Moscow’s Assault on the Vatican The KGB made corrupting the Church a priority.

National Review Online ^ | January 25, 2007 | Ion Mihai Pacepa

[Iris7]

Slavery as practiced here in 1830-60, say, left the slave with no legal rights whatsoever. As I read history this practice has destructive results.

Rome at the time of the First Punic War had slaves, but these slaves had a legal right to own property and protection from extreme treatment without cause. By the Late Western Empire such protections no longer existed. By 450AD the gap between the rich and poor was vast. The middle class (the bulwark of early Rome) had long since been destroyed.

Thucydides talks about comparable things in his history of the Peloponnesian War. When the Greeks of the Persian Wars days talked about Thermopylae they talked about free men fighting against a huge army of slaves.

Even without using any moral argument chattel slavery as known in this country has had disastrous consequences. The historic loss of the Constitutional Republic is only one of them.

"A good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit." Slavery has born bad fruit. Slavery is bad.

This is the actual reality, the truth. Opinion has nothing to do with it. Truth is not a matter of opinion.

Slavery is without any redeeming quality. It is bad through and through.

[Iris7]

Indeed. A clear example of effective propaganda.

Classic work on the subject,

Ellul


Modern Leftist take on the subject

Chomsky

[Campion]

One is reminded of Josef Stalin's wisecrack, "How many divisions has the Pope?"

Not so well known is the Pope's response: "Tell my brother Joseph that my divisions are in heaven."

[Iris7]

The Duranty affair is not over yet. All that follows is from the Weekly Standard:

"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
--New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1

"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
--New York Times, August 23, 1933

"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
--New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6

"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
--New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18

"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."
--New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13

I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. ("An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934," University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP's Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:

Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.

And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.

[Iris7]

Thomas Campion always reminds me of Thomas More as they were both caught up in the same events. After all, what is a mere hundred years?

Utopia
is absurdly misunderstood. It is written in the same ancient literary style as Lucien of Samosota, Jonathan Swift (Gulliver), and Voltaire (Candide). "I write of things which I have neither seen nor learned from another, things which are not and never could have been, and therefore my readers should by no means believe them."

[spanalot]

Great Post.

[megatherium]

Understood.

[murphE]

Thanks for posting.

[narses]

+

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[Dajjal]

Ostpolitik bumpus ad summum

[PhilDragoo]

Senator Joseph McCarthy warned of Soviet agents in the State Department, but it would be forty years before the Venona decrypts confirmed this.

Duranty carried Stalin's water, and Hammer carried the latter's cash.

Gore father and son ran interference for Hammer. Hillary interned under Robert Treuhaft; Bill made improbable journeys to Czechoslavakia and Moscow in the company of Strobe Talbott, the Russia man at State, warning Kapitan Man to depart its spy station at our boomer pen.

The Clinton Janus embraced the grandson of Hitler's mufti, and she who railed at the FJB embraced Suha after the latter's blood libel.

A nest of vipers intertwined with the persistent genocidal trends of human sewers, collaborating with the nation's enemies in capitals from Tehran to Beijing, controls the national media, the national legislature and soon the seat of executive power.

The left and its ministry of truth sees no islamist enemy at the gate, only the weakened president and his bridge too far.

Will another democracy elect a demagogue in the guise of democrat.

[Iris7]

My pleasure. Thanks for looking at it.

[Iris7]

Thanks. Google search "Duranty" and "pulitzer", bottom of first page.

[Iris7]

Enjoyed your home page.

[endthematrix]

Putin was a lieutenant colonel at the time of his "departure" from the KGB.

He wasn't a chairman or head of the KGB - At least that's what I had read.

[Iris7]

Howdy, Phil.

Enjoyed your pastiche (correct use of word, as in 18th Century musical pasticcios). (Irritating how the vulgar wreck perfectly good words, eh?)

Don't see the link between Talbot and the Kapitan Man (Russian spy ship in US territorial waters and famous for the laser incident). ???????

Demagogues and democracy? Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli etc. figured "You ain't got one without the other"! Tyranny follows democracy which follows aristocracy, etc.

Enjoy what I can of Chinese antiquity but Confucius could not hold a candle to Plato.

[devolve]

Good post Phil -

[Iris7]

Looks to me that the GRU and KGB attracted very bright very high quality people. The education provided to up and comers looks to have been quite extraordinary. Not surprising that some very capable, very bright, very hardworking men come from that background.

[maryz]

I'm not sure what it is you posted -- the origin, the source (the purpose is clear enough!).

[HiTech RedNeck]

But did Communists succeed in doing any worse to the morals of the RCC than the RCC did to its own self in America? (Same for mainline evangelical churches)