Nazis And Commies

American Thinker | by Bernie Reeves | Oct. 11, 2009

Is the fascination with Nazis in Western culture a product of natural interest, or is it an unspoken pact by novelists and filmmakers to obscure the greater atrocities committed by the Soviets — most notably under Stalin, who ruled in the same era as Hitler?

A recent documentary on the Turner Classic Movie cable channel illustrated the point. Said the commentators, when all else fails in selecting a villain, make Nazis the sinister evil force and success is assured. Yet the idea to create Soviet villains never appears to occur to novelists and filmmakers, except in spy thrillers where each side is usually defined as morally equivalent. [Read more…]

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Nobel’s Stockholm Syndrome

Townhall | by Jerry Bowyer | Oct. 9, 2009

It was because of a woman named Bertha Kinsky. She was a pacifist and a free-thinker (which means anti-religious). He fell in love with her, and they married, but she left him. He was wealthy, but not intellectually respected. He inherited his father’s industrial business, which was, horror of horrors, an arms manufacturer. He was not a college graduate, but he learned chemistry anyway and developed dynamite, and became one of the wealthiest men in the world. He went on to write poems and anti-Christian plays, but they never respected him. She never really respected him. Alfred Nobel had money, but not status. [Read more…]

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Child Rape and the Values of People Who Make Films

Townhall | by Dennis Prager | Oct. 6, 2009

We have reason to be grateful to the Polanski affair. It offers that most needed of virtues: clarity. It has made the average citizen aware of how broken the cultural elite’s moral compass is. And it has illuminated how equally distorted their self-image is. They see themselves as morally superior. They see themselves as worldly when in fact they are profoundly insular. And they see themselves as courageous artists when in fact the rarest films are those that involve any moral courage (for example, how many films about Islamic terror and the world that incubates that terror can you name?)

But the greatest benefit of the Polanski affair may be that the next time you see the Hollywood elite come out on behalf of or against some public issue, you can most likely assume the opposite is the morally correct position. [Read more…]

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Nation of Men, Not of Laws

American Thinker | by Tad Wintermeyer | Oct. 1, 2009

Roman Polanski and his allies seek to rape the United States and her Constitution. While this metaphor may seem repugnantly acerbic, it rings true. Webster defines rape as the act of seizing and carrying away by force. The thin raiment that hid the left’s hatred and disdain for our Nation’s Constitution has been torn to shreds by their vocal support of a convicted rapist and sodomist. Instead of defining what ‘is’ is, the left has stooped to define what ‘rape’ rape is. The left has laid bare its enmity towards justice and the rule of law. According to the left, the Constitution is “fundamentally flawed” because it is a concrete, tangible document based on moral absolutes, granting individuals superior power over their government. [Read more…]

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Are We Witnessing the Collapse of Liberalism?

American Thinker | by J. Robert Smith | Sep. 29, 2009

Less than a year into his presidency, Barack Obama’s world grows bleaker. Liberalism’s world is bleaker. At home and abroad, liberalism, as advanced by the President, is failing. Are we witnessing the beginnings of another historic event, loosely comparable to the fall of communism twenty years ago? Now the fall of liberalism? [Read more…]

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Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark Levin


SalvoMag | reviewed by Terrell Clemmons | Autumn 2009

In Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, Mark Levin identifies and analyzes two divergent, mutually exclusive philosophies of governance. Tracing the threads of each through American history, Levin discusses America’s founding, the Constitution, federalism, the free market, environmentalism, immigration, and the rise of the welfare state and shows how the conservative principles upon which America was founded have fostered opportunity, prosperity, and strength, and have preserved freedom.

Established on belief in divine providence and natural law, conservative principles recognize “a harmony of interests” and “rules of cooperation” that foster “ordered liberty” and a social contract, which brings about what Levin calls the civil society. In the civil society, the individual is recognized as “a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience.” [Read more…]

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The left still doesn’t get it

American Thinker | by Geoffrey P. Hunt | Sep. 19, 2009

Despite steady progress in achieving their ambition, lefties have acquired neither clue nor interest in how things actually work. Imagine the destruction when the revolucion has transferred power from the oppressor class to them. Suffice that whatever works now isn’t controlled by lefties, which is why whatever does work, works.

The lefties’ only work experience has been organizing protests, crafting slogans and manipulating the media. But regular Americans, in addition to their day jobs in building America and making it work have now also learned the stagecraft of protesting, sloganeering and leveraging the alternative media, while upstaging the mainstream media. [Read more…]

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In Defense of Capitalism

FrontPage Magazine | by Vasko Kohlmayer | Sep. 18, 2009

“Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil… you have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people,” concludes Michael Moore in his latest documentary Capitalism: A Love Story.

Moore’s fulmination is neither surprising nor atypical in this era when capitalism finds itself under all-out assault. Having become something of a derogatory term, capitalism gets faulted for almost every societal problem and ill. Blamed for exploitation, poverty, fraud, alienation, crime, racism and nearly everything else, capitalism is increasingly cast as the great villain of our time. [Read more…]

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Education, Failure in D.C. Public Schools

Townhall | Walter E. Williams | Sep. 16, 2009

Instead of President Obama addressing school students across the nation, he might have accomplished more by focusing his attention on the educational rot in schools in the nation’s capital. The American Legislative Exchange Council recently came out with their 15th edition of “Report Card on American Education: A State-by-State Analysis.” Academic achievement in no state is much to write home about but in Washington, D.C., by any measure, it approaches criminal fraud. Let’s look at the numbers. [Read more…]

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Marxism’s Last (and First) Stronghold


Acton Institute | Samuel Gregg | Sep. 9, 2009

Marxism, we’re often told, is dead. While Communism as a system of authoritarian power still exists in countries like China, Marxism’s contemporary hold over people’s minds, many claim, is nothing compared to its glory days between the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 and the Berlin Wall’s fall twenty years ago.

In many respects, such observations are true. But in other senses, they are not. We need only look at Western Europe—the place where Marxist thought first emerged and took root. One trivial, albeit disturbing sign is many young West Europeans’ willingness to wear t-shirts emblazoned with the Communist hammer and sickle or Che Guevara images. If you want confirmation of this, just take a stroll through downtown Amsterdam, Stockholm, or Rome. [Read more…]

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