HWT Christmas Gift Guide

The first true lesson I had in what the political left was at its heart came when I read The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 .


To see what happened when ruthless men attempted to carry out the Utopian fantasy of collectivism by any means necessary started me on the road to becoming a political conservative and stoked the first fires of the hatred which still burns in me today for the Left in this nation and wherever else it is to be found.

I read Solzhenitsyn's account of what it was to live in the worker's paradise of the Soviet Union as a young man nearly 20 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. At that time the arch-fool Jimmy Carter was in the White House, our intelligence services had been gutted and the morale of our shrinking military was at its lowest point in the 20th century.

At that time I feared that the communists might well be on the winning side of history. Not because they were right but because the West was simply too stupid to stand up to them.

Then Ronald Reagan came and it seemed that the nation was reborn. Within just a little more than 10 years of his last day in office the Soviet Union was no more and the captive nations of Eastern Europe were casting off their chains and beginning to breath free.

Now that nearly 20 years has passed and there is a new generation of adults and near adults who have no adult memories of the Cold War it is essential that the Left not be allowed to rewrite history. Books like The Gulag Archipelago and Robert Conquest's books The Great Terror, about the Stalin era purges, and The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine about the deliberate starving to death of over 10 million people in Ukraine as an instrument of Soviet government policy must be read and reread in the same way that the Holocaust must continue to be studied.

These books are not light reading but they are necessary reading. Any person of high school age and up who is of normal reading ability and intelligence would benefit from any or all of these books.