To be clear: I am not now nor have I ever been a supporter of Communism, let alone a member of the Communist Party.
However, in my teenage years I regularly received Communist propaganda in the mail, and even put it on my bedroom walls. A calendar featuring images of Chairman Mao. A poster of Che Guevara in psychedelic colors. A photo of Red Square with a hammer and sickle overprinted on it.
It stemmed from my hobby of shortwave listening.
Some people hear “shortwave” and think “ham radio.” But ham, or amateur, radio is two-way communication—ham to ham—within specified segments of the radio spectrum. Some (but not all) of those segments lie within the shortwave bands.
Shortwave listening, on the other hand, means listening to broadcast stations that use the shortwave bands. It’s similar to listening to AM or FM radio, only on a different part of the dial, so to speak: strictly one-way.
Shortwave stations can broadcast over a very long distance … even from one side of the earth to the other. This is because shortwaves can be “bounced,” or reflected, off the layer of gases called the ionosphere.
As you might guess, shortwave is mainly of interest to broadcasters seeking an international audience. Back in the heyday this largely meant government-funded stations and religious stations.
The BBC had a North American Service beaming specially curated news and entertainment to the U.S. and Canada. HCJB, the Voice of the Andes, was run by missionaries in Ecuador, broadcasting in Spanish to South America and in English to North America; in English the call letters were said to stand for Heralding Christ Jesus’s Blessings.
Tuning around late at night on my multiband GE receiver, to which I had attached a longwire antenna—the better to make rare catches, such as Radio Ghana—provided many hours of geeky pleasure. It’s also how I acquired all that Commie propaganda delivered to our house by a uniformed employee of the U.S. government.
Collecting so-called QSL cards became a big part of my “SWLing.”
Every time I heard a new station I wrote it in a log, noting date and time, reception quality and some program details. I then sent a report to the station, which in return sent a card confirming my reception of its broadcast.
From most stations, all I received was the card, and perhaps a separate printed broadcast schedule. Radio Australia’s card had a photo of a kookaburra on the front; back then, the station signed on with the laugh of a kookaburra. The BBC’s card had, natch, a picture of the Tower of Big Ben. NHK-World Japan, which had an English-language service, sent a card with a painting of cherry blossoms. HCJB, as I recall, issued a new card every year, increasing their collectability; llamas and Andean panpipes figured prominently.
The Communist stations didn’t stop with QSL cards, though. They sent me whole packets of stuff, and kept me on their mailing lists for months or years after I stopped sending in reception reports.
Radio Moscow was relatively restrained, but Radio China and Radio Havana shipped me big envelopes containing posters, magazines, calendars and more. From the Chinese I got a leatherette-bound copy of Mao’s Little Red Book, English edition; from the Cubans came issue after issue of the Communist newspaper Granma, as well as the aforementioned Che poster.
Here’s the wild thing. As far as I know, nobody cared that I was receiving all this Commie material, and this was in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War. My parents didn’t much like it, but I don’t think I was ever even put on a government list (I’ve tried to find out).
One of the envelopes from Cuba did catch somebody’s attention. In my memory, it was rubber-stamped “Inspected by the CIA” when it arrived, but I’m probably misremembering; would the CIA tell me if it messed with my mail? More likely it was just somebody at the post office—and it still got delivered.
Even having a letter of mine read over the air on Radio Moscow’s “Moscow Mailbag” program didn’t bring the feds to my door. (I think I asked some dumb question about Soviet roads.)
There are a couple of takeaways here.
First, even as an impressionable youth, I wasn’t fooled by the bright pictures of happy workers building the Communist paradise in China, or by Fidel’s speeches extolling the accomplishments of Cuban socialism (Radio Havana sent me English-language transcripts).
I’ve always instinctively disliked collectivism, even mild varieties such as corporate rah-rah-ism and school spirit. I don’t pledge allegiance to flags, parties or religions—including the religion of patriotism. I’m not averse to teamwork or to joining hands with others to accomplish a goal; it’s the surrender to coercive conformity and groupthink that I reject.
Marxism is collectivism at its blood-soaked worst, and at 16 I knew enough about the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their followers to have no illusions as to Communism’s benignity. I savored the propaganda as interesting kitsch; there was zero risk that my possessing it would turn me into a Red.
The second takeaway is how little the U.S. government cared about me, or presumably any American, consuming the propaganda of its declared enemies.
Again, this was the height of the Cold War, when the CIA and other elements of the Deep State were running operations around the world to bring down Communists and others seen as threats to the national interest, which really meant, as it does now, the interests of the Deep State.
Yet as far as average Americans were concerned, the regime seemed to genuinely respect the principle that as free people we could read whatever we liked, even enemy agitprop, and make up our own minds. It’s what made us superior to the Commies, after all.
That’s all changed.
The recent moves toward banning TikTok show the contempt in which our rulers today hold Americans and their freedom.
By a vote of 352 to 65 the House of Representatives passed a bill requiring the Chinese company that owns TikTok to sell it, or else be shut out of the U.S. market. It’s widely expected the company will not comply if the bill becomes law (it still must be ratified by the Senate).
Promoters of the bill argued that the Chinese Communist Party could wield the popular video-sharing app to do all manner of evil, from stealing Americans’ personal data to interfering in elections to deliberately spreading disinformation.
One need not trust the CCP, which like most ruling groups is a thugocracy, to see that a government ban on TikTok is really an attack on the millions of Americans who voluntarily choose to use it, whatever the actual risks—which in any case can be met with private-sector vigilance and security.
As Congressman Thomas Massie noted, such laws are Trojan horses. They become tools for our rulers to cast nets far beyond the original target, to punish domestic political enemies or to create new ways to surveil and restrict ordinary Americans. Exhibit A: The Patriot Act.
Indeed, the TikTok bill grants the president the authority to deem any foreign-owned app or website a national security risk. The potential—nay, likelihood—for abuse should be obvious to anyone.
Even if the law only ever affected TikTok, where did these politicians acquire the right to dictate to 330 million Americans what they may or may not watch online or what apps they may use?
Sixty years ago (almost), no one tried to stop me from receiving propaganda into my home directly from Beijing and Havana. What has changed, aside from technology? Have the politicians become more arrogant and censorship-friendly than they were then?
For Americans, the biggest source of disinformation today is in Washington, DC, not overseas. The Covid psyop alone makes that clear.
Beginning in 2020, politicians and bureaucrats and their megaphone-heads in the media lied about everything Covid, from the real risk of the virus to most people, to the claimed lack of early treatment options, to the reliability of PCR tests, to the since-demolished case for masks, distancing and lockdowns, to the safety and efficacy of the mRNA injections.
Operatives from the FBI and the White House “partnered” with social media to censor and deplatform dissenters from the Covid narrative, including journalists and highly regarded doctors and scientists who merely asked questions or pointed out discrepancies in the official story.
These are perilous times for free speech in the so-called Western democracies. You can be fined in the UK and forced to do community service for posting to Instagram the lyrics to a rap song containing the N word (a real example). Canada’s ruling regime is pushing through laws allowing the arrest of persons voicing socially incorrect opinions, on the theory they might commit a hate crime in the future. Can you say “pre-crime?”
Here in the U.S. the Supreme Court is weighing whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment when it pressured social media companies to remove information it didn’t like. So long as there is any pretense that the Constitution means what it says, this should not even be debatable.
During hearings, one of the justices fretted that an absolutist view of the First Amendment could hamstring the government. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. If only it really did.
Notes
My meta-view of the Constitution is that of Lysander Spooner, who wrote in 1867: “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.” As the otherwise execrable George W. Bush accurately put it (reportedly): “The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper.”
International shortwave broadcasting still exists, but is a ghost what it used to be, another victim of the march of technology, and particularly of the Internet.
When I got a position as an editor on the LSU student newspaper I received a small paycheck from the university, which technically made me an employee of the state of Louisiana. I was required to sign an oath that I was not a member of the Communist Party. I wondered: Would an actual Communist, having gotten that far, be stopped in his tracks by this? “Well, they got me. My bosses in the Kremlin will be so pissed.”
The last prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, was the worst of the worst Covid authoritarians. Who can forget her admonishing New Zealanders to look to her government “as your single source of truth,” and that, “Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth”? Or the press conference where she smirked while announcing the punishments in store for people who refused the jab? Her Marxist background, which includes presiding over the International Union of Socialist Youth, explains much.
As I was finishing up this piece my attention was drawn to this, the opening scene from the Netflix series, “3 Body Problem.” It’s a terrifying depiction of China’s Cultural Revolution and what it did to people.
I asserted in my essay that “national interest”—aka “national security”—really just means the interests of the Deep State. My friend Jacob Hornberger illustrates this well, in regard to the JFK assassination and the hold-up on release of records related to that event:
Today — more than 60 years after the assassination — the CIA continues to keep thousands of its assassination-related records secret. Its justification? You guessed it: “national security,” the two most powerful and meaningless words in the American political lexicon. CIA officials maintain, with straight faces, that if those still-secret assassination-related records were released, the United States would fall into the ocean, be taken over by communists, or have its “national security” endangered in some other silly way.
How in the world can “national security” be threatened by the release of records that are more than 60 years old, regardless of what definition is placed on that nebulous term? Indeed, how can any American really believe this nonsense? They obviously take Americans for dupes.
Permission is given to republish this article with these provisions: 1. You must credit me, R. Stephen Smith, as the author. 2. You must include a link back to this page or to my home page.
How the mighty West has fallen.