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November 2017

Review: The Turn to Tyranny We may never know what degree of personal obsession, political calculation and ideological zeal drove Stalin to kill and persecute so many. Joshua Rubenstein reviews ‘Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941’ by Stephen Kotkin.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-the-turn-to-tyranny-1509487287?mod=nwsrl_review_outlook_u_s_&cx_refModule=nwsrl#cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=ctrl&cx_artPos=11

In the aftermath of Lenin’s death in January 1924, Joseph Stalin —already secretary-general of the Communist Party—emerged as the outright leader of the Soviet Union. “Right through 1927,” Stephen Kotkin notes, Stalin “had not appeared to be a sociopath in the eyes of those who worked most closely with him.” But by 1929-30, he “was exhibiting an intense dark side.” Mr. Kotkin’s “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second volume of a planned three-volume biography, tracks the Soviet leader’s transformation during these crucial years. “Impatient with dictatorship,” Mr. Kotkin says, Stalin set out to forge “a despotism in mass bloodshed.”

The three central episodes of Mr. Kotkin’s narrative, all from the 1930s, are indeed violent and catastrophic, if in different ways: the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture; the atrocities of the Great Terror, when Stalin “arrested and murdered immense numbers of loyal people”; and the rise of Adolf Hitler, the man who would become Stalin’s ally and then, as Mr. Kotkin puts it, his “principal nemesis.” In each case, as Mr. Kotkin shows, Stalin’s personal character—a combination of ruthlessness and paranoia—played a key role in the unfolding of events.

Forced collectivization was the linchpin of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. With the peasants living mostly on small-scale plots, he compelled millions of households to move onto collective farms and sought to turn many peasants into the industrial workers who would build the factories and electric stations needed for crash industrialization. To enforce his plan, he set draconian quotas for the confiscation of “surplus” food and violently repressed millions of so-called kulaks (supposedly better-off peasants), whom he wanted to exterminate as a class.

The consequent famine killed more than five million people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia’s North Caucasus region. Scholars continue to debate whether the famine in Ukraine, which killed some 3.5 million, was a deliberate aim of Stalin’s policies—intended to destroy Ukraine’s national spirit and culture—or the unforeseen result of his war on the peasantry. Although Mr. Kotkin argues that the famine was “not intentional,” his book makes it clear that Stalin was well aware of widespread starvation and that he responded with remarkable cruelty, sealing Ukraine’s borders to make escape impossible. The Kremlin allowed the famine to deepen, accepting a high number of victims rather than ameliorate its most calamitous effects.

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

By Stephen Kotkin
Penguin Press, 1,154 pages, $40

Another crisis erupted after the assassination of the Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov in December 1934. Although many historians, including Robert Conquest and Amy Knight, have argued that Stalin almost certainly orchestrated the crime, Mr. Kotkin accepts the current scholarly consensus that Stalin was not behind Kirov’s murder and that Leonid Nikolayev, a disaffected young worker, carried it out on his own.

There is no debate, however, over how Stalin exploited the murder. He had always insisted that the country “was honeycombed with wreckers,” as Mr. Kotkin writes, and beset by conspiracies to subvert Bolshevik rule. In the wake of Kirov’s death, Stalin first accused thousands of Communist Party figures of engaging in a conspiracy to kill Kirov and then expanded the purge to encompass tens of thousands of military commanders, state-security personnel and party officials, including leaders of the revolution like Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Mr. Kotkin argues that Stalin carried out the purge to “smash his inner circle” and avenge elements within the party that had opposed collectivization, but he doesn’t provide sufficient documentation to buttress the claim. Stalin probably regarded army and state-security officers as the only force that could dislodge him.

With the purges under way, Stalin embarked on the Great Terror, a wave of violence that killed more than 800,000 people in the space of 16 months. Among those targeted were the members of ethnic groups—Poles, Koreans, Germans—whom Stalin regarded as unreliable elements, a fifth column that could threaten the regime in case of war. As with all great crimes, we may never truly know what degree of personal obsession, political calculation and ideological fanaticism drove Stalin to order the execution and imprisonment of so many. CONTINUE AT SITE

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: OCTOBER 2017 THE MONTH THAT WAS

October 24th marked the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia. The rise of Communism gave birth to the world’s deadliest ideology – far worse than Nazism and Fascism, in terms of the number of people subjected to imprisonment, terror and death. Yet does the world associate Communism with evil commensurate with its history? I think not. In the Soviet Union alone, subtracting the number of Soviet soldiers and citizens killed in World II, an estimated twenty million were killed by Stalin. About forty-five million were killed in China by Mao Zedong. Between seven and ten million Ukrainians died during the Soviet-inspired “Holodomor,” in 1932-33. Approximately two million Cambodians – almost a third of the population – died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Millions were killed in North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, East Germany, Rumania, Bulgaria, Ethiopia and other places. Communism killed as many people as died in the two world wars of the last century. As Bruce Thornton, classicist and Hoover research fellow recently put it, its history is a “…road to utopia [that] runs over mountains of corpses.” Today, it is not Communism that concerns us, but its half-brother Socialism. Despite its failure in places like Venezuela and in Europe where unrestrained Muslim immigration has created segregated neighborhoods and increased government dependency, it has become popular in the U.S. among followers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

During the month, elections were held in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, and a re-run, in Africa (Kenya). Elections in Austria and the Czech Republic moved both countries to the right, meaning people are still concerned about terrorism, immigration and economic growth. Sebastian Kurz will become, at age 31, Europe’s youngest leader, when he assumes the Chancellorship of Austria. In the Czech Republic, Andrei Babis, former finance minister, populist and billionaire businessman, won a “thumping” victory, as Prime Minister-designate. The Catalans declared independence, and Spain’s parliament granted Prime Minister Rajoy powers to enforce union. Catalonia has simmered a long time. In 2006, Madrid promised the region increased autonomy. Four years later – amidst recession and financial crisis – they reneged on that promise. This is a story of disillusionment with bureaucratic and distant administrative governments run by elites. While immigration was pivotal in Brexit, the bigger problem is politicians who are deaf to the people they represent and who are unaffected by the policies they promote. We are witnessing a backlash against hypocrisy, arrogance and authoritarianism, in Brussels, Madrid and other capitals.

In Japan, Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party won its third landslide victory. Abe, an ally of the U.S. and a friend of President Trump, is an advocate for more defense spending. He benefitted from North Korea’s militant rhetoric and an improved economy. In Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif returned as Prime Minister and as head of the Pakistan Muslim League two months after being disqualified on charges of corruption. In Argentina, President Mauricio Macri’s Republican Proposal Party increased its seats in both the legislature and the senate, while former president Christina Kirchner’s Justicialist Party lost seats. A re-run of August’s race in Kenya was won again by current president Uhuru Kenyatta.

U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces took back the Al-Omar oil fields – Syria’s most productive – from ISIS forces, fields that had been captured in 2014. Elsewhere, Islamic terrorists persisted in their work. Almost 400 people died in Somalia, when separate truck and car bombs exploded, the work of al-Shabaab militants. In Marseilles, two women were stabbed to death by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The assailant was shot dead. At least seventeen died in Cameroon, in two provinces bordering Nigeria. In all, over 700 people died during the month at the hands of Islamic extremists. Good news came toward the end of the month, when 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmon said his country would return to “moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world.” It should be remembered that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens.

FEDERAL & STATE GOVERNMENT’S GENDER HIRING GAP – GENDER STUDY OF HIGHLY COMPENSATED PUBLIC EMPLOYEES

Politicians reflexively attack perceived gender bias in private companies. But it’s important to ask how those politicians are doing with their own hiring.

Do government payrolls reflect a “gender hiring gap?”

Our OpenTheBooks.com Oversight Report – Federal & State Government’s Gender Hiring Gap analyzed government payrolls:

25 largest federal agencies: the 500 most highly compensated employees from each of the largest 25 federal agencies
Congress: the 1,000 top-paid staffers – including payroll analysis of republican and democratic leadership in U.S. House & Senate
White House staff
Five largest states: the 1,000 most highly compensated public employees within each of the five most populous states: California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.

We found that top-paid men outnumbered women two to one at the federal level. Across the states, just two in 10 top-earners were women.

Politicians talk about a “war on women” in an effort to score political points. Many of those same politicians have striking gaps between male and female wages and employment on their own payrolls.

That’s pure hypocrisy.

Here are a few examples of what you’ll uncover:

We analyzed the 500 most highly compensated employees at the 25 largest federal agencies. Among 12,500 key employees, we found 7,869 men collectively earned $1.5 billion in compensation and 4,631 women collectively earned $817 million.

Female Congressional employees fared even worse. Among the 1,000 top-paid Congressional staffers, male employees who earn up to $172,500 outnumbered female employees who earn the same 2-to-1. Men, collectively, made $105.4 million, while females earned $58.6 million.

At the state level, we analyzed the 1,000 most highly compensated public employees in each of the five most populous states. In the states, collectively, the men earned $1.6 billion versus $386 million for the women. Across the five states, just seven women were employed in the top 100 highest-earning positions.

At every level of government, the number of women employed in the top-paid positions lags the number of men by an enormous
margin.

Download a PDF copy of our report, click here.

Read our press release, click here.

UN launches 65 million dollar legal pogrom to hunt down Israelis and smear Israel as a criminal state Anne Bayefsky

The United Nations has made a deal with the Palestinians to fund a 65 million dollar legal pogrom directed at Israel. The party on the Palestinian side was referred to as the “Government of the State of Palestine.”

More specifically, the “United Nations System in the occupied Palestinian territory” plans to pay eight UN bodies $64,838,510 between the years of 2018 and 2022 to hunt down individual Israelis and smear Israel as a criminal state.

The eight UN bodies or agencies to receive the funds are: the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF (the children’s fund), the UN Development Program, UN Women, UNESCO, UN Habitat, the World Health Organization, and UNRWA (the Palestinian refugee agency). Except for UNESCO, which the United States no longer supports, 22% of the money will come from American taxpayers.

The deal, first signed and disseminated in Arabic back on June 15, 2017, is part of the “UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) for the occupied Palestinian territory for 2018-2022.”

Lawfare at the UN, in Israel’s case, goes by the stage name of “accountability.” It includes accusing Israel of war crimes, apartheid, and crimes against humanity; sending spurious cases to the International Criminal Court; engaging in boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns to destroy the economic well-being of Israel, and making false accusations of violations of fabricated “international law” – in particular criminalizing Israel’s right of self-defense.

The goal is unambiguous: the demonization and destruction of the Jewish state. Lawfare is the converse of a negotiated, peaceful resolution of Israeli-Palestinian disputes, as required by existing agreements between the parties.

According to the report that details the deal, the outcome was a product of consultations that involved non-governmental organizations (NGOs) well-known for their extremist ideologies, including the promotion of terrorism and overt antisemitism.

An Annex lists some of the specific NGOs consulted, such as Al-Haq, Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and the Palestinian NGO Network, while keeping others confidential.

Here is some of the language from the UN Development Assistance Framework:

“Strategic Priority 1: Supporting Palestine’s path to Independence

Eight Killed in Terror Attack in New York Police say at least a dozen were injured Tuesday afternoon when a driver mowed down pedestrians and bikers By Melanie Grayce West, Mara Gay, Biography @MaraGay Mara.Gay@wsj.com Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Kate King

Eight people were killed and at least a dozen injured on Tuesday when a truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a lower Manhattan bike path in what officials said was a “cowardly act of terror,” the deadliest attack in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001.

The driver shouted “God is great” in Arabic when he got out of his truck and was confronted by police, a law-enforcement official said.

He was identified by officials as Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old from Tampa, Fla., who came to the U.S. in 2010 and is originally from Uzbekistan. He is in custody at a local hospital after he was shot in the abdomen by an officer, police said.

A law-enforcement official said police found handwritten notes near the truck saying that the suspect carried out the attack in the name of ISIS.

The terror unfolded shortly after 3 p.m., when the suspect drove a flatbed pickup truck rented from Home Depot for nearly a mile along a picturesque stretch of a bike path along the Hudson River, leaving behind mangled bikes and bodies.

The carnage ended at an intersection in Tribeca near the World Trade Center, where the truck smashed into a small school bus. Then the suspect exited his truck, brandishing a paintball gun and pellet gun before being shot by a New York Police Department officer.