JR Nyquist on Pacepa

Commenting on Mihai Ion Pacepa's recent National Review article Russian Footprints, JR Nyquist observes that the wishful thinking of Western governments regarding Moscow's aims and intentions in the "post-Communist" era has its dangers:

Unfortunately, a bad situation doesn’t go away because you refuse to believe in it. Russia has been working against America in the Middle East for many decades. As KGB Gen. Yury Andropov explained to Pacepa, the Muslim world was a petri dish in which the Russians might “nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought.” You merely combine Islam with class struggle and you get the Iranian Revolution proclaiming America as the “Great Satan.” According to Pacepa, “The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.” The idea that America and Israel form a fascist/imperialist bloc is an old Soviet construct. It is straight from Stalin’s playbook. The Kremlin’s plan would work, according to Pacepa, because Islam “would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.”

Moscow’s anti-Jewish propaganda has so succeeded that a frightening percentage of Americans have fallen for it. What must be understood, first and foremost, by all those who fret over the wickedness of America and Israel, is that the very terms that have come into fashion today originated in the think tanks of the world’s most infamous criminal regime – not as an honest attempt to understand international events, but as a psychological warfare operation codenamed “Zionist Governments” (Sionistskiye Gosudarvstva). If the United States were portrayed as a “Jewish fiefdom,” the Arab world would stop thinking of the threat from Moscow. All eyes would be narrowed in the direction of Washington. According to Pacepa, the KGB ordered its sister agencies in the satellite countries to “export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world.”

The disinformation campaign against Israel and the United States has spread, like an infection, throughout the world. It is now found everywhere, not merely in the Middle East. Old Nazi lies, thought to be dead, are now presented as fresh news. Americans and Europeans no longer remember the past, and don’t realize that history is now repeating itself. Only this time the envisioned holocaust isn’t merely for the Jews, but for Americans. “We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds,” wrote Pacepa, “because we knew we could not win any military battles.” But once you have conquered billions of minds, the military battles are yours without argument.

Those who see in Russia a weak economic power have not considered the equalizing potential of clandestine networks, psychological warfare, strategically organized corruption and blackmail, and nuclear terrorism. Moscow’s combination play could prove deadly. No effective counter-strategy is likely to emerge from Washington because a regime predicated on economic optimism cannot acknowledge the truth, cannot accept the negative implications of ongoing Russian enmity. The Cold War never ended. The nuclear arms race continues – while America falls behind. The first nuclear blows are being set up, and we are led to believe that Arab terrorists will be responsible. The U.S. economy is ready to topple. All one needs is a little (or a big) push.

Read it all.