Free Republic

Iranian security agents allegedly cut away skin bearing tattoos of Reza Shah and an imperial crown before killing a 21-year-old protester before later shooting him dead, according to sources close to his family. The sources told Iran International that Amirhossein Nobakht Pardasti was wounded by pellet fire and detained during the January protests at around 10 p.m. on January 8 near 30-Metri Street in Bagher Shahr, south of Tehran. They said he was taken to hospital, where agents used blades and box cutters to remove skin and flesh bearing the tattoos before shooting him dead in what they described as...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's charge in his latest book that Jews were as much perpetrators of Soviet communist repression as they were its victims has infuriated Russian Jews, who say that the book is filled with inaccuracies. One prominent Jewish leader told Britain's Guardian newspaper that the book was without merit. "This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes," Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress told the Guardian. "Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very sceptical attitude towards the Jews. "This is not a...

The Revolution had given the French hope of a fairer society. Its ideals were shared by the immense majority of the people, the nobility and the clergy. But in 1789 there was no question of abolishing the monarchy nor of forbidding the old form of worship. In 1793 the cup was full: the sale of property seized by the state had benefited those who could afford to buy them. The "patriotic" [Republican-sympathising] middle-classes managed to purchase country houses, churches and good farmland. The new masters were no better than the old ones - often far from it. To look down...