Tag: Soviet Union

Commentary: The Experts Were the Crisis in 2020

RealClearWire

The quote from Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a useful way to begin addressing the Washington Post editorial board’s confident assertion that “’A collective national incompetence in government’” was at the root of the U.S.’s alleged failure vis-à-vis the coronavirus in 2020. According to the Post quoting from a recently released report (“Lessons from the Covid War”), “The United States started out ‘with more capabilities than any other country in the world,’ but “it ended up with 1 million dead.” Were he still around, one guesses Tolstoy would mock the conceit of the Post’s editorialists.

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Commentary: The Universities I Knew in Soviet Russia Valued Merit More than Some American Schools Do Today

Admin

Walking near Temple University, I noticed a flyer advocating for “socialism in our lifetime.” The message from an outside group reads in full, “Socialist Revolution: Join the fight for socialism in our lifetime.” Having grown up in Soviet-era Ukraine and now a tenured professor at Temple, I feel strongly that most college-age Americans do not understand what they are saying when they advocate for socialism. 

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Commentary: The Horrors of the Holodomor Must Not Be Forgotten

Minnesota Sun Staff

Maria Katchmar was 7 when the troops came to her farm. 

The soldiers entered her home in Cherkasy Oblast — a region of Ukraine along the Dnieper River — and immediately began to break everything. Windows and doors. Paintings and linens. Even pots for cooking. Her father was ordered to drown his livestock. When he refused, he was sent to Siberia — and the Soviet troops confiscated the animals anyway.

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Commentary: The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman

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How often the youngsters use the Boomer—sometimes, BOOMER!—when airing their grievances. Maybe they’ve created a keyboard shortcut to spit out “Boomer” with two strokes instead of six. Shift-plus-something or other. Perhaps one of them can show this Boomer how to work this consarn machine.  

What you hear these days, and you hear it all the time, is that the Boomers are the root of all our ills. In January, when Neil Young demanded that Spotify defenestrate Joe Rogan or else lose the Young catalog, writer Declan Leary said Young made his announcement with “boomer sincerity.” Maybe there is a unique Boomer form of sincerity, and maybe Young has it, but one thing Young is not is a Boomer. He was born in 1945. Neil Young belongs to the so-called Silent Generation.

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Commentary: Our Spanish Civil War

Minnesota Sun Staff

From 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in.

The cost to the Spanish people of such brutal and vicious strife was horrific. Over 500,000 Spaniards would die in a little over two-and-a-half years. The country was left in shambles.

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Survivors of Communism Warn About America’s Future: ‘Americans Became Soviet’ Through Cowardice

Minnesota Sun Staff
Soviet monument, Pyramiden Spitsbergen Svalbard

Survivors of communism are concerned about America’s future as they see Marxism spreading in academia and Americans being too cowardly to speak out and stand up against the ideology.

Human Events and the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley recently hosted “Paying The Price: Victims of Communism Panel,” in which five survivors of communist regimes shared their stories and warned about where America appears headed.

Tatiana Menaker, a refusenik who escaped from the Soviet Union after not being allowed to emigrate, said that when she attended San Francisco State University, she “found such brainwashing machine of Marxism, which I even didn’t have in Russia, in the Soviet Union. American professors are all in delirium of Marxism.”

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Commentary: Trump Knew How to Handle Putin, But Biden Has No Clue

Admin

Sometimes we need time to pass and distance to extend to gain fuller perspective on what we did not see contemporaneously from too close. Indeed, G-d tells Moses that no person can see His face (which I teach as meaning an up-close encounter) and live, but people can see the back of G-d’s head (which I teach as meaning a more distant previous encounter, growing ever more distant). See Exodus 33:18-23.

In their October 22, 2012, debate, Obama mocked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney for expressing concern about Russia and Vladimir Putin:

Gov. Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al Qaeda is a threat because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

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Human Events 1968: Will U.S. Liberals Ever Learn?

Minnesota Sun Staff

From time to time, we will run pieces from past issues that seem relevant to what is going in our country or in the world today.

This selection, chosen from 1968, was written as the Soviet Union, along with other Warsaw Pact nations, marched into Czechoslovakia to ruthlessly suppress the people’s uprising which had begun in the now famous “Prague Spring.”  This piece is timely given today’s current warfare between Russia and Ukraine.

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Commentary: Our Enemies Wait as We Destroy Ourselves

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Is the United States becoming like the old Soviet Union in a way that people fail to see because of the noise and the distractions of electoral politics, mass entertainment masking as news, and mass indoctrination masking as entertainment? 

We are becoming a meritocracy that punishes merit and rewards folly. We have all the disutility of a meritocracy—the snobbishness, the restless ambition, the inclination to see merit only in what can be measured or paid for; even the tendency to pull intelligent people out of their native regions and set them down, like gilded tumbleweeds, in places without memory or character. But we get none of the benefits. We punish truth-telling and intelligence, and reward stupidity. 

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Commentary: Countering China’s Grand Strategy

Minnesota Sun Staff
Policeman holding a rifle - in uniform

It has been clear for some time that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) seeks to displace the United States not only as a regional but also as a global hegemonic power. Indeed, we are now in the midst of a new “cold war,” not unlike its predecessor that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union. In the service of its goals, Beijing has pursued a coherent grand strategy. Although China seems to be effectively executing its grand strategy, its success is not foreordained. But countering it must be the strategic priority of the United States.

“Strategy” describes the employment of limited means to achieve the goals of national policy. In general, strategy provides a conceptual link between national ends and scarce resources, both the transformation of those resources into means during peacetime and the application of those means during war.

In the words of Edward Mead Earle:

strategy is the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation—or a coalition of nations—including its armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed. The highest type of strategy—sometimes called grand strategy—is that which so integrates the policies and armaments of the nation that resort to war is either rendered unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory. (emphasis added)

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Wikipedia Moderators Are Debating Removing an Article About Communist Mass Killings for ‘Bias’

Minnesota Sun Staff

Wikipedia moderators are currently considering removing an article titled “mass killings under communist regimes” over concerns of “bias.”

The article was flagged for deletion in September 2021 due to the “neutrality” of the article being disputed in addition to concerns over the “verifiability” of claims made in the article and whether it contained information already available in other areas of Wikipedia, according to a notice posted on the article.

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Commentary: Biden’s Banking Nominee Would Pursue Soviet Economics

RealClearWire
Saule Omarova

Magicians try to distract the audience from looking at one hand by dangling something shiny in the other. So do politicians.

The left’s latest magician: Saule Omarova, President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. OCC is an important agency — it has power to regulate all national banks and federal savings associations. OCC’s wrong moves negatively affect millions of Americans, making banking and other services more expensive and inaccessible, particularly for vulnerable, unbanked Americans.

Rather than answer serious congressional inquiries about whether she is the right fit for OCC, Omarova has attacked duly-elected members of Congress whose voters empower them to serve their interests. By refusing to answer basic questions about her work and worldview, Omarova has obstructed the constitutionally prescribed legislative process.

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Commentary: America Gone Mad

Minnesota Sun Staff

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

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Commentary: Spy Couple Follow in the Grand Tradition of Treasonous Leftist Couples

Minnesota Sun Staff

In the wake of the recent arrest of Maryland nuclear engineer, Jonathan Toebbe, and his wife, Diana Toebbe on charges they tried to sell classified nuclear warship information to a foreign country, the mainstream media has focused on the “mystery” of how this could happen. But very little media coverage has focused on their progressive political background—the most likely key to their misdeeds. 

In fact, strangely enough, husband and wife traitor teams are often linked to left-wing politics. Why hasn’t the establishment media focused on this tie?

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There’s a New Tea Party Brewing… in Moscow

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Vera Kichanova   As Moscow celebrated its 870th anniversary, a futuristic $245 million Zaryadye Park was inaugurated in the heart of the capital — a generous present from Mayor Sergei Sobyanin to his citizens. The 32-acre park includes a ‘floating bridge,’ a piece of tundra, and even an ice cave. The miracle…

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Commentary: Three Myths of Socialism Debunked by Venezuela’s Nightmare

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Venezuela

by Barry Brownstein   History provides endless examples of vicious despots ruling under various collectivist ideologies. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and – today – Kim Jong-un and Nicolás Maduro may have had different names for their collectivist ideologies, but they have resulted in the deaths of countless millions of people and endless misery…

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