by Trevor | Dec 17, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Asia-Pacific, Blog, China, Commentary, CPUSA, Democratic Party, Enemies Within, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
By Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | December 16, 2019, Updated: December 17, 2019
Commentary
Fresh off winning Virginia for the Democratic Party, helping to elect a Democratic governor in Kentucky, and winning a city council seat in Philadelphia, pro-China communists from the Liberation Road group are turning their attention to Arizona and Nevada.
Liberation Road is marshaling all its resources to defeat President Donald Trump. Turning Republican-leaning Arizona blue and holding swing state Nevada for the Democrats would go a long way to achieving that goal and permanently altering the “balance of power” in the United States.
Liberation Road is the main representative of the American Maoist movement. Formed as Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) in 1985, Liberation Road joined the remnants of several Maoist groups—the Proletarian Unity League, Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, Bay Area Revolutionary Union, Robeson-Cabral Collective, League of Revolutionary Struggle, Communist Workers Party, Line of March, and others—into one unified organization.
Confusingly, in 1999, more traditional Maoist FRSO comrades in Illinois and Minnesota broke away to form a new organization also called Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The majority FRSO faction oriented more to electoral work and racial politics—through movements like Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).
In April, the majority FRSO re-named itself Liberation Road—partly to differentiate themselves from their former comrades and partly to make it easier to work with the Democratic Party.
Arizona is a must-win state for Trump in 2020. Once reliably Republican, socialists have exploited Arizona’s growing Latino minorities to move the state toward the left. Communist Party-backed Democrat Kyrsten Sinema narrowly won her U.S. Senate race in 2018, and incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally faces a strong challenge from Democrat Mark Kelly—a former astronaut.
Nevada would be a solidly Republican state if wasn’t for Clark County—Las Vegas. With a huge population of Latino and Asian service workers, leftist groups such as the Maoist-rooted Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) have signed up thousands of new Democratic voters to dominate statewide politics.
Liberation Road has had a lock on San Francisco Bay politics for many years. Almost every leading San Francisco and Oakland politician owes something to Liberation Road or its affiliated groups such as Bay Resistance, Bay Rising, San Francisco Rising Alliance, Oakland Rising, or the Chinese Progressive Association.
Consequently, Liberation Road is able to devote resources and personnel to nearby states such as Arizona and Nevada.
Seed the Vote
Bay Area Liberation Road and its satellite organization LeftRoots have established a political action committee, or PAC, to carry out electoral work both in state and out of state.
Everyday People PAC is a “social justice organization committed to mobilizing our communities to elect candidates that share our values,” its website states.
A subsidiary group “Seed the Vote” is a “project of Everyday People PAC, and it is supported by Bay Resistance, Bay Rising Action, San Francisco Rising Action Fund, and other organizations and individuals throughout the Bay Area committed to building political power in our communities.”
According to the Seed the Vote website, Seed the Vote is supported by Liberation Road cadre Sarah Jarmon and Michelle Foy and LeftRoots members Emily Lee of San Francisco Rising Alliance and Adam Gold of the Center for Popular Democracy Action.
Other supporters include Kimi Lee of Bay Rising Action, Lara Kiswani of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Jill Shenker of San Francisco Rising Action Fund, Rose Mendelsohn of Bay Resistance, and ex-Line of March leader Max Elbaum.
Seed the Vote education team member Calvin Cheung-Miaw is also a leader of the Left Inside Outside Project, a national alliance of Liberation Road, LeftRoots, Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, and Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism established to further infiltrate the Democratic Party and defeat Trump in 2020.
Another Seed the Vote leader Jason Negrón-Gonzales was once a supporter of Bay Area Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), as was Adam Gold, also named above.
According to Negrón-Gonzales, writing on Liberation Road-affiliated website “Organizing Upgrade”:
“The Trump era has been all about the naked aggression of the far right, but cracks are appearing. Trump is battling impeachment, a result not only of his criminality but of the changes that the blue wave brought to Congress. Last month we saw further losses for the right in Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania — the result of sustained organizing by hundreds if not thousands. That work didn’t start this year; it’s the culmination of many years of work. None of this was spontaneous. When we organize, we can win. When we step up to fight, we can win.
“Those are the lessons of last year, and this week — lessons that we have to apply to 2020. Seed the Vote is a project in the Bay Area attempting to create a vehicle to do just that. We want to leverage the experience, capacity, and expertise of organizers and activists in California in support of long-term organizing in our neighboring states.
“Our goal is not just to push Trump out of office, but to help shift the balance of power in the states where we are working in favor of communities of color, social justice organizations, and labor. We want to be tactically and politically smart, and move our politics and organizations forward.”
To this end, according to Negrón-Gonzales, the decision was made to shift resources from local races in 2020 to focus on Arizona and Nevada—and to build a small army to do it.
“The possibility of Trump’s re-election in 2020 is a real one. And it’s one we are determined to stop. When we — a group of left activists rooted in community and labor organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area — gathered this spring, it was with the urgency that came from seeing our communities under relentless assault from a white nationalist, authoritarian administration.
“But we also knew that 2020 — with the size, energy, and leftward shift among the opposition to Trumpism — would give us an opportunity: if we plan carefully and think big, we can make a difference at the ballot box in 2020, the kind of difference the Left failed to make in 2016. And we thought we could do this while building a stronger and more cohesive Left.
“So we launched Seed the Vote. Our practical focus is centered on bolstering 2020 electoral efforts to defeat Trump and the GOP in two key states, Nevada and Arizona.
“We are already building infrastructure and recruiting to (1) deploy several hundred Bay area activists to work with partnering unions and community-based organizations in Nevada and Arizona for two-week periods in October 2020; and (2) connect volunteers with remote call-in and text efforts from the Bay Area to register voters, protect voting rights and increase turnout in key constituencies in November 2020.”
The plan is to not just win in 2020, but to permanently change U.S. politics in favor of the left:
“This effort is not only designed to impact the 2020 election outcome. We are including a training component to provide our volunteers with the skills and experience to lead electoral engagement work, ranging from advanced canvassers to team leaders who can train and supervise others, to campaign managers.
“And our program is crafted to increase the capacity and reach of partner organizations in Nevada and Arizona, as well as participating organizations in the Bay.
“Seed the Vote is an active investment in the long-haul work of building the independent electoral strength of social justice organizations rooted in communities of color and the working class.”
Several hundred dedicated Bay Area communists working with already established leftist voter registration and Get Out the Vote groups in two key swing states could very well decide the 2020 election.
Couple that with Liberation Road’s disciplined and focused work across the South in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, and we have a perfect Maoist storm brewing up.
China’s communist leaders could risk hundreds of billions of dollars trying to defeat Trump in a trade war. Or risk hundreds of millions of lives (including their own) in a shooting war of indeterminate outcome. Or they could defeat Trump by encouraging their U.S. communist “franchise” to spend a few million dollars flipping three or four Southern and Southwestern states to the Democrat column—all under the radar.
Which option would you choose if you led the Communist Party of China?
Featured photo: Arizona voters wait in line to cast their ballot at a polling place during the midterm elections in Phoenix, Ariz., on Nov. 6, 2018. Ralph Freso/Getty Images
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor presents his acclaimed movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Nov 17, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Asia-Pacific, Blog, Democratic Party, Featured, North America
Did a China-based American communist help flip Virginia?
Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times* | November 14, 2019 Updated: November 14, 2019
News Analysis
It’s official. The once deep-red Commonwealth of Virginia is now a blue state. As a result of the Nov. 5 election, Democrats now hold all three of the statewide constitutional offices, both U.S. Senate seats, the majority of its Congress members, and both chambers of the State House.
Laura Ingraham of Fox News says it’s because of “changing demographics.” That’s only partially true. Virginia went blue because a handful of well-organized pro-Chinese communists made it happen.
The group in question, New Virginia Majority (NVM), has exploited Virginia’s changing population and “liberal bleed out” from the Washington area to flip not just Northern Virginia but also districts across the state. Based in Alexandria and Richmond, NVM has sent hundreds of paid workers and volunteers out across the commonwealth to register and send to the polls hundreds of thousands of new voters—all under the nose of the Virginia Republican Party.
WE JUST FLIPPED VIRGINIA! 🥳🎉👏🏿
اس پر New Virginia Majority نے شائع کیا منگل، 5 نومبر، 2019
The Democrats have flipped two state Senate seats and now hold a 10-vote advantage in the Assembly. NVM endorsed and supported 23 Virginia candidates this cycle and won with 15 of them, including two state Senate races and nine Assembly victories.
The 15 who were endorsed by NVM and won are:
- Ghazala Hashmi, Virginia Senate District 10
- John Bell, Virginia Senate District 13
- Wendy Gooditis, House District 10
- Kelly Convirs-Fowler, House District 21
- Elizabeth Guzman, House District 31
- Dan Helmer, House District 40
- Kathy Tran, House District 42
- Hala Ayala, House District 51
- Schuyler VanValkenburg, House District 72
- Rodney Willett, House District 73
- Shelly Simonds, House District 94
- Steve Descano, Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney
- Parisi Deghani-Tafti, Arlington County and Fall’s Church Commonwealth’s Attorney
- Buta Biberaj, Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney
- Phyllis Randall, Chair Loudoun County Board of Supervisors
None of this electoral success was down to luck or changing demographics alone.
NVM Co-Chair Tram Nguyen has already published an op-ed in The New York Times saying, “Democrats could learn a lot from what happened in Virginia.” The message? “Democrats, do what we did in Virginia—everywhere.” By going after the minority vote with mass voter registration drives, you can flip almost any state.
According to Nguyen:
“The national Democratic Party spent millions in Virginia this year, but the state wasn’t always such a priority. From its position in the South to its prominent role in America’s legacy of oppression, Virginia was long considered reliably conservative—unbreakable. As recently as six years ago, Republicans controlled the office of the governor and the General Assembly.
“Local organizations like mine understood the political potential of Virginia when we got started 12 years ago. We are winning because we recognize the power of an electorate that includes and reflects the diversity of our state. We don’t talk to voters only when campaign season rolls around. We try to reach voters of all colors, women, low-income workers and young people where they are, which has made it possible for us to develop a robust base of support along Virginia’s so-called Urban Crescent, from Northern Virginia to Hampton Roads. Long before Election Day, we registered more than 300,000 voters, knocked on more than 2.5 million doors, and organized within communities of color to help win significant policy changes like Medicaid expansion, which covered nearly 400,000 people.”
Nguyen (who was part of Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s transition team) also went on to explain the importance of the ex-convict vote.
“Virginia’s state constitution bars anyone with a felony conviction from voting until their rights have been restored by the governor. For more than nine years, we organized formerly incarcerated women and men to help them demand that their full civil rights be restored. The former governor, Terry McAuliffe, restored the voting rights of more than 173,000 Virginians during his term, more than any other governor in Virginia’s history. In 2016, of the nearly 20,000 men and women who registered to vote for the first time as a result of the restoration of their rights, a whopping 79 percent voted. They were a key voting bloc in Virginia, the only Southern state that Hillary Clinton won.”
NVM worked closely with McAuliffe to win ex-felon voting rights. The organization actually gave the governor an award at its annual dinner for his sterling work.
And the path to success lies in organizing and energizing minority voters who already lean left, but normally vote at very low rates:
“Changes in the shape of the electorate and rising enthusiasm among voters can only go so far, without campaign architecture that channels those changes into tangible political outcomes. …
“Engaging meaningfully with voters of color means talking to tens of thousands of voters to make sure they have the information they need to cast their ballots even after receiving racist Republican campaign communications. … We didn’t need to persuade voters to embrace our worldview—they were already there on the issues. They just needed to be convinced that their vote mattered. To give one example of how this works in practical terms, in precincts in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, turnout this year increased by 24 percent over 2017. …
“States don’t become battlegrounds overnight. Democrats and national progressive organizations have the resources to take their case to the people and win, but they have to start early and organize relentlessly. When they lose, they have to stay in place and keep fighting for every political inch they can get. No place is unwinnable forever.”
All this would be serious enough if NVM members were merely well-meaning “liberal Democrats,” which unfortunately isn’t the case.
NVM is a front for Liberation Road, known until April this year as Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), the United States’ most influential Maoist organization.
Maoist Groups
NVM is led by longtime FRSO/Liberation Road cadre Jon Liss of Alexandria. Several FRSO cadres have served in NVM over the years, as have many activists from two NVM satellite groups, LeftRoots and the Virginia Student Power Network.
FRSO/Liberation Road comes out of the militantly pro-China American Maoist student movement of the 1970s. While it’s more discreet about its Chinese loyalties these days, several of its leading supporters maintain close ties to the People’s Republic.
Fred Engst is a longtime FRSO supporter. Born to U.S. communist parents and raised in China, Engst was educated in the United States, where he became immersed in Maoist politics. He returned to China in 2007 and is now teaching at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.
Alex Tom, a leader of LeftRoots and the pro-Beijing San Francisco-based Chinese Progressive Association, in 2012 formed the China Education and Exposure Program to “build a deeper analysis of China for US progressives and leftists and to build relationships with the grassroots movement in China,” according to his 2013 LeftForum speaker’s bio.
John Marienthal, a San Jose-based FRSO member, has been a leader of the pro-Beijing U.S.–China Peoples Friendship Association for more than 40 years and has taught in several Chinese educational establishments since the 1980s.
Steve McClure is a former Washington resident who, in the 1970s, was active in the pro-Mao Revolutionary Student Brigade. He has close ties to FRSO and NVM. Since 2010, he has worked with the Geography Department of Wuhan University in China, and he is a research associate with the State Key Laboratory of Engineering Information in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing at the university.
McClure has used his skills in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to supply highly targeted voter identification information to NVM.
As far back as 2005, McClure was using GIS technology to identify low-income voters for Liss’s Tenant Workers Support Committee. McClure “plotted lower-income, high-rental housing areas to get a picture of where there was affordable housing in Northern Virginia,” according to the Mason Gazette. This information probably proved very useful when Liss established NVM two years later.
According to an Aug. 25, 2011, post on McClure’s blog:
“I have been recently working with New Virginia Majority to make a series of maps to inform planning for precinct walks in Virginia State house districts. … The core data are lists of individual households by pan-ethnic census categories. … The results are subjective but do suggest … the ways that actual communities conform or diverge from the discrete territorial units which define an electoral terrain in a democracy.”
All this wasn’t theoretical. It was designed to help NVM flip districts across the state by micro-targeting potential Democratic voters in low-income and minority communities. In another post, he wrote:
“In the general elections of 2008, Virginia voted Democratic for the first time since 1964 with Obama carrying the state. Demographic shifts and increased voter participation rather than a shift in political allegiances account for this outcome. …
“Focusing on Prince William County, Virginia, I applied spatial interpolation techniques in a GIS to translate the 2008 election returns from the geography of precincts to year 2000 zoning classification areas for further quantitative analysis. The goal was to produce actionable intelligence for working class organizations building popular power at the base. …
“The results are presented as maps and diagrams which might illuminate challenges and opportunities for organizations engaging with electoral efforts.”
McClure is still actively engaged in giving advice to his U.S. comrades on winning elections for the Democrats.
An article co-written by McClure and Bob Wing, “The Importance of the Fight for the South—and Why It Can and Must Be Won,” appeared on the Liberation Road-linked website Organizing Upgrade on Sept. 4, 2017. It states:
“The far right, racism, militarism, inequality, and poverty are all centered in the South. The majority of African Americans, the main protagonist of progressive politics in this country, live in the South. And the South has more electoral votes, battleground state votes, population, and congresspersons than any other region.
“The South is changing rapidly, giving rise to more progressive demographic groups—especially Black and Latino migrations, LGBTQs and urbanites—and a growing Democratic vote. These trends can only be maximized if the importance of the South is understood as a strategic necessity and the chance to win state by state, is acknowledged and acted upon.
“Hard as the fight is and will be, downplaying the Southern struggle is a losing political strategy and forfeits the moral high ground on the biggest issues facing the country.”
McClure and Wing (another “former” Maoist associated with FRSO) argue that to destroy the Republican Party in the South, black communities must be targeted and mobilized to vote:
“(1) A critical mass of Southern states can and must be won if we are to block or defeat the right in presidential elections. Three of the five or so critical battleground states are in the South: Florida, Virginia and North Carolina. Southern blue and battleground states plus Washington D.C. hold 38 percent of the electoral votes needed to win.
“(2) Winning an anti-rightwing congressional majority depends on winning in the South, as the South has a bigger congressional delegation than any other region and Southern congresspersons also hold key leadership posts within the Republican Party’s congressional hierarchies.
“(3) There are tremendous opportunities to build progressive political power and governance at the local level in the South as 105 counties have a Black majority. …
“While some might dismiss the South, focusing strategically on the Northeast and Pacific Coast as central to a progressive program and the Midwest as the main political battleground, the South’s dynamic growth, historical legacy of Black struggle and powerful political weight make it a critical battlefield.
“The nuance is that the South cannot be won as a bloc, but only state by state and county by county. In fact, winning the South in large part means understanding that it is not a monolithic entity and winning it piece by piece: i.e. politically deconstructing the South.”
President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 shocked the left and, according to McClure and Wing, has made their goal of flipping the South even more urgent:
“This essay was prepared in March 2015, prior to the 2016 election season that eventually resulted in Donald Trump’s victory. However, the far rightwing’s capture of the presidency makes this essay’s main arguments even more important. …
“The South is the key center of the far right and the Republican Party; neither can be defeated without battling for the South.”
Liberation Road has a large presence in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina (Durham for All), and Florida (the New Florida Majority). Now that Virginia is safely in the Democrat column, look to see an upsurge of Maoist electoral activity in North Carolina and Florida to turn those states blue in 2020; Tennessee and Georgia will be next. Then, Texas.
Chinese ‘Collusion’?
Trump has been tougher on Beijing than has any other president in living memory. It’s no secret that China doesn’t like Trump and would love to see him defeated in 2020.
Rather than risk war, or suffer huge economic setbacks, wouldn’t it be much cheaper and easier to use China’s American assets, such as Liberation Road, to ensure Trump’s defeat by “democratic” means?
It’s inconceivable that the Chinese government didn’t know what McClure was up to. After all, they presumably pay his salary or living costs while he is in China.
It’s clear that Liberation Road is tied to China. It’s also clear that their front-group NVM is heavily involved in U.S. electoral politics and played a decisive role in turning Virginia blue. It’s also obvious that Liberation Road’s goal is to destroy President Trump and the Republican Party to pave the way for a socialist America.
Is there Chinese “collusion” here? Do we need investigations and executive action against these subversive groups before they’re able to fully realize their goals? With less than a year until the 2020 election, there’s not much time left to do so.
Photo credit: Virginia voters head to the polls at Nottingham Elementary School Nov. 5, 2019, in Arlington, Va. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor presents his acclaimed movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
*Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
by Trevor | Aug 29, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Asia-Pacific, Blog, Commentary, CPUSA, Democratic Party, Enemies Within, Europe, Featured, Social Movements, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
Commentary
Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | August 26, 2019, Updated: August 26, 2019
The recent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) national convention in Atlanta proved two things:
A. The DSA is definitely a communist organization.
B. The DSA is rapidly becoming an integral part of the international communist movement.
Since cutting decades-old ties to the Socialist International in 2017 (SI is way too moderate for the new breed of DSA comrade!), the DSA has built extensive ties to radical socialist and communist groups in the Muslim world, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
The international guest list of the DSA national convention reflected both the organization’s far-left turn and its commitment to worldwide socialist revolution.
Muslim World
From the Muslim world, the DSA hosted two Americans supporting Middle Eastern revolutionary causes and one representative from the currently unfolding revolution in Sudan.
Speaker Rasha Mubarak represented the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, an umbrella network of supporters of the Palestinian revolutionary movement. The campaign’s advisory board includes Cornel West of the DSA and Ahmad Abuznaid, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization-linked activist and the son of Palestinian civil servant Nabil Abuznaid. The senior Abuznaid was a “close friend” and adviser to Yasser Arafat, founder of the U.S. State Department-designated terror group Palestine Liberation Organization.
Mubarak is the regional director for Central Florida of the Florida Young Democrats, co-founder of Floridians Responding to Refugees, and former central Florida regional director at the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was founded by U.S.-based pro-Hamas activists. Mubarak is also close to DSA members and pro-Palestine Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
Hanan Yahya, a staffer with the office of Detroit City Council member Raquel Castaneda-Lopez, represented the Yemeni Alliance Committee, which is sympathetic to the Iranian-backed rebel faction in the still-raging Yemeni civil war.
From Sudan came Nuha Zein, a geophysics professor and activist in the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), which is a leading element in the current Sudanese revolution. According to a Liberation News interview with Fathi AlFadl, secretary for information and member of the Central Committee of the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP):
“The SCP maintains very close cooperation with the Sudanese Professionals Association. In fact, a number of the SCP work within the SPA. Also, as a party active in the field of trade union movements, the SCP attaches considerable attention to the activities and work of the SPA.”
Latin America
Latin American guests included representatives from the pro-Cuba Workers Party of Brazil and the Peruvian far-left group Nuevo Peru.
Bruno Magalhaes, a Sao Paulo-based academic, represented the Brazilian Socialism and Liberty Party, a mainly Trotskyist grouping that broke away from the Workers Party some years ago, essentially because it was too moderate.
Asia
Asian guests included a representative of ZENKO (National Assembly for Peace and Democracy) from Japan, which is stridently anti-American and is known to have worked closely with the Iraqi Communist Party in the past.
Lawyer Aaron Pedrosa also fired up the DSA crowd with tales from the Philippines revolutionary movement. Pedrosa is a leader of labor group Sanlakas and the Partido Lakas ng Masa (Party of the Laboring Masses), both of which were founded by former leaders of the Maoist terror group Communist Party of the Philippines/New People’s Army.
Europe
The first European delegate to address the DSA convention was Oliver Shroder, head of international politics and a member of the International Commission of Germany’s Die Linke (The Left). Directly descended from the Stalin-era East German Communist Party, Die Linke is now the major socialist party in the united Germany.
One of Schroder’s colleagues on the Die Linke International Commission is Gregor Gysi, the last leader of the East German Communist Party and a man repeatedly dogged by allegations that he was an informer for that country’s dreaded secret police, the Stasi.
Later on, the bill came Waltraud Fritz, representing the Party of the European Left, a more than 30-strong alliance of mainly communist parties currently serving in the European Parliament. Fritz has served on the executive committee of the Communist Party of Austria for the last 20 years. She became a member of the executive board of the Party of the European Left in 2004 and has also been a member of the Party of the European Left political secretariat since 2009.
Fritz passed on “heartfelt greetings of solidarity” from Party of the European Left Chairman Gysi.
She also heaped praise on the assembled DSA comrades, telling them:
“The Left forces of Europe are quite excited about what’s going on here in the USA. … The Democratic Socialists of America are at the forefront of the struggles of a different, of a new America in another radically changed world.”
She also emphasized the importance the European communists placed on the DSA’s work in the United States and vowed that:
“The European Left Party has realized the necessity to work together much closer with the DSA than in the past—much, much closer.”
‘By the Company You Keep’
The DSA portrays itself domestically as a noncommunist political organization that supports a “democratic” form of socialism.
The DSA claims it wants to make the United States more like Norway and Sweden, but on the foreign stage, it works almost exclusively with communist and Trotskyist political allies.
The DSA isn’t allied internationally with the moderate left-wing parties of Northern Europe, but with the openly communist parties of Western and Southern Europe and the “former” Stalinist communist parties of Eastern Europe.
That’s because the “democratic socialist” lie is only for naïve American voters. When the DSA welcomes its real friends into its bosom, they are almost invariably communists and terrorists.
Feature Photo: Democratic Socialists of America holds a rally in New York on Oct. 30, 2017. (Working Families Party/CC BY-NC 2.0)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Jul 25, 2019 | Asia-Pacific, CPUSA, North America, Russia, Socialism/Communism
Commentary
Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | July 24, 2019, Updated: July 24, 2019
Despite taking second place to the “mainstream” media, and the stiff competition from Hollywood, academia, and leftist churches, organized labor is still a major “transmission belt” for communist ideas to the American “masses.”
This wasn’t always the case. For many years, labor in the United States was staunchly anti-communist. However, since 1995, American unions have largely fallen under Marxist control. This gives the far left the political muscle to implement socialist ideas through the Democratic Party—even when these policies clearly damage union members’ interests.
The father of the Bolshevik revolution, V.I. Lenin, prophetically said of the trade union movement, “It is an organization designed to draw in and to train; it is, in fact, a school: a school of administration, a school of economic management, a school of communism.”
Soviet Instruction
In the early days of American communism, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) showed little interest in the labor movement. In those days, American unions tended to be craft-based and fairly conservative. The communists just didn’t think they had much revolutionary potential. But in 1921, the American communists’ Soviet masters set them straight.
On direct orders from Moscow, the CPUSA established the Trade Union Educational League as the U.S. affiliate of the Profintern, the Soviet-created Red International of Labor Unions. Progress was slow but steady through the 1920s and ’30s as the CPUSA began to infiltrate and initiate new labor organizations, both within and outside the “orbit” of the dominant union body in the country, the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
When miners’ union leader John L. Lewis established the forerunner to the more left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935, in competition to the AFL, the communists climbed on board.
The CIO supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his massive expansion of federal power known as the “New Deal.” In July 1943, the CIO established the first political action committee in the United States, the CIO-PAC, to help Roosevelt’s election. In contrast, the AFL was far less partisan, being more willing to work with either main party to get a better deal for its members.
The CIO came under pressure in the late 1940s as Americans started waking up to the massive Soviet-directed communist infiltration of their government and institutions.
Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, claimed that the communist-infiltrated CIO had become the dominant faction in the national Democratic Party:
“They call it the Democratic national convention but obviously it is the CIO convention. Franklin D. Roosevelt is the candidate of the CIO and the Communists because they know if elected, he will continue to put the government of the United States at their service, at home and abroad. … The CIO is in the saddle and the Democrat donkey, under whip and spur, is meekly taking the road to communism and atheism. … Everybody knows that Roosevelt is the Communist candidate.”
In 1946, the Republican Party took control of both the House and Senate. That Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, made all union officers sign an affidavit declaring that they were not communists if the union wished to bring a case before the National Labor Relations Board.
Over the next few years, hundreds of communists were purged from the U.S. labor movement, until, when sufficiently “cleansed,” the CIO was allowed to merge with the AFL in 1955 to form what we now know as the AFL-CIO.
For nearly 40 years, American labor remained under conservative and patriotic leadership. That is, until the over-optimistically named “collapse of communism” convinced the U.S. public that “communism” was no longer a threat.
This country’s largest Marxist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—effectively the new “communist party”—would take deadly advantage of that dangerous illusion.
Re-infiltration
Around 1994, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees President Gerald McEntee approached the AFL-CIO with his idea for “Project ’95,” a coalition effort aimed at retaking the House for the Democratic Party. Moderate AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland turned down the proposal, wishing to keep the door open to some Republicans. McEntee and fellow DSA supporter John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union immediately began plotting Kirkland’s removal.
According to DSA’s Democratic Left, September–October 1995 issue:
“In short order, they amassed support from a coalition that included not just the core of the old CIO (the Auto Workers, Steelworkers, Mine Workers), but the Machinists, Ron Carey’s new-model Teamsters, the Carpenters, and the Laborers. And what began as somewhat inchoate dissatisfaction among top labor leaders with the Big Sleep of the Kirkland era evolved in the course of the year to potentially the most profound reshaping of labor since the founding of the CIO.”
Sweeney formally joined the DSA just before the union elections and went on to oust Kirkland to become president of the AFL-CIO.
According to the Democratic Left article by DSA member and former Washington Post journalist Harold Meyerson, the “progressive coalition” of labor unionists who ousted Kirkland in 1995 was led by McEntee, Richard Trumka, and George Kourpias. McEntee and Trumka (the current AFL-CIO president) were both longtime DSA supporters. Kourpias was a confirmed DSA member.
According to Workers World, “After his victory, Sweeney called a number of high-level meetings with women’s organizations, such as the [CPUSA/DSA-led] Coalition of Labor Union Women, as well as establishment civil rights organizations, and met with the leadership of numerous central labor councils in different cities.” The aim was to build bridges across the American left, to create a unified mass front against the Republican Party.
Sweeney inherited an AFL-CIO constitution that formally banned communists from leadership positions in the organization. Ohio CPUSA leader Wally Kaufman led the charge to abolish that impediment.
According to the CPUSA’s People’s World:
“Kaufman had been nominated to represent the retiree council on the executive committee of the North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor, but said he could not accept due to the anti-Communist clause. This caused an uproar with protests being sent to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. At the following AFL-CIO Convention, the clause was quietly removed. The Painters and most other unions then followed suit removing similar provisions in their constitutions.”
Militants from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s communist, socialist, and student movements flooded into organized labor.
DSA’s Democratic Left letter’s page in the Spring–Summer 2000 edition assured readers:
“More DSA members and alumni of DSA’s Youth Section are moving up through the administrative and organizing reaches of AFL-CIO international unions, and global labor solidarity groups, than ever in recent memory.”
This change in organized labor explains the massive swing to the left in the Democratic Party in the past 25 years. As the unions moved to the left, they effectively took over local Democratic Party machines across the nation. The Democratic Party became increasingly dependent on union money, manpower, and organizational skills to win elections. There is hardly an elected Democrat at any level in this country who doesn’t rely on some degree of organized labor support.
With this support came strings. All over the country, the Marxist unions imposed their candidates and policies on what little was left of a once vibrant and patriotic Democratic Party. The unions helped the Democrats win elections.
In an essay in the same issue of Democratic Left, Meyerson wrote:
“The differences here are magnified because the strategic importance of unions in American politics has increased almost exponentially since John Sweeney took the helm at the AFL-CIO in 1995. It’s the unions that have brought the Democrats back to brink of retaking Congressional power.”
But it was a devil’s bargain. The further left the Democrats went, the smaller their traditional base became—the more they needed union help—the more far-left they veered. It’s a vicious cycle of destruction that is now almost impossible to reverse.
That’s why the Democrats and their union and Marxist masters are so fixated on securing amnesty for the 20 million-plus illegal immigrants now in this country. The Democrats have so destroyed their traditional base that they can now only win by importing millions of new voters from south of the border.
Illegal Immigration
As late as the mid-1990s, both the Democrats and the unions vehemently opposed illegal immigration. They rightly saw that illegal workers would undercut U.S. workers and undermine union organizing.
In 2000, at the AFL-CIO’s national convention in Los Angeles, Service Employees International Union leader and DSA comrade Eliseo Medina engineered a complete turnaround in AFL-CIO policy toward illegal immigration. Illegal aliens were no longer to be shunned. Democrats would no longer campaign to close the borders. From now on, unions would campaign in support of illegal immigrant amnesty.
Medina revealed the real reason for the about-face at the “America’s Future Now!” conference in Washington on June 2, 2009. Medina addressed the gathered comrades on the vital importance of “comprehensive immigration reform”—a code phrase for amnesty.
Medina failed to mention the plight of illegal aliens, focusing instead on how—if given amnesty—they would eventually vote for Democrats.
Speaking of Latino voting patterns in the 2008 election, Medina said:
“When they [Latinos] voted in November, they voted overwhelmingly for progressive candidates. Barack Obama got two out of every three voters that showed up. …
“[If] we reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters. Can you imagine if we have—even the same ratio—two out of three?
“If we have 8 million new voters … we will be creating a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.”
But now, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s 22 million illegal immigrants. In other words, Medina wants to create a socialist one-party state by overwhelming the Republican Party base.
Tough luck for U.S. workers thrown out of jobs or living on incomes much lower than they were accustomed to. The Marxist-led unions don’t care about workers—they only care about revolution and raw power.
American union members are now being asked to accept the DSA-originated Medicare for All, which would put most of them in endless waiting lines for the most routine operations. They’re also being commanded to accept the Marxist Green New Deal, which would completely destroy America’s industrial base, which provides their jobs, and the U.S. military, which guards their freedoms.
Today’s Democratic Party is the tool of the unions. Today’s unions are controlled by revolutionary Marxists. Millions of veteran-supporting, gun-owning, stars and stripes-loving, patriotic union members are being led into socialism by their treacherous anti-American leadership. And they may drag all of the rest of us to hell with them.
That’s why Donald Trump Jr. was correct when he recently stated that the 2020 election would be “about communism versus freedom.”
Photo credit: AFL-CIO President John Sweeney during an AFL-CIO rally on Capitol Hill on June 19, 2007. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Jul 15, 2019 | Asia-Pacific, Blog, China, Commentary, Democratic Party, Enemies Within, Liberty, North America, Socialism/Communism
Commentary
The Epoch Times | July 11, 2019, Updated: July 11, 2019
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party had better be ready for a tsunami of new Democratic voters coming their way in 2020.
Far from the easy victory many pundits are predicting, there’s a strong chance that the president and his party (strong economy notwithstanding) may be overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of new voters coming mainly from the South and Southwest.
The same pro-China, communist-led organizations that almost won gubernatorial races in Florida and Georgia in 2018, and have almost turned once-reliably Republican Virginia blue, are aiming to mobilize a staggering 40 million new voters against President Trump.
If this network can mobilize just 20 percent of the new voters they are targeting, Trump will be a one-term president. Donald Trump Jr.’s recent prediction that the 2020 election will be a battle between “freedom and communism” will prove horribly accurate.
While most commentators are focusing on Midwestern “battleground” states, the American far-left is looking further South. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and its allies are looking to the millions of black, Latino, and low-income white potential voters in the South and Southwest who lean heavily Democrat but traditionally vote in low numbers.
If the FRSO can mobilize several million new Democratic voters in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona over the next 18 months, Trump will find victory extremely difficult—even if he makes some gains in Northern, Midwestern, and Western states.
Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona are all extremely vulnerable. Georgia isn’t far behind, and even Texas is in play. If the communists can flip Florida and Arizona for the Democrats, Trump almost certainly loses. If Georgia and North Carolina turn blue, Texas is not even needed. If Texas goes blue, the Democrat/communist alliance rules the United States forever.
Who Is Jon Liss?
Jon Liss is one of the most influential and little-known political operatives in the United States today. A longtime leader of the FRSO, Liss has been building political influence in Northern Virginia for over three decades. He has been active in Tenants and Workers United, the Rainbow Coalition/Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, the Fairfax County Taxi-drivers Association, and the Left Strategies Collective.
Liss’s organization, FRSO, itself grew out of the Maoist “New Communist Movement” of the 1970s and has maintained ties to the People’s Republic of China. The FRSO is probably about 2,000 members strong, but it works in partnership with the 5,000 members of the equally pro-China Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the nearly 60,000-strong Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Working together in an alliance called the “Left Inside/Outside Project,” these three groups have infiltrated the Democratic Party in every state of the union.
Mass Voter Registration
In recent years, Liss has led New Virginia Majority (NVM), an Alexandria-based voter registration operation that has signed up several hundred thousand, mainly minority voters to turn Virginia to Democratic-leaning from a reliably Republican state. NVM is able to micro-target potential Democratic voters by using sophisticated demographic information and maps generated by an FRSO supporter based in the Geography Department of Wuhan University in China.
NVM’s Florida partner organization, New Florida Majority (NFM), almost elected far-leftist Andrew Gillum to the governorship of Florida in 2018, by helping raise the Democratic vote in the Sunshine State by more than 40 percent. Similar communist-directed mass engagement of minority voters almost elected Stacey Abrams to the governorship of Georgia and Beto O’Rourke to the U.S. Senate from Texas. They did succeed in electing Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate from Arizona and Alabama, respectively. In North Carolina, FRSO activists have used minority voters to elect several leftist Democrats to local government positions.
State Power Caucus
The lessons learned in Virginia, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, and Texas are now being applied on a national scale to oust Trump.
One of the main coordinating bodies for this ambitious project is the State Power Caucus, headed by Liss and FRSO affiliate Andrea Mercado of NFM.
Liss writes about this new strategy on the FRSO-aligned website Organizing Upgrade:
“Inspired by the disaster of Trump and Trumpism two years out, most organizers are engaged in barroom or coffee shop speculation about the 2020 election.
“Among the two dozen announced Democratic candidates, many debate: will it be Sanders or Warren, with their attacks on corporate Democrats? Will it be one of Hillary’s heirs, with their cozy relationship with Wall Street? Will Harris be the first Black woman nominated by a major party? If it’s Biden, do we sit it out?
“All of it is idle speculation unless ‘we’ collectively organize tens of millions of the 108 million eligible voters who didn’t vote in 2016. That’s right, one hundred and eight million eligible voters chose not to register or to vote in 2016. The non-voting block is disproportionately young, poor, and people of color.”
So what’s the solution?
“Dozens of state-based power building organizations have banded together to lead efforts to build a bottom up long term front against Trump and Trumpism. Over the last twenty-five years, state power organizations have grown to fill the political space created by the decline of Democratic Party local organization, the breakup and collapse of ACORN, and low levels of voter turnout. This reflects a shift from narrow Alinskyism and its very limited political engagement.”
For years, communist-influenced groups such as ACORN and its spinoffs have chipped away at the Republican voting base in scattered efforts across multiple states. What Liss reveals here is an effort to consolidate these groups into one front to massively amplify their effects.
Building the Caucus
According to Liss:
“Starting in the summer of 2017, many leading state-power organizations have come together as a caucus to support peer-to-peer learning and incubate innovate organizing practices. Included among the organizations that have been leading the State Power Caucus are New Virginia Majority, New Florida Majority, California Calls, Washington Community Action Network, and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.
“All told, there are 22 organizations from 15 states involved in the Caucus. Importantly, these organizations recognized the need to develop a systematic and long-term alternative to Trumpism.”
These groups, all affiliated with the FRSO, can credibly claim to have had a significant effect on voting patterns since the 2016 election cycle. However, they acknowledge that a much greater effort will be required to defeat Trump.
“We’ve also begun to assess the collective impact of state-based organizations. Looking at 2016, our rough estimate is that at most 4 million people were contacted and encouraged to vote. This is our high-water estimate. The actual number who actually voted is probably much lower still.
“Now, recall the 108 million people who were eligible but not voting? They are largely our ‘core’ constituency, or in other terms, they are our unorganized social base. This 108 million, when compared to the voting electorate, is more Black, more immigrant, more working class and poor.
“If we initially target just half of the 108 million, and we acknowledge that some in that half are going to disagree with our values and politics, some aren’t going to vote no matter what, and some are in geographies that we just can’t reach, we believe our real voter mobilization target number is 40 million, and we’ve agreed as a caucus to that number as our target. That’s our natural constituency.”
Liss sees this goal as a means to elect more socialists and communists to public office, but also to decisively defeat Trump as a step toward moving the country much further down the socialist road.
“The long game to defeat white nationalism and move past neo-liberal corporatism is by building a bottom up movement of 40 million people.”
New Party, New Society
In a follow-up article on Organizing Upgrade, Liss makes it clear that the State Power Caucus aims to go way beyond defeating Trump. The real goal is to build a new mass socialist party that will eventually be able to challenge for state power.
Liss is happy that the communist left has finally acknowledged the necessity of electoral work on the road to a socialist America. The Bernie Sanders movement has been a big part of this tactical shift. Liss writes:
“I’m old, but a little too young to have lived through the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and its battles to form revolutionary parties and pre-parties, that is, to build a disciplined band of professional revolutionaries to carry out a political line. … On the other hand, there is a unique, maybe even historic opportunity to build a political-strategic space to carry out electoral organizing.
“Increasingly, there is a sector of radical organizations who believe that electoral work is a key area of struggle. That is a huge shift from the last few decades: credit Bernie and his campaign for revitalizing the notion of socialism and the importance of elections, credit many immigrant rights, Occupy and Movement for Black Lives leaders for recognizing the need for mass action AND an electoral strategy.”
But all this new energy will be wasted without centralized coordination:
“It’s time to create a ‘general command’ or a place where all organized groups of people who view elections as key area of struggle and who view growing a base of radical ‘new majority’ Democratic voters as a central task. To be explicit, new majority Democrats refers to women, especially women of color, Black and immigrant voters, and sectors of young and working-class voters.”
It’s also imperative to support whoever the Democrats choose to challenge Trump:
“Our task is to build an organizational vehicle, what I call a ‘party-like space’ … around the following points: a) build a stronger, larger base of voters of color, younger voters and women voters (in Virginia, for example, Black women voters have been the motor for all progressive change), b) support existing state power organizations that is ,some of the dozens of social movement organizations contending for state level governing power, or at least organizations that are outside of the Democratic Party structures c) agree to support the Democratic candidate who emerges to take on Trump in the general election.”
So what would this party-like structure do? According to Liss, it would be “a valuable step toward a coherent approach for building a socialist movement.”
“On a strategic level, this party-like space would exist in order to build the foundations for a mass left organization capable of challenging elites in the two dominant parties, leveraging the strengths and demands of multiple movements, and making possible a struggle for life beyond Trump and Trumpism. Practical next steps should include:
1. Agree to these or similar points of unity …
2. Coordinate electoral plans.
3. Do real world work both together and apart, regularly and collectively assess progress, learn lessons and adjust strategies.
4. Recruit other projects and organizations to join this political space.
5. Develop working relationships to funnel members and volunteers to state power organizations, DSA, or the Working Families Party who are building independently of the Democratic Party, while also expanding the electorate and building the broadest front against Trump and Trumpism.”
Communist Inspiration
In order to illustrate the past successes of this approach, Liss cites the example of El Salvador’s often ruling FMLN, an electoral alliance built around the Communist Party of El Salvador.
“In El Salvador, 5 organizations under life-threatening duress managed to unite to create the FMLN. They started with very different strategic positions but created a process for collaboration and coordination. Over time, many of the differences were not nearly as important as the need to work together. Again, while longer term strategic considerations may develop over time, getting this real work started for 2020 is the way to start.”
Credible Threat
The FRSO and its allies have enough people and resources to make possible their plan to mobilize 40 million new voters against Trump.
Their leadership of the State Power Caucus and their control of 22 voter registration organizations in 15 states is no small army. Add to that massive funding from the Democracy Alliance, labor unions, and leftist foundations, and possible ongoing informational support from China. It’s clear that Trump has some serious under-the-radar opposition coming from the FRSO and the State Power Caucus.
These groups will work in California, Ohio, and other states, but the real focus will be Southern and Southwestern Republican-held states with high minority populations. North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona may well be the real battleground states this election cycle.
The outcome of the next election will either set the United States on a new upward spiral of freedom and prosperity, or it could send the United States and the West into a nearly unstoppable downward spiral into socialism and tyranny.
In World War II, the battle for civilization was decided in the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway Island, Normandy, and “The Bulge.”
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Jul 15, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Asia-Pacific, China, Commentary, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
Commentary | The Epoch Times | June 10, 2019 | Updated June 10, 2019
Russia and China formed an international power bloc in 2001 that puts the old Soviet-led military alliance—the Warsaw Pact—to shame. It’s called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
Most Westerners have never heard of it, yet it’s rapidly becoming one of the most powerful forces on the planet.
In fact, most Western leaders operate under the delusional belief that Russia and China are antagonists and can at times be played against each other. The idea that Russia and China are allies and are jointly working to destroy the West is just too much for most Western leaders to contemplate.
The “Russia and China are enemies” disinformation campaign led former President Richard Nixon to open diplomatic and trade relations with Beijing in the mid-1970s. Nixon believed he could play communist China against the communist Soviet Union. Nixon’s massive blunder undermined the United States’ industrial base, while building up a new powerful enemy. Today, the United States faces two world-class enemies rather than one.
Worse, Russia and China are now open allies.
Alliances
The SCO is a permanent intergovernmental international organization, created on June 15, 2001, in Shanghai by the Russian Federation, the Muslim-majority “former” Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and the People’s Republic of China.
The SCO maintains two permanent bodies: the SCO Secretariat, based in Beijing, and the Executive Committee of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The organization’s official languages are Russian and Chinese.
The SCO’s stated goals are “strengthening mutual trust and neighborliness among the member states; promoting their effective cooperation in politics, trade, the economy, research, technology and culture, as well as in education, energy, transport, tourism, environmental protection, and other areas; making joint efforts to maintain and ensure peace, security and stability in the region; and moving towards the establishment of a democratic, fair, and rational new international political and economic order.”
That is double-speak for Russian–Chinese world domination.
The SCO has expanded considerably since its early days, especially since June 2017, when India and Pakistan were granted full membership status.
Currently, the SCO comprises eight member states: India, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
The SCO counts four observer states: Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia. The SCO also maintains six “dialogue partners,” namely Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia, Nepal, Turkey, and the “Democratic Socialist Republic” of Sri Lanka.
The SCO “family” currently consists of two openly communist states—China and Nepal—and eight formerly communist states, all of which maintain communist-era security structures—Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Belarus, and Cambodia. Further, the SCO includes three major Islamic powers: Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, plus Afghanistan and two heavily communist- and Islamist-influenced South Asian nations: India and Sri Lanka.
I believe that North Korea is effectively a Russia/China client state and an ally of Iran, and should also be counted as a de-facto member of the SCO alliance.
One of these countries—Turkey—is still nominally a NATO member, which was established to defend Europe from Moscow’s expansionist ambitions. Turkey is also increasingly becoming the leader of the global Islamist movement.
The SCO is now the largest regional organization in the world in terms of geographical coverage and population, encompassing 60 percent of Eurasia and almost half of the world’s population.
Even more disturbingly, the SCO is a formal, if little-reported-on, military/national security alliance.
War Games
The SCO’s first joint military exercise was held in 2003, with the first phase taking place in Kazakhstan and the second in China. Russia and China have since cooperated in large-scale war games involving thousands of troops—called Peace Missions—in 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2010, and every two years since.
India and Pakistan joined the exercises for the first time in 2018.
During the 2007 war games in Russia, with leaders including then-Chinese President Hu Jintao present, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin announced that Russian strategic bombers would resume regular long-range patrols for the first time since the end of the “Cold War.”
“Starting today, such tours of duty will be conducted regularly and on the strategic scale. … Our pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life,” Putin said, according to The Associated Press.
These patrols now regularly skirt Western Alliance air space.
Of the world’s top 15 military powers (the United States still claims the No. 1 position), the SCO family includes:
- No. 2: Russia
- No. 3: China
- No. 4: India
- No. 9: Turkey
- No. 14: Iran
- No. 15: Pakistan
Of these, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and probably Iran are nuclear powers. It’s also possible that many of the former Soviet republics now in the SCO network maintain some covert nuclear stockpiles.
The United States claims about 6,200 nuclear weapons, all developed before 1992, while France, the United Kingdom, and Israel have around 600 between them, for a total of about 6,800.
Russia publicly claims nuclear weapon parity with the United States (but likely secretly maintains several thousand more), most of which are state-of-the-art weapons; China has around 290 nuclear weapons; India and Pakistan have around 140 each; and North Korea has around 10—for a total of around 7,100.
In the event of all-out war, India may go its own way, as may France, but it’s clear that the SCO has more than enough firepower to mount a serious challenge to a very shaky Western alliance.
It’s foolish to believe that if the United States ever gets in a shooting war with China that Russia will stay on the sidelines. Almost certainly, war with either Russia or China will turn rapidly into a war with the SCO. India under the Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi may well be the wild card, either remaining neutral or possibly allying with the West. However, India did formally join the SCO well after Modi came to power in 2014.
Certainly, India’s very strong communist movement would push to support Russia and China.
According to an article in the Oct. 25, 2006, edition of the Communist Party of Australia’s Guardian newspaper, Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Prakash Karat said: “The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) countries are going to be the new powerhouse of the world. It is in India’s enlightened interest that we understand its importance as we are a country which desperately needs energy. … Trilateral co-operation between India, China, and Russia has symbolic significance as it can dispel the notion that the 21st century is an American century.”
Naivety and cowardice toward the totalitarian regimes of Moscow and Beijing got us to the point we are at today. Nixon’s foolish opening to China built a hostile superpower in less than five decades. Reagan’s toughness on Russia forced Moscow into a 20-year retreat. Not defeat—retreat. Now, Russia is ahead of the United States in most key military areas. A disproportionate focus on the Islamic threat for the past 20 years—while perpetuating a belief that Russia and China could be managed separately—has proven a disastrous strategy.
President Donald Trump has been tough on both Russia and China and their puppets in Iran and North Korea. The only way out of the mess now is to quickly rebuild the United States’ military capabilities while isolating the new Evil Empire until Russia or China—or hopefully, both—is forced into real regime change.
That’s a risky strategy, but any other approach virtually guarantees defeat—and the end of Western civilization as we know it.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
