Many today ridicule prior generations’ concern over Communist infiltration. But current trends are bringing that concern back into focus.
Imagine the United States allying with Russia. If you were alive when Nazi Germany was rampaging across Europe during World War ii, you didn’t have to imagine it. You saw it: The world’s greatest capitalist nation forged a “strange alliance” with the world’s greatest Communist state, the Soviet Union.
When this happened, a peculiar phenomenon surged across America: a wave of popular emotional fervor for the Soviets.
Influential men and media fawned over Joseph Stalin. President Franklin Roosevelt released Communist Party-U.S.A. leader Earl Browder from prison to promote “national unity” between American Communists and the general public.
Yet even during this trying and confusing time, one strong voice cried out a warning against not only the imminent fascist threat from Germany, but the less-understood Communist threat from the Soviet Union.
America emerged from World War ii victorious. It enjoyed economic, political and military dominance and assumed leadership of the free world. It was rivaled only by the Soviet Union.
But even at America’s pinnacle, Herbert W. Armstrong boldly warned that the nation would eventually be invaded by a revived Holy Roman Empire led by Germany. And before that, America’s rejection of God would allow communism to weaken the nation so that it could be invaded.
“Communism is a worldwide political movement, organized inside many countries,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in the April-May 1944 Plain Truth. “From official Communist literature anyone can learn, if he wishes to know the truth, that communism is a plan, in action, for the violent overthrow of capitalism and the capitalistic governments. And capitalism means democracy, since it is the democracies who control more than two thirds of the world’s capital.”
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The First Stage of Subversion
Thirty-six years after Mr. Armstrong first warned American radio audiences about communism in 1934, kgb agent Yuri Bezmenov defected from the Soviet Union and eventually escaped to Canada. He warned America that it was at war with communism.
Bezmenov said that subverting foreign nations was so important to the kgb that most of its resources were allocated to it. “Only about 15 percent of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such,” he explained in an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1985. “The other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or ‘active measures.’”
Ideological subversion, Bezmenov said, is a long-term process involving four stages: 1) demoralization, 2) destabilization, 3) crisis and 4) normalization.
The first state, demoralization, is now an eerily familiar concept among Americans. Many who recognize it think it occurred accidentally, naturally or even fortunately. But former kgb agents, said Bezmenov, recognize it as an intentional ideological attack aimed to “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.”
“It takes about 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation,” Bezmenov wrote in his book, Love Letter to America. “Why that many (or few)? Simple: this is the minimum number of years needed to ‘educate’ one generation of students in a target country (America, for example) and expose them to the ideology of the subverter.”
Such Soviet reeducation methods took deep root in America during the 1960s and ’70s. Bezmenov warned that kgb agents and their socialistic “fellow travelers” would use abstract art, perverted music, pornographic images, homosexual rights, racist politics, pacifist foreign policy and socialist economics to demoralize America.
Whether you believe Bezmenov or not, you have to ask yourself: Does any of this sound familiar?
Mr. Armstrong also warned of this infiltration of America. In a 1980 edition of the Worldwide News, he wrote, “I was saying over the air, and writing, back in 1934, that the Communist[s’] unwavering strategy was, as a first offensive toward world domination, propaganda. They began sowing the seeds of their Communist atheistic education all over the United States—especially among college professors and students.”
“They invaded American university campuses, full force,” he continued, “and the U.S. universities trustingly let them in.”
In practice, communism has never been the grassroots movement Karl Marx predicted. It has been driven by small groups of intellectuals and elites who seize power. Hence the targeting of the American intelligentsia—present and future.
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Wrecking the Economy
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As an economic system, communism pits the larger, poorer groups against the smaller, more wealthy groups. It calls for that wealth to be removed from those who have it and spread evenly among everyone. To accomplish this re-distribution of wealth, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that private land ownership must be abolished, a heavily progressive income tax must be instituted, and all factories and financial institutions must be nationalized.
Regarding the troublesome matter of people (both wealthy and poor) who resist the program, Marx favored violence over reform. The only way to speed the march to his new society was “revolutionary terror,” he wrote.
The mantra of Marxist economics is: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The value produced by those with more “ability” must be redistributed to those with more “need.” This philosophy directly contradicts Jesus Christ’s teaching, represented in the parable of the pounds (Luke 19:12-27), in which each of Christ’s servants is rewarded differently based on how much he actually produced with what he was given.
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The Plot to Abolish the Family
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Perhaps the most diabolical of these means is the Marxist plot to destroy the family. The Communist Manifesto calls the family a capitalist institution based “on private gain.” Marriage, it says, is but the “hypocritical” concealment of private prostitution. The authors hoped and predicted that both “bourgeois family” and “bourgeois marriage” would disappear with the vanishing of private capital.
Throughout the 1960s and into the ’70s, Soviet front groups worked throughout America to destroy marriage. Federal Bureau of Investigation informant Larry Grathwohl penetrated the revolutionary Communist group Weather Underground. After palling around with Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and their crew for months, Grathwohl wrote his report, “Bringing Down America: An fbi Informer With the Weathermen.” The report revealed that the Weather Underground network was determined to abolish monogamous marriage, which they viewed as a repressive remnant of male and white supremacy.
In his book The Naked Communist, author Willard Cleon Skousen identified 45 Communist goals for the ideological subversion of America. These goals were read on the floor of Congress on Jan. 10, 1963. Among them are: discrediting the family as an institution; encouraging promiscuity and easy divorce; emphasizing the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents; promoting pornography; and presenting homosexuality as “normal, natural, healthy.”
Under the influence of Marxist philosophy and Soviet subversion tactics, American educators have spent decades trumpeting sexual liberation, militant feminism and homosexual rights. All this has been done under the banner of freedom, but the truth is that these movements have served as Trojan horses in the assault on marriage.
In Karl Marx’s words: “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”
Full article: Has America Been Influenced by Communism? (The Trumpet)
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