November 30, 2005
Putin vs. the Neo-Comintern
by Patrick J. Buchanan
***
...At its Seventh World Congress in 1935, however, on Stalin's orders, the Comintern repudiated the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism as its mission and called for formation of Popular Fronts in Western nations to combat fascism – a Moscow First policy. For this act of heresy, Trotsky, the champion of permanent revolution, excommunicated Stalin as a "reformist" – and was himself rewarded in 1940 with an ice ax in the head, courtesy of Stalinist assassin Ramon Mercader.
But Trotskyism did not die with Leon Trotsky. It mutated and is today the taproot of that neoconservatism that calls for permanent revolution to advance not global communism, but global democracy. Today, this ideology is embedded in the Party of Reagan and the Bush administration, and neoconservatives are using tax dollars to create and operate their own Neo-Comintern. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which pumps out tens of millions of dollars to "promote democracy" abroad, is its pivotal agency. For 20 years, it has been headed by Carl Gershman, who broke from the Socialist Party to organize Social Democrats USA, which rallied to the candidacy of liberal Democratic Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, whose staff was a nesting ground of neocons from Richard Perle to Frank Gaffney to Elliott Abrams.
One organization captured by the Neo-Comintern is Freedom House. Founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie in 1941 as a voice for global democracy and human rights, Freedom House, on the eve of the Iraq war, chose as its new chairman ex-CIA Director James Woolsey. By his first anniversary in office, Woolsey had declared Vladimir Putin's Russia "un-free" and was beating the drums for "World War IV" against "Islamofascism." Flush with tax dollars and tax-deductible contributions, NED, Freedom House, and their collaborator foundations and think tanks now routinely interfere in the internal affairs of foreign nations. Under the rubric of promoting democracy, creating free markets, etc., they seek to dethrone recalcitrant rulers and advance to power those who share their ideology and will advance their interests and agenda.
(snip)
Though a radical leftist populist, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez was democratically elected. He charges that NED had a hand in the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew his government and in the recall election forced upon him in 2004. Foreign journalists contend that the color-coded popular "revolutions" that ousted Milosevic in Serbia, Shevardnadze in Georgia, and the Kuchma crowd in Ukraine were also made in the USA and hand-tooled at Langley.
(snip)
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=8176Pat Buchanan, IMO, is above all a loyal party man. But sometimes, when not in the heat of a campaign, he drops his guard and says something that's true.