The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution

Two years ago, on the centennial anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that ushered in a century of mass murder and misery, the Trump administration declared a National Day for the Victims of Communism. The New York Times, meanwhile, predictably celebrated the blood-soaked milestone with a series of opinion pieces touting the many upsides of Communism, such as better orgasms for women. The series was titled, with stunning tone-deafness, “Red Century.”

Also on that anniversary in 2017, Bucknell University, a private liberal arts college in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, held a symposium titled “Legacies of the October Revolution,” organized by Bucknell professor of sociology Alexander Riley and associate professor of English Alfred Kentigern Siewers. That symposium spawned an important new book titled The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, edited by Riley and Siewers and featuring essays from three participating scholars. Contrary to the New York Times’ whitewashing, the book’s evaluation of the October Revolution is unequivocally damning.

“Now, a century later, the historical evidence on the nature and legacy of the Bolsheviks and the regime they established is indisputable,” writes editor Riley in the foreword, “Challenging Bolshevik Myth and the Poetry of Totalitarianism”:

None of the utopian goals to which they purported to aspire – the end of inequality and want, an efflorescence of humane cultural values, a more just and democratic social order – were realized. Instead of these noble ends, the Bolsheviks produced the world’s first totalitarian state, a one-party dictatorship whose political power rested almost entirely on the threat and frequent implementation of mass violence.

It gets harsher from there. The book’s essays by a trio of scholars offer “a summary analysis of the historical record books on the Bolshevik reign of terror, a working hypothesis on what produced the distorted and malevolent ideologies and practices that sustained Bolshevism, and an effort at understanding how considerable numbers of intelligent and conscientious individuals could have come to believe such intrinsically unbelievable things” about it, Riley writes.

In the first of three brilliant essays, “Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution: The Invention of Totalitarianism,” French historian and former Maoist militant Stéphane Courtois, author of more than 30 books on communism and totalitarianism (including lead authorship of the essential work on global communism, The Black Book of Communism), undertakes to explain how Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, became the founder of totalitarianism. Courtois demonstrates that Lenin shared with his successor Stalin “the same merciless, amoral, dehumanizing view of political opponents.” It is a strategy familiar to anyone who has been demonized by today’s Democrat Party.

Explaining Identity and Prejudice

The left is fond of accusing President Donald Trump of dividing America, but in fact America was already divided before his presidency – by the left’s obsessive promotion of the inherently divisive “identity politics,” which erases our individuality and boxes us all into categories based on gender and skin color, and then arranges those categories according to a hierarchy of power and oppression.

Farrell Bloch, a former Princeton economics professor and an expert witness in hundreds of matters assessing discrimination, has written a book that couldn’t be more timely and vital to our understanding of identity politics: Identity and Prejudice, from the Canada-based Mantua Books.

In Identity and Prejudice, Prof. Bloch offers a theory explaining why individuals are biased against some race and ethnic groups but in favor of others. He addresses diversity, intersectionality, white privilege, political correctness, and identity politics, and applies his theory to contemporary issues including European and American reaction to Muslim immigration, anti-Israel sentiment, and the elections of Presidents Obama and Trump.

I asked Professor Bloch a few questions about his book via email.

Mark Tapson:           To what extent are identity, prejudice, and discrimination driving political conflicts and decisions today, and have they always done so, or would you say they are more prominent factors in the political scene now than in the past?

Farrell Bloch:           Identity politics, which emphasizes ethnicities as either victims or preferred groups, is pervasive today.  Data that compare demographic groups’ employment, income, and other social and economic measures were not so widely available in the past. These statistics, reports of racist comments and hate crimes, tabulations of the presence or absence of members of race and ethnic groups in various venues, and discussions of related policy issues such as immigration and affirmative action are now ubiquitous.

MT:     You say that the most important contemporary political divide may be the one between those who embrace the Elitist Paradigm and those who reject it. You note that the election of Donald Trump, for example, was likely an expression of antagonism toward it. What is the Elitist Paradigm?

The Serpent and the Red Thread

Several days ago, pro-sharia Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour appeared at the annual conference of American Muslims for Palestine in Chicago and demanded that the audience ask “those who call themselves progressive Zionists” how they can claim to oppose white supremacy in America, but then “support a state like Israel that is based on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.”

The notion that Israel was built on purported Jewish supremacism is pretty rich coming from Islamic supremacist Sarsour, particularly in light of the fact that the alarming spike in Jew-hatred throughout the West today stems largely not from a politically impotent and socially marginalized minority of white supremacists (as the mainstream media would have us believe), but from mass migration from Muslim countries, from the anti-Israel BDS movement driven by Muslim student organizations on university campuses, from the willful blindness toward Islam of multicultural elitists like Canada’s Justin Trudeau, and from the American left’s increasing embrace of Muslim politicians such as Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and activists like Sarsour. Seventy-five years or so after Allied forces liberated the survivors of Nazi concentration camps, Jew-hatred is back with a vengeance.

Of course, it never went away in the first place. It is always with us. Anti-Semitism is the world’s “oldest, most irrational evil,” as Canadian author and blogger Diane Bederman puts it, and in a powerful new book from Mantua Books titled The Serpent and the Red Thread, she tells its story in a stunning, affecting mix of fiction, history and myth. The book is peopled with characters ranging from Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul to Elie Wiesel and Adolph Hitler (whom she refers to as “hitler” – diminishing him by refusing to capitalize his last name).

Ms. Bederman, who also wrote Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, which I previously reviewed for FrontPage Mag here, took time out to answer some questions about her new book for FrontPage Mag.

Mark Tapson:           Tell us about “the red thread” and why you chose to use it as the central motif in your book.

Diane Bederman:   While I was writing the book I heard about the red thread, a Chinese literary device that connects people through time. The thread can bend and twist, but never breaks.  I was writing about Jew haters through time. In Judaism, Amalek represents evil for he was the leader of a tribe who attacked the weakest of the Jews as they fled Egypt. Who can be more evil than one who attacks the weakest of all?  Sadly, there seems to be a pattern of Amaleks, a new one every generation; all connected to the first, through that red thread, that has never been broken. The serpent and his thread take us through 3000 years of Jewish prosecutions, persecutions, pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions ghettos and forced conversions leading to the Holocaust.

MT:     Hitler unsurprisingly plays a prominent role in the book. But other characters also serve as guides through your biography of evil, including biblical figures such as Jesus, Paul, Abraham and Sarah, and a young Elie Wiesel. Why did you decide on these characters?

The Truth is No Defense

As the totalitarian left advances ever more successfully toward amending or abolishing freedom of speech, it is crucial to keep in mind that hand-in-hand with curtailing the speech of those who hold “incorrect” opinions comes the enforcement of Islamic blasphemy laws, the ulterior motive of which is to shield Islam from any criticism whatsoever. This has been the longstanding goal of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the world’s largest Muslim collective, which has worked closely with leftist allies such as Hillary Clinton to promote and implement such censorship. This already has been largely embraced among the multiculturalist elites in Europe; think, for example, of today’s England, where jihadist stabbings are rampant but complaining about them in a tweet will earn you a visit and stern lecture from the police, if not actual arrest.

To grasp just how unacceptable it is to speak the truth about Islam in a multiculturalist society, read Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s jaw-dropping account of her legal ordeal in Austria, titled The Truth is No Defense, recently published by New English Review Press. Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff is an Austrian human rights and anti-sharia activist who, as the daughter of a diplomat and then later as an ambassador’s assistant, had extensive experience living and working in Muslim countries (she was even held hostage during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait). She came to the unfortunate conclusion that sharia and Western values aren’t compatible.

In 2009 she found herself charged with “hate speech” in Austria over factual statements she made during a seminar she gave on Islam. Thus began a Kafkaesque legal odyssey resulting in her conviction for “denigrating the teachings of a legally recognized religion” – i.e. Islam, of course, because can anyone imagine that someone would ever be convicted of denigrating Christianity? Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff subsequently took her appeal before the European Court for Human Rights, but Europe tragically has no First Amendment and therefore, “the truth is no defense” when it comes to critiquing Islam. “This is what totalitarianism looks like,” the Freedom Center’s own Robert Spencer has said of her miscarriage of justice (Spencer is one of more than half a dozen notable experts who present insightful analyses of her case at the book’s conclusion).

Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff was recently in Los Angeles promoting her book, and graciously made the time to answer some questions.

Mark Tapson:           You preface the book by juxtaposing the lives of two 9-year-old girls, “Emma” and “Aisha,” who might be very much alike except for the contrasting cultures in which they live: Western and Islamic. Why did you choose to begin the book this way?

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff:        I chose these two girls and their stories for one reason only: there are millions of Aishas in the Islamic world and millions of Emmas in the Western, non-Islamic world. We still have a choice: do we want the Emmas to turn into Aishas? Or do we protect the Emmas from a life as Aishas? My choice is clear. What is yours?

MT:     When did you first realize that, for the multiculturalist European elites who are determined to shield Islam from criticism, the truth is truly no defense?

The Google Archipelago

Back in January, 2018, I interviewed New York University professor Michael Rectenwald for FrontPage Mag (here) about his experience being outed as “the Deplorable Prof,” the man behind an anonymous Twitter account which he used to criticize the “anti-education and anti-intellectual” social justice ideology of his fellow leftist academics. The subsequent shunning and harassment he endured from his colleagues and the NYU administration drove Rectenwald to declare himself done with the Left, and he later published a book about it titled Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage (which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here). The book is a must-read for understanding the intellectual collapse of the American university under the weight of a totalitarian ideology.

Now the prolific Rectenwald has published another short but vital work, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom from New English Review Press. In it he argues that what he calls the “Big Digital” technologies and their principals like Google represent a new form of corporate state power and leftist authoritarianism. The once-and-future Deplorable Prof agreed to answer a few questions about this dangerous development.

Mark Tapson:           Michael, thanks for taking time out for another interview. In Springtime for Snowflakes you exposed and combatted social justice totalitarians. How does your new book Google Archipelago follow from and expand upon the former one? What insights and/or experiences took you in that direction?

Michael Rectenwald:         Hi Mark. Thanks very much for conducting this interview. I’m particularly grateful that you’ve asked me, again, to write out my answers, because I believe that I’m a much better writer than speaker. 

Google Archipelago (hereafter GA) traces the metastasis of social ideology into the digital realm. It may be regarded as the second in a series of installments on social justice, a series that I began in Springtime for Snowflakes, and which I may continue in a third book, thus completing a trilogy.

The book represents a study of the vastly extended and magnified manifestation of the leftist authoritarian-totalitarian ideology as it expands into cyberspace, extends throughout the cyber-social body, and penetrates the deepest recesses of social and political life. In GA, I connect Big Digital's politics with its technologies. I argue and demonstrate that the technologies are intrinsically leftist and authoritarian. 

For reasons I give in the book, the only way to make sense of the politics of such organizations as Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al and how this politics is reflected in its technologies is to see Big Digital as the leading edge of an economic and governmental conglomeration that aims to monopolize human life on a global scale. Big Digital’s political ambition is to establish a two-tiered system consisting of global corporate-cum-state monopolies on top, with “actually-existing socialism” for everyone else. I call this two-tiered system “corporate socialism,” which I choose over the term “techno-feudalism,” used by others. I have very good reasons for adopting the name corporate socialism rather than techno-feudalism, not the least of which is the penchant of the monopolists for using socialist rhetoric and ideology in their attempts to bring the two-tiered system into existence. Corporate socialism aims to arrive at a singular, one-world state, with vast globalist monopolies controlling production. These monopolies would be paralleled by a socialism or equality of reduced expectations for everyone else. Unwary dupes like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez serve corporate socialists by habituating the masses to this state of affairs. The objectives of corporate socialism are ushered in under the guise of an economic and social equality, an equality of reduced expectations for the vast majority. The corporate socialists don't need equality; equality pertains strictly to the majority deemed destined to live under the reduced expectations of “actually-existing socialism” on the ground.

Ultimately, Big Digital attempts to replace reality with a digital simulation or simulations, simulacra posing as substitutes for reality—to introduce simulated and faux realities or simulacra that displace and replace the real. Forget fake news. Try fake reality. 

MT:     The title of your book obviously echoes Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. How are the social media of today, what you call Big Digital, imprisoning us in a sort of gulag of simulated realities?

Peter Collier, 1939-2019

Peter Collier – publisher, editor, bestselling author, and co-founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center – passed away on November 1, 2019 – All Soul's Day – at the age of 80.

Peter Anthony Dale Collier was born June 2, 1939 in Los Angeles, California. Like his close friend and longtime writing partner David Horowitz, whom he met while both attended UC Berkeley, Collier began his intellectual life as a New Left radical. In 1966 he became an editor at Ramparts magazine, the Left’s most influential publication at the time, as did Horowitz two years later. Collier and Horowitz took over the magazine in 1969 and edited it until 1973, when they left to write a best-selling biography of the Rockefeller dynasty.

Called by the New York Times Book Review “the premier biographers of American dynastic tragedy,” Collier and Horowitz went on to write The Kennedys: An American Drama (1984), which was a number one New York Times bestseller. This was followed by The Fords: An American Epic (1987) and The Roosevelts: An American Saga (1994). On his own, Collier went on to write The Fondas: A Hollywood Dynasty, as well as a notable biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, titled Political Woman.

In the mid-seventies, Collier and Horowitz both became disillusioned with the Left, an intellectually courageous, slow-motion odyssey the pair recorded in their 1989 bestseller Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties, which made them enemies of their former comrades. While Horowitz became the more public face of their apostasy, the more private Collier pursued an astonishingly prolific career as an author, publishing numerous bestsellers in genres ranging from politics to biographies to novels and screenplays, even short fiction.

Sword and Scimitar

On the 18^th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 jihadist attacks on United States soil, as on every anniversary, the cry “Never forget!” went out across social media as Americans somberly vowed to keep the memory of 3,000 murdered innocents alive. But the danger today is not that we will forget the victims, but that we will forget the perpetrators. The New York Times epitomized this willful blindness with a commemorative tweet on the day declaring that “airplanes took aim at the World Trade Center” on 9/11 – a cowardly evasion by the Times, denying any human agency whatsoever behind the attacks instead of placing the blame squarely where it belongs: on Islamic terrorists waging war on unbelievers in the West.

In our politically correct self-loathing induced by decades of leftist indoctrination, the West – or what properly used to be called Christendom – has spent the past eighteen years not extinguishing the Islamic supremacism that brought down the Twin Towers, but often aiding and abetting it, welcoming the barbarians inside the gates and pretending we can coexist. As Raymond Ibrahim writes in his new book Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West, “The West has learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to become an unwitting ally of the jihad.” As a culture we now lack the historical perspective to view the 9/11 attacks in the context of this ongoing, 1400-year clash of civilizations. “Very few understand,” Ibrahim notes, “that this modus operandi stretches back to and has been on continuous display since Islam’s first contact with Christian civilization.”

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a scholar at the Middle East Forum. His previous books include the eye-opening The Al Qaeda Reader and Crucified Again, a must-read about the genocidal persecution of Christians in the Middle East. Sword and Scimitar, an elegantly packaged book (with 16 pages of black-and-white plates) from Da Capo Press, is a deeply researched, thoughtfully analyzed military history of the ancient, existential struggle between the mortal enemies Islam and Judeo-Christian civilization. “[W]hile this book is not a general history of Western-Muslim relations,” Ibrahim clarifies, “it is most certainly a history of the most general aspect of said relations – war.” It “demonstrates once and for all that Muslim hostility for the West is not an aberration but a continuation of Islamic history.”

Feminist: 'Heterosexuality is Just Not Working'

It will come as no news to FrontPage Mag readers that feminism, like every facet of Progressivism, has gone completely off the rails since the triggering ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, but it’s worth an occasional reminder to grasp fully just how desperate and detached from reality feminism is. The latest case in point: a self-described lesbian feminist columnist has declared that pop singer Miley Cyrus, “suicided” sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the mass shooters in Dayton and El Paso are examples of how heterosexuality “is just not working.”

In an opinion piece for NBC News, Marcie Bianco curiously claims that recent trending news stories — Epstein’s downfall; the “toxic masculinity” of male mass shooters; the bisexual Cyrus’s marital breakup; and entertainer Julianne Hough’s public announcement that she’s “not straight” — present “a snapshot of 2019 America” which depicts “an American patriarchy on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

Bianco – a columnist at the Women’s Media Center, a nonprofit created by Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and radical activist Robin Morgan to “raise the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women and girls in media” – observes that Cyrus’ separation from actor Liam Hemsworth and her subsequent dalliance with at least one other woman is more significant than just another failed celebrity relationship. It’s “a blow to the patriarchy.” I am skeptical that it was even a blow to Hemsworth, much less to the entire so-called patriarchy, but the collapse of any marriage, no matter how “consciously uncoupled,” is nothing to celebrate.

Bianco approvingly quotes Cyrus’ redefinition of “what a relationship in this generation looks like. Sexuality and gender identity are completely separate from partnership.” Considering that Hemsworth’s and Cyrus’s “partnership” dissolved, perhaps the lesson here is that indulging a trendy sexuality that is at odds with your partner’s isn’t the best way to redefine a relationship – and doesn’t bode well for this generation. Bianco also praises Julianne Hough’s self-empowering revelation to her husband that she’s not straight. Although Hough’s initially-surprised husband seems supportive of her thus far, anyone who thinks a marriage can survive in which the sexuality of one partner is “completely separate” from the other is living in an ideological fantasy utterly divorced (pun intended) from the reality of human nature – which of course, feminism is.

2+2 = White Privilege

 
In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

It’s no secret that leftist educators have utterly ruined the fields of the humanities with their Marxist wokeness, postmodern deconstructionism, and openly anti-Western bias. Now The College Fix reports that educators are increasingly imposing a social justice agenda in at least one field that you might expect would be free from any sort of ideological perspective: mathematics.

Math is often referred to as a universal language because its principles are universally true. Theorems and formulas are equally valid in America and China and Zimbabwe, and equally apolitical. Nothing seems more politically incorruptible than a math equation. What policy is there to debate in 2+2 = 4? How can one take sides over the fact that the area of a rectangle equals its length multiplied by its width? But for the social justice Left, politics is, or should be, as omnipresent as God. No corner of the universe may remain unilluminated in their quest to overturn the flawed existing order, free the oppressed, and rebuild the world according to their utopian vision. There can be no topic of discussion or field of endeavor in which politics is absent or in which neutrality and objective truth reign.

Mathematics is no exception. Having successfully reduced other pursuits of knowledge from the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful to the subversion of the true, the good, and the beautiful, the relentless Left is now taking aim at the methodological bias supposedly inherent in our Eurocentric (read: racist and colonialist) understanding of math. The goal is “math equity,” because there is no more unforgivable iniquity for the Left than, well, inequity.

Is There Any Hope for Western Europe?

Years ago as I was awakening from my long Democrat slumber and educating myself about Islam, one of the most eye-opening books that I read was a 2006 page-turner titled While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within, by a gay American living in Western Europe. Not only was it enlightening, but it made me an instant fan of Bawer’s compelling storytelling. In addition to following his subsequent books such as Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, and even a thriller about Islamic terrorism called The Alhambra, I was fortunate and honored to become friends with Bruce through our mutual work for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Now Bawer has released a new volume with a stark black cover titled Islam: The Essays, a massive collection of well over three hundred of his articles on this crucial subject dating from the fall of 2002 through the summer of 2018. Though he suggests that the reader undertake the book chronologically in order to understand the evolution of his understanding of the topic (“Early on, for instance, I refer to ‘fundamentalist Islam’; soon enough, I drop the word ‘fundamentalist,’ having realized that Islam itself, properly understood, is fundamentalist.”), Bawer is such an engaging, perceptive writer that one can open the book at random to literally any page and find it impossible to stop reading. A chilling chronicle of the Islamization of multicultural Europe over the last 17 years, Islam: The Essays is a must-have for FrontPage Mag readers and for others in need, like I once was, of awareness and insight into the Religion of Peace™.

Bruce Bawer was able to find time to answer a few of my questions about the book and about the Islamization of Europe today.

Mark Tapson:             Bruce, you note in your opening essay that it wasn’t until you moved from your native New York to Western Europe in ’98 that what you then called “fundamentalist” Islam became a daily reality for you. How was that daily reality different, and how long did it take you to fully grasp what the Islamization around you meant for Europe and the West? Was there any particular incident that showed you the writing on the wall?

Colin Kaepernick’s Symbols of Hate

Just in time for Independence Day 2019, sports apparel giant Nike released the Air Max 1 USA shoe, featuring a miniature “Betsy Ross” flag on each heel. This, of course, is the flag with the earliest American colonies represented by thirteen white stars in a circle which, legend has it, Mrs. Ross presented to George Washington himself. But when Nike pitchman Colin Kaepernick, former NFL national anthem protester, got wind of the plan, he complained to Nike that the flag recalls a time when blacks were enslaved. Also, according to a person who reportedly was privy to the conversation, Kaepernick informed Nike that the flag has recently been appropriated by American white supremacists.

Instead of telling Kaepernick, “So what?” and going forward with the patriotic product, Nike sparked controversy by recalling the shoe from retailers and issuing a statement in which it claimed the decision was “based on concerns that it could unintentionally offend and detract from the nation’s patriotic holiday” – a pathetic excuse. If anything detracted from the Independence Day holiday, it was the controversy that erupted over Nike’s choice to offend the patriotic majority of Americans by sending the message that the Betsy Ross flag is a shameful symbol of racial oppression.

On MSNBC, race-huckstering Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson chimed in on Nike’s decision, of which he predictably approved. He claimed that the Betsy Ross flag

hails from the revolutionary period of this nation’s founding which was deeply embroiled in, you know, in enslavement... But also, it’s the recent use of this flag that has been the most opprobrious. Right-wing white supremacists have used it as a rallying cry for their own cause... Right now this flag has been used by people who want to pummel African-Americans, Latinos, Jews and other people, neo-Nazis that want to claim that they have the true copyright on American identity. So why not choose a flag that is representative of everybody? The diversity of identities, ideologies, people of color and mainstream people who exist in this country? That’s the kind of blowback against the use of this particular flag.

The notion that white supremacist groups have appropriated the Betsy Ross flag is ludicrous. They aren’t in a position to appropriate anything unless the American people allow it. There is no more marginalized, politically impotent extremist element in America today than actual white supremacists, who have been hyped by the leftist media complex as a rising Hitlerian tide empowered by President Trump’s purported bigotry. (Meanwhile the media downplays or even covers for actual threats such as the violent Antifa network, human traffickers at our collapsing southern border, and Islamic terrorists). Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said that the ADL does not even include the flag in its database of hate symbols. “It’s not a thing in the white supremacist movement,” Pitcavage asserted. Lisa Moulder, director of the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia, said she has never heard of the flag being used as a hate symbol. Even if random bigots have tried to adopt the Betsy Ross flag, we only empower and legitimize them when we declare that we don’t have the cultural power to stop them from making the flag their own.  

The Crackup of the Israeli Left

In recent weeks the mostly left-leaning news media have published articles about the turbulence of this year’s elections in Israel with such handwringing titles as “Is the Israeli left doomed to marginalisation?,” “The Decline of the Israeli Left,” and “Whatever Happened to the Israeli Left?” But if one really wants to educate oneself deeply and broadly about this shift in the tiny democracy’s political landscape, one can hardly do better than to read Mordechai Nisan’s new book, The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left, published by Mantua Books. In it, Dr. Nisan brilliantly dissects the rise of the Right and the decline of the Left in the Jewish state. To quote from the book cover’s description, it details how “the Left detached its moorings from reality and principle, raised its voice against the Zionist enterprise, and chose surrender to the Arab enemy.”

If anyone is qualified to expound upon Israel’s political and cultural battlegrounds, it’s Mordechai Nisan. Dr. Nisan (with a doctorate in Political Studies from McGill University) has been a teacher and consultant for a number of academic and public institutions in Israel, including Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he taught Middle East Studies for 35 years. Among his many books are Toward a New Israel: The Jewish State and the Arab Question (1992), Only Israel West of the River: The Jewish State and the Palestinian Question (2011), and Politics and War in Lebanon (2015). He has written articles for The Jerusalem Post, Israel National News, Global Affairs, Middle East Journal, and many other publications. He has also been an activist for Jewish settlement in the territories of Judea and Samaria.

Dr. Nisan was kind enough to take time to answer some questions for FrontPage Mag.

Mark Tapson:             You begin your book by describing Israel as “a fable and a myth, but also a Great Truth.” What do you mean by that?

Mortality and Faith

In 1996, David Horowitz published Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, which became the most noted autobiography of political conversion since Whittaker Chambers’ Witness nearly half a century earlier. Like Horowitz himself, the book became and remains a conservative classic.

The founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center passed his 80^th birthday earlier this year and has just released a less political and more meditative autobiographical follow-up to that iconic work: Mortality and Faith: Reflections on a Journey Through Time. This book collects three* of Horowitz’s previous observations on life, death and meaning, titled The End of Time (published in 2005), A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next (2011), and the arrestingly-titled You’re Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story (2015), together with a short concluding chapter fittingly called “Staying Alive.” As Horowitz puts it in the new book’s preface, Mortality and Faith explores the beliefs which we embrace to answer the existential questions of our lives, and how we are impacted by those answers.

Readers who are familiar only with David Horowitz the political firebrand, the political general who preaches a take-no-prisoners strategy to combatting his former comrades on the left, may be surprised to discover that he is capable also of a disarming sensitivity, vulnerability, and personal honesty. He does not flinch from self-criticism nor engage in self-mythologizing, which is refreshing for a public figure, particularly in the arena of politics. Every page of Mortality and Faith is redolent of a battle-scarred wisdom, earnestness, and humility earned from trials and tribulations both public and private.

Though one gets the impression he might have wished otherwise, a belief in God is not a sustaining or consoling worldview for Horowitz. He freely confesses that his philosophy of life and death stem from a melancholic agnosticism. In You’re Going to be Dead One Day he declared that “All questions about death begin with observations that only a religious faith can answer. I have no such faith,” he says, “and therefore my posing of these questions is without a hope that life eternal awaits us where all will become clear.”

The Rage Less Traveled

On December 18, 2010, two female friends – one Christian and the other Jewish - were hiking together in the hills of Jerusalem when they were accosted by a pair of members from a Palestinian terror cell. Both women were bound and hacked with machetes until the Christian, Kristine Luken, was dead and the other seemingly so.

But in an incredible display of a bottomless will to live, Kay Wilson – with thirteen machete wounds, a crushed sternum, multiple rib fractures, bone splinters in her lungs, a dislocated shoulder and broken shoulder blade – got up and walked over a mile barefoot, bound, and bleeding until she reached help. She survived to testify against her assailants in court. The reason the pair was caught was that Wilson had managed to stab one in the groin with a penknife during the assault, and investigators linked him to the DNA in his blood on her clothing. The two monsters, who were convicted of other crimes as well, including stabbing another Jewish woman to death earlier that same year, were imprisoned for life.

The Rage Less Traveled: A Memoir of Surviving a Machete Attack is Kay Wilson’s relentlessly gripping, intensely personal story. You can find it on Amazon here (and here on audiobook) where the book has racked up dozens of exclusively 5-star reviews. Simultaneously raw and poetic, transcendent and unsentimental, The Rage Less Traveled is not a predictable book about learning to forgive your attackers or seeking interfaith dialogue with members of a Jew-hating ideology. The book acknowledges that evil exists and that there can be no coexistence with it. It is a story about the tortuous road through survival into the light. As Wilson said in her 2019 AIPAC address, “My story is Israel’s story.”

Ms. Wilson kindly agreed to answer some questions about the book and her shocking experience.

Mark Tapson:           You wrote that the media’s initial explanation for the attack on you and your friend Kristine Luken was that it was in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of a Hamas commander. But what was the real reason?

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

In this recent video clip from a news channel’s interview with 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, it is clear that the young girl has no special insight to offer, only canned platitudes (“If everyone does something, huge changes can happen”). And yet the older male interviewer fawns over his teenage subject as if she is a credible, informed expert and a wise Cassandra whose dire warning we ignore at our peril. He does so not in spite of her youth, but precisely because of it. Why? Because the leftist media, and the left generally, love propping up gullible, politically indoctrinated children as authoritative mouthpieces to promote their agendas.

Swedish schoolgirl Thunberg attracted worldwide media attention at age 15 for her activism against weather, and is now the deadly serious face of the left’s climate change hysteria. Recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, Thunberg is following in the carbon footprints of environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez who, at the age of 15, entreated the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 to take action against purportedly human-caused climate change.

After the Parkland school shooting in Florida on Valentine’s Day, 2018, student activists David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez (pictured above), 17 and 18 respectively at the time, were ubiquitous in the media coverage about the atrocity – not because their thoughts on the incident were any more insightful than those of any of their fellow students, but because of their forceful calls for stricter gun control and their eagerness to demonize the hated National Rifle Association. Parkland students who didn’t take a strong anti-gun stance quickly found themselves ignored by the news media. Hogg, whose bumper-sticker mentality proved to be no barrier to getting into Harvard, shot to prominence overnight as the face of the gun confiscation movement in America.

Jazz Jennings, born male in 2000, was only six years old when he began making television appearances – including an interview with Barbara Walters – to discuss his gender dysphoria. He went on to become the media darling of transgender activism, with his own reality TV show about transgender teen drama and his gender reassignment surgery. Similarly disturbing, child drag performer Desmond is Amazing has been the young, garishly made-up face of LGBTQ activism for years, celebrated as a trailblazer on national talk shows and in gay pride parades. He is only eleven.

The American President

In a campaign rally in South Carolina recently, presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg became the latest in a growing number of Democrat leaders who feel that disparaging America is necessary to inspire their base and prove their ideological bona fides. Taking issue with President Donald Trump’s triggering slogan “Make America Great Again,” Buttigieg declared that the America Trump “wants to return us to was never as great as advertised.” Something about the notion of American exceptionalism simply infuriates the left. Trump was savvy enough to realize his MAGA slogan would expose that anti-Americanism and would rally patriotic Americans to his side. One of the principal reasons Trump is sitting in the White House is “that he re-instilled in the common man that sacred presumption that the United States was, and still remains, an exceptional nation blessed by God.”

That quote is from New York Times #1 bestselling author Larry Schweikart’s brand new book, a biography of an American icon – Ronald Reagan, and actually refers to the book’s subject, not Trump. But like Trump, Reagan swept into the presidency in the wake of one of America’s worst presidents by appealing to a yearning to make this country great again.

At nearly 550 pages (including endnotes), Reagan: The American President, from Post Hill Press, is a weighty tome but a page-turning read about the beloved leader whose administration wasn’t perfect, but whose “magnificent, world-changing successes” included “defeating the Soviet Union, putting communist ideology on the road to extinction, and reviving a moribund American economy.”

The prolific historian Schweikart’s previous works include 48 Liberal Lies About American History and A Patriot’s History of the United States (co-written with Michael Allen), the best antidote to the radical Howard Zinn’s corrosive, anti-American work The People’s History of the United States, which has infiltrated virtually every schoolroom in America. Dr. Schweikart kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his new biography of the man many conservatives consider the great American president of the 20^th century, and some the greatest of all time.

Mark Tapson:           What did you want to say about Ronald Reagan that sets your book apart from his many other biographies?

Hollywood Begins Eating its Own

For decades Hollywood, along with academia, has been one of the two prime movers of cultural Marxism in America: promoting leftist causes and narratives, undermining traditional morality and social structures, and rewriting history. Increasingly, showbiz is now being choked by its own wokeness – just as our universities are – as the social justice whiners have inevitably begun to turn on their own.

Hollywood is floundering. This past Easter weekend at the box office was the worst in more than a decade. The big studios with their mega-budget franchises (where would Hollywood be today without Marvel Comics?) increasingly have to resort to overseas profits to keep afloat. Showbiz awards shows, which have degenerated into self-congratulatory displays of anti-Trump virtue-signaling, have been failing spectacularly, posting record low ratings year after year. Trump Derangement Syndrome has caused celebs to publicly double down on their contempt for all those unwoke Americans in the flyover states, pushing audiences farther away than ever before. Meanwhile, independent flicks like Gosnell and Unplanned aimed at underserved conservative audiences are succeeding despite media blackouts and social media subversion.

Instead of engaging in some serious self-examination and concentrating on projects that might win back the American heartland moviegoer, establishment Hollywood is now preoccupied with proving its commitment to identity-politics ideology. Enforcing diversity of gender and skin color (but not of worldview) in all the “above-the-line” fields (acting, directing, producing, showrunning, etc.) has become the dominant consideration in the entertainment realm now. Actress Brie Larson, for example, says playing superheroine Captain Marvel is “my form of activism”; she has has spent almost every minute of her movie promotions slamming “white male critics” and speechifying about gender equality. “Oscars are so not white this year,” CNN announced after a record number of non-white actors won awards in the 2019 ceremony. Deadline declared ecstatically that “Diversity was one of the biggest winners.”

Like all totalitarian environments, Hollywood is also purging itself internally of anyone deemed insufficiently woke. Likeable, nonpartisan comedian Kevin Hart, for example, was pushed out of hosting this year’s Academy Awards show because of a ten-year-old “homophobic” tweet. Actress Roseanne Barr was famously removed from her own show and denounced as a racist for joking that Iranian-born, Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett resembled a character from Planet of the Apes. And the industry which never tires of making movies condemning the Communist-era blacklist has taken up a blacklist in support of the search-and-destroy #MeToo movement. Showbiz hypocrites who slandered Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a rapist yet who knowingly covered for, if not engaged in, decades of systemic sexual predation are now demonstrating they #BelieveAllWomen by shunning the suspects among them, even over unconfirmed accusations.

Apocali Now!

Never mind Islamic terrorism, illegals flooding our border, the rise of MS-13, and the opioid crisis – all the Democrat presidential candidates agree that “climate change” is the most imminent, terrifying threat facing America and the world. As their Party’s rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it recently, the world will end in twelve years if we don't address it.

Well, Evan Sayet has addressed it in a new book and his conclusion is that the Chicken Littles of the left have been whipping up one environmental hysteria after another for over 50 years (none of the dire predictions of which has ever come to pass) and they're at it again. The openly-conservative comedian and philosopher Sayet is perhaps best-known as the author of the enlightening and entertaining must-read titled The KinderGarden of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks, expanded from a must-watch 2007 Heritage Foundation speech that has garnered over 770,000 views on YouTube as of this writing.

Sayet’s newest work is Apocali Now!, a faux children’s book illustrated by nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist A.F. Branco. The book humorously skewers the left’s perpetual fear-mongering about environmental apocalypses, but also manages to touch on their science denial, hypocrisy, totalitarianism – even the mainstream media’s “fake news.”

I asked my friend Evan some questions about the book and more.

Mark Tapson:    Let’s begin with your choice of medium. Why did you decide to take on the left’s “sky is falling” frenzies in a cartoon format?

Evan Sayet:     It was quite by accident. I was writing my next book, tentatively titled Countering Culture: The Left’s War Against All That Is Human, and I began to address all of the fake environmental disasters the Leftist media and others have employed through the years that not only failed to be the catastrophe that they, with their “authority,” swore they would be, but, in fact, barely materialized at all, and suddenly I found it all so ludicrous I was singing it to myself.

MT:        How did you hook up with A.F. Branco as your illustrator?

ES:         Well “hook up” has a whole different meaning these days so I want to make it clear that I have never hooked up with Tony. But, obviously, if this was going to look like a children’s book, I needed an illustrator and, if one needs an illustrator, one of the very first phone calls one makes is to A.F. Branco.

The fact that he instantly signed on meant two things to me. One, that I’d have someone who would make all of my pointed jokes only that much stronger and, two, given how in-demand he is, the fact that he committed to this project without hesitation made it undeniable to me that I wasn’t alone in seeing how important a project Apocali Now! is.

Why Calling America ‘Great’ Triggers the Left

When then-presidential candidate Donald Trump seized upon the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again,” he could not have more shrewdly marked the battle line where the election and the next four years of his term would be fought. Resonating with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan “Let's make America great again,” “MAGA” was perfectly calculated to galvanize Americans on the right who were fed up with eight years of predecessor Barack Obama apologizing for our country, denying American exceptionalism, alienating our allies, and empowering our enemies. It also was the perfect phrase with which to expose the seething hatred leftists feel for this country and its supporters. Trump won the election, no matter what the sore losers of both left and right insist, and two and a half years after he was swept into the White House by heartland patriots (which is exactly why the coastal elites want to eliminate the electoral college), his slogan continues to trigger the rage and animosity of America-haters.

For example: last week in an interview with MSNBC, a question about American greatness prompted a rant from Obama-era attorney general Eric Holder. "I hear these things about 'Let’s make America great again' and I think to myself, ‘Exactly when did you think America was great’?” he said on the network. “It certainly wasn’t when people were enslaved. It certainly wasn’t when women didn’t have the right to vote. It certainly wasn’t when the LGBT community was denied the rights to which it was entitled…

“You know, America has done superb things,” Holder continued. “It has done great things. And it has been a leader in you know, a whole range of things. But we are always a work in process and… looking back, ‘Make America Great Again’ is inconsistent with who we are as Americans at our best where we look at the uncertain future, embrace it and make it our own.”

The rant was a direct shot at Trump, his MAGA slogan, and American citizens who believe in this country’s exceptionalism. It highlighted the fundamental divide between the leftists who are determined to override human nature in pursuit of their utopian vision of human perfectibility, and conservatives who understand that people are fallen beings who can be both flawed and great. For the left, on the other hand, Americans cannot be great because we aren’t yet perfect; not only that, we aren’t merely imperfect but evil because we came by our unparalleled power and prosperity through the exploitation and oppression of others. Thus, we will never be truly great until we atone for those sins by diminishing our greatness.