Recently I attended a play at the local community college.  Before the play started, one of the staff came out to ask the audience members to turn off their cell phones.  I’d never heard this announcement before, but this was the first community college play I’d been to in decades.  Maybe the students, unlike the patrons at the playhouses featuring big-budget traveling shows, just need a bit of help with their etiquette?

Anyway, after telling us to turn off our phones, the announcer asked us to observe a moment of silence in respect for stolen lands.  Then she read a long statement apologizing to the Indians who lived here before the white man came.

What?

Then the play started, and I forgot about the statement.  But it’s been in the back of my mind for a while.  The apology bothered me.

So I looked up the statement.  I couldn’t find the Mesa Community College statement online, but I found a similar one from nearby Scottsdale, Ariz.:

Scottsdale Community College (SCC) credits the diverse Indigenous people still connected to the land on which we gather. Our college resides on the ancient lands of the Huhugam, ancestors to the O’odham and tribal territory of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRP-MIC). SRP-MIC is a federally recognized tribe - one of 22 Arizona Indigenous tribes and one of 574 across the United States. Attached to this physical space is a painful history of forced removal and the resulting intentional genocide of its Indigenous people. We remain appreciative of our ability to teach, learn and serve in a space of such importance and reverence.

SCC acknowledges the land on which we are situated today as the traditional land and home of two distinct tribal nations: the Onk Akimel O’odham (Pima) and the Xalychidom Piipaash (Maricopa). We take this opportunity to thank the original caretakers of this land, the Huhugam. We offer our respect to all O'odham and Piipaash of the past, present and future.

Rather than try to unpack and explain, I’ll let the lefties explain in their own words what they are up to:

A land acknowledgment is a critical step towards working with Native communities to secure meaningful partnership and inclusion in the stewardship and protection of their cultural resources and homelands. Our institutions were founded upon exclusions and erasures of Indigenous peoples. We honor and are grateful for the land we occupy and recognize the ongoing damage of settler colonialism.

The lefties speaking these statements probably aren’t aware that their words come from the teachings of a Soviet disinformation campaign.  Started in 1972, the SIG campaign sought to teach Middle Easterners and North Africans (MENA) to hate Israel and her American supporters.   (SIG stands for a long, unpronounceable name so this is program is always referred to by its initials, even in Soviet documents.)

The SIG campaign sent 3,500–4,000 young people per year from Warsaw Pact nations to MENA nations in a program similar to the American Peace Corps.  But there was a big difference.  The Soviets instructed the teachers on words to say and use when talking about Israel and the U.S.  The goal was to create animosity.

Some of these words were “Zionist,” “settler,” “occupier,” “colonialist,” “imperialism,” “genocide,” and “capitalism.”  These words were selected based on the 1960s works of an anti-Jewish Ukrainian philosopher who had been chastised by the world community for his antisemitic rantings and had found new words to express his hatred. 

Additionally, the aid workers were taught to explain economics as a “zero-sum game.”  Zero-sum means there are winners and losers.  Simply put, one group improves — the Jews in Israel — while another group — the Palestinians — becomes worse off. 

This theory of economic development might sound weird to you, but to the third-world people, this theory matches their world.  Nothing new is created; the people with power accumulate all the wealth.

The SIG program ran from 1972 until the fall of the Soviet Union.  Palestinian leaders — the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and Hamas leader Mahmoud Abbas — were guested in Moscow and taught how to frame their struggles within the anti-Zionist framework.  The Soviets also taught them how to refer to their movements. 

The KGB also translated and distributed copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  This short pamphlet was full of Jewish blood libels and anti-Jewish hatreds.

Over the last 50 years, the MENA peoples migrated to Europe and America, bringing their prejudices with them.  This is why you hear the words listed above to describe Israel's hostage rescue operations in Gaza.

The college teachers with their hatred of America quickly picked up the language and incorporated it into their multicultural rantings.  Multiculturalism arose when the SIG campaign and another Soviet disinformation campaign intersected in the academic community in the early 1980s.

Multiculturalism is ignoring the drawbacks of third-world civilizations while celebrating America’s failure to live up to her lofty ambitions.  It’s the denial of American exceptionalism.

If you listen, you can hear the words of the Soviet disinformation masters in the land acknowledgment statements.  The left has been brainwashed by the Soviets.

When informed that today’s political discussions are held within a framework designed by Soviet disinformation masters, the left says it doesn’t matter.  The USSR collapsed decades ago.

But consider this: through the 1970s, American children were taught that the Monroe Doctrine and Western expansion were good things.  Today’s children are being taught that settlers and imperialism are evil.  The words used today to describe the American forefathers paint them in an evil light.

This is the slow destruction of American patriotism.  The denial of American exceptionalism.

How long can this continue?

Terry Gibbs’s new book The Resentful Citizen Looks at America explores today’s political landscape and reveals connections between leftist ideology and Soviet disinformation campaigns.  Twitter: @ImResentful.

Image: Praveenp via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).