A Tale of Two Militaries

Caption: Russian soldiers prepare to take part in the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in Moscow on May 9. (KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images)

 

It is the best of militaries, it is the most mismanaged of militaries. It is a force of wisdom, it is a force of confusion. It is a military of nobility, it is a military of hypocrisy. The world sits before it urging it on, the nations burn resentfully in its wake.

The first half of each of those sentences reflects the way the people of Russia increasingly see their county’s military—noble, fierce and worthy of high praise. The second half of each reflects the view many Americans have toward the United States military.

This dichotomy between the two reveals a great deal about each nation. Continue reading

KGB Defector: Soviets Engineered Islamist Hatred of America

To understand how things got this point, we have to look into history.  Russian support for islamic terrorism against America has been well documented and still continues today.

KGB head Andropov said Islam and the Arab world was petri dish which could nurture a virulent strain of America-hate.

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking defector from the former Soviet bloc. He fled to the U.S. in 1978 when he was the deputy chief of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service. He was also a top advisor to Nicolae Ceausescu, the country’s Soviet-allied leader.

Ryan Mauro: Why would the Soviet Union sponsor the growth of radical Islam if that ideology also hates communism?

Ion Mihai Pacepa: Because they have another, more important thing in common: anti-Semitism. Long before we had the Holocaust in Germany, we had the Russian word pogrom, defined by an authoritarian Russian dictionary as the “government-organized mass slaughter of some element of the population as a group, such as the Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia.”[1] And long before we had Hitler’s Mein Kampf, we had the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tsarist Russian anti-Semitic forgery that became the basis for much of Mein Kampf and for today’s new anti-Semitism. Continue reading