Mediaboss Marketing

As a (relatively) new American, I was intrigued by Leo Fagans viewpoint on America and Americanism (One way ticket out, April 16). He seems to believe that America is the greatest country in the world (a view shared by Russians, Koreans, Japanese, French and many other countries), and I am not going to argue with his belief.

But if so, why is the infant mortality rate here that of a Third World country? American life expectancy is going down (again, check statistics). We in Europe who had close contact with American troops found that so many of them had an arrogance that was rudeness itself, insofar as they were expected to be ambassadors or guests in their host country.

Mr. Fagan also seems to equate socialism with Communism. There is quite a difference. Socialist countries in Europe in the main do very well for their citizens, with low infant mortality rates, good health care for all and reasonable retirement (I admit not always good), but accountability to their electorate.

In contrast, Communist countries are basically dictatorships, with no accountability to the voters, something I see beginning to happen to this good country.

Valerie Derks

Deer Park

Read the original:
Communism isn't socialism - The Spokesman-Review

One hundred years ago this month, Lenin detrained at Finland Station. Now, young people think George Bush killed more people than Stalin. We need some history lessons, pronto.

One hundred years ago this month, a train pulled by locomotive No. 293 arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Though it was late at night, a large crowd waited waving red flags and flowers. Within a sealed railcar was a passenger who would soon become dictator of the worlds first Marxist state: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.

Returning from a decade in exile, he was jubilantly greeted by socialist comrades, old and new, who a month earlier had deposed Nicholas II. The Russian Revolution achieved by you, Lenin declared at the station, has opened a new epoch. A new epoch, to be sure, but certainly not a better one for the more than 100 million people who, over the course of the next century, would be tortured, persecuted, and murdered in the name of communism.

Tragically, these facts are controversial to someand even unknown by manyin 2017. In particular, a large swath of the millennial generation is unaware of and indifferent to the horrors and deceits of communism as well as those of its fellow-traveling collectivist ideology, socialism.

A recent study conducted by YouGov found only 33 percent of millennials are familiar with Lenin. Of those who are familiar, 25 percent view him favorably. The study also revealed, among other disturbing insights, that 32 percent of millennials believe more people were killed by the administration of George W. Bush than the regime of Joseph Stalin, which was responsible for no fewer than 15 million deaths.

Influenced by educational and cultural systems hostile to free-market economics and willing to whitewash the human toll of Marxism, young Americans are increasingly turning to socialism and other forms of extremist ideology. In a 2016 poll by Harvard University, 33 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 said they supported socialism while 51 percent said they opposed capitalism. Alarming also are the findings that only 25 percent of millennials now believe that living in a democracy is essential, down from 75 percent for their grandparents generation.

At the same time, polls suggest that young people value equality more than democracy. From these data we can infer that many millennials care deeply about the state taking care of them, even if it undermines democratic processes. In a word, collectivism.

In fact, our foundation has tracked the growth of dozens of neo-Marxist organizations active on college campuses and in urban protest movements. Their membership is growing and may now be as high as several hundred thousand. Not surprisingly, these groups are revisionist on U.S. history and spread 21st-century propaganda on American social mediamessages crafted or borrowed from those transmitted in Havana, Beijing, and even Pyongyang.

Senator Bernie Sanders and other leaders of a newly emergent left deploy the phrase democratic socialism as their new ideal. Yet one word, a mere rhetorical modifier connoting noble intent and good governance, should not suffice when it remains unclear how their vision differs from the bloody and economically disastrous socialism experienced by nearly 40 nations in the last hundred years.

But the problem of historical distortion and misperception runs deeper. Last month, the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked the seventh-best university in the country by U.S. News & World Report released Communism for Kids. By Bini Adamczak, a Berlin-based social theorist and artist, the book presents political theory in the simple terms of a childrens story, accompanied by illustrations of lovable little revolutionaries experiencing their political awakening. The lovable little revolutionaries, beginning with Lenin, continuing through Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, and remaining with us today from Pyongyang to Caracas, have inflicted misery on the lives of hundreds of millions.

The soil of ignorance and envy bears not fruit but thorns.

Today, hammer and sickle flags once again flutter above the Crimean Peninsula. In socialist Venezuela, workers are now forcibly relocated to collective farms in coercive efforts to remedy the man-made famine now emaciating the once-prosperous country. In Hong Kong, for the first time in history, Mao is portrayed in textbooks as a socialist heronot a mass murderer. It was this Beijing-mandated revised history curriculum that sparked the 2014 student protests known as the Umbrella Movement.

In 1919, two years after Lenins return to Russia, Lincoln Steffens, eminent muckraker and co-founder of The American Magazine, spent three weeks touring the then newly-established Soviet Union. Enthralled by what he had witnessed, he boasted back home, I have seen the future, and it works. The it, of course, was communism.

Thank You!

You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason

Before long, the Russian experiment devolved into tyranny of unprecedented scale marked by famines, forced labor, show trials, and the brutal repression of opposition. Although Steffens himself jettisoned communism by the early 1930s, he would forever serve as a punching bag for his botched prophecy.

Yet he wasnt entirely wrong. While communism clearly failed to bring utopia, Steffens had in fact, tragically, previewed the future. The Soviet Union lasted another seven decades and today, one-fifth of the worlds population still lives under single-party communist regimes in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. The century of Communism began 100 years ago. The ideology responsible for more deaths than any ideology or religion in human history continues to exact a tragic human toll.

In perverted distortion of Lincolns aspiration for America, these regimes work every day to ensure that governments of the party, by the party, for the party shall not perish from the earth.

More Americans must stand up to defend the truth about what has happened and what is happening when it comes to the failed ideas of collectivism, both socialism and communism. We must fight for justice where feasible, for those who were killed for ideological reasons and their families who continue to suffer. And we must fight to cultivate accurate memory about this difficult history, without which neither truth nor justice is possible. Nor, it would seem, is American democracy.

See the original post:
100 Years of Communism's Bloody Legacy - Daily Beast

Daniel Csnyi is retired, but hes nowhere near inactive, and conducting lectures on a variety of topics at the Forever Learning Institute is one of his frequent activities.

At one point, the director asked me if I had a new topic, and I said that I have to think about it real hard, he says. Csnyi decided to give a series of talks on his life growing up in his native country of Hungary during a period when the country was first occupied by Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union after the Nazis were defeated in World War II.

I lived through that war, and it was kind of dramatic and I thought that I could share of stories with the people, he says. The director thought it was a good idea, and about 15 or 20 people attended the lectures.

The people who attended the lectures found Csnyis stories to be compelling. They were insisting that this is so good that youve to go put it into a book, he says. That sounds like too much trouble, but they convinced me.

Those stories eventually became Csnyis memoir, Surviving World War II On the Losing Side. Much of our history of World War II comes from the viewpoint of soldiers and historians who were on the side of the victorious allied countries particularly the United States and Great Britain. History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors.

However, those who lived in one of the countries occupied by the Axis powers have a story to tell as well, and Csnyis memoir details his life as a boy and young man growing up in Hungary in the days leading up to Germanys invasion and occupation of the country. He also describes life under occupation and the destruction of the country by the Soviet troops who defeated Germany and in turn became the new authoritarian occupiers in Budapest.

Being on the losing side had real consequences for Csnyi, his parents and sisters, he says. That is not because the family sympathized with the Nazis. They did not, but being liberated by the Soviets rather than the Americans or British changed his life significantly. Csnyi made a decision to become a priest after high school, and that decision eventually forced him to flee the country for Austria and eventually Italy, where he continued his studies. Csnyi describes his escape from Hungary along with a group of seminarians in the last part of the book.

Csnyi served as a priest for about 20 years before asking to be relieved of his vows, after which he married and started a family.

Csnyi says the communists persecuted the Hungarian church, so remaining a priest there was impossible. His decision to leave resulted in him being labeled as an enemy of the state. He says that he could not return to the country for fear of being arrested for many years, and that authorities viewed the family members who remained with suspicion.

One party official tried to get Csnyis sister fired after learning about his defection to Rome. The fact that the woman had a brother who was an enemy of socialism and an aspiring priest went into her file. I saw this file with my own eyes, Csnyi says. The brother of this woman was being trained for the priesthood in Rome by the Vatican I was not being trained by the Vatican but my family should be considered an enemy of the people.

The only thing that prevented Csnyis sister from being fired was her supervisor, who said that woman did important work for socialism.

Here is the original post:
Author tells story of life under Nazism, communism in Hungary - South Bend Tribune

Since MSNBCs Rachel Maddow is still preoccupied with the supposed influence of Russia on President Donald Trump and the American political process, we suggest that the publication of a new book called Communism for Kids by MIT Press is worthy of her attention. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolution, this book offers a glimpse into an uprising that was global in scope and which has not only destroyed the moral fiber of Russia, but has also done enormous damage to America.

The author of Communism for Kids, Bini Adamczak, writes that the Russian revolution instilled new hope, particularly in women and people who did not identify themselves within the hetero-normative paradigm. The destruction of the family, she writes, was the goal. With the revolution, the right to legal abortion, both sexes right to divorce, the decriminalization of adultery, and the annulment of the sodomy law (which had previously prohibited homosexuality) were implemented and enforced, she explains.

In Moscow, one could find international communes led by gay communists, she says. Drag kings could become legitimate members of the Red Army. Participants of the revolutionary debates decided upon the destruction of the family, demanded the legalization of incest, and advertised the practice [of] polygamy.

Queer communism is the battle cry of these modern Marxists, who label themselves Queer communists and identify with the origins of the Russian revolution.

Its doubtful that Maddow, despite her obsession with Russia, will turn to this fascinating topic, since she is one of the liberal medias open advocates of the homosexual lifestyle. She is a favorite of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), which now calls itself the Association of LGBTQ Journalists.

On Thursday, in New York City, CNNs Don Lemon hosteda star-studded event for the NLGJA designed to raise tens of thousands of dollars for the organizations programs. More than 350 journalists, news executives, dignitaries and allies attend this event each year in what has become one of New York Citys must-attend media events, the advertisement for NLGJA says.

The corporate media sponsors include Comcast/NBC Universal, Fox News, ABC News, CNN, CBS News and the New York Post.

Despite the virtual integration of the corporate media and the gay rights movement here in the U.S., Communism for Kids author Bini Adamczak writes that more advances have to be made in the field of queer politics, using the strategies of Marxist revolution. Eventually, she says, modern reproduction technologies could be used to completely abolish the sexes.

Transgender liberation is the next major frontier. She notes that In her autobiographically inspired novel Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg grants readers a powerful insight into the connectedness of queer politics. Feinberg, a Marxist member of the Workers World Party, was identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist. Her last words before she died were, Remember me as a revolutionary communist. Hasten the revolution!

Another prominent advocate of transgender liberation is Bradley/Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army analyst sentenced to prison for espionage for his/her collaboration in the release by WikiLeaks of thousands of top secret intelligence reports. Former President Obama commuted Mannings sentence, which was originally 35 years in prison for espionage, and he/she will now be released on May 17, after only seven years in prison. Manning was an open homosexual in the Army before deciding to become a woman.

WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service, declared President Trumps new CIA director, Mike Pompeo. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information. And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.

Yet Pompeo has not indicated whether the lax rules that are in place at the CIA and other intelligence agencies, permitting mentally disordered and confused transgender individuals to gain employment and get top secret security clearances, will be changed.

It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really isa non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia, Pompeo said. In January of this year, our Intelligence Community determined that Russian military intelligencethe GRUhad used WikiLeaks to release data of U.S. victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russias primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.

In his article for AIM, CIA Funding and Recruiting LGBT, Alex Nitzberg wrote about how the CIA maintains its own employee organization called ANGLE, which stands for the Agency Network for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers and Allies. Last December 16, the CIA itself announced that ANGLE had received an award for promoting LGBT issues.

Obamas CIA Director John O. Brennan was quoted as saying, It is difficult to overstate how heartening this progress has been to me. Indeed, one of the highlights of my tenure has been seeing the LGBT community blossom under the leadership of ANGLE and its cadre of devoted alliesa group to which I proudly belong.

Brennan was also an ally of Muslim and pro-communist CIA employees. He personally voted communist before joining the agency in 1980.

The CIA has released a documentary ANGLE of Ascent, highlighting the key role CIA leaders have played in building inclusive environments and focusing on the cultural shift that occurred within the Agency since the signing of Executive Order 12968, which gave LGBT officers the right to obtain a security clearance and serve openly in the Federal Government.

The CIA exists to gather and assess intelligence in order to protect Americas national security, wrote Nitzberg. Americans must decide whether they believe the CIAs involvement in recruiting from and funding LGBT events serves to advance those objectives.

But Americans are not given the opportunity to pass judgement because they are kept in the dark by elements of the news media in bed with the homosexual and transgender movements. As part of this collusion, Pompeo will be encouraged to continue Brennans pro-LGBT policies at the CIA. He will be threatened with the charge of homophobia if he decides to return the CIA to its mission of protecting Americas secrets.

Dari Alexander, WNYW; Jason Bellini, The Wall Street Journal; Gio Benitez, ABC News; Dan Bowens, WNYW; Frank Bruni, The New York Times; Kenneth Craig, CBS News; John Bannon Dias, News 12; Willie Geist, MSNBC; Kendis Gibson, ABC News; Sunny Hostin, The View; Preston Konrad, celebrity stylist; Steve Lacy, WNYW; Brett Larson, FOX News Headlines 24/7; Kyle Marimon, Fresco News; Jared Max, FOX News Headlines 24/7; John Meyer, Fresco News; Michael Musto, OUT.com; Court Passant, CBS Corporation; Lydia Polgreen, The Huffington Post; Caroline Que, The New York Times; Gus Rosendale, WNBC; Carolyn Ryan, The New York Times; Michelangelo Signorile, SiriusXM; Baruch Shemtov, WNYW; Lauren Simonetti, FOX Business Network; Steve Sosna, NBC4; Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal; Joe Toohey, WNYW; Kris Van Cleave, CBS News; and Jana Winter, investigative reporter.

Excerpt from:
'Queer Communism' Finds its Voice - GOPUSA

By Sethumadhavan N

Communism seems to be the flavour of the season as far as Malayalam cinema is concerned. Recently we saw the release of Tom Emmattys Oru Mexican Aparatha (Tovino Thomas) and now we have Sidhartha Sivas Sakhavu (Nivin Pauly) as well. And theres Amal Neerads Comrade in America aka CIA (Dulquer Salmaan) that is due for release shortly. Whats common to all these films is not just that the communist background, its also that these films are being headlined by a popular leading man as well, that surely means that there is definitely an attempt to bring back the theme of communism in Malayalam films. And considering that it is now the LDF-led government in power back in Kerala, this seems to be more than just a casual coincidence. Sidhartha Siva who started off making award winning feature films turned to mainstream commercial films with Kochavva Paulo Ayappa Coelho last year. And with Nivin Pauly on board Sakhavu he has taken a big leap in his career as a filmmaker.

Nivin Pauly plays two different characters, Krishna Kumar and Sakhavu Krishnan. Krishna Kumar is a youth communist leader who is eager to climb up the political ladder by all possible means. Sakhavu Krishnan is a veteran communist leader and social worker, who enjoys the respect of people around him thanks to his good work over the years.

One fine day unknown to both of them, the lives of Krishna Kumar and Sakhavu Krishnan get entwined in an interesting fashion. Krishna Kumar is asked to donate blood to a patient who is about to undergo a surgery and hence he lands up at a Government hospital. It is only much later that he comes to know that the patient is Sakhavu Krishnan. In the course of the day Krishna Kumar slowly goes on to know the life story of Sakhavu Krishnan in detail. The story shifts between the two time zones regularly, one symbolising the past during the heydays of Krishnan when he was an active communist leader, and the present as seen through the eyes of Krishnan.

Beginning with the voice over of Krishnan it is made very clear by Sidhartha Siva that the film would be a positive tribute to communism and its ideologies. The film is indeed a eulogy of sorts to the communist way of life and why the philosophy is so relevant in Kerala. Now this is a tad risky considering that there is a possibility of alienating a certain section of the audience which is not so fond of political dramas or has a different perspective on communism. The writing by Sidhartha Siva at times results in making the proceedings quite slow in a few places, the duration of 164 minutes making it appear slightly stretched overall. And its necessary to note that the film clearly paints Sakahvu Krishnan in extremely positive shades all the way. Luckily the spotlessly white portrayal of Sakhavu Krishnan is balanced by that of the more practical and contemporary Krishna Kumar.

The film benefits a lot by getting the period look (the 1970s) well taken care of, George C Williamss cinematography and the choice of locations aiding the same. Prashant Pillais music goes well with the flow of the film. Of the supporting cast, Althaf as Mahesh provides some laughs while Binu Pappu as Prabhakaran Eerali, Krishnans foe turned close friend, Sreenivasan as the doctor treating Sakhavu Krishnan and Baiju as Garudan Kangani, the right hand man of the tea estate manager leave an impact.

Of the women while Aparna Gopinath and Gayathri Suresh have nothing much to do, Aishwarya Rajesh as Sakhavu Krishnan does well despite her limited scenes. Needless to say the main reason why the film works is Nivin Pauly who brings in a spirited performance, portraying both the contrasting characters in a manner that makes one nearly overlook the issues with the film.

Sakhavu is not as splendid a film as one might have expected, but it is a film that does not mislead the viewer and is definitely worth an outing at the cinemas.

Read the original:
Sakhavu movie review: Introduction to communism - Bangalore Mirror - Bangalore Mirror