The following is an edited transcript of a Daily Wire interview with Bill Whittle on his new, in-depth docuseries on the rise of the Soviet Union: &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">What We Saw: An Empire of Terror</a>.&#8221; 
Daily Wire: Bill, you’ve now produced multiple “What We Saw” documentaries for The Daily Wire: “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apollo 11</a>” and “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Cold War</a>.” Why did you choose the rise of the Soviet Union as your next project?
Bill: Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine I received a call from Jeremy Boreing at The Daily Wire. I just finished covering a fair amount of Russia with &#8220;The Cold War&#8221; series. Given the research for &#8220;The Cold War,&#8221; and my previous readings, I&#8217;ve always been kind of morbidly fascinated with the mechanisms of the Soviet Union — fascinated and disgusted and appalled and intrigued by governments that have to terrorize their people in order to remain in power, antithetical to the American system. And no matter how bad we think things get here, there&#8217;s nothing that&#8217;s happened or is happening now in this country that even approaches this scale.
DW: Why is it important to remember Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution?
Bill: Several years after World War I, Winston Churchill said that the Germans had transmitted a “Bacillus” into Russia in the form of Lenin. I think he got that exactly right. It (Lenin) was a biological weapon. And it was designed to destroy Russia as a great power in World War I. That&#8217;s why the Germans not only allowed Lenin to travel through Germany during the height of the war, but in fact paid his expenses for many, many years afterwards.
This regime is interesting to me for two reasons: the main reason is how intellectual it was — and I have a very low opinion of intellectuals. Intellectualism is for people who think they are intelligent and are so certain of themselves and so certain of what they believe that they feel the right to enforce their theories on other people.
What fascinated me about this horrific system was the theoretical aspect of everything. There was nothing about the system that was practical. There was nothing based on common sense, experience, reason, kindness, decency — nothing. It was all based on the theory of a German philosopher named Karl Marx. His writings appealed to people looking for some sort of justice, but they also appealed to people who had any sort of envy for the people in power but didn&#8217;t want to do any work in order to achieve it.
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The other remarkable quality about all of the Soviet leaders is just how useless they were. Prior to finding themselves in the middle of the system, none of them had jobs. Lenin’s only job was as a failed attorney, very briefly. As a lawyer he lost, I think, 13 out of 14 cases and never really worked a day in his life. Prior to the revolution, he sat around for 16 years, sitting in cafes in safe places like Berlin and Munich and London and Zurich, sipping tea and discussing theory. 
He developed in his massive forehead this idea of how a society should work and there was no real world evidence that would change his mind. If it turned out that there was a difference between the map he had in his head and reality, then the reality had to be well, he would then go about doing whatever he had to do with the lovers of state power to beat reality into line with the theory. And this is why the Soviet state was a terror state. They never had legitimacy. 
The Bolsheviks were a minority every single time they held a so-called “election;” they were a tremendous minority. And you can’t even accuse the Nazis of that.
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DW: In &#8220;An Empire of Terror&#8221; you mention the leader of Russia’s provisional government, Alexander Kerensky. Why wasn’t he able to mount a good defense against the growing Bolshevik threat?
Bill: Someone once wrote that Lenin was “lucky with his enemies.” And that was exactly the case. I have very high regard for Alexander Kerensky’s principles and for what he wanted for the Russian people. But as an actor, Kerensky had two qualities that actors often bring to the world: First, he was spectacularly naive when it came to the real world. And second, he was tremendously vain. These two blind spots led him to believe he was in control when in fact, Lenin was ready to do everything up to and including murder when Kerensky was simply looking out the window at the daisies. He was a good man and history was kind to him but he was no match for Lenin’s ruthlessness. This is the thing about the Soviet state — it&#8217;s designed in such a way that you have to keep the population under control through terror. The people that end up running the machine, by definition, become the most ruthless and terroristic of the bunch.
<div id="attachment_714985" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-714985" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-714985" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/EOT-EP-4-Thumbnail-1024x576.png" alt="" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/EOT-EP-4-Thumbnail-1024x576.png 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/EOT-EP-4-Thumbnail-300x169.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/EOT-EP-4-Thumbnail-768x432.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/EOT-EP-4-Thumbnail-1536x864.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/EOT-EP-4-Thumbnail.png 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />DailyWire+</div>
DW: What were some of the challenges you faced making this new series?
Bill: All roads lead back to Lenin. When I began to realize the magnitude of the crimes that these people committed, I began to feel a tremendous sense of historical responsibility to the people who disappeared without photographs.
800,000 people were killed in one of the gulags called Kolyma. 800,000 people. That makes it second on the leaderboard from hell: Auschwitz is first, Kolyma is second, and Treblinka is third. So, more than anything, I wanted every single episode to have as many photographs of the faces of individual people. And most importantly, we can never use the same face twice. I just wanted faces because, as Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.”
So my biggest challenge was to find a way to try and personalize this. Make people understand that this could just as easily be you or your family, and then try to give them some idea of what the size of 20 million people looks like.
For example, about 100,000 people attend the Super Bowl every year. Imagine that everybody had to exit the stadium, single file, through one gate and you had to stand there and look at every single face as they left the stadium. When you were finished, hours and hours and hours later, you would have only 199 more Super Bowls to look at before you reached 20 million and saw the face of every person killed by this “idea.” And if it&#8217;s killed that many people, maybe it&#8217;s not such a good idea.
DW: Did you come across any surprises in your research?
Bill: The most astonishing story in &#8220;An Empire of Terror&#8221; is a true story. I&#8217;ve worked exceedingly hard and long to make sure that not only everything I wrote was true, but that I also had the receipts for everything.
But the most astonishing coincidence in the entire series is this: Lenin and Stalin were both known to be extremely paranoid, and very, very private people. They kept a very tight circle and they were constantly on the lookout for assassination and betrayal. So when Lenin finally arrives in Moscow from St. Petersburg, and eventually gets himself a little mansion, he is living with his sisters, his wife, and two secretaries. He also has four bodyguards and a private cook named Comrade Spiridon.
Comrade Spiridon went from being the only person that lived with Lenin, who was not related to him, to becoming the only person who lived with Stalin. And he lived with Stalin for the duration of Stalin&#8217;s reign in the Soviet Union. The only person who shared the insight into the entire thing — from the rise from agrarian peasantry to nuclear superpower. Comrade Spiridon was the only man who was on the inside. He would serve dinner to people who were the heads of the secret police one night and then the next night they were gone. They&#8217;d been killed and replaced. The genuinely remarkable part of this story is that Comrade Spiridon’s last name was Putin. This was Vladimir Putin&#8217;s grandfather.
Vladimir Putin learned about the Soviet Union on his grandfather&#8217;s knee. And so the perspective Vladimir Putin received of the Soviet Union was the most elevated inside perspective that was possible to obtain. No one else in the entire history of the Soviet Union, ever, got that close to both of those men. And to think that it was possible for Vladimir Putin to turn out any other way is insane.
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DW: In light of the upcoming presidential election, do you see elements of communism at play in our politics?
Bill: Well, the first thing I think that stands out about the upcoming election is the lawfare that&#8217;s being conducted against Donald Trump. If these people who are committing these atrocities against him genuinely believed in democracy, if they genuinely believed that their democratic values were better than Republican values, they wouldn&#8217;t be trying to lock up Trump. They&#8217;d be doing everything they could to get him to keep talking. If you feel like your only way to win an election is by having your opponent put in jail, you are well on your way to this kind of totalitarian empire of terror. That&#8217;s number one.
Number two is cancel culture. The Left is using cancel culture as a strong-arm tactic to get people to shut up. And we all know the way it works: “You&#8217;re racist” or “we&#8217;re going to call your boss” or “we&#8217;re going to boycott your product” or whatever. But the point is that the only people who feel they need to shut up the opposition are people who know that their opposition has a better argument. And if they don&#8217;t shut them up, they&#8217;re going to win. One of my favorite sayings is that liberals want conservatives to shut up and conservatives want liberals to keep talking. And that&#8217;s the essence of the difference between these two parties.
I have seen a concerted effort in America over the last several years to silence people. This whole idea of cancel culture is as close as we&#8217;ve come so far to taking people out to the Gulag and shooting them in the back of the head. But there are people who do want other people silenced. And the one thing I did realize is that there comes a tipping point when too many people are too quiet for too long. The social proof is to be quiet. The longer everybody is quiet, the harder it is to speak up. Eventually, it will lead to a situation like the Soviet Union, or the Nazi state. With &#8220;An Empire of Terror,&#8221; I was determined to do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.

EOT – Key Art – 16×9 (1)

‘An Empire Of Terror’: Bill Whittle On The Rise Of The Soviet Union

Bill Whittle

Communism

Documentaries

Josef Stalin

Opinion

Readers Pass

Russia

Soviet Union

Vladimir Lenin

Here’s how World War III could happen.
To understand how, we should look historically at the closest that the world has gotten to World War III since the end of World War II.
The world came closest to World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Soviet Union attempted to ship nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba and the United States put a blockade around Cuba to prevent that from happening.
The United States and the USSR stood eyeball-to-eyeball and eventually the USSR backed down. But — that was very, very close.
To understand why we came so close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, you actually have to reverse field for a few years.
The reality is that the USSR started to challenge the United States so strenuously around the world because of roughly a decade of weakness in American foreign policy.
This is how world wars break out — miscalculation. They break out because one side believes that the other side is likely to cave in the face of its aggression.
It&#8217;s particularly true when the United States shows its neck to its enemies. So to really understand what was happening in the lead-up to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, you have to return to 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower was president and there was a crisis that emerged in the Middle East.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1930-world-war-iii-china-edition-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h4>
That crisis involved the Suez Canal. Nasser, the nationalist, pan-Arab nationalist leader of Egypt, decided that he was going to unite all the Arab countries by flexing muscle in the face of the West. And so he decided that despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the building of the Suez Canal, he would nationalize the Suez Canal.
The French and the British both had an interest in the Suez Canal. And they said to Nasser, you can&#8217;t do that. The United States stood on the sidelines and vacillated for a couple of reasons: They believed that if they were kind enough to Nasser, then Nasser would not align himself with the Soviet Union and that Nasser might, in fact, become the tip of the spear in some sort of American overture to the Arab world; if they were just kind and nice to Nasser, then everything would work out just fine. They were supposedly afraid that the USSR was going to get directly involved in the Suez Canal crisis.
Meanwhile, the British were no longer an international power of the sort of vintage they had been historically. The British and the French, who had historically not worked particularly well together, decided to work with the Israelis in order to liberate the Suez Canal, which the British had built.
They went to the Israelis, who were worried about the Egyptian militarization of the Sinai Desert, and Israel decided that it would work with the British and the French in order to free the Suez Canal and possibly overthrow Nasser and put in place somebody who was not going to be an enemy of the West.
The Israelis ended up moving into the Sinai desert, which they quickly overran, and then they were on the march to Cairo.
The plan was for the British and the French to intervene, tell the Israelis to stop, and take over the Suez Canal.
And then — Eisenhower stepped in and rapped everyone on the knuckles. The United States actually stepped in on Egypt’s side and said to the British and the French that this was a violation of international law, hoping Nasser would then align himself with the West. The United States was basically saying to the British and the French that they were no longer world powers.
Again, the Egyptian government didn&#8217;t build the Suez Canal. The British government did it. None of that mattered; the bottom line was that the United States decided to play non-aligned. And in playing non-aligned, Nikita Khrushchev, the new premier of the Soviet Union, decided now was the time to move.
The next thing that happened, just a few months later, was that there was an uprising in Hungary, a state in the Soviet sphere of influence. Suddenly there was a Hungarian revolution, an attempt to actually substitute the puppet government that had been installed by the Soviets with a new government, a better government that was going to essentially remain non-aligned.
The Soviets immediately invaded Hungary and crushed everything and killed everyone involved in the Hungarian revolution of 1956. By 1957, Sputnik was launched and the space race was on. By 1958, Nikita Khrushchev, believing that he had the impetus, felt he had the power to challenge the United States globally.
In 1958, he demanded the withdrawal of American troops and Western troops from Berlin, beginning what was known as the Berlin crisis. For three long years, the Soviet Union and the United States stood toe-to-toe over Berlin.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union facilitated a Cuban revolution that ended with Fidel Castro in charge of Cuba. In 1961, Khrushchev stepped in and solved the Berlin crisis by building the Berlin Wall, which lasted until 1989.
All of this led to the Cuban Missile crisis.
There is one rule when it comes to World War: Lack of clarity in your intention, vacillation, failure to make clear to your enemies what exactly your lines are.
Fake bluffs, empty threats. These things lead to war. Very often the open threat of war actually deters war. Very often, the willingness to actually flex muscle leads the other side to believe, “Hey, maybe I shouldn’t actually go and have this firefight with somebody. They&#8217;re ready to have the firefight.”
Miscalculation is the most likely way the great powers end up in war. That&#8217;s precisely what happened during World War I and happened during World War II. The Germans miscalculated because they thought that since the West had caved at Munich and because they&#8217;d been able to occupy the Sudetenland, they would then be able to then occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia. The aftermath of that was that they thought they could then occupy the Danzig corridor.
Failure of willingness to convey your intention, failure to act as an iron wall against the aggression of your enemies, leads to escalation. And then you actually do get dragged into hot wars that involve extraordinary numbers of casualties.
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Today there is a story out of the <a href="https://www.the-express.com/news/world-news/131715/taiwan-usa-troops-china" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Daily Express</a> that American troops are to be permanently stationed in Taiwan, according to Taipei.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are buzzing the borders of the Taiwan Strait, which is divided between Taiwan and China in terms of offshore control. Chinese jets have been busing the Taiwan Straits. The Chinese are again pursuing hypersonic missile tests.
Now, why would they be doing all of this? The reason they are doing that is because Joe Biden has demonstrated he&#8217;s showing his neck while China has been busily facilitating the creation of an anti-American, anti-Western alliance predominantly staffed by China, Russia and Iran.
Those are countries that are very obviously working together, so much so that the Houthis, an Iranian-backed terror group that is currently attacking shipping in the Red Sea, announced that they would not attack any Chinese or Russian shipping in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden.
What the Biden administration should be doing is taking the position that it is going to destroy any Houthi attempts to harass shipping in the Red Sea. What the United States should be doing in Ukraine is holding the line; the United States does have an interest in holding the line against Russia. The United States, when it comes to Israel, should be saying that Israel has the full capacity to go in to strike Hamas, which is an Iranian proxy group.
The reason that China is getting aggressive with Taiwan, the reason that a war could possibly break out is because China is thinking, “We just don&#8217;t believe that Joe Biden is going to do anything about that. Not only that, you guys look so divided internally in the United States on foreign policy that if we make a move, we think that probably you will just let it go.&#8221;
The single most effective method of upgrading Chinese military capacity is to take or blockade Taiwan. It&#8217;s not about the money for the Chinese military; it is about the microchips. Taiwan is the largest manufacturer of microchips, sophisticated microchips on the planet.
Those microchips are the single greatest advantage the United States has in terms of military tech, because we design all the software here and then the hardware is then printed off and created in Taiwan, but we&#8217;re not even able to ramp up our microchip facilities in the United States fast enough to make up for Taiwan being lost.
But mostly, this is about will.
After the abandonment of Hong Kong, after the abandonment of Afghanistan, after the internal pressures in the United States over Ukraine and Israel, the Chinese are hoping that Taiwan is going to get the message and elect a government that is friendlier to China and then just give them the microchips. Suddenly their military would go from a very large but second-rate military to a first-class military.
It is a game of perception. How does the world perceive Joe Biden right now? They perceive him as weak. How does the world perceive the United States? They perceive the United States as divided. When you have a weak president and a divided United States, that seems like a really good time to march.
And that&#8217;s precisely why it matters.

Russia Holds 75th Anniversary Victory Parade Over The Nazis In WWII

Here’s How World War III Could Happen

Ben Shapiro

Biden Administration

China

Cuba

Egypt

Joe Biden

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” – Winston Churchill
Socialism is a terrific idea in theory. Who would not want everyone in society to have a house with a white picket fence, the job of their dreams, 2.5 kids and a dog? But plain vanilla socialism has failed every single time it has been implemented — the Soviet Union, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Venezuela — and it turned each of those countries (and others) into a totalitarian state.
In a socialist state, success is pushed down, and failure is elevated. This is how equality of outcome is created. In the Soviet Union’s version of plain vanilla socialism, we were taught to hate the wealthy and empathize with the poor. This empathy was easy for us because everyone (with the exception of the tiny ruling-class bureaucrats) was poor.
Capitalism does not offer the sexy, utopian promise of socialism, but it works in practice. Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty; but it is now under threat, ironically, from those who have benefited the most from it — academics. Universities  have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the wealth created by capitalism. 
As Margaret Thatcher once said, “Socialism is a great idea until you run out of other people’s money.”
Universities used to be spartan gyms for our minds, places where opposing ideas collided and gave birth to new ones and where our thinking got challenged through healthy debate. This growth came with healthy pain, the type that accompanies and stimulates intellectual growth.
Today, many universities have been turned into day spas, where, for <a href="https://www.collegeessayadvisors.com/ivy-league-tuition-and-fees-2022-23/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$300,000</a>, a student’s mind will be pampered and coddled. Now they are “safe places” from opposing ideas, which are <a href="https://www.thefire.org/news/absurd-uva-microaggressions-case-shows-just-how-badly-schools-can-abuse-professionalism-codes" target="_blank" rel="noopener">considered</a> as microaggressions. This is where free speech goes to die, unless it calls for the genocidal extermination of Jews; then you can speak your mind.
It seems today’s college administrations are afraid to upset their spa customers (I mean students). They do not seem to be focused on challenging their thinking and producing the brightest but are instead fixated on making students feel better about themselves.
I was not surprised to learn that socialism is slowly poisoning our universities, but I was surprised by its new avenue — the socialization of grades. Professors at a local law school are required to grade to a B+. When professors submit their grades, if the average is below a B+, the system will reject it. The university is afraid of making students feel bad about a low, albeit deserved grade and wants every student to have a high grade-point average upon graduation.
However, what is inflation for one group is deflation for another. This practice punishes hard working students, as their work may result in a lower grade than they deserve, compared to classmates who are preoccupied with attending “TikTok University” during lectures.
Universities are on a quixotic mission to right a wrong — they are fighting against grade inequality. This is what socializing (equalizing) outcomes looks like. In fact, this seemingly innocent practice of equally high grades has the familiar ring of a Karl Marx slogan that I heard endlessly in the Soviet Union: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Law students need a B+, so they get a B+. 
With each graduating class, our capitalistic (equal-opportunity) society is being slowly diluted by equal-outcome dogma (socialism).
Grade inflation appears to be happening in virtually <a href="https://www.gradeinflation.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">every college</a> across the country. Colleges should not receive all the blame for this, however. Unfortunately, it starts in high schools, where super grade inflation is on the rise — grades have gone up while reading and math skills have fallen, with <a href="https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/secured/documents/Evidence-of-Grade-Inflation-in-English-Math-Social-Studies-and-Science.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">minorities experiencing</a> the largest grade inflation. 
Bad grades are a necessary part of education. How else would you know you had not learned something as well as you thought you had? I failed English as a freshman in college. I had been in the US for two years. My English was objectively horrible. I’m glad I didn’t receive special (woke) treatment for being “fresh off the boat.” I studied a lot harder, retook the class and passed it my senior year. If I had not, my English would not have improved and I would not have written several books or received national awards for writing.
The beauty of the Declaration of Independence is that you are guaranteed the “pursuit of happiness” — you are given an equal chance to pursue it. You are not guaranteed the outcome, just the opportunity. There is enormous value, and yes even happiness and meaning in the pursuit of happiness. This pursuit will often take you down a harder road, but it will result in the best version of you and bring a sense of pride and accomplishment.
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<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/anti-semitism-wokeness-and-why-a-strong-america-is-essential-to-israels-survival-part-1-a-small-country-with-a-big-story">READ: Anti-Semitism, Wokeness, And Why A Strong America Is Essential To Israel’s Survival, Part 1: A Small Country With A Big Story</a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/anti-semitism-wokeness-and-why-a-strong-america-is-essential-to-israels-survival-part-2-wokeness-is-destroying-america-one-student-at-a-time">READ: Anti-Semitism, Wokeness, And Why A Strong America Is Essential To Israel’s Survival, Part 2: Wokeness Is Destroying America — One Student at a Time</a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/anti-semitism-wokeness-and-why-a-strong-america-is-essential-to-israels-survival-part-4-one-way-to-save-america-and-israel">READ: Anti-Semitism, Wokeness, And Why A Strong America Is Essential To Israel’s Survival, Part 4: One Way To Save America And Israel</a>
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Vitaliy Katsenelson is CEO of <a href="https://imausa.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://imausa.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1647635730858000&amp;usg=AOvVaw30zrUEAHOucJkCFFh3YMfC">IMA</a> – a value investing firm in Denver. You can read his articles on  <a href="http://contrarianedge.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://ContrarianEdge.com&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1647635730858000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0Ak6ognAG7cu6Z8Bx_j7L8">ContrarianEdge.com</a>. He is the author of <a href="https://soulinthegame.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://soulinthegame.net/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1647635730858000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0w8zHUpuqxRre_0scGo3hI">Soul in the Game</a> – The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022).
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

optical form of an examination with pencil

Anti-Semitism, Wokeness, And Why A Strong America Is Essential To Israel’s Survival, Part 3: The Socialism Of Grades

College

Education

Socialism

Universities

Woke Culture

Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler may be the most infamous villain in world history. He perpetrated the Holocaust, unleashed a reign of totalitarian oppression over most of Europe, and initiated the most destructive conflict the world has ever seen.
Ian Kershaw, a distinguished historian widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on Hitler and the Nazi regime, has <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/03/hitler-nemesis" target="_blank" rel="noopener">referred</a> to him as &#8220;the embodiment of modern political evil.&#8221; The accuracy of that assessment is showcased by the fact that partisans of all political stripes (though it is especially favored by the Left to refer to anything even remotely Right-of-center) use <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-says-trump-is-a-nazi-thats-not-going-to-work" target="_blank" rel="noopener">comparisons to Hitler</a> and his ideology as the ultimate slander against their opponents.
In fact, as many have pointed out, the comparison has become <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/facts-ep-3-fascism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">so ubiquitous</a> that in many ways it has lost its effectiveness as a political epithet. Additionally, to rely on a single historical reference to embody evil diminishes public awareness of other psychopathic despots (especially Left-wing ones) who have rampaged through history, even in the last century.
So, here is a non-exhaustive list of tyrants of the 20th Century who we can reference besides Hitler.
<h4>Vladimir Lenin</h4>
Vladimir Lenin orchestrated the first, but by no means last, successful communist revolution and forged what would become the Soviet Union in a tide of violence and repression.
The Bolsheviks <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/october-revolution/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">launched</a> the October Revolution of 1917 to overthrow the Provisional Government of Russia, which had ruled the country since Tsar Nicholas II abdicated during the February Revolution earlier in the year. The communists quickly seized control of Petrograd (today St. Petersburg) and Moscow, but the country soon descended into a bloody and chaotic <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Civil-War" target="_blank" rel="noopener">civil war</a> as anti-communist factions — ranging from moderate socialists to monarchists to anarchists and separatists — resisted the new government.
<div id="attachment_680029" style="width: 791px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-680029" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-680029 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-781x576.jpg" alt="Credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images" width="781" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-781x576.jpg 781w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-300x221.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-768x567.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-1536x1133.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515384712-2048x1511.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 781px) 100vw, 781px" />Credit: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images</div>
On the orders of Lenin and other top Bolsheviks, soldiers of the newly formed Red Army seized food, property, and other valuables from peasants in order to support the war effort, creating famine and destitution throughout large swathes of the country.
Lenin oversaw the creation of <a href="https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/12/20/whats-the-context-20-december-1917-formation-of-the-cheka-the-first-soviet-security-and-intelligence-agency/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Cheka</a>, the Soviet Union&#8217;s first secret police, and during the civil war it carried out mass arrests, torture and executions in order to suppress any political opponents of the new regime. The Cheka also founded and ran the USSR&#8217;s infamous prison labor system — the gulags.
Lenin also endorsed the murder of the former tsar, his wife, and their five children in July 1918 as anti-communist forces approached the location where they were being held prisoner by the Bolsheviks.
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The Russian Civil War lasted more than 5 years and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Civil-War" target="_blank" rel="noopener">caused</a> the deaths of up to 10 million people — five times the number of Russians who died in World War I.
Though his reign over the nascent Soviet Union was relatively short, a little over 6 years, Lenin&#8217;s ruthlessness provided a blueprint for Left-wing dictators who rose to power throughout the century, most infamously his successor.
<h4>Joseph Stalin</h4>
Joseph Stalin&#8217;s rise to power in the aftermath of Lenin&#8217;s death in 1924 foreshadowed his own brutal tenure as the leader of the Soviet Union. He <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin">supplanted</a> and eventually exiled Lenin&#8217;s preferred successor, Leon Trotsky, and had several of his other opponents demoted and replaced by allies.
Once he secured his position as leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin embarked on a program of collectivization, the forced consolidation of individual farms into large, state-controlled collectives. Along with this policy, Stalin <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/collectivization/collectivization-texts/stalin-on-the-liquidation-of-the-kulak/">called</a> for the elimination of prosperous peasants known as kulaks &#8220;as a class.&#8221; Though these farmers were rarely much better off than their neighbors, Stalin designated them as class enemies, and the new secret police, the NKVD, carried out mass arrests and deportations of the kulaks, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Soviet collectivization of agriculture under Stalin also caused a massive famine that afflicted Ukraine and southern Russia from 1930 to 1933. Known as <a href="https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor">the Holodomor</a> in Ukraine, the Great Soviet Famine killed an <a href="https://www.nber.org/digest/202110/disproportionate-death-ukrainians-soviet-great-famine">estimated</a> 10 million people, of which roughly 4 million were Ukrainians. The legislatures of dozens of countries, including the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-resolution/435">United States</a>, recognize the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Though he had dealt with Trotsky (eventually having him assassinated in Mexico in 1940), Stalin still feared internal opposition to his rule, causing him to instigate <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Purge" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Great Purge</a> in 1936.
Stalin once again deployed the NKVD to hunt down and terrorize his enemies, real and imagined. Dozens of high-ranking Soviet officials, including several original Bolsheviks who had helped Lenin seize power in 1917, were found guilty in show trials and executed for supposedly conspiring to overthrow Stalin.
The purge unleashed a wave of paranoia throughout the country, and suspicion soon extended to the military, ethnic minorities, and even the general population. By the time Stalin declared in 1938 that the internal threat to the Soviet Union had been suppressed, at least <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/great-purge" target="_blank" rel="noopener">700,000 people</a> had died.
<div id="attachment_680033" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-680033" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-680033 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-1024x532.jpg" alt="Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images" width="1024" height="532" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-1024x532.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-300x156.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-768x399.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-1536x797.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-515177218-2048x1063.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images</div>
As a result of the Great Purge, the gulag system founded under Lenin exploded into the infamous &#8220;Gulag Archipelago&#8221; as more and more people were accused of being counter-revolutionaries. Of the estimated 17 million people who <a href="https://apnews.com/general-news-b2adacb992004f4aaa4c739ec3f4629a" target="_blank" rel="noopener">were sent</a> to the gulags between 1930 and 1953, between 1.2 and 1.7 million <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag" target="_blank" rel="noopener">died</a> in the camps.
The Soviet Union invaded Poland along with Nazi Germany in September 1939 as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which facilitated the partition of Eastern Europe between the two countries and their cooperation until the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Stalin <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/katyn-massacre" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ordered</a> the mass execution of Polish prisoners-of-war who had been captured during the invasion, and NKVD agents killed over 20,000 Poles during the Katyn Massacre in April and May 1940.
Stalin continued his totalitarian policies during World War II, in which anyone accused of questioning his leadership was severely punished and collaborators with the Nazis were killed or sent to the gulags. Arrests of political dissidents, carried out by a succession of increasingly monstrous NKVD directors, continued right up to Stalin&#8217;s death.
After he rose to power in the wake of Stalin&#8217;s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/khrushchevs-secret-speech-cult-personality-and-its-consequences-delivered-twentieth-party" target="_blank" rel="noopener">denounced</a> Stalin&#8217;s barbarity and embarked on a campaign of de-Stalinization to dismantle his policies. Estimates on exactly how many people during the Stalin era vary greatly, with most historians placing the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/joseph-stalin" target="_blank" rel="noopener">death toll</a> between 6 million and 20 million.
<h4>Mao Zedong</h4>
In 1949, the Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong — after a decades-long civil war — forced the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek to retreat to Taiwan, cementing communist control over the Chinese mainland.
After a period of relative openness designed to bait opponents of the regime into publicly criticizing the CCP, Mao <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-silence-that-preceded-chinas-great-leap-into-famine-51898077/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">declared</a> the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 to root out anyone who opposed communist rule or collectivization. Between half a million and 2 million people were arrested during the campaign, and hundreds of thousands died due to starvation or ill-treatment during captivity.
Mao&#8217;s most destructive program was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/money/topic/Great-Leap-Forward" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Great Leap Forward</a>, which was intended to transform China from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial powerhouse that could compete with the Soviet Union and the West. The central government set unattainable production quotas for both industry and agriculture, causing lower-level bureaucrats overseeing the programs to take more food from peasants and overwork factory laborers. Out of fear of being labeled anti-communist or, more importantly, anti-Mao, many officials refused to report failures and fabricated data to meet the quotas.
Anyone who opposed the Great Leap Forward could be arrested, tortured, conscripted into forced labor battalions, or summarily executed by the communist overseers. The program was a complete economic disaster, plunging tens of millions of Chinese into grinding poverty.
Because the cadres didn&#8217;t report food shortages and took more food from peasants to fill the outlandish quotas, famine broke out across China. The Great Chinese Famine lasted from 1959 to 1961 and is widely considered one of the worst famines in human history. Scholars continue to debate the exact death toll, but <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/#:~:text=Extent%20of%20famine&amp;text=More%20detailed%20later%20studies%20came,totals%20closer%20to%2040%20million." target="_blank" rel="noopener">most estimates</a> fall between 15 and 55 million deaths from the famine alone.
It wasn&#8217;t until 1981, 5 years after Mao&#8217;s death, that the CCP officially <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/resolution-certain-questions-history-our-party-founding-peoples-republic-china" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recognized</a> that the famine had been primarily caused by policies implemented during the Great Leap Forward.
Much like Stalin, Mao eventually became paranoid about the threat of internal threats to his absolute power. He insisted that capitalists and conservatives had infiltrated Chinese society and called on young people to purge the country of any elements that might threaten communism, launching the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Cultural-Revolution" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cultural Revolution</a>. Units of Red Guards, usually comprised of university students, targeted local government officials, teachers, community elders, and even parents who were accused of not being sufficiently dedicated to Chairman Mao.
<div id="attachment_680035" style="width: 784px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-680035" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-680035 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-774x576.jpg" alt="Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images" width="774" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-774x576.jpg 774w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-300x223.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-768x571.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-1536x1143.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/01/GettyImages-517262776-2048x1524.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 774px) 100vw, 774px" />Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images</div>
Though struggle sessions, in which someone accused of disloyalty to communism was forced to admit their crimes and subjected to public ridicule and abuse, had been a tactic used by the CCP to force ideological conformity for decades, the practice became infamous during the Cultural Revolution. Heretofore committed Chinese communists were suddenly accused of not being ideologically pure enough or being secret capitalists, hauled out into a public space, and harangued by their neighbors. They were most often imprisoned afterward, but in many instances they were executed by the government or killed on the spot by the mob.
Massacres of suspected traitors took place across China, and in the southern province of Guangxi hundreds of instances of cannibalism were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/06/world/a-tale-of-red-guards-and-cannibals.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. Millions were imprisoned or persecuted by the Red Guards, driving thousands to suicide. Overall, between 500,000 and 2 million people died as a result of the Cultural Revolution.
Much like Stalin&#8217;s Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution served to cement Mao&#8217;s position as the undisputed leader of the country.
By the time Mao died in 1976, an <a href="https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder" target="_blank" rel="noopener">estimated</a> 65 million people had died as a result of his regime of terror and subjugation.
Lenin, Stalin, and Mao are all synonymous with communist brutality in the 20th century. Each of them displayed just as much cruelty, ruthlessness, and disregard for human life as Hitler did during his vicious domination of Europe. Though references to Stalin and Mao are made in political discourse, they pale in comparison to those accusing someone or an idea of being Hitler-esque. And the crimes of these men deserve just as much scrutiny and public awareness as those of Hitler and the Nazis. More frequent references to these despots not only phases out the tired Hitler trope, but it can also help point out the horrendous atrocities carried out in the name of communist utopia.

Portraits de théoriciens et de dirigeants communistes

Tired Of Comparing Your Political Enemies To Hitler? Here Are Some Other Evil Despots Worth Mentioning – Part I

Tired Of Comparing Your Political Enemies To Hitler? Here Are Some Other Evil Despots Worth Mentioning - Part I

Adolf Hitler

World

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3ySceWGcOc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life tour</a>. In this part, he takes a question from the audience about whether he is hopeful about the future.
I would say I am hopeful and desperate about the future. I think that is actually the right attitude to have at the moment. For example, between 2000 and 2012, the number of people who were in absolute economic privation in the world plummeted faster than it ever had in history. Part of that was a delayed consequence of the fall of the Soviet Empire; fewer countries around the world were pursuing counterproductive economic visions. As the population radically increased, everyone around the world got much richer. Now, there are still a large number of people who are absolutely poor, and there is an even larger number of people who are relatively poor. But all things considered, we were cruising there for a good while. I see no reason why we could not eradicate absolute poverty pretty much everywhere. I see no reason other than voluntarily willful blindness, stupidity, and malevolence that would necessarily interfere with the eradication of absolute poverty by 2035. We could do that. It is quite obvious.
There is enough food for everyone (though there are distribution problems). It is possible to provide educational resources to everyone. YouTube alone can do that to a huge degree. You might be cynical about that, but TV made people smarter, not stupider. It might have made really smart people somewhat stupider, but it made children who would otherwise have been abandoned alone in their cribs watching absolutely nothing for hours at a time much smarter than they would have been otherwise. This provision of universal information and electronic platforms allow us to disseminate information — almost all information — at almost no cost. So I think things could be radically better if we got our aim right. Part of that is a consequence of our elevated technological and computational power which is becoming cheaper and more powerful at an extraordinarily rapid rate. The vision of a future of plenty on the material and spiritual front beckons like it never has before.
But along with that increased power comes the requirement for increased responsibility and wisdom. We could easily break things apart and produce a hell that would make what happened in the 20th century look like a trial run. I would say that is up to each of us in the most fundamental way. I concluded 40 years ago that the trajectory we walk toward heaven or hell is fundamentally dependent on individual choice. I do not really understand how the universe can be constructed so that that is true, but I believe it is true. Solzhenitsyn said, for example, one man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny, and he did that so he knew. He was not the only person who did that. We each bear ultimate responsibility, in some sense, for the direction of our mutual striving forward. I think that is the core doctrine of the West — that each individual is sovereign and of divine and ultimate worth. There is a commensurate responsibility with that.
I thought when I realized that — partly from reading Solzhenitsyn, Jung, Dostoevsky, Frankl, Nietzsche to some degree, many people were pointing in that direction — it was necessary for us to become aware of that and to take that responsibility on our own shoulders. So I have been talking to people as individuals ever since being at McGill, at Harvard, at the University of Toronto, and then more broadly, publicly, inviting people to the adventure of their life — the moral adventure of their life — driven by my conviction that it actually matters whether you get your act together. It matters eternally in some sense. It matters in a heaven or hell manner. In a totalitarian state, people are locked into tyranny because every individual lies — every single one. That is the grip of the totalitarian state, and to the degree that you are living in deceit, you are contributing to tyranny and the hell that accompanies it — and not in some little way. Not only are you not saying what you should say when you should say it, but you are also not doing what needs to be done when you need to do it. You are turning a blind eye and allowing it to happen. But you are also not bringing into the world what you could bring into the world if you brought everything you could into the world. That lack on your part of bringing into the world what could be there if you would reveal your light is cataclysmic, and that is a painful realization. It goes along with being a locus of divine worth. I believe that.
I believe that if you fail to say what you know to be true, you corrupt the world. You corrupt being. If you lie, you corrupt being. Corrupted being is hell, and if we all lie enough, then we have hell. Whether we all lie enough to bring about hell is actually dependent in much larger part than you might desire to admit. It is dependent on your choice. One of the reasons we [Tammy and I] love doing what we are doing is because we come to these events with thousands of people, and everybody at the event is trying to aim up — and often doing so, especially in contrast with their previous efforts. That is unbelievably motivating and wonderful to see, but also necessary.
We are very powerful now, all of us, with our incredible technological gadgets, our computational power, and that is going to become way more; we are going to get way more powerful than that really fast so you better get your act together because children cannot wield  that kind of power without all hell breaking loose. So I am very optimistic because things could be even better than what we could imagine. But if we want to, we could sure make them worse. So we all have to decide: Are we aiming up with all we have or are we aiming down? I hope that whatever we are doing tonight is a contribution to the consensus that we should each do what we can in the confines of our own life in the unlimited expanse of the opportunity of our own lives to aim up. If we all do that carefully enough, then up we will go. If we do not, then we can have the alternative. So, on that happy note, we will say goodnight.
To continue, listen or watch more content with Dr. Jordan Peterson on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch">DailyWire+</a>.
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> listen to</a> or<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

2 GREGORYWOODMAN_DW_GREECE2022089 copy

Is There Reason To Be Hopeful About The Future?

Jordan Peterson

Psychology

President Ronald Reagan’s son Michael has revealed that when Joe Biden was a senator during Reagan’s terms as president, he warned him that he would leak any covert action Reagan had planned.
Biden’s opposition to Reagan covered many fronts, from foreign policy to the judicial branch of government.
“After my father was out of office he shared with me that Sen Joe Biden confronted him and told him if he disagreed with my father on a Covert action he had planned he would leak it to the media to stop it,” Michael Reagan noted.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
After my father was out of office he shared with me that Sen Joe Biden confronted him and told him if he disagreed with my father on a Covert action he had planned he would leak it to the media to stop it..
&mdash; Michael Reagan (@ReaganWorld) <a href="https://twitter.com/ReaganWorld/status/1617662781611991042?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 23, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
On June 12, 1987, Reagan made the most famous speech of his presidency, as he referred to the Berlin Wall and insisted to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Three days later, Reagan <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/ronald-reagan-warned-us-against-joe-biden" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote in his diary</a> that Biden was a demagogue, asserting, “[There was] some talk about Sen. Biden — now candidate for Pres. I saw him on CNN last night speaking to the John F. Kennedy school at Harvard U. He’s smooth but pure demagog[ue] — out to save Am[erica] from the Reagan doctrine.”
Biden <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122049148440397625" target="_blank" rel="noopener">harshly opposed</a> Reagan&#8217;s Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars,” which was a plan to develop a space-based missile defense program that could protect the country from a large-scale nuclear attack. “Privately, Reagan was quite adamant that the goal of U.S. defense research should be to eliminate the need for nuclear weapons, which he thought were fundamentally immoral,” the State Department has <a href="https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/rd/104253.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">noted</a>.
In 1993, the general who supervised the department of strategic analysis in the Soviet Ministry of Defense recalled telling the Soviet Politburo in 1983: &#8220;Not only could we not defeat SDI, SDI defeated all our possible countermeasures.&#8221;
Biden slammed SDI’s funding, saying, “The president&#8217;s continued adherence to [SDI] constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”
In 1986, when Reagan Reagan nominated William Rehnquist to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, Biden was the Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member. Reagan <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ronald-reagan-on-joe-biden/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote in his diary</a> of Biden and his fellow leftist senators on the committee, Ted Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum, “The 1st meeting was last evening—highlighted by vitriolic attacks on TV by Sens. Kennedy, Metzenbaum &amp; Biden. They really are a lynch mob.”
By 1987, Biden had become the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Reagan nominated the brilliant conservative jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Biden’s partisan treatment of Bork was so brutal that even The Washington Post <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=GdaEDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT97&amp;lpg=PT97&amp;dq=%22washington+post%22+%22While+claiming+that+Judge+Bork+will+have+a+full+and+fair%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=vzalHXs57a&amp;sig=ACfU3U2xj-7O-6xzDBiUm19Und6T_lsZVA&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwj0upivqf_rAhXPxVkKHV3aDQkQ6AEwAHoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=%22washington%20post%22%20%22While%20claiming%20that%20Judge%20Bork%20will%20have%20a%20full%20and%20fair%22&amp;f=false" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> that his “swinging reflexively to the other side of the question at the first hint of pressure, claiming the leadership of the opposition, doesn’t do a whole lot of the senator’s claim to be fir for higher office.” The Post added that Biden had “already cast himself in the role of the prosecutor instead of a juror &#8230;”

Collage Maker-25-Jan-2023-10.46-AM

Michael Reagan: Biden Told My Dad He Would Leak Covert Info

Politics

Ronald Reagan

U.S.

<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/russia" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Russian</a> President <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/vladimir-putin" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Vladimir Putin</a> will skip the funeral of the late Soviet leader <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/mikhail-gorbachev-last-leader-of-soviet-union-dead-at-91-state-media" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mikhail Gorbachev</a>, a Kremlin spokesperson said Thursday. 
Gorbachev, who oversaw the demise of the Soviet Union, died Tuesday at the age of 91. The funeral will be held on Saturday and open to the public, but the Kremlin has <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-will-not-attend-gorbachev-funeral-due-scheduling-constraints-kremlin-2022-09-01/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> that scheduling issues would prevent Putin from paying his respects in person. 
“Unfortunately, the president’s work schedule will not allow him to do this on Sept. 3, so he decided to do it today,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. 
Putin was seen on Russian-state television Thursday placing flowers beside Gorbachev’s coffin. 
Gorbachev’s funeral will not be a state funeral, unlike the ceremonies of previous Soviet and Russian leaders. The ceremony will be held at Moscow’s Hall of Columns, which also hosted the funerals of former Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Peskov confirmed that the event would have “elements” of a state funeral, including a “guard of honor.”
Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the Soviet economy in the 1980s increased relations with the West. Still, some in Russia today viewed these reforms as weak, contributing to the fall of the Soviet Union. He was seen as a divisive figure within Russia. 
The Moscow Times <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/08/31/gorbachevs-love-hate-relationship-with-putin-a78691" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> that Gorbachev “was an irritating thorn in Putin’s side.” Gorbachev had criticized Putin after he announced he would continue to rule Russia for a third term, but Putin clapped back, knocking Gorbachev for “abdicating” power. 
The Russian president has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/01/putin-will-not-attend-gorbachev-funeral-kremlin-says" target="_blank" rel="noopener">called</a> the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
It’s unclear if any world leaders will attend the funeral. Certain officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other nations are barred from the country but have issued statements in response to the late Soviet leader’s death.
President Biden issued a <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/30/statement-of-president-biden-on-the-passing-of-president-mikhail-gorbachev/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">statement</a> on Tuesday calling Gorbachev a “man of remarkable vision” and describing his reforms as “the acts of a rare leader — one with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it.” 
Gorbachev was the last living leader of the Soviet Union. Konstantin Chernenko, who preceded Gorbachev, died in office in 1985.

Russian President Putin Attends Navy Day Parade

Putin To Skip Gorbachev’s Funeral

Vladimir Putin

The former leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev has died. He was 91. 
His death was reported by Ria Novosti, a Russian state media outlet. The outlet cited the Central Clinical Hospital.
Gorbachev was a transformational world leader of the 20th century who attempted to move his nation out of Soviet-era Communism and into a modern democracy. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in changing the nature of East-West relations and helping bring a peaceful end to the decades-long Cold War. 
Gorbachev was also a controversial character within his own country and throughout the world. Some Russians viewed him as weak and irresponsible for placing his country in an unstable position as the Soviet Union dissolved. Other critics in the West point out that Gorbachev didn’t go far enough to root out Communism and improve the Soviet economy, as his reforms failed to address advancing private property rights or limiting the government’s monopoly on production. 
Yet friends and opponents agree that the Soviet leader was known for his strong diplomacy and amiable personality. He found ways of pushing his country toward free thinking and presenting the USSR as a world power that could successfully negotiate with the West. His role in calming Soviet-American tensions temporarily helped end the decades-long Cold War.
The Young Optimist
Gorbachev was born to parents Sergei and Maria Gorbachev in the village of Privolnoye on March 2, 1931. They named him Viktor, but his grandfather christened him Mikhail after his birth in a secret baptism insisted upon by his mother and grandmother despite Stalin’s brazen opposition to religion in the Soviet Union. 
The Gorbachev family was poor for much of Mikhail’s childhood. Both of his grandfathers survived the Gulag, and he and most of his family survived Joseph Stalin’s Soviet famine in 1932-1933 that killed at least 5 million people and was infamously covered up by Western journalists. Despite his family’s bleak standing in the Soviet social structure, Gorbachev looked back fondly on his childhood. “We were poor, practically beggars,” he recalled. “But in general I felt wonderful.”
Less than 10 years later, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, his father was drafted into the army and given charge of a combat engineering squad, seeing action in many battles. Mikhail and his family received a letter in 1944 stating his father had been killed in action. “The family wept for three days,” Gorbachev said. But the mourning would soon end when they received a letter from his father stating he was alive.
A Leader In The Making 
After the war, Mikhail wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue his studies. But his family was so determined to get him into school that his father was willing to sell everything they had. His grandfather even gave him the coat off his back to ensure Mikhail would stay warm when he left home. “You’ve got to study, Mishka,” his grandfather told him. “That’s what it takes to become a real person. Study well!”
School wasn’t easy for him at first, but he soon excelled. He read anything he could and became passionate about acting. Through his rhetorical skills, desire to learn, and ability to earn respect, it became evident to those around him that he was a natural leader. He would go on to study law at Moscow State University, where he met his wife, Raisa. 
<div id="attachment_431034" style="width: 725px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-431034" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-431034" src="https://www.dailywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Mikhail-and-Raisa-Gorbachev-300x195.jpg" alt="" width="715" height="465" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-and-Raisa-Gorbachev-300x195.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-and-Raisa-Gorbachev-885x576.jpg 885w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-and-Raisa-Gorbachev-768x500.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-and-Raisa-Gorbachev-1536x999.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-and-Raisa-Gorbachev-2048x1332.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 715px) 100vw, 715px" />Mikhal Gorbatchev and his wife in Paris, France on October 26, 1985 &#8211; The Soviet Head of State and his wife Raissa. (Photo by Michel SETBOUN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)</div>
“The Moscow University gave me fundamental knowledge and an intellectual potential that determined my career,” he recollected. “It was here that the long process of reassessing my country’s history, its present and its future began and continued over so many years.”
The Birth Of A Political Giant
The natural leadership of Gorbachev was given a chance to blossom quickly after he graduated from Moscow State. In 1956, he was elected as the First Secretary of the Stavropol City Komsomol Committee. By 1970, he was the First Secretary of the Stavropol Territorial Communist Party Committee, an important role focused on developing agricultural facilities and farms in the region. Gorbachev was only 39 when he took this position, significantly younger than other party leaders in the region. 
It was during this time that he met KGB police chief Yury Andropov, the man who would eventually lead the Soviet Union following the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982. 
Gorbachev and Andropov grew close, or at least as close as two Communist leaders jockeying for positions could. The two would sometimes stay up late talking. “Like me, Andropov didn’t like the long, noisy, drunken dinners,” Gorbachev remembered. 
Gorbachev spent seven years as the Stavropol leader, during which time he implemented a plan for the region’s long-term development. 
His leadership didn’t go unnoticed. On November 27, 1978, Gorbachev was elected Central Committee Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He and his family moved to Moscow a week later. After proving himself a capable leader through his oversight of the entire country’s agriculture, Gorbachev became a member of the Soviet Communist’s supreme governing body, the CPSU CC Politburo. 
This new position and status gave both Gorbachev and his wife Raisa opportunities to travel and socialize with some of the world’s most powerful people. He dined with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the father of Justin Trudeau, and spent time with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at her Chequers country retreat. 
Gorbachev and Thatcher struck up a unique friendship. According to interpreters in the room during one of their meals, Gorbachev and Thatcher “talked throughout the whole lunch. Neither of them ate very much because they were so busy.” Neither leader appeared to be “a particularly good listener, but they certainly loved talking.” Gorbachev and Thatcher reportedly went back and forth arguing for the superiority of their economic and political systems. Thatcher later said their debate “has continued ever since and is taken up whenever we meet. I never tire of it.” After the visit, Thatcher couldn’t sound more positive about a new relationship with the Soviet leader. “I like Mr. Gorbachev,” she famously said. “We can do business together.” 
Little did the world know how important Gorbachev’s “business” with the West would become. 
Progressive Visionary And World Leader
On March 10, 1985, Gorbachev received word that General Secretary Konstantine Chernenko had died, and that the USSR needed a new leader. CPSU higher-ups met immediately to arrange a funeral for Chernenko and to discuss who should take control of the party and, in effect, the country. The meeting yielded no results until the next morning when Gorbachev received calls from other CPSU leaders, pledging their support for him to take over. There was no resistance to his appointment. He later said, “I would have withdrawn my candidacy” had there been any resistance. 
As a leader, Gorbachev quickly got to work on his main priority of business: Glasnost and Perestroika. 
As a result of Communism’s failings, the Soviet economy in the early 1980s was an utter disaster as productivity growth fell below zero, and Gorbachev knew something had to be radically changed. His idea to repair the USSR’s dire situation was focused on “overcoming people’s alienation from government and property, giving power to the people (and taking it away from the bureaucratic upper echelons), implanting democracy, and establishing true social justice,” he wrote in his autobiography. According to Gorbachev, the Soviet system was foundationally failing the Russian people, and to fix that failure, perestroika would aim to “penetrate the system to its very foundations and change it, not merely refine or perfect it.”
Glasnost targeted reforming individual rights within the country while perestroika referred to large-scale economic changes, such as free-market ideas and private property. “[I]t was precisely glasnost that awakened people from their social slumber, helped them overcome indifference and passivity and become aware of the stake they had in change and of its important implications for their lives,” Gorbachev explained. “In short, without glasnost there would have been no perestroika.”
Perestroika appeared to work at first as more freedom allowed people to invest and do business, but the economic collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s crushed Gorbachev’s hopes for a changed economic system. 
An Unlikely Friend
Gorbachev’s progressive vision with glasnost and perestroika would eventually help mend the USSR’s relation with the rest of the world, especially America. Gorbachev became General Secretary months after President Ronald Reagan began his second term in office. At this point, the Cold War had been on a roller coaster ride for thirty-plus years. But now, the United States, led by their own visionary leader, had reason to believe it could end soon. 
Reagan ran and governed on strong diplomacy being backed up by the presence of a strong military. “Peace through strength” was his famous motto. He often criticized the Soviet Union and its Communist system, calling it “the evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the present world.” This foreign policy strategy and rhetoric set up the U.S. for a collision course with the USSR unless both Reagan and Gorbachev could find a way to diplomatic solutions.
Much like Thatcher, Reagan found Gorbachev a friendly person and reasonable diplomat. The two leaders first met on November 19, 1985, in Geneva, Switzerland, to address the Cold War arms race and discuss reducing each country’s nuclear weapons. 
<div id="attachment_430994" style="width: 725px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-430994" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-430994" src="https://www.dailywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Mikhail-GorbachevRonald-Reagan-2-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="715" height="479" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-GorbachevRonald-Reagan-2-300x201.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-GorbachevRonald-Reagan-2-859x576.jpg 859w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-GorbachevRonald-Reagan-2-768x515.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-GorbachevRonald-Reagan-2-1536x1030.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/08/Mikhail-GorbachevRonald-Reagan-2-2048x1373.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 715px) 100vw, 715px" />Mikhaïl Gorbatchev et Ronald Reagan en novembre 1985 au Sommet de Genève en Suisse. (Photo by Francois LOCHON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)</div>
These talks would span the next few years, before Reagan’s history-making speech in Berlin, Germany, on June 12, 1987. What was a moving speech to America and the Western world, didn’t affect Gorbachev the same way. He told people years later that he was “not impressed” with Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech. “We knew that Mr. Reagan’s original profession was an actor,” he said. 
Impressed or not, Gorbachev respected the American president, even as he competed against him on the world stage. Two nations that had been bitter enemies since the end of World War II were now speaking fondly of each other. “I’m sure you must have sensed by now during your stay here in this country that we and people in Soviet society hold you in tremendous esteem,” he told Reagan during a meeting in Moscow in 1990.
The respect was mutual as Reagan often talked about his “bond” with the Russian leader. “I think, frankly, [that] President Gorbachev and I discovered a sort of a bond, a friendship between us, that we thought could become such a bond between all the people,” the president told reporters in that same meeting. 
Following Reagan’s death in 2004, Gorbachev reflected on their unique relationship. &#8220;I take the death of Ronald Reagan very hard,&#8221; Gorbachev reflected. &#8220;He was a man whom fate set by me in perhaps the most difficult years at the end of the 20th century.&#8221;
“In terms of human qualities, he and I had, you would say, communicativeness, and this helped us carry on normally,&#8221; Gorbachev said. &#8220;But when you talk about friendly relations in politics, it&#8217;s not the friendship of schoolmates.&#8221;
A Disappointing Idealist
In 1991, after seven years as CPSU General Secretary, Gorbachev’s political opponents and those still loyal to the original ideas of the Soviet Union became nervous. Gorbachev was inching them closer to Westernized democracy and a free-market, ideas directly opposed to Vladimir Lenin’s Communist revolution and Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship. At the same time, he never fully embraced capitalism. Instead, he offered a different solution to fix the USSR’s stagnant economy and called for socialism “with a human face,” a solution that did not remove all the Communist restrictions on business and property. Ultimately, his desire to “overcom[e] people’s alienation from government and property” never came to fruition, and glasnost and perestroika were left unfinished.
Gorbachev never accomplished an economic turnaround and was unable to fend off his political opponents. On August 18, Soviet loyalists attempted a coup against him. His power and progressive leadership were in jeopardy. Months later, on Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev officially stepped down as the nation’s final general secretary. Soon, the USSR would become the Russian Federation and recognize Boris Yeltsin as president. 
The progressive vision and idealist optimism of Gorbachev was killed by the reality of Russia’s Communism. The ideology had promised hope with Lenin and Stalin but eventually destroyed the nation’s economy and military prowess, leading to the USSR’s collapse in 1991. Even Gorbachev’s progressive leadership was unable to stop it. 
Forever An Advocate
Although it was a quick end to a long-developed political career, Gorbachev would remain active in politics and culture. 
In 1993, he established Green Cross International, an organization dedicated to educating the world on environmental problems, such as those caused by the decades-long Cold War. In 1999, he helped form the Nobel Laureates Summits, an annual gathering of world leaders to discuss solutions to problems such as wars and poverty. He has received dozens of awards, one of which includes the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to Gorbachev in 1990 for his work in bringing a peaceful end to the Cold War.
He remains hopeful of the work he accomplished as the Soviet leader. “History will ultimately make the right judgement,” he said in a 2017 interview. “I firmly believe that my work and my efforts were not in vain. I will continue to further the cause to which I have committed myself until the very end.” 
Mikhail Gorbachev was preceded in death by his wife of 46 years Raisa Gorbachev. He is survived by his daughter Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya along with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev, Last Leader Of Soviet Union, Dead At 91: Russian State Media

Mikhail Gorbachev, Former Leader Of Soviet Union, Dead At 91: Report

Obituaries

The hit Netflix show “Stranger Things” shot part of its fourth season inside a Lithuanian prison infamous for its connection to murders of prisoners by Nazis and the Soviet Secret police as well as the imprisonment of Menachem Begin, later the prime minister of Israel.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Stranger Things filmed their latest season at Lukiškės Prison — a literal Nazi concentration camp — where around 100,000 Jews were tortured and then sent to be murdered.
This in such bad taste. I’m shocked by the inhumanity. <a href="https://t.co/Lzcq9kPlAV">pic.twitter.com/Lzcq9kPlAV</a>
&mdash; Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) <a href="https://twitter.com/HenMazzig/status/1534167593958924289?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 7, 2022</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Prisoners at Lukiškės Prison in Vilnius, hundreds of them Jews in World War II, were taken from the prison and murdered.
In September 1940, the Soviet secret police arrested Begin; he was imprisoned in Lukiškės Prison for eight months.
In June 1941, the NKVD shot prisoners at Lukiškės Prison. Later, once they occupied Vilnius, the Nazis started persecuting Jews; in July 1941, German officials took 60 Jews from the prison and murdered them on Titnago Street near the Ponary forest.
“In 1941, the first people to be murdered in the Ponary massacre were 348 Jews and others who had been imprisoned at Lukiškės,” <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/stranger-things-filmed-in-lithuanian-prison-where-nazis-jailed-jews/">The Times of Israel</a> noted. “Nearly 100,000 people, mostly Jewish, would be murdered at the Ponary site near Vilnius, formerly known as Vilna, in the subsequent months.”
“The Lukiškės prison only ceased to operate as a correctional facility in 2019,” <a href="https://best-of-netflix.com/stranger-things-former-nazi-prison-airbnb/">Best of Netflix</a> reported. “The visitors that the building receives now are not the loved ones of inmates but holidaymakers with a penchant for Nazi history or indeed, Stranger Things. The prison has now been redecorated for the Stranger Things set and also transformed into an Airbnb for dark tourism. The remnant atmosphere of human torture and suffering has been glazed over with 1980s-style decor to bring the Stranger Things aesthetic.”
“If you’re worried that the Airbnb is as austere as the prison the Lukiškės represents in Stranger Things, fear not,” <a href="https://www.timeout.com/news/you-can-stay-in-the-prison-where-they-filmed-the-new-season-of-stranger-things-052622">Timeout</a> gushed. “The cell you’ll be staying in is kitted out with lots of home comforts – including plenty of ST-themed décor like 1980s-style furniture and the first season’s famed coloured fairy lights. Considering it is, y’know, a prison cell, the place is pretty damn swanky.”
“It’s been six months since the Battle of Starcourt, which brought terror and destruction to Hawkins,” a synopsis of Stranger Things&#8217; fourth season stated. “Struggling with the aftermath, our group of friends are separated for the first time – and navigating the complexities of high school hasn’t made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.”
&nbsp;

Daily Life In Krakow

‘Stranger Things’ Shot Part Of Season In Infamous Nazi Prison

Jews

Nazis

Prison

Stranger Things

World War II

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been labeled as an enemy of the world, an evil and ruthless aggressor, and even — as President Joe Biden put it — a war criminal.
However, the assault on Ukraine is far from the first time since Putin rose to power that the Russian regime has been accused of leveraging violence to protect and expand its axis of influence and control.
Alexei Navalny
On August 20, 2020, the leading political opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, suddenly fell seriously and mysteriously ill while on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. After an emergency landing, Navalny was rushed to a hospital and put into a coma. Two days later, he was evacuated to a hospital in Germany. 
There, five certified labs from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed that a nerve agent had been used to poison Navalny.
“The presence of this poison was discovered without any doubt,” Germany’s Angela Merkel <a href="https://youtu.be/C3Ou_JY2yV0">announced</a> at the time. “Therefore, it is now certain that Alexei Navalny is the victim of a crime. The attempt was to silence him, and I condemn this.”
Unfortunately for so many, Navalny is far from the only person to fall victim after standing up in some way or another to the Russian regime. In many ways, Putin&#8217;s leading political opponent is lucky, since he lived to tell his story.
Who is Vladimir Putin?
Born in 1952, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was raised during a period of change in the Soviet Union known as de-Stalinization. As a young adult, he joined the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, and quickly rose through the ranks. He served in various roles, which may have included monitoring foreign government officials in Leningrad, spying in New Zealand, and later working as an undercover agent in East Germany. 
As the Soviet Union collapsed, Putin returned to Russia, and resigned from the KGB on the second day of a coup against then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, with Putin saying that he immediately decided which side he was on. 
It just so happened that Putin chose the side that was going to win…
Putin then pivoted to a career in politics, quickly rising to the position of deputy chief of the Presidential Staff under President Boris Yeltsin in just seven years. This meteoric rise continued, and he was eventually appointed as one of several deputy prime ministers. Yeltsin soon appointed Putin as acting prime minister of the Russian Federation, and stated that he wanted Putin to be his successor. Just a few months later, Yeltsin suddenly and unexpectedly resigned, and Putin became Acting President of the Russian Federation — before <a href="https://youtu.be/59AhatpMwRY">winning</a> the election the following March.
Putin has been in control of Russia ever since, as president from 2000 to 2008, as prime minister from 2008 to 2012, and as president again from 2012 until the present day.
And how has Putin exerted unwavering control over Russia for more than twenty years? Some believe that part of the answer to that question is a decades-long trail of violence that begins and ends in the Kremlin.
Journalists and their allies
In a similar fashion to the Soviet Union, under the Putin regime, dozens of journalists or political dissidents have been found dead. In fact, so many journalists have died in Russia — either in the field or from other causes — that an official day of remembrance — the Remembrance Day of Journalists Killed in the Line of Duty — is observed on December 15 every year.
One of these journalists is a woman called Anna Politkovskaya. She wrote a book called “Putin’s Russia,” in which she criticized the Putin regime, and Putin personally, for turning Russia into a police state. In what was found to be a contract killing for $150,000, she was shot at point-blank range outside her apartment. Five men were convicted of her murder, but it was never revealed who paid for the hit.
Putin spoke at her funeral, where he condemned Politkovskaya’s killing — as well as her reporting.
Another journalist in this growing list is Natalia Estemirova. She sometimes worked alongside Politkovskaya, and was found in the woods near her home. She had been abducted and shot in the head. No one was ever convicted in her death. 
Yet another victim of a contract killing was Paul Klebnikov, who was the chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes. He investigated corruption in Russia — especially among the wealthy elite. He was killed in a drive-by shooting.
Political dissidents and Putin rivals
Boris Nemtsov — another former deputy prime minister of Russia under Yeltsin — was an outspoken critic of Putin, accusing Putin of, among many things, being in the pocket of wealthy Russian oligarchs.
He was <a href="https://youtu.be/TUGYJXx0izo">shot</a> four times in the back in the shadows of the Kremlin. Putin took personal control of the investigation, with one theory being that this was the result of Islamic extremism. The killer — or killers — were never found.
Another politician, Sergey Yushenkov, was assassinated just hours after registering his political party, Liberal Russia, to run for office in the parliamentary elections in late 2003.
Four people were convicted, one of them being a former co-chairman of the Liberal Russia party, who denied his involvement and later attempted suicide in prison.
Meanwhile, other deaths are as violent as they are mysterious.
First, there’s Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch, nicknamed “Rasputin,” who assisted Putin in his rise to power. He fled to the United Kingdom after his relationship with Putin deteriorated. He later threatened to bring down Putin and his regime by force — or at least by a bloodless revolution — and openly accused Putin of having his opponents murdered.
He previously survived multiple assassination attempts, including a bombing that decapitated his chauffeur. He was found <a href="https://youtu.be/WE8DcFDvajg">dead</a> in his home in England in what appeared to be a suicide. 
The coroner who investigated returned an open verdict, following two days of “contradictory” evidence. He said that he couldn’t prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Berezovsky killed himself, or was killed by someone else. 
According to one expert who specializes in hanging and asphyxiation cases, the marks on Berezovsky’s neck could not come from hanging, and they were “far away from the typical inverse ‘V’ shape” we usually see. He believed that Berezovsky was instead strangled, and then hung from the shower rail to mimic suicide.
Next, there’s Yuri Shchekochikhin, yet another journalist who investigated corruption and organized crime in the Soviet Union and Russia. He died suddenly from a mysterious illness just days before he was due to travel to the United States to meet with the FBI. His medical records were apparently either lost or destroyed, but his symptoms appeared to match other cases of radioactive poisoning, similar to Roman Tsepov, an earlier confidant to Putin, who died after he had a cup of tea at a local FSB office. 
Soon after, Tsepov was hospitalized after experiencing vomiting, diarrhea, and a drop in white blood cell count. He died 13 days later in Saint Petersburg.
And then there’s perhaps the most famous case of suspected radioactive poisoning of all: the 2006 case involving Alexander Litvinenko.
Alexander Litvinenko
It was also a cup of tea that caused the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent. 
Three weeks after drinking tea laced with the deadly radioactive compound, polonium-210, at a London hotel, Litvinenko died. An <a href="https://youtu.be/bSl7pdsTa-E">investigation</a> by British authorities found that Litvinenko was poisoned by several FSB agents, with orders likely coming straight from the Kremlin.
The European Court of Human Rights found the Kremlin responsible for Litvinenko’s death, while two of the accused FSB agents suggested that Litvinenko might have poisoned himself. 
And on his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Putin of ordering his assassination.
The Chechnya link?
While each one of these deaths, and many others, are disturbing enough, things get even more shocking when we scratch beneath the surface and discover that there are a few common threads that tie them all together, often involving the now-Russian republic of Chechnya.
When Litvinenko left the Federal Security Service, for example, he went on to become a vocal critic of the agency. He later blamed the service for carrying out a series of bombings in 1999 that killed hundreds of civilians in Russia, writing a book titled, “Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within.” 
Meanwhile, Russian authorities blamed these attacks on Chechen warlords, and the bombings increased public support for the invasion of Chechnya that followed, all of which contributed to the rise of Putin, who took a hard-line against Chechnya and vowed not to negotiate with terrorists.
The Liberal Russia leader, Yushenkov, believed that Russia orchestrated these attacks, and claimed to be gathering evidence of such a conspiracy when he was killed.
Berezovsky, the man who died in a supposed suicide, was allied with former Chechen warlord, Ahmed Zakayev, as well as Litvinenko, whom Berezovsky helped with the spread of these claims.
Litvinenko also accused the Kremlin of ordering the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. He’d worked with the doomed journalist on what they saw as another conspiracy — that the FSB were allegedly involved in the Moscow theater hostage crisis, when 50 Chechen terrorists stormed a theater and took 800 people captive. After a 57-hour standoff, Russian special forces raided the theater, during which most of the terrorists and 120 hostages were killed.
Politkovskaya — who investigated this story — also had links to others who have been killed. She was colleagues with Shchekochikhin, who died following a sudden and mysterious illness. Estemirova, who was abducted and shot in the head, also worked with Politkovskaya, and investigated human-rights abuses by Russian forces in Chechnya.
Then there’s Klevinov, who was murdered in a drive-by shooting. According to a Moscow Prosecutor-General, the killing of Politkovskaya may have been linked to the death of Klevinov, with a group led by an ethnic Chechen organized crime boss blamed for the murders.
Has Putin responded?
For his part, Putin has either denied any involvement in these deaths or argued that the same happens elsewhere. For example, during one press conference in 2021, Putin responded to these accusations by referring to the U.S. response to January 6.
“Alright, about my opponents being jailed or imprisoned,” Putin said when <a href="https://youtu.be/pEBYU1aGXMA%5C">pressed</a> by an American journalist. “People went into US Congress with political demands. 400 people are now facing criminal charges. They are facing prison terms of up to 20, maybe 25 years. They are called home-grown terrorists.”
He even went on to reference the shooting of Ashli Babbitt.
“One of the participants, a woman, was shot dead on the spot. She was not threatening with arms or anything,” Putin added. “Why am I bringing this up? Many people are facing the same thing as we do, and I am stressing this — we are sympathizing with the United States, but we do not want the same thing repeating here.”
While experts are hesitant to blame Putin directly for these — and other — deaths, some argue that Putin has instead “created the climate” which allows these murders to happen.
More dead oligarchs as Russia invades Ukraine
With Russia invading Ukraine, the trail of violence involving Russian dissidents, critics, or other prominent figures has <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/every-russian-oligarch-who-has-died-since-putin-invaded-ukraine-full-list-1700022">continued</a>.
Sergey Protosenya, a former high-level manager of Russia’s Novatek energy corporation, was found hanged in Spain earlier in April, while his wife and daughter were found stabbed to death. This came one day after the body of Vladislav Avaev, former vice president of the Russian bank Gazprombank was found, also with the bodies of his wife and daughter.
Vasily Melnikov, a Russian billionaire, was found dead alongside his wife and two sons in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. They had all been stabbed to death in late March.
Mikhail Watford, a Ukrainian-born Russian oligarch, was found dead in his United Kingdom home in February, hanged in his garage. That same month, Alexander Tyulyakov, Deputy General Director of the Unified Settlement Center (UCC) for Corporate Security for Gazprom, was also found hanged in a garage near Saint Petersburg.
***
In reality, we’ll likely never know who was behind these deaths and so many more. One thing is for sure, though: speaking out against the Russian regime is a dangerous business.
To find out more, listen to a <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-in-moscow/id1576594336?i=1000558500613">special episode</a> of Morning Wire, &#8220;Murder in Moscow.&#8221; Ian Haworth is a writer for The Daily Wire and contributor to Morning Wire. Follow him on <a href="https://twitter.com/ighaworth">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ighaworth">Facebook</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/IanGHaworth">YouTube</a>.

Moscow Murders: The Danger Of Standing Up To The Russian Regime

Chechnya

Ukraine

Ukraine-Russia War

On Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questioned Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Russia&#8217;s potential rationale for invading Ukraine.
 During the exchange, Blinken “firmly disagree[d]” with the “proposition” that Russia&#8217;s invasions of other countries were justified if they were part of the former Soviet Union, with Paul asking whether the U.S. &#8220;agitating&#8221; for Ukraine to join NATO in 2021 played a role.
Paul was quickly criticized by those who interpreted his argument as a justification for the invasion of Ukraine.
His communications director, Kelsey Cooper, further explained Paul&#8217;s position to The Daily Wire, saying, “[w]hile there is no justification for Putin’s war on Ukraine, there is an explanation for the invasion, which was the point Dr. Paul was making.”
“Any other interpretation of the exchange is a blatant attempt to misinform,” Cooper claimed. “As Dr. Paul has expressed publicly many times before, he has a great deal of sympathy for Ukraine, and <a href="https://rumble.com/v12ic2f-dr.-rand-paul-grills-secretary-of-state-anthony-blinken-april-26-2022.html">clearly stated</a> his support for them in his exchange today, saying: ‘I’m proud of how well the Ukrainians have fought, I’m supportive of their cause.’”
In a short clip taken from the exchange that was widely circulated on social media, Paul stated, “you could also argue that the countries [Russia has] attacked were part of Russia,” before correcting himself to say “part of the Soviet Union.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): “The countries that have been attacked, Georgia and Ukraine, were part of the Soviet Union &#8230; since the 1920s.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “That does not give Russia the right to attack them.” <a href="https://t.co/jnlRP6wAsN">pic.twitter.com/jnlRP6wAsN</a>
&mdash; The Recount (@therecount) <a href="https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1518979804011372546?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 26, 2022</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
“I firmly disagree with that proposition,” Secretary Blinken replied. “It is the fundamental right of these countries to decide their own future and their own destiny.”
“But I’m saying that the countries that have been attacked, Georgia and Ukraine, were part of the Soviet Union … since the 1920s,” Paul responded, to which Secretary Blinken said, “but that does not give Russia the right to attack them.”
“No one’s saying it does,” Paul interjected.
While the complete exchange lasted almost seven minutes, the 39-second clip was quickly condemned by critics online. Charles Booker, a Democrat running against Paul, <a href="https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1519068905519697924">accused</a> the incumbent senator of being a “puppet, essentially, for Vladimir Putin,” and “trying to protect an invasion that has destroyed maternity wards.”
Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) <a href="https://twitter.com/tedlieu/status/1519036336245776387">implied</a> that Paul was arguing that Russia has a right to former members of the Soviet Union. 
On social media, a 2017 clip of the late Senator John McCain was also shared, during which he <a href="https://twitter.com/votevets/status/1519008389208100864">accused</a> Paul, his then-colleague, of “working for Vladimir Putin,&#8221; following Paul&#8217;s objection to a resolution that would permit Montenegro to join Nato.
McCain <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/16/politics/john-mccain-rand-paul-rule-19-vladimir-putin/index.html">said</a> that the &#8220;gentleman from Kentucky&#8221; and others who may object would be &#8220;carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin.&#8221;
Ian Haworth is a writer for The Daily Wire and contributor to Morning Wire. Follow him on <a href="https://twitter.com/ighaworth">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ighaworth">Facebook</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/IanGHaworth">YouTube</a>.

Rand Paul

‘Blatant Attempt To Misinform’: Rand Paul Fires Back At Critics After Tense Exchange With Antony Blinken

Antony Blinken

In the latest address to world leaders, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the German parliament to tear down the new &#8220;wall&#8221; being built by Russia in Europe, dividing Western and Eastern Europeans over the subject of freedom.
&#8220;Dear [German chancellor Olaf Scholz], tear down this wall,&#8221; Zelensky <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/zelensky-ronald-reagan-scathing-speech-germany-1688930">pleaded</a>, echoing Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 speech when the American president called on the then-President of the Soviet Union, ​​Mikhail Gorbachev, to bring down the Berlin wall.
&#8220;It&#8217;s not a Berlin Wall — it is a wall in central Europe between freedom and bondage and this Wall is growing bigger with every bomb,&#8221; Zelensky said, also calling on Scholz to “​​give Germany the leadership role that you in Germany deserve.”
Zelensky then argued that Germany was more concerned about its own economy than the security of Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion.
“We turned to you,” Zelensky <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10622875/Zelensky-urges-Germany-tear-new-Wall-Europe-that.html">said</a>. “We told you that Nord Stream was a kind of preparation for the war.”
“And the answer we got was purely economic — it is economy, economy, economy but that was the mortar for the new wall,” he said.
Zelensky also discussed the slogan “never again,” in reference to the Holocaust.
&#8220;I address all of you who heard politicians say every year &#8216;never again,&#8217; but I can see these words are worth nothing. Now, our whole nation is being exterminated in Europe, why?&#8221; Zelensky said. &#8220;I address the older people among you who have survived the Second World War, who were rescued during the occupation, who survived Babyn Yar, where President Steinmeier visited last year for the 80th anniversary of the tragedy, and where Russian missiles struck.”
&#8220;It was there that families were killed. Again, 80 years later,&#8221; Zelensky continued. &#8220;You are also behind the wall, a wall that separates you from Ukrainians that are dying in Ukraine with every bomb that is landing on our land.&#8221;
Zelensky’s speech to Germany was notably more critical than his address to the British and American governments. However, Zelensky did invoke the memory of Pearl Harbor and September 11 in his speech to the United States Congress, as part of his call for a no-fly zone.
&#8220;Friends, Americans, in your great history, you have pages that would allow you to understand Ukrainians, understand us now, when we need you right now,&#8221; Zelensky said in his speech to Congress, according to a <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/zelensky-speech-congress-read-address-transcript-b2037126.html">translation</a>. &#8220;Remember Pearl Harbor, terrible morning of December 7, 1941, when your sky was black from the planes attacking you,&#8221; Zelensky said. &#8220;Just remember it, remember, September the 11th, a terrible day in 2001 when evil tried to turn US cities into battlefields, when innocent people were attacked from air, just like nobody else expected it and you could not stop it. Our country experiences the same, every day, right now.”
“Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people,” Zelensky continued. “Russian troops have already fired nearly 1,000 missiles at Ukraine, countless bombs they use drones to kill us with precision. This is a terror that Europe has not seen, has not seen for 80 years and we are asking for a reply for an answer to this terror from the whole world is there’s a lot to ask for to create a no fly zone zone over Ukraine to save people.”
“Is this too much to ask humanitarian no fly zone, something that Ukraine it that Russia would not be able to terrorize our Free Cities,” Zelensky asked. “Is this too much to ask? We offer an alternative: you know what kind of defense systems we need. 300 and other similar systems, you know how much depends on the battlefield on their ability to use aircraft. Powerful, strong air aviation to protect our people with freedom or learn aircraft that can help Ukraine help Europe and you know that they exist and you have them but they are on earth not in Ukraine in the Ukrainian sky.”
“They don’t defend our people. I have a dream,” Zelensky added. “These words are known to each of you today. I can say I have a need. I need to protect our sky. I need your decision. Your help. Which means exactly the same. The same you feel when you hear the words. I have a dream.”
Ian Haworth is a writer for The Daily Wire and contributor to Morning Wire. Follow him on <a href="https://twitter.com/ighaworth">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ighaworth">Facebook</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/IanGHaworth">YouTube</a>.

Zelensky

Zelensky Slams Germany For Allowing New ‘Wall,’ Says ‘Never Again’ Now ‘Worth Nothing’

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