I want to introduce you to one of my favorite authors. He is a geo-political strategist, a historian, a philosopher, an anti-communist, a journalist, and a teacher, but most of all he is a great writer. Someday he will be famous, maybe not in his own lifetime, but I am certain his writing will be his legacy.
Last week, he granted me an interview. He had a lot to say, and that is the subject of this week’s blog.
J. R. Nyquist always knew that he wanted to be a writer. As a young man, his favorite pastime included playing chess, Go, and Stratego. All these strategy games were to provide J.R.N. with a great advantage later in life, which you shall see.
As a sidenote, I am not sure if children still play Stratego today, but I can tell you that my husband Sybren loved this game too, so much that we still have his original board and pieces. They are 60 years old. It is worth considering that if your children or grandchildren are not playing strategy games like these, you should teach them. The kind of world that we are leaving them will be quite different than the world that you and I grew up in. We must teach them many skills that our parents did not teach us, and we did not teach our children.
So, what kind of world are we headed into?
We are now approaching the “crisis” moment of the American political experiment. According to J.R.N., we have been in a battle against Marxist ideology for nine decades. Now, the world communist movement led in concert by Russia and China are preparing to push the west down with “one clenched fist.” The West also includes Japan, Taiwan, and S. Korea.
His thesis, published in the book, The Origins of the Fourth World War, predicted that the Soviet Union was about to deceive the West into believing we defeated the Communist system. Yes, J.R.N. predicted they would fake their own collapse.
It looked real enough at the time, however.
Those of us who remember when Reagan spoke with the West Berlin wall as a backdrop (June 12, 1987) knew that he was making history. In that moment, our president famously told the leader of Russia, “Secretary General Gorbachev, if you seek peace—if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—if you seek liberalization: come here, to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
The wall came down in 1989 and east and western Germany reunited in 1990.
It was easy to believe that Reagan’s brilliant foreign policies, our U.S. military strength, and our thriving economy had beaten Communism. J.R.N. believes that the greatest self-deception occurred in 1991 when the Soviet Union suddenly, supposedly, and completely collapsed.
This doesn’t mean Reagan wasn’t a great president. He was. But the Soviets exploited his enthusiastic anti-communism to create an illusion of Russian weakness and failure.
And we were misled. As J.R.N. says, “The Reagan era was overly optimistic and accepted the end of the Cold War as authentic.”
Think about it this way. Are we supposed to believe that thirty million Communists in Eastern Germany in 1990 and over a 100 million Communists in the former U.S.S.R. flipped a switch in one night and turned into freedom loving enthusiastic capitalists?
J.R.N. has written extensively on these subjects and more.
How did he figure this out?
It happened years before when as a college student, communists attempted to recruit him while he was studying the soviet defector literature.
J.R.N. had originally intended to major in journalism, but one of his professors, a former British Marine, encouraged him to pursue political science as he recognized J.R.N.’s natural talent for strategy.
After graduation in 1981, the economy was still reeling from Jimmy Carter’s high inflation days, so he went to work for AT&T. In 1983, he returned to school to earn his teaching credential and to study public speaking.
A turning point occurred when one day a professor invited him to attend a lecture on improving American education. The speaker was an avowed Communist and the “meeting” was a gathering of members of the Communist party who were discussing J.R.N. says, “how to take over the Democratic Party through its left wing. This is when the communists first noticed me and became friendly. The speaker said, ‘Once we get into power, we will run the country as Lenin described as efficiently as the Post Office.’”
J.R.N. was shocked as was another guest who left, shouting, “That’s ridiculous. The post office cannot run anything right.”
Even though he was a student, his prior work experience as a union employee for the phone company made him appear “proletariat” to his Marxist professors. They began grooming him to become a Marxist like them. They also recognized his superior strategic thinking. “Academics are not always attuned to strategy, so I was targeted,” he says.
But on his own he began reading the classical historians, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, and Tacitus. It was interesting to him how had never heard of these writers while in college, but he spent his free time studying them in depth. This deep immersion in classical history gave J.R.N. an appreciation for the complexity of the rise and fall of nations.
J.R.N. explained there is a parallel in the accounts of Herodotus and Thucydides to America. In Herodotus’s account of the Persian Wars, J.R.N. says, “In defeating the Persians, the Athenians achieved a great triumph, actually a series of triumphs.”
Like the Athenians, we were the great achievers in World War II. Yet, five decades later, Thucydides describes how the Greek poleis turned on Athens as it had become an over-extended empire and considered a bully to boot. Could that be the fate that awaits us?
Time will tell.
Back to J.R.N.
He left the phone company to pursue his teaching career. It was while finishing his education classes, one of his professors at UC Irvine encouraged him to apply to the graduate program in political science.
So, in 1986, he entered graduate school while still teaching high school. Two of his professors told him that he had to read Karl Marx.
So, he did, but while reading Marx, he realized that his professors were asking him to read Marx not as an academic exercise, but because they were practicing Marxists. “I became a fly on the wall,” he says.
Yet his research into Marx and Lenin motivated him differently than his professors hoped. Being open to classical ideas, such as debate and logic, he counterbalanced the radical environment of the political science department and challenged their thinking. Even in the 1980s, the university was teaching Critical Race theory and all its -isms of feminism, racism, and socialism. Yet, J.R.N. was still old school enough to think for himself.
He resisted their indoctrination and started researching Soviet defectors. One professor told him to beware. They could be traitors, he said, but the reaction of his Marxist master teacher was most revealing. When studying under Professor Rein Tagapera who considered himself a “Swedish style socialist, J.R.N. says, “He got quite upset when I failed to criticize Golitsyn for speculating that Andrei Sakharov was a likely agent of the Soviet regime. Golitsyn had said that Sakharov’s Anti-Soviet statements could not be trusted. This infuriated Rein, as Sakharov was his hero. It was intellectual brutality,” J.R.N. said.
From studying Golitsyn, he learned that “when the conditions were right” that the Soviets planned to fake a collapse of the Communist Russian government. They would trick the west into complacency, infiltrate the west, and seek western capital investments to expand their military infrastructure.
When did Golitsyn predict this? In the 1960s. He defected in 1961. He eventually wrote two books: New Lies for Old (1984) and Perestroika Deception (1995). Many consider his books classics in the defector literature because so many of his predictions regarding Russia have proven correct. A hardcover copy costs over $120.00 today. That tells you something.
Now in 1987, it was clear to J.R.N. based on current events and his research that “those conditions were met.” Gorbachev was the KGB-appointed Russian leader to trick the west. The time had come. This defector was telling the truth! Nor was Golitsyn the only one who had discussed a fake collapse scenario as part of Soviet strategy. J.R.N. says that two other defectors named Sejna and Bittman were saying the same thing.
So J.R.N. could see how America was being set up. This epiphany inspired him to write The Origins of the Fourth World War.
Ironically, that same year, a woman invited J.R.N. to lunch who said to him, “They, (being the communists), she said, want a commitment.” J.R.N. turned her down. After that, the graduate school atmosphere became a “shattering experience.” His professors punished him for being an anti-communist. So, he resigned. Looking back on his graduate school experience, J.R.N. thinks we should preserve only the libraries. “Demolish the rest,” he says.
But it was through that experience that cemented J.R.N.’s passion for exposing the infiltration, the history, the philosophy, the psychology, and the strategy of the Russian and Chinese world communist movement. He has been writing about it for almost forty years as a journalist, as an essayist, and as an author.
Over the course of his career, J.R.N. would meet, interview, and read the writings of most of the Soviet defectors. “Sovietologists are missing important nuggets by ignoring and neglecting the defectors,” he says.
Next week, stay tuned for Part II of my interview with J.R. Nyquist. For now, click and read his blog for yourself: https://jrnyquist.blog/
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