The Gathering Storm: An Overview (Despite what everyone came to believe in 1991, communism did not die. It went underground. It became more covert than before. Appeasement of Russia and...

It is naïve to assume that the lower depths of the Sovietological inferno – that is, of Western ignorance and ineptitude in the study of totalitarianism – are where they have always been politically. The new strategy of totalitarianism has made havoc of the political spectrum in Western democracies, and the Right today is scarcely less inclined to self-deception than the Left.”

ANDREI NAVROZOV, 1991

Again and again, we repeat the same mistake. We make unwise bargains with murderous dictators. After all, they changed from bad guys into good guys. They have embraced capitalism and democratic reforms. They are no longer bad. Therefore, we engage with them. We trade with them. We invest in them. We become accessories after the fact, strengthening regimes that routinely murder their own citizens. Eventually, these same regimes point nuclear missiles at us and demand that whole countries be turned over to them.

We never seem to learn that extending a hand in friendship to a crocodile leads to the loss of an arm. “Like Caesar or Napoleon,” wrote Navrozov, “Hitler pursued his aim of world conquest extensively, seeking to add territory after territory to his possessions. Despite the … clear and present danger, democracies failed to prepare for war, and those within Nazi Germany’s reach collapsed when it came.” Writing on the cusp of Moscow’s 1991 August Coup, Navrozov presciently warned of Moscow’s “coming order.” At that time the Kremlin was engaged in deceptive liberalization. Changes were happening, to be sure; but as Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats explained in her book on the KGB, these changes were engineered “to dazzle the West.” In fact, Western businessmen and government leaders were fooled into believing that Russia had become a normal country – no longer totalitarian. And it really did seem so, for a time. Imagine the concessions the Kremlin won in those days: access to capital, technology, and more.

Navrozov wrote, “Had Hitler persisted in the more subtle strategy of Munich, it is likely that Churchill would have remained ‘exiled from power, largely distrusted by both major parties, thought to lack judgement and stability’ (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1973), while Hitler would have dominated the world.” Such, indeed, is the kind of strategy Moscow and Beijing adopted in the 1980s and 90s.

Despite what everyone came to believe in 1991, communism did not die. It went underground. It became more covert than before. In the years that followed, despite losses in Eastern Europe, communism advanced steadily in the West and across the globe. But nobody in a position of power, in a position to advise a Western government, took notice. As Navrozov said in 1991, “The new strategy of totalitarianism … made havoc of the political spectrum in Western democracies, and the Right today is scarcely less inclined to self-deception than the Left.”

Anyone who feared communism was thought to be obsessive, or psychologically abnormal. Meanwhile, the communists continued their “long march” through the institutions, capturing the White House, the Justice Department, and more. It was a covert conquest, managed under false Democratic banners. The mechanism that facilitated this advance is easy to see in retrospect. In 1988, Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev dispatched Georgi Arbatov to the West with a curious message: Moscow had a secret weapon, said Arbatov: “We are going to deprive you of an enemy.” The Kremlin strategist said, “I cannot imagine that we will play this game [the Cold War] again, and without us you cannot play it either.”

What did he mean?

In brief, Arbatov meant that the Soviet Empire was going to disappear. America would be deprived of its enemy. It had already been arranged, almost a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And Ronald Reagan was the perfect president to frame this strategy around. If Reagan accepted Gorbachev’s initiatives, then every conservative and anti-communist would be obliged to accept the “authenticity” of glasnost and perestroika. In strategy, timing is everything; and this was perfect timing. In addition, Reagan was beginning to suffer the first signs of the illness that would take his life. As the Daily Mail noted in 2015, “Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994…. Long before he was diagnosed … Reagan’s speech may have contained clues to his worsening mental condition, according to a new study by the University of Arizona.”

As Russian journalists Yevgenia Albats and Anna Politkovskaya later suggested, the changes in the Soviet Union were facilitated by the KGB. The late Vladimir Bukovsky, who famously stole thousands of documents from Communist Party archives, affirmed that a plan was being followed. “There are some other factors,” said Bukovsky, “which normally are not discussed. And if you try discussing them in the West, they look at you with disbelief. Namely, that it was planned in Moscow by the end of 1988 to change the hard-line communist regimes in Eastern Europe and to find a replacement for them of a more liberal variety.”

After Gorbachev’s transformation of the Soviet bloc took full effect, there would be no reason for Western vigilance. There would be no reason to build new nuclear weapons. Thenceforth America’s nuclear weapons would rot away. And now, after thirty years of rot, the nuclear balance has tipped in Russia and China’s favor. Meanwhile, the Communists would begin to dominate the Democratic Party and more. And then came the diversion of 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American strategists were no longer concerned with what Russia and China were doing. After all, these countries were indispensable partners.  

As Soviet Russia broke apart, China was becoming America’s trading partner. Drawn by China’s cheap labor costs, American investors would transfer America’s industrial base to China. This made sense to the titans of Big Business who never understood the many dangerous mistakes they were making. Like so many caught fish, they only saw the worm and not the hook. Many businessmen were compromised, like Bill Gates of Microsoft. They had unwittingly became partners in crime with the world’s most infamous mass murderers (students of history’s foremost mass murderer, Mao Zedong). 

China and Russia, the two largest communist countries on earth, were becoming capitalist in the eyes of Sovietologists like Francis Fukuyama. The victory of democratic liberalism, said Fukuyama, was an accomplished fact. Humanity had reached the “end of history.” In other words, there would be no more wars, no more totalitarian threat. Fukuyama belonged in the lowest rung of Navrozov’s Sovietological inferno. Lacking moral and strategic sense, these “scholars” of Soviet collapse never woke to the fact that Russia and China were playing a much longer game. The West would spontaneously (though gradually) disarm as Moscow and Beijing rearmed. At the same time a communist fifth column would come to power in the West, operating under the banners of global warming and multiculturalism. Corporations would be coopted, front organizations like the World Economic Forum would emerge. The Pentagon itself would integrate Critical Race Theory into the military’s educational curriculum. In the final phase of this strategy, as KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn warned in 1984,

the communist strategists might be persuaded that the balance had swung irreversibly in their favor. In that event they might well decide on a Sino-Soviet ‘reconciliation.’ The scissors strategy would give way to the strategy of ‘one clenched fist.’ At this point the shift in the political and military balance would be plain for all to see. Convergence would not be between two equal parties, but would be on terms dictated by the communist bloc. The argument for accommodation with the overwhelming strength of communism would be virtually unanswerable. Pressures would build up for changes in the American political and economic system….

From all this we can see that the communist bloc would not repeat Hitler’s mistake of starting a war prematurely. They would gather every possible advantage and extract a series of concessions from Western leaders in advance of war. Some of these Western leaders were, in key instances, communism’s secret partners and “agents of influence.” Better prepared than Hitler in 1938-39, with tentacles and satellite countries across the globe, with presidents and prime ministers under their control, Moscow and Beijing would begin their final offensive by unleashing a biological weapon (COVID), followed by an Anschluss against Ukraine. They would also threaten war in the Far East. Using food, gas, and oil as weapons, Moscow would trigger economic shrinkage in the West. The Biden Administration would help this strategy along, shutting down oil pipelines and making “Big Oil” a pariah. The stage is now set for martial law and the revolutionary transformation of the American political system – exactly as Golitsyn predicted in 1984.

As noted in my interview with Lude Media, Beijing will initiate a “Munich process” in the Far East. “If you want peace, give us Taiwan. If you want peace, give us South Korea. If you want peace, give us Japan.” The Biden Administration, ideologically oriented to anti-Americanism, is sure to cancel every important weapon system. Biden will talk tough and act like he is defending America’s allies. At each step he will undermine that defense and facilitate the enemy’s advance – as he did in Afghanistan during the summer of 2021. Of course, Biden cannot appear to abandon Ukraine or Taiwan, and therefore he must make concessions to popular feeling. Moscow and Beijing are certainly not happy about this, but they are nonetheless patient. Besides, Biden has opened the southern border to infiltration by terrorists and communist bloc commandos. His Justice Department threatens patriots with arrest and incarceration on false charges. Repressive measures are being prepared against the most important target of all – the American people. The coming dictatorship in Washington will exist for only one purpose: national surrender.  

Appeasement of Russia and China is the Biden administration’s plan. When people are afraid and suffering, they will agree to anything. Feed others to the crocodile and save yourself. Comforting lies will be told to justify Washington’s new policy of retreat. Ukraine was corrupt anyway, so let Russia take it. Taiwan is not really a country, so let China have it. The thousands being arrested by the FBI deserve to be imprisoned without due process. After all, they are extremist Christian nationalists. If this is necessary to preserve the Republic, then so be it. But the Republic will be long gone.

In 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich and war was averted. People celebrated. But these celebrations were short-lived. Chamberlain extracted a promise from Hitler in exchange for the Sudetenland. The promise was that Hitler would make no more demands. He would not invade neighboring countries, as he did to Austria. But when Czechoslovakia broke up, and the Czech state was helpless, Hitler invaded anyway – bringing appeasement to an end. The justifications Hitler used for turning Czechia into a protectorate did not matter to the British public. Hitler had broken his promise. 

The logic of appeasement inevitably breaks down. There are several reasons for this. People grow tired of getting cheated. People see that their strategic position worsens as the enemy advances. Under these circumstances no peace lasts forever, especially when built on moral compromises. While it is true that Hitler could have waited, could have shown more patience in his negotiations – life is a timed event. While villains may fantasize about living forever, they do not live forever. 

From this standpoint, a totalitarian state ruled by one man can be hobbled by that man’s mortality. Hitler was a hypochondriac who feared he did not have long to live. Therefore, he pushed his luck at Munich and the Polish Corridor. A totalitarian system under collective leadership is better able to carry out a long-range strategy. And so, the communist bloc has avoided repeating Hitler’s blunder by refusing to rely on one person for everything. Over many decades communism avoided war; that is, until now. One might ask what has changed. We hear that Putin has Parkinson’s and cancer, that Xi suffers from serious high blood pressure. Is this why Russia has gone to war and China is mobilizing?

AS THE GRIM REAPER APPROACHES

Felix Kersten testified about a 1942 meeting he had with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Kersten was Himmler’s doctor. More than that, he was Himmler’s confessor. One day, according to Kersten, the Reichsführer went to his safe, “took out a black portfolio, and took some papers from it.” He then told Kersten, “Read it. You are holding a secret report on the Führer’s illnesses.” According to Kersten, “The report was twenty-six pages long and was a compendium of all Hitler’s medical reports since the time he had been treated for serious eye trouble at the hospital at Pasewalk. The following facts were established: In his youth, Hitler had contracted syphilis. He had left Pasewalk apparently cured, but in 1937 symptoms appeared that showed beyond all possible doubt that the disease was still active.” 

In 1937 Hitler, seeing the approach of inevitable syphilitic paralysis, had no time to waste. He had to accomplish the conquests he envisioned in the next few years or not at all. Given these facts (if facts they are), we should not be surprised that under Stalin, when the communist bloc was also dependent on one man, that a similar problem arose. Edvard Radzinsky’s Stalin biography contains explosive testimony from Stalin’s last bodyguards.[xi] Putting this testimony together with other details, it seems that Stalin was planning the “final war” against the West at the time of his death. His colleagues did not like this plan and plotted to remove him. As Radzinsky explained,

They misunderstood him [Stalin]. He was not afflicted with senile vainglory. The realization of the Great Dream was imminent, when he would lead his peoples in their assault on the enemy’s stronghold. The image of the god – the God Stalin – would lead them into that last, decisive, and truly bloody battle. That was the whole purpose of the Stalin cult. That was why his newspapers and his radio had to exalt his name day and night…. The earth was filled with the thunder of this name. As a contemporary wrote in her diary: ‘Stalin here, Stalin there, Stalin, Stalin everywhere. You can’t go out the kitchen, or sit on the toilet, or eat without Stalin following you…. He creeps into your guts and your very soul, creeps into your brain, stops up all holes, treads on a person’s heels, rings you up in your innermost self, gets into bed with you under the blanket, haunts your memories and your dreams.’  

Radzinsky’s witness testimonies are best understood in the light of National Security Council (NSC) documents declassified from the Eisenhower years. President Eisenhower, fed up with communist dickering in the Korean War peace talks, was planning to widen the war if a ceasefire was not forthcoming. “From the economic perspective,” wrote historian John Lewis Gaddis, “…if the nation had to continue conventional force expenditures on the scale the Korean conflict required, Eisenhower told the National Security Council, there would be reason to wonder ‘whether national bankruptcy or national destruction would get us first.’” 

Eisenhower was quoted as saying, “atomic weapons have virtually achieved conventional status within our armed services.” This was music to Stalin’s ears, for the aging dictator wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. Days after taking office, Eisenhower told his National Security Council, “we should consider the use of tactical atomic weapons [in Korea].” Eisenhower would not allow America to be bled indefinitely by the Korean War. Stalin knew that Eisenhower was serious. The Soviet dictator was eager to accept the American president’s challenge. But Stalin’s chief lieutenants, L. Beria and N. Khrushchev, were frightened by the prospect of war. One night in early March 1953 they arranged for Stalin’s body guards to leave their posts. That was the night Stalin suffered his fatal “stroke.”

Some observers of the present crisis hope that a similar dynamic will play out in Moscow and Beijing; that Putin and/or Xi will be removed from power by those who want to prevent a catastrophic war. All evidence, so far, suggests that we will not be so lucky this time. My own analysis suggests that the leadership in Russia and China is not beholden to one man – to a Hitler or a Stalin. Putin’s illness and Xi’s high blood pressure are incidental. We are dealing with a long-range strategy being carried out by giant secretive bureaucracies.

THE INFILTRATION PROBLEM

The real problem, of course, is the communist penetration of Big Business and Big Government. All Western governments have within them a secret cabal. In his book, The Whole of Their Lives, Benjamin Gitlow explained the inner workings of the deep state. Before breaking with communism, Gitlow had been hand-picked by Stalin to lead America’s Communist Party. Here is how Gitlow described the inner workings of the communist apparatus in 1948:

Though the American communists have not yet secured the kind of control … that they are after, the sinister communist government within a government is in operation and has been in operation for over a decade. If the American people were given an opportunity to sit in on meetings of the Political Committee of the Communist Party they would enjoy a ringside seat at the sessions of the Supreme Council of the Soviet United States. They would be amazed at the matters coming up for consideration. The Political Committee sits like a cabinet. It passes judgment and makes decisions on matters affecting the lives of Americans.

To penetrate the American upper classes, wrote Gitlow, “The Party soon developed a technique for handling people in the upper brackets in a more efficient and more organized fashion. Chosen Party members, whose membership in the Party was kept a dark secret, were fitted out exactly as the movies do a poor girl who suddenly inherits riches. Elaborate apartments were furnished for them in the exclusive sections of New York. In each apartment a bar was erected and stocked with the finest wines and liqueurs.”[xviii] According to Gitlow, “Here penthouse society mingled and rubbed shoulders with Red Bohemia, and had a marvelous time as it was being fleeced.”

A wild conspiracy theory? No. Gitlow’s account was autobiographical. Does anyone really think that rich people are somehow invulnerable to communist subversion? Why would they be any wiser than others? People who are busy making money are not usually equipped to understand something as complex as communism. Human beings have weaknesses, after all – even if they are very rich.

The psychopaths who run the communist movement are good at detecting weaknesses (and exploiting them). Gitlow wrote about a “member of a dance group” who “knows just how to ogle a fat industrialist in such a way that his cheeks turned pink and his heart bubbled over for the poor exploited proletariat.” Gitlow also told of a “young artist, sipping cocktails with an overstuffed and over-powered lady,” expounding on “the role art played in combating fascism.” Money, he said, “rolled into the coffers of the Communist Party.” The communists were influencing our society from the top – from the very top – as far back as the 1920s (when Gitlow was a communist leader). Historically speaking, America has been subject to one hundred years of communist subversion. To imagine the world without this history, without this fleecing of our leisure class, is to misunderstand everything. “Hob-nobbing with fashionable society had no effect whatsoever on the outlook of the communist leaders,” noted Gitlow. “To their credit, it must be stated that they did not succumb to the corrupting influences of bourgeois society. On the contrary, they so influenced the society circles with which they came in contact, so changed the outlook of the gentlemen and ladies with whom they sipped cocktails, that they transformed them into the financial pillars of the Party and subservient agents of the communist cause.”

Subvert the elite, subvert the system. Subvert the system, control the masses. Control the masses, control everything. According to Gitlow, “The communist leaders … hope … to turn the wheels of American history sharply and violently in their direction.” In 1965 Louis Budenz, the former managing editor of the Communist Party newspaper, The Daily Worker, wrote, “The Americans, staggering in the night of ignorance on Soviet Communism, are thus misled over and over again as they move blindly into the American Dark Ages, unaware of the nature or the tactics of their enemies.” Moscow and Beijing, Budenz noted, are “intent upon eternal war until the West is brought to its knees and the Bolshevik invasion has proved a success.”

Gitlow and Budenz remind us of the infiltration of our ruling elites, Big Business and Big Government (not to mention the media and academia). The West’s leaders are not simply clueless, their political flanks have been turned. And now, without fulling realizing it, they are being absorbed into the New Religion of socialism (i.e., a stage in the advance toward communism). At present we are suffering one economic shock after another. The Republican opposition crows about their coming victory in the midterm elections. But will there be midterm elections? And if so, will those elections be “free and fair”? Even now, as conservatives are being investigated for a so-called “insurrection,” a season of rioting and violence has been organized by the communists. Antifa and the Marxist activists of BLM, who pulled down statues of our national heroes two summers ago, are now marching for the right of a mother to kill her unborn baby.

There has already been vandalism against churches and right-to-life organizations. Such property crimes are backed today by an outraged president and vice president. Both are beholden to the communist movement. Religion, of course, is one of communism’s chief enemies – along with motherhood. If you want to undermine a society, undermine motherhood. And what undermines motherhood more than mothers killing their own unborn babies?

According to Fox News, over 63 million abortions have occurred in the United States since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973. Here is slaughter on an unimaginable scale. Since antiquity the medical profession was predicated on “do no harm,” and was opposed to abortion. The degradation of medical ethics has serious implications. For over a year the medical profession has advised 800 million people to participate in a dangerous medical experiment (i.e., the so-called COVID “vaccines”).

Communist subversion is real. The subversion of our morality, our churches, our government, our schools – is real. Somebody organized it. Somebody campaigned for it. Somebody conspired to make it happen. Except for some odd member of Antifa, communists do not have a hammer and sickle tattooed on their foreheads. And they are not coming out of the closet to satisfy our curiosity. It is much easier for them if they pretend to be “liberals” or “progressives,” or even conservatives.

For 35 years I have followed the communist defector literature, which has proven to be a useful guide to communist strategy. One of the more interesting defectors, Jan Sejna, published a book in 1982. Therein he wrote, “One of the basic problems of the West is its frequent failure to recognize the existence of any Soviet ‘grand design’ at all. Those rejecting this concept unwittingly serve Soviet efforts to conceal their objectives and further complicate the process of determining such objectives.’” Sejna further noted, “When my friends and I studied the Strategic Plan our initial reactions were identical: we considered it quite unrealistic, especially in its timing….” However, after his defection to the West Sejna realized that Moscow’s plans were not unrealistic at all. In the West, said Sejna, “I could find no unity, no consistent objective or strategy…. It is not possible to fight the Soviet system and strategy with small tactical steps. For the first time I began to believe that the Soviet Union would be able to achieve her goals – something I had not believed in Czechoslovakia.”

Communism is not an easy subject to discuss because of the many misunderstandings people have. We have to ask what has changed and what has remained the same in Russia and China since 1991. Current events suggest that the communist bloc is being revived. I believe that defector warnings about this possibility are suggestive of something more than happenstance.