Freedom of the Press and Freedom from the Press

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The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says simply that Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The courts have since bent over backwards to interpret and re-interpret the intent of the framers of the Constitution, depending on who the aggrieved parties were and whose interests were at stake.

The courts ruled on what is protected speech and what is not, how far journalists can go with their information, and how far they are protected when compared to private citizens.

For the longest time, the American public believed the press, the major newspapers, beloved radio personalities whose political biases nobody knew because they never made them public by staying neutral and objective, and sources such as NBC, ABC, and CBS.

We took pride in America in the freedom of expressing one’s opinion without the fear of going to jail for their views. We also knew that, by expressing such a view people left themselves exposed to judgment by their employer with the potential of losing one’s job or of being ostracized from certain organizations.

One of the basic “tenets” of the communist revolution was a free press.  Lenin was quite descriptive in his version of freedom of the press – “We demand immediate and unconditional recognition by the authorities of freedom of assembly, freedom of press and an amnesty for all political prisoners and dissenters. Until this is done, all words about tolerance, about religious liberty, will remain a miserable game and an indecent lie. Until freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press is declared, there will not disappear the shameful Russian inquisition which persecutes profession of unofficial faith, unofficial opinions, unofficial doctrines.” He was, of course, referring to his communist brethren who were languishing in prison for various offenses, he had no interest in extending such freedom of the press to those who disagreed with the communist ideology. (Lenin, “The Autocracy is Tottering, Sochtneniya, Vol. VI, p. 314)

Nikita Khrushchev talked about an “objective press.” He decided which articles were objective and asked that they be published in the Soviet press because he believed they were “truthful and objective.” He was the arbiter of truth. But the “free press” the Soviets were cherishing was not really the press that the West viewed as free.

At the time, Turner Catledge of The New York Times wondered why foreign correspondents were censored by the Soviet Union but were not censored in the West. As we well know today, major U.S. publications are quite leftist and openly support socialism, the precursor to communism, and censor those who disagree with them.

Khrushchev responded to Catledge that wasting money on telegraph communications and paper would harm society with news that distort the real life of Soviet Russia and slander and manufacture instead of benefiting society. In such cases, he said, the authorities are justified in withholding false reports and not publishing them.

The USSR Constitution guaranteed “freedom of the press.” Pravda (The Truth) stated on December 26, 1958, “Article Seven – Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Agitation or propaganda, conducted with he aim of undermining or weakening the Soviet power or committing individual, particularly dangerous crimes against the state, the spreading of slanderous fabrications with he same aim, defaming the Soviet state and social order, and equally the spreading of printing or storing of literature of this nature with the same aim will be punishable by imprisonment for a period ranging from six months to seven years or banishment for a period ranging from two to five years.” Discussions of war (“war propaganda”) was particularly distasteful and egregious to the Communist Party. So much for freedom of the press, Soviet style.

TASS, the communist party approved Soviet news agency, said in 1959, “We have no censorship, only control to prevent misuse of the freedom of the press.”

As most historians know, it was mandatory for all regional (oblast) newspapers in the Soviet Union to publish the exactly worded propaganda that appeared in Pravda. It was like today’s Democrat party giving its marching orders to anchors on various leftist channels who repeat the script religiously.

James Reston of the New York Times wondered “why poets, writers, and musicians followed a very narrow line of work” and why Pravda can be bought in New York, but the New York Times could not be sold in the Soviet Union.

The answer was priceless. Subscribers to the New York Times in the Soviet Union were almost non-existent because “Soviet people want the truth and your papers print a lot of untruths and misinformation. Why should we force that on our readers?” The Soviet authorities want their people to understand internal and international events more clearly and not be misled. And western journalists are incapable of understanding the Soviet writers and poets’ literary work. “You understand their literary work quite incorrectly.” (To James Reston of The New York Times; TASS, Oct. 11, 1957)

A “bourgeois newspaper” correspondent not “rightly assesses what he sees, just as not everyone can gaze at the heavens and see the sun as it really is.” In other words, the press can be “objective,” but the definition of “objectivist” is “objectionable” by Soviet ideology.

An op-ed in Pravda on January 27, 1960, said, “The press is a powerful force in the ideological indoctrination of young persons. However, at one time certain newspapers and journals of Latvia were somewhat drawn to objectivist reporting of various aspects of life in capitalist countries. Weak and ideologically depraved literary works were also printed. Party agencies were forced to take serious measures for improving the ideological content of printed matter.”

The oppressed proletariat in the Soviet Union and the other Iron Curtain countries was not stupid. They watched shows like Dallas and saw for themselves how American people lived under the maligned capitalism and the abundance of food in their grocery stores while communist stores were empty. They knew there was a better life beyond the tall barb-wired fences that kept them prisoners in the communist grey paradise.

It is laughable when an apparatchik was quoted saying, “In Moscow there is no censorship. Every correspondent can write what he wants except lies.” And that correspondent would never be heard from again after writing what he wanted.

William Randolph Hearst, Jr., agreed that the free American press has a different view of censorship from Khrushchev’s view. “If I fired everybody who wrote opinions with which I disagree at times, I’m afraid we would not have many people left in the editorial department.”

What about the “freedom to listen” to programs that the communist party found objectionable? The Soviets jammed the Voice of America radio programming because, they said, those voices were dissonant, and the communist authorities did not want the Soviet people to have a “wrong picture of the American people and their voice.”

Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on September 17, 1959, and Irritated that the public was interrupting him, Khrushchev offered to stop speaking if they did not want to hear what he had to say. “The Question of how and what our people should hear is the affair of our people. These questions are decided and will always be decided by the Soviet people themselves and their Government, without foreign interferences.”

It is sad to note that today, conservative Americans have restricted access to social media platforms, and many are periodically banned, and some are shadow banned. Invisible computer censors tell us that we “violate community standards” if we try to read an article, post a photograph, or a video that the leftist censors find objectionable. We are not sure exactly what these community standards are, but they must be quite specifically designed to encompass only conservatives and their viewpoints.

Some conservative Americans have the means to fight back against censorship in a court of law, which is something the communist era victims were not permitted to do. Coral Gables is being sued right now for censoring the showing of the ‘Trayvon Hoax’ movie. Unfortunately, few win against the powerful progressive machine that controls the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. https://www.wnd.com/2020/01/american-city-sued-censoring-trayvon-hoax-movie/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=wnd-newsletter&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=newsletter

In the era of algorithmically designed information highway, do we really have freedom of speech, the freedom to post an opinion, to listen, read, or view? When the press receives its marching orders from the leftist elites who own all venues of the mainstream media, do we still have freedom of the press even though it is guaranteed in the Constitution? What good is a guarantee if it is not enforced? Do we even have freedom from the fake press that overwhelms the airwaves, bookstores, and the printing press?

Rule of Party of One

Photo credit: Wikipedia web

It is upsetting to find out that a principal asked a high school student to remove his baseball jersey at a game where everyone was encouraged to wear patriotic t-shirts.  His white jersey sported the American flag, the name Trump, and number 45. The student had to remove the shirt deemed as making questionable political statements and incite violence. It is hard to understand how our president’s name and number would incite violence. One may not agree with his policies but he is our president, governing over the best economy in decades.

But our country now is negatively transformed and divided by one party, the Democrats, who are busy inciting mob violence among their followers and even paying them to create violent mob situations in the public arena, wearing dark clothing and masks like the cowards that they are, harassing innocent Americans in restaurants, shooting Congressmen on a softball field, banging on the doors of the Supreme Court, blocking traffic in Portland while one policeman is watching, interrupting Senate hearings with chants of hatred, shoving elderly people and hurting peaceful protesters, carrying bats and injuring anyone who dares to wear a hat or t-shirt supporting our president or attending his rallies.

Democrats are masters at demonizing the opposition, accusing them of hate crimes, and calling them Nazis, bigots, xenophobes, islamophobes, racists, and many other descriptors of sheer hatred and intolerance. They are following in the footsteps of Soviet communists and Nikita Khrushchev’s “conquest without war” to fundamentally transform life around the globe.

Nothing could stand in the communists’ way. When Ukrainians refused to collectivize their agriculture, to give up their land and private property for the “greater good,” peasants were attacked with demeaning and dehumanizing words craftily chosen, “kulaks” and “enemies of the people.”

In the insane world of Bolshevism and communism, it was patriotic to kill the opposition. Stalin even “decreed the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” During a very dark period of history, 1929-1933, the number of deaths rose to 10 million, with another 10 million placed in slave-labor camps in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far North. (Conquest without War, Pocket Books Inc., 1961)

When Stalin tried to go further, asking permission to execute members of opposition groups within the Communist Party, the Politburo and the Central Committee refused. But it was only a temporary reprieve as the blood bath escalated.

After Sergei M. Kirov, a Politburo member, was killed by a young Party member, the annihilation of “class enemies” exploded. It is important to note that young party members were always the “useful idiots,” short on real knowledge, and long on ginned up ideological hatred and class animosity rhetoric.

Historians agree that Kirov’s murder was the signal to escalate the repression. Show trials wiped out all the Bolsheviks who led the Revolution, all the surviving members of Lenin’s Politburo. Communists ate their own useful idiots. They had dared to raise their voices against the carefully crafted cult of personality of Comrade Stalin and thus against the “teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.”

Made-up, unfounded, and unproven accusations sent millions of useful idiot Russian communists and non-communists in front of the firing squad. It was a horrible way to get rid of the opposition.

It is for this reason that the recent Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings in the American Senate were hard to watch and daunting as the “show trial,” complete with screaming paid communist Democrats in the gallery, was based on allegations from 36 years ago, and not corroborated by any credible evidence or believable witnesses.

It was eerily reminiscent of a Soviet-style “show trial.” Instead of the person being executed after the Soviet “show trial” where the outcome was already predetermined, in the American “show trial” called hearings, the accused’s entire life and professional life were assassinated in a legal system in which the accused is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.  

Even though the Senate is not an actual court, the guilty “accused,” who had to prove his innocence, was already sentenced in the blaring court of public opinion.  The precedent has been set. If you ever find yourself in a real court and in a similar situation, who is going to come to your defense when you are already deemed guilty in the court of public opinion?

If you don’t have freedom of speech and assembly, and are afraid for your life in a public place, are you really free, or are you living under the rule of the party of one and their paid violent mobs?

The Soviets' Inner Wall

A Memorial to victims who died at the Berlin Wall
Photo credit: Wikipedia

…'from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended over Europe'    – speech made by Winston Churchill in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri

At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies divided Germany from 1945 to 1949 into four sections, each administered by a different allied country, in order to prevent the spread of Nazism (National Socialism).

The Americans, the French, and the British did not take as seriously as the Soviets did the virtual division line between their controlled territories and those controlled by the Soviet Union. People from the western and eastern parts came and went as they pleased, crossing this imaginary border and angering the Soviets in the process who were very partial to their communist ideology and boundaries.

On May 26, 1952 the newly-formed Soviet East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) began building an actual inner border concrete wall, 9 ft. tall and topped with barbed wire, which they dubbed “the anti-imperialist wall.”

In reality it was not a wall built to keep imperialist invaders from West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD) out of East Germany (DDR) but to keep their own East German people inside a one giant Stalinist prison.

To protect their zone and their ideology, the Soviets built one of the deadliest border walls in history. If their citizen dared to even try escaping to the West, they were summarily shot and killed. The wall was so long, over 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to the center of Germany, that it put the Berlin Wall to shame. The concrete wall topped with barbed wire snaked around the countryside with no trees a certain distance from it so that escapees would have no ground cover in any direction.

There was a vehicle barrier in front of this concrete wall and a six foot wide plowed strip of dirt to record foot prints. Watch towers and manned posts made sure that guards caught those attempting to flee. If caught after the fact, the citizens were heavily fined and imprisoned for three years.

Trees were cut down and underbrush was cleared so that there was always a clear line of sight and a clear line of fire. With electronic sensors strategically placed, this “death strip” was running through towns, manicured stretches of land, farms, coal mines, and even through the middle of a house. Many communities were split in half, very similar to the Berlin Wall which split streets in half.

According to historians, out of 17 million East Germans, one million people a year were trying to flee to the west. The border with its buffer zones, no man’s lands, and more guard towers than one could imagine, became so elaborate and strict that the population’s flight or attempts to flee were reduced by 75 percent.

An impregnable barrier of iron, concrete, barbed wire, electric sensors, watch towers, plowed strips, and mine fields was thus built between the German Democratic Republic in the East and the Federal Republic of Germany in the West. When historians refer to the communist Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe, they are referring to this border wall between the two divided Germanys. The first reference to the Iron Curtain, fearing the spread of communism, was made by Winston Churchill in his 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri.

By the 1980s thirty guards were protecting each three-and-a-half mile stretch of the entire border wall. Sixty thousand anti-personnel mines to deter border crossings further reduced the escape rate to less than one percent.

Hundreds of people trying to escape to West Germany from East Germany were shot, stepped over land mine wires, or were killed by dogs. Some of the guards themselves tried to escape to the west.

For over thirty years the Soviets built an elaborate system to imprison East German citizens in their own communist prison country. On November 9, 1989, a series of revolutions caused the demise of this border, the “Iron Curtain” between the East and the West.

The more visible and more photographed wall by the press, The Berlin Wall, a symbol of oppression and shame, of dividing a city between the communist ideology of the Soviets and the capitalist one of the West, was dismantled with much fanfare and celebration, chunk by chunk, by people who escalated the graffiti-painted side of the West. Checkpoint Charlie, the actual crossing point in Berlin, became part of the dustbin of history.

The main stream media revisits the Berlin Wall when it’s convenient to support the progressive globalist narrative of ‘no borders.’ They equate a wall today which protects the sovereignty of any nation as an oppression of the migratory masses from third world countries who are entitled to invade well-developed nations with generous welfare systems, a social security which is missing in their basket-case nations from which they hail. Asylum-seekers and economic refugees have certainly already overwhelmed several European countries.  

The inner East German border wall was also dismantled with less press coverage, creating almost two million tons of debris. A small section of this wall is preserved today in Hötensleben as a memorial to the death zone created between the free state in the West and the communist prison state in the East.

 

Why Are Billionaires, Media, Academia, Environmental Movement Promoting the Enslavement of their Citizens Who Must Decarbonize?

"One must give the Soviets their due. No other country is capable as are the Soviets of manipulating public opinion in the West." – Natalie Grant Wraga

Few intelligent people understood the global environmental communist agenda twenty years ago but Natalie Grant Wraga did. The majority did not pay careful attention and the MSM presented the environmental agenda of Cultural Marxism in a very positive light that seemed logical.

Most people understood the chemical and trash pollution of air, water, and soil. We could see it around us. Nobody wanted to live in a dirty world, polluted beyond safe and healthy habitation. Who can possibly object to the protection of endangered species that have been overhunted for food, selfish predatory trophies, or tribal customs?

But that is not what the environmental Cultural Marxists referred to – they wanted to decarbonize our civilized life, turn us back to a more primitive living in order to better control every facet of our lives, and to reduce the much maligned CO2, the gas of plant life, to levels progressives determined were safe for human and animal habitation.

In an article published in June 16, 2008, “The Marxist Roots of the Global Warming Scare,” Wes Vernon quoted Natalie Grant Wraga: “Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values.”

Wes Vernon mentioned in his article that Natalie Grant Wraga died in 2002 at the age of 101 and “was an internationally-recognized expert on the art of disinformation.” In her obituary in the Washington Post, “Herbert Romerstein, veteran intelligence expert in the legislative and executive branches of government, described Grant/Wraga as ‘one of our leading authorities’ on Soviet deceit.”

He further said that John Berlau of Investors Business Daily “wrote that some of the most respected scholars on Soviet Intelligence have credited this woman with teaching them how to penetrate desinformatzia, Moscow’s term for its ongoing operation to deceive foreign governments.”

Natalie Grant Wraga published her article, “Green Cross: Gorbachev and Global Enviro-Communism,” in the spring of 1998 at the age of 97. Very involved, alert, and out-spoken, Grant became legally blind in her late 80s and was helped in her writing pursuits by her devoted reader/researcher who prefers to remain anonymous. She learned a lot in the process of helping Natalie and considered her an early voice of the movement that would later emerge as The Tea Party.

The Soviets, who at the time were promoting their influence via the ‘peace’ movement, had decided to replace the issue of ‘world peace’ with the task of protecting the world’s environment. “Although ‘peace’ still remains a prominent item on the list of deceitful operations of Soviet leaders,” said Natalie Grant in 1998, “protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for.”

At the time, there were two groups, Natalie said, who represented environmentalism on the world stage – the Earth Council, an NGO chaired by Maurice Strong, then a U.N. top-tier bureaucrat, and the Green Cross International (GCI), a non-governmental organization (NGO) linked to Moscow and chaired by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, its founder.

According to Natalie Grant Wraga, GCI could trace its roots to the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders of Human Survival, in short the Global Forum.  Global Forum was supposed to join the Earth Aid Society through dialogues with its founder, C. Nobel.  The group first met in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in June 1985.

The meeting deliberated environmental degradation and depletion of earth’s resources. According to Grant, two people in the meeting were Angier Biddle Duke, former chief of protocol in the Kennedy and Johnson administration, and Congressman James H. Scheuer of New York. The Congressman visited Moscow and Soviet officials attended a subsequent 1987 conference in Oxford, England. Strangely, she said, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mother Teresa were also in attendance at this conference.

The next big conference of the Global Forum was held in Moscow in 1990 and was co-sponsored by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. With the Academy of Science supporting its content, speakers included U.N. Secretary General and then Senator Al Gore who spoke as a member of the Global Forum Council. He wrote an article in Shared Vision, the Global Forum publication. The keynote speaker was Mikhail S. Gorbachev, then President of the USSR.

The summary of his speech appeared in Shared Vision No. 7 on p. 11 along with the following recommendations: demand a nuclear test ban, establish an international monitoring of the environment, sign a “covenant” to protect “unique ecological zones,” pledge support of U.N.’s environmental programs, and of the June 1992 international conference on the environment in Rio, Brazil.

Natalie Grant Wraga believed that Gorbachev, as President of the USSR, was speaking and promoting the views of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These “communist recommendations” were taken to heart by the Global Forum which became a “communist front and started acting upon Gorbachev’s suggestions.”

Grant/Wraga thought that naïve non-communist environmentalists were duped into joining the communist effort to turn the communists’ recommendations into a battle to protect the Earth. Several events pushed the agenda further:

1.    Stockholm Conference in 1972 (Secretary General was the Canadian millionaire Maurice Strong) – he managed to force his environmentalist agenda onto the world

2.    U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 asked for a code to impose behavioral norms for individuals and states in regards to Earth

3.    The First Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 influenced 178 countries to sign the 40-chapter U.N. document called U.N. Agenda 21; politicians embraced it at first, then started calling everyone that criticized it as conspiracy theorists, then brazenly adopted it one county and town at a time with grants from the federal government disbursed through a foreign entity operating at local levels, the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI)

4.    Formal launching of the Green Cross International in 1993, Kyoto, Japan when Gorbachev accepted the nomination as founder and chairman

5.    U.N. Agenda 21 of 1992, the blue print of Sustainable Development, now part of every government plan around the world, was further promoted and augmented during meetings in Copenhagen, Cairo, and Beijing. Social justice, a blatant communist doctrine, appears prominently in this document and is now heavily promoted by academia and the main stream media who are indoctrinating the American public non-stop.

6.    Rio+5 met in March 1997 to assess the progress of Sustainable Development five years after 1992 Rio conference

7.    The U.N. Second Earth Summit in New York, attended by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore stressed “aid to developing countries” and reducing emissions of “greenhouse gases,” a pact designed, in Grant’s opinion, “to cripple what’s left of American industry.”

The Earth Charter, which had been chaired by Maurice Strong until his death, had collaborated with Green Cross International, chaired by Gorbachev, and launched an Earth Charter in 1994 in Hague. In order to maintain life on earth, countries and their citizens had to engage in “norms of ethical and moral behavior” in all sectors of society as prescribed by these communists. The idea of “consensus” was developed, the bogus scientific “consensus” that progressives are browbeating real scientists with, and ridiculing and marginalizing those who deny that anthropogenic global warming exists.

Green Cross International (GCI) promoted Gorbachev’s communist values while he called for a “new civilization.” What this new civilization entailed was not explained but it was certainly not democracy, nor prayers, since Gorbachev had said that neither can solve the manufactured and bogus “world crisis.” He constantly discussed “change of values” but did not specify what values needed changing, why, and how. But he did say that the planet had rights and “the rights of the Earth” had to be guaranteed.

Natalie Grant Wraga wrote, “GCI suggests greater focusing on ‘soft law.’ Soft law refers to non-binding documents drawn up by special interest groups, such as GCI or the Earth Charter Council, that establish ‘norms,’ hoping they will take on the force of ‘law’ through customary practice. Majority rule and dissent are thereby circumvented.” Grant/Wraga was right, as most of U.N. Agenda 21, although not ratified by the U.S. Senate, has been implemented at all local levels through ICLEI’s visioning committees of Green Growth/Smart Growth initiatives of Sustainable Development.

The U.S. Chapter of Green Cross International, named Global Green USA, was opened in 1994 by Gorbachev during his visit. Its slogan was “one world, one people,” which brings into focus why every school and college in our nation now promotes global citizenship, anti-Americanism, social justice, and total divorce from one’s history, traditions, sovereignty, borders, language, and citizenship.

Grant/Wraga wrote, “Barely one year after its establishment, Green Cross and Crescent International had already formed five national chapters with two headquarters in Hague and Geneva.” She pointed out that none of these organizations had helped any flood or earthquake victims, oil spills’ mitigation, other environmental disasters, and have been silent on dam projects. They have been “long on rhetoric but short on action.”

When Grant/Wraga wrote her article on the Enviro-Communism in 1998, she astutely pointed out that the green movement, green on the outside and red on the inside, was a “Soviet disinformation operation” in which “Facts are exaggerated into a ‘nightmarish’ picture of floods, scorched earth, disease and death. The target was the industrialized West,” scared into submission by “Moscow’s sympathizers in science, academe, and the slavishly obedient Establishment media.”

The 97-year old Natalie Grant Wraga, referring to Maurice Strong and Mikhail Gorbachev, asked a very profound and telling question, “Who profits from the activities of these two men?”

Who profits today from the global warming/climate change industry, worth trillions of dollars? Why are billionaires, the media, the academia, and the environmental movement promoting the enslavement of their citizens who must decarbonize? If they are so worried about the environment, why are they not giving up their fossil-fuel driven wealthy lifestyles and huge fortunes to the poor of the entire world and become poor like the rest of them?

 

Borders Do Matter

Fintina Alba Memorial called "Troita"
 

Political elites have used social engineering to control masses of people and territories over the millennia. They have redrawn borders and moved tribes and herded people into harsher environments, not ideally suitable for human habitation and agriculture; they have sent humans to occupy already heavily populated areas through invasion, conquering them, destroying the local inhabitants’ religion in the process, and forcing them to accept the conquering religion of Islam. Christians organized their own crusades in response, to regain the territories occupied by Muslims.

Many borders have been erased or redrawn as the result of greed, war, war reparations, communism, colonialism, Nazism, Islamic conquests, tribal wars, and other politically and economically driven search for land, natural resources, drinking and irrigation water, navigable water, oil, diamonds, and precious metals.

In the 21^st century, the technocracy and the global elitists have pushed the social engineering much further, by planning to erase all national borders and destroying sovereignty in order to allow free massive migration of peoples around the globe, and by redistributing wealth from the haves to the have nots, regardless of effort.

The British found out that borders are important and chose to vote for Brexit, the exit from the mammoth technocratic experiment called European Union, a state-like federation controlled by Germany.

Angela Merkel invaded her own people with Islamist “refugees,” men of military age who have left their wives, mothers, elderly, and children behind to fight their tribal wars in Syria, while they slashed and burned across Europe, in order to eventually conquer thousands of years of Christian civilization through demographics and the politics of multiculturalism.

Nations want borders, people want to identify with their ancestors, their history, their families, their language, and their native ancestral lands where their heroes lay buried, where archeological remnants of their glorious past can be found, catalogued, and displayed in museums, a collective shrine to our human civilization. 

People are drawn to those with a common bond that establishes where they came from and exemplifies the long and arduous history of survival against all odds. Most people are fascinated by their own genealogical roots and spend time and resources to find out where they came from. Others hyphenate their names to identify with the continent where their ancestors came from.

The desire to belong to your own kind is exemplified by the tragedy that took place 76 years ago at the border between today’s Russia and Romania. On April 1, 1941, on the day of the Holy Easter, a large column of villagers, who were fed up with the Soviet utopian exploitation, attempted to cross into Romania. They were massacred not far from the Romanian border, men, women, children, and grandparents, by machine guns and swords of the Soviet cavalry at Fintina Alba.

On a snowy day, Petru Grigor, Director of Historical and Cultural Research of Cernauti, talked about Romania’s martyrs and their bloody massacre. In the background is the memorial erected to remember those innocents who died in their quest for freedom, away from Soviet-imposed border that destroyed and separated Romanian villages and families of Bucovina. http://trinitastv.ro/stiri-video/ecouri-ale-tragediei-de-la-fantana-alba-si-lunca-80291

The Soviets had installed a new border in June 1940 between USSR and Romania, cutting large chunks of Romanian territory and annexing it to the Soviet Union.

The Red Army had occupied Basarabia, northern Bucovina, and Hertza in the military campaign of June 28-July 4, 1940, an area of almost 20,000 square miles with a population of 3.8 million people. Ready to occupy it with a full-scale invasion, the Soviets gave Romania an ultimatum on June 26 but the Romanian Army, in order to avoid military conflict, agreed to withdraw from the territories. Germany knew of the Soviet interest and remained silent. France, guarantor of Romania’s borders, fell. This emboldened the Soviets to issue the ultimatum of surrender.

Thus a large part of Moldova became, on August 2, 1940, part of the Moldova Soviet Socialist Republic, encompassing most of Basarabia, and part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the breakaway Transnistrian state.

The Hertza region and other regions inhabited by Slavic majorities in northern Bucovina, northern and southern Basarabia, became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Those who objected to the Soviet occupation were politically persecuted, arrested, deported to labor camps where few survived, and executed.

In January and February 1941 massacres took place at Lunca in the region Cernauti, and in spring 1941 at Fintina Alba, in Poiana Varnitei (Varnita canton). About two km from the border, Romanians, who wanted to return to their motherland and their ancestral lands, were murdered by Soviet soldiers.

Villagers had written letters, asking the new Cernauti authorities to allow them to return to their country. In March 1941, the villagers of Storojinet also petitioned to return to Romania, but the requests were denied, and the villagers returned home.

They made the fateful decision to leave on the rumor that the Soviet authorities would allow them to cross the border unharmed, and they would be able to rejoin the Romanian families left behind.

The villagers of Patrautii de Jos, Patrautii de Sus, and Suceveni went to church, prayed for a while, raised a white flag to show that their intentions were peaceful, and over 1,500 people joined a long procession, marching to turn in their requests to be allowed to return to their motherland, Romania.

Many others joined this column in the center of Hilbocia, more than 5,000 souls. A Soviet policeman urged them to return to their homes as their applications were not even accepted, much less considered. Deciding that they would rather die free than live under the Soviet boot, the group resolved to cross the border illegally. As Petru Grigor told the story, the villagers were met by Soviet border guards with machine guns, who mowed the column down in an inferno of bullets and death. “God cried that day.”

An investigation made in 1943 Bucovina, with the help of eye witnesses, discovered the names of 26 martyrs who died on that fateful day, April 1, 1941, in Fintina Alba. A monument called “troita” was erected on the site by Ukraine in 1991, following its installation to power after the dissolution of USSR.

The journalist Ion Dominte, writing in the newspaper “Bucovina” about the massacre at Fintina Alba, left a historical record of the events. The mass deportations of Romanians that took place in the first year of installation of the Soviet regime in this area came to light. Petru Grigor suggested that archeological digs should take place today, to find out the true number of those who were killed.

Orthodox Church pilgrimages with prayers and wreath-placing ceremonies take place every year “in memoriam” of those who sought freedom at all costs and did not wish to live under the Soviet boot across the border from their national roots.

Rationed Food and Purposeful Starvation

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them.

The interminable lines looked like this bread line pictured here. We never knew what was sold at the end of a line we happened to come upon, but we knew we needed whatever people lined up to buy, so we joined the line.

If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the front counter.

People carried cash and a shopping bag just in case they discovered hard to find items: toilet paper, aspirin, cotton balls, soap, potatoes, oranges, apples, flour, sugar, or cooking oil. From time to time, the shortage was so bad, we were issued rationing coupons. Once you ran out of rationing coupons for the month, you could not buy anything unless you were lucky enough to have extra cash to shop from the burgeoning black market of hoarders with communist party connections.

The ruling elite, of course, was fat and happy, shopping at their own grocery stores, usually located underground the local Communist Party headquarters.

It wasn’t that the country did not produce enough food in spite of its disastrous centralized communist party planning. The mad dictator Ceausescu was determined to industrialize the country at the expense of people’s food – he exported so much to the West in exchange for technology and hard currency that the Romanians had to make do with the leftover food not fit for export.

The agricultural five year plan was developed by communist bureaucrats who were community organizers with very little experience at producing anything and very little formal education. They were schooled in the fine art of radical agitation.

Around Christmas time and Easter, there would be more food sent to stores, the lines were shorter for a few days and the stores better stocked. But that did not last very long. People would wipe out the supply in no time and the store shelves would be empty again, with one very expensive salami hanging behind the counter or in the window, buzzed by flies.

But that was nothing compared to the Soviet plan to starve the Romanian population of Bessarabia in 1946-1947 in order to achieve collectivization. According to the 1897 census, almost 48% of the population was Moldovan and thus spoke Romanian. Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina were Romanian-held prior to the military occupation by the Soviet Red Army during June 28-July 4, 1940. To avoid a military conflict, Romania withdrew from the area following a Soviet ultimatum delivered on June 26. The Romanian province was recaptured by Ion Antonescu from 1941-1944 and then reoccupied by the Soviets in 1944. The regions were subsequently incorporated into the USSR.

I recently came across an eye-witness 25 minute documentary by Bogdan Parlea, “Marturii Despre Suferintele Romanilor din Basarabia” (“Witness to the Suffering of the Romanians in Bessarabia”), produced by the Fundatia Sfintii Inchisorilor and Fundatia Parintele Arsenie Boca. Hundreds of thousands of Moldovans died at the hands of their Soviet Socialist tormentors who confiscated their crops by force and shipped the food to USSR. Wheat and corn was left to rot and mold in uncovered wagons at train stations; it was done to leave farmers as poor and desperate as possible in order to better manipulate and control them. http://www.identitatea.it/foametea-din-basarabia-1946-1947/

According to Alexandru Moraru, the gazette “Moldova Socialista” (“Socialist Moldova”) reported on January 28, 1947 that the food industry in the region had exceeded butter production by 33.2 percent, meat production by 32.5 percent, and canned food by 101.9 percent. This was the food confiscated from the starving Moldovans who were too weak to bury their own dead. http://www.historia.ro/exclusiv_web/general/articol/canibalismul-provocat-sovietici-basarabia

It was a Soviet state secret - nobody was allowed to write or speak about the horrors that took place in Chisinau, Orhei, Balti, Cahul, and other villages, how collectivization agents took the last drop of food and grain from the farmer’s barns, and how the children of Moldova were kidnapped, brought into homes, murdered, cooked, and eaten.

Survivors were interviewed as eye witnesses to the communist power which forced peasants to pay confiscatory taxes as well as huge quantities of their crops to the Soviet state, leaving them with little to eat. The small crop yields resulting from a very dry growing season coupled with the forced confiscation in the name of collectivization caused mass famine. Ten percent of the 1.5 million population died of starvation and a large percentage that survived were severely malnourished, looking like Holocaust victims.

Anatolie Iov Spinei described how the crop yield in 1946-1947 was only 500-600 kg per hectare due to the draught that year and the forced quota to the Soviet state was also 500-600 kg.

Eugenia Ciuntu described how her family dug a large barrel in the ground and hid grain inside but the Soviet community organizers came with sticks and tapped the ground, finding the barrel in the soft dirt. They were tapping everywhere, even hay stacks, in an attempt to find every last drop of grain.

Petre Buburuz, Orthodox Priest, explained that the end game was to starve and kill as many peasants as possible, take their land, and establish the Soviet collectives, the “colhoz.” He described how people kidnapped other people and sold them for meat.

Margareta Spanu Cemartan talked about the “communist ideology to scare people, to bring them to desperation,” to make them acquiesce to become part of the collectivization when faced with the prospect of dying. Farmers will turn in their pre-determined quota of grain to the waiting trains, receive a receipt, and then the communist agents would come back for a second round of quotas, forcing them to sweep the last kernels of wheat and corn from their barns and give up their last chicken, cow, or pig. They were left with 8 children and nothing to feed them.

What did they eat? How did they survive? Parents fed their children first and chose to die the swelling and painful death of starvation. Nadejda Botea told how some men ground tree bark to feed their families. Valentina Sturza said that those found hiding food, were sent to Siberia 10-15 years in labor camps. Some survived by boiling non-poisonous weeds.

Ion Moraru said that every family had to turn in a certain quantity of everything that was produced on a farm, eggs, meat, grain, milk, cheese, wool, but not all peasants had all of these, so they had to pay extra taxes to make up for the shortage of food quota. Many were taken to the police precinct and beaten.

Those in charge of the collective farms were afraid to tell Stalin and his henchmen that the crop had been poor because of the draught. Consequently, the quotas were not adjusted to reflect the low crop yield.

People were so desperate to eat, they sold everything of value, icons, gold items, carpets, windows, doors, silverware, candlesticks, rosaries, including the clothes off their backs. According to Anatolie Iov Spinei, “Bread had become the currency.  A carpet was worth a loaf of bread.”

Teodosia Cosmin talked about eating weeds. Her mom sold every piece of clothing in her daughters’ dowry trunks in order to survive.

Anastasia Ursachi talked about farmers keeping cows and goats in the house with them otherwise they were stolen and eaten. “Women carried babies to term, killed them, and fed them to the other children,” she said.

They ate all dogs and cats. Nadejda Botea described how a woman’s husband passed away; she put the body in the attic and fed him daily to her children. The weak were robbed of their food and possessions, so deep was the desperation.

Those who did not engage in cannibalism, were so weak, they were unable to bury their dead. They dragged them into mass graves and abandoned them. Some died when the new crop came in and families ate too much.

After watching this shocking eyewitness documentary with film footage of that time period, I will never again look at food in the same way. The inhumanity of a desperate human being in the quest for survival at all costs is glaring and devastating evidence why communists should never be allowed to take power again.