The New Appeasement

by Baron Bodissey
Gates of Vienna
July 24, 2013

https://www.legal-project.org/4171/the-new-appeasement

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The New Appeasement
by Fjordman

Who really won the Cold War? If we truly and decisively "won" the fight against Marxism, why does the "victorious" superpower the USA a mere generation later have a President Obama who champions Socialist doctrines and practices, barely concealed? Did we fail to fully expose and confront Marxist aggression and infiltration, and has this failure made the Western world vulnerable to Islamic aggression and infiltration today?

The eloquent author and columnist Diana West raises some of these questions in her new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. I will do a more thorough review of this book later this year. At the moment, I am tied up with completing my own upcoming book, Witness to Madness.

As Diana West states: "Since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, the findings that confirm the secret Soviet penetration of U.S. institutions have uneasily co-existed with the old legacy of Soviet-fanned disinformation that tells us the 'Red scare' was just a 'Red-baiter's' fantasy. It is this consensus that conditions us, for example, to sentence Sen. Joe McCarthy to burn in hellfire forever for Senate investigations into Communist penetration, but views a portrait of Chairman Mao by Warhol as just the thing for the chic mantelpiece. Never mind the 30 to 40 million people the Communist dictator killed. Such mental conditioning may have ruptured our moral and logic processes. But it left the field wide open for some serious new revision. Once-secret sources — among them, the Mitrokhin archive, the Venona archive, the Vassiliev archive, and declassified FBI files — reveal the Moscow-directed maneuvers of a strategically-placed intelligence army of American traitors fighting to advance Soviet interests. That's not one Aldrich Ames or five Cambridge spies. Hundreds of American traitors operated surreptitiously in the public square, many of them entering government positions under FDR in the 1930s."

This subject is also briefly touched upon in the book Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me, by the courageous Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Russian dissident under the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union who spent years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag, argues that there should have been a "Nuremberg trial" of sorts after the fall of Communism, just like there was after the fall of national Socialism at the end of the Second World War.

Since this didn't happen, he figures that we never truly won the Cold War as decisively as we could and should have done. International Socialism in the form of Communism was not fully exposed as the inherently evil system that it was. As a consequence, therefore, it carries much less social stigma in the Western world today to call oneself a Communist or a Marxist than to call oneself a national Socialist, although both were murderous, totalitarian belief systems.

Vladimir Bukovsky stresses that such a Nuremberg trial against Communism should have focused on exposing and judging the evil system and the ideology behind it, more than on punishing specific individuals. If you were to punish all those who had collaborated with the repressive Communist regimes you would have to jail millions of people, and Mr. Bukovsky doesn't want to replace the old Gulag with a new one.

Since we've had no such public de-Marxification in which the full belief system was comprehensively exposed, however, many people tend to forget how evil the Communist system was. Moreover, many of those who collaborated or appeased this evil totalitarian system in Western countries got away with it.

Bukovsky personally believes that such a crucial "Nuremberg trial" against Communism was never held because it would have revealed "that the West was infiltrated by the Soviets much deeper than we ever thought, but also that there was ideological collaboration between left-wing parties in the West and the Soviet Union." [Original quote: Vladimir Bukovsky, "The Power of Memory and Acknowledgement," Cato's Letter 2, no. 1 (Winter 2010), The Cato Institute, www.cato.org/pubs/catosletter/catosletterv8n1.pdf]

Because of this failure, the hatred of their own civilization encountered among segments of the Western intelligentsia that had been cultivated by Marxists at home and abroad was never rooted out, but could mutate into new forms and collaborate with other militant enemies of that civilization.

I can see both positive and negative aspects to Bukovsky's suggestion, which may anyway be too late to implement now. But there are plenty of examples where not just the same groups, but in some cases the same individuals, appeased Communism a few decades ago and appease the forces of Islam today.

From Scandinavia, one prominent such case would be Thorbjørn Jagland, the former Prime Minister of Norway, President of the Storting (Parliament) from the Labour Party. It is documented that he was one of many figures on the political Left who had a file in the KGBbecause he was seen as a useful contact.

I would like to stress that I have never seen any evidence that Jagland did anything overtly criminal in his talks with KGB agents. Yet it is arguably foolish behavior to believe you can have any form of "dialogue" with people representing totalitarian belief systems who are only here to infiltrate our societies and subvert our freedoms. These days, he is displaying the very same foolishness when dealing with dangerous Islamic movements and countries.

Now Jagland is the Secretary General of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe has very friendly relations with international Islamic organizations and has made combating so-called "Islamophobia" in Europe one of its stated priorities. The CoE also has a formalized cooperation with the European Union on many of these issues. Coincidentally, the European Commission, the EU's powerful unelected government, is currently headed by a former communist, José Manuel Barroso from Portugal.

In addition to the Council of Europe, Mr. Jagland at the same time also happens to be the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the annual Nobel Peace Prize. One of the three women who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, Tawakkol Karman from Yemen, has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Norwegian Nobel Committee knew about this and thought it was fine. Mr. Jagland told reporters in Oslo that he disagrees with the "perception" widespread in the West that the Brotherhood is a threat to democracy.

The very same Thorbjørn Jagland has repeatedly for years warned against the dangers of "Islamophobia." As late as in July 2013, Mr. Jagland stated that he fears violence in Europe due to increasing xenophobia and people holding "criminal" views regarding mass immigration. He was somewhat unclear as to whether holding critical view on Islam and mass immigration is criminal today or whether it should be criminalized tomorrow.

In both cases, he demonstrates that he thinks it's OK to have a "dialogue" with people associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but not with millions of native Europeans who no longer feel at home in their own countries or safe in the streets of their own cities. It is a worrisome sign that individuals such as Thorbjørn Jagland hold senior positions in Western countries. Unfortunately, there are many others like him out there.

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