Holodomor Used for Political Purposes!

Jewish group objects to ‘Great Famine’ case
June 15, 2009

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2009/06/15/1005888/jewish-group-objects-to-holodomor-lawsuit

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) -- A Jewish group in Ukraine is objecting to a criminal case brought over the "Great Famine" committed in the 1930s.

The nation's security service is pressing the case against a list of former Soviet officials accused of committing the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. Most of the names on the list were Jewish.

Ukrainian lawmaker Aleksandr Feldman, leader of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said last week that it was "a farce" to press the case.

“All organizers of the Great Famine are dead," he said.

Last July, the Ukrainian Security Service released a list of high-ranking Soviet state and Communist Party officials -- as well as officials from NKVD, the police force of Soviet Russia -- that essentially blamed Jews and Latvians responsible for perpetrating and executing the famine because most of the names on the list were Jewish.

The Ukrainian Jewish Committee called on the secret service to revise the list, which incited interethnic hatred, in order to clear up the “inaccuracy.”

Feldman believes there is a danger that the “Holodomor Affair” materials are being used for political purposes.

In late May, security service head Valentin Nalivaychenko claimed at a meeting with representatives of the World Congress of Ukrainians that “Ukraine has collected enough evidence to bring a criminal case regarding the famine, which was artificially created by the Bolshevik regime and caused mass death of citizens.”

Through the World Congress of Ukrainians, Nalivaychenko turned to leading foreign lawyers with a request to help find out the circumstances connected with preparing and committing the genocide.

Soviet Anti-Christianity

Anonymously posted to a message board, but footnotes included. 

A young lawyer called Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov was then living in Samara, the regional capital of one of the areas worst affected by the famine. He was the only member of the local intelligentsia who not only refused to participate in the aid for the hungry, but publicly opposed it. As one of his friends later recalled, "Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, particularly in the appearance of a new industrial proletariat, which would take over from the bourgeoisie.Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the stage that necessarily followed capitalism. Famine would also destroy faith not only in the tsar, but in God too."

Thirty years later, when the "young lawyer" had become the head of the Bolshevik government, his ideas remained unchanged: Famine could and should "strike a mortal blow against the enemy." The enemy in question was the Orthodox Church.

A letter Lenin sent to members of the Politburo on March 19, 1922, shows he wanted to use hunger as a method to break the bond between religion and the masses, to numb their reactions and thus facilitate his planned assault against religious institutions:

In fact the present moment favors us far more than it does them. We are almost 99 percent sure that we can strike a mortal blow against them [our enemies] and consolidate the central position that we are going to need to occupy for several decades to come. With the help of all those starving people who are starting to eat each other, who are dying by the millions, and whose bodies litter the roadside all over the country, it is now and only now that we can--and therefore must--confiscate all church property with all the ruthless energy we can still muster. All evidence suggests that we could not do this at any other moment, because our only hope is the despair engendered in the masses by the famine, which will cause them to look at us in a favorable light or, at the very least, with indifference.

Richard Pipes, A Coincise History Of The Russian Revolution, Vintage Books, Newyork, 1995, s.357
A. Beliakov, Yunost vozhdya (The adolescence of the leader) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiia, 1958), p. 191
Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press Cambridge, p. 124

Tax Resistance Means Book Burning!

The lefties at MoveOn recently moved (their bowels?) on Troy, Michigan. It seems some Tea Party folk, libertarians, and just plain fed-up taxpayers resisted the Troy Public Library's call for an increased millage to maintain its level of service. MoveOn responded by putting together the "pro-library" video linked below: 

http://front.moveon.org/this-is-how-you-beat-the-tea-party. 

The video went "viral," as we're wont to say in the Internet Age, changing hearts and minds. The millage passed. Apparently, taxpayers found the lefties' analogy compelling: if you oppose increased tax funding for the public library, you favor book burning. No kidding. 

I see all kinds of nifty little applications to this line of thinking: 

1) If you oppose tax funding of churches, you favor restoring a Diocletian reign of terror against Christians. 

2) If you oppose free-and-compulsory alcoholic beverages, you favor resurrecting Prohibition. 

3) If you oppose U.S. military and financial aid to Israel, you favor perpetrating another Holocaust. 

Only item #3, however, exudes correctness. This suggests a flaw in the line of thinking. (In some circles, threatening a second Holocaust is reckoned a crime more serious than questioning the official account of the first!) Maybe our friends on the Left can help me cut through the mouth-fog analogizing tax resistance and book burning. 

The American Pizza Community Strikes Back!

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Commercial speech is a subset of speech. Nothing in the text referenced above gives any indication Congress may treat it differently. So by what principle of law or logic did our "I swear to uphold the Constitution" Supervisors justify this camel's nose inside the tent?

People have a right to keep their mouths shut and their keyboard hands idle. Compelling cigarette manufacturers to issue warnings (THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT SMOKING IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH) about their product violated this right. Not surprisingly, it served as a springboard to the later ban on televised cigarette advertising.

Why stop at mandating calorie counts on pizzeria menus? Pizzas are just plain fattening. They're also a staple of the college student, which means consumption often accompanies underage drinking and fornicating.

The public health and welfare considerations trump all of our sacrosanct parchment-protected liberties. Let's skip the preliminaries. Declare War on Pizza.

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But remember, the era of Big Government is over!

WTM

Liberty: Neither Tried nor Wanting

Ferrara conflates liberty, properly understood, with the conditions created by the aggressive secular State. He's also taking a shot at Hans-Hermann Hoppe's groundbreaking Democracy: the God that Failed. But if he read Hoppe, he knows Hoppe attacks the same de-civilizing influences Ferrara attacks. Unlike Ferrara, Hoppe recognizes the true source of the West's debilitation and despair: the State, i.e., the Territorial Monopolist of Violence.

Lew Rockwell describes this criminal syndicate magnificently. “What is the state? It is the group within society that claims for itself the exclusive right to rule everyone under a special set of laws that permit it to do to others what everyone else is rightly prohibited from doing, namely, aggressing against person and property.”

It is precisely this double standard--i.e., the right to steal ("tax") and kill (inflict "collateral damage") in the public interest--that makes the State the de-civilizing agent that it is. How can it be otherwise? Stealing and killing are intrinsically disordered acts! Changing the flavor of the stealing and killing from secular to Catholic is hardly a step in the right direction.

Anti-Holidays

I nominate Anarcho-Freudian Slip day, in honor of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley's infamous slip of the tongue at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. There, in the midst of a police riot, his subconscious emitted the awful truth: "The policeman is not here to create disorder. The policeman is here to preserve disorder."

While the Convention ran from August 26 to 29, 1968, Daley actually uttered the words on September 9 (http://chicago68.com/c68chron.html). (Hat tip, Nicholas Strakon!) So that's where it'll go on the Anti-Holiday Calendar of The Last Ditch.

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President Harry Truman issued the Truman Doctrine on March 12, 1947. Bribery of non-aligned nations would thereafter become part of U.S. strategy to contain the Soviets.

Greece and Turkey were dominoes on the verge of falling at the time. As Wisegeek.com (www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-truman-doctrine.htm) wisely if geekily notes, "The Truman Doctrine was established to give aid to both countries, to help them fight off foreign influence, despite the fact that it would be just another form of foreign influence" (emphasis added).

I seem to recall the Great Communicator mouthing similarly delicious ironies after he'd sent U.S. Marines to join Italian and French counterparts in Lebanon in 1982. The multinational peacekeeping force, he said, would protect the Lebanese from foreign influence. Remarkable.

Error and Religious Freedom

Unfortunately, what many secularists regard as religious freedom, e.g., Obama's contraception mandate, is actually an attack on religious freedom. Religious freedom, properly understood, is proper and good--past papal pronouncements notwithstanding.

It may well be that "error has no rights." But how does one know how to identify error in the absence of an unfettered marketplace of ideas? Those who insist the State has a role to play in defending truth are blindly infusing the State, aka the Territorial Monopolist of Violence, with what the late Roy Childs called "epistemological elitism." Freemasons, atheists, Islamists, Zionists and pagans can just as readily seize the machinery of State as can Catholics. What happens to the cause of truth then?

I take all papal pronouncements seriously, but only those strictly dealing with faith and morals impinge on my conscience. Statements regarding religious liberty are political. Popes are no more infallible when issuing political statements than they are when discussing the weather, economy, astrophysics, the historical accuracy of the orthodox Holocaust account, or which players should be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Embarrassing Shared Premises

Duly noted, WTM. Those pesky premises have consequences! Then again, it has long since been established our "living" Constitution spawns all kinds of viral life forms, aka "emanations and penumbra." This according to the same black-robed oracles whose "universal mandate" ruling we await with bated breath.

No need to invoke or ignore "embarrassing shared premises" under those lax standards. Legislation cut from whole cloth? Well, not exactly: the chicken entrails suggest otherwise.

What's that criticism all right-thinking people level at the anarchists? That without the State humanity would be left to its own devices? Life would degenerate into something "nasty, brutish and short"? No, we can't have that. I don't care what they say I won't live in a world without order.

Tony Pivetta

-----Original Message-----
From:
To:

Sent: Sun, Jun 10, 2012 11:26 am
Subject: Those embarrassing shared premises sting 'em again

Gents:

On ABC's "This Week" panel this morning, Van Jones made a good point, with
respect to the "universal mandate" and the pending SCOTUS ruling:

"It is absolutely settled that the government can have people be forced to pay
for universal health care. It's called Medicare."

Ann Coulter, also on the panel, protested that she'd been talking about the
Constitution, not "Great Society programs." How that comports with her intense
partisanship for Mitt Romney is unclear. Does she consider Medicare to be
unconstitutional? Mitt certainly doesn't. If other "movement" conservatives do,
most of them keep pretty quiet about it.

WTM