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

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 business, politics, academe, entertainment, and spirituality.

Over the past 12 years since departing from official leadership in the Kremlin, Gorbachev has built an international power base of unprecedented scope for any former political figure. His private Gorbachev Foundation--which he has called his "global brain trust"--boasts branches throughout the world, enjoys lavish taxpayer and corporate funding, and sponsors global summits aimed at restructuring our world political, economic, and ethical systems. As president of Green Cross International, he presides over United Nations-sponsored conferences on alleged world crises that demand global solutions. As chairman of the Earth Charter Commission, he has presumed to serve as chief drafter of a "new Ten Commandments" to guide all humanity into a "new world order."

Gorbachev has not attained his international celebrity status on his own steam, however. His every step toward eminence as the premier global elder statesman has been boosted and choreographed by an odd coalition of top Communists from the old Soviet Kremlin gang and Western one-worlders, as exemplified by the higher echelons of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Trilateral Commission. Gorbachev's boon companions in his grand endeavors read like a "Who's Who" of world movers and shakers: David Rockefeller, Steven Rockefeller, George Shultz, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Maurice Strong, Kofi Annan, Walter Cronkite, Henry Kissinger, Shimon Peres, Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Deepak Chopra, and a bevy of like-minded internationalists.

Spots Remain Unchanged

This writer observed from close-up the Gorbachev phenomenon over the past decade-and-a-half, having attended the Gorbachev Foundation's "State of the World Forums," as well as covering Gorbachev's triumphal appearances at the Rio Earth Summit, Stanford University, the United Nations, and other venues. I and other writers for this magazine have repeatedly pointed out Gorbachev's continued expressed commitment to Marxism-Leninism (i.e., Communism) and a world government to which all nations, including the U.S., would eventually be subject.

In his famous 1992 Fulton, Missouri, speech, Gorbachev declared: "I believe that the new world order will not be fully realized unless the United Nations and its Security Council create structures ... which are authorized to impose sanctions and make use of other measures of compulsion." Jim Garrison, Gorbachev's handpicked executive director of the Gorbachev Foundation, developed this idea more fully in a 1995 interview with the SF Weekly of San Francisco. "Over the next 20 to 30 years, we are going to end up with world government," Garrison told the newspaper. "It's inevitable."

According to Garrison, this movement toward world government is "happening right now as you break down the Cold War" and the world becomes more chaotic and turbulent. "But in and through this turbulence," he declared, "is the recognition that we have to empower the United Nations and that we have to govern and regulate human interaction...."

When Gorbachev and his coterie of self-anointed "wise persons" talk about the need to "govern and regulate human interaction," they are advocating Soviet-style regimentation on a global scale. This is evident from, among other things, Gorbachev's steady promotion of the UN's Millennium Development Goals, a prescription for a broad array of global socialist programs, in the name of fighting hunger, disease, environmental degradation, global warming, poverty and other real and imaginary problems.

Gorbachcv's celebrated Earth Charter, unveiled last year at the UN's Earth Summit II in Johannesburg, South Africa, is further evidence of his failure genuinely to break from his Communist past. As a global manifesto for socialism, paganism, and world government, the Earth Charter is as clever a ruse for implementing Communist aims as ever Lenin or Stalin could have conceived.

Has the leopard changed its spots? No, but Gorbachev has white-washed them for the consumption of the gullible. And he is being aided in this massive deception by America's elite, who share his rapacious lust for unrestrained, global power.