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Has anyone else observed a striking pattern in the New York Times recently? Theyve hosted a series of fond, nostalgic recollections about the good old days of twentieth-century Communismthe optimism, the idealism, the moral authority. Not to mention the gulags, the squalor, and the soul-crushing conformity.

Actually, they dont usually mention those things. These articles are part of a series called Red Century, which is supposedly dedicated to exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution. But that history and legacy turn out to be very selectively explored. The editors of the Times could easily spend a year filling their newspaper with a hair-raising litany of Communisms crimes across the globe, stuff that would keep their readers up at night for weeks. Theres certainly no shortage of material: the terror, the gulags, the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, and so on. Yet in this series, the crimes of Communism are mostly just hinted at.

A few articles deal forthrightly with the horrors of the Soviet regime. Others present being a member of the secret police as a morally complex issueit was way to build the future and be a part of something larger than themselvessomething I doubt the Times would be foolish enough to publish if it were about a former member of the Gestapo or the Klan.

Disturbingly, most entries are in this vein of talking about the idealism and human warmth and just plain caring of the people who denied the gulags and the mass starvation in Ukraine. Sure, they may have abetted the torture and murder of millions, but their devotion to creating a more just world was infectious, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substanceto an urgent sense of social injustice, and all of it was infused by an inherent optimism for the future, implied by socialism and progressivism.

The overall thrust of the series is summed up in a call to try Communism again, but maybe this time try not to have any gulags. No, really.

This time, people get to vote. Well, debate and deliberate and then voteand have faith that people can organize together to chart new destinations for humanity.

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.

Meanwhile, we can actually tune in live and see what happens when someone tries to act on this idea of reviving the Communist ideal. A few years ago, leftist pundits were praising Venezuela as a socialist miracle. Then the socialist regime hit the Thatcher Line: it ran out of other peoples money (in this case, oil company money) and the illusion came crashing down. The result: desperate poverty, shortages, squalor, children dying in hospitals from lack of medicine and equipment, refugees fleeing in makeshift boats.

In other words: your basic rundown for a radical socialist regime. Its not the first time this has happened. Its not even the tenth time.

And the socialist revolutionaries respond the way they always have: they try to save the revolution by exterminating political freedom. In the past few weeks, while folks at The New York Times were airily speculating about reviving Communism, but in a good way, Venezuelas socialist revolutionaries staged a flagrantly rigged vote to overturn representative government, and now they have brought back the midnight knock on the door, with the arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of opposition leaders.

At home, the Left is calling for resistance against the authoritarianism of Donald Trumpwhile their most prominent mouthpieces are actively whitewashing a movement that stands for totalitarianism, and the actual young idealists in places like Venezuela are getting gunned down in the streets by the regime. Some of this has even been reported in The New York Times. Maybe somebody ought to inform the opinion editors.

What is it about a thoroughly discredited doctrine like Communism that just wont die? My overall sense from the Red Century series is that enough years have passed since the fall of the Iron Curtain that Western intellectuals now feel they can get away with downplaying Communisms crimes and failures and return to rapturous descriptions of its abstract ideals, without the need any longer to take a serious look at what those ideals really meant in practice.

The theory of Communismthe elevation of the collective over the individual and of government dictates above free, private decision-makingis the fundamental cause of all of its evils. But its also a moral theory with old roots, on that has established itself in many peoples minds as synonymous with morality itself. Of course everyone should put the collective public good over private interestswhat could possibly go wrong? Well, we found out what could go wrong, over and over again. We have plenty of reasons to think that individual rights and private interests are actually essential to a free and prosperous societynot to mention that they might help keep us out of the gulag.

But if you cant bring yourself to question whether the theory of socialism is synonymous with the very idea of morality and progress, you wont be able to relinquish the socialist dream, even after it has been exposed as a nightmare.

This deep vein of denial has troubling consequences. One signstill on a very small scaleis the reconstitution of Young Communist Clubs, something I havent seen much of since I was in college in 1989, the year reality pulled the rug out from under all of the earnest young socialists. This can only be happening again because todays young people have been allowed to grow up ignorant of the nature of Communism, both in the past and in the present. And this is aided and abetted by publications at the top of the culture, like The New York Times, as they draw a gauzy curtain of nostalgia across the history of twentieth-century Communism.

One of those Red Century encomiums to Communist idealism sums up its case by recalling Rosa Luxemburgs revolutionary ultimatum: socialism or barbarism.' But the lesson of historyheck, the lesson of our own timeis that socialism is barbarism.

Dont let The New York Times send this truth down the memory hole.

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Why Is The New York Times Trying to Rehabilitate Communism? - The Federalist

"Teekond" ("Journey" in English) was chosen as the winning design for the Victims of Communism Memorial in Tallinn.

State real estate management company Riigi Kinnisvara AS (RKAS) has announced a public procurement worth 4.5 million for the construction of the planned Victims of Communism Memorial in Tallinn, the deadline for which is Sept. 12.

According to the procurement notice, he contract is planned to enter into force on Oct. 10 and construction work should be completed by Aug. 1, 2018.

The memorial is to cost up to 4.5 million, exclusive of VAT. Its construction will be financed from the state budget.

The planned site of the future memorial is the Maarjame subdistrict of Tallinn, between the districts of Kadriorg and Pirita. The memorial will include the names of approximately 20,000 people who lost their lives as a result of the actions of the communist regime last century, many of whom died far from home and were buried in unknown graves.

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RKAS announces procurement for construction of communism victims memorial - ERR News

Blessed Virgin, Mother of Coromoto, heavenly Patron of Venezuela, free our country from the claws of communism and socialism, the CEV posted on Twitter this Sunday, complete with an image of Santa Maria and a Venezuelan flag.

On Sunday, Venezuelan President Nicols Maduro convened the members of the Constituent Assembly for a vote to replace Venezuelas National Assembly with a new National Constituent Assembly, an attempt to further concentrate his power and eliminate the legislative body that has an opposition majority.

Maduro declared a sweeping victory for himself, which will give him near absolute power over the crisis-torn nation.

The unpopular socialist president is a former bus driver who worked his way up to become a member of the inner circle of former President Hugo Chvez. Chvez eventually made Maduro his vice-president and recommended him as successor to the presidency.

Maduros calling of the Constituent Assembly was harshly criticized by the Venezuelan bishops, who in a communiqu issued on July 27 called the measure unconstitutional, as well as unnecessary, inopportune and harmful for the Venezuelan people.

The Treasury Department has reacted to the power grab by imposing sanctions on Maduro, sending a clear signal of the Trump administrations opposition to his regime.

Yesterdays illegitimate elections confirm that Maduro is a dictator who disregards the will of the Venezuelan people, said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a statement announcing the sanctions.

As of Monday, all of the Venezuelan presidents assets that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction were frozen, and all U.S. citizens have been barred from dealing with him.

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Venezuelan Bishops Pray to Virgin Mary to Free the Country from the 'Claws of Communism' - Breitbart News

Venezuelan people living in Brazil protest against the election of the Constituent Assembly in Venezuela (Getty Images)

The appeal comes as Venezuela descends further into chaos and violence

The Venezuelan Bishops Conference has pleaded for the intercession of the Virgin Mary to free their country from the claws of communism and socialism.

As the country descends further into political chaos, the bishops posted the prayer to their Twitter account along with an image of Mary and a Venezuelan flag.

The prayer reads: Most Holy Virgin, Mother of Coromoto, heavenly Patron of Venezuela, free our homeland from the claws of communism and socialism.

The tweet was posted as Venezuelans went to the polls the elect members for a constituent assembly charged with rewriting the countrys constitution.

President Nicols Maduro convened the assembly on 1 May amid increasingly violent anti-government protests, arguing that rewriting the constitution would promote reconciliation and peace.

Opposition activists accuse the socialist president of a power grab and fear he will use the assembly to cement his own position and hold on to power.

No independent observers monitored the vote, and other South American countries such as Colombia, Panama, Peru and Argentina have refused to recognise it.

Venezuelas bishops have denounced the assembly as unconstitutional and as unnecessary, inconvenient and damaging for the Venezuelan people.

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Bishops plead to Virgin Mary to free Venezuela from 'claws of communism' - Catholic Herald Online

His sisters fled to the east. His father was shot. Making his way through the countryside, he ran into a group of Soviet officers who had been separated from their units. Together, they got through the German lines by crossing the Dnieper River. Once on the other side, he enrolled in a school that taught guerrilla tactics to would-be partisans. After that came a parachute course. In the spring of 1942, he joined a company of 18 partisans on their way to be dropped behind German lines. Fifteen survived. After a few weeks, he was their commander. Soon, he was in charge of a second company. He kept being promoted because his commanding officers kept getting killed.

Jakub applied for Communist Party membership that winter, while still in the field. He was accepted shortly thereafter. All told, he spent over two years in the woods fighting a guerrilla war against the German Army. In that time, he won a little bit of renown. Hes even mentioned in Volume 3 of the Workers History of the Socialist Republic of Belarus (the best volume, in my opinion).

The end of the war found Jakub in a field hospital, recovering from shrapnel wounds. A short while later, he was in Berlin, then in the city of Wroclaw, in western Poland, then back in Warsaw. He returned to a ravaged country and a ruined city. Two of his sisters were dead. One died in Treblinka; the other was shot in a mass execution in 1942, after she was caught on the wrong side of the ghetto wall.

In 1945, he was working in something called the Society of Soviet-Polish Friendship. Soon thereafter, he joined the Ministry of Public Security the secret police.

In Poland today, having worked for the secret police is a heavy thing to admit. The Ministry of Public Security played a crucial role in imposing Communist Party rule by force after the World War II. Its members jailed the opposition and silenced critics. To establish its dominance, the Communist Party fought what amounted to a low-level civil war against the vestiges of the non-Communist resistance. The Ministry of Public Security was the hard edge of Communist power in Poland. In its role as a counterintelligence organization, it also engaged in a shadow war with the C.I.A. and other Western spy agencies. And its in this role that my grandfathers story reappears in the files.

Most of what I know about his life after his career as a partisan comes from a Communist Party personnel file, which I decided to request from the Polish Institute of National Remembrance after finding a tantalizing mention of my grandfathers postwar life in another one of the institutes publications. But the file is vague on what he was doing in those years. It simply lists the departments he was posted to: the department for fighting counterrevolution; counterintelligence; countersabotage. Now it becomes necessary to follow him through the footnotes of historians who study intelligence operations during the start of the Cold War.

In 1950, he turns up as a case officer involved in something called Operation Caesar. Operation Caesar was a false-flag operation, in which the Polish secret police rounded up members of a real, underground resistance group and persuaded them to switch sides. Then they sent them across the Iron Curtain to the West. In the guise of a real resistance movement, they received money and matriel from the C.I.A. and MI6 over $1 million, and several hundred pounds of gold in total then turned around and passed those on to their Polish handlers. My grandfather, it seems, was one of those handlers.

What happened next is difficult to say. He died in 1963, when my mother was 7. She didnt know him well. What memories Ive heard from that time are fragments. He played tennis. He read books. He announced his engagement to my grandmother by saying to his sister, Jadzia, Im getting married. Let me have a shirt. In fact, the best source of information on his life is the file, which we obtained only last year. Even so, much is unsaid.

His story fits into a pattern. My grandfather belonged to a generation of Polish Jews that grew up with the revolution and put all their faith in it. If they survived long enough, they lived to see that faith betrayed.

For Polish Jews in the 1920s and 30s, joining the Communist movement represented the most radical of all possible rebellions, in the words of the Swedish sociologist Jaff Schatz, who wrote the defining work on this generation. It was a rebellion against ones parents and the traditions of Jewish life. It also meant participating in an illegal organization, which brought with it the constant possibility of imprisonment.

To the members of my grandfathers generation, Communism was a way to be modern and a way to escape the shtetl. It was a way to fight anti-Semitism and oppose fascism, both in Poland and worldwide. And perhaps most important, it was way to build the future and be a part of something larger than themselves. Being a Communist was a life of total commitment, persecution and permanent insecurity. But becoming a Communist also meant an intense sense of participation in the movement of history and in the revolutionary upheaval of the world. That upheaval would come soon enough just not in the way they expected.

The participation of Jews in the Polish Communist movement eventually crystallized into a widespread stereotype. The term for it is Zydokomuna, Polish for Judeo-Communism. Usually, the word is meant as a slur, a way of equating Jews with terror and foreign usurpation. The historian Andr Gerrits describes it as a xenophobic assertion, a myth, a delusion. And indeed, it doesnt stand up to closer historical scrutiny. Numerically, Communists were a tiny proportion of the larger Jewish community. Within the Polish Communist movement, Jews were a significant and overrepresented, minority but still a minority. It remains a pillar of anti-Semitic discourse in Poland to this day.

On the whole, Zydokomuna the equation of Communism with Judaism is a delusion and, in common usage, a slur. But for my family at least, it carries a kernel of truth. My grandfather (both of them, actually) belonged to a generation caught between fascism and communism with very little room to maneuver between the two. Before the war, joining the Communist Party meant rebellion. During it, it meant survival.

But there was another dimension to my grandfathers life beside the one described in his party file. In 1963, one of his fellow partisans from Belarus recorded him on his deathbed in a Warsaw hospital speaking about his wartime service.

There, he narrates his autobiographical statement in his Communist Party file, which emphasizes his class background and political work. This time, his testimony centers on one episode from a long war: the night of Jan. 21, 1943. His unit was in the Belarussian village of Novy Svyerzhan, the site of a German work camp for imprisoned Jews. Jakub and his unit decided to storm it under the cover of darkness. They used a soldier disguised as a peasant on a horse as a decoy to approach the camp gates. Then they attacked with machine guns and grenades. After they set the lumber yard ablaze, the surviving Germans ran away. Two hundred Jewish slave workers ran for freedom.

What does it mean to fight on the right side of the war, but the wrong side of history?

Depending on whom you ask today, my grandfathers story is that of a partisan, a traitor, a hero or a spy. The revolution asked a terrible amount of those who served it. Those who resisted paid a similarly awful price. It left in its wake countless lives, like my grandfathers, that cannot be compassed by a single line.

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My Grandfather, the Secret Policeman - New York Times