Eikhe was forced under torture to sign ahead of time a protocol of his confession prepared by the investigative judges, in which he and several other eminent party workers were accused of anti-Soviet activity.
      On October 1, 1939 Eikhe sent his declaration to Stalin in which he categorically denied his guilt and asked for an examination of his case. In the declaration he wrote: “There is no more bitter misery than to sit in the jail of a government for which I have always fought’. . .
      A second declaration of Eikhe has been preserved which he sent to Stalin on October 2, 1939.
      Eikhe wrote in his declaration:
      . . On October 25 of this year I was informed that the investigation in my case has been concluded and I was given access to the materials of this investigation. I have not been guilty of even one of the things with which I am charged and my heart is clean of even the shadow of baseness. I have never in my life told you a word of falsehood, and now, finding my two feet in the grave, I am also not lying.

      “I am now alluding to the most disgraceful part of my life. Not being able to suffer the tortures to which I was submitted, I have been forced to accuse myself and others.
      “. . . I am asking and begging you that you again examine my case, and this not for the purpose of sparing me but in order to unmask the vile provocation.”
      On February 2, 1940 Eikhe was brought before the court. Here he did not confess any guilt and said as follows:
      “In all the so-called confessions of mine there is not one letter written by me with the exception of my signatures under the protocols, which were forced from me. I have made my confession under pressure from the investigative judge, who from the time of my arrest tormented me. After that I began to write all this nonsense. . . The most important thing for me is to tell the court, the party and Stalin that I am not guilty. I have never been guilty of any conspiracy. I will die believing in the truth of party policy as I have believed in it during my whole life.”
      On February 4 Eikhe was shot. (pages S27-S29)

Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and Jacques Ellul, conclusion
by Dr. Michael Bauman

      Because moral order in society is predicated upon virtue and not merely upon freedom, the absence of virtue is far more troubling to a Christian political theorist than is the presence of power. For the sake of virtue alone, therefore, one must resist the drive to abolish all power. The variously coercive powers of family, church, state, and school are not inimical to virtue; rather, they help secure it and make it possible. The eradication of all power results not in virtue, order, or prosperity, but in chaos. Unencumbered freedom (even freedom hiding behind the adjective Christian) is not the political panacea or objective toward which we ought to be ineluctably moving. Instead, we should desire to do what must be done and what can be done, both of which require power. Political freedom, while itself highly desirable, is largely neutral with regard to the advancement of moral virtues and can be detrimental to them. The abolition of political and economic power is not the inescapable precondition of virtue, either that of the powerful or the powerless. In fact, the withering of established political and economic institutions has often been the precondition of 

history’s most heinous misdeeds, as it was during the French Revolution. In light of such considerations, therefore, Christians need to realize that the alternative to totalitarianism and statism is not simply anarchism. As the framers of the American Constitution understood, our guiding principle ought to be a rule of law, not of men; and our political objective ought to be a limited government, not no government at all. By radicalizing politics the way it does–that is, by advocating anarchism in the face of the fact that human beings are inescapably political and societal by nature–Ellulism goes Niebuhr one better: it posits not simply a Christ against culture, but a Christ against creation.
      Destruction of the state is the opiate of anarchists. It has no part in the Christian agenda. It cannot produce a better world; it can only destroy the one that is. That is why Ellul’s anarchistic vision is unfit for human habitation. It relentlessly confuses the force of law with the law of force.
      But if, as I have argued, Ellul’s political ideology does not derive from Scripture, from whence does it arise? And if it does not resemble the teaching of the Bible or of historic Christianity, to what does it bear the greatest affinity? The answer to both questions is the same–Marxism. Ellulism has Marxist roots and Marxist branches. That is, Ellulism shares with Marxism a plethora of presuppositions, methods, and conclusions. Because it has been done so well and so often, to refute each of Ellul’s capitulations to Marxism would both 

fall outside the scope of this chapter and be a useless redundancy. I simply say here that both Ellulism and Marxism are characterized by an ideological correspondence that includes (but is by no means limited to) agreement in the following concepts, procedures, and goals, the delineation of which will be the focus of the final portion of this chapter.
      Historians of Christian thought have repeatedly noticed the difference between the theology and piety of Martin Luther and that of Ulrich Zwingli, the two greatest of the first generation of Protestant Reformers. Luther’s theological distance from Rome, while considerable, is markedly less than Zwingli’s. Scholars often account for this difference by noting that, prior to his conversion to Protestantism, Zwingli was never the intensely ardent Roman Catholic that Luther was. Thus, while Luther brought into Protestantism all of his Catholicism that the Bible did not expressly prohibit, Zwingli brought of his only what the Bible expressly commanded. To the Zwinglians, Luther’s break with Rome was imperfect and incomplete because he continued to tolerate too much Roman residue.
      This inability or unwillingness to break sufficiently from one’s past is not an isolated phenomenon. For example, scholars also have noticed the Manichaean inclinations of the mature Augustine and the lingering Rosicrucianism in Charles William’s Christian novels. Jacques Ellul, too, it seems to me, has made an imperfect and insufficient break from his own Marxist past and from the ideology that necessarily attaches to it, as the following observations will indicate:
A. Human Alienation
      Rather than endorsing the version of alienation expressed by such Christian thinkers as Luther, Schleiermacher, or Kierkegaard (not to mention Saint Paul), Ellul opts for the version articulated by Marx, a version that is not only Ellul’s “starting point” on the subject, but which he characterizes as “perspicacious and even prophetic,” “I firmly believe,” writes Ellul, “that it is in terms of the tradition that goes back to Marx that we must consider man’s present condition.”
B. Anticapitalism
      Like Marx, Ellul views free-market capitalism as a radically flawed, even internally contradictory, economic system. To them, it is riddled with exploitive malfunctions so great that they cannot be considered mere imperfections in an otherwise harmonious and productive system. Also like Marx, Ellul believes that capitalism has produced a class of workers who, because they live by wages, are related to their employers by a cash nexus, which reduces their capacity to work to the subhuman level of a mere commodity, something Marx characterized as wage slavery. Ellul rarely rises above the standard Marxist caricatures of capitalism. For example, he absurdly states that “massacres” are “required to maintain capitalism”; that “workers” are “starved by the capitalist system”; and that for the Christian “allegiance to capitalism

is virtually impossible.” Capitalism’s alleged failures aside, both Marx and Ellul have been forced to acknowledge its unparalleled powers of production.
C. Determinism
      In some cases, Ellul not only agrees with Marx, he surpasses him, as he does on the question of human freedom. According to Marx, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” But Ellul believes that in this regard we need to probe much deeper than Marx did in his criticism of formal democracy. . . . For our choice is never free. We are conditioned by a number of factors that cause us to elect this or that representative, to sign this or that manifesto, to buy this or that newspaper. The man who chooses is always alienated man, man subject to many necessities. Hence his choice is not an exercise of freedom. For it is not he who chooses. The choice is made by his cultural setting, his upbringing, his environment, and the various psychological manipulations to which he is subject.
      One wonders, is Ellul himself somehow exempt from this allegedly pervasive mind control, or is he affirming that his own ideas are merely the mindless dictates imposed upon him by his environment?
D. Money
      Like Marx before him, Ellul believes that money is an inescapably and universally alienating power, one that estranges both those who have it and those who do not. Concerning the role and function of money in society, Ellul believes that “the analysis of Marx is perfectly correct.”
E. Dialectical Methodology
      Like Marx, Ellul believes that only the dialectical method is able to deal successfully with the continuously changing data with which reality presents us. To both Marx and Ellul, dialectical analysis is indispensable. “I am a dialectician above all,” Ellul declares. “I believe nothing can be understood without dialectical analysis.” To rescue the biblical writers (who at least on a consensus view lived prior to the era of dialectics and apart from its influences) from the wholesale dismissal that his radical view entails, Ellul quite remarkably claims that the dialectical method can be traced back to its beginnings with the Hebrew prophets in the eighth century B.C. Ellul, in effect, even goes so far as to jettison, in principle, almost the entire tradition of biblical exegesis: “only dialectical thinking can give a proper account of scriptural revelation, such revelation itself being fundamentally and intrinsically dialectical.”
F. Revolution and Liberation
      At times Ellul sacrifices Marx’s opinions for Lenin’s, as he does when he compares Leninism’s view of revolution and liberation to his own view of the work of Christ, as follows:

It seems to me that the familiar analysis of

Marx, according to which a revolution consonant with the meaning of history brings liberation to the alienated, offers points of similarity but cannot be used because it insists on self-liberation. Lenin’s doctrine is better in this regard, since it gives the party a mediatorial role on behalf of the proletariat. The work of the party with reference to the alienation of the proletariat corresponds figuratively to that of Jesus Christ with regard to the alienation of man. Since the proletariat cannot liberate itself with its feelings of revolt and spontaneous reactions, the work must be done from above. The proletariat comes into the act when it recognizes the reality and is thus in effect de-alienated already. Along these lines the work of Jesus Christ is a revolutionary action in the sense that it is a revolt against alienating forces.

      Time and space would fail were I to identify the full range of Ellul’s Marxisms, including as it does Marxist assumptions on such things as the nature of religion, sociological nomenclature (and the Marxist taxonomy of class structure and class struggle, as well as the Marxist class analysis that attaches to it), egalitarianism, socialism, the nature of merchandise, and sociopolitical revolution, among many others. One does not wonder therefore that Ellul pronounces Fernando Belo’s leftist revolutionism a political choice “which we do not question,” or that Ellul believes the Belo’s view of the “radical opposition between God and Money, God and the State,” and “God and Caesar” is not only true, but “truly evangelical.” Nor is it at all surprising that in Ellul’s The Ethics of Freedom, Karl Marx is the most quoted author, even though this is a text on Christian ethics and Marx is not a Christian. One can tax Ellul with the same charge he himself levels at Belo: he “appears not to suspect [that] Marx’s thought is a whole–a precise, integrated unit, based on a thorough method. Once one has adopted it, one cannot mix it with other methods and concepts.” Nevertheless, Ellul himself adopts Marxist “methods and concepts” and believes that Belo’s choice to be a Communist “clearly merits our respect.”
      It does not.
      Not all, perhaps not even most, of the choices humans make are respectable or worthy of a Christian’s considered approval. Some choices are ignorant and inadequately informed; some are counterproductive; some are wicked. Belo’s attachment to Marxist principles is all these things. It is no more admirable than the choice to become a slave trader, which I consider to be very much the same thing. Marxism has been the ideological justification for the

imprisonment, enslavement, destitution, and murder of countless millions of human beings. It has spawned the most atrocious crimes of history, and its marriage to colossal evilseems both indissolvable and inevitable. Marxism’s historic evil towers over all others. Since World War II more human beings have been murdered under Marxism between the western borders of what once was East Germany and the eastern shores of China than during the entirety of the rest of recorded history, stretching back as it does more than four millennia. When compared to Stalin’s penchant for mass extermination, even Hitler seems an amateur.
      But am I inventing a Marxist Ellul? Not at all. As Ellul himself confesses, he was converted to Marx after reading Das Kapital in his teens. Reading Marx “answered almost all the questions I had been asking myself,” he writes. “It seemed to me that the method of Karl Marx . . . was superior to all that I had encountered elsewhere.” Nor has Ellul’s attachment to Marxism proven merely the skewed judgment or passing infatuation of an uninformed youth. Ellul has “remained unable to eliminate Marx.” “I totally agree,” writes Ellul, “with a Marxism that offers a method of interpretation–one of the best interpretations, in fact, I believe the best–of the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Ellul himself boasts that large and significant portions of his own work and the methodology by which he produced it is consciously patterned after that of Marx: “I was certain, absolutely certain, that if Marx were alive in 1940 he would no longer study economics or the capitalist structures, he would study Technique. So I began to study Technique, using a method as similar as possible to the one Marx used a century earlier to study capitalism.” Ellul identifies Karl Marx and Karl Barth as the twin fountains of his own twofold intellectual origin.
      In short, a man who does not reject socialism, egalitarianism, or the dissolution of the state, but who does reject the teachings of the historic Christian church and the legitimacy of every government, past or present, regardless of its form, history, or ideals, has not really rejected Marxist ideology–despite his claims to the contrary. Simply by distancing himself from other Marxists, Ellul has not thereby distanced himself from Marxist ideology. He has merely subjected it to a marginal reconstruction, as if Marxist methods of analysis could be separated from their philosophical presuppositions and their ideological underpinnings and implications, and as if Marxist methods came from nothing and could lead nowhere. When Ellul opposes the Marxists, it is still an intracamp affair. When he attacks Communist ideologues, he puts his own work under siege. He is not sufficiently alarmed by the pervasive Marxist ideology of his own position.
      The crisis in Ellul’s thought is that there is no crisis in Ellul’s thought, much less a proper resolution.

Russia Goes Red (Again?)  

      Russia’s parliament overwhelmingly confirmed former spymaster Yevgeny Primakov as the country’s new prime minister. He called for a unified assault against the country’s financial crisis and threatening “the toughest measures” against regional governments that try to solve the problem themselves.
      The Communist-dominated State Duma voted 317-63 to confirm Primakov just one day after the 68-year-old foreign minister was nominated by President Boris Yeltsin. It was a rare display of accord after an 18-day political stalemate that finally forced Yeltsin to abandon his previous nominee, Viktor Chernomyrdin.
      In a nationwide television address hours before the Duma session, Yeltsin said Primakov’s emergence as a compromise candidate pulled the country from “the brink of a serious political crisis.”
      “We approached a dangerous line,” he said. “The political leaders of this country have proved that at the decisive moment they are capable of making compromises.”
      To a remarkable degree, though, Primakov’s rise represents a repudiation of Yeltsin and the return of some of the people and ideas that surrounded Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Communist leader of the now-defunct Soviet Union.
      Although Gorbachev himself, with only a 2 percent popularity rating, seems unlikely to return to national office, members of his brain trust of reform Communists are now returning to high government posts. The new prime minister said other factions are also likely to be included in his government, but he stressed that cabinet members would work as “professionals” and not as servants of their parties.
      Primakov’s first order of business was to name Communist Duma member Yuri Maslyukov, a former head of the huge Soviet economic planning agency Gosplan, to be deputy prime minister. Maslyukov, who is expected to be the Primakov government’s top economic official, said in 1996: “Gosplan always knew what the country needed and where to get it. Gosplan was a great achievement in the principles of planning.”
      The Duma also accepted Viktor Gerashchenko, 61, a former head of the Soviet State Bank, as the new chairman of Russia’s Central Bank. Gerashchenko, alternately described as both a skilled economist and an inept manager, was dismissed as Central Bank chairman after Russia’s “Black Tuesday” in October 1994, when the ruble lost a third of its value in a single day.
      The new government’s chief administrator will be former first deputy defense minister Andrei Kokoshin, who warned Western officials two years ago that allowing former Soviet satellites to join NATO “would cause a negative, if not painful, reaction in Russian society” and charged that NATO expansion was “the final blow” of the Cold War against Moscow.

      Like Gorbachev, most of the first members of Primakov’s administration have more faith in big government than in market forces and look to Franklin D. Roosevelt, not Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, for Western ideas. “Nobody criticized Roosevelt when he introduced state controls over the economy after the Great Depression,” Primakov said Friday. “So what must we do? Repeat the wild capitalism we had up until now?”
      Primakov offered the Duma only a general outline of his intentions Friday, saying he hadn’t had enough time to prepare “a detailed program” to combat the crisis. “Don’t expect any quick results,” he cautioned. “I’m not a magician.”
      However, he did offer some “general principles,” saying he will push for a stronger state role in dealing with the country’s battered economy without returning to the “command” system of the Soviet era. “The state must interfere in and regulate many processes in the economy,” he said.
      Primakov also fired a warning at regional officials who are imposing unauthorized price controls and other measures to deal with the crisis. “We will take the toughest measures on this issue,” he said. “We are facing a serious danger of seeing a Russia divided.”
      Primakov, who headed Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service before becoming foreign minister in January 1996, is widely respected as a pragmatist and a diplomat who advocated cordial relations with the United States and other Western nations. Russia’s foreign policy “must remain predictable, must remain democratic,” he said. “We do not need any confrontation. . . . There will be no return to the Cold War.”
Russia’s New Economic Team
      Thumbnails of Russia’s new economic team–the prime minister, Central Bank chairman, and deputy prime minister for economic policy:
      Yevgeny Primakov, prime minister: A former spymaster, the 68-year-old Middle East specialist has been Russia’s foreign minister since 1996. Primakov is known as a low-key but skillful administrator and diplomat respected by hard-liners and liberals alike.
      He has cool but cordial relations with the West, and has pushed a foreign policy aimed at containing America’s global dominance.
      He has no experience running the economy and rarely has expressed views on domestic matters.
      Viktor Gerashchenko, Central Bank chairman: A bureaucratic holdover from the Soviet era, Gerashchenko, 60, was head of the Soviet State Bank in 1991 and masterminded the currency reform that cost many Russians their savings.
      Many economists also blame Gerashchenko for fueling hyperinflation by printing rubles to pay off state debts.
      Market reaction to his candidacy generally has been negative.

      Yuri Maslyukov , deputy prime minister for economic policy: Maslyukov, 60, began his career as a defense industry engineer.
      In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev named him chief of Gosplan, the huge Soviet agency in charge of economic planning, and brought him into the ruling Politburo in 1989.

      Unlike such senior Communists as Yeltsin, Maslyukov remained in the party even after the failed anti-Gorbachev coup and ensuing Soviet collapse. In a July effort to appease hard-liners, Yeltsin made him trade and industry minister.
      Knight Ridder Newspapers, The [Colorado Springs] Gazette, September 12, 1998, p. A15

q    “I am personally aware of a case in which an instructor of theology in a mainline seminary dared to cross the line of critiquing liberation theology.  Upon criticizing liberation theology as a ‘twisting and distorting’ of the gospel, the instructor was accused of ‘verbally assaulting’ the students in the class.  When reading from the King James Psalter as a devotional to begin class, he was accused of ‘mentally raping’ the students.  When expounding the Sermon on the Mount, in particular Jesus’ command concerning divorce, and holding to the issue during a final exam, he was accused of ‘verbal abuse’ of students.  Based on the reports of ‘verbal abuse,’ prior to any investigation of the reports, he was asked—and declined—to resign from the seminary.  He was told that a hearing would follow, and then later told that the hearing would not take place, ‘for his sake’ and the sake of the seminary.  Based on the report of ‘verbal abuse’ and ‘mental rape’ of the students, he was relieved of teaching the required course at the seminary, was dismissed from its ministry seminar, was eliminated from the roster for chapel.  In the end, he was banned from all public teaching and stripped of all roles in the faculty governance of the seminary.  All without any due process, without any public hearing.  This instructor was told by the dean of the faculty that it is ‘inappropriate’ for a professor of systematic theology to expound Scripture in class.”  Paul C. McGlasson, Another Gospel: A Confrontation with Liberation Theology, p. 81, 82

q    “Sordid rumors had been circulating in Managua [Nicaragua] for years, but few people believed them, and nobody mentioned them in public, for they concerned a man with an almost mythic hold on the Nicaraguan imagination: Daniel Ortega Saavedra.  After leading the [Communist] Sandinista revolution in 1979, the dashing leftist ‘comandante’  became Nicaragua’s president and an international icon.  When war-weary Nicaraguans voted him out of power in 1990, Ortega accepted his role as opposition leader with a dignity that, to many, only enhanced his moral stature.  But now Nicaragua is reeling from an accusation that has finally gone public.  Ortega’s stepdaughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez, claims that he had sexually abused her from the time she was 11, in 1978, until her marriage in 1990, and that he continued to harass her verbally until only last month. ‘I knew that going public would cause turmoil,’ Narvaez told Newsweek.  ‘But I feel a great weight has been lifted from me.’  Ortega, 52, has not denied the accusation; he simply said at a press conference, that it caused him ‘great pain and sadness.’” Newsweek, March 23 1998, p. 46

q         “Angela Davis—the Communist who is never called a Communist, despite running several times for vice president on the Communist party ticket—has published a book on the blues and ‘black feminism.’  The lead blurbist is Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel prize, who says the book is ‘a 

serious re-education.’  Oops, poor choice of words.  But at least Morrison’s re-education was voluntary, and presumably not administered in a prison camp.  Unlike the kind that Davis and her comrades always supported.”  The Weekly Standard, March 23, 1998, p. 3

q    “PBS [Public Broadcasting] never lost an opportunity to denigrate Ronald Reagan during his presidency.  In retrospect, President Reagan’s sincerity and idealism make him stand tall compared to the power motives of the current occupant of the White House.  The contrast is enough to cause PBS to eat crow, at least in part.  In a lengthy two-part Reagan documentary that aired the week of February 23, PBS gives Reagan credit for winning the Cold War.”  Paul Craig Roberts, Human Events, March 20, 1998, p. 18

q    “One woman becomes infected with AIDS every 20 seconds worldwide.  Six hundred thousand babies were born HIV-infected in 1996.  Some 1.2 million AIDS orphans have been left behind in Uganda.  More than 400,000 Americans have already died of AIDS, and another 1 million harbor this lethal virus.  The bitter truth is that AIDS did not just happen to America. Instead, it was allowed to happen by an array of institutions, all of which failed to perform their appropriate tasks to safeguard the public health.”  Dr. Cary Savitch, The Washington Times, March 15, 1998, p. B4

q    “The U.S.S.R. is characteristic of the more tolerant Communist arrangements for religion.” Rev. J. Phillip Wogaman (1967 quote), pastor of the Foundry Methodist Church (Washington, D.C.).  Quote found in The Weekly Standard, March 16, 1998, p. 20

q    “It is highly questionable whether Christians in Russia or China are treated any worse than Marxists are treated in the United States.”  Rev. J. Phillip Wogaman (1967 quote), Quote found in The Weekly Standard, March 16, 1998, p. 20

q         “The war on marriage that the feminists in academia are waging hit me when I received the winter issue of my alma mater’s alumnae magazine, the Radcliffe Quarterly.  In 52 pages under the heading ‘Scenes From the Family’ the editors didn’t include any discussion of a successful family based on a man and a woman honoring their solemn promises ‘to have and to hold...for better, for worse...till death do us part.’  Instead, the feature article laid down the feminist line that a woman’s identity disappears in marriage and that ‘marriage is bad for you, at least if you’re female.’  Without any shame the author admitted that she acquired her husband by breaking up another marriage that had lasted 15 years and produced three children.”  Phyllis Schlafly, Human Events, March 20, 1998, p. 20

q    “In his book [This Side of Glory],  David Hilliard  claims to have been fiercely opposed to the ambush [of police officers]: ‘I don’t feel like sacrificing my life for something I don’t believe in.  This is...absolutely crazy...insane.’  But he just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say no and in fact he joined the three car caravan of armed Panthers who ambushed the lone patrol car (two cops were shot, one seriously, with 49 bullet holes later found puncturing the patrol car).  Hilliard was caught, charged, and convicted for his role in the ambush and served four years in prison.”  Heterodoxy, February 1998, p. 9 

q    “Brian Mitchell is a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who, in 1994, wrote a scholarly, well-reasoned, and much respected book, Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military.  During 1997, he was working for Coastal Corp., a Houston-based oil and gas company, as the acting head of their public relations department.  He was in the process of being promoted to direct this department when a new supervisor came on board.  Meanwhile, his new boss, a radical feminist by the name of Victoria G., objected to Brian’s writing a new book, Women in the Military: Flirting With Disaster.  Within a two-month period, Brian, who has three young children (two of them girls), was fired.  Why?  The Coastal Corp., which had previously approved of his writing endeavor, suddenly ‘did not want to be associated with his planned publication.’  Radical feminism was at work behind the scenes.  The long arm of terror is indeed sweeping the land for anyone who would stand up to the radical feminist Stalinists.”  U.S. Navy Commander (retired) Gerald Atkinson, The Washington Times, March 8, 1998, p. B5 

q    “So now Jerry Brown wants to be Mayor Moonbeam!  Actually, the ex-California Governor and one time Presidential hopeful was always more adept at playing political hardball than he let on, and his recently declared candidacy for the top job in Oakland [CA] is based on a perception that this black majority town is in transition, with a conspicuous power vacuum at the top.  Brown has lined up the city’s few established power blocks (the Ron Dellums machine and the Alameda Central Labor Council) behind him.  And to seal the realpolitik Brown always practiced beneath the facade of New Age flakiness, he has brought in another retread from a bygone era, David Hilliard, to help him.  The San Francisco Chronicle, in fact, reported that Hilliard was Brown’s Chief of Staff.  But perhaps because the title so eerily echoed Hilliard’s old title when he was the ramrod of the Black Panther Party during the days when that organization was at war with the cops and with Oakland itself, he got the paper to retract the next day.”  Heterodoxy, February 1998, p. 1 

q            “Conservative media critics have occasionally referred to CNN disparagingly as the ‘Clinton News Network’ because of a perceived bias in favor of the president.  But a series running this month [March 1998] shows it is more the network of the wife of CNN Chairman Ted Turner and could be named JFN, ‘Jane Fonda’s Network.’  In observance of Women’s History Month, CNN is airing on four Sunday

nights ‘A Century of Women: Justice for All,’ hosted by Hillary Rodham Clinton and featuring perhaps the most one-sided biased and distorted view of women ever seen on television.  The history of women is a good subject, but CNN’s treatment is more ideological than documentary.   Real history is played out on a wider screen.  ‘A Century of Women’ is part of CNN’s ‘Perspective’ series.  Unfortunately, it is largely one perspective that could have been titled ‘A Century of Liberal Women.’  Those who thought that Jane Fonda had mellowed since she married Ted Turner were wrong.  Her platform has merely shifted from a seat on an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi to a perch at the top of an American television network.”  Cal Thomas, The [Colorado Springs] Gazette, March 23, 1998, p. N7

q    “As Marxist parties and regimes collapsed around the world, Chile’s once strong Communist Party was no exception and virtually faded from the political scene.  But the party is bouncing back in a revival that is beginning to worry rivals.  ‘We all know what has happened with communism around the world, and here in Chile things are going the other way around,’ said Angel Fantuzzi, a conservative congressman.  I hope this is just a result of Gladys Marin’s charisma, because the communist doctrine is totally obsolete,’ he said.  Opinions vary on what accounts for the recovery of the Partido Communista de Chile (PCCh), but top on everyone’s list is Gladys Marin—the party’s tireless president and main activist who feels equally at ease haranguing workers at a factory gate, arguing in a television debate or facing down riot police.   For Mrs. Marin, a school teacher by profession, party work is now a full-time affair.  She is beginning to see results.  To the surprise of conservative politicians and supporters of Chile’s centrist government, Communists won control of several labor unions and student federations at 11 universities in the last half of 1997.  ‘The task now is to organize a large leftist movement,’ she said.”  The Washington Times, March 10, 1998, p. A12

q        “Multiculturalism is a campaign to lower America’s moral status by defining the American experience in terms of myriad repressions and their victims.  By rewriting history, and by using name-calling (‘Racist!’ ‘Sexist!’ ‘Homophobe!’) to inhibit debate, multiculturalists cultivate grievances, self-pity and claims to entitlements arising from victimization.  Multiculturalism attacks individualism by defining people as mere manifestations of groups (racial, ethnic, sexual) rather than as self-defining participants in a free society.  And one way to make racial, ethnic or sexual identity primary is to destroy alternative sources of individuality and social cohesion, such as a shared history, a common culture and unifying values.  Hence the multiculturalists’ attempts to politicize and purge higher education curriculums.  Once universities are reduced to therapeutic institutions existing to heal victimized groups and reform the victimizing society, our trickle-down culture produces similar distortions in primary and secondary education.”  George F. Will, Newsweek, November 14, 1994, p. 84