Tag Archives: communism

The Press

cracking Down on Journalists in Cuba and Hong Kong

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Communists need their people to toe the party line without question, just like INGSOC does in Orwell’s 1984.

In Cuba, the island nation that could be a paradise, 66 protestors arrested for their actions last summer were tried in December and are still awaiting their sentences. A few who were also arrested for unauthorized use of speech have been sentenced to 15-30 years in prison.

“It has never been easy for journalists to work in Cuba,” Juliane Matthey, press officer for Latin America at Reporters Without Borders, said. On the organization’s 2021 list ranking countries on journalistic freedom, Cuba is the 9th worst, not taking last summer into account.

The Communist Chinese continue to bully journalists in Hong Kong. Stand News was the largest free news agency in the country until Dec 29, when police raided their offices. “The online media organization, which had operated for seven years, took down its website and social media accounts and dismissed all staff.”

Fiction, Reviews

Who’s Afraid of Animal Farm?

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Finding herself unable to read more than individual letters, she fetched Muriel.

‘Muriel,’ she said, ‘read me the Fourth Commandment. Does it not say
something about never sleeping in a bed?’

With some difficulty Muriel spelt it out.

‘It says, ’No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,” she announced finally.

I recently read George Orwell’s Animal Farm with some friends. We talked about it for a couple months. I didn’t know going in that I already knew the ending. That nonsense about equality (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) comes at the end with another scene I sort of remembered. I guess the lack of certainty kept me rooting for a better outcome.

Orwell wrote his fable in the early 40s with Stalin and Trotsky in mind. Trotsky was the Communist idealist who hoped for the workers revolution to sweep the whole world. Stalin was just a dictator. He would have been an abusive mid-level manager in corporate America if he had been born in the States.

In Orwell’s story, Stalin is the pig Napoleon; Trotsky is Snowball. Is Snowball meant to be as pure as the wind-driven snow? Does he have a chance of surviving farm hell? I don’t know. He is the smart one though. He’s the one with vision and plans. The rest of them are lying, thieving pigs who spend so much time gaslighting the other animals that they gaslight themselves.

What is the point of Napoleon telling everyone that one neighboring farmer can’t be trusted one day, the other farmer the next day, and that the traitor they exiled is in league with one or the other of the enemy men week after week? It is either his outsized paranoia, his deliberate gaslighting of everyone he can, or his capricious command and control.

Abusive people can be like that. They change their mind for any reason and force those around them to agree, even if the change makes little difference to anyone. The point isn’t understanding the truth but following the abuser in lockstep. The truth, of course, is whatever the abuser says it is.

How do they teach this book in school and still churn out soft-minded socialists? The animals yearn for freedom, praise themselves for owning their own labor, and yet become more enslaved under pig leadership than they were under human leadership. Maybe teachers join in the gaslighting when this book is discussed. Maybe they explain how Snowball would have been proven right if he had had the chance to succeed; if the animals had just stood up to Napoleon and the other pigs, they could have had their animal-owned and operated farm paradise.

More likely, teachers direct attention to a cult of personality and how Napoleon could be very much like someone else we all disapprove of. Who could that be, children? What larger-than-life personality is a stain to all right-thinking Americans?

A few years ago, a school district in Connecticut pulled Animal Farm from its 8th grade curriculum in strong, socialist style. They didn’t ban it, they said. They have only disapproved it for use. They beat Communist China to the ball by a year.

Authors, Poetry

Miłosz: “All I Wanted Was to Get Out”

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Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs’ pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died. (from “Campo dei Fiori“)

David Pryce-Jones reviews a laudatory biography of the great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz and the difficult decisions he had to make as his homeland of overrun by Soviets. He chose to write and compromise where he needed to in order to write.

His biographer notes his depression, even at least one moment of despair.

Half a deadpan paragraph treats as more or less normal the moment when Miłosz swallowed a quantity of vodka, loaded a revolver with a single bullet, and played Russian roulette. Graham Greene, a not-so-dissimilar character, also gave way to this particular form of nihilism—or is it vanity? . . .

The Sovietization of Poland was bound to be fraught with moral choices that would lead either to reward or to punishment, possibly a concentration camp and death. . . . Once he was in the West, Miłosz himself was to observe, “All I wanted was to get out, and see what would happen next,” accepting that this amounted to making “a pact with the devil.”

Non-fiction

Marx Was a Racist

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Karl Marx, blockhead“Few people who call themselves Marxists have ever even bothered to read Das Kapital,” writes professor Walter Williams. “If one did read it, he would see that people who call themselves Marxists have little in common with Marx.”

In a piece today, Williams says Karl Marx was a racist who would not be tolerated on Twitter, and yet many people who style themselves as his disciples would be outraged if a current public figure said things he said. Pulling from a book by ex-communist Nathaniel Weyl, Williams offers examples.

Marx didn’t think much of Mexicans. When the United States annexed California after the Mexican War, Marx sarcastically asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”

Engels said similar things, such as writing that a political foe who had African heritage was suitable to represent the people living in a district that contained a zoo because he was biologically closer to the animals than other other men.

Of course, the question is not whether anyone from history said anything hateful or disagreeable to modern listeners. The question is whether such statements flow naturally from the speaker’s worldview. Given Communism’s bloody history, even its current practice, I don’t find Marx’s views of personal superiority surprising on any basis.

Non-fiction

MIT Presents Communism for Kids

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This is not a joke.

From the book page: “Once upon a time, people yearned to be free of the misery of capitalism. How could their dreams come true? This little book proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism.”

Historian Philip Jenkins has looked into it and found it isn’t tongue-in-cheek. It’s deeply ignorant. Does it point to Stalin or Mao Zedong as examples of pure communism at work? Of course not. Labor camps? We’ll do it right next time.

Should it not be said that a solid scholarly consensus now accepts that this record of violence and bloodshed was a logical and inevitable consequence of the communist model itself, rather than a tragic betrayal or deformation? Evil Joseph Stalin did not distort the achievements and goals of Noble Vladimir Lenin: rather, he fulfilled them precisely. Pursuing the “for kids” framework, should we not see some equally cheery volumes such as A Day at the Gulag, and even (for middle schoolers) Natasha Is Shot as a Class Enemy? How about Springtime for Stalin?

(via Prufrock News)

Uncategorized

The ‘Backbone’ for Terror Is Broken

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Armando Valladares spent twenty-two years in Cuban prisons. Last year, Marvin Olasky interviewed him on his thoughts of Castro in the beginning and how he survived imprisonment.

What do you say to those who say, “The United States has had an embargo regarding Cuba for more than 50 years and it hasn’t worked?”The embargo was never intended to remove the government in Cuba. The embargo has worked because it has prevented the Cuban government from receiving millions of dollars from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other banking institutions.

Now that the U.S. government and the pope embrace Raúl Castro, what do you think will happen?The only person who really inspires terror in Cuba is Fidel Castro, even if he’s agonizing in a bed. That’s how it was with Josef Stalin. Raúl Castro is alive because his backbone, Fidel, is alive. The day Fidel Castro dies will probably end the entire process.

Publishing

New Film Award: The Duranty

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The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) has announced a new film award “to highlight Hollywood’s feats of cluelessness, naïveté, and deceit when telling the history of socialism, communism, and the Cold War.” The Duranty Award is named for reporter Walter Duranty, who took what Stalin said as gospel and used his reports as PR for the Soviets.

“With each passing year, Hollywood’s historical amnesia about communism and the Cold War grows more disturbing,” said Marion Smith, VOC’s executive director. “The film Trumbo portrayed Hollywood’s most influential communist as an American martyr for free speech, ignoring the fact that communist regimes were—and from China to Cuba, still are—serial abusers of human rights and freedom of conscience.”

The award is an attractive chunk of fool’s gold to be given this year to Trumbo, a film about a communist screenwriter, and that film’s lead actor.