Archive for the ‘Communism’ Category

Arc of Memory ‘living calendar’ chosen for Memorial to Victims of … – Ottawa Citizen

Arc of Memory has won the competition for dsesign of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. -

A sculpture of bronze rods configured in a giant arc and intended to act as a living calendar has been chosenas the winning design for the Memorial to the Victims of Communism.

The design, unveiled Wednesday, marks the latest, and perhaps one of the final chapters, in the saga of a monument that has stirred immense controversy in the capital.

The Arc of Memorywas chosen by Heritage Minister Mlanie Joly afterpublic consultations in March 2017 and on the recommendations of a jury of design professionals. It was one of five designs shortlisted by the Departmentof Canadian Heritage.

The design was created by Toronto architect and artist Paul Raff, designer and arborist Michael A. Ormston-Holloway, and landscape architectsBrett Hoornaert and Luke Kairys.

It features two gently curving wall-like metal frames that will support more than 4,000 bronze rods. Those will be densely arranged along 365 steel fins. Each one will point at a unique angle of the sun, for every hour of every day, across a year, Canadian Heritage explained.

The memorial will be split in the middle at winter solstice, inviting visitors to step through in a metaphorical journey from darkness and oppression to lightness and liberty.

Its a three-dimensional calendar, where every moment can be identified, seen and touched, and where key collective moments, like the fall of the Berlin Wall can be inscribed and expressed as a moment in time, said Raff.Its something that can bring the history tangibly, visibly, into the present.

The sculpture, which will sit in a corner on the west side of the Garden of the Provinces and Territories, between Wellington and Sparks streets, is roughly fourmetres high and 21 metres long.

Constructionis expected to cost $3 million and be completed sometime in 2018, said MP Arif Virani, parliamentary secretary to the minister of Canadian Heritage, who announced the selection.

The federal government has committed half of that amount, along with an additional $500,000 for the design process. The other $1.5 million is being raised by the charity Tribute to Liberty. The new design still requires National Capital Commission approval.

Joly was in Montreal with the prime minister to mark Montreals 375th anniversary on Wednesday and didnt attend the announcement.

Virani said the chosen design met requirements that included public support, aesthetic value and cost. It also has a bold visionary component and is testament to the hardship and persecution people have faced and demonstrating that Canada is indeed a land of refuge, Virani said.

Tribute to Liberty has already provided $1 million of donations to the federal government, and its chair said that outstanding pledges made to their charity will cover the remaining half a million dollars needed to pay for its share of the project once construction begins.

The project has taken a long, winding road. The earlier monuments proposed location, near the Supreme Court of Canada, was heavily criticized, as was its initialdesign and size.

The new design will be much smaller than the previous monument, whichwas to take up 60 per cent of a 5,000-square-metre site.It was later reduced in size to about a third of the site, and latercancelled by the then-new Liberal government.

Ludwik Klimkowski with the model of the winning design Arc of Memory by Team Raff that was selected for the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. Errol McGihon / Postmedia

Tribute to Liberty chair Ludwik Klimkowski said there had been misconceptions about the size and placement of the earlier monument, but that he is pleased now with both the new site and the chosen design.

It still embeds itself within the parliamentary precinct, said Klimkowski. The planned redevelopment of Lebreton Flats to include a hockey arena could mean considerably more foot traffic for their new site, he said.

This particular design is equally, if not more, inclusive, inviting, inspiring and it really enlightens you, he said.

Ottawa architect Barry Padolsky, an outspoken critic of the original monument, said the new design is fairly abstract but perfectly respectable and possibly even imaginative scheme that is more universal than its specific.

Its a modest, human-scale monument. Its not something that will be an eyesore on the landscape, he said.

About eight million Canadians trace their roots to countries that lived or still live under Communism. The memorial is intended to recognize Canadas role providing refuge for those who fled Communism regimes.

TALE OF THE TAPE

Size

New monument: 21 metres long and about four metres tall, divided into two walls.

Canadian Heritage couldnt provide the monuments exact footprint, but said during public consultations earlier this year that the new monument was expected to be between 200 and 500 square metres.

Original monument: Originally planned to occupy about 3,000 square metres; it was later scaled back to about 1,700 square metres. The height of the monument was also reduced by about half to five metres.

Cost

New monument: $3 million, evenly split between charity Tribute to Liberty and the federal government. The department of Canadian Heritage also covered an additional $500,000 for design costs.

Original monument: $5.5 million. The previous Conservative government would have funded up to $4 million of that amount.

Location

New monument: Western corner of the Garden of the Provinces and Territories, which is between Wellington Street and Sparks Street on the western edge of downtown.

Original monument: In front of the Supreme Court of Canada on a 5,000-square-metre plot of land that had previously been earmarked for a new federal justice building.

Design

New monument: A sculptural array of bronze roads configured into a gigantic arc that features two gently curving wall-like metal frames roughly four metres tall and 21 metres long supporting 4,000 short bronze rods.

Original monument: A large viewing platform looked down on ascending folded concrete rows, rising about nine metres at their highest point. The rows were to feature 100 million fingertip-size memory squares that visitors could walk among and touch to viscerally experience the overwhelming scale of the Communist atrocities. The size of the monument was later scaled back.

aseymour@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/andrew_seymour

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Arc of Memory 'living calendar' chosen for Memorial to Victims of ... - Ottawa Citizen

The Democratic Party: Corruption, Communism, with Crashing and Burning – Townhall

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Posted: May 17, 2017 12:01 AM

President Obama ran for office and run his office as The One to destroy the Republican Party. Eight years later Trump is President, and Republicans are finally reversing the damage of that administration. Ironically, the damage done to the Democratic Party has become incalculable and growing.

We all know that during Election 2016, The DNC lied, cheated, and stole the nomination from Bernie. LBernie delegates in California told me that the DNC charged them $2,000 more than Hillary delegates to attend the convention, as well as adding mandatory evenings. Dirty dealing from Day One. The corruption-turned- infighting from the top down has metastasized into Stage Four inoperable cancer.

The DNC Chairmanship to replace the corrupt Donna Brazile (who had replaced the corrupt Debbie Wasserman-Schulz) featured Hillary-Obama puppet Tom Perez and Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison, who wanted to further the Bernie Revolution of unfettered socialismand he praised the Muslim Brotherhood. Who can forget the Idaho DNC candidate who announced: Its my job to tell white men to sit down and shut up! Another contender from Arkansas was booted because he was from Arkansas. Great idea, Democratskick Southerners in the teeth, and keep asking yourselves why you keep losing. Yeah, smart.

Instead of course corruption, the Democrats have embraced more socialistic lunacy. Wait, lets tell it like it is: The DNC has gone full commie.

Consider the goals from listed in the 1963 Congressional record:

13. Do away with all loyalty oathsCalifornia Assembly Democrats just passed this.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United StatesDemocrats.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rightsDemocratic operations.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propagandaHoly Crap, this is so true. Kids are getting picture books featuring Uncle Stalin.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression--Democrats

Push this on a widening scale.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."Exactly.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorceSad, but true.

The Democratic Party has advanced these destructive goals in lock-stop. In contrast, the Republican Party has doubled-down on Biblical truth, rejecting gay marriage, enhancing life, celebrating Americas culture and country.

The Communists intended full takeover the media. Today, hey are losing their chokehold on Americans minds. Besides, DNC corruption has become so brazen, the most liberal of mainstream media sites cannot contain the contagion. The New York Post even glibly told off Crooked Hillary to Fk Off!

Communism and corruption seem to go hand in hand.

Who can forget the lawsuits?!

1. Florida. One state party chair candidate is suing the state party for violating their own by-laws.

2. Nevada: Remember when all hell broke loose on the NVDEM convention floor as the chair of the meeting concluded it hastily?

3. Class Action Lawsuit Number One: The DNC stiffed their convention employees for overtime. So much for caring for the working man.

4. Class Action Lawsuit Number Two: The socialist phoenix has arisen. They are suing the entire DNC for tipping their hand against Bernie Sanders.

This relentless, immoral, communistic and corrupt cancer is killing the California Democratic Party, too. Currently, two candidates are fighting for the state chairmanship in determined, destructive defiance. First, Mr. inevitable front-runner state Vice Chairman Eric Bauman. As the current chairman for Los Angeles County, he was slated to replace former Congressman, state senator, all-around liberal loony fuddy-duddy John Burton. To his credit, the out-going chairman wisely predicted that 30% of Bernie supporters would go to Trump in the general election.

Bauman is often referred to as Bossman, a belligerent insider who dictates what goes, and who runs. Hes also a corporate shill for Big Pharma, a total crony whose only real job has been advisor and consultant to the Democratic Big Wigs in Sacramento. Currently, he sucks up to California Speaker Anthony Rendon, who carries water for the Open Borders lobby as well as Big Labor, Big Business, La Raza, and the expansive, disgusting Octopus of ideologies. Bauman is openly gay, married to a husband, then touts himself as a registered nurse. Love Trumps Hate, right? He quotes from the Old Testament as though he holds any authority to talk about morals and good will. Really.

Baumans challenger? Kimberley Ellis, the candidate endorsed by the Socialist Godfather Bernie Sanders. That says it all, especially for the 60% of California Bernie-crat delegates who romped the Democratic party elections earlier this year. She is a gaining underdog, too, enough that Bauman has been forced to send out two eblasts in one week ahead of the lection at the 2017 Convention.

But just like the DNC, California Democratic Party insiders have worked very hard imitating the Crooked Hillary model to win this election for Eric Bauman

1. The party has allowed elected officials to appoint 5 delegates, all of whom are expected to bow down and vote for the creepy Bossman

2. Rumors have it that the Northern California Party Vice-Chair Alexandra Rooker is threatening Bernie delegates, even calling their own workplaces to get them fired.

This is the modern Democratic Party, people: from slavery to secession, to segregation and socialism, and now outright communism as their mantra. Is it any wonder that working class, gun-rack voters (those bitter clingers) are rejecting the Democratic Party?

Substantive reports now claim that DNC operative Seth Rich was leaking (not hacking) information to Wikileaks. Incredible. Expect more defections from the DNC as Hillary-Shillary puppet Tom Perez continues to lose special elections, while Trump continues galvanizing his base to make America Great Again. With a Bauman win in California, Golden State Democrats have informed me that they will bolt. Perhaps Republicans the can re-register voters and win elections even in California? After all, Biblical morality is making a comeback, and everyone hates corruption, especially when they are paying for it.

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The Fertile Ground of French Communism – New York Times


New York Times
The Fertile Ground of French Communism
New York Times
Mr. Mlenchon, who also had the support of the French Communist Party, or P.C.F., obtained 19.5 percent of the first-round vote, though he came in fourth and couldn't participate in the runoff. By refusing to give Mr. Macron (in Mr. Mlenchon's eyes a ...

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The Fertile Ground of French Communism - New York Times

Why communism gets a pass from our one-party system and culture … – World Tribune

Special to WorldTribune.com

By Ileana Johnson, Fairfax Free Citizen

A bill narrowly passed the house in California, repealing part of the law enacted during the Cold War era in our countrys history when communists were really active and infiltrating our government, attempting to overthrow it.

The bill proposed to eliminate the section which allowed the firing of public employees if they were members of the Communist Party. The bill now goes to the Senate and its author, Democrat Assemblyman Rob Bonta, hopes that it will pass.

Assemblyman Randy Voepel, a Southern California Republican who fought in the Vietnam War, said communists in North Korea and China are still a threat.

Assemblyman Travis Allen, also a Republican, said that this bill is blatantly offensive to all Californians. Communism stands for everything that the United States stands against.

Why the Cold War era laws suddenly need changing is puzzling to other Republicans in the California legislature.

It should not surprise anyone, given the fact that California is now ruled by a one party system, the Democrats; they have become advocates for communism, illegal aliens, and a sanctuary for law breakers.

Judging by the communist stance of academia on campuses around the country and the curriculum taught in our public schools, the Antifa fascist anarchists, Black Lives Matter, SEIU, and other progressive organizations around the country, communism is their way to attain social, environmental, and gender justice, a utopia that the UN is pushing through its many octopus organizations.

Why communism?

The youth in this country have been taught revisionist history for a long time. Many have been purposefully asleep, in a drug stupor, or absent during their history classes.

Communist teachers with an agenda of their own have glossed over the atrocities that various totalitarian communist dear leaders have committed against their own people.

Communism has been repackaged as globalism, global citizens, no borders, no national language, no culture, and no sovereignty under the rule of a few billionaire elites and the United Nations.

And the Democrat Party has been hijacked and is run by communists who are no longer hiding their destructive agenda. Atheists are pushing hard for communism since atheism is the communist states sanctioned religion.

In a recent PragerU video, Dennis Prager wondered, Why Isnt Communism as Hated as Nazism?

If you consider the almost 100 million victims of communism and the six million victims of the Nazis, why is Nazism always cited as evil but communism praised?

Dennis Prager explained that communism enslaved entire nations, Russia, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and much of Central Asia. They ruined the lives of well over a billion people.

Prager gave the following reasons why communism does not have the evil reputation Nazism has:

1) Widespread ignorance of the communist record. Leftists (not liberals) have never loathed communism; they teach communism as a viable and desirable solution to crony capitalism.

2) The Nazis carried out the Holocaust. The communists killed many more of their own people, but they never carried it out in the systematic genocide that the Nazis have engaged in against every woman, man, and child of Jewish descent.

3) Communism is based on nice-sounding theories, Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories. Teachers have focused their attention on the horrifying atrocities of Nazism, and the academia glossed over the evils of communism, calling them perversions of true communism.

4) Germany took responsibility for the evils of Nazism and attempted to make amends for the atrocities committed while the Russians did not apologize for Lenins or Stalins horrors, such as the Holodomor in Ukraine. Lenin, the father of Soviet communism, is treasured in Russia today. People still deny, by assertion or implication, Stalins holocaust, said Russian historian, Donald Rayfield, from the University of London. Mao Zedong is still honored in China.

5) Communists murdered mostly their own people. Nazis killed very few of their own fellow Germans. In the world opinion of academic circles, murdering your own countrymen does not carry the same weight as murdering people from other nations.

6) The Left considers the last good war fought as WWII. Lefties do not look at wars against communist regimes as good wars. Thus, academia considers the Vietnam and Korean Wars against communism as bad wars and the soldiers who fought in them were spat upon when returning home. But Jane Fonda, who sympathized with the Vietnamese and took pictures of herself on their tanks, was glorified by the Left.

WWII was a good war because the Nazis had occupied many European nations that were subsequently liberated at the end of WWII.

Most high school and college students have no idea what happened to millions of innocents under communism, despite testimonials from many of the survivors of communism. And we were saddened to see anarchists in D.C. cowardly photographing their arms and hands while flipping the Victims of Communism Memorial.

Young leftists mocked those who tried to educate by telling them the truth. They have been so thoroughly brainwashed by their schools that they no longer discern rational thought. They see themselves so diversely open-minded, yet their brains had fallen out long time ago.

Why communism gets a pass from our Democrat Party-dominated culture, Why communism gets a pass from our one-party system and culture, WorldTribune.com

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A reminder: Anti-communist hysteria almost destroyed the University … – Los Angeles Times

A bill making its way through the California Legislature to remove membership in the Communist Party as a disqualification for employment by the state 64 years after the rule was imposed prompts us to revisit how anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s almost destroyed the University of California.

The measure by Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Oakland) narrowly passed the Assembly on Monday and is now before the Senate.

Its more than a reminder of the toll that the Red Scare exacted on our public institutions. The measure also lends some perspective to the debate going on today about free speech on university campuses. As we observed recently, the uproar over a few isolated cases of speakers being barred or shouted down obscures how in most respects the debate actually is a marker of free speech, not a sign of suppression. That wasnt the case in the 1950s.

The Legislature enacted its employment ban on communists in 1953. Bonta doesnt go so far as to declare that the states action then was wrong, though he told my colleague Melanie Mason that the communist label could be misused or abused, and frankly, has been in the past, in some of the darker chapters of our history in this country.

The Red Scare impinged on the University of California most directly through the loyalty oath controversy of 1949-54, which I recounted in my recent book Big Science, about the career and work of the Nobel-winning UC Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence.

The controversy began in June 1949 with a vote by the UC Regents to add a statement disavowing membership in the Communist Party to an oath of allegiance already required of UC employees.

At that point, anti-communist hysteria was in full cry in California and across the country. The state legislature had echoed congressional concerns about subversion by establishing its own Committee on Un-American Activities in 1941, but the committee moved into high gear only in 1947, when its chairman, Sen. Jack Tenney, stages a clownish investigation of ostensibly lax security at Lawrences Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab).

Tenneys probe went nowhere, but at the same time the Atomic Energy Commission was stepping up its own red hunt by establishing local panels to investigate employees of AEC contractors including UC, which was running the Los Alamos atomic weapons lab in New Mexico for the government and which received heavy government funding for Lawrences lab. The chairman of the California AEC panel was UC Regent Jack Neylan, a renowned red-baiter. Lawrence was a dear friend of Neylan, and had to step in more than once to dissuade the regent from ordering the dismissal of Lawrence employees he suspected of communist sympathies.

In 1949, Tenney resurfaced with a package of 13 bills targeting suspected communists at the university and elsewhere in state government. Hoping to head off legislative interference in UC affairs, then-Chancellor Robert Sproul proposed a loyalty oath in which UC employees would disavow support of any organization advocating the overthrow of the United States government. The regents added the specific reference to the Communist Party.

Adding to political sensitivities within the UC administration was a speaking invitation tendered by UCLA to Harold Laski, a leftist political scientist from Britain. Sproul, who then had authority over UCLA as well as Berkeley, forced the campus to withdraw the invitation.

Neylan soon emerged as the outstanding hard-liner among the regents. In early 1950, when opposition to the loyalty oath already was coalescing among the faculty, he persuaded the board to fire any employees who refused to sign the oath. Among the majority siding with Neylan was Mario Giannini, son of A.P. Giannini, the founder of the Bank of America and himself a former regent; among those opposing the policy was newly elected Gov. Earl Warren, an ex-officio regent and the future chief justice of the U.S.

The loyalty oath split the UC faculty. A majority opposed the oath but nevertheless chose to sign. For many, being required to affirm ones political loyalty was so repugnant that the real choice became whether to stay at Berkeley at all. European-born scientists and other faculty faced a particular moral quandary: As I wrote in Big Science, even the most ardent anti-communists among them thought the oath an uncomfortably close reminder of the impositions on academic freedom they had suffered in their homelands.

The oath prompted a flow of resignations that sapped Berkeley of the core of its scientific faculty. Many had been attracted to the university by Lawrences fame as the inventor of the atom-smashing cyclotron, and were now appalled that his friendship with Neylan prevented him from speaking out against the oath in fact, even trying to enforce it in his lab.

One who left was the brilliant young particle physicist Wolfgang Pief Panofsky, who was granted a personal audience with Neylan at Lawrences behest. Instead of persuading Panofsky to stay, Neylan hectored him about the evils of communism for two hours straight. Panofsky fled to Stanford, where he taught for the next 56 years.

The loyalty oath affair reached its climax with the firing of 31 non-signers in 1950. That also marked the beginning of the end. Two years later, the state Supreme Court ordered them all reinstated; in 1954 they won back pay for the period of their dismissal. One, David Saxon, would later become president of the university.

The loyalty oath began a subtle transformation in the universitys reputation as a haven for pure science. Instead, it began to seem a place where ones views on the fraught politics of national security loomed over ones career prospects. The atmosphere at Lawrences laboratory and the university as a whole did not make people who dissented feel they were welcome, Saxon observed at a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the affair.

What the episode really illustrated was the folly of trying to impose policies so central to the mission of a university by fiat.

Everybody lost, and no one won, David Gardner, a historian of the controversy and himself a former president of UC, said at the symposium. How could it be that a great university set out in 1949 to clarify a policy about communism and its place in the university, and a year-and-a-half later wind up dismissing 31 members of the faculty of the University of California against whom no charges were made?

At Berkeley, the loyalty oath experience continued to resonate through the 1960s and the birth of the free speech movement, which militated against Vietnam- and civil rights-era restrictions on political speech on the campus. And the issues continue to resonate today not least as a reminder that the loyalty oath affair was fueled at least partially by UCLAs speaking invitation to Laski.

Free-speech challenges still erupt at Berkeley and other UC campuses, but wholesale disqualifications for ones political beliefs or even political statements havent been tried since. That doesnt mean they wont recur political attacks on university faculty members are common, generally as right-wing attacks on supposed liberal leanings of university professors.

The California Legislatures consideration of a bill to wipe communist sympathies off the roster of disqualifying attributes for state employment is a good step, but it passed only narrowly, against opposition from legislators still cherishing the mistakes of the past: The whole concept of communism and Communist Party members working for the state of California is against everything we stand for on this floor," said Assemblyman Randy Voepel (R-Santee) during floor debate. But the politics of the 1950s have no place in the politics of the 21st century.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

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A reminder: Anti-communist hysteria almost destroyed the University ... - Los Angeles Times