November 30, 2005
Putin and the Neo-Comintern
By Pat
Buchanan
The Comintern,
or Communist International, also known as the Third International,
was the 1919 creation of Vladimir Lenin.
Its declared purpose: Fight "by all available means, including
armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie
and for the creation of an international Soviet republic ..."
Fomenting
the communist revolution worldwide was, in brief, the Comintern's
mission.
At its Seventh
World Congress in 1935, however, on Stalin's orders, the Comintern
repudiated the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism as its mission
and called for formation of Popular Fronts in Western nations
to combat fascism -- a Moscow First policy.
For this
act of heresy, Trotsky, the champion of permanent revolution,
excommunicated Stalin as a "reformist" -- and was himself
rewarded in 1940 with an ice ax in the head, courtesy of Stalinist
assassin Ramon Mercader.
But Trotskyism
did not die with Leon Trotsky. It mutated and is today the taproot
of that neoconservatism that calls for permanent revolution to
advance not global communism, but global democracy. Today, this
ideology is embedded in the Party of Reagan and the Bush administration,
and neoconservatives are using tax dollars to create and operate
their own Neo-Comintern.
The National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), which pumps out tens of millions
of dollars to "promote democracy" abroad, is its pivotal
agency. For 20 years, it has been headed by Carl Gershman, who
broke from the Socialist Party to organize Social Democrats USA,
which rallied to the candidacy of liberal Democratic Sen. Henry
"Scoop" Jackson, whose staff was a nesting ground of
neocons from Richard Perle to Frank Gaffney to Elliott Abrams.
One organization
captured by the Neo-Comintern is Freedom House. Founded by Eleanor
Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie in 1941 as a voice for global democracy
and human rights, Freedom House, on the eve of the Iraq war, chose
as its new chairman ex-CIA Director James Woolsey. By his first
anniversary in office, Woolsey had declared Vladimir Putin's Russia
"un-free" and was beating the drums for "World
War IV" against "Islamofascism."
Flush with
tax dollars and tax-deductible contributions, NED, Freedom House
and their collaborator foundations and think tanks now routinely
interfere in the internal affairs of foreign nations. Under the
rubric of promoting democracy, creating free markets, etc., they
seek to dethrone recalcitrant rulers and advance to power those
who share their ideology and will advance their interests and
agenda.
Democracy
is our goal, the neocons claim. But viewing their target lists
in the Middle East, Near East, Central Asia and Latin America,
it is perhaps more exact to say the Neo-Comintern seeks destabilization
of any and all regimes that fail to meet its criteria for membership
in their world democratic revolution.
Though a
radical leftist populist, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez was democratically
elected. He charges that NED had a hand in the 2002 coup that
briefly overthrew his government and in the recall election forced
upon him in 2004. Foreign journalists contend that the color-coded
popular "revolutions" that ousted Milosevic in Serbia,
Shevardnadze in Georgia and the Kuchma crowd in Ukraine were also
made in the USA and hand-tooled at Langley.
Observing
Kiev's "orange revolution" unfold, the Guardian's
Ian Traynor called it "an American creation, a sophisticated
and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass
marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used
to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes."
Russian
President Putin, however, is a former KGB colonel who knows a
little about subversion and wants to guarantee that what happened
to his friends in Belgrade and Kiev does not happen to him or
his chosen successor when he transfers power in 2008. And he is
moving to restrict, and perhaps expedite the expulsion of, all
American and Western meddlers in Russian politics.
"Organizations
functioning in our country and involved in political activity
are basically being used as instruments of foreign policy of other
states," says Putin. And the man has a point.
Which raises
questions for our own government. By what right does the United
States, through tax-funded and tax-exempt organizations, interfere
in the politics of nations that have not attacked or threatened
us? Were the Chinese to intrude in the politics of Mexico and
Central America as we have in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,
would we not be enraged? Would we not react?
Given that
resentment of the United States is pandemic in Latin America,
the Middle East and Europe, what benefits do we derive from incessantly
intruding in the internal affairs of these nations to justify
the rising cost in elite and popular ill will?
Did we defeat
the world communist revolution only to launch our own world democratic
revolution? Did we bury the Comintern of Stalin only to create
our own? What happened to the America that minded her own business?
Why is Bush outsourcing foreign policy to neocons who are the
source of most of his headaches today?
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
