I saw this on Friday, and it’s a good primer for young (and perhaps even old) leftists (or people who think they’re leftists) unfamiliar with their own intellectual history (not to mention why it’s odious to wear a Che teeshirt).
20 thoughts on “The Revolutions”
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I stayed up late to watch the rerun. I don’t think they said anything that I didn’t already know about (thanks Internet!), but hopefully it will reach out to some folks who have never heard it before.
I recorded it, but haven’t had time to watch it yet. Big D, it’s not going to reach those who truly need to see it, the Che Shirt Brigade.
They already decided [read as: been told by their professors] that Beck is the tool of tyrants and a fascist, racist himself. I do find it odd that Beck is the supposed fascist, but he had a clip of Rahm Emmanuel saying the First Amendment is “overrated”
I can’t think of anything more fascist than denying people their free speech, freedom to assemble, rights to BARK at the government, etc. We know where fascists fall with respect to guns already. So the “God Given” part is promptly thrown out because the liberals mostly don’t believe, we continue and without these next two rights in the Bill or Rights, the rest of our rights aren’t worth the toilet paper the liberals think it’s printed on. That’s why I have the following tag on my e-mail…
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Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Benjamin Franklin
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And we are like lambs before wolves.
As best as I can remember from my school days we were never taught, at least more than a possible brief mention, of the atrocities committed by Stalin and Mao (or Pol Pot for that matter). We did however spend an appreciable amount of time on Hitlers atrocities.
I have to wonder if at least some of the reason for that bias is Nazism supposedly being a “right wing” political movement as opposed to the other mass murderers all being communists?
And how did Nazism come to be widely thought of as right wing in the first place?
Cecil,
that’s easy, it’s been portrayed that way, by the LEFTIST MEDIA, who hate the right-wing. If you look, they invariably accuse the right-wing of being fascists and jack-booted thugs. who want to shut down free speech and any dissent.
But, it’s the libs who work toward almost all that. I refer you to the video link above. Or go back to the last two Democrat Conventions.
They had a “Protest Area”, for anyone who had differences with the DNC, and who had the audacity to really do it. The “Protest Area” was blocks away from the convention site. But who in the hell saw it? This approved protesting, of course was all AFTER they’d removed those unsightly homeless people from the streets around the convention hall and shipped them all over the country, one way.
Wait, that last part is elitist, not fascist. My apologies to the DNC.
It’s hard to find a nugget of truth right now for all the propaganda. The MSM is so in the pocket of the libs that it’s ridiculously indescribable. Dr. Goebbels would be SO proud!!
The supposed difference between fascism and socialism really only matters to fascists and socialists, whose mutual sectarian hatreds forbid them from admitting both worship at the same altar.
Indeed, McGehee. The closer the groups, the narrower the field of contention. Communists and fascists only bicker about whose name is on the title of ownership.
Mr. Goldberg had the same question and felt the answer could be provided in book-length.
Cues Monty Python and the Peopels Front of Judea.
Splitters!
When I see some bonehead wearing a Che shirt, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that he is:
A. A moron who doesn’t know who Che really was, or
B. The kind of person who would cheerfully want to line me up against a wall and shoot me for my political beliefs.
Either way, I feel nothing but distain for the wearer.
The rot runs deep, however. My daughter is about to graduate from one of the few better-quality public high schools in California. She is an A student, and particularly interested in history. She got a 4 on the AP European History exam and a 5 on the AP US History exam.
And, until I talked to her about it, she had never heard of…
(1) The deliberate famine in the Ukraine caused by Stalin to wipe out the kolkhoz in the 30s, which killed maybe 30 millon people, nor of its deliberate concealment under false reporting by Walter Duranty of the New York Times,
(2) The “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge wiped out something like a quarter of the population,
(3) The “Boat People” that fled Vietnam after the North conquered the South, who willingly faced starvation and pirates rather than the Communists,
(4) Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the appalling destruction it wreaked on China’s middle class, not to mention some 30 to 50 million deaths overall,
(5) The gulag archipelago, to use Sozhenitsyn’s phrase, that hideous network of death camps for the politically incorrect, operated by the Soviets, and in which perhaps 50 million people perished over the years — far more than were killed by Hitler’s armies in the “Great Patriotic War.”
(6) The awful wreck which Julius Nyere’s Afro-Socialism — still an active influence on our President’s mind! — made of post-colonial Africa, turning e.g. Zimbabwe from Africa’s breadbasket into a basket case unable to feed even its own people,
(7) Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, the Berlin Wall in 1961 and 1991, and the whole awful history of the struggle of the peoples of Eastern Europe to free themselves from Stalin’s deadly iron grip.
Imagine that! It’s hard to argue the proposition that the 20th century was largely the century in which mankind tried out various collectivist schemes for self-governing, experiments during which a total of 100 to 150 million people died, and major countries destroyed their economies, cultures, and even environments (she didn’t learn about the Soviet destruction of the Aral Sea, and if she learned anything about Chernobyl, it was “nuclear power is bad” rather than “don’t let Soviets have the keys to the car or nuclear power plant”). And yet, a top student interested in history in a good school knows almost nothing about this.
But she can tell you everything there is to know about the betrayal of the Southern black by the failure of Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement, and the Seneca Falls declaration. From the point of view in which she was instructed, the 20th century was all about the struggle for equal rights by dark and female people, punctuated by these strange wars, both hot and cold, that can only be explained as massive distractions engineered by the white male patriarchy to keep those quality other people down.
I think for the near future we are safe, because enough people are alive who lived in the 20th century, who remember the horrors of colllectivism. But what about later this century, when we are all gone? Will our woefully ignorant children repeat in the latter half of the 21st century the deadly experiments of the first two-thirds of the 20th?
She’s never heard about the Berlin Wall ca 1991?? Good lord it was in all the papers. Where does she get her news, Steven Colbert exclusively?
I think you answered your own question; she’s hasn’t graduated yet, get busy.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. If she’s a high school senior today, she wasn’t alive when it happened. It was the Soviet Union that imploded in 2001. As for starving the kolkhoz in the 30s, the number I’ve read was closer to 3 million.
For those interested in freedom, 1989 was a pivotal year. That was the year the Iron Curtain fell as one by one, the Warsaw Pact countries threw off the yoke of communism. We’re still feeling the effects of that change today and the final result may not be known for generations. For example, without the communist repression, Yugoslavia exploded into a bunch of warring factions and breakaway republics (as one cartoonist satarized it, “The People’s Republic of Fred”). In addition, Saddam Hussein took the opportunity to invade Kuwait. It also led to factions fighting for control in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawl in 1988, leading to the Taliban eventually seizing power.
Reportedly, back in the early 1970s, someone asked Mao about his opinion of the French Revolution. He said, “Too soon to tell.”
That’s the way the events of 1989 are – too soon to tell how things will work out.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. If she’s a high school senior today, she wasn’t alive when it happened
My math was off, thx. And man does it not seem like 22 years ago.
It was the Soviet Union that imploded in 2001.
I think you’re off about a decade there.
That’s the way the events of 1989 are – too soon to tell how things will work out.
I’m sorry, larry, but as someone who lived through about half of the Cold War (the bit from the Cuban Missile Crisis on) I consider that a stupendously clueless statement. The absence of the Soviet Union from the world stage is a victory for liberty to which at best only the crushing of the Axis in 1945 can compare.
There are, also, many millions of Eastern Europeans, from the Poles to the Hungarians and Czechs that I happen to know from personal experience would gasp in astonishment at your suggestion.
That’s all very well, Carl – but it really is too soon to tell. For Europe in particular, it is beginning to look as if Orwell was only wrong in his timing – and in the fact that Big Brother will probably be wearing a long beard, and orders will be issued from Riyadh. Or maybe Brussels.
Thoughtcrime is already on the statute books of the UK, courtesy of Brussels and the quisling enablers in the UK. I remember reading a near-future SF novel which featured the British Liberation Front. Well, it’s coming. How long is it going to be before UKIP is banned?
I’m sorry, larry, but as someone who lived through about half of the Cold War (the bit from the Cuban Missile Crisis on) I consider that a stupendously clueless statement. The absence of the Soviet Union from the world stage is a victory for liberty to which at best only the crushing of the Axis in 1945 can compare.
Let’s see, we have continued unrest in the Balkans. We have Putin trying to recreate the glory days of Stalin. Those aren’t the only things that are ripple effects from 1989. It was wonderful that so many people had the opportunity to gain their freedom in 1989, but it remains to be seen what happens. Will this turn out different from the end of WWI, which was just a prelude to WWII? Who knows.
There should be no “but”; each and every one of those people were then free to speak out about what is was like to live under a boot. And to respond first-hand to those who attempted to (and to this day continue to attempt to) re-write history. They are living, breathing “facts” that act as counter-weights to socialists in academe and Che-shirt-wearing idiots who would have us believe the wall was built to keep foreigners out. Many of them came out after ’89 and stated the only thing that had kept them going were things like hearing Reagan say “tear down this wall”.
Well, yes, it always, “remains to be seen what happens.” That is the nature of living in 4th dimensional timespace. If genuinely interested, read up on Strauss & Howe or Xenakis’s site; it’s as good as prognostication.
However, that doesn’t enter into the moral calculation the way you imply. You cannot, for example, morally condone slavery based on the calculation that “greater good” will come from it versus liberation in the present.