[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 121 (Wednesday, July 1, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H3053-H3055]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I thank my good friend, Judge Al Green. 
He is a brother, and I appreciate him very much. We have differences of 
opinion, but I know we are going to end up the same place together.
  Madam Speaker, there is so much that has been going on that has been 
disrupting the country, and I am not sure what all my good friend, a 
former judge in Houston, was saying. I didn't get to hear that. But I 
believe he was addressing some of the unrest.
  He and I both want to see freedom. We want to see equality. We want 
to see people treated fairly and equally. Those are things we share, 
and I know that is what is on his heart.
  But I am highly concerned about the legitimate peaceful protests that 
were taking place as a result of the cruel death, the killing of George 
Floyd. And his family, and the way they approached it, was 
inspirational. There deserve to be protests over that horrendous death.
  The Floyd family pointed out they did not want the legacy of George 
Floyd to be violence and suffering and death and looting. That was not, 
and is not, what they want for the memory and legacy of George Floyd.

  But the movement has been hijacked. The violence they don't want, 
just the justice they want. It has been hijacked. And it is very 
important that Americans understand what is going on here, so that it 
is not just those who have spent our lifetimes studying history that 
see so clearly what is going on by instigators who want to see the 
country that has been in an ongoing state of getting better and 
better--for years, even with unfairness and inequality, it has still 
been the hope of the world when it comes to freedom and a shot at 
equality.
  Antifa, short for antifascist--and there has been no greater irony in 
the world that Hitler and Stalin--two mad men, evil men with a 
globalist desire--ended up against each other. Of course, it is quite 
ironic that when they got together and signed a treaty, both of them, 
behind the scenes, were talking about the day when that individual 
would breach the treaty with the other.
  One of the things Stalin was so furious about when Hitler moved east 
was that Hitler broke the treaty before Stalin had the chance to. They 
were two evil people, and they were pushing an evil idea: with Hitler, 
the evil of fascism; with Stalin, the evil of Marxism, communism, 
socialism, whatever you want to call it. It is all about the same 
thing.
  So, you have communism and fascism. Both of them want globalism. They 
want to control the world, and they don't want anybody else to control 
it. They want to control it.
  The treachery and the evil that went under both of those leaders is 
legendary. Hitler killed over 6 million Jews in some of the most 
horrific and evil ways conceivable. Stalin did the same thing, except 
he killed many millions more.
  Then in China, decades after that came Mao, who brought communism to 
China. It is hard to get your arms around a proper number. We know 
Stalin killed around 20 million Ukrainians, starving them to death, but 
he killed no telling how many millions more. You just look at the evil 
treatment of the poor Polish people that when he liberated them, he 
took so many who were what he saw as good slave labor and brought them 
back in slavery to the Soviet Union, where they either worked as slaves 
under Stalin or they were killed.
  When the Iron Curtain fell, just as many historians, including a 
brilliant historian I eagerly learned under at Texas A&M--she was not 
allowed back in the Soviet Union after she wrote about the evil that 
was done to so many of the Polish officers and people. One of my 
favorite history teachers, she was terrific, brilliant. But when the 
Iron Curtain fell, we found out the things that she said and 
discovered, and others did, were exactly right.
  Reagan was right. It was an evil empire. And the one Hitler was 
trying to build was just about as evil--in some ways, much more evil.
  But it is important that young people and millennials understand what 
we are talking about here. This country, warts and all, has been, as 
moviemaker Ron Maxwell said, ``a history of liberation.'' It wasn't 
founded on slavery. It was on the march toward liberation, each step.
  So many Christians, like the Pilgrims and so many others, came to 
avoid persecution for being Christians. Sometimes, people came who were 
considered unwanted in other countries.
  If you look at the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, 
Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, had entered what probably was the 
biggest paragraph setting out a grievance against King George. It is 
spelled out in this grievance against King George, that he ever allowed 
slavery to get going in the Colonies, because it was so terrible. It 
was evil, and it took too long and cost too many lives to get rid of 
it.
  By the way, that grievance didn't end up in the final draft because 
there were States that objected, that supported slavery. So that 
grievance Jefferson had originally put in was taken out. It was not in 
the final draft.

                              {time}  1900

  But it took a war that took half a million lives in a country that 
didn't have half a million lives to spare, devastated the United 
States.
  Lincoln believed the Union should be held together, and it would be 
held together, and this would be the capital of the whole country.
  And he wanted no malice to anyone at the end of the war. He wanted to 
bring the country together. But it took an ordained Christian minister 
named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others, including some 
who served in Congress, it took them standing for equality and what is 
right to ensure that the Declaration of Independence and the 
Constitution would mean what it said.
  In some ways, in recent years, we have been distracted by people who 
have been at war, on offense against Christianity, so that now we are 
to the point where, if you believe what Jesus said, as set out in the 
New Testament, then you, among so many millions now in our country, are 
to be an object of scorn and hate.
  So, as you see these groups that are really Marxist groups--
antifascist does not mean it is a good group; it means it is Marxist. 
And that is where they want to take us, and it means Christianity will 
be persecuted to the extent we have seen, with the horrors we have seen 
over the centuries since Jesus was here.
  So there is an article by Igor Norinsky, June 28, in American 
Greatness, talking about Black Lives Matter.
  I really don't believe at all that there is a single member of 
Congress who doesn't agree Black lives matter. I don't know anybody who 
is in Congress who does not believe that Black lives matter.
  This article starts out saying: ``To the 60 percent of Americans not 
polling for Trump, many firmly left-of-center, a thought experiment as 
November draws nearer: What must be true so that Trump gets your vote? 
It is a miserable question because many Americans are, to put it 
mildly, negative on the President.''
  The article goes on--don't have time to go through the whole thing. 
But the point is made here: ``The emotional call-and-response appeal of 
`black lives matter' ''--and that is with little B, little L, little 
M--``entices all who repeat

[[Page H3054]]

it into believing they are antiracists and that everyone else must be 
the opposite. But `black lives matter'--with small letters--which no 
one disagrees with, is not the same as''--capitalized--``Black Lives 
Matter.''
  They had what they believed at one time--that has since been taken 
down, as I understand it--and substituted for one that is a little more 
palatable, but make no mistake: You look at the history of this group, 
it is a Marxist group.
  The article points out: ``Communism,'' which is simply ``Marxism 
applied, was responsible for over 100 million deaths during the last 
century alone, which says nothing of the psychological terror, the 
Auschwitz of the mind, that imprisoned the untold millions who did not 
perish. The systematic oppression and terror Marxist ideas engendered 
is nowhere better described than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's `Gulag 
Archipelago,' a painstaking and harrowing account of the forced labor 
camp system under Soviet Communism. In a telling passage, he provides 
an insight into the engine that made the tyranny possible.''
  And he quotes from Solzhenitsyn:
  ``Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble--and his conscience 
devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination 
and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a 
dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology--that is what 
gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer 
the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social 
theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own 
or other's eyes. . . . That was how the agents of the Inquisition 
fortified their wills . . . the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, 
by race. . . . Without evildoers, there would have been no 
Archipelago.''
  The writer says: ``I was spared those horrors thanks, in part, to 
being born near the dismal end of the Soviet Union and thanks, in part, 
to the courage of parents who dared seek permission to leave from a 
central authority notoriously brutal to the unbelievers. As Jews 
ostensibly bound for Israel, we had the great fortune of being unwanted 
anyway. Almost all of your life's possessions stay behind--they belong 
to `the people,' after all--but the scars most certainly do not. Scars 
travel with you. The many hundreds of thousands of refugees and exiles 
from Communist countries living in America today can fill entire 
libraries with the stories behind those scars. Go seek them out and 
listen.
  ``Whether in Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the 
precepts of Marxism led humanity as close to the abyss as it has ever 
come.''
  ``Neither do Marxism's purveyors and apologists all sit in Beijing. 
For years, many intellectuals in the West openly espoused Marxism. Its 
great utopian appeal should come as no surprise particularly in our 
present age of social justice. Solzhenitsyn would later lament at the 
West's failure to accept the grim warnings of his testimonial.''
  And, again, from Solzhenitsyn: ``Modern society is hypnotized by 
socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger 
it is in. And one of the greatest of all is that you have lost all 
sense of danger; you cannot even see where it's coming from as it moves 
swiftly toward you.
  ``You imagine you see danger in other parts of the globe and hurl 
arrows from your depleted quiver there. But the greatest danger of all 
is that you have lost the will to defend yourselves.''
  Hate Donald Trump if you want. So far, for now, we have that freedom. 
But the fact is, he saw the dangers from China before anybody in public 
office did and talked about them.
  But anyway, Solzhenitsyn wrote that ``in 1976 as the United States 
was deep into the Cold War. Nearly 45 years later, long after the Cold 
War has ended, the generation that is driving today's revolutionary 
agenda has little to no conception of what socialism is and what brand 
of misery it left in its wake. It is nearly impossible to cultivate any 
sense of dread or urgency in a society where connection to that chapter 
of the human experience has all but been severed. But we have to try.''

  And he is so right.
  ``BLM,'' he says, ``is pure ideology. It appears bent on redefining 
America and its institutions pursuant to progressively tribalistic 
commandments. Draped in the powerful, albeit deceptive, cover of racial 
indignation''--which we should all stand for equality there--``the 
movement has convinced many Americans that being White is an original 
sin, that America is evil, and that the sinner's day in court has 
arrived. It prescribes class struggle, exponentially amplified by the 
battle cry of racial reckoning.''
  ``Revolutions vilify the past.''
  And he goes on.
  But it is important that people understand that, as we try and move 
closer and closer to end any injustice in America--it will never be 
perfect, but it is the closest humanity has ever gotten, and still 
there are things we can do to make it better--it is critical to 
understand the evil that is so close to taking over and embracing this 
country, because we have generations now that have not learned true 
history. They have learned some misbegotten professor's idea, as he or 
she dealt with their own hate and own prejudice, as they rewrote our 
history.
  But if you look fairly at the history, you see injustice, none more 
so than slavery's existence.
  But if you go back to the late 1940s, early 1950s, when Whittaker 
Chambers, who had had a very unpleasant childhood, unpleasant family 
life growing up, thought maybe communism, Marxism was the way to go, 
and he began working with people like Alger Hiss, who was one of the 
most respected people in the State Department, right at the top. And 
because he had an Ivy League education, Ivy Leaguers loved the man, 
just thought he was fantastic.
  But both Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and others with whom they 
worked and believed in communism, were working to bring down the United 
States, just as antifa and so many others are today.
  When Whittaker Chambers began to see that this Marxism that he 
thought so much of actually caused more suffering than the very type of 
government he was trying to bring down, that was revolutionary in his 
mind, and he realized he was fighting the wrong people.
  His book ``Witness''--I should have read it years and years ago, but 
it is only in the last couple of years I read it. Some great statements 
he has in his book.
  ``Few men are so dull that they do not know that the crisis exists 
and that it threatens their lives at every point. It is popular,'' he 
said, ``to call it a social crisis. It is, in fact, a total crisis--
religious, moral, intellectual, social, political, economic. It is 
popular to call it a crisis of the Western world. It is in fact a 
crisis of the whole world. Communism . . . is itself a symptom and an 
irritant of that crisis.''
  He quoted Stalin's statement: ``Is it not true that social democracy 
and social fascism are twins? ''
  Our current chairman of the Judiciary Committee has gotten very upset 
when some of us have pointed out that Hitler and Hitler's party were 
the National Socialist Workers Party in Germany. And he tried to draw 
that distinction, but Stalin himself says: Isn't it true that social 
democracy and social fascism are really twins?
  But Dostoevsky, he quoted, saying: ``The problem of communism is not 
economic problem; the problem of communism is the problem of atheism.''
  I have seen it, lived it for a summer in the Soviet Union. They 
didn't want Christianity. They only allowed one authorized seminary. I 
was told, when I visited there, that they allowed only 40 people to go 
to the only authorized seminary back during those oppressive years 
under communism.
  Whittaker Chambers says: ``One day the Communist really hears those 
screams. The screams . . . do not merely reach his mind. They pierce 
beyond. They pierce to his soul.''
  ``A communist breaks because he must choose at last between 
irreconcilable opposites--God or man, soul or mind, freedom or 
communism.''

                              {time}  1915

  This Marxist ideology that is being pushed on us by groups that hate 
America is very dangerous. Chambers points out `` . . . the crisis of 
the Western world exists to the degree it is indifferent to God. It 
exists to the degree in which the Western world actually

[[Page H3055]]

shares communism's materialist vision, is so dazzled by the logic of 
the materialist interpretation of history, of politics, and economics, 
that it fails to grasp that, for it, the only possible answer to the 
communist or Marxist challenge is to choose either faith in God or 
faith in man. . . . `'
  He said: ``Freedom is a need of the soul and nothing else. It is in 
striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition 
of freedom.''
  I think every American has felt that.
  He says: ``God alone is the insider and guarantor of freedom. He is 
the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior 
freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only 
a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. 
Without freedom, the soul dies. Without the soul, there is no 
justification for freedom.''
  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin made this comment on religion in a November 
1913 letter: ``Every religious idea of God, even flirting with the idea 
of God, is unutterable vileness . . . of the most dangerous kind.''
  I think that is why, on visiting that sole recognized seminary at 
Zagorsk decades ago, I was struck because there was a building there, 
and on the side of the building--this is where you turn into the gates 
of the seminary--was a big painting of Lenin's face and the words: 
``Lenin s nami.'' ``Lenin is with us.''
  So anyone going into this Christian seminary had to see, as they went 
in, that message from the government. You may be going into this 
Christian seminary, but don't ever forget it is Lenin who is with us.
  Now, I had a chance to see Lenin in his tomb. There were rumors that 
his ear was deteriorated and had been replaced by a rubber ear. I don't 
know if that was true, but Lenin was not with us, I can verify. He is 
long gone to his just reward, such as it was.
  Whittaker Chambers said: ``If I had rejected only communism, I would 
have rejected only one political expression of the modern mind, the 
most logical because the most brutal in enforcing the myth of man's 
material perfectibility. What I sensed, without being able to phrase it 
was what has since been phrased with the simplicity of an axiom.''
  This axiom is: ``'Man cannot organize for himself without God; 
without God, man can only organize the world against man.' The gas 
ovens of Buchenwald and the communist execution cellars exist first 
within the minds.''
  He said: ``What I grasped was that religion begins at the point where 
reason and knowledge are powerless and forever fail--the point at which 
man senses the mystery of his good and evil, his suffering, and his 
destiny as a soul in search of God.''
  ``Against liberalism's social optimism,'' which is progress by 
reform, ``and the social optimism revolutionary left,'' which is 
progress by force, ``Dostoevsky asserted the eternal necessity of the 
soul to be itself. But he discerned that the moment man indulged his 
freedom to the point where he was also free from God, it led him into 
tragedy, evil, and often the exact opposite of what had been intended. 
In human terms, there was no solution for the problem of evil.''
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________