The Soviet Union
The butchers who ran the Soviet Union
killed between
25 million
[The Black Book of Communism]
and
60 million
[Rudolph J. Rummel]
innocent humans - men, women and little children.
The monster
Stalin
may be the greatest mass killer of all time.
The home of evil.
Lenin's tomb,
Red Square, Moscow, Russia.
From here.
- Russian history
(also here)
- Soviet Union history
(also here)
- The 1905 revolution
- The 1917 revolution
- A disaster.
A tragedy for Russia and the world that the Reds won.
An appalling step backwards into tyranny.
An appalling crime to replace the Tsar with Lenin's
murderous tyranny,
a thousand times more murderous
than the Tsar's regime.
- The Lenin / Trotsky period, 1917-24
- Some people think Lenin and Trotsky were "not as bad" as Stalin,
that the 1917 revolution was not criminal from the start,
but only became criminal later.
This is one of the greatest lies in history.
Lenin and Trotsky killed
4 million people
- men, women and children
- by mass executions, death camps, and state-caused famine.
See [The Black Book of Communism]
for a good introduction to their genocide,
which started as soon as they got into power in 1917.
- The resistance
-
All across the Russian countryside in 1917-22,
there were riots and uprisings as heroic peasants
tried desperately to hold on to their freedom.
They were well aware of the nature of the scum that had taken over their country.
These forgotten heroes were killed by the million.
Their families - men, women and children - were executed
or sent to death camps.
Their villages were burnt,
and even bombed with chemical weapons
by the monsters Lenin and Trotsky.
- Russian White Guard and Anti-Communism movement
-
The Tambov rebellion of 1920
- It is true that the anti-communist resistance came in many forms,
from liberal democrats to socialist anarchists to Jew-hating nationalists.
The latter carried out hundreds of
pogroms of Jews.
In some areas, the Russian civil war was a conflict
between communism and democracy.
In other areas, it was a conflict between communism and fascism.
But no crimes by (some of) their enemies
can justify the crimes of Lenin and Trotsky.
- The famine
- The Bolsheviks destroyed Russia's economy.
By 1920 the ruble had lost 96 percent of its value.
-
Lenin and Trotsky's oppression became ferocious
as the cities ran out of food
due to the collapse of the economy, caused by themselves
and their stupid Marxist ideas.
Innocent rural Russia was robbed of its food
and butchered
and starved
by the parasitical (literally) urban communists.
-
The Bolsheviks started a massive program of confiscating the food
of the countryside, and starved them into submission.
The monsters
Lenin and Trotsky deliberately started a famine
as a political weapon.
They caused the massive famine of 1921-2,
deliberately killing 2.5 million men, women and
little children, according to
[Rudolph J. Rummel],
or 5 million,
according to
[The Black Book of Communism].
-
The genocide of the Cossacks in 1919
-
The Red Terror in Russia,
Sergei Melgunov, 1925
- about the early Bolshevik atrocities, under Lenin.
- The Stalin period, 1924-53
-
[The Black Book of Communism, Ch.7]
shows that even in 1930 there was still heroic peasant resistance
to collectivization.
Brave peasants even managed to kill hundreds of
Soviet officials.
But
the Soviet state
slaughtered 6 million of them.
- The Ukrainian Famine
(and here)
- In 1932-3, Stalin and his butchers
deliberately starved to death
around
7 million utterly innocent
men, women and little children,
mainly in the Ukraine.
Their food was stolen by the government,
and every measure was taken to prevent them obtaining any food.
-
In World War Two, the west was allied with this
sick genocidal monster
- the worst case of realpolitik
in the history
of the free world.
- The Stalin terror
(and here)
-
The Great Terror,
Robert Conquest, 1968 -
estimates that
5 million people were murdered
in 1935-8 alone.
-
Rudolph J. Rummel
(and here)
estimates
4 million people murdered,
with a possible high of
11 million people
(see here
and here),
in 1935-8 alone.
- Gendercide
- World War Two
-
Not so well known, and hard to believe, is that
even in World War Two,
the Soviet state was still the no.1 killer of Soviet citizens,
with the Nazis no.2.
Even in wartime, Stalin's regime was killing more
of its own people than even an invading barbaric army could.
- In general,
totalitarian government is more murderous than all-out war.
- It is also often forgotten that
the Soviet Union was allied with the Nazis for the first 2 years of the war.
-
The Soviet famine of 1946-7
(1 to 1.5 million dead)
was again caused by the Soviet government.
- Pravda
was founded in 1912
and became the official state newspaper after 1917
when freedom of the press
was abolished.
Pravda
(which, comically, means "Truth")
supported everything the Soviet butchers did from 1917 to 1989.
- The comic book
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
(1930)
sounds pretty accurate in its description of the brutal Soviet state.
Bizarrely, the Tintin author was later embarrassed by it.
I don't see why.
He got it right first time.
-
A bit "bolshie",
or "bolshy",
is like a term of amusement,
rather than designating a mass killer of women and children.
Like "young turk",
its casual use reflects how we ignore and trivialise
non-Nazi holocausts.
- stalinism.com
by John Band
- "dekulakise the nation and eliminate the bourgeoisie".
To some modern leftists, the Soviet democide is just a big, hilarious joke.
But the "kulaks" and the "bourgeoisie" -
millions of innocent men, women and
children -
were torn screaming from their homes,
exterminated, shot, gassed, put in camps and starved to death.
And it's all just a big joke to these people.
-
Cafe Mao is another example of this modern leftist blindness.
Somehow this genocidal killer is amusing to these people.
- Lenin's Tomb
- An anonymous SWP nut
(since exposed as Richard Seymour)
names his blog after a democidal killer in order to be
provocative:
"Lenin is one of the last truly subversive signifiers. The Wall Street Journal can appreciate Marx,
but Lenin still evokes a shiver or two. Therein lies the attraction."
Why not "Eichmann's Tomb"?
- Cyber USSR
by the
"anti-Communist and Cold Warrior"
Hugo S. Cunningham
is different.
Yes, it has a jocular tone.
But he is clearly laughing at
the Soviet Union -
as shown by the data he presents,
such as
Politburo members who got shot
and
Guess which two Politburo members will soon be unmasked as "enemies of the people".
Joking about the liquidation of
Politburo members is definitely acceptable!
- The song
No More Heroes
(1977),
by The Stranglers,
describes Trotsky as a hero.
Apparently this is
not a joke.
-
Note the song does not refer to Lenin
(this is a mis-heard reference to
Lenny Bruce).
Just like the national socialist butchers,
the international socialist butchers
killed millions of innocents, men, women and little children.
It is incredible that anyone still defends these monsters.
The leaders
- Leaders of the Soviet Union
(also here)
- Lenin
(also here),
1917-24.
- Lenin
killed 4 million people
- men, women and little children.
He is the 5th greatest murderer of the 20th century
(after Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Chiang Kai-shek).
- The hate-filled mass murderer Lenin,
with his rage against everyone decent in society,
his drive to kill and destroy everything that generations of
tolerant and hard-working people had built,
and his staggering barbarism,
set the tone for every communist regime that followed in the world.
- Even today, unbelievably, there are people who
openly call themselves Marxist-Leninist
and openly admire Lenin.
-
Lenin's Statue: Adding Insult to Injury
by Jamie Glazov,
on the disgusting Lenin statue in Seattle.
-
Shame on Fremont for its tribute to Lenin
- The statue is a monumental symbol of
the moral sickness of the western left.
- Trotsky
(also here),
1917-24.
-
As leader of the Red Army
in Lenin's war on the peasants,
Trotsky was
a mass murderer.
He was Lenin's prime henchman in the killing of
4 million innocent people - men, women and children.
- Trotsky supported the killing of
all political opponents of the regime -
including
campaigners for liberal western democracy.
Trotsky supported
the extermination of the bourgeoisie.
- There is some justice in the fact that he was
executed by Stalin in Mexico in 1940,
but not much.
He should have been put on trial first,
and then executed.
- Even today, unbelievably, there are people who
openly follow this disgusting mass murderer,
and see him as some kind of "alternative" to Stalin.
-
The Trotsky Museum in Mexico
- the equivalent of a museum to Hess or Eichmann.
- Stalin
(also here),
1924-53.
- Stalin is
perhaps the most evil human being that ever lived.
- Stalin
killed 42 million people
- men, women and little children.
In all of history,
only Mao could possibly have killed more.
-
Khrushchev
(also here),
1953-64.
- Brezhnev
(also here),
1964-82.
- Brezhnev killed around
2 million people
(see below).
- He was also
the imperialist Butcher of
Moldova
1950-52,
and
the Butcher of
The Prague Spring 1968.
- Rudolph J. Rummel
estimates 7 million dead
after Stalin,
mostly through camps.
His estimates for the camps alone
break down as:
- 950,000 dead 1954-5 (Khrushchev)
- 3.1 million dead 1956-60 (Khrushchev)
- 1.6 million dead 1961-70 (Khrushchev, Brezhnev)
- 780,000 dead 1970-82 (Brezhnev)
- 200,000 dead 1983-7 (Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev)
Other butchers
See also:
For 70 years, occupying countries, enslaving their peoples.
A brutal totalitarian empire.
Genocide, gulags, mass shootings, famine, deportations, tyranny.
Sadistic torture to death in interrogation.
Gang-rape of women prisoners.
Mass rape of civilian women in war.
The gassing of prisoners.
Starvation to death of prisoners.
A police state, run by fear.
No human rights.
No civil liberties.
No freedom of speech.
No freedom of religion.
A one-party state, tolerating no opposition or criticism.
Threatening the free world with nuclear weapons.
Threatening Western Europe with invasion and slavery or extinction.
The Soviet Union was truly a curse upon the earth.
-
The Soviet Union: The World No.1 Terror State
- interview with Ion Mihai Pacepa,
on Soviet support for
Iraq, Libya,
Che Guevara, Castro,
Syria, Nasser, the PLO,
European left-wing terrorists,
etc.
- reminding us that during the Cold War, it was not obvious
who was going to win.
-
Complaints about the U.S. are often a form of "Freudian Projection"
and misdirected hatred against the wrong target.
The U.S. is described today by the left as an evil empire,
Great Satan, no.1 terror state, and so on.
Such a state did exist, and thanks to the bravery of western men and women
it was brought down before it could destroy the world.
It was the Soviet Union.
- The KGB
- The Gulags
-
The Gulag:
What We Know Now and Why It Matters
by Anne Applebaum
- Lenin started the Gulag system.
About
25 million innocent people
- men, women and little children -
were deported to the camps
or to exile in deserts or tundra.
Millions died there.
- As to why it matters, Applebaum says with sadness:
"I wrote my book about the Gulag
not "so that it will not happen again," as the cliché
has it, but because it will happen again."
- Dissidents
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(and here)
-
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
-
The Gulag Archipelago
details, among other material, the following:
- The Tsars in 1820-1906
killed about 1000 people
(Chapters 8 and 11).
[The Black Book of Communism]
roughly agrees, saying that in 1825-1905, the Tsars executed about 200 people,
and in
the revolutionary period of 1906-10 the Tsars
executed about 3700 people.
-
The glorious 1917 Bolshevik revolution liberated the Russian people
from the appalling tyranny of the Tsars.
The Bolsheviks in 1917-24 killed
4 million people
and then in 1929-53
killed
40 million more.
-
The classic, 19th century period of the Tsars
was a golden age
of tolerance, freedom and civilization
compared to the tyranny that followed it.
-
The Soviet government
caused the Volga famine,
and then confiscated church charity collected for it
(Chapter 9).
Men, women and children starving to death
was of no concern to them.
- As a sort of black comic relief,
Chapter 10 shows that Lenin devised plans to execute
the hordes expected trying to get into
the glorious Soviet workers' paradise.
But no such people ever came.
A massive and unacknowledged
ethnic cleansing and democide of Germans took place in the Soviet sphere in
Eastern Europe after victory in 1945.
The worst killing was in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
- Soviet World War II crimes
(and here
and here)
- The Katyn Massacre
- The mass execution of Poles by the Soviets in WW2.
- Raoul Wallenberg
- This hero, who saved thousands of Jews in WW2,
was murdered after the war by the Soviets.
- The Red Army carried out an orgy of rape
of millions of innocent civilian women
and children
as it swept across Eastern Europe in 1944-45.
The rapes carried on for several years after the war.
Maybe 200,000 rape victims died.
-
Summary of
communist Poland and Czechoslovakia's postwar
genocide against German civilians, late 1940s.
- Rudolph J. Rummel
- Rummel estimates that:
- Poland killed 1,600,000 people in democide, 1945-8.
- Czechoslovakia killed 200,000 people in democide, 1945-8.
- Expulsion of Germans after World War II
-
An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945
talks about the role of Jews in the post-war democide in Poland.
Maybe it exaggerates their role. I don't know.
I would imagine almost all the killers were mainstream Poles.
Again, exploring this story does not mean one is denying (or even downplaying)
the horror of the Holocaust.
The imperialist Soviet Union brutally occupied
the countries of Eastern Europe
for over 40 years.
All totalitarian philosophies tend to be imperialist.
- From the very start in 1917, the Bolsheviks were brutal,
ruthless imperialists.
After the 1917 revolution,
the occupied states of the Russian Tsarist empire hoped for liberation.
The Bolsheviks immediately crushed these hopes,
and established the most brutal imperialism in
Russian history, including
7 million Ukrainians
deliberately killed by Stalin to break their resistance,
and the deportation of the entire population of
Chechnya.
-
The empire expanded horrifically from 1939 onwards,
as the Soviets attacked Poland and the Baltic states.
Stalin deported and executed hundreds of thousands of people,
and subjugated the countries under tyrannical Soviet rule.
-
With the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet empire kept expanding westwards
until the Soviets occupied half of Europe.
I am old enough to remember the Soviets whining
about the imaginary
"imperialism" of the West
while their jackboot stamped on European freedom.
- Crushed rebellions for freedom:
-
Trust Reagan
to sum it up in 2 words
- the "Evil Empire"
- the best description of the Soviet Union ever.
"Evil",
for otherwise the word
"evil" has no meaning.
And "Empire", calling a spade a spade,
and infuriating all those
western sympathisers with and apologists for
the Soviets.
Even today, the whines about imaginary western
"imperialism" are still alive on the left
- a left that ignored the real, brutal
and entirely non-imaginary Soviet empire.
- Freedom at last:
-
The "House of Terror" museum, Budapest, Hungary.
No trade unions
As well as being imperialist,
the Soviet Union oppressed the workers
and banned workers' trade unions.
- As soon as they got into power in 1917, from the very start
the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky
abolished the right to strike,
abolished the free press,
abolished the right to freedom of religion,
abolished elections and all political opposition,
and executed tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children
in a sea of blood that Russia had not seen for centuries.
The Bolsheviks never believed in freedom.
They never believed in human rights.
-
The killing of the workers at Astrakhan, 1919
-
The killing of the workers at Kronstadt, 1921
-
The brave
Solidarity trade union
in Poland
was in the 1980s alone
as a free workers' group
inside the Soviet bloc.
This is now recognised as World War 3.
And the West were the good guys again
- the defenders of freedom against tyranny again.
And the West won again.
And tyranny was defeated again.
Anti-communism
- McCarthy
is absurdly demonised.
McCarthy's vision was that American leftists were
working for the evil Soviets
to overthrow America,
that they were funded by Moscow,
spied for Moscow,
and tried to infiltrate all walks of American life
with the aim of destroying American democracy
and freedom and liberty,
and replacing it with brutal totalitarianism.
We laugh at this today,
but it was, of course, true.
- Clooney Tunes
- Mark Steyn on the supposedly "brave" anti-McCarthy
movie
Good Night, and Good Luck
by George Clooney.
- "'I'm an old-time liberal and I don't apologize for it,' Clooney told Newsweek.
Good for him. And certainly, regardless of how liberal he is, he's 'old-time'.
I don't mean in the sense that he has the gloss of an old-time movie star, ...
but that his politics is blessedly undisturbed by any developments
on the global scene since circa 1974."
- "To take one example that could stand for Clooney's entire approach to the subject,
Good Night includes shocking scenes of Senator McCarthy accusing
Annie Moss,
who worked in a highly sensitive decoding job in the Pentagon, of being a Communist,
and the heroic Edward R Murrow then denouncing McCarthy's behavior.
But we now know, from the party's own files, that Miss Moss was, indeed, a Communist.
What should we conclude from the absence of this detail in the picture?
That Clooney ... simply doesn't know she's a Commie?
Or that he does know but that he thinks it's harmless?"
- Forerunners of the neo-cons:
Traitors, betraying freedom to tyranny:
Jimmy Carter
- The high water mark of Soviet expansion and western retreat
Ronald Reagan -
The man who won the Cold War
- Ronald Reagan,
the Soviet Union's most deadly enemy.
The man who won the Cold War for the free world.
The man who destroyed communism.
- The book
Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary Leader
by Dinesh D'Souza, 1999.
- The book
Reagan's War:
The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism,
Peter Schweizer, 2002.
- The film
In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed.
"He freed a billion slaves from their Communist masters... This is the story of that achievement: of one man's triumph during the bloodiest and most barbaric century in mankind's history: the 20th century."
-
Dutch Courage
- Mark Steyn's obituary of Reagan.
How Reagan ended the appalling idea of "detente".
"the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world
was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated
but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated.
...
Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism
for what it was: a great evil.
...
That's what counts. He brought down the "evil empire", and all the rest is fine print."
-
Freedom's Team:
How Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II won the Cold War
by John Fund
- Reagan predicts the end of the Soviet Union
and describes it as "The Evil Empire":
- Reagan in 1977
- "My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose."
-
Speech at University of Notre Dame, 1981.
He predicts - as no one
else did at the time - that the Soviet Union would end:
"The West won't contain communism, it will transcend communism.
..
it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history
whose last pages are even now being written."
-
Speech to the House of Commons, 1982
(and short version).
He predicts - again, as no one else did - that the Soviet Union would end:
"In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis
... But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West,
but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union.
It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history
by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.
...
What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term
- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history"
Within a decade, the Soviet world collapsed
and Marxism-Leninism was on the ash-heap of history.
-
Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals,
Orlando, Florida, 1983.
He describes the Soviet Union as
"the focus of evil in the modern world".
He talks of
"the aggressive impulses of an evil empire".
- Reaction to the "Evil Empire" speech
-
Dissidents in the gulag hear the "Evil Empire" speech.
-
The prisoners' conscience
by Natan Sharansky
- "We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth
- a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us."
- Interview
with Natan Sharansky
- ".. the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed
the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a long list of
all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring
to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire ...
This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day.
Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell's Newspeak was dead.
...
For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us.
The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now.
This was the end of Lenin's "Great October Bolshevik Revolution"
and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution
- Reagan's Revolution."
- Reagan was of course
ridiculed by the western left
for this description.
Also here.
-
What the left said about Reagan in the 1980s
- "Primitive: that is the only word for it.
... What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies
to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology
- one in fact rejected by most theologians?"
-
There They Go Again
- Dinesh D'Souza on Reagan's critics - proved wrong by history.
- The Axis of Evil
- More Soviet dissidents
- Reagan, religion and "intelligence"
- Missile defence
- Reagan's visionary "Star Wars" technology has continued to advance,
and pretty soon it may become impossible to attack the US with missiles
(it is already impossible to attack it with an air force, navy
or ground army).
-
Successful shoot-down of satellite USA 193, Feb 2008.
The satellite was travelling at 17,500 mph, at an altitude of 133 nautical miles.
This is in a similar speed and altitude range to
ICBMs.
- Soon it may
only be possible to attack the US through stealth
- an attack like 9/11 delivered by apparent civilians already in the US.
The ultimate nightmare is
a nuke smuggled in on truck or ship
and detonated.
This remains a very real threat.
The end of the Cold War
- The "anti-war" protesters of the 1980s
- The Nobel Peace Prize
- The unelected communist dictator
Gorbachev
won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1990
for letting some of his slaves go.
Reagan, who forced him to, got nothing.
See articles on Gorbachev.
- The West German leader
Willy Brandt
won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1971
for his appeasement of the Soviet Union.
Reagan, who actually liberated Eastern Europe, got nothing.
- US President
Jimmy Carter,
under whom world socialism achieved its maximum strength,
won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2002.
Reagan, who reversed Carter's policies
and led the free world to victory, got nothing.
-
The Gipper and the Hedgehog:
How an "amiable dunce" outsmarted the world
by Glenn Garvin.
Genrikh Grofimenko, former adviser to Brezhnev,
says clearly that it was Reagan who defeated the Soviets.
"Grofimenko marvels that the Nobel Peace Prize went to "the greatest flimflam man of all time,"
Mikhail Gorbachev, while Western intellectuals ignore Reagan
- who, he says, "was tackling world gangsters of the first order of magnitude.""
-
Lucky Dimwit?
by John O'Sullivan
- I remember well how, as he describes,
the fashionable circles
"seized on Gorbachev as a way of denying Reagan or the West any credit for the
liberation of half a continent".
I fell for this line myself.
We all worshipped Gorbachev
- the unelected communist dictator.
It took me years to realise that it was Reagan
who ended the Cold War
and saved the world.
- The Stalin Peace Prize,
later re-named the Lenin Peace Prize.
That's right, a "peace" prize named after two genocidal butchers.
Recipients of this disgusting award include
Picasso, Hewlett Johnson, Pablo Neruda,
Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, W.E.B. DuBois, Fidel Castro,
Nelson Mandela, Linus Pauling and Angela Davis.
- Pope John Paul II
- Mehmet Ali Agca
and the shooting of the Pope in 1981.
- Apparently,
Brezhnev
and
Andropov
were behind
the shooting of the Pope,
because they were afraid of the threat he posed
to their tyrannical rule in Europe.
-
Charles Krauthammer
on how the Pope helped end the Soviet Empire.
Reagan's heir - George W. Bush
Reagan had descended into Alzheimer's by the time of 9/11,
so we never got to hear what he thought of George W. Bush,
and the War against Islamic Fascism.
But I think he would have seen that at last -
after George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton -
he now had a true heir.
- I am old enough to remember how the left - and much of the world -
hated Reagan in the 1980s.
It was just like Bush today.
Both were demonised, hated, and ridiculed as stupid and ignorant
in all fashionable circles.
Why were they hated?
Because they stood up to tyranny, and tried to destroy it,
instead of accepting it.
- Bush, 2004,
asked about anti-American jerks protesting against him in France,
the country America liberated.
He is wonderfully blunt.
At a time when Reagan, the winner of the Cold War, has just died,
and people in Europe are pretending that they never hated him,
Bush remembers how it really was:
"I remember my predecessor, whose life we mourn, Ronald Reagan.
They felt the same way about him."
- And Bush's place in history will be similar to Reagan's.
-
The Last Laugh? Wait for the History Books
by Max Boot
- "Listening to the endless encomiums to Ronald Reagan, many from people who once derided him,
I couldn't help wonder whether some day George W. Bush would receive similar tributes
from his current enemies.
...
The similarities with George W. Bush are uncanny."
-
Let Bush Be Reagan
by Frank J. Gaffney Jr
- "President Bush today confronts in Europe much the same hostility that
President Reagan experienced from the very peoples who had, only a generation or two before,
been saved by American-led armies
- and, in a sense, for much the same reason."
-
Could George W. Bush Be Right?
by Claus Christian Malzahn
- On Bush's visit to Germany,
February 23, 2005
- "When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate
- and the Berlin Wall
- and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down this Wall," he was lampooned the next day
on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. Realpolitik looks different.
But history has shown that it wasn't Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand.
Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination
- a group who in 1987 couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany."
- Europeans just don't believe in the project of
bringing democracy to the whole world:
"Even German conservatives find the idea that Arabic countries could transform themselves
into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd.
This, in fact, is likely the largest point of disagreement between Europe and the United States
...
Europeans today - just like the Europeans of 1987 -
cannot imagine that the world might change."
- "When analysts are confronted by real people, amazing things can happen.
... Maybe the people of Syria, Iran or Jordan will get the idea in their heads to free
themselves from their oppressive regimes just as the East Germans did.
When the voter turnout in Iraq recently exceeded that of many Western nations,
the chorus of critique from Iraq alarmists was, at least for a couple of days, quieted.
Just as quiet as the chorus of Germany experts on the night of Nov. 9, 1989 when the Wall fell.
Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on: Bush might be right, just like Reagan was then."
"General Secretary Gorbachev,
if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity
for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization:
Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
- Ronald Reagan
at the Berlin Wall, 1987.
He was ridiculed for this speech, too.
Two years later, the wall was down.
"How many divisions has the Pope?"
- Stalin's mocking dismissal of Papal influence in Europe.
You know
what I think of the intellectual content of the Papacy,
but it still gives me great pleasure to
note that Stalin and his fascist works
are gone, and the Pope is still here.
Even more amusing, the key figures that brought about
this victory
were Reagan, Thatcher and
Pope John Paul II.
So Stalin could not have been more wrong.
The Pope destroyed Stalin's entire world,
and ended the communist experiment,
without a shot being fired.
Pope John Paul II has been hopeless on the Islamic threat,
but give him credit for this:
He stood up to the Evil Empire.
"millions of men and women ..
live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued.
Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the cold war for liberty"
- Thatcher
on the death of Reagan.
"The Germans took a somber decision. Upon the western front they had from the beginning used the most terrible means of offense at their disposal. They had employed poison gas on the largest scale and had invented the 'Flammenwerfer.' Nevertheless, it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia."
- Winston Churchill nails it yet again,
on Lenin's return to Russia
from exile in 1917.
Return to Communism.
