Pages: 1 2

By J.R. Nyquist

On May 5th President Barack Obama officially launched his re-election campaign. What is the significance of May 5th? As Obama and his friends undoubtedly know, it is Karl Marx’s birthday. Perhaps this is a coincidence? Then again, would it surprise you if Obama was given his start in politics by a “progressive activist” named Alice Palmer? In 1995 Palmer endorsed Obama as her successor in the 13^th district of the Illinois state senate. Perhaps it was incidental, as well, that Palmer attended the 27^th Congress of the Communist Party Soviet Union about which she wrote a glowing review (see Discover the networks).  Palmer also worked for the U.S. Peace Council – which was a Communist front organization. But then, all this is merely incidental because Barack Obama says he is not a socialist.

The connections between Obama and persons involved in the international Communist movement are many. The question that we are afraid to ask, of course, is whether Obama is hiding his ideological beliefs. Many will say it was a coincidence that he picked Karl Marx’s birthday to launch his campaign. Many will say it was ignorance when Obama appointed a Marxist activist (Van Jones) as his Special Advisor for Green Jobs. And some will say it is irrelevant that the youthful Obama’s mentor – Frank Marshall Davis – happens to have been a Communist Party member.

When considering Barack Obama’s background as a community organizer, researcher Stanley Kurtz asked, “What on earth is a community organizer?” The answer to the question was given in Kurtz’s book, Radical –In-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. According to Kurtz, “Barak Obama’s colleagues and mentors were some of the smartest and most influential stealth-socialist community organizers in the country. Their strategies of political realignment and social transformation guide the Obama administration to this day.”

At first Kurtz didn’t believe Obama was a socialist. But then he discovered his mistake. “During the campaign I wasn’t exactly shy in 2008 about calling Obama a radical,” Kurtz told an interviewer. “But even I didn’t think at the time he was literally a socialist. When I looked into his past I saw unmistakable socialist experiences, a phase of his life when he literally was a classical Marxist-Leninist.” When asked why the press had not uncovered Obama’s Marxist background, Kurtz replied, “There was really no serious effort to vet Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. Such material that did come out was really ignored, consciously and systematically by the mainstream press.”

If Obama was a Marxist-Leninist in 1983, why did he join the Democratic Party and soften his views? It was all a matter of tactics, explained Kurtz. Obama and his socialist colleagues of the 1980s realized that they were not going to bring about a socialist revolution in the United States, so their strategy changed. Kurtz explained this change as follows: “[Their] thought was to get a kind of de facto control of the economy from below – not through nationalization from above, but through community organizing from below.”

What Kurtz says is absolutely true. In 1983 I was invited to attend a Communist-led meeting at the Science Lecture Hall on the campus of UC Irvine. There was Communist Party literature on tables in the lobby, and there was a stirring speech. Funny thing, the speech was more about strategy than anything else. The speaker, who was a visiting professor, explained that Americans were deluded by “the American dream.” They would not vote for socialism – at least not yet. What is bound to happen, he said, is another Great Depression. That is what it will take to awaken the socialist spirit in America. Therefore, in preparation for the inevitable economic crisis, the Communists would infiltrate the Democratic Party through its Left wing. Their ultimate goal, he said, was to elect a stealth Communist president.

Naturally, it all sounded crazy in 1983. Today, it sounds like something that may have already happened.  As for the Democratic Party, Communists have indeed been infiltrating. In a town hall meeting earlier this year Congressman Allen West was asked what percentage of U.S. Congressmen were “card-carrying Marxists?” West said it was a fair question and estimated there were approximately 78 to 81 Democrats who were Communists. “It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus,” he said.

Pages: 1 2