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August 10, 2015|George Orwell, Purge Trials, Robert Conquest, Soviet Union, Stalin, The Great Terror

“Anti-Sovietchik No. 1”

by Ron Capshaw|

When the Great Terror, Robert Conquest’s documented expose of Stalin’s Purge Trials, was published in 1968, the response from the Kremlin was predictable. Conquest, who died last week, was denounced as peddling fascist propaganda by Leonid Brezhnev, the hardline replacement for the thaw-attempting Nikita Khruschev when the latter was toppled in 1964. But in private, the truthfulness of Conquest’s account was validated by the KGB, who consulted it to see what their predecessors had been up to.

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May 26, 2015|Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, George Orwell, Spanish Civil War, Stalin

Spain Betrayed—This Time by a Novel

by Ron Capshaw|

“Hemingway the artist is with us again,” exulted Edmund Wilson, America’s then-most influential man of letters, in 1940. He was referring to the writer’s Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, now 75 years old. What Hemingway had “returned” from, Wilson argued, was a knee-jerk Stalinism, imbibed from his time spent as a correspondent in the 1936-1939 conflict. In Wilson’s eyes, Hemingway had surrendered his artistic integrity by writing agitprop in To Have and Have Not (1937) and The Fifth Column (1938). In the 1937 novel, Hemingway seemed to eschew individualism by having his character make the dying declaration that “a man alone ain’t got no fuckin’…

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April 13, 2015|Stalin, Walter Krivitsky, Whittaker Chambers

The Other Witness

by Ron Capshaw|

When I was a graduate student in history at a university in New York, the epicenter of what remains of the Old Left, I got into an argument with a professor over the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, which at that point was 60 years old. What was billed as a non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany, long thought to be bitter foes, was in reality a military partnership. Under it, each dictator grabbed territory; this commenced before the ink dried on the agreement, with their joint invasion of Poland that kick-started the Second World War. In our debate, my position was that the…

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January 25, 2015|Allan Ryskind, communism, Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood, Hollywood Ten, Hollywood Traitors, HUAC, Stalin

Flipping Hollywood’s Blacklist Narrative

by Ron Capshaw|

Once on a British talk show in the early 1970s, anticommunist actor John Wayne startled the host by acknowledging that there was indeed a Hollywood blacklist.  Wayne's follow-up, however, made the host's jaw drop even farther; the blacklist, he stated, wasn't wielded by industry anticommunists against Communist Party members, but by the reverse.  It was for this reason, Wayne stated, that he enlisted in the anticommunist fight in order to defend conservative screenwriters and get them back on the payroll. Wayne, regarded by the Old and New Left, as a fascist, was in actuality more of a rebel against the establishment…

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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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