Alan Keyes – Republican conservative outsider

Most publicity around the Republican candidates for President of the United States is focused around Governor George W. Bush and Senator John McCain. Contra looks at some of the other candidates and concludes that Contra’s favorite is ambassador Alan L. Keyes. He and other second tier candidates (the others have later withdrawn their candidacies) are presented in this article, which also gives part of the background to the initial success of senator McCain.

Worse than Joseph McCarthy…

Not until 1995 the United States revealed that intelligence had run a top secret eavesdropping project against the Soviet Union all the time since the 1940s. The project was called Venona.

Hidden in a former girls school American experts worked on deciphering 25 000 Soviet intelligence telegrams. When the code finally wasx cracked 3 000 of them were made readable.

Evidence was amassed concluding that there were Soviet spies at top levels in the State Department, in other departments and in government agencies. In the midst of this expionage was the US Communist Party.

John Earl Haynes at the Library of Congress and Professor Harvey Klehr present in their book Venona – Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, which was published last year, the successful efforts to reveal Soviet espionage in the United States. Reality on Communist influence turns out to be even worse than the once ridiculed picture painted by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

When will East German agents in Sweden be disclosed?

The two Danish journalists Mette Herborg and Per Michaelsen have written two books on Danish collaborators with the East Gerrman Secret Police, Stasi. The first book called Stasi and Denmark was published in 1996 and reveals several leading Danes that collaborated with Stasi, in several cases they influenced Danish foreign policy. The other book called Weed was published in late 1999 and reveals that the govrnment owned Danish Broadcasting Corporation had an agreement with the East Germans that stopped many important news also in Denmark.

Several East German agents were active also in Sweden. Finally there should be a possibility to disclose their names. The Germans have finally solved the code of a computer tape containing tens of thousands of names of East German agents. Former Stasi chief Markus Wolf recently visiited Sweden and stated to the press that two or three Swedish members of parliament forwarded information to Stasi. Who were they? Swedish attorney general Laila Freivalds (herself born in Latvia under Soviet occupation) discusses the possibilities to take further steps in revealing Stasi activities in Sweden.

Olof Lagercrantz – the man who destryed the leading Swedish quality newspaper, Dagens Nyheter

Olof Lagercrantz was born in 1911. During a quarter of a century he had leading positions in Dagens Nyheter, first as head of its cultural section, later as one of two joint managing editors. The period lasted from 1951 to 1975. During this period he had a devastating influence on Swedish public opinion.

Global nationalism

Modern nationalism has evolved from the state of affairs that developed from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the end of the 30-years war. 1648 was the start of an era that we now see the end of, if we haven’t already gone into a post-Westphalian era. Modern Western nationalism and its counterparts in other parts of the world is distinctive from primitive tribalism. A couple of political scientists write on nationalism as a political phenomenon.

Heroes of the Cold War: Dalai Lamas and peaceful resistance

Tibet is as large as Germany, France and Italy combined. It is sparsely populated with only six million Tibetans. Tibetans have their own culture, language and history. Since 1950 Tibet is however occupied by Communist China. Tibet’s spiritual and temporal leader, the Dalai lama, has all the time since his ecape to India in 1959 been looked upon as one of the most respected leaders of world politics. He was an important person in the Cold War and in 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Amerasia and Chinagate: Chinese influence in the US, past and present

Kenneth Wells, head of the South East Asian section of the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) was stunned by what he read in January 1945. Britsih intelligence had suggested that he should read the latest issue of Amerasia, and especially the article “British Imperial Policy in Asia”.

What Wells read was his own words, at least to a large extent. Words written in a top secret report prepared to the State Department and several US intelligence organizations. When the journal Amerasia was founded the purpose seemed to be to promote the recently agreed cooperation between Kuomintang nationalists and Chinese Communists against the Japanese occupation forces. It was the beginning of a long period of Communist Chinese influence on American foreign policy.

Kuban sixty years later

Contra contributor Marek Zyto last year published the book “Waiting for Messiah. To survive the Holocaust”. He described how he (a Polish-born Jew) as a teenager survived the German occupation of Poland by fleeing to the Kuban plains in southern Russia, between the Caspian and Black Seas.There he was taught – the hard way – the truths of Communism. Since more than fifty years living in Sweden he has now been able to return to the Kuban, for the first time in close to sixty years.