RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/05/06/socialisms-rise-and-fall-heaven-on-earth-book-review/

The volume here reviewed is the second edition of a book first published in 2002. I reviewed it favorably (with some reservations) in 2003. A good case can be made for the new edition, given the survival of socialist ideals and the persisting disagreements about their nature and realizability. It remains of interest why people in different parts of the world are still attracted to these ideals and why the same ideals have been so difficult to implement. Of special interest is what Joshua Muravchik calls the “afterlife” of socialism — what happened to these ideals and political aspirations after the political systems supposedly dedicated to their realization, such as the Soviet Union, ceased to exist.

As the reader is informed in the preface, the new edition is largely unchanged, except for the addition of an epilogue, some updating of the chapter on the kibbutzim (collective farms of modern Israel), and the correction of small errors.

The difficulty of coming to grips with the subject — that is, the proper understanding of the nature of socialist ideals and their realizability — has not diminished since the book was first published. The problem begins with the widely held, undifferentiated views of socialism shared by most Americans. They are unaware of the fundamental differences between authoritarian (or totalitarian) state socialism embedded in one-party systems, such as the former Soviet one or the Chinese one under Mao, and social-democratic societies, such as those in Scandinavia.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/19/george-faludy-hungarian-poet-and-hero-for-our-times/

Had the poet George Faludy not written in his native Hungarian—arguably the most impenetrable of European languages—he would, as many have argued, be world famous. He died aged 95 in 2006, his life spanning the First and Second World Wars, the Russian revolution, and the Nazi and communist takeovers of his country.

Having achieved literary fame at 20, he would be imprisoned by both regimes and spend much of his life as an exile in France, Morocco, America (where he was a tail-gunner for the U.S. Airforce), and Canada, where he fled communism, only to find his lectures picketed and disrupted by campus leftists to whom his experience was an inconvenient truth. A ladies’ man all his life, he surprised the world by suddenly entering a gay relationship with Eric, a Russian ballet dancer, who’d fallen in love with Faludy in print and then rushed across the globe to find him.

In his 90s, after communism fell and Faludy, returning to Budapest, achieved living legend status, he married a poetess 70 years his junior with whom he produced his verses right up to his death. Faludy ignored the rulebook, spurred on by the knowledge that a man like himself would never exist again. He was right.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/10/michel-houellebecq

A review of Serotonine (French Edition), by Michel Houellebecq. French and European Publications Inc (January 3, 2019), 352 pages.

Michel Houllebecq, the bestselling French novelist and provocateur, has a knack for predicting disasters. His sex-tourism novel Plateforme (2001) featured a terrorist incident at a resort in Thailand that was eerily similar to the 2002 Bali bombings. Soumission (2015) was released on the day of the al-Qaeda-linked Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris; the novel’s subject (an Islamist takeover of France) made the coincidence distinctly uncomfortable. Now Houellebecq’s most recent book, Sérotonine (2019), appears to have foreseen the ‘gilet jaune’ (‘yellow vest’) protests that have rocked France since November.

Clearly Houellebecq saw something like this coming, and understood that it was inevitable. Yet for all his perspicacity, Houellebecq is often dismissed as a mere literary troll. Certainly he has a troll’s gift for identifying weak spots in his targets, and then attacking them relentlessly. He is not above this sort of nihilistic glee; but unlike a normal troll, he focuses his rage and disgust, not on random individuals, but on the culture that has grown to dominate the French governing class in the wake of the May 1968 student protests in Paris.

Houellebecq is not a conventional literary artist, or a particularly skilled one. His attempts at philosophical discussion cannot withstand scrutiny for long. He has little critical acumen; even his opinions are, for the most part, conventional and unsurprising, except (sometimes) in their provocative manner of expression. Where Houellebecq stands out from his peers is in his freakish gift for observation. He is not a lyrical writer or a storyteller: he is a seer.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unwanted-review-one-small-town-in-germany-11555107612

When I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., recently, I found the lobby packed with middle- and high-school students from around the country. At first their spirits seemed buoyed by a day away from the classroom. It did not take long, however, for the chilling documentary evidence of Nazi genocide—gruesome photographs of partially burned corpses, a display of bales of hair shaved from female prisoners at Auschwitz—to shock the youths into solemnity. As the students stepped inside a cattle car used to transport Jews to the death camp, their mouths began to open wide as if to ask, What if this had been me sealed inside?

I finished reading Michael Dobbs’s “The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught In Between” with much the same question. Mr. Dobbs affectingly braids three separate narratives into one. His primary goal is to trace the plight and fate of the Jewish families who lived in one small town in Hitler’s Germany. But the outcome of these personal stories cannot be untangled from two other historical strands: Hitler’s increasingly brutal war against the Jews; and America’s ambivalent response to the urgent pleas of those trapped inside Nazi Europe. From these threads Mr. Dobbs weaves a devastating tapestry of too many hopes wrecked and too few lives saved.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-plague-of-radical-feminism-descends-upon-the-nation/

Despite its many falterings and regressions, the Judeo-Hellenic-Christian West over the long and tortuous course of its evolution has produced the most advanced civilization known to history. Characterized by the rule of law, scientific discovery, technological invention, educational opportunity for the masses, economic prosperity, individual autonomy and relative freedom from the harsh exactions of nature, it is now collapsing under the attack of forces rising from within its own existential frontiers.

Its internal assailants are myriad: domestic Marxism, “social justice,” global warming, Islam in its various avatars, anti-Semitism and hatred of Christianity, anti-white bigotry, educational decline, media malfeasance, and economic illiteracy leading to the willful accumulation of unpayable debt. But perhaps the most sinister and destructive of its homegrown adversaries is radical feminism, which seeks the ruin of motherhood and the breakdown of the relation between the sexes. It is a plague the Pharaoh was fortunately spared.

“Almost overnight,” writes Carrie Gress in The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity, “our once pro-life culture became pro-lifestyle, returning to an epicurean paganism that embraces everything that feels good.” How is it, she asks, that the women’s liberation movement “has demolished so decisively the moral and social structures of American society?” “There must be something more,” she answers, “than simple human vice behind the fact that millions of women have betrayed the most sacred and fundamental of relationships, that of mother and child,” leaving “husbands wondering what happened to their wives, fathers wondering what happened to their daughters, and children wondering what happened to their mothers.”

In the introduction to her book “The Red Thread- A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy” author Diana West asks: “What explains the law breaking lengths to which the highest government officials in Washington, D.C. have gone to stop the election of Donald Trump and then destroy his presidency?

”What indeed? These people were not the apparatchiks of the sixties who mimeographed anti American screeds in basements and couriered them on the subways.  They were not the whiners and prevaricators of the never-Trump media. They were not leftist academics preaching to credulous snowflakes.

As West meticulously demonstrates in this short, timely work, they operated at the highest levels of government agencies where they exerted power and prestige and seeded poison. The Ohrs-Nellie and Bruce, Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, ex British spy Christopher Steele, CIA Director and TV star John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI conspirators and lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page invented dossiers, circulated rumors of collusion with Russia, crimes and coverups, all in the service of distracting and destroying a president.

Much of this has been disclosed, but West goes farther investigating the protagonists of the conspiracy. Drawing on interviews, published writings and academic papers, West builds vivid ideological profiles of anti-Trump conspirators who have otherwise remained enigmas to the public.

 As Frank J. Gaffney, Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy, notes in his foreword “Ms. West’s meticulous research lays bare the ideological thread that runs through all these lives….. a leitmotif of communist mentorship, progressivist education, Marxist indoctrination, and ultimately a willing abrogation of oaths of office in obedience to the diktat of an ideology rooted not in Philadelphia, but St. Petersburg and Moscow.

”In The Red Thread , Diana West,  indefatigable journalist and author employs the same investigative techniques and research used in her previous book “American Betrayal- : The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character” displaying, once again, her unique understanding of how history informs current events.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/03/18/author-historian-hanson-

Author and historian Victor Davis Hanson recently joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program to talk about his latest book, “The Case for Trump.”

Q: This is one of those books where, considering how divisive and contentious this president is, you potentially would expect the reviews to involve people losing their minds. And just looking, people who probably don’t like President Trump all that much have read this book and feel as though it is really great look at what exactly is going on with the movement that got Trump elected. What are you finding in terms of response to this work?

A: You know, it’s a very interesting phenomenon because I traveled last week, and people who have read it, their only criticism is the title, and that was my publisher. They say, ‘Well, this is an analysis. It’s not that Trump is a saint or it’s not that he’s a sinner.’ You’re just dispassionately trying to analyze why people voted for him, why he won the nomination, what was the key to his red interior strategy, why he’s effective as a president so far and why people hate him, and what’s the prognosis.

I try to explain why in the book, this effort to provoke impeachment or the emoluments clause and the 25th Amendment or sue on the voting machines, to have this nonending Mueller investigation or McCabe and Rosenstein try to remove him somehow, or all of this assassination from celebrities — blow him up, decapitate him, shoot him, stab him — I don’t think we’ve ever seen that level of vitriol or anger.

There has to be a reason for it. In the book I suggest why he shouldn’t have won, and that he interrupted an invasion 16 years ago — Obama and Hilary’s transformation, in fundamental ways, of the country. There was something about him, without this political or military experience. If he were to succeed, what does that really tell us about the elite, this idea of credentialing and normal traditional experience and qualification that kind of says, ‘How did this guy get annualized 3 percent GDP growth and these other geniuses didn’t?’ and that’s a very revolutionary thing to think.

It’s kind of like looking at these admission scandals at all of these 20 universities and saying, ‘Wow, these people were always virtue signaling how wonderful they were in Hollywood and how great the universities are and they’re both corrupt.’ So I think Trump sort of reopened the floodgates and we’re examining from our attitude toward China to what a Ph.D. or a J.D. means or even a B.A. from Stanford. I think that’s good, I really do.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-red-thread.html

There is more blatant corruption, sniveling conspiracy, and underhanded intrigue revealed in Diana West’s new book, The Red Thread, than in the Kevin Spacey version of The House of Cards, which ran on Netflix from 2013 to 2018. The actors behind the attempted coup against Donald Trump, however, are bland, nondescript nonentities and mediocrities — James Comey, John Brennan, Christopher Steele, Nellie and Bruce Ohr, Reinhold Niebuhr (Who!?!!), the Kramer brothers, Bill Browder and his family, and a passel of others, none of them engaging actors, able to credibly project the immorality and villainy of their characters.

None of them is a Frank or Claire Underwood, though their insatiable hunger for power and control is not fictional and their appetite for power nearly cost this country the 2016 election. And the one character in the series I detested the most in House of Cards was Doug Stamper, Frank’s loyal assistant, “researcher,” gofer, arranger, blackmailer, and Mafia-like enforcer.
They don’t exude or broadcast evil or show any tell-tale signs of duplicity, malice, or a drooling unquenchable appetite for power or a penchant for lying and deceit. They’re about as average-looking as anyone you’d have to wait in line behind at a Wal-Mart check-out. We’re not dealing here with Jack-and-the Beanstock monsters, nor with Leviathans or Behemoths. But rather with a swarm of human termites.

The full title of West’s book is The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. Red Threads could be said to be an overture to West’s other knock-em-flat title, American Betrayal (reviewed by me twice (https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/06/our-enemy-inside-gates.html
https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2017/04/our-enemy-inside-gates-revisited.html), is a much longer work that details the rise of Communist influence in the U.S. in the 1930s and during the FDR years.