posted on June 13, 2007 08:48:21 PM
And with some of the nonsense hillary has suggested lately I'm concerned she's wanting to take us back to some of her marxism ways from her college days.
'The Worst Thing About Communism Is That It Still Exists'
By Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
June 13, 2007
(CNSNews.com) - A new memorial honoring those victimized by communism is an "image of hope" for all those who have suffered under communist regimes, President Bush said Tuesday.
"The 20th century will be remembered as the deadliest century in human history," Bush said at a dedication ceremony in Washington, D.C. "And the record of this brutal era is commemorated in memorials across this city.
"Yet, until now, our nation's capital had no monument to the victims of imperial communism, an ideology that took the lives of an estimated 100 million innocent men, women and children," he said.
The new Victims of Communism Memorial is a 10-foot bronze replica of the 'Goddess of Democracy' statue erected by pro-democracy students and destroyed by Chinese troops in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. The image is based on the Statue of Liberty.
"The sheer numbers of those killed in communism's name are staggering, so large that a precise count is impossible," the president said.
"According to the best scholarly estimate, communism took the lives of tens of millions of people in China and the Soviet Union, and millions more in North Korea, Cambodia, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe," he said.
Pedro Fuentes, a political prisoner in Cuba for 18 years, said the actual number of victims worldwide is probably between 200 and 300 million, because estimates don't include family members and friends of those killed.
"We're talking about the biggest tragedy that's ever happened in our world," Fuentes said Tuesday afternoon at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation. "The worst thing is that [communism] still exists."
He noted that communism is "alive in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and many other countries."
"Every free person should fight against communism," Fuentes said. "We will continue fighting until the last breath."
Alan Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Heritage event that "no cause ever in the history of all mankind has produced more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than communism - it surpassed exponentially all other systems of production in turning out the dead."
"A totalitarian government is no different if you call it Nazi, fascist, or communist," said Tunne Kelam, a member of the European Parliament and a leading Estonian dissident during the Soviet era. Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1940 until 1991.
While he applauded the efforts of honoring the victims of communism, Kelam said more needs to be done to educate people about the history of communism.
"The victims of communism still lack the guarantee that the victims of Nazism have defined as 'Never again,'" he said. "As long as there is no authoritative, international political assessment of the communist authoritarian system, you can't have such guarantees. So, in practical terms, the victims of communism are seen as second class victims."
In his remarks, Bush also pointed to the threat posed by violent Islamist groups. "The evil and hatred that inspired the death of tens of millions of people in the 20th century is still at work in the world," he said.
"Like the communists, the terrorists and radicals who attacked our nation are followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has expansionist ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims," the president added.
"Like the communists, our new enemies believe the innocent can be murdered to serve a radical vision," Bush said. "Like the communists, our new enemies are dismissive of free peoples, claiming that those of us who live in liberty are weak and lack the resolve to defend our free way of life.
"And like the communists, the followers of violent Islamic radicalism are doomed to fail," he said.
The Communist Party of the United States, the Revolutionary Communist Party and International ANSWER - which has historic links to the pro-North Korean Workers World Party - did not return requests for comment for this article.
=======================
“In Washington, D. C.,... a Victims of Communism Memorial will be dedicated... While the memorial is a welcome reminder of man’s capacity to do evil, one wishes that a similar structure were erected to remind the world of leftist academics, clergy and journalists who enabled communism to survive by writing and speaking lies about its true nature. They were more than enablers. They were co-conspirators and accessories to murder. They, too, deserve to share in communism’s ignominy.” —Cal Thomas
"While the democratic party complains about everything THIS President does to protect our Nation": "What would a Democrat president have done at that point?"
"Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack."
Ann Coulter
[ edited by Linda_K on Jun 13, 2007 08:50 PM ]
[ edited by Linda_K on Jun 13, 2007 08:59 PM ]
posted on June 13, 2007 11:25:11 PM
From YOUR article:
"""A totalitarian government is no different if you call it Nazi, fascist, or communist," said Tunne Kelam, a member of the European Parliament and a leading Estonian dissident during the Soviet era.""
I still don't know why you are so afraid of Communism but eagerly embrace Fascism.....?????
posted on June 14, 2007 03:48:03 AM
Next Linda is going to want to wage war against the spread of Communism.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on June 17, 2007 07:59:08 PM
and her comrad, pelosi.
Pelosi's Favorite Stalinist
Return of the San Francisco Democrats.
by Joshua Muravchik
06/25/2007, Volume 012, Issue 39
Since becoming speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi has campaigned for unconditional withdrawal from Iraq with surprising fervor, making it sound as if "the war" and George W. Bush were America's only enemies. I had supposed that the Democrats would prefer to keep up a drumbeat of criticism of the administration's teetering policies without assuming responsibility for whatever comes next in Iraq, which is what they will in effect be doing if they force the president's hand. I had, in short, thought they would behave more like politicians than like ideologues and activists. I had missed the ideological streak in Pelosi's own background.
Pelosi comes from the San Francisco Bay Area, where Democrats have long positioned themselves far to the left of the national party. For example, former congressman Ron Dellums of Berkeley was a tireless stalwart of Communist front groups, and other representatives, like George Miller, Pelosi's closest colleague in the House, and the Burton brothers, John and Phil, manned the party's left fringe. Miller still does.
The reason for this sharp tilt was not, as one might imagine, the influence of University of California student radicalism, which in reality had little reach into practical politics. Rather, it was the unique character of organized labor in the Bay Area. Everywhere else in America, the AFL-CIO was a staunch force for anti-communism. This was symbolized by labor's most important postwar leader, George Meany, who denied labor's backing to George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election for the sole reason that McGovern was soft on communism, and who organized a welcome to America gala for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1975, when President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger refused to receive the Soviet dissident.
Beginning in the late 1940s, American labor unions had purged their own ranks of Communists, the AFL-CIO adopting a policy of expelling any union led by Communists. By and large, this policy provided sufficient impetus for anti-Communist factions to organize to battle the Communists within those unions in which they had become powerful. In most cases the anti-Communists succeeded in running the Communists out. But in some cases the Communists won, and the most important such exception was the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), which controlled the docks of San Francisco.
The ILWU was duly expelled from the AFL-CIO, but it thrived nonetheless. It became arguably the most powerful union in the Bay Area and a big supporter of leftist causes, including inside the Democratic party. Unlike UC students, the ILWU could bring lots of money and resources to bear on behalf of favored candidates.
The force behind the ILWU's ideology was Harry Bridges, an Australian immigrant and devoted Communist. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations tried to deport Bridges, on the grounds that he had lied about his Communist affiliation in his immigration papers, but for various procedural reasons the case was dismissed. So loyal was Bridges to Moscow that during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, he opposed the (1940) reelection of labor hero FDR, because Roosevelt was aligning the United States with Britain against Germany, and the ILWU printed antiwar pamphlets proclaiming "The Yanks Are NOT Coming." As soon as Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union, Bridges did a 180-degree about-face on the war.
While Bridges and his union took transparently pro-Communist stances, Bridges denied that he was a Communist. Only after the fall of the USSR, and the opening of Soviet archives, did the truth emerge that Bridges had been not merely in the party but a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA, a position for which the documents show he was directly approved by the Kremlin.
This means, plain and simple, that he had devoted his life to the service of the Soviet Union and its ruler, Joseph Stalin, one of the three greatest mass murderers of all time. (Hitler and Mao Zedong are the other two.) Like Ronald Reagan, Bridges believed the world was menaced by an evil empire, but to him, the evil was the United States. The influence of Harry Bridges and his ILWU was what pulled the Bay Area Democratic party so far to the left.
The point of rehearsing all of this ancient history is that one of those he influenced and who still goes out of her way to honor that influence is Nancy Pelosi. In 2001, she took to the pages of the Congressional Record to effuse her sentiments on the hundredth anniversary of Harry Bridges's birth, an occasion celebrated only by a gnostic few.
Here is what she said: "Harry Bridges [was] arguably the most significant labor leader of the twentieth century," who was "beloved by the workers of this Nation, and recognized as one of the most important labor leaders in the world." She added: "The International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union [was] the most progressive union of the time." In other words, this Communist-run union was more admirable than all of the anti-Communist unions.
Pelosi delivered this encomium a full nine years after Bridges's membership in the CP Central Committee had been revealed. Nor was this just a single moment. As recently as this February she visited ILWU headquarters to deliver this homage: "It is very special to me, any occasion that I can come to the ILWU hall and acknowledge the leadership of this great union. . . ." This was not just an infatuation with one man.
In addition to her tribute to Bridges, she delivered a similar encomium to another prominent Bay Area Stalin fan, Vivian Hallinan, whose husband was Bridges's lawyer and the 1952 candidate for president of the Communist-front Progressive party. "Vivian," she enthused, "was devoted intellectually and passionately to many causes, well before they became popularly embraced."
This is not to say that Pelosi is a Communist--who is these days?--or that she ever was. But about her adoration of the Stalin-worshiping Bridges there is no doubt. It is no less egregious than Senator Trent Lott's apparent endorsement of Strom Thurmond's racist past, which cost Lott the Senate leadership, the difference being that Thurmond had long since renounced racism, while Bridges never renounced communism.
As she leads the Democratic campaign to withdraw from Iraq and sallies off to meet the likes of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, we should know Pelosi's wretched record in judging who are history's good guys and who are its bad. And we should be mindful that some of what she knows about political values was learned at the feet of people who believed fervently that the great enemy of mankind was none other than America itself.
Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
posted on June 17, 2007 08:53:23 PM
Linda_K
posted on June 15, 2007 02:40:06 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"First They Came for the Jews"
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
posted on June 19, 2007 10:53:10 PM
Linda_K
posted on June 15, 2007 02:40:06 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"First They Came for the Jews"
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
posted on June 20, 2007 07:46:44 AM
Helenjw
posted on January 1, 2007 03:56:17 PM
Oh, cut the crap, Mingo. Here, like at OTWA your clinging attention to Linda exacerbates the problem. If you want to continue it's certainly your prerogative to do so
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you dont want to hear the truth....dont ask the question.
