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November 2017

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100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history. By David Satter

By on November 7th, 2017

Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.

The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist- Lenin ist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”

This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”

Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.

The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.

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Trump – Mean, Misunderstood, or…? Sydney Williams

By on November 7th, 2017

The campaign to sully Donald Trump’s reputation is without precedent. Of course, much of it is his own doing. It was, after all, Mr. Trump who created monikers like “little” Marco, “low energy” Jeb and “crooked” Hillary. Genius for inventing names, even those with a modicum of truth, is not appreciated by those assigned them. But, does such behavior suggest meanness? We read that some who have had business dealings with Mr. Trump claim to have been cheated. Some friends that I like and respect think he is mean. Others disagree. Is he? I don’t know; though those who know him best think he is not, but they may be biased. I don’t know the man. Once, years ago, I was introduced to him at the ‘21’ Club in New York – a matter of about thirty seconds, hardly enough time to form an opinion. On the other hand, mainstream media, along with coastal elites and Washington mandarins, have no qualms claiming the President to be a deceitful, undignified, crude, misogynist, xenophobic bigot. But, keep in mind, these are the same people who told us Ronald Reagan was a dumb movie star and that George W. Bush was a brainless spoiled brat. Perhaps partisanship plays a role? Unlike his Republican predecessors who either used humor to deflect criticism or who ignored such jabs, Mr. Trump fights back.

Politics, as has been said many times, is a blood sport – a game, at least in recent years, better played by the Left than the Right. But, Mr. Trump is a man who plays hard ball, just as do Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. In the absence of a return to civility, which seems unlikely, we will have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like. Both Parties would do well to re-read the proverb about people in glass houses not throwing stones, but my guess is they won’t. And the media sees what it wants to see.

Mr. Trump is a manifestation of our culture and politics. He did not suddenly appear, like a Phoenix. As Hoover Institute Fellow Victor Davis Hanson wrote last May, “Critics miss the fact that Trump is not a catalyst, but a reflection of contemporary culture.” In politics, we get what we deserve.

Decency, respect, civility have withered. Historically, our culture – the civil behavior that guides our lives – was based on our Christian-Judeo heritage. Today, we live in a changed, multi-layered society. Political correctness has replaced common sense. Church attendance is down. Each year, the United States loses about 3000 churches, and about 2.7 million church members become inactive. Bricks and mortar do not make a good Christian, or a good person; but attendance encourages reflection and fellowship – important ingredients in civil society. Manners, likewise, have long disappeared. Opening car doors for women is considered sexist, as is saying, “ladies first.” Instead, pornography, graphic sex, vulgarities proliferate. Our historical culture has been subsumed by a multi-culturalism unrecognizable to prior generations. Respect is no longer innate. It is legislated, as in California’s Gender Recognition Act, while our flag is disrespected by NFL players. Patriotism today has a negative connotation. It is confused with nationalism, yet the former demands responsibility as well as love for one’s country, while the latter infers blind obeisance.

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The Humanitarian Hoax of George Soros: Killing America With Kindness by Linda Goudsmit

By on November 7th, 2017

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Billionaire George Soros is the quintessential humanitarian huckster. He is the man behind the curtain who finances the radical left wing liberal agenda of the Democrat party in the United States through his disingenuous Open Society Foundation (OSF). Money buys political influence and George Soros has a lot of money to spread around. This is the way it works.

The Open Society Foundation funnels money into hundreds of smaller organizations with deceptively positive names like:

– Advancement Project

– Alliance for Justice

– Bill of Rights Defense Committee

– Center for American Progress

– Democracy Alliance

– New Israel Fund

– Psychologists for Social Responsibility

– Southern Poverty Law Center

One must enter the world of deception to fully understand what these organizations actually do. It is essential to remember that an organization with a humanitarian name does not make it a humanitarian organization. The primary focus of Soros’ Open Society Foundation and its funding goals is to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. The long-term ambition being an internationalized globalized one-world government that globalist elites like Soros rule.

Soros’ Open Society was named after Viennese philosopher Karl Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper believed that open societies possessed moral codes based on universal principles that benefited all mankind. Open societies recognized no ultimate truths and particularly disdained any society claiming superior cultural norms. Popper criticized the American confidence in its Declaration of Independence that boldly states “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Soros considered Popper’s greatest philosophical contribution to be his insistence that “the ultimate truth remains permanently beyond our reach.”

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Unlearning Freedom Tom McCaffrey image By Tom McCaffrey —

By on November 7th, 2017

Mr. Bush has shown that the Republican establishment, variously frightened, paralyzed, or rendered incapable of rational judgment by political correctness, can be every bit as damaging to the cause of freedom as the cultural Marxists are.

“We know that the desire for freedom is not confined to, or owned by, any culture; it is the inborn hope of our humanity.” (NPR, Oct. 19, 2017) So said former president George W. Bush in his recent criticism of fellow Republican, President Trump. The idea that, by their very nature, all human beings desire freedom is an unquestioned premise of modern liberalism. It underlay Mr. Bush’s efforts at nation-building in Iraq, and it has underlain a century and a half of U.S. immigration policy. And it is false.

According to Freedom House, 40 per cent of the world’s population today is free, while 60 per cent is only partly free or unfree. The Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, shows a map of the world in which economic freedom is confined to a just handful of countries, mostly in the English-speaking world and northern Europe. Freedom is the exception in the world today, as it has been throughout human history.

By “freedom” I mean the absence of physical compulsion—from three specific sources, foreign enemies, one’s fellow citizens, and one’s own government. As for the first, most peoples throughout history probably have resisted subjugation by other peoples. The desire for freedom in this sense is likely near-universal.

But when it comes to relations with one’s fellow citizens or one’s own government, the record suggests that many peoples have tolerated a great deal of physical compulsion—of women, for example. Saudi women are still prohibited by law from driving an automobile. It defies belief that Muslim women would have quietly tolerated subjugation by men for over a thousand years if the desire for freedom were inborn.

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Trump, ISIS and the Crisis of Meaning When politics limits itself to the material, people seek spiritual purpose elsewhere.

By on November 7th, 2017

Three years and many beheadings after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate, Americans are rejoicing in its demise. “With the liberation of ISIS’s capital and the vast majority of its territory,” President Trump said in a statement, “the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight.”

But does the fall of Raqqa really mean the fall of Islamic State? One needs merely a sharp object—or as we saw last week, a rented truck—and a nearby group of “infidels” to be an ISIS soldier.

After the Oct. 31 New York attack, Mr. Trump tweeted: “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” But ISIS’ most important battlefield is not in the Levant; it is online, in hearts and minds. ISIS’ power comes from ideas, not territory.

The threat is from within as well as without. Sayfullo Saipov, the Uber driver who allegedly murdered eight in ISIS’ name, had been living an unremarkable life in the U.S. for seven years. Thousands of young Muslims have left Europe and the U.S. for Syria and Iraq to answer Mr. Baghdadi’s call. Seduced via social media, young men and women, some of them converts, are also taking up arms in the West, or leaving their homes in Chicago, London and Paris, to live, and perhaps die, for a cause.

The Obama administration argued that young people join ISIS because of poor economic prospects. “We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in 2015. “We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.” That’s myopic. Physicians, computer scientists and star high-school students have been radicalized, too. People are motivated by meaning more than money.

While Western states do (or used to) provide good social services, economic opportunity and consumer goods, they are increasingly indifferent to questions of meaning—to principles worth living, and perhaps dying, for. In the U.S. we are proud of our freedom—but freedom to do and care for what? For a small but not negligible number of young people, answering a call to build a caliphate, allegedly based on the dictums of a holy book, will seem a more genuine choice than ambition or consumerism.

Mr. Trump should know this. His campaign was a kind of call for meaning. Whatever the merits of Mr. Trump’s positions, he framed his views on trade, immigration and foreign policy in terms of America’s national identity: “Make America Great Again.” Hillary Clinton emphasized technical solutions. Can anyone remember her slogans, her rallying cries? There was “breaking down barriers” and “fighting for us” and “I’m with her.” None stuck. She ended on “stronger together.” Together with what or whom?

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Race and America’s Soul A fearless, eye-opening new book probes the wound. Myron Magnet

By on November 7th, 2017

What gives Gene Dattel’s Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure its special power is that, even after its bracingly original and thoroughly researched account of the racism of the abolitionist North from the late eighteenth century until long after the Civil War, the book nevertheless does not shrink from laying the ills of today’s black American underclass not at the door of a painful history, with ample blame for northern as well as southern whites, but squarely at the feet of black Americans themselves. Yes, shameful, deeply shameful, were slavery, Jim Crow, and northern racism, and who can doubt that they left grievous scars? Still, America fought a war to end the evil institution, had a civil rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do. Now, Dattel argues, it’s up to black Americans to save themselves.

The most surprising part of the book is Dattel’s documentation of the racism of northern abolitionists. As early as the 1790s, about a decade after Massachusetts had abolished slavery and while Connecticut was in the midst of its gradual abolition, the white townspeople of Salem and New Haven fretted that the movement of blacks into their neighborhoods would crash property values by up to 50 percent. Nor did Yankees make any distinction between freeborn blacks and freed slaves, as an 1800 survey by the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences found. Yale president Timothy Dwight, who sponsored the survey with lexicographer Noah Webster, summed up its consensus on the state’s blacks: “Uneducated to principals of morality, or to habits of industry . . . they labor only to gratify gross and vulgar appetites. Accordingly, many of them are thieves, liars, profane drunkards, Sabbath-breakers, quarrelsome, idle.” New Haven’s freedmen, Dwight expanded a decade later, “are, generally, neither able, nor inclined to make their freedom a blessing to themselves” and end up as “nuisances to society.” Little wonder, given such attitudes, that as white immigrants crowded into the new nation, employers preferred them to native blacks, left with mostly menial jobs as domestic servants, chimney sweeps, washerwomen, and outhouse cleaners.

Half a century after Connecticut’s survey, New York senator and governor William Seward made a famous abolitionist speech, perhaps a template for Abraham Lincoln’s immortal 1854 Peoria speech. Lincoln’s future secretary of state argued that “a higher law than the Constitution,” decreed by “the Creator of the Universe,” forbade slavery. Nevertheless, that same abolitionist, a decade later, pronounced that “the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of our native vineyard.” Just after the Civil War, Seward added that “I have no more concern for [Negroes] than for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor, they always have been and always will be so everywhere.”

Abolitionists, said ex-slave author and clergyman Samuel R. Ward in the 1840s, “best love the colored man at a distance.” Such even was the case with abolitionist heroine Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the epochal Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At the end of her novel, she sends her ex-slave character and his family, who could easily pass for white, she notes, as missionaries to Liberia. “I have no wish to pass for an American,” says George. “I want a country, a nation, of my own.” Wrote Frederick Douglass, starchily, to Stowe: “The truth is, dear Madam, we are here, & we are likely to remain.”

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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: CROSSING THE TRUMP RUBICON

By on November 7th, 2017

We are in a veritable war of competing visions. The strife inside the two parties is irrelevant—when compared to the larger existential war for the soul of America.

Like it or not, Donald Trump in fits and starts has chosen not to accommodate the progressive vision. But in most unlikely fashion he leads the fight against it.

Those who found him too crude, who saw his tweets as too adolescent, and who vowed never to vote for such an antithesis of conservative and family values have all weighed in.

So have those who are embarrassed that Trump—as did Obama during the Henry Louis Gates fiasco, the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, and the Ferguson shooting and subsequent riots—quite inappropriately weighs in on current criminal investigations and trials.

And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.

The Age of Intolerance

We are no longer in the late 1950s era of liberal reform. It is now a postmodern world of intolerance and lockstep orthodoxy.

There are few Berkeley-like free speech areas on college campuses any more. Students charged with particular crimes enjoy little due process. There is no Joan Baez-style acknowledgement of the tragedy of good Southern poor men fighting for an awful cause. No one acknowledges tragedy anywhere at all; it has all become melodrama. We may yet see Joan Baez’s version of The Band’s ballad or Shelby Foote’s commentaries in Ken Burn’s epic Civil War documentary Trotskyized.

The media is not disinterested. Networks such as CNN see their role actively on the barricades, devoted to the higher cause of destroying the Trump presidency, not as reporting its successes or failures. The danger to free expression and a free media is not even Trumpian bombast. It is the far more deliberate and insidious transformation (begun in full under Obama) of journalism into a progressive ministry of truth. Even if he wished, Trump could not take away what the professional press already surrendered voluntarily.

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The Hollywood Darling Who Tanked His Career to Combat Anti-Semitism By Edward White

By on November 7th, 2017

One December day in 1939, Frank Nugent, a film critic for the New York Times, took his seat at the premiere of Gone with the Wind and waited for the carnage to unfold. So long and overblown had the movie’s ad campaign been that Nugent was sure it was going to be a turkey. When that proved not to be the case, he was stunned. “We cannot get over the shock of not being disappointed,” he wrote in his review the next day.

In truth, Gone with the Wind had come perilously close to being just the kind of disaster Nugent had foreseen. Three weeks into shooting, the producers shut down production, fired the director, and hired Ben Hecht to rewrite the script. Hecht was known as the “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” for his ability to knock out clever, crowd-pleasing work in the time it takes most writers to sharpen their pencils. But this was a tall order even for him: he’d never read Margaret Mitchell’s novel and had just seven days to dismantle and rebuild an epic blockbuster. The fact that he did it—fueled, so he claimed, by nothing but bananas and salted peanuts—might seem evidence of his remarkable talent. Hecht himself cited it as proof of the rank absurdity of Hollywood. Despite authoring dozens of successful films and earning six Oscar nominations, he dismissed Hollywood as a “marzipan kingdom” populated by idiots, responsible for an “eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.”
Hecht gave that lacerating verdict in his autobiography, A Child of the Century (1953), listed by Time in 2011 as one of the hundred best works of nonfiction published since the magazine’s founding in 1923. Written in the rambunctiously opinionated style of Hecht’s hero, H. L. Mencken, the book deals with Hecht’s eclectic life as a literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He was intimidatingly prolific, and always provocative. His second novel, Fantazius Mal­lare (1922) landed him in court on an obscenity charge; a later novel, A Jew in Love (1931) had him labeled as a self-hating Jew. Hecht shrugged off the controversies; bigger strife lay ahead.

As his career in Manhattan and Hollywood climbed to new heights of critical and commercial success, he suddenly swerved onto an entirely unexpected path: revisionist Zionism. During World War II, Hecht sabotaged his Hollywood career by castigating the U.S. and its citizens for failing to stop the Holocaust.

It was 1939, the climax of the so-called golden age of Hollywood. In addition to Gone with the Wind, cinema audiences that year were treated to The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights, the latter two of which Hecht also wrote. But as Hollywood cheered its successes, safe in its bubble of unreality, Hecht’s restless gaze switched to Europe and the increasingly frequent and horrific reports of Jewish persecution. The desperate situation stirred in him a sense of belonging and duty to his fellow Jews that he’d never felt before. So, Hecht did what he always did when something got under his skin: he sat himself down and picked up his pen.

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