Pitting one race or one ethnic group against another is a game the Left has been playing for a very long time. In my 2014 documentary film, There’s No Place Like Utopia, I explored the rarely told history of Leftist exploitation of race and ethnicity, a practice that dates back to the 1930's.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin focused his American propaganda efforts not on fomenting a workers’ revolution - unlikely given America’s free market history - but on discrediting the very idea of America both to its own citizens and the world. The Soviets decided the easiest way to discredit America was through racial division. The Soviet involvement began in 1932, after nine young black Americans were accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama. Even before most Americans had heard of the so-called “Scottsboro Boys,” even before their guilt or innocence was determined, the Soviet Union’s most famous propaganda artist had created a poster, “Freedom to the Prisoners of Scottsboro!”

Public domain via Brown University Library

The Soviets instructed their international apparatus, the COMINTERN, to employ its legal arm called "International Labor Defense," to push the NAACP aside and defend the young men, much as BLM has pushed the NAACP away today. In his book Black Bolshevik, party regular Harry Haywood proudly owned up to the strong-arm Communist tactics in Alabama.

“Scottsboro represented our first serious challenge to recognized Black reformist leadership,” wrote Haygood. For the Soviets and their Leftist American allies, the Scottsboro boys provided a field of battle. If the Communists were to seize that field, liberal black reformers had to be eliminated. “It was necessary to struggle on two fronts,” Haywood wrote, “for both deviated from the line of proletarian internationalism.”

The case of the Scottsboro boys dragged on for years, and Communist Party USA exploited the young men at every turn. For the COMINTERN the goal was not justice for the "boys" or racial equality. The goal was disruption and revolution.

Some American blacks bought into the idea of socialism. They became known as "Black Bolsheviks." Hoping to embarrass the United States during the Depression, the Soviets lured many to the Soviet Union. Prominent among the Black Bolsheviks was an activist named Lovett Fort-Whiteman. In fact, the then conservative Time magazine called Fort-Whiteman “the reddest of the blacks.” A true believer in Communism and a willing propagandist, Fort-Whiteman proved to be a highly successful recruiter as well. Thousands of black Americans flocked to the Soviet Union during the Depression, Fort-Whiteman among them.

Unbeknownst to them, Communists viewed American blacks as “the raw material for revolution” according to former KGB spy Konstantin Preobrazhensky. In this regards, Fort-Whiteman served as something of a prototype. The Left would use African Americans like Fort-Whiteman for their propaganda value and dispense with them when that value was exhausted. In the Soviet Union, that value was short-lived.

The Black Bolsheviks in Russia proved to be too Americanized to yield to the mindless brutality of the Soviet regime. In time, Stalin did with them what he did with other troublesome minorities. He eliminated them. In 1938, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the reddest of the blacks, was dispatched to the notorious Kolyma Gulag in Siberia, and he was dead within a year. No black American survived to tell the tale of the purge by the Communists that killed Fort-Whiteman and uncounted other “Black Bolsheviks.”

Another Black Bolshevik was Chicago poet Frank Marshall Davis. He was sent to Hawaii in 1948 by the COMINTERN to assist in organizing a strike by the communist-controlled dock workers union, the ILWU. The goal was a takeover of the island and expulsion of US naval forces to pave the way for Soviet expansion in Southeast Asia. The strike failed after six months, but Frank Marshall Davis became a writer for the Hawaii communist newspaper and later mentored Barack Obama, radicalizing him during his formative years. I explore this relationship and more in my 2012 film, Dreams from My Real Father.

The Russians continued to exploit black-white friction right up until the end of the Soviet era. Vasili Mitrokhin, the senior archivist for the KGB, confirmed this in his 1985 book, The Sword and the Shield. According to Mitrokhin, in 1971 KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov initiated a series of “active measures” to “stir up racial tensions in the United States.”

One tactic was to send “forged letters” to prominent African Americans (Hank Aaron, likely being one of them) and attribute them to the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society. The outspoken Communist Jim Jones, of Jonestown notoriety, boasted of doing the same and for the same reason: to keep African Americans stirred up and angry, making it easy to recruit and exploit them.

Laird Wilcox, a lifetime ACLU member, has monitored extremist movements both Right and Left. According to Wilcox, many of America’s hard-core progressive groups made a conscious shift after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet dream died. “Rather than present Marxism-Leninism as their goal,” Wilcox wrote, “they piggy-back it onto anti-racism which is far more popular.” They now stake out a claim as "anti-fascist watchdogs" and exert political objectives “by expanding the definition of racism to meet their needs, to include more and more behaviors, and to require more and more invasive remedies.” Those remedies were always socialism, of course.

In researching my recent film, The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud the Divided America, I saw how Soviet tactics had outlasted the Soviet Union. George Zimmerman, the young man who shot Trayvon Martin, was an Hispanic old-time liberal and a walk-the-walk civil rights activist. He devoted his free time to mentoring black youth. George believed in “hope and change” and voted for Obama.

In 2012, however, Florida was the ultimate battleground state in a presidential election year, and the man running to retain the White House depended on a racially charged African American electorate to offset his flatlining U.S. economy. Jobs were scarce due to Obama’s increasing taxation and regulations, and an influx of illegals was driving down wages in inner cities.

Black voters were not motivated, not yet. As I presented with irrefutable evidence in The Trayvon Hoax, a fake witness was used to incriminate Zimmerman. Rachel Jeantel pretended to have been on the phone with Trayvon Martin prior to his beating of Zimmerman. Her changing story, her inability to read her own letter, and the apparent sudden change of her name and age were of no interest to the Left.

It was as if the COMINTERN had resurfaced to take over the media and Democratic Party. The historical liberal belief in due process, equality before the law, and innocent until proven guilty was crushed under the Stalinist boot - in America! Unfortunately, the strategy worked. Obama narrowly won Florida and was re-elected president. If these Stalinist tactics carried Florida in 2012, the activists who control the Party concluded, why not roll it out nationwide in 2020?  That is exactly what they have done, and black Americans are once again pawns in their game.

Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert @JoelSGilbert is president of Highway 61 Entertainment. Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, Trump: The Art of the Insult, There's No Place Like Utopia, Dreams from My Real Father, Atomic Jihad, and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam.