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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; 1968</title>
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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>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-soviet-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-45-years-later/#comments</comments>
		<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>McGovern&#8217;s Legacy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/mcgoverns-legacy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mcgoverns-legacy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/mcgoverns-legacy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Oct 2012 04:25:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1968]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1972]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Convention]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George McGovern]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=159959</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Democratic icon nurtured a leftism that polarized America.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/mcgoverns-legacy/mcgovern11/" rel="attachment wp-att-159964"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-159964" title="mcgovern11" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/mcgovern11.gif" alt="" width="315" height="238" /></a>On Sunday, Democratic icon George McGovern, who served the state of South Dakota for more than twenty years in the House and Senate, passed away at the age of 90. Despite an accomplished <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/21/us/george-mcgovern-dead/index.html">record of service</a> during WWll that included 35 combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot in Europe earning him the Distinguished Flying Cross, McGovern was best known for his anti-war stance with regard to Vietnam, and his overwhelming defeat in the 1972 presidential election. Since his passing, McGovern has been rightly eulogized for his personal affability and agreeableness, but what must not be airbrushed over is the true nature of his influence on the political landscape. As unfortunate as it is, McGovern helped lead the transformation of the Democratic Party into a coalition of leftists distinct from the previous generation of liberals in the Kennedy mold. As a result, the country has never been the same.</p>
<p>It was McGovern himself who <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/us/politics/george-mcgovern-a-democratic-presidential-nominee-and-liberal-stalwart-dies-at-90.html?pagewanted=all">planted the seeds</a> of that divisiveness. As the <em>New York Times</em> notes in its obituary, McGovern &#8220;became the chairman of a Democratic Party commission on delegate selection, created after the fractious 1968 national convention to give the rank and file more say in picking a presidential nominee.&#8221; As a result, the McGovern-Fraser Commission &#8220;rewrote party rules to ensure that more women, young people and members of minorities were included in delegations. The influence of party leaders was curtailed. More states began choosing delegates on the basis of primary elections. And the party’s center of gravity shifted decidedly leftward.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Leftward&#8221; is somewhat inaccurate. Democrats established a de facto quota system informed by identity politics, where people were encouraged to first think of themselves as members of sub-groups identified by race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Nothing has changed to this day, as California&#8217;s 2012 <a href="http://www.cadem.org/admin/miscdocs/files/Final-2012-Delegate-Selection-Plan-11.3.11.pdf">Delegate Selection Plan</a>, for example, reveals. Goals for representation at the Charlotte convention included dividing Californians into six subgroups with the &#8220;proper&#8221; percentages relative to the general population&#8211;as in 16 percent African-American, 29 percent Latino, 1 percent Native American, 10 percent Asian/Pacific Islanders, 12 percent LGBT, 10 percent Disabled Persons, and 18 percent Youth-Under 30.</p>
<p>In 1972, the Democrat convention in Miami turned into a circus. When party activists <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/how-mcgovern%E2%80%99s-radical-party-polarized-america/2/">offered</a> up selections such as migrant-worker organizer Cesar Chavez, Yippee Jerry Rubin, anti-corporate crusader Ralph Nader, Communist dictator Mao Zedong, and sitcom character Archie Bunker for Vice President, all the shenanigans did was push McGovern&#8217;s acceptance speech well into the next morning. Furthermore, the party platform with which Democrats emerged was anathema to middle America. Aside from the staunch anti-war position, they advocated amnesty for war resisters, the abolition of the draft, deep cuts to the military, a $1,000 grant to every American, a guaranteed family income well above the poverty line, prisoners’ rights, federal funding for local food cooperatives, the adoption of an Ethnic Studies curriculum bill, and a host of other leftist initiatives.</p>
<p>Yet it was McGovern&#8217;s opposition to Vietnam that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/21/us/george-mcgovern-dead/index.html">resonated</a> the most with his supporters. &#8220;Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad,&#8221; he said at the convention.</p>
<p>The convention turned out to be the high point of McGovern&#8217;s campaign. Soon after, it was revealed that McGovern&#8217;s running mate, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (D-MO), had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion and undergone electroshock therapy. Despite McGovern&#8217;s promise to back Eagleton &#8220;1000 percent,&#8221; he was replaced by Kennedy in-law R. Sargent Shriver. The election was a rout. McGovern carried Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, earning 17 electoral votes, while Nixon carried 49 states and won 520 electoral votes.</p>
<p>McGovern reflected on that defeat as recently as a month before he died in a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-mcgovern-on-his-1972-presidential-defeat/2012/09/28/dded48fc-f78c-11e1-8398-0327ab83ab91_story.html">piece</a> for the <em>Washington Post.</em> &#8220;The loss is there, an old wound never fully healed,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;My disappointment was certainly personal, made deeper by the awareness that many thousands of young Americans, and far more Vietnamese and other Asian citizens, were going to and did lose their lives with the Nixon administration’s continuation of the war.&#8221;</p>
<p>For McGovern, like so many liberals, the war in Vietnam remains a one-sided telling of history to this day. It was another liberal icon, JFK, who <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/kennedy_vietnam.htm">escalated</a> America&#8217;s presence in Vietnam, because he believed in the Domino Theory: if Vietnam fell to Communism, the entire Southeast Asian Peninsula would follow. In fact, that&#8217;s exactly what happened, and 2-3 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were slaughtered in the ensuing bloodbath. It was a bloodbath caused not only by our troop withdrawal, but the <a href="http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/vietnamwar/a/VietnamEnd.htm">passage</a> of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 by a Democratically controlled Congress, cutting off all aid to Saigon. One year later, Communists gained control of the entire country. That leftists calculatingly omit these details when trumpeting the success of the anti-war movement is nothing short of appalling.</p>
<p>That 1974 vote arguably marked the point where the New Left effectively took control of the Democrat Party. The classical centrist Democrat liberals who had vigorously opposed Communist totalitarianism would thereafter become rarer and rarer within the party. Add the emergence of identity politics to the mix, and the resultant party was no longer &#8220;liberal,&#8221; but leftist.</p>
<p>It is a leftism that has polarized America. That polarization is best explained by the <em>Wall Street Journal&#8217;s</em> James Taranto. While conceding the prevailing meme promoted by leftist obituaries that McGovern was above all else a &#8220;decent man,&#8221; he challenges New Republic writer Rick Perlstein, who <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/108938/george-mcgovern-decent-and-doomed-liberal-icon">laments</a> that McGovern&#8217;s death reminds us of  &#8220;this space between the longing for unapologetic good-government liberalism and its decimation in a fallen political world&#8211;in which the decent and honorable simply get crushed.&#8221; Taranto contends that leftists labor under the delusion &#8220;that left-wing politics and decency are one and the same thing.&#8221; &#8220;This moral vanity leads the left to excuse, or even not to notice, indecent behavior on the part of their own. It is the reason Obama&#8217;s re-election campaign has been less McGovernite than McCarthyite (and we don&#8217;t mean Gene),&#8221; Taranto concludes.</p>
<p>That vanity also explains the evolution of Democrats since 1972, and why that evolution is so detrimental to bipartisanship: there is a great deal of difference between challenging conservative ideology on the basis of political or intellectual differences, and completely dismissing it as fundamentally indecent&#8211;as well as unworthy of serious rebuttal. It is telling that a substantial portion of leftist rebuttal can be reduced to single words like &#8220;racist,&#8221; &#8220;misogynistic,&#8221; &#8220;nativist,&#8221; and &#8220;homophobic&#8221; or simple catch-alls, such as &#8220;cruel&#8221; and &#8220;uncaring.&#8221;</p>
<p>All of this plays into president Obama&#8217;s current campaign, where the focus has been far more on demonizing his opponent than laying out a vision for America. Yet even when Obama lays out a vision, it is marinated in a stew of &#8220;us against them&#8221; grievances that can be traced back to the radicalism that has been mainstreamed into the Democratic Party of today.</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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