From a Telegraph article about the moon landing: In 1966, 20,000 different companies were working on Apollo. Different companies handled different parts of the job, which all had to operate in concert … Kevin Fong points out one of … Continue reading →
Aaron Lake Smith: The Soviet Union, it must be remembered, was a regime founded by freelance writers and editors. In other words, a nightmare. Nice. And there’s more: Pamphleteers, autodidactic theoreticians, critics, publishers of small journals, hot-take artists, takedown artists, … Continue reading →
The people you used to meet working at The Independent: Ironically, Mrs von der Leyen’s year in the UK coincided with the arrest in London of Astrid Proll, one of the Red Army Faction’s most prominent members who had been … Continue reading →
The great Natalie Solent at Samizdata says this: We don’t want to make the enemy live up to their own book of rules, we want them to see the necessity of adopting ours. So we take the high road, but … Continue reading →
Communists are great people, aren’t they? Here’s a declassified cable from a British diplomat describing what happened (at least according to his sources) in Tiananmen Square in 1989: 5. FACT. ON ARRIVAL AT TIANANMEN TROOPS FROM SMR [Shenyang Military Region] … Continue reading →
Here’s the idiot millenial view of communism in a nutshell: Communism is everyone being able to go to nice restaurants with no class, race or gender barriers and nothing fucking else. — The One Who Wishes To Live Deliciously (@evan_welch) … Continue reading →
Communistdef: an idealistic person who helps install a regime built on a gangster structure, and is then surprised when it ends up run by actual gangsters. … Continue reading →
In 1902 Lev Bronstein, aka Leon Trotsky, was in exile in Siberia, with his wife Alexandra and two young daughters. Upon learning of a bit of mild revolutionary intellectual activity in Europe (a new radical newspaper, and a book by … Continue reading →
Jim again, from the comments: I’m convinced that the fall of the Eastern Bloc is responsible for a lot of this. I think a lot of the people who like controlling other people, who don’t really care what the ideology … Continue reading →
I attack the left a lot on this blog for being evil and thick, but sometimes the right are just as thick, even if not evil. Take this guy I argued with on Twitter today. I tweeted this: Indeed, Stalin … Continue reading →
Drummond’s Law says that whatever the left accuse the right of doing is something they’re up to themselves. Now, the left is always accusing the right of being evil, whereas, so the story goes, the right accuses the left of … Continue reading →
There was a discussion a while ago on Orphans of Liberty — can’t find the exact post any more — about thinking up a new name for the left. Personally I quite like ‘clubmen’, because basically leftists want their little … Continue reading →
From Sam in the comments: In addition to what you’ve mentioned I think the reason for a lot of the downplay is that Communism is on the “other” side, and that the Left reflexively defends and gravitates towards anything Anti-Western/American/Conservative. … Continue reading →
So why is it millenials know nothing at all about the atrocities and disasters of Communism? Some Conservatives have complained that it’s because the schools are not teaching it. Students know all about the dangers of Nazism, but they have … Continue reading →
I’m currently reading Robert Service’s bio of Stalin. It’s good so far, but it has one annoying aspect to it that almost every other history book or biography shares, and that is that it just doesn’t remind you enough of … Continue reading →
