Free Republic

Now in their 70s and 80s, children of the victims of Josef Stalin's political repressions remembered one of the darkest pages of Russia's history at a ceremony Wednesday in central Moscow. Several hundred people laid flowers and lit candles to honor the victims of the Great Purge of 1937, when millions were labeled "enemies of the state" and executed without trial or sent to labor camps. The 70th anniversary comes as the Kremlin, focused on restoring Russians' pride in their Soviet-era history, has been trying to soften public perception of Stalin's rule and hushing up the full horror of his...

Hidden City Found Beneath Alexandria Charles Q. Choi Special to LiveScience LiveScience.com Tue Jul 24, 4:45 PM ET The legendary city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great as he swept through Egypt in his quest to conquer the known world. Now scientists have discovered hidden underwater traces of a city that existed at Alexandria at least seven centuries before Alexander the Great arrived, findings hinted at in Homer's Odyssey and that could shed light on the ancient world. Alexandria was founded in Egypt on the shores of the Mediterranean in 332 B.C. to immortalize Alexander the Great. The...

Schoolboys in my native Hungary used to recite an old ditty. It conjured up emotions ossified in the seams of time. The Kings of Hungary Freedom Square, Budapest, Hungary Stork, stork, ciconia, What makes your foot bleed? A Turkish lad is slashing it A Magyar lad is mending it With a fife, a drum and a fiddle of reed.The wounded stork’s song was a fragment of tribal memory bobbing to the surface from the collective unconscious of a great historical hurt. It was a bitter lay, a denunciation of the Ottoman Empire, the Xanadu of imperial Islam. The Turks had...

Those who may share U.S. President George Bush's anguish in these recurrent winters of our discontent are not many. It is easy to describe Bush as a beleaguered president in a war that a majority of Americans now question as the November mid-term election demonstrated. They want an end to the war in Iraq without having to admit defeat. The agony of Bush is compounded by his knowledge of the enemy. That and the constraints placed, in a free society within the context of our integrated world, on his office and its ability to wage the sort of war necessary...

Origin of the Celts - Caucasian, not European The Celts are Circaesir from Circaesya, who lived on the Sea of Grass in what is now west Kazakhstan until late in the second millennium B.C. They were by their own definition a linguistic group, but now they are a culture. Contrary to popular belief, they had nothing to do with European inhabitants known to archaeologists as the 'Beaker folk' and 'Battle Axe people'. The 'Urnfield people' farther east were Circaesir, and obviously related to the Celts. Their descendants integrated with Celts in central Europe. Tradition suggests that the Celts left the...

Israel in World History Lev Navrozov Friday, Aug. 4, 2006 ---------------------------------------- A fantastic rumor (that turned out to be true) spread around Russia in the late 1960s: Anyone who considered himself or herself to be Jewish because one parent was Jewish could apply for an exit visa to go to Israel! According to my internal Soviet passport, I was Russian and bore my Russian father's family name. But on my mother's side there had been 24 generations of rabbis, and so I applied for an exit visa for myself, my wife, my son, and my mother. My father had been...

Gout forced Charles V abdication, study finds By Gene Emery BOSTON (Reuters) - Tests of a 500-year-old pinky finger confirm that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was debilitated by gout and the painful joints it produces, Spanish researchers reported on Wednesday. Jaume Ordi of the University of Barcelona and colleagues used a microscope to examine the tip of one of Charles' pinkie fingers, which was preserved separately from his body in a small red velvet box. After rehydrating and slicing the mummified fingertip, the Ordi team found telltale signs of gout, including the buildup of uric acid crystals. At the...

The American attitude toward the French Revolution has been generally favorable—naturally enough for a nation itself born in revolution. But as revolutions go, the French one in 1789 was among the worst. True, in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, it overthrew a corrupt regime. Yet what these fine ideals led to was, first, the Terror and mass murder in France, and then Napoleon and his wars, which took hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe and Russia. After this pointless slaughter came the restoration of the same corrupt regime that the Revolution overthrew. Aside from immense suffering, the...

Typhoid May Have Caused Fall of Athens, Study Finds Nicholas Bakalar for National Geographic News February 27, 2006 An ancient medical mystery—the cause of a plague that wracked Athens from 426 to 430 B.C. and eventually led to the city's fall—has been solved by DNA analysis, researchers say. The ancient Athenians died from typhoid fever, according to a new study. Scientists from the University of Athens drew this conclusion after studying dental pulp extracted from the teeth of three people found in a mass grave in Athens' Kerameikos cemetery. The mass grave was first discovered in 1994 and was dated...

It was 36 years after the death of Mohammed (632 A.D.) that a Muslim army first laid siege to the eastern gateway to Europe, Constantinople (now Istanbul). After that, Islamic armies battled Europeans in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Sicily, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumania, Wallachia, Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia. "From the fury of the Mohammedan, spare us, O’Lord," was a common prayer uttered in European churches for centuries. Spain was occupied by Muslims for 800 years, Portugal 600, Greece 500, Sicily 300, Serbia 400, Bulgaria 500 and Hungary 150 years. Western occupation of...

Some Conspiracies are Real Today, 13 February 2006, is the 318th anniversary of the so-called "Glorious Revolution" -- the coup d'etat that deposed the rightful King of England, HM James II Stuart, and imposed the rule of the Dutch prince William of Orange and his wife Mary upon the United Kingdom. This was not the result of some minor dynastic quibble. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that James II was the rightful king. His deposition was instead the result of a genuine conspiracy between a group of traitors to overthrow the native-born Catholic King of England and award...

AL QAEDA'S STATED GOAL--to reestablish the caliphate, the political leadership of worldwide Islam embodied first in the successors of the Prophet Muhammad and most recently in the four-century rule of the Ottoman dynasty--is pure, ahistorical fantasy. One way to appreciate this is to revisit the 33-year reign of the most remarkable modern caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909). An ally neither of bigoted Islamists nor of the radical secularists who ultimately deposed him, Abdul Hamid was an Islamic modernizer--and, interestingly, a friend of the United States. Abdul Hamid emphasized the role of Islam inside the Ottoman Empire, and he emerged...

Recently, I showed my students a video about the arrival of the Portuguese in West Africa in 1450. Though initially trading for foodstuffs and gold, the Portuguese soon found out African emperors were willing to trade fellow Africans. Over a period of 350 years, various European countries were to transport 12 million human beings into the Western Hemisphere. The video’s narrator, a native Kenyan noted that the speculation is that for every one African that reached the Americas, “another died in transit.” Africans weren’t stolen away. They were sold away by other Africans who possessed the military might to squash...

Liberté, Egalité, Colonialisme - A new French law stokes interesting fires ANTHONY DANIELS There is nothing quite like a stupid and unnecessary law to raise the ideological temperature. On February 23 of this year, the French National Assembly passed such a law, requiring school teachers of history to emphasize the positive role of French colonialism overseas, particularly in North Africa. There were immediate anti-French demonstrations in Algeria and the Antilles. The French minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, felt obliged to cancel an official visit to the French West Indies, legally part of France rather than a colonial possession, at...

George the Third was the undisputed King of Great Britain; of that there can be no doubt. If it is true that pride goeth before a fall, then the King’s arrogance cost him his American colonies, and much, much more; George the Third lost his mind as a result of hubris, and ended up confined in an insane asylum, mad as a March Hare. This cautionary tale reflects an even greater fall, one which we are in the privileged position of witnessing: the collective mental breakdown of the Liberal Movement. We are witnessing the madness of the postmodern King!

Jerusalem has emerged as a major point of contention in Israel's negotiations with its Arab neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. Claims of historic, religious and legal rights to the city have been asserted by the various parties to the conflict and, accordingly, these three aspects should be reviewed: In discussing Jerusalem, history matters. In weighing ostensibly competing claims to the city, it must be recalled that the Jewish people bases its claim to Jerusalem on a link which dates back millennia. Indeed, Jerusalem has served as the capital of independent Jewish states several times over the past 3,000 years, including since...

PARIS -- France's parliament voted Tuesday to uphold a law that puts an upbeat spin on the country's painful colonial past, ignoring complaints from historians and the former French territory of Algeria. The law, passed quietly this year, requires school textbooks to address France's "positive role" in its former colonies. France's lower house, in a 183-94 vote, rejected an effort by the opposition Socialists to kill the law. Passage would have been unusual, since the effort to overturn the law came from the conservative government's political enemies. The law has embarrassed conservative President Jacques Chirac and threatens to delay the...

Subject: Historical Review of Iraq Situation A California Lawyer's Perspective on Iraq War Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials. Bushido Japan had overrun most of Asia, beginning in 1928, killing millions of civilians throughout China, and impressing millions more as slave labor. The US was in an isolationist, pacifist, mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or...

A revelatory new look at how Shakespeare secretly addressed the most profound political issues of his day, and how his plays embody a hidden history of England. In 16th century England many loyal subjects to the crown were asked to make a terrible choice: to follow their monarch or their God. The era was one of unprecedented authoritarianism: England, it seemed, had become a police state, fearful of threats from abroad and plotters at home. This age of terror was also the era of the greatest creative genius the world has ever known: William Shakespeare. How, then, could such a...

It seems to a modern consensus that Oliver Cromwell was a puritanical tyrant, no better than the king he replaced? I’m wondering if this has always been the view on Cromwell, or is it just a modern liberal revision of history? What was Cromwell’s real legacy? Part of me wonders if Cromwell has been vilified unfairly by the left in much the same way Franco has been. (A person I believe was saving his nation from International Communism – which for shame some of my countrymen fought alongside) One of the problems that faced the parliamentarians once the king was...