Free Republic

It is now fashionable to demonize Russia, but most Americans have forgotten key aspects of 20th-century history, including the Russians’ fight to stop the march of Nazi Germany. Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded — and would soon destroy — a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany’s best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942–43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II.

Covert intelligence operations, propaganda, fake news stories, dirty tricks—all were used in a foreign government’s audacious attempt to influence U.S. elections. It wasn’t 2016; it was 1940, and the operations were employed not by a hostile adversary, but by America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom. Though technology has advanced, and the two nations’ motives could not have been more different, critical aspects of Russia’s alleged covert efforts to bolster the campaign of Donald Trump echo the tactics that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service pioneered seven decades ago. In 1940, as war raged in Europe, British intel officers in New York and...

Following Richard Spencer’s Thursday talk at the University of Florida, a trio of Spencer’s supporters opened fire just outside Gainesville, Fla., during an altercation with those opposing Spencer’s presence. According to a statement from the Gainesville Police Department, Tyler Tenbrink, William Fears, and Colton Fears – all from Texas – were arrested and charged with attempted homicide. The 28-year-old Tenbrink, encouraged by the Fears brothers, fired into the crowd during an altercation following Spencer’s speech. The bullet missed the counter-protesters and struck a nearby building. While Tenbrink and William Fears, 30, both have criminal records – the former is a...

I heard something unusual when I logged on to the New York Times this morning. It seemed to me a dire, authoritative, even apocalyptic sound. It was as if a gigantic clap of thunder had been produced by an immense boot of truth. Allow me to explain. On my screen appeared a think piece comparing Adolf Hitler with Donald Trump. “Trump Isn’t Hitler. But the Lying . . . ,” by op-ed columnist Charles Blow, advances a breathtaking claim that has never, to my knowledge, appeared in any media outlet before: That though Trump isn’t Hitler, he’s actually pretty close,...

A memorial plaque with an Ustasha pro-Nazi slogan is pictured after it was moved from the vicinity of the WWII extermination camp of Jasenovac, to a Croatian memorial site near Novska on September 7, 2017. (AFP PHOTO / STRINGER) An alarming and expanding wave of revisionism in Eastern EuropeThe leadership of the small Jewish community in Croatia, along with representatives of the countryÂ’s Serb minority, has boycotted the last two government-sponsored Holocaust commemorations in 2016 and 2017. Demonstrating impressive moral courage and integrity, they refuse to condone a historical revisionism with echoes of Holocaust denial that aims to rehabilitate...

In an April 20 (given the deep connections between the Brotherhood and the Nazi Party, the date may not have been an accident) story in the Jerusalem Post, the question was asked, Will Qatar abandon the Muslim Brotherhood? As they put it, Qatar is the only country who openly supports the Muslim Brotherhood. This followed the pressure exerted on Qatar to do just that from its three Gulf neighbors, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia even threatened a blockade should Qatar not comply. Clearly the Brotherhood, and their revolutionary aims, had been recognized as a threat...

Irena Sendler Died: May 12, 2008 (aged 98) Warsaw, Poland During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive. Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids. Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants...

BERLIN — Americans can be forgiven for thinking Germany has already successfully thwarted Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Deutsch version of the right-wing populist movements pounding on the gates of Europe. When the overtly racist AfD’s numbers sank in the polls in March, observers across the West felt relieved to know that the European Union’s backbone and strongest advocate would not fall to the far right. Germans, however, feel little such relief. In fact, many are worried sick about the virtual certainty of a far-right party’s entrance to Parliament. That’s because even a small AfD presence in the Bundestag could...

Since the founding of the Soviet Union, modern leftists have been trying to portray Communism as a great thing. We know they’ve succeeded because calling anyone a Nazi is viewed as a heinous charge while calling someone a Communist is no big deal and can even be considered a compliment by some leftists. Walter Duranty, a NYT reporter, got a Pulitzer prize for lying about the mass starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Now that we know the truth, neither the Pulitzer committee nor the NYT want to retract the award. Leftists are so eager to support Communism that...

On Sunday, Aug. 27, a “rally against hate” was scheduled in Berkeley, California, by a small group of relatively conservative Christians, led by Amber Cummings, a transgender Trump supporter and a leader of a group called Patriot Prayer, and a Japanese-American named Joey Gibson. Their event never took place. The left-wing group known as antifa, a contraction of “anti-fascist,” showed up in large numbers. Videos shows its members pouncing on one of the rally supporters, knocking him to the ground, and preparing to beat him with sticks and rocks. The Washington Post reported: “A pepper-spray-wielding Trump supporter was smacked to...

There seems to be an insatiable appetite among the punditry class for the “antifascists are as bad as fascists” argument, a subset of that orthodoxy of the moderate which argues for peace in the face of violence and love in the face of hate. In the last week alone, The Guardian published “Step Aside, Antifa. You Undermine the Trump Resistance,” Truthdig published Chris Hedges’ “How Antifa Mirrors the Alt-Right,” and Trevor Noah devoted an entire segment of his show to the issue of the “Punch Drunk Left” in which he referred to Antifa as “vegan ISIS.” The Department of Homeland...

The horde of black-clad and masked thugs that calls itself AntiFa has created a dilemma for the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the group's professed opposition to fascism is in line with typical Democratic Party rhetoric. On the other hand, their violent methods ironically mirror the methods used by Nazi Party goons in the streets of Germany in the years preceding Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933. After a number of violent incidents in his city, Berkeley mayor Jesse Arreguin has argued that AntiFa be classified as a criminal gang and be prosecuted under the statutes applicable to the...

Anne Frank Center tweets this followed by a list of hateful claims against President Trump. "Must you see more to recognize the escalating parallels of history?" Do your magic if you have the talent to post the image.

The recent deadly Nazi hate-fest in Charlottesville has, in addition to revealing the extreme moral vacuity of the current White House, prompted a call for more compassion and empathy when dealing with basic ideological differences. Pundits orate on NPR about how to recognize the psychological damage of those given to right-wing rage. Classes are offered in tactics for engaging those on "the other side" of political debates. My impeccably Democratic New Hampshire in-laws set off to attend one of these sessions last week, earnest in their desire to find common ground with fellow Americans who voted Trump. These efforts and...

Even Chomsky Agrees. It may feel good, and they may well deserve it, but violence against neo-Nazis only helps sustain a dynamic at which the Nazis will prevail. To many on the right—especially Donald Trump loyalists and devotees of white nationalist YouTube personalities—the black-clad anarchists known as Antifa represent the coming of a Stalinist dictatorship. To a sizable portion of the political left and center, the sight of tiki torch-wielding white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month portends a future of Nuremberg rallies and the death of liberal democracy. The state of many Americans’ heightened anxiety is understandable....

Cindy Sheehan, Tom Hayden, and the Hate America Left meet with pro-Ba'athist members of the Iraqi parliament to discuss “peace.” TO FIND PEOPLE WHO HATE AMERICA AS MUCH AS THEY DO, the Fifth Column Left had to go halfway around the world to meet with Iraqi political leaders who call terrorism “honorable national resistance” and say foreign jihadists “are guaranteed Paradise” – and at least one of whom has ties to militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr. By the end of the trip, the American leftists would echo these sentiments. Somehow most of the media – occupied with interminable coverage of Hurricane...

It's a self-evident truth that fascism, Nazism, etc., are godless, evil, mass-murdering totalitarian ideologies as all freedom loving, non-brainwashed Americans readily admit. How many millions of people must be slaughtered in the name of communism and how many times must they threaten the entire free world with total annihilation until the brainwashed democrats denounce godless Marxism as evil and anti-American? Likewise, how many millions of unborn babies will be offered on the altar of "woman's choice" before they realize abortion is an evil, godless abomination? The Nazi's were and are an evil, godless, mass-murdering totalitarian ideology. The Communists were and...

Over the past few months, we have finally entered the fully realized historical revisionism promised in George Orwell’s “1984,” in which the motto, “Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future,” was central to shaping the book’s dystopian world. In the book, history was continually being rewritten and re-promulgated to meet the political necessities of the moment. There was no history to be remembered, let alone lessons to be learned. For all the talk of Trumpian bluster or exaggeration, there is only one group that seeks to systematically and violently achieve its goals here...

In the 1920s, Nazis and Communists frequently battled in pubs and streets as they fought for supremacy in Germany. After the prolonged battle, the Nazis won out and the Communists were outlawed in Germany the day Hitler took power. That was the beginning of the rise of the Nazis becoming the most hated group in world history. The battle between the two groups did not end there as Stalin took control of Communist Russia, renamed the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, while Hitler was consolidating power and beginning to eradicate his enemies, Stalin was throwing thousands into the Gulag and...

After Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer, hitherto Nazi-friendly internet companies have found their boots and their banhammers. The angry right has for some time anticipated this eventuality, and colonized or established replicas of key services and platforms. 8chan, Voat and Gab are the most well-known examples, respectively resembling 4chan, Reddit and Twitter. Adi Robertson writes that the internet's plumbing, the world of domain name registrars and load mitigation, will be harder to replicate. Why the alt-right can’t build an alt-internet. Even if such a registrar could ignore bad PR, activists could still lodge complaints with the registries, which...