This is the latest in a series of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor at Grove City College, on his latest work, Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, based on a shocking volume of declassified materials from Soviet and Communist Party USA archives and FBI files. Dinesh D’Souza calls Dupes “a significant addition to our historical understanding of the past hundred years.” Big Peace’s Peter Schweizer calls it the “21st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.
Big Peace: Professor Kengor, April 22 marks Earth Day, as it does each year. Tell us the year of the first Earth Day and the odd centennial it shared.
Kengor: The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970, the centennial of the birth of Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevik godfather, architect of the communist totalitarian state.
Big Peace: The first Earth Day occurred on the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth?
Kengor: Yes. The anniversary was a huge deal to the global communist movement and the USSR, where the man’s wretched entrance into this world was treated like the advent of Christ. Speaking of the number “100,” Lenin’s ideology killed over 100 million worldwide.
Big Peace: Lenin was not an environmentalist.
Kengor: No, he was a collectivist. He was also an atheist, who hated human beings, mowing them down, filling land-fills with them.
He did, however, share the penchant for central planning championed by environmentalists.
Big Peace: Was it a coincidence that the first Earth Day occurred on Lenin’s birthday?
Kengor: That’s a question that didn’t escape notice at the time, from the eye of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI to Time and the New York Times and other publications. A lot of people were suspicious.
By the way, the lead to the Time piece covering that first Earth Day, published in the May 4, 1970 edition, shows how our mainstream press was once more level-headed. Time wrote of the event: “It had aspects of a secular, almost pagan holiday–a sense of propitiating an earth increasingly incapable of forgiving what man has inflicted upon it.” Can you imagine that kind of lead in Time today?
Unfortunately, the ’60s radicals now run those publications.
The Time piece noted that 100,000 marched in New York alone. That’s where the communist presence was strongest. New York’s huge communist community had an amazing ability to turn out a crowd, whether to label Eisenhower a fascist for condemning the sweet and innocent Rosenbergs or generating a ticker-tape parade for Fidel Castro. It was at such blatant phoniness that the communists really shined.
Big Peace: Do you think the April 22 dates are a coincidence?
Kengor: That’s a question I’ve considered, but haven’t found a smoking gun. No doubt, Earth Day had domestic roots, particularly via Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat and an environmentalist. By the time of the first day, Country Club Republicans like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller celebrated by launching environmental departments in their states, several years before the ultimate duped chief executive did so in the White House.
But I know this: communists, from Moscow to CPUSA headquarters in New York, had a “campaign” for everything. They were masters of propaganda and agitation. They had an actual Department of Agitprop. They excelled at suckering impressionable liberal/progressive dupes, especially youth, who they targeted at World Youth Festivals and via other sorts of vehicles. At this point, April 1970, they were having wild success with college students. Many of the major anti-war protests had communist fingerprints all over them. In Dupes, I have several chapters on this. The documents have been declassified. Congress knew about the communist involvement.
So, I would be amazed if communists were not involved to some degree. They didn’t need to come up with the idea or organize the thing, but they would have aided and abetted and encouraged it in any way they could.
If readers have any documentation or can help me track this down, I’d be most appreciative. I expect to find more as documents are released. Unfortunately, not many of us are doing this kind of research. Our illustrious “scholars” in the academy have no interest, since many of them were among the dupes. They’re in no hurry to expose themselves as onetime Kremlin stooges.
Big Peace: Did the Soviets care about the environment?
Kengor: The Soviets didn’t give a damn about the environment. The only recycling they did was Lenin’s body, which needs constantly re-embalmed. In fact, Lenin is a metaphor for recycling: it’s costly, challenging, and doesn’t work very well.
For the conventional communist, the environmental movement is a golden opportunity to attack capitalism, profits, corporations, free markets, the West, America. The genuine liberals in the environmental movement are dupes for communists.
The irony is that if you want to see real pollution, the communist world had it unlike anywhere else. It was horrid–toxic. If you want clean up, you need capitalism, because wealthy countries–which are free-market based–can afford it. When you’re communist and dirt poor, your concern is bread or rice, not “paper or plastic.”
Big Peace: Of course, the environmental movement has become a home for collectivists, socialists, and even many ex-communists.
Kengor: That’s absolutely correct, especially in Europe. They’re called “watermelons:” red or pink on the inside and green on the outside.
I believe it was Rush Limbaugh who colorfully said that the environmental movement is a perfect home for ex-communists, because trees and rivers and leaves and birds can’t tell them to take a hike, unlike the suffering kulaks.
It’s no surprise that when Mikhail Gorbachev could no longer hold the Soviet Union together, he went into the environmental movement.
Big Peace: You write about this in your book, God and Ronald Reagan. Gorbachev formed an environmental organization with quasi-religious overtones.
Kengor: The organization was called the Green Cross, re-directing the Red Cross label. It’s a fitting metaphor for the green-olatry of the movement. You can see this in Gorbachev’s 2000 book, On My Country and the World, where he calls for “a new … environmentalization of consciousness.” The book is packed with all sorts of New Age-isms, “Politics of Meaning” babble, and Al Gore-ish nonsense.
In fact, most interesting, and linking back to where we started this interview, in his 1987 book, Perestroika, Gorbachev’s words on Vladimir Lenin were so effusive as to be almost worshipful, reverential. A decade and a half later, when Lenin’s and Gorbachev’s USSR was dispatched to Ronald Reagan’s ash-heap of history, Gorbachev genuflected to Gaia instead of Lenin. And he was far from alone.
Also very telling, his organization’s full title was Green Cross International. Like Marxism-Leninism, like the communist movement, the environmental movement wants to expand worldwide, with demands for excessive government everywhere. Environmentalists of the world, unite!
Speaking of the cross, I’ll finish with this: Earth Day this year falls on Good Friday, when Christ was hoisted upon a cross. The “green” cross is a false god of false promise; Christ’s cross is redemptive.
Big Peace: Happy Easter, Professor Kengor.
Kengor: A blessed Easter and Passover to all the good folks at Big Peace and Breitbart.com.