The New Communism

AIM Report  |  By Cliff Kincaid  |  June 9, 2008

Americans are searching for leadership in this election year and they have found it. Unfortunately, he is not an American politician. Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, who survived the communist system and now leads a country that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet empire, is warning of a new form of communism threatening human freedom and progress.

Like former President Ronald Reagan, who developed his under-standing of the communist menace by fighting the communists in Hollywood, Klaus suffered under them during the communist era in Czechoslovakia. Because of this experience, however, he came to understand how Soviet-style communism, which collapsed as an empire and created the circumstances for the emergence of the Czech Republic as a free and independent nation, never really died as an ideology and that it has imitators in the West.  

His book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, charges that the movement to “save” the environment has been taken over by ideologues who favor total government control over our lives. He says it can be considered a form of communism, socialism or even fascism. Whatever you call it, the result will be the extinction of human freedom.

Fascist Roots

Indeed, Klaus’s book quotes the authoritative essay, “Fascist Ideology: The Green Wing of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents,” by Peter Staudenmaier, as providing the backdrop for understanding the mentality driving the media-led hysteria over “global warming” and the alleged necessity for immediate governmental action at the national and global levels.    

Staudenmaier wrote that “the Nazi movement’s incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.” He explained, “Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring ‘water, winds and tides’ as the energy path of the future.”

While the Nazi embrace of these alternative energy or health solutions does not discredit them, the historical facts should prompt us to consider the motivations of those promoting these causes in the current context. Are the attacks on “Big Oil” and the push for alternative energy technologies being used as a pretext for more government control over the economy? Are the demands for government action to curb global warming being used to undermine and subvert free enterprise capitalism and private property rights? 

But while communism was an atheistic system, Klaus notes, modern environmentalism has assumed a religious dimension and has become a “green religion.”

Liberal Fascism

At the end of Klaus’s remarks on this subject at a Washington, D.C. dinner hosted and sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), master of ceremonies Jonah Goldberg remarked that he wished that we had a U.S. President who would make such a speech. Tragically, Bush and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have fallen into the camp, which includes Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and most of the Democratic Party, which wants to further erode individual freedom in the name of saving the environment. It is the modern version of the Marxist, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” except that the needs of the environment are now being placed above those of people. 

It was noteworthy and appropriate that Goldberg, who praised Klaus’s remarks, has written the excellent book, Liberal Fascism, about the totalitarian tendencies of modern-day liberalism. 

For his part, Klaus writes that  “The environmentalists’ attitude toward nature is analogous to the Marxist approach to economics. The aim in both cases is to replace the free, spontaneous evolution of the world (and humankind) by the would-be optimal, central or—using today’s fashionable adjective—global planning of world development. Much as in the case of Communism, this approach is utopian and would lead to results completely different from the intended ones. Like other utopias, this one can never materialize, and efforts to make it materialize can only be carried out through restrictions of freedom, through the dictates of a small, elitist minority over the overwhelming majority.”

In short, we will not only lose our freedom but economic progress and human advancement will be stifled. And more people will inevitably die.

Klaus adds, “In the past 150 years (at least since Marx), the socialists have been very effectively destroying human freedom under humane and compassionate slogans, such as caring for man, ensuring social equality, and fostering social welfare. The environmentalists are doing the same under equally noble-minded slogans, expressing concern about nature more than about people (recall their radical motto ‘Earth first’). In both cases, the slogans have been (and still are) just a smokescreen. In both cases, the movements were (and are) completely about power, about the hegemony of the ‘chosen ones’ (as they see themselves) over the rest of us, about the imposition of the only correct worldview (their own), about the remodeling of the world.”

In an appendix, Klaus takes on directly the popular congressional push for a so-called “cap and trade” system, on a national and global basis, giving bureaucrats the power to decide the “carbon footprint” of people, companies and nations and limiting their carbon emissions and use of energy. He calls the proposal completely irrational and unscientific and suggests it is just another excuse for giving government more power.

The Forces Of Freedom

In the introduction to the Klaus book, Fred L. Smith Jr., president of CEI, warns about the attraction that the “intellectual class” continues to have for “statism” or “collectivism,”  which are other names for the threats we face. Today, Smith says, we are witnessing “cultural warfare against economic liberty” that requires “pro-freedom voices” to prevent the slide into totalitarianism.

Klaus came to Washington, D.C. at the end of May to lead this effort. But he will return to the Czech Republic. Various American conservative political figures, including former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, are even trying to appear “green.” Gingrich, for example, appears in a commercial, financed by Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, warning about global warming. (The group Judicial Watch contends the commercial is a violation of federal election law and an illegal contribution to Pelosi’s campaign).

Gingrich has become an advocate of “green conservatism” and now proposes a Gore-like “Contract with the Earth.”

In his book, Klaus calls Gore a hypocrite for his “own wasteful consumption of electricity” and says the former vice president has no interest in facts or documentation for his sensational claims. 

The “cultural warfare” Smith warns about can be seen in the almost total blackout that the liberal media gave to Klaus’s various appearances in Washington, D.C., including at the CEI dinner and the National Press Club. Rather than attempt to refute the arguments of a man who has a wealth of knowledge about economics and international economic relations, the liberal media tried their best to ignore him.

Front-Page Coverage

Fortunately, the Washington Times highlighted his warnings on page one. “Environmentalism, says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, is the new communism, a system of elite command-and-control that kills prosperity and should similarly be condemned to the ash heap of history,” the paper reported in a front-page story by David R. Sands. 

“I understand that global warming is a religion conceived to suppress human freedom,” Klaus told editors and reporters at the paper.

In order to demonstrate the courageous nature of the stand that Klaus is taking internationally, the book includes a cartoon of someone resembling Klaus being burned at the stake as three people taunt him, saying, “So, do you believe in warming now?”

Where are the U.S. political leaders who will follow Klaus in taking a forthright stand in favor of human freedom?

THE NETWORK BEHIND THE BUSH-BASHING BOOK

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist “journalist” named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin.

But the connections don’t end here. Boudin’s son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin’s comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the lives of two policemen and a security guard. Dohrn later served jail time for refusing to cooperate in an official investigation of the crime. 

Obama stands to benefit from the McClellan book because it was obviously crafted, under the guidance of Osnos, to inflict maximum damage on President Bush and, by extension, fellow Republican and Iraq War supporter Senator John McCain. None of this can be called an accident.

Virtually all of McClellan’s former friends say that what he is writing and saying now doesn’t sound like him at all. The obvious explanation is that, for whatever reason or motivation, he is reading from a script prepared by Osnos and the far left.

A May 30 Washington Post story reported, “somewhere between proposal and publication, as McClellan told it yesterday, the scales dropped from his eyes, leading him to write a book that accuses his former boss, President Bush, and his senior aides of abandoning ‘candor and honesty’ to wage a ‘political propaganda campaign’ that led the nation into an ‘unnecessary war.’”

But the paper also quoted Osnos as saying that McClellan “needed editorial guidance to tell the story he wanted to tell all along.” This even involved the subtitle, which once ended with “What’s Wrong with Washington,” but became “Washington’s Culture of Deception” in the final product. Osnos told the paper the subtitle “evolved.” The story obviously did so as well.

One question that has been raised by critics is whether McClellan is in it for the money. But that’s less important than the fact that the network that has made this book into a reality incorporates many elements of the far left.

The network that included Stone, who died in 1989, was the subject of Susan Braudy’s 2003 book, Family Circle, about the Boudin family’s communist and socialist ties. Page 185 shows Kathy Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn together, “after Bernardine’s return from Cuba,” where she had “a warm meeting with members of the Viet Cong.”

The Line Of Attack

It is significant that Osnos says that every book he publishes includes a dedication to Benjamin C. Bradlee, I.F. Stone and Robert Bernstein, former head of Random House. The first two are worth mentioning. Bradlee was the executive editor of the Washington Post, famous for once remarking that, during coverage of the Iran-Contra affair under President Reagan, he was having “the most fun since Watergate.” Bradlee was hoping to bring down Reagan, as they had brought down President Nixon in the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal.

Nixon had developed a national reputation as a Congressman and had laid the basis for his runs for national office by helping expose Soviet spy Alger Hiss in the State Department and a communist network inside the U.S. Government. Interestingly, one of Bradlee’s reporters on the Watergate story was Carl Bernstein, whose parents were members of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party.

Iran-Contra did not bring down Reagan, but the far-left apparently hopes the McClellan book will help bring down or further damage President George W. Bush. It can also, in their view, do some collateral damage to McCain. 

It is a tactic that has been employed time and time again. Pegging their coverage to a book, the media create the appearance of a “scandal,” this time with a former “insider,” and try to inflict political damage that benefits the Democrats. The problem for McClellan is that he appears transparently foolish, reciting charges about the Iraq War and so forth that have mostly been raised before by the President’s political enemies. McClellan, who never objected to the policies when he promoted and defended them, is acting like a puppet.     

The Soviet Network

Osnos is the key to understanding the network that is working behind-the-scenes. Osnos was an assistant to I.F. Stone in the 1960s. Stone postured as an independent radical writer but was exposed as a Soviet agent in the transcripts of Soviet messages known as the Venona intercepts and by other sources.

Former Soviet KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin had identified Stone as a Soviet agent but under pressure from Stone’s friends in the media later backed away from that precise description.

However, in his book, The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West, Kalugin still identified Stone as a “fellow traveler” of the Soviet Union who “made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet system” over a period of many years and had regular contacts and lunches with him.     

Osnos is still one among many far-left journalists who do not want to accept the terrible facts about their hero and icon. But as AIM founder Reed Irvine told the New York Times back in 1992, “The charge that I.F. Stone was a Soviet agent does not surprise those who knew that as a fellow traveler, if not a [Communist] party member, Stone remained a faithful Stalinist through the purges, the Hitler-Stalin pact and the absorption of Eastern Europe…”

Braudy’s book about the Boudins, Family Circle, has a lot to say about Kathy Boudin and her uncle, I.F. Stone, also known as Izzy. Before turning to a life of crime as a communist terrorist, she had wanted to work for her uncle’s newsletter, which is also where Osnos worked.  She tells us that Stone tried to organize opposition to U.S. involvement in the Korean War, in order to make South Korea safe for communism, and that he would later work to remove U.S. forces from South Vietnam, in order to pave the way for a communist military victory there. Stone and his comrades were successful in the case of Vietnam. His pro-communist record was clear for all to see, except to Osnos and his ilk.

Defending Reds

According to Braudy, Stone had “achieved fame in the 1950s for fighting for the rights of people who were accused of having been members of the American Communist Party.”

But none of this apparently bothered Osnos, who went to work for Stone in the 1960s. And Osnos’s tie to Stone didn’t bother the Post. “After working for I.F. Stone, Peter Osnos became a correspondent around the world for The Washington Post and the newspaper’s foreign and national editor,” the official I.F. Stone website proclaims.

In 1980, Osnos guest-lectured at the pro-Marxist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) during a Karen DeYoung class on “foreign reporting.”

DeYoung, then a foreign reporter for the Post, is now an associate editor at the paper. The IPS class was being held during a time when the old Soviet Union and its surrogate, Communist Cuba, were destabilizing Central America and hoping to install a series of communist governments. Reagan had stopped the Soviet takeover at a critical juncture when he ordered the military liberation of communist-controlled Grenada. However, Reagan was also supporting the democratic government of El Salvador, which faced a communist terrorist movement, and freedom fighters in Nicaragua. It was the latter that led to the “Iran-Contra affair” when National Security Council staffer Oliver North arranged for unofficial assistance to the Nicaraguan resistance when the liberal Congress was attempting to cut off their aid. 

To Karen DeYoung, as she told the class, “most journalists now, most Western journalists at least, are very eager to seek out guerrilla groups, leftist groups, because you assume they must be the good guys.” 

For his part, as AIM editor Cliff Kincaid noted in an April 1983 Human Events article, “The IPS and the Media: Unholy Alliance,” Osnos exhibited a strange view of communism. He claimed not to know why the Soviets behaved as they did. But he had visited Cuba, where he found no evidence of Soviet control, and came away convinced that there was “apparently genuine rapport” between Castro and the Cuban people.

On March 12, 2008, as he was preparing publication of McClellan’s book, Osnos found enough time to pay tribute to I.F. Stone on the anniversary of Stone’s birthday. Others paying tribute were Robert Kaiser, associate editor and former managing editor of the Washington Post, and Myra MacPherson, author of a book about Stone and former reporter for the Washington Post.

This is the milieu that has spawned the McClellan book. Whatever you may think of Bush, McCain or the Iraq War, there can be no doubt that Bush’s former press secretary has fulfilled the function of “useful idiot.”

Once again, the media are having their fun.