By Peter Barry Chowka
Author of new book claims USSR represented good guys during & after World War II.
You can’t make this stuff up. After four years of the American Left, and Democrats, arguing that post-Communist Russia is our #1 mortal enemy – responsible for colluding with Donald Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign – a stunning new spin has emerged, thanks to a new book published last week and an article about it at a leading Leftist Web site.
The title of a feature article Tuesday in The Daily Beast by the author of the new book is bad enough: “9 Reasons to Thank the USSR: How We Got the Cold War Wrong.” As anti-Communist historian and author Diana West tweeted about it, “Can’t recall reading anything more appalling on more levels.” The Beast is appalling enough on a daily basis, alright, but this article and the book it summarizes should scare the living daylights out of every patriot out there.
The 800-word article, and the 512-page book it is drawn from, Someone Is Out to Get Us: A Not So Brief History of Cold War Paranoia and Madness, are by Brian T. Brown. At his Twitter, Brown – big surprise: he’s not a friend of President Trump or conservatives – describes himself as a “Bumbling but devoted adventurer in dark alleys of American paranoia.”
In the Daily Beast, Brown (hold on to your hat) offers an entirely new radical left revisionist reboot on the West’s Cold War with the Soviet Union on the 30th anniversary this month of the fall of the Berlin Wall:
It was a conflict suffused with fear, paranoia, and a whole lot of lies. This means much of what many of us learned in school about the struggle between the U.S. and USSR was very, very wrong.
Here’s the first buried truth. We fired the first shot. Harry Truman rushed to drop the atom bomb to end the war in Japan to prevent the Soviets from joining the battle in the Pacific. Joseph Stalin got the message. The nuclear arms race was underway.
But our enemy, the so-called evil empire, was really a figment of our fevered imaginations.
Brown’s article, let us say, goes further downhill from there, as he asks:
What would the Cold War have been like if, during history class, American kids learned that the world forever owed a debt of gratitude to Soviet forces and Soviet citizens? Their remarkable resilience saved democracy as much as did George Patton and Iwo Jima.
He then cites “nine reasons why we should’ve thanked the Russians after World War II instead of engaging them in a decades-long Cold War.” Reason #5:
THE REAL MENACE: Joseph McCarthy barely believed a word he said and found zero communists in government roles.
In response, Diana West tweeted a link to M. Stanton Evans’ 2014 article at Breitbart, “McCarthyism By the Numbers.” West’s tweet included a screen shot of a list of fifty names of Americans who, Evans wrote, included:
Suspects named by McCarthy, his aides, or before his committee; identified in sworn testimony, FBI archives, or other official security records as Communists or Soviet agents; or took the Fifth Amendment when asked about such matters.
Rather than quote any more of Brian T. Brown’s “reasons,” interested readers are directed to his article.
Brian T. Brown: The enemy is us
Leaving no doubt about the essence of Brown’s revisionist spin, a summary of his book at Amazon explains:
Someone Is Out to Get Us is the true and complete account of a long-misunderstood period of history during which lies, conspiracies, and paranoia led Americans into a state of madness and misunderstanding, too distracted by fictions to realize that the real enemy was looking back at them in the mirror the whole time.
The revisionist history represented by Brown’s article, and presumably at much greater length in his book which was published in hardcover on November 5, seems absurd. However, one needs to keep in mind that this kind of “history” is now the status quo party line being taught at a majority of American colleges and universities. It’s this fact that helps to explain why recent surveys, like this annual poll in 2019 by YouGov/Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, have found that “Young Americans continue to lose faith in capitalism and embrace socialism.” Summarizing the survey, Axiosreported on Oct. 28:
19% of millennials and 12% of Gen Z said they thought the Communist Manifesto “better guarantees freedom and equality for all” than the Declaration of Independence.
The title of the Axios article, “70% of millennials say they’d vote for a socialist,” seems ripped from the headlines as we see many if not most of the Democrat Party’s leading 2020 presidential wannabes lurch increasingly to the radical left in order to satisfy their party’s socialist/communist-loving base.
The “bottom line” conclusion of the Axios article seems like an understatement: “Young people’s political views often change as they grow older, but their support for socialist ideas and leaders is a sign that the old rules of politics are changing fast.”
Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Peter’s website is http://peter.media. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.
By Peter Barry Chowka
“The idea that (Trump) was in cahoots with Moscow, ridiculous.” — Vladimir Bukovsky 2019
Vladimir Bukovsky, the most famous surviving anti-communist Soviet dissident, has passed away. The sad news broke almost simultaneously early Sunday evening EDT in a tweet from journalist Diana West at 6:07 PM and in a news release emailed by Elizabeth Childs of the Bukovsky Center at 6:34 PM. This reporter was also one of the first to report the news on Twitter at 7:11 PM EDT on Sunday October 27th.
In poor health in recent years, Bukovsky, age 76, according to Childs had died of cardiac arrest at Addenbrookes Hospital near his home in Cambridge, England on Sunday evening at 9:30 PM local time in the UK.
In the 24 hours following Bukovsky’s death, his passing was taken note of in feature articles and obituaries by most of the world’s major media, including the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian.
Bukovsky had lived in the West since he was traded for a Chilean communist in a swap in Zurich in 1976. Before his release to freedom, he had spent a dozen years locked up in the old Soviet Union in prisons, gulags, and mental institutions.
The announcement of Bukovsky’s death emailed by Childs, and posted as an obituary at the Bukovsky Center’s Web site, summarized his life as a dissident in the Soviet Union and his achievements since his departure from the USSR in 1976:
A leading Russian human rights writer and activist, Bukovsky spent a total of 12 years imprisoned by the USSR. After his release to the West in 1976, he spent his last four decades writing and campaigning against successive regimes in his homeland.
Bukovsky first gained notoriety as a student writer and organizer in Moscow. In 1963, he was arrested for possessing forbidden literature. Rather than put him on trial, Soviet authorities had him declared mentally ill and locked him in a psychiatric hospital — a common tactic used in the USSR to discredit dissenters and confine them without appearing to be holding political prisoners. He was arrested again in 1967 and sent to a labor camp for three years.
After his release, Bukovsky created an international uproar when he had psychiatric hospital records for six well-known dissidents smuggled to the West in 1971. International psychiatrists’ organizations studied the records and charged Soviet doctors and the government with creating false diagnoses as a way to indefinitely detain possibly thousands of political opponents who showed no medically recognized symptoms of mental illness.
A gifted writer, Bukovsky was revered for his ability to document both the daily insults and grand oppression of Soviet prison life, and to convey with detail the soul-crushing effects of torture on both prisoner and jailer.
In 2019, one of Bukovsky’s most substantive works, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, was finally published in English in the United States for the first time by Ninth of November Press. It had been scheduled for publication in the U.S. in the 1990s, but never came out. Meanwhile, it was published in England and a number of European countries including, ironically, Russia. The book is based on internal Soviet era documents that Bukovsky got his hands on and managed to copy and smuggle out of Russia when he visited the former USSR under Boris Yelstsin’s post-communist regime in the early 1990s. The 2019 English language version of Judgment in Moscow brought renewed attention to Bukovsky, and he was interviewed at length earlier this year by several leading American journalists, including Celia Farber, who wrote two extensive articles for the Epoch Times, one of them a Q & A that she had on the phone with Bukovsky.
Farber’s articles (here and here), and three lengthy interviews with Bukovsky by Jay Nordlinger published in the National Review (here, here, and here), really need to be read in their entirety to get a full appreciation of the richness in experience and analysis of this man who never sold out his principles.
Asked about the left’s ongoing charges of collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump, Bukovsky told Farber:
Mind you, the idea that he was initially somehow in cahoots with Moscow, ridiculous. I mean he is doing his thing, with some limitations in his understanding of Russia. But calling him a Moscow agent is ridiculous. You might like or dislike him. He has strong character, not very critical of himself, and so forth, but to suggest that he is Moscow’s agent is absolutely ridiculous. . . The president is limited by legislation, by Congress, by whatever. It’s not in his power to change the course of the country as much as they suggest. The president is only an executive officer and that’s it.
Following the news of Bukovsky’s death, journalist Diana West immediately employed her prolific Twitter account to share her thoughts about Bukovsky in a series of incisive tweets and an appreciation of him posted at her Web site. West wrote:
How do we mark the consequence and courage of such an extraordinary man who chose to lead his life in outspoken opposition to evil, who chose to sacrifice years of his life in Soviet labor camps and psychiatric hospitals rather than submit to communist slavery?
In many ways, Diana West is a Western intellectual counterpart to Bukovsky. Her scholarship, especially in her 2013 book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character and more recently in The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, has shed considerable new light on the decades-long collusion between many influential political and cultural leaders of the United States and the old Soviet Union. As Farber concluded after speaking with Bukovsky:
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, it turns out, was correct, but was the wrong messenger, and wound up derailing the cause of anti-communist awareness for half a century.
For more information, the Bukovsky Center Web site, run by volunteers, has been updated with news of Bukovsky’s passing and will be an ongoing source of information.
A two-minute film clip of a clandestine 1970 video interview with Bukovsky in a park outside Moscow, with the caption “The man on camera [Bukovsky] risks his life by speaking,” has been posted as a memoriam to him at YouTube here. It is highly recommended viewing.
As I wrote in an email of condolence to my friend Elizabeth Childs of the Bukovsky Center:
The death of someone who I respect, even if I never met him, usually stops me in my tracks, occasions deep thoughts, and is ultimately rather depressing. . . When you think of what Bukovsky lived through, and survived, it really is astonishing. Re-reading his 2019 interviews Sunday, it was so clear that his perspective today was grounded in a life of truly amazing and unique experiences and was so valuable.
[An earlier version of this article was originally published at American Thinker on October 28, 2019.]
Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Peter’s website is http://peter.media. Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.
By Peter Barry Chowka
Although Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsements of far-left socialist Democratic Party candidates in Tuesday’s (August 7th) primary elections had mixed results, the 28-year-old darling of the Democratic Socialists of America and the mainstream media is still plotting her strategy for the critically important November Congressional elections that are now less than three months away.
The strategy of Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades is to keep the pressure on the Democratic Party to continue its hard left turn towards socialism – which is really Marxism, as my new article online today at The Epoch Times concludes.
The article’s title is The Democratic Socialists of America Are Coming: Do They Represent America’s Future? It’s my fifth article since July 12th published at The Epoch Times.
The article includes some exclusive quotes from Diana West, the distinguished author of American Betrayal and other books and a nationally syndicated columnist. Diana West has been a guest on The Hagmann Report program, most recently on July 31st (click here for video). I received an email from Ms. West with her replies to several questions I had asked her shortly before my weekly appearance on The Hagmann Report on Monday, August 6th and I read portions of her comments on the program, including these lines.
Diana West: “It’s quite clear to me that DSA is communist and Marxist both — and ‘progressive’ and Alinskyite and Fabian as well — in the sense that all of these groups and factions seek to remake America according to the same socialist, centrally planned, varyingly totalitarian vision, all of them creating the kind of tyranny that our Founding Fathers would have had to declare independence from all over again.
“While differences in tactics or presentation may absorb these Marx-influenced groups themselves, even pit them against each, such differences amount to little as far as anti-communists should be concerned. All of these groups pay homage to Marx; thus, they all pose existential threats to liberty, religion, tradition, free markets.”
To read my entire 1,100 word article without charge at The Epoch Times, The Democratic Socialists of America Are Coming: Do They Represent America’s Future? please click here.
Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. During the past year, he has been a frequent contributor to American Thinker. His articles are now appearing in The Epoch Times. Every Monday at 9 PM ET, Peter offers political and media analysis live on The Hagmann Report.Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.
