Vladimir Lenin

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

The looming Lenin comeback

The year 2024 marks the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death. In April of that year, the consummate communist, having blighted as many lives as he could, finally shuffled off his mortal coil, aged fifty-three.“That was young,” you may say. But I reply, “Not nearly young enough.” As we embark on what is sure to be an eventful year, it is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What I have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what is somehow even creepier is his model of government.

lenin

Thursday

Roger Kimball

Taking a page from Lenin’s playbook

I have often been struck by the number of pithy observations — revelatory, pointed or simply true — that were not said by the person to whom they are attributed. Vladimir Lenin apparently never said (in Russian or in English) that “the way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” Mark Twain, to whom many amusing remarks have been falsely attributed, apparently did not contend that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. Edmund Burke neither said nor wrote that evil would triumph if good men did nothing.

inflation

Monday

Matt Purple

Springtime for Cold War nostalgics

My favorite spy movie cliché of all time is the secret agent stuck in the 1980s. The threats have gone asymmetrical, terrorists slip across borders, but our hero longs for the simple days when the world was divided between good Westerners and bad Russians. “You’re a fossil!” sneer his girlboss department administrator, his vegan drone pilot, his tech whiz who has just hunted down a non-state actor by crosschecking the latest SIGINT with a Yelp! review of an Iraqi yoga studio. Cut to him muttering under his breath à la Judi Dench in Casino Royale: “Christ, I miss the Cold War.” Now, suddenly, those who miss the Cold War are having a moment.

Cold War

Thursday

Slavoj Zizek

Putin’s Stalinist playbook

Vladimir Putin's actions have shocked many Western observers over the past few days. But his moves bear all the hallmarks of one of his predecessors: Joseph Stalin. Last Monday, the Russian Duma passed a direct appeal to Putin to recognize the Russian-controlled separatist states of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Russian president first said he would not immediately recognize the so-called republics. The reason for this was he wanted it to appear that when he finally did recognize them as independent republics, he was simply reacting to popular pressure from below. This is straight out of the Stalin playbook.

stalin

Tuesday

Katya Sedgwick

The pagan rites of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg succumbed to cancer, #RestInPower immediately trended. The ACLU, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, actress Reese Witherspoon and the ostensibly Jewish uber-left activists of Bend the Arc all used the woke neologism in their tributes.The play on words likely originated in the 1990s rap. It entered mainstream usage after the 2016 election when the left lost its mind. Even in a culture that’s increasingly — pathetically — obsessed with politics, politicizing death feels like a new low. Ginsburg’s final rite of passage signals a rejection of Jewish and Christian customs along with democratic norms, and a return to paganism and violence.

pagan

Friday

Ben Zeisloft

Here’s some left-wing stuff we can cancel, too

‘What do we burn apart from witches?’ ‘More witches!’A pitchfork-and-iPhone-wielding diversity mob is running amok in major metropolitan areas and on social media, calling for the wholesale destruction of statues, monuments and institutions that mark the history of racism in the United States.In their efforts to build a more perfect union, the mob has so far succeeded in canceling Gone with the Wind, Aunt Jemima, police-themed Legos and thousands of average, working-class Americans. Thanks to these ‘stunning’ and ‘brave’ civil rights heroes, little black boys and girls in America will never again feel terrorized, oppressed, or microaggressed during Saturday morning pancakes or afternoon playtime.

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