Tag: communism

Teen Vogue Bigs up Communism, Anal Sex…

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Communism is great – like, the coolest thing ever!

I learn this from the latest issue of Teen Vogue, which has run a flattering, uncritical, celebratory interview with Ash Sarkar (pictured), a noisy young lefty blogger who has become briefly famous for saying on UK breakfast television “I’m a communist, you idiot”.

To be fair, the person she called an idiot was Piers Morgan.

But I really don’t think that excuses Teen Vogue’s decision to give this gobby child of privilege and her spray-on Marxist views such fawning coverage.

Here’s a sample of the kind of tough interrogation Teen Vogue gave Sarkar:

TV: Is that the biggest barrier to advancing leftist and communist policy positions? Is it a question of hearts and minds?

That was as tricky as it ever got. Really.

Nothing about the two or three million Cambodians starved to death or shot under Pol Pot; nothing about the 50 million or so Chinese killed in Mao’s famine or in his various purges of the intellectual class; nothing about the tens of millions murdered during Lenin’s destruction of the Kulaks or Stalin’s Great Terror; nothing about the immiseration of those who spent decades behind the Iron Curtain, deprived of freedom of speech, perpetually spied upon, doomed to enjoy a significantly less prosperous life than those in the West; nothing about the shortages, the brutality, the hyperinflation, the starvation, the torture and imprisonment and death being experienced in Venezuela right now as a direct result of communist policies…

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. Not.

Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images

Today is Karl Marx’s birthday. As you might expect, social media is awash with morons who still live in Mom and Dad’s basement and whose frontal lobes haven’t yet formed, explaining why the tens of millions of deaths caused by communism had nothing whatsoever to do with cuddly misunderstood Karl. And how capitalism is the real evil, mkay?

Read the rest on Breitbart.

Crushing, Corrupt Political Correctness Just Had Its Berlin Wall Moment

The uniformity of thought required by the establishment today is reminiscent of the old Eastern Bloc.

Because we’re all so obsessed with what it was that made the Nazis tick, we tend to overlook the bigger mystery of how hundreds of millions of people, for a period considerably longer than the lifespan of Hitler’s Germany, remained under the spell of communism.

This is a question that Czeslaw Milosz set out to answer in his 1953 classic The Captive Mind. Milosz was a Polish poet, prominent in the underground during the Nazi occupation, who served as a cultural attaché with Poland’s post-war communist regime before quitting in disgust and fleeing to the US, where he taught at Berkeley and achieved eminence as a Nobel-prize-winning dissident exile.

What Milosz particularly wanted to know was how so many of his literary and intellectual contemporaries embraced dialectical materialism — the only permitted way of thinking in the ‘imperium of the East’ — when, being intelligent and cultured and sensitive, they ought to have seen it was a nonsense that bore no relation to observed reality.

He came up with a number of explanations, one of which captures perfectly that preening sense of entitlement you found then and still find now among luvvie types. Under communism, Milosz explains, artists prepared to endorse the regime are given enormous privileges and power, while simultaneously being freed from having to engage in the kind of struggle or suffer the insecurity that traditionally besets their profession. This appeals to their amour-propre, and gratifies their instinct that they are far more important than the ‘businessmen, aristocrats and tradespeople’ who have previously looked down on them as effete outsiders.

Milosz was writing in the 1950s about life behind an Iron Curtain now so remote and ill-understood as almost to have been airbrushed from history. (Why else would so many kids today find the politics of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and the Occupy movement so fresh and exciting?) But what may strike you as you read his book is how relevant his insights are to the supposedly liberated culture we now inhabit.

Read the rest at the Spectator.