“Without a doubt the Cuban people would have fought courageously but, also without a doubt, the Cuban people would have perished heroically.” Khrushchev to Castro During the short period known as ‘the Cuban missile crisis’, the planet approached more than ever the biggest catastrophe possible. Given the lauding of Castro …
Read More »Homosexuality, the church and the Greek Communists
“I am no longer content to accept the crumbs from the table” Ian Hunter, Australian gay politician, 2009 It is the conviction that the world around us can be understood with reason and our senses that revealed to us that all men are equal in their ability to use these …
Read More »North Korea – Totalitarianism and the police state
“A society where individual life is absolutely pointless, and where everything that is not absolutely compulsory is absolutely forbidden” Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (2003) Under Kim Il Sung North Korea morphed into an archetypal Nationalistic Stalinist state, and it was in this form that it managed to survive without …
Read More »North Korea’s internal propaganda – Personality cult and purity of race
“North Korea is unique in having a dead man as head of state: Kim Jong-Il is the head of the party and the army but the presidency is held in perpetuity by his deceased father, which makes the country a necrocracy or mausolocracy as well as a regime that is …
Read More »How Stalin and Lysenko bankrupted Soviet science
Lysenko constituted the most respected figure of the soviet scientific community for more than 20 years. The acknowledged biologist had the direct support of Stalin and was awarded with many titles during his career. The methods he introduced were forcefully applied throughout the Soviet Union, and in China. He was …
Read More »George Orwell’s list
“Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” George Orwell, Politics and the English language (1946) In 1998, the Daily Telegraph broke a story titled “Socialist Icon Who Became An Informer”. The article spoke of George Orwell, …
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