[video=youtube_share;0_lO7P1ElV8]https://youtu.be/0_lO7P1ElV8[/video]
Chapter Fifteen: The Communist Roots of Terrorism
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. State Terrorism Under Communist Regimes
2. How Communist Regimes Exported Terror
3. The Communist Origins of Islamic Extremism
a. Sayyid Qutb: The Marx of Islamic Extremism
b. The Leninist Vanguard of Jihad
c. The Communist Core of Islamic Extremism
d. Qutb and the Rise of Terrorism
e. How Communism Has Victimized Ordinary Muslims
4. The Chinese Communist Party’s Support of Terrorism
a. The CCP’s Support of Yasser Arafat’s Terrorist Activities
b. The CCP’s Ties to Al-Qaeda
5. The Hidden Alliance Between Terrorism and the Western Radical Left
Conclusion
References
Introduction
On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked passenger airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York, as well as the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people. It was the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that the United States suffered a blow of this scale on its own soil. The 9/11 attacks had worldwide impact. The United States launched a global War on Terror, overthrowing the Islamic regime in Afghanistan and the Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
The public has since become familiar with the terrorist movement and its representatives, such as Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Few, however, are aware of the close relationship between terrorism and communism.
The terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” first appeared in 1795 as a reference to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, [1] which laid the foundations for the communist movement (see Chapter Two of this book).
In the modern world, terrorism comes primarily in three forms: state terrorism under communist regimes, terrorist activity carried out abroad by the agents of communist regimes with the aim of spreading violent revolution, and Islamic extremism, which owes much of its ideology and methods to communism.
1. State Terrorism Under Communist Regimes
The communist century is a century of lies, violence, and killing. Terrorism is an important tool for communists to spread their ideology around the world. The rise of a communist regime, in turn, results without exception in the mobilization of the state machine to impose terrifying brutality. This government-sponsored repression is state terrorism.
Vladimir Lenin relied on terrorism to take power in Russia. In 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin regarded as a revolutionary hero for his role as director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), said plainly, “We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted.” [2]
The Marxist Karl Kautsky, who in 1919 published Terrorism and Communism, gave a comprehensive overview of what would come to pass under the proletarian dictatorship that Lenin sought to establish. Examining the violence of the French Revolution, Kautsky concluded that Lenin’s Bolsheviks had inherited the terrorist character of the Jacobins and would repeat it. [3]
Yuri N. Afanasyev, a Russian historian, blamed Lenin for founding a policy of state terror, violence, and lawlessness: ”Violence is actually our entire history,” Afanasyev said. [4]
Following the creation of the Soviet Union, the communist regimes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Kim Il Sung, and other despots all depended on killing to maintain their power. The violence and barbarism of their state terror has been addressed in previous chapters.
Violence and murder comprise but one component of communism’s terrorist agenda. Even more destructive is how communism uses the combined powers of political and religious fervor to indoctrinate people with communist party culture, planting the seeds of deceit, hatred, and violence to be passed from generation to generation.
2. How Communist Regimes Exported Terror
While imposing state terrorism on their own people, communist regimes support terrorist organizations abroad for the purpose of fomenting revolution or destabilizing rival states.
Anti-communist expert Brian Crozier, founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, spent decades studying the relationship between communism and terrorism, and published many books and papers detailing his findings. He served as an aide to anti-communist leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in analyzing the use of terror by the communist bloc. [5]
Stanislav Lunev, a former officer in the Soviet military’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) who defected to the West, accused the GRU of being one of the primary mentors of terrorists around the world. [6]
Many extremist groups that staged anti-U.S. attacks — among them the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Japanese Red Army commandos, Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Red Army Faction, Turkish arms smugglers, and South American guerrillas — had the support of the Soviet KGB. In 1975, Richard Welch, director of the CIA in Athens, was assassinated by Greek Marxists. [7]
In 1979, top NATO commander General Alexander Haig was involved in an attack that wounded three of his bodyguards when a landmine exploded under their vehicle, which was following the general’s vehicle. In September 1981, General Frederick J. Kroesen, commander of the NATO Central Army Group, was injured in Heidelberg, West Germany, when members of the Red Army Faction fired an anti-tank rocket at his armored car.
The most influential form of modern terrorism, however, was the radical Islam nurtured by the Soviet bloc as a means of destabilizing the Muslim world.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the Middle East belonged to the Western colonial sphere. As peoples in the region gained independence, the Soviet Union took the opportunity to exert influence. Contradictions between Muslim denominations, Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Cold War, oil politics, and the clash of civilizations between the Western and Islamic cultural spheres have led to the complex and chaotic situation that the Middle East finds itself in today.
It was in this background that the Soviet Union carried out its penetration of the Muslim sphere. This may seem contradictory at first glance. Muslims follow an Abrahamic faith and believe in Allah, but Marxism-Leninism is atheist and aims for the elimination of religion. How could they be reconciled?
The communist movement resembles a plague that spreads through all available vectors. Communism made its first, albeit failed, advances on the Muslim world shortly after the October Revolution.
In June 1920, the Bolsheviks aided in the establishment of a Soviet regime in the Iranian province of Gilan, the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic or the Soviet Republic of Gilan. The regime carried out a series of radical reforms, including policies to expropriate landlords of their wealth, that were accompanied by a program of anti-religious propaganda. These measures proved exceedingly unpopular, and the regime was ousted by the following September.
Later, the concept of “Islamic socialism” began to take hold. Representatives include Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Movement (PLO), and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. The PLO was supported by the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and engaged in widespread terrorist activities.
Algeria, South Yemen, and Afghanistan were under communist rule for varying lengths of time during the Cold War. In 1979, the Soviet Union launched an invasion of Afghanistan and occupied the country for ten years in an attempt to prop up the last remaining communist regime in the Muslim world.
Promoting communism in an area with deeply held religious beliefs is a steep challenge. The Soviet Union’s efforts in directly exporting socialist revolution to the Muslim world proved very unsuccessful. However, while communism itself failed to establish control over the region, it did much to influence the creation and development of contemporary Islamic extremism.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, former three-star general in communist Romania and advisor to President Nicolae Ceauşescu, acting chief of his country’s foreign intelligence service and a state secretary of Romania’s Ministry of Interior, became the highest-ranking Eastern Bloc defector when he escaped to the United States in July 1978.
In his article “Russian Footprints,” Pacepa revealed a large amount of insider knowledge about communist support for terrorism in the Middle East. [8] He quoted Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, as saying, “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”
Eighty-two aircraft hijackings were carried out in 1969 alone. Many of them were the work of the PLO with support from the Soviets and Chinese communists. Pacepa recalled that when he visited Sakharovsky’s office, he noticed a sea of small red flags dotting a world map. Each flag represented a hijacked plane.
Sakharovsky boasted to Pacepa that the tactic of aircraft hijacking was his own invention. Between 1968 and 1978, the Romanian security directorate made weekly aircraft deliveries of military supplies to Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon. Archives from the dissolution of East Germany show that that in 1983, the East German Foreign Intelligence Agency sent $1,877,600 worth of ammunition for Kalashnikov assault rifles to Lebanese terrorist organizations. Czechoslovakia provided Islamic terrorists with 1,000 tons of Semtex-H, an odorless plastic explosive.
[Read more in PDF]
Chapter Fifteen: The Communist Roots of Terrorism
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. State Terrorism Under Communist Regimes
2. How Communist Regimes Exported Terror
3. The Communist Origins of Islamic Extremism
a. Sayyid Qutb: The Marx of Islamic Extremism
b. The Leninist Vanguard of Jihad
c. The Communist Core of Islamic Extremism
d. Qutb and the Rise of Terrorism
e. How Communism Has Victimized Ordinary Muslims
4. The Chinese Communist Party’s Support of Terrorism
a. The CCP’s Support of Yasser Arafat’s Terrorist Activities
b. The CCP’s Ties to Al-Qaeda
5. The Hidden Alliance Between Terrorism and the Western Radical Left
Conclusion
References
Introduction
On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked passenger airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York, as well as the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people. It was the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that the United States suffered a blow of this scale on its own soil. The 9/11 attacks had worldwide impact. The United States launched a global War on Terror, overthrowing the Islamic regime in Afghanistan and the Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
The public has since become familiar with the terrorist movement and its representatives, such as Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Few, however, are aware of the close relationship between terrorism and communism.
The terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” first appeared in 1795 as a reference to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, [1] which laid the foundations for the communist movement (see Chapter Two of this book).
In the modern world, terrorism comes primarily in three forms: state terrorism under communist regimes, terrorist activity carried out abroad by the agents of communist regimes with the aim of spreading violent revolution, and Islamic extremism, which owes much of its ideology and methods to communism.
1. State Terrorism Under Communist Regimes
The communist century is a century of lies, violence, and killing. Terrorism is an important tool for communists to spread their ideology around the world. The rise of a communist regime, in turn, results without exception in the mobilization of the state machine to impose terrifying brutality. This government-sponsored repression is state terrorism.
Vladimir Lenin relied on terrorism to take power in Russia. In 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin regarded as a revolutionary hero for his role as director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), said plainly, “We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted.” [2]
The Marxist Karl Kautsky, who in 1919 published Terrorism and Communism, gave a comprehensive overview of what would come to pass under the proletarian dictatorship that Lenin sought to establish. Examining the violence of the French Revolution, Kautsky concluded that Lenin’s Bolsheviks had inherited the terrorist character of the Jacobins and would repeat it. [3]
Yuri N. Afanasyev, a Russian historian, blamed Lenin for founding a policy of state terror, violence, and lawlessness: ”Violence is actually our entire history,” Afanasyev said. [4]
Following the creation of the Soviet Union, the communist regimes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Kim Il Sung, and other despots all depended on killing to maintain their power. The violence and barbarism of their state terror has been addressed in previous chapters.
Violence and murder comprise but one component of communism’s terrorist agenda. Even more destructive is how communism uses the combined powers of political and religious fervor to indoctrinate people with communist party culture, planting the seeds of deceit, hatred, and violence to be passed from generation to generation.
2. How Communist Regimes Exported Terror
While imposing state terrorism on their own people, communist regimes support terrorist organizations abroad for the purpose of fomenting revolution or destabilizing rival states.
Anti-communist expert Brian Crozier, founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, spent decades studying the relationship between communism and terrorism, and published many books and papers detailing his findings. He served as an aide to anti-communist leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in analyzing the use of terror by the communist bloc. [5]
Stanislav Lunev, a former officer in the Soviet military’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) who defected to the West, accused the GRU of being one of the primary mentors of terrorists around the world. [6]
Many extremist groups that staged anti-U.S. attacks — among them the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Japanese Red Army commandos, Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Red Army Faction, Turkish arms smugglers, and South American guerrillas — had the support of the Soviet KGB. In 1975, Richard Welch, director of the CIA in Athens, was assassinated by Greek Marxists. [7]
In 1979, top NATO commander General Alexander Haig was involved in an attack that wounded three of his bodyguards when a landmine exploded under their vehicle, which was following the general’s vehicle. In September 1981, General Frederick J. Kroesen, commander of the NATO Central Army Group, was injured in Heidelberg, West Germany, when members of the Red Army Faction fired an anti-tank rocket at his armored car.
The most influential form of modern terrorism, however, was the radical Islam nurtured by the Soviet bloc as a means of destabilizing the Muslim world.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the Middle East belonged to the Western colonial sphere. As peoples in the region gained independence, the Soviet Union took the opportunity to exert influence. Contradictions between Muslim denominations, Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Cold War, oil politics, and the clash of civilizations between the Western and Islamic cultural spheres have led to the complex and chaotic situation that the Middle East finds itself in today.
It was in this background that the Soviet Union carried out its penetration of the Muslim sphere. This may seem contradictory at first glance. Muslims follow an Abrahamic faith and believe in Allah, but Marxism-Leninism is atheist and aims for the elimination of religion. How could they be reconciled?
The communist movement resembles a plague that spreads through all available vectors. Communism made its first, albeit failed, advances on the Muslim world shortly after the October Revolution.
In June 1920, the Bolsheviks aided in the establishment of a Soviet regime in the Iranian province of Gilan, the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic or the Soviet Republic of Gilan. The regime carried out a series of radical reforms, including policies to expropriate landlords of their wealth, that were accompanied by a program of anti-religious propaganda. These measures proved exceedingly unpopular, and the regime was ousted by the following September.
Later, the concept of “Islamic socialism” began to take hold. Representatives include Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Movement (PLO), and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. The PLO was supported by the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and engaged in widespread terrorist activities.
Algeria, South Yemen, and Afghanistan were under communist rule for varying lengths of time during the Cold War. In 1979, the Soviet Union launched an invasion of Afghanistan and occupied the country for ten years in an attempt to prop up the last remaining communist regime in the Muslim world.
Promoting communism in an area with deeply held religious beliefs is a steep challenge. The Soviet Union’s efforts in directly exporting socialist revolution to the Muslim world proved very unsuccessful. However, while communism itself failed to establish control over the region, it did much to influence the creation and development of contemporary Islamic extremism.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, former three-star general in communist Romania and advisor to President Nicolae Ceauşescu, acting chief of his country’s foreign intelligence service and a state secretary of Romania’s Ministry of Interior, became the highest-ranking Eastern Bloc defector when he escaped to the United States in July 1978.
In his article “Russian Footprints,” Pacepa revealed a large amount of insider knowledge about communist support for terrorism in the Middle East. [8] He quoted Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, as saying, “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”
Eighty-two aircraft hijackings were carried out in 1969 alone. Many of them were the work of the PLO with support from the Soviets and Chinese communists. Pacepa recalled that when he visited Sakharovsky’s office, he noticed a sea of small red flags dotting a world map. Each flag represented a hijacked plane.
Sakharovsky boasted to Pacepa that the tactic of aircraft hijacking was his own invention. Between 1968 and 1978, the Romanian security directorate made weekly aircraft deliveries of military supplies to Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon. Archives from the dissolution of East Germany show that that in 1983, the East German Foreign Intelligence Agency sent $1,877,600 worth of ammunition for Kalashnikov assault rifles to Lebanese terrorist organizations. Czechoslovakia provided Islamic terrorists with 1,000 tons of Semtex-H, an odorless plastic explosive.
[Read more in PDF]