One Hundred Years of Communism

A look at Leninism

On November 7, 1917 (October 25, old style), the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, took over power, and established their totalitarian rule (the first one-party system ever). Lenin called it "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Rule of law and traditional morality were discarded as "bourgeois hypocrisy." Political competition between parties ...
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Perón in the White House

The Perils of Ethnocentric Solipsism

Recently 45 was asked about rising anti-Semitic incidents in our country. The reporter made explicit this question was not an allegation against 45. He was asking what 45 would do to combat these incidents. The orange mountebank responded that he is “the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in ...
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Remembering György Lukács

Against a repressive act of forgetting

Hegelian Marxism and with it the whole tradition of Eastern Europe’s critical (humanist, revisionist etc.) Marxism are under attack. I first read Georg (György) Lukács when I was 18. I knew from family that he was a celebrated thinker and had served as minister of culture in Imre Nagy’s government, ...
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Of Honor and Despair in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt on Stefan Zweig

In 1943, with confirmation of the Nazis’ implementation of what the ossified bureaucratic language called Endlösung (the final solution) -- the extermination of all European Jews -- Hannah Arendt published an essay in the émigré journal Aufbau (printed in New York) on Stefan Zweig and the bygone world of yesterday, ...

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Of Honor and Despair in Dark Times

An Invitation to Clearmindedness

In times of terror and rage like ours, remaining sober is the vital thing. Murderous fanaticism is not Islam. Fringe and mainstream are different things. Engaging in wild generalizations and disseminating venomous stereotypes is a sure recipe for disaster. Any type of fundamentalism must be combated, resisted, opposed. We ought ...
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