eddessaknight's Blog

Marx’s  first crusade was not against capitalism but against soap. I guess every time he had to take a shower, he was too drunk to do it. Otherwise, he always lived off of other people’s money, he never worked, even when his own children were starving, and he drank enough to deform his liver along with his conscience. Surprise: The first Marxist was a shameless rascal, the type of person who would despise the working class.

Lenin was no different. “He was always the spoilt child of the house, surrounded by women who took him for a genius and supported him financially all his life. He never worked,” says one of the most influential and controversial Spanish journalists of the last half century, Federico Jiménez Losantos, author of  A Memoir of Communism, a colossal work published in 2018 and not yet translated into English.

Jiménez Losantos attempts to answer the key question: “One hundred years and one hundred million deaths later, why is Communism still a respected ideology?”

Joe Biden won’t like the answer: It is socialists who have taken it upon themselves to excuse Communism’s crimes. For the first time, a book goes into great detail explaining the reasons for this historical complicity, which still stands, with the help of leftists everywhere, from the Democrats in America to the Social Democrats in Brussels. And it stands in spite of incontestable facts, as P. J. O’Rourke described them in Give War a Chance: “It’s impossible to get decent Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and that’s all you need to know about communism.”

That Communism goes hand in hand with deceit is well known, especially now that we are suffering the consequences of a pandemic secretly exported worldwide by China, under the auspice of the WHO, which is as concerned about world health as Xi Jinping is about allowing the Chinese to go to Mass on Sundays. It’s worth remembering: If China were a free country, its leaders would have raised the alarm in time, and the coronavirus would never have spread to the extent it has today. It is Communism that is to blame for this world crisis.

As Jiménez Losantos reminds us, “the first lie about the Communist revolution” is that it was a “proletarian uprising” against czarism. “In October 1917, there was no czarism in Russia, but instead a democratic republic with the socialist [Alexander] Kerensky at the head of government,” he writes. “What Lenin overthrew was not a tyranny, but a democracy.” As Jiménez Losantos notes: “The only thing the masses really took was the palace cellar. To drink it dry.” Perhaps because, really, “the proletarians who were said to have been saved by Marx, Bakunin, or Lenin did not want to be saved, but to have their own houses, better wages and working conditions, work, life or accident insurance, in short: to be owners.” The truth is that, to be a Communist, you first have to be a millionaire. It doesn’t work the other way around.

Over more than 700 pages, Jiménez Losantos composes a politically incorrect profile of the Communist beast, supported by a very thorough bibliography. He knows what he’s talking about: He used to be a Communist. But in 1976, at the age of 25, after reading  The Gulag Archipelago  and traveling to China, he broke up with Communism for good. The political powers that be drove him out of the two Spanish radio stations where he’d worked and found success as an opinion leader — perhaps they drove him out precisely because of his popularity. After that, in 2009, he started his own radio station and newspaper, EsRadio and  Libertad Digital. From these perches, he defends the role of the United States, where he often spends his summers.

Two characteristics mark Federico Jiménez Losantos’s personality: independence and the defense of freedom. He has forged his career by denouncing the powerful — fighting terrorists, Communists, and lukewarm self-conscious right-wingers alike. The reappearance of Communism in Spain, by the hand of Spain’s current deputy prime minister, Pablo Iglesias, has pushed Jiménez Losantos to write this great work dedicated to the victims of this totalitarian ideology.

The most novel thing in  A Memoir of Communism  is its study of the moment in which socialists absolved the revolutionary Communists. December 1917 was the moment when “perhaps the most important debate on the left in its entire history” took place, he writes. Two months after Lenin seized power by force from the socialist Kerensky, a group of Russian socialists published, in the French newspaper  L’Humanité, an appeal against the Bolshevik regime; they described Bolshevism as violent, terrifying, and “capable of making the very name of socialism hated.” Their appeal was not successful. “There is also no way to ignore Kerensky’s terrible negligence in not condemning to the press Germany’s financing of Lenin after the failed coup in July (a dress rehearsal for what would happen in October).”

Shortly afterwards, in 1918, when Kerensky reappeared in London and Paris, “his criticism of the Leninist coup and the terror unleashed against the opposition produced a phenomenon that would last until our times,” namely “the socialists’ and bourgeois Left’s insistence on denying the evidence of the Communist regime’s illegality and brutality.” Corollary: If you want to ruin the last hope, put it in the hands of a French socialist.

The key to this historical trap is provided in a speech by Kerensky himself: “This regime, which calls itself socialist while following the worst methods of czarism, is the worst enemy of socialism, because the bourgeoisie exploits the example it gives and uses it to discredit our ideal.”

Jiménez Losantos’s thesis is unyielding on this point: With his words Kerensky shows that the Left is not worried about the  crimes  “of which socialists themselves are victims.” No, they are distraught that this sinister Leninism might spoil the  reputation  of their socialist ideal.

The contemporary Left often puts forth a surprising defense when faced with the string of Communism’s failures throughout history: that no one has been able to get it right. It’s about as reasonable as claiming that serial killers shoot their victims because no one has taught them to hunt ducks. It reminds me of those weekend do-it-yourself experts who, when they see you bend a nail for the tenth time while trying to hammer it into a plank, snatch the hammer from you, screaming, “Give it to me, you useless idiot!” And naturally they miss the nail and smash their finger. Speaking of “the alleged Stalinist deviation from authentic Marxism-Leninism,” Jiménez Losantos writes:

In other words, do you know of any Communist leader who has not notably improved his own financial standing thanks to his Communist status? I don’t.

It is not easy to understand Communism without taking a closer look at the personality of its leaders. Lenin’s driving force was hatred. Jiménez Losantos refers to what the founder of socialist realism, Russian writer Maxim Gorky, said regarding this: “I know of no one who felt with the depth and strength of Lenin the hatred, disgust, and contempt for human misery, pain, and suffering.” Jiménez Losantos adds that Lenin “was indifferent to whether others lived or died, except in relation to The Cause, namely, himself.” And then there is the matter of his bad character. “Another of the things Lenin shared with Marx was “the somatization of his failures,” Jiménez Losantos writes. “Both of them had outbursts of anger when someone disagreed with them or things didn’t go the way they wanted.” Sort of like Nancy Pelosi’s tearing up Trump’s State of the Union speech on live TV.

Perhaps that same somatization explains Marx’s visceral contempt for workers, something Marxist professors will never tell you at the university:

In 1921, “the images of hundreds of people dying in the streets, people sleepwalking or prostrate unable to move, the storming of cemeteries and cannibalism, elicited a feeling of horror among society . . . in those capable of feeling horror.” This was not the case with Lenin, who despised the sensitive and who, in the midde of the famine in July 1921, ordered a campaign of “intense propaganda among the rural population explaining to them the economic and political importance of paying taxes on time and in full.” Often we arrive at the same place: A big problem for the Left is that those that die of starvation cannot continue to pay taxes.

However, the balance of victims is difficult. Jiménez Losantos reaches a conclusion:

As for the murderous record of Chinese Communism, he reasons: “The only difference between Mao and Lenin and Stalin is that the Chinese were more numerous than the Russians, and by doing the same as them, Mao was able to kill a great many more.”

Among the Communist massacres, the particular violence against Christians stands out. The antagonism between Communism and Christianity is unconditional, despite the absurd attempts at reconciliation by the left-wing advocates of “liberation theology.” In Christianity, each life is unique and invested with a special dignity; each person is a child of God, created to be free. In Communism, the individual has no value and freedom is forbidden. “For Lenin and his infinite children, property and freedom are one and the same thing,” says Jiménez Losantos. “You cannot take away someone’s property without morally taking away his freedom and physically taking his life. That’s why Communism is the most atrocious form of modern slavery.”

The terrifying religious persecution unleashed against Catholics, in the lead-up to and during the Spanish Civil War in Spain, is paradigmatic. In the massacre of the Paracuellos martyrs in 1936, Jiménez Losantos sees a replica of the massacres perpetrated by the Russian Cheka, the Bolshevik security forces that slaughtered many thousands of “counter-revolutionaries” during the Russian Revolution. “Although the Spanish one, for a population six times smaller, was the worst in the history of Christianity since Diocletian, the Soviet one reached very similar figures.”  A Memoir of Communism  reminds us of the religious massacre in Spain with the grim image of the desecrated body of a nun, displayed in the middle of the street, leaning against a wall, before the indifferent gaze of passers-by.

Only a few days ago we saw Joe Biden promising more Islam in American schools. No one can be surprised by the flirtation of the Left with Islam. First, because of their hatred of Christians, and second, because of the Left’s historic alliance with the faithful of Allah. Russian Communism “since the 1970s, made a pact with its secular or social Communist versions and, after the Fall of the Wall, the Communist regimes made a pact with the radicals,” Jiménez Losantos explains. “The close alliance of Castro and Chávez’s post-Communism with the Iran of the ayatollahs is evident” — the same connection that Iranians have today with the Spanish Communists of the Podemos party.

Communism is not dead. “If the greatest success of the Devil (or of Evil) is to convince people that it does not exist, the survival of Communism is based on the death certificate and the consequent moral pardon that so many historians have extended to it as an exquisite, infinitely researchable corpse,” says Jiménez Losantos, “Communism has been unremembered, history not forgotten, but destroyed.”

In this hour, the United States is fighting the same battle against cultural Marxism as Europe, although the Old Continent has been on the losing side for a long time. The memoir concludes:

If you think your country is safe from these horrors, go out into the street, go to a bar or a college campus, try to talk like Jordan Peterson, and tell me how big the snake’s egg is.

Anti-Semitism NY Times: Jews Not Welcome In The Democratic Party Columnist Caroline Glick highlights the growing problem that the Democratic party presents to the American Jewish community. She points out the recent resignation letter of Bari Weiss, the Jewish NY Times op-ed editor, who resigned because of blatant antisemitism she experienced at the paper, and the

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