Free Republic

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...

When a new book came out, the great C. S. Lewis would first seek out an old one on the same subject. That’s good advice for embattled Americans. In fact, two old books address what is happening today with rare perception. Regent College Publishing has reissued The Green Stick and The Infernal Grove, the two volumes of Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge. Paul Johnson called it one of the great autobiographies of our time, which might be an understatement. Wisdom and wit leap off the pages, and there’s even a news hook: Russia has invaded Ukraine and that...

The internal investigation by JoeBama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) serves two purposes. [Memo Link Here] First, it will identify anyone with nationalist outlooks and/or ‘America First’ ideology; in essence it will identify JoeBama’s political enemies (those that didn’t vote for Biden). Second, it will send a chill through the ranks within all DHS agencies to quiet any dissent to the approved leftist approach (the DHS political agenda). This is essentially putting DHS through the same process previously deployed against the FBI during Robert Mueller and James Comey’s terms. Eliminate any and all opposition to the JoeBama agenda.

The world witnessed Stalin's Purge, Hitler's Holocaust, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Forced Exodus, and Saddam's brutal mass killings. Africa is no stranger to atrocities to the likes of Idi Amin and Mobutu Sese Sekos. Here is another act of genocide carried out by former Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, who is a Communist leader of the Workers Party. Mengistu was part of the Derg, which was the military junta that came to power by overthrowing Haile Selassie in 1974. He ruled from 1977 to 1991. His first act was "Red Terror", in which he attacked anti-Communist guerillas. He detained,...

Ethiopia’s brutal Marxist dictator, known as the African Pol Pot, became the first fallen leader to be found guilty yesterday of genocide in his own country after a 12-year trial.Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former President, who fled to Zimbabwe in 1991, was accused along with top members of his military Government of killing thousands during his 17-year rule. The period was marked by vicious crackdowns on opponents, disastrous wars with neighbouring countries and rebel groups and devastating famines in which starvation was used to force peasants into submission. “Members of the Derg [Government] who are present in court today and...

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article titled "Reading Hayek in Beijing", in relation to the award of Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize to Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist and author of Tombstone, a painstakingly researched history of famine in China during the period of Mao Zedong. Prior to the communist revolution, China was a highly advanced economy. With the implementation of Mao's Red Book teachings, China suffered many episodes of starvation, poverty, and economic collapse. Yang lost his father during the famine that took 36 million Chinese lives during 1958-1962. The article noted that the source of all the...

South African President Jacob Zuma has sought to reassure his country as Nelson Mandela receives treatment for the recurrence of a lung infection. In an interview with the BBC, Mr. Zuma said that people “must not panic” and that the former president was doing “very well” so far. …

Faina Yefimovna Kaplan (1883–September 3, 1918), a.k.a. Fanny Kaplan (born Dora Kaplan), was a political revolutionary and an attempted assassin of Vladimir Lenin. Kaplan was born into a Jewish peasant family, one of seven children. She became a political revolutionary at an early age and joined a socialist group, the Socialist Revolutionaries. In 1906, Kaplan participated in an attempted assassination of a government official. The plot failed and Kaplan was arrested and sentenced to life of katorga works in Akatui, Siberia. She was released when the February Revolution overthrew the imperial government. As a result of her imprisonment, Kaplan suffered...

"Iron Felix" reappeared in central Moscow this week...the Cheka founder's stern bronze visage was quietly re-erected Tuesday morning at the headquarters of...the nation's primary police agency. ... For much of the last decade, Russia has seen the dark side of the Soviet past — the stifling political climate, the gulag camps, the lines at the food shops — fade into memory amid the failed promises of a market economy. The Cheka was disbanded in 1922...but many...talk fondly of a nation that was educated, fed, reasonably healthy and a superpower. Today, what with stark disparities in wealth, pervasive crime, rampant alcoholism,...

Earlier this month I accompanied John O'Sullivan, the head of United Press International, on a private tour of a museum in Budapest. The House of Terror, as it's now called, is situated in an unremarkable apartment building on a thoroughfare of elegant fin de siècle mansions. I passed it often in my childhood and youth, though always careful to walk on the opposite side of the street. We used to call the building simply by its address: 60 Andrássy Road. For 12 years, between 1944 and 1956, saying "60 Andrássy Road" carried the same meaning for us as saying "Bastille"...