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Red Road to Freedom: A history of the South African Communist Party 1921-2021by Tom LodgeJames Currey 70

BUILDING on earlier seminal texts such as RE Simonss voluminous Class and Colour in South Africa and Michael Harmels more celebratory account Fifty Fighting Years, Tom Lodges latest work is a monumental, fascinating and painstakingly researched book that provides by far the most up-to-date and comprehensive history of the South African Communist Party.

Unlike liberal and Trotskyist commentators, Lodge also emerges as a critical but undoubtedly sympathetic observer who skilfully captures a dramatic and compelling story that has film-like qualities.

Lodge kicks off his book by demonstrating how the organised left in South Africa can effectively date its history back to the 1890s, a period in which a myriad of socialist, anarchist and syndicalist organisations began to be formed.

Many of these organisations were effectively derived from movements in Europe and North America. British migrants, for example, were often involved in South Africa branches of the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic federation.

Italians tended to favour syndicalist ways of organising, Jews from Tsarist Russia focused on the Bund and the more broadly based Friends of Russian Freedom and Germans veered towards the orthodox Marxism of their home country.

Sickened by the failure of avowedly socialist bodies to oppose imperialist war and at the same time inspired by the world changing Bolshevik revolution of 1917, more radical elements eventually came together to form the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921.

In this unflinchingly honest account, Lodge argues that much of the work the party carried out in the 1920s and indeed the 30s was of a propagandistic nature and, even then, activity was intermittent and localised with most branches outside the main cities lasting no longer than a few years.

Despite the erstwhile contributions of formidable characters such as Bill Andrews, WH Harrison, Rebecca Bunting and Johnny Gomas and the recruitment of influential trade unionists, membership remained at just a few hundred, a recurring problem being when the organisation did manage to recruit rapidly during periods of labour militancy it rarely managed to retain newcomers.

Lodge relates this to three fundamental and often interrelated weaknesses.

The first being whether the party was effectively functioning as a Leninist organisation. Lodge convincingly demonstrates how interpretation of policy diverged widely, national decisions and detailed Comintern interventions about the need to struggle for a Native Republic notwithstanding.

Second, although the CPSA was undoubtedly operating in a difficult and in many ways unique environment, most members were of white, European descent and prioritised work in the more proletarian but overwhelmingly white, skilled industries. Trade unions occasionally took it down some horrific paths. The most notorious of which being when party militants unfurled a banner reading white workers of the world to unite for a white South Africa during the incredibly bloody and often since ignored miners strike of 1922.

Third, although some tangible links with individuals in the wider national liberation movement were created, operational connections between itself and the then small African National Congress were surprisingly weak and fragmentary, marked as much by an atmosphere of mutual suspicion as by anything else.

The late 1930s and the war years were to see a limited upsurge in the partys fortunes.

Popularity rose among all groups other than far right nationalist Afrikaners who remained as violently opposed as ever. An emphasis on anti-fascist popular front style organising and the increasing prestige of the Soviet Union brought some dividends. Just as significantly the party showed a growing inclination to Africanise its approach to labour struggles, something helped by over 100,000 black workers being brought into industry, a 40 per cent increase on pre-war levels.

Party influence was similarly strengthened by a willingness to work in rural areas and by imaginative campaigns against the infamous pass laws, in defence of squatters rights and against profiteering.

Again, though, while this period did see significant gains, it sometimes came at a cost, inner party factionalism and sometimes justified criticism for restraint in labour militancy during the production first war years being not least among them.

As the nightmare of apartheid began and as the Suppression of Communism Act started to be brutally enforced, the party was quickly driven underground and forced to function very much as a party in exile.

Ideologically, however, its probably fair to say that during this time the party developed its outlook in a much more concrete and sustained fashion, eventually publishing its detailed programme titled The Road to South African Freedom.

In terms of contents this owed much to the experiences of the peoples democracies of Eastern Europe in the immediate post war period and to Soviet theories about how post-colonial states could effectively by pass capitalist stages of development.

Party work accordingly began to stress the need for a national democratic revolution against what they considered to be colonialism of a special type, an analysis which enabled it to develop a growing respect and influence with the now mass based African National Congress.

Following the Sharpeville massacre of 1961, the ANC was to abandon non-violence, and again communists were pre-eminent in the Peoples War of its armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe.

Just as importantly, the party became a key player in the tripartite alliance alongside its comrades in the ANC and Cosatu. By 1985 of the 35 members elected to the national executive, 21 were communists.

In 1990 legal restrictions were lifted, the party published its new programme The Path to Power and negotiations as to how apartheid was to end began.

Assessing the historic contribution of the party to ending racist rule, Lodge draws attention to the importance of its intellectual analysis of what South Africa was and how it could best be changed, its influence in the national liberation movement being out of all proportion to its size.

Lodge additionally emphasises the partys efficient and targeted organisational prowess, particularly within the ANC and Cosatu where cadres, rightly or wrongly, often never drew any distinction between work for the party in particular and work for the tripartite alliance in general.

In terms of the armed struggle, the organisations heroic role remains unchallenged and indisputable, the incorrigible Joe Slovo and martyr Chris Hani having attained iconic status even among those who would offer no support for communist politics.

On an international level, the party was a central body in securing political, economic and military support for the anti-apartheid struggle. The ANC received a huge amount of aid from the Soviet Union and the GDR, solidarity that contrasted sharply with the relentlessly pro-apartheid politics of, for example, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Finally, the SACP was multiracial and multinational to its core and received popular acclaim for its resolute fight against all forms of racism, anti semitism and communalism.

And today? The ANC government still continues to command overwhelming support and gains have been made in housing construction and in the provision of utilities. In terms of foreign policy, South Africa tends to play a broadly progressive role as well.

However, the country remains one of the worlds most unequal societies, unemployment is at record levels and a failure to nationalise mines and initiate land reform has led to an increase in support for somewhat opportunist and politically unstable bodies such as the Economic Freedom Fighters.

The brutal response of the stateto strikes such as at Marikana strike in 2012 alienated many who had assumed that such anti-working-class violence would never be repeated in the post-apartheid era.

Led by the more than capable and comparatively youthful leader Blade Nzimande, in 2007 the party launched its new programme The South African Road to Socialism and membership was said to stand at 50,000. Ten years later it stood at 284,000 and by 2019 to an all-time high of 319,108, becoming in effect the countrys second largest political party

Although four leading communists continue to hold ministerial portfolios, it is not surprising that cracks have appeared in the SACPs longstanding alliance with the ANC.

The party openly campaigns against corruption, has been vocally critical of recent presidents and there have been some recent cases of it fielding independent candidates with limited but not necessarily negligible results.

By no means an easy read, like all in depth historical accounts it raises as many questions as it manages to provide answers and whether or not South African communists will succeed in building socialism in the coming years is obviously a moot point.

What is beyond question is that the party is as central to South African politics today as it has been over the past century and as a guide to understanding its development then, now and in the future Red Road to Freedom is unapparelled.

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Book Review Tested by legacies of colonialism and apartheid - Morning Star Online

In the three months since Russia began its war of aggression, the character of the country has been changing before our eyes. Its much-vaunted military has been exposed as not only weak, disorganized, and corrupt, but also criminal, engaging in pillaging and the torture and mass slaughter of unarmed Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. Resorting to a practice not seen since the Stalin era, Vladimir Putins government has also been deporting captured Ukrainians, apparently by the hundreds of thousands, to distant portions of Russia, first passing them through filtration camps where prisoners are interrogated for nationalist leanings and selected out for punishment. The Russian judicial system has been mobilized to crack down on dissent against the war; among other things, it is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in a labor camp to refer to it as anything but a special military operation. To the extent that there were independent media before the war, they have been shut down and the only voices now in print or on the air are official propaganda. Access to independent news sources on the internet has also been sharply restricted. In sum, Russia has taken a number of steps back toward the repression of the Soviet era.

But as draconian as these various measures all are, Russia is not yet properly called totalitarian as it rightly was during the reign of Joseph Stalin or even much of the Leonid Brezhnev era. About a century ago, Benito Mussolini called fascist Italy a totalitarian state, a concept that he defined with brilliant clarity: Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. But whether the label of totalitarian actually applies to Mussolini-era Italian fascism, or, again, to Putins Russia today, is open to serious question. All-encompassing statism was more of an aspiration than an Italian accomplishment. Even the more thoroughgoing oppression of Nazi Germany did not quite fit the totalitarian model, at least according to the criteria set forth by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich in their influential 1956 volume, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.

To Brzezinski and Friedrich, totalitarian rule was an extreme form of authoritarianism possessing six characteristics: an all-encompassing ideology, a single party, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly and a centrally directed economy. All six were necessary to fit the bill of totalitarian. Absent one, and the definition was not fulfilled. Stalins Soviet Union was the premier case. Nazi Germany, with its only partially centralized economy, was a close second. Putins Russia is moving alarmingly closer, but it still lacks some of totalitarianisms key features.

Here at home and in the West, the concept of totalitarianism came under assault as the Cold War consensus unraveled in the 1960s and 1970s. Revisionist scholars saw it as offering an intellectual foundation and implicit justification for the VietnamWar and the Cold War. A barrage of journal articles and books was launched in an attempt to demolish the construct. As the counterculture emerged, it became fashionable in some quarters of the left to identify the United States itself as totalitarian, or pre- or proto-totalitarian, on a plane with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In this, the novelist Norman Mailer was a pioneer, opining in his famous 1957 essay, The White Negro, that citizens were trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed. Herbert Marcuse, the political theory guru of the New Left, came next, arguing that all industrial societies, very much including the United States, were totalitarian. To some on the extremes, we were not America but Amerika, the spelling signifying a shared identity with Nazi Germany. We shall not defeat Amerika, proclaimed Abbie Hoffman, leader of the leaderless Yippies, by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nationa nation as rugged as the marijuana leaf.

Today, in one of those remarkable inversions of history, the charge that the United States is totalitarian no longer comes from the left but the right, from Americas growing contingent of self-proclaimed post-liberal intellectuals.

To Rod Dreher, senior editor at the American Conservative and the author of a number of best-selling books, liberal democracy is degenerating into something resembling the totalitarianism over which it triumphed in the Cold War. To be sure, qualifies Dreher, [t]his totalitarianism wont look like the USSRs. Its not establishing itself through hard means like armed revolution or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. Dreher has in mind contemporary progressivism: Under the guise of diversity, inclusivity, equity, and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizing dissenters as evil.

Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Why Liberalism Failed, maintains that U.S. constitutional libertiesfreedom of speech, freedom of association, free and fair elections, and freedom of religionhave become an empty faade: [O]ur capacity for self-government has waned almost to the point of nonexistence. We live under what he calls liberalocratic despotism, in which the liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life. Liberal totalitarianism is a phrase he has taken to employing.

To Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American leader of the new U.S. national conservative movement, liberal democracy has become a kind of totalizing dictatorship: [T]he opponents of liberalism have been vanquished one by one, and universal liberal empire has seemed to come within reach. The consequence: There are increasingly insistent demands for conformity to a single universal standard in speech and religion. Liberalism has taken on the worst feature of the medieval Catholic empire upon which it is unwittingly modeled, including a doctrine of infallibility, as well as a taste for the inquisition and the index.

To Adrian Vermeule, an integralistthat is, an advocate of establishing a Catholic confessional stateand a chaired professor at Harvard Law School, communism and liberalism have far more in common than it would seem at first glance. According to Vermeule, [t]he stock distinction between the Enlightenments twinscommunism is violently coercive while liberalism allows freedom of thoughtis glib. Liberal society celebrates toleration, diversity, and free inquiry, but in practice it features a spreading social, cultural, and ideological conformism. And in his account, those who decline to conformilliberal citizens like himselflive much like refuseniks in the totalitarian USSR: They are trapped without exit papers, suffer a narrowing sphere of permitted action and speech, shrinking prospects, and increasing pressure from regulators, employers, and acquaintances, and even from friends and family.

What can one say about this vision of America as a repressive society?

One of the arresting features of the supposed American totalitarianism is that it is invisible. Dreher explains that, given its soft form, [i]ts possible to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism. To Deneen, liberalism is more insidious than its competitor ideologiesfascism and communismprecisely because, unlike highly visible fascist or communist repression, it is unseen: [L]iberalism is less visibly ideological and only surreptitiously remakes the world in its image. [A]s an ideology, it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule.

Of course, another obvious explanation, other than unwitting enslavement by an invisible tyranny, is that the contention that the United States is under totalitarian rule is simply false. The definition of an onslaught is a very violent or forceful attack. If it is possible simply to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism, as Dreher claims, perhaps it is not really much of an onslaught at all. If one considers the six characteristics enumerated by Brzezinski and Friedrich, not a single one of them obtains in the United States. There is no over-arching ideology to which it is mandatory to adhere. No single party dominates with an autocrat at its head. There is no government monopoly on communications or force. No secret police is hounding dissidents. No central economic planning is in place.

To assert, as Deneen does, that the liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life is to make a mockery of the real horrors of totalitarian societies, past and present, like North Korea, where such control is a grim reality. In lamenting the impossibility of obtaining exit papers and the narrowing sphere of permitted action and speech in which he and like-minded colleagues find themselves, Vermeule, a distinguished professor of law who prolifically expresses himself in public lectures, books, articles and even tweets, is doing nothing more than engaging in a vicarious form of victimhood. Likening his (highly privileged) position to that of someone trapped without exit papers is a particularly ugly exercise in America bashing, on a par with anything ever said or done by the Yippies. At any moment, of course, Vermeule is free to resign his Harvard chair and emigrate to the country of his choice; no exit papers are required. As for Drehers soft totalitarianism, on inspection it is a mere oxymoron, a nonsense phrase akin to gentle terror, that serves as a rhetorical grenade to toss in the culture war.

In characterizing America as totalitarian, post-liberals like Dreher are reacting to an over-bearing strain of American progressivism that travels under the name of political correctness and, lately, wokeness, a pejorative term that sheds more heat than light. Dreher would be on target if all he claimed is that some corners of the left have succeeded to a disturbing extent in putting in place mechanisms that attempt to control discourse in educational institutions and corporations. There is indeed a censorious cultural movement afoot that has spread widely, committing outrages along the way. But these outrages are overwhelmingly the handiwork of private actors, not overreaching government. Moreover, countervailing forces are in play: Organizations like the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have sprung up to defend freedom of thought and expression. There is no shortage of thinkers across the political spectrumthe names of Jonathan Chait, Anne Applebaum and Robert P. George come to mindwho offer withering criticism of progressive authoritarianism without rushing to the conclusion that America has descended into some sort of totalitarian nightmare.

The fact of the matter is that in whatever direction one looks, the left-wing progressive agenda is in retreat. A dont say gay bill that bans discussion of sexual orientation in kindergarten through 3rd-grade classrooms has passed in Florida, and copies are under consideration in numerous other jurisdictions. Theres a well-publicized backlash to the participation of transgendered athletes in womens sports. The teaching of critical race theoryor just the perception of the teaching of critical race theoryhas provoked a backlash, leading to books being removed from school libraries, not by the left but by the right. Supposedly woke mega-corporations are under assault from lawmakers, their tax benefits targeted, their antitrust status questioned. The landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion is almost certain to be overturned, and one state after the next is subjecting the procedure to tighter restrictions if not an outright ban. If one looks at the composition of the Supreme Court, it appears that conservatives have been faring rather well. Whatever one thinks about any of these developments, they are not exactly the hallmarks of a left-wing dictatorship, let alone a totalitarian one.

Ironically, even as the post-liberals deplore their own countrys totalitarian character, they have a soft spot for genuine authoritarians. Putin has presided over a regime with a long record of murdering rivals and journalists and engaging in aggression against neighboring countries. This did not deter Dreher from piling praise on the Russian leader for his Christian virtues in articles with titles like Putin Gets It. Why Dont We and Putin, Our Tsar Protector. Only after Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine did Dreher evidently have a change of heart. Now his articles bear titles like Clarity About Russian Brutality, in which he expresses disappointment that the master of the Kremlin, his erstwhile hero of the culture wars, is an utter disgrace.

If the sun has set on one deity, it has long risen on another, namely Viktor Orbn, prime minister of avowedly illiberal Hungary. Hazony and Deneen have made pilgrimages to Budapest to pay homage to the Hungarian leader. At Orbns meet-and-greet with Deneen, reads the official press release, the American academic spoke highly of Hungarys family policy measures, stressing that the future would rest on local communities based on national and family values rather than on liberalism. To Dreher, who had gone to live in Hungary for a spell, Orbns election victory in early April was a moment of triumph: Make no mistake, Dreher pronounced in a tweet, #ViktorOrban is the leader of the West nowthe West that still remembers what the West is. Under Orbn, says Dreher, the Hungarians are defending democracy and national sovereignty over and against the culturally imperialistic liberals of the West.

Never mind that Hungary is a kleptocracy in which the media is overwhelmingly controlled by the state and the ruling Fidesz party. Never mind that Orbn has packed Hungarys courts with cronies. Never mind that, as Arch Puddington has shown, Orbn has adopted a fawning posture toward a true totalitarian state: the Peoples Republic of China. Never mind that Orbns party and government have engaged in a thinly veiled campaign of anti-Semitism, rehabilitating vicious Jew-hating fascist figures of the pre-war era, white-washing Hungarys extensive role in the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, and turning the Jewish Hungarian-born American philanthropist George Soros into a national bogeyman. Like Putins Russia, Hungary makes a show of upholding family values and Christianity, and what is a little state-sponsored anti-Semitism compared to that? Soft totalitarianism may be a self-refuting oxymoron, but a more useful analytical term, creeping authoritarianism, certainly applies to Drehers new political paradise.

What follows from the notion that America is a dictatorship? One logical conclusion would be that the tyranny must be brought down. It would be foolish in the extreme to maintain that the mob that swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6 was inspired by post-liberal theorists. The chief inspirer was Donald Trump himself. But a climate has been created, and wild ideas are in circulation, which Trump exploited.

Deploying violent imagery, the post-liberal theorists are contributors to that climate. Vermeule calls for seizing a strategic position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons. Civility and decency are secondary values, says the integralist Sohrab Ahmari, another post-liberal and an editor at Compact magazine. It is necessary, Ahmari says, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy. The goal of the war is to enjoy the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good. The common and the Highest Good are to be determined, of course, by Ahmari and his like-minded post-liberal comrades themselves. Ahmari, it is pertinent to note, is a supporter of Frances far-right Marine Le Pen, leader of a political party whose roots lie in French fascism.

If there is a whiff of fascism in the air or, perhaps, more precisely, a longing for a Franco or a Salazar, that is unsurprising. Ahmari and his fellow post-liberals hold liberal democracy in contempt. They despise the individualism that is liberalisms underpinning. They valorize national solidarity and cultural homogeneity. They exude a loathing of America as decadent and depraved. We are an evil civilization, and we will be judged, declaims Dreher in a tweet. They follow the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who contended, as Deneen approvingly summarizes his view, that the great totalitarian threat of our age emanated not ultimately from the dictatorships of so-called communist regimes of the Soviet Union or China, but from the unfolding liberal logic of the West (emphasis added).

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them, said George Orwell. But the claim that the greatest totalitarian threat emanates from the unfolding liberal logic of the West is worse than stupid, it is morally despicable, standing on its head the epic struggle between freedom and barbarism while erasing memory of the millions who perished at communist hands. Just as there is something called Holocaust denial, there is something called Gulag denial, and this is an instance of it. It would be interesting to ask Deneen, who has a doctorate in political science, to compare the number of people murdered by the Soviet Union and China with the number murdered by governments operating under the unfolding liberal logic of the West. He would discover that the resulting ratiotens of millions of deaths on one side, zero on the otheris a telling measure of what constitutes a totalitarian threat and what does not. One is only left wondering why Deneen calls the Soviet Union and China so-called communist regimes. While tarring the liberal West as despotic, does he simultaneously harbor doubts about the communist character of these two countries?

Whatever lies behind such confusion (if that is what it is), both the post-liberals calumniation of their own country and their adoration of authoritarian leaders abroad seeps down from the intellectual sphere into the popular culture, where an entire ecosphere of illiberalsactivists, journalists, aspiring politicians, militia members, crackpots of various stripeshas been energized. While retaining his affinity for Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlsonthe keynote speaker at Hazonys first gathering of national conservativeshas broadcast from Budapest, bringing the supposed virtues of Hungary to the broad masses of the Fox television audience. This very month, the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC), hosted a convocation in Hungary in Orbns honor. A strange assortment of characters is now lauding Hungarys illiberal democracy, while lambasting America as a tyranny. Dictator Joe Biden started phase 1 of the Dems Communist takeover of America, is how Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sees the world. The United States needs to be liberated like Ukraine, says Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert. Rod Dreher makes an excellent case that totalitarianism has just about arrived in the U.S., writes Abe Greenwald, an editor at conservative Commentary magazine, addingwith the self-indicting irony escaping himthat the label totalitarian is much abused.

A segment of the right is infected with arrant nonsense, but the content of that arrant nonsense did not spring from nowhere. At a moment when American liberal democracy is coming undone, a group of supposedly serious thinkers has been engaged in a travesty, slandering the United States while simultaneously trivializing the extraordinarily brutal history of 20th century totalitarianism. It is a scandalous falsehood, a perversion of language for political ends, to contend, as Dreher does, that American liberal democracy has degenerated into something resembling the totalitarianism over which it triumphed in the Cold War. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent much of his life caught in the maw of such a regime. His masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, a chronicle of the torture and murder of millions, makes plain what totalitarianism is and what it is not. Live not by lies is Solzhenitsyns indelible admonition to those who would seek freedom. In a case of intellectual hijacking, Live Not By Lies is also the title Dreher gave to his most recent book. It is past time he and his fellow post-liberals began heeding Solzhenitsyns famous words.

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Is the United States Totalitarian? - Lawfare

Whatever misdeed I committed in a previous life must have been a doozy indeed, because a certain cruel editor of a particular leftist magazine, lets call it Contemporary Episodes, has once more sent me a fever dream in a box. On my desk is a package containing copies of the Heroes of Liberty library, a series of right-wing books for kids 7-12 years of age. I have a childrens book on Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, one on conservative pundit Thomas Sowell, and finally U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

The box of books is on my desk because of a very slightly critical review I wrote in 2020 for this magazine of a publishing project called The Tuttle Twins, which is a series of kids books that teach a variety of libertarian lessons, like that some workers are more valuable than others and that governments suppress free markets. My review of this political propaganda for kids of pre-critical thinking age was extremely gently critical, concluding that the series was a hideous fraud and an ugly twisted farce. My good-natured ribbing led to it being covered by some of the big, well-funded libertarian propaganda entities and right-wing think tanks, including the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the CATO Institute. This coverage largely consisted of gloating that the mean review made for good ad copy and that more copies of the books had been sold as a result. Typical for the right, the response was to brag about their economic power rather than respond to any of the substantive arguments I made.

I am now, then, this magazines designated book reviewer for the niche but apparently burgeoning subgenre of reactionary childrens literature. And so let us proceed to the present offering: Heroes of Liberty. These new books have the characteristic giant size and conspicuous thinness of books for kids still learning how to read and enjoy it. Theyre sturdy, with pretty colors and pleasing art design.

They are also the dark bile of the infected toe of the Devil himself. Lacking even the dark sincerity that came from the dedication of the writer of the dreadful Tuttle Twins series, these books are pure synthetic propaganda made to appease the demand of a Sheldon Adelson or a Charles Koch that the children get more naked conservative propaganda in their diets. So lets have a look at the effort to make some really young Republicans.

Lets start with Justice Barrett. Barrett, of course, is most popularly known for her recent receptiveness to striking down major portions of the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion for the first trimester of pregnancy. Striking down the ruling would activate various trigger laws and related acts enacted in a majority of U.S. states that ban the practice, drastically restricting access to family planning and reproductive health care for millions of womenespecially women without the money to travel to a blue state for the procedure. Access to abortion remains widely popular in the U.S., but our limited level of democracy means this need not shape policy.

The Heroes of Liberty book does not trouble its juvenile reader with such unpleasantness. We learn that Barrett works in the Supreme Court, in a big, white, majestic building, and Amy has a very sharp mind. She also has a very big heart: shes the mother of seven children, two of whom she adopted because they had no home of their own. We get her life storybig Catholic family, good student, oldest kid driving the little ones around in a LeSabre. Great humanizing detail.

The art in this book is truly abhorrent, the worst in the books I read. Its a really weird watercolor-y software-generated look with Munchian flowing colors next to photorealistic renderings of peoples faces. The artist credit doesnt specify a medium, but Id guess an illustration program named MigraineSoft.

Barrett goes to Notre Dame and learns about our Constitution which gives us freedom and democratic government, with a fun Supreme Court to make sure that our laws and our government follow the Constitution. Barrett gets married, has kids, and adopts a Haitian child who was very quiet and rarely got enough to eat. She was too weak to sit up or even to cry. This is followed by an illustration of a TV-ready moment showing her taking the child from their hellish country. The couple wanted to collect more orphans, but they couldnt. The government of Haiti had made everything so complicated: there were too many offices and too many officials who created so much red tape. In the end, the government would not let him go.

But then, great news! The catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010 strikes, and the government has a change of heart. Amys eyes welled with tears. Notably, the orphanage where the Barretts adoptee, John Peter, lived was typical of many in Haiti, as the New York Times observed, as many werent literal orphanstheir parents simply couldnt afford to care for them. Notably, the U.S. overthrew the government of Haiti three times in the 20th century.

Barretts career takes off as she becomes a federal judge. She would get up early in the morning to work quietly at her desk while everyone else was still asleep. This way, she would have time to spend with her family later in the day. We learn the criminal justice system will put criminals in jail yet gives everyone a chance to try and prove his innocence. Barrett clerks for a jolly-looking man with impish eyes, a Justice Scalia who believes our laws should follow the Constitution precisely. Amy liked Justice Scalia a lot. She loved his big rolling laugh and his sense of humor. And his boyish charm while upholding sodomy laws and overturning the main part of the Voting Rights Act!

Barrett gets confirmed, and everyone is impressed that shes speaking without notes at her hearing. Barrett learned that as a justice she would have to put aside her own feelings. This is called being impartial. When you are a judge, your job is not to impose your own thoughts or views on someone else. It is to make sure that the law is followed and the Constitution is upheld.

The book concludes that her children are lucky to have her as a mother, and we are lucky to have her as a Supreme Court justice. Great kids stuff here, no way Star Wars can compete with this. Just a story about a lady who is smart and nice and becomes powerful and its our lucky day. Bet your life that one day a kid will read this book without realizing they exist because Barrett helped take away their moms ability to pick a family size.

Next, Thomas Sowell: A Self-Made Man. Readers familiar with the nonstop nightmare hellscape of U.S. media may recognize Sowell as a prominent Black conservative pundit, a libertarian with Ivy League credentials, an economics PhD from the conservative stronghold of the University of Chicago, dozens of books, and a nationally syndicated opinion column. He spent decades at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a conservative think tank where he was the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy (readers will be familiar with my intergalactically best-selling book Capitalism vs. Freedom on the Friedmans and their bad ideas). Sowell was as regular a guest on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News as the phrase Black conservative intellectual makes you think he would be.

Thomas Sowell started out in life at a huge disadvantage. He was raised by his great aunt in a poor town in the South. Growing up, he never got the chance to know his mother and father. And he often had no money for new shoes or even for bus fare. But Thomas Sowell succeeded because wherever he went, and whatever he did, he never accepted anything he didnt think he deserved. He wanted nothing unearned and asked for nobodys pity. Thomas Sowell was determined to make it on his own. And he did.

Get it? Black people who dont take welfare succeed! Meaning they become nationally-known minority supporters of taking away income support and benefits from poor people, often disproportionately minorities. This is the real dark message of the whole reactionary kids publishing project: Take it from me, kid with no critical thinking skills, if you dont ask or expect anything like welfare or healthcare from the rich and powerful of society, and instead get a degree in defending them and then work in what is basically a parallel unaccredited university system of think thanks, you can be rich and go on big-time right-wing media and, as a nonwhite person, speak utterly conventional conservative platitudes and be a stupendous smash hit that brings down the house every time. Sure, the working class will slow-glide into misery and fascism while the ice caps melt, but by then youve had quite the career!

We get many pages on Sowells humble beginnings, with no water or power, in the days of Jim Crow laws in the South. These laws separated Americans based on color. It was unfair. There is no suggestion that this condition had anything to do with right-wing conservatism. (The book does not, for instance, mention that the leading conservative intellectual of the 20th century, William F. Buckley, spent these years defending Southern segregationism.) Sowell learns to read at a young age. His aunts partner takes him to church and presents him to the congregation, where the partner declares he is stepping down from his church duties to help raise Sowell, illustrated with a glowing scene before a gigantic cross.

The family moves to New York City, where teachers are alleged to have wanted Sowell to repeat the third grade, and because its a right-wing indoctrination book, the teachers are depicted as a bullying crowd of sneering freaks. Fortunately the principal, who is handsome, takes young Thomass side after he proves he can do fourth-grade math. Thomas stands up to bullies, moves out, takes part-time jobs, and when he loses his job, the book notes that he was sure about one thing, though: the answer wasnt begging or asking for favors. He would solve his own problems by himself, thank you very much. He cuts back on food until he gets a new job, with the clear implication: Kids, if you lose your job in some recession wave of million-person layoffs, solve the problem yourself ! Eat less! Eat day-old bread! That is literally what is depicted.

We get page after page of Sowell working with eyes downcast, and when he struggles, He didnt dwell on the past or blame Aunt Molly, their poverty, his teachers, or American society. He takes night classes, attends Harvard, and teaches economics at Cornell as an esteemed professor. He helps a Black international student through college by tutoring her rather than giving a mercy grade, and returned to the question of undeserved favors in his many books. He insisted that in the long run, they just dont help people improve their lives. If you give people something they didnt earn, they wouldnt learn how to earn it themselves.

Conspicuously, Barrett and Reagan are both portrayed as mainly responsible for their successful life trajectories, due to their hoary, clichd conservative values of Family and Work Ethic. But its just part of the story, as in most Western individual narrativesonly Sowells book foregrounds his self-madeness. Could it be because hes the Black one and the Right has a miles-long paranoid legacy of disparaging the work ethic of the Black population originally imported for slave labor? No, it could not.

One consolation in this monumentally evil celebration of knowing your place and conforming to the system is the art. Illustrator Carl Pearces work here is by far the best in the books I reviewed, with really lovely composition, and incredible feeling in the faces and playful charm in the children. Its a conservative book, so the teacher characters are evil, but their funny evil faces are fun to look at. Pearce does a ton of fine work here, especially considering the script hes working from. Just an impressive talent. Carl, draw for Current Affairs!

The books all end with a fun facts section, and Sowells includes this: Hes known for his witty observations. He once said: Its amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. Hope you werent eating while reading that cheeky zinger, ho ho!

For his years of valuable service to the U.S. right wing, Sowell had his brushes with real power, too. He was offered the position of Secretary of Labor and, later, Educationterrible things to contemplate by president Ronald Reagan. His book is my last to read on this parade of disgrace.

Finally, Ronald Reagan. Leftist writers are known to have a habit of trying to be cool and neutral when discussing his administration and legacy, only to eventually crack and explode into ranty towering condemnations. Im sure that wont happen this time!

Ronald Reagan: Its Morning in America is a marquee selection for the series and longer than the others, as Saint Ronald is a mainstream conservative icon, often voted the greatest U.S. president. His administration has the real legacy of moving the worlds most important country firmly into todays neoliberal era of deregulated corporations, lower taxes on the rich, and crushed labor unions. Get ready, folks.

Ronald Reagan was one of Americas toughest presidents. That is why he was able to lead the free world to victory in the Cold War. The Cold War was a contest between two visions: freedom and communism. The United States led the free world. The fate of the world hung in the balance. But Ronald Reagan was not afraid. He called the communist bloc an Evil Empire, which is exactly what it was.

But the first story is of President Reagan being deeply moved by the story of Reginald Andrews, an unemployed Black man who saved a blind person who fell on subway tracks. Reagan called a meatpacking plant where Andrews had recently interviewed for a job. He put in a good word for Mr. Andrews. Mr. Andrews was overjoyed when he got the job. He had eight children to feed. It was December. Christmas was just a few days away.

Its an oddly-placed effort to whitewash Reagans racial record, which included fighting doggedly for years against sanctions on South Africas cruel apartheid regime. Reagan also doggedly resisted the creation of a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., resistance which continued until veto-proof Congressional majorities forced his hand.

Then its off to the mans life story. Salesman father, moves a lot, blows a ball game (aw!). Daddy drinks, little Ronald has to drag him in the front door one night, and, like a lot of children of dysfunctional families, he goes to Hollywood. Long before he became president, Americans all over the country came to know his warm and friendly voice, his big gleaming smile, and that twinkle in his eye when he delivered a punch line. But he worried about communism in particular. It posed a major threat to the American way of life.

In America, our government should protect our freedom, not run our lives for us. It should be up to each person to decide what is best for him or her, like which billionaires warehouse empire to work for. But the rotten Communists think the government knows better and that it should control every aspect of peoples lives. In communist countries, governments also think that people should believe in communism and not in God. There are people in America who believe in communism, too, and they want the government to have more control of our lives. Reagan thought they were dangerous. He decided to enter politics to oppose them.

This is a very healthy and even-handed portrayal of politics for young minds, and theyre right, socialists are dangerous. Youre in danger of socialists inflicting health coverage on you and negating your student loan debt. Youre in huge danger of a popular jobs program building clean energy. Look out! The real danger here is keeping kids from being seduced by our cool sexy ideas.

We see Reagans days as governor of California as he suppresses a hippie demonstration which in reality was about Israel-Palestine, but in the book is just because the demonstrators wont leave a public park. The signs in the illustration literally all say Our Park and We will not surrender this park, rather than, for example, Israel commits crimes against humanity. Some of the kids are even supporters of communism, and in the story they erupted in riots, attacking innocent cops. Reagan sends in the National Guard, who are shown helping the police while surrounded by mysterious clouds of something that is not commented upon.

Reagan gets elected and, when asked what his policy on the Cold War would be, he answered like a tough guy from the movies. His policy, he said, was simple: We win. They lose. Reagans speech writers did pitch at a level that feels natural in a kids book, Ill say that. Then, of course, we get the failed assassination attempt, which gets page after page of dramatic portrayal, but with no twist ending, sadly.

We then get the childs version of the end of the Cold War, because Reagan was bravely unsatisfied with the containment strategy that kept the USSR encircled by allies and bases, and he had a very smart plan. Since our free system incentivizes people to work harder and makes us much richer than the communists were, we could win by means of economic power to develop large, advanced, and expensive defense technologies which the Soviets couldnt afford. Ha, we out-waste-spended them! No mention of Russia also being poor because it hosted World War II. The Berlin Wall falls and the Soviet Union disintegrates.

The book concludes with Reagan shown next to Mount Rushmore, the Capitol, the Constitution, a Western landscape, a gigantic American flag, and a soaring eagle, declaring Ronald Reagan believed in God, family, and patriotism. He believed in personal liberty, democracy, and the free market. The government should never try to do for people what they ought to do for themselves. We should all be free to choose our own path in life. It concludes: as Ronald Reagan liked to remind us, its always morning in America.

Of course, the day that dawned with the Reagan Revolution was one of increasingly powerful billionaires, giant crash-prone banks, a labor movement smashed to smithereens, active denial of AIDS for years, a drug war that incarcerated millions of people (a disproportionate number of them Black people), years of austerity cuts to school lunches and public programs, steadily rising global temperatures, and U.S. support for blood-soaked dictators from Zia-ul-Haq to Saddam Hussein. It remains to be seen whether humanity can overcome his calamitous legacy of classes, crashes, and climate change. Reagan and his supporters belong to historys darkest pages, even if those pages are oversized and filled with pictures for kids.

The Heroes of Liberty series is growing, with a new book out this month on John Wayne, continuing the TV cowboy theme begun with Reagan, I guess. But the existing books are enough to draw the conclusion that the Heroes of Liberty series is an abhorrent enterprise to pack the minds of unsuspecting kids with excremental political brainwashing and to prejudice them against any progressive program of social uplift, from universal health care to closing the racial wealth gap. These godforsaken junior texts are the product of a leviathan of hyper-reactionary dark money and an online ad-buying conservative echo chamber striving to take the candy of social democracy away from the babies of the next generation. For years to come, in Americas bookstores, these books will be a lurking threat in the childrens section, like a creep in a raincoat.

I wash my brains of it!

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Get 'Em While They're Young Current Affairs - Current Affairs

Ahead of his death anniversary next week, a look at how Nehru paved the way for an independent socialism in India

Ahead of his death anniversary next week, a look at how Nehru paved the way for an independent socialism in India

Soviet socialism, unlike the Chinese or other variants, compelled everyone to take a position owing to its universal claims, and Jawaharlal Nehru was no exception. His lasting response was that democracy with adult suffrage made the revolutionary seizure of power superfluous. This was his reply, not merely to the Soviet revolution but as much to the 19 thcentury ideal of the revolutionary coup dtat.

When he encountered Soviet communists in Europe in 1926-27, he complained, Personally I have the strongest objection to being led by the nose by the Russians or by anybody else. His four-day visit to Moscow in 1927 resulted in a booklet which has earned him in some circles the reputation of a fellow traveller. Such a person is a useful idiot, a non-communist apologist for the iniquities of communism.

This is curious since he found the country far from endearing. He was repelled by 1) the religious mentality; 2) the communist priesthood; 3) the ubiquitous propaganda; 4) the political dictatorship; 5) the unequal franchise where a worker enjoyed five votes to one for the peasant; 6) the devaluing of the individual citizen through group representation; and 7) outright class exclusions. He wrote admiringly of Lenin, but qualified it by describing him a fanatic; and after a visit to the mausoleum, he found that Even in death he is the dictator.

Nehru commented favourably on the Soviet prison system as reformatory rather than punitive. His polemical purpose was to contrast Soviet prisons with the barbarous British colonial ones with their handcuffs, fetters and other punishments. He followed this us up with another damning comment: it can be said without a shadow of doubt that to be in a Russian prison is far preferable than to be a worker in an Indian factory, whose lot is 10 to 11 hours of work a day and then to live in a crowded and dark and airless tenement, hardly fit for an animal.

His other positive observation concerned universal literacy, a Soviet success story in the 1920s, which historians have often noted. Again, it was set against the appalling British record in India. He took care not to be hostile, but he made clear that this was communism, a special world unto itself containing much that I do not like or admire.

He seemed uncritical only in his description of Nadezhda Krupskaya, that even a few minutes conversation with her discloses her charm. All reports said she was unattractive, slovenly and grimly austere. Nehru was a discriminating judge of feminine charms; but he seems to have lost it with Lenins widow.

His obsession with planning has often been ascribed to Soviet influence. But the idea of planning is an ancient socialist tradition dating to the 1830s, beginning with Henri de Saint-Simon, if he can be considered socialist, followed by Louis Blanc, and by the Fabians in Nehrus time. He had been attracted to the Fabians well before the Soviet revolution and his conversion to socialism in 1926-27. His early passion in the 1930s for planning, not only the material but also the spiritual life of the nation, owes something to these early socialists, especially Saint-Simon; but the Fabians would have been the proximate source of Nehrus ideas on the subject.

Non-alignment defined Nehru as much as planning did. Once again, he related it to socialism, not Soviet communism.

The European war economies then provided functioning models of planning. The German war economy masterminded by Walther Rathenau during World War I was the first example. Though capitalist, German centralised state monopolies provided Lenin a model for his early attempts at Soviet planning. During World War II, the British war economy was exemplary for its centralised efficiency. When Nehru launched his own planning exercises, he justified them more through the image of war than through socialism and the Soviet example.

He endlessly explained that war is conducted by planned effort, not by individual soldiers acting heroically on their own. He had the experience of the British war economy in mind, and if, as it seemed to him, it was possible for a rational and enlightened bureaucracy to rise to such heights, it should presumably be possible in India also in her war on poverty.

Soviet planning fascinated him for its extraordinary success in transforming a backward rural economy of the 1920s into a developed industrial economy in the 1930s capable of defeating the Nazi war machine. But the methods were barbarous and the human cost was hideous. He could not accept them for India; but then he did not face the prospect of total war either. In effect, his sources of inspiration for planning were the pre-Soviet socialist tradition, especially the Fabians, the non-socialist British war economy, and most of all, warfare itself.

Non-alignment defined Nehru as much as planning did. Once again, he related it to socialism, not Soviet communism. The logic of non-alignment was to retain and consolidate the independence so arduously won. It entailed being open to both sides in the Cold War but subordinate to neither. Since India was already totally exposed to the western world, non-alignment required exploring the communist, as also the entire decolonising world. This opening to the communist world has been blamed on his misguided socialism or the malign influence of V.K. Krishna Menon, all of which trivialise a considered strategic choice.

Nehru reasoned that his new state could not promote capitalism freely as that would lead back into the maw of imperialism, London and New York. Socialism would be the corrective.

But he could not endorse communism either, however sympathetic to or interested in the Soviet Union he may have been, as it demanded subservience to Moscow. Socialism was the corrective again. Nor could it be European socialism or social democracy owing to its complicity in imperialism. Hence, it was to be an independent socialism, a lonely road that India would tread. Such a socialism provided the ideological and intellectual backing to non-alignment. It was independent, not pro-Soviet.

While Nehru was indifferent or negative to Soviet theories and practices, he was distinctly positive to its geopolitical role. In the pre-War years, he noted that India and the Soviet Union had a common foe in imperialism. After the War, as he saw American supremacy replace the British with an even wider reach, he found the Soviet presence useful to contain the excesses of western dominance in the subcontinent. Without joining either side in the Cold War, he sought to soften the edges of the power blocs through his non-alignment as in his active diplomacy over Korea and Indo-China.

But the Soviet Union provided a vitally needed additional resource for diplomacy, economic development, and military supplies. He set the foundation for Indo-Soviet friendship as much as he did for good relations with America, but he never pursued either at the expense of the other as his critics and advisors on the left and right wanted him to do. More than anybody else in the political leadership, he maintained clarity on independence of choice, and never let Soviet friendship cloud his judgement.

The writer is the editor of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. This is the last in the essay series onNehru in theMagazine.

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Nehru set the foundation for Indo-Soviet friendship but never let it cloud his judgement - The Hindu

The soviet astronaut, who was the first man in space, was sent on a worldwide tour in 1961 to promote communism. It was during this tour that he met the Queen, sitting down for breakfast with the monarch. Mr Gagarin's visit to the UK took place just three months after his historic flight into space.

The flight, which took place on 12 April 1961, lasted just 48 minutes.

Royal author Andrew Morton claimed that Mr Gagarin "dipped his hand to stroke her leg just above the knee", something which came to "the Queens utter astonishment".

Writing for the Daily Mail, he continued: "With admirable sang froid, she managed to keep a smile on her face as she sipped her coffee.

"Gagarin later explained that hed touched her leg in order to make sure she was real and not just an animated doll."

The astronaut, Mr Morton claimed, also admitted he was unsure as to which cutlery to use.

The Queen reportedly responded: "My dear Mr Gagarin, I was brought up in this palace but believe me, I still dont know in which order I should use all these forks and knives."

Royal protocol guides against touching members of the Royal Family unnecessarily.

But Mr Gagarin is not the only public figure to accidentally breach royal protocol.

LIVE UPDATES:Royal Family LIVE: Harry and Meghan face 'make or break' moment

"Everyone else has to, it doesn't matter who you are, even royals remove sunglasses when they meet royals."

Former US President Donald Trump has also made a number of blunders when meeting the Queen.

In June 2019, like Mr Gagarin, the Republican leader appeared to touch the Queen's back.

The incident, which took place during a state banquet, saw Mr Trump put his hand on her back as she rose from her seat.

And in 2009, Michelle Obama broke protocol by hugging the Queen.

In her memoir, Becoming, Ms Obama explained that she "did what's instinctive to me any time I feel connected to a new person."

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Queen's 'utter astonishment' after Yuri Gagarin 'put hand on THIGH' during communism rant - Express