Last April, millions in North Korea enthusiastically celebrated the "Day of the Sun," when the founder of their communist country, who made them poor as church mice, had been born 97 years ago. If you have ever asked yourself why normal people could fall for mass murderers, read "United in Hate: The Left's Romance With Tyranny and Terror," by Jamie Glazov. The book calls them believers because they believe there is something wrong with their own country, and fantasize about building a different country in which they will finally fit in. Seem familiar?
The book opens with Joseph E. Davies, the second U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union (1936-1938), who preached that "no human being deserved greater respect than Josef Stalin." Over the next 80 pages, the book describes many other prominent believers who, tortured by their personal alienation, crave a fairy-tale world where the individual did not exist, and dreamt of being submerged within a collective whole.
I could write volumes about this part of Dr. Glazov's book, because my experience complements it. In my other life, at the top of the KGB community, I was one of the leaders of the immense machinery engaged in spinning a spider web across the world to snag potential believers and change their minds. Changing minds is what communism is all about. It is also quintessentially Russia, dating back to the famous 1787 Potemkin villages erected for Catherine the Great to feign rural prosperity. No wonder communism and Russia were such a good fit.
Another part of "United in Hate" focuses on Western leftist journalists and writers who dedicated their lives to covering up the failures of Marxism, so as to make it palatable to the West. When in 1933 Walter Duranty, the New York Times' man in Moscow, visited the Ukraine at the peak of its devastating famine that killed millions, he lied in his articles, claiming that village markets overflowed with "eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter." A child could see, he wrote, that "this is not famine but abundance." Sound familiar? In 2009, even a child could see that General Motors had to file for bankruptcy, but the New York Times spilled gallons of ink to conceal this truth and persuade the American people to waste billions on that man-made disaster.
"United in Hate" contains numerous other examples of Western believers who were purposely deceived about the "marvels" of Marxism and came to denigrate American capitalism. George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, Johannes Becher, André Maurois, Theodore Dreisser, H.G. Wells, Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg are just a few. Dr. Glazov documents their lies, and he proves they helped the Kremlin to extend the sinister Soviet empire from the North Pole to the 35th parallel, and to keep the world at bay for most of the last century. This book also demonstrates that most newsmen and writers who were believers have not changed their stripes since the Soviet Union collapsed.
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Today it is considered bad manners to point out any Soviet source of anti-Americanism. It is as if we preferred to assume that hatred for America was somehow Islamic – or French, or German – in origin. It is not, and Dr. Glazov dedicates over half of his book to document that the Soviet regime "had a long record of using its influence to set militant Islam onto anti-American and anti-capitalist paths." Even some terms introduced by Iran's Khomeini into radical Islamic thought were born in Moscow. Mostakbirine ("the arrogant") and mostadafine ("the weakened") are just two of them. Moreover, Dr. Glazov documents that Khomeini's "revolution" has been strongly supported by the Iranian Communist Party, which was secretly financed by the KGB.
The last part of Dr. Glazov's book, "The Bonds of Jew Hate," deals with the believers' love affair with anti-Semitism. "United in Hate" thoroughly documents the leading role played by The Nation in wielding that weapon of the emotions to excuse the terrorists and blame all the evils of the world on the Jews. That is true, though the new anti-Semitism raging against America has deeper roots that go beyond an American magazine.
Let me go behind the scenes. When I was at its top, the KGB community was engaged in anonymously disseminating around the world hundreds of thousands of copies of a forged anti-Semitic tract entitled "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," together with various "testimonies" attesting that the U.S. was a "Zionist country bankrolled by rich Jews, who wanted to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom." The "Protocols," which insinuated that the Jews wanted to conquer the world, was compiled by the Russian Okhrana in 1903, in an effort to strengthen the position of the weak czar Nicholas II and compromise the reforms initiated by Russia's Jewish liberals, who wanted to modernize the country and limit the influence of its old aristocracy. In my day, the KGB community also infiltrated thousands of believers living in the Soviet bloc who belonged to various Islamic ethnic groups and sent Arab agents into the countries of their heritage. Their task was to implant there a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world. These believers were tasked by the KGB community to portray the United States as an "arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom" financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the Islamic world.
Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism spread the way KGB Chairman Andropov had planned. Sept. 11, 2001, is heartrending proof of that. A videotape depicting the grisly decapitation and dismembering of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 offers further evidence that Andropov's strategy succeeded. Pearl was gruesomely murdered only because he was an American Jew.
Post-Soviet Russia has been transformed in unprecedented positive ways. But Russia is, unfortunately, still run by the KGB (under a new name) – which dismissed all its Jewish officers in the early 1970s. In the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within a state. Now the KGB is the state. In August 1998, KGB Gen. Evgeny Primakov became Russia's prime minister, and two months later one of his former colleagues, retired Gen. Albert Makashov, a member of the Duma, called for the "extermination of all Jews in Russia." He insinuated that they were being paid by American Zionism to ruin the motherland. On Nov. 4, 1998, the Duma endorsed Makashov's statement by vote (121 to 107).
Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy, and the Jews have proved to be a convenient one for both Nazism and communism.
The believers do not represent the real America, the country for which Dr. Glazov – and I – started a new life from scratch. There are many, many millions of other Americans like us. Elie Wiesel, one of my American idols, who was born in my native Romania and was freed from a Nazi camp by this magnanimous United States of America, has appealed to them to help their adoptive country fight the current "suspicion and distrust" in America. I appeal to them also to read Dr. Glazov's unique book.
Knowledge empowers, and that is what "United in Hate" does.
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Retired Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official to have defected from the Soviet bloc. In 1989, Romania's tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose accusations had come almost word-for-word out of Pacepa's book "Red Horizons," subsequently republished in 27 countries.