PCG's Andrew Müller: McCarthyite Imitator

The March 2015 issue of PCG's recruitment magazine, The Philadelphia Trumpet, contains this a bizarre, scare mongering article by Andrew Müller entitled "Has America Been Influenced by Communism?"

(Illustration by Melissa Barreiro as seen on page 14 of the March 2014 issue of The Philadelphia Trumpet.)

This article is largely a rewrite of a chapter in the 2014 edition of PCG's booklet, He Was Right. That chapter is given a more inflammatory name: "The Communist Infiltration of America Was Prophesied". A major purpose of this article is to "prove" that HWA was right about Communist infiltration in America.

Let us see what Müller has to say.

Many today ridicule prior generations’ concern over Communist infiltration. But current trends are bringing that concern back into focus. 

Really? Maybe this supposed "ridicule" might have something to do with the fact that many of the accusations of Communist infiltration during the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s were later discovered to be largely imaginary.

In the 1940s and 1950s, many Americans found that warning to ring true. But as time went on, many dismissed it as a Communist scare that never quite appeared. By the new millennium, such a notion seemed outdated.

Today, however, many are starting to wonder what has happened to America and the West—and if this invisible Communist threat was real after all.

There was a Communist movement that found adherents all over the world including America but the problem with McCarthyism that arose in the 1950s (which Müller obliquely refers to) is that many innocent people were unfairly tainted with often false and/or exaggerated accusations. The accusation that one was Communist or somehow like the Communists was often used to blacklist many innocent people and caused much suffering to innocent people. The accusation was used not just to condemn actual Communists but was cynically used to silence unwanted voices.

In practice, communism has never been the grassroots movement Karl Marx predicted. It has been driven by small groups of intellectuals and elites who seize power. Hence the targeting of the American intelligentsia—present and future.

Mr. Armstrong understood this—and he saw a much bigger picture. He warned that demoralization tactics originated from a source beyond Marx, the KGB or the Soviet Union. That warning also explains the effectiveness of the demoralization process: “Communism is the devil’s effort, through his demon-inspired human tools, to take from us this greatest national and economic blessing God ever conferred on any people,” he wrote in 1949.

PCG, like many other marginal religious movements, has a long history of belittling education because they know that if PCG members go to College beyond PCG's control they will discover that many things that PCG's leaders say are simply not true.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet archives revealed the Communist Party-u.s.a. [sic] (an organization that is still alive and well today) received $2 to $3 million a year from the Kremlin to further its subversion activities.

Does the Kremlin fund them today? If they do not then we do not need to worry about the Communist Party-USA receiving funding from them. That thought is never mentioned in this article.

The Communist Party-USA is indeed still in existence but how important is it? Can they mobilize people to effect the political scene? If they are so important then why is it that PCG has rarely mentioned them in their writings? This is just blatant scare mongering with little evidence to back it up.

Müller then asserts that Communism planned to abolish the family. He cites The Communist Manifesto.

Perhaps the most diabolical of these means is the Marxist plot to destroy the family. The Communist Manifesto calls the family a capitalist institution based “on private gain.” Marriage, it says, is but the “hypocritical” concealment of private prostitution. The authors hoped and predicted that both “bourgeois family” and “bourgeois marriage” would disappear with the vanishing of private capital. ...

In his book The Naked Communist, author Willard Cleon Skousen identified 45 Communist goals for the ideological subversion of America. These goals were read on the floor of Congress on Jan. 10, 1963. Among them are: discrediting the family as an institution; encouraging promiscuity and easy divorce; emphasizing the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents; promoting pornography; and presenting homosexuality as “normal, natural, healthy.”

Under the influence of Marxist philosophy and Soviet subversion tactics, American educators have spent decades trumpeting sexual liberation, militant feminism and homosexual rights. All this has been done under the banner of freedom, but the truth is that these movements have served as Trojan horses in the assault on marriage.

And so we see how Müller exploits the exaggerated fear of Communism to condemn unwanted political and social movements. No attempt is made to sift out the wheat and the chaff here. It is all chaff Müller fearfully tells us.

But did the Soviet Union, a state that based its legitimacy on Marxist ideology, the supposed source of these undesired ideas and acts, actually try to abolish the family?

Of course not. In actual fact the Soviet Union was very conservative in regard to family matters. From 1936 till 1955 abortion was banned in the Soviet Union.

Some insight into just how conservative the Soviet Union was in regards to family matters may be seen in the blog, This Ruthless World, written by a woman who grew up in the Soviet Union. This is from her 2013 post, The Long 1950s ... Behind the Iron Curtain.

Second, although it is true that the Soviet Union exercised a tremendous degree of power over its citizens, and it was known to take children away from parents who were deemed Enemies of the People (though this mostly happened during the Great Purges of the 1930’s), no one actually said that “children belong to the state”, much less in front of a bunch of Americans. That is just a straight-up lie. You know how I know that? Because Soviet ideology was very, very heavily into what American conservatives call “traditional family values”. ...

In fact, the Soviet establishment’s attitude towards sex was so conservative, it would make Victorians seem almost randy by comparison. For most of the USSR’s existence, there was virtually no public discussion of sex in any context whatsoever — and inasmuch as the state controlled all means of mass communication, this literally meant there was virtually no public discussion of sex in any context whatsoever.

Also similar to such reluctance to publicly discuss sexual matters there was also a severe social stigma towards children born out of wedlock.

The stigma of unwed motherhood was deep and intractable. An unwed mother had virtually no chance of ever getting married (it was considered emasculating to raise another man’s child, especially a child born illegitimate), and lifelong harassment and ostracism were assured. After I befriended a very nice little girl who lived in the same apartment complex, my father forbade me to play with her because her mother had her out of wedlock. This was also the reason why no other kids played with her, and she was always alone.

“Her mother is a prostitute, and she services Africans. In her home!” my father said.

This was patently untrue, at least the part about African clients coming to the woman’s apartment. Black people were so rarely seen in Russia, if one came to visit in our apartment complex, it would be a sensation. Everyone would come out and stare. And since Russia had a strong courtyard culture, with children and elderly apartment tenants hanging outside their buildings at all hours of the day, this isn’t something that could go unnoticed. And a regular stream of multiple black men? Forget about it. I would have at least heard something. What my father was saying was a pure invention, and I knew it then. But it was the standard way that unwed mothers were treated, and they were considered deserving of the most fantastical and obviously contrived accusations. Society did not recognize any moral obligation towards a woman who had a child out of wedlock, least of all any duty to be fair to her and not to make stuff up.

So considering that the Soviet Union was so conservative about family matters Müller's assertion that Communists plotted to abolish the family must be viewed as nonsense. Instead of trying to understand what actually happened in the Communist countries he just took a few words from The Communist Manifesto that were rarely acted upon to scare monger about Communists in a fanciful way. Considering the many terrible things that actually did occur in the Communist countries it is bizarre that Müller used such a largely delusional assertion to vilify the Communists.

We now return to Müller's article.

America may not have replaced the stars on its flag with hammers and sickles, but it is by now undeniable that it is divided between the idea of freedom and that of communism. The American people long ago rejected God and allowed Satan-inspired Communist philosophy to infiltrate, subvert and divide the nation. God will allow this experience to teach America the natural consequences of broken law.

Talk of equality sounds noble, but as Mr. Armstrong warned, the Communist version of “equality” is only a means to an end. ...

Looking at America today, you have to admit that Mr. Armstrong was right.

This is nonsense. What exactly are "the idea of freedom and that of communism" that he talks of here?

Müller writes that "Talk of equality sounds noble" which insinuates that anyone talking about equality is "actually" a Communist. That would be a terrible and fanciful slur upon many people trying to deal with the pressing social problems in America today. Just because one talks of equality does not mean he or she is trying to launch a wave of violence like Lenin or Stalin.

And so Müller's article comes to an end.

What a bizarre, strange article PCG has produced. Why have the editors of this publication, namely Gerald Flurry, Stephen Flurry, Joel Hilliker, Brad MacDonald, Dennis Leap, Robert Morley, Jeremiah Jacques and Phillip Nice allowed this to be published? Didn't any of them worry that this article was so badly flawed? Couldn't they see what was wrong with this article? Are they also that blind?

Clearly the spirit of McCarthyism is alive and well in the offices of The Philadelphia Trumpet. No good can come from this.