Free Republic

It's been a rough summer for generals in Cuba. They are dropping like flies, as we see in this report:Over just nine days this month, Cuban state media announced the deaths of five generals, sparking a wave of discussion and rampant speculation among analysts and exiles.The senior military leaders all appear to have died between July 17 and 26. Some were serving and others retired, but all had lauded military careers. The youngest was 58. Most were in their 70s or 80s. It is not clear what caused the deaths, and there is no indication they were related.The deaths of...

Recent row during a Turkish parliamentary commission meeting spoke volumes. “We are cleansing everybody,” said the legislative body’s chairman, a member of the Justice and Development Party. “Everybody” means all who disagree with the AKP. “Cleansing” is the pattern established by the party of dismissing “everybody” from state institutions, public office. With Turkey in the third year of the post-coup period, the purge has not slowed. Discontent is being voiced. “Look, esteemed chairman,” roared Kurdish MP Meral Danis Bestas, “when the time comes and when you become subject to criminal charges, I and my friends will not hesitate to come...

Provo, Utah - The head of the Iranian opposition group in exile that supplied early intelligence on Iran's clandestine nuclear program says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has engineered a clever disinformation campaign to convince foreign experts that Iran is eight to 10 years away from developing a nuclear bomb. But in fact, she says, the regime is less than two years away from producing such a weapon, as part of its plan to "create an Iranian empire" in the Middle East. In a wide-ranging weekend telephone conversation from her base of exile in Paris, Maryam Rajavi told me that Mr. Ahmadinejad...

Several high-profile purges are said to have happened in China over the past few months. What do they mean? Do the mysterious removals of cabinet ministers and generals signal weakness? Paranoia? Or something else?Because China is a tightly controlled totalitarian nation, getting good information on it is difficult. China even ceased issuing certain reports about its economic performance last August while criminalizing the gathering of basic corporate performance data necessary to make sound investment decisions.In this context, everything coming out of China should be viewed with extreme skepticism: Is this true, or is this something China wants us to think...

Something is rotten in the imperial court of Chairman Xi Jinping. While the world is distracted by war in the Middle East and Ukraine, a Stalin-like purge is sweeping through China’s ultra-secretive political system, with profound implications for the global economy and even the prospects for peace in the region.The signals emanating from Beijing are unmistakable, even as China’s security services have ramped up repression to totalitarian levels, making it almost impossible to know what is really happening inside the country.The unexplained disappearance and removal of China’s foreign and defense ministers — both Xi loyalists who were handpicked and elevated...

McMaster had purged Derek Harvey, one of the NSC's best people on the Middle East, for trying to fire Obama holdovers. "In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicab—500 miles, village to village—interviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He [was] full of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right....

There’s a reason why “may you live in interesting times” is a curse. The eras we call a “Terror” — Stalin’s Russia, Robespierre‘s France, Pol Pot’s Cambodia — are pretty interesting. Ethiopia in the mid-1970’s was one of the most interesting places in the world. After the Derg, a shadowy committee of leftist officers, toppled the monarchy in 1974, factional violence between Ethiopia’s two main Marxist parties soon came to the fore. Long story short, All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON) backed the Derg — while its rival the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) denounced it as fascistic. And when Mengistu assumed...

Democrats are in for a nightmare scenario if the Republicans win enough seats in the House and Senate to be able to have oversight powers over congressional committees, and a report that was released on Friday by US House Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) shows that he has an extensive plan to dive into the concerns that face Americans about the historic corruption and fraud at the top of the US Government.Jordan is expected to be nominated for Speaker of the House if all goes right for the Republicans giving him a bird’s eye view of what the report details.Media sources...

Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen warlord who is one of the biggest supporters of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, has said that he wants to quit. In a video on his Telegram channel, Mr Kadyrov said that he had been president of Chechnya in Russia’s North Caucasus for 15 years and didn’t want to “outstay” his welcome... He was promoted as Chechnya’s leader by Mr Putin in 2007 and has been a vocal supporter of the Russian president ever since, backing the initial invasion of Ukraine in February with his fighters. Mr Kadyrov’s father, Akhmat, had fought Russian forces in the...

As the mournful notes of the cello brought the four minutes of The Dying Swan to a close at The Hague on January 24, 1931, the audience was in tears. Throughout the performance, there had been no dancer — only a moving spotlight emphasizing the absence of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina the world loved. She had died the day before, of a mysterious lung infection that began almost immediately after her train had left Paris. She'd told doctors she suspected she'd been poisoned. Unable to reach a diagnosis, they treated her symptoms but failed to save her. For Soviet émigrés...

The new rules against extremism are very broadly written but, when taken in conjunction with other activities and pronouncements, their intent is clear. The Biden Pentagon is obsessed with “extremism.” The moment Lloyd Austin was confirmed as Biden’s Defense Secretary, he put the entire military on a 60-day stand down to purge “extremism” in the ranks. Apparently, that stand down was ineffective because Austin is back again, this time with new rules that are again meant to counter “extremism” by preventing troops from engaging in “extremist” activities. The wise and/or paranoid among us believe that those new rules are an...

Is the Scheller case really about enforcing the UCMJ and keeping our services apolitical? Or has ugly partisan politics infected the ranks of those who oversee our armed forces? Is partisan politics playing a role in the Stuart Scheller case? The facts in this case seem pretty clear. We all witnessed the events beginning with the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban followed by the chaotic noncombatant evacuation operation from Kabul’s airport. It was a sad commentary on President Joe Biden’s judgment because had he accepted the advice of his military chain of command (keep at least 2,500 service members...

The Pentagon official tasked with leading efforts to crack down on extremist views among military service members once asserted that backers of former President Donald Trump were also supporters of racism, misogyny and extremism. The official, Bishop Garrison, is a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and head of the Pentagon’s Countering Extremism Working Group. Garrison expressed his view in a series of tweets on July 27, 2019. "Silence from our Congressional leaders is complicity," Garrison tweeted. "He is only going to get worse from here, & his party and its leadership are watching it happen while doing nothing...

After Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier was relieved of his duties by the U.S. Space Force—for the 1984-esque crime of speaking out against Marxist ideology—his self-published book shot to number one on Amazon's charts Monday before selling out. *snip* The unceremonious ouster of Lohmeier for daring to call out the dangers of the Left's ideas in a book—a project of which the military was previously aware—is only the latest incident in our military's accelerating descent into woke inanity that's taken place as critical race theory-based trainings and the wild claims of the 1619 Project go mainstream under the Biden administration.

information totally ripped from patriots.win discussion thread.

The psychological-warfare attack -- its script straight from the antifa/Black Lives Matter version of the Cold War's Marxist playbook -- began in January when the predictable chorus of hard-left hacks in academia, media and government vilified the American military with toxic allegations calculated to demoralize military personnel, sow destructive institutional suspicion and undermine command authority with the goal of weakening U.S. national security. The propaganda ploy the hard left's commissars, fuhrers and utopian messiahs use in their psychological assault first targets individuals. See, right-wing extremists and white supremacists fill the military ranks, and they represent an armed threat, because the...

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has ordered a DOD-wide stand down to discuss the problem of extremism in the ranks, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby said today. Austin and Army Gen. Mark A, Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with service civilian leaders and service chiefs to discuss the problem of extremism. Kirby noted that some of the extremists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 were active duty service members and others were military veterans. Kirby was quick to say that "the vast majority of men and women who serve in...

Enjoy unity at gunpoint in the Bidenist banana republic. Joe Biden has called for “unity” and “healing”. And nobody knows as much about healing as Joe whose wife has a doctorate in education from the university that hosts his Biden Institute and the Beau Biden Foundation which was charging $3K for lessons on preventing online child sex grooming even as Hunter’s laptop with the Foundation’s sticker allegedly showed him doing it. Except maybe Joe’s brother who took out $650,000 in personal loans from a company that bankrupted local hospitals while trading on his brother’s name and connections to his campaign....

Sephora is a French-owned beauty supply store that shows up in more affordable shopping malls. It’s not in the same mall as Saks or Nordstrom. Instead, you’ll find it inside J.C. Penney or near a Costco. In other words, it caters to ordinary Americans, the ones who fall economically in the middle- or blue-collar classes. In other words, economically, it’s in the Trump demographic. Still, when a leftist got word that “beauty influencer” Amanda Ensing was a conservative, Sephora dumped her for failing to “align” with its values. If you’re not familiar with the term “influencer,” I’m sorry to say...

The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. All of the history of a nation or people before Year Zero is largely deemed irrelevant, because it will ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up. In Democratic Kampuchea, so-called New People—intellectuals and members of the old governments—were especially singled out and executed during the purges accompanying Year Zero.