The Red Tide Flows From East to West

Spring Fundraiser 2016, Day Five

Well, we’re past the midweek hump of our quarterly fundraiser and rolling down the far side.

Tip jarThe pace has picked up over the past 48 hours, and we owe a big thank-you to all the dedicated readers whose generosity came out in full force. That includes quite a few from the Western Rifle Shooters Association — I can tell by the ornery places they come from in the South, West, and Southwest of the country. They’re ornery enough to put aside their firearms for a few minutes and come over here to the Counterjihad side of things to make the tip cup clink. Hi, guys! Good to see you here.

Real thank-you notes are starting to roll out, too. But that will take a while, given how many we have to write. Last time I got so far behind that it took me about six weeks just to write all the thank-yous for the donations that came in during the Fundraising Octave. I’ve vowed to do better this quarter — a little late for a New Year’s resolution, but still…

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The theme of this week’s fundraiser is May Day, with a special emphasis on the socialist festivities that surround the celebrations on the first of May. We’ve been focusing on the Soviet Union because that’s where I drew the iconography from for the post headers — you can’t beat the USSR for snappy May Day graphics.

The image at the top of this post features a venerable depiction of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, a.k.a. Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. The image is old, but the occasion of its display is recent — as far as I can tell, the banner was being held aloft by Stalinophiles to celebrate his 130th birthday in 2009, possibly on May Day (although Stalin’s birthday is in December).

Stalin is revered by a significant percentage of Russians, and remains popular in other parts of the former Soviet Union, including his native Georgia. Although probably not in Ukraine, I would guess.

For the rest of the Socialist diaspora, Mr. Dzhugashvili does not rate as a high a place in the pantheon of beloved Communists. Not like Mao, Trotsky, Che, and Ho Chi Minh. Even Lenin enjoys a modicum of respect abroad. But Stalin? Well… The Gutmenschen in Ann Arbor and Berkeley would generally rather not discuss him. Yes, yes, we know you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, but why so MANY? Real Communism has never been tried, and now it never will be, because Stalin ruined the brand. More’s the pity…

For a brief time — from 1941 to 1946 — Stalin was our beloved Uncle Joe, that calm, smiling benign fellow who was our staunch ally in the war against Hitler. We knew he got a little overzealous when dealing with his political opponents, but, hey — it was wartime, and besides, conditions in Russia were very different than they were in the Western democracies. We had to cut him some slack.

We had our reckoning with Nazi crimes after the war, during the occupation and de-Nazification of Germany. But any reckoning with Stalin and Communism had to be postponed until after the Cold War.

Four decades later, when the Wall came down and Communism was tossed onto the garbage scow of history —that’s when we should have had our reckoning with Stalin’s crimes. But we didn’t. George H.W. Bush declared the New World Order, we reached the end of history, and then marked time until Osama Bin Laden strode onto the world stage to strut and fret his hour.

Stalin should have earned his rightful place alongside Hitler as an icon of ultimate evil. His face should be loathed and spat upon. Godwin’s law should be invoked concerning his name, just as it is with Hitler’s. Politicians should excoriate their opponents and liken them to Joseph Stalin in their callous disregard for the welfare of their constituents.

But none of that happened.

It was easier for us just to forget about what Communism had done. We turned it into kitschy consumer items and trendy fashion wear. Che T-shirts and red star berets and all that other swell stuff.

And it was especially easy because Stalin had moved West.

Quietly and imperceptibly, via the successful infiltration of Western governments and institutions, the spirit of Soviet Socialism worked its way into the fabric of Western life. What is now known as Cultural Marxism or Political Correctness was the result of that infiltration. The long march through the institutions took sixty or seventy years, but it was very successful.

In the West, socialism slowly took control of the machinery of the state and the culture from the inside, rather than by violently overthrowing it. The suborning of the mass media and the academy created a level of social and political control that Stalin could only have dreamed of. And all done without violence, by the power of the purse and the pressure of social conformity.

When the USSR fell, money and instructions stopped flowing from the Kremlin to the comrades in the West. But the comrades have remained good little comrades to this day.

If Stalin were alive today he’d want to sit down and talk shop with Barack Hussein Obama over a tureen of borscht and a samovar of tea.

“Joe, my good buddy, I can give you a few tips about how it’s done. Forget the gulag — you don’t need that. Just make sure you control the world’s reserve currency. And you need a printing press. And CNN. And MTV. That’ll keep the lumpenproletariat on the straight and narrow. Pass the caviar, would you, tovarisch?

Now we’re in a weird situation: the Western democracies are sclerotic end-stage socialist states, but Russia is not socialist. Before you start to object, remember: Russia has a flat tax of 13% — no socialist state has a flat tax. Russia is a corrupt autocracy, but it is not socialist.

We Americans needed Russia to remain the enemy after the Cold War, and that’s the way it turned out. But with the demise of the USSR, we couldn’t continue our Machiavellian machinations against the Russians openly; they had to be hidden by a scrim of lies and misdirection. Now we have to pretend that we are full of zeal for democracy in Ukraine — that we’re not sticking a knife into Putin’s underbelly or trying to break his stranglehold on the supply of natural gas to Europe. No, we’re idealistic and pure of heart!

The above applies regardless of any evil things Putin does. He is who he is — he doesn’t have to be a saint to prove that our foreign policy is a foolish, wrongheaded catastrophe.

In a recent comment Col. Bunny expressed it best:

It’s odd, too, that now it is not Russia’s foreign policy that alarms me but the US one. It’s every bit as cynical and sinister as the old Soviet one, especially as it’s wrapped in five layers of lies. I think the absolute Soviet maximum was three.

We support ISIS and Al Qaida in Syria in league with the Saudi Wahhabists to depose (and kill?) the man who’s obviously, hands down, the best leader who respects minorities and shows magnanimity to former enemies. An obvious mortal enemy.

And there are tens of thousands of US troops 10,000 miles from home but not one on our southern border across which we’re being invaded.

All of this takes place at the direction of a mystery man with less papers than a pedigree cocker spaniel and who started his political career in the living room of two communist terrorists, had a communist for a mentor, and has as his closest advisor a woman whose father, grandfather, and father-in-law were communists. Oh, and whose political Bible is a book dedicated to Satan.

When the Soviet Union imploded I said in front of witnesses that we would come to long for the stark simplicity of the Cold War. Now the post-WWII paradigm of a healthy, powerful, decent America is crumbling and a new wind is filling the sails of Mr. Trump. To the great consternation of the Politburo.

Ah, yes, that tall ship with Donald Trump at the tiller! But how is he tacking? What sort of zigzag course is he plotting? And to what destination?

Yesterday Mr. Trump appointed a veteran of one of George Soros’ fund management operations as the national finance chair of his campaign. He’s lying down with the dogs now — will he get up tomorrow with those Open Society fleas?

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On that dyspeptic note, I’ll end this morning’s ramblings.

Yesterday’s dedicated donors hailed from:

Stateside: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Texas, Vermont, and Washington

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the UK

Many thanks to all of you. Dymphna will be back here tomorrow with more to say.

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36 thoughts on “The Red Tide Flows From East to West

  1. George H.W. Bush declared the NWO, not Dubya. Just thought I would throw that in there.

    • Yes, I know that very well — it was a slip of the pen. I got used to slipping that W. in there for eight years.

      Thanks for catching that.

    • oops. That’s what you get when you write your post so late. The B well knows it was George H.W. “Read My Lips” Bush who uttered that phrase. I believe it was in the context of dissing the “old world” of Europe.

      The Bushes have always appeared to be a fine example of extended families who care about one another. Prescott, H.W.’s dad, was a bit hard on the scion -to-be, especially when he signed up for the war at the age of 18 or 19. In turn, H.W. considered W to be a wastrel (which he was for a time before being saved by a good woman). the matriarch was born to be a matriarch and has lived out the role to the fullest…

      …except for some of the questionable ways they acquired money via the Saudis, a fine family indeed. In earlier times they might even have been virtuous…but I lost all respect for H.W. when he rescinded his no-new taxes pledge. After that, for many conservatives, the only thing that kept the GOP afloat was to flick one’s eyes leftward to consider the opposition…

      • you’re right. But in modern politics, in America, it was Poppa B, a member as an adult of the Cold War generation, who was exulting over the fall of the USSR and the fact that the US was the guarantor of peace in Europe since we’d been elected to fund the military machine of ‘peace’.

  2. Absolutely correct, the West is the new Communist Block, and this goes for every area of life, especially religious practice. Russia is now the last European nation where traditional Christian morality is respected and informs lawmaking. Compare that with modern Western Europe and North America, where you can be fined 130,000 dollars for refusing to bake a wedding cake for two lesbians and you can be thrown into prison for refusing to conduct the “wedding” of two homosexuals. The US and the European Union are now a major threat to the freedom of humanity.

    • We’ve conflated public and private life so completely that there is no private area left. Thus the moral outrage against North Carolina for permitting private ( i.e., not publicly-owned) companies to set their own rules for how bathrooms shall be designated.

      I wonder if bars can even post those “we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone” signs they used to have …which were co-opted by restaurants who didn’t want to serve blacks.

      Life has always been nasty, brutish and short. Even if we extended the average span to a millennium, many would still shuffle off reluctantly. But should science manage to extend the span, it will not make us less Nasty or Brutish. The need to control others in order to feel “safe” will become all encompassing.

      • Just a quick note, Dymphna: Even in the (political) wilds of the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve seen the “we reserve the right…” sign posted in restaurants and in shops of various descriptions. (I’ve never, to my knowledge, been in a bar, so can’t advise you on that score.)

        Cynthia out

  3. Joseph Stalin = Joe Steel. To me it sounds like a name assumed by a not so proficient guitarist in a grunge band.

  4. As regards Col. Bunny’s contribution, do you not feel that Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Future” was prophetic?

    • Yes, I do. It’s as if the only thing that was holding the West to a relatively free and open way of life was the contrast between it and the Soviet Union. Remove that comparison, and we (especially the USA, which was the freest country in the West) could slide into a soft totalitarianism to prop up our ruling oligarchy.

  5. Of all the rather negative news stories that I have encountered in the last little while (and there are always plenty of such stories when one makes a habit of frequenting the counter-jihad sites, as I do) Dymphna’s note about Donald Trump having hired “a veteran of one of George Soros’ fund management operations as the national finance chair of his campaign” was probably the most discouraging for me personally. Et tu, Brutus?

    • I didn’t write about that turn of events. It was too dysphoric to even mutter, much less say out loud.

      Here’s the thing about Trump (or one of the things): his bottom line appears to be to hire whomever he can get who he thinks is “the best” at what they do. So this Soros connection wouldn’t deter him from hiring someone who has contributed heavily to the Left. Trump hasn’t much in the way of ideology beyond the bottom line. So this main criterion to hire the best (in his eyes) that money can buy will continue to be on display throughout his public life. And while that person is in his employ, Trump expects adherence to a certain form of loyalty based on the laws of commerce.

      Thus, the rumor that he’s going to ask Rudy Guiliani to head the Department of Homeland Security is a further example of this. And a brilliant choice.

      • I agree re: Trump likely to be a hirer of the best talent. Many people, for some inexplicable reason, imagine becoming and remaining a property developer is easy: it isn’t. And to do so one has to listen to advisers from a multiplicity of specialities and know what one doesn’t know. I can foresee a Trump Cabinet filled with politically savvy appointments of people with relevant expertise, eg Christie as Attorney-General, Carson as Secretary of Health, and then lots of super-talented technocrats, think Nixon plucking Kissinger out of academia.

    • You never trust a real estate broker beyond the restrictions of his, or her, license. I have caught my share of fleas from being involved with less than ethical brokers, even to having my appraiser’s license on the line. All I can wonder about is whether Trump’s choice of finance chair is a payback to the Soros machine for having cleared the path to Donald’s nomination. If that is truly the case, the he is dirtier than Hillary, which is Hillary-ous.

      • I think it was a business decision to choose Mnuchin. He doesn’t care about Right-Left, conservative vs liberal vs anarchists vs reactionaries. He doesn’t owe Soros anything since Soros did what he could to finance all those screeching SJW nuts. Trump is used to moving within the Soros circle, but it doesn’t make him Soros or anything like. BUT, and it’s a biggie- he cares about our southern border. So do I.He wants to lower taxes across the board. He wants to get rid of a lot of the regulation that has frozen our GDP rates and left us with 94 million unemployed.

        There isn’t a darn thing he can do about the debt WALL facing us, but at least he has the decency to talk about it in hushed tones…when he says “trillions” he says it like a businessman not a politician.

        • I sincerely hope that you are correct. With the way that economics has become politicized during the past eight years it is difficult to discern what the collateral results will be. The Bond Market that is funding and underwriting the debt that has been foisted upon us wants to be repaid. There is a growing sentiment among the underpaid working class that debt and low wages are reducing it to serfdom. They will not go quietly into that good night. I do hope that trump as a businessman is savvy enough to realize that and provide some badly needed relief and breathing space. Else, he will have his hands full with a violent uprising on the part of the very people that he needs the most. From where I sit the pot is on the stove and simmering. I am praying that it does not boil over, as it were. As for prayer, it’s about all we have at this juncture.
          Thanks again for your insight.

  6. Please recall the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign. After Bob Dole became the presumptive nominee sometime in March, the Clinton war machine went into high gear. In the intervening period until the August convention, huge sums were spent on seemingly hourly radio and TV negative attack ads defining Dole with relatively no response from the Republicans. Hillary has a huge political war chest with eager donors to begin the project of defining Trump and has already started to do so. While we have ample evidence of politicians saying one thing to get elected and then governing in a different way, I caution against despair. It is still too early to indict Trump. Despite his wealth, he needs cash to counter her attacks. You can be certain he will not go quietly into a Dole-like summer slumber. This reminds me that I need to make my contribution to your excellent organization. Thank you for all that you do.

  7. Ramblings? I can’t agree. This is pure gold:

    “Now we have to pretend that we are full of zeal for democracy in Ukraine — that we’re not sticking a knife into Putin’s underbelly or trying to break his stranglehold on the supply of natural gas to Europe. No, we’re idealistic and pure of heart!

    The above applies regardless of any evil things Putin does. He is who he is — he doesn’t have to be a saint to prove that our foreign policy is a foolish, wrongheaded catastrophe.”

    And that reference to US foreign policy brings me to a point. Nixon was a foreign policy maestro. I was stunned at 14 to hear the Dutch socialist father – a toolmaker – of one of my closest friends assert that Nixon’s foreign policy was top drawer and that that would be his legacy. Compare the Nixon-Kissinger era on US foreign policy to the Obama-H Clinton/Obama-Kerry fiasco. Apart from the stupendous foreign debt Obama has racked up in a mere 7.5 years, the worst thing – yes, I know, it’s a highly competitive field with the extraordinary deterioration in US race relations being a strong contender – about the Obama regime has been its infantile, bone-headed and just plain silly foreign policy. The fate of Libya is, perhaps, Exhibit 1. Or ISIS is, Or Iran going nuclear. I never imagined that the US was capable of getting it so wrong and with such terrible consequences for hundred of millions of human lives.

    And to add insult to injury and very probably make the world an even worse place, one of Obama’s two astonishingly incompetent Secretaries of State is poised to become POTUS!? This is moving into the realm of the surreal. I sincerely hope that I emerge from this 4 year long very, very bad acid trip and find out that in fact Mitt Romney won the US presidential election in 2012 and the minority hire experiment of 2008 was corrected at the earliest possible opportunity. My worst fear – who becomes President of the USA is a matter of huge concern for the entire world – is that the US electorate will indulge in another minority hire. The USA itself will suffer badly if that transpires, but the rest of the world will cop it so much worse. I remember in 1982 when the USA, in the economic sphere, caught a cold: Canada got influenza and Australia caught an even more virulent strain. If the Arkansas lawyer of Whitewater fame becomes POTUS, well heaven help us because it won’t only be an economic disaster.

    • I’m not so sure that Nixon-Kissinger was top-drawer foreign policy talent. They looked good only in comparison to the wishful thinkers of the Democratic Party. Kissinger, to this day, remains in awe of Mao–and Mao and his heirs, even the “reformers”, still see Stalin as a great hero. Nor should any forget that the N-K team undercut Taiwan–an ally–just as the O and Co. are undermining Israel now.

      Kissinger saw himself as a Metternich balancing power among people who were essentially friends, when the need of the hour was a Pitt dealing with a rampaging Napoleon.

      Further, the N-K team misses it that China, until Clinton obligingly bombed their embassy in Belgrade, was subject to bouts of political dissidence roughly once per decade. And did China really do that much to help us win the Cold War, rather than sit on the sidelines and wait for the two barbarian powers to exhaust themselves?

      Certainly the O’s foreign policy has been a disaster. We can only pray that the electorate notices it and reminds itself that Hillary […] was the major manager of the disaster, along with an erstwhile prof. of creative writing with zilch expertise in the area. Of course the N-K job did a better job; but so did virtually everyone else–although maybe the O-HRC team may vie with Jimmy Carter […] for a disastrous foreign policy.

      • Fair enough on N-K only looking comparatively good on foreign policy. Taiwan hasn’t been abandoned though.

        China did nothing to help “us” win the Cold war. China looks after China. Period. At least the maligned “carnival barker” Trump understands this.

  8. In a normal world Hillary Clinton would run as POTUS upon her record as Secretary of State (her highest office). Examining that record day by day, week by week, month by month is ….. appalling.

    • Oh, I dunno, I think one just has to take a sample of her greatest hits rather than listen to every track of every album she ever made. Mind you, if one does what you suggest it could frighten one so deeply that one might not be capable of getting out of bed in the morning. When I read on a screen a CNN poll stating that, inter alia, 50% of respondents thought HC would be better than DT (45%) on terrorism, I blinked and reread it to make sure those percentages related to that issue and not to the one above or below it in the list. “How can that be?” I exclaimed with astonishment to my American paramour; she responded that “CNN is very liberal” which averted my having an aneurism. I was unable to read the rest of the list with any degree of concentration I was so unsettled.

      I mentioned to said paramour, or rather inamorata (as she is of Italian descent), that, whilst the wife of the POTUS, Clinton sat next to Suha Arafat in 2000 and listened politely as the Paris-domiciled billionaire explained to her that Israelis were “poisoning Palestinian school children with toxic gas” and then … kissed her. Clinton justified her non-response and kissing as being part and parcel of diplomatic etiquette. Hmmm. How about a smiling and polite set of questions: “Is that so? I did not know that. How fascinating? What gas do they use? How do they deliver it to the schools? I’ll ask Bill to ask them to stop doing it as it’s not the right thing to do.”

      • I hope someone asks her about that. Of course they won’t let a realist near her. She’d melt into a puddle with nothing left but the pointy hat.

        • Fair enough on N-K only looking comparatively good on foreign policy. Taiwan hasn’t been abandoned though.

          China did nothing to help “us” win the Cold war. China looks after China. Period. At least the maligned “carnival barker” Trump understands this.

          • I have posted this in the wrong thread or place! Re HRC and Suha Arafat: why doesn’t somebody in the media take her to task for this glaring inaction? By 2000 she was no political neophyte. Personally, it defined who she was 16 years ago. And yet there are legions of Jewish women who are going to vote for her. Amazing.

  9. I keep saying it. Mrs. Clinton should be in jail not running for POTUS. and then I have nightmares thinking of all the nit-wits who will vote for that woman. It will be a long and dangerous 4 years. . .

    • Maybe the last Trump will sound before then, (no not him, he’s already ‘sounded’ off enough). 🙂

  10. No doubt – Stalin was an evil man, but as any man he wasn’t just one sided. He had some qualities, which brought him to the top, despite competition never faced by a modern leader. He was against men of exceptional qualities and started as an underdog. He used to wright his own speeches and theoretical works. His understanding of government and international affairs was exceptional even by modern standards. He was an ascetic in his private life.
    Lenin ones said about him that Stalin is Guingis Khan who read Marx’s Kapital.
    Very precise description. Brutal genius with an intellectual base. No politician in history had so much admiration for so long and by so many.
    Not everything he planned worked out, some because of circumstances and some because of limited time he had. Like many dictators before him, he was killed by his close associates.
    The world has changed and hopefully we will never again have another Stalin, but historians and politicians must continue to study his legacy. There is still much to learn from it.

    • Guess what will happened if I use your words but attach them to the Führer? He was so smart and brave. I could picture myself joining the youth SS force back then. (cf. Günter Grass’ “Peeling the Onion”) Also compare the Führer’s vision of future after the war – united Europe, wide autobahns all over the place, workers going on cruses in the Mediterranean, equal work-equal pay, etc, etc. We should learn a lot from him. As you see I am very polite towards you…

    • Stalin’s legacy was the underlying cause of the internal collapse of the machine he built so ruthlessly. Less than forty years after his death.

    • Stalin was methodical, kept his cards close to his chest, and used contacts and people skillfully. Against him, there was the work-shy, erratic (but possibly even more ruthless) Trotsky.

      And to say that Stalin was a Chingiz Khan who had read Marx is unfair to the Mongol. Chinghiz didn’t massacre people who submitted and paid taxes (often because what the Mongols demanded was less than waht they were accustomed to).

    • I didn’t go to the article, but thanks for providing a source. Ben Rhodes is connected and smart. He claims to have some sort of mind-meld with Pres Obama. Mind-meld in a vacuum must make for some interesting physics. The guy has a master’s in creative writing – the perfect field for the airy-fairy tale-teller with the two teleprompters.

  11. Stalin was only being a good Marxist when he engineered the Ukrainian famines. Marx and Engels had declared that the peasants needed to be exterminated because they were too backward to evolve into the Marxist “new man”. The Ukrainian peasants were resisting collectivization more successfully that the Russian peasants, who had been under serfdom longer, so naturally they were first to experience the man-made famines, and of course the “kulacks”, mainly those who were willing to work hard, were sent to the gulag. The disadvantaged favored by the regime were the drunkards and the lazy, who were given authority over the rest of the peasants by the regime.
    Under the Romanovs, the Jews were only allowed to live within the “Pale”, that is, in the Ukraine and Russian Poland, not in Russia proper. That is why the pogroms took place in those two areas, even though the orders often came from St. Petersburg, so to speak.
    I know, I know, Takuan Seiyo came up with a story about how the current uprising in the Ukraine was really an anti Semitic plot, because there was one prominent anti-Semite who played a very marginal though well-publicized role in the initial uprising and was killed very shortly after TS’s article ran. Also because the Ukrainians hadn’t showed proper respect for their Polish betters when they were run by Poland. That had me thinking about how the Poles showed up at Munich back in 1939, yipping for some pieces of Czechoslovakia that they thought they should be awarded. Anyway, the Ukrainian “rebels” included a lot of Baptists, without anti-Semitic histories, and the current Prime Minister is Jewish. Putin wants to be Tzsar and as such considers that the Ukraine and Georgia, etc. should be part of his domain. As such, any old lie will do.

  12. Your reference to “Putin wants to be Tzsar” reminds me of a great Woody Allen joke of the 80’s: the Russian revolution took place when the Russian people realized that the “Tsar” and the “Czar” were the same person!

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