The Left After Communism - Marxism failed because it had been inserted into a hostile environment

Front Page Magazine ^ | October 15, 2012 | David Horowitz

[PowderMonkey]

"Boris Yeltsin perhaps — remarked that it was a pity Marxists had not triumphed in a smaller country because “we would not have had to kill so many people to demonstrate that utopia does not work.” What more is there to say?"

"You extol the virtues of communism because you have never been forced to live under it." - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Cuba.

[ETL]

KGB Putin thinks the "COLLAPSE" of the mass-murdering communist Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century"

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
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"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=
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[ETL]

Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?
American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

In a [] 1984 book [New Lies for Old], ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. ..."

"Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government."

"Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/did_communism_fake_its_own_dea.html
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FReeper khelus provided the following links for reading/downloading both books in their entirety (free):

New Lies for Old:
http://archive.org/details/GolitsynAnatoleTheNewLiesForOldOnes

The Perestroika Deception:
http://curezone.com/upload/Members/ChazTheMeatHe/Books/Golitsyn_The_Perestroika_Deception_The_World_s_Slide_Towards_the_Secon.pdf
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CHINA

"the new leaders pledged to adhere to 'Marx, Lenin, Mao' thought .. for 'a long time to come'"

China: Communist Party goes modern (Asia Times)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/DK16Ad02.html

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The Tea Party = the Left’s “hostile environment.”

[puppypusher]

Any environment that Marxism is inserted into becomes a hostile environment.

[ETL]

If Russia were truly done with Communism and are now “Capitalists”, why would they still support Marxist dictatorships such as Venezuela, Cuba, other Marxist regimes throughout Latin America, the ChiComs and North Korea?

[I want the USA back]

True believers never give up. They think that communism will work if done right. After the failure of the Soviet Union, all reasonable people should know that communism can’t work. But they keep trying. They change their name to “progressive” “democrat party” and keep pushing for their utopia where all have what they need and all give according to their means.

[13Sisters76]

What an excellent article! To call such people as Hobsbaum a “historian” is an insult to historians, such as you cannot imagine. He was an ideologue.

From Plato, to More, to Marx, to Rousseau, to Dewey, leftism has never worked and never WILL work, because of its determination to deny the nature of man. It can be no surprise to anyone that the stellar lights of academia have never existed outside the bubbles of their comfortable lives and the universities. If dropped into a city with nothing but their wits, it wouldn’t take long to see them as the crazy people they truly are, muttering and talking to themselves.

This is not to deny, however, the brand of bigoted leftist who truly believes that they are superior to the “masses” and entitled to rule over them. These STILL believe in the mission of Margaret Sanger, and always will.

The denial of those who embrace leftism, is the denial of those fellow travelers who are responsible for, at least, 120 million dead across the planet. It is tyranny, and nothing else. It IS that barbarism that so many “intellectuals” lay at the free market’s door.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agronomy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism

[Cincinatus' Wife]

......It IS that barbarism that so many “intellectuals” lay at the free market’s door.

".........Their cynicism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for higher ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as having the power to redeem the world from evil. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their sordid and, if necessary, criminal means.

And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.

Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.

Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them." - "Hillary Clinton and the Third Way" - By David Horowitz, June 2000

[arasina]

Cross reference to another FR thread: The Moral Giant and the Leftist Creep by Jeff Jacoby for Townhall.com

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I REGRET that it was only upon reading his obituary this month that I first learned of Nguyen Chi Thien. He was a courageous Vietnamese dissident who had spent nearly 30 years in prison for his opposition to communist repression, cruelty, and lies. Much of Nguyen's opposition was expressed in poetry, most famously "Flowers from Hell," a collection of poems he memorized behind bars, and only put down on paper after being released from prison in 1977.

The poems were published after he audaciously handed off the manuscript to British diplomats at their embassy in Hanoi, the AP obituary recalled. As he walked out of the embassy, "security agents were awaiting him, and he was promptly sent back to prison." He spent the next 12 years in Hoa Lo, the notorious Hanoi Hilton. While he was in captivity, "Flowers from Hell" was published; it earned the International Poetry Award in 1985. By the time he emigrated to the United States in 1995, his poems had achieved wide renown. His stanzas "became as familiar as songs," wrote Anh Do in The Los Angeles Times, and "continue to move the Vietnamese immigrant generation – and their sons and daughters."

By coincidence, the same newspaper page that carried Nguyen's obituary also ran a much longer story about Eric Hobsbawm, the famous British historian who died on Oct. 1 of pneumonia at age 95. The two men could hardly have been less alike.

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[Cincinatus' Wife]

Thank you for posting Jeff Jacoby’s piece.

Bump!

[bert]

“Have compassion, my child; love those who have it, but fly from the pious believers. Nothing is more dangerous than their company, their humble pride. They must either dominate or destroy…” - Rousseau

Wow..... wonder to whom that statement currently applies?

NeoMarxism is now failing in the hostile environment of flyover America

[Pietro]

An old man, w/ a Phd in Philosphy, once told me that the reason communism was bound to fail, and this was in the 70s, was because it went against human nature.

That is why our greatest defense against the Chicoms is freedom. And we can only be free if we're not straddled w/ suffocating debt.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

"Flyover country" instinctively recognizes The Perils of Designer Tribalism - and rejects it.

[elcid1970]

“If Russia were truly done with Communism and are now “Capitalists”, why would they still support Marxist dictatorships.....”

Because it costs them little and inconveniences the West. There’s also a lot of Soviet nostalgia among the Russian leadership.

You might also ask why Russia gives aid & comfort to the various Muslim entities in the Middle East & Central Asia, especially when it has a huge Muslim problem within its own borders. Answer - “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

There’s an excellent article at www.spectator.org about the never-ending political need for Moscow to blame external foes for Russia’s problems.

As for this article, the fact remains that there are to this day far more Marxists in the faculty lounges of American universities than there ever were in the now defunct Soviet Union.

[sergeantdave]

The words brilliant, intelligent and communist cannot appear in the same sentence unless you’re writing satire.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Later.