The difference is that conservatives know that Nazis are imbeciles and thugs, while liberals think that Communists are liberals with the courage of their convictions.

Notice the diversity of Communist flags and symbols in this protest against Confederate statues.

Communists killed tens of millions and enslaved hundreds of millions.

In a better ordered universe they would be shunned every bit as much as the Nazis.

Pardon the "The Modern Mainstream Left is Really the Old Bolshevik Left" theme....

..but here is another one.

//Free speech and enlightenment values are under attack in our universities. In the worthy name of defending the weak and marginalised, many student activists are now adopting the unworthy tactic of seeking to close down open debate. They want to censor people they disagree with. I am their latest victim.

This is not quite the Star Chamber, but it is the same intolerant mentality. Student leader Fran Cowling has denounced me as racist and transphobic, even though I’ve supported every anti-racist and pro-transgender campaign during my 49 years of human rights work.

Fran is the LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Officer of the National Union of Students (NUS). She refused to speak at an LGBT event at Canterbury Christ Church University tonight unless I was dropped from the line-up. This is a variation of the NUS “no-platform” policy; instead of blocking me from speaking, Fran is refusing to share a platform with me.

She has every right to do this. But she does not have any right to make false McCarthyite-style smears. When asked to provide evidence of my supposed racism and transphobia, she was not willing to do so. There is none. Privately I tried to get her to withdraw her outrageous, libellous allegations. But she spurned all my attempts to resolve this matter amicably. As a result I have decided to take my case public.//

So, we have:

1. The revolution is eating its own.....check.

2. Miss the latest line and become an unperson.....check.

3. Fake denunciations on being insufficiently concerned with the minority du jour.....check.

The ironic thing is that the author calls this "McCarthy-ite" when, in fact, there were Communists in government positions, which we know from the Venona intercepts.

It was the Bolsheviks who used defamation about racism to smear and unperson former hardcore leftists.

//They must have realized that such an argument would scarcely be cogent to outsiders. Even to many of the Party it was weak. They must add something really unforgivable to make me an outcast in the eyes of the simple people of the Party. They did this by spreading the story that in my court appearances I had made remarks against the Puerto Rican tenants, that I had slandered them, and showed myself a racist, almost a fascist. And last of all, a charge of anti-Negro, anti-Semitism, and anti-working class was thrown in for good measure.

Dodd, Bella (2014-12-16). School of Darkness: (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 3204-3207). . Kindle Edition.

What can you say?

When tactics work, they work.

"Party Faces." Bella Dodd's observation about the women with "Party faces" - hard and full of hate - came to my mind when I watched the latest video of Melissa Click telling the police to "fuck off" while they attempted to permit the passage of a Homecoming parade.

//The three women among them had faces hard and full of hate — Party faces, I thought, humorless and rigid. They sat there like fates ready to pass on the destinies of human beings.

Dodd, Bella (2014-12-16). School of Darkness: (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 3213-3214). . Kindle Edition.

This is what Bella Dodd was describing.

And this:

//heavy. The futility of my life overcame me. For twenty years I had worked with this Party, and now at the end I found myself with only a few shabby men and women, inconsequential Party functionaries, drained of all mercy, with no humanity in their eyes, with no good will of the kind that works justice. Had they been armed I know they would have pulled the trigger against me.

Dodd, Bella (2014-12-16). School of Darkness: (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 3226-3229). . Kindle Edition. //

People like Melissa Click don't happen by accident. They are educated and trained and weaponized into merciless functionaries with no humanity in their eyes..

Bella Dodd was a high ranking Communist during the 1940s, who was expelled from the Party and returned to the Catholic Church.

"Victims" of the Hollywood Blacklist are less cuddly...

...after you learn that they were apologists for Hitler.

But Trumbo was no intellectual waif writing a pacifist novel. Published “the very month that Hitler marched into Poland,” Ann Coulter recently wrote, Johnny Got His Gun was “a pure propaganda piece designed to squelch American ardor for helping Hitler’s victims.” Trumbo’s novel was written during the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact; as City Journal’s Stefan Kanfer notes in the middle of his review of two recent books on the blacklist:

At first glance, Johnny could pass for the tract of a conscientious objector, ruing the results of Woodrow Wilson’s call to “make the world safe for democracy.” But the book had a hidden agenda: Trumbo had fallen under the spell of Communism and now marched in lockstep with the Party line: Germany and Britain, preparing for all-out war, should duke it out themselves. Never mind the reports of Nazi atrocities; America must not get involved in this European squabble.

The Communist Daily Worker was delighted to serialize Johnny in its pages, and with good reason: the U.S.S.R. had recently signed a nonaggression pact with the Third Reich. But in June 1941, Hitler’s armies invaded Russia. Overnight, Johnny was excised from the Worker’s pages. Now, combat was not only moral but mandatory. When Trumbo’s publishers chose not to keep his novel in print, he went along with their decision. Trumbo sees no inconsistency in the writer’s position. “By 1941,” the book straight-facedly reports, “Hitler had become a menace to the whole world, and when the United States entered the war against Germany in December of that year Trumbo saw ‘no other way than to support it.’”

Also crafted during this same period was Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which had a message quite similar to Trumbo’s Johnny, Ron Rosenbaum, the author of the 1998 book, Explaining Hitler wrote in 2006: 

And speaking of trivializing, there is no more trivializing, over-rated, treatment of Hitler than Chaplin’s dimwitted, laboriously unfunny Great Dictator. Yes Chaplin made some funny movies, but when he tried his hands at politics Chaplin made a movie that did nothing but help Hitler because he made him seem like an unthreatening clown just at a time, 1940, when the world needed to take Hitler’s threat seriously.Yet Chaplin’s film makes it seem like Hitler was nothing but a harmless fool (like Chaplin, same mustache and all). And he made it at a time, during the Nazi-Soviet pact, when the world most needed to mobilize against Hitler’s threat. And yet Chaplin, to his eternal shame ended the film not with a call to oppose fascism, and its murderous hatred, but rather—because he was following the shameful Hitler-friendly Soviet line at the time—ended his film with a call for all workers in the world to lay down their arms—in other words to refuse to join the fight against fascism and Hitler.

Pete Seeger was also making similar noises in his folk music during this period, as PJM’s own Ron Radosh — who in his younger days took banjo lessons from Seeger! — wrote in the New York Sun in 2007:

[In] August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed a pact and became allies. Overnight the communists took a 180-degree turn and became advocates of peace, arguing that Nazi Germany, which the USSR had opposed before 1939, was a benign power, and that the only threat to the world came from imperial Britain and FDR’s America, which was on the verge of fascism. Those who wanted to intervene against Hitler were servants of Republic Steel and the oil cartels.

In the “John Doe” album, Mr. Seeger accused FDR of being a warmongering fascist working for J.P. Morgan. He sang, “I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.” Another song, to the tune of “Cripple Creek” and the sound of Mr. Seeger’s galloping banjo, said, “Franklin D., Franklin D., You ain’t a-gonna send us across the sea,” and “Wendell Willkie and Franklin D., both agree on killing me.”

The film does not tell us what happened in 1941, when — two months after “John Doe” was released — Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. As good communists, Mr. Seeger and his Almanac comrades withdrew the album from circulation, and asked those who had bought copies to return them.

For almost 70 years now, “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia” has been a catchphrase to describe breathtaking intellectual 180-degree pivots. (QED: Democrats and Iraq.) Orwell’s inspiration for the constantly shifting fronts in the futuristic dystopia of 1984 was based on how his fellow socialists reacted after Hitler violated his non-aggression pact with Stalin.

Daniel Hannan wrote in the London Telegraph last year that “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact” and toss it down the Memory Hole, to borrow another Orwellianism:

To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

* * * * * * *

In his Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh, largely through gentle subtext, told the story of how Soviet sympathisers in the West used the alliance with the USSR to rehabilitate its doctrines. Hayek, writing in 1944, devoted the greater part of his Road to Serfdom to refuting the idea that Nazism and Communism were opposed ideologies, well aware of how fervently this idea was being promoted.

He was right; but he made little impact. If you want to see how successful the propagandists of the time were, look at the reaction you get today when – as I did recently – you recite a few unadorned facts that point to the socialist nature of fascism.

Great moments in the history of Atheistic Humanism!

The Communist who personally executed over 7,000 people.

Criminal Communism.

Chinese officials seized and sold infants.

LONGHUI COUNTY, China — Many parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again.

But Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one December morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, Mr. Yuan was holding his 52-day-old daughter at a bus stop when a half-dozen men sprang from a white government van and demanded his marriage certificate.


He did not have one. Both he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage.

Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about $745, to pay the fine he said they demanded if he wanted to keep his child. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.

“They are pirates,” he said last month in an interview at his home, a half-hour trek up a narrow mountain path between terraced rice paddies.

Nearly six years later, he said, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter: “Please come home as soon as possible.”

Mr. Yuan’s daughter was among at least 16 children who were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, an impoverished rural area in Hunan, a southern Chinese province, parents, grandparents and other residents said in interviews last month.


The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue.

From the "Commies are Evil" file - there is no vision of dystopia imagined by a Science Fiction writer that the Communists can't out-imagine...

...and bring into reality.

You've got your man-created famines in the Ukraine, and your intergenerational prison camps in Korea, and your one-child policy backed by forced abortions and sterilizations in China, and now you've got your abduction of "illegal children" whose parents aren't able to pay their illegal child fines:

The fines now imposed on violators of the one-child policy are, by any standards, enormous. In one Chinese county, declared by the UNFPA to be a “Model Birth Control County,” we photographed a billboard of birth control regulations that warned:

Those who illegally reproduce … will be assessed, when their illegal behavior is discovered, a “social compensation fee” based on a unit calculated from a year’s salary for urban dwellers and based on a year’s income after expenses for rural dwellers.

Those who illegally give birth to one child will be assessed a fine 3 to 5 times their annual income; those who illegally give birth to a second child will be assessed a fine from 5 to 7 times their annual income; those who illegally give birth to a third child will be assessed a fine from 7 to 9 times their annual income; those who give birth to 4 or more illegal children will be assessed a fine extrapolated from the above schedule of multiples. For those who illegally take in a child, have an extramarital birth, or have an out of wedlock birth, both parties involved will be assessed a “social compensation fee” according to the above schedule of (income) multiples.

That these fines were actually imposed was clear from our discussions with ordinary Chinese. We were told again and again that violators are fined “tens of thousands of renminbi,” or “20,000 or 30,000 renminbi.” These are enormous sums of money by Chinese standards. One woman reported that she and her husband had been forced to take out a 10-year loan to pay the 25,000 renminbi fine that had been assessed for each of her two illegal daughters. To pay off this “child mortgage,” her husband had been forced to go to work in the city.

And:

When we asked what would happen if a couple couldn’t afford to pay the fine, we were told that offenders would be visited by population control officials who would “seal off” their homes, and possibly even destroy them, as punishment for non-payment.


But these punishments pale in comparison with reports of child abduction. In Lipu county, another UNFPA Model Birth Control County, located in northern Guangxi province, we were told by a village official that “At the present time, if you don’t pay the fine, they come and abduct the baby you just gave birth to and give it to someone else.”

This practice of child abduction has recently been confirmed by the Chinese government. According to a report in the Caixin Century magazine, authorities in the southern Chinese province of Hunan have begun investigating a report that population control officials had seized at least 16 babies born in violation of strict family planning rules, sent them to state-run orphanages, and then sold them abroad for adoption. “Before 1997, they usually punished us by tearing down our houses for breaching the one-child policy, but after 2000 they began to confiscate our children,” the magazine quoted villager Yuan Chaoren as saying.

The children, reportedly from Longhui county near Hunan province’s Shaoyang city, had been abducted by who accused their parents of breaching the one-child policy or illegally adopting children. The local family planning office then sent the children to local orphanages, which listed them as being available for adoption, the report said, adding the office could get 1,000 renminbi or more for each child. The orphanages in turn receive $3,000 to $5,000 for each child adopted overseas, money that is paid by the adoptive parents. The magazine reported that at least one migrant worker said she had found her daughter had been adopted abroad and was now living in the United States.

Via Mark Shea.

SEIU goes "full commie."

SEIU commingles with Communist Party at May Day rally.

After all, what could be wrong with associating with the remnants of an ideology/political party/movement that was responsible for the torture, murder and enslavement of 100s of millions of people.

A different time, a different world.

This story about the conversion of top Communists to Catholicism provides a fascinating glimpse at an alien world, and besides it's inspirational:

Archbishop Fulton Sheen was known for his "celebrity converts" -- famous people whom he had a role in bringing into the Catholic Church. Among them were the automobile executive Henry Ford Jr. and the diplomat Clare Booth Luce, wife of Time/Life publisher Henry Luce. Less well remembered today -- due in part to our fading memory of the Cold War -- but equally sensational at the time was the conversion of Louis Budenz, editor of the Communist Party USA's newspaper, The Daily Worker. Budenz entered the Church with his wife, Margaret, and their three children on October 10, 1945.


In a way, Margaret's conversion is the more remarkable. Louis was baptized and came from a Catholic family, but he abandoned the Faith and devoted himself to his new religion, social reform. Margaret had little religious background and decided during her adolescent years that she did not believe in God. She remembered setting foot in a Catholic Church only once in her life before she and Louis began attending church when she was in her mid-30s: When she was growing up in Pittsburgh, she accompanied her Catholic friend to a novena service at the girl's parish.

We don't appreciate the cult-like aspect of Communism:

Communists in the United States (as elsewhere) were expected to put Party above all, including family. Although the Budenzes were model Communists in other ways, they never quite fit the Communist vision of family life. Neither Louis nor Margaret adopted the loose interpretation of marital fidelity espoused by many of their comrades. Margaret was expected to work for the Party outside the home, but she always put the welfare of her children first. When forced to choose between her obligations to her children and the demands of the Party, she chose her children, risking the ire of the Communist leadership. When Louis and Margaret's love came to fruition in their third child, their Communist friends were incredulous. One of the Party's top operatives urged Louis to abort the baby (which would have been illegal at the time). Another child would put too much financial and emotional strain on the couple, he said, and might result in Margaret's "becoming 'bourgeois.

And:

The day of their reception into the Church and the blessing of their marriage was hectic. Because of the potentially violent consequences of severing ties with the Communist Party, the Budenzes could not let on to their comrades what they were in the process of doing. Monsignor Sheen announced it to the press on the day they professed Catholicism and publicly renounced Communism. Their residence in suburban New York would become a dangerous and inhospitable place after their conversion became known, so after the ceremony in St. Patrick's Cathedral, they hid in a hotel until they could catch a train out of the state. Their destination was South Bend, where Monsignor Sheen had arranged a teaching position for Louis at the University of Notre Dame.

Then, the ending with a twist:

Thus Margaret's in some ways extraordinary biography nonetheless fits a pattern that is recognizable to most Catholic mothers. The constant in her life was devotion to family. She admired and served her husband, bore and cared for her children. This selflessness, it seems clear, paved the way for her journey from atheism to Christianity. After a long career as a Catholic high school teacher following Louis's death, she passed away in 2002 at the age of 94.


"God's grace! What a mystery!," Archbishop Sheen began his foreword to Margaret's autobiography, Streets (1979). A mystery, indeed. Remember the parish novena Margaret attended as a child? The preacher that evening was a relatively unknown but unusually gifted young priest from the Diocese of Peoria whose name meant nothing to her at that point. He was Fulton Sheen.

Gag - 3 minute news report on the few remaining cute and cuddly Nazis in New York.



The get together and play poker and provide news analysis you don't hear on television.  They have the works of Hitler and Mussolini on their bookshelves.  And there seems to be an upturn of interest in entering into the discussion because of high unemployment rates.

What?  Oh....never mind...the report was on Marxists who have the collected works of Stalin on their bookshelves and sing Christmas carols calling Israel an "apartheid state."

Well, that's ok then.

Moronic lickspittles of Mass Murder.

Via Moe Lane.

Apparently, this is a Russian television spot.

If you are going to be a member of a murderous, enslaving criminal conspiracy, make sure it beloved by leftists.


Jonah Goldberg expresses frustration with the "free pass" that a particularly odious, murderous political ideology gets from the media:

I’ve been traveling so I haven’t had a chance to chime in on the NYT cutesy-wutsey story about Communists meeting in NYC.


If this isn’t the perfect illustration of the free pass Communism gets from liberal elites I can’t think of a recent better one. Just for the record, Communists killed more people than Nazis by a factor of 10 at least. Their rule lasted longer, enslaving more people, than the short-lived Third Reich. Moreover, unlike the German people who have repented and apologized quite a lot for their crimes, very few of the nations that have committed mass slaughter in the name of Marx have showed anywhere near the same contrition. Meanwhile the Times covers this group of self-indulgent Communists as if they’re somehow noble-but-eccentric. Can you imagine the Times covering a meeting of Nazis like this? Of course not, and I wouldn’t want them to. But Communists, well, why make a fuss? They are absolved from their history because they’re so well-intentioned. Yeah, it’s funny. But when you think about it’s also disgusting.

Here's the New York Times article on "Where Marxists Pontificate and Play."

IF communists have a reputation for anything, it is seriousness. (And if you have seen old photos of Karl Marx, you know that he did not smile much.) But at the Brecht Forum, a community center on West Street where revolutionaries and radicals gather daily to ponder and to pontificate, they also play. (Smiles abound.)

Michael C. Moynihan at Reason writes:

Via Dan Foster, yet another oh-those-wacky-commies human interest story from a mainstream media outlet. This is perhaps the most understated lede in the history of journalism, from the wonderfully bourgeois-sounding New York Times journalist Channing Joseph: "If communists have a reputation for anything, it is seriousness.” Well, communists do have a reputation for something—and it’s slavery and mass murder, which I suppose is rather serious business, but why pick nits. For instance, the death toll from Mao’s Great Leap Forward alone, according to historian Frank Dikötter’s recent archival research, exceeds 50 million. But Joseph is interested in discovering what commies do for fun when they don’t control the means of production.


In a brief profile of the Brecht Forum, named after the Stalinist playwright Berthold Brecht, who famously defended East Germany’s slaughter of protesting workers in 1953, Joseph offers a deeply uninteresting look at Manhattan’s delusional Reds: "...[T]there is also the monthly Game Night, when regulars put down their copies of “Das Kapital” and immerse themselves in table tennis, foosball and a complicated Marxist version of Monopoly called, appropriately, Class Struggle."

Pay not attention to the murders and the slave camps, they play a cute version of Monopoly!

We're waiting for similar coverage of American Nazis.

Worker's Paradise.

There seems to have been a spate of suicides at the Foxconn factory in Communist China, which is the factory that makes the Iphone:

A 10th employee of iPhone-maker Foxconn jumped to his death late Wednesday, just hours after the company's chairman promised to make life better for employees at the sprawling production site in southern China.

Here is a description of the labor practices in this so-called worker's state:

There's no doubt about it. The Foxconn suicides were caused by job stress. Within half a year, there have been nine suicides attempts with seven confirmed deaths at Foxconn's Shenzhen factory. In the last month, that number suddenly increased to 30 new suicide attempts, prompting the company to hire counselors and even Buddhist monks to free the souls of the suicidal from purgatory.


Foxconn is one of Apple's main manufacturer contractors. Thousands of Mac minis, iPods, iPhones and iPads are assembled daily in the Shenzhen factory, which runs 24/7. The company also produces some products for Intel, Dell, and HP, among others.

After the sixth suicide attempt in April, Southern Weekly—described by The New York Times as China's most influential liberal newspaper—sent a young reporter to sneak into the factory as a worker. At the same time, they sent a senior reporter to talk with Foxconn's executives. Their mission: To discover what's really going on in that factory, and find out the true reasons behind the suicides.

During his 28 days of investigation, Liu Zhi Yi was shocked to discover how the factory workers live in a sort of indentured servitude. They work all day long, stopping only to quickly eat or to sleep. They repeat the same routine again and again except on public holidays. Liu surmised that for many workers, the only escape from this cycle was to end their life.

Liu, a graduate student, was chosen because of his young age, since the factory only hires workers in their twenties. He was hired without issue. He signed only one special document: An overtime working agreement that says the company is not responsible for their long hours of working. According to Liu, this voluntary agreement overrules Chinese state regulation.

Obviously, the answer is that Communists were just "liberals in a hurry."

Claire Berlinski asks, why isno one is interested in the Soviet archives, much less the well-documented Communist atrocities that make the Nazis look like amateurs in the mass-murder game?

She writes:

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

The message has been well and truly drilled home that accusing Communists of being Communists is "McCarthyism", unlike, say, accusing conservatives and people low taxes of being fascists or rascists.

Incidently, it seems that Mikhail Gorbachev was really a Communist, and that the world having survived the Soviet Union is more of a miracle than we imagined:

Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The "commonly accepted" version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.


For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:

Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.

Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?

And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.

A little more of that attitude and Gorbachev could have repressed Solidarity and the democracy protests like Stalin.

When prayer costs

The stuff of which martyrs are made.

On the subject of atheists who have never killed in the name of an atheist future...

Check out this story on how the Soviet Politburo - including Michael Gorbachev - signed an "informal death warrant for Pope John Paul II.

It's perfectly understandable because JPII was undermining the Soviet hegemony over Poland, and how dare he - a mere "clever ape" - stand in the way of dialectical materialism and the force of history.

Humanity was so lucky to have survived the 80's.

The world should have ended sometime during that decade, when the Soviets discovered that they couldn't keep control. We were lucky that we had strong leaders in the West who did not send a message that intimidation could pay dividends, and we were lucky that the Soviet leader did not have the esprit de corp of his murderous predecessors.