Reds

 

Take a look at the teeny tiny face of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne (above). It is drastically dwarfed by that giant “Soviet banner of victory,” which becomes a visual metaphor for the Washington Post itself as it enters a more florid stage of being Bezos’ Red Banner. “Trump’s war on socialism will fail,” the op-ed headline declares, Pravida-pitch-perfect. 

November 16, 1933: The Day Our Fundamental Transformation Began

 

Nov.16, 2018, is the 85th anniversary of an event that most Americans have never heard of. As I argue in my book, “American Betrayal,” it’s the seminal event in modern U.S. history. On this day in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended “normal diplomatic relations” to the communist dictatorship under Joseph Stalin in Moscow.

In exchange for a page of Soviet concessions signed by Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (who, with Prohibition-era beer on his breath, returned to the Soviet Embassy “all smiles … and said, ‘Well, it’s all in the bag; we have it’”), the U.S. government found itself derailed onto a strange, new track through an unfamiliar, soon monotonous, land of endless apologetics.