“We will take America without firing a shot,” said Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of Soviet Russia from 1958 to 1964. The Soviet Union may have vanished, but old Marxist strategies are still being implemented.
The 1969 lecture More Deadly Than War: The Communist Revolution in America, by G. Edward Griffin, is just as relevant today.
Have you noticed people being called racist or fascist just a little too freely?
That isn’t a coincidence. Griffin tells us these labels are used as a strategy, one laid out in the following directive of 1943 from Communist Party headquarters to their American followers:
“When certain obstructionists become too irritating, label them after suitable buildups as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic, and use the prestige of anti-fascist and tolerance organizations to discredit them. In the public mind, constantly associate those who oppose us with those names which already have a bad smell. The association will after enough repetition become fact in the public mind.”
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Combining bad Marxist theory and millennial laziness by Jack Buckby
It’s amazing this tactic ever worked against American conservatives since the Nazis were the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Then again, the truth of the label was never the point. It’s simply a public relations and propaganda tool to discredit opponents, and it has proven so effective it’s still used today.
Labelling of right-wingers in the West as Nazis has allowed the anti-fascist league to resurface in our times as Antifa. They showed up at an event featuring People’s Party of Canada MP Maxime Bernier and conservative commentator Dave Rubin in Hamilton in 2019. Young people blocked the path of an 81-year-old woman and a man on the way to the event and called them “Nazi scum.”
Donald Trump has also endured all manner of names, including white supremacist and xenophobe. That would have been hard to envision in 1986 when Trump received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in celebration of “patriotism, tolerance, brotherhood and diversity,” along with recipients Muhammad Ali and Rosa Parks. Four years later, Trump told Vanity Fair he wouldn’t join the Palm Beach Bath and Tennis Club “because they don’t take blacks and Jews.”
But one fateful day in 2015, Trump said that America needed to screen its southern border because some who came in were criminals. He was conveniently branded a racist from that day forward. In the first 2020 election debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would denounce white supremacist groups. He did, just as he had 38 times before.
Griffin explained that calling people “racist” also served a second purpose:
“As early as 1928, the communists declared that the racial differences among our people constituted the weakest and most vulnerable point in our social fabric. By constantly probing and straining at this one spot, they calculated that eventually the cloth could be torn apart and that Americans could be divided, weakened and perhaps even set against each other in open combat. … They want hatred, violence and bloodshed between the races, and they don’t care how they get it or whom they use, even children if necessary.”
Sadly, many children are dragged into cultural Marxism today, as teachers infuse political correctness into young minds. Long before university, where it usually gets worse, students come to view traditional values as a kind of white supremacy.
As more proof that nothing is new under the sun, the 1918-22 communist magazine The Crusader called for extensive chaos in cities and instructed readers on effective means of committing arson and making Molotov cocktails. Cyril Briggs, a black Caribbean-American writer, published the magazine. One hundred years later, riots and fires caused $2 billion worth of damage following the post-arrest death of George Floyd.
In a 2015 video, Patrisse Cullors said of herself and fellow Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, “we are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.”
Cullors also said she and Garza were “trained organizers.”
Decades prior, African American Manning Johnson believed communism would make things better for his people. Later, he realized they were only being exploited.
In the 1958 book Color, Communism and Common Sense, Johnson wrote: “Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America. During the confusion, demoralization and panic would set in,” then revolutionaries would seize power.
“And when he woke up to this,” Griffin explained, “he dropped out of the party and devoted the rest of his life trying to alert his fellow citizens of all races to the true nature of the Communist Party as he knew it to be from the inside.”
It’s good to know that Marxists can wake up from their false wokeness. One can only hope the same for well-meaning but similarly deceived people today.
Lee Harding is a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Lee is one of our Thought Leaders. For interview requests, click here.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the authors’ alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
