It's not hard to understand why many secular people in the West were fascinated by a figure like Fidel Castro. Where religion retreats, political faiths tend to advance to fill the absence of meaning, purpose, authority (yes, people crave that, too). Add a bold, charismatic leader willing to fight – even die – for something? It was the Iliad, Robin Hood, Star Wars, in hip scraggly beards, jungle fatigues, defiantly smoking Cuban cigars.
But why many religious people over decades were taken with the now departed máximo lider is harder to grasp. Vaticanist Sandro Magister has wittily observed: Pope Francis cried at his passing, Patriarch Kirill wept, but among those close to the situation – the Cuban bishops – it’s dry eyes all around.
Category: Communism
Horribile Dictu: Orthodox Patriarch Praises Castro
Did the United States Defeat the Soviet Union Only to Become Another Soviet Union?
I have posed this question in several forms over the past few years. In his latest, Publius Decius Mus offers an excellent exposition and answer:
Comprehensive Conservative Failure
If I may address professional conservatives directly: It seems to me undeniable that you have already failed. Don’t take it personally. I can rephrase that as “we” if you like, even though I was never much of an operative within Conservatism, Inc. But I was a fellow traveler and supporter, so if you want to lay part of the blame on me, fine.
We failed. We didn’t do what we set out to do. We lost the political and culture wars decisively. Our economic victory turned out to be fruitless: all the gains have accrued to those we nominally “defeated,” as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats are now the party of the super-rich. Our victory in the Cold War also turned to ashes, as we lost our heads pursuing unrealizable foreign ambitions while fighting in ways that preclude the possibility of victory. Not that we know what victory entails or have any idea what to do with it if we achieve it—but that doesn’t matter, because since 1991, we never have. Worse, we were crushed in the war of ideas:
It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived the conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.
You don’t have to be alt-right to see that this is a perfect description of the USSR’s posthumous intellectual victory in the form of “Cultural Marxism.” Climb down from the egghead mountaintops and the defeat becomes even clearer. A principal Soviet export was crude anti-Americanism—grounded in high theory, to be sure, but simplified to be understandable by even the meanest capacities. We “won” the Cold War, but that export nonetheless spread like a virus—so much so that anti-Americanism is now and has been for at least 20 years the civil religion not just of all Third World populations, not just of Western allies, but of American elites and their foot soldiers.
We failed to preserve a true understanding the principles of the Declaration of Independence. We failed to preserve the proper working order of the Constitution. We failed to protect and nurture that virtue in the people necessary to sustain the Constitution. We failed to defend the family from relentless assault. We failed to maintain any semblance of a shared public morality. We allowed—through a combination of active cheering and ineffective opposition—demographic and cultural replacement. We lent a great deal of our talent to serve rapacious interests in the name of “economic freedom.” All the things we were supposed to conserve—the nation, its people, its way of life, its governing structure—we have not conserved.
This is exactly right. It also helps explain the rise of Donald Trump — and why you ought to vote for him despite his manifest negatives. He is our only hope to stop, or at least impede, America's leftward slide into oblivion.
Ron Radosh Defends Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature
Here. Radosh addresses Andrew Klavan's objections. I wonder if Radosh is aware of Dylan's 1983 song in defense of the Rosenbergs. See below.
Did you see Radosh on 60 Minutes Sunday night during the segment on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? Radosh and co-author Joyce Milton definitively showed that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged, or at least Julius was.
There is no Religious Liberty Under Leftism: The Albanian Example
Do you value religious liberty? Then you must work to defeat Hillary Clinton, which is to say: you must vote for Donald Trump.
The Left, being totalitarian, brooks no opposition and is brutal in its suppression of religion. Consider the example of Fr. Ernest Simoni:
Persecution in Albania was exceptionally harsh, even for Communist Eastern Europe. Among the living martyrs who were present and greeted Francis was Fr. Ernest Simoni. He gave a moving account of his almost three decades spent in Albanian labor camps; Francis was visibly moved.
The history behind this personal story is worth recalling. The conflict between the Catholic Church and Communist state in Albania can be divided into three stages:
1) 1944-1948 when the government terrorized and persecuted believers and clergy;
2) 1949-1967 when the government tried to “nationalize” or Albanize the country’s religions, and to establish a National Albanian Catholic Church similar to the Patriotic Church created by Albania’s then-ally, Communist China. This stage reached its culmination with Albania proclaiming itself the world’s first atheist state;
3) 1990 to the present, during which the Albanian Church awoke after decades of martyrdom and persecution.
Fr. Simoni was arrested on December 24, 1963, just after he had finished celebrating the Christmas Vigil Mass in the village of Barbullush, Shkodër. Four officers from the Albanian Secret Police (Sigurimi) showed up at his church and presented him with arrest and execution orders. “They tied my hands behind my back and began beating me, while we were walking to the car,” he recalled.
He was brought to the interrogation facility and kept in complete isolation, suffering unbearable tortures for three consecutive months. The accusation was that he had been teaching his “philosophy.” He taught his people “to die for Christ.” During three months of confinement and interrogation, the persecutors tried to force him provide evidence against the Catholic hierarchy and his brother priests, which he refused.
There is an interesting American connection to his persecution. One of the accusations against Fr. Simoni was that he had celebrated a requiem Mass for the repose of President Kennedy’s soul, exactly a month after the Catholic president’s death. A journal found in Fr. Simoni’s room featured a picture of President Kennedy and was presented to the court as material proof – of something or other.
“By God’s grace, the execution was not carried out,” Fr. Simoni recalled. After the trial, he was sentenced to twenty-eight years of forced labor, working first in the mines and then as a sanitary and sewage worker, until the fall of Communism in 1991.
The Rosenbergs: Still Guilty After All These Years
On this date in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death as atomic spies for the Soviet Union. They were most certainly guilty as we now know. But no amount of proof of their guilt will stop the Left from lying about them as victims of American 'fascism.' In those days we weren't the decadent weaklings we have become, unsure of ourselves, and unwilling to defend our nation against deadly threats.
Why, for example, is Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, still alive? He committed his crimes to the cry of Allahu akbar in 2009, was sentenced to death in 2013, but is still alive. Why hasn't he been executed? Why the endless appeals?
We need a judicial fast track to execution for convicted terrorists.
We have lost our way. We now longer believe in ourselves. We have elected and re-elected a hate-America leftist fool who actually had the temerity to refer to Hasan's terror as "work place violence." And it is a good bet that he will be elected for a third term in the guise of Hillary Milhous Clinton.
What Happened to Angela Davis?
Roger Kimball:
Saturday marked the 44th anniversary of Angela Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. Remember Angela Davis? I asked several of my younger colleagues: No one under 35 had heard of her. But the former Black Panther, recipient of the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize, and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall, was once a household name. That was enough for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, which last Thursday bestowed on Ms. Davis the 2016 Sackler Center First Award, “honoring women who are first in their fields.”
Previous honorees include the novelist Toni Morrison, Miss Piggy and Anita Hill—pioneers all, no question. Ms. Davis is surely the first person to have parlayed an appearance on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list into a tenured professorship at the University of California.
A Red-Diaper Baby I Once Knew: Anecdotes Illustrating Leftist Illusions
In graduate school I was friends for a time with a New York Jew who for the purposes of this memoir I will refer to as 'Saul Peckstein.' A red diaper baby, he was brought up on Communism the way I was brought up on Roman Catholicism. Invited up to his room one day, I was taken aback by three huge posters on his wall, of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
There is a distinctive quality of personal warmth that many Jews display, the quality conveyed when we say of so-and-so that he or she is a mensch. It is a sort of humanity, hard to describe, in my experience not as prevalent among goyim. Peckstein had it. But he was nonetheless able to live comfortably under the gaze of a mass murderer and their philosophical progenitors.
One day we were walking across campus when he said to me, "Don't you think we could run this place?" He was venting the utopian dream of a classless society, a locus classicus of which is a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):
. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
The silly utopianism seeps out of "each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes." Could Saul Kripke have become a diplomat or a chauffeur or an auto mechanic if he wished? Pee Wee Herman a furniture mover or Pope? Woody Allen a bronco buster? Evel Knievel a neurosurgeon? And if Marx has actually done any 'cattle rearing,' he would have soon discovered that he couldn't be successful at it if he did it once in a while when he wasn't in the mood for hunting, fishing, or writing Das Kapital.
On another occasion Peckstein asked, "After the Revolution, what will we do with all the churches?" Like so many other commies he cherished the naive expectation that 'the revolution is right around the corner' in a phrase much bandied-about in CPUSA circles. And in tandem with that naivete, the foolish notion that religion would just wither away when material wants were satisfied and social oppression eliminated, a notion that betrays the deep superficiality of the materialist vision of man and his world.
One night we ate at an expensive restaurant, Anthony's Pier Four at the Boston harbor. Peckstein paid with a bad check. After all, it was an 'exploitative' capitalist enterprise and the owners deserved to be stiffed. But he left a substantial tip in cash for the servers. As I said, he was a mensch.
A few of us graduate students had been meeting to discuss Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One day I announced that the topic for the next meeting would be the Table of Categories. Peckstein quipped, "Is that table you can eat on?" The materialist crudity of the remark annoyed me.
And then there was the time he wondered why people thank God before a meal rather than the farmers.
We were friends for a time, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary non-intellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So the tendency is for one intellectual to view an ideologically divergent other intellectual as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing.
Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one's eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one 'gets it right' doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you'd better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant 'for their own good.'
The typical intellectual nowadays is a secularist who believes in nothing that transcends the human horizon. But he takes into his secularism that old-time fervor, that old-time zeal to suppress dissent and punish apostates. It is called political correctness.
And as you have heard me say more than once: P.C. comes from the C. P.
Socialism Kills
Ron Radosh on Trumbo
Here. Excerpts:
The film presents [Dalton] Trumbo as a hero and martyr for free speech, a principled rich Communist who nevertheless stands firm, sells his beautiful ranch for a “modest” new house in Los Angeles, and survives by writing film scripts — most run of the mill but some major films (such as the Academy Award-winning Roman Holiday) — using a “front” who pretended to be the writer.
[. . .]
While Trumbo was an interesting and colorful character, the film gives us the story of the Communists and the blacklist in the mold of the Ten’s own propaganda book published after their HUAC appearances. The book is Hollywood on Trial, which portrayed them as advocates of free speech who were defending the American Constitution, civil liberties, and American freedom itself.
[. . .]
In presenting this rosy picture, Trumbo avoids dealing with the actual nature of Communism and the role played by the CPUSA in Hollywood in the 1940s. It shows Trumbo and the others of the Ten who invoked the First Amendment as unadulterated heroes, and contrasts them with a group of nasty and brutish anti-Communist villains, including Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Roy Brewer, two conservative groups that supported a blacklist and opposed the Communists, and virtually all those in Hollywood who opposed Communism.
[. . .]
Trumbo was no defender of free speech. He was a serious Communist and a defender of Stalin and the Soviet Union.
[. . .]
He could not have claimed innocence of Stalin’s crimes. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin to a Party Congress, he told an old friend of his that he was not surprised, because he had read George Orwell, Koestler, James Burnham, Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine, authors who told the truth about Soviet totalitarianism. In other words, Trumbo supported Stalin while knowing at the time that “Uncle Joe” was a monster and murderer.
[. . .]
Moreover, as the blacklist came to an end, Trumbo had time to reevaluate much of what he believed that led him to join the Communist Party. When my wife and I were doing research for our book Red Star Over Hollywood, we came across an article Trumbo had written but never published.
In this 1958 article, Trumbo told some frank truths about the Party — truths which eventually led him to quit. You would never suspect this from Roach’s film. There is nothing about the Party accusing him of “white chauvinism” — in today’s terms, racism. The CP, he told one old comrade, threw “a bucket of filth over me.” Moreover, he wrote that the Ten did not “perform historic deeds,” but took part “in a circus orchestrated by CP lawyers, all to save [ourselves] from punishment.”
He concluded that the blacklist took place not only because of the Committee, but because of the antics of the CP itself. In this article, he wrote that “the question of a secret Communist Party lies at the very heart of the Hollywood blacklist,” which is why Americans believed the Communists had something to hide. They lived in the United States, not Stalin’s U.S.S.R., and should have openly proclaimed their views and membership so that the American people could judge them for what they believed. Instead, they formed secret Leninist cells. The CPUSA should have been open and its members all known, he wrote, or the Communists in Hollywood should “not have been members at all.”
On the Tombstone of the USSR
"Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer tr., p. 242)
The Neo-Com Left’s Nihilist Agenda
The following reproduced verbatim from Tully Borland's weblog.
In the absence of a practical alternative to the capitalist system, the [Marxist] revolutionary project is a nihilism–the will to destroy existing societies without an idea of what to do next.The persistence of the revolutionary illusion without the revolutionary fact has given rise to what should properly be called a neo-communist movement–one that has learned nothing from the failures of Communism but has not abandoned the cause itself. Neo-communist radicals add new dimensions of oppression to the Marxist model, like racism and "sexism." But it is the same Marxist model that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, identifies capitalism as the root cause of global problems, and regards the United States as the global system's guardian-in-chief. Consequently, like the Communist perspective it has replaced, the contemporary radical outlook opposes America's wars and opposes America's peace. All that really distinguishes this neo-communist perspective from its Communist predecessor is its ad-hoc attitude towards the revolutionary future, and the nihilistic agenda that follows.
As an expression of its nihilism, the contemporary left defines and organizes itself as a movement against rather than for. Its components may claim to be creating egalitarian futures in which racism, "sexism" and corporate dominance no longer exist and in which "social justice" prevails. But unlike Communists, the neo-coms are not committed to even a rudimentary blueprint as to what such an order might be. It is this lack of programmatic consensus that leads some leftists to deny that there even is a "left," and makes it possible for a fragmented coalition of neo-coms–including anarchists, eco-radicals, radical feminists, "queer" revolutionaries, Maoists, Stalinists, and vaguely defined "progressives"-to operate side by side in improbable coalitions like the antiwar movement. It is why they can do so in ways that benefit such anti-egalitarian allies and regimes as Islamic radicals and the Baathist, fascist state of Iraq.
David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left, Vol II: Progressives (2013): pp.28-29
Like a Moth to the Flame
Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept. She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.
The former 'Comrade Van' was a super-sharp logician but a romantic fool nonetheless. He is known mainly for his contribution to the history of mathematical logic. He edited From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Harvard University Press 1967) and translated some of the papers. The source book is a work of meticulous scholarship that has earned almost universally high praise from experts in the field.
One lesson is the folly of seeking happiness in another human being. The happiness we seek, whether we know it or not, no man or woman can provide. And then there is the mystery of self-destruction. Here is a brilliant, productive, and well-respected man. He knows that 'the flame' will destroy him, but he enters it anyway. And if you believe that this material life is the only life you will ever have, why throw it away for an unstable, pistol-packing female?
One might conclude to the uselessness of logic for life. If the heart has its reasons (Pascal) they apparently are not subject to the discipline of mathematical logic. All that logic and you still behave irrationally about the most important matters of self-interest? So what good is it? Apparently, van Heijenoort never learned to control his sexual and emotional nature. Does it make sense to be ever so scrupulous about what you allow yourself to believe, but not about what you allow yourself to love?
SOURCES (The following are extremely enjoyable books. I've read both twice.)
Anita Burdman Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1993.
Jean van Hejenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Harvard UP, 1978.
Related: Trotsky's Faith
The Last Words of Leon Trotsky
Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, with van Heijenoort standing behind Frida.
The Impulse to Wipe Away the Past is Stalinist
An impulse whose manifestation may be coming to a monument near you. Did the US defeat the SU to become the SU?
Of ChiComs, Cojones, and Civilization
At least the ChiComs have the cojones to defend their civilization against the Islamist barbarians. Not that I approve of the method, the use of state power to force shop keepers to sell alcohol and tobacco products. But if you put a gun to my head and force me to choose between Communist and Islamist totalitarianism, I'll go with the former. Here in the States we have an ever-more-totalitarian leftist government that coddles and excuses and refuses to face and name the reality of Islamist terrorism. (You may recall that the 2009 Fort Hood Islamist terrorist rampage of Nidal Malik Hasan was dismissed by the Obama administration as "work-place violence.") So you can't count on Stateside leftists to go after radical Muslims under that description; they have their hands full persecuting the Christian owners of obscure pizza joints, bakeries and floral shops.
Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in a village in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in “eye-catching displays,” in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported. Establishments that failed to comply were threatened with closure and their owners with prosecution.
Facing widespread discontent over its repressive rule in the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang, and mounting violence in the past two years, China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns to weaken the hold of Islam in the western region. Government employees and children have been barred from attending mosques or observing the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In many places, women have been barred from wearing face-covering veils, and men discouraged from growing long beards.
In the village of Aktash in southern Xinjiang, Communist Party official Adil Sulayman, told RFA that many local shopkeepers had stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes from 2012 “because they fear public scorn,” while many locals had decided to abstain from drinking and smoking.
The Koran calls the use of “intoxicants” sinful, while some Muslim religious leaders have also forbidden smoking.
Story here. (HT: Karl White)