Free Republic

"You can't go anywhere at all, not even to Uzbekistan or Belarus for the May holidays," said one source. -snip- Russia is making overseas travel harder for some officials due to fears that foreign powers may try to gain access to state secrets during the worst crisis in relations with the West for more than 60 years, nine sources told Reuters. The Federal Security Service (FSB) is putting pressure on employees across government ministries not to leave Russia at all, even to visit so-called 'friendly' countries that have not imposed sanctions against Moscow, the sources said. Foreign travel was highly...

Vladimir Putin appears to be clamping down on Russian men trying to dodge his invasion of Ukraine by creating a new digital conscription system which would leave them unable to flee abroad. -snip- Under the new plan, Russian men will start receiving draft papers by registered post and via their personal account on the 'Gosuslugi' online public services portal - the same site used to book doctor appointments or manage state pensions. The old system of delivering papers in person will also remain in place. The new rules will apply both to conscripts and to men who are targeted in...

As a leftist revolutionary party assumes power, an Iron Curtain descends across the nation's capital--complete with razor wire, checkpoints and thousands of heavily armed troops with orders to shoot to kill. I think I've seen this movie before.

A Digital Iron Curtain Descends Over the Internet Why free speech on the web - as we once knew it - will be over within a decade. February 1, 2019 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. A generation of economic pressure failed to regulate the internet. Outraged movie studios and record companies managed to cripple some file sharing pioneers, but broke their teeth on Google’s YouTube. Dot coms like Amazon, Google, Cragislist, eBay and Netflix casually wiped out entire...

March 5th is the anniversary of Winston Churchill's epoch-making "iron curtain" speech in 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri - the most famous acknowledgement of the existence of a "Cold War" between Russia and the West, which put an end to the alliance that defeated the Nazis in World War II. The Cold War, which would often became quite hot in places like Korea and Vietnam - and damn near led to a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 - continued for 45 years until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. "From Stettin in...

LIVING IN EAST Germany during the Cold War meant being watched. By your government. By your neighbors. And even, at times, by your own family. The East German secret police, one of the most intrusive and oppressive spying operations ever assembled, collected millions of files on people it suspected of being enemies of the state. The German Democratic Republic dissolved in 1990 with the fall of communism, but the documents assembled by the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, remain. This massive archive includes 69 miles of shelved documents, 1.8 million images, and 30,300 video and audio recordings housed in...

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. ~ Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965) (speech, Fulton Missouri, 5 March...

In a rather self-serving review article entitled “A historical perspective on the discovery of statins,” Japanese biochemist Akira Endo hits all the conventional and PC notes in his 10-page (including references) trip down memory lane. From the get-go, in the abstract itself he tells us that… “Cholesterol is essential for the functioning of all human organs, but it is nevertheless the cause of coronary heart disease. Building on that knowledge, scientists and the pharmaceutical industry have successfully developed a remarkably effective class of drugs–the statins–that lower cholesterol levels in blood and reduce the frequency of heart attacks.” We would expect...

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Arutz Sheva on Tuesday in time for International Holocaust Memorial Day that the battle over the Holocaust lives on—and is being waged on the field of public memory. According to Zuroff, aside from the widespread scourge of Holocaust denial, a new phenomenon has reared its head recently in eastern Europe, where there are attempts to minimize the genocidal horrors committed against the Jewish people and revise history. “This phenomenon should worry the state of Israel and the Foreign Ministry,” emphasized Zuroff. “In post-Communist eastern Europe, they’re trying...

We will be screening our film "Rockin' the Wall," about music's part in bringing down the Iron Curtain, at the Loft Theater on Speedway, tomorrow night, Wed. Jan. 7 at 7:00 p.m. I'll be there to sign books and do a Q&A. See you there.

The scars left on the soul and minds of so many surviving victims of communism are hard to heal On Christmas 1989, twenty-five years ago, the brutal communist dictatorship of Romania ended with the execution of the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena in front of a firing squad at Tirgoviste, following a brief trial. His reign of terror lasted 24 years (1965-1989). The first communist despot, Gheorghe Georghiu-Dej (1945-1964) was so ruthless, the citizens felt like “hunted” animals during his regime. Almost forty-four years of brutal communism left a deep and festering wound that would be hard to...

...the United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. ....when American military men approach some serious situation they are wont to write at the head of their directive the words "over-all strategic concept". There is wisdom in this, as it leads to clarity of thought. What then is the over-all strategic concept which we should inscribe to-day? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the...

Tuesday, November 05, 2013 The American Iron Curtain Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In March 1946, Winston Churchill told a Missouri audience, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia." >Today a new iron curtain is descending. It encloses the small Missouri town where Churchill gave his speech and all the great capitals of a great nation. Behind the iron curtain...

East Germany's secret police sold citizens to western pharmaceutical companies to use as human guinea pigs in drug trials • Tens of thousands tested with experimental drugs not approved in the West • One study of a drug for heart conditions saw six out of 17 patients die • Sinister practice exposed in disturbing new Germany documentary Former Communist East Germany secretly sold its citizens to western pharmaceutical companies to use as human guinea pigs in drug trials. Tens of thousands of sick people in the former German Democratic Republic were treated with medicines not approved in the West to...

The Weirdest Monuments Of The Communist Era That Are Still Standing After the fall of the Soviet Union, many Communist statues and sculptures were destroyed, while others were moved to statue parks or museums. But many of them remained in the same place for the last 20 years, while the former Soviet areas were transformed into modern countries. Here are thirteen of the most incredible ones. Click to enlarge images below. 1. Lenin's giant head, Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia, Russia The 42 ton, 25 foot tall head of former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin is standing in Ulan-Ude. Built in 1970,...

GDANSK, Poland (AP) — Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago. The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime...

<p>Give that writer a prize.</p> <p>How many ways are there to say that Palestinians and Israelis are talking past each other because they have profoundly different needs and goals? Israel seeks recognition as a legitimate, permanent part of the region with the "secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force" that are the promise of U.N. Resolution 242. Palestinians seek to reverse the establishment of Israel, which they believe was created on their land and at the expense of their patrimony. Whose writing will make Abu Mazen say Jews are the indigenous people of the region and State of Israel is their rightful home? Dennis Ross's latest "six point plan" for a "two state solution" won't do it.</p>

An Extremely Creepy Tour of an Abandoned Soviet Monument in Bulgaria Remember those derelict Bulgarian war memorials that resemble space fortresses? Well, it turns out they're just as otherworldly inside. Here's one intrepid urban explorer's journey into the shadowy corridors of the shuttered Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship memorial in Varna, Bulgaria. It's also a case study on why you never tour old Soviet monuments alone. In its Communist heyday, the "Park-Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship" contained an eternal flame, a bomb shelter, and a tourism center. Loudspeakers would also blast Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 on constant loop. The center opened in...

Gallery: Familiar-yet-alien Soviet arcade games While playing Centipede (don't judge) at my local mall in the '80s, it never occurred to me that somewhere behind the soon-to-fall Iron Curtain there would be some punk playing the Soviet version of arcade games as well. Hell yeah they were! Now, thanks to two nostalgic Muscovites who remembered their days of playing "Sea Battle," there is an entire museum full of these Soviet-era games. The story of the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines is so cool we couldn't make this up if we tried. Let's talk about the games first. Soviet classics Sea...

The implosion of the USSR in December 1991 produced massive economic “collateral damage” in its East European allies, as they simultaneously sought both to assert their new-found independence and draw closer to their potential European allies on the western side of 1946’s “Iron Curtain.” Following the euphoria amity quickly devolved down to practical issues, one of which was that the European Union was leery of welcoming new members after the collapse of Communism that relied on power from Soviet-era nuclear power facilities, especially in the wake of the April 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Accordingly, the last two...