Tag Archives: Ronald Reagan

America Sold Out Taiwan Before Conceding to Red China

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 1 October 2023

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The American Crackdown on Nazi Supporters During the Second World War: A “Brown Scare”?

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 15 August 2023

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“Socialism With A Human Face” Was Always Impossible

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 August 2022

It was on this day in 1968, fifty-four years ago, that the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, one of its colonies in the “Warsaw Pact”, which had embarked on a program of liberalising reforms. The Czech leadership did not intend to depart from the socialist path, merely to soften its edges—and ran into the brute fact that this was not possible. Continue reading

Rethinking the Atlanta Killings

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 April 2022

In 2020, HBO produced a miniseries, “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children”, about the killing of more than two-dozen black people, most of them male and most of them children, between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981, in Atlanta, Georgia. The series has its own themes and slant, which one can take or leave, but it makes a convincing case the legal process that “resolved” the issue was grievously flawed. Continue reading

Women and Terrorism: The Case of the May 19th Communist Organization

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 January 2021

This article was originally published at European Eye on Radicalization

The world has been captivated this week by the scenes of an insurrectionary mob overrunning the United States Capitol at the behest of President Donald Trump. It is unlikely that many people remember or even know that nearly forty years ago, this building—the meeting place of the U.S. Congress, the place where laws are made—was bombed by a Communist terrorist group, a group remarkable for its all-female membership. A new book, Tonight We Bombed the Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America’s First Female Terrorist Group, by William Rosenau, a senior policy historian at CNA and a fellow in the International Security program at New America, examines this forgotten episode. Continue reading

Obituary: Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 6, 2014

Jean-Claude Duvalier in 2011

Jean-Claude Duvalier in 2011

It might have come as a shock to some that a dictator who took power in 1971 and was deposed in 1986 was even still alive, but such is the case with Jean-Claude Duvalier, who died on Saturday. The fact that Duvalier took power in Haiti at the age of 19 was only the least of the weirdness of the dynasty established by his father, Francois, who had been a medical doctor and fashioned himself “Papa Doc” in official propaganda (an honorific passed to Jean-Claude in the succession, hence “Baby Doc”). Continue reading