Category Archives: Communism

Sovietizing the Suburbs: Rule By Bureaucracy

Barack Obama, Communism, Liberty, Private Property, Race, Racism, Regulation

A critical media ought to be withering about Barack Obama’s plans to sovietize any American suburb deemed too white (barring his abodes, his vacation spots and the schools his daughters attend). Instead, pages upon pages of a Google search yield zero criticism of this racist, racialist and tyrannical infringement upon freedom of association, property rights and federalism.

What can one expect from a female “writer” at The Atlantic, reporting on the regulation called “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing”? A surfeit of affection and approval:

… Obama administration issues a new rule—and a mapping tool—that are designed to help communities address segregation. …

… On Wednesday, HUD took a big step toward fixing its own ineffectiveness, releasing a new rule that requires that cities and regions evaluate the presence of fair housing in their communities, submit reports detailing the presence of segregation and blight, and detail what they plan to do about it. Communities will be required to hold meetings or otherwise solicit public opinion about housing planning and integration every five years, and will have a new trove of resources to assess their progress.

“This important step will give local leaders the tools they need to provide all Americans with access to safe, affordable housing in communities that are rich with opportunity,” said HUD Secretary Julian Castro.

Parts of the new rule will take effect in 30 days.

By law, communities are expected to affirmatively further fair housing through the way they use federal funds, including Community Development Block Grants (used for a variety of development initiatives), public-housing-authority programs such as Housing Choice Vouchers and housing complexes, and HOME grants, which fund the development of affordable housing.

Since our local shysters vie for federal funds; they will be diligent about shattering established communities by busing in problem residents. Once again, middle-class Americans will bear the brunt of Obama’s bureaucracy.

The Atlantic‘s idiot “writer” seems to think that the neighborhood creates the individual, rather than the opposite: Individuals acting together create their neighborhoods. She solicits official vapor about “neighborhoods and communities marked by conditions of slum and blight,” [that] exclude people from well-resourced neighborhoods and communities” …

MORE.

Pope In An Intellectual Wilderness

Capitalism, Christianity, Communism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intellectualism, The West

I once read a papal encyclical: John Paul’s. With his 1998 encyclical, Pope John Paul sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness. Who else spoke with unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Pope Francis. He’s too dumb to consider such abstractions.

That Jorge Bergoglio is shaping up to be a bit of a bumpkin is no surprise. He hails from the Latin American strain of Catholicism. And he, Pope Francis, is threatening to undo what Pope John labored to achieve: “steer liberation theology away from the influence of Marxist social analysis.”

In the 2015 encyclical, the Holy See saddles the richest nations with the blame for the despoliation of the earth, when the truth is that the developed world’s advanced technology has helped clean-up the atmosphere, the oceans and the waterways. It is the developing nations—China, India—that despoil the earth and its creatures most. The earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” not in Canada, Germany, or the US (except for where illegal immigrants tread: see “Illegal Immigration’s Negative Impact on the Environment”).

The love for the earth, its creatures and our pets (parrots, dogs, cats) is a distinctly Western sensibility.

The Catholic Crisis Magazine can’t help but take a swipe at the anti-intellectualism of this pope’s “close advisors”:

… the hortatory Cardinal Maradiaga of Honduras said [this] with ill-tempered diction: “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.” From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors. And that’s putting it kindly.

Recommended reading:

“On The Line: The Impact of Immigration Policy on Wild Life and on the Arizona Borderlands”

“Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises” By George Reisman (The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics)

Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever

Communism, Crime, History, The State

Did you know that Jews tried to flee back into Hitler’s Germany from the Communist-controlled, adjacent territories? As hideous as it was, fascism was more merciful than communism. Read “Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever,” and its source, “The Black Book Of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.” And teach it, Brother!

An excerpt:

April the 15th marked Holocaust Memorial Day. Nearly everyone knows about the industrial killing of 6 million Jews, for no other reason than that they were Jews. “Serious historiography” of the subject has ensured that The Shoah, Holocaust in Hebrew, is “consigned to posterity”; its lessons remembered and commemorated throughout the civilized world.

Although she failed to dignify the Armenian genocide of 1915, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour certainly covered the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, Bosnia, northern Iraq, Rwanda and Darfur, for a 2008 documentary about genocide. In the interest of pacifying its Turkish allies, American officialdom has generally aped Amanpour, refusing to implicate the Ottomans in the mass murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians, 100 years ago.

This month, Kim Kardashian and Pope Francis, in order of importance, remedied the Armenian “omission.” The Pontiff called the massacre “the first genocide of the 20th century.” The Armenian-American reality TV star, her posterior and the rest of her entourage, visited the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, to pay their respects.

There is no philosopher of Hannah Arendt’s caliber, today, to give dignity to the victims of the Stalinist, systematic starvation of the Boers by the British, during the Second Boer War. Fifteen percent of the Afrikaner population was rounded up, interned and starved to death–27,000 women and children. The image of young Lizzie van Zyl, who died in the Bloemfontein concentration camp, ought to be engraved in popular memory. It is not! When she died, Lizzie looked like the Jewish bags of bones who perished in the Nazi death and concentration camps.

Mention of Hannah Arendt is a must since this remarkable Jewish philosopher illustrated the similarities between “our century’s two totalitarianisms,” the Nazis and the Soviets. Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” spoke to a truth unmentioned until the publication of “The Black Book of Communism”: Both “systems massacred their victims not for what they did (such as resisting the regime) but for who they were, whether Jews or kulaks.”

If anything, “The Black Book” treads too lightly when it comes to qualitative comparisons between the Nazi and “Marxist-Leninist phenomenon.” On the quantitative front, “Nazism, at an estimated 25 million,” turned out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism, whose “grand total of victims [is] variously estimated at between 85 million and 100 million murdered. … the most colossal case of political carnage in history.”

Qualitatively, the “‘class genocide’ of Communism” is certainly comparable to the “‘race genocide’ of Nazism.” In its reach and methods, moreover, nothing compares to Communism’s continual, ongoing invention of new classes of “enemies of the people” to liquidate. “Mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past.”

The fact that socialists and communists are still voted into power—with swagger in Greece—demonstrates that communists, despite their murderous past, “belong to the camp of democratic progress,” whereas the Right is forever open to suspicions of unforgiven fascist and Nazi sympathies. …

… The complete column is “Remembering The Worst Crimes Against Humanity, Ever.”

The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR

Capitalism, Communism, Crime, Free Markets, libertarianism, Russia

“The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR” is the current column. It questions the current libertarian support (my own included) for Russia, and recounts how ‘grotesquely Stalinist’
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was. An excerpt
:

… One can well understand why the medieval blood ties that tethered some Ukrainians to the Russians would have been severed by the criminal communist regime, which targeted the Ukrainian breadbasket with a vengeance. The communists robbed the Ukrainian peasants of their fertile farms, forced them into slave labor by corralling them into state-owned, collective farms, and systematically starved them by requisitioning most of their grain. The peasants had been left with a fraction of the amount of grain required to sustain life.

Yet these heroic, individualistic farmers rose up against the Reds.

The slogans of the Ukrainian peasantry, in 1919, were “Ukraine for the Ukrainians, down with the Bolsheviks and the Jews (whom they associated with the Bolsheviks), free enterprise, free trade.” Besides the standard mass executions, in order to wipe out this class of people, Stalin devised a diabolical man-made famine which killed up to 10 million .

Fast forward to Kiev, circa 2013, where Ukrainians tore down the statue of the founding father of Bolshevism and a mass murderer in his own right. But that man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, still reposes in a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square.

Why, pray tell? …

Read the rest. “The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR” is now on WND.