Free Republic

Leadership comes in many forms and with many levels of risk, but history gives us a few moments when leaders stood alone and were proven right. [...] In late June 1948 the Soviets cut all road, rail and water access to Berlin, a city controlled by the Western Allies yet surrounded by Soviet-controlled territories. The Soviet’s goal: take Berlin from the Allies by forcing the US-UK-French alliance into one of two options: try to protect a city of 2.1 million starving Germans, or war. The Soviets expected the West to surrender the city quickly. [...] The US was in the...

Simferopol, Crimea (CNN) -- Is Russian President Vladimir Putin an opportunist, grabbing at chances to poke the West in the eye, or a clever strategist with the longer-term goal of restoring a greater Russia? Is he simply riding a tide of Russian patriotic fervor over Crimea? Is he a rational actor aware of the delicate balances within the international system, or as one observer put it, "drunk on power" and oblivious to sanctions? These are the questions preoccupying western governments and Russia's neighbors, after the swift annexation of Crimea and Russian military maneuvers close to the Ukrainian border. There were...

Ukraine's Crimean parliament voted Monday to nationalize energy companies Ukrtransgaz and Chornomornaftohaz, according to a statement on the Parliament's website. A Crimean official said last week that the local authorities may sell the oil and gas company Chornomornaftohaz to a Russian firm "such as Gazprom" once the region assumes control of it. On Sunday, a Russia-backed referendum in Crimea demonstrated overwhelming support for joining the Russian federation. The US and its European allies are expected to announced sanctions against Russia on Monday after Crimea announced that just under 97% of voters in the region supported leaving Ukraine and becoming a...

1804 GMT: The Economist’s Edward Lucas has posted a statement from Bishop Borys Gudziak that provides more information on the kidnapped Greek Catholic Priest: Fr. Kvych was seized by two men in uniform and four men in civilian clothing. The young chaplain for the Ukrainian Navy was taken to an undisclosed location where he is being held captive. A parishioner who called Fr. Kvych’s cellular phone heard abusive language on the line directed at the priest before the call was cut short. Sources confirm that Fr. Kvych is alive. Earlier this week at the direction of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic...

In a letter published on his website on Friday the former Soviet President and Nobel Peace Prize winner said that his position on the Ukrainian crisis remains unchanged. “Our main task is to stop the dangerous escalation and find a solution that would be supported by Ukrainian and Russian citizens and prevent a new Cold War,” the message reads. At the same time, Gorbachev wrote that he would prefer not to get personally involved in the talks and the diplomatic contacts President Vladimir Putin is having with other national leaders almost daily. The former Soviet leader holds that the original...

"Roads to Moscow" World War II history in the song Song on You Tube: Roads to Moscow by Al Stewart Lyric: They crossed over the border, the hour before dawn Moving in lines through the day Most of our planes were destroyed on the ground where they lay Waiting for orders we held in the wood Word from the front never came By evening the sound of the gunfire was miles away Ah, softly we move through the shadows, slip away through the trees Crossing their lines in the mists in the fields on our hands and on our knees...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHD5nd3QLTg Seems appropriate for today. Thread inspired by Freeper Proud2BeRight. The days of Reagan seem like a lifetime ago.......

...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...

The all-out street war in Ukraine’s capital city of Kiev between anti-government protesters and security forces had its beginnings in late November, when President Viktor Yanukovych rejected a bid for closer integration of his country with the European Union. Protests began peacefully, but reports that security services used excessive force on demonstrators escalated the situation. As of Wednesday, dozens of people have been killed, including protesters and police officers, and hundreds injured. For years Yanukovych promised Ukrainians that he would sign an agreement with the EU, which would benefit Ukraine’s economy substantially. Protesters felt betrayed that he suddenly and without...

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has sacked the head of the armed forces, Col Gen Volodymyr Zamana, according to the president's website. The move comes after the most intense violence in Ukraine's three-month crisis turned Kiev into a battle zone. Earlier the state security service announced it was launching a nationwide "anti-terrorist" campaign to deal with a growing "extremist threat". There was a suggestion the armed forces could be deployed for the first time.

So it seems to me that the people of the Ukraine are being used by either pro-russian factions or pro-Europeon Union factions. But no one is talking about the one faction that doesn't want part in either arena. Soros and our own state department has dumped a whole bunch of money into NGO (non Government Organisations) directly affecting the foriegn policy of another soverign nation. No doubt Putin has his fingers in the Ukraine pie, but we aren't noticing it as much becasue the Russian media has been under his thumb after a series of "unfourtunate accidents and suicides". And...

Is communism making a comeback? On its face, the question seems more than a little absurd. The Berlin Wall came down over 24 years ago. We are more than 22 years removed from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. All that remains are the Stalinist museum pieces of North Korea and Cuba, the former an isolated country known mainly for its absurd dictator and starving population, the latter a beautiful island stuck in a 1950s time warp due to backwards economic and social policies. Even China, the one major power still ruled by...

Why communism didn’t have its own Nuremberg? translation: fb.com/SayNOtocommunismThe Nazis were trialed during the Nuremberg Trials, while communism, the most criminal system in the history of human kind still remains with impunity. Who is to be blamed? The Soviets? The Americans? Or maybe Western media and universities, dominated by leftist thinking? Prof. Andrzej Nowak replies to these and other questions.The efforts of realising the communist ideology ended up with annihilation of at least 100 million people/IstockphotoTony Judt, an American historian and a disappointed intellectual who died short time ago noticed in his last book (which was written as conversations run...

Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil” to describe the galling normalcy of Nazi mass-murderer Adolf Eichmann. Covering his trial in Jerusalem, she described Eichmann as less a cartoonish villain than a dull, remorseless, paper-pushing functionary just “doing his job.” The phrase “banality of evil” was instantly controversial, largely because it was misunderstood. Arendt was not trying to minimize Nazism’s evil but to capture its enormity. The staggering moral horror of the Holocaust was that it made complicity “normal.” Liquidating the Jews was not just the stuff of mobs and demagogues but of bureaucracies and bureaucrats. Now consider...

A Russian Member of Parliament (MP) burst out in an anti-Semitic tirade last Thursday, attacking other Russian lawmakers as “Jews” responsible for the 1917 Communist revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Oleg Bolychev, an MP from the ruling United Russia party, called his opponents “Jews, mired in opposition,” during a debate at the regional parliament in Kaliningrad, reports AFP. “At the start of the 1990s, foreign spies were infiltrated into our government who oversaw the destruction of our state,” claimed Bolychev. “You destroyed our country in 1917 and you destroyed our country in 1991.” …

Red herrings - A review of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character by Diana West Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians”...

Yesterday “TheBlaze” published an interview with Romanian Lt. Gen Ion Pacepa, a discussion which arose around the publishing of his work, “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.” Pacepa is a defector to the United States, but not just any run-of-the-mill defector. He is the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence officer to ever defect. He crossed over back in 1978 and was given political asylum by then President Jimmy Carter. He has made a practice since that time to write in defense of freedom while living his life under threat of assassination, hiding out...

That's why it's pretty chilling to hear Vladimir Putin hurling accusations at the West and pointing out that what's going on is identical to what went on when communism was established and religion was completely expunged from the Soviet Union. Between 1917 and 1937, almost a quarter of a million Christians were executed, and churches that survived destruction were converted into things like museums of atheism. Russian President Putin, who hasn't been shy about expressing his disapproval of homosexuality and has banned what he defined as "homosexual propaganda," had this to say: Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their...

The power of history to speak to us depends on our ability to hear it. When we are deaf to its secrets, or too confused or conditioned to decipher them, we miss the opportunity to be empowered by them. We thus fail to overcome the propaganda our own government, like the dictatorships we revile, has all too often deceived us with. I am struck by this aura of static around a sensational new discovery. Researcher and author Krystyna Piorkowska, the Associated Press reported this week, has unearthed a “lost” U.S. document, dating back to 1945, known as the Van Vliet...

On the Soviet ChurchIvan Ilyin(unidentified excerpt, noticed here) ... Some went to martyrdom. Others fled into exile or underground - the forests and ravines. Others went underground – the underground of the personal soul: they learned silent, unobtrusive externally, secret prayer, the prayer of the intimate fire. But there were - the fourth. These decided to say to the Bolsheviks: "Yes, we are with you," and not just to say, but actually to act and to speak, and to affirm by their acts; to help them and to serve their cause, to fulfill all their requirements, to lie with them,...