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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Soviet Union</title>
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		<title>Who Was Yuri Andropov? Ideologue, Policeman, Apparatchik</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/who-was-yuri-andropov-ideologue-policeman-apparatchik/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-was-yuri-andropov-ideologue-policeman-apparatchik</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2014 04:35:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andropov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[KGB]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238843</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why a deceased Soviet butcher has an ever-growing mini-cult following.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/moscow-kremlin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238846" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/moscow-kremlin-450x337.jpg" alt="moscow-kremlin" width="277" height="207" /></a>We should not be surprised that, in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s Russia, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov –born a hundred years ago, on June 15, 1914– enjoys an ever-growing mini-cult following, shaped and upheld from the very top. For Putin and the mafia surrounding him – all characters coming from the middle-level structures of the KGB– Yuri Andropov represents the strength of a system which, they believe, was not meant to collapse. In Andropov, they admire the virility, vitality, stamina, robustness of the system that collapsed in December 1991. Worshiping Andropov, they lionize their own youth.</p>
<p>The triumphalist fantasies of the Soviet years continue to haunt the Kremlin’s imagination. Resorting to the myth of Andropov is in fact an attempt at legitimization by way of history. Obviously, what we are dealing with is a history forged, doctored, counterfeited. In short, a history rigged, distorted, and mystified.</p>
<p>According to this secret police worldview, Andropov’s reforms – carefully supervised by their initiators in the party and security apparatus – were unlikely to lead to a massive breakdown of the ideocratic party-state institutional structure. Andropov was a bureaucrat hardened during the Stalinist purges following WWII. He was a true believer in the USSR’s mission as a “bastion of world socialism.” Like so many other apparatchiks, he had adored Stalin. He had been the protégé of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, the most dogmatic of the official ideologues. Andropov’s election in November 1982 as General Secretary of the CC of the CPSU and president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, thus nominal head of the Soviet state, was a big change in the pattern of succession. This was the first time that a former chief of the secret police had made it to the helm of the totalitarian regime called the USSR. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria had come within reach of this position, but – as we well know – he was finished off before being able to fill it. Arrested in June 1953, a few months after Stalin’s death, Beria was executed as a spy in December of that same year.</p>
<p>Andropov’s career began under the auspices of Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, the supreme ideologue of Stalinism unleashed. Zhdanov was directly in charge of the Karelian-Finnish Autonomous Republic, where Andropov steeply climbed up the party hierarchy. I emphasize this because Zhdanov was the most influential exponent of the Leningrad faction, brutally purged after his death in 1948. The political mythology of Leningrad&#8217;s communists matters a great deal in this particular version of history. Vladimir Putin himself comes from that town, as do many members of his close entourage.</p>
<p>After a stage as a Central Committee bureaucrat, Andropov was sent to Hungary as an ambassador, where he was given the particularly sensitive mission to oversee political dynamics throughout the crucial year 1956. Presumably Andropov himself had suffered a shock following the disclosures in Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s “Secret Report” at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956. On the other hand, ideologically speaking, his convictions were shatterproof and unflinching, made ​​of reinforced concrete. He was not a man of doubts, he lacked the courage to question the thorniest issues in the history of the party that he had served with<em> perinde ac cadaver </em>devotion. He was a fanatic communist, a true believer.</p>
<p>In the Soviet Embassy in Budapest, in 1956, one of Andropov’s subordinates was KGB officer under diplomatic cover, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who later became himself head of the State Security Committee. Astutely friendly and seemingly benevolent, Andropov played the openness card and thus managed to put the suspicions of Imre Nagy and the other reformist group members to sleep. When the revolution broke out on October 23, 1956, Andropov simulated a conciliatory stance and accepted the claims issued by the new government. He was calm and affable, a world-class impersonator. The friendly act was in fact hiding the huge anxiety of Moscow’s envoy.</p>
<p>In truth, Andropov was one of the most adamant activists; he strongly supported the idea of ​ Soviet military intervention. He then gave the legal government members assurances that, if they were to come out of the Yugoslav embassy’s building where they had taken refuge after the second Soviet military intervention, on November 3, 1956, they would be granted freedom and would be able to go home with their families. Right after Nagy and his friends left the embassy premises, giving credence to Andropov’s promises, they were captured, thrown into Soviet trucks, and shipped to Romania. The official story was that they had requested political asylum. In reality, the whole thing was a gangster-like operation, namely the kidnapping of still legitimate officials of a state which had dared to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Andropov was also the one who convinced János Kádár to break with Nagy and form the so-called “Workers’-Peasants’” Quisling government.</p>
<p>As a reward for his contribution to destroying what the communist propaganda called “the Hungarian counter-revolution,” Andropov was put in charge of the CPSU’s international relations department, a position from which he struggled to maintain Soviet hegemony within the world communist movement. As secretary of the CC, he collaborated with Suslov for the consolidation of a hardline ideology. He was one of the most active critics of the Chinese Communist Party, accused of political adventurism, as well as Yugoslav “revisionism.” He loathed any deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The 1968 Prague Spring gave him nightmares, he fervently supported military intervention to suppress what has gone down in history as the attempt to pursue with a human face. He tried unsuccessfully to organize a world communist conference to excommunicate Mao&#8217;s party. He had become the Kremlin&#8217;s most sophisticated expert in world communist affairs.</p>
<p>Precisely because he was a most reliable, disciplined, and faithful apparatchik, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin – the tandem who ended up at the pinnacle of the Soviet dictatorship after Khrushchev’s departure (in October 1964) – appointed Andropov succeed Vladimir Semichastny’s as chairman of the KGB in 1967. Maximum efficiency was needed and Andropov had proven that he was a highly effective defender of the nomenclature.</p>
<p>The one who suggested his appointment as chief-policeman of the USSR was red cardinal Mikhail Suslov, the ideological pontiff who had sensed the risk of the official monolithic doctrine’s disintegration. Andropov’s main mission was to suppress the human rights movement, to nip in the bud any dissident initiative. He was a champion of the most abject misinformation and recklessly cultivated criminal “special methods.”</p>
<p>As shown by <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/">dissident intellectual Yuri Glazov</a> in his illuminating writings, Andropov was a paradigmatic<em> Homo Sovieticus</em>. His main opponents were the great dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. He personally conducted disinformation campaigns against them. He also handled the terrorist actions against Pope John Paul II. In the history of the Cold War, the methodically stubborn bureaucrat Andropov endures as one of the most sinister characters.</p>
<p>When he became secretary general, the KGB started a disinformation campaign in the Western media which sought to advertise him as a secret reformist, “a closet liberal”, a man who, in his heart of hearts, admired Western cultural values, loved jazz, and was by no means the tenacious, obtuse, and dogmatic monster described in previous accounts. In fact, the inflexible Yuri Andropov came to power an exhausted and seriously ill individual– as exhausted and seriously ill as the system that he so badly wished to save. His reforms were modest, half-hearted, lacking vigor and vision, and mainly targeted at strengthening discipline in factories. They did not transcend some trivial doctrinal touch-ups. His formula was “acceleration” (<em>uskorenie</em>).</p>
<p>Andropov was definitely not tempted to encourage the transparency which, under Gorbachev, would become known as glasnost. As secretary general – we learn from Kryuchkov’s memoirs – he opposed the return of the anti-Stalinist party intellectual Aleksandr Yakovlev from the Canadian diplomatic exile. As far as party intellectuals go, he was close to Yevgeny Primakov and Georgy Arbatov, whom he deemed trustworthy not only for party leadership, but also for the KGB. Primakov, the future prime minister of Russia between 1998 and 1999, was probably even an undercover KGB officer.</p>
<p>Andropov personally conducted the frenzied reactions of the official propaganda after the downing of the South Korean airliner in 1983. He died in 1984, mourned by no one except his former KGB underlings, including, most likely, the up-and-coming Vladimir Putin. Perhaps his only merit was promoting Gorbachev, thus speeding up – involuntarily, of course – the ruin of a despotic regime, a totalitarian experiment responsible for the death of over twenty million human beings.</p>
<p>In a rare moment of honesty, Andropov said that there can be no greater error than reopening the public debate on the “accursed question.” He was referring to the Stalin question. Forced by the logic of the struggle for power, Gorbachev reopened this Pandora box and expedited the USSR’s downfall. This denouement was something the KGB abhorred. Years later, Andropov’s fan Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant-colonel, spoke about the end of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the history of the twentieth century.”</p>
<p><em>This essay was broadcast by the Moldovan service of Radio Free Europe. It was translated from Romanian into English by Monica Got.</em></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>NBC Olympics Coverage: Burying Cold War History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/nbc-olympics-coverage-burying-cold-war-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=nbc-olympics-coverage-burying-cold-war-history</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Feb 2014 05:19:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hockey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[miracle on ice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Olympics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219116</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Whitewashing the Evil Empire and the U.S.'s triumphs against it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/miracleonice.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219119" alt="miracleonice" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/miracleonice.jpg" width="263" height="191" /></a>NBC sportscaster Bob “pink-eye” Costas has taken some heat for portraying Russian strongman </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/06/putin-propaganda-nbcs-bob-costas-portrays-russian-leader-as-great-peacemaker/">Vladimir Putin as an amiable and evenhanded diplomat.</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> But that was far from the only snow job in NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics at Sochi.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On Saturday, the United States hockey team defeated Russia 3-2 in game that, by all accounts, equaled the 1980s “Miracle on Ice” in excitement. NBC broadcast the game very early, so the contest doubtless drew a smaller viewership than it deserved. Those who tuned in later for highlights were disappointed.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In their prime-time wrap-up of the day’s events, NBC failed to show any highlights from the 3-2 USA victory. Neither did they show highlights of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice,” at Lake Placid. There a team of American collegians defeated a Soviet team of seasoned professionals, easily on par with the best NHL players and considered a lock for the gold medal. It was as though the junior varsity of Yale or Rutgers had vanquished the mighty Montreal Canadiens in their prime. But none of that for the viewers, even though NBC had on hand Al Michaels, who called the 1980 game and in the closing seconds famously said “do you believe in miracles?”</span></p>
<p>NBC did not have Michaels narrate any highlights from 1980. Instead NBC had him talk about the game. In television talking just doesn’t get it, and Michaels seemed embarrassed not only at the dearth of highlights but the rest of the fare.</p>
<p>Enter Tom Brokaw, not with some memorable moment from the current or past Olympics, of which there are many. The United States also won a gold medal in hockey at the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley, California, beating out the USSR and Canada with a no-name team of amateurs. More than a few from that team are still around, including goalie Jack McCartan. The USA’s 1956 silver medal in hockey was another milestone performance. But Tom Brokaw did not showcase any athletes from any country, and nothing about sports at all.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Instead Tom Brokaw, in his unctuous and marble-mouthed style, inflicted on viewers a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://blog.chron.com/sportsupdate/2014/02/nbc-recounts-u-s-soviet-space-race-in-saturday-documentary-during-olympic-broadcast/">documentary on the “Space Race”</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> between the United States and Soviet Union. The interview subjects included U.S. astronauts John Glenn, Jim Lovell and Tom Stafford, and Soviet cosmonaut Alexi Leonov. Natalya Koroleva, whose father, Sergei Korolev, directed the Soviet space program, also made an appearance.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jim Bell, executive producer of NBC Olympics, said the space race piece would “give our audience a fresh perspective on how the Russian people experienced the race and, to a degree, the Cold War.” And as Brokaw put it, “We went from pointing missiles at each other to exploring the heavens together. The men who pulled it off, cosmonauts and astronauts, all had the right stuff. They became life-long friends. It’s how the world should work all the time.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Brokaw’s piece conveyed the idea that the USA and USSR were simply two large nations trying to outdo each other in space. The implication was that the two nations were more similar than different, which isn’t true.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With all its faults, the USA is a democracy that respects human rights, free speech, free emigration, freedom of worship and other bourgeois trifles. The USSR was a goose-stepping Marxist-Leninist tyranny that repressed all freedoms, murdered millions, imprisoned dissidents, persecuted religious believers, and imposed totalitarian regimes on half of Europe for 50 years. Viewers got no concept of that, nor of the USSR’s quest to colonize the world. That was what the Cold War was about. The USA and the West won that war. The “evil empire,” as Ronald Reagan accurately called it, lost that war. That’s how it actually worked out.</span></p>
<p>NBC’s “fresh perspective” was the latest example of what might be called sickle-cell amnesia, the practice of forgetting any unpleasant realities about the Soviet Union. That is, if NBC bosses knew them in the first place.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, Bob Costas’ puff piece on Putin was a bit too much for David Remnick of the New Yorker. “On the world stage, though, remember he [Putin] is an autocrat,” Remnick said. “He is no democrat. He has no interest in LGBT issues or human rights — all the things that are being discussed.”</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><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" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Why Socialism Is on the Rise</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-socialism-is-on-the-rise/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-socialism-is-on-the-rise</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2014 05:54:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comeback]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214838</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Did the Soviet Union's collapse teach the West nothing?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/de-blasio.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214844" alt="de-blasio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/de-blasio-450x253.jpg" width="315" height="177" /></a>It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression. It&#8217;s taken socialism half that time to come back from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In New York City, avowed socialist Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that his goal is to take &#8220;dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities&#8221; &#8212; the gap between rich and poor. In Seattle, newly elected socialist city Councilmember Kshama Sawant addressed supporters, explaining, &#8220;I wear the badge of socialist with honor.&#8221; To great acclaim from the left, columnist Jesse Myerson of Rolling Stone put out a column telling millennials that they ought to fight for government-guaranteed employment, a universal basic income, collectivization of private property, nationalization of private assets and public banks.</p>
<p>The newly flowering buds of Marxism no longer reside on the fringes. Not when the president of the United States has declared fighting income inequality his chief task as commander in chief. Not when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has said that America faces &#8220;no greater challenge&#8221; than income disparity. Not when MSNBC, The New York Times and the amalgamated pro-Obama media outlets have all declared their mission for 2014 a campaign against rich people.</p>
<p>Less than 20 years ago, former President Bill Clinton, facing reelection, declared &#8220;the era of big government&#8221; over. By 2011, Clinton reversed himself, declaring that it was government&#8217;s role to &#8220;give people the tools and create the conditions to make the most of our lives.&#8221;</p>
<p>So what happened?</p>
<p>Capitalism failed to make a case for itself. Back in 1998, shortly after the world seemed to reach a consensus on the ineffectiveness of socialist schemes, economists Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw wrote that the free market required something beyond mere success: It required &#8220;legitimacy.&#8221; But, said Yergin and Stanislaw, &#8220;a system that takes the pursuit of self-interest and profit as its guiding light does not necessarily satisfy the yearning in the human soul for belief and some higher meaning beyond materialism.&#8221; In other words, they wrote, while Spanish communists would die with the word &#8220;Stalin&#8221; on their lips, &#8220;few people would die with the words &#8216;free markets&#8217; on their lips.&#8221;</p>
<p>The failure to make a moral case for capitalism has doomed capitalism to the status of a perennial backup plan. When people are desperate or wealthy, they turn to socialism; only when they have no other alternative do they embrace the free market. After all, lies about guaranteed security are far more seductive than lectures about personal responsibility.</p>
<p>So what is the moral case for capitalism? It lies in recognition that socialism isn&#8217;t a great idea gone wrong &#8212; it&#8217;s an evil philosophy in action. It isn&#8217;t driven by altruism; it&#8217;s driven by greed and jealousy. Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don&#8217;t give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution. Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness. Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren&#8217;t about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy?</p>
<p>Conservatives talk results when discussing the shortcomings of socialism. They&#8217;re right: Socialism is ineffective, destructive and stunting to the human spirit. But they&#8217;re wrong to abandon the field of morality when discussing the contrast between freedom and control. And it&#8217;s this abandonment &#8212; this perverse laziness &#8212; that has led to socialism&#8217;s comeback, even though within living memory, we have seen continental economies collapse and millions slaughtered in the name of this false god.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><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" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Poverty of Income Inequality</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-poverty-of-income-inequality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-poverty-of-income-inequality</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:30:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real issue is the standard of living.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/df.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213358" alt="df" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/df-450x302.jpg" width="315" height="211" /></a>The left lives from social crisis to social crisis. Now it is leaping nimbly away from its last mess, the great crisis of the uninsured (who have decided to stay uninsured despite Obamacare&#8217;s fines) over to the great crisis of income inequality.</p>
<p>If you believe the left, the leading economic problem that Americans face today is not a lack of jobs or the cost of living, but a crisis of CEO salaries.</p>
<p>The crisis of income inequality, in which some people make a lot more money than everyone else, is irrelevant in an economy where the problem is not that incomes aren&#8217;t high enough, but that they don&#8217;t buy enough, and that there still aren&#8217;t enough jobs at minimum wage or any other wage.</p>
<p>The left’s answer to the high price of medical care wasn&#8217;t to discuss why prices were so high, but to wrap the whole thing in a planned medical economy of price controls and resource limitations administered by death panels whose existence they deny.</p>
<p>Its solution to cost of living issues is to raise the minimum wage. That&#8217;s a slogan that sounds good, because everyone knows more money means more money. At least until you remember that the dollar, like an Obama promise, has no absolute buying power value. And the availability of jobs isn&#8217;t a fixed value either. Raising the minimum wage eliminates jobs and raises the cost of living so that those who keep their jobs now have more money that buys the same amount.</p>
<p>The left’s agenda isn&#8217;t to make life better for the people at the bottom of the economic ladder. It&#8217;s to build up their planned economy with failed solutions that aren’t meant to solve anything. The left&#8217;s solutions don&#8217;t work, because the problem they’re solving isn’t economic inequity, but their own lack of absolute power. And they solve that with economic solutions that fail, necessitating more power grabs until they have complete control.</p>
<p>The progressive solution to income inequality is government intervention. But when has centralization ever produced income equality?</p>
<p>The USSR was the ultimate experiment in central planning. The Soviet Constitution declared, &#8220;The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Soviet Union was supposed to be a classless society. Western leftists assumed that was true. They were wrong. Not only did the Soviet Union have a rigid hierarchy of classes, but<a href="http://akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/"> it also had the same income inequality </a>as any other economy in its class.</p>
<p>After WW2, the wealthiest ten percent of Russians took home <a href="http://akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/">more than seven times</a> as much as the poorest Russians did.</p>
<p>Factory bosses took home 100 times the salary of factory workers. Managers made five times what their employees did. A small percentage of the country wallowed in luxury while a sizable underclass struggled to put food on the table. And these figures are hopelessly inadequate to describe real income inequality in the USSR because most of the real income at the top went unreported because it was derived from corruption and bribery which were and are widespread.</p>
<p>But it wasn&#8217;t income inequality in the USSR that led to poverty and misery. It was the planned economy whose control of the means of production created product shortages by not producing what people wanted, rather what it thought they should have, and whose control over the means of distribution made the black market into the only real source of needed products.</p>
<p>The gap between the rich and the poor matters less than what the poor can buy for their money. That is why the left would rather talk about income inequality than the standard of living. It wants to play around with wealth redistribution, instead of dismantling their programs that make life so expensive. The same hypocrites jabbering about income inequality dream of imposing a Green carbon tax on everyone that will further raise the prices of all goods and services.</p>
<p>The left inflicts poverty and then campaigns against it. It raises the prices of products and the cost of services, it devalues incomes, destroys jobs and raises energy prices… and demands even more regulatory powers so that it can finally solve the poverty mess it creates once and for all.</p>
<p>Even if we assume that income inequality, rather than the standard of living, is the issue to focus on, the worst possible way to achieve it is through more centralization. Free enterprise top 1 and 10 percent incomes are vulnerable to market fluctuations. That&#8217;s not the case in the Socialist sphere where incomes remain high regardless of economic performance.</p>
<p>A CEO who runs a company as badly as Obama runs the country risks his job. Obama risks nothing.</p>
<p>Washington D.C. is a great place to talk about income inequality <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-03-08/local/35446235_1_income-inequality-earners-dc-fiscal-policy-institute">because it has one of the highest </a>levels of income inequality in the country. Obama declared that income inequality is the defining challenge of our time. It&#8217;s a challenge localized in the very cities that voted for him.</p>
<p>Progressives might try to argue that Obama won those cities based on the support of the poor,  but he also <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/man-of-the-people-obama-won-8-of-10-wealthiest-counties/">won 8 of the 10 wealthiest counties</a> in the nation. Not only did he win them, but he won them by margins greater than the national vote. And that shouldn&#8217;t be surprising, since of the wealthiest men in America, numbers one and two were both strong supporters of his campaign.</p>
<p>But the left doesn&#8217;t actually hate the rich. To do that it would have to hate itself.</p>
<p>Occupy Wall Street wasn&#8217;t a bunch of unemployed workers looking for a more compassionate economy. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/study-shows-occupy-wall-street-was-the-1-percent/">A third of the Occupiers</a> had household incomes of six figures. The majority were college grads and 39 percent of the latter had graduate degrees.</p>
<p>The left does hate people who work for a living. The poster child for its childish screeds is Elizabeth Warren, a populist voice of the people <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/woman-of-the-people-elizabeth-warren-buys-740000-condo/">who spent three-quarters of a million</a> on a condo as soon as she got to Washington D.C. and who <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/elizabeth-warren-didnt-get-rich-on-her-own-the-clintons-made-her-rich/">once scored $90,000 from </a>the government for serving as an expert witness.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Warren was right and wrong when she said that no one gets rich on their own. There are people who do get rich on their own. And there are people like her who get rich through their political connections. The left hates people who work for their money and get rich on their own. It loves &#8220;public servants&#8221; like her who get rich off their political connections.</p>
<p>The left argues that the income inequality in this country shows that we have an oligarchy. They&#8217;re right. And they&#8217;re the oligarchy.</p>
<p>In Washington D.C. there is an oligarchy that monopolizes wealth and loots the working people. It&#8217;s a government oligarchy just as it was in the Soviet Union. America doesn&#8217;t have an income inequality problem. It has a government problem.</p>
<p>The growth of government has lowered the standard of living. The <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/44962589">standard of living peaked</a> before Obama took office and fell in the <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/1019/A-long-steep-drop-for-Americans-standard-of-living">sharpest such drop in recorded American</a> history.</p>
<p>The left can shriek about raising the minimum wage all it likes, but the American worker today makes<a href="http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-living-has-fallen-more-than-50-opinion.html"> 57% less an hour than he did in 1970</a>. The left can play its class warfare games, but they cannot and will not restore the standard of living that Americans had in 1970.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><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" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.  </b></p>
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		<title>Health Care for the Pushy and Well Connected</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/health-care-for-the-pushy-and-well-connected/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=health-care-for-the-pushy-and-well-connected</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/health-care-for-the-pushy-and-well-connected/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:20:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[central planners]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209832</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What will the rest of us do?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="start">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/GTY_obama_2obamacare_tk_131021_16x9_992.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209833" alt="GTY_obama_2obamacare_tk_131021_16x9_992" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/GTY_obama_2obamacare_tk_131021_16x9_992-450x340.jpg" width="270" height="204" /></a>So now it turns out Obama knew that 93 million Americans would have their health insurance canceled the whole time he was claiming, &#8220;If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period.&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621571912/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1621571912&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=anncoulter-20">Obama lied. </a><img alt="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=anncoulter-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1621571912" width="1" height="1" border="0" /> Period. &#8220;Hope and Change&#8221; was actually &#8220;A Sucker Is Born Every Minute.&#8221;</p>
<p>Even without <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/31/obama-officials-in-2010-93-million-americans-will-be-unable-to-keep-their-health-plans-under-obamacare/">the 2010 Health and Human Services (HHS) report </a>admitting that 93 million Americans would lose their health insurance, anyone with half a brain (which is a pre-existing condition) knew that millions of Americans would be thrown off their insurance plans under Obamacare. Under the law, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is to determine what every health insurance plan must cover &#8212; and any plans that don&#8217;t are illegal.</p>
<p>As a result, gay guys are now going to be forced to buy plans that cover maternity care. Mormons will have to buy plans that cover gambling addiction therapy. Elderly couples can buy only insurance that includes pediatric dental care. Catholic hospitals will be required to provide birth control and abortions.</p>
<p>Our federal overseers, led by the arrogant and smug gender-feminist Sebelius, know what&#8217;s best for us. (Which is so nice of her since, as she recently pointed out, she doesn&#8217;t work for us.) Her idea of flexibility is not requiring Catholic priests to perform abortions. Not yet, anyway.</p>
</div>
<div id="end">Obviously, health insurance premiums are going through the roof with all these federal mandates. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute reports that health insurance premiums will be higher than before Obamacare in at least 45 states &#8212; an astronomical 256 percent higher in some cases. The Los Angeles Times says middle-income families in California will pay 30 percent more for health insurance, even with the subsidies.Policies are being canceled because your old plan &#8212; the one you shopped for and liked &#8212; is now illegal. It doesn&#8217;t cover Sandra Fluke&#8217;s dental dams. Obama is blaming the insurance companies for discontinuing policies that he made illegal. (At least he isn&#8217;t blaming the cancellations on a guy who put a movie trailer on the Internet this time.)</p>
<p>Isn&#8217;t it your basic duty as a caring human being to buy an expensive health care plan you don&#8217;t really want? Because who knows better about the health care needs of 310 million Americans than a smug gender-feminist? Certainly not you.</p>
<p>And absolutely not your doctor. While campaigning for national health care, our &#8220;Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief&#8221; repeatedly claimed that a doctor would rather amputate your foot or leg and make $50,000 than treat you for diabetes because &#8220;if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that&#8217;s $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 &#8212; immediately the surgeon is reimbursed.&#8221; (Leaving aside Obama&#8217;s unwarranted slander against doctors, Medicare reimburses a surgeon $740 to $1,140 for a leg amputation.)</p>
<p>Why would you want to keep these psycho doctors anyway? Trust Kathleen Sebelius. Under Obamacare, you&#8217;ll get a nice nurse practitioner to attend to your needs &#8212; provided your needs are limited to birth control and psychotherapy. Meanwhile, your doctor will now be offering shoe repair to make ends meet.</p>
<p>Mickey Kaus, a huge supporter of Obamacare, has reacted to its disastrous implementation on his Kausfiles blog by proposing an &#8220;Obamacare Review Commission to monitor the rollout of the exchanges and recommend significant fixes.&#8221;</p>
<p>Why, that&#8217;s almost as good as a &#8220;super-committee&#8221;!</p>
<p>Kaus continues: &#8220;This commission could issue periodic warnings &#8212; this software project isn&#8217;t going fast enough! Death spiral at 3 o&#8217;clock! CMS staff isn&#8217;t up to the job! &#8230; It could suggest that the list of mandated &#8216;essential benefits&#8217; &#8212; including maternity care and pediatric dentistry &#8212; be pared back, which would lower &#8216;sticker shock&#8217; for all. &#8230; Maybe everyone stuck in the individual market should get some subsidy &#8212; $100, $200, $400 &#8212; financed by tax dollars. Maybe the lucky 80 percent or so with employer plans should pay more than the current system asks. Maybe de facto temporary subsidies of the insurance industry should be made explicit and permanent.&#8221;</p>
<p>It gives me a headache just thinking about it. But the government is forcing me to think about it.</p>
<p>The best we can hope for is that influence-peddlers and government bureaucrats make wise decisions about our health care, just as they did with Solyndra, Social Security, public education and the Amtrak food service. Oops! (Only the government could lose billions of dollars with a monopoly.) From the people who brought you the Postal Service &#8230; here&#8217;s Obamacare!</p>
<p>It&#8217;s the homework requirement that is the most annoying aspect of Obamacare. Sure, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance and be forced to buy plans they don&#8217;t want. And many, many millions will no longer be able to go to the doctor of their choosing &#8212; or any doctor at all!</p>
<p>But we&#8217;ve also all been given homework &#8212; mountains of reports, exchanges, insurance plans and mail to study. I&#8217;d prefer a 50 percent tax hike to this forced busy-work under Obamacare.</p>
<p>What if Americans don&#8217;t want to spend weeks online figuring out their new insurance options? What if we don&#8217;t want to provide the government with reams of personal information simply to be able to buy health insurance? What if we just want to pay our doctor directly for a yearly checkup? Why do we have to examine HHS regulations to find out how much that&#8217;s going to cost us in fines and taxes?</p>
<p>Under Obamacare, every day is tax day.</p>
<p>And for what? Eighty-five percent of Americans were happy with their health care before Obamacare, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index &#8212; higher than almost any other product or service polled, with even Amazon coming in at 88 percent satisfaction. Even uninsured Americans were as satisfied with their health care as Canadians were with their national health care.</p>
<p>Kausfiles assured us there would be no death panels or benefits cuts under Obamacare because the voters would rise up and punish politicians if they dared cut our benefits!</p>
<p>What about those of us who don&#8217;t want to be in a constant state of agitation just to get the health care of our choice? Not everyone is better off in a world where the pushy win and the quiet and unassuming die because their rare diseases didn&#8217;t attract a band of noisy lobbyists.</p>
<p>No group of government bureaucrats can substitute for hundreds of millions of Americans making individual choices about their own lives and their own health. It would be as if the government took it upon itself to tell us whom to marry. Only someone who went to Harvard would think central planners should do that.</p>
<p>The smart people in the Soviet Union tried to plan the nation&#8217;s agriculture, and the result was 50 years of &#8220;bad weather.&#8221; And they were dealing with inert objects &#8212; land, seeds and crops.</p>
<p>They didn&#8217;t have to consider whether the fertilizer was a teetotaler who didn&#8217;t anticipate needing substance abuse therapy or a priest who preferred to skimp on marital counseling insurance.</p>
<p>Our central planners think they can direct something infinitely more complex than farmland: human beings and their individual health needs. Under Obamacare, the pushy and the connected win. Everyone else loses.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
</div>
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		<title>Breaking Myths: The Ideas that Ruined Bolshevism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/breaking-myths-the-ideas-that-ruined-bolshevism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=breaking-myths-the-ideas-that-ruined-bolshevism</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Oct 2013 04:25:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gorbachev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leon Aron]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USSR]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206678</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A powerful new book dissects the symbolic matrix of Gorbachev’s revolution.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/lp.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206817" alt="lp" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/lp.jpg" width="264" height="400" /></a>Historian Martin Malia defined the Soviet-type regimes as ideocratic partocracies.  Other authors, including celebrated Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, author of the classical book <i>The Captive Mind</i>, called them logocracies. Ideology was the only legitimizing principle for those corrupt, corruptive, and fundamentally mendacious regimes. The revolutions of 1989-1991 that swept away communist regimes in East-Central Europe and the USSR started, in fact, earlier. What Pope John Paul II called an <i>annus mirabilis</i>, a miraculous year, could not have taken place without the radical changes in the USSR that were initiated and promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev.</p>
<p>Leon Aron’s book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Roads-Temple-Russian-Revolution-1987-1991/dp/0300118449"><i>Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideas in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1977-1991</i> </a>(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012),  a genuine tour de force, is a fascinating chronicle of the main ideas that caused and inspired the revolutionary upheaval in the USSR. A respected student of Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, Aron is the author of a major Yeltsin biography and of numerous articles dealing with Russia’s political culture.  For him, what happened in the USSR between 1987 and 1991 amounted to the complete disbandment of all political myths that had served as justification for the Leninist Leviathan.</p>
<p>Aron is right to highlight what the liberal philosopher, sir Isaiah Berlin, called the power of ideas. In other words, material forces, always emphasized by Marxists, matter, but they are not the only and not even the most significant factor that leads to political revolutions. The Soviet Union had long been in terminal crisis, but this agony could have lasted for many other decades had the revolutionary ideas associated with Gorbachevism not come to fore and imposed a new political vision. Aron contrasts Gorbachev’s ideological revolution to Khrushchev’s half-hearted and inconclusive reforms. The most important distinctions were related to two areas: the imperial identity of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist legacies.  Whereas Khrushchev avoided a radical response to these two challenges, Gorbachev and his supporters moved boldly ahead and engaged in a fundamental overhaul of  the communist party&#8217;s monopoly on power and ideas. <i>Homo Sovieticus </i>was exposed as ideologically bogus, the opposite of classical humanism.</p>
<p>Leon Aron’s main contribution is to luminously retrieve a whole universe of ideas, aspirations, values, emotions, and sentiments put forward by the main proponents of historical fairness, political openness and moral frankness. The book is a superb archeology of what can be called the symbolic matrix of Gorbachev’s revolution. In fact, the philosophy of glasnost, as liberation of mind, developed even before 1987 in the writings of banned authors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vassili Grossman (the great novelist about whom Aron writes with intense empathy).  Its thrust was the absolute opposite of the long-held set of mendacities that formed the foundation of Soviet ideology.</p>
<p>Many of Gorbachev’s close associates were party intellectuals whose political itineraries moved from early infatuation with Stalin and Stalinism, to disappointments and disgust with the bureaucratic despotism, and finally to the deep desire to change the system. Yes, the Gorbachevites did not say it explicitly, pretended that their goals were intra-systemic, but the more they attacked Stalinism’s legacies, the more the revolutionary impetus gathered momentum.</p>
<p>Often called the architect of glasnost, Aleksandr Yakovlev is a main hero in Leon Aron’s captivating discussion of the myth-breaking endeavors of those years. A World War II veteran, recruited into the propaganda apparatus during Stalin’s times, Yakovlev was indeed what is called a child of the 20<sup>th</sup> Congress. This is a reference to the February 1956 party conclave when, during a closed session, Nikita Khrushchev dealt a mortal blow to Stalin’s myth. After that shock, Yakovlev could never accept uncritically the official line, though, for decades, he maintained his doubts for himself and very few confidants.</p>
<p>As an opponent of the increasingly xenophobic direction of Soviet ideology under Leonid Brezhnev, Yakovlev lost his job at the party headquarters (he was the head of the propaganda department) and was sent into diplomatic exile as ambassador to Canada. Gorbachev met him there, was impressed with his intellectual acumen and fresh ideas, and, once in power, brought him to Moscow. Yakovlev became the chief ideologue and, in this quality, was instrumental in allowing for an extraordinary relaxation in cultural life and the launching of radical de-Stalinization. He surrounded himself with other party intellectuals, including many who had worked in Prague at the international journal “World Marxist Review” (the Russian edition was titled “Problems of Peace and Socialism”) and who had been contaminated with neo-Marxist, revisionist ideas, especially regarding the dignity of the individual and universality of human rights.</p>
<p>The Moscow Spring was to a great extent a resumption of the Prague Spring, suppressed by Warsaw Pact tanks in August 1968. Arguably the most anti-Stalinist of all the members of Gorbachev’s entourage, Yakovlev championed the themes of de-Bolshevization, de-ideologization, and democratization. He became the nemesis of party conservatives who organized vicious media attacks on him. Later, after the demise of the USSR, he authored several devastating books about the fundamentally criminal nature of Leninism. He prefaced the Russian edition of the “Black Book of Communism” and chaired the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Terror.</p>
<p>Aron’s book is essentially about the democratic ideas that corroded the Soviet edifice during the Gorbachev revolution. Among those, most important were the rediscovery of human freedom as a non-negotiable, universal value. For more than seven decades, the Soviet utopian experiment was based on duplicity, subservience, conformity, fear, suspicion, and hypocrisy. This dismal moral situation led to rampant cynicism, demoralization, and despair. The book’s title comes from a great film by Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze, “Repentance.” The major question in that masterpiece was human salvation. Redemption is impossible without atonement. Democracy and memory are inseparable. In order to achieve reconciliation, the former tormentors must be subjected to justice. By justice I don&#8217;t mean only legal procedures, but also the  moral indictment of former criminals.</p>
<p>If individuals lost any axiological reference point, they would not be able to find a road to the temple, to the church. They will be, as Polish poet Aleksander Wat, once put it, children in the fog. The men and women of the Russian Revolution, this world-historical event masterfully explored by Leon Aron, looked for a moral and political compass and they found it. All the post-1991 dismay, disenchantment, and dereliction notwithstanding, there was something sublime in that rediscovery of freedom, dignity, and honor. Leon Aron’s book succeeds marvelously in resurrecting what Hannah Arendt called the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Paradigmatic Zek</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-the-paradigmatic-zek/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-the-paradigmatic-zek</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Sep 2013 04:10:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dissident]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gulag]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=202441</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Remembering the dissident who lit moral dynamite under the Soviet myth.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-202445" alt="isolzhe001p1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-274x350.jpg" width="274" height="350" /></a>Five years have passed since the demise, on August 3, 2008, of the great novelist, dissident, and thinker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Forty-five years ago, on August 25, 1968, seven people demonstrated in the Red Square heroically against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, thus ushering in an era of open dissent and ruthless persecutions, including forcible internments into psychiatric institutions. More than twenty years ago, in December 1991, the ideocratic empire called the USSR collapsed. As historian Boris Souvarine, who wrote an unsurpassed Stalin biography, noticed mordantly:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;USSR, four letters, four lies. It was neither a free union, nor Soviet, in the sense of councils&#8217; democracy. Neither was it socialist, if socialism involves social equality, nor a set of republics, in the etymological sense of the term, <em>res publica</em>, an object of civic commitment.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The Solzhenitsyn effect, associated with the publication in the West of his non-fiction monument titled &#8220;The Gulag Archipelago,&#8221; a most devastating indictment of Sovietism, engendered a mutation in the global perception of communism and contributed to the inexorable de-legitimization of totalitarianism. The Soviet myth was dealt a mortal blow. Communist &#8220;humanism&#8221; turned out to be similar to the Nazi one. The Bolshevik &#8220;conscience&#8221; was not different from the Fascist one.</p>
<p>No one has demonstrated more persuasively than Solzhenitsyn the duplicitous, schizophrenic nature of communism, its absolute moral falsity.  His urge for individuals to live within the truth, echoed by Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, founders of Charter 77, was accompanied by his endeavor to expose the terrorist underpinnings of Bolshevism, whatever its incarnations (Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Castro-Guevarism, etc). For Solzhenitsyn, the roots of Bolshevik anti-humanism were linked to its proud embrace of a programmatic, militant atheism. It was, as French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy put it, &#8220;barbarism with a human face.&#8221; Far from being an extenuating circumstance, the humanist pretense was in fact an aggravating one.</p>
<p>Thanks to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the word Gulag has entered current vocabulary as synonymous with the communist concentration camp universe. Romanian thinker intellectual Monica Lovinescu (about whom I <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/truth-memory-dignity-why-does-monica-lovinescu-matter/">wrote here</a>, in FrontPage), once said that if a deluge were to come and she had to choose three books to rescue in order to speak about the totalitarian catastrophes as the hallmark of a century of shame and terror, these would be Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s &#8220;Gulag Archipelago,&#8221; Kostler&#8217;s &#8220;Darkness at Noon,&#8221; and Orwell&#8217;s &#8220;1984.&#8221;  She was right.</p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn was the indomitable chronicler of a century full of genocidal exterminations, impregnated with exacerbated cruelty and infamy. Like Vasilly Grossman, the author of the unforgettable novel &#8220;Life and Fate,&#8221; he explained that totalitarianism would have been impossible in the absence of the monstrously inebriating ideological ingredient:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>“Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied or passed over or suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”</em></p></blockquote>
<p>It was Solzhenitsyn who opened the eyes of millions in the USSR and abroad to the dismal fate of the <em>zeks</em> (concentration camp prisoners). Like Primo Levi who wrote about Auschwitz, Solzhenitsyn documented in immortal prose the struggle for survival under the most atrocious circumstances. Immensely courageous, he challenged the secret police harassment and, in spite of countless obstacles, kept writing. When intimidation and slander turned out to have no effect, the Soviet potentates decided to expel him. In exile, he continued his struggle against oppression and lies. He irritated many in the West with strong criticism of what he decried as rampant mercantilism and moral decay. His onslaught on Western scholarship of Russia and the USSR was ill-informed and unfair. Much of his behavior had something disturbingly Messianic. Yet, his commitment to freedom remained unwavering and his writings belonged to the best tradition of Russian literature. In fact, with all his missteps, including the final accolades to Putin and Putinism, he was one of the great moral consciences of the twentieth century, the epitome of the zek&#8217;s fate and conscience.</p>
<p>He was a giant of Russian and world literature. Max Hayward, Alain Besancon, Claude Lefort, Andre Glucksmann, Monica Lovinescu, Robert Conquest, Pierre Daix, Leo Labedz, Norman Podhoretz, Leonard Shapiro, Efim Etkind, Michael Scammell, Daniel Mahoney and many other praised his writings. The Nobel Prize, disgraced by being granted to the Soviet apologist Mikhail Sholokhov, recovered its honor when offered to Solzhenitsyn. His books, including &#8220;The Cancer Ward,&#8221; &#8220;The First Circle,&#8221; &#8220;The Oak and the Calf,&#8221; &#8220;The Gulag Archipelago,&#8221; and the novel on the Russian Revolutions of 1917 (&#8220;The Red Wheel&#8221;), belong to an enduring thesaurus of dignity.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, by the end of his life, he wrote a book on Russian-Jewish relations which lent itself to charges of anti-Semitism. My main objection is that Solzhenitsyn engaged in historical analysis without a deep knowledge of the appropriate scholarly field and indulged in speculations based on selective and not always reliable sources. He never regarded Bolshevism as an ethnic, specifically Jewish political project, but some of his writings allowed for malevolent and malicious interpretations. He may not have been anti-Semitic, probably was not, yet anti-Semites used his book for their own vicious goals. Let me quote from Natan Sharansky&#8217;s contribution to<a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33533"> a symposium</a> in &#8220;FrontPage&#8221;:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;When I was active in the Soviet dissident movement in the beginning of the 1970s, there were two clear camps. The first was led by Andrei Sakharov and was focused on fighting for universal human rights. The other, led by Solzhenitsyn, was fueled by a strong Russian identity. In a sense, this was a continuation of the classic divide among the Russian intelligentsia between &#8216;Westerners&#8217; and Slavophiles.</em></p>
<p><em>I was fully in the Sakharov camp. I was also part of the Soviet Jewry/Zionist movement, which had serious disagreements with Solzhenitsyn. For instance, he was critical of the Jackson amendment, which was so important for our movement. Whereas Sakharov understood that any expansion of freedom inside the USSR was a victory for the human rights struggle and should therefore be embraced, Solzhenitsyn thought too much energy was being wasted on ensuring freedom of emigration when the entire regime had to go.</em></p>
<p><em>But while the differences between the camps were real and would later, as many of the previous writers correctly mentioned, result in profound disagreements, those differences paled in comparison to our common struggle against Soviet totalitarianism.</em></p>
<p><em>The main challenge for all dissidents – democrats, Zionists, nationalists, etc. – was to convince the West that the Soviet regime was evil and that there was no place for appeasement. In this effort, Solzhenitsyn contributed more than anyone to unmasking that evil. His widely read books had a huge impact, and as a spokesman for the dissident movement, I can tell you that when I mentioned &#8216;The Gulag Archipelago,&#8217; everyone knew what I was talking about. By painting such a vivid and powerful picture of evil, he gave all dissidents an indispensable reference point for our struggle.</em></p>
<p><em>When the Iron Curtain fell, the differences between the camps came to the surface again. On one side were the democrats, heirs to the legacy of Sakharov. On the other was Solzhenitsyn, who put Russian identity first. Against the KGB, the forces of identity and freedom stood on the same side of the barricades. Today, unfortunately they often find themselves on different sides. And Solzhenitsyn was always a champion of identity more than a champion of freedom.</em></p>
<p><em>In a sense, Solzhenitsyn believed that one had to choose between being a man of his people and a man of the world. As I argue in my latest book, Defending Identity, this is a false choice. We can be both, as long as our commitment to our own unique history, people and faith is coupled with a firm commitment to freedom and democracy. For all his great insight, this was something that Solzhenitsyn never saw.</em></p>
<p><em>With Solzhenitsyn, one must also address the issue of anti-Semitism. In the Gulag Archipelago, he writes about some Jews as heads of the camps and in important KGB positions. While this is true, it is clear that he writes about Jewish (and other minority) support for the Soviet regime with a special bitterness and disdain. It is as if he wants his readers to understand that a kind of foreign element oppresses the Russian people.</em></p>
<p><em>In his book, 200 Years Together, he analyzes the history of antisemitism in Russia and of Russian-Jewish relations. Sadly, his explanation of the many anti-Jewish laws and double standards applied towards Jews turns into understanding and even justification.</em></p>
<p><em>But to call him an antisemite would be unjust. His writing stems from a love of his own people rather than a hatred of others. He was more biased in favor of Russia than he was biased against Jews.&#8221;</em></p></blockquote>
<p>A philosopher of dissident action, Solzhenitsyn demystified communism as the dictatorship of lies. For him, like for Anna Akhamatova, Nikolai Berdiayev and Lev Shestov, Bolshevism (an offspring of Marxism), represented a neo-barbaric atheism. In his 1967 letter addressed to the Soviet Writers&#8217; Union, at a moment when he had been turned into a non-person, with no right to publish anything, he asked his former colleagues to give up ideological chimeras and live within the truth. Those words were moral dynamite. Soviet writers ignored him, but critical intellectuals in Czechoslovakia heard him and decided to follow his advise. Writers like Vaclav Havel, Ludvik Vaculik, and Pavel Kohout spelled out their solidarity with Solzhenitsyn. The dissident concept of liberty originated, to a great extent, in his thinking about human honor. Whereas Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov had many disagreements regarding the role of liberalism and pluralism in Russian history, they shared the same unflinching commitment to truth as a non-negotiable value.</p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s novel &#8220;One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,&#8221; published in 1963 with Nikita Khrushchev&#8217;s approval, changed the moral landscape, the ethical compass of literature in the Soviet Bloc. It introduced a new moral matrix, a new grammar of historical knowledge; it made ignorance of the totalitarian evil impossible. It was the first time that the theme of the camps emerged in officially printed prose. Moreover, the main character was a simple Soviet man, not a Bolshevik luminary persecuted by Stalin.</p>
<p>In the West, the effect was also shocking. I would mention the symptomatic case of writer Pierre Daix, editor of the communist weekly “Les Lettres Françaises” (the director was the notorious, though immensely gifted, poet Louis Aragon, an ex-Surrealist converted to Stalinism). In 1949, Daix accused Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko of defamation and lies about the Gulag. It was one of the most publicized trials of that era, a major defeat for the communist propaganda. In 1964, the former zealot Daix wrote the preface to Solzhenitsyn&#8217;s &#8220;One Day.&#8221; In 1968, “Les Lettres Françaises” took the side of the Prague Spring, Daix broke with the French Communist Party and became himself an intellectual dissident.</p>
<p>Whatever his human errors, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remained faithful to the memory of the dead. It took an iron will, an incredible amount of intransigence, a genuine sense of moral urgency, to fight the totalitarian colossus. George Kennan was right, no other writer did as much as Solzhenitsyn in umasking totalitarian despotism. He was the prosecution&#8217;s supreme witness.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Freedom and Kate Upton’s Birthday</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/spyridon-mitsotakis/freedom-and-kate-uptons-birthday/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=freedom-and-kate-uptons-birthday</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/spyridon-mitsotakis/freedom-and-kate-uptons-birthday/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:20:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Spyridon Mitsotakis]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Frederick Upton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kate Upton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Khruschev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193600</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Upton family's unexpected contribution to the cause of liberty. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/kate-upton.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193603" alt="kate-upton" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/kate-upton-450x281.jpg" width="315" height="197" /></a>What are Kate Upton’s politics?  Who knows.  She keeps it to herself.  It is an unnoticed part of her appeal – the fact that one can be a fan of her without having to be wary of some agenda being pushed, or be insulted by arrogant political proselytizing and condescension, is something that is tremendously yet unconsciously appreciated.  She is as decent and classy as she is beautiful.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, while it is expected that she would have critics (who doesn’t?), her detractors have proven time and again to be her antithesis.  They reveal themselves to be absolute losers, and slime balls to their core.  And last week, in which she turned 21, they proved it once again.  By the simple fact of having <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/kate-upton-john-boehner-birthday-song.html" target="_blank">bumped</a> into her uncle, Michigan Congressman Fred Upton, and some of his Republican colleagues in New York, she was accused by <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/kate-upton-celebrates-21-birthday-bash-article-1.1369346?comment=true" target="_blank">anonymous left-wing commenters</a> of a) racism; b) being airheaded; c) not caring about the poor; and other things that shall go unmentioned.  (Ironically, these are – literally – the same morons who destroyed her home state of Michigan.)</p>
<p>But to celebrate her birthday is more than an appreciation of her beauty and grace. It is also a celebration of freedom – because hundreds of millions of people owe their freedom to the Upton family.</p>
<p>The many examples of how the Uptons so greatly contributed to advancement of liberty are too numerous to chronicle in one article. But I wish to highlight just one of the most dramatic – and unexpected – examples.</p>
<p>In what was, as William Safire <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/opinion/24safire.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0" target="_blank">wrote</a>, “one of the great confrontational moments of the cold war … Nikita Khrushchev, bombastic anti-capitalist leader of the Soviet Union, and Richard Nixon, vice president of the United States with the reputation of a hard-line anti-communist, came to rhetorical grips” in the famous “Kitchen Debate” at the 1959 American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow.  Standing inside of a model American kitchen, the Soviet dictator resorted to the debating tactic of screaming at Vice President Nixon about how much better Soviet Communism was than American Capitalism, and all Nixon had to do to win the argument was point to a Washing Machine, the <a href="http://offthebench.nbcsports.com/2012/02/13/wait-kate-uptons-great-grandfather-invented-the-washing-machine/" target="_blank">invention</a> of Frederick Upton 50 years before, to show how much better our system was for the common person.  The Russians who witnessed this spread the news about it throughout the Soviet Union and <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/print/1997-03-31/news/ls-43810_1_iron-curtain" target="_blank">fueled 30 years of discontent</a> over the fact that their Communist system couldn’t produce helpful things like that – they were only able to produce missiles and guns – and they kept demanding change, which is the equivalent of a death sentence to Communist governments.</p>
<p>This is not to say that Frederick Upton, great grandfather of Kate Upton, invented the Washing Machine in 1911 for the purpose of undermining the Soviet Union (which wouldn’t even come into existence for another six years).  The man was simply doing what Americans do: building a product that makes life easier, and selling to those who wanted it.  It was the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith at work.  It just so happened that with this product, Smith’s “invisible hand” would one day be able to reach out and slowly strangle the ghost of Karl Marx.</p>
<p>The collapse of the Soviet Union happened for many reasons – especially once the fight was taken to them by Ronald Reagan (in who’s administration the other Fred Upton, Kate’s uncle, served) – but the fact that life was so demonstrably better in the West served to undercut there claim to their creation of a “worker’s paradise..  Freedom inspires genius, and genius inspires innovation, and innovation inspires a better life.  It’s what America is all about.</p>
<p>Kate herself contributes to this tradition.  When she goes to other places around the world, she becomes a representative of what our society really is – that we are more than what they see and read about coming out of Washington.  That we the people are really, really, awesome.</p>
<p>So three cheers to Kate and her family.  You make us proud.  And ignore the idiot critics – nothing defeats them more than when they see you succeed.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>A Day in the Life of a Russian Christian Dissident</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/faith-j-h-mcdonnell/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-russian-christian-dissident/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-day-in-the-life-of-a-russian-christian-dissident</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 04:38:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Faith J. H. McDonnell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alexander Ogorodnikov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dissident]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gulag]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189885</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The story of one man's relentless heroism in the face of communist terror. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/alexander-ogorodnikov-2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190127" alt="alexander ogorodnikov 2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/alexander-ogorodnikov-2.jpg" width="279" height="420" /></a>Those of us who worry about such things today see Islamist supremacism as the greatest threat to freedom in general and to religious freedom in particular. Not long ago, though, that particular honor belonged to Soviet-style Communism. The Soviet Union seemed unstoppable. And freedom for those who languished in the Gulag? Many prayed for this, but when freedom came it was still quite a shock.</p>
<p>I still remember the shock of joy I felt at the news of the release of one such prisoner in February of 1987. Christian dissident Alexander Ogorodnikov had spent almost nine years in the Gulag for his leadership of the <a href="http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/rcl/08-2_092.pdf">Christian Seminar</a>, an underground movement that had sprung up in answer to the needs of young Christians of many denominations who had found faith in Jesus Christ and were hungry for a way of following Him in their daily lives that the institutional churches could not offer. It was because of this authenticity and practicality that the movement, which encompassed thousands across Russia, so threatened the Communist authorities that they arrested and imprisoned its leaders.</p>
<p>For years advocates had prayed, written letters to Congress, and sent “Return Receipt Requested” missives to Soviet government authorities and Gulag officials on Ogorodnikov’s behalf. At conferences and special gatherings we all added our names and personal messages on letters to Ogorodnikov himself – which he rarely received, but of which the Soviet authorities kept meticulous track.</p>
<p>In late 1986, I was one of a few dozen participants in a <a href="http://libserv23.princeton.edu/princetonperiodicals/cgi-bin/princetonperiodicals?a=d&amp;d=TownTopics19891108-01.2.157&amp;e=-------en-20--1--txt-IN-----">conference</a> at Princeton University, hosted by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-River-Kwai-Ernest-Gordon/dp/0842343563/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1368668207&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=miracle+on+the+river+kwaihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gordon">Dr. Ernest Gordon</a>, retired dean of the school’s chapel, and founder of the Christian Rescue Effort for the Emancipation of Dissidents (CREED). Rolling his R’s in disgust as only a Scotsman can do, Gordon read aloud <a href="http://www.roca.org/OA/63/63d.htm">a letter that Ogorodnikov had written to his mother</a> in May, but only now had reached the West. As a former Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders infantry regiment officer and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243609/">prisoner of the Japanese</a> during WWII, on the Burma Railway, Gordon understood Ogorodnikov’s agony.</p>
<p>Ogorodnikov was in the depths of despair. He had already been in Soviet prison camp for seven and a half years. We were heartbroken as Gordon read how Ogorodnikov begged his mother to appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet to order his execution by firing squad. As an Orthodox Christian, he would not commit suicide. “This is the only way for me to end the prospect of lifelong, painfully slow torture,” Ogorodnikov explained.</p>
<p>Soviet authorities intended to break Ogorodnikov because of his refusal to compromise, be silent, or even leave the Soviet Union rather than be sent to the Gulag as they had suggested when he was arrested in 1978. He suffered from malnutrition and related diseases. As a result of beatings and other mistreatment he was left partially paralyzed in his face and arm. His eyesight was also damaged because of the deliberate darkening of his cell.</p>
<p>Frequently Ogorodnikov was thrown into the <i>shizo</i>, punishment cell, where the temperature was below freezing. He wrote to his mother that he was “systematically deprived of books” and “constantly tortured by hunger and cold.”  He revealed that he was forbidden to pray and that his cross had been brutally torn from his neck 30 times.</p>
<p>“I have spent a total of 659 days on hunger strikes to protest their refusal to let me have a Bible and a prayer book,” he said. Forced feedings were often administered brutally during hunger strikes. The Soviet government had destroyed Ogorodnikov’s marriage to Yelena Levashova, the mother of his son, Dima, pressuring her to leave him by indicating that he would never be free. And they made him feel alone and forgotten by the world and his fellow Christians by keeping from him all the letters that had been sent to him over the years.</p>
<p>There was deep concern over Ogorodnikov’s fate in the notorious Perm Camp 36 if the United States and the world community did not intervene. And the <a href="http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.Download&amp;FileStore_id...">United States</a> and the world did – including President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who successfully linked human rights to national security in their foreign policy. On February 14, 1987, Ogorodnikov was informed that General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had personally ordered his release. Later that year, I met Ogorodnikov – the flesh-and-blood answer to prayer – when he was the surprise guest at Dr. Gordon’s next CREED conference.</p>
<p>After his release, Ogorodnikov never rested. He <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/21/world/freed-dissidents-in-moscow-urge-more-releases.html">fought for justice for other dissidents</a> and raised funds to take care of those who had been physically and/or mentally broken by the Gulag. He also ministered to Armenian refugees who had fled from Islamist-dominated Nagorno-Karabakh. Even in freedom he was constantly harassed by the KGB, but he continued his work. He founded a new political party, the Christian Democratic Party, and an associated organization, the Christian Democratic Union of Russia (CDUR) that established the first private school in the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>In January of 1991, I was part of church two-week mission team to Moscow to encourage and help Ogorodnikov as he prepared to open the first soup kitchen in the Soviet Union. Ogorodnikov took us to see the building that would serve as the new soup kitchen, and he took us to see orphans in State custody that would soon be taken care of in a private, Christian orphanage. Our team provided hundreds of pounds of food to Ogorodnikov and his helpers who were already feeding the homeless on the streets and in the train station and feeding the old-age pensioners in their own flats. Our presence was also a declaration to the Soviet authorities that Ogorodnikov had <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3HAUh5DS_WwC&amp;pg=PA1300&amp;lpg=PA1300&amp;dq=Alexander+Ogorodnikov+U.S.+House+of+Representatives&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=qpTdxXFrMA&amp;sig=4R2DCbq7lbU-A-qtw10MkcP6p1g&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=ko6WUY6-MaP94APg-YCYAQ&amp;ved=0CDwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&amp;q=Alexander%20Ogorodnikov%20U.S.%20House%20of%20Representatives&amp;f=false">friends and supporters</a> of all that he was doing for Russia.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Sasha-and-me1.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-190130 aligncenter" alt="Sasha-and-me" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Sasha-and-me1.jpg" width="320" height="238" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>My meeting with Sasha</strong>.</p>
<p>A new biography <a href="http://www.eerdmans.com/Products/6743/dissident-for-life.aspx"><i>Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia</i></a>, by Koenraad De Wolf (English edition 2013, Eerdmans) is a tribute to Ogorodnikov and all of those steadfast believers – in freedom, in human dignity, in God – “crushed, but not destroyed” by the Soviets. Their oppression and persecution was eloquent testimony, exposing the lies at the foundation of the Communism system and helping to bring down its edifice.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/dfl.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-190129 aligncenter" alt="dfl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/dfl.jpg" width="272" height="408" /></a></p>
<p><i>Dissident for Life</i> brought back all the memories of my own experience of Alexander Ogorodnikov. But it also made me reflect on the significance of that experience as I had never realized while it was happening and wonder what experiences, what relationships in today’s ongoing cosmological fight for our freedom may ultimately be those that will make a similar difference.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The Virtue of Lucidity: Yuri Glazov and the Fate of Communism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:23:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[human nature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mind]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A Soviet dissident's account of totalitarianism's haunting infiltration of the Russian psyche. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/russias1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187405" alt="russia's" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/russias1.jpg" width="280" height="420" /></a><strong>To order <em>Yuri Glazov&#8217;s The Russian Mind Since Stalin&#8217;s Death</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Since-Stalins-Death-Sovietica/dp/9027719691">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In 1985, the USSR seemed immortal. Most of the observers of Soviet affairs were aware of the insuperable systemic tensions (in Hegelian-Marxist parlance, &#8220;contradictions&#8221;), but very few anticipated the regime&#8217;s imminent end. In fact, such insights existed especially among the small and beleaguered dissident enclaves in the Soviet Union itself and in East-Central Europe. Most Western academics, however, were too busy to scrutinize the arcane workings of the Politburo and regarded the dissident activities as marred by romantic daydreaming. Dissidents could be admired, but not taken too seriously. There were exceptions, to be sure, among them Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Conquest, Leo Labedz, Martin Malia, Peter Reddaway, Richard Pipes, Robert C. Tucker and Adam Ulam.</p>
<p>A specialist in Oriental cultures and a professor at Moscow State University, Yuri Glazov (1929-1998) was a noble humanist and a committed democrat. He joined  this quasi-subterranean dissident counter-culture. Because of his heretical views, he was denied the right to teach. Eventually, he left the Soviet Union together with his family and settled in Canada where he taught Russian studies for many years at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His main interests were linked to the role of the Russian intelligentsia in articulating oppositional discourses and strategies, the dynamics of Stalinism and post-Stalinism, and the soul-searching tribulations among those who refused to live within the Big Lie.</p>
<p>Yuri Glazov was among the first scholars to insist on the importance of scrutinizing the psychology of Soviet leaders as a way to fathom how the decision-making process in the Kremlin operates.  Many Western scholars, especially in the 1970s, during the detente era, treated Soviet institutions as similar to those in the West and tried to disregard the pre-eminence of ideology. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Glazov saw ideology as the main underpinning of the  communist dictatorship. Ideology sanctified the absolute falsification of reality, constructed a ritualized super-reality and a pseudo-scientific, in fact mystical vision of history.</p>
<p>He published a truly outstanding book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Since-Stalins-Death-Sovietica/dp/9027719691"><i>The Russian Mind since Stalin&#8217;s Death</i></a>,  in 1985, with D. Reidel Company, a respected academic press.  I read it recently and was struck by his extraordinary prescience and intellectual acumen. Before <em>Glasnost</em> became the ubiquitous buzzword, Glazov identified the search for truth as a subversive method to oppose the system and recover civic dignity. For him the most important psychological feature of Sovietism was the universal sentiment of fear:</p>
<blockquote><p>There is one feeling that people living in non-totalitarian countries are unable adequately to understand: a feeling of fear in a country without law and without justice. This feeling of fear could be read in the eyes and faces; it could be heard in voices and speeches. The feeling of fear destroys the process of communication between people. They say what they do not mean. They hear in other people&#8217;s words what is not meant. Who creates this atmosphere of fear? Who requires it? Can it be kept under control? To what extent does this feeling of fear alter the whole nature of a person?</p></blockquote>
<p>These are disturbingly vital (or, under Soviet conditions, mortal) questions to which Glazov offered remarkably persuasive answers. Fear and mendacity were intertwined in the genesis of what the system aimed at, the New Man, Homo Sovieticus. Communism was not only a political and social revolution, but even more important, it championed an anthropological mutation.</p>
<p>The passage quoted above is from the chapter dealing with the significance of Stalin&#8217;s death for the Soviet political culture. Sixty years have passed since that watershed moment and Stalin&#8217;s ghost continues to haunt the Russian mind. Yuri Glazov&#8217;s illuminating discussion should be read by all those who want to understand the relationship between Stalinism, post-Stalinism, post-Sovietism, and Putinism.  We should keep in mind that he wrote the studies included in that volume years before Mikhail Gorbachev&#8217;s coming to power, when the almost universal consensus was that the Soviet bureaucratic colossus could last for many more decades. Yuri Glazov realized that intellectuals were bound to play a crucial role in the forthcoming changes. In fact, Gorbachevism can be seen as the ideology and practice of the neo-Marxist party intelligentsia.</p>
<p>One of the most provocative chapters deals with Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary in November 1982. Andropov was in fact Gorbachev&#8217;s mentor and it remains to a great extent a mystery how could he ignore the heretical potential in his protégé. For the KGB loyalists, Andropov was the genuine, even the optimal, Soviet leader. No surprise therefore that Vladimir Putin worships him and has encouraged the emergence in recent years of an Andropov mini-cult.</p>
<p>Yuri Glazov&#8217;s enduring analyses converged with those of a major Stalin scholar, Princeton professor Robert C. Tucker, the author of &#8220;The Soviet Political Mind,&#8221; a classic of Soviet studies. Both thinkers understood that, once the ideological zeal was extinct, the system was doomed. The degradation of faith was a decisive catalyst for the demise of the whole system. From the original Marxist-Leninist utopia nothing remained but cynicism, confusion, and disgust with broken promises. For Glazov, the indication of the revolutionary breakdown was the fact that even party bureaucrats were treating the official mythologies as empty, soporific phrases. Nothing captures better the nature of that system than a joke quoted by Yuri Glazov&#8211; Radio Yerevan asks : &#8220;What is Marxism-Leninism, a science or an art? The answer: &#8220;It is probably an art. If it were a science it would have been tried out first on animals.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note: Don&#8217;t miss Vladimir Tismaneanu&#8217;s interview at Frontpage about his new book, <em>The Devil in History</em>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>When Enemies Infiltrated the White House</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/when-enemies-infiltrated-the-white-house/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-enemies-infiltrated-the-white-house</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:56:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harry Dexter White]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Japan]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[How a Soviet mole in FDR's inner circle triggered Pearl Harbor – and its dire relevancy to our conflict today.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/when-enemies-infiltrated-the-white-house/99-1317/" rel="attachment wp-att-180835"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-180835" title="99-1317" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/99-1317.jpg" alt="" width="296" height="240" /></a>On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft delivered a shocking blow to a complacent United States. The losses at Pearl Harbor were heavy, but heavier still was the loss of that sense of distance that had come with the American banishment of European empires from the hemisphere.</p>
<p>Japan had woken a giant and the events of that day led to a changed foreign policy and a changed nation. The impact of that attack would lead the United States to becoming a world power with bases around the world ready to meet any attack. The unspoken element of American foreign policy after that day was to prevent another Pearl Harbor from taking place.</p>
<p>Nearly seven years later, Harry Dexter White, a senior official in the Roosevelt Administration, appeared to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Numerous witnesses, including Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, had implicated White in involvement with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>The House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings were another Pearl Harbor exposing the political vulnerability of the United States to Communist infiltration.</p>
<p>Harry Dexter White, a Harvard PhD and Assistant Treasury Secretary, had played a major role in creating the World Bank and the IMF. Shortly after his testimony, in which he denied all Communist activities, White suffered a heart attack. A few days later he died at his farm after supposedly overdosing on a heart medication that has also at times been used as a poison. Whether that overdose was an accident, a suicide or a murder remains unknown.</p>
<p>In “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596983221">Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor</a>,” John Koster draws a link between the event and the personality, alleging that Harry Dexter White was involved in orchestrating a conspiracy to draw the United States into a war.</p>
<p>There is little doubt that Harry Dexter White had acted as a Communist agent; that much has been confirmed both by American and Soviet intelligence figures. While the newspapers of the day cheered White’s testimony, his involvement and activities are clear and undeniable. And in “Operation Snow,” John Koster adds more information based on declassified documents.</p>
<p>Nor was White alone. The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom were rotten with traitors and fellow travelers. Names such as Alger Hiss and Kim Philby have become signposts on the black road of Communist betrayal.</p>
<p>There is also little doubt that the Soviet Union benefited from Pearl Harbor. Had Japan pushed into Russia, as Hitler wanted it to, then the Soviet Union would have lost the war and the Axis would have been able to finish off the United Kingdom at its leisure, before formulating plans for dealing with the United States.</p>
<p>During this pivotal period, Washington, D.C. was rife with British and Soviet agents closely monitoring the United States government. Of these two groups, the Soviet agents were far more dangerous than their British counterparts like Roald Dahl.</p>
<p>Japan’s interests however lay to the east. Ever since Commodore Perry had sailed into Uraga Harbor, the Land of the Rising Sun had looked to equalize its power relationship with the United States. With the British largely beaten in Asia and the Russians dying in huge numbers, the only power that could still threaten its dominion over Asia was the United States.</p>
<p>Japanese atrocities in China had sickened most Americans. And from a more practical standpoint, America still had significant interests in China and Japanese expansionism would not end there.</p>
<p>An American oil embargo gave Japan only two options; to end its imperial expansion or to attack the United States. The Roosevelt Administration expected Japan to back down, the way that the Clinton Administration expected North Korea to back down and the way that the Obama Administration expects Iran to back down.</p>
<p>The trouble with such ultimatums is that genuine aggressors rarely back down. Instead they attack.</p>
<p>In “Operation Snow,” Koster describes White’s push for maintaining the oil embargo on Japan as a ploy for drawing Japan into a war. Communist agents certainly did a great deal of damage during that period and Harry Dexter White no doubt contributed to the tensions between America and Japan, but the war was also largely inevitable.</p>
<p>Japanese militarists had been planning a war with the United States for some time, and even if the breaking point had not been reached on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, it would have happened somewhere else. The outcome of the war might have been different, but there is little doubt that at some point America and Japan would have collided in the Pacific.</p>
<p>While “Operation Snow” is an excellent assessment of Communist intrigues in the United States and sheds new light on the activities of Harry Dexter White, a subject that has long been neglected, it lacks an equal willingness to directly examine the ruthlessness and hunger for war on the Japanese side.</p>
<p>Koster suggests that Emperor Hirohito risked assassination by his own officers. This is highly unlikely to have happened at the hands of the military establishment, as opposed to rogue Communist officers, regardless of the provocation. Even during the Kyujo Incident, there was no serious thought given to harming the emperor. And if the Japanese military could not harm Emperor Hirohito even as he was preparing to surrender to the United States, it is highly unlikely that they could have harmed him over earlier more moderate efforts at averting war.</p>
<p>Imperial Japan was not compelled into war with the United States. Nor was it unjustly victimized in that war. Japanese war planners had overestimated their odds of victory, but they understood that the road they were walking would end in war. And they were prepared to commit every conceivable atrocity within the scope of that war. To the last days of the war, the Japanese military establishment that began the war could not conceive of turning back. Those who did quickly fell out of favor and lost influence.</p>
<p>Imperial Japan, like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, wanted national greatness, international power and territorial expansion at any cost. They were willing to kill millions to achieve their goals, and while they lost their conquests, the millions did die.</p>
<p>During those crucial decades the United States was largely blind to the threat of the Soviet Union, but it was less blind to the threat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.</p>
<p>Had the United States been as aware of the third threat as it was of the first two, then China might have become a free nation and Eastern Europe would have been free to develop along with Western Europe.</p>
<p>Communist agents like Harry Dexter White were instrumental in preventing the United States from becoming aware of that third threat. And the willingness of leading government officials to blind their societies to that third threat foreshadowed the troubles with Islam that we face today.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone’s Cold War Melodrama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jan 2013 04:30:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Hate-America documentary series blames the U.S. for Soviet expansionism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/showposter/" rel="attachment wp-att-172365"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-172365" title="showposter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/showposter.jpg" alt="" width="298" height="282" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the fourth installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States,” currently airing Mondays on Showtime. Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 4 of Stone’s series.</em></p>
<p>Oliver Stone is the mastodon of the La Brea tar pits of left-wing ideology. In his movies over the years he has recycled stale left-wing narratives with all the nuance and complexity of a Soviet-era <em>Pravda</em> editorial. Now he has brought his agitprop gifts to cable television in the Showtime series “The Untold History of the United States.” In episode 4, “The Cold War: 1945-50,” Stone once again tells the fossilized and duplicitous tale of America’s greed and aggression against a Soviet Union that just wanted to get along with its war-time ally.</p>
<p>Those of a certain age will recognize the story Stone tells, for it was dominant among left-wingers all the way up to the day the Soviet Union collapsed into the dustbin of history, and still can be found among diehard true believers. In this rewriting of history, the Soviet Union had been a stalwart ally during World War II, bearing the brunt of the fight against Nazism and suffering 27,000,000 dead. In 1945, the possibility of continuing cooperation between the West and the Soviets was destroyed by America’s aim to use its overwhelming economic and military power to dominate the world and to destroy the socialist and communist challenges to its hegemony. Winston Churchill is one of the villains in this story. Eager as he was to maintain the British Empire, Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri represented to Stone a “quantum leap in bellicosity” against the Soviets.</p>
<p>President Harry Truman also took a hard-line against the Soviet Union and the democratically elected communist parties in France and Italy, and in 1948 helped England to crush a “popular leftist” government in Greece. This aggression, camouflaged as the  “Truman Doctrine,” against a wartime ally was rationalized by propagating what Stone calls the false “image of the Soviet Union out to conquer the world.” In fact, Stone explains, the Soviets––“stunned” by Truman’s bellicosity–– were simply trying to rebuild their war-shattered country and alleviate its “crushing poverty,” defend their western borders against their historical enemy Germany, and seek the “warm water ports” necessary for their geopolitical interests. Ignoring these understandable needs, Truman bullied the Soviet Union, using nuclear blackmail to drive them from Iran, forcing Germany to cut off reparation payments, and continuing to test nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Fearful of Truman’s imperialist expansionism, the Soviets responded to intervention in Greece with a coup in Hungary, and imposed on its Eastern European satellites a “new and stricter order,” as Stone euphemizes the brutal totalitarian regimes imposed on Eastern Europe. The hero in Stone’s tale is communist fellow traveler Henry Wallace, who “tried to put a stop to the growing madness,” but was spied upon and denigrated by the Truman administration, ending any chance of stopping the “nuclear arms race.” Yet fearful of the “Republican right,” Truman at home instituted surveillance of suspected “subversives,” demanded loyalty oaths, and investigated suspected communists in Hollywood and unions, thus pandering to the irrational fear of communism widespread among Americans vulnerable to the machinations of capitalist overlords. What followed this “red scare” were anti-communist propaganda in movies, and the “witch hunts” conducted by the FBI and CIA, “capitalism’s invisible army,” as Stone calls it.</p>
<p>So goes Stone’s melodrama, in which peace-loving Soviets are driven to occupation and subversion by the imperialist hegemonic ambitions of a United States eager to become the world’s dominant power in order to maximize capitalist profits. Every Soviet move is explained as a natural response to American provocations and aggression. Thus the Soviets overturned the Czech government and installed a puppet regime in 1948, a “purely defensive move,” Stone explains, because the Czech acceptance of Marshall aid was understandably seen as a tool of American penetration. This is the same stale apologetics for tyranny that I remember parroting in my left-wing callow youth, and it will only impress those who are as ignorant of historical fact as I was then. And it works, as most bad history does, by omitting inconvenient truths.</p>
<p>Take, for example, Stone’s central justifying assumption: the implication that the West’s fear of Soviet plans for “world domination” was a paranoid fantasy manipulated by the U.S. government to further its own ambitions to control the world. To believe this requires not only ignoring or explaining away, as Stone does, the decades of mass murder and brutal tyranny perpetrated by Soviet leaders in thrall to an expansionist ideology, but also forgetting the words of Soviet leaders themselves.</p>
<p>In fact, as the great historian of Soviet tyranny <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Ravaged-Century-Robert-Conquest/dp/0393320863/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1357497875&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=robert+conquest">Robert Conquest</a> writes, “The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of [the] Cold War.” Thus there “was never any question of a permanent accommodation between the USSR and the ‘capitalist’ world.” Any “temporary relaxation, a reining back, of the ideology’s inherent expansionism” was strictly tactical, a delay made necessary by Soviet weakness, as in the period following World War II. As Stalin said in 1945, “We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.” In that same year, Deputy Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, in response to ambassador Averell Harriman’s question what the West could do to satisfy Stalin, answered, “Nothing.” In 1946 Litvinov told a Western journalist that the “root cause” of the confrontation with the West was the view in Russia that such a conflict was “inevitable.”</p>
<p>The ultimate triumph of communism was the supreme goal of Soviet foreign policy, as codified by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. In 1968––the year the Soviets brutally crushed the liberal democratic uprising in Czechoslovakia known as the Prague Spring––Gromyko said that “the range of our country’s international interests is not determined by its geographical position alone,” and “despite an acute situation, however far away it appears from our country, the Soviet Union’s reaction is to be expected in all capitals of the world.” Later in his 1975 book <em>The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union</em>, Gromyko wrote, “The Communist Party subordinates all its theoretical and practical activities in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.” So too General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who said, “Our Party has always warned that in the ideological field there can be no peaceful coexistence” with capitalist countries. In 1972 he added regarding the policy of détente, “While pressing for the assertion of the principle of peaceful coexistence, we realize that successes in this important matter in no way signify the possibility of weakening our ideological struggle. On the contrary, we should be prepared for an intensification of this struggle and for its becoming an increasingly acute form of struggle between the two social systems.” This belief had been consistent with Soviet communism ever since Lenin proclaimed a necessary “series of frightful clashes” between communism and capitalism, and so cannot be explained away, as Stone attempts to do, as defensive reaction to American aggression.</p>
<p>It seems, then, that Stone’s paranoid anti-communists like Truman had a valid point, one confirmed by the extensive Soviet spying and subversion that in fact took place in America, as well as the violent subjection and oppression of other countries across the globe. It also explains the point made by historian Richard Pipes in 1975, and confirmed by documents from Soviet archives accessible after the regime’s collapse, that despite protests to the contrary, the Soviet regime was prepared to fight and win a nuclear war. As Soviet official V.V. Zagladin said in 1988, “Repudiating nuclear war and conducting an active struggle for peace, we nevertheless proceeded from the assumption of the possibility of victory in a possible conflict.” Conquest adds, “The Communist armies, as we now know, were on a very short notice for an invasion of West Germany, with the certainty of a tactical nuclear exchange. And military thinking in Moscow inclined to a view that nuclear war, while to be avoided, was winnable.” Given these beliefs, the U.S. aim to maintain superiority in armaments, derided at the time as a dangerous “arms race,” and to resist communist expansion across the globe were necessary for peace and American security.</p>
<p>This evidence of Soviet ideologically driven expansionism destroys the central assumption of Stone’s apologetic narrative: that the West overreacted irrationally against the understandable foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, thus instigating reciprocal overreactions by the Soviets. Many other distortions of history, of course, riddle the film. The implication that the Soviet Union was a friendly ally during World War II is absurd. Stone neglects to mention that in August 1939 Stalin signed a treaty with Hitler and for nearly two years provided much needed resources to Germany until Hitler invaded Russia. Stalin became our ally on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and cooperated with the West not on principle but in order to survive and to receive much-needed aid. The explanation of Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets in 1948 as fueled by American subversion and support of fascists ignores the 5 million Ukrainians slaughtered by Stalin before the war during the terror-famine campaign of 1932-33. In his encomium to Henry Wallace, Stone doesn’t tell us that Wallace’s Progressive Party was mostly a creation of a Communist Party that took its money and marching orders from Moscow, and that Wallace’s candidacy according to one writer was “the closest the Soviet Union ever came to actually choosing a president of the United States.”</p>
<p>Stone’s film is a tired reprise of decades of apologetic revisionist history on the part of leftist radicals who subordinate truth to ideology. Yet we should not dismiss it as unimportant or without consequence. As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr––two historians whose <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Historians-Communism-Espionage/dp/159403088X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1357498182&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=in+denial+haynes">studies</a> of Soviet archives provide the evidence of communist subversion ignored by Stone and others––write, “Communism as a social fact is dead. But communism as a pleasant figment of the ‘progressive’ worldview lives on, giving a phantom life to the illusions and historical distortions that sustained that murderous and oppressive ideology. The intellectual Cold War, alas, is not over. Academic revisionists who color the history of American communism in benign hues see their teaching and writing as the preparation of a new crop of radicals for the task of overthrowing American capitalism and its democratic constitutional order in the name of social justice and peace. Continuing to fight the Cold War in history, they intend to reverse the victory of the West and convince the next generation that the wrong side won, and to prepare the way for a new struggle.” In the age of Obama, this warning is more important than ever.</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone’s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton’s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">Matthew Vadum’s review</a> of Stone’s first episode.</p>
<p>3. Daniel Flynn&#8217;s review of &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace</a>,&#8221; the second episode.</p>
<p>4. Daniel Greenfield’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">review of “The Bomb,”</a> the third episode.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>&#8216;Skyfall&#8217; Returns to &#8216;Bond&#8217; Roots</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dr-joseph-a-yeager/skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:30:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Joseph A. Yeager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bond]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Britain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daniel Craig]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marxism]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Skyfall]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=165268</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New movie is a gift to Brits who still love Queen and country. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dr-joseph-a-yeager/skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots/skyfall_11_h/" rel="attachment wp-att-165689"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-165689" title="Skyfall_11_h" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Skyfall_11_h-450x321.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="225" /></a>Quantum of Solace, the 22nd film in the venerable James Bond series, was arguably the most innovative of them all. Rejecting the ethos that defined Bond’s universe from Ian Fleming&#8217;s Casino Royale, published in 1953, to its cinematic incarnation in 2006, Quantum of Solace presented a bleak, manichean view of geopolitics wherein a greedy West, with willing assistance from a shadowy organization called Quantum, plundered an innocent and helpless third world. There were bows to Marxism, broadsides against capitalism, and shots across the bridge of the CIA.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say Quantum of Solace wore its cynical politics on its sleeve. A red sleeve.</p>
<p>But the ideology of the politics was less innovative than their mere introduction.</p>
<p>Bond films had always been notable for their apolitical tone. Born in 1962, the very apogee of the Cold War, Bond films nevertheless largely steered clear of political shoals. Yes, James Bond, the &#8220;Queen&#8217;s loyal terrier,&#8221; was basically patriotic and the Soviet Union was sometimes obliquely depicted as inimical, but by the standards of the age, politics were conspicuously muted.</p>
<p>That all changed with Quantum of Solace. And it changed in a postcolonial, postmodern manner that would not have pleased founding producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, let alone Ian Fleming, the man who authored it all.</p>
<p>Longstanding Bond observers surely wondered, had current producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, under the influence of Paul Haggis and Marc Forster, permanently turned James Bond against queen and country? (Historian <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2008/11/quantum-of-anti-imperialism.html">Juan Cole</a> gleefully suggested something to that effect.)</p>
<p>But Skyfall, the follow-up to Quantum of Solace, answers the query with a thunderous no.</p>
<p>Skyfall’s plot, for the film’s first half, is murky and nebulous. We learn that villains of some sort have acquired a list of Western agents embedded in terrorist organizations around the globe. We see those agents exposed, to mortal effect, on Youtube. And we witness a bomb blast at MI6 headquarters. But as they used to say in old England, what was it all in aid of?</p>
<p>The shroud is lifted after agent 007 and his MI6 cohort capture arch-foe Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) and extradite him to the UK. Under interrogation, Silva relates his past as an MI6 agent in Hong Kong where, under orders from intelligence chief M (Judi Dench), he was hung out to dry, captured by the Chinese and tortured forte et dure. Silva attempted suicide by crushing a cyanide capsule lodged in a tooth, but the poison, rather than kill its consumer, merely scarred and disfigured him, physically and mentally.</p>
<p>Silva then, unhinged by the experience, has himself become a cyberterrorist bent on murdering M and destroying the organization she controls. From this point on, Skyfall offers a chiseled, linear and straightforward quest for revenge by Silva, coupled to James Bond’s exhaustive and frenzied efforts to thwart and destroy the malign shade of missions past.</p>
<p>Director Sam Mendes realizes the tale at a very high level. While Skyfall drags slightly in the middle, the tension and suspense mount exponentially and resolve in a slam-bang ending that is equal parts action and tragedy. The post-climax coda is a bittersweet and valedictory brew tinctured with optimistic revivification. It all packs a whipsawing wallop of conflicting emotions calculated to leave the audience with a certain sense of pride and good cheer.</p>
<p>Skyfall is a beautifully crafted film. Its cinematography, in contrast to that of Quantum of Solace, leans to the beautiful and the picturesque. Aerial shots of Shanghai at night are breathtaking and contrast powerfully with the stark Scottish landscape where the final pitched battle occurs.</p>
<p>The editing is old school. Contra Quantum of Solace, scenes unfold in a leisurely manner and cameras linger. Even the action sequences, jolting as they are, nevertheless do not disorient through rapid-fire, chaotic edits, as they did in Skyfall’s predecessor.</p>
<p>Acting in Skyfall is top-class. Daniel Craig, already the last word in Bondian toughness, manages to ratchet up his hard-bitten masculinity yet another notch.</p>
<p>Bardem’s Silva will go down in Bond lore as the creepiest villain in series history to date. Silva is an entirely different personality from No County for Old Men’s legendary Anton Chiguhr, but inspires a similar unease and dread.</p>
<p>The criminally underutilized Berenice Marlohe, in the role of distressed dame Severine, delivers a quirkily spellbinding performance. Her giddily terrified interchange with Bond in a Macao casino may be the highlight of the film.</p>
<p>Dame Judi Dench, in her final—and most extensive—turn as M, departs on a note that will draw attention from Oscar voters. She is careworn and fragile, yet also pugnacious and determined. It is an appealing and highly sympathetic performance that sets the audience up for heartbreak rarely realized so powerfully in action and adventure films.</p>
<p>But Skyfall’s unmistakable rejection of the astigmatic pathos and the pernicious self-loathing found in Quantum of Solace is what defines this film.</p>
<p>Skyfall is unabashedly patriotic. Bond, confronted by a mocking Silva, cockily tosses his love of country in the villain’s face. Union Jacks fly. The English bulldog, the four-legged twin of Winston Churchill and talismanic symbol of British tenacity, features prominently. Hence, a ceramic bulldog improbably survives the explosion in M’s MI6 office. M wills the bulldog to Bond. When Bond unwrapped M’s symbolic bequest, the audience in my west Texas theatre erupted in cheers and applause. One can only imagine the response in England itself.</p>
<p>Skyfall venerates tradition and it honors the aged. Bond is twice labeled old-fashioned and on both occasions accepts the jibe as a badge of pride. Judi Dench, the septuagenarian warhorse, is every bit as heroic as Bond himself. What’s more, she pairs with an equally elderly Kincade (Albert Finney) at Bond’s childhood home (named Skyfall), as silver tigers pitched against Silva and his battalion of young cyber-savages. The homage to a generation rapidly disappearing is as touching as it is unthinkable had Quantum of Solace been the template for future Bond films.</p>
<p>Skyfall is an archaizing, historically literate Bond film. The Reformation is mentioned in the context of Bond’s childhood estate of Skyfall. Winston Churchill is referenced when MI6, hoping to avoid another attack from Silva, relocates to the ancient subterranean passages of London. M quotes verses from Tennyson. Adele’s portentous title track could have been written for Shirley Bassey or Nancy Sinatra. Bond pulls his 1964 Aston Martin out of mothballs to spirit M away to Skyfall. He shaves—and is shaved—with a straight razor. The new Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) states that sometimes the old ways are better. Bond’s most technologically sophisticated gadget is a radio transmitter. A monocle and a trilby would not have gone amiss.</p>
<p>This film, much like Fleming’s novels published in austere, post-war Great Britain, is powerful medicine for British spirits at low ebb. Skyfall suggests that Great Britain’s past should not be scorned and reviled. On the contrary, there is much in the nation’s history and traditional culture that should be admired and even revived. For a people steeped in the rituals of masochistic flagellation, Skyfall is a corrective absolution. It is a gift to the people of the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>The 23<sup>rd</sup> instantiation of cinematic James Bond leaves the series with a new roster of dramatis personae. In addition to the above-mentioned Harris in the role of Moneypenny, Ralph Fiennes moves into Dench’s seat as M, and Ben Whishaw revives the role of Q made famous by Desmond Llewellyn. James Bond is thus recharged, rearmed and poised to extend his astonishing half-century run. It’s not out of the question that he could outlive the nation that gave him birth. Then again, the new, old James Bond offers hints for how to revive and prolong Britannia. It is up to the Brits to listen.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Professor Grover Furr Praises Stalin, Claims He Never Committed &#8216;One Crime&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/gabriella-hoffman/professor-praises-stalin-claims-he-never-committed-one-crime/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=professor-praises-stalin-claims-he-never-committed-one-crime</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2012 04:25:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gabriella Hoffman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genocide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[grover furr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[joseph stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164096</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Public university faculty member engages in profane rant defending a genocidal communist tyrant. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4490">CampusReform.org</a>.</strong></p>
<p><iframe width="610" height="343" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/hRPTZF5zSLQ?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>A professor at a public university recently denied Soviet Union Leader Joseph Stalin was responsible for the murder of millions, saying he has “yet to find one crime – one crime that Stalin committed.”</p>
<p>“I know they say he killed 20, 30, 40 million people,” continued Grover Furr, a professor in Medieval English at Montclair State University.</p>
<p>“It’s bullshit.”</p>
<p>Grover Furr of Montclair State University said he has yet to find “one crime that Stalin committed.”</p>
<p>Furr made the comments at a campus debate featuring three individuals supposedly representing conservative, liberal, and libertarian political views.</p>
<p>Following the debate, a student pressed Furr on his comments reminding the professor that most historians believe “100 to 150 million people [were] killed by communist regimes.”</p>
<p>The professor, however, doubled down on his original comment.</p>
<p>“What you said is bullshit,” said Furr.  “It’s wrong. It’s a lie.”</p>
<p>“The history of the Soviet Union is the most falsified,” he added.</p>
<p>The consensus among most historians whether liberal or conservative, is that Stalin was responsible for the persecution and execution of millions in the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/04/world/major-soviet-paper-says-20-million-died-as-victims-of-stalin.html">Soviet weekly newspaper</a> put the total dead as a result of Stalin’s repressions at about 40 million people. A <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/september/naimark-stalin-genocide-092310.html">recent book</a> authored by Stanford Professor of History Norman Naimark even argues that Stalin committed multiple genocides.</p>
<p>“It’s a horrific case of genocide,” said Naimark. “In some cases, a quota was established for the number to be executed, the number to be arrested.”</p>
<p>Furr, who has authored several books on the topic of Marxism, also insisted that the United States has the lowest standard of living among industrialized developed countries.</p>
<p>Furr, nor a university spokesperson, could be immediately reached for comment by Campus Reform.</p>
<p>Other panelists included libertarian professor Yuri Maltsev and conservative professor David Tubbs. The debate was sponsored by the Young Americans for Liberty.</p>
<p><em>Follow the author of this article on twitter: </em><a href="http://twitter.com/Gabby_Hoffman"><em>@Gabby_Hoffman</em></a></p>
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		<title>Uncertain Future for Western Influence in Eastern Europe</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/uncertain-future-for-western-influence-in-eastern-europe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=uncertain-future-for-western-influence-in-eastern-europe</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Oct 2012 04:03:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Parliament]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republic of Georgia]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Election results in the Republic of Georgia stoke fears of rising Russian sway over its old stomping grounds. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/georgia-election_.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146913" title="georgia-election_" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/georgia-election_.gif" alt="" width="375" height="260" /></a>While most of the American media remains fixated on Libya, the Obama administration just got slapped by what is likely to be another dose of unpleasant reality on the foreign policy front. Billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili&#8217;s opposition coalition has <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-01/georgian-president-saakashvili-suffers-surprise-election-setback">defeated</a> U.S.-backed President Mikheil Saakashvili in the nation of Georgia&#8217;s recent parliamentary election. &#8220;It’s clear from the preliminary results that the opposition has the lead and it should form the government. And I as president should help them with this,&#8221; said Saakashvili, as he <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/daaa2a5a-0c65-11e2-a776-00144feabdc0.html#axzz288wUQkmn">conceded</a> defeat early on.</p>
<p>The election results in Georgia&#8217;s parliamentary system of governance mean that Ivanishvili will now assume the post of prime minister. Saakashvili will remain president until presidential elections are held in October 2013, at which point he must stand down after having served two terms in office. During that same period, Georgia&#8217;s new constitution will transfer presidential powers to the prime minister, likely making Ivanishvili the most powerful man in the country as a result.</p>
<p>This election marks the first time Georgia has witnessed a peaceful transfer of power since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Previous transfers occurred as the result of revolutions or armed uprisings. Saakashvili had risen to power in the 2003 Rose Revolution, when the government of President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet minister of foreign affairs, was forced out of power.</p>
<p>During his tenure as president Saakashvili helped to foster an economic turnaround in Georgia and, just as importantly, helped guide the nation towards the West and away from their history of Soviet subjugation. That effort hit a serious speed bump in 2008, when Russia <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/12/AR2008081200365.html?hpid=topnews">precipitated</a> a five day tank and bomber assault that &#8220;freed&#8221; the  secession-minded provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgian rule. Both regions <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/russian_president_names_special_representatives_for_abkhazia_south_ossetia/24527897.html">remain</a> independent states, but are now well within the Russian sphere of influence.</p>
<p>As a result of this election, that sphere of influence just might include the rest of Georgia. Saakashvili&#8217;s supporters have characterized Ivanishvili as a &#8220;Russian stooge,&#8221; based on his promises to forge closer ties with Moscow. No doubt those promises are due in large part to the fact that Ivanishvili has amassed a fortune from Russian investments: Forbes <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/boris-ivanishvili/">puts</a> the figure $6.4 billion. For perspective&#8217;s sake, it should be noted that Georgia&#8217;s national budget in 2011 <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62604">was</a> $3.98 billion. Thus, it is unsurprising that Ivanishvili, who had spent years <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/23/georgia-saakashvili-the-prison-abuse-videos-and-the-election.html">spreading</a> his wealth among such entities as the Georgian Orthodox Church, various arts organizations, and charitable causes in his home region of Imereti, was able to put a viable coalition together, despite entering the political arena as recently as last year. Equally unsurprising, was Saakashvili&#8217;s claim that although he considered the election to be fair, Ivanishvili was able to &#8220;buy&#8221; the political process.</p>
<p>Yet Mr. Ivanishvili, who has criticized Saakashvili&#8217;s hostility towards Russia, refuted those claims. At a news conference following the election he said that Georgia was still <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/world/europe/georgia-election-results.html">aiming</a> for NATO membership, even though he hoped to improve relationships with Russia. “Nothing will disturb our strategy&#8211;our strategic direction is NATO,” he said, further claiming there would be no contact with the Kremlin. “Georgia cannot be a big geopolitical player, as Saakashvili said. We should be a regional player,” he added. As for the election results, Ivanishvili contended Saakashvili had no one but himself to blame. “We had great hopes when he came in. He studied in America; we thought he had an American mentality. But he turned from a democrat into an autocrat. He turned into an authoritarian.”</p>
<p>Yet there are still logistical problems Ivanishvili will have to iron out. The election was bitterly fought, and the two leaders must figure out a way to share power at least until 2013. It also remains to be seen if the the disparate six-party coalition that forms the Georgian Dream can hold itself together. And then there is the Georgian voting system which elects candidates by two methods: 77 out of 150 parliamentary seats in total are decided by the proportional, party list method, while the other 73 seats are secured by a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_voting_system#First_past_the_post">&#8220;first-past-the-post&#8221;</a> methods of voting, in which the first candidate to receive a plurality of votes is declared the winner. According to Georgia&#8217;s Central Electoral Commission (CEC) rival blocs are running &#8220;neck-and-neck&#8221; among the 73 first-past-the-post constituencies. This means it&#8217;s possible that the current ruling party could still maintain a majority, even if it loses the popular vote.</p>
<p>Post-election bitterness may be the key factor in determining all of the above. Like many U.S. elections, there was a late-inning, game-changing &#8220;surprise&#8221; that turned a lead of more than 20 percentage points held by Saakashvili’s party last month into this stunning result. On September 18th, a series of smuggled videos showing prison inmates being beaten and sodomized by their guards in a Tbilisi jail <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444549204578022444084020524.html">appeared</a> on the scene. Saakashvili responded by arresting penal officials, firing his ministers of prisons and the interior, and releasing details of dubious financing surrounding the videos. He even suggested the videos had been staged. Yet the anti-government protests that erupted almost immediately apparently took their toll.</p>
<p>Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe characterized the election results as legitimate. &#8220;Despite the very polarized campaign that included harsh rhetoric and shortcomings, the Georgian people have freely expressed their will at the ballot box,” the OSCE reported. “The process has shown a healthy respect for fundamental freedoms at the heart of democratic elections, and we expect the final count will reflect the choice of the voters.”</p>
<p>Yet Mark Mullen, chairman of Transparency International Georgia, was somewhat less optimistic. ‘‘If we see some form of power sharing&#8211;and it looks like one way or another it’s gonna have to happen&#8211;it’s going to be really unprecedented,” he said.</p>
<p>The new government will not be short of suitors. Russia and the EU will compete with America for the affections of a nation whose three major pipelines allow for the flow of gas and oil to the Black Sea and Turkey from neighboring Azerbaijan&#8211;bypassing Russia in the process. As recently as the middle of last month, Russia was <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/13/caspian-pipeline-plan-russia-european-union_n_960450.html">angered</a> by an EU offer to broker talks between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan aimed at creating a trans-Caspian pipeline that would deliver fuel to the West. That deal would reduce Russia&#8217;s current leverage, and make recurring disputes between Russia and the Ukraine&#8211;which have led to fuel cutoffs in Europe&#8211;less problematic.</p>
<p>With regard to the U.S., despite Ivanishvili&#8217;s stated intention to continue pursuing NATO membership, there is little doubt that the defeat of the staunchly-pro-American Saakashvili represents a setback for U.S. interests in the region. It is no secret that Vladimir Putin wants to <a href="http://endthelie.com/2011/10/05/putin-wants-eurasian-union-to-compete-with-eu-and-us/#axzz289xXdjmi">build</a> a Eurasian Union &#8220;capable of becoming one of the poles in the modern world.” It is also no secret that the Obama administration, via its &#8220;reset button&#8221; strategy, has been more than accommodating in return. Whether or not the fledgling, and promising, Republic of Georgia will fall back into the influence of corrupt Russian hegemony remains to be seen.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>A President&#8217;s Appeasement Politics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/appeasement-politics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=appeasement-politics</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/appeasement-politics/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 May 2012 04:25:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Will Durant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=132671</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Lessons from U.S./Soviet history expose the suicidal folly of Obama’s Islam policy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Barack+Obama+President+Obama+Makes+Statement+GXFfoF73k-wl.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-132680" title="Barack+Obama+President+Obama+Makes+Statement+GXFfoF73k-wl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Barack+Obama+President+Obama+Makes+Statement+GXFfoF73k-wl.gif" alt="" width="375" height="258" /></a>American intellectual Will Durant’s <em>The Lessons of History</em>—co-written with wife Ariel and published in 1968, when the Soviet Union posed a threat to the United States—still offers insightful lessons, especially concerning American-Muslim relations.</p>
<p>In the chapter titled “History and War,” the Durants posit some hypothetical speeches and approaches concerning war.  First, an imaginary U.S. president says before the leaders of communist Russia:</p>
<blockquote><p>If we should follow the usual course of history, we should make war upon you for fear of what you may do a generation hence….  But we are willing to try a new approach.  We respect your peoples and your civilizations as among the most creative in history.   We shall try to understand your feelings, and your desire to develop your own institutions without fear of attack.  We must not allow our mutual fears to lead us into war, for the unparalleled murderousness of our weapons and yours brings into the situation an element unfamiliar in history.  We propose to send representatives to join with yours in a persistent conference for the adjustment of our differences, the cessation of hostilities and subversion, and the reduction of our armaments….  Let us open our doors to each other, and organize cultural exchanges that will promote mutual appreciation and understanding….  We pledge our honor before all mankind to enter into this venture in full sincerity and trust.  If we lose in the historic gamble, the results could not be worse than those that we may expect from traditional policies.  If you and we succeed, we shall merit a place for centuries to come in the grateful memory of mankind.</p></blockquote>
<p>Once the imaginary president concludes, “the general smiles,” write the authors, and retorts:</p>
<blockquote><p>You have forgotten all the lessons of history and all that nature of man which you described.  Some conflicts are too fundamental to be resolved by negotiation; and during the prolonged negotitiations (if history may be our guide) <em>subversion would go on</em>.  A world order will come not by a gentlemen’s agreement, but through so decisive a victory by one of the great powers that it will be able to dictate and enforce international law, as Rome did from Augustus to Aurelius.  Such interludes of widespread peace are unnatural and exceptional; they will soon be ended by changes in the distribution of military power.</p></blockquote>
<p>Now, consider how well this hypothetical exchange, written in 1968, applies to the current situation between the U.S. and the Muslim world:</p>
<p>First, the “imaginary” president has become all too real, in the person of Barack Obama.  Above and beyond his so-called “historic Cairo speech,” where he reached out to and cloyingly flattered the Muslim world, everything this man has subsequently said and done—from <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10797/obama-administration-bans-knowledge-of-islam">expunging all references to Islam in U.S. security documents</a>, to ordering NASA to make Muslims “feel good” about themselves—far exceeds the expressed outreach of the imaginary president.</p>
<p>Next, the situation has changed in a way that makes it even more naïve and irrational for the U.S. to be so appeasing of the Islamic world.  Whereas the U.S.S.R was a nuclear-armed superpower—making dialogue and cooperation logical, practically risk-free options, since, as the imaginary president concluded in his speech, the alternative was war, anyway—that is not the case with the Islamic world, which is currently militarily inferior, and thus need not be appeased.</p>
<p>Quite the contrary, by giving one’s opponent time and freedom, “subversion would go on,” as the imaginary general correctly points out, whether Muslim nations like Iran grow to become nuclear powers, or whether Muslims in the West work to subvert their host nations.  This threat of subversion is especially apt considering that Islam’s own teachings <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2538/taqiyya-islam-rules-of-war">promote subversion</a> and <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11267/tawriya-lying">deceitful tactics</a>.</p>
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		<title>Port Huron at 50: Still Communist After All These Years</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/port-huron-at-50-still-communist-after-all-these-years/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=port-huron-at-50-still-communist-after-all-these-years</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/port-huron-at-50-still-communist-after-all-these-years/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Apr 2012 04:45:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=129039</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An NYU conference celebrates the founding document of the sixties-era radical left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/hayden.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-129040" title="hayden" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/hayden-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>Before there was <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7694">Occupy Wall Street</a> and Zuccotti Park there was Students for a Democratic Society and Port Huron. When it was written in 1962, the <a href="http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html">Port Huron Statement</a> announced the birth of the radical student group <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=7496">Students for a Democratic Society</a> (SDS), and with it the launch of what would become the so-called New Left. The manifesto’s legacy has since been sullied by the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/DESTRUCTIVE-GENERATION-Second-Thoughts-About/dp/0684826410">destructive history of SDS</a>, which within a few years splintered into a bevy of revolutionary Marxist and militant organizations – most notoriously the terrorist <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6808">Weather Underground</a> – that came to embrace the very form of communist totalitarianism the Port Huron Statement professed to reject.</p>
<p>That morally stained history has not prevented SDS veterans, led by the document’s principal author, Tom Hayden, from periodically celebrating the Port Huron Statement as something it never was: a reformist treatise that succeeded in spirit even as it failed to transform America in line with SDS’s radical vision. Hayden has been the leading propagandist of the Port Huron Statement’s supposedly lasting cultural importance, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/port-huron-statement-40">penning</a> and <a href="http://vimeo.com/16326064">delivering</a> near-annual tributes to the document while divulging little about its troubling history. The latest of these commemorative efforts occurred last week at New York University in New York City, which hosted <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/events/huron_schedule.pdf">a two-day conference on the Port Huron Statement</a> to celebrate its 50-year anniversary and to reflect on its historical impact.</p>
<p>Headlined by Hayden, who delivered the keynote address, the conference was a class reunion of sorts of 60-era radicals. The audience was full of aging activists, their nostalgia for the political currents of the sixties betrayed by their graying ponytails, Che Guevara T-shirts, and well-thumbed copies of <em>The Nation</em>. Several said they had been present when the Port Huron Statement was issued in 1962.</p>
<p>Their goal seemed to be to convince themselves that the Port Huron Statement still mattered. Hayden touched on the point directly in his keynote remarks, when he suggested that the document remained historically relevant. “To understand history, you can’t leave it to the historians,” he said. Instead, Hayden left it to himself, and the resulting account was woefully incomplete. Rather than revisit the past, Hayden preferred to rewrite it.</p>
<p>Hayden stressed that the major contribution of the Port Huron Statement was introducing the world to the notion of “participatory democracy.” Hayden described the term in bland terms to mean a call for greater social and economic participation. But as an honest reading of the Port Huron Statement confirms, “participatory democracy” was never a call for democracy at all, but rather a coded prescription for a radical insurrection against established democratic institutions. Thus, it’s not surprising that all of the movements that have embraced “participatory democracy” – from Mexico’s anarcho-communist Zapatista guerillas, to Nicaragua’s communist Sandinistas, to most recently the street thugs and hooligans of Occupy Wall Street – have been unabashedly radical.</p>
<p>Hayden could not bring himself to be more honest about another aspect of the Port Huron Statement, namely it’s opposition to “anti-communism.” As Hayden told it, SDS came under criticism in the 60s for being insufficiently supportive of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. “We were on trial because our views were not anti-communist enough,” Hayden explained ruefully, to sympathetic agreement from the audience.</p>
<p>But that too was a historical whitewash. Not only did the Port Huron Statement reject liberal anti-communism but it embraced its converse, “anti-anti-communism.” The Soviet Union might have been totalitarian and repressive, the authors’ conceded, but it was wrong to “blame only communism” for the Cold War given that the United States, with it’s “monstrous” military structure, its “corporate economy,” and its “imperialist” foreign policy, was not clearly better – and in any case had “done a great deal to foment” Soviet suppression and aggression.</p>
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		<title>Age of Delirium</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/age-of-delirium-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=age-of-delirium-1</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Mar 2012 04:00:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A new film about the fall of the Soviet Union will premiere today, Friday, March 16, in New York at the Tishman Auditorium.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/delerium.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-125836" title="delerium" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/delerium.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="544" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview&#8217;s guest today is David Satter, an expert on Russia and frequent guest on Frontpage Magazine, whose new film, “Age of Delirium,” about the fall of the Soviet Union will premiere Friday, March 16, in New York at the Tishman Auditorium, 40 Washington Square South at 7 pm. Details about the screening which is open to the public are contained in this <a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/153323834782908/">Facebook link</a>.</p>
<p>The film is based on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Delirium-Decline-Soviet-Union/dp/0300087055/ref=pd_sim_b_1">David Satter’s book </a>of the same name.</p>
<p>Readers of Frontpagemag.com in the New York area are cordially invited to attend.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> David Satter, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Congratulations on your new film. What can you tell us about it?</p>
<p><strong>Satter:</strong> The film, “Age of Delirium,” is the story of the fall of the Soviet Union as lived and experienced by the Soviet people. The film shows what it meant to construct an entire state on the basis of a false idea and how truthful information led to the Soviet Union’s rapid and unstoppable collapse.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> How did you become a film maker?</p>
<p><strong>Satter:</strong> It was an accident really. People were impressed with the cinematic qualities of the book and urged me to try to put it on film. The idea quickly found backers and although I had help from a Russian director, it eventually became clear that I would have to take charge of the story telling myself.</p>
<p>The method employed is filmed interviews with persons whose experiences illustrate the forces that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse. The film tells the story of Alexander Shatravka, who crossed the Finnish border only to be handed back by the Finns and tortured in a mental hospital; Nina Smirnova, a crippled girl who prayed for relief at a religious shrine and then began to be persecuted by the communist authorities after she miraculously began to walk; and the young men of the city of Shadrinsk who believed in the Soviet ideology only to learn the reality of the Soviet system while fighting in Afghanistan.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What do you think the film achieves?</p>
<p><strong>Satter:</strong> By recreating through personal stories the eerie reality of the Soviet Union, the film shows what it meant to live in a society based on a false idea and the tragic consequences of the Soviet attempt to remake human nature. In the end, the film illuminates the workings of an ideological society, the very type of society that would be most likely to use weapons of mass destruction. It shows how such a society creates its own fictitious universe and it gives insight into the state of Russian today where the neo-Soviet leaders stand again at the edge of a moral abyss.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Thank you David Satter, good luck on this new film.</p>
<p>We encourage all of our readers in the New York area to go see “Age of Delirium&#8221; which will premiere Friday, March 16, in New York at the Tishman Auditorium, 40 Washington Square South at 7 pm.</p>
<p>For more information see this <a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/153323834782908/">Facebook link</a>.</p>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Age of Delirium</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/age-of-delirium/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=age-of-delirium</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/age-of-delirium/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Mar 2012 04:00:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=125834</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new film about the fall of the Soviet Union will premiere Friday, March 16, in New York at the Tishman Auditorium.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/delerium.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-125836" title="delerium" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/delerium.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="544" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview&#8217;s guest today is David Satter, an expert on Russia and frequent guest on Frontpage Magazine, whose new film, “Age of Delirium,” about the fall of the Soviet Union will premiere Friday, March 16, in New York at the Tishman Auditorium, 40 Washington Square South at 7 pm. Details about the screening which is open to the public are contained in this <a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/153323834782908/">Facebook link</a>.</p>
<p>The film is based on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Delirium-Decline-Soviet-Union/dp/0300087055/ref=pd_sim_b_1">David Satter’s book </a>of the same name.</p>
<p>Readers of Frontpagemag.com in the New York area are cordially invited to attend.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> David Satter, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Congratulations on your new film. What can you tell us about it?</p>
<p><strong>Satter:</strong> The film, “Age of Delirium,” is the story of the fall of the Soviet Union as lived and experienced by the Soviet people. The film shows what it meant to construct an entire state on the basis of a false idea and how truthful information led to the Soviet Union’s rapid and unstoppable collapse.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> How did you become a film maker?</p>
<p><strong>Satter:</strong> It was an accident really. People were impressed with the cinematic qualities of the book and urged me to try to put it on film. The idea quickly found backers and although I had help from a Russian director, it eventually became clear that I would have to take charge of the story telling myself.</p>
<p>The method employed is filmed interviews with persons whose experiences illustrate the forces that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse. The film tells the story of Alexander Shatravka, who crossed the Finnish border only to be handed back by the Finns and tortured in a mental hospital; Nina Smirnova, a crippled girl who prayed for relief at a religious shrine and then began to be persecuted by the communist authorities after she miraculously began to walk; and the young men of the city of Shadrinsk who believed in the Soviet ideology only to learn the reality of the Soviet system while fighting in Afghanistan.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What do you think the film achieves?</p>
<p><strong>Satter:</strong> By recreating through personal stories the eerie reality of the Soviet Union, the film shows what it meant to live in a society based on a false idea and the tragic consequences of the Soviet attempt to remake human nature. In the end, the film illuminates the workings of an ideological society, the very type of society that would be most likely to use weapons of mass destruction. It shows how such a society creates its own fictitious universe and it gives insight into the state of Russian today where the neo-Soviet leaders stand again at the edge of a moral abyss.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Thank you David Satter, good luck on this new film.</p>
<p>We encourage all of our readers in the New York area to go see “Age of Delirium&#8221; which will premiere Friday, March 16, in New York at the Tishman Auditorium, 40 Washington Square South at 7 pm.</p>
<p>For more information see this <a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/153323834782908/">Facebook link</a>.</p>
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		<title>Central Asia: Lessons for the Middle East</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/nodir-ataev-and-steven-plaut/central-asia-lessons-for-the-middle-east/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=central-asia-lessons-for-the-middle-east</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:04:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nodir Ataev and Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Central Asia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nation building]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=118626</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Nation-building's long record of failure.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Kyrgyzstan_Osh_Refugees.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-118663" title="Kyrgyzstan_Osh_Refugees" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Kyrgyzstan_Osh_Refugees.gif" alt="" width="375" height="258" /></a></p>
<p>Just as the new calendar year was about to begin, new violence broke out in the village of Andarak in southern Kyrgyzstan.  Internecine violence among the ethnic groups of Kyrgyzstan has been flaring up periodically for years with the worst outbreaks in 2010.  Kyrgyzstan may be the closest thing to be found in Central Asia to a “bi-national state,” the sort of state that some are proposing be imposed upon the Middle East as a “solution” to replace Israel.  It is the second poorest of the ex-Soviet republics.  The two main ethnic groups in Kyrgyzstan are the Kyrgyz, about 70% of the population, until relatively recently in history a nomadic tribal population, and ethnic Uzbeks, close to 20%.  There are also ethnic Tajiks living in the country.  And there are lessons to learn from the violence there about the viability of multi-ethnic states in the Middle East.</p>
<p>At first glance, Kyrgyzstani ethnic relations might be expected to be idyllic.  Both of the two main population groups consist of predominantly Moslem people speaking Turkic dialects.  The Tajiks are also Moslem, speaking a language close to Farsi.  Yet the country has seen outbreaks of massive inter-ethnic violence. In June 1990, a violent land dispute between the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks erupted in the city of Osh.  In the summer of 2010, southern Kyrgyzstan was again gripped by bloody internecine violence. (The New Year’s violence this year was between ethnic Tajiks and Kyrgyz.)</p>
<p>The south of Kyrgyzstan is predominantly Uzbek and was sliced off and glued into Kyrgyzstan by the Soviets in order to provide the country with parts of the fertile Fergana Valley.   In the 1990 fighting, a state of emergency and curfew were introduced there and the border between the neighboring Uzbekistani and Kirghiz republics was closed. Soviet troops were deployed to stop the violence. According to official reports 230 people died, but unofficial figures range up to more than 1,000.</p>
<p>Central Asia is a part of the globe that is known by few Americans, with even fewer who have visited it.  It is composed of countries that almost no American can identify on a map.  Yet it is nevertheless an important region, located just north of Afghanistan and near the heartland of the forces of the anti-Western jihad, a region whose strategic worth is increasingly valued by the West in light of the war against terror.  And it is also a region in which there are lessons for other parts of the world with regard to “engineering” artificial states.  In particular, it illustrates the folly of proposals to construct “bi-national” and “multi-national” states in the Middle East as some sort of recipe for peace.</p>
<p>Throughout history and until very recently, Central Asians lived within the greater states and empires of other peoples, among them the empires of the Chinese, Mongols, Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Turks and Russians.  Most of Central Asia was conquered by Alexander the Great and so was opened up to “Western-Hellenistic” cultural influence quite early.  Later the region was incorporated within a series of Islamic states, khanates, and empires, including those of Islamized Mongols.  Most of the population was Islamized, although at different paces, with those today called Uzbeks being among the earliest to embrace the faith, and those called the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs converting much later, many only in the last two centuries.  Historically the population of the region did not see itself as composed of separate “nations,” but rather as heterogeneous cultural and linguistic subgroups and clans within those larger empires, and where religious and tribal ties were far more important than “national” ties.</p>
<p>The nature of statehood and nationality in Central Asia was radically and artificially altered by the Soviets, who sought to neutralize the political ambitions and independence of the peoples of the region through a policy of divide and conquer. The Soviets also decided to erect boundaries for “Socialist Republics” and similar political structures (like “autonomous oblasts”) throughout the region.  Stalin and his people intentionally drew “national” boundaries for these new “nations” that often ignored demography and the ethnic compositions of the populations.  They drew borders in an intentional way to include large populations of “alien” peoples in each of the new “republics” being invented.  For example, two of Uzbekistan’s largest cities are in fact ethnically Tajik.</p>
<p>The Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and many others were all interspersed throughout the territories of the “republics” in a dizzying mosaic.  Cynics suspected that the Soviets wanted such structures to prevent ethnic-based opposition from forming, to focus attention of the ethnic groups in conflict against one another so that their populations would be easier to control, and to foment Russification.  The languages of these new “countries” were forcibly and artificially transformed by requiring the use of the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet, although in recent years Cyrillic is being widely replaced by the Latin alphabet.  Stalinist policies of mass expulsion of populations brought other ethnicities and other tensions to Central Asia alongside uprooted populations from the Crimea and Georgia and elsewhere transplanted there.</p>
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