ROBERT CONQUEST, RIP: “Sad news passing the news wire this hour of the passing of the great historian Robert Conquest, at the age of 98,” Steve Hayward writes at Power Line:
Conquest surely deserves to be counted among the top five most important historians of Communism and the Soviet Union in our time. His book The Great Terror, about the Soviet purges and deliberate famine policy of the 1930s, made it impossible for anyone to deny the essential character of Stalin’s regime. But leftists tried anyway. As the Wall Street Journal explains in its new story:
Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions—a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the Cold War in 1968, when sources about the Soviet Union were scarce, Mr. Conquest was vilified by leftists who said he exaggerated the number of victims. When the Cold War ended and archives in Moscow were thrown open, his estimates proved high but more accurate than those of his critics.
Like many great figures though, his most legendary line was supplied by someone else: As Conquest himself told the New York Review of Books, it was Kingsley Amis who famously quipped that Conquest should have re-titled the post-Soviet Union edition of The Great Terror “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”
ROBERT REICH: Personification of Big Government. The little twerp.
A MUST READ: Middlemarch by George Eliot
CONTENTIOUS SUBJECT, ACCURATE ANALYSIS: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/my-negro-problem-and-ours/A very knowledgable analysis of blacks and whites. Blacks are their own worst enemies.
OBAMA IS A TOTALITARIAN, NO DOUBT: If we escape his term in office without a major catastrophe it all be a miracle.
LIBERAL FASCISM WAS A REALLY GOOD BOOK:
Nestlé, eh? That business name rings a bell; it’s what launched Jonah Goldberg to write Liberal Fascism, which focused several chapters on a century’s worth of corporatism, the intertwining of government and corporations, much beloved by the namesake publisher of Bloomberg (and in an even more radical form by Bernie Sanders), which the post-Weimer government of Germany dubbed the Gleichschaltung. As Jonah told Kathryn Jean Lopez in 2009, at the apogee of the left’s Hopenchange Obamamania:
You know, when I first started pondering the book, I thought it might be all about economics. About ten years ago I went on a junket to Switzerland and attended a talk with the CEO of Nestlé. Listening to him, it became very clear to me that he had little to no interest in free markets or capitalism properly understood. He saw his corporation as a “partner” with governments, NGOs, the U.N., and other massive multinationals. The profit motive was good for efficiency and rewarding talent, but beyond that, he wanted order and predictability and as much planning as he could get. I think that mindset informs the entire class of transnational progressives, the shock troops of what H. G. Wells hoped would lead to his liberal-fascist “world brain.”
If you look at how most liberals think about economics, they want big corporations and big government working in tandem with labor, universities (think industrial policy), and progressive organizations to come up with “inclusive” policies set at the national or international level. That’s not necessarily socialism — it’s corporatism. When you listen to how Obama is making economic policy with “everyone at the table,” he’s describing corporatism, the economic philosophy of fascism. Government is the senior partner, but all of the other institutions are on board — so long as they agree with the government’s agenda. The people left out of this coordinated effort — the Nazis called it the Gleichschaltung — are the small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, the ideological, social, or economic mavericks who don’t want to play along. When you listen to Obama demonize Chrysler’s bondholders simply because they want their contracts enforced and the rule of law sustained, you get a sense of what I’m talking about.
I don’t think Obama wants a brutal tyranny any more than Hillary Clinton does (which is to say I don’t think he wants anything of the sort). But I do think they honestly believe that progress is best served if everyone falls in line with a national agenda, a unifying purpose, a “village” mentality expanded to include all of society. That sentiment drips from almost every liberal exhortation about everything from global warming to national service. But to point it out earns you the label of crank. As I said a minute ago about that “We’re All Fascists Now” chapter, I think people fail to understand that tyrannies — including soft, Huxleyan tyrannies — aren’t born from criminal conspiracies by evil men; they’re born by progressive groupthink.
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THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN DEMOCRATS RUN THINGS:
Those who ignore history make the rest of us suffer…
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