Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
45 Goals of Communism?
I recently heard of a former FBI agent named Cleon Skousen who wrote a book called, “Naked Communism”, in 1958. He laid out the goals of communism that were eventually added into the Congressional Records on Jan. 10th, 1963 (appendix A34 – A35). Interestingly, quite a few of those goals seem to be in today’s news and events. See how many you can check off:
- U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
- U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
- Develop the illusion that total disarmament by the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
- Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
- Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
- Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
- Grant recognition to Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
- Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
- Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
- Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
- Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces.
- Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
- Do away with loyalty oaths.
- Continue giving Russia access to U.S. Patent Office.
- Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
- Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
- Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
- Gain control of all student newspapers.
- Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
- Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
- Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
- Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. (An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”)
- Control art critics and directors of art museums.
- Eliminate all laws of obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
- Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
- Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
- Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
- Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
- Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
- Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
- Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
- Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
- Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
- Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
- Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
- Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
- Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
- Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.
- Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
- Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity, masturbation and easy divorce.
- Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
- Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use “united force” to solve economic, political or social problems.
- Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
- Internationalize the Panama Canal.
- Repeal the “Connally Reservation” so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
Number 34 stands out.
Aw, you tricked me! I saw the title “The Naked Communist” and thought it was going to be about the opening credits of “Barbarella”!
That book is from my era. I have it somewhere. I don’t know that I read it through but I’ve used it for reference. I was in ROTC and the military from 1954 through 1968. If one is from that period you probably know about Communism, not as detailed as Skousen, but quite well because we used to be taught about things that were dangerous and destructive. We don’t teach these things now even when they are staring us right in the face.
I wasn’t even born yet – I’ve never even read Orwell’s 1984 – I really need to catch up here. So the current generation is even farther removed. It’s hard to learn history’s lessons but forced to when they are taking place in front of you, as you say!
Holy cats.
Mission accomplished.
On another Ricochet thread I commented that before I was 20 I had read 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Darkness at Noon, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. That gives one a sound basis to understand how America is different from any communist society. I don’t think our young people read these works today.
What attracted you to these types of books? To read all that including the founding documents is really impressive. Did they spur you on to the ROTC and is that still promoted on today’s campuses?
Why do you think Skousen wrote the book you displayed? My attraction was driven by a felt need to be prepared to confront Marxism. I don’t know that there was a big focus in school but it was in the media. The Soviet Union was constantly pushing things in Eastern Europe and then Cuba. The Chinese Communists pushed the Chinese Nationalists out to Taiwan around 1949 and then supported North Korea against South Korea and the U.S. in the Korean Conflict. And then, as the nuclear capability spread, we got in the mode of staying prepared for that. So there was plenty of sources to cause attention to focus on the communist threat.
You really should have highlighted this one since it is why the young people don’t know the things they should.
1984 is a fantastic book. Highly recommend you read it at your earliest opportunity. Read the appendix on the use of language to control thought too.
I didn’t bold any of the sections – this is how I copied it into the post. You are right – that one stood out right away. This list, written in 1953, is probably considered short in 2020, and we could add to it.
For example, I was shocked to learn the influence of the Marxists and Communists inside the Catholic Church, as was revealed by Dr. Bella Dodd: “Right now they are in the highest places where they are working to bring about change in order to weaken the Church’s effectiveness against Communism. “These changes will be so drastic that you will not even recognize the Catholic Church. “Of all the world’s religions, the Catholic Church was the only one feared by the Communists, for it was its only effective opponent. “The whole idea was to destroy, not the institution of the Church, but rather the faith of the people, and even use the institution of the Church, if possible, to destroy the faith through the promotion of a pseudo-religion.”
https://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/letter-48-2018-some-enemy-has-done-this/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIg_mekcea6gIVGey1Ch0nDAPsEAAYASAAEgJI9PD_BwE
“Red China” No one says that anymore. They’re still “red” though
Well, I wonder about this usage of ‘Red’ today. Younger generation Americans probably don’t recognize the meaning clearly since we use ‘red’ to designate Republican leaning political areas here in America and they probably have not been exposed to the ‘Red China’ usage. I’ve been using Chinese communists or CCP (Chinese Communist Party) but with little assurance that American young people understand the significance of that status and the Democrats stand with the communists as it is.
It was a brilliant coup by leftists in the news media when they made “Red” mean conservative, and “Blue”, liberal.
And how stupid were the supposed conservatives at Fox News to accept this! (All future anti-Trumpers, no doubt.)
I can still remember how confused a liberal friend was when I told him ex-Marxist David Horowitz calls himself a “red diaper baby”.
I wondered about that. Why is red in America the color of the right, while everywhere else red is left and blue is the right?
His book was titled The Naked Communist and he wrote another called The Naked Capitalist. The latter was about communist infiltration into the business world.
Red always stood for communism in the U.S., until sometime around 2000, when news media settled on the current color scheme. Prior to that, red and blue were used on election maps, but it was not always the same color for each party.
The networks would more or less randomly assign colors for the election night maps. It just happened that in 2000 they assigned red to the Republicans and blue to the Democrats. And due to the contentious nature of the recounts, it stuck.
Those colors were used to show Republican and Democrat states in an election results map on the news years ago, and the conspiracy theory (if mine alone) is that is was done to remove the “danger” color and the “communist” connotations from the democrats; and the other news organizations inexplicably followed suit.
My observation is that Republicans even all wear identical blue suits, whereas Democrats wear mostly brown, grey and black, even tweed if it’s reddish brown (formerly with leather elbow patches and pince-nez on a silver chain, IIRC).
https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/thinking-about-tim-russert-red-states-and-blue-states/
With the advent of color television, television news reporters have greatly relied on color-coded electoral maps during coverage of presidential election returns every four years. As Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly explained in 2004, the networks arrived at a formula for assigning colors to political parties for election-night coverage so that there would be no perception of favoritism in the color coding. Since 1976, the color of the incumbent party has alternated:
Year
Incumbent
Party
Incumbent
Color
Challenger
Color
1976
Republican
Blue = Ford
Red = Carter
1980
Democratic
Red = Carter
Blue = Reagan
1984
Republican
Blue = Reagan
Red = Mondale
1988
Republican
Red = Bush
Blue = Dukakis
1992
Republican
Blue = Bush
Red = Clinton
1996
Democratic
Red = Clinton
Blue = Dole
2000
Democratic
Blue = Gore
Red = Bush
2004
Republican
Red = Bush
Blue = Kerry
Because of this system, it just so happens that Democrats were assigned the color red and Republicans blue five out of six times between 1976 and 1996. But 2000 and 2004 had blue for Democrats and red for Republicans, and those have been the election years in which the “red state” vs. “blue state” distinction has been popularized.
Right. And for some reason, years ago, the Dems have been given blue, and the Republicans have consistently been given red, despite the existing agreement. I smell conspiracy here.
That was already explained – “Red State” for Republican and “Blue State” for Democrats became a thing during the 2000 election aftermath.
But why?