Tag Archives: Soviet Era

A Short Page Referencing Works by or Associated with Ion Mihai Pacepa

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Spychology

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For articles and books authored by Pacepa, the order is chronological.  All listed have had a glance, at least, but with the exception of Red Horizons, which has been ordered.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  Red Horizons.  Regnery, 1987.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “The KGB’s Man.”  The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2003.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “What does Moscow have to do with the recent war in Lebanon?”  National Review, August 24, 2006.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “A New Cold War.”  WND, September 23, 2012.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “Evidence Shows KGB’s Hand in JFK Assassination.”  WND, November 21, 2013.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “Ex-Soviet bloc spy chief explains how to win War on Terror once and for all.”  Fox News, Opinion,  July 9, 2013.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “The Secret Roots of Liberation Theology.”  National Review, April 23, 2015.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  Looming Disaster.  (PDF).  WND, 2016.

Pacepa, Ion Mihai.  “Next Trigger Event: 1/1/17.”  Intelligence Matters, WND, August 18, 2016.

Berlinski, Claire.  “The Cold War’s Arab Spring: How the Soviets Created Today’s Middle East.”  Tablet, June 20, 2012.

Eckel, Mike and Eugen Tomiuc.  “Ion MIhai Pacepa, Highest-Ranking Soviet Blog Defector to the West, Reported Dead at 92.”  RFE/RL, February 16, 2021.

Ledeen, Michael.  “The Greatest Spy Speaks About the Threat to America.”  Forbes, September 4, 2016.

Martosko, David.  “EXCLUSIVE: New book reveals how KGB operation seeded Muslims countries with anti-American, anti-Jewish propaganda during the 1970s, laying the groundwork for Islamist terrorism against U.S. and Israel.”  Daily Mail, June 25, 2013.

Timmerman, Kenneth R.  “Former Soviet Spy Sees the Long Arm of the KGB in Today’s Muslim Anti-Semitism.” Tablet, August 7, 2013.

Tomiuc, Eugen.  “The Cold War Roots of Islamist Terrorism.” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, July 2, 2013.

Wikipedia.  “Disinformation”.

Wikipedia.  “Ion Mihai Pacepa”.

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FTAC – About that Image of Israeli Girls Signing Rockets

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, Russia

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About that picture of Israeli girls signing rockets —

The photograph was taken on July 17, 2006 by AFP photographer Pedro Ugarte or AP photographer Sebastian Scheiner*, who was then covering Israel’s defensive war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

It appears to have been taken up by the Far Left (New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, has been my trope for a while) in 2012, in which year it was exploited by The Electronic Intifada and others —

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/i-picture-dead-arab-disturbing-video-israeli-childrens-words-echo-indoctrination

http://americantribune.org/?p=14646

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may082012/israeli-missiles.php (note the anti-Semitic caption — a bald lie — invented for the presentation of the image).

Israel Images may provide the most accurate and blunt caption for the true when-where-and-what: http://www.israelimages.com/see_image_details.php?idi=8814

The image was put to use by “Stop The Wall” on July 20, 2006 and on the next day used in a cynically demonizing “message received” way — with pictures to prove it — by “22dollars” — “Dear Lebanese, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Christians Kids – Die with love. Yours Truely, (STET) Israeli Kids.”

When The Electronic Intifada had recycled the same image on its site in 2012, the caption had shifted to crediting Pedro Ugarte, possibly a ploy to keep AP and Scheider from noting the later use of the image.

The issue — who took that picture?  — has come up because writer Gal Beckerman, today Editor of The New York Times Book Review, had posted a similarly titled piece about the picture in the Columbia Journalism Review (July 20, 2006): “About Those Photos of Little Girls and Artillery Shells …: Photographs of Israeli children doodling on artillery rockets have inspired strong reactions across the world. But what’s the story behind the photos?”

Gal’s piece says Scheider took the picture.  I believe it.  Those are the captions that appear in 2006.

Related Reference

On Soviet Era “Active Measures”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures;

https://www.spymuseum.org/education-programs/news-books-briefings/background-briefings/active-measures/;

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/26/putin-s-wicked-leaks-didn-t-start-with-the-dnc.html;

http://fas.org/irp/world/russia/kgb/su0523.htm;

http://www.statecraft.org.uk/research/russian-active-measures-modernised-tradition

On the Soviet KGB and the Palestinian Cause

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

 

Fast Share – ‘What the Cold War Can Teach Us About Jihadism’ | Stratfor

15 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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But as I was writing about the structure of the Islamic State last week, I encountered more and more parallels to the global Marxist movement. This got me thinking even more intently about the similar ways that the two — despite their differences — have applied, encouraged and supported the use of violence. In light of these parallels, the lessons derived from the decades-long struggle against communism throughout the world may provide important guidance for the continuing fight against jihadism.

Read more by Scott Stewart: What the Cold War Can Teach Us About Jihadism | Stratfor – 7/14/2016.

Soviet Anti-Semitism, An Example from Andrew and Mitrokhin’s _The Sword and The Shield_.

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators.  The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.”  During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot.  Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom.  Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953 Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins.  Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctor’s plot.  A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators.

Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin.  The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.  Page 2.  New York: Basic Books, 1999.

In the “Russian Section” (of the in-house library), the above title is appended “UR” for unread.  BackChannels hopes to update that status soon.  Even so, with the theme of anti-Semitism emerging on the second page of a mighty classic, so it appears, among the scholars, the same may inform the character of today’s “Solidarity” organizations and their updates on Soviet disinformation and propaganda programs that produced the privileged and the privileges of the Party.

These historic incidents and the portent of books like The Sword and The Shield may be easily accessed by the lay public as well as scholars, but time having become the new space, information has become the vegetation on the landscape, and large packages so easily spied on Amazon may not be so easily opened.  With each passing year — the volume was published in 1999 — fewer and fewer readers, lay or scholar, are likely to have the experience of seminal works.  For the most part, the public won’t know, won’t have personal or transmitted historic memory, giving cognizant autocrats freedom to deliver the past to their constituents.

Related on BackChannels: “Rhetorical Objects — Anti- Anti-Semitism & Anti-Semitism” (April 20, 2014).

Addendum

This crossed my desktop late this afternoon:

The ultimate goal of state censorship is self-censorship among the citizenry. If you can get the people to police themselves, and each other, it takes part of the burden off the state and also makes people complicit in their own oppression. And so it’s disturbing to see things take this turn in Putin’s Russia. As the New York Times reports, Moscow bookstores removed from their shelves–voluntarily (sort of)–their copies of Maus, the pathbreaking graphic novel of Nazi crimes against the Jews. It’s the “voluntarily” part of this that stands out, and makes it clear that Putinism has not been, and will not be, good for the Jews of Russia.

Mandel, Seth.  “Dark Days Ahead for the Jews of Russia?”  Commentary, April 28, 2015.

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Russia – A Look Back at Ham-Handed Power – An Excerpt from Hedrick Smith’s _The Russians_

01 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by in Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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In his singular work on the character of the Russian people during the Soviet Era, The Russians, journalist Hedrick Smith notes, “Probably the sharpest blow to the spirit of education reform and experimentation in recent years was the emasculation of Phys-Mat School No. 2 in Moscow in 1971-1972.”  Phys-Mat 2 had become an attractive and exemplary magnet school for minds both gifted and ambitious and, attracting accomplished lecturers and bright students both, it afforded uncommon freedoms to an elite qualified by intellectual ability (“Applications to the school soared to three or four times the number of places available,” wrote Smith).

In Smith’s words, here is what happened to “Phys-Mat School No. 2 in Moscow”:

As the logical extension of some of the educational reform theories, the intellectual climate at the school obviously troubled Communist Party conservatives.  The percentage of Jewish students was very high and so was the proportion of Jewish scholars on the faculty, according to my Moscow friends.  When in early 1971, one of the teachers, I. Kh. Sivashinsky, applied to emigrate to Israel, the authorities moved in on the school and began administrative harassments.  According to Igor, a tall, lanky recent graduate, the pretext for administrative inspections was that New Year’s Eve 1971 had been celebrated with a roulette game.  Another pretext, he said, was that a group of students had visited the Jewish synagogue in Moscow and would have gotten away without trouble for the school except that one boy wrote the school;’s initials on a fence near the synagogue.  Purges of the faculty and student body were carried out in spring 1971, and again a year later.  In one action the director and three assistants were fired; later, teachers of history and literature were forced out, an indication that the real reasons for the purge were ideological.  Several other teachers, I was told, resigned in protest to these firings. Marxist-Leninist indoctrination courses were stiffened and students who did poorly in those fields, no matter how talented in science, were called on the carpet, and outside lectures by university professors dwindled to nothing.  By fall, 1972, the previous flood of applicants had fallen off and in in Igor’s words, this once elite school had becomes “a spiritless, gray, sorry spectacle.”

Smith, Hedrick.  The Russians.  New York: Times Books, 1983.

In the left side column of this blog is an epigram by Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Kundera’s remark suits, and as one reads The Russians, not only the atmosphere of the era returns with many of its continued challenges and quirks but also the shadow of the looming authoritarian fist, the familiar oafs of now other states in this era who may wish others not get too far out ahead of themselves or otherwise dull their glorious presence with something like the expression of their separate God-given talents, benevolent accomplishments, and earned compensation.

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