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?

 

Vladimir and His Journey to Freedom

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”             -  Albert Einstein

Klevan, Ukraine
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

My friend Vladimir came to the United States legally in 1979. It was almost impossible to come illegally from the former Soviet communist state, USSR. It was the first and last time in his life when being Jewish helped him a lot, he said. If he would have been a member of the communist party, Vladimir would not have been allowed to immigrate to the United States at that time or to become an American citizen.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s agents of the immigration office loved America and did their best to protect it from invasion by flotsam and jetsam from third world dictatorships, especially communist ones.

Being a member of a communist party today is a badge of foolish smugness since academia and the Obama administration have advanced the global communist platform continuously. Who would have thought that, after escaping communism in the late 1970s, Vladimir would eventually have to live again under communism in the 21^st century America, where it is worshipped by a large percentage of the American people. Did America not fight a war in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism? How many millions died in the fight against communism and as a result of the oppressive exploitation of the utopian ideas of a professorial bum called Karl Marx?

Vladimir’s escape from Kiev was immigration based on religious beliefs. One could argue today that the mostly male, young, and military age “refugees” from Syria and the Middle East are refugees from tribal wars and religious beliefs.

The fundamental difference between Jewish immigrants then from the Soviet Union and other communist satellite countries and today’s “Syrian refugees” is that Judaism is a religion while Islam is a theocracy and a legal system of governance based on Sharia Law. These “refugees” are economic refugees who are not interested in assimilating and contributing to make America great as Jews did. These Muslims want to take over our country and change our Constitution to Sharia Law.  As statistics show, a large percentage of these immigrants become immediate welfare dependents and remain so in perpetuity.

The Communist bloc nations severely restricted freedom and human rights to their populations. Vladimir would not have been able to immigrate to the U.S. had it not been for the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974. Two Democrats, Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, and Rep. Charles Vanik of Ohio, sponsored the bill which passed both houses unanimously. President Gerald Ford signed the bill into law on January 3, 1975. Vladimir and his family were beneficiaries of the Jackson-Vanik amendment which allowed Jewish people to immigrate to the West.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Jewish immigration loophole closed. Vladimir was lucky and escaped with his wife and son two months before the border closed. Immigration resumed in the late 1980s, generally for economic reasons, hence it was called the “sausage expatriation.” This was descriptive of the lone sausage or salami hanging in the windows of grocery stores during the communist era when shortages of food plagued every centrally planned economy. Socialist Venezuela is going through severe shortages of food, diapers, and toilet paper, in a country with huge oil reserves. Cuba is a classic example of a country exploited for 59 years by the communist junta of Fidel Castro.

In December 2012, President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, repealing the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that gave freedom from the communist oppression to so many Jewish people.

The Soviets and even the former dictator Ceausescu took advantage of this Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The Soviets imposed a “diploma” tax on immigration.  The tax was so high that, after the outcry from the West, it was removed after being in effect for over a year. Ceausescu allegedly charged Jewish émigrés $1,000 per head. His regime charged me for my education before I was allowed to leave.

Vladimir’s family paid $500 per person to renounce their Soviet citizenship. Consequently, instead of a passport, they received a piece of paper with a handwritten note under citizenship, “stateless.” They were “stateless” but free.

Although this amendment only applied to Jews and Germans under the “family reunification” egis, the Russians used this opportunity to also expel quite a few dissidents, Soviet writers and other top intelligentsia, who were too much in the public eye to make them disappear, and were thorns in the side of the Soviet regime.

Vladimir remembered that there was no synagogue in Kiev when he grew up, they worshipped underground. A few Christian cathedrals were left for baptisms, weddings, and burials. If people attended church, special agents from each factory were sent to spy on their employees who would pray on Christmas, Easter, or other special holidays. They wrote names down and made sure that such worshippers were given a really hard time in society. They oppressed everybody.

No entrepreneurs were allowed in the former Soviet Union. Those who tried were caught and severely punished. It was easy to go to Siberia for 15 years for a small infraction. His best friend’s parents tried to make candy at home and sell it to friends and neighbors. Because the father was found to have extra cash in the home, over and above his allowed salary, he was arrested by police and later summarily shot. If the commies really wanted to catch someone and make them disappear, it was easy to set them up, to put something incriminating in their homes, and then arrest them for the set-up crime.

Living on the edge of fear was something people got used to. People worried about families, friends, and children. “Soft pressure” was exerted often instead of jail or execution. “Soft pressure” meant that, if you were not in line with the communists, you and your children were not allowed to find jobs, or decent jobs, housing, attend good schools, or universities. And you were constantly watched by the neighborhood informer.

It was a psychological game to keep you suppressed and oppressed at the hands of the state. It was a faceless type of oppression; you never knew who ordered it or exactly why. “They might let you know somehow but you never knew to whom to apologize for your infraction. In Vladimir’s estimation, at least 25 percent of the population was treated this way and they had no recourse.

Vladimir described how getting permission to immigrate took from six months to seven years for some people. Anybody attempting to leave was considered a traitor to the state.  In order to protect your boss from punishment for keeping a traitor employed, you had to leave your job; it was shameful and unpatriotic to keep such a person employed, such a “quisling.”

Wondering how the Soviets knew he was Jewish, Vladimir explained that everything had to be disclosed on the employment forms and it became part of the employment record that followed workers everywhere. Most places, once they found out that the applicants were Jewish, they were told they were wasting their time, they would not be hired.

Vladimir’s case was different because he was an exceptional professional. He was a geophysical engineer in the oil and gas field, working in a Soviet institute of 550 people, with many geologists, engineers, researchers, oil and gas explorers, specialists who knew how to put out oil fires through geological drilling and detonation, and many involved in research and development.

Once he was part of a small group that came up with a plan to put out a difficult oil well fire which they were able to extinguish in six days, a spectacular result, devising a plan to drill sideways in hard rock. For his part, Vladimir was given a bonus of 60 rubles, and a personal visit from the minister of energy. But Vladimir was happy with the personal satisfaction of a job well-done.

Forty-year old Vladimir, his younger wife, and eight-year old son left USSR on the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, November 7. The customs officers, armed to their teeth, reminded them that everybody was celebrating the Soviet Revolution and “you traitors are leaving the country.”

They were allowed to take 72 pounds per person and, not knowing where they would end up, they took forks, pillows, a frying pan, winter shoes, and other implements for survival. I remember when I left legally in 1978 with two sets of sheets that never fit any bed in America.

They were allowed to exchange from rubles the equivalent of $100 per person, $300 for his family, and he still has the money in an envelope. “This was our life-line. We did not have much family to leave our personal property with since most perished in WWII. We gave friends our books, we could not give away photographs older than ten years, and everything was strictly catalogued.” A person was only allowed a wedding band, a pair of earrings, nothing more expensive than 50 rubles, no paintings, and no art objects, nothing that was not on the approved list. Anything extra had to be given to the state. “My friend had given me some paintings, I had to give them back; if I hadn't, the state would have confiscated them.”

It took six months to a year to get paperwork to prove that they did not owe anything to the state. It was a terrible life to extricate from the clutches of communism and to gain freedom in the west. They would get the run around from every office. They had to prove so many things, they had to go to archives to prove everything and run the gauntlet of the Soviet red tape. “That was my life for six months.” Vladimir cannot understand why ignorant Americans are so eager to become communist!

A church in New York help them start their new life in America, got jobs, and eventually built a professional career that took him to Virginia where I met him a few years ago.

Since they left, Vladimir never went back to Kiev, now part of Ukraine. Many others, who left like him, did go back. He would like an apology from the state for what they have put them through. The chance of getting such an apology is zero. The country is no longer the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, it is now Ukraine.

© Ileana Johnson 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Inese's Story of Pain and Triumph

Inese before the fire

Our paths have crossed in 1998. I was looking for an elegant but inexpensive dress in Parisians, a department store in the newly opened mall in the neighboring town. The stylishly dressed blonde, blue-eyed associate seemed out of place; she certainly did not look southern, did not dress southern, she belonged in a chic boutique in Europe.

With her foreign accent and impeccable professionalism, she offered to search off the show floor for a classy dress. After about ten minutes she returned with a beautiful black dress with tiny white polka dots, perfect for a teacher like me. I bought the dress and, while chatting with Inese, I found out that she was from Latvia and had recently gotten married to a local man named Mike, thus explaining her American last name.

This chance encounter was meant for a reason but I did not know why at the time. I had returned many times afterwards and we spent time eating out, socializing, and talking about the past and the future. We invited her into our home and she visited a few times with her young daughters. We built a friendship based on the common experiences of having lived in Eastern Europe under the communist boot, and the life of a foreign transplant married to an American.

Trying to fit into the southern culture was challenging because acceptance was based on how many generations of one’s ancestors lived in those parts. A college education or the willingness to assimilate and contribute to society in a positive way was far less significant. Seven generations of southern residence, we were told, was the passport to societal acceptance. Little did they know that, instead of legal immigrants like us, in two decades Americans would be forced by their own governments to accept illegal immigrants and dangerous refugees from far more threatening locales and backgrounds.

Inese was born and raised in Riga, Latvia, and speaks fluent Russian and Latvian. Her love of tea changed her life forever on a fateful day in May 1974. She was eight years old and home alone. As she turned on the gas stove, a slow leak which had built up gas in the small room blew up in her face and ignited her flannel nightgown. Not knowing what to do, she crouched down and hid her face inside her knees, a move that saved her face but burned her entire torso. By the time the fire was put out, she had third degree burns on 60 percent of her body. A neighbor pulled off what remained of her thick gown which had exacerbated her severe burns.

The same neighbor called an ambulance and the day care where her father was picking up her three-year old brother. He dropped everything and rushed home.  The ambulance was already there and Inese was being whisked away on a stretcher, to the children’s wing of the Riga hospital.  Her mom was so distraught that she had to be admitted as well for a nervous breakdown. For two weeks she was cared for in the same hospital in which her daughter was struggling between life and death. Doctors did not expect Inese to survive and had told her dad to prepare for the worst.

But miraculously, she did wake up from her coma and told her doctor that she had seen a long and narrow tunnel with a bright light at the end. A booming voice had told her, it was not her time, she had to go back. That’s when she opened her eyes for the first time to such excruciating pain that she still remembers it vividly today, more than four decades later.

Inese endured three months of agonizing and unimaginable pain; her dad watched over her with devotion and fervent prayer. He sold most valuables and emptied his savings in order to bribe doctors and medical personnel with walk-around cash in envelopes, as it was the case in every socialist/communist country, to give extra medical attention to his little girl. One doctor, who was to care for her for many years, refused any money.

Once a week, Inese was taken to a special bath where she was soaked in a purple solution that would help nurses cut away, peel off, and remove the bandages that would stick to her burned flesh. The purple dye was an antiseptic to prevent infection. When morphine wore off, the eight-year old little girl would suffer merciless pain.

At the end of three months of torturous care, she was released just in time to start second grade. Her dancing days as an aspiring ballerina were over. Physical therapy did not help her much – the wounds were too fresh and she needed more grafts and many plastic surgeries for years. That is how her eight-year trek to St. Petersburg, then part of the USSR, began, every spring and summer vacation, for much needed reconstructions.

She and her mom traveled by train from Riga, Latvia, to St. Petersburg from 9:00 p.m. to 9 a.m., a 12-hour overnight ride. A caring friend would put her mom up in her small apartment for the duration. Remarkably, the courageous Inese remained an honor roll student through her entire ordeal. By the time she finished all possible plastic reconstructions, high school was almost over.

After college, Inese met, fell in love with, and married a Russian officer in 1987, at the age of 22, and settled into a difficult life on his assigned base in Irkutsk, Siberia, in the former USSR. To visit her mom and dad, Inese would fly for nine hours to Riga, Latvia, and back, even when she became pregnant. Despite all her pain and suffering, Inese gave birth to two beautiful girls in 1988 and 1989. The difficult marriage, drowning in infidelity and alcohol, ended five years later and it seemed that she was going to remain a single mom in Riga until God brought Mike into her life.

It was hard for most men to accept the responsibility of raising someone else’s little girls but Mike had a deep faith in God and a rare generosity. His kindness, determination, and love convinced her to marry him even though it meant that she had to uproot again and move to another foreign country. They were married in 1998, the year I met her in Tupelo.

A young grandmother, Inese is living today the peaceful life full of grace she always yearned for, even though one of her daughters is estranged from the family. Church, prayer, family, and God are very important parts of her life. She confessed to me recently that all the pain she endured during the eight years of constant physical therapy, skin grafts from her legs, and plastic surgeries, even the botched one in the U.S., do not even compare with the pain of not having the love and respect of her estranged daughter.

Yet Inese feels blessed and remains happy, positive, and hopeful, centered on her Christian faith, a true inspiration for other burn victims. During her life’s struggles, she had crossed the globe; she emerged from the difficult times of communist tyranny in USSR and landed in our vast country, where she built a better life for herself and for her family.

Stalin's Meditations Through the Writing of Dr. Watson

Struggling to survive on $3.10 minimum wage of 1978 America, I never envied or blamed anyone for my state in life. I understood the work ethic and the fact that everybody had to start at the bottom and climb the ladder of success if they worked hard.

I came here for the opportunities America offered. I wished to study and earn my Ph.D., raise a family, and be free under capitalism. I did not want my whole life to be watched by the dreaded communist police state and to stand in line for hours every day for our food. I was tired of poverty, fear, misery, and exploitation.

I never really talked about my former life publicly because I had a healthy dose of fear of all the communist agents that had infiltrated the west. I knew they were everywhere, hiding in plain sight in American society. Every knock on the door threw me into a panic – I was reliving the dreaded 2 a.m. knock on our apartment door in Romania.

On the days when the drudgery of being a low-paid secretary was discouraging, I imagined the innocent and happy eyes of my future children who would grow up to experience freedom, parental love, no hunger, a nice home of their own, toys, books, abundant water and electricity, and plenty of clothes to keep them warm.

I can still see in my mind’s eyes the twinkle of happiness when my Dad would bring home something special, grapes in winter, a pear, a banana, or an orange. I wanted to be able to do that for my children every day, without having to stand in endless lines and then come home empty-handed.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Ceausescu, and all those who forced communism and its police state upon millions, were truly evil and Machiavellian tyrants thirsty for absolute power and control.

Dr. Emile E. Watson wrote in 1952, on the occasion of Joseph Stalin’s 72^nd birthday, “Meditations of Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, alias Joseph Stalin,” with the idea to let “the aging Stalin, in his own words,” explain his world communism because the “ignorance of Communism has been a costly luxury for the American people.” (Meditations of Joseph Stalin, The American Coalition, Southern Building, Washington 5, D.C., 1952)

At that time, Dr. Watson’s book was recommended reading for high school students by The National Americanism Commission of The American Legion. http://www.legion.org/commissions/americanism

Millions of Stalin’s communist agents were spread around the globe, his “undercover army” mounting ideological attacks on the “social, political, cultural, and religious edifices of civilized society.” Dr. Watson criticized our foreign policy which he believed was based on “stupidity and the appeasement of Communism.”

In writing this book, necessitated by the fact that there were “several hundred thousand American Communists and fellow travelers in the United States,” Dr. Emile E. Watson consulted with “nine men in the United States and Canada” who were authorities on the subject of communism and of Stalin.

Stalin grew up in a blue collar family – his father was a shoe cobbler and alcoholic who beat his only child, and his mother was a laundress; they lived in squalor and poverty. He trained for five years at the Tiflis Theological Seminary. His life in such an austere and monastically simple environment may have contributed to his sullen and despondent disposition, while his atheism flourished. 

Stalin’s insubordination resulted in his expulsion from the seminary, perhaps guiding him into a future of street activism, crime, and revolution. Having been beaten repeatedly by his father, Stalin became brutal himself and a master at “evasion, trickery, and deception” while pretending to champion the cause of the poor and downtrodden.

After meeting Lenin in 1905 at a revolutionary party meeting in Tammerfors, Finland, Joseph V. Djugashvili was accepted into the ruling elites of the Party. His prior activities of payroll and bank robberies which funded the Bolsheviks, opened up new opportunities for the constantly unemployed and unskilled Joseph, nicknamed by Lenin, Stalin (Man of Steel).  But Lenin found him so capricious that he left instructions in his January 4, 1923 last will and testament that Stalin be removed from the position of General Secretary.

Sentenced to various jail terms and exile in Siberia between 1902 and 1917, the criminally-inclined Joseph changed his name 20 times and found ways to run subversive activities from various czarist prisons and even from Siberia. His experience there taught him how to build later an escape-proof labor camp with the “largest prison and exile population in the world.”

The Bolsheviks, who seized control in 1917, did not want a constitution that would interfere with what they wanted to do. After the Bolshevik dictatorship was entrenched, a Stalin constitution was adopted in 1929 which solidified a government based on “force, violence, recognizing no legal restraints, subject to no laws whatsoever.” 

Stalin’s totalitarianism was validated when the United States gave the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition in 1933. And, on August 17-24, 1943, at the first Quebec conference, a “death sentence was passed on freedom for Eastern Germany, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Manchuria and China.”

Dr. Watson explained that Roosevelt, “like most of the people of the United States, did not comprehend what Communism really is, how it works, and what it intends to do to the rest of the world.” The world did not understand how truly evil Stalin was. Contemporary Americans still have no idea how oppressive communism is and turn a deaf ear to survivor stories and to historical accounts.

The Soviet participation in the United Nations was not geared towards “world peace,” whatever that means, but to create “enmity and division among the non-Communist countries to the detriment of the United States.”

Stalin turned North Korea into a mini-Soviet Union and “trained and equipped a native army” which resulted in a conflict that the United Nations called, in liberal euphemistic fashion, a “police action,” while Stalin described the Communist Chinese fighters in Korea as “volunteers;” and millions of Chinese were subjugated to the will of Kremlin’s communist apparatus.

Stalin took absolute economic control by nationalizing light and heavy industries, commerce, arable land, subsoil, minerals, and water resources. Nothing was left to chance. Private mom and pop enterprises were forced to deliver any surplus to the Bolsheviks at very low and fixed prices, making it highly unprofitable to produce anything except subsistence crops and goods.

Lenin tried in 1921 to reverse the economic disaster and the depopulation of cities caused by the lack of food and succeeded in bringing in surpluses.  “By 1927 there was plenty of food in Moscow and in other cities.” The free enterprise system worked beautifully.

Stalin stepped in and, in 1928 private enterprise took a dive again when he forced collectivization which caused massive starvation in Russia in 1932. “From 1932 on, the Bolshevik regime went through one crisis after another, each worse than the other.”

The Bolshevik collectivism confiscated the peasants’ homes, livestock, tools, and placed them in the ownership of the new collective farm. Farmers were forced to work for their own subsistence, giving the lion’s share to the communists. Growers who resisted this massive confiscation became “enemies of the state” and were loaded onto cattle trains and sent into labor camps in Siberia where they succumbed to cold, hunger, and the backbreaking work.

Many farmers burned their barns, granaries, and killed their animals rather than turn them over to the Soviets – “50 percent of their horses, 45 percent of their cattle, and two-thirds of their sheep and goats.” Fifteen million died of starvation in the famine that ensued. And news of the disaster, like any other purge, was never allowed to travel outside of the Soviet Union.

To completely root out capitalist ideas and to fundamentally transform society, the ruthless communists formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922-1991) which forced people speaking 150 languages and dialects into a huge social engineering project.

“Whole populations, especially in the area of Western Europe, were uprooted. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Letts, Estonians, Germans and others were torn from their families and lands and shipped to remote regions.” All the groundwork was led by the “Communist Fifth Column directed from Moscow.”

Stalin wanted to make sure that the Communist Party survived long after he was gone, controlling the future of all human beings. Bolsheviks, he admitted, should have never been invited as part of the United Nations because they are “permanently at war, war against their own people and against the world.”

“We are war makers and will continue so until we have conquered the world,” Dr. Watson wrote in his book.

What kept millions and millions of Iron Curtain citizens compliant? They had been disarmed, unable to defend themselves, and were frightened by the 2 o’clock a.m. knock on the door when the political police might whisk them away, never to be seen again. This reign of “mute terror” kept them under control. The large contingent of family and neighbors turned police informers on each block were also a force to be feared.

How were so many people lured into accepting communism in the first place? It was plain discontent with one’s miserable status in life and unfettered envy of those who were successful. Communism was presented as the “drowning man’s last hope.” The false and deceptive slogan “forward” did not include personal responsibility for one’s choices in life, it was always someone else fault and nanny communism was there to fix it.

“Victims of poverty, disease, illiteracy and insecurity complexes, frustration, over-emotionalism, racial, religious and political intolerance, an urge of recognition of power are the motivating forces causing discontent among the peoples of the earth.”

Labor leaders in America had become pro-communist, undermining the very capitalist system which provided them with good wages and a standard of living far superior to any communist country.

It is incomprehensible how so many Americans can undermine their own capitalist way of life even today. That is because few understand how the kudzu seed of communism was sown into labor unions, government, and other institutions. Communism was presented as a magical cure for all diseases that “plague” the “socially unjust” capitalism.

The three steps that Stalin used to take over his communist satellite countries were:

1.      Sending in agents for propaganda, agitation, and street organization.

2.      Organize a Fifth Column (overt of covert operatives) and direct it.

3.      Take over the government.

In the Soviet Union Stalin controlled the Communist Party, its Central Committee, and the ultimate power broker, the Politburo. He controlled the state, the Communist Party, and the international communist movement.

He kept two million policemen to control the 300 million Sovietized Russians; additionally, he had the military and the infamous slave labor camps.

The M.V.D., the political police of two million, included agents who were assigned to watch the secret police. And then there was an inner group of thousands of specially-chosen men who answered only to Stalin.

The M.V.D., similar to Hitler’s Gestapo, was organized around regiments, divisions, an air force, tanks, infantry, and artillery. The inner army suppressed rebellions, controlled the railroads, borders, factories, power plants – “the obedience-compelling arm.”

“Every factory, every railroad and every government enterprise were controlled and held in check by these fractions and the M.V.D.”

The masses were also controlled by forcing them to join organizations such as labor syndicates, the young communist league, mandatory professional organizations, or the elementary school “pioneers” with their red scarves and revolutionary berets emblazoned with communist symbols.

Stalin’s Secretariat appointed representatives to all government agencies and to the Communist Party. These hand-picked representatives reported only to the Secretariat and “were authorized to appoint, remove, or command the personnel of any committee or agency.”

Doctors were his medical henchmen. Those who were suspected of harboring divergent opinions were murdered through slow-acting poisons. Lenin’s death is alleged to have been hastened this way.

Stalin was the ultimate dictator and ruler. He arrested, removed, and disposed of members of the Central Committee and Politburo, disappearing them overnight, even removing them from previously published photographs. Stalin was the final decision-maker who imprisoned 12 million Russians in forced labor camps, lording over his slave labor state.

A master in the art of indoctrination, Stalin took over the schools and dictated the curriculum, emphasizing Marx’s, Engels’, and Lenin’s Socialism and vilifying capitalism, molding the youth, controlling the press, radio, and movies. His cult of personality included adulation ceremonies, May 1 parades, military parades, large statues of himself and portraits placed in every institution, factory, and classroom. Journalists and artists were censored.

Bolshevism used propaganda to “create a breakdown between the more backward and undeveloped nations and the West, or as Lenin said, ‘to separate the metropolis from the hinterland,’ … a grand design of economic and political warfare.”

To disrupt the capitalist world economically, Stalin used communist-controlled or communist-influenced labor unions and the diplomatic campaign of “peace” while he thought of nothing else but “to sharpen my knife to cut their throats.”

The long-range Soviet plans to destabilize and destroy other governments also included “undermining their governments and institutions, organize their workers, and steal their secrets, including the atom bomb.”

During Stalin’s reign, Dr. Watson wrote, there were “half-million Communists and fellow travelers in the United States, plus hundreds of communist-front organizations and their subversive publications, with little opposition. Daily these are undermining the moral fiber of the people, and especially the youth.”

Stalin boasted, Dr. Watson wrote, that “My agents and fellow travelers are so deeply infiltrated into the fabric of the United States that they have become a powerful influence in government, industry, labor, education, and religion.”

His agents infiltrated public schools and colleges in the U.S. in the name of “progressive education” which was interpreted to suit their purposes. Dr. Watson wrote that the infiltration was facilitated by the “pirate method.” It was so much easier to enter a port and assault it by taking down the pirate flag and raising the flag of the country to be raided.

Stalin used psychological warfare to capture the empty minds of the young who were craving for direction.  Planting an idea is inexpensive and long-lasting, Dr. Watson wrote. Feeding the empty stomachs like the Americans do, he said, is lost overnight.

Dr. Watson wrote, “Hollywood is a powerful outlet for undermining the Capitalist system by creating doubts in the minds of the adults and, above all, the youth of the United States and other nations to which American films are exported.”

Stalin admitted that communists are dangerous like him because they have no ethics, no integrity, and recognize no moral law. They keep no promises or pledges, except those that are to their advantage. They place no value on human life and suffer no “disturbance of conscience.”

Dr. Watson wrote that our “nation will never fall if the majority of its leaders and people cling to the hand of God, creating a rebirth of religion and morality.”

 

 

Shameless Communist Propaganda from the Left

Photo credit: Ileana Johnson, 2013

Lately I see  a lot of Marxist propaganda in our country, particularly in the MSM and in education. I know all the slogans because I lived the lies of the communist propaganda for 20 years.

I will start with equal pay, social justice, and equality across the board by government fiat. The commie social justice was equality of misery, hunger, poor, cold, and cramped living conditions, scarcity of food, basic needs, electricity, water, and everything else  spoiled brats in America take for granted that is produced by a free market model. The Sochi hotel accommodations are a case in point. To deal with the misery, the workers (the proletariat), which was all of us (except the ruling regime), joked that the “communists pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work.”  I choose capitalist inequality any day.

“Collectivism, community, and the common good” meant that the elites in power stole for their own good and used everything that the community worked hard to produce. We acquiesced like sheep because the commies had jails, jailers, security police, informers, and a well-equipped army. We had nothing but fear and oppression.

NBC’s Olympic opening ceremony introduction described communist Russia as “one of modern history’s pivotal experiments.”  To say that the murder and suffering of millions of citizens who disagreed ideologically with the Soviets, was a vital experiment is a slap in the face of decency and humanity. How can you say that murdering, torturing, oppressing, and imprisoning people for their thoughts was a vital experiment?  Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted on February 7, 2014, “The NBC Olympics is absurd. The Soviet Union was a ‘pivotal experiment?’ Really?  No, it was an evil empire that murdered and oppressed.”

A play at the Arena Stage in the D.C. area, “The Tallest Tree in the Forest,” dedicated praise to the communist Paul Robeson who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and defended the Soviet death machine, aiding and abetting evil. He never mentioned Holomodor, the genocide by man-made starvation in Ukraine in 1932-1933. He was also silent about hundreds of naïve Americans who left in the 1930s for the Soviet Union only to die in the gulags. http://alextimes.com/2014/01/the-cost-of-fighting-the-good-fight/

A self-described communist wrote, “Why you’re wrong about communism: 7 huge misconceptions about it (and capitalism),” in an ill-informed attempt to rewrite the dreadful history of communism by making fallacious comparisons to capitalism. The article is a disturbing list of how the far left views communism.

Progressives have been quite successful in indoctrinating Americans into believing their fantastic misrepresentation of history and I’d like to offer counterpoints.

1.       The author says, “Communism necessarily distributes property universally, but, at least as far as this communist is concerned, can still allow you to keep your smartphone. Deal?” Not true, the property is not distributed, you cannot make deals, property is confiscated at the end of a gun from all people and becomes the patrimony of the ruling elites who use it as they see fit. You would not have a smartphone in the first place unless someone from a free economy developed it first and brought it to the market. Communism mandates “groupthink,” discouraging and punishing people who are creative and who desire to become entrepreneurs.

2.       Capitalist economies were based on free exchange, on the coincidence of wants, until the job-killing EPA regulations and outrageous taxation prevented many companies from producing competitive goods at affordable prices; labor unions controlled by the left drove the wage of a high school graduate to almost $50 an hour in some sectors, prompting many companies to outsource jobs or move to other countries for cheaper labor and less corporate taxation.

Nobody “is forcing you to work for a boss who is trying to get rich by paying you less and working you harder.” You are free to quit, move to any part of the country, and get a new job. That is not an option under communism where everyone works for the state, has a work card which must be stamped by the authorities, and must get the state permission to move or change jobs.

It is not true that the “U.S. particular brand of capitalism required exterminating a continent’s worth of indigenous people and enslaving millions of kidnapped Africans. And all the capitalist industry was only possible because white women, considered the property of their fathers and husbands, were performing the invisible task of child-rearing and housework, without remuneration.”

We did not exterminate an entire continent although some Indians were killed and pushed off their lands into reservations. That hardly qualifies as mass extermination. We did not enslave nor kidnap Africans. The British engaged in the slave trade and the African men and women were sold into slavery to the British by their own tribesmen. The British brought the slaves to the New World. There are many nations and cultures today that still engage in the slave trade. Where is the leftist outrage over that?

Capitalism did not develop because white women stayed home and raised their children without remuneration. That is the most laughable statement I had ever read. Women around the world, of all races, raise their children with love and without pay because we love our children and it is our maternal instinct to do so. We are not invisible. Many of us hold part-time jobs and some have full-time professional careers.

3.       Communism killed at least 100 million people through purposeful starvation, mass shootings, torture, imprisonment in gulags, concentration camps for re-education into the communist ideology, and for resisting the confiscation of their lands, homes, farms, food, and personal belongings. Purposeful famine and starvation as it happened in the Ukraine is a “left wing problem.” Do deny this historical truth is to revise history.

4.       To say that capitalist governments commit human rights atrocities in your lame attempt to excuse the real atrocities committed by communist regimes is unbelievable. 

Capitalism is not responsible for the genocide in Africa; the killing of indigenous tribes and of Christians is committed by Muslim groups in third world dictatorships.

Capitalism is not responsible for the malnutrition in Africa – we have certainly donated billions in food, aid, and specialists to grow crops. 

We are not responsible for “climate-borne deaths.” How exactly are we accountable for climate that has been changing for millions of years? The climate change is called seasons caused by the yearly revolution of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth’s axis, relative to the plane of revolution. Climate change is not man-made.

“Famine like the human species has never known is in the offing because the free market does not price carbon and oil-extracting capitalist firms have, since the collapse of the USSR, become sovereigns of their own.”  This sentence makes no sense. The author seems to imply that, if we don’t tax carbon, famine will take place. Carbon taxes do not benefit anyone but those who impose the taxes and do not reduce pollution.

Global warming is not settled science, it is a hoax and “consensus” science. We have certainly shoveled a  lot of global warming from our driveways this winter. And the expedition of Australian “scientists” to document how the ice caps had melted, were embarrassed when,  stuck in 13 miles of very thick ice, had to be rescued by crews with conventional fuel-driven means, at great cost to society. The desperate left called this cooling, that contradicted their global warming theory, the “Polar Vortex.” In my childhood, the Polar Vortex was called winter.

5.       Progressives, your brand of communism is not going to be “more open, humane, democratic, participatory, and egalitarian than the Russian and Chinese attempts managed.” It is still a form of tyranny, imposing your views of the world on the rest of us.

You cannot afford to bribe citizens forever into accepting your drug-induced utopian dreams that you have concocted in your social studies or ethnic studies classes at the liberal colleges you attended.

Your teacher lied to you in order to keep his/her high paying job and his classes full while promoting outrageous ideology.

 Your god, Marx, was a bum who never worked a day in his life, neglected his family, two of his children died of malnutrition, waiting on handouts from his rich benefactor.  There are only so many producers who work to spread their wealth around to the takers without a work ethic.

6.       “Communism is based on the total opposite of uniformity: tremendous diversity, not just among people, but even with in a single person’s occupation.” That is not true.

Diversity was strongly discouraged; we were expected to conform to a specific mold dictated by the communist party. We wore the same style shoes, always in short supply, and the same style clothes or uniforms.

If one tried to be different or do anything else other than what the assigned job was, you were taken in for questioning by the economic police, then by security police, your comings and goings were recorded by the bloc informer, your extra goods derived from such activity were confiscated, and your extra-curricular activities had to cease or else you went to jail.

“That so many great artists and writers have been Marxists suggest that the production of culture in such a society would breed tremendous individuality and offer superior avenues for expression.” Perhaps in your Marxist utopian dreams there was “tremendous individuality.” Avenues of expression were allowed within the strict communist ideology and slogans.

Yes, we had a culture; it was called Marxism and the worship of the communist party leaders. Every play, movie, poem, painting, picture, cartoon, song, dance, gymnastics, holidays, and athletic games had to proclaim communism and worship the dear leader. If an artist did anything that the party did not approve of, he/she was jailed and his/her works of art trashed and burned.

Lefties are delusional if they think that people had “universal access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You had the right to breathe if the party allowed you to live within the confines of their ideology. You were not allowed to travel; you had to register your residence within 7 days of moving to a new street or a new apartment so that the police could track you. If you did not report your new location, the bloc informer did, and you were subsequently fined and jailed for not doing so.

7.       Capitalism fosters individuality, not communism. In capitalism you don’t have to live in the same type of housing, you have choices in your daily life. You can even stay home shamelessly and claim perennial unemployment, disability, accept welfare, and mooch off your parents until middle age because you are trying to find yourself.

You now have ObamaCare which frees you from the drudgery of having to work. Somebody else is paying for your health insurance.

Under communism everybody had to work. Nobody was fed for free or received welfare. We lived in the same drab and dirty concrete 300 square ft. apartments, took the same dingy buses to work, rode the same rickety bikes, and walked everywhere. We had free medical care but, unless you had the sniffles, most people died when real surgeries had to be performed.

http://www.salon.com/chromeo/article/why_youre_wrong_about_communism_7_huge_misconceptions_about_it_and_capitalism/

Another example of revisionist history is the CNN’s 1999 twenty-four episode documentary, “Cold War,” presented as objective history. On the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, CNN is rebroadcasting its documentary through November 8, 2014.

According to Jaroslaw Martyniuk, “the documentary was infused with an extreme brand of revisionism verging on the tragicomic,… distorting reality and suggesting moral equivalence between the behavior of the Soviet Union and Western  democracies.”

Martyniuk’s  objections to the documentary are as follows:

-          Strong emphasis on Soviet regime “lofty” goals of decent education, free health care, common ownership of the land, and fairness but no mention of the savage revolution, the mass shootings, property confiscations, social engineering, and the millions who died in deliberate mass famines engineered by Lenin

-          CNN indicates that Stalin’s aims were not aggressive, “he feared encirclement by capitalist countries, he was merely establishing a buffer zone through his Eastern European satellite countries of the Iron Curtain”

-          CNN barely mentions the Soviet Union as a “prison of nations” and Stalin as a tyrant who subdued Eastern Europe through brutal coercion and terror

-          The Berlin Blockade episode does not point out the disparate buildup of troops – 40 combat-ready Soviet divisions in Eastern Germany as opposed to 8 allied divisions in Western Germany

-          CNN describes the introduction of the new Deutschemark (currency) and the financial aid (Marshall Plan) to rebuild the war-torn  West Germany as acts of aggression

-          Truman’s attempt to contain communism is labeled by CNN as “the official declaration of the Cold War” but the Soviet aggression and expansionism is ignored

-          In the episode “Reds,” CNN compares the Soviet Gulag with the 1947 investigation of the “Hollywood ten” by the House  Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC); there is no moral equivalency between the internment of 25 million prisoners in the Arctic death camps and ten Hollywood stars who lost their jobs or were jailed for refusing to answer questions before HUAC

-          CNN documentary excuses Stalin and his monstrous crimes  - Soviet Union had a good reason to be concerned by the shortwave transmissions and programming from Radio Liberty; no mention is made of the risk Soviet citizens took by listening to freedom radio broadcasts – deportation to gulags

-          The CNN series allocate 45 minutes to China, commenting that Mao’s Great  Leap Forward “caused millions to die;” to report accurately, it was a mass killing of 45 million Chinese, one of the most deadly man-made disaster in human history

-          While depicting in great detail the electric chair death of Ethel Rosenberg, the Cultural Revolution in China that killed and persecuted millions in violent skirmishes, is barely mentioned

-          The Cold War documentary does not reference the Venona files, discoveries made more recently  in Russian archives, or by historians Anne Applebaum, Simon-Sebag Montefiore,  Timothy Snyder, Vasili Mitrokhin, Frank Dikötter, and M. Stanton Evans.

In an ideal world, students and viewers should listen to the trustworthy voices of average citizens who endured and survived a harsh life during the terrible times of the brutal communist regimes. They should not listen to “progressive” writers who have never experienced communist life but spew very confidently communist propaganda through rose-colored glasses, articulating strong opinions formed and spun from textbook theories that have a distinct anti-American agenda.

The Cold War was a “colossal battle between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and democracy and totalitarianism.” Revisionist presentation of communist atrocities is a sad distortion of truth and of history.

Sources:  CNN’s Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy, Hoover Institution Press, 2000

Jaroslaw Martyniuk, February 2014