Well, I was waiting to see something like this. The U.S. leftists are falling in behind the Communist Party of Canada in support of the Kim regime in totalitarian North Korea — and publishing their pro-communist agitprop at the anti-Semitic hate blog Daily Kos. See NewsBusters, ” Daily Kos Comes to Defense of North Korea; No Worse Than South Korea, USA .” Following the link takes us to the diary at Daily Kos, ” North Korea & Hysteria, Madness .” I love this passage: We have to realize that much of what is written about North Korea is for popular digestion regarding potential invasion. Let’s face it, North Korea is ripe for capitalism, there are millions of potential workers who will work for near nothing. The hope is that the regime will crumble like the Soviet Union and give way to massive investment opportunities. Right. Millions of potential skeletons, but check the post. I can see where Professor Caldararo is coming from. He cites some political science literature on Cold War international politics, and he places North Korea in the framework of a besieged state surrounded by hostile powers. This is something of a realist take, but realism has been perverted by the academic left to demonize Israel as a detriment to U.S. security interests. This Caldararo piece is another application of such abstract analysis in furtherance of the far-left agenda. In particular, this piece is noteworthy for its extreme moral equivalence between North and South Korea, and thus their respective patron systems, communism and capitalism. But while Caldararo is quick to point out the authoritarian politics of the South Korean state, he omits that today Seoul is a democratic regime and perhaps the most successful developing economy in the world today. He also leaves out the enormous human rights abuses and North Korea’s threats to international security and regional order, such as state-sponsored terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Inconvenient facts, I guess. In any case, see Doug Bandow at American Spectator , ” Otherworldly Defense of North Korea “: There is much to complain about South Korea under military rule. But, in case the professor didn’t notice, the South Koreans escaped repression and achieved freedom. It turns out that nasty dictator Park Chung-hee (and he was nasty!) followed economic policies which allowed his people to avoid famine and escape poverty. And dictator Chun Doo-hwan responded to mass protests by holding an election. Silly fellow. He was later convicted and originally sentenced to death for his crimes. His successor, a former general and ally named Roh Tae-woo, allowed another election in which former dissident Kim Young-sam was elected. Roh also later was convicted and sentenced to prison. These guys were amateurs compared to the Kims. See what I mean? But this is the progressive left for you. “No enemies on the left,” and all that. It’s the evil U.S. imperial system that’s the real problem, to hear it from these idiots. And of course, the hate trolls of the progressive fever swamps won’t be inundating the administration at San Francisco State with demands that this guy be fired. No, that’s reserved especially for people who dare to indicate a believe in God and moral decency. It’s pretty messed up. But this is just one more example of the upside-down world we live in where good and decency are deemed as evil and real evil is championed as the saving grace of humanity.
See the rest here:
Niccolo Caldararo, Lecturer in Anthropology, San Francisco State, Hails North Korea as ‘Ripe for Capitalism’
There’s a retrospective on the fall of the Soviet Union at the new Foreign Policy . I’ll be reading and posting more from it, but this essay from Orlando Figes is fascinating, ” Don’t Go There “: In November 2004, Nona Panova was being interviewed by a researcher from the Russian human rights organization Memorial, working under my direction on an oral history project about private life in the Stalin era. Nona, a 75-year-old woman whose father had been arrested during the purges of the 1930s, had been talking for several hours about her upbringing in St. Petersburg and her family when she saw the tape recorder with its microphone. The conversation went like this:Panova: So that’s how it was.… [Notices the tape recorder and shows signs of panic.] Are you recording this? But I’ll be arrested! They’ll put me into jail! Interviewer: Who’ll put you in jail? Panova: Someone will.… I’ve told you so much; there’s so much I’ve said.… Interviewer: [Laughs.] Yes, and it was very interesting, but tell me, who today would want to put you in jail? Panova: But did you really make a recording? Interviewer: Yes, don’t you remember? I warned you at the start that our conversation would be recorded. Panova: Then that’s it. It’s all over for me — they’ll arrest me. More at the link . Ms. Panova thought she’d be killed. Here’s another part this was gripping: For years, what the world knew about the Soviet Union was limited entirely to the public sphere. Apart from a few memoirs by great writers caught up in the repressions of the 1930s, particularly Evgenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, there was little from a personal perspective coming out of those years. More representative testimonies began to emerge only in the glasnost period, when victims of Stalin’s repression were encouraged to come forward with their stories. Organizations like Memorial helped them look for information about their missing relatives, took interviews, and organized archives from the mass of documents, letters, photographs, and artifacts that people brought into their offices in plastic bags and boxes following the Soviet regime’s collapse. And yet even these documents were difficult to interpret. Take diaries, usually regarded as the most direct expression of an individual’s private thoughts and emotions. Diarists of the 1930s and 1940s, however, faced serious obstacles. When a person was arrested, the first thing to be confiscated was the diary, which was likely to be used as incriminating evidence. Many diaries that came to light during the glasnost years express conformist political ideas. Should we take their words at face value, as expressions of a genuine yearning to belong to the Soviet collective, which was no doubt felt by many people insecure about their place in the system? Or should it be assumed that fear drove more to hide themselves behind a mask? Two major finds have been translated from Russian: the 1930s diary of Stepan Podlubny, a kulak son fashioning a Soviet identity for himself in a factory school, which was published in Germany as Tagebuch aus Moskau (1996) by historian Jochen Hellbeck; and Nina Lugovskaya’s schoolgirl diary from the same decade, published in English as I Want to Live (2006). For Hellbeck, the Podlubny diary shows how the individual was practically unable to think outside the terms defined by Soviet politics. In this vision of the “Soviet subject” — developed by Hellbeck from several newly discovered Stalin-era diaries in Revolution on My Mind (2006) — there is little space for private life at all, if we take that to depend on independent thought. Yet the Lugovskaya example shows that even a schoolgirl subjected to the full array of propaganda about the “radiant Soviet future” was not only capable of dissenting, pessimistic, and even “anti-Soviet” thoughts, but eager to confess them to her diary as an expression of her individuality. Living in fear as a direct result of communist totalitarian control. This is where today’s progressives seek to return. They’re communists, and just take a look across the radical left establishment today. To simply speak out against the PC commissars is to risk a termination of employment, personals attacks, threats of violence, or even possible jail time in country’s like Canada and the Netherlands . Progressives are communists. Like Soviet citizens under Stalin, there is no dissenting from the progressive line without threat to life and liberty.
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Chasing the Dying Memories of Soviet Trauma
Terror suspect Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari.
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Saudi Student Arrested in TX for Plotting Terrorist Attack Against GW Bush
It’s strange, since I was just listening to a 20 minute interview with Julian Assange yesterday at TED. I had planned to write about that as soon as this latest breaking news cycle winds down (JournoList, Shirley Sherrod, etc.), and now we’ve got the release of the Afghanistan war logs, which had been expected. Yeah, since the Iraq Apache video smear (and the detailed coverage at Jawa Report , et al., and my own), I’ve been gaining a sharper understanding of Assange and his hard-left enablers worldwide. It’s simply more clear by the day that America’s enemies are not just on the battlefield, but also among the global transnational issue networks working to bring down the United States and its Western allies. I need to research the war logs and find out more on this, so expect updates. Below is a clip featuring Julian Assange for The Guardian . There’s also a big exposé at The Guardian as well, so it’s clear that the newspaper’s coordinating its coverage with WikiLeaks. See, ” Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation .” And of course, the New York Times is on the case, seemingly as deeply involved as is The Guardian . See, ” Inside the Fog of War: Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan .”Also at NYT (FWIW), ” Piecing Together the Reports, and Deciding What to Publish “: The articles published today are based on thousands of United States military incident and intelligence reports — records of engagements, mishaps, intelligence on enemy activity and other events from the war in Afghanistan — that were made public on Sunday on the Internet. The New York Times, The Guardian newspaper in London, and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the material several weeks ago. These reports are used by desk officers in the Pentagon and troops in the field when they make operational plans and prepare briefings on the situation in the war zone. Most of the reports are routine, even mundane, but many add insights, texture and context to a war that has been waged for nearly nine years. Over all these documents amount to a real-time history of the war reported from one important vantage point — that of the soldiers and officers actually doing the fighting and reconstruction. The Source of the Material The documents — some 92,000 individual reports in all — were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds, on the condition that the papers not report on the data until July 25, when WikiLeaks said it intended to post the material on the Internet. WikiLeaks did not reveal where it obtained the material. WikiLeaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing. The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today. The three news organizations agreed to publish their articles simultaneously, but each prepared its own articles. Classified Information Deciding whether to publish secret information is always difficult, and after weighing the risks and public interest, we sometimes chose not to publish. But there are times when the information is of significant public interest, and this is one of those times. The documents illuminate the extraordinary difficulty of what the United States and its allies have undertaken in a way that other accounts have not. Most of the incident reports are marked “secret,” a relatively low level of classification. The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests … There’s more at the link , but I stopped at this line. ” The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests “? Don’t believe it for a second. The New York Times has been the radical left’s institutional organ working to bring about an American defeat in Iraq and the War on Terror, and now in Afghanistan. Recall Heather MacDonald’s piece from 2006, on the Times ‘ reporting that helped killed the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. See, ” National Security Be Damned “: BY NOW IT’S UNDENIABLE: The New York Times is a national security threat. So drunk is it on its own power and so antagonistic to the Bush administration that it will expose every classified antiterror program it finds out about, no matter how legal the program, how carefully crafted to safeguard civil liberties, or how vital to protecting American lives. The Times’s latest revelation of a national security secret appeared on last Friday’s front page–where no al Qaeda operative could possibly miss it. Under the deliberately sensational headline, “Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror,” the Times blows the cover on a highly targeted program to locate terrorist financing networks. According to the report, since 9/11, the Bush administration has obtained information about terror suspects’ international financial transactions from a Belgian clearinghouse of international money transfers. RTWT . See also, Michelle Malkin, ” NY Times Blabbermouths Strike Again .” I’ll have more later after I read and research a bit. Meanwhile, readers can check WikiLeaks directly: ” Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010 .” And the Der Spiegel piece is here: ” Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It ” (via Memeorandum ).
See the article here:
WikiLeaks and the Afghanistan War Logs
