Commentary - A recent NBC report criticizing The Epoch Times repeatedly emphasized that the publication is anti-communism, with the clear implication that this stance is anachronistic, paranoid, or unwarranted. Unfortunately, such views are commonplace in today’s West, certainly on the left, but also on much of what is considered the “right.”
(Article by Trevor Loudon republished from TheEpochTimes.com)
The NBC article included this amazing paragraph: “In 2005, The Epoch Times released its greatest salvo, publishing the ‘Nine Commentaries,’ a widely distributed book-length series of anonymous editorials that it claimed exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘massive crimes’ and ‘attempts to eradicate all traditional morality and religious belief.’”
Multiple reputable sources, including the famous “Black Book on Communism,” written mainly by academic ex-communists, assert that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been responsible for at least 65 million deaths during its 70 years of bloody reign. This adds to the full death toll of communism, which the authors show was at least 100 million.
In the first chapter, titled “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” academic Stéphane Courtois states that “communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.” By comparison, Nazism, while its crimes were also reprehensible, was “distinctly less murderous than Communism,” with a death toll of 25 million innocents.
Currently, 100 million Chinese citizens identify as Christians, and there are many others who are Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, or Falun Gong practitioners. These groups are subjected to ongoing, intense persecution under the CCP.
To The Epoch Times’ credit, it is one of the very few publications in the United States that is not just “pro-freedom” but actively anti-communist, a very important distinction, which was brought home recently in a conversation I had with a senior Epoch Times staffer. He related to me how some Epoch Times journalists had attended a conservative gathering in Washington and were surprised to find they were not universally well-received.
There were some comments that the presence of Epoch Times people, well-known for their opposition to the Communist Party of China, “might damage our trade relations with China.”
Bear in mind that many of these critics were veterans of the Reagan presidency. They had seen how Reagan’s tough anti-communist stance had forced the Soviet Union into a major retreat (not a “collapse,” but a strategic retreat)—something decades of appeasement and East–West trade under previous presidents had failed to achieve.
These “conservative” leaders were all about free trade between nations and liberty at home. However, the thought that they should be opposing “communism” in this day and age was completely foreign to many of them.
What Is Communism?
This view stems from a failure to understand that communism is not just another political system. Communism is a form of organized crime justified by the cult of Marxism–Leninism. It’s basically a combination of criminal inclination coupled with uncontrolled political power.
Like all crime, communism is parasitic. It produces nothing of value itself; it must rely on force, propaganda, torture, intimidation, threats, and espionage to survive. Like cancer, communism consumes its host. Except that in communism’s case, it will only die when the whole planet is consumed.
Must we let things get to that point?
It’s Not Enough to Advocate for Freedom
Most would agree that it’s not enough to merely advocate for a lawful society. A society must also actively work to suppress crime and punish criminals.
Most would agree that it’s not enough to advocate for a healthy population. When cancer appears, for example, it must be starved of nutrients and removed as quickly as possible from its host.
Similarly, it’s not enough to simply advocate for freedom. It is not enough to support free markets, the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, and private property. Liberty will not be assured unless men and women of goodwill fight against that which threatens it.
As long as we remain imperfect beings, some iteration of communism will always be with us. Communism is the politicized, malignant distillation of the evil that’s in all of us. Marx, Lenin, Mao, and other communist leaders saw this flaw in man and sought to organize and legitimize it, awarding their evil ideas with a scientific veneer.
Communism is the highest expression of organized evil this world has ever seen.
How is feeding this beast going to produce good results?
History
Before World War II, Nazi sympathizers in the United States and Britain worked to steer their governments away from confronting Hitler. Big business in many Western nations made fortunes feeding the Nazi war machine.
During the Cold War, leftists in the West were constantly pushing for accommodation of the Soviet Union, even as it swallowed up much of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some Western big businesses were more than happy to line their pockets with blood-stained rubles.
Nazism was ended with a huge loss of life, after years of appeasement had failed.
In the 1980s, Reagan avoided war by pushing the Soviet Union into full retreat through massive economic pressure. Had that pressure been maintained until the KGB was completely removed from power, we might now be friends with a free Russia instead of facing the nuclear weapons of a superior neo-Soviet regime now confronting us.
The United States has a similar choice with China. We can make billions trading with China (while gutting our own industrial base), then spend trillions defending ourselves from the monster we created when the inevitable war comes—not to mention the millions of casualties and the very real possibility of defeat and communist occupation of the lower 48 and Hawaii.
Or we can isolate China economically until the Communist Party is destroyed by internal pressures, and a new government, or governments, arise. That is our only hope for both a free China and a free United States.
Recently, President Donald Trump said in a tweet that U.S. companies “are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”
There is no doubt that Trump has the authority to make such a call.
According to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), signed in 1977 by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, the president has the power to restrict trade once a “national emergency” is declared.
According to the Washington Examiner:
“‘The president can impose a virtual embargo on a nation under IEEPA,’ said John Yoo, director of the public law and policy program at the University of California at Berkeley and a former official in George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel.
“The law has been used in the past to enact sanctions on hostile regimes such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. The Trump administration is now suggesting using it as a trade negotiation tool. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said China was an ‘enemy’ of the United States on trade.”
China is the United States’ enemy on every front, Secretary Mnuchin, not just in trade.
Let’s hope Trump is prepared to use IEEPA not just as a “bargaining chip,” but as the first step in doing to communist China what Reagan did to the Soviet Union.
The only peaceful way to achieve any real change in China, and to curb the regime’s criminal behavior and foreign and military policies of expansion, is to use U.S. economic leverage.
President Richard Nixon and communist China’s “best friend in America,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, opened up U.S.–China trade in the 1970s in a grossly misguided attempt to play communist-ruled Beijing against communist-ruled Moscow. That is the moral and practical equivalent of the FBI allying with the Italian Mafia to defeat the Russian mob.
Had the United States and the West economically blockaded Soviet Russia and communist China from the very beginning, both criminal regimes would have collapsed in a relatively short time. Millions of lives would have been saved, and the West could have spent trillions less on defending itself from the monsters they were economically supporting.
The Current State of Affairs
Today, the heavily nuclear-armed and FSB (KGB)-run Russia is in a formal military alliance (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) with communist-run China, which is now the world’s second-largest economy. Communism is closer to destroying this planet than it ever has been.
Communism is the plague of our times. After a setback in the Reagan era, communist and semi-communist parties now rule Russia, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba, Nepal, South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, the Congo, Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and, only half in jest, California.
Communist ideology has deeply penetrated every Western nation, and in the United States, it dominates the universities, organized labor, Hollywood, and the new Democratic Party. And still most Western conservatives and libertarians refuse to become active anti-communists.
Any force for freedom that doesn’t actively oppose communism is doomed to eventual failure. It is as impotent as a saint who won’t oppose sin, a pastor who won’t condemn the devil, a policeman who won’t arrest criminals, or a doctor who won’t fight disease.
The Epoch Times is one of a handful of pro-freedom publications in the West that actively works to expose and oppose communism. We will never fully defeat communism, but if we refuse to oppose it, it will inevitably defeat us. If you aren’t fighting communism, you are in effect enabling its eventual terrifying victory.
The Epoch Times is proudly and actively anti-communist. All of us who love liberty, regardless of our spiritual beliefs, should support The Epoch Times in this noble endeavor.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the year in which President Jimmy Carter signed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Read more at: TheEpochTimes.com and Liberty.news.
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