Free Republic

Joseph Stalin had been General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party for six years in 1928, when John Dewey, "the father of modern education," toured Russia with a group of educators. Later that year, The New Republic published Dewey's Impressions of Soviet Russia and the revolutionary world. This polemic stands as a remarkable testament to progressivism's disdain for mankind, reason, and truth. It is also Dewey's most honest and concise primer on the principles of his progressive education method. Anyone prepared to defend the idea of government-controlled schooling after reading this work is perhaps beyond reach of rational argument. Dewey's...

The commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa has been fired for misconduct. Army Maj. Gen. Ralph Baker was relieved of his duties on March 28, according to U.S. Africa Command spokesman Benjamin Benson. Gen. Carter Ham, AFRICOM commander, lost confidence in Baker's ability to lead, but the command isn't releasing any further details at this time because the alleged misconduct is being appealed, Benson said.

Three Numbers In the Soviet Union preparations begin for the fiftieth anniversary of the communist revolution; in particular, a large collective "book epic" is conceived. The idea has been talked about in the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers with Fedin, Twardowski, Tikhonov, Surkov Gribachev, etc., and, of course, the idea will be implemented. Not even one "book epic", probably, will be created. We decided to offer the authors of this undertaking three numbers that will be useful for any "book epic." NUMBER ONE It is a question of human losses in the revolutionary transformation of Russia. Ninety-plus years...

Over the past few years, evangelical atheists have switched places with fire-and-brimstone Christians: where once it was the Christians who brooked no disagreement, now it is the atheists; and it is the atheists, too, who perform cartwheels on the heads of pins. Christopher Hitchens once even managed to argue of the Reverend Martin Luther King, of all people, that ‘In no real as opposed to nominal sense . . . was he a Christian’. A weaselly self-righteousness is now the hallmark of the celebrity unbeliever. Meanwhile, it is the Christian who nods diligently in any discussion, taking pains to reassure the atheists...

Yury Fidelgoltz, a Stalin-era gulag survivor, has an answer ready when he hears people pine for the "good old days" under Uncle Joe. "My answer is clear. If Stalin came to power now, you wouldn't talk like that because he'd snap your necks!" Fidelgoltz said, leaning forward in his chair, his blue eyes narrowing during a recent conversation in his apartment in Moscow. Fidelgoltz, 85, was a 20-year-old aspiring actor when he was sentenced to a decade of hard labor for anti-Soviet scribblings in his private diary. He served six years, from 1948 to 1954, before his release, the result...

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men Look'd at each other wild a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien. ---John Keats, from On First looking into Chapman's Homer A few days before I wrote these words, opened for the first time Whittaker Chambers' WITNESS. It is his account of the Alger Hiss espionage case. And, as Chambers says, "all the props of an espionage case are there--foreign agents, household traitors, stolen documents,...

Nazism and Communism They Endured the Communist Terror by Horst Schüler    Place of horror. A Soviet prison camp in the Vorkuta region. Our author Horst student had there for four years, forced to work - PHOTO:. PICTURE-ALLIANCE / AKG-IMAGES / A contribution to the controversy over the memory of the victims of Nazism and Stalinism: Horst Schüler responds to the historian Wolfgang Benz. The former director of the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism Wolfgang Benz has recently published in Tagesspiegel about the dispute over the right of interpretation of the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship and communist regimes....

Feb. 2 marked the 70th anniversary of the end of one of World War II's most decisive and utterly destructive battles, the five-months of slaughter in the Russian city then called Stalingrad. In 2012, this column revisited several major battles of 1942, including Midway and El Alamein. Midway destroyed Japan's strategic offensive capabilities. El Alamein began the Western Allies' long drive to Berlin. Winston Churchill saw Britain's North African victory as, "perhaps, the end of the beginning." Subsequent allied victories on the Western and Eastern fronts proved Churchill correct, with Stalingrad the eastern end of the beginning. However, the...

VOLGOGRAD, Russia - An aged T-34 tank clattered into the centre of the southern Russian city once known as Stalingrad and soldiers dressed in World War II-era uniforms marched solemnly as Russia marked the 70th anniversary of the end of one of modern warfare's bloodiest battles. President Vladimir Putin came to the city later Saturday to take part in the commemorations, including a visit to the famous hilltop memorial complex surmounted by a towering 87-meter (280-foot) statue of a sword-wielding woman representing the motherland. "Stalingrad will forever remain a symbol of unity and invincibility of our people, a symbol of...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

Joseph Stalin’s firearms confiscation was a tremendous success for the Socialist state. This is a tremendous reminder on how Stalin was able to control, starve, punish and imprison a defenseless people. (Video at link)

Exclusive: Ellis Washington has historical chart linking firearm restrictions to genocide Here’s the Formula: Hatred + Government + Disarmed Civilians = Genocide. What makes the argument so powerful? Two factors. First, it makes common sense: Unarmed, defenseless people have no hope against armed aggressors. Second, it states the historical truth: Evil governments did wipe out 170,000,000 innocent non-military lives in the 20th century alone. ~ Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership website The pretext: Massacre of the innocents – Newtown, Conn. I am a professor at a wonderful online school called National Paralegal College (NPC). Shannon Southard, a student...

The White House Correspondents Association is strongly urging the Obama administration to allow press access to the president’s official swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 20, following indications from inauguration committee officials that the event could potentially be closed to the press. “Mindful of the historic nature of this occasion, we expect the White House will continue the long tradition of opening the President’s official swearing-in to full press access, and we as an organization are looking forward to working with the administration to make that happen,” Ed Henry, the Fox News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents Association, said...

House Republican leaders used a secret criteria list to decide which conservatives to purge from powerful House committees, Breitbart News has learned. As this time, it appears they will keep the criteria list hidden from the public, too. Spokespeople for members of House GOP leadership have refused to discuss details about the list on the record with press. Because GOP Leadership won't discuss the list, it’s unclear what specific criteria the list contained and how much of a role it played in the conservative purge. It’s also unclear which member of House Republican leadership initiated this process. In remarks to...

A university professor says the recent discovery of a carrier pigeon’s corpse in a chimney in Normandy, France has shed new light on events of the last year of World War II in the European theater. Harvard professor of European History Albee Leftkowitz believes that the failure of the pigeon’s mission may have hampered the advance of American forces on the Western Front and forced President Roosevelt to accede to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. “Right-wing critics of President Roosevelt have made much of what they call FDR’s misplaced trust in ‘Uncle Joe’...

The most striking proof that the Arab anti-Israel cause is a common meeting ground for both Nazis and Communists --and that the Arabs welcomed supporters of both ilks-- lies in the friendship of Carlos, the notorious master terrorist who served the PLO, with Fran*ois Genoud, an old Nazi, one of the leading Nazis in pre-War Switzerland, later a financier who provided funds for Habash's faction of the PLO. "Carlos" (his nom de guerre) was what is called a "red diaper baby." His fabulously rich father, a Venezuelan lawyer and owner of estates, gave "Carlos" the name Ilich, Lenin's patronymic, as...

The Secretary of State Project, the once influential group backed by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, has either gone into hiding or informally disbanded. What happened? Did the group just disappear? Well, before we investigate the group’s possible demise, perhaps a quick history lesson is in order. ... “In most states the secretary of state is the chief elections officer, so putting left-wingers in the often-overlooked but critically important office allows these political radicals to manipulate the electoral process,” writes Matthew Vadum for the American Spectator. “This is what liberals call ‘election protection,’” he adds. Add billionaire donor George Soros and...

Meet the hard-core Communist who mentored the future 44th President of the United States. LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE: Frank Marshall Davis was a literal, card-carrying member of Communist Party USA (CPUSA). His card number was 47544. He was pro-Soviet, pro–Red China. He edited and wrote for Party-line publications such as the Chicago Star and the Honolulu Record; contributors to the former actually served as secret agents to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Davis did outrageous Soviet propaganda work in his columns, at every juncture agitating and opposing U.S. attempts to slow Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. He favored Yalta and Red...

On Monday evening, the BBC altered its programme schedule to broadcast an hour-long tribute to an old man who had died aged 95, with fawning contributions from the likes of historian Simon Schama and Labour peer Melvyn Bragg. The next day, the Left-leaning Guardian filled not only the front page and the whole of an inside page but also devoted almost its entire G2 Supplement to the news. The Times devoted a leading article to the death, and a two-page obituary. You might imagine, given all this coverage and the fact that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband also went out...

Dear Askel5, For many years, I thought you were a bit of a nut. A very INTELLIGENT nut, but a nut nonetheless. Your constant harping about Gramscian politics was, to my mind, weird a little paranoid. It turns out you were one hundred percent right. The move to destroy America has been very below-the-surface, highly organized, and extremely effective ... and the model has been, indeed, Antonio Gramsci's.From the work Notes on Saul Alinsky and Neo-Marxism: Remember that the primary influence for Obama's strategy comes from Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." With that in mind..."Alinsky's tactics were based, not on...