What is the purpose of education?

I finished reading “Dumbing Us Down” The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto and I would highly recommend it to anyone with kids, grand-kids or even if you are thinking about having kids. This is a short book, it is only 104 pages but it is powerful, I read it twice. If you would like to know more about Mr. Gatto, check out www.johntaylorgatto.com

I would also like to encourage you to read an essay he wrote titled “Against School” http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm
in it he quotes H.L. Mencken, who wrote in “The American Mercury” for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

I don’t know about you but that scares me, could this be true?


As I said before, I read the book twice, the second time with a highlighter. I want to share just a few of the lines that are now glowing yellow in my marked up copy. The publisher of “Dumbing Us Down” wrote a note in the beginning of the book……..

”If one were to poll our nation’s leading educators about what the goal of our educational systems should be, I suspect one would come up with as many goals as educators. But I also imagine that the capacity to form one’s own convictions independent of what was being taught in the classroom, the ability to think critically based upon one’s own experience, would not rank high on many lists.
In the context of our culture, it is easy to see that critical thinking is a threat. As parents, we all want what is ‘best’ for our children. Yet, by our own actions and lifestyles, and through the demands that we place on our educational institutions, it is clear that by ‘best’ we all-too-often mean ‘most.’ This shift from the qualitative to the quantitative, from thinking about what is best for the holistic development of the individual human being to thinking about which resources should be available to semi-monopoly governmental educational institutions certainly does not bear close scrutiny.”


So, I would like to hear from you, what do you think is the purpose(s) of education and do you think our public schools are accomplishing those goals?

gm

Jack Webb Schools Obama on Democracy

We must act now

http://www.goooh.com/

Margaret Thatcher

"If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing."

"Enough Money"

One of the many shallow statements that sound good-- if you don't stop and think about it-- is that "at some point, you have made enough money."

The key word in this statement, made by President Barack Obama recently, is "you." There is nothing wrong with my deciding how much money is enough for me or your deciding how much money is enough for you, but when politicians think that they should be deciding how much money is enough for other people, that is starting down a very slippery slope.


Politicians with the power to determine each citizen's income are no longer public servants. They are public masters.
Are we really so eaten up with envy, or so mesmerized by rhetoric, that we are willing to sacrifice our own freedom by giving politicians the power to decide how much money anybody can make or keep? Of course, that will start only with "the rich," but surely history tells us that it will not end there.

The French Revolution began arbitrary executions among the hereditary aristocracy, but ended up arbitrarily executing all sorts of other people, including eventually even leaders of the Revolution itself, such as Robespierre.
Very similar patterns appeared in the Bolshevik Revolution, in the rise of the Nazis and in numerous other times and places, where expanded and arbitrary powers were put into the hands of politicians-- and were used against the population as a whole.


Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy-- quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody's rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can't tell the water where to go.


The moral bankruptcy of the notion that third parties can decide when somebody else has "enough" money is matched by its economic illiteracy. The rest of the country is not poorer by the amount of Bill Gates' fortune today and was not poorer by the amount of John D. Rockefeller's fortune a century ago.


Both men were selling a product that others were also selling, but more people chose to buy theirs. Those people would not have voluntarily continued to pay their hard-earned money for Rockefeller's oil or Gates' software if what they received was not worth more to them than what they paid.


The fortunes that the sellers amassed were not a deduction from the buyers' wealth. Buyers and sellers both gained from these transactions or the transactions wouldn't have continued.


Ida Tarbell's famous muckraking book, "History of the Standard Oil Company," said that Rockefeller "should have been satisfied" with the money he had acquired by 1870, implying greed in his continued efforts to increase the size and profitability of Standard Oil. But would the public have been better off or worse off if Rockefeller had retired in 1870?


One of the crucial facts left out of Ida Tarbell's book was that Rockefeller's improvements in the oil industry brought down the price of oil to a fraction of what it had been before.
As just one example, oil was first shipped in barrels, which is why we still measure oil in terms of the number of barrels today, even though oil is seldom-- if ever-- actually shipped in barrels any more. John D. Rockefeller shipped his oil in railroad tank cars, reducing transportation costs, among other costs that he found ways of reducing.


Would the public have been better off if older and more costly methods of producing, processing and shipping oil had continued to be used, leading to prices far higher than necessary?


Apparently Rockefeller himself decided at some point that he had enough money, and then donated enough of it to create a world-class university from day one-- the University of Chicago-- as well as donating to innumerable other philanthropic projects.


But that is wholly different from having politicians make such decisions for other people. Politicians who take on that role stifle economic progress and drain away other people's money, in order to hand out goodies that will help get themselves re-elected. Some people call that "social justice," even when it is anti-social politics.

by Thomas Sowell Tuesday, May 18, 2010

We need more of this!!!

Victoria Jackson

Taking Feminism Back

Today, in Columbia, South Carolina, two of the women who are showing America what real feminism is, will appear together, at which time Sarah Palin will officially endorse Nikki Haley for South Carolina Governor. I had the honor of meeting Nikki Haley, and hearing her speak, in Atlanta at the Red State Gathering last Summer.

She’s even more impressive in person than she is on paper (or web). She was one of several women, including Liz Cheney whom I also adore, who spoke at that event, each as impressive as the next. All smart as whips, charismatic, charming, quick, impassioned, energetic and with a fighting spirit embodying my personal motto: “Walk softly. But carry a big lipstick.”

The left hates that phrase and they have ridiculed me for it on more than one occasion. You see, they don’t get it. It’s not surprising, really, as we’ve all known for some time that while the left trots out the For The Women ™ meme constantly, they are anything but. The same way that self-avowed modern day feminists are anything but feminist. In fact, they are diametrically opposed to feminism, by it’s very definition, because their entire agenda is actually harmful to women. This is why I now call them Femogynists and I’m taking the term feminist back.

True feminists are women like Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley. They are the new faces of feminism. That has a great built-in bonus, too — they are far easier on the eyes and exhibit none of that irksome hysterical screeching like the already irrelevant and soon to be extinct femogynists. They, and women like them, are coming to the forefront now.
We’ve had it, you see. We are angry. We are tired of femogynists claiming that they speak for us. We are tired of being sneered at as gender traitors for not toeing the faux feminist line and by daring to be pro-life. We are tired of the attempts to diminish Motherhood. We are tired of women being painted as perpetual victims by the left, in need of Big Daddy Government to save us.

We are tired of working so hard to raise our families and having the government take more and more away. We are angry at being treated like children who aren’t capable of running their own lives, even down to what foods we eat. We are angry that our children’s futures are being squandered and we are fearful that they will never know the country we knew and love. We are angry that we are losing our freedom. That old phrase “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?” Say hello to the scorned (I’m waving at you right now)

We are the women whom the left hates. And, you know if the left hates us, we must be doing something right, yes? They hate us because they don’t understand us, they actually believe that women are lesser, and they have a perverted definition of equality. With all their claims of “equality”, they don’t honestly believe that at all. Amanda Marcotte, once head blogger for cheater and long-time paternity denier John Edwards, exposed that when she recently tried to explain why all women should be liberals:
For me, women’s rights and liberalism are, in my mind, pretty hard to unhook, and it fascinates and amuses me that you see conservatives complain that feminists are always with the democrats, as if there’s ever going to be a form of conservative feminism. You look at someone like Sarah Palin trying to wear that mantle, and you see the flaw in trying to be a so-called conservative feminist, which is that you’re not very pro-women. Women need things for equality that tailor very neatly to the general liberal agenda: Clean environment, universal healthcare, civil rights, individual rights, bodily autonomy, things like that. I fail to see how the two agendas are all that different.

Who is not very pro-women, Miss Marcotte? Silly me! I suppose you must be right because I’m a big dum-dum. How can mere women care about pesky things like the economy or icky military stuff? Math is hard! And that’s for boys! (Well, except for President Obama, evidently). I should just shut up or start screeching about my “right” to abort unborn babies so that I can be “equal” and care about pretty stuff like the environment.

Yeah, not so much. I’ll stick with Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, Michelle Bachmann, Michelle Malkin and other strong, brilliant Moms.

I believe that the left is in for a rude awakening and a nice long time out given to them from said Mommies. Leave it to Mommy to make it all better, as always!

by Lori Ziganto 2010 May 14
 

Texas doctors opting out of Medicare at alarming rate

“You do Medicare for God and country because you lose money on it”  “The only way to provide cost-effective care is outside the Medicare system, a system without constant paperwork and headaches and inadequate reimbursement.”

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7009807.html


If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

Milton Friedman

Power of the Individual

How about a tax incentive?

Anybody with a vague sense of the power of numbers realizes that a million people paying a dollar is better than one-hundred people paying a thousand dollars. That’s pretty straightforward, no real argument here. I also hope this next proposal is as close to universal as the last. The purpose of government is to, in some way; enhance the lives of the governed. It’s not what happens but in a perfect world it would be the goal.
Deep down everyone knows, no mater what drivel spews from a politicians mouth pre-election, that the most effective way to raise money is to tax the largest number of people, which at this point is the lower-middle class and the middle class.
All of what I have regurgitated to this point I hope is self-evident, but this is where I have a drastic and maybe revolutionary departure from the conventional governmental financial wisdom. For simplicity and to avoid reader boredom I am going to use round numbers that I’m grabbing from mid-air to illustrate a simple point. Because I’m not an accountant the actual numbers would be different based on many factors I’m not privy to, but the theory would still be the same.
So, to raise the standard of living without financing myriads of government bureaucracy, why not change the tax codes? For simplistic purposes I will only talk about a single family tax code.
Why not reverse the tax brackets? We would of course exempt any family that falls into the economic status of poverty… let’s call that 20k. We know that the median household income is around 40k so that would be the bulk of households. Then let’s assume an outbreak of governmental honesty, OK, OK I know it’s a stretch but suspend disbelief for just a moment.
The President goes on TV and says, “Our country is in financial trouble, we can not pay for most of our programs. We are going to implement a new more aggressive tax structure to solve this problem and I’m sorry to say the middle class is going to shoulder the burden. The tax structure is simple; if you make 21k to 100k you will pay a flat income tax of 50%. Everyone that falls above and below that will pay zero…
This tax code will do 2 things, it will generate more revenue to finance current programs, but even more importantly it will create a huge incentive for middle income people to increase their standard of living without another government program. Dare I say that in five years the United States would have more millionaires’ per-capita than any other time in history?
So instead of trying to legislate the myth of fairness by pulling down people that achieve, why not reward those that are willing to get the extra job and find a way to earn the extra dollar? If we were able to increase the individual income by such an amount there would be significantly less need for all the entitlement programs in turn the government would need less money.

gm

How To Be Poor

Extreme poverty is not a difficult condition to reach. All you have to do is remove yourself to a desolate wilderness area, and exert the minimum effort necessary to feed and shelter yourself. Any increase in activity, or human interaction, will make you less poor.
It’s more difficult to become poor if you start off with the advantages of modern technology, surrounded by the incredible human resources of a capitalist republic. Here are some techniques that both individuals, and nations, find equally reliable for impoverishing themselves:
Spend more than you earn. Nothing gets you to the poor house faster than spending money with wild abandon, especially when you borrow large sums, and pay exorbitant interest rates. The national debt of the United States approaches $13 trillion, and it’s growing by four billion dollars per day. Babies born today will begin their lives with $42,000 in debt clamped around their wrists and ankles. We paid over $383 billion in interest on the national debt last year. Anyone who has allowed a huge portion of their income to drain away into interest payments on credit card debt can testify how effectively it greases the slide into poverty.
Be as inflexible as possible. Long-term commitments locking in high levels of spending will greatly reduce your ability to exploit new opportunities, and deal with setbacks. Someone who dedicates most of their income to monthly cable service, cell phones, club memberships, and car payments is poorly equipped to investigate new business opportunities. A financial emergency can wipe out their meager savings and push them into ruin.
The same principle applies at the national level. Huge amounts of untouchable entitlement spending fuel our national debt, and leave us with limited resources for coping with war and disaster. Our massive government has already begun to eat into the muscle and bone of the economy, reducing the flexibility of private corporations through taxes and regulations. Nationalized industries become calcified in layers of bureaucracy, political ambition, and the need to satisfy powerful constituencies. Efficiency and flexibility are far down the list of priorities. Government is far slower to adapt to changing conditions than free markets, leaving poorly-invested national resources to rot away.
Lose control of your finances. People who don’t pay attention to their bank accounts and balance sheets are always surprised to discover they’re bankrupt. If you’re already broke, it really stings when a $20 check for pizza bounces, costing you $50 in fees. The tumble into poverty often begins when a spendthrift relative or spouse is given access to a formerly solvent bank account.
The American taxpayer is suffering through a shotgun wedding to an irresponsible government. We have very little idea of what happens to the money vacuumed from our paychecks by Washington. The federal government could never pass the kind of audit it routinely demands from businesses. Billions of dollars from the Obama “stimulus” simply vanished into thin air.
No one can possibly comprehend the entirety of federal spending bills or tax law, and our congressional representatives don’t even try. Massive bills like ObamaCare sprawl across the American economy, groaning and popping out poisonous little “Easter eggs” every few days. The percentage of the government’s tax and spending machinery which lies completely beyond the understanding or control of its citizens is growing at a rapid pace.
Try not to cooperate with others. Human interaction produces wealth: the exchange of goods and services, from which both parties gain. Almost every job is easier if you have help. Operations become more productive when labor can be specialized, leaving each worker to concentrate on using his talents and expertise.
An individual can become poor by minimizing his contact with others. Removing the benefits of exchange and cooperation goes a long way toward destroying wealth. A nation achieves the same effect by replacing free markets with government control, building barriers to exchange and cooperation. When the State separates producers and consumers, using hearty blows from its ham fists, it keeps resources from finding demand. A notable effect of this is high unemployment, which greatly assists our national quest for poverty.
Convince yourself improvement is impossible. Poverty requires a certain lack of initiative. The best way to remain unemployed is to stop looking for a job, because you’re certain none can be found. Despair flourishes after the careful elimination of hope. Some poor souls look at the ruins of a dissolute life, decide they don’t know where to start fixing it… and therefore never get started. If success is the refusal to be beaten, failure is the refusal to pursue success.
A nation becomes poor by making unsustainable commitments, then telling itself they can never be reformed. A confession of national helplessness transforms a recession into a depression. Big Government grows like a tumor, after convincing the public there is no way to reverse its growth. Every government program is indestructible, pushed on a populace with the assurances there are no practical or moral alternatives. We’re told we can never improve the situation – there are too many entrenched dependencies, stupid voters, powerful politicians, and unbreakable laws in our way. All opposition to the statist agenda is illegitimate, based in racism or greed.
To complete our journey into national poverty, it’s essential to give another Congress, and presidential term, to those who tell us we’re not capable of managing our business affairs, speech, and personal health. We must accept the proposition that freedom is such a failure that even thinking about it is sinful. There are no possible solutions to our problems, beyond those officially approved by the great minds in Washington, who are only interested in policing only one border: the limits of their imagination.
Obedience is the perfect ingredient to complete the recipe of poverty, after risk and innovation have been filtered out. History has shown us many wonders, but there has never been such a thing as a wealthy slave. If we surrender another decade to politicians who spend delusional amounts of imaginary money, demand rigid control of our markets, and replace voluntary cooperation for mutual advantage with compulsory obedience to the State, America can finally become poor.

Posted by Doctor Zero on May 13, 2010

“The closest thing on this earth to immortality,”

“is a federal program.” – Ronald Reagan


"Mrs. Obama — all-too-happy recipient of a Wal-Mart dependent compensation package worth more than $100,000 in 2008, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records"
http://article.nationalreview.com/434020/michelle-obama-food-profiteer-turned-food-cop/michelle-malkin

“A funny thing happened on the way to preventing hunger among America’s poor – the nation got fat.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/434169/the-first-lady-and-fat-government/mona-charen

You know the old saying “Half a truth is as good as a lie”.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/05/17/junk-economics-a-closer-look-at-those-shocking-health-insurance-profits/

"According to the Congressional Budget Office, the new law will provide coverage to 32 million by 2019, but will still leave 24 million Americans uninsured."
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/04/23/obamacare%e2%80%99s-big-surprises-for-the-uninsured/

An interesting day at work

As you know, I work in healthcare. I have had the opportunity to work in many different arenas and in many different facilities; such is a blessing of my profession, flexibility.

Something that I have noticed in the last few years is the change in a few patients’ expectations. There are those that expect to have pain free surgery. They want to be seen now and they insist on every test and procedure imaginable. More often than not, the people with these attitudes are unwilling to pay for ANYTHING. I recently took care of a woman recovering from elective surgery. While I was in her room giving her pain medication and taking her vital signs I listened while she visited with her family. She mentioned that they had just returned from a trip to Disneyland and that they were looking forward to their future trip to Hawaii in the summer. This woman talked about going to a tanning salon to get “ready” for the sun. She talked about needing to get her hair and nails done (yes, some people talk about this kinda stuff while they are recovering) I noticed that she had a couple of large detailed tattoos. Later in the day I heard about their small living room (I was asking if they had stairs in their house that she would have to deal with) but now that they have the 52 inch flat screen TV they had more room, and she intended to stay in the recliner and watch movies during her recovery. This same patient told me that her husband was out of work and they have 4 children and that they couldn’t wait for “nationalized healthcare” because they couldn’t afford insurance (she was receiving all of her care for free).

I know this story sounds amazing and made up because what person would say all this while I was working right there but this is exactly what I am trying to point out. Some people have the expectation that because they want a service and need that service that it is a RIGHT.


Well, not to brag or anything but we don’t own a big TV, we don’t have cable or a dish, we rarely eat out and my husband drives a 39 year old car to work (and believe me it is NOT considered a classic, but don't tell him that:) we don’t have the latest and greatest cell phones, laptops, iPods or iPads and the reason we don’t have these things is because we make CHOICES.


All my life I was taught to work hard and save money and that I could be successful if I learned a “marketable skill” (my dads favorite term). We are extremely blessed. Neither my husband nor I went to expensive universities or hold impressive degrees but we have those marketable skills and we try hard to be good stewards of the gifts God gives us and to be charitable to those less fortunate. We are living the American dream.


Oh, and when my patient was finally ready to go home and she had met all the discharge criteria, I wheeled her out to the front of the hospital and her husband picked her up in a brand new car.

gm


 en•ti•tle•ment

Pronunciation: \-ˈtī-təl-mənt\

Function: noun

Date: 1942

1 a : the state or condition of being entitled : RIGHT b : a right to benefits specified especially by law or contract

2 : a government program providing benefits to members of a specified group; also : funds supporting or distributed by such a program

3 : belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges


very interestig, check it out when you have a minute
http://www.helium.com/items/316120-a-history-of-american-entitlement-programs



 
kinda fits:) 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRgB2eeHZEw
pretty funny

Brian Regan on pop tarts

The government wants to track your children's fat

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/65781

http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2010/05/13/ron-kind-d-wi-3-wants-the-government-to-track-how-much-your-daughter-weighs/

Since when are mandates the same as choices? This has never been about health care or "for the good of the people" it has ALWAYS been about power and control.
gm

Obama Is Going To Pay For My Gas And Mortgage!!!

ObamaCare: An Unmitigated Disaster

Americans are learning that ObamaCare will pile on insurmountable debt and cause government to encroach on every area of our lives. ObamaCare is, as Yuval Levin said, an "unmitigated disaster -- for our health care system, for our fiscal future, and for any notion of limited government." And the more we learn about the specific provisions, the more we discover that the bill does not reflect our values -- faith, family and freedom -- nor does it strengthen those principles that are the foundation of a great nation.


Each day while Democrats are criss-crossing the country to declare that ObamaCare is not a government takeover of health care, a new government expert releases figures indicating that ObamaCare is going to be outrageously expensive and won't do what the president promised it would. Now they tell us!

Many Americans were outraged after ObamaCare passed when a report from the Office of the Actuary of Medicare indicated that the costs of the bill would increase rather than cut the costs of health care in the United States. In an April 23 appearance before the House Appropriations Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared that nobody really knows what ObamaCare will cost. Ed Morrissey, the prominent blogger on Hot Air, called the $5 billion appropriated for ObamaCare just a "spit-balling number," because "no one has the faintest clue how much money will actually get spent on this program." There is clear evidence, however, from the Congressional Budget Office that the average fine for those three million middle-class Americans who are expected to pay a penalty for not having health insurance will amount to more than $1,000 per person. The report estimates that the government will collect about $4 billion per year in fines from 2017 to 2019.


In addition to questions about cost, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll reveals that over half of Americans are confused about what the law means (55 percent) and what impact it will have on them (56 percent). Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), ranking Republican on the Budget Committee and a leader in explaining Obamanomics, believes that the nation is at a "tipping point" and could be on a "very dangerous" path toward a social welfare state. He says ObamaCare "has $2 trillion in higher taxes, doubles the debt in five years, triples the debt in 10 years," and consists of the "largest entitlement" expansion in 35 years where the "majority of Americans are more dependent upon the government than they are themselves." More than 70 percent, Ryan claims, will get more benefits from the government than they pay for in taxes -- making 3-out-of-10 families either supplement or supply the income for the other seven families.


Numerous polls indicate that the public's trust in government is at an "historic low." The Pew Research Center reported that only 22 percent of Americans trust government today. A Quinnipiac poll notes that the President's approval rating is down to 44 percent, and Congress's approval is 25 percent. Daniel Henninger, of the Wall Street Journal, said, "The American people have issued a no-confidence vote in government." Henninger thinks that the distrust is because, with almost universal access to the Internet, the "veil was ripped from the true cost of government" so that everyone could see how much spending -- $9 trillion -- was out of control.


ObamaCare contains $670 billion in tax increases. For the middle class, there are at least 14 different tax increases signed into law that target taxpayers making less than $250,000 per year. In Massachusetts, a state that enacted health care reforms similar to the national plan, more than a half-dozen lawsuits were filed to stop double-digit premium increases. The Boston Globe warned that ObamaCare could result in similar lawsuits at the federal level. Indeed, Richard Epstein, a constitutional lawyer writing in the Wall Street Journal, stated that regulated public utilities have a right to a "risk-adjusted rate of return on their invested capital." Others are predicting federal lawsuits where courts will slap down "efforts to control by fiat the price of the insurance" that Americans are legally mandated to buy. Attorneys general in more than a dozen states are working to challenge the legal mandate in federal court as unconstitutional.


Finally, officials are owning up to what most Americans already knew. ObamaCare means higher costs and lower quality; ObamaCare means rationing and higher taxes - including a Value Added Tax (VAT). It means mandating and penalties. President Obama and his liberal colleagues on the Hill jettisoned the world's best health care system for the dubious honor of having achieved "health care reform." Now, in addition to figuring out how to pay for the trillion dollar government takeover of health care, we have to untangle the budgetary gimmicks, bureaucratic mess, and disastrous financial crisis that the nation faces as a result.

By Janice Shaw Crouse posted on AmericanThinker.com 5/1/10

When are we going to stop believing politicians promises??? Will someone please tell me of ONE government program that is a success and cost LESS than originally projected?
gm

The Angry Cloud

White House's Goldman Ties

White House's Goldman Ties


Malkin talks about all the connections that the Obama administration has to Goldman Sachs and all of money in play. And she is right to point out the hypocrisy, that the Left screamed at the top of their lungs over Enron and Bush, yet Obama, even more connected to Goldman Sachs, gets praise for wanting to ‘fix’ Wall St and use Goldman Sachs as its ox to pull that cart.


All of these are good arguments, but I tend to fall down on the side of all of the corruption that has taken place since Obama took office. He has spent us into oblivion and lied while doing it. Back room deals are the norm for this administration and he has never been held to account by the statist MSM. Thus he continues to deceive and bankrupt our country and we will all pay for it soon enough.
And yet he has the audacity to call out and demagogue Wall St as if he is the white knight whose sword has never stabbed anyone in the back. It’s honestly quite disgusting to see all of this happening, especially with a complicit media.

Posted by therightscoop in Politics on Apr 21st, 2010

Some blacks now have doubts about Obama

Some blacks now have doubts about Obama (OneNewsNow.com)

Race and Resentment

Recent stories out of both Philadelphia and San Francisco tell of black students beating up Asian American students. This is especially painful for those who expected that the election of Barack Obama would mark the beginning of a post-racial America.


While Obama's winning the majority of the votes in overwhelmingly white states suggests that many Americans are ready to move beyond race, it is painfully clear that others are not.


Those who explain racial antagonisms on some rationalistic basis will have a hard time demonstrating how Asian Americans have made blacks worse off. Certainly none of the historic wrongs done to blacks was done by the small Asian American population who, for most of their history in this country, have not had enough clout to prevent themselves from being discriminated against


While ugly racial or ethnic conflicts can seldom be explained by rational economic or other self-interest, they have been too common to be just inexplicable oddities-- whether in America or in other countries around the world, and whether today or in centuries past.


Resentments and hostility toward people with higher achievements are one of the most widespread of human failings. Resentments of achievements are more deadly than envy of wealth.


The hatred of people who started at the bottom and worked their way up has far exceeded any hostility toward those who were simply born into wealth. None of the sultans who inherited extraordinary fortunes in Malaysia has been hated like the Chinese, who arrived there destitute and rose by their own efforts.


Inheritors of the Rockefeller fortune have been elected as popular governors in three states, attracting nothing like the hostility toward the Jewish immigrants who rose from poverty on Manhattan's Lower East Side to prosperity in a variety of fields.


Others who started at the bottom and rose to prosperity-- the Lebanese in West Africa, the Indians in Fiji, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, for example-- have likewise been hated for their achievements. Being born a sultan or a Rockefeller is not an achievement.


Achievements are a reflection on others who may have had similar, and sometimes better, chances but who did not make the most of their chances. Achievements are like a slap across the face to those who are not achieving, and many people react with the same kind of anger that such an insult would provoke.


In our own times, especially, this is not just a spontaneous reaction. Many of our educators, our intelligentsia and our media -- not to mention our politicians-- promote an attitude that other people's achievements are grievances, rather than examples.


When black school children who are working hard in school and succeeding academically are attacked and beaten up by black classmates for "acting white," why is it surprising that similar hostility is turned against Asian Americans, who are often achieving academically more so than whites?


This attitude is not peculiar to some in the black community or to the United States. The same phenomenon is found among lower-class whites in Britain, where academically achieving white students have been beaten up badly enough by their white classmates to require hospital treatment.


These are poisonous and self-destructive consequences of a steady drumbeat of ideological hype about differences that are translated into "disparities" and "inequities," provoking envy and resentments under their more prettied-up name of "social justice."


Asian American school children who are beaten up are just some of the victims of these resentments that are whipped up. Young people who are seething with resentments, instead of seizing educational and other opportunities around them, are bigger victims in the long run, whether they are blacks in the US or lower-class whites in the UK. A decade after these beatings, these Asian Americans will be headed up in the world, while the hoodlums who beat them up are more likely to be headed for crime and prison.


People who call differences "inequities" and achievements "privilege" leave social havoc in their wake, while feeling noble about siding with the less fortunate. It would never occur to them that they have any responsibility for the harm done to both blacks and Asian Americans.

Thomas Sowell posted on Townhall.com 5/4/2010

West VS Holder

Colonel Allen West




Attorney General Eric Holder



Now, which man do you believe has your back and wants to protect America???
gm

Ray Charles - So Help Me God

Chilling confession of MSA Student, She Wants a Second Holocaust

“For It”: MSA Student Confesses She Wants a Second Holocaust


Please read some of the comments that followed the blog post:




They arrested a group in Michigan because they talked of anti-government activity. All they did was talk of it. Here you have muslims admitting their alliance and hate of Jews and Christians. Why are they allowed here? Why are they not rounded up as this group was and put in jail and the media convict them? What is wrong with this picture? Thank you David for giving us lots of information.
mary jo



We as a nation should wake up. radical Islam is here moving deep into our own streets and schools. We are handing them the technology, knowledge, and all ammunition so they could kill our system, values, citizens and children.
She is the living proof of it.
MM



What we saw is not scary – it is reality. Our kids are in danger – yes they are and we have to unite and to push back to protect our kids. Condemning MSA is not going to help. Now we know how they fill about Jews, Christians, Americans, all of us-Infidel’s.
By the way-I am very proud to be an Infidel.
We can't have and let another Holocaust to happen.
I am from Latvia and saw Nazis gas chambers, mass graves, concentration camps.
My message to all Infidel haters – you will not simply leave us alone, but we will not let you to destroy the World and Civilization.
Hitler tried, Stalin tried and you are trying again and you will end-up same way as they did.
gregory



I'm from England & I should tell you guys from America that you all need to take action sooner rather than later against this islamic death cult because in my country in Birmingham there are actually official signs up in the street saying & I quote (No Whites after 7.00pm) and our governments stance on this is that it is for our own safety. These area's with these signs up are called Muslim area's. In my opinion islamic faith is nothing
more than an out dated 1300 year old death cult that is structured in such a way that it targets non - believers into either converting or migrating away from muslim area's or in some extreme cases resulting in death of non-believers. All muslims get their teachings from one source which is the Qu'ran therefore I can’t differentiate so called moderate muslims from extreme muslims.
David



Between in-your-face radical Islam and blatant Marxism, how much more do people have to see? I don't think it's because people are ignorant. I think it's because if they acknowledge what is really going on, they'll have to do something about it, and that takes a lot of effort and courage.
@supertx


once again the Left reacts in a reasonable, dispassionate, clear-headed manner and the Right ( well, some from the Right ) react hysterically, emotionally, and sensationally.
look at yourselves going bonkers over this silly incident i'd laugh at it all if your reaction was not such a poor reflection upon America
Kimmy Ferris

The left shows a reasonable, clear-headed sympathy for the concept of rounding up and exterminating all Jews. It's only hysterical people who react emotionally to that idea.

It's a safe bet that most people on the right know more than leftists do about the hateful, genocidal talk that Muslims spew in Arabic when they think the infidels aren't listening. And they're certainly paying better attention to what the Muslim mob is actually doing around the world. Have you ever heard of Ilan Halimi, just for example?
Radegunda

Kitty Werthmann Interview

We must listen and learn history or we are doomed to repeat it.  We must also ACT on our knowledge.  Please comment and let me know what you think, thanks for checking out my blog.
gm

Will Americans refuse to open their eyes?

May 12, 2010


"You will keep on hearing, but will not understand; and you will keep on seeing, but will not perceive; for the heart of this people has become dull, and with their ears they scarcely hear, and they have closed their eyes lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and return, and I should heal them."
Isaiah 6:9-10


Dear michal,
The following is an eyewitness account. What happened when the Nazis took over Austria should sober all thinking Americans. The similarities to contemporary America can be ignored only to our peril.

America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don't Let Freedom Slip Away

By: Kitty Werthmann

What I am about to tell you is something you've probably never heard or will ever read in history books.
I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide - 98% of the vote. I've never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.
In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25% inflation and 25% bank loan interest rates. Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn't want to work; there simply weren't any jobs. My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people - about 30 daily. The Communist Party and the National Socialist Party were fighting each other. Blocks and blocks of cities like Vienna , Linz , and Graz were destroyed. The people became desperate and petitioned the government to let them decide what kind of government they wanted. We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933. We had been told that they didn't have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group -- Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria . We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler. We were overjoyed, and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed. After the election, German officials were appointed, and like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service.
Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn't support his family. Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage. Hitler Targets Education - Eliminates Religious Instruction for Children:  Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler's picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn't pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles," and had physical education.
Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300,and the third time they would be subject to jail. The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had. My mother was very unhappy. When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn't do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun - no sports, and no political indoctrination. I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn't exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy.
Equal Rights Hits Home: In 1939, the war started and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn't work, you didn't get a ration card, and if you didn't have a card, you starved to death.
Women who stayed home to raise their families didn't have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men. Soon after this, the draft was implemented. It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps. During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service.
Hitler Restructured the Family Through Daycare: When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. You could take your children ages 4 weeks to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, 7 days a week, under the total care of the government. The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had.
Health Care and Small Business Suffer Under Government Controls:
Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna . After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries. As for health care, our tax rates went up to 80% of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a
household. We had big programs for families. All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing. We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn't meet all the demands. Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control. We had consumer protection. We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the live-stock, then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it.
"Mercy Killing" Redefined: In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps . The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness. As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia.
The Final Steps - Gun Laws: Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long after-wards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily.
No more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up.
Totalitarianism didn't come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria . Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.
After World War II, Russian troops occupied Austria. Women were raped, preteen to elderly. The press never wrote about this either. When the Soviets left in 1955, they took everything that they could, dismantling whole factories in the process. They sawed down whole orchards of fruit, and what they couldn't destroy, they burned. We called it The Burned Earth. Most of the population barricaded themselves in their houses. Women hid in their cellars for 6 weeks as the troops mobilized. Those who couldn't, paid the price. There is a monument in Vienna today, dedicated to those women who were massacred by the Russians.


Kitty Werthmann, of Pierre, South Dakota, lobbies the South Dakota state Legislature on issues that concern all Americans, and serves as the State Affiliate for Eagle Forum. She has lived in the United States since 1950 and has been a U.S. citizen since 1962.

Received via email from http://www.restoreamerica.org
 
First they made promises, then they "encouraged" mothers to get out of the home, they removed God and replaced Him with government, they nationalized schools, food and farms, they took over businesses and health care, big government became essential and  "raised" the next generation while at the same time exterminating the elderly and the inconvenient.  They removed the peoples ability to defend themselves by taking away their guns and silenced dissenters. 
Does ANY of this sound familiar???
gm

Amazon Review of "A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia"

The case against the Evil Empire, September 6, 2003

By C.J. Griffin (Little River, SC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Hardcover)

This is one of the best and most important books ever written on the Soviet Union, which is exposed here as a blood-soaked totalitarian tyranny every bit as nefarious as Hitler's Third Reich. Yakovlev, once a prominent member of the Soviet elite and architect of "perestroika" who is now head of the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, demolishes the revisionist history coming from Gregory L. Freeze, J. Arch Getty, Robert W. Thurston and others. He is in a better position to know what happened than anyone else, considering he has been going through the archives for the last ten years. This makes A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia the most damning indictment of Soviet Communism since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's monumental work of history, The Gulag Archipelago.
Yakovlev confidently states with absolute certainty that the number of people murdered by the Soviet state for political reasons or who perished in camps/gulags or in state-enforced famines is around 30-35 million - with a total of 60 million dead if you include those who perished during the second world war, in which Stalin is partly responsible for being foolish enough to form a pact with Hitler and paranoid enough to butcher tens of thousands of his military elite, leaving his country open to attack. The clergy were subjected to the most bestial of atrocities: priests, monks and nuns were crucified on the central doors of iconostases, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled with priestly stoles, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were executed in 1918 alone. Besides the clergy and military elite, other victims of Soviet Communism include: peasants (many millions), the intelligentsia, returning Soviet POW's, whole ethnic groups (Crimean Taters, Don Cossacks, Chechens, Volga Germans, Kalmyks, etc.), even so-called "Socially Dangerous Children."
Yakovlev also tackles one of the great myths about Soviet Communism: Good Lenin/Bad Stalin. Lenin was no big-hearted idealist concerned for humanity, but a fanatic and a cold-blooded murderer, willing to kill off millions of his fellow countrymen in the name of the "revolution." Yakovlev quotes the murderous orders Lenin issued: "impose mass terror immediately, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who have been getting soldiers, former officers, and so on drunk. Not a minute's delay." "Hang (by all means hang, so people will see) no fewer than 100 known kulaks, fat cats, bloodsuckers." "launch merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards. Suspicious individuals to be locked up in concentration camp outside city." In 1919, Lenin ordered the Cheka (Bolshevik secret police) to execute those who did not show up for work on a particular religious holiday. As Yakovlev shows, Stalin simply picked up where Lenin left off.
I absolutely urge anyone interested in the bloody history of the 20th century to read this book.

A Hidden History of Evil

Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.
For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.
Then there’s Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who once spent 12 years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas—political psychiatric hospitals—after being convicted of copying anti-Soviet literature. He, too, possesses a massive collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.” These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function. “I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” Bukovsky writes. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?”
The originals of most of Stroilov’s documents remain in the Kremlin archives, where, like most of the Soviet Union’s top-secret documents from the post-Stalin era, they remain classified. They include, Stroilov says, transcripts of nearly every conversation between Gorbachev and his foreign counterparts—hundreds of them, a near-complete diplomatic record of the era, available nowhere else. There are notes from the Politburo taken by Georgy Shakhnazarov, an aide of Gorbachev’s, and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. There is the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev—Gorbachev’s principal aide and deputy chief of the body formerly known as the Comintern—which dates from 1972 to the collapse of the regime. There are reports, dating from the 1960s, by Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Central Committee’s International Department until 1987 and then Gorbachev’s advisor until 1991. Zagladin was both envoy and spy, charged with gathering secrets, spreading disinformation, and advancing Soviet influence.
When Gorbachev and his aides were ousted from the Kremlin, they took unauthorized copies of these documents with them. The documents were scanned and stored in the archives of the Gorbachev Foundation, one of the first independent think tanks in modern Russia, where a handful of friendly and vetted researchers were given limited access to them. Then, in 1999, the foundation opened a small part of the archive to independent researchers, including Stroilov. The key parts of the collection remained restricted; documents could be copied only with the written permission of the author, and Gorbachev refused to authorize any copies whatsoever. But there was a flaw in the foundation’s security, Stroilov explained to me. When things went wrong with the computers, as often they did, he was able to watch the network administrator typing the password that gave access to the foundation’s network. Slowly and secretly, Stroilov copied the archive and sent it to secure locations around the world.
When I first heard about Stroilov’s documents, I wondered if they were forgeries. But in 2006, having assessed the documents with the cooperation of prominent Soviet dissidents and Cold War spies, British judges concluded that Stroilov was credible and granted his asylum request. The Gorbachev Foundation itself has since acknowledged the documents’ authenticity.
Bukovsky’s story is similar. In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin’s government invited him to testify at the Constitutional Court of Russia in a case concerning the constitutionality of the Communist Party. The Russian State Archives granted Bukovsky access to its documents to prepare his testimony. Using a handheld scanner, he copied thousands of documents and smuggled them to the West.
The Russian state cannot sue Stroilov or Bukovsky for breach of copyright, since the material was created by the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, neither of which now exists. Had he remained in Russia, however, Stroilov believes that he could have been prosecuted for disclosure of state secrets or treason. The military historian Igor Sutyagin is now serving 15 years in a hard-labor camp for the crime of collecting newspaper clippings and other open-source materials and sending them to a British consulting firm. The danger that Stroilov and Bukovsky faced was real and grave; they both assumed, one imagines, that the world would take notice of what they had risked so much to acquire.
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The Ωcommonly accepted≈ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:

H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .

M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .

H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.

M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!

H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.


One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
There are other ways in which the story that Stroilov’s and Bukovsky’s papers tell isn’t over. They suggest, for example, that the architects of the European integration project, as well as many of today’s senior leaders in the European Union, were far too close to the USSR for comfort. This raises important questions about the nature of contemporary Europe—questions that might be asked when Americans consider Europe as a model for social policy, or when they seek European diplomatic cooperation on key issues of national security.
According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from 1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament, approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet. Coates, says Zagladin, explained that “creating an infrastructure of cooperation between the two parliament[s] would help . . . to isolate the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who are interested in the USSR’s collapse.” Coates served as chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights from 1992 to 1994. How did it come to pass that Europe was taking advice about human rights from a man who had apparently wished to “isolate” those interested in the USSR’s collapse and sought to extend Soviet influence in Europe?
Or consider a report on Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, who led Spain’s integration into the European Community as its foreign minister. On March 3, 1989, according to these documents, he explained to Gorbachev that “the success of perestroika means only one thing—the success of the socialist revolution in contemporary conditions. And that is exactly what the reactionaries don’t accept.” Eighteen months later, Ordóñez told Gorbachev: “I feel intellectual disgust when I have to read, for example, passages in the documents of ΩG7≈ where the problems of democracy, freedom of human personality and ideology of market economy are set on the same level. As a socialist, I cannot accept such an equation.” Perhaps most shockingly, the Eastern European press has reported that Stroilov’s documents suggest that François Mitterrand was maneuvering with Gorbachev to ensure that Germany would unite as a neutral, socialist entity under a Franco-Soviet condominium.
Zagladin’s records also note that the former leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, approached Gorbachev—unauthorized, while Kinnock was leader of the opposition—through a secret envoy to discuss the possibility of halting the United Kingdom’s Trident nuclear-missile program. The minutes of the meeting between Gorbachev and the envoy, MP Stuart Holland, read as follows:
In [Holland’s] opinion, Soviet Union should be very interested in liquidation of “Tridents” because, apart from other things, the West—meaning the US, Britain and France—would have a serious advantage over the Soviet Union after the completion of START treaty. That advantage will need to be eliminated. . . . At the same time Holland noted that, of course, we can seriously think about realisation of that idea only if the Labour comes to power. He said Thatcher . . . would never agree to any reduction of nuclear armaments.
Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”
Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.
Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?
Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.” The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it. Neither has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration. In 2004, a very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.
Stroilov has a long list of complaints about journalists who have initially shown interest in the documents, only to tell him later that their editors have declared the story insignificant. In advance of Gorbachev’s visit to Germany for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stroilov says, he offered the German press the documents depicting Gorbachev unflatteringly. There were no takers. In France, news about the documents showing Mitterrand’s and Gorbachev’s plans to turn Germany into a dependent socialist state prompted a few murmurs of curiosity, nothing more. Bukovsky’s vast collection about Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, Palestinian and otherwise, remains largely unpublished.
Stroilov says that he and Bukovsky approached Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press, which is leading a publishing project on the history of the Cold War. He claims that initially Brent was enthusiastic and asked him to write a book, based on the documents, about the first Gulf War. Stroilov says that he wrote the first six chapters, sent them off, and never heard from Brent again, despite sending him e-mail after e-mail. “I can only speculate what so much frightened him in that book,” Stroilov wrote to me.
I’ve also asked Brent and received no reply. This doesn’t mean anything; people are busy. I am less inclined to believe in complex attempts to suppress the truth than I am in indifference and preoccupation with other things. Stroilov sees in these events “a kind of a taboo, the vague common understanding in the Establishment that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, not to throw stones in a house of glass, and not to mention a rope in the house of a hanged man.” I suspect it is something even more disturbing: no one much cares.
“I know the time will come,” Stroilov says, “when the world has to look at those documents very carefully. We just cannot escape this. We have no way forward until we face the truth about what happened to us in the twentieth century. Even now, no matter how hard we try to ignore history, all these questions come back to us time and again.”
The questions come back time and again, it is true, but few remember that they have been asked before, and few remember what the answer looked like. No one talks much about the victims of Communism. No one erects memorials to the throngs of people murdered by the Soviet state. (In his widely ignored book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika under Gorbachev, puts the number at 30 to 35 million.)
Indeed, many still subscribe to the essential tenets of Communist ideology. Politicians, academics, students, even the occasional autodidact taxi driver still stand opposed to private property. Many remain enthralled by schemes for central economic planning. Stalin, according to polls, is one of Russia’s most popular historical figures. No small number of young people in Istanbul, where I live, proudly describe themselves as Communists; I have met such people around the world, from Seattle to Calcutta.
We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.


Claire Berlinski, a contributing editor of City Journal, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_soviet-archives.html
 
 
I have added Claire Berlinski's book as well as "A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia" and "The Gulag Archipelago" to my reading list but I need to do so much more, we must educate ourselves and then make sure to share with and inform as many other people as we can.  Please comment with your suggestions and/or advice.  Thanks again for checking out my blog.
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