Communism Is Now Globalism

Communism did not disappear in 1989 with the revolution that ended its tyranny in the Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe. China, Cuba, North Korea are still ruled by the communist party. China has adopted a capitalist business model but the rest is still pure socialist repression. South America is almost entirely socialist, the precursor to communism.

European Communism went underground, spread mightily into the U.S. via NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and rebranded itself as globalism, communism on such a large scale that Stalin and Khrushchev would envy its tentacles dug deeply into the flesh of nations under the guise of environmentalism. Billionaires and U.N. are saving/protecting the planet from human footprint thanks to the pixie dust net zero carbon of green energy.

Because communism was never really taught in American schools, young generations today do not understand what it is and that one cannot be a loyal American and a communist at the same time.

Through their demonstrations, chants, and destruction in big cities, young Americans do not understand that we are not a democracy, we are a Constitutional Republic, and that overthrowing the institutions of our society and replacing it with the materialist dialectic of Marxism is not at all democratic. They promote violence, brute force, and revolution at their atheistic core and use deception, masquerade, and false promises to achieve their goals.

Communists want to destroy law and order, to create chaos, by making false claims of police brutality, illegal arrests, persecution, racial discrimination, and inequity. Defund the police claims and support of illegal invasion of our country are two of the weapons in their ideological arsenal. They create more as they go.

As J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “The legacy of communism in this country has been to implant distrust of free government, law and order, and the rational solution of conflicts.”

Violence and the concept of “class struggle” and racism are the tools of communist propaganda and agitation.

Young Americans should know more about American traditions, our national heroes, our history, good and bad, and democratic traditions that are now being replaced by a technocratic, race-based tyranny.

In the early 20^th century America, communists hid their activities. The first known representative of the Bolshevik regime of V.I. Lenin in America was Ludwig C.A.K. Martens, a strange communist, wearing “ill-fitting clothes,” making “clandestine movements in Lower Manhattan.” From his office on Broadway, he financed his activities in the 1920 by “smuggling diamonds into the U.S.”

A century later, after the first Bolshevik in the U.S., Martens, an army of Marxists staff our universities, the technocrat corporate world, the halls of political power, the mainstream media, the government at all levels, and the public schools.

With access to “intellectual community,” hundreds of thousands of students, faculty, and “civil society” with interest in “academic freedom,” the master propagandists posed as protectors of “democracy” and the Constitution. But we are not a democracy, we are a Constitutional Republic. Repeat the lie of democracy often and it becomes the truth for the brainwashed masses.

Radio, television, mainstream media, and the Internet have enabled the lies of communism to be spread non-stop to the gullible masses who lacked the knowledge of history and of facts in their basic education. The church, the Pope, priests and preachers, jumped into the fray and became mouthpieces for the globalist [communist] movement. Communist propagandists with a clerical cloak don’t denounce religion as the “opium of the people” but they denounce white parishioners as “white supremacists” and the benefactors of “white privilege,” made up constructs in order to vilify and divide the races.

The mainstream media has become the press of the communist party platform as represented by elected politicians who are no longer servants of the people but their dictators.

On June 9-15, 1968, the convention of the New Leftist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) met in East Lansing, Michigan. The Guardian newsweekly reported it as such: “The new left in the United States has developed in the last several years from liberalism to anticapitalism, from reformism to revolution.” A picture of attendees was showing them waving two flags, a red one for communism and a black one for anarchism. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the major organizational expression of the new left.

To achieve their goals in the 20^th century, communist organizers used the civil rights movement and black nationalism to their advantage. They also used labor and industry as a means to propagate their “democratic socialism” and the need for revolution.

In the 21^st century apparatchiks are using environmentalism, illegal immigration without borders, hate speech, which is any speech they disagree with, and new racial segregation across the country in order to keep the country divided.

Citizens can’t see the full problem because they do not understand or know that communism is a totalitarian philosophy of human life encompassing education, art, literature, press, medicine, work, police, military, mobility, travel or lack thereof, property, and leisure.

The easiest population group to indoctrinate are students in public schools. Marxist teachers have their pupils’ attention every day for ten months each year of the twelve years of public-school miseducation. They teach them what to think instead of how to think. Once the brainwashing is done, it is not reversible.

It is obvious today to anybody who pays attention and thinks logically that “Communists adapt their agitation and propaganda to the fears, prejudices, problems, and special grievances or aspirations of many ethnic, racial, and religious groups to be found in this country,” including issues between native-born and legal foreign-born.  (J. E. Hoover, On communism, Random House, 1969, p. 129)

 

How Was Sustainable Development Introduced?

The lynchpin of U.N. Agenda 2030, originally U.N. Agenda 21, is Sustainable Development (SD) with its 17 SD goals established by the United Nations’ globalist cabal.

The concept of Sustainable Development (SD) was introduced in 1987 at the conference of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, 29^th prime minister of Norway. She served three terms.

To achieve SD, a vague definition was introduced: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It is quite vague, leaving room for abuse and constant changes predicated on a hidden agenda - what needs, whose needs specifically, who decides, for how long, and what ability of future generations. It can literally and figuratively be anything the cabal decides in secret. The rest of the world must obey.

The blueprint for SD in 1987 became U.N. Agenda 21 in 1992, signed by 179 nations at the U.N. Conference on Environment and development in Rio. The document was 300 pages long, now more pages have been added.

To “Americanize” this SD blueprint, President Bill Clinton formed the President’s Council on Sustainable Development by Executive Order #12852 on June 29, 1993, with 12 cabinet secretaries, six environmental organizations, i.e., the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and executives from Enron, Browning Ferris, and S.C. Johnson.

Federal government grants spread Sustainable Development (SD) to all 50 states by creating a huge group of Sustainable Development NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and by giving grants directly to cash starved state and local governments.

The federal grants provided the funding; NGOs provided the leadership; local governments provided the targets for change without the knowledge or vote of the population affected by SD changes.

EPA and other federal agencies awarded “visioning” grants and “challenge” grants to develop a plan of action to transform communities across the country into sustainable development communities.

Universities also received grants dispersed to individual colleges within each university to teach students about SD.

NGOs (non-governmental organizations) received grants to work with local governments to create county-wide or region-wide plans such as Your Town 2024 or Sustainable Your Town or SD Region X, Y, Z Plan.

Visioning meetings developed comprehensive plans which included:

-         Nature preservation

-         Save the wetland

-         Improve the wetlands

-         Restrict development in sensitive areas (they decided what was sensitive)

-         Sustainable agriculture and farming (no fertilizer, no chemicals)

-         Never compromise wetlands or wildlife to the detriment of humans living in the area

-         Preservation of scenic views

-         Designate scenic highways

-         Development must be clustered and high rise

-         Rural village concept (it worked in Sovietized Europe after the Communist Party confiscated all agricultural land)

-         Smart growth, planned developments such as 15-minute cities

-         Walkability, 5 minutes from work, play, and school

-         Increased population density

-         Limit mobile homes

-         Zoning to encourage infill

-         More codes to be enforced

-         Conservation easements on agricultural land (a contract that forbids the landowner to do anything with the land without the NGO’s permission)

-         Sidewalks, bike paths, and walking paths

-         Multi-use trails and corridors that are landscaped

Comprehensive planning in SD cannot be initiated by the landowners but by the local community who are told what they need and want by a coalition of international organizations.

Smart Growth implies Land-Use control by the government:

-         1976 U.N. Conference on Human Settlements “D(1)(d) Governments must maintain full jurisdiction and exercise complete sovereignty over land with a view to freely planning development of human settlements…”

-         1992 U.N. Conference on Environment & Development “7.30(c) Develop fiscal incentives and land-use control measures, including land-use planning solutions for a more rational and environmentally sound use of limited land resources.’

Urban boundary zones appear in comprehensive master plans – municipal services such as water, sewer, fire, and police protection are not provided even though locals pay taxes for such.

Consensus of civil society (who is this civil society always quoted by the U.N. cabal every time they meet in tropical and very expensive locales where they issue new and revised documents and regulations) never includes locals who are affected by these comprehensive plans developed by outsiders.

Farmers know their land and treasure it. They know how to protect their resources because their livelihood depends on it. They don’t need outsiders telling them how to farm and where.

Government-managed societies end in environmental degradation, misuse of resources, greater division of economic classes, and hopelessness for the government-dependent poor. I know because I have experienced it. “Life is always better when people cooperate rather than a few try to dominate and control.”

Global governance using environmentalism as a tool started probably in 1891 when Cecil Rhodes asserted that the entire globe should be governed by the British Empire. How convenient to colonize the entire planet! Which is exactly what the globalist cabal wants to do.

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor Roosevelt used the term United Nations for the first time in his “Declaration of the United Nations.”

At about the same time, Professor Quincy Wright predicted the U.N. when he described in the Baltimore News Post a “Commission to Study the Organization of Peace”. United Nations became everything but an organization of peace.

Rachel Carson, another doomsayer, wrote Silent Spring and her infamous book convinced an entire generation that we are poisoning and destroying the earth.

In my 21^st century America, I hear and see thousands of birds every year in the vicinity of our suburban home. Incidentally, the U.N. Agenda 2030 cabal wants to forbid suburbia while busy cutting down forests to make paper and carboard boxes and burying CO2 pipelines (to mitigate the faux global warming), denying the gas of plant life to billions of trees that need to be replenished after so much paper use instead of the much-maligned plastics.

The real goal of SD is to reduce and control the earth’s population drastically because they are producing too much carbon. How paying a tax for said carbon is going to save the planet and offsetting CO2 production is never explained. But, one of the cabal members spoke openly that those citizens who cannot afford to travel anywhere can sell their potential carbon footprint to those citizens who are rich and can afford to go places and spew more carbon in the atmosphere with their jets and yachts.

Obviously, SD is a huge scam for power and control by the rich globalist cabal. It has nothing to do with the environment. If it did, the rich would be out there cleaning the environment polluted by China, India, and other poor countries that do not have a functioning garbage disposal plan, they use rivers and oceans to dispose of their trash.

If the cabal cared about the environment, they would not pay billions of dollars to spray daily our atmosphere with chemicals and chalk on their belief that blocking out the sun will mitigate the damage done by their global warming/climate change industry. In the process, they are harming mother nature, the weather, the climate, the food, water, and oxygen supply of the planet, killing animals and people.

 

 

 

Communism Explained for Useful Idiots

Communism cannot be described and incorporated into one definition because it is a philosophy, an economic system, a political doctrine, a highly directed and controlled lifestyle, a police state, a psychological conditioning, and an absolute indoctrination by any means necessary, primarily through fear, violence, and brute force.

The adherents of communism describe it as a philosophy which attempts to explain where humans came from, how they developed across the millennia, and their ultimate future in utopia.

The communists do not believe in God, they are atheists, although the Communist Party allows some churches to exist for the sole purpose of using the priests to spread Marxist indoctrination to their congregations, for traditional baptisms, church weddings, and burials. The police state does offer matrimonial services by a state clerk in the Marriage House set up by the Communist Party leadership of the area.

When the priests do not cooperate to indoctrinate their flock, they suffer the same disappearance fate as the non-compliant masses they call the proletariat.

The proletariat and professionals are equally poor and miserable, never smiling anywhere, looking down when walking or standing in crowds, working for pathetic wages as in “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

The communists believe in keeping the masses poor enough and wanting enough that they comply with the oppression in order to survive – like a dog fed enough rations to keep it from dying and making that underfed dog beg every day for the said rations in exchange for good behavior.

The communist world is a world full of fake equality, abundance of material benefits for life, and total social justice although up close and personal, it is an outrageous injustice for all those who are not members of the Communist Party elite.

When out and about, the proletariat has to be prepared to be asked to show his/her papers on demand and the word “please” is never found in the authorities’ lexicon.

In communism, the proletariat, the farmers, and professionals are always guilty of whatever crime the Communist Party decides and manufactures until proven innocent which in a communist court of law never happens.

Communists don’t just offer free housing, child care, education, personal needs, free education, a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, “all things to all men,” and a cure for all of world’s ills, but also it promises “a paradise on earth.” The problem is that it never delivers any of it.

My grandma had a very wise saying about all these communist promises of freebies, “never go with a large bag to an orchard on expectations of a bountiful crop because you might just leave empty-handed.”

Despite their rhetoric, communists do not like democracy, they prefer tyranny. Their euphemistic and charismatic language attempts to cover the fact that they are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Communists are not interested in building anything, in building a better nation, a better life, they are interested in wrecking and destroying everything, including history, who people are, and in remaking the globe and life in their desired image.

Their ultimate goal is world domination which explains why they prefer a new world order called globalism. And the push for global communism is coming from the U.N. and NGOs in Geneva. Some believe that communism, fascism, and tyranny do not really exist; it is the technocracy that we have to fear. But technocracy is the tool with which the global communists seek to control us.

The Fifth Column of the Nazis has been surpassed today by the Fifth Column of Global Communism. Western Civilization is in peril and the symbol of the free world, America, is also in peril. It is being attacked from within and without by the forces of the Fifth Column. And the indoctrinated generations, without any historical knowledge of communism or context, are willing to destroy their own country and future. They are the Useful Idiots as the Soviets termed their status.

“Atheistic communism denies every ideal we uphold” and uses terrorism, subversion, and relentless academic and mainstream media propaganda to trap everyone in a giant communist spider web under the guise of racism. Everything and everyone who disagrees with them and their platform is racist and thus immediately fired and “cancelled.”

There is a huge difference between what communists say communism is and what it actually is – a totalitarian form of socialism based on “duplicity, hypocrisy, and sham.”

Communists promise:

1.     Materialistic explanation of the origin of man

2.     Economic interpretation of history based on class struggle

3.     Abolition of capitalism which is seen as exploitation

4.     How to overthrow capitalism

5.     Moral code based on utility

6.     Abolition of all religions

7.     World-wide communist revolution

8.     World-wide communist society.

It is impossible to calculate the amount of human misery and death caused by the communist empires of the 20^th century.

The history of communism has shown that their proletariat are nothing but pawn, slave subjects to the Communist Party’s whims, with no civil rights, no justice, just gulags, where terror and torture are the order of the day.

The communist paradise is just a lie where injustice, poverty, and misery rule. War is never abolished as communists promise. People cannot revolt because they have no guns.

When they took power, communists confiscated guns, land, private property, money, homes, and personal possessions. They left the people penniless and dependent on a “benevolent” government to care for them. If the people refused to obey, they met a quick death, or long-term imprisonment, if they were lucky.

Communism, since the publication of the Communist Manifesto pamphlet in 1848, has not:

-         Held free elections

-         Had independent search for truth

-         Had freedom of the press

-         Had freedom of speech

-         Had freedom of religion

-         Had an independent judicial system (judges were always controlled by the state)

-         Had a legacy of love, just hatred

-         Had freedom, just coercion and the use of force, violence, and death.

The fanaticism of communism is so deeply rooted that they are still faithful to the original Soviet communism and atheism to this day - once a communist, always a communist.

Power and Control

There is no doubt that power and control over millions of other human beings provide those at the top, the cabal of globalists, with immense feelings of intoxication, a god-like power.  

The quest for this all-consuming power has created social, political, and economic upheaval across the centuries. And billions of innocents paid the ultimate price for wars, famine, pestilence, and poverty caused by men with aspirations to control as much land as possible and humanity in general.

The quest for power and control exploded with the Industrial Revolution which eventually had a deep effect on many countries in the twentieth century: socialism, revolutions, bolshevism, communism, fascism, and many other isms that are still plaguing the globe in the twenty-first century.

America’s initial incursion into communism started with the arrival of the first Marxists/Socialists from Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. More European immigrants brought with them the ideas and theories of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876).

Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866), a friend of Marx and Engels, came to this country in 1851; a former artillery officer in the Prussian army, he enlisted in the Union Army as a captain and retired as a general. After the Civil War, he edited a Marxist newspaper in St. Louis in which Marx’s and Engel’s ideas were published for German immigrants.

Another German immigrant, Friedrich Sorge (1826-1906), was also a pioneer of Marxism in America. He organized a communist club in New York City in 1857. He led the American branch of the First International. 

Communism has a long history in New York City. Marx established the world headquarters of the First International there in 1872 and placed Sorge in charge. 

The year 1917 marked the entry of the United States into World War I. For communists, however, 1917 represented something else entirely.

The communists seized power in Russia in 1917 during the “Great October Socialist Revolution.” According to the Gregorian calendar, the date was November 7, 1917. However, according to the Julian calendar used by the Russians, the revolution took place on October 25, 1917, hence the term “October Revolution.”

According to J.E. Hoover, the “Great October Socialist Revolution” was actually two events in Russia in 1917:

1.     The first event was the overthrow of the czarist regime in March 1917 and its replacement with a Provisional Government.

2.     The second event was the actual communist seizure of power on November 7 when the Russian people’s temporary freedom ended. The czarist power and control were replaced by the communist power and control.

Power and control exercised by a few egotistical mad men fills historical pages with bloody treachery, deceit, individual and mass terrorism, broken treaties, infiltrations, subversions, guerilla warfare, sabotage, wars, torture, genocide, repression of minorities, purges, assassinations, slave-labor camps, prisons, concentration camps, religious suppression and persecution, abrogation of individual liberties, and the ultimate goal to communize the planet under one government.

Military terms seem to abound in the communist tactics of power and control, i.e., “mobilize the masses,” “advance detachment of the proletariat,” “storm the fortress of capitalism,” “in the front ranks of the struggle,” and “shifts in the ranks.”  They are clever wordsmiths, replacing reality with euphemisms and meaningless slogans of deceit. They train ideologically and militarily an elite corps of “professional revolutionaries” in order to influence mass support of non-communists.

Communists use front groups and organizations to disseminate their propaganda through newspapers, magazines, schools, universities, Hollywood, and mass media.

They form bonds and temporary coalitions with other political organizations while pretending to work in the interest of the majority of the population. 

The most insidious action is sponsoring as many candidates as possible for election to public office at all levels. And they have deep pockets filled by donations from billionaires who share the same communist ideology.

The communists’ religion is atheism. To Marx and Lenin, organized religion was “the opium of the people.”  Lenin mocked religion as a “kind of spiritual gin in which the slaves of capital drown their human shape and their claims to any decent human life.”

The Bolshevik’s “proletarian” revolution was “actually an armed insurrection by a small group against an almost powerless government.”  

Interestingly, not all communist coups were armed insurrections, some coups occurred in the voting booths through massive cheating and deception.  

Others took power and control through misleading and false promises of “Bread, Peace, and Freedom!” The communists’ idea of liberty was the establishment of a police state based on naked force and terror. And they succeeded in many Soviet-controlled countries, ushering in initially the “era of socialism.”

At the end of the socialist era, terror and lies transformed into communist tyranny. When tanks rolled in and crushed any workers’ demonstrations against the regime, their power and control became absolute. At that point, communism converted into a campaign of terror waged against the people, with total disregard for moral and religious values and utter contempt for the cost in human life and individual freedoms. 

Nothing lasts forever, eventually all that is left is dust and rust. The men at the top who destroy so many lives and societies with their dangerous ideologies and power, are long gone by the time subsequent generations suffer the consequences of their actions.

 

 

 

Masters of Indoctrination, Manipulation, and Agitation

Bread line

Communists are masters of agitation, manipulation, infiltration, and indoctrination. Just ask millions of people who have survived and fled from socialist republics ruled by the Communist Party.

Starting with the Bolsheviks, the communists perfected that art of infiltrating schools, colleges, labor unions, community groups, civic groups, NGOs, the government, churches, professional, social, and economic organizations. Their goal has always been to subvert all institutions but particularly minority groups and ethnic groups.

The communists adapted their propaganda to the fears, prejudices, real or invented problems, and social grievances that blame society at large for a minority group’s problems.

Communists are masters at exploiting frictions and differences between native-born and foreign born, whites and non-whites, Jews and Muslims, Christians and atheists, rich and poor, all with the ultimate agenda of aligning the divergent groups with the communist ideology of the collective.

The communist agitators have no real interest in helping the poor, non-whites, or any other “aggrieved” group which claims to experience friction in society, they are only interested in exploiting them for personal gain by magnifying the alleged, newly invented grievances.

The BLM organization agitated young crowds to destroy, loot, and burn cities in the name of “black lives matter,” and, after collecting millions of dollars for this new cause, the BLM masters took the money and ran to buy themselves gated mansions, yachts, and other luxury goods, doing nothing for the alleged oppressed. It was all deception and fraud. They used the “black lives matter” riots to gain wealth for themselves and to advance the cause of American communism.

NGOs have promoted riots, burning and looting, using the communist argument of “class struggle” to their advantage. They injected the idealist and jobless, mostly white crowds into racial issues, exploiting them, promoting hatred for law and order (defunding the police), creating domestic civil unrest and division, fomenting racial strife, hatred, and violence.

Over time, I have heard the phrase that communism is “the wave of the future” and “the future belongs to the youth.” Those are transparent and impossible lies.

College students, the naïve humans that they are, credulous and idealistic, are buying those phrases and the impossible dreams that they engender. By the time these idealistic young men and women find jobs and become gainfully employed, tax-paying citizens, with children and bills to pay, the reality of communism will hit them hard in the wallet.

Students are idealistic and believe that they are making the world a better place through their activism. Who can resist the dream of world peace? To this end, they are the easiest to fool and mobilize, the preferred useful idiots of communist professors and other apparatchiks.

As someone wise once said, young minds are pliable and fertile, the “soil in which the communists hope to implant the alien seed of Marxism.”

The communist activists cleverly use students and their naiveté, convincing them to destroy the democratic processes of government. They think that the erasure of institutions that have built our nation into a successful country will create a “tabula rasa” (clean slate) onto which communism can inscribe its oppressive footprint. They promise so much free stuff to new converts that the attraction becomes magical. But economics teaches us that nothing is free, someone must pay for it.

American students do not know this because they are no longer taught how to think logically, they are taught what to think. Since the history of communism is not studied in American schools, students have no idea that the communism they think they want is a “materialistic, godless dogma dedicated to world domination.”

The extensive outreach of college professors who indoctrinate students in their classes has convinced young, impressionable minds that communism is superior to a free government.

As the current government is working increasingly against the people, one wonders if there is a free government anymore, accountable to ‘we the people’ and how soon the leaders of tomorrow, the current pliable and naïve students, will be subservient to the metastasized government. At that point, they wished they could reverse it peacefully.

 

The Rus and How Russia Got Its Name

The Vikings, sailing in their strong and narrow ships, built so tough that were able to withstand rough seas, reached amazing parts of the world such as Newfoundland via Iceland and Greenland, and may have discovered America before Christopher Columbus. Their raids reached around today’s France, Spain, Italy, the southern part of the Mediterranean, England, Ireland, Germany, the Nordic countries, all the way to Kiev and the Caspian Sea.

They were searching for land more fertile than the soil in Scandinavia. They used Europe’s rivers such as the Rhine and the Volga and their tributaries to reach unsuspected communities which they raided with the intent to carry the loot and trade with other Vikings.

The red haired and bearded Viking raiders started plundering Europe’s villages at the end of the eighth century and by the tenth century the raids ended, and the Vikings became colonists.

Normandy was granted to them in 911 A.D. and they adopted the French language and their religion. The Duke of Normandy became a powerful ruler of Europe and his Christian soldiers conquered all of England in 1066, then southern Italy and Sicily.

Norwegians, without maps and compasses and with 50-70 feet long boats, founded in the deserted Iceland a land of farmers and fishermen in which all free men could speak and vote, the first democracy since Greece.

Erik the Red found Greenland. His son Leif found a land which he called Vinland, Newfoundland. He tried to colonize it but failed.

A grave of a Viking raider/trader found in eastern Sweden in a town called Fittja, was evidence to the reach of the Viking explorations; it contained silver pieces from Cordoba, Spain, Egypt and Syria, Baghdad, and the city of Tashkent in Central Asia, today’s capital of Uzbekistan.

The Viking raids’ destinations were churches and monasteries where they knew that Christians kept incredible valuables made of gold, silver, and precious gems. In the process of raiding, the Vikings destroyed and burned to the ground many churches and monasteries.

The plundering Dane named Rorik, after sacking the port of Dorestad, at the mouth of the River Rhine, decided to settle there and became a prosperous merchant. Others formed trading posts far away which grew into cities like Dublin and Kiev. There was already a flourishing Scandinavian trade in furs, cattle, dairy, and Baltic amber during the Roman times.

The Vikings were vigorous warriors, aggressive, enterprising, willing to take risks, and did not fear death. Valhalla was heaven and final destination.

Ibn Faldan, the Arab ambassador from the Caliphate of Baghdad, wrote on a mission to the “Rus,” the Vikings of the East, in 922 A.D.:

“Never have I seen people of more perfect physique; they are tall as date palms and reddish in color. They are the filthiest of God’s creatures. They do not wash after discharging their natural functions, neither do they wash their hands after meals. They are as stray donkeys. . . . Ten or twenty of them may live together in one house, and each man has a couch of his own . . ..”

Ibn Faldan described how a slave girl brings her master a huge bowl of water in which he washed his face, hands, and hair, blew his nose and spit into the water. Then the bowl was carried to his neighbor who followed the same ritual until the same bowl was carried around to the entire household.

Faldan wrote about the Viking chief’s burial ritual in an ornate boat decorated with silk brocades; how an old woman named the Angel of Death stabbed a young slave-woman who “volunteered” to die with her master; the Viking men banged on their shields to drown out the cries of the slave while the ship, the dead chief, and his young and unwilling slave were set on fire for his fleeting trip to Valhalla.

The geographer Ibn Rusteh, another Arab traveler, wrote about thirty years later that the Vikings wore “exquisite clothes, respect their guests, are hospitable and friendly to strangers.” They stick together in battle as one until victory but are very quarrelsome, wrote Rusteh. Both writers agreed that the Vikings demanded too much tribute from Slav villages.

The Vikings were called the Rus by their Finnish neighbors. According to the twelfth century Russian Chronicle, the Rus were invited by the Slavs in the ninth century to rule their land because “Our land is rich, but there is no order in it. Come rule over us.”

Rurik, his brothers, and their descendants accepted the Slavs’ offer and established Novgorod, Smolesnk, and Kiev, which they stated to be the “mother of Russian cities.” Kiev became the “early capital of this Slavic land now ruled by the Rus and soon to be known as Rus or in English, Russia.” (Quest for the Past)

The Viking savages, as the Arabs wrote, were civilized by contact with the Byzantine world (today’s Istanbul). Prince Vladimir converted in 987 to Eastern Christianity and married the Byzantine Emperor’s sister. She was not too happy about the marriage and tried everything in her power to prevent it but was unsuccessful. Vladimir is said to have had hundreds of paramours.

Scholars believe that, by the end of the tenth century, the Viking blood in Russian society had diluted, which explained the Slavic name Vladimir. Historians agree that the mixture of Vikings and Slavs resulted in the first Russian state.

In 907 A.D., a Viking fleet commanded by the Swedish ruler of Kiev, Oleg, attacked the Byzantine Empire, according to the Russian Chronicle, by bringing his boats on land with wheels fitted on them. The ships, with spread sails pushed by the wind, rolled onto the city and the overwhelmed Byzantines had to beg for peace because the Byzantine Emperor and his army were away. Oleg’s son, Igor, tried the same trick in 942 A.D. but failed miserably when his fleet was destroyed.

 The Vikings maneuvered their slender boats swiftly up rivers, estuaries, “sailing around headlands, bringing fire, rape, and pillage inland.” In 793 A.D. they sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne (northeastern coast of England), the monks were slaughtered, and the holy treasures stolen.

St. Bertin Abbey’s annals in Rouen, France, describe “Danish pirates” in 841 A.D. “carrying everywhere a fury of rapine, fire, and sword.”

In 885 A.D. the Danes destroyed Paris. On horse and on foot, running through fields and hills, killing babies, children, young men, old men, fathers, sons, and mothers . . .. They ravage, they despoil, they destroy, they burn. . ..” They took no prisoners.

Records are scant and they come from third parties such as Arab travelers and religious people some of whom had been robbed. The Vikings do not have written accounts, but they do have Icelandic Sagas.

Archeologists depend heavily on findings from Viking tombs and unearthed homes and villages. Full armors for the head and torso have not survived but a famous warrior’s helmet dated from the seventh century was found in Sweden. Five other partial helmets survive from the Viking Age. Thick leather protected other parts of the body and the warriors carried a shield, an ax, or a heavy sword.

For Your Own Safety

As I watched the armed soldiers of the National Guard patrol the New York City’s subway system, soldiers that could demand to rifle through someone’s purse or backpacks, for their own safety, mind you, I am reminded of the fact that New Yorkers strongly believe in gun control and have demanded that the police be defunded. Now that crime is escalating to a seeming point of no return, New Yorkers are changing their tunes and want more police protection.

New Yorkers are willing to give their freedom to armed soldiers, for their own protection. Is this another resigned submission to molestation, just like passengers have given up all their freedoms and rights to the TSA in order to board a plane? It is sad to see TSA employees groping children, handicapped people, and grandmas with walkers and canes for “their own safety.”

A friend who has not flown for many years until recently and had no idea how extensive the TSA body searches were, was outraged and felt violated when the TSA agents touched all her private parts. When she protested, she was told repeatedly that it was for her own safety. When this 70-year-old grandma’s protests almost got her arrested for no reason other than asking questions, she complied to the invasive groping.

I grew up under communism with armed soldiers and armed police surrounding us everywhere we went. We were never molested publicly like Americans are at airports but we had to show the content of our purses upon exiting grocery stores.  Clothing stores were exempted, I assumed because we could never reach them, they were placed behind counters.

It was ridiculous that women had to show the contents of their purses for three reasons. Few women owned purses, they were small, and could barely hold anything other than a handkerchief. Additionally, grocery stores also stored food behind tall counters and food was only given to customers after they paid for their purchases and showed the clerk their receipt.  If you did not have a receipt stamped “paid,” then no merchandise was given to you.

If you exited the store with your purse, that meant that you purchased nothing. Shopping bags were made of durable jute string and expanded into a larger fishing net with handles in which all women carried shopping items.

In clothing stores, there were no dressing rooms, so it was impossible to steal anything by walking out with it. You had to know your exact size, make sure of what you wanted to purchase because, once in your possession, it was yours to keep and was never returnable even if it did not fit or was damaged.

When the police checked our identification passes (papers, please) and purses, they exercised their power to humiliate, harass, and oppress us at will, showing us that the commies were in control, and we had no choice but to comply and obey.

Theft actually occurred in two places: a. at work and b. in people’s homes.

In order to survive the equally small wages paid to everyone by the police state, regardless of education and training, (we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us) people took bribes and stole items from their work and bartered them with others for things they needed or sold them on the black market in order to earn additional money.  

Doctors and medical personnel accepted bribes to give some patients priority, quicker, or better service. The bribes came in the form of hard-to-find food, toiletries, cosmetics, soaps, needed medicines such as aspirin or cortisone shots, and an envelope with money called “walking around money.”  

If you did not have walking around money, you wasted your time going to see the socialist medicine doctor because you would wait forever. They would put you in the hospital, but they had no resources to treat you with or test you with. You got a chicken wire metal frame bed, a stained mattress, you had to bring your own sheets and towels and you had to wait in the 20-bed ward for days before a resident might see you.

Factory workers stole parts or finished products, traded services for others, stole bottles of wine to trade for sugar, cooking oil, rice, or meat; if they were truckers, siphoned milk or gasoline out of their big delivery trucks and bartered their loot with others. When someone was caught stealing, everyone who bought things or traded with him/her paid a fine or went to jail.

Even some family members stole from each other sometimes. Those in the country who had more and better food, were jealous of those who lived in the city and had a bathtub and indoor plumbing but empty pantries and starving.

The envy was real even though cold water was cut off sometimes all day, and, if we were lucky, hot water flowed two hours a day, usually when people were asleep.  

But the biggest thieves were the Communist Party high ranking members and their lackeys who confiscated the land, homes, savings, and wealth from citizens they deemed bourgeois, after throwing them in prison. Their only crimes were that they had accumulated wealth through hard work and did not subscribe to the Marxist ideology. People I knew and one great-uncle spent long years in prison for being anti-communists. One friend was sentenced to 17 years in a lead mine labor camp for inheriting from his parents a small hotel in a mountain resort.

Many people like my dad would not take anything from work that he had not earned and paid for.  He was a very hard-working, honorable, and honest man who deserved a much better life than the miserable existence and struggle under the communist oppression that ended his life much too early.