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Showing posts with label Eastern Europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eastern Europe. Show all posts

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Rand Paul Tells The Truth!

Rand Paul Stuns Interviewer, Comes Clean on Election Meddling

BY DAVE BROOKS 
JULY 15, 2018 AT 3:10PM
 Print
Russia meddled in the 2016 election in part as a retaliation against the U.S. influencing elections in eastern Europe, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday.
“I think really we mistake our response if we think it’s about accountability from the Russians,” Paul told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “They are going to spy on us, do spy on us. They are going to interfere in our elections, we also do the same,” Paul said.
The comments, which come just a day before President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, show a realism that neither staunch Republicans or Democrats discuss, which is that Russia attempted various hacking and disinformation campaigns surrounding the 2016 election to discredit former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I would say it’s not morally equivalent,” Paul said of Russia’s election meddling relating to America’s campaigns to influence foreign elections. “But I think in [Russia’s] mind it is. It’s important to know in your adversary’s mind the way they perceive thing. They react to our interference in their elections and one of the reasons they didn’t like Hillary Clinton, they found her responsible for some of the activity by the U.S. in their elections under the [Former President Barack] Obama administration,” Paul said.
The special counsel investigation into Russian meddling led by Robert Mueller filed indictments Friday against 12 Russians connected to state intelligence services for allegedly hacking and attempting to hack the Democratic National Committee and other organizations to steal privileged information leading up to the 2016 election.
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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that there was “no allegation in this indictment that the Americans knew that they were corresponding with Russian intelligence officers” in announcing the charges.
Paul said that there were other ways to protect America’s electoral system, since it’s unlikely that foreign countries will stop trying to influence our elections.
“We all do it,” Paul said of spying and election meddling. “We need to make sure or electoral process is protected,” Paul said. Because the Russia issue has become intensely partisan, “we’ve forgotten the most important thing is the integrity of the election,” Paul said.
Paul advocates making sure electronic records are “decentralized and we don’t store all of the data in one place even for a state.” Paul also advocated for a backup system.

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Most of Russia’s meddling came in the form of advertising online, and that’s trickier to stop. “Can we restrict the Russians? We might be able to in some ways,” Paul said, but emphasized that it’s not reasonable to expect the Russians to admit their attempts to interfere.
“We’ve wanted Russians to admit it. They are not going to admit it, the same way we’re not going to admit we were involved in the Ukrainian elections or in the Russian elections. So all countries that can spy interfere, do. All countries that want to interfere in elections and have the ability to, they try,” Paul said.
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Tuesday, December 5, 2017

The Recipe For Destroying A Country--France's Acceptance Of Muslim Immigration

France: Islamism in the Heart of the State

by 
  • On all questions dedicated to immigration and Islam, France's Council of State has become an Islamo-leftist body, dedicated to encouraging Muslim immigration and protecting the expansion of Islam and Islamism in France.
  • The government wanted to expel foreign workers immediately after the cancellation of their work permit. Due to the Council of State, deportation was delayed by 24 hours, enough time to allow them to escape and become permanent illegal immigrants.
  • Maybe the elites are looking for "redemption" after France colonized parts of Africa. They are forgetting, however, that it was Muslims who colonized the Middle East, the Christian Byzantine Empire, North Africa, Greece, much of Eastern Europe and Asia, Northern Cyprus and Spain.
On October 25, 2017, the highest French administrative court, the Council of State (Conseil d'État), ordered the removal of a Roman Catholic cross from the top of a monument dedicated to Pope John Paul II in a public square in Ploërmel, Britanny. According to the France's highest administrative court, this cross was said to violate the secular nature of the State. Not the statue of the ex-pope John Paul II by itself; just the cross above it.
Social media, in France and abroad -- especially in Poland where John Paul II was born -- flew into an immediate uproar: How could the government of a country considered the "eldest daughter of the Catholic church" ask for the removal of a Catholic cross in a tiny village that nobody even knew about before this incident?
The Council of State is an independent legal body that has jurisdiction over disputes concerning civil liberties, administrative police, taxes, public contracts, the civil service, public health, competition rules, environmental law and secularism, to name just a few of its missions. The Council of State is also -- as its name implies -- the main advisor of every branch of government. Each time a minister or a prime minister has a difficult political decision to make, he sends the case to the Council of State. Generally, the Council of State's advice becomes the law.
The immense respect due to the Council of State seems to have caused even the keenest observers to miss the fact that, on all questions dedicated to immigration and Islam, the Council of State has become an Islamo-leftist body dedicated to encouraging Muslim immigration and protecting the expansion of Islam and Islamism in France.

On all questions dedicated to immigration and Islam, France's Council of State (Conseil d'État) has become an Islamo-leftist body, dedicated to encouraging Muslim immigration and protecting the expansion of Islam and Islamism in France. (Image source: Lino Bento/Flickr)

A few examples include:
  • 1978. The right to migrate and work in France without an employment contract. The Council of State cancelled the government's decision to require an employment contract for a foreigner to migrate and work in France.
  • 1978. The right to family reunification. Against the will of the government, which wanted to adapt migratory movements to a slower growth of the economy, the Council of State ruled that non-French immigrants have the "right to a family life", meaning that the wives and children of migrants workers are authorized to come, live and work in France as if they were French citizens. From that date, "family reunification" became an open door to migrants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
  • 1980. The right to polygamy. A foreign citizen is allowed to migrate in France with as many wives as he is married to in his country of origin. In 1993, a previous law had prevented second wives from obtaining visas.
  • 1985. The right to illegal immigration. The government wanted to expel foreign workers immediately after the cancellation of their work permit. Due to the Council of State, deportation was delayed by 24 hours, enough time to escape and become a permanent illegal immigrant.
  • 1989. Islamic veil in school is not "incompatible" with secularism. Since 18th century, state public schools were a tool of the state to build an education system away from the influence of the Catholic church. In 1989, with the authorization for schoolgirls to wear the Islamic veil, the Council of State introduced the right for a religion to influence a secularist education system. After 15 years of heated controversy, a 2004 law reversed that ruling and again prohibited the Islamic veil in the public secondary-school system, but not at universities.
  • 2004. Authorization of Al Manar, Hezbollah's virulently anti-Semitic television channel, to broadcast in France. After strong protests by leaders of the Jewish community, however, the government passed a law that made it obligatory for the Council of State to prohibit the Islamist channel.
  • 2010. The Council of State strongly opposed the government's decision legally to ban the burqa in the public space. A law banning the burqa was eventually passed.
  • 2011. Public money is allowed for building mosques after the Council of State bypassed the secularist law from 1905.
  • 2013. The Council of State gives the right to veiled mothers to be part of public school trips. Before that, school trips were considered an extension of the school. Consequently, the 2004 law prohibiting Islamic veil at school was applied against veiled mothers. In 2012, however, that law was reversed; now, veiled mothers are allowed to accompany pupils on school trips.
  • 2013. The Council of State opposed the dismissal of a veiled employee in a daycare nursery, Baby Loup. The Baby Loup veil controversy, which lasted five years, mobilized national and international media, politicians, and a large part of the judicial system. The question was: Does a female employee have the right to wear an Islamic headscarf, even if company rules prohibit it? Eventually, the employee was dismissed and Baby Loup, which was located in a Muslim suburb, moved elsewhere.
  • 2016. The Council of State allowed burkinis, the full-covering swimsuit for women. The ruling affects seaside resorts such as Nice, and places where the burkini does not create public disorder. In August 2016, burkinis started appearing on French beaches. In Nice, the capital of the Côte d'Azur, a few weeks after an Islamist terrorist murdered 82 people on July 14, four policemen delivered a warning to a burkini-clad woman lying on a beach. Pictures in the Daily Mail of policemen surrounding "poor and isolated Muslim woman," were published throughout the world. The Council of State ruled that any municipal prohibition of the burkini was prohibited -- unless the burkini was creating public disorder.
  • 2016. More money for "refugees". The Council of State ruled that the State had to give more money to help tens of thousands of "refugees" to find a place to sleep while their files were being examined by immigration officials, contrary to other applicants.
  • 2017. A government-funded mega-mosque in Paris. The Council of State helped the mayor of Paris legally build a giant mosque and donate it as a gift to an Islamic association.
  • 2017. Islamic veil in nursing schools. The Council of State authorized the Islamic veil in nurses' training institutions even if internal rules prohibited exhibiting conspicuous religious signs.
  • 2017. Public showers and toilets for migrants. The Council of State ruled that the government has an obligation to provide illegal immigrants with public showers and public toilets in Calais, where thousands of young men from Africa and the Middle East try every day illegally to cross the Channel to England. Notably, this ruling is based on Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says this obligation is only for prisoners of war. Does the Council of State consider the French State as a jailer of migrants? There is no mention whatsoever in the ruling of considerations of public health.
Although the list above is not exhaustive, the rulings of the Council of State in favor of Islam, Islamism and unlimited, unvetted Muslim migration is systematic.
The question is: Why? Many French elites seem to be followers of a globalist ideology of no borders, no rules -- only the "human rights" of migrants from other nations vs. the rights of the citizens of France.
Perhaps many elites feel guilty after French State actively collaborated with Nazis, especially against Jews, during World War II, so that now they are trying, instead, to help Muslims -- whose culture and goals could hardly be farther from that of the Jews. Nevertheless, many seem to think of Muslims as "the Jews" of 21st century.
Perhaps many among the elites secretly do not like their country.
Or perhaps many elites are looking for "redemption" after France colonized parts of Africa and Northern Africa. They are forgetting, however, that it was Muslims who colonized the Middle East, the Christian Byzantine Empire, North Africa, Greece, much of Eastern Europe and Asia, Northern Cyprus and Spain.
Maybe it is a mix of all these guilts. What is certain is that after the collaboration of the French State with the Nazis, the judges of the Council of State are collaborating with yet another totalitarian ideology: political Islam.
Yves Mamou, author and journalist, based in France, worked for two decades as a journalist for Le Monde. He is finishing a book about "Collaborators and Useful Idiots of Islamism in France," to be published in 2018.
© 2017 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
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Sunday, August 13, 2017

So Is The New York Times Suggesting A Return To Communism?


Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism

Kristen R. Ghodsee
RED CENTURY 
A woman working at a collective farm near Moscow in 1955. Mark Redkin/FotoSoyuz, via Getty Images
When Americans think of Communism in Eastern Europe, they imagine travel restrictions, bleak landscapes of gray concrete, miserable men and women languishing in long lines to shop in empty markets and security services snooping on the private lives of citizens. While much of this was true, our collective stereotype of Communist life does not tell the whole story.
Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care. But there’s one advantage that has received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure.
A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.
How to account for this facet of life behind the Iron Curtain?
Consider Ana Durcheva from Bulgaria, who was 65 when I first met her in 2011. Having lived her first 43 years under Communism, she often complained that the new free market hindered Bulgarians’ ability to develop healthy amorous relationships.
“Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance,” she said. “After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased.”
Ms. Durcheva was a single mother for many years, but she insisted that her life before 1989 was more gratifying than the stressful existence of her daughter, who was born in the late 1970s.
“All she does is work and work,” Ms. Durcheva told me in 2013, “and when she comes home at night she is too tired to be with her husband. But it doesn’t matter, because he is tired, too. They sit together in front of the television like zombies. When I was her age, we had much more fun.”
Last year in Jena, a university town in the former East Germany, I spoke with a recently married 30-something named Daniela Gruber. Her own mother — born and raised under the Communist system — was putting pressure on Ms. Gruber to have a baby.
“She doesn’t understand how much harder it is now — it was so easy for women before the Wall fell,” she told me, referring to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “They had kindergartens and crèches, and they could take maternity leave and have their jobs held for them. I work contract to contract, and don’t have time to get pregnant.”
This generational divide between daughters and mothers who reached adulthood on either side of 1989 supports the idea that women had more fulfilling lives during the Communist era. And they owed this quality of life, in part, to the fact that these regimes saw women’s emancipation as central to advanced “scientific socialist” societies, as they saw themselves.
Although East European Communist states needed women’s labor to realize their programs for rapid industrialization after World War II, the ideological foundation for women’s equality with men was laid by August Bebel and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century. After the Bolshevik takeover, Vladimir Lenin and Aleksandra Kollontai enabled a sexual revolution in the early years of the Soviet Union, with Kollontai arguing that love should be freed from economic considerations.
The Soviets extended full suffrage to women in 1917, three years before the United States did. The Bolsheviks also liberalized divorce laws, guaranteed reproductive rights and attempted to socialize domestic labor by investing in public laundries and people’s canteens. Women were mobilized into the labor force and became financially untethered from men.
In Central Asia in the 1920s, Russian women crusaded for the liberation of Muslim women. This top-down campaign met a violent backlash from local patriarchs not keen to see their sisters, wives and daughters freed from the shackles of tradition.
In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin reversed much of the Soviet Union’s early progress in women’s rights — outlawing abortion and promoting the nuclear family. However, the acute male labor shortages that followed World War II spurred other Communist governments to push forward with various programs for women’s emancipation, including state-sponsored research on the mysteries of female sexuality. Most Eastern European women could not travel to the West or read a free press, but scientific socialism did come with some benefits.
“As early as 1952, Czechoslovak sexologists started doing research on the female orgasm, and in 1961 they held a conference solely devoted to the topic,” Katerina Liskova, a professor at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, told me. “They focused on the importance of the equality between men and women as a core component of female pleasure. Some even argued that men need to share housework and child rearing, otherwise there would be no good sex.”
Agnieszka Koscianska, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Warsaw, told me that pre-1989 Polish sexologists “didn’t limit sex to bodily experiences and stressed the importance of social and cultural contexts for sexual pleasure.” It was state socialism’s answer to work-life balance: “Even the best stimulation, they argued, will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.”
In all the Warsaw Pact countries, the imposition of one-party rule precipitated a sweeping overhaul of laws regarding the family. Communists invested major resources in the education and training of women and in guaranteeing their employment. State-run women’s committees sought to re-educate boys to accept girls as full comrades, and they attempted to convince their compatriots that male chauvinism was a remnant of the pre-socialist past.
Although gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy, Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined. Eastern bloc women did not need to marry, or have sex, for money. The socialist state met their basic needs and countries such as Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany committed extra resources to support single mothers, divorcées and widows. With the noted exceptions of Romania, Albania and Stalin’s Soviet Union, most Eastern European countries guaranteed access to sex education and abortion. This reduced the social costs of accidental pregnancy and lowered the opportunity costs of becoming a mother.
Some liberal feminists in the West grudgingly acknowledged those accomplishments but were critical of the achievements of state socialism because they did not emerge from independent women’s movements, but represented a type of emancipation from above. Many academic feminists today celebrate choice but also embrace a cultural relativism dictated by the imperatives of intersectionality. Any top-down political program that seeks to impose a universalist set of values like equal rights for women is seriously out of fashion.
The result, unfortunately, has been that many of the advances of women’s liberation in the former Warsaw Pact countries have been lost or reversed. Ms. Durcheva’s adult daughter and the younger Ms. Gruber now struggle to resolve the work-life problems that Communist governments had once solved for their mothers.
“The Republic gave me my freedom,” Ms. Durcheva once told me, referring to the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. “Democracy took some of that freedom away.”
As for Ms. Gruber, she has no illusions about the brutalities of East German Communism; she just wishes “things weren’t so much harder now.”
Because they championed sexual equality — at work, at home and in the bedroom — and were willing to enforce it, Communist women who occupied positions in the state apparatus could be called cultural imperialists. But the liberation they imposed radically transformed millions of lives across the globe, including those of many women who still walk among us as the mothers and grandmothers of adults in the now democratic member states of the European Union. Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.
Kristen R. Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of numerous books on European Communism and its aftermath, including, most recently, “Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th-Century Communism.”
This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. 
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 13, 2017, on Page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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