With the death of Pope Francis, here are some crucial items below to read and seriously reflect upon while awaiting the papal conclave in Rome to be conducted at the Sistine Chapel where the new pontiff will be chosen.

The papal conclave, where cardinals elect a new pope, is expected to begin in Rome in early May 2025, likely within 15-20 days after Pope Francis’ death.

In these extraordinary, apocalyptic times, my own candidate for the position of the new pontiff is Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.

Archbishop Vigano was born on January 16, 1941 in Varese, Italy. He was ordained a priest on March 24, 1968 and incardinated in the Diocese of Pavia (Italy). He has a doctorate in both canon and civil law (utroque iure). His Excellency started his service in the Diplomatic Corps of the Holy See as Attaché in 1973 in Iraq and Kuwait. In 1976 he was transferred to the Apostolic Nunciature in Great Britain, and from 1978 until 1989 worked at the Secretariat of State of Vatican City. On April 4, 1989 he was nominated Special Envoy with the functions of Permanent Observer to the European Council in Strasbourg. He was consecrated an archbishop on April 26, 1992 and made Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana. He was nominated Apostolic Pro-Nuncio in Nigeria, on April 3, 1992. On April 4, 1998 he was nominated Delegate for the Pontifical Representations. Archbishop Viganò served as Secretary General of the Governorate of the Vatican City State from July 16, 2009 until September 3, 2011. On October 19, 2011 Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, a post he held until his retirement in April of 2016.

Hilaire Belloc: “Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”

Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson (.pdf version)

Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914) was the youngest son of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and younger brother of Edward Frederic Benson. In 1895, he was ordained a priest in the Church of England by his father who was then Archbishop of Canterbury. After many years of questioning and soul-searching he was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1903. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904 and named a Monsignor in 1911. This book, written in 1907, is Benson’s dystopic vision of a near future world in which religion has, by and large, been rejected or simply fallen by the wayside. The Catholic Church has retreated to Italy and Ireland, while the majority of the rest of the world is either Humanistic or Pantheistic. There is a ‘one world’ government, and euthanasia is widely available. The plot follows the tale of a priest, Percy Franklin, who becomes Pope Silvester III, and a mysterious man named Julian Felsenburgh, who is identical in looks to the priest and who becomes “Lord of the World.” “The one condition of progress…on the planet that happened to be men’s dwelling place, was peace, not the sword which Christ brought or that which Mahomet wielded; but peace that arose from, not passed, understanding; the peace that sprang from a knowledge that man was all and was able to develop himself only by sympathy with his fellows…”

Benson was sent to Cambridge to write and serve as a priest chaplain to the Catholic community. Later, he was allowed to live on his own to devote himself to writing. A prolific author, he traveled extensively, writing and lecturing. Benson wrote many apologetic works, including The Religion of the Plain Man, Paradoxes of Catholicism, and Confessions of a Convert. He was also a bestselling novelist, writing The Holy Blissful Martyr Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Come Rack! Come Rope!, and The Necromancers. The dystopian novel Lord of the World is his best-known work.

Apocalypse Now, By Harry W. Crocker III

Story of Satanic Fashion Show Staged Inside a Church Almost Directly Out of 1907 Apocalyptic Distopian Novel, Lord of the World

This teaching on the Resurrection is a transcript of Dr. Gene Scott as he preached it live from the Los Angeles University Cathedral.

THE RESURRECTION by Dr. w. euGENE SCOTT (Ph.D., Stanford University)
Preached at the Los Angeles University Cathedral
Copyright © 2009 Pastor Melissa Scott. Dr. Gene Scott ® is a registered trademark name. Pastor Melissa Scott ® is a registered trademark name. W. euGene Scott Ph.D ® is a registered trademark name. All rights reserved.

The Road from Runnymede

This exceptional film traces the development of Anglo-American Political Institutions, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law, from Magna Carta through the American Constitution.

The American Revolution, by Charles Burris

Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution, by Murray N. Rothbard

The Origins of American Politics, by Bernard Bailyn

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by Bernard Bailyn

The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation, by Bernard Bailyn

Conceived in Liberty Combined 1-4 Volume Edition, by Murray N, Rothbard

Conceived in Liberty Volume 5, by Murray N. Rothbard

And it’s a doozy. US Catholic bishops have been in a bind for years, and this book tells us how we got there — including the role played  by the taxpayer grants from the Agency for International Development and Obama-Biden’s millions for the bishops’ border “charities” that  wound up on the front page this year.

So it’s kept me busy (and silent) these past couple of years… but it’s worth it. I hope that LRC can give it a link!

Trump just released over 10,000 previously classified RFK assassination files—and America is buzzing. In this Free-form Friday episode of America’s Untold Stories, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley break down what’s inside the documents, why the MLK Jr. family opposes further releases, and whether these revelations challenge the official narrative.

From secret records to modern power plays, we cover:

• MLK Jr. family backlash over declassification

• Harvard’s war with Trump on foreign student visas

• Letitia James’ mortgage fraud probe

• Silicon Valley drone companies stuck using Chinese parts

• CNN reveals most Americans now support mass deportations

• Tulsi Gabbard’s voting record sparks new controversy

• Grieving mother Patty Morin’s plea from the White House press room

Buckle up—this episode peels back layers of politics, history, and power

In our perilous, chaotic times of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd, it is essential to know the deep background story of the history of Communist apparats/fronts and African-Americans, from the beginning of the Communist Party (and other Marxist-Leninist ideological instrumentalities) attempts to capture and engage the allegiance of Black Americans from 1919 to the present.  Black Lives Matter, Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA)

Here are several items below to explore:

“ANARCHY U.S.A.” –– 1966 John Birch Society Film.

This is a C-SPAN 3 re-broadcast of an anti-communism film, produced in 1966 by the John Birch Society, which uses narration and news footage to detail the methods of communist revolutionaries in China, Algeria, and Cuba, then argues that U.S. Civil Rights leaders are also Communists using the same methods. The film condemns several U.S. Presidents and the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts.

The Communist Position on the Negro Question (pdf)

For decades this was the official statement of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA)

“Even as the Great Migration witnessed a major shift of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and urban centers, during the Depression decade the majority of blacks were still scratching out a meagre living as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant laborers tied by debt and KKK terrorism to peonage in the South. In the 1930s, the Communist Party U.S.A. dedicated itself to fighting the “defenders of white chauvinism,” educating and liberating oppressed African Americans, and advocating for “Self-Determination for the Black Belt.”

Here is the formal FBI analysis of this document.

Communist Revolution in the Streets, by Gary Allen

This seminal volume has been actively suppressed and surviving copies are extremely rare. Here are excerpts from this prophetic work — One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six

The Whole of Their Lives: Communism in America – A Personal History and Intimate Portrayal of Its Leaders, by Benjamin Gitlow

Gitlow was American Communist Party General Secretary, Communist International executive committee member who courageously revealed the true nature of subversion, infiltration & Stalinist control of the CPUSA.

I own a signed edition of this rare book.

The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, by Eugene Lyons

Amazon Review:

As the author points out the “decade” of penetration by the communists in America never really ended. Those fanatical comrades wound up in places of influence and with each generation that influence has remained and become magnified. When you read this book you will recognize many tactics, ideas, and strategies that are visible today. This book should be read alongside the books by Diana West wherein she describes this country’s attack from within and how we have never really come to grips with nor denounced the communist takeover of our culture and society. That was a triumph of the reds: to operate in this country and to be able to simultaneously inoculate themselves from the blowback of condemnation. Much of what we are living with today, the political correctness and the rest of the insanity stems from the left’s desire to destroy from within.

Color, Communism And Common Sense, by Manning Johnson

This book by former Communist apparatchik Manning Johnson is a must read. As the current chaotic political environment swells, remnants of the past are ignored. This powerful book gives incredible insight into the tricks and the trade of the Communist Party, and their manipulation of minorities here in the USA. This been going on for a long period and the contemporary leaders of the BLM movement have claimed they are trained Marxists. In 1932, Johnson studied for three months under J. Peters, William Z. Foster, Jack Stachel, Alexander Bittelman, Max Bedacht, Israel Amter, Gil Green, Harry Haywood, and James S. Allen among others at the “National Training School,” part of the New Workers School, a “secret school” devoted to training “development of professional revolutionists, professional revolutionaries, or active functionaries of the Communist Party.” He served as a national organizer for the Trade Union Unity League. From 1931 to 1932, he served as a District agitation propaganda director for Buffalo, New York. From 1932 to 1934, he was district organizer for Buffalo. In 1935, Manning Johnson ran as a Communist Party candidate for New York’s 22nd Congressional District for the United States House of Representatives. From 1936 to 1939, he served on the Party’s National Committee, National Trade Union Commission, and Negro Commission. Fellow members of the Party’s National Negro Commission were: James S. Allen, Elizabeth Lawson, Robert Minor, and George Blake Charney. The infiltration of other parties started long before the Communist Control Act of 1954. Communists predominantly hide behind and operate under other party names, primarily the Democrats. They also do their work via many front organizations that indoctrinate, stir, and agitate their pawns.

In Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups: Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-first Congress, First Session, Parts 1-3, Manning Johnson produced a list of Communist-front organizations that included: African Blood Brotherhood (headed by Richard B. Moore and Cyril Briggs), All Harlem Youth Conference, American Negro Labor Congress, Artists Committee for Protection of Negro Rights, Citizens Committee for the Appointment of a Negro to the Board of Education, Civil Rights Congress, Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training, Committee for the Negro in the Arts, Committee to Abolish Peonage, Committee to Aid the Fighting South, Committee to Defend Angelo Herndon, League of Young Southerners, Council on African Affairs, Defense Committee for Claudia Jones, George Washington Carver School, Harlem Committee to End Police Brutality, Harlem Council on Education, International Committee of Negro Workers, International Committee on African Affairs, International Trade Union Committee for Negro Workers, International Workers Order, League for Protection of Minority Rights, League of Struggle for Negro Rights, National Conference of Negro Youth, National Emergency Committee to Stop Lynching, National Negro Congress, National Student Committee for Negro Problems, Negro Cultural Committee, Negro Labor Victory Committee, Negro People’s Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, Scottsboro Defense Committee, Southern Negro Youth Congress, Southern Youth Legislature, United Aid for Peoples of African Descent, United Front for Herndon, United Harlem Tenants and Consumers Organization, and United Negro and Allied Veterans of America among others.

Black and Conservative: The autobiography of George S. Schuyler, by George S. Schuyler

Amazon Review

Don’t Believe the Hype!!: The Incredible History of Communist Subversion in America’s Black Community, by C Brian Madden

Amazon Book Description

Have you ever wondered why, today’s American culture has took a dramatic change for the worse? Have you ever wondered by our youth are no longer interested in pursuing the “American Dream” anymore? Ever wonder why, a certain culture of people, have no longer cared about whether they live or die or not, say “blank the police” and are always hostile towards those holding authority? The answer to these questions will shock you; and they are being done on purpose!! This book will show you how we got to this point in today’s society, especially when it comes to the African-American Community.

Black Revolutionaries in the United States: Communist Interventions, Volume II, by Communist Research Cluster

Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1990, by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Amazon Book Description:

In this important study, Earl Ofari Hutchinson examines in detail the American Communist Party’s efforts to win the allegiance of black Americans and the various responses to this from the black community. Beginning with events of the 1920s, Hutchinson discusses at length the historical forces that encouraged alliances between African Americans and the predominately white American Communist Party. He also takes an in-depth look at why, and how, issues of class, party ideology, and racial identity stood in the way of a partnership of black leaders and communists in the United States. Blacks and Reds addresses landmark events surrounding associations between communists and black activists. Hutchinson examines, among other things, how Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois’s support of party activities affected their lives and how the Communist Party used the trial of Angela Davis to promote its own interests. His scope ranges from oft forgotten signs of misdirection, such as how communists’ efforts to express racial sympathy in the early 1950s contributed to their own near destruction during the McCarthy era, to a thorough discussion of how the Party’s effort to gain a foothold in Stokely Carmichael’s SNCC, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King’s SCLC, and Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Panthers shook up the civil rights movement by triggering the FBI’s secret war against King, Malcolm X, and others considered to be black radicals.

How Communists Became a Scapegoat for the Red Summer ‘Race Riots’ of 1919, article by Becky Little

Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, by Harry Haywood

Amazon review

A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle, by Harry Haywood

Amazon Book Description:

Mustering out of the U.S. army in 1919, Harry Haywood stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of his life. Within months, he found himself in the middle of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history and realized that he’d been fighting the wrong war—the real enemy was right here at home. This book is Haywood’s eloquent account of coming of age as a black man in twentieth-century America and of his political awakening in the Communist Party.

For all its cultural and historical interest, Harry Haywood’s story is also noteworthy for its considerable narrative drama. The son of parents born into slavery, Haywood tells how he grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, found his first job as a shoeshine boy in Minneapolis, then went on to work as a waiter on trains and in restaurants in Chicago. After fighting in France during the war, he studied how to make revolutions in Moscow during the 1920s, led the Communist Party’s move into the Deep South in 1931, helped to organize the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, worked with the Sharecroppers’ Union, supported protests in Chicago against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, fought with the International Brigades in Spain, served in the Merchant Marines during World War II, and continued to fight for the right of self-determination for the Afro-American nation in the United States until his death in 1985.

This new edition of his classic autobiography, Black Bolshevik, introduces American readers to the little-known story of a brilliant thinker, writer, and activist whose life encapsulates the struggle for freedom against all odds of the New Negro generation that came of age during and after World War I.

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

Amazon Review:

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore redefines the standard chronology of the Civil Rights movement, popularly known for its post-WWII activity. Post-WWII civil rights action would culminate in achievement with Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 and 1965 Acts of President Johnson. As the title of the book indicates, and according to Gilmore, civil rights in fact had far earlier and far more radical origins in Communism, labor, Fascism and anti-Fascism, and the Popular Front. She substantiates her thesis by tracing the activity of these movements, and by placing within them the African Americans and whites involved who both worked together and in opposition to one another to end or continue Jim Crow. The issue of black civil rights is typically isolated to the United States and is considered to be historically a distinct American problem. By highlighting the involvement of radical movements that found their roots in Europe, Gilmore places African American civil rights on an international stage and redefines it within the context of what the world was experiencing and how this weaved into American culture. Gilmore shows that in America there was an active Communist Party that was focused on illuminating how racism created class differences, and had a purpose to overcome this class inequality by organizing Southern black laborers into a force white supremacists could not reckon with. The CPUSA would become a major player in calling for an end to Jim Crow and white supremacy, and would operate at the same time of the NAACP, whom the communists considered too conservative and bourgeois. The distinction between the two is one where the Communist Party favored direct action and the NAACP preferred legal means to solve issues, and Gilmore states that when placed alongside Communism, the conservative nature of the NAACP is stark (7). In emphasizing this simplistic distinction between the two, Gilmore slights the NAACP of some of its own influence and early contribution. Though less radical in comparison to a system like Communism, the NAACP nevertheless operated within a legal system that was hostile to them. When placed within the cultural context of America in the early 20th century, the NAACP was also radical in its own way because it defied the “place” of the African American, and the organization enjoyed many successes of its own. For example, the NAACP played a major role in the 1923 Moore v. Dempsey decision that strengthened due process and African American’s Constitutional rights. It was not only the Communist Party that took an interest in labor either, though Gilmore makes it seem as if labor was a CPUSA concern only and does not mention that the NAACP was involved in the creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African American labor union (52). Though these successes are certainly not as radical as labor marches through the streets of Gastonia, they are still significant to early civil rights radicalism. In keeping with the international scope of civil rights and the importance of the Communist Party, Gilmore brings to light that Africa Americans even went to Russia, had audience with Stalin himself, and many even let out sighs of relief to be in a country where they could, for the first time, enjoy life without fear. African American civil rights and Communism are two movements not typically linked together. In placing them together, Gilmore effectively rewrites civil rights history to include world wide involvement. She does similarly with Fascism in the United States. Gilmore reveals that Fascist ideology was intertwined with white supremacy (106), yet Gilmore does not adequately make the connection between the ideologies of Fascism and white supremacy to explain how white supremacists co-opted Fascism into their beliefs. Additionally, Gilmore splits up the influence of Fascism into two different sections, one in which she describes how some Americans embraced it early on, and then how later Fascism became linked with Communism and Nazi policy, and was thereafter largely rejected within America. Gilmore skips from one to the other without describing the intermediate years and how white supremacists that were once Fascist came to reject the ideology. Gilmore makes it clear why they did, but does not trace how or what happened to the former Black Shirt white supremacist American Fascists. Gilmore focuses her narrative on select people and groups, which allows her to make her points without filling pages with names and events that would have made the monograph dense and less fluid. Through the experiences of her select characters, Gilmore documents the progress of movements and is then allowed to move on with her point made by their examples. As she admits in her introduction, she leaves out a significant portion of people in the South who played major roles in the Civil Rights movement (11). As reviewer Michael Dennis points out, the people ignored precisely the kind of political linkages that defined the popular front and did a good deal more grass roots organizing in the South than Fort-Whiteman. While leaving out these groups of people and their contributions does not weaken the argument Gilmore is trying to make, adding them would have strengthened her narrative by illustrating the scope of the work the Popular Front involved itself in. While she leaves out some groups and people, she includes other often overlooked players such as Truman’s committee on civil rights, adding another layer to the retelling of conventional civil rights history (409). Gilmore’s limited focus allows her to incorporate an element of familiarity that makes her story easier and more enjoyable to read. The people involved in the movements she writes about become more than just names, but people with personalities. The emotional connection forged with these people give the book a sense of intimacy. Much like in her previous book, Gender & Jim Crow, Gilmore uses this feeling of familiarity to make assumptions about people’s feelings and motivations that cannot be supported by evidence. For instance, Gilmore assumes that Louise Thompson must have been hiding something about her feelings for African American Communist Lovett Fort-Whiteman (143). She does the same when she attempts to psychoanalyze the reticence of Alain Locke and attributes it to an attraction to the charismatic Langston Hughes (137). These are things that Gilmore herself simply cannot know without personal testimony. In some cases, Gilmore is able to more successfully pull off her personal narratives. When she describes the death of Fort-Whiteman, she adds a touching reflection of his last moments that closes up the extraordinary life of this very unique man (154). It is in moments like those that Gilmore fosters a true emotional connection between her book and the reader. The combination of humanization and the personalization of events with a unique historical interpretation make Defying Dixie an essential book on the civil rights movement. Defying Dixie adds a new layer to the understanding of how the civil rights movement progressed, and what influenced the later movement. While it does not rewrite the entirety of the movement, it inserts a new level that should not be overlooked.

Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-35, by Randi Storch

Amazon Book Description:

Red Chicago is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago’s neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago’s rank-and-file Communists.

Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow’s former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago’s Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders’ intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago’s Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members’ actions as an integral part of the communities and industries in which they lived and worked.

Communists in Harlem During the Depression, by Mark Naison

Amazon Book Description:

No socialist organization has ever had a more profound effect on black life than the Communist Party did in Harlem during the Depression. Mark Naison describes how the party won the early endorsement of such people as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and how its support of racial equality and integration impressed black intellectuals, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson.

This meticulously researched work, largely based on primary materials and interviews with leading black Communists from the 1930s, is the first to fully explore this provocative encounter between whites and blacks. It provides a detailed look at an exciting period of reform, as well as an intimate portrait of Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, at the high point of its influence and pride.

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, by Robin D. G. Kelley

Amazon Book Description:

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the “long Civil Rights movement,” Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama’s repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama’s farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party’s tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.

After discussing the book’s origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

How ‘Communism’ Brought Racial Equality To The South

National Public Radio (NPR Broadcast ) State-sponsored media interview:

Tell Me More continues its Black History Month series of conversations with a discussion about the role of the Communist Party. It was prominent in the fight for racial equality in the south, specifically Alabama, where segregation was most oppressive. Many courageous activists were communists. Host Michel Martin speaks with historian Robin Kelley about his book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression about how the communist party tried to secure racial, economic, and political reforms.

Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950, by Mary Stanton

Amazon Book Description:

Red, Black, White is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D. G. Kelley’s groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the district 17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, it acquaints a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on postwar black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans.

After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931, it was open season for old-fashioned lynchings, legal (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered, and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, “disappeared,” or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton―a noted chronicler of the left and of social justice movements in the South―explores the resources available to Depression-era Reds before the advent of the New Deal or the modern civil rights movement. What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion by which to evaluate the Reds’ accomplishments.

Through seven cases of the CPUSA (district 17) activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the cult of white southern womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of African Americans, Jews, and communists. Yet this still is a story of how these groups fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change in a fractured region.

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, by Cedric Robinson 

Amazon Book Description:

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people’s history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.

To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century Black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.

Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism, by Frank Chapman

Amazon Review.

Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, by Erik S. McDuffie

Amazon Book Description:

Sojourning for Freedom portrays pioneering black women activists from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, focusing on their participation in the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) between 1919 and 1956. Erik S. McDuffie considers how women from diverse locales and backgrounds became radicalized, joined the CPUSA, and advocated a pathbreaking politics committed to black liberation, women’s rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international solidarity. McDuffie explores the lives of black left feminists, including the bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, who wrote about the “triple exploitation” of race, gender, and class; Esther Cooper Jackson, an Alabama-based civil rights activist who chronicled the experiences of black female domestic workers; and Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist who emerged as one of the Communist Party’s leading theorists of black women’s exploitation. Drawing on more than forty oral histories collected from veteran black women radicals and their family members, McDuffie examines how these women negotiated race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics within the CPUSA. In Sojourning for Freedom, he depicts a community of radical black women activist intellectuals who helped to lay the foundation for a transnational modern black feminism.

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, by Carole Boyce Davies

Amazon Book Description:

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.

Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union: An Autobiography, by Robert Robinson

John Alt Review:

Some years ago, I read Black On Red: My 44 Years Inside The Soviet Union, a book by Robert Robinson, An African-American who lived in Detroit during the Depression. I had to read it again, for it is about as gripping an autobiography as one can find. Hired in 1927 as a floor sweeper by Ford Motor Company, he became a toolmaker there. In April 1930, through Amtorg, a Soviet trade agency based in New York, a Russian delegation toured the plant. A Russian asked if he would like to work in the Soviet Union. At Ford he earned $140 a month–good wages–but was offered $250 a month, free living quarters, maid service, 30 days vacation a year and a car. All of this for a one year contract. At 23 and recently from Cuba, where he grew up, he was ready for some adventure. Like most things Soviet, the promises were eventually to mark a tragic life, his.

So in 1930 Robinson went, and thereon hangs his tale. He describes various discrimination against blacks while the Soviet government painted itself as an ethnically tolerant utopia.

Robert Robinson was a highly talented, even gifted toolmaker and mechanical engineer. (He graduated from The Moscow Evening Institute of Mechanical Engineering. Despite its clumsy name, its training was excellent.) He received numerous Soviet medals, citations, and awards. As one instance of his ability, managers didn’t think he could quickly design, develop, and fabricate 13 indicators used for checking precision gauges, but he did in three and one half months. This increased production seventy-two fold. All the time, a jealous colleague was undermining his efforts by stealing pieces or sabotaging machines.

Despite his education, training, and ability, he was repeatedly passed over. Through the years he witnessed many less able men move up the ladder to become plant director or branch manager, but he did not get a promotion or pay raise.

During the 1930s Moscow purges, he never undressed until 4 AM, nervously awaiting a Secret Police knock at his door. Next day, he and others would silently take note of fellow employees who did not show up for work. He was aware of the foreigners who disappeared from the First State Ball Bearing Factory. When he started there, he found 362 foreigners. By 1939 only he and a Hungarian were left. Because he was a foreigner, friends begged him not to visit them.

Informers lurked everywhere. If a Russian was asked to spy on neighbors he dared not refuse else he became a suspect. Informants watched a neighbor’s comings and goings from his apartment, as well as who visited him, or what he bought at the store.

Late one night in 1943, Robinson did hear a knock on his door. He thought his time had finally come, his hand shaking as he opened it. Two agents were startled to see his face, then mumbled “Excuse us. There was some mistake.”

As I read the book, I could only feel immense sadness for this man, who lost the best years of his life in a dull, dreary, police state. He learned to control his feelings, to confide in nobody. Many times he would be sounded out–perhaps innocently–over his views on this or that, and always he responded with neutrality or political correctness. He could not afford to trust anybody. That was how he survived finally to leave the Workers’ Paradise.

Born in Jamaica about 1907, he became acclimated to bitter Moscow winters. He was there when Hitler’s wermacht and luftwaffe invaded Russia, the German army 44 miles from Moscow. The Russian government recruited every able-bodied man to age 60. In 1941 he was called for his draft physical, but was not inducted because of a bad left eye. Under fierce aerial bombardment, the streets of Moscow were barricaded against the coming onslaught as he and others were told that the factory would be moved to Kuybyshev. On the train, he beheld thousands upon thousands of people fleeing Moscow–men, women, and children, young and old–shivering while trudging icy roads carrying suitcases tied with cord. In Kuybyshev whole families shared horse stalls, with over 70 people using one toilet and one wash basin.

During the war with Germany, black bread was rationed at 600 grams (21.1 oz) a day. A sack of potatoes cost 900 rubles ($180). Robert Robinson made 1100 rubles month. He ate 7 or 8 cabbage leaves soaked in lukewarm water. Others at the factory became so weak that they could not control their bladders and urinated in their pants. Some died, collapsing on the floor in front of their machines. Every passing moment the men thought of food, its smell, its taste. After months of hunger, he began losing all energy, felt listless, and went to a doctor. As he took his shirt off, she went behind a screen and cried. He at first thought she was shocked to see his skin color, but she wept because his arms were toothpicks, his stomach stretched tight against corrugated ribs. He had not looked in a mirror for months. She told him he was at death’s doorway. She invited him to her house to dine each Sunday with her, her husband, and daughter.

He never joined the communist party because of his religious faith. He could not accept atheist doctrine. He saw through a racist, repressive system, and was watchful that he not suggest even a nuance of deviant political behavior. He was made to act in a Mosfilm propaganda movie, Deep Are The Roots, then considered a classic in Russia, about racism in the United States. When asked as an “expert,” Robinson told the director that the movie was over-the-top, extremely overdone, but the director had his own career at stake and probably could not listen.

During 44 years in Soviet society, Robert Robinson found that the deepest discrimination was against blacks and orientals. In his book he notes that in the USA people may or may not condone institutional and racial discrimination but they do recognize that it exists. In the USSR, officially and socially, such discrimination did not occur. To admit the contrary would have been to violate the Soviet agenda of equality and brotherly love. He states that he “could never get used to Russian racism. They prided themselves on freedom from prejudice, so racism was especially virulent.”

During the 1930s he met and chatted on a park bench with black American poet Langston Hughes. He met and spent evenings with the hugely talented and internationally famous American Paul Robeson (athlete, actor, orator, concert singer, lawyer, social activist), and his wife Eslanda each time they visited Moscow. He asked Robeson as a fellow black man to intervene for him so he could escape Russia. Robeson avoided him on the issue. Eventually Robert Robinson learned from Eslanda that Paul did not want to do it because that would sour his relationship with the Soviet leadership.

After many years of trying, and through the extended efforts of Ugandan ambassadors Mathias Lubega, and Michael Ondoga, Robert Robinson was granted a visa for a vacation in Uganda. He was careful. He bought an Aeroflot round trip ticket although he never wanted to return. To reduce suspicion he took just a few rubles, packed few clothes.

From the airport gate to the aircraft he took a bus. Then it happened. In freezing cold, a coatless woman ran after the bus shouting his name. He dared not turn around. But the bus stopped and the driver called back for him. He got off. She told him he could not go because he had no vaccination papers. This was false; he had shown them and had been vaccinated. He trembled, wept inwardly, was totally devastated, but he repeated the process, the doctor this time simply signing the form without using a needle. Again he waited months and finally got approval.

The day came, and he climbed on the bus, praying silently as it neared the airplane. He boarded and feared that somebody would again call his name before the plane began taxiing. Or the pilot would be ordered to turn the aircraft around. It did not happen. He landed in Uganda. We are left to imagine the feelings that must have overwhelmed him as he stepped off, out of a police state and into the warm African sun.

This was 1974 and he found himself at the hotel feted as personal guest of Idi Amin, Ugandan President For Life. When Robinson visited Amin the President offered him Ugandan citizenship, but Robinson declined, fearing that it would bring violent wrath of the KGB down on him in this relatively unprotected country. For several years he taught at Uganda Technical College outside Kampala. In Uganda he met Zylpha Mapp, an African-American lecturer at the Teacher College. They married in 1976. Tensions and suppression grew in Uganda as Idi Amin became mentally unstable. Through the unrelenting efforts of an African-American US Information Service Officer, William B. Davis, in 1980 he and Zylpha were able to fly to the United States, where he was declared a legal U.S. resident, as he had to forfeit his U.S. citizenship many years before. On December 6, 1986, they became U.S. citizens. living in Washington, DC. He died in 1994 of cancer. Zylpha Mapp-Robinson died in 2001, age 87. (She was born August 25, 1914.)

Even in the United States he could not rid himself of a life lived in fear, caution, and suspicion. Robinson hoped that his book would reveal the USSR for the oppressive society it was. “Even now,” he said, “I have to be careful because so many people do not understand the Russian psychology, that once you have offended the Russians, you are never forgiven. Never forgiven.”

He did not intend that statement to detract from the countless ordinary Russians who befriended and helped him. He understood them as victims of the same system. He had fond memories of people such as the lady doctor who invited him to her house to dine during the Great Patriotic War against Germany.

He was aware of the immense suffering of his Russian friends. He tells the story of a lovely sixteen year old girl on her way to school. She was stopped by an aide of Lavrentiy Beria, head of MVD, Soviet Secret Police. The aide wanted her to climb in his car, but she refused. At the end of the school day, she looked out the window. The aide was still there. She knew she couldn’t call her parents, else they would be visited and probably sent to a labor camp. She had no choice. For two years she was raped by Beria, her parents in despair and anguish. After Beria tired of her, he forced the family to give up their belongings and move to Lithuania.

If you want to know about the Stalinist purges, and about the horrible sacrifices Russians made during WWII, read this book. Robinson was there. Spending most of his life in the Soviet Union, he suffered, struggled, silently wept, but endured. He lived through it all, an eye witness to history from the purges to Hitler’s invasion to Sputnik and the Cold War.

Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise, by Joy Gleason Carew

Amazon Book Description:

One of the most compelling, yet little known stories of race relations in the twentieth century is the account of blacks who chose to leave the United States to be involved in the Soviet Experiment in the 1920s and 1930s. Frustrated by the limitations imposed by racism in their home country, African Americans were lured by the promise of opportunity abroad. A number of them settled there, raised families, and became integrated into society. The Soviet economy likewise reaped enormous benefits from the talent and expertise that these individuals brought, and the all around success story became a platform for political leaders to boast their party goals of creating a society where all members were equal.

In Blacks, Reds, and Russians, Joy Gleason Carew offers insight into the political strategies that often underlie relationships between different peoples and countries. She draws on the autobiographies of key sojourners, including Harry Haywood and Robert Robinson, in addition to the writings of Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. Interviews with the descendants of figures such as Paul Robeson and Oliver Golden offer rare personal insights into the story of a group of emigrants who, confronted by the daunting challenges of making a life for themselves in a racist United States, found unprecedented opportunities in communist Russia.

Military Judge Matthew McCall ruled last week that the CIA’s torture of September 11 defendant Ammar al-Baluchi rendered his confessions as inadmissible.  The prosecution failed to prove by a preponderance of evidence that his statements were voluntary and were not obtained by torture.  The statements were made in January 2007, four months after he was transferred from secret overseas CIA locations where he was abused and held in isolation for more than three years.

Ammar al-Baluchi is accused of facilitating the 9/11 attacks by providing money and other assistance to the alleged hijackers.  He is the nephew of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  He is also the cousin of Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for the 1993 WTC bombing and the Bojinka Plot.

Carol Rosenberg of The New York Times reported, “The CIA routinely beat Baluchi and kept him naked.  Student interrogators took turns slamming his head against a wall.  He was deprived of sleep for 82 straight hours by shackling him at the ankles and wrists in a way that forced him to stand, naked, with a hood on his head.  He was made to fear he would be drowned in a mock waterboarding technique in which he was laid out on a tarp as cold water was poured onto a towel covering his face.”

Judge McCall wrote, “Just as the CIA’s psychologists had planned, (Baluchi) learned that he was helpless to resist the torture, and that cooperation meant a lessening of abuse and an increase in rewards.”

Alka Pradhan, one of al-Baluchi’s lawyers said, “Torture has stained the Guantanamo military commissions since their inception.  This ruling is the only measure of accountability that Mr. al Baluchi has ever received for the brutality he endured, and it is long overdue.”

Why did the US national-security state torture 9/11 defendants such as Ammar al-Baluchi if they had credible evidence obtained through lawful means of their guilt?  Evidence extracted through torture is known to be unreliable because the person who is being tortured is motivated to say whatever he thinks his torturers want him to say, rather than to tell the truth.

Why did the US national-security state deprive the truth of the 9/11 attacks from the victims’ families and the public?  The US national-security state enabled the 9/11 attacks to occur to create a justification to wage wars of aggression in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq in order to achieve their geostrategic objectives.  The US national-security state does not care about the 9/11 victims, their families, or the millions of people that they murdered in the wars of aggression that they launched after 9/11.

The conquest theory of the state, associated with the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, holds that the origins of the state are in war and conquest.  The personal X account of the Argentinian president celebrates the Argentinian government’s origins in war, conquest, and attempted genocide of the native population.

The text on X reads:  “146 years after the beginning of the heroic enterprise led by the hero of the nation, General Julio Argentino Roca, we honor the Desert Campaign as a fundamental historical milestone in the history of our nation, which marked not only the expansion of the national territory, but also the foundation of the modern Argentine State.”

An Argentinian correspondent writes:

“Milei’s office is celebrating what can be described as a genocide, albeit a less famous one . . . .  The Argentinian government successfully exterminated more or less all of the native populations by means of a series of “wars” where the natives armed with rudimentary spears and a few rifles faced an organized army with Remington rifles.  The main warlords of these expeditions to the desert were the president Manuel Rosas and the infamous general and later president Julio Argentino Roca, the most ruthless and consequent proponent of a policy of extermination of the natives.  Not only did the Argentinian army massacre about 15,000 natives, but the survivors had to endure a life of semi-slavery.  It is horrible and yet telling that Milei’s office celebrates a horrible historical fat like the extermination of the natives . . . as though it was a feat of civilization and progress.”

Join us in Auburn, Alabama to hear Ron Unz on “The True History of World War II; USS Liberty Survivor Phil Tourney on “The Attack on the USS Liberty”; retired Airforce Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski on a personal perspective on Pentagon Lies; Wanjiru Njoya on “Reconstruction Reconsidered”; Scott Horton on How DC restarted the Cold War with Russia and the Ukraine disaster; Brion McClanahan on “The Rightous Cause Conquers the World”; Ilana Mercer on “The Real Israel”; Hunt Tooley on how World War I spawned the total state; Yours Truly on the “false virtue” of American imperialism; and other great speakers.

It was banned in Miami, but not in Auburn.  The Oscar-winning documentary, “No Other Land,” will be shown on the afternoon of May 15 just before the evening cocktail reception.  Come and join us.  You’ll never hear any discussions like this on the FOX War Channel.

An influential strategist from a NATO member commiserates.  https://thecradle.co/articles/blue-homeland-architect-warns-nato-has-failed-and-the-eu-wants-turkiye-on-its-knees

Over the course of the past three millennia, Western Civilization has faced many apocalyptic challenges and existential threats, both internal and external.

I believe we stand today, as a civilization, quivering on an oscillating precipice facing perhaps our greatest danger, one as real and threatening as the series of Medieval invasions from multiple hostile forces, the Magyars (Hungarians) from the east, the Viking expansion from the north and the Arabs from the south, all followed by the Bubonic Plague which ravaged the continent. In the 20th Century the West faced and defeated the onslaught of those twin totalitarian tyrannies, National Socialist Germany and Marxist/Leninist Socialism of the USSR.

Those who hate and seek the destruction of the West wear many ideological guises and raiment.

The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this Dialogue. The Spirit of Western Civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everyone is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education.

Logos is an ancient Greek term. It means reason as expressed in human speech. The Greeks believed reason to be the controlling principle in an orderly, harmonious universe (cosmos).

The faculties of reason (conceptual thought) and language (propositional speech) are what distinguish human beings from other creatures.

Accordingly, man is described as “the rational animal.” As philosopher Mortimer Adler points out in his book, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes:

. . . man is the only talking, the only naming, declaring or questioning, affirming or denying, the only arguing, agreeing or disagreeing, the only discursive animal.

Philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand develops this idea further in her book, For the New Intellectual:

Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food, and the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

But to think is an act of choice . . . Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think – not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment . . . Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality.

Human beings are capable of abstract thought, the transcendence of their immediate environment, and the emancipation from the perpetual present.

In one of the most important books of the 20^th Century, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, historian Carroll Quigley elaborates on this crucial idea of abstraction:  

Both man and universe are dynamic, or changeable in time, and the chief additional complexity is that both are changing in a continuum of abstraction, as well as in the more familiar continuum of space-time. The continuum of abstraction simply means that the reality in which man and the universe function exists in five dimensions; of these the dimension of abstraction covers a range from the most concrete and material end of reality to, at the opposite extreme, the most abstract and spiritual end of reality, with every possible gradation between these two ends along the intervening dimensions that determine reality, including the three dimensions of space, the fourth of time, and this fifth of abstraction. This means that man is concrete and material at one end of his person, is abstract and spiritual at the other end, and covers all the gradations between, with a large central zone concerned with his chaos of emotional experiences and feelings.

In order to think about himself or the universe with the more abstract and rational end of his being, man has to categorize and to conceptualize both his nature and the nature of reality, while, in order to act and to feel on the less abstract end of his being, he must function more directly, outside the limits of categories, without the buffer of concepts. Thus man might look at his own being as divided into three levels of body, emotions, and reason. The body, functioning directly in space-time-abstraction, is much concerned with concrete situations, individual and unique events, at a specific time and place. The middle levels of his being are concerned with himself and his reactions to reality in terms of feelings and emotions as determined by endocrine and neurological reactions. The upper levels of his being are concerned with his neurological analysis and manipulation of conceptualized abstractions. The three corresponding operations of his being are sensual, emotional or intuitive, and rational.

The sequence of intellectual history is concerned with the sequence of styles or fads that have been prevalent, one after another, as to what emphasis or combinations of man’s three levels of operations would be used in his efforts to experience life and to cope with the universe.

Early Christianity, influenced by Greek philosophy, borrowed the term “Logos” as a symbolic representation for Jesus Christ. Logos was the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world. It was identified with the Second Person of the Trinity.

In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was made nothing that has been made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness grasped it not. There was a man, one sent from God, whose name was John. This man came as a witness concerning the light, that all might believe through him. He was not himself the light, but was to bear witness to the light. It was the true light that enlightens every man who comes into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But to as many as received Him He gave the power of becoming sons of God; to those who believe in His name; who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. And we saw His glory – glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father – full of grace and truth.

The Gospel of John 1, 1-14

With this Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian intellectual inheritance (in addition to the various elements offered by the barbarian Germanic tribes and the Muslim world) Western civilization has developed as “logocentric” or reasoned speech-centered.

From the time of the Protestant Reformation, particular emphasis has been placed upon the written word as a means of transmitting and recording knowledge, away from the earlier “art of memory” or oral tradition of classic Greek and Roman antiquity.

“Printing was to bring about the most radical alteration ever made in Western intellectual history, and its effects were to be felt in every area of human activity,” noted James Burke in his excellent book, The Day The Universe Changed.

“The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology, — everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children; and if one wished to characterize the collective mind of this present period, or indeed of any period,—the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference,—one would best do it by the one word immaturity.” ― Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Anyone remotely aware of the dynamic interplay of ideas and events in the world for the past several decades is well aware that in the media, in the academy, and in the corridors of power, Western Civilization is under a vicious and aggressive assault. This has particularly accelerated in the past few weeks. Here are vital unapologetic defenses of the West and its definitive legacy in shaping the world:

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray

Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis, by James Lindsay

The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, by Heather Mac Donald

When Everyone Kneels, Who Will Stand Up for Western History and Culture? article by Giulio Meotti

“In Defense of Western Civilization,” article by Richard Finger

How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity, by Rodney Stark

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.; (EWTN series The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization; online at YouTube)

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, by Anthony Esolen

Civilization, by Kenneth Clark; (BBC TV series Civilization); online at YouTube (here)

Phoenix: The Triumph of the West, by J. M. Roberts; (BBC TV series The Triumph of the West; select episodes online at YouTube)

The Great Books of the Western World, by Mortimer J. Adler (Author, Editor), Clifton Fadiman (Editor), and Philip W. Goetz (Editor)

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos , by Jordan B. Peterson

The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, by Allan Bloom

The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail

“Must It Be the Rest Against the West?” article by Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy

“The Coming Anarchy,” article by Robert Kaplan

“The Superiority of Western Values in Eight Minutes,” Speech by Ibn Warraq

Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy, by Ibn Warraq

“Sharia’s Incompatibility with Western Values, Explained,” article by Immanuel Al-Manteeqi

The Theory of Education in the United States, by Albert Jay Nock

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock

The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, by Henry Adams

What If Everyone Had A Classical Education?” TED presentation by Rebekah Hagstrom

“The Trivium of Classical Education: Historical Development Decline in the 20th Century and Resurgence in Recent Decades,” A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Faculty of Greenleaf University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Randall D. Hart, July 2004.

Why Marxist Organizations Like BLM Seek to Dismantle the “Western Nuclear Family”

Épater le bourgeois (shock the middle classes) has been the revolutionary rallying cry of the left in the cultural war against Judeo-Christian morality and the nuclear family for well over a hundred and fifty years.

It lies at the epicenter of Modernism, Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism, Progressivism, Feminism, Environmentalism, and Homosexualism.

For fascinating, in-depth explorations of bourgeois (middle class) culture, see Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914, by Peter Gay;  The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud Volume 1: Education of the Senses, Volume 1, by Peter Gay; The Tender Passion: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 2, by Peter Gay; The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3, by Peter Gay; The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 4, by Peter Gay; Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 5, by Peter Gay; Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition, by Gertrude Himmelfarb;  The De-moralization Of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, by Gertrude Himmelfarb; and One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb; The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre McClosky; Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t explain the Modern World, by Deirdre McClosky; and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capitol or Institutions, Enriched the World, by Dierdre McClosky.

The classic and definitive statement of elitist contempt for bourgeois culture is Eminent Victorians, by the scathing, bitchy biographer Lytton Strachey. Strachey, who along with his homosexual lover and fellow Cambridge Apostles initiate, economist John Maynard Keynes, were unabashed advocates of “the higher sodomy,” setting forth the destructive agenda for generations of anti-bourgeois subversion.

Later the Apostles served as the breeding nest for treason by spawning Soviet espionage agents Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Michael Straight. 

Following in the degenerate path blazed earlier by Keynes, the postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault sexually assaulted young boys while living in Tunisia.

See also Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, by Peter Gay; Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, by E. Michael Jones; Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872-1927, by Daniel Albright; France: Fin de Siècle, by Eugen Weber; Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, by Carl E. Schorske; Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, by Peter Gay; Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, by Mel Gordon; Modern Times: The Word from the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson; The Shock of the New, (DVD) by Robert Hughes; Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies, by Paul Buhle and David Wagner;  Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture, by Chris Robe’; Enemies of Society, by Paul Johnson; The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, by Robert Nisbet; and Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America.  

On today’s Tuesday Newsday episode of America’s Untold Stories, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley dive into a chilling, developing story: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s mansion was set ablaze while his family slept inside. Shocking new details reveal the suspect intended to physically harm the governor, turning this case from political unrest into an attempted assassination plot.

We also examine Harvard’s fiery public response to Trump’s demands, setting the stage for what could become a billion-dollar battle between academia and the White House. Plus, Hollywood reels as China officially retaliates against Trump’s tariffs by reducing U.S. film imports, shaking the entertainment industry to its core.

Taylor Lorenz is under fire for her bizarre praise of alleged killer Luigi Mangione. Meanwhile, a deportation mix-up forces the Trump administration to address wrongful removal—and punt responsibility.

Closing out the show, we look at how Trump’s endorsement is turbocharging Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign.

Don’t miss this explosive, headline-packed Tuesday Newsday.

FOX commentator Charles Payne recently repeated Pat Buchanan’s old post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy (After this, therefore because of this) about tariffs in a Breitbart column.  The fallacy goes like this: 1).  Economic growth occurred during the post Civil War period up to the turn of the century.  2).  High protectionist tariffs were imposed during the Lincoln regime and lasted for some fifty years.  3).  Therefore, the protectionist tariffs caused the economic growth.  Yes, and the rooster crows in the morning, then the sun comes up, therefore the rooster crowing causes the sun to come up.

It was the absence of income taxation and a hardly noticeable regulatory regime that were the most important policy issues related to post Civil War growth, along with the existence of the gold standard (in various forms).  International trade was a small fraction of the entire economy, so tariff taxes on imports could not possibly have been the One Cause of post-war prosperity as Buchanan and now Payne argue.  In addition, many of the tariff taxes were imposed on inputs used in the manufacturing process by American corporations, hindering economic growth.  This period of protectionist tariff plunder was especially harmful to American farmers because a tax on imports eventually becomes a de facto tax on exports, and farmers exported huge amounts of their produce.  This is because impoverishing America’s trading partners by blocking them from selling here results in the fact that they then have fewer dollars with which to buy American goods.  At the time that was overwhelmingly American farm produce.  Tariff taxes also reduced the disposable income of the American working class during that period, as all taxation does.

Furthermore, if what these two cheerleaders for the quintessentially anti-populist policy of protectionist plunder of average Americans were true, then there should have been hardly any economic growth at all from the end of World War II until today, when the average tariff rate declined for 78 years from about 11 percent to 2.5 percent last year as shown in this graph.   That was before President Trump proposed an almost sixfold increase in the average tariff tax rate last week.

No one ever created prosperity by raising taxes and as Ron Unz recently wrote, President Trump’s tariff tax increase proposal could well turn out to be the biggest one-time tax increase in world history.

Oscar Garu forwards this message about Milei’s “end of the CEPO”:

“This is a joke.  The common people, who would have exchanged pesos in cash for dollars are substantially prevented from doing so with the ridiculous limit of $100 U.S. per month.  Caputo’s [the Argentinian Minister of Economy] and Milei’s friends, who are in to take advantage of the carry trade, and who keep their pesos in the banks will have the golden opportunity to exchange their pesos, acquired while the exchange rate with the Dollar was kept artificially low by the government, and to drain a big part of the new dollars flowing in through the IMF’s new credits for Argentina.  Anyway, how you can claim to lift the exchange controls when there is a new and stifling limit for cash is a big mystery.”

Lysander Spooner on the difference between a government and a highwayman (1870)
Found in: No Treason. No. VI. The Constitution of No Authority (1870)

The constitutional lawyer, legal theorist, abolitionist, and radical individualist Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) applied the same moral principles to the actions of an organization as he did to a single individual. This led him to make some harsh criticisms of the government as this powerful quotation reveals:

“But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

“The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.

“The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.”

With all the concentrated destruction of the politically inconvenient and declared obsolete historical past of America (and Western Civilization in general) occurring, it is perhaps appropriate to take another look at this column I wrote on the occasion of the death of the Communist terrorist Nelson Mandela.

Useful Idiots 2013

The internationally acclaimed and beloved John Lennon song I discussed, Imagine, will no doubt continue to be aggressively put forth by progressives to replace our current antiquated, irrelevant and “racist” national anthem.

Rather than the old Stalinist anthem of the USSR sung by Communist Party of the United States of America member Paul Robeson or The Internationale sung by CPUSA member Pete Seeger, this is the universally beloved song that was most appropriate for the Nelson Mandela final send-off. Most recently it played a central role in the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.

Here is what John Lennon himself said about his legendary anthem:

“The song ‘Imagine,’ which says, Imagine that there was no more religion, no more country, no more politics is virtually The Communist Manifesto, even though I am not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement. You see, ‘Imagine’ was exactly the same message, but sugar-coated. Now ‘Imagine’ is a big hit almost everywhere; anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic song, but because it is sugar-coated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do.”

There you have it from the man himself. So the idea that Imagine was based on The Communist Manifesto cannot be written off as a paranoid, right-wing conspiracy theory. It’s a fact.

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today…

(No more concept of God/Heaven/Hell)

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace..

(No more national sovereignty or religion)

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will be as one

(Who is the hell is “us?” Communism = New World Order)

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world…

(Abolition of private property)

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will live as one

Several poems from Yoko Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit inspired Lennon to write the lyrics for “Imagine” — in particular, one which Capitol Records reproduced on the back cover of the original Imagine LP titled “Cloud Piece”, reads: “Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in your garden to put them in. Lennon later said the composition “should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song. A lot of it—the lyric and the concept—came from Yoko, but in those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit.”

One of the most disturbing and challenging books I have ever read is Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, The Free Press/Macmillian, Inc., 1994 (republished as Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Muzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, Enigma Books, 2004).

Professor Koch meticulously details the manipulation by the Soviets’ master propagandist Willi Munzenberg of thousands of European and American progressives in the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s by his vast publishing network and interlocking front organizations under the covert direction of the Communist International (Comintern) and the Soviet secret services of the NKVD and the GRU. He particularly concentrates upon the intellectual elite that fell under Munzenberg’s sway in this cultural war against the West. This includes such persons as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Andre’ Malraux, Andre’ Gide, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Parker, George Grosz, Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Bertolt Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

This volume shatters myth after historical myth of this critical period.

Munzenberg, Koch states, “developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is political.” The notion that – the ethical is the political – and that the highest form of ethical expression was “anti-fascism,” – with the Soviet Union as the publicly-identified, ideologically most dedicated opponent of fascism, thus holding the moral high ground. This myth was actually built upon the basest of lies.

As Koch demonstrates, from the earliest days of the National Socialist regime in Germany, beginning with the Reichstag Fire less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor, a sinister covert relationship between Nazi secret intelligence and their Soviet counterpart existed.

This clandestine cooperation continued throughout the decade. Hitler’s massacre of Ernst Rohm and his S. A. leadership in the Night of the Long Knives, Stalin’s terror purge of CPSU party members, feckless intellectuals, military officers (most notably Field Marshal Tukhachevsky’s betrayal by documents forged in a Gestapo laboratory), and the murder of tens of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, reaching its culmination in the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of August, 1939. Publicly the Soviet Union and their international Popular Front network (of what were secretly designated “useful idiots” or “Innocents’ Clubs”) preached “anti-fascism.” Covertly Stalin sought accommodation, appeasement, and eventual alliance with Hitler.

Besides fascinating details dealing with the duplicitous Reichstag Fire trials, the Cambridge Five British espionage scandal, the Spanish Civil War as an international component to Stalin’s Great Terror, and finally Muzenberg’s own mysterious murder, one of the most intriguing aspects of Koch’s study involves the use of women espionage agents.

“Many of the ‘Muzenberg-men’ were women. The Russian writer and historian Nina Berberova writes with astringent authority about a cohort of agents or near-agents, the women whom she calls the ‘Ladies of the Kremlin.” These were women who became influential figures in European and American intellectual life partly on their own, but above all through the men in their lives. The men, most often, were famous writers, ‘spokesmen for the West,’ Meanwhile, the consorts whom they most trusted were guided by the Soviet services.

“Leading this list were two members of the minor Russian aristocracy: the Baroness Moura Budberg, who was mistress to both Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, and the Princess Maria Pavlova Koudachova. Moura Budberg’s links to the Soviets were shadowy, and remained secret for decades, until they were at last exposed by the Russian historian Arkady Vaksberg in his 1997 book, The Gorky Secret. We have more certain knowledge about the Princess Koudachova, who first became secretary, later mistress, wife, and at last widow to the once enormously celebrated pacifist novelist Romain Rolland.

“Maria Pavlova Koudachova was an agent directly under Soviet secret service control. There is some questionable evidence to suggest that she was trained and assigned to Rolland’s life even before she left Russia after the Revolution. . . That she was a secret service operative, however, and one expressly planted in Rolland’s life, cannot be doubted. Babette Gross (common-law wife of Willi Munzenberg) put it to me plainly in the summer of 1989. ‘She was an apparatchik,’ she said flatly. ‘And she ran him.’” (Koch, page 28).

Koch proceeds to discuss other women deep within the Communist apparat, such as the American Ella Winter, and their distinguished men of distinction. In Winter’s case, the men were pioneer muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, and upon his death, Hollywood screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, part of Hemingway’s circle immortalized in The Sun Also Rises. Stewart was the Academy Award-winning author of The Philadelphia Story, and one of the highest-paid screenwriters of the day, notes Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley in Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, Crown Forum, 1998. He was also one of “the most vociferous guardians of the Party line,” especially through the vexatious days of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (Billingsley, page 82).

Upon reading these various accounts a pattern soon develops. The profiles were remarkably similar. The men were all internationally known novelists, artists, playwrights, etc. celebrated for their independence of mind, their supposed integrity of spirit, but in actuality men who were manipulated by their muses.

The technique proved very successful in this inter-war period.

There is no reason to believe that the Communist intelligence services ceased to use these agents of influence during the years of the Cold War.

“Yoko Ono, phone your office.”

The late Charlotte Iserbyt was the consummate whistleblower! Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms.

Charlotte T. Iserbyt, 91 of Dresden, passed away at her home on the afternoon of February 8, 2022.  Born in New York on October 26, 1930, she was the daughter of Clifton and Charlotte (Thomson), and the wife of the late Jan Iserbyt.

Iserbyt’s father and grandfather were Yale University graduates and members of the Skull and Bones secret society.

Iserbyt was a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa.

Iserbyt was a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America’s Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day.

A prolific writer, Ms. Iserbyt authored two books, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America…A Chronological Paper Trail in 1999, which alleges that changes gradually brought into the American public education system work to eliminate the influences of a child’s parents and mold the child into a member of the proletariat in preparation for a socialist-collectivist world of the future. She also wrote three editions of Back to Basics Reform or…OBE*Skinnerian International Curriculum between 1985 and 2003 and Back to Basics Reform, which documents her experiences working in the U.S. Department of Education, where she was privy to past and future plans to restructure American education.

Ms. Iserbyt contributed numerous articles to professional journals and newspapers. She was a freelance writer and had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.

Nick Eberstadt is a political economist and Harvard grad with lots of accolades and many academic accomplishments. He has also written a number of excellent books, one of which I was delighted to learn confirms my long held views about America’s flight from work. The book is called Men Without Work, and it was first published in 2016 when Nick first began to see a shocking number of healthy men in their prime working years, exit the workforce. Today, the number of able-bodied men who have affirmatively elected to not work is north of 7.2 million. These are not men who can afford to support themselves. Many are addicted to pain medication. Very few—according to their own responses in exhaustive surveys—contribute to their household or to their community. They do not attend church, and they do not participate in civic organizations. They do not exercise. What they do, mostly, is play. As Nick explains in this episode, these men spend an average of 2,000 hours a year on screens.  

I was fascinated by our conversation…and troubled. We have nearly 7.6 million open jobs in this county, and no one seems willing to do them. Nick has the courage to spell it all out, and I encourage you to watch. It’s worth your time.

#podcast #usa #work mikeroweWORKS—My foundation is giving away $2.5 million in trade scholarships. Apply by April 17:

https://mikeroweworks.org/scholarship/

Tulsi Gabbard says the long-suppressed RFK and MLK Jr. files are “ready to release,” igniting a new wave of interest in the intelligence community’s secrets.

Join Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley on this Free-form Friday episode of America’s Untold Stories as they dig into what might be revealed, and how Gabbard’s “hunters” are putting pressure on the FBI and CIA for more.

Plus, Trump orders the DOJ to investigate former DHS official and “Anonymous” op-ed writer Miles Taylor, calling him guilty of “treason.” Will the deep state finally get exposed?

We also break down the bizarre case of a Catholic school teacher who admitted to sleeping with a student—then blamed her husband for “neglect.”

And in a fiery update to the Seth Rich saga, attorney Ty Clevenger files to hold the FBI in contempt for ignoring court orders to release records.

From celebrity scandals to government secrecy and everything in between, this is one Friday you don’t want to miss.

“I, Pencil.”

Said Donald Trump, happy as a child with his new favorite Christmas toy, celebrating the bloating of the federal bureaucracy with even more money taken from the pockets of American consumers through tariff taxation.  No wonder Elon Musk thinks Peter Navarro, Trump’s mercantilist tariff advisor, is “an idiot.”

The two seminal articles which predicted and defined the Trump Phenomena are:

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution, by Angelo M. Codevilla, and

The Return of the Middle American Radical: An intellectual history of Trump supporters, by John Judis

Also —

How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996.
This should be the Rosetta Stone for Trumpism