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Stranger in Moscow On this date in 1988, Ronald Reagan told Soviet college students about freedom – and the future. by Bruce Bawer

By on May 31st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/__trashed-19/

Thirty-five years ago today, on May 31, 1988, Ronald Reagan, who was in the last year of his presidency and was in Moscow for the last of his summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, delivered a landmark speech to an audience of students at Moscow State University, a hub of scientific and technical research. The occasion was unprecedented, and the speech itself a masterstroke: with palpable enthusiasm, Reagan talked up the ongoing technological revolution that heralded a new information age, and urged the young Soviets to embrace freedom and peace so that they could be part of it:

Standing here before a mural of your revolution, I want to talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now, quietly sweeping the globe without bloodshed or conflict. Its effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world, shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives. It’s easy to underestimate because it’s not accompanied by banners or fanfare. It’s been called the technological or information revolution, and as its emblem, one might take the tiny silicon chip, no bigger than a fingerprint.

Reagan outlined some of the many ways in which our lives were being – or were about to be – transformed, from weather forecasting to instant computer translations to the mapping of the human genome. All of these developments, he underscored, were products not of government planning but of independent experimentation by individuals, some of them very young people – the near-contemporaries of those Moscow students – tinkering in their own garages. And their achievements, he pointed out, would have been impossible without the gift of freedom – a subject on which he proceeded to expound to that audience of Communist vassals with his customary eloquence:

Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to dream – to follow your dream or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters. Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer….

Cognizant that those students had learned the importance, in scientific and technological development, of ingenuity, innovation, and experiment, Reagan cannily played on this learning in his attempt to hook them on the idea of freedom. But he also mentioned other fruits of Western liberty that he knew would appeal to them: for example, he enticed them with the then unimaginable notion that someday, like their counterparts in the West, they might actually be able to spend a summer backpacking around Europe. “Is this just a dream?” he asked. “Perhaps, but it is a dream that is our responsibility to have come true.” In fact, it would come true in three years. Similarly, he floated the idea of sharing U.S. magazines and TV shows with the USSR by satellite. Of course, the Internet would soon make those items, and a great deal more, available to Russians.

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HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Things Worth Remembering: The Extraordinary Courage of Tatiana Gnedich Condemned to ten years in the gulag, the scholar sat in her cell and translated an epic poem—all 16,000 lines—from memory. Douglas Murray

By on May 29th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-tatiana-gnedich?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Here I am going to break one of my own rules, and dedicate a column to a translator of a poet, rather than an actual poet. I cannot stop myself from doing so. For it is necessary to pause and to say the name of Tatiana Gnedich.

I started this series talking about the significance of one act of memory—that of Boris Pasternak and the thousands of Russian writers in 1937 who knew Pasternak’s translation of Shakespeare by heart. Pasternak was then, as now, a famous writer. His own act of translation and memory cannot be diminished. But if it could ever have been superseded, then it is by a woman who almost nobody in the English-speaking world has heard of.

One of Gnedich’s ancestors had translated The Iliad into Russian, and in the 1930s she looked set to follow in his footsteps. She was studying seventeenth-century English literature at Leningrad State University when the purges began, and the universities were among the institutions trying to oust all enemies of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism for crimes that shifted by the day.

At a meeting at the university (which she was not at), Gnedich was denounced for having noble ancestry and, what is more, of hiding it. She was indignant at the claim—indignant that she should be shamed into hiding ancestors of whom she was proud. 

So she was thrown out of the university for “boasting about her noble ancestry.” The madness of those days was such that even someone who simply wanted to study the Elizabethan poets could not avoid politics.

At some point, Gnedich was allowed back into the university. With her mother, she moved into a small wooden house in Leningrad. During the siege of the city, from late 1941 to early 1944, her mother died and their house burned down. 

In December 1944, she got it in her head that even entertaining a desire to go to Britain was an act of sedition. She confessed to this, was duly put on trial, and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag.

While in jail awaiting transfer to a faraway Gulag camp, an interrogator asked her why she didn’t use any of the books that she was entitled to in the holding cell. She replied: “I’m busy. I don’t have the time.” 

Busy with what, the interrogator asked. 

“I’m translating Byron’s ‘Don Juan,’ ” she told him. 

The interrogator realized that she was doing it from memory. 

“But how do you remember your final version?” he asked her. 

Gnedich agreed that this was the hardest part, “especially now that I’m approaching the end. My head is too full to remember anything new.” 

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HISTORY Comments turned off

The FBI Was Created by Napoleon’s Grandnephew History takes some odd twists and turns. by Daniel Greenfield

By on May 9th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-fbi-was-created-by-napoleons-grandnephew/

History takes some odd twists and turns.

This particular odd twist began when Napoleon tried to build a dynasty out of less-than-ideal stock. His brother Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte lacked his talent for winning battles, running a country or doing much of anything. After disgracing himself during a naval command, he fled to America and married an heiress.

Jerome had a son, but remained a spineless weasel. After trying and failing to talk Napoleon into accepting his wife, he agreed to divorce her and marry royalty. Jerome failed miserably as a prince, wasted money, lost battles and was a disaster. Meanwhile, his son, also Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, grew up in America. Jerome had two sons, Jerome II and Charles ‘Charlie’ Joseph Bonaparte. Both men made a better show of the family name than their absent deadbeat prince of a dad had. Jerome II became a successful fighting man while Charlie wound up in Teddy Roosevelt’s cabinet as Attorney General Charlie Bonaparte or Charle the Crook Chaser.

Charlie Bonaparte created the Bureau of Investigation which would later become the FBI.

Napoleon’s grandnephew created the FBI originally to fight leftist anarchist terrorists. As organized crime took off, the FBI’s mission shifted more to what we know it as today, combating interstate crime.

And for those who accuse the Bureau of overreach, it was created by a Bonaparte.

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HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

THE GREAT LIBERATION OF THE LAND OF ISRAEL : VICTOR SHARPE

By on May 8th, 2023

I was re-reading an early article from May 26, 2003, titled “The Divine Zionist Roadmap” written by Rabbi Eliezer Waldman. It dealt with the liberation of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, in that miraculous Israeli victory of June 1967 over Arab genocidal aggression.

It also dealt with the liberation of the ancient sites of the Jewish towns and villages that had for too long been occupied by the Jordanian Arab regime.

The Jordanian Arab Legion, officered by British mercenaries, had illegally annexed the biblical heartland of Israel known as Judea and Samaria in 1948 and had renamed it the West Bank; a name the world since then has gleefully and shamefully embraced. Incidentally, only Britain and Pakistan ever recognized that Arab land grab.

Rabbi Waldman, in writing of the Israeli victory over the Arabs, stated, “…We were then blessed by divine miracles that not only helped us overcome our enemies but united us again with the heartland of Israel. Thousands of people filled with the enthusiasm of Jewish faith, returned to our liberated towns in the hills of Judea and Samaria, so that the song of redemption could be heard again in these hills after 2,000 years of desolation.

“Thus, we established the significant reality of 250,000 Jews living a normal Jewish life of faith and joy in Yesha today. More than all the distorted plans and roadmaps drawn up by foreigners, we are sure that this reality will determine the future life of Israel and its redemption process.”

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ELECTIONS, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Trump 2024 Dilemma: What Would Ben-Gurion Do? He saw the need to help the British fight the Nazis while opposing the British occupation of Palestine.By Ruth R. Wisse

By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-dilemma-what-would-ben-gurion-do-israel-british-white-paper-re-election-52ed5dcc?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“It is now more urgent than ever to recover and restore the best of America, but also more difficult because the former president fails to embody the greatness of America that he seeks to restore. Sober Americans will therefore defend the Trump record without supporting his candidacy, and deny him re-election while defeating those who did not allow him to govern.”

“We can’t win with Trump and we can’t win without him,” a friend said, echoing many other sober Americans. But I suggested that recent Jewish history shows a way out of the bind Republicans face in regaining the White House without its former incumbent.

In 1939, as World War II began, the Jewish community of Palestine faced simultaneous and competing challenges from Europe and at home.

Adolf Hitler intended to wipe out the Jews of Europe. Jews in the Land of Israel urgently needed to provide refuge for the millions being refused entry everywhere else. They faced resistance in Palestine, where the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, was determined to prevent the fleeing Jews from entering their homeland. He incited the local Arab population to violence, warning the British overseers of potential pan-Arab resistance against the British throughout the Middle East.

Britain had been entrusted with the mandate for Palestine after defeating the Ottomans in World War I. Though the mandate was intended to include the establishment of a Jewish national home, three-fourths of the territory was given to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and British authorities undertook neutral supervision over the rest. The more the Arabs rioted in the 1920s and ’30s, the more the British gave way to their demands and prevented Jews from arming in self-defense. This culminated in the British White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration and prevented Jews’ rescue from certain death.

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HISTORY, OPINION Comments turned off

Our Singular Century How to connect the dots when they’re spinning out of control by Walter Russell Mead

By on April 28th, 2023

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/our-singular-century-walter-russell-mead-via-meadia

The American historian Henry Adams was the son of Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Britain during the Civil War who was charged with keeping Britain from intervening on the side of the South. Henry was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of President John Adams. Born in 1838 when the railroad was still a novelty, he died in 1918. His histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations are still read with respect.

It was the acceleration of historical change more than the fact of it that increasingly fascinated Adams as he watched the Industrial Revolution and its associated dislocations unfold around him. Late in his life he set himself the task of quantifying, so far as this was possible, the rate of change as measured by the total amount of physical force that human beings could control. His results have fascinated me for years.

What he found is what we can call the Adams curve. Wind power and human and animal muscle power were the resources at humanity’s disposal for much of our history, and the amount of force humanity could generate grew slowly with population and a slow increase in the mastery of natural forces.

After 1600 his estimates showed the beginning of a faster increase in humanity’s power. The increase visibly accelerates between 1700 and 1800, and between 1800 and 1900 the flat line of earlier centuries takes the shape of a hyperbola as the rate of increase in human power reached for the sky. As Adams put it, “The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900, but, measured by any standard known to science—by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any shape—the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800.”

Looking ahead, Adams saw only more of the same, with the curve of human progress becoming more hyperbolic as it became more nearly a vertical line moving straight up the graph. The historian, whose early recollections included walking hand in hand with his grandfather John Quincy Adams to the town school, looked forward to an unrecognizable future in which the gap between pure thought and the material world would close sometime around 2025.

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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Five Facts for its 80th anniversary By Moshe Phillips

By on April 6th, 2023

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/warsaw-ghetto-uprising-five-facts-for-its-80th-anniversary/2023/04/03/

April 19 is the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Here are five stunning facts about the revolt that most histories of the Holocaust hardly ever include.

Mordechai Anielewicz was not the sole leader of the ghetto fighters.

After the naming of the Yad Mordechai kibbutz, with its physically stunning Memorial to Mordechai Anielewicz, and the heroic story of its defenders in the 1948 War of Independence battle fought there, the name Anielewicz became forever cemented in the public’s mind as the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. However, Anielewicz led only one of the two main armed resistance organizations in the ghetto. Anielewicz led the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization). The other organization was the ZZW (Jewish Military Union), and its frontline commander was Paweł Frenkel (also spelled Frenkiel). The ZZW’s chairman was psychiatrist and neurologist Dr. David Wdowinski, who survived the war and testified against Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Two years later, he published a short, personal account about the uprising called And We Are Not Saved (1963). Both the ZOB and ZZW are best described as Zionist organizations, and the majority of their leaderships and fighters came from Zionist youth movements.

The fighters only had bricks, Molotov cocktails and a few pistols with which to launch their revolt.

On Jan. 18, 1943, the first armed Jewish resistance action in the ghetto by an organized force occurred. It is believed that this first round of fighting was conducted by the young Zionists with pistols and improvised explosive devices such as homemade grenades. Many reports claim that for the first-time resistance fighters were able to take rifles from the Nazis they killed. Whether or not that is true, what is known is that the ZZW was able to obtain machine guns and other rifles from both criminal sources and from contacts in the Polish resistance Home Army (the AK).

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FOREIGN POLICY, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Gulf War: 20 Years Later Was the war worth the blood and treasure we spent on it? Here’s whom to ask. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on March 22nd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-gulf-war-20-years-later/

Monday marked the twentieth anniversary of the second Gulf war, which detractors call the invasion of Iraq. I have always looked at it as the liberation, as do many Iraqis.

But most Americans have been taught a history of lies, a history forged by left-wing political activists and their allies in the media and rarely contradicted by those who knew the truth.

Even Britannica, the once authoritative encyclopedia, has bowed to the political orthodoxy, referring to Saddam Hussein’s “alleged” possession and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

That is the founding myth of the “Bush lied, people died” Democrats and the media.

So were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion?

Absolutely. We know that because the United States and its coalition partners assembled a team of over 1,400 special forces operators, scientists and intelligence analysts to scour Iraq for the evidence. And what they reported has been wildly mischaracterized – at times, even by the leaders of that very effort.

David Kay, a former IAEA inspector who became famous for his parking lot “standoff” with Saddam’s goons, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 23, 2004, that WMD stockpiles would not be found in Iraq. “I don’t think they existed,” Kay said.

“Stockpiles” quickly became the defining term. But in Kay’s interim report to the House intelligence committee, just four months earlier, he painted a very different picture. “We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002,” he said.

This included:

*  A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and “that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N.” Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn’t have a biological weapons program?

*    New research on BW agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.

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HISTORY, MEDIA Comments turned off

Another Pulitzer Prize discredited as propaganda By Monica Showalter

By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/another_pulitzer_prize_discredited_as_propaganda.html

Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America’s South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists?

Here’s the Pulitzer Prize–winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that “immoral” war against a communist takeover:

There’s no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It’s crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder to look at.

It ran on the front page of the New York Times, cropped from the original to fill the space and make its impact even more immediate.

And it got the results the anti-war left wanted: public sentiment abruptly turned against the war as a result of this photo.  The Vietnamese people were abandoned by the Americans, whose cut-and-run evacuation from the Saigon embassy rooftop was only recently bested by Joe Biden’s Afghanistan pullout.  After that, the re-education camps rolled in, the boat people launched into the high seas, and the killing fields of Cambodia began.

Jane Fonda must have been so proud of herself.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

Frederick Douglass: The Former Slave Who Loved the Constitution His words have generational reverberations. by Ryan Bomberger

By on February 15th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-former-slave-who-loved-the-constitution/

“The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” These words were delivered by a former slave. The all-caps emphasis was his. In an 1852 speech entitled What to the Slave is the Fourth of July the inimitable Frederick Douglass called out the evil of slavery while praising an undeniable instrument of liberation: the U.S. Constitution.

If you visit the National Museum of African-American History and Culture’s (NMAAHC) online exhibit of Douglass’ Fourth of July speech, you won’t see or hear any mention of the Constitution. It’s not the first or last time that the Smithsonian will suppress history. Remember, NMAAHC is the same museum that heavily pushes racist “White Privilege” rhetoric and the infamous (but removed) “Whiteness and White Culture” infographic that proclaimed having a hard work ethic, intact married family, and using objecting rational thinking were “white.”

The Left loves its racism.

We live in an America that is vastly changed from the one in 1852. Too many enjoy being bound up in the past as they refuse to see the profoundly altered present. They choose to paint a false America and take pride in dividing us by the beautiful hues of our skin.

Former NFL antagonist and activist, Colin Kaepernick, loves trotting out the pre-abolition excerpts from this Douglass’ speech in an attempt to justify his fake oppression as a multi-million-dollar brand ambassador for Nike (an actual oppressor that profits from forced labor) and former professional athlete. Douglass rightfully denounces the failure of our nation’s political and religious leaders to live up to our national creed and Biblical principles. However, anti-America progressives ignore the hope offered in Douglass’ fiery address: “Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.”

If a former slave can say he does not despair, why do modern-day, self-proclaimed (celebrity) victims constantly portray America as a place of oppression, doom and gloom? Douglass continued:

“‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”

What are the obvious tendencies of this age? With the rise of wokism in our public schools, the solidifying of Marxism in our colleges and universities, and the celebration of tyrannical regimes like China in Hollywood and professional sports, leftist tendencies seem to want to “burn down the system.” Literally.

Ruth Colker, the Distinguished University Professor and Heck Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law at Ohio State University, has a radically different take than Douglass. She calls the Law of the Land the “White Supremacist Constitution.” Colker, who is white, writes: “The United States Constitution is a document that, during every era, has helped further white supremacy. Rather than understand the document as a force for progressive structural change, we should understand it as a barrier to change. Put differently, the U.S. Constitution has been a resounding success at preserving white supremacy. For example, U.S. citizens in the District of Columbia, who are disproportionately racial minorities, are provided no power in the U.S. Senate, while the former slave-holding states of Alabama and Mississippi have as much Senatorial power as California and New York.”

There’s that hopeless and historically-challenged progressivism. The Senate is intentionally meant to have equal representation from each state; Colker doesn’t mention that the House’ representation is based on population. You would think a “distinguished” professor would know these basic facts. The Constitution was ratified in 1788. The District of Columbia wasn’t created until 1790. In 1800 the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 70% of DC was white. DC didn’t become a majority-black city until 1957.

Don’t let historical accuracy get in the way of political zealotry. New York Times bestselling author and anti-racism propagandist, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, wants to pass an “anti-racism” amendment to our Constitution. Kendi has expressed the only way to fight (alleged) discrimination is with more (actual) discrimination. He believes his racist Critical Race Theory approach to governance is the way forward: “To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.” In his Politico Op-ed, Kendi duplicitously demands that “we have to prevent public officials from dividing Americans through racist ideas” as his best-selling books undeniably divide people by color.

Kendi’s worldview is hostile to that of Dr. Martin Luther King. With “anti-racism”, content of character no longer matters; color is supreme. Yet Dr. King, who actually experienced the codified systemic racism that Kendi pretends to face, had this to say about nonviolent activism and the Constitution in his I’ve Been to the Mountaintop speech: “And I knew that as they were sitting in [at the lunch counter], they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

The concepts of liberty espoused in our Declaration of Independence and our amendable Constitution are worth defending and celebrating. Combined with our rich Judeo-Christian heritage, they make America an exceptional nation that draws more people worldwide than any other nation.

Douglass impacted millions in his lifetime with his indefatigable advocacy for human equality. His words have generational reverberations. He influenced a President – a friend – who continually evolved on the issue of “race” because of Douglass’ faith-based convictions and eloquence. Abraham Lincoln so presciently summed up the power of We The People: “The people — the people — are the rightful masters of both Congresses and Courts — not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it.”

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