OrthodoxNet.com Blog

American Thinker | Jonathan D. Strong | May. 15, 2008

Since the end of the Second World War, much of Western Civilization took it for granted that the progress and triumph of human rights, freedom, and liberal democracy would continue in perpetuity. Of course, there were setbacks as communist insurgencies and revolution snuffed out the lights of liberty in various places round the globe, but the hope of freedom always reappeared in places like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Tiananmen Square, Poland, and most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And despite the success that liberal democracy has experienced since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possibility of Western concepts of freedoms no longer progressing, but in fact, regressing, is now more of a possibility than perhaps since Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930’s. What we may be witnessing today is not progress but regress in terms of our rights and freedoms. Continue Reading »

Townhall | Dennis Prager | Apr. 8, 2008

I am convinced that human evil is so great that most people choose either to ignore it or to focus their concerns elsewhere — like those who believe that human-created carbon dioxide emission, not human evil, poses the greatest threat to mankind. No one will ever get killed for fighting global warming. Fighting evil, on the other hand, is quite dangerous. Continue Reading »

Christian Science Monitor | Dec. 24, 2007

Vladimir Putin is Time’s “Person of the Year”? What about Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov, forced to withdraw his presidential bid because of state harassment? What about Burma’s monks, beaten into silence? Standing for freedom is much harder than suppressing it. Continue Reading »

LifesiteNews.com | Matthew Cullinan Hoffman | September 7, 2007

Reveals Chilling Parallels with the Ideas of Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger

An Israeli doctor has recently published an account of the Nazi use of abortion, euthanasia, and sterilization to eliminate groups they deemed “inferior stock”, especially Jewish and Slavic people.

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FrontPageMagazine.com | Jacob Laksin | July 26, 2007

Arriving in Cuba last week for the first time since the release of his new documentary, Sicko, Michael Moore met with an enthusiastic reception from the communist authorities. Previously, Cuba’s health minister, José Ramón Balaguer, had led the way in gushing that Moore has helped “the world see the deeply humane principles of Cuban society.” For a dictatorship that imprisons journalists and dissidents as a matter of course, it was a rare rave for political commentary.

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Townhall.com | Paul Greenberg | June 22, 2007

Kurt Waldheim is dead. It says so in the New York Times, and doubtless in all the other official records-from his death certificate to his extensive resume. His papers were always in order, his career well documented: law degree, University of Vienna; a string of diplomatic posts culminating in his appointment as Austria’s foreign minister; secretary-general of the United Nations; president of Austria.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal | Jody Williams and Mia Farrow | May 23, 2007

Chinese oil companies fuel genocide in Darfur. It’s time for Americans to divest.

We met in Abeche, eastern Chad, in February of this year. We were both working for the United Nations, focusing on the violence in Darfur and how it has spilled over into local and refugee populations in Chad and the Central African Republic. We had something else in common as well: Both of us had been inadvertently funding the atrocities we were trying to stop.

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Townhall.com Chuck Colson March 30, 2007

For Americans over, say, fifty, the image of desperate Vietnamese surrounding the American embassy during the fall of Saigon is one we will not soon forget. Watching American helicopters fly away leaving people, many of whom had helped us, to their fates in Vietnam made me feel ashamed—a sense of shame that only grew when we learned what happened to many of those people. These memories are why I find some recent stories coming out of Iraq troubling. As I have told “BreakPoint” listeners and readers, I believe that we should not leave Iraq until we have first established a measure of stability and restored order. To do otherwise would be bad for American security and even worse, of course, for the Iraqi people.

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New York Times John Burns January 9, 2007

The courtroom he dominated for 15 months seemed much smaller on Monday without him there to mock the judges and assert his menacing place in history.

But the thick, high-register voice of Saddam Hussein was unmistakable. In audio recordings made years ago and played 10 days after his hanging, Mr. Hussein was heard justifying the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, predicting they would kill “thousands” and saying he alone among Iraq’s leaders had the authority to order chemical attacks.

In the history of prosecutions against some of the last century’s grimmest men, there can rarely have been a moment that so starkly caught a despot’s unpitying nature.

On one recording, Mr. Hussein presses the merits of chemical weapons on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice-president, and now, the Americans believe, the fugitive leader of the Sunni insurgency that has tied down thousands of American troops. Mr. Douri, a notorious hard-liner, asks whether chemical attacks will be effective against civilian populations, and suggests that they might stir an international outcry.

“Yes, they’re very effective if people don’t wear masks,” Mr. Hussein replies.

“You mean they will kill thousands?” Mr. Douri asks.

“Yes, they will kill thousands,” Mr. Hussein says.
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Wall Street Opinion Journal Suki Kim October 16, 2006

Despite the much-touted label of being the most secretive nation in the world, the one thing everyone knows about North Korea is that its people have been dying in massive numbers from starvation and persecution for decades, the reality of which seems to have bypassed the nations involved in the on-again-off-again six-party talks–whose diplomacy has apparently failed. By landing a punch at the nonproliferation policy of the U.N. Security Council, an organization soon to be led by South Korean Ban Ki Moon, North Korea yet again thwarted its former promises of stopping all nuclear activities. The Bush administration is advocating harsher ways of punishing a country they maintain is a member of the “axis of evil” through tougher sanctions and cutting off its financial sources, neither of which has worked so far in stopping North Korea from doing whatever it wants to do. Now that it claims to have become the world’s ninth nuclear power, I wonder what will change, if anything, for its people.

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Townhall.com Val Prieto August 17, 2006

The “r” on the typewriter no longer works and there’s no ñ key. The ink being engraved into the paper isn’t ink; it’s shoe polish. Typewriter ribbons are hard to come by and paper is old, brittle and scarce. There’s no copy machine, no scanner, no fax and there is no phone next to the typewriter on his desk. Computers aren’t allowed. Satellite dishes receiving the latest world news aren’t allowed. There’s no software, no hardware, and no staff. There are only a few sheets of yellowing paper, a typewriter, a pencil and a candle to see by.

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Moscow News June 27, 2006

The Moscow Patriarchate believes that human rights work in Russia has been compromised by the inability to discern real cases of human rights violations and the use of human rights for political purposes, Interfax news agency reports.

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Christianity Today July 2006

Seeking to better her life, Irina, 18, answers a newspaper advertisement for a training course in Berlin. Using a falsified passport, she travels from her native Ukraine to Germany. There she is told the school is closed and sent to Belgium for a “job.” Upon arrival, Irina learns she owes those in charge $10,000 and must repay the debt by prostitution. Irina’s handlers take her documents, beat and rape her, and make her a prostitute. Eventually they turn her over to another pimp in Brussels’ red-light district. Watching for a chance at freedom, Irina escapes one day—only to be jailed by the police because she has no documentation.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal Melanie Kirkpatrick May 12, 2006

“A North Korean like you is easier to kill than a chicken.”

Old habits die hard–especially those whose disregard could mean death. So it is understandable that the North Korean refugees with whom I met this week set strict ground rules for our interview: no names, no photographs, no indication of their location in the U.S., and no identifying details of the Southeast Asian nation whose government risked the ire of China to permit them to depart for asylum in this country after they sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy there.

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Hotzone Kevin Sites Mar 20 2006

Married at the age of four, an Afghan girl was subjected to years of beatings and torture, finally escaping to discover that within all the world’s cruelty, there is also some kindness.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Eleven-year old Gulsoma lay in a heap on the ground in front of her father-in-law. He told her that if she didn’t find a missing watch by the next morning he would kill her. He almost had already.

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Venezuela’s Marxist dictatorship is destroying property rights across the country. We’ve noted in the past how it’s happened in the countryside, at sugar farms, on nature reserves, among the large and small corporations, and in apartment and office buildings. But these aren’t the only places – the destruction of property rights also is happening in the poorest neighborhoods.

In an unexpectedly good article, Alex Holland, a writer at Venezuelanalysis, a Chavista propaganda organ, unwittingly describes how even poor shantytown dwellerss with desperate need for title-deed ownership are being badly affected by collectivization, which is destroying the weak property rights these urban poor once had. The writer explains the horrible dynamic with perfect clarity and honesty and then ineptly defends it, making the Marxist propaganda easy for us to gloss over. Evidently, the facts on the ground were just too big for this writer.

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Wall Street Journal MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY December 30, 2005

“On May 27, [1966,] 166 Cubans — civilians and members of the military — were executed and submitted to medical procedures of blood extraction of an average of seven pints per person. This blood is sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of $50 per pint with the dual purpose of obtaining hard currency and contributing to the Vietcong Communist aggression.

“A pint of blood is equivalent to half a liter. Extracting this amount of blood from a person sentenced to death produces cerebral anemia and a state of unconsciousness and paralysis. Once the blood is extracted, the person is taken by two militiamen on a stretcher to the location where the execution takes place.”

– InterAmerican Human Rights Commission, April 7, 1967
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The New Yorker Orhan Pamuk Posted 2005-12-12

Turkish author on trial for writing about the Turkish massacre of Armenians.

In Istanbul this Friday—in Şişli, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask that I be imprisoned for three years. I should perhaps find it worrying that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried in the same court for the same offense, under Article 301 of the same statute, and was found guilty, but I remain optimistic. For, like my lawyer, I believe that the case against me is thin; I do not think I will end up in jail.

This makes it somewhat embarrassing to see my trial overdramatized. I am only too aware that most of the Istanbul friends from whom I have sought advice have at some point undergone much harsher interrogation and lost many years to court cases and prison sentences just because of a book, just because of something they had written. Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons, I cannot say I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last “a real Turkish writer.” But when I uttered the words that landed me in trouble I was not seeking that kind of honor.

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WorldNetDaily.com Jon Dougherty November 29, 2005

Expert says Chinese leader’s policies led to death of 77 million countrymen

A noted expert in calculating the number of deaths caused by authoritarian regimes says the late Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung’s policies and actions led to the deaths of nearly 77 million of his countrymen, surpassing those killed by Nazi Party founder Adolf Hitler and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin.

R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science and a Nobel Peace Prize finalist who has published dozens of books chronicling so-called “democide,” or death by government, said the new Chinese figure – nearly double his previous estimate of about 38 million – was based on what he believes was Mao’s duplicity in China’s great famine of 1958 to 1961.

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FrontPageMagazine.com Patrick Devenny June 22, 2005

The far-Left is nothing if not tenacious. Not only has Amnesty International condemned the United States in the harshest possible terms — in the middle of a war when international image is vital — but its most recent report spends more time criticizing the rogue pranks at Gitmo more harshly than the death camps run by the North Koreans.

Rather than apologizing after referring to the American detention center in Guantanamo Bay as a gulag, Amnesty International has attempted a unique maneuver to break out of its public relations death spiral. The “non-partisan” advocacy group has taken to calling actual gulag survivors and begging for their endorsement of Amnesty’s statement. In an editorial published in The Washington Post on June 18th, Soviet gulag veteran Pavel Litvinov recounted how a senior Amnesty staffer called him asking for his public support. When Litvinov suggested there was quite a difference between his own experiences and those of the terrorists imprisoned in Guantanamo, the staffer responded “Sure, but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees.”