Robert Conquest: Prepare to Vomit

The San Francisco Chronicle has a favorable review of Bob Avakian's From Ike to Mao and Beyond, the memoir of a recalcitrant Marxist.

According to the Chronicle, the book "leaves a breathtaking impression. Having deepened and purified his convictions over 40 years of personal and political struggle, Avakian sounds a high, sustained cry for complete social transformation almost as if he were the trumpet of Lenin himself." Here's an excerpt:

Avakian, 62, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and other upheavals of the Bay Area in the 1960s, makes an unqualified case for Marxism-Leninism as a fertile thought system that's as alive now as it was when the two revolutionary masterminds created it to answer what they saw as capitalism's fundamental inhumanity.

We love this statement from the article:

"Events like this Berkeley program are one important means to get the news of this memoir out there and in that way introduce him, so to speak, to people," Wolff [the author of the Introduction] said. "However, we are also acutely aware of what this government does to revolutionary leaders once they begin to win a hearing."

Ah yes, the "we're so dangerous we're persecuted" angle. That'll sell a few books in this dastardly free market system that the Marxist Avakian disdains but wants to profit from. It's too bad that Avakian, as a Seinfeld episode would frame it, is not "bombable": No one, outside of a few university strongholds, cares what a Marxist says.

We also like the insinuation that our land is so oppressive that he can't speak his mind--yet he is. When are these leftists going to see the idiotic irony of these exaggerations and publicity stunts?

Here's one final excerpt from the article that reveals Avakian's intellectual honesty better than anything:

In the book, Avakian is at his most provocative when he assesses Stalin and Mao. He applauds Stalin for leading the first historical experience in building socialism, the Soviet Union, under difficult circumstances. Although he refers to Stalin's mistakes, he makes no mention of the millions who died under the Soviet dictatorship and insists upon a balanced view.

A discussion of Stalin without mentioning the millions he killed? That's like talking about Hitler without mentioning the Jews, the 1919 World Series without gambling, or Nixon without Watergate.

We're guessing he also fails to mention Mao's atrocities (or Pol Pot's or the other monstrous brood of Lenin's).

Oh well, if you want to read more about this publishing event that only hippies and professors will note, go here: Link.