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It’s one of the more common phrases. You’ve heard it a dozen times: history repeats itself. But no one seems to be able to put their finger on just which bit of history is bound to repeat. The fact is some things are flatly forgotten before they come round again, and I’m not talking about Hitler’s rise to power, (everyone likes to harp on that) or Russian aggression ( because the Evil Empire is back), or how the next politician will be worse than the first, they are all corrupt, everybody knows it… We’ve had a stomach full of stuff going round and round. There are just some merry-go-ride’s we should stay off.

So tell me, why, if history repeats itself, does it always have to be bad?

No, I prefer good news. What about the guy who said “give me liberty or give me death,” and the men who pledged their lives and fortunes and honor for the greater good. Let’s talk about liberty and freedom, and the things that drove the American revolution — those things from your 8th grade history class that you forgot. I’m telling you liberty is back. I’ve seen it. It exploded in the small country of Ukraine. Freedom has finally come round one more time.

I guess I’m privileged to have seen it. Not long after the war started, I walked into a hospital room with the wife of the president of Ukraine where we greeted two young men, 19 and 21 years old. The spirit of liberty was there. It was in that room. They each had lost a leg, blown off in the war for their nation’s freedom — but their faces weren’t broken or defeated or dismayed. The president’s wife and I just looked at one another and cried. I couldn’t take it, it hurt too much. I saw tears stream down her face and those boys actually tried to cheer us up.

There are people in this world willing to pay the price for freedom, and they always win against the people out to make a buck. Ask King George. He lost his colonies because he never knew it, or had forgotten. And right now, my bets on Ukraine, on liberty and freedom every time.

In politics and the press, everyone has an opinion about Russia and Putin and cold wars, but most have no clue about liberty and freedom. More Russian experts have popped up to speak and write and make appearances than weeds in my grandfather’s garden. Marvin Kalb popped up, dusted himself off, and gave the world his take on why Russia blew off those boys legs through the lens of a condensed lesson in Slavic history, entitled “Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War.”

Now, lest you take me to task for simplifying several hundred pages of his work in this short article, let me say I feel justified because I’m merely following his own example on two counts: to try to condense Slavic history as he did is an admirable feat, apart from being impossible, and at the least, very, very unfair; but to summarily wrap up your conclusions in a few sentences, as he did, is patronizing if not downright misleading. His tome of words results in one option presented — cut Ukraine in half. For all that he did present, and probe and illustrate he failed to examine other options. Reading it was like watching one of those movies where you can’t believe the ending.

Quite frankly, he forgot liberty and freedom. He never once mentioned it in reference to Ukraine. Not once.

Let me get to the point. Somewhere in the middle, Kalb says that some in the west hold the “…rather simplistic view¹ that Russia has committed aggression, which is true, and therefore Russia must now pay a price…”  That Kalb considers war and the death of uncounted thousands as simplistic could give you a clue to unravel the heart of his book, and his purpose for writing: to put it plainly, Ukraine should be cut in half, and the larger half goes to Russia.

For example, Kalb says Ukraine has a split personality, and “This split persists to this day, one reason why a division of Ukraine between east and west as a way out of the current mess falls into the realm of the possible.”

And then, if his book were a video game, out pops the easter egg for those who know how to find it: “One option though, would seem to supersede all others: Would Ukraine be better off if it were divided in two— one country with loosely patrolled borders becoming two countries with tightly controlled borders?”  Did you get that? Just one option. Liberty and freedom aren’t even runners up.

Once the spirit of freedom and liberty gets out, apparently Kalb thinks you can fence it in — I prefer to differ. Hundreds and thousands of people gathered for an entire winter to stand for their rights, and Kalb thinks they should have all gone home. They were willing to die once — was it a fluke? — but now they should lose even more than what drove them to the city square the first time, and shut up and be happy about it. Poor Kalb has never seen freedom, nor liberty, and he has no authority to write about it. You don’t have to labor with the reasoning of the book when it’s so easy to dismiss his conclusions.

This freedom and liberty message is important. It births nations. Let’s replay it in our minds, shall we? The government becomes oppressive, tyrannical. The people rise up and fill the public square. The authorities resist. The ranks of people swell. They throw words, and then eventually rocks. Shots are fired. People die. But they prevail, and the spirit of independence and liberty begins to grow — and suddenly they find themselves at war with a world superpower. They have no army, no weapons, no money, no leadership…. but they fight.

That is Ukraine today. That is what happened on Maidan. But that was also the American revolution, the Boston Massacre, the shot heard round the world. History does repeat herself. Freedom has come round one more time, and you are not going to fence it in. America should stand for Ukraine because Ukraine now stands for everything that once made America.

While freedom and liberty are positive, for the sake of fairness, let me counter Kalb’s “one option” with a little bit of negative as well — quite simply, in Ukraine there is too much bad blood for any option of a divided country to become possible. It’s a common joke among Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches. “Are you going home after the war?” to which the other soldiers replies, “I’m from Luhansk.” Drawing a line down the middle of a map won’t take that away.

It gets worse. While his books claims to dissect the confrontationalonal relationship between Ukraine and Russia, Kalb never once mentions the Holodomor.  This crucial piece of the puzzle is brushed aside as a not man made famine, and his copious index in the back of the book doesn’t even contain the word famine.  What’s he hiding here? Perhaps the one single, greatest historical reason Ukraine fears, hates, and is prepared to fight Russia and Kalb glosses it over? Ahem. Oh, you don’t know what the Holodomor was? Look it up.

It’s also curious that Kalb fails to mention the obvious. Putin knows we have a color blind president that wouldn’t know a red line if he saw one. A timetable in this conflict clearly exists. Things between Russia and Ukraine will be in a free for all until the next American presidential election.

As well, Kalb makes no mention of the displaced peoples — a strategic progrom to empty the East of any who would vote pro-Kyiv in a Crimea-like referendum.  No mention of the Christian priests and pastors targeted, kidnapped and killed so their congregations would scatter, and flee to Kyiv.  No mention of the numerous human rights violations, the beatings, the rapes, the senseless murders. No mention of the “anti-semitic” propaganda unleashed that uprooted many Jews from their homes, and pushed them west.

In fact, Kalb presents the war as a civil one — no invasion, no takeover, no people driven out, but a nation divided — something noble reserved for the villains. Here we should be clear. It’s not a civil war, it’s the result of Russian propaganda, a hybrid war — a literal invasion of one country by another — one infused with hired thugs and mercenaries, in which the worst of human nature has been displayed.

Mr. Kalb, calling it a civil war is an insult. You need to apologize to 45 million people and their children. They want to be free.

And freedom, dear sir, is the one option you forgot to mention.

Dale Armstrong

1. That would be you, Mr. Congressman or Senator, reading this book. ↩︎

By Marin Guentchev, MD, PhD, and Hristo Guentchev

Stalin had a dream. It was a dream about one global Communist state. However, before making his dream a reality, there was one obstacle he had to overcome—Capitalism. The only way to do that was by gaining control of Russia in order to use its extensive resources to forward his ideas. Yet again today we witness individuals with global ambitions, and their approach is very similar to Stalin’s.

Almost 30 years ago, everybody thought that with the fall of Communism, Stalin’s ideas were finally proven wrong. For former communist countries like Bulgaria, a long and painful transition to a free society was about to begin. The United States supported that transition by investing in a civil society through USAID and the America for Bulgaria Foundation (A4B). In the beginning, the newly established civil sector contributed to the promotion of democracy and a free market economy.

However, things gradually changed. From being vehicles of a free society, A4B-supported NGOs became propagators of a specific ideological narrative. Instead of supporting the erection of institutions that would allow ordinary Bulgarians to participate in government, they began pressing for the implementation of a left-liberal agenda against the will of the majority of the people—a scenario that was repeated in most Eastern European countries.

One of the many examples is the attitude of the news outlets Dnevnik/Capital and Mediapool, which together receive approximately 94% of A4B’s budget dedicated to media. Ever since the late 1990s, Dnevnik and Capital took a stance for gun control, open borders, abortion, gender mainstreaming, minority empowerment, and political correctness. When citing US media they took a one-sided approach, favoring the opinions of the left. They would reprint articles from the liberal New York Times and Washington Post two to three times more often than articles from the conservative Wall Street Journal. With regard to TV broadcasts, CNN was referred to 10 times more often in their publications than Fox News.

Another hint that A4B was favoring the left-wing agenda was the fact that the majority of funds went to organizations associated with George Soros’s Open Society. Since 2009, 92% of the 12 million USD distributed through the A4B Civil Society and Democratic Institutions program has been channeled into organizations that have also received funding from or partnered with Open Society.

The effects of this favoritism are as follows: (1) A4B-supported liberal-left has gained a monopoly over civil society in Bulgaria and in most other Eastern European countries; (2) since liberal-left policies are very unpopular here, it has led to a growing hostility toward the United States and has established Russia as a conservative leader in the region; (3) Bulgarian and other Eastern European immigrants in the United States have been biased in supporting the Democratic Party rather the Republican Party; and (4) A4B-sponsored media are now hostile toward the current White House administration.

In other words, in Eastern Europe, the United States Government finances mainly liberal-left organizations, which are more loyal to their political agenda than to the public they should serve.

As with Russia in the early 20th century, yet again liberal-left Marxists have found a state rich and powerful enough to fund their political activities and spread their ideas. For the sake of the American people and all Eastern Europeans, this has to stop now, and only the United States Government can stop it.

About the authors

Marin Guentchev received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, Austria. Currently he is founder and owner of Trinity Medical Center in Sofia, Bulgaria and is Junior Professor (Privatdozent) for neurosurgery at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Hristo Guentchev received his architectural degree from the Technical University in Vienna, Austria. He is founder and owner of Prototyp Ltd an international facade engineering company. Prototyp’s portfolio includes engineering work on landmark projects like the extension of the British Museum (London), BMW Museum (Munich), Louvre (Abu Dhabi), and Museum of the Bible (Washington, D.C.).

Since 2018 they write a blog (http://www.gbros.org/) discussing Bulgarian and European politics. Their political articles have been published in The American Spectator, Epicenter.bg, Glasove.bg.

By Marin Guentchev, MD, PhD, and Hristo Guentchev

Europe’s politicians and its mainstream media are full of panic and disbelief. Waking up to the reality of being unable to defend themselves, they accuse President Trump of not taking a more aggressive stance towards Russia at the recently concluded Helsinki summit. However, who is to blame here?

During the last few decades, almost all the EU countries have reduced their military expenditure to invest heavily in an ever-expanding social welfare system, while cleverly passing off the whole enterprise as testimony to their pacifism. For example, Germany has successfully used its past military misadventures to adopt a non-militaristic stance, which allowed it to halve its defence expenditure from 2.4% of its GDP in 1990 to 1.2% of its GDP in 2017. The effects of this policy have become obvious—a spate of press reports on broken tanks, submarines, and helicopters call into question Europe’s ability to defend itself.

Despite its obvious military weakness since 2014, the EU entered into an escalating confrontation with the Russian Federation by imposing economic sanctions on it and supporting President Putin’s opponents. Nevertheless, EU military expenditure remained unchanged at an extremely low level of 1.5% of its GDP. This leaves one with the impression that the EU’s policy towards Russia was based on the presumption that if the confrontation escalated to an armed conflict, the US would meet its obligation to intervene on its behalf.

Meanwhile, Germany has cleverly used NATO’s protection, Russia’s economic weakness, and the instability in Ukraine to increase its importance in the EU energy market. The planned doubling of the North Stream pipeline capacity from Russia to Germany and the disruption of the South Stream pipeline from Russia to Bulgaria in 2014 raises suspicion that the EU policy towards Russia aims at eventually providing Germany with a monopoly over EU’s energy supply by pushing the conservative East European countries—including Ukraine—out of the natural gas transit market. This undertaking has the potential to cause deep and long-lasting divisions within the EU and NATO, much to the disadvantage of the US, which will ultimately cede its influence over Ukraine to Russia.

The possibility of US troops having to fight for European/German economic interests and potential conflicts within the EU/NATO was the context in which President Trump arrived at the recent NATO summit at Brussels. After years of quiet diplomacy that proved unsuccessful, the only option left was to forcefully insist on an increase in military spending and a termination of the North Stream 2 pipeline project, alternatively, NATO’s viability should be reconsidered; the EU leadership rushed to describe this as an act of treason.

The mostly western European outrage at the idea that the EU member states have to fulfill their obligation to increase defence spending and invest in energy independence from Russia had one very important consequence—it undermined NATO’s and, as a result, President Trump’s position just before the Helsinki summit with President Putin of Russia. The woozy appearance of Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, in Brussels further strengthened the impression that the EU is an unreliable and unsteady partner.

So, given the fact that the EU is currently more of a liability than an asset in the confrontation with Russia, how could we Europeans expect the Trump administration to take a firmer stand in Helsinki? At the summit, President Trump did the best possible thing for the people of Europe—he prevented further escalation of the conflict with Russia and won time. He has won time for the EU to strengthen its military readiness and brace for a major energy crisis.

Now, the EU has to use this window of opportunity and act fast to strengthen its unity, increase its defence capacity, and diversify its energy supplies. Even Trump’s worst detractors will agree on that. Further, when the EU is stronger, more united in its desire for freedom, and more energy independent, we might expect President Trump to be tougher on Russia.

It is clear that if the European countries are to meet their defence-spending obligations, either major tax increases or social spending cuts have to be made. Another way to increase the military expenditure is to change the spending priorities of EU’s vast budget and direct more funding into the European armies.

The EU also needs to act quickly with regard to North Stream 2 and its divisive effect within NATO. In 2014, for the sake of preserving the EU’s unity, Bulgaria gave up the South Stream pipeline. Now, Germany should emulate Bulgaria’s example and give up North Stream 2.

Whatever the EU leadership decides to do, it has to do it quickly because the window of opportunity won’t stay open for long. However, panicking and complaining, when confronted with reality, has never been a good option.

About the authors

Marin Guentchev received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Vienna, Austria. Currently he is founder and owner of Trinity Medical Center in Sofia, Bulgaria and is Junior Professor (Privatdozent) for neurosurgery at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Hristo Guentchev received his architectural degree from the Technical University in Vienna, Austria. He is founder and owner of Prototyp Ltd an international facade engineering company. Prototyp’s portfolio includes engineering work on landmark projects like the extension of the British Museum (London), BMW Museum (Munich), Louvre (Abu Dhabi), and Museum of the Bible (Washington, D.C.).

Since 2018 they write a blog (http://www.gbros.org/) discussing Bulgarian and European politics. Their political articles have been published in The American Spectator, Epicenter.bg, Glasove.bg.