A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”

He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

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"Mm hmm, yes, I saw you in my dream," she repeated, her Russian accent faded now to a passable American. "Very clearly I saw you. And you were dead."

Like many intelligent Russians who came of age during the closing act of the USSR, my ex-wife was a kind of stand-up comedian in reverse. Just as the talented comic artfully sets up a punch line, so too could she expertly build toward a release of sorts. But the punch line was never a joke. It was instead an opening up of a psychic trap door, showing foolish Americans that beneath their feet was not the security of a prosperous and powerful nation, but rather the void of the impending destruction that awaits us all. When your superpower homeland has been blown apart into 15 compromised statelets it's comforting to keep in your pocket that great transnational equalizer: death.

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On February 11, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the growing national debt was as serious as the Cold War. "It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of [red] ink," he said.

On March 24, reports The Hill, House Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling picked up the theme, but added an extra special Commie-baiting twist by bringing China directly into the conversation.

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Broun previously warned that the president was showing "signs of being Marxist," as well as doing "exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany," so really no one should be surprised that this guy was not impressed by the president's vision of "winning the future."

And that's why he wrote, as the speech wrapped up, "Mr. President, you don't believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism."

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Those unpleasant questions were provoked by Beck's latest bizarre outburst concerning religion when, in the throes of yet another lecture July 13 on why Christians should abhor social justice, he alluded to his belief that "the Jews" had killed Jesus Christ.

Discussing liberation theology and its portrayal of Jesus,  Beck said: "If he was a victim and this theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did."

Beck's recitation of the old Christ-killer canard -- a foundation of anti-Semitic ideology from the Passion Plays of the Middle Ages through the rise of Nazism to Mel Gibson's contemporary spewing -- may or may not represent personal prejudice. As the Fox News star might say, some of his best friends (including his publicist Matthew Hiltzik) happen to be Jewish.

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Elian, then 5, was found floating in the ocean off Florida's coast on Thanksgiving in 1999 as The Guardian recounts. Soon thereafter the U.S. and Cuba were wrapped up in the international-relations version of a squabbling custody battle. Cuba prevailed when Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the forcible removal of Elian, by then 6, from his relatives' house in Miami.

This week the communist nation held a state celebration of the 10th anniversary of Elian's return to his home country, which is where he spoke to reporters. President Raul Castro attended the celebration, according to the Cuban News Agency. The Babble has a short firsthand account of the 2000 protests in Cuba about Elian's custody battle.

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Flash forward 20 years and many of the hopes of those who were present at the breaching of the Wall have not been realized. In much of the former Soviet bloc the intervening decades have been distinguished not only by young democracies, but also by corruption and shady insider dealing. But for Americans what may be more disheartening is that the roles of East and West have been, to some extent, reversed. Ironically, instead of the ex-Eastern Bloc looking to the U.S. as a model, the U.S. seems to be modeling its behavior on post-communist Eastern Europe. And nothing less than America's public interest is at stake.

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Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

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Genuine support for Communism -- meaning the Marxist-Leninist governing ideology of the Soviet Union and its allies, as distinct from various flavors of socialism or social democracy -- was minimal in the Western world, despite the United States government's best efforts to uncover it. But you didn't have to endorse Communism to be fascinated by it. Simply the existence of that alternate model, with its claim of scientific inevitability and its alleged utopian aims, had a bizarre, distorting effect on political discourse clear across the ideological spectrum.

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When the blood had been washed from the asphalt and the hopes of a more equitable China had dissipated, Han Dongfang got on his bicycle and rode out of the city. It was June 4, 1989, the Sunday when the Chinese Communist Party cleared protesters from Beijing's Tiananmen Square and, according to the official figure, shot 319 of them. Other sources cite up to 3,000 dead.

The 25-year-old railroad electrician had dedicated himself to a special mission. "I wanted to ride around the country to talk to workers and farmers," says Han. About a month earlier, his friends had announced, on Tiananmen Square, that they had selected him as the spokesman of their independent trade union.

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Excuse me if I skip work tomorrow to see my doctor for whiplash. After all, just last week, I spent a fair amount of my time wading through right-wing attacks on the president that accused him of not only leading the country down the road to "socialism" and "economic Marxism" but also of a nefarious plan to sabotage the U.S. dollar. So I can't get it straight -- does Obama swear fealty to Ayn Rand or Vladimir Lenin? Because it can't be both, right? I know Obama's an accomplished politician, but come on!

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D.R./IFC Films

Hafsia Herzi (left) and Habib Boufares in "The Secret of the Grain."

You can tell it's a French film when one of the actresses gets naked inside five minutes. But in the case of Abdellatif Kechiche's richly enjoyable and consistently surprising "The Secret of the Grain," that first naked-chick scene is deceptive. If I tell you that the movie starts with a buxom honey-blond enticing the handsome tour guide below decks on a Mediterranean port-city cruise for a little hands-on demonstration, and that it ends with a teenage girl staging her sexual awakening in public, in the form of a vigorous belly-dance performance in a crowded shipboard restaurant, you'll think, oh, it's that kind of European film.

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Extraordinary to reflect that I have lived long enough to see communism die and then the capitalism that replaced it too; to see the nation state and the empire wither away in Europe, and now to return in Asia, and that I have managed to do this without getting very old at all.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/18/capitalism_as_we_know_it/feed/ 2 http://www.salon.com/2008/08/05/solzhenitsyn/ http://www.salon.com/2008/08/05/solzhenitsyn/#comments Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/08/05/solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died on Aug. 3 at the age of 89, was, by most accounts, a difficult man. His sizable oeuvre, urgent and prophetic in its condemnation of communism, left little room for moral inaction; he spent nearly two decades in the United States, but the comforts of America also disgusted him. And when he returned to his homeland in the 1990s, its headlong rush to materialism -- a McDonald's in Moscow! -- offered a jarring contrast to the image of Holy Russia that had so long beguiled him. In the end, one gets the sense that the modern world disappointed Solzhenitsyn so thoroughly that he could only find refuge in words from which he fashioned a country -- an agrarian, God-fearing Russia -- scrubbed free of the distasteful century into which he was born.

The nearly 30 works he published were instrumental in bringing the Soviet Union to its knees, but none struck as deeply as his first, a slim volume called "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Its author was an artillery officer who, during World War II, had depicted Stalin unfavorably in a letter to a colleague, earning himself an eight-year sentence in a labor camp. In the camp he survived his first bout with cancer; then, facing internal exile in the outer reaches of the empire, began to write of his experiences while teaching science at a high school, guided by Dostoevski's insight that "beauty will save the world."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/08/05/solzhenitsyn/feed/ 13 http://www.salon.com/2008/07/04/mcain_vietnam/ http://www.salon.com/2008/07/04/mcain_vietnam/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:44:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joe_conason//2008/07/04/mcain_vietnam Nobody has denigrated the service of John McCain or his suffering in captivity as a prisoner of North Vietnam, as much as his supporters wish to pretend that someone did. Nobody has denied that his valor in captivity offers insight into his character. But so far almost nobody has asked the most important question about McCain's military experience, which is how his past might influence his future as president.

The most pertinent issue is not what McCain did or didn't do during the war in Vietnam, but what he learned from that searing, incredibly bloody and wholly unnecessary failure of U.S. policy. Clearly he learned that torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive, and he has spoken with great moral authority on that issue. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake -- and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/04/mcain_vietnam/feed/ 197 http://www.salon.com/2008/06/26/trumbo/ http://www.salon.com/2008/06/26/trumbo/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:28:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/06/26/trumbo

Photo by Mitzi Trumbo

Dalton Trumbo

No one has ever summed up the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s -- and, by extension, the entire history of that decade's anti-Communist witch hunt -- any better than this:

"The blacklist was a time of evil. No one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides. It will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew or were diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us -- right, left, or center -- emerged from that long nightmare without sin."

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