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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Thomas de Waal to discuss the modern Chechnya in a post-war environment where suspicions are high and cultures crash.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Chechens I Used to Know
‘Chechnya’s bin Laden’ Killed by Russian Troops
Clashes in Russia’s Caucasus kill 10 rebels
Thomas de Waal’s The Caucasus: An Introduction
Putin’s czarist vision

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Alexander Litvinenko was a hero in the mold of Mosab Hassan Yossef, the so-called “Son of Hamas,” who the US is sickeningly threatening to deport.  In fact, their fates may be quite similar if this is to happen, as in 2006 Litvinenko as you may recall was poisoned with Polonium-210, an extremely rare radioactive substance, and essential ingredient to early nuclear bombs.

Why was he poisoned?  Litvinenko, a former KGB/FSB agent who left the service and defected to London was a staunch critic of the Putin regime, and apparently knew too much for the Kremlin to bare.  For Litvinenko implicated the Russian government in a variety of terrorist attacks, abroad for example through their training of Al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1998, and disgustingly at home through an attempted bombing of an apartment complex in 1999, and the infamous 2002 Moscow theater and 2004 Beslan school attacks.

I recently read his book Allegations, which in light of recent events is proving quite prescient.

One argument he makes that should resonate with all of us regards political resistance to the criminal Russian government:

There is no need to break any law, even most cruel one, in order to remain humans and citizens.  All we need to do is to take a civic stance, to demand that the authorities strictly obey the constitution.  Putin and his propaganda team know this, so they try to divide us, to set us against each other.  In doing so, the Kremlin strategists appeal to the lowest instincts, using every ethnic, religious or property differences we may have.  That is exactly why we must understand that our common enemy now is Putin’s regime (Allegations, 100).

Is this not precisely what we are witnessing today?  Our citizens are peacefully demanding a return to the Constitution, while our Progressive Putins try to spark racial and class warfare to divide and conquer us.

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On Saturday morning, I was stopped short by a text message-  a plane crash had killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 96 others.  Immediately, I called and asked the location… Russia.

With tragic irony, the Polish Presidential delegation was wiped out while enroute to memorialize the 1940 Katyn Forest Massacre.  During World War II (April 1940), the Russians murdered 22,000 members of the captured Polish Officer Corps. On Stalin’s orders, the Russians killed captured Polish military officers, civil servants, and intellectuals, including lawyers, physicians, teachers, professors, engineers, priests, rabbis and other professionals.  By “liquidating” the Polish Officer Corps and much of the professional class, the Russians eased future “communization” of Poland.

The Russians had never apologized for the Katyn Massacre and for 50 years had denied culpability.  Scheduled for last weekend, the memorial event was meant to extend a hand and unclench a fist.  Instead, the Polish State aircraft crashed nearly at the same site.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski was hated by the Russians;  he was blunt, and a tough negotiator.  As a friend of Lech Walesa, member of Solidarity, and former mayor of Warsaw, President Kaczynski had been jailed while resisting communism.

The historic Polish motto, “Our Freedom is Yours”, is deeply ingrained in the national political culture.

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On 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 19^th-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 America in which I was raised always stood for freedom, and not just freedom for Americans but freedom for suffering people around the World.  When I was an exchange student in Germany in 1983, I found myself in endless debates about this, and about my President Ronald Reagan and his desire to build a missile defense system in Western Europe.   I loved the German people.  The kids were so refreshing in many ways, but their cynical views of the motives of my President shocked me.

John Loudon at Berlin Wall

I admit that I am a little unique.   As a fairly young child, I poured through every issue of Time magazine, which is like our version of the German magazine, Die Zeit.  Jimmy Carter was the President.  He talked of peace while cutting our defense spending.  I remember being very scared seeing charts and graphs comparing our defense systems including war planes, ships and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).  The American armaments were blue and the Soviets vastly superior forced were Red.  Here my story gets really odd.  I was 12 years old when I read George Orwell’s 1984.  The year was 1979.  I was so struck by what I read and the parallels to the modern Soviet Union, that I picked up a copy of the Communist Manifesto. What I read made me nearly shriek in fear.

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Okay, it’s time to finally admit it:  Barack Obama hates businessmen.  Not just certain businessmen, mind you, but the entire profession.

Of course President Obama will deny this.   He told Businessweek magazine in a recent interview that he is not anti-business and that he believes in the private sector.  But the evidence is overwhelming,  and it helps explain why he is pursuing kamakazi-like economic policies that will damage the private sector in America.

Obama has demonized just about every business sector in America.  Through the 2008 campaign to the present,  he has gone after credit card companies, the coal industry, mortgage companies, real estate companies, steelmakers, utilities, drug companies, doctors, oil companies, Wall Street, defense contractors, and health insurance companies, just to name a few.  In each case he has dinged them for greed, taking excessive profits, and failing to put people first.  His criticisms have not been over minor matters but over their basic core functions, and their values or lack of them.

Obama demonstrates almost complete ignorance about the private sector and it’s no wonder:  he has so little experience in it.  He has spent his adult life in college, teaching college, and organizing communities.  The one private sector job he has held, for a consulting firm in New York, he recounts as a terrible experience.  In his memoirs he describes the experience as working for a private business “like a spy behind enemy lines.”  He also recounts in his memoirs that the multinational corporations in the Indonesia of his youth were propelling the average worker “into deeper despair.”  He likened the presence of corporations in his native Africa to a form of “neocolonialism.”  Michelle Obama has beseeched young people, “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we are asking young people to do.  Don’t go into corporate America.  You know, become teachers, work for the community,  be a social worker, be a nurse….move out of the money-making industry, into the helping industry.”

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Is it just me, or has 2009 been exceptionally rich in the deaths of legendary figures?  In August Ted Kennedy was finally reunited in heaven with Mary Jo Kopechne. In July a much more interesting man, Harry Patch, the last veteran of World War I, died aged 111.

Only a few days after Kennedy expired, Sergei Mikhalkov, the Stalin-loving author of the lyrics to three versions of the Soviet and Russian national anthem also shuffled off this mortal coil. And what about Walter Cronkite, Ed McMahon etc? All of these deaths were recognized as significant breaks with the past, symbolic passings that marked the end of an era, even if the era in question had actually come to a close decades earlier. On October 12th yet another such mega-death was marked in Russia, as Vyacheslav Ivankov- AKA Yaponchik- was buried in Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery. Although his name is less well known than Ted Kennedy’s, Yaponchik’s life and career are highly significant nevertheless, for as the most notorious Russian mobster of the 1990s he was a living (until recently, anyway) symbol of an era of near-total societal collapse, the repercussions of which are still felt globally today.

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