Free Republic

Helen Rappaport, an acclaimed historian and author, said that books, papers and journals charting Lenin’s last years show that he contracted the sexually transmitted disease and that it ultimately claimed his life. She said Lenin showed many symptoms of syphilis and that many among the Soviet hierarchy believed he had it. But they were banned from speaking in public and threatened with death because of the embarrassment it would cause. Instead, official documents show that his death was attributed to declining health following three stokes and an assassination attempt in 1918. Central to Miss Rappaport’s case was a report written...

Recently, I was at a boomer backyard barbecue in Boston.The males had Ivy League degrees and high incomes evident in subtle ways. The wives who were white had the perfect cheekbones and teeth that only generations of breeding and expensive maintenance can produce. The nonwhite wives had PhD’s instead. The host in a Yes We Can T-shirt sneezed. “Barack you!” said a preppie-looking man, and explained with a broad smile that it’s a new locution replacing “Bless you.” I walked up to the Obamapod and said, “I like your barackhlo line.” “It’s Barack you,” he said, with the typical linguistic...

If you define "socialist" as advocating government ownership of the "means of production," which is what I've always understood socialist to mean, then, no, modern leftists (or progressives or whatever they want to be called) no longer believe that, right now at least, widespread government ownership of economic enterprises is a good strategy. As a sketch of that now-obsolete view of socialism, consider Lenin in State and Revolution: "The development of capitalism ... creates the preconditions that enable really "all" to take part in the administration of the state. Some of these preconditions are: universal literacy, which has already been...

Historians have long agreed that Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin suffered a series of three strokes that eventually led to his death. But new evidence has been uncovered that appears to show Lenin actually succumbed to the sexually transmitted disease, syphilis. The Soviets made huge attempts to cover up the real reasons for Lenin's erratic behaviour and sudden bouts of rage in the years leading up to his death in 1924...

Lately there's has been an anti-Wall Street sentiment, propagated by the media that has become exacerbated as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) hit 10,000 Oct. 14. On CNBC's Oct. 15 "Street Signs," Jim Cramer, host of "Mad Money," was asked by fill-in host Melissa Francis what he thought about the outrage over Wall Street hitting its stride, while unemployment continues to rise. "What did you think about [Morgan Stanley CEO] John Mack's answer to the big question of the day, which is the divergence between Main Street and Wall Street?" Francis asked. "We see Dow 10,000 - bonuses are...

Written in July, 1916 At last there has appeared in Germany, illegally, without any adaptation to the despicable Junker censorship, a Social-Democratic pamphlet dealing with questions of the war! The author, who evidently belongs to the “Left-radical” wing of the Party, signs himself Junius[3] (which in Latin means junior) and gave his pamphlet the title: The Crisis of Social-Democracy. Appended are the “Theses on the Tasks of International Social-Democracy,” which have already been submitted to the Berne I.S.C. (International Socialist Committee) and published in No. 3 of its Bulletin; the theses were drafted by the “International” group, which in the...

Written June of 1916 We must now try to sum up, to draw together the threads of what has been said above on the subject of imperialism. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main...

That was how Sotsial-Demokrat posed the alternative with regard to the German Social-Democratic Party, back in its issue No. 35[1] , when it elaborated the fundamental ideas of the Manifesto on war issued by our Party’s Central Committee.[2] Notice how the facts bear out this conclusion. The German Social-Democratic Party is clearly disintegrating. Otto Ruhle, Karl Liebknecht’s closest associate, quite apart from the I.S.D. group (International Socialists of Germany),[3] which has been consistently fighting the hypocritical Kautskyites, has openly come out for a split. Vorwarts had no serious, honest answer. There are actually two workers’ parties in Germany. Even in...

Written in English before November 9 1915 Dear Comrades! We are extremely glad to get your leaflet. Your appeal to the members of the Socialist Party to struggle for a new International, for clear-cut revolutionary socialism as taught by Marx and Engels, and against the opportunism, especially against those who are in favor of working class participation in a war of defence, corresponds fully with the position our party (Social-Democratic Labor Party of Russia, Central Committee) has taken from the beginning of this war and has always taken during more than ten years. We send you our sincerest greetings &...

Pravdy No. 35, March 13, 1914. Capitalism cannot be at a standstill for a single moment. It must forever be moving forward. Competition, which is keenest in a period of crisis like the present, calls for the invention of an increasing number of new devices to reduce the cost of production. But the domination of capital converts all these devices into instruments for the further exploitation of the workers. The Taylor system is one of these devices. Advocates of this system recently used the following techniques in America. An electric lamp was attached to a worker’s arm, the worker’s movements...

Liberal Professor Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky is on the war path against socialism. This time he has approached the question, not from the political and economic angle, but from that of an abstract discussion on equality (perhaps the professor thought such an abstract discussion more suitable for the religious and philosophical gatherings which he has addressed?). "If we take socialism, not as an economic theory, but as a living ideal," Mr. Tugan declared, "then, undoubtedly, it is associated with the ideal of equality, but equality is a concept . . . that cannot be deduced from experience and reason." This is the...

Published: Proletarskaya Pravda No. 19, January 1, 1914 This is the battle-cry of the class-conscious American workers. They say: We have only one political question be fore us, and that is the question of the workers’ earnings and their working day. To Russian workers it may at first sight seem very strange and puzzling to have all social and political questions reduced to a single one. But in the United States of America, the most advanced country in the world, which has almost complete political liberty, where democratic institutions are most developed, and where tremendous progress has been made in...

Novy Ekonomist (No. 21 for 1913), a journal published by Mr. P. Migulin, with the Octobrists and Cadets jointly collaborating, carries an interesting note about income tax in the United States. The bill exempts from taxation all incomes up to 4,000 dollars (8,000 rubles). Taxation is envisaged at the rate of one per cent on all incomes exceeding 4,000 dollars, two per cent on all incomes exceeding 20,000 dollars and so on, with slight increases in the percentage as incomes increase. Thus the plan is for a progressive income tax, but with an exceedingly slow rate of progression, so that...

From a speech in March of 1918(Lenin’s appearance was greeted with a prolonged standing ovation. The “Internationale” was sung.) In his speech Lenin, in a clear and popular form, explained the essential features and basic points of the Soviet Constitution. The Soviets were the highest form of democratic government by the people. The Soviets were not something invented out of one’s head, they were the product of living reality. They appeared and developed for the first time in history in our backward country, but objectively they should become the form of government by the working people all over the world....

First published in 1930 in the second and third editions of V. I. Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. XVI. Published according to the manuscript. Our Ministry of Public (forgive the expression) “Education” boasts inordinately of the particularly rapid growth of its expenditure. In the explanatory note to the 1913 budget by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance we find a summary of the estimates of the Ministry of Public (so-called) Education for the post-revolutionary years. These estimates have increased from 46,000,000 rubles in 1907 to 137,000,000 in 1913. A tremendous growth—almost trebled in something like six years! But our...

From a Pravda No. 21, March 26, 1913 The question of the “oil hunger”, the inordinate increase in the price of oil and the criminal conspiracy of the oil magnates for the purpose of fleecing the consumer, has aroused quite legitimate interest and quite understandable indignation in the Duma, and to a still greater degree out side the Duma. The duel between the Minister of Commerce and Industry, who in a faintly disguised form defended the oil kings of the syndicate, and Mr. Markov the Second, who furiously and ardently expressed the hurt feelings of the noble feudal landowners—this duel...

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I was taught to believe individual pursuits are selfish and sacrificing for the collective good is noble.In kindergarten we sang songs about Lenin, the leader of the Socialist Revolution. In school we learned about the beautiful socialist system, where everybody is equal and everything is fair; about ugly capitalism, where people are exploited and treat each other like wolves in the wilderness. Life in the USSR modeled the socialist ideal. God-based religion was suppressed and replaced with cultlike adoration for political figures. The government-assigned salary of the proletariat (blue-collar worker) was 30%-50% higher...

A picture of a young Adolf Hitler apparently playing chess against Vladimir Lenin 100 years ago has come to light. The image is said to have been created in Vienna by Hitler's art teacher, Emma Lowenstramm, and is signed on the reverse by the two dictators. Hitler was a jobbing artist in the city in 1909 and Lenin was in exile and the house where they allegedly played the game belonged to a prominent Jewish family. In the run-up to the Second World War the Jewish family fled and gave many of their possessions, including the etching and chess set,...

We know that the great Chinese Republic, established at the cost of such sacrifice by progressive democrats among the Asian masses, recently encountered very grave financial difficulties. The six “Great” Powers, which are considered civilised nations, but which in reality follow the most reactionary policies, formed a financial consortium which suspended the granting of a loan to China. The point is that the Chinese revolution did not evoke among the European bourgeoisie any enthusiasm for freedom and democracy—only the proletariat can entertain that feeling, which is alien to the knights of profit; it gave rise to the urge to plunder...

The parallels between Barack Hussein Obama and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin are intriguing. To be sure, there are differences: Barack Obama is not the absolute ruler of a tyrannical state. Lenin was. We are not about to see a violent Bolshevik coup like Lenin's. (At least, I'm fairly sure.) America in 2009 is not Russia in 1917. So we won't equate them. And yet, without losing sight of those facts, the similarities are too strong for mere coincidence. So I'm going to make up the word "Leninoid," as a reminder that Obama isn't Lenin  -- but he must have hired the...

Here is video from California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy holding a Town Hall Meeting in Bakersfield where he was asked why the Congress was allowing President Obama to create all the "Czars" he is creating. Just before he answered there were shouts from the audience of "He's a communist!" McCarthy answered the question by saying he did not believe Obama had the right to appoint these "Czars" AND give them powers that encroach on the "Checks and Balances" the Constitution requires. . . . . (Watch Video)

The Minister of Finance, in his explanatory note on the Budget, and all the government parties assure themselves and others that our Budget is firmly based. They refer, among other things, to the “achievements” of industry, which indubitably has been on the upgrade in the last few years. Our industry, as well as our entire national economy, has been developing along capitalist lines. That is indisputable, and needs no proof. But anyone who limits himself to data on “development” and to the smugly boastful statement that “there is an increase of so-and-so many per cent” shuts his eyes to Russia’s...

U.S. capitalism is ahead of all. The greatest development of technology and the most rapid progress are facts which make old Europe emulate the Yankees. But it is not the democratic institutions that the European bourgeoisie is borrowing from America, nor political liberty, nor yet the republican political system, but the latest methods of exploiting the workers. The most widely discussed topic today in Europe, and to some extent in Russia, is the “system” of the American engineer, Frederick Taylor. Not so long ago Mr. Semyonov read a paper on this system in the assembly hall of the Railway Engineering...

What a strange comparison, the reader may think. How can a race be compared with a nation? It is a permissible comparison. The Negroes were the last to be freed from slavery, and they still bear, more than anyone else, the cruel marks of slavery—even in advanced countries—for capitalism has no “room” for other than legal emancipation, and even the latter it curtails in every possible way. With regard to the Russians, history has it that they were “almost” freed from serf bondage in 1861. It was about the same time, following the civil war against the American slaveowners, that...

The 32nd Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labour, as the association of trade unions is called, has come to a close in Rochester. Alongside the rapidly growing Socialist Party, this association is a living relic of the past: of the old craft-union, liberal-bourgeois traditions that hang full weight over America’s working-class aristocracy. On August 31, 1911, the Federation had 1,841,268 members. Samuel Gompers, a strong opponent of socialism, was re-elected President. But Max Hayes, the socialist workers’ candidate, received 5,074 votes against Gompers’s 11,974, whereas previously Gompers used to be elected unanimously. The struggle of the socialists against...

During the campaign we were told that Barack Obama was post-partisan, we were told that he was post-racial and we were told he was a transformational figure. In other words the willfully ignorant leftwing media bought and fishwrapped all of the Obama Campaign tripe and resold it to the voters of this country. Meanwhile the opposition party nominated a doddering old fool who did little opposing and a lot of agreeing. Little did the average American know, although conservative activists and freepers knew all too well, the administration would be nothing like the promises. From the very beginning the most...

We have already pointed out in Pravda the great importance of the Republican Party split in America and the formation of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party.[2] Now the elections are over. The Democrats have won, and at once the consequences predicted by the socialists are beginning to tell. Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, with its 4.5 million votes, is a specimen of the broad bourgeois-reformist trend which has come on the scene in sweeping American fashion. What happens to this trend is of general interest because, in one form or another, it exists in all capitalist countries. In any bourgeois-reformist trend there are two...

The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections Wilson, a “Democrat”, has been elected President of the United States of America. He has polled over six million votes, Roosevelt (the new National Progressive Party) over four million, Taft (Republican Party) over three million, and the Socialist Eugene Debs 800,000 votes. The world significance of the U.S. elections lies not so much in the great increase in the number of Socialist votes as in the far-reaching crisis of the bourgeois parties, in the amazing force with which their decay has been revealed. Lastly, the significance of the elections lies in...

The latest issue of the American labour weekly, Appeal to Reason, received in Europe reports that its circulation has increased to 984,000 copies. The letters and demands coming in—writes the editor (No. 875, September 7, new style)—indicate beyond doubt that we shall exceed one million copies in the next few weeks. This figure—a million copies of a socialist weekly which American courts harass and persecute shamelessly and which is growing and gaining strength under the fire of persecution—-shows more clearly than long arguments the kind of revolution that is approaching in America. Not long ago the sycophantic Novoye Vremya, a...

For the next several days, I will publish letters and Essays by Vladamir Lenin On the United States. Examine Bolshevik views on the US way of life and free market. I hope you all find it very interesting EXCERPT The sharpening of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is to be observed in all the advanced capitalist countries. The tendency is the same everywhere, though it manifests itself differently in accordance with the difference in historical conditions, political systems and forms of the labour movement. In America and Britain, where complete political liberty exists and where the proletariat...

For the next several days, I will publish letters and Essays by Vladamir Lenin On the United States. Examine Bolshevik views on the US way of life and free market. I hope you all find it very interestingEXCERPT The two ways I have indicated of "solving" the agrarian question in developing bourgeois Russia correspond to the two paths of development of capitalism in agriculture. I call these two paths the Prussian and the American paths. The characteristic feature of the first is that medieval relations in landowning are not liquidated at one stroke, but are gradually adapted to capitalism, which...

For the next several days, I will publish letters and Essays by Vladamir Lenin On the United States. Examine Bolshevik views on the US way of life and free market. I hope you all find it very interesting In Volume III of Capital (2. Teil S 156) Marx had already pointed out the the form of landed property with which the incipient capitalist mode of production is confronted does not suit capitalism. Capitalism creates for itself the required forms of agrarian relationships out of the old forms, out of feudal land property, peasants commune property, clan property, ETC. In that...

For the next several days, I will publish letters and Essays by Vladamir Lenin On the United States. Examine Bolshevik views on the US way of life and free market. I hope you all find it very interesting Marxism and the American General Redistribution In Issue 15 of Vperyod April 20th 1905, Vladimir Lenin discusses Marx's views of America's founding and on land distribution....The year was not 1848 as erroneously stated in the article by Comrade-, but 1846. Herman Krige, a Co-worker of Marx and at the time a very young man, had gone to America in 1845 and there...

Lenin statue collapses, kills man in Belarus MINSK, Belarus — A massive statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin collapsed on a man who was hanging from it Monday, killing him on the spot, authorities said. The 21-year-old man was drunk when he climbed onto the five-meter (16-foot)-high plaster monument and hung from its arm, the Emergency Situations ministry said. It then broke into pieces and he was crushed. The statue in the southeastern Belarus town of Uvarovichi was built in 1939. "The monument's heavy head tumbled on him," said Nataliya Bolbas, a principal at a school in Uvarovichi facing the...

HOMEL, Belarus -- A 21-year-old man from the southeastern Belarusian town of Uvaravichy in Belarus was killed when a piece of a statue to Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin fell on him as he tried to climb it, RFE/RL's Belarus Service reports. Early this morning, the unnamed man climbed atop the seven-meter monument and tried to hang from Lenin's famous outstretched arm.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict called on Tuesday for a "world political authority" to manage the global economy and for more government regulation of national economies to pull the world out of the current crisis and avoid a repeat. The pope made his call for a re-think of the way the world economy is run in a new encyclical which touched on a number of social issues but whose main connecting thread was how the current crisis has affected both rich and poor nations. Parts of the encyclical, titled "Charity in Truth," seemed bound to upset free marketeers because...

"Thank you very much..."

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez says he has a new book for President Barack Obama: "What is to be Done?" by communist Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state. Chavez says he'll "give it to Obama at the next meeting." "What is to be Done?" is Lenin's political treatise on the role of intellectuals and the proletariat in promoting revolution, written more than a decade before he led the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917.

President Hugo Chavez says he has a new book for President Barack Obama: "What is to be Done?" by communist Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state. Chavez says he'll "give it to Obama at the next meeting." "What is to be Done?" is Lenin's political treatise on the role of intellectuals and the proletariat in promoting revolution, written more than a decade before he led the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917.

It’s Earth Day again – unless you’re celebrating Administrative Professionals Day (which is also today, but only for people who work). In honor of Earth Day, I offer the following tips to make your home less green and more comfortable. Just like Al Gore’s phat crib. Instead of being green, we’re going brown. Brown Tips 1. Make sure and hoard incandescent light bulbs before the government mandated CF bulbs are completely phased in. This is especially important if you own a historic home and wish to preserve period lighting. Nothing is uglier than a Victorian home with gulag like interrogation...

From NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) [the very first] Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. It was spectacularly successful, achieving grassroots concern for environmental problems facing the nation. More than 2,000 colleges and universities, over 10,000 high schools and grade schools, and 20 million citizens participated, nearly ten percent of the U.S. population at that time. American Heritage (October 1993) magazine referred to this first Earth Day as “one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy...” http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/events/earthday/welcome.html __________________________________________________________________________ From EarthDay.net... Earth Day -- April 22 -- each year marks the anniversary of the...

When I lived in Waterbury, Vermont, in the late 1980s I attended a bluegrass concert in the park one summer evening. The band (its name escapes me) had recently returned from a Vermont Arts Council/ State Department-type cultural exchange trip to the then Soviet Union. During a break in the music, a couple of the musicians told the assembled crowd of Boomer hippies about the trip; the bass player showing off a souvenir, which was a lapel pin fastened to his shirt pocket. It was small, gold-colored, and bore the likeness of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history by the...

In 1955, then Soviet Premier, Nikita Krushchev ordered April 22nd be designated a day to celebrate Communism. In 1970, it was chosen to be Earth Day by Gaylord Nelson, one of the founders of the event. Those founders had 365 days from which to choose. They chose Lenin's birthday. When Communism was imposed on Russia in 1917, the first thing it did was to outlaw the ownership of private property. Under Communism, the State owns all property and all natural resources. In recent years in the United States, the Clinton-Gore Administration has declared millions of acres of mineral and oil-rich...

One of Russia's most famous statues of Vladimir Lenin has been bombed, leaving the Bolshevik revolutionary with a gaping hole in his rear. The bronze statue, in the city of St Petersburg, was badly damaged before dawn on Wednesday, when the blast blew a hole in Lenin's coat. No-one was hurt in the attack, the motive for which was unknown. The statue, outside the Finland Station, marks the Bolshevik leader's return from exile in April 1917. "Today at 0430 [0030 GMT] there was an explosion at the Lenin monument at the Finland Station in the city centre," a spokesman for...

"We're looking for supporters," said DeHaven of Hoover, one of the event's organizers. "We're not looking for a fight. That will come later, when we have an army."

The leftist American press so wanted “change” that they turned their collective head from every reasonable query regarding a freshman senator with a blank résumé and a past so secret that he dare not even allow his birth or college records to become public. A man so surrounded by well-known evil doers, that the only thing on his résumé is a long list of ill-fated associations with terrorists, criminals and anti-American thugs. Still, the American press went so far as to label this man a “messiah,” a savior… who would forever change our nation, righting all the wrongs of freedom...

The White House and Congress are rushing to write legislation that allows the federal government to take over and unwind the businesses of a large financial institution—such as AIG or Citigroup —the way it now can with commercial banks, CNBC has learned. The regulatory authority—similar to the FDIC’s so-called bridge bank powers—was originally expected to be included in a broader reform package addressing systemic risk. But now it's being crafted as stand-alone legislation in the wake of the public uproar over the AIG executive bonuses. The legislation, being spearheaded by House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) could be ready...

Lenin famously said of liberals in the West that they were "useful idiots." A number of really smart (go ahead, ask them) people endorsed Obama only to find out that they were hoodwinked. He's not the guy they fell in love with. It's the morning after, and they've been forced to confront the fact that he's a fraud. A forgery. In John LeCarre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" master spy George Smiley points out that "the more one has paid for a forgery, the more one defends it in the face of all the evidence to the contrary." And, these people...

15 March 2009Darwinists Tie Themselves Into Knots Denying the Obvious Some Darwinists will say anything to try to draw attention away from the obvious. The point of my “Scientific Certitude” post was to show that evolutionary theory has been used to support racist views. Darwin was a firmly committed racist, and he was not shy about expressing his racist views: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,...

Here is video (via Gateway Pundit) of CNBC's Stock Guru Jim Cramer yesterday saying that the Obama Administration is yet to show any sign that they realize that their agenda is destroying the life savings of millions of Americans. Cramer said he "felt it everywhere he went" this past weekend, and told of a kid who pulled him aside and told him, "You were right to say we've elected a Leninist," a reference to Vladimir Lenin who was the father of the communist movement. Below is a video clip from February 3 when Cramer compared the rhetoric of Obama to...