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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Lenin</title>
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		<title>The Great October: A Revolution Financed By an Enemy Government</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/oleg-atbashian/the-great-october-a-revolution-financed-by-an-enemy-government/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-great-october-a-revolution-financed-by-an-enemy-government</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:20:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Oleg Atbashian]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The example Lenin set for American communists to follow.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Lenin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244755" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Lenin.jpg" alt="Lenin" width="283" height="164" /></a>Can it be true that Vladimir Lenin, the alleged &#8220;leader of the world Proletariat,&#8221; whose monuments adorned central squares in every Soviet town and who inspired generations of Soviet citizens, had been a mere agent provocateur working for the German government?</p>
<p>In <em>The World Crisis, Volume 5,</em> Winston Churchill writes this about war-time Germany in 1917:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;They turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The rest is history: Lenin staged a coup and withdrew Russia from World War One, conceding large swaths of land to Germany. In the process, he consolidated his power, initiated the policy of Red Terror, brutally exterminated all opposition, and founded the world&#8217;s first totalitarian socialist state.</p>
<p>Many contemporary politicians had made claims that Lenin was a long-time agent of the Imperial German Secret Service. A warrant for his arrest was issued after the Russian government had learned that the Bolsheviks were financed by the Germans, with whom Russia was at war. However, with time these claims dwindled as no documentary proof could be found.</p>
<p>Why did Lenin&#8217;s culpability, which his contemporaries considered evident, stop being so evident to the following generations? What did the contemporaries know that we don&#8217;t?</p>
<p>It would be safe to assume that Soviet agents, who had penetrated all levels of Western societies early on, had successfully removed and destroyed all proof, along with all the witnesses. They apparently did it so well that even the Nazis, who inherited the German intelligence service about a decade later, couldn&#8217;t find any related documents, otherwise they would have certainly demonstrated them to the world in order to prove the illegitimacy of the rival dictatorship. Let&#8217;s leave further speculations to the authors of period spy thrillers.</p>
<p>The fact is, Lenin&#8217;s case wouldn&#8217;t be all that unique. At the time, the Imperial German Secret Service seemed to have a policy of recruiting agents among exiled Russian communists and financing their subversive activities and propaganda aimed to plunge Russia into turmoil. Some of them, like Fuerstenberg and Kozlovsky, were prominent Bolsheviks with close ties to Lenin.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=38cce5bb-1ef7-439d-a351-607e76877d1f">This author</a> provides a number of other examples of such recruitment and money trails, concluding his research by saying, &#8220;we know that the Bolsheviks conducted public relations that seemed to be beyond their means. We know that German agents &#8211; some with considerable funds at their disposal &#8211; were closely entwined with the Bolsheviks. And we know that Lenin lied when confronted about that situation.&#8221;</p>
<p>The truth was unearthed only in the late 1980s, with the opening of Soviet archives to the public. The newly declassified documents revealed the dates, the banks, and the substantial amounts of money provided to the communists by Kaiser&#8217;s Germany, which financed Lenin&#8217;s subversive, seditious activities. According to historian <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=BIQuNweyC4kC&amp;pg=PA39#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">Albert L. Weeks</a>, the German authorities cynically referred to Lenin as a &#8220;bacillus&#8221; who would &#8220;infect&#8221; Russia and thus incapacitate a major military adversary.</p>
<p>But do even the large money transfers and the intriguing return from exile in a sealed one-car train make Lenin a spy? Only in the most general sense of the word; strictly speaking, he was rather a sociopathic traitor and a criminally-minded, community-organizing opportunist, driven by the principle of &#8220;the enemy of my enemy is my friend.&#8221; In the words of Weeks,  Lenin &#8220;merely took advantage of the Kaiser&#8217;s &#8216;generosity&#8217; and exploited the subsidies for his own purposes in seizing and holding power in Russia.&#8221;</p>
<p>And yet, while the Bolshevik revolution could not have been engineered by the Western bankers as some modern conspiracy theories claim, there is enough evidence to suggest that Lenin could not have pulled it off without Germany&#8217;s financial and logistical help. And even if he had, the &#8220;leader of the workers and peasants&#8221; would surely have used less radical strategies had he not had a second career on which to fall back.</p>
<p>Common sense suggests that if left to their own devices, Lenin and his close comrades would be less likely to take such great risks; it was the helpful network of foreign agents with backup plans, escape routes, and other comforting factors that boosted their confidence and provided the feeling of relative safety. Thus, their motto, &#8220;we have nothing to lose but our chains,&#8221; was a lie. The selfless sacrifice and the blind trust in the Communist Manifesto was good enough for the people but not for the people&#8217;s leaders.</p>
<p>In this, Lenin was not an exception. Being the leader of the semi-legal communist party, he collaborated with his nation&#8217;s enemy in a time of war much like the American communists and other leftist groups, who have throughout history collaborated with enemies of the United States in order to gain more influence at the expense of their own country.</p>
<p>The irrefutable evidence that Lenin and his party conspired with and received funding from an enemy government sheds an unforgiving light on the seditious and treasonous character, methods, and motivations of all international communist and socialist movements, the Communist Party USA, and every communist party around the world, who continue to operate by Lenin&#8217;s methods and who still hold him as a major inspiration.</p>
<p>In the court of law, a verdict based on false or tainted evidence is usually overturned. We have to wonder if in the court of history, the verdict regarding the celebrated &#8220;people&#8217;s revolution&#8221; paid for by an imperial intelligence service will also be altered &#8211; and if our history books will be corrected accordingly.</p>
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		<title>A Farewell to Lenin: Stalin&#8217;s Litany of Vows</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/a-farewell-to-lenin-stalins-litany-of-vows/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-farewell-to-lenin-stalins-litany-of-vows</link>
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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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		<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>Lenin Beheaded</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2013 05:45:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
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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>Ideological Sociopath: Stalin Reads Machiavelli</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/ideological-sociopath-stalin-reads-machiavelli/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ideological-sociopath-stalin-reads-machiavelli</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 04:46:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The consequences of considering vice a virtue.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/joseph-stalin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-189144" alt="joseph-stalin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/joseph-stalin.jpg" width="265" height="230" /></a><em>Author&#8217;s note: This essay is written in memory of Yelena Bonner (1923-2011) who, together with Andrei Sakharov and other heroic dissidents, held truth, dignity, and liberty as non-negotiable values.</em></p>
<p>At the end of the documentary film “Stalin Thought of You,” Stalin’s favorite cartoonist, Boris Efimov, over one hundred years old, brother of Bolshevik journalist Mihail Koltsov (killed during the Great Terror), who had been a friend of Hemingway and of Malraux, expresses his gratitude for not being executed like his sibling. But he adamantly refuses to unequivocally condemn Stalin: “He was not a man, he was a phenomenon.” Ilya Ehrenburg, another famous survivor of the Great Terror, most probably had similar thoughts on the subject. Explaining such situations, such human cataclysms, remains a moral and intellectual duty if we wish to avoid their repetition. The fact that so many Russians continue to worship Stalin’s memory is equally disconcerting, revolting, and revealing. But Stalin was not only a Russian phenomenon. Similarly to Hitler, he embodied, in an extreme and criminal fashion, modernity’s pathologies.  This is what I have in mind when, following Leszek Kolakowski’s line of thought, I talk about the presence of the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/">Devil in History</a>.</p>
<p>I know that it might sound shocking, but one cannot deny the fact that Stalin had a <i>Weltanschauung</i> and that he was, in his own way, an intellectual. A self-taught, homicidal, liberticidal, and fanatical one, but an intellectual nevertheless. Wasn’t Engels a self-taught philosopher as well? Similarly, one cannot ignore the affinities between Bolshevism and the tradition of political and philosophical radicalism, Russian and European. Marxism was the apotheosis of ethical relativism; it suspended traditional distinctions between good and evil, it defined the good in utilitarian fashion, instrumentally and pragmatically, as all that served the cause of a Messianic proletariat, the alleged redemptive class. In fact, this was a recipe for what Alain Besancon (echoing Vladimir Soloviev) coined as the falsification of the good. In several annotations, long kept secret, Stalin defined his own table of values, he signaled out what he considered vice (or, sin, if you want) and virtue.</p>
<p>In Arthur Koestler’s <i>Darkness at Noon</i>, the main character, an Old Bolshevik, Nikolai Rubashov, declares that “Number one” (Stalin) kept Machiavelli’s <i>The Prince</i> as his favorite night-table book. Here we are witnesses of a <i>sui generis</i> Machiavellianism, not the recognition and cultivation of the humanist dimension of the Florentine’s work.  Historian Robert Service was allowed access to Stalin personal library and he could check Lenin’s volume <i>Materialism and Empirio-Criticism</i>, the 1939 edition, with the annotations of the his “most faithful collaborator and disciple.” At that hour of history (<i>il faisait minuit dans le siècle, </i>wrote once Victor Serge), the general secretary had no significant rival. The Great Terror had reached its genocidal aims; a year later, Trotsky, his unforgivable nemesis, was assassinated in Coyoacan, Mexico, by the NKVD agent Ramon Mercader. In 1939, the <i>Short Course of the History of CPSU (b)</i> was published – the ultimate codification of the Stalinist cosmology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and demonology.</p>
<p>On the blank page at the end of Lenin’s volume (which in itself was a manifesto for a rudimentary philosophical materialism, equally naïve and aggressive), with no connection to the polemic between Bolshevism and epistemologists Mach or Avenarius, Stalin scribbled: “NB! If a person is: 1. Strong (spiritually), 2) active, 3) intelligent (or capable), then he is a good person regardless of other vices.” After this, the “coryphaeus of science” enumerates what he held to be vices: “1) weakness, 2) laziness, 3) stupidity.” This is all that Stalin writes; nothing about pride, egocentrism, cruelty, avarice, deceit, greed, hypocrisy, envy, infamy, rabid jealousy, or carnal sins. In this context, one is not amazed anymore of how Stalin ignored Nikolai Yezhov’s (homo)sexual orgies or the notorious transgressions perpetrated by Beria, a serial rapist. It is striking that in these lines, never meant for the public eye, Stalin adopts a traditional ethical vocabulary that he talks of virtues and vices. But it is in no way a rehabilitation, even as a mere intimate personal confession, of the Christian tradition, which he once studied at the Theological Seminary in Tbilisi. On the contrary!</p>
<p>Robert Service is right: “The content of the commentary is deeply unChristian; it is reminscent more of Niccolo Machiavelli and Friedrich Nietzsche than of the Bible. For Stalin the criterion of goodness was not morality but effectiveness. … Furthermore, the fact that the characteristics despised by Stalin were weakness, idleness and stupidity is revealing. Stalin the killer slept easily at night.” (Robert Service, <i>Stalin: A Biography</i>, Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 342) Rubashov, a former People’s Commissar, hero of the Revolution, “unmasked” as a traitor, imagined Stalin in similar fashion. Koestler himself, after his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, disenchanted with the show-trials in Moscow, resigned from the German’s Writers Union in exile, which was under complete communist control. The text of his letter of resignation is in fact the embryo of his great political novel that would later influence entire generations, truly becoming a anticommunist manifesto (to use the title of John V. Fleming’s excellent book).</p>
<p>It is only symptomatic that these reflections on what one could call Joseph Dzhugashvili’s personal anti-ethics were written down on the last page of a Lenin volume. Without Lenin, Dzhugashvili would have never morphed into Stalin. We don’t know if Stalin read Nietzsche, but we know that Lenin kept in his book-shelves <i>Thus Spoke Zahathustra</i> with his own notes. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal has written a superb book on the intellectual relationship between Bolshevism and Nietzsche, which I reviewed in <i>Times Literary Supplement</i>.</p>
<p>Gorki, Bodganov, Lunacharsky tried to reconcile Marx and Nietzsche, to establish a new political religion of the New Man as <i>Übermensch</i>. For Lenin, this was heresy not in terms of the overall goal of the project, but because of its mystical undertones. A no nonsense, uncompromising, single-minded revolutionary, with little patience for what he regarded as idle metaphysical squabbles, Lenin lambasted the Bolshevik God-seekers in the name of Marxist rationalism. Service remarked, and he is not the first to do so, that Stalin had his own copy of <i>The Prince</i>, with personal annotations on the sides, but the copy disappeared from the archives. Where might it be now? Maybe in the book-shelves of one of Russia’s oligarchs. There are authors who claim that Hitler owned a copy of this book as well, and that he was particularly fond of it. The Marxist Gnostic, Antonio Gramsci, referring to Lenin’s vanguard party, called it admiringly “the modern Prince”. Marxism thus turned into a sociology of revolutionary will and virtue embodied in the redemptive image of a Party, the predestined repository of absolute truth.</p>
<p>According to Stalin, courage was the cardinal value that ennobled and justified human action regardless of the latter’s finality. Service writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>“His insistence on the importance of courage could have derived from Machiavelli’s supreme demand on the ruler: namely that he should have <i>vertù</i>. This is a word barely translatable into either Russian or English; but it is identified with manliness, endeavor, courage, and excellence. Stalin, if this is correct, saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavelian vertù.” (p. 343).</p></blockquote>
<p>He was a paranoid and sociopathic despot, who projected himself in those heroes who changed the fate of the world, who believed himself on the same level with builders of empires and religions. Projecting himself obsessively into these empire-builders, he became one.</p>
<p>Turning ends into absolutes and the exaltation of violence did not begin though with Stalin. Revolutionary Machiavellianism, to use E. A. Rees&#8217;s concept, comes close to both visions equally cynical and fanatical about “metapolitics” (see Peter Viereck’s classical study), about the Romanticization, re-enchantment of the world by way of myth, community, self-abandonment and sacrifice. Metapolitics emphasizes the centrality of myth in all human experience. I don’t believe that in Stalin’s case we encounter a <i>vertu</i>, in the real sense of the concept, as it was used by Machiavelli. I don’t agree with Bertrand Russell, who once called <i>The Prince</i> a “handbook for gangsters.” But it is true that ideological gangsters know how to twist and disfigure a philosophical text so that what was previously envisioned as a glorification of civic virtue converts into the justification of cynical non-virtue.</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>Back to Lenin? Bolshevism as Barbarism</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2013 04:45:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The hymns honoring the architect of a criminal system that exterminated millions continue. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/lenin147.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-188501" alt="lenin147" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/lenin147.jpg" width="245" height="350" /></a>It has become fashionable among leftist circles to invoke a return to Lenin, to radicalism, to utopia. Among those who advocate such imperative to “retest the communist hypothesis” one can count French philosopher Alain Badiou, a former admirer of the Khmer Rouges, and Slovene thinker, Slavoj Zizek, the new idol of Western university campuses, subject of documentary hagiographic movies, and prophet of a new phantasmagoric world revolution. Did the partisans of such positions ever stop to think how it would sound a call for “retesting the Nazi hypothesis”? One must be totally oblivious to history, an incurable cynic, in order to ignore the fact that Leninism, just like National-Socialism, means political terrorism, the apotheosis of fanatical partisanship, the boundless cult of violence and nihilism, etc. In short, Leninism presupposes all of what Polish poet Aleksander Wat called the destruction of the inner man. <i>Leninism is theoretical and practical anti-humanism.</i></p>
<p>There have been conferences and symposia where Lenin is presented, in an academic context and without any trace of compassion for the millions of victims of “the great experiment,” as the philosopher of the break with an order putatively condemned by history. All in all, it is unsurprising that the prophets of violence worship Lenin. What is surprising is that intellectuals, who should have learnt from the catastrophes of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, are engaged in an endeavor driven by n programmatic irresponsibility. It is simply shocking that in countries where the Leninist model was implemented, one can still read and hear hymns honoring the architect of a criminal system.</p>
<p>Should we be amazed by all this? What could one expect from the epigones of Georg Lukacs, the Marxist philosopher who declared, in a 1970 dialogue with Italian sociologist Franco Ferraroti, that he preferred the worst form of socialisms to the best incarnation of capitalism. A perplexing statement, which was parodied by Leszek Kolakowski as follows: “This is why one can see endless crowds of people seeking asylum lining up in front of the embassies of Albania and not of those of Sweden.” Real history does not matter for such sectarians. What does matter is the dogma to which they are faithful in total disregard of reality. If facts stand in the way, they adopt a position mirroring the statement of one famous German philosopher: “Too bad for the facts!”  It is quite telltale that one of Hugo Chavez&#8217;s intellectual heroes was Istvan Meszaros, one of Lukacs&#8217;s former students who, unlike other Hungarian former neo-Marxists converted to liberalism (e.g. Agnes Heller and Janos Kis), has remained a  flaming Marxist, faithful to the dialectical sophistries of his mentor.</p>
<p>An excellent example of such world-view is a recent memoir by a Romanian Marxist intellectual, Ion Ianosi, who happened to be deeply involved for long stretches of time in the ideologization of the country’s culture during communism. The volume’s title is <i>My International</i>. Some critics glorify the book as testimony of heartfelt sincerity. What is missing in those more than 800 pages is an honest analysis of Bolshevism as justification of social genocide. Ion Ianosi seemingly excels on topics such as “Marx and Art”, “Lenin and Art”, pretty much the same fields for which his expertise was called upon during his activity within the Romanian communist party’s Agitprop. But Ianosi shies away from trying his expert pen on topics such as the crimes against humanity inspired by the Marxist-Leninist ideology.</p>
<p>Even before the Bolsheviks’ coming into power, it was clear that Lenin was a fanatical propagandist, a utopian ideologue fixated on social purity and purification, an heir to Robespierre and St. Just, but no philosopher. Philosophy implies doubt and Lenin was the man without doubts. This does not mean that there were no honorable individuals who fell in the trap of Lenin’s and his followers’ metaphysical verbiage. The dean of Russian social-democracy, Georgi Plekhanov was right. Lenin was never a philosopher. What did he want, though? Maybe we should remember Louis Althusser’s (a French philosopher who exerted great influence over Badiou) idea: “Lenin did not found a new philosophy of praxis, but a new praxis of philosophy.” A praxis that resulted in mass murder.</p>
<p>Lenin was the practitioner of a simplistic, partisan, and exclusivist philosophy. He rejected emphatically any possibility for a middle path, of a <i>tertium datur</i> between what he called “bourgeois ideology” and the “proletarian” one. Lenin’s Manichaeism was inexorable. For Lenin and his followers, ideas were (are) always the manifestation of class interests. Greatly valued by many people of the Left, Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin’s favorite executed by Stalin, did not adopt a different approach, thus drawing Gramsci’s harsh critique. The latter, author of a Gnostic version of  revolutionary theory, was one of the very few Marxists able to take seriously the autonomy of superstructures and the role of historical will. This is the meaning of a notion essential for the Leninist conception about ideas, ideologies and philosophical consciousness: <i>partiinost</i> &#8211; partisanship, class position, militant commitment, total and abject subordination to the party line.</p>
<p>Leninism is a revolutionary doctrine that sanctifies political violence and condemns entire social categories to state-engineered extinction. It is a secular demonology constructing a cosmogony of exclusion rooted in the visceral contempt for the rule of law, legality, and the universality of human rights. <i>“Back to Lenin” means a return to barbarism, blindness, and murder.</i><i>    </i></p>
<p><strong>Editor’s note: Don’t miss Vladimir Tismaneanu’s interview at Frontpage about his new book, <em>The Devil in History</em>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/">here</a>.</strong></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 Marxist Roots of Obama&#8217;s War on the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/the-marxist-roots-of-obamas-war-on-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-marxist-roots-of-obamas-war-on-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Apr 2013 04:42:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Guess how Marx and Lenin sought to destroy the "bourgeoisie"?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/the-marxist-roots-of-obamas-war-on-the-middle-class/obamam2/" rel="attachment wp-att-183890"><img class=" wp-image-183890 alignleft" title="obamam2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/obamam2.png" alt="" width="241" height="161" /></a>How many times have you heard President Obama express concern for the middle class? More than you can count, I&#8217;m sure. If you are in the middle class, Obama’s frequent mentions of you should make you very worried. A key part of Obama’s <em>modus operandi</em> is his habitual use of verbal misdirection—saying one thing and then doing the opposite.</p>
<p>This is a man who will affirm the truism, “none of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be,”  and then, fifteen minutes later, propose increased federal spending in industries that he favors, such as green energy. (He did this in his 2011 State of the Union address.) He has earnestly told us that federal deficit spending is “not sustainable,” and then merrily continued with his budget-busting spending plans. Obama has promised “no more bailouts,” only to endorse (in the same speech—his 2012 SOTU address) the Dodd-Frankenstein monster known as “the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” that effectively guarantees future bailouts for big banks.</p>
<p>Obama pays lip service to the middle class because he needs their votes, but he is no friend of the middle class. Right from the start, he has favored big business at the expense of the middle class. (See, for example, Timothy P. Carney’s detailed account, <em>Obamanomics</em>.)</p>
<p>It is well known that Obama is a disciple and practitioner of the strategy and tactics of the late revolutionary Saul Alinsky, who despised the middle class, denigrating them as “materialistic, decadent… degenerate… and corrupt.” (For a well-researched discussion of the Alinksy link, read Chapter 3 of James R. Keena’s excellent book, <em>We’ve Been Had</em>.)</p>
<p>Karl Marx was another writer whose influence on Obama is well known. Marx railed against the middle class, fulminating in <em>The Communist Manifesto</em>, “The middle class owner of property&#8230;must be swept out of the way and made impossible.” Elsewhere in the <em>Manifesto</em>, Marx called for “the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie.”</p>
<p>Building on Marx’s concepts, Lenin sought the destruction of the bourgeois class and its values, recommending, as the strategy for annihilating the middle class, “grind[ing] them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”</p>
<p>Is Obama acting on the basis of this Marxist-Leninist animus against the middle class? Certainly, nobody can honestly argue that middle-class Americans as a whole have prospered under the Obama administration. The official unemployment rate has remained stubbornly high, while the <a href="http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LN11300000">percentage of adult Americans working</a> has declined to historic lows. Meanwhile, during the Obama era, median family income has dropped several thousand dollars while the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/11/news/economy/fed-family-net-worth/index.htm">median net worth</a> of Americans has dropped as much as 40%. Meanwhile, savers earn microscopic returns and effectively grant interest-free loans to the government as a result of the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest-rate policy.</p>
<p>Such dismal data should be of no surprise to anyone who understands economics. <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012.07/19/obama-strays-from-the-script-reveals-an-ideology-hed-prefer-to-hide/">Obama’s ideology</a> is plainly Marxian, shown in his antipathy for entrepreneurs (“you didn’t build that”). As I have argued <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/07/26/president-obamas-marxist-leninist-economics-fact-and-fiction/2/">elsewhere</a>, Obama’s economic policies have been those of a dedicated Marxist-Leninist. He has worked to advance the implementation of all ten planks in Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” outlining how to impose socialism incrementally.</p>
<p>As for Lenin’s fiendish plan to crush the middle class with taxes and inflation, Obama has increased taxes by over $6 trillion (I refer here to Obama’s deficits, which are taxes that will fall on future taxpayers) and the Federal Reserve inflationary dollar-creating policy (“quantitative easing”) that already is eating away at the purchasing power of the dollar while sowing the seeds of severe future inflation. Many Americans have been beguiled by Obama’s rhetoric about raising taxes on “the rich.” They overlook the mathematical fact that “the rich” (even as liberally defined by Obama) don’t have enough money to keep the Obama/progressive wealth redistribution game going, and that, sooner or later, the heaviest economic burden will have to fall on the middle class.</p>
<p>The American middle class should never underestimate an ambitious politician’s willingness to impose economic hardship on the country to achieve his political goals. Indeed, Obama is far from the first Democrat to take advantage of the “<a href="http://www.forbes.com/markhendrickson/2012/05/31/president-obamas-wealth-destroying-goal-taking-the-curley-effect-nationwide/">Curley effect</a>,” but he may be the most zealous. Apparently influenced by the Cloward-Piven stragtegy of bringing about the financial collapse of the U.S. by overloading government transfer programs, Obama has presided over explosive growth in the number of Americans on the food stamps program and federal disability.</p>
<p>Large segments of the American middle class either do not understand what Obama is trying to do, or else they have been intellectually crippled by “higher education,” causing them to suffer from the delusion that Obama’s path is righteous and just. An earlier, non-Marxian commentator on the American scene, the acerbic H. L. Mencken, scornfully referred to the American middle class as “the booboisie,” and expressed his cynicism in the memorable and currently apropos aphorism, &#8220;Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”</p>
<p>Lenin once gloated, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” He was wrong, because the inherent flaws of socialism collapsed the Soviet Union. But, as Emerson once said, “A nation never falls but by suicide,” so while we avoided selling the fatal rope to a foreign enemy, we might have elected our own hangman.</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>Preserving Cold War History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/preserving-cold-war-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=preserving-cold-war-history</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:41:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Stepping into the world behind the Iron Curtain.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/preserving-cold-war-history/coldwar/" rel="attachment wp-att-168756"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-168756" title="coldwar" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/coldwar-450x299.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="179" /></a>Recently I attended a private fundraising event at the <a href="http://www.wendemuseum.org/">Wende Museum</a> in Culver City in the Los Angeles area. The Wende website describes it as “a collections-based research and education institute that preserves Cold War artifacts and history, making resources available to scholars and applying historical lessons of the past to the present.” A Cold War museum in the heart of the entertainment world – who knew?</p>
<p>Incorporated in Los Angeles ten years ago, the Wende was founded by young historian Justinian “Justin” Jampol to address the rampant destruction of Cold War artifacts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall (<em>wende</em> is German for “turning point,” a phrase often used to refer to that historic event and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union). “Evidence of this critical period in world history is quickly disappearing,” <a href="http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&amp;int_new=49259">said</a> Jampol. So he made it his mission to collect and preserve that evidence.</p>
<p>The result is an amazing collection of over 70,000 artifacts, archives and personal histories from Communist-era Eastern Europe, including furniture, paintings, sculptures, posters, flags, signs, political propaganda, clothing, tapestries, books, films, electronics, remnants of Checkpoint Charlie, and the longest stretch of the original Berlin Wall outside of Germany. Nearly 75% of the objects in that collection originate from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The Wende uses the history and culture of the GDR as a “lens through which to observe the larger cultural implications of Cold War-era Eastern European and the Soviet Union.”</p>
<p>Jampol led those of us at the fundraiser on a tour through the small display rooms and a crowded downstairs warehouse packed to the gills with these items. We were also shown through a nearby building which houses a collection of Cold War-era surveillance equipment. The collection gives off a palpable sense of the oppressive history to which it bears witness.</p>
<p>The Wende Museum won’t have to endure cramped quarters much longer. The city council has just given it a 75-year lease in a high-visibility building near Sony Studios in Culver City. Not only that, but the museum will get a higher profile as the subject of <a href="http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&amp;int_new=49259">an upcoming book</a> from the major art publisher Taschen. Wayne Ratkovich, Chair of The Wende Museum Board, notes that “the book will present more than just an exhaustive documentation of The Wende&#8217;s collection and the artifacts of the Cold War. It will provide a unique view of life behind the Iron Curtain.”</p>
<p>The Museum focuses on pivotal moments in Cold War history – “beginnings, endings and transformative events” – such as the formation of the Warsaw Pact, the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the evolution of former Communist countries to members of a pan-European union. But the Wende also recognizes history on a more personal level, as preserved through oral histories and material remnants like family photo albums, scrapbooks and home movies, to “explore the layered realities of everyday life behind the Iron Curtain,” the “symbols, rituals, mass organizations and state-approved creative expression generated across the region,” and “the ways that official ideology was subverted, rejected and given new meaning in the private sphere.”</p>
<p>The Museum serves as an unparalleled educational resource not only for insight into the Eastern perspective of the Cold War, but the legacy of the Cold War and its contemporary relevance as well. Jampol is always searching for unique, interdisciplinary ways to engage audiences, such as urban landscape projects, online tools, exhibitions that provide access to shared knowledge, and a wiki-catalog that allows the public to contribute to the creation of artifacts and to upload videos and other content. In addition, “We host an annual conference or workshop for international scholars and students, loan materials to museum and institutions around the world, and produce and publish research projects,” <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/cold-war-relics-the-wende-museum-saves-communist-design/243464/">he says</a>.</p>
<p>Organized by journalist/historian David Stein, who also heads up an organization of counterculture conservatives called the <a href="http://www.countercontempt.com/">Republican Party Animals</a> (“this is not your father’s GOP”), the fundraising event featured the city council has just given it a 75-year lease on a high-visibility building by Downtown Culver City, near Sony Studios.talk radio host Larry Elder among the speakers, as well as the prolific journalist/novelist/screenwriter Michael Walsh, who happens to be on the museum’s Board of Directors. Walsh shared some of his personal experiences in Berlin while writing for <em>Time</em> magazine and other publications at that time (I have interviewed him about his thriller novels for FrontPage Mag <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/mark-tapson/shock-warning-an-interview-with-michael-walsh-2/">here</a>, and reviewed his recent Encounter broadside <a href="http://www.amazon.com/People-v-Democratic-Party/dp/1594036616/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1342849458&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+people+vs+the+democratic+party"><em>The People v. The Democratic Party</em></a> <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/the-people-v-the-democratic-party/">here</a>).</p>
<p>U.S. Navy Commander J.E. Dyer also spoke to the capacity crowd at the event. Having served in Naval Intelligence from 1983 through 2004, beginning her career under Ronald Reagan and finishing it serving in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, Commander Dyer has written for <em>The Weekly Standard</em>, <em>HotAir</em>, <em>Commentary</em>, and elsewhere, and is working on a book about Ronald Reagan, whom she quoted several times in her brief presentation. “Reagan saw the Cold War as a battle for the hearts and minds of people,” Dyer pointed out, and she quoted from his 1987 “tear down that wall” address about that struggle:</p>
<blockquote><p>After these four decades there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.</p></blockquote>
<p>And so it was. The Berlin Wall came down two years after that famous speech, because, to paraphrase another Dyer quote from Reagan’ 1982 address on arms reduction, he demonstrated the will to rebuild America’s strength and force the Soviets to back down.</p>
<p>The arrival in movie theaters of <em>Red Dawn</em>, a remake of the Cold War cult favorite of the same name, has given reviewers occasion to trot out a tired but favorite phrase of the left: “Cold War paranoia,” a dismissive term which implies that the threat of Soviet Communism was only a chimeric obsession of jingoistic conservatives. Justinian Jampol and his Cold War museum are working diligently to preserve the evidence of the War’s oppressive reality in Eastern Europe.</p>
<p><em>Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He focuses on the politics of popular culture.</em></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>Oliver Stone’s Unbelievable Crap</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/oliver-stones-unbelievable-crap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-unbelievable-crap</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2012 04:54:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Henry Wallace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Saddam Hussein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Showtime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Untold History of the United States]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163373</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A communist filmmaker brings his latest perverse attack on America to Showtime.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/oliver-stones-unbelievable-crap/285757_10151109153466538_1447963112_n/" rel="attachment wp-att-163383"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163383" title="285757_10151109153466538_1447963112_n" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/285757_10151109153466538_1447963112_n-350x350.gif" alt="" width="280" height="280" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Originally published at <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/10/30/Oliver-Stone-David-Horowitz">Breitbart.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>On the evidence of his new Showtime mini-series and companion book, Oliver Stone is both a communist and political moron, a redundancy to be sure. Having previously celebrated a trio of evil-doers – Castro, Arafat and Hugo Chavez – Stone now adds <em>The Untold History of the United States</em> to the cinematic garbage heap he has been piling up since <em>J.F.K.</em> and <em>Born on the 4</em><em><sup>th</sup></em><em> of July</em>. Like them, this latest contribution is an unrelenting (and unrelentingly perverse) attack on America as history’s Great Satan, the root cause of worldly evil.</p>
<p>The heroes of this latest Stone fantasy are &#8212; I kid you not &#8212; Vladimir Lenin and Henry Wallace. Wallace is cast by Stone as the visionary of a planet without capitalism and war, and consequently as America’s missed opportunity to change the world. Along the way, Stone composes nauseating apologetics for Joseph Stalin and other historical villains including even Saddam Hussein, all of which are necessary to sustain his preposterous narrative of America as the great villain of a century in which America in fact defeated the two most monstrous regimes on human record – the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany – liberating more than a billion people in the process.</p>
<p>For those too young to remember, Henry Wallace was a former Vice President who was snookered by American Communists into running for the White House in 1948 as the anti-Cold War candidate of the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party was a political front the Communists had created to help Stalin drag millions of East Europeans into his Soviet gulag and slaughterhouse. Two years later, when the Communists invaded South Korea, a chastened and pathetic Wallace went on television to concede that he had been duped into lending his name to a malevolent cause. Wallace died soon after in disgrace. Now Stone is attempting to resurrect his most shameful hour and present it to the uninformed as the second coming.</p>
<p>By contrast, <em>every</em> step of America’s way in Stone’s fabrication is portrayed in the worst imaginable light, up to and including the Islamist attacks of 9/11, which he describes as merely an excuse America used to conduct criminal wars “against two Islamic nations” that caused “far more damage to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever could,” while “shredding the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Convention” in the process.</p>
<p>Even the title of Stone’s rant is a lie, since his narratives of the Bolshevik Revolution (idealists whose noble vision was thwarted by capitalist pigs), World War II (Stalin won it) and the Cold War (launched by American imperialists but ended by peace-loving Mikhail Gorbachev) are a twice-told story: the first time by Kremlin propagandists and their minions, the second by leftwing diehards who can’t handle the truth, and who have now been joined by the executives at Showtime in airing a miniseries that is malignant and unbelievable crap.</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>Forward with Obama, Mao and Lenin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/forward-with-obama-mao-and-lenin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=forward-with-obama-mao-and-lenin</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 May 2012 04:39:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Forward]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mao]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[slogan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=130650</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Fixation on the always distant future means never having to say you're sorry for destroying the present. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/120501lenin.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-130652" title="120501lenin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/120501lenin.gif" alt="" width="375" height="313" /></a>The Obama slogan for 2012 is in and it&#8217;s &#8220;Forward.” The left has always been enamored of &#8220;Forwardism&#8221; or &#8220;Progressivism&#8221; which mean much the same thing. Before MSNBC had &#8220;Lean Forward,&#8221; Mao had the Great Leap Forward, which killed some 40 million people, far more people than MSNBC can ever dream of tuning in to their programs.</p>
<p>When Lenin wanted to launch his own newspaper, he called it, &#8220;Vperod&#8221; or &#8220;Forward.&#8221; The name has popped up on the mastheads of left-wing newspapers across the world. It&#8217;s &#8220;Vorwarts&#8221; in Germany, &#8220;Voorwarts&#8221; in the Netherlands and &#8220;Ila al-Amam&#8221; in the Arab world. Back in New York it&#8217;s &#8220;The Forward.&#8221;</p>
<p>There are any number of left-wing political parties who have named themselves &#8220;Forward&#8221;, including the Forward Communist Party of India, Kadima, the left-wing opposition party in Israel, and Vperod, a Russian political party that split off from the Socialist Resistance on account of the latter not being radical enough.</p>
<p>Picking &#8220;Forward&#8221; as his campaign slogan puts Obama in good company with Lenin and Mao, and it sounds positive until you stop and realize that it&#8217;s meant more as an order than a suggestion. There&#8217;s a reason leftist newspapers with that name add an exclamation mark at the end of it. It&#8217;s not a proposal, it&#8217;s a command. Lean forward, march forward, live forward and then die forward. We&#8217;ve burned the bridges, run up the deficit and trashed the economy so there&#8217;s no going back.</p>
<p>An old Soviet era joke told the story of the wife of a Communist leader who upon hearing that her husband had developed a progressive paralysis, clapped her hands and exclaimed that at least it was progressive. That is the underlying message of &#8220;Forward&#8221; to voters: the country may be paralyzed, but at least it&#8217;s a progressive paralysis which leaves us unable to move our heads and stop leaning forward.</p>
<p>That may be why it remains a popular campaign slogan among desperate left of center candidates. When Adlai Stevenson, dean of the liberal eggheads, ran in 1952, the campaign buttons read, &#8220;Forward with Stevenson.&#8221; The country chose to go backward instead with Eisenhower winning by a landslide.</p>
<p>Tony Blair ran for his third term with the slogan, &#8220;Britain, forward, not back,&#8221; which despite its clumsiness did conclusively explain that &#8220;Forward&#8221; as a campaign slogan means there&#8217;s no going back. However Blair forgot to tell voters that this referred to his immigration policy which helped create Broken Britain.</p>
<p>In this forward-looking Britain, the police are being trained to look for signs of sorcery among immigrants after children have been murdered on suspicion that they might be witches. The last woman to be executed on witchcraft charges in the area was back in 1727, but now the UK is back in the witch hunting business or the hunting witchhunters business as the case may be. That&#8217;s not to mention the Islamic female genital mutilation business, which is also booming as part of Britain&#8217;s forward march into the 7th century.</p>
<p>Had Blair been a touch more honest, the slogan would have been, &#8220;Britain, so forward, it&#8217;s backward.&#8221; Much like having a mind so open your brains fall out, that is one of the dangers of being so forward, going so far ahead you end up in the desert praising absolute monarchies and slave states as beacons of freedom and democracy, while your police hunt witchhunters and the mutilators of little girls in your own cities.</p>
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		<title>Carlos the Jackal, Carlos the Jihadi</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/mark-tapson/carlos-the-jackal-carlos-the-jihadi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=carlos-the-jackal-carlos-the-jihadi</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:30:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Carlos the Jackal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The unrepentant master terrorist comes to trial in France – again]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/1.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-111892" title="1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>The brutal and charismatic terrorist once known all over the world as Carlos the Jackal, already serving a life sentence pronounced in 1997 in France for the murder of two policemen and an informant in 1975, went on trial again this week in France – this time for terrorism charges, for which he faces another life sentence.</p>
<p>Describing himself to the court as “a professional revolutionary,” the 62-year-old Carlos <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8875034/Carlos-the-Jackal-trial-begins-with-a-smile-and-raised-fist-from-terrorist.html">launched into diatribes</a> against “racist” Israel and “Zionist exploiters,” drawing applause from supporters in the packed courthouse, to whom he blew kisses. He denied involvement in the crimes in question, from 1982-3 in France; but in an interview the day before, he boasted that the operations he plotted in his career resulted in 2000 deaths. As for the innocent victims, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/carlos-jackal-boasts-2-000-deaths-224812710.html">Carlos justified</a> their Marxist-inspired murders this way: “There were very few. I calculated that they were fewer than 10 percent. So out of 1,500 to 2,000 killed, there were not more than 200 civilian victims.” One of his defense attorneys asked the court instead to spare a thought for “victims” of Western-backed wars in Libya and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in Venezuela, Carlos was named after Vladimir Ilich Lenin, whom Carlos’ rabidly Marxist father called “the biggest man in all humanity” (Carlos’ younger brothers were named Vladimir and Lenin). “Humanity before the bomb is divided into two periods,” his father said, “before and after Lenin, not Christ who was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill man.”</p>
<p>The successful lawyer spoonfed ideology to his child with an almost religious devotion, setting the boy on a path of ideological hatred and terrorist violence early on. “Revolution is my supreme euphoria,” Carlos claimed. He joined the Venezuelan Communist Youth at 15, where he organized anti-government street marches and learned how to make Molotov cocktails and set cars on fire.</p>
<p>He was then supposedly sent to Cuba at the age of 17 to complete his education in a political indoctrination camp which also ran courses in sabotage techniques, run by Castro’s secret service and a local KGB boss. There he was trained in small arms, explosives, cryptography, falsification of documents, and other revolutionary skills.</p>
<p>Sent to London to study, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1970 at the age of 21, after further Marxist student activism and training in guerrilla warfare. An affluent young Latin playboy who enjoyed living large while plotting to rid the world of capitalist oppression, Carlos, whose motto was “life, duty, revolution,” idolized another murderer, Ché Guevara. He fumbled his way through an assassination attempt, then botched (but deadly nonetheless) grenade and bomb attacks in Paris, and two failed RPG attacks at Paris airports, before shooting dead two French detectives and fleeing to Beirut.</p>
<p>The unrepentant killer led a bold assault on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975 (for which he donned a beret in the style of Ché), a hostage-taking operation that catapulted him to international fame and earned him upwards of $20 million in ransom payout. But his failure to follow orders and to execute specific hostages cost him his membership in the PFLP.</p>
<p>Thereafter and throughout the ‘80s, Carlos connected with a variety of terrorist partners, including Saddam Hussein, to continue his reign of terror. He even spearheaded a plot to assassinate Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, only to have the Muslim Brotherhood beat him to it.</p>
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		<title>Islamist Strategy in a Nutshell</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/barry-rubin/islamist-strategy-in-a-nutshell/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamist-strategy-in-a-nutshell</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:15:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Barry Rubin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[collective punishment]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[diplomacy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economic sanctions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hatred]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hizballah]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The twisted and criminal rules by which our enemy plays -- and plans to destroy us.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/str.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-62351" title="str" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/str.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="306" /></a></p>
<p>In what follows, &#8220;we&#8221; represents such disparate forces as Hamas, Hizballah, Iran, Iraqi insurgents, al-Qaida, Syria, the Taliban, and others including radical Arab nationalists and now Turkish Islamists. These forces are not all alike or allied but do often follow a parallel set of rules quite different from how international affairs have generally been conducted.</p>
<p>&#8211;We&#8217;ll never give up. No matter what you do, we will continue fighting. No matter what you offer we will keep attacking you. Since you can&#8217;t win you should give up.</p>
<p>&#8211;We&#8217;re indifferent to pressure you put on us. We will turn this pressure against you. Against us, deterrence does not exist; diplomacy does not convince. Neither does the carrot buy us off, nor does the stick make us yield. There are no solutions that can end the conflict. You cannot win militarily nor make peace through diplomacy.</p>
<p>&#8211;If you set economic sanctions we&#8217;ll say you are starving our people in an act of &#8220;collective punishment.&#8221; Moreover, sanctions will cost you money and generate opposition among those who lose profits.</p>
<p>&#8211;In response to military operations we&#8217;ll attack your civilians. Casualties will undermine your internal support. We will try to force you to kill civilians accidentally. We won&#8217;t care but will use this to persuade many that you are evil. Thus, we will simultaneously murder your civilians and get you condemned as human rights&#8217; violators.</p>
<p>&#8211;If you try to isolate us we will use your own media and intellectuals against you. At times, we&#8217;ll hint at moderation and make promises of change. We won&#8217;t do so enough to alienate our own followers but enough to subvert yours. They will demand you engage us, which means you making concessions for nothing real in exchange.</p>
<p>&#8211;Talking to our own people, we foment hatred and demonize you. Speaking to the West, we will accuse you of fomenting hatred. We will hypocritically turn against you all the concepts you developed: racism, imperialism, failure to understand the &#8220;other,&#8221; and so on. These, of course, are our ideas but your feelings of guilt, ignorance about us, and indifference to ideology will make you not notice that fact.</p>
<p>&#8211;We will claim to be victims and &#8220;underdogs.&#8221; Because you are the stronger and more &#8220;advanced&#8221; that means you are the villains. We&#8217;re not held responsible for our deeds or expected to live up to the same standards. There is no shortage of, to quote Lenin, &#8220;useful idiots&#8221; who will echo our propaganda.</p>
<p>&#8211;Since our societies are weak, undemocratic, and have few real moderates, you will have to make deals with phoney moderates and dictatorial regimes weakened by corruption and incompetence.</p>
<p>&#8211;Even the less radical regimes, often our immediate adversaries, partly play into our hands. Due to popular pressure&#8211;plus their desire to mobilize support and distract attention from their own shortcomings&#8211;they trumpet Arab and Islamic solidarity. They denounce the West, blame all problems on Israel, and revile America, even as they accept your aid. They glorify interpretations of Islam not too far from ours. They cheer Iraqi insurgents, Hizballah, and Hamas. They don&#8217;t struggle against Iran getting nuclear weapons. They lay the basis for our mass support and recruits, as Lenin said selling us the rope to hang them as well as you.</p>
<p>&#8211;There&#8217;s no diplomatic solution for you, though you yearn to find one. There&#8217;s no military solution for you, whether you try that or not. You love life, we love death; you are divided, we are united; you want to get back to material satisfaction, we are dedicated revolutionaries. We will outlast you.</p>
<p>&#8211;Finally, our greatest weapon is that you truly don&#8217;t understand all the points made above. You are taught, informed, and often led by people who simply don&#8217;t comprehend what an alternative, highly ideological, revolutionary worldview means. In effect, we will try, and often succeed, to turn your &#8220;best and brightest&#8221; into the worst and dimmest who think you can persuade us, blame you for the conflicts, or expect that we will alter our course, and we will use those mistakes against you.</p>
<p>The above analysis seems pessimistic but actually is the opposite. Most of this strategy&#8217;s power is based on spreading illusions, depending on gullibility. Much of the rest relies on their enemies&#8217; psychological weaknesses.</p>
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		<title>The Day Somali Music Died</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/the-day-somali-music-died/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-day-somali-music-died</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:09:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why Somali Islamists have banned songs.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/radio.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58422" title="radio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/radio.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="295" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/">Pajamas</a></strong></p>
<p>Islamist insurgents have ordered Somali radio stations to stop playing music, a ban that went into effect last Tuesday. This order follows <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/13/somalia-radio-music-ban" target="_blank">the Islamists’ ban</a> on musical ringtones, movies, men without beards, football, women’s beauty salons, and bras. Those not adhering to the new ban risk a grave threat to their physical well-being, which includes getting assassinated or undergoing Sharia-based punishments. Such punishments include having your limbs amputated, your eyes gauged out, your tongue cut out, and your ears cut off.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/13/somalia-radio-music-ban" target="_blank">majority of radio stations</a> in southern and central Somalia stopped playing music and jingles on Tuesday. In Mogadishu, the capital, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/13/somalia-radio-music-ban" target="_blank">only the government-controlled Radio Mogadishu</a>, which is protected by African Union peacekeepers, and the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/13/somalia-radio-music-ban" target="_blank">UN-funded Radio Bar-Kulan</a>, whose studio is in Nairobi, resisted the order.</p>
<p>In order to understand this phenomenon, it is critical to keep in mind that for the totalitarian radical, <em>experiencing any kind of joy</em> means succumbing to the false consciousness that, in the utopian mindset, must be purged from the earth. Earthly joy distracts from the constant vigilance that is necessary to engage in revolutionary battle.</p>
<p>This is why Lenin refused to listen to music, since, as he explained, “it makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.” For Lenin, violent revolution was the priority — a priority endangered by the emotions music could induce.</p>
<p>Sayyid Qutb, one of Islamism’s godfathers, could relate to this vision all too well — and he serves as a perfect example of Islam’s rejection of the joyous celebration of <em>this </em>world and <em>this</em> life. In his work <em>Milestones</em>, Qutb demonizes the pursuit of individual interests and sensual pleasures — but above all sexual pleasure — and of personal happiness and fulfillment. The word “desire” reverberates through <em>Milestones</em> as a diabolical entity.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-day-somali-music-died/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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