Esoteric Brezhnevism

  Francis Casimir Kajencki (1918-2008) A puzzling circumstance of the Second World War is that it reached the status of a global conflict when the British and French empires, ostensibly out of concern for Polish sovereignty, declared war on Germany in the wake of its September 1939 invasion of Poland, but that these same powers not only did not declare war on the Soviet Union, which also invaded Poland that month, but joined forces with Stalin’s government in an alliance to defeat the Axis. Allied “victory” in Europe, moreover, resulted not in the restoration of Polish independence, but Soviet occupation of Poland along with the rest of Eastern Europe. A little-known book, American Betrayal: Franklin Roosevelt Casts Poland into Communist Captivity , grapples with this problematic legacy of the war. Self-published by Francis Casimir Kajencki in 2007, the year before he died, the book is a patriotic Polish-American’s pained assessment of his country’s treacherous treatment of its belea

  While the Contras’ guerrilla war with Nicaragua’s Sandinista government during the 1980s has generally been framed and understood by Americans as a Cold War ideological struggle with, perhaps, entrepreneurial aspects by way of the drug trade, debate has additionally contested the degree to which this was also an ethnic conflict between Hispanic Nicaraguans and indios . The Miskito or Miskitu Indians of the country’s Atlantic coast “have always regarded with suspicion” the “Catholic, Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans to whom they refer as ‘Spaniards’,” notes Will Lehman, who observes that “it is not so much the ‘Indian’ part of the Miskito that distinguishes them from other Nicaraguans – the majority of whom have partial Native American ancestry – but rather the very ‘mixed’ Afro-Indian-Protestant identity” of the Miskitos [1]. Werner Herzog, in the narration of his 1984 anti-Sandinista propaganda documentary Ballad of the Little Soldier , states that the Miskitos initially allied themse

In my popular 2017 article “ Israel, Manson, and Vampirism: The Freaky Life of Laurence Merrick ”, I discussed the intriguing figure of IDF veteran, Zionist activist, stage and film director, and actors’ school proprietor Zev (or Zeev or Zehev) Lahav, who switched his name to the less ethnically obtrusive Laurence Merrick at some point after moving to California in an apparent bid to liken himself to a well-known Broadway producer, David Merrick [1]. He was also one of the founders of Independent Screen Producers, Inc., a distribution exchange “covering the 13 Western states and wholly owned by the producers.” [2] Serving as a human dot connecting Sharon Tate and the Manson Family, Merrick is surprisingly little-known – which, in itself, is worthy of note. Five years ago, with a cursory search, I was able to find comparatively little information on the Israeli enigma, but some interesting additional tidbits have come to my attention since then, perhaps justifying a second look. Born