The Threat of Communism: Then and Now

Soviet-era Dissident Vladimir Bukovsky speaks at an opposition meeting in Moscow, 17 December 2007. Bukovsky is a potential united oppostion candidate for president in Russia’s March 2008 presidential elections. AFP PHOTO / ALEXEY SAZONOV (Photo credit should read Alexey SAZONOV/AFP/Getty Images)

 

One of the most famous enemies of Soviet communism is Vladimir Bukovsky. He was tortured by Soviet authorities. He spent many years in Soviet prisons. He was even declared “insane” and sent to a psychiatric prison. When Bukovsky was exiled to the West, people paid lip service to his courage; but few heeded his warnings about Gorbachev’s Perestroika.

Bukovsky reminded everyone that all Soviet leaders were liars. Gorbachev, he said, was no exception—and was certainly no democrat. Like Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, Gorbachev was a liar and a hangman. But hardly anyone listened. Everyone wanted to believe the Cold War was over.

But how could we have won the Cold War? This was the inconvenient question Bukovsky asked. Random House senior editor Jason Epstein rejected Bukovsky’s question altogether. And so, Bukovsky’s book on the equivocal “fall of communism” was not published in English—until now.

November 16, 1933: The Day Our Fundamental Transformation Began

 

Nov.16, 2018, is the 85th anniversary of an event that most Americans have never heard of. As I argue in my book, “American Betrayal,” it’s the seminal event in modern U.S. history. On this day in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended “normal diplomatic relations” to the communist dictatorship under Joseph Stalin in Moscow.

In exchange for a page of Soviet concessions signed by Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (who, with Prohibition-era beer on his breath, returned to the Soviet Embassy “all smiles … and said, ‘Well, it’s all in the bag; we have it’”), the U.S. government found itself derailed onto a strange, new track through an unfamiliar, soon monotonous, land of endless apologetics.

War Games in the Pacific

WASHINGTON/BERLIN (Own report) – German soldiers will soon participate in maneuvers in the Pacific and will be on hand as observers on patrols in the South China Sea, according to announcements by the US Navy and the French Minister of Defense, Florence Parly. At a top-level conference in Singapore last weekend, Parly declared that Paris will dispatch warships to the South China Sea in the next few days and will also navigate through the territorial waters of Islands China claims as its territory. According to Parly, German military observers will embark on these ships. At the same time, German soldiers are preparing their participation in the US led RIMPAC 2018 maneuver, taking place mainly near Hawaii. RIMPAC is the world’s largest international maritime exercise. During RIMPAC 2016 German soldiers trained in “liberating” an island, which, according to the scenario, was held by the “Draco” militia. “Draco” is the Latin term for “dragon” – a symbol for China.

The Grand Troika: A Chance for a World New Order

 

Back in the late summer of 2017 I wrote an analysis of the state of world affairs and international relations after two seismic geopolitical world events occurred almost simultaneously in 2016 – the UK Referendum result to Leave the European Union and the defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton by Republican Donald Trump for the White House in the US 2016 Presidential Election. Those twin political events were like major earth shaking bombs going off creating all kinds of disturbances and tremors, aftershocks and creating the greatest of shock and bewilderment within the international political order that had held sway since the defeat of Nazism in 1945.

It had become clear to me by the summer of 2017, as I had thought for some time, that politics in Britain – and global geostrategic politics within the broader historical framework of civilizational and human development – had changed profoundly and significantly from were we had been during the 1990s-2012 period, perhaps even from where I started off life in the most intense but ending days of the Cold War in the mid 1980s.

Escalation Dominance

 

On March 1, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin delivered a speech that effectively declared Russia has overwhelming nuclear superiority and war-winning capability against the United States, NATO, and the entire world.

While President Obama neglected modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent, questing for a “world without nuclear weapons” – Russia achieved what the USSR never could against any U.S. president during the Cold War, the holy grail of nuclear superiority, what strategists call “escalation dominance.”

God Keep America Safe

Liliya Shevstova (Source: Youtube.com)

 

Liliya Shevtsova, formerly head of the Carnegie Foundation Moscow Center and a fellow at Brookings ,is a prolific writer on Russian Politics. She was also the cofounder of the Davos World Economic Forum Global Council on Russia’s Future. In this article for the liberal Echo Moscow website, Shevtsova explores Russia’s hate-love relationship with the United States, which has remained a constant from Lenin to Putin. Russia has mastered the art of exploiting American resources without renouncing an ideology of eventually destroying its adversary.

“Imagine that the United States of America suddenly disappeared – flew to the Moon or something. What would we do in Russia? What would we talk about – who would we denigrate or secretly admire? What would the TV prattle about? And whom would Putin talk to, if the American president was unavailable? Russian foreign policy would disappear completely, since it is based on the conviction that the world held together is our enmity-cooperation with the US.

Cold War files show CIA support for guerrilla warfare inside USSR (Part II)

Please click here for part one: Cold War files show CIA support for guerrilla warfare inside USSR (Part I)

 

 

The role of the CIA in funding and helping to organize anti-Soviet groups inside the USSR has been known for decades. But, as intelNews explained in part I of this article, a batch of recently released documents, unearthed by Russian-language service of Latvian state television, sheds light into the CIA’s early understanding of the identity, strength and operations of these groups. They also contain new information about the background and structure of underground anti-Soviet groups like the Forest Brothers in Latvia.

Russia’s New Global Aims

The Cold War is back, but it is a different Cold War because it is a different Russia. It is important to know who the Russians are and what has shaped their worldview, including their sometimes justified suspicion and hostility toward the US.

Some features of Russian government go back to their beginnings as a country in the 10th century. Their geography places them very far north, which means that food, particularly grain harvests, are uncertain. The country has experienced more famine than feast. This is one reason for aggressively moving in on neighbors with better geography and better harvests (Ukraine and Belarus).

Russia in 2030

It has become increasingly clear that Russia is on the inexorable path toward restoring its territory on the old map of the USSR. Whether Moscow will be able to achieve such a grandiose scheme to recreate another Soviet Union-size Rodina has been traditionally believed to depend on the strength and willingness of NATO and Europe to counter such Russian ambition. The assumption is that if the counterthrusts from the West are robust enough, Moscow will fail in its attempt, otherwise Russia’s territorial map will look like the Soviet Union in 2030.

This dichotomy of thrust and counterthrust by Russia on the one side and the West on the other is for the most part inadequate largely because there is also another crucial factor in deciding the outcome of Russia’s territorial expansion, namely, China and its own territorial ambition that goes against Russia’s objectives in much of Central and East Asia.

New USSR: Vladimir Putin ‘to recreate HUGE SOVIET BLOCK’ in plan to DESTROY the West

Putin could potentially head up a huge Soviet bloc (Getty)

 

FORMER Soviet countries could be set to form a huge powerful bloc reminiscent of the USSER [sic], the former president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev has claimed amid heightened tensions between Russia and the West.

Mr Gorbachev, who was the eighth and final leader of the former Soviet Union, has suggested countries within the former Communist republic could form a new union with an opt-in basis.

Reflecting on the collapse of the USSR in an interview with a Russian TV show to mark the 25th anniversary of its dissolution, the former statesman said: “I think that a new union is possible.”

The New Russian Empire

Russian President Vladimir Putin / AP

 

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in early March 2014 and subsequent confrontational policies in the Middle East and parts of Europe have spawned myriad debates assessing Vladimir Putin’s ambitions and their implications for global security. Many of these discussions conclude that Russia seeks little more than a revival of Soviet-era influence in the near abroad–that is, nations bordering Russia.

The EU as Soviet lite: I’ve seen this movie before and it does not end well

After the Brexit and recent attacks against migrants in Britain I can’t get rid of the deja vu feeling. I’ve already watched this movie, a quarter century ago. I know how its ends.

In summer of 1989, the Lithuanian Sejm decided to withdraw from the Soviet Union and establish Lithuanian laws in the country. It was the beginning of the end for USSR — a giant corrupt monster, which for 70 years had bullied the world and its people under the pretense of communist ideology.

Intimidation and sanctions could not prevent the collapse. The fabricated artificial entity, thoroughly impregnated with falsehood and lies, fell apart like a house of cards.

The New Middle East: Exit America Enter Russia

Is the genie finally out of the bottle?

A myriad of seemingly unrelated events and loose ends are converging in a manner that points in the direction of a huge win for Russian diplomacy in the Middle East, and we only need to connect the dots to see this scenario unfolding.

What dots, one might ask?

The Unexpected Snake

Click to learn your lesson.

 

The Farmer and the Snake

A Farmer walked through his field one cold winter morning. On the ground lay a Snake, stiff and frozen with the cold. The Farmer knew how deadly the Snake could be, and yet he picked it up and put it in his bosom to warm it back to life.

The Snake soon revived, and when it had enough strength, bit the man who had been so kind to it. The bite was deadly and the Farmer felt that he must die. “Oh,” cried the Farmer with his last breath, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.”

The Greatest Kindness Will Not Bind the Ungrateful.

Top Russian Test Pilot: Russia – Not The U.S. – Is The Only Country With Successful Fifth-Generation Aircraft

When American fifth-generation fighters, the F-35 in particular, have 419 deficiencies, the Russian test pilot might actually not be spreading propaganda.

 

Anatoly Kvochur (Source: Migflug.com)

 

On April 11, 2016, the pro-Kremlin media outlet Pravda.ru published an interview with Anatoly Kvochur, a distinguished Russian test pilot, who started his career in the Soviet forces and is currently deputy chief of the Gromov Flight Research Institute at Zhukovsky airbase. In the interview, Kvochur states that Russia has developed successful fifth-generation fighter aircraft – as opposed to the U.S., whose F-22 and F-35 fifth-generation fighter jets should, he claims, be considered a “failure.”[1] He also asserts that Russia’s “military doctrine is purely defensive,” whereas U.S. military doctrine is “a doctrine of global domination.”

On March 2, 2016, Russian Aerospace Forces commander Viktor Bondarev announced that Russia’s sixth-generation fighter is being developed in both manned and unmanned versions.[2]

The following are excerpts from Kvochur’s interview with Pravda.ru:[3]