This article was originally published by The New American on July 14, 1986 under the title “The Captive Nations,” prior to the lifting of the Iron Curtain and the apparent demise of Soviet communism. It is reprinted now because of the important evidence it contains exposing how help from the West — particularly the United States — made communism the force it became.
Nearly 140 years ago, two German socialists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared that “a spectre is haunting Europe the spectre of Communism.” Writing in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx and Engels asserted: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.”
Almost 70 years ago, the spectre of Communism conjured up by Marx and Engels took on an aggressive and imperialistic body when a Russian revolutionary named Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known to the world as Nikolai Lenin, overthrew the provisional Russian government of Aleksandr Kerensky by force and established his Bolshevik regime. The diabolical legions unleashed by Lenin have since 1917 captured more than two-score countries and imposed their brutal tyranny on over one-third of the world’s population.
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The plight of the Captive Nations is never very far from the consciousness of many Americans, however little concern they might manifest for the hundreds of millions of their fellow human beings suffering under Communism. Hardly a day goes by without media coverage of persecution of dissidents in the Soviet Union, arrest of trade union leaders in Poland, feticide and infanticide in Red China, maiming of children with bombs disguised as toys in Afghanistan, the flight of “boat people” from Southeast Asia, deliberate starvation in Ethiopia, and attempts by courageous freedom fighters in Angola and Nicaragua to topple their slavemasters.
Presidential Proclamations
The tragedy of the captive peoples even draws the official attention of the U.S. government every summer as the President, responding to the will of Congress, proclaims the third week of July “Captive Nations Week.” These proclamations, however, have been watered down considerably over the past 27 years and apparently have no impact whatsoever on continuing efforts to placate and appease Kremlin bosses and their puppets on the various continents of the world.
The Captive Nations resolution adopted by Congress in 1959 contained some strong language about “Communist imperialism” and “the imperialistic and aggressive policies of Russian Communism.” The resolution also listed 23 nations that had been subjugated by Communism. President Eisenhower, who in the fall of 1959 hosted the visit to America of the prime Soviet imperialist of that time, Nikita Khrushchev, issued a proclamation on July 17, 1960, stating that “many nations throughout the world have been made captive by the imperialistic and aggressive policies of Soviet Communism.” He also invited the American people to observe Captive Nations Week “with appropriate ceremonies and activities, and I urge them to study the plight of the Soviet-dominated nations and to recommit themselves to the support of the just aspirations of the peoples of those captive nations.”
On July 19, 1985, President Reagan issued a Captive Nations proclamation that expressed his support for “those nations of Eastern Europe that have known conquest and captivity for decades; those struggling to save themselves from Communist expansionism in Latin America; and the people of Afghanistan and Kampuchea [Cambodia] struggling against invasion and military occupation by their neighbors.” Mr. Reagan said that “as long as the struggle from within these nations continues, and as long as we remain firm in our support, the light of freedom will not be extinguished. Together with the people of these captive nations, we fight against military occupation, political oppression, Communist expansion, and totalitarian brutality.”
It is hard to take the President’s proclamation seriously knowing that he was planning to meet a few months later with Mikhail Gorbachev, the current Soviet imperialist dedicated to keeping the Captive Nations enslaved and to adding more countries to his evil empire. And knowing that Mr. Reagan has approved favorable trade benefits for the Communist regimes in Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, and still maintains diplomatic ties with the bloody Red dictatorship in Afghanistan. President Eisenhower in 1960 urged the American people “to study the plight of the Soviet-dominated nations and to recommit themselves to the support of the just aspirations of the peoples of those captive nations.” The best President Reagan could do last year was to invite all Americans “to reaffirm their dedication to the international principles of justice and freedom, which unite us and inspire others.”
Despite the media attention and the presidential proclamations, however, the plight of the Captive Nations grows more desperate as the U.S. government and its allies not only accept the status quo but help to strengthen the criminal regimes in these countries with diplomatic recognition, economic assistance, loans and loan guarantees, technology transfers, and, in some instances, even military equipment. It is an historical fact that many of the Captive Nations would never have fallen to Communism, and would not still be subjugated today, were it not for the policies and predilections of the United States government, American businessmen and industrialists, and liberals in the media. The tragic history of the past seven decades must be retold lest we forget our suffering brothers and sisters – and lest we find ourselves in the same hopeless situation. Those who ignore history are certain to repeat it.
The Bolshevik Revolution
The visitor to the Lenin Museum in Moscow was struck by the numerous portraits and busts of Lenin, as well as by the many statements of the founder of modern-day Communism. One Leninist pronouncement, dated 1923, was translated by an interpreter as follows:
First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States, which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.
Whether or not Lenin ever phrased the Communist plan for world domination in such precise terms, the statement accurately summarizes the advance of Communism since the Bolsheviks toppled the socialist Kerensky only a few months after he had ousted Tsar Nicholas. Lenin had arrived in Petrograd, Russia, in April 1917, his journey from Switzerland in a sealed train having been facilitated and financed by the German Foreign Office in an effort to undermine the Russian army and remove Russia from World War I. After the Bolsheviks had seized power on November 7, 1917, German Foreign Secretary Richard von Kuhlmann sent a telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm II that said in part:
Russia appeared to be the weakest link in the chain of our enemies. Our task was to further weaken this link and, if possible, to break it. This was the object of the revolutionary activity organized by us behind enemy lines: the promoting of separatist tendencies, and the support of Bolshevism….
The Bolshevik seizure of Russia was no spontaneous uprising of the masses. It was the bloody imposition of a Communist dictatorship from the top by a group of revolutionaries organized and financed from outside Russia. Lenin had come from Switzerland and Leon Trotsky from New York City to spearhead the takeover. They were funded by the German government with money that was channeled through a Swedish bank owned by Olof Aschberg, who had a continuous working relationship with the Guaranty Trust Company in New York. When the Soviets formed their first international bank (Ruskombank) in 1922, Aschberg was its head and Max May, vice president of Guaranty Trust, was chief of its foreign division.
Another American supporter of the Bolsheviks was William Boyce Thompson, director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who led a Red Cross Mission to Moscow in 1917 and made a personal contribution of $1 million to the Communists. This mission was not “one of neutral humanitarianism,” said Antony C. Sutton in his book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, but “was in fact a mission of Wall Street financiers to influence and pave the way for control, through either Kerensky or the Bolshevik revolutionaries, of the Russian market and resources. No other explanation will explain the actions of the mission …. The single overwhelming objective was to gain political and economic influence with the new regime, whatever its ideology.”
The plight of the Russian people grew steadily worse under the Bolsheviks. Within a few months after they seized power, said Eugene Lyons in his book Workers’ Paradise Lost,
most of the tsarist practices the Leninists had condemned were revived, usually in more ominous forms: political prisoners, convictions without trial and without the formality of charges, savage persecution of dissenting views, death penalties for more varieties of crime than in any other modern nation. The rest were put into effect in the following years, including the suppression of all other parties, restoration of the internal passport, a state monopoly of the press, along with repressive practices the monarchy had outlived for a century or more.
Lyons credits the Bolsheviks with having “pioneered the basic techniques and set the pattern for fascist adaptations in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere: The one omnipotent party of blindly obedient zealots, the single-slate ‘elections,’ the gigantic concentration camps, the substitution of slogans for thought. Both in Italy and Germany, as we shall see in its proper context later, their policies directly helped open the floodgates to fascist inundations.”
Help From Capitalists
By 1921, Russia was in chaos and on the verge of collapse. Factories were empty, mine shafts were flooded, and there was a critical shortage of consumer goods, heating fuel, and foodstuffs. Five million had starved to death since 1917, and famine was again sweeping the country. Herbert Hoover, a future President of the United States, organized a relief organization and Americans alone sent 700,000 tons of foodstuffs to the Russian government.
Meanwhile, Lenin had announced a New Economic Plan that would enlist the aid of other countries in rebuilding the Russian economy. He had proclaimed in 1920 that this “industrial cohabitation with the capitalists” would only be temporary and “as soon as we are strong enough to overthrow capitalism, we shall immediately seize it by the throat.” The capitalists, Lenin predicted, “will extend credits, which will strengthen for us the Communist Party in their countries and, giving us the materials and technology we lack, they will restore our military industry, indispensable for our future victorious attack on our suppliers. In other words, they will labor for the preparations for their own suicide.”
From Austria, Denmark, England, Germany, Sweden, and the United States came all that was needed to revitalize Soviet industry, agriculture, mining, forestry, fishing, and fur-trapping, American companies, including Standard Oil and General Electric, supplied $37 million worth of machinery and equipment from 1921 to 1925 alone. Germany’s Junkers aircraft firm created Soviet air power; Britain’s Lena Goldfields Ltd. started operations in the icy Kolymar region of Siberia, where at least three million slave laborers perished from 1932 to 1954; America’s Averell Harriman paid $3.45 million in 1925 for the rights to mine a manganese field for 20 years and export its ore; and America’s Armand Hammer made a fortune in Russia producing pens and pencils.
But once the factories were built, the equipment installed, and the workers trained, Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, had the foreign technicians arrested on charges of “industrial espionage” and ordered them out of the country. Other Americans suffered the same fate in the 1930s, but only after Henry Ford, once a target of Bolshevik attacks, had built an automobile factory in Gorki; the Mackee Company of Cleveland had constructed the huge iron and steel works at Magnitogorsk; and Colonel Hugh Cooper had directed the building of the world’s largest hydroelectric power station in Dnieprostroi.
Still another huge boost for the struggling Soviet regime came in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition to the Stalin dictatorship, giving it a credibility and place in the world that it most certainly did not deserve. FDR should have heeded the advice proffered in 1920 by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby:
The existing regime in Russia is based upon the negation of every principle of honor and good faith …. The responsible leaders of the regime have frequently and openly boasted that they are willing to sign agreements and undertakings with foreign powers while not having the slightest intention of observing such undertakings or carrying out such agreements.
Upon numerous occasions the responsible spokesmen of this power, and its official agencies, have declared that it is their understanding that the very existence of Bolshevism in Russia, the maintenance of their own rule, depends, and must continue to depend, upon the occurrence of revolutions in all the great civilized nations, including the United States, which will overthrow and destroy their governments and set up Bolshevist rule in their stead. They have made it quite plain that they intend to use every means, including, of course, diplomatic agencies, to promote such revolutionary movements in other countries….
We cannot recognize, hold official relations with, or give friendly reception to the agents of a government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions; whose diplomats will be the agitators of dangerous revolt; whose spokesmen say that they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.
The prophetic words of Secretary Colby have been proved true over and over again since 1920. The ink was hardly dry on the recognition papers when the Soviet Union began a massive espionage operation against the United States, one that saw its agents rise to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Some Red spy rings were exposed, but many others known to have existed have never been uncovered. It has to be presumed that the heirs of former State Department official Alger Hiss did not leave the government when Hiss went to jail in 1950 for lying about his service to the Kremlin.
The Lend-Lease Fiasco
Until Stalin collaborated with Adolf Hitler in 1939 to carve Up Poland, the Soviet regime had spent most of its time consolidating its power across the vast expanse of Russia by swallowing up such nations as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Georgia, Turkestan, and the Ukraine. The deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians during the 1930s is an atrocity that is still not widely known, although congressional documents (The Crimes of Khrushchev), books (The Great Terror by Robert Conquest), and a 1985 Canadian television program (Harvest of Despair) have documented that barbaric policy.
The Hitler-Stalin Pact was proceeding nicely for the two totalitarians until Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. Suddenly, the Soviet enemy became America’s “ally,” at least in the eyes of the Roosevelt Administration. At a Russian Aid Rally in New York City in June 1942, presidential advisor Harry Hopkins told the Soviets that “we are determined that nothing shall stop us from sharing with you all that we have and are in this conflict, and we look forward to sharing with you the fruits of victory and peace.” Hopkins concluded that “generations unborn will owe a great measure of their freedom to the unconquerable power of the Soviet people.”
The wish of Harry Hopkins to save the Soviet Union from destruction came true as America sent more than $11 billion worth of supplies and services to the USSR from 1942 to 1946. This incredible flow of goods included more than 14,000 aircraft; nearly half a million tanks, trucks, jeeps, and other vehicles; more than 400 combat ships; 325,784 tons of explosives; over four million tons of foodstuffs; more than 1,300 diesel marine engines, many of which were taken away from General Douglas MacArthur; over 219,000 tons of critically scarce copper wire and cable; and huge quantities of industrial equipment and specialized machine tools for military production.
Major George Racey Jordan, a U.S. Army officer who expedited Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR through Great Falls, Montana, wrote a book (From Major Jordan’s Diaries) that describes in detail what he called “the greatest mail-order catalogue in history.” Jordan, whose orders described him as the “United Nations Representative” at Great Falls, said he was informed by his superiors in Washington that “the modification, equipment, and movement of Russian planes have been given first priority, even over planes for U.S. Army Air Forces….”
Major Jordan also tells of the thousands of black suitcases that traveled through the Lend-Lease pipeline under diplomatic immunity. These suitcases carried not only tons of classified documents, according to Jordan, but also at least 1,465 pounds of uranium chemicals and “2.2 pounds of uranium metal at a time when the total American stock was 4.5 pounds.”
While the United States was moving heaven and earth to give the Soviet Union everything it demanded, the Reds were sending hundreds of spies to America with orders to gather all the information available on U.S. industrial and military production. Among the items obtained, according to David Dallin’s book Soviet Espionage,
were designs of industrial plants, special machines, parts and details; photographs and blueprints of technical processes in the aviation, arms, oil, submarine-building, and many other industries; long-range plans for the development of large industrial units; hundreds of maps of the United States, the individual states, industrial sites, bridges; descriptions of railroads, reports on the building of cities and highways; and so on.
The Soviet Union emerged from World War II not only with enormous territorial gains, but also with billions in industrial and military goods and technology. The Communists got $10 billion in compensation from Germany for war damage and expropriated nearly half of Germany’s 1943 industrial capacity, worth perhaps $40 billion. They shipped 6,000 German scientists, technicians, and specialists behind the Iron Curtain, some of whom had worked at the German V-2 rocket factory at Nordhausen. That factory was captured intact by American forces, but they were ordered to leave everything there for the Soviets. A Russian colonel who arrived after the Americans had gone exclaimed: “The Americans have given us all this! In ten years, they’ll regret it! Imagine — our rockets flying across the ocean!”
Détente and Aggression
According to Antony Sutton, the Soviet leadership has long employed “an exquisite combination of policies to gain its objectives. The most important is this two-phase cycle of ‘détente’ and aggression. ‘Détente’ to gain technological and economic sustenance from the West. Then, when strength is built up, or if possible simultaneously, ‘détente’ vanishes, to be replaced by renewed territorial expansion.” The blunt truth, Sutton said in National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union, “is that trade with the Soviet Union from 1917 to the present has built the Free World an enemy of the first order.”
Democratic and Republican Presidents, along with bankers and businessmen like David Rockefeller, Armand Hammer, Cyrus Eaton, and Donald Kendall, have tried to justify aid to and trade with the Communists by saying that it “builds bridges” to the other side and improves the chances for peace. Not so, says Antony Sutton:
When all the rhetoric about “peaceful trade” is boiled out, it comes down to a single inescapable fact — the guns, the ammunition, the weapons, the transportation systems that killed Americans in Vietnam came from the American-subsidized economy of the Soviet Union. The trucks that carried these weapons down the Ho Chi Minh trail came from American-built plants. The ships that carried the supplies to Sihanoukville and Haiphong came from NATO allies and used propulsion systems that our State Department could have kept out of Soviet hands….
Whichever way we cut the cake, there is only one logical and inescapable conclusion: The technical capability to wage the Korean and Vietnamese wars originated on both sides in Western, mainly American, technology, and the political illusion of “peaceful trade” was the carrier for this war-making technology.
First … Eastern Europe
Space does not permit a detailed account of how each of the nations in Central and Eastern Europe was captured by the Communists in the 1940s. Since the circumstances involving the subjugation of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia were similar in many respects, a brief discussion of just two of those countries should be sufficient to illustrate what happened to the entire region. The brutal annihilation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania deserves separate treatment. Additional information about the Red conquest of each of these countries can be found in such books as The Ordeal of the Captive Nations by Hawthorne Daniel.
The Baltic States
Bordered on the east by the Baltic Sea and on the west by the Soviet Union, the nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were gobbled up by the USSR in August of 1940. Their fate had already been decided at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact a year earlier, but the liquidation process began in earnest in the spring of 1940 with the arrest and deportation to Russia of the most influential political, military, business, church, and labor leaders in the three countries. Puppet governments were set up, phony “elections” were held, businesses were seized, all transportation facilities and industries were nationalized, churches were subjected to atheistic regulations, monasteries were closed, schools were placed under Soviet directors, and newspapers were either suppressed or heavily censored.
The Soviet secret police, known then as the NKVD, quickly established a reign of terror, recruiting people to spy on their friends and neighbors and drawing up the lists of those to be murdered or deported to slave labor camps in the Arctic regions of the USSR because they posed a potential threat to Soviet rule. While no accurate figures of the number of persons deported from the Baltic states are available, one NKVD report, dated June 13, 1941, tells of 11,102 Estonians, 16,255 Latvians, and 21,114 Lithuanians – a total of 48,471 – who were herded into 871 freight cars and sent off to Siberia on that one day.
In that same month, June 1941, Hitler began his invasion of Russia, capturing the Baltic states and ruthlessly dominating them for the next three years. At first, the bitterly anti-Communist people of the three small nations joined with the Nazis in fighting their Soviet oppressors, but the Nazi deportation of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians to slave labor camps in Germany and the annihilation of half a million Baltic Jews soon made the people bitterly anti-Nazi as well. When the tide of the war turned in 1944, the advancing Russian army overran the three countries again and, by the end of that year, the Baltic states were absorbed once more into the cruel world of Communist enslavement.
Poland
The armies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia invaded Poland in September 1939 and, after Warsaw fell on September 28th, their leaders signed an agreement to divide up the country. While the Nazis are justly remembered and condemned for the atrocities they committed against the Polish people, including the execution of millions at concentration camps in Auschwitz and Majdanek and elsewhere, Soviet brutalities are less well known. The Communists, for example, sent some 200,000 Polish soldiers to internment camps, murdered at least 10,000 Polish officers in 1940 and buried them in a mass grave in the Katyn Forest, and deported hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians to labor camps in the USSR.
The critical year for Poland was 1944. After five years of war, the Polish Home Army under the leadership of a patriot named General Bor-Komorowski numbered about 380,000 men, nearly 40,000 of them in Warsaw alone. Russian forces, which had reached the outskirts of the capital city in July, urged Bor to launch an assault on the heavily armed and well-supplied Germans in Warsaw. Believing that the Soviets would come to his help, the general attacked on August 1st. The Communists, however, did not come forward and the valiant Poles, out of supplies and food after 63 days of fighting, were forced to surrender to the Nazis on October 3rd. More than 250,000 Poles had died in the battle, and the city was a virtual shambles. Three months later, the Red Army began its offensive, driving the Germans out of Warsaw and out of Poland.
Why did the Russians hold their army back? “They did so first,” said Hawthorne Daniel, “in order that the Polish Home Army might be destroyed, thus bringing to an end the opposition these Polish patriots would otherwise have offered to the Communist committee of Lublin – opposition that the Lublin group could not have overcome if General Bor and his Underground army had come to be the heroes of Poland, as victory in Warsaw would have made inevitable. And second, they did so in order to bring discredit on the Polish government in exile – the only Polish government that Poles widely acknowledged, and the one official body that offered any obstacle to the rise of the Lublin committee to actual authority.”
At the Teheran Conference in 1943, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed to Stalin’s demand that he retain half of Poland. At the Yalta Conference 15 months later, Roosevelt and Churchill signed a statement endorsing “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” as well as “the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.” The Declaration of Liberated Europe, however, also recognized the Lublin Communist group as the provisional government of Poland, said it should be “reorganized on a broader democratic basis,” and urged it to hold “free and unfettered elections as soon as possible….”
In the period between the Teheran and Yalta conferences, the Soviets had set up their own provisional government in the Polish city of Lublin and interpreted the Yalta agreement as meaning that the new government of Poland should be the Lublin gang. When the composition of Poland’s postwar government was announced in June 1945, 16 of the 21 cabinet posts were held by members of the Lublin group. Both the United States and Britain officially recognized this Communist-dominated regime on July 5th.
The “free and unfettered elections” called for at Yalta were delayed by the Reds for two years while they consolidated their power. The Communists created a number of new political parties designed to appear to be independent and arrested hundreds of officials and thousands of regular members of their only real opposition, the Polish Peasant Party. When elections were finally held in January 1947, the Reds had everything under control and “won” 382 of the 444 seats in the new Diet.
The fraudulent elections prompted Arthur Bliss Lane, the U.S. Ambassador to Poland from 1944 to 1947, to resign his post and write the shocking story of that era in a book appropriately entitled I Saw Poland Betrayed. Sharing the blame for the tragic betrayal of Poland, said Ambassador Lane, were President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, all of whom tried to appease Stalin instead of standing firm. Lane predicted in 1948 that the Communists would continue to seize one country after another until they controlled the world, or until they were confronted by “the effective resistance of a stronger power – the United States of America.”
Not only has that “effective resistance” never materialized in the past 38 years, but the U.S. government has instead effectively helped the Communists – militarily, economically, and diplomatically – to expand their evil empire and add to the toll of Captive Nations.
Czechoslovakia
The Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 is a textbook example of two Red methods of non-violent conquest: participation in a coalition government and application of “pressure from below” and “pressure from above.” That the Communists were in a position to utilize these techniques was due in large measure to the failure of American forces to capture Prague when the Germans retreated in May 1945. The Americans were halted a few miles outside the city and Waited there while the Red Army occupied the capital.
President Eduard Benes, head of a Czech government-in-exile in London during the war, entered into a coalition with Czech Communists who had spent the war in Moscow. When the Communists got 38 percent of the vote in the May 1946 elections, Benes agreed to give them the key posts of Prime Minister, Interior Minister (control of the police), Information Minister (propaganda and press), and Agriculture Minister (land reform). The coalition functioned reasonably well for about a year, but the Communists were busy extending their power throughout the country and undermining their opposition.
When the Communist Minister of the Interior installed 12 Communists as police commissioners in Prague in January 1948, a dozen non-Communist members of the cabinet resigned, apparently expecting the Red Prime Minister to follow suit. But Clement Gottwald did not step down. He drew up a new cabinet list of 13 Communists and four Social Democrats and presented it to President Benes, who had been half-paralyzed by a stroke and was unable to resist the Communists.
While the Communists were gaining power in government positions (“pressure from above”), their “action committees” were organizing mass demonstrations in Prague and elsewhere (“pressure from below”). The people did not know what was happening because the media were in the hands of the Reds. The Communist pincer movement had been successful and, with the deaths of non-Communist Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk (his body was found beneath his office window) in March of 1948 and President Benes in September, Czechoslovakia became a Captive Nation without a shot being fired.
… the Masses of Asia
The fall of China to the Communists in 1949 may have been their most important conquest since 1917, not only because of the vast area and population involved but also because of Red China’s subsequent impact on its neighbors and the world. The Chinese Communists immediately invaded Tibet and began a genocidal campaign of murder, torture, rape, abduction, and forced sterilization in that country of two to three million people. in their effort to exterminate the Tibetan race, culture, and religion, the Reds killed scores of thousands of people, destroyed more than 2,000 monasteries, imprisoned countless numbers of Buddhist priests and nuns, shipped children to Red China for indoctrination in Communist ideology, and virtually wiped the nation out of existence. Lowell Thomas Jr. tells the gruesome story in his 1956 book The Silent War.
If Red China had not gone Communist, it would not have been able to intervene in the Korean War and U.S. and South Korean forces would have been able to restore freedom to Communist North Korea. If there were no Communist China, there might have been no Vietnam War and no Communist capture of Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam in 1975 after two U.S. Presidents refused to let American forces win the war in Southeast Asia and liberate the people of North Vietnam. In their book Murder of a Gentle Land, John Barron and Anthony Paul offer a chilling account of the Communist genocide in Cambodia that may have killed three million persons, about 40 percent of the population of that country,
Many books have been written about how the Communists seized China (see, for instance, two by Anthony Kubek: How the Far East Was Lost and The Red China Papers). Briefly, the Communists won because U.S. government officials sided with them and against the anti-Communist government of Chiang Kai-shek at all the crucial times. For instance, President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference agreed to give the Soviet Union effective control of Manchuria. The Soviets then accepted the surrender of the one-million-man Japanese army there and turned over all of its arms and ammunition to the Communist forces of Mao Tse-tung. There were also the four cease-fires that General George Marshall imposed on Chiang’s troops each time they threatened to defeat Mao’s guerrillas, the American embargo on .30-caliber ammunition, and the deactivation of 180 of Chiang’s 300 divisions.
Finally, there were the efforts of Communists and pro-Communists in the State Department to build up Mao as an “agrarian reformer” and to characterize Chiang as a corrupt despot. “It is my judgment, and I was in the State Department at the time,” said former Ambassador William D. Pawley, “that this whole fiasco, the loss of China and the subsequent difficulties with which the United States has been faced, was the result of mistaken policy of Dean Acheson, Phil Jessup, [Owen] Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, John Service, John Davies, [O. E.] Clubb, and others.” Asked if he thought the mistaken policy was the result of “sincere mistakes of judgment,” Pawley replied: “No, I don’t.”
Before leaving Asia, mention must be made of the Captive Nation of Afghanistan, where a fierce struggle continues between Afghan freedom fighters and more than 100,000 Soviet soldiers employing a highly sophisticated arsenal of weapons and equipment. Though the conquest of that country is generally thought to have occurred with the invasion of Soviet troops in December 1979 (many of them riding in trucks newly built at the Kama River factory constructed in the Soviet Union with American money and technology), the Communists probably gained control of the government in Kabul in 1973. That was when former Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan toppled King Mohammed Zahir Shah. Apparently, Daoud was not deemed sufficiently pro-Soviet, for he and 30 members of his family were gunned down in 1978, bringing a Communist named Nur Mohammed Taraki into power. Taraki was succeeded in December 1979 by Babrak Karmal, who lasted six years before being replaced by the former head of the Afghan secret police, Najibullah.
… Encircle the United States
In their decades-long drive for world domination, the Communists have purposefully caused the deaths — by war, assassination, terrorism, forced labor, and starvation — of more than 100 million people. There is nothing in their words or actions to indicate that their goal is anything less than the subjugation of every nation on earth. From Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev to Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, there has been no deviation from that goal. “Since the days of Lenin,” Antony Sutton has said, “Soviet objectives have only changed in the imagination of Washington policymakers.”
The Communist juggernaut has been stalled very few times in the past four decades. Only in Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and Grenada (1983) have Red regimes been ousted from power. Some African countries have moved in and out of the Communist orbit, and some South American nations have narrowly escaped the Red tide. The current problems in Africa can be traced back to the winds of independence that swept that continent in the early 1960s. When European nations cut the cord to their overseas territories, the Communists were ready to seize control.
Remember the chaotic situation in the former Belgian Congo (now Zaire) when independence came in 1960 and Communist savages ran amok under the leadership of a Red named Patrice Lumumba? When Moise Tshombe, the capable leader of the peaceful province of Katanga, tried to secede from the Congo, the United Nations sent in troops not to quell Lumumba’s savagery but to put down Tshombe’s secession. The atrocities the UN forces committed against peace-loving Katangans were recounted by 46 civilian doctors who were there. In a booklet entitled 46 Angry Men, the doctors described murders and assassinations, rapes, maimings, machine-gunning of civilian buildings, shooting at ambulances, bombing of hospitals, and internment in concentration camps of 40,000 refugees “in living and hygenic conditions bordering on genocide.”
Libya became a Soviet client state in 1969, when Muammar Qaddafi seized power and quickly converted the North African nation into a formidable military power and the terrorist training capital of the world with the considerable assistance of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Syria, and East Germany. A plan by Libyan military officers to overthrow Qaddafi in 1971 was relayed to him by U.S. Embassy officials and the plotters were handed over to Qaddafi for execution.
After being part of a group that seized power in Ethiopia in 1974, Mengistu Haile Mariam emerged as the country’s dictator in 1977 and immediately launched a “red terror” against domestic opponents, slaughtering thousands of “counterrevolutionaries.” He then made a pilgrimage to Moscow, where he hailed the Soviet Union’s contribution “to the cause of world peace, democracy, and socialism” and expressed solidarity with his Communist comrades in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, and Chile. “Our goal is socialism and Communism,” Mengistu told a crowd in Addis Ababa in 1978 that included Vasily Kuznetsov of the Soviet Union, terrorist Robert Mugabe of Rhodesia, and Fidel Castro, who had sent 11,000 soldiers to Ethiopia to help keep Mengistu in power.
A leftist coup in Portugal in 1974 brought independence to its African territories of Angola and Mozambique, which immediately were captured by Communist terrorists who had been waging war there for years. More than 20,000 Cubans were dispatched to Angola to protect the regime of Agostinho Neto. A like number of Soviet-bloc personnel soon arrived in Mozambique to prop up the brutal dictatorship of Samora Machel.
After years of pressure from the United States, Britain, and the United Nations, Ian Smith finally stepped down as Prime Minister of peaceful, anti-Communist Rhodesia in 1979 and Robert Mugabe became the leader of Zimbabwe the following year. That Mugabe has turned the country into a Captive Nation is no surprise. By the time he arrived in London in 1979 for peace talks with Smith and the British, said John F. Burns of the New York Times in 1980, Mugabe had earned the reputation “as a Marxist ideologue whose guerrilla forces, in their brutality against black and white civilians, had few counterparts in modern warfare.”
Cuba
In a statement issued in September 1960, after the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee had conducted many hearings on the Communist Threat to the United States Through the Caribbean, Senators James O. Eastland and Thomas J. Dodd declared that “Cuba was handed to Castro and the Communists by a combination of Americans in the same way that China was handed to the Communists.” They said that State Department policy planners “misguided American opinion with the myth that the Chinese Communists were ‘agrarian reformers.’ The State Department has not been cleansed of those elements whose policies contributed so much to the loss of China to the Free World.”
There was overwhelming evidence when Fidel Castro took power in January 1959 that he had been a Communist agent at least since 1948, when he led a bloody Communist uprising in Bogota, Colombia. On December 31, 1958, Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom told a Senate subcommittee that “there was no evidence of any organized Communist element within the Castro movement or that Senor Castro himself was under Communist influence.” Rubottom was at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota in 1948 when Castro boasted over the radio that he was a leader of the Red insurrection.
Also contributing to the myth that Castro was not a Communist was Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, a longtime apologist for Communist-infiltrated movements, who became Castro’s chief cheerleader in the United States. When Earl E. T. Smith was named Ambassador to Cuba in 1957, Roy Rubottom set up a briefing not with the outgoing U.S. envoy, Arthur Gardner, but with Herbert Matthews!
In his book The Fourth Floor, Ambassador Smith lists 20 “day-to-day actions of those on the Fourth Floor of the State Department who shaped American foreign policy toward Cuba.” The actions included suspending the sale of arms and ammunition to the Batista government, “which had a devastating psychological effect upon those supporting the government of Cuba”; persuading other governments not to sell arms to Cuba; suspending shipment of all replacement parts for combat equipment; issuing public statements that hurt the Batista government and aided the Communist guerrillas; and “maintaining friendly contacts with representatives of the revolutionaries, thereby giving sympathetic audience and comfort to those who were openly advocating the overthrow of the government of Cuba.”
Nicaragua
If the sellout of Cuba to the Communists paralleled that of China, then the sellout of Nicaragua to the Reds in 1979 was a carbon copy of Cuba. “Nicaragua is Cuba all over again,” said Ambassador Earl Smith. The similarities are too many to be coincidental. The leaders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front received their training in the Soviet Union and Cuba and were backed by both Red governments in their terrorist war against the Somoza government. The Sandinistas were glorified in the American press by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, Alan Riding of the New York Times, and Karen De Young of the Washington Post.
“Our nation was truly delivered into the hands of the Marxist enemy by President Jimmy Carter and his administration,” said former Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza in his book Nicaragua Betrayed. “In this treachery, his most active accomplices were Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, and Cuba. I was betrayed by a longstanding and trusted ally. That, in itself, is bad enough, But, more importantly, two million anti-Communist citizens of Nicaragua were neatly placed in a U.S.-designed package and handed to the Communists.”
Somoza listed 27 steps in the Carter Administration’s betrayal of his country. The steps included cutting off all military assistance to Nicaragua; prohibiting the sale of military hardware to Nicaragua; pressuring other countries not to deliver arms and ammunition already en route; blocking International Monetary Fund credit for Nicaragua; ignoring positive proof that the Sandinistas were backed by Cuba with men, arms, and equipment; pressuring other countries to condemn the Somoza government, to cancel financing arrangements for a hydroelectric dam project, and to boycott exports of Nicaraguan coffee and beef; and breaking promises to replace him with a non-Marxist group and to give the National Guard arms to protect the country.
On the final page of his book, Somoza said that “while I’m privileged to tread this planet called earth, I shall do all within my power to see that other free nations do not suffer the agonizing death which struck Nicaragua. In my own way, I am sounding the alarm. To be effective, this alarm must be heard in the United States of America. It is my wish, it is my impassioned hope that the freedom-loving people of the United States will hear the alarm and that they will respond without delay. There is no time for dalliance.”
On September 17, 1980, two weeks after his book was published, Anastasio Somoza Debayle was assassinated on the streets of Asuncion, Paraguay.
