Communism

If I had a hammer & sickle

Featured image Ron Radosh was a student and follower of Pete Seeger. Ron recalls his personal relationship with Seeger as well as Seeger’s loyalty to the vagaries of the Communist Party line in his memoir Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, published by Encounter Books in 2001. Encounter has kept it in print along with the rest of the back catalog. In 1941 Seeger »

At the Bradley Prizes

Featured image The Bradley Foundation held its annual Bradley Prizes award ceremony this week in Washington on May 17. Moderated by the Wall Street Journal’s own former Bradley Prize-winning Kim Strassel, the event honored 2022 recipients Wilfred McClay, Glenn Loury, and Chen Guangcheng. Having been sent a link to view the ceremony via live stream, my wife and I watched at our kitchen table. When the great Bill McClay finished speaking, my »

Imagine Communism

Featured image The Babylon Bee made this video that parodies one of popular music’s more detestable songs. This version is much better: “Imagine Communism.” Via InstaPundit. »

The Chinese Communists Are Evil

Featured image One of the strangest phenomena of our time is the whitewashing of the Chinese Communist Party by American liberals. Fifty years ago, everyone knew that the CCP was vicious, cruel and evil. But over the years, economic self-interest–the desire to take advantage of what is at best low-wage labor, and at worst slave labor–has triumphed over moral judgment. With hindsight, maybe Richard Nixon’s famous opening up of China and Bill »

Is President Xi reviving Maoism?

Featured image China’s President Xi Jinping reportedly is moving down a Maoist path. If so, this is probably the most important development of 2021. The Wall Street Journal reports on this development in a story with the headline: “Xi Jinping Aims to Rein In Chinese Capitalism, Hew to Mao’s Socialist Vision.” The subtitle is: “Going beyond curbing tech giants, [Xi] wants the Communist Party to steer flows of money and set tighter »

My dad and Hubert Humphrey

Featured image Scott’s Father’s Day tribute to his dad includes a picture of his father and Hubert Humphrey. Scott noted that the picture was taken not long after Humphrey had led the charge to retake the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party from the Communists between 1946 and 1948. Around the same time as that picture was taken, my father, a socialist, was a leader in the movement to wrest control of certain union locals in »

Our men in Havana

Featured image Tim Weiner is a former New York Times reporter and author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007). The history of the CIA, according to Weiner, is a history of the failures of the CIA. The CIA chose not to ignore the book. It posted a response by the agency’s historian that the agency has unfortunately removed from its site. The CIA historian’s response to Weiner’s book »

Suicide of the liberals

Featured image We have previously drawn attention to Professor Gary Saul Morson’s New Criterion essay “How the great truth dawned,” Professor Morson’s New Criterion lecture “Leninthink,” Professor Morson’s New York Review of Books review “The horror, the horror,” and Professor Morson’s book Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (Steve wrote about it here). To these I now want to add Professor Morson’s First Things essay “Suicide of the liberals.” Drawing on »

Talking Leninthink

Featured image We drew attention to Professor Gary Saul Morson’s essay “How the great truth dawned.” It led off the September 2019 issue of The New Criterion. Beginning and ending with Solzhenitsyn, Professor Morson’s essay takes up the Gulag, Communism, mass murder, Russian literature, the turn to God and much more. It is a great essay. The New Criterion invited Professor Morson back to deliver its inaugural Circle Lecture. It posted an »

Ben Mankiewicz’s heroes

Featured image Let’s try a thought experiment. Although the claim that Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election campaign has no basis, it seems likely that Russia tried to interfere in the election via posts on social media. Suppose Congress undertook to investigate this matter. Suppose that, in conducting its investigation, a committee called as witnesses people who participated in social media and who had past ties with Russia. Finally, suppose »

Useful idiots, Sanders edition

Featured image The late Paul Hollander wrote Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba when the Cold War was still raging (it was published in 1981). It remains a valuable historical study of the phenomenon of political tourism to totalitarian countries by high-minded residents of free Western societies. Hollander briefly observes in the preface that “the pilgrimages to the Soviet Union are a thing of the »

Bernie Sanders’s party line apology for communist dictatorships

Featured image Fifty years ago in leftist circles, communist sympathizers like me could take one of two lines on Joseph Stalin. We could condemn Stalin and say he betrayed the communist revolution or we could spout the following: “Stalin did some good things and some bad things. He should be criticized for the bad things and praised for the good ones.” I tried out the second line — the party line — »

Why did Sanders cling to failing communist regimes decades longer than other leftists?

Featured image I think it was in the summer of 1962 that our family stayed with my father’s brother and his family in Brooklyn. I had a cousin who was a year or two older than I was and, being a New Yorker, probably five years older in sophistication years. During the visit, my cousin, age 14 or 15 going on 20, extolled the virtues of Fidel Castro. I was skeptical, but »

The 15-Minute Video Book of Bernie

Featured image The good folks at ReasonTV put together this 15-minute highlight reel of Bernie Sanders’s greatest socialist hits, and I expect we’ll see parts of this rolled out by other campaigns—especially Bloomberg but ultimately Trump’s campaign—if Bernie does well in the early primaries. Worth it alone for the quote at the very beginning on the virtue of food lines in socialist countries. That one quote alone ought to kill Bernie’s campaign »

The Fall of the Wall, 30 Years Later

Featured image The fall of the Berlin Wall on this day 30 years ago was the most spectacular moment of the end of the Cold War, but in fact only represented the mid-point in the “last sad chapter” of this bizarre story, as Ronald Reagan once put it.  The occasion of remembering the last day of the Wall is a fitting time to recall the broader sweep of events that surrounded it. »

Bukovsky’s dissent

Featured image Vladimir Bukovsky died this past Sunday at his home in Cambridge (UK) at the age of 76. The New York Times obituary is here; the brief AP obituary is here. The Vladimir Bukovsky site has much more. Bukovsky was of course the incredibly brave dissident who spent 12 years in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and labor camps before his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1976. His memoir — To Build »

Kowtowing, South Park style

Featured image Britain’s Guardian reports on South Park’s mock apology to China in response to the regime’s censorship. The Guardian notes that the South Park crew has stepped up to show the NBA how it’s done: “South Park’s creators posted a statement on Twitter under the headline: “Official apology to China from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, which said: ‘Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into »