The recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life told us what we already knew: America is becoming more and more religious. The draw of a spiritual life is growing in all sectors, and apparently all over the world—even in the officially atheist China. Christians in China: no longer in hiding(I guess this is another case of "atheists" who believe in God). The Chicago Tribune has a fascinating article on the rise of Christianity in China, that mentions some of the reasons that people are coming to church: 

Many of the church's new adherents profess a common belief that 30 years of ungoverned capitalism, amid the fading of communist ideology, has opened a yawning spiritual gap.

A public debate in China over ethics in business has bloomed in recent years from an unlikely source: the same unsafe products that have bedeviled U.S. consumers. In the most infamous case, 13 Chinese babies died and 200 were sickened in 2004 when a manufacturer skimped on the ingredients in infant milk. The case became a symbol of an economy so out of control that people could no longer trust their countrymen to adhere to the most basic ethical standards.

Later in the article, a Chinese professor is quoted saying that he thinks Christianity may be what helps Communism to survive in China.

And in the States, though evangelical Christianity continues to attract hordes of worshippers to mega-churches every week, the quest for spirituality leads in all directions. The Atlanta Journal Constitution covers the trend of black Americans converting into Judaism. Many of these converts feel they are “coming home”: 

That's how Sivan Ariel sees her experience. Born to a Catholic family in the Virgin Islands, Ariel now believes her biracial grandmother practiced Jewish customs she learned from her mother.
"She would always talk about the laws of God" and the Exodus story, Ariel said. Her grandmother would light white candles, which now remind Ariel of those lit on the Sabbath.
"She was the only person I knew that actually did that, so I wondered if it was actually witchcraft," Ariel said with a chuckle.

Ariel left Catholicism when she moved to Atlanta for college and joined a Pentecostal church for a while. But she never felt comfortable there, and she began a spiritual search that led her to convert to Judaism.
…
Ariel, referring to her experience and those of other black Jews, said, "Some of us know beyond a shadow of a doubt we're here because we're home."

Rabbi Norry called this an "unprecedented time" of interest in Judaism.

"Business is booming," he said. "On any given Shabbos, there's 10 non-Jews at our service, visiting or studying to be Jewish."

Still, he asks every convert: "Why would you ever want to be Jewish? Don't you know how many people hate us?"

The black converts respond differently, he said. They look at him as if to say: "Welcome to my world."

People seek religion for a variety of diverse reasons.  How the spread of Christianity might influence the nation of China, and how the growing number of black Jews might ultimately influence Judaism remains to be seen.

The Devil's in the details: David BerlinskiFile this in the Shit Where You Eat Department. My other digital stomping ground, Pajamas Media, has run a rather silly piece by one of the cleverer sophists of the Intelligent Design movement (do I mean to say 'moment'?), David Berlinski. A trained mathematician with a doctorate from Princeton and author of the just published The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, Berlinski is a high-profile member of the Discovery Institute, a religious think tank that sets upon Darwin's theory the way lions used to set upon Christians, and whose primus inter pares David Klinghoffer has had multiple outpourings in these pages, most recently comparing evolutionism to Nazism.

Slate's inestimable David Engber recently profiled Berlinski in a series of pieces about the conspiracy-mongering paranoids of pseudoscience:

Berlinski's radical and often wrong-headed skepticism represents an ascendant style in the popular debate over American science: Like the recent crop of global-warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists, Berlinski uses doubt as a weapon against the academy—he's more concerned with what we don't know than what we do. He uses uncertainty to challenge the scientific consensus; he points to the evidence that isn't there and seeks out the things that can't be proved. In its extreme and ideological form, this contrarian approach to science can turn into a form of paranoia—a state of permanent suspicion and outrage. But Berlinski is hardly a victim of the style. He's merely its most methodical practitioner.

What distinguished Berlinski from the pack is that he is not a believer himself; only an enemy of what he sees as belief's arrogant opponents. As one of his book jackets says, his ambition is to "turn the scientific community's cherished skepticism back on itself." He doubts the Big Bang could account for the origins of the universe, and he is unimpressed with the fossil record as a document of man's development into the lowly, febrile creature you see in the mirror each morning. So Berlinski is more of a fellow traveler and jujitsu artist of Intelligent Design than a true keeper of the flame.

I should add that my friend and fellow Nabokovian Ron Rosenbaum, who is the kind of literary journalist I want to be when I grow up, has called Berlinski "that rara avis, a True Skeptic, one of the most provocative—and courageous—of contemporary writers and thinkers. To me, Mr. Berlinski is a genuine intellectual hero." Now Ron has met the man in the flesh and so may have glimpsed a gem-like flame I keep missing in my investigations of Berlinski's scholarship. I should also admit that I'm capable of little commentary on advanced calculus beyond the Barbie-like assertion that it's "hard," but I do know something about logic and the fashioning of an intellectual argument. I can also affirm that Steven Pinker, one of Berlinski's foils, is not a fraud, nor does he present his theses as "dogmatically established, beyond the purview of doubt." Pinker recognizes that science still has much more to learn than it has to teach, but, unlike Berlinski, he does not believe existing epistemological lacunae are sufficient explanations for the existence of the divine.

Insane moral equivalence seems to be a trademark characteristic of this latest Great Awakening of cranks and fantasists, and Berlinski provides a good example at Pajamas, likening atheist scientists to Soviet commissars:

The commissars having vacated the scene, it is the scientific community that has acquired their authority. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Weinberg, Vic Stenger, Sam Harris, and most recently the mathematician John Paulos, have had a look around: They haven’t seen a thing. No one could have seen less.

It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

This comes as a kind of evidence against interest throat-clearing before introducing a supposed snatch of "gotchas" in the new Ben Stein-produced documentary Expelled, which is to Intelligent Design what Michael Moore was to Saddam Hussein, and which makes much the same case as Berlinski does here -- that practitioners of junk science have been hounded like Zionist-Trotskyist-CIA-deviationists out of the workers' paradise of the scientific community. Did you know that if asked Richard Dawkins can't certify for 100% certain that there is not a prime mover in the universe? Q.E.D. there is one.

I'm not sure if Berlinski knows less about science or about Communism, but I certainly know more about the latter than he, so let's begin there.

It is of course untrue to say that the Soviet citizenry believed the Politburo to be "infallible;" it had been indoctrinated to believe that under Marxism-Leninism the Party itself was infallible and greater than any one man or collection of men. The Russian word for this was Partiinost, and it is why high-ranking Communists were routinely purged without any threat posed to the larger totalitarian system that produced and replaced them as interchangeably as cogs. One might make the case that Stalin was, in the popular imagination, an unerring supreme leader, but that historical observation comes at the expense of religion, not materialism. Indeed, many scholars of Russian political history have traced Stalin's personality cult back to the time of Golden Horde. The autocratic political imprint left by the Mongolian conquerors of infant Russia was then fused with Byzantine Caesaropapism, which is why the czars were not just secular heads of state, but godheads anointed and certified by the Eastern Orthodox Church. (As Peter the Great was given to remark when told Russia needed a holy Patriarch, Russia already had one -- himself.)

As for classical Marxism, apart from being so greatly at odds with the messianic or ecclesiastical tradition, it was, as the French philosopher Raymond Aron once put it, a "Christian heresy;" a political movement that foreordained Providence on earth, where class took the place of sin. An apter comparison for Berlinski to have made, then, would be between the Soviet commissars and the clerisy during the Inquisition, both in terms of the brutal methods of interrogation employed and the interrogators' core objectives. (Dr. Dawkins's very participation in a shambolic documentary like Expelled is proof of his willingness confront and challenge adversarial thinking, a willingness which the commissars and the priestly agents of Torquemada were not known for sharing.)

Communism, it must also be said, was not favorably disposed to the kind of science understood and practiced by the atheists Berlinski cites. One need only look at Lysenkoism or some of Stalin's sillier linguistic theories to see how vulgarized and ideologized science was in the former Soviet Union -- the Baconian method of inquiry and trial and error never had a fighting chance. Nor would anyone trained even at the elementary level in the philosophical underpinnings of that method fail to spot the problem with a question like this:

"[W]hat reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?"

One can't prove a negative proposition, and the burden of providing evidence still falls to Berlinski and his contrarian cohort. Why should we suppose God does exist? Mention of the awe and mystery of the universe only begs the question.

As for Albert Einstein, he was once asked if he believed in the divine and replied, "I believe in Spinoza's god," which is as polite an admission of atheism as anyone has ever given. Unless of course believers wouldn't mind replacing "God" with the word "Nature" as the great Jewish sage was tellingly given to do -- after being excommunicated by a rather commissar-like Dutch rabbinate.

Related in Jewcy: Philosopher and biologist Sahotra Sarkar explains that "'Intelligent Design' Creationism is an Immoral Fraud."

Greetings From Moldova: where Jesus was a communist carpenter Greetings from Moldova! You know, the former Soviet state bordered by Ukraine and Romania, whose special characteristics include being the poorest nation in Europe, as well as the first former Soviet state to elect a Communist as its president! It's hard to believe that a country where 98% of the population weighs in as Eastern Orthodox voted President Vladimir Voronin -- a Communist -- into office, but they did, and now priests, nuns, and assorted other believers are being intimidated and harassed by secret police.

Meanwhile, Christians in India aren't faring much better, what with increasing attacks by fundamentalist, nationalist religious groups such as radical Hindus and "anti-Christian fanatics."

And here in the U.S., a Burmese Christian refugee who gained asylum this past August is settling into his new life on the East Coast, while religious persecution in his homeland continues on.

Over at Salon.com, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg -- who is either a demagogue or historian depending on your politics -- associates liberalism with Nazism, suggesting that "this organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation" is "as fascist as death camps and yellow stars."Red Commie Oppression: Would Jonah really turn her down?

He also says that Hillary Clinton is a dystopian Big Mother: "[T]he vision of the Huxleyian Brave New World future is one where everyone's happy... That's the fascism in Hillary Clinton's vision. It's not the Orwellian stamping on a human face thing, it's hugs and kisses and taking care of boo-boos. ... [A]n unwanted hug is still oppressive if you can't escape from it."

Escape from Hillary's embrace? Isn't that what Bill has tried to accomplish for the last 26 years?

Why we need a left

In my first two posts of this series, I tried to defend opponents of violent jihadism and supporters of the Iraq war from the charge that they had abandoned the values of the left and indeed attempted to make a case that tackling Islamofascism and tyranny are on the contrary, authentic leftist positions to take.

I promised that my next post would look at the broader issue of why a left is still necessary. Clearly this is a topic more suited for a lengthy polemical book than a blog post (Yes, I am open to offers….) so what follows is a brief and simplified attempt to make the case that in the modern world, the values of the left remain absolutely essential if the combination of chaos and dynamism that prevails is to meet with a progressive response.

The first thing that has to be said in any attempt to state the case for the left in 2007 is – forget the far left. Leninism is dead, Trotskyism is dead, Stalinism is dead, Maoism is dead, the concept of ‘socialist revolution’ is dead and the idea of a planned socialist economy is dead. And to that one should add a long overdue – thankfully.

Millions of people were murdered, perished or were incarcerated as a result of ‘socialist experiments’ in the last century. Millions more had their lives and their family’s lives wrecked by communist dictatorships and in countries now described as ‘formerly communist states’ the impact of over four decades of totalitarianism are still felt.

That tiny minority of oddballs who continue to believe in the ‘dictatorship of the proleteriat’ and other euphemisms for state terror should be as unacceptable to democrats as far right-wing opponents of liberal democracy – what is amazing is that they are still regarded as acceptable leaders for ‘peace movements’ and labour movement organisations.

But, of course, while Marxist inspired revolutionary socialism was a horrendous catastrophe, social democracy (or democratic socialism if you prefer) came out of the last century with a pretty good balance sheet. Western European welfare states were inspired by and largely created by the social-democratic parties of the labour movement. The health care systems, the universal education systems, the progressive housing solutions, the victories in terms of wages and work conditions for millions of European workers are a credit to the social democratic project. It was never plain-sailing of course and there were times when the tide turned against social democracy (the era of Kohl-Reagan-Thatcher) and there were times when one wondered if anything would remain of the core aims of social-democracy (the era of the third-way).

But on the whole, social-democrats can be justly proud of the achievements of their parties in the past century. In countries where social democracy took root, real acute poverty is a thing of the past even though great inequalities of wealth remain. Likewise the values of social liberalism also can look back on great progress – great steps forward have been made in gender equality, gay rights, racial equality and religious freedom.

Together social-democracy and social-liberalism have improved the lot of millions of people and won real and lasting victories – if one steps away from the disasters of revolutionary socialism, reject it utterly, then the left has actually enjoyed enormous success – successes which of course need to be defended, expanded and improved upon. But while social democracy in Europe has been able to make headway in the main goal of taking the benefits of a capitalist economy and using the state to more broadly distribute the resources available and has, through regulation and intervention, been able to force capitalists to pay better wages and offer better working conditions, on a global scale poverty remains at an intolerable level with millions living in starvation conditions.

And while liberal democracy reigns across the continent of Europe – no longer restricted only to the western half – large parts of the world remain in the grip of tyrannies or face threats from violent totalitarian movements. It is no coincidence that many of those parts of the world where poverty remains acute are also countries where democracy has yet to be able to take root. And there, surely, lays the answer to what the purpose of a modern left should surely be – defending and expanding on the gains of the victories of social democracy in the west, tackling the scar of global poverty and pushing for the expansion of democracy internationally. In an era of rapid globalisation, the moment seems perfect for the western left to make a real effort to globalise its values.

Yet at the same time, when one reads the debates over the past decade, a lack of confidence in the core values of both liberalism and social democracy emerges which hinders the ability of the democratic left to take on the tasks facing it. Cynicism about the value of democracy as opposed to an enthusiasm to spread it globally and cultural relativism rather than international solidarity risk making the left into a club of parochial critics. An unwillingness to tackle economic questions and a Luddite anti-globalisation stance rather than a concerted effort to create a social-democratic world, leave the left looking like a snooty western elite who wash their hands with some charity rather than address the need to shift globalisation in a progressive direction aimed at eliminating poverty.

The democratic left has much to be proud of (including its opposition to the anti-democratic left) but it must leave behind the cynicism and nihilism that has infected it in the past decade or so and confidently take on a new role as champions of a progressive globalisation and the internationalisation of democracy. In my final part of this series I will sketch out some rough ideas for how that might start to take shape.

Yesterday, some Jewcy readers observed that Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked and recent contributor here, began his journalistic career at a magazine named Living Marxism. Living Marxism was the organ of Britain's Revolutionary Communist Party, which held positions with which most Jewcers would not agree. Our would-be comrade commissars proclaim that O'Neill must be exiled from Jewcy.

Michael Kinsley says that the digital age is a propitious time to be a cranky libertarian, but it's also springtime for leftist factionalism. On the web, every clique can sanctify its own luminoso blogrollo, forever excommunicating deviationists for doctrinal unorthodoxies, past affiliations, refusals to pronounce some shibboleth of our corner of the internet.

Not here. Take the stultifying provincialism of left politics, amplify it with the Circle Jerk culture of the blogosphere, and you have something of a Jewcy nightmare: a hothouse of unchallenged ideology and lazy self-congratulation that looks like everything Jewcy was born to combat. Neither the Jewish community nor the left need help making themselves sclerotic, conformist, or irrelevant. The promise of the internet, for us, is its capacity to smash those tendencies, rather than reinforce them.

This isn't just about this specific issue: about Brendan O'Neill, the RCP, Living Marxist, or the Oxford Union debate. It's about what breadth of views can be accommodated in Jewcy, and who gets to contribute. We agree that there are borders to the pale, and some people are beyond those borders. But we're also aware of all the barriers that stand in the way of productive communication between people with well-entrenched and opposing positions: a reluctance or flat-out unwillingness to process evidence contradictory to one’s own point of view, an application of nearly impossible standards of evidence for opposing points but a knee-jerk acceptance of supporting points, a presumption of one's own intellectual bravery and integrity and an assumption that the opposition is weak or foolish or venal or lazy, et cetera. These, too, are things we want to overcome, rather than reinforce.

So defining Jewcy's boundaries will be an ongoing process. We'll discuss them. But we won't define them by pronouncing takfir on anyone who joined an organization with which Jewcy itself would not wish to partner.

Meanwhile, Kvetcher, nee David Kelsey, has taken Jewcy to task for our handling of the Oxford Union kerfuffle.

Jewcy chose a symbol of November 9th Society to represent the debate, even though the November 9th Society is a hardline neo-Nazi party that is quite critical of the British National Party for being mere "conservatives on steroids." That Jewcy chose their logo (replete with swastika, of course) to represent Nick Griffin is as risible as it is shrill.

Continue reading...

For some time now, I have been a member-in-good-standing of the Facebook group: "Che Guevara is a PENDEJO." Here is the group's description:

For anyone out there
who's sick of seeing Che Guevara shirts being worn by idealistic
college students and/or simply hates Che Guevara or any other
communists for that matter.

We also invite anyone who's sick of hearing "naw man, you got it all wrong, Castro was an asshole but Che had the right idea."

If
you're slightly amused by the irony of a Marxist t-shirt being sold and
worn in a capitalist system, feel free to join as well.

I was immediately reminded of my association in this august body upon reading Robert Scheer's latest in The Nation (which has a thing for Cuban commies), offering a critical appraisal of Guevara's ideology (apparently it was more sophisticated than "Murdering the bourgeosie," as I had always assumed it to be) and explaining how his CIA-orchestrated assassination has actually proven fortuitous for the left because it turned him into a martyr for the new generation of Latin American leftist leaders to extol. This sentence is emblematic:

Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging bureaucracy.

You gotta hand it to Scheer: "Restless" is a pretty good euphemism for "killing people with whom you disagree." Even better is Scheer's whitewashing Guevara's capricious violence as some sort of response to the ineffectiveness of the new Cuban revolutionary government's "emerging bureaucracy." Che's actually a do-it-yourself anti-statist conservative!

One can excuse certain elements of the Left's embrace of totalitarian murderers like Che Guevara because these sorts of folks have always had a hard time coming to grips with thugs preaching a "progressive" ethos. Bashing the Left for loving Che is nothing new. But more troubling among the apologists for Guevara (and the Cuban revolution, more generally) is the lack of acknowledgment of what the Cuban Communists did to homosexuals--that other, oppressed minority which supposedly owes its salvation to the Left, along with the "working classes."

In 1960, just a year after coming to power, Guevara's glorious revolution established forced labor camps (actual gulags, not the fake one of Amnesty International's imagination) for any and all assortment of undesirables. This is how Alvaro Vargas Losa tells it (his article is entitled, by the way, "The Killing Machine," which confirms Scheer's impression that Guevara was indeed just "restless" with the ineffectiveness of the Cuban government's ability to violently suppress dissent):

This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement,
starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents,
homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban
priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de
Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded
into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint
into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some
would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and
most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros’s wrenching
documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.

The Communist Cuban regime's treatment of homosexuals was most famously recounted in Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls, the film version of which cast Johnny Depp as a transvestite who smuggled Arenas's prison diaries off the island via his amazingly stretchable...well, you get the picture.

Scheer offers a few drips and drabs of qualified criticism about Che's legacy.
"Fortunately," he writes, Latin America's new crop of leftist thugs "differ from Che in preferring the ballot to the gun," (just wait until Hugo Chavez loses an election). But you know the left is lost when it is still able to glorify and explain away the crimes of a murderer of homosexuals.

When I saw the headline of this Times piece -- "A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini" -- I thought it was another example of late-breaking news coverage from the paper that first informed us about a week ago of the "ironic" hipsters who've carved out a niche for themselves in Williamsburg. Then I read this:

Ms. Guevara and her family, too, have tried to stop the marketing of Che’s image in ways that they find abhorrent. She says they have reached out to lawyers in New York, whom she would not identify, to pursue companies the family thinks are misusing the image, not to sue them for damages, but to ask them to stop.

Communists who sue for copyright infringement. What's next?

Ms. Guevara travels the world speaking at conferences dealing with Che. At one in Italy, she learned after signing T-shirts for some young people that they were Fascists. “They knew nothing about him,” she said with a sigh.

Gotcha. 

It was on a trip a few years ago to that mecca of petit bourgeois decadence, Las Vegas, that I devoured Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left.  This book is now widely considered the definitive text on the various trotskisant movements (or "groupuscules") that peppered the Gotham cityscape in the twenties and thirties. Mostly Jewish, with as much a tropism for literature as for politics, these sons and daughters of immigrants started out as revolutionaries and wound up anti-Communists, either of a liberal or conservative stripe. (Wald deftly showed that the was as nerve-racking as it was satisfying, especially for latterday patrons of the establishment who traffick in selective memories about the old days and bygone struggles, who took what position when, who did what to whom.) 

A number of these complicated and dynamic figures are now forgotten: If Herbert Solow can't earn a place at the table for being the leading American Trotskyist before World War II, then he at least deserves recognition as the man who helped nurture the critical talents of one Lionel Trilling. Others are famous for their continuing influence (Norman Podhoretz is an advisor to Rudy Giuliani) and their semi-permanent positions on the mastheads of great, or once-great, journals of opinion like Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary and Dissent. On the whole, they're all defined more according to their ex-identities, those idealistic and embarrassing vestiges of a radical past which they've spent the second and third acts of their distinctively American lives repudiating. As Irving Kristol once put it, "As long as I can remember, I've been a 'neo' something. I was a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neocon. Eventually I'll just be a 'neo.'"

Wald has since altered his focus to account for some of the lesser -- or at least less acknowledged -- revolutionaries of yesterday who left us enduring ruins and monuments of their time. Most of these were Stalinists, strict CP men who wrote forgettably because in the eyes of the Party, they were themselves forgettable: mere individuals being ground through the cogs of history.

Installment one began in 2002 with Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Now Wald has published the follow-up volume, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, which is well-reviewed by J. Hoberman in The Nation:

Exiles's major tour de force is the chapter "Inventing Mike Gold," a startling rehabilitation of the Communist Party's leading literary hack (and hatchet man), remembered today largely for his contribution to the mythology of the Lower East Side, Jews Without Money (1930), one of the few proletarian novels to earn a spot in the academic canon. Wald downplays Gold's greatest hit to present him as a lapsed romantic Modernist, linking him to Walt Whitman and even the Beats. (One of the book's more fascinating secondary narratives recounts the way Whitman, the American poet most admired by leftists, was transformed into a Popular Front icon. In Gold's 1935 "Ode to Walt Whitman," Wald notes, the poet "is likened to a reborn Christ, to the spirit of communism, to nature, and to Bolshevism...serv[ing] as the multipurpose icon of Gold's multiethnic cultural mosaic.")

Wald by no means ignores Gold's work. Still, cognizant of (if not necessarily endorsing) Kempton's contempt for talent sacrificed on the altar of social revolution, he is almost always more interested in the drama of lives than those of literature, mapping a "humanscape" populated by writers committed to political commitment. Thus, Exiles's cover features Gold in action, addressing a 1930 May Day rally. The denizens of Waldsville are often quite colorful. Exiles featured such rare birds as the forgotten Woody Guthrie analogue Donald Lee West, as well as Communist poet Joy Davidman, who was married to "radical folksinger" William Lindsay Gresham before she decamped to England to change the life of C.S. Lewis. Trinity, which is more concerned with prose than poetry, devotes half a chapter to Lauren Gilfillan, whose precocious (and once-celebrated) nonfiction novel--a firsthand account of the Great Coal Strike of 1931 called I Went to Pit College--although more straightforward (and ironic), prefigures by several years the art reportage of the James Agee-Walker Evans classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

It might interest you to know that Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, wrote her graduate thesis on Gold, further fueling speculation about her intellectual kinship with Paul Wolfowitz and the left-to-right school of U.S. foreign policy.

It might also interest you to know that Gold actually was not so cut-and-dry an apparatchik as he's made out to be here.

After a notorious Leavisite dust-up with Thornton Wilder -- whose ecclesiastic death-wish unsettled plenty of non-Reds, too -- about the shaky relationship between art and ideology, Gold wrote a vigorous defense in The New Republic of Jews Without Money, which, admittedly, was a journeyman's attempt at what James T. Farrell would later accomplish with his brilliant Studs Lonigan trilogy, the Irish-American working class epic of the forties. Gold’s book, in an interesting turn of events, had been attacked from the left by Melvin Levy, in full prolier-than-thou mode for what Levy saw as too minimalist a depiction of alienated factory life in New York. 

Gold responded, “It is difficult to write proletarian literature in this country because all the critics are bourgeois. If a Thornton Wilder writes books in praise of the Catholic theology, or if a Robinson Jeffers preaches universal pessimism and mass-suicide, that is art. But if a revolutionary writer, even by implication, shows the social ideas that are stirring in the heart of the working class, he is called a propagandist. [Let] us not fear to be crude or propagandistic. We are going somewhere. The rest of literature is sinking into the arms of Catholicism, and death.”

George Orwell, surveying the wreckage of T.S. Eliot's talent twenty or so years after the publication of "The Waste Land," noted that “It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist Party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines.”

And no less of a critic than Edmund Wilson commented on the Gold-Levy affair that "it has now become plain that the economic crisis is to be accompanied by a literary one.” What Wilson saw in proletarian literature -- John Dos Passos representing the highwater mark -- was that it was the only of several utopias hitched to the stream train of the future rather than to the wagons of the past:

Most Americans of the type of Dos Passos and Eliot—that is, sensitive and widely read literary people—have some such agreeable fantasy in which they can allow their minds to take refuge from the perplexities and oppressions about them. In the case of H.L. Mencken, it is a sort of German university town, where people drink a great deal of beer and devour a great many books, and where they respect the local nobility—if only the Germany of the Empire had not been destroyed by war! In the case of certain American writers from the top layer of the old South, it is the old-fashioned Southern plantation, where men are high-spirited and punctilious and women gracious and lovely, where affectionate and loyal Negroes are happy to keep in their place—if only the feudal South had not perished in 1865! With Ezra Pound, it is a medieval Provence, where poor but accomplished troubadours enjoy the favors of noble ladies—if only the troubadours were not deader than Provencal! With Dos Passos, it is an army of workers, disinterested, industrious and sturdy, but full of the good-fellowship and gaiety in which the Webster Hall balls nowadays are usually so dismally lacking—if only the American workers were not preoccupied with buying Ford cars and radios, instead of organizing themselves to overthrow the civilization of the bourgeoisie! And in T.S. Eliot’s case, it is a world of seventeenth-century churchmen, who combine the most scrupulous conscience with the ability to write good prose—if it were only not so difficult nowadays for men who are capable of becoming good writers to accept the Apostolic Succession!

[Note: This is the first in a four-part series on the state of the left. --ed]

I suspect it might be men in particular who have a problem about leaving behind the passions of our youth. We can't let go of our favourite bands from our teens, we still take an odd pleasure in eating the candy we enjoyed as a kid, we have ever-lasting soft spots for those early girlfriends and spend an inordinate amount of time watching and talking about games.

But when it comes to politics, surely a grown up affair, we really should be able to cast off much more easily our youthful attachments, shouldn't we? Yet, when it comes to ideology and allegiance, it is hard to throw out every little pamphlet from the wardrobe. If you were a teenage Trot, a youthful commie, or an adolescent anarchist, you have probably found yourself caught in the trap – the past six years have been hard for anyone who still identifies themselves as a lefty but maintains a commitment to the core principles that were supposed to bind all the 57 varieties of leftism. Yet you can't get let go.

I'm addressing this to the kind of readers who, perhaps with a background in Marxism, or socialism or social-democracy or serious liberalism, have found themselves shuffling away from the ANSWER-led anti-war demonstrations, raising eyebrows at people buying the latest Chomsky Self-Help Guide for Lefties, shaking their head at those who have failed to take clear sides in the conflict against Islamism and sighing when hearing those who have allowed their opposition to the Iraq war to lead them to ignoring the need for solidarity with Iraqi democrats.

I'm talking about the kind of people who found much to appreciate in Paul Berman's thoughtful and informative Terror and Liberalism or in the more strident arguments of Christopher Hitchens about the struggle against Islamism and the bankruptcy of the anti-war movement. I am talking about those of you who get labelled 'neo-con' by old comrades and aren't really sure whether to simply embrace the presumed insult or to fire back with a list of their leftist credentials.

Because the dissenting voices that have emerged on the left in the past five or six years have been fairly confident in asserting that, despite supporting 'Bush's wars', despite finding Paul Wolfowitz closer to their own views on foreign affairs than John Kerry, despite finding more to nod along to in Commentary than the magazines of the left, they are still the torch-bearers of real leftism and it is the rest of the left who have sold out.

Why do we bother? Are we just clinging to an identity from our youth and denying that old line that "If you aren't a socialist at 18 you haven't got a heart but if you are a socialist at 40 you haven't got a brain"? Are we just trying to deny that we are following the classic path of moving rightward, drifting into conservatism as we mature? Or are we actually on to something, are we really witnessing the separation of the left into two new camps – 'the anti-imperialists' who put the blame for all the world's ills at the door of western democracies and we, the 'anti-fascists' who despite our criticisms of capitalism, recognise the need to take sides against tyranny, theocracy and terror?

In the coming weeks I want to make the case for the re-affirmation of liberal left principles against the crude anti-imperialism (in hard and soft version) that has come to dominate the voice of the radical left. To argue why, despite our embarrassment at those who claim to be the authentic voice of radicalism, it is really the Eustonite, the Bermanite, the Hitchensian, left that is the true torch-carrier of our youthful idealism. I want to argue that there is, in fact, nothing 'right-wing' about opposing tyranny, terrorism and fascism and nothing 'left-wing' about making excuses for tyrants. That it is an agenda of social solidarity and liberalism that has the best chance of defeating reaction across the globe and not isolationism, thoughtless militarism or free-market evangelism. I will make the case that here is nothing in opposing injustice abroad that stops us from making the case for a liberal-left agenda at home.

In short, I will argue that not only is it still possible to be a lefty but that, rather, it is more essential than ever.

[Read part two here.]

Sam Tanenhaus has a brilliant essay in this week's New Republic (not yet available online) about the slow, sad decline of American conservatism as a philosophy. If Andrew Sullivan wonders why his book The Conservative Soul caused an ocean of yawns on the right when it debuted months ago, it's because our body politic has had little need for the Oakeshottian dichotomy between enterprise and civil associations. (Andrew's native Tories evidently have little need for one these days, too.)

Conservatism as a galvanizing movement has always been one of negation rather than positive assertion. Leo Strauss, discoursing on the favored twin in Isaiah Berlin's Gemini category of liberties, referred to "negative liberty" -- the blessed absence of state compulsion -- as "liberty with a minus sign." American conservatism has always been ideology with a minus sign. The cold war gave it its reason for being; it was religious in both the literal and metaphoric senses of the term, with the god-fearing waging their "twilight struggle" against the godless. As Tanenhaus writes, American triumphalism, which was postwar conservatism avant la lettre, was a "purifying doctrine" pitted against the "Soviets' derived from Marx by way of Lenin," yet it consisted of... "what exactly?" Nothing. It didn't need to consist of anything beyond a transcendent and apocalyptic repudiation of "Marx by way of Lenin."

So if George Bush has failed to take up the mantle of Whittaker Chambers -- correctly if conveniently identified by Tanenhaus, Chambers' biographer, as the founder of American conservatism -- it is because Bush has failed to understand the true menace of Islamism the way Chambers did that of Communism. (That not many Republican strategists were once Kalashkinov-toting jihadists who eventually saw the light may delay further the necessary comprehension.)

I'm not sure I buy Tanenhaus's thesis that conservatism is on the wane, but I do agree that Chambers is still worth taking seriously if for no other reason than those farcical defenders of Alger Hiss continue to view him as a threat. Here's a post I wrote a few months ago about tragic Baltimore bullfrog of the twentieth century:

"I have sometimes been asked at this point: What went on in the minds of those Americans, all highly educated men, that made it possible for them to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized, expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore, ultimately the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as a problem of conscience, but as a problem of operations. Making due allowance for the differences of intelligence, nerve, background and political development among the individual men involved... the answer to the question must still be: no problem of conscience was then involved. For the Communists, the problem of conscience had been settled long before, at the moment when they accepted the program and discipline of the Communist Party." -- Whittaker Chambers, Witness

I shall never forget the feeling of a missed opportunity when I began my first job out of college at the Queens Museum of Art. A few months before my hire, Alger Hiss's son had been invited to speak at the museum about how his poor, beloved papa was turned into a falsely accused victim of a national bugbear responsible for the insidious advent of Joseph McCarthy and the age of the "loyalty oath." It's easy to trick yourself out as a martyr -- or, in Hiss, Jr.'s case, a vicarious one -- when every schoolchild has been taught that America's relationship to Communism was nothing more than a series of reactionary witch-hunts. There was no real threat to national security, Communists did not infiltrate the State Department. And if you need moral surety on this question, just look who interrogated Hiss -- Richard Nixon.

Political myths die hard. We now know the following about Hiss: He was a spy attached to the Washington "Ware group," who copied sensitive State Department documents and passed them along to Moscow. (His typewriter was matched with the ink on the documents, microfilms of which were buried for years in a pumpkin on Chambers' Maryland farm.) Though never a CP member (that wouldn't have looked good on his government job application), Hiss volunteered his automobile for above-ground Party use, despite being told that this was irregular and dangerous -- an underground agent was not supposed to let anything that could be traced back to him come out in the open and tinctured Red. Hiss was just that eager to advance the struggle. He also thought Franklin Roosevelt, whom he publicly adulated, was a craven bourgeois guilty of resuscitating capitalism just as the revolution looked to be imminent. Whittaker Chambers, who endured no small amount of obloquy and was the target of decades-long character assassination, was telling the truth. Richard Nixon was right.

Continue reading...

• Classroom mindfulness
• Fatah coup?
• YouTube on your $500 phone
• Shimon Peres and a convicted spy
• Communist chic in Berlin hotel

Democratiya's summer issue is out, and it's required reading. Here is Nick Cohen reviewing a new collection of Orwell's journalism:

When the Poles rose up on the orders of the exiled government in London to throw the Germans out and stop the Soviet Union taking the city [Orwell] protested 'against the mean and cowardly attitude' of the liberal press, which urged that they should be left to die.

What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw. The enormous majority of left-wingers who swallow the policy put out by the News Chronicle, etc., know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter. If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the Committee of Liberation and recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots. Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not 'Is this policy right or wrong?' but 'This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?' And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

Today, you don't here a single voice raised in protest about what al Qaeda is doing to Iraq or against the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world. If anything the duplicity is worse than during Stalinism. Then, leftish intellectuals could pretend to themselves that the Soviet Union was progressive and at some level shared their values. By contrast, Islamism makes no secret of its contempt for the Left and for liberalism or its appropriation of Nazi conspiracy theory. From the Iranian Revolution onwards, the first task of radical Islam has been to persecute Muslim socialists, liberals and freethinkers.

My Anglophilia knows no bounds. One of the reasons I assiduously follow the political spats on the other side of the Atlantic is because they're so much more candid about ideological differences than what passes for partisan debate or controversy over here. You will still find the odd editor of a liberal broadsheet in London going moist in the orbs to remember the glory years of Leonid Brezhnev, or to recall how Stalin and Mao's nationalist pas de deux might have ended more amicably if it weren't for the machinations of Tito. These are old feuds that should be bygones, and they scarcely resonant with, say, the AARP readership of The Nation, a greybeard demographic that preoccupies itself more with the revisionist innocence of Alger Hiss, meaning it still denies that he was a fellow traveler and Soviet spy.

I've had my problems with Robert Service in the past, chiefly because I thought his Stalin biography was mediocre where it was orthodox and bad where it was heterodox.  But look at what happens when a scholar of Russian history writes a book called Comrades! that attempts to trace the lineaments common to all Communist regimes in the 20th century. Look at what idiot Kremlin lickspittles at the Guardian go and do to him:

All this I mentioned repeatedly in my book, but it was not quite what one reviewer, the Guardian's Seumas Milne, wanted. He denied that I stated that communist leaders unleashed a drive towards industrial and cultural modernisation. Next, he alleged that I followed a "neoconservative" agenda. He also maintained that the so-called "revisionist" school of Soviet history was not getting a fair wind in the western media.

His Stalinoid form and content of argument involved deliberate misrepresentation. It would seem that Milne and his like consider it fair game to denounce anybody who comes to a considered anti-communist standpoint as a neocon. This is a shoddy way to handle a serious political discussion. If this farrago had not come from the editor of the comment pages of one of our national newspapers, it would not be worth bothering about. What is more, Milne is typical of a more general trend that retains a nostalgia for communism, and it is a trend that ought to be repudiated.

There's barely even a conventional school of Soviet history in the western media since most of the stuff we know about the USSR comes from evidence that has only just been released and siphoned through. 

What a shame Service didn't go on record one way or the other about the Iraq war. Then Milne and his Hundred Acre Wood of Red hacks would have had easier epithets to hurl at him. 

I want badly to say that this essay almost redeems him for his silliness about Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

When I met von Donnersmarck in Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy, and economics in the mid-1990s, I discussed my reservations with him. While fiercely defending the basic historical accuracy of the film, he immediately agreed that some details were deliberately altered for dramatic effect. Thus, he explained, if he had shown the Stasi cadets in uniform, no ordinary cinemagoer would have identified with them. But because he shows them (inaccurately) in student-type civilian dress and has one of them (implausibly) ask a naive question to the effect of "isn't bullying people in interrogations wrong?," the viewer can identify with them and is drawn into the story. He argued that in a movie the reality has always to be verdichtet, a word which means thickened, concentrated, intensified, but carries a verbal association with Dichtung, meaning poetry or, more broadly, fiction. Hence the elevated language ("I beg you, I beseech you"—ich flehe dich an—says the playwright at one point, asking his girlfriend not to submit again to the minister's piggish lechery). Hence the luxuriant palette of rich greens, browns, and subtle grays in which the whole movie is shot, and the frankly operatic staging of Christa's death.

During a subsequent question-and-answer session in an Oxford cinema the director mentioned, in separate answers, two films that he admired: Claude Lanzmann's harrowing Holocaust documentary, Shoah, and Anthony Minghella's version of The Talented Mr. Ripley—a thriller involving murder and stolen identity—which he singled out because "it doesn't bore me, and for that I'm very grateful." In The Lives of Others, Shoah meets The Talented Mr. Ripley. Von Donnersmarck does care about the historical facts, but he's even more concerned not to bore us. And for that we are grateful. It is just because he is not an East German survivor but a fresh, cosmopolitan child of the Americanized West, a privileged Wessi down to the carefully unbuttoned tips of his pink button-down shirt, fluent in American-accented English and the universal language of Hollywood, that he is able to translate the East German experience into an idiom that catches the imagination of the world.

A brief note about the Stasi agent's quick conversion into a "good man." It wasn't necessary all that quick. Just because the clipped, gray automaton we're introduced to at the beginning of the film indicates Wiesler was still the perfect surveillance agent doesn't mean he hadn't had doubts about his profession or his state before eavesdropping on a charismatic intellectual and his beautiful actress girlfriend.

The point conveyed by the best fictional anatomies of totalitarian societies is that even the oppressors harbor a latent, or incipient, sympathy with those they oppress. When O'Brien tells Winston Smith of the life Winston and Julia will be forced to lead in the underground -- a life that would in all probability end in early death -- is there not a slight vicarious thrill in his forecast of their martyrdom?

The very psychology that enabled regimes of terror in the twentieth century was also responsible for their downfall. A two-hour time window may have required the filmmaker to speed up the process in his characters some, but the essential truth of his film remains in tact.

The Stasi on Our Minds - The New York Review of Books

As a political system, let alone one thought to be on the winning side of history, Communism is dead. However, what made it so appealing in the 20th century is well worth studying today, when messianism and the mad pursuits of foreordained utopias are still with us. Robert Service's new history of Communism, Comrades!, is said to one of the best single volume histories of the subject:

Eschewing the usual convoluted language of Marxist debates, he provides a gripping account of communism's intellectual origins, pedigree and impact. Concluding that Marx and his followers “were not the fundamental rethinkers of the contemporary world”—he accords that honour to Albert Einstein, Max Weber and others—Mr Service turns from ideas to their practical application.

He argues that one can indeed trace a single unified history of communism, namely by following the rise and spread of the “truly innovative” Russian model. Through numerous country studies, the author concludes that all durable regimes had essential coercive characteristics in common. They centralised power, eliminated rival parties, attacked religion, established secret police forces and sent dissenters to labour camps. He compares communists both to fascists, with whom he sees ideological differences but practical similarities, and to early Christians. Like the latter, he says, communists enjoyed a feeling of certainty blessed by omniscience, with the deity in their case being “the march of history”.

What makes Russia innovative is that for centuries it cultivated the two main characteristics of Soviet Communism: autocracy and statism. Russia never reall had a "feudal" period in the proper economic sense of the word: under a unique, Asiatic configuration, the state was the sole owner of land, and the tsar simply doled out real estate to the aristocracy, which was little more than a bonded military class (known as pomestchiki) before the reforms inaugurated by Peter the Great. A country where peasants would actually elect to become slaves in order to avoid paying taxes is one that seems tailor-made for totalitarianism. The Russian paradox is that the grey, uniform masses are periodically galvanized into violent upheavals and revolutions by an intelligentsia comprised of young radicals, whom you can now see flitting across the stage at Lincoln Center in Tom Stoppard's magnetic play The Coast of Utopia. Alexander Herzen may have been the most humane and liberal of the Russian thinkers, but he still believed that the motherland already enjoyed a kind of populist communism in the obshchina-based agrarian society. Herzen's hope was that Russia could skip mercantilism and bourgeois capitalism altogether and arrive at socialism without the pettifogging political economy outlined by Marx and Engels. Herzen's inchoate social theory, based on the observations made of Russia by a Prussian sociologist, motivated the next generation of intelligents into adopting a more cohesive revolutionary plan, one that, through all its violent fits and dynamic mutations, culminated in 1917.

Because it's Friday and even this is better than Spider-Man 3:

Stalin: Why doesn't he scare you like Hitler?Were you aware of this?

There's a hot new TV show-- in Russia-- about the life of Josef Stalin. It's called Stalin Live!

Jazz hands!!!!

For real, yo.

The show's structural device is an elderly Stalin, in the last weeks of his life, recalling episodes in his younger days, most presenting him in a favorable light.

For Stalin admirers, of whom there are many in Russia, the series is an entertaining and educational look at the man who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. To critics, it is a dangerous distortion of history that threatens to misinform a younger generation about a leader responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and reinforce a trend toward greater authoritarianism in politics.

And evidently a huge number of Russians basically agree with actor David Giorgobiani, who had this to say:

Many more years have to pass before we can make an unbiased judgment on that great man," he said. "One hundred years from now, no one will pay attention to the fact that so many people perished and the costs were so terribly high. But everyone will remember that such a great country was saved.

Umm... okay.As a Jewish woman, and someone who grew up in a red diaper, in years when Russian Jews were still trying to get out of the USSR in floods, I've thought a lot about the relationship between Stalinist Communism and anti-Semitism. I learned as a kid about the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and about Stalin's treatment of the Trotskyites. Not to mention all the purges, starting with that of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. There is no question but that Stalin was an anti-Semite, a violent tormenter of Jews.

So how do I feel about this TV show?

It horrifies me. And I don't understand why we haven't heard much about it!!! Why isn’t the Jewish press freaking out???If a widely-distributed German TV show were being made about the military and economic successes of Hitler, leaving out his bloodlust and total lack of respect for human life… you can bet your sweet asses we'd be screaming our heads off. Why aren't we screaming our heads off?

And what does this all say about the new Russia and Judaism?

All one needs to know about the goggle-eyed gulag lover:

This perversity—and he was perverse, whether he realized it or not—made him the most conspicuous single example in the 20^th century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization.

To this I might add that Nabokov had existentialism pegged in his review of La Nausée. It was "a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy and... for every so-called 'existentialist' one finds quite a few 'suctorialists.'"

Sometimes you could actually hear the slurping as a fitting physical concomitant of existentialist thought.

It's become the work of a moment to dismiss horrible political thinkers of the 20th century as good-for-nothing cranks, tout court. Just when you think a totalitarian style and substance have merged seamlessly into one pleasing, repulsive whole, you find, damn it, that there is a tiny germ of redemption in those you'd quite like there not to be. Ezra Pound was a fascist and a bigot and a lousy poet and an even lousier translator, but he knew talent when he saw it as an editor, which is T.S. Eliot appears in more anthologies and critical journals today. Pablo Neruda wrote odes to Stalin ("the sun and the moon") and predicted, upon the tyrant's death, that all would be well with the Soviet experiment because "Malenkov would finish [his] work." Still, Czeslaw Milosz was generous enough to say that Neruda knew the plight of impoverished Chileans better than most, and if his death galvanized a public opposition to Augusto Pinochet, then perhaps the Latin was not so easily consigned to the dustbin of history, after all.

Sartre's an altogether trickier customer for the simple fact that we already have his more salubrious twin in the postwar French tradition: Camus. This is the Hobsbawm/Orwell split in terms of continental heroism. You want glamour? Check out the bookjacket photo of the author of L'etranger: that trench coat, those dark-circles under the eyes, that cigarette dangling from the lips. (Clive James said he got into the business of writing just so he could one day embody this incandescent cool.) You want moral courage and honesty? Camus said he opposed French imperialism in his homeland of Algeria, but that wasn't enough to make him forget about his beloved mama when the NLF took to the streets.... You want resistance? Combat did more to excise the intellectual rot of Nazism than all of Sartre's go-nowhere colloquies in the "underground." And when it came time to say goodbye to all that and repudiate Stalinism for what it was, Camus witnessed for the virtues of humane liberalism, prefiguring the next wave of great anti-ideology philosophes like Raymond Aron and, yes, Bernard Henri-Levy.

No Exit was a groundless fear of a debased and compromised mind: the exit was merely another man.

Michael Totten interviews the hard-leftist opposition to Ahmadinejad, et. al (Hat tip: Sully):

“Some of the Communists in Iran were a part of the 1979 revolution,” I said. “Were you a part of that revolution?”

“Yes,” Kamal said. “We were. We were supported by people who were workers and poor people. You should remember that the Komalah Party was the first party that brought women equality. Komalah still wants women to have the same rights that men do.”

“How long did your Party have good relations with the government after the revolution?” I said.

I’m not sure if he dodged my question or if it was lost in translation.

“We have 3,000 martyrs,” he said. “We have hope and we have struggled for many years. We have activities everywhere.”

Would you like human rights and democracy with that?: Chinese president Hu JintaoToday China passed it first law establishing property rights, an act free marketeers are hailing as a decisive shift away from the kind of corporate fascism that has governed the Asian tiger's bogus brand of socialism for the past 25 years. However, as the Wall Street Journal econ blog The Informed Reader points out:

“[t]he new law is mainly aimed at reassuring the fast-growing middle class that their assets are secure. Its ratification, expected later this month, would give private property the same legal protection as state property. Until now, state and local officials have been able to seize businesses and land for housing and factory construction in return for little or no compensation, moves that have led to widespread protests."

And R.J. Elliott at The China Analyst says:

Far from helping the poor in rural China enforcing Property Rights will give legality to any land grab that has previously occured by Chinese Party Officials. This in a sense is setting in stone previous corrupt behaviour making a small number of individuals very rich.

In his masterpiece Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman explains the torturous process of the Baconian method it affects the life and work of his protagonist, the Soviet physicist Viktor Shtrum.

The laboratory experiments had been intended to confirm the predictions of the theory. They had failed to do this. The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. A theory that had been elaborated on the basis of decades of work by many researchers, a theory that had then explained many things in subsequent experimental results, seemed quite unshakeable. Repetition of the experiments had shown again and again that the deflections of charged particles in interaction with the nucleus still failed to correspond with what the theory predicted. Even the most generous allowance for the inaccuracy of the experiments, for the imperfection of the measuring apparatus and the emulsions used to photograph the fission of the nuclei, could in no way account for such large discrepancies.

Realizing that there could be no doubt as to the accuracy of the results, Viktor had then attempted to patch up the theory. He had postulated various arbitrary hypotheses that would reconcile the new experimental data with the theory. Everything he had done had been based on one fundamental belief: that, since the theory was itself deduced from experimental data, it was impossible for an experiment to contradict it.

An enormous amount of labour was expended in an attempt to reconcile the new data with the theory. Nevertheless, the patched-up theory still failed to account for new contradictions in the results form the laboratory. The theory remained as powerless as ever, though it still seemed unthinkable to reject it.

Although he doesn't go into much detail, it's clear Grossman's hero is helping to speed along the development of the Soviet atom bomb. (At one decisive point, when it looks as if the black marias are en route to haul him away to jail, Shtrum is saved by the personal intervention of Stalin himself. Even as a Jew, this doctor was too indispensable to a more exigent "plot" to be purged under the spate of postwar anti-Semitic hysteria.)

However, notice how craftily in the above paragraphs Grossman metaphorically anatomizes the mentality of Communism! The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. All the improvisational skill in the world can't save a debased theory.

Had this extraordinary Russian novelist been less brave in other parts of Life and Fate (probably the only book ever to get "arrested" for its "individualism" -- read "excellence"), he might have well smuggled in this coded criticism of ideology and gotten away with it. At the very least, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera would have been proud.

If the absurdities of the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of science hadn't been so harmful and blood-soaked, they'd have been hilarious. Stalin ruled as a kind of armchair white-coat over a vast matrix of scholarship and laboratory research that might otherwise have yielded a few lasting monuments to a particularly dark era in Russian history. Instead, he celebrated crackpots, killed the real talent, and then -- because such is the caprice of despots everywhere -- "rehabilitated" the slain victims and proceeded to lock up all the old crackpots. Stalin took this tack with linguistics, believe it or not. (Hold your cheap Chomsky jokes, please.) Having bought into the charlatan N. Marr's theory that the totality of the Russian language emanated from exactly four sounds -- “rosh,” “sal, ” “ber,” and “yon" -- Stalin eventually decided that, no, that probably wasn't right after all. (His epiphany did not coincide with lending credence or stays of execution to Marr's sane antagonists, who'd gone out of their way to debunk such patent nonsense in the 30's.) Then Stalin wrote a book on "Marxist" linguistics, showed Marr to be the fool everyone knew he was, and all was right again with the dialectical Force.

A new book's come out about the Georgian monster's intellectual depredations on the scientific community. Although Communism is dead, we really must continue to hear ab