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Facebook announced today it would fund a project called Defending Digital Democracy. The project, co-founded by the campaign managers for both Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, aims to thwart outside interference in elections.

The Belfer Center at The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University announced the project earlier this month. Eric Rosenbach, Co-Director of the Belfer Center and former Assistant Secretary of Defense will be heading it up. In a Harvard press release he said:

Americans across the political spectrum agree that political contests should be decided by the power of ideas, not the skill of foreign hackers. Cyber deterrence starts with strong cyber defense and this project brings together key partners in politics, national security, and technology to generate innovative ideas to safeguard our key democratic institutions.

The announcement came during Black Hat, an annual security event held in Las Vegas. Reuters reports Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said:

Right now we are the founding sponsor, but we are in discussions with other tech organizations. The goal for our money specifically is to help build a standalone ISAO (Information Sharing and Analysis Organization) that pulls in all the different groups that have some kind of vulnerability.

Stamos declined to say how much money Facebook would be contributing to the Defending Digital Democracy project. He did, however, announce that Facebook would be offering a $1 million Internet Defense Prize for researchers this year, according to Financial Times.

The social network also announced it would be investing in education by joining forces with CodePath, a training company that provides free education for engineers.

Facebook has shown a vested interest in fighting fake-news, though perhaps this isnt entirely altruistic. The social network might not have intentionally meddled in the 2016 Presidential election, but the role that false news articles on Facebook played cant be overstated.

In a few long years well start the entire US Presidential election circus all over again, in the mean-time weve got hundreds of elections from the State to Federal level occurring first. The Defending Digital Democracy team has more than its fair share of work ahead.

Update 1:47 PM CST : A representative for Facebook contacted us to say that the social network was disclosing it pledged $500,000 to the Defending Digital Democracy project.

Facebook funds Harvard effort to fight election hacking, propaganda on Reuters

Read next: It's time to fear Amazon

Excerpt from:
Facebook teams with Harvard to defend democracy from hackers - TNW

In the summer of 1944, the Nazi occupation of Poland was nearing the end of its fifth year. More than one in five Poles had been killed, enslaved, or shipped off to concentration camps. The country was being incrementally destroyed to make way for Adolf Hitlers vision of a greater German Reich. Still, hundreds of thousands of Poles continued to fight.

By August, the Soviet Red Army had managed to drive German forces off of Russian territory and take parts of Poland. Vast amounts of American and British aid, including trucks, food, and raw materials, enabled the Soviets to deploy and supply vast numbers of tanks, planes, and guns.

With an Allied victory no longer in doubt, Polands Armia Krajowa (Home Army) saw what it considered its best chance for success: an uprising in the Polish capital of Warsaw, timed to coincide with the arrival of the oncoming Soviet offensive.

Just days before, on July 25, Radio Moscow had called for every Polish homestead to become a stronghold in the struggle against the invaders. On July 29, Soviet tanks reached the outskirts of Warsaw and began engaging the German armoreddivisions there.

Starting on Aug. 1, tens of thousands of Home Army members, armed with captured German weaponry and supplies provided by the Western airlifts, seized control over Warsaw and attempted to establish radio contact with the Soviets.

Soldiers of the Polish Home Army ride a captured German Panther tank on Aug. 2 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising. (Juliusz Bogdan Deczkowski/Public Domain)

But no help was forthcoming. For reasons that to this day remain classified by the Kremlin, the Soviet offensive stopped on the outskirts of Warsaw. A nearby Soviet airbase remained unused, while Western airdrops were limited to faraway locations in Italy.

Without heavy weapons or outside support, the Polish resistance stood no chance against even the weakened German occupation force. Warsaw was razed and up to 200,000 civilians died, the majority of them executed by the Nazis after the battle.

Soviet forces only restarted their offensive in January 1945, and the war ended that May.

For the major Alliednationsthe United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Union among themWorld War II was a clear victory. Six years of aggressive conquest and mass murder by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were put to an end, and the Axis powers unconditionally surrendered.

But for Poland and other nations in Eastern Europe, the end of Nazi occupation and genocide broughttotalitarian Soviet rule. The democratic Western allies had gone to war in 1939 because Germany had invaded Poland, yet at the wars end, they were unwilling to intervene when the Soviets established a puppet regime there.

Western officials and media often failed to criticize their Soviet ally or consider dictator Josef Stalins goals rationally. The vast provision of aid to the Red Army, for instance, might well have been the boost needed for the Soviet regime to subjugate Eastern Europe in the postwar period.

We might have wasted less money and material than we did, said U.S. diplomat George Kennan in a 1951 letter. We might have arrived in the centre of Europe slightly sooner and less encumbered with obligations to our Soviet ally. The postwar line of division between East and West might have lain somewhat farther east than it is today, and that would certainly be a relief to everyone concerned.

A U.S.-produced 2-ton Studebaker truck, here pictured in Soviet service in Berlin in May 1945. Thousands of vehicles sent to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program aided Stalin in his conquest of Eastern Europe. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 204-018 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The Soviet communist regime and its Polish communist allies certainly benefited from the destruction of the organized resistance loyal to the prewar Polish government. Soviet propaganda downplayed the achievements of the Home Army and labeled them as reactionaries.

George Orwell, the disillusioned British communist who authored Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, expressed his disgust with the general inclination among journalists to sympathize with the Soviet attitude on the Warsaw Uprising.

One was left with the general impression that the Poles deserved to have their bottoms smacked for doing what all the Allied wirelesses had been urging them to do for years past, Orwell wrote in September 1944.

Dont imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency.

Meanwhile, participation in World War II on the side of the Allies seemed to absolve Stalin of his treacherous prewar actionsthe Soviet Union had originally been an ally of Germany, and in fact had aided Hitler in the 1939 invasion of Poland that began the war in the first place. Only in 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, did the communist superpower switch sides.

Unsurprisingly, Moscow resumed the oppressive and murderous policies toward its Polish satellite state that the communist leadership had indulged in from 1939 to 1941.

Tens of thousands of patriotic Polish soldiers and officers, especially those who had lived in Great Britain, hastened to rebuild their country. Rather than giving these men a heros welcome, the communist government subjected them to persecution, including show trials, torture, and execution.

Warsaw, now the capital of the communist Polish Peoples Republic, also became the namesake of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-controlled military alliance that, throughout the Cold War, placed the resources and territory of Eastern Europe at Moscows disposal.

The real history and memory of the Polish resistance in World War IIthat Poland was one of the few occupied nations to produce no major traitors or collaborators; that Polish operatives secured valuable intelligence or destroyed Nazi infrastructure in daring missions; that pilots of the Polish government-in-exile matched and exceeded their Western comrades in the aircould only enter public discourse in the 1980s, when cracks started to appear in the communists control.

The Solidarity movement, fueled by inextinguishable patriotism and the perseverance of the traditional Catholic faith, pitted millions of ordinary Poles against the foreign-backed regime that preached Marxism and atheism. By 1989, 45 years after the Poles had tried to retake their capital from the Nazis, the Soviets relented. On June 4, general elections were held, and the communist authorities left office in 1990.

Hundreds of people demonstrate in the streets of Warsaw during a May Day rally organised by Trade Union Solidarity on May 01, 1989. (DRUSZCZ WOJTEIC/AFP/Getty Images)

The Polish experience, from the closing months of World War II to 1989, holds continued relevance for those living in the worlds surviving communist regimes. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have participated in a movement to renounce the Communist Party and its affiliated youth organizations. Impoverished North Korea, which has preserved a Stalinist program of absolute social control and military aggression, stands increasingly isolated.

In a speech delivered on July 6 in Warsaw, President Donald Trump tapped into this experience, praising the Poles for standing up to their regimes totalitarian ideology.

Referring to a pivotal 1979 sermon by Pope John Paul II, Trump said: A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, 1million Poles sang three simple words: We Want God.'

Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been fully compiled and its ideology still persists. The Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged. Read the whole series atept.ms/DeadEndCom

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Epoch Times.

See original here:
The Warsaw Uprising and Poland's Battle With Communism - The Epoch Times

Published time: 26 Jul, 2017 15:30

Indigenous tribes have responded to Philippines President Rodrigo Dutertes threat to bomb their schools because he believes theyre teaching subversion and communism.

Duterte made the threats against the native, non-muslim, Lumad people from the southern island of Mindinao.

READ MORE: Hundreds protest martial law in Philippines, hurl red paint at police

Get out of there, Im telling the Lumads now. Ill have those bombed, including your structures, he said in a press conference on Monday, according to AP.

I will use the armed forces, the Philippines Air Force. Ill really have those bombed... because you are operating illegally and you are teaching the children to rebel against government.

The comments came after the breakdown of peace negotiations between the government and the Communist New Peoples Army (NPA).

The NPA has been waging an insurgency in the Philippines for nearly 50 years and the government believes its using tribal areas in the countryside as its base of operations.

The president's statements hurt us because he does not seem to value our lives, a Lumad spokesperson told Philippine news outlet ABS-CBN.

Indigenous leaders refuted Duterte's allegations that they harbor communist rebels and said that the claims go back to the administration of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

US-based Human Rights Watch condemned the comments and called on Duterte to publicly retract them. They also implored the president to sign a Safe Schools Declaration to protect schools and universities from attacks during war.

Mindanao is currently under martial law due to an uprising by militants linked to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in the city of Marawi.

Lumad groups staged a demonstration in Philippines capital Manila on Monday to call for an end to martial law on the island.

Duterte issued the threat at a press conference following his State of the Nation Address on Monday. During that speech he vowed to continue his war on drugs.

The fight against illegal drugs will continue because that is the root cause of so much evil and so much suffering. [Drugs] weakens the social fabric and deters foreign investment from pouring in, he said.

See the rest here:
Duterte's threat to bomb 'communist' schools bewilders indigenous groups - RT

One of the more transparently manipulative and hypocritical slogans used by Western Communist Parties in the mid 1930s to recruit allies for Stalin was specifically designed for Catholics:

You can still take Communion and love the Soviet Union.

Graham Greene, novelist, pundit, and above all, Catholic, embodied this slogan.

Indeed, Greenes attempts to link Catholicism with a Soviet Union that persecuted priests from the get-go predated this slogan. Since the 1920s, Greene had sought to merge his Catholic faith with his Communist one, which prompted George Orwell, a foe of both organized religion and communism, to label Green the first Catholic fellow traveler. But even today, an argument is made that Greene was hostile to Communism in whatever form it took until his death in 1991.

This school of thought relies on criticisms Greene made toward the ideology throughout his life.

Witnessing Communist behavior in Mexico in the 1930s, Greene attacked both Catholicism and Communism for their unconcern with human rights. He later sought to distance himself from his fellow intellectuals who fell hard for Stalin in the 1930s, declaring that Their God failed.

Greene also compared his Church with Stalinist persecution, once writing that, historically, Catholics had their own Stalinist periods, thousands of themTorquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. Visiting Vietnam while still a French colony in the 1950s, Greene expressed that he had a great deal of sympathy for the French in Vietnam.

A decade later, Greene condemned the 1968 Soviet crackdown on their Czechoslovakian satellite as revealing that the days of idealsand ideologies which are their political expressionare certainly over[and] that morality counts for nothing in international politics.

In 1971, he stated that he was against the Russian version of Communism which he disliked even in its post-Stalin form. He even refused the Order of Lenin medal awarded him by the Soviets, but there was a yin to this yang, and the Soviets were on the mark when recognizing that Greene earned such an award.

Even when admitting the great crimes committed by Communistsand CatholicsGreene nevertheless justified said crimes because both had not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent to poverty. As such, he stated that I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.

Because of these supposedly shared sentiments, Greene paid both the ultimate compliment by stating that one could easily be a member of both ideologies. There is no reason why a Communist should renounce his Catholic faith, he said.

To find scriptural backing for such a combination, Greene cited the Epistle of James, whose warnings to the rich represented words of revolution.

And although supposedly distancing himself from Soviet communism, Greene nevertheless preferred it over American democracy.

In 1967, a decade after the brutal Soviet crackdowns on Poland and Hungary, both of whom authentically sought the sort of humane revolution Greene supposedly championed, the writer stated his preference for the Soviet Union over the United States:

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States of America, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union. Russians only destroy its body, whereas the Americans destroy its soul.

Greene traced the American war on religious salvation to how solidly anchoredAmerican materialism was in the country. By turns, the less solidly anchoredRussian materialism allowed the existence of a latent sense of religion.

Such religious possibilities Greene cited as the chief reason why I have felt a sort of attraction to Communism.

This bizarre attraction included defending, even admiring on the basis of their faith, Soviet spies who betrayed Greenes country. When his former intelligence boss and friend Kim Philby validated accusations that he was a Soviet mole by defecting to Moscow, Greene lauded the spys faith in Russia as akin to the religious faith of a devout Catholic.

But whatever supposed ambivalence Greene felt toward the Soviets was not in evidence regarding third world communism.

For despite his 50s era support of the French war against Vietnam, Greene opposed American intervention to the extent that he became even more a Communist sympathizer.

Regarding the Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, Greene typically short-circuited any criticisms he had toward Castro such as the dictators authoritarianism with praise. In spite of Greenes awareness of how the regime cracked down on religious freedom, he nevertheless praised Castros fight against so-called American imperialism til the end of the writers life.

Such faint criticisms were not applied, however, to the Stalinist-style Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Instead, he fell unreservedly hard for it because he saw it as merging Church with State.

In contradiction to his characterization of a materialism-free Soviet Union, he praised the Sandinistas for attempting to keep the materialism of both the Soviets and the US at bay by allying with neither (both the Soviets and the Cubans funded the regime in actuality).

Free from such supposed religion-destroying materialism, Greene approvingly saw the regime as having the flexibility to move beyond their policies supporting freedom of religion toward an actual merging of Church with State by allowing Catholic priests into the government. Because of this, Greene gushed that the Sandinista regime was in fact a Roman Catholic government.

When confronted with undemocratic and outright anti-religious behavior of the Sandinistas, Greene still defended the government for its supposed pro-Catholic policies. The regime repeatedly refused free elections (and when they were held under UN supervision, the Sandinista secret police allowed a mob to attack voters standing in line with machetes) as well as persecuting, among others, a Catholic priest named Obando y Bravo for criticizing the actual nature of the regime.

Regarding the Soviets, Greene never gave up his dream of Russia allying with the Catholic Church. In a moist 1987 paean to Gorbachev given in Moscow, two years before the General Secretarys democratic reformsinadvertentlydestroyed the Communist country; Greene wanted the still-totalitarian government to partner with the Catholic Church.

In this speech before the Soviet congress, and Gorbachev, the writer spoke of his dreamthat perhaps one day before I die, I shall know that there is an Ambassador of the Soviet Union giving good advice at the Vatican.

Such an enthusiasm led Greene into opposing the democratic Polish Solidarity movement and instead supporting the Polish Catholics who in turn supported their Soviet-controlled government.

Today, there is nothing particular new about Catholics and Protestants defending Communist regimes on religious grounds (evidence to the contrary, the United Methodist Church credits the Cuban regime for its religious tolerance). But Greene was a pioneer of it, and went far beyond reformed Communist spy Whittaker Chambers famousor depending upon your point of viewinfamous breakdown of religion being about faith in God versus communisms faith in Man.

Instead, Greene subscribed to both faiths and frequently defended his Church partnering with any Communist State, no matter the bloody history of the former and the repressive crackdowns by Communist regimes on their religious citizens.

But Greenes faith in both held fast until his death, and he used them to defend Communism on religious grounds, and vice versa.

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The rest is here:
Graham Greene: Catholic Communist - The Liberty Conservative

Mark Alexander Jul. 26, 2017

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. Thomas Jefferson (1781)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), still reeling from the electoral thrashing put on them by Donald Trump and the Republicans last November, announced a major charade this week. Their Democrat Party is, once again, attempting to reboot and rebrand itself into something its not.

The party is adopting a new slogan for its policy props, A Better Deal. Yes, its a cheap knock-off of Franklin Roosevelts 1933 New Deal slogan and is an updated do-over of FDRs failed socialist policies while cloaking them in the language of Donald Trumps middle class appeal.

Barack Obama used FDRs model to buy two presidential elections, so why not try it again? So what if the Democrats last grand national experiment with centralized statist policies, the so-called Great Society, was also an abysmal failure. All thats important to Pelosi, Schumer and the rest of their party is a return to power. And if they can fool enough people at the ballot box with false promises based on economic centralization and wealth redistribution, theyll accomplish their mission.

Of course, the best contemporary case study in the failure of Democrat regulatory schemes is the so-called Affordable Care Act ObamaCare or whats left of it today.

According to Schumer, When you lose an election with someone who has 40% popularity, you look in the mirror and say, What did we do wrong? And the number one thing that we did wrong is we didnt tell people what we stood for. A bold, sharp-edged message, platform [and] policy that talks about working people and how the system is rigged against them is going to resonate.

Actually, Id argue that the number one thing the Democrats got wrong was Hillary Clinton. And Id also argue that people knew exactly what her party stood for.

Schumer hopes the new message will resonate because it will include some proposals (plagiarized from language in Trumps playbook) that are quite different than the Democratic Party you heard in the past [when] we were too namby-pamby. (I suspect the last Democrat leader to use the term namby-pamby was FDR.)

The full focus-grouped slogan is A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future, and it includes a list of 26 populist promises. However, no Better Deal list can be found on the Democrat Party website because not all Democrats are on board.

Talking about 26 separate issues before an election to an electorate is overwhelming, said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus. You have to punch through the clutter of what everyone else is saying.

Fact is, the new and improved Better Deal will prove to be nothing more than all the previous Democrats socialist Raw Deals over the past century.

How do I know?

The first clue is that its being promoted by Democrats. Dead giveaway.

But the second clue, the more substantive one, would be a century of failed socialism that has left hundreds of millions of victims in its worldwide wake of devastation and destruction.

On November 7th, Sen. Bernie Sanders and his socialist legions of misinformed millennial serfs across the nation, who were all sandbagged by the Democrat Party in 2016 to clear a path for Hillary Clinton, will be celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the Great Socialist Revolution of 1917.

Thats the date when Vladimir Lenins band of Bolsheviks overtook the Russian Provisional Government in Petrograd, which led to the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922 and the vision for the spread of socialist communism worldwide. And indeed it did metastasize.

The USSRs horrific Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist state endured until the mid 1980s, when the last of its socialist dictators, Mikhail Gorbachev, implemented dramatic economic reforms through his free-enterprise glasnost and perestroika policies. It was an effort to avert a complete socialist meltdown.

Gorbachev attempted to head off the total collapse of the Soviet Union after Ronald Reagan helped him see the light. But it was too little, too late, and as President Reagan was leaving office in 1989, the Soviets Eastern European satellite states were being overthrown by democracy movements. When Gorbachev resigned from what was left of the USSR in 1991, it reconstituted itself as the Russian Federation.

(Begin Sarcasm) Notably, the Federation is now headed by Donald Trumps best buddy and biggest campaign booster, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. According to socialist Democrats in our country, in collusion with their mainstream media propaganda machine, Putin managed to win the 2016 election for Trump. (End Sarcasm)

More than 25 years since the USSRs collapse, the Federations economy is largely dependent on energy exports, antiquated industry and struggling service sectors. It will take many more years to build a healthy economy on the toxic trash heap of Soviet socialism.

For those of us who were on the ground in the former USSR, and then again after 1990 assisting early Federation reformers, the devastation of 70 years of socialism was and remains apparent in every corner of every quarter of the former Soviet states.

But the socialists now heading the Democrat Party here in the U.S. are either in complete denial about the consequences of the state-planned and regulated economy they seek to implement, or blinded by their own insatiable quest for power.

These party leaders, who label anyone questioning their socialist climate change agenda science deniers, are themselves socialism deniers.

While Sovietologists and Sinologists can explain the historic consequences of socialism in Russia and China (and its puppet state, North Korea) in great detail, any amateur observer with an ounce of acumen can discern those consequences unfolding in real time in what was once the most prosperous nation on the South American continent, Venezuela.

Three short years ago, the Leftmedia proclaimed that Venezuela was socialist Hugo Chavezs economic miracle.

Recall how Bernie Sanders proclaimed, The American dream is more apt to be realized in Venezuela, adding, Whos the banana republic now?

Well, while I appreciate the fact that Bernie is the only Democrat honest enough to call himself a socialist, he is now eating heaping helpings of crow as more than 30 million Venezuelan men, women and children starve while Feelin the Bern of the unfettered socialism he advocated.

I dare Bernie, or any of his mindless millennials who embrace the profoundly ignorant opinion that socialism works, to vacation in Venezuelas now-imploding capital of Caracas. (Travel tip: Bring your own toilet paper.) And while there, they might want to try the newest weight-loss fad, the Venezuelan diet! If they hurry, maybe they can get there by Sunday, in time for Chavezs socialist successor, Nicolas Maduro, to impanel his fake constituent assembly for rubber-stamping his socialist policy directives.

Ignorance is bliss at least until you run out of toilet paper.

Make no mistake, Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged. It seeks a centrally planned economy directed by a dominant-party state that controls economic production by way of taxation, regulation and income redistribution, and control of public opinion by way of its mainstream media propaganda machine. The rise of Democratic Socialism therefore depends upon supplanting Liberty the rights endowed by our Creator primarily by denying that such an endowment even exists.

After the defeat of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi (National Socialist German Workers Party) regime, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill observed, Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Four decades later, as the USSR was on the verge of collapse, Ronald Reagan observed, Throughout the developing world, people are rejecting socialism because they see that it doesnt empower people, it impoverishes them.

His contemporary, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, keenly summed up the problem with socialism: Socialist governments always run out of other peoples money.

Sound familiar?

(Footnote: On the subject of socialist problems, I invite you to listen to an interview with my friend, noted economist Thomas DiLorenzo, on his new book, The Problem with Socialism.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis Pro Deo et Libertate 1776

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The Socialism Deniers and the 'Better Deal' - Patriot Post