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We need to think about where we are now, and compare it to where we have been. The world has seen much worse, but it wont mean anything if we dont use those lessons to conduct us forward.

Heda Margolius Kovaly was for many years a living example of the depth and despair the human spirit is made to endure when societies run amuck.

A Jewish woman of middle-class means in then Czechoslovakia, Kovaly was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, from which she eventually escaped, the only survivor in her immediate family.

Years later, her husband, Rudolf Margolius, was executed during the infamous 1952 Slansky show trial in a Communist Party purge, itself an event of antisemitic overtones where confessions were scripted and forced. Eleven men were put to death for no reason. Films of the trial, rare for the Soviet period, were found in 2018 and are being restored.

Kovaly detailed these events in a classic memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, a book I read in college and recently reread. It struck me that her story has some useful lessons for us as we make our way through this turbulent time.

It encapsulates a time and a place full of memories that we shouldnt forget. A time when people were turned against one another, when suspicion and fear ruled the day and when loyalty to a party is greater than loyalty to facts and truth.

Truth alone does not prevail, Kovaly wrote. When it clashes with power, truth often loses. It prevails only when people are strong enough to defend it.

We do not speak enough today of this sort of freedom and truth. The big picture freedom and truth.

Blare Davenport, Grade 1, smiled as she received a carnation from members of Rising Tide, a Jersey City-based non-profit, at Sacred Heart School in the wake of the deadly shooting on Dec. 10, 2019. Teacher Delos Reyes helped hand them out to students as well.(Photo: Courtesy of Archdiocese of Newark)

The troubling thing to be avoided is what takes root slowly without even making us aware of its presence. The reliance on the stiff rhetoric of a politician bent on projecting power through biting, divisive words, more than on quiet, confident diplomacy.

Its the thought that our enemy is the neighbor who must be self-evidently insane because of who they vote for. That good, ordinary people must in fact hate their country. That we allow ourselves to be distracted from reality in the name of party loyalty.

Memorial service in Paterson on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2019 for Douglas Miguel Rodriguez Barzola, who was killed in the Jersey City shooting on Tuesday. New Jersey Attorney General, Gurbir Grewal hugs Rodriguez's wife, Martha Freire, center, and daughter, Amy.(Photo: Viorel Florescu / NorthJersey.com)

It seems beyond belief that in Czechoslovakia after the communist coup in 1948, Kovaly wrote, people were once again tortured by the police, that prison camps existed and we did not know, and that if anyone had told us the truth we would have refused to believe it.

Thats a strong quote for us. It does not match our age. Yet can anyone deny that many of these elements are present now? Many of us are suspicious of one another. We have witnessed an increase in crimes of hate, some of them quite high profile, and they have passed on more quietly than we might have imagined not many years ago.

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We live in an era where politicians deem stories they dont like as fake news. But Kovaly knew real fake news. She knew fake justice. She knew real deception, and she knew the desperation that drove a people to find comfort in a place that would offer them none.

I have often thought many of our people turned to communism not so much in revolt against the existing political system, but out of sheer despair over human nature which showed itself at its very worst after the war, she wrote. Since it is impossible for men to give up on mankind, they blame the social order in which they live. They condemn the human condition.

To speak bluntly, we need to think about where we are nowand compare it to where we have been. The world has seen much worse, but it wont mean anything if we dont use those lessons to conduct us forward.

Freedom, as Kovaly fought for it, the right to live ones life according to your conscience and in privacy, is basically about vigilance. It is something that we must not only guard for ourselves but for each other. And it is important to realize that freedom cannot be granted by what governments do but what they dont do.

This is not a high-minded call to abstain or somehow rise above the political questions of the day. But as we approach this troubled Christmas and a new year promising impeachment and much political turmoil, we need to keep our eye on that classical concept of freedom at the heart of Heda Margolius Kovalys story. A freedom that is neither Republican nor Democrat, liberal nor conservative, but universal.

If we are fighting more with each other, and not giving each other some benefit of the doubt, we will lose our vigilance for the foundation that fastens our society together: freedom, the right to privacy and due process, all the parts of our Constitution that all of us need whether weve ever thought about it or not. These are the things that eventually lead Heda Margolius Kovaly to seek refuge in the United States. As we spend this time turned inward, examining what we are really about and what we think we stand for, we should always aim to be that beacon for the world.

In the end, Kovalys story was about hope and survival and a force for good that she compared to a shy little bird within her.

Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wings in rapture, she wrote. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant.

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Alex Hubbard is a USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee columnist. Email him at dhubbard@tennessean.com or tweet to him at @alexhubbard7.

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Anti-communist writer Heda Kovaly warned us we must speak and defend the truth in the worst of times | Opinion - Tennessean

East German border guards are seen through a gap in the Berlin Wall after demonstrators pulled down a segment of the structure at the Brandenburg Gate in this November 11, 1989 file photo.

On March 5, 1946, in his speech at Fulton, Missouri, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill used the metaphor of the Iron Curtain, descending from Szczecin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, to define the process of political division that spread across Europe after World War II. This metaphor, along with the Berlin Wall, become the symbol of the political, economic and social divisions in Europe for almost 45 years. The countries behind that line, which under the provisions of Yalta in 1945 were subordinated to the USSR as its satellites had been destined to follow a completely different historical path from the rest of Europe.

Our nations have never surrendered to the political destiny that was imposed upon them. Strong opposition to the communist system started to emerge and protests began as early as the 1950s and 60s. In Poland the first mass demonstrations took place in June 1956 in Poznan. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which was an attempt of the Hungarian people to free themselves from Soviet domination and break the monopoly of the communist party, began in October with a rally of students in Budapest as a sign of solidarity with Poland. It was bloodily suppressed by the Red Army. Czechoslovak reforms of the Prague Spring in 1968 were destroyed by the Soviet troops and forces of the other Warsaw Pact countries. The strikes and demonstrations of the Polish shipyard workers in Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin in December 1970 were bloodily suppressed. The same occurred in Radom and Warsaw in 1976. The culmination of all these protests was the massive outbreak of strikes in Poland in the summer of 1980 resulting in the establishment of the Solidarity Independent Trade Union, the first of its kind in the communist countries.

The democratic breakthrough started with the first partially free elections to the Polish Sejm on June 4, 1989. Its consequence was the appointment of the first non-communist prime minister, an activist of the democratic opposition Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who formed a government based on a coalition of all parliamentary forces. Democracy in Poland had become a reality. In November 1990, presidential elections were won by Lech Walesa, the legendary leader of Solidarity. The process of regaining independence and the re-establishment of democracy symbolically ended with the withdrawal of the last units of the Soviet army from Poland in 1993.

In May 1989, the removal of fences on the border between Hungary and Austria began. The border was completely opened in September, allowing thousands of East German citizens to flee to the Federal Republic of Germany via Hungary. A mass demonstration in East Germany was held in autumn of 1989, which ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

The Candle Demonstration organized by Roman Catholic dissent groups on March 25, 1988 in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, was the first mass demonstration since 1969 against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The demonstration was brutally suppressed by the police and caused widespread outrage in Slovakia with the ball rolling toward real, sustained popular resistance to the communist regime. It was the beginning of a popular uprising that ultimately led to the Velvet Revolution, from November 17 to December 29, 1989.

In Prague on November 17, 1989, thousands of students went out and demonstrated in the center. The police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration. The event sparked protests across the whole country over the coming weeks. In response, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on November 28 that it would relinquish power and end the one-party system. Barbed wire and other obstructions were removed from the borders with West Germany and Austria in early December. On December 10, Slovak Communist President Gustav Husak appointed the first largely non-communist government in Czechoslovakia and resigned. Alexander Dubcek, leader of the Prague Spring, was elected speaker of the Federal Parliament on 28 December and Vaclav Havel the president of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989. Free elections were held in June 1990, in which the Citizens Forum (in the Czech Republic) and the Society Against Violence (in Slovakia) won.

In Hungary, the process of political transformation began on June 16, 1989, when 250,000 people attended the solemn reburial of Imre Nagy, prime minister of Hungary at the time of the 1956 Revolution. After the Soviet-imposed end of the revolution, Nagy was taken to custody, and was tried and executed for treason. On July 6, 1989, he was formally rehabilitated. Some consider it symbolic that on the very same day, the long-time communist leader of Hungary, Janos Kadar, died. The declaration of the Third Hungarian Republic was proclaimed on October 23, 1989, on the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1956 revolution. The first free parliamentary elections were held on March 25, 1990, won by the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). The first political leaders of the newly democratic Hungary were Jozsef Antall as prime minister and Arpad Goncz as president.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the long-lasting rule of Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria. Faced with domestic pressure for political change through massive demonstrations and civil unrest, the communist party started a dialogue with the liberal opposition. Parliament was dissolved and elections were held for a Grand National Assembly, which adopted a new democratic constitution. The attempts of the communist party to hold onto power with political reshuffles met with mass civil disapproval, leading to permanent protests in front of the Parliament and civil unrest during which the communist party headquarters were set on fire. Finally, in 1991, the newly established center-right Union of Democratic Forces won the general elections and in 1992, its leader, Professor Zhelyu Zhelev, was elected president of the Republic.

In Romania, the beginning of the revolution took place in Timisoara, where, for the first time, crowds of people shouted freedom. The word spread like a shock wave across the country, encouraging more people to go out onto the streets to protest against the communist regime. With courage and determination, Romanians changed the regime, and decided by themselves for a better life, turning a dictatorship into a solid, long-lasting democracy. More than 1,000 people died on the streets in Timisoara, Bucharest and other cities of Romania.

In 1991, a new fundamental law secured the foundation of the democratic institutions in Romania, the rule of law and principles which later on facilitated the harmonization of the Romanian legal and institutional framework with the European acquis. Gradually, Romania became a trustful member of the European Union and Transatlantic Alliance, thus creating and maintaining within the society the enthusiasm of democratic participation.

Summing up, the process of overthrowing the communist regimes, started in Poland, quickly spread through Central and Eastern Europe. In 1990, free elections were held in of our countries. In 1991, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and other ex-Soviet republics proclaimed their independence. This marked the end of the Soviet Union, whose last act was the Declaration of December 26, 1991 on the self-dissolution of the USSR. In the same year, the last communist dictatorship in Europe collapsed in Albania while the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance were dissolved.

Since then, our countries have been free to take sovereign decisions in foreign and domestic policies. Thirty years after the autumn of 1989, we have all become members of the EU and NATO. These fundamental changes continue to have a deep impact on all aspects of social, political, economic and cultural life in Central and Eastern Europe. We, the new democracies that emerged after 1989, often say, Much rests behind us, but more is yet to come.

Iveta Hricova, ambassador of the Slovak Republic; Jan Bondy, ambassador of the Czech Republic; Erik Haupt, ambassador of the Republic of Hungary; Valentin Poriazov, ambassador of the Republic of Bulgaria; Tomasz Wisniewski, charge daffaires a.i. of the Republic of Poland; Ioana Veronica Ciolca, charge d'affaires a.i. of Romania

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Remember 1989, when Central and East Europe nations overthrew communism | Kathimerini - http://www.ekathimerini.com

The Central Committee Building is an unlikely time machine. With its seven storeys and two wings of offices, it seems too huge to slip between the fabric of the centuries and with its stark Soviet-brutalist stylings, it feels rather more Cold-War thriller than sci-fi movie.

And yet, unchanged by the three decades that have flowed behind it, it also looks like a teleportation device with the coordinates locked on to December 1989 the month when the people of Bucharest booed and hissed on its steps. Standing in front of it on what is now called Piata Revolutiei (Revolution Square), I am 14 years old again, watching agog at the demise of Communism in Romania on a TV in suburban Birmingham.

Romanias self-severing from the Eastern Bloc was the violent footnote to what history has come to regard as the euphoric game of dominoes that played out across Europe 30 years ago. Polands emergence from political suffocation was a triumph of collective will and Solidarity, Czechoslovakias pulling down of the Iron Curtain was a (largely) peaceful process that earned the tag-line Velvet Revolution, and the events that made Berlin a party zone need no explanation. But there were no hands across fractured walls in Romania; no mass singalongs on hated barriers. There was despair, fury and, in the end, in footage which summarised the speed of events, presidential blood on the concrete.

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30 years after the Romanian Revolution, has Bucharest shaken off the ghost of its communist dictator? - Telegraph.co.uk

Mike Selby

Robin Hood has had many enemies over the centuries. He fought against absolute religious authority in the English Ballads of the 14th century; civil authority in numerous stage plays (including two by Shakespeare); the Norman aristocracy in Sir Walter Scotts Ivanhoe,; and Prince John along with the Sherriff of Nottingham in Howard Pyles 1883 novel The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottingham Shire.

No one could have predicted that the great outlaw of English folklore would come up against Joseph McCarthy. Yet that is exactly what happened in the fall of 1953, when a Mrs. Thomas J. White called for the purge of any text mentioning Robin Hood in all Indiana schools and libraries. White the chair of the Indiana Textbook Committee somehow equated Hoods ethic of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor as textbook communism.

There is a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood, she told the state school authorities. They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. Thats the Communist line. Its just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.

Laughable I know. Except at the time the United States was at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Telling White she was crazy or even disagreeing with her was a great way to find ones name on a list of subversives, which typically ended in the loss of ones job. Family, friends and neighbors would be investigated as well, with serious consequences awaiting those not in step with this political agenda of fear and repression.

A handful of Indiana University at Bloomington didnt care. They felt it ridiculous and morally repugnant to equate Robin Hood with communism. Not only does the story predate the origins of communist thought by centuries, but it has nothing to do with the ideology at all. All versions of the story are about the misconduct of the privileged. There is no hint of the workers paradise promised by Marx and Engels. If anything Robin Hood would be the hero of the oppressed living in a communist country.

So the students began what history would call the Green Feather Movement. After gathering thousands of feathers from Indiana poultry farms, they went around to all campus classrooms and tacked a feather on each bulletin board (after they had dipped each one in green dye). They had white buttons with green feathers made, and sent these out to universities all over the United States. Green Feather movements took hold at Illinois State University, Purdue, and Harvard.

This story quickly made it across the Atlantic, where the real Sheriff of Nottingham (sadly reduced from a medieval arch villain to head of courtroom security) chimed in: Why Robin Hood is no Communist, he told reporters. Although if were alive today, wed probably call him a gangster. It even made its way to Russia, where the Soviets not known for their sense of humor laughed at the notion.

No one was laughing back in Indiana, where the F.B.I. began surveillance of Green Feather members. A file was created for each student involved, with agents set to infiltrate this most subversive of causes.

And then it all became moot. The Indiana State School Administration voted against Whites recommendation, and any and all versions of Robin Hood remained in the states schools and libraries. This was quickly followed by Joseph McCarthys censure by the U.S. Senate, the beginning of the end of his reign of domestic terror.

No man in all merry England shall be my master, Robin Hood famously said to the Sheriff of Nottingham. Neither will a mid-20th century Hoosier woman.

Mike Selby is Information Services Librarian at the Cranbrook Public Library

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BookNotes: The un-American and communistical Robin Hood - Cranbrook Townsman

The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) has recently announced that it will hold three major meetings in Turkey's three biggest cities, Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir. Turkey's communists have called on the working people of Turkey to attend the gatherings "calling for hope, organizing, celebrating to win 2020."

The major event in Izmir will be held December 21, in Istanbul on December 22 and in Ankara on January 4.

In its statement calling for the events, under the slogan "To win 2020" (2020' yi kazanmak iin),TKP said "We will change this country we love, we are determined."

The full statement is as follows:

People have to work for a pittance. They are dismissed without compensation pays.Our forests are being destroyed. The prices ofelectricity, natural gas, water, public transportation areconstantly rising.Education and health systems arecollapsed.The most basic human rights are suspended.Our women are being killed. Our children are being raped.

Of course, we do not want to live in such a country. We do not want and we arenot going anywhere!

We will change this country we love, we are determined.

Nobody is going to touch women, children. We will not leave nature and our historical heritage at the mercy of corporations who see nothing but money in them. Education and health services will be provided equally and free for all and our schools will be in control of reason and science, not of dark minds and bigotry. Basic requirements such as heating, housing, and water will be provided free of charge. Since no one can exploit the workers, everyone will live humanely. Everyone will be employed. Our industry and agriculture will be re-planned in line with the interests of the country and society. An egalitarian and emancipatory order will be established.

For this, we are thrusting out our friendly hand. To share our words, our songs, our hearts, and our minds, to share our goal of a bright future for Turkey...

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"To win 2020": Communist Party of Turkey to hold gatherings in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir - In Defense of Communism