Sunday Open Thread: Cheka Edition
by PubliusToday, in 1917, Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, was established.
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Posts Tagged ‘Soviet Union’
ClimateGate Just Got Much, Much Bigger
by Christopher C. HornerOver at ICECAP.us Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo has posted an item on a “Russian Bombshell” highly relevant to the ClimateGate scandal. The Russian media first posted the story and now some Brits are loving it.
The long and the short of it is best summarized by the Telegraph’s James Dellingpole: “What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.”
That is, we have yet further evidence that the data is being cooked to make the long-running claim of an increase in global temperatures, and now to diminish the apparent cooling of said temps. As the gang at EU referendum tout, “it is in Soviet Union that the CRU, NOAA, NASA show the greatest warming.”
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Tuesday Open Thread: Soviet Edition
by PubliusToday, in 1991, the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine signed an agreement officially dissolving the Soviet Union.
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Scientists and Climate Change: Hide the Baloney
by Christopher C. HornerOn this day of thanks I am grateful for, among many blessings, the unfolding affirmation of that about which we have been warning policymakers, in lurid detail now confirmed: the global warming industry’s aggressive game of Hide the Baloney.
Here are my thoughts on the matter.
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Undercover Video: University Political Officials shut down Gulag Memorial
by James O'KeefeTo commemorate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a group of students at Washington University in St. Louis chose to stand up to the tyranny of socialism and bring awareness to its consequences.
The students erected a Soviet gulag on the quad of the University to vividly display the ultimate “solution” to dissidence in socialist societies sparking campus intrigue, discussion, and debate. Although an officer initially arrived on the scene and found everything was peaceful, undercover video reveals smarmy Washington University administrators continuing to press and make excuses to shut the fake-Gulag down.It took the bureaucracy hours to find an obscure policy to use against the students.
The group responsible has plans to make more gulag demonstrations on campuses around the country.
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Tearing Down and Building Up Walls
by Dan FreemanToday marks the twentieth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the most visible symbol of the Iron Curtain that divided the Free World from those in bondage. Only a few short years before, Ronald Reagan famously challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”. Two years after the fall of the Wall, the Soviet Union had collapsed.
Can there be a sharper contrast than the hopefulness with which we watched the Berlin wall torn down, and the nightmare we find ourselves in today? Individual freedom was suddenly within reach of half a continent who were enslaved by the utopian dream fabricated by Marx and implemented by Lenin and Stalin. Incredibly, those who still believe in that utopia are running our White House and our Congress. How did we move in twenty short years from defeating the evil empire—not with bullets, but with the immense power that comes from a free people, each acting in their own self interest, outperforming those of the great Soviet collective in every way—to electing Barack Obama, whose policies more resemble those that came out of the failed Soviet state than America?
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The Fall of the Wall: A Resounding Victory for Freedom
by Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked a resounding victory for freedom and human dignity. On this day 20 years ago, a long-standing symbol of division and oppression crumbled under the weight of a revolution inspired by leaders whose faith in God and commitment to freedom changed the world. Years in the making, that movement dismantled the Soviet bloc in a matter of months, erecting in its place a number of young democracies that our nation now counts among its staunchest allies.
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Remembering the Berlin Wall: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
by Michael WalshOn Feb. 13, 1985, I stood in the Theaterplatz in Dresden listening to Erich Honecker give a speech. The speech was not simply one of those standard commie stemwinders to which those of us reporting from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were accustomed. For one thing, we were gathered outside the newly restored Semper Opera House, designed by the architect Gottfried Semper in 1841, rebuilt after a fire in 1869 and long considered one of the glories of 19th-century musical architecture. For another, it was bitterly cold, at least twenty below zero on the Fahrenheit scale if not colder. For a third, all Honecker wanted to talk about – at great length – was the U.S. missile defense system, then under consideration by the Reagan Administration.
This was odd, because the occasion we – and by ‘we” I mean the western press, opera dignitaries, the local nomenklatura (party bigwigs and apparatchiks), the East German Stasi officers assigned to shadow us, and their KGB bosses – were there to witness was the celebratory re-opening of the great opera house, destroyed for the second time on the night of Feb. 12-13, 1945 “by Anglo-American bombers,” as the commemorative poster helpfully reminded us. (I have my copy, suitably framed, on the wall of my home.) If memory serves, Honecker, however, had very little to say about Semper or the opera house or the work we were about to hear, Weber’s Der Freischütz, which had been playing the night the city was incinerated. Instead, the little party boss – I had run into him in the Bellevue Hotel across the river, where the westerners were staying, and was pleased to see that he was as unimpressive in person as he was on television – went on a prolonged rant about die Sternkriege, the so-called “Star Wars” program that even then was setting off protests among the “peace demonstrators” in western Europe, England and, of course, at home as well.
As we stood there, shivering and bored, my colleague and friend, John Rockwell of The New York Times (who, like me, spoke fluent German) leaned over and said: “Personally, I think Star Wars is bullshit, but it really has these guys scared.” John was right: Star Wars pretty much was bullshit, especially at the time, but it nonetheless terrified the technologically backward Soviets and their satellite marionettes, and it set off the inexorable forces (as Marxists like to say) that just four years later would bring down the Berlin Wall. Reagan was playing poker with a lot of chips but lousy cards, raising the rear ends off the morally, culturally and fiscally bankrupt Soviets.
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The Fall of the Wall Didn’t Kill the Left: They’re Back and Attacking Us Again
by PubliusFrom the Daily Mail:
The collapse of communism was actually a slow-burning process. Its moral and political bankruptcy became obvious decades before that glorious Berlin day in November 1989
Twenty years ago today, supporters of freedom and human rights cheered and wept for joy as the Berlin Wall was torn down by jubilant young Germans.
To so many, that heady day seemed to herald the emergence of a better world. The spectre of communism had finally been laid to rest. Liberty had triumphed over tyranny.
The end of the Cold War even led some to proclaim that this was ‘the end of history’ - which was to say that liberal democracy was now the dominant and unchallengeable force in the world.
However, the 9/11 attacks on America tragically proved this to be absurdly over-optimistic. The eruption of radical Islamism revealed that, while the West may have been rid of one enemy in the Soviet Union, another deadly foe had risen to take its place. So much is, sadly, all too evident. (more…)
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Global Generation Republicans: The Next Birth of Freedom
by Rep. Thaddeus G. McCotter (R-MI)They were “Wide Awakes” – scores of torchbearers marching through sleepy hamlets to herald the emancipation of a people from the bonds of slavery into God-given liberty. These despised and decried champions of human freedom and defenders of American Union proudly called themselves “Republicans.”
Through the ensuing decades of political triumphs, falters and defeats, we Republicans never forgot our honorable heritage – until today. Amidst the stormy present, some of our compatriots suffer from an apocalyptic intimation that America’s revolutionary experiment in human freedom and self-government is over. They are wrong.
Throughout the life of the exceptional nation we’ve inherited from our parents and must bequeath to our children, America’s strength and salvation remains her free people. They have and will never let her down.
Indeed, through history’s lens Global Generation Republicans glean the transformational challenges confronting our nation.
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Reagan Was Noble, But Obama Got the Prize
by Thomas Del BeccaroIn an age where style trumps substance in so many ways, few can be surprised that a fledging President would receive a Nobel Peace Prize. It bears repeating that Obama was President for just a matter of days before the nomination process was closed. Nevertheless, and without any substantive accomplishment, Obama was awarded the Prize – unanimously – apparently for things to come. No wonder 58% of Americans believe that politics was behind the choice.
By contrast, consider the accomplishment of Ronald Reagan who, last I checked, did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. According to Margaret Thatcher, Reagan won the Cold War “without firing a shot.” In the words of Henry Kissinger, it was “the most stunning diplomatic feat of the modern era.” In the wake of that victory, millions upon millions of people were set free – and, as history has shown, a free people are far more likely to be a peaceful people.
So why didn’t Reagan get the Prize? The answer is simple, the political Left, including the Nobel committee, didn’t like the way Reagan went about setting people free. Reagan, we well remember, installed missiles in Europe. He did so because he believed what Thomas Jefferson told us long ago: “Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace.” Reagan, in time, would modernize Jefferson’s wisdom by advocating “peace through strength.”
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Politics Aside, Propaganda isn’t Pretty
by Doug O'BrienThere are two things fundamentally wrong with the Obama administration’s efforts to turn the arts into a vehicle for political advocacy. First, it is an egregious abuse of power both in terms of misappropriation of public resources and a chilling of the free expression of ideas at the core of artistic vitality. The second problem is that the resulting art as propaganda usually stinks.
You don’t have to be an ancient history professor to know that government controlled (or heavily influenced) art is, on the whole, lousy. There are still artists alive today who either toiled in or toiled against the socialized artistic regimens of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Some laudable efforts undertaken by the WPA aside, there is no shortage of examples of art and architecture that glorifies the state and crushes the human spirit. The funny thing is that the critics who most abhor the impact on art of the Nazis and Soviets and the works they produced are proud liberals who saw how it helped quash the concepts of non-conformity and innovation that are the life blood of artistic progress.
When Obama’s leftist appointees at the National Endowment for the Humanities came up with the idea that they would recruit fellow-travelers in the arts community to harness their “talent” to promote the One’s political agenda they were hardly charting new territory. Most every regime in history has done the same thing. Allegorical painting is the most common example used by popes and princes to glorify their side of the political story. Chairman Mao’s Red Brigades used drama and opera as tools of the state propaganda machine, and made ruthlessly sure that you didn’t experience any alternative theater on the side.
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