Free Republic

Leon Panetta While a Southern California based congressman in the 1970s and ’80s, CIA director and Obama Secretary of Defense nominee Leon Panetta, was close to a pro-communist, Santa Cruz based “peace activist” named Lucy Haessler. In spite (or perhaps because of) Haessler’s involvement with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, Panetta placed a tribute in the Congressional Record, April 11, 1984, to mark Haessler’s 80th birthday. Panetta noted that Lucy Haessler attended several conferences of the East German based organization in France, the Soviet Union, Poland and East Germany. He did neglect to mention however that the W.I.D.F. was...

How a “post-Stalin Stalinist” suppressed slave revolt history. Anthony Flood, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, 91 pages, 2019. After U.S. recognition of the USSR in 1933, the Communist Party USA made significant gains in America. Many left the Party after Stalin’s show-trials and purges of the mid-1930s, and many others after the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939. By contrast, the American Herbert Aptheker joined the Communist Party “virtually because of it,” explains his former research assistant, friend, and comrade Anthony Flood. Four years before the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Aptheker approved when Stalin shipped oil to Mussolini to aid the fascist dictator’s...