OrthodoxNet.com Blog

American Thinker | James Lewis | Oct. 15, 2008

Bill Ayers said in 1995 that he was just a “small ‘c’ communist.” He said it with a little laugh. And most of us aren’t even shocked. We’ve heard words like that before. But we should feel shivers running up our spines.

I know goofy liberals who moan about all the good intentions demonstrated by Karl Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. They’re all Obama voters, for some reason. They are the same kinds of people who think Jesus was a communist, and that George W. Bush is Hitler. They are often the kind of people who try desperately to be completely nice in their lives, especially to designated victims. But often they harbor a belly full of rage — against conservatives, or big corporations, or fundamentalist Christians, or anybody who challenges their belief in their own saintliness.

In basic politics there are only two numbers you need to know. One is Six Million. You know what that means. The other number is not nearly as well-known, but it should be. It’s One Hundred Million. Continue Reading »

New York Post | Charles Hurt | Oct. 15, 2008

You won’t find it in his campaign ads, but Barack Obama let slip his plans to become a modern-day Robin Hood in the White House, confiscating money from the rich to give to the poor.

Conservatives yesterday ripped Obama after he was caught on video telling an Ohio plumber that he intends to take the profits of small-business owners and “spread the wealth around” to those with lesser incomes.

The fracas over Obama’s tax plan broke out Sunday outside Toledo when Joe Wurzelbacher approached the candidate. Wurzelbacher said he planned to become the owner of a small plumbing business that will take in more than the $250,000 amount at which Obama plans to begin raising tax rates. “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” the blue-collar worker asked. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | James Lewis | Aug. 13, 2008

“Everything must be different!” or “Alles muss anders sein!” was a slogan of the Nazi Party. It is also the heart’s desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism was a deeply revolutionary creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it’s true. Hitler and his criminal gang hated the rich, the capitalists, the Jews, the Christian Churches, and “the System”. They went through their Leftist phase early in life, and then went on to discover Aryan racial purity as their beau ideal. (As a swarthy Italian, Mussolini preferred to appeal to ancient Roman imperial glory).

Nazism was hatched in the same little intellectual cafes as a myriad of Leftwing ideologies, like social-democracy, anarchism, the Socialist Workers’ Party, Trotskyism, Proudhonism, the lot. Peter Viereck writing in 1941 saw fascism’s origins clearly. In the back streets of European cities you can still find the local anarchist or Leninist storefront, with old guys wearing 1900 laborer’s caps and big mustaches, and fierce revolutionary posters of Lenin tacked on the walls. You can also find them in Berkeley, California. Continue Reading »

FrontPageMagazine | Dennis Prager | Aug. 19, 2008

We are constantly reminded about the destructive consequences of religion — intolerance, hatred, division, inquisitions, persecutions of “heretics,” holy wars. Though far from the whole story, they are, nevertheless, true. There have been many awful consequences of religion.

What one almost never hears described are the deleterious consequences of secularism — the terrible developments that have accompanied the breakdown of traditional religion and belief in God. For every thousand students who learn about the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials, maybe two learn to associate Gulag, Auschwitz, The Cultural Revolution, and the Cambodian genocide with secular regimes and ideologies. Continue Reading »

McClatchy Newspapers | Les Blumenthal | Aug. 29, 2008

Scientists fear impact of Asian pollutants on U.S. - From 500 miles in space, satellites track brown clouds of dust, soot and other toxic pollutants from China and elsewhere in Asia as they stream across the Pacific and take dead aim at the western U.S.

A fleet of tiny, specially equipped unmanned aerial vehicles, launched from an island in the East China Sea 700 or so miles downwind of Beijing , are flying through the projected paths of the pollution taking chemical samples and recording temperatures, humidity levels and sunlight intensity in the clouds of smog.

On the summit of 9,000-foot Mt. Bachelor in central Oregon and near sea level at Cheeka Peak on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula , monitors track the pollution as it arrives in America. Continue Reading »

FrontPageMagazine.com | Barry Loberfeld | Aug. 13, 2008

For defenders of the Constitution, the free market, and individual liberty, no single issue has thus far proved more defeating – on both the intellectual and electoral battlefields – than that of poverty. It has handed one unearned (and by no means inevitable) victory after another to the unconstitutional statism of collectivist liberals.

The conquest of poverty (to borrow the title of Henry Hazlitt’s classic) requires just two weapons: wealth and compassion. So the only real question is: Who can better provide these – civil society (”the market”) or the political state?

The answer as it regards wealth has now been settled: “[C]apitalism has won,” conceded left-aligned economic historian Robert Heilbroner in 1989. “Socialism,” conversely, “has been a great tragedy this century.” Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Paul Kengor | Aug. 10, 2008

In a tribute I wrote earlier, posted at National Review, I noted that it is impossible to capture in one column what Solzhenitsyn meant, experienced, and how he went about translating it to the West. Professors like me know such frustration well, as we struggle to fully convey the impact of such a man to a classroom of students born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In my earlier piece, I talked about The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s shocking firsthand account of the Soviet forced-labor-camp system, where he himself had been held captive, and where tens of millions of innocents perished. In a disturbing way, that book may have made Solzhenitsyn the most significant of all Russian writers, quite a prize when one considers the caliber of the company. Continue Reading »

Acton.org | John Couretas | Aug. 6, 2008

The world justly celebrates the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a great man whose work and witness seems most aptly summed up in a single word: prophetic. But, as prophets are in a habit of doing, he made some people feel the needle who were sure they didn’t deserve it. This was especially so for Western liberals who, in the eyes of Solzhenitsyn, were indifferent to — if not supportive of — communist oppression. Continue Reading »

Wall Street Opinion Journal | Robert Conquest | August 8, 2005

Those of us who had long been concerned to expose and resist Stalinism, in the West as in the USSR, learned much from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I met him in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1974, soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union — the result of his novel, “The Gulag Archipelago,” being published in Paris. He was personally pleasant; I have a photograph of the two of us, he holding a Russian edition of my book, “The Great Terror,” with evident approbation. He asked if I would translate a “little” poem of his. Of course I agreed. Continue Reading »

The Times | Tony Halpin

Last struggle is over for Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He was the conscience of a nation whose writings exposed the horrors of the Communist Gulag and galvanised Russian opposition to the tyranny of the Soviet Union.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s long struggle for his beloved Russia ended last night at his home in Moscow, 14 years after he had returned in triumph from exile imposed by the Soviet regime that he had helped to bring down. His son Stepan said that the Nobel laureate had suffered heart failure, aged 89.

The former dissident had been in failing health for some years. He lived long enough to be fêted by a Kremlin that had once condemned him to slave labour. The former Russian president, Vladimir Putin, once a KGB officer, travelled to Solzhenitsyn’s home to present him with the State Prize for humanitarian achievement last year, thanking him for “all your work for the good of Russia”. Continue Reading »

WorldNetDaily | Craige McMillan | July 24, 2008

Communist government officials always loved communism – because they never experienced it. Apparently the same is true of Democrat officials preparing for the “I’m a progressive, not a communist” lovefest in Denver, Colo. Consumers in the mile high city pay 40.4 cents per gallon to the state and feds for each gallon they extract at the gas pumps. Unless, of course, they are Democrat muckety-mucks zipping around Denver in their free (provided by General Motors) cars, which have been filling up at city pumps to evade gasoline taxes. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Rick Moran | July 19, 2008

Ever wonder (in your worst nightmares) what it might be like to live in a totalitarian state like China?

This is the kind of power government has in the Communist country - they are shutting down a modern city in order to cut pollution levels for the Olympics: Continue Reading »

American Thinker | J.R. Dunn | July 15, 2008

It’s difficult to avoid exasperation over the left’s absolute refusal to acknowledge the new realities of the Iraq war. The surge, the Anbar awakening, the collapse of the militias (particularly that belonging to everybody’s favorite would-be caliph, Moqtada al-Sadr) — it’s as if none of it ever happened, as if one the most impressive turnabouts in modern military annals never took place.

The left, including its Democratic political wing and placeholders in the media, continue on with the same defeatist drone that we’ve heard since 2003, concentrating on lone (and mercifully rare) suicide bombers, emphasizing Coalition casualties, and highlighting the new government’s difficulties. Continue Reading »

FrontPageMag | Jamie Weinstein | July 9, 2008

“One day, I discovered three kernels of corn in a small pile of cow dung, picked them up and cleaned them with my sleeve before eating,” says Shin In-kun at www.northkoreanrefugees.com. “As miserable as it may seem, that was my lucky day.”

You may be asking yourself in what twisted world could that revolting story be considered a lucky day? Welcome to North Korea. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Paul Kengor | Jun. 13, 2008

Since literally the founding of the American Communist Party in 1919, the extreme left — specifically, the communists — have relied upon genuine liberals to be dupes, or suckers, to help further their cause. Here’s how it typically worked: the communists would engage in some sort of work or agenda, very focused, and which they would be prepared to publicly deny. Anyone who has done any work with or on communists, from New York City to Moscow, can speak at length about how they operated with deceit. As Vladimir Lenin had said, in a favorite quote cited often by Ronald Reagan, the only morality that communists recognized was that which furthered their interests. Continue Reading »

Investor’s Business Daily | Jun. 2, 2008

In a commencement speech at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama advised graduates not to pursue the American dream of success. Ivy League graduates who live in big homes can be selfish, you know.

President Kennedy once spoke of a rising tide that would lift all boats. Obama wants us to pull into shore and tie them to a dock. Worse than that, a disturbing pattern of rhetoric indicates he will not only counsel a draconian lifestyle, but also mandate it. Continue Reading »

Investor’s Business Daily | May. 28, 2008

Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda and his FARC terrorist group died long before he did last March 26. That’s because Colombians now embrace free markets over terror. So why is Congress still halting free trade? Continue Reading »

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American Thinker | James Lewis | May. 23, 2008

Today, for the first time in American history we have two — count ‘em, two — hard-core Leftists running for the Democrat Party nomination. The Left hasn’t had this kind of chance for power since Truman defeated Henry Wallace in 1948. Hillary and Obama are Marx twins who only differ in race and gender.

All the media tell us is how great it is to have a woman and a black man running for president. What those two really believe, where they learned their quasi-religion, where they derive their support, who else they want to raise to power, and what they will do if they get there — all that doesn’t even get discussed. All over the world, Leftist hearts are leaping at Hillarybama. What exciting progress! Continue Reading »

OrthodoxNet.com | Craig Yates | Apr. 22, 2008

In recognition of Earth Day, there is an excellent article in the BBC News today which reveals the real agenda behind the global warming movement, which is the abolishment of capitalism. Continue Reading »