Oslo Journal, Part II

National Review Online

A few years ago, I met a man named Bill at a gathering. “I’m sorry, what was your last name again?” I said. He said, “Browder. Bill Browder.” “Any relation?” I said. “Yes. Grandson.”

Bill Browder is the grandson of Earl Browder, the head of the Communist party — the CPUSA. He told me on that occasion, “My grandfather was the biggest Communist in America, and I was the biggest capitalist in Russia.” Bill Browder is the head of Hermitage Capital Management.

Sergei Magnitsky was his lawyer — the man who was tortured to death by the Russian authorities. You may have heard of the Magnitsky Act, in America: an act that places all the restrictions our country can impose, I gather, on the individuals who participated in Magnitsky’s murder. This has to do with visas, bank accounts, and that sort of thing.

That’s why Browder is here at the Freedom Forum: to tell the Magnitsky story, and to discuss the law.

First, he speaks a little about his background (his own background). Earl Browder was from Wichita, he says. I think, “Interesting — same as the Koch family.” Browder went to Moscow in 1927 and stayed several years. Married there. On home soil, he ran for president twice. The country preferred FDR.
When Bill Browder wanted to rebel against his family, what’d he do? “I put on a suit and tie, and I became a capitalist.”

If you want to know about the Magnitsky case, I suggest that you read a piece in World Affairs, by Michael Weiss. I once thought of doing a piece on Magnitsky. And then I saw this — and realized Weiss had said it all (or certainly enough).

To know about Sergei Magnitsky, and what the Russian government did to him, is to be sickened. I’m glad that Browder has made a cause out of Magnitsky. He could have sailed on, forgetting Russia, tending to his hedge fund. But instead he is burning for justice, and determined to get as much as he can.

Let me quote the beginning of Weiss’s article:

“There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!” thundered Max Shachtman — once known as Leon Trotsky’s “foreign minister” — in New York City in 1950. By popular account, the line had been cooked up that night by a young Shachtmanite named Irving Howe; it ended the debate between the anti-Stalinist socialist Shachtman and his opponent, Earl Browder, former head of the Communist Party USA, who had been expelled from the party in 1946 at the behest of Moscow Central after suggesting that Soviet Communism and American capitalism might coexist after all.

In 2011, I interviewed Eugene D. Genovese, the great American historian. He was a young Communist (and an older Communist too). And he was present at that 1950 debate between Shachtman and Browder. I wrote, “Genovese is a great mimic and raconteur, with a phenomenal memory, and he entertains me with impressions and stories. How many people today can do Max Shachtman?” The line he “did” was the famous line quoted by Weiss (though Genovese did it in a fuller version — in context).

The Oslo Freedom Forum is a strange mixture of glitterati and the wretched of the earth — or the formerly wretched, or their representatives. Let me tell you what I mean. I spot a young woman who looks like a model. She has a nametag. I Google her. She is, indeed, a model — and a very successful one.

A little later, I see her brush up against Yuan Weijing — who not very long ago was beaten to a pulp by Chinese Communist authorities in her own home, in a tiny, woebegone village called Dongshigu.

A weird world, sometimes.

A young woman named Arzina Begum speaks about child marriage. She is from Bangladesh, and she has devoted herself to the abolition of child marriage. She got her village declared — savor this phrase — a “child-marriage-free zone.”

We also hear from Hannah Song, who runs a group called Liberty in North Korea (there’s a concept!). She speaks of “collective punishment”: When one person displeases the regime, three generations of his family are put into camps.

Totalitarian regimes are very good at this: punishing family, friends, and others. That discourages dissent: because someone else’s welfare is, in a sense, in your hands. A despicable technique.

Think of what the Chinese Communists are doing to Chen Guangcheng’s family right now.

Song shows us pictures of famines in North Korea, pictures that look much like Holocaust pictures. And she shows the famous shot of the Korean Peninsula at night: The southern half is all lit up, the north is pitch black.

I have a memory: During an interview I had with him at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld handed me that very picture. (See the image here.)

Will the North ever be as bright as the South? Will it ever have even a twinkle or two? That would be a sight to see.

Thanks for joining me today, and we’ll continue with Part III on Monday. займы на карту hairy girl female wrestling https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php zp-pdl.com buy over the counter medicines