Communism

A Letter From Hong Kong
The normal coexists with the brutal. Last Saturday, in Hong Kong, carefree expat children walk by my apartment building, holding party balloons as Puma police helicopters buzz overhead. Less than a mile away people are fired on with tear gas and water cannon spewing blue dye. I imagine that this

NARRATED: Milan Kundera Warned Us About Historical Amnesia. Now It’s Happening Again
Greg Ellis reads Milan Kundera Warned Us About Historical Amnesia. Now It’s Happening Again, Ewan Morrison’s essay celebrating the 90th birthday of the Czech novelist. It was published in Quillette on March 31, 2019.

George Faludy: Hungarian Poet and Hero for Our Times
Had the poet George Faludy not written in his native Hungarian—arguably the most impenetrable of European languages—he would, as many have argued, be world famous. He died aged 95 in 2006, his life spanning the First and Second World Wars, the Russian revolution, and the Nazi and communist

What Can We Learn from Dictators' Literature?
Dictators, of course, are terrible people. They also tend to be terrible writers. Yet many tyrants have entertained the illusion that they were literary super geniuses. Mein Kampf and Quotations from Chairman Mao (aka The Little Red Book) are the best-known works in the dictatorial canon, but they represent only