Browsing: Politics

A Brief History On October 30, 1961, former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin suffered the indignity of having his body removed from a place of honor in Lenin’s Tomb and parked in a regular grave with a plain granite marker.  Stalin’s body suffered only a minor indignity compared to some other former national leaders, and here we discuss a few of those. Digging Deeper Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of Britain, was dug up in 1661, three years after his death to be tried and “executed,” including beheading. Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, died in exile in 1821, and someone removed…

A Brief History On October 29, 2015, China announced the end of its “one child” policy that had been in effect since 1979, limiting couples to one child in an effort to curb population growth. Digging Deeper Fears of what seemed to be inevitable overpopulation caused China’s leaders to raise the age for marriage and to encourage couples to delay having children, limiting the number of children they had, and spacing out pregnancies.  Finally, the Draconian edict of one child per couple was put into effect, but with many exceptions. In 2015, the policy became a two-child policy, and in…

A Brief History On October 27, 1962, US Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson was shot down and killed while flying his U-2 spy plane over Cuba. Digging Deeper The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a face-off between the US and the USSR over the Soviets stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba, close to the American mainland.  After two weeks of negotiations and nearly causing a nuclear war, national leaders reached a deal where the Soviets would remove nukes from Cuba and the US would remove nuclear missiles from Turkey and possibly Italy. Despite debate about taking drastic military action…

A Brief History On October 26, 1979, Kim Jae-kyu, the head of the South Korean CIA, assassinated the country’s president, Park Chung Hee.  The president died on the spot of gunshot wounds to the chest and head. Digging Deeper One pervasive conspiracy theory regarding the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy is that the American CIA was somehow involved.  While such theories are usually treated as forays into fiction, the assassination of the South Korean president by his own CIA show that the idea might not be all that farfetched. Director Kim used a Walther PPK to shoot his…

A Brief History On October 25, 1924, the Daily Mail, a London based British newspaper, published a fake letter called “the Zinoviev letter,” a letter said to be from Grigory Zinoviev, a Moscow based leader of the Communist International.  The letter was a fake and intentionally presented to sway public opinion against the Labour Party in Britain’s 1924 elections. Digging Deeper The fake letter was successful in stoking anti-communist public hysteria and getting the Conservative Party a victory in the elections. While calling the media “Fake News” is often seen as a conspiracy theory ploy used by one side or…