The Exception

Commenting on the news of Fidel Castro's resignation, Carl Bildt points out:

I dag är Kuba det enda landet i den västra hemisfären som saknar en folkvald regering. I stället tyngs det av ett föråldrat och förstelnat kommunistiskt styre.

Today Cuba is the only country in the western hemisphere which lacks a popularly elected government. Instead it is weighed down by an obsolete and fossilized Communist regime.

The Singing Revolution - II

At Townhall.com Brent Bozell has a review of The Singing Revolution. The piece opens on an engaging note:

There have been a number of stories in the press in recent months about Geographically Challenged America. None tops the report about Miami Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder confessing he hadn't known that people spoke English in London.

"I couldn't find London on a map if they didn't have the names of the countries," he explained. "I swear to God. I don't know what nothing is. I know Italy looks like a boot."

I suppose we'd all have another chuckle if Crowder were asked to find Estonia on a map, but in truth how many can? And for those of us who can, how many of us know anything of significance about this seemingly insignificant little country?

Read it all

(hat tip: Leopoldo)

Historical Excuses

In the Washington Times, columnist and political scientist Arnold Beichman takes issue with a recent book by New York Times reporter Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, which purports to be a history of the CIA, but contains among other things the assertion that

the CIA used Radio Free Europe (RFE) to spark the October 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation and satellization. In other words as instigators and cheerleaders, the CIA and RFE, says Mr. Weiner, were responsible for the bloody events.

"If Mr. Weiner had done any homework," Beichman notes, "he would have realized how misplaced is his accusation."

Meanwhile, Estonian politician Mari-Ann Kelam recalls that arguments of the kind presented by Weiner were common currency during the years that marked the end of Communism in Eastern Europe:

One of George Bush’s excuses in 1990 for not being pro-active on the Soviet-occupied Baltic nations was this same nonsense about the “radios encouraging the Hungarians” and not wanting to repeat that fiasco…He told us this at a meeting in the White House with American Baltic leaders.

The Grand Deception

An interesting piece by JR Nyquist on the notion, beloved of US conservatives, that "the Soviet Union fell because Ronald Reagan pushed it over."

Not so, says Nyquist,pointing to the new work of exiled Czech director Robert Buchar, who is currently making a film on the true origins of Eastern Europe's "People power":

Former chief of CIA Soviet Bloc Counterintelligence, Tennant H. "Pete" Bagley told Buchar that an unknown hand was behind the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. "There was a different truth in this respect," Bagley said. "and that’s a truth that was so well hidden that I don’t know if it ever will come out…." According to Ludvik Zivcak, a Communist secret police official tasked with organizing the demonstration that triggered the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia,“Many people think or believe that in 1989 there was a mass uprising of the nation. From what I did, or where I worked, I am convinced that there was no uprising at all. It’s hard to find out today who wrote the script but it wasn’t written in America. America just jumped on the bandwagon at the end. So the script was most probably written in the East.”

Hat tip: Mark Pettifor