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The New York Times has a lengthy, melancholy essay celebrating the role of Communism in American life by Vivian Gornick. Its getting all of the predictable and mostly deserved blowback from conservatives.

As someone raised in anti-Communism, I expected to have a similar enraged reaction, but I have to say I found the piece almost touching. Almost.

Gornick writes:

Most Communists never set foot in party headquarters, laid eyes on a Central Committee member, or were privy to policy-making sessions. But every rank-and-filer knew that party unionists were crucial to the rise of industrial labor; party lawyers defended blacks in the South; party organizers lived, worked, and sometimes died with miners in Appalachia; farm workers in California; steel workers in Pittsburgh. What made it all real were the organizations the party built: the International Workers Order, the National Negro Congress, the Unemployment Councils. Whenever some new world catastrophe announced itself throughout the Depression and World War II, The Daily Worker sold out in minutes.

It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of ones own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith, even when a 3-year-old could see that it was eating itself alive.

I think this is all a bit too rose-colored, but its not exactly wrong either. Lots of fairly ordinary Americans considered themselves Communists. The Communist Party did fight for civil rights and free speech in America. The individual lawyers and activists behind those efforts were no doubt often sincere. But whats left out of this telling is that they were cleared to do this sort of thing by the party bosses for the propaganda value. If you think Stalin and his apparatchiks gave a whit about civil rights or free speech in America, or anywhere else, youre ignorant or a fool.

One small example. The Smith Act was the heart of what would later be called McCarthyism. It allowed the Federal government to prosecute members of subversive organizations that sought the overthrow of the U.S. government. It was initially used and abused by FDR against alleged pro-Nazi elements during World War II, in what historian Leo Ribuffo called the Brown Scare. Later, it was used against Communists. The first Communists it was used against? Trotskyists (you know, the ones who actually supported a worldwide community of workers). And you know who supported these anti-Communist witch-hunts? The Stalinist pawns of the Communist Party of the United States. They named names and publicly supported the trials, because the first priority for the Communist Party was supporting Stalin, not workers liberation or any of the stuff Ms. Gornick rhapsodizes over.

Lenin supposedly called Western intellectuals who supported the Soviet Union useful idiots (though theres some doubt whether he actually used the term). The people Ms. Gornick describes werent intellectuals, but they were dupes. Probably, or at least possibly, decent on the whole, but fools nonetheless. It was hardly as if one needed to be a member of the CPUSA to support labor unions or civil rights. Just ask Norman Thomas.

Gornick concludes at the end:

I was 20 years old in April 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalins rule. Night after night the people at my fathers kitchen table raged or wept or sat staring into space. I was beside myself with youthful rage. Lies! I screamed at them. Lies and treachery and murder. And all in the name of socialism! In the name of socialism! Confused and heartbroken, they pleaded with me to wait and see, this couldnt be the whole truth, it simply couldnt be. But it was.

The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map.

The effective life of the Communist Party in the United States was approximately 40 years in length. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were Communists at one time or another during those 40 years. Many of these people endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin, and even imprisonment. They were two generations of Americans whose lives were formed by political history as were no other American lives save those of the original Revolutionists. History is in them and they are in history.

Yes, some of those people suffered imprisonment, in no small part thanks to the treachery of the Communists themselves. Others suffered because they were part of an organization that was expressly hostile to the United States of America and in the service of a regime that murdered millions while claiming to be a champion of civil rights. I can appreciate Ms. Gornicks nostalgia, but as Robert Nisbet said, nostalgia is the rust of memory. It seems to me a bit sad and pathetic, that she and at least to some extent the New York Times thinks the most important thing to remember from this sad chapter in American life are victims not of Stalins mass murder or of Soviet espionage but the victims of their own stupidity.

Update: A reader made a point that was gnawing in the back of my head that I should have made above. If you really had to wait for Kruschevs1956 speech to be disillusioned with Communism, you really were pretty deep in the bunker. The Nazi Soviet Pact in 1939 removed illusions for many Communists nearly two decades earlier. If your faith in Communism kept you in the Party after that (or, say, the assassination of Trotsky), you really dont deserve any sympathy for your later disappointment or for your alleged idealism.

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The Times' Postcard for Communism - National Review

FrontPage Magazine

Celebrating Communism at the New York Times FrontPage Magazine The New York Times commemorated the Communist holiday in its own way with an essay by Vivian Gornick, now eighty-one, a card-carrying member of the old New York intellectual crowd and author of a 2011 biography of anarchist heroine Emma ...

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Celebrating Communism at the New York Times - FrontPage Magazine

After Pope Francis early in his papacy decried capitalism as trickle-down economics a polemical phrase coined by the left during the Reagan years that Francis frequently borrows radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh commented, This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope. Talk show host Michael Savage called him Lenins pope. Pope Francis took such comments as a compliment. I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I dont feel offended, he told the Italian press.

Pope Francis grew up in socialist Argentina, an experience that left a deep impression on his thinking. He told the Latin American journalists Javier Camara and Sebastian Pfaffen that as a young man he read books of the Communist Party that my boss in the laboratory gave me and that there was a period where I would wait anxiously for the newspaperLa Vanguardia, which was not allowed to be sold with the other newspapers and was brought to us by the socialist militants.

The boss to whom Pope Francis referred is Esther Ballestrino de Careaga. He has described her as a Paraguayan woman and a fervent communist. He considers her one of his most important mentors. I owe a huge amount to that great woman, he has said, saying that she taught me so much about politics. (He worked for her as an assistant at Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory in Buenos Aires.)

She often read Communist Party texts to me and gave them to me to read. So I also got to know that very materialistic conception. I remember that she also gave me the statement from the American Communists in defense of the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death, he has said. Learning about communism, he said, through a courageous and honest person was helpful. I realized a few things, an aspect of the social, which I then found in the social doctrine of the Church. As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he took pride in helping her hide the familys Marxist literature from the authorities who were investigating her. According to the author James Carroll, Bergoglio smuggled her communist books, including MarxsDas Kapital, into a Jesuit library.

Tragically, Ballestrino herself disappeared at the hands of security forces in 1977, reported Vatican correspondent John Allen. Almost three decades later, when her remains were discovered and identified, Bergoglio gave permission for her to be buried in the garden of a Buenos Aires church called Santa Cruz, the spot where she had been abducted. Her daughter requested that her mother and several other women be buried there because it was the last place they had been as free people. Despite knowing full well that Ballestrino was not a believing Catholic, the future pope readily consented.

These biographical details throw light on the popes ideological instincts. Yet many commentators have ignored them, breezily casting his leftism as a bit confused but basically harmless.

I must say that communists have stolen our flag. The flag of the poor is Christian, he said in 2014.Such a comment would have startled his predecessors. They didnt see communism as a benign exaggeration. They saw it as a grave threat to God-given freedom, as it proposes that governments eliminate large swaths of individual freedom, private property and business in order to produce the equality of a society without economic classes.

In the early twentieth century, as Marxs socialism spread across the world, Pope Pius XI declared the theory anathema. No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist, he said. To hear Pope Francis speak today, one might conclude the reverse: that no can be at the same time a good Catholic and an opponent of socialism.

Inequality is the root of all evil, Pope Francis wrote on his Twitter account in 2014.One can imagine Karl Marx blurting that out, but none of Franciss predecessors would have made such an outrageous claim. According to traditional Catholic theology, the root of all evil came not from inequality but from Satans refusal to accept inequality. Out of envy of Gods superiority, Satan rebelled. He could not bear his lesser status.

He was in effect the first revolutionary, which is why the socialist agitator Saul Alinsky a mentor to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (who did her senior thesis at Wellesley on his thought) offered an acknowledgment in his book,Rules for Radicals, to Satan. Alinsky saw him as the first champion of the have nots.

Were the 20th-century English Catholic satirist Evelyn Waugh alive today, he would find the radical left-wing political flirtations of Pope Francis too bitterly farcical even for fiction. Could a satirist like Waugh have imagined a pope happily receiving from a Latin American despot the gift of a crucifix shaped in the form of a Marxist hammer and sickle? That surreal scene happened during Pope Franciss visit to Bolivia in July 2015.

Evo Morales, Bolivias proudly Marxist president, offered the pontiff that sacrilegious image of Jesus Christ. Morales described the gift as a copy of a crucifix designed by a late priest, Fr. Luis Espinal, who belonged to the Jesuit order (as does Pope Francis) and had committed his life to melding Marxism with religion. Pope Francis had honored Espinals memory upon his arrival in Bolivia.

Had John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI seen such a grotesque cross, they might have broken it over their knees. Not Pope Francis. He accepted the hammer-and-sickle cross warmly, telling the press on the plane ride back to Rome that I understand this work and that for me it wasnt an offense. After the visit, Morales gushed, I feel like now I have a Pope. I didnt feel that before.

George Neumayr is the author of The Political Pope: How Pope Francis Is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives, to be released Tuesday by Center Street.

See the article here:
Pope Francis's Communist Mentor | The American Spectator - American Spectator

Today, May 1, is -- as we all have heard repeatedly -- International Workers' Day. It's instructive -- if not very informative -- to look at al Jazeera's take on it.

In dozens of countries, May Day is an official holiday, and for labour rights campaigners it is particularly important.

In the United States, it is symbolic of past labour struggles against a host of workers' rights violations, including lengthy work days and weeks, poor conditions and child labour.

Of course, starting in the '20s, and eventually formalized in the '50s, the United States made it Loyalty Day. Also Law Day. We've already seen how Loyalty Day has suddenly become a Big Deal this year, so I won't repeat myself. But May 1 is also suggested as a commemorative day for another, much darker, reason. Ilya Somin has been campaigning for years to have May 1 declared Victims of Communism Day.

Go here to read the rest:
Remember the VICTIMS of Communism on May Day! - PJ Media

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The man, identified as Daniel Llorente, has previously waged similar protests against the communist regime of dictator Ral Castro and has expressed vocally his support for the American government.

Video of the incident shows that Llorente took off running in front of the throngs, waving an American flag before the likeness of mass murderer Ernesto Che Guevara in the Plaza of the Revolution, waiting to march just moments before the May Day parade was to begin, shouting anti-government slogans. A group of men waiting on the sidelines, who have not been identified in reports, restrained, beat, and dragged Llorente away. Every major Cuban government leader, including dictator Castro, was in attendance.

The Miami-based outletMart Noticias identified the man as Llorente, a freelance cab driver and dissident, but does not belong to any dissident organizations. Instead, he has used his American flag to protest on previous occasions by waving it before public congregations. A year ago, Llorente protested before a crowd awaiting the first American cruise ships arrival in Havana, the Adonia. Llorente greeted the ship waving an American flag and shouting Yes we can!, the famous slogan of President Barack Obamas first presidential campaign. The government organized a rabble to berate Llorente with racial epithets, and Llorente responded by asserting his freedom.

I use whatever flag I want because I am free. I am not a hypocrite, not like all the Cubans marching yesterday [the 2016 May Day march] all those Cubans are hypocrites, he told his detractors. He went on to praise the U.S. flag as the pride of the Americans and assert, I dont fear the government.

Llorente was also beaten and whisked away following that incident.

May Day, or International Workers Day, is a holiday organized to celebrate Marxism worldwide. In Cuba, governed by communists for over half a century, the government celebrates annually with a large mandatory parade in Havana.

In a rare admission that the Llorente incident occurred, state propaganda outletGranmacondemned the protester as an annexationist and claimed he had a criminal record for armed robbery. The newspaper insisted that 800,000 Cubans marched to celebrate communism and ran a number of articles claiming that the ideology, which has killed nearly 100 million people worldwide, remains popular. Among the articles supporting the government was one headlined Fidel, More Present than Ever (he is dead).

Violence against dissidents remains rampant in Cuba, perhaps more common under Ral Castro than during the end of his brothers term. In March, for example, two members of the dissident group Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), one a pregnant teen, were attacked by a communist mob and beaten, the woman punched in the womb in an attempt to force her to abort. That same month, Eduardo Cardet, the head of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), was sentenced to three years in prison for allegedly refusing to mourn the death of Fidel Castro. The Ladies in White, a group of dissidents who protest every Sunday by attending Catholic Mass in their signature color and holding images of prisoners of conscience, are beaten and arrested following that Mass on a weekly basis.

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VIDEO: Cuban Dissident Beaten for Interrupting Communist May Day Parade Waving US Flag - Breitbart News