A Warning in 1960 by Gen. Carlos P. Romulo

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Readers Digest published an article in November 1960 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gen. Carlos P. Romulo (1899-1985), a diplomat, statesman, Philippine Ambassador to the U.S., and President of the United Nations General Assembly (1949). He served in WWII with Gen. Douglas McArthur.

“America, Wake up!” was a critique of the United States of America and of its citizens whom he perceived and described as “strangely unmoved” and “meek” in the face of the “menace and humiliation” of the overt communist aggression and infiltration around the world during the Cold War era.

Even though Americans believe that all men are “equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Gen. Romulo warned that the “Red despotism of the universal Communist police state could come into being in our own lifetime.”

He understood that Russia was determined to dominate the world and he cautioned, “America, wake up! Shake off the course of inaction that is giving the forces of evil the right of way in this world! Face up to the blunt fact that you are now engaged in a real war and that it must be fought and won. This is the only alternative to defeat by default!”

He saw clearly that dictatorships were not interested in “peaceful coexistence,” they wanted control at all costs. Gen. Romulo witnessed vicious communists who kept entire nations captive and poor, even banning the word “liberation.” We don’t have to look very far to see that population confinement, misery, and abject poverty caused by communism still exists today in Cuba.

Communists were so focused on “winning the war to the finish,” whether it was cold or hot, that they employed any weapon necessary, “from propaganda leaflets to military force, from sabotage and murder to smiles and handshakes.  And they are always on the offensive,” Romulo wrote.  

During the Cold War era, Americans and the world were subjected to one manufactured crisis after another and each was “Made in Soviet Russia,” bent on “the creation of a one Communist world.” Very patient, communist activists around the world knew that they were engaged in a long, protracted war, spanning decades.

At the time, phony negotiations dealt with euphemistic scenarios such as “relieving tensions,” stabilizing situations,” “keeping the boat from rocking,” “containing communism,” instead of, in Romulo’s opinion, “eliminating the scourge.”

Well, the communist “scourge” has survived the fall of the Soviet Union, of the Berlin Wall, and of the Iron Curtain in 1989, and is coming back with a vengeance, including in the 2016 United States, where it is fashionable to be communist, to vote communist, and to desire and protest violently in support of a communist utopia.

Gen. Romulo explained how the “United States twice renewed the moratorium on nuclear testing, thus giving the Kremlin exactly what it wanted – a test ban without inspection.” It sounds eerily similar to the nuclear concessions made recently to Iran. At the time, Romulo said, the truth was that “the free-world leaders are dealing with a sinister global conspiracy by international gangsters as if it were an old-style dispute between civilized nations which respect the diplomatic niceties and the sanctity of treaties.”

Gen.  Romulo described how Russian communists had been schooled in the fine art of indoctrinating and pressuring racial minorities like himself to turn against the West.  He had been approached on numerous occasions by East German and Russian apparatchiks assigned to brainwash him. He believed the West was too passive when faced with such endless propaganda which made the “Western ‘colonialism’ the whipping boy in world opinion.” Nothing has changed 56 years later.

According to Gen. Romulo, communist propaganda was “allowed to undermine public morale and sow confusion in the United States itself.” He mentioned former President Herbert Hoover who spoke about a “multitude of citizens who have sunk to the posture of perpetual apology and seeming shame for ourselves.” It appears that apologists never went away, they have mushroomed during the frequent apology tours of the last seven years of this “transformational” administration.

Gen. Romulo believed that American honesty and puritanical background produced individuals with an “inordinate guilt complex. Somehow, it has become the fashion to belittle major American accomplishments, while all Soviet claims, including dubious boasts of future accomplishments, are played up in a groveling spirit.” It seems that this academia-manufactured guilt has grown over the last 56 years to the point where American exceptionalism is squashed constantly while mediocrity and primitiveness of other backward nations are praised and exalted.

Gen. Romulo wondered if America could project an “accurate image of its own society and a truthful image of the Communist slave world?” It seems that this faulty image of American society has become larger than life thanks to the work of American academia and liberals who constantly belittle and berate American exceptionalism, promote mediocrity, and revise history to reflect their socialist/communist views of the world.

Gen. Romulo had proposed a global public education campaign on such a grand scale as to exceed the Communist propaganda efforts on all continents. Unfortunately, the global education campaigns promoted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the so-called non-profits, such as global citizenship, international baccalaureate, and Common Core are actually supporting and advancing global communism and Islam, not freedom, not Christianity, nor American exceptionalism.

The agit-prop machine, agitation and propaganda, said Romulo, had spent billions of dollars on hundreds of special schools which produced “armies of experts in brainwashing and subversion” which had been deployed throughout the world.

These agit-prop graduates trained “Asians, Africans, Latin Americans, West Europeans and even citizens of the United States in all revolutionary techniques, from propaganda and sabotage to street rioting and guerilla fighting.” Generations later we see the results of these schools in today’s organized rioting by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and other communist organizations in the U.S. funded by progressive billionaires and elites who support global communism.

Romulo suggested that Americans have to fight these communists with their own “tricks and stratagems,” because it is the “only way to win the struggle for survival.” Appeasement is futile in any kind of war, cold or hot, he concluded.