Top Soviet-bloc defector: Marxism infecting U.S.

WorldNetDaily/

By Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa

Editor’s note: Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc official ever to defect to the West. In December 1989, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word-for-word out of Pacepa’s book, “Red Horizons,” subsequently republished in 27 countries.

After President Carter approved his request for political asylum, Pacepa became an American citizen and worked with U.S. intelligence agencies against the former Eastern Bloc. The CIA has praised Pacepa’s cooperation for providing “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”

A few weeks ago I read “America’s Marxist Picnic,” a touching story by WND’s David Kupelian, which illustrates how much the U.S. government hated Marxism a generation ago.

David’s father was one of America’s top rocket scientists, and he became deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces under Ronald Reagan. During the 1970s, however, the U.S. government considered withdrawing his top secret security clearance because some informer had reported that, during his teen years, his mother had attended an Armenian church picnic where a pro-Soviet speaker gave a talk.

That story moved me. My father also worked for America – not as a top rocket scientist, but as service manager of the General Motors affiliate in Romania. Working for America became a crime when the communists took over Romania at the end of WWII and my father was soon killed by the Red Army.

Today the Communist Party is abolished in Romania, which re-became a trustworthy ally of the U.S.. Meanwhile, the formerly cursed Communist Party USA is throwing its full support to the current president of the United States.

I wrote to David. That’s how this interview was born.

Editor’s note: Ion Mihai Pacepa was interviewed by WND Managing Editor David Kupelian.

WND: Gen. Pacepa, it’s an honor to talk with you. Please tell me, did America win the Cold War? If so, why are we fighting Marxism in our own country today? And if not, what really happened?

Pacepa: Yes, we won the Cold War, but unlike other wars the Cold War did not end with an act of surrender and with the defeated enemy throwing down his weapons. But no, we are not fighting Marxism in our country, because the American people have not yet been warned that their country is being contaminated by Marxism. A few conservative luminaries like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly have warned that Marxism is infecting the United States, but neither the Republicans’ “Pledge to America” nor the Tea Party’s “Contract from America” has mentioned the word Marxism.

So far, to the best of my knowledge, only your “Marxism, American-Style” (June 2012 Whistleblower magazine) and PJ Media’s “Say No To Socialism” have called attention to the looming dangers of Marxism, a heresy that killed some 94 million people and transformed a third of the world into feudal societies in the middle of the 20th century.

There is still a widely popular belief in the U.S. and Western Europe that the nefarious Marxist legacy was uprooted in 1991 when the Soviet Union was abolished, just as the Nazi legacy was extirpated in 1945 when World War II ended. That is simply wishful thinking. There is a considerable difference between these two historical events.

In the 1950s, when I headed Romania’s foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I witnessed how Hitler’s Third Reich had been demolished, its war criminals put on trial, its military and police forces disbanded and the Nazis removed from public office. I also saw how West Germany’s economy was being rebuilt with the help of Marshall Plan money and how the country had become a multi-party democracy and a close friend of the United States. In 1959, when I returned to Romania, West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) made it the leading industrial power in Europe.

None of those things have happened in the former Soviet Union. No individual has been put on trial, although its Marxist regime killed many more millions than the Nazis did. Most Soviet institutions, under new names, have been left in place and are now run by many of the same people who guided the Marxist state. The KGB and the Red Army, which instrumented the Cold War, have also remained in place with new nameplates at their doors.

“Communism is dead,” people shouted in 1989, when the Berlin Wall began to come down. Soviet Communism is indeed dead as a form of government. But Marxism is on the rise again, and people are not paying attention. Why not? Because most people do not seem to be familiar with the undercover forms of Marxism we are facing today.

Hiding the ugly face of Marxism behind a smiling mask has become a Marxist science, which I described in a large piece recently published in PJ Media. Here let me just say that until 1963, Marxism was mostly camouflaged as “socialism.” The 1963 missile crisis generated by the socialist República de Cuba gave the socialist mask of Marxism a dirty name in the West and few Marxists wanted to be openly associated with it anymore. They therefore began hiding their Marxism under a new cover called “economic determinism,” which became all the rage among leftists who no longer wanted to be labeled socialists.

Economic determinism is a theory of survival rooted in Marx’s “Manifesto” (another theory of survival), but it pretends that the economic organization of a society, not the class war, determines the nature of all other aspects of life. Over the years, economic determinism has assumed different names. Khrushchev’s dogonyat i peregonyat (catching up with and overtaking the West in 10 years) and Gorbachev’s perestroika are the best known.

I wrote the script of Nicolae Ceausescu’s determinism, which was hidden behind the nickname “New Economic Order.” Most Americans, who are not used to dealing with undercover Marxists, have problems recognizing one. In April 1978, President Carter publicly hailed Ceausescu as a “great national and international leader who [had] taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community.” At the time, I was standing next to Ceausescu at the White House – and I just smiled.

Three months later, I was granted political asylum in the United States, and I informed President Carter how Ceausescu had been feeding him a pack of lies. The admiration for Ceausescu’s undercover Marxism had, however, taken on such a life of its own that the U.S. Congress, dominated by President Carter’s Democratic Party, brought the United States a sui-generis version of Ceausescu’s economic determinism. That move generated double-digit inflation. The U.S. prime rate hit 21.5 percent, the highest in U.S. history, and people had to spend long hours in line waiting to buy gas for their cars.

Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and later an economic adviser to President Obama, has kept that undercover Marxism alive in the U.S. She even wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the merits of the allegedly “mixed” socialist-capitalist economies in Ceausescu’s Romania and Tito’s Yugoslavia. Two American presidents went to Bucharest to pay tribute to Ceausescu’s Marxism disguised as economic determinism. None had ever gone there before.

A few months ago, when the devastating economic crisis in Greece exploded, economic determinism lost credibility and our Democratic Party replaced it with “progressivism,” which is the current cover name for American Marxism. The real Progressive Movement was born after the U.S. financial crisis of 1893, which the country tried to solve by redistributing America’s wealth. The progressives pushed through the first federal income tax and they created a string of labor standards that opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess that generated the Great Depression. A new Progressive Movement, dubbed the New Deal, led to steep top tax rates, strict financial regulations, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, eventually generating the current economic crisis.

Today’s Progressive Movement was born in New York’s Zuccotti Park. It was first known as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and advocated the abolition of “capitalist America.” The Democratic Party strongly embraced it and made “Progressive” its new byword. “God bless them,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told the U.S. Congress. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” 

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