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September 12, 2018|collectivization of agriculture, dekulakization, Josef Stalin, Olexa Woropay, S. Lozovy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, the Holodomor, The Ninth Circle

Thinking About the Holodomor: Part III

by Flagg Taylor|

Monument to the Victims of the Holodomor, with the statue "Bitter Memory of Childhood" in foreground, Kiev, Ukraine (DmyTo/Shutterstock.com).
In 1932 and 1933, Ukrainian peasants' grain was taken from them by force, and those who resisted were arrested, jailed, and often executed.

May 11, 2018|Armando Ianucci, Central Committee of the Communist Party, Josef Stalin, Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Union, The Death of Stalin, Totalitarianism

A Grimly Effective Death of Stalin

by Kenneth D.M. Jensen|

Steve Buscemi, Sylvestra Le Touzel, and Gerald Lepkowski in The Death of Stalin
There’s a lesson here for those who imagine one-party states, ideologues, and power-hungry tyrants are not really so different from you and me.

July 10, 2017|Josef Stalin, Kim Jong Un, Mao Zedong, Missile Defense, North Korea, United Nations Charter

With North Korea, Deterrence Remains the Best Option

by Karl Walling|

A South Korean navy ship fires a missile during a drill aimed to counter North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile test on July 6, 2017. (Photo by South Korean Defense Ministry via Getty Images)

For the great strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz, strategy is about the imaginative search for options to achieve objectives and a critical analysis of which one is best.

Sometimes there are no good options and one must select the least bad option.

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March 3, 2017|Bitter Harvest, Bolshevism, collectivization of agriculture, George Mendeluk, Josef Stalin

Telling the Story of the Holodomor

by Mark Judge|

bitter-harvest-800x520

In his great movies and Schindler’s List (1993) and Lincoln (2012), Steven Spielberg provided a good model for adapting tragic historic drama to celluloid. Instead of taking a sprawling subject like the Holocaust or the Civil War and trying to capture all of it, you narrowcast. Take one relatively small patch of time, such as Lincoln’s attempt to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, or a few years in the life of World War II hero Oskar Schindler, and focus on that. It sharpens the plot and suspense and intensifies the performance of the actors.

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August 5, 2016|Boris Yeltsin, Gulag, Josef Stalin, Karl Marx, Mikhail Gorbachev, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich, Vladimir Lenin, Yegor Gaidar

Secondhand Gulag

by Donald Devine|

Children Standing on a Fallen Statue of Stalin (Photo by David Turnley/ Getty Images)

Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets can only be compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973). It is an absolutely indispensable look into the human condition.

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April 28, 2016|communism, Josef Stalin, Joshua Rubenstein, Lavrenty Beria, The Last Days of Stalin

Last Paroxysm of the Tyrant

by Ron Capshaw|

In Martin Amis’ underrated study of Josef Stalin, he asserted that Stalin’s much larger body count than Hitler’s was based on weapons the Nazi dictator did not have. Chief among these was that Stalin lived longer.

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November 30, 2015|Bruce Cook, civil liberties, Dalton Trumbo, HUAC, Jay Roach, John McNamara, Johnny Got His Gun, Josef Stalin

Film the Legend

by Ron Capshaw|

On publicity junkets for Trumbo, star Bryan Cranston has repeated the line, “Everyone has the right to be wrong.” Cranston claims this quote came from Dalton Trumbo himself, and shows that the blacklisted screenwriter supported and defended everyone’s right to free speech.

The real Trumbo didn’t. The movie is frank about his membership in the American Communist Party, but its makers (director Jay Roach, screenwriter John McNamara) give us not a hint of what that entailed, or how roundly contradicted is Trumbo-the-free-speech-avatar by Trumbo the actual person.

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May 18, 2015|Jesus, Josef Stalin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pontius Pilate, Soviet Communism

Didn’t You Know that Manuscripts Don’t Burn?

by Joseph Bottum|

You might think the greatest literary assault on Soviet communism is Animal Farm, George Orwell’s fast-paced 1945 allegory—and you wouldn’t be far wrong. Although it satirizes the specifics of Stalin’s triumph over Trotsky, Bukharin, and the others in the wake of Lenin’s revolution, the book drives toward the more universal conclusion that the swinish elements of human nature will always snuffle their way toward power. All animals are equal, as Orwell famously put it, but some animals will quickly attempt to prove that they’re more equal than others. For that matter, you might think the most important account of Soviet communism…

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December 29, 2014|Bolshevism, Czar Nicholas II, Josef Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Lenin

A Fanatic’s Federalism

by Will Morrisey|

It wouldn’t be fair to have called Bolshevism the death of irony. But it did insist on its exile. In the fall of 1922, V.I. Lenin deported intellectuals—putting them on two vessels jocularly called the Philosophers’ Steamers—for exhibiting such suspicious traits as “knows a foreign language” and “uses irony.” Those with opinions at actual variance with the new regime were interned in labor camps on an island near the White Sea. The newly formed State Political Administration (GPU) saw to it that no creeping Socratism would shadow the prospect of radiant tomorrows opened by History’s proletarian vanguard. As distinct from philosophy,…

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Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

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The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

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James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

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Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

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Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

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Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

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America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

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About

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law & Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

The opinions expressed on Law & Liberty are solely those of the contributors to the site and do not reflect the opinions of Liberty Fund.
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