If screenwriters don’t know the stories, they could start with the Black Book of Communism. It could introduce them to such episodes as Stalin’s terror-famine in Ukraine, the Gulag, the deportation of the Kulaks, the Katyn Forest massacre, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Hungarian revolution, Che Guevara’s executions in Havana, the flight of the boat people from Vietnam, Pol Pot’s mass slaughter—material enough for dozens of movies. ~David Boaz

Well, having just mentioned The Killing Fields, it seems odd that he seems to list “Pol Pot’s mass slaughter” as one of the things that hasn’t been treated in a film.  The Katyn massacre was part of the story of the codecracker movie nobody went to see, Enigma, and The Lost City showed briefly but effectively the beginnings of communist terror under Castro and Guevara.  The horrors and chaos of the Cultural Revolution have been depicted, albeit not in a systematic way, in the fine Chinese movie To Live and, again, One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich portrays Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag.  The Last Emperor at least obliquely refers to the police state under Mao (and this otherwise movie actually exaggerates the mistreatment accorded to Pu Yi after his deposition).  Tom Hulce starred as the projectionist in an outstanding portrait of Stalin, The Inner Circle, that was as quickly forgotten as it was brilliant in depicting the dictator and his willing lackey (it was more of a portrait of the cult of personality, but very powerful all the same).  Robert Duvall played the man himself in a miniseries about Stalin.  Those are just the ones that I have happened to see or know about myself.  

Now, it is absolutely true that there are still not enough movies being made to tell the stories of the more vast, systematic crimes of the Soviet Union and Maoist China against its subject peoples, including the genocide of the Ukrainians or the famines induced by collectivisation in China, and there are obvious political reasons why telling the stories about the evils of communism does not inspire a lot of folks out in Hollywood. 

Yet if screenwriters and producers are not banging down the door to make these movies, to listen to contemporaries of all political persuasions compare current threats to the Greatest Evil Ever you would be hard-pressed to find very many who talk about how such-and-such a foreign leader is the “new Khruschev” or the “new Stalin.”  No, every pundit knows that to get people to pay attention to a foreign crisis he has to invoke Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust.  Chauvinists and jingoes call it Islamofascism for a reason (they are ignorant), but they have another reason: fascism causes a visceral, negative reaction in virtually all who hear it, while communism may well deeply offend many but somehow lacks the emotional power that sixty years of continuous conditioning about Nazis have created.  There is a more immediate hunger for anti-Nazi stories in America, because Americans were directly involved in fighting Nazi Germany in a way that we simply weren’t with the Soviets.  Even telling stories from the Korean War are probably less appealing, because the war was enormously unpopular and ended in stalemate.    

Even so, there are a few more films depicting the crimes of communism than Mr. Boaz allows.  If they are less well known, that may be because they have smaller audiences, perhaps because the Cold War ended with a whimper rather than a bunker.  All of this may in turn explain why there are fewer movies made about the evils of communism: the stories are very dramatic and powerful, but the collapse of communism came about in large part because the system simply broke down and the many peoples who laboured under that yoke finally threw off the yoke themselves.  Sad to say, but great stories about foreigners successfully struggling against their repressive governments are not the source of big box-office results.  What kind of anticommunist movies sell over here?  Rambo.  Now you can probably see why there aren’t more of them being made.

The footnotes to the modern Armenian translation of Sayat Nova’s Angin akn vret sharats had an interesting explanation for what seemed a partly impenetrable line of verse.  The verse ran:

Khosrov pachayemen toghats, doon Tovoozi takht is, gozal.

Now, takht is the word for throne shared by Armenian, Persian and Urdu.  However, without the explanatory note linking this takht to the invasion of India and raid on Delhi by Nadir Shah in 1739, which was when he made off with the Peacock Throne, my Armenian teacher and I would not have readily made sense of what was meant.  Once Nadir Shah entered the picture, everything came together nicely.  Since this poem was probably written in 1758, Nadir Shah’s exploits would not have been such distant history for the ashugh.  The translation of the line would run as follows:

Left by King Khusrau, you are the Peacock Throne, beautiful one.

Skandari-Zoolghari toghats javahir is, angin lal is

In America, even the Satanists embrace triangulation. ~Reihan

Viewed another way, though, this might be the ultimate confirmation that triangulation is just the sort of diabolical method that some of us have always considered it to be.

Sharon is the bad guy who seemingly looks forward to a war. ~President Ronald Reagan, from private diary entry on Jan. 16, 1982

And, in fact, Laphroaig does taste like burning plastic. But it’s good burning plastic. ~Mencius Moldbug (that’s the name he uses–really)

I second that.  My introduction to Laphroaig was at the recent ISI/Liberty Fund colloquium at Mecosta.  We had received word from the Scotsman among us that this was good whiskey, and we were not likely to dismiss the informed opinion of a Scot on a matter as weighty as this one. 

As for the matter of restoring the Byzantine Empire, well, let me just say that I have heard of worse solutions to political problems in the Balkans and the Near East than this.  However, past attempts have not exactly done much for the well-being of Christians and Christianity in Anatolia, which therefore makes any resumption of the megali idea undesirable at the present time.  The main problem with reconstituting the empire, assuming it could be done, is that there would need to be a much better and formally defined procedure for succession.  Byzantium’s all-too-frequent usurpations and civil wars were obviously among its more unattractive qualities for those living inside the empire.  In some sense, this was a terribly traditionally Roman thing for them to be doing, but it did not really help in the long run.

Helal enjoys working with Rice. He appreciates her interest in hearing all points of view on a given subject and her understanding of the details. When I ask him what he makes of the words he often translates for her, like “freedom” and “democracy,” he is polite, but wary. “I cannot imagine that you can go anywhere in the world and ask people, ‘Do you want to be free?’ and they will say, ‘No, we really love to be prisoners,’” he says. The problem is not with freedom but with democracy, a concept that evolved in differing and idiosyncratic ways in the Western historical experience. “In the Middle East, they look at things and ask, Is it halal or haram,” he explains. “Is it approved by the religion or not? If you go to a Bedouin society and you tell them that the state will determine how you’re going to settle a conflict between you and your cousin, you must be out of your mind, because the most important and powerful tool to them will be tribal law, which is unwritten.” ~David Samuels

Indeed, there is a sense in which you do have to be out of your mind to accept as normal the idea that the state settles such disputes.  Anyone who surveys history has to know just how abnormal such an arrangement is, how much it contradicts so many of our instincts and customs and how ultimately fragile and contingent upon a certain ethos it is.  It is strange to read Mr. Helal’s statement, which expresses with perfect clarity a view of the world that appears to be not so very different from my own, and try to reconcile that with his work alongside a Secretary of State who believes in the “inevitability of democratic change” in the very same region.  One of them is right, and I do not think it is Secretary Rice.

She is trying to have things both ways, a fact that she understands, because she is not stupid. At the same time, she believes she can have things both ways, because she believes that history is on her side. ~David Samuels

“Israel today will not do anything, take no initiative whatsoever,” Halevy says, “unless the United States approves it. It was never that way before.” The retired spymaster sips his tea, and looks me in the eye as he searches for an appropriate way to define how the relationship has changed.

“Insemination is an act of two, not of three,” he finally says. “As a result of what happened in 2003 and 2004, the natural act of insemination between Israel and its neighbors is no longer possible.” ~David Samuels

This seems to me to relate directly to Edward Luttawak’s much-discussed Prospect article, in which he basically says that the U.S. should leave the Near East to the Near Easterners and, by implication, largely step away from the Israel-Palestine conflict.  If Halevy is right, that would also seem to suit the best interests of Israel as well, since ironically it would actually free the hand of the Israeli government to act.

“I used to deal with Condi when I was head of Mossad and she was national-security adviser, and I had a great respect for her, and admiration,” Halevy says. “I still do. But I think that in her role of secretary of state, things are not going too well. The main problem is that Condi Rice was never an expert on the Middle East. That’s not her area of expertise. And therefore, she has to rely on others. And the others in this case is a lawyer who is an ideologue”—meaning Elliott Abrams—“who believes that you can promote a certain ideology anywhere and everywhere around the world if you think it’s the right ideology. And you really don’t have to know very much about the basic facts in the region that you’re dealing with, because you have to tailor the region to your ideology.” ~David Samuels

As late as 1987 or 1988, Rice said, the American policy of democratic change in Europe would have looked like a failure. What her answer suggested was that the Bush administration’s policy of encouraging democratic change in the Middle East might appear to fail for 50 years, and then might be judged to have been a farsighted success. ~David Samuels

Well, actually, since in 1987-88 the Soviets were already buckling, Gorbachev was talking up glasnost and perestroika, Solidarity remained a dynamic force in Poland, and Vaclav Havel had emerged in Czechoslovakia–all of which had followed deliberate, concerted efforts by a foreign imperial power to suppress by force all attempts at local political change as recently as twenty years earlier, we can say that Rice either doesn’t remember what was happening in the late ’80s in the one part of the world about which she was allegedly an expert or that she is spinning like a top.  Gentle reader, which do you think it is?  A huge difference between central and eastern Europe in the Cold War and the Near East today is rather obvious: many of the countries of central and eastern Europe had had at least some past experience with representative government in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.  Encouraging democratic change in a part of the world where that actually has a chance of working might be worth pursuing over the long term.  Pursuing a pipe dream, even if you pursue it studiously for five centuries, will not make the pipe dream any more realistic.