By Andrew L. Jaffee

The worst economic/political experiment in human history — communism and Nazism (National Socialist German Workers Party) — was great at killing millions of poor souls. Now the Chinese version of the über-nanny-state wishes to extend its control to… life after death:

A SENIOR Tibetan lama and Chinese government advisers have defended contentious rules banning reincarnations of “living Buddhas” without approval.

The rules are apparently aimed at empowering China to name the next Dalai Lama when the 14th and current Dalai Lama dies.

Last July, China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs issued regulations banning reincarnations of living Buddhas, or holy monks, who failed to seek government approval, ostensibly to manipulate the centuries-old practice and legitimise future appointments by the atheist Communist Party. …

(more…)

by Daniel Pipes*

Liberal fascism sounds like an oxymoron — or a term for conservatives to insult liberals. Actually, it was coined by a socialist writer, none other than the respected and influential left-winger H.G. Wells, who in 1931 called on fellow progressives to become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” Really.

His words, indeed, fit a much larger pattern of fusing socialism with fascism: Mussolini was a leading socialist figure who, during World War I, turned away from internationalism in favor of Italian nationalism and called the blend Fascism. Likewise, Hitler headed the National Socialist German Workers Party.

(more…)

by Daniel Pipes*

What’s wrong with American liberalism? What happened to the self-assured, optimistic, and practical Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy? Why has Joe Lieberman, their closest contemporary incarnation, been run out of the party? How did anti-Americanism infect schools, the media, and Hollywood? And whence comes the liberal rage that conservatives like Ann Coulter, Jeff Jacoby, Michelle Malkin, and the Media Research Center have extensively documented?

(more…)

By Stanislaw Krajewski

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of Jews, communism and Jewish communists, primarily with a Jewish audience in mind. Despite there having been Jewish communists, who like other communists may have been victimizers, there was no such phenomenon as Jewish communism. The Jews who remained in Eastern Europe were often victims rather than victimizers. The number of Jewish communists was important, but not as large as antisemites asserted. The problem lies in the quasi-religious zeal of communists who were Jews. The message is that communism does pose a moral problem to Jews.

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

“The making of profits is impossible,” wrote Eleanor Marx, summarizing one of her father’s key economic concepts as set forth in his rather long-winded Das Kapital. I then wonder how my left-wing friends would explain the fact that, “China will soon overtake Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy behind the US and Japan.” We’re talking 100’s of billions in “communist” profits; so much so that the politburo has had to “curb the pace of growth” with “five interest rate increases in 2007 and limits on spending on factories and property:”

China’s economy grew at an annual pace of 11.5% in the three months to the end of September, official figures show.

The figure was ahead of economists’ predictions but slightly slower than the 11.9% seen in the previous quarter. …

Growth slowed to 11.5%! Still no contradictions? China is the “world’s second largest emitter” of carbon and, “Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.” And these left-wingers still think of China as some kind of nirvana…

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

Marxists of the world: you can get a lock of Che Guevara’s hair! Now you can wear your Che t-shirt AND attach a lock of his own hair to your dreadlock coif. Don’t be outdone by your Marxist comrades. Get out to organize and represent in style. Reframe the debate. Revisionize. Take it to the man. Raise class consciousness. Be the first to bid on a piece of communist, revolutionary history:

Strands of hair taken from the body of Ernesto Che Guevara by a former CIA officer involved in his death are being sold at an auction in the US.

They are part of a lot also including photos of Che Guevara’s dead body and fingerprints taken after he was killed in Bolivia 40 years ago. …

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

“We are furious. If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award [the Congressional Gold Medal], there must be no justice or good people in the world.”

- Zhang Qingli, Chinese Communist Party secretary for Tibet

What a world the Chinese Communist Party lives in… Maura Moynihan explains why China is so afraid of the humble Dalai Lama:

…True, the Dalai Lama is no ordinary scholar and teacher; he is the living symbol of the Buddhist faith. It seems that Beijing’s cadres fear his moral authority and do not want the international community to examine their record in Tibet, because they have a lot to hide.

It has been 48 years since the Dalai Lama eluded capture by the People’s Liberation Army and escaped to India, whereupon Chairman Mao Zedong began to plunder Tibet’s wealth and murdered more than 1 million of its people.

In the mid-1990s, the Chinese politburo implemented the “Strike Hard Campaign” that declared Buddhism “a disease to be eradicated.” News of major protests in Tibet has not been widely disseminated in recent years, and now the survival of Tibetan civilization has reached a tipping point.

In 2000, China launched a vast infrastructure campaign called “Opening and Development of the Western Regions” and embarked on a new phase of subjugation and control. Construction of rail and road links to Tibet, such as the Qingzang railway that opened last year, has accelerated Beijing’s surveillance of Tibetans and has advanced the Sinofication of the Himalayan and Turkic peoples who inhabit China’s western territories.

Exploiting Tibet’s resources for the mainland’s industrial base is a strategic and economic priority for China’s government, which suppresses manifestations of Tibetan identity or nationalism with blunt force. …

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

Despite the fact that Dubya has incinerated his political capital through gross incompetence, I’m still only finding fresh political creativity on the Right — and this is coming from a recovered leftist.

I was at a “60s” party about a month ago, and inevitably, two guys were wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. They just don’t get it. I imagined the reaction if I were to have worn a Hitler t-shirt to their shindig. Heck, an American flag t-shirt would’ve turned heads there. I thought of John Lennon’s words from Revolution, he being the Left’s solely-claimed-for-their-own hero:

You say you want a revolution, well, you know
We all wanna change the world

You tell me that its evolution, well, you know
We all wanna change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out…

You say you’ve got a real solution, well, you know

We’d all love to see the plan…

But if you goin’ carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow…

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

Hero. Rebel. Revolutionary. These are words one often hears in association with Ernesto Che Guevara. …

- BBC

These are words one often hears about Che from historical illiterates and wannabe, middle class “revolutionaries.” You know, the ones who walk around wearing Che t-shirts; the ones whose entire belief systems are solely based on the t-shirt they are wearing. Yesterday, Cuba “officially” commemorated the 40-year anniversary of Che’s execution. This sham pageantry was in reality a commemoration of dictatorship; a reminder of the prison in which most Cubans live. Here’s a historical reminder of what Guevara really stood for:

…Che himself admitted to ordering “several thousand” executions during the first year of the Castro regime. Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA operative who helped track him down in Bolivia and was the last person to question him, says that Che during his final talk, admitted to “a couple thousand” executions. …

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

President Hugo Chavez threatened on Monday to take over any private schools refusing to submit to the oversight of his socialist government, a move some Venezuelans fear will impose leftist ideology in the classroom. …

- Associated Press

First of all, there’s nothing “socialist” about Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan government. Marx and Engels wanted to create a utopian “state in which the working class and poor peasantry exercised direct control on management of industry and society through democratically elected soviets or councils.” Chavez is concentrating all power in his own hands. He’s clamping down on the free press and is paling around with the very anti-Semitic Iranian President Ahmadinejad. Chavez has taken direct control of Venezuela’s oil wealth, as well as the country’s electrical and telecommunications companies. The money will certainly go into his own pockets. Most recently, Chavez has moved to take direct control of Venezuela’s central bank and military, and is busy editing the constitution to make himself president for life.

There is nothing “socialist” going on in Venezuela, just the exploits of another cheap thug following in the Castro/Mugabe/Milosevic tradition: absolute power forever. Will Venezuelan students be able to differentiate between Chavez’s megalomania and Marx and Engels’ teachings?

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

Did the blind contractor’s bridge even make it across the river? If so, how would he have known — for sure, not second-hand? The blind leading the blind? Idiots leading the blind or vice versa? How could a blind man update a draftsman’s blueprint? I guess this is what you get when billionaire communist/capitalists bid work out to private contractors (would Marx even understand this sentence?). From Reuters:

A Chinese court has jailed two officials after they let a blind contractor build a bridge which collapsed during construction and injured 12 people, the official Xinhua news agency said Monday. …

“After the blind contractor changed the blueprint, he carried out the work only using a roughly drawn draft of the plan, which caused the bridge to collapse,” the report said.

Xinhua did not explain how the contractor was able to run the project considering his inability to see.

Ah… yeah…

(more…)

A personal, historical vignette

By Cainnech Ó Sullibhain

Every day in our lives we hear of the men who fight battles for their country and become heroes, but we never hear of the unsung heroes that are never even mentioned in the news media. They are of course both men and women who are put into a position where their loyalty and bravery go well beyond that of a soldier on the battlefield. This story is one that no one ever got wind of. I speak as one of those who risked his life, maybe out of loyalty or common sense, who partook in such an operation.

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

Russian President Vladimir Putin has prevented political dissidents from attending summit talks with the EU. He’s afraid of a former chess player? Such a tough guy, pushing around tiny nations like Estonia. Vladimir has surrounded himself with other former KGB goons, so in the Kremlin nowadays, “influence stems from the former Soviet organs of repression.” Back in the USSR? From the Beeb:

A number of leading anti-Putin activists, including the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, had passports confiscated and were detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.

The authorities said they had false travel documents.

Several foreign journalists were also reportedly prevented from traveling.

False? Yeah, if you’re KGB/NKVD…

(more…)

By RA Sprinkle

A synopsis of world history paints a dark picture of humanity, or rather, of mankind’s inhumanity. The weak have never been secure, insomuch, that survival in the animal kingdom is a suitable allegory to that of the kingdom of men.

On the other hand, strength alone does not ensure peace. To the contrary, more often than not strength has been used as an oppressive force to conquer and subdue, to kill, spoil and plunder.

Whatever peace the world will know will only come by way of strength with principles, not by an equilibrium of shared power among nations, nor by agreement upon common interests, but by the power of a greater power, which, guided by principles and values exerts the proper degree of force as a counter weight to arrest hostile and aggressive forces.

(more…)

By Andrew L. Jaffee

Here we go again (again). This time it started with Estonia’s morally sound decision to dismantle a symbol of Russian/Soviet conquest and occupation of their homeland (Eesti). Every time I express support for the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), some troll comes out of the woodwork calling me a “Nazi collaborator,” or insisting that “all” Balts were Nazi collaborators. It’s almost funny, as I’m an American-Lithuanian-Jew — try that one — and I’ve heard it from both sides: “All Jews were communists,” “All Lithuanians were Nazis,” etc. But the pro-Soviet trolls aren’t interested in the truth. I interpret their obsession with Nazi war crimes — while ignoring Soviet war crimes — as an attempt to sanitize what the Russians and their collaborators did during their occupation of the various Soviet “republics.” The trolls are also attempting to preserve the gleaming image (murderous rampage) of communism.

(more…)