Saturday, April 22, 2017

Have Americans Lost Their Minds?

The Ship of Fools
"Sadly, too many Americans have lost their collective minds and found their collectivist minds."  - A. J. Cameron

Western Europeans have been watching the vitriolic opposition to President Trump with great personal interest, wondering if Americans have lost their minds. Being the inveterate leftists that they are, even in the face of demographic suicide, they were rooting for a like-minded female socialist who vowed to turn the U.S. into the European basket case model of failed multiculturalism and diversity, flooding their countries with more and more Islamists in order to forever change the western culture into a Caliphate. The MSM reported ad litteram the same Teleprompter talking points, that she was the most experienced statesman of the two. No mention of her corruption or scandals, just a constant digging for fabricated dirt on then candidate Trump.

Eastern Europeans thought Americans have lost their minds, afflicted by the progressivist, anti-American malaise, having mounted ever-escalating mob violence and anarchic opposition to the Trump presidency, funded, flamed, and organized by rich billionaires, Hollywood stars, crony capitalists, academia, and the main street media.  The black-clad and masked rioters have been beating up anybody who does not share their twisted view of the world, silencing any opposition on America’s campuses, especially at Berkeley.

No Eastern European can understand why the former bastion of progress, the shiny city on the hill, the America of Europe’s hopes and dreams, has suddenly decided to cut its own healthy veins, throbbing with wealthy blood, just to watch the patient die an untimely death.

How did patriotic Americans manage to send the Marxist brainwashed of America into a frenzy of daily protests and vitriolic talk in the MSM, Hollywood, and other halls of power, hunting down mercilessly President Trump, his family, and anyone who works for him, or who supports him? Which masters are these anti-American “global citizens” serving and why? Are they tired of their abundant lifestyle, of their civilization, of their success, and want to throw it all away for the utopian promise of failed Marxism and to the 7th century denizens of Islamic theocracy in the name of insane tolerance and diversity?

Sane Americans and Europeans do not understand why Cultural Marxists engage in cultural and historical vandalism in all countries in which they advocate for suicidal diversity and multiculturalism.

The Democrat Party Marxists are still looking for ways to invalidate the presidential election even though Trump had much more electoral votes than his opponent who allegedly had more popular votes coming from illegal alien voters.

The entire “civil society,” meaning the united leftist agitators around the globe, was incensed when President Trump dared to mention the Islamist attack in Sweden and the religionists of peace who burned down businesses and private property the night before, as shown on Fox News. For some reason, suicidal European bureaucrats are burying the truth, the violence, the rapes, and the destruction of their countries in order not to offend the Muslims.

It will be interesting to watch what will happen with the vote in France this weekend, a vote that will decide if France is determined to survive as a western civilized nation or to continue on the path of multiculturalist self-destruction.  Marie Le Pen promises to end Islamist refugee migration.

The EU bureaucrats joined the protest chorus over President Trump’s “inhumane and xenophobic” fence on the border with Mexico. I suppose the fences erected between EU nations and other countries around the globe, including Mexico’s wall with its borders, Belize and Guatemala, are more “humane?” India shares its border with Pakistan; it is lit by 150,000 floodlights which give off so much light that it is visible from space as an orange glowing line.

The elite globalists are exporting “democracy” around the third world through wars and forced U.N. policies disguised as Sustainable Development to allegedly save the planet from anthropogenic global warming/climate change. The climate change industry and its sycophant lobby have become very powerful since it is worth now trillions of dollars of easy money. It is nothing but exploitation of the poor and of the middle class using environmentalism as a weapon.  As Hans-Hermann Hoppe said, “Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.”

Multinationals and non-government organizations (NGOs) have so much money at stake; they are more powerful and wealthier than most countries.  They are at the forefront of the fight against President Trump’s administration and his nationalist policies. They are instrumental in passing treaties like TPP, NAFTA, and laws that are anti-American, do not benefit the American taxpayers, and represent solely the interests of the elite billionaires around the globe.

Multinational corporations and their interests had and still have an important role in the evolution of the economic, social, and political climate around the globe. United Nations, technocrats, and corrupt politicians are the instruments of implementation of all globalist policies and treaties that will eventually eliminate all borders and create a global hodge-podge of billions of people without any national identity, migrating around the globe, and controlled by the globalist elites through settlements, food or lack thereof, water, land, and medical help.

The fight of a potential WWIII will be the fight to install the new world order through the following:

-          Uniform culture

-          Uniform law

-          Mixing nationalities and races

-          Destruction of national pride

-          Destruction of borders

-          Weakening of states until they are no longer relevant

-          Destruction of the family

-          Destruction of religion

-          One world authority under U.N.

-          Total control and supervision of the individual through technology

-          One single currency

-          One single army

If we consider the percentage of Americans who have bought into this globalist agenda blindly and are trying to replace Americanism with Cultural Marxism and Islamo-fascism, we can perhaps answer my question with a definitive yes - Americans have lost their collective minds.

 

 

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

U.N. Planned International Flood of Migrants


In case you were wondering about the planned invasion of Europe and other developed nations, including the United States, wonder no more. Today, The International Organization for Migration, a United Nations Migration Agency, funded partially and generously with your taxpayer dollars for 65 years, is holding an International Dialogue on Migration in New York, on April 18-19, with the theme, “Strengthening International Cooperation on and Governance of Migration towards the Adoption of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration in 2018.”

I highlighted the words “regular, governance, Global Compact” to illustrate that this vaunted meeting of third world tin pot dictatorships aims to establish and control the global no-borders policy through an on-going flood of migrants to the west, destroying sovereignty and diluting nationality and citizenship. It is not about protecting migrants temporarily from tribal wars and conflict, it is about resettlement of huge populations and forcing multi-culturalism on those countries that resist and wish to maintain their “borders, language, and culture.”

There are millions of refugees around the world who are fleeing conflict in their nations and they must be helped in order to return them safely when the conflict is over. But the European invasion of mostly military age men from the Middle East contains only about 10 percent Syrians who are fleeing the seven-year civil war in Syria, the rest are economic opportunists on a “Hijrah” conquest in the senescent Europe, fast replaced by a fertile Muslim population.

U.N. plans to govern migration through a global compact, a sort of constitution for the rights of everyone to move across national borders unimpeded in another step towards spreading the wealth of a globalist commonwealth ruled by the few billionaire elites and their well-funded “civil society” lapdogs.

They are not shy or hiding the fact that their conference and efforts are part of U.N.’s Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, the very Agenda the MSM keeps telling us that does not exist and those reporting on it are conspiracy theorists:

“It is an opportunity for States and all relevant migration actors to frame the core objectives for the global compact, and ground it in the existing normative structures and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Seeing this global migration as a human right, “the IOM Director General William Lacy Swing said in opening remarks today, “The Global Compact presents a historical opportunity to achieve a world in which migrants move as a matter of genuine choice rather than a necessity; a world of opportunity to migrate through safe, orderly, and regular channels; and a world in which migration is well governed and is able to act as a positive force for individuals, societies, and the States.”

If you want to keep your country and borders safe from unvetted invasion, you want to limit the number of economic refugees and illegals flooding your country, causing violence, rapes, and murders, too bad; the United Nations will override your President who has promised a check on unvetted refugees and a wall on the southern border. The almighty United Nations bureaucrats from New York will override him and the American people’s wishes.

The “needs, capacities, and contributions of migrants” will supersede your national needs because their safety, dignity, and human rights are more important than yours.

The four core elements of this compact, as presented by Ambassador Swing are:

1.      Protecting the rights of migrants

2.      Facilitating safe, orderly, and regular migration

3.      Reducing the incidence and impacts of forced and irregular migration

4.      Addressing mobility consequences of natural and human-induced disasters

Louise Arbour, the Secretary General’s Special Representative for International Migration, pointed out that “It is up to all of us to embrace human mobility, and recognize that good migration governance requires a commitment to genuine cooperation. People in transit and destination countries should not be made to look at migrants as burdens, or even worse as threats to themselves or their way of life.”

Perhaps Louise Arbour should pay close attention to the mayhem and violence caused by Angela Merkel’s flood of “rapefugees” in Europe who have destroyed cities and entire areas, raping, threatening, destroying property, harming the local population, and altering their way of life forever, while politicians and the main stream media are ignoring reality and covering up the often savage violence.

Arbour said, “Instead, we need collectively to strengthen the narrative – one which has the virtue of truth – that recognizes human mobility and diversity as a contribution to evolving societies and strong economies.”

The U.N. bureaucrats are not explaining why the male refugees cannot stay in their own countries, fight their tribal wars, end them with a lasting peace, and make their societies evolve and economies strong?

I am not sure on what virtual reality realm Louise Arbour’s version of truth resides, but the lying narrative keeps pushing diversity as a contributing factor of society and strong economies when in reality these migrants become wards of welfare as soon as they enter any country they plan to occupy and they never intend to work. Diversity and multiculturalism in Europe have proven to be utter failures; society has devolved into basket cases of areas that the police avoid at all costs.

As listed by IOM, the conference will be addressed by representatives of “governments, civil society, academia, and the private sector.” Among the speakers are:

-          Amina J. Mohammed, U.N. Deputy Secretary General

-          Peter Thomson, President of the U.N. General Assembly

-          Louise Arbour,  Secretary General ‘s Special Representative for International Migration

-          Ahmed Hussein, Refugees and Citizenship of Canada

-          Permanent Representatives of Switzerland and Mexico

This conference will be followed by the second Global Compact on Migration which will take place on July 18-19 in Geneva, “culminating in the stocktaking preparatory meeting in Mexico in December.” http://www.iom.int/idm-2017-global-compact-migration

The United Nations Agenda 2030 of Sustainable Development is not going away and its goals are relatively close to completion, now to include the forced flood of international migrants around the globe and the obliteration of national borders and sovereignty.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Tom DeWeese Fights for Property Rights

Property owners in Texas have received a temporary reprieve when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which attempted to grab 90,000 acres of “Texas sovereign land” along the banks of the Red River, stopped the surveys that were ordered by the Obama administration.

According to Breitbart, Tommy Henderson won in August 2015 his 30-year personal battle with the BLM over the acreage his family lost in the federal lawsuit. Now the land his family had owned since 1904 was his again, with full ownership and control. http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2017/04/08/texas-wins-victory-ranchers-blm/

Breitbart quoted Acting Cadastral Survey Chief Stephen Beyerlein, who wrote on March 29, 2017, “Having reviewed this deposition testimony and other new information, the BLM believes the survey methodology was used in error and may have caused errors in identifying the location of the Gradient Boundary.”

President of the Texas Farm Bureau, Russell Boening, wrote, “We take it very seriously when government decides that private property no longer belongs to those who have purchased, paid taxes, and hold titles to it.”

Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, wrote, “This latest action by the Trump administration protects the property rights of Texans as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court and prevents the federal government from infringing upon Texas’ sovereign borders. It was our contention all along that the BLM’s surveys were conducted improperly and unlawfully. We will vigilantly defend Texas’ border from federal overreach.”

When it comes to property rights issues, Tom DeWeese has been fighting the federal, state, and local overreach for decades. President of the American Policy Center, DeWeese travels around the country giving lectures on the many facets of property rights infringements, one of the many issues deemed unsustainable by the Sustainable Development plans of U.N. Agenda 21 of 1992, now morphed into Agenda 2030.

Local governments are changing and Americans are not paying attention unless it affects them directly. American philosophy is based on individual liberty. At the core of this philosophy is the private ownership of property, of one’s own land. Globalist bureaucrats want to change that.

Tom DeWeese quotes in his speeches an economist from Peru, Hernando de Soto, “In the West, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventory is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy.”

In his book, The Mystery of Capital, Hernando De Soto argues that it is private property that allowed the West to create such wealth and become so successful. Equity in private property was used as seed investment for various ventures.

As Calvin Coolidge said, “Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing.” The Nevadan Rancher Wayne Hage, who first stood up to BLM and fought them to his last day, said, “If you don’t have the right to own and control property, then you are property.”

But, as John Adams said, “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.” That is why people are fighting the government at all levels to maintain and control their land.

In 1976, the Report from U.N.’s Habitat 1 Conference said, “Land – cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principle instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.”

Property rights are important elements of Agenda 21, a 40-chapter document signed in Rio in 1992 by 178 countries. Agenda 21 is a “comprehensive blue print for reorganizing human society” around the three Es:

1.      Economics (private public partnerships, eminent domain)

2.      Ethics (social justice, environmental justice, gender justice, racial justice)

3.      Environment (the excuse for it all)

Saving the environment from human activity (the anthropogenic global warming debacle now morphed into the climate change industry) is the given excuse for all of the globalist control of every facet of human life, including ownership of private property. But, as H. L. Mencken said, “A plan to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”

The American Planning Association pushes the Agenda 21 goals in their planning groups, calling them a comprehensive blue print, but denies that Agenda 21 exists, said DeWeese.

The United Nations bureaucrats want to harmonize the United States into the rest of the global matrix. You should not be able to control your government, they say, government should control you, including your private property.

According to Tom DeWeese, until around the year 2000, governments were proud to advertise their compliance with U.N.’s Agenda 21’s now turned Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development plans, including every agency of our government that rewrote their mission statements to include Sustainability. After 2000, the agenda continued more aggressively but quietly, overtly calling anybody who opposes it or discusses it conspiracy theorists. DeWeese added that politicians vacate auditoriums and are silent any time the discussion turns to U.N. Agenda 21 as if it does not exist. Yet thousands of documents released in the last decades prove otherwise.

U.N.’s Biodiversity Assessment Report declared the following not sustainable: “ski runs, grazing of livestock, plowing of soil, building fences, industry, single family homes, paved and tarred roads, logging activities, reservoirs, power line construction, and economic systems that fail to set proper value on the environment.”

Tom DeWeese is the author of Erase. Richard Viguerie said, “Tom DeWeese’s Erase presents a fictional path through a dystopian future. However, in Erase every single policy presented in the book, from the use of technology to change our culture; to the use of the public school classrooms to eliminate true knowledge; to the destruction of Christianity in a drive to meld all religions into one powerful tool for government, is all true and happening at this very moment.”

DeWeese is working on a new book, Property Rights Matter, “covering the issues and offering non-governmental solutions to using property ownership as a means to build wealth and freedom, from the inner city to the western ranges.”

When completed, he plans to launch a “Property Right Network, made up of activists and groups across the nation with the goal of making property rights a major issue for upcoming campaigns and to create a fighting force against Sustainable Development policies. DeWeese “fully believes that if we can protect property rights then we can stop Agenda 21/2030.”

Talking about how property rights affect the inner city, DeWeese wants to “build small businesses against the Smart Growth policies that have displaced ethnic neighborhoods.”

The American Planning Association admitted in a Special Report that Smart Growth does not work. “The current planning policy strategies for land use and transportation have virtually no impact on the major long term increases in resource and energy consumption. They generally tend to increase costs and reduce economic competitiveness… In many cases, the socioeconomic consequences of less housing choice, crowding, and congestion may outweigh the very modest CO2 reduction benefits.”

Yet all cities continue the Smart Growth/Green Growth planning and developing of bike paths, of stack and pack housing with mixed use, tiny apartments with no parking and elevators, of tiny alley or RV style diminutive homes in which the owner must constantly assemble and disassemble furniture in order to live in it, all located five-minute walk or bike from work, school, shopping, and play, a very attractive proposition for single young people who cannot afford a mortgage or do not desire to set roots and have a family.

“What we’re trying to do is see equity of public space. When you build your streets for cars, you’re actually building in the expectation that people are going to have cars.” This communist type thinking has kept for decades millions of people living in the Soviet communist satellite nations, close to the areas where they were born, their mobility highly restricted to a few-mile radius, at the mercy of public transportation, buses, rail, and trams.

The ideal communist city, as described by the Soviet architect Alexei Gutnov, was very much like the ideal Agenda 21 envisioned urban areas:

“The chaotic growth of cities will be replaced by a dynamic system of urban settlement. The region is formed by the economic inter-dependence of its development, from the industrial complex to the industrial area and industrial region. The region has a single system of transportation, a centralized administration, and a united system of education and research.” The U.N.’s various Agenda 21/2030 documents and conferences talk about human settlements.

Local and state planning group, planning departments and elected officials deny any connection of their plans to international programs, that there are any concerted efforts to install the mandates of U.N.’s Agenda 21/2030. But there are three main plans of attack:

1.      Destroy private property ownership and control
       2.      Impose regional councils through regionalism and thus take government away from the  people

3.      Support the entire plan with federal grant money which is hard to turn away, especially in areas strapped for revenue

The U.N. Commission on Global Governance talks about regionalism. “Regionalism must precede globalism. We foresee a seamless system of governance from local communities, individual states, regional unions and up through to the United Nations itself.” All the regional plans that have popped up around the world, Heartland 2030, Smart Growth 2030, are identical in scope, are run by NGOs who have applied for the grants, and have one thing in common, none of them are driven by locals.

The globalist planners and their local representatives keep telling us what they are going to do but Americans are no paying attention.

Ted Trainer, the author of Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, wrote, “Nothing of lasting significance will be achieved unless it is clearly understood that our efforts in these local initiatives are the first steps to the eventual replacement of the present society by one which is not driven by market forces, profits, competition, growth or affluence.”

Harvey Ruvin, the Vice Chair of ICLEI stated, “Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective.” Thomas Lovejoy, science advisor to the Department of Interior said, “(We) will map the whole nation – determine development for the whole country, and regulate it all.”

Joe Hindman, a historian, suggested in 1966 that “The strategy is to make property ownership so unbearable by harassment through building inspections, remodeling orders, fines and jailings that owners give up in despair and sell to land developers at cut-rate prices. Punitive municipal codes are the weapons in the warfare.”

According to DeWeese, when Dave Foreman dreamed up the scheme for the Wildlands Project in 1983, he said, “It is not enough to preserve the roadless, undeveloped country remaining. We must recreate wilderness in large regions: move out the cars and civilized people, dismantle the roads and dams, reclaim the plowed lands and clear cuts, -- and reintroduce extirpated species.” So people living in the country will be stripped of their lands and herded into the cities, the same way the Soviets had herded villagers into the cities, bulldozed their homes for agriculture, for the “collective good,” and crowded them all into concrete high rise apartments the size of an average American hotel room. That is why the Bundys fought back.

We are told ad nauseam that Agenda 21 is just a suggestion, without any enforcement capabilities. How did every agency of the federal, state, and local government develop a comprehensive development plan exactly as mandated by U.N. Agenda 21?

Tom DeWeese explains how it became “the law of the land:”

After the Rio conference in 1992, when U.N. Agenda 21 was signed by President George H.W. Bush, thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) went to Congress, through HUD, EPA, DOT, DOE, and helped them create grant programs with strings attached that were the implementation of Agenda 21. Then they went to state legislators to pass laws that every community had to have a comprehensive development plan. As local officials scratched their heads as to what comprehensive development plans were, they were presented by the same NGOs with a box, with the whole plan and the grant money, local supervisors did not have to do anything, they only had to sign. And so Agenda 21 became the “law of the land.”

The rules imposed were strict building codes, punitive municipal codes, septic tank codes, plumbing codes, electric codes, bike lanes, high rise apartments with no parking lots, light rail trains, public transportation, HOV restricted lanes, formerly public roads given to developers who turned them into expensive toll roads, all paid by taxpayer dollars but without input or vote from the taxpayers. Once the local officials took the grant money on behalf of the community which was very often totally ignorant of what was going on or their objections ignored, they had to accept the restrictions. 

DeWeese describes the new government language of comprehensive development plans used to restrict and destroy property rights:  wetlands, conservation easements, watersheds, view sheds, rails to trail, biosphere reserves, green ways, partnerships, preservation, stakeholders, land use, environmental protection, diversity, visioning, open space, heritage area.

The stakeholder councils, people who do not live in your community, dictate your future according to the mandates of U.N. Agenda 21/2030. Your locally elected officials just rubber stamp what these NGOs envision for you and your children, for generations to come, because you are too stupid to be entrusted with your own future, your freedoms must be curtailed for the sake of the planet. All these restrictions are imposed on you by the elite globalists while they live how they want and wherever they want, with total disregard for their carbon footprint because they are “civil society.”
The community councils that you have not elected, self-appointed bureaucrats, appointed hacks armed with their own political agenda, have turned your community into a “little Soviet society.” You no longer have a representative government. You are forced to have smart meters on your homes, on your gas lines, on your HVACs; the councils control what you do on your property, if you collect rain water, snow melt, your tree and bush pruning or planting, the paint color scheme of your home, the height of your grass, what you can and cannot grow in your own back yard, and many other restrictions.

NGOs and regional councils know the right way to live and how to govern in place of locally elected officials. They have become a shadow government. Regional councils and planners answer to NO ONE. Americans are living the wrong way and must be forced to live the way the regional planners envision for them.

NGOs establish “the strategic vision to insure proper growth,” transportation, housing, jobs, land use, education, property, housing, and health care. “Under Sustainable Health Care, all the provisions of Obamacare are found,” said DeWeese. When the regional planners draw a boundary around your city, everything built outside of it becomes "urban sprawl," a dirty word for city planners. But to you and me, it is our homes; it is where we want to live, added DeWeese.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, described what is truly happening to every facet of our lives.
“What is occurring here, not just in this (conference), but in the whole climate change process, is the complete transformation of the economic structure of the world. This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.”

To sum it up, you are no longer free; you are now a vassal to the United Nations tin pot bureaucrats who are subjugating your freedoms and sovereignty with your own taxpayer dollars and the dictates of Sustainable Development.

 

 

 

 

 

Friday, April 7, 2017

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 21st 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, April 3, 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 21st 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.

Saturday, April 1, 2017

Contemplating Mortality

Handsome Bogart, 18-years old
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2017
I used to think that it was rather morbid that my in-laws had purchased their burial plots when my husband was a small child. Every time we went for a visit, we stayed in a hotel across from the hilly Memorial Gardens, with a large white praying statue on top. The lush green grass and the occasional Canada geese grazing on the slopes were peaceful and comforting evidence of perennial life.
Every time Ray would drive by he would joke in his inimitable dark humor that he bought his wife an anniversary gift and she never used it. It gave me shivers, imagining my husband’s parents deceased.
As the way of all flesh goes, it seems to be closer and closer that Joan may have to use that anniversary gift from long, long time ago. Time flew by and, as it did, we thought of living, of family, of togetherness, of life’s accomplishments, not of mortality. We thought of ourselves as living forever until someone close or known to us got really sick and died. We brushed away the annoying thought of death, as if it would never happen to us eventually. Yet we all leave this earth as dust, a short lived spark in the memory of those who know us, perhaps love us, who are still alive and left behind.
I had an eerie feeling the first time I visited my Dad’s grave. It was perhaps because I was really sick when he died and I could not attend the funeral so many thousands of miles away. In a sense, I never really had closure. I stared for hours at the pictures of his funeral my uncle had sent me, but it was not the same. It was as if he was still alive in some far away corner of the world.
But I was staring then at this corner of the world and reality slapped me in the face. My Daddy was but dust and my memories of our lives together for the first twenty years of my life. With the grace of God, Dad and Mom made me, cared for me, and loved me enough to let me go to a better place so far away. How do you ever thank your parents for choosing life?
I knew Dad’s mortal remains where interred there, but his spirit was somewhere else, in Heaven, but in some ways it lived inside of me. It was so quiet around me, you could almost hear every sound nature made, buzzing of bees, the wind moving the tall grasses, and the leaves twirling on tree branches in the gentle breeze. The earth was alive but my Daddy was part of its dust. His bones were resting in a bag deep in the earth, the wooden coffin perhaps long decayed. I planted a flower on his grave wondering if sufficient rain would keep it alive after my departure. How long would it be before it withered and died, turning to dust?
My mom is losing her battle with dementia and she hardly remembers her life in the correct sequential order. We are happy when she remembers our names.
My mother-in-law is paralyzed following a botched spinal operation and will be sent soon to a hospice, closer to the ultimate chapter of her life. Her beautiful blue eyes are still the eyes of the little girl she once was, not understanding what happened, why time flew by so fast.
Bogart is our beautiful Snow Shoe Siamese whom we adore. He is turning 18-years old sometime this year, we don’t know when because my daughters adopted him from the pound. The vet told us, he was one year old then. Although his previous owner abused him in the first year of his life, we gave him a good and loving life and home.
Bogart is showing signs of old age, turning lean and meowing more than usual, probably from arthritis pain, but can still do a hippodrome routine once in a while, running up and down the stairs, thinking he is a race horse. We clip his twisted claws which sometimes get snagged or tangled on various pieces of furniture, tapestry, or leather chairs. He is an old kitty, a centenarian in human years.
As hubby and I are struggling with profound health issues, we are now fully realizing that we are no longer the immortal young who thought we could live forever. It seems like yesterday when we met, the years flew by, but we never had enough time together, we wasted part of our youth with other spouses who were not our soul mates.
My husband is an American hero who dedicated his entire adult life to his country and I hope that someday he will take his proper place at Arlington National Cemetery.
We cannot understood why we were here on earth and why God created us, for what purpose, but we now understand that we are no longer immortal and we hope that we are going eventually to a good place, part of the circle of life, leaving traces of us in our children’s DNA.
Does it matter for most people where the final resting place will be? The sun will rise again, rain and snow will soak the ground, the moon will cast ghostly shadows in my beloved woods, the fierce hawkish wind will blow, and the earth will renew itself as it had done for millennia. We become again invisible atoms in the universe.