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Barring such a revival, the future would belong to socialism and communism, which on this view were but the most consistent sects of the new secular religion.

According to communism, history was a series of class struggles, and at the time industrial workers were pitted against their employers.

Proponents of domestic containment invoked the threat of communism to justify suppressing all elements of society that did nt meet their vision of a stable family.

In cases of crimes against humanity committed in the eras of national socialism and communism the world still applies a double standard.

Although these relations were never entirely free of frictions, tensions have increased over the two decades since the fall of communism.

In 1932, communists came into the sanatorium, and his attitude toward the autonomy of patients was mistaken for his favoring communism.

After the fall of communism political and social changes caused an increase in the number of airlines operating at the airport.

Then, political propaganda got more aggressive, informing those who had rejected the fake image of communism, that the regime reported overall success through the country, praising its achievements.

The civilian government considered joining the allies, but many officers in the armed forces and ordinary citizens objected due to fears over the spread of communism.

Their mission was to stop communism and in pursuit of that mission they would ally with anyone and do anything to fight communism.

He had read about communism since his youth, and concluded that it was a poison that would destroy humans, take away their liberties and relinquish the independence of nations.

The primitive communism stage most likely begins soon after the dawn of humanity itself, at the stage where fire is developed, and communal living therefore becomes more convenient.

Anarchism is often considered to be a radical left-wing ideology, and much of anarchist economics and anarchist legal philosophy reflect anti-statist interpretations of communism, collectivism, syndicalism or participatory economics.

The radical politics in the continent, with the spectre of nationalization, contributed daily to the feeling of confrontation, in an archipelago that was openly hostile to communism and leftist ideologies.

Their evaluation is supported, in their minds, by a quasi-scientific theory according to which the wheel of history moves inexorably towards communisma curious hypothesis because the evidence is, frankly, lacking.

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communism Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary

No, they are not true-believing Communists. No, they are not unaware of the toll of the Great Leap Forward or the Killing Fields. No, they are not plotting to undermine democracy.

But they will insist that there is an essential difference between Nazism and Communism between race-hatred and class-hatred; Buchenwald and the gulag that morally favors the latter. They will attempt to dissociate Communist theory from practice in an effort to acquit the former. They will balance acknowledgment of the repression and mass murder of Communism with references to its real advances and achievements. They will say that true communism has never been tried. They will write about Stalinist playwright Lillian Hellman in tones of sympathy and understanding they never extend to film director Elia Kazan.

Progressive intelligentsia is moralist against one half of the world, but accords to the revolutionary movement an indulgence that is realist in the extreme, the French scholar Raymond Aron wrote in The Opium of the Intellectuals in 1955. How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?

On Thursday, I noted that intellectuals have a long history of making fools of themselves with their political commitments, and that the phenomenon is fully bipartisan.

But the consequences of the lefts fellow-traveling and excuse-making are more dangerous. Venezuela is today in the throes of socialist dictatorship and humanitarian ruin, having been cheered along its predictable and unmerry course by the usual progressive suspects.

One of those suspects, Jeremy Corbyn, may be Britains next prime minister, in part because a generation of Britons has come of age not knowing that the line running from progressive social commitments to catastrophic economic results is short and straight.

Bernie Sanders captured the heart, if not yet the brain, of the Democratic Party last year by portraying democratic socialism as nothing more than an extension of New Deal liberalism. But the Vermont senator also insists that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. Efforts to criminalize capitalism and financial services also have predictable results.

Its a bitter fact that the most astonishing strategic victory by the West in the last century turns out to be the one whose lessons weve never seriously bothered to teach, much less to learn. An ideology that at one point enslaved and immiserated roughly a third of the world collapsed without a fight and was exposed for all to see. Yet we still have trouble condemning it as we do equivalent evils. And we treat its sympathizers as romantics and idealists, rather than as the fools, fanatics or cynics they really were and are.

Winston Churchill wrote that when the Germans allowed the leader of the Bolsheviks to travel from Switzerland to St. Petersburg in 1917, they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus.

A century on, the bacillus isnt eradicated, and our immunity to it is still in doubt.

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Opinion | Communism Through Rose-Colored Glasses

I was a child of the Cold War. I grew up being taught to fear the commies. They wanted to take away all my rights, make us slaves, send us to camps, nuke the planet. You know, standard scare-the-crap-out-of-a-7-year-old-with-existential-dread.

Of course, as the Cold War thawed and eventually ended because Rocky beat Ivan Drago and gave a speech, commies werent so scary anymore. Sure, their ideology was still bad, their economic philosophy was stupid, and they would never rule the world, but they werent scary.

I still dont find them frightening anymore. I mean, basically whats left of the commies is China, which is just a bunch of capitalist oligarchs; Cuba, which has become a hipster tourist destination; and North Korea, which is only kinda communist and mostly just good for the occasional nuclear annihilation nostalgia. In America, communism is pretty much the domain of millennials wholl lose interest after their first good job and the hard-core types who spend most of their time holding meetings about planning meetings to hold a rally if they can get off work. For the most part, communism is dead. Oh, I forgot Vietnam is still communist, but were friends with them, so it doesnt count.

But sometimes, sometimes I remember why communism existed in the first place. Earlier this week, Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, gave a good example for why Russia isnt a monarchy anymore. She posted on her Instagram a picture of herself striding off a government jet with her husband after visiting the Scrooge McDuck vault of gold at Fort Knox, and tagged all of her expensive clothes.

Look, I get that shes rich, I mean her parents own a freaking castle in Scotland and shes married to a former Goldman Sachs guy; shes not hurting. You shouldnt begrudge peoples wealth; its one of the Ten Commandments for a reason. People just get lucky by birth or work or simply picking the right numbers and end up stinking rich, but it doesnt make them a bad person. Look at the group The Giving Pledge 158 billionaires who collectively donated $365 billion to charities. Nicki Minaj, whos worth about $70 million, just randomly decided to start paying off peoples student loans one day on Twitter. Makes me regret not following her. Theres nothing wrong with making money. There is a problem with it turning you into a jackass.

Of course, when Linton posted the photo along with the list of her designer clothes, people began to call her out. When the Secret Service is out of money because it has to guard Trumps daughter during a spending spree and pay Trump to use the golf carts at the golf courses he lives at, it's really beyond the pale that Linton steps off a government jet tagging Valentino shoes, Mouret pants, and a freaking scarf that costs at least $200 (seriously, I Googled all the things she tagged). Her entire outfit, including the purse, is two-thirds of what I make in a year. The shoes alone are just about my take-home pay in a month. But $200 or more scarf?! Its a square of fabric. Ive been to the fabric store; I can get two yards of silk for like 20 bucks. Oh, but its designer! So fucking what? I get spending a few million on a Picasso, but two bills for a fancy napkin you wrap around your throat?

When people called Linton out, she went on a big tirade about how much money they pay in taxes, talking about how much they have sacrificed for the country, and told a commenter her "life looks cute." Look, lady, unless you got no legs and PTSD from an IED in Anbar Province, you dont get to compare paying taxes to sacrificing your body for the country. Hell, Peace Corps members sacrifice more, social workers who are on welfare sacrifice more, freaking fire jumpers out in Yellowstone sacrifice more than you having to pony up some cash.

Then she had the audacity to say her critics were out of touch. Seriously. I know people who prostitute to pay back student loans. Hell, I know some who do it just to pay the rent. So when you live with a guy whose goal is to cut taxes on the 1 percent and corporations for a president who is billing the U.S. government to babysit him while he shitposts on Twitter from the 11th hole, bragging about your stupid sunglasses kind of pisses us off when a lot of us have seriously thought, You know, I could probably rob this place and not get caught, when standing in line at the 7-Eleven using change to put gas in the car.

I have a pithy saying, The best argument for communism is capitalism and vice versa. Im cool with European-style socialism; corporations make the goods and give you jobs while the government taxes them and pays for your school and health care, and will feed you and put a roof over your head if necessary.

Capitalism is cool because if youre clever enough and lucky enough, you can be fugly as sin and still get laid regularly. Communism sucks, though, because its an authoritarian regime that crushes dissent, cant run a national economy, and makes shitty cars. Capitalism can be hell too. Just go back and read about the Gilded Age. You think its bad now, but corporations basically hired out the National Guard to shoot union workers, for Gods sake, back then. Upton Sinclairs The Jungle, a novel about the horrific conditions in the meatpacking industry at the turn of the century, wasnt that embellished. I mean, unregulated capitalism and its associated robber barons and plutocrats corrupting the government nearly tore the country apart at the turn of the last century. Anarchists were setting off bombs on Wall Street for a reason back then.

At a time when our countrys government is becoming more and more beholden to special interests and lobbyists; when corporations are putting quarterly profits above the environment, and executives get multimillion-dollar severance packages for driving a company into the dirt while their workers cant afford to go to the doctor; when people have to take on a lifetime of crippling debt just to get an education so they can rise above poverty wages I mean, cmon. Do these folks just not get it? People dont believe in the American Dream anymore; they dont buy the temporarily embarrassed millionaires shtick anymore. Theyre anxious, theyre desperate, theyre hopeless, and theyre getting angry.

For a D-list actress married to a Wall Street banker whos working for a guy who is basically a grifter and store-brand mobster to tell average Americans to get over her flaunting her wealth so flippantly while using government resources paid with their tax dollars? Well, all I can say to that is, Workers of the World Unite

AMANDA KERRI is a writer and comedian based in Oklahoma City. Follow her on Twitter @Amanda_Kerri.

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Louise Linton Is a Walking Ad for Communism - Advocate.com

Posters of Lenin and Stalin in Red Square, 1947 / Getty Images

BY: Alex Griswold August 24, 2017 12:24 pm

The New York Timeshaspublished several op-eds in 2017as part of its "Red Century" series commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Many of the pieces have notedatrocities the Soviets carried out. A number of the editorials, however, have also offered defenses for or praise of aspects of communism. Among them:

Women had better sex under communism

"Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism,"arguedKristen R. Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time," she wrote. "But there's one advantage that has received little attention: Women under communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure."

Stalinism inspired Americans

"When Communism Inspired Americans," from left-wing Times journalist Vivian Gornick, is a retelling of her childhood spent in a radical Bronx family during the age of Josef Stalin.

"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 one's own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified," she wrote.

"Americawasfortunate to have had the communists here,'"Gornick quoted her mother as saying. "They, more than most, prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was.'"

The Bolsheviks were romantics deep down

University of California, Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine penned a story on "The Love Lives of Bolsheviks," an account of how a belief in communism spurred Bolshevik leaders towardpassionate love affairs.

The romanticism Slezkine described dimmed a bit when he revealed one of the star-crossed lovers "unleashed the Red Terror [and] ordered the execution of the czar and his family," and anotherbecame "a leading advocate of forced labor in the countryside."

Lenin was aconservationist

Yale senior lecturerFred Strebeigh authored "Lenin's Eco-Warriors," a piece highlighting how Vladimir Lenin, "a longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping," passed reforms to protectRussia's environment.

"For now, at least, Lenin's legacy is preserved and Russia remains the world leader, ahead of Brazil and Australia, in protecting the most land at the highest level," Strebeigh wrote.

The Soviets supported the Harlem Renaissance

"When the Harlem Renaissance Went to Communist Moscow," wrote the University of Pennsylvania's Jennifer Williams. Williams chronicled how black artists in the 1930's thought there was greater opportunity in Moscow, arguingat the time, "the American Negro stands very little chance of achieving true representation" in Hollywood.

"In the Soviet Union, racial equality was not merely incidental but a state project," Williams wrote, detailing how the Soviets recruited Harlem artists for a propaganda film about race relations in America.

Unfortunately for the artists, the USSR's support for the film project was yanked once it achieved its true objective: diplomatic recognitionfrom the U.S. government.

Without the Soviets, we would not have "Star Trek"

Counterculture writer A. M. Gittlitz argued in "Make It So': Star Trek' and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism," that the sci-fi series "Star Trek" owed its genesis to Russian Revolution principles.

Gittlitz cited the novel Red Star, a book about autopian colony on Marsthatadheres to communism. That book helped spark Russian "Cosmism," a belief that the future of communism rested in technology and mastering space.

Gittlitz argued "Star Trek" was particularly inspired by Argentine Trotskyist leader J. Posadas. As aleader of Argentina's socialist movement, Posadas argued alien visitors would be socialists and would help "free Earth from the grip of Yankee imperialism and the bureaucratic workers' states."

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The 6 Worst Defenses of Communism Published By the NY Times This Year - Washington Free Beacon

MP Oudekki Loone (Center).

"Honored Minister Stavros Kontonis, I want to express my sincere gratitude and respect for your and the Greek government's decision not to participate in the conference whose topic was 'The legacy of the crimes of communist regimes in 21st century Europe,'" wrote Loone in a letter published on stavroslygeros.gr (link in Greek). "Your explanation of the reasoning behind your decision was perfect! Unfortunately such efforts to indirectly justify the Nazi regime and Nazi ideology are staunchly present in Estonian politics today."

According to Loone, her own decision to celebrate the Soviet victory in World War II on May 9 earned the ire of many Estonian journalists and politicians, but it also earned support. "Thus let me confirm to you that Estonia is not a Nazi state and that here, just like elsewhere, Nazis and supporters of Nazism are in the minority," she wrote.

Loone claimed that the Greek minister's decision was a reminder of European values and gave strength to everyone concerned about the rise of a Cold War-era climate today.

"This conference is a disgrace, but I am certain that a future exists in which such events will not be organized anymore," the Estonian MP concluded. "You only helped to bring on such a future more quickly."

Victims of communism and Nazim were commemorated in Tallinn on Wednesday, the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which was proclaimed in the European Parliament in April 2009 as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.

Since 2009, EU justice ministers and representatives of organizations that study the crimes of totalitarian regimes have met on Aug. 23 every year; this year, they met in Tallinn for the second time.

Greek Minister of Justice Stavro Kontonis refused to participate in the conference, as he claimed that Nazism and communism could not be compared to one another.

Estonian Minister of Justice Urmas Reinsalu (IRL) has promised to respond in writing to his Greek colleague.

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Estonian MP thanks Greek minister who defended communism - ERR News