"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
“I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself
that I'd done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.”
- Raoul Wallenberg, Letter and Dispatches 1924 - 1944
"From
mid-May to the beginning of July 1944, some 440,000 Hungarian Jews were
deported to Auschwitz – the fastest, cruelest, and most efficient
killing field in the Holocaust. Wallenberg arrived as a member of the
Swedish Legation in Budapest in mid-July 1944. In a remarkable
demonstration of ingenuity and inspiration, bluff and bravado, he
rescued some 100,000 Jews in the last six months of 1944 and the
beginning of 1945, more than any other single government or
organization."
Nonviolent resistance to the radical evil of the Nazis by courageous Danes and German housewives also worked and saved thousands of Jewish people from the Holocaust.
It should come as no surprise that Wallenberg was abducted by Soviet Communist forces. The Nazis and the Soviets had been partners in the partition and conquest of Poland six years prior, in September 1939.
Let us honor Raoul Wallenberg for all the lives he saved, and let us also continue to demand justice for this good man, who had his life taken by Josef Stalin.
“I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself
that I'd done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.”
- Raoul Wallenberg, Letter and Dispatches 1924 - 1944
"From
mid-May to the beginning of July 1944, some 440,000 Hungarian Jews were
deported to Auschwitz – the fastest, cruelest, and most efficient
killing field in the Holocaust. Wallenberg arrived as a member of the
Swedish Legation in Budapest in mid-July 1944. In a remarkable
demonstration of ingenuity and inspiration, bluff and bravado, he
rescued some 100,000 Jews in the last six months of 1944 and the
beginning of 1945, more than any other single government or
organization."
Nonviolent resistance to the radical evil of the Nazis by courageous Danes and German housewives also worked and saved thousands of Jewish people from the Holocaust.
It should come as no surprise that Wallenberg was abducted by Soviet Communist forces. The Nazis and the Soviets had been partners in the partition and conquest of Poland six years prior, in September 1939.
Today, on #RaoulWallenberg Commemorative Day, we honour the enduring legacy of Swedish diplomat and hero of the Holocaust Raoul Wallenberg, a hero who refused to be a bystander. We also mark 80 years since his disappearance into the Soviet Gulag- a profound and ongoing injustice.… pic.twitter.com/54p7TdQRFb
— Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (@TheRWCHR) January 17, 2025
Let us honor Raoul Wallenberg for all the lives he saved, and let us also continue to demand justice for him, who had his life taken by Josef Stalin. The Russians refuse to reveal what they did to Wallenberg, and his family has filed a lawsuit against them. In 2016, Sweden declared him dead.
Today marks the 80th anniversary of the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg.
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg displayed outstanding civil courage and bravery when he saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.
“I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself
that I'd done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.”
- Raoul Wallenberg, Letter and Dispatches 1924 - 1944
Raoul Wallenberg (August 4, 1912 - disappeared January 17, 1945)
Today is Raoul Wallenberg Day in Canada in honor of his couragous example. Irwin Cotler, a Canadian member of parliament, in an OpEd last year in Haaretz, described the last and most dramatic rescue carried out by Wallenberg:
"As the
Nazis advanced on Budapest and threatened to blow up the city’s ghetto
and liquidate the remaining Jews, [Wallenberg] put the Nazi generals on notice
that they would be held accountable and brought to justice, if not
executed, for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Nazi
generals desisted. Some 70,000 more Jews were saved, thanks to the
indomitable courage of one person prepared to confront radical evil."
Nonviolent resistance to the radical evil of the Nazis by courageous Danes and German housewives also worked and saved thousands of Jewish people from the Holocaust.
— Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (@TheRWCHR) January 16, 2023
Let us honor Raoul Wallenberg for all the lives he saved, and let us also continue to demand justice for him, who had his life taken by Josef Stalin. The Russians refuse to reveal what they did to Wallenberg, and his family has filed a lawsuit against them. In 2016, Sweden declared him dead.
Each year, on 17 January, we honour the memory of Raoul Wallenberg. The Swedish diplomat saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.
Join us in lighting a candle today for Raoul, his humanitarian deeds and human solidarity! pic.twitter.com/sTyxeGHUu0
— Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (@SweMFA) January 17, 2023
Engaging in the conversation over the human rights situation in Cuba leads to ad hominem attacks against ones character, in order to avoid a substantive conversation of the facts presented and the arguments put forward.
Yesterday, The Washington Post published a letter to the editor on the important topic of the regime in Cuba covering up past epidemics and punishing whistleblowers with prison, and tweeted it out upsetting some folks. The letter is reproduced below.
Opinion: Cuba’s powerhouse status comes through repression
April 5, 2021 at 4:35 p.m. EDT
Patient receives Sputnik V vaccine dose against Covid-19 in
Almaty, Kazakhstan. (Pavel Mikheyev/Reuters)
The March 31 news article “Cuba could become a vaccine powerhouse” pointed out that Havana wants to soften its image as a “broadly authoritarian country” that has done “some pretty bad things.” Cuban doctors and journalists who raised the alarm in prior outbreaks on the island were locked up and punished.
Repression patterns during this pandemic in Cuba indicate officials seek to downplay covid-19’s severity on the island. According to Duane Gubler at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, “Cuba has a history of not reporting epidemics until they become obvious,” and that is pretty bad.
John Suarez, Falls Church
The writer is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.
— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) April 6, 2021
This led to attacks against the author, including for being formerly of Freedom House, raising questions about the organization because it has received public funds. It is a ridiculous argument, because the organization has also been critical of the U.S. government and human rights deficits in the United States.
Anti-Nazi, Anti-Communist, Pro-Freedom org founded 1941
On May 30, 2006, The New York Times announced the death of one of the founders of Freedom House, George Field, and in the obituary revealed the pedigree of this human rights and pro-democracy organization.
"George Field, who fought isolationism,
Fascism, Communism, racism, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism and other
extremisms for three decades as the guiding spirit behind Freedom House,
a nonpartisan organization dedicated to democracy and human rights,
died Friday in Kennett Square, Pa. He was 101."
It is ironic that Castro regime apologists question the bonafides of Freedom House, but not surprising because they have done the same to Amnesty International in the past. Meanwhile conservatives are upset with Freedom House because it has also viewed with a critical eye Western Democracies, including the United States.
Civil rights icon Bayard Rustin was called by some "the unknown hero" of the civil rights movement. He was a "tireless crusader for
justice, a disciple of [Mohandas] Gandhi, a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., and
the architect of the legendary [1963] March on Washington." Rustin debated Malcolm X in 1962 from both a principled and strategic nonviolent position and would go on to play an important role at Freedom House.
It is doubly ironic because of Soviet Communism's and Castroism's alliances with Nazism and embrace of antisemitism and other extremisms to create new levels of misery for those unlikely enough to fall under their rule.
Sorry, but the fight against tyranny, racism, and other bigotries over the past 80 years beginning in 1941, the same year that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union began still allied together to conquer the rest of the world imposing the perpetual darkness of totalitarianism, and Freedom House came into existence to resist both of them, and their ideologies on October 31, 1941.
Being linked to Freedom House is high praise, now defending the Castro regime on the other hand is shameful.
“I will never be able to go back to Sweden without knowing inside myself
that I'd done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.”
- Raoul Wallenberg, Letter and Dispatches 1924 - 1944
Raoul Wallenberg (August 4, 1912 - disappeared January 17, 1945)
Today is Raoul Wallenberg Day in Canada in honor of his couragous example. Irwin Cotler, a Canadian member of parliament, in an OpEd today in Haaretz, described the last and most dramatic rescue carried out by Wallenberg:
"As the
Nazis advanced on Budapest and threatened to blow up the city’s ghetto
and liquidate the remaining Jews, [Wallenberg] put the Nazi generals on notice
that they would be held accountable and brought to justice, if not
executed, for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Nazi
generals desisted. Some 70,000 more Jews were saved, thanks to the
indomitable courage of one person prepared to confront radical evil."
Nonviolent resistance to the radical evil of the Nazis by courageous Danes and German housewives also worked and saved thousands of Jewish people from the Holocaust.
Let us honor Raoul Wallenberg for all the lives he saved, and let us also continue to demand justice for him, who had his life taken by Josef Stalin. The Russians refuse to reveal what they did to him, and Wallenberg's family has sued the Russians. Sweden declared him dead in 2016.
When the Jews of Budapest were set to be deported in 1944, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg led an operation to save them. He paid a heavy price for his bravery: Wallenberg was detained, 75 years ago today, and was not seen from again. #WeRemember@UNESCO@AuschwitzMuseumpic.twitter.com/iS6VxCeKJ8
We are still in the midst of Hanukkah, and in Cuba today, Jewish children are being assaulted for displaying their Jewishness, and ordered by regime authorities to conceal their identity or be punished.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) on December 23, 2019 reported that Liusdan Martínez Lescaille, a twelve year-old Jewish boy has been forbidden by Cuban educational authorities from entering his school while wearing a kippah ( also known as a yarmulke) since December 11, 2019 with the result that he has been prevented from continuing his education. His younger brother, Daniel Moises, has also been subjected to the ban and government authorities threatened to open legal proceedings against his parents, jailing them and taking their children away for "threatening the children’s normal development."
Cuban Jewish family targeted by the Castro regime for being Jewish.
CSW documented that Liusdan was regularly beaten up at school since the family moved to the Nuevitas municipality in 2016, and that the situation worsened in September 2019.
"According to his parents, Olainis Tejada Beltrán and Yeliney Lescaille Prebal, members of the Sephardic Bnei Anusim community, their son was singled out for ridicule soon after he started classes in September 2019 at the Latin America Urban Basic Secondary School in Nuevitas. Since then he has been subjected to four severe beatings instigated by a classmate who is the son of a military captain, along with other students. Despite multiple complaints by the parents to Martínez Lescaille’s teacher, who is head of the grade and the school director, no action was taken to protect the child.
After Tejada Beltrán publicly denounced the treatment of his son in the independent media, the Cuban educational authorities created a commission to review his son’s situation. However, during this period, he was pressured by school administrators on multiple occasions to retract his complaints. At one point there was an attempt by the school director to expel his son for supposed acts of violence, however, five teachers stepped in to defend Martínez Lescaille and the expulsion did not take place. On 11 December the commission announced its findings, holding a school guard responsible for failing to stop the attacks on Martínez Lescaille. However, rather than sanctioning the guard, a kippah ban was put in place instead. Tejada Beltrán has called for the ban to be revoked, pointing out that it effectively prohibits his son from entering the school grounds and that there are no other educational alternatives.
The Castro regime has a long history of anti-semitism. Seth J. Frantzman, a Jewish academic based in Jerusalem, following the death of Fidel Castro in November 2016 wrote an analysis of the tyrant's antisemitism.
"Most Jews fled Cuba when Castro came to power, dwindling from 15,000 to around 1,500 by 2014. One Castro entered the Soviet orbit the official anti-Zionist and anti-Israel line became common in Cuba, but most writers argue it did not flow over into anti-semitism. Only one anti-semitic incident, stone throwing at a synagogue during the 1973 war, was recorded in decades."
Religious repression was widespread in Cuba, beginning in the 1960s, and that also included Judaism. The 1973 attack on the synagogue coincided with Fidel Castro breaking diplomatic relations with Israel on September 10, 1973.
Seth J. Frantzman
The lack of reported anti-semitic incidents had more to do with the end of independent civil society, shuttering of the free press, and the outlawing of human rights groups under Castro. Frantzman exposes the duplicity of Fidel Castro, highlighting how he prevented the importation of kosher meat.
The reality is revealed in an interesting report was revealed regarding an episode in 1994 in which Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau attempted to get Castro to allow kosher meat into Cuba. An Israeli diplomat named Joel Barromi told Haaaretz writer Adi Schwartz in a 2006 interview surprising details. The Cuban leader had initially rejected Lau’s request to bring in kosher meat. “I told you that I am fighting against the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in my country…do you want to make my people anti-Semitic,” Castro asked. “We have the practice of allocating 150 grams of bread a day, but the Jews in Cuba would have meat? [The people] will have a horrible hatred for them, envy them tremendously and loot their homes if under such conditions you see to import kosher meat for the Jews, you yourself create the anti-Semitism that I have been stopping.”
This is the example of supposedly stopping anti-semitism, to threaten Jews that if they should want to eat kosher meat that they would “create” anti-semitism. Castro was at first admitting that he had starved his country by putting it on bread rations, but surely Cubans eat some meat. So why would some meat for Jewish people “make” them anti-Semitic? One wonders whether “envy” for Muslims eating Halal would create the same excuse for Islamophobia just because Muslims celebrate Eid by eating a sheep? According to articles the same Cuba that feared meat would force people to be anti-semitic, was welcoming to Halal food.
Digging deeper one finds disturbing patterns in the actions carried out by the Castro regime over the past six decades.
Otto-Ernst Remer was a German Wehrmacht officer who played a major role in stopping the July 20 plot in 1944 against Adolf Hitler, and established a Neo-Nazi political party in post-war Germany, before fleeing to the Middle East where he served as an advisor to Arab nationalists. In the early 1960s Otto-Ernst Remer had contacts with and assisted Fidel Castro in Cuba with the purchase of weapons. Ernst-Remer along with Ernst Wilhelm Springer sold the Cuban dictator 4,000 pistols. Castro also contracted former Nazi SS officers to train Cuban troops. German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) reported: "Evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served its objectives." Until the end of his life Remer remained an unrepentant Nazi who engaged in holocaust denial.
The Castro regime aided, trained, and armed terrorist groups that targeted Israel for destruction. Cuban troops were sent by Castro to the Middle East to fight against Israel, with the Yom Kippur war being a high profile example. Focus on Cuba, an information service of the Cuba Transition Project of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami in their Issue 57 published staff report on July 29, 2004 titled "Castro and Terrorism: A Chronology" that summarized this hostility to Israel.
Cuban military and intelligence personnel aided Middle Eastern groups and regimes in their struggle against Israel, and Cuban troops fought on the side of Arab States, particularly Syria, during the Yom Kippur war. Castro sent military instructors and advisors into Palestinian bases; cooperated with Libya in the founding of World Mathaba, a terrorist movement; and established close military cooperation and exchanges with Iraq, Libya, Southern Yemen, the Polisario Front for the Liberation of Western Sahara, the PLO and others in the Middle East.
"France expelled three high‐ranking Cuban diplomats today in connection with the worldwide search for a man called Carlos, who is believed to be an important link in an international terrorist network." [...] "The French Interior Ministry said that
investigators were convinced that the terrorist network had been helped
significantly by the intelligence services of “certain nations.” The
Cubans, according to the ministry, had been “constant visitors” to the
Paris hideout of Carlos. André
Mousset, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, added that the Carlos
affair was looking more and more like an “international terrorist plot.” [...] French authorities have also said that
Carlos may have been directly involved with a siege at the French
Embassy in The Hague last September and a grenade attack the same month
on Le Drugstore on the Left Bank here, in which three persons were
killed and 22 wounded. The Cuban
diplomats on whom expulsion orders were served today were Raul Rodriguez
Sainz, 32 years old, first secretary for cultural affairs; Pedro Lara
Zamora, 33, deputy cultural attache, and Ernesto Reyes Herrera, 32, the
chief of protocol.
In January 1966 the Castro regime hosted the first Tricontinental Conference in Havana. This was the first major forum where both Cuba and the PLO participate. Author Claire Sterling wrote in 1981 that "the roots of the terrorist network can be traced directly to the Tricontinental Congress held in Havana in January 1966."
Castro regime met and planned with PLO in 1966
Less than a year later, in 1967, according to David J. Kopilow,
more than a dozen training camps for guerrillas are established in
Cuba, under the direction of KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine. Palestinians
were among the terrorist groups trained.
Carlos the Jackal received training in Cuba, and obtained assistance from Cuban diplomats in Europe. He had detailed knowledge of the operation to assassinate an Israeli diplomat in Chevy Chase, Maryland and contacts with the terrorists who carried out the political killing in July 1973. Carlos was also credited with being the man behind the seizure of 70 hostages at the OPEC oil ministers' meeting in Vienna in 1975 and the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.
In the 1970s the Cubans started arriving in the Middle East in large numbers to train guerrillas, but they would go beyond terrorism into full military action against the Jewish people.
In the August 1988 issue of The Atlantic in the article "Cuba: Havana's Military Machine" by John Hoyt Williams provided more detail on Cuban involvement in the Yom Kippur War against Israel.
In 1973, probably at Moscow's behest, Castro dispatched 500 Cuban tank commanders to Syria. These men performed well and died well in the Yom Kippur War with Israel. Not long after their debut in Syria, Cuban military personnel were training, arming, and advising Polisario guerrillas who were fighting for the independence of the Western Sahara.
The Castro regime closely followed the example of their Arab counterparts in referring to Israel in terms previously reserved for Nazis. For example, Bruno Rodriguez, now Cuba's Foreign Minister, but in 1978, when he was a leader of Cuba's Union of Young Communists, he told a gathering at the University of Havana "that the attitude of the Zionist authorities was similar to Hitler's hordes who massacred millions of European Jews during World War II." The occasion of Rodriguez's speech was the 30th anniversary of Israel's founding, an event referred to by him as the"usurpation of Palestinian territory by Zionism to convert it into the state of Israel."
Israeli athletes were tortured and murdered by terrorists linked to the Castro regime in 1972
Myles Kantor's November 12, 2003 article in National Review, "Who’s Afraid of 'Uncle Fidel'?" exposed the underreporting of anti-semitism by the Anti-Defamation League with regards to Cuba and detailed some of the Castro regime's anti-Israel and anti-Jewish history.
“I am assaulted by the anti-Israel propaganda,” Cuban Jew Ricardo Behar remarks. “It is a constant nightmare over our minds.” Cuban Jew Tony Fune refers to the regime’s “persistent Judeophobia” that manifests itself in the media’s “endless hours of hatred against Israel.”Foxman writes of the U.N.’s 1975 resolution that equated Zionism with racism:Thankfully, the “Zionism is racism” resolution was revoked in 1991 by a U.N. vote of 87 to 25–although this vote of course indicates that, as of 1991, at least twenty-five states were still willing to openly maintain the position that Zionism is a form of racism, thereby seeking to delegitimize Israel and threaten the Jewish right of self-determination.Cuba cosponsored the resolution and was one of the 25 countries that opposed its revocation.
Scholar Irving Louis Horowitz in his 2007 paper, “Cuba, Castro and Anti-Semitism” observed that “the remnants of the Jewish community in Havana, not-withstanding, Cuba is one more nation where anti-Semitism without Jews is a core belief.”
This is underscored by the actions of the dictatorship in Cuba over the past six decades.
Castro regime officials in 2019 barred Jewish children from wearing the kippah to school, decades earlier barred the importation of kosher meat into Cuba, while importing Halal food, broke relations with Israel in 1973, trained terrorists who murdered Israelis, sent Cuban troops to Syria to fight against Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and backed the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. This accumulation of facts should lead reasonable people to conclude that the Castro regime is antisemitic.
Poster for the PLO in 1972 denies existence of Israel
This blog is based on a December 27, 2091 CubaBrief by the Center for a Free Cuba.
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera
Tens of thousands of Estonians fled the approaching Red Army in 1944.
Yesterday afternoon, on the 80th anniversary of the joint Communist-Nazi parade in Brest, also coincided with the observance of the 75th Anniversary of the Great Refugee Flight of 1944 at the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, DC.
On this day - 1939 - #German and #Soviet troops paraded together in the Polish city of Brest, helpfully reminding the world of their odious collaboration in invading #Poland Here, Wehrmacht General Heinz Guderian and Brigadier-General Semyon Krivoshein watch the parade. #WW2pic.twitter.com/S3vtVEX2f9
Estonians gathered to tell their stories of seeking refuge as the Soviet Red Army returned to impose their tyrannical rule until real liberation was achieved finally in 1991.
Thank you, Washington Estonian Society for organizing a commemoration observing the 75th Anniversary of the Great Refugee Flight of 1944 at the @VoCommunism today. Incredibly moving stories by the refugees and their descendants. Read more: https://t.co/s2LncMBO0cpic.twitter.com/0zpLXvd2uC
In 1944 80,000 people fled from Estonia in fear of the advancing Red Army, the terror of the first Soviet occupation was still fresh. Many who left then never saw their homeland again.
"The ruling circles of Poland boasted quite a lot about the ‘stability’
of their state and the ‘might’ of their army. However, one swift blow to
Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing
was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty which had
existed by oppressing non-Polish nationalities." - Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet Foreign Minister in October 31, 1939 speech
On September 17, 2019 the Soviet Union invaded Poland.
80 years ago today in the early morning hours of September 17, 1939 the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East. According to the History Channel, "the 'reason' given was that Russia had to come to the aid of its “blood
brothers,” the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, who were trapped in
territory that had been illegally annexed by Poland."
On September 17, 1939 with "between 600–650,000 soldiers and over 5,000 thousand Red Army tanks [of the Soviet Union]
invaded the Second Polish Republic, which had been fighting against
German aggression since 1 September."
This invasion was in accordance with the secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided up Central Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Nazi and Soviet troops met in the middle of Poland and exchanged pleasantries on September 22, 1939 and held a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk. Soviet troops paid their respects as the Swastika flag was lowered, and Germans moved west to their agreed upon line of partition.
About 230,000 [Polish] soldiers and officers and thousands of military
service representatives were taken captive by the Bolsheviks."
The Soviet precursor to the KGB intelligence service was the NKVD. "From October 1939, the delegated NKVD officials from Moscow heard the
prisoners, encouraged them to cooperate and collected data. Only a few
of the prisoners agreed to collaborate. The commanding officers’ reports
included opinions about hostile attitudes of the Poles and a minimal
chance of them being useful to the USSR authorities."
Nazi and Soviet soldiers salute raising of the Nazi flag on September 22, 1939 in Poland
The decision to shoot the prisoners was signed on March 5, 1940 by seven members of the All- Union
Communist Party (Bolsheviks) authorities: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy
Beria (proposer), Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas
Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.
The lists of those sent to death were to be prepared and signed by
Piotr Soprunienko, commander-in-chief of the Prisoners of War Board of
People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which was created by the
order of Beria in September 1939
In the Spring of 1940 the Soviet secret police began to shoot the
prisoners in the back of the head or in the neck and burying them in
mass graves. This war crime became known as the Katyn massacre.
The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact not only partitioned Poland but also divided up Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania into Nazi and Soviet "spheres of influence." The Soviet Union was an ally of the Third Reich during the first 18 months of World War Two.
17 September 1939 | The Soviet Union invaded Poland, assisting the Germans, as agreed in the #Ribbentrop-#Molotov Pact & its secret protocol that divided Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland & Romania into German and Soviet "spheres of influence." https://t.co/yxr87GBN03pic.twitter.com/syabhoa5AL
A closer look at an unrepentant Nazi who sold weapons to Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro in 1962 when Otto-Ernst Remer was selling him weapons
Seventy five years ago on August 7, 1944 the trials of the conspirators who tried to kill Adolf Hitler in Operation Valkyrie began. Judge Roland Freisler presided over the political show trial of the men who had attempted to rescue Germany and bring the Nazi regime and the war to an end.
On July 20, 1944 the failure of a bombing to kill Hitler, and one man crushed the conspiracy and brought to an end this high level plot by civilian and military officials. The bomb went off and injured,
but did not kill Hitler at the Wolf's Lair, a command post near
Rastenburg, East Prussia (present-day Poland). The July 20 plot or as it came to be known Operation Valkyrie failed. In the end 7,000 people were arrested, and
4,980 executed for their role in the plot.
The New York Times on October 9, 1997 reported on Otto-Ernst Remer's role in breaking up the anti-Nazi conspiracy:
Mr. Remer initially followed a general's orders to seal off Berlin
Government ministries, but Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels soon put
him on the phone with Hitler, who promoted Mr. Remer to colonel and
ordered him to crush the rebellion.
Mr. Remer was instrumental in the arrest
of the conspirators, including Claus von Stauffenberg, the plot leader,
and their families. Many were executed, and others were sent to
concentration camps, said Shimon Samuels, of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center, an organization based in Los Angeles that tracks Nazi war
criminals.
Mr. Remer later won promotion to major general, commanded a division and was responsible for Hitler's personal security.
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H25087 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de
However, what remains disturbing is that the man who broke up the conspiracy Otto-Ernst Remer
(18 August 1912 – 4 October 1997) would go on to play a big role in
post-Nazi Germany. Captured by the United States, he remained a prisoner
of war until 1947.
Following his release, he obtained funding from the Soviet Union and established the Socialist Reich Party
in 1950 that worked with the Communist Party of Germany. Campaign
themes of the Socialist Reich Party included that the Holocaust was an
allied propaganda invention, it accused the United States of building
fake gas chambers and producing fake news-film footage about
concentration camps, that the politics of the Allied-powers created West
German state were merely a front for American domination, and that West
Germany's puppet status of the United States should be opposed.
The Socialist Reich Party was banned in 1952 and Otto-Ernst Remer fled to Egypt. He was an advisor to Gamal Abdel Nasser, and worked with other former Nazis assisting Arab states with the development of their armed
forces. In the early 1960s Otto-Ernst Remer had contacts with and assisted Fidel Castro in Cuba with the purchase of weapons. Ernst-Remer along with Ernst Wilhelm Springer sold the Cuban dictator 4,000 pistols. German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) reported: "Evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served its objectives."
Otto-Ernst Remer returned
to West Germany in the 1980s, and set up an organization entitled the
"German Freedom Movement" (G.F.M.), which advocated the reunification of
East and West Germany, and the removal of NATO military forces from
West German soil. The G.F.M. was an umbrella organization for multiple
underground Neo-Nazi splinter-groups, and Remer used it to influence a
new generation of post-war born Germans. Until the end of his days he continued to engage in Holocaust denial, was an unrepentant Nazi
and continued to promote and organize underground Neo-Nazi movements
that continue to engage in acts of terror and murder to the present day.
Otto-Ernst Remer in 1993
None of this should comes as a shock considering that Communist Russia allied with Nazi Germany in 1939 to start World War Two, and covertly promoted Nazi elements again in post-war Germany to undermine West German democracy.
It is also important to remember that it was not just the Soviet Union that allied with the Nazis from 1939 to 1941, but the whole international communist movement.
Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emeritus, at Emory University, described how communists had mistakenly viewed the Nazis as a means to achieving power and undermining capitalist democracies.
"Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1932 had been immeasurably aided by the German communists’ steadfast support for the Comintern tactic of “class against class,” which demanded no cooperation with other anti-Nazi forces. German communists blithely insisted that Hitler’s triumph would be evanescent—summarized in their optimistic slogan, Nach Hitler, kommen wir ('After Hitler, us'). By 1936, the folly of that policy was evident, leading the Soviet Union to drop it and seek alliances to stop Hitler."
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister
Vyacheslav Molotov and the Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von
Ribbentrop, officially called the Treaty of Non-aggression between
Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was signed 75 years
ago. Made public on August 23, 1939 the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact
was a Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact with secret protocols setting out
how the two regimes would divide Poland and the Baltic States. World War 2 would begin with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Unioninvaded Poland from the East on September 17, 1939. The double invasion is dramatized in Andrzej Wajda's 2007 film Katyn.
Nazi Foreign Minister Von
Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin, and his foreign minister, Molotov
The Communist International (Comintern), known also as the Third International issued new orders to their members once the non-aggression pact had been made public. Professor Klehr described the new directive.
Good communists were ordered to oppose anyone intending to stand in Hitler’s way. With Ribbentrop’s second visit to Moscow at the end of September and the signing of a German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, the Comintern emphasized that the primary adversary was those countries that were at war with Germany, and those socialists and social democrats fighting against fascism. Germany had concluded a pact with the USSR, while “reactionary” England, at the helm of a vast colonial empire, was the “bulwark of capitalism.” Thus, communist parties in England and France were ordered to call for the defeat of their countries—ordered, in other words, to officially embrace treason.
According to Klehr, Nazi reports confirmed that the Communists were fulfilling their part of the agreement and sided against Western Democracies.
A June 1940 Gestapo report approvingly noted that the Soviet government was favorably disposed to the Third Reich and had endorsed its invasions of the Scandinavian states and Belgium and Holland “as necessary and proper.” The report went on to note that the Comintern had avoided open attacks on Germany, and that the parties and publications allied with the Comintern were not pushing for communists to struggle against National Socialism or denounce fascism.
This arrangement only ended on June 22, 1941 when the Nazis double crossed their Soviet allies and launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Communist morality has no problem with any of it because as the communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin observed in a speech to Russian communist youth on October 2, 1920:
"The class struggle
is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to
that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to
that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old
exploiting society and to unite all the working people around
the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."
This is the morality that led the Soviet Union to back Nazis in post-war Germany and Fidel Castro to use former Waffen SS to train his security forces and buy weapons from Nazis in the 1960s. This is the "morality" of the ends justify the means.
This is the value system of totalitarians.
Otto-Ernst Remer died in Spain on October 4, 1997. He was 85 years old and an unrepentant and true believing Nazi.
However the value system that prevailed in Germany was a profoundly different one. A value system reflected by those who defied Hitler and the Nazis at the cost of their own lives.
Free Venezuelans gather in front of the White House on Saturday, March 16, 2019
This morning in Washington, DC joined with Free Venezuelans in a protest next to the White House in support of Juan Guaidó,
the interim president of Venezuela, and to explain the current situation in the country. Speakers called for three steps to normalization: 1) end Maduro's usurpation of the country, 2) a transition government, and 3) free and fair elections.
Free Venezuelans and their allies face off with pro-Maduro protest.
I carried a poster with the images Geraldine Moreno and Génesis Carmona,
two Venezuelan martyrs killed in February 2014. They were murdered by
Maduro's security forces, trained by Castro's intelligence services.
Génesis Carmona, a local beauty queen, was just 22 years old and
nonviolently expressing her desire for a better Venezuela when she was shot in the head on February 18, 2014 and died a day later.
Geraldine Moreno was shot in the head with buckshot on February 19, 2014 in Tazajal, located in Naguanagua, in the state of Carabobo while taking part in a protest and in one of her last tweets on February 17th explained what motivated her to take part in the demonstrations: "No one sends meI go becauseIwant todefend myVenezuela." She died from her injuries on Saturday, February 22, 2014. She was 23 years old.
Sadly, there have been many other young Venezuelans murdered at the hands of Maduro's security services and it is still happening.
MT @ElChinoTzu Venezuelans in Washington DC protest against the group of socialist gringos who hide behind the slogan HandsOffVenezuela and pretend to speak on our behalf. We made it very clear that Venezuela wants FREEDOM pic.twitter.com/lpImD0gUr4#CubaHandsOffVenezuela
We also peacefully faced off with supporters of the
Maduro dictatorship, who had been organized by the Answer Coalition, that included violent
communist revolutionaries.
During the pro-Maduro demonstration U.S.Hands Off Venezuela, a Chavista from the Answer Coalition attacked a Venezuelan who was filming in the area. Some Venezuelan activists were surprised by the violence. They shoudn't have been. One of the organizing groups of the pro-Maduro protest is the Workers
World Party (WWP), a revolutionary Marxist–Leninist political party that
by definition believes in violent proletarian revolution.
Despite repeated provocations we maintained our non-violent discipline, and carried out the objectives of the protest.
We protested for a free Venezuela, supported President Juan Guaidó, called for Cuba Hands Off Venezuela, for humanitarian aide to be allowed in, and for Maduro and his criminal lackeys to be out of power.
Free Venezuelans face off with Pro-Maduro protersters
Venezuelan protesters made it clear that the goal of the democratic opposition is the completion of a democratic transition with free and fair elections that restores the rule of law and freedom for Venezuelan citizens.This means that millions of Venezuelan exiles will be able to return home, and all political prisoners will be freed.
Venezuelan activists also called on those who wanted to know more about what is transpiring in Venezuela to ask a Venezuelan.
This SOS Venezuela protest in Washington DC was but one of many that took place around the world today in more than 200 cities and in Venezuela itself with hundreds of thousands participating.
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