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Tag: Communism

  • Tom Brokaw Remembers the Fall of the Berlin Wall on Its 25th Anniversary

    Tom Brokaw was on hand the day the Berlin Wall came down 25 years ago today — the only network news anchor to report live from the scene.

    Brokaw, best known as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 2004, says it was a day when all of the stars aligned.

    “When we went, we had no idea the wall would fall on our watch,” Brokaw told Today‘s Erica Hill, in a report commemorating the anniversary. “It was one of those times in a journalists’ life when everything breaks in the right way.”

    Brokow, who announced in February that he has bone cancer, recounted that no one knew when the wall would come down, but he and his team were prepared just in case.

    “We had no idea the wall would fall on our watch,” Browkaw said.

    Few can forget the meaning of the day that symbolically ended the Cold War, but for younger audiences, Brokow offered an analogy.

    “Think about dividing California in half, and for 45 years the northern half has to live behind a wall like San Quentin, and the southern half can go about being Southern California,” he said. “That’s what they were.”

    Brokow said the feeling of seeing the wall coming down was “absolutely palpable.”

    In Today‘s report, a flashback clip is shown, with a voiceover of Brokow expressing the importance of the year 1989, when America’s fight against Communism was effectively over.

    “I guess I always thought that 1968 would be the most memorable year of my journalistic career. The deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, of course. But 1989, think about what we have witnessed this year, the wall has effectively come down.”

  • Xi Jinping Meets with US; Talk Economy & Security

    When Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the President of the People’s Republic of China, came into office a little over one year ago, he faced several monumental challenges as the leader of the world’s largest and potentially most powerful country. The main issue plaguing Xi was China’s economy, which had gone into quite a slump despite being the world’s second largest. Over the past two years, Xi has made every decision to expand China’s influence and grow its global market – a decision which has been at odds with the intentions and wants of the world’s largest economy, the United States. On Wednesday, Xi Jinping met with several US diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry, at the sixth round of the United States-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) to discuss the ongoing issues between the world’s two economic juggernauts.

    This year marks the 35th year of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the US and China, going back to the Nixon administration. While relations have improved over time, recent decisions by Xi have increased tensions between the US and China.

    Xi has given orders to allow China to become more aggressive in the South Pacific, pushing against US allies such as South Korea and Japan, reaffirming his notion that “The vast Pacific Ocean has ample space to accommodate two great nations.”

    While Xi’s statement may be true, his unilateral decision making (powers granted to him by being both the General Secretary and President of China) has led the US to question the ideas of state sovereignty and the intentions of China in the near future.

    On Tuesday, President Obama released a statement concerning the upcoming S&ED meeting in which he acknowledged the differences between the two nations, but also the need to create some similarities:

    The United States and China will not always see eye-to-eye on every issue. That is to be expected for two nations with different histories and cultures. It also is why we need to build our relationship around common challenges, mutual responsibilities, and shared interests, even while we candidly address our differences.

    President Obama is not attending the S&ED, but Secretary of State Kerry reiterated the President’s message on Wednesday with his opening remarks: “Let me emphasize to you today: The U.S. isn’t seeking to contain China.” Instead, Kerry emphasized that the US is simply seeking to make the South Pacific and China a more stable place, enabling the global market to continue to operate without hinderance or strife.

    At first glance, Xi seemed to agree with Kerry and the US on Wednesday, saying, “A conflict between China and United States will definitely be a disaster for the two countries and the world.” However, Xi would go on to add that “We should respect and treat each other equally, and respect the other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and respect each other’s choice on the path of development,” seemingly hinting at the fact that he thinks the United States and China should stop interfering in each others’ affairs and just let it be.

    With recent comparisons to Mao Zedong’s ideological warfare against his own people and China’s aggressive actions in the South Pacific, the US need be wary of its communications with China in the near future. While China is still currently the world’s second largest economy, it is projected to surpass the United States in the very near future. With increased economic power and its ownership of much of the US economy, any disruption in peaceful relations could end in much more disaster for the US than China.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Kim Yo-Jong, Sister Of North Korean Leader Kim Jong-Un Makes First Official Appearance On Election Day

    Election Day was a family affair for North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Along with his escort of party and military officials, Kim Jong-un brought along his younger sister Kim Yo-jong to the polling station for the socialist nation’s quinquennial elections.

    The state-run television network showed images of Kim Yo-jong trailing her brother’s group en route to the polling station at the capital’s Kim Il-sung University of Politics. Another image showed Kim Yo-jong in the act of casting her ballot.

    This may be Kim Yo-jong’s official debut, but it is not the first time she has been in public with her brother. In 2011, she was present at the funeral of her father and former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, which was televised. Kim Yo-jong has also been seen accompanying her brother during his local and overseas trips.

    Kim Yo-jong, who is believed to be 26 years old, is the youngest sister of the current North Korean dictator and the youngest daughter of the late Kim Jong-il. During her recent appearance, she donned a black suit and skirt, and was listed as a senior government official, although the exact position was not specified.

    In 2012, Kim Yo-jong was seen on television riding a white steed with her aunt and Kim Jong-il’s sister Kim Kyong-hui. The elder female Kim, who has the rank of a four-star general, was very active in North Korean politics before she reportedly fell ill.

    North Korea’s state-run news agency KCNA reported a unanimous victory with zero abstention for Kim Jong-un. The agency claims that “all voters of the constituency participated in the voting process” and that 100 percent of them chose Kim Jong-un. The North Korean ballot contained only one name – Kim Jong-un’s – and voters were required to write down “Yes” or “No” on the paper.

    Image via South China Morning Post

  • Kim Jong Un Gives New Year’s Day Speech

    Kim Jong Un Gives New Year’s Day Speech

    North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un on Wednesday praised the recent purge of “counterrevolutionary” elements from the government, in reference to last month’s execution of his uncle Jang Song Thaek for treason.

    Kim said the party had been united a hundred fold after removing those who were causing faction. In his New Year’s address, Kim said the ruling party was able to detect counterrevolutionary factionists and anti-party dissenters at the opportune time. Following the decisions, “The Party and revolutionary ranks were further consolidated and our single-hearted unity was solidified to the maximum,” Kim said

    Kim further opined that for the country to progress, it needs to be more vigilant in weeding out any sort of alien ideology and called for thorough worker’s ideological education so that party members can think and act in unison with the party’s philosophy.

    The North Korean government is notorious for its dictatorship and the way it has successfully used propaganda to project a picture of a powerful Kim who demands unquestionable loyalty. The purge of Kim’s uncle will likely be used for more propaganda.

    Kim became the country’s ruler in 2011 following the death of his father, King Jong II. He turns 31 next week and experts say the removal of the highest ranking government official may consolidate his power or bring chaos.

    Meanwhile, Kim talked about a number of policy goals for the country including agriculture and the economy. However, the North Korean leader did not make mention of foreign investment or international trade as his father had done. This could mean that North Korea may have to focus on domestic trade.

    Other issues mentioned include U.S. and South Korea’s interference in his country’s nuclear plans. Last month, South Korea warned that a military provocation is a possibility if North Korea does not cease its nuclear ambitions.

    Image via YouTube

  • North Korea Executes Kim Jong-un’s Uncle

    Early Friday morning in North Korea, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA – Korea’s official news outlet) reported that Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong-un’s uncle, was executed.

    The news comes as purges of North Korea’s central governing personnel continue. Kim Jong-un took power nearly 2 years ago following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il. At the time of his ascent, Kim Jong-un was 28 years old and believed by many to be too young and ill-prepared to rule. Fortunately for Jong-un, though, he had many advisers left from the reign of his father to assist along the way.

    One of those mentors was Jang Song-thaek, the husband of Kim Jong-il’s sister, Kim Kyong-Hui, and thus Kim Jong-un’s uncle. Song-thaek was instrumental during Jong-un’s transitional period, a time where Song-thaek’s mentorship and assistance was essential to ensure that Jong-un was able to capture the power necessary to rule such an authoritarian state.

    According to the press release from KCNA, Jang Song-thaek “brought together undesirable forces and formed a faction as the boss of a modern day factional group for a long time and thus committed such hideous crime as attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state.”

    The report goes on to describe Song-thaek as a “traitor”, “despicable political careerist”, “trickster”, “despicable human scum”, and “worse than a dog”.

    Jang Song-thaek was arrested earlier this week on charges of corruption, acts of treachery, drug use, gambling, and womanizing. Jang was brought to trial after “the service personnel and people throughout the country broke into angry shouts that a stern judgment of the revolution should be meted out to the anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional elements.”

    Because North Korea is a communist state with closed borders and media outlets, the truth behind these allegations may never be known. However, many analysts see this recent purge of older political advisers as an attempt for Kim Jong-un to create a generational divide between his own rule and the rule of his father: “Kim is young. He has a long way to go and this was an inevitable step to consolidate power around him with young and fresh generals,” stated Koh You-hwan, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.

    Many political pundits also see this purge as a move of desperation which has come much too soon: “That purge was surprisingly earlier than expected. Kim’s been in power for less than two years and he does not yet have a strong political base in the party. North Korea is likely to be unstable for the time being,” reported Park Chang-kwon, senior research fellow at Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul.

    Fears concerning what will happen next in North Korea are not unwarranted. Earlier this year, Kim Jong-un and North Korea made threats of missile attacks against several countries and toward restarting their nuclear weapons program. These recent rounds of purges could attest to two happenings: 1) Kim Jong-un is facing resistance to his plans and ideas internally and wishes to have those sentiments removed; or 2) Kim Jong-un has become a bit too cocksure early in his rule and wishes to operate based on his own ideas and opinions. Whatever the reason, one can be reasonably certain that North Korea is yet to experience even more uncertainty and instability in the years to come.

    [Image via YouTube]

  • Explosions in North China Caused by Bombs

    Explosions in North China Caused by Bombs

    One person is dead and eight are injured from explosions in China. These blasts happened near office buildings controlled by the Shanxi Communist Party Committee that is located in Taiyuan, China. The explosions began around 7:40 in the morning on Wednesday, local time.

    According to the official Xinhua news agency, “Judging from the scattering of small metal balls, it is suspected that improvised bombs exploded.”

    (image)

    Witnesses claim that seven explosions were heard from what has presently been considered to be homemade bombs. The streets near the area were closed until 10:30 a.m. while police investigated the area. Heavy clouds of smoke remained in the air, and windows to nearby buses had been blown out as a result of the blast. Reports claim that as many as twenty vehicles in the vicinity of the explosions have been damaged.

    (image)

    According to eyewitness, Li Zhenzhen, who works in Taiyuan, “There were a lot of glass shards on the ground. There was blood on the ground.”

    Security has been on extra alert since the October 28th attack involving a sport utility vehicle. The vehicle traveled through a crowd of pedestrians, killing 5 and injuring 40, before erupting into fire on the Tiananmen Gate that is located in Beijing.

    These recent explosions have occurred on the eve of the Chinese Communist Party’s current Central Committee’s third plenum, which is a monumental meeting that focuses on the economic condition of the party. There is much speculation of who specifically fired the homemade bombs, especially considered the recent climate regarding displays of social unrest. The Chinese government has questioned whether the militant group (East Turkestan Islamic Movement) is responsible.

    [Images Via Wikimedia Commons, Sina, and South China Morning Post News]

  • Dmitry Medvedev Sells Russian Oil to China As Russia Dies Out

    The party-state elite and oligarchs of Russia joined together to sign a $85 billion deal to extract Russian oil and sell it to China, through a mutual agreement between Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday.

    Rosneft, Russia’s biggest producer of oil, under the grip of oligarchs will fuel China’s turbocharged growth with an additional 70 million barrels of crude oil per year for the next decade, according to latest agreement.

    The agreement “testifies to the fact that we have reached a higher and a brand new level of cooperation,” said Dmitry Medvedev in his prepared remarks.

    According to some estimates, China is now the world’s largest economy, having surpassed United States shortly after Beijing Olympics. China is also the world’s largest energy market and its biggest energy importer.

    Russian energy giants run two oil pipelines and one gas pipeline to deliver energy to China. China imported as much as 170 million barrels of oil from Russia in 2012, according to China’s state controlled news agency, Xinhua.

    In June, Russia and China signed another agreement according to which 2.5 billion barrels of Russian oil valued at an estimated $270 billion would be supplied to China over the next quarter century.

    While the hostile party-state elite and the oligarchs are enriching themselves with trillions of dollars in oil and gas wealth, Russian people have been reduced to abject poverty, squalor and humiliation.

    It is hard to imagine a people that have suffered more under state terror than Russians. From 1917-1991, the genocidal Bolsheviks imposed an uninterrupted reign of mass terror and depredations against Eastern-Europeans, unprecedented in the history of mankind.

    When the Soviet Union dissolved, the former communists morphed into “capitalists” overnight and proceeded to plunder and ransack Eastern Europe with spine chilling rapacity.

    Hyperinflation and mass shortages of food, fuel, medicine coupled with mass unemployment and total breakdown of law and order devastated the European half of former Soviet Empire, while birth-rates collapsed.

    Russians have been subjected to what demographers are calling “hypermortality”, a state where deaths far exceed births leading to a catastrophic demographic collapse of societies and entire ethnic groups.

    As Russian population is decimated in Eastern-Siberia, Chinese, which outnumber Russians 30-to-1 in that region, are migrating and acquiring land and economic assets. This might create a new geo-political crisis in coming years.

    [image from wikimedia]

  • Fidel Castro Turns 86, Maintains Silence

    Today marks the 86th birthday of Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary and decades-long leader of the Caribbean country. Castro has maintained silence and stayed out of view for two months now, prompting speculation about his health or possible death. A report by Reuters states that the last statement heard from Castro was his opinion column published in the Cuban state press on June 19.

    Fidel Castro was the leader of the 26th of July Movement, which over threw the government of Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959. In the decades since, Castro has maintained control of the country through the Communist Party of Cuba and a single-party socialist system of government.

    Castro has survived assassination attempts and coups throughout his years as Cuba’s leader. According to a 2007 Reuters report, it was revealed that year that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency worked with mobsters to attempt to assassinate Castro in the early 1960’s. When asked about Castro, U.S. President George W. Bush said, “One day the good lord will take Fidel Castro away.” Castro mocked Bush in response. From the Reuters report:

    He fired back at Bush’s latest remark with irony.

    “Now I understand why I survived Bush’s plans and the plans of other presidents who ordered my assassination: the good Lord protected me,” Castro, a self-declared atheist, said in a statement sent to the foreign media late on Thursday.

    Castro stepped down as leader of the Cuban revolution and has largely stayed out of the spotlight since his health began to deteriorate back in 2006. At that time, Castro underwent emergency surgery to correct intestinal bleeding and ceded power to his brother, Raul Castro on what was supposed to be a temporary basis. Since that time, Raul Castro has been in charge of the country. Speculation about Castro’s health has been constant in the years since.

  • Allen West: Republican Believes There are Almost 100 Communists in Democratic Party

    Allen Bernard West is the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 22nd congressional district. West attended a town hall meeting in Jensen Beach, located in the district in which he will be running for re-election in a new seat. At the meeting he was asked how many members of the Democratic Party are card-carrying Marxist Socialists and he responded by saying that he believes there are 78-81 members (in Congress) of the Democratic Party who belong to the Communist Party.

    Angela Melvin is West’s spokeswoman. She defended his comments and clarified to whom West was referring:

    “The Congressman was referring to the 76 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The Communist Party has publicly referred to the Progressive Caucus as its allies. The Progressive Caucus speaks for itself. These individuals certainly aren’t proponents of free markets or individual economic freedom.”

    Apparently this really ticked off some people on Twitter:

    (image)@nicolesandler
    Nicole Sandler    RT @Karoli: I wonder how Allen West would like it if progressives told town halls he was a member of the totalitarian dictator party.(image) 4 hours ago via TweetDeck ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@theMK_ultra
    Marcus Thompson    Rep. Allen West is an EMBARRASSMENT!!!(image) 1 minute ago via TweetCaster for Android ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@SkyviewKevin
    Kevin L. Lang    @MalaniKai

    This Allen West Character puts a whole new definition to the term “IDIOT”

    ~ K. Lang
    _(image) 2 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@shannonevans
    Shannon Evans    Allen West is perfect example of a radical right wing extremist Return to 1950’s McCarthyism Insanity rules the right, no other explanation(image) 8 minutes ago via web ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@whistle39
    Kristi Rohlfing    Joe Scarborough Incensed Over Rep. Allen West Comment On ‘Communist’ American Legislators: ‘Meet My Wrath’ | Mediaite – http://t.co/rquPSZcQ(image) 58 seconds ago via Echofon ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@GStuedler
    GStuedler    Allen West is the male version of Ann Coulter. He has no policy, no game and no mind…so he makes stuff up. As inflammatory as possible…(image) 40 seconds ago via TweetDeck ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@follow_nicole
    Nicole    Allen West is that crazy uncle who ignorantly spouts off conspiracy theories who family ignores, but, republicans vote into office.(image) 50 seconds ago via web ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    Libero Della Piana is Vice President of the Communist Party USA. He says that there are no members of Congress who are members of the Communist Party: “Applicants have to apply through the national or local organizations and pay dues. Trust me — if a member of Congress applied to join the Communist Party we would know about it.”