Communism

The ferocious incivility Americans have witnessed for decades has arisen largely from the left—and for good reason

In this latest episode of the Substandard, Sonny reviews The Death of Stalin, a movie Vic did not see because he refused to pay for parking. The return of Jony Ive is met with skepticism. Recriminations are launched, profanities are hurled. It's the crankiest Substandard yet!

Stein’s Law—named for the late economist Herbert Stein, who was chair of Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers—goes something like this: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” (His son Ben Stein’s law, by contrast, is probably this.) It’s one of the few pithy economic phrases…

It's possible Celino Villanueva Jaramillo is the world’s oldest man. Born in 1896, he is now 121 according to Chilean government records, making him four years older than the current Guinness World Record holder, the Guardian reports.

While we’re distracted reliving last year’s election, a graver anniversary will be passing by. On Nov. 8, 1917, at 2:10 a.m., Vladimir Lenin’s soldiers stormed the Winter Palace after a two-day siege and found the men who’d fall to their coup. They stopped the clock in the former imperial dining…

Until his death on October 14, Richard Wilbur had spent nearly half a century as America’s greatest living poet. A writer of opulent forms and playful wit, whose rhymed and measured stanzas combined the intellectual complexities of modernist verse with the familiar pleasures of an older tradition,…

Oakland, Calif.

Oakland, Calif.

We take a backseat to no one in deploring the effects that social media have on our culture. However, sometimes they provide people platforms to announce to the world that they possess dangerous and/or idiotic beliefs. This can be useful.

At the United Nations, President Trump warned North Korea that its jefe “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” If need be, Trump said, the United States would “totally destroy North Korea.” For its part, North Korea has said it would deliver “the greatest pain and…

Pretty incredible quote here in the New York magazine interview with New York mayor Bill de Blasio. Several people have jokingly called the man a communist, but here he is arguing against private property rights more or less on the basis of "each according to his ability, each according to his…

Nice little show you got there... In Boston, a bizarre extortion trial involving movie-stereotype union Teamsters and celebrities from the hit television show Top Chef resulted in a verdict of not guilty for the Teamsters. Interestingly, "at least three witnesses testified that a top [mayoral] aide…

The Scrapbook spent a few days driving around with the station on, and if you’re looking for bizarro-world news and endless gabfests about how America is populated with imperialist running dogs, well, Sputnik Radio is for you. The station’s Moscow-mandated agenda is impossible to ignore. There’s an…

Havana

Havana

"What to do?"

What is the world's most effective weapon? During the First World War, gas killed about 90,000 people. During the Second World War, it was used to kill 6,000,000 Jews. Directly and indirectly, the two atomic bombs killed about 200,000 Japanese; the Japanese used anthrax, cholera and the bubonic…

Anything to lose weight if you're a Cosmo girl!

This was not your typical film premiere. The Bleeding Edge depicts the live-organ harvesting of religious dissidents by agents of the Chinese government and its reigning Communist Party—and the film's starring actress, human-rights activist and religious dissident Anastasia Lin was allegedly almost…

Congressional Republicans agree with Democrats that Russia's hacking of Democratic emails merits investigation. But however troubling Moscow's election-season mischief-making might have been, there's no reason to assume the results of the presidential vote itself were in any way unfair. The real…

Congressional Republicans agree with Democrats that Russia’s hacking of Democratic emails merits investigation. But however troubling Moscow's election-season mischief-making might have been, there's no reason to assume the results of the presidential vote itself were in any way unfair. The real…

In 1953, a young Fidel Castro was tried for his armed attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The attack was a dismal failure, though its date—July 26—was later taken as the name of Castro's revolutionary movement. At the trial 24…

In 1953, a young Fidel Castro was tried for his armed attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The attack was a dismal failure, though its date—July 26—was later taken as the name of Castro's revolutionary movement. At the trial 24…

The Associated Press reports:

Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film and theatre producer and director who restored his country's consciousness of its torment at the hands of its Russian and Nazi German enemies, died on October 9 in Warsaw at the age of 90. His body of work made him an outstanding personality in the past 60 years of…

Once upon a time in America, a state-sponsored healthcare exchange used a multi-hour Richard Simmons dance party to promote insurance coverage to young people. Somehow this is not the worst marketing ploy to youth a government has used in the last three years.

Like a lot of people my age and older, I first discovered Dalton Trumbo through Metallica. Spurred on by many late night viewings of the haunting video for the band’s anti-war single “One,” I discovered Johnny Got His Gun—Trumbo’s 1939 novel that inspired the 1971 film adaptation, which in turn…

In the last 20 years, America’s political, media, and business establishments have done their best to rehabilitate the image of China’s Communist government. After all, there’s a lot of money to be made by playing nice with China and looking the other way when Beijing continues to routinely commit…

The news is so bad these days, we could all benefit from journalists taking the time to report more inspirational tales. Thankfully, Time magazine is here to help, as evidenced by this uplifting headline: “How Che Guevara Didn’t Let Asthma Affect His Ambitions.” Wait .  .  . what?

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in scheduling his U.S. visit, seems to have fallen into a trap common for many communist leaders: underestimating papal power. Xi will be following in the footsteps of Pope Francis on visits first to the White House in Washington, and then to the United Nations in New…

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and eight other members of a congressional delegation that recently headed to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, spoke positively of the trip at a press conference on Tuesday. They not only met with government officials in each country, but they also visited…

Time and again it is reported that Muslim terrorists in the process of inflicting lethal bodily harm (with firearms, explosives, knives, or by running over people with cars) shout “God is Great!” (Allahu Akbar). It is a remarkable and seemingly puzzling phenomenon that has received little…

A new book set to be released next week alleges that the CIA took steps to prevent anti-American tirades from Chinese Communist officials from being heard in America. The details are revealed in Michael Pillsbury's The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global…

Philip Larkin began one of his better-known poems with the arresting observation that Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me)— / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP. Larkin was born in 1922, and so would have been in the…

Last week’s announcement that the White House intends to restore normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba is part of Barack Obama’s larger project to overturn what he perceives to be wrongheaded, or at least outdated, foreign policies. From Obama’s perspective, the Cold War…

Berlin

On Sunday, the leaders of Hong Kong’s democracy protests abruptly scrapped a poll of protester sentiment they had announced just days earlier. The idea of the poll had been to get protesters’ reactions to two bones thrown to them by the Hong Kong government in televised talks held on October 21.   

Representatives of the student led democracy protests in Hong Kong are due to enter into a dialogue with the Hong Kong government on Tuesday.  The prospects for success are not good.  The two sides are far apart, with the government saying it will not even discuss the protesters’ chief demand – the…

Apart from the death of a journalist, no more poignant event is ever recorded in the media than the demise of a onetime “antiwar activist.” This was confirmed in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post last week, where the passing in Budapest of Fred Branfman, 72, was duly noted. 

Twenty-five years have passed since a lone man stood in front of Chinese tanks and dared to defy Beijing’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. His bold challenge to the Chinese Communist Party was one of history’s most profound reminders of the insatiable human desire to live free even in the…

Amid the usual news stories this Easter Sunday – accounts of the president’s family attending church and the pope addressing multitudes – there is this startling and vastly hopeful headline:

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section of our February 10, 2014 issue and an interview with Ron Radosh on his piece The Red Warbler.

President Obama released this statement on the passing of singer Pete Seeger:

The political debate over what to do about global warming rages on, largely because liberals refuse to have an honest discussion about their plans to deal with it. The heart of their every proposed “solution” to climate change is a radical economic program that would threaten the livelihood and…

Today, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate, President Obama paid appropriate tribute to the brave East Germans who rebelled 60 years ago against Communist dictatorship:

Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking at the General Assembly of the Organization of American States in Guatemala on Wednesday, reminisced about his first trip to Latin America as a U.S. senator back in 1985:

And now the last of them is gone. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II—three who won the Cold War and, it isn't too much to say, saved the West (at least for a while!)—are no longer with us. Their examples remain.

Good news for a change from Phnom Penh: Ieng Sary, brother-in-law of and cofounder with Pol Pot of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge movement, died last week. Or perhaps it wasn’t really good news. His heart (who knew he had one?) gave out before the Cambodian-U.N. tribunal had a chance to finish…

When everything changes, what should be done?

The chairman of the President Barack Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, praised China this morning on CBS: 

A report in the Chinese state-run Xinhua outlet claims that President Barack Obama congratulated Xi Jinping on his "election" to be the top Communist in China. Jinping will be the next president of China, and now controls the Chinese military.

During Monday night’s presidential debate, the candidates beat their breasts vying to be tougher on China. Barack Obama pointed to his accomplishments, while Mitt Romney attacked the president for being afraid to label China a currency manipulator. The amount of time devoted to America’s largest…

In noting the death last week in London of Eric Hobsbawm, The Scrapbook observed its usual doctrine of de mortuis nil nisi bonum. But then our attention was drawn to his New York Times obituary, which blandly explained that Hobsbawm’s “three-volume economic history of the rise of industrial…

Vice President Joe Biden quoted the official propaganda outlet of the Chinese Communist regime to knock Mitt Romney at a campaign event today:

A Washington tortured by Vietnam was flummoxed in 1972 when Australian voters made the Labor party’s antiwar Gough Whitlam prime minister after 23 years of conservative rule. Entering Henry Kissinger’s office at the White House on December 23 for a conversation about China relating to President…

China’s interest in South America is easily explained: The Asian giant has a voracious appetite for commodities and raw materials, including Argentine soybeans, Brazilian iron ore, Chilean and Peruvian metals, Ecuadorean and Venezuelan oil, and Uruguayan beef. Therefore, Beijing has expanded trade…

Today's the twenty-five year anniversary of Ronald Reagan's powerful Brandenburg Gate address in Berlin, Germany. Watch here:

Of the books I have read about China, The Corpse Walker, which I reviewed for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is one of my favorites. Written by Liao Yiwu, The Corpse Walker contains stories about the strange mix of people Liao met while traveling around China and serving time in jail for writing and…

The blind, barefoot lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, imprisoned for exposing the morally repugnant practice of forced abortion and sterilization, just evaded one of the world’s most sophisticated state police. It’s a shrewd move: figuring out how to get a sick blind man from his house arrest to Beijing—a…

Allen West created an apparent controversy when he stated at a Florida event, "I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party." Democrats decried West's comment--and even the Communist Party USA slammed the Florida congressman. 

Former network television host Tom Brokaw will be appearing on the Chinese Communist channel later tonight, according to a press release from China Central Television. The Communist channel bears the ironic acronym CCTV, which in other contexts usually stands for “closed-circuit television.”

The Wall Street Journal Asia has published an editorial arguing that the process for “electing” Hong Kong’s next chief executive reflects the erosion of the “one country, two systems” principle that was supposed to allow Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and ultimately full democracy. The…

Kiev 

The Washington Post has an interesting story on the escalating verbal attacks from theChinese government on America's top diplomat in Hong Kong, Stephen Young. (The Wall Street Journal Asia editorial on the subject here: “Paranoia in Hong Kong.”) The Post’s Andrew Higgins reports that the Hong Kong…

Former Czech president Václav Havel died Sunday morning in his home in the northern part of the Czech Republic. Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic, serving in the latter office from 1993 to 2003. But Havel will be best remembered as the…

Senator Mark Kirk is pushing for the U.S. to engage in deeper strategic cooperation with China on drugs, terrorism, and Afghanistan. Speaking yesterday at the Foreign Policy Initiative’s annual conference at the Newseum, the Illinois Republican argued that the U.S. should build a supply line to…

John Merline: "The Austerity Myth: Federal Spending Up 5% This Year"

WEEKLY STANDARD contributor Ron Radosh, one of the top anti-communist scholars in the country, reports this bombshell about one of America's most popular furniture brands:

On July 23, two high-speed trains collided on an elevated track near the Chinese city of Wenzhou, killing at least 39 people and injuring several hundred. In the days since the crash, shock and sympathy have turned to outrage as the Chinese government's propagandistic, face-saving response to the…

Speculation over the medical condition of former Chinese Communist leader Jiang Zemin continues unabated since a Hong Kong television station, ATV, broadcast an unattributed news story of his death on July 6. Jiang’s health has been thought to be in decline for some months, but when he did not make…

"Panetta: Iraq will ask for some US troops to stay"

Red Conspirator

“We can only find the ways to communism if we get started and try them out, whether in the opposition or in the government,” Gesine Lötzsch, co-president of the German Left Party, declared earlier this week.

When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize last week, the authoritarians in Beijing responded in their typical, iron-fisted fashion. The Foreign Ministry immediately called the award "blasphemy" and a "desecration," and characterized Liu as a common criminal. They cancelled…

On September 7, a particularly aggressive Chinese fishing boat captain, Zhan Qixiong, rammed his vessel, the Minjinyu 5179, into two Japanese patrol boats after he refused to heed warnings to leave disputed waters in the East China Sea. The incident occurred around the islets and rock outcroppings…

Left-wing groups convened the “One Nation Working Together” rally on the National Mall on Saturday, October 2, hoping to counter Glenn Beck’s well-attended “Restoring Honor” gathering in August.  They also wanted to energize their base before the November elections, hoping to counter Tea Party…

Throughout American history, citizens have been duped. It’s a word as old as the republic itself. George Washington, in his “Farewell Address,” warned about “dupes”—that is, those who, unwittingly, allow themselves to be deceived or misled by active adversaries of the United States.

Two weeks ago, the FBI released 423 pages from its files on the late radical historian Howard Zinn. The bureau kept tabs on him for over 25 years, long before he became the bestselling author of A People’s History of the United States. Followers of Zinn’s career will not be surprised to hear the…