[PowderMonkey]

"Boris Yeltsin perhaps — remarked that it was a pity Marxists had not triumphed in a smaller country because “we would not have had to kill so many people to demonstrate that utopia does not work.” What more is there to say?"

"You extol the virtues of communism because you have never been forced to live under it." - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

[ETL]

KGB Putin thinks the "COLLAPSE" of the mass-murdering communist Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century"

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
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"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=
____________________________________________________

[ETL]

Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?
American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

In a [] 1984 book [New Lies for Old], ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. ..."

"Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government."

"Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/did_communism_fake_its_own_dea.html
_____________________________________________________

FReeper khelus provided the following links for reading/downloading both books in their entirety (free):

New Lies for Old:
http://archive.org/details/GolitsynAnatoleTheNewLiesForOldOnes

The Perestroika Deception:
http://curezone.com/upload/Members/ChazTheMeatHe/Books/Golitsyn_The_Perestroika_Deception_The_World_s_Slide_Towards_the_Secon.pdf
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CHINA

"the new leaders pledged to adhere to 'Marx, Lenin, Mao' thought .. for 'a long time to come'"

China: Communist Party goes modern (Asia Times)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/DK16Ad02.html

[puppypusher]

Any environment that Marxism is inserted into becomes a hostile environment.

[ETL]

If Russia were truly done with Communism and are now “Capitalists”, why would they still support Marxist dictatorships such as Venezuela, Cuba, other Marxist regimes throughout Latin America, the ChiComs and North Korea?

[I want the USA back]

True believers never give up. They think that communism will work if done right. After the failure of the Soviet Union, all reasonable people should know that communism can’t work. But they keep trying. They change their name to “progressive” “democrat party” and keep pushing for their utopia where all have what they need and all give according to their means.

[13Sisters76]

What an excellent article! To call such people as Hobsbaum a “historian” is an insult to historians, such as you cannot imagine. He was an ideologue.

From Plato, to More, to Marx, to Rousseau, to Dewey, leftism has never worked and never WILL work, because of its determination to deny the nature of man. It can be no surprise to anyone that the stellar lights of academia have never existed outside the bubbles of their comfortable lives and the universities. If dropped into a city with nothing but their wits, it wouldn’t take long to see them as the crazy people they truly are, muttering and talking to themselves.

This is not to deny, however, the brand of bigoted leftist who truly believes that they are superior to the “masses” and entitled to rule over them. These STILL believe in the mission of Margaret Sanger, and always will.

The denial of those who embrace leftism, is the denial of those fellow travelers who are responsible for, at least, 120 million dead across the planet. It is tyranny, and nothing else. It IS that barbarism that so many “intellectuals” lay at the free market’s door.

[arasina]

Cross reference to another FR thread: The Moral Giant and the Leftist Creep by Jeff Jacoby for Townhall.com

---

I REGRET that it was only upon reading his obituary this month that I first learned of Nguyen Chi Thien. He was a courageous Vietnamese dissident who had spent nearly 30 years in prison for his opposition to communist repression, cruelty, and lies. Much of Nguyen's opposition was expressed in poetry, most famously "Flowers from Hell," a collection of poems he memorized behind bars, and only put down on paper after being released from prison in 1977.

The poems were published after he audaciously handed off the manuscript to British diplomats at their embassy in Hanoi, the AP obituary recalled. As he walked out of the embassy, "security agents were awaiting him, and he was promptly sent back to prison." He spent the next 12 years in Hoa Lo, the notorious Hanoi Hilton. While he was in captivity, "Flowers from Hell" was published; it earned the International Poetry Award in 1985. By the time he emigrated to the United States in 1995, his poems had achieved wide renown. His stanzas "became as familiar as songs," wrote Anh Do in The Los Angeles Times, and "continue to move the Vietnamese immigrant generation – and their sons and daughters."

By coincidence, the same newspaper page that carried Nguyen's obituary also ran a much longer story about Eric Hobsbawm, the famous British historian who died on Oct. 1 of pneumonia at age 95. The two men could hardly have been less alike.

---

[bert]

“Have compassion, my child; love those who have it, but fly from the pious believers. Nothing is more dangerous than their company, their humble pride. They must either dominate or destroy…” - Rousseau

Wow..... wonder to whom that statement currently applies?

NeoMarxism is now failing in the hostile environment of flyover America

[sergeantdave]

The words brilliant, intelligent and communist cannot appear in the same sentence unless you’re writing satire.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Later.

[headsonpikes]

I favor the Romanian response to impudent socialists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8YiIBER9zw

This event helped restore my faith in human nature. :^)

[M Kehoe]

Good evening.

Marxism failed because it had been inserted into a hostile environment

Marxism failed because it IS a hostile environment. Hostile to the human soul.

5.56mm

[Billthedrill]

Bump for later.

[Billthedrill]

A wonderful article, and thank you very much for posting it. To reply in full would be beyond the limitations of a web forum, or at least to attempt to do so in an evening. Here, however, are a few random thoughts.

Marxism is, essentially, a model built around premises that are held not for evidential but for emotional reasons: the fundamental resentment of the uneven distribution of wealth; the conviction that it is the result of injustice rather than ability; the notion that redistribution - sanctioned theft - will allow the suppressed creative potential of the impoverished to flower; the notion that untapped human actualization depends on material possession; the notion, entirely contradicted by historical evidence, that collectivism could lead to a classless society instead of the return to the feudal class structure from which capitalism represented an escape in Marx's own model.

The flaw in the application of this body of theory is not that it needs to be overlaid on a properly advanced society, but that it carries within itself the internal contradictions of which Marx was certain were the characteristics of, and would be the downfall of, capitalism. A model that promises a classless society that results instead in Djilas' New Class is a model that is fundamentally flawed, and the response on the part of Hobsbawm and others of his outlook that the whole thing would still turn out the right way given enough time is the response of a cultist denying reality. It didn't.

The evidence is there in the cold facts. This political model was, in fact, overlaid by force on capitalist societies throughout the Soviet bloc with one uniform result: police states from which people would die to escape. To dismiss these martyrs to human freedom as traitors, agents, or deluded fools is the last fatal act of an intellect that stubbornly clings to a dream world that bears increasingly little relation to the real one. This is not the response of a fantasist, it is the response of a paranoid schizophrenic. Simply put, at this point ideology has proceeded from mental candy to mental disease.

The illusion continues. The end of the Cold War was not brought about by a saintly Gorbachev and a poor, simple Reagan somehow magically defying the basic nature of their respective systems. That narrative wouldn't work in a comic book. It was, on the contrary, brought about by a systematic rejection of the squalor that permeated socialist societies and the desire on the part of their prisoners for something better for their children. It was not effected by coddled academics bleating from their podia but by families in smoking jalopies crashing the borders in Hungary, by Germans shot for tunneling into Berlin, by Poles rallying around a stubborn labor leader and an even more stubborn Pope. These have no place in the lofty environs of Marxist academia, and it is the final, resounding failure of Marxism that it consigns these people to irrelevancy while their governments were toppling into the ash heap of history.

The real failure of Marxist academics and radicals lies in the stubborn denial that the common people on whose behalf they strove, categorically rejected the hell they'd created. It led those who consider themselves the keepers of historical inevitability into a desperate rejection of historical events. The model has failed, it's gone, it's over, and repeating the same mistakes in the hope of a different outcome is truly an act of insanity.

[Revolting cat!]

Not to worry, after the election (whatever the result) Barack Obama will have more flexibility.