Buchanan and Stockman Under Putin's Spell

My long-time friend Pat Buchanan said in the 1992 presidential race that Ukraine was the first country he would visit if elected president. Back then, he had many Ukrainian American supporters  in his Cold War support of freedom for Ukraine and its people, a support seen  in many of his columns, some exposing for example the KGB’s disinformation campaigns against ethnics home and abroad.  

Peter B. Hrycenko

I am still a fan of Pat, but not for his Putin worship. See his July 25 column (and others) Is Putin Worse Than Stalin? It seems odd when he shows up on Moscow TV being interviewed by Shevardnadze’s daughter, in the heart of an oppressed criminal state, telling the world that the US should turn its back on Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, Georgia – while saying little derogatory about the latest evil empire.

How has his thinking changed on that struggling nation? He praises Russia’s mobster-in-chief Putin regularly in columns, saying we need to better understand this messianic dictator because he is historically entitled to his murderous takeover of neighbors.

For starters, our Western intelligence services have been heavily in Ukraine since before the Soviet breakup. (Don’t anybody mention that.) Of course the EU has a financial interest in Ukraine and its resources. A Ukraine that doesn’t look backward like Russia is a bonus to all the world.

Let us not forget that the US and bankers were heavily involved inside Russia itself in the 1990’s. We weren’t just there for the greatest plundering of an empire in history. Our FBI was battling with the Red Mafiya which had gained a foothold in the US. Ask Louie Freeh about that.

Without Western help, Ukraine would have been Russia twenty years ago.

Yet even with all the on-the-ground humanitarian and para-military aid, we saw Moscow this past winter ready to topple Ukraine. Putin’s mobsters both in and out of Ukraine had drained away enough wealth and bought out enough politicians, assassinated enough journalists and activists.

One would think the Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Russian citizens would give up in the face of unimaginable poverty and persecution. They did not, have not, and today we see the re-organized military of Ukraine pounding away at Putin’s terrorists. Our CIA, God bless them, is providing us daily images of the truth.

Now David Stockman (July 25: My Thoughts On Pat Buchanan’s Brilliant And Incisive Take on Washington’s Ukrainian Fiasco) fell into the Pat Buchanan scheme nicely. He writes that Putin “is no totalitarian menace even remotely in the same league as his Soviet predecessors. In that regard, Hillary Clinton’s sophomoric comparison of him to Hitler is downright preposterous.” Just wait a little longer, David, there is more to come in mobsterland. See if you change your tune.

Last Christmas, Putin barred our Russian expert journalist David Satter from re-entering Russia. See, Mr Satter has a different take on Putin. Watch his film “Age of Delirium” to see what the Soviet Man did to the oppressed nations and most importantly how the Putin mindset of lying, cheating, grubbing at all costs is expected over there today.

One more thing. I can’t imagine if Pat is able to sit still in his McLean chair, while reading David’s column in praise of him. David praises whatever non-intervention in Eastern Europe since the times of FDR. FDR however was not only unfortunately enfeebled by polio, he gave away the store to Stalin. In FDR’s last years of life, the White House foreign policy was run by the likes of Soviet agents of influence Harry Hopkins (the Lend-Lease give-away), Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White. China and Eastern Europe fell. Tens of millions were murdered then, now 150 million and counting. East European American commandos were betrayed to Stalin and tortured on television. Pat Buchanan knows this.

 Next order of business: send Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell and Jimmy Carter to Moscow to suggest it is time for a change.

A Joe McCarthy We Should Know

A restless world tired of traditional faith came to embrace a new religion in international socialism. That affair cost 150 million lives.  While a hostile world intelligentsia and a liberal media, the likes of the NY Times, worked hard at covering up the atrocities through the decades, there would be those young correspondents who risked their lives and reputations to expose them.  Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones for example travelled into the Ukrainian famine and smuggled out stories to the West.  For this, Muggeridge was sacked by his newspaper the Manchester Guardian. Jones was later assassinated by the NKVD.  George Orwell, a lifelong democratic socialist and anti-Stalinist, captured that era in “Animal Farm” and worked Jones into the book.  Societal persecution dogged all three men for speaking the truth when it wasn’t chic to suggest the Russian Revolution shouldn’t happen in the West.

Peter B. Hrycenko

But that top-down revolution was indeed unfolding here.

As Ukrainians worldwide commemorate the 80^th anniversary of Holodomor, the forced Soviet famine of 1932-33 that killed 10 million, with a December 4 monument unveiling in Washington, I’d like to say a few things about a hero who shed greatest light on communist infiltration and deception in America.  Joe McCarthy.

Loathed by many in the big media yet loved by the common man, Wisconsin Senator McCarthy for a scant five years went to the media to share what was going on in a federal government having a devil of a time cleaning out national security risks.  Warring with the Eastern Liberal Establishment got him packaged into the most hated politician in American history.  

He is the eternal face of the misunderstood and poorly explained Red Scare.  

A prime example of conventional treatment today of McCarthy and the period can be seen in the columns of The Morning Call's Paul Carpenter.  A couple times a year he drags out old Joe for a drubbing.


But first about the national security nightmare under Roosevelt and Truman.   Thousands of moles nosed their way into US government.  A maturing FBI grew aware of that cultural phenomenon but was hampered  because of the lax attitude under Roosevelt who himself could have summed up  the Stalin age when he quipped “ give Uncle Joe what he wants.”  We’re not talking about cute moles your dog digs up in the yard or the silly youth who paints a basement bathroom walls in black gloss along with a glowing hammer and sickle.  We’re talking intellectuals who clubbed together for years to overthrow American life and were often on the Kremlin payroll. Highest placed agents of influence, such as the State Department’s Alger Hiss, the White House’s Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins,  and Treasury’s Harry Dexter White, helped seal the fate of Eastern Europe – and China. The atom bomb project under the mysterious J. Robert Oppenheimer had true believers delivering Los Alamos secrets.

By 1945, our Army’s Signal Corps had the ultra-secret Operation Venona decoding cable message traffic between the US and Moscow.  They found 349 US citizens and resident aliens active in espionage, while thousands more could not be fully identified, according to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr in their book “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.”  Prosecutors had a dilemma: they couldn’t use Venona nor sometimes the best FBI evidence in courts without tipping off the Soviets.  Instead they had to settle on nailing many of the traitors and fellow travellers on lesser perjury charges. Untold numbers were quietly ushered out of government service by loyalty boards and personnel security officers.

Back to America’s astounding cold warrior.  In 15 months his investigative committee accomplished a decade’s work by Senate standards. Great energy was expended battling the White House just to get records out of various agencies such as the State Department and Army.  Famed prosecutors Roy Cohn and Robert F. Kennedy added star appeal. However the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower continuum didn’t take well to McCarthy’s growing power. Veteran journalist and educator M. Stanton Evans in his unequaled “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fight against America’s Enemies” explained McCarthy in retaliation would help to bring down several  prominent Democrats, most notably  Truman.  Curiously, Ike and his lib-mod Beltway advisors had weighed in against McCarthy.  VP Richard Nixon -- the hero who nailed Alger Hiss not long ago while a California congressman -- had been tasked in lining up votes in the Senate to censure him for his scalding arguments with senators. The Army hearings and the censure battle would cost the Republicans control of Congress. 

One of the best attorneys in America, Edward Bennett Williams, defending McCarthy, found out the censure hearing was no court of law. The Senate gave the sentence first, the verdict later.  Of those 46 charges against him, none was left standing. That led Nixon to strike off the word "censor" and replace it with "condemn." Satisfied that blowback wouldn't burn them should there be blowback, the establishment "condemned" McCarthy on just one laughable count, "conduct unbecoming." Williams pointed out that a number of current senators were already guilty of much more against McCarthy and society in general. Hypocrisy prevailed.

Declassified Operation Venona and the brief opening of KGB archives in post-Soviet Russia proved McCarthy right about his charges. Of course the mainsteam media and many knowing historians have ignored that.