The Moe Green Discussion hosted By Richard Modiano

Join Richard Modiano as he talks to David Priestland bout his book "The Red Flag: A History of Communism" David Priestland has studied Communism for many years. He is University Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford and a Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, and the author of Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization. This is an excellent panoramic overview of Communism from Karl Marx to today. It has a fair amount of detail but has to hurry along to cover 150 years in 600 pages. What I liked the most about this book is its ability to provide context and a reasonable assessment of the twists and turns of Communist history. He shows that there were divergent trends within the groups calling themselves Communist and each of these group took power at different times with similar results. He does a very good job of showing how alluring the ideas were but how awful they were in execution. The long and painful history is a demonstration of this political philosophy's bankruptcy.