TOMMY ROBINSON, POLITICAL PRISONER

A corrupt British court system silences a righteous whistleblower.

Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270316/tommy-robinson-political-prisoner-matthew-vadum

May 31, 2018

[Editor' note: To help Tommy, visit his website, tommyrobinson.online, and also go to Rebel Media, which has nobly taken up his cause.]

One of Britain’s most prominent human rights activists is being held as a political prisoner for reporting on a brutal Muslim child-rape gang, one of many such “grooming” gang cases that country’s government has been downplaying or outright covering up in recent years.

Authorities in the United Kingdom are notorious for protecting Muslims who rape Britons and for covering up the crimes of Muslim rape rings. Some government officials and journalists suppress news of the sex crimes out of a perverse sense of political correctness; others because they are afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic.

From the 1980s to the 2010s, as many as 1,400 Britons, mostly white girls, were raped largely by Muslim men in Rotherham, England. In recent years Muslim rape gangs have been uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Aylesbury, Banbury, and in many other British communities.

Not surprisingly, many Britons now longer trust their government to handle such grooming cases fairly.

Some like scrappy English Defence League co-founder Tommy Robinson, a married father of three who has been sounding the alarm about the Islamization of the United Kingdom for years, try to bring transparency to a distrusted legal process.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is an imperfect vehicle for reform. He has hadplenty of legal troubles unrelated to his activism – for example, a conviction for mortgage fraud, and at times he seems a bit too eager to use his fists. But he is doing his countrymen a great service by drawing their attention to tremendous evils in his society that go largely unchallenged.

Whatever misdeeds Robinson may have carried out, they are insignificant compared to the crime waves unleashed on the British public by violent, misogynistic Muslim men who refuse to assimilate and adapt to their new homeland.

Unfortunately, Robinson can’t look for relief to weakling Prime Minister Theresa May, who is an Islamist appeaser. Her Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, is a Muslim.

The deck is stacked against those skeptical of Islam. In the United Kingdom the police now monitor statements on social media and jail those who express frowned-upon sentiments. In the U.K., Big Brother is no longer just something from George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Not surprisingly, Muslim terrorism apologist and Second Amendment-hater Piers Morgan pulled out the usual canards about Islam while attacking Robinson during a recent TV interview.

Based on nothing in particular, Morgan called him a “bigoted lunatic stirring up hatred” as Robinson characterized the Koran as a “violent and cursed book,” adding, “this book is the reason we are in such a mess.”

Piers claimed, “We’re in this mess because people take Islam, they are terrorists and they abuse the nature of Islam and… perpetrate evil.”

Robinson shot back denying Islam is a religion. “Islam is an idea – a bad idea,” he said, echoing ex-Muslim and genital mutilation survivor Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has called Islam “a political theory of conquest that seeks domination by any means it can.”

It was last Friday, May 25, when Robinson was reporting outside Leeds Crown Court in England when he was taken into custody for his most recent act of unauthorized citizen journalism. A tanning salon owner, Robinson filmed on his smartphone the arrival of accused rapists on trial for acts allegedly committed while being part of a so-called Muslim grooming gang. The broadcast consisted of an hour-long Facebook Live stream that within hours had been viewed more than 250,000 times.

The arresting officers informed Robinson he was being taken into custody for suspicion of breaching the peace. Taking footage in a public place of people walking into a courthouse is not in itself a breach of the peace even in the United Kingdom.

But this arrest was for what constituted a second offense under contempt of court laws, and was therefore grounds for Robinson’s probation to be revoked and for a sentence that was previously suspended for the same so-called crime to be carried out. He is now serving a 13-month term in secure custody at Hull Prison.

Because the filming May 25 was of accused persons in an ongoing criminal trial where a publication ban preventing news from being reported had been imposed, the court that day imposed a separate publication ban specifically on reporting what happened to Robinson. As happens in police states, the court ordered the media not to report on Robinson’s case, ostensibly to avoid “a substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice in these proceedings" against the rape suspects.

As Leeds Live reported on the events of May 25 days after Robinson’s arrest:

Eventually, the 35-year-old was arrested on suspicion of a breach of the peace and was held in the court cells before being taken up to the courtroom to face the trial judge.

In a rare move, he was arrested, charged and sentenced within five hours. The video footage was played to Judge Geoffrey Marson QC as Robinson sat in the dock.

Contempt of Court legislation largely applies to media publications - but as Tommy Robinson was broadcasting live on Facebook to the 778,280 people who like his page, and his 848,100 followers - he can be deemed a publisher in his own right.

Judge Geoffrey Marson QC told him: “I respect everyone’s right to free speech. That’s one of the most important rights that we have.

“With those rights come responsibilities. The responsibility to exercise that freedom of speech within the law.

“I am not sure you appreciate the potential consequence of what you have done."

Judge Marson claimed that Robinson waving a single smartphone around outside the courthouse could somehow have led to a mistrial declaration in the prosecution of the accused rapists, a claim that seems laughable on its face.

It is more likely Marson does not appreciate the social value of what Robinson, whom he jailed for the same kind of citizen journalism that got the man in trouble in the first place, did outside his courtroom.

Marson, who almost certainly believes he did the right thing in sending Robinson to prison, is an instrument of a corrupt system defending itself.

The U.K. is a country without anything even remotely comparable to the First Amendment, which still has creepy, frightening blasphemy laws, and where truth is not necessarily a defense to a defamation lawsuit.

The American system, readers need to be reminded, is about liberty – the system in England is about order, which is one of the reasons why American patriots had to overthrow the yoke of English tyranny in 1776. Liberty is frightening to intellectually stunted legal bureaucrats obsessed with order, which helps to explain why the English legal system has treated a heroic figure like Robinson so harshly.

As for Robinson, he seems to have predicted his sudden disappearance from the public scene.

In March, Twitter banned Robinson for the Left’s favorite catch-all thought crime, so-called hate speech. He alsoposted an ominous video on YouTube on March 2 titled “I won’t be around for much longer.”

I'm not going to be around for much longer. Between the police, the mainstream media and social media giants in Silicon Valley there is a concerted effort to silence and discredit me. Soon enough they will remove me from social media completely.

So far that sinister plan seems to be working.

Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."

"Tommy this, an' Tommy that ...an' Tommy go away"

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/8675/tommy-this-an-tommy-that-an-tommy-go-away

May 28, 2018

Tommy Robinson being arrested in Leeds last Friday.

On Sunday morning I had the pleasure of appearing with Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron on their Sky Australia show, "Outsiders", to talk mainly about the Obama Administration's attempt to subvert the Trump campaign in the 2016 US election, and in particular the remarkable Anglo-Australian contribution to that effort. (You can view our exchange here - and/or listen to it here, starting about 17 minutes in).

But, just before I came on (about 15 minutes in), Rowan and Ross addressed recent events in the United Kingdom and in particular the fate of, er, someone whose name they weren't permitted to mention but who, um, had been gaoled for, er, something or other... This was somewhat astonishing to me, as I'd assumed empire-wide D-notices had lapsed with the passage of the Statute of Westminster. But mein hosts circled back, cautiously, to the topic toward the end of my interview - and I observed, as I have before, how in almost the entirety of the western world, whenever anyone draws attention to some of the more problematic aspects of Islam, the state cracks down not on the problematic aspects, but on the guy who draws attention thereto. In Britain and Europe, we are an incident or two away from literally "shooting the messenger".

Rowan, Ross and I all knew we were referring to a gentleman by the name of Tommy Robinson. I expect many of you know that, too. But I doubt most Australian viewers had much of a clue about it, and I'm pretty certain the overwhelming majority of his fellow Englishmen are unaware of his fate. As readers may recall, I have met Mr Robinson just once, at an event at the European Parliament in Brussels. He is an engaging, charismatic fellow, albeit a bit rough-hewn for the refined sensibilities of the metropolitan media - although I thought he had the better of a rather somnolent Jeremy Paxman in this BBC interview.

On Friday, Robinson was livestreaming (from his telephone) outside Leeds Crown Court where last week's Grooming Gang of the Week were on trial for "grooming" - the useless euphemism for industrial-scale child gang rape and sex slavery by large numbers of Muslim men with the active connivance (as I pointed out to the Sky guys) of every organ of the state: social workers, police, politicians. Oh, and also the media. Me last year, on my time in a certain municipality about thirty miles south of Leeds:

Tracking down the victims of Rotherham required a bit of elementary detective work on my part, but it's not that difficult. What struck me, as my time in town proceeded, was how few members of the British media had been sufficiently interested to make the effort: The young ladies were unstoppably garrulous in part because, with a few honorable exceptions, so few of their countrymen have ever sought them out to hear their stories.

You can say a lot of things about Tommy Robinson, but he's one of the embarrassingly small number of Britons who recognizes the horror inflicted on those young and vulnerable girls on the receiving end of "diversity" and seeks to do something about it.

So on Friday he was outside the Crown Court in Leeds. He was not demonstrating, or accosting or chanting, or even speaking. He was just pointing his mobile phone upon the scene from a distance. Within minutes, seven coppers showed up in whatever they use instead of a Black Maria these days, tossed him inside it and drove off. In other words, these were not "investigating officers" called to the scene: They showed up with the intent to take him away. Within hours, he was tried, convicted and gaoled - at HM Prison Hull, a Category B chokey, or one level below maximum security. The judge in the case, one Geoffrey Marson, spent all of four minutes on trying, convicting and sentencing Robinson. It is not clear whether that leisurely tribunal included his order expressly forbidding "any report on these proceedings" (the case is Regina vs Yaxley-Lennon because that's Robinson's real name).

Which is why, all the way over in Sydney, Messrs Dean and Cameron were being so vague and cautious. In Britain itself, early online reports at The Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record, The Birmingham Mail and elsewhere vanished instantly, and silence has been maintained, especially on radio and TV, ever since.

The justification for this is Robinson's previous conviction in a previous Grooming Gang of the Week case at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion, the judge sentenced him to three months' imprisonment suspended for eighteen months. That was almost exactly a year ago - so, suspension-wise, he came up six months short when the plods collared him on Friday. That doesn't explain why Judge Marson in Leeds added an additional ten months (ie, he quadrupled his sentence) and disregarded a point that Judge Norton last year took into account - that the British state insists on banging up Robinson in gaols full of Muslim blokes who violently assault him. In Canterbury, Her Honor was sympathetic - up to a point:

I accept what Mr. Kovalevsky [Robinson's barrister] tells me about the dangers that you might face were you to be sent into immediate custody. I have to say it is on a knife edge so far as I am concerned because a very large part of me thinks so what? you could be put into protective custody.

Given that Judge Marson devoted a full four minutes to his drive-thru trial on Friday, I seriously doubt whether 25 seconds of that was devoted to any consideration of "protective custody". Indeed, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the British state would quite like it if Robinson were to be offed in HMP Hull. Yesterday UKIP Euro-MP Gerard Batten Tweeted:

UKIP Peer Malcolm Lord Pearson has written to Home Secretary Sajid Javid today saying : if Tommy is murdered or injured in prison he and others will mount a private prosecution against Mr Javid as an accessory, or for misconduct in public office.

Two and a half years ago, when I appeared at the Danish Parliament to mark the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons, there was some brief discussion of Tommy Robinson. My friend Douglas Murray noted that in 2014 Robinson had been gaoled for ...go on, guess: Islamophobia? Hate crimes? Yanking off some Muslima's hijab on the streets of Luton?

No. The British state sentenced Mr Robinson to eighteen months in jail for misrepresentation on a mortgage application. At HMP Woodhill he was savagely attacked by the Muslim gangs who operate with impunity in many UK prisons. As Douglas remarked, many people make "misrepresentations" on mortgage applications, but the vigor with which the constabulary hunt down this particular mortgage-misrepresenter is unique. In one of the few mainstream publications to risk comment on Friday's events (read it while you can), Rod Liddle underlines the point:

I'm not remotely a fan of Robinson. But I do not like the idea that simply being Robinson is enough to get you arrested.

Just so. With respect to this particular citizen among sixty million, the police function as the Old Bill of attainder: Get Robinson - on anything.

Supposedly Judge Marson ordered a media blackout because news reports would "prejudice" the trial of the groomers. Surely the opposite is true - that widespread reporting of the arrest of Robinson would lead to fewer citizens attempting to "prejudice" the trials of groomers. At the very least, when a man loses his liberty and is gaoled immediately without due process on an instantly quadrupled sentence, it would be nice to think that a free press would be free enough to mull the pros and cons of such an action. But Geoffrey Marson seems to have been minded to teach a more basic lesson - that in England, as in Argentina under the junta, you can be disappeared by the state, and it won't even make the papers.

And the lesson is not lost on those few who question the cozy bipartisan multiculti consensus: Best to fall into line - or at least pipe down.

Rod Liddle notes another aspect - the contrast between the urgency of the flatfeet when it comes to Tommy Robinson and their utter lethargic indifference when it comes to the young women I spoke to in Rotherham and the thousands of others like them in Leeds, Telford, Oxford, [Your Town Here]... West Yorkshire Police in Leeds are not to be confused with South Yorkshire Police in Rotherham. The latter are institutionally corrupt and depraved. As I told Mark Steyn Club members last year of my meeting with the victims of Rotherham:

To Mad Ash and his fellow 'Asians', the likes of Jessica and Katie are 'white slags'. To Her Majesty's Constabulary, they're mere 'Paki-shaggers', and thus unworthy of valuable police resources. The girls recall the night Mad Ash's brother Bannaras was in his car having sex with a twelve-year-old. A 'jam sandwich' - a police cruiser - pulled up alongside, and the officer rolled down the window. 'She's just sucking my c**k, mate,' said Bannaras Hussain. 

The cops drove away... 

Jessica kept a detailed diary of what had happened to her. She took it to the cops. It 'disappeared'. There was one kindly officer, but the others told him to back off, and, when he didn't, he died in an accident. Katie puts the word 'accident' in air quotes. Rotherham is a land of coincidence. 'Some of these things can happen, but not all of them, not in one town.' 

A couple of years after taking them her diary, Jessica went back to see the police. This time the detective told her none of the officers who'd witnessed her abuse would support her story because if they gave evidence at trial they'd wind up 'getting in the shit'. She left the room having taken the precaution of covertly recording the conversation. And thus the cover-up began to unravel...

It is striking to read Judge Norton's sentencing remarks from last year (Judge Marson's do not appear to be available: he rules in darkness). Her Honor huffs and puffs about Mr Robinson referring to "Muslim paedophiles" and "Muslim child rapists". I can appreciate that that might be vaguely annoying if one were a non-paedophile Muslim - although evidently not so annoying that spokespersons for the wider Muslim community ever rouse themselves to object to all the industrial-scale sex slavery. But it is a fact that in 21st-century England - in Yorkshire, in Shropshire, in Lancashire, in Oxfordshire, in the Home Counties - child-rape gangs are Muslim. It is a phenomenon, one that has never existed previously in the British Isles and one which will continue and metastasize until there is honest debate about it.

And, while Judge Norton is evidently outraged by Tommy Robinson's ill manners in referring to Muslims who rape children as "Muslim child rapists", one notices that neither she nor anybody else display any such outrage about the ruined lives of thousands of victims of men who get away with their evil for years ...because officialdom has chosen to prioritize "Islamophobia" over real crimes.

One more thought from my trip to Rotherham:

The cops drove away. It must have been an abiding image for Jessica, for Katie, for Bannaras Hussain's twelve-year-old, for the girl who would later testify that all three brothers pissed on her like 'a pack of animals', for a thousand and more 'Paki-shaggers' and 'white slags' all over Rotherham, year in year out, for decades: The police driving away ...and leaving them.

...and heading off to arrest one man with a cellphone, over and over and over.

~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a Tales for Our Timesampler for those who've yet to hear any of our audio adventures, with yours truly introducing and reading Conan Doyle, H G Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and more. On Saturday morning we presented the results of our "Oh Happy Day" competition: It wasn't exactly a D-notice, but we were under considerable legal pressure from a vexatious litigant. Our Saturday movie date offered contrasting movie treatments of an ingenious stage thriller: Dial RM for Remake. And for Memorial Day we offered a song for the season, some thoughts onwar and sacrifice, and a word from the real talent in the family. If you were busy with your own Memorial Day observances, we hope you'll want to check out one or two of the foregoing as this brand new week begins. We shall have a Tales for Our Time birthday bonus to launch the start of our second year later this week.

In June I'll be back in my hometown of Toronto next month to celebrate the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and to accept the signal honour of the very firstGeorge Jonas Freedom Award. Hope to see you there.

Thank you so much for all the Mark Steyn Club subscription renewals this past month - and for all the new memberships, too. Tomorrow, Tuesday, we will be presenting another of our Clubland Q&As live around the planet at 4pm North American Eastern - and we may return to the subject of Tommy Robinson and related matters. For more information on the Steyn Club, see here - and don't forget our limited-time Gift Membership.

'MISS ISRAEL' AND 'WONDER WOMAN' TO PRODUCE MOVIE GLORIFYING FIDEL CASTRO

“The Fuhrer’s swastika is today Israel’s banner” - Fidel Castro.

Humberto Fontova

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270276/miss-israel-and-wonder-woman-produce-movie-humberto-fontova

May 30, 2018

“Gal Gadot is on board to produce and possibly star in a movie based on Peter Kornbluh’s Politico article “‘My Dearest Fidel’: An ABC Journalist’s Secret Liaison With Fidel Castro.” “When I first read Peter’s article, I was entranced by his thrilling account of a complicated, fascinating woman [Castro and Che Guevara groupie Lisa Howard] in the midst of a high-stakes, real-life drama,” Gadot said. “I knew immediately that I had to be involved creatively with telling Lisa Howard’s story, and am thrilled to be producing this film with Sue.”

Fidel Castro’s habitual references to Israel as “Fascist!””Nazi!” and “Genocidal!” are the least of it. He also put his (stolen) money where his mouth is: sending tanks and troops to Syria during the Yom Kippur war attempting to “erase Israel.” His Stalinist regime also sponsored the famous UN resolution equating “Zionism with Racism” and drove out 90 per cent of Cuba’s Jewish population.

In fact, what Czar Nicholas failed to accomplish with 20 years of pogroms, “My Dearest Fidel” pulled off in three years of his Stalinist rule. He drove out a higher percentage of Jews from Cuba than Czar Nicholas drove from Russian and even Hafez Assad drove out of Syria. Yet “Miss Israel” seems as charmed by him as was Lisa Howard-- who also had the hots for Fidel’s sidekick Che Guevara.

In fact, in December 1964 Lisa Howard threw a celebrity-studded party in her Manhattan bungalow in honor of Che Guevara, who was addressing the UN that week. “Executions?!” Che Guevara exclaimed to the claps and cheers of that august international body. “Certainly we execute!—and we will continue executing as long as necessary!...the U.S.is carnivorous animal feeding on the helpless!” More claps and cheers greeted Che Guevara—followed by a simply fab party thrown by Lisa Howard, Gal Gadot’s new heroine.   

By the way, in between signing autographs for Manhattan’s glitterati at Lisa Howard’s place during that trip Che Guevara was also plotting with the Black Liberation Front to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Think of the drama this side-plot would add to Gadot’s movie!

I offer this sure-fire nail-biter on the part of Howard’s heartthrob to Gal Gadot’s screenwriters on the house. Don’t mention it, Ms Gadot! Happy to help with your project!  Thorough documentation for this terror-plot provided here.   

Politico writer Peter Kornbluh, by the way (who “entranced” Gal Gadot with his Politico article), is among the Castro-regime’s most active (but unregistered) U.S. agent/lobbyists. Kornbluh’s links to the terror-sponsoring Castro regime are so intimate that the Stalinist regime’s KGB-tutored secret police use Kornbluh as a celebrity prop in the ransom notes for their hostages. 

Think I jest?

Well, remember when Castro grabbed Alan Gross as a U.S. hostage to blackmail Obama into releasing the Castro terrorist/spies convicted of (among other crimes) conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens?…

Oh, I know, I know, the Fake News Media and Castro’s propaganda ministry (but I repeat myself) refer to this as “Obama’s historic opening to Cuba!” In fact it was a craven, sniveling (and typically Democrat) caving to blackmail by aterror-sponsoring, hostage-taking regime.

And why did Castro choose a Jewish American hostage (Alan Gross)?  Perhaps this might provide a clue:

“The control that Israel has over the United States is enormous.” Fidel Castro,

And here’s what the Simon Weisenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper heard from a Castro official while visiting hostage Alan Gross in his Havana prison cell: "Everyone knows that the Jews have a lot of clout in Washington.”

At any rate, here’s a picture (i.e.ransom-note) taken by KGB-mentored Cuban apparatchiks of Alan Gross in captivity featuring Peter Kornbluh. You’ve got to admit that’s quite an honor!

Recently a ceremony was held at the Cuban embassy in Washington, D.C., in honor, homage and tribute to the mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring dictator Fidel Castro. This strikes me as perfectly proper for Cuban diplomats. 

But what should you make of U.S. “scholars” billed as “impartial” gleefully offering “honor, homage and tribute” to the mass-murdering, terror-sponsor who craved to nuke their homeland? Wouldn’t this seem to make a sorry joke of their “impartial scholarship and expertise?” When featuring an article by such a person shouldn’t Politico provide its readers with a term a tad more revelatory of his agenda than mere “scholar?”

Well, here’s a picture of that celebration of “honor, homage and tribute” to Fidel Castro featuring, Gal Gadot’s “entrancer” Peter Kornbluh among other “U.S. Scholars.”

Oh, and if the term “heartthrob” for Fidel and Che in relation to Lisa Howard strikes some of my amigos as unnecessarily hyperbolic, I invite them (especially the ladies who are much better than men in these matters) to  study Lisa Howard’s face in these pictures of her with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Scroll down a bit and you’ll find that Ann Margaret never gazed upon Conrad Birdie more adoringly than (early feminist) Lisa Howard gazed upon Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, the jailers and torturers of the longest-suffering women political prisoners in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.

‘SAVED FROM CERTAIN DEATH’ TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF HISTORY

He believed Russia was on the right track before World War I, and he waxed optimistic about the transition to democracy in the early 1990s.

By Jonathan Daly
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Saved-from-certain-death-to-change-the-course-of-history-558570
May 28, 2018


In this Nov. 15, 2007 file photo, President Bush, right, presents the 2007 National Humanities Medal to author and historian Richard Pipes of Cambridge, Mass., during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Pipes, a renowned scholar of Russian history and aide to President Ronald Reagan has died in Massachusetts at age 94. His son, Daniel Pipes, says his father died early Thursday morning, May 17, 2018, at a nursing home near his residence in Cambridge. (Gerald Herbert/AP)

Richard Pipes, who died on May 17, 2018, was the most versatile, prolific and influential historian of Russia in the English-speaking world. He was also a prominent Sovietologist – a rare combination. His sweeping interpretation of Russia shaped worldwide perceptions and helped bring about the collapse of the USSR.

Born Ryszard Edgar Pipes in 1923 in Polish Silesia, he grew up in Warsaw and fled with his parents amid the Nazi occupation in late October 1939. Thanks to his father’s connections, fluent German, and audacity, they made it to safety, through Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Pipes commenced university studies in 1940 at Muskingum College in Ohio. Drafted in early 1943, he received Russian language training at Cornell University. After the war, he joined a brilliant cohort of future Russian historians at Harvard University, studying with the Russian émigré Michael Karpovich.

Pipes’s dissertation and resultant first book, The Formation of the Soviet Union (1954), laid the foundation for the now burgeoning field of nationalities studies of Russia and the former Soviet Union. His second book, which came out five years later, was a critical edition with extensive commentary on the defense of Russian autocracy by Nicholas Karamzin (1766–1826), a poet, the country’s first major historian and a founder of the modern Russian literary language. Here Pipes adumbrated his understanding of an underlying Russian political culture that tends toward political absolutism. Both volumes remain in print and are considered classics.

Pipes went on to write 20 more books and scores of scholarly articles, but these two works set the parameters of his approach: meticulous attention to historical detail, to concrete circumstances and to individual human agency, combined with an emphasis on fundamental issues and an overarching interpretation.

Pipes spent his career working through mountains of primary sources and, as an early practitioner of oral history, conducting hundreds of interviews. No historical determinist, he nevertheless believed it essential for historians to gain a deep understanding of a given people’s geography, climate, religious experience and ethnic composition. The fact, for example, that Russia had a short growing season and was comprised of dozens of disparate nationalities were features not to be overlooked.

For Pipes, “classes” and “social forces” do not make history; people do, and in particular political and military leaders. Although Pipes recognized that “one can become engrossed in the history of grain prices in medieval Hungary,” he devoted his life almost exclusively to “big questions” of Russian history, including the intelligentsia, liberal and conservative ideas, the overweening power of the state, Soviet expansionism, and the Russian Revolution.

Taken together, the elements of his approach enabled Pipes to articulate a broad interpretation of Russian history in his sweeping Russia under the Old Regime (1974), another classic no historian of Russia can ignore. In Pipes’s view, Russia tends toward unfettered political power, disregard for individual rights, and a “patrimonial” attitude of the rulers toward property and resources. In the era of Russian President Vladimir Putin, this feature of the interpretation, even to skeptics, now seems especially prescient.

From the 1950s, Pipes had commented on Soviet society, government and geopolitics. He viewed the USSR as an illegitimate state with an oppressed citizenry and a privileged elite, beset by demographic challenges, committed to expansionism and lacking conceptions of international stability and rightful spheres of national influence. In 1970, Senator Henry Jackson, a “Cold War liberal,” took notice and engaged Pipes as a consultant. In 1976, Pipes led the Team B analysis of the CIA’s Soviet strategic estimates.

His resultant Commentary article, “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War” (1977), brought Pipes notoriety and a position as Soviet and East European expert in Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council. Here Pipes drafted (and Reagan signed in 1983) National Security Decision Directive 75. It articulated a “grand strategy” to challenge the USSR politically, economically, militarily, diplomatically and culturally and thereby to nudge the Kremlin toward reform. It is hard not to see the rise of Gorbachev and the implementation of his reforms as, in part, consequences of this strategy.

After Washington, Pipes completed his monumental two-volume study of the Russian Revolution and early Bolshevik rule (1990, 1994), the continuation of Russia under the Old Regime. With some 1,500 pages and over 4,000 scholarly references, it is a tour de force of factual detail, brilliant writing, intellectual sophistication and moral depth. Colleagues berated him for ignoring mass participation in the revolution, for “prosecuting the Russian Revolution,” for arguing that Lenin’s indiscriminate violence against specific social categories prefigured Nazi atrocities, and for suggesting that the institutions and political culture of early Bolshevism laid the necessary foundations of Stalinism.

Decades after the collapse of the USSR, it is hard to understand the ferocity of those debates or why many “revisionists” despised Pipes. In reality, the October Revolution can be rightly interpreted as a coup d’état with little popular support and as a human catastrophe of colossal proportions. It seems now incontestable that dismantling prerevolutionary restraints on government, like the independent judiciary and property rights, and deploying dehumanizing rhetoric and repression paved the way toward Stalinism. Nor does Stalin’s targeting for exile of millions of peasants and for execution of hundreds of thousands of “socially undesirables” now seem less than at least a foretaste of the Holocaust.

His service in Washington and his history of the Russian Revolution made Pipes a public intellectual with speaking engagements, interviews and newspaper commentary across the globe. Property and Freedom (1999), which presents strong property rights as a bulwark of political liberty, won the prestigious Bruno Leoni Prize in 2015.Communism: A History (2001) was translated into 14 languages. Pipes gained worldwide fame.

Pipes’s reputation as a “Russophobe” is unjustified. He disliked the Russian government (in all its phases) but loved Russian culture, both the warmth of its people and the profundity of its arts. Chekhov was his favorite author in world literature. He had close, supportive relations with many Russians (and non-Russian citizens of the USSR and Russia – he was named honorary consul of Georgia in 1997) both within the country and abroad. Before the Soviet collapse, many dissidents revered him, and for decades thereafter Pipes was viewed as a sage commentator on Russian affairs, probably more than any other foreign scholar.

He believed Russia was on the right track before World War I, and he waxed optimistic about the transition to democracy in the early 1990s. He cared deeply about Russia’s future and devoted much of his scholarship to seeking a “usable past” for its present guidance. Pipes’s two-volume biography of the liberal activist and thinker Peter Struve (1970, 1980), a labor of love, was meant to provide a future role model for freedom-seeking Russians. He was thrilled when the book was published in Russia in 2001 and he was invited to take part in a conference on Struve’s life in Russia in 2003. He hoped his last book, Alexander Yakovlev: The Man Whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism (2015), would inspire reform-minded Russians.

Some Russian historians have published as much or have investigated such varied periods and themes or have conceived robust and multifaceted interpretations of Russia’s history, but no other has achieved all these things in one lifetime.

The author is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Swift Injustice: The Case of Tommy Robinson

by Bruce Bawer
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12378/tommy-robinson-injustice
May 27, 2018


Tommy Robinson Arrested for Reporting on 'Grooming Gangs' in Front of British Court | MRCTV

The very first time I set foot in London, back in my early twenties, I kicked up into an adrenaline high that lasted for the entire week of my visit. Never, in later years, did any other place ever have such an impact on me -- not Paris, not Rome. Yes, Rome was a cradle of Western civilization, and Paris a hub of Western culture -- but Britain was the place where the values of the Anglosphere, above all a dedication to freedom, had fully taken form. Without Britain, there would have been no U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or Bill of Rights.

In recent years, alas, Britain has deviated from its commitment to liberty. Foreign critics of Islam, such as the American scholar Robert Spencer, and for a time, even the Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders have been barred from the country. Now, at least one prominent native critic of Islam, Tommy Robinson, has been repeatedly harassed by the police, railroaded by the courts, and left unprotected by prison officials who have allowed Muslim inmates to beat him senseless. Clearly, British authorities view Robinson as a troublemaker and would like nothing more than to see him give up his fight, leave the country (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands), or get killed by a jihadist (as happened to the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh).

On Friday, as reported here yesterday, the saga of Tommy Robinson entered a new chapter. British police officers pulled him off a street in Leeds, where, in his role as a citizen journalist, he was livestreaming a Facebook video from outside a courthouse. Inside that building, several defendants were on trial for allegedly being part of a so-called "grooming gang" -- a group of men, almost all Muslim, who systematically rape non-Muslim children, in some cases hundreds of them, over a period of years or decades. Some ten thousand Facebook viewers around the world witnessed Robinson's arrest live.

The police promptly dragged Robinson in front of a judge, where, without having access to his own lawyer, he was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.

Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced him also ordered the British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. Even ordinary citizens who had written about the arrest on social media removed their posts, for fear of sharing Robinson's fate. All this happened on the same day.

A kangaroo court, then a gag order. In the United Kingdom, rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying. On various occasions over the years, I have been subjected in person to an immediate threat of Islamic violence: I have had a knife pulled on me by a young gang member, and been encircled by a crowd of belligerent men in djellabas outside a radical mosque. But that was not frightening. This is frightening -- this utter violation of fundamental British freedoms.

From one perspective, to be sure, Robinson's lightning-fast arrest, trial, and jailing should not have come as a surprise. "There has been a campaign to 'get Tommy' -- or what looks remarkably like it -- for some time," a source in the UK told me Saturday morning.

The apparent justification for Robinson's arrest is that he was on a suspended sentence. In May of last year, he was taken into custody while reporting from outside a courthouse in Kent, where another group of Muslim defendants was being tried, also on "grooming" charges. That arrest was also unjustified. At least, however, Robinson was given a suspended sentence. This time, presumably, it was determined that the mere act of reporting yet again from outside another courthouse amounted to a violation of the terms of his suspended sentence.

The official cynicism here is obvious. The UK source made a vital point: that often, when one of these "grooming gang" trials is being held, the extended families and friends of the defendants stand outside the courthouse and "heckle and intimidate" the rape victims as well as their families and supporters. "I've had reports of children as young as five throwing stones at victims' families," the source said. 

"This intimidation by extended community groups also involves going around to houses and harassing people... I've even heard that inside the court building, witnesses for the prosecution have needed police protection to go to the bathroom."

Needless to say, this heckling and harassment is rarely reported on and never punished.

One potentially positive aspect of this ugly turn of events is that it turned heads that should have been turned long ago. The UK source noted that many of her Twitter contacts "were tweeting that they didn't necessarily support Tommy in general but were appalled that someone reporting these [grooming] crimes was arrested." Some of her acquaintances, she said, "are stunned and in despair." On Saturday, thousands of Robinson's supporters rallied in Westminster. But will such public protests make any difference? One British ex-cop reacted to Robinson's incarceration with a video urging his fellow countrymen not just to march or rally but to join Ann Marie Waters' party For Britain and do for freedom of speech in Britain what UKIP did to get British out of the EU.

While Robinson is being punished for drawing attention to Muslim rape gangs, the Sikh Awareness Society, which has also reported on these "grooming" trials, is left alone. "They are a godsend," said the source, "because they pull no punches yet don't seem to get the intimidation that people like Tommy get." Of course -- British police would not dare arrest a bearded man in a turban. The source also mentioned an imam who was arrested recently only to be let go by police after "a large group of supporters demanded his release." At least one police officer acknowledged that the imam had been freed because otherwise "they would have been facing riots all around the country." The source summed up British authorities' current approach to the Islamic situation as follows: "they have lost control... and are simply going for those who they think will make the least fuss. The classroom bully has terrorised the teacher into punishing the kids who are bullied."

One assumes that the officials think that perpetrating this kind of injustice will somehow keep the peace. If I were one of their number, I would not be so certain. The people at that Westminster rally on Saturday were angry. How many other British subjects share their anger? The source expressed concern that this summer in Britain may turn out to be quite restive. Well, maybe that is all for the good.

Why, however, has not one prominent or powerful individual in all of the United Kingdom come forward to challenge the mistreatment of Tommy Robinson -- which is to say, for freedom of speech?

Is the whole British establishment a bunch of cowards? I suppose we will know the answer to that question soon enough, if we do not know it already.

Bruce Bawer is the author of the new novel The Alhambra (Swamp Fox Editions). His book While Europe Slept (2006) was a New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His other books include A Place at the Table (1993), Stealing Jesus (1997), Surrender (2009), and The Victims' Revolution (2012). A native New Yorker, he has lived in Europe since 1998.

Update:

UK: You're Not Allowed to Talk about It. About What? Don't Ask.-

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12389/britain-dissent-silenced

What Obama and his political Choom Gang did is far worse than Watergate

By Charles Hurt

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/20/barack-obama-and-his-political-choom-gang/

May 20, 2018

At the end of all the scandal and drama, all of the breathlessly reported lies and false accusations, at the end of all the money wasted on some zany kabuki swamp dance choreographed to the thrumming of giant bullfrogs and yipping of excited coyotes — at the end of all of this — it comes down to precisely what we said it was a year and a half ago.

The Obama administration — with or without the knowledge and direction of President Obama himself — perverted one of the most powerful, clandestine spying operations in the world and used it at the very height of a presidential campaign to spy on political opponents, punish them and, ultimately, silence them through extortion.

If this was orchestrated without the express knowledge of Mr. Obama, then it reveals just how blatantly he instructed by example the weaponizing of the entire federal government to carry out his low, dishonest and unjust ideology. By any means necessary, one might say. Only instead of being driving by visions of justice, these people were driven by visions of undying power.

If this conspiracy was carried out at the express direction of Mr. Obama or other high officials in his administration, then they belong in jail. From unmasking of political opponents, to leaking their names to the press, to killing legitimate investigations, to launching politically motivated witch hunts, a racket of this scale could not have been carried out without some major juice and cover at the top levels of the Department of Justice, FBI and the White House.

The rogue henchmen carrying out the dirty work, as always, presented as perfect, decent and most honest little Boy Scouts like former FBI Director James B. Comey.

Most of the FBI today must be horrified by the degree to which Mr. Comey and his goon squad handed over the entire mission of the FBI to political hacks inside the Obama administration. Still, there were far too many inside the bureau willing to junk their oath in the name of some kind of higher “justice.” Which is just another way of saying “selling their soul for partisan gain.”

What the Obama administration did to infiltrate the Trump campaign, spy on political opponents and then launch a wicked vendetta against them is worse than anything J. Edgar Hoover ever did — at least that we know about.

It is worse than any of the domestic abuses by the CIA during the Cold War.

It is worse even than what the federal government did to undermine civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr.

As bad and corrupt as it is to harass innocent citizens under any circumstances, it is so much worse to weaponize the government to pursue and punish and eliminate domestic political opponents. That is the sort of thing that destroys a Republic.

And yes, it is even much worse than Watergate. At the end of the day, Watergate was a bungled break-in by low-level political hacks. And then it was about the political cover-up and how high it went.

What happened under Mr. Obama is the stuff of Third-World dictators.

When Donald Trump was running for president, establishment Republicans and Democrats alike ran around thumping their chests feigning outrage that Mr. Trump would not be capable of respecting the Constitution.

At that time, the Obama administration was spying on Mr. Trump and his campaign and carrying out the most extensive and brazen undercover espionage-war campaign against political opponents that we have ever seen.

All the while nary a peep from these same smarmy swamp creatures as Mr. Obama rolled the constitution into joints so he and his political Choom Gang could smoke bales of weed.

• Contact Charles Hurt at churt@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter at @charleshurt.

Deadbeat son is a sign of America’s failure to raise boys

By Karol Markowicz

https://nypost.com/2018/05/26/deadbeat-son-is-a-sign-of-americas-failure-to-raise-boys/

May 26, 2018

Michael Rotondo in front of parents' home

Last week, a judge in New York ruled that a 30-year-old man must move out of his childhood home on June 1 after his parents served him with several notices asking him to go. The ruling inadvertently exposed a hidden truth: The boys are not all right.

A generation of damaged boys are turning into impaired men and, as seen by the mocking coverage of this case, we’re treating this development like a joke, encouraged to ridicule and condemn them for it.

For months, Mark and Christina Rotondo asked son Michael to vacate their home. He had lived with them for eight years and, as he approached his 31st birthday, his parents set deadlines encouraging him to leave. They provided him with guidance and gave him money to move on, which he proceeded to spend on other things.

Michael, meanwhile, claimed he didn’t want to remain in their home, especially after they took him off the family phone plan, but he couldn’t seem to motivate out the actual door.

The story is a terrifying real-life version of the 2006 romantic comedy “Failure to Launch” starring Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker. In it, McConaughey’s parents, desperate to get their grown son out of the house, hire Parker to help them do that.

But what was a hilarious premise in 2006 is all too real in 2018. The Rotondo family story is a warning to modern families with no Hollywood love story at the end. While the media lambast Michael as an “entitled millennial,” that only tells part of the story. What’s happening is an all-out failure in how we are raising boys.

A Pew Research poll from 2016 showed that men age 18-36, exactly Michael Rotondo’s demographic, were more likely to be living at home with their parents than alone, with a roommate or with a partner. That’s a startling statistic, especially as the same isn’t true for women. We can’t blame this stagnation on the entitlement of the millennial generation when half of that generation is living their lives as intended.

Part of the problem is we’ve been encouraging girls at the expense of boys. The language of empowerment we use around girls is absent from how we talk to boys. The expectation that males will succeed just because they are male has been smashed, just like feminists wanted, but now what? To shrug our shoulders and not care what happens to a generation of young men is to produce a generation of Michael Rotondos, adrift and living at home as they enter their 30s.

It doesn’t help that this demographic is also finding it so hard to get, and stay, employed. An Economic Policy Institute report from February found that men are absent from the workforce in large numbers. This is a big change from the past. The report noted that “in 1979, only 6.3 percent of prime-age men did not work at all over the course of a year, but that number nearly doubled to 11.9 percent in 2016.” The telling thing is that there isn’t widespread concern about this; instead there is a celebration that women are outpacing men at school and at work.

A 2010 study by psychologist Judith Kleinfeld in the journal Gender Issues found that boys’ issues were going unaddressed. Boys, the study found, had “higher rates of suicide, conduct disorders, emotional disturbance, premature death and juvenile delinquency than their female peers, as well as lower grades, test scores and college attendance rates.”

It’s no wonder a generation of boys are growing into fearful adults who would rather live in their childhood room, and sleep on their old Superman sheets washed by Mom, than take a chance in a world for which they are unprepared.

The rising prominence of Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson is a development of this. He has been described as a “father figure” to this group of lost boys. His controversial speeches, which are attended overwhelmingly by men and offer direction on getting their lives in order — to literally “clean up their room” — is taking the place of parents who have failed to instruct their children to do the same.

The fact that Peterson’s YouTube videos go viral to a majority male audience, and his book “Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos” is a bestseller, is significant. Despite some of his questionable ideas (such as if white privilege even exists), Peterson is speaking directly to men about something that has become a rarity in our “Future is Female” world.

We tell girls they are amazing and unstoppable by virtue of their gender while telling boys they have to somehow overcome their gender to be great. The result is a slumping male, unsure how to live his life, forced to watch YouTube videos to figure it out.

The Rotondos are right to force Michael to live his own life; they don’t owe him support this far into adulthood. But the message of this case should be taken to heart by us all.

Michael isn’t alone in his failure to launch; there are many others like him. We mock him at our own peril.

We need to start teaching boys how to “clean up their rooms” or not be so surprised that grown-up men still live in them.

FILED UNDER BOYS ,  MEN ,  MILLENNIALS ,  PARENTING