In order for a case to reach the courts, a judge has to be willing to accept that it makes some sense.
In the 1970s a woman constantly referred to herself as a “Marxist-Leninist.” Someone called her a “Communist” and she sued him. I don’t know whether she won or not, but it went to court in a serious civil case.

Marx, author of “The Communist Manifesto,” would have been astonished to hear that he was not a Communist. Lenin would also have considered anyone who did not consider him to be a Communist to be a lunatic.

I repeat, the judge took the case.

There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that a Marxist-Leninist was a Communist. The suit was about the right of a person to say so.

There was a TV movie some years ago about Robert Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer was a leftist who was in on the development of the atomic bomb during World War II from the get-go. The whole point of the movie was to show that, while practically everybody Oppenheimer associated with was openly a Communist, Oppenheimer himself was not.

One scene showed a friend of Oppenheimer’s going to a picnic with his fellow Communists in a bus marked, “Communist Jewish League.” Some people stopped the bus and started shouting. Finally someone said something that started the fight. He called them “Commie Jews!”

This bigot was the villain of the piece.

Everybody watching the movie understood that a group of Communist Jews had the right to ride in a bus with the words “Communist-Jewish League” emblazoned on both sides, but no non-Communist gentile had any right calling them Communist Jews.

Those were fighting words. Please remember, EVERYBODY watching the movie was expected to understand that.

For many years it was considered extreme right-wing propaganda to call Fidel Castro a Communist. In 1957, while Castro was still a little-known guerilla in the Cuban hills, National Review announced he was an avowed Communist, from his own words.

The media, Republican moderates and many conservatives not only denied this statement, they ridiculed it.

In 1958, before Castro took power on January 1, 1959, the John Birch Society announced he was a Communist. For a couple of years after Castro took power in Cuba, saying he was a Communist was a strictly right-wing thing.

Then, in 1960, Castro announced that he was and always had been a Marxist-Leninist. Most of the media did what they always do. When the truth came out, they simply forgot that they had ever denied it and so did any conservative who ever wanted to be part of the national media.

But some in the liberal media held out. They insisted that when Castro said he had always been a “Marxist-Leninist” it did not mean they had been wrong. They argued at some length that a Marxist-Leninist was not necessarily a Communist.

Posted by Bob on April 4, 2006 at 2:53 pm

One of the basic premises of international relations is what I refer to as “The A-C Rule.”

Country A, let’s say France, has a country that borders on it, say Germany. France is A, Germany is B.

So since they share a border, it is for sure that A and B, Germany and France, will be most likely to go to war with each other and to be in competition with each other.

Then there is a Country C. Country C is on the OTHER side of Country B. In 1939, it was Poland that bordered on Germany on the opposite side from France. France is A, Germany on its border is B and the country on Germany’s OTHER border is C.

The enemy of my enemy is my natural ally. So France and Poland were likely to beunited bymutual hostility to Germany, Country B.

Graduate professors in International Relations love to point out that the oldest treaty of alliance in existence was ona clay tablet in cunieform script.

That clay tablet recorded an alliance of Countries A and C against the country which bordered on them both, Country C.

Which explains why his British cousins left Czar Nicholas to die at the hands of the Bolshevike. They were LITERALLY his cousins.

But by the time the Czar fell in 1917 Britain and France had made the war into a crusade “to make the world safe for democracy.”

The reason France and Britain made common cause with Russia was because, in 1914 when the war began, France was on one side of Germany and Russia, which held the half of Poland Germany did not hold, was GEOGRAPHICALLY in position C, bordering Germany on the other side from France.

Britain, due to power of the British Fleet and English Channel in 1914, did not feel that it bordered on anybody.

But Russia was also on the other side from Britain and France POLITICALLY. It was an unapologetic Czarist despotism.

POLITICALLY as well as geographically, Germany was between the Western Allies and Russia. It had a despotism, but nowhere near the despotism Russia had.

This often happens. Country C is often further away from Country A politically than each is from Country B.

The Allies, in their “War to save democracy” with their new American ally, could not afford to accept the Czar as a refugee from the Bolshevik Revolution which threatened his life in Novermber of 1917.

So the A-C Rule is very, very, VERY practical. More often than not, it is a matter of life and death.