April 13th is the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Katyn Massacre.

 "To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night

The Soviet Union claimed to enter Poland in September of 1939 to "take care" of the people and seven months later beginning in April 1940 they had executed 22,000 Polish officers and buried them in mass graves in what became known as the Katyn Massacre.

Today is the day of remembrance for the victims. Let us remember and place this crime into its historic context.

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."

The Soviet Union "invaded Poland on the pretext that ‘the Polish country and its government ceased to exist’. Consequently, ‘the USSR had to take care of the people who lived in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus and their possessions’ as the Soviet propaganda referred to the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic." ... " About 230,000 [Polish] soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Bolsheviks."

Today, state commemoration of the victims of the 1940 #KatynMassacre took place in the Katyn Museum in Warsaw. Deputy President Krzysztof Szwagrzyk represented the IPN at the 85th anniversary event, jointly organized by the Office for War Veterans and Victims of Oppression, Katyn… pic.twitter.com/kiQ2tK5zvo

— Institute of National Remembrance (@ipngovpl_eng) April 13, 2025

The reality was that the Soviets had entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that included secret protocols dividing up Poland. Nazi and Soviet troops met in the middle of Poland and exchanged pleasantries in September of 1939. 

The Soviet precursor to the KGB 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."

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.

On #KatynMemorialDay, we remember victims of the #Katyn massacre.
20,000+ Polish army officers, police, border guard officers, intelligentsia were murdered by the Soviets 83 years ago, in line with Stalin's orders.
Among them were 100s of Polish Jews, incl. rabbi Baruch Steinberg pic.twitter.com/GmXRHTVnQx

— AJC Central Europe (@AJC_CE) April 13, 2023

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.

Smolensk–Katyn
On 3 April, the first prisoners from Kozelsk were transported in cattle trucks through Smolensk to Gniezdovo, where smaller groups were transported by prison cars commonly called ‘czornyje worony’ (‘black ravens’) to the wilderness called Kozie Gory in Katyn Forest. The functionaries of the NKVD killed each person by shooting in the back of the head. By 11 May, 1940, 4,421 Polish citizens had been killed and buried in Katyn death pits. There is an assumption that some officers had been killed in Smolensk²⁸.

Kharkov–Piatykhatky
The first group of prisoners from Starobelsk camp was transported to the headquarters of the Board of Kharkov NKVD district on 5 April 1940. Every night in the basement of the building in Dscherschinski Street executioners killed prisoners by shooting in the neck. The trucks carried the bodies to the pits in Forest Park in Kharkov, a kilometer and a half to Piatykhatky village. By 12 May 3,820 Polish citizens had been killed in Kharkov²⁹.

Kalinin (Tver)–Miednoye
On 4 April, 1940, the NKVD started to send prisoners from Ostashkov to the headquarters of the Board of Kalinin NKVD district (today’s Tver) at 6 Soviet Street. The executions took place in the basements. The same method of killing was used: a shot to the neck. In the mornings trucks carried the bodies to the pits in Miednoye village, 30 kilometers further away. By 22 May, 1940, 6,311 Polish citizens had been killed in Kalinin. What is worth mentioning when it comes to the Katyn lie, is that the territory of Miednoye cemetery has never belonged to Germany³⁰.

Polish authorities built war cemeteries at the places where the officers’ bodies had been buried. The cemeteries were officially opened in the year 2000. (in Kharkov on 17 June, in Katyn on 28 July and on 2 September in Miednoye)³¹.

Survivors
Only 395 people from the three camps survived. Some of them owed their rescue to pure chance. Several people were willing to fight on the Soviet side in case of German invasion. There were also agents among them, the same ones as the NKVD had in the camps. The officers who were arrested in the camps and transported to NKVD Lubyanka prison in Moscow also managed to escape death in the summer of 1940³².

The Guardian summed up the crime as follows: "Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, in one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century."

Eighty years ago in the Spring of 1943 the crime of Katyn was first discovered, but the Soviets denied their role in the crime. 

13 April 1943 | The German radio broadcasted the news about the discovery in Katyn Forest of mass graves of Polish prisoners of war murdered by Soviet NKVD in 1940.

Today in Poland we observe the Day of Remembrance of Victims of the #Katyn Massacre. https://t.co/5xaU5Fnkxk pic.twitter.com/f1i4TxhcpA

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) April 13, 2025

Forty seven years later on April 13, 1990 the Soviet Union admitted its guilt in the 1940 Katyn Massacre.

“Katyń came to symbolize Polish war losses,” historian Adam Zamoyski told TVP World. Eighty-five years after its discovery, the massacre remains a defining wound in Poland’s national memory. pic.twitter.com/OtTv0b156t

— TVP World (@TVPWorld_com) April 13, 2025

A Christmas Miracle: The Collapse of the Soviet Union on this day in 1991

"My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him. " - Mohandas Gandhi

 

Christmas returned to the Kremlin

Thirty four years ago, on December 25, 1991, a regime born in 1917 and formerly named in 1922 came to an end. 

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or as it was also known, the Soviet Union, was formerly brought to an end on Christmas day and replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States. 

 The last day of the Soviet Union was Christmas day. 

Let that sink in.

 Now there are those who claim that the world is a less stable place without the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev claims that it could have been reformed. 

Academic Stephen F. Cohen goes further and quotes approvingly both Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky with the adage: "Anyone who does not regret the breakup of the Soviet Union has no heart. And anyone who thinks it can be reconstructed has no head." 

Vaclav Havel, a man who had both head and heart, understood why this kind of regime was so profoundly inhuman: "As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it."

The optimism expressed by Gorbachev and the nostalgia of Cohen fail to take into account the human cost of the USSR. The Soviet Union took the lives of an estimated 61 million human beings. It was a brutal and evil system that allied with Nazi Germany to start WW2 in 1939, and afterwards spawned other brutal regimes around the globe that claimed over 100 million lives. Their lives mattered. Vaclav Havel, in his 1990 New Years Speech, called on his countrymen to remember. 

"The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today's freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc, and thus the background of our own newfound freedom." 

The number of lives lost is only the material accounting and does not take into account the spiritual ruin visited upon billions and its aftermath to the present day. The late Czech president  explained it in the  same address.

"The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships."

The destruction, both material and spiritual, generated by the Soviet Union over seventy years will take centuries to repair and transcend. That hard truth may not be cause for celebration, but the end of the system that wreaked so much damage is cause for celebration, not regret. To do otherwise is to be heartless. The fact that it happened without violence on Christmas Day in 1991 is also cause for joy. 

Criminally, Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022 expanded his war into Ukraine in what some view as an attempt to resurrect the Soviet empire and the rivers of blood are flowing again, and we do not know how it will end. Gorbachev passed away on August 30, 2022 a respected figure abroad, but reviled in Russia. He was in many ways the polar opposite of Vladimir Putin.

This is why Ukraine is celebrating the end of the Soviet Union over social media this Christmas.

On this day in 1991, the Soviet Union finally ceased to exist. A moment that went down in history as a triumph of liberty.

Its dissolution ended a regime built on repression, censorship, political terror, genocidal famines, mass deportations, and the systematic erasure of… pic.twitter.com/4xVa7YhpYe

— MFA of Ukraine 🇺🇦 (@MFA_Ukraine) December 26, 2025

People of goodwill should join them in celebrating the end of this evil regime. 

Secondly, the largest remaining communist regime, the Peoples Republic of China, remains in power and  with the aid of smaller communist powers (Cuba, Laos, Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela, Vietnam, and their networks) is backing Putin's invasion of Ukraine. 

The Chinese Communist Party celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2021. It is a tragedy that they did not go the same way as the Soviet Union in 1991.

Over seven million people have died due to a pandemic unleashed by the communist dictatorship in Beijing. However, this is a small number for the Communist Chinese Party that has killed more than ten times as many Chinese people to advance communist policies in China alone. 

People of goodwill must also continue to work for and pray for the day that a second miracle can be celebrated with the the end of communism in China, and a third miracle with the defeat of the Russian invaders in Ukraine.  

Does Cuba pose a threat to U.S. national security?

The case for the affirmative.

The first victims of Cuban communism are the Cuban people.

They were the ones that suffered the terrorism of the July 26th Movement that carried out a hundred bombings in Havana in one night.

They were the ones that suffered the summary executions in the early days of the revolution.

There are over a thousand political prisoners currently in Cuba’s prisons today.

Jose Daniel Ferrer was a member of the Christian Liberation Movement that sought through the existing legal system to pursue change through the Varela Project.

The response of the dictatorship was to lock up Jose Daniel Ferrer and 74 others in 2003 to long prison terms.

In his case they threatened him with a death sentence for gathering signatures in a citizen petition drive.

Oswaldo Payá who was the head of the initiative together with his youth leader Harold Cepero were murdered by agents of the Cuban government in 2012.

We also cannot forget that next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of the shoot down of two Brothers to the Rescue planes.

Brothers to the Rescue was an effort by Cubans and Cuban Americans to save the lives of Cubans in the Florida Straits.  Because they were nonviolently engaging with the dissidents on the island the regime felt  it was unacceptable and they sent out MiGs that blew two civilian planes out of the sky in international airspace.

However that is not our focus today but the harm Havana has done to U.S. national security, and the role the Cuban dictatorship has played in destabilizing the Western Hemisphere.

Cuba remains a threat to U.S. national security

I would like to begin by dispelling some myths that all too often are spread in the Academy. One is that Fidel Castro was driven into the arms of the Russians by the Americans.

This is not true. We now know thanks to the Soviet archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the initial contacts with the KGB and the Castro brothers was in 1953.

Early contacts with the KGB (1953)

Leonov (c). On his right, R. Castro. To his left, Bernardo Lemús

“The KGB’s leading Latin American expert, Nikolai Leonov, who was the first to make contact with [Raul] Castro, wrote later, ‘Cuba forced us to take a fresh look at the whole continent, which until then had traditionally occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system of priorities.’- The charismatic appeal of Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara extended far beyond Latin America,” wrote Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin in The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the the Third World – Newly Revealed Secrets from the Mitrokhin Archive published in 2006.

Raul Castro and Nikolai Leonov first met in 1953, and struck up a relationship that would endure for 69 years, until Leonov’s passing in 2022. On March 11, 2016, Leonov was interviewed on official Cuban television in the Mesa Redonda program about his supposed first encounter with Raul Castro on a trans-Atlantic voyage. Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992, offers a different report obtained from classified files. Leonov and Raul Castro “became ‘firm friends’ in Prague in 1953 and then worked together with Fidel from 1956 and after he took power in 1959.”

The U.S. Arms Embargo on Batista

At the same time that the United States was placing an arms embargo on Fulgencio Batista in early 1958, and receiving representatives of Fidel Castro’s July 26th Movement in Washington DC, the Soviet KGB already had a firmly established relationship with the Castro brothers.

On March 17, 1958 Fidel Castro’s future candidate for provisional president, Manuel Urrutia, along with a delegation of other supporters in exile of the July 26th movement, met with officials at the State Department. They successfully lobbied the U.S. government arguing that arms shipments to Cuba were for hemispheric defense, and they claimed that Batista using them against Cuban nationals was in violation of the conditions agreed to between the two countries.

Batista’s regime presented to the U.S. Embassy in Havana a formal note protesting the delay in the shipment of M-1 rifles to the Cuban Army, and warned that it would weaken the Cuban government and lead to its possible downfall.

The United States placed an arms embargo on the Batista dictatorship in March 1958.

On March 26, 1958 in another telegram from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Havana the view was expressed how the arms embargo could lead to the fall of Batista’s regime:

“Department has considered the possibility its actions could have an adverse psychological effect on GOC and could unintentionally contribute to or accelerate eventual Batista downfall. On other hand, shipment US combat arms at this time would probably invite increased resentment against US and associate it with Batista strong arm methods, especially following so closely on heels of following developments:
Government publicly desisted from peace efforts.Government suspended guarantees again.Batista expressed confidence Government will win elections with his candidate and insists they will be held despite suspension guarantees but has made no real effort to satisfy public opinion on their fairness and effectiveness as possible means achieve fair and acceptable solution.Batista announced would increase size arms and informed you he would again undertake mass population shift Oriente, and otherwise acted in manner to discourage those who supported or could be brought to support peaceful settlement by constructive negotiations.”

The United States would continue to pressure Batista to hold free elections and leave office for the remainder of 1958. Earl E. T. Smith, the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, on December 17, 1958 delivered a message from the State Department to Fulgencio Batista that the United States viewed “with skepticism any plan on his part, or any intention on his part, to remain in Cuba indefinitely.”

The U.S. government had dealt the Batista regime a mortal blow, and fourteen days later the Cuban dictatorship fell.

Fulgencio Batista fled into exile on January 1, 1959, and the United States quickly recognized the revolutionary government of the Castro brothers.

The Castro brothers’ newly established Cuban government was acknowledged by the U.S. on January 7, 1959. The new regime was recognized in a mere seven days. Comparatively, after Fulgencio Batista’s March 10, 1952 coup, it took the US seventeen days to recognize his government.

Fidel Castro visited Caracas on January 23, 1959 and met with Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt, a social democrat, “to enlist cooperation and financial backing for ‘the master plan against the gringos.’”In April 1959 Fidel Castro visited the United States on an eleven day trip that concluded with a three hour meeting with Vice President Richard Nixon on April 19, 1959.

The Castro brothers carried out mass executions, expropriated U.S. companies, and sent armed expeditions to overthrow governments in Latin America beginning in 1959.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, representing Fidel Castro’s new regime, visited Gaza in June 1959, and encouraged Palestinian refugees to “continue the struggle to liberate their land” “through resistance to occupation,” according to the publication Palestine Land Society. He asked, “where are the training camps? Where are the factories to manufacture arms? Where are people’s mobilization centers?” … According to the publication Palestine Land Society, “Guevara was accompanied by General Caprera, an expert in Guerilla warfare. Caprera met with community leaders to advise on methods of resistance.”

 

Soviet Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan visited Havana in February 1960. The Soviet Vice Premier arrived in Cuba on February 4, 1960.

Regime insider Carlos Franqu in his book Family Portrait with Fidel described the visit as follows.

In the early days of February, Anastas Mikoyan, vice-prime minister of the Soviet Union, came to Cuba. Fidel Castro, Raúl, Che Guevara, and President Dorticós met him at the Havana airport. He was given a huge reception and an extended tour of the island-with Fidel at his side-which lasted for weeks. A major topic was the Soviet Union’s purchase of Cuban sugar and our purchase of Russian oil.

Castro diplomatically recognized the Soviet Union on May 8, 1960.

To say that the United States pushed the Castro brothers into the arms of the Soviet Union is absurd. The Castro brothers had already been conspiring with Moscow for six years in 1959.

[ Continue here ] 

Why the UK's victory in the Battle of Britain makes the International Day of Democracy today possible

"Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction." - Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (1948)

 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the greatest Briton

 

Today the United Nations is observing International Day of  Democracy and the United Kingdom is observing Battle of Britain Day. It is fair to say if the British Democracy had not triumphed over Nazi Germany in that great battle, then we would not have an International Day of Democracy, and the past 80 years would be very different.  

 

This double observance heightens the importance of remembering the wisdom of Winston Churchill and honor the man who twice saved democracy from Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.  

 

Today in 1940, the Battle of Britain's most decisive clash saw the Royal Air Force repel the largest Luftwaffe air strike against the United Kingdom. Months earlier on June 18, 1940 in a speech in The House of Commons titled "Their Finest Hour" Prime Minister Churchill explained the stakes of World War II and the start of the existential clash for Great Britain: 

I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

It is shocking in 2025 that some today claim that it was a mistake to go to war against Nazi Germany, and attempt to white wash the profound evil of Hitler's regime in Berlin. 

 

At the same time the apologists for international communism like to extol their so-called "antifascist"credentials while remaining silent or finding bizarre revisionist explanations on the connections between fascism and communism that Mr. Churchill succinctly outlined in the quote at the top of the page. 

 

Of equal concern is the attempt to deny the fact that Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin signed a pact in August of 1939, that secretly included the division of Central and Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, that started World War II. 

 

This alliance lasted until the summer of 1941 when Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet union. Consider for a moment that it was Britain and France who honoring their alliance declared war on Nazi Germany on September 1, 1939 when Poland was invaded by Hitler's Third Reich. 

 

Churchill did not equivocate and in a radio address on October 1, 1939 described the Russian's role as invaders along with the Nazis days after.

 "Poland has been again overrun by two of the great Powers which held her in bondage for 150 years, but were unable to quench the spirit of the Polish nation. The heroic defense of Warsaw shows that the soul of Poland is indestructible, and that she will rise again like a rock, which may for a spell be submerged by a tidal wave, but which remains a rock."

Britain and France were convinced that Russia and Germany were allies and plans were drawn up to attack Russian oil fields in order to deny them to the Nazis in what became known in the planning stages as Operation Pike.  Months later the reversals continued for Christendom. The Fall of France to the Nazi war machine took place between May 10 and June 25, 1940 over the span of 46 days ending in the evacuation of Dunkirk. This disaster is what led to Operation Pike being scrapped.

The British Empire was alone for almost a year between June 25, 1940 through June 22, 1941 as the sole main resistance to Nazi Germany. The United States would remain neutral until Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the Soviet Union was a de facto ally of Nazi Germany until Hitler invaded communist Russia on June 22, 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. The United Kingdom was all that stood between the survival of Christian civilization and a new Dark Age that Adolf Hitler called the Thousand Year Reich. If one is truly Anti-Nazi then one must celebrate and honor the legacy of Winston Churchill, who early on identified the Nazi threat and issued calls to to resistance with one of the most important in a radio address to London and the United States on October 16, 1938.

"Dictatorship – the fetish worship of one man – is a passing phase. A state of society where men may not speak their minds, where children denounce their parents to the police, where a business man or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinions; such a state of society cannot long endure if brought into contact with the healthy outside world. The light of civilised progress with its tolerances and co-operation, with its dignities and joys, has often in the past been blotted out. But I hold the belief that we have now at last got far enough ahead of barbarism to control it, and to avert it, if only we realise what is afoot and make up our minds in time. We shall do it in the end. But how much harder our toil for every day’s delay! Is this a call to war? Does anyone pretend that preparation for resistance to aggression is unleashing war? I declare it to be the sole guarantee of peace. We need the swift gathering of forces to confront not only military but moral aggression; the resolute and sober acceptance of their duty by the English-speaking peoples and by all the nations, great and small, who wish to walk with them."

Four years earlier on November 16, 1934, after the Nazis had just been in power a little over two years Winston Churchill warned of their threat to peace:

There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtue, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men, preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by parliament, or by public opinion. In that country all pacifist speeches, all morbid war books are forbidden or suppressed, and their authors rigorously imprisoned. From their new table of commandments they have omitted “thou shall not kill.”

Sadly the world did not listen to Churchill until it was too late to avoid a major conflict, but at least it was not too late to stop the Nazi war machine although it came at great cost and suffering. Churchill understood that to defeat Hitler the Soviet Union would have to change sides and when the Nazis invaded Russia the British Prime Minister joked, "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The price of ending Hitler was cozying up to Josef Stalin, another genocidal totalitarian monster.

Churchill was not blind to the nature of his wartime ally and understood the threat of Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union and thankfully his warnings on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri were listened to this time and may have avoided World War III, albeit with a cold peace.

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow." 

He then went on to make a remarkable statement about the circumstances that led to World War II and how it was completely avoidable:

Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again.

Churchill was not only an Anti-Nazi but also an Anti-Communist and a conservative who on May 24, 1948 observed: "Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy." 

He also understood and celebrated the importance of free speech. In the midst of the war in 1943 he observed: 

"Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."  

Today let us remember this great statesman, democrat, and conservative and call on all people of good will to learn form this greatest of Britons. His moral clarity, and the victory in the Battle of Britain 85 years ago, makes possible the celebration of the International Day of Democracy.

 

April 13th is the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Katyn Massacre.

 "To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night

The Soviet Union claimed to enter Poland in September of 1939 to "take care" of the people and seven months later beginning in April 1940 they had executed 22,000 Polish officers and buried them in mass graves in what became known as the Katyn Massacre.

Today is the day of remembrance for the victims. Let us remember and place this crime into its historic context.

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."

The Soviet Union "invaded Poland on the pretext that ‘the Polish country and its government ceased to exist’. Consequently, ‘the USSR had to take care of the people who lived in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus and their possessions’ as the Soviet propaganda referred to the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic." ... " About 230,000 [Polish] soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Bolsheviks."

Today, 13 April, on the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Katyń Massacre, we pay tribute to the Polish prisoners of war who were brutally murdered by the NKVD in the spring of 1940.

Their graves are symbols of truth and suffering, reminding us of the cruelty of… pic.twitter.com/tNNgcf85Fm

— Ministry of Foreign Affairs 🇵🇱 (@PolandMFA) April 13, 2026

The reality was that the Soviets had entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that included secret protocols dividing up Poland. Nazi and Soviet troops met in the middle of Poland and exchanged pleasantries in September of 1939. 

The Soviet precursor to the KGB 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."

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.

🇵🇱 Today we remember the victims of the Katyn Massacre.

In 1940, thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals were brutally executed by the Soviet secret police.

We will never let the truth be forgotten. pic.twitter.com/HxJy2NgNr0

— ECR Group (@ecrgroup) April 13, 2026

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.

Smolensk–Katyn
On 3 April, the first prisoners from Kozelsk were transported in cattle trucks through Smolensk to Gniezdovo, where smaller groups were transported by prison cars commonly called ‘czornyje worony’ (‘black ravens’) to the wilderness called Kozie Gory in Katyn Forest. The functionaries of the NKVD killed each person by shooting in the back of the head. By 11 May, 1940, 4,421 Polish citizens had been killed and buried in Katyn death pits. There is an assumption that some officers had been killed in Smolensk²⁸.

Kharkov–Piatykhatky
The first group of prisoners from Starobelsk camp was transported to the headquarters of the Board of Kharkov NKVD district on 5 April 1940. Every night in the basement of the building in Dscherschinski Street executioners killed prisoners by shooting in the neck. The trucks carried the bodies to the pits in Forest Park in Kharkov, a kilometer and a half to Piatykhatky village. By 12 May 3,820 Polish citizens had been killed in Kharkov²⁹.

Kalinin (Tver)–Miednoye
On 4 April, 1940, the NKVD started to send prisoners from Ostashkov to the headquarters of the Board of Kalinin NKVD district (today’s Tver) at 6 Soviet Street. The executions took place in the basements. The same method of killing was used: a shot to the neck. In the mornings trucks carried the bodies to the pits in Miednoye village, 30 kilometers further away. By 22 May, 1940, 6,311 Polish citizens had been killed in Kalinin. What is worth mentioning when it comes to the Katyn lie, is that the territory of Miednoye cemetery has never belonged to Germany³⁰.

Polish authorities built war cemeteries at the places where the officers’ bodies had been buried. The cemeteries were officially opened in the year 2000. (in Kharkov on 17 June, in Katyn on 28 July and on 2 September in Miednoye)³¹.

Survivors
Only 395 people from the three camps survived. Some of them owed their rescue to pure chance. Several people were willing to fight on the Soviet side in case of German invasion. There were also agents among them, the same ones as the NKVD had in the camps. The officers who were arrested in the camps and transported to NKVD Lubyanka prison in Moscow also managed to escape death in the summer of 1940³².

The Guardian summed up the crime as follows: "Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, in one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century."

Eighty three years ago in the Spring of 1943 the crime of Katyn was first discovered, but the Soviets denied their role in the crime. 

13 April 1943 | The German radio broadcast the news about the discovery in Katyn Forest of mass graves of Polish prisoners of war murdered by Soviet NKVD in 1940.

Today in Poland we observe the Day of Remembrance of Victims of the #Katyn Massacre. https://t.co/5xaU5Fnkxk pic.twitter.com/TD7dXvB7pT

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) April 13, 2026

Forty seven years later on April 13, 1990 the Soviet Union admitted its guilt in the 1940 Katyn Massacre.

“Katyń came to symbolize Polish war losses,” historian Adam Zamoyski told TVP World. Eighty-five years after its discovery, the massacre remains a defining wound in Poland’s national memory. pic.twitter.com/OtTv0b156t

— TVP World (@TVPWorld_com) April 13, 2025

The problematic origins of International Women's Day and the Beijing Declaration

Truth and Memory.

International Women’s Day 2025 Theme: What Does ‘Accelerate Action’ Mean?

Today is "International Women's Day" and over the internet socialists, communists, and well meaning persons are celebrating a holiday that was first celebrated on February 28, 1909 by the Socialist Party of America, but today's date, March 8th, is owed to a tragic history.

On March 8, 1917 (February 23 in the Julian calendar), tens of thousands of Russian women took to the streets of Petrogad (St Petersburg) in protest demanding "Bread and Peace" for the lack of food due to World War One, and within a week Czar Nicholas II had abdicated his throne in what became known as the February Revolution. 

International Women's Day on March 8, 1917

This would lead eight months later to the October Revolution and the rise of the Bolsheviks and 74 years of totalitarian communist rule that led to tens of millions dead. The February Revolution that took place on March 8th in our Gregorian calendar is the origin of the reason that International Women's Day is celebrated today, and that is problematic. However, it is here to stay, the United Nations formally recognized it in 1975.

This year's observance was especially problematic because they were also celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration which I called out in a Twitter thread.  No sense of irony that feminists gathered in Communist China in 1995 at a time that not only were Chinese women's bodily autonomy completely under state control, and Chinese baby girls were slowly being killed in dying rooms due to their gender.

22 years later the New York Times was still gender washing the communist misogynist regime in China. 

On September 25, 2017 at 8:11pm NYT Opinion tweeted: "For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big" and sparked an online conversation with many outraged at what they rightfully described as a white wash of a mass murdering dictatorship.

Some necessary context on the Beijing regime and women

Mao Zedong took power on October 1, 1949 and ruled with an iron fist until his death on September 9, 1976 and left a record of carnage difficult to equal over 27 years that included horrors inflicted on Chinese women.

Ten years prior to his death the old dictator launched the Cultural Revolution that began a decade of bloodshed that would claim millions of lives.  First generation dictator Mao Zedong was 72 years old at the time and the communist regime had been in power 17 years and on May 16, 1966 the communist party May 16 Notification warned that the party had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionary “revisionists” who were plotting to create a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” 

Sexual horrors of the Chinese cultural revolution

China expert Frank Dikotter explained how in "1968, millions were sent to the countryside after they finished school, some of whom were girls as young as 14. Thousands of young girls were left at the mercy of villagers and raped.” Xinran  in her 2002 The Good Women of China described how young girls suffered the worse of the sexual horrors in the Cultural Revolution: "The perpetrators were their teachers, their friends, even their fathers and brothers, who lost control of their animal instincts." 
Mao died in 1976 and the decade long blood letting came to an end.

During Mao's Cultural Revolution thousands of young women were raped in camps

But the communist regime continued on, after the founder's departure, and three years later began it's infamous one-child policy. On September 26, 1980 The New York Times ran a UPI story reporting that "Chinese Reds Limited To a Child Per Family"  and euphemistically wrote  "China intensified its population-control drive today by ordering the 38 million Communist Party members to have only one child per family" and how the policy would use "painstaking patience and persuasion." 15 years later Time Magazine reported in 2015 that "patience and persuasion" included "forced abortions and sterilization, and a gender imbalance resulting from female infanticide."  

Click here to see the 1995 documentary "The Dying Rooms"

Tom Hilditch in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), reproduced in World Press Review, in September of 1995 described it as a "A Holocaust of Little Girls" and reported on the plight of a Chinese baby girl in an orphanage:

Mei-ming has lain this way for 10 days now: tied up in urine-soaked blankets, scabs of dried mucus growing across her eyes, her face shrinking to a skull, malnutrition slowly shriveling her two-year old body. The orphanage staff call her room the "dying room", and they have abandoned here for the very same reasons her parents abandoned her shortly after she was born. She is a girl. When Mei-ming dies four days later, it will be of sheer neglect. Afterward, the orphanage will deny she ever existed. She will be just another invisible victim of the collision between China's one-child policy and its traditional preference for male heirs. She is one of perhaps 15 million female babies who have disappeared from China's demographics since the one-child-per-family policy was introduced in 1979.

 Communist China continued the one child policy until 2015. 

Amnesty International, not a right wing group, monitored how Beijing's one child policy operated in practice and in 1996 published the report China: No one is safe and presented details and specific cases.

Birth control policy in China

The official line
Family planning is “voluntary”, although birth control has been compulsory since 1979. Government demographers recommend stabilization of the population at 1.3 billion by the year 2000, which they say can only be achieved through “strict measures”. “Coercion is not permitted”, according to the State Family Planning Commission.

Some facts
-Women pregnant outside the plan have been abducted and forced to have abortions or undergo sterilization.
-Pregnant women have been detained and threatened until they agree to have abortions.
-People who refuse to comply with the policy have been harassed and some have been ill-treated by officials.
-“Above-quota” new-born babies have reportedly been killed by doctors under pressure from officials.
-The homes of couples who refuse to obey the child quotas have been demolished.
-Relatives of those who cannot pay fines imposed for having had too many children have been held hostage until the money was paid.
-Those helping families to have “above quota” children have been severely punished.
-Those committing human rights violations while enforcing the birth control policy often go unpunished.

A victim
An unmarried woman in Hebei province who had adopted one of her brother’s children was detained several times in an attempt to force her brother to pay fines for having had too many children. In November 1994 she was held for seven days with a dozen other men and women. She was reportedly blindfolded, stripped naked, tied and beaten with an electric baton.
Quote: ‘It was part of my work to force women...to have abortions. In the evening, when the couple was likely to be at home, we would go to their houses and drag the woman out. If the woman was not at home, we would take her husband or another member along and keep them in custody until the woman turned herself in.’ - A former family planning official, 1993

In April of 2010, Roseann Rife, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Director said,"Forced sterilizations carried out by officials amount to torture and the haste of the procedures raises questions about their safety and possible health impacts."

Some would attempt to argue that it is the Chinese cultural baggage, and not the communist ideology that is responsible for this mistreatment of women, but other communist dictatorship have different, but equally misogynistic track records that have inspired works of great literature.

Shannon Quinn authored the essay "17 Moments In History that Inspired the Handmaid’s Tale" in History Collection and provides a summary of Ceauşescu's Decree 770 policy for women.

One of the specific events that Margaret Atwood found during her research process was “Decree 770” in Romania. This was a law that passed in 1967 that made abortions and all forms of contraception illegal. This had nothing to do with religious beliefs. It was an action that the government believed was necessary for the future of their country. The government already taxed married couples a 6% income tax if they did not have children between the ages of 25 and 50, but they realized that this was not enough to stop people from using contraception.

During the 1950’s, Romanian women were entering the workforce and having fewer children. By the 1960’s, abortion became a common practice, because there were very few birth control options available to women to prevent pregnancy. This began a sharp dip in the country’s birth rate. The Communist Party wanted the population to increase from 23 million to 30 million in a single year, so they enacted Decree 770. After the change of law in 1967, and women no longer had access to birth control, the number of babies born that year skyrocketed to roughly double what they had been the year before. Thousands of new preschools and nursery schools had to be built. Orphanages were overflowing with children whose parents could not afford them. 

Aside from making abortions illegal and taking contraception off of store shelves, women’s bodies were literally policed. Decree 770 forced women to visit the gynecologist once a month to check for pregnancy, and police officers stood in the halls to make sure women complied. If a woman was pregnant, the doctors followed her progress very closely. Wealthy women were able to buy birth control pills and condoms on the black market, but poor women did not have that option. There were some cases where women caught the pregnancy before the doctors did, and some women died while attempting to give themselves an at-home abortion. The policy continued until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s.

Hundreds of thousands of women and children were subjected to this in Romania, and millions of women were forced to have children.

Elena Ceaușescu and Nicolae Ceausescu

Women leaders in communist regimes are few and far between, such as Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, in China, Elena Ceaușescu in Romania, and Vilma Espín in Cuba who became high profile figures because of their respective husbands. They owed whatever power they had to their husbands. Independent women with popular support and their own power base did not fare well under these regimes.

10,000 Romanian babies infected with HIV via dirty needles

Imagine for a moment being born and placed in a cage as a newborn washed via a hose with cold water and never experiencing human touch. Fed like an animal and contracting HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases through dirty needles used to inject the child with vitamins. All of this done to sell the children, as one would any other commodity, on the international black-market. Heartless capitalists? No, heartless Marxist- Leninists in the Ceausescu communist regime in Romania. The regime decided it needed to increase its population and in 2013 Scientific American explained how this crime was systematically planned out and its aftermath in the article Tragedy Leads to Study of Severe Child Neglect.

Nicolae Ceausescu decreed in 1966 that Romania would develop its “human capital” via a government-enforced mandate to increase the country's population. Ceauşescu, Romania's leader from 1965 to 1989, banned contraception and abortions and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families that had fewer than five children. State doctors—the menstrual police—conducted gynecologic examinations in the workplace of women of childbearing age to see whether they were producing sufficient offspring. The birth rate initially skyrocketed. Yet because families were too poor to keep their children, they abandoned many of them to large state-run institutions.

 Hundreds of thousands of Romanian children were subjected to this. However, a better world is possible, not a perfect one, but a better one.

Democracies with market economies and the rule of law do not engage in these horrors.

They have seen the rise of women leaders around the world: Golda Meir in Israel, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Indira Gandhi in India, Angela Merkel in Germany, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in Iceland, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, Kim Campbell in Canada, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Erna Solberg in Norway, Simonetta Sommaruga in Switzerland, and the list goes on for a while. 

Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher

International Women's Day should be a day to celebrate democracy and markets as instruments for the empowerment of women, and observe closely the dystopian record for women under communist regimes, and resolve to resist the system that inspired Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, not a day for communist self-promotion.  

 

Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy 2025: Dissidents from Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan, Tibet, Russia and Venezuela to Spotlight Abuses at 17th Geneva Summit

#GenevaSummit2025 #RaiseYourVoice

Post taken and adapted from the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy.

GENEVA, February 17, 2025 — Leading dissidents and courageous activists worldwide will gather in Geneva, Switzerland, on February 18, 2025, for the Annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy at the Centre International de Conférences Genève.

The Summit, hosted by a coalition of over 30 human rights organizations, will showcase the voices of the world’s bravest human rights defenders, many of whom have suffered torture and unjust imprisonment. The event will also provide a vital platform to family members of political prisoners who are struggling to free their loved ones.

Featured speakers include:

• Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran.

• Garry Kasparov, human rights activist, promoter of democracy, and former World Chess Champion.

• Vladimir Kara-Murza, Russian dissident and politician who survived two poisoning attempts.

• Evgenia Kara-Murza, activist and wife of formerly jailed Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza

• Edmundo González is the president-elect of Venezuela.

• Osiris Puerto Terry is a victim of brutality by the Cuban regime, shot twice at the 11J protests. 

• Sebastien Lai, democracy activist and son of the pro-democracy media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai.

• Rahima Mahmut, Uyghur human rights activist, translator, and singer.

• Nazanin Afshin-Jam is an Iranian-Canadian human rights and democracy advocate.

• Massouda Jalal, Former Afghan Minister of Women’s Affairs and the first woman to run for President of Afghanistan.

• Husna Jalal, Exiled Afghan women’s rights activist and the daughter of Massouda Jalal.

• Assita Kanko, Belgian Member of the European Parliament, writer, and women’s rights activist.

• Betlehem Isaak, Swedish-Eritrean writer and daughter of Dawit Isaak, the longest arbitrarily detained journalist in the world.

• Times Wang, Human rights lawyer and the son of Chinese political prisoner Wang Bingzhang.

• Namkyi, exiled Tibetan activist and former political prisoner.

• Tirad Badawi, son of Raif Badawi, an iconic figure of freedom of expression in Saudi Arabia.

• Nguyen Van Trang, Vietnamese democracy activist and victim of transnational repression.

Speakers are available for interviews before the event and more speakers are set to be announced soon. For a full list of speakers, please see our media kit. For media inquiries or interview requests, contact media@genevasummit.org.

The annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy assembles hundreds of brave dissidents, human rights activists, diplomats, journalists, and student leaders, shedding light on pressing global human rights issues. It offers a platform for activists, former prisoners, and heroes to share their struggles for democracy. The Summit draws hundreds of attendees and garners extensive media coverage worldwide from major media outlets, including CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, and TIME magazine.

Admission to this year’s Geneva Summit is free and open to the public, but registration is mandatory.