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May Day and the Third Reich
The always astute Daniel Greenfield (FrontPageMag.com) points to the New York Times article “When Communism Inspired Americans”:
But the New York Times will run “When Communism Inspired Americans”. It will run it because while Communism didn’t inspire Americans, it did inspire the left to try and turn America into a totalitarian state. It still does. This is the dirty little secret that leaks out of the left.
When the media runs these evocative nostalgic pieces about Communism, it’s the equivalent of a pedophile sharing snapshots of summer camp. It’s the disgusting secret of truly vile people leaking out.
Here’s a quote from the second paragraph. “America was fortunate to have had the Communists here. They, more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was.”
As cities worldwide start cleaning up garbage left by Marxist May Day activists, there is little discussion about what these people really aspire to. Mainstream media barely focus on their message, rhetoric, propaganda and hysterical chants, but instead, puts these people into a sympathetic downtrodden proletariat class. They purposely withhold educating their viewers as to the hundreds of millions who have suffered or were brutally murdered under Communist dictatorships.
Greenfield compares the Communist horrors to those of Nazi Germany, asking why western media cannot put the two in the same category.
Nazis don’t get a forum to pour out their romantic nostalgia for attending Hitler rallies. Communists do because the left sympathizes with them. It must offer occasional apologies and disavowals, but the love for a horrifying ideology that was totalitarian all the way down, whose mass murder of millions was not an accident of fate, but was always an integral part of it, tells the truth about the left.
He concludes;
This is the left. It returns, like a dog to its vomit, to the dream of the true radicalism of a totalitarian leftist state. It occasionally deals with uncomfortable truths. Circles around them. And then it lapses back into an opium dream of Marxists sitting around a kitchen table and debating whom to shoot first.
We will be interviewing Daniel Greenfield tomorrow and would like to ask a few questions from Ricochet members. If you have a question, please submit below or IM me directly with how your name should be stated (pseudonym, first or whole name).
Published in General
I’m not sure there is a question here, but it brings to mind the leadership of the 60’s campus radicals discussing how, after the overthrow of the government, the US would be divided up for administration between the Soviets, the Chinese, the Cubans, and the Vietnamese.
I think there is certainly a question. Today’s leftists are continuing the sixties baby boomer ideology which metastasized into universities, media, and pop culture. Che’ posters donning college dorm rooms shows the baton has been passed down.
The left’s glossing over communism reminds me of George C Scott( as gum chewing Gen Buck Turgeson) in Dr Strangelove discussing nuclear war,”sure we might get our hair mussed but no more than 10-20 million tops”
Sometimes you gotta muss a few hundred million heads to achieve the dream. Hitler bad, communism good. Makes perfect sense.
What is the least destructive outcome he can imagine from our civil war? What does he hope for?
Ms. Gornick writes of her parents and their fellow travelers: “When these people sat down to talk, … above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, …”
Why, if she thinks “History sat down with them,” did they and she never notice what history so plainly tells us: that socialism has never worked ever. And let’s talk about her inexplicable belief that communism could possibly lift anyone out of a “nameless, faceless obscurity,” when that is exactly where it aims to put us all.
A great article by Mr. Greenfield. My question for him: Do you see a way we can ever overcome the damage the American Left has done via our school system since the 1970s? They created several generations of Bernie Sanders voters by presenting socialism as a warm and fuzzy answer to all the world’s ills. Not only that, but I recently read that a huge percentage of millennials actually believe that George Bush was responsible for more deaths than Stalin. It’s just astounding. What can we do to stem the tide?
IIRC, that meeting also included discussion of how they would have reeducation camps and that approximately 10% of the population would have to be killed when they couldn’t be properly reeducated.
How do the progressives square their embracing of Islam? Is it hatred of common enemies or delusion?
Hmmm. I wonder, does the romantic ideal and separation of the Nazism and Communism originally stem from the likelihood the allies may not have been able to beat Hilter without Stalin? I would guess not, that it’s more ideological.
The Left’s blind spot regarding the actual facts of communism is somewhat amazing. A political science professor named R J Rummel spent his career documenting and cataloging what he termed “democide” – the murder of any person or people, including genocide, politicide and mass murder. In general deaths caused by war against other nations are excluded from these totals except for acts such as the above. According to him the top 10 killer governments of the 20th century were:
According to Rummel, government democide was responsible for the deaths of a little over 200 million people in the 20th century of which communist governments accounted for the lion’s share at a little over 149 million murders (about 75% of all death by government).
Great article and question. I had something similar already on this but will use yours. Thanks Aaron.
Dave, how do we get a more balanced picture of history to be taught in the schools? I know some school districts have been working on this strategy, but it seems like such a slow slog.
I think it stems from the giant lie that the people are all equal and have all the power and the ills of mankind can be solved by embracing the lowly yet heroic proletariat and Che is so hip and cool and motorcycle diary like and one day the commies will get it right and rainbows will fill the skies.
My favorite refrain from these morons is that Communism would work if the West would just let it. But noooooo, we had to be all obstructionist with our “care for human rights” and “love of individual liberty.”
Ha. Unfortunately, unbridled idealism always goes hand-in-hand with leftism. So even if they do ever admit that socialism has never worked before, they say, “That’s because WE weren’t the ones trying it! Nobody ever before in history has ever tried as hard as WE will, and nobody has ever CARED as much as we do! This time it will work! Yes We Can!”
Susan, I think many of us advocate decentralized control, and in many cases abolishing the union corruption aka the NEA altogether. But your question then opens the devil’s advocate’s point: how do we ensure all children are taught equally? Would the school districts of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and DC teach kids the same history as those in Tulsa, Dallas or Phoenix?
Everything was fine until Jimmy Carter came along.
Greenfield blogs at Sultan Knish.
In the summer of 1969, while at a freshman orientation weekend at the U of Wisconsin, I saw a notice for a meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and attended out of curiosity. I watched as two groups of young Americans bitterly argued and denounced each other, one self-labeled as Stalinists, the others as Trotskyites. Yes, it was truly inspiring.
Ha I knew an SDS member in college. He’d gone to high school in NYC with a dorm mate of mine. He was a total loser.
I was anti-war but remember sitting there thinking “these people are insane”. On the other hand Bill Ayers did all right for himself, avoiding jail, and retiring from a long career as an influential professor in the field of education and his equally nasty wife, Bernadine Dohrn, escaped prosecution and went on to become an instructor of clinical law at Northwestern Law School. Plus, they became mentors in Chicago politics for a future American president. Shows you what I know.
There’s no way to ensure equality. Even within one school some teachers are going to be better than others. It should be up to the school boards all across the nation to ensure quality, not any federal entity.
Somehow, the US survived before the Department of Education and before school boards. In a free society, each school develops a reputation and decisions are made from there.
I can hear it now: “Do you know who my father is? I’ll be outta here in 15 minutes!”
Ayer’s father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison, the largest electric utility in Illinois…It’s always the rich kids falling under Marx’s spell!
Maybe “semester abroad” trips to Venezuela?
An interesting post. Thank you.
Are there facts that exclude the USA from such a list of democide?
Thus the need for confiscatory estate taxes.
Agreed Randy. My only concern (and I’m a school-choice proponent) is that certain publicly funded schools will indoctrinate kids with the progressive agenda which will only perpetuate the cycle of stupid. Not sure how to prevent that without some national standard.
I don’t know who David Greenfield is, but maybe you could ask him. (The name does sound vaguely familiar, so if he writes stuff maybe I’ve read some of his work.)
I didn’t celebrate May Day by trying to watch the big parade on Russian TV on the internet. Time-zone problems. Instead, I re-watched the Marlen Khutsiev film, I am Twenty, from the early-mid 60s, which was filmed by working the story into actual public events, including a May Day parade in Moscow. It’s still not clear to me how Khutsiev and his team managed this with the technology available back in the early 60s. Nikita Khrushchev denounced the film when it came out, which resulted in Khutsiev reworking part of it in an attempt to placate him, which gets obvious towards the end. Even so, it departs from the standard socialist realism, as even his earlier work from the 1950s did.
My favorite Khutsiev film is July Rain but this one is a close second.
The segment with the May Day parade starts at about 50:00.
This definition of democide correctly pertains to innocent citizens victimized by that particular government, not uniformed enemy soldiers of war. However, there are other definitions used by anti-American activists for political purposes that do include the United States as they expand the measures to abortion and ‘soft-kill democide’.