Free Republic

Chinese President Xi Jinping opened a critical Communist Party Congress on Wednesday with a pledge to build a “modern socialist country” that will never copy the political systems of others and will remain open to the world. […] “Through a long period of hard work, socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era. This is a new historical direction in our country’s development,” Xi said in a speech carried live across the nation on state television. China will relax market access for foreign investment and expand access to its services sector, as well as deepen market-oriented reform of its...

The European Union could remove Colombian guerilla movement FARC from its list of known terrorists, pending the signing of the peace agreement between the group and the country’s government. EurActiv Spain reports.Ahead of a formalization of the deal between FARC and the Colombian government, the EU indicated that it could soon remove the group from its terrorist blacklist. “FARC currently sits on the list of terrorist organizations in Colombia,” confirmed European Commission spokesperson Maja Kocijancic today (26 September), adding that the EU “has strongly supported the Colombia peace deal”. […] The European Court of Justice last week recommended that Hamas...

Below is my translation of an interview I found very interesting with former Soviet dissident and political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky by Alessandra Nucci, published in the December 2012 issue of the Italian periodical Radici Cristiane. What he says provides a very useful background to understand what lies behind the European Union project and its similarities with the Soviet Union, a subject on which Bukovsky has written a book. Vladimir Bukovsky, 70, is one of the most famous ex-political prisoners of the former Soviet Union. In total he spent twelve years of internment, including prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals, before...

Claire Berlinski A Hidden History of Evil Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives? Though Mikhail Gorbachev is lionized in the West, the untranslated archives suggest a much darker figure. In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism...

The fact is that we live in a time of fateful challenges. As a people and a nation we are under test. This challenge is, of course, Marxism-Leninism. There is no mystery in its strategies and tactics. It has always been concrete and spelled out in black and white. It has also been openly and actively tested in the economic, political, and ideological struggle for control around globe. Lenin, the founder of the first Communist state, put it simply: "First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia. We will encircle the last bastion of capitalism, the United...

Barack Obama called Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings on Tuesday with a promise: As president, he would revisit bankruptcy laws to give judges more leeway to prevent foreclosures. Obama didn't need to lay out a quid pro quo because the message was clear. Cummings, who voted against the financial-markets bailout on Monday, told Obama he was “open” to changing his vote but wasn’t there yet. "I have to look beyond [the bailout] to a rainbow called Obama," he said. "When you bring in the Obama factor, that's very very important." As the final high stakes vote on the bailout bill approaches...

Gorbachev, Who Turns 75 Thursday, Says End of Cold War Only Strengthened U.S. 'Arrogance' MOSCOW - Mikhail Gorbachev's magnetic brown eyes shine as brightly as ever, and he speaks with the same passion about the collapse of the Soviet Union as he prepares to mark his 75th birthday on Thursday. The man who ended the Cold War and launched democratic reforms that broke the repressive Soviet regime continues to enjoy the limelight, globe-trotting on behalf of his political foundation and environmental group and taking part in charity projects. At a meeting with foreign reporters this week, Gorbachev blamed the United...

When Nikita Khrushchev died in 1971, I was still a girl, but I remember him well. We used to visit him on the weekends on his farm at Petrovo Dalnee, about 30 miles outside of Moscow. I would work with him among the tomatoes or beehives. Although to me he was my kindly old great-grandfather, my family assured me that he was a great man, a world leader, a liberator -- someone I should be proud of.

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign has hired a new director of religion outreach, who is being described by a Catholic group as "a curious choice." Mara Vanderslice, who formerly worked as religion outreach director for Democrat Howard Dean, was raised without any faith and didn't become an evangelical Christian until she attended Earlham College, a Quaker school known for its adherence to pacifism, the Catholic League said on Monday. According to Catholic League President William Donohue, when Vanderslice was in college she was active in the Earlham Socialist Alliance, a group that supports convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and...