Commies are Evil.

Being leftwing means never having to say you're sorry.

//Western public opinion has never come to terms with the crimes of Communism. Every school child knows about the Holocaust, Apartheid, and American slavery, as they should. But Pol Pot’s murder of a quarter of Cambodia’s population has not dimmed academic enthusiasm for the Marxism his henchmen studied in Paris. Neither the Chinese Cultural Revolution nor the Great Purges seem to have cast a shadow on the leftists who apologized for them. Quite the contrary, university classes typically blame the Cold War on American “paranoia” about communism and still picture Bolsheviks as idealists in too great a hurry. Being leftwing means never having to say you’re sorry.

In 1997 Stéphane Courtois published (in French) The Black Book of Communism, an anthology in which experts document, country by country, how many people Marxist–Leninists killed. With suitable academic equanimity, contributors ask whether the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians, or the deportation of all Chechens to central Asia that took the lives of one person in three, qualifies as “genocide.” The only sign of real emotional urgency occurs in Courtois’s introduction, which breaks intellectual taboos by drawing parallels with Nazism, questioning Socialists’ frequent alliances with Communists, and, above all, wondering why intellectuals continue to apologize for Communist murders.

Some figures speak for themselves. The volume’s scholars estimate twenty million deaths in the ussr, sixty-five million in China, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 million in Mengistu’s Ethiopia and other African countries, and so on, to a total of about one hundred million. (Eerily, the chief revolutionary in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed predicts that the cost of perfect equality will be “a hundred million heads.”) So far as I can tell, these estimates are understatements. For example, the most authoritative study of Stalin’s war against the peasantry in the early 1930s, Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, arrives at a figure twice the one in this volume. The difference between the two estimates—the margin of error—equals the number of Jews killed by the Nazis.//


I just finished a book on the Soviet war on religion that kind of fits this model, viz "Godless Communists."   Bolsheviks really didn't have a plan to persecute Christianity. Bolshevik religious policy was ad hoc. Christians brought on the persecution by being superstitious and ignorant and resisting Bolshevik efforts to loot their churches.

At the end of 1932, there were half the number of churches and less than half the number of Orthodox priests, but at least the range of metaphysical options had been expanded to include Godless materialism.

How do these things happen to such nice people as the Bolsheviks?

Footnote to History.

The love affair with Atheistic Humanism always starts and ends the same way.

//At the height of the Terror, the American emigrants had besieged their embassy, begging for passports so they could leave Russia.

They were turned away only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking NKVD agents.

Inside, the American diplomats had known about these disappearances almost from the very beginning. But they did little to save their fellow countrymen, whom they had christened "the captured Americans."

Thousands killed

The emigrants began their long journey either into the prison cells and the Gulag camps, or the shorter route to the execution grounds.

In the killing fields at Butovo, a suburb 27 kilometres south-east of Moscow, several of the American baseball players were executed during the Terror, and lie buried in mass graves stretching for hundreds of metres.

The mass graves at Butovo, outside Moscow

Many US workers ended up in mass graves just outside Moscow

Thousands were killed in this quiet country backwater, surrounded by trees to muffle their screams.//

Progressives/Liberals/Leftists are always demanding that apologies be given for things that happened in 200 years ago...

...but when will the Left apologize to Whittaker Chambers?

//But here's the thing: the people Chambers named were, in fact, guilty.

They include Henry Collins, employed at National Recovery Administration and later the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA); Lee Pressman, assistant general counsel of the AAA. John Abt, chief of Litigation for the AAA from 1933 to 1935, assistant general counsel of the Works Progress Administration in 1935, chief counsel on Senator Robert La Follette, Jr.'s from 1936 to 1937, council to the Communist Party USA, and special assistant to the United States Attorney General, 1937 and 1938; Charles Kramer, employed at the Department of Labor National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); Nathan Witt, employed at the AAA and the NLRB. George Silverman, employed at the Railroad Retirement Board; Marion Bachrach, sister of John Abt; John Herrmann, who introduced Chambers to Hiss and was an author assistant to Harold Ware (who ran the communist cell in Washington) employed at the AAA; Nathaniel Weyl, Donald Hiss, and Victor Perlo of the War Production Board and later the Departments of Commerce and Treasury.

Either by their own admission or released records, all of these people were revealed to be communists acting against America.

For a queer, paranoid, disheveled lump, Chambers racked up quite a batting average.

The incredible thing about Perlstein's passage is that, if you follow its logic, it's clear that he regrets that these people were actually caught. He posits that if not for Whittaker Chambers -- and Nixon -- Alger Hiss would have faded into obscurity. In other words: had Chambers not come forward, one of the leaders of an international criminal conspiracy to bring down the United States would have gotten away with it.

Why do people like Perlstein continue to hold on to their defense of Hiss?//

History of Socialism...

...shopping in the Soviet Union, circa 1990.

Good times....good times....

Another "Communist Learning Moment" - 

The "Dalton Trumbo" movie:

//Of course, this is not who Trumbo was. At one point in the movie, we see a copy of Trumbo’s 1939 pre-World War II novel, “Johnny Got His Gun,”  which is about a World War I veteran who lost his arms, legs and eyesight in the war, and who cannot talk. The gruesome novel was meant as an anti-war statement. The Communist newspaper The Daily Worker serialized it during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (Aug. 23, 1939 to June 22, 1941) when the Soviet line was for America to stay out of the war. When Nazi Germany broke the pact the Communist Party line changed, from calling FDR an “imperialist” and Churchill a warmonger, to demanding military intervention and an alliance with the Soviet Union. Trumbo immediately scurried to withdraw the book from circulation, and bookstores were ordered to send their copies back to the publisher.

Moreover, he approached the FBI and gave them the names of prospective readers who had written him asking where they could obtain the book. They might be opposing “the commander-in-chief,” he said to the agents, and should be investigated. He feared as well that they might be “acting politically.” So Trumbo named names to the Bureau, only later to condemn those who cooperated with HUAC’s investigation of Communism in Hollywood and did the same.//

Happy New Year!

Thanks to the capitalism and the collapse of Communism, only 10% of the world live in poverty.

This qualifies as "good news"....

...unless you are heavily invested in the "Government as Savior" model, which is why it will be pretty much a non-story

//To hear the global left these days, you'd think the only thing that matters is income inequality. Socialist candidate Bernie Sanders has even made income inequality a linchpin of his presidential
campaign, as has millionaire presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton.

"The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time," says The Bern , "it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time."

But not so long ago, the left's big bugbear was poverty, not inequality. Then a funny thing happened: The left had to de-emphasize poverty because, as measured by the World Bank and others, absolute poverty is disappearing fast, thanks to capitalism and the collapse of communism.

That's right. Capitalism — not big government — is killing poverty. Socialism talks about poverty, but capitalism actually does something about it. As this chart shows, 200 years ago, 19 out of 20 people on Earth lived on less than $2 a day, adjusted for inflation, the definition of absolute poverty. Today, for the first time ever, less than one in 10 people live in this kind of abject state.//

There can be good socialists and bad socialists, but it takes atheism to make socialism  truly evil.

Atheists like to claim that atheism is not responsible for atheist atrocities because "atheism is a lack of belief" and "a lack of belief has never caused anyone to do anything."

As if ignorance has never been the cause of a mistake, bad judgment or injury.

In this case, perhaps, the ignorance lies in the failure to perceive the victims of Communism as beings made in the image of God rather than mere commodities?

//China harvested livers, kidneys, corneas and even hearts from tens of thousands religious prisoners while they were still alive and the world is paying no attention, according to a new documentary.

Rumours of the live organ trade in China first surfaced in 2006, and have been supported by human rights lawyers, witnesses and even surgeons who admit having performed the operations.
But claims that supporters of the Falun Gong faith are having their organs sold to wealthy transplant tourists from all over the world are still not taken seriously.

The documentary, Hard to Believe, offers the first sustained examination into why the world is so willing to turn a blind eye to 'one of the most catastrophic human rights violations in our time'.//

Probably guilty of a building code violation.

Atheist humanists are very concerned about building code violations.

REMAINS OF PRIEST TORTURED TO DEATH BY COMMUNISTS DISCOVERED IN PRAGUE

If you are interested in Cold War espionage...

....the NSA has a "Venona" site.

//Also, VENONA has excellent examples of the work of a KGB
agent and Communist Party functionary, covernames ECHO and
DICK (Bernard Schuster), in carrying out investigations on behalf of
the KGB as part of the vetting process of agent candidates (New York
to Moscow, Nos. 1221, 1457, and 1512, all from 1944).

Alger Hiss, a veteran GRU agent,
is presumably found in one KGB
message: Washington to Moscow,
no. 1822, 30 March 1945. In this
message, A, meaning the chief
Illegal ALBERT (Iskak Akhmerov)
reports about his interview of ALES,
who describes his recent GRU career
and says he has been a GRU agent
continuously since 1935. Analysts
later identified ALES as probably
Hiss. Presumably, ALBERT was
examining the possibility of
transferring Hiss from GRU to the
KGB.

The left has been in favor of Blacklists for a long time.

The Left's support of Free Speech is purely tactical.

//Once on a British talk show in the early 1970s, anticommunist actor John Wayne startled the host by acknowledging that there was indeed a Hollywood blacklist.  Wayne’s follow-up, however, made the host’s jaw drop even farther; the blacklist, he stated, wasn’t wielded by industry anticommunists against Communist Party members, but by the reverse.  It was for this reason, Wayne stated, that he enlisted in the anticommunist fight in order to defend conservative screenwriters and get them back on the payroll.

Wayne, regarded by the Old and New Left, as a fascist, was in actuality more of a rebel against the establishment than they ever would be.  The “establishment” in this case was Left Coast Hollywood, already entrenched by the early 70s, who, taking a leaf from the Hollywood communist narrative, asserted that the blacklisted were liberals battling fascism in the form of industry anticommunists.  Upholders of free speech rather than the Stalinists they were, they paid the consequences for their New Deal liberalism by going to jail and being denied employment in the industry for two decades.   Their eventual triumph wasn’t just in overturning the blacklist, but in getting modern day Hollywood, academia and liberals to accept their narrative.  Hence, anticommunist movie stars like Robert Taylor have had their names removed from buildings, while blacklisted screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo have free speech fountains at colleges dedicated to them.

This spin is nourished by the memoirs of the children of the blacklisted, who give the narrative more poignancy by showing how the blacklist warped their childhoods.  These recollections all follow the same theme: assertions by the children that their parents were not knee jerk Stalinists; followed by a strong, loving family unit (no affairs or alcoholism are allowed into this narrative); then the unit is warped while at the same time being brought closer together as the blacklist hits; then a decade of near-poverty, school yard bullying, and a redemptive move toward leftist politics.

More than honoring the memory of their parents is involved here.  As with Left Coast Hollywood, they have followed the narrative by continuing how they were used by their parents in protests against their jail terms—displayed with placards bearing how their parents were going to jail while their parents stood piously by.

By contrast, the children of their anticommunist foes have stayed silent.  But Allen Ryskind, the son of the blacklisted’s bete noir, Academy-awarding screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, does not engage in self-pity or strumming the violin in Hollywood Traitors.  While he notes that his father was the victim of the blacklist Wayne spoke of, he doesn’t play on it.  Nor does he use the example of his father—a Jew and member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Screenwriters’ Guild as well as a two-time voter for FDR—to refute the Left’s charge that their opponents were anti-Semites, anti-labor and anti-New Deal.

More people united only by their lack of belief not attacking Christians because of their lack of belief.

Commies are evil

Members of the Xiaying Holy Love congregation in Ningbo, a port city 170 miles north of Wenzhou, said they held their last service on May 11 after Religious Affairs officials decided their place of worship was an eyesore that needed destroying.

"They told us the cross was too shiny, too tall and too big," said one worshipper.

Last week, a coalition of underground church leaders, activists, academics and lawyers urged Beijing to guarantee its citizens’ rights to freedom of religious belief and expression.

More here. 

Jay Carney - Admirer of Totalitarianism
But it's OK because it's only Communism.

Commies are Evil.

The Truth about Che.

My tour of the Cuban countryside took me to Che’s final resting place in a mausoleum behind an imposing momument on the outskirts of Santa Clara. Before I stepped off the bus I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t argue with a single person, Cuban or foreign, at the memorial—not so much out of respect for the dead, but because I didn’t want to be “that guy.” Better to just zip it for an hour and tell the truth about Che later in writing.

Not sixty seconds after I swore to keep quiet, an American tourist sitting next to me said something so naïve that I almost bled in my mouth. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? We don’t have anyone in American history who is loved like the Cubans love Che.”

Cuba is a police state and Che was its co-founder. Cubans “love” him the same way Romanians “loved” Nicolae Ceausescu and East Germans “loved” Berlin Wall architect Erich Honecker.  

You know what happens to Cubans who display open hated of Che?

They get arrested.

When he was still alive, they were executed or herded into slave-labor camps.

So yeah, everyone “loves” him. It’s required by law. Woe to those who disobey State Security. 

The human spirit is a powerful force, though, and some Cubans can’t take it. A million and a half fled to the United States to escape the instruments of Che Guevara’s repression, many across the Florida Straits where the odds of survival are no better than two out of three. Others resisted at home, especially during the 1960s, the decade of global rebellion.

“They corrupt the morals of young girls!” Castro shouted against rebellious youth at the time, “and destroy posters of Che! What do they think? That this is a bourgeois liberal regime? NO! There is nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!”

Angel Ciutat advised Che about the construction of Cuba’s secret police, which he learned from the most sinister secret police chief of all—Lavrenty Beria, head of Josef Stalin’s NKVD. Nearly all Che’s victims were Cuban. Would Americans love a foreign implant who murdered thousands, forced thousands more into slavery, and drove more than a million to exile?

Of course not. 

The Communist grip on the Western news media hasn't relaxed...

....in the 25 years since it died.

The American Left just can't shake it's love affair with mass-murdering Commies.

Video: NBC Praises Communism as One of History’s ‘Pivotal Experiments’

 “The towering presence, the empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint. The revolution that birthed one of modern history’s pivotal experiments. But if politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it’s passion that endures. As a more reliable right to their collective heart. What they build in aspirations lifted by imagination. What they craft, through the wonder of every last detail. How magical the fusion of sound and movement can be. How much a glass of distilled perfection and an overflowing table can matter. Discover the Russian people through these indelible signatures. Discover what we share with them through the games that open here tonight.”

George Orwell, call your office. As he wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” in 1946, such euphemisms are “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” and certainly describing Communism as “one of modern history’s pivotal experiments” fits the bill in spades. Or as Stacy McCain accurately described it this week at the American Spectator, “The Worst Idea in the World”:

Just imagine a documentary on Germany describing 1932 as anything other than the beginning of a nightmare of terror.

Great moments in public discourse.

First, I think we need to stop firing people for what they say on Facebook. I'd rather have people demonstrating that they are idiots, than not.

Second, the Loomis case is an example of why the "spot the idiot" game is so useful. According to Glen Reynolds:

DAVID HENDERSON: Free Speech for Me but Not for Thee: The Case of Erik Loomis.

It turns out, by the way, that Crooked Timber also misled by omission. Everyone knows that the expression “head on a stick” is a metaphor, and that is how Crooked Timber defended Loomis. But see here for some of his truly vile comments. Crooked Timber quoted none of these.
Also, the other person, besides the people at Crooked Timber, who is unwilling to defend freedom of speech is . . . Erik Loomis. When given a chance to clarify his views on LaPierre, he wrote, “Dear rightwingers, to be clear, I don’t want to see Wayne LaPierre dead. I want to see him in prison for the rest of his life.”
And what would he want LaPierre in prison for? For murder? No. It would be for speaking out in favor of, and lobbying for, people’s right to own guns. So, again, “freedom of speech for me, but not for thee.”

That’s consistent with their general approach. They’re lefty-defenders, not liberty-defenders.

Plus this: “Reading how vile the comments of this ‘gifted young scholar’ were, I did start thinking that, at a minimum, some people at URI should occasionally monitor his class or question his students to find out whether he brings anywhere close to that amount of venom to discussions with students who disagree with him.”

And, from the comments: “One irony of all this: While FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) is already at work defending Loomis against possible sanction by URI, I doubt very much that Loomis himself would be supportive of other work FIRE does to protect the rights of students who, for example, agree with Wayne LaPierre.”

We are much better off having Leftists expose their inner fascism, than we are having them sit around in rooms calmly plotting the murder of 25 million Americans, as was the case with the graduate students from the 1% who made up the Weather Underground.



Those people are evil

The Defining Characteristic of the Modern Generation -

Narcissism.

Millions of foreigners are murdered by Communism and it's no big deal, but blacklist a few Hollywood Communist screenwriters and it is a "holocuast."  Jonah Goldberg disembowels this sorry attitude:

The anti-Communist effort also painted with too broad a brush at times. That story is far better known and is treated as one of America’s greatest sins, especially in Hollywood where a number of screenwriters were blacklisted. I’m willing to argue about where the line between right and wrong, good and evil, should be drawn when it comes to the blacklist. I’ve had those arguments many times and reasonable people draw those lines in different places. But given that tens or hundreds of millions of people were murdered in the name of Communism, the loss of a few screenwriting jobs never struck me as much more than a footnote or sidebar to the story. That doesn’t justify treating people unfairly of course, but I remain amazed at the ability of people to shrug off mass murder as the boring fixation of tedious rightwingers while simultaneously growing furious and indignant over the Hollywood blacklist. Yes, America should have a high standard for how we treat our own, but the mismatch always struck me as a depraved self-indulgence.

Enter The Hollywood Reporter’s apology for “Hollywood’s Holocaust.” Apparently, The Hollywood Reporter didn’t toe the progressive line during the Red scare and it is now apologizing for it. Howard Kurtz celebrates THR’s better-late-than-never apology for this ”odious” and an “appalling chapter of the publication’s history.”

Well, okay. But “Hollywood’s Holocaust”? Really? That’s a moral and logical perversion. It’s hard enough to get liberals to admit that the Soviet genocide in the Ukraine was a holocaust or to get them to do more than shrug at China’s murder of 65 million people. But when Hollywood studios refrained from hiring people whose political views are out of fashion (they’d never do that today, would they?) that’s a “Holocaust”? Good lord, what is wrong with these people?

Commies are Nazis with good press agents.

Daniel Hannam - the last sensible man in Europe - takes the adjacent European Union propoganda poster to task for including a "hammer and sickel" with its deptiction of religious symbols:

Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.

For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people's courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.

Yet here it sits on a poster in the European Commission, advertising the moral deafness of its author (I hope that's what it is, rather than lingering nostalgia). The Bolshevist sigil celebrates the ideology which, in strict numerical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ever devised by our species. That it can be passed unremarked day after day in the corridors of Brussels is nauseating.

Communists are Nazis with a Better Public Relations Agent.

For the last 40 to 50 years, people have grown up with the sense that there really never were Communists and if there were, they were idealistic "liberals in a hurry."

It is disquieting how an unlimited, pro-bono contribution of unstinting love from generations of writers and producers and directors and intellectuals have managed to put lipstick on the pig of the most evil inventions of the human mind.

And they knew - know - what they are doing. Thomas Woods notes that Marxist Historian Richard Hobsbawm died last Monday with this observation:

The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm died this past Monday. Hobsbawm was far inferior as a scholar to a great many other Marxists, but the British establishment’s lack of discernment made him a celebrity. There is an analogy here with Paul Krugman, who is doubtless viewed with contempt by superior Keynesian macroeconomists who wonder how this polemicist came to be the country’s spokesman for Keynesianism.

Hobsbawm — who later reversed his earlier enthusiasm for Stalin — was asked in 1994 whether, if communism could have achieved its goals with only 15-20 million deaths, he would have supported it. “Yes,” came his answer.

This man was eulogized in the major British newspapers this week.

Except in the Daily Mail, which skewered him, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum be damned.

I just had a conversation with the Widget and the Wadget where I had to explain that there really were Communists, that Communists were spying on us, that Communists were a threat, that they were not an invention of Joe McCarthy's mind, that Stalin had starved and murdered millions, that there were Communists in the media who covered up Stalin's murders, such manufactured starvation of the Ukrainians, and that there really were Communists in Hollywood, Academics and Washington who wanted to hurt the United States. They seemed incredulous and I wanted to know how a 14 and 15 year old had been exposed to the left's version of the Cold War and only the left's version.

Television, apparently.

In any event, Hobsbawm's death and this obituary in the Daily Mail are timely:

He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide. But was hero of the BBC and the Guardian, Eric Hobsbawm a TRAITOR too?

Historian defended the Soviet killing of millions in the name of Communism

When he was at Cambridge in the 1930s he knew Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and other Soviet agents, who were recruited by Marxists

Four years before his death said he wanted to see MI5 files on him to find out who had 'snitched on him'

Read the Daily Mail obituary and reflect on how honored and well-paid Hobsbawm was for telling lie after lie after lie for the Communist cause.

From the "Commies are Evil" file - While we are watching the evil persecution of Christians by Islamofascists, let's not forget the evil persecution of Christians by evil Commmies."

Vietnam sentences Christian bloggers to prison:

The People’s Court in Ho Chi Minh City today passed sentence on three Christian bloggers in a case that has polarized the religious community and drawn international criticism.

Nguyen Van Hai and Marie Ta Phong Tan received sentences of 12 years and 10 years, respectively, with five additional years of house arrest, while Phan Thanh Hai received a four-year sentence and three years of house arrest.

The bloggers were charged with spreading anti-government propaganda under Article 88 of the country’s criminal code. They were founding members of the Free Journalist Club, an organization not recognized as an official body by the government.

State media reports before today’s verdict said Phan Thanh Hai had “pleaded guilty and asked for a lenient sentence,” while the two other defendants “obstinately” denied the charges against them.

The United States embassy in Hanoi was quick to criticize the verdict.

“We are deeply concerned by reports that the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court convicted and sentenced blogger Dieu Cay [Nguyen Van Hai] to 12 years in prison for peacefully expressing his political views,” the embassy said in a statement today.

“The government’s treatment of Dieu Cay appears to be inconsistent with Vietnam’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights relating to freedom of expression and due process,” the statement added.

It further urged the government to “release Dieu Cay and his fellow bloggers. As President Obama said on World Press Freedom Day, we call upon all governments to take the necessary steps to create societies in which independent journalists can operate freely and without fear.”

Local blogs reported that an estimated 400 security officials blocked access to the court and confiscated cameras and mobile phones from bystanders who attempted to take photos.

Hate group that invented the idea of class warfare, and hold the record for "greatest mass murderers of the 20th Century"...

...say, "Obama's our guy."

But they're only Communists, so nobody's particularly concerned.

And to be fair, the Communists didn't just kill the 1%, they killed the middle-class, independent farmers, Poles, Jews and anyone else who got in the way of creating a more equal society.