The End of Soviet Communism

Here is an excellent post about the beginning of the end of Soviet communism. This particular post puts that starting point not in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in 1956, when Krushchev gave a speech about the horrors perpetrated by Stalin. I don't know whether or not this view would be substantiated by mainstream historians, but I enjoyed it anyway.

I loved this comment about lefties, though:

I was a radical leftist in the '60's when I woke up to the realization that our own homegrown Left/Liberals are of exactly the same ilk as the Soviets and ChiComs. Remember the shock and awe when Alexander Solzhenytsin got "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago" published? I'll never forget the look on the faces of my com-symp friends when they read, or even heard word of, those works. These people are festering and fulminating here at home, even as we speak, as I think all of you are aware. They're disguised now as Environmentalists, Progressives, and New Agers, but there are many subsets, too.

I suspect this is a latent disease, like cancer, that has always lurked in the human psyche: The mob that brought down the Roman Republic; the hierarchy of the Catholic Church - which brought on the Protestant Reformation; the "levelers" of Cromwell's England; the Directory of the French Revolution; Karl Marx's loyal followers; the 'Wobblies' here in America; and so on.

Any mass of people who have looked inside themselves and seen only a gaping chasm of emptiness (no talents, no conscience, no empathy) will come to believe that violent theft from productive members of society is the only path for their survival. So they believe, and they may be correct, that they won't survive without a scheme, or scam, or a hybrid of the two: a customized religion, just for them.

As I've said before, lefties never let facts get in the way.