Podcasts about soviet communist party

NTD has produced a special TV series adapted from the book “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World,“ by the editorial team of ”Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.“ Watch the eighth episode, ”Infiltrating the West Pt. 2,” here. Since the Communist Party does not have leadership over Western countries, communist supporters, wittingly or not, disguise themselves by infiltrating all sorts of organizations and institutions. There are at least four major forces driving communist subversion in the West. The first agent of subversion was the Soviet Union, which founded the communist Third International (Comintern) to spread revolution worldwide. The second means of subversion was effected by local communist parties, which worked with the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. Third, economic crisis and social upheaval have encouraged many Western governments to adopt socialist policies in the last few decades, resulting in a steady shift to the left. The fourth force of subversion comes from those who sympathize with and support the Communist Party and socialism. These fellow travelers serve communism as a fifth column of “useful idiots” within Western society, helping to destroy its culture, sow moral degeneracy, and undermine legitimate government.   ⭕️ Watch in-depth videos based on Truth & Tradition at Epoch TV

Here are some historical events that happened on November 12 in the past:1918: Austria becomes a republic, marking the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.1927: Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, marking a significant moment in the power struggle within the Soviet Union.1941: During World War II, the Soviet Union launches Operation Typhoon, an offensive against German forces near Moscow.1954: Ellis Island, the immigration station in New York Harbor, closes its doors after processing over 20 million immigrants since 1892.1969: Independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the My Lai Massacre story. The My Lai Massacre was a mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly people, by U.S. Army soldiers during the Vietnam War.1990: Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web.Podcast Website:https://atozenglishpodcast.com/a-to-z-this-day-in-world-history-november-12th/Social Media:Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/671098974684413/Tik Tok:@atozenglish1Instagram:@atozenglish22Twitter:@atozenglish22A to Z Facebook Page:https://www.facebook.com/theatozenglishpodcastCheck out our You Tube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCds7JR-5dbarBfas4Ve4h8ADonate to the show: https://app.redcircle.com/shows/9472af5c-8580-45e1-b0dd-ff211db08a90/donationsRobin and Jack started a new You Tube channel called English Word Master. You can check it out here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2aXaXaMY4P2VhVaEre5w7ABecome a member of Podchaser and leave a positive review!https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-a-to-z-english-podcast-4779670Join our Whatsapp group: https://forms.gle/zKCS8y1t9jwv2KTn7Intro/Outro Music: Daybird by Broke for Freehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Broke_For_Free/Directionless_EP/Broke_For_Free_-_Directionless_EP_-_03_Day_Bird/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcodehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/eaters/simian-samba/audrey-horne/https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Joplin/Piano_Rolls_from_archiveorg/ScottJoplin-RagtimeDance1906/https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-a-to-z-english-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Show-notes and Transcript... 'The CCP is the mortal enemy of the US!'  This is one of the opening lines in Frank Gaffney's latest bestseller "The Indictment" and we are delighted to welcome him to Hearts of Oak today.  Frank has been a towering figure in the conservative movement for many decades from his time serving in the Reagan administration through to all the work done with Centre for Security Policy.  He is the go to person on any issue relating to national security of the US and in his new book Frank sets out eight charges against The Chinese Communist Party that lay out the reason and basis for a prosecution against them.  From their crimes against their own people to crimes against the whole world using biological warfare, espionage and infiltration while showing how the CCP are ravaging America's energy security and taking down the military.  This book gives a roadmap for any Republican legislator and official to use before its too late. Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. serves as Vice Chair for the Committee on the Present Danger: China. The Committee on the Present Danger: China defends America through public education and advocacy against the full array of conventional and non-conventional dangers posed by the People's Republic of China. As with the Soviet Union in the past, Communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States and to the idea of freedom—one that requires a new American consensus regarding the policies and priorities required to defeat this threat. And for this purpose, it is necessary to bring to bear the collective skills, expertise and energies of a diverse group of experts on China, national security practitioners, human rights and religious freedom activists and others who have joined forces under the umbrella of the Committee on Present Danger: China. In 1988, he founded the Center for Security Policy. Mr. Gaffney serves at the Executive Vice Chairman for the Center. The Center has been nationally and internationally recognized as a resource for timely, informed and penetrating analyses of foreign and defense policy matters. Under President Ronald Reagan, he acted as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. He served as chairman of the High Level Group (NATO's senior politico-military committee) and as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control. Policy under Assistant Secretary Richard Perle. He was also a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Frank hosts Secure Freedom Radio, an hour-long, nationally syndicated program that airs every weeknight. His daily Secure Freedom Minute commentaries are heard on 200 stations coast-to-coast. He is a featured contributor to Breitbart Radio and a columnist for Breitbart.com. He appears often on national and international television networks such as Fox News, CNN and BBC. Over the years, his op.ed. articles have appeared in such publications as: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, National Review, Newsday, American Legion Magazine, and Commentary. Mr. Gaffney is Founder, President, and CEO of Save the Persecuted Christians (STPC), a not-for-profit, non-partisan educational corporation established in 2018 to inform Americans of the global crisis of rising anti- Christian violence and to hold state and non-state persecutors accountable for their crimes against humanity. Frank's leadership has been recognized by numerous organizations including: the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award (1987), the U.S. Business and Industry Council's Defender of the National Interest Award (1994), the Navy League of the United States' “Alfred Thayer Mahan Literary Achievement Award” (1999), and the Zionist Organization of America's “Louis Brandeis Award” (2003). Mr. Gaffney received a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.  'The Indictment' with forward by Steve Bannon available from Amazon...  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Indictment-Prosecuting-Chinese-Communist-Friends-ebook/dp/B0C297HN7Y/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1 Connect with Frank and 'Securing Freedom'... WEBSITE:  https://www.securingamerica.tv/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/frankgaffney GETTR:      https://gettr.com/user/frankgaffney Interview recorded 9.6.23 *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more...  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Please subscribe, like and share! Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Frank Gaffney. And I was delighted that Frank had the time to join us. I've had the pleasure of being on his show numerous times. And he is one of the towering figures of the conservative movement across the world with a specific focus on security. But today he joins us to talk about his book, The Indictment, Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party for What It Has Done Against the West and it lays out nine charges against the CCP. So we we touch on most of them, on energy security, on the US military and how it's been attacked, on the economic battle that China has waged against the West, on the biological attack that we've seen over the last three years, and of course how China has captured a lot of the elites in America and the West, and not only the elites individuals but the institutions as well. So much to cover and he ends up with actually 20 action items and how we can respond to this. I know after listening to Frank you will want to get the book. It is a fantastic overview of the threat that we face from China.  Frank Gaffney, it's wonderful to have you with us today. Thank you for your time.  (Frank Gaffney) The pleasure is really mine. Thank you for yours. Not at all. I think I first heard your name from Lord Pearson, who I've had the pleasure of working with for 10 years and when I first heard your name you sounded like a legendary figure who had their finger on the pulse policy-wise. You'd served in the Reagan administration so politically and you were doing public engagement and helping the public understand. So it is a delight to have you on with us. Thank you, I'm really appreciative of your time.  Well I'm a huge fan of Malcolm Pearson's. We've had a mutual admiration society I think for a long time and I appreciate so much of the work that he's been doing as have you, Peter, at Hearts of Oak. And I'm always delighted to have a chance to have you on our program and look forward to the visit with you here on yours. Not at all, it's great to have you. And the viewers obviously @FrankGaffney on all the social media platforms, at Twitter and everything else, and @SecureFreedom. And of course they can watch that. And Center for Security Policy is the organization which you're the founder of. Maybe we could start on that and let us know what led you to start the organization itself and why was it needed? I left the Reagan administration in the beginning of 1988 and looked about for an organization that did what I thought needed to be done to help people like me during my time in the Reagan Pentagon contend with the various challenges that policy makers have. Trying to stay not only engaged properly in various fights, both internal to the administration, as was true in that case, as well as externally, by enlisting the help of people on the outside. There didn't seem to be any efficient way of doing that, other than retail, which is, a very challenging thing when you've got a very busy program. I was able to establish that others felt as I did, that it would be useful to have an organization that could help senior policy makers inside the government, with a single phone call to bring in experts and others that they wanted to have engaged in those fights, if you will, from the outside with efficient connectivity, as they say. So we started the organization, the Center for Security Policy. Over the 35 years it's been in business, spawned a great many tiger teams and team Bs and working groups and coalitions and the like to try to basically advance what my old boss, Ronald Reagan, described as the practice of peace through strength and to help those in government in the executive branch on Capitol Hill, as well as the media and the public at large, understand the challenges we face and what needed to be done about them. And I'm very proud of the work that the center has been doing and happy to continue to be a part of it as its executive chairman. I think when I first came across you, your focus had been on Islam and that certainly had been what I have learned over the last 15 years. And this is a change to looking at a different threat, China. And that's what we're going to bring up the book. Let me bring up the screen itself. And this is the publication itself, the indictment, and it is available everywhere, Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China and the World. And we're going to go into this chapter by chapter, looking at the charges you have. But yeah, that change, that focus from looking at Islam and the threat on to China. Tell us about that. Well, I guess I would say the sort of arc of my career, such as it has been mostly downhill from my time with President Reagan, I have to say, but it's been fighting totalitarians of one stripe or another, first the Soviets, of course, during my time prior to the Reagan administration in the United States Senate with two terrific members of that body, Senator Scoop Jackson, a Democrat, and Senator John Tower, a Republican. Then, of course, during the Reagan administration, when we were really in the clinches, bringing down the Soviet Union, as Reagan promised he would do. And then, as you say, during the sort of interlude after the fall of the Soviet Union, the people who emerged to kind of fill the totalitarian vacuum, if you will, were what I think of as Sharia supremacists. It's not all Muslims. Of course, it's those who seek to impose this Islamic code of Sharia on the rest of us and use jihad to accomplish that. And that was a very serious threat at the time, but it has certainly been overshadowed and far surpassed in recent years by the emergence of yet another totalitarian, another communist one, that is to say the Chinese Communist Party. And what we've been doing in the past four years, Peter, is trying to essentially replicate some very important capabilities that I think helped Ronald Reagan define and then ultimately defeat his times, as he put it, existential threat to freedom, namely the Soviet Communist Party, one of which was something called the Committee on the Present Danger, which was this kind of pickup team of national security practitioners, subject matter experts, business leaders, and others who came together to really try to help Ronald Reagan, one of its members as a matter of fact, devise a strategy for taking down the evil empire. And he brought 30 or so members of that committee into his administration. Once, he had run on a platform of changing the trajectory from détente or appeasement, if you will, and maybe containment at best of the Soviets, to one of rolling back that evil empire and, freeing its enslaved peoples. Those members of the Committee on the Present Danger helped him do that, and the rest, as they say, is history. We've created, about four years ago, what we call the Committee on the Present Danger in China, to hopefully help elective officials accomplish a similar kind of course correction with what is, in fact, not only our time's existential threat to freedom, but I believe far and away the most serious we in the free world have ever faced, and that would be, again, the Chinese Communist Party or CCP. And one of the things that we've been doing over these past 9, 10, 11 months or so has been a series of webinars, some 70 of them, designed to do two things. One, to examine what the Chinese mean when they describe the practice of unrestricted warfare against America. And secondly, who has been helping them wage that kind of warfare against us in the United States and really the free world more generally. It's been a fascinating experience. I've had the privilege of moderating these programs. And what we came up with were well over 100 hours of very, very high-quality analysis, insights, policy recommendations, and the like. And what we wanted to do, basically, was to, distil the most important of those points, make them accessible to the audience and the public more generally. And that's where this book, The Indictment, came from, was that distilled essence and I've been very pleased to see that it's been selling well, I think because people know there's a problem with China, they don't just fully understand what it is and we're hoping to help explain it and give them action items as to what needs to be done now about it.  I love the research then that's gone into it as you've given us an insight because often you see publications rushed out just simply going to market for the sake of publishing. But hearing about those 100 hours, those intense discussions, really understanding, I mean, it is a mammoth amount of research that's gone into it. Well, it is. And again, I think the beauty of this is that people can have access to that research as well. In fact, at the back of the book, we have a list of all of the webinars that we drew upon and QR codes, which enable them very easily to go to the videotape, as they say, see them themselves. What we've got are basically, in most cases, just a quote or two from them. But there's really a, well, I think of it as kind of a graduate level course on the Chinese Communist Party. The warfare that it's been engaged in, its ambitions for global hegemony, and how far advanced it now is towards realizing that objective, thanks in part to the help of what they call captured elites, especially here in the United States. I love, looking even just at the beginning of the introduction, one of the short paragraphs was you jump straight in and you see exactly where you understand the issue to be. The Chinese Communist Party is the United States' mortal enemy. The CCP explicitly seeks America's destruction as long as devastating, I bet, pre-violent, unrestricted warfare techniques against us for decades with the help of their friends amongst American captured elites. I just thought, because sometimes authors slowly go into the topic, but you put it straight out there, this is the threat we face. Kind of up front, yeah. And partly that's because I think, you know, there's a famous expression here in the States, Peter, as you may know, that says a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. And I think an awful lot of Americans, and I think people around the world for that matter, have been mugged by the reality of the Chinese, well, biological warfare attack against all of us using this so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus, the Wuhan virus, the Chinese Communist Party biological warfare engineered virus that made the pandemic of COVID-19 possible. And to the extent that they have been mugged by reality and have some sense that there's something really seriously wrong with what the Chinese are doing, there's an appetite for learning more that I think requires just directness and candour and that's what we've tried to bring to this book, The Indictment. Well, we'll jump into that charge which is the fourth one, that the CCP has waged biological warfare against America and the rest of the world. I'm wondering is this the first time that many people have woken up to the reality with all the information coming out about the origins of it, with China being able to provide the protection equipment, being able to provide the testing equipment, being able to provide everything seemingly extremely quickly. Do you think that was a wake-up call for many people? I think so. I pray so, because it's certainly urgently needed. And just a word about kind of the structure of the book under the rubric of it being an indictment. We have a number of charges, and you've mentioned charge number four is that the Chinese Communist Party deliberately launched a biological warfare attack against the United States and the world. And that's based on an analysis not only that, in fact, this virus came out of a, biowarfare laboratory in Wuhan called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is now more and more generally accepted as what happened, after years of being lied to and otherwise told, no, no, no, it came out of nature. But the real kicker, Peter, and what makes this indisputably a biological warfare attack is that however the virus got out of the laboratory, and we just don't know for sure whether it was by accident or deliberately. What we do know is that the Chinese communists deliberately sent it overseas. And again, as you know, Peter, by contrast, they were ensuring that nobody left Wuhan to go anywhere else in China. But if they wanted to get on a plane to some international destination, especially here, they were on their way. So that is why we consider it to be deliberate, purposeful, malevolent, and in fact a proof of concept of something else that's also in that chapter about charge four, which is very disconcerting, needless to say. And that is that about 20 years ago, the man who was at the time the defense minister of China. A general by the name of Qi Haoqian, spoke in secret to a group of party leaders and told them, among other things, that Deng Xiaoping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the man who brought us, by the way, Tiananmen Square, back in the early 1990s, had given as a charge to the biowarfare program of China, which, by the way, is illegal, the mission of depopulating the United States so that it could be colonized by China. So this episode was, I think, a precursor, a test, a proof of concept, if you will, of what may well be in store for us with a lot worse, a lot more virulent bioengineered viruses or what have you, in that arsenal of such products that the Chinese have been beavering away at for decades now. The first charge the CCP has perpetrated crimes against the people of China and it's captive nations. We kind of have been aware in the West of how the Chinese people living in China are treated with all different types of controls. I mean, you started on that, a focus on how it's treating its own people, before taking it wider. I mean, tell us more about that. Yeah, this seems to be the right place to start, not only to help people calibrate on the nature of the Chinese Communist Party, namely that it is the most murderous regime in history. It has killed, probably conservatively, a hundred million of its own people. And by that I mean people that it claims are their people, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Southern Mongolians, people now in Hong Kong, people who are really enslaved peoples of China. But the vast majority of that number are Han Chinese themselves, who've been starved, who've been tortured to death, that their organs harvested who've otherwise been thrown into gulags and slave labour camps and all the rest. The point is that never in the history of the world, really if you take the entire history of the world, have you ever seen anything like the killing machine that the Chinese Communist Party has represented, especially if you add, as I think we have to, the 400 million children they have murdered in the womb, they boast about it. And by some estimates, it's probably 500 million at this point. Whatever the number is, it's just staggering. And people need to understand that for two reasons. One, both to properly calibrate, as I say, the character of this enemy we face, but also to realize that if you think about it, even for a half a minute, any regime that treats its own people that badly is not going to treat ours better. So this is one of the reasons why we start with the crimes against humanity by the Chinese Communist Party and then pivot to eight other charges, including the one we discussed, the biological warfare one, that constitute, we think, war crimes against this country and others.  Well then you move on to CCP is at war with America and it's interesting, myself looking at when we had the Cold War, we had the Iron Curtain, which was the line between the West and between the USSR. And it was a war. And yet when you look at China, the same discussion, the same rhetoric, the same words are not used. And we're just told it's just an economic powerhouse that is fighting for, I guess, control of certain parts. But it's not a war as such. Tell us why you you are saying that the CCP is at war with America? Well, for one reason, they've declared war on America, a little known fact. And I'm not speaking about the publication in 1999. Obviously, with the permission of the Chinese Communist Party of a book entitled, unrestricted warfare, by two senior colonels in the People's Liberation Army, who by way went on to become decorated general officers subsequently, so this was no rogue operation, but they proceeded to lay out I think some 20 different lines of attack that could be used and would be used by the Chinese Communist Party to weaken and take down, if they can, America without firing a shot. But beyond that, which is kind of, as they say in the intelligence business, a clue, the Chinese actually published in May of 2019, not in some secret document internal to the Chinese Party, but in the pages of its most important propaganda outlet, People's Daily, a declaration of, quote, people's war, unquote, against the United States of America. That again is a clue. And Xi Jinping, the general secretary now of the Chinese Communist Party, has made no secret of his belief that the Chinese have to defeat the United States, have to supplant it to become the rightful inheritors once again of the place in the world that the Chinese have historically considered to be theirs, namely the center of the universe, the middle kingdom, the dominant power on the planet. So, for all these reasons, I think it's just unmistakable that they are at war with us. Not necessarily that we want it or that we feel ourselves to be in that state, but that's the facts, ma'am. And if you don't understand it, as the famous Chinese strategist Sun Tzu made clear, you can't possibly win such a war. China does seem to have an appetite for growth, for control, for dominance, and is happy to bring claims that are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old to lay claim. And the same kind of, I guess, conversation diplomacy in the West doesn't seem to work as well there. Is that a fair thought?  Well, look, I think the Chinese have many attributes. And when I say the Chinese, I mean sort of the party, the Chinese Communist Party. Some of them are historical traits of Chinese emperors and other rulers, but some of them are unique to the Chinese Communist Party. One is patience, for sure. Another is the practice of deception. For sure. And a third is, going back again to Sun Tzu, to see what you can do to defeat your enemy without actually having to fight them. And all of those are part and parcel of the kind of warfare that the Chinese Communist Party has been waging against us. That general secretary I mentioned a a moment ago, Deng Xiaoping, at the end of the Soviet empire, as he observed essentially the Reagan strategy leading to its defeat, he resolved that that Cold War may be over, but a new Cold War was beginning between the United States and China, and whereas the Soviets had lost theirs, China would win the new one, and they would use what he came to call a hide-and-bide strategy to pull that off. What would that mean? Well, that would mean that they would hide their true intent, which is world domination, and they would bide their time patiently, as the Chinese often do. In the process, they would enlist as much help from elites in particular, what they would say captured elites in places like the United States, who would help with technology, know-how and investment dollars and other ways to both weaken the United States and strengthen communist China. This has played out brilliantly over the past three or four decades, to the point now where the current general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, sees no need for hiding and biding any longer. He's rather, as I said earlier, frontally, aggressively showing that he intends to pursue, our destruction, including by not just these pre-violent or non-kinetic, unrestricted warfare techniques, Peter, but actually the old-fashioned kind, the shooting war kind as well. And that capture in America, at least, we've kind of, the media have allowed us a little snapshot into some of the bribery, the espionage there, but we've kind of haven't seen much of it. But it does seem to be so deep, even looking at the institutions, the control that China have on simply educational institutions. I mean, tell us more about about how they've captured that, I guess, so easily. Well, they've done it, I think, partly by that hide-and-bide strategy, by having not only members of various sectors of our society, running from Wall Street and the financial sector to business more generally, to media, to academia, as you say, to Hollywood, And also, of course, our political elites. But they've got buy-in from the top levels of our government to the idea that we want to do whatever we can to enrich and even strengthen communist China. And all these other folks, again, especially those mavens of Wall Street, were only too happy to make good money, at least personally, by engineering the penetration of our society and influential elites by the Chinese Communist Party, but also doing everything they conceivably could do to both enrich and enhance the power of what is in fact our mortal enemy. It's insane. It is reckless. It has put us in extreme peril, I believe, but I think that's essentially how this has worked out over time, and of course, you know, it has to be said. The more culpable such individuals in these elites have become of clearly aiding and abetting our enemy, the more incentive they've had not to acknowledge that reality, to cover it up, to continue to perpetuate it and prosper in doing so personally, but increasing, as I say, danger to the rest of us. In Charge 5 you talk about the economy and that certainly seemed to early on the Chinese were rolling this out. In the cold war you never talked about made in Russia it wasn't a thing but you think made in china and it is everywhere every product not only the electronic side but just everything is made in China. It seems as though they have taken a different route maybe than other times, certainly in the Cold War this was not the route that Russia went down, but the  economic attack, that seems to be specifically part of this attack by the CCP.  You're absolutely right, and I think that this again goes back to that hide-and-bide idea of Deng Xiaoping. He recognized that one of the things that that enabled Ronald Reagan to take down the Soviet Union was that it had not fully integrated its economy with the West. It had tried to varying degrees, but not very successfully. And certainly when Reagan began his strategy of rolling back, he famously called it, we win, they lose, it became even more difficult the Soviets to have that kind of access and influence. The Chinese set about making sure that they were intimately engaged with Americans, both buying their products for a time and and doing deals that would give these American businessmen, particularly, access to the incredibly appetizing idea of 1 point x billion mouths needing toothbrushes or whatever. That was a kind of tractor beam, if you will, for getting American participation in and involvement with the Chinese Communist Party. Over time, of course, that changed dramatically. All of those industrial capabilities that we had that would sell stuff to China migrated to China. In some cases, quite literally, lock, stock, and barrel. Some of our factories were dismantled and rebuilt in China to sell us from there what we had previously sold them from here. I hail from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the heart of what is now called the Rust Belt. When I was growing up, it was Steel City. It became the Rust Belt, not out of some inevitable decline, but because the Chinese Communist Party's economic warfare essentially took down our steel industry by replicating it there and then for a fraction of the cost, usually through dumping, making it uneconomic to build real steel output here. But that was just one example. You mentioned electronics, you mentioned flat screens, televisions, any number of other things, medicines not least, we have allowed to become increasingly if not exclusively dependent upon China as a result of this kind of economic warfare. And it's madness. I mean, look, we saw in the pandemic the dangers associated with relying on China for not only medication, but personal protective equipment and testing and the rest of it. That is not an accident, comrade. That is by design. And it has made it very difficult for people to contemplate disengaging, decoupling, as it's called, from China. But as we say in the action part of the book, the specific steps, we recommend some 20 of them, we have no choice but to decouple because the Chinese are in the process of doing it to us and it will be extremely problematic if we have not made preparations to compensate for those sources. And of course President Trump understood this and one of his big themes was returning jobs back to America and he was maybe the first leader in the West to realize what was happening and actually do something about it. I mean, tell us about that because that's the chain and obviously with Biden being in, it's again trying to roll that back and seem to try and destroy the manufacturing base, the technology base, everything to make us more subservient on China.  Right. I think Donald Trump, long before he became president, was very clear-eyed about the problem that we face from China. I've written a number of books on the subject and spoken about it at length for many years, decades I think. As president he sought to take some corrective steps. But this goes back to the point about captured elites. He was obstructed at every turn by people like Steve Mnuchin. The Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Kudlow, who had some shining moments, but unfortunately all too often sort of defaulted to we need to keep engaging and keep Wall Street happy and the like. And similarly, members of Congress, many of them relying on donors like the Wall Street mavens, were not keen on this decoupling and so resisted Trump. I think his single most effective effort was the use of tariffs, which he could more or less do unilaterally and that wasn't directly under the control of the Treasury Department as were things like investment flows and the like. But I just would say this, Peter, I think that the cumulative effect of what Donald Trump did was certainly to showcase the dangers we faced from China, and to try for the first time, really, since Nixon went there. To adjust the trajectory of our relationship. It's a shame. It's really, I think, a tragedy that he wasn't able to do more, partly, you know, I think, due to the considerations that I just talked about, but we'd have been even worse off than we are today if we'd had Hillary Clinton, for example, pursuing aggressively that same policy of doing the bidding of China, enabling its power to grow and otherwise weaken our own. The Chinese have a term for this, they call it comprehensive national power. And I think there's no doubt about it that as it is, especially as a result of the Biden administration, I kind of consider it the Obama-Biden 3.0 administration. But whatever you call it, it's definitely picked up where Obama left off. But the Chinese calculation is their comprehensive national power has greatly increased. And our comprehensive national power has greatly diminished. And unfortunately, that's partly why I think, and I hope I'm wrong about this, as I hope I'm wrong about everything, frankly, but especially this, that they have calculated that they can now, move into that next phase, a shooting war phase, perhaps not cost-free, but with sufficient impunity to make it worthwhile. Well, that's one of the other seven as CCP enablers are taking down the US military and Chinese military spending is huge and it seems though that's rising at a time where the US military are reducing in size and more worried about diversity issues and pronouns than they are about equipment and training. And of course, you could espionage with Chinese taking a lot of secrets and replicating and being ahead in the hypersonic missiles, being ahead of the US. I mean, tell us about that because it does seem that China are in a perfect position of strength going into any possible military confrontation.  I don't know if it's a perfect position but I'm afraid they perceive it as a position of relative strength to ours, especially in in the Western Pacific, the immense build-up of their Navy, in a few short years, a product of decades of planning, to be sure, and building of shipyards. It's said that one of China's shipyards is larger than the entire footprint of every single American shipyard. And that translates into, of course, vastly greater capacity to push more platforms to sea. And the Chinese are doing that. And, you know, you have now a 300-some ship Navy in China, which is roughly the same size, a bit larger than ours. But when you realize that ours is deployed worldwide and much of it on the other side of a canal in Panama that the Chinese happened to control. It means we've got roughly half of our Navy confronting the entirety of their Navy. And their Navy is not only very modern and increasingly capable, as you say, of having advanced weapon systems on board, but also is now building, we're told, to something on the order of a 400 ship fleet. And that means, you know, we will be outgunned for sure. And to the point that you just made about hyper sonics, Peter, there's a study, as you know, that has just recently been published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute that found that in some 37, out of 44 different technology categories, most of them with relevance to military applications. China is ahead of the United States. So that qualitative edge that we've relied upon to offset quantitative disadvantages is now, I think, unfortunately, a thing of the past. And that's a very ominous thing indeed. Just the final thing to touch on is energy security. And I love the way the book goes through these. You get an absolute overall understanding of the threat. It's not just on the military or economic, but it's the energy security. And obviously Biden is doing all he can to destroy American independent energy policy. But even you see China with the boycotts of Russia energy, well, China and India step in and they just get energy on the cheap. But it seems though that energy security in America is really being degraded alarmingly. Well again that's the point of the exercise. The Biden administration is deliberately dismantling not only our prospective energy dominance as Donald Trump is fond of talking about but also our energy independence. In favour of what? In favour of making us dependent on China for energy products like solar panels and windmills and even transformers for our electric grid, all of which creates a new supply chain that we simply cannot afford as a matter of national security to rely upon the goodwill of the Chinese to supply. But in a way, this makes a larger point. What I think is the case. And I really don't believe this is an exaggeration, Peter, every policy that the Biden administration has pursued, both domestic and foreign, certainly not just this energy security piece, has two things in common. One, they've all been bad for America. And two, they've all benefited, either directly or at least indirectly, the Chinese Communist Party. And that, I think, has something to do with the fact that the President of the United States is as one of our committee on the present danger China members of career, CIA undercover operative spy who used to recruit and run foreign agents for the United States. He says in the terms of the trade, his business, the lexicon, if you will, of intelligence, Joe Biden has to be described as a controlled asset of the Chinese Communist Party. And that explains a lot about what I just described, and why, again, it is not an accident that it is doing so much damage to us and further emboldening as well as empowering our mortal enemy of the Chinese Communist Party.  And you mentioned, and we'll just finish on this, that you finish off the book, What Must We Do? 20 Action Items to Protect America and Defeat the CCP. People can go through all those, but you just want to mention, it's always good, you lay out a dark situation, a absolute threat to not only America but to the West itself. But you end off by giving actually points that there is a response that can happen. Let us know more about that.  Well thank you. Yes, they're relatively brief but they really flow from the longer conversation in the earlier segment of the book where we're talking about the specific problems in these various areas. And it's mostly just common sense, frankly. It starts with understanding that we are, in fact, at war with the Chinese Communist Party. If you don't get that right, you're not going to do much of the rest of it, obviously. That we need to, in fact, adopt a war footing in response to the threat we're facing, much as the Chinese are on a war footing now. And again, increasingly, one that is seemingly meant to be a violent shooting or footing at that. But as important as anything we talk about is the urgent need to remove from positions of power and influence, those captured elites, especially if God forbid, we do in fact face the prospect of a violent conflict with China, we simply can't have as the commander-in-chief of the United States military. It's a controlled asset of the enemy. Another of the very important points, I think, taking a page out of the Reagan playbook, which of course I'm both an admirer of and played a small role in trying to implement. Namely, the delegitimization of the Chinese Communist Party as he delegitimized the evil empire of the Soviet Union is crucial for one other reason besides, you know, trying to make the lives miserable of the CCP. It helps to speak to the people of China, which, going back to where we started, have suffered more than anybody at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party have more interest than anybody in seeing the end of this party. They're not our enemy. We have no, I think, quarrel with the Chinese people. But the Chinese Communist Party is our enemy and theirs as well. And we need to delegitimate them. And we think the way to do that is to describe them as what they are, a transnational criminal organization. Well, we'll finish on that. I'll again leave our viewers with, there it is, the indictment prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China and the World is available anywhere, not only in the US, but in the UK, in Europe. Frank, I appreciate your time. As I said at the beginning, I'll repeat that you are a legendary figure in the conservative movement and your focus on security brings something quite fresh that others don't bring. So we do appreciate your time today. And my yours, and thank you for those kind words, and back at you. We appreciate you all as well, and give my regards of Lord Pearson.

The U.S. spent the first ten months of 1949 in a recession. Competition for the advertising dollar was stiffer. There were now over two-thousand-six-hundred AM and FM radio stations in the country, and TV was becoming a serious threat. Over one-hundred Television stations were on the air. Only two Network Radio shows had ratings higher than a 20. Just two years earlier, there were fifteen. Radio's average Top 50 ratings were their lowest since 1937 and network radio revenue dropped for the first time since 1933. Meanwhile, NBC, ABC, CBS, and the Dumont Network reported a combined TV income of $29.4 Million. But advertisers were learning that TV production costs were much greater than radio's. The extra money had to come from somewhere. Radio budgets were the likely source. On December 18th, 1949, NBC broadcast an episode of America United with a panel discussion on estimates and predictions concerning 1950. It was moderated by David Brinkley, at the time NBC's Washington commentator. The post-World War II world had been chaotic. Europe was rebuilding slowly as the US and Russia became the two superpowers. That same day, as the Philadelphia Eagles were beating the Los Angeles Rams in the 1949 NFL Championship Game, Nikita Khrushchev was made The Soviet Communist Party's secretary of the Central Committee, and single-party Communist elections were held in Bulgaria. Two days later, Josef Stalin was awarded the Order of Lenin as part of celebrations for his seventieth birthday.

(Bonus) Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 –21 January 1924), better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Soviet Communist Party. A Marxist, he developed a variant of Communist ideology known as Leninism.

In the wake of a crime spree, Dinesh points out how Democrats unleashed criminals and now can't control them. Dinesh makes the case for why CNN should fire everyone and then dissolve itself, just as the Soviet Communist Party did in the 1990s. As part of his continuing examination of tyranny in Shakespeare, Dinesh introduces the play "Julius Caesar." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, the focus shifts to Moscow and a look at changes in the Communist world. Nikita Khrushchev, reviled in the Soviet Communist Party for buckling under to Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, is blissfully unaware of the threat to his power bubbling up in the ranks of the Party leadership. A coup is clearly afoot, but the competition for which bureaucratic apparatchik will replace him—Brezhnev, Suslov, Malenkov of somebody else—becomes unexpectedly fierce. Waiting in the shadows, Alexander Shelepin, former head of the KGB, is sitting on a “dictatorship coach” and a cache of secret documents that he hopes will give him the edge in the power struggle that breaks out in the Kremlin in the fall of 1964. Length: 26:02 Show Notes For This Episode Next Episode (Bonus, Recap & Explainer): April 18, 2021 Next Regular Episode: April 25, 2021

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial in 1938. Koestler’s book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial in 1938. Koestler’s book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial in 1938. Koestler’s book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial in 1938. Koestler’s book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler's book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin's purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin's show trial in 1938. Koestler's book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial in 1938. Koestler’s book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This week on ChinaEconTalk, Jordan interviews Chris Miller, associate professor of international history at Tufts University and a specialist on Russian politics, economics, and foreign policy. Drawing on some of his recent publications, Miller discusses topics ranging from Sino-Soviet collaboration and competition to their respective economic and political reform programs in the 1970s and 80s. Miller concludes by exploring the significance of the collapse of the USSR in terms of the impression it made on Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping, and what this may suggest about the future of Chinese politics and the ongoing Sino-Russian relationship. As Xi himself is reported to have said during a closed-door meeting in 2012: “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? … Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone. In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.” What to listen for on this week’s ChinaEconTalk:  34:17: On the Soviet origins of Deng’s Reform and Opening strategy: “There was a period of learning [by China] from the Soviet Union in the 1950s right after the revolution...Deng picked that back up to a certain extent in the late 1970s...the goal was to give space to private enterprises in the countryside and to give space to farmers to operate without central Party control...Deng saw this and said, ‘I wonder if we can try something like this at home in China, and we can use Lenin to justify it.’” 52:15: “The CCP interpretation, which is also the interpretation of many in Russia today, is that it’s plausible to have had a strong man reform the economy but keep the party and the state as they were, and in my research that just seems extraordinarily implausible…in some ways the Xi Jinping view is the ‘have your cake and eat it too’ version, and the reality is the history doesn’t support that counterfactual.”

This week on ChinaEconTalk, Jordan interviews Chris Miller, associate professor of international history at Tufts University and a specialist on Russian politics, economics, and foreign policy. Drawing on some of his recent publications, Miller discusses topics ranging from Sino-Soviet collaboration and competition to their respective economic and political reform programs in the 1970s and 80s. Miller concludes by exploring the significance of the collapse of the USSR in terms of the impression it made on Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping, and what this may suggest about the future of Chinese politics and the ongoing Sino-Russian relationship. As Xi himself is reported to have said during a closed-door meeting in 2012: “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? … Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone. In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.” What to listen for on this week's ChinaEconTalk:  34:17: On the Soviet origins of Deng's Reform and Opening strategy: “There was a period of learning [by China] from the Soviet Union in the 1950s right after the revolution...Deng picked that back up to a certain extent in the late 1970s...the goal was to give space to private enterprises in the countryside and to give space to farmers to operate without central Party control...Deng saw this and said, ‘I wonder if we can try something like this at home in China, and we can use Lenin to justify it.'” 52:15: “The CCP interpretation, which is also the interpretation of many in Russia today, is that it's plausible to have had a strong man reform the economy but keep the party and the state as they were, and in my research that just seems extraordinarily implausible…in some ways the Xi Jinping view is the ‘have your cake and eat it too' version, and the reality is the history doesn't support that counterfactual.” Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

After the fall of Soviet Communist Party, former Soviet Union leader Gorbachev tried and failed to re-enter politics. He then became an environmentalist and established the Green Cross International. Obviously, Gorbachev would be likely to introduce communist factors into his environmental pursuits, and he often promoted the establishment of a world government in order to stop environmental crisis.

After the fall of Soviet Communist Party, former Soviet Union leader Gorbachev tried and failed to re-enter politics. He then became an environmentalist and established the Green Cross International. Obviously, Gorbachev would be likely to introduce communist factors into his environmental pursuits, and he often promoted the establishment of a world government in order to stop environmental crisis.

After the fall of Soviet Communist Party, former Soviet Union leader Gorbachev tried and failed to re-enter politics. He then became an environmentalist and established the Green Cross International. Obviously, Gorbachev would be likely to introduce communist factors into his environmental pursuits, and he often promoted the establishment of a world government in order to stop environmental crisis.

After the fall of Soviet Communist Party, former Soviet Union leader Gorbachev tried and failed to re-enter politics. He then became an environmentalist and established the Green Cross International. Obviously, Gorbachev would be likely to introduce communist factors into his environmental pursuits, and he often promoted the establishment of a world government in order to stop environmental crisis.

After the fall of Soviet Communist Party, former Soviet Union leader Gorbachev tried and failed to re-enter politics. He then became an environmentalist and established the Green Cross International. Obviously, Gorbachev would be likely to introduce communist factors into his environmental pursuits, and he often promoted the establishment of a world government in order to stop environmental crisis.

The first agent of subversion was the Soviet Union, which founded the communist Third International (Comintern) to spread revolution worldwide. Starting in the 1980s, the Chinese communists implemented economic reform. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established political, business, and cultural exchanges that gave it an opportunity to infiltrate the West. The second means of subversion was effected by local communist parties, which worked with the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. Third, economic crisis and social upheaval have encouraged many Western governments to adopt socialist policies in the last few decades, resulting in a steady shift to the left. The fourth force of subversion comes from those who sympathize with and support the Communist Party and socialism. These fellow travelers serve communism as a fifth column of “useful idiots” within Western society, helping to destroy its culture, sow moral degeneracy, and undermine legitimate government.

The first agent of subversion was the Soviet Union, which founded the communist Third International (Comintern) to spread revolution worldwide. Starting in the 1980s, the Chinese communists implemented economic reform. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established political, business, and cultural exchanges that gave it an opportunity to infiltrate the West. The second means of subversion was effected by local communist parties, which worked with the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. Third, economic crisis and social upheaval have encouraged many Western governments to adopt socialist policies in the last few decades, resulting in a steady shift to the left. The fourth force of subversion comes from those who sympathize with and support the Communist Party and socialism. These fellow travelers serve communism as a fifth column of “useful idiots” within Western society, helping to destroy its culture, sow moral degeneracy, and undermine legitimate government.

The first agent of subversion was the Soviet Union, which founded the communist Third International (Comintern) to spread revolution worldwide. Starting in the 1980s, the Chinese communists implemented economic reform. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established political, business, and cultural exchanges that gave it an opportunity to infiltrate the West. The second means of subversion was effected by local communist parties, which worked with the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. Third, economic crisis and social upheaval have encouraged many Western governments to adopt socialist policies in the last few decades, resulting in a steady shift to the left. The fourth force of subversion comes from those who sympathize with and support the Communist Party and socialism. These fellow travelers serve communism as a fifth column of “useful idiots” within Western society, helping to destroy its culture, sow moral degeneracy, and undermine legitimate government.

The first agent of subversion was the Soviet Union, which founded the communist Third International (Comintern) to spread revolution worldwide. Starting in the 1980s, the Chinese communists implemented economic reform. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established political, business, and cultural exchanges that gave it an opportunity to infiltrate the West. The second means of subversion was effected by local communist parties, which worked with the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. Third, economic crisis and social upheaval have encouraged many Western governments to adopt socialist policies in the last few decades, resulting in a steady shift to the left. The fourth force of subversion comes from those who sympathize with and support the Communist Party and socialism. These fellow travelers serve communism as a fifth column of “useful idiots” within Western society, helping to destroy its culture, sow moral degeneracy, and undermine legitimate government.

The first agent of subversion was the Soviet Union, which founded the communist Third International (Comintern) to spread revolution worldwide. Starting in the 1980s, the Chinese communists implemented economic reform. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established political, business, and cultural exchanges that gave it an opportunity to infiltrate the West. The second means of subversion was effected by local communist parties, which worked with the Soviet Communist Party and the Comintern. Third, economic crisis and social upheaval have encouraged many Western governments to adopt socialist policies in the last few decades, resulting in a steady shift to the left. The fourth force of subversion comes from those who sympathize with and support the Communist Party and socialism. These fellow travelers serve communism as a fifth column of “useful idiots” within Western society, helping to destroy its culture, sow moral degeneracy, and undermine legitimate government.

In my latest documentary, we describe Russian President Vladimir Putin as the most powerful man in the world. But why? After all, the United States -- and China, for that matter -- are more powerful countries than Russia. The power of a head of state is determined both by the country's strength and the capacity he or she has to exercise that power, unilaterally, unconstrained by other institutions, parties and political forces. And combining those two metrics, it's easy to see why Vladimir Putin rises to the top of list. Putin has created what he calls a "vertical of power," something unlike any we see in other great nations. As the Russian chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov -- himself a harsh critic of Putin -- has noted, the entire structure of Russian political power rests on one man. When the czar died, you knew the structure that would endure and the process by which his successor, his son, would be elevated. When the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party died, the Standing Committee and the Politburo would select his successor. But when Putin dies -- I almost wrote if -- what will happen? No one knows. To understand Putin, you have to understand Russia. The last hundred years for that country have seen the fall of the monarchy, the collapse of democracy, the great depression, World War II with its tens of millions of Russians dead, Stalin's totalitarian brutalities, the collapse of communism, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin's years of chaos and corruption. Then comes Vladimir Putin, who ushers in stability and, in popular perception, rising standards of living and increasing prominence and respect in the world. That respect is important. Russians have immense national pride. Russia is the largest country on the planet -- 48 times larger than Germany and encompassing 11 time zones that straddle Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Russia is also a rich country, containing some of the largest deposits of raw materials, from oil and natural gas to nickel and aluminum. Culturally, it has often thought of itself as the third Rome, preserving Christianity even as Rome and Byzantium fell to the Barbarians.

More on the inner workings of the Soviet Communist Party after 1928 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.