Our long association with Lee Edwards the writer began when CHQ Chairman Richard A
Viguerie became Executive Secretary of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the conservative youth movement founded at William F. Buckley, Jr.’s estate at Sharon, Connecticut. Lee Edwards became the first Editor of The New Guard, the newsletter, and later magazine of YAF, and a lifelong friendship was formed.
When Richard A. Viguerie founded Conservative Digest, a print forerunner of ConservativeHQ.com, Dr. Edwards was recruited to edit and help grow the new publication.
As the son of a newspaper man – as journalists were called back in the day – writing was in Lee Edwards’ blood.
In addition to his many articles for conservative publications such as National Review, Lee wrote an astonishing 25 books and edited several more.
Lee knew Bill Buckley for more than 40 years and delivered a much-needed intellectual biography of the man who has been called “the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century.” In his “William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement” Lee tells the incredible story of a man who could have been a playboy, sailing his yacht and skiing in Switzerland, but who chose to be the St. Paul of the conservative movement, carrying the message far and wide. The book is still available via Kindle and is still an important resource for those interested in the development of the modern conservative movement.
Lee Edwards was not just a chronicler of the conservative movement and its personalities, he was a thinker and intellectual contributor in his own right, and one of his contributions was to remind us that conservatism is not just a political movement, but a habit of the mind developed through books and the ideas found in them. His “Reading the Right Books: A Guide for the Intelligent Conservative” is a guide for intelligent, conservative-minded readers who want to prepare themselves for a public life of thought and action, and so seek to know more about politics, public policy and modern conservative thought, as well as literature, economics, religion, history, and statesmanship.
No review of Lee Edwards literary oeuvre would be complete without mentioning his long association with the Heritage Foundation, where he served as Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought and historian in residence.
And, for those who love a good inside story of politics and politicians, history and untold stories, Lee Edwards’ autobiography “Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty” is a must read. Not only does it tell some great political stories, it gives us insight into how a great, kind and humble man, grew and quietly influenced our politics across generations. It is available today on Kindle.
Lee Edwards was a writer and a thinker and throughout his long life he never stopped writing. One of his special interests, indeed the issue that first got him involved in politics was opposition to Communism. Perhaps Dr. Edwards greatest legacy is his creation of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which grew into the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, DC.
Lee’s writing about Communism is as fresh today as it was in the 60s, 70s and 80s, but we leave you with an article about a new Marxist-Leninist threat facing us today that was one of the last articles he wrote for National Review.
Putin the Marxist-Leninist
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation. You cannot understand Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine unless you understand that he is a Marxist-Leninist.
During his school years, Putin read the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in his spare time. He came of age in 1973, when the Soviet Union was a superpower and sponsoring Marxist regimes on every continent, advancing Lenin’s dream of a communist world. He joined the KGB in 1987 at age 35 and spent the next 16 years rising in the ranks to lieutenant colonel. In 1984, he was sent to Moscow for additional training at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute. As KGB chairman, Andropov had pushed hard for the Warsaw Pact to crush the 1968 Prague Spring.
For a Marxist-Leninist, war within nations and between nations is inevitable.
Marx taught that “war is the midwife of revolutions.” Lenin agreed, declaring that “great historical questions can be solved only by violence.”
Mao Zedong, whom Putin surely read, wrote: “Every communist must grasp that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. . . . In fact, we may say that the whole world can be remolded only with a gun.” This is the ideology that molded Putin.
An educated Marxist-Leninist such as Putin accepted that there had been more than 100 million victims of communism, an acceptable price to pay to remodel the world. He accepted the purges that Lenin and Stalin used to cement their rule, the forced famines that eliminated enemies of the state, the forced labor camps in Siberia, the tight control of all media. Putin studied the techniques of agitation and propaganda, applying them in his KGB assignment in Dresden in East Germany during the Cold War.
He resigned from the KGB in 1991 to begin a political career in St. Petersburg, his hometown. He had an aptitude for Machiavellian politics and moved to Moscow to join the Yeltsin administration. He rose quickly. In August 1999, Putin was appointed one of three deputy prime ministers and then the same day was named acting prime minister. He has never relinquished power to this day.
Given his KGB training, it was inevitable that Putin would manipulate elections, rewrite the Russian constitution, imprison and even poison his opponents, close down Memorial and every other NGO that called attention to the crimes of Marxism-Leninism, order the brutal subjugation of Chechnya, seize Crimea, and invade Ukraine.
A leading Russian historian writing about 17th-century Russia indicted it with this telling phrase: “The state swelled and the people shrank.” The same portrait is true of present-day Russia and its president in perpetuity, Vladimir Putin.
In his 2005 address to the nation’s top politicians and parliament, Putin said: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.” This is the official Russian translation. The Associated Press translation substituted “catastrophe” for “disaster” and called the breakup “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
In either translation, Putin laments the passing of the Soviet Union and its empire. As prime minister and president, Putin has moved again and again to build a new Russian empire, most recently in his invasion of Ukraine. We can deal effectively with Putin only if we accept how much he is in thrall to Marxism-Leninism and its core idea that political power grows only out of the barrel of a gun.
