"Poekhali," or "Let's go." With those words, Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan 60 years ago today. His historic flight stunned the world and turned the smiling Russian into a superstar.

Gagarin's rocket, Vostok 1, carried him into orbit, after which he circled the Earth for 108 minutes before returning to the ground. With this, Gagarin became the first human to successfully travel into space.

The Soviet space program had strange origins. In the dying years of the old Russian empire, an eccentric librarian in Moscow dreamt up the idea that humanity's "common task" was to resurrect the dead. Humanity would have to scour the universe to find the dust into which our ancestors had dissolved, and then colonize other planets to provide room for their newly revived bodies.

Editors' note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion's inaugural Circle Lecture on September 25, 2019.

Lenin was more severe.
— Vyacheslav Molotov, the only senior official to work for both Lenin and Stalin, when asked to compare them.

Lenin "in general" loved people but . . . his love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.
— Maxim Gorky

When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism.
— Lenin

Beyond Doctrine

An old Soviet joke poses the question: What was the most important world-historical event of the year 1875? Answer: Lenin was five years old.

The point of the joke, of course, is that the Soviets virtually deified Lenin. Criticism of him was routinely referred to as "blasphemy," while icon corners in homes and institutions were replaced by "Lenin corners." Lenin museums sprung up everywhere, and institutions of every kind took his name. In addition to Leningrad, there were cities named Leninsk (in Kazakhstan), Leninogorsk (in Tatarstan), Leninaul (in Dagestan), Leninakan (in Armenia), Leninkend, Leninavan, and at least four different Leninabads. On a visit to the Caucasus I remember being surprised at seeing Mayakovsky's famous verses about Lenin inscribed on a mountaintop: "Lenin lived! Lenin lives! Lenin will live!" The famous mausoleum where his body is preserved served as the regime's most sacred shrine.

Vasily Grossman was a war correspondent in the Soviet Union during World War II. After the war he became a novelist, and Life and Fate, about life in the Soviet Union during the Battle of Stalingrad, is considered his masterpiece. Written in 1960, the novel was suppressed by the KBG and not published until after a manuscript was smuggled to the West in the 70's.


Last night I finished watching the 12-part TV series adopted from Life and Fate (Amazon Prime; Russian with English subtitles). As you might expect, life in Soviet Union under Stalin was a dystopian nightmare where political persecution was so commonplace that various slang terms developed around it. For example, one character warns another "Don't you know you could get a 'tenner' [ten years in the gulag] for telling that joke?"


It is easy enough to imagine how fortunate we are not to live in such a time and place. But as I watched the show, it dawned on me that such optimism may not be entirely warranted. There are disturbing parallels between life under Stalin and life under "progressive" ideology today, and maybe we are in the incipient stages of a revolution that will push us every closer to Uncle Joe's way of doing things.

Two examples will suffice to demonstrate my point. Cancel culture is Soviet-style denunciation writ small. Nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum is the main character in the series. Viktor protests when his superiors fire a secretary in his office because she is Jewish. Despite his brilliant scientific work, his colleagues denounce him as an enemy of the state, and put him on the road to losing his livelihood, exactly like a victim of cancel culture today.

In confidential interrogation reports, Iraqi detainee M060108-01 is depicted as a model prisoner, "cooperative" with his American captors, and unusually chatty. At times he seemed to go out of his way to be helpful, especially when offered a chance to inform on rivals within his organization, then known as the Islamic State of Iraq.

Over several days of questioning in 2008, the detainee provided precise directions on how to find the secret headquarters for the insurgent group's media wing, down to the color of the front door and the times of days when the office would be occupied. When asked about the group's No. 2 leader — a Moroccan-born Swede named Abu Qaswarah — he drew maps of the man's compound and gave up the name of Qaswarah's personal courier.

Weeks after those revelations, U.S. soldiers killed Qaswarah in a raid in the Iraqi city of Mosul. Meanwhile, the detainee, U.S. officials say, would go on to become famous under a different name: Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi — the current leader of the Islamic State.

U.S. officials opened a rare window into the terrorist chief's early background as a militant with the release this week of dozens of formerly classified interrogation reports from his months in an American detention camp in Iraq. Whereas the Defense Department previously released a handful of documents that cast the future Islamic State leader as an informant, the newly released records are an intimate portrait of a prolific — at times eager — prison snitch who offered U.S. forces scores of priceless details that helped them battle the terrorist organization he now heads. The Islamic State grew out of an organization that was once called al-Qaida in Iraq.

The 3,400-year-old royal city was built by Amenhotep III, abandoned by his heretic son, Akhenaten, and contains stunningly preserved remains.

Three thousand four hundred years ago, a contentious ancient Egyptian king abandoned his name, his religion, and his capital in Thebes (modern Luxor). Archaeologists know what happened next: The pharaoh Akhenaten built the short-lived city of Akhetaten, where he ruled alongside his wife, Nefertiti and worshipped the sun. After his death, his young son Tutankhamun became ruler of Egypt — and turned his back on his father's controversial legacy.

But why did Akhenaten abandon Thebes, which had been the capital of ancient Egypt for more than 150 years? Answers may lie in the discovery of an industrial royal metropolis within Thebes that Akhenaten inherited from his father, Amenhotep III. The find, which has been dubbed the "lost golden city of Luxor" in an announcement released today, will generate as much enthusiasm, speculation, and controversy as the renegade pharaoh who left it.

Soon after World War II, Germany was cleaved in two by the allies who won the war. 'West Germany' came under the influence of Western Europe and the US, and East Germany under the Soviet Union. The eastern section of Germany, under the political and ideological influence of Communism, came to develop one of the most notoriously oppressive secret police organizations in modern history: the Stasi.

On this week's show, we discuss Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck's moving and expertly directed 2006 German film 'The Lives of Others' (spoiler warning!). The movie's depiction of life under Stasi control, the power dynamics at play in the Communist nation, and the lives it destroyed, among other things, all contribute to make the 'The Lives of Others' an instructive work from which to understand the destructive power of totalitarianism on a very personal level. However, the film also offers a light of hope in the face of immense bleakness.

Join us as we discuss the film, its overall plot and themes, expert characterization, historical accuracy (or lack thereof), and why it deserves a watch - or two! Just make sure the Stasi don't find out. They don't arrest people on a whim, after all.


We're also on LBRY!

Running Time: 01:07:39

Download: MP3 — 64.3 MB

A freshly unearthed Bronze-Age stone may be the oldest three-dimensional map in Europe, researchers say.

The 2m by 1.5m slab (5ft by 6.5ft), first uncovered in 1900, was found again in a cellar in a castle in France in 2014.

Archaeologists who studied patterns engraved on the 4,000-year-old stone say they believe the markings are a map of an area in western Brittany.

They say this makes the slab the oldest 3D map of a known area in Europe.

I have noticed that many pro-Chinese thinkers and writers have lately made the mistake of presuming that Chinese culture and civilization stands in total opposition to the divisive/imperially minded western culture which has laid waste to much of the world over the past centuries.

This perception has expressed itself in the various assertions that China's philosophy of Tianxia (rooted in the idea of a Mandate of Heaven to justify power systems) is both superior and apart from the system of Westphalia which arose in the form of a 1648 Peace Treaty that eneded the 30 years religious wars of Europe and established the foundations of the modern nation state.

Confucius

While the Principle of Tianxia is a beautiful and important concept for westerners to understand, and truly is the basis for international harmony which transcends the narrow limits of geopolitics plaguing the west, there is something dangerously false embedded in any thesis that assumes it to stand in opposition with Westphalia which needs to be exposed. The fact is that Tianxia is not only in complete harmony with the principle of Westphalia, but that the decay of western values into the Hobbesian mess of total war and economic manipulation is not due to anything within the Treaty of Westphalia but rather in spite of it.

The Eisenhower presidency would see Washington taken over by business executives, Wall Street lawyers, and investment bankers — and by a closely aligned warrior caste that had emerged into public prominence during World War II.

As discussed in part two of this series, the war in Vietnam did not start on its official date, November 1st, 1955, but rather 1945 when American clandestine operations were launched in Vietnam to "prepare the ground".

1. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, goes over in his book "The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy," how the CIA was used to instigate psy-ops and paramilitary (terrorist) activities in Vietnam to create the pretext required for an open declaration of war and for the entry of the U.S. military into a twenty-year-long meat grinder.

This was a strategy reserved not just for Vietnam, but had become the general U.S. foreign policy in all regions that were considered threats to the Cold War Grand Strategy, as seen under the directorship of the Dulles brothers (See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series).

In 1920, Scientific American reported that the atmosphere was deficient in CO2, and that crop productivity could be greatly enhanced by introducing CO2 emissions from from smokestacks, and that earth was covered with luxuriant forests when CO2 levels were much higher.

Fertilizing the air with carbon dioxide to promote plant growth

ONE of the principal constituents making up the body of a plant is carbon, representing about one-half of its organic substance. The opinion that this carbon is derived from the soil has long been abandoned, modern investigation having shown atmospheric carbonic acid to be absorbed by means of the chlorophyll or green matter of the leaves and decomposed into its elements, the carbon, in conjunction with the root sap and atmospheric moisture, being worked into organic compounds.

Whereas atmospheric air at present is relatively poor in carbonic acid, of which it contains only about .03 per cent, at an early period in the development of our planet, when this was covered with the luxuriant forests our coal deposits are derived from, it comprised incomparably greater quantities of this gas. This fact suggested the idea of heightening the fertility of the soil by increasing its carbonic acid content and thus producing conditions resembling those of antediluvian ages.