Know your Enemy: Marxism-Leninism and the Marks of Extremism, Past and Present. In a time of ideological/religious war against peace and freedom as waged by Cold War Communists or contemporary radical Islamist militants, a successful American national strategy of peace, freedom, and security must under- stand the principles and practices before being able to marshal the instruments of moral and strategic strength and statecraft necessary to disable and defeat them. During the Cold War, the chief enemy of global peace and freedom was the Soviet Union with its militant Communist Marxist-Leninist ideology and its reliance on domestic and international terror and war. The violent dogmas of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin derived from a nihilistic “dialectical” vision of history and human nature that rejected man’s individual value and rights and the possibility of mankind’s peaceful democratic progress.

Marxist-Leninist extremism required class warfare, an all-powerful Communist vanguard elite of power, privilege, and profit, and Communist revolutions to impose an absolute “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The dictatorship would own, nationalize, monopolize, centralize and plan all property and production, and all political, economic, and cultural life. Imbued with a holy war insistence to “believe in the new order, convert, or be imprisoned or eliminated,” the new Soviet state religion eradicated existing civilizational principles and institutions. These included individual values and rights, private property, family relationships, independent religious and cultural expressions, minority rights, representative government and government accountability, and legitimacy based on consent. The new order was articulated and violently imposed and spread by infalli- ble “supreme leaders” and their militant party apparatus as the first twentieth-century totalitarian theocracy and model for molding an ideal collectivized society and “new man.” The extremist elements of Soviet Marx- ism-Leninism (and variants like Maoism) are strikingly comparable to violent extremist interpretations of Is- lam, Sharia law and jihad warfare to eliminate dissidents, diversity, individual dignity, and paths to democratic civil society.

The Spread of Extremist Cancers in four World Wars. Just as cancers metastasize and cannot be ignored without increasing their threat, expansionist totalitarian anti-democratic faiths such as Communism and that of militant extremist networks associated with Al Qaeda, ISIL, and Iran in dozens of nations, attack and spread unless recognized and countered wherever they appear. The Soviet Union gained deadly destructive power not only through terror, intimidation, and deception against nearby targets, but also by collaboration with other regional and global militant forces in three world wars. This is the same playbook global Al Qaeda affiliates use in today’s fourth world war.

Soviet Collaboration in the First and Second World Wars. During the First World War, Lenin and his Communist extremists collaborated with the Imperial German General Staff against the post-czarist provi- sional democratic coalition government in Russia, and after the war supported Communist revolutionary movements throughout Europe. Before and during the Second World War the Soviet Union then collaborated at critical stages with the totalitarian Axis powers beginning with the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the joint National Socialist and Soviet invasion of Poland and lasting until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union twenty-one months later. The Soviet people then fought heroically, but Soviet forces remained absent from the other core fronts of the Second World War, where the democracies fought for four to five years. The Russian people’s heroism in the Great Patriotic War does not legitimate the Communist Party’s terrorism and millions of murders in Russia, Ukraine, and other targeted European societies before, during, and after the war. In the East, under the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact with Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union stood by and thus facilitated Japan’s Asian and Pacific wars of aggression including against the United States, China, etc. and they only intervened in the last days (in Manchuria) after U.S. use of the atomic bomb had assured Japan’s unconditional surrender.

Soviet Collaboration in the Cold War and Russia’s Post-Cold War Collaboration with Extremists Wars on Democracy. During the Cold War, the Third World War, Soviet collaboration with anti-democratic extremists included support of totalitarian Communist allies including their East European allies and proxies, Mao Tse Tung’s China, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Tens of millions of people became victims of Communism as the Soviet Union made common cause with extreme revolutions and terrorist pro-Communist “wars of national liberation.” In the