Free Republic

The left knows this too and, through the artifice of forced “anti-racist” training, it is deliberately driving a wedge between Americans. Friendship and affection have to be given freely. You can’t force someone to like you, just as you can’t be forced to like another person or even a group of people. Any attempt at this type of coercion will likely produce the opposite result. Progressives want to use the power of government to codify favoritism and then manufacture kinship. That’s hardly a recipe for success. Nevertheless, they seem determined to force the issue until the country is so polarized...

Holocaust scholars slam EU for backing Nazi-Communist comparison By Cnaan Liphshiz WARSAW - Leading Holocaust researchers have criticized European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek ahead of his speech at Auschwitz Tuesday, for endorsing the equalization of the Nazi genocide with Communist brutal oppression. Some scholars call this growing trend "the gravest threat to preserving the memory of the Holocaust," suggesting it serves to exculpate populations complicit in the extermination of their Jewish minorities. "It is inconceivable that the ceremony at Auschwitz will feature an address by a parliament president who entertains initiatives meant to efface and obfuscate the Holocaust," said Shimon...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said on Tuesday he supported tough measures taken by Russian President Vladimir Putin and wished he had adopted them. Gorbachev, whose political reforms led to the collapse of the communist empire, said he should have squashed the challenge from Boris Yeltsin, his arch-rival and subsequently first Russian president, by sending him into diplomatic exile.

The past, the East learns, is always present By Judy Dempsey International Herald Tribune THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2006 BERLIN After Poland's new conservative government took office late last year, one of its first decisions was to recall 10 ambassadors because of their communist past. Then last week, a Hungarian weekly magazine published charges that the film director Istvan Szabo was an informer during the late 1950s, a particularly depressing era after Soviet-led tanks crushed the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. It also disclosed that the retired Catholic primate, Cardinal Laszlo Paskai, imprisoned by the communist regime from 1949 to 1956, had cooperated...