Free Republic

In conventional accounts of the Chinese Revolutionary Civil War (1926–1949), Mao Zedong is shown towering heroically above a great throng of adoring peasants, who have surged up in a great wave to defeat their imperialist foes and propel the Communists into power. A growing number of historians—both in China and abroad—have begun to unpick the myth. Jung Chang and John Halliday wrote a scathing retelling of Mao’s life and actions, with the thesis that Mao and his followers were bloodthirsty thugs who bullied their way into power through anti-civilian violence, sinister manipulation and dumb luck. Otto Braun documented many of...

President Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in June 1993. She was confirmed two months later by a vote of 96 to 3, and not a single senator asked her about her ten years litigating cases for the ACLU, she said in an appearance on Thursday. “I wish I could wave a magic wand and have it go back to the way it — the way it was,” Ginsburg told a gathering at the George Washington University Law School. […] “The way it was, was right. The way it is, is wrong,” she said, drawing applause...

We came very, very close to losing the country. Hillary Clinton would have finished off the job of subverting the American founding. Everyone knows that. The corruption and sedition that has followed the legitimate election of Donald John Trump to the American presidency has been shocking. However, there is a silver lining to all this commotion, screaming, lying, and colluding. First of all, it will almost ensure POTUS will get re-elected. The middle of the country can see through what is going on. The legacy, corrupt media has lost its ability to influence the outcome of our political process. Even...

Marxism has its place in civilized discourse, as do questions about the morality of nuclear weapons. Even torture, slightly euphemized, is a suitable topic for debate; there are two sides at least, each with something to say. But next to nothing can be said for nationalism, which is all but a synonym for racism, persecution and war. Nationalism was responsible for World War I. Nationalism was behind the Nazis. And so on. Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, will have none of this. Over the past two years Hazony’s byline has appeared frequently in the Wall Street Journal , where...

Lithuania on Friday urged American retail giant Walmart to stop selling T-shirts and hoodies with Soviet hammer and sickle symbols, insisting the image insults victims of often deadly Soviet-era persecution. “We sent a letter to Walmart requesting the withdrawal of products with Soviet symbols and we are still waiting for a reaction,” Lithuanian ambassador to the US Rolandas Krisciunas said. The hammer and sickle symbol is banned in Lithuania... The Baltic state’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius tweeted: “You wouldn’t buy Nazi-themed clothing, would you? “We trust @Walmart’s moral stance & call to withdraw products with the symbols of mass murders.”...

Socialists and Communists are not known to be rational thinkers, they are indoctrinated sheeple who memorize and repeat what they are told without questioning, in exchange for special benefits People used to ask me what we ate when I was growing up in communist Eastern Europe. Women were quite thin and beautiful, on the “Ceausescu diet.” We were not just told how much to eat by decree but food was quite scarce and highly rationed. If a person dared to stash more food than the Communist Party deemed necessary, that person paid dearly in fines and eventually jail. Of course...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCSQb00ihQo An in-depth look at #Communist policies that have destroyed civilized debate. We discuss #dialectical #materialism, repressive tolerance and an explanation on how we used to handle disagreements. Bonus: story about a donkey that fell into a well will remind you how traditional people dealt with hardship.

The thought of Karl Marx, a German political agitator whose theory of “scientific socialism” wreaked havoc on the world for most of the 20th century, would seem to have been consigned to the ash heap of history following the fall of the Eastern Bloc communist regimes from 1989 to 1991. After decades of mass murder claiming tens of millions of victims, as well as the totalitarian oppression of hundreds of millions more, the reputation of Marxism had been destroyed almost completely, seemingly assuring its final demise.However, a resurgence of interest in Marx’s thought has been ongoing since 2008, when the...

Colin Kaepernick Named Face of Nike's 30th Anniversary of 'Just Do It' CampaignNike Picks Colin Kaepernick to be Face of “Just Do It' Campaign”

Nancy Pelosi is the chief villain of Republican campaign ads. The leader some Democrats promise to vote against. The subject of much speculation that her grip on power is coming to an end. Nevertheless, she says she’s not going anywhere — and certainly not while President Donald Trump is in the White House. “This is not anything to make a big fuss over, it’s politics,” Pelosi said in a 35-minute phone interview with The Associated Press. “I can take the heat and that’s why I stay in the kitchen.” Pushing back on those who say her leadership position is in...

Vladimir Putin may frighten some countries, but Russia gives many South Africans a warm and fuzzy feeling. They remember support in decades past: during apartheid the Soviet Union provided military training and arms to the African National Congress (ANC), as well as to other liberation movements on the continent. Some surprisingly common South African first names—such as Soviet, Moscow and Lenin—are living tributes to these old ties. Sputnik Ratau, born shortly after the first satellite’s launch, is a spokesman for the water and sanitation department. A high school in KwaZulu-Natal is named after Eric Mtshali, a stalwart of the struggle...

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. — Joseph StalinIt is a great irony that at a time when Facebook and Twitter are closing accounts of conservatives for allegedly promoting “hate,” and conservative speakers are banned from college campuses for (as it is charged) “peddling hate,” opinion polls suggest that socialism is more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, is the most popular figure among progressive Democrats, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emerged from the Bronx as the newest socialist celebrity and is...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) is sponsoring legislation that would negate the control of corporate shareholders and transfer authority to government. Her bill—the “Accountable Capitalism Act”–is, in her words, “intended to replace greedy profiteering with the more socially beneficial guidance of government oversight.” The prime motive for the bill was her discovery that employees share of the income generated by businesses has fallen from 85% 20 years ago to “only” 75% today. “As Karl Marx conclusively proved more than 150 years ago, all the value created by businesses comes from labor,” Warren contended. “It is shameful that any of this value...

Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner on Friday said he plans to present an amendment preventing President Trump from “arbitrarily revoking security clearances.” Warner’s announcement came after Trump earlier this week revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan and hinted Friday that he would soon do the same for Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr. “I will be introducing an amendment next week to block the President from punishing and intimidating his critics by arbitrarily revoking security clearances,” Warner tweeted. “Stay tuned.”

Father Karol Wojtyła, who later became Pope John Paul II, is pictured in the early 1950s surrounded by young people. Father Wojtyła would regularly go on mountain excursions with a group of young married couples and students that called itself Środowisko, meaning environment or milieu. (Archival Collection of Adam Bujak)Karol Wojtyła, the man who became St. John Paul II, regularly escaped from two of the worst totalitarian regimes in history: German Nazism, and later, Soviet Communism. By “escaped,” I do not mean that he ran away. Rather, as a priest and bishop, he escaped only by going deeper.As the...

North Korean authorities are calling for strengthened vigilance against “non-socialist” behavior in advance of a major national holiday, with ruling party youth groups deployed across the country to warn or detain citizens found wearing condemned fashions or hairstyles, North Korean sources say. The campaign follows earlier efforts aimed at suppressing lifestyles found not to conform with socialist ideals, a source in North Hamgyong province, bordering China, told RFA’s Korean Service. “Inspection units are being dispatched to public areas,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There have been crackdowns on non-socialist behaviors in the past, but since these hadn’t...

Nor do we describe our enemy as "jihadists" or "Islamists" because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children.

A poster for a recent Pearl Jam concert has sparked outrage for depicting the corpse of President Donald Trump. The band staged a concert to get fans to vote for Democratic Sen. Jon Tester on Monday. To promote the show, bassist Jeff Ament and artist Bobby Draws Skullz drew up some artwork that included graphic imagery of the White House on fire and the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial cracked and breaking. The artwork also included an image of the corpse of Trump being picked at by a bald eagle while it reaches for a briefcase that appears to have...

In 1987, not long after David Horowitz had completed his transition from ’60s radical to ’80s conservative, he received a letter from an ex-comrade. They’d just had a political argument over the phone, and she wanted to close the conversation with a summary of his renunciation of the hard Left. They had both been Red Diaper babies, classmates at the Sunnyside Progressive School, and children of members of a Communist enclave in Queens. Now, her companion of the barricades had decided to back “the vile policies of Ronald Reagan.” Why? She spends one paragraph clarifying her own position relative to...

In August 1968 Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to crush a burgeoning democratic reform movement known as the Prague Spring. Here is a recap of the shock intervention that reined in the Soviet satellite state, its aspirations for democracy warded off for another 20 years. "At 11:00 pm, Soviet, Polish, East German, Bulgarian and Hungarian troops crossed the Czechoslovak border," AFP reported early on August 21, picking up Radio Prague's announcement of the overnight invasion. Tensions had been mounting between then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the reformist government that had taken over in the Central European state. In...