07/29/15

America’s Enemies Are Laughing at Us

Time magazine is out with a colorful and glossy “Inside the New Cuba” special edition, featuring smiling Cuban kids wearing Communist garb on the cover. Page 64 has a photo showing “Cuban fans” holding up “their national flag” at a baseball game. It turns out that the really happy Cubans are those who have been defecting from the island “paradise,” as Time magazine calls the prison camp country.

Credit goes to Christine Rousselle of Townhall.com for covering these defections. They seem to be developing into a regular feature, with Rousselle providing regular updates about additional defections.

So far, eight players from the Cuban men’s field hockey team, four rowers from the Cuban national team, and two members of the Cuban soccer team have defected.

The defections completely undercut the chapter of the special Time magazine issue on Cuba that is titled, “The Big League Next Door,” which speculates that normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba could “stop Cuba’s top talent from fleeing…” This chapter is written by Robert Siegel, senior host of National Public Radio, and Eyder Peralta, an NPR reporter.

Washington Nationals infielder Yunel Escobar defected from Cuba when he was 21. The Washington Post covered his story in a May 7 article, noting:

Escobar’s love of baseball was fueled by television broadcasts and video games, both forbidden in Cuba. He paid to watch MLB games and favorite players such as Alex Rodriguez, Roberto Alomar, Omar Vizquel and fellow Cuban Livan Hernandez on a TV with a hush-hush antenna at a friend’s house. He also grew to love Ken Griffey Jr. because of a video game he played often in secret. A friend had smuggled in a console and charged the equivalent of 50 cents per hour to play.

The entire story is worth reading and there are many touching moments, such as the story of when Escobar spent two days at an immigration detention center in Miami “and kissed the ground when he was released.”

These are the immigrants we should welcome, since they have developed an appreciation of the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. They want to enjoy and celebrate American freedom, not distort and transform the country into a Third World welfare state of cheap labor for corporations and paid-for votes for the Democratic Party.

In the Time magazine version of Cuba, we are told in the section, “Scenes from the Revolution,” that Fidel Castro “promised to clean up the government, restore democracy and civil liberties, and promote social justice.” Nothing is said about whether he fulfilled those promises.

By contrast, we are told that his predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, was a “ruthless dictator” who ran a system characterized by “economic and social inequality and a corrupt government.” The implication is that Castro changed all of that for the better.

A caption on a page of pictures of Cuban cowboys on the communist island informs us that “Before Castro nationalized all farms, almost three quarters of Cuba’s arable lands was owned by fewer than 3,000 individuals and corporations, many of them American, while most farmworkers were renters.” One of the Cuban cowboys proclaims, “It is no longer of Communism or no Communism. It belongs to us.”

You mean communism works after all? That seems to be the message of this special Time magazine Cuba edition.

It’s completely absurd but this is what passes for serious journalism. It reminds me of the old Ronald Reagan joke, reportedly told to Mikhail Gorbachev, about two men walking down a street in Moscow, when one asks, “Is this pure communism? Have we passed through the stage of socialism and reached pure communism? The other replies, “Hell, no. It’s gonna get a lot worse.”

Ben Lewis wrote an article, “Hammer & tickle,” noting that “Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy.”

These days, Oleg Atbashian makes fun of the Marxists and their apologists on a regular basis, on his “People’s Cube” website. One of his latest offerings is the new poster featuring the “Rebel without a gender.” The People’s Cube proclaims, “Che is dead, long live Conchita: a new rebel icon.”

His tribute to the Museum of Communism in Prague is a lot of laughs, as he displays some of the posters from the old communist days, such as the one announcing that communist women would have burnt their bras like their sisters in the West, “if there were any in the shops.”

Another communist poster said: “Sometimes there was no toilet paper in the shops. Luckily there was not much food, either.”

Meanwhile, believe it or not, the comedian Jack Black is being featured in a video campaign from the group Global Zero to sell the Iranian nuclear deal. He previously starred in such films as “Shallow Hal,” “School of Rock,” “Nacho Libre,” and the Kung Fu Panda films.

A comedian as the face of the Iranian nuclear deal? This is where the laughing begins to die down.

The Iranians and their Russian sponsors are the ones laughing at us now.

So are the Cuban Communists.

They may lose some people through defections, but they get an embassy on American soil where they can base their spies and recruit agents inside the U.S. government.

07/22/15

The Media Love Affair with McCain

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

In the fight between Donald Trump and John McCain (R-AZ) over the senator’s military service, the liberal media have taken McCain’s side. But since when did the media get concerned about the noble cause of fighting communism in Vietnam?

Our media, led by CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite, who was then an influential media figure, protested the Vietnam War and prompted the U.S. withdrawal and communist takeover. His FBI file demonstrated Cronkite’s contacts with Soviet officials and how he was used as a dupe by the communists.

More than 58,000 Americans sacrificed and died to save that country from communism.

The liberal media never supported the war against communism in Vietnam. Yet they are now browbeating Trump over avoiding the war through deferments. Our media are full of hypocrites. They don’t admire McCain for fighting in Vietnam. They admire him because he is a “maverick” who frequently takes the liberal line, such as on “comprehensive immigration reform.”

If the liberals in the media are so enamored of McCain’s military service in Vietnam, let them revisit the history of the Vietnam War and express some outrage over the fact that it was a Democratic Congress that cut off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the communist takeover and the genocide in neighboring Cambodia.

What about some critical coverage of Obama’s recent meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the head of Vietnam’s Communist Party? Vietnam is one of the beneficiaries of Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement. If passed, it would benefit Vietnam’s communist rulers.

As we have pointed out, “Interestingly, Obama is trying to sell the agreement as a counter to China’s influence throughout the world. He wants us to believe that China and Vietnam somehow differ on their common objective of achieving world communism at the expense of America’s standing as the leader of what used to be the Free World. Both countries would gladly welcome the U.S. to help pay to accelerate the growth of their socialist economies and expand their markets.”

McCain supports the TPP; Trump does not.

We have pointed out that Vietnam is “a dictatorship with the blood of those Americans on its hands,” a reference to what the communists did to McCain and our soldiers, and “which has no respect for the human rights of its own people.”

A bipartisan congressional letter about Obama’s meeting with the Vietnamese communist reaffirmed this fact. It was signed by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), who represents one of the largest Vietnamese populations outside of Vietnam in the world, in Orange County, California. She said, “I am disappointed that the administration has chosen to host Nguyen Phu Trong, the General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party. There continues to be egregious and systemic human rights abuses in Vietnam, including religious and political persecutions. As an advocate for human rights in Vietnam I cannot ignore the dismal state of freedom of the press and freedom of speech.”

This is precisely what McCain and tens of thousands of other Americans were fighting to prevent.

Yet, McCain issued a statement, saying that he “warmly” welcomed Trong’s “historic trip” to the United States. He added, “This visit demonstrates the growing strength of the U.S.-Vietnam partnership as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the normalization of relations between our countries.”

Why is McCain celebrating a “partnership” with a dictatorship that he and thousands of Americans fought against?

What’s more, McCain says the U.S. “must further ease the prohibition on the sale of lethal military equipment to Vietnam…” Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry had partially lifted a ban on lethal weapons sales to Vietnam in October of 2014.

If our media are so concerned about an American Vietnam veteran being the target of a perceived insult from Trump, why haven’t they put pressure on the Obama administration to clean up Vietnam’s human rights record before going ahead with another agreement to benefit that regime? After all, this is the same regime that captured and tortured Sen. McCain.

The answer is that our media are using the current McCain controversy to damage Trump, who has almost single-handedly made illegal immigration into a national issue. They don’t really care about McCain’s service in Vietnam.

When President Bill Clinton normalized relations with communist Vietnam in 1995, he thanked Senator McCain and then-Senator John Kerry (D-MA) for agreeing with the notion that America had to “move forward on Vietnam.”

What has happened in the meantime?

We pointed out 11 years ago that President Clinton’s lifting of the U.S. trade embargo on Vietnam in 1995 was followed by a bilateral trade agreement. Kerry and McCain supported that, too. The U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam has been consistently rising ever since, to the point where it was $19.6 billion in 2013.

In his statement on Trong’s visit to the United States, McCain said, “Since 1995, annual U.S.-Vietnam trade has increased from less than $500 million to $36 billion last year.” He conveniently ignored the trade deficits that have cost American jobs. For example, the communist regime has been dumping shrimp products into the United States at artificially low prices, and has become the fourth largest shrimp supplier to the U.S. market, even though several shipments have been detected with banned antibiotics.

At the time he extended diplomatic relations, Clinton said, “Whatever we may think about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives. They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people. Today the Vietnamese are independent, and we believe this step will help to extend the reach of freedom in Vietnam and, in so doing, to enable these fine veterans of Vietnam to keep working for that freedom.”

False. The Vietnamese people did not become independent. They became slaves of the communists.

Obama recently met with their slave master. But our media didn’t utter any tears for the victims of communism.

You may also recall that then-Senator Kerry ran a Senate investigation that brought the search for live American POWs from the war to a close. McCain was a member of the Kerry committee.

Since McCain has been in the news for his military service, this should have been a newsworthy topic for our media.

Roger Hall, A POW/MIA researcher, went to court, having sued the CIA for documents on missing or abandoned Vietnam POWs. Hall and many others are convinced that hundreds of American POWs were left behind in Vietnam.

Former Senator Bob Smith (R) of New Hampshire wrote the legislation creating the Senate Select Committee on POWs and MIAs in the early 1990s in order to get the truth released to the public.

“Despite the release of thousands of documents and the testimony of dozens of witnesses, I could not complete the job. Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Select Committee, and Senator John McCain were more interested in establishing diplomatic relations and putting the war behind them than they were about finding the truth about our missing,” said Smith. “I fought them constantly to the point of exhaustion. It was a very sad chapter in American history.”

A YouTube video exposed McCain’s efforts to block access to POW information and examines his alleged cooperation with the North Vietnamese while he was in captivity. Senator Smith is one of those featured in the video.

Why don’t the media remind us of that? We have the answer. They are too busy bashing Trump and trying to look patriotic about the Vietnam War.

06/25/15

Kim Jong Un for President

04/24/15

Muslim Brotherhood Pay-rolled by Clinton Foundation

By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.com

Per the Muslim Brotherhood website:

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is reporting that Gehad El-Haddad, described as “spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood”, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a 2103 case known as “the media trial”.

April 13, 2015 On April 11, 2015, Gehad El-Haddad, spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood, was sentenced to life imprisonment in case 317 for the year 2013 known as “the media trial”.

Fourteen defendants received death sentences while thirty seven including Gehad were sentenced to life in prison. Among the convicted are 15 journalists and spokespersons.

According to the case evidence list (pp. 25 – 26, excerpts attached in Arabic), the evidence against Gehad is that he “conducted three interviews for the New York Times, an American TV channel (PBS), and a Spanish newspaper (Elmundo)”.

In the NYT interview, Gehad said that the MB group came “close to annihilation once under Nasser, but this is worse.” He also added that the crisis “is creating a new tier of youth leaders” and that this “happened at Rabaa.”

El-Mundo published a lengthy interview with Gehad in Spanish in which he said “we remain committed to non-violence and will continue the peaceful struggle to restore democracy.” He also added that he cannot give in to offers that exchange the freedom of the country with personal safety and that he “would rather die for the country he wishes to live under the tyranny of a dictator.”

“I’m a wanted man for saying my opinion and for standing politically in opposition to the coup” these were Gehad’s statements to the PBS. He added “They’re trying to wipe the existent, decapitate the Muslim Brotherhood. And they can’t do that. It’s an idea. You can’t kill an idea”.

Gehad’s family will appeal the verdict.

In August 2013, the GMBDW reported on the arrest of Gehad El-Haddad by Egyptian security forces. At the time, we noted that although we were the first and only Western source known to have reported on El-Haddad’s employment by the Clinton Foundation, mainstream media reports mentioning this employment failed to credit the GMBDW.

Gehad El-Haddad, the the son of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam El-Haddad, was a Senior Adviser on Foreign Affairs to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ‘s Freedom and Justice Party, a position he held since May 2011. His resume also says that he was is a Senior Adviser & Media Spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood as well as a Steering Committee Member of the Brotherhood’s Renaissance (Nahda) Project. Mr Haddad was also the Media Strategist & Official Spokesperson for the presidential campaign of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. Gehad El-Haddad’s resume reports that he was the City Director for the William J. Clinton Foundation from August 2007 – August 2012. Among his duties at the Foundation were representing the Foundation’s Clinton Climate Initiative in Egypt, setting up the foundation’s office in Egypt and managed official registration, and identifying and developing program-based projects & delivery work plans.

*** It came down to Human Abedin, whose own family is deeply steeped in the Brotherhood and Sisterhood movement in Egypt and Qatar.

A senior Muslim Brotherhood operative recently arrested in Egypt worked for years at the William J. Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation has also received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and a foundation that is an Iranian regime front.

The current Egyptian government, which was put in power after the military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, has launched a sweeping crackdown on the Brotherhood and calls it a terrorist organization. One of the senior officials arrested is Gehad (Jihad) el-Haddad.

From 2007 to 2012, el-Haddad was the Egyptian director for the Clinton Foundation. El-Haddad’s father is Essam el-Haddad, a member of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau.

01/14/15

Notorious Red Exploits King Legacy

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Janel Davis of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a “noted scholar, author and veteran civil rights activist” by the name of Angela Davis will deliver the keynote address January 18 at Kennesaw State University’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance. This is the same Angela Davis “who supported the imprisonment of Soviet political dissidents (calling them common criminals), cheered on the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize (formerly the International Stalin Peace Prize) by communist East Germany,” as noted by another paper, the British Telegraph.

The differences reflect the abysmal state of our media today, as compared to a foreign newspaper that conducted some basic research. Janel Davis is obviously a young reporter who has not been trained to properly investigate a subject she is writing about. As a result, she misleads her audience and makes a fool out of herself.

A photograph of Davis shaking hands with the Stalinist East German dictator, Erich Honecker, is not that difficult to find on the Internet.

Davis, a two-time candidate for vice-president on the Communist Party ticket, is getting paid $20,000 by Kennesaw State University for giving a speech. Earlier in her career she beat a murder rap and was a college professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

In a 2012 speech, she spoke of the “planetary euphoria” she felt when Barack Obama was elected president. Davis said Obama’s presidency had resulted in “an upsurge of activism” that would not have taken place “if the Republican candidate had been elected.”

In addition to the International Lenin Peace Prize, she received an honorary degree from the Karl Marx University of Leipzig, East Germany.

The transformation of a communist apologist for the old Soviet Union and East Germany into a “scholar” and “civil rights activist” is on the same level as Davis pretending to be a working class hero while making big bucks on the lecture circuit. Nevertheless, she still talks and acts like a communist true believer and participated in the “Occupy” movement at events in various cities.

Those who believe communism is dead might be surprised to learn that in 2012 she gave a speech calling for “combating anti-communism.” At the same time, she has adopted the cause of radical Islam, declaring “Islamophobia” to be a major threat, the communist People’s World reported.

The paper went on to say that Davis “spoke at length about [the] centrality of the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people to the discontent in the Muslim world,” and challenged the audience to recognize “that Israeli apartheid…is just as bad” as South African apartheid.

Davis concluded her address by saying that “we need peace, justice, equality, and socialism for us all.”

A Google search finds that Davis’s Marxist speeches are being offered for fees that range from $10,000 to $20,000. It looks like Kennesaw, located about 20 miles outside Atlanta, got stuck with the higher rate.

Most of those offering her services as a speaker provide an extreme make-over of her career, in order to mask her decades of serving the interests of the secret police in the Soviet Union and East Germany.

For example, the American Program Bureau calls Davis a “Feminist & Writer,” whose topics include “The Role of Art in Society.”

The Keppler Speakers Bureau calls her a “living legend” who will “recount her experience as one of the country’s most prominent activists for social justice.”

The Lavin Agency calls Davis a “Legendary Human Rights Activist” who is “internationally known for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad.”

The latter claim is most definitely a lie, since Davis was an ardent proponent of the Soviet/East German system of oppression and ignored the victims of communism—some 100 million of them.

Now Davis is claiming the mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King, a man honored by Americans for his commitment to peaceful change. Many young blacks may be duped into believing that Davis is somehow in the same league as Dr. King, as a result of papers like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) sanitizing her career. The Davis speech is sponsored by the Kennesaw State African-American Student Alliance.

Phil Kent’s piece, “AJC Omits KSU Speaker’s Communist Background,” was the first indication that the Davis appearance at Kennesaw was not going to take place without some critical comment. He went into some detail about Davis, even noting that she once told an ACLU meeting that she “believes in the violent overthrow of America’s government.”

But that government is now showering her with student and taxpayer dollars through state universities. It is quite a racket.

Julian March of the Wilmington Star-News reports that Davis is going from Kennesaw to speak on January 20 at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), also as part of a Martin Luther King Jr. event. The article mentions her communist past but quotes Todd McFadden, a UNCW instructor and director of the Upperman African American Cultural Center, as saying “the controversy associated with Davis’ name has faded” over the years.

He says, “Martin Luther King was controversial in his day but obviously is a much more accepted figure. Things like that change.”

One thing that has changed is that we have a media which censors the truth about people like Davis who rip off the system in order to destroy it.

In addition to pocketing tens of thousands of capitalist dollars from colleges and universities, the Angela Davis group called Critical Resistance, notes writer Tina Trent, gets funding from the super capitalist hedge-fund operator George Soros through his Open Society Foundation.

Critical Resistance aims to empty the prisons of the United States, since criminals are considered victims of a capitalist society.

This campaign is one reason why, according to the AJC, Davis has emerged as a “scholar” on the issue of “imprisonment.”

12/29/14

None Dare Call It Treason 50 Years Later

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

I recently asked John A. Stormer, author of the 1964 bestseller, None Dare Call It Treason, if he thought President Barack Obama was a Marxist. “He’s two things,” Stormer told me. “Is he a Marxist or is he a Muslim? He is really involved in both of these things. He’s anti-American.”

Obama’s policies have benefited enemies of the U.S. across the spectrum, from Muslim to Marxist. All of these anti-American forces have made dramatic gains under Obama. This means that the situation is far worse for America than when Stormer wrote his seven-million-copy bestseller.

Stormer’s book was described at the time as an exposé of how the U.S. government was ostensibly “fighting” communism with its right hand, while actually aiding, supporting, and promoting communism with its left. The book was self-published at a time when the U.S. was opposing communism in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, but doing business with countries like the Soviet Union, which were supplying the enemy that was killing American soldiers on the battlefield.

The difference now, as we have seen with Obama’s recognition and bailout of the Castro regime in Cuba, is that the U.S. government doesn’t even pretend to be anti-communist anymore. Obama has made the U.S. into a facilitator of international communism.

Our troubles are compounded by the spectacle of “conservatives” who pretend not to grasp what is going on. Columnist George Will writes at National Review that Cuba is a “geopolitical irrelevancy.” He says, “Cuba’s regime, although totalitarian, no longer matters in international politics.”

Will must have missed Vladimir Putin’s visit to Cuba in July, when he had meetings with brothers Raul and Fidel Castro and participated in a ceremony at the Memorial to the Soviet Internationalist Soldier. It is a tribute to Soviet soldiers who were stationed in Cuba in the early 1960s and died there. Putin forgave most of Cuba’s debt to the former Soviet Union.

Before that, in May, investigative reporter Bill Gertz noted that Cuba and Russia “concluded a security deal” aimed at bolstering “intelligence and military ties” between the two countries.

Will must have missed that dispatch.

But Russia isn’t the only U.S adversary that considers Cuba geopolitically relevant.

Toby Westerman, editor of International News Analysis Today, wrote a 2012 column noting that Communist China regards the island of Cuba as “strategically located for the interception of U.S. military and civilian satellite communications,” and that “China’s spy service also cooperates closely with Havana’s own world-class intelligence services.”

Westerman added, “The value Beijing places upon the information acquired via Havana can be seen in the October 2011 visit to the island by General Guo Boxiong, Vice Chairman of China’s Central Military Commission. Guo’s presence in Cuba underscored that China has a special military commitment in addition to a sizable economic investment in Cuba.”

Considering the damage that is being done to the United States, and the failure of “conservative” columnists such as George Will to recognize it, we are reminded that the title of Stormer’s book came from the famous John Harington quotation: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

But it gets worse.

Just two days after Obama announced his new Cuba policy, Raul Castro received the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Rogozin, during an official visit to Cuba on the occasion of the 12th Session of the Cuba-Russia Intergovernmental Commission.

Will should be advised that all of this is being covered in the English-language version of the official Cuban Communist Party paper Granma. The information is not a national security secret.

The Cuba-Russia Intergovernmental Commission on economic-trade and scientific-technical collaboration held a meeting designed to “advance tasks and objectives established during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Cuba in July…” The objective, according to Granma, is “to realize agreements in order to increase exchanges in diverse spheres” and “address key areas of interest to both countries.”

While Raul Castro’s talk of a “new economic model” in Cuba has been trumpeted far and wide by the U.S. media, his December 20 speech to the “National Assembly of People’s Power” said this does not mean that capitalism will be tolerated. He said the “guidelines” for the new economy make it clear that “The economic system which will prevail in Cuba will continue to be based on the people’s socialist ownership of the fundamental means of production, governed by the socialist principle of distribution, from each according to his/her capacity to each according to his/her contribution.”

He referred to “the irreversibility of socialism in Cuba.”

To understand the strategic significance of Obama’s change in policy toward the dictatorship in Cuba, Castro said he will be participating in the Seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama on April 10-11, 2015. The event is managed by the Organization of American States (OAS), a group that used to be dedicated to promoting democracy in the hemisphere.

How things change.

In January 1962, the OAS was an anti-Communist organization, having established a “Special Consultative Committee on Security Against the Subversive Action of International Communism.” The group declared, “The principles of communism are incompatible with the principles of the inter-American system.”

It passed a resolution declaring, “The present Government of Cuba has identified itself with the principles of Marxist-Leninist ideology, has established a political, economic, and social system based on that doctrine, and accepts military assistance from extra-continental communist powers, including even the threat of military intervention in America on the part of the Soviet Union…”

Nothing has changed over the years, except that Russia has replaced the Soviet Union and international communism has made dramatic gains in the hemisphere.

Another big change, of course, is that the U.S. President is either a Marxist or a Muslim. Take your pick. Perhaps, as Stormer says, anti-American is the best description.

Referring to Republican Senators Rand Paul (KY) and Marco Rubio (FL), Will writes, “As they brawl about Cuba, a geopolitical irrelevancy, neither seems presidential.” But this is the kind of debate that we desperately need to have. It will determine if the U.S. is a force for good or evil in the world. Senator Paul has sided with Obama and Castro. Senator Rubio has come down on the side of freedom.

This debate will not only determine if the Republican Party remains pro-freedom and anti-communist, but whether the United States will stay true to Ronald Reagan’s vision of a world free from communism.

It is troubling, 50 years after the publication of None Dare Call It Treason, that we have to go through this debate all over again—this time with the stakes even higher.

One thing is clear at this point: we need a new generation of conservatives in the media willing to take a stand for freedom, and to conduct a review of the “death of communism.”