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'Communism for Kids' Fails to Make Amazon.com Top 100 Rankings CNSNews.com (blog) A new book that sells the concept of Communism in the simple terms of a children's story has failed to sell on Amazon.com except in the category for true believers. Communism for Kids by MIT Press unfolds like a story, with jealous princesses ...

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'Communism for Kids' Fails to Make Amazon.com Top 100 Rankings - CNSNews.com (blog)

In 2004, German political theorist and queer politics expert Bini Adamczak wrote Communism for Kids, and, for some reason, MIT Press has decided that it needed to be translated and published in English this year. At last, American families will have the opportunity to take Adamczaks ideas from the fever swamps of the Occupy movement to their childrens bedrooms.

Dont expect this scholar of social theory to deal with communisms long history of failure, however. Communism for Kids is a fantasy complete with princesses and talking chairs and thus affords the author free rein to lambast capitalism and construct her own imaginary, happier vision of communism. Claiming to be new, the book promotes the same tired theory that communisms problems lie in implementation, not in ideology.

MIT Presss website has an overview which touts how this communism is different: This little book proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism. Ah, communism that is free from authoritarianism. That old chestnut.

In keeping with the usual propagandistic style, the aesthetic of Communism for Kids is predictably creepy:

Left-wing propaganda has proliferated in childrens books recently. In another work, A Is for Activist, children are taught the alphabet via charming limericks such as: T is for Trans. / For Trains, Tiaras / Tulips, Tractors, / and Tigers Too! / Trust in The True / The he she They That is you! Books such as these promise to cleanse children of wrongthink before they can even spell and before they have learned any history. Usually, they are topical. But if you come down on the partisan or establishment side of things, you can also find cute stories featuring Hillary Clinton or Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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German Book Communism for Kids Translated into English by MIT Press - National Review

NewsBusters (blog)

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."

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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

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