Dmitri Volkogonov, changer
[NOTE: Like yesterday’s post, this rumination was sparked by Martin Amis’ book Koba the Dread.]
Here’s a tragic quote about political change, from Dmitri Volkogonov, a man who wrote biographies of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky:
“Perhaps the only thing I achieved in this life,” he wrote (when his life was ending), “was to break with the faith I had held for so long.”
That faith was in communism.
Volkogonov died at the age of 67. What happened to change his mind after a lifetime of toiling for the glory of the USSR? It happened in stages:
Long known in Western military circles as one of the hardest of hardliners, Volkogonov began, by the middle of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, to have serious doubts about the Soviet regime. At first, these concerned only Joseph Stalin, whose purges led to the deaths of both of Volkogonov’s parents. He spent nearly twenty years compiling a revisionist (by Soviet standards) biography. He forthrightly described Stalin’s alleged crimes but remained an admirer of Vladimir Lenin and (following the Nikita Khrushchev line) believed that Stalinism was a perversion of true Leninism. (His views on Lenin changed after he went back into the archives to do his biography of Lenin. It was then that he read that Lenin too had murdered thousands of his opponents.)
Volkogonov’s wife also begged him not to publish the book and he did hold it back for a time, fearful of the consequences. Once the book was published, these consequences were not slow in coming. He was fired in 1991 from his job as director of the Institute of Military History at the Ministry of Defense of the USSR by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Once the Soviet Union’s collapse was complete, Volkogonov combined his historical work with political activity in the newly established Russian state. Following the failed Soviet coup attempt of 1991, Volkogonov was appointed Defense Advisor to Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. By then, he was already afflicted with the cancer that would kill him in 1995. Before he died, he contributed much to the so-called “liberal” strain of Russian thought that was condemned during the Soviet period.
Why was Volkogonov able to change when so many could not? I’m not sure, and really don’t know enough to say, but apparently the turning point involved his going back into the archives to read in great depth the letters and other private papers of Lenin and Trotsky, and finding so many smoking guns (of the rhetorical type) that he could no longer deny the nature and goals of both men.
It must have been an astounding and especially dramatic change experience. But not everyone would have reacted the way Volkogonov did. Some would have shored up and defended their previous views and life work, making excuses and rationalizing away what they had found, in order to preserve their view of the world and their own place in it.
This obituary (Volkogonov died in 1995) from the LA Times offers a bit more information. His death occurred just weeks after he finished his magnum opus Seven Leaders, which ties a great many threads together, examining “every Soviet ruler from Lenin to Mikhail S. Gorbachev–from details of their quirky obsessions to analyses of their momentous decisions.”
The English title of the book seems to actually be Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime. The following is from the Publisher’s Weekly review of the book:
Volkogonov cogently argues for a seamless connection between Lenin’s absolutism and Stalin’s merciless dictatorship. Drawing on new material, including declassified documents from state and Party archives, he reveals Lenin’s paranoia toward foreigners as well as Stalin’s pivotal role in egging on his puppet in North Korea, Kim Il-sung, to start a war with the South in 1950. Khrushchev, though he repudiated the Stalinist cult of personality, was out of touch with the masses, in Volkogonov’s estimate, while indecisive, mediocre, suave Brezhnev mistook economic and social stagnation for stability. Both Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were “political pygmies” who strived to preserve a sclerotic system. Bristling with startling revelations, this scathing panorama of seven decades of Soviet rule brims with much treachery, intrigue, reversals of fortune and personal idiosyncrasies.
As I said, I know very little about Volkogonov. In fact, I’d never heard of him until I encountered his name in Amis’ book. But I have little doubt that a goodly part of what gave Volkogonov the motivation to write this final book—and even, perhaps, the strength to live long enough to finish it—was his remorse at his own nearly-lifelong complicity in the myth of Communism, and his outrage at those who made it possible.
Stalin murdered his parents, and 30 years later he began to have doubts??
Whoa.
Reminds me of that character (Lev?) in Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle: the true believer who never doubts the Revolution– even after a decade in the gulag!
About the same time (late 1990s) I met with some Czech engineering firms, and at dinner talked with them about the political changes all around them. The biggest thing about the engineers who were in their 50’s was that their children could travel freely. They said they regretted this the most about their period under communism.
My guess is Volkogonov not only was changed by reading the archives, but was prepared by seeing that the propaganda about the west was utterly wrong. For a literary Russian, this had to be the cruelest thing.
Occam’s Beard: although I can’t find evidence for this, my guess is that Volkogonov may have been anti-Stalin for many many years, but preserved his reverence for Lenin and Trotsky until much later. I’m not sure, though. I agree that the time frame given in the quote seems very odd.
Occam’s Beard,
I thought it was common knowledge that murdering one’s parents might well be what a proper communist or socialist would have to do, or have done. No one is beyond reproach, let alone execution. Parents and others were not just possible, but probable targets. Anyone who held part of the old power structures, family, church, old state, police… targets.
It is interesting to see someone, of their own volition, change. But what caused this man to change was similar to what caused me to change. Reading history. I would guess that is why so many liberals today refuse history, or attempt to change what is written about it.
I don’t know if the book will go on to discuss it, but what I would be interested in knowing is, once he realized ‘the dream’ was a murderous trap, what he might have gone on to believe in. Very possibly he was stuck looking back in horror so strongly that he didn’t quite have time to look to the future by the time he came to the realizations?
If you have the stomach for it, read the Gulag Archipeligo. If I remember correctly, volume two is dedicated to Lenin’s crimes and his part in setting up what became the Gulag. The description of the women “zeks” building a canal above the Arctic Circle is especially horrifying.
The murder and tyranny went towards a good cause while the horrid hypocrisy of the West, so ably illustrated in “Eminent Victorians,” will never be reconciled.
How can one possible equate, or even worse, rank the sexual repression and imperialism of the Victorian era over the fundamental yearnings for human rights as expressed in the glorious examples of the Russian Revolution, North Korea, and currently, the wonderful Arab Spring.
This is why we must, simply must, establish more government power and control even if it means murder and tyranny. The United States does not recognize the basic standard of the General Assembly of the United Nations from 50 years ago. That wonderful man, the Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, before he died, expressed the basic need:
“The time has come to recognize quality, affordable health care as a basic right for all Americans, not just an expensive privilege for the few. President Obama has called on Congress to enact comprehensive health reform legislation, and now is the time to do it. As a nation, we can’t afford to delay any longer.”
And if we have to kill half of the United States to give them health care, then all the world will remember our glorious commitment.
http://harvardhrj.com/2009/09/health-care-as-a-basic-human-right-moving-from-lip-service-to-reality/
Whitaker Chambers remarked that burgeoning Communist power was inexplicable to him and that as best he could make of it, Communism appealed to the divided minded. Whatever the cost, the Socialist/Communist society was paramount. As a test you had to ask yourself, or anyone, the question: If in 1921 Lenin and Trotsky had built the workers’ paradise, and, knowing that 15 million had been sacrificed in the making of it, would you want to live in it? The correct socialist answer was yes. But then, as capitalism teaches, the price at which one can be bought differs from man to man.
When you say “changers” we now know the category you instinctively put it in.
It is not like a change in fashion.
It is a most serious and dire thing. It is near the maximum of a basic even ontological moral move.
In our country it concerns, universally, the change or mom being a Democrat or Liberal to be something, almost anything, other than that. But more likely a conservative.
There is something there ripe for deeper analysis. There is the gang with white hats and the gang with black hats and they are so far from being the same thing that lives depend on it.
It’s all about culture isn’t it? One is good and one is rotten enough to be horrified at.
I just don’t hang with the true believers on the other side any more. No more thn I’d hang with a true believer Soviet Communist. They aren’t “American”. They are something alien and foreign and horrific.
Occam…Where did you read that Stalin “murdered his parents”? Ummm, he didn’t, but he killed or imprisoned in the gulag every friend, the spouses of close associates, nearly all the ‘Old Bolsheviks’, etc. Routine telegrams during the Great Terror would state orders like,”Liquidate 10,000 enemies of the people immediately”. Tiny blips in the overall numbers. Read Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow”, “The Great Terror” and “Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps” and read numbers beyond the human mind to grasp.
It isn’t that western liberals love a communist or a socialist society. It’s that they hate a Christian society more.
And the manner in which the bible predicted these people would appear in their destructiveness, has revealed itself to be words of uncanny wisdom on a scale that should shock the open minded.
NeoConScum,
No, not Stalin’s parents, Volkogonov’s parents were murdered by Stalin in purges. Stalin did murder his own wives though, definitely one but probably both, personally.
SteveH,
Yes, I’ve realized for a long time that the factions of the left don’t love… anything. They are bound by mutual hate. Something that should cause any man to shudder when considering. Then again, when the left gains tyrannical power, that is why it kills off the other leftist factions and even direct allies first.
NeoConScum: Occam’s Beard was referring to the fact that Stalin was responsible for the death of Volkogonov’s parents.
No. I disagree. Occam’s use of the posssive adjective”his” is too much of an obvious error on his part. Quite clearly, Stalin killed his parents.
Kidding.
Amazing what a simple wrong word choice can do, sometimes, no? Except in poetry where it comes in handy.
I am sure Occam is amused, thinking this is a blog, not an Obama class on Constitutional law.
An ambiguous “same” pronoun once gave rise to a major constitutional question: whether John Tyler was in fact the tenth President of the United States.
President William Henry Harrison died on April 4, 1841. Article II of the Constitution read: “In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the SAME shall devolve on the Vice-President. [U.S. Constitution, Art. II, § 1.]”
There was uncertainty whether SAME referred to “the powers and duties of the said office” or to “the said office” itself. (An “it” or a “they” would have prevented the ambiguity.)
For some time, senators debated whether Tyler had assumed the presidency or only the President’s powers. Congress finally passed a resolution referring to Tyler as “the President of the United States.”
Yet, constitutional historians are in unanimous agreement that the framers intended the Vice-President to act as President but not to be President.
In 1967, the 25th Amendment remedied the ambiguity by providing that if the President dies, resigns, or is removed, “the Vice President shall become President” (U.S. Constitution, Amend. 25, § 1). If the President is disabled, the Vice President assumes the office’s powers and duties as “Acting President” as long as the disability continues (ibid. §§ 3, 4).
Therefore, the question presents: “In case of Obama’s death, would Biden be worse than Obama?”
Hey, do you think the words “Obama” and “death” in such close proximity will occasion a “Kimberlin” lawfare against me, against Neo.
Who knows? Could be you. Could be me. Could be your neighbor? Could be your blogger your like?
Time to take a stand. Time to stand. Time to fight. Time to investigate. Time to vote. Time to tea a e party!
not an Obama class on Constitutional law
No, this blog maintains a much higher intellectual level than that, I’m sure.
the SAME shall devolve on the Vice-President.
Strictly speaking, in this context “same” is also an article, and thus “the same” constitutes (no pun intended) a pleonasm.
Volkogonov! The Exeter of biographers. Much more so than Boswell actually.
Common use of the word “same:”
“Equity enabled them to hold any kind of property in trust for their own benefit, and to dispose of the same [read ‘it’] at pleasure.” Stephen Pfeil, “Law,” 17 Encyclopedia Americana 86, 90 (1953).
Obviously, “it” is not an article. An article is an adjective.
“Same,” as used in legalese, is a pronoun, one of the eight parts of speech and cannot possibly be confused with an adjective.
Traditional grammar classifies words based on eight parts of speech: the verb, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection.
And you know this!
It was within the last year I read on the Internet — so it has to be true — that the Russian government finally released the medical file on Lenin…
And that 88 year old suspicions were true: he died of syphilis — and NEVER had a stroke.
Which was why the foremost physician expert in syphilis was his attending in his final daze.
Terminal syphilis is brutal on the mind — and is infamous for triggering insane behavior.
( Rather like ‘bath salts’ in the modern day. )
===
Napoleon died of syphilis, IIRC… On June 17th, 1815 he was so ripped up by syphilis he couldn’t march with his army. This little detail was a mystery for over 185 years. However, his attending physician left written medical notes — stashed in his estate — only recently revealed. Most military analysts believe that this is the day he lost his campaign. (!) Naturally, the despot hid his troubles well.
And Adolf was obsessed with his health inre syphilis… ( He was taking arsenic at a time when its only permitted usage was to fight syphilis. )
( And in other quirky news: Adolf insisted that his personal body guard be entirely homosexual. This little tidbit came out only recently from Britain. They captured one of his SS bodyguards during 1944, he was at the front, and he told the British more than they wanted to know. (!)
This goes a long way to explaining his personal ties to Rohm — and his own bizarre sex ‘life.’
Perhaps it should be re-branded as the affliction of despots.
===
I recommend The Soviet Mafia, Vaksberg
ISBN 0-312-07135-3
The bizarro nature of Soviet ‘economics’ is a fright.
Occam & N-Neocon…Ooopsy! My baaaad. Yep, Koba killed millions of parents so, heck, why not Volkoganov’s. (-:
blert: Whew..! Thank goodness for that pesky internet,’Yo.* (*And, TG for Snopes, eh?) Krupskaya must’a been pizzed outta her old gourd to discover she’d been infected by Lover Boy Vlad!
Why was Volkogonov able to change when so many could not? I’m not sure, and really don’t know enough to say…
Actually… you do. It has to do with why we seek god, or not. TRUTH. The point of truth is that there IS a material reality, and a metaphysical spiritual one, that is the whole truth. To survive, we are elegantly tuned to truth, and a lie requires energy to maintain, as a lie can’t rework reality to a degree to fully put itself in place over the truth.
God is reality. God is truth. You can project the archetype one way or another, but the one that also informs us how to behave in a truthful world and so on, blesses its followers. The idea that the “materialists”, like Dawkins and similar, deny the spiritual by literalizing abstractions used when language fails.
Good people find it almost impossible to live the lie, even if the lie serves them. We are not made to (unless we are sociopathic or something over-rides our ‘normal’ selves). This is why Richard Wright wrote “too smart to be a communist”, in that those that are smart enough are useful, but too smart, they catch on to the game (and either accept it, or cant).
In EVERY conversion story, they find that consciousness rising, was consciousness dimming.
This is why movies like the matrix resonate (as doe’s rocky horror which as a B movie has more of a following than such should have). The closest abstract thing in media I can think of to show or illustrate it was the movie “The Truman Show”. No one could tell Truman the game. Or rather, part of the game was not to tell Truman. But a false reality, false front, etc.. Eventually is ragged around the edges. One only needs to know the rules for such things from science fiction and magic stories… while in thrall, the illusion suffices, and no one wants to question it much. But over time, rational people start to notice the ragged edges of the illusion. The chocolates that never fill you up (Lion Witch and the Wardrobe). That the one providing the illusion is the one who gains, not you.
The whole game is to present something as it isn’t, so that you act as if it is, while it acts like it is, which isn’t. (ouch!). so when one does not read deeply into something and assumes and one’s mind makes up the filler to make it seem whole, one can accept the false front. Feminism was and is such a front, openly admitted to be such DEPENDING on what your reading and the intended audience. You won’t ever read it in the stuff in the women’s magazines, or the view discussing it, but among those who make policy, who consider the front one of several armies, and discuss the positions they should take, its open that it’s a front.
You are finding slowly that the stories of people inside such a system converting and how are infinitely more interesting than people who are actually distant and who can more easily deny things asserting their ignorance as a basis.
EACH of these converters do so on their own, with very little instigation or temptation of others, and often at great risk and sacrifice, as what they are questioning is many times more brutal as what ours can do at this moment in time.
You will find that they either directly experienced some history that forces them to question what is the truth. Or they read a history, or they received permission to travel and in doing so, witnessed that which they were told otherwise.
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky – became disenchanted with his work in the KGB, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968
Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist, so he read the histories — he got to read what actually happened, and knew what the false front was too. [he refused to defection and exfiltration without the agreement that his work would be published for the world to see… ergo the two books]
Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn a Soviet KGB defector and author of two books about the long-term deception strategy of the KGB leadership. This strategy was to let the system collapse, and to basically then portray a false front and cooperation. This would open borders, facilitate technology theft, the placement of thousands in points of control, and facilitate communications with such people (which before was quite difficult). [his predictions that could be validated have over a 96% success rate, and were made in the 1960s. it was Golitsyn that exposed Kim Philby] — His book new lies for old is an eye opener — more so now that years have passed since it was published (
Other famous people to read, would be Bella Dodd, who testified after she found god through her conversations with Fulton J Sheen.
A REALLY good one to read that is a very complicated journey is Freda Utley… which would also clearly show that Liberal means communist from long time ago (whence it was co-opted for confusion and the taking of members).
Odyssey of a Liberal Memoirs BY FREDA UTLEY
“Three decades have passed since I wrote The Dream We Lost* telling the story of my life in Russia in the 30’s, and describing the new system of exploitation developed by the Communist totalitarian dictatorship.”
Sadly the books are often FREE to read and few do. Been recommending them for decades and now the times are making those curious enough to read, and see similar stories over and over and over. But you can also see them struggle a whole lot, trying to fix or make whole what they shouldn’t… even Utley could not completely adjust after her life, and would still think in terms that owning property and privilege was the same on the other end… a north pole south pole (as she says).
Which is why I know that you know the answer neo… once you see it a few times over and over, you realize the masque is cracked. Then you start to wonder whats behind that mask, and so on. you start to grab the thread and very soon, you have unraveled the sweater and the realty stands naked before you.
And remember, not everyone who converts, is honestly converting…
There is no such thing as a former Communist, just as there is no such thing as a former Black.
— JiÅ™é KÅ™ižan (1941-2010), Czech screenwriter and former aide of President Vé¡clav Havel
Volkogonov cogently argues for a seamless connection between Lenin’s absolutism and Stalin’s merciless dictatorship.
A bit of explanation as to what that means might be in order. Its not what most think, or what would come to mind in most. What Volkogonov was arguing was that all of this was planned and a single thread to a common end, but trying different methods, and solutions.
Its presented as cults of personality, but how can this be fully so if there is a supreme soviet in the background? That shadow is the continuity that we ignore, like a ghost that comes up with “solutions”. The Jewish solution, the solution of the problem of the west, etc.
The rest of the paragraph we may miss is that he is describing that all these leaders were blind. NONE of them were in any way, in touch with the people, their needs etc. they could only tell what was told to them in reports and so forth. The more punitive the system was from day one, the less valid and useful this information was. The idea of Philip Dru sounded great on paper, but implemented in reality, its unworkable. (and so what this causes is a crisis. And either they rebel against the system as Volkogonov did, or they realize that a lie or real, it’s a good way to work a system and make a living — as those who can have such crisis tend to have access to such a luxury of choice)
blert: Just now read that Robespierre, Couthon and St.Just did NOT die on the guillotine on 9 Thermidor! All three lived a quiet and happy exile in England…And, Lenin had syph, not multiple strokes…The moon landing was faked in the Mojave Desert…and ummmmm…and Captain Kangaroo was wounded on Suribachi..oh, and Stalin was gay and lusted for FDR….
Okie-Doaky…gotta adjust those meds and git’to work.
Now I ask the bigger question that makes everyone very uncomfortable if they take the time to think of it. we know and have movies that illustrate the horror of the incas, the Spanish inquisition (more horrible than it was), the genocidal Nazis we have movies galore ranging from serious to comedy hit series…
Why do we not know the details of the history of Russia?
If Auschwitz is close to a household name, why isn’t Holodomor?
1,100,000 were estimated killed at Auschwitz
7,500,000 high estimate for Holodomor (two million more were sent to concentration camps)
By the way, where did the food go that was taken from the Ukrainian people to starve them?
Stalin sold the grain to the west… FDR gladly bought it as FDR really liked Stalin and admired him greatly…
“I know you will not mind me being brutally frank when I tell you that I think i can personally handle Stalin better then either your foreign office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all of your top people.(Because they knew what Stalin was all about and FDR’s naive view didn’t help.) He thinks he likes me better and I hope he will continue to.” — FDR to Churchill
On March 31, 1945, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded the final form of their plans in a secret codicil to the agreement. Outlining the plan to forcibly return the refugees to the Soviet Union, this codicil was kept secret from the US and British people for over fifty years.
Operation Keelhaul was what it was called…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called this operation “the last secret of World War II.”
After getting millions forcibly returned, to which a huge number were murdered, tortured, and all that kind of stuff… the soviets kept more than 60,000 American and British troops as prisoners.
And its not like the American soldiers didn’t know what would happen to the people they had to turn over:
“The Americans returned to Plattling visibly shamefaced. Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees.” – Tolstoy
In EACH country that Stalin took, about a 1/3 of the population was removed or murdered and soviet citizens were moved in. even today, these citizens provide a reserve of spies, problem makers, racist baiting, and so on… the removal of the others destroyed the culture and the lineages of family and their histories (much as feminism did).
What have we forgotten? Leaving out what I have covered above.
(I am particularly picking the high numbers — I am not an apologist… if you want to low ball the numbers, go ahead, look them up and see how “low” they go — they still boggle the average mind)
Don Cossacks by the communists in the 1920s — 2 million people
Volga Germans from 1915 to 1945 — 1 million
Lithuanian Jews — 196,000 / Citizens — 400,000 (out of a population of 1.2 million)
Lithuanian Jews — 196,000 / Citizens — 400,000 (out of a population of 1.2 million)
Latvian Jews — 66,000 (19,000 others) / (only about 3,500 survived)
Precise numbers killed by three occupations in Latvia are not known, they constantly find new mass graves…
[edited for length by n-n]
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their
swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien
eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks
at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient
wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no
songs.
G. K . CHESTERTON,
“The Secret People”
from utley:
take a moment to notice how she knows whats going on due to prior experience, and of course watches the new make the same mistake. but also note what she says about lying…
and here comes the sock
but where they a different breed?
is what we have in office a different breed?
if not. then what do we have in office?
Remember, “Hux the reasonable”, was always about how these are not the same as those, but here is one of many testimonies of the discovery that they are NOT different.
and i hope that neo read this before she cuts the end off, as its a critical passage in describing the journey utley has made… which is more than anything else she could read as utley was a writer, and so one can read her books and works.
she was also a well connected icon to the fabians, and shaw, and others… they were all around her (As they were when i was a kid… who do you think i learned stuff from besides family?)
so what will happen to these welfare people, the ows people, etc?
they will be removed, they are the scaffoldingt that has to come down to prevent counter rev and return.
but utley is a VERY VERY Good read, which is why i recommended her as you can follow along from her early days, and through her loyal life, only to have her love murdered by that which she served, and her being hunted, and then being used AGAIN, and then realizing the TRUTH
it takes the feeling of despondence and disillusionment… once that happens, then you start to hear the cognitive dissonance and start to read histories and so on.
if your lucky, someone like me gets you to read the stuff, and your on your journey. but if you refuse to read it, and refuse to learn the long tracts of the PERSONAL VERSIONS that are so parallel, your really defending your status quo of ignorance and the bliss that comes with it… (when they say ignorance is bliss, they are referring to the joy of the idiot, not an actuality)
October 26, 1954… they tried to assassinate Nasser… its very interesting to read things in which the thinkers being so close, end up predicting what will come one way or another.
Nasser died of a heart attack… however, KGB admitted that they had killed others using a tube device that causes heart attacks and leaves no trace.
guess what mao chose? then guess what they decided after that? now they are at war economically with people too dumb to realize they are in a war… but the gender war got them used to a war in which only one side fights and the other side gives up without such a fight
The shadow of the past era of “colonial exploitation” still hangs over us, enabling the Communists to misrepresent America in Vietnam as an imperialist aggressor. Even more destructive in stymieing American policy is the legacy of misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Communist policy and aims everywhere in the world inherited from the Popular Front era.
FEMINISM was born in the popular front era… so was black racialism…(Trotsky invented the term racist)… they were popular fronts… ie. traitorious groups that use people to betray their own people, and do so because the ideas they promote are considered popular.
feminism is a popular front…
Hankow in 1938 leads directly to Korea and to our well nigh insoluble dilemma in Vietnam today. – utley
Consequently today the Chinese have been compelled to become, or at least to seem to be, the very opposite of what they once were. Under Communism’s stern compulsions, the Chinese are no longer permitted to be Chinese.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
“Let us only manage to get a capitalist system in China,” was his line, “and put an end to the system which enriches only officials and bankers and hinders our industrial development.” Innoculated against Communism by his sojourn in Moscow, this is still his view. It is of course anathema to most latter day liberals or “progressives” who fail to see the close connection between big government and great wealth which strangles free private enterprise. Thirty years ago in Hankow his views were more perceptive and prescient than I then realized, although they impressed me sufficiently to record them.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Despite her [Emily Hahn – New Yorker Magazine] good standing in the American liberal literary establishment, she made fun of the ignorant and misleading reporting on China as when she wrote:
so we complain about dupes duping us.. but the dupes were duped by dupes that were duped before they were born!!! -artfldgr
you have to realize that she is unknown as they have nearly scrubbed her from the history books. in her time, she became very famous, so famous the soviets and chinese could not touch her. her books and such read like a whose who of last century…
she was punished to be erased over time.
while others were rewarded with memories better than they actually were (sanger comes to mind)
the same is true today as we feel we hae to self exterminate because we are running out of room
I well remember how shocked and angry I had felt at her reply to my query “Why are most Americans only worked up about the Nazi crimes and atrocities and care little about the horrible things the Japanese do to the Chinese?”
“Well you know,” said Eleanor Roosevelt with her toothy smile and vicar’s wife superior mein, “we never expected those oriental people to be civilized.”
and
While touring German cities devastated by our bombing she had remarked that the Germans could not really be in dire straits because they looked so clean and were growing flowers in the ruins of their homes. Instead of appreciating the sterling qualities of the German people who under almost any circumstances keep up appearances, Mrs. Roosevelt reserved her compassion for the black or white derelicts who had lost their self respect.
talk about interesting insights as to the presidents wife… from her being invited and so on…
to read freda is to read a journey of a true believer taking 30 years to wake up to what is TRUTH…
if you knew me prior to 2005… you would not have heard me talk much of soviet history or past. in fact, my friends never knew i was a child of a refugee family, and had lived on their assumptions!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
but this is common too… as you will note that you read each of these peoples story, because they talked… they gave up their safety, the freedom they had, the support of states… TO TELL YOU AND TEACH YOU
[edited for length by n-n]
When Voltaire’s character, Candide, discovered that the world did not behave as it should have done according to his teacher Dr. Panglos – prototype of the liberal eggheads of our time – he ascribed his unhappy experiences to his own shortcomings, saying, “There must be something wrong with me!” So also Americans today are continually being told, and have almost come to believe, that if only they were virtuous, peace-loving and self-sacrificing, ready to help everybody in the world to a better life by giving away their substance, while also perfecting their own society, the Communist menace would fade away.
Meanwhile the Communists, having long since learned that they got nowhere by adhering to their professed principles but could advance from strength to strength through a Machiavellian policy of guile and force and fraud, run rings around the bewildered Western democracies.
From world revolution, to champion of democracy against fascism, to collaboration with Nazi Germany, to champion of democracy again after Hitler attacked; to imperialist expansion at the War’s end with Western help or acquiescence, to rattling atomic bombs to terrify the world into submission, to pretending to desire peaceful co-existence with us in order to rally their forces for a new attack after we shall once again have given them a blood transfusion of economic aid. This is the Soviet record which unfortunately proves that the American belief that good conquers evil by example is illusion.
The original Communist line under Lenin and Trotsky was honest and sincere and a complete failure. Under Lenin’s leadership the international ideal was never lost sight of, and Russia’s national interest was subordinated to the final aim of World revolution to establish a new Socialist order everywhere. The policy failed completely, since neither in Germany nor elsewhere did the promised proletarian revolution make headway. Just as today the international ideal of the brotherhood of man which dominates American liberal thinking is getting us nowhere.
Lenin dead and Trotsky exiled, Stalin was free to pursue his own eminently successful, dishonest, hypocritical, cowardly and brutal policy. Russia’s national interest, or more correctly the interest of her Bolshevik aristocracy, became the objective of Soviet policy. The safety of the Kremlin tyrants was secured by embroiling the “capitalist world’ in war; by the use of ‘Popular Front’ movements to impel England and France to fight Germany, instead of continuing the intelligent Neville Chamberlain policy of letting Germany go East and destroy Soviet Russia, or herself, or weaken both of them in a contest of the two totalitarian giants.
Artfldgr: no, I disagree that I know the answer to the question I actually asked. I pretty much already understand the process of change that you are describing: how it happens, and even why (at least mostly, or partly) in each individual case.
What I do not understand—and this is what my question was focusing on—is why only some people change when confronted with much the same facts or similar ones, or similar life experiences. Some accept the new knowledge and it shakes them to their core, and they change. They are truth-pursuers, you might say. Others find the change too overwhelming, and reject it and rationalize it away.
My question had to do with that difference in personalities and/or orientation to change: some roll with it and some are too threatened by it. I’m not sure why one person is of the first type and another of the second, but I have observed it to be so.
The main factor which compels people to believe in lies and ignore reality is Stockholm syndrome: dependable people desperately want to believe that their captors and masters actually do not want inflict to them much harm. This is self-preservation trick, to which most people fall. Only exceptionally rare ones love the truth more than psychological comfort. In Biblical times they were called prophets, and they have courage to accuse kings and priests, as well as majority of population of betrayal of truth and Covenant.
My decision to leave the Old World for the New was the best I ever made. Years before I had failed, by not really trying, to stop Arcadi coming to Moscow from China in 1930 when I already really knew, but had not yet admitted to myself, that once in Russia he would never again be allowed to leave.
In 1939 by taking our son to the United States when he was only five years old, I enabled him to become an American, not simply by eventual citizenship, but in heart and mind and outlook.
[by taking obama away, they did what?]
I myself am still rootless in the sense of not really belonging anywhere and being still at heart an internationalist or citizen of the world.
There are times when the pull of my origins causes me to regret leaving the Old World.
But my son is as American as those born here, and perhaps more like the original Americans who came to the New World from Europe and made the United States great and strong and free, because like them, he knows through my experience, better than the native born what it means not to enjoy the blessings of liberty. Utley
EXPERIENCE…. makes all the difference…
but if this is what it took, was preservation preserving what they thought it was?
her books are celebrated in small circles for their clarity, honesty and ablity to detail the details…
which is why almost no one knows her!!!!
Society as such is built on conformism, so establishment always consist of men like Panglos and O’Brien. And such men as Candid or Winston Smith (paradigmatic changers) always are exceptions.
I can not agree that there is no such thing as “former communist”. There are many well-known examples to the contrary, beginning with Alexander Solgenitzine, who described his conversion in his memoirs. For him, it began with his arrest. And I know two else: my grandmother and myself. She was not only communist, but ardent Stalinist, she worked as Party propagandist at high-level position in Comintern. But she also was a professional PhD historian, expert in medieval Persia and Ottoman empire, arabist scholar and Koran translator. All facts about internal working of Asian despotic regimes she knew perfectly well, but isolated this wast knowledge from just as vast insider knowledge of working of Communist party propaganda machine. She was Old Bolshevik with pre-revolutionary membership in Bolshevik underground organization in Kiev since she was 17. But after Khruchshev’s exposure of some Stalin’s crimes she began to think, and gradually all her ideological delusions were destroyed and she could apply her analitical skills to the facts she already knew. In 1958 she confessed to me: “My fault was that I forbade myself to think”. Most of her friends, Old Bolsheviks, perished in Stalin purges. She was lucky to survive, probably, because her ex-husband (my granddad) was NKVD general who led the purges himself and could protect her.
let ultley clue you in neo as to the force that would PREVENT!!!!
and there you have it.
you become persona non grata among the life you created.. the friends who are not freinds but travelers on the same road, leave you.
ie. when you leave the road, you find out they were not your friends but “fellow travelers” and would be friends for only as long as the trup lasted
but also, the other side wont let you in.
are you truthful, or are you lying? at the very least, your dumb enough to be tricked, and that implies liability..
so your left alone…
EACH of the stories of the defector and things is a story of willing to be alone for a better world, than have a social home.
they cant be with liberals, the tolerant dont tolerate…
they cant be with the non liberals, they dont trust ex liberals…
so, all your left is this isolation that knocks on our primate genetics as to be isolated as a chimp, is to die slowly and painfully.
also, the monolithic idea that the opponents are few… means that if you change sides, you think your leaving the larger set, to the small losing set…
all that comes into play
but go take a look at Mamet… is he making as much as he did before? how about the last years of Davis or Langston huges? Dodd? and the others?
most people have a weird idea that if they get through life without working too hard, and without too much sadness, and with some comfort, they win…
socialism offers them that, and a fun time discussing things within a framework they maintain and are instantly popular.
in a society of isolates who no longer can get along thanks to feminism removing their childhood training as people in the family…
being part of a collective is their way to belong
without that… then what?
I can not agree that there is no such thing as “former communist”. sergey
that was my point…
that coming from such a basis of lies, the side they woud become a part of cant trust them either.
ie. once a liar, your always a liar, even if you tell the truth…
there are a lot of anti communists… and your descriptions validate my point…
something cracks the illusion for them and they cant reassemble it. in your famiies case, knowlege of history (which is a major crack maker).
in the sense of solitznen its the split between him knowing he was not bad or did wrong, and the sytem was selecting him… ie. a VERY familiar way to crack the glass… ie. you live your life by party ways, and follow the rules and do everything from childhood, and suddenly your in this kangaroo thing in which nothing or very little is real and your just a place holder in a play… who you are, what you did or didnt do, are irrelevent…
one of my big conversions was the feminist movement was so poawerful that it oculd destroy my family, desipite my doing NOTHINg, and had courts and judges and all manner of things.
like solitznen, the curtain was drawn back and you realized that the spravka made public was just ad copy, and that what was going on was not as presented.
this woke me up fully… to the degree what i opposed had been made without me paying too much attention to it.
so the point is that there ARE converts
but how can you tell?
there have also been false converts
I, for one, think it’s big of artfldger to allow the pleasant seeming commenter, neoneocon, to joust with him here at his blog. A Giver. Nice.