Free Republic

As freedom-lovers throughout the world celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the freedom-lovers at the New York Times, if there are any, have to be reflecting on that paper's own role in the Wall's construction. As it happens, no English-speaker was more responsible for the savage sprawl of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain that reinforced it than the Times' own ace reporter, Walter Duranty. In November 1933, the one-legged reporter had come to Washington, D.C. from Moscow to witness President Roosevelt officially recognize the Soviet Union. Duranty knew, and everyone else knew, that...

MOSCOW — Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, warned Friday that Russians had lost their sense of horror over Stalin’s purges, and called for the construction of museums and memorial centers devoted to the atrocities, as well as further efforts to unearth and identify the dead. Mr. Medvedev made the comments on his video blog, on the occasion of a holiday devoted to the memory of victims of repression. He warned that revisionist historians risked glossing over the darker passages of the Soviet past, citing a poll that showed that 90 percent of young people could not name victims of the...

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has made an outspoken attack on those seeking to rehabilitate former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Millions of Soviet citizens died under Stalin's rule and Mr Medvedev said it was not possible to justify those who exterminated their own people. He also warned against efforts to falsify history and defend repression. Some Russian politicians have recently tried to portray Stalin in a more positive light. Under President Medvedev's predecessor, current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Stalin was often promoted as an efficient leader who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. Brutal regime Mr Medvedev made the unusually...

Russian court ruled against Josef Stalin's grandson Tuesday in a libel suit over a newspaper article that said the Soviet dictator sent thousands of people to their deaths. A judge at a Moscow district court rejected Yevgeny Dzhugashvili's claim that Novaya Gazeta damaged Stalin's honor and dignity in an April article that referred to him as a "bloodthirsty cannibal." The case essentially put Stalin on trial more than 50 years after his death. A ruling against the newspaper would have been seen as an exoneration one of the 20th century's most notorious autocrats.

Most historians in Russia and the West agree that Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people. But now a bizarre libel hearing is under way at a Moscow court that could clear the name of the power-crazed Soviet dictator, widely considered one of history’s most vicious tyrants.

Stalin’s grandson blames Poland 09.10.2009 16:01 Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, the grandson of Joseph Stalin, is suing an opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and a civil rights society Memorial for defamation of the Soviet dictator and blaming Poland of having masterminded the libel. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili says that an article published in Novaya Gazeta, in cooperation with Memorial, is a lie. The article claims that Stalin personally ordered the deaths of thousands of Soviet and Polish citizens in Katyn. Stalin’s grandson, who was not present at the hearing in a Moscow court, is demanding 10 million ruble (23,000 euro) compensation for moral damage, claiming...

Joseph Stalin's grandson in legal battle to defend tyrant's reputation Tony Halpin in Moscow In what must rank as one of Russia’s strangest legal cases, a court began a libel hearing yesterday in defence of the reputation of Joseph Stalin. Yevgeni Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s grandson, is taking part in a demand for ten million roubles (£200,000) in damages from Novaya Gazeta, a liberal opposition newspaper, over an article that accused the Soviet tyrant of personally approving executions. The case is being brought by Leonid Zhura, a devoted Stalinist, who insists the dictator never actually killed anybody — despite the deaths of...

Joseph Stalin's grandson has launched a court action claiming a liberal Russian newspaper has defamed the former Soviet dictator. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili says an article claiming Stalin personally ordered the deaths of Soviet citizens is a lie. A Moscow court has agreed to hear the case against the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The paper published a piece referring to declassified death warrants which it says bore Stalin's personal signature. Mr Dzhugashvili - who was not at the court as the case was brought on Thursday - says that is a lie, and that Stalin never directly ordered the deaths of anyone....

"Hear our cry, Obama." "Deliver us, Obama." Video at link.

Written in English before November 9 1915 Dear Comrades! We are extremely glad to get your leaflet. Your appeal to the members of the Socialist Party to struggle for a new International, for clear-cut revolutionary socialism as taught by Marx and Engels, and against the opportunism, especially against those who are in favor of working class participation in a war of defence, corresponds fully with the position our party (Social-Democratic Labor Party of Russia, Central Committee) has taken from the beginning of this war and has always taken during more than ten years. We send you our sincerest greetings &...

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — Four men were arrested and a fifth is being sought in connection with the campus gang rape of an 18-year-old female Hofstra University student. The four suspects — only one of whom is a student at the school — were arrested on Long Island, N.Y., on Monday; a fifth is still at large. ... Police say 19-year-old Jesus Ortiz and 21-year-old Rondell Bedward, both of the Bronx, were arraigned on rape charges Monday. The other two, 19-year-old Stalin Felipe, of the Bronx, and 20-year-old Kevin Taveras, of Brentwood, are to be arraigned Tuesday in Hempstead. Police didn't...

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says that the demonstrations in Washington, D.C., Saturday do not represent the views of the broader public when it comes to health care reform.

Anyways, take these xenophobic tendencies that have been created for over the past 1300 years (or more than 5,000 years, depending on your source) and then brutally colonize the country for thirty six years. Then, add in a devastating civil war (the Korean War) that wasn't allowed to see its natural conclusion - a war ending with there being two rival Korean states is definitely unnatural (or just look at the fact that the armistic isn't even a peace treaty, but a cease fire signed by China, North Korea, and the U.S.). That's at the heart of my argument. And,...

Please excuse the vanity. Could anyone verify if Fact Check is legitimate? It was recently discovered that some internet fact checking website was nothing but two liberally biased individuals putting their spin on the information they were checking on and posting it to their site. I thought it was Fact Check. If this is not correct, I apologize for giving the wrong impression, but it would also be an opportunity to set that straight in the responses. If anyone could help me out and provide a link I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

The president’s chief economic adviser warned Friday that the nation’s unemployment rate could stay “unacceptably high” for years to come — a situation that would seriously complicate Barack Obama’s ability to convince Americans that he’s beating back the recession. “The level of unemployment is unacceptably high,” National Economic Council Director Larry Summers said Friday. “And will, by all forecasts, remain unacceptably high for a number of years.” Summers’ comments came in a briefing with reporters ahead of Obama’s speech in New York City on Monday, marking the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an event widely regarded as...

On Sept. 1, while the international media focused on commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War in Poland, Russian children returned to their classrooms to begin a new school year. They found the world transformed. New state-approved textbooks have recast Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin into "one of the most successful leaders of the U.S.S.R." No longer is he regarded as a paranoid mass-murderer responsible for the deaths of nearly 20 million people. He has become a great, if flawed, national leader -- an "efficient manager" who defeated the Nazis, saved Europe and industrialized a...

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century...

How Will We Judge the Korean War in a Century? [...] What I am arguing is will this be the consensus twenty years from today (or forty years after this article was written). I mean, yes, most ordinary South Koreans enjoys such material prosperity that probably only a select few and I mean a very select few in North Korea could only begin to dream about. I am saying that had the Korean War run its course without intervention from the United States (or equivalently had Harry S. Truman not settled on a policy, the Truman Doctrine, where not winning...

Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, grandson of the former doctor of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, has filed a lawsuit demanding damages of $300,000 for what he termed “the slander of my late grandfather by Novaya Gazeta.” The newspaper, as have most historians, attributed millions of murders to the regime headed by Stalin from the mid 1920s to his death in 1953. It is Dzhugashvili’s contention that every single one of these homicides “was in self-defense, not only of my grandfather’s own person, but of the entire nation.” The absence of evidence for the claim of self defense “is due to my grandfather’s...

U.S. naivete not only wrongly interfered with the natural development of East Asia, but in particular with respect to Korea, the greatest tragedy was that by the U.S. interfering in what was basically a civil war, the peninsula saw all the carnage and destructionthat would've played out anyways had the U.S. not interfered, but the wardid nothing to unify the nation ("Containment"). Moreover, the perverse state that North Korea finds herself to be in is a direct result of the natural order of things being prevented from occurring. Other Sinic nations experienced similar bouts of reconciliation, but with the fruits...

On September 8, Barack Obama will address every school kid in America, reason number 216 to home school. Obama has already sent out an agenda for the teachers to follow. Again, on the surface, not all that ominous, but this is Barack Obama we are talking about here, a committed communist who was mentored from the tender age of 10 years old by communist Frank Marshall Davis. This is Barack Obama who, in his books, says he sought our Marxist radicals in college as well as the Marxist professors. Those were his people.

MOSCOW–Joseph Stalin was in the dock yesterday when a Russian court held a preliminary hearing in a libel case brought by his grandson over a newspaper story that said the tyrant had ordered the killings of Soviet citizens. Rights groups say the case shows a creeping attempt in modern Russia to paint a more benevolent picture of the Soviet Union's most feared leader, under whose rule millions perished. Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, is seeking 9.5 million rubles ($327,000) from the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and 500,000 rubles ($17,225) from the author of an article published last April claiming Stalin personally signed...

Obama and his minions are finding out that just calling anyone who disagrees with him and his crazy agenda a racist is getting old. Their new tact, as evidenced by Rep. Diane Watson of California, is even scarier- if Obama fails, America fails. the investment of a nation into an individual reminds me of another political movement, but I can't think of just what....

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Josef Stalin was in the dock on Monday when a Russian court held a preliminary hearing in a libel case brought by his grandson over a newspaper story which said the tyrant had ordered the killings of Soviet citizens. Rights groups say the case shows a creeping attempt in modern Russia to paint a more benevolent picture of the Soviet Union's most feared leader, under whose rule millions perished. Stalin's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, is seeking 9.5 million roubles ($299,000) from the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and 500,000 roubles from the author of an article published last April claiming...

Activists Denounce Stalin in Station 28 August 2009 By Kristina Mikulova / Special to The Moscow Times The freshly renovated Kurskaya metro station reopened this week as the newest front in a bitter controversy over the legacy of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, whose name was returned to the facade after more than 50 years. The entrance hall of the Circle Line station once again bears a verse from the 1944 version of the Soviet anthem: “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation; He inspired us to work and be heroic.” Human rights activists condemned the reference to Stalin...

When Winston Churchill learned in the spring of 1945 that the Americans were going to halt their advance on Berlin from the west and leave Hitler's capital to the mercies of the Red Army of the Soviet Union, he was furious. The United States government had made an absolute commitment not to let post-war Europe separate out into distinct areas of political influence. But now this was precisely what was being allowed to happen. Russian behaviour was worsening by the day as Stalin's all-conquering men rolled up the countries in the east and made them satellites of Moscow, in defiance...

Sunday, August 23, marks the 70th anniversary of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - the non-aggression treaty signed in 1939 by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The pact included a secret protocol dividing Eastern and Central Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. Days after it was signed, first German and then Soviet forces invaded Poland. The anniversary's approach has sparked a debate in Europe. Western governments condemn Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin as two equally murderous variants of totalitarianism. The Russian government calls that comparison a "distortion" of history. On August 17,...

Seventy years ago Sunday, the Soviet Union signed a pact with Nazi Germany that gave dictator Josef Stalin a free hand to take over part of Poland and the Baltic states on the eve of World War II. Most of the world now condemns the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but Russia has mounted a new defense of the 1939 treaty as it seeks to restore some of its now-lost sphere of influence. "This is all being rehabilitated because this is now a very lively issue for Russia," said military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. "This is not about history at all." (snip) The Soviet...

The white flag is flying over Camp Obama, which makes a pleasant change from the red flag that, metaphorically speaking, has been flying there since January 20. Barack Obama’s plan for socialised health care on the Stalinist model across the United States is now in full retreat. Not only will it not play in Peoria, it will not play anywhere. Politicians returning to Washington after scrubbing off the tar and feathers acquired at town-hall meetings are bringing with them a blast of reality that has been absent from Obama’s dreamland regime since his inauguration. For months Obama had been trumpeting...

Sam Vaknin is considered by many as the world's renowned expert on Narcissism. He is the author of the book, "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited". He states that after spending over a thousand hours of watching and analyzing tapes and videos of Barack Hussein Obama, examining his body language, his gestures and speeches that Obama demonstrates that he suffers from NPD, or 'narcissistic personality disorder'. Narcissists are people who project a grandiose but false image of themselves. They can be and often are, dangerous people. Listen at the link above.

The remains of more than 20 suspected victims of Joseph Stalin's secret police have been found in the basement of a church in northern Belarus. Soviet bullets were found with the remains at Glubokoye, a village which had been in Poland but fell into Soviet hands in 1939. A youth group discovered the remains earlier this week, reports say. Local historians said the victims had most probably been shot by the NKVD secret police between 1939 and 1941. "I think we can all but rule out any suggestion that these people were shot by the Germans during the occupation," historian...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict called on Tuesday for a "world political authority" to manage the global economy and for more government regulation of national economies to pull the world out of the current crisis and avoid a repeat. The pope made his call for a re-think of the way the world economy is run in a new encyclical which touched on a number of social issues but whose main connecting thread was how the current crisis has affected both rich and poor nations. Parts of the encyclical, titled "Charity in Truth," seemed bound to upset free marketeers because...

"Thank you very much..."

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said. Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times Representative Rush Holt Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (170) » The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said. Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications...

ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE Tue Jun 16 2009 08:45:10 ET On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care -- a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm! Highlights on the agenda: ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House. The network plans a primetime special -- 'Prescription for America' -- originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on...

Distorting the facts about the Second World War may well be a prelude to a battle over a land corridor through Poland A dispatch from The Daily Telegraph's Moscow correspondent last week showed that the madness is back, in Russia at least, and with it the determination to abuse and manipulate history. A research official in the Russian defence ministry has published an essay saying that Poland effectively started the Second World War by refusing to accede to Germany's "modest" demands. We may take it that this man's view reflects that of the Russian state; it is certainly widely interpreted...

It has been 64 years since the end of the Great Patriotic War, better known in the West and the rest of the world as World War 2, but the debate over the victory and its debasement has never been stronger or more ruthlessly waged. It is time to set things straight. First we will work through the favorite Myths that the West loves to use against Russia. Myth 1: Poland was the first victim of the Nazi and Soviet regimes.First of all, let us set the stage on Poland. Between 1918 and 1924, Poland invaded all of its neighbors...

This week marks not only the first hundred days of King Barack's reign and the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street, but also the 90th birthday of Pete Seeger. The celebrations of Mr Seeger's tenth decade are extensive. If he seems a remote figure from the pop culture back catalogue, not so fast: He played at the Obama inauguration. Which, when you think about it, is quite something. One must congratulate the old banjo-picker on making it to four score and ten, which is a lot older than many "dissenting artists" made it to under the regimes...

Dr. Vaknin has written extensively about narcissism. Dr. Vaknin States "I must confess I was impressed by Sen.Barack Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident - a wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words. Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American...

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...

Following overwhelming House passage last week, the Senate tonight voted 74 to 14 on a procedural move that essentially guarantees a major expansion of a national service corps, a cornerstone of volunteerism that dates back to the era of President Kennedy. It’s akin to a call to arms by President Obama, who has harkened back to those early days to demand giving back by those who voted for him. In fact, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the senior Democrat from Massachusetts whose battle with brain cancer has oft kept him absent from the Senate these days, appeared on the floor to...

St. Louis, MO- The city installed red light cameras at twenty intersections, and they've taken in nearly $2 million in fines since they were installed last summer. Traffic Law Center where spokesperson Ann Horner says she see flashes from the camera on a daily basis. Horner however says there are no consequences for not paying. She says if you have outstanding parking tickets you cannot renew your plates or driver's license, but there's nothing in place like that if you get a red light ticket. Horner says it's all unconstitutional because there's a presumption of innocence in this country, and...

President Barack Obama's administration has dropped outright US hostility toward the world's first permanent war crimes court, but it is still a far cry from joining it, experts say. US officials say the new team is reviewing its policy on the International Criminal Court (ICC) after former president George W. Bush's administration snubbed it and drew fire that it was showing contempt for international law.

Amid all of the mixed messages on the strength of the economy coming from the White House, one theme has emerged loudly, clearly, and unvaryingly: The American economic system is about to undergo a profound shift. “Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously stated. “Never waste a good crisis,” concurred Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Americans, said Obama, should “discover great opportunity in great crisis.” What kind of opportunity? “Capitalism,” Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner said last week, “will be different.” All of Obama’s economic policies thus far are designed...

President Obama was so concerned that he may have mishandled a question from New York Times reporters about whether he was a socialist, that he called the paper to clarify his position. The president initially answered the question aboard Air Force One saying, "Let's take a look at the budget, the answer would be no." The president explained he wanted a return to the tax rates of the 1990s by giving a tax-cut to 95 percent of workers. But the president may have felt that was too dismissive, and called the Times from the Oval Office explaining: "It was hard...

Seeing things plain, not lying to oneself, not subscribing to the delusions of others – these virtues, seemingly so simple, prove in life difficult to achieve and tricky to exercise. An inevitable imitative pressure assimilates people to one another so that mere opinion, received but never vetted, comes to function as a surrogate reality, in the cave-like error of which people stumble about their errands in a lurching mockery of witting behavior. The ancients worried about false or second-hand judgment (doxa) or about superstition. Modern people must grapple with ideology. The critique of ideology is the single most important exercise...

The Russian government is to outlaw criticism of Soviet military tactics during the Second World War in the latest example of its heavy-handed approach to dissent. The controversial plan comes after a television documentary exposed the scale of human losses during one of the conflict's bloodiest battles. The programme stirred deep emotions in a country that has traditionally glorified the heroic exploits of ordinary soldiers during the 'Great Patriotic War' but has often ignored the immense human cost behind the victory over Nazi Germany. As anger among veterans swelled, the government sensed an opportunity to capitalise on the public mood...

Russian officials rejected Ukrainian charges that Stalin’s forced starvation of 7 million Ukrainians during the 1930s constituted a case of genocide. Vladimir Kozlov, head of Russia’s Federal Archives Agency, insisted that it “was merely a case of mass murder.” “These Ukrainians act as if they were singled out for massacre because of some ethnic animosity on the part of Russia’s great leader,” Kozlov said. “The records show quite clearly that the Ukrainian peasants were liquidated for their resistance to collectivization of their land. Therefore, they were killed for economic, not ethnic reasons. Allegations of genocide are baseless.” “Stalin is treated...