Author: Richard Barnes

Nothing New Under The Sun II

Richard Barnes

Contrary to the hopes of millions of peoples around the world, the fall of the Communist Soviet Union did not mark an end to the state’s ages long, relentless offensive to bring all humanity and her activities under the state’s total control.

Nor did Soviet Communism mark the beginning of that quest. The previous post noted that Marx and Engels assumed Communism to be the Jacobins’ program a century before; Lenin himself said the Jacobins’ fatal error was to stop the terror, a mistake he (Lenin) was determined to not repeat.

However, going back to the Jacobins is not going back anywhere near far enough.

In the Middle Ages, there was a real tension within the church as to which was the more important or critical: the particulars or the absolute? How this question was answered would also lead to determining the standard by which the church should be governed: by men and their traditions or by the full authority of the Bible? Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live has an interesting narrative on this point, as does R. J. Rushdoony’s The One And The Many. 

This was a very real debate which “swung” one way to the other and back, with consequences for centuries thereafter.

Over time, those who pushed for men and their traditions won out over those who pushed for the authority of the Bible. The humanist victory was accompanied with absolutism, which is usually the case when the authority of the Bible, the Word and Law of God, is minimized or otherwise not recognized. According to St. Peter, judgment must begin in the house of God. As goes the church, so goes the rest. So the tension within the church devolved into a tension between the church and the state. After all, both claimed authority on the basis of men and traditions, not on the basis of eternal Law.

Interestingly, most folks believe that the church in the Middle Ages was running things. That’s a dangerous oversimplification. The church may have opened the door for the tyranny that followed; however, she ended up being blamed for crimes which she actually opposed. She clearly preferred to be the one running things, however the fact is that she was not.

In the battle to determine who was the supreme manifestation of man on earth, church or state, the state clearly won out. Yes, many in the church fought and argued for her supremacy, while many in the kings’ courts argued for the supremacy of Caesar.

Very few argued for the supremacy of God over both church and state. That was inherent in Augustine’s phrase, “The One and the Many” — God is One in Three Persons. Wherever the Trinitarian faith prevails, not only in creeds, but in sincere belief and practice, there is freedom. There is a recognition of individual liberty and desires (the Many) but also of community and communion, acknowledging the need for unity (the One). And there is the recognition that there are spheres in life, of which church and state are two. Others include family, school, work, etc. But all are under God and none is to usurp the sphere of another.

An example of the state’s tyranny for which the church is usually blamed is the case of John Hus. At the Council of Constance (1414-1418 in Bohemia) the church declared that John Hus was not a heretic. The members of the council disagreed with his focus on the Bible, but this was not heresy, according to them.

Emperor Sigismund had promised safe conduct to Hus. But that was a lie: as soon as Hus arrived he was arrested and was not permitted to defend himself; he was only permitted to renounce his faith, something he would not do. Regardless, Sigismund declared that even if Hus recanted his faith, he would be executed.

Hus declared, “I appeal to Jesus Christ, the Only Judge who is omnipotent and wholly Just. In His hands I place my cause, not on the foundation of false witnesses and councils, but on the foundation of truth and justice.”

He was cruelly burned at the stake, by Caesar’s orders and henchmen. Hus’s example can be multiplied by the thousands.

The state requires conformity, whether it be 21st Century health mandates, 20th Century Soviet Union, or 15th Century Bohemia. And for total conformity to become a reality, total control is necessary: everyone is to think the same and to do the same. For this to be so, the state must control even our thoughts and our beliefs. 

This is nothing new, not even in the 15th Century.

Incidentally, throughout the Inquisition, a program in which the Church did not execute anybody, the state did, sober estimates of executions range from a low of 2,000 to a high of 20,000. Compare that to the deaths chargeable to atheistic Communist regimes in the 20th Century alone, where the numbers go into the tens of millions and even up to 200,000 million, depending on your sources. I am most certainly not excusing the church’s role in this nefarious period of history; however, the tale needs to be told truthfully.

The important point for the purposes of this post is to realize that the battles of the Middle Ages revolved around the question: Christ or Caesar? The 16th Century Reformation decidedly proclaimed the Crown Rights of Christ the King — which became the cry of the English Puritans of the 17th Century, which conviction they brought to the Americas. This meant that Christ was over both the church and the state.

To the Reformers the solution of The One And The Many was the Trinitarian faith under which men were free to govern themselves according to the Bible, the only Rule for life. Under that faith, all legitimate institutions were under Jesus Christ. This meant that the state had no business regulating the church nor did the church have any business performing duties delegated by God to the civil authorities. So, for instance, the administration of justice was a civic duty. But the church could and should proclaim the justice of God including rebuke of a State which would deviate from God’s Law. This was a church duty and she had the liberty to freely exercise that duty.

With the passing of the decades and centuries, Americans increasingly inclined towards a more Erastian persuasion, meaning that as the state grew, citizens saw it as god, without actually saying so. For example, the federal income tax laws “exempt” charitable organizations, into which they lump the church. However, the 17th Century understanding was that the church was a separate sphere or kingdom under God’s Kingdom. The income tax authorities (if there had been any back then), would have absolutely no business determining if a church met their definition of charitable organization or not, much less demand a certification or registration to that effect.

The Erastian view is that the church must indeed “prove” to the state whatever the state demands. And that’s where we are today: a spot where the church is seen as “under” the state. The past three years where churches were shut down or ordered to cease communion or to wear masks or to practice social distance clearly demonstrated that the state, and many churchgoers, do not believe that Jesus is the Head of His Church, let alone King.

But, again, even that is not something new under the sun.

Way back in the Garden of Eden, man was tempted to be his own god; a god who determines what is right and what is wrong. He was tempted to not obey the Triune God Who had told him that He, God, tells him, man, what is right and what is wrong. R. J. Rushdoony has written much about this and any reader who is interested is encouraged to look into his writings.

Practically all of history is man’s quest to be god. The City and Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) is collective man attempting to be god. The attempt failed.

All such schemes will fail, whether they be Sigismund executing John Hus, whether they be Communist China seeking to control what her people think, whether they be federal and state officials telling churches how to worship and when, or whether it be the World Economic Forum predestinating us to a solitary, nasty, brutish, and short life.

All will fail.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Jan Hus (1370-1415) statue in Prague, Czech Republic

Emperor Sigismund (1368-1437)

Thomas Erastus (1524-1583)

Nothing New Under The Sun I

Richard Barnes

Recent posts have cited verifiable examples of major early to mid-20th Century United States and England policy decisions that have had cataclysmic impacts on our lives, not to mention the lives of tens of millions of human beings across the earth.

For decades, the media, academia, and government had poo-poohed the nefarious birthings of these policies, even mocking high officials who sought to raise the alarms or sound the warnings. Such were characterized as “wild-eyed”, slanderers, conspiracy nuts, and worse. 

When the evidence — in our own files and archives, in the released Venona transcripts, and much more — was finally widely available, the media exhibited curious disinterest at best, dishonest obfuscation at second best. Names long associated as unjustly tarred, turned out to have been Soviet agents or knowing facilitators or avid “believers” intent on doing as told by their Soviet heroes.

For example, Elizabeth Bentley’s revelations, all corroborated, amounted to over 50,000 pages in the FBI files alone. And this was only a fraction of the Communist infiltration in the executive branch of the federal government, which was known at the time but loudly denied by the executive branch, the media, and others who knew better. 

To cite just one FBI memo from December, 1945:

“It has become increasingly clear in the investigation of this case that there are a tremendous number of persons employed in the United States government who are Communists and strive daily to advance the cause of Communism and destroy the foundations of this government … Today nearly every department or agency of this government is infiltrated with them in varying degree. To aggravate the situation they appear to have concentrated most heavily in those departments which make policy … or carry it into effect … There has emerged already a picture of a large, energetic, and capable number of Communists who operate daily in the legislative field, as well as in the executive branch of government ….”

The raw files are unbelievably extensive; they indicate a vast network throughout our agencies and, later, as our appointees in the founding of international bodies such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, and much, much more. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of individuals, at the very least. Plus the thousands who were trained and who worked under their aegises. 

Again, as noted here and here, just a fraction of these not only effectuated our wartime alliances but also the destinies of Eastern Europe and China. 

This was a big deal. And it continues to be downplayed to this day. 

For example, Maurice Halperin, a United States diplomat, was a Soviet agent who provided Moscow sensitive information on governments in exile, such as Poland. This enabled Stalin to maneuver in a way that ensured only his henchmen were installed, post war in Poland, while murdering those opposed to him. After the war, Halperin moved over to the State Department where he advised the head of the department on policy towards Latin America. To avoid having to testify, he eventually fled to Moscow in the early 50s, and then to Havana, and finally absconded to Canada where he died. His actions were deadly to millions.

How does Wikipedia document his treason to his fellow countrymen?

“After Halperin’s death, the release of the Venona project decryptions of coded Soviet cables, as well as information gleaned from Soviet KGB archives, revealed [sic!] that Halperin was involved in espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union while serving in an official capacity with the United States government.”

So, basically, we have a conflict of interest case and not much more with this fellow, who was finally found out with the public release of Venona after his death.

However, the aforementioned archives from the 40s and 50s are voluminous in their record of attempts to warn the executive branch that Halperin was a Communist agent doing immeasurable harm, with the real life blood of millions on the line. These warnings were ignored, to put it charitably.

Multiply Halperin by at least hundreds if not thousands and you get the picture.

Why is this important today, when the Soviet Union no longer exists?

Because those policies, primarily foreign but with very real domestic implications, were set in concrete and are followed, with emendations or amendments to this very day. We continue to be haunted by the Halperins of Christmases past.

But that is not the most important reason for us to care about these matters.

I hinted at the critical reason in the last post. What is the “Guide” that those who love liberty follow? In my prior post we quoted Philip Jaffe as he openly admitted that his guide was Communism.

The Communist Manifesto was published in 1948. Its authors, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx acknowledged that Communism was not new. For example, it was embodied by the French revolutionaries.

Ideas and demands such as:

“The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

“Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”

“Communists desire to introduce … an openly legalized community of women …..”

Perhaps the most famous passage includes the following prescriptions for all modern societies:

  • Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
  • A heavy progressive or graduated income tax [the United States had no income tax until 1916]
  • Abolition of all right of inheritance.
  • Confiscation of all property of all emigrants.
  • Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
  • Free education for all children in public schools [elsewhere in the Manifesto the authors make clear that parents must not be allowed to educate their children].

Prior generations were rightfully aghast at these demands and were naturally opposed to anyone proposing them. Hence the deceitful, undercover approach to such matters by politicians, bureaucrats, academics and educators, entertainment mavens, “public servants”, and more. 

But they have all — without exception — to some degree or other — worked their way into our policy prescriptions, politics, education, and even religious denominations.

The opponents are right in their observations. However, they are wrong in thinking this is something new under the sun. 

It is not new. And by not seeing its origins, we fail in our battles against it.

For there is indeed nothing new under the sun.

Originally published in 1848, continues to have avid followers

Elizabeth Bentley (1905-1963). Communist agent who defected, at great risk to her life. Her revelations were astounding back in 1945 and are astounding even today. She was denounced as a traitor, a liar, and a criminal by her old comrades and their enablers. The president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, denigrated her testimony as a “red herring”.

Maurice Halperin (1906-1995)

The Guide

Richard Barnes

In the prior post I quoted Philip Jaffe, one of many American operatives, agents, or otherwise “true believers” who, although they did incalculable harm to the United States and her allies, that harm was nothing compared to the tens of millions who were tortured, starved, and murdered plus the hundreds of millions who were enslaved under the Communist utopias they helped usher in and maintain in power.

Let us read again part of what Jaffe wrote:

“It was through Chi Chao-ting, a cousin of mine by marriage, that I accepted the Communist version of Marxism as a guide to the contemporary world … For a period of more than fifteen years, Chi Chao-ting and I were intimate personal friends and close personal associates…. (emphasis mine)”

Like Jaffe, many 20th Century Americans and Europeans had lost the “Guide” that previous generations had taken for granted: Christianity.

For example, a Wall Street Journal survey, published in March, of this year found that “America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It: Patriotism, religion, and hard work hold less importance”. 

“Since 1998”, it found drastic declines in importance of patriotism (70% to 38%), religion (62% to 39%),  childbearing (59% to 30%), and more. What is truly alarming is that these categories had already suffered steep downturns throughout the 20th Century, especially from the late 1950s onward. To experience such additional declines “since 1998” is indicative of a country that has been transformed more deeply than most of us care to acknowledge.

I believe that all men are religious; we are religious because we are made in the image of God. Even atheists such as Jaffe concede the religious need for a “guide” through which to see the world. Of course, he would have denied that need to have been “religious”, but it most certainly is. His bible was Communism and he acted upon it. His gods were Marx and Engels and Chi Chao-ting, his cousin by marriage.

In the 1990s during business trips to Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Italy, I would seek opportunities to talk about American history with professionals in financial and general management executive positions of power and influence. They all had higher education and above average intelligence. Without exception, not one of them mentioned Christianity or religion when I’d ask them what they knew or had learned about the history of the United States. Instead, their confident, matter-of-fact replies would go into great depth on issues such as autonomy, material wealth, distrust of monarchy, hatred of taxation, with the Boston Tea Party thrown in for good measure.

They were genuinely surprised when I would steer the discussion to historical facts such as the Mayflower Compact; the great Puritan migration; the “Presbyterian rebellion”; the Great Awakening; the influence of Puritan, John Winthrop in the colonial era, which was the foundation of the constitutional republic, founded over a century later; the pervasive role of Calvinist Presbyterian, John Witherspoon, in the founding of the republic and his influence on our Founders; and much more.

The distressing thing about the ignorance about the true causes of liberty and our love thereof was that much of their learning had come from American sources taught in their European schools. It is a false teaching, which has had profound, baleful effects on Europe to this day.

So now, in both Europe and the United States, individual rights and personal autonomy are glorified and idolatrously exalted. All forms of collective identity — family, church, community, “mom and pop” commercial or agrarian entrepreneurship — are mocked, downplayed, and, where possible, destroyed. Did you notice that during the recent years of “crisis”, the “Big Boys” — Walmart, Sam’s, Costco, etc. — were deemed “essential” but small businesses, homes, farms, and church were not?

By seeking to supposedly unshackle ourselves from any religious guidance, we end up pursuing freedom from even biological certainties — men and women denying their physical realities and actually harming their bodies in doing so; mothers doing the same to their own children(!). We now hear about “transhumanism” where some seek to take us beyond the reality of being human. 

In my boyhood, I had the privilege of being in the presence of general managers and even high executives of  Bethlehem Steel. They saw themselves as “belonging” to their country; as leading a company that was “an American company”. They were not perfect, but at least they had an identity you could sink your teeth into. Movies such as 1954’s Executive Suite with William Holden merely reflected the reality on the street in that era.

But now, we hear of CEO’s and President’s who consider themselves to be “citizens of the world”. They pay more attention to Xi Jinping than to Middle America. 

Their pragmatic, cold, decisions tell us they are uncaring because they are unmoored. 

It is refreshing to read about Poland and Hungary who, seeing the devastation such rootless atheism has wreaked on their countries, have openly questioned the wisdom of modern liberal democracy, so called, and have called instead for a return to the old paths. In 2012, Hungary passed the Fundamental Law, a way of law based on Christianity. The liberal Guardian, practically beside itself, promptly went on the attack, mocking Hungary’s appeal to “values such as family, nation, fidelity, faith, love, and labor,”  and its recognition of marriage and childbearing as foundational to society, and Christianity as inseparable from nationhood.

Hungary simply announced that a Christian democratic model entails the separation of church and state but not that of church and society. She rejects the compulsory atheism now prevalent in America and Europe. And for that she has been attacked to this very day. I wish them the very best and hope we take a page from her gutsy valor. Because it is a page from our own founding.

We all need a Guide. We all need a framework, or spectacles through which we see and measure our lives and the world we inhabit and in which we act. Jaffe was honest in admitting this and his guide led him to embrace the antithesis of the principles which formed our founding and our liberty and in so doing, it led him to a very real, palpable, costly, and bloody betrayal of those principles and of the very real people who believed in those principles. People not only in America, but in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

What is most distressing is that Jaffe’s guide is what has been being inculcated in America’s universities and in her elementary and high schools since the early and the mid 20th Century, respectively.

It is an Erastian indoctrination, one that insists on giving the state (government) all power and authority, even above the church. That is not our heritage. Our founding, which includes the century and a half colonial era, presupposed a Triune God under Whom all else lives and has its being. The state is merely one sphere of several, which include the family and the church. But all are under God, our Guide.

Any sphere which rejects this ends up usurping what belong to God alone. And the results are not pretty.

“Between 1629 and 1640, no fewer than twenty thousand Puritans fled from England to America. This was an astonishing number, considering the distances and the hazards of the journey (M. Stanton Evans).”

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and Karl Marx (1818-1883). Engels was a wealthy industrialist who pretended to tell the rest of us what was good for us; Marx was a truly despicable, hateful character (see Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals) whose personality is rampant in all Communist regimes. Their apologists have a very tough row to hoe: they must overturn the words of Jesus: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

Mayflower Compact  (1620) — America’s history, including the constitutions of the 13 colonies, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the constitutions of the states simply cannot be understood if we ignore the covenantal nature of our founding.

John Winthrop (1588-1649), first governor of Massachussets, whose sermon, known as “The City Upon A Hill” resonates even today.

John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was a very influential Founding Father of the United States. He was a minister of the Gospel and the president of Presbyterian College of New Jersey, now Princeton.

Viktor Orbán (born 1963), Prime Minister of Hungary. Having lived under Soviet Communism, he now refuses to live under EU totalitarianism.

Iconic view of the “stacks” in Bethlehem, PA. Bethlehem Steel Company no longer exists (1857-2003)

The cast of 1954’s classic movie, Executive Suite

The Asian Event — Mao

Richard Barnes

This post reviews the second of two events which help demonstrate the very real, deleterious impacts of Darwinian, Marxist, and Nietzschean philosophies in our education, entertainment, media, civil government, and other public and private spaces. The first event, the European, related to Tito. 

The second event, the Asian, relates to Mao.

It is difficult for us today to understand or sympathize, let alone vicariously experience the shock, disappointment, and demoralization of the Second World War generation upon learning that China had fallen to Communist tyranny.

I was born a few years after the fall of China to the Communists and a few years after that I would hear phrases such as “we lost China”, “we betrayed China”, and “we betrayed our ally.” Later in life, when I did my own reading and research, I saw that such sentiments were very widespread across America, but not so in the institutions of Washington D. C., despite a significant minority of congressmen and senators who attempted to get to the bottom of whatever had happened.

Similar to the intrigues which eventually succeeded in betraying Mihailovich and installing Tito in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union had placed critical listening posts in both Japan and China, as well as in Washington D.C. Remember that the Soviets were our “ally”, and security was lax if not nonexistent with regards to Communists in critical intelligence and policy centers. Recall how “Wild Bill” Donovan knowingly and recklessly contracted Communists because they will “fight Nazis”. We are still bleeding from the damage that pragmatic yet foolish policy did to our country.

Who were these listening posts? Men such as Lauchlin Currie, administrative assistant to FDR; Professor Owen Lattimore, assigned by FDR to China as “advisor” to Chiang Kai-shek, the writer, Agnes Smedley, a tireless promoter of the Communists in Yenan, China, who was a favorite of Gen. Joseph Stillwell, who never failed in undermining, undercutting, and loudly insulting Chiang Kai-shek, our ally in the efforts against Japan.

Stillwell was not named in the Venona files; he was a useful idiot. The rest were nefariously immortalized therein, along with others who played their own sinister roles: John Service, a U. S. State Department “reporter” whose “dispatches” were nothing less than rivers of venom against the anti-Communist Nationalists and swooning encomiums on behalf of the Communists; Sol Adler and Harry Dexter White, of the United States Treasury who successfully withheld critical assistance to the Nationalists which assistance had been authorized by law.

(Are we surprised at the unequal application of law that we are seeing today, over seven decades later? This contempt for law and for its just application has a long pedigree in world history and is not new in our own experience, sad to say.)

Two more mentions are important for this narrative: Chen Han-seng, a Comintern agent who, in 1949, after his work was done, decamped, along with many others, to Peking (now Bejing) where he was installed as an official of the Communist regime there; and Richard Sorge, a German-born Communist operative based in Tokyo known to history as perhaps the most successful Red agent of all time. Although his is not a household name, his impact has affected us all.

Sorge’s objective was simple: make certain that Japan does not go to war with her traditional enemy, Russia, now the Soviet Union. In order to protect Stalin, all efforts were focused on instigating war with the United States.

Internally, in Japan, Sorge’s highly connected Japanese assistants forcefully lobbied the Imperial Cabinet to strike, not north at Russia, but to the south against British, Dutch, or American Pacific interests. The pretext was oil, sorely needed by the Empire.

Eugene Lyons in The Red Decade, wrote, “While the invasion of China was under way, Moscow did not relax its efforts to obtain a nonaggression pact with Japan. But no stone was left unturned in the effort to force a Japanese-American conflict … The Soviet hope — quite justifiable from the angle of Russia’s own Realpolitik — was to get Japan and the United States at each other’s throats….”

Sorge also had his contacts in the United States, where discussions were taking place about the advisability of seeking a truce with Tokyo, who was winding down its four-year war with China, and so avert a direct clash between Japan and the United States, who were ostensibly championing the anti-Communist Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek. 

Sorge’s friends jumped into action, with Currie strongly advising FDR that such a modus vivendi with Japan would do “irreparable damage to the good will we have built up in China.” Others also argued and lobbied forcefully against any approach between Japan and the United States.

To get a sense of the absolute lack of integrity in these people, in their total immersion in Marxist ends-justify-any-means depravity, consider that one of their repeated and strongest arguments was that any peace with Japan would be a betrayal of “our noble ally, Chiang Kai-shek”. That such a betrayal would be “destructive of the Chinese belief in America”. 

So, we had two large, Red choirs singing the same tune stereophonically: one in Japan, the other in the United States, and both playing and singing a work composed and conducted by Moscow. 

They succeeded in both countries: there would be no peace between Japan and the United States; no attack by Japan on Russia; and no peace in the Pacific.

One could argue that Pearl Harbor would have happened anyway. Maybe. However, the more important observation is that the outcome was fully in keeping with Moscow’s intentions. The historical record, including the Venona archives, make this abundantly clear.

And as it became obvious that Germany and Japan would be defeated, the Communists began their volte face operation to discredit Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists while promoting the Reds, led by Mao Tse Tung (Mao Zedong). 

The script was almost exactly the same as that employed on behalf of Stalin and Tito, only here it was edited for Stalin and Mao. 

The Nationalists, who had been depicted as heroic and tireless in their war against the Japanese invaders, were now, mirabile dictu, incompetent, corrupt, cowardly, and, for good measure, actually did not do any fighting. All the fighting was really done by Mao’s Communists. To say that this was an exact inversion of the truth, is to write with extravagant understatement. This unrelenting Niagara of official disinformation coupled with overt contempt and outright sabotage of stated United States policy of assistance to the Nationalists, succeeded. The Nationalists were indeed defeated and Chiang Kai-shek exiled himself and his people to Taipei (Taiwan). 

The reader who would like to know more about this appalling chapter of our history would do well to read Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Suffice it to say that Mao’s toll of up to 80 million dead are likely underestimates. 

One of the culprits in this distressing saga was Philip Jaffe, an American Communist whose influence in the China tale is without measure. Jaffe was an editor as well as publisher and writer of his own magazine, China Today and later, Amerasia. He was caught red-handed (no pun intended) receiving purloined documents from the State Department from John Service. These documents were confidential information from the Nationalists to the United States. The case was eventually swept under the proverbial rug but the record is available for interested parties to peruse.

Perhaps Jaffe’s own words shine a light into the mindset of so many Americans working to undermine their own country and countrymen while promoting an ideology responsible for the murders and tortures of so many millions and the attempt to enslave the rest:

“It was through Chi Chao-ting, a cousin of mine by marriage, that I accepted the Communist version of Marxism as a guide to the contemporary world … For a period of more than fifteen years, Chi Chao-ting and I were intimate personal friends and close personal associates … He would ultimately become the economic adviser to H. H. Kung, the Kuomintang (Nationalist) finance minister, while simultaneously working clandestinely as an underground operative for Mao…. Upon his death in 1963 in Peking he would be given a hero’s funeral.”

The many Americans, many of whom were Ivy League educated, were not motivated by money to act against their country and their neighbors. Recognition and fame were not the guiding star which spurred them in their unflagging promotion of Communism here and abroad. 

No. Like Philip Jaffe, Communism was the lens through which they gave meaning to the world and to their lives.

As for the millions dead, as New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, coldly and pitilessly put it: “To make a good omelet, you must crack a few eggs.” For him, that was justification for his outright lies in denying the Stalin famines in the 1930s. Lies which earned him the Pulitzer Prize, which to this day has not been revoked.

And to this day, the “China hands” were never brought to justice.

At least in this world.

Philip Jaffe (1895-1980) at left, in Yenan (Communist-held) China. Owen Lattimore (1900-1989), second from left; Zhu De (1886-1976), second from right, from a wealthy family he adopted Communism; Agnes Jaffe (1898-2003)

Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)

Mao Zedong (1893-1976)

Lauchlin Currie (1902-1993)

Harry Dexter White (1892-1948)

Sol Adler (1909-1994) and Mao

Gen. Joseph Stillwell (1883-1946)

The European Event — Tito

Richard Barnes

In Seeds Planted, I noted the profound, injurious, generational influence Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Frederick Nietzsche have had on Western civilization over the last one hundred and fifty years or so. In other posts, such as Universities: 1960s, I’ve cited the very real, practical impact of such philosophies on professors, students, corporate, and government elites in the 20th and 21st centuries.

To further illustrate this very real, deleterious impact, a brief review of two major events of the Cold War would help.

This post will look at the European event, the next will consider the Asian.

As a kid, I was assured by the Weekly Reader that Marshal Tito was a heroic maverick within Eastern European Communism. That he was a thorn in Stalin’s and, later, Khrushchev’s sides. If you check the ever-so-reliable Wikipedia, you’ll read, “During World War II, he was the leader of the Yugoslav Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in German-occupied Europe.”

With what is now known, and has been known since the mid 1990s when the Venona decrypts (secret messages between Moscow and its American agents) plus Soviet archives were made available, it is inconceivable, but all-too-familiar, that Wikipedia would print such drivel. It is also revealing that the reality behind Tito and his rise to power is still unknown to the vast majority of Americans.

It is most important to keep in mind that the Venona messages were known to United States intelligence back in the 50s. Yes, the “Red Scare” decade, so called. But these were kept undisclosed to Congressional investigators who were in turn castigated — by those hiding the evidence — for “looking for Communists under every bed”. 

Not only that, but what the messages revealed was also known to major Communist agents, such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, who, at great risk to their lives, informed the FBI and others in the executive branch (the White House) in both Democrat (Roosevelt, Truman) and Republican (Eisenhower) administrations, each of which stonewalled and did so successfully. The Uniparty is not a new thing.

This knowledge was known and certainly was obtainable by “hard-nosed reporters” like Edward Murrow and Drew Pearson, who instead obfuscated, diverted, and reported calumniously against men and women who attempted to sound the alarm.

George Clooney, who came along decades later, is certainly without excuse. He knew that Annie Moss was indeed a Communist agent. However, his movie focused on Murrow-hagiography and McCarthy-condemnation. In a press interview, Clooney admitted that he knew she had been a Communist but that the issue Murrow supposedly harped on was her right to face her accuser. This is poppycock. She had been afforded that right, something the movie clearly obfuscated. But, of course, if the movie had made it clear that she was a Communist, there would have been no movie.

Most of us will recall that Hitler and Stalin, supposed “enemies to the death”, had agreed to a pact in 1939. This had all the usual suspects clamoring for “peace” and non-intervention except for Japan. There, we were to pull all the stops to help our gallant ally, Chiang Kai-shek. We will look at that part of the sphere, and the dizzying volte-face from Chiang to Mao, in the next post.

While the Pact was still in force, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in early 1941. Resistance to Hitler was a group named the Chetniks, headed by General Draja Mihailovich.

Mihailovich and the Chetniks fought valiantly and successfully until the Hitler-Stalin Pact was abrogated in the late summer of 1941. Then, mirabile-dictu, another “resistance” group arose, called the Partisans. Unlike the Chetniks, who were both anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, the Partisans were Communist. Their leader was Josep Broz, a Stalin protégé whom we know as Tito.

By the end of 1941, after Pearl Harbor, the United States had entered the war as a Soviet ally and in 1942 the pro-Tito blitz in the power corridors of Washington had begun. From whence this push for Tito?

Venona fingers two agents, Duncan C. Lee in Washington and Cedric Belfrage in New York City. Lee was the top assistant of the head of American intelligence, “Wild Bill” Donovan, and Belfrage was the top assistant of Donovan’s counterpart, William Stephenson, who ran British intelligence in North America.

The two men actively recruited Communists and trained them in guerrilla warfare and techniques.

As a side note, Donovan was one of the more colorful figures in modern American history. However, his cold pragmatism whereby he had no concern with Communist agents just so long as they “fought Hitler”, misled him and, more importantly, harmed his country beyond calculation.

The trained guerrilla units were assembled in Cairo where yet another Soviet British agent, James Klugmann, recruiter of the Cambridge Five — Blunt, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Cairncross — operated most successfully.

Klugmann was Tito’s biggest promoter, submitting countless reports praising Tito and denigrating Mihailovich. He attributed military action by Mihailovich to Tito, he showed briefing maps that falsely reflected vast Partisan control over much of Yugoslavia, and he suppressed news of Nazi statements where Mihailovich (not Tito) was named as the enemy of the Reich.

He even lied about Mihailovich’s actions against the Italians by calling them “meetings” and “evidence of collaboration” between the Chetniks and Mussolini.

Incredible — because it was incredible indeed — were his reports describing the Partisans as paragons of virtue and as progressives and lovers of democracy and respecters of rights, ad nauseum.

A less well-known American, Linn Farish of the OSS, the predecessor agency to the CIA, also added his poisonous two cents. He flew into Yugoslavia to work with the Partisans and the British and after a mere 6 weeks there, he submitted a report that mirrored those by Klugmann, praising Tito and condemning Mihailovich and the Chetniks as traitors and Nazi collaborators; a complete inversion of the reality.

Farish had not spent a single minute with Mihailovich; clearly his “report” was hearsay from Klugmann and the Communist Partisans. He even went so far as to say the Partisans reflect the founding of the United States, whose patriots are forerunners of men such as Tito.

His “report”, by some bureaucratic miracle, was placed in the hands of FDR shortly before the Tehran conference with Churchill and Stalin. It became the first item on the agenda and Roosevelt handed it to Stalin, who must have striven mightily to suppress a chortle.

Within weeks, Mihailovich, the anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, was abandoned by England and the United States, and all resources — American, British, and Soviet — were channelled to the Communist Tito who hunted Mihailovich down and had him executed after a show trial.

Venona confirms:

Farish was a KGB contact with the code name “Attila”

Duncan C. Lee supplied the Soviets with top classified information, including the D-Day invasion and operations in China and Japan. He also divulged British and American diplomatic negotiating strategy, something Stalin no doubt very much appreciated

Cedric Belfrage reported to Soviet intelligence on private discussions between Winston Churchill and William Stephenson, head of North American British intelligence. He turned over British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere during World War II and shortly thereafter.

James Klugmann was a devout Communist whose fanaticism did not raise Churchill’s, or any American’s, eyebrows, and whose “reports” were taken at face value. 

The above, and many more confirmed by Venona and the Soviet Archives, in addition to United States government files, were responsible for the loss of American, British, and allies’ lives whose activities were divulged to the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, the North Korean Communists, and others. 

For the most part, these men and their coteries came from privileged backgrounds and enjoyed the very best education offered by the West, including American Ivy League colleges, Cambridge, and others. We will be looking at that “Western education” in future posts.

None were ever brought to justice.

The next post will look at the same playbook followed on the other side of the globe.

Draja Mihailovich (1893-1946)

Josip Broz “Tito” (1892-1980) and Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

James Klugmann (1912-1977)

William “Wild Bill” Donovan (1883-1959)

Duncan C. Lee (1913-1988)

Cedric Belfrage (1904-1990)