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I have some questions for the Idaho County Democrats.

What is an equal opportunity, compassionate, inclusive society look like; is rioting, looting, and burning our country as endorsed by current national Democrat leadership the beginning of this vision?

Does this include the endorsement of the Black Live Matters organization, whose founders declare they are trained in the ways of Marxism? For those who are not familiar with Marxism, here are some quotes from a couple of avowed Marxists.

Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis: it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical examples. -- Karl Marx.

Vladimir Lenin told his followers, Violence will be the inevitable accompaniment of the collapse of capitalism.

History records not only these revolutionary words, but also the fact that communism is responsible for the death of over 100 million people who would not comply to Marxist demands.

Communists wish to erase history and rewrite it with a narrative that undermines the foundation of our countrys founding principle that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

Todays national Democrat Party platform has removed the words Under God from the pledge of allegiance and is embracing the violence and destruction we are witnessing.

The Idaho County Democrats cannot hide behind the narrative that you are like me unless you denounce the violence these radicals are wishing to impose upon our nation.

We should all take the time to read our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution and also read Martin Luther Kings I Have a Dream speech. These works remind us that our founding was a promise that needs to be kept and fought for. Kings example also reminds us that violence is not the solution.

The tearing down of these ideals that we are divinely created and replacing them with mans vision, is to live in an ever-changing society subject to the next tyrant and the destruction they will bring to enforce their vision of utopia.

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LETTER: Idaho County Democrats cannot hide behind the narrative - Idaho County Free Press

In a provocative decision the authorities of the illegal state entity of Northern Cyprus announced on Tuesday the opening of the coastal section of the long fenced-off occupied town of Varosha (Famagusta).

Speaking after a meeting in Ankara with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish Cypriot official Ersin Tatar told reporters that "the coast will open to the public from Thursday morning."

Erdogan welcomed Tatar's announcement as a "courageous decision" and added: "We hope Varosha will entirely open. We are ready to give any support on this issue".

"It is an undisputed fact that Varosha is a Turkish Cypriot territory. The decision about it rests with the Turkish Cypriot authorities," the Turkish President added.

The Turkish army has kept the town fenced off since its Greek Cypriot residents fled when it invaded Cyprus in 1974.

In a statement issued today, the Press Bureau of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) denounces the decision of Turkey, pointing out that this act reveals the hypocrisy of EU-USA-NATO.

The statement reads:

This decision is part of the perpetuation of the 46-year Turkish occupation of the 37% of Cyprus' territory and part of the dichotomous plans that have been hatching.

These developments reveal, once again, the hypocritical stance of the EU, the U.S. and NATO, who add grist to the mill of Turkish aggression, promoting strategic relations with Turkey's bourgeois class. At the same time, they [developments] expose the government of ND which entangles the country deeper in the euro-atlantic plans and cultivates dangerous complacency among the people.

Today, it becomes even more necessary to strengthen the demand for an independent Cyprus, one and not two states, with a single sovereignty, one citizenship and international personality, without foreign troops and bases, without guarantors and protectors, a common homeland of Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots, with the people being dominant in their place.

IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM

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KKE: Erdogan's decision to open Varosha in occupied Cyprus reveals the hypocrisy of EU-USA-NATO - In Defense of Communism

Oct 3rd 2020

The Quiet Americans. By Scott Anderson.Doubleday; 576 pages; $30. To be published in Britain by Picador in February 2021; 20.

THIS INTRIGUING book is an indictment. From its first page it argues that the CIA lost its way, in all senses, in the first decade of the cold war. Its witnesses are four courageous and initially idealistic patriots. Frank Wisner oversaw some of the earliest efforts to roll back communism in Europe. Michael Burke was a daredevil figure in the same game. Edward Lansdale was an minence grise in the Far East. Peter Sichel, a German-born Jewish wine-merchant and Wunderkindand the only one of the four still aliveheld his nose as he co-opted former Nazis into the agency, an initiative cited as one of its original sins.

Scott Anderson, a veteran foreign correspondent and novelist, weaves a beguiling if sometimes puzzling narrative from their criss-crossing careers. He takes in the Philippines, Vietnam and the CIAs early venality in Central America. He traipses along the Iron Curtain to unveil a string of early disasters in eastern Europe. His verdict is damning, yet also imprecise.

All four agents had brave, brilliant starts in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIAs forerunner, during the second world war, and were driven largely by principle. The author shows how they were all laid low, in moral and career terms, by the wrong-headedness of their political overlords, which they only occasionally resisted. The villains include J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss who, jealous of the CIA, stoked paranoia among allies as well as enemies, and Senator Joseph McCarthy, who ruined hundreds of lives in his quest for reds under the bed; but also, less predictably, the Dulles brothers, John Foster as secretary of state and Allen as head of the CIA. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower are castigated. Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and even Barack Obama take a few knocks.

Of the four spies, Lansdale and Burke ultimately left the CIA in despair, stricken by the moral compromises they had been asked to make. Wisner committed suicide. The agents whom he and Burke infiltrated into Romania, Poland, the Baltic states and East Germany all disappeared; most were probably killed. Worse, in Mr Andersons view, were the results of two early successes, the coups against democracy in Iran and Guatemala, which tarnished the CIA for ever in the eyes of many in the Middle East and Latin America.

Telling this tale of woe through the four men is a clever device, and Mr Anderson is a fine narrator. Each of the quartet had remarkable early achievements. Lansdale, a former adman in California with a gift for empathy, almost single-handedly steered Ramon Magsaysay into the presidency of the Philippines in 1953 (he died in an air crash). Lansdale then became the most trusted adviser to Vietnams president, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was ousted and killed in 1963. Many of the CIAs failures stemmed from familiar shortcomings. We all have this tendency to look for information that confirms our beliefs and to ignore what conflicts with them, explains Mr Sichel. Its very hard to give somebody information he doesnt want to hear, and the more senior they are, the worse it is.

Early in his own career Mr Anderson witnessed the murderous brutality of a right-wing regime in El Salvador that was backed by the CIA. The very phrase anti-communist, he writes, took on a squalid quality when I considered the crimes done in its name. He duly dismisses out of hand the cold war strategy of Truman, Eisenhower and their successorsbased on the threat of massive retaliation, including nuclear war, if the Soviets overstepped the mark, while the CIA undertook a constant lower-level pushback, including covert operations. He lambasts George Kennan, a fabled diplomat, for encouraging the CIAs policy of containment, which was designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce. This anti-communist refrain, he complains, lasted until communism collapsed. Oddly, he ignores the possibility that this outcome was precipitated at least partly by relentless outside pressure from the CIA and others.

More questionable still is his assertion that Americas over-zealous leaders and submissive spooks undercut the moderate faction within the Kremlin and bolstered the militants, and thus, especially after Stalins death in 1953, missed a golden opportunity to dramatically alter the course of the cold war. He even implicates the CIA in the suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956: by egging it on but backing away, Mr Anderson charges, the agency encouraged Moscow to crack down. Hungarian rebels may have picked up mixed signals from the Americans. But it is surely fanciful to suggest that Nikita Khrushchev was poised to let Hungary go, before the CIAs machinations changed his mind.

Espionage, intelligence-gathering and covert operations are by definition dodgy trades, whatever the motives of their practitioners. Mr Anderson vigorously argues that his quartet epitomised Americas slide into moral ambiguity and strategic muddle. Intelligence officers like them provided the fuel for the nuclear arms race and drove nations into the orbits of East or West. Spies on both sides were the cold wars first frontline soldiers.

But then Mr Anderson switches his animus back against the presidents and policymakers. Virtually every major covert mission undertaken by the CIA from its inception until today, he says, has been done under the express, if unwritten, orders of presidents. The agency is doomed to be the ultimate fall-guy. So were the flawed four both culprits and victims? A puzzling conundrum.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Original sins"

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An indictment of the CIA, through the lives of four spies - The Economist

If its presidential election time, then, like clockwork, its time for Republicans to continue the US national security establishments sixty-year-long attack on Cuba. Thats because Republican presidential candidates feel the need to pander to Cuban American voters in Florida as a way to show how tough they are on communism.

Well, not all communism. The US government, especially the Pentagon, loves the communist regime in Vietnam, the one that killed some fifty-eight thousand American men in the Vietnam War. Today, the US and Vietnamese regimes are living in peaceful and friendly coexistence, exactly what the national security establishment said was impossible during the Cold War.

President Trump now continues this electoral tradition by slamming additional sanctions on the Cuban and the American people. He has issued an edict prohibiting American citizens from staying in hotels in Cuba that are owned by the Cuban government. He has also ordered Americans not to bring back to the United States Cuban rum or Cuban cigars.

Those measures are on top of those taken by Trump last year to reduce travel to Cuba, which included bans on cruise ships, yachts, fishing boats, and group educational and cultural trips to Cuba.

Oh, in bringing up the US governments close and friendly relationship with the communist regime in Vietnam, I forgot to mention that Trump, by his own admission, fell in love with the communist dictator of North Korea. Why, Trump even salutes communist generals in that country.

But not Cuba. US officials, including Trump, hate Cuba. No falling in love with Cubas communist rulers. No peaceful and friendly coexistence there. Thats because over the decades, Cuba has indirectly exposed the corrupt sham of the entire Cold War and the corrupt machinery of the US national security establishment.

After all, recall what the Pentagon and the CIA said throughout the Cold Warthat Cuba posed a grave threat to US national security. They said that the island was a dagger pointed at Americas throat. They said America couldnt stand with a communist regime ninety miles away from American shores.

And yet, despite the continued existence of Cubas communist regime, the US government is still standing, more powerful and more omnipotent than ever. And while it certainly has become more socialist (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, public schooling, etc.), no one is claiming that it has been taken over by the Russian or Chinese Reds.

But Americans were told to be afraid of Cuba, very afraid. Thats why there were repeated CIA and Pentagon regime change operations against the Cuban regime, including top-secret assassination plots, in partnership with the Mafia, on the part of the CIA.

In fact, Trump announced his new measures at a White House event honoring Bay of Pigs veterans. But lets keep something important in mind: this was a CIA operation from the get-go, one designed to use Cuban exiles as the invaders so that Americans wouldnt know that the US government was behind the operation.

The question naturally arises: Under what legal authority did the US government conspire to invade Cuba or assassinate its rulers? There certainly was no congressional declaration of war against Cuba, which the Constitution requires as a prerequisite to waging war against another country. And one thing is for sure: an invasion is most definitely an act of war and an assassination is an act of murder.

The fact is that there never was a legal justification for the CIAs invasion of Cuba. But once the US government was converted into a national security state after World War II, the powers of the national security branch of the governmenti.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and theNSAessentially became omnipotent. The Constitution became irrelevant, at least insofar as the other three branches of the federal government were concerned.

There was also OperationNorthwoods, the infamous plan by the Pentagon to conduct deadly and destructive terrorist attacks on American soil and make them look like they were done by Cuban agents. The idea was to provide a false and deceptive pretext for invading Cuba and effecting regime change.

Where was the constitutional authority for OperationNorthwoods? There was none, but that was considered irrelevant.

In fact, the reason that the Cuban regime invited the Soviet Union to install nuclear missiles in Cuba was because the Castro regime knew about the Pentagons and CIAs desires to invade Cuba. The Cubans wanted the missiles to deter US officials or, in the worst case, to defend themselves from a Pentagon-CIA attack. Thus, it was the US national security establishment that was indirectly responsible for bringing the US and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

Through the entire Cold War and beyond, Cuba never attacked the US or even threatened to do so. It has always been the US government that has been the aggressor against Cuba, including with its embargo, sanctions, assassination plots, and state-sponsored terrorism within Cuba.

The Cuban communist regime has continued standing. What about the much-vaunted threat to national security that it supposedly posed to the United States, especially during the Cold War? It was always a crooked and corrupt sham, just like the entire Cold War was. Thats why US officials hate Cuba so muchthey know that the continued existence of the Cuban communist regime has shown the utter corruptness of the entire Cold War, something President Kennedy realized prior to his assassination.

After all, the United States is still standing. For that matter, so is the communist regime in Vietnam, which Pentagon and CIA officials said ultimately would cause a domino effect that would end with the Reds in control of the US government. How utterly ludicrous.

Through it all, it has not only been the Cuban people who have suffered from these antics. It has also been the American people, not just economically but especially through the destruction of their own economic liberty and freedom of travel.

After all, dont forget who Trumps orders and prohibitions are directed to: the American people. If they violate his edicts, it is they who will go to jail or be fined or both.

So, here you have the supreme ironyto oppose a Cuban regime that controls the economic activity of its citizens through its socialist system, US officials control the economic activity of the American people. Its called destroying liberty at home to oppose communism and socialism abroad.

Too bad the American people dont have the gumption to fight for their own fundamental rights here at home, including the fundamental rights of freedom of travel and freedom of trade that US officials have destroyed in their decades-long war against Cuba.

Reprinted from the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Link:
Trump Continues the By no means-Ending Struggle on Cuba - The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader

by Vivian Gornick

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 161 pp., $25.00; $16.00 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Verso, 265 pp., $19.95 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Picador, 164 pp., $15.99 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Picador, 165 pp., $16.00 (paper)

From birth to death, writes Vivian Gornick, in her memoir The Odd Woman and the City,

we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and dont want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressionsanger, cruelty, the need to humiliateyet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with.

From there the divisions multiply. We long for experience, we shrink from experience; we want to understand, we dont want to understand. We confuse our neuroses for our innermost truths and in the end it all boils down to: nothing. Pointless disharmony. Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities, she writes in another memoir, Fierce Attachments.

But then there are times when we feel ourselves whole. We stand at the center of our experience and something inside us flares into bright life. Under the influence of a conviction of inner clarity, we become eloquent, prolificwhat Gornick calls our expressive selves. This, we feel, is the meaning of life. This is what it means to be alive.

Gornick has published thirteen books in fifty years, fourteen if you count Woman in Sexist Society, the anthology of feminist writing she coedited with Barbara K. Moran in 1971. Most concern someone whose quest for the expressive self rises to the level of an addiction. In a new introduction to The Romance of American Communism, her 1977 book reissued earlier this year, Gornick observes that there is a certain kind of cultural herothe artist, the scientist, the thinkerwho is often characterized as one who lives for the work. This hero is her subject. Why do people devote their lives to causes that deprive them of love and comfort and ordinary happiness, Gornick asks? As a lifelong writer, a woman of blunt manner and deep feeling for whom the effort is agony, she has a personal investment in the answer.

Gornick has long enjoyed an audience of literary depressives and feminists. Now, a late-career revival is expanding her readership. In 2015 The Odd Woman and the City introduced her to a new generation. In 2020 four more Gornick titles have given occasion for a backward glance: Unfinished Business, a new bibliomemoir about rereading, and reissues of Approaching Eye Level (1996), The End of the Novel of Love (1997), and The Romance of American Communism. The timing of their publication could be chalked up to the return of American socialism, or to the tendency to rediscover women artists in old age. But the lasting value of her work lies in her commitment to the question of what it means to feel expressive: to experience the feeling that tells a person not approximately, but precisely who they are.

Because

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The Desk and the Daring | by Dayna Tortorici - The New York Review of Books