Communist Propaganda and Revisionist History

The communist propaganda has intensified at a fever pitch. It’s not just the supine main stream media that constantly bombard us with scripted and highly subjective chats/gossip pretending to be “news,” canned and distributed by the same progressive owners of the mass media who order their minions to read the latest socialist Democrat talking points. The objective is to use irrational mob mentality in order to stir hatred towards our President and of anything remotely conservative or pro-America.

It is Hollywood that makes a living in capitalist America by reading their movie lines written by someone else, and acting on celluloid as they are told, influencing Millennials with brains full of runny grits, telling us in front of microphones that they are experts because of a movie role they’ve played. Their educational “expertise” is contradicted by their high school dropout status.  

It is the vaunted halls of academia indoctrinating millions of young Americans, useful idiots, who have lost touch with reality, if they’ve ever had any contact with it, dumbed down by participation trophies and parents telling them how special they are, threatening teachers and principals, excusing moronic or bullying behavior, and lack of work ethic.

It is liberal arts colleges who give high tuition payers worthless diplomas. These “scholars,” trained in puppetry, social justice, non-existent “white privilege,” and racism stoked by the left, wonder why they cannot find jobs in their fields, blaming capitalism for their lack of employability and embracing communism’s purported equality and wealth confiscation of the “rich,” stretching the idea of rich to the breaking point.

Communism is now the new ideology of the left that the young and some old Americans have embraced with fervor, having no idea what it is, or any sympathy for the 100 million of humans who died as victims of communism.

Young Americans are totally blind and deaf to history and cover their ears and eyes and reject those who survived communism and have taken great pains and paid high prices to escape communist totalitarian societies. Most, like me, fleeing communist oppression, have left everything they’ve ever known and loved behind and came to America legally.

Why would anyone leave if communism is so great? How many Americans are clamoring to move to a communist country, giving up their American citizenship? Why would Cubans take great chances and die at sea in rickety contraptions on their voyage to America if Castro’s communism is so great? Why were so many innocent people shot and killed before 1989, trying to escalate the Berlin Wall from the communist German side to the free German western side if communism is so wonderful? Why would communists have to build barbed wire and cement walls to keep people prisoners in their own communist “paradise?”

You cannot, of course, ask logical questions of liberals lest be told that you are judgmental. I make decisions by using sound judgment and logic, not feelings and emotions like liberals do.

Real journalists, historians, and teachers must tell the truth about communism. The ideology is pure evil and has spawned a Marxist empire. History should teach and dissect very carefully for future generations what communism had done to citizens around the world during decades of totalitarian regimes’ rule of terror.

Vladimir Bukovsky took great risks when he and his friend Pavel photocopied archival documents in the early 1990s in Russia and from the Gorbachev Foundation archives in Moscow. These were brought to England by Pavel Stroilov. Bukovsky has published some of the documents and the links in his upcoming book in the English version, Judgment in Moscow, Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity. (May 2019) https://bukovsky-archive.com/

Bukovsky obtained thousands of documents over a period of a year. Had he not succeeded, he said, “it is highly likely that they would have lain secret for many more years, if not forever,” lost to history. While offering these documents for free to the western press, most have ignored him with “So what? Who cares?” The typical media tends to marginalize the anti-communism messenger with claims of “McCarthyism.”

Bukovsky wrote in Chapter 6, “The Revolution That Never Was,” that Gorbachev, with help from his most trusted aids, upon leaving Kremlin, copied top secret documents and stored them in the Gorbachev Foundation for “friendly researchers.” In 2003, Gorbachev was told to black out the documents. In the interim, however, Bukovsky’s friend, Pavel, copied a huge cache of documents on a daily basis and sent them to Bukovsky.

According to Bukovsky, the change that happened in 1989 in the communist world, the so-called fall, was too soft, too velvety as in the Velvet Revolution, to have happened by chance. There was no struggle, no terrible bloodshed, save for a few who had died in the Romanian December 1989 Revolution. The western world believed it as a chain of “accidents and coincidences.”

Bukovsky explains in his book that “these changes occurred due to a decision by Moscow and under certain pressure from the Kremlin: as we recall, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for conducting this operation.”  All the “liberalization” happened with Moscow’s blessing, said Bukovsky.

Among many examples, Bukovsky wrote about the Czech security that orchestrated their “revolution” during which it was revealed that a “killed student” was actually a very much alive and breathing employee of the Czechoslovak state security. The “revolution” failed to bring a “liberal” communist to power, instead bringing Havel.

Bukovsky provides documentary proof in his book that “the Velvet Revolution of 1989 was a Soviet operation” and that “the communist brethren all over the world continued to be trained, supplied with arms and technical means.” The Soviets had no intention of giving up their power and influence in the world.

Twenty-nine years have passed since the “fall” of communism yet its influence has grown globally by leaps and bounds, promoted constantly by various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with deep pockets, calling themselves non-profits, affiliated with the U.N., and promoting the 17 goals of the communist globalist Agenda of 2030.

New generations have been brainwashed into collectivism by Common Core standards of education, using Mother Earth environmentalism and global warming/climate change as Armageddon. These educational standards have been introduced concurrently around the world by the same billionaires and their foundations. They are determined to shape humanity into their view of the world. And they found politicians like Ocasio-Cortez who is telling her young acolytes that, in order to save the world from extinction, people must rethink having babies.

It is evident that, to free the world from the murderous legacy of communism, one must “use history to discredit the ideas on which communism was based.” But real history is no longer taught in public schools, replaced by progressives’ revisionist history.

Bukovsky asks very important questions, “Why were the horrific crimes of the Soviet Union – among them concentration camps, torture, starvation, and even genocide – so often misunderstood and ignored by Western politicians, academics, and the media? After the regime’s fall, why did the world’s democracies, who less than 50 years before had been rigorous in punishing Nazism atrocities, stand by as the moment passed to put the communist perpetrators on trial?”

Bukovsky was able to prove through archival documents Moscow’s influence “over Western political parties, governments, media, and prominent individuals.”

 

My Visit to The National Museum of Health and Medicine

National Museum of Health and Medicine
Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 2014

Surgeon General William A. Hammond founded the Army Medical Museum in 1862 to “document the effects of war wounds and disease on the human body.” Its staff has conducted pioneering research on infectious diseases, pathology, and medical techniques. Museum researchers “contributed to discovering the cause of yellow fever and developing a vaccination for typhoid fever.” The Army Medical Museum was designated a Registered National Historic Landmark under the Historic Sites Act of August 21, 1935.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine is housed in its new facility in Silver Springs, Maryland. Originally located in the former Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the museum focused on army medicine and artifacts from the Civil War and subsequent world wars, including the wars in Vietnam and Korea.

I visited the museum a few years ago in its former location and was struck about the lugubrious atmosphere, the smell of decay, mold, and formaldehyde. The museum today is modern and antiseptic, “dedicated to preserving, collecting, and interpreting the artifacts, specimens, photographs and documents that chronicle the history and practice of medicine over the centuries.

Specimen storage area
Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 2014

The National Museum of Health and Medicine’s collection contains more than 25 million specimens, slides, photographs, artifacts, artworks, and documents that accumulated since 1862 after the “Army Medical Department ordered that ‘all specimens of morbid anatomy’ be gathered from Civil War battlefields.” Many specimens are kept in temperature-controlled storage in the wall to wall sliding bins and can be observed behind a huge glass enclosure. A forensic teaching laboratory, visible through large windows, contained skeletal remains and the tools necessary for identification.

Instruments such as chisels, ossicle hooks, rotary burs, cerebral exploratory cannula, mastoid gouge, Volkmann’s spoon, periosteal elevator, searcher and scoop, retractors were Macewen’s instruments used in 1894 for brain operations.

A few tools used by Surgeon General William A. Hammond (circa 1860) were displayed. During the Civil War era surgeons performed cranial trephination, a procedure which involved drilling a circular hole into the skull to relieve intracranial pressure after head wounds. Of the 220 operations performed by Union surgeons, 50 percent were successful.

Today surgeons have an array of tools, equipment, and materials at their disposal to detect brain injury, including the life-saving titanium mesh which allows for bone-regrowth and does not interfere with MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging).

Cross-sections of the brain on display revealed subarachnoid hematomas (bleeding of smaller vessels) and subdural hematomas (bleeding of larger vessels). Such injuries can occur from a single blow to the head or from an explosion.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2014

One fascinating specimen floating in a vertical cylinder was a brain connected to the spinal cord, dating back to 1935. It showed the complexity of the bundles of axons (nerve fibers) that supply information from the brain to torso, arms, and legs.

Biomedical engineers developed devices and processes such as artificial kidneys used in dialysis, prosthetic limbs, and tissue engineering of the skin. On display was a Drake artificial leg dating back to 1866 and a Kolff-Brigham artificial kidney. Manufactured by Edward Olson of Massachusetts, this artificial kidney could cleanse the blood of one or two patients daily, passing arterial blood through cellophane tubing wrapped around a drum, which rotated through a 100-liter chemical bath.

More than 45,000 Civil War soldiers from both sides survived amputations and were fitted with prosthetics. Many soldiers did not survive their bullet and shrapnel wounds unless their limbs were amputated.  

The bloodiest year of the Civil War was 1864. Ninety percent of the more than 200,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War were victims of small arms fire. The museum’s collection documents the devastating injuries of almost 500 soldiers with shattered bones, holes in the skull, and horrible wounds. William Tod Helmuth said in 1873, “The effects are truly terrible; bones are ground almost to powder, muscles, ligaments, and tendons torn away… loss of life, certainly of limb, is almost an inevitable consequence.”

Bones with osteomyelitis
Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 2014

At that time, surgeons were provided by the U.S. military with “more than 100 different instruments used in complicated procedures ranging from bullet extraction to reconstructive surgery. Standard medical supplies included 97 different drugs produced by nearly two dozen manufacturers under government contract.”

“More than 400,000 soldiers from both sides died from disease during the war, almost twice as many as were killed in action. Open latrines, unclean water, stifling tents and rotting foods turned crowded camps into breeding grounds for sickness.” Dysentery and childhood diseases such as chickenpox, measles, and mumps were deadly in those unsanitary conditions. Osteomyelitis (bone infections) and gangrene spread easily through hospitals.

The Army Medical Museum had preserved by the end of the Civil War more than 4,000 skeletal specimens with various gunshot, blunt force, and sharp force injuries. Wet tissue specimens were also preserved in alcohol. Medical records with treatment and surgical procedures were also carefully catalogued, including drawings, photographs, letters, reports, and diaries of nurses. The data was compiled into a six-volume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. The archives and the specimens are still used in scientific studies today.

The museum holds the largest collection of pathological gross tissue in the world and some samples are quite rare. Microscopic sections of tissue, cells, or blood identify abnormalities, disease, and deformities.

Among various microscopes dating from 1853 and 1881, the Zeiss microscope used by Walter Reed in 1898-1899 and the 1665 London microscope used by Robert Hooke of the Royal Society stand out. Robert Hooke wrote Micrographia and was the first person to use the word “cell” in microscopic structures.

U.S. Army Major Water Reed (1851-1902) has saved countless lives through his research into the causes of typhoid and yellow fever and the discovery that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes. Maj. Reed was the curator of the Army National Museum and professor of clinical microscopy at the Army Medical School (now the Walter Reed Institute of Research).

The first physician to be inducted in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at New York University in 1963, Dr. Walter Reed left an indelible mark in the U.S. history of medicine. In 1936 The Walter Reed Medal was established in his honor, to be awarded annually for “meritorious achievement in tropical medicine research.”

Walter Reed General Hospital was founded in 1909 and remained the Army’s premier treatment center for more than a century until it was merged in 2011 with the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The merger formed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.  On my last museum visit at the Washington, D.C. location, I spoke with a couple of soldiers injured in Iraq who were recuperating and were taking a stroll on the grounds.

Amputated Elephantiasis leg
Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 2014

The most gruesome non-military specimen was the amputated leg of a 27-year old in 1894 who had Elephantiasis and lived with this leg for 12 years. In response to a parasite, the leg became inflamed and scar tissue formed which accumulated over time. Elephantiasis is still prevalent in some tropical areas today.

One interesting display contained two bits of blackened cloth expectorated by a colonel 18 weeks after he had been shot in the chest when fragments of his uniform were lodged within his body.

The bullet fragment extracted from Abraham Lincoln’s head post-mortem is barely visible under a tiny round glass container.

Capt. Henry Wirz was arrested at the end of the war for crimes committed while commanding the Confederate prison at Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia. During his watch, 13,000 of the 45,000 Union soldiers died in captivity from brutality. Wirz denied the charges by claiming a debilitating injury to his right arm.  After his execution on November 10, 1865, an autopsy discovered that he had full use of his right arm.

Museum working lab
Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 2014

A  hydrocephalic baby, conjoined twins, fetal skeletons, a cross-section of a black lung, a liver with cirrhosis, diseased kidneys, a kidney with scarlet fever, carcinomas in the kidney, spina bifida, a human hairball from the stomach, and a scrotum with Elephantiasis are some of the non-war medical specimens on display.

A portion of the museum is dedicated to identifying human remains both military and civil through:

-        -  DNA evidence (after 1994 the military collects blood samples from service members and archives them in a repository; mitochondrial DNA can be extracted 125 years after death)

-        -  Anthropological evidence (analyzing skeletal remains, fingerprinting, dental records, and nuclear DNA)

 

-          Age-at-death-estimation (based on age-related microscopic changes of bone)

-          Dental evidence (based on existing dental records)

-          Virtual autopsy (3-D images provide a detailed map of injuries and foreign objects in the body)

After September 11, 2001, 38 pouches and 13 boxes of human remains were flown to Dover Air Force Base for examination by the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner. By November 16, 2001, “all but five of the 189 deceased had been scientifically identified.”

Trauma Bay II in Balad, Iraq, located on a scarred concrete slab, had saved more lives between 2003-2007 than any other war theater hospital, with a survival rate of 98 percent, and served as a testing ground for innovative technologies that relieved pain and suffering for patients who were evacuated when stabilized. This floor is now preserved in the museum.

Lt. Col. Chester Buckenmaier III pioneered the use of a peripheral nerve block while deployed at the Balad hospital. While the patient remained conscious, his goal was to manage pain, keeping a patient alert during a 5-hour flight. From September 2001 through September 2007, more than 44,000 severely wounded patients were flown from Balad to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near Ramstein, Germany, within 24-72 hours after arriving at Balad.

Arm and foot prosthetics

Instruments on display show the progression from wood and ivory to steel, the choice metal in the age of sterilization, and the sophistication of tools that developed to enable surgeons to perform more complex surgeries.

Military medicine protected combatants against enemy weapons, infectious diseases (vaccinations against tropical diseases, drugs to fight malaria, typhoid, and dengue fever, starting with the Continental Army), psychological stresses, and environmental forces such as high altitudes and extreme hot and cold temperatures (preventing dehydration, altitude sickness). From the early strips of linen cloth or lint packing and protecting wounds, modern bandages are hemostatic, helping wounds to clot while protecting against infection.

Civil War Prosthesis
Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 2014

After WWI, rehab became part of military medicine. The primitive prostheses of mid-1800s were replaced by bionic limbs that replicate the functioning of the lost limbs. Thirty facial and skull reconstructions were documented during the Civil War such as suturing the soft tissues of eyelids, nose, and mouth. Private Carleton Burgan had his entire face reconstructed by Dr. Gurdon Buck in 1863 during a seven month period at New York City’s Hospital. A gangrenous ulcer on his tongue destroyed his upper mouth, palate, right check, and right eye.

Doctors today at the 3-D Medical Applications Center at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, create 250-400 3-D anatomical models and custom implants annually.

WWII hygiene poster
Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 2014

On a quick trip to the bathroom before departure, I discovered four WWII posters produced by the Army Medical Museum during its campaign to educate service members about personal hygiene, STDs, and infectious diseases.

I left with a sense of disappointment that had nothing to do with the museum. Although I saw ample evidence of how well our servicemen are cared for on the battle field and immediately afterwards in surgery and rehab, I know how inadequately veterans are treated medically once they come home and retire, how rationed and often substandard their care is.

Author’s Note: The data, photographs, and quotes used in this article can be found in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs, Maryland.

© Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh