More News Than You Can Shake a Conspiracy Stick At: Part One

Once Upon a Time in the West has it right: the White House had an "incredible explanation" for President Obama's meeting with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. "The president tends to roam around the larger (White) House and sometimes walks into meetings that weren't previously on his schedule." It's incredible because it's ridiculous. The president doesn't just wander anywhere, especially not into meetings with former heads-of-state. Of course, our pliant press left that weak explanation alone. After all, Gorbachev is a good guy, right?

I wrote about Gorbachev not long ago, when he conspicuously criticized Vladimir Putin. I took that as disinformation, a shoring up of Gorbachev's ludicrous but entirely accepted image as an independent reformer, a sort of Russian maverick who is genuinely interested in world peace and things like global warming.

It's unclear why the ruse of Obama "roaming" into a meeting with Gorbachev is necessary. After all, "a delegation led by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Russia last week and met Medvedev."

Once Upon a Time in the West points us to an interview Gorbachev had with the Italian paper La Stampa after the U.S. elections. It was picked up by Novosti:

He said the Republicans have failed to realize that the Soviet Union no longer exists, that Europe has changed, and that new powers like China, Brazil and Mexico have emerged as important players on the world stage.

This theme, that "Republicans have failed to realize that the Soviet Union no longer exists," albeit silly, is important. It has been repeated often lately, and we will hear it more and more as war preparations, if that's what they are, heat up. Novosti also quoted "former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky":

He said that, "being a liberal himself, he thinks that the world will take a left turn," and that "a global perestroika would be a logical response to the global crisis."

"The paradigm of global development is about to change. The era inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago is over."

He said decisions in neoliberal economies had been made mainly by supranational institutions and transnational corporations.

This is scary stuff. As is plain for all to see, even Gorbachev's reformer persona stresses a new, internationalist, anti-sovereign world system. Perestroika, for him, is a convergence of political systems toward a unity that looks a lot more like international socialism than it does a collection of national interests unified only by capitalist trade.

This much is clear in Gorbachev's own formulation of perestroika. As Once Upon a Time quotes from Gorbachev's book, he writes, "Perestroika is closely connected with socialism as a system... We are looking within socialism, rather than outside it, for the answers to all the questions that arise... We will proceed toward better socialism rather than away from it." Gorbachev's appeal to the West is precisely his claim that socialism and democracy are compatible, which we know is nothing more than a Leninist lie.

Perestroika itself is a lie, a lie that is inherent in Leninism, a tactic outlined by Lenin himself in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, What is to be Done?, and many other places. It is not a spontaneous development within ideological communism that breaks down the walls of authority, but a deliberate concoction meant to appeal to the wishful thinking of the West. And it works.