EUROPE MUST CONDEMN COMMUNISM AND ITS RELATED CRIMINAL IDEOLOGY

Polish opinion journal Wszystko Co Najważniejsze in late 2020 published an article by Renato Cristin, professor at the University of Trieste in Italy and research associate of the Fondazione Liberal in Rome. Cristin called for condemnation of the crime commited by communism. Excerpts below:

In 1945, nearly thirty years from the creation of the Soviet Union in 1917, communism, understood as a political regime and a state form, divided the European continent in two. Marked out by terror and blood, the boundary was like a deep wound that made the nations of Eastern Europe suffer, whilst the inhabitants of Europe’s western part were shocked.

A microcosm of this great geopolitical rift was the city of Berlin where the essence of the Iron Curtain was encapsulated by the Wall and where human drama and tragedy caused by communism could be observed as if under a microscope in a laboratory.

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For almost fifty years, communism kept the world and, consequently, Europe split into two blocs. Importantly, hostile behaviour was the domain of states or governments: social-communist on the one hand, liberal-democratic on the other.

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Today,more than thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes, understanding the evil represented by communism can help bring the nations of Europe closer together. I believe that, once we decide to condemn communism irrevocably, as we were right to do in the case of National Socialism, the unanimous rejection of this non-liberal, anti-European, anti-Christian, criminal and inhuman ideology could strengthen relations both between people and the nations of Europe.

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…Europe is still torn internally by this disease of the soul which is communist ideology. In order to analyse its persistence in contemporary Europe, we must start with a straightforward question: why did we not treat communism in the same way as we treated National Socialism (which was the only right thing to do)?

When I equate the two systems, I want to emphasise both their criminal and genocidal similarities as well as differences in how they applied the methods of social control and mass extermination. I believe that it is precisely out of respect for the unique nature of the Shoah, that is the Holocaust, that we must also condemn communist crimes and genocidal killings unconditionally.

It is only when the matter is finally settled in all seriousness with no understatements, that communism can become a monster to be feared, a tragedy that must never be allowed to happen again…We must make Europeans understand that communism is a virus, a foreign body in the midst of true European traditions and an enemy of Europe’s civilisation.

The final condemnation of communism should therefore be a political goal the EU must strive for. On the one hand, the nations of Eastern Europe expect a historical judgement which would prevent communism from returning in any form whatsoever to oppress them again, and on the other, western nations should get to know this ideology, be afraid of it and suppress its outbreaks in their respective countries.

Motivated by this line of thinking, last year, together with my late friend Vladimir Bukovsky, we drafted and made public a document calling for a Nuremberg trial of communism, a trial whose value would be not only historical but political and moral. Condemnation of crimes perpetrated in the name of communist ideology is a necessary step required by civil and moral conscience of people living in the free world. Our collective conscience should learn lessons from the unsolicited experiences of Central and Eastern European countries.

However, attempts to reach this goal have long met with a lot of resistance in Europe. The progressive world of culture and the media, in all its various forms, has always supported cultural Marxism. It has refused to equate communism with Nazism, limited its criticism to the so-called real socialism and offered communism a helping hand by presenting it as the ideal of goodness and justice.

This monstrous historical and theoretical lie made it possible to propagate communism in Europe and all over the world. It is now high time to expose it and tell the world the truth, allowing it perhaps to condemn this ideology forever.

WILL THE EUROPEAN CATASTROPHE ALSO BE AMERICA’S

On December 13, 2020, National Interest published an important article by Andrew A. Michta, dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. The views expressed in the  article was Michta’s own. For excerpts see below:

Much like America in the late twentieth century, Europe in the last decade of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the peak of its power. Its empires ruled over vast colonial dominions unlike any in history, while its culture set the standard for the world to emulate. Although there were occasional warning signs that established power centers might be tested in years to come, and that various collectivist ideologies had begun to stir beneath the surface, the dominant sense was one of enduring confidence that the extant power structure was sound and that Europe’s global civilizing mission would continue unabated. And yet, only fourteen years into the twentieth century the world was on fire…

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In a mere four years the grand civilization of imperial Europe had committed collective suicide in the trenches on the Somme and in the fields of Tannenberg, which pushed the totalitarian impulses of communism, fascism and Nazism into the role of a midwife barely one decade after the war.

After twenty years of interwar armistice, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia set the world ablaze yet again, propelled by a drive to replace what remained of the old world with one defined by a set of collectivist absolutes that produced Stalinist and Nazi horrors, killed millions and completed Europe’s devolution from being the center of the world’s civilization into the ultimate prize in Cold War great-power competition. 

Today, America is feeling the impact of what its elites unleashed during its own “fin de siècle” of the 1990s after our victory over the Soviet Union, driven as in the past by an unprecedented ideological hubris…

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The globalization, the off-shoring of manufacturing to China and the consequent deindustrialization of the country deconstructed the societal bonds and drove the recompilation of American national identity.

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The decision to offshore manufacturing in the 1990s in order to take advantage of cheap labor in Communist China set in motion what is today in effect the “feudalization of America.”

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The unbridled triumphalism of our business and policy elites at the end of the Cold War broke the bond between liberalism and nationalism that has historically defined the American nation and the Republic. Since its inception, the country has rested on a carefully negotiated balance between the liberal values of individual liberty and economic independence on the one hand, and the recognition that the unquestioned allegiance of each citizen to the nation, on the other, are the sine qua non of the country’s systemic stability.

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America’s post-Cold War era  has been shaped by the liberal hubris of its fin de siècle—an age of American unchallenged hegemony but also a time when the nation’s economic power that took generations to accumulate was wagered on a…whimsy predicated on a misreading of what the implosion of the Soviet Union heralded for the world.

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The liberal “end of history” era that presented itself as the final consummation of the market principles cum individual will…in reality proved to be one of the most ideologized and thereby destructive in American history… China will likely challenge America’s supremacy within the next decade if not sooner, and Russia will seek to capitalize on the opportunity to revise the post–Cold War order in Europe and Eurasia. We have thirty years of ideological hubris to thank for it.

Comment: Professor Rudolf Kjellén (1864 – 1922), the father of geopolitics. The Swedish professor was not only a geographer and political scientist. He was also a futurist. In his book “Den stora Orienten – Resestudier i Österväg” (The Great Orient), 1911, Kjellén predicted that Japan was the rising challenger of the European colonial powers.

In his works before and after World War I Kjellén ranked the great powers and explained the reason why there was a difference in power in the world.

On the top were the leading great powers at the time before the First World War: Great Britain, the United States, Russia and Germany. Second class great powers were France, Japan, Austria-Hungary and Italy.

The futurist Kjellén warned predicted that the great powers of Europe was on the way down. In ”Stormakterna” (The Great Powers), Part II, (1905) he warned that the life of great powers could end in various ways not only by external intervention but also through hubris and selfdestruction. More that 100 years after the prediction of Kjellén there are two hyperpowers, the United States and China. Has American statecraft 1991 to 2015 caused by a false belief in globalization paved the way for Western catastrophe?

SENATOR TOM COTTON (R): WALL STREET, DEMOCRATS AND COMMUNIST CHINA

Fox News on December 8, 2020 reported on a comment by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican, Arkansas, concerning communist China’s influence in the United States. Excerpts below:

Top American business leaders have effectively become “lobbyists for communist China, “selfishly advocating  for the same foreign power that seeks to undermine the United States and its democratic system, Senator Tom Cotton said.

“A lot of these Democrats have been in bed with China and a lot of them have been there for a very long time,” Cotton said to Fox, “But unfortunately, a lot of America’s corporate leaders have been as well.

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“There was reporting, when a Chinese trade negotiator came to America last year, they met at the Chamber of Commerce with a bunch of business executives and asked them to lobby the president and lobby Congress on China’s behalf,” Cotton said.

“Sadly, that’s been the case now for 20 or 30 years, that many American businesses are effectively lobbyists for communist China. That needs to stop,” Cotton continued. “They need to recognize that America should come first, not their profits.”

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“No matter what the titans of industry may think, China is our adversary,” Cotton also said, “ripping us off and stealing our jobs and taking our factories and threatening our allies and interests in the Western Pacific for 30 years.”

Cotton, a member of the Senate Intelligence Commitee, accused politicians in Washington of looking the other way because China “has cultivated American business to such a great degree.

“The time for that has got to stop,”  Cotton said. “These corporate CEOs need to focus on bringing those jobs back to America, or at least getting them out of China. Because as long as you’re operating in China, you’re susceptible to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party.”

POLITICAL WARFARE AGAINST UKRAINE AT LUND UNIVERSITY, SWEDEN

Institute for a Political-Psychological Freedom Campaign (IPPFC)

IPPFC will report from time to time on the research project “Ukrainian Long-Distance Nationalism in the Cold War” at Lund University, Sweden,  headed by Project Leader Per Anders Rudling. He has published for years with the intent to defame Ukraine and Ukrainian freedom fighters.

Already in 2012 a number of Ukrainian-Canadian organizations sent a letter to the Swedish university protesting against his attempts to portray leading Ukrainian anticommunists as war criminals.

In the summer of 2020 the League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) and League of Ukrainian Canadian Women issued a statement in general concerning the defamation of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Canadian Community through anti-Ukrainian disinformation.

STATEMENT ON DEFAMING UKRAINE AND THE UKRAINIAN CANADIAN COMMUNITY

 After Ukraine’s loss of its War for Independence  in 1918-1921, the country fell again under the control of neighbouring foreign powers, namely:  Soviet Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.  This set the stage for the emergence of a massive Ukrainian Liberation Movement spearheaded by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which during  World War II directed its struggle against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.  Ukraine became the main battlefield between those two totalitarian superpowers, and where their violence was especially and unprecedentedly extreme.

As a renowned American journalist Edgar Snow noted: “The whole titanic struggle […] was first of all a Ukrainian war.  No fewer than 10 million people had been ‘lost’ to Ukraine since 1941. […]  No single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industry, its farmland and its humanity.” According to official statistics, Ukraine’s human losses in World War II were up to 10 million dead:  4.1 – military; 5.9 – civilian, which remains the highest casualty rate among all combatant nations in World War II.

Since the end of WWII, Russia, either in its Soviet incarnation or now under Putin’s rule, has spared no effort to defame the Ukrainian nation and its global diaspora, including the Ukrainian Canadian community. Hence, today as before discredited allegations from non-credible sources are again being dredged up to smear Ukrainian Canadians for their admiration for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), including their leaders, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, respectively, and the Ukrainian liberation struggle against both Nazi and Communist regimes during WWII as a whole.

To dismiss these attacks and not respond would be a prudent course, so as not to draw further attention to them. By responding, it also could be construed as giving credence to the accusations. However, to allow lies and disinformation repeated ad nauseam to go unanswered, especially by a campaign reminiscent of Russian hybrid information warfare, can create a veneer of credibility that can be taken at face value by unaware Canadians, and that have even led to acts of violence against monuments and memorials. And, therefore, we are compelled to respond with the following for the record:

Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, agreed to form a Ukrainian Legion in the regular German Army comprised of two battalions, Nachtigall and Roland. On behalf of the Ukrainian side, the commander of the Nachtigall Battalion was Roman Shukhevych, and on behalf of the Germans, Theodor Oberländer.

OUN’s strategic objective was a plan to proclaim the restoration of Ukraine’s independence once the Ukrainian Legion was on Ukrainian soil. Nachtigall entered Lviv on June 29, 1941. The next day, June 30, 1941, OUN proclaimed Ukraine’s independence. In response, the German high command ordered the arrest and execution of numerous OUN leaders and many of the battalions’ officers and demobilized the battalions. Stepan Bandera and the Head of the Ukrainian Government Yaroslav Stetsko spent 3 years in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen, while Bandera’s two brothers died in Auschwitz. Roman Shukhevych avoided arrest by going underground.

 Subsequently, in 1942, many soldiers from Nachtigall and its partner battalion Roland joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, commanded by Roman Shukhevych. The UPA fought Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to the end of WWII and continued its armed struggle against the Soviets well into the 1950s.

Six separate and exhaustive investigations established that neither Stepan Bandera, nor Yaroslav Stetsko, nor the OUN, nor its members in the Nachtigall and Roland Battalions, nor the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, including Roman Shukhevych, participated in the heinous war crimes in 1941 and pogroms against the Jews:

The investigation of the Extraordinary State Commission on German atrocities, created by the Soviet government in 1944, identified the specific individuals and the branches of the German security services, who perpetrated war crimes and pogroms. The findings contained no direct or indirect reference, much less accusations, against members of the OUN, Nachtigall, or Roland.

Subsequently, the exhaustive Nuremberg war crimes trials, again, exhaustively reviewed the evidence concerning war crimes and pogroms and, again, made no mention of OUN, UPA, or the Nachtigall and Roland battalions. Moreover, a German document presented cynically by Soviet prosecutors (USSR-014) at the Nuremberg Trials referred to an order issued to the Einsatzkommando on November 25, 1941, which stated: “The Bandera organization is preparing an uprising in Reichkommisariat Ukraine with the aim of establishing an independent Ukrainian state. All members of Bandera’s organization must be arrested and, after rigorous interrogation, are to be secretly executed on the pretext of being looters.”

During the German occupation of Ukraine (1941-1944) up to 10,000 members of the Ukrainian liberation movement were killed by the Nazis.

 The conspiracy was invented in 1959, following the assassination of Stepan Bandera in Munich, West Germany, by a Soviet KGB agent. The point was to discredit the OUN and Nachtigall. The KGB plot was an elaborate attempt to compromise Theodor Oberländer, the then Minister for Displaced Persons for West Germany, and to delegitimize the OUN as a national liberation movement. The allegation was that Oberländer, as the commanding German officer of the Nachtigall Battalion in Lviv in 1941, launched pogroms against the Jews.

However, after an extensive trial, the West German court concluded that there were no grounds for accusing Oberländer, Shukhevych, or anyone else associated with Nachtigall or OUN of any criminal acts against Jews in Lviv in July 1941. On the contrary, the court established that it was the German Security Service (SD), the Security Police, and the Einsatzkommando 5 that had perpetrated the mass murder of Jews and Poles.

The fourth investigation was at the request of Oberländer, himself. An international commission of eminent and unimpeachable international jurists, none of whom were German, convened in The Hague from November 1959 to March 1960. They unanimously concluded, “that the accusations against the Nachtigall Battalion and the then Lieutenant and currently Federal Minister Oberländer has no foundation in fact.” The commission further found that the KGB disinformation campaign was primarily designed to deflect attention away from itself for the assassination of Bandera by casting blame on Oberländer and the Germans.

Similarly, a report prepared by US intelligence agencies in 1952 established that the Ukrainian nationalist underground, OUN, and its military wing, UPA, were neither fascists nor Nazis, but rather a legitimate liberation movement of the Ukrainian people fighting for an independent state of their own, that they fought against both the German and Russian forces, and continued the fight against the Russian occupiers well beyond WWII.

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Finally, the Canadian government’s Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada investigated all allegations concerning war crimes. At the request of Stepan Bandera’s family in Canada, Bandera was included in the investigation and, in its final report in 1986, the Commission cleared Stepan Bandera of any direct or indirect involvement in war crimes.

However, attacks against Ukrainian Canadians are not limited to the OUN/UPA and hate speech alone. A monument to Roman Shukhevych was again vandalized in Edmonton last year.

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Apparently, the perpetrators of this act of hate speech and violence ignore that which doesn’t fit their narrative, including the definitive findings of Canada’s own Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals.

Notwithstanding the exhaustive investigations and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the campaign to delegitimize the national struggle for the independence of Ukraine by demonizing the OUN and the UPA continues. It continues because Ukrainians’ liberation struggle during the 20^th century is an inspiration to Ukrainians today. The Kremlin and its fellow travelers abroad still cannot come to terms with a free, independent and democratic Ukraine, where its citizens of all religious and ethnic backgrounds, be they Ukrainians, Jews, or Russians, live in greater harmony and individually enjoy more freedoms than in any other country of the former Soviet Russian empire. Ethnic and religious tolerance is the hallmark of Ukrainian society.

Today, Ukraine is in a six-year long war with Russia. Resistance to Russian aggression has come at a high cost. Over fourteen thousand Ukrainian men, women, and children are dead, tens of thousands maimed, and nearly two million rendered internal refugees. No less costly are the consequences of Russia’s hybrid war tactics that penetrate deep into the country far from the battlefield, which disrupts the economy, and includes information warfare and cyber attacks on infrastructure, fomenting political turmoil, media manipulation, etc. There is no aspect of Ukrainian society that is not targeted by Russia.

A priority for Russia is to discredit the Ukrainian national liberation struggle as a source of pride and determination in Ukrainians’ ongoing quest to fulfill the hopes and aspirations of the millions of innocent Ukrainian victims of Russia’s campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing, a campaign designed to eliminate Ukrainians as a political nation worthy of an independent country of their own.   Every day,  Ukrainians of every ethnic and religious persuasion suffer directly and indirectly as a result of the Russian invaders. Irrespective of their backgrounds, millions of Ukrainians reject anti-Ukrainian disinformation spread by Russia’s hybrid war machine, including its agents, fellow travelers, and useful idiots in the West. Ukrainians honor Bandera and Shukhevych and OUN/UPA as symbols of resistance to German and Russian aggression and colonial occupation of their land. Bandera, Shukhevych, and their courageous freedom fighters sacrificed their lives for the independence of Ukraine and human liberties for all of its citizens.

In March 2018, the Government of Canada declared Mr Kirill Kalinin, an intelligence operative working out of the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Ottawa, to be a persona non grata. He was subsequently removed from this country. Kalinin had been identified by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as responsible for orchestrating a campaign of slander directed against the Honourable Chrystia Freeland, currently the Deputy Prime Minister. He was also promoting stories about an alleged “Nazi monument” in the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, abetted in his efforts by fellow travelers and other persons manifestly less interested in history than in perpetuating disproven allegations, even to the extent of provoking or indulging in hate crimes. The Moscow operatives’ campaign in Canada was supported by the Russian media with close ties to the Kremlin, including notorious TV host Dmitry Kiselyov (currently on Canada’s economic sanctions list), who broadcasted in prime time on a Russian national TV network a propaganda segment repeating many of the above stated lies, also attacking Canadian Members of Parliament and Ukrainian Canadian community organizations. In his conspiracy theory, Mr Kiselyov went as far as suggesting that Nazi-loving Ukrainians were running Canada’s government. 

In the past and again today, Canada is the target of efforts to discredit the Ukrainian Canadian community, turn Canadians against each other, and undermine Canada’s support for a free and independent, democratic, and tolerant Ukraine. By seeking to tarnish the history of the Ukrainian people’s heroic and unrelenting struggle against both the Nazi and Communist regimes and the Ukrainian Canadian community for its long-standing defence of the liberation of Ukraine, they try to undermine our community’s reputation of respect for our fellow Canadian citizens and their ethnic and religious communities.

The current attacks on Ukraine and the Ukrainian Canadian community will not stand. We call on our fellow Canadians to reject purveyors of historical revisionism, hate speech, and disinformation. These attacks are designed to destabilize Canadians’ national unity and undercut our government’s opposition to Putin’s Russia and support for Ukraine’s quest to consolidate its hard-won independence and continue on the path to building a free and democratic society.

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Toronto – July 22, 2020

League of Ukrainian Canadians and League of Ukrainian Canadian Women

National Executives

DID CHINA INFLUENCE AMERICAN POLICIES FOR DECADES THROUGH A COVERT NETWORK?

Washington Times on December 6, 2020 reported on a speech by Professor Di Donhsheng of Beijing University indicating that Hunter Biden was helped by the CCP to obtain business deals. Excerpts below:

On influencing the United States, Mr. Di said, he could not provide further details about the work of Chinese agents without compromising their identities. However, he said President Trump’s trade war with China upset decades of close ties between Washington and Beijing that the agent network facilitated.

Mr. Di could not be reached for comment. The university’s Contemporary China Studies Program, where Mr. Di works, had no immediate comment.

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“The intelligence is clear,” Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in a published article. “Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically. There are no moral or ethical boundaries to their pursuit of power.”

Bill Evanina, director of the DNI Counterintelligence and Security Center, said China has begun targeting officials slated to hold posts in an incoming Biden administration.

A senior Trump administration official said Mr. Di‘s speech was a rare case of a Chinese official revealing very sensitive information.

Mr. Di is a frequent consultant to Chinese Communist Party and government organs, including the Foreign Ministry and the International Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the Central Organization Department and other ministries and commissions.

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Mr. Di:

In plain and simple language, during the last three to four decades, we used the core circle inside America’s real power, he said. As I said, the Wall Street had a very profound influence over America’s domestic and foreign affairs since the 1970s. We used to heavily rely on them.

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On Mr. Trump’s comments that Hunter Biden has financial interests around the world, Mr. Di said: “But who helped Biden‘s son build his global companies? You understand? There are indeed buy-and-sell transactions involved in here. So I think at this particular time…it is of strategic and tactical value for us to show goodwill to Mr. Biden. Of course, this is just from my limited perspective as a political economist.”

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China expert Gordon Chang said, “Di Dongsheng’s comments show the breathtaking arrogance of the Chinese elite, which now has no hesitation about expressing in public its belief that with a Democratic President  China will once again control the highest levels in Washington.”

HISTORIEDOCENTEN I LUND TROR SIG VARA BÅDE POLIS, ÅKLAGARE OCH DOMARE I PROPAGANDAN MOT UKRAINA

Lundadocenten Per Anders Rudling bedriver propaganda mot Ukraina och landets frihetskämpar i kampen för frihet och självständighet. Vid en konferens i USA har docenten hållit ett föredrag om Mykola Lebed (1909 – 1998), en frihetskämpe och gerillakrigare som var generalsekreterare i Högsta motståndsrådet UHVR under andra världskrigets kamp mot sovjetiska och nazityska trupper. Från 1949 bodde Lebed i USA och var då chef för Prologue Research and Publishing house i New York från 1952 till 1974.

En ledande ukrainsk historiker beskriver Rudlings föredrag på följande sätt i en ukrainsk tidskrift i USA:

Pers Anders Rudling gave a paper on Mykola Lebed…with the single goal of portraying him as a war criminal. “He never faced justice or accountability for his wartime activities,” Rudling lamented. Putting aside the fact that it is not the task of academics to serve as courts of law, the obsession with Lebed’s alleged war criminality ignores, to cite one example, his leadership and organization of the Prolog Research and Publishing house for a quarter of a century from

1953 to 1978 during which it became the centre of Ukrainian diaspora liberal political life.

Selecting elements of Lebed’s biography from the 1930s and certain allegations about his wartime activities…while ignoring everything else can hardly be construed as objective scholarship. There are countless guerrillas who become politicians and state leaders. Charles de Gaulle served as Prime Minister and President during five of the nine years (1958-1962) of the Algerian war of independence (1954- 1962) during which 1.5 million died from conflict, executions and torture. But, a biography of de Gaulle that only focused on his responsibility as head of state during the commission of French war crimes in Algeria would not be a valid representation of his political life.

LUNDS UNIVERSITET OCH ANTIUKRAINSK PROPAGANDA

Den 5 oktober 2012 skrev ett antal ledande kanadensare av ukrainsk härkomst i Canadian Conference of Support of Ukraine (CCSU) till Lunds universitet om docenten Per Anders Rudling.

Rudlings författarverksamhet under tiden som docent vid Lunds universitet har konsekvent syftat till att anklaga ledande ukrainska antikommunister och frihetskämpar för att vara högerextrema. Vissa skall enligt Rudling till och med vara ansvariga för krigsförbrytelser under andra världskriget. Det bör noteras att de ukrainska patrioter Rudling angriper aldrig dömts för något brott.

Trots de oansvariga angreppen är han 2020 fortsatt anställd vid Lunds universitet. Hans författarskap vad beträffar Ukraina fortsätter att vara ett problem för goda svensk-ukrainska relationerna. Rudling presenterar uppgifter i sin propaganda som är förknippade med den information som 1959 till 1991 spreds av sovjetiska KGB och östtyska Stasi om ledande ukrainska frihetskämpar under andra världskriget.

Sovjetiska och östtyska smutskastningskampanjer riktades bland annat mot den västtyske ministern och professorn Theodor Oberländer, Ukrainas förre president Stefan Bandera och premiärministern i Banderas regering, Jaroslav Stetsko, samt den ukrainske generalen Roman Shukhevych (UPA). Oberländer friades från de sovjetiska och östtyska anklagelserna av en särskilt tillsatt internationell kommission verksam i Haag, Nederländerna. Det politiska krigföringen har fortsatts under Putin.

Nu har en stiftelse i Stockholm missletts att förse Rudling med medel för att vid universitetet i Lund under 2020 till 2025 fortsätta sin så kallade forskning. Det är frågan om ett projekt där han samarbetar med socialistiska forskare vid olika kanadensiska universitet. Upprördheten över Rudlings förtal är stor i Förenta staterna, Kanada och Ukraina där man inte kan förstå hur Lunds universitet är villigt att riskera sitt akademiska rykte genom att ställa sig bakom den pågående kampanjen mot Ukraina.

SOME U.S. 2020 ELECTION LAW CASES

The Supreme Court of the United States during the 2020 election season is providing up-to-date information on major election law cases as they make their way through every level of the court system. It is a valuable resource on election law and administration for the general public, lawyers, educators, journalists and policymakers.  Below are a few of the ongoing cases:

Hotze v. Hollins U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit

Whether nearly 127,000 votes cast via drive-through voting during the early voting period in Harris County, Texas, which contains much of the city of Houston, violate state election laws and should be invalidated.

Carson v. Simon        U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit

Whether a measure by Minnesota elections officials extending the deadline for timely postmarked absentee ballots to be received and still counted until one week after Election Day violates the U.S. Constitution; and (2) whether the challengers, two nominees to serve as Republican Party presidential electors in Minnesota, have legal standing to challenge the measure.

Michigan Alliance for Retired Americans v. Benson  Michigan Court of Appeals

Whether a policy by the secretary of state of Michigan extending the deadline to receive absentee ballots that are postmarked by Election Day until 14 days after Election Day violates federal law and the U.S Constitution.

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar  U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania

Whether a number of Pennsylvania elections accommodations in light of the coronavirus pandemic – providing additional drop-off sites and alleviating signature-matching requirements for absentee ballots, as well as lifting a restriction on employing out-of-county poll workers – violate state election law and the U.S. Constitution.

The New Georgia Project v. Raffensperger  U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit

Whether Georgia’s requirement that absentee ballots be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day poses an unconstitutional infringement on the right to vote in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

Donald J. Trump for President v. Way  U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey

Whether an executive order by the governor of New Jersey in light of the coronavirus pandemic that requires mail-in ballots to be sent to all registered voters in the state, and extends the deadline for submitting them, violates federal election law and the Constitution.

Donald J. Trump for President v. Cegavske  U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada

Whether recent changes by the state legislature to Nevada’s voting procedures including, among other things, the expansion of voting-by-mail and a requirement that officials count ballots received up to three days after Election Day, violate federal election law and the Fourteenth Amendment.

DEFECTOR GROUP WANTS TO OVERTHROW NORTH KOREAN REGIME

A defector group that calls itself Free Joseon (Free North Korea) has promised to liberate North Korea. In 2019 it claimed responsibility for a February 22 raid on Pyongyang’s embassy in Madrid. Ten intruders then armed with knives and replica pistols entered the embassy.

Free Joseon operatives tied up North Korean diplomats and made off with computers, cellphones and other equipment .

Normally, says Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korean studies expert at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, North Korea would not mention anything at all that might puncture “the myth of invincible, unassailable, infallible, omnipotent leadership.” But too much information was flowing into North Korea for the regime to keep the Madrid embassy incident a secret.

Free Joseon has declared the aim is to topple the dictator and has established a “provisional government” to take power in Pyongyang.

Reports of the group came already in 2017, following the assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia. Under a new name Cheollima Civil Defense (Cheollima is the Korean equivalent of Pegasus, the winged horse in Greek mythology), it claimed it had taken Kim Jong Nam’s son Kim Han Sol under its protection.

 On March 1, 2019, the group posted on Youtube a video in which a woman, whose face is obscured, reads the group’s declaration of revolution and the establishment of a government in exile.

“We the people of North Korea,” she says, “indict this immoral and illegitimate regime for the starvation of millions, despite the ability to feed them, for government-sponsored murder, torture and imprisonment.”

Even if the Pyongyang regime eventually falls the entire government system will not be eradicated,” says Kim Jung-bong, a former official with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. “I think a new government will emerge from within North Korea.”

Park Sang Hak, director of a Seoul-based umbrella group called the Association of North Korea Human Rights, expresses envy of his fellow defectors in the Free Joseon group.  

Free Joseon says on its website that it is planning big things for the future.

WILLIAM SIMM’S “NATIONAL PROGRESS IN AMERICA” –A Short Essay

[Here is a speech in sonnets —a novelty, certain-
ly, and such as never was delivered either in Par-
liament or Congress. It is possible that it may be
quoted in both places in some future period, since
events perpetually bring about a renewal of the
strifes in respect to which it was written. These
were such as threatened the peace in our Oregon
difficulties.]

IV NATIONAL PROGRESS.

And what are nations, but the gathering streams,
That gush from base beginnings? Let them flow,
Destined to gather tribute as they go ;
And still expanding to the sun’s broad gleams,
To catch new brightness with increasing length ;
Thus grace and beauty link themselves to strength,
Until the glorious progress takes a name
Like Rome or Albion which consenting realms,
Whom fear or favor, love or hate o’erwhelms,
Decree, in song and story, shall be Fame !
Ours is a rash, rude people, like the rest,
Just at our wild beginnings glad to own
That mountain impulse which must bear us on,
Till Glory, born of Power, shall make our rule
confessed.

The poem of South Carolina author William Gilmore Simms (1806 – 1870) reflected the idea of the destiny in the West of the United States. According to Edgar Allan Poe in 1845 Simms was the best novelist America had produced. He might also have been the best poet of America.  “In the mid-19^th century he certainly did much to foster the literary life in the South of America. Only James Fenimore Cooper was as popular as Simms. There is a growing interest in Simms around the world.

In South Carolina the Simms Initiatives funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation has since 2010 republished a large number of Simms work. He published more than 130 books during his lifetime. The historical novels of Simms have a special place in Southern tradition. Colonel Francis Marion was a leading Revolutionary War hero, who was nicknamed “The Swamp Fox” because of his advanced guerrilla warfare tactics. Simm’s biography of Marion (“The Life of Francis Marion”) is a masterful work and his most scholarly biography with the use of both primary and secondary sources. He should also be remembered as a great poet.

In the 1840s Simms was politically active and served for some years in the South Carolina Legislature. He was in contact with the nationalistic Young America group in New York City. This group was active in freeing American literature from British literary models.  From the end of the 1840s he concentrated more on the place of the South in American progress and supported the ideas of Manifest Destiny.  Simms was for annexation of Texas but also Oregon in the northwest.

What he called ”a speech in sonnets”  (”National Progress in America”) was published in 1846 in United States Magazine and Democratic Review. In Sonnet IV (”National Progress”) the prominent Southern author argued that nations are like streams and should be allowed to ”flow”, Destined to gather tribute as they go” (2-3). The United States followed its destiny, so Simms, like the ancient Israelites and  America was to be compared to Rome and Albion (England).

Simms lost his home and his vast library in a fire during the Civil War, but continued his literary career. When he passed away in 1870 he was greatly honored and laid to rest in the Magnolia Cemetery in his home city of Charleston.