Ukraine: Let’s coin a new term for an old tactic, ‘Bolshelinskyism’

Renee Nal wrote earlier today at Liberty Unyielding about the Yanukovich government trying to intimidate opposition protesters in Kiev by sending a threatening message to their cell phones.  As she notes, selecting their phones to receive the message required the government tracking their phone activity.

Creepy, indeed, as Renee says.  But in a sense, it’s just a modern, technical method of fomenting the kind of violent, “dirty tricks” political conflict in which Bolsheviks specialized a century ago, and which disciples of Saul Alinsky sought to perfect in the 1960s.  What this set of tactics is about is creating chaos, fear, conflict between groups:

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Facts and implications: Notes on Diana West’s American Betrayal

What are the implications of the extensively documented fact that agents of the Soviet government were employed in high positions in the United States government in the 1930s and 1940s?  Do we have a skewed view of World War II because we have failed to address that question?  If our perspective changed, would we judge that we didn’t even win World War II – but, to be more accurate, Stalin did?

Diana West’s remarkable new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, compiles some potential answers to these questions.  As West argues early in the book,