Many modern day communist wannabe’s cling to the idea that the catastrophic, mass murdering failures of communism can be blamed on bad people being put in charge in the system. “If only Trotsky had risen to power instead of Stalin,” they lament.

This essay is for them. Is is largely a critique of the book “Leon Trotsky” by Irving Howe, Viking Press, 1978, which offers a very tepid criticism of the mass murderer.

Some excerpts:

BACKGROUND:

Leon Trotsky has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked. The reasons for this are clear enough. He was a writer, an occasional literary critic — according to Irving Howe, a very good one — and an historian (of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917). He had an interest in psychoanalysis and modern developments in physics, and, even when in power, suggested that the new Communist thought-controllers shouldn’t be too harsh on writers with such ideas — not exactly a Nat Hentoff position on freedom of expression, but about as good as one can expect among Communists.

Above all, Trotsky was himself an intellectual, and one who played a great part in what many of that breed have considered to be the real world — the world of revolutionary bloodshed and terror. He was second only to Lenin in 1917; in the Civil War he was the leader of the Red Army and the Organizer of Victory.

. . . .

Trotsky lost out to Stalin in the power struggle of the 1920s, and in exile became a severe and knowledgeable critic of his great antagonist; thus, for intellectuals with no access to other critics of Stalinism — classical liberal, anarchist, or conservative — Trotsky’s writings in the 1930s opened their eyes to some aspects at least of the charnel-house that was Stalin’s Russia. During the period of the Great Purge and the Moscow show trials, Trotsky was placed at the center of the myth of treason and collaboration with Germany and Japan that Stalin spun as a pretext for eliminating his old comrades.

THE IGNORANCE:

In analyzing the Tsarist regime, Trotsky had picked up on the strand of Marxist thought that saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production. This was a view that Marx expressed, for instance, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

More importantly, the class character of Marxism itself — as well as the probable consequences of the coming to power of a Marxist Party — had been identified well before Trotsky’s time. The great 19th-century anarchist Michael Bakunin — whose name does not even appear in Howe’s book, just as not a single other anarchist is even mentioned anywhere in it — had already subjected Marxism to critical scrutiny in the 1870s. In the course of this, Bakunin had uncovered the dirty little secret of the future Marxist state:

The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class…. But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all … but there will be a government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many “heads overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars. [Emphasis added.]

This perspective was taken up somewhat later by the Polish-Russian revolutionist, Waclaw Machajski, who held, in the words of Max Nomad, that — “nineteenth century socialism was not the expression of the interests of the manual workers but the ideology of the impecunious, malcontent, lower middle-class intellectual workers … behind the socialist ‘ideal’ was a new form of exploitation for the benefit of the officeholders and managers of the socialized state.”

Thus, that Marxism in power would mean the rule of state functionaries was not merely intrinsically probable — given the massive increment of state power envisaged by Marxists, what else could it be? — but it had also been predicted by writers well known to a revolutionary like Trotsky. Trotsky, however, had not permitted himself to take this analysis seriously before committing himself to the Marxist revolutionary enterprise. More than that: “To the end of his days,” as Howe writes, he “held that Stalinist Russia should still be designated as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ because it preserved the nationalized property forms that were a ‘conquest’ of the Russian Revolution” — as if nationalized property and the planned economy were not the very instruments of rule of the new class in Soviet Russia!

It remained for some of Trotsky’s more critical disciples, especially Max Shachtman in the United States, to point out to their master what had actually happened in Russia: that the Revolution had not produced a “workers’ State,” nor was there any danger that “capitalism” would be restored, as Trotsky continued to fret it would. Instead, there had come into an existence in Russia a “bureaucratic collectivism” even more reactionary and oppressive than what had gone before.

. . . .

One slight obstacle was encountered, however, on the road to the abolition of the price system and the market: “Reality,” as Trotsky noted, “came into increasing conflict” with the economic “system” that the Bolshevik rulers had fastened on Russia. After a few years of misery and famine for the Russian masses — there is no record of any Bolshevik leader having died of starvation in this period — the rulers thought again, and a New Economic Policy (NEP) — including elements of private ownership and allowing for market transactions — was decreed.

The significance of all this cannot be exaggerated. What we have with Trotsky and his comrades in the Great October Revolution is the spectacle of a few literary-philosophical intellectuals seizing power in a great country with the aim of overturning the whole economic system — but without the slightest idea of how an economic system works. In State and Revolution, written just before he took power, Lenin wrote,

The accounting and control necessary [for the operation of a national economy] have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.

With this piece of cretinism Trotsky doubtless agreed. And why wouldn’t he? Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest had all their lives been professional revolutionaries, with no connection at all to the process of production and, except for Bukharin, little interest in the real workings of an economic system. Their concerns had been the strategy and tactics of revolution and the perpetual, monkish exegesis of the holy books of Marxism.

The nitty-gritty of how an economic system functions — how, in our world, men and women work, produce, exchange, and survive — was something from which they prudishly averted their eyes, as pertaining to the nether-regions. These “materialists” and “scientific socialists” lived in a mental world where understanding Hegel, Feuerbach, and the hideousness of Eugen Duehring’s philosophical errors was infinitely more important than understanding what might be the meaning of a price.

Of the actual operations of social production and exchange they had about the same appreciation as John Henry Newman or, indeed, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. This is a common enough circumstance among intellectuals; the tragedy here is that the Bolsheviks came to rule over millions of real workers, real peasants, and real businessmen.

THE EVIL:

Howe puts the matter rather too sweetly: once in power, he says, “Trotsky was trying to think his way through difficulties no Russian Marxist had quite foreseen.” And what did the brilliant intellectual propose as a solution to the problems Russia now faced? “In December 1919 Trotsky put forward a series of ‘theses’ [sic] before the party’s Central Committee in which he argued for compulsory work and labor armies ruled through military discipline….”

So, forced labor, and not just for political opponents, but for the Russian working class. Let Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, the left-anarchists from the May days of 1968 in Paris, take up the argument:

“Was it so true,” Trotsky asked, “that compulsory labor was always unproductive?” He denounced this view as “wretched and miserable liberal prejudice,” learnedly pointing out that “chattel slavery, too, was productive” and that compulsory serf labor was in its times “a progressive phenomenon.” He told the unions [at the Third Congress of Trade Unions] that “coercion, regimentation, and militarization of labor were no mere emergency measures and that the workers’ State normally had the right to coerce any citizen to perform any work at any place of its choosing.”

And why not? Hadn’t Marx and Engels, in their ten-point program for revolutionary government in The Communist Manifesto, demanded as point eight, “Equal liability for all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture”? Neither Marx nor Engels ever disavowed their claim that those in charge of “the workers’ state” had the right to enslave the workers and peasants whenever the need might arise. Now, having annihilated the hated market, the Bolsheviks found that the need for enslavement had, indeed, arisen. And of all the Bolshevik leaders, the most ardent and aggressive advocate of forced labor was Leon Trotsky.

. . . .

He [Howe] says that in the struggle with Stalin, Trotsky was at a disadvantage, because he “fought on the terrain of the enemy, accepting the damaging assumption of a Bolshevik monopoly of power.” But why is this assumption located on the enemy’s terrain? Trotsky shared that view with Stalin. He no more believed that a supporter of capitalism had a right to propagate his ideas than a medieval inquisitor believed in a witch’s right to her own personal style. And as for the rights even of other socialists — Trotsky in 1921 had led the attack on the Kronstadt rebels, who merely demanded freedom for socialists other than the Bolsheviks. At the time, Trotsky boasted that the rebels would be shot “like partridges” — as, pursuant to his orders, they were.

. . . .

When Trotsky promoted the formation of worker-slave armies in industry, he believed that his own will was the will of the Proletarian Man. It is easy to guess whose will would stand in for that of Communist Man when the time came to direct the collective experiments on the physiological life, the complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physiological training, the reconstruction of the traditional family, the substitution of “something else” for blind sexual selection in the reproduction of human beings, and the creation of the superhuman.

This, then, is Trotsky’s final goal: a world where mankind is “free” in the sense that Marxism understands the term — where all of human life, starting from the economics, but going on to embrace everything, even the most private and intimate parts of human existence — is consciously planned by “society,” which is assumed to have a single will. And it is this — this disgusting positivist nightmare — that, for him, made all the enslavement and killings acceptable!

Surely, this was another dirty little secret that Howe had an obligation to let us in on.

Howe ends by saying of Trotsky that “the example of his energy and heroism is likely to grip the imagination of generations to come,” adding that, “even those of us who cannot heed his word may recognize that Leon Trotsky, in his power and his fall, is one of the titans of our century.”

This is the kind of writing that covers the great issues of right and wrong in human affairs with a blanket of historicist snow. The fact is that Trotsky used his talents to take power in order to impose his willful dream — the abolition of the market, private property, and the bourgeoisie. His actions brought untold misery and death to his country.

@ 5:30, the Chairman of BB&T talks about how they refused to participate in eminent domain endeavors, and “pick-a-payment” mortgages, even though such mortgages were sellable on secondary markets. He then offers a fantastic, insider look at TARP. Because the Fed didn’t want to let the public know which banks had gotten into trouble, they forced ALL big banks to accept TARP.

@ 24:30, A libertarian asks a question which points to the divide between Randian Objectivists and libertarians. The guy’s defence of Rand’s war on altruism is rather feeble.

FYI, I favor 95% of Rand’s Objectivism.

@ 27:00, there is a great discussion of fish pedicures, and a psychopathic, parasitic legislator who wants to outlaw the practice (unless you can sterilize the fish).

@ 36:30, I think there’s a good question about the state’s role in preventive legislation, like laws which regulate distracted driving, which poses threats to other people’s liberty. I guy from Reason Magazine who took the question answered well — as well as you can answer if you believe in the state. However, I think the correct response is the anarcho-capitalist line, that roads should be privatized, and regulated by their private owners.

@ 41:30, there is a wonderful chart correlating sales of Atlas Shrugged with expansions of the U.S. government.

“Courting Disaster” (Regnery; $29.95), by Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter in the Bush Administration, begins by imagining the horror that would have resulted had the plot succeeded. He conjures fifteen hundred dead airline passengers, televised “images of debris floating in the ocean,” and gleeful jihadis issuing fresh threats: “We will rain upon you such terror and destruction that you will never know peace.”

The plot, of course, was thwarted—an outcome that has been credited to smart detective work. But Thiessen writes that there is a more important reason that his dreadful scenario never came to pass: the Central Intelligence Agency provided the United Kingdom with pivotal intelligence, using “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the Bush Administration.

. . . .

Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”

Thiessen’s claim about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed looks equally shaky.

. . . .

Recently, Thiessen was hired by the Washington Post as an online columnist. Neither a journalist nor a terrorism expert, he got his start as a publicist for conservative politicians, among them Jesse Helms, the late Republican senator from North Carolina. After Bush’s election in 2000, he began writing speeches for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and, eventually, became a speechwriter in the Bush White House.

. . . .

Thiessen’s effort to rewrite the history of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program comes not long after a Presidential race in which both the Republican and the Democratic nominees agreed that state-sponsored cruelty had damaged and dishonored America. The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not back” has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it. (Read more from newyorker.com)

Current rankings at Amazon:

* #12 in All Books
* #2 in Nonfiction
* #1 in Economics, and
* #1 in Government!

Here is the description, direct from the Publisher’s Website:

Ever since Barack Obama was young, Hope has lived inside him. From the beaches of Hawaii to the streets of Chicago, from the jungles of Indonesia to the plains of Kenya, he has held on to Hope. Even as a boy, Barack knew he wasn’t quite like anybody else, but through his journeys he found the ability to listen to Hope and become what he was meant to be: a bridge to bring people together.

a few choice paragraphs:

His mama, white as whipped cream; his daddy, black as ink…

He was there in Chicago because he cared about these people. They were his family. People in Kenya were his family. Indonesians were his family. And no matter where he was, the world was his home. And who he was could be summed up in one word: loveable.

and

When Barack wasn’t studying he liked to jog along the Hudson River. He couldn’t help but notice the river of hurt and hate and history that separated blacks and whites. Being both, he could not take sides. Don’t worry, said Hope. I will be your bridge. In time you will be the bridge for others.

but that’s not all, there’s more:

When his classes came to an end, he raced to Chicago to join hands with the church, to learn new lessons: Not how to be black or white, but how to be a healer, how to change things, how to make a difference in the world.

of course, no book about Vladimir Lenin would be complete without talking about his days in the trenches as a community organizer:

The work was grueling, with stretches of failure, and puny patches of success. Door-to-door Barack went, early mornings, late nights, pleading and preaching, coaxing strangers to march together, to make life better for everyone. He worked hard as a farmer, planting the words “Yes, we can!” like seeds in spring.

but that’s not all, there’s still more good stuff:

Before Barack chased his future, he visited his past, traveling to Kenya to find his family, his father’s bones, and his own place in the circle of Africa…Finally, Barack knelt in the soil at his father’s grave, listening to the still, small voice that spoke to his heart: Go now. Fly free. Become the man you were meant to be. Live in hope.

Having gotten the blessings of his father’s spirit, Barack set forth…

Hope may be slim and beautiful, but she is no weak thing…[Barack] proved it again when all of Washington, D.C., wondered what this skinny kid with the funny name could offer a nation in need. But the hope that lived in Barack burned bright, and on the night he became a senator, everybody felt the flame.

but that’s not all! He had a date with destiny, and:

One sun-drenched day, as his wife Michelle stood by, Barack smiled on a sea of faces from Wichita to Waikiki. He saw whites and blacks, rich and poor, Christians and Muslims and Jews; he saw the ghosts of his parents, of Gramps and Toot, of Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK. And on that special day Barack was the bridge that held them all together. “I want to be your president,” he said. “Can we make America better? Can we work together, as one?” With a single voice the crowd called out, “Yes! We can!”

And that’s just one book. I personally think we need to change the calender to BB (Before Barack) and AB (After Barack). I mean it is undeniable that the man is the second coming. But, that’s not all, let’s look at the other tome on Barack Obama for children:

(Read more from aipnews.com)

This excellent about our new administration was written by Yuri Maltsev.

Check out his excellent book, Requiem for Marx. Another excellent essay which serves as the book’s introduction is excerpted here.

Sooner Than We Thought
by Yuri N. Maltsev

The new Obama regime is taking shape in Washington and provinces eager to take power and secure the “change you can believe in” using humungous propaganda machine of both government radio and television and still privately owned, so-called “mainstream media.” These private networks are competing with National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in praising Obama’s first choices from his new dog to his new chief of staff.

The thought scene in the US today resembles that of Russia in 1917, Cuba in 1959 or China in 1948. Incessant calls for “unity” and “fairness,” attacks on “divisive,” “toxic” and “hateful” language are nothing new � they resemble Germany of 1932 and Venezuela of 1996, today’s Putin’s Russia and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. . . .

In the old Marxist tradition, the new great Leader’s calls for “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the U.S. military. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had openly shared this vision of the civilian national security force (CNSF) in his book:

It’s time for a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, All Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation and community service.

. . . .

A phone call from Moscow woke me up in the middle of the night. My friend Vladimir, former Soviet Army general turned reformer under Yeltsin and businessman under Putin, sounded slightly drunk and very agitated. “I am watching televised interrogation of Alan Greenspan and another guy by some Jewish investigator and it looks exactly like the “Great terror” is back, but not here, for a change. What is going on? Would they shoot all these economic subversives and saboteurs at the end of the day? ”

“I am not sure about that, definitely not at the end of the day. Maybe after elections,” I mumbled in response and went back to bed. My sleep was ruined however, and in a desperate attempt to get it back I opened Greenspan’s “Gold and Economic Freedom” chapter in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Yes, Comrade Waxman (D-CA) definitely has a case against former capitalist sympathizer Greenspan. This now repentant agent of the world capitalism wrote back in 1966 about Waxmans of the time:

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense � perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire � that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

Make no mistake about it � Greenspan was attacked by Waxman and the new socialist establishment because of his libertarian past and free-market rhetoric and not because of his job as chief inflationist and central planner. The show trial over Greenspan’s pro-capitalist past was turned by Waxman and his committee comrades into the trial against capitalism itself.

(Read the whole thing at lewrockwell.com)

“If you know your history, you know that in 1934 there was an attempted coup in the United States that was thwarted largely due to the efforts of U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler (ret.)

Look it up.

Among other things, Butler was only one of 19 people ever awarded the Medal of Honor twice and the only person to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor for two different actions.

After it dawned on him how his heroism and the heroism of the troops under his command had been misused, he wrote a book called “War is a Racket” which I can virtually guarantee you never heard about in school.

Butler concluded there are only two reasons to ever take up arms:

1. To defend the country against real – not manufactured – attacks
2. To defend the Bill of Rights

Sounds good to me.”

(Read more from brasschecktv.com)

Most Americans don’t know our country’s dark history and love affair with Eugenics – the forcible castration or sterilization of citizens deemed undesirable, made possible, of course, by the power of the state.

William Faulkner obliquely railed against these monstrous policies in many of his novels.

“Eugenics attracted the support of prominent Americans. Progressive Theodore Roosevelt summed up eugenicist theory: ‘Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce.’ Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the famous opinion upholding Virginia’s decision to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck: ‘Three generations of imbeciles,’ he averred, ‘are enough.’

Other supporters were Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, and in Britain, Winston Churchill and Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, postulator of evolution. Britain originated the idea of ‘lethal chambers’ for its ‘unfit.’ . . .

Thanks to the Nazis, highly praised by eugenicists here, the movement eventually collapsed. But not before nearly 50,000 Americans were sterilized. . . .

An irony of this book is that its publisher hails itself as ‘progressive.’ As the late economist and historian Murray Rothbard wrote, ‘Progressivism’ was a movement in New England born of Yankee Pietism in the early 19th century. By the early 20th, it had matured into a Messianic ideology of pervasive social controls to better the world: prohibition of alcohol, statist government regulation of business, even the ‘war to end all wars,’ World War I. And, of course, eugenics was there, too.” (Read more from waragainsttheweak.com)

I’m wary of the over-educated. They’re the ones, when they seize the reins of power, who think the rest of us need to be saved from ourselves, who think they can socially engineer a better world through the power of the state. Freedom works best.

I see eugenics in the same light as obsession with world over-population in the 80’s, or global warming today. Politicians lead very empty lives and need problems to solve, real or imagined. Pseudo science provides an endless source of pseudo crises for which politicians can take money and power and pretend to save the world.

An excerpt from the book, What Has Government Done to Our Money?, by the great Austrian Economist Murray Rothbard (1926-1995).

“Government imposes price controls largely in order to divert public attention from governmental inflation to the alleged evils of the free market. As we have seen, ‘Gresham’s Law’–that an artificially overvalued money tends to drive an artificially undervalued money out of circulation–is an example of the general consequences of price control. Government places, in effect, a maximum price on one type of money in terms of the other.”

Me: Think of how, when the our government began debasing silver quarters in the 1960s, all the true silver quarters disappeared almost instantly.

“. . . With the name of the country’s currency now prominent in accounting instead its actual weight, contracts began to pledge payment in certain amounts of ‘money.’ Legal tender laws dictated what that ‘money’ could be. When only the original gold or silver was designated ‘legal tender,’ people considered it harmless, but they should have realized that a dangerous precedent had been set for government control of money. If the government sticks to the original money, its legal tender law is superfluous and unnecessary. On the other hand, the government may declare as legal tender a lower-quality currency side-by-side with the original. Thus, the government may decree worn coins as good as new ones in paying off debt, of silver and gold equivalent to each other in the fixed ratio.The legal tender laws then bring Gresham’s Law into being. . . .

Governmental control of money could only become absolute, and its counterfeiting unchallenged, as money-substitutes came into prominence in recent centuries. The advent of paper money and bank deposits, an economic boon when backed fully by gold or silver, provided the open sesame for government’s road to power over money, and thereby over the entire economic system.” (Read more from Mises.org)

This is another great Lew Rockwell podcast. Find more here.

Charles Adams, author of For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization, speaks about taxes and tax resistance, from the Bible, the Greeks, and through present day.

This brief lecture by the Mises Institute’s director of editorial affairs offers a fantastic glimpse at the long struggle for truth by economists of the Austrian School.

Of all the issues I cover here on LostRepublic.us, voicing doubts about human-induced climate change earns me by far the most consternation from friends and readers.

From the website realclimate.org:

“RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.”

Sorry, they do not take a stand on the issue. They only critique various news stories and individual studies.

Here is a book review of three climate change books: Winds of Change, Catastrophe, and The Weather Makers.

“In the wake of the accusation by Chas Freeman that his nomination to lead the National Intelligence Council was derailed by an “Israeli lobby,” a forthcoming memoir by another distinguished ambassador adds stunning new charges to the debate. The ambassador, John Gunther Dean, writes that over the years he not only came under pressure from pro-Israeli groups and officials in Washington but also was the target of an Israeli-inspired assassination attempt in 1980 in Lebanon, where he had opened links to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Dean’s suspicions that Israeli agents may have also been involved in the mysterious plane crash in 1988 that killed Pakistan’s president, General Mohammed Zia ul Haq, led finally to a decision in Washington to declare him mentally unfit, which forced his resignation from the foreign service after a thirty-year career. After he left public service, he was rehabilitated by the State Department, given a distinguished service medal and eventually encouraged to write his memoirs. Now 82, Dean sees the subsequent positive attention he has received as proof that the insanity charge (he calls it Stalinist) was phony, a supposition later confirmed by a former head of the department’s medical service.

Dean, whose memoir is titled Danger Zones: A Diplomat’s Fight for America’s Interests, was American ambassador in Lebanon in August 1980 when a three-car convoy carrying him and his family was attacked near Beirut.” (Read more from the nation.com)