Free Republic

Hell on Earth Oct 22nd 2009 The West still turns a blind eye to the world's most brutal and systematic abuse of human rights A SPRAWLING encampment of think-tankers, academics, hacks and policymakers earns a living outside North Korea’s walls. They pick over its nuclear intentions and the prospects for the diplomatic dance known as the six-party process, which is meant to persuade North Korea to give up its nukes for cash and security guarantees. The encampment needs something to live on. Since North Korea declared the six-party talks dead in the spring, scraps have been meagre. So the North’s...

A Russian historian investigating the fate of Germans imprisoned in the Soviet Union during the second world war has been arrested, in the latest apparent clampdown on historical research into the Stalin era by the Russian authorities. Mikhail Suprun was detained last month by officers from Russia's security services. They searched his apartment and carried off his entire personal archive. He has now been charged with violating privacy laws and, if convicted, faces up to four years in jail. Suprun had been researching Germans sent to Russia's Arctic gulags. A professor of history at Arkhangelsk's Pomorskiy university, his study included...

Some of those in conservative circles predicted chirping crickets from the liberals regarding the incarceration of Laura Ling and Euna Lee by the North Korean government. They made snide remarks that the libs cared more about foreign terrorists being pampered by the U.S. than two Americans being sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for unspecified crimes.Thankfully, this is not true, and it seems that there is bipartisan support for the immediate release of these two women. But the question will be, how will the current administration handle the situation? As Gotham Chopra wrote on the Huffington Post:"Considering the unprecedented stakes and...

So about the Homeland Security Document created last week talking about "Rightwing Extremists" and their alleged threat... Why in the hell would they even use the term Rightwing? Why are they introducing a political slant into this equation? Extremist groups are extremist groups, period. Is there a document that analyzes the threat from leftwing extremists? Here is the definition on the HSA bulletin of what Rightwing Extremism is: "Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those...

KALININGRAD, April 9 (Itar-Tass) -- Kaliningrad hosts ceremonial events dedicated to the 64th anniversary of the heroic storming operation of the Koenigsberg city-fortress by the Soviet troops. On April 9, 1945, during the Eastern Prussian offensive operation of the Soviet troops the forces of the 3rd Belarussian front under the command of Marshall of the Soviet Union Alexander Vasilevsky after a 4-day fierce battle routed the 130,000-strong group of the fascist troops and liberated the Koenigsberg city-fortress that was considered as an unassailable stronghold in Eastern Prussia. The storm of Koenigsberg made the victory over the Hitler Germany closer, as...

Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent. As he wanders through the streets of St. Petersburg contemplating murder, the hero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment notices “that special Petersburg stench� which seems to be everywhere. Somehow, that stench constitutes the atmosphere in which lethal and repulsive ideas arise.When Jonathan Brent arrived in Moscow, he detected the same stench. It was 1992, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Brent seized a unique opportunity that, if not for him, would doubtless have been missed. He came to negotiate a deal to publish sensitive and secret documents from the Central...

DHARMSALA, India — Chinese rule in Tibet has created a "hell on earth" that has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, the Dalai Lama said Tuesday in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the failed uprising that sent him into exile. Speaking to thousands of supporters, the Tibetan spiritual leader said Chinese martial law, and hard-line policies such as the Cultural Revolution, had devastated the Himalayan region. "These thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth," he said in this Indian hill town, where he and the...

President Obama will convene the most ambitious arms reduction talks with Russia for a generation, aiming to slash each country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons by 80 per cent. The radical treaty would cut the number of nuclear warheads to 1,000 each, The Times has learnt. Key to the initiative is a review of the Bush Administration’s plan for a US missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, a project fiercely opposed by Moscow. Mr Obama is to establish a non-proliferation office at the White House to oversee the talks, expected to be headed by Gary Samore, a non-proliferation negotiator in the...

Friday Digest Vol. 09 No. 04 30 January 2009 THE FOUNDATION "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." --Second Amendment, United States Constitution PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE Sixty million armed Patriots ... and counting By Mark Alexander By now, you've probably heard that large sectors of the U.S. economy have collapsed, consumer confidence is at a historic low, Democrats control the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, and they're poised to print "bailout and infrastructure" money on the theory of "trickle...

WASHINGTON, Oct 03, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today on the Mental Health Parity legislation that was approved by the House and signed into law today: "Today, the House acted in a bipartisan way to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act with the aim of addressing the challenges felt by Americans on Main Street. "Among those many challenges is the fact that almost every American family has to grapple with mental illness at some point. "By including the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act in this essential...

We all know the potential horrors if Socialized Medicine were ever made a reality in this country, but to someone who only sees the good, and none of the bad, it is difficult for them to see the truth. In my discussion with a liberal friend I was having difficulty describing a parallel. We all can provide stories of long wait times, and lack of care experienced in other countries, but the answer always seems to be, "America will do it better". My point is that when a person has no responsibility to bear the costs of healthcare, he will...

From Hillary Clinton Forum Yesterday, 09:44 PM Maddie Kaddison New Member = <100 Posts Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 99 Poster Rank: #454 Obama's supporters scare me. Here is a comment I just read from this story (the story that Dean Reynolds of CBS wrote about Obama's "stinky" plane etc): Quote: I support Obama, but I disagree on some major issues. One is that we need to use major authoritarian measures against wingnuts and theocrats to save this country. That in particular includes deprogramming institutions and a Gitmo like camp to deal with the worst wingnuts. These people should be...

Denver is preparing for possible mass arrests of protesters during the Democratic Convention by turning a warehouse into a makeshift holding facility. The holding center, on city property, has cells formed from chain-link fences and barbed wire, with security cameras on the outside, station KUSA in Denver reported. Glenn Spagnuolo and other activists gathered outside the facility to protest the city’s plan to use it as a processing center for people arrested outside the convention. “We feel the city should be ashamed of this secret prison they’ve set up,” Spagnuolo said.

In 1949 a publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences carried an item about a bizarre incident that occurred during excavations near the Kolyma River in the gold-mining region of northeastern Siberia. A subterranean stream was discovered, frozen long ago, containing fish and salamanders tens of thousands of years old. They were so well preserved that the men who discovered the stream broke open the ice and ate them. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, managed somehow to read that piece.

'Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel prize winner for literature who was exiled from the Soviet Union and graphically portrayed life in Soviet labour camps, was dead at age 89, the news agency Interfax reported early Monday. The agency quoted literary circles in the Russian capital. The world famous writer and historian had not been seen in public for months. He died from the aftermath of a stroke, according to unconfirmed information.'

ON THE website of the Tennessee Republican Party is a short video in which residents of Nashville talk about the pride they feel for their country. One man, for example, mentions his esteem for the First and Second Amendments. A Vanderbilt graduate student says he was proud when Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall - "and I was prouder when it came down." A young professional woman extols the "academic and job opportunities that women have in this country." A police officer named Juan says he is proud of having immigrated to the United States,...

Russia's greatest living novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is working feverishly to complete his collected works and is writing every day despite failing health, a missing vertebra and being unable to walk, his wife, Natalia, revealed yesterday.

NBC NEWS STATEMENT REGARDING CHELSEA CLINTON COMMENT: On Thursday's "Tucker" on MSNBC, David Shuster, who was serving as guest-host of the program, made a comment about Chelsea Clinton and the Clinton campaign that was irresponsible and inappropriate. Shuster, who apologized this morning on MSNBC and will again this evening, has been suspended from appearing on all NBC News broadcasts, other than to make his apology. He has also extended an apology to the Clinton family. NBC News takes these matters seriously, and offers our sincere regrets to the Clintons for the remarks.

The United Nations’ “Terrorism: Dimensions, Threats and Countermeasures” conference in Tunis concluded that Islam should not be blamed for terror carried out in its name. “The UN did not blame communism for the Soviet gulags or the genocide in Cambodia,” observed conference chairman Abdullah al-Ibi of Saudi Arabia. “Yet, one can find language in the sacred manifestos written by its founder that could be interpreted as granting license for murder and mayhem. If communism gets a pass, so must Islam.” Ibi suggested that “attempts to point the finger of blame will be self-defeating” and that the West “would be better...

The day Saigon fell -- April 30, 1975 -- Lt. Col. Lam Tran gathered his stunned and despondent soldiers and distributed his little money among them. "My heart broke down," says Tran, who now lives in the Twin Cities. "I told them, 'Go home to your families. Now we must all fend for ourselves.'" Minutes later, a bone-shattering explosion shook a nearby house. Twenty of his men had detonated their grenades inside and blown themselves to oblivion. "They were so ashamed," recalls Tran. "They knew it didn't have to be this way." Tran, who led airborne assaults in jungle fighting,...

Construction workers have stumbled upon 34 skeletons in a cellar a few hundred meters from the Kremlin, in what may be proof of a Soviet secret police execution site in the center of Moscow. The remains of 34 bodies and a rusty pistol were found in the basement of 8 Nikolskaya Ulitsa on Wednesday, said Vladimir Korobkov, a spokesman for the city police. "The shots were fired point blank," an unidentified law enforcement source said, Interfax reported. "The nature of the wounds and the positioning of the bodies suggest that the workers have found an execution chamber."

The Russian Natural Resources Ministry says samples of earth taken from where their navy planted a flag on the seabed below the North Pole show beyond doubt that the Arctic is Russian. “Extensive testing has shown that these soils are thoroughly permeated with the DNA of Russian prisoners who perished in the Gulags,” said Josef Zhukovsky, spokesman for the Ministry. “It is incontrovertible that Russians got there first. This precedence proves our claim to this land.” Apparently, the thousands of corpses thrown into the northerly flowing rivers that ran past the numerous concentration camps that served to house opponents of...

In a speech in Tipton, Iowa yesterday, Senator John Edwards described his health care program "It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK. *** Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental...

It wasn’t long ago that most conspiracy theories came from conservatives. The right, after all gave our country the John Birch Society. But these days, liberals have a virtual monopoly on loony ideas -- and they seem to be getting crazier all the time. For example, in case you haven’t noticed, the United States is sliding into fascism. Well, not sliding, actually. We’re being driven into fascism. By you-know-who. “Beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society,� Naomi Wolf wrote this year in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “There is essentially...

The unassuming international champion of universal health care, Michael Moore, was asked (New York Sun, June 29) whether, while filming "Sicko," he inquired about the condition of Cuban journalist Normando Gonzalez, a political prisoner since 2003. He has contracted severe chronic illnesses while in a Castro gulag. Moore answered that he asked only about Cuba's health care system while he was there. Among other suffering prisoners in Cuban cells who would have added further dimension to "Sicko" are independent librarians, put away for more than 20-year sentences for the crime of giving Cubans access to books and other publications forbidden...

Bush is no rocket scientist by any stretch, but if there was ever a doubt why Kerry didn't get elected it is moments like this. Wow.

To say the amnesty bill was an emotional issue is an understatement. The Capitol Hill phones rang non-stop, causing some members to simply unplug them and turn off their answering machines. They were hearing from their constituents that they don’t want this amnesty bill to pass and they were ignoring these pleas. But to have a citizen arrested because they disagree is beyond the pale and begs the question, why do they care more about illegal aliens than they do their own constituents? Homeless activist, Ted Hayes, was on Capitol Hill, like thousands of other citizens who make unscheduled visits...

Guantanamo Bay is a humane place for enemy combatants that is worth keeping IT is disappointing that so many people embrace a contrived image of Guantanamo Bay. Reality for Guantanamo Bay is the daily professionalism of its staff, the humanity of its detention centres and the fair and transparent nature of the military commissions charged with trying alleged war criminals. It is a reality that has been all but ignored or forgotten. Today, most of the detainees are housed in new buildings modelled on US civilian prisons in Indiana and Michigan. Detainees receive three culturally appropriate meals a day. Each...

For the first 22 years of his life Shin Dong Hyok's home address was Political Prison Camp No 14, Gaechon County, South Pyeongan Province, North Korea. He grew up in unimaginable hardship in one of North Korea'skwanli-so, the gulag system built by Kim Il Sung in 1972 to work prisoners until they died. His "crime" was to have been born to parents categorised by the regime as from the "hostile classes" - the 27 per cent of the population considered national enemies, impure elements and reactionaries. Under Kim Jong Il's "three generation" policy, the family members of anyone who commits...

Remembering Communism’s Victims By Jacob Laksin FrontPageMagazine.com June 15, 2007 Washington D.C. -- Holocaust victims have one. So do the fallen of World War II and Vietnam. But what of the estimated 100 million who perished at the hands of the last century’s greatest tragedy, communist totalitarianism? Until recently, these silenced masses -- victims of Soviet gulags, Vietnamese concentration camps, Cambodia‘s killing fields, the East German, Cuban and North Korean police states -- had no fitting memorial to remind the world of their unjust, and often inhuman, fate, let alone of the ideology that abbreviated so many lives. That changed...

Washington June 8, 2007 - CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr reported this evening that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Peter Pace's departure from that post may be linked to his recent comments regarding lesbian and gay military personnel. According to Starr's report, Pace's comments, along with his role in planning the war in Iraq and his support for convicted Vice Presidential advisor I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, played key roles in Congressional opposition to Pace's re-nomination. "His recent statements that he believed homosexual statements are immoral" presented a "significant problem" for Pace according to Starr. "Congressional leaders, in warning Secretary...

Wilson says 'good riddance' to Scooter Libby, Cheney should be next. Former Ambassador Joe Wilson, whose wife Valerie Plame was at the heart of the Lewis "Scooter" Libby case, showed no mercy following the announcement of Libby's jail sentence. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000 for lying to federal investigators about his role in the outing of former CIA operative Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife. Here's the Wilson statement in full: “As Americans, both Valerie and I are grateful that justice has been served, reconfirming that our country remains a nation of laws. We are also...

Handing out anti-gay fliers is apparently a risky act in Crystal Lake, Illinois. A 16-year-old girl who did so was charged with a felony hate crime and held without bail at a juvenile detention center for more than two weeks. Then the judge relented and let her go home. But the girl is being treated like a dangerous mafia chieftain: she was brought to court in leg shackles, she wears an electronic ankle device, and her phone calls and Internet use are being monitored. Her trial starts on Tuesday, June 5. One of her friends, also 16, will be tried...

Less than fifteen years after the last Soviet troops pulled out of the Baltic States, a new survey has shown that young Swedes are still in the dark about the fate of its neighbours behind the Iron Curtain. A poll carried out by Demoskop on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism (Föreningen för upplysning om kommunismen - UOK) found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag. This can be contrasted with the 95 percent who knew of Auschwitz. "Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the...

Tens of millions were swept up in the gulag, shipped off to exile, forced labor, and often death. The victims included ethnic minorities and the intelligentsia, but also, less well known, the so-called kulaks. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who documented the Soviet penal system in "The Gulag Archipelago," wrote of the nearly 2 million kulaks deported between 1930 and 1931: "This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it." ... As the "resettlement" of the kulaks continued, millions of other "undesirables" joined them in internal exile. Yagoda's "grandiose plan" to...

Speaking in 2004 to a crowd of wealthy democratic supporters during a fund raising event in San Francisco, Hillary Clinton spoke the very words that illustrate the intentions of the government so very well. "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." While those words were spoken three years ago, they are just as important today. They represent not just the Democrat party's strong commitment to the redistribution of wealth rightfully earned by the American people, it provides insight into the focus that our politicians have in running our nation. It highlights the precise...

Keep in prayer for the Vietnam Human Rights Bill. It is presently in the Senate after passing by a wide margin in the House. If you have any doubt about whether the Bill should pass, take a look at the picture below of an actual re-education camp in Vietnam provided by the Montagnard Foundation. Re-education camps are where believers are typically sent. Stay tuned as we will post a picture per day over the next 4 days. Top    12/26/2004 VietnamPicture 3 of a Vietnamese Re-Education Camp Keep in prayer for the Vietnam Human Rights Bill. It is presently...

Russia has suffered terribly at the hands of Islamic terrorism over the centuries and continues suffer today. Yet, Russia is the best friend of the terrorism-exporting Muslim countries. Russia is actively helping Iran towards its ambition to extiprate Israel. Will Russia learn a lesson?

Primorsky (AsiaNews) – The North Korean government is paying for oil imported from Russia by dispatching forced labour at zero cost since it has no other way to pay in goods or services. This was confirmed by the investigations of independent journalists, a professor of the Far Eastern Research Centre of Vladivostok and members of the Russian government. According to statistics of the local administration of Primorsky city, Pyongyang’s oil imports increased from 62,000 dollars in 2001 to 4.4 million dollars last year. An expert who lives in North Korea, anonymous for security reasons, said: “The city from where the...

Russian Journalist Politkovskaya Found Dead October 7, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Moscow police say prominent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, known for her critical coverage of the war in Chechnya, was killed today in the capital. Moscow police said Politkovskaya's body was found in an elevator in the apartment building where she was living in the city center. The Interfax news agency quoted police officials as saying a pistol and four bullets were found in the elevator. Politkovskaya was respected for her critical, in-depth coverage of the Russian government's campaign in Chechnya. In 2004, she fell seriously ill with symptoms of food...

On Saturday, September 23, 2006, I was watching “Es Tu Capital” [“It is your Capital”] hosted by Antonio Aguillen of Univision. This show is in Spanish and it has a focus on city, state and federal issues every Saturday morning. It is basically the Univision “Meet the Press” of San Antonio and South Texas. At approximately 9:50 a.m., host Antonio Aguillen asked his two guests in the civil rights movement if it were true that the detention and processing centers in South Texas for illegal aliens were essentially “Soviet style Gulags” for workers who were crossing the border. One of...

Drive down Victory Boulevard in Grozny, and you'd never think there had been a war in Chechnya. Five years ago this broad avenue looked like Stalingrad after World War II. Now it's flanked with new apartments and boutiques selling Italian clothes -- snip--- The rest of the world may not have noticed, but Russia's president has won the Chechen war. He did not start it, but he prosecuted it with the full might of Russia's military. The conflict was as brutal as any Europe has known in the last century. Grozny was bombed flat, along with half of Chechnya's towns....

Poster's note: this is a long read, but well worth it. Solzhenitsyn describes succinctly what many of us feel, but cannot express.Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, Thursday, June 8, 1978 I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates. Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we...

RIGA, August 16, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- August 21 marks the 15th anniversary of Latvia declaring full independence from the Soviet Union, after the failed coup attempt in Moscow a few days earlier. Since then Latvia has gone from strength to strength, joining the European Union and NATO in 2004. "June 17, 1940, the Soviets came in, and in 1941, the Germans came in and pushed back the Soviets," says Oskars Gruzins, a young guide at the Museum of Occupation in the heart of old Riga, as he shows tourists a large map of Latvia. "After the Germans were defeated, the...

Walter Ciszek (1904-1984) Before there was an Armistice Day, Walter Ciszek was born on November 11, 1904, and lived through a crucified century. Death came gracefully in 1984 on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. In boyhood he was a bully in a gang on the gritty streets of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, and Ciszek’s Polish immigrant father dragged him to the police station, hoping to put him into a reform school. Everyone thought he was joking when the eighth grader announced that he would enter the Polish minor seminary. The seminarian swam in an icy lake and rose before dawn...

The Diocese of Allentown is asking the Vatican to canonize a Shenandoah priest who survived more than two decades of imprisonment in the Soviet Union. The diocese sent three crates of materials concerning the Rev. Walter Ciszek’s life to Rome two weeks ago. The crates included six cardboard boxes that contained things such as sworn testimony from 45 witnesses and thousands of typed pages of his writings and meditations. The documents reportedly took 16 years to compile. The Vatican is slated to review them beginning Tuesday. “They arrived last week,” Sister Albertine of the Father Walter Ciszek Prayer League in...

N.Korea Gulag Musical to Hit Washington A Korean musical about human rights abuses in North Korea’s notorious Yoduk concentration camp will be staged at the National Theater in Washington D.C. Producers of “Yoduk Story” said Monday the musical will debut there on Sept. 21. The 165-year old National Theater is right on Pennsylvania Avenue, about 100 m from the White House, and is one of the national symbols. There will be 10 shows until Oct. 1 at the theater. Suzanne Scholte, the head of the activist group Defense Forum Foundation who played a key part in arranging the show's U.S....

From the Gulag to the Killing Fields By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | June 5, 2006Frontpage Interview's guest today is Paul Hollander, an expert on anti-Americanism and the author of two masterpiece works on the psychology of the Left: Political Pilgrims and Anti-Americanism. He is the editor of a collection of essays by America's foremost scholars and thinkers, Understanding Anti-Americanism. He has now gathered together an unprecedented volume consisting of more than forty personal memoirs of Communist repression from dissidents across the world in the new book From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression...

Gulag tourism: Lithuania's 'Stalin's World' a hit GRUTAS (LITHUANIA): A Soviet prison camp may not sound like the ideal place for a good time. Even less so in a country that was occupied by the Red Army for half a century. Yet Grutas Park, a quirky theme park dotted with relics of Lithuania's communist past, has become a major tourist attraction in this former Soviet republic. Now celebrating its fifth anniversary, the park popularly known as "Stalin's World," every year welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors who traipse along two miles of wooden walkways resembling those in Siberian prison camps...

I hereby nominate David Finkel for a Pulitzer Prize in photography. The photo that he took above PERFECTLY captures the LUNACY of the Left. In this particular case, the crazed face in the photo belongs to one Maryscott O'Connor who writes a Leftwing Moonbat Blog called MY LEFT WING which is one long primal scream of ANGER at Bush and the EVIL Republicans. According to this Washington Post ARTICLE, when O'Connor isn't posting about how she wishes Bush would go to hell "after contracting incurable cancer and suffering for protracted periods of time without benefit of medication," she "relaxes"...