This is an article by Zero HP Lovecraft, who tells me that most of it comes from the work of psychologist Robert B Cialdini, but he has added his own social media moral at the end. During the Korean War, captured American soldiers found themselves in POW camps run by Chinese Communists. The Chinese treated […]
Some people think I’m exaggerating or joking when I say that the left, even in the UK and the US, will put outspoken right-wingers in gulags given half a chance. But I’m not. At least, I sometimes am joking or exaggerating, but I do think that gulags are the end-point of hard leftism in the […]
I’m going to have more time in my diary now that I don’t have to do those re-education sessions with Lily Allen. Social media
From Wood Elf in the comments: I actually did that ! Well, not as much seize the means of production, but rather, through work and thrift over 25 years I bought the means of production. And now this little person is the sole owner of his very own furniture workshop, full of machines and high […]
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 the great contradictions of this, given the culture war between American democracy and Soviet communism, […]
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, and failed poets who’d reinvented themselves as labor organizers—fractious and at constant war with one […]
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 on the run from German authorities. Proll used the alias Anna, hiding out in […]
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 make a point of pointing out that this is ‘hate speech’, and that ‘free speech […]
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] HAD SEPARATED STUDENTS AND RESIDENTS. STUDENTS UNDERSTOOD THEY WERE GIVEN ONE HOUR TO LEAVE SQUARE […]
Here’s the idiot millenial view of communism in a nutshell: https://twitter.com/evan_welch/status/995746783048404992 Except that it turns out that the restaurant has no food. And everyone gets locked in, then rival packs form and fight for dominance, and before too long some people have been killed or enslaved by the others, and some are being eaten. That’s […]
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. Social media
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 Lenin) he suddenly decided that he should be a part of it, so he resolved […]
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 is they have to espouse, just that espousing it puts them in charge of other […]
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 and Mao never personally killed anyone. https://t.co/9FWhUx7zJW — Hector Drummond #StayHomeWatchSocietyCrumble (@hector_drummond) January 30, 2019 […]
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 merely being wrong, not evil. But if Drummond’s Law applies to this situation then we […]
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 club to rule the world. That’s actually how Lenin and the Bolsheviks thought, they saw […]
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. It’s the mark of a simple mind (and something I see from the Right […]
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 a vague, rosy-tinted impression of Communism, because the schools, and the culture at large, tell […]
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 what the year in question is. What I mean is that there will be plenty […]
Recently I blogged about the bungled attempted assassination of Trotsky that took place in Mexico in 1940, a few months before the successful one happened. It was both incompetent and nasty, so much so that it would make a good comedy along the lines of The Death of Stalin. There’s a lot more to this […]