Free Republic

The U.S. House has taken a stand for human rights by passing a bill directing the White House to implement more severe sanctions against the government of Mainland China, which has for seventy years called itself the "People's Republic of China," a gallows-humor name for a government that exists almost entirely to impose suffering upon its own people. In passing this latest bill, the U.S. House joins the U.S. Senate (which passed a similar bill earlier this year), and also joins the governments of Great Britain, Japan, Australia, the E.U., and many other nations in recent years who have called...

In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels popularized a new slant on utopian mob rule. There had been mob rule before – the rivers of blood in 1890s Paris predated Marxism by half a century – but what Marx and Engels popularized was a theory of permanence and universality. They imagined a global linkage between all the desperate, violent, bloody moments of history, and told their acolytes that their own individual quests to become commissars of their own towns were part of something bigger. Even if they lost, they were part of the march of history toward worldwide...