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BOOKS

A Stalin-Era Story, Roiling Russia Jay Nordlinger

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/a-stalin-era-story-roiling-russia/

The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s classic, becomes a movie

It’s a miracle,” everyone says. It’s a miracle that Michael Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita made it to Russian screens. It’s a further miracle that the adaptation, this movie, has stayed there (so far). Among those who use the word “miracle” is Lockshin himself.

He is the director, and The Master and Margarita? That’s the classic novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian writer who lived from 1891 to 1940. He worked on the novel from 1928 until his death. In 1930, he burned his manuscript. Then he started again. The novel could not be published during his lifetime. Stalin would not have liked it. It was published decades after Bulgakov’s death, with the first complete version appearing in 1973.

Maybe the most famous line of the book is “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Bulgakov may have picked this up from Christopher Marlowe, whose Doctor Faustus cries, “I’ll burn my books!” (but it is not so simple). There is a lot of the Faust legend in The Master and Margarita: Goethe, certainly. There is even a character named “Berlioz.” (Hector Berlioz composed a kind of oratorio — which can also be staged as an opera — called “The Damnation of Faust.”)

So, that’s what The Master and Margarita is about? A pact with the devil? What the novel is about is a complicated, not really answerable question. Michael Lockshin puts it amusingly, in a conversation with me: “Ask ten Bulgakov scholars what the novel is about, and you’ll get ten different answers. Ask a hundred, and you’ll get a hundred.”

The book has a devil character, yes. (His name is “Woland” and he pays a visit to Moscow, entourage in tow.) The book deals with religion and irreligion. There is a love story. There are various stories, interweaving.

Regardless, everyone can agree on this: The novel depicts the condition of the artist under dictatorship — the life that Bulgakov was living. The life that many were living. Lockshin’s film adaptation depicts the same.

A to Z Insanity: Kids’ Alphabet Book Has a Gender for Every Letter Catherine Salgado

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/04/01/a-to-z-insanity-kids-alphabet-book-has-a-gender-for-every-letter-n4927819

Since today is April Fools’, it seems appropriate to discuss an entirely inappropriate alphabet book being pushed to young kids (including by tech giant Amazon), which has a fake “gender” for all the letters of the alphabet.

The book is called “ABC of Gender Identity,” by Devika Dalal, available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. This is how the wacky authoress describes her childhood propaganda text: “Children begin exploring their gender from as young as three years old. But many are taught that there are only two to choose from. In an effort to introduce a wider lens and promote greater diversity, inclusion and acceptance, I developed ABC of Gender Identity – an A to Z alphabet book designed to normalize nonbinary genders.” In other words, it’s a fantasy book masquerading as non-fiction, and proportionately dangerous to innocent young kids who don’t know any better.

The book is now “distributed globally and available at all major retailers and libraries,” the authoress declared. Libs of TikTok shared a video in which a young woman explained that “ABC of Gender Identity” was given to a kid in a British Columbia school. The video showed the child’s mother flipping through the book, which shows a different invented “gender” for each letter of the alphabet. The complete list of inanity was “Agender, bigender, cisgender, demigender, endogender, femme, gender fluid, horogender, intersex, juxera, kynigender, libragender, man (or boy), nonbinary, offgender, pangender, gender (questioning), (gender) reassigned, subgender, transgender, ungender, venngender, woman (or girl), xirl/xay, yinyang ren, ze/zir.”

CHAPTER 12: Seeding Race Wars Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024]

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27668/chapter-12-seeding-race-wars

 lindagoudsmit.com goudsmit.pundicity.com 

James Lindsay’s analysis of Woke Marxism (Chapter 11) is supported by the extraordinary Testimony of Dr. Bella Dodd to HUAC in 1953.[i] The U.S. House of Representatives formed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938 to look into subversive activity by private citizens. Bella Dodd (1904–1969) was a New York teacher, lawyer, labor union activist, and high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and 1940s. She speaks candidly about her idealism; her seduction into the Communist Party as a young woman; and her growing disillusionment, disaffection, and final ardent anti-communist stance.

Bella Dodd testifies with an experienced insider’s voice, exposing the fundamental deceit of communism in her very personal and powerful sworn statement. She explains how millions of Americans, herself included, were sucked into communism with slogans and generalizations—seduced by feelings, not facts. Excerpts from her testimony are particularly relevant today:

Take, for instance, the whole question of antifascism. The Communist Party in this country set itself up as the one organization that was fighting fascism. Very few other organizations gave them a battle for that, and so the Americans got to feeling, “These are the anti-Fascists.”

We only learn now, after reading documents captured by the American soldiers in Germany, that throughout the time the Communists were calling themselves “anti-Fascists,” they were working with the German high brass while Hitler was in power…. Well, they took the anti-Fascist slogan and made themselves the protagonists of antifascism.

They did the same thing with the word “democracy.” It became very difficult to oppose them because they posed everything in terms of the word “democracy.” … (pp. 1746–1747)

They divide your loyalty to the “country” from loyalty to the “people.” They say, “We are the greatest Americans there are. We believe in supporting the people.”

Who are the people? They are for the class society—for the proletariat. They say, “The working class makes up 98 percent of the people. Therefore, we, in our desire to protect the people, are the greatest democrats that there are.” But they forget to tell you that as far as they are concerned, before they are through taking power, they will kill off large sections of the working class if it doesn’t go along with their program…. (p. 1748)

In War Against the Jews: How to End Hamas Barbarism, Alan Dershowitz

—#1 New York Times bestselling author and one of America’s most respected legal scholars—explains why the horrific attack of Oct 7 and Israel’s just response changes everything. 

It has changed the relationship between Israel and the United States, especially with regard to the possibility of direct American intervention. 
It has required Israel to consider its nuclear option as a last resort to assure its survival. 
It has revealed dangerous attitudes among America’s future leaders on today’s college campuses toward Israel’s possible destruction.
It has exposed media biases that have been exacerbated with Israel’s vulnerabilities. 
It has united Israelis and Jews around the world as never before, despite the deep divisions among them politically, religiously, and ideologically.  Nothing will ever be the same. 
It has clouded the future of peace between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbors and has diminished the proposals for a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
It has made predictions about the future of the region nearly impossible, except that imposing instability is inevitable.

In this short book, Dershowitz analyzes these transforming events and suggests how to move forward.

Steeped in Fragility Jonathan Haidt describes how a smartphone-based childhood works against making children resilient.Carolyn D. Gorman

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-smartphone-based-childhood-works-against-making-children-resilient

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Random House, 400 pp., $30)

In 2018’s The Coddling of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contended that kids are inherently “antifragile”—that is, they benefit from adversity. But instead of “preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child,” parents have surrendered to bad ideas and practices that foster a culture of emotional fragility, with its calls for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and censorship.

Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, is a thematic extension of this argument. It describes how Gen Z—those born after 1995, the first “to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets”—has been made fragile by the transition from a play-based to a smartphone-based childhood. The virtual environment of social media, Haidt contends, amplifies extreme ideas and worsens cognitive distortions, swelling this cohort’s rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm.

Haidt chronicles how the shift to a phone-based childhood affects learning. It deprives children of experiences that make them productive participants in a democratic society. One reason that kids play is to practice adult skills like independently resolving conflicts. Virtual environments don’t offer this practice—kids can just log off or leave a chat to avoid disputes—while crowding out time spent on real-world activities that do. Unsupervised physical play, with opportunity for low-cost mistakes and even some criticism and teasing, are crucial for learning interpersonal skills and building resilience.

Ironically, while we overemphasize protecting children from the slightest physical or emotional harm in the real world, the virtual world has greater potential for danger. In this realm, parents can’t reward kids with increasing levels of responsibility and independence as they get older. Age does not exist online; little more is needed than, say, checking a box without verification to access a webpage meant for those over 18.

Social media exploits our natural sensitivity to others’ opinions and actions. Haidt describes how evolutionary pressures have rewarded those who learn to conform and who pick the right people to copy. Millions of followers or likes on a post tell young people what they should do to fit in. Social media’s architecture is designed to make the most extreme content go viral. It’s easy to see how constant exposure to the pseudo-norms of a virtual environment, whether radical political ideas or unattainable standards of wealth, beauty, and success, can lead to sustained negative feelings.

The virality of social media presents other dangers. A social miscalculation among a few kids on the playground can help children calibrate their behavior; the same mistake on the Internet can result in thousands—or even millions—of harassing comments and will live online forever.

The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, the Right, and the Jews by Benjamin Ginsberg

The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, the Right, and the Jews is a clarion call—not only to Jews, but to all Americans. As a nation, we must wake up and face the rising anti-Semitic threat and act accordingly.

But that threat is not coming from its usual source. The most virulent form of anti-Semitism today, Ginsberg warns, is the result of toxic identity politics and anti-Israeli sentiment coming from today’s political Left.

Perhaps the most persecuted people in all of history, Jews have stood tall in the face of unprecedented persecution in all places, at all times. Their culture’s rigorous emphasis on education and achievement catapults them, Ginsberg argues, to the upper echelons of the societies in which they live. But their success too often breeds resentment and jealousy, leading to an ugly anti-Semitism that has led, historically, to unspeakable violence.

In this urgent new work, Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg—political scientist, professor, and bestselling author—exposes the ugly face of this new, progressive anti-Semitism (which is also thriving in Europe). To combat it, he urges American Jews to form new political alliances, particularly with evangelical Christians.

The stakes of not doing so, says Ginsberg, are horrifically high—not only for the survival of the Jewish people, but for America’s survival. After all, the Jews have contributed immeasurably to America’s scientific, cultural, and economic achievements. Jews have been good for America; and America has been good to the Jews. But what once was so can change … and Jews can never afford to forget their history.

Read this book and learn:

Why the Jews have always persisted in the face of persecution;
Why the new face of Jewish persecution has found a home on university campuses, Left-leaning media outlets, and other unlikely places;
The high and horrible costs of anti-Semitism;
The profound benefits of philo-Semitism;
The details of the new alliances that must be made to ensure the continuing success of American Jews—and America itself;
And much, much more…

In this must-read tour de force, Ginsberg enlightens readers by tracing the history of the Jewish people—starting from the children of Abraham and ending with Jews today—and urging all Jews and all Americans to learn the lessons of that history. Now.

CHAPTER 11: Critical Race Theory: A Species of the Ideological Thought Genus Marxism Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release April 2024] by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27641/chapter-11-critical-race-theory-a-species-of

 goudsmit.pundicity.com 

 lindagoudsmit.com 

Dr. James Lindsay, mathematician, cultural critic, political analyst, and prolific anti-Woke/anti-Marxist writer, presents an extraordinary and original analysis of the existential threat facing Western Civilization. He introduces Marxism as a genus of ideological thought, and categorizes classical economic Marxism, Maoism, radical feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and Woke as species in the genus of Marxism. It is a magnificent discourse that identifies Woke as the 21st-century species of Marxism evolved to attack the West, signaling our entry into the transformational stage of education, the final phase of Outcome-Based Education (OBE), discussed in Chapter 6.

Lindsay addressed the European Parliament at its Woke Conference on March 29, 2023[i]. It is a stunning speech in which he states unequivocally, “Woke is Maoism with Western characteristics.” The complete transcript follows.

[Transcript]

Woke: A Culture War Against Europe | James Lindsay at the European Parliament

March 29, 2023 [posted May 30, 2023]

Hello. Thank you. I’m glad to be here. I want to address something Tom just said, which is, in fact, that woke is supposed to advance equity in Europe. So, here’s the definition of equity and see if it sounds like a definition of anything else you’ve ever heard of.

The definition of equity comes from the public administration literature. It was written by a man named George Frederickson, and the definition is “an administered political economy in which Shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal.”

Does that sound like anything you’ve heard of before—like socialism? They’re going to administer an economy to make “shares” equal. The only difference between equity and socialism is the type of property that they redistribute—the type of shares. They’re going to redistribute social and cultural capital, in addition to economic and material capital.

And so, this is my thesis: When we say, “What is woke?” Woke is Maoism with American characteristics.

The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation by Victor Davis Hanson

A New York Times–bestselling historian charts how and why societies from ancient Greece to the modern era chose to utterly destroy their foes, and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time

War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend the trajectory of civilization—sometimes to the breaking point. From Troy to Hiroshima, moments when war has ended in utter annihilation have reverberated through the centuries, signaling the end of political systems, cultures, and epochs. Though much has changed over the millennia, human nature remains the same. Modern societies are not immune from the horror of a war of extinction.

In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier

From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming, not healing, American children

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
“Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge

Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired—and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

CHAPTER 10: Objective Reality Is Required for a Free Society Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [upcoming release April 2024]

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27618/chapter-10-objective-reality-is-required-for

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  lindagoudsmit.com 

The globalist War on America, documented in the Dodd Report, is a culture war fought without bullets that has targeted America’s children for over 100 years. The classroom is the globalists’ chosen battlefield, because whoever controls the educational curriculum controls the future. Why is this true?

Because children live what they learn. Education is an industry, and like all industries, it produces a product. The goal of America’s enemies is to produce an unaware, compliant citizenry groomed for life in the planned globalist Unistate. The War on America’s Children utilizes both informational and psychological warfare to achieve that goal.

The globalist social engineers are skilled strategists applying subversive wartime psychological tactics to “change the hearts and minds” of American children. The strategic goals are to replace parental authority with governmental authority, and to move society from objective reality, the adult world of facts, to subjective reality, the childish world of feelings.

Interfering with a child’s developing ability to reality-test is a staggering deceit and a monstrous abuse of power. Education reformer Deborah DeGroff’s 2019 handbook Between the Covers: What’s Inside a Children’s Book?[i]exposes the deceit and documents the sad reality of illiteracy in America today.

In the past, when children were told that every student was a butterfly, the children knew it wasn’t true because they could see for themselves that some students were extremely smart and others weren’t–––no matter what the teacher said. At that time, children were still learning to read with phonics. It was a time before sight-words and whole-word instruction became ubiquitous, and well before “hi-lo” reading even existed.

I had never heard of hi-lo reading before reading Deborah DeGroff’s book. Basically, instead of teaching children to actually read, a deceitful system was developed to address and adapt to the alarmingly low reading levels across the country. Hi-lo is a reference to the fact that the book content is considered upper-grade (high school interest), but the actual reading level is lower grade—sometimes as low as second- or third-grade level!!