Top Soviet-bloc defector: Marxism infecting U.S.
'Americans are not blind. They just do not really
know what Marxism is'
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.”
WND:
You have said, “In the Soviet Union, the KGB was a
state within a state. Now the KGB
is
the state.” Please explain that.
Pacepa:
General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the Soviet
gauleiter of Romania, who afterwards rose to
head the almighty Soviet espionage service for 15
years of the Cold War, used to tell me that “every
society reflects its own past.” Sakharovsky, who was
a Russian to the marrow of his bones, believed that
someday “our socialist camp” might wear an entirely
different face, and that even the Communist Party
might have become history, but that would not
matter. The party was a foreign organism introduced
by Lenin into the Russian body, and sooner or later
it would be rejected. One thing, though, was certain
to remain unchanged: “our gosbezopasnost”
(the state security service).
Sakharovsky used to
point out that “our gosbezopasnost” had
kept Russia alive for the past 500 years, “our
gosbezopasnost” would guide her helm for the
next 500 years, “our gosbezopasnost” would
win the war with “our main enemy, American Zionism,”
and “our gosbezopasnost” would eventually
make Russia the leader of the world.
Sakharovsky was right.
Marxism triumphed in feudal Russia, which had been a
police state since the 16th century’s Ivan the
Terrible. There Marxism evolved into a secret
samoderzhaviye or autocracy, the historical
Russian form of one-man totalitarian dictatorship,
in which the new Marxist tsar’s political police
first exterminated the entire leadership of Lenin’s
Communist Party and then, behind a facade of
Marxism, quietly took precedence over the original
tools of ideology and the Communist Party for
running their country.
Only a handful of
people working in extremely close proximity to the
Soviet and East European rulers knew that after
Lenin died his Communist Party gradually became a
scramble of bureaucrats, playing no greater role in
the Soviet Union than did Lenin’s embalmed corpse in
the Kremlin mausoleum.
So far, Sakharovsky has
proved to be a dependable prophet. His successor,
Vladimir Kryuchkov, who later authored the August
1991 coup that briefly deposed Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev, clearly shared the same fanatical belief
in gosbezopasnost. Kryuchkov’s successor,
Yevgeny Primakov, who was an undercover KGB officer
under Sakharovsky, rose to become Russia’s prime
minister.
On Dec. 31, 1999,
Russia’s first freely elected president, Boris
Yeltsin, stunned the world by announcing his
resignation.
“I shouldn’t be in the
way of the natural course of history,” Yeltsin
explained, speaking in front of a gaily decorated
New Year’s tree and blue, red and white Russian flag
with a golden Russian eagle.
“I understand that
I must do it and Russia must enter the new
millennium with new politicians, with new faces,
with new intelligent, strong, energetic people.”
Yeltsin then signed a
decree “On the execution of the powers of the
Russian president,” which stated that under Article
92 Section 3 of the Russian Constitution, the power
of the Russian president should be temporarily
performed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Yeltsin also announced
that a special presidential election would be held
around March 27, 2000, and he made a strong appeal
for people to vote for Putin, who was “a strong
person worthy of becoming president.” For his part,
the newly appointed president signed a decree
pardoning Yeltsin, who was rumored to be connected
to massive bribery scandals, “for any possible
misdeeds” and granted him “total immunity” from
being prosecuted (or even searched and questioned)
for “any and all” actions committed while in office.
Putin also gave Yeltsin a lifetime pension and a
state dacha.
To me, that had all the
appearances of a KGB palace putsch.
Indeed, as of June
2003, some
6,000 former KGB officers
were holding positions in Russia’s central and
regional governments.
Among them:
Vladimir Putin, elected
president of Russia; Vladimir Osipov, head of the
Presidential Personnel Directorate; Sergey Ivanov,
defense minister; Igor Sergeyevich Ivanov, minister
of foreign affairs; Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin,
deputy directors in the Presidential Administration;
Vyacheslav Soltaganov, deputy secretary of the
Security Council; Viktor Vasilyevich Cherkesov,
chairman of the State Committee on Drug Trafficking;
Vyacheslav Trubinkov, deputy foreign minister;
Vladimir Kozlov, deputy media minister; Gennady
Moshkov, first deputy transport minister; Nikolay
Negodov, deputy transport minister; Vladimir
Strzhalkovsky, deputy minister for economic
development; Vladimir Makarov, Leonid Lobzenko and
Igor Mezhakov, deputy chairmen of the State Customs
Committee; Sergey Verevkin-Rokhalsky and Anatoly
Sedov, deputy taxes and duties ministers; Anatoly
Tsybulevsky and Vladimir Lazovsky, deputy directors
of the of the Federal Tax Police Service; Alexander
Grigoriev, general director of the Russian Agency
for State Reserves; Alexander Spiridonov, deputy
chairman of Russia’s Financial Monitoring Committee;
Vladimir Kulakov, Voronezh governor; Viktor Maslov,
Smolensk governor.
Can you imagine a
democratic Germany run by Gestapo officers?
Putin is indeed trying
to make Russia the first intelligence dictatorship
in history. In 2004, nearly half of all top
governmental positions were held by former officers
of the KGB. The Soviet Union had had one KGB officer
for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Russia had one
intelligence officer for every 297 citizens.
A new generation of
Russians is now struggling to demolish the barriers
Soviet Marxism spent over 70 years erecting between
themselves and the rest of the world, and to develop
a new national identity. If history – including that
of the last 22 years – is any guide, these Russians,
who are now enjoying their regained nationalism,
will not truly turn westward. They will struggle to
rebuild a kind of an Old Russian Empire by inspiring
themselves from old Russian traditions and by using
old Russian ways and means.
This does not mean
Russia cannot change, but for that to happen, it
will need help. In order for us to help, we should
first fully understand what is now going on behind
the veil of secrecy that still surrounds the
Kremlin. Man would not have learned to walk on the
moon if he had not first studied what the moon was
really made of and where it lay in the universe.
WND:
Gen. Pacepa, you are credited with playing a pivotal
role in waking up the Romanian people and inspiring
the overthrow of the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu. Why
is it that a communist nation like Romania could
hear and heed your message, but not America?
Pacepa:
Emil Constantinescu, the second post-Communist
president of Romania, once said:
The missiles that
destroyed Communism were launched from Radio Free
Europe, and this was Washington’s most important
investment during the Cold War. I do not know
whether the Americans themselves realize this now,
seven years after the fall of Communism, but we
understand it perfectly.
The serialization of my
book “Red Horizons” by Radio Free Europe was just
one of the missiles fired against the Romanian
version of Marxism during the Cold War years. We
need a kind of Radio Free America. Let’s hope that
others, many others, will join our efforts to help
the new generation of Americans – who have no longer
been taught real history in schools and know little
if anything about America’s 44 years of war against
Marxism – to understand the deadly danger of this
heresy.
American essayist
George Santayana, an immigrant like me, used to say
that those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it. Let’s hope that others, many
others, will help America understand this truism.
WND:
Many Americans would roll their eyes at the phrase
“Marxism in America,” even though with every passing
year we are becoming more and more Marxist. Why are
so many Americans so blind?
Pacepa:
They are not blind. They just do not really know
what Marxism is. Few Americans will roll their eyes
hearing the world “Nazism.” Why? Because the hideous
crimes committed by Nazism were publicly exposed and
their main authors were publicly tried and hanged.
Unfortunately, there was no trial of Communism,
although this Marxist heresy had killed 10 times
more people than Nazism killed. Nazi archives have
been opened to the public, who could learn about
Nazism’s atrocities from the horse’s mouth. Most
Soviet archives are still sealed.
Stalin was famously
quoted as saying: If it is not written, it did not
happen. But Marxism did happen, it generated a
dreadful empire of gulags and it spawned a 44-year
Cold War. Let’s open that Pandora’s box. The United
States of America is a unique country of freedom,
built by people who came to this land of opportunity
in search of religious, economic and personal
freedom. Once Americans know the truth, they will
never allow themselves to become puppets of Marxism.
WND:
General, you were the head of Romania’s Presidential
House – the equivalent in the U.S. of being White
House chief of staff and director of the CIA, the
FBI and the Department of Homeland Security – but
you ultimately defected to the West. You radically
changed, and gave your loyalty to America. What woke
you up? What changed you?
Pacepa:
Michelle Obama once confessed in front of television
cameras broadcasting her statement worldwide: “For
the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my
country because it feels like hope is finally making
a comeback.” When I was Michelle’s age I also liked
to believe that history started with me. It took me
a very long time to see the light. Power can
generate blindness and it did in my case. It took me
many more years to find the courage to renounce my
exorbitantly luxurious existence and to face up to
the truth about the hidden face of Marxism.
Communist rulers have always been very generous with
their spy chiefs – that is until they tire of them
and kill them off.
It was noon when the
U.S. military plane that was bringing me to freedom
landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside of
Washington, D.C., on that memorable July 28, 1978,
and I was sitting up front in the cockpit with the
pilots. It was a glorious, sunny day outside, which
only magnified the fireworks popping off inside of
me. For many, many years I had learned to hide my
personal feelings. For that was the way of life in a
Marxist society, where the government had its
informants everywhere and where microphones covered
you everyplace you went, from the office to the
bedroom. But on that unforgettable day I had an
overwhelming desire to dance around in a jig all by
myself.
I was a free man! I was
in America! The joy of finally becoming part of this
magnanimous land of liberty, where nothing was
impossible, was surpassed only by the joy of simply
being alive.
It was my desperate
hunger for freedom that woke me up.
WND:
What will it take for Americans to wake up?
Pacepa:
A “Campaign of Truth” like the one unleashed by
President Harry Truman in 1950. I still keep the
declassified version of his NSC 68/1950 on my desk.
That 58-page document put together by the U.S.
National Security Council set forth the strategy of
exposing and containing Marxism and Soviet
Communism.
“The issues that face
us are momentous,” the document stated, “involving
the fulfillment or destruction not only of this
Republic but of civilization itself.” Truman
reasoned that Marxism and Soviet Communism were the
mortal enemies of freedom and religion – of all
religions – and he believed their expansion
could be stopped only “through a concerted effort”
that would place the superiority and strength of
what he called “truth and freedom” before the
peoples of the world.
Marxism is now
threatening our country again. Let’s unleash another
Truman-style campaign of truth. Let’s remind the
leaders of the Democratic Party that Truman was a
Democrat. Let also remind them that John F. Kennedy,
another Democrat, was ready to start a nuclear war
in order to protect the United States from the
danger of Marxism. And let’s remind America that the
peace and freedom of the world depend on the
economic power of United States and the united
resolve of its public opinion, as was always the
case.
If our capitalist
economy and national unity go, so will our
prosperity, our security and the peace of the world.
WND:
Thank you, Gen. Pacepa. It has been enlightening.