Tag Archives: soviet union

Ex-KGB Spies Shape the New America

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In a  “News with Views” article from 2003 Charlotte Iserbyt analyzes the dynamics of “convergence”whereby the soi-disant capitalist USA merges with the communist USSR, while the population is brain-washed to believe in a Cold War victory of “capitalism” over “communism”:

Reading:  Convergence Theory. 

Also: Convergence Theory (Social Sciences)

and Convergence Hypothesis.

[I use quotation marks around the two terms, because the manner in which they exist today suggests that they are simply two different versions of the same totalitarian system:

“United States-Russian Merger: A Done Deal?”

 Charlotte Iserbyt, News With Views, October 16, 2003

“The average American when confronted with world news that has Putin and Bush embracing one another one year and quarreling/threatening to target one another with missiles the next year, sinks into a state of “cognitive dissonance” whereby he is unable to make sense of anything or to carry on an intelligent conversation about the subject at hand, reacting to one’s comment with nothing more than a “glazed expression.”

This back and forth “planned” agenda is, of course, a brilliant psychological strategy, part of the dialectic, and highly effective in keeping the “sheeple” in line.

When, as a result, none of the conditioned “sheeple” utter a peep over such pre and post-9/11 actions, the “traitors” know that it’s “safe” to take actions such as naming Henry Kissinger, a Soviet agent, to lead an investigation of 9/11… if ever there was a fox overseeing the hen house! (Please refer to Iserbyt article, “Kissinger Out of the Closet” for documentation regarding Kissinger being a Soviet agent.)…..

..The New York Times, in an article dated 8/24/03 entitled “Former Top Russian Spy Pledges Allegiance” stated that the above Center…….

Lila: The Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, http://www.cicentre.com a consulting service in Alexandria, Virginia.

“…provides expertise and advice in counterintelligence, counterterrorism and security for the government (repeat government, ed) and companies.”

The hiring of these ex-KGB agents appears to be a result of FBI/KGB collaboration. The New American, July 30, 2001 discussed such collaboration in a news item entitled “Community Policing, East and West.”

It said: “Among Louis Freeh’s supposedly commendable achievements as FBI director, according to Robert S. Bennett, (brother of William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, ed) was the realization of his vision of a ‘global FBI.’…..

….The New York Times article also says, and this is interesting in light of the U.S.-Soviet education exchange agreements which have been going on since President Eisenhower signed the first one in 1958, “Kalugin’s relationship with America began in the late 1950’s, when Communist officials noticed his skill with languages. He was a K.G.B. trainee when he was sent to Columbia University as an exchange student.The New York Times goes on to reveal the following: “He was one of the generals of the cold war, a K.G.B. leader who did his best to undermine Western capitalism by recruiting Americans to work for Moscow….

…It was Kalugin, a frequent TV commentator and regular guest on Fox News, who stirred up a hornet’s nest last spring by spilling the beans (to an unnamed intelligence agent) on a spy cruise (go to http://www.cicentre.com and click on SpyTrek) regarding his associates, ex-K.G.B. Chiefs Primakov (also former President of Russia and close associate/advisor to Saddam Hussein who visited with Saddam in February of this year, prior to the war in Iraq) and General Alexander Karpov working for recently retired Admiral Poindexter’s Office of Information Awareness which is attached to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology by the military.

This information is covered in detail in an article in the April 2003 issue of Soviet Analyst (www.sovietanalyst.com) entitled “Architect of Soviet Middle East Terror to ‘Advise’ Washington“…Convergence Acquires New Meaning” by Christopher Story, a highly respected researcher and author with offices in London and New York City.

The story was also covered in the May 15, 2003 issue of The Howard Phillips Issues and Strategy Bulletin in an entry entitled “GWB Names Kremlin Spymaster Primakov as Consultant to U.S. Homeland Security Team”.

Please see Iserbyt’s two articles on this subject at www.NewsWithViews.com: “Former KGB Heads to Help Spy on Americans” 4/24/03 and “Former USSR/Russian Premier to Work for Homeland Security” 4/22/03, both of which included information taken from an article in American Free Press entitled “Get Ready for the Sovietization of America”, 4/21/03 by Al Martin, www.almartinraw.com, a former intelligence agent.

Al Martin’s information can also be traced to the same important source, Oleg Kalugin.”

US “Strip-Search”: Same As Soviet Gulag’s

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http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/women-src/images/nightsearch.jpg

Gulag history: online exhibit

This is a drawing by Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, a former prisoner of the Soviet Union, of prisoners stripped of their clothes by prison guards in the Soviet gulag.

[Courtesy of Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia Foundation, Moscow.]

Note: These are political prisoners in a concentration camp in the Soviet Russia.

Note: “Strip-searches” that humiliate the subject in exactly the same way as in Soviet Russia, and to the same extent (and worse), are conducted routinely as “standard procedure” in the United States, without any kind of sustained questioning from the media and academic institutions.

QUOTE (Preet Bharara about Khobragade’s strip-search)

“He said she was “fully searched” by a female deputy marshal in private and called it standard procedure for “every defendant, rich or poor, American or not.”

[The red herring is the emphasis by Bharara on the notion of equality.

Of course, the treatment of a diplomat as though she were a random citizen is in itself an issue.

A gross violation of international protocol/law is clearly a hostile act by the Dept. of State and the NY attorney.

But the outrage among Indians over the matter was perfectly appropriate, even beside the question of the immunity of foreign diplomats in a host country.

Strip-searches, regardless of the status of the victim, are barbaric and violate human rights.]

In the US, such searches are being used for mere suspects, people not yet found guilty of anything at all, people arrested for any charge whatsoever.  In practice, people have been strip-searched for trivial offenses like unpaid traffic-tickets.

Please note that visual inspection of cavities which is a part of all standard strip-searches requires the subject to bend over and part the buttocks for inspection of the anus, often with a flash-light. It also requires the subject to move the testicles or bare the labia for visibility.

Often, the subject is asked to squat on his haunches and cough while baring his genitals. These are, by any standard, deeply humiliating and self-demeaning acts for any one, innocent or guilty, to perform in public, especially in front of a uniformed stranger, subject to few or no restraints. and especially when the procedure is also video-taped, ostensibly for security, thus harnessing the subjects not only into acts of voyeurism but into their pornographic representation and subsequent replication ad infinitum in contexts and for audiences over which he/she has no control, practical or legal.

Strip-searches – whether they include visual inspection of the body-cavities or digital probes of body-cavities  – constitute a type of custodial rape or sexual molestation, and have been deemed so by the laws of some countries.

But they have been defined as constitutionally sanctioned behavior permissible to the state, even in the case of minor offenses, by decree of the US Supreme Court:

QUOTE:

“Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed,” Justice Kennedy wrote, adding that about 13 million people are admitted each year to the nation’s jails.

The procedures endorsed by the majority are forbidden by statute in at least 10 states and are at odds with the policies of federal authorities. According to a supporting brief filed by the American Bar Association, international human rights treaties also ban the procedures.”

Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom:

“The arrival at the corrective labor camp turned out to be the culmination of the humiliation. First we were made to strip naked and were shoved into some roofless enclosures made out of planks. Above our heads the stars twinkled; below our bare feet lay frozen excrement. An enclosure measured 3 square feet. Each held three to four naked, shivering, and frightened men and women. Then these ’kennel cages’ were opened one after the other and the naked people were led across a courtyard‘the camp version of a foyer‘into a special building where our documents were ’formulated’ and our things were ’searched.’

The goal of the search was to leave us with rags, and to take the good things ’sweaters, mittens, socks, scarves, vests, and good shoes’for themselves. Ten thieves shamelessly fleeced these destitute and barely alive people.

‘Corrective‘ is something that should make you better, and ‘labor‘ ennobles you. But ‘camp‘? A camp wasn‘t a jail. So then what on earth was going on? ”

“The night search, the most degrading procedure, was frequently repeated. “Get up! Get undressed! Hands up! Out into the hall! Line up against the wall.” Naked we were especially frightened. “Among the blind, the one-eyed is king,” and next to them I was still a hero—for the time being. Our hair was undone. What were they looking for? What more could they take away from us? There was something, however: they pulled out all the ties that had been holding up the nuns’ skirts and our underwear.”

Courtesy of Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia Foundation, Moscow. Translation by Deborah Hoffman.

Murray Rothbard: Hooray For Che!

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File under ideological insanity – Rothbard gives props to the people’s poseur, Che Guevara, whom even the anarchist left today has rejected:

“What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution. More than any man since the lovable but entirely ineffectual nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, Che earned the title of “professional revolutionary.” And furthermore, to paraphrase Christopher Jencks in a recent perceptive, if wrongheaded, article in the New Republic, we all knew that his enemy was our enemy–that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U. S. imperialism.

Trained as a physician in Argentina, witnessing CIA-fomented counter-revolution by the thug Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Guevara dedicated the rest of his life to the Revolution. He found a promising field first in Cuba, where, as everyone knows, Che was second only to Fidel Castro in waging and then winning the revolution there.”

and this:

But in his mighty heart Che could not refrain from leaping a whole raft of stages, from plunging romantically but recklessly into the premature adventure of armed struggle in Latin America. And so, with tragic irony, Che Guevara, in his daring and courage, was betrayed by the very Bolivian peasantry whom he was trying to liberate, and who barely understood the meaning
of the conflict. Che died from violating his own principles of revolutionary war.

And this, enthusiastically quoting from Fidel Castro’s praise of Che:

“Newspapers of all tendencies have univermlly recognized Che’s virtues… . He is an almost unique example of how a man could win the recognition and respect of his enemies, of the very enemies he faced with his arms in his hands, of those who have been ideological enemies and have nevertheless expressed feelings of admiration and of respect toward Che.”

Murray Rothbard, “Ernesto Che Geuvara: RIP,” Mises.org http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/3_3/3_3_1.pdf

See also this article from a strict anarcho-capitalist position about Rothbard’s misrepresentation of his views to placate or mislead followers: The 10 Points Of The Libertarian Party Abolitionist Caucus.pdf.

Note – My main objection to an-cap positions is that they are easily manipulated by the state (national and transnational) for its own ends. An an-cap world is possible, but only spottily.

Now, in contrast to Rothbard’s glowing portrait, here is a more candid assessment of Che’s actual record from the anarchistlibrary.org (Che Guevara: why anarchists should view him critically):

Organise, Issue 47, Winter 1997/1998
flag.blackened.net

QUOTE: “After all, the Che cult is still used to obscure the real nature of Castro’s Cuba, one of the final bastions of Stalinism.”

QUOTE: “He demanded the death penalty for “informers, insubordinates, malingerers and deserters.” He himself personally carried out executions. Indeed the first execution carried out against an informer by the Castroists was undertaken by Che. He wrote: “I ended the problem giving him a shot with a.32 pistol in the right side of the brain.” On another occasion he planned on shooting a group of guerrillas who had gone on hunger strike because of bad food. Fidel intervened to stop him. Another guerrilla who dared to question Che was ordered into battle without a weapon!”

QUOTE: “With the Castroite victory in 1959, Che, along with his Stalinist buddy Raul Castro, was put in charge of building up state control. He purged the army, carried out re-education classes within it, and was supreme prosecutor in the executions of Batista supporters, 550 being shot in the first few months. He was seen as extremely ruthless by those who saw him at work. These killings against supporters of the old regime, some of whom had been implicated in torture and murder, was extended in 1960 to those in the working class movement who criticised the Castro regime. The anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had their press closed down and many militants were thrown in prison. Che was directly implicated in this.”

QUOTE: “Photo opportunities with the peasantry and proletariat, good looks and a dramatic death in no way exonerate him from his historical role in the suppression of the popular classes, state terror and capitalism, and changing Cuba from the semi-colony of one great power the US, to another, the USSR.”

QUOTE: “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing” “Hate will be an element of the battle, a merciless hate for the enemy, that will inspire the guerrilla-soldier to superhuman efforts of strength and changes him into an effective, violent, selected, in cold blood killing machine”

Was Atheism The Source Of Communist Cruelty?

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Peter Hitchens, brother of Christopher, the well-known journalist and professional atheist, reflects on the role of religion in restraining human beings from evil actions (Daily Mail, March 15, 2010):

“Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn. I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour. Continue reading →

State Terrorism: The Ukrainian Genocide, 1933

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The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why.  Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.

“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale — between seven and 11 million people.

But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told  their stories  about concentration  camps and massacres.  The experience  was also  captured  unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………

British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.

“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”

Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………

“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”

Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.

The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.

Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.

The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”

Solzhenitsyn: Walk Away From the Gangrene

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Live Not By Lies

Monday, February 18, 1974

Following is the full text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s essay ``Live Not By Lies.” It is perhaps the last thing he wrote on his native soil [before the collapse of the Soviet Union] and circulated among Moscow’s intellectuals [at that time]. The essay is dated Feb. 12, the day that secret police broke into his apartment and arrested him. The next day he was exiled to West Germany.

“At one time we dared not even to whisper. Now we write and read samizdat, and sometimes when we gather in the smoking room at the Science Institute we complain frankly to one another: What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us? gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home. Propping up remote, uncivilized regimes. Fanning up civil war. And we recklessly fostered Mao Tse-tung at our expense– and it will be we who are sent to war against him, and will have to go. Is there any way out? And they put on trial anybody they want and they put sane people in asylums–always they, and we are powerless.

Things have almost reached rock bottom. …..We fear only to lag behind the herd and to take a step alone-and suddenly find ourselves without white bread, without heating gas and without a Moscow registration……

When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: “I am violence. Run away, make way for me–I will crush you.” But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally–since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies–all loyalty lies in that.

And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.

This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.

We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth our loud or to express aloud what we think. It’s not necessary. It’s dangerous. But let us refuse to say that which we do not think…..

Our path is to walk away from the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside. That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world.

.. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude….

And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul- don’t let him be proud of his`progressive” views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a merited figure, or a general–let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and warm.

Even this path, which is the most modest of all paths of resistance, will not be easy for us. But it is much easier than self-immolation or a hunger strike: The flames will not envelope your body, your eyeballs, will not burst from the heat, and brown bread and clean water will always be available to your family…….

It will not be an easy choice for a body, but it is only one for a soul. Not, it is not an easy path. But there are already people, even dozens of them, who over the years have maintained all these points and live by the truth.

So you will not be the first to take this path, but will join those who have already taken it. This path will be easier and shorter for all of us if we take it by mutual efforts and in close rank. If there are thousands of us, they will not be able to do anything with us. If there are tens of thousands of us, then we would not even recognize our country…..

And if we get cold feet, even taking this step, then we are worthless and hopeless, and the scorn of Pushkin should be directed to us:“Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.”