Time for another LinkSwarm!
Posts Tagged ‘Communism’
LinkSwarm for May 6, 2013
Monday, May 6th, 2013May 1st: Victims of Communism Day
Wednesday, May 1st, 2013Today is an important day.
I’m speaking, of course, of Victims of Communism Day.
People may say that anti-communism is a cause that’s passe, but keep in mind that:
Plus, the crimes of an ideology that killed 100 million people should never be forgotten. Especially one that still has friends in high places.
More on Margaret Thatcher: Quotes, Videos and Tributes
Monday, April 8th, 2013More on the late Margaret Thatcher:
“I am not a consensus politician. I’m a conviction politician.”
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
Britain was a disaster: The lights frequently went out, trash was piled up in the streets, and the IMF was called in to bail the treasury out — in response to which the civil service decided that their role was to “manage” Britain’s decline and fall….’Diversity’ types are amusingly silent about her — and for good reason, as her example is utterly lethal to the culture of victimhood on which they rely. The global Left, likewise, has strong motives to disparage her: She realized that decline was a choice….She was right and they were wrong. While they blathered, she helped to defeat Communism, restored democracy to the Falklands, and saved Britain from the reds at home. She was, without doubt, our finest post-war premier and she made an incalculable contribution to the life of my country of birth.
Those on the Left who still probably regard Thatcher as a hate-figure, have either forgotten the history of the Cold War or possibly never understood that Communism meant the virtual enslavement of millions of people in the East European countries, who loathed its ideology as much as Margaret Thatcher herself. It is simply not possible to imagine Thatcher visiting Russia in the 1930s, like certain Left-wing useful idiots from Britain, and being taken in by Stalin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary East Europeans took a different view of her to her critics in this country. For them she symbolised opposition to Communism; indeed she was given a tumultuous welcome by the shipyard workers in Gdansk when she visited them. She wept at the sight.
Thatcher on Socialism
Announcing the invasion of the Falklands
Her statement on European integration (“No! No! No!”).
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
Thatcher on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Firing Line:
On the danger of the Euro:
Margaret Thatcher, RIP
Monday, April 8th, 2013Margaret Thatcher has died. With Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, she made up the trio of moral leaders in the West who understood what a great evil communism was when so many wanted to appease it, paving the way for the West’s ultimate triumph in the Cold War. Her free market polices reinvigorated a strike-wracked UK economy many thought moribund. She arrested the British military’s decline and retook the Falkland Islands while Tory “wets” were quitely pushing to let them go.
She tamed the IRA and forced a Labour Party dominated by communust-friendly fossils Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock to reform and tack back toward the center.
She was hugely influential, smart, capable, and exactly the sort of leader the UK needed in the dark days of the late 1970s. The UK shall not see her like again.
LinkSwarm for June 22, 2012
Friday, June 22nd, 2012A quick LinkSwarm for a busy Friday:
May 1: Observing Victims of Communism Day
Tuesday, May 1st, 2012Today is May 1st, meaning that once again it’s time to observe Victims of Communism Day. As I’ve written before, Communism killed somewhere between 85 million and 140 million people.
And the world in general, and the international left in specific, still hasn’t come to gripes with the scale of the scale of mass murder committed in the name of communism.
LinkSwarm for January 9, 2012
Monday, January 9th, 2012Like a squirrel hording nuts for winter, I’ve set aside a few tasty links for you to chew on:
Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.
Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.
[snip]
Not only does redistributionist government direct wealth upward; in asserting a right to do so, it siphons power into itself. A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government “corrections” of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic.This reticence, in an age in which political reticence is rare, reflects the difficulty of articulating principled defenses of these practices. They go undefended because they are generally popular with a public that misunderstands their net effects and because the practices are the political class’s vocation today. The big winners from these practices are that class and the interests adept at collaborating with it.
Government uses redistribution to correct social outcomes that offend it. But government rarely explains, or perhaps even recognizes, the reasoning by which it decides why particular outcomes of consensual market activities are incorrect. When taxes are levied not to efficiently fund government but to impose this or that notion of distributive justice, remember: Taxes are always coerced contributions to government, which is always the first, and often the principal, beneficiary of them.
Call it The Dennis Moore Effect. “He steals from the poor, and gives to the rich…”
Hat tips: Real Clear Politics, Insta, Ace.
China Cuts TV By 2/3rds
Thursday, January 5th, 2012“Chinese broadcasters have axed two-thirds of popular TV shows in line with a government directive to curb “excessive entertainment,” according to local media reports.”
“Air time will be filled instead with extended news bulletins and ‘programs that promote traditional virtues and socialist core values.’”
I don’t think you want to do that, sunshine. People like their TV, and they need something to distract them from China’s imploding economy, general unrest, specific unrest among the Muslim population, unequal sex ratios, Communist Party suppression of dissent, and the endemic corruption. You want to give them more circuses, not less. Do they really think that The Happy Socialist Progress Hour is an acceptable substitute for a popular drama or comedy, or can they just not afford circuses anymore?
And if they can no longer afford the circuses, how soon will it be before they can no longer afford the bread?
Vaclav Havel, RIP
Sunday, December 18th, 2011We’ve lost one of the great heroes of the 20th century.
Vaclav Havel, a man who was (in chronological order) an important playwright, a hero of the struggle against communism, and founding President of the Czech Republic, is dead at 75.
Of the three, Havel’s role in the struggle against communism was far and away the most important. In a country in which the state’s (and in turn Moscow’s) imprimatur was necessary for a playwright to make a living, Havel refused to buckle under or avoid criticizing the great evil that was communism. In the wake of Prague Spring, his works were banned and he was repeatedly imprisoned, but he kept speaking out, finally helping lead the Velvet Revolution and, after the fall of Communism, setting the stage for the “Velvet Divorce,” in which the Czech Republic and Slovakia split peacefully into two separate nations, even though he opposed it.
Havel, unlike Yasser Arafat, Le Duc Tho and Barack Obama, never won a Nobel Peace Prize, despite doing more for peace, justice and freedom than the vast majority of winners.
Understand that there are people as noble, brave and truthful as Havel sitting in jail in Cuba and China this very moment, many of whom who have been beaten and tortured for speaking truth to power. And Havel, in and out of power, never stopped fighting for the victims of communism, as shown by this video:
Texas Senate Race Update for November 5, 2011
Saturday, November 5th, 2011I suppose I should do these updates some day other than Friday night Saturday morning, since few people read them then or over the weekend, but it’s been a busy week…
Cubans here and there have had to endure the calamities of the Revolution alone. Conservatives in America reached out to us and supported us, and our parents found solace in their enmity to Communism. But they weren’t really with us either, because they had no idea how awful Fidel Castro really was. It simply isn’t within the comprehension of any American that someone could actually choose to be as evil as Castro. The sheer depravity of his crimes against the Cuban people helped to keep the depredations of his rule a secret hiding in plain sight, where only other Cubans could see them.
It’s no surprise that liberal papers such as the Dallas Morning News now think they’re in some position to judge which families are truly exiles and which aren’t. It was liberal papers — particularly the New York Times — that originally built Castro up into an international hero and persisted in romanticizing him long after he offered Cuba’s young men to the Kremlin as a Third World army. It was liberal papers that blamed the U.S. embargo for the economic catastrophe into which Castro plunged Cuba. It was liberal newspapers that helped to occlude the unspeakable daily abuses of Castro’s regime beneath the fantasy of a romantic nationalist who was bravely willing to stand up to imperialism.
“There is power,” the Dallas Morning News tells us, “in linking your past and your future to this unending struggle [against Fidel]. But because the fathers of both these men [Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio] migrated several years before the revolution, as is now clear, the link is at best a stretch. In the case of Cruz, the situation is even more complicated because his father originally supported Castro.” What utter nonsense. It would be offensive if the editors actually had any idea what they were talking about. No Cuban exile would for a second say that the Rubio and Cruz families were any less exile than anyone else. All of our families lost their homeland. That some were already here when it happened is irrelevant — nobody meant to forsake Cuba by coming here. We lost Cuba because Castro took it from us, from all of us, born and unborn, both here and back there.
Among Cuban-Americans, having been an early supporter of Castro in no way diminishes your anti-Communist credentials. On the contrary, it is the typical story for almost every family. Virtually all of our families opposed the dictatorship of Batista. Virtually all of our families believed Castro’s rhetoric of democracy and liberty. The first thing everyone hated about him was his evident relish in betraying his most ardent supporters. That was the first of many very personal reasons he would give us to hate him, reasons that only we can really understand.
What makes us exiles is not merely the fact that our families can’t go back to Cuba. It is that Castro wantonly ruined the land that our families grew up in, the land of our forefathers, and now that land exists only in the fading black-and-white pictures and memories of the happy childhoods of a generation that is dying now. Compared with that, what possible difference could it make that our grandparents arrived one year and not another? Senator Rubio didn’t know exactly what year his father first got here because it doesn’t matter.
Still, I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised by the Dallas Morning News’s display of presumptuousness and ignorance. The editors are decent people, and if they knew even 5 percent of what I know about the Revolution and its exiles, I’m sure they would be deeply ashamed of what they’ve written. But they don’t and they never will — Castro has already seen to that.
Read the whole thing.
- Ted Cruz: 54%
- Glenn Addison: 21%
- Lela Pittenger: 20%
- Andrew Castanuela: 5%
- David Dewhurst: <1%
