Issue number 5 of this year’s Connecticut Law Review is an excellent symposium on firearms law, policy, and culture. The lead article is from Nicholas Johnson, of Fordham: Firearms Policy and the Black Community: An Assessment of the Modern Orthodoxy. Johnson (who is my co-author on the Second Amendment textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment) details the long […]
Archive | Communism
Question for Supporters of the Boycott of Ender’s Game
If you think people should boycott the movie Ender’s Game (discussed by co-blogger Dale here) because of Orson Scott Card’s anti-gay marriage remarks, do you also think that people back in the 1940s and 50s were justified in threatening to boycott movies if Hollywood employed Communists as screenwriters? Do you the studios were justified in […]
Victims of Communism Day
Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have advocated turning this date into Victims of Communism Day (though I should note that I didn’t invent the idea). In my very first post on the subject, I outlined the rationale for this step: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not […]
Communism, The Americans, and the Nature of Evil
The Americans, FX’s new TV series about KGB sleeper agents living in America in the early 1980s, has drawn mostly rave reviews. I have a somewhat mixed reaction. On the positive side, I thought that Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are extremely effective in the lead roles of Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, KGB agents who […]
Evolving Christian Attitudes Towards Personal and National Self-Defense
A forthcoming issue of the Connecticut Law Review will feature a symposium on an article by Prof. Nicholas Johnson (Fordham) about the changing attitudes of the Black leadership towards firearms. In brief, Black leadership was historically very supportive the right to keep and bear arms, and particularly concerned that Blacks be able to have firearms […]
Ronald Coase on China’s Transition to Capitalism
Legendary Nobel Prize-winning economist and legal scholar Ronald Coase has just published a new book, How China Became Capitalist, coauthored with political scientist Ning Wang. It’s incredible that Coase is still publishing books at the age of 102! He puts the rest of us academics to shame. Coase and Wang summarize their thesis in this […]
Eric Hobsbawm and the Neglect of Communist Crimes
I was going to comment on the passing of Eric Hobsbawm, the famous historian and longtime apologist for communism. But co-bloggers Jonathan Adler and David Bernstein have already said most of what I could have said. I also recommend this column by Jeff Jacoby. I will add only that Hobsbawm’s career is yet another example […]
Comment on Eric Hobsbawm
From a Facebook friend: “What really galls is that the same people who fawn over this guy no doubt buy into Naomi Klein’s demonization of Milton Friedman.” Because being a libertarian who once gave economic advice to Pinochet is evil, but being a life-long Stalinist reflects “good intentions” (or, better, yet, just shoot the Stalinism […]
On Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) may well have been a great historian, but we should also not forget that he was a moral midget or, in Jeff Jacoby’s words, a “dogmatic leftist creep.” A lifelong member of the Communist Party and apologist for Soviet oppression, Hobsbawm maintained that a Communist revolution would be worth the sacrifice of […]
U.S. Complicity in Katyn Cover-Up
Newly declassified documents reveal that the U.S. government concealed evidence that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn forest massacre of several thousand Polish POWs. In all, over 20,000 Poles were killed in mass executions. The USSR had consistently denied responsibility for the killings until 1990. The newly released documents show U.S. officials were […]
The Gulag Museum and Russia’s Historical Memory of Communism
During my recent visit to Russia, I visited the Gulag Museum in Moscow, one of the few recent Russian efforts to accurately portray the horrible atrocities of communism. The mass murders and other crimes of communist regimes have often been neglected in both Russia and the West. In recent years, that neglect has deepened in […]
North Korea’s Gulags
CNN has a good story on North Korea’s system of prison camps, modeled on the Gulags of the Soviet Union, but possibly even worse: Watching the public execution of his mother and older brother, Shin Dong-Hyuk thought the punishment was just. They had planned to escape the North Korean labor camp they were being held […]
Alternative Dates for Victims of Communism Day
Most of the commentary on my latest post advocating the transformation of May Day into Victims of Communism Day has been positive. A few people, however, have argued that some other date is more appropriate than May 1. Some claim that it is wrong to use May Day because of its former status as a […]
Victims of Communism Day
Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have been commemorating this day here at the Volokh Conspiracy as Victims of Communism Day. Various other websites and blogs have promoted the same concept. In time, we hope to make this a worldwide commemoration similar to Holocaust Memorial Day. I explained the rationale for this idea in […]
Trivializing Communism
I don’t agree with everything that CNN columnist John Avlon writes in his denunciation of Republican Rep. Allen West for claiming that some 80 Democratic House members are “communists.” But this part is right on target: The ghost of Joe McCarthy’s ulcerous accusations hung over a disturbingly casual comment this past week by U.S. Rep. […]