America, Russia, and China

PREFACE

Over forty years have passed since my first letter or essay was published in a newspaper printed in the United States. Since then, I suppose that I have written hundreds of items, some in English and some in Polish, some for the newspapers and some for other readerships. As I look back on this activity, I am struck by the fact that I — and those who believe and think as I do — have been fighting the same battles over and over again. Furthermore, though we have frequently won the intellectual battles, the perspective of forty-some years shows me clearly that the United States has been losing the moral and political wars.

Abortion, divorce, illegitimacy, drugs, the deceptions of the mass media, the decadence of television and the movies, the use of our own tax dollars by our politicians to buy our votes, and the recent [1996] re-election to the White House of one of the worst scoundrels ever to disgrace his country — all these are the fruits of a philosophical and religious liberalism which has been in the American air since at least 1952, when I first saw the Statue of Liberty. Not satisfied with political liberty, we wanted freedom from responsibility, discipline, and moral norms. In the 1960's, we started to get what we wanted, until now almost nothing is left of the old America.

The 1996 national elections symbolize the collapse. Dole represented the generation which raised and educated the generation of Clinton. Dole, with his lack of principles and convictions, explains why and how no principles and convictions were ever transmitted to the Clinton generation. Morally, the United States was already "running on empty" in the 1950's.

The way in which the Cold War ended came as a pleasant surprise to me. The Soviet Union rotted and collapsed faster than the United States and the rest of the West. It probably would not have happened if not for the 1980's weapons build-up, which pushed the Soviet Union into bankruptcy — and which was engineered by Ronald Reagan, perhaps the least liberal American President since before World War II. And yet, it seems to me that disaster has merely been postponed.

The conduct of American foreign and defense policy remains in the hands of the same "East Coast Establishment" which gave Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta, in 1945, and which spent the next thirty-five years cultivating "peaceful coexistence," "detente," and other forms of appeasement. Today, this same Elite seems to believe that dollars, diplomacy, and the liberal ideal will lead to a "New World Order" and perhaps even to a one-world government, in which that same Elite will enjoy power and profits and in which both America and Russia will be reduced to the status of provinces. Almost totally demoralized, the American people may allow themselves to accept this. Russia, however, may be less willing.... And Russia still has a nuclear card which it can play....

It is hard to believe that everything that is happening is only because of lack of common sense and logic. Such apparent stupidity cannot possibly be real. There must be a deliberate reason for it. But what? The only possible reason that I can see is that secret organizations have succeeded in infiltrating our government and our entire "establishment." Their goal is the destruction of American sovereignty, the subversion of all the good that America once represented, and the creation of a one-world government which will be, so they think, under their own control. Just as Roosevelt liked the mass murderer Stalin so much that he gave him half of Europe, so our government and our "establishment" likes Russia. They are brothers under the skin, hating God, religion, morality, and all the ideals represented by the Statue of Liberty. They do not fear Russia; they fear only the American citizen, which is why they are so busily trying to disarm him.

Their plan will not work, of course. Russia is interested only in a one-world government under its own control. It despises our leaders and manipulators as gullible fools. Unfortunately, those same fools, with their evil arrogance, will drag us all to destruction before they are themselves destroyed by men as evil, but even more clever, than they are.

Realists sometimes get accused of being pessimists. Well, so be it. Still, I claim two major advantages for my pessimism. First, those who would continue the fight must know what they are up against if they are to make the best of their situation. If we are up against a civilizational collapse which has been underway for generations, we will accomplish nothing if we think merely in terms of winning this election or passing that legislation. Second, those who would continue the fight must know that they are likely to suffer many more defeats before, perchance, they start winning the war. Realism protects us against that false optimism which can easily turn into despair and surrender.

Realism, incidentally, also forces me to admit that my career as a publicist is nearing its end. Being over 80 years old, I find myself having to pass the torch on to those who are younger than I am. As I do so, I would like to thank Mr. C. Stolarczyk, who organized the publication of [America, Wake Up!], the many editors who published my various essays and letters over the years, and the friends whose appreciative interest has encouraged me to keep up the fight. Above all, I owe special thanks to my wife, Lisaweta (pictured here), without whose co-operation I would have accomplished little or nothing. Of all my editors and critics, she was the most critical — and the most helpful.

Although I have been an American citizen since the 1950's, I was raised and educated in Poland. During the last forty years, I have repeatedly been struck by the parallels between the mistakes which once destroyed Poland and the mistakes which now promise to destroy the United States.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Poland was a Great Power with a territory extending literally from the Baltic to the Black Seas. By the late eighteenth century, Poland had squandered its power and had rendered itself unfit for anything except to be partitioned and annexed by its neighbors, including Russia. Several factors played a role in the story of Poland's political suicide. First, those who were responsible for the conduct of affairs of state tended, as a group, to ignore the country's long-term interests in favor of their own private interests. Second, some of them were actually willing to accept foreign bribes in order to advance the interests of Poland's rivals and enemies. Third, many Poles swallowed the propaganda, fostered especially by Russia, that Poland could secure the friendship of its neighbors by disarming and ceasing to be a threat to them. Although Poland regained its independence in 1919, the events of World War II (including the tragedy of the Warsaw Insurrection, in which I was a participant) and the post-war years illustrate that history does not usually give second chances to those who wasted their first opportunities.

With the end of the Cold War, many Americans may ask how this tale can be relevant to us today. My answer: the same Russia which once partitioned Poland and which rivalized with the United States during the Cold War is still very much there. Ever since the time of Peter the Great, Russia has followed the same patient and consistent policy of expansion. After the interruption of the Revolution of 1917, the same geopolitical and psychological imperatives which drove the "white czars" of the Romanov dynasty reasserted themselves under the "red czars" of the Communist Party. Whenever Russia sorts out the confusion which has followed the so-called "fall of Communism," we must expect that the "brown czars" who are already emerging (and who generally spent their formative years as Communist Party functionaries) will respond to the same geopolitical and psychological imperatives which motivated their predecessors. When they do so, they will find that the nuclear arsenal inherited from the "red czars" is still a powerful card to be played. In fact, despite the general disarray of the Russian military establishment, the modernization and maintenance of that arsenal remains a high priority.

A comparison from American history may be helpful. In the 1830's, Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the single most profound student of the American people and their institutions, predicted that the United States and Russia would one day be the world's Great Powers. During the first half of the 1860's, many Europeans anticipated or hoped that the breakup of the Union and the resulting Civil War would nullify Tocqueville's prophecy of American political greatness. Within a few months of the end of the War Between the States, however, it was clear that the United States was in a better position than ever before to play a major role on the world scene. Today, while many Americans anticipate or hope that Russia's troubles have put an end to that country's ability to be a rival for world power, there is a strong probability that Russia will emerge from these troubles into a position of greater strength, confidence, and ambition.

In the meantime, China, with its two billion people and with its tradition of seeing itself as the "Middle Kingdom" to which all "barbarians" ought to be subject, is making its own preparations for a bid for world power. Fortunately for us, Mao Tse-Tung's "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" set China back by a generation. Even so, under Mao's more calculating successors, China has made up much of the lost time and now promises, within a generation at most, to be the dominant power in the Orient. In the next few years, we are likely to see a de facto Russian-Chinese alliance which will allow the two countries to cooperate in the economic and technological areas, while also freeing Russia to concentrate on the absorption of Europe and China to concentrate on the absorption of the Far East. In all likelihood, the two countries do not anticipate a showdown between themselves until some time after the United States has been pushed altogether off the Eurasian "world island." At that point, each probably hopes and plans to use America as a pawn in its final contest against the other.

While the details remain unknown, it seems fairly clear that what I have sketched out here represents the general pattern which world politics will follow over the next five to twenty years. In the face of this, the United States is re-enacting all the follies which were once played out by my Polish ancestors. First of all, we see not merely a pre-occupation with domestic affairs, but a selfish obsession with the political advantages which can be derived from the manipulation of the short-term interests of various political groups. Despite all the hot air coming from both parties about balancing the budget, all indications are that transfer payments, including welfare, entitlements for the Middle Class, and "corporate welfare," will continue to grow. The combined burden of taxation and regulation is systematically devouring the accumulated capital of centuries, thereby destroying the economic foundation of American military power.

All the attention which was paid several years ago to the so-called "peace dividend" was an early indicator that the money was beginning to run out and that the economic and technical prerequisites for national defense would be sacrificed in order to keep the transfer payments going. As the country heads closer to bankruptcy, we must anticipate that the scramble to loot whatever can still be looted and to grab whatever can still be grabbed will completely displace any concern with anything that is going on across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The social catastrophe which is being brought on by illegitimacy, drug use, crime, and the collapse of the schools will intensify and accelerate the trends. The more ominous the threats, the more inventive will be the rationalizations for ignoring them and the more tenaciously those rationalizations will be defended. Misguided "America First" conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan, can be expected to play as harmful a role in this respect as the liberal enthusiasts for the welfare state.

Corruption provides a second parallel between the Poland of the seventeenth century and the United States of today. Just as leading members of the Polish nobility took foreign money in exchange for the betrayal of their country's interests, so we find members of the Clinton Administration taking Chinese money in what appears to be payment for pro-Chinese policy decisions. As the details emerge concerning the scandal of the Lippo Corporation, the Riadys, the foreign campaign contributions to the Clinton Re-Election campaign, and the cushy jobs provided to ex-officials of the Administration by Chinese-controlled enterprises, it will become increasingly difficult to believe that the President was unaware of the treason — there is no other word for it — surrounding him.

Finally, if Poland once swallowed the illusion that it could survive and prosper without military power, so our own elites appear to have swallowed a similar illusion. The increased prominence of the United Nations, the "aggressive multilateralism" of the Clinton Administration, and such international authorities as the World Trade Organization are all manifestations of what George Bush once called a "new world order." (The Maastricht agreement has, if anything, taken Western Europe even further down this road than the United States has gone.) We may safely assume that the progressive surrender of American sovereignty does not stem from any overtly or consciously suicidal tendencies on the part of the influential players behind the scenes. Rather, it seems much more probable that the "interlocking elites" of big government, big business, academia, the media, and the banks view some sort of one-world government as a means of institutionalizing and expanding their power and, of course, their profits. In all probability, they calculate that once-free societies can be bribed into a willing surrender of personal liberty and national independence. In an environment of economic and social insecurity, "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" are likely to be effective inducements. The progressive legitimization of sexual immorality suggests also that "freedom below the belt" will be held out as a consolation prize for the abandonment of the more traditional kinds of personal freedom.

The problem with this scheme (apart, of course, from its breathtakingly cynical amorality) is that neither Russia nor China are likely to want any part of it, though they will certainly play along with it up to the point where it might require them to give up their own freedom of action. The managers of the "new world order" will then find out that an under-equipped, homosexualized, and feminized military is totally unsuited for war, regardless of its suitability for "peace-keeping."

The general trends which I have described here are already so far advanced, and have already built up so much momentum, that it is questionable whether the United States can still find the mental, moral, and material resources to escape. Within a few years, it is almost certain that the resources will cease to exist and that nothing short of thermonuclear war will be humanly capable of preventing today's trends from arriving at their logical destination.

Waclaw Bakierowski, 22 March 1997.

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