Tag: USSR

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ideological culture

Revolutionaries for Bernie

Jurek, Bernie Sanders, gulags, USSR, Soviet Union, socialism,

It seems like just last week we were arguing about how it is not OK to go around “punching Nazis.” 

Now we have a Bernie Sanders campaign employee fuming about putting people he disagrees with into “re-​education camps.”

“The only thing that fascists understand is violence,” said a Field Manager in the campaign’s Iowa office, as caught on all-​too-​candid camera by Project Veritas. “So, the only way you can confront them is with violence.”

It is one thing to get called a “fascist!” or “Nazi!” by a leftist for disagreeing with a leftist, it is another thing to be sucker-​punched by a leftist for disagreeing with a leftist — and something far, far worse to be put into a concentration camp for expressing non-​leftist-​approved views.

His name is Kyle Jurek. Project Veritas has certainly not dubbed him a typical Bernie voter. His views are described as “extreme left-​wing fringe,” and the utility of the clandestine recordings, taken over months, said to lie in the insight they provide “into the mentality of many Sanders staffers and what they truly believe.”

Jurek’s beliefs include extra-​legal violence and Soviet Gulag revisionism, expressed with f‑bombs and mf-​barrages. “You want to fight against the revolution, you’re going to die for it, mother — ” Jurek lashes out at “fellow” Democrats … and MSNBC … and Trump voters. He talks about setting Milwaukee afire. And not rhetorically.

 We’ve long worried about the Vermont senator, who has defended horrific Soviet and Cuban rule throughout his long history of communist apologia.

I guess the real test is how Jurek’s comrades — er, fellow Sanders supporters — react to the revelations. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. As this commentary posts, the only official response has come from the Iowa state director for the Sanders campaign, Misty Rebik, who dismissed the video, saying, “The hundreds of thousands of Iowans we’ve talked to this caucus season don’t care about political gossip …” Jurek has not been dismissed. A search of the Washington Post and New York Times websites show neither paper has reported on the story.

The Babylon Bee made the obvious “democratic gulag” joke.

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Jurek, Bernie Sanders, gulags, USSR, Soviet Union, socialism,

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folly ideological culture moral hazard

Mass Murderers Are Cool?

Walmart, hammer and sickle, USSR, mass murder, socialism, communism, cool

If you have a lick of sense, you wouldn’t emblazon images of Ché Guevara on your chest or your wall — and yet Ché t‑shirts and posters have been a pop culture hit for decades now.

He is cool, we are told, because he was ¡Viva la Revolución! and all that.

But it could get worse. You could be emblazoning a hammer and sickle.

Walmart’s website is there to help. Under “men’s sleeveless,” for example, we see an artistic rendering of the old Communist symbol, frankly identified as a “Soviet Hammer and Sickle,” white on black for $14.97.* Walmart files it under “Pop culture.”

Aren’t men’s sleeveless shirts called “wife beaters”? Should we now call them Kulak Killers?

It’s hip to murder millions!

No wonder Lithuania and several other Baltic countries — who suffered greatly under Soviet rule — object. Indeed, many of these countries go too far in actually banning the symbols. Now, they have contacted Walmart requesting a cessation in hawking the offensive merchandise. “You wouldn’t buy Nazi-​themed clothing, would you?” Lithuania’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius tweeted. Or sell such items.

But a few people might. Certainly, a lot of people do buy stuff that others regard as “Nazi.” Sometimes to be “cool”; other times to make a controversial political point.

At the Uhuru Store, Gavin McInnes’s “ProudBoys Official” sells a “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” t‑shirt for twice the price of Walmart’s Hammer and Sickle shirt — and that surely has annoyed leftists who have seen it.

I’m waiting for the death of cool.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The shirts also come in Navy, Royal and Gray. I guess to get a red commie shirt you have to go for the sleeves.

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies responsibility too much government

The Times Must Change

USSR, Soviet Union, communism, socialism, apologist, New York Times

“Political leaders prefer to project a noble history, sometimes by turning complicity in atrocities into claims of victimhood,” the New York Times informed us last Sunday. “In Russia, Mr. Putin and many of his lieutenants came from the K.G.B. and resisted fully confronting its repressive history. And they, like many of their countrymen, prefer to portray Stalin not only as the architect of the Gulag but also as the leader who built Russia’s industrial might and led it to victory in the Great Patriotic War.” 

The Gray Lady here marks the passing of Arseny Roginsky, an organizer and activist who kept alive the memory of state mass murder in his homeland. The Times quotes the late hero as insisting that common talk of “victims of repression” is nowhere near enough. The repression did not merely descend upon the people as “a plague.” 

The victims were targets of “state terror.”

But there was something missing in this too-​brief notice. Though the Nazis were mentioned, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn’t.

Communism was not.*

State terror did not infect its perpetrators biologically, like the world’s worst case of x-oplasmosis. It neither descended from the heavens nor ascended from the swamps. The infection was ideological — the result of Marxian socialism, of unworkable communism. 

By not mentioning socialism or communism or even the USSR, the New York Times carries on its sad history of leftist apologetics. The case of the lying propagandist Walter Duranty — the Times’ award-​winning foreign correspondent and author of Mission to Moscow — should have been the last of that.

It isn’t, apparently. The Times still protects its safe-​space socialist readers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The omissions were also present in the Times’ initial obituary.

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