Seeing Red - Spontaneous anti-American demonstrations? Think again.

Over the March 15-16 weekend there were simultaneous anti-American and pro-peace demonstrations around the world, with the largest in Athens and Moscow. It is significant that the headquarters of the Soviet-created World Peace Council (WPC) is now in Athens, and that its honorary chairman is still the same KGB asset, Romesh Chandra, who chaired this Cold War organization during the years when I was a Communist general. This current bashing of the U.S. makes me believe I am watching a revival of an old stage drama, the lines of which I know by heart. Back in the 1970Ss the drama featured that same Ramesh Chandra and consisted of the WPC's virulent offensive to counteract American efforts aimed at protecting the world against Communist expansion.

In fact, the WPC Secretariat recently recognized that the WPC has "participated in or co-organized" the current worldwide anti-American demonstrations. On December 14, 2002, the WPC convened a meeting of its Communist-style Executive Committee and then issued an official communiqué stating, in vintage Soviet language: "The Bush administration is intensifying readiness for the unilateral attack on Iraq, and this unilateralism of hegemony is becoming the biggest threat to world peace." An international appeal published by the WPC Secretariat on the same day confirmed that the WPC had indeed been involved in organizing anti-American demonstrations in "USA, Great Britain, Florence, Prague and in many other European capitals, as well as in other countries." The WPC appeal called upon "the peoples and movements of the world aspiring to peace and justice to unite their voices and actions against the U.S. war on Iraq."

The WPC was created by Moscow in the 1950s and had only one task: to portray the United States as being run by a "war-mongering government." To make it look like a Western organization, Moscow headquartered it in Paris, but in 1954 the French government accused the WPC of being a Soviet puppet and kicked it out of France. Therefore, its headquarters were moved to Soviet-occupied Vienna, and then to Prague when Austria became neutral. It is remarkable that, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States remained the only superpower, Romesh Chandra moved his WPC to Athens and focused its operations toward "waging a struggle against the New World Order." According to its current charter, adopted during a 1996 Peace Congress in Mexico, the WPC has now "broadened into a worldwide mass movement" whose task is to support "those people and liberation movements" fighting "against [American] imperialism."

Back in the 1970s, when Moscow appointed Romesh Chandra to head the WPC, it introduced him to the world as being an "apolitical" Indian. In reality, Chandra was a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party of India, one of the foreign Communist parties most loyal to the Soviet Union at that time. Khrushchev himself approved a $50 million annual budget for the "new" WPC (the money was delivered by the KGB in the form of laundered cash dollars, in order to hide its Soviet origin), and tasked Chandra to focus the WPC effort on condemning the American intervention in Vietnam as a "murderous adventure" and to require all WPC national branches to initiate demonstrations around the world against America's imperialism and its war in Vietnam.

Until 1978, when I left Romania for good, I managed the Romanian side of the WPC, whose operations implicated thousands of undercover Soviet-bloc intelligence officers and many other thousands of paid and voluntary Communist activists. By that time Chandra's WPC had reportedly collected 700 million signatures on a "ban-the-American-atomic-bomb" petition that had been drafted in Moscow and adopted by a peace conference convened in Stockholm. In a 1981 article published in the Comintern journal entitled Problems of Peace and Socialism (the English translation of which was called World Marxist Review), Chandra wrote: "The struggle to curb the arms race has become a mass demonstration against the deployment of new U.S. missiles." Soon after that, Chandra and his WPC unleashed a worldwide offensive against the deployment by the United States of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe, and it organized "global campaigns" to protest the production of the neutron bomb announced by U.S. president Jimmy Carter and against the U.S. decision on "Star Wars," WPC's derisive term for the American strategic defense initiative (SDI).

In 1851 Karl Marx issued his now famous dictum: "History always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce." The new anti-American Axis Beijing-Moscow-Berlin-Paris is indeed a farcical effort to revive the anti-Americanism created by the WPC and its sponsors during the Cold War era.

— General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is currently finishing a new book,Red Roots: The origins of today's anti-Americanism.

Anti-War Protests Have Big Price Tags

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

SEATTLE — Large anti-war protests come with a hefty price tag.

Money is needed to rent or buy stages, sound systems, permits and portable toilets, and tabs often run as high as $200,000 per demonstration — much more than the average grassroots peace group will ever have in its coffers.

So who is picking up the tab?

"The major anti-U.S. government demonstrations are organized by people who have been around for a long time, particularly the Workers World Party, which has existed for more than 30 years now and has always supported the enemies of the United States," said Herbert Romerstein, a retired agent of the U.S. Information Agency.

The Workers World Party describes itself as Marxist in nature.

Officially, protest organizers are groups such as Not in Our Name and International A.N.S.W.E.R., but the demonstration's sponsors have long histories of backing anti-government causes.

Not in Our Name is financed by the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization. I.F.C.O. is a million-dollar-a-year non-profit that supports Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and once sponsored a group headed by Sami Al-Arian — the University of South Florida professor being charged with fundraising for terrorist organizations Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A.N.S.W.E.R. is an offshoot of the International Action Center, which intelligence officials say is a front for the Worker's World Party. A.N.S.W.E.R. canceled a scheduled interview with Fox News but a worker in the Seattle field office acknowledged there are ties.

"There are some Workers World Party members in A.N.S.W.E.R.," said A.N.S.W.E.R. coordinator Jim McMahan.

The International Action Center was founded by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who is a longtime public face of the anti-war movement.

The Workers World Party supports North Korea's brutal regime and I.F.C.O. defied U.N. sanctions when it made a trip to Iraq in the mid-1990s. Now, both are sugar daddies to the anti-war movement.

"The American people have the right to know whether stooges of [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il or Castro or Saddam Hussein are involved in these demonstrations," Romerstein said.

The groups bankrolling these protests say they're spending their money the way donors would want, and protest organizers say it doesn't matter where the money comes from — the message is their own.

Others wonder if knowing the fringe politics of the people paying the bills might keep some demonstrators off the streets.

But anti-war organizers — regardless of their financial backing — are plugging ahead and are actually planning more aggressive action that they say will be hard to ignore, despite the fact that the United States is on the brink of war with Iraq.

"People will step up their actions, there will be active civil disobedience," said Simona Sharoni of United for Peace in Thurston County, Wash.

Direct Action, a San Francisco Bay-area group of anti-war veterans, has been drawing up their own battle plan should there be a war.

They say they will shut down 70 targets in San Francisco alone, including power plants, water systems, the Federal Reserve, oil companies, the Pacific Exchange and the Transamerica Building.

And their hit list goes beyond economic targets.

Some protesters are promising to chain themselves to fences at schools and day care centers so working parents will have to stay home from their jobs. Organizers say this will give others a chance to contemplate how war affects the children of Iraq.

"The civilians in Iraq are losing their lives and one day of work is worth a thousand lives," said Leone Reinbold, an anti-war activist in San Francisco.

Reinbold helped organize the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle three years ago. She blames the violence and damage on anarchists from the radical fringe, not the mainstream demonstrators.

All the same, police departments from coast to coast know that keeping things peaceful won't be easy.

"We know based on the last one that each preceding demonstration has been a little bit more volatile than the one before," said Deputy Chief Greg Suhr of the San Francisco Police Department.

Some protestors are vowing to bring traffic to a standstill, as they recently did on a Seattle bridge. But many wonder if paralyzing the morning commute and engaging in similar disruptions will win converts or make enemies of people losing patience with their tactics.

Ooo! Do I get an advanced degree? Here is a little quote written in 1933 from Orwell's Homage to Catalonia:

In reality, it was the Communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain. Later, when the Right Wing forces were in full control, the Communists showed themselves willing to go a great deal further than the Liberals in hunting down revolutionary leaders.
[Snip]
Between the Communists and those who claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this maneuver simply gives Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery.

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