The Soviets Taught the SPLC Everything Its Apparatchiks Needed to Succeed
Stalin Was the Master at Racial Dirty Tricks, Morris Dees His Apprentice
“Spontaneous” London protest for George Floyd mirrored that for Sacco and Vanzetti
Among the more helpful mentors in my reportorial career was the late Laird Wilcox, the founder of the Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements at University of Kansas’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Wilcox started his collection while still a leftist, but the more he learned about extremism, the more he saw leftism as its primary cause, the proximate source of which could be traced back to Josef Stalin.
Early on, Wilcox was attracted by the stated ideals of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an operation founded by Morris Dees in 1971. The more Wilcox learned about the SPLC, however, the more disillusioned he became. “When their reports on ‘extremist’ groups began appearing,” said Wilcox in a 2010 interview, “it was obviously a bogus fundraising scheme that was into demonizing and blacklisting.”
Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements at University of Kansas
Wilcox also saw the futility of listing hate groups. “The SPLC has listings I had never heard of and I know this area pretty well,” he noted. “I concluded that a lot of them were vanishingly small or didn’t exist, or could even be an invention of the SPLC.” By the 1990s, Wilcox concluded that many of the groups he had listed “were really intelligence-gathering operations with no objective membership, some by federal or state agencies and some by groups like the SPLC.”
Ideology was as powerful a driver for the SPLC as was money. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the SPLC and other leftist groups shifted their tactics. “Rather than present socialism or Marxism-Leninism as their goal,” Wilcox wrote of the various “watchdog” operations, “they piggy-back it onto anti-racism which is far more popular.” In short, for more than 30 years, the SPLC and others like it have been fomenting racial division and then raising money allegedly to stop it. Wilcox’s 1997 book, The Watchdogs: A Close Look At Anti-Racist “Watchdog” Groups, exposed their strategy early on.
The “watchdogs” had learned well from their Soviet mentors. An excellent source on this connection is The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, a landmark book by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin based on thousands of handwritten notes Mitrokhin smuggled from the Soviet Union.
The only real difference between the Soviet’s “Service A” and the SPLC was funding. Each hoped to sow racial division in the United States, but Service A did not rely on frightened donors. Like the SPLC, it specialized in false flag operations. Using stationery from right wing groups like the Minutemen or the John Birch Society, its operatives sent letters to civil rights groups and the media intended to provoke outrage.
Did Section A write the “hate” letters that defined Aaron’s assault on Ruth’s record? Maybe.
In advance of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Section A sent letters on Ku Klux Klan stationery to the Olympic committees of African and Asian countries. One such letter read, “THE OLYMPICS—FOR THE WHITES ONLY! African monkeys! A grand reception awaits you in Los Angeles! We are preparing for the Olympic games by shooting at black moving targets.”
If these threats sounds too outrageous to be believed, they are more grounded than the widely believed claims made by Jussie Smollett. Service A operatives understood that the media, here and abroad, wanted to believe the worst of white America.
Josef Stalin paved the way for Jussie Smollett
The Soviets called the practice “framing”—that is, taking a rumor or a small kernel of truth and rewriting the history of a person or an institution around it. On the racial front, the Soviets pioneered this practice more than a half-century before leftist watchdogs took it up.
Upon his ascension to power in 1924, Josef Stalin reoriented the international propaganda arm of the Communist Party, the Comintern, away from fomenting revolution in America and toward discrediting the American ideal. The world had to see America through fresh, unblinking eyes, not as the great melting pot, but as a simmering stew of racist and xenophobic injustice.
Even the ACLU dismissed Sacco and Vanzetti as “a couple of wops in a jam”
In 1925 the Comintern found just the victims of American injustice it was looking for in Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a pair of dapper Italian anarchists in the Luigi Mangione mold who had been justifiably convicted for the murder of an Italian American payroll clerk five years prior.
On cue, “spontaneous” protests sprung up throughout the world. Europe’s great squares filled with sobbing, shouting protestors, declaiming the innocence of the immigrant martyrs and denouncing the vile injustice of their persecutors.
London protests for Sacco and Vanzetti anticipated those for George Floyd
The SPLC took up where the Cominern left off. In recent years, they elevated the thuggish likes of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery, and especially George Floyd to the pantheon first graced by murderers Sacco and Vanzetti. Floyd’s international mobs may have even exceeded those ginned up for the Italian anarchists.
In truth, of course, protest organizers cared no more about Floyd or Heather Heyer, the woman killed at Charlottesville, than they did about Sacco and Vanzetti. Indeed, these apparatchiks feast on chaos. The SPLC more than doubled its revenue in the year after Heyer’s death. BLM did even better post-George Floyd.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Katherine Ann Porter learned the rules of the game a century ago. As the final hours ticked down for Sacco and Vanzetti, Porter stood vigil with other “useful idiots” outside a Boston prison. Ever the innocent liberal, Porter approached her group leader, a “fanatical little woman” and a dogmatic Communist, and expressed her hope that the boys could still be saved. The response of this female comrade was noteworthy largely for its candor: “Saved . . . who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?”
The filthiest lucre of all is that raked in by greedy race hustlers.
A very good article, Jack. The USSR always tried to use America’s racial problems to undermine it from within and discredit its mission of standing up for free peoples around the world. Jim Crow was definitely something they used to show how awful we were. They called us “racist” and “imperialist” constantly. They constantly tried to make us look like hypocrites. It was from Lenin and Stalin that the SPLC learned their tactics. The thing is, it was the Soviet Union who were the huge hypocrites. You think racism and other forms of discrimination didn’t exist in the USSR? Ha! Don’t make me laugh! Look at all the ethnic groups Stalin deported. It’s an endless list! Just to name a FEW: Koreans, Ingarian Finns, Kalmyks, Balkars, Volga Germans, Chechens, Italians, Greeks, Ingush, Kola Norwegians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Armenians, and Meskheitan Turks. Not to mention how African and Asian students who came from abroad to study in the USSR were treated. They were harassed, called racial slurs and assaulted by local people. Interracial dating and sex was frowned upon and met with violence. A student from Ghana who was dating a white Soviet girl was actually stabbed to death for doing so. White Soviet women who went out with black or Asian men were deemed prostitutes. The white Soviet mothers of mixed-race babies were pressured to get abortions or give the babies up for adoptions.
Jews faced open discrimination in the USSR and the Soviet Union hated Israel and gladly gave weapons and aid to its Arab enemies. The Jewish religion was suppressed and Jewish services were spied on by the KGB. The father of my friend Liza Libes here on Substack, was thrown in jail by the Soviet authorities in Azerbaijan because he was a Jew. Her great-grandfather was framed for a crime he didn’t commit and murdered because he was a Jew as well. Ethnic Russians were the only ones ever allowed to rise all that high in the Politburo, certainly the only ones with a the exception of Stalin, to become Premier of the county. Could a Ukrainian, Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Georgian, Cossack, Crimean Tatar, or Asian ever risen to become Premier of the USSR? Never in a million years! Nor could a woman have ever done so. Gays and lesbians had to stay in the closet in the Soviet Union. Disabled people were socially ostracized, neglected and abused.
Such kind, tolerant people those Soviets were! Lavrenity Beria head of the NKVD, was a serial rapist and a pedophile by the way. The Red Army raped millions of German, Austrian and Polish women as they pushed the Nazis back to Berlin. How about how brutally they treated German POWs? That’s a real hoot! Or how about when from 1941 to 1944, Soviet partisans slaughtered Finnish women and children? So progressive! So tolerant! Boy! They sure were being tolerant when they mercilessly persecuted Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims at home and slaughtered whole Afghan families including women, children, babies, and old people abroad weren’t they? They were sure being good non-imperialist freedom fighters when they looted the city of Budapest during World War II or sent tanks rolling into East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia to brutally repress pushes for freedom! The SPLC should be so proud that THESE folks are their role models!