JRN: Yes, the "crisis of modernity" has everything to do with the disintegration of the Christian faith -- Catholic and Protestant. The corruption of doctrine, the corruption of time-honored rules and ideas, was allowed to advance decade after decade. Materialist thinkers have yet to acknowledge the negative power of modernity's de-spiritualization. Decade after decade secular leveling advanced. At times it seemed that we were successfully coping, adapting and learning. But the leveling of the soul, the shrinking of the West's soul, has already occurred. To understand the pace of change, I was born in 1958 and my generation absorbed many of the old ideals, though we did not always live by them. Those born after 1980, however, have absorbed almost nothing of the old ideals. The churches have failed to bring Christian thinking to today's young people. Secular entertainment and secular schools have shoved religion aside. In light of such profound spiritual change there is no way, no possible way, that our civilization can long avoid a period of destructive wars and political upheavals. My work has been to envision the specific causes of the coming destructive wars, knowing full well that the real cause (i.e., the deeper underlying cause) is spiritual and not political. The West will be forced to learn a bitter lesson. For the present, the leading pundits deny what is coming. They deny history, arguing that modern man is somehow exempt from history's pattern. But we are not exempt and we will suffer the same fate as those who, in previous history, followed this very path. Our technology cannot save us. In fact, it only assures that our destruction will be swifter, more efficient and thorough.

 

Mídia Sem Mascara: Speaking of religion, we know that Europe is under a slow but sure Islamicization process. Do you think Europe is going to become an Islamic continent in the future? And what about America? Wouldn't America be the next step in this Islamic expansion? Does the spread of Islam have something to do with Russia and China, or is it an independent development?

JRN: Islam is penetrating Europe through immigration.

JRN: Americans in general are anti-communist. But there has been a qualitative change in this stance. In the 1950s Americans realized that communist spies had penetrated our institutions, and they were alarmed by these penetrations. But the alarm gradually faded. Communist subversion ceased being a national issue despite the fact that communist subversion advanced from strength to strength. After the culture shifted from print media (books, magazines and newspapers) to television, the public lost interest in communism. By 1980 Ronald Reagan appeared as a quaint old-fashioned anti-communist. He had been a film star, so he translated his Cold War message easily to television. And this worked until Gorbachev won Reagan's friendship with his "glasnost" and his "perestroika." During the Reagan years the main anti-communist youth movement was YAF (Young Americans for Freedom). This was an insignificant group, made up of a handful of "conservative" students. On a campus of 20,000 you might find ten to fifteen active YAF members. As a graduate student in political science at the University of California, I did not participate in YAF beyond attending one or two meetings, having learned that the leading YAF organizers smoked marijuana and one of the East European girls in the group repeated what I'd said about a left-wing professor to the professor. This was not encouraging. All in all, anti-communism was not a normal concern (and those concerned with it were not considered normal), and as far as I could see being anti-communist was never an answer to anything, and was more like a noose around my neck. But I accepted this noose. One might say I preferred to "hang with the truth." It was, at least in my case, the result of an unpleasant discovery. Far too many professors and graduate students were Marxists. They were not Soviet spies or agents of a foreign power. They were simply pro-socialists who hated capitalism and thought the Soviet Union was harmless. Some tended to believe Soviet propaganda while assuming that everything done by the U.S. government was "evil." They generally mocked the U.S. political system, disparaged American freedoms, despised the free market and secretly dreamt of revolution. Their animating spirit was thwarted ambition, resentment, envy and malice. Some communists I met were sincere idealists; but most were sour little souls inwardly wounded by their own cosmic unimportance. In my view, Karl Marx was a fraud and communism was a criminal enterprise from the outset. By 1987 I concluded that America's tolerance of communism within the educational establishment indicated a coming "time of troubles." 

Rohnka: Am I wrong if I see the American anti-communist today as a strange mix of consistent conservative attitudes and a touch of crazy conspiracy theory? I remember well my shock at reading that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had been masterminded by a small circle of New York Masonic strategists. How would you comment on this phenomenon, and what is your experience with people of such views?

JRN: The idea, on the part of conspiracists, that the Bolshevik Revolution was engineered by Masonic conspirators in New York, is the dirty step-child of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This theory is poisonous, ignorant and futile. The people in America who believe such theories are opponents of the U.S. government. They oppose the capitalists and unwittingly side with the communists, imagining that in doing so they are opposing THE CONSPIRACY. In reality, the Protocols and similar conspiracy nonsense was invented by Russian secret police officials for purposes of mass manipulation. And Russia continues to use this sort of thing world-wide. The Arab world along with most Islamic countries are in the grip of the Protocols, and the same can be said for our primitive anti-communists in America -- like the John Birch Society -- who have been convinced that there is a conspiracy "above communism" (i.e., capitalism). Grand conspiracy theory is, in fact, a contagious intellectual illness. 

Rohnka: What was the influence of Anatoliy Golitsyn on your political views, and could you imagine Jeffrey Nyquist's analysis without New Lies for Old?

JRN: Golitsyn indirectly influenced my political views. He influenced my perception of Soviet grand strategy, which then caused me to recognize certain weaknesses within the capitalist West. This led me to trace Western weakness to market hedonism, de-spiritualization and the baneful affects of television. Please note that Russia and China are weak powers when compared with America. But wealth and power are corrosive if the antidotes to corrosion are set aside. And I believe that's what the American people have done. America has developed a serious weakness as well as blindness, and the Russians are eager to take advantage of a developing situation. In fact, they have the sophistication to manipulate the U.S. in a variety of ways. I want to add, especially, that Golitsyn is not a god and his analysis is not 100 percent correct. There are many mysteries with regard to the inner workings of the "former" Soviet power structures. We do not understand how these structures work (in detail) because they are so secretive. We do not know what the principal players actually believe (in terms of ideological orientation). But one thing I am certain of, after watching their behavior for the past 15 years: Golitsyn is right in terms of the final tendency of Russian politics. Whatever the "changes" in the communist world signify, there has been a consistent effort to use these changes to detach America from Europe, to build a military alliance with China, to retool Soviet war industries, to use criminal organizations as allies in a secret war, to sabotage America's economic system via control of raw material inputs and the penetration of major banks, to ultimately isolate and destabilize the United States, and to destroy any chance of it rising from the ashes or using its nuclear arsenal. Following that, the power structures of Moscow and Beijing plan to split the world into spheres of influence, with lesser nations having a share in "looting rights." One might think of this process as a grand strategic proposition that never dies or surrenders. It simply adjusts itself to new conditions and new requirements. The inner nature of the leaders in Moscow has not changed (whatever their ideological pretensions), and this should be obvious because real change -- internal change -- rarely happen in this world. Whether Golitsyn's accurate predictions are due to his own previous involvement with KGB strategists, or to psycho-sociological intuition, he has correctly anticipated the overall direction of international affairs. My own thinking owes a great deal to his insights.

Rohnka: Let us look at the early 1960s. The Soviet spy named Golitsyn came to Washington. He comes over with a strategic revelation in his head, and he wants to speak with the first man in American policy -- the President of the United States. This is a problem, of course, because it is impossible for President Kennedy to meet with a Russian spy. Then Golitsyn meets Angleton, the chief of CIA counter-intelligence. For about 13 years Golitsyn and Angleton work together to convince the American establishment about the grand threat posed by Russian deception strategy. Their warning is not heeded. In 1974 Angleton is fired from the CIA, Golitsyn is pushed into the political wilderness. Don't you think this was the turning point in American defense history? Is there any coincidence that detente policy coincided with the government's rejection of the Golitsyn message?

JRN: The administration of President Nixon was a disaster in many respects. Nixon's detente policy, his opening to China, were naturally fatal to Golitsyn's message and Angleton's function as counter-intelligence chief. It may not be generally known in Poland, but a Polish intelligence defector, Michael Goleniewski, claimed that Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, was a Soviet agent recruited by the GRU during the occupation of Germany in 1945. There were problems with Goleniewski's mental stability, to be sure, but the intelligence he provided had always been first rate. In the case of Kissinger, there are known facts that tend to confirm Goleniewski's claim. Books about Kissinger reveal that on more than one occasion, after becoming Secretary of State, he brought people into the State Department who were found to have communist ties. Kissinger's handling of Vietnam and the China opening are also suspect. His arms control treaties with the Soviet Union, as well as the unilateral destruction of America's biological weapons stockpiles cry out for explanation. These actions were carried out on his advice. The policies later advocated by Kissinger's deputies in later administrations (e.g., Lawrence Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft and Alexander Haig) also raise alarm bells. But more significant than the possible penetration of the U.S. government by Soviet agent networks, we find that a kind of hedonism had begun to set into American thinking by 1975. Unpleasant thoughts, the necessity of hard choices, tough reforms in the intelligence community, were simply out of the question. An inner softness was, by then, dominant. Golitsyn's analysis and Angleton's fears were dismissed as "Cold War paranoia." Fear of Russian penetration, fear of Russian deception, was necessarily characterized as "mental illness." Here we see an example of "the sociology of knowledge" at work. Under certain cultural conditions, certain facts cannot be known because they are socially unacceptable. 

Rhonka: The 1980s were the years in which Solidarity took shape in Poland. Lech Walesa was the great hero. Threats of Soviet intervention, tanks on the streets, were very real at the time. Poland dreamed of freedom. Did you have any suspicions then that it could be some kind of political trick?

JRN: In America I heard various things from my Polish-American friends, but people were hopeful. I had no suspicions in the early 1980s. Americans liked the idea of a free Poland; and for them, Walesa was a hero. Nobody paid attention when Golitsyn warned against Solidarity in his 1984 book, New Lies for Old. He explained that the communists had moved to take Solidarity over and use it to introduce controlled changes. I watched the 1989 revolutions with skepticism. I looked for critical thinking from Western analysts. But there wasn't any. Everybody accepted the 1989-91 changes uncritically. No debate occurred. Golitsyn's name was mentioned, from time to time, as a curious footnote. Then several anti-Golitsyn books were published, smearing his name and slandering his ideas. Tom Mangold's Cold Warrior is one example. Mangold appeared on many talk shows. The public was told that Golitsyn was mentally unbalanced. His accurate predictions were not mentioned, and his reputation was destroyed.

Rohnka: Ronald Reagan personified the hope of anti-communists everywhere in the world. How could you explain that his presidency was chosen for implementing Soviet deception strategy? Was it the best timing or simply a coincidence?

JRN: If Moscow's strategists could trick Reagan then they could accomplish anything. Of course, Reagan was getting old and soft. So they took aim during the last years of his second term. After playing Cold War games, they flattered Reagan and built him up. They made concessions. This was a very effective tactical switch. As everyone knows, the great charm offensive worked and Reagan led the way -- along with Thatcher -- in accepting Gorbachev as "a man we can do business with." Afterwards no conservative dared question the changes in the communist bloc. The conservatives, in fact, were eager to claim victory. The whole process was incredibly self-serving, and the Republicans were shameless in their readiness to claim what they had no right to claim.

Rohnka: The false collapse of communism, the so-called "democratic revolutions" in countries like Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, etc., were judged, in spite of the obvious facts, as real historical events by the establishments of Western Europe and the United States. Was this typical Western naiveté, the well-crafted work of agents of influence or a lucky outcome for Moscow?

JRN: People love to think of themselves as winners. Nothing is more flattering than the appearance of victory. The announced changes in Poland and Czechoslovakia and Romania brought a wave of relief. This was the political equivalent of a drug. Already the West was divided on the issue of communism, with the left arguing that communism was never a serious threat in the first place. Furthermore, the West by that time had become hedonistic in its responses, as I mentioned earlier.

Rohnka: Have you an unequivocal opinion about the goals and methods of Soviet strategy associated with the false collapse of communism? On the one hand we have unilateral disarmament of the Western alliance and intensive Russian rearmament behind the legend of rusting Soviet military equipment. Secondly, the convergence strategy is still alive, which means a progressive coming together of both political systems. Don't you think that, in the light of increasing leftist trends in the Western countries, that the military option will not be required?

JRN: This is an excellent question because it illustrates the difference between rationalistic thinking about history versus the empirical approach. The intention of any power, of course, is to win an easy victory. To win without fighting, as Sun Tzu said, "is excellence in warfare." But the process of subversion, the process of convergence, the process of deceptive change and corruption -- in the East as well as the West -- involves a moral and intellectual unraveling. Such a process necessarily leads to catastrophic violence, on an epic scale. You cannot derange a man's sense of what is, you cannot abolish the foundations of order itself, without unleashing anarchy in the soul which leads to abuse of the economic system, rampant criminality, revolutionary intrigue and social upheaval. The readiness to exploit such an upheaval is present in Russian and Chinese national strategy, even though they hope to win bloodless victories. Yes, they have managed remarkable changes within their own social systems -- the Chinese have achieved an economic revolution as Russia has achieved a mock political revolution within the CIS countries. But the breakdown of the global economic system, based as it is on American dominance, means total breakdown. It means international anarchy and dictatorial opportunism. It signifies the advent of another world war.

Rohnka: As I know you are very critical of social and political reality in the United States. In your book, Origins of the Fourth World War, you present a tragic picture of the moral and spiritual condition of your nation. What will be the future of America?

JRN: I believe that the dollar will continue to fall, an economic crisis will occur, the U.S. will become politically unstable and the communists (i.e., Moscow and Beijing) will exploit the situation strategically.

Rohnka: The Moscow putsch has a long, 15-year history. In the Soviet bloc there were no authentic democratic reforms during this period. The communists ruled as usual in almost every corner of this dolorous space. The West seems to have no interest in changing this situation. The West has its own problems: terrorism, drugs and organized crime -- with no time for secondary matters. In reality the West itself is the biggest problem. The traditional sense of freedom disappeared in something like a dark hole. Huge bureaucracy, unbelievable corruption, political correctness, total surveillance of its own citizens, unimaginable fiscal stringency indicate where things are headed. It is not freedom in the West, but slavery. A new Bolshevik face. What should be the answer of mankind or of a single man?

JRN: I should correct a false impression that many people in Eastern Europe have about America. Knowing how the U.S. security system works and how police and security functions are executed (having been a security professional myself), the idea that there is "total surveillance" of American citizens is seriously mistaken. I remember being shocked, in 1988, when I asked a Czech waiter how he liked America. He said that it was just like Eastern Europe, only richer. This puzzled me, so I asked what he meant. He said that it was the same surveillance state that he'd left, only the CIA and FBI were "more efficient." Their cleverness, he said, consisted in the fact that they were watching everyone in such an inconspicuous way that nobody suspected they were being watched. This is a laughable instance of "mirror imaging." It is hard for East Europeans, I think, to realize how absolutely unsupervised Americans actually are. Our political culture insists that police surveillance of anyone -- excepting known criminals or spies -- is itself criminal. This view has been translated into law. It has escaped notice by many critics of America, but civil suits were successfully filed against FBI officials in the 1970s -- and the FBI lost in court. Before 9/11 it was illegal for the FBI to spy on American citizens unless legally authorized by a judge (who alone can authorize wiretaps). Furthermore, the FBI is a very small organization, incapable of watching more than a fraction of the crazies, Nazis, communists, Islamists, etc. Please note, FBI officials were forced to pay penalties and fines in the late 1970s because of surveillance conducted during anti-terrorist operations (versus the communist Weather Underground). Security officials in this country have lost their jobs over petty infractions. In 1974 the head of CIA counter-intelligence (James Angleton) was forced to resign because he was part of a scheme to open mail from the Soviet Union. All government officials in this country know the penalties. They know that the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild (the legal arm of the Communist Party U.S.A.) are watching for violations. Security in this country was paralyzed for two decades. The attack of 9/11 occurred under a legal regime that safeguarded the spy, the saboteur and the criminal. We have many rights in this country, and a policeman's lot is not a happy one. The famous gangster Al Capone could not be prosecuted successfully for many years because he had rights that gave him the edge in court. Only when he was found guilty of a tax violation was he put in prison. Since 9/11 more sensible measures have been put in place, allowing the police and FBI to monitor suspects and keep files on subversive groups. For the past 20 years, before the World Trade Center attacks, it was illegal for the FBI or CIA to maintain files on subversive American groups based in the U.S.A. It should also be understood that the American intelligence services are run by university-educated liberals. George Tenet was such a man. These are people who think anti-Communism was a sick joke (and that communism is a meaningless term anyway). There is this impression out there, due to anti-American propaganda, that America is a right-wing country. But America is a country that has grown soft and slovenly during five decades of prosperity. Basically, the security regime remains lax. The people are too busy shopping and having fun. Everything here is predicated on work and consumption.

 

Now I will say a word about crazy legislation and bureaucracy in the United States. While the left is attacking the police and the intelligence services, the left simultaneously campaigns to take guns out of the hands of citizens through legislation. Environmental legislation deprives land-owners of their property rights. Laws for fighting drug cartels have been misused by lazy police officials to confiscate property, and entrapment was used in an attempt to recruit Randy Weaver to spy on Idaho Nazis -- which backfired when Federal officials opened fire on Weaver's family. The government is not all-powerful in this country, and Randy Weaver's acquittal could not have happened in a genuinely totalitarian country. While it is true that left wing crazies are given teaching positions at leading American universities, right wing crazies like Timothy McVeigh imagine that the deranged laws passed by Green Party activists and other leftist busy-bodies prove the existence of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. But the multiplication of resentful, deranged ideologues proves nothing. It is merely a symptom of a society that will not maintain its standards, traditions and intellectual integrity. A kind of anarchy reigns, and the result is an ideological free-for-all in which leftists can dictate certain environmental policies (like crippling the nation's timber industry in the Northwest), while right-wingers arm themselves for "Judgment Day" in the futile belief they are governed by ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government). It was Timothy McVeigh who once suggested to Ted Kaczynski (the "unabomber") that the far left and far right should come together since they had the same enemy. This very concept was adopted by Stalin in the 1930s. It is the concept of the Red-Brown alliance.

The problem with America is distraction, enervation, intellectual decline, fiscal irresponsibility, lax attitudes, materialism and permissiveness. At the same time, however, the strengths of America deserve to be listed. Europeans do not understand the kind of freedom and initiative that still exists in the United States. Freedom forces the average American into a kind of discipline, in terms of creative work. I believe that freedom is essential. But licentiousness must not be permitted. Civilization also depends on traditional values, belief in God and classical teachings. We must have balance, and we must return to aristocratic standards of culture.