Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Nobel laureate author who demonstrated that truth is to tyrants as penicillin is to syphilis, has passed on at the age of 89.

Rest well, sir.

The Forsaken

A review of a harrowing new book by Tim Tzouliadis that tells the story about how thousands of Depression-era Americans bought into the lies spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty about the glories of Stalinism, emigrated to the Soviet Union in search of Utopia, and ended up dying in the Gulags for their gullibility.

Proof that Champagne Communism is not just a charming Islington eccentricity.

Indiana Jones and the Communists of Doom

The Communist Party in Russia has its knickers in a collective twist over the new Indiana Jones film, where the Reds are the baddies.

Given their part in the committing the worst campaigns of mass murder in history while enslaving a sixth of the world's population and bringing us all to the brink of nuclear annihilation to further their own sick ends of universal conquest, one would think the heirs of Marx and Lenin would just thank whatever lack of deity they worship that they aren't being hounded the way the Nazis were and just exit history quietly.

Communist Nostalgia

It's the 90^th anniversary of the October Revolution and the BBC's James Rodgers looks at the hard time Russia's Communists have today:

These were people who toiled all their lives to build a Communist utopia, only to find that their reward was a penance of a pension doled out in the harsh, new, capitalist Russia of the 1990s.

Actually, Mr. Rodgers, they toiled all their lives in the service of a totalitarian regime that was bent on turning the entire planet into a prison camp and murdered 100 million people trying and in a just world their "reward" would have been something more appropriate than a pension. But such an oversight isn't surprising. Mr. Rodgers spends gallons of ink writing about Russia's Communists' idealism, nostalgia and hopes for the future, but spares not a drop for the victims of their brutish, tyrannical ideology.

I wonder if the BBC will follow this up with a similar puff piece about Neo-Nazis in Germany.

I also wonder if the Moon is made of cheese.

Some Revolutionaries Are More Equal Than Others

In a move of pure, unbridled cynicism not seen since the days of the Hitler/Stalin pact, the Communists and the Jihadists recently met in Tehran to form an entente cordial and the former came away with a lesson in dhimmitude:

The hope was that the conference would produce a synthesis of Marxist and Khomeinist ideologies and highlight what the Iranian leader has labeled "the divine aspect of revolutionary war." But the event itself proved rather embarrassing.

The embarrassment came when Iranian speaker, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, declared that Ernesto "Che" Guevara was actually a religious man who believed in neither Communism or the Soviet Union. Waxing on his subject, Mr, Qassemi said,

Today, communism has been consigned to the garbage can of history as foreseen by Imam Khomeini. Thus progressists everywhere must accept the leadership of our religious, pro-justice movement.

When the the late Mr. Guevara's daughter, who was attending in a proper dhimmi headscarf, made a vocal protest she and her (bewhiskered) brother were rushed away and reduced to the level of unpersons by the end of the conference.

Given the advanced age of the Communist participants and the bald confidence of the Jihadists that they were the true "progressives", it isn't surprising that things ended up with the Communists being treated less as partners than as appetisers. Perhaps the Left should rethink this alliance before they discover that the hijabs and beards have gone from a courtesy to a requirement.

Atomic Che

(T)he people (of Cuba) you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face if the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names... they will feel completely happy and fulfilled.

Che Guevara

The BBC is indulging in one of its periodic bouts of Socialist worship; this time extolling the "legacy" of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Not surprisingly, there are gallons of ink spilled in rapture of his "iconic" image, his "inspiration" and battles against "injustice."

Unfortunately, they do overlook the tiny matter of his knowingly working in the cause of a totalitarian system, his love of mass executions, his introduction of the gulag to Cuba, his rank cowardice in battle, and his wild fanaticism that made him lust after the idea of universal Stalinist dictatorship ushered in on the backs of a hundred million radioactive corpses.

But that's just awkward nit-picking against the reputation of a dead Communist murderer who's cornered the tee-shirt market.