Our socialist history of collusion with Russia
Most understand that socialism conquered its first country, Russia, in 1917 under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and has always been a revolutionary doctrine never content to allow any people to choose another way. Eighteen months later, it was organized to do the same in America.
Yes, colluding with Russia has been a part of our history for over a hundred years, but it has been the socialists who colluded. We see three times in the 20th Century when its imprint was most evident: after World War I, after World War II, and during the Vietnam War. Space permits only a brief summation of each.
“It was in 1919 that a majority of the membership of the Socialist Party of the United States voted to join the Comintern, established by the Bolsheviks.” It was Aug. 31 when splinter socialist groups formed the Communist Labor Party of America under the leadership of John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. They quickly attached themselves to labor unions, especially the Industrial Workers of the World, famous for its use of sabotage and violence in protesting World War I.
Allegiance to The 21 Conditions of the Russian Comintern was required for membership, so those joining were loyal to the Bolshevik Revolution and its ideology above our own government. One of these 21 conditions read: “Every party wishing to belong to the Communist International must systematically and persistently develop a Communist agitation within the trade unions.” Iron discipline and periodic cleansing rid them of the less revolutionary.
Any enemy of the Soviet Republic was their enemy. They understood that propaganda was their main weapon, and it was to be used in spreading the communist ideology and eventually overthrowing the U.S. government.
When Lenin encouraged world revolution in 1919, loyal communists went to work everywhere. In America, they called for labor union strikes across the nation “urging the workers to rise up against the government of the United States.” Some 2,600 strikes resulted with over 6,000 arrested. These were accompanied by a wave of bombings, some 36 bombs mailed to prominent politicians in April 1919 alone. In June, another eight bombs comprising 25 pounds of dynamite each were sent to mostly prominent government officials. In 1920, “a wagonload of explosives was detonated on Wall Street, killing 38 people and injuring 200 others.” Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s own home was bombed twice.
Most history textbooks undermine these events and villainize Palmer, omitting that the raids were conducted under the authority of numerous states as well as the federal government.
The Constitution defines treason as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which does allow the death sentence. In kindness, many found guilty were offered one-way transportation to Russia on the Buford, the ship nicknamed the “Soviet Ark.” Many chose to go there. The only death sentences given for the sabotage and violence of the Red Scare were to radicals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for the murders of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli — not for their political affiliation.
The Great Depression brought the nation to its knees, and the socialists, modeling the Russian-led USSR, openly planned conquest. William Z. Foster, head of the Communist Party USA, in his book “Toward Soviet America” wrote of what “the American Soviet government” would look like. It would nationalize education: “The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxist dialectical materialism, internationalism.” All religious schools and churches would be abolished. God would be banished and all property collectivized.
So much of what he advocated then has been implemented under socialism and “liberalism.”
With a philosophy mirroring socialist Russia, America was awash with spies for the Kremlin. Benjamin Gitlow, who defected from the Communist Labor Party of America he co-founded, confided, “The Communist Party of the United States is proud of the spies it has supplied to the Soviet government out of its own ranks.” Remember that it was socialists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who passed atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, for which they were executed in 1953. Communist State Department wonder boy Alger Hiss also passed atomic secrets to Russia, played a major role in communist victories under Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference, and became acting secretary-general of the UN in 1945, among other things.
The third major attempt to communize and thus overthrow our system of government was during the Vietnam War. I have in my possession hundreds of Senate and House Hearings of American socialists colluding with Russia. So prevalent was the problem that U.S. News and World Report published “Communism and the New Left” in 1970 with chapters on how socialists exploited war, blacks, disorder, youth, and labor. A favorite chapter is “Spying for Russia.” We lost the Vietnam War primarily because of the socialist enemy within America. Consequently, South Vietnam and Cambodia were turned over to the communists.
Also in my possession are at least a hundred books about U.S. socialists colluding with Russia. It is a very old story.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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