Czech Republic: Strong showing for communists in regional elections

They’re almost as stupid as the US.

The Communist Party is the second political force in Russia and the Communists lead the Moldovan opposition.

The Bohemians must be nostalgic for the old Gottwald days of gloom and doom.

The majority of Czechs are atheists. Does that have some bearing on the promises of communism’s favor?

The entire European Union is on a downward socialist spiral.

This is upsetting.
When I lived in Slovakia, the Communist were like a joke.
I remember their silly little campaign car with a loud speaker.
Nobody paid them any attention.
I assumed that the Czech Republic would be the same, but I guess that the worldwide recession that was starting just as I left in Jan 2009, has given the Commies a boost.

Talk about not being able to break a bad habit.

The Bohemians must be nostalgic for the old Gottwald days of gloom and doom.

Same for Putin.

KGB Putin thinks the "COLLAPSE" of the mass-murdering communist Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century"

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
____________________________________________________

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=
____________________________________________________

Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?
American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

In a [] 1984 book [New Lies for Old], ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. ..."

"Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government."

"Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/did_communism_fake_its_own_dea.html
_____________________________________________________

FReeper khelus provided the following links for reading/downloading both books in their entirety (free):

New Lies for Old:
http://archive.org/details/GolitsynAnatoleTheNewLiesForOldOnes

The Perestroika Deception:
http://curezone.com/upload/Members/ChazTheMeatHe/Books/Golitsyn_The_Perestroika_Deception_The_World_s_Slide_Towards_the_Secon.pdf

Sad to hear this.

I always marveled at the velvet revolution....people shaking their keys to bring down a government.

The link for the piece on Putin longing for the days of the communist Soviet Union is apparently no longer working. Here’s a site that has the article:

“World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin’s State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” What this former KGB officer is saying is that it would have been better for the world if a totalitarian dictatorship, one that in the seven decades of its existence was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Russians and other peoples or their imprisonment in a Gulag slave labor system, were still to exist. Just imagine if German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder were to announce that the fall of the Third Reich was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Putin%27s+Russia—Stalin+lite.-a0133838999

!

This is the most powerful site I have found
Stories from communist Ukraine
http://www.ukrainiangenocide.org/survivors.html

The truth is post-communist movement in Eastern Europe was tainted by Clinton-style liberal corruption. After decades of big government US advisors who got unlimited influence there had to teach misleaded population free enterprise and other real American values but they taught them Hollywood, junk food and gay rights instead. A lot of people are disappointed to a point of turning back to commies they hated a decade ago.

Looks like you guys won’t follow this site, so I’ll post a little of it.

Stories from communist Ukraine
http://www.ukrainiangenocide.org/survivors.html

“This was the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history. It took the
extraordinary form of an artificial famine deliberately created by the ruling
powers. The savage combination of words for the designation of a crime - an
artificial deliberately planned famine - is still incredible to many people
throughout the world, but indicates the uniqueness of the tragedy of 1933,
which is unparalleled, for a time of peace, in the number of victims it claimed.”
Wasyl Hryshko - Genocide Survivor, 1933

“They were horrible years! Mothers were slicing their children and sticking
them in pots to cook them, and then ate them. My mother went into the field
where some horses were dying and brought back a horse’s head. About five
women bit into this horse’s head. What a horror it was; people were dropping
dead on the road. If you pierced them the blood was like water. So many
people died. I remember every thing in the village, including the time they
took the crosses off the churches. Two members from the Komsomol
(Communist Youth Organization) went up and took the crosses down. They
buried them two meters into the ground and old women would go to kiss that
plot of ground...

Then they filled the wooden church full of wheat. During the night mice made
their way through the walls, leaving little holes from which women filled their
buckets with the wheat. The Komsomol took the wheat from the church, and
afterward it stood empty. So many people died in the village that in the
cemetery they stopped putting up crosses. During the winter an old woman
would take a cross from the cemetery to make a fire in her house so that her
children would not freeze.”
Nina Popovych - Genocide Survivor - born 1925, Lysycha Balka, Ukraine
- from Irene Antonovych and Lialia Kuchma’s Generations: A Documentary
of Ukrainians in Chicago, p. 32

“In 1932 and 1933 Kyiv seemed like a paradise to nearly villagers who had
been stripped of all they had by the Soviet government. A no wonder: some
villages were dying out completely, except for those who still had the courage
and strength to flee. There were cases where mothers had gone mad and
killed a child to feed the rest of the family. So, thousands of villagers flocked
to the city of Kyiv. Many of the weak ones sat or lay down by buildings or
fences, most never to get up again. Trucks driven by policemen or
Communist Youth League members, mobilized for that purpose, went around
picking up bodies or carrying those still alive somewhere outside the city
limits. It was especially terrible to see mothers whose faces had turned black
from hunger with children who no longer cry, but only squeal, moving their
lips in an attempt to find sustenance where there was none. People sought
salvation and found death. I saw these things as I walked to work through
the Haymarket on Pidvil’na Street near the Golden Gates and Volodymyr
Street.”
Varvara Dibert - Genocide Survivor - from Congressional testimony
presented before the United States Ukraine Famine Commission in
Washington, DC, October 8, 1986.

“The spring of 1933 was the most horrible and tragic moment in the history of
the Ukrainian people. In th fall of 1932 and the early winter of 1933 the
Russian Communist government had taken away the entire grain crop and all
food produce from the Ukrainian farmers in order to bring them into
submission and obedient servitude in the collective farms.

In the collective farms of my native district, which numbered 672 people, 164
died that fatal spring of 1933. Actually this collective farm suffered little
compared with all the surrounding places, for to induce the farmers to remain
there, they were given 300 grams of bread per person baked from all kinds
of chaff and some liquid concoction cooked from refuse. But there were
villages and hamlets where not a single person remained alive. For instance,
in the large village of Chemychyna, in Neforoshchanske County, which
stretched for two and a half miles, though I do not recall it’s population, and
the hamlet Rybky, of the Sukho-Mayachka village administration, where 60%
of the population died.

Here is another of the many incidents of the famine:

In my native village, there was a stallion kept for breeding mares. He was
well fed, receiving 13 pounds of oats daily, but for some unknown reason, he
suddenly died. This happened at the end of May 1933. This district
administration forbid the stallion to be buried, until a special commission
arrived and held an inquest.

The dead stallion lay in the open for three days and began to decay. A
guard was appointed to shield it from the starving people who would have
eaten the meat. On the fourth day the commission arrived and, having
completed the investigation, ordered the stallion to be buried.

No sooner was that done and the commission gone, then like an avalanche,
the people descended on the dead, decaying stallion and, in an instant,
nothing was left of him. Violent arguments ensued, because some had
grabbed more than their share.

A spectacle I shall never forget was when a 16 year old boy who, beside his
stepmother, was the only survivor in the family, and swollen from starvation,
crawled up to the place where the dead stallion had been and finding a hoof,
snatched it in both hands and gnawed at it furiously. The boy was never
seen again, and rumors circulated, that he had been eaten by his
stepmother.

It was forbidden for people to leave their villages. GPU* guards blocked all
roads and railways. Any food that farmers happened to be carrying was
taken away from them. For picking a stray head of wheat or a frozen potato
or beet left behind in the field, a person was sentenced to ten years in prison
or concentration camp, according to the ruling passed by the government
August 7, 1932.

Thousands of corpses littered the streets, byways and buildings. Deaths
occurred at such a rate that the government could not keep up with burying
the corpses.

During all this time there was not the slightest sign of any famine in the
neighboring Russian territory. The Soviet press never mentioned the famine
in Ukraine but on the contrary, (even) printed misleading propaganda about
“flowering Ukraine” and her great achievements in industry and
collectivization.

To cover up its bloody crime, the Soviet government warned all doctors not
to state true cause of death on death certificates. Instead, they stated a
prevalent digestive ailment was the cause.”

*GPU = Soviet secret police

Polikarp Kybkalo - Genocide Survivor testimony presented before the
United States Ukraine Famine Commission in Washington, DC on October 8,
1986

In 1931, I was ten years old, and I remember well what happened in my native
village in the Kyiv region. In the spring of that year, we had virtually no seed.
The Communists had taken all the grain, and although they saw that we
were weak and hungry, they came and searched for more grain. My mother
had stashed away some corn that had already sprouted, but they found that,
too, and took it. What we did manage to sow, the starving people pulled up
out of the ground and ate.

In the villages and on the collective farms (our village had two collectives), a
lot of land lay fallow, because people had nothing to sow, and there wasn’t
enough manpower to do the sowing. Most people couldn’t walk, and those
few who could, had no strength. When, at harvest time, there weren’t
enough local people to harvest the grain, others were sent in to help on the
collectives. These people spoke Russian, and they were given provisions.

After the harvest, the villages tried to go out in the field to look for a few
gleanings of wheat or cabbage, and the Communists would arrest them and
shoot them or send them to Siberia. My aunt, Tatiana Rudenko, was taken
away. They said she had stolen the property of the collective farm.

That summer, the vegetables couldn’t even ripen. People pulled them out of
the ground, still green, and ate them. People ate leaves, nettles, milk thistle.
By autumn, no one had any chickens or cattle. Here and there, someone
had a few potatoes or beets. People coming from other villages, told the
very same story. They would travel all over trying to get food. They would
fall by the roadside, and none of us could do anything to help them. Before
the ground froze, they were just left lying there dead in the snow or, if they
died in the house, they were dragged out to the cattle- shed, and they would
lie there frozen until spring. There was no one to dig graves.

All the train stations were overflowing with starving, dying people. Everyone
wanted to go to Russia (the RSFSR) because it was said that there was no
famine there. Very few (of those left) returned. They all perished on the
way. They weren’t allowed into Russia and were turned back at the border.
Those who somehow managed to get to Russia, were able to save
themselves.

In February of 1933, there were so few children left that the schools were
closed. By this time, there wasn’t a cat, dog, or sparrow in the village. In that
month, my cousin Mykailo Rudenko died. A month later my aunt Nastia
Klymenko and her son, my cousin Ivan, died, as well as my classmate, Dokia
Klymenko. There was cannibalism in our village.

On my farmstead, an 18 year old boy, Danylo Hukhlib, died and his mother
and younger sisters and brothers cut him up and ate him. The Communists
came and took them away, and we never saw them again. People said they
took them a little ways of and shot them right away, the little ones and the
older ones, together.

At that time, I remember, I had heavy, swollen legs. My sister Tamara, had a
large swollen stomach, and her neck was long, and thin, like a bird’s neck.
People didn’t look like people. They were more like starving ghosts.

The ground thawed, and they began to take the dead to the ravine in ox
carts. The air was filled with the reeking odor of decomposing bodies. The
wind carried this odor far and wide. It was thus over all of Ukraine.”
Tatiana Pawlichka - Genocide Survivor testimony before the United States
Ukraine Famine Commission in Washington, DC on October 8, 1986.

Europeans are looking to communists and socialists for the same reason the US did in 2008: people had lost hope in the alternative.

Softcore Soviet communism of 60s-80s is actually viewed positively by poor people who has a few ambitions there.
They’ve wasted their opportunities and aren’t busy to catch any stars, so all they want is their social security, free health care and garanteed job or pension. It is no matter if they’ll have to wait a year to get a fridge or 5 years to buy a vehicle. They are unable or simply lazy to earn enough to get it under “evil capitalist” system.

Ukraine Famine - 1932-1933 - 7,000,000 Deaths

Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, set in motion events designed to cause a famine in the Ukraine to destroy the people there seeking independence from his rule. As a result, an estimated 7,000,000 persons perished in this farming area, known as the breadbasket of Europe, with the people deprived of the food they had grown with their own hands.

http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/Ukraine_famine.htm
____________________________________________________________

RE: Walter Duranty, the "principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R"

Prize Specimen
The campaign to revoke Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer
Andrew Stuttaford
May 7, 2003

We will never know how many Ukrainians died in Stalin's famines of the early 1930s. As Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, "No one was keeping count." Writing back in the mid- 1980s, historian Robert Conquest came up with a death toll of around six million, a calculation not so inconsistent with later research (the writers of The Black Book of Communism (1999) estimated a total of four million for 1933 alone).

Four million, six million, seven million, when the numbers are this grotesque does the exact figure matter? Just remember this instead:

The first family to die was the Rafalyks — father, mother and a child. Later on the Fediy family of five also perished of starvation. Then followed the families of Prokhar Lytvyn (four persons), Fedir Hontowy (three persons), Samson Fediy (three persons). The second child of the latter family was beaten to death on somebody's onion patch. Mykola and Larion Fediy died, followed by Andrew Fediy and his wife; Stefan Fediy; Anton Fediy, his wife and four children (his two other little girls survived); Boris Fediy, his wife and three children: Olanviy Fediy and his wife; Taras Fediy and his wife; Theodore Fesenko; Constantine Fesenko; Melania Fediy; Lawrenty Fediy; Peter Fediy; Eulysis Fediy and his brother Fred; Isidore Fediy, his wife and two children; Ivan Hontowy, his wife and two children; Vasyl Perch, his wife and child; Makar Fediy; Prokip Fesenko: Abraham Fediy; Ivan Skaska, his wife and eight children.

Some of these people were buried in a cemetery plot; others were left lying wherever they died. For instance, Elizabeth Lukashenko died on the meadow; her remains were eaten by ravens. Others were simply dumped into any handy excavation. The remains of Lawrenty Fediy lay on the hearth of his dwelling until devoured by rats.*

And that's just one village — Fediivka, in the Poltava Province.

We will never know whether Walter Duranty, the principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R., ever visited Fediivka. Almost certainly not. What we do know is that, in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that "there [was] no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation," he soothed, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." So that was all right then.

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".

Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.

As the years passed, and the extent of the famine and the other, innumerable, brutalities of Stalin's long tyranny became increasingly difficult to deny, Duranty's reputation collapsed (I wrote about this on NRO a couple of years ago), but his Pulitzer Prize has endured.

Ah, that Pulitzer Prize. In his will old Joseph Pulitzer described what the prize was designed to achieve: " The encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In 1932 the Pulitzer Board awarded Walter Duranty its prize. It's an achievement that the New York Times still celebrates. The gray lady is pleased to publish its storied Pulitzer roster in a full-page advertisement each year, and, clearly, it finds the name of Duranty as one that is still fit to print. His name is near the top of the list, an accident of chronology, but there it is, Duranty, Times man, denier of the Ukrainian genocide — proudly paraded for all to see. Interestingly, the list of prizewinners posted on the New York Times Company's website is more forthcoming: Against Duranty's name, it is noted that "other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."

Understandably enough, Duranty's Pulitzer is an insult that has lost none of its power to appall. In a new initiative, Ukrainian groups have launched a fresh campaign designed to persuade the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award to Duranty. The Pulitzer's nabobs do not appear to be impressed. A message dated April 29, 2003 from the board's administrator to one of the organizers of the Ukrainian campaign includes the following words:

The current Board is aware that complaints about the Duranty award have surfaced again. [The campaign's] submission…will be placed on file with others we have received. However, to date, the Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous Board's decision, made seventy years ago in a different era and under different circumstances.

A "different era," "different circumstances" — would that have been said, I wonder, about someone who had covered up Nazi savagery? But then, more relevantly, the Pulitzer's representative notes that Duranty's prize was awarded "for a specific set of stories in 1931," in other words, before the famine struck with its full, horrific, force. And there he has a point. The prize is designed to reward a specific piece of journalism — not a body of work. To strip Duranty of the prize on the grounds of his subsequent conduct, however disgusting it may have been, would be a retrospective change of the rules, behavior more typical of the old U.S.S.R. than today's U.S.A.

But what was that "specific set of stories?" Duranty won his prize " for [his] dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan." They were, said the Pulitzer Board "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity…."

Really? As summarized by S. J. Taylor in her excellent — and appropriately titled — biography of Duranty, Stalin's Apologist, the statement with which Duranty accepted his prize gives some hint of the "sound judgment" contained in his dispatches.

""Despite present imperfections," he continued, he had come to realize there was something very good about the Soviets' "planned system of economy." And there was something more: Duranty had learned, he said, "to respect the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, who [had grown] into a really great statesman.""

In truth, of course, this was simply nonsense, a distortion that, in some ways bore even less resemblance to reality than "Jimmy's World," the tale of an eight-year-old junkie that, briefly, won a Pulitzer for Janet Cooke of the Washington Post. Tragic "Jimmy" turned out not to exist. He was a concoction, a fiction, nothing more. The Post did the right thing — Cooke's prize was rapidly returned.

After 70 years the New York Times has yet to do the right thing. There is, naturally, always room for disagreement over how events are interpreted, particularly in an era of revolutionary change, but Duranty's writings clearly tipped over into propaganda, and, often, outright deception, a cynical sugarcoating of the squalor of a system in which he almost certainly didn't believe. His motivation seems to have been purely opportunistic, access to the Moscow "story" for the Times and the well-paid lifestyle and the fame ("the Great Duranty" was, some said, the best-known journalist in the world) that this brought. Too much criticism of Stalin's rule and this privileged existence would end. Duranty's "Stalin" was a lie, not much more genuine than Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" and, as he well knew at the time, so too were the descriptions of the Soviet experiment that brought him that Pulitzer.

And if that is not enough to make the Pulitzer Board to reconsider withdrawing an award that disgraces both the name of Joseph Pulitzer and his prize, it is up to the New York Times to insist that it does so.

*From an account quoted in Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow.

** On another occasion (a dinner party, ironically) that autumn Duranty talked about seven million deaths.

http://www.nationalreview.com/stuttaford/stuttaford050703.asp

We actually have some FReepers who consistently go out of their way to make excuses and rational KGB Putin’s actions. A handful openly admit they like, admire and trust him.