Savage Continent

When you think of the most deadly people in history the names that pop into your mind are typically your power hungry sociopaths... you know... Hitler, Stalin, Mao... Pol Pot. If you turn back the clock or know your history you might toss up names like Gengis Kahn, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar or Ashurbanipal II. You might also consider Leopold II , Charles V, or Ivan The Terrible. Whatever you come up with, its typically a head of state or at least someone who with military power. You don'...

You’ve heard the phrase “follow the science” or “science is real” over the past several years. Having “science” on one’s side seems to make a viewpoint authoritative if not infallible. The Soviet Union believed this wholeheartedly. Not only that but they believed their whole system of government itself was BASED on science. This was the “Scientific Socialism” of Marx and Engels put into practice on a grand scale. Science or the idea of it permeated every aspect of Soviet life to an extent tha...

Stalin's plan to Collectivize the Soviet Union was finally in full swing. Peasants everywhere were being forced to abandon their antiquated bucolic lifestyles and become modern proletarians on large agroindustrial farms. Marx’s dream of “labor armies” in the countryside was finally coming true. "The worker's paradise is upon us comrades!!" Well... not so fast. The pushback against this plan was widespread and determined... so much so that even Stalin had to publicly admit it simply woul...

Stalin had big plans for revolutionizing the Soviet Union and nowhere where those plans bigger than Ukraine. 90% percent of the population in the republic were small time farmers who worked the same plots of land their ancestors always had. He wanted to dispossess all of them and force everyone into large industrial plantations where they would become employees of the state. Convinced that that the "fascist" Western democracies were itching to invade, he wanted to take the agraria...

They say nature abhors a vacuum. By the late 1920's everything remotely traditional in Russian culture had been all but atomized. Churches had been dynamited, clergy were either dead, imprisoned or so marginalized that they were no longer relevant. A whole way of life had abruptly ended. But what now? The Soviets were not afraid to tell you how to act in public or even what to think in private. Under the draconian Article 58 of the legal code even your private feelings could make you a crimin...

Marxists had always assumed the that Communism... when it finally arrived would be a perfect existence without religion. In the words of John Lennon :"Imagine there's no heaven... no hell below us, above us only sky." This had been a concept tossed around by European intellectuals since the Enlightenment yet few had dared to act upon it. The Russian Revolution gave the World a chance to see what it would be like to make that dream a reality. Lenin believed that religion (especially Russian Or...

Marx was fond of the phrase “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” Creating the shining future of communism meant destruction of the corrupt system of bourgeois capitalism. Like Marx, Friedrich Nietzche thought the western world’s moral system was hopelessly flawed, only he believed it was tainted by the “slave morality” of Christianity. Unlike Marx though, he thought a new race of supermen would be needed to cure the World of the plague of nihilism that would descend upon humanit...

To some he was a genius that gave hope to millions. To others he was charlatan that nearly led mankind to its destruction. Everyone agreed that he was a rebel that offered a savage indictment on the harsh realities of modern industrial society; a prophet of doom to the powers that be. His work still inspires aspiration and dread to this day. It is still relevant. In a century it will remain relevant. Who was he? What did he really believe? What vision did he offer? You may think y...

Khrushchev finally makes what he believes will be his master stroke on the island of Cuba. If he can only get those medium range missiles operational in time all his bluff and bluster for the past 7 years will have paid off. But just when success seems within his grasp, disaster strikes. Kennedy finds out... and not only does he find out but he threatens actual nuclear war.. ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. Meanwhile on Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara have resolved to to throw their tropical ...

We all know Khrushchev has been fibbing big time but in 1961 it was big news. For eight years the world believed that the USSR had an arsenal so big that could demolish mankind in a matter of minutes. But what? What’s this? He’s been bluffing?! What would you do in his shoes? I know, let’s build a bomb so big that the mushroom cloud reaches 40 miles into the stratosphere and were it to be detonated in New York, windows in Montreal would be shattered and then… provoke a war in Berlin. Next… at...