Free Republic

When a new book came out, the great C. S. Lewis would first seek out an old one on the same subject. That’s good advice for embattled Americans. In fact, two old books address what is happening today with rare perception. Regent College Publishing has reissued The Green Stick and The Infernal Grove, the two volumes of Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge. Paul Johnson called it one of the great autobiographies of our time, which might be an understatement. Wisdom and wit leap off the pages, and there’s even a news hook: Russia has invaded Ukraine and that...

How a “post-Stalin Stalinist” suppressed slave revolt history. Anthony Flood, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, 91 pages, 2019. After U.S. recognition of the USSR in 1933, the Communist Party USA made significant gains in America. Many left the Party after Stalin’s show-trials and purges of the mid-1930s, and many others after the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939. By contrast, the American Herbert Aptheker joined the Communist Party “virtually because of it,” explains his former research assistant, friend, and comrade Anthony Flood. Four years before the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Aptheker approved when Stalin shipped oil to Mussolini to aid the fascist dictator’s...

RIGA, Latvia - Second-guessing Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Bush said Saturday the United States played a role in Europe's painful division after World War II — a decision that helped cause "one of the greatest wrongs of history" when the Soviet Union imposed its harsh rule across Central and Eastern Europe. Bush said the lessons of the past will not be forgotten as the United States tries to spread freedom in the Middle East. "We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability," the president said. "We...