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These three men contributed, both individually and jointly, to the overthrow of communism behind the Iron Curtain in Europe.

Blessed Stefan Cardinal Wyszyski, Pope St. John Paul II and President Ronald W. Reagan were all described as modern Knights of Liberty for their roles in bringing down European communism in the 1980s and 90s during an international conference at the Victims of Communism Memorial Museum in Washington on Thursday.

Panelists from the United States and Poland spoke about how the three men contributed, both individually and jointly, to the overthrow of communism behind the Iron Curtain in Europe. Major speakers included papal biographer George Weigel, European Member of Parliament Ryszard Legutko, and Bishop Sawomir Oder who, as postulator, handled John Pauls canonization process. Other panelists included Jan Kotaski, Polands former ambassador to the Vatican; Profs. Zbigniew Stawrowski, John Radziowski, Marek Chodakiewicz. Henry Nau, Lee Edwards, Paul Kengor, and Victims of Communism personnel, including Dr. Elizabeth Spalding and Ambassador Andrew Bremberg.

Wyszyski, who became Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw (and thus Primate of Poland) in 1948, assumed his post as communism in its postwar, Stalinist phase was stamping out all political pluralism in Poland. Seeing that Western recognition of the Yalta division of Europe was not going to be reversed, Wyszyski sought to carve out what space he could for the Church within the status quo. When the communists in 1953 claimed the right to make all ecclesiastical appointments, from parish priests on up, the Primate led the bishops collective declaration Non Possumus (we cannot agree), which landed Wyszyski under isolated house arrest for three years. During the time, the Primate prepared his spiritual strategy, including a nine-year novena to lead up to the millennium of Polish Christianity in 1966, which led to the recatechesis of the country.

Pope John Paul II who, as Karol Wojtya served as Archbishop of Krakw for 14 years alongside Primate Wyszyski. Despite relentless communist efforts to divide the two, Wojtya maintained loyal solidarity with Wyszyski. On Oct. 22, as cardinals processed up to the new Pope to declare their homage, John Paul got up and raised Wyszyski, embracing him. The next day, the new Pope declared, This Polish pope, who today full of fear of God, but also of trust, is beginning a new pontificate, would not be on Peters Chair were it not for your faith, which did not retreat before prison and suffering.

Reagan, who narrowly lost the Republican presidential nomination in 1976 and was expected to run in 1980, had already formulated a principled anti-communism, based not on political expediency but a moral assessment of the evil empire. Watching John Pauls first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979 nine days that changed the world, as papal biographer George Weigel described it Reagan became convinced Poland was the linchpin in bringing down the Soviet Empire and that he needed to work with the Pope towards that goal. His intention was reinforced by his conviction that both his and John Pauls survival of assassination attempts in 1981 were part of a divine plan to pursue that goal.

All the speakers emphasized that, while their goals were clear, Wyszyski, John Paul and Reagan were also all realists who recognized that, while their end might be long-range, their means should always focus on expanding liberty for the captive nations while never compromising on freedoms won. All of them saw the struggle against communism not as a political or economic one but fundamentally as a moral struggle for freedom and human rights. For that reason, none of them parsed words in speaking the truth about communism or defending the rights of peoples subjugated by it.

Winsome Sears, the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, made a surprise appearance. The conference ended with a discussion about challenges of defending freedom and explaining communism to young people the post 9/11 generation today.

The Victims of Communism is an educational, research and human rights nonprofit foundation established to keep alive the memory of communisms historical record, continue the struggle for freedom in countries still under the Marxist yoke, and to memorialize the more than 100 million victims murdered by communism since 1917, including by collecting victims testimonies. It has opened a museum to the victims of communism at 900 15th Street Northwest in Washington and erected a memorial modeled on the Tiananmen Statue of Liberty from 1989 near Union Station in the capital.

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Wyszyski, John Paul II and Reagan Saluted as Knights of Liberty - National Catholic Register

By Jennifer Scott, Politics Reporter @NifS

Friday 24 March 2023 10:48, UK

Downing Street has shown "important signs of regret and embarrassment" over the rhetoric used by ministers to describe Albanians, according to the country's prime minister.

Edi Rama has previously accused Home Secretary Suella Braverman of fuelling xenophobic attacks after she spoke in parliament about an "invasion" of asylum seekers and "Albanian criminals" when describing the small boats crisis.

But speaking to Sky News at the end of his visit to the UK - which included a meeting with PM Rishi Sunak - Mr Rama said progress had been made on the language, which he hoped would not be repeated.

"British/Albanian relations touched the lowest point in history since we have come out of communism because of that rhetoric that has put the Albanian community in Britain under a very, very heavy pressure," he said.

"I must say that finally, on the side of Downing Street, we have been heard and there is not only words, but also deeds in putting together in place a joint taskforce to crack down the criminal networks, which is of course something Albania has always wanted.

"While we are having very important signs of regret and of embarrassment that is, let's say, enough at this point. I hope very much that this will not be repeated anymore and that the Albanian community here will be really honoured for it."

More than a third of people who crossed the Channel to the UK in the first nine months of last year were from Albania, according to government figures.

Under Mr Sunak's five-point plan to stop illegal immigration that was launched in December, an agreement was made with Mr Rama to embed Border Force officials in Tirana, Albania's capital, as part of a package of measures to reduce Channel crossings among people from the country.

The Albanian PM said it was a "trend" in countries that have come out of communism to see the UK as a place to go for a better life, but without a visa route, people would come via boats and seek asylum instead.

Read more:Singling out Albanian migrants 'disgraceful moment', says Edi RamaTikTok to be blocked from parliamentary devices and network

"I'm not here to question the sovereignty and the mandate of the British government to have a policy on the borders but this is all what it is about - economic reasons for coming, getting a job and building a future in a place that has always been the shining city on a hill," he said.

"They claim asylum because there is no other way. They are not part of the free labour market. So it's all about dreaming and hoping to get what they imagine best for their life now and without waiting for many more years that this might happen in Albania."

Mr Rama called on the UK government to "never forget that the Albanians here are doing great and they are helping and contributing for Britain to be a better place".

He added: "Albanians here are working for construction companies, Albanians who are nursing elderly people, Albanians doing your cooking - so improving the British kitchens, I must say - and they are even singing too, let alone the academics and the students. And it has been so unfair to them to put them under such a pressure.

"But at the same time, they are a very strong base to build something very important."

The Albanian PM urged ministers to "separate the fight against crime" from those people seeking a job, adding: "It's about having a visa system that gives access to people to apply in a regular manner and to be processed without taking the Channel, coming here to work and coming here to offer their skills.

"This is a combination of factors that is slowly getting in place and I'm sure that this issue will be solved.

"But I'm not sure that closing the borders and not letting people come in is the best for the British economy. But this is not for me to decide, is for the British people."

More here:
Downing Street showed 'signs of regret and embarrassment' over Albanian rhetoric, says country's PM - Sky News

Fiction in translation

Championed by Elena Ferrante, Cspedess neo-realist classic The Forbidden Notebook is being reissued 70 years after it was first published. It still speaks to womens lives today

Sat 25 Mar 2023 07.00 EDT

Postwar Italian neorealism was one of the most exciting literary movements of the 20th century, but its only recently that the female neorealists have had the attention they deserve. In 2018, the publisher Daunt began its vital championing of Natalia Ginzburg, and now Pushkin brings us Alba de Cspedes. These women were famous in their lifetimes but have been forgotten since, and I think we owe their rediscovery to our own need for a reinvigorated realist novel during a moment almost as crisis-laden as Italy in the 1940s.

Its telling that many of todays most sophisticated realists, Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney among them, have been crucial in championing Ginzburg. And its no coincidence that all this began with Ferrante fever. Elena Ferrante herself owes so much to neorealism, and its she who has driven the rediscovery of Cspedes. In Frantumaglia, a collection of letters and reflections, she listed Cspedess The Best of Husbands as one of the few novels books of encouragement she could read while writing. Publishers everywhere rushed to find a copy, and this agile, conversational translation of Cspedess 1952 Forbidden Notebook, by Ferrantes own translator, Ann Goldstein, is the first in a series of novels to be republished.

When I write in this notebook I feel Im committing a serious sin, a sacrilege: its as if I were talking to the devil. Forbidden Notebook is about a 43-year-old woman who, during a rare moment of freedom, wanders the streets of Rome on a sunny Sunday and buys a notebook from a wary shopkeeper (such items were prohibited on Sundays). Valeria returns to her husband and almost adult children only to realise she wants to hide the notebook but has nowhere to do so: I no longer had a drawer, or any storage space, that was still mine. She then begins a period of secret diary writing that feels sinful but is also a vital, unstoppable source of defiant personal definition.

Elements of the novel are autobiographical, but Cspedes was a more glamorous figure than Valeria and came from a more dangerous and powerful world. Her grandfather was the first president of Cuba, having helped lead the fight for independence. With typically passionate recklessness, she married an Italian count aged 15, had a son, and divorced soon after. She then lived publicly as the lover of Francesco Bounous, an Italian diplomat, working together in resisting fascism.

Her first novel, Theres No Turning Back, became an instant bestseller in 1938. Its the story of eight young women a kind of early version of Mary McCarthys The Group. Her feminist writing and communism made her a target for the fascists and in 1943, she and Bounous escaped to Abruzzo and spent a month hiding in the woods, waiting to cross German lines. Cspedes had met Ginzburg before the war, and Id be fascinated to trace their criss-crossing paths over these terrifying months. At just this point, Ginzburg fled Abruzzo to hide in Rome, where her husband would soon be arrested and tortured. Cspedes was safer than Ginzburg, because she wasnt Jewish, but she put herself willingly in danger, broadcasting for partisan radio when she made it to Bari, getting arrested for the second time.

The war left her chastened but determined to live and to write. She became a major player in the Italian literary scene, publishing a series of novels chronicling this period of social change on an intimate, personal scale. She also edited a journal called Mercurio where she published the giants of Italian neorealism, and wrote an agony aunt column for the popular magazine Epoca. Here she achieved the astonishing feat of gaining enormous popular success and the esteem of the highest-minded writers of her day. At one point Sartre wanted to publish the columns as a book in France and write a preface himself. What she did here and in her novels was to combine intimate revelation about womens bodily and emotional lives with a deep moral seriousness about the need for change within marriage as an institution and within womens lives.

Forbidden Notebook is in part a documentation of postwar changes in womens lives, observed with the meticulous detail of neorealism. Valerias daughter has an open affair with a not-yet-divorced man that horrifies her mother, who then comes to see this horror as symptomatic of a dead set of moral values. But Valerias diary also enables Cspedes to ask perennial questions about the value and dangers of an examined life.

Whats at stake emerges in a powerful exchange between Ginzburg and Cspedes in Mercurio in 1948, republished in the NYRB. Here Ginzburg bemoans the bad habit women have of falling into a well, floating or even drowning in the dark and painful waters of melancholy. Cspedes responds by saying that, though she agrees, she believes the well itself can be a source of strength. Because every time we fall in the well we descend to the deepest roots of our being human.

It is this well Valeria falls into when she begins secretly to write, and finds that details she used to forget quickly amid the daily busyness of household tasks and office work take on new significance. Seeing how much resonance there is in a word or intonation, she begins to understand the secret meaning of life. Theres exhilaration here, but also fears that feel as though they must be Cspedess own: is the writer in danger of participating less when shes analysing more? Is it too depressing to know the people closest to her too well?

For the reader, the discoveries of the notebook emerge as discoveries of freedom. We share Valerias pleasure and release when she manages secretly to write. Valeria is an unreliable narrator, though, and we see her cowardice and need to be loved more clearly than she does, and fear for her when she embarks on a love affair with her over-romanticised boss. The act of writing appears to have set off processes of change she cant control, yet the love affair seems incompatible with the clear-sightedness of her writerly vision; her willingness to enter the well and look around in the murky water with open eyes.

Cspedes herself remained in the well, despite her diplomat husbands growing disapproval of her writing, and emerged with confidence and elan to describe what she found there: weakness, dreams, melancholy, aspirations, basically all those feelings that shape and improve the human spirit.

Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).

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Resistance fighter, novelist - and Sartres favourite agony aunt: rediscovering Alba Cspedes - The Guardian

Northwest Arkansas is not the first place you would think to stage the first major exhibition of work by Mexican artist Diego Rivera in two decades.

Yet, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is uniquely suited forDiego Riveras America. Its a museum specifically for American art(unfortunately people often forget that the United States and Mexico are both part of North America) and Bentonville, where the museum is located, is among thefastest growing citiesin the U.S. and the surrounding area has arapidly growingHispanic community. Sadly, the exhibition only hints at Riveras politics, which championed the working class and dreamed of a more equitable world, a missed opportunity in a society so focused on diversity and inclusion.

With over 130 works including easel paintings, pastels, watercolors, illustrations for print magazines, and of course the murals on which Riveras legacy is built, the show has the weight of a full-on retrospective, but that is definitely not what it is. Here, Rivera is presented fully formed. The works, as the title suggests, were all made in either Mexico or the United States between the 1920s and the early 1940s.

There have been two major retrospectives of Diego Rivera, one in Detroit in the 80s, and one in Cleveland in the 90s, James Oles, the exhibitions curator, toldARTnews.I didnt want to repeat those models, so I chose to focus on about the period between 1921, when he returns to Mexico after this extended time in Europe and paints his first mural, to the beginning of the Cold War, when Riveras impact and influence in the United States in particular begins to wane because of the shifting political climate.

Because of the specific nature of the exhibition, those unfamiliar with Riveras work would very much benefit from reading the labels, which give a great deal of arguably-needed context about Riveras life before the years covered in the exhibition.Without a doubt, the show is anchored by Riveras murals. Its a tricky thing, showing murals anywhere other than on the walls where they were painted, but Oles found a way around that obstacle: projections.

The projections are a novel idea, giving visitors a life-sized view of Riveras most gripping stuff in more ways than one. Thats because they arent just projected stills but short films with accompanying sound. Its so simple, so smart. But, as most creative types know, its often the simple things that are most difficult to get right.

I kind of timed it so that if you walked into the room, you might see nothing. But if you were a little patient, then suddenly somebody would appear or some action would happen, said Oles. One of the big things that a museum curator wants is for people to stop and look, instead of just walking by, looking at the label and moving on to the next work of art. But, with these videos people stop and look kids just come in and sit on the floor and watch the film. Theres no story, no plot. But that someone can enjoy watching the whole thing for three or four minutes, thats a huge success story.

Unfortunately, the projections just slightly miss their mark, sadly taking away from the grandeur of Riveras murals. To give these short films life, to show scale, and to inject some narrative, Oles hired actors that appear randomly during each loop. A preteen ensemble duo sits in front of one, sawing away at their instruments on an otherwise empty stage. During another, chicly dressed women and tuxedoed waiters walk up and down a set of stairs while in the background floats the clamor of a Roaring 20s themed party. But its clear we arent at the party. And the people walk by so infrequently that one gets the feeling there actually isnt a party at all, or a concert. Its all a slightly distracting put-on that draws the eye aways from the murals.

The first projected mural you come across (the one with the string duo) isCreation(1923). Commissioned by Jos Vasconcelos, the first secretariat of public education after the revolution, it was Riveras first important mural. Heavily biblical, the fresco is aesthetically inspired more by Riveras time in Europe than the later murals, but his unique style is fully present. Thick, almost cartoonish hands and limbs that somehow project a solemn dignity and, at its center, a man who represents the mestizaje, that mixture of Indigenous and European cultures that makes Mexico unique.

Where the projected murals are beautiful and slightly awkward, the preparatory sketches and ephemera throughout the exhibition are elegant, subtle, and as powerful as the finished works. They provide a glimpse into Riveras mind, his processes, and reveal that Rivera was not just a singular painter but also an exceptional draftsman, illustrator, and storyteller. The chalk and charcoal studies forCreationare a grad school seminar in anatomy, and the chalk-on-paper version ofThe Corn Seller,which hangs right next to the oil-and-canvas version are worth the trip down south alone.

The exhibition is organized into thematic galleries, which put the objects, scenes, and cultural intricacies that set Riveras imagination to work in pleasant, digestible portions. A room dedicated to pictures of mothers and daughters not only shows Riveras gentle touch but also, if youre paying attention, his revolutionary hope in a generation that at the time was still counting on their fingers and braiding each others hair. Another is focused on the rural customs and idyllic culture of Tehuantepec, a municipality in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Rivera first visited the area in 1922, shortly after joining the Mexican Communist Party, and like many before and after romanticized the areas pastotal customs and traditions, which fell in line with the Communist goal of an economic system that would lead to an equitable society that still embraced cultural diversity.

Throughout the show, especially in the murals, is Riveras idealized version of Communism. As strange as it sounds now, in the 1930s, when the US economy was crippled by the Great Depression, the idea that Capitalism as an economic system was on its way out was commonly held and Communism seemed like a viable alternative. Throughout the exhibition, the labels hint at Riveras Communist ideals with words like workers and working class but there isnt much mention of his political leanings until the gallery dedicated to the proletariat.

This feels another slightly missed opportunity in that the explanation of what Communism meant back then (as opposed to what it means in a post-Cold War society) feels like an afterthought, or worse, something that was intentionally avoided. Oles explained, however, that apart from the murals not much of Riveras work had overtly political themes or images, in large part because he survived on commissions from wealthy patrons who were (gasp!) more interested in tranquil and idealized images of traditional life in Mexico then radical left-wing imagery. And, of course, like Rivera, museums often rely on the whim of generous patrons and Oles pointed out that that there simply arent many images that one can borrow with that [radical] theme.

(Incidentally, another reason Crystal Bridges is so perfect for this Rivera exhibition is that the museum is a private institution founded by Alice Walton of the Walmart family, exactly the kind of patrons that Rivera relied on throughout his life.)

Still, the proletariat room highlights Riveras illustrations for magazines likeFortuneand reminds viewers that, back then, communists and capitalists were united against fascist threats like Nazi Germany and Francos Spain. And, it would be remiss to leave out the studies and cartoons made in preparation for the muralMan at the Crossroads,a fresco commissioned by the Rockefellers in 1932 for the lobby of the RCA building at Rockefeller Center. The work was harangued by the media as anti-capitalist propaganda before it was completed, which ultimately led to its destruction.

In his day, Rivera was considered equal to modern art giants like Picasso and Modigliani, a reputation that has undeservedly waned. An exhibition of this magnitude and depth is well deserved and will hopefully encourage not only an interest in Riveras work but also in his revolutionary ideals, class consciousness, and his cultural empathy.

Excerpt from:
Crystal Bridgess Diego Rivera Show Is Long Overdue, But Shies From His Politics - ARTnews

Virginia Dems claim that teaching about evils of communism will offend Asian Americans. How offensive  Fox News

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Virginia Dems claim that teaching about evils of communism will offend Asian Americans. How offensive - Fox News