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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Paul Kengor</title>
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		<title>Thou Shalt Not Kill: When the Communists Murdered a Priest</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-kengor/thou-shalt-not-kill-when-the-communists-murdered-a-priest/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=thou-shalt-not-kill-when-the-communists-murdered-a-priest</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2014 04:25:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerzy Popieluszko]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Piotrowski]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poland]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Roman Catholic]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The murder of Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko, thirty years ago.... ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Jerzy_Popieluszko.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243573" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Jerzy_Popieluszko-450x255.jpg" alt="Jerzy_Popieluszko" width="268" height="152" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://spectator.org/">Spectator.org</a>.</strong></p>
<p>It was October 19, 1984—30 years ago this week. A gentle, courageous, and genuinely holy priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, age 37, found himself in a ghastly spot that, though it must have horrified him, surely did not surprise him. An unholy trinity of thugs from communist Poland’s secret police had seized and pummeled him. He was bound and gagged and stuffed into the trunk of their cream-colored Fiat 125 automobile as they roamed the countryside trying to decide where to dispatch him. This kindly priest was no less than the chaplain to the Solidarity movement, the freedom fighters who would ultimately prove fatal to Soviet communism—and not without Popieluszko’s stoic inspiration.</p>
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<p>The ringleader this October day was Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski, an agent of Poland’s SB. Unlike Jerzy, who grew up devoutly religious, Piotrowski was raised in an atheist household, which, like the communist despots who governed Poland, was an aberration in this pious Roman Catholic country. The disregard for God and morality made Piotrowski an ideal man for the grisly task ahead, which he assumed with a special, channeled viciousness.</p>
<p>Piotrowski’s first beating of the priest that evening was so severe that it should have killed him. Jerzy was a small man afflicted with Addison’s disease. He previously had been hospitalized for other infirmities, including (understandably) stress and anxiety. But somehow, the priest was managing to survive as he fought for his life in the cold, dark trunk of the Fiat. In fact, somehow he unloosened the ropes that knotted him and extricated himself from the car. He began to run, shouting to anyone who could hear, “Help! Save my life!”</p>
<p>He was run down by Piotrowski, a dedicated disciple of what a Polish admirer of Jerzy, Pope John Paul II, would dub the Culture of Death. “I caught up with him and hit him on the head several times with the stick,” Piotrowski later confessed. “I hit him near or on the head. He fell limp again. I think he must have been unconscious. And then I became—never mind, it doesn’t matter.”</p>
<p>It did matter. It certainly mattered to the helpless priest. What Piotrowski became was something altogether worse. He seemed overtaken by another force. As recorded by authors Roger Boyes and John Moody in their superb book, <em>Messenger of the Truth</em>, which is now a <a href="http://www.messengerofthetruth.com/">gripping documentary</a>, Piotrowski’s accomplices thought their comrade had gone mad, “so wild were the blows.” It was like a public flogging. Jerzy’s pounding was so relentless that it wouldn’t be misplaced to think of Christ’s scourging at the pillar. This young man <em>in persona Christi</em>, not much older than Jesus Christ at his death agony, was being brutally tortured. It was a kind of crucifixion; the kind at which communists uniquely excelled.</p>
<p>One is tempted to say that Piotrowski beat the hell out of Father Jerzy, but such would be inappropriate and inaccurate for such a man of faith. Really, the hell was coming out of the beater, in all its demonic force and fury.</p>
<p>After another round of thrashing, Piotrowski and his two fellow tormentors ramped up the treatment. They grabbed a roll of thick adhesive tape and ran it around the priest’s mouth, nose, and head, tossing him once again in the vehicle, like a hunk of garbage on its way to the heap.</p>
<p>Though he could barely breathe or move, Father Jerzy somehow again pried open the trunk as the car continued to its destination. This set Piotrowski into a rage. He stopped the vehicle, got out, looked sternly at the priest, and told him that if he made even one more sound, he would strangle him with his bare hands and shoot him. Boyes and Moody report what happened next: “He [Piotrowski] replaced the gun and lifted [his] club. It came down on the priest’s nose, but instead of the sound of cartilage breaking, there was a plop, like a stick hitting the surface of a puddle.”</p>
<p>The perpetrators didn’t realize it quite yet, but it was the final, deadly blow. The next time they saw Father Jerzy, they had no doubt.</p>
<p>The killers drove to a spot at the Vistula River. They tied two heavy bags of stones, each weighing nearly 25 pounds, to the priest’s ankles. They lifted him in a vertical position above the water and then quietly let him go. He sunk into the blackness below them. It was 10 minutes before midnight, October 19, 1984. “Popieluszko is dead,” announced Lieutenant Leszek Pekala to his collaborators in this revolting, sad crime. The third helper, Lieutenant Waldemar Chmielewski, solemnly and simply affirmed, “That’s right.”</p>
<p>They drove away, downing a bottle of vodka to try to numb what they had done. Pekala thought to himself as he drank, “Now we are murderers.”</p>
<p>Indeed they were. Of course, so was the system they represented. It and its handmaidens had consumed countless Jerzy Popieluszkos and tens of millions of others whose names tragically will never be remembered on the anniversary of their deaths.</p>
<p>This priest, however, was remembered, by the millions. When he didn’t show for 7:00 a.m. Mass the next morning, his parishioners were immediately alarmed. This wasn’t like the loyal and punctual man of the cloth. A search for his whereabouts quickly commenced. It would take some time, but the truth eventually prevailed, as it did against communism generally. Among those sickened by the news was a Polish priest in the Vatican, Karol Wojtyla—Pope John Paul II. The shocked pontiff could relate: he had experienced many fellow Poles and priests killed by totalitarianism. He himself was a survivor. The communists had wanted him dead as well; they tried to assassinate him three years earlier.</p>
<p>And like John Paul II, Jerzy Popieluszko’s torment at the hands of devils was not in vain. Millions of Poles poured out of their homes and into churches to pay him homage, as they had for their native son, Karol Wojtyla, back in June 1979—a historic, life-changing visit that a young Jerzy helped coordinate. Ironically, Jerzy had been charged with working between the Vatican and Polish Ministry of Health to arrange emergency safety measures during that trip. Then, too, he had the mission of protecting people from harm—harm by communism.</p>
<p>Ultimately, Jerzy Popieluszko’s struggle, like that of his pope, was not in vain. As Tertullian once put it, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. The communists could not extinguish Poles’ desire for the Church, for God, and for freedom. It would take another five years after his death, but the saintly priest’s demise had further fueled the flames for the torch of freedom and the corresponding crash and burn of communism.</p>
<p>In retrospect, Jerzy’s murder in 1984 marked the mid-point between two cataclysmic events that put nails in the coffin of communism: John Paul II’s June 1979 visit to Poland and the crucial free elections held in Poland in June 1989. Those elections, more than anything else, signaled the coming collapse of communism. Mikhail Gorbachev later said that when those elections were held in Poland, he knew it was all over. It was no coincidence that the Berlin Wall fell five months later.</p>
<p>Father Jerzy Popieluszko was one of many martyrs at the hands of atheistic communism. But his cause was an especially significant one. His service and death was not in vain.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Death of a Communist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-kengor/death-of-a-communist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=death-of-a-communist</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:49:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Robeson Jr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Press]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Paul Robeson Jr. gets a pass from the press.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/lkr.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235240" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/lkr.jpg" alt="lkr" width="313" height="207" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://spectator.org/">Spectator.org</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Paul Robeson Jr. has died at age 86. He was the son of the famous African-American performer and activist Paul Robeson, who died in 1976 at age 77. Regardless of what the adoring left says, both men were hardcore communists, with the senior Robeson being a dedicated Stalinist.</p>
<p>The headline for Paul Jr.’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/arts/activist-and-author-paul-robeson-jr-dies-at-86.html?hpw&amp;rref=obituaries&amp;_r=2">obituary in the <em>New York Times</em></a> was predictable, stating simply, “Paul Robeson Jr., Activist and Author, Dies at 86.” The <em>Times</em> is always reliable for a flatteringly misleading headline at the death of any old communist, hailing the deceased as a celebrated “progressive” or “civil rights activist” or whatever—really, anything but an American Bolshevik.</p>
<p>To its credit, the <em>Times</em> could not avoid conceding that Paul Jr. had been a communist. It cited Paul Jr. himself acknowledging that he had been a member of the Communist Party. But to its discredit, the <em>Times</em> quoted Paul Jr. insisting that his father was not a communist—a predictable falsehood from Paul Jr. and predictable bad information from the <em>Times</em>. “While they had much in common,” the <em>Times</em> said of father and son, “he [Paul Jr.] said one difference was that he was a member of the Communist Party from 1948 to 1962 while his father never joined the party.” The <em>Times</em> was sure to add: “During the McCarthy era, his father faced F.B.I. surveillance after he criticized the government.”</p>
<p>Yes, of course. That one and only Red Terror, better known to liberals as The McCarthy Era. Once again, the bad guy is not Joe Stalin but Joe McCarthy. And yet again, the handy narrative is sheer nonsense. The <em>Times</em> and its readers repeatedly <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dupes-Americas-Adversaries-Manipulated-Progressives/dp/1935191756/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=1X80278XXJWYP0H7WD2S">dupe themselves</a> into such self-imposed ignorance.</p>
<p>To that end, let me put this bluntly, and without the slightest whiff of exaggeration: Paul Robeson Sr. was an unflagging admirer of Joseph Stalin, one of the most prolific killers in history. It was this that brought Robeson under congressional scrutiny in the 1930s when the Democrats ran Congress, the White House, and the attorney general’s office—long before Joe McCarthy emerged on the scene. Even the <em>New York Times</em> once called Robeson “an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union.” He was dedicated to the Communist Party USA goal of fundamentally transforming America into a “Soviet American Republic.”</p>
<p>The senior Robeson’s Soviet romance began in 1934, the year he made a pilgrimage to the Motherland. When he returned, he spoke at length to the Moscow-funded <em>Daily Worker</em>. In a breathless piece than ran in the January 15, 1935 issue, under the headline, &#8220;&#8216;I Am at Home,’ Says Robeson At Reception in Soviet Union,” Robeson gloried in the “feeling of safety and abundance and freedom” he found “wherever” he turned under Stalin. When asked about Stalin’s purges, Robeson responded with a stunning statement that probably surprised even the Kremlin: “From what I have already seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot!”</p>
<p>The KGB tortured people pretty damned hard to get those kinds of statements. But Paul Robeson Sr. needed no such compulsion; just some careful wining and dining and duping. Indeed, Robeson was deadly serious. He was enamored with what he found in Stalin’s state, so much so that he moved his family there—his son included. They lived there, where they were given excessively special treatment. The Soviets rolled out the red carpet, literally.</p>
<p>In 1952, shortly before Stalin’s death, Paul Robeson was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize, which he unhesitatingly accepted. And when his beloved Stalin perished in March 1953, Robeson was moved to tears and to verse. He responded with a poetic eulogy titled, “To You Beloved Comrade.” He tearfully recalled the unforgettable moment when he elevated his son, Paul Jr., at the site of Stalin, as if lifting the boy in the air to present him with some sort of supernatural commission. Robeson waxed reverently of this “kindly,” “good” man of “wisdom,” “deep humanity,” and “understanding.” Stalin’s “noble example” and “daily guidance” had left Russians a “rich and monumental heritage.” The death of the “great Stalin,” reported a heartbroken Robeson, left “tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief.”</p>
<p>Of course, in reality, Stalin left tens of millions dead, and their families bowed in heart-aching grief.</p>
<p>It would take almost a half-century after Robeson’s death for Communist Party USA to publicly concede the obvious: Paul Robeson Sr. had been a longtime secret member. In May 1998, the centennial of Robeson’s birth, longtime CPUSA head Gus Hall finally, proudly revealed the truth. Hall made that announcement in a speech reprinted in the leading Marxist journal <em>Political Affairs</em>.</p>
<p>Only progressives were surprised by Hall’s revelation. They are still today; that is, they would be if they bothered to learn or care about the facts. The <em>New York Times</em> is still clueless.</p>
<p>That brings us back to Paul Robeson Jr. The younger Robeson perpetuated the lie that his father was not a communist. And the left embraced him.</p>
<p>Paul Jr. had long been loved by the communist and “progressive” left merely for being the son of Paul Sr. Historian Ron Radosh, a former communist, ran in some of the same political circles as Paul Jr. Radosh remembers being in high school in the 1950s and attending the national conference of the Labor Youth League, one of the incarnations of the Young Communist League. After a plenary statement, various attendees raised their hands to comment. One of them was Paul Jr. The speaker eagerly recognized him and said, “I call on Paul from Harlem.”</p>
<p>Radosh recalls:</p>
<blockquote><p>Robeson Jr. stood up, and the entire audience gave him a standing ovation and cheers that lasted at least five minutes. Then everyone sang &#8220;The World Youth Song,&#8221; before he could say one word. I don’t remember his comment, but it was trivial at best and was only a few sentences. I believe that’s when he saw that he didn’t have to make a living, but could manage to make a career out of being Robeson’s son.</p></blockquote>
<p>Radosh called Paul Jr. “a total sycophant and enabler of his father’s legacy.”</p>
<p>Charlie Wiley, a longtime anti-communist who was Paul Jr.’s age, vividly recalls his run-ins with the young Robeson. He encountered him a number of times, most memorably at one of the notorious Soviet-orchestrated World Youth Festivals, specifically the Vienna World Youth Festival in August 1959. These festivals were serious ideological battlegrounds, with the international communist movement using them to indoctrinate as many youth as possible. Young American communists like Robeson went to these events to agitate against America and for communist Russia. They were countered by pro-American anti-communists such as Charlie Wiley, the late Herb Romerstein, and others.</p>
<p>These debates were intense, vicious. In Vienna, they turned physical. One of the British anti-communists was beaten unconscious and carried to the nearest hospital. Wiley was assaulted, as were women in the American delegation. The communists had yet again resorted to force to advance their cause. It was what they knew best.</p>
<p>Wiley says that Paul Jr. basically ran the American delegation, or at least sought to. The communists were not a numerical majority in the delegation, but they were seasoned manipulators who easily dominated the group. As the leader of the communist cell, Paul Jr. tried to speak for the full delegation. At the welcoming ceremony, Robeson stepped forward on behalf of the entire American contingent, speaking in what one participant called “very beautiful Russian.” In fact, he knew Russian so well that he listed his occupation at the time as “translator.”</p>
<p>Wiley describes Paul Jr. as “really hardcore,” “a hard, committed, austere communist.” He was “mean, tough, no nonsense, not one to mess around with.” Wiley says that whereas he (Wiley) could personally trick other American communists into trusting him as possibly one of them, and thus goading them in a less destructive direction, Paul Jr. “didn’t trust me at all.” The younger Robeson constantly gave him a cold, hard stare. He knew his way around. Unlike the wide-eyed liberals, Robeson was a committed radical leftist who was no sucker.</p>
<p>Wiley added this comment on Paul Jr.’s personality:</p>
<blockquote><p>As an interesting side-note, there was one funny thing I remember about Paul Robeson Jr. It’s funny what sticks with you, but I remember the <em>language</em> he used. He was the first male I ever encountered who swore in front of women with really foul language—rude, crude. I mean the &#8220;F-word&#8221; and everything. You have to understand that men just didn’t talk like that in those days. Later on they would all the time, but not back then. Robeson was the first time where I saw that. It really struck me. It was very unusual.</p></blockquote>
<p>Charlie Wiley told me these things two years ago, and I wrote them down. When I emailed him immediately upon receiving news of Paul Jr.’s death, he emphatically added that the younger Robeson “was a worse America hater than his father,” and concluded by calling him a “son-of-a-bitch.”</p>
<p>Clearly, the animosity is still palpable. And for good reason.</p>
<p>Back in Washington after the Vienna festival, there was a dramatic follow-up showdown between Paul Jr., Charlie Wiley, Herb Romerstein, and other delegates. The fireworks started on February 4, 1960 before the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Pennsylvania Democrat Francis Walter, a staunch Cold Warrior (back when such Democrats existed).</p>
<p>Wiley and Romerstein were fully candid in their testimonies. Romerstein, a former communist, deeply impressed the committee. Paul Robeson Jr., on the other hand, was characteristically evasive, snide, unintimidated, and disrespectful. He refused to answer basic questions, including repeatedly refusing to affirm that he was a member of the Communist Party. He wouldn&#8217;t discuss his pro-Soviet work at the Vienna festival; to the contrary, he maligned the anti-communist Americans who were there. Amazingly, Paul Jr. accused <em>them</em> (the anti-communists) of agitating and turning the festival into a “cold-war battlefield.” He said that they had come to “disrupt,” “discredit,” and “subvert” the festival. They were a “disgrace,” he snarled at the committee.</p>
<p>It was a grossly mendacious performance. It was also a blatantly pro-Soviet stunt. Moscow surely reveled in every minute of it.</p>
<p>Robeson then turned his guns on the House Committee itself, which he accused of “harass[ing] those who fight for Negro equality,” of giving “aid and comfort to segregationists,” of undermining “the enforcement of civil rights of Negroes,” of “never doing anything about civil rights,” and of being sympathetic to “self-confessed Nazis and Fascist collaborators.”</p>
<p>This was the typical smear tactic used by the communist left. And, of course, Paul Jr. accused the committee of “attempting to poison the minds of young people with the ideology of McCarthyism.”</p>
<p>Again, quite a performance.</p>
<p>Alas, when it came to poisoning the minds of young people—and also accusing the House committee of being racist, fascist, and pro-Nazi—one such communist who excelled at the art was <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Communist-Paul-Kengor/dp/B00C01DYBY/ref=pd_sim_b_1">Frank Marshall Davis</a>, who joined Communist Party USA during World War II (after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact). Davis, who I profiled at length in an October 2012 cover feature for <em>The American Spectator</em>, deserves mention here. He knew the senior Paul Robeson extremely well, admired him greatly, and likely knew Paul Jr.</p>
<p>Davis mentioned Robeson more than any other figure in his weekly columns for the communist-line <em>Chicago Star</em> and <em>Honolulu Record</em>. He was his biggest cheerleader. Davis, who otherwise lied about his party membership and work, candidly acknowledged in his memoirs that Robeson was a major factor, if not <em>the</em> factor, in Davis suddenly uprooting from Chicago in 1949 to move to Hawaii to do Communist Party work there.</p>
<p>There, in Honolulu, Davis would eventually meet and mentor a young person named Barack Obama. There’s no doubt that Davis would have regaled young Obama with stories of glory about the great Paul Robeson. Does Obama today have an opinion of either Robeson? He absolutely does, and I would pay good money to hear it. What was his reaction to the younger Robeson’s death? How about the old man, Frank’s pal? Unfortunately, we can expect no one in our press corps will bother to ask the president.</p>
<p>As for both the senior and junior Paul Robeson, they will be eternally remembered by our press and “progressives” as stoic civil rights crusaders, lionized as fearless freedom fighters who battled the nefarious forces of McCarthyism. Their work on behalf of a truly pernicious regime and ideology will get a wink and a pass.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>On Ozzie Guillen, Fidel Castro, and Baseball in Cuba</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/paul-kengor/on-ozzie-guillen-fidel-castro-and-baseball-in-cuba/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=on-ozzie-guillen-fidel-castro-and-baseball-in-cuba</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Apr 2012 04:00:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marlins]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ozzie Guillen]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Would the Florida Marlins manager consider managing the Cuban national baseball team?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/marlins.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-128890" title="marlins" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/marlins.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="304" /></a>“I love Fidel Castro,” said Florida Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen to <em>Time</em> magazine. “A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [expletive] is still here.” Guillen “respects” the Cuban despot.</p>
<p>Guillen has since apologized profusely for his comments, which infuriated Florida’s Cuban émigré community—and for good reason.</p>
<p>Fidel Castro is a tyrant. I could go through a litany of the man’s crimes against humanity since he turned a beautiful country into a communist dictatorship over 50 years ago. Castro violated every form of basic human rights, from freedom of speech to press to assembly to religion. He jailed dissidents and never stood for election—a promise he made in 1959. Liberals might take note of Castro’s locking up of homosexuals on the island. And then there was that whole Cuban Missile Crisis thing, where Fidel and his pal Che Guevara—a hero at American universities—actually wanted to launch the nuclear missiles at the United States and unleash nuclear Armageddon. And don’t forget about the 15,000-20,000 Cubans that Castro has executed, or the tens of thousands who have drowned trying to swim 100 miles to the shores of Florida.</p>
<p>Safely ensconced on those shores is Mr. Ozzie Guillen, who became rich playing baseball under America’s free-enterprise system. Guillen currently basks in a <a href="http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/09/28/ozzie-guillens-new-contract-with-marlins-worth-10-million/" target="_blank"> four-year contract for $10-million</a> managing the Marlins. He would never be able to make that kind of money in Cuba. In fact, to consider just how bad Cuba is under Castro, let’s stick to baseball:</p>
<p>Fidel’s favorite sport is baseball. He turned it into a national past-time in Cuba. Unfortunately, Cuban players are not permitted to score some badly needed dollars, or personal freedom. I recall a telling incident in the spring of 1999. The Cuban national team came to America; specifically, to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, where they played the Baltimore Orioles. They blew out the Orioles 12 to 6, giving Castro something to crow about. He framed the win as a victory for communism over capitalism.</p>
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		<title>Sterilizing Those Pesky Humans: Earth Day with Paul Ehrlich</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/sterilizing-those-pesky-humans-earth-day-with-paul-ehrlich/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sterilizing-those-pesky-humans-earth-day-with-paul-ehrlich</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 04:00:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birth centennial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[earth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[harmful insects]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Ehrlich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[population bomb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[symbol]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Vladimir Lenin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=91018</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dark, hateful and racist world of a living symbol of Earth Day.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/erlich.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91022" title="erlich" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/erlich.jpg" alt="" width="350" height="235" /></a></p>
<p>Every April 22 is Earth Day. As one who studies Soviet Russia, I can’t help notice that the day coincides with the birthday of Vladimir Lenin. The inaugural Earth Day occurred April 22, 1970, no less than Lenin’s birth centennial.</p>
<p>This is most ironic. Lenin is a decaying symbol of central planning, which, regrettably, is the ideological preference of many of those filling the streets on Earth Day. Although Lenin was a collectivist, not an environmentalist, he is frequently recycled, as mortuary specialists from Russia’s health ministry regularly re-embalm him in his tomb.</p>
<p>Lenin had no respect for life. He declared certain people “harmful insects.” In Lenin’s deadly worldview, pesky humans were not precious, special, unrepeatable; they were disposable.</p>
<p>That brings me to a living symbol of Earth Day: Paul Ehrlich. Dr. Ehrlich’s explosive bestseller, <em>The Population Bomb</em>, inspired the freshman class that first Earth Day, embodying the wildest fears of apocalypse mongers. The great Johnny Carson was, sadly, one of Ehrlich’s dupes, giving him a platform on “The Tonight Show” dozens of times.</p>
<p>Much has been said about Ehrlich’s book. But as author John Berlau reports, one item has been conveniently sunk into a land-fill. “He [Ehrlich] flirted with a proposal to require adding contraceptive material to all food items in the United States,” writes Berlau in Eco-Freaks.</p>
<p>“But Ehrlich’s most drastic—and contemptuous—measures were reserved for the third world. Ehrlich advocated that all men in India who had three or more children be forcibly sterilized.”</p>
<p>Really? That was something I needed to see for myself, certainly never learning this in my public education. So, I tracked down a September 1971 edition of The Population Bomb.</p>
<p>What Ehrlich wrote is jaw-dropping. Dealing first with pesky Americans, he wrote (pages 130-31):</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;[T]he first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size. Those of you who are appalled at such a suggestion can rest easy. The option isn’t even open to us, since no such substance exists.</p>
<p>If the choice now is either such additives or catastrophe, we shall have catastrophe. It might be possible to develop such population control tools, although the task would not be simple. Either the additive would have to operate equally well and with minimum side effects against both sexes, or some way would have to be found to direct it only to one sex and shield the other.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>As for pesky (non-white) folks in places like India, Ehrlich was less patient. On pages 151-52, he favored “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children,” and with the direct help of the U.S. government. “We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments,” advised Ehrlich. “We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies.”</p>
<p>Was this “coercion?” asked Ehrlich. Of course, but it was “coercion in a good cause.” Immediate action was imperative, assessed the professor. It was, after all, 1970, and the human race had precious little time. Ehrlich warned of humans metastasizing all over Mother Earth. He said stoically:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I wish I could offer you some sugarcoated solutions, but I’m afraid the time for them is long gone. A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells…. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies—often horribly…. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>To borrow from other scaremonger imagery of the era, such as the hysterical propaganda film Soylent Green, it was only a matter of time before the helpless masses started consuming one another. Only government action by anointed elites could save us from Armageddon.</p>
<p>Today, Ehrlich remains an icon, holding a plum spot at Stanford as the Bing Professor of Population Studies. Because he’s a liberal, a “progressive,” the 78-year-old has gotten away with this, much like Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood matron, who ran a “Negro Project,” spoke at a KKK rally, labeled certain pesky people “human weeds” and “imbeciles” and “morons,” and preached “race improvement.”</p>
<p>For icons of the left, there’s no need to say “I’m sorry.” The sins of the fathers and mothers of the progressive left are buried with the trash, never to be recycled, especially at Earth Day.</p>
<p><strong>— Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision &amp; Values. His books include &#8220;The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,&#8221; and the newly released &#8220;Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.&#8221;</strong></p>
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		<title>Churchill&#8217;s &#8220;Iron Curtain&#8221; at 65</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/churchills-iron-curtain-at-65/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=churchills-iron-curtain-at-65</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Mar 2011 04:25:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=86931</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A speech that rocked the world and changed history.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/churchill.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-86932" title="churchill" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/churchill.jpg" alt="" width="296" height="369" /></a></p>
<p>It  was 65 years ago, March 5, 1946, when Winston Churchill delivered his  “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. It was a speech that rocked  the world and changed history.</p>
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<p>By  then, Churchill was no longer British prime minister. He and his  conservatives had been replaced by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party,  which busily nationalized everything under the sun, from car companies  to healthcare, pursued Keynesian economic policies with reckless  abandon, exploded the public sector, and piled debts that buried Britain  for a generation. Churchill was out, and Britain’s giant lunge leftward  was in, enabled by an electorate that voted for “change.”</p>
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<p>Churchill  and his work, however, were hardly finished. He had been called upon to  save Western civilization at the start of the decade, when Hitler’s  Germany was at the gates. Now, he saw new vandals, equally dangerous,  already inside the gates, and colored red. Stalin was their dictator.</p>
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<p>Worse,  the West, complacent and tired of war, had no clue of the threat; it  could not see the wolf at the door. The former prime minister travelled  to America to issue a wake-up call to the free world.</p>
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<p>So, at little Westminster College, on March 5, 1946, at the invitation of President Harry Truman, Churchill cut loose:</p>
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<p>Nobody  knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization  intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any,  to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies….</p>
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<p>From  Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has  descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of  the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin,  Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, all these famous  cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all  are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to  a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Churchill  conceded these were tough words to hear on the “morrow of a great  victory” over Nazism, one where Stalin’s Russia had been an ally.  Nonetheless, we could not be blind to reality, and simply wish away the  dangers.</p>
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<p>Of  course, Churchill was exactly right, as anyone paying attention should  have noticed. A month earlier, Stalin had delivered his Bolshoi Theater  speech, which followed blatant Soviet violations of the Yalta agreement  signed a year earlier. Moscow was installing puppet governments and  refusing promises of free elections throughout Eastern Europe, all the  while committing countless war crimes, especially in eastern Germany,  where Red Army soldiers committed two million rapes.</p>
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		<title>Leftist Dupes: From the Communist Brotherhood to the Muslim Brotherhood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/leftist-dupes-from-the-communist-brotherhood-to-the-muslim-brotherhood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftist-dupes-from-the-communist-brotherhood-to-the-muslim-brotherhood</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Feb 2011 04:45:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=84681</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Recalling the Left’s support for the most vicious revolutionary monsters of the past 100 years. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/dupes1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-84692" title="dupes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/dupes1.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="249" /></a></p>
<p>As President Obama encourages an immediate “transition” from Hosni Mubarak to whatever might replace him in Egypt, hope again springs eternal among the American Left. The president has made clear that he supports the presence of the Islamofascist Muslim Brotherhood in the new government, and it appears that no one in the halls of power has sense to persuade him otherwise. Even his director of national intelligence, James Clapper, &#8220;clarified&#8221; for the Congress on Thursday that the ultra-Islamic Brotherhood is &#8220;largely secular&#8221; with no &#8220;overarching agenda.&#8221; The progressive dream, clearly, is that the Muslim Brotherhood will take power and build yet another revolutionary anti-American utopia &#8212; which will ideally follow in the footsteps of other recent great Muslim Sharia paradises, from Hamas to the Ayatollah. Forgive me for not sharing in the optimism.</p>
<p>Instead, I thought I’d offer a walk down memory lane, recalling the Left’s pattern of judgment regarding other leading “revolutionaries” of the past 100 years. Who are some of these dictators, these monsters? Join me, if you will.</p>
<p>A fitting to place to start is Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, first communist dictators of a truly Evil Empire. From the outset, numerous American “progressives” were enchanted with the “Great Experiment” in the Soviet Motherland. I could fill a book with examples. (In fact, I have.) Here, I’ll offer just a few.</p>
<p>Corliss Lamont, ACLU member, Columbia University professor, leading atheist/”humanist,” who embraced every leftist cause under the sun from the 1920s to the 1990s, made an early pilgrimage to Moscow. He loved what he saw, recording his observations in a book he co-authored with his wife. Probably nothing moved the Lamonts quite as much as their moment near the rotting breast of Lenin, who, by the time the Lamonts arrived in Moscow, had been dead and encased in a glass-covered box for eight years. They recorded:</p>
<p>Lenin’s face is strong, calm, and refined in the fundamental sense. His hand rests on a red pillow and his hands, clasped on his chest in a tranquil way, appear delicate and intellectual. The short yet forceful beard is reddish. We have to keep moving, though we want to stop and look longer and more carefully…. [I]t is not enough.</p>
<p>No, it was not enough; the Lamonts ached for more, and so they got in line again to revisit Lenin. They paid “homage,” “taking strength from [Lenin’s] impersonally beautiful and resolute face,” which was “perfectly natural and wholly desirable.”</p>
<p>In general, the Lamonts returned home to America to report the “great deal of happiness,” the “new human nature” they had discovered in communist Russia. “[T]he new world of the twentieth century is the Soviet Union,” they glowed to their progressive comrades. “And no one who is seriously interested in the progress of the human spirit can afford to miss it.”</p>
<p>Some “progress.” As the Lamonts wrote those words, Stalin was ramping up his forced famine, his Great Purge, and launching his annihilation of tens of millions of human spirits. Few in the USSR would <em>miss it</em>—the mass murder and criminality, that is.</p>
<p>But that wasn’t the feeling among the American Left. Among them was Corliss Lamont’s colleague, Dr. John Dewey, pillar of Columbia Teachers College, and founding father of American public education. The Bolsheviks adored Dewey, immediately translating into Russian several of Dewey’s major works before the Russian Civil War had even ended. The respect was mutual, and John Dewey couldn’t wait to make his own pilgrimage to the USSR, which he did in the summer of 1928, preceding the Lamonts’ visit. When Dewey returned, he filed a six-part series in <em>The New Republic</em>.</p>
<p>Dewey’s <em>TNR</em> dispatches on Russia were almost lyrical, as he waxed poetic about what he had experienced. Dewey discovered a “kind of completed transmigration of souls,” an “impression of movement, vitality, energy. The people go about as if some mighty and oppressive load had been removed, as if they were newly awakened to the consciousness of released energies.”</p>
<p>In Dewey’s mind, the Bolsheviks had thoroughly liberated the Russian people. “[T]the essence of the Revolution,” reported the Columbia professor, was “in its release of courage, energy and confidence in life.”</p>
<p>So taken was Dewey that he almost swooned: “My mind was in a whirl of new impressions in those early days in Leningrad. Readjustment was difficult, and I lived somewhat dazed.”</p>
<p>Dewey had been frustrated by having “heard altogether too much about Communism, about the Third International [the Comintern], too much about the Bolsheviki.” No, averred Dewey, what needed to be understood was that the Bolsheviks had ushered in not any sort of dangerous dictatorship, but, rather, a “revolution of heart and mind” and a “liberation of a people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate.”</p>
<p>Dr. Dewey also praised “the orderly and safe character of life in Russia” under Stalin. Indeed, said the unflinching professor, there was <em>no</em> country in <em>all</em> of Europe in which “the external routine of life is more settled and secure.”</p>
<p>The faculty at Columbia was hardly the only place enchanted by Lenin and Stalin. Some of the finest minds from Britain’s literati were likewise impressed.</p>
<p>“I’ve never met a man more candid, fair, and honest,” marveled author H. G. Wells upon his return from a meeting with Joe Stalin in 1934, at the start of the Great Purge. “Everyone trusts him.” Wells had likewise been impressed by Vladimir Lenin, whom he called a “frank,” “refreshing,” and “amazing little man,” who had “almost persuaded me to share his vision.”</p>
<p>Fully persuaded was Wells’ fellow socialist, George Bernard Shaw, who piped up with an even more outrageous assessment after meeting with Stalin: “[W]e cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbor [the Soviet Union] … humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men.”</p>
<p>Shaw was deadly serious; this was not sarcasm scribbled for some tasteless stage comedy.</p>
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		<title>Ronald Reagan: The Anti-Nixon/Kissinger</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/ronald-reagan-the-anti-nixonkissinger/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ronald-reagan-the-anti-nixonkissinger</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Feb 2011 04:25:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[How Reagan's foreign policy broke the mold. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/reagan1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-84402" title="reagan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/reagan1.jpg" alt="" width="392" height="294" /></a></p>
<p>Sunday, February 6, marked the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/06/remembrances-of-a-giant-among-men/">birth centennial of Ronald Reagan</a>. As a Reagan  biographer, I’m often asked how Reagan was different from his  predecessors, Republican and Democrat, and especially in the area of  foreign policy. There were many ways, but here are two of the most  fundamental:</p>
<p>First,  Reagan actually believed he could win the Cold War. He committed  himself to that goal early and unequivocally. To cite just one example,  Richard V. Allen, his first national security adviser, recalls a  discussion in January 1977, four years before the presidency, when  Reagan told him flatly: “Dick, my idea of American policy toward the  Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We  win and they lose.”</p>
<p>In  this, Reagan stood apart from not only Democrats like Jimmy Carter but  Republicans like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and their chief  foreign-policy adviser, Henry Kissinger.</p>
<p>But  there’s another way Reagan was so different from the likes of Nixon and  Kissinger in particular. It’s a poignant example involving  long-persecuted Soviet Jews. It was recently driven home to me, yet  again, when I heard newly released comments by Nixon and Kissinger.</p>
<p>Kissinger and Nixon placed détente with the Soviets above all else. Their approach was pure Machiavellian <em>realpolitik</em>.  They did not frame the U.S.-Soviet confrontation as good vs. evil, as  Reagan did. Their goal wasn’t to defeat the Soviet Union. Their  prevailing priority was getting along with the Soviets. They pursued  that objective at almost any expense, whether keeping Eastern Europeans  captive behind the Iron Curtain or keeping Russian Jews from emigrating.</p>
<p>In  the early 1970s, pressure had been building on the Nixon administration  to lobby the Soviets to ease up on restrictions on Jews. Both Kissinger  and Nixon were dismissive. How dismissive? The latest round of released  tapes shows Kissinger offering an awful assessment to his White House  boss on March 1, 1973.</p>
<p>“The  emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of  American foreign policy,” Kissinger stated coldly. “And if they put Jews  into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.  Maybe a humanitarian concern.”</p>
<p>Nixon responded: “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”</p>
<p>Alas,  here is a painfully instructive example of how Ronald Reagan so  differed even from intensely anti-communist Republicans of his era.  Reagan would have been aghast at these comments. In fact, Reagan was  willing to “blow up” negotiations with the Soviets over matters like  Jewish emigration.</p>
<p>Reagan  hounded Mikhail Gorbachev on this issue. About 10 years ago, the  official “MemCons,” or Memoranda of Conversation, from the various  Reagan-Gorbachev one-on-ones were declassified, from the Geneva to  Moscow summits. In these, Reagan repeatedly dug at Gorbachev on  emigration of Jews, to the point where Gorbachev snapped at the  president.</p>
<p>Such  persecuted Russians (Jews and non-Jews) were constantly on Reagan’s  mind. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci recalled that the president  “would walk around with lists in his pocket of people who were in prison  in the Soviet Union.” Each time Secretary of State George Shultz  prepared to meet with a Soviet official, Reagan pulled out the  names—“some of whom we’d heard of but most of whom we hadn’t,” said  Carlucci—and say, “I want you to raise these names with the Soviets.”  And sure enough, said Carlucci, “George would raise them and one by one  they would be released or allowed to leave.”</p>
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		<title>TNR’s Progressive Dupes</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/tnr%e2%80%99s-progressive-dupes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tnr%25e2%2580%2599s-progressive-dupes</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Jan 2011 04:35:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=81928</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The New Republic's little-known history of propaganda peddling for brutal communist regimes. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/TNRShip_0.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-81993" title="TNRShip_0" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/TNRShip_0.gif" alt="" width="375" height="353" /></a></p>
<p>“I am a patriot for Russia; the Future is there; Russia will win out and it will save the world. That is my belief.”</p>
<p>—Lincoln Steffens, popular 1920s journalist for <em>The New Republic.</em></p>
<p>Martin Peretz is stepping down as editor-in-chief of <em>The New Republic</em>. As <a href="../2011/01/07/in-defense-of-marty-peretz-2/" target="_blank">noted at FrontPageMag last week</a>, he is assuming the title of editor-in-chief emeritus, an honorary position, though he is retaining his popular blog at <em>TNR</em>’s website. I’m sure the reasons for this are varied, but it seems the culmination of a long-term falling out between Peretz and the hard Left. More than that, it says a lot about the status of the Left in general, particularly the direction of the “progressive” movement over the past 100 years.</p>
<p>For the record, I’ve never met Martin Peretz, nor even exchanged an email with him, but I can say this much: In my opinion, Peretz single-handedly saved and brought broad respectability to <em>The New Republic</em>. He bought the magazine in the mid-1970s. By the late 1980s, when I started subscribing as an undergraduate, it was a bulwark of thoughtful liberalism, and regularly full of surprises. <em>TNR</em>’s contributors argued logically, methodically, with facts. It was a refreshing change from the emotional outbursts I usually encountered from liberals. My files are still packed with <em>TNR</em> articles from that period.</p>
<p>In fact, in one of my courses, I still use a handful of <em>TNR</em> pieces on the first Gulf War, dated 1990-91, from Morton Kondracke, David Korn, a superb analysis by Stephen Solarz, and the second-to-none reporting from Kuwait by the late Michael Kelly, God rest his soul. It was wonderful work, and much less predictable and more interesting than what was being published by the flagship of the right, <em>National Review</em>—with no disrespect to <em>NR</em>.</p>
<p>And when it came to competitors on the Left, from the crazies at <em>The Nation</em> to the silly <em>New York Times</em>—which always feigned the appearance of objectivity, like CBS News—you could trust <em>The New Republic</em>. One had faith that its writers thought things through.</p>
<p>So valuable was <em>TNR</em> to me personally, that when I entered grad school in the early 1990s, and was virtually penniless, it was one of only two subscriptions I kept.</p>
<p>That turned out to be a wise choice in another important way that speaks to Martin Peretz’s leadership. The post-Cold War <em>TNR</em> was, at long last, and long overdue, excellent on the sins of communism, giving seminal books like <em>The Black Book of Communism</em> the exposure they desperately needed among an American Left that always viewed Joe McCarthy and anti-communism as a greater concern than Joe Stalin and pro-communism. In the 1990s, <em>TNR</em> made amends for more recent Cold War meanderings, such as its juvenile April 4, 1983 editorial ripping “Reverend Reagan” for his “Evil Empire” speech, and, further back still, for the scandalous nonsense that filled its pages from the 1910s to 1930s.</p>
<p>As to that older history, it’s especially revealing of what Martin Peretz changed at <em>TNR</em>. What the early <em>TNR</em> reported on Bolshevism and the Lenin-Stalin state was outrageous. In a just world, the magazine would not have survived the ignominy that should have come its way. If a conservative magazine had a similar track record regarding the far Right, it would have never survived.</p>
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		<title>From the Cold War to the Terror War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/from-the-cold-war-to-the-terror-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=from-the-cold-war-to-the-terror-war</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/from-the-cold-war-to-the-terror-war/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:41:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=81297</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How "progressives" continue their war on historical memory and their romance with the enemies of freedom.  ]]></description>
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<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s Note:<em> </em>The following interview with Dr. Jamie Glazov was conducted by Dr. Paul Kengor through the venue of &#8220;V&amp;V Q&amp;A,&#8221; an e-publication from <a href="http://www.visandvals.org/">The Center for Vision &amp; Values</a> at Grove City College.<br />
</strong></p>
<p><strong>Kengor:</strong> Jamie Glazov, welcome to &#8220;V&amp;V Q&amp;A.&#8221;</p>
<p>Our goal today is to talk about your new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Showdown-Evil-Struggle-Against-Tyranny/dp/0973406550/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1294394202&amp;sr=1-1"><em>Showdown With Evil: Our Struggle Against Tyranny and Terror</em></a>.  But before we get to that, I want to introduce you to our readers.  First off, for many years, our writers at Grove City College, including  myself, have contributed to your fearless website,<strong><em> </em></strong>FrontPageMagazine.com. Tell us about FrontPage and its mission.</p>
<p><strong>Glazov:</strong> FrontPageMag.com is on the frontlines fighting the terror and culture  war. We are primarily about exposing-and stopping in its tracks-the  enemy at home and abroad. In other words, we bring attention to the  danger and evil of radical Islam and to those forces on our own  territory who aid and abet this <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unholy-Alliance-Radical-Islam-American/dp/089526076X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1294394244&amp;sr=1-2"><em>Unholy Alliance</em>.</a> By informing the world about this deadly and malicious enemy we face,  we seek to undermine its totalitarian impulses and objectives.</p>
<p><strong>Kengor:</strong> Please also tell us about your fascinating background, and specially  your father&#8217;s story-and where we can read more about your father.</p>
<p><strong>Glazov:</strong> My dad and mom, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were brave dissidents in the  former Soviet Union who stood up against one of the most evil regimes in  history. They put their lives on the line for political prisoners who  were being tortured and oppressed by the KGB and they fought  courageously for freedom of conscience. You can read more about them and  their heroic struggle <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/11/remembering-a-dissident/">here</a>.</p>
<p>Because  of this background and my respect for their noble efforts, I have  dedicated my life to fighting for liberty, opposing the despotic forces  who seek to annihilate it, and to standing up for those heroes who  languish in gulags and prisons for their belief in truth and freedom.</p>
<p><strong>Kengor:</strong> When the Cold War finally ended, what were your father&#8217;s thoughts? And,  more specifically, was he hopeful that Americans would learn the true  lessons of the Cold War and the horrors of the Soviet experiment and  communism generally?</p>
<p><strong>Glazov:</strong> My dad, like my mom, was exhilarated with the fall of the Soviet  Empire, or what we thought was its fall. They thought the truth would  come out, that there would be Nuremberg-style trials for the communist  monsters who had committed so many barbaric crimes against humanity,  that the communist system and ideology would be punished and  delegitimized for its inhumanity, and that the seed of this evil, which  is the socialist idea itself, would be exposed and refuted for the evil  that it represents and engenders. Alas, this did not happen; the same  communist criminals rule Russia today, the Left is unrepentant in the  West, and the true lessons of the Cold War have not been absorbed by the  West.</p>
<p><strong>Kengor:</strong> Indeed, we spend much of our time writing about those lessons here.  Much of what we do, like you, is simply to remind people again and again  what they should have learned to begin with. It&#8217;s a form of remedial  education, trying to correct what American education, from high schools  to our universities, has failed to provide.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s get to the book, <em>Showdown With Evil</em>.  <a href="http://www.mantuabooks.com/showdownwithevilreview.html">The endorsements are remarkable</a>, from James Woolsey to David Frum to  the fascinating Soviet defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, among others. You also  got a Foreword from Richard Perle, which Perle doesn&#8217;t do every day for  just anyone. First, on the general focus, there&#8217;s a transition here  from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Explain that, and how the two  are connected.</p>
<p><strong>Glazov:</strong> The Left reached its hand out in solidarity to the communist enemy in  the Cold War. Now it is doing the same thing in our terror war, but this  time the totalitarian adversary that garners the Left&#8217;s veneration and  devotion is Radical Islam. The Left is always engaged in a pathological  romance with our despotic enemies who wish us harm. My previous book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1294394393&amp;sr=1-1"><em>United in Hate</em></a>, documents the history and ingredients of this phenomenon. My new book, <em>Showdown With Evil</em>, is a collection of my interviews with the greatest minds of our age who illuminate this putrid and unholy Alliance.</p>
<p><strong>Kengor:</strong> The book has a very interesting format, quite engaging, a lively and  informative read. You have roughly 30 interviews that you&#8217;ve conducted  with major thinkers and scholars over the years, from William F. Buckley  to Richard Pipes to Norman Podhoretz, from Natan Sharansky to Victor  Davis Hanson, and as diverse as Christopher Hitchens and Ann Coulter. Do  you have a favorite or two among these? Which, and why?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Glazov:</strong> Well, all of the individuals I interviewed are great in my view. But  you mention the late William F. Buckley, the father of modern  conservatism and a great hero to me, and it was really an honor for me  to speak with him. He spoke some sacred words in the interview on the  essence of the totalitarian enemy we face, including his profound  thoughts on the Left&#8217;s putrid love affair with Islamic jihad. Everyone  should also check out the interview with David Horowitz on his book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unholy-Alliance-Radical-Islam-American/dp/089526076X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1294394244&amp;sr=1-2"><em>Unholy Alliance</em></a></em>,  in which David sets the critical foundation to our understanding of how  and why progressives have engaged in their dalliance with communist and  Islamist monsters.</p>
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		<title>Statue to Stalin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/statue-to-stalin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=statue-to-stalin</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/paul-kengor/statue-to-stalin/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:30:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why exactly has the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA erected a statue of a mass murderer?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/stalin1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-81042" title="stalin1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/stalin1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="263" /></a></p>
<p>Of course, it’s customary at year’s end to share  our favorite news items from the year past. As someone who teaches and  writes about history, I tend to focus on historical things I fear are  lost to American education.</p>
<p>So, my enduring “news item” of 2010 falls under the  category of historical outrage, though it is redeemed somewhat by  another item considerably more positive. I’d like to link them here as a  teachable moment.</p>
<p>My outrage of 2010: the National D-Day Memorial in  Bedford, Va., erected a statue of Joseph Stalin, architect of the Great  Purge, Ukrainian famine, gulag, war on religion, and countless millions  of deaths. We learned about this travesty thanks to the vigilance of the  Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which created a website (<a href="http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=36516092&amp;msgid=313940&amp;act=O9KS&amp;c=617533&amp;destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stalinstatue.com%2F" target="_blank">www.stalinstatue.com</a>)  to call attention to this moral-historical obscenity. The site features  a petition, with thousands of signatures from around the world.  Addressed to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation and President  Obama’s interior secretary, it demanded that the “true history of World  War II must be protected from distortion and misinformation.”</p>
<p>Among the distortion and misinformation, as noted  by the petition: “neither Joseph Stalin nor Soviet forces played any  part in the D-Day landing at Normandy.”</p>
<p>Worse, it was Stalin, via the August 1939  Hitler-Stalin “Non-Aggression” Pact, who helped launch World War II in  the first place, ultimately leading to D-Day—i.e., the horrible deaths  suffered by all those American boys on those beaches in France.</p>
<p>Ironically, such disinformation was once the crass  domain of Kremlin propagandists, of Stalin’s in-house stooges. That this  absurdity would happen in America today, by educators, is breathtaking.  Well, it happened in 2010.</p>
<p>My sources tell me that the Stalin statue has since  been removed, though reportedly as part of a compromise merely to move  it to another exhibit. They fear it hasn’t gone away for good. Without a  stake in the chest in a sealed coffin stuffed with garlic, they dread  that Stalin could rise again in Bedford, especially if we don’t stand  vigilant with torches and crosses.</p>
<p>I’m not optimistic.</p>
<p>On the plus side, however, 2010 finally shed the  light of truth upon one of Stalin’s most heinous acts. The light was  cast not by Americans in Bedford but, ironically, by Russians in Moscow.  It was a long-overdue moment of justice concerning the Katyn Woods  massacre.</p>
<p>The slaughter at Katyn was one of the worst war  crimes of the bloody 20th century, rooted in that pact between Hitler  and Stalin, who in September 1939 jointly invaded, annihilated, and  partitioned Poland. The Soviets seized thousands of Polish military  officers as prisoners. The fate of those Poles was secretly sealed on  March 5, 1940 when Stalin himself signed their death warrant, condemning  21,857 of them to “the supreme penalty: shooting.”</p>
<p>What happened next remained a state secret for  decades. The Polish officers were taken to three primary sites, the most  infamous of which bears the name of the crime: the Katyn Woods, located  near Smolensk, Russia. There, these unsuspecting men were methodically  slaughtered. The Bolsheviks covered their crime with a thin layer of  dirt.</p>
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