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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 23, 2019 15:38:02 GMT -8
The link is to a wonderful, if somewhat long, piece which covers the importance of literature to the Russian soul and how it helped bring out the truth about Lenin and the Communists. I posted another piece by this author a week or two back, and this one is just as good. The Truth WonThe author has the best explanation of the insane evil of Bolshevism that I have come across.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 23, 2019 16:47:42 GMT -8
Horrible. Truly horrible. And yet very persuasive as to what is wrong with Bolshevism. My father had an interesting view of his own: He said the problem with Communism was that they regard their people as human fertilizer, to be expended to increase the wealth and power of the state. He was right about that.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 23, 2019 18:56:42 GMT -8
It is hard to disagree with your father's view. And of course the State is secondary to and a tool of the party. The party is the vanguard fighting for a glorious future in which everyone will live complete, want-free, fulfilled lives. Given such a wonderful future, a little pain (at least 100 million lives) in the present is nothing to be concerned about.
It is amazing how such criminals, psychopaths, liars and cheats such as Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Stalin, Mao and others are able to fool people into believing them.
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Post by artraveler on Oct 23, 2019 19:25:54 GMT -8
The author has the best explanation of the insane evil of Bolshevism that I have come across. If you haven't read Dr. Zhivago it is difficult to understand how the Soviet state became what it was. Pasternak has the romance of Tolstoy, and the passion of Dostoevsky. Way back in the 60s it was almost impossible to buy Zhivago in a retail bookstore. I bought a copy in a John Birch Bookstore. Interestingly, it was the CIA that made publication of the book possible in the world outside of the USSR. It was Bill Colby that channeled the money to an Italian publisher to get distribution in Europe and the US. I suppose in the mind of the KGB this would be considered misinformation maybe even meddling in internal Soviet politics.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 8, 2019 8:20:27 GMT -8
I am delinquent in never having read a great Russian novel. And, yes, that is a long piece. I think a bit too long. I couldn’t make it to the end. Maybe I’m just impatient and expect my truths to be sound-bite-sized. But I think when someone simply stretches and stretches their point, it can dilute their point. So I did skip around a bit.
And it sure isn’t the mainstream media.
Having just read “The Killer Angels,” I can see the truth of this.
Perhaps what motivated you to point us to this article is that our ways of today are exactly opposite to the old Russian ways. Now denial-of-truth is the norm. Propping up or inventing various “narratives” that support one’s prejudices or utopian political views is now what “serious” artists and intellectuals are called to do.
I wonder if the timely impact of that is that the Russian state had become a gigantic series of lies, much as we are becoming. This scenario seems to fit us today.
This is how the mainstream media operates.
Go out into the world. See what you see. Write about it (whether in a work of historical fiction or a journalistic piece). Nope. Most people just blab blab blab nonstop, aggrieved about one thing or another. And although many sound as if they are talking truths, they often do so in grand theories. “Let’s control guns.” or “Let’s support the second amendment.” Few are willing to state something like “If you discount crimes committed by blacks, the U.S. would have the crime rate of Denmark.”
I found a lot of that at StubbornThings. There was lots of grand theorizing but nobody actually connecting the theory to important facts of the world. Our society is full of Evgeniya Ginzburgs who face interrogation of one kind or another. You can’t interview for a job at Walmart without some of this, let alone at one of the creepy left-wing corporations.
I never saw one piece about what someone faced in their own place of work. But “theory” is easier, less personal, and certainly far less dangerous than meeting the interrogator with “just honest.”
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Post by timothylane on Nov 8, 2019 9:04:45 GMT -8
Shelby Foote once made a similar observation, linking his novels to his history. As he saw it, a good novelist does full research, and also knows how to present it entertainingly. The combination can be used to make great historical writing.
Irving Wallace makes similar points in The Prize. He even did a book about writing it.
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Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 8, 2019 12:01:10 GMT -8
Anyone familiar with public education (at least in America) will understand that heads can get crammed full of facts (mine did….usually an A+ in history and social studies) while having very little understanding of the subject matter.
Historical novels can still be short on the correct interpretation, playing loose with the facts or skewing the truth by stressing some facts and leaving out others. But good ones can give you an understanding of the events like no parcel of cold facts stuffed inside one's head could ever do.
Right now I’m near the tail end of my current book, “The Smoke at Dawn.” Jeff Shaara is so overloading the book with intramural rivalries between generals (and endless introspective examinations of what everyone is thinking about everyone else) that it’s beginning to look as if the Civil War wasn’t a battle over slavery or secession but was a battle between the various personalities of the generals.
There’s probably more than a little bit of truth to that as well.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 8, 2019 12:36:09 GMT -8
There are always going to be disputes between commanders, sometimes personal and sometimes over how to fight a war. Grant had serious disputes with McClernand (who was unpopular with many West Pointers) and Rosecrans. Lee had a talent for sending elsewhere generals he considered inadequate (there were plenty of those) or too captious (such as D. H. Hill and possibly G. W. Smith). Richard Taylor was an admirer of Stonewall Jackson (who commanded him in the Valley Campaign), but contemptuous of his Transmississippi commander, Edmund Kirby Smith. There were scattered duels or possible duels, especially in the South, not to mention Jefferson C. Davis's murder of his superior, William Nelson, in the Galt House in Louisville during the Kentucky campaign. (Davis, who borrowed his gun from an aide to Indiana Governor Oliver Morton, was punished for the crime: His later promotion from Brigadier General to Major General was only brevet rank.)
But there were a few cases that transcended the rest. The Army of the Potomac and associated forces may have been the worst case. John Pope was exceptionally unpopular ("I don't care for John Pope one pinch of owl dung"), and the army was in general divided between McClellan men and McClellan opponents. This is why, when the generals of the Army of the Potomac were asked their opinion of Daniel Sickles advance from the Round Tops to the Peach Orchard, half thought it was a good move and half thought it was a bad move. Hence the reference to Sickles, in one biography, as "the general who won -- or almost lost -- the Battle of Gettysburg." Of course, Sickles having gotten away with the murder of Philip Barton Key on the basis of the first use of the "unwritten law" (Edwin Stanton was many things, including a clever lawyer) made him a special case.
The Army of Tennessee may not have been as bad as that. Then again, it may have been. No one is known to have said anything quite as bad about Bragg as John Hatch's comment on Pope. But there was never a petition to get rid of the Army of Potomac commander, though there were a few incidents that came close to that. The difference was that the Army of the Potomac was strong enough to make up for the disputes, and the Army of Tennessee wasn't.
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Post by kungfuzu on Nov 8, 2019 13:42:46 GMT -8
The link is to an article at NRO which responds to a dishonest speech by Germany's Socialist Foreign Minister on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the communists in East Europe. Dishonest German Socialist
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Post by timothylane on Nov 8, 2019 14:14:40 GMT -8
Well, the continental narcissism there is probably no worse than the personal narcissism of the Black God saying that the important aspect of the Fall of the Wall is that it somehow led to him. At least Europe had something to do with it, though the US played an essential role that a Social Democrat is unwilling to admit (especially with the anti-globalist Trump presiding).
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Post by kungfuzu on Nov 27, 2019 17:35:25 GMT -8
The link is to an article by Larry Klayman who founded Judicial Watch. What he writes is undeniable, but will make many people uncomfortable. The comments section has some interesting observations. Larry Klayman
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Post by timothylane on Nov 27, 2019 17:51:28 GMT -8
Very interesting, especially his very reasonable analysis of Jewish leftism and its flaws. I'm not sure Trump is the US President who did the most for Israel. Harry Truman recognized it against State Department advice, and Richard Nixon provided critical supplies in the Yom Kippur War. You could make a case for any of the 3, I suspect. The worst would almost certainly be the Black God, followed by Jimmy the Creep. The others were helpful (unlike those 2), but probably not as much as the other 3.
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Post by kungfuzu on Nov 27, 2019 20:46:55 GMT -8
Here is one of those people Klayman is talking about.
Who the hell is he to tell us that we need to have our culture/etc. improved? As I told a friend in Hongkong when asked if I thought Obama loved the USA, "one does not wish to fundamentally change that which one loves." Clearly Bloomberg thinks America needs to be changed thus we must question his love of country, but there is no doubt he loves money. Just another plutocrat who looks to keep the plebs down when telling them how he is going to help them.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 27, 2019 21:02:23 GMT -8
I'm sure Doomberg loves the land of America, no doubt owning a good bit of it. He just has no use for the people who live there and the society and culture they've built, which is why he wants to replace them with a new population and culture.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jan 7, 2020 12:26:39 GMT -8
An interesting article by David Cole, who is himself Jewish. The West's death is worth our destructionCole points out something which I have long noted, i.e. that left-wing Jews do not seem to learn from their past or they hate the West so much that they are willing to go down with it is some sort of Goetterdaemerung.
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Post by timothylane on Jan 7, 2020 14:59:14 GMT -8
I don't know how many Jews this may be true of, but it certainly sounds very much like I can now understand what makes George Soros tick. And it's well to remember that hate is much of the basis of leftism. The only shock would be that they will be willing to accept their own catastrophe as long as they take down the West -- especially the United States and Israel. And as such, it explains the phenomenon of leftist Israelis who wish to destroy their own country.
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Post by timothylane on Jan 9, 2020 9:27:38 GMT -8
An article today reports on a problem with anti-Semitism at . . . a "progressive Jewish" school. Part of the problem was a speaker from a George Soros group, but there's also a history teacher who considers Israel genocidal (and also dislikes heterosexuals, evidently) -- and is about to teach about the Holocaust. You just can't make this stuff up. But it certainly would seem to confirm the problem with leftist Jews. The link is:
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Post by kungfuzu on Jan 9, 2020 9:49:44 GMT -8
It was clear from this pervert's photo that she was a deviant. She has a PhD in "gender studies."
To have such confused, unhappy people teaching children is a crime. Those who hired her are either insane or wish to destroy their children and culture.
Of course, if I were as ugly as this creature, I might go nuts as well.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jan 9, 2020 13:23:00 GMT -8
Here is a piece which touches upon my post of yesterday and our discussion today of progressives' ideas regarding crime.
I don't believe the meme progressives use about crime. I think it is much more likely they are happy to use crime, criminals and the criminal justice system to destroy the West.
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Post by timothylane on Jan 9, 2020 13:44:15 GMT -8
Yes, I believe I've discussed this issue here before. In 1988, there was an ad after the Willie Horton case became infamous as an example of liberal idiocy regarding crime showing criminals entering and leaving a judge through a revolving door (it may actually have been a turnstile). It's going to be time to run this (or a variant of it) this year. Demagogue insanity (or genuine evil) on such issues only hurts them if enough swing voters know about it. The synoptic media certainly won't inform them.
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