Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'communism'

August 23, 2023

The Firemen’s Ball: When Comedy Made Ideology Cringe

Miloš Forman was an incredibly famous director in the 1980s, when his Amadeus (1984) won eight Oscars out of 11 nominations, and Ragtime (1981) also received eight nominations, period pieces about music’s potential for social transformation, overcoming prejudices or conventions, and making a new world. Continue Reading...
May 17, 2023

Tetris and the Birth of an Obsession

It may be hard to picture now, when American children spend seemingly every waking hour absorbed in Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but once upon a time the country’s youth contented themselves with activities that did not involve gazing into tiny screens—you know, riding bikes, throwing around a football, jumping rope. Continue Reading...
January 18, 2023

Fidel Castro’s Failed Paradise

Six decades after its celebrated communist revolution, Cuba remains a totem for America’s left. Yet the country is imploding into irrelevance. Fidel Castro is dead and Raul Castro is retired, but their successors rule as if 1989 had never occurred. Continue Reading...
September 15, 2022

The Manchurian Candidate Is a Neglected Masterpiece

In 1959, when Richard Condon published his political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, he took a topical idea and ran amok with it. The idea was that during the Korean War a platoon of GIs had been captured by the Chinese, brainwashed (“not just washed, but dry-cleaned”), and released back home to do the enemy’s bidding. Continue Reading...
September 08, 2022

Remember the Cold War’s Witness

It was 70 years ago, 1952, that Whittaker Chambers published his memoir, Witness. It was a bestseller with a major impact, including on a future president who, more than any other figure, defeated the country that Chambers once served, winning the Cold War. Continue Reading...
January 21, 2022

Lenin’s ugly legacy of identity politics

“I broke sharply with all questions of religion,” said Vladimir Lenin, with typical vituperation. “I took off my cross and threw it in the rubbish bin.” Such was a metaphor for the dark turn made by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who came to be known by an alias, “Lenin.” Continue Reading...
November 30, 2021

Xi Jinping manipulates history on his way to a third term

China’s Xi Jinping has already served longer than any U.S. president other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Xi is likely to pass FDR in just a couple years. The Chinese president and Chinese Communist Party general secretary has secured the support necessary for a third term—expected to be followed by a fourth and even fifth one, should Xi, currently 68, live long enough. Continue Reading...
October 15, 2021

Czechs vote communists out of parliament

Since 1925, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia has had a seat at the table in Czech parliaments. While momentarily sidelined by the Nazi occupation during World War II, the party managed to centralize power rather quickly thereafter, working with Moscow to crush dissent and impose totalitarian control from 1948 until the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Continue Reading...