Free Republic

...Mnangagwa struck a conciliatory tone in the months leading up to the election. Declaring that Zimbabwe was “open for business,” he amended a law requiring local ownership of diamond and platinum mines. He signaled his intent to end farm seizures and vowed to sell off failing state enterprises. He even wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for democracy and equal rights for all citizens. But Mnangagwa is tied to numerous human rights abuses, including overseeing a series of government-ordered massacres between 1982 and 1986 known as the “Gukurahundi.” An estimated 20,000 civilians from Zimbabwe’s Ndebele ethnic group were killed....

HARARE, Zimbabwe — A new documentary on massacres by Zimbabwe's military … The screening in the capital, Harare, would have been almost impossible under former leader Robert Mugabe, who led the country for 37 years and resigned following military intervention in November. President Emmerson Mnangagwa, a longtime Mugabe loyalist and enforcer who succeeded him, has tolerated documentaries and plays critical of the government amid promises of a "flowering of democracy." But none has taken such direct aim at Mnangagwa as the new documentary on the army operation he supported as state security minister between 1983 and 1987. "Gukurahundi genocide: 36...

In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue is automatically deemed invalid or at least less valid and valuable if you’re not a member of a group whose plight is being discussed. Men can’t really know what it’s like to be women, white people can’t really know what it’s like to be people of colour, the straight ones can’t really know what it’s like to have other sexual orientations. Your identity is your argument; “You wouldn’t know what...

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT, is a communist. I learned this from a right-winger so extreme he can’t tell communists from socialists. Conservatives have now moved so far to the right that they label moderates as “socialists” and liberals as “communists.” Sanders doesn’t hide the fact he’s a socialist and a liberal. He’s a relic of a bygone era before the Right turned “socialist” and “liberal” into pejoratives akin to “terrorist” or “pedophile.” I once told a sensible conservative that I prefer socialists to fascists. His response — “How can you tell the difference?” —sounded clever, but it’s essentially nonsense...

On Orthodox Easter, Russian Patriarch Kirill addressed scores of the faithful, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. He likened the resurrection of Christ—who, in Orthodox parlance, “trampled down death by death”—to the Russian, née Soviet, victory over the Nazis. Kirill’s religious praise of Soviet victory is nothing new. Under Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union tried tapping into the nation’s “enormous spiritual strength” by reviving the Orthodox Church in Russia, albeit in a limited capacity. Realizing the power the church had to unite Russia and its near abroad—and seeking to bring Nazi-controlled territory back under Soviet influence,...

If your only source of information about American politics in 2018 were the GOP’s campaign ads, you would think that the Democratic Party was a radical left-wing organization, whose principal constituents were anarchists, misandrists, literal terrorists, and acolytes of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. If you supplemented those 30-second spots with Donald Trump’s stump speeches, and Fox News’ prime-time lineup, you might further conclude that Nancy Pelosi was the chair of The House Antifa Caucus. In other words: The GOP’s message-makers are working round-the-clock to collapse the distinctions between the Democratic Party and the most radical activists at the far-left fringes...

In 1958 China, a public health campaign went terribly wrong. The Great Sparrow Campaign was a symbol of human folly. Millions of people perished.

Anyone who grew up with the Eastern Orthodox Church (in my case, the Greek Orthodox Church) will get a good laugh at Vladimir Putin pretending to be a Christian during his first Easter as Russian ruler. As recounted by the great journalist Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006), the bravest of all the many Putin-critics to be systematically assassinated, in her book Putin’s Russia: The three men clumsily and clownishly crossed themselves, Medvedev making his crosses by touching his hands to his forehead and then to his genitals. It was risible. Medvedev followed Putin in shaking the patriarch’s hand as if he were...

Pope Francis has conferred sainthood on murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero at a ceremony in the Vatican. He praised the cleric - an advocate for peace during El Salvador's civil war - for sacrificing his own safety to be "close to the poor and his people". Óscar Romero was killed by soldiers while giving Mass in 1980. His killers have never been brought to justice. Pope Francis also canonised Pope Paul VI, known for making reforms to the Catholic Church in the 1960s. The bestowing of a sainthood onto Archbishop Romero has long been called for by Catholics in the...

I was thinking of starting a ping list for a weekly Quote thread regarding the government and other topics. Please let me know if this will be useful for this forum and please add your own quotes.

The UK’s obligations in response to this week’s warnings from the UN over global warming will be controversial and politically fraught, taking the country into “uncharted territory” and testing the political consensus on climate change, the its top climate adviser has warned. The government will have to regulate industry and intervene in the market in ways that will prove controversial in parliament, predicted Chris Stark, chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change (CCCP). He said reducing emissions by the amounts needed would “require answers that the market unfettered will not deliver”. Stark said the independence of the CCCP, which...

Radio Free Europe recently reported about forced abortions and other human rights abuses inside China’s “political re-education camps.” A woman named Gulzira Mogdin said she was forced to abort her unborn baby five months into her pregnancy while detained in one of the camps last year. “If you already have two children, they make you terminate your pregnancy,” Mogdin told RFE. “It’s tough. They took the child from the womb.” Mogdin is a Chinese citizen but also an ethnic minority, her ancestors being from Kazakhstan. A widow with two young children, she said she remarried a man in Kazakhstan in...

Today's post is in honor of Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Aaron J. Taylor, who gave his life for our country on this date in 2009. The 27-year-old explosive ordinance technician from Bovey, Minn. was clearing a bridge near Camp Dwyer, Afghanistan, when he was killed by an improvised explosive device. He had previously served in Iraq and was assigned to Marine Wing Support Squadron 372, Marine Wing Support Group 37, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, I Marine Expeditionary Force.1861: 1,000 Confederate soldiers land on Florida's Santa Rosa Island and assault Union-held Fort Pickens. The attackers withdraw after the federal guns inflict...

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday denounced the “awful abuses” of Muslim Uygurs detained in Chinese reeducation camps. “Hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of Uygurs are held against their will in so-called re-education camps where they’re forced to endure severe political indoctrination and other awful abuses,” Pompeo said in a speech in Washington on the state of religious freedom around the world. He also expressed concern about the fate of Christians in China, who he said had been targeted in a government crackdown. The government, he said, has been “closing churches, burning Bibles and ordering followers to...

American politician Joseph McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin, testifies against the US Army during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Washington, DC, June 9, 1954. (Getty Images) An open letter to Brent Bozell, Tucker Carlson, Sen. John Cornyn, Jerome Corsi, Joseph diGenova, Hugh Hewitt, Sen. Mh itcMcConnell, Bill O’Reilly, President Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and all other conservatives who still decry “McCarthyism”: How about reconsidering the origins of “McCarthyism” and understanding them for what they are—the very seeds of our Marxian destruction and collective shambles? To set the scene, imagine that post-World War II period, when Americans were still trying to...

“No taxation without representation!”That was a popular phrase during the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War. Colonists thought it was unfair to be taxed and subjected to English rule without consent.Today Washington DC hands down laws and taxes to every one of the 320 million people living in the United States.And just like under English rule, we are not represented in the federal government.Now I know what you’re thinking… we have the right to vote for our leaders.Our votes send Representatives, Senators, and the President to Washington DC. And they represent our interests in government. US Representatives are...

Ex-Soviet Kazakhstan has refused asylum to an escaped Chinese national whose court testimony helped expose a secretive network of re-education camps in China's restive Xinjiang region. China launched its "Strike Hard" campaign targeting separatism in Muslim-majority Xinjiang in 2014. The crackdown intensified two years later when hardline official Chen Quanguoc -- infamous for his repressive rule in Tibet -- became the region's new Communist Party chief. Over a million people -- mostly ethnic Uighurs -- are allegedly being held in a secretive network of extra-judicial, political re-education centres. Sayragul Sauytbay, 41, was denied political asylum by a migration committee in...

The American left accelerated its attack on every precept of civil society this month by arguing that the presumption of innocence, as the leftists would say, “isn’t really a thing.” The context for this latest assault is that, in its unquenchable zeal for power, the left is willing to dismiss principles that have guided human interaction for centuries just so they may have a chance at preserving a more liberal court. Specifically, their latest claim is that Judge Brett Kavanaugh need not be presumed innocent until proven guilty during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee because those hearings are...

For the last century control of the United States has cycled between the 19th Century Democratic and Republican parties. Voters choose between the old ideas of the Democratic Party and the old ideas of the Republican Party. The two parties are mired in the same old partisan conflicts election after election. The Democrats in particular seem more interested in playing partisan political games than in dealing seriously with the nation's problems. Republicans are increasingly following their example. Millennials need to decide whether they want to continue the politics of their grandparents' generation or replace the 19th Century parties with 21st...

It’s not every society whose ideals are embodied by a corpse. But in the Soviet Union, the never-decaying body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was meant to freeze his ideals in time: a promise to citizens that they were on the collective path to the bright communist future. Opened to visitors on August 1, 1924, his mausoleum became a key symbol of Soviet power, from the saint-like aura around Lenin’s remains to the Politburo’s tradition of standing atop the structure on holidays. Today, the unburied body remains a lingering element of the Soviet legacy, representing Russia’s inability or unwillingness to bury...