On the evening of June 10, in the midst of an impromptu desecration festival in Portsmouth, Virginia, the statue of a Confederate soldier was yanked off its pedestal and crowned the unfortunate Chris Green, who stood underneath.
Green, now in a medically induced coma, coded twice on the way to the hospital. He may not survive. Erasing the past is a dangerous business. It has been since the communists got involved in rewriting history a century ago.
As it happens, George Floyd died exactly 100 years and 40 days after Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter were shot to death in a payroll robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. These men have little in common with Floyd save that none of them deserved to die and that their respective deaths set off worldwide demonstrations orchestrated out of the very same playbook.
In the 1920s, communists had to erase some immediate history — namely, the fact that a pair of Italian anarchists murdered Berardelli and Parmenter in cold blood. The evidence that the anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, killed the pair was overwhelming. They were convicted soon after the murders.
Sacco and Vanzetti: Th...
Best Price: $1.78
Buy New $8.80
(as of 06:20 UTC - Details)
In 1924, as the appeals process wore on, Sacco and Vanzetti caught a break of sorts. Lenin died, and Stalin replaced him. Always the realist, Stalin had no illusions that the Soviet P.R. arm, the Comintern, could inspire an American revolution. He focused his American efforts instead on defamation.
With Stalin’s blessing, the Comintern set out to find a case that would undermine the idea of America, which at the time held great sway throughout the world. America was widely perceived as the land of opportunity, the ever beckoning home of the free and the brave. For the Soviet experiment to prevail, the American experiment had to yield. The world had to see America through fresh, unblinking eyes, not as the great melting pot, but as a simmering stew of xenophobic injustice.
In 1925, the Comintern came looking for Sacco and Vanzetti, glass slipper in hand. Almost immediately, “spontaneous” protests sprung up throughout the world. Europe’s great squares filled with sobbing, shouting protesters, declaiming the innocence of the immigrant martyrs and denouncing the vile injustice of their persecutors. These protesters donated hundreds of thousands dollars to the cause, almost none of which found its way to the real Defense Committee.
In Search of Sacco and...
Best Price: $1.99
Buy New $13.60
(as of 06:20 UTC - Details)
In America, the Comintern created theater and allowed the actors to find their way to the parts. The casting call for the Sacco and Vanzetti protests attracted a who’s who of literary leading lights. Prominent American authors Upton Sinclair, Katherine Ann Porter, John Dos Passos, and Edna St. Vincent Millay not only protested the seeming injustice, but also created literary works around it. Scores more picketed, protested, or signed petitions. International luminaries joined in as well. George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein wrote letters on behalf of the anarchists. French Nobel Prize–winner Romain Rolland sent a telegram to the Massachusetts governor.
As the August 1927 execution date approached, the Comintern went to work. Its Berlin office arranged for material declaring the pair’s innocence to be reprinted and distributed throughout the world. Protest movements swelled in major American cities and European capitals. On the night before the execution, five thousand militants roamed the streets of Geneva savaging everything from cars to movies that smelled of America.
