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Not a Misprint: MIT Press to Publish 'Communism for Kids' Book NewsBusters (blog) Talk about starting the indoctrination early. The Washington Free Beacon on Monday reported that MIT Press will be publishing Communism for Kids, a book ... Culture Beat: Pushing Communism on Children The Patriot PostPatriot Post all 3 news articles »

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Not a Misprint: MIT Press to Publish 'Communism for Kids' Book - NewsBusters (blog)

Reviews and News:

MIT publishes Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak, "'a Berlin-based social theorist and artist' heavily involved in 'queer theory.' When it originally appeared in German, the book was titled Kommunismus: Kleine Geschichte, wie Endlich Alles Anders Wirdroughly, Communism: A Little Story, How Finally Everything Will Be Different."

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Patrick J. Burns reviews Reginald Thomas Foster's Ossa Latinitatis Solathe Latinist's life work, "condensed to just over eight hundred pages, each one filled with enthusiasm for and meticulous study of the language to which Foster has dedicated his life."

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When television was a medical device.

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What makes Canadian food unique? Moose.

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The history and appeal of the French Foreign Legion: "The reasons modern recruits give for joining can seem prosaic. Gareth Carins, a former quantity surveyor, turned down the British Army in favour of the Legion. 'The truth was, I liked the army,' he writes in Diary of a Legionnaire (2007). 'I liked hill-walking, I liked travelling, and I was looking for an adventure.' He reports that people regard his justification with 'a look of disbelief and even disappointment' and rightly so, since the mystique of the Legion can't be so easily captured. The one thing Carins doesn't mention is death, but death is close to the heart of the Legion's attraction."

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Alex Renton takes aim at the brutality of British boarding schools in Stiff Upper Lip.

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Essay of the Day:

The Fifth Marquess of Lansdowne served briefly and, at first blush, unremarkably as Britain's Foreign Secretary from 1900 to 1905, but he was a great negotiator, John Bew and Andrew Ehrhardt argue in The American Interest, and maybe even one of the greatest conservative diplomats of the twentieth century:

"Shut out of Europe, Lansdowne began his effort to rebalance British power with a move on the chessboard that was at once bold, imaginative, and unexpected. In an effort to preserve Britain's privileged access to Asian markets, his first priority was to blunt Russia's influence in the region, which he did by crafting an unlikely alliance with Japan in 1902. As Henry Kissinger later remarked, this was 'the first time since Richelieu's dealings with the Ottoman Turks that any European country had gone for help outside the Concert of Europe.'

"The terms of the deal were even more important. Under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, both nations promised neutrality if either power was involved in a war over China or Korea with one adversary. Should either power find themselves in a war with two states, one alliance partner was required to offer military assistance to the other. This deftly inserted caveat kept Britain out of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. What is more, Japan's emphatic besting of the Russian fleet at Tsushima represented a further vindication of Lansdowne's strategy. Japanese victory ensured that Britain had a powerful ally in the Far East, a point reinforced by the renewal of the alliance in 1905. As a result, as Paul Kennedy has written, 'Britain's maritime position by the second half of 1905 was more favorable than it had been for the previous two decades.'

"While the Anglo-Japanese alliance was the first pillar of Lansdowne's new approach, the question of Britain's European isolation remained unanswered. So it was through the Entente Cordiale of 1904, between Britain and France, that Lansdowne delivered what was, in effect, a 'diplomatic revolution' in British foreign policy."

Read the rest.

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Photo: Sorano

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Poem: Dana Gioia, "The Sunday News"

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Prufrock: Communism for Kids, the Greatest Conservative Diplomat, and the Appeal of the French Foreign Legion - The Weekly Standard

Ismail Kadare said in an open letter distributed to media on Wednesday that he asked two weeks ago for the files held on him by the Sigurimi - Albanias Communist-era secret police - to be opened up so he can discover who spied on him.

"I inform you that I requested the opening of my file two weeks ago, without putting any condition or restriction [on it]," he said in the letter.

The Authority for Information on Former Communist Police Secret Files, which was established at the beginning of January, will deal with the request.

For the first time since the fall of communism, the new body makes it possible for people to know what information the former secret police had on them, and find out the names of the people who spied on them.

In his letter, Kadare said that he was one of the first Albanians to publicly call for the opening of the files years ago.

"Unfortunately, my request was not heard and it has caused obvious tension. Today, more than a quarter of the century later, this tension continues, for reasons that are easy to understand," he wrote.

He said that the fallen Communist tyranny had made every effort to keep the truth about literature life in Albania while it was in power under wraps.

"To unveil the truth about the Communist dictatorship is necessary today, although this has been delayed," he concluded in his letter.

During Communism, many writers in Albania were persecuted and some killed because of their writing.

Kadare left Albania in 1990, almost a year before the system collapsed, claiming political asylum in France while issuing statements in favor of democratisation.

He is considered one of the greatest writer that Albania ever had, winning many international prizes, including the Man Booker Prize in 2005 and the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts in 2009.

Almost every year Kadare is mentioned by the media all over the world as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. His novels and poetry have been published in about 45 languages.

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Albanian Novelist Demands to See Communist Police File - Balkan Insight

All throughout 1917, the toils of war and cascading revolutionary activity overturned the Russian Czarist government and established the left-leaning but democratically principled Provisional Government. The new authorities made preparations to hold elections. For the many political philosophies and groups then existing in Russian intelligentsia, it was an exciting prospect.

In March 1917, Czar Nicholas II was deposed and forced to abdicate following major bloodshed in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. But the vast nation, containing many different cultures and races across about 20 percent of the worlds land area, had never been a democracy and was unprepared to implement a universal, secret electoral system.

By May, the Provisional Government had not been able to carry out an election, and dissent was mounting from all sides. The date was delayed multiple times and public opinion sank further.

After several violent anti-government actions throughout the summer, the radical Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin armed itself and mobilized. In their infamous October Revolution, 100 communist militiamen took the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, killing two people, and seized the Russian capital.

As a communist, Lenin despised democracy, calling it a capitalist tool of oppression. Yet to mollify the still-powerful opposition, the Bolsheviks agreed to go forward with elections.

The Bolsheviks would convene the Assembly, but were ultimately unwilling to accept its results. As claimed in one initial report, the proposed Russian parliament must right the historical wrongs and protect the working class from exploitation.

In a speech at the time, Lenins right-hand man Leon Trotsky proclaimed: Long live an immediate, honest, democratic peace. All power to the Soviets. All land to the people. Long live the Constituent Assembly.

There are conflicting reports on whether Lenin believed he would win the elections, or if he and his Bolsheviks were merely feigning support. In any case, their language provided an excuse for the Bolsheviks to later dissolve the Constituent Assembly.

Bolsheviks held power through underground Soviets, or councils of urban workers and soldiers. Lenins dictatorship of the proletariat was incompatible with the proposed democracy.

Lenin (center, with dark fur hat and coat) and other communist leaders with Red Army soldiers who participated in crushing the anti-Bolshevik Kronshtadt uprising. (Leon Leonidov)

In November, elections for the Constituent Assembly were held and confirmed the Bolsheviks fears that theythe self-appointed leader of the Russian Revolutionwould not win a popular vote. Bolsheviks won less than a quarter of the total vote of 40 million Russians, losing badly to the Socialist Revolutionaries who had broad support from the peasant masses.

As described by Tony Cliff, a British communist writer, Lenin derided the election results, saying that obsolete laws had given the Socialist Revolutionaries (labelled as right-wing by the Bolsheviks) undue weight.

In the article The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Lenin expressed his anger with the peasant population: The country cannot be equal to the town under the historical conditions of this epoch. The town inevitably leads the country. The country inevitably follows the town.

When democracy worked against the Bolsheviks, Lenin turned to violence. According to Cliff, revolution and the struggle between capitalist and proletarian forces boiled down to counting the machine guns, the bayonets, the grenades at their disposal.

The Bolsheviks were rejected by the rural peasants, but they gathered a large following among urban workers and soldiers who had deserted from the ongoing fight against Germany in World War I. Lenin and his political party had the military force to take power.

The Russian Civil War is readily understood as a fight between socialist Red and conservative White Russian forces, but this mischaracterizes the nature of the conflict and its participants. Tens of millions of Russian peasants, opposed to Lenins dictatorship, were the most numerous among victims in a war that by some estimates killed over 12 million people, or more than all combat deaths in World War I.

Bolshevik economic policies, or war communism, starved millions of people in the Russian countryside when their grain was seized. And after the civil war, millions more were fated to perish in the brutal projects of Lenins successor, Joseph Stalin.

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How Lenin's Bolsheviks Brought Communism to Russia - Epoch Times - The Epoch Times

At Miami college founded by Cubans exiled under communism, officials shut down pro-capitalism club

After granting the pro-capitalism club Turning Point USA tabling rights on campus last fall, administrators at St. Thomas University founded in 1961 by Augustinians expelled from Cuba by the communist Castro dictatorship have revoked that permission.

In an email obtained by The College Fix, Carmen Brown, an administrator at the Miami-based Catholic university, recently wrote to the clubs field director Driena Sixto that the organizations foul language does not align with the schools Catholic principles, thus they are prohibited from promoting their cause on campus.

In reviewing your organization, including its website, we found that your organizations use of foul language is offensive to the very principle of what we stand for in our Catholic core values as an institution. Therefore, we regret to inform you that we are not approving your organizations presence on our campus, Brown wrote in the March 16 email.

Brown did not respond when Sixto asked for clarification about the allegation, though Sixto told The Fix she believes the administration might have taken issue with TPUSAs slogans Big Government Sucks and Socialism Sucks. But when Sixto asked Brown specifically if this was the language to which she referred, she said Brown directed her to the schools lawyer, who also did not reply. Brown also did not respond to The College Fixs requests for comment.

Matt Lamb, director of campus integrity for Turning Point USA, called the administrations decision troubling.

The school invokes a broad opposition to foul language to keep a free-market, conservative group off of campus, Lamb told The Fix via email. The higher-ups in the school administration frequently dodged requests to speak with us, and then failed to keep their facts straight.

Sixto, who is not a student at the school but rather a field director that helps college students in the Miami area launch and maintain Turning Point USA chapters, shared a strongly worded email with The College Fix that she sent to St. Thomas students who had signed up to be a part of the group.

In an ironic turn of events, the school that was founded in 1961 by Augustinians that were expelled from Cuba by the communist Castro dictatorship is now a school where conservative values and freedom of expression are undesired, thanks to complaints of left-wing, and self-declared communist/socialist faculty members, Sixto wrote.

She also pointed out that Turning Point USA in fact stands for the same principles of limited government that the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami has invoked in their lawsuit against a government mandate, which forces employers to subsidize abortion-inducing contraceptives.

Whats more, TPUSA is the largest student group at Barry University, a Catholic University similar to St. Thomas and both schools receive funding from the Archdiocese of Miami, Sixto noted.

In a separate email she sent in mid-March to St. Thomas students, Sixto said she believes at the crux of the issue is professors who do not like the groups free-market message.

A couple of self-declared socialist professors on campus complained about having me on campus promoting capitalism and free markets, and apparently it triggered them enough to go complain and have me shut down. This is what socialists, communists and the left customarily do anywhere in the world, Sixto wrote. Since their ideas are so bad and go against the very concept of individual liberty and freedom they have a hard time selling it to others. Therefore the next step is to silence those who dont agree with them through censorship.

Nearly six universities over the last two years have refused club status to TPUSA, though the chapters have eventually overcome most of these fights with the help of free-speech supporting organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Lamb said he is hopeful that a similar outcome will be possible at St. Thomas. Sixto has implored the administration, university president, and the archdiocese of Miami to reconsider their decision.

We look forward to the university reconsidering their decision, Lamb said.

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About the Author

Kate Hardiman is a student at the University of Notre Dame majoring in the Program of Liberal Studies and minoring in the Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics (PPE) Program. She serves as campus editor of the Irish Roverand is a fellow of both the Constitutional Studies Department and Center for Ethics and Culture. She interned at The Hillin Washington D.C. for the summer of 2015 and has had articles published there, as well as onMinding the Campus.

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At Miami college founded by Cubans exiled under communism, officials shut down pro-capitalism club - The College Fix