Communism

Don’t RIP, Karl

Featured image Via InstaPundit, I learn that Karl Marx died on this day in 1883. I concur with Glenn Reynolds’ suggestion that March 14 should therefore be a holiday: Marx performed the difficult feat of being wrong about everything. Most people are right about some things and wrong about others; the law of averages sets in. But if you are an ideologue, like Marx, and if your ideology is stupid, you can »

Cuba’s New Cheering Section

Featured image As John noted recently, members of “The Squad” recently snuck off to Cuba, a one-party Communist dictatorship and massive violator of human rights. The woke Democrats seem unaware of films and books that document the repressions of the Stalinist regime. Consider, for example, Improper Conduct, by Cuban cinematographer Nestor Almendros, who in 1979 won an Oscar for Days of Heaven. Improper Conduct shows how Fidel Castro tossed homosexuals into forced »

Happy Death Day, You Miserable Son of a Bitch

Featured image Josef Stalin died on this day in 1953. In his sleep; so, like Lenin, Mao and Castro, and unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Ceausescu, he never paid a price for his crimes. The Victims of Communism remember: Stalin died on this day in 1953. He left behind a legacy of terror, famine, and mass murder. Remember the victims. pic.twitter.com/HUBBYUZMwh — Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) March 5, 2024 Stalin ranks second only »

Squad Sneaks Off to Cuba

Featured image There was a time when, if you said that liberals suffer from Communism envy, they would deny it. Is that still true? Perhaps not, as to the Squad, two members of which were among a delegation that made a more or less secret trip to Cuba: A delegation of the U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus traveled to Cuba last week in a trip that has not previously been disclosed by the »

The Shambhalic Henry Wallace

Featured image Henry Wallace! I have long thought that Roosevelt’s replacement of Wallace with Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944 provided irrefutable proof that God looks out for the United States. Wallace was a fool who would have altered the course of history very much for the worse if he had succeeded Roosevelt to the presidency in 1945 instead of Truman. Among other evidence of Wallace’s foolishness, one thinks of Wallace’s »

An AK Christmas to Remember

Featured image Christmas celebrations are in full swing but worth remembering that it wasn’t that way in the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. Romania’s Nicolae Ceaucescu, for example, banned the holiday and bulldozed churches in Bucharest. Nicolae and wife Elena lived like royalty as the people lined up for the barest necessities. Midnight arrests, torture and assassination were common, and by the late 1980s the people weren’t going to take it anymore. »

A Whitaker Chambers Xmas

Featured image A friend asked me to recommend a book about Whittaker Chambers as a Christmas gift for her smartly conservative daughter several years ago. Chambers stands at the center of an incredible drama and several fantastic books about him. There is still much to be learned from him and his case. Here I revisit and expand the list with a little help from the eminent historian Harvey Klehr: 1. Witness is »

The ordeal of Jimmy Lai

Featured image One might understand the true meaning of resistance from observing the ordeal of Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai. He resists the tyranny of the CCP regime and goes on trial for it today. Among the accessible stories reporting on the commencement of trial is the BBC’s here. The Wall Street Journal has a highly sympathetic story by Austin Ranzy and Elaine Wu here (behind the WSJ paywall) as well as the »

The Left’s 9/11

Featured image September 11, 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the left’s 9/11 world-historical catastrophe: the day Chile’s aspiring Communist dictator Salvador Allende was deposed in a military coup. Needless to say the left has always seen the deft hand of Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA behind the event, and while it is certainly true the Nixon Administration was hostile to Allende’s proto-Communist regime, subsequent history ought to disabuse everyone that our »

New Insight on How The Cold War Ended

Featured image One reason I’m not posting much right now is that I’m in the middle of a three-day conference for scholars at the Reagan Library that they kindly titled after my books, “The Age of Reagan.” Last night the conference featured me in an after-dinner conversation with Beth Fischer of the University of Toronto, author of The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan’s Cold War Legacy. Don’t be misled by the »

Communists Love Free Enterprise

Featured image Of all living Americans, Angela Davis may have the most disgraceful history. She is a Communist–her description, not mine; she was twice the Communist Party’s candidate for vice president, and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. She once participated in the murder of a judge in California. She was acquitted of the crime by a biased jury, but there was never any serious doubt about her »

Inside the Stanford shoutdown

Featured image I have repeatedly noted the role played by the National Lawyers Guild chapter at Stanford in the shoutdown of Judge Duncan at the March 9 Federalist Society event that has disgraced the law school several times over. The National Lawyers Guild is an old Communist front group that seeks to spread the old-time religion despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Alan Dershowitz now reviews the »

The tears of Tirien Steinbach

Featured image Megyn Kelly covered the disgrace of Stanford Law School on her Sirius XM/podcast show yesterday. She invited Tim Rosenberger to discuss the disgrace. Rosenberger is the president of Stanford Law School’s Federalist Society chapter and hosted Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at the shoutdown. In the video of the segment below, Megyn Kelly mocks Stanford DEI Dean Tirien Steinbach. Rosenberger does a good job discussing the event. Kelly deserves some »

Hu’s next

Featured image Reuters has a good story on the forcible removal of Chinese former President Hu Jintao from the closing ceremony of the Communist Party Congress on Saturday: Hu, 79, Xi Jinping’s immediate predecessor, was seated to the left of Xi. He was led off the stage of the main auditorium of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing by two stewards, a Reuters witness at the congress said. Video footage »

At the struggle session

Featured image Over at the University of Minnesota Medical School, one probably shouldn’t be seen with books such as Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon or Fan Shen’s memoir Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard. It might reflect an inclination to think for yourself and other such bourgeois indulgences. I’m thinking that they missed a few strokes at this year’s white-coat ceremony for new students. The video below is a »

In Cuba, Bread Lines But No Bread

Featured image It has been a while since we checked in on Fidel’s socialist paradise. You might think that an utterly failed and discredited regime would inevitably be overthrown, but that hasn’t happened, at least not yet. (See also Venezuela.) Meanwhile, when you think things can’t get worse, the decline continues. Babalublog reports: “After Milk and Beef, Bread Disappears from the Cuban Table.” From the balcony, Yudineya watched dozens of bread and »

It Always Goes Back to Marx, Somehow…

Featured image Leftists will get impatient or roll their eyes when they hear someone like Jordan Peterson describe postmodernist “critical theory,” critical race theory, or any aspect of identity politics (especially the phenomenon of “gender fluidity”) as “cultural Marxism.”  And yet. . . Michael Anton drew my attention to a passage in the transcript of Leo Strauss’s seminar on Marx that he taught at the University of Chicago in 1960 (emphasis added): Partly »