A collection of 26 posts
Anna D. Shapiro’s recent revival of Eric Bentley’s 1972 play about the HUAC hearings offered entertainment along with the pleasures of moral certainty and ideological reinforcement.
Contemporary anti-Zionism encodes a totalising worldview that blends the tributaries of Nazi, communist, and Islamist anti-Zionism into a single stream.
The structural case for why collectivist systems fail.
An impressive new biography of Jessica Mitford emphasises her sceptical and anti-authoritarian personality. But this was only half of the picture.
The death toll under Communist regimes is of incredible magnitude. Yet whenever I attack Communism for being an evil ideology, I get a serious number of rebuttals.
Wokeness has not retreated—it has simply shapeshifted.
A valuable new collection of wartime letters written by Leslie Fiedler shows how politically astute the budding literary critic was about communism.
Clay Risen’s new book about the American “Red Scare” emphasises the injustices of anti-communism but minimises the true extent and danger of communist infiltration.
Jonathan Kay speaks with Bard College historian Sean McMeekin about his new book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism.
In a new book on the history of communism, Sean McMeekin traces the movement’s roots to egalitarian creeds embraced throughout history by prophets, philosophers, utopians, and serfs.
Melvin Lasky was an indefatigable defender of the liberal spirit during the recovery of postwar Germany.
Why are some in Russia and Eastern Europe pining for the communist system that once oppressed them?
The themes of Liu Cixin’s trilogy undermine his protestations of loyalty to the People’s Republic.
Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale.
It is into such pathologies that The Captive Mind delves, and why it has such application to our time.