party. Fascism grew out of theories espoused by radical Marxists who became nationalistic in their outlook. V.I. Lenin’s seizure of power made no sense to Marxists. Karl 

Marx had made it clear that socialist liberation required the material abundance made possible by an advanced industrial system and a politically mature workforce to overthrow the old order. Nothing of the sort existed in Russia. Lenin’s internationalism was dismissed as a fiction.
      World War I turned many Italian Marxists into fascists. Fascism was a response to Italy’s feeling of domination by more advanced industrial nations. Italians experienced fascism as a regenerative response of a proud people who felt humiliated. Class outrage faded as the sense of national outrage grew.
      Mr. Gregor shows that fascism was a major intellectual movement of reactive development of nationalism. Fascist theoreticians, of whom many were Marxists, believed that the revolutions of the 20th century would be those of poor, less-developed nations mobilizing their populations against the "demoplutocracies."
      Mr. Gregor traces the changes in the Marxist theory of fascism and in the raison d’etre of the Marxist systems. He provides an interesting account of Soviet and Chinese theoreticians analyzing one another’s system as fascist, and he takes the reader step by step through the devolution of Soviet and Maoist Marxism into fascism. He shows that "the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin, like the Italy of Mussolini’s fascism, had assumed the major features of a reactive developmental nationalism." His chapter, "Fascism and Post-Soviet Russia," is riveting reading. No Western policy-maker should be without the knowledge in these 20 pages.
      Mr. Gregor has performed a signal service. He demolishes the partisan, propagandistic "left/right" dichotomy that has prevented any understanding of the insurrectionary violence of our time. He concludes that the contest of the 20th century has continued into the 21st. It is not between the right and the left, but between representative democracies and their anti-democractic opponents.
      One wonders what future democracy has in the United States when a large and growing racial minority is systematically taught to feel oppressed and humiliated by a hegemonic "white culture." In structure, the propaganda against "white culture" is no different from the fascist propaganda against the "demoplutocracies," and it could produce an equally fascistic response. A population riven by internal resentments is unlikely to succeed when confronted by external mobilized resentment. The United States faces unrecognized dangers and had best sit up and take notice.
      —The Washington Times, June, 27, 2000, p. A 21

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