This particular meltdown is told through a series of flashbacks, memories, and present experiences. The story follows the relationship between Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) and her son, Kevin. While John C. Reilly plays the role of Eva’s husband and Kevin’s father,Franklin, the movie is really about the damaged and hopeless relationship between a mother and her son.

From the very beginning, there is something wrong with Kevin. He cries too much as an infant, doesn’t speak as a toddler, and looks his mom straight in the eye and smiles when she catches him masturbating in the bathroom. Yes, Kevin is startling when he is only a toddler (Rock Duer). Kevin is infuriating as a young boy (Jasper Newell), and Kevin is utterly and completely terrifying as a teenager (Ezra Miller), at least to his mom. If anything, he is the perfect son to his father.

During the beginning of the movie, we learn that Kevin was responsible for a shooting at his high school. After that, we are taken step by step through the events that led up to the horrific incident. We see a mother who is not only suspicious of, but legitimately despises her son, yet keeps trying to somehow make connection. We see an oblivious father, archery lessons in the backyard, and the distrubing conclusion to a little sister’s missing pet guinea pig. We see a son who appears so evil that even Rosemary’s baby would have a hard time standing up to him on the playground should they ever cross paths. We see the meltdown of the entire thing.

The first five minutes of the movie are enough to hook you. Each minute thereafter is enough to make you cringe, gasp for breath, and stare at the screen in complete shock and awe.  By the time the end of the movie rolls around, you will already be wondering about specific elements of the story. In fact, you will already have a good idea of what exactly is about to happen. All I can say is this: When your suspicions are confirmed and the missing pieces fall into place, I don’t know that you will be able to make complete sense of life, at least not for the time that immediately follows the rolling of the credits. The last five minutes of the film were brutally honest and saddening. The final minute of the film left me dumbstruck and incapable of attaching a relatable emotion to what I had just seen.

Don’t watch this if you’ve got a bun in the oven. For every parent that dreams of what their kids will be when they grow up—a doctor, a lawyer, the next president of the United States—there are many more who don’t think about what they would never want their children to be, and that’s Kevin.

Seriously, you will never crack a smile in this movie. Your face won’t know how to react.

Jurassic Park: The Game is an episodic, downloadable third-person adventure video game developed by Telltale Games that is based on the Jurassic Park franchise. The game, which is the latest of several Universal/Telltale deals, was originally announced in June 2010 before being revealed in the February issue of Game Informer. The first episode was expected for release in April 2011, but instead will be pushed back to November 15 along with the original Console (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360) release, resulting in a multi-platform release with all 5 episodes at once.

Development

The game was originally announced on June 8, 2010 along with Back to the Future: The Game. However, Back to the Future was released first, on December 22, 2010. On January 14, 2011, in an exclusive article for Game Informer, Jurassic Park: The Game was officially unveiled. The game is set to have an original plot that takes place both concurrently and after the plot of the original Jurassic Park film and is set to resolve some loose ends of the film, such as the fate of Dennis Nedry’s shaving-cream can and the embryos contained within. It was also announced that there will be new characters and that the characters from the original film will only be referenced. There are also returning dinosaurs, which are the Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Dilophosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Brachiosaurus, Gallimimus, Triceratops, as well as a new, nocturnal dinosaur with glowing eyes, which has been confirmed to be Troodon, and Mosasaurus that will be seen in Jurassic Park’s marine facility. The game will also include dinosaurs, such as Herrerasaurus and Compsognathus, and also Pteranodon that were known or speculated to have been in the park but were never shown. It has been stated that the game will not be a shooter and instead focus more on its characters. The developers have described it as being similar to Heavy Rain. It will also have decision-based objectives as well as quick-time events that affect gameplay as well as how the game’s events play out, making it the first game by Telltale in which the player can be killed.

Release

In a reveal trailer released February 2011, Jurassic Park: The Game was confirmed for April 2011. Console release was confirmed for Fall 2011. A pre-order for the game is entitled to all 5 episodes delivered monthly, a collector’s DVD at the end of the season, and special forums access to behind the scenes features/content (production art, game designer chats, etc.). On April 25, 2011, Telltale Games announced that the PC/Mac version would be delayed until Fall, resulting in a multi-platform release. All pre-orders up until April 24 will be refunded and a free game voucher was offered as compensation good for any Telltale game ever and in the future. The game is now to be released on PC and consoles Nov 15.

Platforms

Episodes for Microsoft Windows and MacOS X will be released starting Fall 2011, while PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions will release simultaneously in the Fall. However, the Xbox 360 will get a retail disc release, as opposed to the episodic release of the other platforms.

Source: Wikipedia

The story is the famous predation in Tsavo, Tanzania, in the 1890s by two lions which killed or devoured some dozen or so railroad workers, while an American engineer, brought in to supervise the building of a bridge, is forced to hunt down and kill the lions in order to complete the bridge.

Robert Stack of later Untouchables fame plays the engineer, in his first scene arriving like some drunken New Years Eve partier who in confusion has commandeered a railroad engine. The sight of a stern Elliot Ness breaking out in ribald song as he falls reeling from the cab is likely the best scene in the movie, and the only one worth watching.

Not satisfied with one-take scenes and insipid direction, the producers, in a naked effort to somehow boost ratings, trotted out a white-haired overweight Nigel Bruce, set him in a canvas folding chair and propped his signature pipe in his mouth. Emitting his usual huffs and harrumphs and waxing mock indignant at the boringly predictable utterances of the other characters may have played well at 221-B Baker Street ten years earlier, but in the context of a siege by ghost-like lions in midnight East Africa such “acting” comes across as merely out-of-place tiresome cliche. For the first time, this reviewer confesses to not sitting through an entire film which he intended to review. Quelle catastrophe. —SiriusReviews.com © 2011

By November 1923 these notes became of such little value that, in the social chaos that accompanied its fall, it was common for persons to be robbed—not of the marks in their possession, but of the heavy satchels which were necessary to carry the notes, leaving the victim lying in a pile of worthless paper. Fergusson concludes, and makes a believable case for the reader, that the real culprit in causing the German inflation, and therefore substantially contributing to the collapse of the Weimar government at the close of 1923—and the institution, or more accurately the re-institution, of dictatorial rule, when General Stinnes suspended the new German Constitution, imposed a military regime, and effectively ended the German people’s short flirtation with republican and democratic rule—was uncontrolled deficit spending coupled with a collapse in the ability of the government to collect any meaningful level of taxes, which induced Havenstein to react to the upward pressure on prices by constantly issuing fresh batches of notes, which transformed a problem with mere inflation into a problem of hyper-inflation. By an unfortunate coincidence, Havenstein died at almost the same moment that the military regime seized power, enabling Stinnes’ regime to gather to itself the accolades of having seemingly brought order out of chaos, which order was in fact brought about Dr. Schact who quickly reversed the course set by Havenstein, and was able to re-impose effective taxation.

The relevance of this book is that Fergusson makes a solid case for regarding the modern U.S. Federal Reserve with concern as it issues repeated doses of “quantitative easing” without Congress increasing taxation. This essentially repeats the mistake of the Weimar cabinets in 1919 through 1923, and raises the question as to whether Keynesianism, with its optimistic view of deficit spending, dismissing proponents of balanced budgets with the seemingly innocuous phrase “after all, we only owe it to ourselves,” is merely a one-way ride to a financial cemetery. Bernanke, today’s equivalent of Dr. Havenstein, may be instituting the same policy even if not embracing the same theory of the late Reichsbank director, with the result that the U.S may be destined for a similar bout with a hyper-deflating currency. We can only hope not.

As for criticisms of this book: First, Fergusson fails to explain satisfactorily why Austria and Hungary, having experienced parallel situations to Weimar Germany, also experienced hyper-inflation, although Havenstein had no authority to issue notes in those countries. Those countries’ currencies inflated more quickly and collapsed sooner than the mark. Second, Fergusson repeatedly labels German nationalists and veterans’ organizations as “right-wing.” This resort to common parlance is too simple. Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin were nationalists. Stalin’s Soviet Union was decidedly militarist, with an economy permanently organized for war to an extent greater than Hitler’s Germany. Even Lenin was widely accused during his lifetime of harboring Russian nationalist tendencies. In Germany, the Majority Socialists in the Reichstag voted to support the Kaiser’s war effort, certainly a nationalistic move, yet few would label any of those mentioned above “right-wing.” Hitler’s National Socialism, and especially the S.A under Ernst Rohm, had strong anti-capitalist sympathies, especially in 1923 at the height of the inflation phenomenon when Hitler attempted the Beer Hall Putsch. Perhaps nationalist versus internationalist would be more explanatory than the overly used and simplistic left-wing versus right-wing.

Fergusson paints a dramatic picture of Germany’s travails at the height of the greatest inflation in recorded history, and is well worth the read. His picture is also a warning of what may await other nations which fail to take to heart the lesson that unrestricted deficit spending leads inexorably to collapse of a nation’s currency, followed by chaos in its economy, flight of savings and wealth, and inevitably ending in economic depression—the painful withdrawal period as society learns to live once again without the drug of repeated “quantitative easings.” –SiriusReviews.com

Literate, perceptive, armed with facts, and drenched in acidic observations on the clownish antics and militantly self-righteous statements of Western intellectuals whose experience of Russia was either wholly imaginary or limited to closely choreographed Intourist shadow-plays as Soviet handlers led them by the nose and starry-eyed past Potemkin villages, Lyons’ The Red Decade packs page after page with the story of the birth, life, and finally paralysis and stasis, since it never died, of the Communist Party U.S.A. and its rise to fantastic influence in a land whose history and culture are utterly alien to its militaristic, anti-democratic, conspiratorial, and totalitarian doctrines.

As proof that American Communism was a foreign implant serving only the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union, Lyons traces the public pronouncements of the American party and compares them to the zig-zagging foreign policies of the Soviet regime and finds that the two perfectly coincide. From 1917 to 1921 the Bolsheviks pursued armed world revolution at all costs, forming the Communist International (Comintern) for this widely-publicized purpose. In the U.S the first American Communists, almost entirely East European immigrants with little knowledge or experience with the U.S., forced a break with the majority American socialists, rejecting the latter for their preference for peaceful “reformism.”

From 1922 to 1928 the New Economic Policy (NEP) was implemented in Russia, seeking to rebuild the economy which had collapsed as a result of prodrazhverstka—Bolshevik seizures of hidden food stocks from starving peasants. The Bolsheviks even began signing treaties with foreign “imperialists,” arriving hat-in-hand asking to join international conferences and haughtily indicating that they would deign to accept loans from capitalists whom they thought “desperate” for new markets.

In the US, the new American Communist Party became subdued in its behavior while it was subjected to a series of purges as Moscow established organizational control, first via Comintern delegations (entering the U.S. en masse with fake passports), then by Stalin’s appointees. Leadership finally settled on the frumpy and self-effacing Earl Browder who was awarded formal leadership of the American Communist Party for the sole reason that, unlike his rivals, Browder never voiced support in public or private for any of Stalin’s chief rivals Trotsky, Zinoviev, or Bukharin.

From 1928 to 1935, with Stalin now firmly in control of both the Russian Party and the Comintern, Moscow resumed Lenin’s former policy of agricultural expropriation and world revolution, splitting with socialist and labor parties world-wide who were henceforth attacked as “social fascists” for their heresy of doubting the imminence of the global collapse of capitalism, and scorning collective security arrangements like the “League of Robber Nations,” as Lenin had termed it.

Browder’s party during this period broke with every American socialist party and union movement, viciously attacking Hoover and FDR equally as “tools of Wall Street,” and the New Deal as “fascist.” The Party’s well-financed smear machine condemned American progressives and anyone who upheld “American exceptionalism” as “rotten liberals,” yet spent far more time and devoted far more space in its many propaganda publications to vicious attacks on rival Communist parties that still adhered to Trotsky or purged American leaders like Lore and Lovestone, and non-stop personal attacks on American union leaders like John L Lewis and socialist leaders who defied the Kremlin’s authority like Norman Thomas.

From 1935 to 1939 Stalin panicked at the rise of Hitler, who stubbornly refused every suggestion of possible cooperation from Stalin, and reversed his foreign policy. The Comintern suddenly began calling for united “Popular Fronts” with socialists—and even capitalist bourgeoisie—in every Western country, Stalin even ordering a new “Soviet Constitution” to attract sympathy and support from formerly despised democrats in the West.

In the U.S, FDR and the New Deal were suddenly found to be “communist” at heart, and the CP-US’ multifarious and voluble media proclaimed undying support and friendship for U.S culture and history, condemned U.S. isolationism, and endorsed the virtues of collective security and military intervention in the Spanish Civil War. This at a time when Hitler’s Wehrmacht was still conducting secret military training inside the Soviet Union under the terms of the Weimar Republic’s 1922 Treaty of Rapallo (terminated by Hitler in 1935), and Stalin was happily selling oil to Mussolini which fueled his Fascist invasion of Abyssinia (1935) and again during Italy’s military intervention in Spain (in 1937-39).

In August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact which enabled Hitler’s invasion of Poland and triggered World War II. As if turning on a dime, Stalin’s international propaganda machine suddenly found Nazism to be something much less than the fount of all evil. Collective security overnight reverted to anathema, and imperialism and capitalism once again became the only enemy of Communists everywhere.

Stalin’s zig was matched precisely by a zag in policy and pronouncements of the CP-US, which within hours of the Pact hastily issued reformulated slogans and propaganda proclaiming the virtues of US isolationism, unlimited support for non-interventionist “peace coalitions” like the League for Peace and Democracy (changing the name from “League Against War and Fascism”), flooding their executive boards with salaried Communist Party functionaries, and implementing strikes by Communist-infiltrated unions such as the C.I.O which halted the production of half the military aircraft production in the US during early 1941 until FDR sent in the army to run the plants, all in an effort to impede U.S. aid to Britain and France while they sought to resist Hitler.

Lyons makes the interesting point that one of Hitler’s motivations in signing the Pact may have been to recruit a Stalin-dominated global Comintern as a foil against the US, consciously seeking thus to prevent American aid to Britain and France, believing that Stalin’s Comintern had such powerful influence that it could keep the U.S. out of the war. The SA’s own street battles with the Comintern in major German cities throughout the 1920s and early 1930s certainly makes it plausible that Hitler viewed the Comintern as a global power. In hindsight, this strategy may indeed have worked for a time.

The ultimate zigzag followed in June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Reversing on the same dime, Nazism suddenly reverted to being the sole enemy of Mankind, U.S. isolationism overnight returned to being the worst of evils, and the virtues of collective security were suddenly and desperately proclaimed by Communist Parties world-wide as the Wehrmacht invaded Russia and approached Moscow.

In the propaganda of the CP-US, “Uncle Joe” became America’s best friend interested only in peaceful democracy. The CP-US feverishly promoted the American war effort, blocking all union strikes thus ensuring the smooth production of America’s war materials, and immediately began calling for implementation of a “Second Front” to halt the Nazis. Given the accuracy of Lyons’ analysis, amazingly perceptive for 1940 and 41 when most Americans were enamored with “Uncle Joe,” one can almost imagine an agent of the Comintern whispering in Tojo’s ear, “Don’t invade the Workers’ Paradise…attack those evil capitalists in the U.S instead!” Strange how it all worked out for Stalin in the end, and for the Comintern.

Only in 1950 did this period end when Stalin tested the West in Korea, finally triggering a significant anti-communist reaction in the U.S that quarantined the CP-US and contributed in its long-term decline.

It is hardly possible to do justice here regarding the wealth of information provided by Lyons on the penetration of American institutions by Communists and Communism in the Red Decade of the 1930s. Every conceivable industry, educational institution, unions and labor movements, the theater, arts, publishing, and every branch of the New Deal’s make-work projects were infiltrated by Party members. The Party swelled from a few thousand in 1932 to tens of thousand by 1939, not to mention millions of supporters, seeming to represent ideas whose “time had come.”

The very vocabulary of intellectual discourse in the U.S. was transformed as high-society ladies of leisure, college professors, penny novelists, and media moguls equally proclaimed themselves “workers,” donned brimless workers’ caps, and championed the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, calling for “liquidation of the bourgeoisie as a class,” by definition including themselves and their own families. “Innocents Clubs” mushroomed across the country. “Fascist” became a new derogatory term hurled at any socialist who strayed from Moscow’s control, the foremost example being Mussolini, who had been the most popular socialist leader in Italy until he broke with Moscow and traded the hammer and sickle for the ancient Roman fasces. “Fellow-travelers” volunteered to man “front organizations” and assist “transmission belts” to promulgate the latest “party line.” For those whose membership in the Party was to remain secret, there was “boring from within” and turning capitalism “inside-out.” And for all, a fascination with “Proletcult,” proletarian culture, with faux workers’ parties in high-society penthouses, and Ivy League intellectuals eager to prove their working-class sympathies by plunging their pink uncallused hands into farmsoil and machine oil.

The devils of the day became “Hearst and Hitler” and anyone who had the audacity and bad taste to mention the deaths of millions by state-caused famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s or the bloody purge of millions more in the late 1930s, including not only virtually the entire officer corps of the Red Army, but most Bolshevik veterans of the Russian Revolution of 1917, by a paranoid Stalin who wished no reminders of his embarassingly small role in that event to survive. The influence of Stalin can be measured by the pick-ax murder of his Bolshevik rival Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, the murderer subsequently given a public parade in Moscow.

The influence of Stalin’s supporters in the U.S. can be measured by the nomination of Uncle Joe’s loyal supporter, Henry A.Wallace, as Vice-President in the campaign of 1944, and by the Hollywood productions of the pro-Soviet propaganda films North Star and Mission to Moscow. The former, an attempt to portray a famine-devastated and collectivized Ukraine, whose citizens joyfully welcomed the Nazis in 1941 as liberators from Stalin’s tyranny, instead as an autonomous happy-go-lucky village of prosperous free farmers with ample livestock, extensive private farms, and the latest consumer goods, fervently supportive of the regime in Moscow. The latter, a bald propaganda piece extolling Stalin’s thuggish war-mongering despotism as a mirror image of the U.S, with a supposedly functional Constitution, democratic procedures in the Soviet government, and a genial Uncle Joe devoted to world peace.

Even the film Citizen Kane bore traces of the Communist inundation, being a personal torpedo aimed at William Randolph Hearst, a contract-hit on the CP-US’s most visible and frequent target, by Orson Welles. Indeed, to publicly oppose the CP in Hollywood in the late 1930s meant to be subjected to the notorious Blacklist, which only the most famous movie stars could afford to publicly defy, which was far more effective and complete than the feeble anti-communist “greylist” of the 1950′s.

As Lyons carefully describes, capacity to resist the flow of the Children’s Crusade for Communism was rare. For formal CP-US members, to lose one of the repeated power struggles in its ranks merely meant expulsion from the Party. Higher-ups could not simply resign—this would bring public embarassment to the Party. Rather a resignation was always followed by a highly public personal smear in the many Party publications, with vicious attacks and invented calumnies and offenses. For former fellow-travelers who defected and attempted to publish anything critical of the Party—or worse, of the Soviet Union—all the resources of the vast marketing machine in the US and abroad would be employed to enforce “Communist discipline.”

Americans today have difficulty comprehending what this meant for true “cult-members” who strayed. The Communist Party, in the U.S as in other countries for many years, was far more than merely a political party. It was, as Lyons said, “a movement, a lobby, a religion, and a racket.” And more: it was a tribe which took care of its own. Lyons points out that higher officials at times employed Mafia hit men and union thugs to eliminate or intimidate rivals within the Communist Party. A defector was, by definition, a traitor to the community and must be dealt with by any means available. Anyone who questioned the party line, whether a member or a perpetual critic, would be subjected to social ostracism and personal invective that reached far beyond mere dislike to embrace professional sabotage and the blacklisting of employment opportunities that could reach into the highest governmental levels.

It was a movement in that the Communist Party’s Marxist and Leninist ideas reached into the furthest reaches of popular discourse and seeming geographical isolation, defying any attempt to bring public attention to inconvenient facts in the Soviet Union.

It was a lobby in that the Party was constantly engaged in loudly promoting specific political agendas, even if at times totally reversing its stated goals, then reversing yet again. Or in attacking specific programs and any public personae associated with those programs. The Party indeed practically invented the art of personal assassination by the press, since adopted by the U.S. media as standard practice, the Party having learned this technique from the Russian official press organs during Stalin’s campaigns against “Trotskyism” and “Bukharinism”—witness the CP-US campaign in the late 1920s against merely one of its former leaders in the form of its hysterical press campaign against “Lorism,” a CP-US leader who lost a power struggle and was purged by the Kremlin.

Communism was a vibrant, if decadent, religion. Like the Vatican, the global Communist parties had a monastic world headquarters which was the Kremlin; a series of Popes the first of whom was Lenin and the second Stalin; a holy text which was Marx’s Das Capital, followed by works by Lenin and Stalin; a pantheon of saints being Marx and Engels to whom was later added Lenin and other fallen Communist heros; a dogmatic doctrine which was “After the Revolution, the Workers of the World will unite and establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat over any non-proletarians who may survive”; a priesthood which was the current membership of the Russian CP (being a native speaker of Russian was an absolute prerequisite, and being Jewish helped); a Heaven which was the utopian Communist state to follow the establishing of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which a Providential History made inevitable; a Hell which was the current system of “capitalist exploitation” marked by smoking “satanic mills” and any other trace of non-egalitarianism; an “army of Christian soldiers” which was of course the Soviet Red Army; an inner core of disciplined Jesuits which was the GPU, the NKVD, and the KGB; and a Satan, which was of course Trotsky, then Hitler, then whoever happened to be the current American President. And most important of all: a clear distinction between “the saved” and “the damned” determined exclusively by whether one was a loyal and obedient member of the single correct and infallible Communist Party, ie, that local Party branch that was recognized by and unquestioningly obedient to the dictates of the Russian Kremlin and which alone received its financial subsidies—no small factor during the Depression, when many thousands of CP loyalists saw no alternative but to remain loyal to whomever currently dispensed the Party paychecks, paralleling the situation in Russia where to be purged meant to face starvation since private employment was a crime.

To risk falling from grace with this monolithic, vast, and extraordinarily powerful cult and be excommunicated from its ranks required a degree of personal bravery that few possessed, especially after witnessing the attacks on former members who strayed and were subjected to vicious retaliation and ostracism from life-long friends, co-workers, employers, union rank and file, government officials, neighbors, church-members, even spouses and one’s own family. How much easier to go slack and silently mouth “red-baiter” along with the rest of the cultic sheep. Yes, even church-members. Earl Browder, for instance, came from a family of Unitarians, as did this reviewer, who knows well what it means to be raised in an atmosphere where the only causes are left-wing, the only doctrines Socialist doctrines, the only “gods” radical icons and dead Communist saints. From personal experience, this reviewer knows full well that to break with the fanatical dogmas of America’s “progressive” left-wing can mean petty social ostracism, even without ever having joined any political party.

It was a racket in that the upper levels of the CP-US were as corrupt as any Tammany Hall, except the currency was more than mere money, but fame and power. Power over potential victims of the massive smear machinery that could be unleashed on anyone naïve enough to personally provoke a high-level party functionary, or block a job application for a New Deal project. Fame in that mere association with the Holy Cause of aiding the Great Experiment in the remote Asian hinterland, where no one knew exactly what was happening but “felt” it was good, made one giddy from the attention and praise that one received.

Walter Duranty, for example, the long-term foreign correspondent in Moscow for the New York Times, knew well what was happening in the Ukraine as hundreds of starved peasants threw themselves at his train on each “fact-finding” trip, but reported only that the Great Experiment required a few eggs be cracked—and other than that, all was well in Russia. The clamor and acclaim that Duranty received in his occasional visits to the U.S where his upbeat correspondence had made him the toast of New York’s Left elite, doubtless made him more drunk than a box of Moscow vodka, culminating in his being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his careful omission of the word “famine” even as his special train ran over corpses of the starved—more evidence of the Cult’s penetration and extraordinary dominance of American media and social elite in the 1930s.

As Lyons pointed out already in 1941, and as legions of former-travelers attempted to point out afterward, American leftists, liberals, and progressives were obsessed with non-existent utopias, and the more distant and less accessible, the more certain they were that glorious Socialism was being built there. Piles of dead—Duranty’s “cracked eggs”—did not deter them from locating their utopia in Russia, just as a generation later China became their favorite despite even greater heaps of corpses of innocents, into the tens of millions. And subsequent identifications of Communist Utopia with Yugoslavia, East Germany, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and now Venezuela, have never been inconvenienced by the slaughters and collapsed economies accompanying the Communist takeovers of any of those states, or deterred by the eventual rejection of Communism by virtually all of those same states when finally freed of their respective despots and secret police.

A few criticisms might be leveled against Lyons. For one, he suggests that most Communists were unaware of the reality of events in Russia and had their hearts in the right place. Fifty years after this book was written, with the Soviet archives wide open to anyone’s inspection, it can no longer be said that Communists today are unaware of those events, and given the perceptivity of Lyons in the 1930s, not to mention many others who attempted to report accurately what was actually transpiring in Russia, including many ex-Communists, political refugees, victims of NKVD death-squads, and survivors of Siberian death-camps, but were shouted down at public meetings and defamed in print by the Communist apparatus, their earnest submissions rejected by fellow-traveling publishers as “red-baiting,” it seems impossible to this reviewer that any thinking person with an ounce of moral or intellectual integrity in the 1930s could truly have been unaware of the Communist atrocities—being willfully ignorant if not consciously lying.

Given that rumors of Nazi concentration camps were taken as established fact by the Left elite in the U.S. without a shred of proof as early as 1934, it seems more than strange that the vastly larger Communist gulags and slaughter of much huger numbers in Stalin’s blood purges of 1937-39 should be dismissed as “red-herrings” or as “primitive anti-communism” by uninformed disgruntled “right-wingers.” Decades later, this reviewer listened to a college professor of American history at the University of Texas in Austin smugly denounce anti-communists who, in his opinion, were ignorantly attempting to pin the blame for the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in east Poland on the Red Army, when “as everyone knows” Nazis were the perpetrators. This he said in the 1970s after it was proven that Stalin’s KGB were indeed the culprits who had massacred the Polish officers in order to guarantee absorption of eastern Poland into the Soviet sphere in late 1939, and which was finally proved beyond all dispute in the 1990s by evidence from the Soviet archives.

In short, most American Communists were not the innocent naïfs that Lyons gave them credit for, misled by a vacuum of information in the U.S in the 1930s, but in fact knew full well what they were about, and what the facts were.

Second, Lyons restates the Trotskyist view that Stalin himself was of no consequence, but merely the expression of an impersonal force of burocracy. But this sidesteps the central fact, crystal clear through a century of hindsight, that Communism itself, as a political and social and economic system, is fundamentally flawed and inevitably degenerates into a Fuhrer-type regime run by cadres of secret police. This too was amply clear already by the late 1930s to anyone who cared to remove their rosy spectacles and read any daily newspaper by the light of open day.

Third, Lyons might have explored the overlap of the American Mafia, particularly the early Jewish gangsters, with unions in New York, seeing as how a symbiotic relationship apparently existed among the three entities, the New York garment and manufacturing and kosher food unions being ground zero in the U.S. for Communism, organized crime, and Jewish immigrants. How far this relationship went may even shed light on the ties that existed among the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, the crime boss Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, and unions in Chicago where the Jewish Jack Ruby originated. But this is highly speculative, and is not meant to suggest that Communism was an ethnic phenomenon beyond its early years.

All in all, a great and easy read, and highly entertaining and educational concerning a momentous social movement that has since receded into history, leaving little more than the gigantic self-contained gulag that is Stalinist North Korea—Lenin’s last remaining “workers’ paradise” imprisoned by its own broken “egg-shell.” Lyons’ book is a unique work, and, given the still lingering legacy of profound media suspicion which the Comintern, being the greatest marketing and propaganda machine that ever existed, historically managed to attach to any work with even the barest hint of inconvenient facts that may lend themselves to the remotest criticism of Communism, may remain highly unusual.

First rate—read it, and learn some actual facts about American history which the reviewer guarantees the censorship of the Establishment Left will never allow inside a class-room or on a cable-channel near you.

This book is a tendentious, unimaginative in the extreme, dully doctrinaire work by a class-war  Marxist-Leninist of the most dreary variety, as pious and stolid in his armored faith in the Soviet Union as any knight of the round table. In his hands, every trace of individuality is “counter-revolutionary”, every attempt to defend life and property is “capitalist aggression”, and the slightest hint of government by representative democracy is “bourgeois reaction…laced with corruption and scandal”, just as every industrial plant is by definition “colonized” by capitalists.

Communist violence, on the other hand, is routinely excused and recast in glowing and self-righteous terms, drenched in faux militance, such as “the battle for wheat” and “battle for the lira”, with murder and intimidation all-too-easily translated into slogans such as “political action”, “will to power”, and “will to victory”. Every thuggish riot is a social “movement”, every petty theft a “revolutionary act”.

In his world, diversity of opinion is “counter-revolutionary”—except when his hero Antonio Gramsci is stridently seeking to make his voice heard among skeptical and disapproving socialist leaders. Voting is an “obstacle to revolutionary progress”, except in the context of striking workers who are attempting to vote at worker council meetings in favor of Communists like Bordiga. Hierarchy and discipline are aspects of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, except where “socialist hierarchy” and “Communist discipline” are “central” to Communist success. Every land seizure by persons whom the author would term “rednecks” were such to happen in the United States, is “class conflict erupting in popular action” and “communal revolt”, even in the context of Mafia-ridden rural Italy. The same act if done by a Communist is a “revolutionary act”, but “fascist terror” if done by anyone in opposition, or a “fascist attack” on socialists’ “preaching of calm, non-violence”.

He accuses the Italian President Giolitti of “bad faith” when he expanded suffrage in 1912, but remains silent when Lenin eliminated suffrage entirely in 1917, and he supports Gramsci and Bordiga when they advocate the end of suffrage in Italy. He blames the “bourgeois” politician Ansaldo for funding Italian banks and newspapers to take a stand against worker riots, but says nary a word about the Soviet Union funding Italian Communists and public unions and anyone else in the government willing to take a bribe to submit to Moscow’s instructions.

Williams’ main theme is that World War I destroyed the PSI, the Italian Socialist Party, so that there was no effective release valve from “mounting popular exasperation” which finally found an outlet in the “occupation of the factories” of northern Italy by Italian industrial workers in 1920. A secondary theme is the emergence of the modern Communist Party of Italy from the failure of this occupation, jettisoning what remained of the PSI, the new Communist Party led first by Bordiga and then Gramsci who gradually abandons his “reformism” and embraces the abstentionism of Bordiga.

Exchange “redneck” for “working class” and one sees immediately the problem with all this. “Dictatorship of the rednecks” just doesn’t have the same ring. In the end, Williams hair-splitting doctrinal disputes among Bordiga and Gramsci and Serrati amount to no more than the pedantic filioque dispute between the Latin and Orthodox churches in the tenth century, and results in similarly ridiculous statements like “the conquest of self-consciousness” and “determinism is a condition of voluntarism”. This is the kind of nonsense that follows application of the dialectic to politics.

Williams’ classically bad thinking is matched by classically bad writing. For example: “it was in 1917 that contradictions became acute”, referring to the alleged internal contradictions of capitalism which could only find an outlet through violence (note the persistent Marxist dialectical mode of thought: only out of the violent clash of opposites can peaceful synthesis emerge). A real writer might phrase it: “The social equilibrium of the sons of Romulus gyroed into chaos in the wake of the Teutonic juggernaut at Caporetto”. But one cannot expect such innovative writing any more than innovative thinking from a dully doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist like Gwyn Williams.

Many issues he fails to make clear: For instance, to what extent was Italian Communism controlled by the Comintern, meaning indirectly by Lenin’s new Communist Party-Soviet Union headquartered in Moscow? On the one hand, Williams describes how slavishly the leading figures of the Italian Left regarded Lenin and his Bolsheviks in Russia, celebrating the arrival of an emissary or any communication from Lenin like a missive from the Pope, the only land anywhere where socialism had “conquered”. On the other hand, Bordiga sent a public letter to Lenin remonstrating his failure to back “abstentionism” (boycotting of elections) by Italian Communists. Still, the ultimate outcome of this “failure of Communist discipline” was Bordiga’s own purging from the Communist Party of Italy—this regarding the founding father of Communism in Italy, “Italy’s Lenin”—which suggests that the observation by others, implied by Williams himself, that there was only one Communist Party, administered top-down through the Comintern, which was itself administered top-down by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and that precious little independence existed in the Communist Party of Italy, was correct. A just outcome, at any rate, given Bordiga’s constant advocacy of party unity through purges of dissidents, and contempt for voting procedures. Perhaps it is more accurate to state that Bordiga could never have held any position of leadership in the new Communist Party of Italy without Moscow’s approval, and when he imagined that he enjoyed some degree of independence, Moscow set him straight.

A second issue he similarly skirts: although he acknowledges that Mussolini was the most popular socialist in Italy prior to World War I, and was the editor of the leading socialist publication Avanti, and further that Mussolini largely stole the thunder from the post-war PSI by drawing most Italian youth to his banner of action for action’s sake under the new symbol of the ancient Roman fasces, Williams fails to account for why Mussolini’s popularity should occur in the wake of the Occupation of the Factories in 1920. How does Williams explain the huge wave of support enjoyed by Mussolini in early 1921, culminating in national elections that showed very few Italians voting for Communists, or even for socialist candidates? Could it be that the “masses” were relieved to see law and order restored instead of an endless series of street riots and an economy collapsed by unremitting nation-wide strikes? Or that, having seen the famines in Russia and the wreckage of the short-lived Communist regimes in Hungary and Bavaria, even socialist leaders in Italy were relieved not to see a “workers’ paradise” come in Italy?  How does Williams discount the logic that manipulation, deception, and violence in internal party relations should not result in anything but the same in its external relations?

Third, since Gramsci consciously modeled his proposed Communist Party of Italy on the early Christian movement, how does Williams square this with the allegedly de-mystified and secular “scientific” basis of modern Socialism, which every class-war Marxist always invokes in an effort to cloak his own profound mystification in an aura of science? Surely even a doctrinaire in-the-box Marxist (non)thinker such as Williams sees the yawning chasm in logic between a claimed humanist and secularist and the fervently religious and apocalyptic global Communist movement which brought with it “in truth, a powerful feeling of conversion” in Williams’ own words? No such admission in this book. This reviewer advises that if the gentle reader desires objectivity and balance, he shall encounter more inside the covers of a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Awake! Magazine than in this work by Professor Williams.

The movie is controversial because of the father’s early decision to jettison the rules of civilization in order to ensure the survival of his family. For instance when he runs out of money to buy supplies he uses the guns he cannot afford to rob the store owner of both the guns and the goods that he can afford. Later he tosses gasoline across a jammed freeway to create a stop-sign so his family can drive across. When he arrives at his chosen isolated spot in the mountains, he destroys the bridge so no one else can find it. Finally, he hunts down and murders the local hoods for molesting his daughter, with hardly a second thought. On the other hand, he eventually agrees to take in the very store owner he had earlier robbed, to protect him and his wife from the same hoods (unsuccessfully). In one of the most interesting scenes, when a doctor is treating his son, Milland makes a positive comment on the outcome of the nuclear exchange, when the doctor replies “Well, ding-ding for us”, sarcastically referring to folly of conducting war with nuclear weapons, and implying that the sane person in such a situation would do just what Milland had done–abandon society and its rules and revert to the most primitive of instincts: protect oneself and one’s own. Plainly the writer and producer wished to state their view of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction through the characters of Milland and the Doctor.

One of the best end-of-the-world movies ever made, replete with hot-rods, classic 50′s juvenile delinquents, destruction and mayhem on a grand scale, and a great one for wondering What would I do if ever forced to undergo the same thing? –SiriusReviews.com

Perhaps the best (or worst) example was that of the Crater at Petersburg, where an unparalleled opportunity to rapidly end the war appeared out of Lee’s failure to fully respond to Grant’s outflanking maneuver to Lee’s south. After weeks of careful preparation, the mines in the Confederate trenches were blown—only to see the advantage lost due to officer rivalry, poor timing, and lack of support for the initial shock troops, who were massacred as a consequence.

Catton relates a sad, tired tale of endless slaughter caused by the absence of any proven strategy for victory except the mindless sacrificing of ever more thousands of lives to entrenched Confederate guns. The Civil War having begun with fanciful notions of Napoleonic bayonet charges, by Appomattox the trenches of World War I are already looming in the distance.

Must Lee have surrendered, or could he have retreated to the hills and given battle yet again? Catton leaves the impression that this was possible, and that in the end the Army of Northern Virginia remained undefeated, like a boxer who, though bloodied and battered, still stands, and that the intimidated Union Army leadership, and perhaps Grant himself, were relieved that Lee finally chose to end the matter and wished to make it as easy as possible for him to do so. Essential to any student of the Civil War: Catton never loses his grip. — Siriusreviews.com

(All Rights Reserved 2007)

He follows a constant theme: the naked ship-wrecked fugitive Cabeza de Vaca’s extravagant tale of jewels and cities was the “first whorl” that in time became a whirlwind, leading in the 1760’s to a climactic global war among the “four empires” of France, Britain, Spain, and the United States, which began and ended around the strategic Mississippi, and which culminated in Lewis and Clark’s headlong rush to the mouth of the Columbia in 1804, barely beating out British explorers still intent on fencing in an expanding “imperial” United States.

Entirely unlike contemporary academic works in style, with their courier newspaper-headline prose and careful nodding to the modern Tammany Hall corruption of multiculturalism, DeVoto has not a trace of political correctness. In its pages, Lewis and Clark’s men brag at how many Indian girls they got pregnant on their journey. Indian tribes drive French fur traders “crazy” begging for communal “drunks” where liquor removed all their inhibitions resulting in savage beatings, vengeful murders between spouses, and accidental shootings of their own children. Tribes gloat at their prowess in annihilating entire villages of enemy tribes, including the meticulous slaughtering of their children. Still other tribes guard their privileged monopoly in European trade-goods with fierce jealousy, both blocking Europeans from penetrating west, and using their newly-acquired European guns to punish any tribe who might attempt to evade their monopoly and trade directly with the Europeans.

Indian tortures of luckless European settlers and of other Indians is remorselessly described, including the connivance of French priests who at times encouraged boiling captives alive lest the fur trade be interrupted—after all, infidels are destined for the flames; what’s the harm in allowing “our loyal Indians” to bring it to them a few years sooner? Likewise, European traders were not loath to force Indian girls into slavery, and many tribes were eager to trade their girls for a few trinkets and knives, while in other tribes the women, married and unmarried, would persistently offer themselves to any European who happened along out of mere curiosity or “for a kind word.” Different climes, different values.

Neither are modern orthodoxies spared. Far from painting North America as a fairy-tale land of pristine wilderness and timeless beauty, DeVoto describes how each spring witnessed the drowning of tens of thousands of buffalo as the branches of the Missouri broke their ice, plunging the animals into the depths, such that it was possible to walk along river-banks for great distances upon their carcasses—those not being eagerly scavenged by Indians—and driving people far from every river-bank for several weeks each spring due to the stench of their decaying bodies. And after the annual spring drowning came the grass-fires, with herds of buffalo burned and blinded by flames staggering into boulders and tumbling down hills and bank, both horrifying and pathetic. A phenomenon far from the salons of Paris where fans of Rousseau discussed the virtues of nature and its noble savages over tea-cups with up-ended pinkies. Far from the fate of luckless settlers and the smallpox epidemics that turned populous Indian nations into ghost-towns long before most settlers arrived, the kings and emperors of Europe, apprised of the fate of their distant subjects, shrugged and resumed moving pawns and queens across maps of the world.

— Siriusreviews.com (All Rights Reserved 2008)