November 9th marked the end of an era. It should be world-wide day of celebration.

by Rod Williams - Saturday will come and go with almost no mention that that day was the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  It is a shame. November 9th should be a National holiday. Or better yet, it should be a worldwide holiday. It should rival a combination of New Years’ Eve and the 4th of July. There should be concerts, parades, dancing in the street, Champagne toast, ringing of church bells, and fire works.

On November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the world changed forever. As the world watched, we did not know if Russia would send in troops to put down the rebellion or not. We did not know if East German guards would fire on their fellow citizens. In 1958 an uprising in Hungary was crushed. In 1968 the Czech rebellion was likewise suppressed. As we watched in 1989 it was hard to believe that the East German rebellion would end differently, but there was reason to hope.

There was reason to believe that there were few true believers in Communism left behind the Iron curtain. Gorbachev, to save Communism, had launched Perestroika and Glasnost, which had not saved Communism but sealed its fate. The Soviets had been forced to realize that they could not outspend the west in the arms race. The Solidarity union movement had sprung up in Poland and not been crushed and Catholicism had a Polish pope who was encouraging the Catholics behind the Iron Curtain to keep the faith, and America had a president who said his goal was not to co-exist with Communism but to defeat it. The West was more confident and the East seemed exhausted.

With modern communications and contact between the captive peoples of the East and the free people of the West, Communist governments could no longer convince their people that Communism was a superior way to organize society. And, for the first time, attempts to spread Communism had failed. From the tiny island of Granada, to Nicaragua, to Afghanistan, attempts at expansion had met with failure. When the demonstrators in East Germany began chipping away at the wall, the guards did not fire, the Soviets did not send in tanks and the walls came tumbling down.

It would still be a couple more years before the other Communist dominoes fell, but one by one they did, except for the two dysfunctional states of North Korea and Cuba. China did not fall, but morphed into a state that Marx or Mao would not recognize. It is only nominally communist. China became a mixed economy with an repressive authoritarian one-party government and it is now flexing its muscle and threatening its neighbors, but it is not spreading an ideology to change the world.

From the time of the establishment of the first Communist state in Russia in 1917, Communism had steadily grown taking root in country after county until by the time of the fall of the Berlin wall 34% of the worlds populations lived under Communist domination. And by peaceful means, Communism was gaining ground in much of the west with “Euro-communism” gaining acceptance and becoming parties in coalition governments.

For more than seventy years, freedom had been on the defensive and Communism had been ascending. During that time, approximately 100 million people were killed with a brutal efficiency. Approximately 65 million were killed in China under Mao Zedong, 25 million in Leninist and Stalinist Russia, 2 million in Cambodia, and millions more in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. This was accomplished by mass murders, planned famines, working people to death in labor camps, and other ruthless methods. From the thousands of Cossacks slaughtered on the orders of Lenin to the victims of Mao’s “land reform” the totals mounted. In addition to the millions of deaths, many more millions spend part of their lives in prison in the Gulag of Russia and the reeducation camps of Vietnam and China. Those who never spend part of their life in real prisons, lived in societies with secret police, enforced conformity, thought control, fear, scarcity, and everyone spying on everyone else.

While the world looked with horror on the approximate 11 million victims of Hitler’s Europe, for some reason less attentions has been paid to the 100 million victims of Communist tyranny. While the Nazi era lasted for only 11 years, the Communist terror began in 1917 and continues to this day. The story would be complete if the last Communist regime fell, but the fall of the Berlin Wall is a landmark event. By the fall of the wall, it was clear that Communism was not the wave of the future and that freedom would survive in the world.

Not only would freedom survive in the world, but the world itself would survive. It is easy to forget what a dangerous place the world was on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The world's nuclear stockpiles had grown to 70,000 warheads, with an average destructive power about 20 times that of the weapons that were dropped on Japan. One deranged colonel, one failure of a radar system, or one misreading of intentions could have led to events that destroyed the world. We were one blink away from destruction of life on earth. If there is any event in the history of world worthy of celebrating, it should be the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Top Stories

A Season of Giving

This is the time of the year when I look at my giving for the year and make end of year gifts to organizations and causes I support.  I do not belong to a church so I do not tithe or regularly support a church like many people do.  Throughout the year I give to various causes but at the end of the year I take stock of my giving and make most of my donations.

My giving includes support for political causes in which I believe and to good candidates running for office.  Some may think that political contribution are a separate category of giving than charitable causes but I do not agree.  I fear for our country and want to preserve liberty, promote limited government, promote good government, promote justice, protect private property and promote a free market economy.  I want America to remain a unique country.  I do not want our nation to become a "normal" European-type social welfare state. America has been the arsenal of Democracy and the leader of the free world. We are the essential country both in power to do good and as an example of what can be.

There are evil forces in the world.  It is easy to forget how the whole world was on the bring of a nuclear Armageddon at the end of the cold war and how half of the world's population was under communist domination and it is easy to forget the 100 million victims of communism.  While Communism is no longer the primary threat freedom faces at this time, the views that made communism so seductive are alive and well.  People are often ready to follow an ideology that promises to fix everything and they are willing to sacrifice their freedom for an idealistic utopian promise of a better tomorrow.

In my view, resisting tyranny and promoting freedom are every bit as important as finding a cure for a disease or feeding the hungry. We also, however, have a moral obligation, I believe, to help those in need.  I do not think this is a collective obligation. I don't think one gains any merits when the government robs you of your earnings and gives it to someone else. The fact that you are taxed does not satisfy the obligation to be charitable.

If you examine your life and have been blessed and do not give, please consider doing so.  It is so easy to simply not care and not share.  I find that I am blessed when I give. Also, giving makes one more sensitive to the cause to which they give and more vested in results. One has to follow their own heart and where I choose to give, may not be the same place you choose to give but below are some of the organizations I find to be worthy of my support. If you are looking for a place to give where your money will be put to good use, I urge you to consider contributing to the following organizations.

Nashville Rescue Mission is an organization with which we are all familiar.  They are the primary
agency serving Nashville's homeless. They feed them, provide shelter, and provide case management attempting to get people employed and off the street.  They are a faith-based organization and do not receive government funding. The Nashville Rescue Mission saves lives and helps the most unfortunate of our city.

The Beacon Center of Tennessee is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, and independent organization dedicated to providing expert empirical research and timely free market solutions to public policy issues in Tennessee. They have fought for elimination of barriers to the right to earn a living. In the days before Uber and Lyft, when Nashville tried to harass and regulate out of existence a ride-sharing company, Beacon came to the defense of the company. Beacon has successfully pushed for bold reforms in education, healthcare, economic regulation, and tax policy, among many others. They also investigate and expose government waste.

Institute for Justice fights for economic liberty including opposing unreasonable licensing laws that serve to protect certain service industries from competition. They were active in Nashville in the past when they opposed the city's efforts to shut down an early pioneer in alternative transportation.  The city tried to force all providers of ride-sharing services similar to Uber or Lyft to charge a minimum fee of $40 per trip among other measure designed to stamp out alternative transportation and to protect the taxi interest. IJ also was active in Nashville in protecting the rights of a small business owner by the name of Joy Ford when the city wanted to take her music business office and sell the property to a big developer. Currently, IJ is working with The Beacon Center to challenge the city's prohibition against home-based businesses.  Metro's ban makes illegal home recording studios and music teachers giving piano lessens in their home and even a one-chair hair salon. The enforcement of the ban is arbitrary. IJ has also been active in fighting civil forfeiture in which the government may seize one's property and to regain the property the owner must prove he is not engaged in criminal activity.

Judicial Watch uses the open records or freedom of information laws to investigate and uncover misconduct by government officials and litigates to hold politicians and public officials accountable who engage in corrupt activities. They also fight for fair and honest elections and defend voter ID laws and fight illegal sanctuary policies.

Tennessee Parks & Greenways Foundation  is a nonprofit land trust dedicated to protecting

and conserving Tennessee’s natural treasures. It is the oldest accredited, statewide land trust in Tennessee. Through collaboration with members, private landowners, local municipalities, and state and federal agencies, they work to create parks, establish wildlife corridors, expand existing protected public lands, and enhance public recreation opportunities.  Some of the most endangered and beautiful spots in Tennessee have been saved and made publicly accessible due to the work of this organization. 

 Tennessee Eagle Forum. The mission of TEF is "to enable conservative and pro-family men and women to participate in the process of self-government and public-policy making so that America will continue to be a land of individual liberty, respect for family integrity, public and private virtue, and private enterprise."  The organization is highly effective and has a tireless leader in Bobbie Patray.

Victim of Communism Memorial Foundation.  The Berlin Wall fell, but communism didn’t. One

hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution, one fifth of the world’s population still lives under single-party communist regimes in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Communist regimes commit the worst and widest-scale human rights abuses on the planet. Communism promises to make everyone equal, but delivers radical inequality. Every time it’s tried, it ends in economic collapse or a police state. From the famines, purges, and gulags of Soviet Russia to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge—from the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre to the Castro regime’s 2012 murder of Oswaldo Payá—communists have killed more than 100 million people. Countless more suffered and suffer still. Unfortunately, many are unaware of the record of communism and an entire generation of Americans is open to collectivist ideas because they don’t know the truth. This foundations tries to keep the memory of the evils of communism alive.

The Alzheimer Association  advances research to end Alzheimer's and dementia while enhancing

care for those living with the disease. I support this organization because my wife has been living with dementia for at least 16 years. Misdiagnosed as having Alzheimer's in 2003 it was not until sometime in 2015 that she was correctly diagnosed as having a different condition. By the time the she was properly diagnosed and treated, the brain damage was advanced and not reversible. Advances in diagnosing and treating dementia would have made a big difference in Louella's life and in my life as her caregiver.

.

Top Stories

November 9th marked the end of an era. It should be world-wide day of celebration.

Yesterday came and went with almost no mention that that day was the 28th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  It is a shame. November 9th should be a National holiday. Or better yet, it should be a worldwide holiday. It should rival a combination of New Years’ Eve and the 4th of July. There should be concerts, dancing in the street, Champagne toast, ringing of church bells, and fire works.

On November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the world changed forever. As the world watched, we did not know if Russia would send in troops to put down the rebellion or not. We did not know if East German guards would fire on their fellow citizens. In 1958 an uprising in Hungary was crushed. In 1968 the Czech rebellion was likewise suppressed. As we watched in 1989 it was hard to believe that the East German rebellion would end differently, but there was reason to hope.

There was reason to believe that there were few true believers in Communism left behind the Iron curtain. Gorbachev, to save Communism, had launched Perestroika and Glasnost, which had not saved Communism but sealed its fate. The Soviets had been forced to realize that they could not outspend the west in the arms race. The Solidarity union movement had sprung up in Poland and not been crushed and Catholicism had a Polish pope who was encouraging the Catholics behind the Iron Curtain to keep the faith, and America had a president who said his goal was not to co-exist with Communism but to defeat it. The West was more confident and the East seemed exhausted.

With modern communications and contact between the captive peoples of the East and the free people of the West, Communist governments could no longer convince their people that Communism was a superior way to organize society. And, for the first time, attempts to spread Communism had failed. From the tiny island of Granada, to Nicaragua, to Afghanistan, attempts at expansion had met with failure. When the demonstrators in East Germany began chipping away at the wall, the guards did not fire, the Soviets did not send in tanks and the walls came tumbling down.

It would still be a couple more years before the other Communist dominoes fell, but one by one they did, except for the two dysfunctional teetering states of North Korea and Cuba. China did not fall, but morphed into a state that Marx or Mao would not recognize. It is only nominally communist. China became a mixed economy with an repressive authoritarian one-party government that daily continues to change.

From the time of the establishment of the first Communist state in Russia in 1917, Communism had steadily grown taking country by county until by the time of the fall of the Berlin wall 34% of the worlds populations lived under Communist domination. And by peaceful means, Communism was gaining ground in much of the west with “Euro-communism” gaining acceptance and becoming parties in coalition governments. For more than seventy years, freedom had been on the defensive and Communism had been ascending.

During that time, approximately 100 million people were killed with a brutal efficiency. Approximately 65 million were killed in China under Mao Zedong, 25 million in Leninist and Stalinist Russia, 2 million in Cambodia, and millions more in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. This was accomplished by mass murders, planned famines, working people to death in labor camps, and other ruthless methods. From the thousands of Cossacks slaughtered on the orders of Lenin to the victims of Mao’s “land reform” the totals mounted. In addition to the millions of deaths, many more millions spend part of their lives in prison in the Gulag of Russia and the reeducation camps of Vietnam and China. Those who never spend part of their life in real prisons, lived in societies with secret police, enforced conformity, thought control, fear, scarcity, and everyone spying on everyone else.

While the world looked with horror on the approximate 11 million victims of Hitler’s Europe, for some reason less attentions was paid to the 100 million victims of Communist tyranny. While the Nazi era lasted for only 11 years, the Communist terror began in 1917 and continues to this day. The story would be complete if the last Communist regime fell, but the fall of the Berlin Wall is a landmark event. By the fall of the wall, it was clear that Communism was not the wave of the future and that freedom would survive in the world.

Not only would freedom survive in the world, but the world itself would survive. It is easy to forget what a dangerous place the world was on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The world's nuclear stockpiles had grown to 70,000 warheads, with an average destructive power about 20 times that of the weapons that were dropped on Japan. One deranged colonel, one failure of a radar system, or one misreading of intentions could have led to events that destroyed the world. We were one blink away from destruction of life on earth. If there is any event in the history of world worthy of celebrating, it should be the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Top Stories

The Lie That Will Not Die

Gene Wisdom

by Gene Wisdom - Like a bad horror movie the twentieth century gave birth to a monster. We are told it came to us suddenly in the form of a Revolution in Russia. But no, the beast gestated for decades in the minds of those thinkers who also gave us modern liberalism. The evil twin carried the same genes of a focus on economic equality, on the ability to create a utopia here on earth, and more fundamentally in the view that man’s nature is malleable; no, even more—perfectible. In the even earlier—by millenia—promise made to Adam by one who said he had Adam’s best interest at heart. Satan. “I’m from hell, I’m here to help.”

The promise? You shall be as Gods. If possible that would indeed be quite an improvement on man’s nature which eons of evolution have yet to dent.

Jean Jacques Rousseau tickled man’s ears telling him that he was born a noble savage, that the society into which he was born corrupted his soul. If man would but subsume his will to the General Will embodied in the State and eliminate those intermediate associations and influences and obligations he could live the tranquil life. Karl Marx simply gave a different cast to the baleful society; for him, the evil was in the economic arrangements, in exploitation by a powerful class. Still, the evil was not within man’s heart but again “out there” in the world. The goal was the same. General Will became the State, centralized and all powerful.

Lenin went on to weaponize these perversions, the ancient promise. Class warfare became coup d’etat, a sudden taking of power. But to effect the promise, to seal the lie, required a revolution in society, in government. Once power was taken, the real revolution began of overturning society. The intermediate associations were abolished as Rousseau required. Private organizations were eliminated, churches closed, priests imprisoned as in the first Rousseauan experiment, the French Revolution, opponents tortured and eliminated. Individual farms had to be abolished in the government’s absorption of individuals and the economy. Millions died in the ensuing orchestrated famine. To remake man, millions had to die. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, Lenin said. Millions.

And the millions multiplied. By the count of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, that number is over 100 million. The bodies piled up. In the USSR, where this nightmare first took form, the number was over 30 million, according to the late scholar Robert Conquest. In China, 65 million. Eastern Europe, Angola, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua. And in North Korea, Cuba, and China, the bodies continue to pile up. For those who doubt China’s place in Communism’s ongoing horrors, you need but read human rights activist Harry Wu’s report on the Chinese laogai prison system.

And these numbers are but the bodies, the lives taken. Communism’s toll, its lie, also counted in the souls and minds destroyed. The horrors of the Soviet Gulag, the ongoing hideousness of the North Korean concentration camps in which over 200,000 are currently imprisoned, Cuba’s political prisons, and the systemic campaign of rapes of German women by the Red Army at the end of World War II are the short list.

In addition to the torment behind its Iron Curtain were the efforts to subvert free countries in the Marxian mandate of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world, unite!”, the infernal version of the Great Commission, except that instead of freeing individual souls, it sought to subjugate peoples behind its barbed wires and guard towers. It began with the Communist International, the Comintern, in a worldwide campaign of subversion. The discipline of world Communist parties is captured in J. Edgar Hoover’s classic, Masters of Deceit. While not remembered as a moral high point it should not be forgotten that Senator McCarthy’s campaign was a response to that effort of subversion and espionage. And in addition to this are the countless numbers who have died fighting to defend against Communism’s attacks. American lives alone in Korea and Vietnam are over one hundred thousand.

President Trump, whom I otherwise am loathe to mention in the same sentence as Ronaldus Maximus, in a very Reaganesque move declared November 7 as National Day for the Victims of Communism. But is Communism a lesson not to be repeated? On that day one hundred years ago Lenin declared war on civilization, giving pallid life to the dream of Rousseau. We’ve long heard the adage from George Santayana that “those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. Unfortunately, given modern liberalism’s spoiled fruit in the West, which is our public education system and the attack on learning and real history, has given us a generation of “millennials”, most of whom in recent polling prefer Communism to free enterprise and liberty. And so, this system that has cost the lives and souls of millions of people, this lie that has had more human cost than centuries of warfare lives in the prison countries of North Korea, Cuba, and China, and in the weakened minds of Western youth.

Gene Wisdom, a retired naval officer, is a lifelong conservative Republican.  He is a native Alabamian, and he and his wife have recently moved from Nashville, where they lived for ten years, to Knoxville. While in Nashville Gene was moderator of the Conservative Fusion Book Club.

Top Stories

Old hatreds made new

by Marion Smith, The Washington Times, August 21, 2017 - Amid the chaos of Charlottesville, two specters from the previous century’s darkest hours have re-emerged. Alongside the well-publicized Nazi symbols on full display during the “Unite the Right” rally, so too were Communist hammers and sickles brandished by the opposing anti-fascist or “Antifa” protesters. Many have rightfully condemned the neo-Nazis and their Ku Klux Klan allies leading Riefenstahl-esque, torchlit processions through our streets, but there has been virtual silence about the neo-Marxists and anarchist comrades hurling bricks and incendiary bombs, all the while refusing to acknowledge communism’s long record of totalitarianism, racism and death.

Lining up against one another in public, clubs and bats in hand, those on the far right and the far left are horrifying replications of our nation’s greatest historical foes. At their respective beginnings in the 1910s and 1930s, both the communists in Russia and the national socialists in Germany comprised tiny minority factions in their countries. But they became the loudest, the best organized and the most violent.

Indeed, 78 years ago this week, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and Joseph Stalin’s USSR co-launched World War II by signing a nonaggression pact. Negotiated by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, their regimes agreed to conquer Europe by dividing it in half. Fascism and communism ignited a conflict that would consume millions of lives by marching shoulder-to-shoulder into battle.

Within days of signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland. Over the next several months, Stalin invaded Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and the other half of beleaguered Poland. For nearly two years, the Nazi SS and Soviet NKVD (predecessor to the equally-dreaded KGB) intimately collaborated. Soviet secret police, for instance, rounded up German Jews who had escaped to the Soviet Union and handed them over to the SS.

Then in 1941, Hitler broke the pact and attacked the Soviet Union. When the war ended, the Nazi regime was finished, but the Soviet empire lived on—sustained by its domination of Eastern Europe. Partisans in the Baltic forests who had fought occupying Nazi forces promptly repositioned their rifles toward the Red Army. And pro-fascist collaborators slotted seamlessly into the Eastern Bloc’s nascent state security apparatuses.

Even as late as the 1980s, most in the West expected that the Soviet Union—despite its obvious weaknesses—would persist indefinitely. However, refugees from Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland and other “captive nations” began organizing protests on Aug. 23, the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, calling it “Black Ribbon Day.” They stressed to the world that Stalin—who was made over by fellow travelers in the West as “Uncle Joe”—was actually an enemy of peace in World War II. They further urged Americans to oppose the Soviet Union, which still controlled much of Central and Eastern Europe.

My Comment: This op-ed can be read in The Washington Times.

I thought President Trumps handling of the Charlottsville violence was tone deaf, insensitive, inarticulate and distracting from advancing his own agenda.  I disagree with the President. I do not think "good people" march under a Nazi flag and shoulder to shoulder with members of the Ku Klux Klan.  I think President Trump picked the wrong time to say something that needed to be said, however.  While "good people" do not march under a Nazi banner, neither do good people march under the banner of the hammer and sickle.  Those who embrace Communism have no moral authority to condemn Nazism. While there may not be moral equivalency between those marching with White nationalist in Charlottsville and those who marched in opposition, there is moral equivalency between Nazism and Communism.

Top Stories

Watch "The Lives of Others," to understand life under a Communist dictatorship.

Communism as a political force and an viable ideology began unraveling twenty-nine years ago this November with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  From the Bolsheviks who murdered their way into power and continuing today with needless famine and persecution in North Korea, more than 100 million people have died victims of an evil ideology. In addition to those who were murdered by Communist regimes, many many more spend part of their lives in the Soviet Gulag or were brutalized, humiliated and "reeducated" by the Communist during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or were imprisoned or exiled in other countries ruled by Communist.

Many many millions more who were not killed or imprisoned lived lives of desperation and fear in repressive regimes, never having known the simplest freedoms that we take for granted. 

Unfortunately many do not know the extent of Communism’s atrocities. While the horrors of Nazism are well known, and should be, Communist regimes around the world exacted a death toll surpassing that of all Nazi and Fascist and authoritarian regimes several times over. 

One of my favorite movies that explains portrays the truth of  life behind the iron curtain is Lives of Others. This movie is powerful and intense without relying on edge-of-your-seat plotting or staging. It is not an over-the-top thriller, yet it is captivating and engaging by simply telling a very human story. The movie tells the story of a Communist secret polices agent who accepts an assignment from his superiors to spy on a playwright. He bugs the apartment, set up surveillance equipment in an attic, and begin reporting on the playwright's daily activities.  Over time he becomes disillusioned with the police state. The film has been praised for its accuracy in reporting what life was actually like in East Germany. The Lives of Others won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won various other international awards. It is available on Netflix. I highly recommend it.

Top Stories