http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=3032 With thanks to Professor Ilia Toli for alerting me to the update on this story, and to Danny. Prof. Toli mentions that at the bottom of this Albanian-language link about Hysen Sherifi’s sentencing, the comments “could have been from any Islamic forum whatsoever. They call for the extermination of all infidels (more than 80% […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Two elections ago, the Democratic Party was on the verge of being torn to shreds. After a long series of dirty tricks and one stolen election later, there was an uncomfortable coming together. Obama and his cronies kept most of the important positions, while the Clintonites got a few pieces of the foreign policy […]
http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/ Saudi with Pressure Cooker Arrested at Detroit Airport Federal agents arrested a suspicious traveler with an altered Saudi Arabian passport at Detroit Metro Airport over the weekend after discovering a pressure cooker in his luggage. According to a criminal complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court, the passenger, Hussain Al Khawahir arrived Friday at […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/obamas-irs-gate/ President Obama’s use of the Internal Revenue Service to vex and harass his political opposition is yet more proof that he is far more interested in hunting down his domestic adversaries than Islamic terrorists. Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said revelations the Obama IRS singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny ought to “send a […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-axis-behind-benghazi?f=puball There is now a burgeoning cornucopia of common sense revelations concerning the administration’s Benghazi cover up. Despite a new lucidity flowing from the drip, dripping deck chairs of deception and correctness, reporters have yet to define the iceberg clearly: I’m convinced it is an unholy civil union of political Islamists and U.S. transnational progressives. […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/mad-men-the-lefts-hidden-persuader Lest anyone think that I oppose advertising, I wish to correct that assumption. I can enjoy print and TV advertising when it’s innovative and attention-getting. A 2012 Bloomberg Businessweek book review of Jane Maas’s Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond (conforming to a consensus that […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/pamela-geller-banned-by-a-canadian-synagogue-on-the-glazov-gang/
[Don’t miss the Evening Event With Jamie Glazov coming up on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 from 7-9pm in Los Angeles CA. Everyone is welcome. For more information, click here.]
This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Michael Chandler, a Black American Patriot, Borek Volarik, an anti-Communist Czech Defector, and Morgan Brittany, a conservative TV and movie star.
The Gang gathered to discuss Will Obama Be Impeached Over Benghazi? The dialogue occurred in Part II (starting at the 9:30 mark) with the guests gauging how where the administration’s troubles could lead. The dialogue was preceded by an analysis of: Pamela Geller Banned By a Canadian Synagogue, in which the Gang explored why a freedom fighter who stands up for oppressed Muslim women isn’t welcome in Canada — while Islamic terrorists are.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/a-real-human-rights-group-defends-freedom-in-oslo/print/ There are human-rights organizations and there are human-rights organizations. Some of them, while purportedly apolitical and worldwide in scope, are awash in anti-Americanism, soft on Communism, prepared to let African tyrants off the hook while blaming all the world’s problems on the West, and eager to smear Israel even as they blithely overlook the […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/melanie-phillips/welcome-to-obamastan/ Reprinted from MelaniePhillips.com. Fort Hood, Benghazi, the Boston bombings, Iran/Syria, Israel. The pattern is unmistakeable; the danger to America is exponentially increasing; the scandal is deepening into something nearer to a national crisis. The Obama administration is playing down the Islamist threat to the US and the free world, empowering Islamists at home and […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/ideological-sociopath-stalin-reads-machiavelli/
Author’s note: This essay is written in memory of Yelena Bonner (1923-2011) who, together with Andrei Sakharov and other heroic dissidents, held truth, dignity, and liberty as non-negotiable values.
At the end of the documentary film “Stalin Thought of You,” Stalin’s favorite cartoonist, Boris Efimov, over one hundred years old, brother of Bolshevik journalist Mihail Koltsov (killed during the Great Terror), who had been a friend of Hemingway and of Malraux, expresses his gratitude for not being executed like his sibling. But he adamantly refuses to unequivocally condemn Stalin: “He was not a man, he was a phenomenon.” Ilya Ehrenburg, another famous survivor of the Great Terror, most probably had similar thoughts on the subject. Explaining such situations, such human cataclysms, remains a moral and intellectual duty if we wish to avoid their repetition. The fact that so many Russians continue to worship Stalin’s memory is equally disconcerting, revolting, and revealing. But Stalin was not only a Russian phenomenon. Similarly to Hitler, he embodied, in an extreme and criminal fashion, modernity’s pathologies. This is what I have in mind when, following Leszek Kolakowski’s line of thought, I talk about the presence of the Devil in History.
I know that it might sound shocking, but one cannot deny the fact that Stalin had a Weltanschauung and that he was, in his own way, an intellectual. A self-taught, homicidal, liberticidal, and fanatical one, but an intellectual nevertheless. Wasn’t Engels a self-taught philosopher as well? Similarly, one cannot ignore the affinities between Bolshevism and the tradition of political and philosophical radicalism, Russian and European. Marxism was the apotheosis of ethical relativism; it suspended traditional distinctions between good and evil, it defined the good in utilitarian fashion, instrumentally and pragmatically, as all that served the cause of a Messianic proletariat, the alleged redemptive class. In fact, this was a recipe for what Alain Besancon (echoing Vladimir Soloviev) coined as the falsification of the good. In several annotations, long kept secret, Stalin defined his own table of values, he signaled out what he considered vice (or, sin, if you want) and virtue.
In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the main character, an Old Bolshevik, Nikolai Rubashov, declares that “Number one” (Stalin) kept Machiavelli’s The Prince as his favorite night-table book. Here we are witnesses of a sui generis Machiavellianism, not the recognition and cultivation of the humanist dimension of the Florentine’s work. Historian Robert Service was allowed access to Stalin personal library and he could check Lenin’s volume Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the 1939 edition, with the annotations of the his “most faithful collaborator and disciple.” At that hour of history (il faisait minuit dans le siècle, wrote once Victor Serge), the general secretary had no significant rival. The Great Terror had reached its genocidal aims; a year later, Trotsky, his unforgivable nemesis, was assassinated in Coyoacan, Mexico, by the NKVD agent Ramon Mercader. In 1939, the Short Course of the History of CPSU (b) was published – the ultimate codification of the Stalinist cosmology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and demonology.
