Thread by @RealLoriSpencer

In 1993, Sen. Claiborne Pell, (Senate Foreign Relations Committee) toned down the 1959 anti-#communist law.

#JFK's Secretary of State Dean Rusk described the resolution as “one of the wildest kinds of cold war kind of thing you ever seen in your life.”

link.medium.com/yalvBNXWkwb

Pell deleted the list of “captive nations,” some of which (“Idel-Ural”;“Cossackia”) were “invented in the Nazi propaganda ministry,” according to George Kennan, the architect of anti-Soviet “containment strategy.” Sen. Pell removed references to “Communist Russian imperialism.”

The Cold War was over, but not for all. The NCNC vigorously denounced Sen. Pell’s amendment. The organization requested Congressional hearings on “our inadequate policies in East Europe and Siberia,” apparently in order to promote the goal of breaking up the Russian Federation.

Later that year, US president Bill Clinton sought to remove “numerous Cold War restrictions and critical references to the former Soviet Union” from the statute books before meeting with Russian president Boris Yeltsin in early 1994.

The main author of the Captive Nations Week resolution (Public Law 86–90) signed by President Eisenhower in July 1959 was Lev Dobriansky, the longtime president of the nationalist Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.

Some declared it the Ukrainian American community’s biggest political feat. In a letter to Eisenhower, the far-right American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (AF-ABN) called Public Law 86–90 “one of the greatest documents of modern history.”

Dobriansky, who cofounded the VOC with Lee Edwards and Zbigniew Brzezinski after chairing the NCNC for decades, was an important ally of the cultish OUN(B) --which massacred thousands of Jews and Poles during World War II, led by the notorious Nazi collaborator Stepan #Bandera.

They met in the early 1950s, and Dobriansky helped Stepan #Bandera receive his first visa to the United States a few months after the first Captive Nations Week, but he didn’t make it, because the KGB assassinated Bandera in Munich.

The OUN(B) functioned as the vanguard party of the extremist Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which Scott and Jon Lee Anderson described in their exposé of the World Anti-Communist League as “the largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators in the world.”

Bandera’s deputy and successor, Yaroslav Stetsko, a vicious antisemite, led the ABN for life. He had his Banderite proxies take over the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America in 1980, and received valuable photo ops with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the White House.

It is rather fitting that this 1970 video of Captive Nations Week is randomly spliced with footage from the OUN(B)'s Ukrainian American Youth Association camp in Ellenville, New York with its larger than life busts of OUN leaders incl. Stepan #Bandera.

In 1985, Ronald Reagan appointed Lev Dobriansky as the US Ambassador to the Bahamas after he presided over an OUN(B) “coup” in the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.

The Bulgarian National Front (BNF) was established after #WWII by former members of the Union of Bulgarian National Legions, a pro-#Nazi organization that brandished swastikas and organized torchlit marches in 1930s Sofia.

Ivan Dochev, one of its leaders who met with Adolf #Hitler, founded the BNF, and led the AF-ABN in the 1960s. He is heavily featured in the above archival footage, and is sitting on the right in the still image that previews the Youtube video, which begins with a BNF event.

During #WWII Dochev served as the mayor of a #Nazi-occupied town in Bulgaria where the Jewish population was exterminated. After the war, Bulgarian authorities sentenced him to death three times in absentia.

Radi Slavoff, the BNF’s representative in Washington during the 1980s, played an important role in the Republican Party’s electoral “ethnic strategy” in those days, arranged a White House visit for Ivan Dochev with President #Reagan in 1984.

At the turn of the 21st century, the VOC and NCNC had similar boards of directors. Lev Dobriansky chaired them both. When he died in 2008, his anticommunist comrade Lee Edwards hailed him “a hero of the Cold War” and “Mr. Captive Nations.”

The OUN(B) wasn’t the only political cult in the newly created VOC’s orbit. When Lee Edwards cofounded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, he was editor of The World and I, magazine of with the Unification Church led by self-declared messiah Rev. Sung Myung Moon.

One of the principal backers of the World Anti-Communist League was the American Security Council, a Cold Warrior think tank of the military industrial complex that was especially influential with Ronald Reagan in office. Edwards and Dobriansky had been members since the 1950s.

The Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front that enlisted Ronald Reagan as a spokesperson, bombarded Americans with $5 million of propaganda from 1950–55 in order to boost support for the Cold War.

Here's a typical anti-communist propaganda film produced by the CIA's Crusade for Freedom in the 1950s, narrated by Lowell Thomas:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, VOC cofounder, was briefed about the CIA’s Ukrainian operations after Dobriansky began to accurately identify his rivals in the Ukrainian American community as “CIA tools.” Brzezinski addressed the 13th Congress of Americans of Ukrainian Descent in 1980.

In 1985, journalist Joe Conason wrote an article titled “#Reagan and the War Crimes Lobby” for the Village Voice about the ascent of the #Nazi OUN-ABN-WACL nexus.

Ronald #Reagan elevated the importance of Captive Nations Week with an annual ceremony at the White House, which people like ABN leader Yaroslav Stetsko managed to attend.

Over thirty years later, in 2019, the first annual “Captive Nations Summit” was held in Washington, organized by the Victims of Communism (VOC) and Heritage Foundation with the apparent support of the #Trump administration.

One of the most prominent speakers represented the alleged “captive nation” of #Venezuela: Carlos Vecchio, the man tasked with leading the Trump administration’s coup attempt in Venezuela.

After helping to incite a violent opposition campaign following the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013, Carlos Vecchio became a wanted man and fled to the United States.

At the inaugural Captive Nations Summit, he gave thanks to the VOC and #Trump for helping him start a “new life.”

The Summit was held “in conjunction with the US Department of State Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom,” one of the first initiatives undertaken by the State Department under the leadership of former CIA director Mike Pompeo.

Earlier that week, the VOC executive director wrote an article titled, “#Communism is making a comeback; so should Captive Nations Week.”
“Never heard of it? You’re not alone. Yet this usually-forgotten, federally mandated occasion… is worth resurrecting in the 21st century.”

#Trump proclaimed the resurrection of "Captive Nations Week" in 2018, saying "Germany is being held captive by #Russia."

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1017955116035592192?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1017955116035592192%7Ctwgr%5Ed9ddbd27e3ec0a397f5d5de4e00f892923c26ea8%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fthehill%2Fstatus%2F1017955116035592192image%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Fi.embed.ly%2F1%2Fimage3Furl3Dhttps253A252F252Fabs.twimg.com252Ferrors252Flogo46x38.png26key3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07