Free Republic

It is hard to imagine a sadder group of people than the children of Americans who spied for the Soviet Union. I am thinking of the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the son of Alger Hiss, and now Harry Dexter White’s two daughters, who in a recent letter to the New York Times Book Review rebuke a reviewer for referring to their father, a high-ranking Treasury official under Roosevelt and Truman, as a Soviet agent. What a tragedy the end of the Cold War has been for the kids and grandkids of the spies. How do they talk...

"Our country has been shaken by strife, but only a few people were held accountable for that in our lifetime," said Georgi Poltavchenko, the Russian president's aide. "I do not think it is fair that those who initiated the strife remain in the center of our state near the Kremlin." Khrushchev in 1962 ordered Stalin's remains removed from Lenin's Tomb, implying Lenin's remains were still sacred. But if Leninism had lost its importance in Russian political thought at the highest levels, if Russian public opinion abominated Lenin's memory, the founder of the Soviet Union would have been reburied in some...

Yalta Condemned Millions to Tyranny FDR’s Failure Not Forgotten by Arnold Beichman Posted May 13, 2005 Earlier this week Vladimir Putin celebrated in Moscow the end of World War II and glorified—yes, glorified—the memory of Josef Stalin, one of the great mass murderers of all time. So much for Putin and what he calls his “managed democracy.” President Bush, on the other hand, celebrated the historic date differently. He had the courage to speak truth to power in a once-captive nation, Latvia, which along with Estonia and Lithuania, had suffered for half a century under a Soviet dictatorship. Bush told...

There is another war going on today in Iraq about which little is heard. It is a war against Christianity. Christians in Iraq are a comparatively small, windling minority: fewer than 800,000, merely 3 percent out of a population of 26 million. Though Iraqi Christians are a minuscule minority, they suffering unrelenting Muslim persecution. The Iraqi Christian population, once was more than 15 percent, decreases daily due to emigration to safety in Western countries. Muslim persecution in Iraq of Christians was highlighted in January when Archbishop Basil Georges Casmoussa in Mosul was kidnapped. Cooler Muslim heads must have prevailed because...

One of the more revolting contemporary English politicians is London's Mayor Ken Livingstone. He has just accused Israel — Israel, if you please — of "ethnic cleansing" and has described Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as "a war criminal who should be in prison." His remarks came after vicious anti-Semitic attacks in England increased 42 percent last year over the previous year, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. During a recent press conference, Mr, Livingstone compared a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard.

MCDONALD'S IS CELEBRATING ITS 15TH anniversary in Russia. Its sales have risen steadily, reaching $310 million in 2004. The company reports that it is serving more than 200,000 customers daily in more than a hundred Russian locations. Well, three cheers for McDonald's, but what's the big deal?Why is McDonald's such a success when all they're selling is a Russian staple, a kotlety as they call it? It was once a puzzle to me, but there's a story behind this McDonald's success story.Some years ago I was staying at one of Moscow's most luxurious hotels, just built by private German investors,...

Please, members of Congress, do something about an arrant case of discrimination against a loyal American friend. Citizens of Britain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark — all the "old" members of the European Union — do not need visas to come to the United States and stay here for up to 90 days. Citizens of Poland, however, must go through the long-winding bureaucratic visa application. Poland is the only former Soviet satellite that provided significant military support in Iraq, thereby incurring German and French anger. By example, Poland helped persuade other European countries to tone down anti-American rhetoric on the Iraq war....

Shouldn't President Bush be asking if it isn't time to dump the United Nations and to start anew? What kind of an organization is the United Nations whose General Assembly, with its automatic anti-Israel majority, devotes its time and finances (the United States pays almost a quarter of the U.N. budget) to badgering Israel, the only genuine democracy in the Middle East? What kind of organization is the U.N. Security Council in which a has-been like France is a permanent member but Germany, India and Japan are not? Does it make any sense to give French President Jacques Chirac, America-hater...

The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com Enduring shiftBy Arnold BeichmanPublished November 15, 2004 In his essay on "The Future of Liberalism," (1882) Matthew Arnold wrote: "If experience has established any one thing in this world it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and provide for them."     Our November presidential election demonstrated the validity of Arnold's pronouncement. For...

There seems to be general agreement that the Democratic Party leadership and rank-and-file are particularly embittered. They are embittered with their dismal electoral fate over several decades and full of bile and spleen about the continued successes of Republican Party candidates. And they have good reason to be bitter. Most people do not realize the depth of the Republican hold on electoral and appointive posts and for how long the Republican Party has been in power in Washington and in the 50 states. That may explain the embitterment.

<p>The re-election of President George Bush is essential to ensure American and even global security against Islamist terrorism. Any possibility his re-election could be in danger should be carefully examined so the possibility can be quarantined like a computer virus.</p>

<p>Canadian historian Jack Granatstein has said, "Anti-Americanism has been and, to a substantial degree, remains Canada's state religion, the very bedrock of Canadian nationalism."</p> <p>That finding is true of two of the three Canadian political parties vying in the national election. The most anti-American party is, of course, the statist Liberal Party, now in power. Second in hostility is the socialist New Democratic Party. The least hostile is the Conservative Party, which is given a good chance of ousting the corrupted Liberal Party on June 28. The Liberal government has been under investigation for allowing the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars by advertising agencies. The present Liberal Party prime minister, Paul Martin, 66, was finance minister during all the stealing but says he knew nothing about it.</p>

<p>Among the most ungenerous and uninformed obituary comments about President Reagan, I give the cup to Thomas Cronin, the McHugh Professor of American Institutions at Colorado College. With sneering rhetoric, he is quoted in the New York Times obituary that Americans evaluate the greatness of a president on "criteria that are over and above popularity and re-election," criteria that in Mr. Cronin's opinion President Reagan obviously did not fulfill.</p>

<p>This is the 60th anniversary of the publication of "Road to Serfdom," by Friedrich Hayek. It is one of the most important books of the 20th century, as important as the publication of "Das Kapital" was, in its malign way, in the 19th.</p>

<p>This is a story about George Soros, philanthropist billionaire and political crusader. But first some background.</p> <p>The formation of the American Liberty League was announced on Aug. 22, 1934. Its backers were rich and powerful conservative business and political leaders of both major parties who hated Roosevelt and his New Deal. And "hated" is not too strong. A New Yorker cartoon at the time showed three evening-gowned dowagers in diamond tiaras with a caption "Let's all go down to the Translux [a New York newsreel theatre of the time] and hiss Roosevelt."</p>

There are some highly intelligent Islamist terrorist strategists who understand European politics to an extraordinary degree and, more importantly, they know how to exploit divisive issues in European politics like the war in Iraq, with or without suicide bombers. This statement flies in the face of Fareed Zakaria's March 15 Newsweek column, "The radicals are desperate." If Madrid March 11 is an example of their desperation, one shudders to think what the terrorists will do when they become cautious and optimistic. My view of their political intelligence is based on a March 14 expose in the Italian daily, Il Giornale...

If you're wondering how the Islamist terrorists got enough explosives to kill 190 Spaniards and wound 1200 more, many maimed for life, here's a dispatch from the daily news report of Radio Free Europe which may be an answer. According to the Czech Republic news agency, CTK, Czech police seized "hundreds of tons of imported, military-grade plastic explosives and detained two men on weapon-trafficking charges on March 10." The police, no doubt sensitive to protocol, failed to identify the country from which the shipments originated but a Czech newspaper spilled the beans: The country is Sweden and the shipment was...

<p>In the dear old days of the Soviet Union, there grew up two subdisciplines in Western political science. One was called Kremlinology, the other Sovietology.</p> <p>These disciplines were developed because the Soviet Union was pledged to the overthrow of democratic countries, it had become a great military power and, as a closed society, it was immune to normal research procedures.</p>

<p>Three communist countries are responsible for the world's most devastating famines.</p> <p>Forcible collectivization of agriculture by Mao Tse-tung caused a famine in the early 1960s, which cost the lives of between 27 million and 40 million Chinese people. V.I. Lenin and Josef Stalin between them created two famines in the Soviet Union that cost the lives of at least 12 million people.</p>

Questions never asked at the O.K. Corral Bush-Russert press event Sunday: Is the world, especially the Middle East, better off with the overthrow and capture of Saddam Hussein? Is there a chance that a democratic Iraq will bring peace and stability to the Middle East? I hope President Bush will ask these questions of his opponent during the presidential debates. If one were to ask: Is the world better off without a Soviet Union or a Nazi Germany, the answer would be a resounding "Yes." If one were to ask the people of Kuwait are they better off with Saddam...