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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Vladimir Tismaneanu</title>
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		<title>Who Was Yuri Andropov? Ideologue, Policeman, Apparatchik</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/who-was-yuri-andropov-ideologue-policeman-apparatchik/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-was-yuri-andropov-ideologue-policeman-apparatchik</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2014 04:35:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Andropov]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238843</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why a deceased Soviet butcher has an ever-growing mini-cult following.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/moscow-kremlin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238846" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/moscow-kremlin-450x337.jpg" alt="moscow-kremlin" width="277" height="207" /></a>We should not be surprised that, in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s Russia, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov –born a hundred years ago, on June 15, 1914– enjoys an ever-growing mini-cult following, shaped and upheld from the very top. For Putin and the mafia surrounding him – all characters coming from the middle-level structures of the KGB– Yuri Andropov represents the strength of a system which, they believe, was not meant to collapse. In Andropov, they admire the virility, vitality, stamina, robustness of the system that collapsed in December 1991. Worshiping Andropov, they lionize their own youth.</p>
<p>The triumphalist fantasies of the Soviet years continue to haunt the Kremlin’s imagination. Resorting to the myth of Andropov is in fact an attempt at legitimization by way of history. Obviously, what we are dealing with is a history forged, doctored, counterfeited. In short, a history rigged, distorted, and mystified.</p>
<p>According to this secret police worldview, Andropov’s reforms – carefully supervised by their initiators in the party and security apparatus – were unlikely to lead to a massive breakdown of the ideocratic party-state institutional structure. Andropov was a bureaucrat hardened during the Stalinist purges following WWII. He was a true believer in the USSR’s mission as a “bastion of world socialism.” Like so many other apparatchiks, he had adored Stalin. He had been the protégé of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, the most dogmatic of the official ideologues. Andropov’s election in November 1982 as General Secretary of the CC of the CPSU and president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, thus nominal head of the Soviet state, was a big change in the pattern of succession. This was the first time that a former chief of the secret police had made it to the helm of the totalitarian regime called the USSR. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria had come within reach of this position, but – as we well know – he was finished off before being able to fill it. Arrested in June 1953, a few months after Stalin’s death, Beria was executed as a spy in December of that same year.</p>
<p>Andropov’s career began under the auspices of Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, the supreme ideologue of Stalinism unleashed. Zhdanov was directly in charge of the Karelian-Finnish Autonomous Republic, where Andropov steeply climbed up the party hierarchy. I emphasize this because Zhdanov was the most influential exponent of the Leningrad faction, brutally purged after his death in 1948. The political mythology of Leningrad&#8217;s communists matters a great deal in this particular version of history. Vladimir Putin himself comes from that town, as do many members of his close entourage.</p>
<p>After a stage as a Central Committee bureaucrat, Andropov was sent to Hungary as an ambassador, where he was given the particularly sensitive mission to oversee political dynamics throughout the crucial year 1956. Presumably Andropov himself had suffered a shock following the disclosures in Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s “Secret Report” at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956. On the other hand, ideologically speaking, his convictions were shatterproof and unflinching, made ​​of reinforced concrete. He was not a man of doubts, he lacked the courage to question the thorniest issues in the history of the party that he had served with<em> perinde ac cadaver </em>devotion. He was a fanatic communist, a true believer.</p>
<p>In the Soviet Embassy in Budapest, in 1956, one of Andropov’s subordinates was KGB officer under diplomatic cover, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who later became himself head of the State Security Committee. Astutely friendly and seemingly benevolent, Andropov played the openness card and thus managed to put the suspicions of Imre Nagy and the other reformist group members to sleep. When the revolution broke out on October 23, 1956, Andropov simulated a conciliatory stance and accepted the claims issued by the new government. He was calm and affable, a world-class impersonator. The friendly act was in fact hiding the huge anxiety of Moscow’s envoy.</p>
<p>In truth, Andropov was one of the most adamant activists; he strongly supported the idea of ​ Soviet military intervention. He then gave the legal government members assurances that, if they were to come out of the Yugoslav embassy’s building where they had taken refuge after the second Soviet military intervention, on November 3, 1956, they would be granted freedom and would be able to go home with their families. Right after Nagy and his friends left the embassy premises, giving credence to Andropov’s promises, they were captured, thrown into Soviet trucks, and shipped to Romania. The official story was that they had requested political asylum. In reality, the whole thing was a gangster-like operation, namely the kidnapping of still legitimate officials of a state which had dared to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Andropov was also the one who convinced János Kádár to break with Nagy and form the so-called “Workers’-Peasants’” Quisling government.</p>
<p>As a reward for his contribution to destroying what the communist propaganda called “the Hungarian counter-revolution,” Andropov was put in charge of the CPSU’s international relations department, a position from which he struggled to maintain Soviet hegemony within the world communist movement. As secretary of the CC, he collaborated with Suslov for the consolidation of a hardline ideology. He was one of the most active critics of the Chinese Communist Party, accused of political adventurism, as well as Yugoslav “revisionism.” He loathed any deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The 1968 Prague Spring gave him nightmares, he fervently supported military intervention to suppress what has gone down in history as the attempt to pursue with a human face. He tried unsuccessfully to organize a world communist conference to excommunicate Mao&#8217;s party. He had become the Kremlin&#8217;s most sophisticated expert in world communist affairs.</p>
<p>Precisely because he was a most reliable, disciplined, and faithful apparatchik, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin – the tandem who ended up at the pinnacle of the Soviet dictatorship after Khrushchev’s departure (in October 1964) – appointed Andropov succeed Vladimir Semichastny’s as chairman of the KGB in 1967. Maximum efficiency was needed and Andropov had proven that he was a highly effective defender of the nomenclature.</p>
<p>The one who suggested his appointment as chief-policeman of the USSR was red cardinal Mikhail Suslov, the ideological pontiff who had sensed the risk of the official monolithic doctrine’s disintegration. Andropov’s main mission was to suppress the human rights movement, to nip in the bud any dissident initiative. He was a champion of the most abject misinformation and recklessly cultivated criminal “special methods.”</p>
<p>As shown by <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/">dissident intellectual Yuri Glazov</a> in his illuminating writings, Andropov was a paradigmatic<em> Homo Sovieticus</em>. His main opponents were the great dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. He personally conducted disinformation campaigns against them. He also handled the terrorist actions against Pope John Paul II. In the history of the Cold War, the methodically stubborn bureaucrat Andropov endures as one of the most sinister characters.</p>
<p>When he became secretary general, the KGB started a disinformation campaign in the Western media which sought to advertise him as a secret reformist, “a closet liberal”, a man who, in his heart of hearts, admired Western cultural values, loved jazz, and was by no means the tenacious, obtuse, and dogmatic monster described in previous accounts. In fact, the inflexible Yuri Andropov came to power an exhausted and seriously ill individual– as exhausted and seriously ill as the system that he so badly wished to save. His reforms were modest, half-hearted, lacking vigor and vision, and mainly targeted at strengthening discipline in factories. They did not transcend some trivial doctrinal touch-ups. His formula was “acceleration” (<em>uskorenie</em>).</p>
<p>Andropov was definitely not tempted to encourage the transparency which, under Gorbachev, would become known as glasnost. As secretary general – we learn from Kryuchkov’s memoirs – he opposed the return of the anti-Stalinist party intellectual Aleksandr Yakovlev from the Canadian diplomatic exile. As far as party intellectuals go, he was close to Yevgeny Primakov and Georgy Arbatov, whom he deemed trustworthy not only for party leadership, but also for the KGB. Primakov, the future prime minister of Russia between 1998 and 1999, was probably even an undercover KGB officer.</p>
<p>Andropov personally conducted the frenzied reactions of the official propaganda after the downing of the South Korean airliner in 1983. He died in 1984, mourned by no one except his former KGB underlings, including, most likely, the up-and-coming Vladimir Putin. Perhaps his only merit was promoting Gorbachev, thus speeding up – involuntarily, of course – the ruin of a despotic regime, a totalitarian experiment responsible for the death of over twenty million human beings.</p>
<p>In a rare moment of honesty, Andropov said that there can be no greater error than reopening the public debate on the “accursed question.” He was referring to the Stalin question. Forced by the logic of the struggle for power, Gorbachev reopened this Pandora box and expedited the USSR’s downfall. This denouement was something the KGB abhorred. Years later, Andropov’s fan Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant-colonel, spoke about the end of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the history of the twentieth century.”</p>
<p><em>This essay was broadcast by the Moldovan service of Radio Free Europe. It was translated from Romanian into English by Monica Got.</em></p>
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		<title>From Andropov to Putin: The Last Spasm of a Decrepit Dictatorship</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/from-andropov-to-putin-the-last-spasm-of-a-decrepit-dictatorship/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=from-andropov-to-putin-the-last-spasm-of-a-decrepit-dictatorship</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2014 04:15:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237332</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The last gasp of the secret police's squalid rule?  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pa.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237393" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pa-450x281.jpg" alt="pa" width="309" height="193" /></a>Kremlinology is back on the daily agenda. This can hardly be considered good news. I distinctly remember: the year was 1983 and Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov – former Chairman of the Committee for State Security, an institution known under the horrifying acronym of KGB – reigned as absolute leader of the CPSU and the USSR. Today, the Russian Federation is commanded by none other than Andropov’s former subordinate, one-time KGB lieutenant-colonel and deputy chief of the residency in Dresden (in what was called – then and for four more decades after that – the GDR), Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.</p>
<p>On September 1, 1983, a Soviet fighter shot down a South Korean Air Lines commercial aircraft (Flight 007), which had taken off from Kennedy Airport in New York City and was heading for Seoul after a stopover in Anchorage, Alaska. The current tragedy, directly linked to Russia’s intervention against the democratic revolution in Ukraine, shows that the Putin regime is applying and developing the strategy of Bolshevik-inspired international terrorism. The West must acknowledge this state of affairs before it is too late.</p>
<p>Years ago, the <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/remembering-a-dissident-3-1-1/">Soviet dissident Yuri Glazov</a>, one of the most lucid interpreters of the Soviet experience, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/">diagnosed Andropov&#8217;s neo-Stalinism</a>, more sophisticated but no less repressive than Leonid Brezhnev&#8217;s, as the last gasp of the nomenklatura&#8217;s squalid rule. The same can be said about Putinism, this latter-day incarnation of the Andropov model. I will write soon about the Andropov legacies and Putin&#8217;s efforts to revive it.</p>
<p>Andropov’s propaganda claimed that the Soviet leader had not been aware of the decision to attack. Born one hundred years ago in 1914, Andropov died in 1984. He was followed in office by the inept Konstantin Chernenko and then – with his strengths and weaknesses, his well-known consistencies and inconsistencies – by Mikhail Gorbachev.</p>
<p>September 1983 is considered to be among the top moments of the last period of the Cold War, a moment of all-out, explosive tension. The USSR collapsed in December 1991. What followed was the Boris Yeltsin chapter, and then – under various avatars, either as president or Prime Minister – that of Putin. For the latter, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Putinism meant imposing a disguised dictatorship of the KGB’s successor, the new/old secret police known as the FSB. The FSB&#8217;s “ethos” is deeply rooted in the tradition which began with the Cheka and the entranced Polish-Russian Bolshevik, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky.</p>
<p>On July 17, 2014, a missile launched by the separatists in Eastern Ukraine – armed by Putin’s Russia and with military leadership provided by Russian citizens, Putin’s direct emissaries – downed a Malaysian airliner, flight MH 17, with 298 passengers on board. No one survived. The disaster was complete. Only apparently was this an anomalous and absurd action. In fact, as so many of the actions prompted by Russian (then Soviet, then yet again Russian) imperialism, it’s all about the infamous paranoid style being consistently exercised, without any reluctance or scruples. It replicates Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic&#8217;s mendacious tricks in his relationship with mass murders such as General Ratko Mladic and the psychopathic nationalist Radovan Karadzic.</p>
<p>In fact, Putin – either explicitly or surreptitiously – has encouraged the separatist rebels. Putin’s propaganda has gone once more into a state of hysteria, bearing a shocking resemblance to that of Slobodan Milosevic, especially that of the delirious Serbian television, during the wars of secession in former Yugoslavia. The lies are coming down in heavy waves, frantically and shamelessly. Brought up in the KGB’s climate of fabrications, legends, and mystifications, Putin idolizes Andropov. What is currently happening in Russia is linked to perhaps the last great spasm of the totalitarian secret police. Stale and stifling, Putin’s world belongs to bygone times. Predicting its end can be read by those who <em>can</em> read – the facts, not the stars.</p>
<p>Andrew Nagorski, one of the finest experts on the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet world, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-nagorski/the-downed-airliner-putin_b_5599912.html">writes the following</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>When the façade of an authoritarian regime begins to be exposed to the harsh glare of truth, it usually crumbles at some point. That doesn’t necessarily happen immediately or even fast. But both the world at large and the Russians themselves will soon realize that the emperor in the Kremlin has no clothes. Future historians are likely to look at the downing of Malaysian Flight 17 as a pivotal moment in that process.</p></blockquote>
<p>I find it unnecessary to emphasize British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash’s competence. In “The New York Times,” Garton Ash – the author of the classic book “The Uses of Adversity,” a profound connoisseur of Europe’s political meanderings of the last five decades and more, an expert on German-Russian relations and the recent history of what was the Soviet Bloc – deals with the ominous Putin doctrine. It is a doctrine which encodes, in an aggressive manner, Russia’s right to intervene whenever the Kremlin decides that the rights of populations of Russian origin from other countries are being threatened.</p>
<p>The Russianness criterion would be similar to that used by Nazi Germany in the &#8217;30s in order to define what was known as &#8220;Deutschtum,&#8221; meaning the common origin as a people, as “volk.” Garton Ash is right, this is an ideology of resentment, a conglomeration of authoritarian-imperial and intensely nationalist fantasies, with catastrophic consequences for the international situation. Putinism, as a mental formula, was not born yesterday. It suffices to read or re-read the writings of admirable individuals such as Andrei Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, Yuri Glazov, Sergey Kovalev, Yuri Orlov to grasp the barbaric, totalitarian roots of what we may call the Putin Doctrine.</p>
<p><em>This article came out on the Romanian online platform www.contributors.ro and was translated into English by Monica Got.</em></p>
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		<title>Czar Putka&#8217;s Imperial Delusions</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jul 2014 04:49:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A new book unveils the dark world of a brutal tyrant driven by messianic delusions.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/putin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236568" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/putin-383x350.jpg" alt="putin" width="311" height="284" /></a>Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has a past and an ideology. He is the head of a mafia-like association of thugs, mountebanks, and experts in manipulation, often described as &#8220;political technologists.&#8221; In other words, in spite of the masterfully crafted image of &#8220;The Man Without a Face,&#8221; to use the title of Masha Gessen&#8217;s gripping biography, Putin is not the elusively enigmatic individual propelled by anonymous forces to the rudder of the Russian boat in one of the most turbulent periods of the country&#8217;s history. Putin is the offspring of the political culture of the Soviet secret police and inherits from that constellation of passions, emotions, and phobias his political techniques and the deep contempt for individual rights.</p>
<p>In his book &#8220;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fragile-Empire-Russia-Vladimir-Putin/dp/0300181213"><em>Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin</em></a>&#8221; (Yale University Press, 2013), journalist Ben Judah succeeds admirably in deconstructing the origins, dynamics, and ramifications of the Putin regime, from the early days in Sankt Petersburg, when the teenager &#8220;Putka&#8221; was a street bully, through the KGB career, to the transmogrification into a supporter of Anatoly Sobchak, the flamboyant advocate of glasnost in the morose city on the river Neva. Not that Sobchak was a choir boy: he rose to prominence in association with the visible and invisible authoritarians in that city and engaged in reckless populism and shady economic deals. He relied on the former KGB lieutenant-colonel Putin and Putin found in Sobchak a man intimately associated with Boris Yeltsin&#8217;s bid for power, a consistently supportive patron. Judah mentions several times that Putin is fiercely loyal to those who are faithful to him. In fact, he showed this psychological feature in his relation with Sobchak.</p>
<p>In addition to the Sobchak group. Putin benefited from the enthusiastic trust bestowed upon him by the Machiavellian, power-thirsty tycoon Boris Berezovsky, the driving force in the Kremlin during Yeltsin&#8217;s second, agonizingly inept presidency. What Berezovsky needed, and Putin seemed to offer, was a disciplined, self-effacing, ascetic leader, able to restore a certain sense of hope among the increasingly disillusioned Russians, sick and tired with corruption, cynicism, and rampant plundering of the state. Nothing in Putin&#8217;s past suggested his cupitdy, greed, even rapaciousness. His KGB past indicated admiration for such paragons of austerity as the Cheka founder, Feliks Dzerhinsky, and the orgaization&#8217;s head during the persecution of the dissidents in the 1970s, Yuri Andropov. He seemed malleable and, most important, controllable. Berezovsky was terribly wrong, he misread Putin&#8217;s mind and paid for this huge mistake. Putka was interested in both power and money. He saw the oligarchs as a means to achieve these two objectives. Those who accepted his iron fist continued to thrive. Those who, like Brezovsky, did not understand that Yeltsin&#8217;s times of senile debauchery were over, were forced into exile. Putin&#8217;s nemesis, billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, paid with years of labor camp for the reckless ambtion to challenge the new czar. Power for Putin is indivisble and unsharable.</p>
<p>The best chapters in the book deal with Putin&#8217;s circle and his views on state, history, and Russia&#8217;s role in the world. Obviously, he is not a sophisticated doctrinaire. His main ideas come from dubious sources such as the maniac of Eurasian imperialism, Aleksandr Dugin. Judah mentions Dugin, but only passingly. In fact, it has been Dugin who articulated, in most virulent terms, the doctrine of imperial conservatism that Putin adopted wholeheartedly. Add to this the bizarre fascination with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s vision of a resurrected Russian empire that would necessarily incorporate the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan. Ironically, the same Solzhenitsyn, a main voice of Soviet dissent in the 1970s, the author of &#8220;The Gulag Archipelago,&#8221; chose to endorse Vladimir Putin as a genuine Russian patriot. He accepted honors from Putin that he had rejected when offered by Boris Yeltsin. The former dissident was thrilled to see the former KGB officer espouse his nationalist ideas and anti-liberal ideals.</p>
<p>Understanding Putin&#8217;s behavior in recent years, including his repudiation of the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014 and the invasion of Crimea, means to grasp his authoritarian mindset, including his conviction that might creates right. His values are macho-like, vertically-authoritarian, militaristic, opposed to tolerance and diversity. He despises the democratic opposition (people like Boris Nemtsov, Gary Kasparov, and Aleksey Navalny) and deeply distrusts intitiatives from below, civil society, and Western liberalism. Helped by immensely cynical operators like Sergey Markov and Vladislav Surkov, a cult of Putin&#8217;s personality has emerged as a pillar of this authoritarian-kleptocratic system. Judah documents impressively how the promise of a &#8220;dictatorship of law&#8221; evaporated into a cronyist system with an ideological camouflage reminiscent of Fascism.</p>
<p>Is there any light of this somber tunnel? Can one hope that democratic parties and movements will one day, sooner or later, prevail and create a state based on rule of law? Putin&#8217;s panic-ridden and fiercely aggressive reaction to the Ukrainian Revolution shows that he is aware of the deep trends within the Russian society. He knows that his quasi-dictatorial regime, based on lies, intimidation, and scorn for civic values, can be overthrown by a popular revolution. Judah concludes his brilliant book with these foreboding words: &#8220;There is paranoia everywhere and a presence in Putin&#8217;s office, one whose shadow is so huge that encompasses everything to the point it cannot be seen. The ghost of Boris Yeltsin. All Putin&#8217;s career has been about not being Yeltsin.&#8221; (p. 329).</p>
<p>Revolutions happen suddenly, swiftly, and unpredictably. One day, Putin may wake up and realize that all his impersonation of imperial grandeur has turned out to be another Russian mirage, a fatally bankrupt effort to derail his country&#8217;s advance toward democratic normality. As I write this review, analogies with Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini abound. From Zbigniew Brzezinski to Hillary Clinton, a consensus seems to coalesce regarding Putin as a new totalitarian dictator. Ben Judah&#8217;s book is a perfect companion in any endeavor meant to explain Putin&#8217;s seemingly absurd actions. He does not live in a non-real world, as Angela Merkel put it, but rather in his own reality, haunted by conspiratorial obsessions and driven by messianic delusions. He sees himself as Russia&#8217;s redeemer and indulges therefore in fervid fantasies of salvation.</p>
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		<title>The Power of Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida”</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-power-of-pawel-pawlikowskis-ida/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-power-of-pawel-pawlikowskis-ida</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jul 2014 04:45:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Holocaust]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ida]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pawel Pawlikowski]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Polish film]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A 2013 Polish masterpiece confronts the visible and invisible traumatic effects of the Holocaust.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ida.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-235847" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ida-262x350.jpg" alt="ida" width="262" height="350" /></a>&#8220;You are Jewish. And your real name is Ida.&#8221; These two trenchant sentences, uttered by Wanda, a Polish-Jewish communist, to her niece Anna, a twenty-year-old novitiate ready to become a nun, define the infinitely complex story captured in &#8220;Ida,&#8221; a 2013 Polish masterpiece. Historically, the film, situated in the grim atmosphere of socialist Poland in the early 1960s, deals with the visible and invisible traumatic effects of the Holocaust. Psychologically, it is a meditation on the many faces of human freedom, on what it means to be a woman, a Christian, a Jew, and a human being in a century marred by genocides and destructive ideological passions.</p>
<p>Before taking her celibacy oath, Anna follows the Mother Superior&#8217;s urge to visit her aunt, her only relative and, we find out, the only other survivor of a family that perished during the Holocaust. This encounter leads to a quest for a long-buried past, to appalling revelations, and to Anna&#8217;s final return to her monastic calling. But this is a different woman, one who has lost her original innocence by discovering, in a most concrete, material way, the existence of Evil. Anna the nun will remain forever indebted to her sinful aunt for having allowed her to recover a tragic family history, even if this confrontation with the past meant Wanda&#8217;s own breakdown. To say more about the plot in this article will spoil the experience of seeing one of the great movies of our times. Just one caveat: Do not expect simple questions in this film, and even less so simple answers.</p>
<p>Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida” is an entrancingly absorbing movie. A film of utmost purity, with frames that remain forever grafted in one’s mind. A film about memory, trauma, truth, and the pursuit of one’s inner self. It belongs in the same category with the great films of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Agnieszka Holland.</p>
<p>Wanda is an overwhelming character, right out of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel “Ashes and Diamonds.” Once the horrible, dreaded, “Iron Wanda,” “Red Wanda,” a fanatic communist prosecutor asking for death penalties against alleged &#8220;enemies of the people,&#8221; she is now merely pathetic. Her first name is reminiscent of the notorious Wanda Wasilewska, Stalin’s favorite amongst Polish communists, whom he otherwise detested (see Marci Shore’s book “Caviar and Ashes”). With the utopia shattered to pieces, all that was left were the cigarettes, the one-night stands, and the vodka. In the company of her niece, she rediscovers her lost humanity. Or, at least, she hopes to retrieve it, together with the long suppressed memories of her Jewish fate.</p>
<p>Most probably, Wanda’s character is somehow inspired by the famous, or rather the grisly Julia (Luna) Brystigyer and Helena Wolynska-Brus, both active members of the repressive apparatus in the 1950s (the former as an investigator and head of the Security’s anti-clerical department, the latter as a military prosecutor). In either case, these two avatars of Polish Stalinism at its harshest were what Agata Kulesza, the actress assigned to the role, had in mind when playing the part. Pawlikowski himself told her about the case of Helena Brus. Nonetheless, what the actress went for – and I believe she succeeded in – was an attempt to summon up the human in that which was, in fact, its very opposite: “It was a challenge for my character to carry around all this past and also remain someone whom people could like.” One year before her death, the sadistic Luna converted to Catholicism. But did she ever repent?</p>
<p>Anna (Ida), played by Agata Trzebuchowska, is seemingly glacial, seraphic, Antigone-like, in a tragic-discreet way. Her gaze is reminiscent of a Vermeer painting. Aunt and niece alike, marred by the curse of the totalitarian twins – as the great Polish writer Jerzy Giedroyc called them – Stalinism and Nazism. In sum, bloodlands, to use the title of Timothy Snyder&#8217;s great book. The psychological suspense is astonishing. Not to mention the use of shadows and silence (much like in Bergman’s films). And Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is the ideal soundtrack for Wanda’s catharsis. Just look at the window.</p>
<p>Wanda and Anna’s conversation about the funeral of the boy who had been killed twenty years before is illuminating. Anna suggests bringing a priest, whilst Wanda – putting on a sarcastic, yet melancholy smile – responds: “A rabbi, perhaps.”</p>
<p>Politics is undetectable throughout the film. The political myth is, nevertheless, present. The story takes place in a dictatorship. An atheist tyranny born (enforced, actually) on the tormented soil of a martyred Poland. The same place where the catastrophe called Shoah had occurred. Where the Nazis had tried to obliterate all Christian compassion and human solidarity. The secret remains are discovered and put to rest where they really belong, in a Jewish cemetery with derelict, shattered tombstones. Wanda has fulfilled her destiny, but she could not have done it alone, without Anna. And Anna could not have done it without becoming who she once was, namely Ida.</p>
<p>The year is 1962, we are in a courtroom where Wanda is the judge. On the wall, just above her head, the picture of the party boss Wladislaw Gomulka. The restaurant is filled with Adriano Celentano’s music and a lot of jazz (John Coltrane). Tavern scenes play a key role in Polish cinema. In the films of young Andrzej Wajda, the song <em>Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino</em> – among others – is heard playing in restaurants. For us Eastern Europeans, “Ashes and Diamonds” was our very own “Casablanca.”</p>
<p>Someone asked Pawlikowski: why doesn’t Anna choose to remain Ida? In Poland back then, Jewish identity was dubious, negated publicly and denied privately. Just five years later, after the Six-Day War, overt anti-Semitism broke out afresh, as party and state policy. Then came March 1968, the students’ revolt, the arrests, the new and last exodus.</p>
<p>Historian Jan Gross wrote about post-Auschwitz anti-Semitism. Moreover, Anna’s way back to the monastery is related to her double orphan status. She had lost her family, she is now losing it once more. In a world of utter uprooting, Anna chooses to leave all that is worldly behind. She turns to Jesus, she absconds so that she may everlastingly mourn those “killed at dawn” (Zbigniew Herbert). She will wash the statue of Christ for all eternity, hoping to learn from the Son of Man how it was possible for humanity to descend into the horror of the Holocaust. A toil of memory and a toil of mourning, “Ida” is, above all, a harrowing confession about the damaged lives (to use Theodor W. Adorno’s words) of those who inhabited what was once Central Europe.</p>
<p><strong>[This article was translated from Romanian by Monica Got.]</strong></p>
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		<title>Homage to Maidania: Reflections on the Revolution in Ukraine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/homage-to-maidania-reflections-on-the-revolution-in-ukraine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=homage-to-maidania-reflections-on-the-revolution-in-ukraine</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:55:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maidan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yanukovych]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A symbol of the spontaenous anti-totalitarian search for freedom.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lenin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219797" alt="lenin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lenin.jpg" width="350" height="197" /></a>Twenty-five years after what Pope John Paul II named the <i>annus mirabilis</i> 1989, Ukrainians succeeded in overthrowing an appallingly corrupt autocracy. Viktor Yanukovych and his clique claimed that they had come to power as a result of free elections. What they refused to admit is that such elections do not offer a blank check for murdering peaceful, non-violent expressions of civic disobedience. The Independence Square in the heart of Kiev has become a real experiment in civic self-empowerment, a symbol of spontaneous anti-totalitarian search for freedom. In this respect, the Maidan, as the place is widely known, is reminiscent of the Kronstadt anti-Bolshevik uprising in March 1921 and the anti-Stalinist militias in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Maidania is more than a geographic location. It is, like George Orwell&#8217;s Catalonia, a state of mind.</p>
<p>Revolutions have more than one cause and a plurality of consequences. The Ukrainian Revolution was born out of desperation, anger, and outrage. It has been a massive response to Yanukovych&#8217;s acceptance of Vladimir Putin&#8217;s diktat and the implicit abandoning of the country&#8217;s national sovereignty. A Soviet-trained bureaucrat and a hyper-corrupt politician, Yanukovych had nothing but contempt for citizens as the true holders of popular sovereignty. Like Romania&#8217;s Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, founder of dynastic communism, Yanukovych ignored reality and lived in his own delusional universe. Ukrainians call him Yanushescu. He ordered the massacre of unarmend citizens in the name of an alleged national interest. In fact, he defended only his selfish interests, his survival in power. The moronic reactions of the Yanukovych gang to the enduring challenges from below sped up the revolutionary upheaval.</p>
<p>It was not oppositional political parties that ensured the demise of this dictatorship with a democratic facade. Like East Europeans in 1989, like Russians in 1991, Ukrainians have discovered the possibility of a non-Machiavellian way of practicing politics. The name for this yearning is civil society. It had been civil society that got rid of Yanukovych and foiled the opportunistic arrangements imposed by the European Union. Had it been the way the EU wished things to evolve, the Maidan would have long since capitulated.</p>
<p>Putin&#8217;s propaganda has intitiated a global campaign to besmirch the Maidan as the territory of extremism, jingoism, and resurrected Fascism. Yanukovych&#8217;s nincompoops have echoed these calumnies. No rhetorical device has been spared to portray the Maidan freedom fighters as heirs to World War II ultra-nationalists. This was precisely the device employed by Slobodan Milosevic to de-legitimize the Croatian and the Bosnian struggle for independence. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez&#8217;s successor, Nicolas Maduro, denounces the protesters as &#8220;fascists&#8221; and uses violence to smash the opposition.</p>
<p>The reality is that the Maidan has been diverse, protean, polymorphic,  ideologically flexible, and opposed to any form of extremism. I don&#8217;t deny the existence of far-right groups, but any movement like the Maidan is bound to magnetize individuals of various political persuasions. I speak here of the mainstream, not the periphery.</p>
<p>The real message of what I call Maidania is not intolerance, but tolerance, not exclusion, but inclusion, not Russia, but Europe. Maidania is a transideological, post-Utopian project. A legacy of 1989, its main value is living in truth. Ukraine&#8217;s new leaders will have to build upon the social capital of trust, truth, and tolerance created by Maidania. They will have to honor the memory of those who were murdered because they believed in the citizens&#8217; right to fight for truth.</p>
<p><i>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author of numerous books including &#8220;Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel &#8221; (Free Press, 1992, expanded paperback 1993, Ukrainian translation, 2003) and &#8220;The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century&#8221; (University of California Press, 2012).<br />
</i></p>
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		<title>A Farewell to Lenin: Stalin&#8217;s Litany of Vows</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jan 2014 05:30:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trotsky]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Ninety years since a monster's death. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin45.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217038" alt="lenin45" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin45.jpg" width="277" height="358" /></a>Ninety years ago, on January 21, 1924, the founder of the Bolshevik party and of the Soviet Union, the undisputed coryphaeus of world communism, passed away. Lenin&#8217;s last year was nothing but an endless agony. Isolated in a mansion turned into a sanatorium of sorts, a former artistocratic residence located outside Moscow, Lenin was in fact a prisoner of  information strictly filtered by the Bolshevik leadership&#8217;s emissary, the Politburo member and the head of the party&#8217;s department of cadres, the Georgian-born revolutionary Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known as Stalin, and also, for his close friends, as Koba.</p>
<p>In his &#8220;Letter to the Congress,&#8221; dictated in December 1922 and January 1923 to his secretary, Lydia Fotieva, Lenin requested Stalin&#8217;s replacement as general secretary. Politburo members read the document but decided to keep it secret. Lenin&#8217;s demands were ignored, denied, forgotten. The old leader&#8217;s power had vanished. Paeans were of course dedicated to him, he was lionized in poems and songs, his name was frantically chanted, but he had ceased to be the real decision-maker regarding the great strategic choices and bureaucratic appointments. By that moment, all the key institutions of the totalitarian system had been set in place and made to function in order to preserve the Bolsheviks&#8217;  absolute hold on power. In the following years, the epigones, and Stalin more than anybody else, did their utmost to radicalize them and to exacerbate the exclusionary, genocidal logic of  Leninism.</p>
<p>Lenin&#8217;s disciples preferred to maintain Stalin in a crucial position. With very few exceptions, they failed to realize that he who controls the cadres controls the party and thereby the whole system. When they became aware of this situation, it was tragically late. They had lost the battle. The Old Bolsheviks had been eliminated from crucial positions, politically emasculated, replaced by robot-like creatures totally subjugated by the supreme leader, the <i>vozhd </i>(the Bolshevik equivalent of what the Nazi would call the <i>Fuhrer</i>). Among those, some became utterly influential as members of Stalin&#8217;s entorurage: Lazar Kaganovich, Georgi Malenkov, Lev Mekhlis, and Nikolay Yezhov.</p>
<p>In 1929, Stalin unleashed the &#8220;revolution from above&#8221; and implemented Lev Trotsky&#8217;s militaristic program minus the proposals to observe a modicum of intra-party democracy. Lenin&#8217;s final opposition to the bureaucratic elephantiasis and his critique of the mendacious propaganda system were totally discarded. The Leninist creed was sacralized and mummified in order to legitimize the power appetite of a profitocratic nomenklatura, a parasytical caste claiming to represent the proletarian interests and values.</p>
<p>At the moment of Lenin&#8217;s demise, the party elite was beset by a well-camouflaged, yet fierce struggle between those who wanted to inherit his mantle. Stalin established an alliance with Lev Kamenev, the head of the Moscow party organization and Lenin&#8217;s deputy at helm of the Council of People&#8217;s Commissars, and with Grigory Zinoviev, the leader of the Petrograd  (soon to be baptized Leningrad) organization and chairman of the Third International, also known as the Comintern, a supra-national institution created in 1919 to promote Leninist revolutionary ideas globally.</p>
<p>Thus, a troika emerged made up of Lenin&#8217;s epigones: Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin. They shared a common hostility to Lev Trotsky, a Politburo member, the first commander of the Red Army, and a firebrand revolutionary apostle. In his &#8220;Letter to the Congress,&#8221; in fact his political testament, Lenin had called Trotsky &#8220;the most brilliant member of the Central Committee.&#8221; The triumvirs hated Trotky&#8217;s revolutionary extravaganzas, his undisguised sense of superiority, and his presumed Bonapartist inclinations. As early as 1923, when Lenin was still alive, Zinoviev had launched a furious campaign in defense of  Bolshevism against the mortal peril, the extremely dangerous Trotskyist deviation. This was in fact a fabrication, a political chimera, a fantasy meant to vilify and demonize Trotsky. The Leninist cult found support also among the members of Nikolay Bukharin&#8217;s faction.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Bukharin, much younger than other Bolshevik luminaries, was the editor of  &#8220;Pravda&#8221; and widely seen as the paty&#8217;s main theorist. Trotsky&#8217;s alleged sins included his pre-1917 non-Bolshevism, his internationalist ardour perceived as irresponsibly adventurous, and a lack of trust in the capacity of the Soviet people to buld up socialism in one country. During those battles for power, Stalin postured as sober, modest, reliable, and non-vindictive. Zinoviev and Kamenev foolishly thought that they could control or at least guide him with their advice. They were dismally wrong. The troika disintegrated in 1925. Eleven year later, in the summer of 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were charged with surreal crimes, confessed their guilt, and were executed as &#8220;rabid dogs.&#8221; A former Menshevik, chief prosecutor Andrey Vyshinski, exulted in publicly humiliating these two former closest associates of the party&#8217;s founder.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-217004 aligncenter" alt="lenin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin.jpg" width="528" height="397" /></a><strong>Stalinist mythologies: Lenin and Stalin, a painting by Aleksei Vasiliev.</strong></p>
<p>Stalin&#8217;s  funeral oration remains as an antological piece in the history of world communism. It was Koba&#8217;s opportunity to affirm himself publicly as the defunct leader&#8217;s genuine successor. Lenin&#8217;s cultic divinization became the foundation for the emerging communist logocracy. In this theocracy, Stalin acted as pontifex maximus, the only legitimate interpreter of the revolutionary gnosis. The myth of the infallible party, owner of truth, found its counterpart in the myth of the omniscient genius, the visionary leader inspired by the universally purifying, redemptive doctrine bequeathed by Lenin. Any attempt to undermine the ironclad unity of the party leadership represented a political crime and needed to be smashed ruthlessly. Factionalism was a lethal disease.</p>
<p>All these themes were saliently featured in Stalin&#8217;s oath delivered in that frigidly cold January in Moscow. That text contained, <i>in embryo</i>, the Stalinist gospel. In spite of its monotonous discursive repetitions, the litany evolved in a crescendo of quasi-mystical devotion. Each paragraph begins with the magical words: &#8220;Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us&#8230;&#8221; Lenin emerges from this hagiographic apotheosis as eternally alive, unperishable, immortal. Lenin has become the vivid presence of a fallacious, temporary absence. Medieval superstitions did thus triumph within a political and ideological movement proudly dedicated to materialist philosophical principles. One doesn&#8217;t need to endorse Isaac Deutscher&#8217;s approach to Bolshevism in order to agree with him that Stalinism was a blending of Marxism and primitive magic.</p>
<p>Far away from Moscow, undergoing medical treatment in the Caucasus, Leon Trotsky did not attend the funerals. The triumvirs telegraphed him that the ceremony could not be postponed until he could get back. In reality, they wanted to make sure that the symbolic transfer of the Leninist charisma would take place in the absence of the arch-rival, a political enemy that had to be compromised and neutralized.</p>
<p>For Stalin, Trotsky embodied the opposite of his own vision of the professional revolutionary: cosmopolite, multi-lingual, with immense literary and philosophical readings, a brilliant journalist, a masterful stylist, and an electrifying orateur. Antipodically situated, Dzhugashvili was dark, dull, somber, a taciturn introvert, pathologically suspicious of everyone and everything. Like Lenin, Trotsky belonged to an international fraternity of Central Europeans socialists. He had known Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and many others. He had read Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Lassale, and Marx in German. Yet, this superiority was misleading and did not help him in the terrible, unsparing competition with Stalin.  He committed a huge mistake by calling Dzhugasvili &#8220;the Central Committee&#8217;s most notorious mediocrity.&#8221; Narcissistic arrogance was Trotsky&#8217;s main weakness for which he was to finally pay with his life.</p>
<p>In his &#8220;Oath,&#8221; Stalin forcefully highlighted the themes that were to energize him in his endeavor to demonstrate that he outdid all his rivals in terms of deep dedication to Lenin&#8217;s desires:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and guard the purity of the great title of member of the Party. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill your behest with honor! &#8230; Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to guard and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall spare no effort to fulfill this behest with honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen with all our might  the alliance of the workers and peasant. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill with honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen and extend the union of republics. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to remain faithful to the principles of the Communist International. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall not spare our lives to strengthen and extend the union of the working people of the whole world&#8211;the Communist International!&#8221;</i> (see T. H. Rigby, editor, “Stalin”, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966, p. 40). It is noteworthy that Stalin addresses Lenin in present tense, thus suggesting that, as a famous slogan put it, &#8220;Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Dzhugashvili&#8217;s funeral oration consecrated, codified, and petrified the hegemonic narrative about Lenin&#8217;s immortality. It became the premise for the new myth of Stalin&#8217;s boundless genius and allowed him to masquerade as the only legitimate interpreter of the infallible Leninist doctrine. In brief, as long as the movement follows the Leninist compass, its members will be able to distinguish between North and South, between good and evil, between the road to triumph and the path to disaster. The banner of Leninism is invincible, as Stalin, Mao, Khrushchev, Castro, Che Guevara, Dolores Ibarruri, Nicolae Ceausescu, etc. would have it.</p>
<p>There is a consensus among Stalin&#8217;s great biographers, from Boris Souvarine and Robert Conquest to Robert C. Tucker and Robert Service, that all these pledges, uttered with truly religious intensity, were later abandoned, betrayed, abjured. Yet, this does not mean that at the moment he delivered his farewell address, Stalin was lying. In his mind, most likely, he remained faithful, until his very last day, to the creed he proclaimed in that January of the great separation, to the mystical absolutism of the vanguard party, the predestined instrument Reason did invent in order to achieve its goals in History and rescue humanity from the valley of tears.</p>
<p><i>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author, most recently, of  ”The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century” (University of California Press), a book dedicated to the memory of Leszek Kolakowski, Tony Judt, and Robert C. Tucker. More on this book in the </i><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/"><i>dialogue with Jamie Glazov</i></a><i>.   </i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.  </b><i><br />
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		<title>A Good Fight</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/a-good-fight/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-good-fight</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Dec 2013 05:58:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Havel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kolakowski]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Black Book of the American Left]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The political journey of David Horowitz.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tbb1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-213701" alt="tbb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tbb1.jpg" width="300" height="454" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/">WeeklyStandard.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>To order <em>The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I &#8211; My Life and Times</em>, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=SZLFMGIYTBFM">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>David Horowitz is a political thinker and cultural critic who enjoys challenging leftist shibboleths. His main contribution to contemporary political discourse is a passionate commitment to an outspoken, unabashed, myth-breaking version of conservatism. If communism was the triumph of mendaciousness, he argues in this poignant collection of writings, conservatism cannot accept the proliferation of self-serving legends and half-truths.</p>
<p>This makes his public interventions refreshingly unpredictable, iconoclastic, and engaging. He is a former insider, and his views have the veracity of the firsthand witness. Horowitz knows better than anybody else the hypocrisies of the left, the unacknowledged skeletons in its closet, and its fear to come to terms with past ignominies. He is an apostate who sees no reason to mince his words to please the religion of political and historical correctness. His masters are other critics of totalitarian delusions, from George Orwell to <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/why-kolakowski-matters/">Leszek Kolakowski</a>; in fact, Horowitz’s awakening from his leftist dreams was decisively catalyzed by the illuminating effect of Kolakowski’s devastating <a id="FALINK_2_0_1" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/why-kolakowski-matters/">critique</a> of socialist ideas. Unlike his former comrades, however, Horowitz believes in the healing value of second thoughts.</p>
<p>Vilified by enemies as a right-wing crusader, Horowitz is, in fact, a lucid thinker for whom ideas matter and words have consequences. His break with the left in the late 1970s was a response to what he perceived to be its rampant sense of self-righteousness, combined with its readiness to endorse obsolete and pernicious utopian ideals. Born to a Communist family in Queens, Horowitz flirted with the Leninist creed as a teenager but <a id="FALINK_3_0_2" href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/good-fight_771511.html#">found</a> out early that the Communist sect was insufferably obtuse and irretrievably sclerotic. He attended Columbia, where he discovered Western Marxism and other non-Bolshevik revolutionary doctrines. From the very beginning, he had an appetite for heresy.</p>
<p>He joined the emerging New Left and went to England, where he became a disciple and close associate of the socialist historian Isaac Deutscher, author of once-celebrated biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. Thanks to Deutscher, Horowitz met other British leftists, including the sociologist Ralph Miliband (father of the current leader of the <a id="FALINK_1_0_0" href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/good-fight_771511.html#">Labour</a> party). Consumed by revolutionary pathos, he wrote books, pamphlets, and manifestoes, denounced Western imperialism, and condemned the Vietnam war.</p>
<p>Once back in the United States, he became the editor, with Peter Collier, of <em>Ramparts</em>, the New Left’s most influential publication. In later books, Horowitz engages in soul-searching analyses of his attraction to the extreme radicalism of the Black Panthers and other far-left groups. Under tragic circumstances—a friend of his was murdered by the Panthers—he discovered that these celebrated antiestablishment fighters were fundamentally sociopaths. What followed was an itinerary of self-scrutiny, self-understanding, and moral epiphany. He reinvented himself as an anti-Marxist, antitotalitarian, anti-utopian thinker.</p>
<p>Obviously, David Horowitz is not the first to have deplored the spellbinding effects of what Raymond Aron called the opium of the intellectuals. Before him, social and cultural critics (Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, to name only the most famous ones) took the same path; Bertolt Brecht’s Marxist mentor, Karl Korsch, broke with his revolutionary past in the 1950s. Even Max Horkheimer, one of the Frankfurt School’s luminaries, ended as a conservative thinker. As Ignazio Silone, himself a former Leninist, put it: The ultimate struggle would be between Communists and ex-Communists.</p>
<p>In Horowitz’s case, however, it is a struggle waged by an ex-leftist ideologue against political mythologies that have made whole generations run amok. Like Kolakowski and Václav Havel, Horowitz identifies ideological blindness as the source of radical zealotry. He knows that ideologies are coercive structures with immense enthralling effects—indeed, what Kenneth Minogue called “alien powers.” Putting together his fervid writings is, for him, a duty of conscience. He does not claim to be nonpartisan and proudly recognizes his attachment to a conservative vision of politics. But he is a pluralist: He refuses the idea of infallible ideological revelation, admits that human beings can err, and invites his readers to exercise their critical faculties. He does not pontificate.</p>
<p>Judith Shklar once wrote about a liberalism of fear, a philosophy rooted in the awareness that the onslaught against liberal values in totalitarian experiments inevitably results in catastrophe. Horowitz’s conservatism is inspired by the conviction that utopian hubris is always conducive to moral, social, and political disaster. It is not an optimistic  conservatism, but a tragic one. Horowitz confesses that he is an agnostic, yet he realizes that liberty, as a nonnegotiable human value, has a transcendent legitimation in religion. In the absence of a moral ground, individuals are suspended in a moral no-man’s land: Rebels become revolutionaries and exert their logical fallacies to eliminate deviation from a sacralized ideology.</p>
<p>For Horowitz, the main battle is now related to cultural hegemony. He understands that political rivalries are directly linked to clashes of values. Refusing to be pigeonholed into a formula, he combines themes belonging to classical liberalism, Burkean conservatism, and neoconservatism. His social criticism is a response to what he perceives to be the collapse of the center in American politics and the takeover of the liberal mainstream by proponents of refurbished leftist fallacies. He regards anticapitalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Zionism as ideological mantras meant to camouflage a deep contempt for human rights.</p>
<p><em>The Black Book of the American Left</em> is an illuminating contribution to our understanding of what Hannah Arendt once called the ideological storms of the 20th century. It shows how American radicals partook of the same romantic passions and redemptive fantasies as their European peers. The philosophical languages were different, of course, but the electrifying desire to negate the existing order, no matter the human costs, was the same.</p>
<p><em>Vladimir Tismaneanu, professor of politics at the University of Maryland, is the author, most recently, of </em>The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century<em>. </em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em><br />
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<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
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		<title>Comrade Isaac and Sir Isaiah</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/comrade-isaac-and-sir-isaiah/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=comrade-isaac-and-sir-isaiah</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Dec 2013 05:17:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Berlin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bolshevik]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Caute]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deutscher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hobsbawm]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A new book explores two individual destinies intertwined with the most agonizing questions of our time.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/isaiah_isaiah.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213528" alt="isaiah_isaiah" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/isaiah_isaiah.jpg" width="298" height="198" /></a>It is hard to find two more strikingly different intellectual personalities than the author of Trotsky&#8217;s classic biography and one of the &#8220;Russian Thinkers.&#8221;  Comrade Isaac (Deutscher), as he was called by like-minded left-wing thinkers, was enamored with grandiose Hegelian-Marxist  generalization and worshipped great men (a category in which he included Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky). Sir Isaiah (Berlin) was by nature skeptical, suspicious of utopianism, abhorred radicalism of any shade, and valued, more than anything else, the sense of reality. Deutscher was committed to monistic determinism, Berlin cherished agonistic pluralism.</p>
<p>During the Cold War years, these two thinkers, both born in the Russian empire to Jewish families with long rabbinical traditions, both émigrés (at different ages, to be sure) to England, both magnetized by Russian culture, came to embody incompatible visions of politics, history, and morality.</p>
<p>One important distinction needs to be made from the very outset: whereas Deutscher joined the underground Polish Communist Party in the 1920s, Berlin was never a member of a Leninist sect. True, comrade Isaac broke with the Stalinists and became an independent Marxist, an influential journalist and an acclaimed historian, but he never jettisoned a romanticized vision of early Bolshevism as a fountain of revolutionary hope. He admired intransigence, arduous pursuit of an ultimate revolutionary dream meant to fulfill a secret plan of History. For Berlin, this was nonsense. He abhorred any grandiose teleology and admired Alexander Herzen, a Russian thinker who opposed reckless radicalism. Like Herzen, in many respects his intellectual hero, Berlin refused to believe that history (not capitalized) develops in accordance with an esoteric libretto. Whereas he acknowledged, without sharing, Karl Marx&#8217;s philosophical insights, he regarded Lenin not only as a delusional Jacobin, but also as the founder of a despicable totalitarian experiment.</p>
<p>David Caute offers in this new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Isaac-Isaiah-David-Caute/dp/0300192096/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1387423220&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Isaac+%26+Isaiah%3A+The+Covert+Punishment+of+a+Cold+War+Heretic"><i>Isaac &amp; Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic</i></a> (Yale University Press, 2013), a thrilling, though sometimes debatable, story of passionate acrimony, fierce hostility, and bitter disagreement which may explain Isaac Deutscher&#8217;s failure to achieve the academic recognition that many thought he fully deserved and others considered to be totally unjustified. In other words, Caute suggests, it was Isaiah Berlin&#8217;s adamantly formulated refusal to support Deutscher&#8217;s hiring by the University of Sussex that killed the historian&#8217;s professorial prospects.</p>
<p>In fact, what Berlin did was to share with the academic powers-that-be his profound and enduring dislike of Deutscher as an historian of Bolshevism and as a public intellectual. He worded his message in utterly harsh terms and they definitely had an immediate impact. That Sussex cut off negotiations with Deutscher was not Berlin&#8217;s responsibility. Yet, one can assume, had he not written that confidential note to Vice-Chancellor John Fulton on March 4, 1963,  Deutscher might have joined, as initially planned, the Sussex faculty.</p>
<p>In fact, for years after the incident, Berlin agonized over widespread rumors that he may have been the villain in a story of  ideological persecution. Whereas there is no doubt that being a Marxist was not, in Berlin&#8217;s eyes, an impediment for one to be a <em>bona fide</em> academic, he had no patience for Lenin&#8217;s apologists. And, in his eyes, Deutscher was emblematic for this species that he despised. His letter was unsparingly frank, yet undoubtedly candid:&#8221;Your letter puts me in a cruel dilemma. The candidate of whom you speak (i.e., Deutscher) is the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable. (&#8230;) The man in question is the only one about whom I have any such feeling &#8230; and of course I do not think that personal opinions, especially left-wing ones, should be any barrier to academic appointment by you or any other university in England at the present moment&#8221; (p.279). These, to me, are hardly the words of a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior instigating an academic vendetta.</p>
<p>An intellectual historian himself and a former fellow of All Souls in the early 1960s, when he and Berlin were colleagues, Caute explores in this captivatingly provocative book two individual destinies involved in the definition of some of the most agonizing questions of our time: Why did the Bolshevik Revolution fail? Was Stalin Lenin&#8217;s genuine heir or the arch-traitor of a presumably humanist Bolshevism? Was the Soviet Union reformable?</p>
<p>Some, like Deutscher and his dear friend Ralph Miliband, thought that there was a pristine socialism which had been tainted by the Soviet tragedy (&#8220;the actually existing socialism&#8221;). Berlin, like Leszek Kolakowski, after his break with the early illusions, found the seeds of Stalinism in the Leninist totalitarian pedagogy and even in Marx&#8217;s immoderate historical hubris. Yet, he never wrote about Marx with the same sense of moral outrage reserved to Lenin. Idealizing Lenin was for him an offense to the millions of victims of totalitarianism. When Deuscher wrote a condescending review of Boris Pasternak&#8217;s novel &#8220;Doctor Zhivago,&#8221; Berlin was scandalized. For Berlin, Deutscher was not a genuine heretic, but rather a super-gifted Leninist preacher.</p>
<p>Deutscher died at the age 60 in 1967. We don&#8217;t know how he would have reacted to Gorbachev&#8217;s revolutionary changes. Or, actually, we know: he would have hoped that the flame of October could be rekindled and that Lenin&#8217;s unfulfilled testament could finally be carried out. Trotsky would have finally been vindicated. We know, of course, that none of these expected outcomes did occur. In fact, all Deutscher&#8217;s important predictions turned out to have been utterly wrong.</p>
<p>Until his last day, Deutscher hoped that a redeemer would come to power in Russia to save what he arduously believed to be the abandoned promise of universal liberation. For Berlin, this was simply nonsense. In his view, communism was a historical catastrophe, &#8220;a total failure, and there are more horrible crimes on its conscience&#8211;if it exists&#8211; than on that of any other movement in history, not even the great religious persecutions&#8221; (p. 78). Furthermore, like political writer Leo Labedz (another Polish émigré), he considered Deutscher an intellectual fraud, a manipulator of historical evidence and an ideologue masquerading as a scholar. This is in fact the key point: Isaac Deutscher&#8217;s interpretation of communism remained tainted by the romanticization of Lenin&#8217;s times. He lambasted Orwell and despised Koestler. The former, he argued, cultivated the &#8220;mysticism of cruelty.&#8221; The latter was a neurotic renegade who converted his own obsessions into moral arguments.</p>
<p>In times when moral clarity was desperately needed, Deutscher preferred to provide anti-anti-communist obfuscations and ironies. No wonder that Berlin had little patience for him. The issue was not that Deutscher was a Marxist. Caute mentions Berlin saying that he would have no quarrel with E. H. Carr and Eric Hobsbawm. These two historians, Marxist as they undoubtedly were, remained faithful to the facts, did not twist them to suit an ideological agenda. If, by omission or by commission, Berlin really made impossible Deutscher&#8217;s appointment at the University of Sussex, he did it not because of intellectual intolerance. He was really convinced, as most great Sovietologists, that Deutscher was a propagandist first, and a scholar second.</p>
<p>The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It could suggest a secretive, conspiratorial undertaking motivated by petty, retaliatory, vindictive motives. You don&#8217;t need to be a Berliner (as Timothy Garton Ash once called those like himself who admire Sir Isaiah&#8217;s writings) to see why he was so reluctant to endorse the academic career of a person he found irretrievably disingenuous. And Deutscher was not a choir boy, either: he threatened Labedz with a calumny suit &#8211;it did not happen because of  Deutscher&#8217;s unexpected death in 1967&#8211;because the editor of <i>Survey </i>had questioned his intellectual honesty. In fact, Deutscher was pugnacious, cantankerous, and utterly contemptuous of those whom he disagreed with. For him, Boris Souvarine, the French ex-communist author of a classic, truly formidable biography of Stalin, a genuine anti-Bolshevik socialist, was nothing but a &#8220;scribbler.&#8221;</p>
<p>Part of the story was deeply personal: Berlin could never forget or forgive Deutscher&#8217;s condescending review in the <i>Observer </i>of his lecture on &#8220;Historical Inevitability.&#8221; From that moment on, Isaiah regarded Isaac as a &#8220;wicked man.&#8221; Yet, at a deeper level, the issue was, as Caute insists, their incompatible perspectives on historical determinism and human agency.</p>
<p>For Berlin, nothing was more deleterious to history as an intellectual enterprise than the ambition to discover historical laws and to link causally human behavior to such impersonal, mysterious norms. The ostensible target may have been Marx&#8217;s oracular doctrine, the immediate one was the increasingly influential Deutscher and his teleological musings. As for Soviet studies, Berlin highly admired works by Leonard Schapiro and the American Sovietologists. For Deutscher these were irredeemably shallow and partisan, imbued with Menshevik prejudices and Cold War phobias. For Berlin, receiving lessons about Hegel and Marx from a person whom he regarded as a philosophical dilettante was truly unpalatable. Add to this their irreconcilable views on Jews, Zionism, and Israel, and one gets a sense of how Berlin&#8217;s animosity reached an intensity unparalleled in his reactions to any other scholar.</p>
<p>Deutscher fancied himself as the great historian of the twentieth century&#8217;s main revolutionary saga. For Berlin, this was simply not true. He saw comrade Isaac as an unrepentant servant of a God that failed, a crusader for a cause that he found atrociously and inescapably wrong. I talked recently with David Horowitz about Deutscher. He knew him well, during the times of his leftist illusions; Deutscher was his mentor. A man of certain generosity, to be sure, comrade Isaac was nevertheless a true believer. He never approved of  the apostates, found them morally dishonest and politically repugnant. His tolerance of heresy was limited to those who chose not to radically break with the Bolshevik gospel.</p>
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		<title>Empire of Madness: Caligula in Pyongyang</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:48:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jang Song-thaek]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jong-Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[purge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The North Korean nomenklatura braces itself; no one is safe.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lp.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213351" alt="lp" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lp-450x281.jpg" width="315" height="197" /></a>North Korea is Stalin&#8217;s ultimate dream come true. It is a most dangerous actor in world politics and a despicable tyranny where reason and moderation are treated as mortal enemies. Blind obedience is mandatory and so is infinite subservience to the Supreme Leader, the administrator of truth, memory, and universal poverty. It is the most hermetic regime in the world, an armed-to-the-teeth totalitarian despotism whose possession of  nuclear weapons  gives nightmares to all those who know how the Kim dynasty and its sycophants operate. It is, in fact, as the recent bloody purges made clearer than ever, a huge concentration camp run by a lunatic commander.</p>
<p>The mysterious, baby-faced monster Kim Jong-un has unleashed a Stalin-style onslaught on his own acolytes. It is like a re-enactment of the Soviet Great Purge when Stalin got rid of the whole Bolshevik Old Guard. It is not an exaggeration to predict more bloodshed to follow. No doubt the North Korean nomenklatura is now frightened and  humiliated. No one is safe in this universe of paranoid delusions and rampant suspicions.</p>
<p>The propaganda machine indulges in hysterical harangues against the alleged traitors, despicable vermin, &#8220;repugnant human scum,&#8221; &#8220;nauseating reptiles&#8221; and other surreal zoological metaphors. Until recently the regime&#8217;s number two, lionized as a wise advisor to the satrap, Kim Jong-un&#8217;s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was killed after having been swamped into an ocean of  morbid accusations. Is this the abysmal end or the frightening beginning of young Kim&#8217;s absolute rule?</p>
<p>As Nicholas Eberstadt has pointed out, Kim Jong-un&#8217;s grandfather and father avoided dealing mortal blows to the members of the highest communist aristocracy. They practiced a dynastic communism that blended nationalist mysticism with ferocious Stalinism. The Juche doctrine means the right of the communist Lidero Maximo to act as arbitrarily and erratically as he wishes. Initially, the enigmatic &#8220;Dear Leader,&#8221; a latter-day Caligula with a Swiss high-school background and the face of a hieratic, opaque deity, seemed to be just a puppet manipulated by his ostensibly omnipotent aunt and uncle. He has finally escaped their suffocating grip, or at least this seems to be his conviction. He acts ruthlessly and in perfect cold blood. Will he continue the carnage or will he be himself liquidated by an equally brutal backlash from those whom he wants to eliminate? Will this grotesque farce culminate in a settling of accounts that could somehow restore a minimal rationality in this empire of madness? What card will China play?</p>
<p>When Kim Jong-un was ritualistically anointed his father&#8217;s successor two years ago, and the world media were disseminating those mind-boggling images with teenagers hitting their heads and old ladies screaming as loud as possible their desperation, I predicted that the struggle for power would exacerbate to the point of assassinations and show trials. What is at stake is absolute power within an absolutist regime, a red monarchy if ever one was. For the time being, the &#8220;beloved aunt&#8221; and estranged wife of the executed &#8220;traitor,&#8221; has managed to survive. It is not sure at all that the vindictive Kim Jong-un will spare her. The logic of  unbound Stalinism is an ever-growing, endless purge. Still, it is hard to know whether in the dark corridors of the North Korean pyramid of power some of the alleged loyalists are not sharpening their daggers. This is not Hamlet in Pyongyang, but rather Richard III or Caligula.</p>
<p>I have written a lot on national Stalinism and dynastic communism in Romania, North Korea, and Cuba. There are striking similarities between Nicolae Ceausescu&#8217;s and Kim Il-sung&#8217;s experiments. In 1986 I published in the journal &#8220;Orbis&#8221; a study titled “Byzantine Rites, Stalinist Follies: The Twilight of  Dynastic Socialism in Romania.”  I explored the wedding between unbound Stalinism and nationalist delirium, the mixing of autarchic narcissism and ideological paranoia, the relations between party elite, secret police and army within a decrepit dictatorship.  I am tempted to write now an article titled  “Confucian Rites, Stalinist Follies: The Twilight of  Dynastic Communism in North Korea.” Ideological dictatorships, also known as ideocracies or logocracies, cultivate miracle, myth, and mystery (a point made by historian Fritz Stern).</p>
<p>In the case of North Korea, the miracle and the myth are totally exhausted. The mystery remains and this is most alarming.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Permanent Putsch in Romania</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/permanent-putsch-in-romania/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=permanent-putsch-in-romania</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 13 Dec 2013 05:30:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Basescu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Parliament]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[putsch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romania]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[West]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A day of shame for the Romanian Parliament. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/rom.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213075" alt="rom" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/rom.jpg" width="301" height="226" /></a>Leon Trotsky glorified the permanent revolution. The main expertise of the ruling coalition in Romania is the permanent putsch. More precisely, it wages an insidiously perverse onslaught on the country&#8217;s democracy. On December 10, the Parliament, controlled by the Left, voted to essentially modify the Penal Code. Parliamentarians and other officials will enjoy what can be called super-immunity, i. e., impunity. In other words, they will be able steal as much as they want with no fear of legal retribution.</p>
<p>The embassies of the European Union (Romania joined it in 2007) are flabbergasted. Civil society organizations have issued staunch condemnations. One journalist called that day &#8220;Black Tuesday.&#8221; Democratic forces are in shock. It was a day of shame for the Romanian Parliament. Romania runs the risk of becoming the pariah state of the European Union. <strong></strong></p>
<p>In July 2012, the socialist-liberal coalition unleashed a coup against the country&#8217;s pro-Western, pro-NATO, staunchly pro-US president, Traian Basescu. Putin&#8217;s loudspeaker, the radio station &#8220;Russia&#8217;s  Voice,&#8221; acclaimed the pseudo-constitutional putsch. <strong></strong></p>
<p>Western pressures, including staunch reactions from Germany and US officials, forced the putschists to step back. A referendum followed, and the beleaguered Basescu returned to the presidential palace in Bucharest. The real stake was not just the president&#8217;s personal fate, but rather the interruption and radical reversal of his reforms. Among those were the new Penal Code, extremely severe with corruption, and the creation of dynamic anti-corruption agencies. <strong></strong></p>
<p>The socialist party (it calls itself social democratic), whose honorary leader is the former communist apparatchik Ion Iliescu (Nicolae Ceausescu&#8217;s successor and the main usurper of the bloody December 1989 revolution) resents the rule of law, accountability, and transparency. The octogenarian Iliescu remains attached to the Bolshevik passion of his Stalinist youth.<strong></strong></p>
<p>Together with the liberals and a mini-party run by a former secret police collaborator turned into a post-communist tycoon, the socialists want to perpetuate (if possible, forever) an authoritarian kleptocratic regime with strong pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing inclinations. The party&#8217;s leader, a 40-year-old lawyer named Victor Ponta, was exposed as a plagiarist in the pages of the highly-respected &#8220;Nature&#8221; magazine. Large sections of his PhD dissertation were literally copied from books written by other authors. In Germany, a Defense Minister resigned following a similar scandal. In Romania, Victor Ponta has thrived, in spite of protests issued by his own alma mater, the University of Bucharest. Add to this Ponta&#8217;s unabashed admiration for Che Guevara and Mao and you get the image of a histrionic prevaricator in love with Leninist murderous fanatics.</p>
<p>The Social-Liberal Union won the parliamentary elections in December 2012 and has enjoyed a comfortable majority that has allowed it to foster its grip on economic resources. It bombarded the country with emergency decrees. Any criticism of the ruling team is immediately vilified as &#8220;anti-patriotic.&#8221; Both Ponta and his main ally, the leader of the Liberal Party and chair of the Senate, the higher chamber of the Romanian Parliament, Crin Antonescu, have decisively contributed to what I identify as an alarming de-democratization process. The opposition is, unfortunately, divided and demoralized. President Basescu&#8217;s second term comes to an end in December 2014. One can foresee a very turbulent electoral year.</p>
<p>It is hard to predict when and whether Romanians will take to the streets massively like their Bulgarian and Ukrainian neighbors. It is, however, clear that, sooner rather than later,  this state of affairs will result in an explosion of outrage. The left coalition is widely perceived as an alliance of crooks, thieves, and political gangsters. Super-immunity means, in this case, super-lawlessness.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Lenin Beheaded</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2013 05:45:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kiev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soviet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The toppling of Lenin's statue in Kiev represents a watershed moment. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lenint.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212726" alt="lenint" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lenint-450x300.jpg" width="270" height="180" /></a>There are symbolic moments that mark the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. It&#8217;s hard to predict the next steps of the Ukrainian upheaval. But the toppling of Lenin&#8217;s statue in Kiev has clearly a foundational value.</p>
<p>It is a watershed.</p>
<p>The protesters, or perhaps, better said, the revolutionaries, refuse to accept the prolongation of communism&#8217;s big lie. Some of them are nationalists, others are civic liberals, but they all share a deep contempt for the Leninist legacies of duplicity and terror. Getting rid of this ultimate material incarnation of Soviet imperialism should have happened before. The statue was once vandalized in recent years, but the government arranged for it to be repaired. Comrade Lenin&#8217;s memory needed to be salvaged.</p>
<p>In October 1956, the Hungarian revolutionaries pulled down Stalin&#8217;s statue in Budapest, thus symbolically signalling their rejection of an alien, asphyxiating despotism. From the generalissimo&#8217;s gigantic body nothing remained on the postament than the boots. In Russia, Lenin&#8217;s statues continue to dominate public spaces. In addition, Vladimir Putin&#8217;s regime has built new ones for the former KGB strongman, Leonid Brezhnev&#8217;s successor as head of the USSR, Yuri Andropov.</p>
<p>The nature of EU is not the point of the demonstrations. Ukrainians want to belong to the West, not to the East. They refuse Putin&#8217;s Eurasian mythologies as another camouflage for Russian hegemonism. EU has many problems, but the Ukrainians see it as a chance to escape a geopolitical fatality that has plagued their history for centuries. Before we minimize or discard their European dreams, let&#8217;s try to understand them.</p>
<p>For Ukrainians, Russia means oppression, humiliation, bondage. Others feel the same way. This explains why Georgia&#8217;s  former president Mikhail Saakashvili and Moldova&#8217;s former prime minister Vlad Filat went to Kiev to spell out their solidarity with the protesters.</p>
<p>There are instances when euphoria needs to be understood, not condemned. When some leftist prophets irresponsibly proclaim the need &#8220;to retest the Bolshevik hypothesis&#8221;, (e.g. Slavoj Zizek), a morally outrageous and intellectually ludicrous statement, Ukrainian citizens get rid of the abhorred Bolshevik monuments. This type of action needs to be welcomed and supported.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Ukrainian People Power</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/ukrainian-people-power/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ukrainian-people-power</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Dec 2013 05:50:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1989]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Ukrainian revolutionaries choose Europe because they know who Putin is and what Putinism means. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/hc_edited-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-212438" alt="hc_edited-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/hc_edited-1.jpg" width="400" height="286" /></a>In 2014 we will celebrate a quarter of a century since the revolutions of 1989. It was a formidable succession of events that made Pope John II speak about an <em>annus mirabilis</em>. Something unexpected, truly miraculous happened then: presumably eternal dictatorships fell apart as a castle built of sand. The Bolshevik fortresses disintegrated, leaving behind them both exhilaration and confusion. The moral landscape had been plagued by decades of state-sponsored lies. Those revolutions were anti-utopian, anti-ideological, anti-teleological. Because they refused any form of cynical arrangements (or they appeared to repudiate such intrigues), some called them anti-political endeavors.</p>
<p>We are experiencing these days a resurrection of the civic spirit in the Ukraine. As noticed by Adrian Karatnicky, one of the most knowledgeable commentators on Ukrainian politics, we deal with a Euro-revolution. Revolutions take place when the old regime is irrevocably compromised and the citizens cannot bear anymore its mendacities and methods. In the case of the Ukraine, this is a pro-European revolution and a radical rejection of Vladimir Putin&#8217;s diktat. The protesters have resumed the interrupted project of the 2004 Orange Revolution, an uprising that Vaclav Havel justifiably called the first post-communist revolution within the former Soviet Bloc. The open society confronts directly its rivals and enemies.</p>
<p>Modern revolutions involve idealistic passions, sudden discontinuities, abrupt fractures. The logic of subservience is challenged from below by spontaneous forms of civic empowerment. The public space, long frozen, is suddenly invaded by innovative modes of participation. Read Hannah Arendt&#8217;s &#8220;On Revolution,&#8221; especially the chapter about the revolutionary tradition and its lost treasure. Egor Sobolev, one of the protesters&#8217; leaders in Kiev, states unequivocally that the general opinion is favorable to the American and European ideals: &#8220;Real power should belong to the citizens, not to ministers, presidents, and politicians.&#8221;</p>
<p>Historical time contract change their conventional meanings. The same thing happened in Prague during the Velvet Revolution, in November 1989. All taboos and prohibitions collapse. Revolutions celebrate a proud defiance of the established order, suddenly appearing as totally obsolete. They advocate a rebirth, a new order of centuries, a <em>novus ordo seclorum</em>. New structures emerge on the ruins of the old ones. People are yearning for something totally different, what German philosophy calls &#8220;das ganz Andere.&#8221; Revolutions are instances of historical transcendence.</p>
<p>What seemed to last forever disintegrates under our astonished eyes. American sociologist Aristide Zolberg described revolutions as moments of madness. Political meteorology fails to forecast such events. In Kiev, Lviv, even in Viktor Yanukovich&#8217;s fiefdom Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, people take to the streets. Hundreds of thousands discover that they are the real source of power. Like in Hungary in 1956, citizens reclaim political sovereignty and national dignity. These were the main goals of the anti-totalitarian revolutions in 1989.</p>
<p>The call for European integration is directly related to the 1989 political imagination. Ukrainians refuse to be annexed by the Russian empire. When they say Europe, they mean rule of law, struggle for transparency and guaranteed accountability. The government responded with violence. Many protesters were beaten. This was a stupid move on the part of Yanukovich and his camarilla. Instead of deterring the revolutionaries, such actions angered them. The Ukrainian revolutionaries choose Europe because they know who Putin is and what Putinism means. They don&#8217;t want to accept the Kremlin&#8217;s decrees as God&#8217;s orders. They want norms and procedures, not repression, blackmail, and threats.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Indomitable Natalia Gorbanevskaya</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2013 05:49:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Monica Lovinescu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Natalia Gorbanevskaya]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vladimir Putin]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A noble voice of the Soviet dissident movement passes from the stage. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nat.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-212233" alt="CZECH-RUSSIA-HISTORY-GORBANEVSKAYA-FILES" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/nat.jpg" width="400" height="303" /></a>The ongoing revolutionary upheaval in the Ukraine shows that the spirit of freedom prevails over infamy and fear.</p>
<p>This is the great lesson of Natalia Gorbanevskaya&#8217;s admirable life. A main voice of the Soviet dissident movement, Gorbanevskaya passed away in Paris at the age of 77. She was one of the few demonstrators in the Red Square, in August 1968, who dared to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Their courageous action, dashed by the KGB, marked the birth of the human rights movement in the USSR. Their heroic defiance of the despotic Leviathan remains a most inspiring example of civic disobedience, under the most unpropitious circumstances. The secret police obtained a temporary victory, but, in the long run, Gorbanevskaya and her fellow dissidents were the victors.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union fell apart in December 1991. In recent years, Vladimir Putin&#8217;s regime has tried to impose the image of Yuri Andropov as a great statesman. In fact, he was an ideological hack and a brutal persecutor of all those who dared to challenge the regime. No wonder he is Putin&#8217;s idol. In August 2013, Gorbanevskaya went to Moscow to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the protest. Together with her friends, she was arrested again on charges of holding an unauthorized rally. Putin and his servants do not fear the ridicule. All they care about is power.</p>
<p>Trained as a psychologist, Natalia was a poet and a fighter. She was a main contributor to the &#8220;Chronicle of Current Events,&#8221; a samizdat publication documenting human rights abuses. Arrested in 1969, she was interned into the Soviet mental hospitals, charged with &#8220;schizophrenia.&#8221; The political use of psychiatry remains one of the most scurrilous pages in the sordid history of Soviet repression.</p>
<p>For the totalitarian system, any criticism amounted to a mental disease. Her case became an international <em>cause célèbre</em>. Joan Baez wrote a famous song praising Natalia&#8217;s courage. Forced into exile, Gorbanevskaya continued her struggle in Paris where she worked for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Her colleague, the Romanian writer and political thinker, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/truth-memory-dignity-why-does-monica-lovinescu-matter/">Monica Lovinescu</a>, praised Natalia&#8217;s unshakeable commitment to freedom. Her writings belong to the best of the dissident tradition. As a poet, she expressed the longing for dignity and happiness in times of suffering and despondency.</p>
<p>Let me quote these moving lines, an unperishable testimony of a noble spirit:</p>
<p><em>&#8220;In my own twentieth century</em><br />
<em> where there are more dead than graves</em><br />
<em> to put them in, my miserable</em><br />
<em> forever unshared love</em><br />
<em> among those Goya images</em><br />
<em> is nervous, faint, absurd,</em><br />
<em> as, after the screaming of jets,</em><br />
<em> the trump of Jericho.&#8221;</em></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bashe.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-212235 aligncenter" alt="bashe" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bashe-450x253.jpg" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Defying Evil: Albert Camus and His Century</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/defying-evil-albert-camus-and-his-century/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=defying-evil-albert-camus-and-his-century</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:29:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Camus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[century]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nov..7]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totaliatrianism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Born a century ago on November 7, 1913 -- a titan who diagnosed the malady of our times. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p align="left"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/albert_camusx.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209911" alt="albert_camusx" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/albert_camusx.jpg" width="315" height="240" /></a><i>Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes<br />
&#8211;</i>Albert Camus, <i>The</i> <i>Rebel</i></p>
<p align="left">I disagree with Bernard-Henri Lévy: the 20<sup>th</sup> century did not belong to Sartre. From the point of view of the Evil perpetrated, it was Lenin’s century. But if one takes honesty, truth, or Good as criteria, then it was Camus’s age. When we are assaulted by so much unsettling news, when we despair as we witness the rise of moral misery, when nihilism resurrects in front of our own eyes (but did it really lay dormant throughout all these years ravaged by ideological fantasies?), it is time to return to Albert Camus.</p>
<p align="left">We often talk about “the treason of the intellectuals,” but we often forget that there were intellectuals who did not betray. Solzhenitsyn was no traitor. Neither was Havel. The Romanian political and religious thinker, Nicolae Steinhardt, did not abandon his principles even when tortured physically and psychologically.</p>
<p align="left">Camus was born a century ago on November 7, 1913. He died on January 4, 1960 in a tragic and absurd car accident. His work remains proof that one can live, think, and write with dignity without acquiescing in infamy. He diagnosed the malady of our times; he called it the plague. He knew that despite any illusions to the contrary, the totalitarian plague is always latent &#8212; ready to devastate both the soul and the society.</p>
<p align="left">I remember one sentence in <i>The Rebel</i>, which in fact is the cardinal principle warning us against utopian radicalisms: “None of the evils that totalitarianism claims to cure is worse than totalitarianism itself.”</p>
<p align="left">In times when seemingly there was no chance to challenge the advance of communist totalitarianism, when important Western intellectuals became mouthpieces for the so-called “campaign for peace,” Camus was among the very few who voiced the truth. He was one of those who unambiguously denounced the falsification of fundamental values such as Good and Evil.</p>
<p align="left">In those dark times, there were some intellectuals who refused to capitulate. They supported the struggle for political cultural freedom. One should list here intellectuals such as Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, Eugene Ionesco, George Orwell, Manès Sperber, Karl Popper, Karl Jaspers, Czeslaw Milosz, Ignazio Silone, Sidney Hook, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, Dwight Macdonald, Nicola Chiaromonte, Ghita Ionescu, or the group from &#8220;Partisan Review&#8221; (Philip Rahv and William Phillips).</p>
<p align="left">Impressed with the sincerity of Camus’s political and philosophical positions, Hannah Arendt described him as one of the few honorable people in 1950s Paris. In contrast with Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Jeanson, Simone de Beauvoir or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to give some examples, Camus did not have any reasons to be ashamed when, in February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s heir, condemned “the cult of personality,” which in fact was the beginning of the condemnation of a system that was criminal from its very inception.</p>
<p align="left">For Camus, the totalitarian horrors, Dachau and Kolyma, were part of a global monstrosity provoked by the utopia of total social engineering, of the Crystal Palace meant to justify the Great Terror or the hysterical Kristallnacht. Nobody diagnosed as precisely as the author of <i>The Plague</i> the genealogy and the consequences of twentieth century demonic nihilism.</p>
<p align="left">In her book <i>Camus: A Romance</i> (Grove Press, 2009), Elizabeth Hawes fascinatingly reconstitutes, with great empathy, a spiritual, truly moral exemplary itinerary. Starting from searching the truth about Camus, discussing with his friends, relatives, and closed ones, the author seeks and finds the truth about herself. When many do not hesitate to talk about “Sartre’s century,” there are some of us who (maybe because of it) argue in favor of Camus’s moral pre-eminence. Political thinker Jeffrey Isaac has shown how Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus gave voice, in times that humiliated subjectivity, to the ethics of revolt. Along similar lines, one should remember historian Tony Judt’s volume about Camus, Raymond Aron and Léon Blum, <i>The Burden of Responsibility</i> (University of Chicago Press, 2007).</p>
<p align="left">I remember well what it meant for my generation, during communism, the publication of the novels <i>The Stranger </i>and <i>The Plague</i>, as well as of the essay <i>The Myth of Sisyphus</i>. We were fascinated with revolutionary infatuation, with violence and purification. Likewise, some of us were deeply moved by <i>The Rebel</i>, a book that circulated clandestinely, which we considered the perfect complement to Dostoyevsky’s <i>The Demons</i>.</p>
<p align="left">While Sartre and even Marleau-Ponty justified the Moscow show trials or communist terror in general as expressions of “the cunning of Reason,” Camus rejected those spurious rationalizations, considering them immoral and irresponsible. Sartre’s reply to <i>The Rebel</i> was a 300-page text in 1952, <i>The Communists and Peace</i>, a manifesto of ethical abjection and political abdication before Stalin’s disciples and/or agents. To Camus’s sorrow, Sartre also coordinated a negative campaign of reappraisals in the pages of the magazine where Camus had published two chapters of <i>The Revel</i>: in <i>Temps Modernes</i>. Sartre entrusted the besmirching of his former friend to a zealous and opportunistic young man eager to please his master, Francis Jeanson.</p>
<p align="left">There were very few who stood by Camus’s side. Among them there was Jean Grenier, his old philosophy professor, and poet René Char. Sartre himself intervened with a short, but extremely sarcastic text. He accused Camus of a supposedly supreme sin – that he wandered the Republic of Letters on a “portable pedestal” from which he lambasted Marxism for its responsibility in totalitarian crimes. Once asked what he would do if France was occupied by the Red Army, unfazed, the author of <i>Being and Nothingness</i> answered: “I will continue writing just as I did during the Nazi occupation.” Even later, Sartre continued to celebrate Marxism as “the definitive philosophy of our times.”</p>
<p align="left">During those years of shame and helplessness, Camus saved us. Sartre was a great thinker but profoundly cynical. Camus was a great thinker but committed to truth. He was a writer who rescued human dignity in a century devastated by concentration camps, gas chambers, mass graves, by Auschwitz, Katyn and the Gulag.</p>
<p align="left">For Camus, the philosophy of the absurd was one of resistance. Sisyphus never gives up; he continues his struggle, hoping against hope that someday he will prevail. Camus discovered in the very heart of revolt an element of thoughtlessness – the immoderation which he chose to explain rather than justify. The supreme virtue he commended, to the despair of Marxists and left-existentialists, was moderation. He denounced the Stalinist camps and he paid for his courage. He was exiled from the sectarian “fraternity” of Sartrian existentialism. He opposed torture irrespectively of who employed it. He contested capital punishment when many feared to do so. He was equally a great writer and a great moralist. Slandered and belittled by the metaphysical snobs of an honorless epoch, Camus remains one of the solid references of antitotalitarian consciousness.</p>
<p align="left">Albert Camus was one of exiled Romanian intellectuals Monica Lovinescu’s and Virgil Ierunca’s favorite writers. This was so exactly because he combined, in a tragic synthesis, ethics with aesthetics. Camus’s death, a thinker whom they loved and identified with on grounds of his unwavering fidelity to the truth, was a terrible blow. André Marlaux was right: “Death turns life into destiny.” That year, 1960, news from Romania were even worse as any hope of reuniting with Monica’s mother (who was imprisoned for refusing to collaborate with the communist regime) vanished and totalitarianism reigned unchallenged in Bucharest. To use the title of a novel by Victor Serge, “it was midnight in the century.”</p>
<p align="left">Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yelena Bonner, Vaclav Havel, Leszek Kolakowski, Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Glazov, Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca were honest intellectuals despite the hardships of a humiliating epoch of totalitarianisms. Their legacy is that of modest virtues that prevailed over countless sins.</p>
<p align="left">In Monica Lovinescu’s words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p align="left">“Honesty, the duty to question certainties, the endorsement of relative but concrete values, the unrest of never-ending doubt. No salvos, no trumpets, no headlines. Only the necessity, by way of such seemingly tentative methods, to defend human beings from ideological fantasies that kill more inexorably than violence itself.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p align="left">When so many indulged in lies, hypocrisy, double-think, and double-talk, these intellectuals cultivated truth, dignity, and honor.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Breaking Myths: The Ideas that Ruined Bolshevism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/breaking-myths-the-ideas-that-ruined-bolshevism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=breaking-myths-the-ideas-that-ruined-bolshevism</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Oct 2013 04:25:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gorbachev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leon Aron]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A powerful new book dissects the symbolic matrix of Gorbachev’s revolution.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/lp.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206817" alt="lp" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/lp.jpg" width="264" height="400" /></a>Historian Martin Malia defined the Soviet-type regimes as ideocratic partocracies.  Other authors, including celebrated Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, author of the classical book <i>The Captive Mind</i>, called them logocracies. Ideology was the only legitimizing principle for those corrupt, corruptive, and fundamentally mendacious regimes. The revolutions of 1989-1991 that swept away communist regimes in East-Central Europe and the USSR started, in fact, earlier. What Pope John Paul II called an <i>annus mirabilis</i>, a miraculous year, could not have taken place without the radical changes in the USSR that were initiated and promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev.</p>
<p>Leon Aron’s book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Roads-Temple-Russian-Revolution-1987-1991/dp/0300118449"><i>Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideas in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1977-1991</i> </a>(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012),  a genuine tour de force, is a fascinating chronicle of the main ideas that caused and inspired the revolutionary upheaval in the USSR. A respected student of Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, Aron is the author of a major Yeltsin biography and of numerous articles dealing with Russia’s political culture.  For him, what happened in the USSR between 1987 and 1991 amounted to the complete disbandment of all political myths that had served as justification for the Leninist Leviathan.</p>
<p>Aron is right to highlight what the liberal philosopher, sir Isaiah Berlin, called the power of ideas. In other words, material forces, always emphasized by Marxists, matter, but they are not the only and not even the most significant factor that leads to political revolutions. The Soviet Union had long been in terminal crisis, but this agony could have lasted for many other decades had the revolutionary ideas associated with Gorbachevism not come to fore and imposed a new political vision. Aron contrasts Gorbachev’s ideological revolution to Khrushchev’s half-hearted and inconclusive reforms. The most important distinctions were related to two areas: the imperial identity of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist legacies.  Whereas Khrushchev avoided a radical response to these two challenges, Gorbachev and his supporters moved boldly ahead and engaged in a fundamental overhaul of  the communist party&#8217;s monopoly on power and ideas. <i>Homo Sovieticus </i>was exposed as ideologically bogus, the opposite of classical humanism.</p>
<p>Leon Aron’s main contribution is to luminously retrieve a whole universe of ideas, aspirations, values, emotions, and sentiments put forward by the main proponents of historical fairness, political openness and moral frankness. The book is a superb archeology of what can be called the symbolic matrix of Gorbachev’s revolution. In fact, the philosophy of glasnost, as liberation of mind, developed even before 1987 in the writings of banned authors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vassili Grossman (the great novelist about whom Aron writes with intense empathy).  Its thrust was the absolute opposite of the long-held set of mendacities that formed the foundation of Soviet ideology.</p>
<p>Many of Gorbachev’s close associates were party intellectuals whose political itineraries moved from early infatuation with Stalin and Stalinism, to disappointments and disgust with the bureaucratic despotism, and finally to the deep desire to change the system. Yes, the Gorbachevites did not say it explicitly, pretended that their goals were intra-systemic, but the more they attacked Stalinism’s legacies, the more the revolutionary impetus gathered momentum.</p>
<p>Often called the architect of glasnost, Aleksandr Yakovlev is a main hero in Leon Aron’s captivating discussion of the myth-breaking endeavors of those years. A World War II veteran, recruited into the propaganda apparatus during Stalin’s times, Yakovlev was indeed what is called a child of the 20<sup>th</sup> Congress. This is a reference to the February 1956 party conclave when, during a closed session, Nikita Khrushchev dealt a mortal blow to Stalin’s myth. After that shock, Yakovlev could never accept uncritically the official line, though, for decades, he maintained his doubts for himself and very few confidants.</p>
<p>As an opponent of the increasingly xenophobic direction of Soviet ideology under Leonid Brezhnev, Yakovlev lost his job at the party headquarters (he was the head of the propaganda department) and was sent into diplomatic exile as ambassador to Canada. Gorbachev met him there, was impressed with his intellectual acumen and fresh ideas, and, once in power, brought him to Moscow. Yakovlev became the chief ideologue and, in this quality, was instrumental in allowing for an extraordinary relaxation in cultural life and the launching of radical de-Stalinization. He surrounded himself with other party intellectuals, including many who had worked in Prague at the international journal “World Marxist Review” (the Russian edition was titled “Problems of Peace and Socialism”) and who had been contaminated with neo-Marxist, revisionist ideas, especially regarding the dignity of the individual and universality of human rights.</p>
<p>The Moscow Spring was to a great extent a resumption of the Prague Spring, suppressed by Warsaw Pact tanks in August 1968. Arguably the most anti-Stalinist of all the members of Gorbachev’s entourage, Yakovlev championed the themes of de-Bolshevization, de-ideologization, and democratization. He became the nemesis of party conservatives who organized vicious media attacks on him. Later, after the demise of the USSR, he authored several devastating books about the fundamentally criminal nature of Leninism. He prefaced the Russian edition of the “Black Book of Communism” and chaired the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Terror.</p>
<p>Aron’s book is essentially about the democratic ideas that corroded the Soviet edifice during the Gorbachev revolution. Among those, most important were the rediscovery of human freedom as a non-negotiable, universal value. For more than seven decades, the Soviet utopian experiment was based on duplicity, subservience, conformity, fear, suspicion, and hypocrisy. This dismal moral situation led to rampant cynicism, demoralization, and despair. The book’s title comes from a great film by Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze, “Repentance.” The major question in that masterpiece was human salvation. Redemption is impossible without atonement. Democracy and memory are inseparable. In order to achieve reconciliation, the former tormentors must be subjected to justice. By justice I don&#8217;t mean only legal procedures, but also the  moral indictment of former criminals.</p>
<p>If individuals lost any axiological reference point, they would not be able to find a road to the temple, to the church. They will be, as Polish poet Aleksander Wat, once put it, children in the fog. The men and women of the Russian Revolution, this world-historical event masterfully explored by Leon Aron, looked for a moral and political compass and they found it. All the post-1991 dismay, disenchantment, and dereliction notwithstanding, there was something sublime in that rediscovery of freedom, dignity, and honor. Leon Aron’s book succeeds marvelously in resurrecting what Hannah Arendt called the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Stalin, Putin, and the Challenges of Memory</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Sep 2013 04:42:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[david satter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leszek Kolakowski]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Václav Havel]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The high price of denial.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/it.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-205710" alt="it" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/it-224x350.jpg" width="224" height="350" /></a>Polish thinker Leszek Kolakowski (often called the philosopher of &#8220;Solidarity) saw the post-communist landscape as marred by enduring Leninist legacies. He called these debris &#8220;moving ruins,&#8221; referring to the avatars of the old elites, the absence of moral clarity, and the persistence of ideological and cultural relics of the old regime. The first stage of the revolutions of 1989-1991 was dominated by an exhilarating sense of recovered liberty and the widespread belief that authoritarianism had been irreversibly defeated. Sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt accurately  described those revolutions as non-utopian, non-ideological, non-eschatological. As a rule, they were non-violent eruptions of civic discontent against the supremacy of lies and the rampant cynicism of the communist bureaucracies. The thrust of the mass protests was favoring the dissident philosophy of freedom, civility, and  dignity.</p>
<p>The initial expectations were high and very few were able to foresee the advent of ugly forms of populism, exclusiveness, cynicism, and intolerance that Vaclav Havel diagnosed as the post-communist nightmare. Bolshevism seemed defunct and political scientists celebrated the triumph of liberal revolutions. This euphoria has dissipated in recent years, leaving behind it a sense of discomfort, discomfiture, and disillusionment. One of the major problems lies in the failure of these societies (especially in the former Soviet Union, but also in Romania, Bulgaria, even Poland and the Czech Republic) to reckon with the totalitarian past.</p>
<p>For those who want to understand the avatars of post-Soviet Russian politics and the failure of both elites and society to come to terms with the traumatic Bolshevik past, David Satter’s insightful book <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/russia-and-the-communist-past/"><i>It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past</i> </a>( New Haven &amp; London, Yale University Press, 2012) is a truly illuminating guide. A veteran observer of Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, Satter is both a gifted journalist and a chronicler of intellectual and political currents. His main argument is that a democratic polity in which the individual is treated decently and where human rights are taken seriously cannot be erected on amnesia, mystification and blatant lies. The crucial question he deals with is how Russians process the Stalinist legacies, how and why the <i>generalissimo</i>’s ghost continues to haunt collective memories and public imagination. Splendidly researched and engagingly written, this book offers invaluable vignettes of various reactions to the still unprocessed remembrance of the totalitarian times. Putin’s “managed democracy,” in fact a creeping authoritarianism with an eclectic and questionable constellation of ideological claims (statism, Eurasianism, nationalism), is rooted precisely in this perpetuation of denial.</p>
<p>Formed in the secretive culture of the KGB, “Czar Vladimir” remains deeply attached to the possessed founder of the Bolshevik secret police (the <i>Cheka</i>), Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat who decided to give his early dream to become a priest and turned instead into a fanatic Leninist. The chapter dealing with the ongoing efforts to lionize this torturer is particularly revealing and deeply disturbing. In the same vein, Satter highlights the endeavors to instill a sense of admiration for Yuri Andropov, himself an adamant Leninist, who, as chairman of the KGB in the 1970s and 1980s, supervised the persecution of Soviet dissidents and the neutralization of any form of opposition.</p>
<p>Understandably, the Putin regime finds in such unsavory figures examples of civic dedication and political idealism. At the same time, independent researchers and journalists who want to rescue memory remain isolated and seem to engage in quixotic searches for truth. In this respect, Satter’s book is not only an excellent report of the unsettling status of memory and moral justice in contemporary Russia, but also an effort to support the beleaguered activists of the “Memorial” society who refuse to endorse the official policies of forgetfulness.</p>
<p>For Satter, Russia is a country “that has not been willing to face the full truth about Communism.” After the inconclusive attempts under Boris Yeltsin to organize a trial of the Communist Party, things have moved in a different direction: the mythologies of the Soviet times have been restored and those who continue to insist on the atrocities of the past have been increasingly marginalized. No surprise therefore that Vyacheslav Nikonov, a political commentator with close ties to the Putin leadership and Stalin’s Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s grandson, puts it bluntly: “People are not interested in the past. Any attempt to dig into the past evokes only irritation.” It remains to be seen who are those who repudiate this reckoning with the past and what are their motivations. How does one explain that two decades after the collapse of the USSR there has been no expression of state repentance for the millions of innocent individuals murdered by the Soviet regime?</p>
<p>I agree with Satter that no lawful state, no functional and credible democracy can exist if the lawlessness of the past remains ignored or is systematically trivialized. Using all kinds of rationalizations, the Russians have avoided the coming to terms with the appalling past. The result of this depressing situation is that Russia’s morality is beset by cynicism and widespread contempt for values cherished by the dissidents: civility, dignity, memory. The Russian state sees little reason to cultivate the anti-totalitarian ethos. The Orthodox Church, with its own history of martyrdom, but also of complicity, tries to annex the memory of the victims to its own refurbished self-image of unmitigated resistance to Communism.</p>
<p>One of the best chapters in Satter’s book deals with the appeals of communism, an enduring and still enigmatic topic. I am not sure that by the end of the 1970s Bolshevism was still an energizing Messianic project. In fact, it was rather a stultified, hollow dogma. The original dream of world revolution had been abandoned in favor of more traditional imperial expansionism. Still, for decades, communism played the role of a secular religion, proposing the main reference points, the moral compass, for generations. Its genuine amoralism was shrouded in rhetorical proclamations of equality and fraternity. It was bogus, but exhilarating bogus. This quasi-ethical cement is now regretted by many who prefer to remember the victory over Nazi Germany rather than the horrors of the Gulag. Compared to the experiences of political justice in East-Central Europe, Russia has basically shunned its moral recovery. The reasons for this failure are definitely linked to the weakness of political will. Putin confessed admiration for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but the state-backed history textbooks published with his blessing have been crude attempts to condone the mass terror of the 1930s. If Russia is to become a genuine democratic community, it will have to finally address the issues so poignantly explored in this book.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, a few years ago Putin lamented the collapse of the USSR as &#8220;the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century&#8221;. For him and his former KGB cronies, pluralism remains the enemy. In this respect, Putin is more Stalin&#8217;s than Yeltsin&#8217;s heir. His ideology has little to do with Bolshevik mythologies, yet his mindset remains authoritarian and inimical to individual rights. His worldview is conspiratorial, sectarian, militaristic, and exclusive, a prolongation of Lenin&#8217;s Manichean political cosmology.</p>
<p><strong>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author most recently of <i>T<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/">he Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century</a></i> (University of California Press, 2012).</strong></p>
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		<title>Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Paradigmatic Zek</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Sep 2013 04:10:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dissident]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gulag]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Remembering the dissident who lit moral dynamite under the Soviet myth.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-202445" alt="isolzhe001p1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-274x350.jpg" width="274" height="350" /></a>Five years have passed since the demise, on August 3, 2008, of the great novelist, dissident, and thinker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Forty-five years ago, on August 25, 1968, seven people demonstrated in the Red Square heroically against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, thus ushering in an era of open dissent and ruthless persecutions, including forcible internments into psychiatric institutions. More than twenty years ago, in December 1991, the ideocratic empire called the USSR collapsed. As historian Boris Souvarine, who wrote an unsurpassed Stalin biography, noticed mordantly:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;USSR, four letters, four lies. It was neither a free union, nor Soviet, in the sense of councils&#8217; democracy. Neither was it socialist, if socialism involves social equality, nor a set of republics, in the etymological sense of the term, <em>res publica</em>, an object of civic commitment.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The Solzhenitsyn effect, associated with the publication in the West of his non-fiction monument titled &#8220;The Gulag Archipelago,&#8221; a most devastating indictment of Sovietism, engendered a mutation in the global perception of communism and contributed to the inexorable de-legitimization of totalitarianism. The Soviet myth was dealt a mortal blow. Communist &#8220;humanism&#8221; turned out to be similar to the Nazi one. The Bolshevik &#8220;conscience&#8221; was not different from the Fascist one.</p>
<p>No one has demonstrated more persuasively than Solzhenitsyn the duplicitous, schizophrenic nature of communism, its absolute moral falsity.  His urge for individuals to live within the truth, echoed by Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, founders of Charter 77, was accompanied by his endeavor to expose the terrorist underpinnings of Bolshevism, whatever its incarnations (Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Castro-Guevarism, etc). For Solzhenitsyn, the roots of Bolshevik anti-humanism were linked to its proud embrace of a programmatic, militant atheism. It was, as French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy put it, &#8220;barbarism with a human face.&#8221; Far from being an extenuating circumstance, the humanist pretense was in fact an aggravating one.</p>
<p>Thanks to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the word Gulag has entered current vocabulary as synonymous with the communist concentration camp universe. Romanian thinker intellectual Monica Lovinescu (about whom I <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/truth-memory-dignity-why-does-monica-lovinescu-matter/">wrote here</a>, in FrontPage), once said that if a deluge were to come and she had to choose three books to rescue in order to speak about the totalitarian catastrophes as the hallmark of a century of shame and terror, these would be Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s &#8220;Gulag Archipelago,&#8221; Kostler&#8217;s &#8220;Darkness at Noon,&#8221; and Orwell&#8217;s &#8220;1984.&#8221;  She was right.</p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn was the indomitable chronicler of a century full of genocidal exterminations, impregnated with exacerbated cruelty and infamy. Like Vasilly Grossman, the author of the unforgettable novel &#8220;Life and Fate,&#8221; he explained that totalitarianism would have been impossible in the absence of the monstrously inebriating ideological ingredient:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>“Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied or passed over or suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”</em></p></blockquote>
<p>It was Solzhenitsyn who opened the eyes of millions in the USSR and abroad to the dismal fate of the <em>zeks</em> (concentration camp prisoners). Like Primo Levi who wrote about Auschwitz, Solzhenitsyn documented in immortal prose the struggle for survival under the most atrocious circumstances. Immensely courageous, he challenged the secret police harassment and, in spite of countless obstacles, kept writing. When intimidation and slander turned out to have no effect, the Soviet potentates decided to expel him. In exile, he continued his struggle against oppression and lies. He irritated many in the West with strong criticism of what he decried as rampant mercantilism and moral decay. His onslaught on Western scholarship of Russia and the USSR was ill-informed and unfair. Much of his behavior had something disturbingly Messianic. Yet, his commitment to freedom remained unwavering and his writings belonged to the best tradition of Russian literature. In fact, with all his missteps, including the final accolades to Putin and Putinism, he was one of the great moral consciences of the twentieth century, the epitome of the zek&#8217;s fate and conscience.</p>
<p>He was a giant of Russian and world literature. Max Hayward, Alain Besancon, Claude Lefort, Andre Glucksmann, Monica Lovinescu, Robert Conquest, Pierre Daix, Leo Labedz, Norman Podhoretz, Leonard Shapiro, Efim Etkind, Michael Scammell, Daniel Mahoney and many other praised his writings. The Nobel Prize, disgraced by being granted to the Soviet apologist Mikhail Sholokhov, recovered its honor when offered to Solzhenitsyn. His books, including &#8220;The Cancer Ward,&#8221; &#8220;The First Circle,&#8221; &#8220;The Oak and the Calf,&#8221; &#8220;The Gulag Archipelago,&#8221; and the novel on the Russian Revolutions of 1917 (&#8220;The Red Wheel&#8221;), belong to an enduring thesaurus of dignity.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, by the end of his life, he wrote a book on Russian-Jewish relations which lent itself to charges of anti-Semitism. My main objection is that Solzhenitsyn engaged in historical analysis without a deep knowledge of the appropriate scholarly field and indulged in speculations based on selective and not always reliable sources. He never regarded Bolshevism as an ethnic, specifically Jewish political project, but some of his writings allowed for malevolent and malicious interpretations. He may not have been anti-Semitic, probably was not, yet anti-Semites used his book for their own vicious goals. Let me quote from Natan Sharansky&#8217;s contribution to<a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33533"> a symposium</a> in &#8220;FrontPage&#8221;:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;When I was active in the Soviet dissident movement in the beginning of the 1970s, there were two clear camps. The first was led by Andrei Sakharov and was focused on fighting for universal human rights. The other, led by Solzhenitsyn, was fueled by a strong Russian identity. In a sense, this was a continuation of the classic divide among the Russian intelligentsia between &#8216;Westerners&#8217; and Slavophiles.</em></p>
<p><em>I was fully in the Sakharov camp. I was also part of the Soviet Jewry/Zionist movement, which had serious disagreements with Solzhenitsyn. For instance, he was critical of the Jackson amendment, which was so important for our movement. Whereas Sakharov understood that any expansion of freedom inside the USSR was a victory for the human rights struggle and should therefore be embraced, Solzhenitsyn thought too much energy was being wasted on ensuring freedom of emigration when the entire regime had to go.</em></p>
<p><em>But while the differences between the camps were real and would later, as many of the previous writers correctly mentioned, result in profound disagreements, those differences paled in comparison to our common struggle against Soviet totalitarianism.</em></p>
<p><em>The main challenge for all dissidents – democrats, Zionists, nationalists, etc. – was to convince the West that the Soviet regime was evil and that there was no place for appeasement. In this effort, Solzhenitsyn contributed more than anyone to unmasking that evil. His widely read books had a huge impact, and as a spokesman for the dissident movement, I can tell you that when I mentioned &#8216;The Gulag Archipelago,&#8217; everyone knew what I was talking about. By painting such a vivid and powerful picture of evil, he gave all dissidents an indispensable reference point for our struggle.</em></p>
<p><em>When the Iron Curtain fell, the differences between the camps came to the surface again. On one side were the democrats, heirs to the legacy of Sakharov. On the other was Solzhenitsyn, who put Russian identity first. Against the KGB, the forces of identity and freedom stood on the same side of the barricades. Today, unfortunately they often find themselves on different sides. And Solzhenitsyn was always a champion of identity more than a champion of freedom.</em></p>
<p><em>In a sense, Solzhenitsyn believed that one had to choose between being a man of his people and a man of the world. As I argue in my latest book, Defending Identity, this is a false choice. We can be both, as long as our commitment to our own unique history, people and faith is coupled with a firm commitment to freedom and democracy. For all his great insight, this was something that Solzhenitsyn never saw.</em></p>
<p><em>With Solzhenitsyn, one must also address the issue of anti-Semitism. In the Gulag Archipelago, he writes about some Jews as heads of the camps and in important KGB positions. While this is true, it is clear that he writes about Jewish (and other minority) support for the Soviet regime with a special bitterness and disdain. It is as if he wants his readers to understand that a kind of foreign element oppresses the Russian people.</em></p>
<p><em>In his book, 200 Years Together, he analyzes the history of antisemitism in Russia and of Russian-Jewish relations. Sadly, his explanation of the many anti-Jewish laws and double standards applied towards Jews turns into understanding and even justification.</em></p>
<p><em>But to call him an antisemite would be unjust. His writing stems from a love of his own people rather than a hatred of others. He was more biased in favor of Russia than he was biased against Jews.&#8221;</em></p></blockquote>
<p>A philosopher of dissident action, Solzhenitsyn demystified communism as the dictatorship of lies. For him, like for Anna Akhamatova, Nikolai Berdiayev and Lev Shestov, Bolshevism (an offspring of Marxism), represented a neo-barbaric atheism. In his 1967 letter addressed to the Soviet Writers&#8217; Union, at a moment when he had been turned into a non-person, with no right to publish anything, he asked his former colleagues to give up ideological chimeras and live within the truth. Those words were moral dynamite. Soviet writers ignored him, but critical intellectuals in Czechoslovakia heard him and decided to follow his advise. Writers like Vaclav Havel, Ludvik Vaculik, and Pavel Kohout spelled out their solidarity with Solzhenitsyn. The dissident concept of liberty originated, to a great extent, in his thinking about human honor. Whereas Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov had many disagreements regarding the role of liberalism and pluralism in Russian history, they shared the same unflinching commitment to truth as a non-negotiable value.</p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s novel &#8220;One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,&#8221; published in 1963 with Nikita Khrushchev&#8217;s approval, changed the moral landscape, the ethical compass of literature in the Soviet Bloc. It introduced a new moral matrix, a new grammar of historical knowledge; it made ignorance of the totalitarian evil impossible. It was the first time that the theme of the camps emerged in officially printed prose. Moreover, the main character was a simple Soviet man, not a Bolshevik luminary persecuted by Stalin.</p>
<p>In the West, the effect was also shocking. I would mention the symptomatic case of writer Pierre Daix, editor of the communist weekly “Les Lettres Françaises” (the director was the notorious, though immensely gifted, poet Louis Aragon, an ex-Surrealist converted to Stalinism). In 1949, Daix accused Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko of defamation and lies about the Gulag. It was one of the most publicized trials of that era, a major defeat for the communist propaganda. In 1964, the former zealot Daix wrote the preface to Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s &#8220;One Day.&#8221; In 1968, “Les Lettres Françaises” took the side of the Prague Spring, Daix broke with the French Communist Party and became himself an intellectual dissident.</p>
<p>Whatever his human errors, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remained faithful to the memory of the dead. It took an iron will, an incredible amount of intransigence, a genuine sense of moral urgency, to fight the totalitarian colossus. George Kennan was right, no other writer did as much as Solzhenitsyn in umasking totalitarian despotism. He was the prosecution&#8217;s supreme witness.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 45 Years Later</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-soviet-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-45-years-later/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-soviet-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-45-years-later</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Aug 2013 04:24:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1968]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anniversary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brezhnev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Czechoslovakia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dubcek]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201372</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The socialism that came in from the cold. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/czech.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-201377" alt="czech" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/czech.jpg" width="319" height="193" /></a>In August 1968, the Warsaw Pact tanks and half a million-strong military killed the Prague Spring. It was not simply the end of a daring political experiment, but also a gigantic defeat for the dreams of reconciling communism and democracy. Marxist revisionism, the utopian endeavor to rediscover the presumably forgotten thesaurus of left-wing radicalism, suffered a terrible blow.  In the words of a Polish dissident, &#8220;We then realized that there was no socialism with a human face, but only totalitarianism with broken teeth.&#8221;</p>
<p>Even Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher who in the 1950s had been silent (to put it mildly) about the Gulag, lambasted the invasion as &#8220;the socialism which came in from the cold.&#8221; It was the Leninist communism of barbed wire, fear, suspicion and lies. Stalin, as famous East European dissidents showed, was Lenin&#8217;s most faithful heir. He was also the most successful disciple. Post-Stalin Soviet leaders refused to allow for genuine democratization, remained faithful to the original one-party autocracy. A joke of those times captured this continuity: &#8220;What are Brezhnev eyebrows? Stalin&#8217;s mustache at a higher level.&#8221;</p>
<p>The leader of the Prague Spring was Alexander Dubcek, a Moscow-trained communist apparatchik with reformist propensities. Elected Communist Party leader in January 1968, he launched an ambitious renewal program. In a few months, many Stalinist institutions lost their power. Censorship was disbanded, intellectuals were excited, civil society returned. Warsaw Pact leaders, headed by the sclerotic Leonid Brezhnev, panicked. Romania&#8217;s Nicolae Ceausescu supported Dubcek not because of solidarity with the attempt to humanize socialism, but rather as a way to challenge Soviet imperialist claims.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/czech2.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-201378 aligncenter" alt="czech2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/czech2.jpg" width="450" height="276" /></a></p>
<p>Adopted in April 1968, the &#8220;Action Program&#8221; of the Czechoslovak communists pledged to put an end to repressive policies and engage the party in a genuine dialogue with the citizens. One its main authors, Zdenek Mlynar, had studied law in Moscow in the early 1950s. He shared a dormitory room with a young Soviet student, an arduous Komsomol militant named Mikhail Gorbachev. They became close friends. Years later, Gorbachev would resume the Prague Spring agenda hoping against hope that democratic communism could somehow be accomplished.</p>
<p>In June, writer Ludvik Vaculik issued a document that entered history as &#8220;The Two Thousand Words&#8221; manifesto. The Soviets and their allies went ballistic. The Manifesto was an unmitigated, outspoken, unambiguous call for political pluralism. Millions supported it expecting a multi-party system to emerge soon. As events unfolded in breathtaking speed, the neo-Stalinists East European despots acted pre-emptively and crushed the Prague Spring. Dubcek and his comrades were arrested, transported to Moscow and forced to sign a humiliating capitulation. A few months later, Dubcek was expelled from the communist party. A new freeze followed under the name &#8220;normalization.&#8221; It was the normalcy of jails, denunciations, terror. In the words of poet Luis Aragon, another repentant ex-Stalinist, the country had become &#8220;a Biafra of the spirit.&#8221; Opposition activists were harassed, besmirched, jailed. They acted heroically in spite of the most unpropitious circumstances. Among them, critical intellectuals like Vaclav Havel who argued in favor of the power of the powerless.</p>
<p>Then in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow. In his belief that communism included such a humanistic dimension and his insistence that Stalin had been a vicious traitor to the original Marxist and Leninist messages, Gorbachev was part of a long tradition within the communist chapels. Students of Marxism refer to the attempt to turn such beliefs into policy as revisionism.</p>
<p>Of course, Gorbachev was not the first celebrated revisionist. Before him, attempts had been made by others to reconcile socialism with democracy and to jettison the repressive features of the system as distortions of an intrinsically healthy order. Consider Imre Nagy, Hungary&#8217;s premier during the 1956 revolution, executed in 1958, and then Alexander Dubcek. Both Nagy and Dubcek failed because Soviet intervention crushed their experiments and dashed hopes of renovating socialism from within. But when Gorbachev came to power in March 1985 and announced his program of renewal, there was no foreign force to threaten the great shaker in the Kremlin. The seeds of the negation of the old order were planted in the empire&#8217;s innermost sanctum.</p>
<p>What have been the main illusions of Nagy, Dubcek, Gorbachev and other revisionists? First, that the Communist Party, as the initiator of reforms, should preserve a central role during their implementation. Second, that there was a middle way between the conservation of Stalinist structures and their complete disbandment. Third, that a compromise of sorts could be reached with the exponents of the old regime. And fourth, that the population at large was ready to enthusiastically espouse the revisionist program and endorse the new leaders in the frantic search for modernization. The revisionists naively believed in their popular mandate.</p>
<p>But this logic was basically flawed. The system could not tolerate structural changes and secreted antibodies. In the case of the Soviet Union, instead of foreign intervention, Gorbachev was faced with the morose inertia of the bureaucratic colossus. His exhortations increasingly fell on deaf ears, as economic performance failed to improve. The work ethos was plagued by apathy and indifference.</p>
<p>Were Dubcek and Gorbachev true believers? In a sense yes, because only a true believer would have engaged in such destructive action while hoping that there was enough loyalty to the system among its subjects to keep the regime alive. The crushing of the Prague Spring was justified as defense of socialist internationalism. In fact, Marxist internationalism was nothing but hollow, ludicrous rhetoric, a facade for Soviet imperialism, ethical dereliction, civic paralysis, and bureaucratic domination. It symbolized the breakdown of Marxist revisionism. It demonstrated a truth that East Europeans had been long familiar with: There is no communism with a human face.</p>
<p><strong>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author most recently of &#8220;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520239725/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0520239725&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=theweesta-20">The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century</a>&#8221; (University of California Press, 2012).</strong></p>
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		<title>A Passion for Truth: In Memoriam Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013)</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Aug 2013 04:36:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[evil]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genocide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jean Bethke Elshtain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A titan who knew that refusal to act against evil inevitably leads to acquiescence and complicity with it.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/elshtain.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-201004" alt="elshtain" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/elshtain.jpg" width="250" height="350" /></a>The first thing to be said about Jean Bethke Elshtain is that she embodied paradigmatically the idea of a public intellectual, an engaged spectator, to use Raymond Aron&#8217;s famous formulation. For her, the concept of liberty as articulated by the dissidents of Eastern Europe (Sakharov, Havel, but also John Paul II) symbolized an indispensable anchor, a source of hope in our turbulent and dismaying world. Both in her writings (21 books and hundreds of articles) and public interventions, Jean was direct, honest, unabashedly dedicated to defending truth against opportunistic lies and cowardly conformity. She identified herself as a Christian thinker and, at the University of Chicago, held appointments both in political science and in the Divinity School.</p>
<p>I first met her in the spring of 2006, at a dinner organized by our common friend, Martin Palous, former Charter 77 spokesman, philosopher and at that moment the Czech Republic&#8217;s ambassador to Washington. My wife, Mary, and I spent hours in one of the most enriching intellectual conversations of our lives. A few days later, I was approached by Robert Boyers, the editor of &#8220;Salmagundi,&#8221; who invited me to a conference on Jihad, violence, and terrorism. He told me that it was Jean Bethke Elshtain who had recommended me. The proceedings came out as a special issue of the journal.</p>
<p>The &#8220;Boston Globe&#8221; reported on the conference and described my intervention as the most adamant in support of the war. In fact, I was simply voicing there the ideas held by Joan Bethke Elshtain, Vaclav Havel, Andre Glucksmann and many others who saw the value of a just war against a despicable criminal despotism. It was a difficult task taking into account that Christopher Hitchens, who was also listed as a participant, had to cancel his presence at the very last minute. So, there I was, the East European, debating such hyper-controversial issues with famous critics of the war, including Benjamin Barber, Martha Nussbaum, and Peter Singer. &#8220;Public intellectuals, much of the time at least, should be party poopers,&#8221; Jean Bethke Elshtain declared in 2001. On that occasion, I definitely was one.</p>
<p>For Jean, values and principles mattered, truth was not a malleable, fluid, relative entity, and the dignity of the individual needed to be defended against any attempts to diminish it. A professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of Chicago, Jean delivered major lectures on various campuses, authored influential books on burning political and ethical issues, including the acclaimed &#8220;Democracy on Trial.&#8221; She was not afraid to defend her views, to offer logical, historical, and ethical arguments for the need to engage in the Iraq war.</p>
<p>A lifelong student of Augustine (a passion she shared with Hannah Arendt), Jean knew that refusal to act against evil inevitably leads to acquiescence and complicity with it:</p>
<blockquote><p>The fight against German fascism and Japanese militarism put us in the world to stay. With our great power comes an even greater responsibility. One of our ongoing responsibilities is to respond to the cries of the aggrieved. Victims of genocide, for example, have a reasonable expectation that powerful nations devoted to human rights will attempt to stay the hand of the murderers.</p></blockquote>
<p>For her, September 11 was a not a &#8220;bad accident,&#8221; but a fundamental change in world affairs. It marked a mutation not only in political strategies, but also in the American way of dealing with the horrors of war:</p>
<blockquote><p>I come from a small people, Volga Germans, who would have been murdered or exiled had they remained in Russia rather than making the wrenching journey to America. &#8230; An image that crowds out many others in my mind is that of tens of thousands fleeing New York City by foot. As I watched and wept, I recalled something I had said many times in my classes on war: &#8220;Americans don’t have living memories of what it means to flee a city in flames. Americans have not been horrified by refugees fleeing burning cities.&#8221; No more. Now we know.</p></blockquote>
<p>At the end of his life, the great sociologist Daniel Bell confessed that he was most worried by the loss of historical sense among America&#8217;s youth. His was also Jean Bethke Elshtain&#8217;s concern. For her, like for Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski, Judith Shklar, and Paul Ricoeur, truth and memory are inseparable. In the preface of her book, &#8220;Sovereignty: God, State, and Self,&#8221; she wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized &#8220;forgetting,&#8221; a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, &#8220;borne back ceaselessly into the past,&#8221; in F. Scott Fitzgerald&#8217;s memorable words from <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. This historic recognition should not occasion resentment or dour heaviness; rather, it should instill gratitude. As this book drew to a close, I realized that it was no culminating magnum opus &#8212; few books are &#8212; but, rather, a contribution to the shared memory of our time and place. And that is enough.</p></blockquote>
<p>In her endless quest for truth, Jean Bethke Elshtain illustrated in a most inspiring way that quality described by Thomas Mann as <a href="http://www.demdigest.net/blog/2013/08/jean-bethke-elshtain-on-democracy-and-civil-society/">the nobility of spirit</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Betrayed Illusions: The Left and the Jews</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/betrayed-illusions-the-left-and-the-jews/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=betrayed-illusions-the-left-and-the-jews</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Aug 2013 04:17:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[How Bolshevik internationalism degenerated into vicious anti-Semitism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Israel-Apartheid.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200423" alt="Israel-Apartheid" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Israel-Apartheid-450x271.jpg" width="315" height="190" /></a>Almost sixty-one years ago, in November 1952, in Prague, the former secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, a diehard, fanatic Stalinist, Rudolf Slansky, and 13 other prominent communists, mostly Jewish, were sentenced to death for alleged treason and Zionist conspiracy.  At the same time, Stalin’s terminal paranoia led to the execution of the leaders of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, including celebrated Yiddish-language poet Peretz Markish, and the imprisonment of famous physicians accused of trying to poison Soviet leaders. Soviet Bloc media were filled with venomous anti-Semitic harangues. Had Stalin not died in March 1953, the doctors would have been executed, hundreds of thousands arrested, millions forcibly resettled. The likelihood of a gigantic pogrom, a Soviet-style <i>Kristallnacht</i>,  was looming large. The official terms for Jews was &#8220;rootless cosmopolitans.&#8221; Like in the National Socialist demonology, they were stigmatized as the driving force of the execrated capitalism, carriers of decadent values, agents of treason and dissolution. Even after Stalin&#8217;s demise, his successor Nikita Khrushchev continued to encourage anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews as mercenary individuals, speculators and &#8220;genetically&#8221; un-patriotic.</p>
<p>How was it possible for Bolshevik internationalism to degenerate into vicious anti-Semitism, similar to the worst propaganda excesses of the Black Hundreds in czarist Russia? Where did the promises of Marxist humanism, the dream of proletarian solidarity, irrespective of language and origin, vanish? Perhaps there was something in the secret grammar of leftist obsessions, in the underlying political fantasies of the Left, that explained these despicable outbursts of intolerance?</p>
<p>There is a genealogy of this depressing story, a line of ideas that sends us back to the origins of modern socialism and its hostility to money, banks, profit, and capitalism in general. Not only Marxism found its roots in that search for a pure, unpolluted natural community, but also the neo-romantic movements that were to lead to Fascism. A scrupulous and immensely erudite historian of modern political passions, including socialism, Zionism, and their counterparts at the extreme right end of the ideological continuum, Robert Wistrich (who teaches at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem), wrote a real treatise on the enduring anti-Semitic propensities among left-wing revolutionary movements. Published in 2012 by University of Nebraska Press,  &#8220;From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel&#8221; is must reading for those who want to understand the apparent paradox of the Left&#8217;s espousal of far-right conspiratorial, xenophobic delusions.</p>
<p>He shows how resentful ideas shaped the original socialist vision of Jews as promoters of capitalist instincts and vices. Even before the French Revolution, major Enlightenment figures expressed staunch Judeophobic attitudes. In France, Voltaire lambasted Jews as irretrievably tribalistic, whereas in Germany Hegel’s disciples regarded Judaism as a fundamentally reactionary religion, an obstacle to human emancipation. Another major German philosopher, Johann Gottlob Fichte, postulated the incompatibility between Germanness (racially defined), and Jews. From Fichte to Richard Wagner and to the genocidal prophets Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler, there was a line of morbid fixation on the Jews as a pathogenic factor, comparable to harmful insects whose liquidation could ensure the health of the popular community (<i>Volksgemeinschaft</i>).</p>
<p>One of the most adamant anti-Semites was Bruno Bauer, initially a close friend of Karl Marx, later his philosophical and political enemy. Marx himself maintained an ambivalent, often embarrassed and hostile, attitude to his Jewish origins. As a matter of fact, his early text on “The Jewish Question” portrayed Jews in most unflattering colors, seeing them as the embodiment of everything romantics loved to hate: selfishness, mercantilism, soullessness. In the young Hegelian&#8217;s view, Jews meant capitalism and transcending the Jewish question implied a proletarian revolution that would abolish capitalism and implicitly the Jewish condition. Its ugly anti-Semitic stances notwithstanding, Marx’s early article became a sacred text for left-wingers who tried to address the issue of Jewish emancipation and assimilation. They all borrowed from the founding father the conviction that Jews were the incarnation of capitalist injustice, identified them with soulless plutocracy, and called for an ultimate de-Judaization of society via the ultimate revolutionary apocalypse. For Marx, a classless society meant a society without Jews as Jews. His musings on the Jewish question were philosophically preposterous, morally reprehensible, and sociologically groundless.</p>
<p>The same fixation functioned in non-Marxist leftist circles, from Proudhon to Bakunin and other anarchists. Wistrich explores convincingly the affinities between the far left and the far right in terms of their shared opposition to a perceived Judeo-plutocratic conspiracy. The Nazis would further exacerbate this myth, incorporating it in a broader Weltanschauung that insisted on the need to oppose both Jewish capitalism and Jewish Communism. Logical paradoxes notwithstanding, these myths have persisted for decades. By the end of his life, Joseph Stalin was as convinced as Hitler that the house of Rothschild (or Wall Street as its latter day metamorphosis) is behind all world-historical events.</p>
<p>The demonization of the Jew as the symbol of the abhorred bourgeoisie coincided, within the Left, with the efforts by Jewish luminaries and rank-and-file members alike, to deny their roots. Think of such luminaries as Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Yakov Sverdlov, Rosa Luxemburg, Ruth Fischer, and the list is endless. Both “Red Rosa” and Lev Trotsky were born to traditional Jewish families, both did their utmost to overcome that heredity and convert to a supra-national, truly universalistic identity. Both advocated a Messianic doctrine of apocalyptic revolution. After all, Marx and Engels claimed in the “Communist Manifesto” that proletarians do not have a motherland. Why would they, Rosa and Leon, have one? They did not conceal their origin, but saw it as irrelevant for the much larger, more grandiose agenda of their revolutionary dreams. Did they really succeed?</p>
<p>Obviously, Jewish revolutionary internationalism failed. Both German and Russian socialists continued to see Jewish revolutionaries as tolerated individuals, rather than full-fledged members of the national parties. Veteran Social Democrats such as August Bebel and Frantz Mehring saw Rosa as an exalted, almost quixotic figure. In his struggle for Lenin’s mantle, Stalin did not hesitate to resort to anti-Semitic innuendo against his arch-rival Trotsky (whom he dubbed Judas) and other Jewish members of the Bolshevik Old Guard.  Publicly, at least in the 1930s, the <i>vozhd</i> (Leader) condemned anti-Semitism which he defined as a modern version of cannibalism. Privately, he unabashedly indulged in scurrilous anti-Semitic jokes.</p>
<p>The Romanian Stalinist Ana Pauker, the country&#8217;s Foreign Minister between 1947 and 1952, was first and foremost a soldier of the global communist movement. She remained loyal to the Bolshevik creed in spite of many terrible experiences, including the execution of her husband in the USSR, during the Great Purge, as a renegade and a spy. Ana Pauker was herself arrested for a few months in early 1953. When she found out that Stalin had died in March, she started to cry.</p>
<p>The rise of Zionism contributed the radicalization of leftist anti-Semitic prejudice. Furthermore, unable to predict the Holocaust (Trotsky was the sole notable exception), the Left remained attached to its outworn dogmas. The emergence of the state of Israel created a new reality that the left chose to either ignore or distort to the point of a grotesque caricature. Instead of the traditional identification with the underdog, the radical Left has decided that Israel represents capitalism at its worst, a new form of colonialism and even racism.</p>
<p>Echoing previous follies, some of those who champion these stances happen to be themselves Jewish. In some respects, it is as if people refuse to learn from history. Perhaps instead of people I should say intellectuals: a species made up of individuals more often than not seduced (and eager to be seduced) by the siren songs of utopianism.</p>
<p>In recent years, leftist biases, stereotypes and delusions regarding Jews, Judaism, and the state of Israel have grown and proliferated. Ironically, most of those who promote and advocate such bigoted, conspiratorial views have no idea that they are merely recycling Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin’s murderous visions of a world without Jews.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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