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His sisters fled to the east. His father was shot. Making his way through the countryside, he ran into a group of Soviet officers who had been separated from their units. Together, they got through the German lines by crossing the Dnieper River. Once on the other side, he enrolled in a school that taught guerrilla tactics to would-be partisans. After that came a parachute course. In the spring of 1942, he joined a company of 18 partisans on their way to be dropped behind German lines. Fifteen survived. After a few weeks, he was their commander. Soon, he was in charge of a second company. He kept being promoted because his commanding officers kept getting killed.

Jakub applied for Communist Party membership that winter, while still in the field. He was accepted shortly thereafter. All told, he spent over two years in the woods fighting a guerrilla war against the German Army. In that time, he won a little bit of renown. Hes even mentioned in Volume 3 of the Workers History of the Socialist Republic of Belarus (the best volume, in my opinion).

The end of the war found Jakub in a field hospital, recovering from shrapnel wounds. A short while later, he was in Berlin, then in the city of Wroclaw, in western Poland, then back in Warsaw. He returned to a ravaged country and a ruined city. Two of his sisters were dead. One died in Treblinka; the other was shot in a mass execution in 1942, after she was caught on the wrong side of the ghetto wall.

In 1945, he was working in something called the Society of Soviet-Polish Friendship. Soon thereafter, he joined the Ministry of Public Security the secret police.

In Poland today, having worked for the secret police is a heavy thing to admit. The Ministry of Public Security played a crucial role in imposing Communist Party rule by force after the World War II. Its members jailed the opposition and silenced critics. To establish its dominance, the Communist Party fought what amounted to a low-level civil war against the vestiges of the non-Communist resistance. The Ministry of Public Security was the hard edge of Communist power in Poland. In its role as a counterintelligence organization, it also engaged in a shadow war with the C.I.A. and other Western spy agencies. And its in this role that my grandfathers story reappears in the files.

Most of what I know about his life after his career as a partisan comes from a Communist Party personnel file, which I decided to request from the Polish Institute of National Remembrance after finding a tantalizing mention of my grandfathers postwar life in another one of the institutes publications. But the file is vague on what he was doing in those years. It simply lists the departments he was posted to: the department for fighting counterrevolution; counterintelligence; countersabotage. Now it becomes necessary to follow him through the footnotes of historians who study intelligence operations during the start of the Cold War.

In 1950, he turns up as a case officer involved in something called Operation Caesar. Operation Caesar was a false-flag operation, in which the Polish secret police rounded up members of a real, underground resistance group and persuaded them to switch sides. Then they sent them across the Iron Curtain to the West. In the guise of a real resistance movement, they received money and matriel from the C.I.A. and MI6 over $1 million, and several hundred pounds of gold in total then turned around and passed those on to their Polish handlers. My grandfather, it seems, was one of those handlers.

What happened next is difficult to say. He died in 1963, when my mother was 7. She didnt know him well. What memories Ive heard from that time are fragments. He played tennis. He read books. He announced his engagement to my grandmother by saying to his sister, Jadzia, Im getting married. Let me have a shirt. In fact, the best source of information on his life is the file, which we obtained only last year. Even so, much is unsaid.

His story fits into a pattern. My grandfather belonged to a generation of Polish Jews that grew up with the revolution and put all their faith in it. If they survived long enough, they lived to see that faith betrayed.

For Polish Jews in the 1920s and 30s, joining the Communist movement represented the most radical of all possible rebellions, in the words of the Swedish sociologist Jaff Schatz, who wrote the defining work on this generation. It was a rebellion against ones parents and the traditions of Jewish life. It also meant participating in an illegal organization, which brought with it the constant possibility of imprisonment.

To the members of my grandfathers generation, Communism was a way to be modern and a way to escape the shtetl. It was a way to fight anti-Semitism and oppose fascism, both in Poland and worldwide. And perhaps most important, it was way to build the future and be a part of something larger than themselves. Being a Communist was a life of total commitment, persecution and permanent insecurity. But becoming a Communist also meant an intense sense of participation in the movement of history and in the revolutionary upheaval of the world. That upheaval would come soon enough just not in the way they expected.

The participation of Jews in the Polish Communist movement eventually crystallized into a widespread stereotype. The term for it is Zydokomuna, Polish for Judeo-Communism. Usually, the word is meant as a slur, a way of equating Jews with terror and foreign usurpation. The historian Andr Gerrits describes it as a xenophobic assertion, a myth, a delusion. And indeed, it doesnt stand up to closer historical scrutiny. Numerically, Communists were a tiny proportion of the larger Jewish community. Within the Polish Communist movement, Jews were a significant and overrepresented, minority but still a minority. It remains a pillar of anti-Semitic discourse in Poland to this day.

On the whole, Zydokomuna the equation of Communism with Judaism is a delusion and, in common usage, a slur. But for my family at least, it carries a kernel of truth. My grandfather (both of them, actually) belonged to a generation caught between fascism and communism with very little room to maneuver between the two. Before the war, joining the Communist Party meant rebellion. During it, it meant survival.

But there was another dimension to my grandfathers life beside the one described in his party file. In 1963, one of his fellow partisans from Belarus recorded him on his deathbed in a Warsaw hospital speaking about his wartime service.

There, he narrates his autobiographical statement in his Communist Party file, which emphasizes his class background and political work. This time, his testimony centers on one episode from a long war: the night of Jan. 21, 1943. His unit was in the Belarussian village of Novy Svyerzhan, the site of a German work camp for imprisoned Jews. Jakub and his unit decided to storm it under the cover of darkness. They used a soldier disguised as a peasant on a horse as a decoy to approach the camp gates. Then they attacked with machine guns and grenades. After they set the lumber yard ablaze, the surviving Germans ran away. Two hundred Jewish slave workers ran for freedom.

What does it mean to fight on the right side of the war, but the wrong side of history?

Depending on whom you ask today, my grandfathers story is that of a partisan, a traitor, a hero or a spy. The revolution asked a terrible amount of those who served it. Those who resisted paid a similarly awful price. It left in its wake countless lives, like my grandfathers, that cannot be compassed by a single line.

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My Grandfather, the Secret Policeman - New York Times

31 July 2017 | by Rose Gamble The result effectively removes the Venezuelan political opposition and leaves the ruling socialist party with almost complete control over the country

Bishops in Venezuelapleaded for the intercession of the Virgin Mary to free their country from the claws of communism and socialism as President Nicholas Maduro claimed Sundays (30 July) poll as a vote for the revolution.

The national electoral council said more than eight million people had turned out to vote for members of the constituent assembly who will be tasked withrewriting the countrys constitution.

The opposition immediately disputed the number, saying less than half that number had taken part. They added that many voters had boycotted a vote that would effectively turn the country into a dictatorship.

In a prayer posted to Twitter the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference wrote: Most Holy Virgin, Mother of Coromoto, heavenly Patron of Venezuela, free our homeland from the claws of communism and socialism.

Sunday's vote was marked by the worst violence since protests against the Maduro government began in April. The opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, said as many as 14 had died in protests as voting was under way and the prosecutors office confirmed at least six people had been killed by gunfire, including a national guardsman.

Late on Sunday evening, electoral officials announced the winners of the vote, a list of leftist stalwarts including Cilia Flores, president Maduros wife.

The result effectively removes the Venezuelan political opposition and leaves the ruling socialist party with almost complete control over the country.

Maduro hailed the vote as a victory over imperialism in a speech on national television late on Sunday.

Its when imperialism challenges us that we prove ourselves worthy of the blood of the liberators that runs through the veins of men, women, children and young people, he said.

However, theEuropean Union has condemned the excessive and disproportionate use of force by security forces and said it had serious doubts whether the election could be recognised.

Venezuela has democratically elected and legitimate institutions whose role is to work together and to find a negotiated solution to the current crisis. A constituent assembly, elected under doubtful and often violent circumstances, cannot be part of the solution, the blocs foreign policy service said.

Days before the vote, the Venezuelas bishops conference said it was "unconstitutional as well as unnecessary, inconvenient and damaging to the Venezuelan people, "

"It will be a biased and skewed instrument that will not resolve but rather aggravate the acute problems of the high cost of living and the lack of food and medicine that the people suffer and will worsen the political crisis we currently suffer," the statement said.

The new assembly will be convened within 72 hours of the vote.

PICTURE:Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro delivers a speech in Caracas during the closing campaign ceremony for the 27 July Constituent Assembly election. The banner reads "Power"

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Venezuelan bishops plead for country to be freed from 'claws of communism and socialism' following Sunday's vote - The Tablet

Roadside signs illustrating pick-your-own blueberries, peaches and grapes let motorists know what to expect at Four Seasons Farm. It takes a chat with owner Martin Schaffer, though, to learn the international intrigue behind the rural Mason County enterprise.

Seeking political freedom, Schaffer, then 26, fled his native Czechoslovakia in 1984. He says the communists blocked career goals.

I was a manager, he said of his job in an agricultural-related industry. It was very structured under communism. I was told that I was going to lose my (management) job and I was going to be just a worker if I didnt sign up for the Communist Party.

People in leading management positions had to be in the party, said Schaffer, 59. Some people signed up for the reason of getting a better job. It was something that I was not willing to put up with.

He left, never to return.

Schaffer fled to Austria and applied for a visa to the United States. He then relocated in New Hampshire through the assistance of sponsoring Baptist missionaries. They helped him learn the language and secure a laboratory animal job similar to the one he had performed in Central Europe.

After seven years in New England, he transferred to the Florida Keys. There, Schaffer built his own catamaran and operated a charter sailing outfit for seven more years. It was the volatile coastal weather that convinced Schaffer and his ex-wife to head north.

He was ready to try something new.

I found that building the boat was nicer than sailing it, he said. I like producing with my hands. I had good, repeat customers, but sailing became a chore for me because I was not creating.

He settled on 109 acres of hilly West Virginia farmland after a three-year property search. Schaffer soon found his niche in growing nutritious food. He alone cares for his crops and livestock from dawn until dusk.

Im a big believer in that food is our medicine, he said. We should eat to be healthy and as natural as possible. I like interacting with my customers. They come in a good mood, and theyre interested in eating good, healthy food.

From our farm to your table is the slogan of the agriculture business along Route 87 near the Mason-Jackson county line.

Farm occupants include a menagerie of sheep, goats, ducks, seven dogs and 11 peacocks.

Summer customers visit from Point Pleasant, Ripley and beyond for the peaches, apples and blueberries. Schaffer has 15 honey hives and is laying the groundwork to expand with blackberries and raspberries next summer.

Also, Schaffer is excited about the relatively new line of RazzMatazz table grapes.

They are small, seedless grapes that grow in small bundles, and the flavor... its like candy, he said with a laugh.

Four Seasons Farms mainstay is about 40 customers in the Huntington area with a year-round demand for his eggs and other staples. Schaffer sends a weekly email of available inventory and follows with next-day delivery.

He says cooperation from local offices of the United States Department of Agriculture and the Natural Resources Conservation Service has been a positive influence.

People complain about government, but their programs for small farmers are very helpful, he said, alluding to the nearby high-tunnel greenhouse.

Schaffer admits everything in America may not be peachy, but says its far superior to the alternatives. He shows pride in his country by flying Old Glory from a flagpole situated between his driveway and modest farmhouse.

I came to America not to be a Czech in the United States, Schaffer said. I came to America to be an American. I am so happy to live in the United States. I think its the greatest country to live in.

Life is good, he says.

I like what Im doing, Schaffer said, among several docile critters gathered in the shadow of his lawn chair. Everybody heres in total peace.

Four Seasons Farm is situated along Route 87 near the Mason County community of Baden. Schaffer may be contacted at FourSeasonsFarm@ymail.com or 304-895-3973.

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After Fleeing Communism, Farming 'Peachy' in W.Va. - The Exponent Telegram (press release) (registration)

If ever I have to live in a dictatorship, put me down for one of those right-wing set-ups. To toil under leftist autocracy would be too exhausting you plant potatoes all day, get chased around by the secret police, then have to wade through articles in the Guardian explaining why youre not experiencing true socialism.

Its the standard response of Western radicals faced with the brutal truth about the regimes they fetishise. They will not bedissuaded by evidence that their ideology tends to result in mass immiseration and exciting opportunities in the garbage-scavenging economy. For no evidence is possible: when command economies go wrong, it turns out real socialists were never in command.

Venezuela is shaping up to be the next false dawn and soon its erstwhile champions will airily assure us that it too wasnt run along genuine socialist lines. Incumbent president Nicols Maduro is celebrating his victory in Sundays election in which he took Bertolt Brecht somewhat literally and dissolved the peoples parliament and elected another.

The 2015 election, which saw moderate parties wrest control of the National Assembly, was the first major reversal in power forMaduro. Since then he has been busy packing the courts, suspending regional elections, and intimidating the opposition. He has also overseen an economic implosion. Hugo Chvez was able to bankroll his socialist paradise with oil revenues. But when petroleum prices plummeted, so too did Venezuelas ability to fund its expansive social welfare system and generous fuel subsidies. This has produced public unrest and growing hostility towards the regime amongst even its loyalest constituencies, including the poor and rural. The Chavista miracle is over.

Maduros new Constituent Assembly, which will replace the National Assembly, will be composed entirely of candidates nominated by his United Socialist Party. It will be empowered to rewrite the constitution to remove what precious checks and balances remain. The United States has branded the move another step toward dictatorship and termed the Maduro junta architects of authoritarianism. Socialism the real variety or otherwise having failed, the Venezuelan people will have no choice but to live with it for some time to come.

The unfolding crisis has prompted calls for Jeremy Corbyn and other former Chvez fan boys to acknowledge yet another failure of their worldview. The Labour leader hailed Chvez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared and making massive contributions to Venezuela [and] a very wide world. Diane Abbott once declared that Chavez shows another world is possible. Owen Jones pronounced him an icon for Venezuelas long-suffering poor who represented a break from years of corrupt regimes with often dire human rights records. All this he achieved despite an aggressively hostile media and bitter foreign critics, Jones gushed.

In large part it was their shared anti-Americanism that brought Chvez and the Western far-left together. He was a plucky little Simn Bolvar for the 21st century, defying latter day imperialists and defending the independence of Latin America. Like them, he despised neoliberalism. (Neo is Greek for new and Leftist for all forms of.) It hardly mattered that Chvez, while undoubtedly giving the poor more of a hearing than most of his predecessors, was in truth a thug and a strongman. Those notorious right-wingers at Human Rights Watch said his regime was characterised by a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human rights guarantees.

Human rights monitors were deported and a judge who freed one of Chvezs critics from arbitrary detention found herself summarily jailed then placed under house arrest. Commercial TV stations had their licences revoked and restrictions were placed on critical newspapers. When Globovisin, the last remaining independent broadcaster, covered a prison riot that was poorly handled by the government, it was fined millions of dollars for promot[ing] hatred for political reasons that generated anxiety in the population. After Globovisins owner accused Chvez of not respecting press freedoms, he was arrested for disseminating false information and offending the president. Even mans best friend wasnt safe from the megalomaniac dictator. When a soap opera mocked Chavez by naming a dog after him, his government had the show cancelled.

Asking Corbyn and his fellow-travellers to recant their cheerleading for the extinguishing of Venezuelan democracy is futile. They would not accept the premise, then theyd accuse you of being a CIA asset, and when every excuse had been exhausted they would invoke the not-real-socialism clause. The question they should be pressed on is this: If Chavismo is so progressive and egalitarian, why do they not support it for Britain? Why does Jeremy Corbyn prescribe full-bloodedsocialism for Venezuela but wont do the same for Britain? The far-left has spent decades pointing to political miserablism inflicted on the worlds poor and prating that another world is possible and yet now that they are in control of the Labour Party they seem pretty relaxed about the world we have. They are like Leninists lost on a gap year: Capitalism in one country, to the barricades everywhere else.

Corbyn and his ilk are not revolutionaries but revolution tourists. They find far-flung political struggles exotic and romantic; they wouldnt like to live in Venezuela but its a sun-kissed break from the dreary managerialism of Britain. This is nothing more than the cultural appropriation they denounce in its every other manifestation but what a thrilling form it takes, allowing absolute white boys from hipster London to join the Latin American proletariat until they get bored and alight upon a new cause to patronise. They will never find true socialism because they only want it for others, not themselves.

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Socialism is destroying Venezuela but the left will never admit it - Spectator.co.uk (blog)

Vox published an interesting interview Sunday with Eric Weinstein. Weinstein is a managing director at Peter Thiels investment firm and is also the brother of (former?) Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein. The interview is about the future of capitalism and Vox has titled it Why capitalism cant survive without socialism.

What Weinsteinactually has to say about the future of capitalism is more interesting than the headline suggests. He believes the production and assembly jobs of yesteryear are not coming back. As computer technology improves a greater and greater percentage of what we consider traditional work will no longer require human hands:

Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been a helpful pursuer, chasing workers from the activities of lowest value into repetitive behaviors of far higher value. The problem with computer technology is that it would appear to target all repetitive behaviors. If you break up all human activity into behaviors that happen only once and do not reset themselves, together with those that cycle on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, you see that technology is in danger of removing the cyclic behaviors rather than chasing us from cyclic behaviors of low importance to ones of high value.

But that does not mean that Weinstein believes the end of free markets areat hand. On the contrary, he suggests the market will need to become more free for the people capable of creating new things. But for everyone else? He suggests the kind of assembly line jobs that used to provide high school grads with a decent wage need to be replaced by something and that something is some form of socialism:

I believe capitalism will need to be much more unfettered. Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based.

By the same token, we have to understand that our population is not a collection of workers to be input to the machine of capitalism, but rather a nation of souls whose dignity, well-being, and health must be considered on independent, humanitarian terms. Now, that does not mean we can afford to indulge in national welfare of a kind that would rob our most vulnerable of a dignity that has previously been supplied by the workplace.

People will have to be engaged in socially positive activities, but not all of those socially positive activities may be able to command a sufficient share of the market to consume at an appropriate level, and so I think were going to have to augment the hypercapitalism which will provide the growth of the hypersocialism based on both dignity and need.

Theres a lot to unpack here but clearly what hes describing is really a two-tier system. There are those minority of minds who will continue to thrive in some kind of hypercapitalism. Meanwhile, everyone else will need to rely on some kind of universal basic income.

Elsewhere in the piece, Weinstein talks about the danger of todays truly rich being out of touch with how the majority of people live. But his prediction of the future sounds like a place where that would be even more the case than it is now. How does a hypercaptialist relate to millions of people who dont feel the need to work at all? I joked on Twitter that this is how you get the Eloi and the Morlocks, two groups who no longer seem to have anything in common.

Weinstein also acknowledges the dignity of work in his comments about the future. Whats not clear is how his system would avoid the problem of free riders, i.e. once people are no longer expected to make it on their own why would they even try? Why not just stay home and collect subsistence? Im not saying everyone would do that but what if 15% of the population did? Could society carry the weight of all those who refuse to do anything for themselves?

And what is the political system that guides this future? Do the capitalists and socialists each get the same vote? If so, whats to keep the socialists (who are in the majority) from voting themselves a raise every six months. What prevents a Hugo Chavez figure from running on a platform to add a tax on the hypercapitalistsor simply expropriate all of their earnings and products en masse for the good of the people. That sort of thing is usually popular in socialist countries until it begins to backfire as it is now in Venezuela.

Obviously, Im not convinced by this argument, but it does raise some interesting questions. When machines can do a better job at most things than human workers, how will the millions of people who once had those jobs survive? People on the right should be thinking about this because you can bet people on the left are already doing so.

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Is this the future? Capitalism for the brightest and socialism for everyone else - Hot Air