Communism

Dangerous Pollution from China Threatening US Mainland

McClatchy Newspapers | Les Blumenthal | Aug. 29, 2008

Scientists fear impact of Asian pollutants on U.S. – From 500 miles in space, satellites track brown clouds of dust, soot and other toxic pollutants from China and elsewhere in Asia as they stream across the Pacific and take dead aim at the western U.S.

A fleet of tiny, specially equipped unmanned aerial vehicles, launched from an island in the East China Sea 700 or so miles downwind of Beijing , are flying through the projected paths of the pollution taking chemical samples and recording temperatures, humidity levels and sunlight intensity in the clouds of smog.

On the summit of 9,000-foot Mt. Bachelor in central Oregon and near sea level at Cheeka Peak on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula , monitors track the pollution as it arrives in America. [Read more…]

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What about the Poor?

FrontPageMagazine.com | Barry Loberfeld | Aug. 13, 2008

For defenders of the Constitution, the free market, and individual liberty, no single issue has thus far proved more defeating – on both the intellectual and electoral battlefields – than that of poverty. It has handed one unearned (and by no means inevitable) victory after another to the unconstitutional statism of collectivist liberals.

The conquest of poverty (to borrow the title of Henry Hazlitt’s classic) requires just two weapons: wealth and compassion. So the only real question is: Who can better provide these – civil society (“the market”) or the political state?

The answer as it regards wealth has now been settled: “[C]apitalism has won,” conceded left-aligned economic historian Robert Heilbroner in 1989. “Socialism,” conversely, “has been a great tragedy this century.” [Read more…]

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Solzhenitsyn, Reagan, and the Death of Détente

American Thinker | Paul Kengor | Aug. 10, 2008

In a tribute I wrote earlier, posted at National Review, I noted that it is impossible to capture in one column what Solzhenitsyn meant, experienced, and how he went about translating it to the West. Professors like me know such frustration well, as we struggle to fully convey the impact of such a man to a classroom of students born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In my earlier piece, I talked about The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s shocking firsthand account of the Soviet forced-labor-camp system, where he himself had been held captive, and where tens of millions of innocents perished. In a disturbing way, that book may have made Solzhenitsyn the most significant of all Russian writers, quite a prize when one considers the caliber of the company. [Read more…]

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Solzhenitsyn and His Critics

Acton.org | John Couretas | Aug. 6, 2008

The world justly celebrates the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a great man whose work and witness seems most aptly summed up in a single word: prophetic. But, as prophets are in a habit of doing, he made some people feel the needle who were sure they didn’t deserve it. This was especially so for Western liberals who, in the eyes of Solzhenitsyn, were indifferent to — if not supportive of — communist oppression. [Read more…]

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Solzhenitsyn Was a Russian Patriot

Wall Street Opinion Journal | Robert Conquest | August 8, 2005

Those of us who had long been concerned to expose and resist Stalinism, in the West as in the USSR, learned much from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I met him in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1974, soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union — the result of his novel, “The Gulag Archipelago,” being published in Paris. He was personally pleasant; I have a photograph of the two of us, he holding a Russian edition of my book, “The Great Terror,” with evident approbation. He asked if I would translate a “little” poem of his. Of course I agreed. [Read more…]

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn – Memory Eternal

The Times | Tony Halpin

Last struggle is over for Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He was the conscience of a nation whose writings exposed the horrors of the Communist Gulag and galvanised Russian opposition to the tyranny of the Soviet Union.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s long struggle for his beloved Russia ended last night at his home in Moscow, 14 years after he had returned in triumph from exile imposed by the Soviet regime that he had helped to bring down. His son Stepan said that the Nobel laureate had suffered heart failure, aged 89.

The former dissident had been in failing health for some years. He lived long enough to be fêted by a Kremlin that had once condemned him to slave labour. The former Russian president, Vladimir Putin, once a KGB officer, travelled to Solzhenitsyn’s home to present him with the State Prize for humanitarian achievement last year, thanking him for “all your work for the good of Russia”. [Read more…]

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Why communists loved communism

WorldNetDaily | Craige McMillan | July 24, 2008

Communist government officials always loved communism – because they never experienced it. Apparently the same is true of Democrat officials preparing for the “I’m a progressive, not a communist” lovefest in Denver, Colo. Consumers in the mile high city pay 40.4 cents per gallon to the state and feds for each gallon they extract at the gas pumps. Unless, of course, they are Democrat muckety-mucks zipping around Denver in their free (provided by General Motors) cars, which have been filling up at city pumps to evade gasoline taxes. [Read more…]

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Memory and the Left

American Thinker | J.R. Dunn | July 15, 2008

It’s difficult to avoid exasperation over the left’s absolute refusal to acknowledge the new realities of the Iraq war. The surge, the Anbar awakening, the collapse of the militias (particularly that belonging to everybody’s favorite would-be caliph, Moqtada al-Sadr) — it’s as if none of it ever happened, as if one the most impressive turnabouts in modern military annals never took place.

The left, including its Democratic political wing and placeholders in the media, continue on with the same defeatist drone that we’ve heard since 2003, concentrating on lone (and mercifully rare) suicide bombers, emphasizing Coalition casualties, and highlighting the new government’s difficulties. [Read more…]

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Return of the Dupes and the Anti-Anti-Communists

American Thinker | Paul Kengor | Jun. 13, 2008

Since literally the founding of the American Communist Party in 1919, the extreme left — specifically, the communists — have relied upon genuine liberals to be dupes, or suckers, to help further their cause. Here’s how it typically worked: the communists would engage in some sort of work or agenda, very focused, and which they would be prepared to publicly deny. Anyone who has done any work with or on communists, from New York City to Moscow, can speak at length about how they operated with deceit. As Vladimir Lenin had said, in a favorite quote cited often by Ronald Reagan, the only morality that communists recognized was that which furthered their interests. [Read more…]

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