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International Affairs
Driving to Self-Destruction in a Cadillac
Toby Westerman
Cadillac, a division of General Motors, was once synonymous with financial achievement and success in the world. Cadillac was as American as apple pie, if at the upper crust. Today, however, with the agreement by Cadillac to pay for the production expenses of a Chinese Communist Party propaganda film, the Cadillac brand now stands for something quite different: the appeasement of a power hostile to the United States in the name of financial gain.
GM funds a Chinese Communist Party film |
GM CEO Daniel Akerson describes China as the "key to [GM"s] success." GM was one of the auto companies receiving 2009 federal bailout money.
The film GM is funding, with an English title of Birth of a Party or The Great Achievement of the Founding of the Party, is due to be released in China on June 15.
Cadillac lost its luster as the top vehicule symbol of status to other makes of cars long ago, after decades of legendary poor workmanship and terrible gas mileage. Cadillac can now add to its list of misjudgments paying for a film commemorating the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, a political organization which has been responsible for the deaths of many millions of human beings whose only crime was that they may have disagreed with the Party.
The action of Cadillac is not merely an act of kowtow in the hope of profit. It is the reflection of a much wider strategy by China to establish dominance - economically, socially, politically, and militarily. In turn, this dominance is in the name not of Chinese civilization, but of an ideology introduced into general Chinese society by the Communist Party of China.
Cadillac's payment for this communist propaganda film occurs within the context of a single-party State in which all activities are monitored by a large and efficient secret police. The Chinese Communist Party is able to lay out courses of action that are to occur over many years.
In Communist China there is no real election cycle to which the Party must respond. There are only the dictates and will of the Party, and prison for those who go too far beyond limits established by the Party. In this environment long-range planning is both possible and necessary.
In today's China, profit is encouraged, but so is the intense study of the works of Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. While capitalist enterprise, largely based on slave labor, is permitted, everything done is under the eyes of China's secret police. The nearly twenty-year Chinese military buildup and modernization is financed by the profits from China's corporations.
Repeating Lenin’s strategy
Although all this appears quite paradoxical, there is no inconsistency. There is an international plan that goes back for decades. There is a reason why Chinese students are studying the theories of Lenin: It is because he is the primary inspiration for China's current economic and cultural strategy.
 Lenin's New Economic Policy - a semi-capitalism to support Communism |
The problems China had faced before allowing capitalist enterprises to develop were not fundamentally different from those Lenin had confronted shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew Russia's weak provisional government in 1917, and then went on to defeat Tsarist counter-revolutionaries by 1920. Although the Bolsheviks were triumphant militarily within Russia's borders, the regime still faced a nearly collapsed economy and peasant resentment at home along with hostile foreign governments abroad.
Lenin desperately needed help, his regime would not long survive the constant peasant uprisings that plagued Soviet Russia.
To solve his many pressing problems, Lenin acted boldly. In 1921, he announced the end of State ownership of most industries and proclaimed a New Economic Policy (NEP) which encouraged small scale capitalist enterprises.
He also worked through individuals in the American business community who were sympathetic to Soviet Russia to persuade businessmen that Russia had changed and was no longer the enemy to Capitalism it once appeared to be. Lenin took steps to establish a pro-Soviet propaganda machine in Europe and the United States. Within Russia, he instructed his secret police to be extra-vigilant against those attempting to take the new economic freedoms too far. The Bolshevik secret police was given the additional task of operating beyond the borders of Russia to hunt down anti-communists in exile and mislead Western governments as to the actual state of affairs inside Russia.
The NEP did bring back a degree of prosperity to the newly established Soviet Union, but it had a powerful enemy who rose to power after Lenin's death: Josef Stalin.
The New Economic Policy ended with Stalin, who decided that brutality and mass murder was the path to the Communist Utopia. As can be imagined, Stalin and Stalinism had its enemies, just as Lenin's NEP continued to have its advocates who remained silent – and fearful – inside Stalin's regime. After Stalin's death, the methods of Lenin's NEP gradually gained respectability once again.
Misguided American strategy toward China
By the 1960s, the largest of the Communist States, the Soviet Union and China, found that they were in positions similar to that of Lenin in 1921.
In 1972, Mao allowed China to "open" to the West. Supposedly China needed an ally against a peevish Soviet Union. This was joyous news to then-president Richard M. Nixon, bedeviled as he was by the continuing war in Vietnam. Nixon reasoned that China would be a handy ally against the Soviets and would be helpful in the negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
As China appeared to glide along toward a capitalist Renaissance, Russia seemed to remain mired in all things Soviet. The no-nonsense approach of U.S. President Ronald Reagan applied more economic and military pressure to the Soviets, contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Putin and Chinese Premier Wen Jiaboa - a solid alliance |
Oddly, however, one renowned expert in Communism, Fidel Castro, summed up the end of the Soviet Union not as a triumph of anti-Soviet reactionaries, but as "naive and inadvertent."
Other anomalies occurred. The "new" Russia did not develop a democratic system, but lapsed into what is today a one-party State. Curiously, by the mid-1990s the "new" Russia became the leading supplier of China's arms modernization campaign. Many had believed that growing Chinese power would force Russia into an alliance with the West. In addition, capitalist activity did not, as many had predicted, force China to evolve into a democratic State.
Instead the opposite has happened. China and Russia are firm allies, both are one-party States, both are engaged in Cold War level espionage activities against the U.S., and both are supporting anti-American regimes and movements around the world.
Lenin is in the driver's seat, and he is driving a Western Cadillac.
Posted June 15, 2011
Toby Westerman publishes
International News Analysis - Today
An investigative, analytical, and uncompromising weekly analysis of the world situation
Contact T. Westerman at
www.inatoday.com
or P.O. BOX 5182, Rockford, ILL, 61125-0182
Related Topics of Interest
A Cold War that Continues
Color Variations in Communism
The Rise of the Neo-Communist Empire
Ignoring the Evil of Communism in Cuba
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