Ghosts of Communism in Asia

Journalist Michael Totten considers the history of Vietnam.

We Have a Finalist For Stupidest Op-Ed of the Year

Via Power Line comes the link to this amazing utterance: "Libertarians are the New Communists."  That's right, folks: libertarians are fearsome power-hungry tyrants who want to ... leave you alone!

"Libertarian." You keep you using that word ...

Reading Hayek in Beijing

Mao, Hayek, and journalist Yang Jisheng.  Do read.

May Day

Since 2007, Ilya Somin has treated today as a day to remember the victims of Communism.  Let us continue and join in.

(I can't help adding that one of my friends actually flaunted the hammer and sickle today.  I felt sick.  Geez, woman!  Would you so blithely flaunt the swastika?)  

A Woman of Consequence

A historian looks at the legacy of the Iron Lady.  Oh, and she was right about the euro too.  How about this for our quote of the day:

The reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s death is painfully predictable. 

The right is honoring her service in standing up to socialism and communism at home and abroad, while the left is vilifying her for standing up to socialism and communism at home and abroad.

As someone else said, Maggie Thatcher p*ssed off all the right people, and I think that is a honorable epitaph indeed.  Anyway, look at this, this, this, and this:

Quote of the Day: David Mamet on Communism

Playwright David Mamet has just written a piece for the Daily Beast.  It's all worth a look, and it gives us the quote of the day:

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.  

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

It's depressing just how readily this historical fact has been forgotten/buried by statist educators, activists, and politicians.

Imaging Mao's Famine

A historian wonders: Where is the photographic evidence of Mao's disaster?  In the Great Leap Forward (Into the Abyss), at least 45 million people died of starvation and oppression over some 4 years of absolute hell on earth, but visual documentation is largely lacking.  Honestly, how does it look that the some officials in the Soviet Union was more forthcoming about the murderous famine that Stalin created in Ukraine?

One wonders, though, whether if we ever saw the Chinese photos, we would be thoroughly sickened.  The end of the article details the only photo of the famine that the author ever saw, and the description is horrifying.  

UPDATE: No photos of the Great Famine, but you can still get an eyeful of the Communist propaganda posters from the same period.  Surreal.

Book Review: New Biography of Mao

This one focuses on Mao's ties with Stalin. The bloodiest bromance of the 20th century?

Quote of the Day: Insta-Prof on Communists

The eminent law prof seems rather peppery:

Communists are no better than Nazis. Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing, not a sin. Go broke and starve, commies. It’s what you deserve for being eager, willing servants of totalitarianism.

Don't hold back, now.  Tell us what you really think!

Totalitarian Communism Loses Another Useful Idiot

My opinion of historian and unrepentant Communist cheerleader and apologist Eric Hobsbawm is a matter of public record here.  Two weeks ago he shuffled off this mortal coil, and I didn't bother saying good riddance.  Still, here's an interesting little piece wondering whether you can be both a good historian and a Stalinist.  I think the real issue is how so many people didn't think that Hobsbawm's Communist totalitarian sympathies mattered.  Imagine, if you will, if he were an unrepentant Nazi apologist or Holocaust denier.  Nobody respectable in his august academic circles would dream of giving him the time of day ... well, almost nobody.

Is the Chinese Communist Party Doomed?

Professor Minxin Pei has a question: Is the CCP doomed?  It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.  Still, here's a thought - change or die:

The answer to the question of how a one-party regime can manage its own political transformation to save itself is more interesting and complicated. 

Essentially, there are two paths for such regimes: the Soviet route to certain self-destruction, and the Taiwan-Mexican route to self-renewal and transformation.

Consider Today "Victims of Communism Day"

Volokh has the right idea.  While we're at it, spare a thought for the current victims in North Korean gulags (see this) and Chinese prisons. I've recommended this book on the subject.

History Lesson: 100 Years in 10 Minutes

This is an interesting compilation, though I do take issue with the fact that the selection is often desultory and that it focuses too much on the negative and does not include enough mention of humanitarian, scientific, medical, artistic, and other forms of achievements.  (No, mentioning the founding of Greenpeace does not count.)   It's so pessimistic, complete with the depressingly doom-tastic soundtrack.  I also found it a little odd that the founding of Israel in 1948 was not included, even though this moment in history is hugely important both to supporters and opponents.  Well, still, whoever made this took the time and effort to do this, so props to them.  Maybe I should make my own video.

20 Years After the End of the USSR

A few thoughts.  Don't be fooled by the apologists for the Soviet Union (and other exponents of totalitarian Communism) or the dipsticks who are into retro Commie chic.

"Apologists For Communist Totalitarianism: I Hate Those Guys"

Yes.  RELATED: Deplorable UN is deplorable.

Hitchens on Kim's North Korea

Even in his absence Christopher Hitchens is still on point.  See this 2005 piece in which Hitchens visits North Korea and describes it as being worse than Orwell's dystopia from 1984.  Read the whole thing.


UPDATE: While we're at it, read Havel on North Korea too.

You Miserable Vomitous Mass: Meet This Useful Idiot for Totalitarian Communism

Meet British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has a new book.  As for the man:

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of "15, 20 million people might have been justified" in establishing a Marxist paradise. "Yes," Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the "sacrifice of millions of lives" in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm's lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It's not that he didn't know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It's that he didn't much care.

Disgusting.  In a just world, he should be run off campus in utter disgrace for justifying outright massacre and industrial-scale cruelty.  I'm sick of useful idiots who keep insisting that Communist regimes who slaughtered, imprisoned, brutalized, and oppressed millions of people "just weren't doing it right" and that the next great Commie effort will bring some ludicrous Marxist paradise on earth.  Inhuman, immoral garbage.  They might think they're revolutionary, but I only find them revolting.  Of course, these dipsticks assume that they will be among the Communist elites who get to run the new utopia, not one of the "15, 20 million" who get to be cavalierly sacrificed -- nay, liquidated -- "for the greater good."  The greater good of the nomenklatura, you mean.  What is my professional academic opinion of this type of historian?  *Barf!*

Mikhail Gorbachev at Age 80

An interesting interview.

Today in History: The Berlin Wall Went Up 50 Years Ago

And thus began 28 terrible years marked with too much blood of those trying to escape, voting with their feet against totalitarian Communism.  Oh, and lest we forget: the Wall didn't come down "by itself."  Freedom-loving people went out there and finally tore that sucker down in 1989.  But in remembrance:

The number of people who died trying to cross the Wall is disputed - at least 136 are known to have been killed but victims' groups say the true number is more than 700. The first victim was thought to be Guenter Litfin on 24 August 1961 and the last Chris Gueffroy on 6 February 1989.

I also give you one archival photo that has always stuck with me--an East German border guard defecting in 1961, leaping through the 2-day-old Wall as it begins to form first as a barbed-wire barricade:

UPDATE 1:  Some members of the German far Left are nostalgic for the Wall and "the good old days" when you could get shot for trying to escape East Germany.  Actual apologists for the Wall and totalitarian Communism.  Ugh, how repugnant!  They get the "dirtbag du jour" tag.   Link xie-xie to gentle reader Marian.

UPDATE 2: The mayor of Berlin is appalled with Wall-nostalgia:

"We don't have any tolerance for those who nostalgically distort the history of the Berlin Wall and Germany's division," [Mayor Klaus] Wowereit said at the ceremony in front of a small section of the Wall recently rebuilt for posterity. 

"The Wall was part of a dictatorship," he said. "And it's alarming that even today some people argue there were good reasons to build the Wall. No! There's no legitimate reason nor justification for violating human rights and for killings."

Nerd News: Historian Smackdown Over Trotsky

Read this.  No, really!  You've never had this much fun reading about Trotsky.  Here's a piece of the furious kerfuffle over a recent academic monograph/biography (my emphasis in boldface):

But the new issue of The American Historical Review contains a notice that will earn a place in the annals of the scholarly take-down. One historian says of another that he “commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question." Its publisher (one of the most prominent university presses in the United States) “has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship." 

And plenty more where that came from. Since reading the review last week, I have been in touch with both the reviewer and the review-ee -- then spent a week trying to elicit a comment from the pertinent acquisitions editor at the press, who has gone either on vacation or into hiding.

The volume in question is Trotsky: A Life (Harvard University Press, 2009) by Robert Service, a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford.  Harvard and Oxford, eh?  Well, having a fancy name and snooty credentials doesn't mean a darn thing if you haven't got basic competence.  An academic credential or reputation is just a stupid label that increasingly is no indication of actual substance.