Free Republic

As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back. "Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave...

Europe’s deepening economic crisis and a rising conservative front in Eastern Europe are putting the European Union under pressure. Brussels is responding repressively to this growing strain, stepping onto the thin ice of censorship and thought control. This policy forces submission or encourages secessionist tendencies. Two well-documented political flashpoints best illustrate the EU Commission’s shift in mindset. On one hand, the Brexit process, sabotaged by Brussels and London, and on the other, the ongoing conflict with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Orbán has built a political model on resisting open-border policies, deliberate demographic shifts, and the escalating Ukraine conflict. His message is...

Government wants 'decommunization' law 12.09.2006 The ruling Law and Justice is pressing for creating legislation on 'decommunisation'. The purpose of the new law is to rid public and political life in Poland of the remnants of Communist influence still to be found, believes the government, in many areas of public life. Story by Slawek Szefs These former Communist 'aparatchiks' have not only swiftly and painlessly entered Poland's democratic ranks, but have also been reaping considerable financial profits from the country's economic transformations, passing in silence over their abrupt change in orientation. The Law and Justice parliamentarians claim that it's high...

PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned fellow EU countries that joint defence is still realistic, but urged continued military cooperation with the US The Danish government will support a series of small steps to reinforce the EU's joint foreign and security policy this autumn, when member nations begin the dirty work of negotiating a new constitutional treaty for the European partnership. Denmark will neither contribute to majority-rule resolutions on defence, nor move to withdraw the military defence of Europe from the NATO alliance with the US, Rasmussen said Monday at an EU conference at Copenhagen's Industriens Hus. The prime minister warned...

A former North Dakota State Senator pleaded guilty today to traveling to Prague, Czech Republic, to have commercial sex with minor boys. According to court documents and facts established in public proceedings, Ray Holmberg, 80, of Grand Forks, took approximately 14 trips to Prague between 2011 and 2021 to engage in commercial sex acts with minor boys. During some of these trips, Holmberg used the alias “Sean Evans” while staying at a brothel where young boys provided commercial sexual services. Holmberg also went to a public park in front of the main train station in Prague to procure sex from...

Newsweek reports that researchers from the Margulan Institute of Archaeology have discovered a face carved into a granite boulder at the top of a rocky outcrop in central Kazakhstan. The carving measures about ten inches long by eight inches wide, with well-preserved eyes, nose, and lips. A collapsed stone stele measuring more than six feet long and three feet wide was found nearby. It had been carved on one side with an image of a deer with large antlers. Archaeologist Sergey Yarygin said that the carved face and the stela are similar to others found at Bronze Age sites in...

Poland has emerged as one Ukraine’s most ardent supporters during Russia’s invasion despite historical grievances between the neighboring nations that stir up bad feelings to this day. “There are still open wounds in the memory of many people,” Duda said, an obvious reference to the massacres of some 100,000 Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during the 1940s. Poland considers the killings genocide. The difficult past in Poland-Ukraine relations goes back even further than that. In a part of Europe where entire nations have disappeared from maps for generations before returning from the ashes of collapsed empires, sometimes at the expense of...

The Justice Department on Friday charged three Azerbaijani gangsters with plotting to murder a Brooklyn-based Iranian-American author and activist last year. The case stems from the July arrest of Khalid Mehdiyev, who was collared near Masih Alinejad’s home with an assault rifle after the beefy and bearded 24-year-old was filmed ringing Alinejad’s doorbell and lingering on her porch in a leafy part of the New York City borough. The other two men facing charges are 43-year-old Rafat “Rome” Amirov, a resident of Iran who was arrested on Jan. 26 in New York, and 38-year-old Polad “Haci Qaqa” Omarov, who was...

The Slavic crone, known for living in a house built on chicken legs and feasting on children, is a complex, and arguably feminist, figure – as a new book shows, says David Barnett. I In fairy tales, women of a certain age usually take one of two roles: the wicked witch or the evil stepmother, and sometimes both. A key figure from Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga certainly fulfils the requirements of the wicked witch – she lives in a house that walks through the forest on chicken legs, and sometimes flies around in a giant mortar and pestle. She usually...

The ability to mobilize civil society, through media in particular, can tip the scales towards victory or defeat as much as bombs and tanks.As the bombardment of Ukraine’s two largest cities intensifies, there’s another aspect of the struggle between Russia and Ukraine that is getting less notice from military analysts fixated on troop numbers and equipment — the moral aspect of war and its interplay with information warfare. Based on the relatively small force Russian President Vladimir Putin sent charging at Kyiv, he appeared to expect Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to flee and his government to collapse. When Zelenskyy refused...

In one fell swoop, Poland went from being a threat to the West's democratic-liberal political order to the tip of the spear in the fight to protect this order from what it suddenly sees as the preeminent threat: Russian President Vladimir Putin, and what the West perceives to be his "imperialistic" plan of expansion. Up until recently, US President Joe Biden refused to meet with his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, due to what the Democratic administration believes to be the Polish government's conservative policies. The European Union, too, had mobilized to impose economic sanctions on Poland for "harming the values...

President Biden said Friday he plans to send a small number of U.S. forces to Eastern Europe in the “near term” amid growing fears of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. “I’ll be moving troops to Eastern Europe in the NATO countries in the near term,” Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews upon returning from a trip to Pittsburgh. “Not too many.”

Leaders in the Group of Seven are looking for a consensus regarding Russia’s “malign behavior” towards Ukraine. The leaders of the U.K., U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Italy are meeting at the Museum of Liverpool for two days of talks, with Russia-Ukraine tensions one of the key issues on the table, The Associated Press reported. The meeting is hosted by British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who wants “a show of unity against global aggressors” and a coordinated response....

Alongside Poland, Hungary has formed a semi-alliance of conservative central European powers, and has been an example of sorts for Western conservatives. They all should do more.Entrenched leftists within the U.S. State Department are supporting the effort to demote Viktor Orban from prime minister of Hungary, if a report in Financial Times is correct. The Biden administration also left Hungary off its invitation list for a forthcoming international virtual Democracy Summit on Dec. 9 and 10 to which some 100 countries were invited.“Trump and his enablers and those who invaded and attacked our Capitol, they don’t like the world we’re...

I'm writing from Warsaw, Poland, making for both my first time venturing behind the old Iron Curtain and my first trip back to Europe since the onset of COVID-19. Despite the overcast weather endemic to this part of the globe, the mood on the ground is unmistakably buoyant. Poland, along with its fellow Visegrad Group member Central European nations of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic -- and perhaps also including nearby Austria -- has emerged as a perhaps-unlikely ground zero in the fight to save Western civilization from a debilitating and increasingly all-encompassing liberal decadence. The sad history of...

It is a hard fact that the centre of gravity of Israeli politics is now far to the Right, and still moving rightwards. This will remain so, with or without ‘Bibi’ There was a tempest in a small teapot recently, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israel of apartheid. That echoed the views of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which said in January that the current Israeli Government is an “apartheid regime.” But the official response was different. The Israeli Government ignored B’Tselem, but its Washington Embassy gave HRW the standard response to foreign criticism: “We strongly reject the...

On April 23, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed Kremlin officials to draw up a list of “unfriendly countries.” Although the identity of these “unfriendly countries” has yet to be officially confirmed, Russian media reports citing leaked information suggest the list will be dominated by Russia’s neighbors. According to a report published by Izvestia newspaper, the nations set to feature on the list of “unfriendly countries” are the United States, Poland, Czechia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ukraine, and Australia. The most striking thing about this group is the fact that five of the ten featured countries share land...

The alliance has intensified its military presence in Black Sea waters following a rift in relations between the western states and Russia triggered by a 2014 coup and the start of an internal conflict in Ukraine.A fleet of at least four NATO warships has docked in the Ukrainian port of Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea, Dumskaya.net online media outlet reported. The ships arrived around 9 am GMT on 10 March, according to the media. The commanders of the fleet are reportedly expected to meet with the leadership of the Ukrainian Navy during the visit to Odessa.The arriving...

Not because Trump is a Republican. Not because of his conservative policies. Not as a way to nullify the outcome of the 2016 election. But because he engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors of exactly the sort the founders had in mind when they created the impeachment process in the U.S. Constitution. The details of those crimes have been laid out a thousand times, but here they are again: Congress voted to give $391 million to Ukraine, an ally that was at war, defending itself against Russia. But Trump withheld that money in a clear violation — an illegal violation...

When communism collapsed across Eastern Europe in 1989, the process was swift and surprisingly peaceful. Decades of terror and tyranny came to a sudden end with hardly a shot fired: governments stepped down, borders opened, walls fell. One country, however, proved to be the exception. Thirty years ago this week, citizens of Romania were being killed by the hundreds as they took to the streets to demand liberty from their brutal communist regime. Unrest that had begun December 16 in the southwestern city of TimiÅŸoara soon spread throughout Romania, fueled by the news that protesters were being gunned down by...