That is the name of this Craige McMillan column:
Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels.
– Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa
The longer I live and observe, the more apparent it becomes that the political left in America – and, indeed, the West – has never originated a single idea on their own. Rather, they have been empty vessels with big, loud mouths – filled with the thoughts, deceits and calculated hatreds of their own enemies – whom they have obliged by "shouting from the rooftops" their newfound "intellectual acumen."
It really doesn't matter if we're talking about members of the press, tenured college professors, or today's crop of permanent wanna-be leaders of the free world (whose only real job has ever been to seek power over others). Their main product is short, trite phrases, devoid of meaning but designed to twist debate.
No clearer picture of this phenomenon could be painted than "Propaganda Redux," an essay by Gen. Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector to the West during the Cold War.
Pacepa points out that the Communist war against American presidents – and thus America – began with Truman, for whom they coined the name "butcher of Hiroshima." Eisenhower was portrayed as "a war-mongering 'shark' run by the military-industrial complex, Johnson as a mafia boss who bumped off his predecessor, Nixon as a petty tyrant, Ford as a dimwitted football player and Jimmy Carter as a bumbling peanut farmer." (Does anyone find these Soviet characterizations similar to the ones that appeared in our own newspapers?)
"The European leftists, like any totalitarians, needed a tangible enemy, and we gave them one," Gen. Pacepa writes. "In 1978, when I left Romania for good, the bloc intelligence community had already collected 700 million signatures on a 'Yankees-Go-Home' petition, at the same time launching the slogan 'Europe for the Europeans.'"
Gen. Pacepa gives a thumbnail sketch of the "dezinformatsiya" war by the communists against America, a war conceived by Yuri Andropov during his tenure in the KGB. He acknowledges that the Communists spent billions of dollars financing leftist movements in the U.S. and Europe. These leftists, he wrote, "were like putty in our hands."
Pacepa points out that today's mainline Democrat politicians seem to have adopted the Soviet playbook. During World War II, he writes, "Republican challenger Thomas Dewey declined to criticize President Roosevelt's war policy." Can one imagine today the same courtesy extended to our men and women on the battlefield by a power-hungry politician in a tight race? There are precious few examples, but Joe Lieberman does come to mind. Read the general's column – and his prescription for America.
Note: For a good overview of "dezinformatsiya," check this entry from the Intelligence Encyclopedia.
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