The Grand Deception

Those who fear Russia are easily mocked. "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," is on video. Watch it and laugh. Concern about communist subversion is also mocked. All you have to do is remember what a bad egg Joseph McCarthy was, if you remember at all. To allay any lingering doubt or fear, go to Russia and take the KGB tour. See all the rusting submarines and missile boats you want. You can even see rusty signs in front of Russia's ABM radar at Sofrino.

If you subscribed to "National Review" when it was still under the influence of Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, you may remember a completely different magazine than exists today. It's funny how vigilance and a sense of danger can be turned into smug self-satisfaction over time.

Twenty years ago, a Russian KGB defector named Anatoliy Golitsyn went to see William F. Buckley, the editor of "National Review." Golitsyn needed help on writing a book with the title "New Lies for Old." It was about Russia's strategy of faking the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. As it happened, Buckley showed Golitsyn the door.

After the "patron saint of American conservatives" closed the door on the truth about communist strategy, few would have the courage to look back and say that Golitsyn was right. The changes in Eastern Europe have been deceptive, orchestrated and calculated from on high. The strategy has been to disarm the West and get communist bloc countries inside NATO – to subvert the alliance from within.

Consider the Czech Republic as an example. Having entered NATO, it is yet controlled by the old communists who are waiting for a signal from Moscow. That's all it will take for them to reverse the changes that have taken place since 1989. Yesterday, I received a letter from a politically active Czech citizen, Hana Catalanova. "I know how hard this is to make people see," she wrote. "You might think it is better over here ... no, it is not!"

The big lie of 1989, the grand deception, was cynically calculated to take advantage of modern apathy and ignorance: "... we are actually living our lives in such lies, and people don't care," wrote Catalanova. "What about the next generation, our kids?"

Hana worries about freedom and the truth. Explaining how the communists retained control after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, she noted, "The problem here is that too many people were involved and engaged in shady deals with the secret police and corruption ... betraying their friends, fellow workers, next door neighbors. And this is such a small country."

America has a different excuse for turning its back on freedom and the truth. As I once told a leading Russian military defector who asked about America's unpatriotic attitudes, "They're too busy shopping and having fun."

The Czechs have another problem. "In towns and villages everyone knows everyone," explained Catalanova, "They are hiding their past behind the silence. They stay deaf to everything that doesn't concern them, because if they speak up, somebody might tell who they were before. I can tell you, it is all very depressing."

Hana Catalanova has written an important essay on the imprisonment of Captain Vladimir Hucin, a Czech official who has uncovered the truth about secret communist structures controlling important public institutions. "The whole world must know that communism is not dead," wrote Catalanova. "It is very much alive and threatens to overthrow the world democracies."

People here in America look around and wonder why the environmentalists are so strong, why business is under assault and rural property rights are no longer secure. They wonder why so many are teaching Marxist propaganda in schools and universities. Some of us cannot understand why our political leaders keep insisting on further military cutbacks as they continue to do business with the gangsters in Beijing and Moscow.

The short answer is: We've been subverted, infiltrated, duped and manipulated by communists and leftists. We have been too busy shopping and having fun to notice their "long march" through our institutions. We have been too absorbed in our careers and personal satisfactions. And now our country has its own hidden (or not so hidden) communist structures. As Russia and China prepare new missiles against us, our own state system allows itself to be unthinkingly nudged toward self-dissolution.

The danger is real, despite all the ridicule that comes to mind about "communists under every bush." Have you talked to your daughter's social studies teacher? Have you any idea where all this political correctness ultimately comes from?

If I joined the present chorus writing about shark attacks, the response to my column would be huge. But since I write about the advance of communism, about evidence that our Cold War enemy has been playing a trick on us, I get hardly any response at all. Americans have lost their sense of self preservation, their sense of history.

Do you really think that an enemy of more than four decades simply ran up the white flag because he couldn't "pay the bills"?

Of course, that's what you want to believe to keep your peace of mind. But this peace of mind is for fools. Give it up and get with the facts and testimony. The superficial reports on Russia, Chechnya, Eastern Europe and the collapse of communism are laced with falsehood and distortion. Such reports do not convey a real understanding of events.

French journalist Anne Nivat's book on the Chechin war has recently been translated into English. It deserves to be widely read, though few will understand its importance. Nivat disguised herself as a Chechin refugee and watched events close up. Many of the Chechins she interviewed felt the war was a Kremlin puppet show. "I'm ashamed for Western Europe, where you live in a world of lies," an elderly Chechin told Navat. "We are all victims, manipulated by the politicians in Moscow."

The same could be said for America.

J.R. Nyquist, a WorldNetDaily contributing editor and a renowned expert in geopolitics and international relations, is the author of "Origins of the Fourth World War." Visit his news-analysis and opinion site, JRNyquist.com.

Russia Seeks More Time to Disarm
By JUDITH INGRAM
Associated Press Writer
September 6, 2001, 12:19 PM EDT
MOSCOW -- A top official acknowledged Thursday that Russia had delayed destroying its chemical weapons stocks but said Moscow is committed to doing so and deserves a five-year extension of an international deadline.
A former Russian prime minister, Sergei Kiriyenko now oversees the Volga River region, where five of Russia's seven chemical weapons storage sites are located. He also heads a new committee charged with leading the political effort to destroy Russia's 44,000 tons of chemical weapons, the world's largest arsenal.
Russia ratified the Convention on Chemical Weapons in 1997, committing itself to destroy the stockpile within a decade. But it had long complained that it could not afford the estimated $7 billion program despite pledges of aid from the United States, Europe and Canada.
Kiriyenko told reporters that until this year Russia had done too little to fulfill its obligations under the 1993 convention and the U.S. Congress had good reason to freeze its funding for the program over the last two years.
"We certainly understand that insofar as Russia, in the period from 1997 ... until 2000, did not devote itself to the problem, we ourselves are guilty," Kiriyenko said.
Now the Cabinet has approved a new, cheaper program that would allow Russia to destroy its arsenal by 2012, without having to seek international funding beyond what has already been pledged. The new program cuts the originally planned seven destruction sites to three, and halves the estimated cost to about $3.5 billion.
As evidence of the government's new attitude, Kiriyenko pointed out that Russia had transferred authority over the destruction effort from the defense ministry to a civilian agency, underlining its position that Russia no longer considered the weapons an active part of its military arsenal.
The Russian government devoted six times more funds to the program this year than last, and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has agreed to a further increase in next year's budget, Kiriyenko said.
This year, Russia completed destruction of the detonators used for its chemical weapons, and it is close to completing elimination of its stocks of phosgene, a so-called choking agent that disables or kills by making the lungs fill with fluid, Kiriyenko said. Destruction of these stocks is the least complex of all the weapons elimination processes.
But Russia will need five more years to complete the destruction, since some of the facilities have not even been built. Kiriyenko started Russia's campaign for a deadline extension in Tokyo earlier this week, and he is set to embark on a tour of the other Group of Seven capitals this month.
Copyright © 2001, The Associated Press

Just 5 more years! Honest!!!

Russia Adamant on ABM Treaty
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
Associated Press Writer
September 6, 2001, 2:44 PM EDT
MOSCOW -- Russia is ready to discuss U.S. concerns about missile threats but firmly stands for keeping the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov wrote in a book that hit Moscow bookstores Thursday.
The ABM treaty has "proven its central role in ensuring strategic stability," Ivanov said in his book, "The New Russian Diplomacy: Ten Years of the Country's Foreign Policy," which sums up Moscow's post-Soviet diplomatic activities.
Ivanov's firm reiteration of Russia's adherence to the ABM contrasted with a senior U.S. administration official's statement in Washington on Wednesday that Moscow may be on the verge of accepting the principle of limited anti-missile defense, which would violate the treaty.
Ivanov's views underlined once again how each of the two countries, while professing readiness to hear out the other, is convinced its own unbending stance will win out in the end.
President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed in July to discuss Washington's missile defense plans and deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals in a series of consultations. U.S. officials have made it clear they want the talks to move briskly, but the Russians favor prolonging the talks.
With the Pentagon still in the process of assessing how many nuclear weapons the United States needs, the consultations have brought no visible results yet. Kremlin officials have expressed irritation about the talks, saying Washington's failure to make specific proposals has made them pointless.
The consultations will continue this month, with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith talking separately with Russian delegations.
Putin is scheduled to again meet with Bush at the sidelines of the Asian economic summit in Shanghai next month, then visit the U.S. president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in November, but Russian officials and analysts have been skeptical of the chances for a quick compromise.
Oleg Chernov, deputy secretary of Putin's security council, told The Washington Post on Thursday that "it's impossible" that an agreement would be reached that quickly and said it would take at least another year to negotiate a compromise.
Chernov was unavailable for comment Thursday, and a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry refrained from comment.
Alexander Pikayev, a military analyst for the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, said no quick breakthrough in talks was likely.
"As long as the Pentagon is still busy with a review of U.S. nuclear forces, it's impossible to reach an agreement on missile defense and nuclear cuts by November," he said.
Russia has firmly opposed the U.S. intention to build a national defense against ballistic missiles, saying such a missile shield would tilt the military balance in the U.S. favor and undermine global stability. It has rejected U.S. arguments that the planned missile defense, aimed at threats from such nations as North Korea, is not intended equally to deter a massive strike of the kind Russia is capable of launching.
Ivanov argued in his book that the treaty allows "finding effective solutions to the problems related to spread of mass destruction weapons and missile technologies."
"Russia doesn't refuse to jointly assess the missile threats our American partners are talking about," Ivanov said, adding that "as of today these threats are purely hypothetical."
Copyright © 2001, The Associated Press

"these threats are purely hypothetical."

Would these commies lie to us?

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