The Communist Infiltration of America Was Prophesied

He was right that the radical left would sabotage the U.S.

Another remarkable forecast taking on new relevance in our day

Imagine the United States allying with Russia. If you were alive when Nazi Germany was rampaging across Europe during World War ii, you didn’t have to imagine it. You saw it: The world’s greatest free-market economy forged a “strange alliance” with the world’s greatest Communist state, the Soviet Union.

When this happened, a peculiar phenomenon surged across America: a wave of popular emotional fervor for the Soviets. Influential men and media fawned over Joseph Stalin. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed kgb defector Harry L. Hopkins as U.S. secretary of Commerce and released Communist Party usa leader Earl Browder from prison to promote “national unity” between American Communists and the public.

Yet even during this trying and confusing time, one strong voice cried out a warning against not only the imminent fascist threat from Germany but also the less-understood Communist threat from the Soviet Union.

America emerged from World War ii victorious. It assumed leadership of the free world and was rivaled only by the Soviet Union. But even at America’s political, economic and military pinnacle, Herbert W. Armstrong warned that the nation would be invaded by a revived Holy Roman Empire led by Germany. And before that, America’s rejection of God would allow communism to weaken the nation so that it could be invaded.

“Communism is a worldwide political movement, organized inside many countries,” he wrote in the April-May 1944 Plain Truth. “From official Communist literature anyone can learn, if he wishes to know the truth, that communism is a plan, in action, for the violent overthrow of capitalism and the capitalistic governments.”

During and after the Second World War, Mr. Armstrong dogmatically proclaimed the biblical truth that Russia would not attack America militarily before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Instead, he revealed that Russia would wage a psychological warfare of propaganda, infiltration, subversion and demoralization. The Russians would attack “our minds, our moral and spiritual values, rather than our bodies and our earthly possessions.”

“What we fail to grasp, in the struggle with Russia, is this: We are not fighting a single nation in a military war, but a gigantic worldwide, plain-clothes army, masquerading as a political party, seeking to conquer the world with an entirely new kind of warfare,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in 1956. “It’s a kind of warfare we don’t understand or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence! All this, cleverly disguised as a harmless political party! Communism is worldwide psychological warfare!”

Mr. Armstrong warned of a time when end-time Israel (particularly Britain and America) would become “mixed up” ideologically “with foreigners” (Hosea 7:8; Moffatt). He pointed to Hosea 7:8-13, a passage warning that Britain and America would “seek alliances with foreign nations, forsaking God” (ibid). He noted how this passage shows these alliances would “eat away” America’s strength “unknown to him” (verse 9; Moffatt).

Subsequent events have shown that America’s dalliance with communism has perverted its morals, weakened its economic power, and eaten away its strength. This is a tragic story, but America was warned!

The First Stage of Subversion

Thirty-six years after Mr. Armstrong first started warning American radio audiences about communism in 1934, kgb Agent Yuri Bezmenov defected from the Soviet Union and escaped to Canada. After his defection, Bezmenov went to great lengths to warn the people of America that they were at war with communism. Like Mr. Armstrong said, this was not a war of guns and tanks but a war of ideological subversion.

According to Bezmenov, the subversion of foreign nations was so important to the Soviet kgb that most of the notorious spy agency’s resources were allocated to propaganda activities. “Only about 15 percent of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such,” he told G. Edward Griffin in a 1984 interview. “The other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or ‘active measures.’”

Subversion, Bezmenov said, is a long-term process involving four steps: 1) demoralization, 2) destabilization, 3) crisis and 4) normalization.

The first of these steps, demoralization, is a program designed to “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country” (ibid).

“It takes about 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation,” Bezmenov wrote in his book Love Letter to America. “Why that many (or few)? Simple: This is the minimum number of years needed to ‘educate’ one generation of students in a target country (America, for example) and expose them to the ideology of the subverter” (emphasis added).

Mr. Armstrong also warned of this infiltration of America. “I was saying over the air, and writing, back in 1934, that the Communist unwavering strategy was, as a first offensive toward world domination, propaganda,” he wrote in a 1980 issue of the Worldwide News. “They began sowing the seeds of their Communist atheistic education all over the United States—especially among college professors and students.”

“They invaded American university campuses, full force,” he continued, “and the U.S. universities trustingly let them in.”

These reeducation methods took deep root in America during the 1960s and ’70s. Bezmenov warned that kgb agents and their socialistic “fellow travelers” would use abstract art, perverted music, pornographic images, homosexual rights, racist politics, pacifist foreign policy and socialist economics to demoralize America.

This was the era when future U.S. President Barack Obama fell under the influence of Frank Marshall Davis, a radical black pornographer and Communist Party usa member who believed the greatest threat to the world wasn’t the Soviet menace but “Anglo-American imperialist domination.” Obama’s grandfather Stanley Dunham introduced him, thinking Davis could act as a father-figure. So, like many other American youth in the 1960s and ’70s, Obama was indoctrinated in Communist philosophy from a young age.

Shortly before a 10-year-old Barack Obama met Frank Marshall Davis, Mr. Armstrong rhetorically warned: “Why are our people unable to recognize the Communist line—the Communist plan and conspiracy—in college and university riots, in propaganda accusing ‘police brutality,’ in ‘black power,’ ‘black panther’ and other slogans, even in ‘civil disobedience’ and ‘nonviolent’ movements of protest which lead to violence?”

Mr. Armstrong answered this question with this shocking truth: “The guiding hand in student revolt is the Communist Party. Many students, their emotions stirred and enraged to violence, do not themselves realize this. Yet actually, these young leaders of the ‘New Left’ movement are going beyond the Communist Party. Their plan is to stir up college-age students to revolt first and the[n] teenage high school adolescents. If they can corrupt and/or win over tomorrow’s students, they will gain control” (Plain Truth, March 1969).

Seeing the bigger picture, Mr. Armstrong understood that Communist demoralization tactics originated from a higher source than Karl Marx or the kgb. “[C]ommunism is the devil’s effort, through his demon-inspired human tools, to take from us this greatest national and economic blessing God ever conferred on any people!” he wrote in the January 1949 Plain Truth. Even though the Soviet Union fell before its subversion efforts could progress to the stage of “destabilization” and “crisis,” the effects of Satan-inspired demoralization tactics are very much alive in America today. Marxist leaders controlled the U.S. government during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and still control much of U.S. media and academia today.

Corruption of Modern Education

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, documents from the Soviet archives revealed the Communist Party usa received $2 million to $3 million a year from the Kremlin to further its subversion activities.

Most of the efforts put forth by the Kremlin, the U.S. Communist Party and their “fellow travelers” went not toward traditional espionage but toward the infiltration of American education. According to Yuri Bezmenov, the main methods of Soviet demoralization were student exchanges with Moscow, the flooding of college campuses with Marxist literature, international seminars with Soviet participation, the infiltration of universities with radical leftists (often unknowingly under the guidance of kgb subverters), and the establishment of Communist-staffed newspapers and organization of “study groups” to disseminate Soviet propaganda.

In 1976, Barack Obama attended one of these “study groups,” a Marxist-socialist fellowship at Occidental College founded by John Drew called the Democratic Socialist Alliance. In a radio interview with Dr. Paul Kengor on the Glen Meakem Program, Drew explained that in 1980, his girlfriend at the time, Caroline Boss, introduced the 19-year-old Obama to him as a fellow Marxist. When Obama predicted a violent people’s revolution, Drew was surprised. By this time in his life, Drew had abandoned the violent, revolutionary style of Marxist-Leninism in favor of a more gradualist approach espoused by Herbert Marcuse.

Obama’s experience was not uncommon. “Before World War ii the Communist Party in the United States was making great headway,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in the April 1980 Plain Truth. “They began infiltrating the colleges and universities. If they could not ‘convert’ professors, they worked on students who would become teachers later. Thus they were recruiting teachers to teach their doctrine all over the United States.”

According to a former staff director of a Senate investigations subcommittee, between 1935 and 1953, the Communist Party “enlisted the support of at least 3,500 professors—many of them as dues-paying members, many others as fellow travelers, some as out-and-out espionage agents, some as adherents of the party line in varying degrees, and some as the unwitting dupes of subversion” (J. B. Matthews, “Communism and the Colleges,” American Mercury, May 1953).

The ultimate goal of communism is a “utopian” society where every individual is completely reliant on society (the Communist Party). This is why the Marxist-Leninist concept of education emphasizes “mass character” and “collectivism” over “individual abilities.” For a collectivist society to truly succeed, it needs more than just a generation of people who don’t want to support themselves: It needs a generation of people who cannot support themselves!

This is the direction many liberals want America to go. In the words of Bezmenov, “The American romance with state-run education as encouraged by kgb subverters has already produced generations of graduates who cannot spell, cannot find Nicaragua on a world map, cannot think creatively and independently. I wonder if Albert Einstein would have arrived at his theory of relativity if he had been educated in one of today’s American public schools. Most likely he would have ‘discovered’ marijuana and variant methods of sexual intercourse instead.”

Wrecking the Economy

“Communism, of course, is many things,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in the February 1962 Plain Truth. “It is a doctrine …. It is a revolutionary program. It is relentless class war. It is a radical philosophy of history. It is a radical philosophy of society. It is a social system. It is an economic system. It is a political strategy. It is a world conspiracy.”

As “an economic system,” communism pits the poorer classes against those who have been economically more successful by calling for the redistribution of wealth from the property-owning class to the wage-labor class. To accomplish this redistribution of wealth, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that private land ownership must be abolished, a heavily progressive income tax must be instituted, and all factories and financial institutions must be nationalized.

The mantra of Marxist economics is: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” In other words, the wealth of those with more “ability” is redistributed to those with more “need.” This philosophy directly contradicts Jesus Christ’s teaching, as taught in the parable of the pounds (Luke 19:12-27), in which each of Christ’s servants is rewarded differently based on how much he produced with what he was given.

The main reason Marxism doesn’t work is that human beings lack incentive to work when they don’t receive the benefits for their labor. 1 Timothy 5:8 says, “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” By contrast, Marxism teaches people to rely on others to care for them. It is possibly the greatest enemy of personal responsibility ever invented.

The Soviet Union fell because of Russia’s enthusiastic embrace of Marxist-Leninist economics. As Russian economist Grigory Yavlinsky, an adviser to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, said: “The Soviet system is not working because the workers are not working.”

Despite the economic disaster that befell the Soviet Union, a shocking number of American economists cling to this socialist movement with Marxist traditions. The current political environment of the United States exalts many Communist ideals. Barack Obama appointed many Communist-influenced people to prominent government positions, and President Donald Trump has not been able to remove all of them.

Herbert Armstrong warned that Communist economics would sap America’s strength and weaken its economic power. “Satan is not a visible red devil with tail, horns and a pitchfork,” he wrote in the October 1951 Plain Truth. “The real Satan is invisible. The world doesn’t see him or recognize his works. … It doesn’t grasp the diabolical deception of communism—Satan’s economic delusion, employing propaganda based on false economies as its first arm of attack ….”

The Marxist Plot to Abolish the Family

Herbert Armstrong also warned that Communist subversion would use “every diabolical means” to pervert “our morals,” wreck “our social structure,” and destroy “our spiritual and religious life.”

Perhaps the most “diabolical” of these means is the Marxist plot to destroy the family. The Communist Manifesto derides the family as a capitalist institution based “on private gain.” Marriage, it says, is but the “hypocritical” concealment of private prostitution. The authors hoped and predicted that both “bourgeois family” and “bourgeois marriage” would disappear with the departure of private capital.

Throughout the 1960s and into the ’70s, Soviet front groups were working throughout America to destroy traditional marriage. Federal Bureau of Investigation informant Larry Grathwohl penetrated the revolutionary Communist group Weather Underground. After palling around with Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and their crew for months, Grathwohl wrote his report, “Bringing Down America: An fbi Informer With the Weathermen.” The report reveals that the Weather Underground network was determined to abolish monogamous marriage, which they viewed as a repressive remnant of male and white supremacy.

In his book The Naked Communist, author Willard Cleon Skousen identified 45 Communist goals for the ideological subversion of America. These goals were read on the floor of Congress on January 10, 1963. Among them are discrediting the family as an institution, encouraging promiscuity and easy divorce, emphasizing the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents, promoting pornography, and presenting homosexuality as “normal, natural, healthy.” These are all designed to advance the destruction of marriage and family.

Under the influence of Marxist philosophy and Soviet subversion tactics, American educators have spent decades trumpeting sexual liberation, militant feminism and homosexual rights. All this has been done under the banner of freedom, but the truth is that these movements have served as Trojan horses in a far more sinister plot to abolish marriage and destroy the nuclear family!

In Karl Marx’s words: “Communism abolishes eternal truths. It abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”

Or, in Mr. Armstrong’s words, “Communism is the vulture of decadent, dying politics, religion and society” (Plain Truth subscriber letter, Nov. 24, 1967).

Herbert Armstrong elaborated further in a 1979 World Tomorrow television broadcast. “Now, Satan has a kingdom; he’s the god of the world, and he’s the invisible ruler of the world, and the whole world is under his sway, by God’s permission,” he said. “Satan can’t do anything God does not permit because high above all rule is that of God, and God is permitting certain things for a reason that we learn by experience.

“Jesus said, ‘If a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand’—and that’s a good thing to remember. If the United States gets divided too much between the idea of freedom and the idea of communism, this country could not stand.” Now, over four decades later, it is evident that the United States is very much divided between “the idea of freedom and the idea of communism.”

Because Americans have rejected God and allowed Satan-inspired Communist philosophy to creep into the nation, God will allow this experience to teach America the natural consequences of broken law!

Talk of equality sounds noble, but Mr. Armstrong warned that Communist “equality” was only a means to an end. “As fostered by the Soviet Union,” he wrote in 1949, “communism is launched as a worldwide class struggle, pitting the poorer class against those who have been economically more successful, arousing class prejudice, stirring up race hatreds. While they pretend to stand for peace, they engender only strife, and they feed like a vulture on poverty, discontent, discouragement, confusion and chaos.”

He warned, “Communism is the devil’s effort, through his demon-inspired human tools, to take from us this greatest national and economic blessing God ever conferred on any people!” (Plain Truth, January 1949).

Looking at America today, you have to admit once again that he was right! The second Trump presidential administration is trying to purge Communist thinking from the government, but a century of Communist subversion will not be rolled back so easily. Communism has already weakened America to the point where a revived Holy Roman Empire could defeat and conquer what is left of America’s national strength. Unless the nation repents, that time is just ahead.