This may be the funniest book about Lenin ever published, a generalization difficult to prove because there have been thousands of books about Lenin in hundreds of languages.
Peter Kornbluh, William Burr and Tom Blanton (eds)
National Security Archive
The historical record documents the darker side of Kissinger’s controversial tenure in power: his role in the overthrow of democracy and the rise of dictatorship in Chile; disdain for human rights; support for dirty, and even genocidal, wars abroad..
Bernd Gehrke is critical of those in the peace movement and left who dismissed the threat of invasion coming from Russia - a failure to understand the genesis of today’s Russian capitalism and its emergence from Soviet-era party bureaucracy.
It is important for us to rethink the usual categories, including «defense of the Motherland,» clearing them of militarism. It is worth defending the Motherland first of all from poverty, violence, war, corrupt politicians and unscrupulous capital.
Sergei Prokofiev died 70 years ago today, overshadowed by the death of Joseph Stalin, who had banned much of his work. But Prokofiev’s brilliant musical compositions have outlived him and still sound fresh and exciting to modern listeners.
A top-down society is extremely brittle. Vertical control is easier; it eliminates the need to convince anyone. But it is far less effective. The number of errors and the cost of correcting them increase sharply.
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