Obama’s Worldview and the Roots of Political Correctness: KGB Covert Influence Operations

Obama’s Worldview and the Roots of Political Correctness:  KGB Covert Influence Operations

By: Kent Clizbe

Originally appeared in NewsMax; Sept. 30, 2008

In the 1920s, Vladimir Lenin charged a select group of communist espionage officers with a long range covert influence project.  Their goal:  To undermine the culture, society, and economy of the USA.  To weaken America in preparation for a socialist revolution.  The communists targeted the three transmission belts of American culture:  Academia, the Media, and Hollywood.  Recent research reveals the unbelievable extent of their success.  Today we see the results in Obama’s campaign talking points, the Media’s assistance, and Hollywood and Academia’s slavish toeing of the party line . 

The communist ops were focused on the long term.  The operators were convinced that political evolution had reached its high point in Russia.  The revolution would spread across the globe.  Their covert operators had long term horizons, measured in decades rather than months.  Their leaders changed, Lenin to Stalin.  KGB chiefs were regularly slaughtered, along with millions of other Soviet citizens.  Yet the covert influence ops remained active from 1920 to the fall of Russian communism in 1980.  Not even the most optimistic KGB minion dared dream their operations would echo into the 21^st century. 

In fact, the seeds planted by the Communist spies have grown into a kudzu plant that still sprouts new shoots, spreading its noxious tendrils throughout the USA, thriving even as the gardeners that planted them are long dead. 

Communist intelligence officers infiltrated the cultural transmission belts of American society and planted covert influence payloads.  Comparing the content of the original payloads to today’s PC creed reveals them to be identical.

The payload and methodology was best summarized by a communist agent working against Hollywood, quoted by Stephen Koch: 

“You claim to be an independent-minded idealist.  You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break. 

You believe in open-mindedness.  You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country. You’re frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman.  You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works.  You believe in peace. 

You yearn for international understanding.  You hate fascism. 

You think the capitalist system is corrupt.  You say it over and over and over again.” ¹

One of the first, and certainly most effective, recruitments for the covert influence program was the New York Times’ Walter Duranty.  Recently completed analysis, in conjunction with former KGB operators, of Duranty’s lifestyle, access, and reporting reveals that he was, almost without doubt, a paid espionage agent.  Duranty, America’s man in Moscow for more than a decade supplied the US media with a steady stream of communist-fed information.  The implied subtext of Duranty’s message was:  “Communism works.  It is inevitable.  The USA is doomed”  KGB operators now admit that they were tasked to continue implanting such messages up until the fall of the USSR. ² 

The media accepted Duranty’s covert influence messages as gospel.  He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.  The KGB must have gloated over their unbelievable success.  Duranty, and the New York Times, set the template for America’s press to be manipulated by the KGB.  He was “the doyenne of left-leaning Westerners who believe that what happened inside Soviet Russia held the key to the future for the rest of the world.” ³ 

The Soviet-trained intelligence service of North Vietnam infiltrated the American press corps in Saigon, another covert influence coup.  Pham Xuan An, a communist espionage agent, worked for Time magazine for almost 30 years.  Beginning as a translator, he ended his career as the last Time correspondent in Saigon, filing stories for publication in the US after the North Vietnamese victory.  All the while, An was a communist espionage agent.  Morley Safer, upon An’s death in 2006, evidently without irony, called him one of the “best-connected journalists in the country.” ⁴

In 1934, the operation against America’s Education system bore fruit  at the Teachers College of Columbia University.  A group of intellectuals began their contribution to the communist project to destroy traditional American society, calling themselves, “Reconstructionists.”  Their message planned for every classroom, called for educators to be “less frightened of imposition and indoctrination.” ⁵   

My analysis reveals that the leader of this group, George Counts, was likely a covert influence agent.  His multiple trips to the USSR, from the late 1920s to the early ‘30s, place him squarely in the sights of the KGB’s covert influence operators.  During his travels across the communist country, he would have been squired by intelligence officers, who would develop him for eventual recruitment.  The success of this covert influence recruitment is reflected in Counts’ books, published in 1931, The New Russian Primer, and The Soviet Challenge to America.  The first was a direct translation of a communist indoctrination text for Soviet children, extolling the virtues of the first Five Year Plan.  His co-author was a Soviet “translator,” most likely supplied by the KGB.  

Covert ops against American schools were in full swing by 1937.  Agents of covert influence working as teachers in elementary and secondary schools carried out their indoctrination “without exposing themselves.”  Their covert influence mission was to “affect the children’s thinking, and …mobilize other teachers.” ⁶ 

According to PC in 2008, the United States is a racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, bigoted, war-mongering fascist imperialist State.  What we think of as a “Politically Correct” point of view, is the Leninist/Stalinist covert influence payload, emerged from underground.   

When the kudzu pushed up from its underground hiatus after the 60’s, Bill Ayers and Obama’s foundation in Chicago pushed for school reform.  Ayers said, “Teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? ‘I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist,’” ⁷  The covert operation bears fruit decades later. 

Willi Munzenberg, Lenin’s chief covert influence operator was determined to instill the mindset in Americans that, as Koch says, “to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.” ⁸   This is as close as we can come to a definition of PC today.  Simply substitute “Soviet” with “Democrat,” or “Liberal,” and there you have it.  Keith Olbermann could not express the PC point of view any more clearly.  The covert influence payload emerges today as PC. 

Munzenberg’s operations, run from Vienna and Paris, dispatched communist espionage officers into Hollywood.  There they built solid operations, recruiting screenwriters, producers, actors, directors, and hangers-on.  Their success against the film industry was notable and unparalleled.  Underground, and overt communist organizations flourished there.  One communist recruit explained how the party made him comfortable:  “I would be spared the agony of thinking my way through difficult issues: all the thinking would be done for me by an elite core of trained cerebrators…”⁹  

The Hollywood strategy was wildly successful over the long-term.  The elite corps of today, Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, Matt Damon, Oliver Stone, et al, save the PC multitudes from doing any heavy thinking.  The elites provide emotionally satisfying, Politically Correct views on any and all issues, packaged for the consumption of the PC proletariat.    

When Obama recently decried the bitterness of Midwesterners clinging to their guns, their religion and their anti-immigrant sentiments, he was echoing the Leninist/Stalinist covert payload of decades ago.  When Obama’s preacher, Mr. Wright, accused the US government of inflicting AIDS on “people of color,” as a means of genocide, he parroted a KGB covert influence operational payload, first inserted in an Indian paper in 1984. ¹⁰ 

When Progressives today chant, “Bush lied, people died,” they parrot the KGB’s messages.  In the run-up to World War II, the communists characterized President Roosevelt as a war-mongering imperialist, and American foreign policy as somehow evil, and definitely naive.  Reading the comments on virtually any Daily Kos posting today reveals the astounding success of the KGB’s influence op. 

The goals of PC, which began to emerge after the 1970s, up until today, are nearly identical to the goals of the Communist International in 1920:  Destroy the society in which capitalism thrives.  Bring the capitalists to their knees, so that the Elite Vanguard can install a dictatorship of the proletariat, for the good of all mankind.  The proletariat is too gullible and easily swayed by logic and reality.  The Elites know better than the masses. 

The Leninist Elite Vanguard of the Proletariat in 1920 is today’s Elite Vanguard of Progressives, with Obama as the public face.  They know better than you.  They are oh-so-smart, oh-so-cosmopolitan, oh-so-loved in Vienna and Paris.  They plan to give the rubes and hayseeds of fly-over country what’s best for them, like it or not, made palatable by oratory and lies, and spoon-fed by their friends in the media, Hollywood, and academia.    

Only difference between then and now is:  Now we know better.  Don’t be fooled again.    

Kent Clizbe, a former CIA case officer, is the author of the soon-to-be-released non-fiction book, Willing Accomplices:  An Intelligence Officer’s Shocking Proof That Soviet Spies Manipulated American Culture, Hollywood, the News Media, Academia and the Democratic Party and Created Political Correctness.

©2008 Kent Clizbe

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Notes

1  Double Lives, 2004, pp. 249-250.

2  Interviews with former KGB case officers, Washington DC, 2008.

3  Taylor, S.J.  Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in    Moscow.,  1990, p. 5.

4  Safer, Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam, 1990.

5  Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade, 1980, p. 85. 

6  Budenz, The Techniques of Communism, 1954, p. 209. 

7  “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism in Schools,”  Wall St Journal, September 23, 2008, p. A28. 

8  Double Lives, 2004, p. 15. 

9  Radosh, Ronald, and Allis Radosh.  Red Star over Hollywood: The Film            Colony’s Long Romance with the Left, 2006, p. 43.

10  Andrew & Mitrokhin, The World was Going Our Way, 2005, p. 340.