I'm not too wild about scientology either.

What, pray tell, has that got to do with the late Dr. Constantine Menges? I am not going to venture any speculation as to what you could be driving at there.

Do you know his religion? It wasn't Scientology. Here is a brief obit from National Review.

Constantine Menges, a Turkish-born freedom fighter and rightwing revolutionary, has died at the age of 64
* Constantine Menges, a Turkish-born freedom fighter and rightwing revolutionary, has died at the age of 64. From helping East German refugees escape over the Berlin Wall, to working for equal voting rights in Mississippi, to organizing civil resistance after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Menges sought to extend the sphere of freedom to the oppressed. In the early 1980s, he worked as a Latin America specialist for the CIA and the White House--from which perch he helped plan the liberation of Grenada from the Castro-backed Communist government, threw his weight behind the Nicaraguan Contras, and supported the Salvadoran rebels. "Constant Menace," as he was nicknamed by his friends (and foes), firmly believed in rolling back Moscow by turning the Soviets' own methods against them through sponsoring "national liberation movements," authorizing covert action, and underwriting democratic revolutionary insurgencies in anti-American despotisms.
More recently, Menges cast his eye on the rise of China and Russia, the emerging pro-Castro constellation in Latin America, and the dubious role of Iran in Middle Eastern affairs. We will miss his wisdom and spirit in the tumultuous era to come.
R.I.P.

There are thousands of books out there that aren't worth my time.

Perhaps your time isn't too valuable to read Dr. Menges. I am extremely busy too, but found his insights absolutely solid. And others were also profoundly effected by him. He was a solid warrior for freedom in the Reagan Administration:

July 26, 2004

Constantine Menges: A Tribute

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

With the passing on Sunday of Constantine Menges, whose hauntingly-prescient columns on foreign affairs have graced these pages for many years, the free world has lost a revolutionary strategist.

An academic by training, Dr. Menges was recruited by incoming CIA director William Casey in May 1981 to become his National Intelligence Officer for Latin America. It was not just Constantine's impressive intellectual firepower that attracted Casey, but his fierce independence, his tenaciousness, and his over-riding vision that it was America's destiny among nations to serve as the standard bearer of freedom to the oppressed of the world. Casey wanted to challenge the corporate views of Agency insiders, and saw in Menges the right man for the job.

Constantine's goal in life was to devise strategies for defeating tyrannies, just as V.I. Lenin and Trotsky had devised strategies to create them. He was a professional revolutionary on the side of freedom.

Just before joining the CIA, Menges proposed that the U.S. government establish a "National Foundation for Democracy" to promote nascent democratic movements in countries living under communism and other forms of tyranny. President Reagan embraced the idea, and two years later convinced Congress to fund the National Endowment for Democracy.

While working for Casey, Dr. Menges urged the CIA to adopt a "pro-democracy" approach toward defeating communism in Latin America, that skillfully blended support for pro-democracy political movements with the selective use of force. When he moved to the White House in 1983 to become a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, his very first assignment was to draw up plans to restore democracy in Grenada after a Communist coup. It was this part of the Grenada mission, more than the military intervention alone, that marked the definitive end of the Carter era and demonstrated that it was possible to "roll back" Communism, surely Ronald Reagan's greatest legacy.

When I met Constantine four years ago, I never would have imagined it would be in the "sunset" of his life. He had just turned sixty; he and Nancy, his wife of twenty-five years, were enjoying Georgetown like a young married couple. Dining with them at restaurants, or in their home or in mine invariably became an intellectual fireworks display. Constantine was not only bursting with his own ideas, but knew how to inspire others.

Indeed, over the past two years, Menges has been more active than ever in warning of new threats looming just over the horizon. He has warned the Bush administration repeatedly about the active infiltration of Iraq by thousands of Iranian government thugs and intelligence operatives. Even as the U.S. was celebrating the end of major combat activities in May 2003, Constantine predicted that the lull in violence would be only a respite. The Iranians had established no fewer than 42 Arabic-language radio and television stations beaming anti-American propaganda into Iraq, he said, without an effective U.S. response. The results were predictable, and deadly.

In Iran itself, Constantine urged the Bush administration to aid pro-democracy groups to build a broad-based national movement capable of challenging the tyrannical rule of Iran's clerics. As a strategist of freedom, who knew that dictators could be defeated - but that it required hard work, good planning, training, and dedication. Arm chair revolutionaries, who ran for cover at the first shots, would never do the trick, he knew. But equally dangerous were armed Marxist-Islamic groups who sought to replace one dictatorship with another.

The son of German refugees from World War II, he had a special understanding of appeasement, and blasted the Clinton administration for caving in to Communist China. But in a just-completed book-length manuscript called 2008: The Preventable War, he was scarcely more tender toward the Bush administration for its failure to recognize the threat of the growing military and strategic cooperation between Russia and Communist China.

Those whose loss is arguably the greatest, however, are those who have never met him and who don't even know his name: freedom-lovers in countries such as Iran, who aspire to break the yolks of tyranny. They have lost not only a friend, but a revolutionary thinker and strategist who understood that if you failed to fight for freedom you inevitably die in chains.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight and author of The French Betrayal of America, just released from Crown Forum.

[I previously said that the Dept. of Education and those for federalizing education had]...enabled the Leftists to use Federal mandates and interference in local education to polticize it and use it as a tool for indoctrination.

Everybody here at Free Republic knows EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Nobody with a shred of conservative constitutional convictions or knowledge or sentiment would then make the response you did:

I'm afraid I haven't a clue what you're talking about.

And what's more, I no longer care.

Mayhaps you will care to at least learn of a fallen oak...

EULOGY FOR CONSTANTINE MENGES
by Curtin Winsor, Atlas Economic Research Foundation,
July 16, 2004

Constantine Menges has passed from us -- a great tree fallen in the forest before its time. As in his sunlit clearing, we now gather to honor him and to share grief that has come to linger -- but not to last. Our sorrow for his passing is not for him, but for us. As we were made better by his presence, his passing diminishes our nation and each of us.

Constantine was the child of democratic opponents to Hitler. He was born on the first day of the Second World War, after their flight to safety in Turkey. He once explained to me that he was sent alone to America at the age of four, identified by a tag on his overcoat coat, with other children of refugees in 1943. He was to live with family friends that he had never met for the next three years. He described his childhood memory of the Statue of Liberty as his ship entered New York harbor in the morning light. Its torch infused him with the spirit of democracy. It was a light that would shine forth from Constantine throughout his life and work.

I met Constantine in 1978 and immediately found him to be a kindred spirit, a warm, considerate and true friend, and a rock of principle. He stood strong for democracy when destiny thrust us both into the storm of the Central American Crisis in 1980. He expected no less of his friends, and our friendship, warmed by his positive outlook and broad interests, gave me an opportunity to share the challenges and heartaches that arise from standing on principle…

Constantine's ability to conceptualize and guide political warfare in support of democracy was his strongest contribution to America’s victory in the Cold War and after. He offered a rare combination of analytical ability, idealistic orientation and practical implementation. This balance of talents enabled him to support active freedom movements against communist dictatorships and to encourage transitions to democracy.

Constantine was prescient as an analyst. Many of his recommendations tended to look too far into the future for the reactive "professionals" who comprise much of our foreign policy establishment. Had Constantine’s proposal to then-Vice President George H. W. Bush's Commission on Terrorism been heeded in 1987, problems we now face would be less significant or even absent. He was almost alone in warning that Iran would pose a major threat to post-Saddam Iraq, a year before the Second Iraq War. He long foresaw the dangers to democratic prospects in Latin America from the Foro do Sao Paolo, the alliance of Chavez in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba and Lula in Brazil. He warned us that this dark alliance would endanger the South American continent and Mexico. Evidence increasingly suggests that he was correct. His final work, now at the printer, raises unpopular but increasingly evident concerns about the danger of links between Russian corruption and advanced military technology feeding the capacity and ambitions of the Peoples Republic of China.

Constantine was a kind hearted, cheerful and friendly human being. He strongly believed that most people contained goodness (albeit temporarily impaired in some instances) and that they were inclined to do the right thing if enabled to do so. He listened well at an interpersonal level and was always concerned about the wellbeing of others, even when he was confronting his own mortality.

He was a dedicated family man. He and Nancy were married for 29 years. He was considerate and generous. He was devoted as a father to their only child, Christopher, and as a loving son to his own recently deceased parents. As a family man, he embodied the very principles that he stood for in all aspects of his life. As a friend, he was caring and supportive. His broad interests, positive and articulate nature were uplifting for those so fortunate as to be his friends and he sustained these qualities to the very end.

Constantine was brave. Adversity was his lot. But he was armored by inner light and conviction that his message of optimism and active opposition to evil must be heard.

He was modest without being humble. Although Constantine endured scorn and rejection from some of his peers, such was his nature that these encounters with negativity did not abash him. He was a confident man, fortified by his strong belief in a just God and in the essential link between his work and the summum bonum that must eventually prove God’s will.

Like a giant oak that stood against the wind, alone in a field, where each bough was as great as a full tree, so was Constantine Menges -- scholar, patriot, linguist, humanist, man of ideas, man of understanding, man of action, and warrior in the truest sense.

Today, it is for his friends who are gathered here to carry forward the political vision and ideas that he championed. His chapter has ended - and we who are left behind must find ways to sustain both his unheeded concerns and his transcendent optimism.

We need to sustain his forward looking political vision more than ever in the unfolding battle of Liberal Civilization against the dark and chaotic forces of international terrorism. It will require many of us to take up the duties that he sustained alone -- standing against the wind.

Resqueat en pacem et luce aeternum, Constantine.