Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen about their visit to totalitarian North Korea.

…When foreigners visit, the government stages Internet browsing sessions by having “students” look at pre-downloaded and pre-approved content, spending hours (as they did when we were there) scrolling up and down their screens in totalitarian unison.

Imagine how clueless they are to think they could fool anyone from the west, let alone the Google chief.

With North Korea threatening a nuclear missile attack, it’s nice to know we have an anti-missile defense, thanks to Ronald Reagan.

John Kerry, now Secretary of State, did everything he could to kill the program in its infancy.

In the 1980s, when now- Secretary of State John Kerry was a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts, he criticized the Reagan administration’s plan for a missile defense system — known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — calling it a “cancer on our nation’s defense.”

According to an Aug. 5, 1986 storyfrom the Associated Press, then-Sen. Kerry wanted to cut funding for SDI — critically known at the time as ‘Star Wars’– and called the program a “cancer.”

“In debate, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called Star Wars ‘a cancer’ and said ‘what we must do is deny this program the funds that would enable this cancer on our nation’s defense to grow any further,’” the 1986 AP report said.

At the time, the Senate narrowly rejected an attempt to cut SDI funding by $3.2 billion for the upcoming fiscal year.

One year earlier in June 1985, AP reported that Kerry was advocating the same position of limiting funding to SDI, calling it, “a dream based on an illusion.”

Kerry and his Democrat ilk will never acknowledge they were wrong.

The mere threat of an effective missile defense led the Soviets, who could not compete due to their top-down sluggish economy, to cry uncle and hastened the end of the Cold War.

Does Reagan get any credit from the Dem Cong? Hardly.

Just as Margaret Thatcher, who saved Britain from itself, gets no respect from the left.

It’s one thing to disagree with ideology in the abstract. But when the left cannot even acknowledge the historical facts of what Thatcher/Reagan achieved, one despairs of ever reaching common ground.

Does the North Korean dictator need a booster seat?

And what’s with the goofy hats worn by the men second from left and at far right? Do they store their lunch under there?

For the story on NK’s plan to attack America, read here.

Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker. Anderson had a long piece in the New Yorker in January, describing a nation in disarray.

Consider this about Caracas:

Caracas has deteriorated beyond all measure. It has one of the highest homicide rates in the world; last year, in a city of three million, an estimated thirty-six hundred people were murdered, or about one every two hours.

Chavez’s death means nervous time in Cuba because Venezuelan oil has kept the Castro regime afloat.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frias, who died on Tuesday, from cancer, at the age of fifty-eight, was one of the most flamboyantly provocative leaders on the world scene in recent years. His death came after months in which his health was a national mystery, the subject of obfuscation and rumors; he spent inauguration day for his second term in a hospital bed in Cuba. Vice-President Nicolás Maduro, who made the announcement, is one of the politicians now maneuvering to control Venezuela, where elections will be held within thirty days.

A one-time army paratrooper who served two years in prison after leading a botched military coup against Venezuela’s government in 1992, Chávez emerged from behind bars, after an amnesty, with a renewed determination to achieve power, and sought the support of Cuba’s veteran Communist leader Fidel Castro to do so. In 1998, Chávez won Venezuela’s Presidential elections, promising to change things in his country forever, from top to bottom. Since the day he was first sworn in as President, in February, 1999, he devoted himself to doing precisely that. What he has left is a country that, in some ways, will never be the same, and which, in other ways, is the (more…)

Chairman Mao was the largest mass murderer in history, yet he is still respected by many progressives.

Obama’s first White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn, said that Mao was one of her favorite political philosophers, one that she “turns to the most.”

Yang Jisheng sets the record straight.

THIRTY-SIX million people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people resorted to cannibalism.

The toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 or the number of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War II.

After 50 years, the famine still cannot be freely discussed in the place where it happened. My book “Tombstone” could be published only in Hong Kong, Japan and the West. It remains banned in mainland China, where historical amnesia looms large and government control of information and expression has tightened during the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, which began last week and will conclude with a once-in-a-decade leadership transition.

Those who deny that the famine happened, as an executive at the state-run newspaper People’s Daily recently did, enjoy freedom of speech, despite their fatuous claims about “three years of natural disasters.” But no plague, flood or earthquake ever wrought such horror during those years. One might wonder why the Chinese government won’t allow the true tale to be told, since Mao’s economic policies were abandoned in the late 1970s in favor of liberalization, and food has been plentiful ever since.

The reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was the root cause of the famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has observed, no major famine has ever occurred in a democracy…

Read it all.

I met a guy at party last night who emigrated from Poland in 1986, when the Soviet Union still held sway. He lives in a neighborhood next to Wildwood Park, in Thousand Oaks, California.

(You can see some photographs I’ve taken there, here.)

I mentioned to my new Polish friend that some notable movies/TV shows had been filmed there, including  Spartacus, Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

He lit up and told me that when living in Poland he watched Bonanza and started recalling the characters’ names. He also said the government allowed them to watch one American film a week, and it was always a western.

I suppose the westerns were regarded as harmless because they didn’t belie the Communist propaganda about America. That is, that we were destitute and lawless. It was much more preferable to show the USA of the 1880s than, say, “Beach Blanket Bingo.” The latter, bad as the movie was, would have shattered the notion that we were suffering (notwithstanding the acting of Frankie Avalon.)

This brought to mind Leonid Brezhnev’s 1973 visit to the US. He was a big fan of the TV series, “The Rifleman” and when he got to meet its star, Chuck Connors, he gave him a hearty bear hug.

I do wonder about the thinking of the Communists. Westerns didn’t betray their lies about America, but they just might have undermined the collectivist ideology of communism. After all, most westerns celebrated brave individual who stood up for what was right.

North Korea sends workers to China as slaves. Bush was right.

Barbara Demick in the LA Times:

China is quietly inviting tens of thousands of North Korean guest workers into the country in a deal that will provide a cash infusion to help prop up a teetering regime with little more to export than the drudgery of a desperately poor population.

The deal, which has not been publicly announced by either Beijing or Pyongyang, would allow about 40,000 seamstresses, technicians, mechanics, construction workers and miners to work in China on industrial training visas, businesspeople and Korea analysts say. Most of the workers’ earnings will go directly to the communist North Korean regime.

“The North Koreans can’t export weapons anymore because of [international] sanctions, so they are using their people to raise cash,” said Sohn Kyang-ju, a former South Korean intelligence official who now heads the Seoul-based NK Daily Unification Strategy Institute.

Although migrants from North Korea, as well as Vietnam, Myanmar and the Philippines, have worked illegally in China for years, it is unprecedented for Beijing to issue visas for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, several labor experts in China said. The deal, which provides workers for a region where China suffers no labor shortages, underscores how far Beijing is willing to go to support its potentially unstable protege.

Longtime leader Kim Jong Il died last year and was replaced by his son Kim Jong Un, who is in his late 20s.

“My gut feeling is that this is the beginning of a larger wave of North Korean workers coming in. It could be quite significant,” said John Park, an academic who has written widely on North Korean-Chinese relations. “It will allow the North Koreans to piggyback on China’s economic success to jump-start the economy under the new leadership.”

Over the years, North Korea has exported smaller numbers of workers to far eastern Russia, where they work in logging and mining, as well as to Libya, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Angola. Hundreds of young North Korean women used to work in garment and shoe factories in the Czech Republic, but their contracts were canceled because of European human rights activists’ concern that they were virtually slave laborers…

This isn’t just cruel and immoral, it’s stupid. LA Times

LIJIN China — Six months pregnant, 38-year-old Ma Jihong was healthy and fit, her body toned from working in the cotton fields. So when 10 people from the local family planning office showed up one morning in October, she slipped through a gap in the concrete wall around the house and bolted like a sprinter toward the main road.

Five-year-old Yanyan, the younger of Ma’s two daughters, was alone in the house with her mother at the time. Her father came rushing in from the yard when he heard the screaming.

“My father tried to delay them. He used his arms to try to block them,” the little girl recalled last month in the family’s courtyard, cluttered with rusting farm equipment.

Wearing a pink polka-dot tutu and matching sandals, Yanyan waved her arms to imitate what her father did. “But there were too many people. He couldn’t stop them.”

Ma was caught and taken in for an abortion. Her family did not see her until later in the day. By then, she was lying in a bed in the Lijin County Hospital with a roll of toilet paper supporting her head. Her complexion was sallow and a dried stream of blood was under her nostrils, her mother-in-law, Gao Hongying, said.

“They took my daughter-in-law at 9 a.m. By 5 p.m., she was dead,” Gao said.

Forced abortions and sterilizations are the bane of villagers in this gentle farmland along the easternmost stretch of the Yellow River, about 200 miles southeast of Beijing. Across the country, overzealous enforcement of family planning rules, along with land confiscations, is one of the biggest sources of anger toward the Chinese Communist Party.

Does Joe Biden know about this?

I lived in Miami for 10 years. One thing I learned: never say anything nice about Fidel Castro, which is understandable and justified.

If you were running for dog catcher, a last minute campaign smear might consist of someone leaking a photo of your cousin having lunch with someone who was rumored to have liked Castro. Seriously. It was comic.

So when I heard that the Florida (Miami) Marlins manager praised the dictator, I knew what was next.

“I love Fidel Castro,” Guillen told Time magazine. After a beat, he went on to explain: “A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [expletive] is still here.”

It’s understandable why a Major League manager would admire the longevity of a figure like Castro, given the rapidity with which teams pull the plug on managers. But expressing love for the Cuban dictator when you’re running a team in South Florida is akin to … well … we’re having a tough time coming up with a local equivalent. It would be like the manager of the Dodgers asserting that organic produce is bad for you, or that hybrid cars are ugly, or that film subsidies are a bad deal for taxpayers. Actually, none of that rises to the same level; to Florida’s Cuban-immigrant community, praising Castro is little different from praising Adolf Hitler — even if you’re only expressing admiration for his survival skills, not his politics.

Guillen has apologized for his comment, “with my heart in my hand and on bended knees.” That didn’t stop the team from suspending him for five games, even as protesters and a county commissioner call for his resignation. This strikes many non-Floridians, including us, as a gross overreaction, maybe even an assault on American values: Why should he be punished for expressing a minority-held political view?

…or ask for some, ahem, grass — they might just feed you fescue.

Seriously, North Korea is trying to attract tourists.

Eyebrows arched and tongues clucked among the cognoscenti when Dubya said North Korea was part of an axis of evil. How gauche of him to notice.

Yet how true. Here’s another first person tale, excerpted in the WSJ yesterday.

On Jan. 2, 2005, 23-year-old Shin Dong-hyuk squirmed through an electric fence and escaped from Camp 14, a political prison camp in North Korea. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are estimated to be held in the country’s political camps, and Mr. Shin is the only person known to have been born in a camp who has made his way to the West. (His father, Mr. Shin eventually learned, was a prisoner because two of his brothers had defected to the south during the Korean War. Mr. Shin’s crime was being his father’s son.) In this excerpt from “Escape From Camp 14,” Blaine Harden details his unlikely escape.

In 1998, when Shin turned 16, he became an adult worker. His years of schooling to that point had only served as training for hard labor.

Many of his classmates were assigned to coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Shin was lucky—he was assigned to a pig farm, where 200 men and women raised about 800 pigs, along with goats, rabbits, chickens and a few cows. As a prisoner, Shin was not allowed to eat the meat of any livestock on the farm. But he and other prisoners could sometimes steal. The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half-rations, so they ate purloined pork raw.

In March 2003, Shin was transferred to the camp’s garment factory, a crowded, chaotic, stressful work site where 2,000 women and 500 men made military uniforms. Meals were skimpy, hours were endless, and Shin was always hungry. There was pressure to snitch on fellow prisoners.

In the garment factory, the superintendent wanted Shin to inform on an important new prisoner. Park Yong Chul, short and stout, with a shock of white hair, had lived abroad. He knew senior people in the North Korean government. The superintendent ordered Shin to teach Park how to fix sewing machines and to become his friend. Shin was to report back on everything that Park said about his past, his politics and his family. “Park needs to confess,” the superintendent said. “He’s holding out on us.”

In October 2004, Shin and Park began spending 14 hours a day together. Park paid polite attention to Shin’s instructions on sewing machine maintenance. Just as politely, he avoided questions about his past. But after a few weeks, Park began to open up. He said he was raised in a large apartment in Pyongyang and had followed the privileged educational trajectory of North Korea’s elites, studying in East Germany and the Soviet Union. He patiently attempted to explain what life was like outside Camp 14.

As they walked the factory floor, Park told Shin that the giant country next door was called China. Its people were rapidly getting rich. He said that in the south there was another Korea. In South Korea, he said, everyone was already rich. Park explained the concept of money. He told Shin about the existence of television and computers and mobile phones. He explained that the world was round.

Much of what Park talked about, especially at the beginning, was difficult for Shin to understand or care about. What delighted him—what he kept begging Park for—were stories about food and eating. These were the stories that kept Shin up at night fantasizing about a better life. Freedom, in Shin’s mind, was just another word for grilled meat…

Related: in a post from November 2009 a North Korean escapee recounts the death of her husband from starvation.

Too late smart.

Pope Benedict XVI, flying to Cuba for a historic visit, has said that Marxism was out of place in the contemporary world and urged Cubans to find “new models”.

His remarks on Friday were at least as forthright as any made by his predecessor, John Paul II, on a groundbreaking trip to the country 14 years ago. Answering a question about his visit to Cuba, which has remained a communist bastion for more than 50 years, the pope said: “Today it is evident that Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality.”

He told reporters accompanying him on the papal plane: “In this way we can no longer respond and build a society. New models must be found with patience and in a constructive way.”

The Pope should stop in Miami and see how the Cubans who fled the Communist dictatorship are thriving.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that communism never “corresponded to reality.:

Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker whose work I generally admire, has a piece in the current issue titled “The Caging of America.”

I haven’t finished reading it, but I agree that the war on drugs is a failure that is both counterproductive and damaging.

Instead of just letting drug addicts ruin their own lives with cheap, legal drugs, we’ve created criminal franchises to aspiring gangsters that warp community values and waste public resources.

Agreed.

But the article begins with a photo of a 10-year old boy looking tiny in his cell with this caption.

Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags.

Stalin rounded up innocent people, sent them to forced work camps where thousands died.

The analogy is not just foolish, it insults the memory of Stalin’s victims.

One for each N. Korean starved to death by Kim Jong-Il. For the evil monster, an hour long Bronx cheer would have been more appropriate. Good riddance.

John Hayward at Human Events.

The United Nations General Assembly observed a moment of silence for recently departed psychopathic totalitarian dictator Kim Jong-Il of North Korea today.  MSNBC reports:

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the 193-nation General Assembly, saying he was following existing practice, led the moment of silence before an assembly meeting at 3 p.m. EST.

He offered condolences to the people of North Korea.

North Korea’s U.N. mission made a similar request to the U.N. Security Council, though Western diplomats said it was rejected.

“We didn’t think it would be appropriate,” a diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Several Western diplomats said Pyongyang’s request for Kim to be honored was highly unusual. They voiced surprise that Nassir had granted it and added that their delegations would most likely boycott the moment of silence in the assembly.

North Korea is still officially under Security Council sanction for Kim’s habit of blowing billions on nuclear weapons while his people starve.  At least 200,000 North Koreans are rotting in political dungeons, many of them suffering brutal tortures, and not the kind that involve wet towels on the face.  Kim Jong-Il reached outside his borders to kill and kidnap South Koreans, Japanese, and others.  He’s brought the world to the brink of Armageddon repeatedly.

The only “moment of silence” it would be appropriate to observe in the name of Kim Jong-Il would be the one following the permanent shutdown of the United Nations circus.  Once again, the concessions made to allow barbarians and dictators into the great “parliament of mankind” corrupt it beyond recognition.  An ostensibly noble effort in international outreach is twisted into an absurdist nightmare because it feels obliged to take a horror show like North Korea seriously, and treat its abusive dictator as some sort of mighty statesman whose passage leaves the world poorer.

Instead, he should be treated as the obscene monster he was, and denounced with every breath taken by civilized men, while the moments of silence are reserved for his victims.

Life seems to be cheap in China.

Mao blithely led 40-60 million Chinese to their deaths over his reign. That the fudge factor is 20 million tells you something in itself.

Now, Chinese are facing up to it, as Barbara Demick at the LAT explains.

How do you turn Bad Samaritans good?

The question has become a national obsession since the shocking death of a 2-year-old named Yueyue who was ignored by 18 passersby as she lay bleeding on the street after a hit-and-run last month in southern China.

Nearly every day brings a new outrage — an 88-year-old man suffocating in his own blood after falling and breaking a nose, people rushing to photograph a suicide attempt without bothering to help — and another hand-wringing editorial about how to cultivate the kindness of strangers.

The latest example came Wednesday, when a 5-year-old boy playing on a sidewalk was struck by a wooden beam that had fallen from a construction site in the city of Linyi in the eastern province of Shandong. His mother begged motorists and bystanders to help bring him to a hospital, but all refused — including the chengguan, low-level municipal police, who drove by and ignored her, according to local media.

An ambulance eventually arrived, but the boy, named Longlong, died on his way to the hospital.

What to do?

Groups with names such as China Kindness and Filial Piety Special Committee and the Office of National Spiritual Civilization have launched special projects to encourage better behavior.

“Trust is one of the hottest topics at the moment,” said Wu Yilin, a pollster at Beijing’s Renmin University of China. Her department has been surveying people about the degree to which they would help a total stranger. In a poll shortly before the hit-and-run, 64.8% of Chinese said they would help an elderly stranger who had fallen, with those refusing saying they feared getting into trouble.

“We in China are very close to our parents and our families, but there is no trust in strangers,” Wu said.

The lack of charitable spirit in China is supported by a poll released in April by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Based on polling data from Gallup, it shows China second from the bottom in a list of 40 countries ranked for “pro-social behavior”: giving to charity, volunteering time and helping strangers.

And why are things this way?

In China, pundits cast about to point the blame. Has the frenetic pursuit of wealth in the go-go economy eroded the values that the Communist Party once instilled about individual sacrifice for the greater good? Or does the blame lie with the Communist Party’s repression of religion and the legacy of brutality of the Cultural Revolution?

The ChiComs never instilled communitarian values. On the contrary, they turned citizen against citizen, institutionalizing distrust.

Now, for the big laugh.

On the flip side, state media have gone out of their way to publicize morality tales showing the heroism and generosity of ordinary Chinese.

One video that captured the public’s attention shows people banding together in a Shanghai park Oct. 23 to help a pregnant woman who fainted. The video shows the group carrying her and flagging down a motorist who volunteers to drive her to the hospital.

“Ever since Little Yueyue left this world, people started to question the consciences. Some even said Chinese no longer have morality,” a caption reads on the video. “Here, people with their actions showed that Chinese still have a heart…. Let’s be proud of Shanghai and of the Shanghai people.”

The problem is, it didn’t really happen that way.

Last week, the head of a Shanghai film production company held a news conference and acknowledged that three of his employees had staged the fall-and-rescue in what he described as a “beautiful lie.”

“What they did was inappropriate, but their intentions were good,” said Zhang Jun of Erma China. “They thought if people saw this on television it would set an example about how they should behave in a warmhearted way when something happens.”

College will not only cost parents a fortune, it will expose their sons and daughters to twits who honor mass murderers.

Mark Seelinger at The College Fix:

It’s not often that I have the opportunity to comment on the goings-on of NC State, UNC’s friendly, down-the-road school of engineering and pig farming. But it seems that the Mao Infatuation Virus has spread to Raleigh. In an email sent to students in NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS), Dean of the College Jeffrey P. Braden writes,

“Finally, a bit of advice. The friends you make in college will be your friends for life, and will influence what you do and how you think throughout your life time-so choose wisely. Some of the best friends I made as a student were Plato, Henry David Thoreau, Mao Tse-tung, Margaret Mead, and Maya Angelou. My colleagues are eager to make similar introductions for you!”

Let’s just briefly recount some of the Great Mao Zedong’s accomplishments:

1. Caused approximately 40 million people to starve to death during the Great Leap Forward

2. Instigated a reign of terror and chaos in the course of the Cultural Revolution

3. Killed millions more during his purges of the 1950′s

And let’s not forget his warm and friendly relationship with that other great thinker of the twentieth century, Joesph Stalin.

Rob Long at Richochet

China, according to them, is the happiest nation on earth.  But that may just be sucking up to their powerful, and generous, neighbor to the northwest.  If China is in fact happier than North Korea, maybe North Korea needs to open some KFC’s and Haagen-Daz shops.

In case you’re interested, the United States ranks 203rd.

The whole list is here — in Korean — but the highlights of the list are here, from the Beijinger.com:

North Korea has released its rating of countries based on happiness, awarding China perfect marks. Where does North Korea place itself and others?

North Korea magnanimously gave away the number one spot and ranked itself second with 98 points out of 100.

Rounding out the top five are Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela.

Getting a dismal 3 happiness points and holding onto last place is the United States, referred to as “the American Empire.”

Probably the only people in the world who still believe in the “American empire” are the North Koreans.  Barack Obama has already disabused everyone else of that notion.

Ekaterina Loushnikova in oD Russia

…I stood outside the door for a long time. I’d never met a 100-year old before. “He probably doesn’t remember anything,” I thought doubtfully, as I rang the bell. The door opened immediately and before me stood a tall, thin old man with bright, youthful eyes.

Pavel Galitsky has outlived all his tormentors and almost all his contemporaries

“Just wait while I turn off the computer,” he said. “People keep trying to ring me on Skype.”

I was quite taken aback that a man of this age should know how to use the computer and Skype, as by no means everyone knows how to do this in Russia, and not only the elderly. I was even more surprised when we started with a concert: in honour of my visit, Pavel Kalinkovich began to sing the old Russian romance “The chrysanthemums have long since ceased to bloom”. His voice was so deafening that the red needle on my Dictaphone went right over the red line.

“Did you sing in the camp too, Pavel Kalinkovich?”

“I certainly did. For two weeks I was even on the propaganda team, but then I was chucked out because they clocked I was a ‘contra’  – I was sent to prison for ‘Anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation’ (Article 58)”.

“And had you actually been agitating?”

Pavel Kalinkovich bursts out laughing. “I burst out laughing in exactly the same way when the interrogator said this to me. He barked ‘Stand up, you f*****!’  I got up and said ‘Comrade Pozdnyakov, why are you are contravening socialist legality?’ ‘I’m no comrade of yours, you bastard!’  He pressed a button to summon the guard. ‘Search this character!’

“Then they threw me in jail. The cell, a former peasant larder 4 metres long and 2 wide, had 32 people in it. People couldn’t even sit down. They had to stand and take turns to sleep. At that time arresting a man was as easy as falling off a log.”

I remember the story I was told by my grandmother, Valentina Nikolaevna. In 1937 she was working as an agronomist on a collective farm attached to an agricultural institute which studied plant selection. During the day.  But at night it was another “selection” — the selection of people. Every night the huge corridor of the communal flat where the specialists lived rang with the sound of footsteps. Every night each person waited for the knock on his door. Before going to bed they put a little suitcase with essentials by the bed.  My grandmother lived in the furthest room. She was lucky – they never came for her.

Taylor Dinerman at National Review brings us some useful history, showing how the Democrats exploited Sputnik to expand the federal government.

Democrats should be careful when they invoke Sputnik. Their party’s response to the Soviet Union’s achievement may have helped win them three elections, in 1958, 1960, and 1962, but it also helped bring about the Cuban missile crisis and durably poisoned the political atmosphere around national-security issues.

After Sputnik was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, President Eisenhower reacted calmly; he knew that by not complaining about the overflight of U.S. territory by the Soviet spacecraft, he was setting a precedent. He understood the significance of Sputnik in large part because in 1953, almost immediately after taking office, he had ordered work to begin on America’s first spy satellite, the WS-117. As the Russians were basking in the glow of their space triumph, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles said that the Soviets “might have done us a good turn unintentionally, in establishing the concept of international freedom of space.” Three years later, when the first U.S. spy satellites successfully delivered pictures from deep inside the USSR, no one in Moscow denounced the Americans for violations of the sacred airspace of Mother Russia. The U.S. no longer needed to fly U-2 missions in order to look inside their borders.

It is hard to imagine today what a huge advantage totalitarian states had in the pre-Sputnik era. They were closed societies, allowing the rest of the world to see only a carefully molded image of military strength, political regimentation, and economic success. They were aided in this by Western intellectuals, journalists, and celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty, and Charles Lindbergh. From Hitler’s march into the Rhineland in 1936 to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Western governments had to estimate the strength of their enemies in a fog of ignorance. Spy satellites dispersed that fog. Totalitarian power became a lot less total.

From a strategic point of view, Sputnik was a Soviet blunder of the first magnitude. If the Americans had gone first, it would have given Russia a chance to demonize all space operations as imperialist aggression in the heavens. Every U.S. satellite launch would have been denounced as a crime against humanity. The U.S. space program in both its civil and military aspects would have been crippled.

But from a propaganda point of view, Sputnik was a triumph, and in this they were aided and abetted by America’s Democrats. President Eisenhower later wrote that “in the weeks and months after Sputnik, many Americans seemed to be seized with a sudden worry that our defenses had crumbled, but also with an equally unjustified alarm that our entire educational system was defective.” The Democrats would not let a good crisis go to waste.

Sen. Stuart Symington (D., Ct.) was one of those who accused the Eisenhower administration of being in a “state of complacency not justified by the facts.” He claimed that by 1962, Russia would have 3,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Official U.S. intelligence estimates gave that number as 500; the recently published third volume of Boris Chertok’s memoir Rockets and People: Hot Days of the Cold War claims that in 1962, “the US had 5,000 units of nuclear weaponry supported by delivery systems (to strike the territory of the USSR) against the USSR’s 300 units.”

Yet the Democrats launched an unceasing campaign on the theme of a missile gap. Accusing Eisenhower, of all people, of failing to understand a vital military question would seem ridiculous. But thanks to Sputnik, to the need to keep America’s spy-satellite program secret, and to the partisans in the media, they convinced a lot of voters that the Republicans had neglected the defense of the nation in favor of budgetary restraint…

The Chinese communists are very touchy about their history, especially the Great Leap Forward, which killed 45,000,000 people.

Central planners take note.

Frank Ditkotter in the New York Times

From 2005 to 2009, I examined hundreds of documents all over China, traveling from subtropical Guangdong to arid Gansu Province near the deserts of Inner Mongolia.

The party records were usually housed on the local party committee premises, closely guarded by soldiers. Inside were acres of dusty, yellowing paper held together in folders that could contain anything from a single scrap of paper scribbled by a party secretary decades ago to neatly typewritten minutes of secret leadership meetings.

Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that some 20 to 30 million people died.

But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.

In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.a

Humberto Fontava:

Forty three years ago this week, Ernesto “Che” Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying “What goes around comes around” ever fit, it’s here.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.” As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work.

Even as a youth, Ernesto Guevara’s writings revealed a serious mental illness. “My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido that falls in my hands!” This passage is from Ernesto Guevara’s famous Motorcycle Diaries, though Robert Redford somehow overlooked it while directing his heart-warming movie.

The Spanish word vencido, by the way, translates into “defeated” or “surrendered.”And indeed, “the “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” very, very rarely reached Guevara’s nostrils from anything properly describable as combat. It mostly came from the close-range murders of defenseless men (and boys.) Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro and Che’s theft of their humble family farm, all refused blindfolds and all died sneering at their Communist murderers, as did thousands of their valiant countrymen. “Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo!” “The defiant yells would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble,” wrote eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares.

The one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara’s life was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys. Under his own gun dozens died. Under his orders thousands crumpled. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally, even comically.

Did Stalin commit genocide? Is the Pope German?

Mass killing is still the way a lot of governments do business.

The past few decades have seen terrifying examples in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia.

Murder on a national scale, yes – but is it genocide? “The word carries a powerful punch,” said Stanford history Professor Norman Naimark. “In international courts, it’s considered the crime of crimes.”

Nations have tugs of war over the official definition of the word “genocide” itself – which mentions only national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. The definition can determine, after all, international relations, foreign aid and national morale. Look at the annual international tussle over whether the 1915 Turkish massacre and deportation of the Armenians “counts” as genocide.

Naimark, author of the controversial new book Stalin’s Genocides, argues that we need a much broader definition of genocide, one that includes nations killing social classes and political groups. His case in point: Stalin.

The book’s title is plural for a reason: He argues that the Soviet elimination of a social class, the kulaks (who were higher-income farmers), and the subsequent killer famine among all Ukrainian peasants – as well as the notorious 1937 order No. 00447 that called for the mass execution and exile of “socially harmful elements” as “enemies of the people” – were, in fact, genocide. (more…)

Guy Sorman in City Journal:

The four surviving leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, including the former head of state, Khieu Samphan, have been imprisoned in Phnom Penh since 2007 and will be brought to justice in their own country. On September 16, a United Nations-backed Cambodian tribunal indicted them for genocide, crimes against humanity, and other crimes. The tribunal has already established its credibility with its first trial: this past July 26, it sentenced Kaing Guek Eav (better known as Duch), a cog in the Khmer Rouge’s extermination machine, to 35 years in prison. Duch ran a torture center from 1975 to 1979 that produced 15,000 victims. Unlike the Nuremberg tribunal that judged Nazi leaders in 1945, the Phnom Penh tribunal is not run by the victorious powers; it functions within the Cambodian justice system, sustained by Cambodian public opinion, though the U.N. provides financing. The tribunal’s legitimacy and objectivity are beyond reproach. Still, the Cambodian public did not see Duch’s sentence as sufficient in view of his crimes. The defendant apparently persuaded the court that he was obeying his superior’s orders—the same excuse Nazi leaders made at Nuremberg.

In the Western and Asian press, as well as in statements by various governments, a distinct effort has been made to reduce the crimes of Duch and of Khieu Samphan to matters of local circumstance. It is as if an unfortunate catastrophe had fallen on Cambodia in 1975 called the “Khmer Rouge,” killing 1.5 million Khmers. But who or what was behind what the tribunal has called the genocide of Khmers by other Khmers? Might this be the fault of the United States? Was it not the Americans who, by setting up a regime in Cambodia to their liking, brought about a nationalist reaction? Or, might this genocide not be a cultural legacy, distinctive of Khmer civilization? Archeologists are digging through the past in vain to find a historical precedent. The true explanation, the meaning of the crime, can be found in the declarations of the Khmer Rouge themselves: just as Hitler described his crimes in advance, Pol Pot (who died in 1998) had explained early on that he would destroy his people, so as to create a new one. Pol Pot called himself a Communist; he became one in the 1960s as a student in Paris, then a cradle of Marxism. Since Pol Pot and leaders of the regime that he forced on his people referred to themselves as Communists—and in no way claimed to be heirs of some Cambodian dynasty—we must acknowledge that they were, in fact, Communists.

What the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia was in fact real Communism. There was no radical distinction, either conceptually or concretely, between the rule of the Khmer Rouge and that of Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, or the North Korean regime. All Communist regimes follow strangely similar trajectories, barely colored by local traditions. In every case, these regimes seek to make a blank slate of the past and to forge a new humanity. In every case, the “rich,” intellectuals, and skeptics wind up exterminated. The Khmer Rouge rounded up urban and rural populations in agricultural communities based on precedents both Russian (the Kolkhozy) and Chinese (the popular communes), and they acted for the same ideological reasons and with the same result: famine. There is no such thing as real Communism without massacre, torture, concentration camps, gulags, or laogai. And if there has never been any such thing, then we must conclude that there could be no other outcome: Communist ideology leads necessarily to mass violence, because the masses do not want real Communism. This is as true in the rice fields of Cambodia as in the plains of Ukraine or under Cuban palms…

Cuba on Monday announced plans to cut 500,000 state workers by March 2011 and help them get work in the private sector, in the most sweeping reforms instituted since President Raul Castro took over from his brother in 2008.

With eight million citizens over age 15, that means 6.25% of the population will lose their government jobs.

Lucky them.

Many of those to be let go will be urged to form private cooperatives. Others will be pushed into jobs at foreign-run companies and joint ventures. Still more will need to set up their own small business — particularly in the areas of transport and house rental — according to an internal Communist Party document obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

So the Castros finally wise up.

Having lived in Miami for ten years, I know what Cubans can do: among other things, they were bankers, doctors, professors, entrepreneurs — go-getters who lived the American dream.

Meanwhile, back in the homeland, Cubans suffered through 50 years of shabbiness. Shabby food, shabby homes, shabby clothes, shabby healthcare (free, but no antibiotics) and shabby cars (it’s a testament to their ingenuity that they’ve keep these ’50s-era cars running all this time.)

If an American landlord treats his tenants this way, he ends up shamed on the 6 o’clock news. But Castro did it to an entire nation for half a century and gets glorified by Sean Penn and Oliver Stone, among others.

Maybe they’ll ask Fidel to give one of his famous six-hour speeches–one long mea culpa.

Oy, even El Commandante admits it’s a flop.

Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba’s communist economic model doesn’t work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel’s brother Raul, the country’s president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba’s 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba’s economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore” Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

One wonders what actor Matt Damon, such a big fan of anti-American historian Howard Zinn that he plugged him in his movie Good Will Hunting, narrated an audio book and did a TV series based on Zinn’s work, will think of this.

A recent Freedom of Information document drop shows that Zinn was an active member of the communist party, having joined long after the truth of the evil empire was known.

Stacy McCain:

Although Zinn denied being a member of the CPUSA, the FBI file discloses that several reliable informants in the party identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week.

What’s more, one of the files reveals that a reliable informant provided a photograph of Zinn teaching a class on “Basic Marxism” at party headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. A participant in the class said that Zinn taught that “the basic teaching of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to by those present.”

The FBI file also includes information on Zinn’s pro-Castro activism and support for radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and Black Panther Party. Much of the latter was in connection with Zinn’s support for a communist military victory in Vietnam.

For background on Zinn, read this by Daniel Flynn of the History News Network:

Who is the most influential historian in America? Could it be Pulitzer Prize winners Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Joseph Ellis or David McCullough, whose scholarly works have reached a broad literary public? The answer is none of the above. The accolade belongs instead to the unreconstructed, anti-American Marxist Howard Zinn, whose cartoon anti-history of the United States is still selling 128,000 copies a year twenty years after its original publication. Many of those copies are assigned readings for courses in colleges and high schools taught by leftist disciples of their radical mentor.

“Objectivity is impossible,” Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

History serving “a social aim” other than the preservation or interpretation of a historical record is precisely what we get in A People’s History of the United States. Howard Zinn’s 776 page tome, which after selling more than a million copies, has been recently re-released in a hardback edition.

What accounts for the massive sales figures? One odd answer for a work by a university professor is that A People’s History of the United States has been the beneficiary of fawning celebrities, who are not normally associated with . Zinn has discussed politics with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and was on Rage Against the Machine’s reading list (note: beware of rock bands that issue reading lists). In Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon’s “Will Hunting” tells his psychiatrist that A People’s History of the United States will “knock you on your ass.” Damon and co-star Ben Affleck, who grew up near Zinn outside of Harvard Square, are said to be producing a miniseries based on their neighbor’s magnum opus. Zinn repaid the actors’ youthful infatuation by including them in an inconsequential paragraph in the book’s new edition.

Read it all.

Another one of Oliver Stone’s pals (Castro being numero uno), Hugo Chavez, is showing just how nutty he is by digging up Simon Bolivar’s bones.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ordered Bolivar’s tomb be opened because he suspects he was murdered.

Most accounts maintain Bolivar died from tuberculosis in Colombia in 1830.

Mr Chavez announced the exhumation of his hero on Twitter, saying he “wept with emotion”.

“What impressive moments we have lived tonight. We have seen the bones of the Great Bolivar!” he tweeted from the national pantheon in Caracas.

“That glorious skeleton must be Bolivar, because his flame can be felt. Bolivar lives!” he added.

I’d say his bones prove otherwise.

More than 50 experts including criminal investigators and forensic pathologists have been examining the remains to see if Bolivar was the victim of a conspiracy rather than disease, according to Venezuela’s attorney-general, Luisa Ortega Diaz.

“We have important discoveries that will be announced to the nation at the appropriate moment,” she said.

Maybe Chavez is being wily, using the Bolivar shtick to distract his people from his ruinous rule.

But the biggest question is where’s Geraldo in this story?