The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic [...]
József Cardinal Mindszenty's memoir is an epic of the great suffering of the Hungarian nation and of this man’s participation in it, out of his love for his people, his Church, and his God. In addition to the cruelties of totally repugnant totalitarianism, he endured abandonment by the Church, culminating in heartbreaking treatment by the [...]
When it’s written, the history of our time won’t dwell long on the hardships of the recent past. But history will ask: Did a nation borne of hope lose hope? Did a people forged by courage find courage wanting? Did a generation steeled by hard war and a harsh peace forsake honor at the moment [...]
When Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet regime as the “evil empire,” he was echoing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who said the USSR was “the concentration of world evil.” From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitols of the ancient states [...]
Without a deep religious faith, Whittaker Chambers could hardly have made his stand against Communism and, in fact, almost failed to do so. “The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great.” —Stepan Trofimvovitch, in The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is the [...]
Communists know that the strength of their regime is measured in terms of ideological uniformity. This is what makes the pervasiveness of COVID kitsch so unnerving. The coordinated censorship of opposing viewpoints, both scientific and conspiratorial, is creepily reminiscent of 20th-century excess. Sabina, the headstrong artist in Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, is haunted [...]
It seemed inconceivable that Marx could be seduced by Hitler. And yet “critical race theory” is as obsessed with race as were the Nazis. According to the new generation of Marxists, the political struggle is not about a struggle between the classes but a struggle between the races. Many years ago, when I was an [...]
John Dewey believed that education is synonymous with instilling progressive ideas into the consciousness of the child, and that the purpose of schools is to indoctrinate the young and construct a communist society. These are the foundations for disaster. For a hundred years the American education system has been married to the philosophy of John [...]
Marx and Engels’ endorsement of the racially-charged project of European imperialism, their casual dismissal of vast swathes of racialized humanity as ‘backward’ or immutably despotic, their indifference to the enslavement of millions of black Africans, and above all their unshakeable belief in the superiority of the white Germanic races, should leave no doubt in anyone’s [...]
In our new social paradigm, moral confusion abounds. Two popular ideologies—Marxism and Libertarianism—attempt to address this confusion. However, neither accounts for the fundamentally social nature of the human person: the way shared values conceive culture and art, how the primacy of belief binds communities together, or that we are born knowing we were created to [...]
The evidence is more than clear: Communism, socialism, and progressivism have each made huge comebacks, re-entering political discourse. Even their titles have reacquired respect and a semblance of dignity in many circles of public thought. What happened? The West won the Cold War in 1989, didn’t she? I am fiercely proud of the fact that [...]
Though they should be on the same side in their opposition to globalism, Russia and Poland have recently entered into an unholy spat over the history of World War II. The Russian Ambassador to Poland stated recently in an interview with the Russian news site rbc.ru that relations between Russia and Poland are “the worst [...]
“Red Metal” fully understands that we live in a post-Communist world, a world of fundamentalisms as well as of nation-states and tenuous alliances. I highly recommend the novel, not only for its entertainment value, but also for its ability to ask all the right questions we Americans need to be asking. Red Metal, by Mark [...]
A few years back, a film, The Act of Killing (2012), ran at a London cinema for 52 weeks. Such a run is unusual for any film: even more so for a documentary feature about Indonesia. The film’s subject matter revolves around one man, Anwar Congo, who is convivial, charming even, and with real screen [...]