Holidays blurb

12/14/202012/14/2020 Brandon Christensen Current Events Andrei Znamenski, Joe Biden, socialism

I hope you have been enjoying the nightcaps. Life has been busy. I read somewhere that so-called “progressives” are pushing to make the executive branch as strong as possible. It’s like they learned absolutely nothing from the Trump years.

Luckily, Joe Biden doesn’t pander to the loudest factions on his side of the aisle. Things are already looking up for 2021.

Andrei has a new book out: Socialism as a Secular Creed: A Modern Global History. I’ll have more on it later. Here’s the link. Y’all stay safe out there.

RCH: Religion in the USSR

10/05/201810/05/2018 Brandon Christensen History, Links Andrei Znamenski, Buddhism, ethnicity, freedom of religion, RealClearHistory, religious toleration, Soviet Union

That’s the topic of my weekend column at RealClearHistory. An excerpt:

4. Buddhism was also outlawed and persecuted to the fullest extent of the Soviet law. Buddhism was practiced by a few different non-Russian ethnic groups in central Asia, and these small ethnic groups were given more leniency than most, but Buddhism came to be viewed by the Soviet intelligentsia as extremely dangerous, due to the fact that many left-leaning scholars abandoned socialism for Buddhist principles. The work of Andrei Znamenski, a historian of religion and ideology at the University of Memphis, is particularly useful for finding out why this happened.

Please, read the rest. Dr Znamenski, of course, blogs here on occasion, but I do wish he’d do so more often…

Lunchtime Links

10/25/201710/23/2017 Brandon Christensen Links Al-Monitor, Andrei Znamenski, Andrew Nathan, Barry Weingast, Catalonia, China, colonialism, Ed Crooks, Financial Times, geopolitics, Iraq, Karin Eriksson, Kurdistan, Lapland, legal theory, New York Review of Books, Rick Noack, rule of law, secession, Sweden, the Economist, Tibet, Turkey, WorldViews

Lunchtime Links

08/09/201708/08/2017 Brandon Christensen Links Andrei Znamenski, Areo Magazine, Barotseland, Casamance, China, colonialism, economic development, ethnonationalism, Europe, federalism, Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto, information, Mark Koyama, Pierre Englebert, Siberia, Will TG Miller

Around the Web: The Failure of Detroit and the Demagogue of Vienna

07/23/201307/23/2013 Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Links, Politics Andrei Znamenski, Detroit, eminent domain, Ilya Somin, Karl Lueger, Richard Wolff

Ilya Somin argues that Detroit’s aggressive use of eminent domain needs to be incorporated into any discussion of Detroit’s failure (be sure to read through the ‘comments’ section, too).
Richard Wolff blames “capitalism” for Detroit’s failure. No seriously.
Historian Andrei Znamenski has a great piece in the Independent Review on the political life of Karl Lueger, a socialist who became mayor of Vienna in the late 19th century.

Ultimately, I think that Detroit’s failure can be chalked up to bad fiscal policy, cronyism (at the local, regional and federal levels) and freer trade (which lets me drive a high-quality Toyota rather than some clunker from Detroit).

Lueger was an advocate of social justice and consequently of national socialism. Znamenski found that he had a profound influence on the thinking of an impressionable young artist living in Vienna at the time.