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

On April 13, 1990 the Soviet Union admitted its guilt in the 1940 Katyn Massacre.

Markers over the mass graves of Katyn

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.

#OnThisDay April 13, 1990: The Soviet Union admitted guilt for the Katyn Massacre, accepting responsibility for the murders of nearly 22,000 Polish officers https://t.co/zCZ13RNVGl

— The Moscow Times (@MoscowTimes) April 13, 2019

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."

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.

Nazi and Soviet soldiers greet one another in Poland (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.

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."

Katyn Crime has shaped our history for decades.

🕯️We remember the prisoners of war, innocent victims of the Soviet murder.

➡️Discover their story at https://t.co/xs46w0VsCX#KatynProMemoria #Katyn80 @CPRDiP pic.twitter.com/cYIsNrzyg5

— Ministry of Foreign Affairs 🇵🇱 (@PolandMFA) April 13, 2020

After decades of blaming the crime, on the Nazis, their allies at the time, the Russian parliament, the State Duma, on November 26, 2010 took another important step forward in finally acknowledging something the entire world already knew: “the Katyn crime was committed on direct orders from Stalin and other Soviet leaders.”

The first book in English on the Katyn Massacre was published in 1951. In the U.S. Congress  the Madden Committee conducted an exhaustive investigation in 1952 that concluded that the Soviet Union had committed the atrocity.

Nazi Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin, & Soviet foreign minister, Molotov

Ghost of Ochoa: Why Castro's foreign minister is loudly protesting a Newsweek story

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act -III, Scene-II 

Yesterday, Castro's foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, issued a strong denial over social media that was also carried by the dictatorship's official media, rejecting the statement reported and published by Newsweek on April 3, 2020 that a "senior Pentagon official said that the U.S. Intelligence Community 'has evidence that Maduro is trafficking drugs using naval vessels between Venezuela and Cuba.'" 

Clearly, the military junta in Cuba is nervous. The United States Department of Justice announced on March 26, 2020 that Nicolás Maduro Moros and 14 current and former Venezuelan Officials were charged with narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other criminal charges. 


The Castro regime has a decades long relationship with drug cartels, and has been involved in the drug smuggling business itself, and high ranking officials have been indicted in the past.

Manuel Noriega and Fidel Castro before  the unpleasantness of 1989

Last time something like that happened was in 1989 when Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was indicted, captured, sentenced and jailed for drug trafficking, the Castro regime responded by holding a show trial and executing possible witnesses linking the Castro brothers to cocaine trafficking.  High ranking officials were subjected to political show trials, were they admitted their guilt, and were then shot by firing squad. 

General Arnaldo Ochoa prior to being purged and executed in 1989.

General Arnaldo Ochoa, who backed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and had distinguished himself in South Africa in important battles against the Apartheid regime's army, had grown too popular among the troops, and had the mistaken idea that he had the right to an opinion.  Others like Tony de la Guardia were executed because they could have testified to the direct involvement of the Castro brothers in the drug trade.  Bad luck for his twin brother Patricio, who ended up sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Tony and Patricio de la Guardia at their show trial in 1989

No doubt officials in the Castro regime are looking around the room during official meetings wondering if they know too much, or are too popular and will be given the Ochoa or De la Guardia treatment.

Guilt or innocence does not matter, but if you have left a bad impression with Raul Castro or if your capture would lead to testimony that endangered him, or someone else in the Castro family then a show trial or a sudden fatal illness could easily result.

Not a fun time to be in the inner circle of the Castro regime. It also explains why Castro's foreign minister doth protest too much.

Will China experts and the Chamber of commerce recognize that their policy to Beijing is wrong?

Recognizing that one was wrong is the first step towards getting on the right track.

For decades, experts told us that engaging economically with Communist China would lead the regime to adopt free markets, the rule of law, and eventually democracy. 

Instead, Beijing modernized and perfected their totalitarian controls, modernized and expanded their military, rejected the rule of law, returned to Maoism under Xi, and through their secrecy, lies, and obstruction of citizen efforts placed millions of lives at risk around the world, and crippled whole economies. 

Communist China's international leverage led the World Health Organization (WHO) to repeat their talking points on the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 virus while slavishly praising its response. On January 14, 2020, nearly two months after the first case in mid-November 2019, the WHO was claiming that there was "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus." Sixteen days later there was a change of message, but the pro-Beijing slant continued.

"[We must:]
-share data, knowledge & experience with WHO & the world.
The only way we will defeat this outbreak is for all countries to work together in a spirit of solidarity & cooperation. We are all in this together, & we can only stop it together"-@DrTedros #2019nCov

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 30, 2020

Beijing's cover up of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is sending billions into poverty with a global economic collapse. To those experts and cheerleaders for doing business with and amorally engaging communist totalitarians one question: Will you finally admit you were wrong?

Will Senator Bernie Sanders revisit his repeated claim that Communist China has achieved "more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization." The reality is just the opposite with the cover up of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Wuhan, and the true number of death their are not known, and the failure to report in a timely fashion led to the spread of this virus into a deadly pandemic.

Mercantilism with the People’s Liberation Army is not free trade. Embracing and legitimizing a totalitarian regime that murdered over 37 million of their own people is not a good idea. It is the equivalent of giving steroids and weight training equipment to a serial killer who is a 98 pound weakling with the belief that by making him strong he’d change his ways.

We have not had free trade or “liberalization” with China. What there has been is trade subsidized by the US government via American corporations that have done business with companies that by in large are owned by the People’s Liberation Army (i.e. the Chinese government). It is a sordid business and we are now in the midst of suffering the moral hazard resulting from this disastrous policy. 

We should never had gone into business with a mass murdering dictatorship, and pursued a policy of sanctions instead. Ayn Rand, was wrong on many things, but she was right about free trade with free nations. She also declared, "I do not believe that an individual should cooperate with criminals, and, for all the same reasons, I do not believe that free countries should cooperate with dictatorships." 

Sanctions are a nonviolent alternative to war, and often a refusal to cooperate with dictatorships. Not engaging in business with another country is a choice not an obligation. Globalization and trading relationships with the outlaw regime in Beijing was the Chinese people’s problem before Western nations economically linked up with them. Now it is the West's problem and is destroying Western economies, and many others.

For most of American history citizens organized and pushed for sanctions. The anti-apartheid struggle began with local and city sanctions that ended in Congress passing national sanctions against the racist regime in South Africa. At the state level Massachusetts passed a law against trading with Burma. Other sanctions had been voted in at the city and municipal level. This is a historic reality, and part of an American tradition of liberty that was gutted by big corporate interests and a friendly Supreme Court in 2000.

In 2000 the Supreme Court in Crosby versus National Foreign Trade Council decision stripped that power from states and localities and left it in the hands of the executive branch. Soon after, the Supreme Court forced Massachusetts to do business with companies that had done business with the military junta in Burma.    

It is time to revisit these decisions, along with the policy of exporting the industrial base of the United States to mainland China, and pursue a policy that empowers liberty and not a mass murdering totalitarian dictatorship.

This will necessitate the China experts and the Chamber of Commerce recognizing that they were wrong on engaging with Beijing's communist regime.


Hopefully it is not too late to break the narrative and the lies of the communist tyranny in China, it is literally killing us. 

Xi or Mao: Who will be the greatest mass murderer in human history

 

52 years ago Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at 6:01pm in Memphis, Tennessee

"If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. ... I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others." - Martin Luther King Jr., 'Drum Major' sermon February 4, 1968.

Before and after 6:01pm CST at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01pm CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he died at 7:05pm. Reverend King was in Memphis to support sanitation workers who were on strike.

Why was #MLK in Memphis at the time he was assassinated? #SanitationWorkers #EconomicJustice #PoorPeoplesCampaign

The Why: https://t.co/CPIMWORSPa pic.twitter.com/eDDtCAfLle

— The King Center (@TheKingCenter) April 4, 2020

The night before on April 3, 1968 Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. scaled the heights of American rhetoric dismantling the case for violence and reaffirming nonviolent resistance.

The King Center provided the following abstract summary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I've Been to the Mountaintop speech on April 3, 1968 in their website:

Dr. King gave this address at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee the night before he was assassinated. He called for nonviolent protest and a boycott of Memphis area businesses in support of the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike. Conveying a sense of foreboding, he not only recounted a near-death experience when he was stabbed near the heart, but also spoke of the possibility of his own demise at the hands of those who opposed him.

Today, on the 52nd anniversary of the day he was assassinated, we remember #MLK’s love & legacy.

We are inspired by his courage & consistency to purpose.

We believe that his teachings & examples of compassionate action are relevant & applicable.

How he wanted to be eulogized: pic.twitter.com/bmX7c3MDKp

— The King Center (@TheKingCenter) April 4, 2020

In this speech Reverend King outlined the purpose of the overall nonviolent struggle in broad terms:

 "And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying -- We are saying that we are God's children. And that we are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live."

Funeral services were held for Reverend King on April 9, 1968. Coretta Scott King requested that King eulogize himself: His last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a recording of his famous 'Drum Major' sermon, given on February 4, 1968, was played at the funeral.  The King family held solemn services for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, attended by thousands including the then Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Richard Nixon.

Meanwhile in Memphis the local government met the demands that had been made by Reverend King and the striking sanitation workers.

The King family went on to found the King Center and continued his nonviolent legacy to the present day. Other activists from King's inner circle continued their civil rights work, while some, like John Lewis, entered political life and continued working to realize Reverend King's beloved community in the U.S. Congress.

Remembering when Cuba was on the vanguard of medical research, and today's dismal reality in the time of COVID-19

Setting the record straight

America Arias Maternity Hospital Building (Havana, Cuba 1930s)

Original version: CubaBrief

Cuba today traffics its doctors abroad for the profit of the dictatorship while Cubans in the island do without. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic there are shortages in Cuba, and a regime that was slow to respond in a constructive manner leading to protests, and public calls for action. Meanwhile PBS is broadcasting Castro propaganda on Cuba's "vaunted" healthcare system in a program to air Wednesday titled "Cuba's Cancer Hope". 

The hard reality is that Cuba's glory days of "cutting-edge" medicine pre-date the Castro regime.

Carlos J. Finlay, pioneering Cuban doctor

Carlos Juan Finlay, a Cuban epidemiologist, discovered that yellow fever was transmitted from infected to healthy humans by a mosquito vector. Dr. Finlay identified that the carrier of yellow fever was the mosquito Culex fasciatus, today known as Aedes aegypti. Finlay's career began under the Spanish colony and continued into the early years of the Cuban Republic. Dr. Finlay was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906.

However, he was not the only great Cuban doctor to become internationally renowned.

I know this first hand because as a child my pediatrician in Little Havana, in a modest office near Flagler Street, was Dr. Agustin Walfredo Castellanos, his patients used to call him "El Chino Castellanos". He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959 and 1960 by Colombia and Ecuador respectively.

Dr. Agustin Walfredo Castellanos

Dr. Castellanos described "the first practical method of angiocardiography, with which he studied several congenital malformations of the heart. Also, he designed the first automatic angiocardiographic injection device. He also pioneered the method of retrograde injection of contrast material into the aorta which was mainly used to diagnose patent ductus arteriosus."

Reference to Castellanos (1938) and his co-workers in Cuba breakthrough in Angiocardiography

Angiocardiography, according to Merriam Webster is "the radiographic visualization of the heart and its blood vessels after injection of a radiopaque substance.

Dr. Castellanos and his colleagues published the first important paper on the clinical applications of intravenous angiocardiography in the Archivos de la Sociedad de Estudios Clinicos in 1937. Cuban medicine prior to 1959 was not just groundbreaking in basic research, but also in public health.

Cuban doctors in the 1930s provided the breakthrough that made above images possible.

 Professor James W. McGuire and Laura B. Frankel in their paper published in the Latin American Research Review, “Mortality Decline in Cuba, 1900-1959: Patterns, Comparisons, and Causes” found that “Cuba's progress relative to other Latin American countries at reducing infant mortality was even greater from 1900 to 1960 than from 1960 to 1995. During the earlier period, Cuba led all Latin American countries for which data are available at raising life expectancy and reducing infant mortality. From 1960 to 1995, by contrast, it came in fourth and fifth respectively.”

Rodolfo J. Stusser, M.D. in his November 2013 paper, "Cuba’s Long Tradition of Health Care Policies: Implications for Cuba and Other Nations," documented that "in 1958 Cuba had 6,000 physicians, 3,624 pharmacists, 2,260 pharmacies, about 500 laboratories, and 60 drug manufacturers, handling 40,000 different products for 6 million inhabitants."

Numbers don't lie, although the Castro regime would like to disappear them.

Thankfully, Glenn Garvin writing at Reason Magazine has burst one of the propaganda bubbles of the Castro dictatorship and its fictitious "lung cancer cure" reporting that "CIMAvax is far from a "cutting-edge" medicine. The truth is that it barely works at all. As Cuba's Cancer Hope admits in a single throw-away line, "Cuban clinical trials show that it extends life three to five months on average." The five-year survival rate for its users is about 15 percent, roughly the same as that for patients treated with approved U.S. cancer therapies. American oncologists hoot in frustration at patients who want help getting to Cuba to obtain CIMAvax. Says one, quoted in a recent report by Public Radio International: "Without seeing new stats, it's not that impressive… . I am not too worried about people not being able to go to Cuba."

Earlier this month, Castro's Venezuelan henchman was promoting Cuba's "interferon" as a cure that saved "around 3,500 lives in China" declaring Cuba in the vanguard, Caribbean National Weekly called it the antidote for COVID-19, and Newsweek was calling it a "wonder drug." The reality is far more humble. Interferon Alpha-2B Recombinant (IFNrec) was jointly developed with China, but they did not pioneer the discovery of interferon. Interferon research, not surprisingly, was pioneered in Switzerland in the 1950s. Finally, interferon is not a cure but a possible treatment, with risky side effects that in the late stages of the illness can cause more harm than good. The communist regimes in Cuba and in China are profiting off of the desperation of people around the world caught up in a pandemic that spread out of control because Beijing covered it up for weeks. Sadly, many have fallen for this propaganda.

One last point on Cuban medicine, post-1959 who are the great doctors that have made strides in medicine that have led them to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine? We know that Cuban medical missions have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on three occasions, but President Donald Trump has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. One need not be a doctor to get that nomination.

The more important question is how many Cuban doctors, educated and trained under the Castro regime, have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine?