Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Communism

  • Trotsky’s Faith in Man

    On 20 August 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. It makes no sense to put your faith in Man, as I argue in a 2021 Substack entry.

  • Why Did Communism Fail?

    Top o' the Stack.

  • The Chinese Trial Balloon, Realpolitik, and What it Excludes

    Now this you should read. Excerpt: If I’m right, Beijing’s chief reason for floating a balloon over North America was to see whether it would elicit a response from the U.S. government and military, as well as from the American people. And so it did, judging from the subsequent uproar in the press and on…

  • Globalist-Capitalist Woke Leftism

    Here are some half-baked thoughts that perhaps Vito C. and Ed B. can help me formulate. The new global-capitalist woke leftism (GCWL) is very different from the old socialist-humanist leftism (which I take to include both the Old Left and the New Left). I want to understand the similarities and the differences. GCWL versus SHL…

  • Memories of the Moscow Trials

    An important 1984 essay by Sidney Hook.  Related: The Trial of Kyle: The Show Trial Comes to America See also:  Sidney Hook Reviews Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual Sidney Hook on Freda Utley

  • Marxism and Pelagianism

    If Pelagianism is the false belief that man can save himself without help ab extra, then Marxism is a latter-day secularized form of Pelagianism. Among the central  pillars of Marxist and indeed all leftist delusion is the conceit that human beings are fundamentally good. The blood-drenched attempts at the remaking of humanity in the image…

  • ‘The Wrong Side of History’

    This is a re-thought and  much improved version of a post that first appeared on this weblog on 15 May 2012.  ………………………….. I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.' This question I want to raise is whether this is a phrase that a…

  • Stalin the Bookman

    Here is a review of Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books. Excerpts: He was also an avid reader. Roberts’s book begins as an analysis of the personal library Stalin left behind, scattered around his various dachas and offices. It comprised some 25,000 volumes, covering a wide range of subjects including Marxism, political…

  • Trotsky’s Faith in Man

    Substack latest. On 20 August 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

  • Is the US Becoming the SU?

    I've been warning of this for years. Ed West, America has become its own worst enemy. Excerpt: Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of…

  • Is America Pre-Totalitarian?

    Rod Dreher raises the question. The video is less than ten minutes long.

  • History Lesson

    The Pitesti Gulag in Romania

  • Rebel with a Cause

    "The eighty-year-old mystery of the murder of Sheldon Robert Harte, Leon Trotsky’s most controversial bodyguard." Jean van Heijenoort was another of the Old Man's bodyguards.  I met van Heijenoort in the mid-70s when he came to Boston College on the invitation of my quondam girlfriend, Charaine H., a student at Brandeis University where van Heijenoort…

  • Trotsky’s Faith in Man

    On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own. Read the rest. The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great…

  • Why Do Leftists Call Good People Racists?

    Dennis Prager: First, truth is not a left-wing value. As I have said and written ever since studying communism and the left in graduate school at the Columbia University Russian Institute, truth is a [classically] liberal value and a conservative value, but it is not a left-wing value. However, destroying opponents by destroying their reputations…