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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Stalin</title>
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		<title>Russian Nativity Play: A Tale of Two Josephs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/oleg-atbashian/russian-nativity-play-a-tale-of-two-josephs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=russian-nativity-play-a-tale-of-two-josephs</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:40:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Oleg Atbashian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christmas play]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joseph]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nativity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[What happens to a Christmas play when Joseph Stalin is more known than the biblical Joseph.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Joseph.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248319" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Joseph-293x350.jpg" alt="Joseph" width="221" height="264" /></a>This &#8220;life imitates the People&#8217;s Cube&#8221; moment comes from St. Petersburg, Russia. What seems to be a spoof is a legitimate story via <a href="http://ria.ru/society/20141225/1040186712.html">RIA Novosti</a>, a Russian news agency. As a historical footnote, Nativity plays are a new concept in Russia, where Joseph Stalin is more known than the biblical Joseph, which occasionally causes Freudian slips like this one.</p>
<p>A St. Petersburg student mistakenly showed up dressed as Joseph Stalin to the Christmas play where he was supposed to play the biblical character of Joseph.</p>
<p>&#8220;Yesterday, my 12-year-old son participated in a school play. He told us ahead of time that he got the role of Joseph Stalin who is talking to some woman. It wasn&#8217;t a big surprise to us, as he has played parts in school plays before, and once he was even a watermelon,&#8221; wrote the student&#8217;s father Fyodor Gavrichenko on his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10205116943470500&amp;set=a.1318879219340.47466.1451565715&amp;type=1&amp;fref=nf">Facebook page</a>.</p>
<p>Gavrichenko said the whole family worked on making the costume &#8211; especially the grandmother, who sewed trouser stripes to the pants, found some old army boots, made a generalissimo mustache and a red folder with a big star.</p>
<p>They didn&#8217;t realize the mistake until the last moment because the play was in German as part of the boy&#8217;s foreign language class, and no one understood what the son&#8217;s lines meant. Apparently, the boy hadn&#8217;t been paying attention in class either. Instead of bringing the costume to school before the play, he showed the teacher its picture on his cell phone. The teacher thought it was a joke and said that the costume &#8220;rocks.&#8221;</p>
<p>The family sensed trouble when they saw their son&#8217;s classmate dressed as Magi. &#8220;Who are you?&#8221; asked the Magi. &#8220;I&#8217;m Mary&#8217;s husband… Joseph Stalin,&#8221; said the boy. His confidence shaken, the classmate went to the teacher: &#8220;Our Joseph turns out to be Stalin… Is that a good thing?&#8221; &#8220;What?&#8221; asked the teacher, as he pulled the curtain revealing the Nativity scene with Joseph and Mary. It was too late to change.</p>
<p>The plot thickened before the drama began. According to the father, Stalin&#8217;s outfit was a smash. The boy&#8217;s lines were accompanied by fits of hysterical laughter through the tears from other parents, some of whom reportedly fell off their chairs.</p>
<p>Those who can read the original Facebook post in Russian will notice that the father knows as little about the Nativity story as his son, confusing characters and their roles in the story. This is rather a norm in Russia, where erstwhile official atheism is only now being replaced by the official Orthodox Church. This St. Petersburg father couldn&#8217;t tell the shepherds from angels even if his son&#8217;s play weren&#8217;t in German. But at least he&#8217;s trying.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><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"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Stalin-Hitler Pact Turns 75</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/the-stalin-hitler-pact-turns-75/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-stalin-hitler-pact-turns-75</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2014 04:10:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[75]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anniversary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hitler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nazism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[pact]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239135</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why a memorial would be useful for Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/genocide_template_clip_image002.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239136" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/genocide_template_clip_image002.jpg" alt="genocide_template_clip_image002" width="306" height="267" /></a>In June, Western democratic leaders invited Vladimir Putin to the 70th anniversary of D-Day memorial in France, but there’s no good reason he should have been there. Putin is an autocrat, not a democrat. He laments the demise of the Soviet Union, a dictatorship that played no role in the D-Day operation. And since Putin is now conducting an incremental invasion of Ukraine, a different memorial would be more suitable. As it happens, this one is long overdue and remains shrouded in ignorance.</p>
<p>Seventy-five years ago, on August 23, 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany became allies through the Stalin-Hitler Pact. Joachim von Ribbentrop signed for Hitler and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed on behalf of Stalin. Molotov said that Hitlerism was “a matter of taste,” and that it was “not only senseless, but criminal” to wage war on Hitler “camouflaged as a fight for democracy.” Though often described as a “non-aggression pact,” the reverse was true.</p>
<p>The month after the Pact, Stalin and Hitler both invaded Poland, starting World War II. The Pact also gave Stalin control of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which he retained after the war, along with other conquests such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and what became the German Democrat Republic, the regime that made emigration an exciting experience.</p>
<p>While the pact was in effect, Soviet and Nazi intelligence agencies worked together and American Communists did everything in their power to keep the United States from coming to Britain’s aid. During the Pact, the Soviets murdered 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest. That came at the direct order of Stalin, as Russia now acknowledges. Less well known is the reality that Stalin also handed over German Jewish Communists to Hitler’s Gestapo. At the Nuremberg trials after the war, Joachim von Ribbentrop was convicted for signing the Pact while Molotov, who signed for Stalin, sat in the accuser’s chair. So Stalin and his gang got away with it.</p>
<p>A Nazi-Soviet Pact memorial would be a great opportunity for Putin to express his admiration for Stalin. Maybe he could provide some enlightenment on what happened to the Jews Stalin handed over to Hitler. And as a former KGB man, maybe he could bring out more details of Soviet-Nazi intelligence cooperation during the Pact. This could be a shining moment for Putin, but the memorial would also do others some good.</p>
<p>American educators, for example, could familiarize themselves with these events and gauge the depths of their ignorance and denial. Some might even decide to make the Stalin-Hitler Pact into a college course. That would tell students something they don’t know. American politicians would also benefit.</p>
<p>It’s a good bet that most of them, regardless of party, know little if anything about the Stalin-Hitler Pact. A 75th anniversary memorial would help educate them, and would be particularly relevant for Barack Obama, President of the United States. He could use the memorial to expand on one of his mentors.</p>
<p>That would be Frank Marshall Davis, an orthodox Stalinist of exceptional ferocity, with an absolutely sulfuric hatred of the United States. Davis joined the Communist Party USA after the Pact was signed, at the same time others were leaving the ranks, never to return. The Pact memorial would be an opportunity for Obama to provide a full profile of the man his handlers disguised simply as “Frank” in &#8220;Dreams From My Father.&#8221; If Frank Marshall Davis ever believed, said, or did anything with which Obama disagreed, a Stalin-Hitler Pact memorial would be the ideal time to set the record straight. After all, the Obama administration is the most transparent in history, with not a smidgeon of corruption. And of course, it would be another photo op he could use to raise funds. He could even bring along his travelling studio audience.</p>
<p>Former First Lady and current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could also benefit. One of her mentors is Robert Treuhaft, a Stalinist lawyer who joined the Communist Party USA after the Stalin-Hitler Pact and served faithfully in the USSR’s alibi armory. Hillary Clinton, who interned for Treuhaft, could use a Pact memorial to clarify Treuhaft’s career, and explain why he left the Communist Party in 1958, as he claimed. And she could go on record if she ever disagreed with anything her Stalinist mentor believed, said or did.</p>
<p>That could prove enlightening, but as with Benghazi she might just say “what does it matter?” Actually, it matters quite a bit, especially for someone who wants to be president, and the one who already is.</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>Reductio ad Hillaryum</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/reductio-ad-hillaryum/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reductio-ad-hillaryum</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 04:20:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hitler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why Hillary evoked memories of Hitler, but not Stalin, on the Ukrainian crisis.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/9430680.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220661" alt="9430680" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/9430680-439x350.jpg" width="307" height="245" /></a>Hillary Clinton has waded into the Ukrainian crisis by invoking history. Referring to Vladimir Putin’s plans to provide passports to Russians outside the nation’s borders, she said:</span></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/05/hillary-clinton-says-putins-action-are-like-what-hitler-did-back-in-the-30s/">“Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ‘30s.”</a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">She continued:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">All the Germans that were. . . the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people, and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The former First Lady, a likely presidential candidate in 2016, is right about Hitler’s tactics but she ignores the “back in the &#8217;30s” history most applicable to Ukraine. The shot-caller back then was Joseph Stalin, and he set out to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism, as Russian tyrants had done for ages. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/soft-pedaling-stalinist-genocide/">Stalin had a different plan &#8212; known as genocide</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In his forced collectivization campaign, Stalin raised Ukraine’s grain procurement quotas by 44 percent. That meant that there would not be enough grain to feed the people, but to make sure, Stalin also deployed regular troops and secret police units in a merciless war of attrition. And that condemned millions to death by starvation. That is genocide by any standard, but for Stalin it was a big success. As one of his commanders said, it showed the Ukrainians “who is the master here.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That’s what Stalin did “back in the &#8217;30s” but Hillary Clinton ignored it entirely. Neither did she mention that in 1939 Stalin signed a pact with Hitler, and that the two dictators jointly invaded Poland. Poles remember that, and Ukrainians remember Stalin all too well, unlike American politicians.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Back in the 1930s Americans were not well informed about Stalinist genocide because of deliberate deception by Walter Duranty of the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times. </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">At the very time Stalin was starving millions to death Duranty wrote that the Ukraine was a veritable cornucopia, flowing with milk and honey. In Duranty’s narrative famine was impossible under the scientific, planned economy of the USSR and the wise leadership of Stalin. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Duranty was fond of saying, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” and “I put my money on Stalin.” Something similar is going on now.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Vladimir Putin laments the demise of the USSR and on his watch Stalin has been experiencing a revival. During the recent winter Olympics at Sochi, where Stalin’s villa has been carefully maintained, a Russian student told NBC that “Stalin took Russia to next level.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Putin doubtless believes that and, as Hillary Clinton also said, Putin “believes his mission is to restore Russian greatness,” including control of former Soviet Union countries. “When he looks at Ukraine, he sees a place that he believes is by its very nature part of Mother Russia.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That is true and imperialism is the highest stage of Putinism. Hillary Clinton won’t stop it by talking about Hitler. President Obama won’t stop it by essentially giving Putin everything he wants. And leftist Democrats like Dennis Kucinich won’t stop it by </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/russia-ukraine-covert-operations-Dennis-Kuchinich/2014/03/04/id/556082">blaming the Ukraine crisis on the United States</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. That’s why in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, everybody is so nervous.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The D&#8217;Souza Arrest: Obama Adopts the Stalinist Style</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/the-dsouza-arrest-obama-adopts-the-stalinist-style/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-dsouza-arrest-obama-adopts-the-stalinist-style</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Jan 2014 05:58:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Arrest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[department of justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dinesh D'Souza]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[He isn’t killing his political opponents, but he is using state power to hound them.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Dinesh-DSouza-on-the-stu-taylor-show.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217344" alt="Dinesh-DSouza-on-the-stu-taylor-show" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Dinesh-DSouza-on-the-stu-taylor-show-450x330.jpg" width="315" height="231" /></a>I’m no fan of Dinesh D’Souza, but this is ridiculous.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Dinesh and I locked horns a few years back when he attacked me in his book The Enemy At Home, saying that books like mine should not be written. His line was that Islam was a religion of peace, that pious, morally upright Muslims had been driven to lash out against the U.S. because of the immorality of our pop culture, and that American conservatives should ally with what he termed “conservative Muslims” against their common, amoral Leftist foe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He and I debated this at CPAC in 2007 and on several radio shows, which grew increasingly heated as he charged me with “Islamophobia” (a term used by Muslim Brotherhood entities to stigmatize opposition to jihad terror) and invoked Saudi-funded Islamic apologist John Esposito as an authority.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The ensuing years have only shown more vividly what nonsense Dinesh’s position was, as “conservative Muslims” the world over wage jihad against America, and non-Muslims everywhere, more furiously than ever.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I rehash all this to show the falsehood of the line that has been circulating around in the Leftist media ever since Dinesh D’Souza was indicted: that only people who share D’Souza’s views are concerned about his indictment. As Tal Kopan put it in </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/right-wing-dinesh-dsouza-charges-102568.html" target="_blank">Politico</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, “In the wake of the indictment of conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza for alleged fraud, conservatives are crying foul that it is evidence of the Obama administration punishing its critics.”</span></p>
<p>Liberals should be as concerned about this as conservatives. Foes of jihad should be just as concerned about it as those who share D’Souza’s worries about “Islamophobia.” For the evidence is mounting that D’Souza has indeed been targeted for being a public and high-profile foe of Barack Obama – a development that should disquiet anyone who believes in the value of a stable, functioning republic with a loyal opposition. Pamela Geller notes <a title="" href="http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/persecution-of-obamas-political-foes/" target="_blank">here</a> that D’Souza is not remotely the only conservative or Obama critic who has been targeted for prosecution, while Obama’s Justice Department has turned a blind eye to illegal campaign contributions from Gaza during Obama’s 2008 campaign. And then there was the Obama Justice Department’s dismissal of the New Black Panthers voter intimidation case.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What’s more, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/25/9-violent-criminals-who-paid-less-for-bail-than-2016-filmmaker-dinesh-dsouza/" target="_blank">bail for D’Souza was set higher</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> than that given to several people accused of attempted murder, rape, assault, and the like. To whom is Dinesh D’Souza more dangerous than a man who sexually assaulted a teenager, or a man who kept old men captive in a filthy “dungeon”?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is something new in American politics. When I was six years old, I took notice of the presidential campaign, and asked my father who was the “good guy”: Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey. My father answered, “They’re both good men. They both want to do what is right for the country. They just disagree on what some of the right things to do may be.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That kind of respect for the opposition was commonplace in America back in 1968, but it has all but vanished now. I remember being taken aback in college by the obscene, relentless, vicious hatred that the Left directed toward Ronald Reagan – I was at that time entirely sympathetic with their disdain for him, but the frenzy with which they expressed it, their wild furious contempt, shocked me. And that was nothing compared to what they had in store for George W. Bush. The Democratic Party as a whole, along with the entire Leftist establishment, adopted the Alinskyite tactic of ridiculing, mocking and smearing their foes instead of engaging them on the level of ideas. Leftists now routinely portray their opponents as simultaneously stupid and evil, idiotic but crafty; it’s practically a reflex.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Decades of this have poisoned the well of American politics, and paved the way for Obama to take the demonization to the next level by unleashing the law on them. Arresting prominent members of the opposition is the kind of behavior we have seen from the likes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler; it is a hallmark of authoritarianism, not (until now) of politics in the United States. Of course, Stalin and Hitler didn’t stop with arresting their foes; they had them murdered as well, usually after a show trial. Obama is not doing that, but is even one step down this road one that Americans want to take?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Leftist pundits who are waving away concern over the arrest of D’Souza should bear in mind that the worm could turn. They could, for some reason or another, find themselves somewhere down the line opposing the Obama regime or some other presidency that apes Obama’s strategy. Then those who are claiming that only believers in crazy “conspiracy theories” are concerned about the Obama Justice Department’s (to say nothing of the Obama IRS) clear pattern of singling out opponents of the President for prosecution while ignoring more serious crimes among his friends may find themselves on the receiving end of this tactic.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Civility and mutual respect are in dire need of restoration in the American public square, but two have to play at that game, and only one side is even interested in the game at all. With the arrest of Dinesh D’Souza, Barack Obama has adopted a key feature of the Stalinist style of politics. Before he or anyone else gets the idea of adopting anything else from the authoritarians’ playbook, Americans – Left and Right – would be well-advised to stand together to repudiate him and these tactics once and for all, and resoundingly.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But by relentlessly demonizing their opponents, Barack Obama and his cohorts have almost certainly already made that impossible.</span></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>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>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trotsky]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Ninety years since a monster's death. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin45.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217038" alt="lenin45" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin45.jpg" width="277" height="358" /></a>Ninety years ago, on January 21, 1924, the founder of the Bolshevik party and of the Soviet Union, the undisputed coryphaeus of world communism, passed away. Lenin&#8217;s last year was nothing but an endless agony. Isolated in a mansion turned into a sanatorium of sorts, a former artistocratic residence located outside Moscow, Lenin was in fact a prisoner of  information strictly filtered by the Bolshevik leadership&#8217;s emissary, the Politburo member and the head of the party&#8217;s department of cadres, the Georgian-born revolutionary Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known as Stalin, and also, for his close friends, as Koba.</p>
<p>In his &#8220;Letter to the Congress,&#8221; dictated in December 1922 and January 1923 to his secretary, Lydia Fotieva, Lenin requested Stalin&#8217;s replacement as general secretary. Politburo members read the document but decided to keep it secret. Lenin&#8217;s demands were ignored, denied, forgotten. The old leader&#8217;s power had vanished. Paeans were of course dedicated to him, he was lionized in poems and songs, his name was frantically chanted, but he had ceased to be the real decision-maker regarding the great strategic choices and bureaucratic appointments. By that moment, all the key institutions of the totalitarian system had been set in place and made to function in order to preserve the Bolsheviks&#8217;  absolute hold on power. In the following years, the epigones, and Stalin more than anybody else, did their utmost to radicalize them and to exacerbate the exclusionary, genocidal logic of  Leninism.</p>
<p>Lenin&#8217;s disciples preferred to maintain Stalin in a crucial position. With very few exceptions, they failed to realize that he who controls the cadres controls the party and thereby the whole system. When they became aware of this situation, it was tragically late. They had lost the battle. The Old Bolsheviks had been eliminated from crucial positions, politically emasculated, replaced by robot-like creatures totally subjugated by the supreme leader, the <i>vozhd </i>(the Bolshevik equivalent of what the Nazi would call the <i>Fuhrer</i>). Among those, some became utterly influential as members of Stalin&#8217;s entorurage: Lazar Kaganovich, Georgi Malenkov, Lev Mekhlis, and Nikolay Yezhov.</p>
<p>In 1929, Stalin unleashed the &#8220;revolution from above&#8221; and implemented Lev Trotsky&#8217;s militaristic program minus the proposals to observe a modicum of intra-party democracy. Lenin&#8217;s final opposition to the bureaucratic elephantiasis and his critique of the mendacious propaganda system were totally discarded. The Leninist creed was sacralized and mummified in order to legitimize the power appetite of a profitocratic nomenklatura, a parasytical caste claiming to represent the proletarian interests and values.</p>
<p>At the moment of Lenin&#8217;s demise, the party elite was beset by a well-camouflaged, yet fierce struggle between those who wanted to inherit his mantle. Stalin established an alliance with Lev Kamenev, the head of the Moscow party organization and Lenin&#8217;s deputy at helm of the Council of People&#8217;s Commissars, and with Grigory Zinoviev, the leader of the Petrograd  (soon to be baptized Leningrad) organization and chairman of the Third International, also known as the Comintern, a supra-national institution created in 1919 to promote Leninist revolutionary ideas globally.</p>
<p>Thus, a troika emerged made up of Lenin&#8217;s epigones: Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin. They shared a common hostility to Lev Trotsky, a Politburo member, the first commander of the Red Army, and a firebrand revolutionary apostle. In his &#8220;Letter to the Congress,&#8221; in fact his political testament, Lenin had called Trotsky &#8220;the most brilliant member of the Central Committee.&#8221; The triumvirs hated Trotky&#8217;s revolutionary extravaganzas, his undisguised sense of superiority, and his presumed Bonapartist inclinations. As early as 1923, when Lenin was still alive, Zinoviev had launched a furious campaign in defense of  Bolshevism against the mortal peril, the extremely dangerous Trotskyist deviation. This was in fact a fabrication, a political chimera, a fantasy meant to vilify and demonize Trotsky. The Leninist cult found support also among the members of Nikolay Bukharin&#8217;s faction.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Bukharin, much younger than other Bolshevik luminaries, was the editor of  &#8220;Pravda&#8221; and widely seen as the paty&#8217;s main theorist. Trotsky&#8217;s alleged sins included his pre-1917 non-Bolshevism, his internationalist ardour perceived as irresponsibly adventurous, and a lack of trust in the capacity of the Soviet people to buld up socialism in one country. During those battles for power, Stalin postured as sober, modest, reliable, and non-vindictive. Zinoviev and Kamenev foolishly thought that they could control or at least guide him with their advice. They were dismally wrong. The troika disintegrated in 1925. Eleven year later, in the summer of 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were charged with surreal crimes, confessed their guilt, and were executed as &#8220;rabid dogs.&#8221; A former Menshevik, chief prosecutor Andrey Vyshinski, exulted in publicly humiliating these two former closest associates of the party&#8217;s founder.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-217004 aligncenter" alt="lenin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/lenin.jpg" width="528" height="397" /></a><strong>Stalinist mythologies: Lenin and Stalin, a painting by Aleksei Vasiliev.</strong></p>
<p>Stalin&#8217;s  funeral oration remains as an antological piece in the history of world communism. It was Koba&#8217;s opportunity to affirm himself publicly as the defunct leader&#8217;s genuine successor. Lenin&#8217;s cultic divinization became the foundation for the emerging communist logocracy. In this theocracy, Stalin acted as pontifex maximus, the only legitimate interpreter of the revolutionary gnosis. The myth of the infallible party, owner of truth, found its counterpart in the myth of the omniscient genius, the visionary leader inspired by the universally purifying, redemptive doctrine bequeathed by Lenin. Any attempt to undermine the ironclad unity of the party leadership represented a political crime and needed to be smashed ruthlessly. Factionalism was a lethal disease.</p>
<p>All these themes were saliently featured in Stalin&#8217;s oath delivered in that frigidly cold January in Moscow. That text contained, <i>in embryo</i>, the Stalinist gospel. In spite of its monotonous discursive repetitions, the litany evolved in a crescendo of quasi-mystical devotion. Each paragraph begins with the magical words: &#8220;Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us&#8230;&#8221; Lenin emerges from this hagiographic apotheosis as eternally alive, unperishable, immortal. Lenin has become the vivid presence of a fallacious, temporary absence. Medieval superstitions did thus triumph within a political and ideological movement proudly dedicated to materialist philosophical principles. One doesn&#8217;t need to endorse Isaac Deutscher&#8217;s approach to Bolshevism in order to agree with him that Stalinism was a blending of Marxism and primitive magic.</p>
<p>Far away from Moscow, undergoing medical treatment in the Caucasus, Leon Trotsky did not attend the funerals. The triumvirs telegraphed him that the ceremony could not be postponed until he could get back. In reality, they wanted to make sure that the symbolic transfer of the Leninist charisma would take place in the absence of the arch-rival, a political enemy that had to be compromised and neutralized.</p>
<p>For Stalin, Trotsky embodied the opposite of his own vision of the professional revolutionary: cosmopolite, multi-lingual, with immense literary and philosophical readings, a brilliant journalist, a masterful stylist, and an electrifying orateur. Antipodically situated, Dzhugashvili was dark, dull, somber, a taciturn introvert, pathologically suspicious of everyone and everything. Like Lenin, Trotsky belonged to an international fraternity of Central Europeans socialists. He had known Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and many others. He had read Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Lassale, and Marx in German. Yet, this superiority was misleading and did not help him in the terrible, unsparing competition with Stalin.  He committed a huge mistake by calling Dzhugasvili &#8220;the Central Committee&#8217;s most notorious mediocrity.&#8221; Narcissistic arrogance was Trotsky&#8217;s main weakness for which he was to finally pay with his life.</p>
<p>In his &#8220;Oath,&#8221; Stalin forcefully highlighted the themes that were to energize him in his endeavor to demonstrate that he outdid all his rivals in terms of deep dedication to Lenin&#8217;s desires:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and guard the purity of the great title of member of the Party. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill your behest with honor! &#8230; Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to guard and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall spare no effort to fulfill this behest with honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen with all our might  the alliance of the workers and peasant. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill with honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen and extend the union of republics. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to remain faithful to the principles of the Communist International. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall not spare our lives to strengthen and extend the union of the working people of the whole world&#8211;the Communist International!&#8221;</i> (see T. H. Rigby, editor, “Stalin”, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966, p. 40). It is noteworthy that Stalin addresses Lenin in present tense, thus suggesting that, as a famous slogan put it, &#8220;Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Dzhugashvili&#8217;s funeral oration consecrated, codified, and petrified the hegemonic narrative about Lenin&#8217;s immortality. It became the premise for the new myth of Stalin&#8217;s boundless genius and allowed him to masquerade as the only legitimate interpreter of the infallible Leninist doctrine. In brief, as long as the movement follows the Leninist compass, its members will be able to distinguish between North and South, between good and evil, between the road to triumph and the path to disaster. The banner of Leninism is invincible, as Stalin, Mao, Khrushchev, Castro, Che Guevara, Dolores Ibarruri, Nicolae Ceausescu, etc. would have it.</p>
<p>There is a consensus among Stalin&#8217;s great biographers, from Boris Souvarine and Robert Conquest to Robert C. Tucker and Robert Service, that all these pledges, uttered with truly religious intensity, were later abandoned, betrayed, abjured. Yet, this does not mean that at the moment he delivered his farewell address, Stalin was lying. In his mind, most likely, he remained faithful, until his very last day, to the creed he proclaimed in that January of the great separation, to the mystical absolutism of the vanguard party, the predestined instrument Reason did invent in order to achieve its goals in History and rescue humanity from the valley of tears.</p>
<p><i>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author, most recently, of  ”The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century” (University of California Press), a book dedicated to the memory of Leszek Kolakowski, Tony Judt, and Robert C. Tucker. More on this book in the </i><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/"><i>dialogue with Jamie Glazov</i></a><i>.   </i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.  </b><i><br />
</i><i></i></p>
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		<title>Dennis Rodman and Other Stalinist Fellow Travelers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/dennis-rodman-and-other-stalinist-fellow-travelers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dennis-rodman-and-other-stalinist-fellow-travelers</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2014 05:12:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dennis Rodman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jung Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trip]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[An ugly American tradition. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/140108080325-01-rodman-0108-horizontal-gallery.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-215026" alt="140108080325-01-rodman-0108-horizontal-gallery" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/140108080325-01-rodman-0108-horizontal-gallery-446x350.jpg" width="268" height="210" /></a>The antics of former NBA player Dennis Rodman in North Korea have puzzled many observers but should come as no surprise. Rodman is actually part of a longstanding American tradition of propping up Stalinist regimes at the nadir of their brutality. It all started with Stalin himself.</p>
<p>“One must not make a god of Stalin. He was too important for that.” That is the sort of thing one cannot make up. It comes from <i>I Change Worlds</i> (1935) by Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist who helped found the <i>Moscow News</i>, an English-language Soviet publication staffed by American Communist women “of quite exceptional horror,” as the <i>Manchester Guardian’s</i> Moscow correspondent Malcolm Muggeridge put it. He wrote that Strong bore an expression of such overwhelming stupidity it actually gave her a rare kind of beauty.</p>
<p>Strong also wrote for such prestigious publications as the <i>Atlantic</i>, and remained a faithful member of Stalin’s alibi armory, denying or defending every atrocity. That got her no seniority with the boss and in 1949 Stalin had Strong arrested and charged her with espionage. She duly transferred her allegiance to Mao Tse-Tung and lived in Communist China until her death in 1970.</p>
<p>While Strong was defending Stalin, Muggeridge broke the story of Stalin’s <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/famine.html">forced famine in the Ukraine</a>, which claimed millions of lives. But according to Walter Duranty of the <i>New York Times</i> the Ukraine at the time was a veritable cornucopia, flowing with milk and honey. In Duranty’s narrative famine was impossible under the scientific, planned economy of the USSR and the wise leadership of Stalin. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize and later admitted he knew the full horror of the famine all along. His favorite expressions included: “I put my money on Stalin,” and “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”</p>
<p>For more American adulation of the USSR see Paul Hollander’s <i>Political Pilgrims</i>, which includes the Soviet colony of Cuba. Americans lining up to pay homage to Fidel Castro included New Left stalwart Abbie Hoffman, who said of Fidel: “He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight, the crowd immediately is transformed.”</p>
<p>Castro tortured poets, persecuted homosexuals and ran a regime so repressive that people flee at the first opportunity on anything that floats. That repression proved no object to American celebrity adulators such as Robert Redford and Oliver Stone. The same crew, with celebrities like Martin Sheen, were big fans of the Sandinista junta in Nicaragua as it attacked the press and imprisoned dissidents. But Castro and the Sandinistas are no match for the fathomless depravity of North Korea.</p>
<p>As former <i>Washington Post</i> East Asia bureau chief Blaine Harden noted in <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/north-korea-campout/"><i>Escape From Camp 14</i></a>, North Korea’s forced labor camps “have now existed twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps.” Since the regime works prisoners into their graves, death camps would be an accurate description. The regime also eliminates “enemies of class” through three generations, as Kim Il-Sung proclaimed. With Stalin’s encouragement, he invaded South Korea in 1950. But as American leftist icon I.F. Stone explained in <i>Hidden History of the Korean War</i>, South Korea invaded the North.</p>
<p>North Korea’s current Stalinist-in-chief is Kim Jong-un. According to reports in a Chinese state-backed newspaper, Kim Jong-un recently had his uncle and five of his aides stripped naked and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/kim-jonguns-executed-uncle-jang-song-thaek-stripped-naked-fed-to-120-dogs-as-officials-watched-9037109.html">fed to a pack of hungry dogs</a>. According to other reports the aides were executed with anti-aircraft machine guns.</p>
<p>The North Korean regime also threatens the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons and aids terrorist groups. None of that matters to Dennis Rodman, who bows to Kim Jong-un, croons “Happy Birthday” to the dictator, and charges that one of his victims, American Kenneth Bae, actually deserves his 15-year sentence.</p>
<p>Whether he knows it or not, Dennis Rodman follows the American tradition of abetting Stalinist regimes at the very depths of their depravity. The worst regime gets probably the most buffoonish apologist. They didn’t call him “The Worm” for nothing.</p>
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		<title>Empire of Madness: Caligula in Pyongyang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/empire-of-madness-caligula-in-pyongyang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=empire-of-madness-caligula-in-pyongyang</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:48:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jang Song-thaek]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Jong-Un]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[purge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The North Korean nomenklatura braces itself; no one is safe.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lp.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213351" alt="lp" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lp-450x281.jpg" width="315" height="197" /></a>North Korea is Stalin&#8217;s ultimate dream come true. It is a most dangerous actor in world politics and a despicable tyranny where reason and moderation are treated as mortal enemies. Blind obedience is mandatory and so is infinite subservience to the Supreme Leader, the administrator of truth, memory, and universal poverty. It is the most hermetic regime in the world, an armed-to-the-teeth totalitarian despotism whose possession of  nuclear weapons  gives nightmares to all those who know how the Kim dynasty and its sycophants operate. It is, in fact, as the recent bloody purges made clearer than ever, a huge concentration camp run by a lunatic commander.</p>
<p>The mysterious, baby-faced monster Kim Jong-un has unleashed a Stalin-style onslaught on his own acolytes. It is like a re-enactment of the Soviet Great Purge when Stalin got rid of the whole Bolshevik Old Guard. It is not an exaggeration to predict more bloodshed to follow. No doubt the North Korean nomenklatura is now frightened and  humiliated. No one is safe in this universe of paranoid delusions and rampant suspicions.</p>
<p>The propaganda machine indulges in hysterical harangues against the alleged traitors, despicable vermin, &#8220;repugnant human scum,&#8221; &#8220;nauseating reptiles&#8221; and other surreal zoological metaphors. Until recently the regime&#8217;s number two, lionized as a wise advisor to the satrap, Kim Jong-un&#8217;s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was killed after having been swamped into an ocean of  morbid accusations. Is this the abysmal end or the frightening beginning of young Kim&#8217;s absolute rule?</p>
<p>As Nicholas Eberstadt has pointed out, Kim Jong-un&#8217;s grandfather and father avoided dealing mortal blows to the members of the highest communist aristocracy. They practiced a dynastic communism that blended nationalist mysticism with ferocious Stalinism. The Juche doctrine means the right of the communist Lidero Maximo to act as arbitrarily and erratically as he wishes. Initially, the enigmatic &#8220;Dear Leader,&#8221; a latter-day Caligula with a Swiss high-school background and the face of a hieratic, opaque deity, seemed to be just a puppet manipulated by his ostensibly omnipotent aunt and uncle. He has finally escaped their suffocating grip, or at least this seems to be his conviction. He acts ruthlessly and in perfect cold blood. Will he continue the carnage or will he be himself liquidated by an equally brutal backlash from those whom he wants to eliminate? Will this grotesque farce culminate in a settling of accounts that could somehow restore a minimal rationality in this empire of madness? What card will China play?</p>
<p>When Kim Jong-un was ritualistically anointed his father&#8217;s successor two years ago, and the world media were disseminating those mind-boggling images with teenagers hitting their heads and old ladies screaming as loud as possible their desperation, I predicted that the struggle for power would exacerbate to the point of assassinations and show trials. What is at stake is absolute power within an absolutist regime, a red monarchy if ever one was. For the time being, the &#8220;beloved aunt&#8221; and estranged wife of the executed &#8220;traitor,&#8221; has managed to survive. It is not sure at all that the vindictive Kim Jong-un will spare her. The logic of  unbound Stalinism is an ever-growing, endless purge. Still, it is hard to know whether in the dark corridors of the North Korean pyramid of power some of the alleged loyalists are not sharpening their daggers. This is not Hamlet in Pyongyang, but rather Richard III or Caligula.</p>
<p>I have written a lot on national Stalinism and dynastic communism in Romania, North Korea, and Cuba. There are striking similarities between Nicolae Ceausescu&#8217;s and Kim Il-sung&#8217;s experiments. In 1986 I published in the journal &#8220;Orbis&#8221; a study titled “Byzantine Rites, Stalinist Follies: The Twilight of  Dynastic Socialism in Romania.”  I explored the wedding between unbound Stalinism and nationalist delirium, the mixing of autarchic narcissism and ideological paranoia, the relations between party elite, secret police and army within a decrepit dictatorship.  I am tempted to write now an article titled  “Confucian Rites, Stalinist Follies: The Twilight of  Dynastic Communism in North Korea.” Ideological dictatorships, also known as ideocracies or logocracies, cultivate miracle, myth, and mystery (a point made by historian Fritz Stern).</p>
<p>In the case of North Korea, the miracle and the myth are totally exhausted. The mystery remains and this is most alarming.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>British Labor and the Gulag</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/giles-udy/british-labor-and-the-gulag/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=british-labor-and-the-gulag</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2013 04:10:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Giles Udy]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George Bernard Shaw]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mass murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209454</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[More evidence of the Left's devotion to mass murder for the greater good. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Shaw_George.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209461" alt="Shaw_George" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Shaw_George.jpg" width="324" height="494" /></a>The British Left today presents itself as the defender of minorities and the vulnerable. Not so long ago, though, the British Labor Government’s enthusiasm for Soviet Communism led it to support the regime’s persecution of peasants and religious believers. When hundreds of thousands died in the Gulag, or ended up slave laborers in the camps, they preferred to turn a blind eye to their Russian comrades’ crimes.</p>
<p>The Labor Party welcomed the Russian Revolution of October 1917: C.T. Cramp, the railwaymen’s leader and Labor Chairman, proclaimed in 1924, ‘Capitalism has got to be smashed as it is smashed in Russia. Those of us who are revolutionaries are determined to do it.’</p>
<p>Throughout the 1920s a succession of squabbles and disagreements between Labor and British and Soviet Communists failed to dim Labor enthusiasm for what Fenner Brockway, soon to be a Labor Member of Parliament (MP) and a future peer, called the ‘heroic achievements in building up the Workers’ State’.</p>
<p>In May 1927 a police raid on the Soviet trade mission in London uncovered stolen military documents, and the Conservative Government expelled the entire Soviet trade and diplomatic missions. Labor MPs were outraged. In the House Commons, James Maxton MP,  a leading Labor MP, left the House in no doubt about where his allegiance lay: ‘My sympathies are absolutely with the ultimate aims and objects of the Russian Soviet Government.’</p>
<p>A.J. Cook, the miners’ leader, whose union had received over £250,000 ($11m today) from the Soviets during the General Strike, expressed similar sentiments, this time adding a hint of menace: ‘I am proud of Russia, and I owe more allegiance to Russian workers than to Mr Baldwin (the Conservative Prime Minister) and his government. The Labor Party and the trade union movement is out to do what Russia has done. It is not for me to say just how it will be accomplished, for the necessities of the moment will decide what action we shall take to achieve that end, but undoubtedly it will be accomplished.’</p>
<p>Labor MPs responded to the expulsions by hosting a lunch in the Soviets’ honor in the House of Commons, presided over the President of the British trade union movement. A few days later an official Labor delegation went to Victoria Railway Station to bid them farewell. At its head was Arthur Henderson, twice party leader, who would be in office two years later as Foreign Secretary (minister) in a new Labor Government.</p>
<p>By 1929, the year that Labor won the British general election, Stalin was setting about formalizing the Soviet penal system into what has now become known as the Gulag and brought in punitive new measures to eradicate religion, nationalize agriculture and neutralize the countryside as a base for future counter-revolution.</p>
<p>Over the next two years 1.5 million peasant smallholders (the <em>kulaks</em>)<i> </i>were turned out of their homes at just a few hours’ notice, loaded onto cattle trucks and deported to the Far North and Siberia.  Forty thousand, a quota determined before the operation began, never made it to the trains and were shot out of hand.</p>
<p>Hundreds of thousands of kulaks – men, women, and children – were dumped in the isolated forests of North West Russia, under military guard, where they were forced to cut timber for the export market. A significant proportion of it (worth $500m annually at today’s prices) went to Britain.</p>
<p>Horrifying accounts first began to surface of the persecution of Russian religious believers – shootings, arrests, and the dynamiting of religious buildings. In Britain, a national campaign quickly sprang up to persuade the Government to put pressure on the Soviets to halt the persecution. Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called a day of prayer which was observed by millions around the world and became the single biggest protest against Soviet Communism in history. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald wrote angrily to Lang complaining that the church was meddling in politics. Lang merely replied that he had not thought of consulting the Prime Minister before calling his church to prayer.</p>
<p>The Left fought back. Agitators constantly disrupted the many protest meetings taking place up and down the country. In the Commons Labor MPs kept up a stream of counter-allegations and denials. George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright and staunch Socialist, wrote to a leading newspaper with eleven other Socialist leaders, insisting that the stories of religious persecution in Russia were ‘malicious inventions’ driven by ‘class hostility.’</p>
<p>In the summer of 1930 the first British timber ships returned from Russia, bearing eyewitness accounts of the plight of the persecuted believers and kulaks. Over the next few months British diplomats confirmed that the north west of Russia had become little short of a vast prison camp. In the port of Archangel alone there were 10,000 prisoners loading timber.</p>
<p>But these dispatches went unknown outside government circles. Conservative MPs could not get the story into the public domain until January 1931 when sworn statements from escaped prisoners began to appear in the press. Labor MPs insisted they were forged. Ramsay Macdonald said the evidence was inadequate to halt the trade. In the Commons, Foreign Secretary Henderson maintained that an existing law prohibiting the import of the products of prison labour could not be used because Soviet labor camps could not be classed as ‘prisons.’ Opposition offers of co-operation to redraft the legislation were ignored.</p>
<p>Protesters managed to force the subject to be raised in just one debate in the House of Commons, on March 25<sup>th</sup>. George Strauss, a future Labor minister dismissed the humanitarian appeals as a cloak to support an attack on the Soviets ‘put forward on political grounds with political motives.’ Instead, he insisted, ‘the conditions of the prisoners in Russia are very much more favorable than in our English prisons.’</p>
<p>William Graham, the Trade Minister, gave the main speech for the Government. Insisting, contrary to his civil servants’ briefing notes, that ‘no evidence of any kind’ had been tendered to support the Conservatives’ ‘extravagant’ claims, he concluded:</p>
<blockquote><p>[The Soviets] are engaged in a vast and very remarkable economic experiment, and what we have always said is that they are entitled in their own way to pursue that experiment without outside interference … I say, let the experiment continue. Let us give all the co-operation we can.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Labor Government fell that summer and was defeated in the autumn in the biggest landslide in British electoral history. The popular story, much repeated by the Left today, is of MacDonald’s ‘betrayal’ of the Left and of his party. While there may be substance to allegations of his vanity and social climbing, the same cannot be said for his austere Chancellor of the Exchequer and fellow ‘deserter’ Philip Snowden. Snowden is similarly demonized today, particularly for his comments that the Labor Manifesto of 1931 (its election program) was little short of ‘Bolshevism run mad.’</p>
<p>But he might have had a point. If Labor had won the 1931 election its support for the ‘Great Experiment’ in Russia and radical Socialist revolution at home would have continued unabashed. Note the words of G.D.H. Cole, one of the most influential British Socialist intellectuals of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century: ‘It will be best’, he wrote in 1933, ‘as soon as Parliament has conferred on the Government the necessary emergency powers, for it to meet as seldom as possible, leaving the Socialists to carry on.’  British trades unions would also be replaced – by ‘local soviets.’</p>
<p>Most ominous, as Cole sought to explore the shape of a future Socialist Britain, was his tacit support for Communist repression:</p>
<blockquote><p>In seeking for a basis for [a] new instrument of socialization Communists repudiate not only the capitalist conception of the rights of property but also the capitalist conception of individual liberty … Critics of Russian institutions in capitalist countries are apt to dwell very greatly on the alleged suppression of liberty in Russia to-day, and to base their arguments on the disappearance of the characteristic liberties associated in their minds with the liberal-parliamentary State. But though the Soviet system in its present working does undoubtedly restrict individual liberty very seriously in certain directions … it has resulted in other directions in an enormous extension of the liberties of the great mass of the Russian people.</p></blockquote>
<p>It amounted to the introduction of a police state.</p>
<p>How far this new society might to go to create its new civilization was explored most starkly by George Bernard Shaw when he proposed the state execution of the politically undesirable:</p>
<blockquote><p>Every person who owes his life to civilized society… should appear at reasonable intervals before a properly qualified jury to justify his existence, which should be suddenly and painlessly terminated<i> </i>if he fails to justify it, and is either a positive nuisance or more trouble than he is worth … A great part of the secret of the success of Russian Communism is that every Russian knows that unless he makes his life a paying proposition for his country then he will probably lose it.  I am proud to have been the first to advocate this most necessary reform<em>.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Shaw repeated the call a number of times between 1921 and 1938 and even appealed for the scientific community to develop a painless poison gas so the exterminations could be carried out ‘humanely.’</p>
<p>In 2006 the Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair dedicated a window in honor of Shaw and his colleagues at the prestigious London School of Economics. ‘A lot of the values they stood for,’ he said, ‘would be very recognizable in today’s Labor party.’</p>
<p>Blair couldn’t have been more mistaken. History has been sanitized.  In fact they supported, excused or denied some of the greatest crimes against humanity in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century, and praised Stalin, one of its worst tyrants. Today they are honored.  Meanwhile, P.G. Wodehouse, the author of the Jeeves stories, is still has to be fully rehabilitated for his foolish decision to broadcast a mildly comic piece about life while he was held in Nazi internment. The contrast is a stark one.</p>
<p><i>Giles Udy is a British historian who has spent the last seven years researching government archives to uncover the full story outlined in this article. He is finishing a book which deals with this subject and the wider topic of the influence of Soviet Communism in the British Labor Party between the wars.</i></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Josh Brewster</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Jamie Glazov</strong> about the Left&#8217;s romance with tyranny and terro</em>r:</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/SNJg6w6CB0o" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></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>Collaborating with Nazis in the Counterjihad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/collaborating-with-nazis-in-the-counterjihad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=collaborating-with-nazis-in-the-counterjihad</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/collaborating-with-nazis-in-the-counterjihad/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Oct 2013 15:06:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[counterjihadist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[golden dawn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207363</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If the Counterjihad isn't for a free society, then it stops being a grand struggle and becomes a choice of evils. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/hitler-stalin-2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-207364" alt="hitler-stalin-2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/hitler-stalin-2-450x310.jpg" width="450" height="310" /></a></p>
<p>Regarding the invasion of the USSR, Churchill famously said, &#8220;If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.&#8221;</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve been playing the enemy of my enemy is my friend game for a while now. It&#8217;s how we got mixed up in Afghanistan and Iraq for example. It&#8217;s why Muslim Brotherhood operatives and assorted Islamists found safe harbor in the West. Because at least they were Anti-Communist.</p>
<p>We allied with the Communists to beat the Nazis. And then we allied with the Islamists to beat the Communists. And what now, allying with the Nazis?</p>
<p>All our decisions were probably strategically necessary. Maybe we had to deal with Stalin to keep Western Europe free, even if that meant losing Eastern Europe. Did we really have to sign on with the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Mujaheddin to beat the Soviet Union? In retrospect, probably not. We didn&#8217;t really gain anything from the Green Belt strategy and the Islamization of the West may end up destroying us.</p>
<p>And now? Well that&#8217;s the question.</p>
<p>There are a lot of things that brought this on. The EDL situation. Golden Dawn. The descent of the Islam vs. Europe blog into Neo-Nazi rants.</p>
<p>But it&#8217;s a lot more than that. It&#8217;s a necessary dialogue about how we can fight evil and still keep our souls. How we can fight evil without becoming evil.</p>
<p>EDL&#8217;s leaders apparently couldn&#8217;t cope with the presence of some Nazis within the organization and decided to leave. That may or may not have been the wrong choice. I&#8217;m not on the scene. To me the EDL looked like a promising organization, but I did see the BNP dissolve back to the same idiotic habits of the far right, after a promising start, and take their support down with it. I don&#8217;t think the EDL is going down that road, but there are certainly people who would like to take it down that road.</p>
<p>In Europe, the line is often thinner than it is in the United States. The left likes to depict any patriotic or nationalistic group as Nazis. And actual Nazis like to sneak into those groups. And there&#8217;s a middle line. People who are capable of swinging one way or another. Who start going, &#8220;Well, maybe Hitler had a point.&#8221; and &#8220;What we need is another Thousand Year Reich.&#8221;</p>
<p>Breivik exemplifies the kind of loose figure who seizes on random ideas from the Counterjihad in pursuit of an entirely different agenda. Breivik wasn&#8217;t really against Islam, he occasionally spoke of allying with it. What he had were bizarre Hitlerian dreams of taking over Europe and killing anyone he didn&#8217;t like.</p>
<p>There are Breiviks who are drawn in. Men who don&#8217;t oppose Islamization because they value freedom, but who use Islamization as a convenient rallying cry for their equally horrifying plans for slave lands and mass murder.</p>
<p>They&#8217;re not necessarily Nazis. They may not have even read Mein Kampf. But their thinking is very much along those same lines. Take over, kill everyone and build a totalitarian utopia.</p>
<p>They&#8217;re not likely to succeed or even get close, but their very presence destroys the contrast that makes the Counterjihad work. If the Counterjihad isn&#8217;t for a free society, but something that is borderline indistinguishable from the visions of a Qaradawi or a Tariq Ramadan, except without the Islam part, then it stops being a grand struggle and becomes a choice of evils.</p>
<p>Hitler and Stalin had more in common with each other than they did with any of their victims. Breivik had more in common with Jihadists. And he knew it so well that he thought about working for them.</p>
<p>The enemies of a free society where people can think for themselves and live their own lives have more in common with each other than they do with us. And they are bound to turn on us.</p>
<p>And their presence also lulls us into forgetting what they are. The alliance with the USSR made it difficult for many people to shift gears and understand that Communism and Stalin were still evil. The alliance with the Islamists has made that shift difficult even to this day. What we forget is that when we ally with evil&#8230; we take that evil into ourselves. And we lose the sensitivity to evil that we once had. It stops seeming evil.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t have any easy answers to offer. Everyone will make their own decisions. That&#8217;s the essence of a free society. But I have to wonder how long we can keep allying with one evil against another only to then have to fight the evil that we allied with.</p>
<p>Is there a way to break the cycle?</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t know if there are any answers, but maybe it&#8217;s a conversation worth having.</p>
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		<title>Stalin, Putin, and the Challenges of Memory</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/stalin-putin-and-the-challenges-of-memory/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stalin-putin-and-the-challenges-of-memory</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Sep 2013 04:42:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[david satter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leszek Kolakowski]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Václav Havel]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205704</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The high price of denial.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/it.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-205710" alt="it" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/it-224x350.jpg" width="224" height="350" /></a>Polish thinker Leszek Kolakowski (often called the philosopher of &#8220;Solidarity) saw the post-communist landscape as marred by enduring Leninist legacies. He called these debris &#8220;moving ruins,&#8221; referring to the avatars of the old elites, the absence of moral clarity, and the persistence of ideological and cultural relics of the old regime. The first stage of the revolutions of 1989-1991 was dominated by an exhilarating sense of recovered liberty and the widespread belief that authoritarianism had been irreversibly defeated. Sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt accurately  described those revolutions as non-utopian, non-ideological, non-eschatological. As a rule, they were non-violent eruptions of civic discontent against the supremacy of lies and the rampant cynicism of the communist bureaucracies. The thrust of the mass protests was favoring the dissident philosophy of freedom, civility, and  dignity.</p>
<p>The initial expectations were high and very few were able to foresee the advent of ugly forms of populism, exclusiveness, cynicism, and intolerance that Vaclav Havel diagnosed as the post-communist nightmare. Bolshevism seemed defunct and political scientists celebrated the triumph of liberal revolutions. This euphoria has dissipated in recent years, leaving behind it a sense of discomfort, discomfiture, and disillusionment. One of the major problems lies in the failure of these societies (especially in the former Soviet Union, but also in Romania, Bulgaria, even Poland and the Czech Republic) to reckon with the totalitarian past.</p>
<p>For those who want to understand the avatars of post-Soviet Russian politics and the failure of both elites and society to come to terms with the traumatic Bolshevik past, David Satter’s insightful book <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/russia-and-the-communist-past/"><i>It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past</i> </a>( New Haven &amp; London, Yale University Press, 2012) is a truly illuminating guide. A veteran observer of Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, Satter is both a gifted journalist and a chronicler of intellectual and political currents. His main argument is that a democratic polity in which the individual is treated decently and where human rights are taken seriously cannot be erected on amnesia, mystification and blatant lies. The crucial question he deals with is how Russians process the Stalinist legacies, how and why the <i>generalissimo</i>’s ghost continues to haunt collective memories and public imagination. Splendidly researched and engagingly written, this book offers invaluable vignettes of various reactions to the still unprocessed remembrance of the totalitarian times. Putin’s “managed democracy,” in fact a creeping authoritarianism with an eclectic and questionable constellation of ideological claims (statism, Eurasianism, nationalism), is rooted precisely in this perpetuation of denial.</p>
<p>Formed in the secretive culture of the KGB, “Czar Vladimir” remains deeply attached to the possessed founder of the Bolshevik secret police (the <i>Cheka</i>), Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat who decided to give his early dream to become a priest and turned instead into a fanatic Leninist. The chapter dealing with the ongoing efforts to lionize this torturer is particularly revealing and deeply disturbing. In the same vein, Satter highlights the endeavors to instill a sense of admiration for Yuri Andropov, himself an adamant Leninist, who, as chairman of the KGB in the 1970s and 1980s, supervised the persecution of Soviet dissidents and the neutralization of any form of opposition.</p>
<p>Understandably, the Putin regime finds in such unsavory figures examples of civic dedication and political idealism. At the same time, independent researchers and journalists who want to rescue memory remain isolated and seem to engage in quixotic searches for truth. In this respect, Satter’s book is not only an excellent report of the unsettling status of memory and moral justice in contemporary Russia, but also an effort to support the beleaguered activists of the “Memorial” society who refuse to endorse the official policies of forgetfulness.</p>
<p>For Satter, Russia is a country “that has not been willing to face the full truth about Communism.” After the inconclusive attempts under Boris Yeltsin to organize a trial of the Communist Party, things have moved in a different direction: the mythologies of the Soviet times have been restored and those who continue to insist on the atrocities of the past have been increasingly marginalized. No surprise therefore that Vyacheslav Nikonov, a political commentator with close ties to the Putin leadership and Stalin’s Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s grandson, puts it bluntly: “People are not interested in the past. Any attempt to dig into the past evokes only irritation.” It remains to be seen who are those who repudiate this reckoning with the past and what are their motivations. How does one explain that two decades after the collapse of the USSR there has been no expression of state repentance for the millions of innocent individuals murdered by the Soviet regime?</p>
<p>I agree with Satter that no lawful state, no functional and credible democracy can exist if the lawlessness of the past remains ignored or is systematically trivialized. Using all kinds of rationalizations, the Russians have avoided the coming to terms with the appalling past. The result of this depressing situation is that Russia’s morality is beset by cynicism and widespread contempt for values cherished by the dissidents: civility, dignity, memory. The Russian state sees little reason to cultivate the anti-totalitarian ethos. The Orthodox Church, with its own history of martyrdom, but also of complicity, tries to annex the memory of the victims to its own refurbished self-image of unmitigated resistance to Communism.</p>
<p>One of the best chapters in Satter’s book deals with the appeals of communism, an enduring and still enigmatic topic. I am not sure that by the end of the 1970s Bolshevism was still an energizing Messianic project. In fact, it was rather a stultified, hollow dogma. The original dream of world revolution had been abandoned in favor of more traditional imperial expansionism. Still, for decades, communism played the role of a secular religion, proposing the main reference points, the moral compass, for generations. Its genuine amoralism was shrouded in rhetorical proclamations of equality and fraternity. It was bogus, but exhilarating bogus. This quasi-ethical cement is now regretted by many who prefer to remember the victory over Nazi Germany rather than the horrors of the Gulag. Compared to the experiences of political justice in East-Central Europe, Russia has basically shunned its moral recovery. The reasons for this failure are definitely linked to the weakness of political will. Putin confessed admiration for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but the state-backed history textbooks published with his blessing have been crude attempts to condone the mass terror of the 1930s. If Russia is to become a genuine democratic community, it will have to finally address the issues so poignantly explored in this book.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, a few years ago Putin lamented the collapse of the USSR as &#8220;the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century&#8221;. For him and his former KGB cronies, pluralism remains the enemy. In this respect, Putin is more Stalin&#8217;s than Yeltsin&#8217;s heir. His ideology has little to do with Bolshevik mythologies, yet his mindset remains authoritarian and inimical to individual rights. His worldview is conspiratorial, sectarian, militaristic, and exclusive, a prolongation of Lenin&#8217;s Manichean political cosmology.</p>
<p><strong>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author most recently of <i>T<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/">he Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century</a></i> (University of California Press, 2012).</strong></p>
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		<title>Laudatory Tributes for Saul Landau</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ron-radosh/laudatory-tributes-for-saul-landau/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=laudatory-tributes-for-saul-landau</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2013 04:45:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ron Radosh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Saul Landau]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S. newspapers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=204323</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Major U.S. newspapers celebrate a supporter of repressive communist regimes.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/sl.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-204327" alt="sl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/sl-450x298.jpg" width="315" height="209" /></a><strong>Visit <a href="http://pjmedia.com/">PJMedia.com</a></strong><a href="http://pjmedia.com/">.</a></p>
<p>Last Monday, Stalinist-Castroite filmmaker Saul Landau died at his home in Alameda, California. His death inspired major obituaries in our country’s leading mainstream newspapers, including the <em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/activist-and-filmmaker-saul-landau-dies-at-77/2013/09/10/43578542-1729-11e3-804b-d3a1a3a18f2c_story.html">Washington Post</a></em>, the <em><a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-fidel-filmmaker-saul-landau-dies-20130910,0,1953654,full.story">Los Angeles Times</a></em>, and, as expected, the <em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/arts/saul-landau-maker-of-films-with-leftist-edge-dies-at-77.html?ref=obituaries">New York Times</a></em>. If there is one thing you can count on old media for, it is that they will run laudatory tributes whenever a member in good standing of the far Left passes.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if during the Academy Awards, when his photo is flashed and his name mentioned in the tribute to those who left the film colony in the past year, there is loud applause and the usual suspects stand in respect. After all, his current project was a film praising the convicted Cuban spies — the so-called Cuban Five — which he was filming with Danny Glover.</p>
<p>It is remarkable how Landau’s politics are described in the obits.</p>
<p>The headline of the <em>NYT</em> obit read: “Saul Landau, Maker of Films with a Leftist Edge, Dies at 77.” I love that term, “leftist edge.” It implies he was an objective observer of the subjects he filmed, but put a slightly leftist tint on them. As writer Douglas Martin put it, Landau “aspired to marshal art and literature to illuminate social and political problems.”</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/09/13/how-the-death-of-saul-landau-a-supporter-of-repressive-communist-regimes-is-celebrated-by-the-major-u-s-newspapers/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Diana West’s Attempt to Respond</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ron-radosh/diana-wests-attempt-to-respond/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=diana-wests-attempt-to-respond</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:30:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ron Radosh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[American Betrayal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diana west]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FDR]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[WW II]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=199963</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Two claims to refute my review, both false.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Picture-3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-199967" alt="Picture-3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Picture-3.jpg" width="280" height="226" /></a>On her own <a href="http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2610/If-Frontpage-Lies-about-This-Theyll-Lie-about-Anything-Pt-2.aspx">website</a>, amidst yet more personal smears and snide comments, Diana West offers a couple of responses to my critique of her book. After clearing her throat with the comment that my review was “7,000 words of misrepresenting, twisting, and omitting…passed off as a ‘review,’” she adds that it was also “a series of flattened, screaming, straw-man arguments that fail in terms of the most basic intellectual honesty to convey any reality-based synopsis of the evidence assembled inside the pages of my book.”</p>
<p>Then she proceeds to reassert her discredited claim, made on numerous occasions throughout her book, that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent, specifically the “Agent 19” referred to in the Venona decrypts. Since I refuted this in my review, she adds yet another claim: “I could burn the Venona document Radosh singlemindedly and dishonestly focuses on to the exclusion of other evidence and still make the same case against Hopkins.”</p>
<p>Here West simply skips over the fact that my review also points out that the Vassiliev notebooks, which she also alleges substantiate her conclusion about Hopkins, on the contrary make clear in scores of different entries that Agent 19 was <i>not</i> Hopkins but actually State Department official Laurence Duggan. Talk about dishonesty! It is not as though this claim is unimportant. It makes a big difference whether Hopkins was a sucker for Soviet propaganda or actually working for Soviet intelligence. Those who don’t understand this distinction will think highly of Diana West and her unreliable book. Not surprisingly she also fails to address the fact, raised in my review, that Eduard Mark, a third main source she draws on for the erroneous claim about Hopkins, eventually conceded that he was wrong after being confronted by the evidence that West ignores.</p>
<p>Later next week, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes will deal with her fourth source for the claim, a KGB agent named Iskhak Akhermov, as well as other aspects of her book.</p>
<p>Now for her second and last point:</p>
<blockquote><p>I will not, however, take responsibility for Radosh fabrications he attributes to me. I don’t yet know how many there are in this ridiculously long review, but here is something Radosh hits me for that isn&#8217;t in my book:</p>
<blockquote><p>Instead of weighing these fears, West turns to another anecdote telling how George Elsey found confidential files in the Map Room that showed FDR naively thinking he could trust Stalin, and instructed Hopkins to tell Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front in 1942. She believes that this was a smoking gun proving that FDR was “making common cause with the NKVD.”</p></blockquote>
<p>This &#8220;anecdote&#8221; Radosh says I supposedly ‘turn to’ is not in my book! When I first read it, the story wasn&#8217;t familiar to me, so I scanned the book, also performed a search of the electronic version, and couldn&#8217;t find it. I do find one reference to Elsey, circa 1948, regarding the Whittaker Chambers case.</p></blockquote>
<p>Maybe she couldn’t find the anecdote. But it is there in three different places where she writes how FDR told Hopkins to go into Molotov’s bedroom while he was staying in the White House so that he could meet with the President, and at that meeting, Hopkins told Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front. They can be found on p. 129, p. 268 and p. 296. She missed them because of a trivial error I did make which was to associate the anecdote she took from her source, Laurence Rees’ <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Behind-Closed-Doors/dp/B005M50F26/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376007883&amp;sr=1-5&amp;keywords=laurence+rees">WW II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West</a></i>, with the anecdote about Elsey’s find, which is in another part of Rees’ book. West may not have mentioned Elsey’s role in her own text, but it is the anecdote itself about the Second Front that is the crux of this matter and she does refer to it on three occasions. So much for her evidence that my review is “ a series of flattened, screaming, straw-man arguments.”</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>The Red Fascism of Colonel Chavez</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-red-fascism-of-colonel-chavez/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-red-fascism-of-colonel-chavez</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 May 2013 04:15:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hitler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyranny]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=191091</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Venezuelan comandante was the real successor of Stalin and Hitler.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Ahmadinejad_chavez.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-191263" alt="Venezuela's President Chavez speaks next to Iran's President Ahmadinejad during an agreement-signing ceremony in Tehran" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Ahmadinejad_chavez-450x330.jpg" width="315" height="231" /></a>What are the legacies of chavismo? Shameless demagogy, rampant poverty, duplicitous kleptocracy, strident chauvinism, ubiquitous propaganda, demonization of political opponents, a delusional police state pretending, like Castro&#8217;s Cuba, to embody the behests of History. Hugo Chavez (1954-2013) was the most strident voice of the new anti-western and anti-democratic front. By the end of his life (he passed away on March 5, precisely sixty years after Stalin’s demise), the Venezuelan comandante, compromised in his own country, was increasingly prone to engage in external adventures.</p>
<p>Not unlike Che Guevara&#8211;Che’s daughter Aleida is the author of a hagiography about Chavez&#8211;the Venezuelan leader dreamed of himself as the reincarnation of Bolivar, Jose Marti, Lenin, and even Evita Peron (a few years ago, Chavez proclaimed: “Evita died on July 26,1952. Only two days later, on July 28, 1954 I was born. Imagine!”) As the ridicule does not kill, Chavez launched a campaign to unearth Bolivar’s bones in order to demonstrate that El Libertador was poisoned bya reactionary conspiracy. In 2008, voicing his hostility to Colombia’s democratic regime, Chavez called  the neighbouring country “Latin America’s Israel.”</p>
<p>In this crusade, the narco-terrorism of the FARC guerillas, colluded with Chavez’ delirious petro-populism. Combining grotesque bufoonery, political farce, and the most obscene demagogy, Chavez symbolized leftist opportunism in its most aggressive form. We deal with red Fascism, because Chavez’s methods and aspirations did not differ essentially from those of Mussolini; statism, cult of personality, tribalist collectivism, indigenista messianism, the annihilation of political rivals, and the persecution of any source of civic autonomy. As in Eastern Europe before the revolutions of 1989, civil society has become the main enemy of the dictatorship.  Like Eastern Europe’s Leninist dinosaurs, Chavez indulged in endless, systematic lying.</p>
<p>The ally of the Castro brothers started his career as a demagogue of Peronista orientation. His affinities linked him to the far right; irrationalism, exacerbated nationalism, fascination with occultism, militarism, and political shamanism. Gradually, he absorbed the obsessions of the far left and discovered in the anti-imperialist rhetoric a self-aggrandizing platform able to catapult him as a prophet of the new tercermundismo.</p>
<p>Years ago, noted Venezuelan political thinker Carlos Rangel (1929-1988) wrote an illuminating book about Latin America’s revolutionary myths (&#8220;Del Buen Salvaje al buen Revolucionario,” translated into English as &#8220;The Latin Americans. The Love-Hate Relationship with the US.”) Rangel diagnosed the resentful grammar underlying the utopian Castro-Guevarist project. If we think of the youth years of Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin, it is hard not to notice precisely this contempt for the rule of law (&#8220;Rechtstaat”). The same can be said about the declassé young Hitler in a multi-ethnic Vienna, a city open to bourgeois modernity. These revolutionaries were in fact viscerally anti-conservative: they loathed pluralist values, procedural parliamentarism, and religion appeared to them as a form of mental enslavement. There is a whole literature about the socialist roots of Fascism.</p>
<p>We notice the emergence of a new International (exalting &#8220;el nuevo socialismo del siglo 21”) opposed not only to the United States (no matter who is the president, George W. Bush or Barack Obama), but hostile to the free market and to the economic, political, and cultural project based on the recognition of human rights.</p>
<p>We hear passionately humanitarian denunciations of the treatment of Islamicist prisoners in Guantanamo, but very little about the fact that on the same island, in Cuba, whoever dares to oppose the police dictatorship suffers ruthless persecutions. With his phantasmagorical ideas about “Bolivarian Socialism”, colonel Chavez epitomized the effort to regroup and resuscitate the leftist attempt to delegitimize and abolish pluralism.</p>
<p>In another book written by Rangel about Third World mythologies (with a foreword, as for the previous one by the late French political thinker Jean-François Revel) we find a seminal analysis of socialism as a doctrine intimately related to Fascism in terms of rejecting capitalism as “plutocratic,” “soulless,” and “mercantile”. Both politcal religions –Communism and Fascism- promised to accomplish <i>hic ad nunc</i> the perfect community. In the words of political philosopher Eric Voegelin, they tried to immanentize the Eschaton. This meant to condemn human beings to State-dictated happiness. As Rangel put it: “It was not at all an accident that Joseph Goebbels oscillated for a while between Communism and Nazism: he realized that both ideologies were equally compatible with his own inclination for a nationalist and authoritarian government that would save the country from what he saw as the decadent liberalism of the Weimar Republic.”</p>
<p>Colonel Chavez’ red Fascism was welcomed by the most diverse circles: from Iranian Islamiscist theocrat Ahmadinejad to the unreconstructed Sandinista Marxist Daniel Ortega. The frantic search for the New Man, anti-Occidentalism, anti-Semitism, and the utopian-revolutionary hubris made Hugo Chavez the real successor of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Guevara, and Fidel Castro.</p>
<p><strong>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland and the author of numerous books including &#8220;<em>Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel</em>,&#8221; &#8220;<em>Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe,&#8221;</em> and &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/"><em>The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century</em></a>.” The views presented in his articles are his and do not represent any institution.</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>Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/soviet-crimes-against-the-jewish-people/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=soviet-crimes-against-the-jewish-people</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 04:36:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Irina Tsukerman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=188505</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new initiative sets out to document the historical record of Soviet Jew-Hate and its consequences.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/stalin1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-189378" alt="stalin1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/stalin1.jpg" width="300" height="304" /></a>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Irina Tsukerman, the coordinator for <i>Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People, </i>a new initiative which focuses on the digital documentation of sites and narratives connected to Soviet persecution of Jews, as well as sites and stories associated with acts of resistance.</p>
<p><b>FP:</b> Irina Tsukerman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>I would like to talk to you today about your new initiative, <i>Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People.</i></p>
<p>But let’s begin with you telling us a bit about your background and what inspired you to start this effort.</p>
<p><b>Tsukerman: </b>I was born in Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. I grew up seeing many of the things associated with Communism &#8211; bread lines/food shortages, expectation of conformity in every aspect of one&#8217;s thinking and behavior, poor quality of services and whatever products we had, envy of the West, coupled with abject hatred towards it. I was also acutely aware of my Jewish identity. On the one hand, my family has always been proudly Jewish; on the other hand, my parents had the &#8220;Fifth Paragraph&#8221; in their passports, which divided the population by ethnicity by the State and allowed for official discrimination under the quota system. We moved to the United States in 1995, and, growing up, I continued to maintain my interest in both my Jewish heritage and the culture of my country of origin. I heard many stories from my grandmother, parents, and many others about what life was like through the decades.</p>
<p>I also read many books and watched movies which exposed and poked fun at the Soviet system. Those issues were on my mind as I went through the public school system in New York, and to my horror, realized that the history of the Soviet Union was presented in a very distorted, dismissive, and apologetic way and most people really did not have much of an idea of what had actually gone on.</p>
<p>As I grew up, I watched how social policy increasingly leaned towards political correctness and superficial multiculturalism. The Soviet Union was also supposed to be a very internationalist state, yet one of the most popular accusation against Jews was &#8220;cosmopolitanism and Zionism.&#8221; It became clear to me that when you purport to be accepting of everything, you end  up becoming increasingly intolerant, and my prediction eventually came true.</p>
<p>Being very active in social networking sites, I noted that many people were willing to give up the marketplace of ideas and report each other to the website domain for comments and articles which offended their sensibilities. Having gone to law school and having assumed that at least people who are trained to think critically would see through collectivist mentality and embrace an individualist way of thinking, I eventually realized that nothing could be farther from the truth. Lack of basic education on life in Communist states and idealization of collectivism in school and other programming has brought both the general community and much of the secular Jewish community in New York to the point that such mentality has come to be welcomed and embraced without much questioning.  Having more degrees did not make anyone more individualistic.  When I was approached by Jason Guberman and asked to coordinate this project, I saw it as an opportunity to show to the public at large, and the left-wing (and often quite illiberal) Jewish community, the real story behind the idealized socialist veneer.</p>
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<p><b>FP:</b> So what is the project all about and what is your main aim?</p>
<p><b>Tsukerman: </b>The project seeks to peel away the false notion that the Soviet Union was somehow preferable to Nazi Germany, and further, that it was certainly better for the Jews. Through digital documentation of personal narratives and sites, connected to the persecution of Jews on the basis of their ethnic and religious identities, we will show that the Soviet Union was actually the equivalent of Nazi Germany in terms of its motivations.</p>
<p>The fact that it was less efficient should not take away from the evil intent with regard to both a &#8220;Final Solution&#8221; for the Jews, that was in the works but interrupted by Stalin&#8217;s death, and the way it has treated its Jewish population throughout the 72 years of its existence. In addition to showing that the National Socialist state and the Internationalist Socialist States were flip sides of the same coin, we will show that collectivist mentality anywhere can lead to similar results. We will memorialize the victims, survivors, dissidents, and their supporters through the creation of a digital museum/database. None of the Soviet perpetrators ever stood trial for their atrocities. At least, this project will preserve history and expose the truth.</p>
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<p><b>FP:</b>  What is the relevance of this issue today?</p>
<p><b>Tsukerman: </b>The issue is universal, and the project can serve as a model for any oppressed minority under any collectivist and anti-humanitarian regime at any point in time. The dangers of collectivism have shown themselves again and again through the ages, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao&#8217;s Cultural Revolution, Castro&#8217;s Cuba being only some of the examples that one could site as evidence. Today, the world is facing just as many dangers from collectivism as it did in the 20th century. Russia itself is attempting to reemerge as a global force, by wielding influence over its former states, such as its intervention in the Ukrainian elections in recent years, as well as its invasion of George, and by lending support to such regimes as Assad&#8217;s Syria and the now-deceased Hugo Chavez, and their ilk. Islamism (however you want to call it&#8230; extremism/jihadism/<wbr />fundamentalism) is nothing if not collectivist and anti-humanitarian at its core.</p>
<p>If you look at the Iranian regime, under the religious guise, it espouses the same collectivist, totalitarian principles that the Soviet Union professed under the name of communism/socialism. Even in the United States, there is a growing tendency towards collectivist mentality &#8211; from the ever-present political correctness, to the dissolution of our basic economic principles. Obamacare, which few people really understand, is but one example. Mayor Bloomberg&#8217;s thankfully failed attempt to ban large sodas for the benefit of humanity is another issue. Federal regulation of such minutiae as food in school, and the general tendency to try to fit everyone in the same box regardless of his individual needs, is very disturbing. I think it is natural and easier to lean towards collectivism, without thinking about the evil of such ideology and the results it brings about.</p>
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<p><b>FP: </b>Share with us the tactics and techniques you are employing to achieve your goal.</p>
<p><b>Tsukerman: </b>Our first exhibit is scheduled for August. We will digitally document 25 sites and stories connected to Soviet Crimes against Jews, using photography, video, Google Earth technology, and 3D panoramas to capture   the places that may otherwise become extinct to history. We will also present oral narratives by survivors and dissidents, which will hopefully memorialize their stories as well as inspire individuals facing the dangers of collectivist regimes elsewhere today. We are also interviewing the supporters of dissidents abroad, such as those who worked on the passage of the Jackson-Vannick amendment, and individuals who smuggled in Jewish prayer books and subversive literature to the underground meeting places, such as apartments where the dissidents met and underground synagogues.</p>
<p>In addition, our website will feature an extensive database linking to books, articles, and other projects, and resources that contains more detailed historical information on these events. We are seeking to collaborate with heritage organizations to create digital and heritage trails of sites connected to dissidents, that visitors could follow if they wish, whether they are in the area, or from the comfort of their own desk. Our goal is to make this project very much a collaborative effort with other organizations that are working on similar projects in other countries, such as former Soviet satellite states. Ultimately, we aim to be as informative and educational as possible and to have a very broad base of support and audience.</p>
<p><b>FP:</b> You are also looking for assistance right?</p>
<p><b>Tsukerman: </b>Absolutely. We are looking for:</p>
<p><strong>Sources of information: </strong>Witness accounts, anyone with a relevant story about persecution by the state on the basis of their Jewish ethnicity, religion, or identity, and/or acts of attempted resistance/dissent. Anyone with access to archives, such as KGB documents or trial transcripts, photographs, video images of any sort, who would be willing to share those documents with us, would be great.</p>
<p>Anyone, who would be able to identify important sites, such as prison cells, location of psychiatric hospitals, gulag barracks, underground synagogues or apartments or other places where secret meetings by dissidents would be held, would be very helpful. And of course, any connections to other individuals, whether survivors, relatives of victims, dissidents, or their active supporters in the United States, would be great to interview for the project.</p>
<p><strong>Sources of advice:</strong> Academics with a background in Soviet or Soviet Jewish or Communist history, who would be willing give us occasional feedback or serve on our advisory board, as well as individuals in the broader community, such as those who were active in the political community or major Jewish organizations, or anyone else, who has relevant knowledge and background and who could give us suggestions as our project develops.</p>
<p><strong>Interns and volunteers:</strong> We are already getting many great interviews, documents, and research material. We need fluent Russian and English speakers, preferably with document translation experience, who could help us translate and transmit the archive documents, as well as write up site summaries for the exhibit we are launching in August.</p>
<p>Additionally, volunteers both in the United States and abroad, who could help with interviewing our subjects on video, taking photos of sites, and helping with relevant archival research are a priority right now. We have many great leads and hope to see many enthusiastic volunteers, interested in helping to bring this information to the public. Other volunteers with skills such as website design would also be very helpful.</p>
<p>All inquiries can be sent to me at <a href="mailto:scajpinfo@gmail.com" target="_blank">scajpinfo@gmail.com</a> and will be answered promptly. I am coordinating the project and will be happy to answer any questions, provide additional information, and listen to any feedback, suggestions, and advice. We have a detailed brief to distribute to anyone who is interested.Our website, <a href="http://www.scajp.org/" target="_blank">scajp.org,</a> is currently in development and we are hoping to launch it shortly. It will feature our first exhibit, information about the project, and link to many relevant resources.</p>
<p><b>FP:</b> Irina Tsukerman, thank you so much for joining Frontpage Interview and we wish you the best of luck in your project.</p>
<p><em><strong></strong></em><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>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>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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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>The Virtue of Lucidity: Yuri Glazov and the Fate of Communism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:23:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Soviet dissident's account of totalitarianism's haunting infiltration of the Russian psyche. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/russias1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187405" alt="russia's" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/russias1.jpg" width="280" height="420" /></a><strong>To order <em>Yuri Glazov&#8217;s The Russian Mind Since Stalin&#8217;s Death</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Since-Stalins-Death-Sovietica/dp/9027719691">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In 1985, the USSR seemed immortal. Most of the observers of Soviet affairs were aware of the insuperable systemic tensions (in Hegelian-Marxist parlance, &#8220;contradictions&#8221;), but very few anticipated the regime&#8217;s imminent end. In fact, such insights existed especially among the small and beleaguered dissident enclaves in the Soviet Union itself and in East-Central Europe. Most Western academics, however, were too busy to scrutinize the arcane workings of the Politburo and regarded the dissident activities as marred by romantic daydreaming. Dissidents could be admired, but not taken too seriously. There were exceptions, to be sure, among them Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Conquest, Leo Labedz, Martin Malia, Peter Reddaway, Richard Pipes, Robert C. Tucker and Adam Ulam.</p>
<p>A specialist in Oriental cultures and a professor at Moscow State University, Yuri Glazov (1929-1998) was a noble humanist and a committed democrat. He joined  this quasi-subterranean dissident counter-culture. Because of his heretical views, he was denied the right to teach. Eventually, he left the Soviet Union together with his family and settled in Canada where he taught Russian studies for many years at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His main interests were linked to the role of the Russian intelligentsia in articulating oppositional discourses and strategies, the dynamics of Stalinism and post-Stalinism, and the soul-searching tribulations among those who refused to live within the Big Lie.</p>
<p>Yuri Glazov was among the first scholars to insist on the importance of scrutinizing the psychology of Soviet leaders as a way to fathom how the decision-making process in the Kremlin operates.  Many Western scholars, especially in the 1970s, during the detente era, treated Soviet institutions as similar to those in the West and tried to disregard the pre-eminence of ideology. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Glazov saw ideology as the main underpinning of the  communist dictatorship. Ideology sanctified the absolute falsification of reality, constructed a ritualized super-reality and a pseudo-scientific, in fact mystical vision of history.</p>
<p>He published a truly outstanding book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Since-Stalins-Death-Sovietica/dp/9027719691"><i>The Russian Mind since Stalin&#8217;s Death</i></a>,  in 1985, with D. Reidel Company, a respected academic press.  I read it recently and was struck by his extraordinary prescience and intellectual acumen. Before <em>Glasnost</em> became the ubiquitous buzzword, Glazov identified the search for truth as a subversive method to oppose the system and recover civic dignity. For him the most important psychological feature of Sovietism was the universal sentiment of fear:</p>
<blockquote><p>There is one feeling that people living in non-totalitarian countries are unable adequately to understand: a feeling of fear in a country without law and without justice. This feeling of fear could be read in the eyes and faces; it could be heard in voices and speeches. The feeling of fear destroys the process of communication between people. They say what they do not mean. They hear in other people&#8217;s words what is not meant. Who creates this atmosphere of fear? Who requires it? Can it be kept under control? To what extent does this feeling of fear alter the whole nature of a person?</p></blockquote>
<p>These are disturbingly vital (or, under Soviet conditions, mortal) questions to which Glazov offered remarkably persuasive answers. Fear and mendacity were intertwined in the genesis of what the system aimed at, the New Man, Homo Sovieticus. Communism was not only a political and social revolution, but even more important, it championed an anthropological mutation.</p>
<p>The passage quoted above is from the chapter dealing with the significance of Stalin&#8217;s death for the Soviet political culture. Sixty years have passed since that watershed moment and Stalin&#8217;s ghost continues to haunt the Russian mind. Yuri Glazov&#8217;s illuminating discussion should be read by all those who want to understand the relationship between Stalinism, post-Stalinism, post-Sovietism, and Putinism.  We should keep in mind that he wrote the studies included in that volume years before Mikhail Gorbachev&#8217;s coming to power, when the almost universal consensus was that the Soviet bureaucratic colossus could last for many more decades. Yuri Glazov realized that intellectuals were bound to play a crucial role in the forthcoming changes. In fact, Gorbachevism can be seen as the ideology and practice of the neo-Marxist party intelligentsia.</p>
<p>One of the most provocative chapters deals with Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary in November 1982. Andropov was in fact Gorbachev&#8217;s mentor and it remains to a great extent a mystery how could he ignore the heretical potential in his protégé. For the KGB loyalists, Andropov was the genuine, even the optimal, Soviet leader. No surprise therefore that Vladimir Putin worships him and has encouraged the emergence in recent years of an Andropov mini-cult.</p>
<p>Yuri Glazov&#8217;s enduring analyses converged with those of a major Stalin scholar, Princeton professor Robert C. Tucker, the author of &#8220;The Soviet Political Mind,&#8221; a classic of Soviet studies. Both thinkers understood that, once the ideological zeal was extinct, the system was doomed. The degradation of faith was a decisive catalyst for the demise of the whole system. From the original Marxist-Leninist utopia nothing remained but cynicism, confusion, and disgust with broken promises. For Glazov, the indication of the revolutionary breakdown was the fact that even party bureaucrats were treating the official mythologies as empty, soporific phrases. Nothing captures better the nature of that system than a joke quoted by Yuri Glazov&#8211; Radio Yerevan asks : &#8220;What is Marxism-Leninism, a science or an art? The answer: &#8220;It is probably an art. If it were a science it would have been tried out first on animals.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note: Don&#8217;t miss Vladimir Tismaneanu&#8217;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>How Stalin Fooled the World and Why It Matters Today</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/how-stalin-fooled-the-world-and-why-it-matters-today/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-stalin-fooled-the-world-and-why-it-matters-today</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:46:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Every time appeasers push "diplomatic solutions," we find ourselves back sitting across the table from Uncle Joe.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/how-stalin-fooled-the-world-and-why-it-matters-today/joseph-stalin-us-army-public-domain/" rel="attachment wp-att-182235"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-182235" title="Joseph-Stalin-US-Army-public-domain" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Joseph-Stalin-US-Army-public-domain.jpg" alt="" width="253" height="205" /></a>There are two ways that liberal historians usually look at Stalin. The most leftward of these is to see Stalin as a victim of German and American imperialism who struggled to maintain the peace in the face of aggressive expansionistic efforts by Nazi Germany and the United States.</p>
<p>Such a revisionist history would seem to have been thoroughly discredited in this day and age, despite its persistence in the early days of the Cold War, but it continues resurfacing, most recently in an Oliver Stone documentary series.</p>
<p>But for the most part, Khrushchev’s disavowal of Stalin completed a process that began once the Soviet dictator cut a deal with Hitler, triggering a growing Destalinization cascade on the left. Stalinists still persisted in the West, but their influence on the authoring of history steadily diminished. Instead they embraced a different version of history that would salvage the ideological integrity of the left.</p>
<p>In this more conventional version of history, Stalin was not truly a Communist, but a non-ideological dictator who had seized control of the Soviet ship of state and transformed a promisingly progressive revolution into a backward feudal tyranny.</p>
<p>This version of history had been developed by the Trotskyites and a number of disaffected groups on the left and with the Cold War; it became the conventional version of history. After the fall of the USSR, it was embraced by nationalists looking to resurrect Stalin as a monarch, rather than a party man.</p>
<p>Stalin indeed appeared to have jettisoned bits of the old international Communist agenda and zeroed in on domestic purges. The constant civil bloodshed convinced many of his potential enemies that Stalin’s USSR was mainly a threat to its own people. They viewed Stalin as a domestic tyrant, rather than an international Red Emperor.</p>
<p>But as Robert Gellately argues in <em>Stalin’s</em> <em>Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War</em>, accepting the view of Stalin as a pragmatic tyrant may have been the worst mistake that they ever made.</p>
<p>Gellately takes on both versions of Stalin, contending that the Soviet tyrant was not the victim of warmongering, but the author of the Cold War who had deliberately sought a global conflict for the sake of Communist ideology and Communist power.</p>
<p>The linkage between these two elements is vitally important. By reducing Stalin and his Soviet Union to mere tyrant and tyranny, revisionist liberal historians could successfully argue that they just wanted to be left alone. And if Stalin had been no more than a tyrant and the USSR no more than a pedestal for his cult of personality, that reading of history might have some plausibility.</p>
<p>Only by rediscovering Stalin as an ideological tyrant and the USSR as a Red Empire, as Gellately does, is that revisionist reading of the Cold War rendered null and void.</p>
<p>As early as 1920, Stalin was already envisioning a Red Empire, in Gellately’s words, that would encompass Russia and much of Eastern Europe. Stalin’s actions in both World War II and the Cold War were aimed at realizing that Red Empire.</p>
<p>Gellately takes note of Stalin’s self-definition as a “professional revolutionary and party organizer” and connects it to his international ambitions. The Stalin who emerges in <em>Stalin’s Curse</em> does not represent a break with the leftist history of the revolution, but a continuation of it. While liberal history insists on viewing Stalinism as a break from Leninism, Gellately makes a convincing case for the reign of Stalin as a natural extension of the reign of Lenin.</p>
<p>Most compellingly, <em>Stalin’s Curse</em> argues for recognizing Stalin’s strategic acumen in outwitting FDR and Churchill, as he had been unable to outwit Hitler, using the familiar narrative of Russian victimhood in a war that he had clumsily stumbled into to demand territorial concessions all the way up to Germany.  And yet Stalin’s achievements largely came from the willingness of his Western allies to lose sight of what he was and what he represented.</p>
<p>In one telling moment, that has a dreadful modern resonance, FDR, while staying in the bugged Soviet mission, is warned by Churchill that Stalin was preparing “a Communist replacement for the Polish government.”</p>
<p>The Soviet agent overhearing the conversation listens to FDR accuse Churchill of preparing an anti-Communist government and recalls “thinking how strange it was&#8221; for the president to “put Churchill and Stalin on the same plane” and to think of himself as “the arbiter between them.”</p>
<p>That moment is not the only one in Stalin’s Curse that bears such historical echoes. The National Front coalitions that the Soviet Union used to take over Eastern Europe bear a strong similarity to the Islamist coalitions used to take over the Arab Spring. And the willingness of the West to believe the comforting lies that they were told remind us that our disastrous foreign policy did not emerge yesterday.</p>
<p>While Stalin casually disposed of hundreds of thousands of lives, he took few major strategic risks, relying on attrition to do his work for him. As a canny negotiator, Stalin used every peace offer as an opening bid to expand his control replicating his battlefield strategy at the negotiating table</p>
<p>When FDR and Churchill thought that they were shaping a final settlement for Europe, they were actually engaging in an endless bargaining session that would only be settled with the Red Army.</p>
<p>History concerns itself with dry facts, but has less to say about human minds, and so it is difficult to know whether FDR and Churchill were fooled or whether they chose to be fooled. When FDR and Churchill praised Stalin’s integrity and sincerity, had they been deceived by the world’s greatest actor or did they allow themselves to be deceived so that the terrible compromises they made seemed more palatable?</p>
<p>This question, like so many of the others in <em>Stalin’s Curse</em>, remains applicable today. While Stalin is dead, there are many lesser Stalins like Morsi, small vicious men with an unlimited capacity for bloodshed and an even more unlimited ability to fool Western leaders into believing in their sincerity and goodness.</p>
<p>The negotiations that allowed Stalin to gobble up so many countries have been repeated again and again. And every time that diplomats call for a diplomatic solution in North Korea and Iran, we find ourselves back sitting across the table from Uncle Joe.</p>
<p>And that may be Stalin’s true curse.</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>Untold History of the USSR</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/untold-history-of-the-ussr/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=untold-history-of-the-ussr</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:38:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[neo-communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USSR]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180984</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The backstory to Oliver Stone’s neo-communist encyclopedia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/untold-history-of-the-ussr/osb/" rel="attachment wp-att-181174"><img class=" wp-image-181174 alignleft" title="osb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/osb.gif" alt="" width="280" height="280" /></a><em>The Untold History of the United States, </em>by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, weighs in at 750 pages, an elephantine encyclopedia of neo-communist demonology. None of it is “untold” and on every page one hears the sound of a barrel being scraped. David Horowitz rightly called it <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/oliver-stones-unbelievable-crap/">“unbelievable crap</a>,” but some readers might profit from an examination of the places where the book most needs stool softener and a polygraph test.</p>
<p>This must be the only book endorsed by Bill Maher, Daniel Ellsberg, and Mikhail Gorbachev, which makes sense. The only hero is former vice president Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president of the United States in 1948. He’s portrayed here as a kind of American Gorbachev, the only hope to save the United States which, by setting off atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “once again, proved itself unready to provide the kind of leadership a desperate world cried out for.”</p>
<p>The authors tout Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man,” but fail to note that, as one observer put it, Wallace’s Communist backers confused the Common Man with the Comintern. That organization does not appear in the book, which contains material about the USSR, Stalin, Communism and such.</p>
<p>The Nazi-Soviet Pact does appear but consider the treatment of the 1939 alliance that started World War II. It was an “unsavory deal,” Stalin struck with Hitler because he feared a “German-Polish alliance” to attack the USSR. It was actually to divide up Europe and crush the democracies, but that’s how Stalin and his echo-chamber spun it.</p>
<p>True to form, <em>Untold History</em> lists only two atrocities for Stalin, the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest and “having the Red Army stop on the banks of the Vistula while the Germans put down the Warsaw uprising.” Nothing about the genocide noted in the <em>Black Book of Communism</em> and, more recently, Timothy Snyder’s <em>Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin</em>. The authors even include a photo of Russians mourning Stalin, who at the time of his death in 1953 was about to unleash terror on Soviet Jews, then slandered as “rootless cosmopolitans.”</p>
<p>As Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton noted in <em>The Rosenberg File, </em>American Communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were responsible for giving nuclear weapons to the worst mass murder in history. Here they are only “accused atomic spies.” Stone and Kuznick tout “the legendary Communist-backed Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” but ignore the real story of this Stalinist militia as outlined in Cecil Eby’s <em>Comrades and Commissars</em>.</p>
<p>Stone and Kuznick are not eager to explain what American Stalinists were up to during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Readers will not learn that they worked in concert with pro-Nazi organizations against the allies, particularly Britain. They picketed the White House and called FDR a “warmonger,” a charge the authors apply to virtually all U.S. Presidents, particularly Reagan, whose chapter is subtitled “Death Squads for Democracy.” No moral equivalence here. In <em>Untold History</em>, the USSR is the peaceful regime.</p>
<p>After World War II the USSR “had no blueprint for postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe and hoped to maintain friendly and collaborative relations with its wartime allies.” Further, the Soviets “had gone out of their way to guarantee West Berliners’ access to food and coal from the eastern zone or from direct Soviet provisions.” So the heroic Berlin airlift touted in American schools was all for nothing.</p>
<p>The USSR oppressed half or Europe for nearly half a century, smashed reform in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and later invaded Afghanistan. Yet CIA director William Casey’s picture of a “hostile, expansionist USSR” was “an image that didn’t accord with the facts.” And in the1983 the Soviets “mistakenly took a Korean Air Lines passenger jet for a spy plane.”</p>
<p>Thus, the Soviets make “mistakes” and are evaluated by their alleged aspiration for a better world. The United States, on the other hand, commits crimes and is evaluated on the authors’ vision of its record. The USA emerges here as an evil empire eager to spread tyranny and crush the poor by any means necessary. But consider the untold backstory here.</p>
<p>Hollywood leftists, Richard Grenier once observed, charge that America and capitalism are evil – except for their three-picture deal, except for their bank account, except for their Bel-Air mansion, except for their BMW and Mercedes-Benz. So despite <em>JFK</em>, <em>Wall Street</em>, and <em>The Untold History of the United States</em>, Oliver Stone does after all believe in American exceptionalism.</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>Stalin’s Dead Hand</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/stalins-dead-hand/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stalins-dead-hand</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Mar 2013 04:41:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[legacy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyrant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179939</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the fight over the tyrant's true brutal legacy is the fight for the future of Russia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/stalins-dead-hand/stalin-kiss_1584259i/" rel="attachment wp-att-179942"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-179942" title="stalin-kiss_1584259i" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/stalin-kiss_1584259i-450x333.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="200" /></a>Imagine if Hitler had ranked first in a current German survey of the greatest figures of history. While that did not happen, last year <a href="http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2013/03/01/stalin-puzzle-deciphering-post-soviet-public-opinion/fmz8">Stalin finished first among Russians in a Carnegie survey</a> of the most influential figures of history, proving that people do not learn from history, they learn from the victors of history.</p>
<p>Stalin died in March 1953. Sixty years have passed since then, but the old tyrant remains a shadowy presence over Russia offering the simple solution of the bullet and the gulag. Iosif, the robber and government informant is dead, but in his place is the meticulously manufactured idea that Stalin’s way is the only way. The war over that dark history represents the political struggle over the soul of Russia.</p>
<p>Stalin became a post-ideological tyrant, posturing as a nationalist when necessary, reviving the country’s religious identity when needed, and purging people less out of ideology and more out of freewheeling paranoia. The Russian people viewed his successors, men like Khrushchev and Brezhnev, with contempt, but despite all the torture and atrocities, he retained his iconic status.</p>
<p>Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, Stalin remains a popular figure having transcended the ideology that most Westerners associated him with. The Communist left claims Stalin as a Communist while the Nationalist right claims him as a destroyer of Communism. Stalin endures among these groups as a symbol of power and decisive action.</p>
<p>The old Communist icons have faded away, but Stalin remains the quintessential tyrant. A figure closely associated with Russian greatness and Georgian glory, rather than with Communism.</p>
<p>Russia has historically vacillated between well-meaning inept leaders and ruthlessly brutal tyrants. The current governing scheme has given Russians both at the same time, with Medvedev playing the role of the well-meaning inept leader and Putin that of the ruthless tyrant stepping in when he falters. The historical pattern is as old as the czars and the outbreaks of democracy have not yet freed the Russian people from that bloody cycle.</p>
<p>During the end of the Soviet era, only 12 percent named Stalin a significant figure, but last year he was in first place again. The 1989 figures largely reflected Soviet orthodoxy with Lenin and Marx depicted as the dominant figures of history. Marx has since largely vanished, falling from 35 percent to 6 percent in 5 years, indicating that his placement was a product of ideological conformity and that there is no affinity at all for his economic ideas.  Lenin took a sharp tumble, but still ranks second.</p>
<p>The Soviet-era survey reflected the Communist interpretation of history, but the post-Soviet surveys reflect how that history has been massaged, interpreted and reinterpreted. Communism has been defeated, but its greatest tyrant lives on. The old statues might have been torn down, but the idea of Stalin as the pivotal tyrannical force of history could not and would not be so easily disposed of. Not when it is so useful to his spiritual successor.</p>
<p>A number of the contributors to the Carnegie study link Stalin’s rise in popularity to the Putin era, but Stalin’s popularity had increased significantly during the 90s before Putin came to power. Stalin’s star rose even higher under Putin, raising the question of whether Putin elevated Stalin or Stalin elevated Putin, or whether there was a synergy with tyranny feeding off tyranny.</p>
<p>There is no question that Putin’s regime has resurrected some Soviet monsters. The bust of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police state, has been restored to a position of honor, and while Putin publicly disavowed some of Stalin’s atrocities, his political allies have paid tribute to the old monster and his regime put Stalin back into the school system.</p>
<p>Sixty years after Stalin’s death, Russia is on the cusp of losing the last few citizens who lived through his reign as adults. The Stalin of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren is a historical figure assembled from scraps of propaganda by a state-controlled media.</p>
<p>Stalin polls best among the teenagers who have been immersed in the propaganda of the new regime and the older citizens who lived under the waning decades of the Soviet era. The most educated are most likely to view him negatively while the least educated are most likely to view him positively. The ratings split similarly among the big cities and the villages suggesting that pro-Stalin images and texts are more influential in the media than in the educational system. In Russia as in the United States, television programming and infotainment may be more effective than education.</p>
<p>Stalin carefully controlled his own image while alive. In death his image has been remade a dozen times.  Most Russians denounce Stalin’s atrocities, but nearly half view his contribution to Russian history positively. Most would not want to live under his rule, but view his rule as largely beneficial. Rather than being contradictory, these clashing views reflect a willingness to embrace the tyrant’s ethos of the ends justifying the means.</p>
<p>Mussolini never did quite make the trains run on time, but Stalin is credited with everything from the electrification of Russia’s rural areas to defeating the Nazi armies during World War II. The history is often wrong, with industrial accomplishments overstated, defeats minimized and the degree of foreign aid received from the United States largely buried, but the myth has become a vital part of the official history of Russia’s new rulers. By measuring Stalin’s atrocities against his results, the implicit message is that nothing of significance can be accomplished without harsh measures.</p>
<p>The fictionalization of Stalin’s accomplishments justifies Putin’s atrocities in a version of history where getting anything done requires a strong leader willing to spill blood across the snow. And when Putin’s hour on the stage is done, it is all too likely that Stalin will go on serving that same purpose for the next tyrant and the one after that.</p>
<p>The struggle over Stalin’s place in history is also the struggle over the soul of Russia. Tyrants need a Stalin to justify their tyranny, while the democracy movement needs to definitely end the Stalin era once and for all. The struggle over history will determine whether Russia will be free.</p>
<p>In the battle over history, the state, with its monopoly over the media and the educational system, has the upper hand, diminishing Stalin’s atrocities while emphasizing his achievements. And when the last witnesses to the Stalin era have died, then history will be fully in the hands of the interpreters of history.</p>
<p>Stalin, as the study points out, has become an idea, more than a man. A dead hand weighing down Russian history.</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>Oliver Stone: America Is a &#8216;Fascist Force&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/oliver-stone-america-is-a-fascist-force/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stone-america-is-a-fascist-force</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jan 2013 04:46:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kazin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kuznick]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Michael Kazin's interview with Stone and Kuznick reveals the camp in which the whole Left resides.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/oliver-stone-america-is-a-fascist-force/kaz/" rel="attachment wp-att-173092"><img class=" wp-image-173092 alignleft" title="kaz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/kaz.png" alt="" width="303" height="209" /></a>The C-SPAN Book TV program <a href="http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/309696-1"><em>After Words</em></a> recently featured a conversation with controversial film director <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=628">Oliver Stone</a> and American University professor Peter Kuznick. The two are co-authors of a massive new book, <em>The Untold History of the United States</em>, which Stone has parlayed into a multi-part Showtime documentary (and which FrontPage Mag has addressed <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">here</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">here</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">here</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/">here</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-untold-history-of-the-left/">here</a>). As you might expect, the hour featured Kuznick and Stone denouncing American imperialism and placing the blame for Cold War mistrust on the U.S., while only paying lip service to the notion that some responsibility lay with the Soviets.</p>
<p>The program was hosted by Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University and the co-editor of <em>Dissent</em>, a quarterly socialist magazine of politics and culture. As a Harvard student, Kazin was a leader in the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6723">Students for a Democratic Society</a> and briefly a member of the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808">Weatherman</a> faction. Although he describes himself in this show as “an anti-Communist leftist, someone who thinks that Stalin was a horrible mass murderer, one of the worst in history,” and although he gently challenges his guests on a couple of occasions, for the most part Kazin is supportive of their Cold War perspective: “I agree with both of you that the United States was hardly blameless, and did a lot to exacerbate that rivalry and hostility.” What a less predictable and more stimulating program it might have been if, say, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/author/ron-radosh/">Ron Radosh</a> or David Horowitz had been tapped to moderate the discussion.</p>
<p>Stone and Kuznick discuss at length the 1948 Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, the unsung hero of their book. When <em>Time</em> publisher Henry Luce called for the 20<sup>th</sup> century to be “the American century,” Wallace responded by saying, in Kuznick’s words, “it shouldn’t be the American century. It should be the century of the Common Man. So what we need is a worldwide revolution.” Kuznick relates approvingly how Wallace “called for ending colonialism, ending imperialism, ending monopolies and cartels, and the economic exploitation.”</p>
<p>Kuznick goes on to lament how badly Americans are schooled in history, without noting the fact that this is partially the result of the left’s educational agenda and indoctrination from professors like himself, who present American history as a shameful parade of genocidal atrocities and ruthless imperialism. Current history books don’t provide the framework for understanding the American “empire,” Stone chimed in, adding that, like <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939">Howard Zinn</a>’s subversive and ubiquitous <em>The People’s History of the United States</em>, “we’re trying to make this book a primer” for high school readers the age of his own daughter, 16-17. Their intention, of course, is to pollute young minds with their Blame America First mentality.</p>
<p>It is in the final minutes of the program that the participants begin to let their hair down and expose more radical opinions. Stone, for example, raises the specter of the so-called Red Scare: “Is it not convenient for the bosses, the owners, the elites, to deflect the tensions that exist in this era in American life by pointing to Stalin and the Communists and saying, ‘This is the enemy’?” He goes on to add that “Stalin has always been a convenient boogey man for the right and the center, the Trumanites, up to today.” Kazin responded by agreeing but added that the Communists, by their heinous actions, did give some legitimacy to the right’s concerns – which the right then used “to scare people,” Kuznick hastened to add. So Communist brutality and repression were real, but pointing it out was paranoid fear-mongering?</p>
<p>Stone joked about finding it insulting that airports were named after two aggressive anti-Communists, former Eisenhower Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and former President Ronald Reagan. Kazin and Kuznick laughed along with him and the latter added, “At least we got [the first black Supreme Court Justice] Thurgood Marshall in there in Baltimore.”</p>
<p>Kazin brought the conversation into the present by asking, “Has American foreign policy changed at all now since the Cold War?&#8230; Is the U.S. still seeing the world as its own oyster to be cracked open?” Kuznick and Stone share a knowing smile at this, as if they have a lot to say on the topic – Kuznick in particular looks like he’s bursting to respond – but Stone merely says, “You’re answering your own question.” He and Kuznick go on to lament “the lost opportunities” for peace, particularly during the presidencies of both Bushes.</p>
<p>“What kind of foreign policy do you think the United States <em>should</em> have?” Kazin asks. Stone asserts that the world he would like to live in is one of “compassion and a love of mankind, a global purpose – in Wallace’s phrase, a ‘century of the Common Man.’” But instead, “no one acts worse than we [in the U.S.] do because we don’t trust anybody.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, because we’ve got the power to enforce it,” blurts Kuznick. He proceeds to put forth statistics about America’s unequal share of the world’s wealth, then Stone finishes the discussion with more anti-American blather: “We are this fascist force in the universe for control… Are we gonna follow our conscience, our good sense, our heart? Or are we gonna follow our baser instincts?”</p>
<p>“That’s probably a good way to end,” Kazin quips, and the program abruptly comes to a close.</p>
<p>Actually, a good way to end would have been to hear a countervailing voice challenging the perverse notion of America as a “fascist force in the universe.” Radical historians like Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick see American greed, paranoia and imperialism as the source of all international inequity and animosity; what their <em>Untold History</em> does not tell is that, on balance, America has been a greater force for good in its short existence than any nation or power in history. They want us to be more trusting and cooperative with the very forces that seek our destruction; but what their <em>Untold History</em> does not tell is that America has had, and continues to have, existential enemies with their own power-grasping agendas. What <em>Untold History</em> does not tell is the whole truth.</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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