Olasky Books: Night of the Living Dead: Three Books on Autocracies

Saturday a week ago was a non-holiday in Moscow. November 7 used to be big there, with tanks and soldiers marching in front of the Kremlin. Communists annually celebrated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1917 that brought them to power. No more: The Putin regime does not want to honor uprisings, because it might be next.

Paul Mason, the author of Reds: A Global History of Communism (Scribner, 2026), is a “social democrat” yearning for a peaceful transformation of society, yet repeatedly his history shows how that doesn’t happen. Example one: “In 1917 Lenin had assured followers that there would be little resistance to the seizure of power… there would be no need for a repressive state of the kind utilized by the capitalists. By March 1921, each of these conceits had evaporated.”

In China, Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” in 1958 featured top-down decrees ignoring what farmers had learned for centuries. Example two: Sparrows were eating grain, so Beijing ordered “a campaign to kill all sparrows, which resulted in a plague of locusts.” That’s only one of the reasons at least fifteen million people (and maybe three times as many, with records still covered up) “died from famine during the three years that followed the Great Leap Forward. Mao had promised to return the Chinese people to global greatness. Instead, he inflicted the worst famine in modern history.”

Now, Mason notes, some among the young have “absorbed the whole simplistic package of neo-Leninism.” He worries that they ignore “three generations of critical research into Mao and Stalin.” Those who lack historical understanding make “even the leaders of Hamas in Gaza,” along with other autocrats, “heroes of the anti-capitalist struggle.”

Once we start creating our own religious and ideological idols, we’ll believe in just about anything, as Paul Gutjar shows in Faith in Space (Princeton, 2026). Chapters on familiar beliefs, including spiritualism and scientology, lead to jaw-dropping chapters on groups such as the “Ashtar Command” that base terrestrial hopes on extraterrestrial beings. But it’s much worse when communists or fascists take over entire countries: James M. Scott’s wonderfully written Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War (Norton, 2026) tells Japan’s haunting tale.

I won’t detail here the gut-wrenching chapters on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs dropped in 1945. They do make me thank God that for 81 years we’ve had no more nuclear destruction—surprising, given how other new weapons throughout the centuries did not stay in the closet. I’ve wondered whether the US should have dropped the second bomb, but Scott shows how even then Japan’s militarists did not want to give up: Emperor Hirohito finally intervened. It seems the Nagasaki decision was tragically right. 

Is command-and-control China becoming such an economic powerhouse that its future dominance seems tragically inevitable? Trang X. Ta’s Scenes of Affliction: Begging and Public Suffering in Urban China (Princeton, 2026) shows what’s largely unreported: China has huge numbers of poor, sick, or disabled beggars who lay out their heart-rending stories in elaborate public posterboard displays on the streets of every major Chinese city, recounting tales of loss and injustice. Trang says China suffers from “a pervasive sense of anxiety and injustice,” along with “the pervasiveness of counterfeit goods and scams.”

Briefly noted

I hope you’ll subscribe to my free Substack by going to https://marvinolasky.substack.com. And here are four more books to consider:

Susan Gillingham’s The Psalms: A Companion (Penguin Random House, 2026) offers a brief overview of each psalm and observations regarding their cultural significance: For example, “the universal appropriation of Psalm 90 is vast,” with writers from Shakespeare to Isaac Watts and Evelyn Waugh drawing from its depths. Furthermore, Jews have made Psalm 90 and its theme of transience part of their funeral traditions, while Christians have connected verse four to Christ’s second coming.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster, 2026) made best-seller lists because Trump 2 is so unprecedented, but little is revelatory for those who have been reading day after day White House coverage by the two New York Times reporters: It will be most useful for historians a generation from now.

Reuben Bredenhof winsomely lays out The Ministry of Small Things (P&R, 2026) that big-time preachers should remember, including “Take the Time to Get to Know Your People”, “Use Your Ears”, and “Ask the Questions You Don’t Want to Ask.” In After Church Hurt (New Growth Press, 2026), Timothy St. John gives good advice about picking up the pieces when things go wrong.

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