PATRICE GREANVILLE—Hitchens is at his debunking best on this video exposé, apparently from the time when he was still playing on the Left camp (real old left, not the WOKE left of today). Overall, everything he says here is bankable, except for his gratuitous detour and cheap shot at Albania’s Enver Hoxa, which shows that he was at best a left liberal anticommunist, but no formulated revolutionist.
-
-
GROVER FURR—n the January – February 2023 issue of Current Affairs there appears an article titled “Stalin Will Never Be Redeemable/” Its subtitle reads: Stalin was socialism’s worst enemy. History is easily forgotten, so nostalgia for the “Man of Steel” needs to be guarded against. A person who knows of my long interest in Joseph Stalin and the “Stalin years” of Soviet history alerted me to this article when it appeared online. He wondered what my response to Skopic’s accusations against Stalin might be.
I have been studying the Stalin period of Soviet history for many years now I decided to write a response to Skopic’s article because it is a brief compendium of many of the allegations made against Stalin not only by overtly pro-capitalist and anticommunist writers, but by persons who are, or wish to be, or think that they are, on the anti-capitalist Left. -
RT—The battle for Artyomovsk – a major stronghold and logistics hub for Kiev’s forces in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) – has been underway for months, being described by some as the fiercest in the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Earlier this week, Russian officials said the encirclement of the city had almost been completed and reported heavy street battles inside it.
-
SABBY SABS—Sabby discusses the expanding protests in France, now engulfing most cities, large and small, and showing no sign of disbanding. The French are clearly setting an example that Americans, in particular, show follow. Democracies, as Jefferson warned, need periodic rebellion, or vigorous protests, and certainly an alert citizenry to survive.
-
BRUCE LERRO—In cross-cultural psychology, the major world divisions are between the West and the East. But what about Russia? Is it closer culturally to Europe or to China and India? As you will find out in this article, the answer is neither. Absence of a bourgeois spirit, specialization, rationalism or empiricism in Russia. For political and economic reasons, I disagree with Nicholas Berdyaev’s characterization of the Russian “soul” as conflicted spiritually between Dionysian paganism and ascetism or politically between anarchism and despotism. However, what Berdyaev is right about is that Russians are not bourgeois.
