Free Republic

Click anywhere for video. This 1924 Soviet Cartoon captures the spirit of those who want to make the rich pay their fair share. Also interesting to see early animation from a Communist country. Ten minutes long, watch the first two minutes and the last two, if you don't have 11 minutes. Weird, surreal stuff.

Yesterday morning in Sofia, Bulgaria, anti-Communist street artists painted over a monument commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Soviet "liberation" (i.e. a Communist coup d'état) of Bulgaria in 1944. Who did they add to the statue? The Joker, among others.

Last night I watched the movie 9th Company on Netflix. This is an outstanding war movie that in my opinion is not to be missed by war movie aficionados. It's a riveting, true account of a group of young enlisted Soviet paratroopers. In the beginning, you follow this group of young men through the rigors of bootcamp where they eventually develop a close camaraderie. They're mentored by a tough, stomach-punching drill sergeant who's the lone survivor of his unit from the Afghan conflict. Even though he's tough as nails, he cares about his soldiers he mentors and wishes he could...

Moscow, December 7, Interfax - Hieromonk Makary (Markish), lecturer of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk seminary, who worked as a programmer in the USA and graduated from the ROCOR Holy Trinity seminary believes that Russian citizens have more freedom of self-expression than Americans. "Those who remember Soviet rule should lose their tongue, if they start speaking about lacking freedom of self-expression. I lived in the USA and here in Russia freedom of expression is much higher than in the States though they have 200 year old democratic tradition," Father Makary said in his interview with Interfax-Religion. According to him, "the fact that anyone...

George Blake, a British double agent, has forecast that the "American empire" will crumble, and predicted that every country in the world will one day embrace communism. In a rare interview given on his 88th birthday, the former Soviet agent said he had no regrets and expressed no remorse for betraying Britain or its intelligence service. Blake, who calls himself Georgy Ivanovich in Moscow, said he still had no time for American foreign policy. "The American empire will disappear because everyone who lives by the sword dies from the sword," he told the daily Izvestia newspaper. Blake was a member...

Aside from the obviuous shortcommings of central planning, I'm interested in the circumdtances which caused the USSR to implode. Was it inability to meet foreign obligations? Would appreciate opioions and any sources.

One cannot help but be struck by the comparisons that can be drawn between Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Barack Obama—at least when it comes to Afghanistan. Within a year or so of taking office as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had come to the realization that the Soviet Union needed to terminate its intervention in Afghanistan, end the mounting losses to Soviet blood and treasure, and abandon the hopes of the most radical of both the Afghan Communists as well as the most doctrinaire Soviet officials that Afghanistan could be recreated as a model...

http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/genocide.html from National Review, 1995-Dec-31, by George Watson: Never Blame the Left The Left is perceived as kind and caring, despite its extensive history of promoting genocide. When it comes to handing out blame, it is widely assumed that the Right is wicked and the Left incompetent. Or rather, you sometimes begin to feel, any given policy must have been Right if it was wicked, Left if it was incompetent. Mr. Watson, formerly a professor at New York University and now a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, is the author of Politics & Literature in Modern Britain and The ...

My previous post looked at Vermont's independent Senator Bernie Sanders and his links to senior Communist Party USA member Mike Bayer. I speculated that Bayer may be both a communist spy and agent-of-influence inside Sanders' Vermont Progressive Party. It turns out that Bayer is not the first possible communist agent to back Bernie Sanders. During his unsuccessful 1988 run for U.S. Congress, then Burlington, Vermont mayor Sanders received the endorsement of I. F. Stone, an iconic leftist journalist, alleged communist sympathizer, Soviet spy and possible agent-of- influence. Here is a letter that Stone mailed out on behalf of the Sanders...

US President Barack Obama’s warm endorsement of the plan to build a mosque by the ruins of the World Trade Center tells Israel – and its enemies – everything we need to know about the president of the United States of America. -Caroline B. Glick, Jerusalem Post At the moment, part of the land designated for the jihad monument is owned by ConEd. The crafty imam-in-chief, as far as we know, doesn’t have the funding to construct his monstrosity. Although Hillary’s State Department is doing what it can to help out by sending Rauf on a fundraising outing at taxpayer...

Fists? Let me first state that I sympathize to the cause of the people involved in Freedom Works organization. However their resent artwork looks like photoshoped Soviet posters. It’s like somebody erased Kremlin and put the Capitol on the background on their 9/12 tax-payer march on Washington DC poster. Kim Jong Il is going crazy with envy looking at those fists at the 8/27 convention poster. He does not respect the copyrights so it is very possible for him to use the ‘fisty’ artwork as a center piece at the next parade in North Korea. The communist artists may...

I’ve gone back and forth on the Cuba embargo. When the regime there represented a violation of the Monroe Doctrine as the outpost of a hostile overseas power, it was imperative. With the end of the Cold War, the embargo no longer seemed justifiable. But now, with Fidel at 84 years old, it would seem to make sense to wait til he dies to lift it, both so he can’t claim a victory before his death and to show the Cuban people that he was the reason for the embargo. But I’m rethinking even that. Al Kamen had an item...

The Senate Banking Committee passed the Livable Communities Act on Tuesday, moving the bill one step closer to final passage. The bill creates $4 billion in neighborhood planning grants for “sustainable” living projects and a new federal office to oversee them. Similar legislation in the House has been criticized by Republicans on the House Budget Committee, who charge that “the program’s aim is to impose a Washington-based, central planning model on localities across the country.” In the Senate version, written by outgoing Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the Livable Communities Act would designate $4 billion to aid local governments in...

Socialism is socialism — i.e., pure satanic evil. The only difference between one brand and another is how much the rulers are able to get away with. American socialists were complicit in Stalin's Holodomor. Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for facilitating the genocide by helping to cover it up. The socialists currently running that unspeakably vile publication have refused to renounce the prize. Give the Left enough power, and Americans will rot in mass graves. Don't take my word for it; Obama's cohorts have already said so. On the positive side, ending human lives...

Russia's parliament on Friday voted to boost the powers of the successor to the Soviet KGB, allowing it to summon people it believes are about to commit a crime and threaten jail for those who disobey its orders. Rights groups said the proposed regulations could be used by the FSB security service to detain opposition activists and independent journalists and undermine President Dmitry Medvedev's promises to foster civil rights. "It's a step toward a police state," said Vladimir Ulas, a member of the opposition Communist Party. "It is effectively a ban on any real opposition activity." The bill, which would...

When I was wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all during the 1990s, of course I made a great many acquaintances. What follows was one of them, a guy I met on a train. He had recently been fishing, and insisted I join him in his meal. Normally, I am a laid-back, mellow, easy-going sort of person, and I had no problems accepting the hospitality of Russians, Ukrainians, White Russians, and Moldavians, but this was, uh, dead fish. I however got the impression I had better eat, and so for the...

Please don't mind the Frankenstein singing (I'm sure Dolph himself doesn't care, just watch him deal with a truckload of ice at 1:40 of this clip).. Rather impressive for "an older guy". But, even though he can do things like this and all that, I'd guess he'd bow down to this boxer: (as far as I know, Ingemar "Ingo" Johansson was the last universially acknowledged white boxer to hold the title of world champion): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsO66Oqm7pY Long live boxing!

The Soviet Union was on the brink of launching a nuclear attack against China in 1969 and only backed down after the US told Moscow such a move would start World War Three, according to a Chinese historian. The extraordinary assertion, made in a publication sanctioned by China's ruling Communist Party, suggests that the world came perilously close to nuclear war just seven years after the Cuban missile crisis. Richard Nixon in Moscow with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1974 Liu Chenshan, the author of a series of articles that chronicle the five times China has faced a nuclear threat...

Claire Berlinski A Hidden History of Evil Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives? Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated archives suggest a much darker figure. In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism...

Vladimir Dubinin, President of the Russian Bodybuilding Federation, revealed: "He liked [revolution leader] Lenin's bust very much, and later in a letter he wrote that this bust always gives him a charge of energy, so he keeps it in his office rather than in the museum." Dubinin said Schwarzenegger was also sent busts of Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.