To put it mildly, this doesn't sound good:

North Korea said it is scrapping all military and political agreements with South Korea, accusing the government in Seoul of pushing inter-Korean relations to "the brink of war."

"All the agreed points concerning the issue of putting an end to the political and military confrontation between the north and south will be nullified," the reunification committee in Pyongyang said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency today.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Kim Jong Il's regime threatened "strong military steps" in response to South Korea's confrontational policies and about two months after North Korea imposed border restrictions with South Korea.

The regime has repeatedly called South Korean President Lee Myung Bak a "traitor" and a "sycophant to the U.S." It has demanded South Korea stop civic groups from launching balloons loaded with so-called propaganda leaflets criticizing Kim.

North Korea also announced today it is canceling an Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-Aggression, Cooperation and Exchange with South Korea and nullified the military boundary in the West Sea, according to KCNA's statement.

North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war as their 1950-1953 conflict ended in a truce and not a peace treaty. The two nations are separated by one of the world's most heavily fortified borders, with 1.7 million soldiers facing off each day.

Sabre rattling, or something far worse? Gird your loins--we'll likely soon see.

Via Jonah Goldberg, this is a well produced look at the political spectrum and its history. Jonah writes, "I have my quibbles, but overall I think this pretty useful." I'm very much in sync with the graph that outline the poltical spectrum, which appears at 30 seconds into the video:

I had planned to post a link to this item by Mark Hemingway in the Corner...

Here's a handy map Prop 8 opponents have put together showing you where donors to prop 8 live. You have to love the "Jump to San Francisco, Salt Lake City , or Orange County" feature. If someone put together a map showing where all the gay people in the neighborhood live that would properly be called an implicit threat, but this is altogether different, right?

....But this article titled "The Revival Of The Blacklist" at The American Vision puts a number of related pieces together, along with a note of another fear of cold war tactics in a hot election battle far from Los Angeles:

The Franken-Coleman election in Minnesota is testimony to the fact that conservatives fear liberal blacklisting. A lot of liberal money came in to support of Franken by noted liberals like Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, George Clooney, Michael J. Fox, Ted Danson, David Letterman, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, and Steve Martin. Because the FCC data base is open to the media, those who donate are available to the Hollywood left. A conservative who donated to Coleman would be "outed" in periodicals like Variety and Politico and might find it difficult getting steady work in the entertainment industry (see interview here).

A similar tactic is being used to punish those who supported Proposition 8. A Los Angeles Times article reports that many "in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban. Already out is Scott Eckern, director of the nonprofit California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, who resigned after a flurry of complaints from prominent theater artists, including 'Hairspray' composer Marc Shaiman, when word of his contribution to the Yes on [Prop] 8 campaign surfaced."

A letter writer to the San Francisco Chronicle who supported Prop 8 was intimidated when Internet search engines were used "to find the letter writer's small business, his Web site (which included the names of his children and dog), his phone number and his clients. And they posted that information in the 'Comments' section of SFGate.com--urging, in ugly language, retribution against the author's business and its identified clients."

Now, is this to say that conservatives can't work in Hollywood today? Not at all. Is there a fear factor that keeps conservatives from speaking out? I don't doubt it. Those who are touted as conservatives usually have no stated public opinion on abortion and homosexuality. Patricia Heaton and Angie Harmon are notable exceptions. Kurt Russell is listed as a conservative, actually, a libertarian, which might explain why he's living with Goldie Hawn and not married to her, although I must say that he's stayed with her longer than Brad Pitt did with Jennifer Aniston. Many (most?) are economic conservatives like Kelsey Grammar and Drew Carey. And there are more who are being encouraged to make their conservative beliefs public.

Like so much of liberalism, liberals are hypocritical. They decry the blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s but don't seem to mind if the right people are being blacklisted today who defy their pet causes.

Thus rendering the well over 40 year old Annual Blacklist Movie (scroll to about 1:15 into this edition of Silicon Graffiti from July for a montage of clips from numerous examples of this Tinseltown perennial) as even more hypocritical than it already was:

Related thoughts here.

If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, here's a sample:

Meet Che Guevara. Just think of him as Jesus plus Abraham Lincoln with a touch of Moses and Dr. Doug Ross. After 4 1/2 hours of watching Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara heal the sick, teach the illiterate, daze the women, execute the lawless, defeat the corrupt, uplift the peasantry and spew the sound bite, I was convinced there would be a scene in which he turned water to Bacardi.

You can't spell cliche without "Che." And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right? Minus punch lines - or perhaps with them. "We are in a difficult situation," Che observes, at a point when his army is surrounded and forced to eat its horses.

The story of the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara is played with much broody self-importance by Benicio Del Toro. It will be shown in two parts after its one-week opening run. That way, on consecutive evenings, it can bore everyone but activist grad students.

Read the whole thing.

Nick Gillespie debunks Che chic in awesome new video from Reason.TV:

I was glad to see this moment from 2005 mentioned--and described as "Wearing a swastika in a synagogue."

Update: If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, don't miss it.

That's the New York Times' take on Rosie O'Donnell's variety show yesterday--and if Rosie bombed with the Gray Lady, Rosie bombed.

Of course, Hollywood's enemies list seems to be an ever-growing phenomenon, rendering the annual Hollywood blacklist movie even more hypocritical than it already was.

Eric Holder in 2000: Elian Gonzalez "was not taken at the point of a gun...they were armed agents who acted very sensitively":

Jim Geraghty asks, "Can Senators Play Video at a Confirmation Hearing?"

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds links to Lawrence Tribe's op-ed in the New York Times from April of 2000, titled, "Justice Taken Too Far",which asks, "Where did [Janet Reno] derive the legal authority to invade that Miami home in order to seize the child?"

Basil Exposition: The Cold War's over.
Austin Powers: Ah, finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh, comrades? Eh?
Basil Exposition: Austin, we won.

John Nolte writes on the New Hollywood Blacklist:

At least once a year we get a new narrative or documentary about the infamous Hollywood blacklist that forced a number of screenwriters out of the business or underground with the use of a pseudonym.

I included clips from a whole bunch of those annual Hollywood perennials in a Silicon Graffiti video back in July, which makes for a great double-feature with John's post. Speaking of which, here's more from John:

Most of these movies hit me as wish fulfillment fantasies with the filmmakers and their stars (George Clooney, Frank Darabont, Irwin Winkler, and on and on and on...) puffing out their chests to stridently declare that if they had been alive then that! never would've happened. Oh, no, they would have put their careers and livelihoods on the line to fight the good fight for the right to hold unpopular political beliefs without fear of retribution.

Well - here - we - are.

And where are you?

As John writes, they're too busy yelling, "Him, over there, He's Spartacus!"

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we visit industrious Outer Party Member Winston Smith hard at work in the Ministry of Truth, and look at how history can be turned on a dime, including:

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

This is the 19th edition of our ongoing Silicon Graffiti videoblog series, which began in January of this year; click here for all of the previous editions.

Jonah Goldberg updates a Boomer/Gen-X Saturday morning video chestnut: "The new Schoolhouse Rock cartoon: 'Conjunction: a word that connects a racist attack and Barack Obama'":

This week, an editorial writer for the Kansas City Star denounced John McCain and Sarah Palin for suggesting that Obama is a socialist because he wants to "spread the wealth around." Don't they understand that "socialist" has always been a racist codeword used by bigots like J. Edgar Hoover to demonize black activists like W.E.B. Du Bois?

A couple problems: First, as best I can remember, Marx, Engels, Lenin, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington do not usually get a lot of attention during Black History Month. Second, as writer Michael Moynihan recently noted, Du Bois wasn't merely a socialist, he was a Stalinist! (Du Bois was not entirely unsympathetic to the Nazis, either.) [Paul Robeson was also pretty keen on Uncle Joe--Ed] Besides, when did "socialist" stop being an anti-Semitic codeword for Jew? Maybe when the left started going batty over "neocons."

I'm pretty sure I received the memo replacing the outdated terminology a while back from the liberal Bletchley Park.

As Mary Katharine Ham writes:

Palin addressed a North Carolina fund-raiser Thursday night saying, "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe...that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

The comment was quickly picked up by media outlets and the Obama campaign, whose spokesman Bill Burton asked in an e-mail to reporters, "What part of the country isn't pro-America?"

Well, there is a small company town in southern California whose chief industry routinely compares one American political party with an ideology that that ended 60 years ago, but not before killing tens of millions of people, while annually explaining away its own deeply entrenched support for an ideology that concurrently also killed tens of millions of people, and is still trudging along in one form or another.

Further answers here.

Linking to my April 2005 review of Frederick Taylor's Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, which discussed what a geopolitical football the city of Dresden has been ever since the end of World War II, Canada's Damon Penny notes that a panel of German historians has revised the death toll of the allies' bombing of the city near the end of WWII sharply downward:

For more than 60 years Britain's Bomber Command led by Arthur 'Bomber' Harris has been vilified for causing up to 500,000 deaths in the carpet bombing of Dresden during World War II.

But now, after a four-year investigation, a panel of German historians has said that the true number of dead from the Allied air raids in January 1945 was between 18,000 and 25,000.

They reached the figure after combing through death certificates, hitherto sealed eyewitness reports, registration cards for people made homeless and hospital records.

It now emerges that the high number of deaths from 'Operation Thunderclap' was a myth invented by the Nazis, perpetuated by Communists and re-born in the past decade to serve the aims of ultra-nationalists.

[...]

It suited the Nazi propaganda machine to claim that half-a-million women and children had been incinerated in the firestorm. It helped persuade a struggling population that this was awaited them all unless they fought for Nazism with their last breath.

Then the Communist East Germans perpetuated the myth, mindful that it served their purposes by showing the destructiveness of capitalism and fascism combined.

In the last decade neo-Nazis have sought to keep the lie alive as they praise many of the policies of the Third Reich.

Incidentally, Dresden also makes an appearance near the end of this post on modern architecture and the near universal need amongst the left to start from zero.

They told me that if George W. Bush were elected president, I'd be spending time in Hooverville! And they were right!

On Thursday and Friday, I videoed Roger L. Simon at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. As Roger writes:

I am back from five days as a Hoover Media Fellow where - among many interesting and valuable encounters with other fellows - I got to meet one of my personal heroes, Robert Conquest, age 91.

I am pleased to report the author of that seminal work on Stalinism The Great Terror has, as the cliche goes, all his marbles at his advanced age. Ed Driscoll and I visited him and his third wife Liddy at their home in Stanford faculty housing on Friday to make a short video. Sharp as he may be mentally, the historian/poet is quite feeble, his voice weak, but we still found his stories of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, etc., riveting. This is a man who has been at the very center of the intellectual conflicts of the Twentieth Century. After reading Conquest, you can never look at GB Shaw, JP Sartre and numerous other Stalin apologists with the same unbridled admiration.

Conquest answered a few questions for us and even read some of his poetry, including a translation he did from a long battlefield poem by Solzhenitsyn (Prussian Nights). The Russian author asked Conquest to translate it when they met in Zurich in 1975 after Solzhenitsyn had been finally expelled from the Soviet Union. The raw footage of our video has been uploaded to our servers and will appear in edited form on Pajamas TV next week.

Roger asked Conquest about his Three Laws of Politics--and much like Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws, these are holding up extremely well.

Jules Crittenden studies photos to determine if Kim Jong Il is an ex-despot, or merely pining for the fjords.

(In any case, we probably should put the four million volts through the clapped-out tyrant just to see if he goes "voom.")

A few years ago, when Jonah Goldberg pointed out "the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history", he wasn't kidding!

In 1946, Whittaker Chamber managed to sum up the entire history of the 20th century in 16 perfectly chosen words:

The dominant problem of the 20th Century is the reconciliation of economic security with political liberty.

Absolutely spot on.

Words you rarely like to hear from a presidential candidate: "Beijing looks like a pretty good option."

In a devastating comparison, Maggie's Farm notes that Obama's gaffes have gotten so bad, he's beginning to make Bob Dylan sound sensible by comparison.

Found via Orrin Judd, Lloyd Billingsley, who previously wrote "Hollywood's Missing Movies", which featured a plot summary of Total Eclipse, the greatest film Hollywood will never make, has a review of the new hagio-documentary, Trumbo:

Capitalism is evil and America is a horrible fascist place, the argument goes, except for my lucrative studio contract, except for my fat bank account, except for my mansion, my swimming pool, my ranch, and my luxury cars. That's why there were jokes about Robert Rich, one of Trumbo's pseudonyms. Trumbo, who died in 1976, tells those stories here, along with his one-man show of accredited victimhood, in which he gets some help. Former Nation editor Victor Navasky does a lot of the explaining, and his book Naming Names, a defense of the screen Stalinists, is conveniently displayed beside him.

Here is the familiar footage of the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on Communism in Hollywood, which foolishly focused on film content. The screen Stalinists were eager to testify but the strategy of defying the committee came straight from the CPUSA bosses. Trumbo is billed as an independent thinker and contrarian, but that didn't extend to Party bosses. When they laid down the law, they were obeyed. As John Huston later discovered, the strategy was all about protecting John Howard Lawson, the Party's straw boss in the studio talent guilds, and like Trumbo, an unpleasant fellow to those of other affiliations, even on the left.

Some studio people were friendly to the committee because the Party, in its heyday, wielded plenty of power in the studios and had made their lives miserable, doing all they could to quash their projects and ruin their careers. Trumbo provides not a hint of that background, nor why the committee came to Hollywood in the first place. It was the result of an investigation of Gerhard Eisler, a Comintern agent whose brother Hanns wrote scores for Hollywood movies. The Comintern isn't even mentioned a single time.

Footage from films such as Papillon and Spartacus shows how much Trumbo imposed the heroes-versus-informers template. He also has a brief role in Papillon as a prison commandant, which is appropriate. The Hollywood Communists maintained silence as Stalin kangaroo courted their fellow writers and artists into the gulag, or just killed them off. Nothing about that in Trumbo, nothing that would threaten his status as the icon of what, in Hollywood, passes for the Greatest Generation.

Trumbo will likely win an Oscar for best documentary, even though it's as much a fantasy as Tropic Thunder. Trumbo's back story and the tale of CPUSA overtures in Hollywood are much more dramatic and action packed, but so far no takers in the dream factories.

I know at least one Blogger who gave it a shot, however:

Details on the BrothersJudd Blog.

Andrew Breitbart's latest Washington Times column on the new Hollywood Blacklist features several quotes from his father-in-law, the great Orson Bean:

"When the blacklist hit, I saw actors walk across the street to avoid me. The doorman at 485 Madison Avenue (former CBS headquarters) turned his back as I walked by. But I never felt hated by the ring-wing blacklisters. They just felt we were terribly wrong," he said.

"These days, the left doesn't just disagree with right-wingers--they hate them."

Maybe that's why there's been historically much more of a outflow amongst intellectuals from port to starboard since the mid-1950s. As Jonah Goldberg noted in early 2001, many ex-communists followed Bean's path to the right--or at the least back to the center:

If you count normal, non-pointy headed people, millions. Generation after generation of the Left's best minds have decided they like things over here more. Many if not most of National Review's founding editors were former Communists. The very word "neoconservative" was coined as an epithet by the socialist Michael Harrington to describe all of his friends who were heading for the exits to conservatism. It's not just the older generation. Every decade we get a new wave of writers and scholars who have come in from the rain, Christina Hoff Sommers, Michael Kelly, Andrew Ferguson, Charles Murray, just to name a few. Hell, I don't even act surprised anymore when I meet conservatives who say "I used to be a Communist." It's almost a cliche.

Which might also help to explain Glenn Reynolds' quote from a year later:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

We touched upon the original blacklist, and Hollywood's eternal Mobius Loop-style reminiscences of it in a recent edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog:

"At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."

--Ring Lardner Jr., at Trumbo's memorial service in 1976.

Back in 2006, Mark Steyn noted that "Hollywood prefers to make 'controversial' films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won."

You can see that dynamic--or lack thereof--at work in the new documentary Trumbo that's hitting the art house circuit this summer on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. It's a look at the Blacklist and McCarthyism of the 1950s that's brave and daring--a cutting edge triumph of dissent and free speech! ...As long as you're willing to discount the dozen-plus movies on the topic that Hollywood has made since the mid-1960s.

In contrast, did Hollywood produce or distribute any anti-Soviet Union films during that same time period? Not too many, needless to say; but we'll also look at the few that qualify--if only tangentially. Along the way, we also look at the convoluted real-life history of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun novel, which as Orrin Judd described in his review, is as byzantine a story as anything Trumbo wrote for the silver screen.

Those are the topics we explore in the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog. It takes its title from an earlier article by Steyn, back when he reviewed the play that toured a few years ago starring Nathan Lane as Trumbo for the New Criterion. For our previous forays in videoblogging, tune in here.

Update: Andrew Breitbart looks at the new Hollywood blacklist: "Mr. Spielberg, tear down this wall!" And Glenn Reynolds links to Total Eclipse, the greatest film you've never seen.

Ivan Osorio quips:

My friend Tom Palmer says that whenever he sees somebody sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt, he likes to ask the wearer, “That’s a great t-shirt; do you have the entire collection?” The wearer usually responds either with a blank stare or by asking Tom what does he mean, to which Tom then responds: “You know, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot…”

Now I can happily say that the disgusting Che is in the right company in at least one type of merchandise. The photo below was taken recently by a friend in vacation in Italy.

Wnat's the photo? Well, as Ivan asks, "Would they also have Castro rum and Stalin vodka?"

(Via Tim Blair, who notes, "Che may finally have liberated someone, but he’s still mixing with the wrong crowd.")

Back in 2003, in a post titled "Mao And The Godfather", we had some thoughts on, and a photo of, the Andy Warhol print of Mao Zedong that hung above the mantelpiece in Francis Ford Coppola's dining room at the height of his power as a film director in the mid-1970s.

A reader of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog quotes from an article by Jed Perl that suggests that Warhol didn't choose Mao as a subject randomly:

Mao is Marilyn, only more so. The terms "icon" and "global icon" are nowadays tossed around with slapdash glee, so it is important to make a basic distinction. It was the moviegoing public that made Marilyn Monroe an icon, because they responded to her beauty, her charm, her wit. The people who hang posters of Marilyn on their walls do so because they like her. It's that simple. But the omnipresence of Mao's image has an altogether different origin. While Leftists in the United States in the late 1960s may have gladly chosen to hang Mao's portrait on their walls, among the billion Chinese who were sure to have his portrait in their homes and in their workplaces, it was understood that they would have endangered their own safety if they did not put his portrait where Mao wanted it to be. There is a world of difference between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from above, and the difference has more than a little to do with the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian society. Warhol's way of blurring this distinction leads straight to the political pornography that characterizes so much of the new Chinese art.

The distinction was not lost on Warhol. According to one of the umpteen books on him that has appeared in recent years, Warhol "often stated that his goal was to obtain the patronage of a dictator, who would then mandate that Warhol's portrait be placed in every governmental office, school, and so on, ensuring the artist unlimited financial opportunities." Was Warhol kidding when he fantasized about being a dictator's court painter? To some degree, of course, he must have been. But then again the fascination of Warhol's work was based on a confusion or conflation of a number of different kinds of power, beginning with the power of celebrity and the power of advertising and the power of art. In the early 1970s he added to that incendiary but still somewhat benign mix another element: the power of communist propaganda. That was the point at which his work turned foul. Warhol's Maos—as well as the Hammer and Sickle still lifes from later in the 1970s and the Lenin portraits of the 1980s—bring his own mercenary spin to a Western love affair with the certitudes of absolutist politics that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. That was when some members of the European and American intelligentsia decided that the bombastic images of healthy working men and women coming first out of Russia and then out of Nazi Germany offered a relief from the intricacies of modern art. After all, there is nothing less intricate than a painting by Andy Warhol.
The impact that totalitarian imagery can have on free people is an enduring problem. Susan Sontag's essay on the subject, "Fascinating Fascism," was published two years after Warhol began to paint Mao. She could just as well have been thinking of Warhol's Maos, and more generally of the leftist infatuation with the iconography of the Cultural Revolution, when she remarked that the sophisticated public was beginning "to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of Pop Art." Sontag, who never liked to get too far ahead of her audience, was aware that her readership had still not quite outlived its infatuation with the Maoist look. But she made an important point when she observed that there is a difference between appreciating the peculiar power of a certain kind of totalitarian imagery and going right ahead and succumbing to that power.

As Jonah's reader suggests, expect lots more totalitarian imagery during the coming Olympics in Beijing; in the meantime, we'll always have Che.

As Charles Johnson writes:

If you aren’t familiar with the story of John McCain’s capture and torture by the North Vietnamese, I highly recommend this article at US News, a reprint of McCain’s first-person account originally published in 1973: John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account - US News and World Report.

I was generally familiar with what happened to McCain, but have gained an enormous respect for him after reading this article.

Needless to say, RTWT.

In Canada's National Post, Robert Fulford asks what to many is a fairly straightforward rhetorical question:

Why aren't the Vietnamese more grateful to Tom Hayden? Recently, he returned for the first time in 36 years to the country that he and his then-wife Jane Fonda tried to save from American domination in the Vietnam war. The trip disappointed him. As he writes in the March 10 issue of The Nation, Vietnam has turned capitalist. Was that what he fought for? Absolutely not. He remains capitalism's enemy, still the same lefty who helped found 1960s student radicalism.

In the San Jose suburb of Milpitas, the large Vietnamese population is so enamored with the current communist regime that they've gone back to flying the flag of the free former South Vietnam. And they're not alone.

Via Small Dead Animals, which notes:

Ah yes, those ungrateful Vietnamese. After Hollywood cleared their path for a worker's paradise they've decided they don't like it much after all and are abandoning it. Oh well, Hollywood still has Cuba and there's always Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to embrace.

And possibly, eventually, not even the former:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Alarcón's reputation in some circles.

Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies.

Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks.

"It passes from flash drive to flash drive," said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. "This is going to get out of the government's hands because the technology is moving so rapidly."

This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and Cuba has the benefit of much more modern techology, to boot.

As the Cato Institute, among many others has noted, in the 1980s:

Fax machines and photocopiers, video recorders and personal computers outside the government were no longer exotica but a sprawling, living nervous system that linked the Russian political opposition, the republican independence movements, and the burgeoning private sector. Tied informally together, this equipment constituted a network of considerable scale.

During that period, those same tools had a similar, if sadly less revolutionary impact in China. So the decision to allow possession of computers in Cuba by the new regime after Castro's six year PC blockade could have suprisingly remarkable long term consequences for that currently still-imprisoned Island.

"Castro Rejects Idea of Political Change."

I guess Fidel's the ultimate example of a one-time youthful leftwing revolutionary who's now standing athwart history yelling "stop."

Fidel Castro's friends at AP write, “‘The night before, I slept better than ever,’ Castro reportedly wrote in a newspaper column. ‘My conscience was clear and I promised myself a vacation.’”

John McCain has an excellent tropical suggestion for Castro's travel itinerary.

Update: Related thoughts from Mark Steyn, who writes, "there beats in the liberal breast a strange passion for normalizing dictatorships."

Highlighted on Drudge is what is currently a brief Reuters note:

HAVANA (Reuters) - Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Tuesday that he will not return to lead the country, retiring as head of state 49 years after he seized power in an armed revolution.

"Developing", needless to say.

Update: UPI adds:

HAVANA, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Fidel Castro, the ailing strongman who led Cuba for 47 years, is stepping down as president and commander in chief, it was reported Tuesday.

Castro, 81, who has been suffering from an undisclosed intestinal ailment, disclosed his resignation in a letter published in the state-run newspaper Granma, CNN reported. In that letter, he said he would not accept being elected to another term as president of the state council or commander in chief when the Parliament meets Sunday.

Since mid-2006, Castro's younger brother, Raul, has been Cuba's acting president, running the government's day-to-day operations.

Fidel Castro ruled the communist island since leading a revolution that toppled Gen. Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Michelle Malkin has more.

Anne Applebaum explains why actors like Sean Penn and fashion models such as Naomi Campbell get the warm and fuzzies around murderous thugs such as Hugo Chavez:

In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia, and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention, and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration John Reed once felt—the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all his wealth, fame, media access, and Hollywood power, Sean Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

As she explains, it's the same radical chic urge that drove celebrities, intellectuals, and the original useful idiots of 90 years ago to flock to the then-new Soviet Union.

Yesterday, we linked to a Power Line item regarding Cuban dissident Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, who was awarded the Medal of Freedom from President Bush today, where he described Biscet as "a dangerous man" to the Cuban dictatorship--"He is dangerous in the same way that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi were dangerous."

(And just to dovetail with Scott Johnson's post above, you just know the folks at AFP loved having to type that line.)

Biscet is also the topic of a recent video by The Wall Street Journal featuring columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady:

"Conservatives are down on President Bush, blaming him for everything under the sun, picking at him. Sure, he’s made mistakes. But he also has greatness in him. And this was a great act. In bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Oscar Biscet — an all-but-forgotten and all-but-helpless man in a Cuban dungeon — George Bush has done an incredibly large-hearted and important thing."

I've been getting numerous visitors today searching on "Deborah Santana"; they've been going to my post with a photograph of Carlos Santana and his wife Deborah at the 2006 Oscars, with Carlos in his dinner jacket and uber-reactionary Che T-shirt, and now I know why: they're declaring their marriage splitsville.

For those who are interested, here are the details from the San Jose Mercury of their divorce announcement.

Eric Scheie spots the Columbine killers in the process of becoming cult heroes:

Considering Che a hero while blaming the NRA for kids who go bad?

In a twisted way, there's a certain logic to it.

Sadly, yes (see also Oswald, Lee Harvey and his benighted status in Oliver Stone's JFK.) And if Cho Seung-Hui joins the list, we can trace a key moment in his ascension to this decision by NBC to create his Che/Oswald/Travis Bickle-style anti-hero pose.

Radical chic--it's not just for Park Avenue orchestra conductors anymore!

(Someone should send a case of these T-shirts to BBC HQ.)

The week is far from over, but it's already been filled with deja vu all over again. And again.

Or as to paraphrase those parodies of 1930s-era Time magazine, Backwards ran the flashbacks until reeled the mind...

Want to relive 1945? The Washington Post makes Gerald Ford look like a brilliant Cold War historian.

Or maybe you'd like to revisit 1994? OJ's back in the police blotter once again.

How 'bout 1997? Matt Drudge has the dinosaur media p.o.ed all over again.

Or, why not something as recent as 2004! On National Talk Like A Pirate Day, avast maties, for the return of the Captain Dan the Newsman, swashbuckling his way back into the Blogosphere's hearts with a $70 million lawsuit against his former employer.

Or we can set the Wayback Machine back to the new Ice Age predicted by NASA in 1971; and way, way back--to 1492.

...Where it all will end, knows God!

Update: speaking of "a couple of week links", welcome readers of Jules Crittenden and Don Surber!

Well, it's not that new a podcast--I actually recorded this last December, just as Tech Central Station was transitioning away from podcasting back towards emphasizing traditional print articles. But I didn't want this interview with author Paul Kengor and his book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism to be abandoned entirely, so I'm sharing it here, as a sort of late summer rerun. While there are a few questions near the end of my interview with the author tied to the then-recent mid-term elections, most of the material discussed is pretty timeless stuff: how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War--and spent much of his adult life preparing for the job.

27 minutes, 33 seconds in length, 25.2 MB file size, and no iPod required--virtually any PC with a broadband connection can download and play a podcast. So click here to listen!

At age 88, with the terminal moment approaching with ever-increasing speed, Pete Seeger has second thoughts.

For Seeger, it's too little, and more importantly far, far too late, but at least he's attempting to square his record somewhat by publicly admitting that he was wrong--twice--on the most important moral questions of the 20th century.

Update: "Better late than never, but Jesus, is this late".

Heh. Indeed.

Orrin Judd writes that the Spanish Civil War is "best thought of as the first battle of the Cold War, with the Western Left, not atypically, on the wrong side." He links to a piece by Warren Carroll of the American Spectator, who notes:

WHEN THE HEROICS of the Spanish Civil War come up -- Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway's fictions or the effusions of various poets -- there is a very large and usually unremarked elephant in the room: Orwell, who actually fought, and Hemingway who wrote about fighting, were on the wrong side.

Read the whole thing.

No good can come of this:

The Russian school manuals are being rewritten in order to fit the Putin doctrine of a strong Russia, unashamed of its past, bluntly distorting facts and bullying the US. Even scarier is the glorification of Stalin.

On the other hand, given the prevailing attitudes of the Russian people, combined with their failing demographics, it's not entirely surprising.

More from the memory hole, as Michael Chapman of CNSNews.com interviews Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him:

Cybercast News Service: What do you consider to be some of Guevara's greatest crimes or offenses that people today should know about?

Humberto Fontova: He was the chief executioner. He performed for the Cuban revolution what Heinrich Himmler performed for the Nazis. Everything Che Guevara did was directed by Fidel Castro. Early on, when they were in the mountains, Castro realized that Che seemed to relish executing little farm boys. There were executions carried out, carried out in the mountains, of so-called informers. I interviewed many people who witnessed those executions. There was no due process.

Che Guevara wrote a letter to his father in 1957 and to his abandoned wife. In the letter to her, he wrote, "I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood." Then, to his father, "I really like killing." The man was a clinical sadist, whereas Fidel Castro you could describe as a psychopath in that the murders did not affect him one way or the other. It was a means to an end - the consolidation of his one-man rule. Che has a famous quote, where he wrote, a revolutionary has to become "a cold killing machine." The thing was, Che Guevara was anything but cold. He was a warm killing machine. He relished the slaughter.

And Hollywood can't stop making movies idolizing him, which helps to place this recent essay by Jonah Goldberg into context.

Video of the day, via Greg Hanke:

And if you haven't seen it yet, don't miss this surreal clip of a prematurely embalmed Stalin "touring" Berlin shortly after WWII.

Update: And speaking of World War II, "Out with the old axis, in with the new axis".

Paco, a frequent contributor to Tim Blair's site, notes that America's leftwing artists need to believe that they live in an oppressive culture, no matter how free from government regulation their speech is:

Pretending that one lives in an oppressive and fearful society, and saying so publicly, creates a sensation of courage and nobility that, in reality, is totally missing from the lives of many of these artsy types. For some reason, it’s not enough for these people to be perceived as interesting, or witty, or brilliant: they have this great need to be perceived as heroic as well.

Meanwhile, Christa Wolf, a communist writer who made her career in East Germany, a society which of course actually did outlaw freedom of speech, is feeling nostalgic:

The trajectory of Wolf’s political evolution has many parallels with that of leftist Western intellectuals, whom historical events compel to abandon their support for communist regimes, but who prove unwilling or unable fully to renounce their earlier convictions. Wolf continued to nurture utopian longings and lingering reverence for Marxist ideals even after the East German regime’s collapse. She responded to the reunification of Germany with a reaffirmation of moral equivalence: if communist systems had turned out to be bad, so were the Western capitalist ones, and there was little to choose from between them. Wolf’s complaints about consumerism expressed these attitudes, as when she writes of a time “when we are supposed to be buried in material objects and become material things ourselves”—a complaint that gives comfort to intellectuals, whose sense of identity is rooted in the role of social critic.

Wolf did not seize the opportunity One Day a Year presented for a thorough, systematic probing of the evolution of her worldview, nor for an understanding of the errors and illusions to which she was susceptible. She seems annoyed by those who “demanded my confession of guilt as an entry into the Western media landscape”—even though she managed to enter it without making such confessions. The sources of her qualified disillusionment with the East German regime remain unclear, as does the extent of her dissatisfaction. What is clear is that for Wolf, not even living most of her life in a highly repressive communist society could extinguish her longing for an ideal, egalitarian, non-commercial society.

And speaking of teaching old dogma new tricks, Amity Shlaes reconsiders our reverence for FDR.

Sidney Pollack, the director of Havana (and numerous, not to mention, better movies) on Fidel Castro:

Castro lost his mind a long time ago. He's a dictator. He started out like a lot of them with probably genuinely good impulses to create a revolution that was fair and then he got in power and look what he did.

Or as fellow Hollywood denizen Peter Mehlman wrote over the weekend:

You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc. Only the Saudi royal family is driven by the same motives as Bush, but they were already entrenched. Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of "I'm so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends' good?"

How can anyone not see it? It's not that their policies have been misguided or haven't played out right. They. Don't. Even. Mean. Well.

Fortunately, the Daily Gut has a running tally, "For those of you keeping score at home, here's a partial list (in no particular order) of leaders who have meant or mean well":

Hitler
Stalin
Lenin
Mao
Big Kim and Li'l Kim
Castro
The Khmer Rouge
Ceausescu
The Taliban
Saddam
Ayatollah Khomeini
Ahmedinejad

I'll take an incompetent leader over one who means well any day!

The thing about Mehlman's column is it lays out the central tenet of lefty thought: All that matters is that you mean well.

In the 1940s and '50s many lefties (including some if not all of the Hollywood Ten) were apologists for Stalin? Who cares - they were "idealists" who meant well.

Decades of welfare programs actually hurt the already poor and and caused more to join them? Doesn't matter - we meant well.

Ted Kennedy is directly responsible for a young woman's death? Water under the bridge - he means well.

Carter's weakness made the US a laughingstock and emboldened the Iranians to kidnap Americans? Hey, c'mon, the man's practically a saint - he meant well.

Clinton's lack of response to terrorist aggression laid the groundwork for 9/11? That's okay - he meant well.

The UN is a corrupt friend to dictators that does nothing to stop mass slaughter, human rights abuses, and genocide? No biggee - it's a noble ideal and we support it because we mean well.

Pretending there are two sides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when one side glorifies suicide bombers, rejoices when America is attacked, and can't even keep from fighting and killing amongst themselves? Sure - because we mean well.

Amnesty International equates Gitmo with Soviet-era gulags? Why not - they mean well.

Giving credence to nitwits with double-digit IQs who think the Bush administration had a hand in the 9/11 attacks? Of course - they're just "questioning authority," which makes them patriots who mean well.

Mao obviously meant well, especially when he has Hollywood admirers ranging from the Godfather-era Francis Ford Coppola to Shrek's sweetheart, Cameron Diaz.

One of many amazing passages from Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man. To very slightly paraphrase Michael Herr: simple surfaces, long reverberations:

For years now, Roosevelt had been reading Duranty in the New York Times on Russia. The godlessness troubled him--the purge of the churches. He told Perkins about his meetings with Maxim Litvinov the Soviet envoy. “Well now, Max, you know what I mean by religion. You know what religion gives a man. You know the difference between the religious and the irreligious person.” He went on: Look here, sometime you are going to die, Max, and when you die, you are going to remember your old father and mother—good, pious Jewish people who believed in God and taught you to pray to God.” Roosevelt told Litvinov that religious freedom was important if the the United States was to recognize the Bolsheviks, and he told Perkins he thought he had made an impression on Litvinov.

More from Shlaes, here.

Premiere magazine looks at 20 movies stuck in development hell, and I'd add Total Eclipse, a film I've been waiting to see for seven years. Before it was cancelled, some test footage was shot though; James Lileks has a rare clip of its surprisingly wooden star.

Tim Blair quotes a passage from the New Republic’s Paul Berman regarding the hostility on the left that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has faced, both in Europe and the US:

Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the mention of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights from discussion - no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme Right.

This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn--not to mention Castro's many, many critics--might wonder at how new an event it is to be shunned as an apostate by the Western left.

Mark Steyn takes on the blacklist! Or rather, the sentimentality that's built up over the last half century in Hollywood regarding it, which, much like believing that Richard Nixon (let alone the Gipper and George W. Bush) is the antichrist, requires that the blinders be placed as tight as possible over the eyes. Not to mention the brain:

Bernard Gordon died over the weekend. He was one of those Hollywood Communists of the Forties blacklisted in the Fifties, and it defined him till the end. A solid Hollywood screenwriter, Gordon adapted The Day Of The Triffids and was a reliable hand at war movies, among them The Battle Of The Bulge and, of all things, Hellcats Of The Navy, with Ronald Reagan's only film role with Nancy. Gordon's screenplay and the stars' performance aren't always in sync: even as Ron's explaining why he's so tortured with guilt he can never marry her, he and Nancy look like a placidly contented small-town couple heading for a night out at the local Rotary Club. In later years, the screenwriter led the protests against the very belated Oscar awarded to Elia Kazan in 1999. As Gordon wrote of Kazan in The Los Angeles Times, “He helped to support an oppressive regime that did incalculable damage to America and abroad.”

Interesting choice of word: "regime". And what about the regime you supported?

* * *

That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to [in Gentleman's Agreement], it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?

Read the whole thing.

Every other year it seems, Hollywood makes a movie about the horrors of the blacklist. And every other year it seems, the rest of us ask this question.

Now that Garrison Keillor and Joan Baez have each had second thoughts, maybe they can help spearhead their production!

Claudia Rosett describes the hellish North Korean famine:

When the Soviet system imploded in 1991, there was great concern that in the immediate aftermath the populations of post-communist nations, suddenly cut loose from Big Brother, might starve. They didn't. Although life was hard, people used their newfound freedoms to cope. But in one of the Soviet-engendered communist states where the totalitarian regime survived — North Korea — the result was famine.

Perhaps because no TV cameras were allowed in, and far too little information was allowed out, the North Korean famine of the 1990s remains one of the most muffled horrors of modern times. By now, however, there have been enough studies, reports, and tales from defectors to confirm that the deprivation in North Korea was catastrophic: One million or more people died, and food shortages continue to this day.

Ted Turner and the editors at the L.A. Times should read Claudia's article--naturally, the odds that they actually will are virtually zero.

Or, Springtime For Mao Tse-Tung: James Lileks checks in with a report from Beijing, about as off-off-off-off-Broadway as theater can get.

Update: Speaking of China, over at TCS Daily, Nick Schulz has some (much less satiric) thoughts on its role in the global economy--"The Lego-fication of Heavy Industry".

Jay Nordlinger wirtes, "If you have not seen The Lives of Others, I urge you to do so at the first opportunity":

This is the movie about the Stasi, the East German secret police. Since the dawn of film, there have been about two anti-Communist movies. And that’s because the people who make movies are — um, let’s just say not anti-Communist. At any rate, if you’re going to make one of the precious few anti-Communist movies, it had better be good. And this one is great.

I couldn’t help being amused at the information given at the beginning of the movie. We are told that the year is 1984, long before Gorbachev, when life in the Soviet bloc is dark, hopeless, and grim.

Well, I myself came of political age about this time, and East Germany was always portrayed to me as a quite benign state. Even an admirable one! You see, we in the West had “political rights,” such as those to speech and assembly; and those in the East had “economic rights,” such as those to food and shelter. And East Germany was something of a model: socialist but not Stalinist. Why, in Erich Honecker Land, a form of justice had been realized!

Do you remember, you old television-watchers, how Bob Novak used to tease Al Hunt about loving East Germany?

In any case, we’re all anti-Communists now, which is to be welcomed. Although some of us are lagging behind on Cuba, aren’t we?

You read (honest) materials about East Germany, you read (honest) materials about Cuba — very, very similar. The Germans shot would-be escapees on a wall; the Cubans shoot would-be escapees in the water. Once the Cuban people are allowed to see The Lives of Others, they will effortlessly recognize everything.

Nordlinger's thoughts on the universality of The Lives Of Others (and surely the 1984 time period of the movie is no accident) reminded me of something that Theodore Dalrymple recently wrote about George Orwell. The bulk of the article is now behind The New Criterion's pay-to-read firewall, but fortunately, this excerpt was quoted elsewhere:

Insofar as it is possible for an intellectual in a liberal democracy to be brave, Orwell was brave.

Perhaps the most genuine and moving encomia to him I ever heard were in Romania in the dark days just before the downfall of Ceausescu. Nineteen Eighty-Four circulated clandestinely, and several Romanians told me that they found it astonishing how an Englishman, who had never so much as set foot in a communist country, seemed to understand their own experience from the inside, as it were, and sometimes better than they understood it themselves, so that the meaning of their own experience became clearer to them as a result of reading him. And this they found immensely consoling, the very opposite of Primo Levi’s terrible nightmare that after he was released from Auschwitz no one would listen to him or believe him because what he had to say was so utterly at variance with all previous human experience. Orwell’s book reassured the Romanians to whom I spoke that, the Iron Curtain notwithstanding, they were not alone, and also that the political conditions under which they were living were highly abnormal and therefore, however apparently durable, historically temporary. Dismal and pessimistic as the book may have seemed to a reader in the west, it was read with immense joy in the east. Few authors have ever been loved and venerated as Orwell was loved and venerated by the people to whom I spoke in Romania.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that there are a few samizdat copies of 1984 floating around Fidel's island gulag; I wonder what his imprisoned citizens think of it.

Maybe, says Ace, who posts some thoughts on San Francisco State, which recently investigated College Republicans for flag desecration and blasphemy, two things which otherwise never occur on campus...

Update: Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein explores conflicting on-campus identity politics.

England's Daily Mail reports, "Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims".

David Irving should be feeling awfully smug about this.

Update: More thoughts on the topic from American history teacher Betsy Newmark.

More: Follow the Insta-links for some additional related thoughts. And here's a reminder from seven years ago that England's recent societal meltdowm wasn't exactly unexpected.

Found via Maggie's Farm (where it's cocktail hour!), The View From 1776 has a great post on how Hollywood went Red in the 1930. Here's but a sample:

Collins later repented his years in the CPUSA. He unburdened himself in Confessions of a Red Screenwriter, published in the October 6, 1952, issue of New Leader. He wrote:

A Communist is always prepared. He, or rather his party, has an answer for everything. When I joined the party, I was handed ready-made: friends, a cause, a faith and a viewpoint on all phenomena. I also had a one-shot solution to all the world’s ills and inequities....Suppose our Comrade keeps up with all the twists and turns of party policy, what is his reward? Why, peace of mind, of course. Since he has an answer for everything, he has a great sensof personal security; the world is safe; everything is explained – his history and the future; and everything is also simplified – into black and white....

The party member, on the other hand, has to make only one effort. He must be “flexible.” “Flexible” means that you cheer for Earl Browder [former CPUSA head] on his birthday and the next day you despise him as a “betrayer of the working class”...

All of which is a reminder of what a huge "Nyah!" Lillian Hellman's infamous quote that "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions" was to the HCUAA. And of something that Dennis Prager wrote in 2004:

As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing."

And of course, such "flexibility" is an ever-present part of today's society and its media.

And I think that "flexibility" is one of the reasons why Glenn Reynolds is correct when he writes:

It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't.

The non-politicized sectors are under much less pressure to cut their conscience to fit this year's fashions.

Ed Morrissey writes that a 1971 letter by Albert Speer ties him to the Holocaust. As Ed notes, that isn't all that surprising: Speer had to know, as Germany's concentration camp system supplied much of the slave labor that Speer, as armaments minister, worked to death to keep pumping out weapons and munitions (and here's but one nightmarish example) in the last years of Nazi Germany:

Historians always looked at Speer's claims of innocence about the Holocaust with some suspicion. William Shirer, whose Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains the seminal work on Nazi Germany, wondered in his history how Speer could have remained ignorant of the death-camp system. Speer drew his workers from the same system, and demanded more and more as the war progressed. Any ignorance on their provenance or their fate had to either be willful or faked.

They also questioned his sentencing, even at the time of the Nuremberg trials. The men who supplied the forced labor to Speer had their necks stretched, while Speer essentially walked away from the ruins of Nazi Germany. Why? Speer made a calculated decision to defy Hermann Goering and admit all of the horrors of the Third Reich, expressing remorse and sorrow all along the way. Goering had rallied the rest of the defendants to assume a defiant tone, defending the Nazis and blaming the atrocities on everyone else. The tribunal allowed itself to be impressed by Speer's no-nonsense admissions of the obvious and rewarded him with his life.

Now it appears that Speer was more calculating even than most thought. The letter makes clear that Speer knew exactly what the Nazis would do to the Jews, and cared so little that he helped them work prisoners to death. Essentially, Speer lived a lie for the last half of his life, aided and abetted by a credulous West that for some reason wanted to believe his strange protestations of innocence.

Of course, Speer would hardly be the last polished representative of a totalitarian regime with the blood of innocents on his hands that "a credulous West" was all too willing to forgive.

Speer owes almost a half century of additional life to that polished, seemingly cultured persona. But millions of innocent victims in Germany's concentration camps died needlessly due to his organizational genius, which bought Nazi Germany time it wouldn't have had otherwise.

"Fidel I love you. We both have the same initials. We are both powerful men. And we both use our power for good."--Francis Ford Coppola.

Actually, they both use their power to substantially increase their own personal net worths. Except Coppola makes his by putting guns in his actors' hands, not in your back.

And of course, Coppola is far from the only person in Hollywood who loves Fidel.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

The New York Times praises Forest Whitaker for his portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland for revealing "some of Amin’s positive qualities".

Has Idi taken his first step on the inevitable path towards icongraphic T-shirt superstardom?

And it wouldn't be the first time that the Times itself has met a bloodthirsty dictator and/or third world revolutionary and presented his positive, nuanced qualities as well.

The One Free Korea blog links to a news report that states that "On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the camp in Hwasung escaped"; the camp is "half the size of the state of Rhode Island", and holds 10,000 prisoners. One Free Korea adds:

In the history of North Korea, there has only been one known incident like this one — the mass uprising at Onsong, Camp Number 12, in 1987, when 5,000 people were killed. The punishment for escape is death, and former guards claim that they were offered generous bounties for killing escaping prisoners.

Apparently 21 have been recaptured and face near-certain death sentences; others have made it to China:

The significance of this, if true, is proof of the existence of an organized underground inside North Korea. As you will see below, Hwasong is a very long walk from China. Without help from an underground, these people would have had nowhere to go; they would all have been recaptured or killed almost immediately. If around 100 prisoners were still at large weeks after the fact, or made it at least as far as China, someone must have helped, hidden, and fed them.

I certainly hope they make it to ultimate safety.

Despite Ted Turner's fantasies to the contrary, North Korea is a nightmarish hellhole of a nation. As Christopher Hitchens wrote last year, "George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint".

Richard Miniter asks, "aren’t you tired of the whole 'you’re-a-fascist' line?"

The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist—and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.

Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) “fascists” simply reveals the Left’s nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas.

Spot-on--don't miss the rest.

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs spots the perfect gift for the hip, young wannabe terrorist whose Che or hammer and sickle T-shirt is looking particularly ratty--for sale at the Las Vegas Urban Outfitters.

Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham has some very much related gift suggestions.

Mark Steyn appeared on Hugh Hewitt's show this afternoon:

I think one of the horrible and contemptible aspects of our generation is that we're posers. You know, after 1945, everybody said never again. It's chiseled on the markers in front of concentration camps all over Europe. Never again. Never again. And we thought those words meant something. And in fact, the never again event turns up all the time. It turns up in Rwanda. It turns up in Darfur. it turns up when we sit by and listen to people like Ahmadinejad pledging to wipe Israel off the face of the map. And we think that that is just like a kind of rhetorical ploy in the opening of negotiations. We don't understand that he does mean it, that he wants a world, and certainly a Middle East, but preferably a world, without Jews. And I think we are morals posers, and these are perhaps the most hollow words of our time, those words, never again.

HH: And as is, I think, increasingly hollow, the support that we had for the Cedar Revolution, as Hezbollah becomes more and more belligerent, and less and less inclined to do anything other than bring down the government of Lebanon.

MS: Yes, and I think there is a...Hezbollah is really a kind of model for the future, that you will have these institutions that prey on weak states, and take over sections of weak states, and yet have all the advantages of not being a state entity with the responsibility that imposes. One of the most disgusting things about this settlement of the Israeli-Hezbollah war, as it was, is that you had the U.N., and you have European nations, and other nations effectively treating Hezbollah as a quasi-state entity. And who's fault is that? I mean, the U.N. gave the PLO, a terrorist organization, a seat at the United Nations. In a sense, we have made this rod for our own back.

Read, or, once the clips are up, listen, to the rest.

Newsbusters explores "Dictatorships and Double Standards in the NY Times".

But it's not like this is a new development, of course.

Is North Korea killing its citizens for the insurance money?

I'm sure the L.A. Times will get right on this story.

Two of the most significant events of the 20th century happened on this day in Germany, separated by six decades: Kristallnacht and the fall of the Berlin wall. At Townhall, Rabbi Hanoch Teller writes:

The accurate translation of Kristallnacht is “Crystal Night,” and Field Marshal Hermann Goering, who had just been charged with implementing the Reich’s Jewish policy, intended to use this connotation to ridicule the victims. Like so many other Nazi perversions of language (Sonderbehandlung, “special treatment” referring to gassing victims; Euthanasie, for mass murder of retarded and physically handicapped patients) this term was meant to be a cynical appellation that would free the victims of any sympathy and reinterpret murder, arson, robbery and plunder into a glistening event marked by sparkle and gleam.

History books refer to Kristallnacht as the beginning of the Holocaust. This is akin to saying that the burning of the Reichstag is what was responsible for Hitler becoming Germany's unchallenged Fuhrer. Such oversimplification conveys an ignorance of history and aborts the chance for the proper lesson to be learned.

Nearly seven decades is adequate time to soberly reflect, and set the record straight. Auschwitz did not evolve from the Wannsee Conference, which did not evolve from The Nuremberg Laws, which did not evolve from Versailles humiliation.

The eventuality of the Holocaust was inescapable regardless of Kristallnacht. Once the dynamics of hatred were engaged, annihilation was inevitable. The Nazis sought a “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem” and they had the might, the determination and the requisite ruthlessness for its execution.

The Nazis attempted to portray Kristallnacht as a spontaneous eruption of German hatred for the Jews. Alas, nothing happens overnight; hatred festers, it doesn’t metastasize.

After World War II, East Germany replaced one Evil Empire with another, and in 1961, the Berlin Wall went up to physically divide Berlin's free and unfree halves. On November 9th, 1989, it was "breached", to borrow a word from this BBC article:

The Berlin Wall has been breached after nearly three decades keeping East and West Berliners apart.

At midnight East Germany's Communist rulers gave permission for gates along the Wall to be opened after hundreds of people converged on crossing points.

They surged through cheering and shouting and were be met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side.

Ecstatic crowds immediately began to clamber on top of the Wall and hack large chunks out of the 28-mile (45-kilometre) barrier.

It had been erected in 1961 on the orders of East Germany's former leader Walter Ulbricht stop people leaving for West Germany.

Since 1949 about 2.5 million people had fled East Germany.

After 1961, the Wall and other fortifications along the 860-mile (1,380-kilometre) border shared by East and West Germany have kept most East Germans in.

Many of those attempting to escape have been shot dead by border guards.

A couple of years ago, Steven Hayward excerpted the opening to the follow-up to his magisterial first volume of The Age Of Reagan:

"Virtually the entire foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government," Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalled, tried to stop Ronald Reagan from saying "Tear down this wall," including Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz and the new National Security Adviser, General Colin Powell. "Some Reagan advisers," the New York Times reported without naming names, "wanted an address with less polemics." The State Department and the National Security Council persisted up to the last minute trying to derail it, including one meeting between Powell and White House communications director Tom Griscom that participants say was "tense and forceful." Reagan had to intervene against his own advisers. Ken Duberstein, serving then as Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, has offered different accounts of how the conversation went, but the gist of it was like this—Reagan: "I’m the president, right?" Duberstein: "Yes, sir, Mr. President. We’re clear about that." Reagan: "So I get to decide whether the line about tearing down the wall stays in?" Duberstein: "That’s right, sir. It’s your decision." Reagan: "Then it stays in."

Fittingly, a large slab of the wall is on display at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California:

Read More »

UPI reports, "Communist Party eyes '08 Russian elections":

Moscow, Oct. 26 (UPI) — Russia's Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov wants to replace Vladimir Putin as president.

Although elections won't be until 2008 and the party has not selected its candidate, Zyuganov says he has 100 percent support in the party.

Zyuganov said the Communist Party was gearing up now because if support, and the political apparatus, weren't secured now, "it would be difficult to count on success in the presidential election," ITAR-Tass said.

The Communist Party said it hoped for 20 percent support in next year's parliamentary election, the Russian government news agency said. Zyuganov said party leaders hoped for results that would change "the voting configuration in parliament," ITAR-Tass said.

The Communists will rally and march in Moscow Nov. 7, ITAR-Tass said. That date marks the October Revolution (under the old calendar) that brought down the tsar in 1917. Officially it has been replaced by a Day of National Unity Nov. 4. The party also will participate in events marking the 100th anniversary of Leonid Brezhnev's birth on Dec. 19.

Hey, they only killed tens of million people the first time around. But they'll get it right this time!

This Daily Mail article that Drudge links to is headlined, "China's 'cruelty olympics' causes international outrage", and yet its photos--a monkey lifting weights, a bear balancing himself on the high bars, don't look all that horrible to me. Instead, it looks like the sort of stuff Americans watched every Sunday night on the Ed Sullivan show, and later, pretty regularly on Johnny Carson for literally decades. (But I'm willing to parachute in Lancelot Link, Secret Squirrel, and Morocco Mole to investigate the situtation further, if you'd like.)

I linked to Julia Gorin's essay on global warming yesterday, which began thusly:

It's a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming - at least that's what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

Substitute "animal 'rights'" for environmentalism, and those points apply equally well with China's "animal olympics".

And it's worth noting that the International Olympic Committee didn't lose much sleep over China's human rights record, when awarding them the real Olympics in 2008, of course. (It's probably not a coincidence whom China then immediately hired to iron out the architectural details...)

Update: Heh^TM.

Courtesy of James Lileks, the "Angel of History" pays a visit to Fidel Castro:

"Eventually it will come down to this, my friend: History will note that the people in the American jails at the tip of this island ate better than the average Cuban."

Read the whole thing.

Have a Kleenex or ten ready, but don't miss Ed Morrissey's look at "Saint Maximilian Kolbe, A Saint For Our Times".

(Sorry for the lack of posting--a couple of big projects are temporarily pushing wall-to-wall blogging to the backburner.)

Back in March, when Slobodan Milosevic assumed room tempature, Austin Bay described the progression of his ideological beliefs moving "from red to brown" as the Cold War ended:

Milosevic orchestrated the Serb-Croat war and crafted the Serb strategy of “creeping aggression.” He was also the bully behind “ethnic cleansing” in eastern Bosnia. He epitomized the move from “red to brown” in eastern Europe– moving from Communist to ultra-nationalist fascist as the Cold War ended.

Earlier, as World War II transitioned into the Cold War, the career path of Nobel Literature Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass jagged in the opposite direction, as Mona Charen writes:

How disgusting. We now learn that Soviet-appeasing, Western-despising, America-detesting Nobel Literature Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass was a member of the Waffen SS in his youth. Grass earned his lofty reputation by indulging every fashionable far-left cliché of his time. Europe’s elite opinion shapers rewarded this with the Nobel Prize and he received kow tows throughout his long and verbose career.Victor Davis Hanson has the details.

He now reveals that he did not just serve the German Wehrmacht in World War II (obviously millions did so both voluntarily and involuntarily) but in the SS, the unit hand-picked for atrocity work; Holocaust a specialty.

Did he believe that his anti-Americanism somehow expiated the sin of Nazism? That’s certainly the way Europe’s elites would see it. For those not sunk in total moral obtuseness however, Grass career betrays his consistency. He went from being a participant in one tyranny to being an apologist for another – all the while heaping scorn on the humane power that opposed them both.

Austin added this in his post about Milosevic:

The Nazis and Communists both knew they were cut from the same hideous human mold. They both share a disdain for liberalism and a disregard for human life. They are also permanently anti-American. Hitler called the US cowboys– remember that next time you hear the US “cowboy” disparaged. You can see these traits displayed by the Stalinists still among us.

And as I wrote at the time, it's almost like the two ideologies are intertwined...

Update: Tim Blair spots Grass being dubbed "the country’s moral guide for decades" by the press and responds thusly:

Germany’s “moral guide”, was he? Tough gig.

Heh! Indeed. ^TM

Christopher Hitchens paints a hellish picture of North Korea. I fear though, that the reality is even worse than Hitchens' descriptions:

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the "slavery" of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves "captive." The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place—North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave—my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.

Read the whole thing--its closing sentence is not seen very often in the pages of Slate.

Michelle Malkin explains the reality of North Korea to Ted Turner.

(The L.A. Times and Harvard could stand to listen as well.)

Castro's doctor is at it again, repeating his annual statement that Castro will live to be 140. (Via Drudge, whose photo of the rapidly aging dictator belies his doctor's absurdities.)

As I wrote right around this time two years ago, if I was the personal physician to a murdering communist dictator and had a wife or family I wanted to protect, I'd probably say stuff like that, too.

(As to what Stalin was planning to do to his doctors, shortly before--mercifully for the world--dying, click here.)

Update: Heh^TM.

Over at TCS Daily, Lauren Weiner crafts an exceptional profile of Lillian Hellman:

In this woman we find a true master: Capitalism was all greed and exploitation yet Hellman, its critic, enjoyed wealth, luxury, and ordering lesser beings around. She believed herself to be original and independent-minded, but in finding capitalism itself fascist, she was not voicing an original thought but parroting the main plank of the Communist Party's ideological platform.

Read the whole thing. In 1952, Hellman told HCUAA, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions". Which is remarkably ironic, and quite possibly knowingly so: nothing was more fashionable (especially in Hollywood), or more likely to change direction on a dime, than communism itself.

As a follow-up to the previous post, Deborah Orin notes that communism's sway over the many college professors holds firm (which illustrates just how reactionary the academy remains):

Harvard University has a bizarre idea of how to advance the education of its grads: Instruct them to bow down to North Ko rea's paranoid dictators and show proper "respect" for the Axis of Evil.

It's the ultimate in radical Stalinist chic - the Harvard Alumni Association's $636-a-night totalitarian luxury tour of a rogue nation where thousands are deliberately starved to death.

"Demonstrations of respect for the country's late leader, Kim Il Sung, and for the current leader, Kim Jong Il, are important," instructs the Harvard Alumni Association's tour memo.

"You will be expected to bow as a gesture of respect at the statue of Kim Il Sung and at his mausoleum."

Harvard even tries to pretend that bowing down to thugs is perfectly normal - explaining that it's because "North Korea, like every country, has its own unique protocols."

Well, yes, that certainly is a charming use of euphemism to cover up an ugly and unique reality - since North Korea is not "like every country."

North Korea's "protocols" feature massive human-rights abuses, deliberate famine, concentration camps, religious persecution, gas chambers, likely genocide and trafficking in women and children.

Plus sending body snatchers to Japan and South Korea to kidnap children and force them to train North Korean spies.

Satie Yokota, the mother of a Japanese girl kidnapped in 1977 at age 13 while clutching her racket on the way home from school badminton practice, calls North Korea "enemies of humanity." Now 70, she fears she'll die before she ever sees her daughter again.

Then there's the Stalinist personality cult - when the Harvard alums bow down, they'll be joining the national worship that requires every North Korean to wear a Kim Il Sung lapel pin or else.

Not surprisingly, the Harvard alums are also instructed to carefully censor their reading matter because "certain types of literature may not be allowed into North Korea."

No word yet on whether or not the L.A. Times sufficiently kowtowed last year to gain admission.

In other news concerning the academy, John Leo is handing out his annual Sheldon Award, "given annually to the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus".

In constrast to those who celebrate May Day, Catallarchy has an annual link-filled Day Of Remembrance for the over 100 million--and counting--murdered by the ideology.

Meanwhile, Orrin Judd links to a 1999 article in The Freeman:

On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs.” Translation: “One can’t expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

With those words in 1790, Maximilian Robespierre welcomed the horrific French Revolution that had begun the year before. A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, he would become the architect of the Revolution’s bloodiest phase—the Reign of Terror of 1793–94. Robespierre and his guillotine broke eggs by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a utopian society based on the seductive slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

But, alas, Robespierre never made a single omelet. Nor did any of the other thugs who held power in the decade after 1789. They left France in moral, political, and economic ruin, and ripe for the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.

As with Robespierre, no omelets came from the egg-breaking efforts of Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini either. [...]

In The New Yorker in 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the Soviet Union was making great economic progress in part because the socialist system made “full use” of its manpower, in contrast to the less efficient capitalist West. But an 846-page authoritative study published in 1997, The Black Book of Communism, estimated that the communist ideology claimed 20 million lives in the “workers’ paradise.” Similarly, The Black Book documented the death tolls in other communist lands: 45 to 72 million in China, between 1.3 million and 2.3 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America.

Additionally, all of those murderous regimes were economic basket cases; they squandered resources on the police and military, built vast and incompetent bureaucracies, and produced almost nothing for which there was a market beyond their borders. They didn’t make “full use” of anything except police power. In every single communist country the world over, the story has been the same: lots of broken eggs, no omelets. No exceptions.

But hey, just wait for the next time, when you know they'll get it right...

I guess Burlington Coat Factory is finally out of Che T-shirts: Brent Baker of NewsBusters spots a New York-based correspondent for NBC displaying a serious case of Communist Chic. And note that his producers apparently didn't mind him going on the air in this rig:

Tim Vincent, the Britain-born New York correspondent for Access Hollywood, sported a hammer and sickle T-shirt on Friday's show as he stood in front of NBC's Rockefeller Plaza complex and introduced a piece on American Dreamz, the movie takeoff of American Idol. Though he wore a jacket over the red shirt with the symbol of the regime which murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions more for decades, a gold hammer and sickle was clearly visible inside a red star. The gold-outlined red star, sans the hammer and sickle, matches the Soviet's Red Army emblem. I don't get it. Is this some kind of cool statement with thirtysomethings, elite New Yorkers or Brits? Or is it just part of some promotion for an upcoming movie?

As Baker writes, "Imagine the proper outrage that would explode if he had worn a Nazi swastika".

Well, it would certainly sell in the Hong Kong market. But if Vincent really wanted to get a rise out of viewers in Manhattan and Hollywood, he'd wear one of these shirts.

Update: Reporters--even Hollywood gossip reporters--with lingering cases of Communist Chic should read about Hao Wu or Charles Lee.

Another Update: Noting that Steven Spielberg will be an official consultant “in culture and art for the creation of the spectacular ceremonies” for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Jason Apuzzo writes:

Imagine for a moment if back in 1936 Joseph Goebbels had called up director John Ford for a little help stage-managing the Berlin Olympics. Ford, of course, would’ve turned such an overture down - but seventy years later, well, Hollywood’s a lot more accommodating toward tyrannical dictatorships!

Indeed they are.

In his latest Impromptu, Jay Nordlinger writes:

The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is defending his decision to kowtow to the Red Chinese. According to this article, he said, "We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one."

A nice line: "to follow the law." I wonder whether Schmidt considers some laws too brutal or unjust to be worth the trouble. And I wonder whether he considers any lawmaking body — e.g., the PRC — unworthy of respect.

Schmidt also said, "I think it's arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate."

Oh, is that it? It's arrogant not to bless the oppression by some people of other people? Is there any regime Schmidt would feel unarrogant about criticizing? And even if you can't do anything about oppression — do you have to cooperate with it?

I also love these particular words: "tell that country how to operate." We're not talking about a "country"; we're talking about a Communist dictatorship that seized power 60 years ago and has hung on ruthlessly.

Finally, Schmidt said, "There are many cases where certain information is not available due to local law or local custom."

I really love that "local law or local custom." When I hear the words "local custom," I think of native dress or dancing, or perhaps arranged marriages. Schmidt is talking about a vicious police state!

Beautiful. Just beautiful. And here am I, a booster of business (and incessant user of Google).

Aren't we all?

Austin Bay has some thoughts on the now fortunately very dead former Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic:

Milosevic orchestrated the Serb-Croat war and crafted the Serb strategy of “creeping aggression.” He was also the bully behind “ethnic cleansing” in eastern Bosnia. He epitomized the move from “red to brown” in eastern Europe– moving from Communist to ultra-nationalist fascist as the Cold War ended. The Nazis and Communists both knew they were cut from the same hideous human mold. They both share a disdain for liberalism and a disregard for human life. They are also permanently anti-American. Hitler called the US cowboys– remember that next time you hear the US “cowboy” disparaged. You can see these traits displayed by the Stalinists still among us.

It's almost like the two ideologies are intertwined...

Update: Mark Steyn reprints his 2003 piece on Slobo, which reminds us that in December of that year, Milosevic won a seat in Serbia's legislature--even whilst jailed during his endless trial. As Steyn writes today:

his "trial" will presumably come to an end, now that Sloboperry Masonevic isn't around to cross-examine prosecution witnesses into the next decade. Instead, we can move on to a decade-long inquiry into his death.

And it's sure to be the subject of some Euro-Oliver Stone's next movie.

Kinko? What is this Kinko? Tim Blair notes:

Kofi Annan is alarmed to learn of a rival warlord:

When asked by a staffer if U.N. jobs will be farmed out to Kinko’s from now on, Mr. Annan showed how out of touch he has become from his underlings and from his fellow New Yorkers. “What is Kinko?” he asked.

Bring this Kinko to Kofi! Kofi destroy Kinko!

No wonder Kofi doesn't want to know what Kinko's is, considering how much the photocopier has done to subvert the very regimes that he and the rest of the gang at Turtle Bay specialize in propping up.

Back in July, Anne Applebaum noted:

In 1949, when George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel "1984," he gave its hero, Winston, a job at the Ministry of Truth. All day long, Winston clips politically unacceptable facts, stuffs them into little pneumatic tubes, and then pushes the tubes down a chute. Beside him sits a woman in charge of finding and erasing the names of people who have been "vaporized." And their office, Orwell wrote, "with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department."

It's odd to read "1984" in 2005, because the politics of Orwell's vision aren't outdated. There are still plenty of governments in the world that go to extraordinary lengths to shape what their citizens read, think and say, just like Orwell's Big Brother. But the technology envisioned in "1984" is so -- well, 1980s. Paper? Pneumatic tubes? Workers in cubicles? Nowadays, none of that is necessary: It can all be done electronically, especially if, like the Chinese government, you seek the cooperation of large American companies.

Evan Coyne Maloney writes that on the Chinese version of Google, Tiananmen Square has gone down the memory hole.

In his latest syndicated column, Jonah Goldberg writes:

A wave of pious indignation and table-thumping has spread across the nation's editorial pages over the freedom to search for Internet porn. Don't get me wrong: I think you do have the right to search for porn. But it is interesting to see what gets people's First Amendment gag reflex going. The Baltimore Sun, for example, warns that a "witch-hunt" for search-engine abusers might be around the corner if Google cooperates with the government.

Maureen Dowd, the reigning scribe of unthinking liberalism, recently wrote in the New York Times that Dick Cheney — whom she calls "The Grim Peeper" — is trying to turn America into a "police state." "I don't like the thought of Dick Cheney ogling my Googling," Dowd writes without rhyme or reason.

It was a silly column, even for Dowd, but it does capture a certain level of both the legitimate fear and the outright paranoia out there.

Partisanship is obviously part of the equation. For instance, the heretofore-unknown disease of Cheneyphobia seems to be reaching epidemic proportions. It seems to cause some people to believe that the vice president of the United States has superhuman powers and that he is capable of personally reading hundreds of millions of e-mails while listening to thousands of hours of phone conversations and — simultaneously — scanning trillions of web searches.

Robert Kuttner, writing about a different controversy in the Boston Globe, shows serious symptoms of the affliction when he writes, "Google plus Dick Cheney is a recipe for undoing the liberties for which the original patriots of the American Revolution bled and died."

On the narrow point about Dick Cheney, this is all a bunch of nonsense. The Department of Justice is in a lawsuit with the ACLU over the Child Online Protection Act, which is designed to help prevent kids from being exposed to online porn. The law ran afoul of the First Amendment, according to a lower court, and the Supreme Court asked for additional information pending its final decision on the matter. The Department of Justice asked Google, as well as MSN, Yahoo!, and Time Warner (AOL's parent), to provide data on their search engines from a one-week period. (The Associated Press scarily refers to the request as a "White House subpoena," as if the White House could actually issue subpoenas.) No personal information was asked for and none has been given. Everyone but Google complied, because there's really no reason not to. Google, however, sees itself in a very idealistic light and has decided to stand on principle against the government, prompting huzzahs from all the predictable sources.

But the same crowd celebrating Google's decision has generally been quiet about, for example, public health surveys that ask doctors to report all sorts of really private information (anonymous, of course) for epidemiological purposes. If you're going to consider it a grotesque infringement on personal liberty for the government to find out that some anonymous person Google-searched "lesbian love goats," [nice self-reference for us old school G-File fans--Ed] you'd think you'd also be upset by the National Institutes of Health cataloging how many people fitting your description have had prostate exams in the last year. The intrusion is at least as serious, but because no one imagines that Dick Cheney cares about your prostate — yet! — the First Amendment thumpers don't offer a peep.

But there is a larger issue here worth considering. It has become something of an article of faith that technology is always on the side of liberty. In the old Soviet Union, the Xerox machines were chained up at night in order to prevent unauthorized photocopying. (Of course, they weren't called "Xerox machines" but "Glorious People's Photostatic Replicator" or "Trabant Machine" or some such.) The Soviet authorities recognized that information technology was the enemy of totalitarianism. Freedom of the photocopier was not only freedom of the press, but freedom to communicate, which lies at the core of all liberty.

The Internet age has seemingly confirmed this. In China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other oppressive regimes, Internet usage is severely policed because the free-flow of information is seen as a threat to the regime.

And ironically, companies such as Google are more than willing to cooperate. Google's original corporate motto was famously "Don't Be Evil". But as Publius writes:

It looks as if there is a limit to that. Google will resist the U.S. government, but won’t stand up in any way to China? Judging by its actions at home, one would think Google to be a pioneer in bringing access to information and resisting attempts from governments to repress it or monitor it. This says that isn’t the case, and it makes me wonder — just a little — what its motivation is to resisting the U.S. government and giving in to the Chinese. Perhaps they should change their motto to, “It’s just business.”

As I wrote back in October, when Google was more than happy to shaft Taiwan on behalf of China:

Half the cars in Google's parking lots probably have the ubiquitous Silicon Valley "FREE TIBET!!" bumper stickers. Too bad that Google's current ozone layer of management doesn't seem to want to symbolically free Taiwan.

Or, most damning of all, China itself.

Much more, here, including a few contrarian views, as well.

When I first read Pajamas' story on the aftermath of Tuesday's brutal massacre in Dongzhou village, I thought for sure it contained a typo:

Word spread via several media sources that Chinese authorities were attempting to cover up the massacre of 20 demonstrators in South China by buying the bodies

But it may not be--The American Thinker has an excerpt from The South China Morning Post with this passage:

Another villager whose relative, 31-year-old Wei Jin, was killed in the shooting, said local officials had offered the family hush money if they surrendered Wei’s body.

“They offered us a sum but said we would have to give up the body,” the villager said. “We are not going to agree.”

Good for them. But with a government as totalitarian--and bloody--as China's, this may be an offer they can't refuse.

Update: Gateway Pundit has photos, and--shades of 1989--reports, "Tanks Move on China Town":

The situation at Dongzhou Town, Red Bay, in the city of Shanwei, Guangdong Province is rapidly deteriorating. According to the villagers, the government has not only arranged tanks to occupy the city, machine guns have also been set up, ready to strafe villagers on the street at anytime. Up to now, 70 people are known to have been shot to death. Most of the dead are young people in their twenties. The dead bodies were buried to destroy any evidence of the shootings. Families are not allowed to claim the bodies of their relatives.

Read the rest.

While Reuters seems bent on entering David Irving terrority, in an essay in Tech Central Station, Stephen Schwartz looks at attempts by academics to whitewash the blood-stained history of the Soviet Union. Anne Applebaum has touched on this issue as well.

James Taranto notes curious--if sadly, not very surprising--language from the wire service whose post-9/11 performance has been, to say the least, problematic:

Yesterday we noted that a Reuters dispatch, titled "Iran's President Questions Holocaust," included this sentence: "Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust." A later version of the dispatch, however, deleted the words "Historians say" and presented the Holocaust as fact: "The Nazis killed some 6 million Jews during their 1933-1945 rule."

But today, Reuters has a new formulation:

Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Regarding this widely-accepted view, Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency IRNA . . .

Reuters, of course, famously forbade its "reporters" from referring to the Sept. 11 attacks as an act of terrorism. "We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing field," said Stephen Jukes, the "global news editor," in September 2001. Apparently Reuters thinks Holocaust deniers are entitled to a "level playing field," even if that means downgrading a historical fact to a "widely accepted view."

And at least once, they've invited a top Palestinian terrorist to appear in an in-house gag video.

Update: Related thoughts from Roger L. Simon, and Hugh Hewitt.

This is the headline of an article from Friday's San Francisco Chronicle:

BERKELEY
Mao debunkers defend their book
Critics call it effort to discredit communism

After over 100 million killed, one certainly hopes.

(For our earlier looks at Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao book, click here and through the links on this post.)

That's the German translation of "For You", the message that was printed on the Berlin Wall--by the East Germans, for the benefit of their citizens imprisoned behind it. As Tom McMahon writes, hopefully we'll "never forget what a monstrosity Communism was in general, and the Berlin Wall was in particular".

(Via VodkaPundit, who writes, "This picture isn't exactly news, but it's sure worth remembering". Related thoughts here.)

Between Condi and Chutch, it's obviously Photoshop day in the neighborhood. So let's look at the folks who pioneered the art of selective airbrushing: Stalin's Soviet Union.

Yesterday, we linked to Roger L. Simon's thoughts on the dismissive review by Nicholas Kristof of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's important new book, Mao, The Unknown Story in The New York Times. James Panero of The New Criterion has more:

What is it with public intellectuals and mass murderers? Kristof's disgraceful conclusion to his review speaks volumes to the acceptability and even expectability in intellectual circles of praising the most murderous villain--in terms of numbers killed--of the twentieth century. Kristof's shameful display caps a review that applauds the book in disclosing the details of Maoism abroad but fails to mention anything about Maoism at home. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised, then, at Kristof's critical and moral breakdown. It's the old "Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time" defense--a defense as indefensible for Il Duce as it is for Chairman Mao. [Kristof is far from the first to attempt it of course--Ed.]

Nicholas D. Kristof, thank you for telling us how you really can improve a country by murdering twenty million of its people. And for this, you are today's Walter Duranty Award Winner!

When it comes to the Times, that could be a daily series.

Update: In a post titled "Lost Illusions", Greg Hlatky writes:

Pray, what is incongruous about [Mao] being bumbling and a psychopath and being revered? Take away their power and the great dictators of the 20th century are pretty nondescript. Apart from his cunning and ruthlessness, Hitler was a remarkably banal character. His underlings were even less impressive: a Nuremburg prison guard said, "Who'd have thought that we were fighting this war against a bunch of jerks?"

Then there's Kristof's "Yes, but...", which I've noticed before, where Communism's evils are supposed to be balanced out by the good it brought to the nations unfortunate enough to fall under it: Soviet electrification, China's reduction in child mortality or, nowadays, the famous Cuban health care system, the virtues of which we can always read about in the nuttier letters to the editor of the New York Times or from Hollywood goofballs. Always ignored is the question of whether such advances would have taken place without Communism. The answer, I think, is obvious.

I forget which biography of Hitler I read that noted that while his apologists praise the Autobahn, the Volkswagen, and other technological advancements, such breakthroughs were going on in the 1930s throughout the world--and didn't need murderous totalitarianism to spur them on in the rest of Europe (Italy being the exception of course) or America. The same is even more true in the free world, post-World War II.

By the way, while Debbie Schlussel does give away spoilers in her post on Flight Plan, be sure to at least scroll to the update of the article, to check out Jodie's dream project: rehabilitating the reputation of Leni Riefenstahl.

No, really! Whitewashing Leni Riefenstahl's place in history was only a matter of time I guess, as all the films airbrushing Che's reputation are becoming old hat.

In some sort of thankfully rare harmonic convergence of idiocy, two television news veterans simultaneously go coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, as Hugh Hewitt notes. First up is Dan Rather:

I am going to have to ask the Columbia Journalism School folks about the "new journalism order." Before long, Rather will be blaming the Bilderbergers for the forged docs.

Of Captain Dan The (now retired, thank God) Newsman, Roger L. Simon writes:

'Honest' Dan Rather comes back from the dead to set us straight in an 'emotional' speech about the media at Fordham Law.

"It's been one of television news' finest moments," Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

"They were willing to speak truth to power," Rather said of the coverage.

I'm not even going to comment on that bizarre statement, but you've got to hand it to Dan. If most of us had been caught lying like he had on national television, we would have moved to South America by now.

Speaking truth to power is certainly a concept that Ted Turner has never heard of. Whether it's Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Iraq, Turner's never met a totalitarian regime he didn't want to prop up with sympathetic coverage.

And these days, North Korea is no exception. One man's Hell on Earth is another man's fun vacation getaway, as Ted describes Kim Jung Il's rotting death trap of a country to Wolf Blitzer, who walks a thin line between being absolutely incredulous, but respectful towards the man who founded the network that employs him:

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With the 2008 Olympics in Beijing only a few years away, graphic artists are getting busy planning logos for the event. This one, found via The Corner, seems particularly appropriate.

While I was looking up links for the post below, I came across this item from The Belmont Club's Wretchard, who looks at what he calls Stalin's "final, Final Solution", his proposed destruction of Russia's Jews in the early 1950s:

Though the Great Terror of the late 1930s is widely viewed as the height of Stalin's purges, the number of arrests actually peaked in the early 1950s, and Stalin was planning hundreds of thousands more on the eve of his death in 1953. These arrests were spurred by the "doctors' plot," a supposed conspiracy among Jewish doctors to kill members of the government and destroy the U.S.S.R. at the behest of the Americans. Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, and Naumov, executive secretary of Russia's Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Repressed Persons, trace how Stalin himself put together ... (a plan) ... to accomplish several goals: to purge his Ministry of Security and upper ranks of government; to defuse the potential threat posed by Soviet Jews, many of whom had ties to the U.S. and the new state of Israel; and to provide fuel for an armed conflict with the U.S.

Fortunately, Stalin's stroke and death soon afterwards put a stop to it, but not before four large prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north were built. And not before all of Stalin's other monstrous crimes had occurred during his long, bloody reign. As Wretchard writes, "This was pretty heavy stuff, but then Stalin had the dubious distinction of killing many more people than Adolph Hitler".

(Via Willisms.)

There have been numerous books on the horrors of Nazi Germany's Holocaust. And both Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, from 1973 and Anne Applebaum's Gulag from 2003 have exposed the horrors of its Soviet inspiration.

But both of those regimes have been cast aside, to borrow President Reagan's phrase, on the ash heap of history. In contrast, North Korea's concentration camps and that totalitarian nation's multitude of other horrors continue, unabated, to this very day.

In a recent review, Orrin Judd looks at The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, written in 2000 by Kang Chol-Hwan, who, as the title of his book implies, spent a decade, beginning in 1977, trapped as a prisoner inside of North Korea's nightmarish Yodok concentration camp. One reassuring sign: in contrast to President Ford's embarrassing rebuff of Solzhenitsyn, Orrin links to a Washington Post article which notes that President Bush met with Chol-Hwan earlier this year.

In the New Criterion Roger Sandall looks at the best documentary you've never seen:

Can anyone doubt that the next documentary blockbuster will be American Gulag: Inside Uncle Sam’s Camps, from Michael Moore? There must be a dozen scripts already circulating in Hollywood with similar titles, and now that Amnesty International has weighed in, surely it’s only a matter of time before a new example of creative filmmaking will be breaking attendance records nationwide.

So let me suggest a way of dealing with the inevitable agonizing over Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Get hold of a video of Marina Goldovskaya's film about the genuine article, The Solovky Power: Evidence and Documents, and sit your friends down for an in-depth look at the real, original, death-through-labor Soviet archetype, where something far worse than the occasional mistreatment of Korans occurred. This distinguished film will enable everyone to get their historical bearings; moreover, it is a standing rebuke to those who would recklessly trivialize a name, and a system, that may have cost 2.7 million lives.

By strange good fortune The Solovky Power was recently shown in Los Angeles. At 7:30, on Wednesday April 13, students at the UCLA School of Film and Television, living and working in the shadow of Hollywood, were brought face to face with actual zeks—men and women who had survived ten, twenty, and up to thirty years confinement on the Solovetsky Islands, 150 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle in the White Sea, with the slogan “Freedom Through Work!” over the gate.

One can only wonder what the audience made of it. Many film students would be unable to name the year of the Bolshevik Revolution; while historically, most students planning careers in documentary stand politically to the left of the Hollywood Ten. While it’s possible that those at the UCLA School of Film and Television are better informed than most, I think it would be safe to say that an searching examination of the real Gulag, showing how Stalin’s labor camps were already up and running in 1923, accompanied by interviews with the dictator’s victims, was a campus experience that for California was something new.

Read the rest.

I've only just now started reading The Future of The European Past, published by The New Criterion in 1997, a used copy of which arrived in the mail today, but I'm very glad to see that one of its key essays, "A Dearth of Feeling" by the great Anne Applebaum, is also available on her Website. The whole thing is well-worth reading, but in light of Dick Durbin's recent outburst, I think this passage is key:

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The Wall Street Journal explains why China doesn't want you to read a book review for the upcoming blockbuster biography of Mao:

The China National Publications Import & Export (Group) Corporation--the official distributors of foreign publications in China--last week informed Dow Jones, publishers of the Review and this newspaper, that inclusion of the book review would keep the June issue of the monthly magazine off newsstands. An article on trafficking in endangered species was also deemed offensive.

"It may seem strange that Beijing is so sensitive to criticism of Mao after all this time," says Hugo Restall, editor of the Review. "But then consider that, despite tremendous economic progress, China's political system is still pretty close to where it was half a century ago--and look at the disasters like the Cultural Revolution that followed.

"Naturally, the country's leaders want to conceal from their own people and the rest of the world just how vulnerable China is to political instability," Mr. Restall went on. "The tools in their arsenal range from the subtle, such as recruiting businessmen to speak on their behalf, to the crude, like banning magazines."

Here's a portion of the review itself:

Two years ago at a Harvard conference devoted to Mao Zedong, retired Beijing University Professor Yue Daiyun recalled her suffering during the Maoist era. “Why would Mao relentlessly and repeatedly knock down and trample those who came to support him, had never opposed him, indeed embraced and loved him?” The constant fear during those years, she said, was that “no one is safe.”

Too infirm to come to the Harvard conference, Li Rui, once Mao’s secretary, sent a paper stating that “Mao was a person who did not fear death and he did not care how many were killed. Tens of millions of people suffered during every political movement and millions starved to death.”

Most of the contemporary biographers of Mao, from Stuart Schram, (still the leading Mao scholar), to Philip Short, author of Mao: A Life, were at Harvard. Only two guests from Beijing praised the chairman. But there was an effort among the other academics to find why many Chinese worshipped Mao.

One of those present was Harvard’s Roderick MacFarquhar, who in volume three of his great The Origins of the Cultural Revolution compared Mao to Hitler and wrote, “I have been particularly interested in the human tragedy represented by Mao’s purge of his long-time comrades of the Long March and the base areas [and] his dissolution of the Yan’an ‘Round Table.’”

Now comes Jung Chang, author of the excellent, bestseller Wild Swans. She and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, have written Mao: The Unknown Story—which is huge in every sense. They answer Professor MacFarquhar’s concern, Professor Yue’s question—how could Mao do it?—and refute Li Rui’s suggestion that while Mao was a world-class killer, he didn’t fear death. From this copiously documented book we learn that Mao killed because he liked it; that he acquired a taste for slaughter in the late 1920s; and that he was terrified of death, probably because he had killed so many that revenge may have been lurking around every corner.

In her publisher’s note, Ms. Chang explains her motives for writing this book:

I decided to write about Mao because I was fascinated by this man, who dominated my life in China, and who devastated the lives of my fellow countrymen. He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did. Yet the world knows astonishingly little about him.

In an interview in the Sunday Telegraph she said Mao was “the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world.”

It is always disturbing when a book claims to be the “unknown story.” Ms. Chang claims that the world knows little of Mao. Actually the world, because of years of Western Mao scholarship and the experience of many Chinese whose lives the chairman indeed devastated, knows a lot about him. There are other biographies, some of them excellent, to which little or no credit is given by the authors, and—thanks to Harvard’s Stuart Schram—many volumes of Mao’s writings.

I am no Mao specialist, but before reading this latest biography I was broadly aware of the Mao story, particularly his life-long heartlessness and capacity for inflicting suffering on a national scale. Lucian Pye, for example, saw him pretty clearly decades ago (he is not cited in this book) and Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic by David Apter and Tony Saich, cited but not acknowledged, analyzes Mao’s unusual capacity for striking terror as acutely as Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday. Some of the lesser parts of the story had been published earlier, such as the enormously profitable opium-growing business at Mao’s guerrilla headquarters, Yan’an, by Chen Yung-fa in 1995 (cited in this biography) but in every case Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday add considerable detail to a story which will shock many Chinese.

And until this book there continued to be a lingering feeling in the West that Mao, despite everything, was a great man. And among many Chinese he remained a great man who went bad. That is the view of the Communist Party, which has officially judged Mao to be 70% good and “a great Marxist,” and still hangs his gigantic portrait over the main gate to the Forbidden City, from which it gazed down during the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989. It was a mark of Mao’s continuing special status that in May of that year, near the end of the demonstrations, when three men hurled paint at the portrait, they were tackled and detained not by the police but by other demonstrators. The very people who were shouting “Li Peng resign,” and “Down with Deng Xiaoping,” and calling for fundamental reform of the Party, could not countenance an attack on the Great Teacher and Helmsman who in their childhoods they had learned was “the red red sun in our hearts.”

All that is swept away by the authors. If Mao were on trial, and they presented their evidence, if the judge warned the jury they could convict only if there were no shadow of doubt, the verdict would be a unanimous guilty as charged.

Read the rest--if only to quietly vex Mao's successors.

Roger L. Simon has links to a couple of reviews of the upcoming book on Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday that we mentioned here and here.

Sadly though, unlike Roger, we didn't title either post, "Papa Mao Mao Mao, Papa Mao Tse Tung!". And that is to our ever-lasting regret.

Orrin Judd links to a profile that appears in The Australian of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, who have a new history of Mao Tsetung coming out this fall:

"I wanted to get inside his head and understand him because he dominated my life and ruined things for a quarter of the world's population," [Chung] says.

"We thought it would take about two years but as we dug deeper -- like a pair of detectives -- we discovered more and more. We were so constantly surprised [that] we kept going. He killed more people than anyone in history and was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, yet it is astonishing how little the world knows about him."

Mao's portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where government leaders proudly present themselves as his heirs, and Western politicians, from Kissinger to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam, who were so thrilled to visit Mao, have still failed to understand his ghastly nature, she says.

"This is the greatest mass murderer in history, a man we calculate killed at least 70 million people and was prepared to let many, many more die if necessary to pursue his mad policies."

But. You just know the B-word is coming. And sure enough, it appears in a defense of Mao, later in the article:

Philip Short, a British author and journalist who published a book on Mao in 1999, says that Chang and Halliday have come close to a hatchet job. Speaking by telephone from northeastern China, where he is lecturing and conducting further research on Mao, Short says it does nobody any good to exaggerate the obvious monstrosities of Mao.

"I fear this is a case of writing history to fit their own views; doing what the Chinese call cutting the feet to fit the shoes," Short says.

"Mao was ruthless and tyrannical enough in real life that there's no need to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out of Satan. Do we really gain in understanding by denying his complexity, his perversity, his genius and reducing him to a one-dimensional caricature?

"Mao was a tyrant, but [also] much more than that. He was the reverse of a one-dimensional man. He was a great poet, a visionary and, I would argue, a military strategist of genius. He had great skills and enormous failings. Let's not oversimplify and pretend he was just a monster.

As Orrin sardonically writes, "Surely we can all agree that his poetry redeems him. Just like with Hitler’s paintings".

This part of Short's defense of Mao is particularly amusing in a grim sort of way:

The handling of the Great Famine was atrocious but it was not just Mao who cooked it up; almost every other Chinese leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Get that? It's a weird inversion of the Nazis' "I was just following orders" defense at Nuremberg. Mao was giving the orders--but hey, so many others were following them. It was the law of the land, the conventional wisdom. And that makes it OK, right? Who are we to judge?!

Let's reword Short's defense of Mao to see how it would look with a more occidental flavor:

The Final Solution was atrocious but it was not just Hitler who cooked it up; almost every other German leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Or, let's take it to the Russian T-for-terror room:

The handling of the Great Famine was atrocious but it was not just Stalin who cooked it up; almost every other Soviet leader was enthusiastically involved in it. It was not just one man who caused all this pain.

Doesn't quite fly, does it? Hitler and Stalin are seen by most civilized people as the pair of 20th century monsters they were. Hopefully Chang and Halliday's book will help cement Mao's atrocities into most people's minds as equally well.

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Glenn Reynolds links to a great post by Matt Welch on the blindness of tourists to death, decay and starvation in Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there's no annoying electronic scoreboard!

But hey, at least they've got free healthcare!

The left complains endlessly about the US's prisoner of war camp at Guantanamo, even as they're gleefully ignoring the rest of the island, which is itself one giant prison with Castro as the warden. Val Prieto dubs it a case of OTS--short for "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome".

Orrin Judd has had several recent posts that have highlighted the darkest aspect of what the Terri Schiavo drama could portend: that Germany's obsession with euthanasia, and eventually wholesale assembly line-style slaughter in the 1930s and 1940s, actually pre-dated the rise of the Nazis, just as anti-Semitism was present long before as well. The Nazis simply stoked both ideas and then perfected the dark technology to carry them out.

This is actually consistent with much current historical thinking about pre-WWII Germany. In the past, most historians viewed the Nazis as a strange alien virus that subverted the will of the peaceful and enlightened Germans, as Orrin himself wrote a few years ago:

When it comes to popular history on the Nazi era, a subject about which very little deviation from the norm is tolerated, the one book that you'll most often see cited is William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, this book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now.

Current thinking seems to be quite different: as Ian Kershaw described in his two-volume biography of Hitler (full disclosure: I haven't read Vol. 1 yet), Hitler was accepted quite enthusiastically by the bulk of the German people, at least until the invasion of Russia went south.

Scientists in particular led the way for much of Germany's culture of death, as Mark P. Mostert noted in the fall 2002 Journal of Special Education:

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In the Wall Street Journal, Bridget Johnson has an essay titled "Red Dusk", in which she writes that it's time Hollywood gave up its love affair with communism:

What feature films have showed the true nature of communism? There was "The Killing Fields," showing families torn apart, cities emptied, forced labor, bones littering the Cambodian landscape. Adding to the authenticity was its star, Oscar-winner and real-life survivor Haing S. Ngor, who would have been summarily executed had his intellectual background been discovered by the Khmer Rouge. As a cinematic achievement, it ranks as one of the best films of all time. As a historical testament, it shows that communism had nothing to do with betterment of the masses but stripped away everything that comprised the individual. Though this film should be required high-school viewing, not much else springs to mind that could counter the effects of pro-Marxist cinema.

I'll bet the big studio execs have never thought--or cared--to do a big-screen adaptation of "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression," by Stephane Courtois, et al. The book's 1997 publishing in France touched off a firestorm of controversy--mostly from offended French commies--and it stands as an astonishing comprehensive account of what this political ideology has wreaked on mankind in less than a century. The film version of this 800-plus-page account would be excruciatingly long and painful--too long for a 32-ounce soda and too nauseating for popcorn. So since Hollywood is all about franchises now anyway, the book could be adapted into several movies, each covering a corner of the globe and that region's own unique suffering under communism.

How about a film on the Soviet Union, beginning with Lenin and the 1917 revolution, droning on to Stalin's purges with hundreds of thousands executed by firing squad, and millions forced from their homes or carted off to labor camps? We'd see Soviet bloc countries strangled under communist rule, Berlin divided with concrete and snipers, Nicolae Ceausescu destroying historic Bucharest. We'd see Soviet terror exported with the scorched-earth policy in Afghanistan.

Red China would make a stellar film that lacks a happy ending--for now. Viewers would see Mao Tse-tung turn the colorful Chinese culture into a gray, bleak "worker's paradise" steeped in hunger and executions. We'd see the Great Leap Forward to devastating famine, murder and destruction in Tibet, women forced to abort their children, and the blood of student demonstrators spilled on Tiananmen Square. Complete the Asian film series with the "re-education" by terror in North Vietnam, the Maoist insurgency in Nepal that has killed thousands, and the hellish nightmare that is North Korea.

Some brilliant young director would have to tackle Africa's woes under communism, such as the starvation in Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam. And we can't forget the Latin American films, highlighting Peru's Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorists. And, of course, add a stark motion picture on the fall of Cuba--to be directed by anyone but Oliver Stone--that, though bloody and tragic, can end on a slightly lighter note (and an ovation) with Fidel Castro's fall down the stairs last October.

It's worth noting that Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley wrote an article with an almost identical theme for Reason five years ago.

My take? It will never happen--at least not in my lifetime. TV's gotten a little closer: HBO's Stalin (starring a heavily made-up Robert Duvall in the title role) showed us the evils of the man, and their production of Robert Harris's Fatherland was a thinly-disguised parable on the moral implications of our period of detente with the Soviet Union--even if its filmmakers didn't know it. The British production of Harris's Enigma tacetly highlighted the Katyn forest massacre (where the Soviets shot and buried over 4000 Polish service personnel at the start of World War II), but there's just no way that Hollywood will ever do a big-budget theatrical film that focuses squarely on the evils of the Soviet Union.

One reason why, as Billingsley's article details, is that Hollywood has its own alternate view of history to protect: that the 1950s blacklist of admitted communist screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo was the single greatest evil ever perpetrated by mankind. And their deep-seated view that former Warner contract player Ronald Reagan was, as Clark Clifford famously described him, "an amiable dunce"--even as he looked for ways to win the Cold War in the years before he became president.

For Hollywood to portray communism as evil would be to look deeply into its own soul--and question much of its last 60 years. As I said, it won't happen.

Although I'd love to be proven wrong.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: Betsy was nice enough to link to my piece, along with an addendum in which she offers some ideas for Hollywood:

The more I think about it, the more it seems like Hollywood is missing out on some great possibilities. And they wouldn't have to all be downer stories. What about a romance taking place against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rest of the Iron Curtain? How about a movie about some of the brave Soviet writers who risked everything to publish their samizdat literature? Or life in Romania leading to the fall of Ceausescu? Some actress who wanted a great Oscar-wortby role should commission a movie based on the life of the great poet, Anna Akhmatova. What a great movie of courage and suffering her life would make.

Once Hollywood finishes cranking out a spate of films about our brave boys in Iraq that match all of their great World War II films, they'll get right on those, I'm sure.

Hugh Hewitt points to this comment on Roger L. Simon's Weblog to put the L.A. Times' pro-North Korean piece into perspective:

Imagine if the LAT had printed this story in the 70's....... "South Africa Without the Rancor" As I was travelling in Kenya I came across this South African buisnessman. He did not want to give out his name. We talked of the current strain in relations between South Africa and the rest of the world. "The press is always so negative. Every story is bad, bad, bad. Every country has human rights problems, is your country perfect? We are just like everyone else, we marry, we love, we fight, were charitable. You can't impose your western standards on everyone, we are differnt and we should be allowed our own expression of government. We come from a tribal society and we have needed strong leaders and the idea of democracy is foreign to us. Our blacks have their own autonomous states within the South African structure and they really don't want independence or equality. Our blacks thrive under our strong leadership and Botha is really no different then any tribal king. It is the constant agression of the west that is the cause of friction between us"

If this crap was printed at the time the LA Times would have been forced to fire it's entire news division.

Hugh has other examples of the Times' pro-North Korean biases on his blog.

Update: He's also heard back from the author of the Times piece in question, and fisks her response within an inch of its life.

With his Che chic T-shirt, Carlos Santana seems to be implying that while he's happy to be attending the Academy Awards, he'd rather be off leading Cuban firing squads. (Here's a copy of the shot, since all photos will scroll off Yahoo after a while.)

As Jay Nordlinger once wrote:

Listen to what Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the Miami congressman, has to say about Che. I doubt the New York Public Library would trust it — but you can: "Guevara was an Argentinian loser who alleged he was a doctor even though he couldn't give a simple flu shot. What he was good at was killing people, and he became one of history's cruelest serial killers. He was Castro's primary henchman, murdering hundreds of innocent people without due process, usually finishing off the work of the mass-production firing squads with shots to the back of the neck. He was and will always be the most despicable, disgusting figure of the Castro killing machine, the foreigner who was made a serial killer of Cubans by Castro, and got great pleasure from his role."

Indeed, he did. Guevara, famous as he is — famous as his mug is — is little known. He was, as Diaz-Balart says, Castro's number-one revolutionary thug. He presided over those summary executions at La Cabaña — the old fortress that Guevara commandeered — and he very much enjoyed administering the coup de grâce. He also enjoyed parading people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which the victims were killed. Viva Cristo Rey! ("Long Live Christ the King!") they would sometimes yell.

Remember this, too: Guevara founded the labor-camp system, in which countless Cubans — judged "deviant" by the regime — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag; it is Che's legacy.

And it's oh so in at the increasingly politicized--and radicalized--Academy Awards!

Update: Earlier this month, I wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard on a new Miles Davis DVD that was built around documentary footage of his appearance at the 1970 Isle of Wight music festival in England. Santana appears fairly prominently in new footage on the disc, to offer a rocker's take on Miles Davis' music. I left this bit about him on the cutting room floor, to keep the article a managable length:

There’s a classic “shut up and play” moment (to paraphrase the title of Laura Ingraham’s recent book), when Santana, discussing how incredible and wonderful and universal pop music of the 1960s was, says:

Isle of Wight was a pure result of consciousness-revolution music. “Hell no, we won’t go to Vietnam” and “we shall overcome”. The sixties—the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—was the most important decade of the 20th century.

Why?

Because it gave birth to questioning authority, particularly if it’s not enlightened by God. Are you listening, George Bush?

Is the president listening to God, or to Santana? If it’s the latter, to coin a phrase that’s probably been uttered a few times at the ranch in Crawford, the odds are slim and none, and Slim just left town. And both Santana and the DVD's director know it—but that doesn’t stop them from preaching to the choir and alienating half of the disc’s potential audience.

So are Che and Castro enlightened by God? Is it possible for their victims to question their authority--which most definitely flows from the barrel of a gun, one that was more than likely being aimed at the base of your skull by the man whose T-shirt Santana chose to wear the Academy Awards?

As the Professor would say, not for peace, merely on the other side.

(Post title via Frank Zappa, incidentally.)

Matthew Davis of Flak Magazine looks at a 578-acre park in northwest Moscow known by its Russian initials, VDNKh:

It houses more than 80 pavilions and monuments originally designed to showcase the achievements of the USSR. Each one is devoted to a specific aspect of the Soviet Union: agriculture, economics, science, industry and hunting, to name a few. And of course, there's the cosmonaut pavilion.

The place is a theme park of ideology, a carnival of communism. VDNKh was designed solely to boost the glory of the State. Welcome to Soviet Disneyland.

VDNKh is lined with once-grand boulevards, fountains and statues, all adorned with the icons of communism. When Stalin had it built in 1939, it was open to all Russians as a kind of state-approved Soviet world's fair. Visitors would flock to the site for a day and be duly dazzled by the all-providing power of the State. Then they'd go line up for bread.

The years following the Empire's collapse saw a knee-jerk purge of all things Soviet [that's knee-jerk liberalism of the very best kind--Ed] from public spaces: streets were renamed, commemorative plaques were defaced, and hundreds of statues were torn down. Indeed, VNDKh is one of the few bastions of the Soviet State left that generations too young to remember the Empire can visit.

Omniously, Davis writes that with its economy sputtering, there's a growing nostalgia in Russia for its Soviet past:

According to French journalist Jean-Marie Chauvier, Russians are jaded by the fact that most are worse off now then they were under communism, as the country is now run by a core of private oligarchs. Neo-Communist political parties have repeatedly tried to pounce on this. Glossing over the gulags, censorship and bread lines of the old system, they call for a return to the guaranteed security of Communist days. More and more people are listening.

They should pretty happy with Vladimir Putin then--under his leadership, Russia is now considered "Not Free" by the American-based Freedom House institute. It appears a growing number of Russians would like him to finish the job.

Reuters reports:

Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews.

That's staggering--but not all that surprising, to be honest. For the Blogosphere's take, click here. Jonah Goldberg's comments are particularly worthwhile.

Dennis Prager observes a jaw-dropping quote from the New York Times:

In an interview with The New York Times Magazine, William F. Buckley Jr., on the occasion of his taking leave from National Review, the magazine he founded 50 years ago, was asked a series of questions. Needless to say, given the politics of The New York Times and its interviewer, the questions were nearly all challenging. But nothing quite prepared a reader for this one:

"You seem indifferent to suffering. Have you ever suffered yourself?"

In one sentence, a New York Times interviewer summed up the liberal view of conservatives -- "indifferent to suffering." As I have long believed, in general, conservatives think liberals are fools and liberals think conservatives are evil.

Ronald Reagan frequently called himself a National Review conservative. He ended the Cold War and freed hundreds of millions from the literal and figurative Gulag that was the Soviet Union. With National Review, Bill Buckley virtually created the modern conservative movement.

If it were up to the Times, the Soviet Union, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein would all still be in power.

Tell me again who seems indifferent to suffering.

Back in early April, we linked to this site at its old URL and wrote:

P.J. O'Rourke once wrote a book called Holidays in Hell. If you're up for a virtual one, how about a motorcycle ride past the abandoned hulk of Chernobyl and its nearby deserted ghost towns, with Elena, a beautiful Russian brunette as your guide?

Steven Den Beste links to Elena's site as the launching pad for an essay on the archeological implications of Chernobyl. Den Beste describes what it tells us about the state of the Soviet Union at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown, only four years after Arthur Schlesinger, just back from a trip to Moscow in 1982, said that President Reagan was delusional about the crumbling state of the Evil Empire:

"I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street -- more of almost everything," he said, adding his contempt for "those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink."

Betsy Newmark looks at what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's sons went through the day after Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as president.

Of couuuuurse he can. But hey, if I was the personal physician to a murdering communist dictator and had a wife or family I wanted to protect, I'd probably say stuff like that, too.

UPDATE: Via James Lileks, this is a great piece of writing on Castro's dissidents, as well as his useful idiots in the US.

Devastating piece by Glenn Garvin in Reason. It's actually a book review, but it holds up extremely well as an article in and of itself:

The speed with which the Soviet empire imploded and the economic ruin and popular revulsion that were revealed have made it clear that baby boomer intellectuals and journalists, viewing the world through the distorted lens of Vietnam, overwhelmingly got it wrong. Peasants ate less and were slaughtered more on the other side of the Iron Curtain; the jails were fuller; the KGB’s list was a lot longer and a lot deadlier than Joe McCarthy’s. A team of French historians calculated the worldwide death toll of communism during the 20th century at more than 93 million. When Hoover Institution historian Robert Conquest used newly available data from the Soviet Union to update The Great Terror, his account of Stalin’s murderous purges of the 1930s, his publishers asked for a new title. "How about I Told You So, You F***ing Fools?" Conquest suggested.

Needless to say, RTWT.

His interviewer just demolishes him over his lack of knowledge of Castro, whom he's just made a (thoroughly whitewashed) documentary on.

And this is the guy who was going to get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination!?

UPDATE: David Cohen adds, "This interview serves as an important reminder that sometimes there's no conspiracy. Sometimes, at bottom, there is just an ignorant idiot."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan writes, "Just when you think Stone couldnt get more morally depraved...The man is laughing - laughing - at a gulag".

Beef: It's what's for dinner! Except in Cuba, where killing cattle by citizens was made illegal by Castro's communist state, because their cattle are so rare (pun not intended).

Matt Welch writes:

When I visited Cuba in 1998, a favorite way of getting beyond the grim, mostly meatless food rations was to raise a pig -- illegally, of course -- in your apartment. The only problem was the squealing, so Cubans would simply cut the little porkers' vocal cords.

Workers' Paradise, indeed.

Anne Applebaum writes that a new Auschwitz is under our noses, and wonders why, once again, so few people care:

Later -- in 10 years, or in 60 -- it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied.

Historians in Asia, Europe and here will finger various institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas chambers but failed to act.

As Mark Twain (may have) said, "The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme".

England's Guardian looks at North Korea's Camp 22, and its Auschwitz-like horrors. As Orrin Judd writes, "Saying 'Never again' makes us all feel better, but when it starts happening again we show rather little interest in stopping it".

Back in January of 2001, close to three years before Moveon.org debuted their Bush=Hitler ads, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: "Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?"

Bruce Bartlett lists some of the reasons why leftists have had to "think real hard" about that question.

Meanwhile, Suzanne Fields writes, "Mocking the horrors of the Holocaust has become a cottage industry in the dark corners of the anti-Semitic world, but who could have believed that in 60 years references to the Nazis would be played for laughs. An anti-Bush Web site parodies Time magazine's Person of the Year, pasting a swastika on the arm of an American soldier."

The New York Times' protypical Soviet dupe gets to keep his Pulitzer Prize. The Times and, as InstaPundit noted, Robert Fisk dodged a bullet.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan despairs:

Arthur Sulzberger Jr describes the work of Walter Duranty as 'slovenly.' That simply misses the point. Duranty wasn't slovenly; he was an active and knowing apologist of mass murder, tyranny, and brutality. If the Times had won a Pulitzer for someone denying the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, there would not even be a question of the Pulitzer standing. But what Duranty did was no different. It was a wilful attempt to disguise mass murder in order to promote Communist ideology. It wasn't slovenly; it was extremely diligent and entirely malign. The NYT doesn't see this. They still fail to see that tolerating mass murder on the left is no different than the same on the right.

Not all that surprising, actually.

One of the most important books published this past summer was Anne Applebaum's Gulag. In a recent speech, she explained some of the reasons why the horrors of the Soviets aren't as viscerally remembered today by society as a whole as the Nazis were:

Do we, in the West, remember the Soviet past any better [than Russia does today]? One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I really encountered this subject only while living in Eastern Europe, and I started to wonder why.

Since there are a lot of writers in the room today, I think I can also confess that I was further inspired by an irritating New York Times review of my first book, in 1994, which was about the Western borderlands of the former Soviet Union. Although largely positive, of course, it contained the following line:

Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how many in the West remember it? After all, the killing was so--so boring, and ostensibly undramatic.

Were Stalin's murders boring? Many people think so. Put differently, the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler.

Ken Livingstone, a former British member of Parliament, now Mayor of London, once struggled to explain the difference to me. Yes, the Nazis were "evil," he said. But the Soviet Union was "deformed." That view echoes the feeling that many people have, even people who are not old-fashioned members of the British Labor Party: The Soviet Union simply went wrong somehow, but it was not fundamentally wrong in the way that Hitler's Germany was wrong.

Until recently, it was possible to explain this absence of popular feeling about the tragedy of European communism in the West as the logical result of a particular set of circumstances. The passage of time is part of it: Communist regimes really did grow less reprehensible as the years went by. Nobody was very frightened of General Jaruzelski, or even of Brezhnev, although both were responsible for a great deal of destruction. Besides, archives were closed. Access to camp sites was forbidden. No television cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as they had done in Germany at the end of the Second World War. No images, in turn, meant that the subject, in our image-driven culture, didn't really exist either.

I'd like to think that Applebaum's book will help change that, but given how Saddam Hussein's record is being ignored by many today, I'm not very hopeful.

Roger Ebert has a perceptive retrospective of Leni Riefenstahl, drawing upon his 1994 review of the documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

Ebert appropriately excoriates Riefenstahl for being a Nazi sympathizer. But how many Soviet filmmakers are still praised to this day by film scholars, even though their works, while fictional, were propaganda to the Soviet Union? Is it simply because Sergei Eisenstein (to name one example) created fiction, whereas Riefenstahl was a documentarian?

It's been frequently noted that a huge mistake on our part was not holding Nuremberg-like trials for the apparatchiks and party members of the Soviet Union after the Cold War ended. This is yet another example of how a lack of recorded judgment continues to create an unnecessary double standard when it comes to two equally evil empires of the 20th century.

Update: Ebert's piece on Riefenstahl has since scrolled off the Sun-Times' site, but is currently available here.

Orrin Judd writes that Berlin is considering resurrecting their 60 foot high statue of Lenin.

Ironically, there's already a statue on Lenin in the US. A 30-foot high representation of Vladimir Ilyich is displayed prominently on a street in Fremont, a suburb of Seattle.

No really--Seattle has a statue devoted to one of the most evil, destructive men in history--and they're proud of it! When we were there during Memorial Day weekend, we stopped by the Guitar Center that was near our hotel, both so I could explore, and to kill time. I bought a few CD-ROMs of Acid Loops, and the clerk, a bearded, but otherwise surprisingly clean-cut fellow in his mid-30s or so noticed my out-of-state credit card and asked what we were planning to see that day. My wife mentioned she'd like to see the canals and locks in Fremont (just across the bridge from our hotel), and the clerk said, "yeah, they have a state of Karl Marx there. It's really cool!"

He didn't notice the death ray I was projecting. I had to bite my tongue to not say, "nahh, I'd like to check out the Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler statues first. Then I'll check out Marx." Instead I just took my purchase and waited to get in the car before blowing a gasket.

It's actually not Marx, it's Lenin, which I discovered after a little Googling. But either way, it's been frequently noted that a huge mistake on our part was not holding Nuremberg-like trials for the apparatchiks and party members of the Soviet Union after the Cold War ended. It might have caused more people to think before erecting statues to mass murderers--especially in the US.

Jeff Brokaw has a link to his 1953 obituary in the New York Times, which is as close to necrophilia as the Times as ever come.

And Andrew Sullivan has a link to The Onion's "1953" Stalin obit, which he describes--quite accurately--as "better than the New York Times'".

Meanwhile, ABC News' Peter Jennings yesterday, reported that "more than 3,000 people met today at the Soviet dictator’s grave adjacent to Red Square. Many of them said Russia could use a leader like Stalin again":

But at least Jennings described Stalin as “one of the world's most brutal dictators” and pointed out that “he murdered millions of his own people.”

After relaying how a 14-year-old boy claimed that though “Stalin had many sins,” they “were justified,” Jennings powerfully concluded: “There are still no memorials to the people Stalin had killed.”

Jennings concluded the March 5 World News Tonight: “Finally, this evening, a lesson about remembering. As the Bush administration contemplates trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein, who President Bush has always referred to as a brutal dictator, we take note of an anniversary. It is 50 years ago today that one of the world’s most brutal dictators died: Josef Stalin.”

For Peter Jennings, I suppose, that's progress.

Check out this line by Molly Ivins, by way of Jonah Goldberg:

For those of you who have not read Paris 1919, I recommend it highly. Roosevelt was anti-colonialist. That system was a great evil, a greater horror even than Nazism or Stalinism.

Jonah replies, and he's spot-on, at least in my book:

the suggestion that colonialism was a greater horror than Nazism or Stalinism is so stupid and so repugnant it really must be addressed. Does she know what she's saying? Doesn't she know how many tens of thousands of brave colonial troops fought side by side with the British against the Germans and the Japanese? And whereas there are many defenders of British colonialism - and other colonial regimes - I think she will have to look under a lot of rocks to find defenders of the death camps of the Holocaust. Considering that Nazism and Stalinism represented the very worst kind of colonialism, one wonders what it was about the Raj that Ivins considers worse than Stalin's collectivization or the rape of Poland.

Colonialism worse than the death camps of the Nazis, or the gulags of the Soviets? As I said, it's staggering that someone would write that--let alone think it.

Instead of my usual urbane voice of reason, allow me to risk sounding like Floyd R. Turbo for a moment. I was recently sent a copy of The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, written by Michael Ondaatje, to review for Blogcritics. It's a series of interviews with Murch on the artistic choices that he made when editing the classic films he's worked on over the years, including Francis Ford Coppola's best films--The Godfather movies, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. Those are all staggering movies (The Conversation is criminally underrated), and Murch is, without a doubt, one of the most talented editors to emerge in the "new Hollywood" of the 1970s. And it appears to be a well-written, very readable book, which, while I haven't finished digesting it (I'll post a proper review of it on Blogcritics--this isn't it), I can easily recommend to any film buff.

But the photo above, which I scanned from the book, "knocked me for six", as the English would say. Here's Francis Ford Coppola, at the height of his powers, shortly after making his fortune from the first two Godfather movies. It's taken, I believe, in Coppola's Napa Valley mansion, in what I assume is either his dining room, or perhaps a conference room.

In any case, notice the Warhol Mao print, and its placement directly behind Coppola, who it's safe to assume always sat at the head of the table. It was clearly hung there to establish some sort of "we're both powerful men" relationship.

Perhaps (and I'm being really charitable here), Coppola was making a statement about how dictatorships are powerless before the power of mass media (Warhol of course, cranked these prints out like mad). But probably not. Imagine dining with someone who had a print of Hitler, Stalin, or Castro (heck, that last one is probably still hanging in more than a few unrepentant leftists' homes). Wouldn't you have some second thoughts about your host?

What is it with the left and their love of evil men who have the murders of tens of millions of people on their hands? Is it the desire to seek some sort of weird, Palpatine-like father figure? Is it a belief that all of the evidence against their heroes is slanderous? (I'd pull off an Orwellian, "seeking the love of Big Brother" reference here, but that would be awfully cliched.) Or that the genocide they commit--all those broken eggs---is justified?

Remember this photo next time Sean Penn goes to Baghdad. Or Spielberg to Havana.

UPDATE: Here's the review of the Murch book. Surprisingly--and enjoyably--free of overt politics, with the obvious exception of the above photo.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on this topic, here.

Kevin Holtsberry has an excellent review of Martin Amis' new book, Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million on Blogcritics.com. Here's a sample of Holtsberry's review:

This is what turned Stalin from a petty if brutal dictator to what Amis calls "negative perfection," his simply inability to accept reality. Amis explores this "negative perfection" and all its base, degrading, and horrifying fullness. He discuss the forced famines, the concentration camps, Stalin's seeming attempts to wipe off the face of the earth anyone and anything that displeased him. Stalin's obsessions and maniacal actions literally warped the foundations of civil society in the Soviet Union until they snapped. Soon truth had no meaning and survival seemed almost random luck. Amis illustrates this tragic and absurd situation when discussing the census of 1937. Apparently their was a national census in 1937, the first one since 1926. Stalin felt that the population should be 170 million. The Census Board reported their findings - 167 million. Stalin's policies of forced famine and concentration camps was having too great an effect on the population. Stalin's reaction? Have the Census Board arrested and shot! Their crime: "treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR."

Martin Amis' new book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million has definitely generated some good discussions on Stalin and the Soviet Union. Here's Andrew Stuttaford's book review, Andrew Sullivan on The Times and Stalin, James Lileks on Diego Rivera, and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake on communism's lasting appeal to intellectuals.

Meanwhile, Orrin Judd has a long reader letter and his rebuttal, on the wintry George Orwell, arguably the first neo-conservative. Or the last honest socialist. Or something.

Back in early May, we ran this story from Wired News, called "Judas Unmasked?". Today's Washington Times has an article on how the Search for Frank's betrayer has been reopened.

Found, oddly enough on the home page of
Wired News, under their "Ephemera..." column, with no link to any article for background material was this piece titled:

Judas Unmasked?
Who betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis? The question has lingered since the end of World War II and now a British author thinks she has found the answer. Carol Ann Lee believes that a business associate of Anne's father Otto, Anton Ahlers, tipped off Dutch police to the whereabouts of the Frank family. German and Dutch security police raided the building alongside an Amsterdam canal and arrested the Frank family, including Anne. Only Otto survived the ordeal; Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp only weeks before the end of the war.

The title leaves me with a definite sense of moral queasiness, and a vague reminder of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's essay on "Defining Deviancy Down". Judas of course, "turned in" Christ. But Nazi Germany, and its conquered nations, were teeming with "Judases" , ready to turn in their fellow neighbors at a moment's notice.

What do you call Judas when he's but one of millions?

NOTE: For a variety of Anne Frank links, as well as a review of her diary, visit this Brothers Judd page.

The X Factor Blog links to an article in Wired, which says that Cuba has banned PC sales to its citizens. Wired says:

Early attempts to confirm the information independently were unsuccessful. Dozens of messages to Cuban retailers and government officials in Cuba went unanswered. Cuba's spokesman in Washington, Luis Fernandez, was consistently evasive.

"If we didn't have an embargo, there could be computers for everybody," Fernandez replied when asked this question: Are computer sales to the public banned in Cuba?

The X Factor adds"That's like asking: "What did you want for dinner tonight, honey?" And getting the response: "I'll tell YOU a thing or two about Disneyland!" WTF?"

I'm surprised that they didn't do this sooner. Alvin Toffler has consistently written about how photocopiers and computers have almost always been illegal in totalitarian regimes, because they allow for easy dissemination of information (such as books and articles about how the free world differs from totalitarian regimes!). Toffler once mentioned how successful The Third Wave and Future Shock were in China and the Soviet Union, but he didn't see a dime of it, because it was largely distributed in bootleg form via photocopiers.

Armando Valladares, a writer who spent 22 years imprisoned in a Castro government gulag for opposing communism, says democracy will only return to Cuba when Fidel Castro disappears because there is no one in Cuba to replace him.

"It's not like in the old Soviet Union where one secretary of the (communist) party would succeed another one. The dictatorship in Cuba is like all Latin American dictatorships, once the leader disappears, the dictatorship disappears," he said.

I hope he's right--it can't happen soon enough.

For more on the horrors of Cuba, check out Jeff Jacoby's ongoing, three part story of his recent visit there.