Enemies Of The People
By Rod Dreher • March 2, 2018, 10:15 AM
Last night I watched “Paper Heads,†a 1995 documentary about Communism in what was then Czechoslovakia. It mixed propaganda films from the regime with testimony from people who had been tortured in communist prisons, or whose relatives had been abused in some way by the state. It was a crude but very powerful film. All that talk about brotherhood and shared prosperity and justice concealed cruelty, injustice, and murder of those who stood between the Party and Paradise.
The most chilling part of the film, at least to me, were the clips of the 1950s show trials. The rhetoric from the judges and prosecutors, and the narration by the state media announcer, denounced the accused as traitors, parasites, enemies of the people, and so forth. And these poor people, dignified but clearly in terror, confessed to their “crimes†and received the death penalty. Only in this way could the worker’s paradise be built, or so it was claimed by the communists in the film.
Just now I read David Brooks’s column today about how progressives are winning the culture war. Brooks had recommended earlier a moderate approach to advancing gun control, beginning with treating gun owners with respect. He now concedes that he might have been wrong about that. Excerpt:
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http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/enemies-of-the-people/Please remember to excerpt.