Stalin’s Man at the New York Times
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stalins-man-at-the-new-york-times-11595867217
On Olivia de Havilland’s 101st birthday [July 1, 1916], she should be remembered for being the first Hollywood liberal to publicly expose and to call for an end to the alliance with Communists and fellow-travelers. She asked Hollywood actors to choose between being advocates for liberal democracy, and giving support to the Soviet Union’s line during the start of what became the Cold War. That effort deserves to be celebrated, and de Havilland praised for her courage and the integrity of her action.READ MORE
My father was a scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at Moscow State University. His main field of study concerned Oriental languages and cultures, with a specialty in the Chinese, Sanskrit and Tamil areas. Despite his rewarding career, my dad put everything on the line and began to attend human rights demonstrations in Moscow on behalf of political prisoners. He also started to sign letters of protest against the political repressions that were heightening in the country in the 1960s, connected as they were to the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union after the Khrushchev thaw. The activities my dad engaged in could land a Soviet citizen in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital for decades.READ MORE
On February 24, 1968, my father signed the Letter of Twelve, a letter written and signed by twelve Soviet dissidents to the Supreme Congress of Communist Parties in Budapest denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. He was immediately fired from his work for being “unprofessional” in his scholarly studies (even though he previously had received high praise for his academic studies).
The picture of my dad, shown above, was taken by a friend who had come to visit him the evening of the day he was expelled from the Academy. . .
Traditionally, research has focused on the role that U.S. reporters played as messengers, recruiters, and sources of information (and disinformation), but some of those "journalist spies also collected a large amount of secret diplomatic and military information" from 1941 through 1946 as World War II gave way to the Cold War, writes Alexander G. Lovelace of Ohio University.READ MORE
The man who saved the world... 50 years ago, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, second-in-command Vasilli Arkhipov of the Soviet submarine B-59 refused to agree with his Captain's order to launch nuclear torpedos against US warships and setting off what might well have been a terminal superpower nuclear war.READ MORE ABOUT THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
The US had been dropping depth charges near the submarine in an attempt to force it to surface, unaware it was carrying nuclear arms. The Soviet officers, who had lost radio contact with Moscow, concluded that World War 3 had begun, and two of the officers agreed to 'blast the warships out of the water'. Arkhipov refused to agree - unanimous consent of three officers was required - and thanks to him, we are here to talk about it.
His story is finally being told - the BBC is airing a documentary on it.
Raise a glass to Vasilli Arkhipov - the Man Who Saved the World.
...if conservatives win in America and elsewhere, domestic drilling will go into high gear and the price of oil will drop. If the price of oil drops, Russia is wiped out.Why Putin Cannot Afford an Obama Defeat.
...if anything, highlights the gas giant’s core problem: Gazprom has gone beyond the point of any commercial return to play the role that Russia wants, due to shale developments elsewhere [Emphasis mine.]. Unless Putin backs up his words with credible actions, not just fobbing off the EU, but putting more ‘state’ and cash back into Gazprom to progress its global ambitions, it’s going to suffer a slow and painful market death. That’s not exactly good news for Mr. Putin either. Back to Soviet economics 101.Do any of you realize how f*cking amazing life is that this ex-KGB self-worshipping tough guy Vladimir Putin's entire f*cking future rests with our real-life version of Maxwell Smart's re-election? (Forget Chauncey Gardiner!)
In 1989, there were 11 major media giants emerging as the most powerful names in the global Media Monopoly. Today there are nine major corporations dominating the global media (although two of the nine are actually controlled by one family). And that’s why American Free Press exists: to counter the ever-tightening Media Monopoly both here in the United States—and around the globe.
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In 1963, a popular Democratic president was assassinated by a Marxist named Oswald, who had actually defected to the Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. with a Soviet wife, was an active member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and had attempted to assassinate a right-wing general named Edwin Walker earlier in the year.How the Democrats Nearly Destroyed the Economy
Yet those who write history found these facts inconvenient. They created a different history in which the "atmosphere of hate" in the southern city of Dallas, Texas, led to the terrible political violence. In other words, it was political conservatism that led to John F. Kennedy's assassination.
The former communists running Russia apparently understand tax policy better than the crowd in charge of U.S. tax policy. Not only does Russia have a 13 percent flat tax, but the government has just announced it will eliminate the capital gains tax (which shouldn’t exist in a pure flat tax anyhow).
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.This is very interesting to those of us who were old enough to take notice:
...the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:And this is so typical, but, still heartbreaking:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
...today we have a best friend in the West who has our back. We aren’t orphans anymore. There is a certain individual in this land, by the name of Glenn Beck, who has a television show on the Fox News Channel with a mass following; he is masterfully exposing this phenomenon that we experienced — and are still experiencing. He is telling the truth about the Soviet regime and about communism and he is beaming a light on leftists and liberals for their long romance, which continues till this day, with communist systems and the ideologies that brought them into place. Just recently, Beck’s program featured his profound documentary, The Revolutionary Holocaust, which powerfully illustrates the evil of communism and the leftist ideals that brought its horrors into existence. Beck’s documentary exposes the crimes against humanity perpetrated by mass murderers such as Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, who, till this day, enjoy great idolization in leftist milieus and, as we know, in the Obama White House itself.Read the whole thing!
I would like to take this moment to express my deepest and heartfelt gratitude to Glenn Beck...
"Last Exit to Utopia" was first published in France nearly a decade ago. It concerns itself primarily with the failure of much of the French left to come to grips with the collapse of communism and the exposure of its innumerable crimes. The events and debates under its review date mainly to the 1990s, and its author died in 2006.
Yet the book, at last available in English in this fine translation, ought to command close attention because it was written by Jean-François Revel, who—unlike such bien-pensant idols as Jean-Paul Sartre (an admirer of Stalin) and Michel Foucault (a cheerleader of the Ayatollah Khomeini)—deserves to be ranked as the pre-eminent French political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. What's more, the book's themes continue to resonate today, when murderous ideologies still compete for legitimacy and "enlightened" understanding by the Western intelligentsia.
Revel's great subject was totalitarianism, not just its practice but also its intellectual methods, deceits and disturbing psychological attractions. In books such as The Totalitarian TemptationSo...you'd think that the collapse of the Soviet Union woulda put an end to all that bullshit...BUT NO (as the late John Belushi of Saturday Night Live used to say)!(1976) and How Democracies Perish
(1983), he dissected the mind-set of Western intellectuals who, living in democracies, found much to admire in gulag countries like the Soviet Union and Cuba and much to detest in free ones—the U.S. most of all.
The tipping point, in Revel's view, was the publication in 1997 of "The Black Book of Communism," an 800-page compendium of the serial barbarities of communist regimes from China and Ethiopia to Russia and Cambodia. This massive scholarly undertaking, meticulous in its research and incontrovertible in its findings, was instantly greeted with fury by much of the French intelligentsia, which refused to accept that its own eyes-wide-shut apologetics for the likes of Mao, Mengistu, Stalin and Pol Pot were no less a form of complicity in mass murder than Holocaust denial.Karl Marx gives us a hint of at least some part of the attraction to the brutality of totalitarianism:
"What is the worldly religion of the Jew?" Marx asked. "Huckstering. What is his God? Money." Communism, according to its founding father, "would make the Jew impossible."And, like the race hustlers who'd be out of a job if they ever acceded to the end of racism in America,
"Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not." --Jean-François RevelRavel has also given us a great gift--a clue to our own situation today in dealing with the radical savages who have a blind dedication to the "excommunication of modernity":
Revel's analysis helps to make sense of the latest version of the totalitarian temptation, this time the temptation of radical Islam......but you'll have to read the whole book review in order to get this, the new modern mystery of our time.
Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.Read the whole thing
"On 9-10 May of this year," the May 14 memorandum explained, "Sen. Edward Kennedy's close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow." (Tunney was Kennedy's law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) "The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov."
Kennedy's message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. "The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations," the memorandum stated. "These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign."
Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers...
Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
