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Dmitri Volkogonov, changer — 40 Comments

  1. Stalin murdered his parents, and 30 years later he began to have doubts??

    Whoa.

  2. Reminds me of that character (Lev?) in Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle: the true believer who never doubts the Revolution– even after a decade in the gulag!

  3. About the same time (late 1990s) I met with some Czech engineering firms, and at dinner talked with them about the political changes all around them. The biggest thing about the engineers who were in their 50’s was that their children could travel freely. They said they regretted this the most about their period under communism.

    My guess is Volkogonov not only was changed by reading the archives, but was prepared by seeing that the propaganda about the west was utterly wrong. For a literary Russian, this had to be the cruelest thing.

  4. Occam’s Beard: although I can’t find evidence for this, my guess is that Volkogonov may have been anti-Stalin for many many years, but preserved his reverence for Lenin and Trotsky until much later. I’m not sure, though. I agree that the time frame given in the quote seems very odd.

  5. Occam’s Beard,

    I thought it was common knowledge that murdering one’s parents might well be what a proper communist or socialist would have to do, or have done. No one is beyond reproach, let alone execution. Parents and others were not just possible, but probable targets. Anyone who held part of the old power structures, family, church, old state, police… targets.

    It is interesting to see someone, of their own volition, change. But what caused this man to change was similar to what caused me to change. Reading history. I would guess that is why so many liberals today refuse history, or attempt to change what is written about it.

    I don’t know if the book will go on to discuss it, but what I would be interested in knowing is, once he realized ‘the dream’ was a murderous trap, what he might have gone on to believe in. Very possibly he was stuck looking back in horror so strongly that he didn’t quite have time to look to the future by the time he came to the realizations?

  6. If you have the stomach for it, read the Gulag Archipeligo. If I remember correctly, volume two is dedicated to Lenin’s crimes and his part in setting up what became the Gulag. The description of the women “zeks” building a canal above the Arctic Circle is especially horrifying.

  7. The murder and tyranny went towards a good cause while the horrid hypocrisy of the West, so ably illustrated in “Eminent Victorians,” will never be reconciled.

    How can one possible equate, or even worse, rank the sexual repression and imperialism of the Victorian era over the fundamental yearnings for human rights as expressed in the glorious examples of the Russian Revolution, North Korea, and currently, the wonderful Arab Spring.

    This is why we must, simply must, establish more government power and control even if it means murder and tyranny. The United States does not recognize the basic standard of the General Assembly of the United Nations from 50 years ago. That wonderful man, the Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, before he died, expressed the basic need:

    “The time has come to recognize quality, affordable health care as a basic right for all Americans, not just an expensive privilege for the few. President Obama has called on Congress to enact comprehensive health reform legislation, and now is the time to do it. As a nation, we can’t afford to delay any longer.”

    And if we have to kill half of the United States to give them health care, then all the world will remember our glorious commitment.

  8. Whitaker Chambers remarked that burgeoning Communist power was inexplicable to him and that as best he could make of it, Communism appealed to the divided minded. Whatever the cost, the Socialist/Communist society was paramount. As a test you had to ask yourself, or anyone, the question: If in 1921 Lenin and Trotsky had built the workers’ paradise, and, knowing that 15 million had been sacrificed in the making of it, would you want to live in it? The correct socialist answer was yes. But then, as capitalism teaches, the price at which one can be bought differs from man to man.

  9. When you say “changers” we now know the category you instinctively put it in.

    It is not like a change in fashion.

    It is a most serious and dire thing. It is near the maximum of a basic even ontological moral move.

    In our country it concerns, universally, the change or mom being a Democrat or Liberal to be something, almost anything, other than that. But more likely a conservative.

    There is something there ripe for deeper analysis. There is the gang with white hats and the gang with black hats and they are so far from being the same thing that lives depend on it.

    It’s all about culture isn’t it? One is good and one is rotten enough to be horrified at.

    I just don’t hang with the true believers on the other side any more. No more thn I’d hang with a true believer Soviet Communist. They aren’t “American”. They are something alien and foreign and horrific.

  10. Occam…Where did you read that Stalin “murdered his parents”? Ummm, he didn’t, but he killed or imprisoned in the gulag every friend, the spouses of close associates, nearly all the ‘Old Bolsheviks’, etc. Routine telegrams during the Great Terror would state orders like,”Liquidate 10,000 enemies of the people immediately”. Tiny blips in the overall numbers. Read Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow”, “The Great Terror” and “Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps” and read numbers beyond the human mind to grasp.

  11. It isn’t that western liberals love a communist or a socialist society. It’s that they hate a Christian society more.

    And the manner in which the bible predicted these people would appear in their destructiveness, has revealed itself to be words of uncanny wisdom on a scale that should shock the open minded.

  12. NeoConScum,

    No, not Stalin’s parents, Volkogonov’s parents were murdered by Stalin in purges. Stalin did murder his own wives though, definitely one but probably both, personally.

    SteveH,

    Yes, I’ve realized for a long time that the factions of the left don’t love… anything. They are bound by mutual hate. Something that should cause any man to shudder when considering. Then again, when the left gains tyrannical power, that is why it kills off the other leftist factions and even direct allies first.

  13. NeoConScum: Occam’s Beard was referring to the fact that Stalin was responsible for the death of Volkogonov’s parents.

  14. No. I disagree. Occam’s use of the posssive adjective”his” is too much of an obvious error on his part. Quite clearly, Stalin killed his parents.

    Kidding.

    Amazing what a simple wrong word choice can do, sometimes, no? Except in poetry where it comes in handy.

    I am sure Occam is amused, thinking this is a blog, not an Obama class on Constitutional law.

  15. An ambiguous “same” pronoun once gave rise to a major constitutional question: whether John Tyler was in fact the tenth President of the United States.

    President William Henry Harrison died on April 4, 1841. Article II of the Constitution read: “In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the SAME shall devolve on the Vice-President. [U.S. Constitution, Art. II, § 1.]”

    There was uncertainty whether SAME referred to “the powers and duties of the said office” or to “the said office” itself. (An “it” or a “they” would have prevented the ambiguity.)

    For some time, senators debated whether Tyler had assumed the presidency or only the President’s powers. Congress finally passed a resolution referring to Tyler as “the President of the United States.”

    Yet, constitutional historians are in unanimous agreement that the framers intended the Vice-President to act as President but not to be President.

    In 1967, the 25th Amendment remedied the ambiguity by providing that if the President dies, resigns, or is removed, “the Vice President shall become President” (U.S. Constitution, Amend. 25, § 1). If the President is disabled, the Vice President assumes the office’s powers and duties as “Acting President” as long as the disability continues (ibid. §§ 3, 4).

    Therefore, the question presents: “In case of Obama’s death, would Biden be worse than Obama?”

  16. Hey, do you think the words “Obama” and “death” in such close proximity will occasion a “Kimberlin” lawfare against me, against Neo.

    Who knows? Could be you. Could be me. Could be your neighbor? Could be your blogger your like?

    Time to take a stand. Time to stand. Time to fight. Time to investigate. Time to vote. Time to tea a e party!

  17. not an Obama class on Constitutional law

    No, this blog maintains a much higher intellectual level than that, I’m sure.

    the SAME shall devolve on the Vice-President.

    Strictly speaking, in this context “same” is also an article, and thus “the same” constitutes (no pun intended) a pleonasm.

  18. Volkogonov! The Exeter of biographers. Much more so than Boswell actually.

  19. Common use of the word “same:”

    “Equity enabled them to hold any kind of property in trust for their own benefit, and to dispose of the same [read ‘it’] at pleasure.” Stephen Pfeil, “Law,” 17 Encyclopedia Americana 86, 90 (1953).

    Obviously, “it” is not an article. An article is an adjective.

    “Same,” as used in legalese, is a pronoun, one of the eight parts of speech and cannot possibly be confused with an adjective.

    Traditional grammar classifies words based on eight parts of speech: the verb, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection.

    And you know this!

  20. It was within the last year I read on the Internet — so it has to be true — that the Russian government finally released the medical file on Lenin…

    And that 88 year old suspicions were true: he died of syphilis — and NEVER had a stroke.

    Which was why the foremost physician expert in syphilis was his attending in his final daze.

    Terminal syphilis is brutal on the mind — and is infamous for triggering insane behavior.

    ( Rather like ‘bath salts’ in the modern day. )

    ===

    Napoleon died of syphilis, IIRC… On June 17th, 1815 he was so ripped up by syphilis he couldn’t march with his army. This little detail was a mystery for over 185 years. However, his attending physician left written medical notes — stashed in his estate — only recently revealed. Most military analysts believe that this is the day he lost his campaign. (!) Naturally, the despot hid his troubles well.

    And Adolf was obsessed with his health inre syphilis… ( He was taking arsenic at a time when its only permitted usage was to fight syphilis. )

    ( And in other quirky news: Adolf insisted that his personal body guard be entirely homosexual. This little tidbit came out only recently from Britain. They captured one of his SS bodyguards during 1944, he was at the front, and he told the British more than they wanted to know. (!)

    This goes a long way to explaining his personal ties to Rohm — and his own bizarre sex ‘life.’

    Perhaps it should be re-branded as the affliction of despots.

    ===

    I recommend The Soviet Mafia, Vaksberg

    ISBN 0-312-07135-3

    The bizarro nature of Soviet ‘economics’ is a fright.

  21. Occam & N-Neocon…Ooopsy! My baaaad. Yep, Koba killed millions of parents so, heck, why not Volkoganov’s. (-:

    blert: Whew..! Thank goodness for that pesky internet,’Yo.* (*And, TG for Snopes, eh?) Krupskaya must’a been pizzed outta her old gourd to discover she’d been infected by Lover Boy Vlad!

  22. Why was Volkogonov able to change when so many could not? I’m not sure, and really don’t know enough to say…

    Actually… you do. It has to do with why we seek god, or not. TRUTH. The point of truth is that there IS a material reality, and a metaphysical spiritual one, that is the whole truth. To survive, we are elegantly tuned to truth, and a lie requires energy to maintain, as a lie can’t rework reality to a degree to fully put itself in place over the truth.

    God is reality. God is truth. You can project the archetype one way or another, but the one that also informs us how to behave in a truthful world and so on, blesses its followers. The idea that the “materialists”, like Dawkins and similar, deny the spiritual by literalizing abstractions used when language fails.

    Good people find it almost impossible to live the lie, even if the lie serves them. We are not made to (unless we are sociopathic or something over-rides our ‘normal’ selves). This is why Richard Wright wrote “too smart to be a communist”, in that those that are smart enough are useful, but too smart, they catch on to the game (and either accept it, or cant).

    In EVERY conversion story, they find that consciousness rising, was consciousness dimming.

    This is why movies like the matrix resonate (as doe’s rocky horror which as a B movie has more of a following than such should have). The closest abstract thing in media I can think of to show or illustrate it was the movie “The Truman Show”. No one could tell Truman the game. Or rather, part of the game was not to tell Truman. But a false reality, false front, etc.. Eventually is ragged around the edges. One only needs to know the rules for such things from science fiction and magic stories… while in thrall, the illusion suffices, and no one wants to question it much. But over time, rational people start to notice the ragged edges of the illusion. The chocolates that never fill you up (Lion Witch and the Wardrobe). That the one providing the illusion is the one who gains, not you.

    The whole game is to present something as it isn’t, so that you act as if it is, while it acts like it is, which isn’t. (ouch!). so when one does not read deeply into something and assumes and one’s mind makes up the filler to make it seem whole, one can accept the false front. Feminism was and is such a front, openly admitted to be such DEPENDING on what your reading and the intended audience. You won’t ever read it in the stuff in the women’s magazines, or the view discussing it, but among those who make policy, who consider the front one of several armies, and discuss the positions they should take, its open that it’s a front.

    You are finding slowly that the stories of people inside such a system converting and how are infinitely more interesting than people who are actually distant and who can more easily deny things asserting their ignorance as a basis.

    EACH of these converters do so on their own, with very little instigation or temptation of others, and often at great risk and sacrifice, as what they are questioning is many times more brutal as what ours can do at this moment in time.

    You will find that they either directly experienced some history that forces them to question what is the truth. Or they read a history, or they received permission to travel and in doing so, witnessed that which they were told otherwise.

    Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky – became disenchanted with his work in the KGB, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

    Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist, so he read the histories — he got to read what actually happened, and knew what the false front was too. [he refused to defection and exfiltration without the agreement that his work would be published for the world to see… ergo the two books]

    Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn a Soviet KGB defector and author of two books about the long-term deception strategy of the KGB leadership. This strategy was to let the system collapse, and to basically then portray a false front and cooperation. This would open borders, facilitate technology theft, the placement of thousands in points of control, and facilitate communications with such people (which before was quite difficult). [his predictions that could be validated have over a 96% success rate, and were made in the 1960s. it was Golitsyn that exposed Kim Philby] — His book new lies for old is an eye opener — more so now that years have passed since it was published (

    Other famous people to read, would be Bella Dodd, who testified after she found god through her conversations with Fulton J Sheen.

    A REALLY good one to read that is a very complicated journey is Freda Utley… which would also clearly show that Liberal means communist from long time ago (whence it was co-opted for confusion and the taking of members).

    Odyssey of a Liberal Memoirs BY FREDA UTLEY
    “Three decades have passed since I wrote The Dream We Lost* telling the story of my life in Russia in the 30’s, and describing the new system of exploitation developed by the Communist totalitarian dictatorship.”

    Sadly the books are often FREE to read and few do. Been recommending them for decades and now the times are making those curious enough to read, and see similar stories over and over and over. But you can also see them struggle a whole lot, trying to fix or make whole what they shouldn’t… even Utley could not completely adjust after her life, and would still think in terms that owning property and privilege was the same on the other end… a north pole south pole (as she says).

    Which is why I know that you know the answer neo… once you see it a few times over and over, you realize the masque is cracked. Then you start to wonder whats behind that mask, and so on. you start to grab the thread and very soon, you have unraveled the sweater and the realty stands naked before you.

    In now writing my memoirs which cover my life before and after my disillusionment in Russia, I still find no words more relevant to our times and my experience than the quotation from William Morris’s Dream of John Ball:

    I pondered all these things and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat; and when it comes about it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

    My life’s story is that of the education of a liberal in our time, although it may be that neither my critics to the “Right” or to the “Left” regard me as anything of the sort.

    Old political labels have become so confused by passion and prejudice, or so outdated, that they have become irrelevant to our age.

    Yet the old landmarks still stand despite the wrongly labeled signposts which confuse and lead astray the generation which has come of age as I overpass the Biblical limit of threescore years and ten.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    The belief that we can ourselves create a better world makes life purposeful and worth living–however dim the hope becomes as we grow old. Thus, I suppose I am still a liberal within the original meaning of that much-abused word, although having learned through experience more than is dreamed of in the philosophy of most Western liberals, I no longer share their faith in the inevitability of progress and the perfectibility of man through the creation of a better material environment.

    And remember, not everyone who converts, is honestly converting…

    There is no such thing as a former Communist, just as there is no such thing as a former Black.
    — JiÅ™é­ KÅ™ižan (1941-2010), Czech screenwriter and former aide of President Vé¡clav Havel

  23. Volkogonov cogently argues for a seamless connection between Lenin’s absolutism and Stalin’s merciless dictatorship.

    A bit of explanation as to what that means might be in order. Its not what most think, or what would come to mind in most. What Volkogonov was arguing was that all of this was planned and a single thread to a common end, but trying different methods, and solutions.

    Its presented as cults of personality, but how can this be fully so if there is a supreme soviet in the background? That shadow is the continuity that we ignore, like a ghost that comes up with “solutions”. The Jewish solution, the solution of the problem of the west, etc.

    The rest of the paragraph we may miss is that he is describing that all these leaders were blind. NONE of them were in any way, in touch with the people, their needs etc. they could only tell what was told to them in reports and so forth. The more punitive the system was from day one, the less valid and useful this information was. The idea of Philip Dru sounded great on paper, but implemented in reality, its unworkable. (and so what this causes is a crisis. And either they rebel against the system as Volkogonov did, or they realize that a lie or real, it’s a good way to work a system and make a living — as those who can have such crisis tend to have access to such a luxury of choice)

  24. blert: Just now read that Robespierre, Couthon and St.Just did NOT die on the guillotine on 9 Thermidor! All three lived a quiet and happy exile in England…And, Lenin had syph, not multiple strokes…The moon landing was faked in the Mojave Desert…and ummmmm…and Captain Kangaroo was wounded on Suribachi..oh, and Stalin was gay and lusted for FDR….

    Okie-Doaky…gotta adjust those meds and git’to work.

  25. Now I ask the bigger question that makes everyone very uncomfortable if they take the time to think of it. we know and have movies that illustrate the horror of the incas, the Spanish inquisition (more horrible than it was), the genocidal Nazis we have movies galore ranging from serious to comedy hit series…

    Why do we not know the details of the history of Russia?

    If Auschwitz is close to a household name, why isn’t Holodomor?
    1,100,000 were estimated killed at Auschwitz
    7,500,000 high estimate for Holodomor (two million more were sent to concentration camps)

    By the way, where did the food go that was taken from the Ukrainian people to starve them?
    Stalin sold the grain to the west… FDR gladly bought it as FDR really liked Stalin and admired him greatly…

    “I know you will not mind me being brutally frank when I tell you that I think i can personally handle Stalin better then either your foreign office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all of your top people.(Because they knew what Stalin was all about and FDR’s naive view didn’t help.) He thinks he likes me better and I hope he will continue to.” — FDR to Churchill

    On March 31, 1945, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded the final form of their plans in a secret codicil to the agreement. Outlining the plan to forcibly return the refugees to the Soviet Union, this codicil was kept secret from the US and British people for over fifty years.

    Operation Keelhaul was what it was called…

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called this operation “the last secret of World War II.”

    After getting millions forcibly returned, to which a huge number were murdered, tortured, and all that kind of stuff… the soviets kept more than 60,000 American and British troops as prisoners.

    And its not like the American soldiers didn’t know what would happen to the people they had to turn over:
    “The Americans returned to Plattling visibly shamefaced. Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees.” – Tolstoy

    Five years ago, I wrote about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my column, they knew nothing of the 1932-33 genocide in which Josef Stalin’s Soviet regime murdered seven million Ukrainians and sent two million more to concentration camps.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-
    How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine’s population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history’s black hole.

    In EACH country that Stalin took, about a 1/3 of the population was removed or murdered and soviet citizens were moved in. even today, these citizens provide a reserve of spies, problem makers, racist baiting, and so on… the removal of the others destroyed the culture and the lineages of family and their histories (much as feminism did).

    What have we forgotten? Leaving out what I have covered above.
    (I am particularly picking the high numbers — I am not an apologist… if you want to low ball the numbers, go ahead, look them up and see how “low” they go — they still boggle the average mind)

    Don Cossacks by the communists in the 1920s — 2 million people
    Volga Germans from 1915 to 1945 — 1 million
    Lithuanian Jews — 196,000 / Citizens — 400,000 (out of a population of 1.2 million)
    Lithuanian Jews — 196,000 / Citizens — 400,000 (out of a population of 1.2 million)
    Latvian Jews — 66,000 (19,000 others) / (only about 3,500 survived)

    Precise numbers killed by three occupations in Latvia are not known, they constantly find new mass graves…
    [edited for length by n-n]

  26. They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
    Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their
    swords.
    They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien
    eyes;
    They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks
    at flies.
    And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient
    wrongs,
    Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no
    songs.
    G. K . CHESTERTON,
    “The Secret People”

  27. from utley:

    take a moment to notice how she knows whats going on due to prior experience, and of course watches the new make the same mistake. but also note what she says about lying…

    I may have explained how and why so many of America’s leading “experts” on China in the State Department, the press, and the universities, were so tragically mistaken concerning the nature and aims of the Chinese Communist Party as to distort U.S. policy after the war. Long residence in China, or exclusive concentration on the Chinese scene, was not an advantage but a handicap in assessing the realities of the situation. The China experts generally ignored the complication introduced into the Chinese political situation by the fact that the Communists were under the orders of a foreign power. This was acknowledged momentarily by Edgar Snow when he wrote that the first allegiance of the Chinese Communists was to Moscow and that Comintern policy is determined by “its main if not its sole objective: the strengthening of the strategic-security of the USSR.”

    Most of the Americans who came to champion the Chinese Communist cause had no inkling of what Snow knew but chose to ignore or deny when it suited his purpose.

    It was all too easy in Hankow to be taken in by the Communist democratic masquerade.

    In 1938 the Chinese Communists actually were fighting the Japanese and obeying the orders of the Central Government.

    They had a delegation in Hankow, a newspaper and freedom to publish their views.

    Then, as again in 1946, when General Marshall came to China, they were represented by the personable, intelligent and persuasive Chou En-lai (Peking’s Prime Minister today) who has probably during his remarkably durable political life, made more Western converts to Communism than any other man living.

    It was not until after the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 and the Russo-Japanese pact in 1940 that the Chinese Communists came to direct their main “war effort” against the Kuomintang.

    and here comes the sock

    Even I, disillusioned as I was about Communism, found it easy to believe in the reality of the United Front in China in 1938.

    I knew from my experience in Moscow that Communists are liars-on-principle whenever it becomes necessary to delude “the masses” in order to achieve the “higher aims” of establishing the Socialist new order.

    I ought to have known that the Chinese Communists could be no different from any others anywhere and everywhere in the world.

    But I was temporarily deluded by the seemingly liberal attitude of the Communists who welcomed me in Hankow as warmly as the National Government.

    I failed to realize that they could not afford to cold-shoulder me because I was too popular on account of my book Japan’s Feet Of Clay, which had been widely sold in its Chinese translation and which the Japanese held accountable in large part for the origin of the boycott movement in America. Thus, I imagined that the friendly attitude toward me of the Chinese Communists, as shown when Chou En-lai came to visit me at my lodgings and the Eighth Route Army gave a reception in my honor, proved that they were different from the British and other European Communists who would not have dared even to talk to me. Since they must have known that my Russian husband had been arrested and sent to a Soviet concentration camp, and that I was a fugitive with my Russian born son from Stalin’s tyranny, I reasoned that the warm welcome given me by the Communists in China indicated that they really were a different breed.

    but where they a different breed?
    is what we have in office a different breed?

    if not. then what do we have in office?

    Remember, “Hux the reasonable”, was always about how these are not the same as those, but here is one of many testimonies of the discovery that they are NOT different.

    and i hope that neo read this before she cuts the end off, as its a critical passage in describing the journey utley has made… which is more than anything else she could read as utley was a writer, and so one can read her books and works.

    she was also a well connected icon to the fabians, and shaw, and others… they were all around her (As they were when i was a kid… who do you think i learned stuff from besides family?)

    Today, in attempting to be honest with myself and my readers, I realize that I was then still infected with the liberal disease of wishful thinking.

    It takes time for anyone to cut their losses, ideological or material, by admitting that their fundamental beliefs or assumptions have been wrong.

    Despite my Russian experience I had not as yet reached the point of acknowledging that the basic Marxist theory, not simply the Russian practice of Communism, was false and cannot but lead to totalitarian tyranny everywhere in the world.

    Also, my longing to belong to the liberal community which was my natural habitat, from which I had for so long been exiled in Moscow and into which I was welcomed in Hankow, helped to warp my judgment. (she was love bombed like cults do)

    In a word, maybe at the bottom of my heart, or in the recesses of my mind, I did not really believe everything I wrote in my 1939 book China At War, warmly praised by liberal reviewers for its “objectivity.”

    I ought to have known that the Chinese Communists were playing the same opportunist role in 1938 as in the 20’s, when they collaborated for a while with the Chiang Kai-shek forces against the Western imperialists with the intention of flinging him away “like a squeezed lemon” once he had served their purpose.*

    so what will happen to these welfare people, the ows people, etc?

    they will be removed, they are the scaffoldingt that has to come down to prevent counter rev and return.

    but utley is a VERY VERY Good read, which is why i recommended her as you can follow along from her early days, and through her loyal life, only to have her love murdered by that which she served, and her being hunted, and then being used AGAIN, and then realizing the TRUTH

    it takes the feeling of despondence and disillusionment… once that happens, then you start to hear the cognitive dissonance and start to read histories and so on.

    if your lucky, someone like me gets you to read the stuff, and your on your journey. but if you refuse to read it, and refuse to learn the long tracts of the PERSONAL VERSIONS that are so parallel, your really defending your status quo of ignorance and the bliss that comes with it… (when they say ignorance is bliss, they are referring to the joy of the idiot, not an actuality)

  28. Gimo as he came to be known, was one of the few or only national leaders who bested Stalin at his own game. Which explains why he was never forgiven by the Kremlin which eventually succeeded in so discrediting him in Western eyes that the Communists were able to take over China by our default.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    Today the Kremlin displays far greater sagacity in its alliances with Nationalist movements in the “Third World,” which give it the strength to challenge the United States. It may intend to liquidate Nasser in the unlikely event that the Communist Party should ever become a potent indigenous force in the Arab world. But it does not say so. Moscow today is content to acquire positions of strength from which to undermine the West by alliances with national movements, confident in the assumption that sooner or later the “Third World” will be compelled to become as national socialist as Soviet Russia.

    October 26, 1954… they tried to assassinate Nasser… its very interesting to read things in which the thinkers being so close, end up predicting what will come one way or another.

    Nasser died of a heart attack… however, KGB admitted that they had killed others using a tube device that causes heart attacks and leaves no trace.

    In China yesterday, as in the “underdeveloped” or “Third World” today, the fundamental issue was whether to take the Moscow road of national “socialist” economic development under a dictatorship, forcing sacrifices by the “masses” to accumulate capital for industrial development and military strength; or to seek friendship, credits and technical aid from the Western powers which, after having voluntarily or unwillingly relinquished sovereignty and privilege in their colonies, are ready to collaborate on terms of equality for the mutual benefit of all.

    guess what mao chose? then guess what they decided after that? now they are at war economically with people too dumb to realize they are in a war… but the gender war got them used to a war in which only one side fights and the other side gives up without such a fight

    The shadow of the past era of “colonial exploitation” still hangs over us, enabling the Communists to misrepresent America in Vietnam as an imperialist aggressor. Even more destructive in stymieing American policy is the legacy of misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Communist policy and aims everywhere in the world inherited from the Popular Front era.

    FEMINISM was born in the popular front era… so was black racialism…(Trotsky invented the term racist)… they were popular fronts… ie. traitorious groups that use people to betray their own people, and do so because the ideas they promote are considered popular.

    feminism is a popular front…

    [M]any of the roots of modern feminist movement are located in the Popular Front organizations of the postwar period.

    Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, as women poured into the Party, they organized national and state commissions on the status of women, raised the issue of women’s rights, and joined with liberal middle- and working-class women in consumer and feminist organizations.

    The creative thinking of Mary Inman, a theorist whom the feminists of the 1970s often invoked as a mother of the new movement, outlived her 1943 expulsion from the CPUSA.

    Communist women built on her ideas regarding the special exploitation of women, going beyond the Party’s usual language of class.
    [edited for length by n-n]

  29. Hankow in 1938 leads directly to Korea and to our well nigh insoluble dilemma in Vietnam today. – utley

    Consequently today the Chinese have been compelled to become, or at least to seem to be, the very opposite of what they once were. Under Communism’s stern compulsions, the Chinese are no longer permitted to be Chinese.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    “Let us only manage to get a capitalist system in China,” was his line, “and put an end to the system which enriches only officials and bankers and hinders our industrial development.” Innoculated against Communism by his sojourn in Moscow, this is still his view. It is of course anathema to most latter day liberals or “progressives” who fail to see the close connection between big government and great wealth which strangles free private enterprise. Thirty years ago in Hankow his views were more perceptive and prescient than I then realized, although they impressed me sufficiently to record them.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    Despite her [Emily Hahn – New Yorker Magazine] good standing in the American liberal literary establishment, she made fun of the ignorant and misleading reporting on China as when she wrote:

    The average American is full of hooey through no fault of his own. He thinks guerrillas are the only soldiers who do any fighting at all in China. He thinks the woods are full of them. Actually, the great burden of resistance has rested on the regular army. The situation is due to the peculiarity of most American newspapermen in China, who are nearly all of them inclined to be Leftist, out of a frustrated sense of guilt, a superior viewpoint of things as they are, and a tendency to follow the crowd – of newspapermen. Most newspapermen don’t know any more about the Communists in China that you do. They hear rumors . . . but the chances of seeing what goes on among the Chinese Communists are even less than those of seeing the inside of Russia. If you live in Chungking, you can always interview Chou En-lai, That is what he is there for. But if you think he is going to give you all the answers you are as innocent as an American newspaperman.

    so we complain about dupes duping us.. but the dupes were duped by dupes that were duped before they were born!!! -artfldgr

    Everywhere I was delighted by the unique American atmosphere of social equality, freedom from class prejudices, friendliness and informality.

    In Chicago I spoke to a huge audience for the Council on Foreign Relations, then run by Clifford Utley who had phoned me to Seattle on hearing of my arrival in the States.

    I also remember remarking in Chicago my astonishment at the ease of telephonic communication over the vast territory of the U.S. as contrasted with the rotten postal system, and Bertie [Bertrand Russel] saying with a chuckle that this was because America had to demonstrate the superiority of private enterprise over “socialism” by having an appallingly bad postal service.

    you have to realize that she is unknown as they have nearly scrubbed her from the history books. in her time, she became very famous, so famous the soviets and chinese could not touch her. her books and such read like a whose who of last century…

    she was punished to be erased over time.
    while others were rewarded with memories better than they actually were (sanger comes to mind)

    Most eastern seaboard Americans had less conception of the vast size of their country than I had acquired. The Committee in New York which had arranged my speaking tour was so oblivious of the vast extent of America’s Western territories that it had arranged for me to lecture one day in Spokane and be in Oakland the next in days when air travel was yet in its childhood.

    the same is true today as we feel we hae to self exterminate because we are running out of room

    I well remember how shocked and angry I had felt at her reply to my query “Why are most Americans only worked up about the Nazi crimes and atrocities and care little about the horrible things the Japanese do to the Chinese?”

    “Well you know,” said Eleanor Roosevelt with her toothy smile and vicar’s wife superior mein, “we never expected those oriental people to be civilized.”

    and

    While touring German cities devastated by our bombing she had remarked that the Germans could not really be in dire straits because they looked so clean and were growing flowers in the ruins of their homes. Instead of appreciating the sterling qualities of the German people who under almost any circumstances keep up appearances, Mrs. Roosevelt reserved her compassion for the black or white derelicts who had lost their self respect.

    talk about interesting insights as to the presidents wife… from her being invited and so on…

    to read freda is to read a journey of a true believer taking 30 years to wake up to what is TRUTH…

    By 1939 I was finding it more and more difficult to hold either my tongue or my pen concerning the Soviet Union and Communism.

    if you knew me prior to 2005… you would not have heard me talk much of soviet history or past. in fact, my friends never knew i was a child of a refugee family, and had lived on their assumptions!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    but this is common too… as you will note that you read each of these peoples story, because they talked… they gave up their safety, the freedom they had, the support of states… TO TELL YOU AND TEACH YOU
    [edited for length by n-n]

  30. When Voltaire’s character, Candide, discovered that the world did not behave as it should have done according to his teacher Dr. Panglos – prototype of the liberal eggheads of our time – he ascribed his unhappy experiences to his own shortcomings, saying, “There must be something wrong with me!” So also Americans today are continually being told, and have almost come to believe, that if only they were virtuous, peace-loving and self-sacrificing, ready to help everybody in the world to a better life by giving away their substance, while also perfecting their own society, the Communist menace would fade away.

    Meanwhile the Communists, having long since learned that they got nowhere by adhering to their professed principles but could advance from strength to strength through a Machiavellian policy of guile and force and fraud, run rings around the bewildered Western democracies.

    From world revolution, to champion of democracy against fascism, to collaboration with Nazi Germany, to champion of democracy again after Hitler attacked; to imperialist expansion at the War’s end with Western help or acquiescence, to rattling atomic bombs to terrify the world into submission, to pretending to desire peaceful co-existence with us in order to rally their forces for a new attack after we shall once again have given them a blood transfusion of economic aid. This is the Soviet record which unfortunately proves that the American belief that good conquers evil by example is illusion.

    The original Communist line under Lenin and Trotsky was honest and sincere and a complete failure. Under Lenin’s leadership the international ideal was never lost sight of, and Russia’s national interest was subordinated to the final aim of World revolution to establish a new Socialist order everywhere. The policy failed completely, since neither in Germany nor elsewhere did the promised proletarian revolution make headway. Just as today the international ideal of the brotherhood of man which dominates American liberal thinking is getting us nowhere.

    Lenin dead and Trotsky exiled, Stalin was free to pursue his own eminently successful, dishonest, hypocritical, cowardly and brutal policy. Russia’s national interest, or more correctly the interest of her Bolshevik aristocracy, became the objective of Soviet policy. The safety of the Kremlin tyrants was secured by embroiling the “capitalist world’ in war; by the use of ‘Popular Front’ movements to impel England and France to fight Germany, instead of continuing the intelligent Neville Chamberlain policy of letting Germany go East and destroy Soviet Russia, or herself, or weaken both of them in a contest of the two totalitarian giants.

  31. Artfldgr: no, I disagree that I know the answer to the question I actually asked. I pretty much already understand the process of change that you are describing: how it happens, and even why (at least mostly, or partly) in each individual case.

    What I do not understand—and this is what my question was focusing on—is why only some people change when confronted with much the same facts or similar ones, or similar life experiences. Some accept the new knowledge and it shakes them to their core, and they change. They are truth-pursuers, you might say. Others find the change too overwhelming, and reject it and rationalize it away.

    My question had to do with that difference in personalities and/or orientation to change: some roll with it and some are too threatened by it. I’m not sure why one person is of the first type and another of the second, but I have observed it to be so.

  32. The main factor which compels people to believe in lies and ignore reality is Stockholm syndrome: dependable people desperately want to believe that their captors and masters actually do not want inflict to them much harm. This is self-preservation trick, to which most people fall. Only exceptionally rare ones love the truth more than psychological comfort. In Biblical times they were called prophets, and they have courage to accuse kings and priests, as well as majority of population of betrayal of truth and Covenant.

  33. My decision to leave the Old World for the New was the best I ever made. Years before I had failed, by not really trying, to stop Arcadi coming to Moscow from China in 1930 when I already really knew, but had not yet admitted to myself, that once in Russia he would never again be allowed to leave.

    In 1939 by taking our son to the United States when he was only five years old, I enabled him to become an American, not simply by eventual citizenship, but in heart and mind and outlook.

    [by taking obama away, they did what?]

    I myself am still rootless in the sense of not really belonging anywhere and being still at heart an internationalist or citizen of the world.

    There are times when the pull of my origins causes me to regret leaving the Old World.

    But my son is as American as those born here, and perhaps more like the original Americans who came to the New World from Europe and made the United States great and strong and free, because like them, he knows through my experience, better than the native born what it means not to enjoy the blessings of liberty. Utley

    EXPERIENCE…. makes all the difference…

    George and I were attuned because we were old style liberals nurtured in the faith of the Age of Reason. To us it seemed obvious that the radical doctrines of our time needed a thorough re-examination in the light of the experience of our era. In contrast, the attitude of the dominant majority of liberals and socialists in America at the time George died, recalled the famous three stone monkeys of Lincoln Cathedral who shut their eyes, ears and mouth in order not to see, or hear, or speak any evil of the “First Socialist State.”

    The sad fact was that most “progressives” were denying the basis of their rationalist philosophy by refusing to face facts. They clung to their old faith that socialism per se must be good and progressive despite the evidence to the contrary. Their attitude toward the Soviet Union was not unlike that of well meaning Catholics in the Middle Ages who, although horrified by the tortures inflicted by the Inquisition on heretics and dissenters, convinced themselves that these atrocities were necessary for the preservation of the true faith.

    but if this is what it took, was preservation preserving what they thought it was?

    We had believed that socialism would mean the emancipation of mankind not its regimentation, brutalization and the denial of individual rights and liberties together with contempt for the power of human reason. We had too late foreseen that the dynamic of revolution might serve the cause of tyranny and that the greatest miseries were to be inflicted in the name of Socialism. George Calverton was one of the few socialists who had the wisdom to perceive and the mental courage to admit that “public ownership of the means of production and distribution” in practice entailed the imposition of a more cruel and soul destroying despotism than any before known to mankind. In my tribute to F. V. Calverton published together with those written by others of his friends in the last issue of the Modem Quarterly I wrote:

    We who survive him can only hope that we shall preserve our balance, our values and our integrity as he did, and refuse to accept the easy maxims and doubt-resolving faiths which now sway the world. George never could believe that the end justifies the means, that socialism is only a question of economic forms, that democracy can be preserved by abandoning it, or that Satan can be cast out by Satan.

    There is perhaps no solution to the dilemma which confronts us.

    The dilemma consists in the fact that by combating evil with evil we produce only more evil and become like that which we oppose;

    and yet that if we refuse to meet fire with fire we appear to condone what we abhor.

    It is an old, old problem, but to us it seems new because for a generation or more we have believed that capitalism was the root of all evil, and that socialism would put an end to inequality, injustice, poverty, hatred, envy and war.

    Now we know that the end of the profit system may mean production not for use but for war-may mean tyranny, concentration camps, terror and oppression of the weak at home and abroad, whether such “Socialism” still covers itself with the tattered remnants of nineteenth century humanism as in Russia, or naked and unashamed, proclaims its reversion to primitive values and standards and myths as in Germany.

    her books are celebrated in small circles for their clarity, honesty and ablity to detail the details…

    which is why almost no one knows her!!!!

  34. Society as such is built on conformism, so establishment always consist of men like Panglos and O’Brien. And such men as Candid or Winston Smith (paradigmatic changers) always are exceptions.

  35. What I do not understand–and this is what my question was focusing on–is why only some people change when confronted with much the same facts or similar ones, or similar life experiences. Some accept the new knowledge and it shakes them to their core, and they change. They are truth-pursuers, you might say. Others find the change too overwhelming, and reject it and rationalize it away.

    My question had to do with that difference in personalities and/or orientation to change: some roll with it and some are too threatened by it. I’m not sure why one person is of the first type and another of the second, but I have observed it to be so.

    Genetics… that if the population doesnt blanket options, then survival may not happen.

    its that simple…

    but in the case of communism its much more complicated… because what they also have to do is swim against a tide that wants them cosseted and is steeping them in games.

    let me see if i can explain this in a way that someone who has not met tons of people on both sides on this.

    there are several types of people out ther,e as can be shown by certain psychology studies. we have all kinds of trite names for them, and we dont check to see if they are the same people in the different tests.

    but we have people who in a crisis, just do nothing… then you have people who freak out… they are less than useless and more dangerous… and you have those who can take control and organize.

    what we are missing from our ideas of things is that different levels of people are required to produce a functional vibrant society. broom sweeps cant be brain surgeons, or the system collapses.

    in the case of all this, which person your referring to has to do with their life experiences and what they paid attention to!!!!!!!!!!!

    while we are not blank slates, we can be corrupted machines.

    waht is outside your view, and consideration are the thousands of tiny things that shape ones ideas, and where they come from and how monolithic they are… (in terms of media and others cooperating as one collective to con the “people” out of their power)

    the same question you ask might as well be directed to why some people will take a risk and build a company and a bigt life, and others will not.

    i am one of the ones who do the first, and know the others are fewer. they will trade something they dont value (themselves) for something that to them has value (false safety)

    what your missing is the social games made to favor one type over another!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    let me clue you in…

    can a man be a man?
    of course not, neutered by women, there is no male leader to stand up and lead the others, and what your describing is a journey easier to take if someone leads you that you trust.

    where is dad to tell you family is important (as he cant make babies, and values that which he cant make – unlike the other), and so on.

    where is that? you only have to read the stories of successful women describing they owe their fathers, to “get” it.

    you now have to think about the social pedagogies we have changed and had made national in school, and what they as moves on a chess board together accomplish!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    if i play up entitlement, and so on. will i create people who are willing to risk adversity? if i play up collectivism, over individualism, will they be individuals and challenge the status quo?

    the answer is in front of you, but its marked “forbidden, do not see… “…

    this is one of the reasons certain movies and scenes resonate… in this case “These are not the droids your looking for”, and the lesser mind parrots and thats it.

    well.. if you are setting all these forces in opposition, and premises… your creating people that cant do what your wondering about.

    the SOVIETS GOT GOOD AT THAT… it kept them from losing power… the same people are still in power from before 95…

    the soviets and communists were very good at making schools teach attitudes and things that would promote a soviet state. learned helplessness, the inability to act wihtout an approved leader, no ability to self organize, lack of trust outside the collective.

    a thousand tiny beliefs that add up together to prevent what your asking about.

    self esteem – prevents them from having the humility necessary to believe they can be duped.

    feminist emasculation – negates the biggest force that could prevent it… and does so on several levels!!! ranging from, what would i fight for to win what? to lack of examples and being taught to stand up for yourself (Without the state)

    each liberal progressive point has an ulterior motive… as i keep pointing out… if it didn’t have the ulterior motive of supporting their unlimited goal… it would not be promoted!!!

    ie. an habitual liar lies even when they dont have to and telling the truth would serve them better!

    Utley has her paragraphs on them
    Hayek does too…

    hayeks explanations sound like pop psych and put the blame on the believer, as if they had full knowing…

    but utley, which is why i recommend her, was one of the duped!!! as was dodd, and others.

    and i recommended them because in your search for knowing, the person whose whole life and such is wrapped up, and their success and so on is too… would have much more impediment to TRUTH than say you or i, where our pronouncements would not mean much of anything. either way we get up and work and so on. but they owe their front of success to the system they are serving, and so when they question it, their success fades.. (or they find a new one, and enlightens)

    you can almost divide the two camps up by whether they operate on principals they understand, or vocationally, by applying rules.

    the latter cant break out of the rule base… ie. to violate the rules they are given, to think for themselves is a poor choice… they are safe as long as they follow the orders

    they are afraid of the state, the loss of friends, the loss of economy, and so on

    you might as well ask what makes a man a saint (willing to die for his faith rather than just change his mind and walk away).

    you will also find that those that are religious will question more than those who are secular.

    your asking about things like integrity… and integrity has to do with belief… faith… one does not learn the benefits of integrity, they learn it by having it. those without it find its magic inexplicable,. those with it, would not abandon it before their life…

    so its a mix of base personality, how they were raised, whether referential intergrity (truth) is necessary, whether their morals say lies are bad.

    or as utley says… whether they believe that Satan can cast out Satan…

    i can tell you right now. you are the cloth that knows Satan would not cast himself out… and so, referential integrity is important, and so you detect lies.

    this is taught in the bible in the ideas that a sick tree does not bear healthy fruit…

    if your not principal base and your ideas just hang there, as missives. you have no logical ability to check what your hearing. your choices are not by whats valid and avoid who lies, your choices are about waht sounds good, or feels good, or what others tell you is.

    these are the ones who dont come around… dumbind down schooling for equality and such makes more of them by proportion.

    just as teaching that law limites freedom for necessity, changes the premise fromwhich law flowers from… just as teaching that law does not limit freedom, but exists to protect peoples rights.

    the latter is a limited idea of law in which those actions that cost others their freedom are on the table, and nothng else is.

    while the first one puts everything on the table, and will end up with totalitarianism.

    muddling up words and principals do this. and this is necessary in communism, because as said a 100 times, if you get what they want of you, you wont march with them.

    so the difference is education, bible, and culture passed on by family…

    hey! isnt that what the popular front called feminism worked on? feminism to change schools… cause hatred of the bible for being misogynistic (yes, how dare they want women to value themselves enough not to have group sex with strange progressive men for nothing).. and they vowed to destroy family

    and there you have your reason why? without DAD to do what DADS do, you get something else.

    after all, who in the family would instil honor, honesty, fealty, selflessness, questioning authority, rugged individualism, etc?

    mom? how so? she is all about selfishness and herself and entitlement… oh, and martyrdom too… (ie. she has long nails from a salon, but complains how much she sacrifices for the kids she barely bothers with)

    what your asking about is where are the values that would get someone to question

    where are the values that would get someone to take the harder road?

    i dont know… ever try to question womens authority or their choices? what names do they call you? ever try to get someone to take the road of such hate for no reward?

    note that traditional conservative hetero normal families produce the patriots the honorable, the ones that sacrifice, and so on. the left and liberals produce people that dont volunteer, give as much, etc..

    if your a Canada goose, why fly north if socialists are going to feed you (temporarily)?

  36. I can not agree that there is no such thing as “former communist”. There are many well-known examples to the contrary, beginning with Alexander Solgenitzine, who described his conversion in his memoirs. For him, it began with his arrest. And I know two else: my grandmother and myself. She was not only communist, but ardent Stalinist, she worked as Party propagandist at high-level position in Comintern. But she also was a professional PhD historian, expert in medieval Persia and Ottoman empire, arabist scholar and Koran translator. All facts about internal working of Asian despotic regimes she knew perfectly well, but isolated this wast knowledge from just as vast insider knowledge of working of Communist party propaganda machine. She was Old Bolshevik with pre-revolutionary membership in Bolshevik underground organization in Kiev since she was 17. But after Khruchshev’s exposure of some Stalin’s crimes she began to think, and gradually all her ideological delusions were destroyed and she could apply her analitical skills to the facts she already knew. In 1958 she confessed to me: “My fault was that I forbade myself to think”. Most of her friends, Old Bolsheviks, perished in Stalin purges. She was lucky to survive, probably, because her ex-husband (my granddad) was NKVD general who led the purges himself and could protect her.

  37. let ultley clue you in neo as to the force that would PREVENT!!!!

    By including a Third Part in which I showed the resemblance between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and concluded that the latter was the greater evil, I ruined my chances of being heard in America. I was so aware of the disastrous consequences which must follow if Russia were to supplant Germany as the strongest power in Europe that I pleaded for a negotiated peace lest we “Make the World Safe for Stalin.” Instead of winning friends and influencing people before arguing against American intervention in the Second World War, I had thrown everything into one package and made enemies on all sides. I had gone too far too soon. I had outraged too many prejudices, taken on too many adversaries simultaneously, endeavored to make my readers swallow too large a dose of truth, or reality, at one gulp. Consequently I failed to break through the barriers set up by the stubborn refusal of liberal idealists to see the world as it is, and the equally obstructive belief of reactionaries that the Golden Age lies in the past.

    It was not only the Communists and their faithful fellow travellers who wanted to consign me and my book to oblivion. I had ruffled the serenity of all the happy liberal idealists who dwell in ivory towers, or penthouses far from the sight and sound and feel of human suffering, imagining that the world can easily be reformed according to their blueprints without cost to themselves. To them, the Russian people were like so many guinea pigs subjected to an experiment in better living whose sufferings should be nomore taken into account than those of animals vivisected to advance scientific or medical knowledge.

    One recalls the famous remark made by Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of The New York Times, during the famine which resulted from the forced collectivization of the peasants and the liquidation of the Kulaks, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

    Whereas the Left disapproved of me for having assailed their calm endurance of other people’s sufferings, and because I was an apostate from the Communist Party, the Right distrusted me because I had once been in it. Like other ex-Communists who become the most implacable of anti-Communists by reason of their experience in the Communist hell, I learned that when you leave the Party you run the gauntlet on both sides. I did not quite, even metaphorically, ride into the valley of death like the soldiers in Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, shot down by cannon to the right and left of them in a hopeless assault on impregnable positions. My situation was analogous, but happily there were enough Americans on all sides who cheered me on instead of shooting at me.

    and there you have it.
    you become persona non grata among the life you created.. the friends who are not freinds but travelers on the same road, leave you.

    ie. when you leave the road, you find out they were not your friends but “fellow travelers” and would be friends for only as long as the trup lasted

    but also, the other side wont let you in.

    are you truthful, or are you lying? at the very least, your dumb enough to be tricked, and that implies liability..

    so your left alone…

    EACH of the stories of the defector and things is a story of willing to be alone for a better world, than have a social home.

    they cant be with liberals, the tolerant dont tolerate…

    they cant be with the non liberals, they dont trust ex liberals…

    so, all your left is this isolation that knocks on our primate genetics as to be isolated as a chimp, is to die slowly and painfully.

    also, the monolithic idea that the opponents are few… means that if you change sides, you think your leaving the larger set, to the small losing set…

    all that comes into play

    but go take a look at Mamet… is he making as much as he did before? how about the last years of Davis or Langston huges? Dodd? and the others?

    most people have a weird idea that if they get through life without working too hard, and without too much sadness, and with some comfort, they win…

    socialism offers them that, and a fun time discussing things within a framework they maintain and are instantly popular.

    in a society of isolates who no longer can get along thanks to feminism removing their childhood training as people in the family…

    being part of a collective is their way to belong

    without that… then what?

  38. I can not agree that there is no such thing as “former communist”. sergey

    that was my point…
    that coming from such a basis of lies, the side they woud become a part of cant trust them either.

    ie. once a liar, your always a liar, even if you tell the truth…

    there are a lot of anti communists… and your descriptions validate my point…

    something cracks the illusion for them and they cant reassemble it. in your famiies case, knowlege of history (which is a major crack maker).

    in the sense of solitznen its the split between him knowing he was not bad or did wrong, and the sytem was selecting him… ie. a VERY familiar way to crack the glass… ie. you live your life by party ways, and follow the rules and do everything from childhood, and suddenly your in this kangaroo thing in which nothing or very little is real and your just a place holder in a play… who you are, what you did or didnt do, are irrelevent…

    one of my big conversions was the feminist movement was so poawerful that it oculd destroy my family, desipite my doing NOTHINg, and had courts and judges and all manner of things.

    like solitznen, the curtain was drawn back and you realized that the spravka made public was just ad copy, and that what was going on was not as presented.

    this woke me up fully… to the degree what i opposed had been made without me paying too much attention to it.

    so the point is that there ARE converts
    but how can you tell?
    there have also been false converts

  39. I, for one, think it’s big of artfldger to allow the pleasant seeming commenter, neoneocon, to joust with him here at his blog. A Giver. Nice.

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