http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/new-year-same-struggle-against-tyranny/print/ And so yet another year ends, and a new one begins. And at the instant when we exchange the old, crumpled calendar, crammed with activities once planned and now completed, for the freshly printed one, a map of a land yet to be discovered, we clink champagne glasses to toast the relentless, one-directional movement […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/vladimir-kara-murza/a-life-of-integrity-vladimir-bukovsky-at-70/print/
Reprinted from ImRussia.org.
Yesterday, on Sunday, December 30, Vladimir Bukovsky – writer, scientist, human rights campaigner, and one of the founders of the dissident movement in the USSR – celebrated his 70th birthday. IMR Senior Policy Advisor Vladimir Kara-Murza recalls the milestones in Bukovsky’s life – and urges the present-day Russian opposition to heed his advice.
Vladimir Bukovsky does not like to be called a politician, preferring to be known as a neurophysiologist, writer or, at the very least, civic activist. In truth, he never engaged in politics: he merely realized, at an early age, that he could not reconcile himself to live quietly with a criminal and mendacious regime that sought to make millions of people its silent accomplices. Bukovsky’s protest was a moral one. “We did not play politics, we did not draft programs for the ‘people’s liberation,’” he recalls in his memoirs, To Build a Castle (a must-read for anyone interested in Russian history). “Our only weapon was glasnost (openness). Not propaganda, but glasnost, so that no one could say ‘I did not know.’ The rest is a matter for each person’s conscience.”
“I did not know” was a popular answer among members of the older generation when asked by the youngsters of the 1950s about Stalin’s times. The public condemnation of Stalinist crimes at the 1956 Communist Party congress and (almost immediately) the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution, which showed that the nature of the regime has not changed, were formative events for Bukovsky. His protest activity began literally during his school days: he joined a clandestine anti-Soviet group and published an underground satirical journal. In response, he was expelled from school, summoned to a dressing-down by the Moscow City Communist Party Committee, and barred from studying at university (he nevertheless won admission to Moscow State University, only to be discovered and expelled a year later.)
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/andrew-harrod/geert-wilders-courageous-journey/print/ Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders has released in 2012 his autobiographical account of his internationally known condemnation of, and personal conflicts with, Islam, with a forward available online by his fellow comrade in letters vis-à-vis Islam, conservative columnist Mark Steyn. Marked for Death: Islam’s War against the West and Me recounts how an individual Dutchman […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/professor_calls_for_death_penalty_for_climate_change_deniers.html
It is as inevitable as the rising of the sun; the Left, when thwarted in their quest for power, suggests the use of lethal force to compel those who disagree.
There is a nauseating litany of murders done by our betters in their pursuit of the Benthamite vision of “the greatest good for the most people” — which in their minds equates to collectivization and socialism. You have Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Margaret Sanger, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot. Now we can add one more name to the list: Professor Richard Parncutt, Musicologist at Graz University in Austria.
Parncutt has issued — and later retracted after it the public outcry — a manifesto calling for the execution of prominent “Climate Change Deniers”. What is interesting is that Parncutt hates the death penalty and supports Amnesty International’s efforts to end it.
This would be a shocking thing for a college professor to do were it an isolated incident, but this call has been made a number of times in the past. For instance, an anonymous poster at the liberal website Talking Points Memo called for similar action, as did Climate Progress editor Joe Romm, who called for “deniers” to be strangled in their beds. Grist magazine writer David Roberts called for Nuremberg trials for “deniers” and NASA’s James Hansen has likewise called for similar trials.
The violent rhetoric has been ongoing — and disturbing. Liberals in the United States have repeatedly tried to blame mass shootings on talk radio for inflaming the public, yet they are strangely silent about actual calls to violence on the part of environmentalists.
Coked Up: How Hezbollah is fundraising with Mexican drug cartels The terrorist group Hezbollah is thought to be filling a void created by a lack of funds from Iran with illicit drug money http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2332/coked_up_how_hezbollah_is_fundraising_with_mexican_drug_cartels beleaguered Hezbollah is partnering with brutal Mexican drug gangs in order to raise cash and further its aspirations for attacks on […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2331/william_rees_mogg_a_hero_of_intellectual_conservatism
Mogg was a great thinker and admirer of the Jews….
“One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all.”
– William Rees-Mogg, former Editor-in-Chief for The Times of London and a member of the House of Lords
Like many, I was saddened to learn of the death of William Rees-Mogg on Saturday morning. Throughout his life, he was a man of great principle and intellect.
He was a life-long conservative and always held true to the principles of British conservatism, even during times when The Conservative Party itself moved away from them.
He was innovative in the way he presented his ideas and how he went about promoting the ideas of others. In 1951, age 23, he, along with Geoffrey Howe, invented the first right-wing think tank, The Bow Group.
He created the group to have free and open debate on policy, and to influence the manifesto of The Conservative Party whilst remaining independent of the party itself.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2358/The-Scandal-of-2013.aspx Early in 2012, I opened a column with this question: “Is there a single public official who is examining – who cares about – the murder spree by Afghan security forces against Western troops and security contractors in Afghanistan?” Nearly one year has passed, during which 62 Americans and other Westerners have been killed […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ It took some 22 hours for American help to arrive in Benghazi after all the t’s had been crossed and the i’s had been dotted, and the body of America’s ambassador to Libya had been dragged through the streets by “rescuers” stopping along the way to pose for cell phone pictures with his corpse. […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ There are two types of things that we put money into; the things that we need and the things that we don’t. The former represent our physical needs and the latter our spiritual needs. Food for the body and food for the mind. We need to eat, but we don’t need to see a […]
http://www.timesofisrael.com/my-mom-and-dad-the-would-be-zionist-hijackers/
My mom and dad, the would-be Zionist plane hijackers An Israeli filmmaker hopes her next project will be a documentary about her parents, whose famous failure to steal a plane helped make Soviet Jewry a global cause
By RENEE GHERT-ZAND
Anat Kutznetzov-Zalmanson’s parents hijacked a plane, and she wants the world to know about it.Sylva Zalmanson and Eduard Kuznetzov’s only real crime was that they wanted to leave the USSR and live freely as Jews in Israel.
To their daughter, a filmmaker, they are heroes who jumpstarted the movement to free Soviet Jewry, not the criminals the Soviet government made them out to be, sentencing one to death and the other to years of hard labor.
When Kuznetzov-Zalmanson, 32, was a child in Israel, people would approach her parents in the street and embrace them. Teachers would ask her to tell their story in class. But now, several decades later, most people, especially young ones, know very little, if anything, about the Prisoners of Zion who fought for human rights and permission to emigrate from the behind the Iron Curtain. If they are asked about refuseniks, the only name to spring to mind is often that of former Israeli politician Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky, now chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
They almost certainly have no knowledge of the 16 people (14 of them Jews) led by Zalmanson and Kuznetzov, who attempted to hijack a plane from the USSR to Sweden on June 13, 1970, in a desperate bid to attract the world’s attention to their plight.
