Upstaging the SPLC: Communist Shapeshifters

Otto Dix, “Portrait of the (“new woman”, “anti-Nazi”) journalist Sylvia von Harden”, 1926

The recent U.S. government indictment of the SPLC may prompt a sigh of relief among White nationalist activists. Its defamatory activities have already caused significant harm to conservative and nationalist scholars, often labeled in SPLC vernacular as “white supremacists” or “antisemites.” Why it has taken the U.S. government so long to investigate the SPLC’s financial dealings remains unclear, especially given that some other agencies have used similar tactics—manufacturing threats to justify their own existence.

The SPLC’s smearing methods were heavily borrowed from standard practices in former communist Eastern Europe, where governments had to keep fabricating “fascists”, “nazis”, or “terrorists” in order to sustain their totalitarian regimes. One may also speculate, given the multiracial profile of the SPLC staff and its associates, that internal rifts may have prompted disgruntled individuals from one racial group to rat out their colleagues of a different color over the misallocated funds. When a money squeeze sets in, race always matters—just as money always talks.

This is nothing new in the left-leaning proto-communist and Antifa scenes. Those who were born and lived in communist states, or those who have studied the psychology of the communist mindset, know deadly well that the greatest enemies of communism, as recent history has amply demonstrated, were often disgruntled communist insiders. This brings to mind the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—caused not by proverbial right-wing insiders or foreign outsiders, but by systemic abuse of state funds coupled with internal ethnic squabbles among communist party members. The breakup of communist Yugoslavia and the infighting in the multiethnic Communist League comes to mind.

The True Non-Believers

The SPLC’s demonization of right-wing and nationalist circles in the U.S. and EU feels like a reenactment of quasi-judicial proceedings in former communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Whether other anti-hate think tanks or agencies will now come under the Trump administration’s scrutiny remains to be seen. One may gloat over the SPLC’s sudden fall from grace, but questions remain as to whether there will be similar legal efforts and comparable media outcry if other domestic, self-proclaimed anti-hate, anti-fascist organizations come onto the DOJ’s radar screen. The powerful Jewish ADL uses a far more refined name-calling when it comes to vilifying right-wing and nationalist dissenters. Why not examine its sources of funding as well as the methods of its demonology courses it presents at schools and police department? It is, however, very significant that over the past year the ADL and AIPAC have toned down their demonological rhetoric against so-called White supremacists while fully backing Trump’s rhetoric about bombing Iran to oblivion. A raw deal? A quid pro quo? Everybody can take a wild guess.

Nor are right-wing Christians in the U.S. and nationalist figureheads in Europe lagging behind in their sycophancy, as recently shown by the ‘discreet visit’ of French nationalist leader Marine Le Pen to the Israeli Embassy in Paris. The age of mutual Euro-right-wing and Israeli brownnosing is dawning.

The buck doesn’t stop with the SPLC though. Hundreds of other NGOs, especially in the EU—as noted in my previous pieces—are non-governmental in name only, yet depend on substantial state funding, draping themselves in the romantic attire of love, peace, and multiracial tolerance. Their public posturing, much like that of the SPLC, is a carbon copy of earlier Bolshevik agencies in the early Soviet Union. One must repeat, time and again, that some of the most zealous communist henchmen in the Soviet Union and Europe—such as Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, Lavrentiy Beria, and Béla Kun, along with thousands of their leftist sidekicks—were put to death by their former trusted comrades-in-arms. In Czechoslovakia in 1952, a dozen communist Jews, the early masters of the post-WWII Czech totalitarian system, were executed on charges of treason by their former comrades in arms.  The same upstaging scenario may have been brewing among jealous rank-and-file SPLC members, where everyone thought they could run the money side best on their own..

Historically, the more exotic titles these virtue-signaling agencies carry—such as the lavishly funded SPLC or the UK-based NGO Hope Not Hate—the more prone they are not just to violent proscriptions of right-wing wrong-thinkers but also to constant purges of their own kind. In passing, one should mention the case of Hans-Georg Maaßen, who headed Germany’s powerful domestic intelligence service—euphemistically known as the “Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution “ (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz)—and who was removed from his post in 2018 by Chancellor Angela Merkel following disagreements over the agency’s inquisitorial practices against the manufactured right-wing menace.

I have already written and provided references to the rise of the totalitarian spirit, also suggesting that it is part and parcel of absolute democracy—not its opposite, as many scholars claim. As a brainchild of post-communist multiracial pathology, the SPLC operates in a manner similar to the former intel agency Securitate in communist Romania, the Stasi in ex-East Germany, or the UDBA in communist ex-Yugoslavia. All of those secret service outlets kept hunting down anticommunist wrong-thinkers even if there were none in sight. Ultimately, the paranoid mindset of communist cutthroats  made them terminate each other. The SPLC would have finished the same way, one way or another, regardless of the recent Trump clamp-down.

Here are some personal remarks. When my father, Mirko Sunic,  a former Catholic lawyer, was arrested in communist Yugoslavia in 1984 on charges of having ties with Croat émigrés in the UK, the first to testify against him were our family members! This is a classic mode of the totalitarian mindset—of war of all against all—where self-denial and avoidance of guilt by association by family members becomes the rule, so well-illustrated in Shakespeare’s prose.

There is no such thing as true believers in politics. The SPLC members could have, under different circumstances and with different winds blowing, acted as a loudspeaker of the Right-wing or, for that matter, embraced belief in fearsome extraterrestrials. Furthermore, contrary to widespread belief, Croatia did not turn in 1991 into a right-wing country based on its own decision. Its new diplomatic and intelligence apparatus was staffed entirely by former communist officials. It was, willy-nilly, the ethnic infighting amidst the famed intel agency UDBA that sped up the independence of Croatia. As a high diplomat in newly born Croatia, I was literally surrounded by former Yugoslav diplomats who, in a matter of weeks and months, had converted from ardent Yugo-communist apparatchiks into church-going ardent Croat nationalists. The dread of getting terminated by their former Serbian communist comrades made them welcome extreme right-wing nationalists and expats who were best skilled to protect their rears. The true Croat nationalists did their work out on the front lines—similar to the Ukrainian Azov—still daydreaming their unfulfilled dreams.

No need to reinvent the wheel when discussing the SPLC . Political shapeshifting into the Other is nothing new, as was well described by the Latin poet Ovid two millennia ago. Family disunion or party betrayal will continue whoever comes to rule the US or EU ten years from now or ten centuries down the road. One must be prepared that the communism-minded SPLC or other left-wing NGOs in the US will, under different circumstantial sunsets, become devoted right-wingers or hide when needed—where the sun don’t shine.

The modern Left has always followed the mode of an all-you-can-eat buffet, i.e., dancing to the tune of the dominant ideology. Neither are right-wingers much better, as we learn from Shakespeare’s Richard III. Our own tribe, our ingroups, many of our own people—if our longed-for “White miracle” happens—will quickly resort to mindless vindictiveness and show their egomaniacal racial traits. With permission granted, let us cite again the French-Romanian pagan philosopher Emil Cioran, who warned us to beware of any attachment: “To be free is to rid yourself forever of the notion of reward; it is to expect nothing—neither from men nor from gods.”