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 Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian. .
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The numbers of victims of Stalin's and Mao's terror ran into dozens of millions according to all estimates, but even Stalin himself realized in 1938 that his terror merely harmed him and his absolute power. Who was persecuted in Soviet Russia after his death in 1953 and up to the fall of the dictatorship in 1991? Those who openly came out against it (like Solzhenitsyn, who published his book ÒGulag ArchipelagoÓ abroad) and began to be called Òdissidents.Ó
They were few by definition. Millions of Soviet people were against the dictatorship, which finally fell in 1991, but mere dozens dared to come out against it openly and were put on trial (or deported in the case of Solzhenitsyn).
Yet what tremendous attention the West was paying to the ÒSoviet dissidentsÓ! More than a thousand correspondents turned up to meet Solzhenitsyn when he arrived in the United States!
In 1978 I co-founded the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies. Since its key subject was Òthe Soviet threat,Ó its Advisory Board was a Who's Who of Western celebrities, beginning alphabetically with Saul Bellow. True, Òforeign policy liberals,Ó such as the New York Times staff, refused to publish me, but, owing to Òforeign policy conservatives,Ó I lectured on the ÒSoviet threatÓ all over the West, while in North Carolina they bought a week of my time and carried me from university to university and from high school to high school, with TV interviews in between. Reporters of the major local periodicals were always in the lecture hall.
When China began in 1986 the development of post-nuclear superweapons Ñ no, not of mass, but of global-scale, destruction, I understood that the key geostrategic danger was shifting from Russia to China, and, indeed, the Soviet dictatorship collapsed in 1991. The Chinese dissidents persecuted in China after Mao's death are far more numerous than were the Soviet dissidents persecuted in Soviet Russia after Stalin's death.
In Moscow, there was nothing comparable to Beijing's Tiananmen Square massacre of thousands of dissidents. The Square was only an open-air PR center for six weeks of a countrywide dissident movement whose more than 100,000 dissidents were arrested, according to Liu Binyan's book of 1989 ÒTell the World.Ó
The spiritual movement Falun Gong? Estimates range up to hundreds of thousands arrested and up to 100,000 incarcerated in forced labor camps.
Tibet? The victims come up to Òmore than a million,Ó according to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (DøCal.), who seems to be the only member of Congress watching China.
The persecution of dissent in a big dictatorship is intimately linked with the rulers' quest for world domination. After all, what is the West from their point of view? A North Atlantic bicontinental Tiananmen Square that subverts the dictatorship in China by its very existence. Crush it! With nano weapons, for example!
But in contrast to the Western tremendous response to the Soviet dissidents, the Western reaction to the Chinese dissidents is a deafening silence.
True, the West could not help noticing the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 Ñ it was too newsworthy, too photogenic, too unusual to be missed, and President Clinton spoke of Òthe Beijing butchers.Ó But ere long he forgot what he himself had been saying, the Chinese dissidents vanished from the Western media and from the statements of the Western political establishment, and China became a Western health resort, famous for its Beijing duck. The symbol was now not the Beijing butchers, but the Beijing duck.
The Chinese dissident Harry Wu spent nineteen years in labor camps Ñ twice as long as did Solzhenitsyn. Wu's book ÒTroublemaker: The Story of Chinese Dissident Harry WuÓ combines Solzhenitsyn's ÒOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich-Ó and ÒGulag Archipelago.Ó But when ÒOne Day . . .Ó had been published in Russia, an American correspondent in Moscow dictated his translation by telephone as the hottest news item. What Western periodical did not review or at least mention it?
Wu's ÒTroublemakerÓ? Well, NewsMax.com sells it, and this is how I learned about its publication Ñ I read Editor Rita Samols's note after my NewsMax.com column of Oct. 17, 2003, as I also learned about Wu's Laogai Foundation, publicizing abuses in the Chinese labor camps.
On October 10, I and my assistant Isak Baldwin were honored to meet John Kusumi, the founder of China Support Network, its name implying that China is the people of China and above all the Chinese dissidents, not the dictatorship in China. Present at our meeting were a charming and highly intelligent young lady, Nicole Scarcelli, in charge of China Support Network public relations, and two Tiananmen Square dissidents, Mount Hu and Meng Jiu, who escaped from the Square to the United States.
No, neither John Kusumi, nor either of the two Tiananmen Square heroes and now researchers and activists of the Chinese dissident movement in the United States, nor Harry Wu, nor anyone else in the Chinese dissident cause were met by more than a thousand correspondents at an airport or sent on a world lecture tour Ñ no, not even on a North Carolina lecture circuit.
But heroism is all the more heroic when it is accompanied not by lecture fees, press reports, ovations, and TV programs, but by silence, indifference, and self-imposed ignorance, suicidal for the West, to begin with.
The mission of both the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies and John Kusumi's CSN is to breach the wall of silence, indifference, and self-imposed ignorance and show the reality of China, not a glossy tourist poster, advertising the Beijing duck.
This is why we met on October 10, 2003.
John is a self-effacing person, and I could not elicit from him anything about him personally except what I had known from the Internet, viz., that in 1984, at the age of 18, he ran for U.S. presidency, though the law requires that the president be 35 or older.
This detail in his life shows his intellectual independence (he named his worldview Òpractical idealismÓ) and the power of his personality. Indeed, why should the president's age be 35 or over? Many scientists and thinkers of genius revealed it in their teen years. Is statecraft or statesmanship so different from all other fields of human endeavor?
It is this intellectual independence and the power of personality that enabled John to react to the Tiananmen Square massacre not with the older-than-35 President Clinton's transient curses, but with the practical-idealistic foundation of the China Support Network.
ÒCommunism is still communism. As much as ever, it is still godless, evil, and killing people today,Ó Kusumi said, and continued, ÒAmerica's mainstream issue is now one that is lost on the spin doctors of network TV. How are they ever going to tell us the truth, after all these years of keeping it from us? Ñ 'This just in. Communism is a bad thing'?Ó
As Chinese dissidents continue their face-off with the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Support Network seems a place where the cold war never ended. ÒBy now, our slogan could say, 'Fighting Communism for 14 Years,Ó offered Kusumi, whose network has taken positions against the free trade pact with China Ñ absent reform Ñ and against the 2008 Olympics being awarded to Beijing, China. Again, the opposition concentrate on the absence of democracy in China.
Kusumi and the Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square are now in their mid thirties, compatriots in their age group. They continue vigorous activism, and invite the public and those who would render assistance to www.chinasupport.net, where their latest news is posted. The Chinese Support Network is releasing a new report, The Road Map To Democracy, about the Chinese democracy movement. The latter is swept with a new campaign to ÒBring Jiang To Justice,Ó referring to Jiang Zemin, the former President of China, whom they see as the dictator responsible for genocide and other crimes against humanity.
It remains to be seen whether they can arrange an international tribunal for the trial of the former dictator, but they are determined. ÒThe China Support Network sees this cause as being vital to the world's safety and well-being, and to the future of all of humankind,Ó according to the Road Map To Democracy. ÒIt remains the work of the Tiananmen Generation to bring democratic political reform to mainland China,Ó notes Kusumi.
Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.