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BOOKS

Socialism: A Grab-Bag of Superstitions Superstitionism is no basis for a system of government. By Lloyd Billingsley

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/27/socialism-a-grab-bag-of-superstitions/

During recent election cycles, “socialism” got quite a workout, without much detail about what it actually represents. For that knowledge, one of the best sources is Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century by the late Sidney Hook, born in 1902, before any socialist country existed. 

“Socialism was a feeling of moral protest against remediable evils that surrounded us,” Hook writes, but there was more to it. “Our socialism was an ersatz religion in that we lived in its light, were buoyed up by its promise, and prepared to make sacrifices for it.” The great philosopher was also candid about the way it worked.

“Socialist faith contrasted the realities of the capitalist system with the ideals of a vaguely defined socialism, since at the time no Socialist system existed anywhere.” Once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established, Hook would conduct a proper comparison of the realities of capitalism with the realities of socialism, such as terror and violence, “the weapon of those who scorned argument and evidence.”

Lenin was the first to refer to those who did not support the Soviet regime as “vermin,” but like Stalin professed to believe that the victims of the “Red Terror” were guilty of something, however far-fetched. As Hook recalled, “they would never have admitted to the slaughter of the innocent but their apologists admitted it and justified it!” One of those apologists was dramatist Bertolt Brecht, author of The Threepenny Opera and other works. 

Of the victims of Soviet terror, numbering in the millions, Brecht said, “the more innocent they are, the more they deserved to be shot.” Hook said nothing, escorted Brecht out the door, and never saw him again.  

Soviet socialism was supposedly on the side of the workers, but as Hook discovered, “the workers could be exploited in a collectivist economy as well as in a free market economy.”

Soviet socialism professed to be “scientific,” but as Hook learned, there are no “national truths” in science, no “German science,” and no “Jewish science.” 

In similar style, there are no “class truths” or “party truths” in science; no “proletarian science” and no such thing as “bourgeois physics” and so forth. As the philosopher explains, “this is what happens when one is in the grip of a monastic dogma,” a dogma “sustained by systematic delusion.” 

Later in life, Hook came clean.  

Another French Writer is Alarmed About the Future of France The bleak possibility of civil war? by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-french-writer-is-alarmed-about-the-future-of-france/

Like Eric Zemmour, like Michel Houllebecq, the French writer and essayist Laurent Obertone is alarmed about the future of France. He sees the country as a likely victim of the Great Replacement. By this is meant the replacement of the indigenous Europeans by non-European migrants. More specifically, in France the worry is that the French will be demographically overwhelmed by millions of Muslim migrants and their large families. Laurent Obertone considers the bleak possibility of a civil war in France in an article from November 2022, but of course nothing has changed in the intervening months: “‘The more time passes, the less reversible the situation will be,’ says prominent author Laurent Obertone on risk of civil war in France,” by Olivier Bault, Remix News, November 17, 2022:

Renowned French author Laurent Obertone presents a bleak future of a France in conflict in his books, but he says that such a reality is not far from fiction.

An exclusive interview with French journalist, essayist, and novelist Laurent Obertone, author of the prophetic bestseller novel “Guerilla – The day everything went up in flames” (in French: “Guérilla – Le jour où tout s’embrasa”) and of several essays on the violent and totalitarian drift of French society (“La France Orange Mécanique” – Clockwork Orange France, “La France Big Brother” – Big Brother France, etc.). Following its big success in France, the novel “Guerilla” has also been translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, and Japanese, and will soon be published in Spanish.

The Persecution of George Pell Keith Windschuttle

https://quadrant.org.au/product/the-persecution-of-george-pell/

This book is the story of how the highest levels of the police, judiciary and politics in Australia, plus victim lobby groups, compensation lawyers, and journalists for major news media, found common cause to persecute, convict and jail an innocent man.

They had been persuaded by fanciful accusations that, twenty years earlier, George Cardinal Pell of the Catholic Church had sexually abused two 13-year-old choirboys in the priests’ sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, on a Sunday morning after Mass.

The campaign against Pell aimed not only to personally destroy one of Australia’s most influential religious leaders, but to trash the reputation of his Church as well. To get their man, lawyers, judges and a Royal Commission had to reverse long-standing legal principles including the presumption of innocence, guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and the onus of proof being on the prosecution. They insisted that a claim of child sexual abuse must always be believed.

Had it succeeded, the campaign would have set damaging precedents for the rule of law in Australia. Pell spent 400 days in prison before a unanimous judgment of the High Court acquitted him, and set him free.

“Destiny of the Republic” by Candice Millard- Review by Sydney Williams

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Four U.S. presidents have been assassinated; three of them within a thirty-six-and-a-half-year period: Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, James Garfield in July 1881, and William McKinley in September 1901. The fourth, of course, was John Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It was not until McKinley’s assassination that the president was assigned a secret service detail. Even then, ex-presidents were on their own. In 1953, President Truman and his wife Bess, famously, took the train home to Independence, Missouri, mingling with passengers and without secret service protection.

Ms. Millard tells the story of James Garfield, his abbreviated tenure as President, his assassination, and the times in which he lived. It was on the 36th ballot, at the Republican convention in Chicago in early June 1880, that Ohio Congressman and former Union General James A. Garfield was nominated for the Presidency – a position he had never sought. On November 3, 1880, he was elected the 20th President of the United States, narrowly defeating Winfield S. Hancock. “Although he was by nature,” Ms. Millard wrote, “a cheerful and optimistic man, like Lincoln, he had long felt he would die an early death.” On September 19, 1881, Garfield did die of septicemia and dehydration brought on by a bullet wound, inflicted by a deranged Charles Guiteau on July 2 at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C.

Prince Harry’s 400-page temper tantrum Spare is one of the most annoying books I have ever read. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/11/prince-harrys-400-page-temper-tantrum/

This is the most annoying book I have read in a long time. Even the bio on the first page is annoying. The Duke of Sussex, it says, is ‘a husband, father, humanitarian, military veteran, mental-wellness advocate and environmentalist’. I’m surprised it didn’t add ‘He / him’. Environmentalist? Mother Nature might have something to say about that. The man who once flew in a private jet to a Google camp in Sicily to speak about climate change, and who snorted ‘No one is perfect’ when a hack had the temerity to point out that 60 per cent of the flights he takes are on private jets, is now putting ‘environmentalist’ in his actual bio? Now that’s chutzpah. Or gaslighting. One of those.

Actually, Spare is a big, fat, wordy act of gaslighting. It’s a 400-page tantrum about family and money and tiaras (I’m not joking). It’s primal therapy masquerading as memoir, where the aim seems to be less to tell the truth about what’s being going on in the deranged House of Windsor than to absolve Harry and Meghan of any responsibility for it. These two are never to blame for anything, apparently. Drama and malice just magically appear whenever they’re around. Curious. Most of all, Spare is an act of fraternal treachery. I don’t know much about life in a royal family. But I know about brothers. And I know that if any of my brothers did to me what Harry has done to William in this infernal book, it would be game over. The betrayal of confidence contained in this self-pitying tome is extraordinary.

Irritation drips from every page. There’s the Jamie Oliver-style banterous lingo. Harry goes on a ‘lads’ trip’ with a ‘bunch of muppets’. His grandpa, Prince Philip, liked to ‘rock a bit of scruff now and then’, he says, by which he means grow facial hair. He loves a cheeky Nando’s. That’s a surefire way of ‘enhancing my calm’, he says – ‘Nando’s chicken’. He and a mate were ‘proper fucked’ once when they tried to round up some cows. ‘Fuck fuck fuck’, he says to himself in Afghanistan, like one of the middle-class characters in a Richard Curtis film. One of his military superiors had ‘the heart of a fucking ninja’, he says. ‘And at that moment I needed a ninja.’ At Eton he watches Family Guy ‘while stoned’ and forms an ‘inexplicable bond with Stewie’.

The Soviet Union: A Primer Michael Malice’s new book is the perfect gift for anyone who thinks Communism is cool. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-soviet-union-a-primer/

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by the Soviet Union. For most of my life, it was the other superpower, the villain to our hero, the anti-matter to our matter. We had freedom and prosperity; they had neither. It loomed large in our imaginations but was, as Churchill famously put it, a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” We held their lives in our hands, and they held ours in theirs. During my teens, I read everything about the place that I could get my hands on.

In 1976, paperback editions were issued of both Russia: The People and the Power by Robert G. Kaiser, who’d been the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow, and The Russians by Hedrick Smith, who’d held the same position at the New York Times. I read both books avidly. At around the same time, probably on the 19-cent used-book tables at the legendary Barnes & Noble annex at 5th Avenue and 18th Street, I came across a paperback entitled The Soviet Union: The First Fifty Years, edited by Harrison E. Salisbury. Published in 1967, it contained twenty-odd essays by New York Times staffers on different aspects of contemporary Soviet life and culture.

I still have my copies of these books. I paged through them just now. In all three, what stands out most is the authors’ readiness to normalize life under totalitarianism – to emphasize the good, to minimize the bad, to make Soviet life relatable to Americans by portraying it as something that, just like our own life, has its pluses and minuses. Smith warns in his foreword that readers shouldn’t “misinterpret my criticisms of certain features of the Russian way of life as constituting approval of corresponding aspects of Western society.” Similarly, Kaiser, in his introduction, writes that “when I criticize some aspect of Soviet life, implicitly or explicitly, I hope it is clear that I am not simultaneously trying to endorse the corresponding feature of Western life.” I only just now noticed the striking similarity between those two sentences. Remarkable, no?

Final Battle: David Horowitz Defines the Fight for America We’re one election away from losing our future. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/final-battle-david-horowitz-defines-the-fight-for-america/

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776.

No American who loves our country can look at these past years without feeling that our souls have been tried. At conservative conferences and events there is an inescapable desire for a big picture sense of what we are up against and whether the fight can be won. And that is what David Horowitz offers in his latest book, “Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be the Last”.

Since “Destructive Generation”, Horowitz has spent over three decades chronicling our national crisis in his books and few deny that we are living in the world that he had spent so long warning conservatives would come to pass if the totalitarian ambitions of the Left went unchecked.

“Final Battle” is a fitting title for a culture warrior whose message to conservatives, over and over again, was that they needed to learn to fight. This is a book that describes the fight and its missed opportunities, of those who fought and those who didn’t, and what the next phase, and perhaps the final phase, of the struggle for the country that he loves so much looks like.

Bibi: A Remarkable Life Israel’s Prime Minister tells his story. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bibi-a-remarkable-life/

One of the good tidings of great joy for the otherwise none too promising year of  2023 is that Benjamin Netanyahu, as of December 29, is prime minister of Israel for the third time. As Britain was blessed to have Margaret Thatcher, and the U.S. blessed to have Reagan and Trump, so Israel has been blessed to have this singular figure at the helm for so much of its short history. To explain why this is the case would take a substantial book. Fortunately, that book – Bibi: My Story, Netanyahu’s autobiography – has just been published. And it’s not only substantial but superlative – a first-rate account of one of the most influential lives of the past century.

Born a year after his country’s founding, Bibi, in the early pages of his book, offer a tantalizing glimpse of Israel in its infancy. There were giants in the earth then, and Bibi grew up surrounded by many of them. Among them was his father’s mentor, Joseph Klausner, who, Bibi tells us, “invented the modern Hebrew words for ‘shirt,’ ‘pencil,’ and many other terms” – a detail that underlines the remarkable extent to which Israel’s founding really was, at once, a matter of resurrecting an ancient civilization while at the same time creating a distinctive modern society from scratch.

Another one of Israel’s founding giants was Bibi’s father, Benzion, a brilliant scholar, historian, and editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica. In 1933, at age 23, Benzion had written an article warning of a coming “Holocaust” of the Jews – and been dismissed as “alarmist.” In the years before the establishment of Israel, Benzion played a major role in promoting Zionism in America and Europe. Bibi worshiped him. “The secret to the encyclopedia’s great success, my father said, was clarity,” Bibi recalls. “Eighth graders and doctoral students, he said, should be able to read and understand with equal ease complex entries made simple by his rigorous editing. And they did.” Bibi obviously learned his father’s lesson: this book is uncommonly well written, lucid, vivid, and consistently engaging.

Owing, first of all, to his father’s academic career (ending in a faculty position at Cornell) and, later, to his own education (at MIT), Bibi spent much of his early life in the U.S., hence his perfect, unaccented American English. Throughout this book, his affection and admiration for America are palpable. But Bibi is first and last an Israeli, a man who has devoted his life to his homeland’s preservation, peace, and prosperity.

And the same was true of Bibi’s older brother, Yoni, and his younger brother, Iddo, both of whom, like Bibi, served in Israel’s special forces. Iddo went on to be a radiologist and playwright; Yoni briefly attended Yale and Hebrew University in Jerusalem but quit to return to the IDF. In 2011, Elizabeth Gentieu, who had taught Yoni high-school English in the U.S., remembered how eager the teenager was to return to Israel. “But surely there must be some advantages to life here,” Gentieu said. Yoni replied: “Here in America my classmates don’t know what they are living for, but in Israel, we know.”

Michelle Admits She ‘Couldn’t Stand’ Barry By Jeannie DeAngelis

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/michelle_admits_she_couldnt_stand_barry.html

While promoting her self-help book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, during a “cross-generational” conversation in Atlanta, Michelle Obama shared deep thoughts with a panel moderated by American radio personality, rapper, singer, actress, and toady Angie Martinez.  

The star-studded, “powerful” women of color on the panel also included singer, actress, and television personality Kelly Rowland; Beyoncé’s mama, Tina “Knowles” Lawson; vitiligo spokesperson/model Winnie Harlow; and H.E.R., AKA Gabi Wilson, a singer, songwriter, musician, and actress.

In The Light We Carry, Michelle Obama penned a chapter entitled “Partnering Well.”  Based on decades of Michelle Obama’s unstinting extension of political compromise, racial conciliation, and partisan collegiality, she now must feel qualified to counsel others on how to get along with those they secretly hate.  This time, the always relatable Michelle chose to make her point by shedding “light” on her love/hate partnership with husband Barack.

Much to everyone’s surprise, soft and embraceable Michelle admitted that for more than a decade, she “couldn’t stand” her spouse.  From 1992 until 2002, while Barry was strategizing his passage from a community activist to ruler of the world, Michelle was silently aiming her death stare at someone other than Trump.

One must admit that it is impressive how Michelle manages to paint herself as the victim of whatever circumstance she happens to find herself in.  Furthermore — not that this is a competition — it’s been many years since Barack Obama graced the world stage with his awesomeness.  Yet, unlike Michelle, there are hundreds of millions of Americans who still “can’t stand” him.

As an outspoken activist, Michelle has built her reputation on perpetual scorekeeping.

Biden Screamed and Dropped F-Bombs As Border Crisis Ravaged Sarah Arnold  

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/12/22/biden-screamed-and-dropped-f-bomb-as-border-crisis-ravaged-n2617493

The southern border is in shambles. It has been overrun by illegal migrants and drug cartels who are bringing dangerous substances and people into the U.S., yet America’s president believes that there are “more important” things to worry about. 

However, it turns out that President Joe Biden was and is fully aware of the havoc he has caused on the border. 

According to a new book titled, “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,” author Chris Whipple said that Biden screamed and cursed as the crisis at the border escalated. 

Whipple, who spent the first two years shadowing the Biden Administration, recalled the moment the president learned that thousands of illegal migrants were storming the southern border. 

“Meanwhile, illegal immigrants kept arriving. And Biden was furious,” Whipple wrote, adding “aides had rarely seen him so angry. From all over the West Wing, you could hear the president cursing, dropping f-bombs.” 

Despite Biden never visiting the border or addressing the problem at all, he reportedly had a “short fuse” when it came to the matter. 

“Next to vaccine disinformation, this was the thing that made Biden’s blood boil,” the book reads. 

A senior official reportedly told Whipple that Biden was frustrated with the “lack of solutions” his team brought to him as the country began to become more aware of the problem.