Free Republic

“To some,” CNN tweeted Friday, “Ashli Babbitt, who was killed in the Capitol riot, was a terrorist. To others, she’s a martyr and seen as a recruiting tool.” Twitter’s legion of blue-check Leftist propagandists immediately protested that other “terrorists” are seen as martyrs as well. Never-Trump former Bush consultant Matthew Dowd likened Babbitt to Hitler, who was responsible for the murder of twelve million people in Europe, and actor Terry Kinney likened her to Mohamed Atta, who was partially responsible for the murder of nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001. In their indignation, however, they ignored the fact...

What we're seeing now is modern liberalism reaching the end of the line. Out-of-control cancel culture, borders open again to illegal immigration, and the Democrat majorities in Congress attempting to impose one-party rule on the country are nothing less than the symptoms of a dying ideology, a contemporary liberalism that has reached its logical conclusion and is ditching what used to work and is instead imposing its radical will and agenda on the entire country. Beginning in the Sixties when a radical form of liberalism emerged, it has been constantly on the prowl for the next victim class to feed...

Reporting on the antics of the impeachment-frenzied liberals, Liberty Nation has likened the second attempt to a circus. The simile is apt. But there is a dark side to the Dem shenanigans. The backdrop of seven-foot-high fences with razor concertina wire affixed to the top and armed National Guard soldiers patrolling seems more suited to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s image of the Soviet gulag than to the capital of America, land of the free. The Trump Derangement Syndrome that afflicted Democrats while the former president was in office has turned to hysterics in his absence. And the left’s histrionics now come with...

The USPS uses a program called Mail Imaging, which takes a photograph of the outside of every piece of mail sent in the U.S. While the primary purpose of taking the pictures is to process the mail, law enforcement agencies are able to request images of mail sent and received by a target they are investigating.

Long but fascinating. This is what the left really wants to do with those who don't share its vision of a 'radiant future'. A Zek Remembers StalinÂ’s Camps A new foreword to Julius MargolinÂ’s stunning, recovered memoir of the gulag TIMOTHY SNYDER SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 Wikipedia Political prisoners eating lunch in the Intalag coal mineWIKIPEDIA We speak of memory, but memory is empty without witness. It is too much to expect that all who suffer speak. Yet without witness, memory devolves into propaganda that serves the moment. Julius Margolin asks whether the real Russia is the one that celebrates victory...

SEATTLE - As suddenly as it appeared, the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest was gone. **SNIP** Durkan’s destruction of the CHOP was a reversal of her previous position. On June 12, when Trump accused her of letting anarchists take over the city, Durkan responded, “Seattle is fine. Don’t be so afraid of democracy.” But over the last few weeks, the CHOP had become increasingly controversial. While the daytime scene resembled a music festival or cultural event, the nights became more violent. Six shootings, two of them fatal, occurred in or near the zone in the last two weeks of June, a...

The children of victims of Stalin-era repressions have the right to receive state housing in the cities where their parents had been deported from, Russia’s Supreme Court has said in a landmark ruling Tuesday. Amendments to the 1991 law rehabilitating victims of Soviet-era political repressions adopted in 2005 contradict the Russian Constitution because they make it “impossible” for their children to receive housing, the court said. The court instructed federal and regional lawmakers to amend their legislation to ease housing restrictions “without delay.” “This is practically the most we could have expected from the Constitutional Court,” Grigory Vaypan, a lawyer...

Great expectations characterised 1989...The Gorbachev era brought about a frenzy of change, and people witnessed incredible events on a weekly basis: they snatched up newspapers, hung on every word broadcast on TV, and with every passing day they felt more alive and free. By the mid-1990s, nostalgia for the Soviet period started to creep in. The greyness of the Brezhnev era, with its endless queues and empty shops, started to be recalled as a peaceful, prosperous time. And gradually something that had seemed impossible during perestroika, became real: Stalin’s shadow loomed large again. Vladimir Putin’s rise to power came accompanied...

Natan Sharansky looks the same as he always has — and he is a welcome sight. So is Avital, his wife. She came out of the Soviet Union before he did — a good twelve years before. She campaigned for the release of her husband, who was in the Gulag. I tell her, “I remember watching you on Nightline and other programs.” Her husband remarks, “The biggest mistake the KGB made was letting Avital out.” From what I can tell, they have a tender, warm relationship — truly spousal. We are sitting in a coffee shop here in Jerusalem, with...

Russia's online community has been abuzz over the past week with praise for popular YouTuber Yury Dud's documentary about life in the land of the gulag labor camps. His documentary, “Kolyma — Birthplace of Our Fear,” was viewed 9.5 million times in seven days. It’s a departure for the 32-year-old sports editor, whose 5.1 million subscribers tune in to watch him interview personalities from all walks of life about their personal lives. “Why is it that — after rappers, comedians, musicians, actors and directors — we approached this difficult and alarming subject?” Dud asks at the top of the show....

On the Memorial Day for the Victims of Communism, Hungary Today had the opportunity to interview producer Tamás Lajos about his film Eternal Winter, which commemorates the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians deported to the Gulag and Gupvi forced-labor camps. Since its debut a year ago, the film has won several prestigious awards at various international film festivals. Q: Could this be an interesting topic for foreigners as well? Do you think viewing the movie would get them interested in this part of Hungary’s history? A: I think this topic is also a novelty abroad. I feel like, in the...

On Jan. 22, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy will announce the five short documentary films up for the Oscar. Among the shortlisted films is the documentary “Women of the Gulag” by Russian-American director, Marianna Yarovskaya. It is the first time in the 91 years of the Oscar’s history that a woman director from Russia is so close to getting such prestigious award. Yarovskaya´s documentary film centers on the memories of six remarkable women survivors of the Gulag. Now in their eighties and nineties, they were sentenced to Soviet forced labor camps during the Stalin era. But...

Perhaps the only thing that outrages Russian defenders of Stalin more than the obvious parallels between his regime and Hitler’s is any reference to the alliance the two dictators formed in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, one that opened the way to war in Europe and lasted until Hitler turned on his former ally in June 1941. But now there may be something even more offensive to such defenders of Stalin and his system: the discovery of documents which confirm that the NKVD cooperated closely with the Gestapo well before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed and that may have paved...

“Since the year 2000 is that history has been gradually re-politicized. And the Russians started treating history that way. They’ve become more sensitive again about discussing this sort of crimes of their past. For the Russians, understanding the history of the gulag is absolutely crucial. It is also crucial for the West" ...Under President Putin, the Stalin period has come to be viewed with ambiguity by politicians, writers, film makers, and regrettably the public. The stories of the victims of the gulag, told by simple people who had little or no understanding of why this was happening to them, make...

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Russian writer and I must say prophet Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A statue was erected this month in a Moscow neighborhood to mark the anniversary of his birth with Russia's President Vladimir Putin paying his respects. Its a story that happens to take place in an around December 25th, 1949. Christmas Day in the Western nations, but not in Russia. However, it certainly is the Christmas season as it happened USSR style. Among other people in the story are the prisoners of the "best prison" in the Soviet Gulag Archipelago on...

The Gulag forced-labor camps in the USSR were “a good thing” as prisoners worked there to the benefit of the state, a 23-year-old local MP in Yekaterinburg said, and was slammed online as a “monster” in need of a history lesson. “Gulag is, actually, a good thing. Previously, the people were sent to work under supervision – at least, there was some benefit from them. But now, the inmates – rapists and murderers – just drink builder’s tea and do nothing, while we waste our money on them,” Andrey Pirozhkov, a recently-elected Communist Party MP in the Yekaterinburg’s local parliament,...

Gulag hunter is an unusual CV entry, admits Stepan Cernousek. "We are not like professional archaeologists from the university — it is a kind of passion which is a little strange, because the topic is very dark." Stepan is the leader of a small team of archaeologists, amateur historians, and adventurers, trekking thousands of kilometres across Siberian taiga forest and facing bears, freezing temperatures and raging rivers to preserve an increasingly forgotten part of Russia's dark past — the more than 30,000 prison camps that embodied forced labour: the gulags. "Today's Russia and its relationship with its history is awkward,"...

Attila Szász’s new film Eternal Winter, based on Norbert Köbli’s script, bagged another prestigious honor last week when it took home the award for Best Drama at the 33rd Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival (FLIFF). The film previously won the award for Best European Movie of the Year in Berlin and Szász was chosen to receive the award for Best Director at the 42nd Montreal World Film Festival. Following the Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1944, local, Ethnic German women are taken from their small village, loaded into cattle wagons and forced to work in coal mines under inhuman conditions...

A new Stalin statue will be erected in Russia’s third-largest city of Novosibirsk next spring as the legacy of the Soviet dictator continues to divide society. Contemporary attitudes are split in Russia toward the historical role of Stalin, who is responsible for the deaths and suffering of millions of Soviet citizens during his rule from 1924 until his death in 1953. Polls show Russians view him as a “remarkable” figure and the younger population is unaware of Stalin-era purges, while President Vladimir Putin has dismissed attacks on Stalin as a ploy to demonize Russia. A Novosibirsk action group voted Saturday...

VLADIMIR, Russia -- Anna Galinkina was appalled recently to see portraits of Stalin-era secret-police officers festooning celebratory billboards at local bus stops. Her father, Zinovy Galinkin, was sent to the gulag shortly after World War II on flimsy accusations of "anti-Soviet propaganda," and she resents the rehabilitation of those who persecuted her family under the government of President Vladimir Putin. "Today it is obvious that they've removed their masks...The ruling corporate elite of heirs of the Soviet chekists" -- a reference to the former secret police -- "are openly taking revenge on those who refuse to let society forget about...