Is it Going to Repeat Itself in the U.S.?

The following was written by Mark Andrew Dwyer and published on the Federal Observer on September 10, 2017. ~ Editor

Introduction
Many political dysfunctionalities, anomalies, and pathologies that have been proliferating across the West for a few decades now are the results of a metastasis of the Soviet Bolshevism that had been carried on with mass emigration of the so-called “intelligentsia” from Russia, former Soviet Union, and its satellites. Some of the emigrants went straight to the U.S. while others settled and procreated elsewhere, with many of their progeny finding their way, legally or otherwise, to America. A brief analysis of the political trends and structure of the Soviet Union reveals certain disturbingly close similarities between them and some of their counterparts in the U.S. and the European Union. These similarities and the presence of the striving “intelligentsia” of the Russian-Soviet extraction in the U.S. move our country closer to a point where the necessary conditions for the neo-Bolshevik revolution are met. The above described process seem to follow directions how to impose socialism that were given to the Soviets by the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research in the 1920s.

Interestingly, the Institute moved from University Frankfurt am Main in Germany via Geneva, Switzerland, (1933) to the Columbia University in the U.S. (1934), an influential academic institution that became one of the early bastions of neo-Marxism (a.k.a. cultural Marxism) in the U.S.

The article offers a list of signature policies and traits that were/are characteristic of Soviet regime and the emerging new ruling class in America that is – to a large extent – an offspring of that regime. Knowing the said “signatures” may help those willing to defend our nation from a Bolshevik-style takeover properly identify their main foes and adversaries and the tactics that they employ.

1. The Soviet Union
100 years ago, November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a coup d’etat in Petrograd, then capital of Russia, overthrowing the Russian Provisional Government that had been established immediately after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of the Russian Empire earlier that year. On November 8, a Council of People’s Commissars with Vladimir Lenin (his real name was Ulianov) as its leader was formed to later become the Soviet Government. What resulted from that almost bloodless coup was a national bloodbath followed by seven decades of oppression, terror, torture, slave-labor camps, starvation, and economic misery which resulted in millions (six millions is the lowest estimate, 60 millions is the highest estimate) deaths of innocent civilians, most of which have been attributed to the harsh rule of Soviet second leader, Joseph Stalin (his real name was Dzhugashvili).

Not that all the citizens of the Soviet Union directly suffered from their dictatorial government and its executive apparatus, even though the prevailing living standards in Soviet Union during the Lenin’s and Stalin’s tenures were truly miserable. Oddly enough, the Soviet regime did enjoy a steady support of the majority of its population, due to such factors as censorship, propaganda, indoctrination of youth, and nation’s dependence on government-administered entitlements, as well as natural submissiveness Marxist-Leninist revolutionary sentiments not withstanding) and ignorance – if not outright stupidity – of its least intelligent but most numerous citizens.

But the main source of the Soviet ruling clique’s remarkable stable monopoly on power was not the mandate given to it by the blue-collar working class (the so-called proletariat) but the overriding commitment of a big part of the Russian “intelligentsia” to the Soviet ideology. These were hundreds of thousands of devoted Marxists, as well as millions of the predisposed to accept Marx’s awed dogmas, who provided the necessary context for clique’s unobstructed functioning. In their eyes, the Soviet government could do no wrong simply because of its political agenda that aimed at elimination of social inequalities and exploitation of proletariat, and creation of “scientifically” managed, planned economy that – according to several Soviet leading scientists – was poised to dramatically outperform all Western economies. And so they turned their blind eyes and deaf ears on all the obvious signs that their beloved “workers’ paradise” was quickly becoming what late President Reagan christened as the Evil Empire.

Nominally, the Soviet Union was a representative republic with one political party in charge of nominations for elections and all other things even remotely political. In reality, although many members of the Soviet government, for instance, the members of the Supreme Soviet – the topmost legislative body of the Soviet Union – were elected in direct voting, those who actually had the real power were either “elected” by other elected members of the Soviet government or by members of the Soviet Communist Party, or were elected once, one way or another, and then held on to their positions for as long as they were not kicked-out (“purged” was the politically-correct term in this respect) from their offices by the more powerful or ruthless ones. Moreover, the Supreme Soviet’s function was quickly reduced to rubber-stamping the decisions made behind the closed doors by the Soviet ruling clique. Of course, the members of the executive apparatus, the so-called “apparatchiks”, were all appointed by and served at pleasure of the clique. As a result, the clique and the apparatus, in a way similar to the Third and Fourth Branches of the U.S. government, were not accountable to the voters; the Soviet Union was ruled without any regard to the desires and preferences of its citizens the majority of whom were duped into believing that their votes really did count.

2. The metastasis
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet oppression of its people was gradually loosened and some modest economic and political reforms were undertaken, including softening of a de facto ban on emigration. Many people begun realizing that the Soviet ruling clique’s foremost objective was to maintain, by any means necessary, the monopoly on power. As atrocities of Stalin and his executioners became publicly known (they were blamed for between nine and 60 million of preventable deaths of their own citizens), a new emerging leadership gained a wide support among the Soviet working class and moved on to sending the old clique and its most faithful apparatchiks packing. Many of those separated from access to political power, and those disappointed in the abrupt change of course of the Soviet Union, which latter category included a big part of the “intelligentsia”, re-discovered the ideas first formulated in 1920s and 30s by the members of the so-called Frankfurt School of studies of Marxism.

The Frankfurt School, formally established in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research (its original name was the Institute for Marxism; that name was changed to Institute for Social Research for public relations reasons) at University of Frankfurt am Main (the present name is the Goethe University Frankfurt, then, a bastion of the academic Left), comprised of some Marxist-leaning faculty of German and Austrian universities who were mainly interested in exploration of theoretic and practical methods of implementing Marxist-socialism. The School expressed, among other things, sharp criticism of the Bolsheviks and their revolution, some of which was based on an intuitively obvious fact. If one is serious about an imposition of unsustainable socio-economic system that is predicated upon ideology-based distribution of proceeds from production, as opposed to free-market competition-based merit system (e.g., modern Western capitalism), then one has to chose as a host a wealthy and productive nation, like the United States, and not a poor and industrially unproductive one, like Russia. Then parasitizing on the pre-existing capitalist economy could last much longer before the host eventually dies. (Obviously, they did not mention the unsustainability of Marxism and other forms of socialism, nor did they dwell on its intrinsic inability to produce abundance and wealth by itself, in their criticism.) From a perspective of a knowledgeable observer, it was like saying that if one intended to jump of the roof, the flight to Earth was going to be more enjoyable and last longer if one selected a 120-floor skyscraper and not a 10-floor tenement house. (And then, passing by the 80-th floor after the jump, one could assure oneself: “So far, so good.”)

After Adolf Hitler – a national socialist that was very critical of the Frankfurt School and its faculty – closed the Institute in 1933, it relocated itself first to Geneva, Switzerland, and then in 1934 – guess where? – to New York City, U.S., where the Institute re-established itself and got affiliated with Columbia, an Ivy-League university that became one of the main bastions of communism and cultural Marxism in the U.S. ever since. (Not that Columbia was against communism before.) Taking into account all the influence accumulated by the graduates from Columbia U., particularly those with degrees from its Law School and School of Journalism, it must surprise no one that by the time a part of the Soviet “intelligentsia” was ready to emigrate from post-Stalin Soviet Union the U.S. opened its gates, closed in 1924 with the passing of Immigration and Naturalization Act, to new class of immigrants: refugees from the Soviet Union and vicinity. And so the metastasis of the Soviet cancer begun.

Although pre-WWI emigration from Russia was massive (est. 2 million immigrants headed mostly to America), initially, the Soviet emigrees into the U.S., were few. Later, with passing new laws, in particular, the new Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 that revoked the national quota established in 1924, that number was increasing to peak in 1980s. The fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and, later, in the Soviet Union, provided a huge boost to that migration. Since the beginning of the trend, millions of immigrants from the Soviet Union, Russia, and some adjacent nations, have been admitted into the U.S. Some, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, were running from the oppressive Soviet system. Those welcomed opportunity to enjoy freedom and prosperity that our country had to offer and testified about evils and atrocities of the Soviet system. But a vast majority, although many of them considered themselves “refugees”, did not share an infatuation with American dream so common among pre-1965 immigrants, and have merely seen America as a new playground which to re-try the failed experiment that they or their ancestors participated in implementing in their native countries, an escape from a sinking ship (a dead-end street, if you will) of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism, or a stepping stone on their ascend to world domination. Those already here formed beachheads for the following waves of migration of their likel y-minded compatriots. As they kept passing their natural, if not genetic, propensity to Marxism and similar forms of socialism on their offspring, the size of this new army of future leaders of socialist revolution, the now-American “intelligentsia” of mostly Soviet-Russian origin, has been growing rapidly, blending with their Westernized counterparts already entrenched in the American structures of power.

And it shows. While the prevailing sentiments of the inhabitants of today’s Russia are drifting away from Bolshevism, Sovietism, Marxism-Leninism, and alikes, one can notice that, over the last two or three decades or so, a tendency towards this kind of socialist system in America, enhanced with the affinity for diversity, multiculturalism, border and immigration non-enforcement, and subjugation of the U.S. to global governance, is picking up some steam. Marx’s teachings that were largely discredited in Russia (and elsewhere) and blamed for preventable deaths of tens of millions of innocent civilians and misery of more than a billion are being resurrected in American colleges and universities from the trash bin of political history where they belong. These new trends are particularly visible in California where hundreds of thousands of Soviet and Russian post-WWII immigrants have settled in. Why am I not surprised with these opposing drifts in political orientations of Russia and America? After all, what the immigrants and their ancestors have done to their countries of origin is what they and their progeny are – most likely – going to do to ours.

For a recent and insightful example that illustrates the above trend, one can check out any of the articles on immigration posted at Forward, for instance, Meet the Progressive Russian Immigrants Fighting Trump. The picture in this article shows what a fairly typical young female member (above) of the “intelligentsia” of Soviet-Russian origin looks like. A law student at UC Berkeley with a left-leaning “Liberal” plans for her future career and a justice fellow of George Soros’s (his name at birth was Schwartz) Open Society Foundations, she leads a protest against Pres. Trump restrictions on immigration from six predominantly Muslim countries. (This fact alone shows the absurdity of allegations of Trump’s “collusion with Russia”.) According to her own statements, she feels solidarity with refugees fleeing Syria, Central America, and oppression and death throughout the world, out of moral obligation and gratitude for a chance that we gave to her and her parents to begin a new life in our country, America.

That’s right. Hundreds of thousands of now-American, formerly Soviet-Russian, “intelligentsia” and their off-spring are trying to remake our country on the image of the ideals they had for theirs out of the “gratitude” for letting them immigrate here. And that can mean only one thing that they brought with themselves as a gift for us, if their dreams and wishes do come true.

3. The Neo-Bolshevik (soft) Revolution
Let’s be clear, the exact re-occurrence of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in the U.S. in 2017 is not likely. Different times, different places, different people, and different technology will likely produce different events. But that should not be much of a reconciliation for those of us with a strong attachment to our Constitutional Republic. We need to keep in mind that those who, by conspiracy, open movement, or spontaneous cooperation, want to push the U.S. over the edge of socialism desire the creation of utopia that they and their ancestors tried but failed to build in the Soviet Union. They are not going to give up as long as they or their descendants are here, and will use any concession or favor made to their side as an extra propellant in their never-ending thrust toward monopoly on power.

The situation in Russia in 1917 just before the Bolshevik revolution bears some striking similarity to what we have now, in 2017, in the U.S. The federal government is weak and does not seem able or willing to defend itself against its adversaries. Foreign conflicts and threats further diminish its ability to enforce the law and bring state and local rogue governing bodies (for instance, California government that refused to abide by the federal immigration law) to compliance with the U.S. Constitution and exercise the powers vested in it. Disgruntled masses of those working at the bottom of the wage scale, reinforced by millions of opportunistic aliens who often are in contempt with the American status quo, organize as a resistance movement against the government and the nation, and are readying for “extra-parliamentary” pre-emption of political power and the redistribution of wealth that is likely to follow the said preemption. Some are already marching on the streets, chanting that the President must be forced to step down By Any Means Necessary. (Note the similarity of those chants with Georg Lukacs’s – one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians since Karl Marx and a founder and inspirator of the Frankfurt School – calls to overthrow the Western culture by any means necessary.) Some states – like California, where the anti-American sentiments are particularly popular among general population saturated with recent immigrants and illegal aliens, often disloyal, indoctrinated, and propagandized by the so-called “mainstream” media and “education” institutions – are engaged in well-orchestrated acts of treason against the U.S. and the American nation for the benefit of the aliens and foreign entities. And the main fake-news/propaganda networks, like CNN, pour the gas into the fire, inciting disobedience and – in some cases – violence among already excited population of Left-leaning operatives and their useful idiots.

This is the time that the Left has been salivating for since Sen. McCarthy’s effort to defeat them had failed. And – I must admit – they worked hard for this dream of theirs to come true. Beginning with passing of the secret of the atomic bomb to Soviets by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1945, they hardly missed a chance to make the U.S. a weaker country, ostensibly, in order to strengthen the individual liberties of We the People, but in reality to make America an easier prey of a neo-Bolshevik coup should it take place. Recent acts and orders that resulted in injection of hundreds of thousands of Muslim “refugees” into America and promotion of Islam to a viable political power capable of challenging still prevailing Protestant Christians here, as well as the plots to submit the U.S. to trans-national super-governments, serve that sinister purpose as well. It has been a popular “concern” among many “intelligentsia” (even among those firmly rooted in the U.S.) that the U.S. was too strong, and some other nations, for instance, today’s Communist China (in the past, it was the Soviet Union), “deserved” to be elevated to the world-dominant powers. Apparently, they do not think that strong and free America gives them any advantage in pursuit of their political agenda.

Although the election of Donald Trump to the Oval Office, and his “Make America Great, Again” policies and rhetoric, delivered a serious, even if short-lived, blow to their plans to turn the U.S. into a “progressive” utopia not that dissimilar to the Soviet regime, they still maintain enough control over the nation, its information highways, and its government to continue with their hostile take-over (Dinesh D’Souza calls it simply a theft) of America. They have parasitized our education system, press (mass media), movies and entertainment, and infiltrated the judiciary with activist judges sympathetic to their cause. Now they use the institutions they control to facilitate the nal grab of political power. As of the time of this writing, coming neo-Bolshevik soft Revolution sometimes in the near future is a very real possibility. It is not difficult to sense such eventuality as the multitudes of would-be (soft) revolutionaries in the media, government, education, entertainment, and labor unions have been forced to show their true anti-American colors in their frantic plots to stop President Trump from exercising his executive power of the U.S. and to discredit, in the eyes of the voters, his repeated attempts to salvage the American Republic.

4. You can tell them by their signature policies, traits, and ploys
What the Bolsheviks and their offspring were/are really good at is control of a representative Republic with a ruling body that is de facto or de jure unaccountable to the voters. This was how the Soviet regime maintained its monopoly on power. This also is how the Left’s animators with roots in Russia/Soviet Union and vicinity curtail American people’s struggle to remain free: by gradual usurpation of power by the Third (The Judiciary, unaccountable to the voters, infested with activist judges) and Fourth (the federal bureaucracy, unaccountable to the voters and protected by public sector labor unions in their positions of power) Branches of the U.S. government to the point that they became a super-government over the Political Branches (The Legislative Branch and the Executive Branch) of the government. So, the more the Third and Fourth Branches prevail over the other two, in addition to the subordination of the latter to trans-national governing bodies (by their very nature unaccountable to the American voters), the more it is indicative of the tightening grasp of power by the emerging ruling class.

They did have a number of serious obstacles they had to overcome, though. Here are some typical examples of how they handled these obstacles.

Are we, Americans, too attached to our Constitutional Republic and the liberties it affords to its citizens? No problem. Brainwash and indoctrinate American youth in schools and universities with pro-socialistic anti-Christian ideology, re-brand patriotism as evil “nationalism”, teach them that free-market capitalism, the source and foundation of our freedom and prosperity, is dysfunctional and evil, expose them to revisionist history (for instance, to the one written by Howard Zinn, a son of his immigrant mother from Russia who arguably did more damage to our Republic than the Rosenbergs who passed the nuclear secrets to the Soviets right after the WWII) that caricatures the U.S. as a specimen of discrimination, oppression, aggression, and exploitation, and paint Constitutional freedoms spelled-out in Bill of Rights as harmful reminiscences of the past that must be disposed of if the “progress” is to be made.

Do we cling to the fruits of our work and refuse their redistribution among the “more-deserving” people? No problem. Just disarm the American citizenry so that we have no means to resist the imposition of “social justice” (a more adequate term for “social justice” should be socialist “justice”) on us.

Is America lacking enough of disgruntled laborers (the so-called “proletariat” in Marxist terminology) and its radicalized middle class in not desperate enough to carry on a successful coup? No problem. Mass importation (recently, mostly from Mexico, but now also from several other countries with strong socialistic leanings, like China) of unassimilable future revolutionaries slowly eradicates one of the main differences between 1917’s Russia and 2017’s U.S.: a lack of a large class of relatively low-paid or jobless workers in America who perceive modern Western capitalism and American individual liberties as the root causes of their misery and not the sources of abundance and freedom. (Their relentless search for a class or classes of the “oppressed” and “exploited” which they are willing to be the “defenders” of reminds me of California lawyers’ aggressive search for prospective plaintiffs on whose behalf lucrative lawsuits can be filed.)

Below are examples of signature policies and schemes employed by those who gave Russians the Bolshevik revolution. Many of those are expressions of characteristic traits and phobias exhibited by those revolutionaries and their descendants. Isn’t it telling that the leading neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School embraced the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, an expert on phobias, as if they were trying to divert public attention away from their own psychopathologies? (I cannot help noticing some striking similarities between these “signatures” and the policies and schemes implemented or advocated by the Left and its animators in America, many of whom are the direct products of the Frankfurt School and its academic fallout.)

These are:

– projection (the attribution to others of one’s own, usually pathological, sinister, or hostile, intentions),

– eleutherophobia (fear of freedom; out of concern of one’s own survival, I suppose),

– gun control, Christian control, capitalism control, America control,

– election fraud,

– overriding – if not stubborn – submission to the ideology that in their eyes is unfalsifiable (so you are really wasting your time trying to engage in a rational argument with them), and

– overwhelming and mostly unopposed propaganda that deceives, obfuscates, and lies as it pleases.

Here are some more specific signatures of the Lefties with roots in Russia, Soviet Union, and vicinity.

Once you realize the similarities here, their Soviet/Bolshevik origin becomes inescapably obvious.

– In Soviet Union, as reported by Solzhenitsyn, the critics of socialism were often deemed mentally ill and confined to psychiatric hospitals. A group of “Liberal” members of the U.S. Congress wants to appoint a commission of psychiatrists to determine if Pres. Trump is mentally fit to hold his office. Also, there is a tendency among “Liberals” (borrowed from teachings of Sigmund Freud) to falsely pathologize their adversaries as being mentally sick, marking them with “sticky” labels such as “homophobes”, “Islamophobes”, “xenophobes”, etc. The latter has all the appearances of projection.

– A push for equality has been supplanted with advocacy of Soviet equality. In it, as George Orwell aptly noticed in his novel “Animal’s Farm”, all people are equal, but some are more equal than others. The latter includes: “protected minorities” (“privileged” seems more descriptive here than “protected”) and virtually all those who Mitt Romney once characterized as “takers” during his run of presidency in 2012, as well as retired law enforcement personnel that is largely exempt from draconian gun-control laws in states (like California) that imposes them.

– Eradication of perceived evil (like, say, colonialism or racism) is to be accomplished with the reverse evil (anti-colonialism – a Soviet-invented name for colonization of Western countries by nations previously colonized by some of them; anti-racism – racial-based discrimination against those deemed as beneficiaries of past racial-based discrimination, etc.).

– Asserting that a general population is egoistic, mean, and stupid, and that it is a role of the wise government, that because of its political very orientation can do no wrong, to enforce altruism, goodness, and wisdom. (This belief was as central to the Soviet ideology as it is central to contemporary American “Liberalism”; in today’s California ruled by one political party, it appears as an undisputed dogma.)

– Replacement of free market with government’s regulation and planning, the very idea that despite enormous national effort kept Soviet economy weak and collapsed it, eventually. Former President Obama was one of the advocates of that replacement.

– Elimination of meaningful competition and rewards for the winners. That idea has been attributed to the leader of Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin, and has been transplanted into the U.S. for several decades, now. For instance, social promotion, medals for participation, self-esteem building, etc., are the off-spring of that idea propagated in the U.S. education system.

– Blaming modern Western capitalism for the poverty of groups and nations – a recurring themes in Soviet propaganda and “Liberal” Left’s ideology; among other flaws it ignores the fact that with the world population of over 7 billion, today, we all would have been miserably poor without the productivity of modern Western capitalism.

– The empowerment of the least successful; Marx called it the dictatorship of proletariat- politically-motivated appointments and elections of many unqualified, unwilling, or unfit individuals in charge of governmental and economic activities to the obvious detriment of all. In the U.S., it is usually referred to as affirmative action, (engineered) diversity, or Rawls’ distributive justice with the “least privileged” being declared as its primary beneficiaries, without any regard to merit or desert. For instance, half of California one-party government would never get elected on their merits without a systemic push to empower them and their ethnic and racial “under-represented” groups.

– Mixing the law-abiding with criminals, the educated with the dumb, the productive with the unwilling to work, the civilized with the barbaric, etc., was one of the signature policies of the Soviet regime and its satellites. It has been vigorously pushed for in the U.S., albeit in a slightly different version, under the pretense of “diversity” in violation of the “freedom of association” clause of First Amendment, most recently, by the Obama former administration.

– A strong tendency to transnationalism, an early expression of which was articulated in “Manifesto of the Communist International” (1919), is a signature trait of Bolsheviks that they passed on their off-spring. Present demands to abolish national borders, submit once sovereign nations (like the U.S.) to the authority of super-governments and “international laws”, for instance, United Nations Organization or Paris Climate Accord, and to allow unrestricted mass migrations (needed in order to enable anticolonialism, a late Bolsheviks’ signature policy) can be squarely attributed to that Bolshevian trait.

Out of the above, the advocacy of gun control deserves a special mention. It is a relatively new “signature” trait of the majority of Soviet-Russian immigrants and their offspring. It is rooted in hoplophobia (an irrational fear of guns, as opposed to an understandable fear of dangerous individuals and groups armed with guns) that was, probably, triggered by the traumatic events of WWII, particularly, during German occupation of Eastern territories in which those who suffer from it have their ancestry. Since a vast majority of Americans did not have this kind of experience, hoplophobia has been rare among the residents with no recent roots in Eastern Europe, Russia and Soviet Union. Thus a strong push for gun control is mostly an imported phenomenon in the U.S. And the fact that it is on the rise, particularly in states, like California, with large populations of Soviet-Russian origin, clearly indicates these immigrants’ growing influence in American politics. Interestingly, European Union is imposing similar California-style measures on its member states, which strongly suggests that the push for gun control is a transnational plot orchestrated at high levels of political power structures and not a spontaneous grass-root movement of common folks concerned with the safety of their children.

5. Prognosis
There is so much hysteria in the media and academia about the neo-Nazis while the real threat for today’s America comes from the mainstream militant Left and its neo-Marxist ideologues and their useful idiots. The former are few and marginalized while the latter are millions-strong and growing. One day, they may provide the context in which to launch a revolution that will end America as we know her form the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and turn her into yet another socialistic hellhole of the very kind that so many bona de immigrants have been desperately trying to escape.

Socialism in any form is incompatible with the U.S. just like cancer is incompatible with human body, although some forms of it are more deadly than others. It is a pity that it metastasized into the U.S., arguably the best country that has ever existed on planet Earth. It is going to be difficult and painful to eradicate it. But if we fail to do so then the cancer of socialism will surely cause the collapse of our nation, just like it caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As long as the “intelligentsia” of Soviet-Russian extraction lives and acts in America, we face a danger that our country will go full neo-Bolshevik. Their ancestors did it once, in Russia, and they will do it, again, here.

They can’t help it. It’s in their nature.

~ The Author ~
Mr. Dwyer has been a continuing contributor to the Federal Observer. Mark Andrew Dwyer’s recent columns are posted at:
https://federalobserver.com/?s=mark+andrew+dwyer
Links to his other commentaries can be found here: http://www.oocities.org/readerswrite/List_date.htm