Amerika

We have no memory now, in part because of a neurotic compulsion to stay current because our society is unstable and therefore, routinely makes unpredictable moves, and he who gets the new last loses. Yet since history repeats itself, much can be learned from the past.

For example, most people now do not remember the Cambridge Five:

Along with Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and a fifth man, thought by many to have been John Cairncross, the Cambridge Five passed information about the UK to the Soviet Union throughout World War Two and into at least the 1950s.

After being recruited during their studies, the group went on to occupy positions within the Foreign Office, MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

Shortly before the end of the war, Philby was promoted to head of the SIS’s anti-Soviet section – meaning he was in charge of running operations against the Soviets while operating as a KGB agent.

In the 1930s, when these men were at Cambridge, admiration of Communism was de rigueur among Western intellectuals. The Great Depression had proven capitalism wrong, they thought, not considering how much taxation and regulation had caused that event, and therefore, we had to try something else.

Further, the West had turned on itself after WW1, the “war to end all wars” which turned out to do just the opposite, sacrificing much of a generation of young men for a power-mad political game. Democracy seemed destined for the junkheap as well (in this, they were correct).

Even more, Europe had become hopelessly crowded and dependent on its governments, making daily life into a process of obedience, which made it ugly and pathetic, and caused people of spirit to rebel against “progress” and modernism.

They wanted an orderly society like they had under the kings, but to demand that would be to reject both the Revolutions and the Enlightenment,™ so they did not dare let their thoughts wander there. Instead, they focused on what seemed like the opposite to capitalist democracy: centralized socialism.

As these young people wandered like fawns into the grips of campus socialist organizations, they found out too late that these groups were in fact sponsored by the Soviet Union, and now they were targets for blackmail: a known Communist would never get a job. Thus they were locked in.

The Soviet agents knew that they should look for people who were under-utilized and craving respect and give them an opportunity to become powerful by stabbing their society in the back. These people tended to be unreliable, but would pass along information.

America had a similar experience since many its intellectuals similarly embraced Communism. Even if we ignore Walter Duranty, deep penetration of the American government seems likely since the Venona transcripts reveal that there were a great number of active informers:

The best measure of how many actual spies McCarthy turned up lay buried in the 5,000 pages of decoded Soviet intelligence cables that were intercepted by the Venona Project, a supersecret U.S. counterintelligence project launched in 1943. Parsing those messages, officials uncovered evidence that hundreds of Americans were helping the Russians steal information, from atomic secrets to diplomatic strategies. Historian John Haynes carefully cross-checked the 159 people McCarthy named between 1950 and 1952 as communists, spies or other actors in the grand conspiracy. Venona files confirmed seven as having been involved in espionage. Another two, Haynes found, were named as spies in the KGB archives, and a 10th was what he called an “ambiguous case.”

It turns out that the real number was close to what McCarthy indicated, and that the Left silenced such criticisms:

It has long been known that the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) had been paid for by the Soviet Union. But acknowledgment of even this truth has been hard to come by. In liberal and leftist circles the term “Moscow gold” was accompanied most often by derisive laughter and the riposte that it was not Moscow gold but the paid dues of FBI informants that kept the CPUSA afloat. Actually, it was both.

McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-45. He just didn’t know their names.

The Venona transcripts contain the code names of about 200 persons, although some of these were clearly persons who had unwitting contact with Soviet agents. The Venona documents indicate that there were perhaps a dozen Soviet agents in the State Department alone. It is now clear that the Truman administration wasn’t looking very hard.

Similarly with the Cambridge Five, American government knew of a problem but could not spot it because the recruiting had begun so early. By the 1950s, the Communists had officially left behind their Party membership back in the 1930s, two decades prior, and no one thought about those hazy college days.

Not surprisingly, Communist agents went into other areas of government, such as media, producing a ideological echo chamber that continues to this day:

What [ideological subversion] basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

All of this came out of despair at the events of the nineteen-teens, and still controls much of our world today. The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the destruction it set into motion may still prove it victorious, much as the destruction of the USA by diversity may prove Hitler victorious.

This simply makes us marvel at how effective democracy is at self-destruction, and how brainwashed we are that none can point out this simple fact. It turns out that with Leftist conquest of our culture, we lost the ability to identify anything except egalitarianism as “good.”

Tags: cambridge five, communism, egalitarianism, joseph mccarthy, venona transcripts