FROM USSR TO ISIS

[Draggingtree]

Front Page Magazine: FROM USSR TO ISIS How modern progressives are the heirs of Stalin’s “alibi armory.”

August 8, 2016 Lloyd Billingsley

Ben Rhodes, the president’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, recently told the New York Times Magazine that newspapers no longer have foreign bureaus, so “they call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo.” The average reporter Rhodes encounters is 27 years old and “their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

 

One of the things they know nothing about is the major movement of modern times, Marxism-Leninism, also known as Communism, which first appeared nearly 100 years ago in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. From the start, the movement attracted attention around the world.

 

“I have seen the future and it works,” wrote American Lincoln Steffens, and that set the trend for “progressives,” as Communists and fellow travellers styled themselves. With the USSR firmly identified with the future, and the United States and other democratic capitalist nations cast as representatives of the past, defense of the Soviet regime became job one. When Stalin took the helm, the progressives hit stride