Special Report: The biggest Russia-gate scandal of all

By Cliff Kincaid

Anti-communist freedom fighter Vladimir Bukovsky suggests there is a simple reason why the West has never held Nuremberg-style court trials for the communists – Western leaders were complicit in communist crimes and they don't want to be held accountable.

The subtitle of his massive book Judgment in Moscow is "Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity," but it also has lessons for the United States as President Trump confronts Communist China, another threat made possible by Western trade and aid.

Consider that former President Barack Hussein Obama in November 2017 had rushed over to Beijing to clink glasses with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. The Chinese media hailed the reunion as a meeting of "veteran cadre," an extraordinary term that means the former U.S. President has been operating as a communist agent or operative. The Chinese state news outlet Xinhua reported that "Xi made a positive appraisal of Obama's efforts in promoting China-US relations during his presidency."

Bukovsky's website proclaims: "The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the communists, and end up with yourself."

His book indicts American officials and names the names of those who thought the Soviet Union could also be integrated into the international order. It is so explosive that all major American publishers rejected it. It was finally published by Ninth of November, a small press headquartered in California that is named after the day the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Elizabeth Childs, President of Ninth of November Press, has been working hard to get the media to pay attention to the explosive allegations and information in the Bukovsky book.

The book is the story of the ultimate Russia-gate scandal as told by a victim of the Soviet system. Bukovsky experienced communism from the inside, as he was incarcerated in Soviet prisons and psychiatric institutions. A true whistleblower with direct knowledge and access to incriminating documents, not hearsay, he exposes America's "progressive" elites as apologists for communism and documents how the European Union was a Soviet project from the start. Bukovsky co-authored (with Pavel Stroilov) another eye-opener, EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration, which examines "secretive discussions between Western and Soviet Union leaders planning to create a collectivist European Union State."

Those of us who traveled in Europe during the Cold War, when East and West Berlin were separated by machine guns and barbed wire, may have a better appreciation of the stakes. Those who never saw the Berlin Wall can, nevertheless, take a look at what is happening in Hong Kong today. Or they can read Judgment in Moscow if they want to understand Russia.

Russia, as we demonstrate in our book, Back from the Dead: Return of the Evil Empire, went through the communist experiment that lingers there and now grips our nation. The "errors" of communism in Russia, as some Catholic traditionalists believe, have never been "corrected" by the church (and therefore Russia) and unless Russia is converted to Christ in a consecration ceremony it will continue to wreak havoc on the world.

We see the turmoil all around us. KGB defector Konstantin Preobrazhensky spoke to our conference on Lenin and Sharia in 2012 and understands that America is suffering through its own communist revolution.

Bukovsky tells me he is not a religious man, as he is too skeptical to accept any religion or dogma and has adopted a more "libertarian" view about the basic need for individual rights and responsibilities.

In this spirit, he is a signatory to the "Appeal for Nuremberg Trials for Communism," which states that "Communism did not fall with the Berlin Wall," despite the dramatic nature of that event. The appeal says, "This ideology is still alive in the world, in states and parties that are openly communist and in political and cultural thought that minimizes and tries to erase the crimes of communism, as if it were a good idea which only happened to coincide with the rise of one brutal regime after another across decades and continents."

Indeed, before ultimate victory can be hoped for, an official Nuremberg Trial for the communists and their fellow travelers in the West must be held. Perhaps President Trump could ask Bukovsky to come to the White House to get this proceeding underway. You can bet the Obamas are not going to use their lucrative deal with Netflix to sound the alarm about socialism and communism. Indeed, their recent "documentary" on that platform, "American Factory," done by a socialist, seemed to suggest the only problem with Chinese communism was the lack of American-style labor unions. The filmmaker had previously directed the film "Seeing Red," a sympathetic look at American communists working for Moscow.

Bukovsky's book notes that the Communist Party USA has been treated as a joke, since there were reportedly only about forty thousand communists in the whole of the USA. "One should not forget," writes Bukovsky, "that back in 1917, Lenin also started out with only forty thousand comrades." He goes on to describe communist involvement in domestic U.S. politics at Moscow's direction.

Indeed, while praising anti-communist President Ronald Reagan, he notes that a liberal Congress opposed his "Reagan Doctrine" of supporting freedom fighters around the world and "dreamed up the most unbelievable strategems in order to tie President Reagan's hands." This outcome reflected what Reagan himself described as increasing communist influence in Congress. Journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave had asked President Reagan in 1987 what can be done "when two dozen pro-Marxists with real political clout can, in our own Congress, influence great issues of defense, arms control and international policy?" Reagan agreed that this was, indeed, "a problem we have to face," and that the Soviets and their communist agents had tried to "make anti-communism unfashionable. And they have succeeded." He then made a reference to the days when Congress had a committee (the House Committee on Un-American Activities) that would investigate even its own members if communist involvement was suspected.

Today, the figure is several dozen Marxists in Congress. Dozens more have Marxist or radical Muslim affiliations.

In a telephone interview conducted on June 6, 2019, the anniversary of D-Day, the former Soviet dissident and political prisoner offered his thoughts on Russia-gate, the European Union, and President Trump.

I asked Bukovsky on the D-Day anniversary about the successful effort of the world to get rid of Nazism, or National Socialism, but its failure to get rid of international communism. The world considered Nazism a crime, he said, but communism is still regarded as just "an aberration, a mistake." Plus, he notes in his book, communism made an effort "to masquerade as humanism." That gave communism a human face of compassion and equality. Similar propaganda seems to be working here, as Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist who sympathized with the Soviet Union and even took a honeymoon there, is a popular figure.

The left-ward drift of the Democratic Party validates Bukovsky's observation that "upon closer scrutiny, real anti-communists, who understood fully what we had to deal with, were fewer in the West than in the Soviet Union." The statement suggests America will have to go through the process, with all the suffering that would entail, in order to understand the true nature of communism.

"Let's put it this way," he explained in our discussion. "what we had in Russia, the Soviet Union, was a huge experiment. The experiment has failed. Now, in science, a failed experiment is as good as the one that is successful because you learn from it. My desire was the world would understand that the underlying principle of socialism is wrong and cannot work. As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, I hoped that the world would analyze it and try to understand how it happened and why it happened, and come to the conclusion that the whole idea of socialism or totalitarianism is completely wrong. It just leads to collapse. But no one made that kind of conclusion. Unfortunately, our experiment did not bring any lessons."

Regarding the so-called Russia-gate scandal, in which American "progressives" accused President Trump of being a Russian agent, Bukovsky dismissed it as a "political game." He said, "For the first time, the left-wing establishment discovered the Russian threat. Previously, they didn't see any threat. When it was real and we tried to attract the attention of the world to the Russian threat, we were accused of being paranoid and unrealistic and things like that. Now we have proven we were not paranoid. It did exist. Suddenly, the world discovers the Russian threat. That, of course, is a political game."

He said the allegations constitute political games by "the elites," who "should have come to the conclusion that all of the socialist experiments are absolutely deadly."

Instead, however, we see that socialism is accepted by many young people and Democratic Party politicians.

The target of Russia-gate, President Trump, came up during our discussion, with Bukovsky echoing the president's comments about the political "swamp." He said, "I would say his great achievement was that he disturbed the swamp. We were living in the swamp when the elites were in some kind of consensus in everything and we were losing our freedom and no one would say anything at all."

When Trump "disturbed the swamp," he said "it became a subject of discussion, something which for 20 years no one noticed – how far we were sliding down to the left side and all the political correctness. Being an amateur, he came out of nothing, out of nowhere, and started asking questions like a child who just emerged in the world. And that disturbed the whole thing. It forces people to think again and that's good."

"That's the good side," he said of Trump. "The bad side is that he's very inconsistent and doesn't have much experience and makes blunders. But that's inevitable. He's not a professional politician. So he makes mistakes. The effect overall is positive because it disturbed the consensus."

Concerning the future, he thinks the European Union (EU) will collapse. "I predicted it 15 years ago," he noted. "It's going to collapse like the Soviet Union. It's inevitable. So for me it's a time to buy popcorn and sit in a chair and watch it unfold in front of me."

While that may seem likely, as the British exit from the EU (known as Brexit) proceeds, what is not so clear is that an EU "collapse" would mean the end of international communism in Europe, or what Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev called their "Common European Home." Indeed, Bukovsky documents Soviet influence over European "socialist" movements, including the Socialist International.

In the U.S, after carefully considering Bukovsky's revelations, the only issue to debate is whether these Western elites were dupes or Kremlin agents. In any case, they must be identified, held accountable, and punished. Bukovsky names the names. It's our job to act.

In the pages of a 1994 edition of the left-wing publication Dissent, historian Eugene D. Genovese wrote, "The Crimes of Communism: What did you know and when did you know it?" Genovese was a Marxist who became a conservative Catholic. But the discussion never went beyond academia to the actual creation of international tribunals to prosecute the criminals.

Bukovsky asks, "How is it possible to explain to people who have never lived under this regime that communism is not a political system and not even so much a crime as a sort of mass illness, like an epidemic of the plague?"

We see such illness all around us, in the form of political correctness, as well as the spectacle of a young Swedish girl reaching a fever pitch as she lectures the UN about changes in the weather that she sees as life-threatening Armageddon. By appearing at the UN, headed by a former president of the Socialist International, she seemed to think a global government of some sort would save us.

In their booklet EUSSR, Bukovsky and Stroilov write about not only a "collectivist European State," but how Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev envisioned "many other homes of cooperation" beyond the European home, leading to a World Government.

It was the West's favorite Soviet communist, Mikhail Gorbachev, who launched the climate scare in the first place, to keep communism going under a different name, "sustainable development." While going green, the former Soviet president had declared his commitment to a one-world communist state, saying on November 2, 1987, "We are moving towards a new world, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road." This statement concluded his report "October and Perestroika: The Revolution Continues."

Gorbachev figures prominently in Bukovsky's book, as a hero to the elites who accepted his "fables" about changes in the Soviet Union and around the world and became the subject of "thoughtless euphoria" in the West.

Despite the record of Soviet assassinations of dissidents, Bukovsky, now 76 years old and in stable but poor health, laughs and says he doesn't fear for his safety and is not scared of anyone. "When they try to kill you every year," he said, "you stop worrying about it."

But many people in the United States are afraid of Bukovsky – and his message. That's why it took so long to get this book, written in 1995, published in English. But after twenty-five years, the book that was nearly lost to the English-speaking world is now available.

• Cliff Kincaid, president of America's Survival, Inc. is the author or co-author of 15 books, including Back from the Dead: Return of the Evil Empire. www.usasurvival.org

© Cliff Kincaid