TRIGGER WARNING:  This is what you get with "Antifa".

For John, BLUF:  Governments hold People back, and allowing them to die, on the promise of a bright future can be named —Communism.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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MURDERERS' ROW, SOVIET-STYLE

From The Boston Pilot, by Writer George Weigel, 1 November 2017.

Here is the lede plus one:

One hundred years ago, on November 7, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party expropriated the chaotic Russian people's revolution that had begun eight months earlier, setting in motion modernity's first experiment in totalitarianism.  The ensuing bloodbath was unprecedented, not only in itself but in the vast bloodletting it inspired in wannabe-Lenins over the next six decades.  And still the Leninist dream lives on: in a hellhole like North Korea; in the island prison, Cuba; in what ought to be one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, Venezuela.  Lenin and his disciples created more martyrs in the twentieth century than Caligula, Nero, and Diocletian could have imagined.  And yet, somehow, communist bloodbaths have never drawn the continuous, unambiguous, and deserved condemnation visited upon other tyrannies.

The horrors Lenin let loose have rarely been as powerfully captured as in Anne Applebaum's new book, Red Famine:  Stalin's War on Ukraine.  In her earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning study, Gulag, Applebaum demonstrated that the slave-labor camps of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "archipelago" were not incidental to the Soviet enterprise, but an integral part of it, economically and politically.  Now, Anne Applebaum makes unmistakably clear that the Holodomor, the terror famine in Ukraine that took some four million lives in 1932-33, was artificially created and ruthlessly enforced by Lenin's heir, Stalin, to break Ukraine's national spirit while providing the faltering Soviet economy with hard currency from agricultural exports.  Or to put it more simply:  Stalin starved some four million men, women, and children to death for ideological and political purposes.

That mass murder could take place on this scale was due to the fact that the fires of utopian, revolutionary conviction incinerated many consciences.  Here, for example, is the chilling, post-Holodomor testimony of one communist activist who helped implement the catastrophic destruction of peasant agriculture in Ukraine and its replacement by ideologically-correct collective farms:  "I firmly believed that the end justified the means.  Our great goal was the triumph of communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible -- to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work, everyone who stood in the way.  And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to 'intellectual squeamishness' and 'stupid liberalism'."

And, here is the Harvey Weinstein question in this genocide:

As repellant as Stalin's Leninist morality of revolution was, the tacit acquiescence in this mass, artificial famine by western reporters who knew what was afoot in Ukraine but wrote nothing about it, so as not to jeopardize their Kremlin sources and their cushy lifestyles in Moscow, was equally revolting.  Here, the chief villain remains the odious Walter Duranty of the New York Times, a principle agent of the cover-up of the Holodomor that continued well into the 1960s -- and that is being revived in Putin's Russia today, as part of its propaganda war against a now-independent Ukraine.

I would be a lot more impressed with The New York Times it if would denounce the late Walter Duranty and return his Pulitzer Prize.

Regards  —  Cliff