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Posted on 07/12/2003 8:19:23 AM PDT by knighthawk
Sometimes it takes a blunt instrument to change things, and Ann Coulter's book Treason, may be that weapon. It's certainly blunt and there's no doubt it's meant as a weapon. It's certainly effective since it is selling as fast as former First Lady, Senator Clinton's bag of wind. Crown Forum, Random House's spanking new conservative imprint, has gone back to the well three times since releasing the book two weeks ago, putting almost half a million copies of Treason in print. Clinton has sold 1,000,000 in her first month. These brisk sales are worth noting, since Coulter, rather than Clinton, is discussing actual history, rather than papering over scandal and prepping for a presidential run.
Did I say shrill? Treason is so shrill, it shattered all my wine glasses and I wasn't even reading out loud. Belly laughs aside -- and tall, blonde, goddess-y Coulter is very funny -- this is crackpot conservatism. Yet, 46 pages of carefully sourced footnotes bear out the fact that she's done her research. And maybe, just maybe, putting aside her more egregious exaggerations, she's right.
Her point? That since the 1920s, the American left, and every Democratic presidency and Congress (including and especially Roosevelt and Harry Truman), deliberately gave in to foreign tyranny because their administrations were salted through with communist agents. That those communists influenced the government in such a way that allowed the Soviet Union to build nuclear warheads, and point them at the U.S. for 50 years, causing eight hundred million people, including you and I, to grow up under threat of annihilation. That Joe McCarthy was right, and a much maligned great man. That at Yalta, with known Communist spy Alger Hiss by his side, Roosevelt gave Uncle Joe Stalin Eastern Europe, and watched while he took eastern Poland, Moldavia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Albania. And the United Nations was formed with the same adviser whispering in his ear.
That Harry Truman looked the other way when Stalin murdered three million Russian prisoners of war returned home by Truman. That on Truman's watch, the Soviets consolidated their control over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, eastern Germany to the Elbe River, Yugoslavia, and North Korea. Afterwards, with the exception of the Kennedys (though Coulter doesn't think much of JFK and RFK, they were ardent anti-communists) and Nixon, further ground was lost to Communism. Appeasement of evil was the name of the game right up to Reagan.
While this tyranny occurred, the American, Canadian and European left praised and actively aided Joe Stalin, while he murdered between 12 and 20 million of his own subjects, and ran a prison camp regime that even the Nazis would think cruel. As avid Stalin supporter, Jean Paul Sartre said, while privately expressing horror at what was occurring, proving that some knew the brutalism well, "it is not our duty to write about the Soviet labour camps."
That the Western press underreported and even lied about what was really happening. Evidence that The New York Times does not dispute shows their star, Walter Duranty, knew that millions were being starved to death at the very time he used the newspaper to deny Stalin's forced Ukrainian famine. The Times has refused to return the prize he won in 1932 for his Soviet reporting. In fact it still displays Duranty's work in an in-house exhibit honouring the paper's Pulitzer Prize winners.
By 1995, the declassified Vernona Project, which consisted of decrypted Soviet cables, as well as recently opened Soviet records, revealed that there were well over three hundred Soviet spies working in top posts for the U.S. government in the 1940s and '50s. The conspiracy that Joe McCarthy feared was very much in operation. The release of these decrypted records has occasioned little reporting in various newspapers of record in the West. "The killing was so ... so boring, and ostensibly undramatic," said one reporter reviewing the material.
I don't think so.
This from a report in the '60s: "I have seen convicts swallow huge numbers of nails and barbed wire. I have seen them swallow mercury thermometers, pewter tureens, chess pieces, dominoes, needles, ground glass, spoons, knives ... I have seen convicts sew up their mouths and eyes with thread or wire, sew rows of buttons to their bodies; or nail their testicles to the bed ... I have seen convicts cut open the skin on their arms and legs and peel it off as if it were a stocking, or cut out lumps of flesh from their stomach or legs, roast them and eat them; or let the blood drip from a slit vein into a tureen, crumble bread crumbs into it, then gulp it down like a bowl of soup ... or cut off their nose or ears or penis."
Why did the left support such barbarism? Coulter does not answer this, but Anne Applebaum, from whose stunning, thorough and sane, Gulag, the above passage is taken, tries.
"Communist ideals, -- social justice, equality for all -- are simply far more attractive to most in the West than the Nazi advocacy of racism and the triumph of the strong over the weak. Perhaps this helps explain why eyewitness reports of the Gulag were, from the very beginning, often dismissed by the very same people who would never have questioned ... Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel."
Reagan was laughed at when, in 1983, he said that as long as the Kremlin continued to "preach the supremacy of the state, declaring its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world."
Under Reagan's natural heir, George Bush, such tyrannies are beginning to collapse all over the world. It is time the left stopped sheltering evil and brutality, and got on board.
And note to Crown Forum: For pity's sake, get Coulter an editor.
enickson@nationalpost.com
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Conservatives with a certain reputation to defend don't like to approve Ann's book completely, because it might open them up to charges of extremism. The problem isn't that Coulter is shrill, but that the liberals are shrill, and that anyone who really recommends Coulter's book as honest and well written will be subject to the same vile attacks as Coulter herself. So they all protect themselves. Yes, this needed to be said . . . BUT it shouldn't have been said so shrilly.
Exactly what did Coulter say that was demonstrably wrong? Isn't treason and complicity with Communist murder sufficient to demand a rather harsh response?
This review actually reveals the power of the McCarthyite myth. Conservatives who have a certain position and something to lose simply don't dare cross the line that will get them labeled as extremists and McCarthyites.
The left never uses the language of calm restraint.
Some were returned from Ft.Dix, New Jersey. They fought repatriation. They were taken by armed guard to a waiting ship and when they tried to tear up the engine room to prevent being returned to certain death, they were beaten and drugged.
Liberals did that but today liberals scream about civil liberties if aliens from states which support terrorism is interviewed by the Department of Justice.
"Communist ideals, -- social justice, equality for all -- are simply far more attractive to most in the West than the Nazi advocacy of racism and the triumph of the strong over the weak." - Anne Applebaum
That's right.
Human beings are wired to function as a part of. Modern ease and mass communication allow ideas - good ones or bad ones - to yank millions of people together with a common ideology. What is ideology? It is envisioning a way for other people to live. In groups of animals or tribes of people, the younger generation passionately - even bloodily - challenges the status quo with a different order. Championing the weak over the strong is the most revolutionary and enduring ideological challenge. Still going strong after 160-some years.
It is natural for young wealthy intellectuals to become true believers. They think they are enlightened and bringing enlightenment while actually functioning as mere cogs of the movement. They overlook apparent evils while keeping eyes on the prize of a greater good.
An analysis based on selfish interests does not yield fruit to answer the question Why do they do it? If you are prone to follow the money you must realize that the great numbers of useful idiots who further communist and socialist causes already have money. They are bored and want something fun to do. There is a will to power. That is why the vast majority of foundations are progressive. That is why the breakdown of donations to Democrat candidates shows huge donations from a wealthy few.
Richard Nixon was right in charging Alger Hiss with being a Soviet spy.
The American Left is so many shrieking fairies in Act-Up t-shirts and nun drag raising a perverse Greek chorus against Ann Coulter's thesis.
For your consideration, the opening paragraphs of Conclusion: Why They Hate Us, TREASON: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, Crown Forum, 2003, page 285:
While liberals ponder the psychopathology of Islamofascists, it might be useful to examine their own psychological profile. Why do they hate America? Are liberals "humilitated"? Paranoid? Agrarian reformers? And do we have to be nice to them, too?
Whether they are rooting for the atheistic regimes of Stalin and Mao, satanic suicide bombers and terrorists, or the Central Park rapists, liberals always take the side of savages against civilization. Indeed, an attack on America by Islamic fanatics finally gave the lie to the old Communist Party line about anti-Communism being a covert form of anti-Semitism. Inasmuch as half the Soviet spies were Ivy-educated WASPs, this was always a stretch. Even the willfully stupid might have noticed that their pal Stalin wasn't exactly holding parades for Jews.
As a corollary to Ann Coulter's nailing the Left for being anti-civilization (please note Jesse Jackson served as Charles Taylor's paid lobbyist with Bill Clinton's blessing as the Left bleats we must go into Liberia), I offer Eric Hoffer.
The True Believer and other works of Eric Hoffer note totalitarians are motivated by feelings of worthlessness--it is of course the Left which is obsessed with "feelings" and "self-esteem".
Further, Hoffer notes the identity of the root psyche of Communists and Nazis. Hence Hitler readily recruited Communists to the NSDAP.
Today the Soviet-apologists of old remain in the forefront of the Hate America First movement.
Their bleat for "civil rights" never extends to the victims of repression in, say, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China, Cuba.
At any rate, the extant reviewer did indeed miss the last chapter of TREASON. Coulter has the Left down.
The distancing of certain squeamish limp-wristed weenies from the swashbuckling Coulter is tiresome.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
And now, the rules must be observed:
Another superb job, great work.
And of course, special thanks for the observance of the requisite RULES.
That since the 1920s, the American left, and every Democratic presidency and Congress (including and especially Roosevelt and Harry Truman), deliberately gave in to foreign tyranny because their administrations were salted through with communist agents. That those communists influenced the government in such a way that allowed the Soviet Union to build nuclear warheads, and point them at the U.S. for 50 years, causing eight hundred million people, including you and I, to grow up under threat of annihilation.
Baloney, what a copout line. Just because someone criticizes Ann for one aspect of one of her books doesn't make them dishonest or scheming. Ever heard of a difference of opinion? Sorry, but her book is unnecessarily clumsy, when she has clearly shown herself to be capable of much more. Not every arrow is going to hit the bullseye, so it doesn't make her a bad archer or author. But it does mean that in this case she missed a bit.
Calling anyone who disagrees with 100% constant adulation of Ann a RINO, commie, shill, or whatever invective some want to throw out is just childish, and cheapens your other arguments.
The True Believer and other works of Eric Hoffer note totalitarians are motivated by feelings of worthlessness--it is of course the Left which is obsessed with "feelings" and "self-esteem".
Anybody who doesn't recognize the "chilling truth" of your statement better get ready to duck and cover cause 04 is going to be evil, wicked, mean and nasty.
The left is in the throes of death and like a severely wounded predator, that is when they are by far the most dangerous.
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