Russia and China -- Our Friends?
Many Americans find it unthinkable that Russia or China would launch an attack on the US knowing that it would mean millions of casualties on their soil. But what Americans fail to take into account is the mindset of the authoritarian communists who still occupy every important military and political office in those countries.
These are the same people who gave the world brainwashing, the Secret Police, and the Gulag. Under these communist leaders and their predecessors, China and the Soviet Union became the most murderous regime in the history of the human race, and the primary victims were their own citizens.
According to Professor R. J. Rummel, author of Death By Government:
"Almost 62 million people, nearly 54,800,000 of them citizens, have been murdered by the Communist Party -- the government -- of the Soviet Union. "Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, even infants and the infirm, were killed in cold blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions; they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of... nothing."
[Death by Government, pp. 79 & 80.]
Second only to the Soviet Union in mass murder, is Communist China. At least 35,236,000 people have been killed in Red China. Rummel writes:
"These poor souls have experienced every manner of death for every conceivable reason: genocide, politicide, mass murder, massacres, and individual directed assassination."
[Death by Government, p. 92]
Have Russia and China "reformed," and become peaceful lambs, as President Clinton would have us believe? The evidence is overwhelming to the contrary.
THE MYTH OF RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY
Americans and the world would like to believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall ended the threat of international communism. For a few years that indeed seemed to be true, in at least parts of the former Soviet Union.
Free elections were promised. Multiple political parties were allowed. Captive nations -- such as Latvia and Lithuania -- were set free. Press censorship was scaled back. There was some attempt at free market reforms. And foreign capital was invited in.
However, the reforms were at best paltry. As Joel Carmichael, editor of Midstream wrote last year, "Out of the 12 fragments of the former Soviet Union, only one -- Russia -- has received a popular election." And of those 12 countries, virtually every one is run by former high-ranking communist officials.
What of the highly-touted free market "reforms"? While small, privately-owned businesses were allowed, virtually all farming and manufacturing -- including Russia's dominant defense industries -- remain firmly in control of the state, as well as virtually all communications, transportation, and housing. (Last year, a measure to allow private ownership of homes was firmly defeated in the Duma, Russia's parliament -- a parliament controlled by the communist party.)
In brief, the centralized apparatus of economic control remains firmly in the hands of "former" communists, both in Russia, China, and throughout the states of the former Soviet Union. And the same people are in charge of the economy. Richard Ebeling, Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College and a regular visitor to Russia (his wife is Russian) states bluntly, "The same people in the same offices are still running the economy. Only the names of their offices have changed."
What of the highly-touted new free market "businesses" in Russia? All but the smallest businesses are controlled and run by the Russian Mafia, which in turn is controlled by former KGB (state security) agents and the Russian government.
Even the USSR's Gulag -- the concentration camps that were the epitome of totalitarian communism -- remain and, in fact, have grown. Avraham Shifrin, author of The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union and the world authority on the Gulag, stated in 1996:
"Basically the situation in the camps of Russia, the Ukraine (as well as other parts of the USSR with the exception of the Baltic states) has not changed. As a matter of fact, the Russian authorities have had to transform their entire industry and base it on forced labor of prisoners; for this purpose, the camps -- within the last few years -- have been gradually enlarged..." Shifrin noted ominously, "The West believes the Russian lies, as it wants to believe there will be a quiet life, but there won't be."
RUSSIA'S COMMITMENT TO GLOBAL CONQUEST
In 1996, I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Edward Teller, the former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Teller is one of America's premiere scientists, best known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb."
It was Teller who persuaded President Truman to develop the hydrogen bomb -- a thermonuclear weapon 1,000-times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Teller's recommendation proved critical when Russia exploded their own thermonuclear device shortly after the United States. If the Soviet's had had a monopoly on thermonuclear weapons, they might well have dominated the earth.
In the 1980's, Teller also convinced President Reagan to begin development of the next generation of superweapons, known as "Star Wars."
When I spoke to Teller at his home, he was very worried about Clinton's military polices, which he called extremely "dangerous." According to Teller, under Clinton the US has ceased the development of virtually all strategic weapons, especially nuclear ones.
Teller seemed perplexed that an American president would do such a thing, especially since the Russians and Chinese were building new and more powerful weapons at breakneck speed. If this goes on, Teller said, the US military would witness no real improvement in its weapons systems for a decade -- exposing America to pre-emptive attack.
I asked Dr. Teller to quantify the risk of the United States becoming involved in a global nuclear war if Clinton's policies continued. He replied that in 1992 the chances of the United States becoming involved in a global war was at most one chance in a hundred, with the main risk being accidental war. However, under Clinton's military stagnation policies, Dr. Teller explained, the chance of global nuclear war will increase to 50-50 during the next few years.
Dr. Teller also stressed the importance of technologically-advanced weapons in safeguarding our society. He noted that for centuries China's culture was considered more advanced than West's, but the West was still able to dominate China and the world. Why? Because, Teller, explained, the West had developed the technology to effectively use gunpowder -- the first superweapon. This new weaponry, coupled with advanced navigation aides, gave the West dominance of the seas and control of the world.
The same principle holds today, Teller said. The nation that achieves dominance in superweapons of mass destruction dominates the world.
The US may have dazzling gadgetry in the cockpit of an F-16, and formidable aircraft carriers, neither of which the Russians have. But in a nuclear war, such weapons are not that important, compared to nuclear weapons. (Saddam Hussein understands well this concept. By UN estimates, he has given up $120 billion in lost oil sales during the past decade, rather than abandon his biological, chemical and nuclear programs.)
The Soviet strategy for the past three decades has been to achieve numerical superiority in superweapons while preventing the West from developing new superweapons.
President Clinton has been a willing accomplice with Russia's agenda. Not only has he refused to develop any major new weapons systems, he has halted underground testing of nuclear weapons, which is crucial to the development of new superweapons. At the same time, he did nothing when Russia conducted no less than five underground nuclear tests during the fall of 1998 alone.
To put it briefly, the West has been disarming, while the Russians and Chinese have been building their militaries rapidly -- especially their strategic forces, or "superweapons."
WAS THE WEST TRICKED?
Since its inception in 1917, the Soviet Union followed the policy of alternating periods of repression with relaxing of authority and opening to the West to attract Western capital and aid. Then, a few years later, revitalized by the infusion of Western money and technology, they would clamp down again, more brutally than ever. China has done the same.
Time and again, the West has been taken in by this trick. Indeed, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union was the darling of myopic intellectuals in America and Europe who praised it for its "noble" ideology, donated funds and urged Western aid -- while ignoring the mind-numbing repression, concentration camps and mass executions.
Anatoliy Golitsyn, an important KGB defector, warned the CIA that the USSR would launch a massive "liberalization" movement, as a ruse to get the West to disarm.
Golitsyn's 1984 book, Old Lies For New: The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation, eerily predicted that the Soviet Union would "collapse", that Eastern Europe would be "liberated", and that the Berlin Wall would be torn down -- all as a way to deceive the West into disarming. All of these events have taken place, including massive Western disarmament under Clinton (described in detail in later articles of this series).
Golitsyn claims that the Western public has been fed a steady diet of disinformation about Russia. During this period, Golitsyn warned, Russia's military-industrial complex would not shrink but would rapidly expand. What's the purpose of this enormous military expansion?
Read the whole series: Russia and China Prepare for War, Parts I-VIII.
Revisit Christopher Ruddy's interview with Russian defector Stanislav Lunev Defector Reveals Russian War Plans.
