Question: Is this for real? I mean, really really real? It sure seems official, yes. But it also seems a little too neat and convenient, for our side. I've seen it crop up in many venues over the years, and every time I read it, I find myself saying Yes!, Yes!, Yes!...uh, wait a minute. This is not a challenge. This is a question.
If you interpret the piece the way I do, it is much more official. All Skousen was doing was merely applying what Communism stood for and applying it to it's most effective ends: abusing the courts, breaking the church, and attacking families.
So in reality, they may have not been actual goals, but merely an assessment of how Communists would best achieve their goals. Skousen was an FBI analyst and was using common effective analytical techniques. I'm an intelligence analyst myself, and we use similar techniques to make assessments. The most common one is as follows:
Capability + Intent = Threat
You take what the enemy can do, combine it with the enemy would like to do, and you end up with a plausible "likely outcome". It seems as if Skousen was doing the same thing. The Communists had the capability to inflitrate open American institutions, and they would like to do so, so they WILL PROBABLY do so.
Still, the 45 goals are still chilling.
I've wondered myself. I didn't find it at Snopes. I did ask them to look into it.