Nelson A. Pryor: Guest Columnist
There are a lot of things we aren’t being let in on. Nothing has changed! The game’s been rigged, the club’s been formed, and, we’re not in it!
Choosing sides
On February 6, 1931, the New York Times, 22, ran a major article on Russian Exiles, many facts and letters showing the exiles’ actual treatment then, as well as a commentary on Soviet “soft-heartedness.”
Concerning the USSR’s “political prisoners,” an interesting thing happened. Nothing! The article died on the vine. Little or no impact. An exercise in futility.
Under the editorship of Roger Baldwin, a report by the International Committee for Political Prisoners, entitled “Letters from Russian Prisons, 1925” was issued. Its impact was zilch!
Why, with the exposure Roger Baldwin, then head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and heavyweights like Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, could give it, why did it fail?
How could the drive against the Russian Intelligentsia and the peasants, forcefully filling concentration camps “in plain sight,” continue? These camps were publicly exposed as camps of torture, utilizing third-degree methods, and, of starvation. According to a statement of the Committee of the Socialist International of 1930, there were 45,000 political prisoners in one camp alone.
There were even many wholesale arrests of citizens which came to constitute the infamous show trials of 1922.
In 1925, the Committee for Political Prisoners in Russia asserted that “Nothing similar has been known in the history of Western Europe, not even in pre-revolutionary Russia.” Exposure was not enough!
But I Didn’t Know!
The head choppers are active in the Middle East. Europe is being blown up, one train station, one highway, at a time. Concentrations of civilians, army personnel, and even those at schools and churches, are predictable targets.
We cannot depend on people, like I named above, to light up the world with wisdom. All those, who volunteer to be leaders, don’t necessarily lead.
For instance, the organizations I named above are all on the political left. Socialists! They have been at war against the producers, by definition! Well, haven’t we seen the fruit of that evil, in our immediate lifetime? That’s what Cuba is/was about! Or, how about Venezuela after Heugo Chavez? Those economies are working like they should! And people are surprised?
Bold Leaders! Who Lead!
Leaders? But do we have volunteers to support them? One of the boldest was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, then national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. The April 14, 1952 New York Times 16, reported the Bishop at St. Patrick’s in New York City, say: “Fifty years from now communism will be forgotten.”
Or how about President Ronald Reagan, on June 12, 1987, declared to the Soviets: “Tear down This Wall.” And it was down, on Nov. 11, 1989.
Nikita Khrushchev
Not all were believers! On Nov. 18, 1956 Nikita Khrushchev said “We will bury you!”
The world is. Are we solvers of problems, or, part of the problem?
Let’s pull the curtain back, like Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz. Let’s learn! Let’s tell them we won’t take this socialism anymore!