Archive for the ‘Communism’ Category

Gender Ideology Is More Dangerous than Communism, Says Bishop – Breitbart News

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

Marek Jdraszewski, the new Archbishop of Krakow, said belief in the interchangeability of male and female, and trans ideology, was a fundamental denial of reality and absurd from a scientific point of view.

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

The archbishop, whose diocese was once held by Pope John Paul II, told Catholic News Agency that Pope Francis had emphasised to him in a meeting the danger of gender ideology because it breaks with the anthropological vision of what the man [is] according[to] the work of the Creator God.

God created the man as male and female, while gender ideology does everything possible to cancel differences between man and woman, the archbishop said.

This is absurd from a biological point of view, and it does not deal just with the human being: gender ideology has dramatic consequences in social life and in current culture.

We cannot be open to this ideology, that is profoundly against God the Creator and against everything Christ himself taught us, he said.

His comments come less than a month after another Catholic bishop, Cardinal Antonio Caizares, slammed gender theory as a denial of reason that undermines the traditional family, which in turn leads to social problems such as juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, prostitution and violence against women.

In a statement released on the feast of the Epiphany, the cardinal said: We must fight for human dignity and against every type of discrimination, but denying biological differences between men and women is not a solution.

He had previously described gender ideology as the most insidious and destructive ideology in all history.

An LGBT group filed hate speech charges against him last year, accusing him of using words that were full of hatred, homophobic and sexism, and incite hatred against those who do not fit into the archaic models defended by the Catholic hierarchy.

The charges were dismissed just days later.

View original post here:
Gender Ideology Is More Dangerous than Communism, Says Bishop - Breitbart News

Bulgarian right-wing parties mark day of commemorating victims of communism – The Sofia Globe

Members of Boiko Borissovs GERB party and of the centre-right Reformist Bloc coalition held separate wreath-laying ceremonies in central Sofia on February 1, the day of remembrance of the victims of the countrys communist regime. The day also was marked by a special statement by former justice minister Hristo Ivanovs Yes Bulgaria party.

In a brief statement marking the day, released in mid-afternoon, Bulgarian head of state President Roumen Radev said that in the countrys history, there were still many open wounds and unclosed pages.

As head of state, I share the conviction that only together, telling the whole truth and without trading in the past, can we overcome the divisions in our society. Every innocent victim deserves our respect, Radev said.

In 2011, the then-government headed by Boiko Borissov voted February 1 as the day of commemoration of the victims of communism, acting on a proposal put forward by former presidents Zhelyu Zhelev and Petar Stoyanov, at the suggestion of former political exile Dimi Panitza.

The February 1 date was chosen because it is the anniversary of the 1945 killing of 147 people, including Prince Kiril, three former prime ministers, military generals and MPs, following the death sentences handed to them by a communist Peoples Court.

That Peoples Court followed large-scale extra-judicial killings of people, from local mayors to priests to police chiefs, journalists and others, at the time of the communist takeover of Bulgaria.

In the course of the Peoples Court process, from December 1944 to April 1945, a total of 12 special courts operated. More than 28 600 Bulgarians were arrested, 11 122 were put on trial, and a reported 9155 were sentenced, 2618 of them to death, while 1126 were given life sentences and others were imprisoned from one to 20 years.

The ensuing years did not see an end to repression, as large numbers of Bulgarians were forced into labour camps or otherwise internally displaced.

Radevs predecessor as President, RossenPlevneliev, who after winning election on the ticket of Boiko Borissovs centre-right GERB party was in office from 2012 to January 2017, participated over the years in wreath-laying ceremonies at commemorative events for the victims and also issued a number of statements on the issue, not only on February 1 but on other occasions, such as the commemoration of victims at the political prison camp at Belene.

Speaking at the first commemoration that he attended as head of state, in February 2012, Plevneliev said that the Peoples Court had become a symbol of the repression of the Bulgarian people.

At that ceremony, he said that the 20th century was marked by ideologically-motivated political violence, of which millions of European citizens became the victims. The difference is that in Europe the victims of this violence are remembered and revered, while in this country you still hear the calls to forget the past, Plevneliev said.

In the years since the November 1989 fall of Bulgarias communist regime, dealing with the past has been a keenly-contested issue between centre- and right-wing political forces that took on the mantle of anti-communism, and socialist politicians who have an entirely different view of the countrys communist past.

An act of Parliament approved by Bulgarias National Assembly in April 2000 deemed the communist regime and the Bulgarian Communist Party criminal. Sixteen years later, a group of centre-right MPs in the now-departed 43rd National Assembly tabled legislation providing for the outlawing and removal from public display of communist symbols, legislation that got first-reading stage approval by the time Parliament was dissolved to make way for early elections.

Attempts at lustration of former senior communist party office-bearers in the early decades of Bulgarias transition to democracy were struck down by the Constitutional Court.

In October 2016, the Constitutional Court nullified legislation approved a few months earlier by the National Assembly that removed the statute of limitations on serious crimes committed under the communist regime.

The Dossier Commission, established by statute at the end of 2006 to identify people in various walks of public life who worked for the communist-era secret services State Security and the Peoples Army military intelligence, has publicly disclosed the identities of more than 12 000 agents and collaborators. This disclosure is, by the same constitutional principles that forbid lustration and enshrine the freedom to pursue a profession, no bar to continuing in public life.

(Main photo: Members of the GERB delegation at the Sofia monument to the victims of communism)

/Politics

comments

More here:
Bulgarian right-wing parties mark day of commemorating victims of communism - The Sofia Globe

Romanians Flood Streets as Cabinet Defies Protests Over Pardons – Bloomberg

A demonstration against decrees to pardon corrupt politicians and decriminalise other offences, on Jan. 29.

Romanias president urged the government to reverse a surprise decision to quashcorruption investigations into officials andannul some other convictions after the measures drew thousands of protesters into the streets of major cities.

About 12,000 people ralliedin freezing temperatures late Tuesday in Bucharest,demanding the government step down. At least 8,000 gathered elsewhere in the eastern European nation. The cabinet earlier backed proposals that had sparked the biggest protests since the fall of communism.Some of the changes require parliamentary approval, while others have already been published in the official journal.

This damages the judiciary and breaches its independence,President Klaus Iohannis said Wednesday, after meeting members of the Superior Council of Magistrates, which monitors the courts and is challenging the governments measures. The only option I wont accept is doing nothing about it. We must make a stand at an institutional level.

The most important business stories of the day.

Get Bloomberg's daily newsletter.

More than 1,000 demonstrators remainedin Bucharest on Wednesday, with further demonstrations planned for the evening. The turmoil sent the leu 1.2 percent weaker, heading to the biggest decline in more than 3 1/2 years and more than erasing its 2017 gain against the euro.

Concerns have arisenin other parts of the region that democracy is under threat. The EU has reprimanded Poland and Hungary for state encroachment on thejudiciary and the media. The government in Warsaw backed away from plans to tighten abortion rules after mass protests. European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker criticized Romanias actions on Wednesday.

The fight against corruption needs to be advanced, not undone, Juncker said in a statement. Were following the latest developments in Romania with great concern.

The government says its trying to relieve overcrowded prisons, where conditions have led to cases being filed with the European Court for Human Rights.I took into account all the requests of the people and amended the bills, Justice Minister Florin Iordache said Wednesday. He said he stands-by his plan, despite the protests.

If the pardons legislation is approved, prisoners serving sentences shorter than five years --excluding rapists and multiple offenders -- will befreed, according to Iordache. A separate emergency decree decriminalized abuse of public office for offenses concerning less than 200,000 lei ($48,000) of damages.

Anti-graft prosecutors, whove locked up hundreds of corrupt officials in a four-year clampdown, said Wednesday that theyre currently working on more than 2,000abuse-of-office cases. In the past two years alone, theyve sent more than 1,000 people to trial, seeking to recover damages in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion).

Romania ranks fourth-worst for graft in the EU, according to Berlin-based Transparency International. Social Democratic leader Liviu Dragnea is serving a two-year suspended sentence for electoral fraud and faces anotherabuse-of-office probe in which he denies wrongdoing.

Continued here:
Romanians Flood Streets as Cabinet Defies Protests Over Pardons - Bloomberg

How the U.S. used Soviet-style land reforms to counter communism … – Russia Beyond the Headlines

Wolf Ladejinsky, an economist and agriculturalist who fled the Soviet Union in 1921, helped Japan and Taiwan implement major agricultural reforms that led to the countries becoming completely self-sufficient in food production. These reforms also ensured that these countries stayed largely capitalistic.

Facebook

Pinterest

WhatsApp

Major land reforms were implemented in Japan after World War II. The above picture shows rice farmers in Kochi in 1955. Source: Getty Images

Over the lifespan of the Soviet Union, several dissidents and refugees reached positions of eminence in the United States. However, few of these former Soviet citizens ever managed to implement communist-inspired policies to counter communism itself. This is where Wolf Issac Ladejinsky stood out.

Born in Ukraine (which was then a part of the Russian Empire) to a reasonably wealthy family in 1899, Ladejinsky lived a comfortable life until the Bolshevik Revolution, when his fathers businesses were expropriated by the government.

He fled the country and entered the U.S. as a refugee in 1922. Quickly learning English, Ladejinsky enrolled in Columbia University, where he earned a BA and then did a graduate degree in economics.

His publications on the collectivization of agriculture gave the world a rare Russian perspective into the policies that were taking place at that time, Vikas Chandran, a former agriculture specialist at the World Bank told RBTH.

His subsequent works and policies were greatly influenced by this one aspect of the Soviet Union, although he almost made it a life mission to stop the spread of communism.

In 1935, Ladejinsky joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture, choosing to focus on foreign agricultural issues. He continued to study the Soviet model, but also paid attention to agriculture in Asia, particularly Japan, India and British Malaya (which includes Singapore and the modern-day peninsular Malaysia).

He increasingly saw land distribution and redistribution as the key to political stability, Ben Stavis, Director, Asian Studies Program at Temple University, wrote in a paper.

He had seen the power of the Bolshevik slogan, peace, land, bread.He gauged that if more peasants owned their own land, communism would lose much of its appeal. Land ownership was profoundly political and land reform could be an anti-communist tool.

In his pre-World War II writings, Ladejinsky stated that Japans occupation of Taiwan and certain parts of Northeastern China were largely on account of land hunger created by an existing feudal system in the country.

In 1945, he joined the staff of General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in post-war Japan. He advocated a peaceful redistribution of land in the war-ravaged country.

Under the Ladejinsky-MacArthur land reforms, more than 5 million acres were taken from large landholders and sold to former tenants.

There was no violence or element of direct force in this, unlike in the USSR of the 1920s and 30s, Chandran said. This has a huge impact on the lives of millions of farmers in Japan. Here, a capitalistic country managed an essentially socialist measure and kept the weaker sections of society from needing assistance from communists.

Stavis attributed the smooth transition to the fact that the landlords could not organize private armies and resist the policies of the occupation forces.

The farmers who received the distributed land formed the bedrock of support for Japans Liberal Democratic Policy. The combination of political stability and a hard working farmer community helped Japan become an agricultural powerhouse.

As farmers, they were highly motivated to invest in agriculture and expand production, Stavis wrote. Japan's agriculture productivity has shown solid growth over the decades.

At the closing stages of the Chinese Civil War, Ladejinsky tried to help the Chinese Nationalists hurriedly implement land reforms but it was too late.

He moved to Taiwan and introduced the policies on the island. The authorities on the island welcome the idea of implementing the land reforms since it would weaken the rural power structure, which was a potential obstacle for the Nationalists.

As in Japan, the land reform in Taiwan was very successful, Stavis wrote. It created a class of small scale farmers, with real incentives to expand farm production. This class was inherently conservative and contributed to the social and political stability of Taiwan.

Both in Japan and Taiwan, the landlords were given industrial bonds and this helped both countries rapidly industrialize.

Later in his career, Ladejinsky met with lesser degrees of success in India and other Asian countries.

He spent most of the last decade of his life in India as a World Bank consultant. Ladejinsky grew increasingly critical as the Indian Government's grand proposals for land reform became weakened by political convenience and competing priorities, according to a New York Times reportwritten after his death in 1975.

Until the peasantry begins to vote in its own interest, the chances are that integrated agrarian reforms in this part of the world by due process of law will be almost impossible Lajedinsky wrote in 1971.

More than five decades after his death, the very process of land reforms still evokes strong emotions in Asia. However, his flexible and calculated approach in the continent helped the U.S. stop the spread of communism.

The fact that Lajedinsky was born in the Soviet Union and advocated land reforms and helping the rural poor made him a suspected communist in the eyes of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Despite being an advocate against communism, Lajedinsky lost his U.S. government job in 1954. A year later, he was reinstated by Dwight Eisenhower administration, which admitted that a mistake had been made.

Original post:
How the U.S. used Soviet-style land reforms to counter communism ... - Russia Beyond the Headlines

Institute says Poland’s Walesa collaborated with communist secret police – Reuters

WARSAW Poland's government-affiliated history institute said on Tuesday it had new evidence that Lech Walesa, who led protests and strikes that shook communist rule in the 1980s, had been a paid informant for the secret police in the 1970s.

A lawyer for Walesa, whose leadership of the Solidarity trade union contributed to the fall of communism throughout eastern Europe, said the evidence could be faulty and asked to question the assessors.

The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) said a handwriting study had proved the authenticity of documents suggesting that Walesa, who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize and became Polish president, had collaborated with communist rulers.

It said he had provided at least 29 reports signed "Bolek", a codename long ascribed to Walesa, but did not say what they contained.

"There is no doubt," investigator Andrzej Pozorski told a news conference. "A handwritten agreement to collaborate with the Security Police from Dec. 21, 1970, was written in its entirety by Lech Walesa."

Pictures of the moustachioed former electrician being borne aloft by workers occupying the Gdansk shipyards became an inspiration for anti-communist movements across the Soviet bloc.

Walesa, now 73, has acknowledged once signing a commitment to inform, but he insists he never fulfilled it, and a special court exonerated him in 2000.

The issue has flared up again since the conservative, nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, also a former anti-communist activist who fell out with Walesa in the 1990s, won power in 2015.

The PiS argues that Poland lost sight of its Catholic national identity and of social justice in the transition to democracy and eventual membership of the European Union.

Any suggestion that Poland remained under communist influence despite ending totalitarian rule in 1989 - notably that Walesa might have been controlled by former secret police as president in 1990-95 - strengthens the PiS narrative.

HISTORY BOOKS

"We don't want to remove Walesa from history books," IPN head Jaroslaw Szarek told reporters. "What changes is how he can be evaluated."

"Starting today, we can ask a new question: ... to what extent Lech Walesa's collaboration in the early 1970s determined his subsequent decisions ... in the 1980s and after 1989. This question remains open."

Pozorski said the IPN, set up in 1998 to investigate crimes "against the Polish nation", had reviewed 17 cash receipts and concluded they were written by Walesa.

Walesa's legal representative, Jan Widacki, said the examination did not amount to scientific evidence and asked to question the assessors.

"Walesa's handwriting today is not Walesa's handwriting from the '70s when he was a simple laborer," he told the public television channel TVP Info.

The documents surfaced last year at the house of a late communist interior minister.

The PiS campaigned in 2015 on a promise to help the poor, accusing past rulers of abandoning a vast number of working Poles when they instituted painful free-market reforms.

Walesa's defenders say that, whatever the authenticity of the documents, they cannot undermine his merits in leading efforts to shake off communist rule.

"His is a legend of a man who isn't born a leader but becomes one," historian Jan Skorzynski told the liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza. "A man who, despite his weakness, could rise again and lead a movement. Perhaps his experience in the 1970s made him into such an effective leader during the 1980 strike."

Throughout post-Soviet Europe, historians have warned that communist-era secret police files are hard to interpret, because documents were sometimes falsified and witnesses coerced.

Historians have said Poland's communist government tried to dissuade the Nobel committee from awarding the Peace Prize to Walesa by offering falsified documents that he had collaborated when he led Solidarity between 1978 and 1981.

(Additional reporting by Marcin Goettig; Writing by Lidia Kelly and Justyna Pawlak; editing by Ralph Boulton)

WASHINGTON Nationals from the seven Muslim-majority countries temporarily blocked from entering the United States by President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration may not be granted admission any time soon, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said on Tuesday.

PARIS French police searched presidential candidate Francois Fillon's office in parliament on Tuesday as an inquiry into alleged fake work by his wife threatened his campaign and party leaders began to consider a 'Plan B' without him.

BAGHDAD The next round of United Nations-based peace talks on Syria have been scheduled for February 20, British ambassador to the United Nations Matthew Rycroft said on Tuesday.

Read the original here:
Institute says Poland's Walesa collaborated with communist secret police - Reuters