"Little Trumps"

"Our national crisis will not be correctly perceived, let alone solved, until we recognize that the root of the problem lies in that supposed repository of virtue, the American people. The prestige media's rote expeditions to rural diners in Iowa to discover the Real America are wearing distinctly thin at this juncture, because what lies at the core of Trump's support is a not-insignificant fraction of would-be totalitarians who possess the same mentality as those who lynched Black people in the Jim Crow South, mobbed Jews during Kristallnacht and beheaded professors during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution."

Mike Lofgren at Salon warns of an "America slid[ing] into totalitarianism."

"Provides Copious Evidence That the United States Sought Russian Entry Up To and Even After the Bombs Were Dropped"

"In the first edition of his path breaking volume, Giangreco demolished the revisionist myth that Truman's depiction of an invasion as a looming catastrophe was a gross exaggeration, a 'postwar creation' designed to cover up the real reasons for using the bombs.  Citing a variety of hitherto untapped sources (including documentation on the production of 500,000 Purple Heart medals for the invasion's dead and wounded), Giangreco showed that Truman's vision was amply borne out by the projected casualty figures military and civilian planners routinely used.  
Now, in the expanded edition of Hell to Pay, his research again involves areas that have received little or no attention."

Robert James Maddox at History News Network reviews D. M. Giangreco's Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947.

"The Souring of American Exceptionalism"

"America's uniqueness, even pre-Trump, was expressed as much through negative indicators than positive. It is more violent than other comparable societies, both one-on-one and in the gun massacres to which the country has become so habituated. It has worse health outcomes than comparably wealthy countries, and some of them most important of them are deteriorating further even as they improve almost everywhere else. America's average levels of academic achievement lag those of other advanced countries. Fewer Americans vote—and in no other democracy does organized money count for so much in political life. A century ago, H.L. Mencken observed the American 'national genius for corruption,' and (again pre-Trump) Transparency International's corruption perceptions index ranks the U.S. in 18th place, behind Hong Kong, Belgium, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany—never mind first-place finishers Denmark and New Zealand.
"As I said: pre-Trump. Now the United States has elected a president who seems much more aligned with—and comfortable in the company of—the rulers of Turkey, Hungary, Uzbekistan, and the Philippines than his counterparts in other highly developed countries."

David Frum at The Atlantic takes stock of the United States upon its 241st birthday.

And in a 2013 Montreal Review article, Eric Foner looks at the history of the term, "American exceptionalism."

"A Fairy Story"

"Orwell was disturbed by the way both Animal Farm and 1984 were used by conservatives as indictments of British socialism, and he often protested this interpretation of his writings. Yet he did not foresee how his ideas would be expropriated by those with views diametrically opposed to his. There is no doubt he was ingeniously exploited in the service of the most damaging criticism of the left. What made his comments so effective was that they came from a man whose own leftist credentials were beyond dispute. Orwell never found a way of counteracting the conservative exploitation of his ideas and criticism. Though it was never his major purpose to censure socialism for its failures in the modern world, this crude verdict is levelled at his work by many American critics."

John Rodden and John Rossi in Modern Age mark the seventieth anniversary of George Orwell's Animal Farm.

"The Heartbreak Is What Lingers Longest"

"The title comes from Albert Camus. Men learned in Spain, the French novelist wrote sadly, that 'one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, and that there are times when courage is not rewarded.'"

Bob Drogin in the Los Angeles Times reviews Adam Hochschild's Spain Is in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

"Better to Surrender to Washington than to Moscow"

"President Truman’s decision to go nuclear has long been a source of controversy. Many, of course, have argued that attacking civilians can never be justified. Then, in the 1960s, a 'revisionist school' of historians suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima--that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power.
"Hasegawa--who was born in Japan and has taught in the United States since 1990, and who reads English, Japanese, and Russian--rejects both the traditional and revisionist positions. According to his close examination of the evidence, Japan was not poised to surrender before Hiroshima, as the revisionists argued, nor was it ready to give in immediately after the atomic bomb, as traditionalists have always seen it. Instead, it took the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, several days after Hiroshima, to bring the capitulation."

Gareth Cook in The Boston Globe discusses historical debates over why Japan surrendered in August 1945.

Four Legs Good

"In Zimbabwe, as the rule of Robert Mugabe's kleptocratic clique became ever more exorbitant, an opposition newspaper took the opportunity to reprint Animal Farm in serial form. It did so without comment, except that one of the accompanying illustrations showed Napoleon the dictator wearing the trademark black horn-rimmed spectacles of Zimbabwe's own leader. The offices of the newspaper were soon afterwards blown up by a weapons-grade bomb, but before too long Zimbabwean children, also, will be able to appreciate the book in its own right."

In The Guardian, Christopher Hitchens revisits George Orwell's Animal Farm.

"These Bolshevik Balladeers"

"We did not know that the folk boom was a reverberation of an earlier boomlet, a foray into American music roots, many of whose movers and shakers were as Red as a bowl of cherries. Who on our suburban street knew that Woody Guthrie, the hero of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, had been a columnist for the Daily Worker? Or that the man from whom we heard rollicking sea chanteys, a Briton named Ewan MacColl, was at one point kept from entering the United States as an undesirable alien? Then there was the cuddly-looking guy with the slightly pedantic six-record set and companion volume, Burl Ives Presents America’s Musical Heritage. If my parents or any of the neighbors were aware that Ives had been summoned, in 1952, to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and had identified Pete Seeger as a communist, they kept the details to themselves."

Lauren Weiner in First Things traces the political underpinnings of the 1950s folk revival.

"A Parable about the Dangers of Utopianism"

"He grew up in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, witnessing revolutions and counter-revolutions. He was one of the first Zionist settlers in Palestine. He became a star in the Berlin of Sally Bowles' cabarets and a rising Adolf Hitler. He was jailed and nearly shot by Gen. Franco. He fled the Nazis through Casablanca, Morocco. He gave Albert Camus a black eye, George Orwell a holiday home, and Soviet communism an enema. He had sex with supermodel twins, took magic mushrooms with Timothy Leary*, and helped create Intelligent Design. Oh—and he was a rapist."

Johann Hari in Slate reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.

"Flatter than a Crepe Suzette"

"Wirt's day in the sun came back in 1934, when the obscure Midwestern blowhard placed himself at the center of a political maelstrom by 'discovering' a plot by members of Franklin Roosevelt's Brain Trust to launch a Bolshevik takeover of the United States.
"That Wirt's yarn was transparently absurd didn't keep it from being taken seriously on the front pages of newspapers coast to coast, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. He gave speeches, wrote a book and went to Washington to give personal testimony at a standing-room-only congressional hearing.
"If that reminds you of the overly solicitous treatment given by the press, cable news programs and Republican office holders to purveyors of such lurid claptrap as the Obama birth certificate story or the fantasy of healthcare 'death panels,' now you know why it pays to study history."

Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times recalls the sudden rise and fall of William A. Wirt in 1934.

And the International Wrong

"The British and the French will be there for the same reason—Central Europe in general and Poland in particular now have a large number of votes in European institutions and generally have to be taken more seriously than they used to be. Top-level U.S. politicians will presumably be absent because they, by contrast, have no special reason to take Central Europeans seriously. Generally speaking, the former Allies prefer to remember the bits of the war—D-Day, for example—that contribute to their memory of the 1945 Triumph of Democracy, preferring to forget that the war's initial raison d'être, the independence of Poland and the freedom of Central Europe, was not really achieved until 1989."

Anne Applebaum in Slate discusses today's commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II.

Poison Summer

"In Mexico, settled near the capital in the small town of Coyoacán, in a house owned by the painter Diego Rivera (who was married to the radical artist Frida Kahlo), Trotsky and his wife Natalia maintained a bizarre imprisoned court. Unable to go out much because of fear that the NKVD would kill him, Trotsky welcomed a regular supply of visitors, was supported by loyal Trotskyist secretaries and guards, and played on a world stage by writing ferociously trenchant articles about Stalin and the character of the deformed workers' state that the Soviet Union had become. The avant-garde artists and writers who flirted with Trotsky form a sparkling backdrop to the political narrative, and Patenaude provides a series of fascinating pen portraits of a motley crew of believers and fellow travellers (a term invented by Trotsky for those who were happy to join the journey but reluctant about the destination). The most famous was Frida Kahlo, who came quickly under Trotsky's spell and indulged in a brief affair until she tired of it. Hovering a little further out on the ring of friends and colleagues were Soviet moles and agents, waiting for Trotsky to drop his guard."

In Literary Review, Richard Overy reviews Bertrand M Patenaude's Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky.

Roll Away the Stone

"Eric Alterman, a onetime Stone protégé, called the Stone-KGB stories 'smears,' 'phony,' and 'pathetic,' dismissing the whole contretemps as 'an almost entirely bogus controversy over whether Stone ever willingly spied for the Russians or cooperated with the KGB in any way. He did not.'
"KGB archival documents tell a different story."

In Commentary, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Alexander Vassiliev reveal that I. F. Stone worked for the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

Eric Alterman responds in The Daily Beast. (And here in The Nation.)

As does Todd Gitlin in The American Prospect.

David Oshinsky in Slate tries to sum up.

And in the Los Angeles Times, biographer D. D. Guttenplan argues that Stone was the "first blogger."

Beasts of England

"'After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm–in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.'"

Richard Brooks in The Sunday Times reveals that T. S. Elliot, as a former director of Faber and Faber, rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for publication in 1944.

Framing the Guilty

"Mr. Sobell also concurred in what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband, was aware of Julius’s espionage, but did not actively participate."

Sam Roberts in The New York Times reports that Morton Sobell, an associate of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, has admitted to spying for the Soviet Union.

"The Least Heralded Migration in American History"

"They came to Russia full of enthusiasm, bringing with them baseball and jazz, and eager to acclimatize. Russians found it difficult to believe the Americans' tales of woe when they saw their clothes, luxurious by Russian standards. And the migrants were themselves quite unprepared for the poverty and lawlessness which characterized life under Stalin, and in many if not most cases decided to leave. They soon learned, however, that when they surrendered their American passports upon stepping on Soviet soil (passports which were then used by Soviet agents in America), they had become, automatically, Soviet citizens."

Richard Pipes reviews Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken in The New York Sun.

Away with All Your Superstitions

"Those who want to know how the communist theory worked in practice should then turn to Robert Service's Comrades, one of the best of many recent accounts of how the movement grew, spread, and briefly captivated half the world before collapsing in 1989. If you want more blood and gore, read The Black Book of Communism, compiled by French ex-Trotskyites. Service's book is better on the Comintern, Titoism, and the Sino-Soviet split. The Black Book's authors are better on torture, concentration camps, and mass murder. Take your pick or read them both."

For this year's May Day, Anne Applebaum in Slate recommends books about communism.

City College Churchills

"The radical inclination, the intellectual banality and the overweening certainty all derive from what Heilbrunn accurately describes as 'a highly selective and moralistic view of history as a drama of salvation and idolatry.' The point is a crucial one. For neoconservatives, the past begins and ends with the period 1938 to 1945. This is history as tendentious parable in which appeasement always invites aggression; 'isolationism' paves the way for holocaust; and vigorous leadership (neoconservatives strongly favoring Winston Churchill over Franklin Delano Roosevelt) ensures the ultimate triumph of freedom, albeit too late to save the millions carted off to the Nazi death camps."

Andrew J. Bacevich reviews Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons in the Los Angeles Times.

As does David Greenberg in The American Prospect.

Bush Fails History

"Bush's cavalier invocations of history for political purposes are not surprising. But for an American president to dredge up ugly old canards about Yalta stretches the boundaries of decency and should draw reprimands..."

In Slate, David Greenberg of Rutgers University rebuts George W. Bush's recent comments about the Yalta Conference of 1945.