The media’s vital role as “watchdogs” is rarely more important than in matters of national security. And rarely is national security more threatened and in need of protection by loud barking than in cases involving treason by high-level officials and penetration of the government by agents of hostile foreign powers. However, for much of the past century, while agents of totalitarian foreign powers have relentlessly attacked America, our press has acted like “the dog that didn’t bark” in the Sherlock Holmes mystery Silver Blaze.
In that classic whodunit, a famous thoroughbred champion was stolen from the stable in the middle of the night and its trainer murdered. That the stable watchdog had not barked prompted Holmes to consider that the caper was an inside job involving the murdered trainer. It had not barked because it had recognized the trainer and had not realized that anything was amiss. Here the analogy ends; the stable watchdog had no way of knowing that it should bark. The media “watchdogs” can claim no such innocence. They have not barked because they have been in league with our nation’s enemies, both as ideological sympathizers and active conspirators. Instead of drawing public attention to important facts crucial to our survival, they have engaged in a systematic effort to suppress, censor, and spike this information.
During the bloody 20th century, no other danger came close to equaling the global menace posed by the world Communist conspiracy. By body count alone, it dwarfed all other causes of death, except natural causes. In his extensive studies of war and genocide, University of Hawaii political science professor R.J. Rummel found that roughly 38.5 million deaths worldwide resulted from wars and revolutions from World War I through 1987. This horrendous carnage paled, however, next to the body count produced by this past century’s “megamurderers” — the 15 states that killed at least one million people during “peacetime.” These regimes slaughtered over 151 million victims — almost four times the battle deaths from all wars during the same period. Communist regimes murdered the vast majority of these victims, with Soviet Russia and Red China producing the largest piles of corpses. No other nation or movement comes close to rivaling the Communist death toll. And no other nation or movement comes close to matching the global apparatus of millions of spies, moles, agents of influence, propagandists, saboteurs, terrorists, and assassins fielded by the Communists.
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Spiking the Truth About Communism
Throughout most of the last century, the Lenins, Stalins, Maos, and Castros of world Communism were drenching the globe in blood, carrying forward a plan of world conquest, and penetrating virtually all U.S. institutions. Yet instead of barking out loudly about these enormous crimes, the American press provided strategic cover. Over and over again, the U.S. media opinion cartel duplicitously assisted the Red commissars of Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, and gravely deceived the American public. One of the most common tactics employed by the elite press is to “spike” facts, information, and stories challenging or contradicting the Party Line. Spiking, in media argot, means to suppress, censor, or kill a story. Sometimes the spiking can be so pervasive and efficient that a complete “blackout” is achieved.
The case of Walter Duranty and the New York Times chillingly exemplifies the spike and blackout in operation over an extended period. In the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, Duranty was one of the world’s most famous journalists, and undoubtedly the most influential writer on the Soviet Union. A Pulitzer Prize winner whose articles filled the Times’ front pages with gripping stories from Mother Russia, he was the undisputed don of the Moscow correspondents. One of the most notorious crimes committed by Duranty and the Times was the spiking of Stalin’s mass-starvation genocide in the Ukraine during the early 1930s. More than seven million Ukrainian men, women, and children perished in that hideous Communist holocaust, while Duranty was singing Stalin’s praises and insisting that FDR’s plan to recognize the Soviet Union and establish diplomatic relations with Moscow was in America’s interest. Without access to the truth, the American public failed to see through the rosy picture that the Times painted of Russia. Consequently, few opposed the pro-Stalin policies.
When British writer Malcolm Muggeridge and other reporters tried to tell the world of the massive death toll resulting from Stalin’s orders, which they were witnessing with their own eyes, Duranty used his prestige to discredit their stories. Famine reports were “mostly bunk,” “malignant propaganda,” or “a sheer absurdity” he claimed, even though he had witnessed the horrific devastation himself. While millions were starving, Duranty told his worldwide reading audience of “village markets flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk, and butter.” He declared that “a child can see this is not famine but abundance.” Similarly, he explained away Stalin’s murderous purges and show trials. The Times’ Insider management knew that Duranty was lying, yet continued printing his lies. Duranty and the Times continued covering for Stalin’s crimes and were responsible for selling many of the pro-Soviet policies of the Roosevelt administration (and the administrations which followed) to the American public.
Unfortunately, the long Duranty epoch at the Times, nearly 30 years, was not unique; many other Times reporters followed his lead in covering Soviet Russia and the Communist revolutions in China, Poland, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and many other countries. Time after time they, together with their editors and publishers, used the news blackout technique to hide the truth from the American people about Communist atrocities, torture, assassination, subversion, mass-murder, duplicity, and betrayal. At the same time, they willingly transmitted Communist propaganda or fabricated their own lies to smear anti-Communist governments under Communist attack. Throughout the decades and up to the present, many of the other news organizations have replicated this Times-style deception.
Hiding the Fifth Column
Even more important than spiking information about the gruesome reality of Communism in foreign countries has been the decades-long, comprehensive media blackout concerning America’s internal Communist threat. Over the past 10 years, documents released from intelligence archives in Russia and the U.S. have confirmed what responsible anti-Communist leaders in America had long asserted and the major U.S. media had long denied or ridiculed: From the 1920s onward, numerous Communist agents serving the Soviet Union had penetrated the U.S. government and many had risen to top levels of influence. Abundant documentation of this fact became readily available to the media in the 1940s and 50s, because of congressional investigations and defections of foreign Communist agents and U.S. citizens who had been members of the Communist Party.
The media cartel spiked and smothered many of the important revelations and facts contained in the numerous congressional reports about Communist activities in the U.S. Ditto for the revelations by important defectors and the many alarms sounded in books, essays, and speeches by knowledgeable anti-Communist scholars and civic leaders. This censorship was essential to help another media tactic succeed, a tactic that has worked hand-in-glove with the blackout: discrediting and smearing the anti-Communist opposition. The intensive media smears of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Rep. Martin Dies, and John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, for instance, succeeded to the degree they did because so many of the background facts necessary to evaluate both their warnings and the credibility of the attacks against them had been buried. Benjamin Gitlow, Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, and Whittaker Chambers were top members of the Communist Party with inside knowledge of Communist operations within the U.S. However, upon defecting, they, and many others like them, suffered the same treatment as Hoover, McCarthy, and Welch: smears and character attacks from both the open Communist Party press and the media cartel.
Now, decades later, with the release of the decoded “Venona” documents by the National Security Agency and some of the Soviet archive documents, all of these maliciously maligned witnesses have been vindicated. Their statements about the methods by which the Kremlin funded U.S. Communist Party operations have proven true, along with many other important claims derided by the media. But the same mainstream news organs that slavishly followed the Communist Party Line in discrediting these brave witnesses are not admitting their “errors” or uttering mea culpas for their sins. There is no attempt to make amends for their grievous deception or to correct the massive disinformation ensconced in the public record, history books, and the public consciousness.
When treating the issues of domestic subversion and the Cold War, the mainstream media continue to rant and rail about “the evil of McCarthyism,” “anti-Communist witch hunts,” and “hysteria,” completely ignoring all of the new evidence showing the concerns of the period were more than justified. In fact, the recent evidence shows that far from exaggerating the numbers of Communists and their influence in government and other institutions, the claims of McCarthy, Hoover, Welch, Bentley, and others were understatements. New evidence concerning Soviet moles such as Harold Ware, Nathan Silvermaster, Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss, Armand Hammer, Ted Hall, and others confirms that the danger then was (and now is) far greater than even most of the “alarmists” believed. But most of the recently surfacing evidence has received the same blackout treatment that the original warnings were subjected to decades ago. That some of this information has been allowed to surface in the media is more than offset by the reality of two generations of Americans deprived of any background knowledge of this issue by the blackout. Therefore, those Americans have little interest in the subject or no basis for appreciating the significance of the evidence.
Agents Still in Place
Reams of unimpeachable evidence document the fact that an enormous Communist fifth column — a secret army of enemy agents — was placed into our government and throughout our society over the past several decades. It is also a fact that the fifth column did not disappear with what the media cartel regularly refers to as “the collapse of Communism” or the “end of the Cold War.” It continues to function through a large network of agents with longstanding ties to organizations fronting for the Soviet KGB and its successive reincarnations. It functions virtually unimpeded because the media cartel ignores its existence. The following are some recent and current examples of the media spiking stories about this dangerous Trojan Horse within our gates.
Ron Dellums: When he retired in 1997, Mr. Dellums (D-Calif.) had served nearly 30 years in the U.S. House of Representatives. With a record of subversive activity that would mark him as one of the most extreme radicals ever to serve in Congress, it is doubtful that he could have passed even the lowest level security checks if he had applied for a job in the Defense Department. Nevertheless, during his later years in office he was appointed to the House Select Committee on Intelligence and then made chairman of the House Armed Services Committee! As such, he had access to many of America’s top secrets and tremendous influence over our country’s defenses.
This travesty was only possible because the major media spiked his radical record and referred to him only as a “liberal” or a “progressive.” However, Dellums had allied himself with the Communist cause and America’s avowed enemies for virtually all of his active adult life. He strongly supported the Black Panther Party and was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the U.S. branch of the Socialist International, which proudly boasts of its direct lineage from Karl Marx. He worked closely with the World Peace Council (WPC), a major global front group for the Soviet KGB. He likewise collaborated with the notorious Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), another group hardwired into the KGB. He was a boon companion to Marxist-Leninist dictators like Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and Maurice Bishop in Grenada. While in Congress, Dellums worked untiringly to gut America’s defense and intelligence capabilities and provide financial and technological aid to our enemies.
Rep. Barbara Lee: When Rep. Dellums left office, he passed his House seat to his comrade and former assistant, Barbara Lee. Rep. Lee co-chairs the radical Progressive Caucus and chairs the extreme-left Congressional Black Caucus. Even more telling, in 1992 Lee was elected to the national coordinating committee of the Committees of Correspondence (CoC) and has actively participated with the group since. The CoC was formed by top leaders of the Communist Party USA. They split from CPUSA in 1991 to form an organization promoting the same goals but unencumbered by the Communist label still carrying negatives with many people. But make no mistake, the change is all cosmetic. The CoC website promotes and praises the Communist Manifesto, and CoC official Danny Rubina has declared the group is continuing “the best traditions and history of the CPUSA….” Little wonder, with longtime CPUSA officials Angela Davis, Herbert Aptheker, Ossie Davis, Jack O’Dell, Charlene Mitchell, and Carl Bloice leading the group.
Lee fits right in. When U.S. troops invaded Grenada in 1983 they found tons of Communist documents, including minutes of the island’s ruling Politburo meetings. In the minutes of December 15, 1982, the Reds noted that “Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the International Airport that was done by Ron Dellums.” It went on to note that Lee and Dellums were asking the Communists to make any changes they wanted to the report before it was submitted to the Armed Services Committee. In other words, the subversive duo was inviting our nation’s enemies to have a hand in our national defense policies. However, as with her mentor, Dellums, the media cartel makes sure these embarrassing facts never surface; the press describes her as “passionate,” “principled,” “liberal,” and “progressive.” Unfortunately, Rep. Lee is not the only fifth columnist serving in Congress that the controlled press continues to protect.
IPS: The aforementioned Institute for Policy Studies has been, since the early 1960s, a leading fountainhead of subversive activity and has spawned a vast network of fronts and revolutionary cadres. Although its ties to the Soviet KGB, Cuban DGI, CPUSA, and terrorist groups have been repeatedly exposed, its activist alumni continue to serve in Congress, on congressional staffs, in sensitive positions in the executive branch, in the media and in academe. IPS veterans such as Richard Barnet, Morton Halperin, Cora Weiss, Michael Parenti, Gar Alperovitz, Derek Shearer, Robert Borosage, Tariq Ali, William Arkin, and others are regularly given platforms in the major media to dispense Marxist-Leninist propaganda disguised as “liberal” (or even “moderate”) opinion. Their radical records are never mentioned; they are identified simply as authors, scholars, and “experts.” Because this vital information has been blacked out, the average readers, viewers, and listeners have no way of knowing that they are being fed doses of toxic disinformation.
Blackout Bombardment
All of our examples above have dealt with the media’s use of the blackout technique in matters of national security and subversion, but it is regularly used in other areas as well. Take, for instance, global warming and abortion. Every American has been bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands, of stories claiming “science” has proved that the earth faces catastrophic consequences because carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activity are causing our atmosphere to warm by trapping more solar energy. Yet very few Americans have ever heard of the many scientific studies debunking the global warming “crisis.” And fewer still have heard of the petition signed by over 17,000 scientists, including many of the world’s leading meteorologists and climatologists, challenging the whole global warming premise. This information has fallen victim to the media blackout. The abortion debate provides a particularly striking but less extensive example of media blackout. The media keep the American people from hearing about and seeing Sarah Smith, Gianna Jessen, Jim Kelly, Rosa Rodriguez, and Christelle Morrison. Who are they? They are unanswerable, living reminders that the unborn fetus is not just a blob of tissue, but a human being. Sarah, Gianna, Jim, Rosa, and Christelle are living human beings who, as fetuses, survived abortions meant to take their lives. Media support for completely unrestricted abortion would suffer a serious blow if millions of Americans were exposed to the truth to which these abortion survivors’ living presence testifies. Thus, since the abortionists’ instruments failed to deny these survivors life, the media has used its own deadly instrument, the spike, to deny their existence.
This article originally appeared in the February 10, 2003 issue of The New American
