Free Republic

I bet you thought rock and rollers in the '60s were all left-wing radicals advocating the violent takeover of America in order to replace our style of government with communism. According to Ralph Benko, a conservative human rights advocate, you couldn't be more wrong: [T]he evidence is that the greatest musicians of the golden age of Rock (to whose work we’re all still listening since nothing better has come along) are, where it counts the most, deeply conservative. Taking this further, Benko believes the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who may have stopped America from installing a Marxist dictatorship...

"I am now only an American professor," Gen. Bela Kiraly said with a grin. His grin was a survivor's grin -- a charming, elegant East European survivor with a sense of humor about himself and perhaps the end-of-1984 Christmas party. Smile and sip the holiday brew, for we were about to survive George Orwell's ominous year in which The Party prohibits free thought and exerts total control over Oceania -- Orwell's fictional masks for communism crushing Great Britain. We were in non-fictional Brooklyn, however, in a real friend's home, and we were quite free to speak and think. I suggested...

July 27, 2009, 4:00 a.m. McNamara’s FollyThe road to failure in Vietnam. By Conrad Black The recent death of former U.S. defense secretary and World Bank president Robert McNamara, at 93, has raised again, in editorials and obituaries, the hoary head of the Vietnam War. Geeky in his thick, rimless glasses and slicked-back hair, expressionless, desiccated, fast-talking, and mechanically confident, McNamara was at the cutting edge of the managerial revolution—a business administrator, statistician, and efficiency expert. He was a mesmerizing figure for a time, especially after the Kennedy public-relations apparatus confected the myth of calibrated crisis management in the...

Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign during the post-war era in the US remain one of the great totemic events in liberal-Left mythology. Every time there is a revival of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, solemn words are trotted out about how this metaphor for the appalling witch-hunts which ruined careers is a devastating indictment of irrational fear, blah blah blah. Well, not exactly. The point of The Crucible is that there were no witches. But back in the real world, there certainly were spies. A new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes,...

It began with youthful idealism and ended in bitter regret. Anthony Blunt - English gentleman, art adviser to Queen Elizabeth II, and Soviet spy - felt the decision to give British secrets to the Kremlin was “the biggest mistake of my life.’’ Blunt wrote of his remorse in a 30,000-word memoir completed shortly before his death in 1983 and released today by the British Library. It was given to the library in 1984 on condition it not be made public for 25 years. Blunt was the infamous “fourth man’’ in a ring of upper-class Britons who spied for the Soviet...

...A former nuclear missile launch center that closed as the Cold War was winding down opened Monday to a public curious to see what life was like at the once top-secret site.

There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week. Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: "The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short...

OPINION JULY 13, 2009 Obama Rewrites the Cold War The President has a duty to stand up to the lies of our enemies. By LIZ CHENEY There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week. Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: "The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from...

The radical in the White House could not admit that the US won the Cold War today in an interview with Major Garret from FOX News.

President Barack Obama is refusing to acknowledge the central role of the United States in winning the Cold War and bringing down the Soviet Union. This is video of Fox News' Major Garrett reporting that Obama received a one-hour lecture from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the Cold War. Later when he talked with Garrett, Garrett pressed him on his statement in a speech that the Cold War ended not because of any one nation but because of the actions of many nations and because the people of Eastern Europe and Russia decided it would end peacefully. Of course,...

Watch video: http://www.butasforme.com/2009/07/07/obama-downplays-us-role-in-cold-war-victory-after-hour-long-lecture-by-putin/

LONDON: Former US defence secretary Robert S. McNamara, who has died in Washington aged 93, wanted America to attack China with nuclear weapons if it invaded India for a second time. Although he became a hated figure among the world’s Left for his role as an architect of America’s war on Vietnam, one of his chief aims when he became the head of the World Bank in 1968 was to leverage the Bank’s aid to persuade India to tackle poverty more effectively. McNamara was key to plans discussed by US President John F. Kennedy in May 1963 to defend India...

Obama: We have reset U.S.-Russia relations @ 12:18 pm by Jeremy P. Jacobs President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev touted the results of the first day of their summit in Moscow at a press conference on Monday. Both presidents complimented the others' "business-like" approach to the summit and both appeared pleased with the agreements that came out of the first day. Obama said at the beginning at that shortly after taking office they "resolved to reset U.S.-Russian relations." "Today, after less than six months," he went on, "we have done exactly that." In particular, Obama touted the summit's agreements...

Youthful Ideals Shaped Obama Goal of Nuclear Disarmament In college, Barack Obama wrote about nuclear arms. As a senator, he viewed a deactivated Russian nuclear missile. By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER Published: July 4, 2009 In the depths of the cold war, in 1983, a senior at Columbia University wrote in a campus newsmagazine, Sundial, about the vision of “a nuclear free world.” He railed against discussions of “first- versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads....

Budapest - Bela Kiraly, a key figure in Hungary's ill-fated anti-Soviet revolution in 1956, died at the age of 97, the Ministry of Defence told MTI on Saturday. Inaugurated as an officer in 1935, Kadar graduated from the Budapest Military Academy in 1942, then took part in the Second World War. Promoted to general in 1950, he became commander of the Military Academy. A year later, however, he was sentenced to death, later mitigated to life imprisonment, under the trumped-up charge of conspiracy against the state. A key phase of his life was the 1956 revolution and freedom fight when...

WASHINGTON – Days from his first Moscow summit, President Barack Obama declared Thursday that former Russian President Vladimir Putin "still has a lot of sway" in his nation and needs an in-person reminder the Cold War is over. On next week's trip, Obama will meet not only with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev but with Putin, the prime minister who hand-picked Medvedev as his successor. Said Obama: "I think that it's important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev that Putin understand that the old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations is outdated. ... Putin has one foot in...

GDANSK, Poland--When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989. Poles fought for their freedom for so many years that they hold in special esteem those who backed them in their struggle. Support was the test of friendship. President Reagan was such a friend. His policy of aiding democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the dark days of the Cold War meant...

In the first hour, investigative reporter Peter Lance will talk about the attempts by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to kill his book, Triple Cross http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060886889/ctoc . Then, former KGB agent and intelligence expert Oleg Kalugin ( http://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Espionage-Against/dp/0465014453/ctoc ) will discuss Soviet propaganda, including mysterious disappearances and cover-ups, and give us an insider account of what it was like to be a spy working behind the Iron Curtain.

THIRTY years after Britain's notorious winter of discontent, it has become clear that the election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government not only ended a long period of Labour rule but also defeated the Left's attempt, led from the trade unions, to transfigure British parliamentary democracy into a form of Soviet state. The leading figure in this story was the general secretary of Britain's largest union, the Transport and General Workers Union, and chairman of the Trades Union Congress's international committee, Jack Jones. In 1977, more than half the respondents to a Gallup poll named him the most powerful man in...

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR WAS REALLY AMERICA'S WAR By Michael Johns If there exists one visional depiction of the Cold War's end, it is still a Eurocentric one, November 9, 1989, the day East Berliners joined with those of the city's West in celebration of the Berlin Wall's demise. Three weeks earlier, on October 19, 1989, Stalinist East German dictator Erich Honecker, facing mass internal opposition, was forced from power when the Kremlin, overwhelmed with comparable resistance on many fronts, for the first time refused to provide the East German dictatorship with the political or military cover it had come to...

LONDON: Secret files have at last revealed the identity of the top spy who transferred Britain's atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union and paved the way for the nuclear standoff with the west, triggering the Cold War for nearly five decades. Though the MI5 suspected him, trailed him and monitored his every move, they were never able to get the man, codenamed "Eric" by the KGB, whose espionage campaign to steal the Allies nuclear bomb plans was codenamed Enormous. Declassified MI5 files have confirmed that the master spy, described as the "main source", was a Soviet mole at the...

“Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB In America,” by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Yale University Press, May 2009, 704 pages, $35. Joe McCarthy was right after all. There were Communists in the State Department. Maybe not the number Tail Gunner Joe claimed — or even the ones he suspected. However, Soviet spies were, indeed, employed by the U.S. government in the 1930s and ’40s. Documentation of these Soviet espionage efforts in the United States comes from KGB archives — as revealed in “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB In America.” After the...

Federal officials say a Washington, D.C.-area couple has been arrested and accused of spying for Cuba. Officials say both are former U.S. government employees -- he from the State Department, she as a Congressional aide. One official says the spying went on for more than two decades. We expect to learn more details later today when a federal indictment is unsealed. For now, officials will not disclose the names or any other details....

Today's the 20th anniversary of the Tiannamen Square massacre. No doubt Lefties, democrats, and the Obama Administration is out rejoicing. Pic of Bush-loving reactionary standing in the way of Hope and Change.

Is Germany doing enough to figure out how much the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, influenced West Germany? Or would it prefer to not open old wounds? The discovery that the policeman who unwittingly helped triggered the 1968 student protest movement was a Stasi spy has unleashed a heated historical debate. The revelation that the policeman who shot Berlin student Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 was a spy for the Stasi East German intelligence service has led to an intense historical debate in Germany. Ohnesorg's death radicalized many students and is seen as one of the factors that lead to the...

Clearing the air vs. splitting hairs and distorting Cold War history (Part 1) Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter whitewashed Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, volumes have been written about that late superpower's penetration of American Society and its institutions before and during the Cold War years. It can be said without credible contradiction that what we now know about Soviet spying and infiltration of the U.S. for seven decades vindicates the much-maligned anti-Communists (in and out of Congress) of that era. If anything, they didn't know the half of it. It was they who warned — often to...

INTRODUCTION TO THE RUSSIAN FIALKA: GENERAL DESCRIPTION: The Fialka is generally similar in design to the German Enigma cipher machine but it has 10 rotors with 30 Russian characters/contacts instead of the 3 or 4 rotors with 26 letters/numbers/contacts in the German WW-2 Enigmas. The first version of the Fialka, the M-100 was produced in the 1930s and it was followed by the M-105 and then the M-125 models described here. The M-125 models include the M-125-MN and the much more complicated M-125-3MN. (M-125-3MP3 and M-125-3MP2 models have also been reported. They appear nearly identical with the M-125-3MN but may...

We are about to look at the trials of a man who was judged in one decade for what he was said to have done in another. —Alistair Cooke, A Generation on Trial, 1950 It was not entirely true, even in 1950, that Alger Hiss was being judged primarily on the basis of what he had done in the 1930s. Unless a former Communist Party member had thoroughly repudiated his past and turned against his one-time friends and political associates, he was suspected in the late forties and early fifties of still being a secret Communist — or, at the...

Even those who count Ronald Reagan among the handful of great American presidents have a hard time saying exactly where his greatness lay, or how it made itself felt. Reagan was an enigma: affable but friendless, a nonintellectual man of ideas, an ingenuous power politician. His presidency seemed like a success until 1986 and a failure thereafter, yet his most important legacy — the ending of the cold war — dates from those last two lame-duck years. The central puzzle is whether Reagan actually “won” the cold war at all. Did he cannily bring the Soviet Union to its knees,...

In 1993, Bill Clinton joked, "Gosh, I miss the Cold War." And, he explained, somberly: "We had an intellectually coherent thing. The American people knew what the rules were." Such Cold War nostalgia vexed many conservatives. It seemed to us that the Cold War consensus had broken down with the Vietnam War. Clinton himself didn't much like that Cold War endeavor, which is one reason he worked so assiduously to avoid serving in it. A young John Kerry did serve, but he also threw away his medals and denounced his fellow servicemen as war criminals. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, had proclaimed...

In 1993, Bill Clinton joked, “Gosh, I miss the Cold War.” Because, he explained, somberly: “We had an intellectually coherent thing. The American people knew what the rules were.” Such Cold War nostalgia vexed many conservatives. It seemed to us that the Cold War consensus had broken down with the Vietnam War. Clinton himself didn’t much like that Cold War endeavor, which is one reason he worked so assiduously to avoid serving in it. A young John Kerry did serve, but he also threw away his medals and denounced his fellow servicemen as war criminals. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, had proclaimed...

This is one of those things that makes you feel old. Some movie publicists tell me that Thursday is the 25th anniversary of an important movie, "Red Dawn," which depicts a Soviet Communist invasion of America and a band of American teens--the "Wolverines"--who heroically fight them off. (IMDB differs and says it was released on August 10, 1984, so I'll repost on this, again, then.) American Cinemathique sent me word that the organization will be marking "Red Dawn's" 25th anniversary with a special showing and discussion at the historic, restored Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, on Thursday Night at 7:30...

When new information about Americans who had cooperated with the Soviet KGB began to emerge in the 1990s, no individual case generated as much controversy as that of the journalist I.F. Stone, who had long been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and a teller of truth to power before his death in 1989.

WASHINGTON: The Chinese cyber spies have penetrated so deep into the US system — ranging from its secure defence network, banking system, electricity grid to putting spy chips into its defence planes — that it can cause serious damage to the US any time, a top US official on counter-intelligence has said. “Chinese penetrations of unclassified DoD networks have also been widely reported. Those are more sophisticated, though hardly state of the art,” said National Counterintelligence Executive, Joel Brenner, at the University of Texas - Austin, last week, according to a transcript made available on Wednesday. Listing out some of...

      ~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Road Trip: Area 51, Nevada Area 51 is a nickname for a military base located in the southern portion of Nevada in the western United States (83 miles north-northwest of downtown Las Vegas). Situated at its center, on the southern shore of Groom Lake, is a large secretive military airfield. The base's primary purpose is to support development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. The base lies within the United States Air Force's vast Nevada Test and Training Range. Although the facilities at the range are managed by the 99th...

Ten years ago Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and said, "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Not long afterward, the wall came tumbling down and the most formidable empire in world history collapsed so fast that, in Vaclav Havel's words, "we had no time even to be astonished." With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the most ambitious political and social experiment of the modern era...

A close aide to Ronald Reagan has claimed that the former US president tried to convert the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Christianity.A new biography that draws on recently declassified documents discloses a secret exchange between the two leaders that left at least one official present convinced that Reagan had tried to persuade his counterpart of God's existence. The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, by the former Los Angeles Times reporter James Mann, provides fresh insight into the former US president's religious convictions and the role they played in foreign policy. Reagan had apparently reached a conviction, which has since become...

The cold war helps settle a hot debate about how hearts grow.New cells in old hearts.Punchstock Fallout from nuclear bomb tests during the cold war has just yielded encouraging news for those searching for ways to reverse heart disease.A team led by Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has shown that adult human hearts make new muscle cells, albeit very, very slowly1.Human heart cells that can generate cardiomyocytes in culture have been identified before. But how the heart regenerates naturally has been hotly contested, says Kenneth Chien of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge. "This study shows...

Obama and the case of the missing 'thesis' By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative ProducerJuly 24, 2008 excerpt: The hunt for Obama’s senior “thesis” began with a throwaway line in a newspaper article last October. The New York Times story, on Obama’s early New York years, mentioned in passing that the presidential contender had majored in political science at Columbia and had spent his time “writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament.” Journalists began hounding Columbia University for copies of the musty document. Conservative bloggers began wondering if the young Obama had written a no-nukes screed that he might...

LONDON: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has landed in a row after the release of a photograph showing him meeting the then US President Ronald Reagan as an undercover KGB agent disguised as a tourist in 1988. President Barack Obama's official photographer Pete Souza has claimed that he took the photograph at Red Square in Moscow 21 years ago when Reagan was on his first-ever tour to the erstwhile Soviet Union. According to him, the photo indicates that Putin was actually part of a KGB plot to harangue Reagan in Moscow over his human rights record, leading British newspaper 'The...

Moscow, March 20, Interfax - In 1980s, the idea that religion might change the Soviet system preoccupied US President Ronald Reagan. This is testified by the notes taken by two Reagan aides during the meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. According to these documents recently declassified and made available at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Reagan secretly attempted to persuade Gorbachev of the existence of God, Vedomosti. Pyatnitsa newspaper reports. During their fourth summit meeting in 1988, Reagan launched into a private conversation with Gorbachev, one that he promised he would deny had ever taken place. The...

During the Cold War, the Stasi - East Germany's secret police - sent "Romeo" spies to the West.They seduced secretaries working in Bonn and tricked them into handing over secrets. More than 30 of the women were later prosecuted for spying. Now a former senior Stasi officer has told BBC News the women should be pardoned. One of those targeted by the Stasi more than 30 years ago is Gabriele Kliem, who still suffers the consequences. "It's like an invisible amputation of the soul," she says. "I am totally alone, I don't have any family, I don't have any friends."...

During the Cold War, the Stasi - East Germany's secret police - sent "Romeo" spies to the West. They seduced secretaries working in Bonn and tricked them into handing over secrets. More than 30 of the women were later prosecuted for spying. Now a former senior Stasi officer has told BBC News the women should be pardoned. One of those targeted by the Stasi more than 30 years ago is Gabriele Kliem, who still suffers the consequences. "It's like an invisible amputation of the soul," she says. "I am totally alone, I don't have any family, I don't have any...

[video] America voted for hope and change. We just hope they like the change they’re getting. According to CNN, the Russian government just announced that they may base long-range bombers in Cuba for the first time since the 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart with a special “Restart” button this week, he apparently took it as a sign his government could restart the Cold War. Next thing you know,

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, long-secret archives of the Communist International were thrown open to western researchers for the first time. Many previously unknown details of communist history have been revealed--including the 1935 Comintern orders directing Communists to begin work in Hawaii. These were uncovered by veteran researcher Herbert Romerstein in Moscow.

It was the question that preoccupied President Ronald Reagan: Was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a religious believer? Reagan held a series of summits with Gorbachev from 1985 to 1988, and as their meetings proceeded, Reagan sometimes speculated to his aides that Gorbachev's use of phrases such as "God bless" might be an expression of religious faith. Many of the summit sessions involved large groups of U.S. and Soviet officials, discussing issues like arms control and regional conflicts. But in one-on-one talks with Gorbachev outside the presence of other senior officials like Secretary of State George Shultz, Reagan sometimes ventured off...

It is fascinating to compare the new phase of Russia-U.S. relations with what happened at the end of World War Two. As varied sources, including recently published Soviet documents, show, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to take more territory—at a minimum what later became the satellite states of Eastern Europe, possibly Turkey, Iran, Greece, and other countries—yet feared dependency on the West given the post-war weakness of the USSR. He wasn’t trying to conquer the world but Stalin’s response grew from a combination of expansionism and fear of the West. Stalin’s belief that the West was hostile was driven by...

As Milosevic's intelligence chief, Jovica Stanisic is accused of setting up genocidal death squads. But as a valuable source for the CIA, an agency veteran says, he also 'did a whole lot of good.' Reporting from Belgrade, Serbia -- At night, when the lawns are empty and the lamps along the walking paths are the only source of light, Topcider Park on the outskirts of Belgrade is a perfect meeting place for spies. It was here in 1992, as the former Yugoslavia was erupting in ethnic violence, that a wary CIA agent made his way toward the park's gazebo and...

Letter From J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to the President's Special Consultant, Admiral Sidney Souers Washington, July 7, 1950 My Dear Admiral: For some months representatives of the FBI and of the Department of Justice have been formulating a plan of action for an emergency situation wherein it would be necessary to apprehend and detain persons who are potentially dangerous to the internal security of the country. I thought you would be interested in a brief outline of the plan. Action to Be Taken By the Department of Justice The plan envisions four types...

Its hard to get an automobile in the soviet union. They are owned mainly by elite bureaucrats. It takes an average of 10 years to get a car. 1 out of 7 families owned automobiles. You have to go through a major process and put the money out in advance. so this man did this and the dealer said "okay in 10 years come get your car." "Morning or afternoon?" The man replied. "well what difference does it make?" Said the dealer. "The plumber is coming in the morning." [snip] In another car incident, Gorbachev was late from getting to...