RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dissident-outlives-soviet-communism-11572302952

Only death could silence Vladimir Bukovsky. His crusade against the Communist system in Russia and beyond, before and after the Berlin Wall’s fall, was unequaled. He died Sunday at age 76 at his home in Cambridge, England, where he’d lived since the Soviet Union expelled him in 1976.

He didn’t seem to know fear. He was kicked out of high school for creating a satirical magazine. He took night classes and managed to enter Moscow University, where he held unofficial poetry readings and disseminated underground literature. He was expelled from university after denouncing the Young Communist League as useless and later arrested for possessing anti-Soviet literature. In prison he met other dissidents, was “diagnosed” as schizophrenic, read Dickens in English and studied Soviet law. After his release, he protested and was detained again. Altogether he spent 12 years in psychiatric hospitals, prisons or labor camps.

He realized that to make a difference, he had to get his message out to the West. He succeeded, but at the price of additional torture, which he described in his best-selling autobiography, “To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter.” He staged hunger strikes aimed at improving medical treatment in prison and encouraged others to do the same. The authorities force-fed the prisoners through the nose.

The book was published in 1978. By then Bukovsky had been in the West for two years, studying biology at Cambridge University and continuing to defend freedom. In 1983 Bukovsky and Armando Valladares, a Cuban dissident, co-founded the anticommunist Resistance International. His influence grew as he informally advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15050/eu-freedom-control

” We are not ‘citizens of the world’… ; we are also not citizens of Europe. We are inhabitants of Europe, but citizens of our nation states…” — Václav Klaus; MCC Budapest Summit on Migration; Hungary; March 23, 2019.

“The European elites understood that to succeed in their ambition to get rid of the nation-states and to create a State of Europe… they have to dissolve the old existing nations by mixing them with migrants from all over the world. By means of this procedure they want to create a new, truly European man, a Homo bruxellarum. This is the main reason why they are – without paying attention to all kinds of negative and destructive side-effects – supporting and promoting mass migration.” — Václav Klaus, MCC Budapest Summit on Migration, Hungary; March 23, 2019.

“Multiculturalism is not a manifestation of Europe’s generosity, or some noble embodiment of love and truth. [It] is what remains after mass migration reveals itself as a threat, rather than a benefit, to the economies of European countries.” — Jan Keller, Czech sociologist, October 16, 2018.

“The [European] community must rely fully on the spiritual, intellectual, and political values that in recent decades have been maintained, cultivated, and practiced in the democratic countries of Western Europe. I mean values like political and economic plurality, parliamentary democracy, respect for civil rights and freedoms, the decentralization of local administration and municipal government, and all that these things imply…It does not mean adaptation to something alien…” — Vaclav Havel, “Summer Meditations”, 1991.

Europe is in the throes of an internal debate between those who continue to view it as a constellation of free nations and those who see it as an entity controlled by Brussels.

Although the Brexit controversy may highlight this split, the conflict — as the former Czech President (and former Prime Minister), Václav Klaus, pointed out 13 years ago — has been raging for decades:

In his 2006 book, What is Europeism, Or, What Should Not be the Future for Europe?, Klaus wrote:

“For half a century there has been an ongoing dispute in Europe between the advocates of the liberalization model of European integration – which was based primarily on intergovernmental cooperation of individual European countries (which kept significant majority of parameters of their political, social and economic systems in their own hands) and on the removal of all unnecessary barriers to human activities existing on the borders of states – and the advocates of the harmonization (or homogenization) integration model, which is based on unification from above, orchestrated by the EU-authorities, with the ambition to level-out all aspects of life for all Europeans …

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15090/sweden-gang-violence

In Sweden, crucial societal issues, such as who is behind the current crime epidemic, are a public taboo.

“With the exception of three people in the survey, all have been offered help since they were boys. Some of them were already registered with the police as ten-year-olds… They have undergone programs… far from the criminal environment in Malmö…. It has not worked. In many cases, social services use the same words: all resources have been exhausted. Put another way: what the social services have done so far does not help, and there are no more measures to try out”. — Sydsvenskan, September 21, 2019

The government therefore recently presented a new initiative, which seeks to tackle the gang violence. The government proposal, however, never specifically mentions who is mainly behind the gang violence and that its own migration policies have in large part created the situation in which Swedish society now finds itself.

These are facts that mainstream politicians have avoided discussing openly for years. The question is: How do you solve a critical societal problem… without talking about it openly?

It does not seem likely that any of these hardened criminals will be swayed much by “increased investments in schools and social services in ‘vulnerable areas'”, as one of the government proposals suggests.

“Since 2015, 32 people have been shot dead in 30 separate acts in Malmö’s latest murder wave. Our survey of the murders shows that more than 120 young men are linked to them in different ways”, according to a recent series of reports about gang violence in the Swedish mainstream newspaper, Sydsvenskan.

“There is much talk about ‘gang wars’ in Malmö,” the report relates.

“Nothing indicates that there are fixed groupings with hierarchical structures and regulated activities in Malmö’s crime world. Rather, on the contrary — everything can be seen as one single gang. And there is civil war [within the gang]. We have mapped 200 criminals in the city. Most of them know each other – they have grown up together, been schoolmates, shared housing and moved in the same circles. Of these, we have selected 20 men for closer examination. Either because they are suspected of having shot, planned or otherwise contributed to the murders. Or that they themselves have fallen victim. And for being identified… as central people in Malmö’s crime world in recent years. At least 18 of the murders have, according to our review, occurred within the relatively narrow circle of these 20 men”.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

President Trump made good on a campaign promise with the U.S. Special Operations raid on Barisha, Syria that sent Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi into a dead-end tunnel, where he blew himself and three of his children to bits. In May 2019, Mr. Trump had announced “the end of the caliphate” in the territorial sense, but the Americans have now eliminated its theological master and terrorist dictator. Bravo to the brave, intrepid, and patriotic men and women who proved once again, as President George W. Bush said, that “you can run, but you can’t hide.”

Let’s clear the quick and stupid stuff first: No, this is not the end of ISIS ideology or terrorism spawned by it; no, it doesn’t fix the problem of Syria; no, it doesn’t make things right with the Kurds; no it doesn’t slow Iran’s desire for a hegemonic land bridge to the Mediterranean. And, yes, The Washington Post is an idiot.

Now, the implications. Most important for the future of the region and elsewhere, the ISIS concept of a land-based “caliphate” has probably expired. A retired naval commander notes:

It’s not 2013 anymore, when the progress of ISIS as a territory-gobbling guerrilla-terrorist force became evident. Their progress was defined by the Euphrates River, which they were following from the general area of Raqqa, from one side, and a general area between Ramadi and Haditha on the other, to link up between the Syria-Iraq border and Deir-ez-Zor. The fact that they were trying to consolidate and control that area was an arresting indication of their intentions, and then in 2014 they stormed into Mosul in the north.

The ISIS plan was different from that of al-Qaeda, which hid in caves in Afghanistan, as remote from its targets as it could be — and thus believed itself safe from retaliation. ISIS planted itself and its flag in the middle of Syria and Iraq: The benefit being oil fields with their revenue, land for training and operations, the ability to levy taxes on the population, and to show how a “real” Islamic civilization would work. Not too many people were impressed.