Not to be missed: the first of a two-part series of radio broadcasts detailing the West’s suicidal love affair with Soviet communism and the role the “useful idiots” — otherwise smart people who for whatever reason fell under the spell of the God That Failed:

The phrase ‘useful idiots’, supposedly Lenin’s, refers to Westerners duped into saying good things about bad regimes.

In political jargon it was used to describe Soviet sympathisers in Western countries and the attitude of the Soviet government towards them.

Useful idiots, in a broader sense, refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and public that utopias rather than Belsens thrived.

In part one John Sweeney looks at Stalin’s Western apologists.

You can listen to part one, available for only five more days, here. (more…)

“Art belongs to the sphere of ideology”  said Leonid Illychev, Krushev’s spokesman for the arts in 1963. It could as easily be the motto of our contemporary arts education programs, particularly at the graduate level.

It would be stretching a point to say that Master of Fine Arts programs are moving onto the marquee of the Cry Wolf Project. Nevertheless, the intellectual timbre of the M.F.A.—dominated by theory-soaked pronunciamentos for the reconstruction of everything—provides the subsoil in which the Project is rooted. The Projects’ left-leaning muse settles easily into the arts where avant-garde postures are rewarded and so-called critical theory stands bail for critical thinking.

Recently, I was invited to lead a weekly seminar for M.F.A. candidates in an art school dedicated to figurative traditions. The course is called Art and Culture, an umbrella topic I like to address. So, without seeing the syllabus, I signed on. A grave mistake. When the course material came, I read through it and withdrew my acceptance. The culture being promoted was not mine. It was art world culture: semi-literate, reflexively left-liberal, and sodden with the hot new trends of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Few of the required readings addressed the concerns faced by working artists. What little existed was hedged about with Marxist/feminist shuffles: “The Political Economy of the Male Nude,” patter about “masculinity, muscularity and modernity,” and “Woman as Sex Obect.” Titles redolent of the kampfzeit rhetoric of the Sixties joined the greatest hits of French literary theory. The darlings of deconstruction dominated a reading list geared to flattering M.F.A. grads into seeing themselves as Continental intellectuals—a class famously hostile to the mores and moorings of traditional institutions. (more…)

We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.                 – Andy Stern, SEIU

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

There are only two kinds of government. Limited Government (LG) which limits the powers of the people at the top, which limits their ability to corrupt the system, and Big Government (BG) which is designed so a small elite group at the top reap all the benefits of a society and there is no limit on what they can do with their power.

All the names for forms of government like socialism, communism, fascism, etc. are merely definitions of style. BG systems all eventually drift toward some form of tyranny until they collapse from their own corruption or revolution. The most successful and stable form of government in modern times is the LG federalist model of the United States. But that has been corrupted, and now is changing into a BG system where it is doomed to fail unless events change it back.

I’ve tried to cover the history as much as I could in the limited space I had, but today I want to explore what it all means. First I highly recommend two documentaries that will help put a lot of things in perspective if you haven’t seen them. They were both made by Adam Curtis, a British film maker. The first is The Century of Self which talks about how elites have used psychology to help manufacture consent. The other is The Trap which talks about how liberal thinking helped create the nightmare bureaucratic world we live in today. Curtis has a leftward tilt, but he’s even-handed. The information he relates is well worth your time. (more…)