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The ghost of Walter Duranty still lives at The New York Times, and it has a perverse sense of timing. Last week, on the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Times continued its bizarre nostalgia series about communist dictatorships with a piece titled Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism. The author, Kristen Ghodsee, points to a single, post-reunification study to allege that women under the iron fist of East Germany had twice as many orgasms as women in capitalist West Germany.

Highlighting a single bright spot of communist life while mostly ignoring its many dangers, indignities, and rights violations would be bad enough. Ghodsee takes it a step further, however, by speculating that the totalitarianism she euphemistically refers to as a top-down campaign was actually the secret sauce in the communists successful female liberation.

Those comrades insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things needs an emancipation proclamation from above.

The leftist ideologue is forever being disappointed. Just as Vladimir Lenin was frustrated with the less-than-revolutionary Russian peasantry, the oppressed whom the modern left tries to liberate never seem to quite live up to expectations. Concerned with such frivolities as putting food on the table and spending time with their families, people always fall short of someone elses vision of liberation.

Even today, womens choices about work-life balance and the wage gap those choices create cause many furrowed feminist brows. Actual womenwho in surveys still indicate that their ideal work-family balance is part-time work, despite all the social pressure nowadays against this viewsimply arent as radical as they ought to be when left free to choose their own paths. Ghodsees solution, like the GDRs, is simple: women must be forcibly liberated for their own good.

There is just enough truth in The New York Times article to bolster its radical message. Just as the Roaring Twenties in the United States swept in many changes in womens social roles, so too the 1920s in the Soviet Union brought a period of genuine sexual libertinism and experimentation, encouraged by the vanguard of communist intellectuals that populated Russian cafes. In the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution, peopleespecially those far away from the bloody revolution itselfcould be more easily forgiven for thinking that communism was going to lead to a happier, more prosperous future, given that most of the twentieth-century examples of its barbarism had yet to occur.

But the reality of life in the Warsaw Pact was decidedly different than the picture Ghodsee paints in her column. My father, who grew up in Communist Poland, describes the women he recalls, married in their 20s and 30s, as exhausted, spending most of their time outside of working hours standing in lines and feverishly combing contacts to scrape together the bare necessities for their households.

If American feminists think their second shiftworking full-time and still remaining primarily responsible for domestic dutiesis a burden, they should try to imagine the average womans life in communist paradise, where women went without capitalisms time-saving household appliances and frequently confronted empty grocery shelves.

The laundry list of progressive policies listed in the articlegovernment-paid maternity leave, mandated equality in work, daycare centers to remove parental responsibilities and rear the new generation of homo sovieticusnowhere near made up for being turned away from the toilet paper line.

And as soon as female liberation came up against the needs of the communist state, those benefits were reversed, as happened in Ceausescus Romania. Romania was one of the most sexually liberated countries in the Warsaw Pact, but when its government leaders decided it needed more Romanians, contraception and abortion not only lost state support, but became punishable by law virtually overnight.

Yes, Ms. Ghodsee, in communist societies, men and women were equal: equally poor and afraid of their own government.

In the face of a disheartening future, with little hope of being financially successful, intellectually curious, or artistically exploratory outside of dogma-sanctioned boundaries, young people in communist societies leaned more strongly on their personal relationships for happiness. They found joy where they could, in the excitement of a new romance, or in the right bunch of flowers to bring a smile to a wifes face and a little color to a gray home. Its possible they also found it in more frequent sex, as Ghodsees article claims, although her single data point and two interviews are hardly convincing evidence.

But even these personal joys were infected by the Communist state, as movingly demonstrated in the plot of 2007s Oscar-winning film, The Lives of Others. Trust was broken between husbands and wives, as the secret police found ways to play their fears against one another to control the population. In Ghodsees alleged sexual utopia, the GDR, it is estimated that almost one in six people was an informant for the Stasi. Many were coerced, bullied, and broken into betraying the lovers with whom they were having those all-important orgasms.

There is nothing romantic about life in such a system. It is incompatible with the basic dignity of the human being. Instead of tallying up orgasms, Ghodsee should instead listen to the words of one of Russias greatest female poets, Anna Akhmatova, who had a truer impression of life under communism.

Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth Through which one hundred million people scream; Thats how I wish them to remember me when I am dead On the eve of my remembrance day. If someone someday in this country Decides to raise a memorial to me, I give my consent to this festivity But only on this condition do not build it By the sea where I was born, I have severed my last ties with the sea; Nor in the Tsars Park by the hallowed stump Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me; Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours And no-one slid open the bolt. Listen, even in blissful death I fear That I will forget the Black Marias*, Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman Howled like a wounded beast.

* Black Marias is a reference to the vans used by the secret police, which made people disappear, whether to interrogation cells or to the gulags.

Inez Feltscher Stepman is an education policy analyst in Washington DC. Her work has been published in Orange County Register, The Resurgent, RedState, Breitbart.com, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @inezfeltscher.

Original post:
Quit Glorifying Communism. There Is Nothing Romantic About Life In A Police State - The Federalist

Take the Czech Republic, for instance.

After World War I, statues from the vanished Hapsburg empire were quickly taken down and replaced by Czechoslovakias new, democratic heroes, like Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, its first president. After World War II, Communists erased Masaryk from public tributes, but he was put back in place after that system collapsed. One statue of Masaryk in the small town of Holesov was taken away and re-erected five times, said Zdenek Lukes, a historian and architect in Prague.

Mr. Lukes opposes the removal of such statues, but he said that in some cases a little historical context must be added. I like the solution they used in the town of Litomysl, Mr. Lukes said. Instead of removing a statue of the Communist minister of culture, they placed a plaque there explaining who he was and what he did.

Slovakia, which broke away after the fall of communism, also reveres Masaryk, but has built its own stable of national heroes, with the biggest disputes over the countrys wartime leader, Jozef Tiso, who was hanged for collaborating with the Nazis. Though monuments to Tiso are still shunned in most of the country, the small village of Cakajovce has erected its own Pantheon of Slovak Historical Figures, with Tiso at the center.

The recent bloody history of Eastern Europe, where occupation by Nazis and then Soviets scrambled political allegiances, has made the region especially susceptible to these waves of political upheaval. But such disputes are not confined to the East.

The spectacular tomb of Spains former fascist ruler, Gen. Francisco Franco, at Valle de los Caidos is still a pilgrimage destination for conservative Spaniards, and has survived several efforts to remove it.

In Italy, the right-wing mayor of Brescia tried in 2013 to restore a monumental statue of a muscular youth from 1932, called Fascist Era but nicknamed Bigio by residents to its perch in the center of town.

The statue, placed in storage after the war, should be seen as a work of art, the mayor argued, bled of its fascist baggage. Many disagreed, vehemently. He lost the next election, and his successor chose to keep Bigio in storage, where he remains.

In Germany, Nazi images and symbols were scrubbed from public spaces immediately after the war, and the display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols is illegal. The site of the bunker where Hitler died has been obscured, to deny neo-fascists a rallying point. The Olympic Stadium, where Hitler presided over the 1936 Games, is still in use, though stripped of all Nazi regalia.

The fall of the Berlin Wall presented fresh challenges. Statues of Lenin were swiftly removed in the early 1990s, but some sites were converted, including a former prison for the Communist security police that was turned into an informational center teaching about the past.

The goal, Culture Minister Monika Grtters of Germany said, is to explain everything, without holding back, without an agenda, without seeking to be in the right.

The extent to which these political symbols from the past still inflame emotions can be seen from a passerbys reaction in Dresden this month to a drunken American tourist giving a Nazi salute a solid punch in the face.

Normally, when jarring political changes happen, the statues of the former leaders and heroes are among the first casualties. Iraqis pulled Saddam Hussein from his perch in Firdos Square in 2003, and there are countless shots of Lenin flat on his face after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

To Ivaylo Dichev, a professor of culture anthropology at Sofia University in Bulgaria, the recent scenes from the United States have a clear resonance. Eastern Europe went through a similar period in the 90s, when a lot of Communist-era monuments were removed, he said.

In many cases, countries chose to move Communist-era statues to tourist-oriented sites, like Gruto Parkas in Lithuania and Memento Park outside Budapest.

But that has not halted controversies over public monuments.

In 2007, the removal from the center of Estonias capital of a statue of a Soviet soldier, head bent to mourn the deaths of comrades killed fighting the Nazis, resulted in riots by ethnic Russians.

In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has led the country in a nationalist direction, disputes over public monuments have become a regular feature.

A statue dedicated to Soviet heroes in a park near Parliament was painted red several times by activists. And a monument dedicated to all the victims of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, in the same park, was widely criticized as an attempt by Mr. Orbans government to obscure Hungarys wartime history by ignoring its collaboration with the Nazis in the murder of Hungarys Jews.

In Bulgaria, the authorities decided this year to remove a huge Soviet-era monument that had been left to molder in Sofia since Communisms collapse. But in July, pro-Russian protesters took to the streets, and the demolition was temporarily halted.

This was after activists, in 2011, defaced a huge monument to the Soviet Army in Sofias main park by painting its heroic figures to look like Superman, Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald. The monument has been a regular target of politically minded vandals ever since. In 2013, someone painted all the figures bright pink, spurring an official complaint from the Russian Embassy and an apology from the Bulgarian government.

But not all disputes over public statuary in Europe are fallout from the Nazi and Soviet years. Continuing political turmoil has produced fresh ones.

The breakup of Yugoslavia in the wars of the 1990s caused many of the countries that emerged including Croatia and Macedonia to remove monuments to the former countrys Communist-era leader, Josip Broz Tito.

In Skopje, Macedonias capital, where Titos image was once ubiquitous, he now presides mainly outside a single elementary school named for him. Instead, fresh disputes over public statuary have flared up.

Eager to establish itself as a sovereign nation, Macedonias rulers went on a building spree in Skopje, erecting dozens of statues of contemporary political figures, as well as a giant one known as Warrior, but looking suspiciously like Alexander the Great seen as a rebuke to the neighboring Greek province of Macedonia, which complained that Alexander was theirs to honor.

Now, the nationalist leader who went on the building spree, Nikola Gruevski, has been removed from office and his left-wing successors are trying to decide what to do with all the statues of lawmakers and ministers from a former government.

In this case, we can see how certain symbology can be eruptive and damaging for a democracy when used in political causes, said Aleksandar Petrov, an architect and author in Skopje.

Of course, such problems have bedeviled Europe since the dawn of civilization as new conquerors erased traces of their predecessors, leaving behind a patchwork of stone survivors from ancient Rome to the Holy Roman Empire whose subjects may not have been exemplars of human rights and modern morality.

Nobody would even think of removing statues of Napoleon or Roman emperors, said Mr. Lukes, the Czech historian.

After a certain point, time erases political enmity and the images lose much of their symbolic power. Perhaps, he said, a way forward in America would be to emulate Litomysls example and add context to the monument.

I believe a plaque explaining who he was and what he did would suit General Lee very well, Mr. Lukes said.

Reporting was contributed by Joanna Berendt from Warsaw; Hana de Goeij from Prague; Aleksandar Dimishkovski from Skopje, Macedonia; and Melissa Eddy from Annaberg-Buchholz, Germany.

A version of this article appears in print on August 18, 2017, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Political Rage Over Statues? Old News in the Old World.

The rest is here:
Political Rage Over Statues? Old News in the Old World - New York Times

One cold grey February morning, back in 2001, we turned the key and opened the creaking gate on to a world that could not have been further from the built-up street just strides away. As far as the eye could see, scattered sheds teetered on the edge of a tidal wave of dense bramble. Halfway down the hill, just as the path disappeared into this surge, were plots 20 to 24: our new allotments. Whatever else, this was going to be groundbreaking stuff.

Driven by the vision that more food can and should be grown in London, we set up OrganicLea on a derelict allotment in Chingford, east London. The Lea Valley, which for centuries used the river to transport food down the Thames, from Saxon settlers growing celery in the sixth century to Italians growing cucumbers in glasshouses in the 1950s, was a good place to start.

Over the next year or two we cleared the brambles, made a compost heap, built raised beds, and planted a forest garden with apple trees, worcesterberries and blackcurrant bushes. We created a number of features, including a pond, a willow dome and a compost toilet, built into a honeysuckle bush. All our vegetable planting was done using organic and permaculture principles, working with nature, not against it, to grow food in a sustainable way. We then started to run rudimentary gardening courses from the potting shed, and sell our seasonal produce.

For the past nine years we have managed the 12-acre site as a community market garden. We grow more than eight tonnes of fruit and veg a year, feeding 330 households through our veg box scheme, as well as sending produce to market stalls and eateries across London. We work with the local council to deliver accredited horticulture courses and helped it develop a food policy, which aims to ensure that locally grown, healthy and sustainable food is affordable and accessible to all.

We also run a volunteering programme that welcomes participants from all walks of life to take part, from seed sowing to veg box packing. And we support young people and residents groups to develop their own food growing spaces all over east London.

We do all this as a workers co-operative, employing 15 members. Where normal allotments are rented by individuals, were a community food project, and as a workers co-operative we manage the operation ourselves, without any need for bosses or shareholders.

The community food movement is flowering in the UK and we are proud founder members of Londons community food growers network and the land workers alliance, organisations that are drawing people back to the land and using the land as a way to contribute to local politics.

Allotment gardens have always been more than mere domestic food growing units. From their very beginning in the Victorian period, when land was given to the labouring poor for growing food, theyve provided a space for recreation and an alternative to industrial capitalism.

Allotments offer a way for individuals and the community to come together. They are special places. In 1908, the Small Holdings and Allotments Act placed a duty on local authorities to provide allotments according to demand, and by the end of the first world war land was made available to everyone, primarily as a way of assisting returning service men. By 1925, local authorities were banned from selling or converting allotments without ministerial consent.

This means that, legally speaking, selling from allotment gardens is a murky issue. It is legally permissible for allotment gardens to market the surplus, up to 49% of what allotmenteers produce, and councils are also entitled to put unwanted allotments to commercial use on a year-by-year basis. We believe there is a strong case for promoting limited trading activity: it would enable people to spend more time on their plots, because they can generate some income from it, and would stimulate the local food economy.

By 2009, seven years after signing our first allotment contract, we had built such a reputation that when the council closed down its central plant nursery operation, it entrusted us with the facility. Our site is now located where they originally managed all the local parks and street tree operations.

We are one of many responses to a broken food system, that exploits producers and harms consumers. It contributes significantly to climate change, air and water pollution and is essentially run for the short term profits of food corporations rather than the long term benefit of communities and the environment.

Our purpose is to demonstrate what can happen if groups of committed people with ideas are given space to nurture and grow.

Ru Litherland works at OrganicLea

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Carrots and communism: the allotments plotting a food revolution - The Guardian

Arnold Ahlert Aug. 17, 2017

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the two revolutions that swept through Russia, ending the reign of the czarists and enabling the rise of radical Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Since then communist ideology has precipitated the deaths of more than 100 million people and counting.

The riot in Charlottesville last Saturday is a stark reminder of the American Lefts dubious double standard with regard to virulent ideologies. While leftists are correctly contemptuous of the Nazism that forms the foundation of white supremacist hate groups, they retain a soft spot in their hearts for Communism.

And yet both ideologies are flip sides of the same totalitarian coin.

For most leftists, and many other Americans, Hitlers Third Reich remains the ultimate expression of racist, murderous hate. Yet among the 20th centurys worst mass murderers, Adolf Hitler comes in third by a wide margin. By most historical estimates, Hitler murdered six million Jews and an additional five million others, bringing his total to 11 million.

Josef Stalins total is conventionally put at 20 million killed, with some historians contending it may be twice that number.

Both men pale in comparison to Mao Zedung. Chairman Mao bears responsibility for 40 to 77 million killed, with the discrepancy owing to an ongoing historical argument over whether the mass starvation of millions in Chinas great famine (1958-1961) was intentional or not. Most historians lean toward the higher number.

Mao and Stalin were Communisms superstars, but there were other mass murderers like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979 and killed up to two million people. Their ascendance was part of the Communist takeover of the Southeast Asian Peninsula following Americas withdrawal from Vietnam, whose own fall to Communism was aided and abetted by a Democrat-controlled Congress that cut funding to South Vietnams government from $700 million in 1974 to only $300 million the following year. This enabled Hanois Communist takeover and additional mass murders.

So why is Hitler, as opposed to Mao or Stalin, the embodiment of evil? Because the American Left has never completely rejected its belief in the philosophy of Communism and its radical egalitarian, collectivist worldview. Leftists only wish to paint the American Right as racist, and thus use Nazis as a bludgeon.

Moreover, a certain level of nostalgia remains the order of the day. In a series of articles called Red Century, The New York Times explored an ideology it alternately acknowledged as horrific yet morally complex.

Morally bankrupt is more like it, despite Times columnist and Democratic Socialists of America vice chairman Bhaskar Sunkaras pathetic attempt to separate the message from the messengers. We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how to avoid their failures, he insists.

Such contemptible nonsense courtesy of the Times is nothing new. Reporter Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for singing Stalins praises during a Ukrainian famine that killed 10 million in 1932. Yet as Sunkara indicates, Durantys apologist take you cant make an omelet without breaking a few eggs remains ideologically operational.

It also remains literally operational in Venezuela, whose implosion reveals the rank ignorance of leftist useful idiots like Jesse Jackson, Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, Oliver Stone and others who hailed the 21st century Socialism that is devolving into totalitarian tyranny.

The same totalitarian tyranny entrenched in North Korea.

To communist sympathizers and adherents, none of it matters. Nor does it matter that Communisms founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were avowed racists and anti-Semites. Both expressed contempt for Mexicans, politicians with nger-like features, a quality Engels referred to as a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, and the huckstering Marx referred to as the worldly religion of the Jew.

The progressive blind spot to communism reflects historical ignorance on the part of Americans and Europeans, columnist Michael Rubin asserts.

In America, it is cultivated ignorance. Thus 40% of Millennials believe its acceptable to suppress offensive speech about minorities, while minorities and their equally clueless allies countenance elimination of history itself, emulating the Islamic State, as well as the Nazis who destroyed any piece of art Hitler found offensive.

And on Americas college campuses, where leftists routinely shut down speech they define as hate employing violence if necessary to do so they are emulating Communist Chinas Red Guard movement that precipitated attacks on those whose traditional views were insufficiently revolutionary.

The Lefts cultivation of communist ideas has occurred for decades. In 1993, Library of Congress experts traveled to Moscow to copy previously secret records of Communist Party USA activities that had been sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping. They reveal irrefutable evidence of cooperation between the Soviets and American leftists from the 20s through the '40s. Coded Soviet intercepts known as the Venona Papers confirmed that infiltration, vindicating much of what Sen. Joseph McCarthy asserted during the '50s, despite his continuing status as the Lefts most enduring icon of evil.

In the '60s, the college students who recoiled in the presence of a swastika did so while wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and singing the praises of Communist Party U.S.A. radicals like Angela Davis. It was also a time when future failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was learning and teaching the revolutionary tactics of communist sympathizer Saul Alinsky tactics Barack Obama perfected in winning the presidency.

In the '70s and '80s, Democrats pursued their admiration of the Soviet Union with vigor, making peace trips to the USSR, often as members of communist-created front groups. And when Ronald Reagan called the Soviets the evil empire they actually were, Democrats painted him as a warmonger who would lead the nation to nuclear holocaust. Moreover, the party that currently excoriates Donald Trump for his Russian connections apparently had no problem when Ted Kennedy offered to help the Soviets thwart Reagans re-election.

Most recently, the Obama administration had at least two communist sympathizers working for it: former White House Communication Director Anita Dunn, who professed admiration for Mao Zedung, and former CIA Director John Brennan, who voted for Communist Party candidate Gus Hall in 1980. As for Obama himself, a video from 1995 shows him stating he was taught about race relations by Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis.

Until the left, and all the institutions influenced by the left, acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world, argues Dennis Prager.

Of course, as Prager knows full well, the American Left embraces Communism. Moreover, moral confusion is a necessary component of leftist power. When right and wrong are relative, by any means necessary becomes a reasonable substitute. Exhibit A is a despicable Washington Post op-ed by Johns Hopkins University associate professor N.D.B. Connolly, who insists leftist generic solutions to racism, etc. arent working.

What to do instead? Start throwing rocks, he advises.

Thus, 100 years and 100 million deaths later, the American Lefts infatuation with Communism remains undimmed. And as decent Americans recoil in disgust, the historical purges remain ongoing, begging the inevitable question:

When do the book burnings begin?

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The American Left's Infatuation With Communism - Patriot Post

Catholic World News

August 17, 2017

The secretary-general of the Russian Catholic bishops conference has asked Christians in the West to help keep alive the memory of Russian Christians who died under Communist persecution.

The sufferings in Soviet prisons and labor camps remain an issue for the whole of society in Russia, said Msgr. Igor Kovalevsky. Churches have been built to those who died for the faith, who deserve to be compared to the martyrs of Christianitys first centuries.

Msgr. Kovalevsky reported that during the Great Purge of the Stalin era, 442 Catholic priests and more than 100,000 Orthodox priests were killed. Of more than 1,000 Catholic churches and chapels, all but two were destroyed or converted for secular use.

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Catholic Church in Russia recalls victims of Communism - Catholic Culture