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This year is the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The man who orchestrated it died 93 years ago, on 21 January 1924. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ushered into the world one of the most brutal dictatorship it has ever seen in the Soviet Union, writes Joachim Starbatty.

German Liberal-Conservative Reformists MEP Joachim Starbatty is affiliated with the European Conservatives and Reformists group [ECR]. Starbatty is a professor emeritus of economics at Tbingen University.

This year is the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The man who orchestrated it died 93 years ago, on 21 January 1924. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, ushered into the world one of the most brutal dictatorships it has ever seen, in the Soviet Union. Aided by the Soviets numerous other Communists rose to power, with similarly dire effects for their people; in North Korea and Cuba some still reign. Not just because the ideology continues to claim lives, but because many millennials hold a sympathy for communism borne of ignorance, it is vital we remember its grim reality.

One of the fundamental problems of communism came from the core of its ideology; the belief that capitalists served no meaningful task. The reality is that the investments made by capitalists, chosen with care given they have their own money on the line, serve to drive competition, innovation and progress. Without investors innovative firms like Apple or Microsoft would never get off the ground, the variety of goods and services would remain minimal, and the economy would remain stagnant. In communist societies, this is exactly what happened.

It is true that communist nations generally industrialised, but many had begun their industrialisation before communist parties took power; Russia was the 4th greatest industrial power in 1914. Moreover, communist nations were copying an achievement already made; where the West had to invent the tools of industry, the communists merely had to plagiarise them. The greatest caveat is in how industrialisation was achieved. Where the Soviet system paid for its centrally planned industrialisation with blood, famine and poverty that consumed millions of lives, the western liberal model based in property rights, free enterprise and the rule of law had seen industrialisation paired immense reductions in poverty and child mortality with previously unimaginable prosperity.

So, then, communism brought with it oppression, suffering and poverty, without exception. That some celebrate it despite the impoverishment it has brought entire peoples, the ruin it has wrought on nations, and the millions slaughtered, is a testament to a stunning lack of knowledge. If the West is to remain prosperous, free and democratic, the horrors of communism must be remembered.

This year, the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe will focus on the dark legacy of the communist system, and the divergent developments of post-communist states.

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Lenin: Father of the Bolshevik Revolution - EurActiv

JAKARTA Indonesian police on Monday questioned a hardline Muslim cleric over a hate speech complaint by a civil group following a lecture in which he said new banknotes carried the communist hammer-and-sickle symbol.

Communism remains a highly sensitive issue in Indonesia after bloody anti-communist purges in the country in 1965 and symbols and some literature remain outlawed.

Habib Rizieq, head of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), is being investigated over two separate complaints, as authorities take a tougher stance against fundamentalist groups in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation.

Rizieq made the comments about the banknotes in a videotaped lecture last month.

"This is already a formal investigation," said Jakarta police spokesman Argo Yuwono. "We are looking looking further into his comments on whether the money has the hammer-and-sickle symbol."

The central bank has denied the new banknotes carry any communist symbols.

"What's being seen by some people as a hammer and sickle symbol is actually the Bank Indonesia logo...and it is part of the security elements in the notes to prevent counterfeiting," Bank Indonesia said in a statement this month.

Last week, Rizieq was questioned by police over claims that he made defamatory comments in 2014 about one of Indonesia's founding fathers, Sukarno, and had questioned the legitimacy of the state ideology, Pancasila.

If found guilty, he could face up to four years in prison.

The cleric has denied wrongdoing in both cases.

Rizieq's supporters condemned the investigation of the complaints as indicating the "criminalization" of their leader.

"This is systematic tyranny against Habib Rizieq, which destroys the pillars of justice," said the FPI's Jakarta chief, Novel Bamukmin. "It's a form of criminalizing the clerics."

Rizieq and the FPI were key drivers behind recent rallies against the Christian governor of Jakarta, whom they accused of insulting the Muslim holy book, the Koran. The rallies were the biggest Indonesia has seen in nearly 20 years.

Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama is in on trial for blasphemy, but remains one of the frontrunners in next month's governor election.

Purnama has denied blasphemy. There are concerns he has been unfairly targeted and that the government has not done enough to protect the rights of religious and ethnic minorities.

(Reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa; Writing by Kanupriya Kapoor; Editing by Ed Davies and Clarence Fernandez)

LONDON British Prime Minister Theresa May will learn on Tuesday whether parliament must agree to the triggering of Britain's exit from the European Union, potentially giving lawmakers who oppose her plans a chance to amend or hinder her Brexit vision.

BEIRUT Syrian refugee children in Lebanon are struggling to get an education and many are being pushed into work or early marriage instead, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF said on Monday.

PARIS Benoit Hamon, a former Socialist government rebel, won the first round of a primary on Sunday and will meet ex-prime minister Manuel Valls in a runoff to decide who will be the candidate of the beleaguered left in a presidential election in spring.

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Indonesia police question cleric over lecture on communist symbols - Reuters

Cathy Young Published 8:41 a.m. ET Jan. 21, 2017 | Updated 20 hours ago

People arrive on the mall for the Women's March in Washington, Jan. 21, 2017.(Photo: John Taggart, epa)

If you're going to protest a new president famously accused of being a tool ofRussian strongman Vladimir Putin, common sense would suggest avoiding high-profile speakers who were proudtools of Putin's former employer, the Soviet Union. But common sense is often in short supply in our public life.

The Womens March on Washington, the massive protest against Donald TrumpSaturday, has been dogged by accusations of not being inclusive enough toward men, pro-life womenand even white feminists who feel they are being treated as oppressors by minority activists. The newly released list of speakers raises even more questions about whom and what the march represents. The entire roster skews far left, from feminist doyenne Gloria Steinem to filmmaker Michael Moore with no room for anti-Trump Republicans such as GOP activists Ana Navarro and Amanda Carpenter. And then theres Angela Davis, a star speaker and honorary co-chair of the event. An activist and scholar, Davis is also a Communist Party veteranwith a long record of support for political violence in the United States and the worst of human rights abusers abroad.

The Washington Postarticle on the Womens March speakers identified Davis as a civil rights era icon. In fact, while Davis participated in civil rights activism as a teenager in her native Birmingham, Alabama, she spent the peak years of the movement studying philosophy in Europe; she did not become an icon until 1970, as a famous fugitive accused of aiding a courthouse escape attempt in which a judge was shot dead and a juror and a prosecutor were wounded. Davis, by then a University of California professor, a Black Panther militant, and a hardcore Marxist-Leninist, was eventually acquitted by a handpicked politically sympathetic jury despite evidence that the weapons used in the incident were registered in her name. In subsequent years, she was an active supporter of the radical Jonestown commune in Guyana, which ended in murder and mass suicide.

But whatever one thinks of Daviss domestic militancy, her true claim to infamy is her career as an apologist for repressive communist regimes. During her 18 months in jail, Davis became a heroine across the Soviet bloc; for communist states frequently criticized for imprisoning dissidents, a perceived political prisoner in the United States was a godsend. After her release, Davis was feted in East Germany (a 1972 photo shows her shaking hands with then-General Secretary Erich Honecker, whose orders to shoot people trying to escape the socialist paradise by crossing the border into West Germany resulted in over 1,000 deaths), in Cuba, and in the Soviet Union, where she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prizein 1979, just months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

It takes some cheek to mount a protest against Trump with a speaker who was twice honored by Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

In July 1972, Czech journalist and activist Jiri Pelikan, a prominent figure in the reformist Prague Spring who was forced to emigrate after the 1968 Soviet invasion, wrote the recently freed Davis an open letter expressing sympathy with her experience and urging her to speak out against human rights violations in Communist countries. Most of his appeal focused on the brutal treatment of Czech dissidentsmany of them, like Pelikan himself, idealistic Communists who thought Communism could be humanized into democratic socialism. Davis did not respond; however, her friend Charlene Mitchell told The Guardian that Davis did not think people should leave socialist countries to return to the capitalist system and that even if such people said they were communists they were still acting in opposition to the socialist system, objectively speaking. Mitchell also said, professing to speak on Daviss behalf, that people in Eastern Europe were only jailed if they were undermining the government.

Later, Davis remained a leader in the slavishly pro-Soviet Communist Party USA; in the 1980 and 1984 elections, she was the Partys vice-presidential candidate. She did not leave the organization until 1991, when the Soviet Union was relegated as those elections winner, Ronald Reagan, had predicted to the ash heap of history.

Daviss Communist past only undermines the message of the women's march.

The opposition to Trump accuses him of being a would-be dictator who seeks to impose an authoritarian order and trample human rights. While these claims may be exaggerated, there is a good case to be made that the incoming President has a strong authoritarian streak.Vigilant opposition is certainly needed. Yet Davis has amply and repeatedly demonstrated her hypocrisy on the subject of dictatorship and human rights.

What's more, the rhetoric of the anti-Trump resistance often portrays him as being in cahoots with Vladimir Putin, or even as a Kremlin puppet. Yet the same resistance is honoring a woman who ran for political office in the United Stateson the ticket of a party that was quite literally a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. Such hypocrisy lends credence to gibes by Trump supporters, such as Ann Coulter, that liberals and progressives had no problem with Russia when it was the Soviet Union but are now being hawkish against post-Communist Russia.

Trump has often been assailed for drawing support from extremists including white nationalists and neo-Nazis and not doing enough to repudiate them. Yet the opposition clearly has its own extremism problem, openly welcoming a person with an unmistakable history of reprehensible views. When an anti-abortion feminist group is beyond the pale but a longtime apologist for the crimes of Communism is not, the resistance can hardly lay a claim to the moral high ground or appeal to the bulk of Americans who consider themselves moderates.

Cathy Young is a columnist atNewsdayandRealClearPolitics.comand aContributing Editor atReason. Follow her on Twitter@CathyYoung63.

You can readdiverse opinions from ourBoard of Contributorsand other writers ontheOpinion front page,on Twitter@USATOpinionand in our dailyOpinion newsletter.

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Women's March on Washington honors Soviet tool: Column - USA TODAY

In a fresh insult to victims of terrorism everywhere, outgoing President Barack Obama decided to commute the 70-year sentence of communist terror leader Oscar Lopez Rivera (shown), whose terrorist group unleashed a wave of savage violence that included more than 120 bombings across the United States. The brutal Fidel Castro-backed Marxist-Leninist terror group, known as the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), murdered six and injured dozens of Americans amid its campaign to enslave Puerto Rico under communist rule. Critics and victims of terror expressed outrage, with some suggesting the move was a green light by Obama for future communist terrorism against innocent Americans.

But far from being a surprise, the latest radical move is merely a reflection of Obama's radical roots. After all, the virtually unknown extremist who grabbed the presidency with the backing of the establishment got his political career off the ground in the home of Castro-backed communist terrorist William Ayers of the Weather Underground a close ally of the FALN terrorists. According to FBI operative Larry Grathwohl who infiltrated the outfit, Ayers' Weathermen group was plotting to exterminate 25 million anti-communist Americans in death camps once they overthrew America with help from foreign communist dictatorships. Like Obama and Ayers, Lopez Rivera was also a community organizer in Chicago.

Under Obama's scheme, announced on January 17, the FALN terrorist leader Lopez Rivera will officially be a free man on May 17. Whether he will resume his terrorist activities remains to be seen. But it is noteworthy that the convicted terror leader refused a previous offer of freedom conditioned upon his renunciation of violence and terrorism. He has never expressed remorse. And as far as anyone knows, Lopez Rivera still believes in the use of terrorism and in murdering innocent people to bring about totalitarian communist enslavement of the Puerto Rican people. Apparently he has some allies in Congress, including longtime Marxist-Leninist activist Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who gushed that he was overjoyed and overwhelmed with emotion.

Perhaps the most infamous attack by the FALN terror group was a 1975 bombing at Fraunces Tavern in New York that killed four innocent victims and injured more than 50. Before that, the FALN had bombed Exxon, Union Carbide, Federal Reserve Bank buildings, and other targets. Among the many victims was a police officer with the New York Police Department, who was maimed and blinded. By 1977, the communist terrorists were bombing Defense Department personnel, too. In an attack on the Mobil building, FALN terrorists killed another victim, critically injuring many more. Fortunately, the terrorists were also rather incompetent, so despite being busted with massive amounts of explosives, their war of terrorism and enslavement was not as deadly as it might have been.

Lopez Rivera was a key player in it all, helping to lead the terrorist group's operations in Chicago and the surrounding area. He was arrested in 1981, when the FBI found large quantities of dynamite, firearms, explosives material, fake identification, and more in his apartments. The terror leader was charged and convicted in federal court for seditious conspiracy, violating the Hobbs Act, illegal possession of weapons, interstate transportation of stolen cars, armed robbery, interstate transportation of firearms, and conspiracy to transport explosives with intent to destroy government property. He was sentenced to more than 50 years in prison by a federal court that same year.

Apologists for communism and terrorism have claimed that there is no proof Lopez Rivera directly murdered anyone, which, as critics have pointed out, could also be said of Osama bin Laden or Terry Nichols. But in his indictment, prosecutors listed 28 terrorist bombings across the Chicago region as overt acts in support of the conspiracy he was convicted of participating in. At his trial, a FALN witness also described, under oath, how Lopez Rivera had personally trained him in how to produce deadly bombs. Throughout the ordeal, he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court, and he never expressed regret for the murder and mayhem he and his co-conspirators unleashed.

Adding insult to injury, rather than serving his sentence peacefully, the terror leader and his communist co-conspirators concocted a plot to break him out of federal prison at Leavenworth in Kansas by murdering prison guards. Had the plot not been stopped, it would almost certainly have left prison officials and law-enforcement officers dead. After his associates were busted with bombs and guns plotting the escape, Lopez Rivera had his sentence extended by 15 years, time which he will never serve thanks to an outgoing Obama who seems determined to support terrorism and terrorists of any variety all over the world.

But the FALN terror leader could have been free almost a decade ago. With Obama's future scandal-plagued Attorney General Eric Fast-and-Furious Holder operating behind the scenes, then-President Bill Clinton offered in 1999 to commute the sentences of a more than a dozen FALN terrorists, including Lopez Rivera. Eleven were eventually freed. But Lopez Rivera refused the offer because he would have to renounce terror, serve another 10 years, and leave some of his co-conspirators behind. Victims of the FALN's terror campaign were horrified, and the spectacle was so unpopular that even Clinton's wife Hillary Clinton was forced to criticize the move by her husband amid her campaign for the U.S. Senate.

At the time, investigative journalist William F. Jasper with The New American blasted the move by Clinton. The Presidents clemency for FALN thugs opens the door to new acts of violence and exposes the hypocrisy of [Clinton's] supposed tough stance against terrorism, Jasper wrote. This White House-sponsored, massive, terrorist jailbreak was a flagrant and visceral broadside against Americas national security. Numerous law-enforcement personnel who spoke to The New American also expressed outrage at the release of communist terrorists from prison.

Aside from a handful of far-left extremists in entertainment, academia, and government, commentators were aghast at Obama's decision, blasting the unconscionable move to free an unrepentant terrorist. Even some establishment voices were taken aback by the move. The FALN's season of insurrection is long over, wrote columnist Charles Lane with the far-left Washington Post in a piece that was also run by the pro-Obama Chicago Tribune. But for the group's victims, as well as for all Americans concerned with the consequences our government applies to terrorists, this last-minute get-out-of-jail-free card for Oscar Lopez Rivera seems anything but well-timed.

On the other hand, Obama's Castro-backed terrorist friend Bill Ayers, who wanted to exterminate 25 million Americans in death camps with help from Beijing, Havana, and Moscow, was ecstatic when he learned of the news. Still in the air, dancing in the aisles, the unrepentant communist terrorist and Obama ally wrote on Facebook after hearing of Lopez Rivera's imminent release. The day before, Ayers tweeted that he was on his way to Havana headquarters of the mass-murdering Communist Cuban dictatorship, which helped finance and guide his terror attacks in America but that he would return in time to rise up in Washington, D.C., for Donald Trump's inauguration.

The Communist Party USA and its official mouthpiece People's World also celebrated the decision. Oscar will be freed! wrote the communist propagandists, absurdly describing the terrorist as a political prisoner who was in prison merely for fighting for his country's independence. Also celebrating the move was Jacobin magazine, which falsely argued that Lopez Rivera's conviction on seditious conspiracy charges was the equivalent of a thought crime.

The far-left Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, which targets Hispanics with deception and propaganda, completely whitewashed the terror leader's crimes. In what critics described as fake news, the increasingly discredited Univision even suggested the terrorist was jailed merely for pursuing the independence ideal, assuring that all human beings have the right to want their country to be free and sovereign. Much of the English-speaking establishment media simply ignored the explosive developments altogether, focusing instead on Obama's decision to free leaker Bradley Manning.

Ironically, despite decades of scheming by Lopez Rivera and the totalitarian forces behind his terror campaign, the people of Puerto Rico themselves do not wish to be independent from the United States much less to live under a Stalinist regime akin to the barbaric dictatorship enslaving Cuba that also backed the FALN. Today, just a tiny radical fringe in Puerto Rico supports the FALN agenda. But that does not mean the terrorists and the forces behind them are no longer a threat to life, liberty, and property.

With this move freeing Lopez Rivera, Obama has again disrespected victims of terrorism and American law enforcement, while emboldening communists and terrorists everywhere. But unfortunately, the latest scheme from the White House follows a long pattern over the last eight years of this administration. From aiding and abetting Marxist mass-murderers in Cuba and El Salvador to shilling for amnesty and seats in Congress for brutal Marxist terrorists in Colombia and beyond, Obama has been among the biggest enablers of terrorism in U.S. history. It is time for Congress and the next administration to find out what has been going on.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Photo:Oscar Lopez Rivera

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Obama Frees Communist Terrorist, Sparking Outrage - The New American

Zuma is a communist or at minimum has a communist ideology, was a member of the communist party previously, empathizes with Mugabe of Zimbabwe, another communist.

This policy wreaks of communism. Doesn't South Africa have enough of problems as it is without going more towards communism? Work on the real problems, housing (no one should have to live in substandard housing/shacks or informal settlements, unemployment (25% unemployment is ridiculous), jobs and education.

Ramaphosa is a capitalist, owning the franchises in RSA for both McDonald's and Coca-Cola. If you insist on sticking with the ANC, at least let him run the helm and get your country back on track.

Just tell me one place in the world where communism has been successful. You've got a beautiful country. Tackle the real problems at hand.

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Communism, plain and simple - News24