By Ion Mihai Pacepa
From time to time, a book can change history. Dr. Jamie Glazov's Showdown With Evil is such a book, for it restores faith in American exceptionalism. Although its author was not privileged to be born in this country -- or maybe for that very reason -- he has dedicated his life to promoting America's excellence. His new book tells us why millions of people from all over the world are willing to pay any price, even death sentences, to join this unique land of freedom -- as he and I both did. It also proves that the Democratic Party's portrayal of the U.S. as a "decaying, racist, capitalist realm" unable to provide medical care for the poor, to rebuild its "crumbling schools," and replace the "shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race,"[1] is a self-serving lie designed to allow the leftist leaders of that party to steal America's wealth and use it for converting this magnificent country into a monument to themselves. Finally, this book shows us, in great details, how to rebuild the U.S. as the leader of the world.
Showdown With Evil is, in my view, a continuation of Dr. Glazov's first book, United in Hate, which examines the behavior of political leaders who, feeling uncomfortable in their own country, have bought into such off-the-wall utopian schemes as Marxism. That book called them believers, because they believe there is something profoundly wrong with their own country and fantasize about changing it into one where they will finally fit in. United in Hate dealt with believers from all over the world, and documented how they -- knowingly or not -- brought Marxism to power in over a third of the world. Showdown With Evil focuses on the believers now leading the U.S. Democratic Party, who -- knowingly or not -- are spreading the virus of Marxism within the U.S. Those believers portrayed the U.S. as a rotten country, and ran the 2008 elections on a populist electoral platform of redistributing the wealth of the country in order to "change" it. Millions of young Americans who had no longer been taught real history in the schools, and most of the people belonging to the 38% of U.S. households exempted from paying taxes at that time (now the figure is 47%), became galvanized by the Democratic Party's populist pledge to "tax the rich" in order to "change" that "rotting" capitalist America into a utopian country whose people are rewarded according to their need, not to their work, and they gave their votes to the Party of Change.
Of course, people everywhere want their political leaders to be better than their predecessors. But "redistribution of wealth" and "change" are also the quintessence of Marxism, which is built on the dialectical materialist tenet that quantitative changes generate qualitative transformations. Indeed, soon after the Democratic Party won the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress, the United States began being changed from a country belonging to "We the People" into one managed by a kind of a Marxist nomenklatura with unchecked power. This American nomenklatura started running the country secretly, as all Marxist nomenklaturas did. "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," the leader of the U.S. House of Representatives nomenkatura once told the media.[2] That was a first in U.S. history.
It did not take long before this American nomenklatura took control of home mortgages, banks, school loans, auto-makers and most of the health care industry. When tens of thousands of Americans disagreed with this furtive transfer of wealth from private hands into those of the government, the Congressional nomenklatura called them Nazis. That was what the Marxist nomenklatura, when I belonged to it, had also called its critics.
On Feb. 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed: "We Are All Socialists Now."[3] That was what my Romania's official newspaper Scînteia loudly proclaimed in the early 1970s, when the Communists changed that country into a monument to themselves. Two years after grabbing the power, the U.S. Congressional nomenklatura produced the same results as Romania's Marxist nomenklatura did -- on a U.S. scale. Over fourteen million Americans lost their jobs, and 41.8 million people went on government food stamps. The GDP dipped from 3.4% to 1.6%. The national debt rose to an unprecedented $13 trillion, and it is projected to reach $18 trillion by 2019.
Scînteia went bankrupt. Newsweek was sold for one dollar. But a member of the U.S. Congressional nomenklatura representing the bankrupt state of California -- who is also a stout admirer of and visitor to Fidel Castro's Cuba -- began preaching that the future of the U.S. oil industry is "all about socializing," all about "the government taking over and running all our oil companies."[4] In 1948, when the Romanian nomenklatura nationalized the oil industry, that country was the second greatest oil exporter in Europe. Thirty years later, when I broke with Marxism, Romania was a heavy importer of oil, gasoline was rationed, the temperature in public places had to be kept under 63 degrees, and all shops had to close no later than 5:30 pm to save energy. Dr. Glazov's book contains numerous examples proving that stealing does not pay, even if committed by the government of a superpower--as the collapse of the Soviet empire overwhelmingly demonstrates.
On November 9, 1989, when I watched on television as the Berlin Wall was being torn down, I was incredibly proud to be an American. The whole world was expressing its gratitude to the United States for its 45 years of successful Cold War against the Marxist Soviet empire. Soon, my native Romania also stopped thinking of government as a boon bestowed from on high. Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain abandoned their ruinous experiments with Marxism as well, and they began pursuing various national versions of economic social and cultural conservatism.
Alas, now the virus of Marxism and its nauseating, Stalinesque cult of personality has started infecting our shores. A new generation of young Americans, who know little if anything about this bubonic plague that killed some hundred million people worldwide, is giving -- knowingly or not -- Marxism another lease on life. Even the Russian Pravda is puzzled: "It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed."[5]
Last November, the United States faced one of the most important elections in its history. The voters decided which of our two main political parties would control the House of Representatives. In fact, however, the true result was that the American people rejected the Democratic Party's attempts to transform our country into a decaying Marxist realm, and they decided to keep the United States the leader of the Free World. Showdown With Evil tells us how to achieve that goal, for Dr. Glazov's new book is also a kind of "do it yourself" manual for renewing confidence in the U.S. Its guidelines are rooted in the battle of the author and his parents -- leading Soviet dissidents -- against the plague of Marxism, and also in 29 interviews Dr. Glazov conducted with some of the world's most significant conservative luminaries. William F. Buckley, Richard Perle, Natan Sharansky, Norman Podhoretz, Andrew McCarthy, Victor Davis Hanson, Theodore Dalrymple, Kenneth Levin, Phyllis Chesler and Kenneth Levin are just a few of them.
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest Soviet bloc official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc. In 1989, Romania's tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was sentenced to death at the end of a trial whose accusations came out of his book, Red Horizons, subsequently translated in 27 languages.
