Gorbachev charm offensive: the former Soviet dictator once again brings his ongoing socialist, world government campaign to America's heartland.(Deception)

Mikhail Gorbachev is coming to Middle America. To Wisconsin's Fox Cities, to be precise--a group of communities on the Fox River clustered around the city of Appleton. Mr. Gorbachev will be the keynote speaker and main attraction at an October lst-3rd conference that proposes to launch a new project called Communities for International Development. Some Fox Cities business, media, and academic leaders are all aglow over the supposed opportunities and prestige the Gorbachev visit will bring. However, the Appleton-based John Birch Society offers a far less naive, and more realistic, take on the hype-driven event.

"Mikhail Gorbachev is a lifelong Communist who clawed his way to the top of the murderous power structure of the Soviet Union, presided over the continued Soviet genocide of Afghanistan, and supported worldwide Communist repression, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation to terrorist states," says G. Vance Smith, chief executive officer of the John Birch Society.

"Can the leopard change its spots?" asks Mr. Smith, who then continues: "When it comes to Gorbachev and the current leadership of Russia, the answer should be an obvious and emphatic 'No!' The so-called transformation of Russia under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Primakov, and Putin has been a colossal deception. We still have lifelong Communists controlling all the centers of Russian power: the presidency, the Congress, the military, the secret police, the media, the judiciary. The stark facts show that in Russia, as in the other former states of the Soviet Union, power is still concentrated in the hands of the nomenklatura, the same totalitarians who ran the old regime. President Putin, Gorbachev's brutal friend and former KGB/FSB boss, is a prime example. Since the so-called collapse of the Soviet Union, American tax-payers have shoveled tens of billions of dollars into the pockets of these tyrants. But we cannot successfully bribe them to change their nature. Gorbachev, Putin, and company are all smiles and charm now, but at some point they will drop their pretenses and show their iron fist inside the velvet glove."

The Real Gorby

Years before the August Coup charade of 1991 that unseated Gorbachev and installed Yeltsin, the John Birch Society was pointing out that the Kremlin's masters of strategic deception had initiated a so-called long-range peace offensive aimed at convincing the West that Communism was evolving and transforming into a more mellow system. "Former Soviet strategist Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected to the West, accurately predicted decades ago that Soviet leaders would stage an incredible 'break with the past' to lull the U.S. to sleep, obtain massive economic and technological aid, and effect a gradual political 'convergence' with the West," says Birch Society president John F. McManus.

That convergence, Mr. McManus notes, is already very dangerously far advanced. "Russia and its fellow 'former' Communist satellites are being treated as genuine allies and integrated into NATO, the European Union, and U.S. political, economic, military, and intelligence organizations," he says. "The Masters of Deceit are accomplishing through stealth," charges McManus, "what they could not pull off through direct military conquest. His doubletalk notwithstanding, Gorbachev has plainly stated that his goal is world government--a Marxist-Leninist world government. And that is clearly the direction our political leaders have been taking us. Gorbachev's Communities for International Development seeks to advance the convergence scheme by setting up more Sister City lobbying groups--NGOs, non-governmental organizations--to push for more U.S.-Russian integration and more transfers of U.S. wealth to Russia. He may not command the daily headlines that he did when he headed the Soviet Union, but Mikhail Gorbachev is, arguably, more influential and dangerous now than when his finger was on the Soviet nuclear trigger."

Mikhail Gorbachev dangerous? Gorbachev, the great reformer, the "man who ended the Cold War," the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Time magazine's "Man of the Decade"? Yes, that Mikhail Gorbachev, the supposed global visionary, environmental activist, and peace advocate who is the toast of the planet's elite in the worlds of ...