Two wars over Ukraine
Pacifists and liberals are fond of repeating the old adage that ‘the first casualty of war is the truth.’ In fact, the exact contrary is far closer to the truth: […]
Category Archives: Stalinism
How, why and when capitalism was restored in China
Part 8 of China in the age of American decrepitude The overthrow of capitalism in China in the early 1950s took place under very unfavourable circumstances. From nearby Korea, US […]
The long and torturous road to the Third Chinese Revolution
Part 7 of China in the age of American decrepitude When the sudden decline of US industry in the 1980s and 1990s opened the possibility, for the first time in […]
Chernobyl, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and truth in fiction
A review of Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, a 2019 mini-series in five parts on HBO/Sky. In an early scene of Chernobyl, a young pregnant […]
Harry Holland, Leon Trotsky, and ‘Undesirable Immigrants’
The New Zealand Labour Party formed in 1916 encompassed a wide range of tendencies in the labour movement, from revolutionaries to obdurate class-collaborationists. But initially at least, it was led […]
Was New Zealand’s participation in the Second World War avoidable?
A Review of Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society in the Second World War, by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, with Hugh Eldred-Grigg. A guest post by Terry Coggan. World War Two is seen […]
Ukraine’s “History Wars” and the political descendants of Stalin and Walter Duranty
A friend has drawn my attention to a criticism of my review of the film Mr Jones. (See here for the review – this post will make more sense if […]
The Holodomor in Ukraine and the obfuscations of “Mr Jones”
Few countries in the world suffered more than Ukraine in the twentieth century. One of the nations of the Soviet Union favoured with fertile soils and bountiful agriculture, geography made […]
“Trotsky” : the pornographication of history
In one of the opening scenes of Trotsky, the 2017 television mini-series produced by Russian state television and directed by Alexander Kott and Konstantin Statsky,1 Trotsky is travelling on his […]
The death of the revolution in China and its re-birth – told in a brilliant new novel
The generation of workers and peasants who made the Chinese revolution in the course of the bitter fight against Japanese occupation in the 1940s has largely passed away. So have […]
A worker at large 