Liberals Are Almost Supporting Ukraine More than Conservatives

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: I’m surprised I don’t see liberals virtue-signaling with Ukraine-themed face coverings.

Liberals are some of the worst pro-Ukie Russia-hating maniacs out there. A lot of them are calling for no-fly zones and direct attacks on Russia and Moscow. This makes sense because liberals and Democrats are the ones who went crazy with the McCarthyite BS about “Russia interfered with our election” and “Russia stole the election for Trump” (LOL), “Trump and the Republicans are with Russia”, on and on. The worst insult any liberal dishes out is “You are a Russian”, “You are Putin’s mouthpiece,” “How much does Russia pay you?”

Keep in mind that anything that goes against the Democrats in any way is “Russian propaganda.” It’s totally embarrassing that liberals would do this, but liberals were always some of the worst Cold Warriors of all because Republicans were always calling them Communists and fellow travelers so the Democrats were always in a dick-measuring contest with the Republicans about who could be more anti-Communist. Chris Dodd and Alan Cranston, two of the most liberal members of Congress, were the strongest supporters of the Death Squad Government in El Salvador.

My liberal Democrat father supported every US foreign policy objective ever. He supported every rightwing fascist CIA coup we ever indulged in. He supported all of the death squad democracies we supported. His saving grace was opposition to the Vietnam War, but that war was the last time that liberal Democrats took a principled antiwar position.

And he only changed on this after the Tet Offensive in 1968, but at least he changed. Tet was the signal for opinion change in the US on the war. Believe it or not, before Tet, a majority of Americans supported the war in Vietnam! After Tet for the first time, Americans turned on the war. Walter Cronkite, a great journalist and one of the last real journalists in the US where most are now glorified stenographers, famously turned against the war on national TV! He was a hero to many Americans and I watched him on the news many times.

As I recall it, General Westmoreland kept lying and saying we were winning the war from 1964-68. We were always just turning the corner and the light was always appearing at the end of the tunnel.  Like the suckers they are today, the majority of Americans fell for it.

With the Tet Offensive, it become obvious that he had been lying all along. The enemy was not defeated; instead it was stronger than ever. I remember my mother’s frustration at being lied to. People had had enough. They’d been told for four years and they were steadily winning and victory was coming any day now, but then Tet came and it showed that the enemy was stronger than ever.

This split extended after the war and led to investigations into the CIA, CIA/FBI assassinations, etc. This lasted for a few years and led to a reluctance to get involved in any foreign adventures involving blood and treasure as most of them do. This was called “The Vietnam War Syndrome” and a major goal of hawk monsters like Donald Rumsfeld (the murderer of Patrice Lumumba) and Dick Cheney declared war on the Vietnam War Syndrome.

Rumsfeld is the murderer of Patrice Lumumba when he was a DIA officer in the Congo and Cheney personally had Minnesota progressive Paul Wellstone killed in a plane crash and deliberately failed to stop the 911 attack when he could have. One of the stated purposes of the fake Iraq War was to get rid of the Vietnam Syndrome. So it appears we did get rid of it for a while. Trump then threatened to bring back the Vietnam War Syndrome with his neo-isolationism and skepticism about what he called “the forever wars” (and I thank him very much for using that term).

This infuriated the Deep State, the National Security Establishment (same thing), and the neoconservatives. These factions jumped right back into power as soon as Biden came aboard. It was directly to their escalations that this war in Ukraine ever happened at all. Under Trump it might not have happened.

Alt Left: Karl Marx, “The Genesis of Capital”: The Creation of Capitalism and Its Link to Modern Land Reform

This fascinating document is available in booklet form as it is only ~35 pages. It is an excerpt from the larger Capital volume. It’s not an easy read but it’s not impossible either.

Some of the writing is gorgeous. I read one sentence to my very anti-Communist liberal Democrat father and he swooned over the prose. That one sentence was both perfect and beautiful, though it dealt with some terrible.

In many places, this is forceful – see the fencing of the Commons in the 1300’s, done deliberately to force the peasants into the capitalist mode or production. Indeed theorists said that if the peasants could not be shoved into capitalism, there would be no capitalism, for their would be no workers. It was essential to destroy the peasants ability to live off the land for themselves in order to force them into worse circumstances as industrial workers.

We see this very same rhetoric employed today in India – where it is argued that the tribals in Chattisargh and other places must be uprooted from the lands, have their lands stolen from them to give to mining and forest industries, and forced into the capitalist mode in cities in order to properly develop the economy. It is argued that India cannot develop its economy until the Adivasis have been destroyed. Note that as with the ancient peasants, the Adivasis will live much poorer lives in the cities than the were in the rural areas.

In Colombia, we see something very similar. In Colombia, small farmers own a lot of land. They are able to subsist off this land and they do not need to participate in the larger economy. They grow enough food for themselves and some city people. The process of the Colombian revolution and the genocidal response of the Colombian oligarchy to it is all throwing the peasants off of these small plots, stealing their land at gunpoint (the paramilitaries are used for this), and terrorizing or killing them if they refuse to hand over their land.

The land is then confiscated by latifundias or large landowners who by and large control the Colombian economy. They grow coffee, bananas, etc. and raise cattle for export, generating money for the economy in the process.

In fact, this process has been going on all over Latin America for over 200 years as sort of a slow-motion process of ethnic cleansing and land theft. Smalholders are able to live off the land in Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, and Brazil, and this is seen as unacceptable as they only grow food for themselves and possibly for city-dwellers but the produce cannot be exported.

These countries wish to develop an export model of agriculture based on the large scale production of food crops for export mostly to the US. In return, their ability to produce their own food is destroyed, in my opinion, rendering their economies completely backwards. The people are then rendered vulnerable to the purchase of imported food from the US, often packaged or canned food that is not very good for you.

As you can see, the country gets screwed and the US wins both ways. By destroying the basis for feeding themselves, the US wins an export market for its processed foods. By replacing these with food crops for export to the US, the US gets to make money by importing and selling these food crops. In return the country gains nothing.

Only a small landholding and import-export elite (maybe 2

And in the process, of course, the country generates a revolutionary movement, often an armed one.

This can be seen in areas of Colombia. In one particular part of Southern Colombia, most of the rural peasantry had been thrown off the land and most of the land was now held by a few large landowners who were raising cattle on the land. The peasants had been terrorized off of their stolen land and formed ghettos in a large city nearby, which increased the poverty rate and the slump percentage of the city by a lot. Here they were poor, unhealthy, poorly fed and clothed, living in slums in shacks with no sewage systems, clean water or electricity.

These slums began to generate a lot of street crime as they tend to do. Outside of the cities on the main roads, there were soldiers and paramilitaries everywhere and one went from one armed roadblock to the other. Curiously enough, a large guerrilla movement had developed among the few remaining peasants and in teeming slums. Armed guerrillas extorted the latifundias for money that they called “war taxes.” The latifundias now paid a lot of money for paramilitaries to patrol their lands.

In the slums, an urban guerrilla movement was developing. Police, soldiers and paramilitary members were attacked with bombs, RPG’s and automatic weapons all the time and took significant casualties. The war had now moved to the city where there was no war before. Bomb and gun attacks hit city police stations on a regular basis. Death squads and army units roamed the land and the unarmed Left in the form or human rights activists, labor union members and organizers, community organizers and activists, environmentalists, campesino organizations, organizations of slum-dwellers and indigineous leaders were murdered and tortured to death on a regular basis.

The idiot US and the West see this as a process of “Communist guerrillas trying to subvert Colombian democracy, shoot their way into power, and set up a murderous Communist dictatorship which will destroy freedom and prosperity in Colombia”. The vast majority of Americans and others in the West actually buy this bullshit. Many on the Left refuse to support the Colombian guerrilla, insisting that they are anachronistic and that they should try to seek power peacefully. However, since the FARC disarmed, former members and members of newly formed political parties have been massacred like flies. So state terror blocks all road to peaceful change, leaving no alternative but the way of the gun.

Obviously the ridiculous analysis of this situation that Westerners believe has no basis in reality. The Western media cheers on the genocidal Colombian state and says that the Colombian democracy is waging a war against irrational and bloodthirsty terrorism, typically linked with drug trafficking to describe them as criminals and destroy their legitimacy.

As long as this process goes on, Colombia’s economy will stay forever backwards.

It is necessary to do a land reform in the rural areas before any country can prosper economically. Indeed this “socialist” project of land reform which the US spent decades in the Cold War slaughtering millions of people to stop was actually implemented by the US in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in order to fend off a Communist threat. Oddly enough, it ended up creating the basis for subsequent booming development in those places.

Land reform was and is the basis for the Communist and Leftist revolutions and guerrilla forces in South Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia, Nepal, Peru, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay in the past 55-65 years, with some of the revolutions happening later 40 years ago. In Paraguay this process has just started several years ago when a FARC split has taken up arms agains the state.

Interview with an Anarchist in Haifa about the Palestinian Resistance against Israeli Occupation

From an interesting anarchist site here.

During the last couple of months, the situation in Palestine has escalated into a generalized uprising against Zionism, colonialism and apartheid. All of Israel’s and the local far-right’s attempts to crush the spirit of the Palestinian people have resulted in a unified mass resistance, for the first time in decades. The following text is a ground level report from an occupied land, discussing the course of the insurrection, as well as the counter-insurgency tactics, and Hamas’ role in the events.

For starters, could we have some info about you? As it would help us to better understand from what position you are talking.

I’m an anarchist based in Haifa, Occupied Palestine, so-called Israel. I live in an historical Palestinian city that faced a massive attack and terrorist aggression by Zionist militias in 1948 aimed at expelling the local indigenous population and colonizing the land. Since then, the Palestinians that remain live under an ethnic supremacist and apartheid system, and the refugees abroad are still aspiring to return. I come from a settler Jewish family, arriving on this land during the ’80s, and once I got the facts straight, I knew which position I should take.

Once again, bad news spread around the world from the Palestinian and Israeli territories. In a few words, what happened there?

We had a rough few months here. Not sure exactly where to start, but it’s good to concentrate on Jerusalem/Al-Quds that, as in many other uprisings, was the trigger. During April, settlers and cops provoked people in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian part of town, especially in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the Al-Aqsa compound.

In order to get the background you need, know that from the Zionist occupation of 1948 to 1967, East Jerusalem was under the control of Jordan. Some of the neighborhoods were populated by Palestinian refugees escaping the Zionist invasion and Nakba of 1948. Sheikh Jarrah is one of them.

After the occupation of 1967, the Zionist state celebrated the “reunification” of Jerusalem each year, now a national holiday. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers arrived at the neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, much like the rest of the occupied West Bank, with clear plans of colonization and Judaization of the area.

In Sheikh Jarrah, an old Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, settler organizations engaged in legal battles against local residents in the Israeli apartheid court system in efforts to evict local Palestinians and replace them with Jewish settlers, claiming the property used to be owned by Jews. A few families had already been evicted during 2008, 2009, and 2017, and now, a new court ruling puts an additional eight families under a threat of eviction, which is roughly 500 people. Jewish settlements exist in other neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as well, such as Silwan and Abu Tor.

In the Al-Aqsa compound, one of the holiest places to Islam, Israel placed barriers in Bab Al-‘Amud, one of the entrances to the mosque, in the beginning on the month of Ramadan in an effort to limit the number of worshipers and restrict movement. This act provoked outrage and days of rioting ensued in Bab Al-‘Amud and the main streets in East Jerusalem. The barriers were eventually removed.

Meanwhile, tensions in the city had escalated. Some Palestinian youth posted TikTok videos of them attacking Jews around the city, and Jewish far-right gangs mobilized to attack people suspected of being Arabs in the city center. Lehava, a far-right organization, led a racist ‘Death to Arabs’ march from the city center to Bab Al-‘Amud during the riots and were blocked by police on their way.

On May 10, during “Jerusalem Day”, the national holiday celebrating the occupation of the eastern part of the city in 1967, the annual ‘flag parade’ took place in the city, and right-wing participants were expected to enter the Muslim quarter in the old city and shout racist slurs under police protection as they do every year.

Israeli police invaded the Al-Aqsa mosque, and in the intense riots, dozens of cops and hundreds of protestors were injured. Around 5 pm, Hamas announced that Israel has 1 hour to evict all of its police forces from Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa compound. As this deadline passed, Hamas launched rockets into Israel, reaching Jerusalem. Israel in response announced a military operation in Gaza, and began to bombard the Gaza Strip with airstrikes in a massacre and destruction that lasted 12 days, until a ceasefire was reached on May 21.

Meanwhile, a generalized uprising took place amongst the Palestinians, including ’48 Palestinians living in the territories occupied in 1948 (i.e., so-called “Israel”), ’67 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and refugee communities abroad. A united insurrection, with days of riots in Palestinian, Israeli, and mixed cities and villages, refugee camps in nearby countries, and Israeli embassies and consulates everywhere. A general strike was also announced on May 18 involving all of the Palestinians for the first time in decades.

What are the important facts or basics we need to know about the history of this conflict? Should we call it a conflict, actually?

It is a conflict as much as an attack by a nuclear superpower with one of the most advanced armies in the world backed by the strongest state on earth against a poor occupied civilian population without an army could be characterized as a “conflict”. This is an aggression, the ‘two sides’ are the oppressor and the oppressed, the colonizer and the colonized.

The asymmetrical nature of the situation is so inherent, it’s completely ridiculous in my opinion that people struggle with ‘complexities’ while entire neighborhoods are being erased in Gaza by Israeli military airstrikes, killing 250 people in less than two weeks while Gazans have primitive rockets, most of them falling in open fields or being neutralized by Iron Dome- Israel’s defense system. The 12 people killed on the Israeli side came from mostly from the lower classes of society – mainly migrant workers and even Palestinians, as was the case in the village of Dahamash, near Ramle.

To really understand the true nature of this ‘conflict’ one must understand the inherently racist and colonialist nature of Zionism. As the Zionist occupation armies invaded this land in 1948, it was rich with culture. In what’s known as the Nakba, literally ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, entire villages were erased, massacres were committed, and hundreds of thousands of refugees driven away off their land. In the conquest for the Jewish homeland, a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing was committed. The indigenous population abroad in refugee camps in nearby countries and all over the world are still aspiring to return.

Those that managed to stay were subjected to realities of colonialism, racism, and discrimination. Laws such as the Absentee Property Act ruled that land and property of refugees fleeing Zionist aggression is now state property. The newly arrived Jewish immigrants were housed in those empty neighborhoods and towns. Military rule was imposed on the Palestinians who remained in Israel from 1948 to 1966 that imposed land restrictions, caused their expulsion from villages, and subjected them to curfews, detentions, and various other discriminatory actions, all with one aim: to increase the Jewish presence and cleanse the land of Palestinians as much as possible.

After the occupation of 1967, unlike the one of 1948, Israel decided not to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip to its official territory but to keep it in an unclear ‘temporary status’. Even though the Israeli military control basically every facet of the Palestinians’ life there, they are not Israeli citizens, are under military law, and have no rights. The Jewish settlers living in settlements nearby are full Israeli citizens and are under civilian law. Israeli settlements divide the West Bank into small cantons, and the separation wall since 2003 is another tool of land theft. The wall does not go through the 1967 “Green Line” border, but goes inside villages, in many cases annexing land in favor of nearby Jewish settlements.

Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has been under siege as a tool of collective punishment for Hamas’ rule over the area. Despite Israel’s claim of withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it still controls its borders, water, and airspace. Gaza, one of the densest populated areas in the world with a population of over 2 million, has already been bombed numerous times in military operations (massacres) in recent years, leading to thousands of casualties and a deteriorating humanitarian catastrophe.

Israel is the leading front of settler-colonialism currently in the world, one of the ugliest examples of nation building as a way of solving the problems of minorities within the boundaries of the state. There won’t be an end in sight without decolonization, return of the refugees, and a truly shared and equal existence without Zionism and apartheid. The time to start building the basis for such a future is now.

How do the Palestinian people live and/or survive? Is this apartheid taking the scale of an ethnic cleansing or a genocide? What is HAMAS’ role?

Hundreds of people are facing eviction in East Jerusalem. Gaza is in ruins, is still under a siege, and is the largest open prison in the world. Total devastation and human tragedy. 250 were killed during the latest Israeli aggression. Clean water is scarce. Health facilities were damaged, including the only lab in Gaza for testing Covid-19 cases. The pandemic is on the rise. Electricity hours are limited. Tens of thousands are displaced with no home to come back to. Unemployment and poverty are exploding.

Inside so-called Israel, Palestinians are facing an intense state terror campaign, aimed at repressing any dissent and punishing those willing to resist. About 2,000 were arrested so far in the protests this month, with more arrests expected. In the West Bank, settlements and a racist separation wall continues to divide the land into small cantons, annex lands from Palestinian villages, and make life unbearable. The refugees are still unable to return.

Palestine has been experiencing an ongoing, uninterrupted ethnic cleansing campaign since 1948. The Nakba never ended. One settler in the Eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan made it very clear: “We won’t stop until East Jerusalem becomes like West Jerusalem. Jewish. The Palestinians have no place in this vision.”

But despite all of the hardship, people are still resisting. The Palestinians stood fast during the last uprising, proved their unity, and fought the Zionist state bravely, despite all the attempts to divide them and crush their spirit. The revolt proved to be courageous and uncontrollable. None of the youth fighting the police in Palestinian and mixed cities by erecting barricades and defending against fascist invasion were obedient to any party or political faction. The new generation of fighters on the street are immune to the pacification efforts from the regular collaborator’s forces, in the form of political parties, NGOs, and respectable community and religious ‘leaders’.

Hamas’ role in the story is exactly what the “Palestinian leadership” did during every wave of popular uprising: take over the situation and kill the  appeal of mass insurrection. Just like the P.L.O. (Palestine Liberation Organization) during the first Intifada, once the militarist militias took over, the ‘professional revolutionaries’, the people became passive spectators of their own ‘liberation’. During the insurrection, the focus turned quickly to rockets launched in Gaza flying over Israeli cities, and the riots and protests largely died out. One can’t help but feel that Hamas interrupted the birth of a popular mass movement in the inner cities of the occupation that wasssssssssssssssssssssssssssss capable of creating real damage.

What about the Israelis? How do they react in this condition? Is there any far-right movement in society? Had Netanyahu the support of the people?

During the last uprising, there was a big far-right anti-Palestinian mobilization with fascist lynch mobs attacking Palestinians. In a now-infamous incident in Bat Yam, racist lynch mobs that tried to reach Jaffa rioted, smashed windows of businesses owned by Arabs, and attacked an Arab driver, all caught on live television. The police were not present. In Haifa, they stormed Palestinian neighborhoods, attacked passengers, damaged cars, threw stones at houses, and shouted racist slurs.

In Lydda, extremist settlers from the West Bank came to the city armed with guns despite the police announcing curfew in the city in the early days of the uprising and shot people, threw stones, set stores on fire, and attacked mosques and cemeteries. In a few cases the police stood by and did nothing. There is even documentation of them throwing stones at Palestinians from police lines. Those pogroms are well documented, but there are significantly more Palestinians arrested than far-right Jewish fascists.

To get into Israeli fascism and the local far-right movement would be quite a lengthy endeavor, let me just say the working class here is generally very right-wing and that Zionism has created a monster I’m not sure it can control. They are allowed to freely attack Palestinians to suppress generalized uprisings but have to disappear and go underground once exposed.

They are the direct consequence of Zionism, and it’s important for me to state that people use the far-right extremists as a way to avoid dealing with mainstream Zionism. It’s easy for liberal Israelis to get disgusted by right-wing assholes shouting death to Arabs in Jerusalem and then support IDF soldiers attacking Gaza during airstrikes, actually putting ‘death to Arabs’ into practice. In a state founded on ethnic cleansing backed by an inherently racist and colonialist ideology, one should not be surprised at the existence of racist pogromists and lynch mobs.

Netanyahu is quite a polarizing figure, but I’ll say he has the support of a huge chunk of Israeli society. But not everyone of course. During last summer, Jerusalem held some very big anti-Netanyahu demonstrations.

The “Anti-Bibi (Netanyahu’s nickname in Israel) Movement” got its momentum after corruption allegations were made public and a police investigation around these allegations is ongoing. Israel is currently in an electoral crisis after 4 elections in the last 2 years, and despite Bibi winning the largest number of votes in all of them, he was time and again unable to form a government due to Israel’s electoral system, and new elections were announced.

In the last elections held in March, Netanyahu once again got the largest number of votes, but again was unable to form a government, and the mandate went to his opponents – the rightwing Naftali Bennet and the centrist Yair Lapid, who would apparently share the government for two years each.

So for now, if things don’t change, it seems as though the anti-Bibi movement reached its goal. But things are not expected to go smoothly. Protests for and against the new government are polarizing the country, and things can go anywhere from here. There are even talks in the media about the possibility of political assassination, as the pro-Bibi camp is very unhappy about the course of events.

What about the persecuted and imprisoned people in so-called Israel? Who are they and what have they tried to do? Are there any movements against the state and the capital?

There was actually quite a long tradition of Israeli Jewish working class communities that calling for an end of the occupation. The Israeli Black Panthers, a group of young Mizrahi Jewish immigrants active in Jerusalem during the 70’s, were critical of Zionism and combined calls for an end to  military rule of Palestinians in their demands for economic and social justice. Here in Haifa, there was also a famous Mizrahi revolt in the 50’s in the Wadi Salib neighborhood – by the way, an historical Palestinian neighborhood whose population got evicted during the Nakba.

After a police officer shot and injured a person in a local café, the residents rioted for days, demanding an end to police brutality and discrimination against Mizrahi Jews by the Ashkenazi elite. An end to military rule over the Arabs was one of the demands. There was a time in which solidarity with the Palestinians was part of the radical Mizrahi working class conscience. But this tradition is long gone. The “Mizrahi discourse” today has deteriorated into liberal “identity politics” nonsense, with demands like ‘representation’ of politicians in Parliament, more Mizrahi police officers, and putting the faces of famous Mizrahi people on currency bills.

It’s hard to explain how right wing the Israeli working class is. But people are still revolting.

During the last few years, there were some incidents of police officers shooting and killing Ethiopian Jewish youth. People went out to the streets and rioted all over the country, in many cases connecting it with the Black Lives Matter movement in the so-called US. There weren’t any clear solidarity messages with the Palestinians, but a pretty significant movement against army conscription grew out of the Ethiopian-Jewish protests, under the banner “Our blood is good only for wars”. That’s a big deal in a militaristic state like Israel in which the army is above all.

Also, connections are being made, and it’s hard to predict where social processes will take us. During the anti-Netanyahu protests last summer in Jerusalem, proletariat youth met each other on the street, with Ethiopians, Palestinians, Mizrahi, feminists, environmentalists etc. protesting side by side for the same interests. Despite how liberal the overall demonstrations were, on its far edges, communities that don’t usually get to see each other face to face and are ignorant of their shared interests finally got the chance to do so.

People are now making the connections between the deaths of Ethiopian Jewish youth like Salomon Teka and Yehuda Biagda with the deaths of Palestinians like Iyad Al-Halak and Munis Anabtawi, all of whom were murdered by police. It took a long time for this to happen. But of course I don’t want to paint the picture in more romantic colors than it actually is. It’s too early to discuss any movement that is willing to give up the state and capital amongst Israelis, and I doubt it will happen any time soon. The Palestinian resistance will remain the only truly revolutionary movement in the region.

The conversation about antisemitism and anti-Zionism is starting every time this crisis is arising. Do you accept these terms and if so, what is your opinion on them? Is there anything problematic in the use of these terms? Is the state of Israel using them in its blame-game and, on the other hand, is there such hate from any part of the Palestinians?

Just talked about it with some German comrades lately! I’m going to be completely honest with y’all here: I’m sick and tired of antisemitism being brought up every time the issue of Palestine is being raised. I doubt the honesty and integrity of anyone who, while entire neighborhoods are being erased with airstrikes and people are being evicted from their homes to be replaced by settlers, all he has to say is “Yes, but the Jews”.

We need to really focus right now. People are dying. Ethnic cleansing and colonization campaigns are ongoing. State repression and terror is at an all-time high. Gaza is a Hell on earth and the situation is unbearable. This is a human catastrophe. We don’t have the time to deal with false accusations. Don’t take the bait.

I’m not going to get into how anti-Zionism is different from antisemitism. It’s so old and well known that it’s boring and cliché at this point. Most people already know these things, and many of those who don’t won’t listen anyway. The Left goes around in circles about this because it’s apparently easier to deal with false ‘complexities’ and theoretical debates than to notice what’s happening in front of your eyes. Jewish people have been opposing Zionism since the very beginning, way before the state of Israel existed.

The nation-state form is a project of reinventing the mechanism needed to ‘purify’ and simplify the land of any diversity and complexity until nothing is left but a monolithic state identity. Just notice the language they use – “Israel has the right to defend itself.” States don’t have rights. They only have “rights” insofar as they protect their citizens, and we all know states don’t do that.

I honestly think that Israel is one of the worst things that has happened to Jewish people. It’s an extension of their historical ethnic cleansing from Europe, and a step backwards in many respects. By looking at Netanyahu’s relationship with figures like Trump and Bolsonaro, and the Israeli Right’s warm relationship with its European and American counterparts, you can clearly see that Zionism and antisemitism not only do not oppose each other, they go very well together. They complement each other.

Anyway, as for antisemitism in the solidarity movement, it exists and of course needs to be dealt with. Jewish and Palestinian comrades are aware of it and have been fighting it for decades. The BDS movement for example is strictly against any kind of racism including antisemitism and has been enforcing this policy against any bigots abusing their platform.

People need to gatekeep the solidarity movement against any kind of fascist bullshit like I saw comrades in Germany confronting Turkish fascists infiltrating a pro-Palestinian demonstration. That’s good and needs to happen more. It’s different from simply labeling the whole movement antisemitic. Fascists will take a hold in any platform they feel they can use to propagate their hate, and they infiltrate social movements constantly. It’s our job as antifascists to deny that to them.

As far as the Middle East goes, could we have a “political map” on the converging and conflicting state forces? Some Palestinians, for example, were requesting on social media the help of Pakistan. On the other hand, the state of Israel has the support of the U.S.A. What is your perspective on the world’s response concerning the never-ending violence and massacre in the area?

Geopolitics of course play a big part in inflaming the so-called “conflict”. After the so-called US became a superpower in the 1940’s, and Britain drew its forces out of the Middle East, there was a strong need for a new ‘regional cop’, a Western ally to keep local interests in check. Arab nationalism was a strong force at that time, and a pro-Western power was the logical “security” needed to keep “stability”, meaning American influence and control, over the resources of the region.

Israel impressed the US during the Nakba, with the American military describing it as “the strongest military force in the region after Turkey.” This perception received further confirmation in 1967 after Israel destroyed Nasser’s Egypt and eliminated Arab nationalism as a dominant power in the region.

Even further confirmation came in 1970 when Israel protected Jordan from a Syrian invasion, probably in order to protect oil fields. This tendency grew over the years. Today, Israel receives billions of dollars in military aid from the US annually, more aid than the US gives the entire African continent. To keep a strong Israel is a significant US strategic goal, which is another reason why the US repeatedly vetoes and blocks UN decisions concerning the Palestinians.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, are completely alone and constantly betrayed by their so-called ‘allies’. The Arab countries have long ago abandoned ‘Arab nationalism’ in favor of a neocolonial order of puppet dictators and Western influence. The “Arab Spring” might have given hope for a second, but generally speaking, new dictators replaced the old ones. The latest ‘peace agreement’ between Israel and the UAE shows the lengths neoliberal monarchies in the Middle East will go in normalizing Israel’s presence as long as business and free trade are protected and promoted.

Other state powers are completely opportunistic: The Soviets gave their support during the Cold War whenever it suited their interests. The Palestinians can’t even count on their own “leadership”, as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are themselves corrupted dictators and opportunistic bureaucracies acting against their own people. The only real ally left is the people on the ground with the international solidarity movement willing to raise its voice and act against modern forms of apartheid, colonialism, and state terror.

Is there any message you want to send to the anarchists and antifascists around the world? How can we all show our solidarity to the Palestinians or the peace and freedom fighters in so-called Israel?

The Palestinians need help and support. They need action and solidarity. Comrades loving freedom from all over the world need to raise their voice for them. Target Israeli interests in your region. Join your local BDS chapter and call for a boycott. Organize direct action. Do anything you can to get the message across. Internationalist revolutionary solidarity is our strongest weapon against state terror and repression. “Comrades” who are silent – your silence is deafening.

Anything about the future?

Fuck “co-existence.” We need co-resistance. We need a joint insurrection of Israelis and Palestinians on the ground and refugees and their supporters abroad against colonialist Zionism and the apartheid regime. We need to create the basis of a new culture, of people capable of creating an autonomy in which people could meet each other on the streets and reinvent living together. We need to share this land as equals, to smash the visible and invisible borders of fear and control, and imagine politics beyond state terror. We need all of this to not be a fantasy but a reality of struggle, courage, and forming brave connections. May we see the day.

You can check the report I wrote to Crime, Inc. concerning the last uprising, in which I dive to some of the topics I mentioned here in details.

Latest Update (End of June): As the last Flag March was interrupted by Hamas rockets, the settlers decided to hold another one. After the riots and the last escalation, there was a big controversy, but the new government held by the new prime minister Naftali Bennet eventually allowed the march to take place on June 15, with thousands of settlers and right-wing activists raiding Jerusalem yelling racist slurs against Arabs and Muslims, all under full police protection as usual.

Numerous shouts of “Death to Arabs,” calls for burning of villages and a second Nakba, and slurs against the Muslim prophet Muhammad were recorded during the march. Small groups of Palestinian resistance on the outskirts of the route of the march were brutally suppressed by riot police. Hamas once again threatened Israel, and in response to the march launched explosive balloons to towns and agricultural fields near the Gaza border, causing fires. Israel in response attacked Gaza once again, this time under the new government, which is obviously the same as the old.

From: https://radiofragmata.org/2021/07/03/fuck-co-existence-we-need-co-resistance-an-interview-with-an-anarchist-in-haifa-about-the-palestinian-resistance-against-the-israeli-occupation/

Alt Left: Russian Thinking on Black-White Versus Grey Areas

Commenter Siberiancat, who is a Russian, left this comment a while back:

Russians are pretty good with gray areas.

An illustration:

A Russian emigrant mathematician and psychologist Vladimir Lefevre was an adviser to Reagan on how to conduct negotiations with Gorbachev. He had a theory that Western and Eastern European (in this case, Soviet) ethics were completely different.

In Western thinking, there is a clear difference between Good and Evil. One should confront evil, yet compromise with an enemy is a good thing

In the Eastern approach, there is no Good and Evil. Everything is gray. The ends justify the means, and one should not compromise with an enemy.

The advice was to conduct negotiations in such a way that the Soviets would not look like compromising to the domestic constituency. Make negotiations mostly informal. Avoid formal deals that might be seen as defeats by the ordinary Russians.

I would not say that Russians are Easterners, having nothing in common with the Chinese or Indians, yet the ethical systems between them and the West are obviously different.

Oh, and Lefevre was the guy who coined the term Evil Empire.

I find it interesting that he ties Eastern European (as in Slavic?) thinking with Russian thinking. What about in the Baltic states? They’re so Westernized. And the Czechs are so Western they are barely even Slavs. And what do we do with the Romanians? The culture and religion of the East, yet the language of the West? I suspect they are more Eastern than we think. The Balkans, Greece, …Hell, even Bulgaria, are more Southern European or better yet, Southeastern European.

I know everyone over there hates the Turks and I don’t blame them, but I’m afraid that they’re more Turkified than they think, especially the Greeks. Or perhaps the entire region is Southeast Europanified, Southeast European being different from both Eastern and Southern Europe. The Turks like to delude themselves that they are part of general Southeastern Europe, but that is just more Muslim arrogance. They’re so much closer to the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Kurds that they hate so much than they will ever admit. Religion isn’t as big a part of human culture as everyone thinks. In a lot of areas, it’s almost a cultural “add-on.”

I do like this part though:

In the Eastern approach, there is no Good and Evil. Everything is gray.

Reminds me of the great line from Rumi:

Over there In that field Beyond good and evil I will meet you there

– Rumi

That is just so perfect, I am sorry. And it’s so…Eastern…Hell, it’s almost downright Chinese for Chrissake. Rumi was an Iranian Shia Sufi poet. I wonder to what extent Iranian thinking is “Eastern?” I hate to say like Chinese, but I sense a deep vibe of Chinese philosophy in that bit of terse poetry.

Alt Left: The Assassination of Politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia in 1948

This is the information contained in the huge update I just made in this post. I just updated the post with a lot of information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 which led to the massive riots called The Bogotazo, after which a decade of mass killings called La Violencia took place. The assassination of Gaitan, even more than the banana workers strike, jump-started the movement of the armed Colombian Left in the form of the Colombian guerrillas.

In 1948 in Colombia, a very popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated for the same reason that given for the overthrow of Arbenz of Guatemala seven years later. The Liberal Party was one of two fascist parties of the oligarchy, along with the Conservative Party. See below for more on them.

The Liberal Party was anything but. Yet Gaitán was an interesting figure, part of a socialist movement in the party who advocated very popular candidate who promised major changes in Colombian society a battle against social, political, and economic inequality. He was also a feminist who advocated the uplift of the status of Colombian woman in society. In addition, he broached the subject of land reform, a hot button issue in Colombia.

In fact, as in so many other places in Latin America such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the endless Leftist guerrilla war against the government is more of a fight over land than anything else. To this day, the Colombian oligarchy has refused to do a land reform, in part because this is where most of their money comes from.

Even Venezuela has had only partial success at a land reform, as it has proven too difficult to break up the big estates or latifundias. Instead, since much of the land lies idle and fallow, peasants have conducted land invasions of fallowed land in the latifundias, which has resulted in a lot of conflict.

Death squads funded by the latifundia oligarchs have murdered over 150 peasant leaders since Chavez came in over the last 20 years. Parts of the Chavista Movement have been aligned with the rural rich for whatever reason, and they have been involved in repressing these peasant movements also.

He was murdered by the Colombian oligarchy or ruling class, which has stayed in power by mass murder for 75 years now. They were even massacring people earlier, as there was a mass slaughter of striking workers at banana plantations in the northwest in a place called La Magdalena in 1928.

Even this early, the US was waging a Cold War against the USSR. The US became very alarmed by the strike, as the plantations were owned by the US United Fruit Company. United Fruit and the US government described the strikers as subversives and Communists. The US threatened to invade if the strike was not put down by the Colombian government.

Under orders from United Fruit, the Colombian military attacked the workers. Many striking workers were killed. The event was memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his famous novel 100 Years of Solitude. The event was a watershed in Colombian politics, as an actual Colombian Left was formed around this time.

Gaitan was an excellent speaker and his rallies drew large crowds of union members and poor people. He was characterized as a demagogue, like Juan Peron, who was already rising to power in Argentina. He was also a budding nationalist. He was criticized by the Conservative Party, the right wing of the Liberal Party, and even the Communist Party, which regarded him as a competitor for the interests of the workers.

In 1933, he split with the Liberal Party and formed the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (National Leftist Revolutionary Union). In 1946, he proposed a Gaitanista Program. It advocated many things:

Development agencies for the advancement of the social, political, and economic advancement of peasants in the countryside. Policies to redistribute wealth in Colombia. Nationalization of public services, a progressive income tax, and the development of a national economy. A land reform and new pro-labor laws.

In terms of foreign policy, it advocated an economic union of Latin American countries so they could serve the interests of their people instead of that of the oligarchies and foreign carpetbagging corporations. His project could be best described as anti-plutocratic and anti-imperialist.

He was assassinated in 1948 by a “lone gunman,” Juan Roa Sierra, along the lines of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two ex-CIA agents have confessed that it was really the CIA that was behind the operation. The assassin took orders from two named CIA agents and the assassination plan was called Operation Pantomime.

This was probably one of the first of countless assassinations of liberal and leftwing figures the world over by the CIA undertaken as part of the Cold War. Sierra visited Gaitan in his office in  the morning and at 1 PM, he shot Gaitan dead.

An enraged mob then set upon Sierra, who was protected by an Army colonel. He was chased to a store where  he holed up. The mob smashed into the store and dragged him outside. He was beaten and stabbed so many times that his corpse was unrecognizable.

At the time of his assassination, a meeting of the Pan-American Conference led by US Secretary of State George Marshall. At this meeting, all members of the group agreed that fighting Communism was their number one concern.

The despicable Organization of American States or OAS, a fake organization of Latin American countries that is actually run by the US and serves to promote the interests of the US and its neo-colonies in Latin America.

At the same time, the Latin American Youth Congress was taking place. It been organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba and was funded by Juan Peron of Argentina. A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a law student at the time and was eating lunch at the time  Gaitan was killed. He rushed to the scene and arrived just in time to see Sierra lynched by the mob. He memorialized the event in his book, Living to Tell the Tale.

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray. Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

The Colombian government quickly blamed the USSR and the Colombian Communist Party for the murder. They also tied in the young Fidel Castro with the plot. This version seems very unlikely.

Notice that this CIA assassination took place under “liberal Democrat” Harry Truman.

The murder of this candidate was followed by a wild  riot known as the Bogotazo. Many of the rioters were armed and the riots left much of downtown Bogota in ruins. The riots left 1,800 people dead. This was part of a larger reign of violence in the countryside which had started in 1930. By 1948, Bogota was full of peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside.

Alt Left: Updated: How the Armed Colombian Left (the FARC and the ELN) Came to Be

I just updated this post with a lot of information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 which led to the massive riots called The Bogotazo, after which a decade of mass killings called La Violencia took place. The assassination of Gaitan, even more than the banana workers strike, jump-started the movement of the armed Colombian Left in the form of the Colombian guerrillas.

In 1948 in Colombia, a very popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated for the same reason that given for the overthrow of Arbenz of Guatemala seven years later. The Liberal Party was one of two fascist parties of the oligarchy, along with the Conservative Party. See below for more on them.

The Liberal Party was anything but. Yet Gaitán was an interesting figure, part of a socialist movement in the party who advocated very popular candidate who promised major changes in Colombian society a battle against social, political, and economic inequality. He was also a feminist who advocated the uplift of the status of Colombian woman in society. In addition, he broached the subject of land reform, a hot button issue in Colombia.

In fact, as in so many other places in Latin America such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the endless Leftist guerrilla war against the government is more of a fight over land than anything else. To this day, the Colombian oligarchy has refused to do a land reform, in part because this is where most of their money comes from.

Even Venezuela has had only partial success at a land reform, as it has proven too difficult to break up the big estates or latifundias. Instead, since much of the land lies idle and fallow, peasants have conducted land invasions of fallowed land in the latifundias, which has resulted in a lot of conflict.

Death squads funded by the latifundia oligarchs have murdered over 150 peasant leaders since Chavez came in over the last 20 years. Parts of the Chavista Movement have been aligned with the rural rich for whatever reason, and they have been involved in repressing these peasant movements also.

He was murdered by the Colombian oligarchy or ruling class, which has stayed in power by mass murder for 75 years now. They were even massacring people earlier, as there was a mass slaughter of striking workers at banana plantations in the northwest in a place called La Magdalena in 1928.

Even this early, the US was waging a Cold War against the USSR. The US became very alarmed by the strike, as the plantations were owned by the US United Fruit Company. United Fruit and the US government described the strikers as subversives and Communists. The US threatened to invade if the strike was not put down by the Colombian government.

Under orders from United Fruit, the Colombian military attacked the workers. Many striking workers were killed. The event was memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his famous novel 100 Years of Solitude. The event was a watershed in Colombian politics, as an actual Colombian Left was formed around this time.

Gaitan was an excellent speaker and his rallies drew large crowds of union members and poor people. He was characterized as a demagogue, like Juan Peron, who was already rising to power in Argentina. He was also a budding nationalist. He was criticized by the Conservative Party, the right wing of the Liberal Party, and even the Communist Party, which regarded him as a competitor for the interests of the workers.

In 1933, he split with the Liberal Party and formed the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (National Leftist Revolutionary Union). In 1946, he proposed a Gaitanista Program. It advocated many things:

Development agencies for the advancement of the social, political, and economic advancement of peasants in the countryside. Policies to redistribute wealth in Colombia. Nationalization of public services, a progressive income tax, and the development of a national economy. A land reform and new pro-labor laws.

In terms of foreign policy, it advocated an economic union of Latin American countries so they could serve the interests of their people instead of that of the oligarchies and foreign carpetbagging corporations. His project could be best described as anti-plutocratic and anti-imperialist.

He was assassinated in 1948 by a “lone gunman,” Juan Roa Sierra, along the lines of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two ex-CIA agents have confessed that it was really the CIA that was behind the operation. The assassin took orders from two named CIA agents and the assassination plan was called Operation Pantomime.

This was probably one of the first of countless assassinations of liberal and leftwing figures the world over by the CIA undertaken as part of the Cold War. Sierra visited Gaitan in his office in  the morning and at 1 PM, he shot Gaitan dead.

An enraged mob then set upon Sierra, who was protected by an Army colonel. He was chased to a store where  he holed up. The mob smashed into the store and dragged him outside. He was beaten and stabbed so many times that his corpse was unrecognizable.

At the time of his assassination, a meeting of the Pan-American Conference led by US Secretary of State George Marshall. At this meeting, all members of the group agreed that fighting Communism was their number one concern.

The despicable Organization of American States or OAS, a fake organization of Latin American countries that is actually run by the US and serves to promote the interests of the US and its neo-colonies in Latin America.

At the same time, the Latin American Youth Congress was taking place. It been organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba and was funded by Juan Peron of Argentina. A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a law student at the time and was eating lunch at the time  Gaitan was killed. He rushed to the scene and arrived just in time to see Sierra lynched by the mob. He memorialized the event in his book, Living to Tell the Tale.

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray.

Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

The Colombian government quickly blamed the USSR and the Colombian Communist Party for the murder. They also tied in the young Fidel Castro with the plot. This version seems very unlikely.

Notice that this CIA assassination took place under “liberal Democrat” Harry Truman.

The murder of this candidate was followed by a wild  riot known as the Bogotazo. Many of the rioters were armed and the riots left much of downtown Bogota in ruins. The riots left 1,800 people dead. This was part of a larger reign of violence in the countryside which had started in 1930. By 1948, Bogota was full of peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside.

The Bogotazo led eventually to La Violencia, a truly crazy 10 year period from 1954-1964 in which Liberals and Conservatives, which ideologically are both simply fascist parties, with the Liberals masquerading as social democrats to the extent that they are even members of the Socialist International, massacred each other in huge numbers for no particular reason at all.

The Liberals and Conservatives typically trade off running the country. Although they hated each other to the point of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of each other, the odd thing is that despite their names, ideologically and in governance, there is little difference between. They are both far rightwing parties of the oligarchy.

The armed Left in the form of the ELN, which was created in 1964, theorizes that La Violencia was simply a way for the elite to slaughter the politically active working class.

After La Violencia ended in 1964, a small group of people tired of being massacred settled in some property in West-Central Colombia and declared themselves a semi-autonomous republic. They were also heavily armed. They said that and armed themselves mostly to keep from being massacred. And they did set it up as a “Communist republic” but it was only a small patch of land of no particular consequence and the group’s numbers never numbered greater than 200.

They named this place Marquetalia. Manuel “Sure Shot” Marulanda, the leader of the FARC for the next 40 years, was one of the founders of this commune. The Colombian government became very alarmed that 200 people had called themselves Communists and settled some lands that they freaked out and called for Uncle Sam to come help.

This was under the “liberal Democrat” Johnson Administration. The US also became very alarmed and we sent several generals and a troop of Green Berets down there.

At this time, the Green Berets were advising the Guatemalan government in putting down a Left insurgency that began there in 1960. They put it down via massacres of the civilian population. There’s nothing noble about the Green Berets. They’re simply the US government version of a Latin American death squad.

Anyway, a significant army detachment was mobilized and Marquetalia was attacked with US advisors by their side. There are suggestions that the US and Colombia even used chemical weapons against the commune.

The Marquetalians fought back but were defeated, suffering many casualties. The survivors retreated into the mountains of Colombia. These are really mountain jungles as the mountains are covered in a jungle-like near-rainforest and it’s impossible to find anyone or anything in there.

There they decided that all peaceful attempts at change, including setting up a semi-autonomous commune, were impossible, so they could either sit in the villages and wait for the government to come murder them or they could take up arms so they could at least fight back when the army and death squads came.

The group was called the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and they are still active to this day, 56 years later. At one time around 2000, they controlled ~5

The ELN (National Liberation Army) was formed at the same time, in 1964, in Eastern Colombia under obscure circumstances that I’m not aware of.

The original philosophy was Liberation Theology and their leader was Camilo Torres, the original “priest with a machine gun.” Liberation theology can be thought of as “Jesus with a machine gun” and in fact there are murals in Latin America showing exactly this. The idea is that Jesus supported “the preferential option for the poor” and that even armed struggle to achieve this goal was not only valid but very Christian.

One of the original theorists was an educator named Paulo Friere in Brazil who published a famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – also published in the same year that the ELN and the FARC were formed in 1964 -along these lines, advocating a liberation theology component to be the focus of the curriculum in Latin America. Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez could be considered the father of Liberation Theology. He wrote a book called The Theology of Liberation around this same time.

To this day, although the ELN are Leftists, they are still officially a Christian organization and they have many supporters among the Catholic clergy in Colombia, as does the officially atheist FARC.

Alt Left: How the US Staged Fascist Coups in Many Countries the World Over in the Last 70 Years

After World War, the Cold War was started and the murderous Dulles Brothers Installed the Policy known as Containment. This was implemented between 1946-48. As part of this policy, the US overthrew nationalist, social democratic, and even liberal democratically elected governments all over the world as part of the “War on Communism.” We replaced them with rightwing dictatorships. Although it is arguable, in general all rightwing  authoritarian regimes or dictatorships are probably fascist. Rightwing dictatorship = fascism.

These regimes were found most of Central America in Guatemala after 1954, in El Salvador and Honduras since forever, and in Nicaragua under the Somozas.

They were found in all of South America at one time or another. We can see them in the generals after 1964 in Brazil, the democratic facade duopoly regimes in Venezuela in Colombia (especially after 1947 and again in 1964, Ecuador, Peru until the generals’ revolt in 1968, Bolivia under Banzer after 1953, Paraguay under Strausser, Argentina and Uruguay under the generals in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and Pinochet in Chile.

They were also seen in the Caribbean in Cuba under Bautista, the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and Haiti under the Duvaliers.

In Southeast Asia, they were found in Thieu in South Vietnam, Sihanouk in Cambodia, the monarchy in Laos, the military regimes in Thailand, Suharto in Indonesia, the Sultan in Brunei, Marcos in the Philippines, and Taiwan under Chiang Kai Chek.

In Northeast Asia, a regime of this type was found in South Korea from 1947-on.

They were found South Asia with Pakistan under Generals like Zia, in Central Asia in the Shah of Iran, and in a sense, the Arab World with Saddam (Saddam was installed by the CIA), King Hassan in Morocco, the Gulf monarchies, and Jordan. Earlier, they were found in the monarchies in Libya and Egypt that were overthrown by Arab nationalists. Also, Israel played this sort of role with a democratic facade.

We also found them in the Near East in the military regimes in Turkey (especially Turgut Ozul) and for a while in Greece under the colonels in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

NATO formed the backbone of a “rightwing dictatorship” in the background of Western Europe (especially Italy), where Operation Gladio NATO intelligence essentially ran most of those countries as a Deep State behind the scenes. These regimes were found in Spain under Franco and in Portugal under Salazar along with its colonies.

These regimes were not so much in evidence in Africa except in South Africa and Rhodesia and most prominently, Mobutu in Zaire and Samuel Doe in Liberia.

The fascist forms of these rightwing dictatorships varied, most being nonracist fascism but a few being racist fascists (Turkey), and others being Mussolinists (Suharto in Indonesia with his “pangesila”)

Alt Left: The Nature of Latin American Rightwing Dictatorships (Fascist Regimes) in Latin America

The Venezuelan elite are classic Latin American elite fascists, a somewhat distinct type. Most of the elite down there has this “Latin American fascist” orientation.

It’s generally not race-based, but the ruling elite tends to be lighter-skinned than the darker masses, even in Haiti. Instead, it’s more like the “rightwing authoritarianism” or “rightwing dictatorships” that we saw so many of in the Cold War in Latin America and elsewhere.

Alt Left: How the Cold War Against Communism Ended up Being a War against Nationalism, Social Democracy, and even Liberalism

All of these liberal Democrats signing on to this media war on Venezuela need to recognize that the corporate media is using the Venezuelan example as part of a “war on socialism” to discredit the very word socialism and everything associated with it.

Remember when Trump said before Congress that the US will never be a socialist country? Here, socialism refers to social democracy in either in name/action, which exists in 9

Remember how the entire Congress, including the vast majority of Democratic Congressmen, gave that fascist a standing ovation when he said that? And liberal Democrats dare to claim that they are on the left! They’re not on the left of anything, except maybe the left wing of Republican Party.

The corporate media and the US money/government elite (The Deep State, basically) despises anything that even smacks of socialism, especially social democracy which they truly hate because it is most likely to be implemented. This started during the Cold War but it was already going on in the Depression, when US fascists nearly staged a military coup against FDR, who they said was a Communist.

But during the Cold War the demonization of anything smacking of socialism, no matter how mild, really got under way with two bloodthirsty killers, the Dulles Brothers, who initiated the policy of Containment and created the CIA out of the wartime US intelligence agency, effectively turning the US into a militarized, national security state.

In other words, they initiated what boils down to the US Deep State or the foreign policy establishment of the United States. Note that the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about is absolutely part of this Deep State too, as it and the national security state are each part of each other.

It was during this era when the US overthrew countries all the time for the tiniest movements towards social democracy and a lot of times simply for implementing social liberalism, the ideology of the US Democratic Party!

For instance, Aristide in Haiti was overthrown for the simple reason that he raised the minimum wage.

The US Democratic Party gave complete support to both of these coups, without a single dissenting member. My “liberal Democrat” father, actually a “Cold War liberal,” a truly awful group of people, gave his complete support to the fascist coup that overthrew Aristide. Why? Because Time Magazine told him it needed to be done. My father foolishly believed that Time Magazine was a liberal or at least Centrist project though it’s never been either.

So the Democratic Party supports raising the minimum wage, sure, but overseas, if you do it, the Democratic Party will call you a Communist and overthrow you in a fascist coup! Disgusting or what?

Nationalist, Social Democratic, and even Liberal Governments Overthrown by the CIA in the Last 70 years

Arbenz in Guatemala was overthrown in 1954 simply for implementing a mild social democracy. About

Juan Bosch came to power in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and started to implement a mild social democracy. The US media demonized him as a Communist, and soon LBJ staged a fascist coup to overthrow him.

The Mossadegh government in Iran was elected in 1953 for electing a nationalist who nationalized British Petroleum’s oil and set about to implement a mild social democracy with nationalist overtones. He was overthrown by the US and UK and a fascist monarch called Reza Shah was installed and held power for the next 26 years.

A leftwing government was elected in Guyana around 1970, and the Western media went into hysterics. In reality, he was just a social democrat. The “liberal” UK soon overthrew him in a fascist coup.

The US waged economic war against Manley’s government in Jamaica in the late 80’s and early 90’s. He was never anything but a social democrat.

The Left took power in Brazil in 1964 after they won an election. In truth they were just social democrats. They were quickly overthrown in a fascist coup by generals in the military a year later.

A social democratic government that contained a few Communists was elected in 1960 in Iraq. The CIA overthrew that government in a bloody coup and installed Saddam Hussein with specific instructions to get rid of and crack down on the Communists.

Patrice Lumumba in the Congo came to power in 1964. I believe he was never anything more than a social democrat. Nevertheless, the Western media went insane, calling him a Communist. A year later he was overthrown with the help of US intelligence. It is a proven fact that Donald Rumsfeld, then working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, helped set up his arrest and subsequent execution by being tied to a tree and shot.

Alt Left: The US Has Always Supported Fascism Except for a Few Years in the 1940’s

America loves fascists, that’s the bottom line. And it’s worse America loves fascists, that’s the bottom line.

And it’s worse than that. Capitalists love fascism. Capitalists have never opposed any fascist state or rightwing dictatorship. Nor have any conservatives ever opposed a single fascist state or rightwing dictatorship.

Now that does not mean that the US is a fascist country, at least in its domestic policies.

Its foreign policy is a lot harder to figure. The US been supporting fascism overseas ever since US corporations started migrating overseas, first in Latin America, in search of greater profits, as capitalism demands that they must do. We may well be a fascist country at the moment. Trump is a fascist and the Republican Party is now a full-fledged fascist party, whereas before this aspect of itself was somewhat submerged, hidden, or put on the back-burner.

But the US has always been a pro-fascist country. We supported fascism from 1910 all the way through the 1930’s. The New York Times praised Hitler when he took power. Corporations in the UK felt the same way. He was killing and imprisoning the Left, and making the country safe for wealth and capital. Which is all any capitalist ever wants.

It is only when fascism became racialized, expansionist, and colonial in part due to rage at not being invited to the party when the European powers were racialized and expansionist as part of the divvying up, enslavement, and looting of the word outside of Europe by the European powers.

Japan and Germany were left out of this block party, so they decided, “Hey it’s our turn now. You guys have your colonialism, now we will have ours.” As the West continued to hold all of its colonies, the Axis powers were correct. Indeed we had to be forced into the war by the Japanese attack that we literally provoked and forced them into.

World War 2 was the only time in history that the US has ever used its military might to attack fascism, mostly because fascism had been getting rather out of hand, uncontrolled, chaotic, and destructive.

Right before the war, the US was pro-fascist, and no sooner was the ink dry on the surrender papers when the US started recruiting former Nazis, Mussolinists, and fascist Axis collaborators in Eastern Europe, but also in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. We immediately hired these Nazis to be our army for the dirty war we declared on the Soviet Union probably a day after the Yalta Agreement.

And no sooner were the Japanese fascists defeated that we started funding and training the Japanese fascist collaborators in South Korea to fight communism. The truth is that no one hates Communists more than fascists. Fascists think they should be killed on sight. More non-fascists are a bit more squeamish or at least not as extremist. So we recruited this brutal and amoral fascists to be dirty-fighting (Nazi-like) soldiers in our war against Communism. The first fascist armies funded by the West started operations in the Baltics and Ukraine only a few months after the Armistice.

So we only fought fascism for four years, from 1941-1945. Before that until 1910, we had supported it. And from 1945-on, the US supported any and all fascist countries or guerrillas everywhere on Earth.

After 1989, US liberal Democrats said this fascist dirty war was the lamentable but sadly necessary policy of the Cold War. Now that the Cold War was over, we didn’t need to be so evil anymore, and now we could go back to being the shining city on the hill.

Except the fascist Cold War didn’t end in 1989. It’s still going on to this day in the sense that it has reverted to the pre-World War 2 policy of supporting rightwing authoritarians and attacking any and all manifestations of the Left. All of the Left countries that were targeted in the Cold War remained targets after Gorbachev.

So the Cold War was never about fighting the evils of Communism in the form of the USSR. The Cold War was simply another phase of the fascist war on the Left everywhere on Earth that the US has waged since 1910. The enemy was never the USSR. The enemy was always socialism, or in many places, even social democracy or social liberalism.

So while we have traditionally not been a fascist country, we have always been a pro-fascist country. We didn’t practice it, but we supported itself everywhere it appeared on Earth.

Alt Left: The War Crimes and Depraved Murders/Massacres/Genocides of America Began Immediately After World War Ended

Scarcely were the lights out on WW2 when we started recruiting “ex”-Nazis for our military and intelligence agencies.

We started setting up Operation Gladio or the Stay Behind Network, composed almost purely of Nazis and other fascists, to defend Europe after a possible Soviet invasion and conquest. They would form the behind the lines resistance against the new Soviet Order in Europe.

We started setting up and funding “ex” Nazis and Nazi collaborators all over Eastern Europe to serve as similar stay behind networks to wage guerilla war in parts of the USSR, especially the Baltics (the Forest Brothers) and Ukraine. These guerrilla wars lasted until 1956 and were very brutally put down, mostly by the NKVD.

 

Alt Left: A Reasonable Project for “Soft” Taiwanese Independence to Assuage PRC Fears

Vicmund the Han: What do you think of Taiwanese based on your observations?

You’re going to hate me for saying this, but I think they should go independent. But I would like a peace treaty with China beforehand, an economic agreement, CCP military bases in Taiwan dual staffed, Taiwanese military bases in China dual-staffed, perhaps some sort of integration military or econonomic-wise like the CIS or better yet, Belarus. Transform it into a deep alliance and work together. The radical independencists will have to be sidelined.

The main thing is to make it so an independent Taiwan is not a military threat to China. No US military bases in Taiwan, integration of both nations’ policies towards the US and maybe on a lot of other things. Brotherly countries with a strong alliance who agree to disagree on certain things, but when they do, they are “brotherly opposition.”

There is only one China. There are two countries, Taiwan and China. Taiwan is not China. It’s Taiwan. The only China is the People’s Republic. Two Chinas policy was insane, but one China policy is crazy too as it says that Taiwan doesn’t even exist!

The problem is that most  Chinese, including the CCP, are stark raving nuts about this question, so I am really worried that they will not want to put this project into effect. China sees Taiwan as a rebellious province of China. Well, it’s a part of China that fought a war and  achieved their independence from China via military might. So it’s not a rebellious province anymore. It’s like Eritrea split off from Ethiopia. It’s a new country.

Chinese nationalism is ok in a sense, but it’s also ethnic nationalism in a sense and it’s definitely ultranationalism in a revanchist way. You can’t go back and retake land you lost in wars. That’s what those world wars were all about. Irredentism and revanchism have got to go. Chinese nationalism suffers from a lot of the insanities, toxicities, and mental disorders of any nationalism. It is fascist in a sense that all extreme nationalisms or patriotardisms are, though only in a very broad sense of wanting a restoration of a Chinese empire.

It’s nation-state nationalism or patriotardism like exists in many countries, including the US.  It differs from almost all fascisms in not being ethnic-based and in not being part of a nation-building project where all non-Chinese Han/non-Mandarin speakers have to turn into Chinese Mandarin-speaking Hans. They all have to get rid of their languages, ethnic identities, and religions and cultures and become Hans in a sense. Chinese nationalism doesn’t work like that.

It’s inclusive rather than exclusive, offers autonomy instead of forced assimilation, and retains in a sense the notion of self-determination of nations in that nations in  China are free to  speak their languages, practice  their cultures and religions, etc. Pretty typical of the national policies of many Communist countries, though certainly not all of them! It’s more like Soviet nationalism. The Soviets went after breakaway provinces too you know.

Eastern Europe was quite hostile to minority languages, ethnicities, and cultures. Polish and Yugoslavian nationalisms were nation-building projects. I’m not sure how minorities were treated in Slovakia (Hungarians), Romania (Germans), etc. There was much persecution of the Rusyns in Poland, ethnic Germans everywhere, and Italians and Chakavian-speaking Istrians on the islands in Croatia after World War 2 of course. They were accused of siding with the enemy.

Alt Left: America’s Salad Days, or When America Ran the World, 1945-60

The UN has been an American province for a long time. Let’s take after World War 2 for example. Sure, there was a UN. But from 1945-1960, the UN and the US were pretty much synonymous. Hence the pussilanimous and disgustingly murderous behavior of the US proxy called the “UN” in the Korean War. After World War 2, we had not only defeated all of our adversaries but most of our allies lay in ruins too. We weren’t running the world before the war – Germany and Pax Brittanica were vying for that honor – but we sure were after the war.

Some people think we allowed our allies to get destroyed on purpose so we could, in our usual slimy way, end up sidelining our allies and running the world, the World Dictatorship Ruled by the US being the main US project since 1945. I don’t know why Americans think it is groovy for the US to be this swaggering, belligerent, out of control outlaw organized crime gang that rules the world.

Do Americans really think that’s cool or something? Because that’s exactly what we are. We aren’t even a country. We’re an Outlaw Empire ruled by an Organized Geopolitical Crime Gang that happens to be the top gang in the world right now?

Anyway from 1945-60, the world was our oyster. Of course, we fucked it up like we fucked up everything. Even the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan reportedly had sleazy Mafia-like subplots going on. After that, we finally started getting some good hard pushback from China and the USSR (Thank God and it was about time!), first in Cuba, next with the Missile Crisis and the Gary Powers affair, and especially in Vietnam.

The cycle of anti-imperialist revolutions followed in Algeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, India, Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Palestine, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Dominican Republic, South Africa, Ireland, and Guyana. Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia the Basques followed suit. Arab nationalist revolutions took Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq by storm.

The Shah fell in Iran in what was actually very much an anti-imperialist revolution. A revolution rocked Afghanistan.

But 1945-1960 were the America’s salad days.

Alt Left: What the Hell Happened to Europe, Anyway?

From Moon of Alabama. By the way, I cannot recommend that site highly enough. The bottom line over there is the search for the truth. Grab your stomach if you go over there though because their (factual) revelations about this county will make you want to retch. Not recommended for patriotards. A common phrase over there is “the Outlaw US Empire,” which, sadly, is exactly what we are.

A brief history of Europe since WW2 showing how it became a slave colony of the US. NATO (North American Terrorist Organization) and the EU both massively involved. The stuff below is very complex if you don’t have the background, so go ahead and ask me any question you want if you need anything explicated.

EU tries not to lag behind US in its attempts to ‘punish’ Russia – Lavrov

As I’ve been trying to say here, this is part of a bigger overall process happening in the European Peninsula since the post-war period marked by an unbroken streak of decline in every possible facet.

This process, however, is multifaceted and is an amalgamation of many variables, historical and economic:

  1. Most important of all, Europe went from imperial to colonial status in a big bang event (WWII);
  2. Cold War cut it off from the rest of Eurasia;
  3. This status as USA-oriented (American colony) ossified beyond the Cold War in the form of the ideology of Atlanticism and social democracy (“socialism” in American terminology);
  4. Collapse of social democracy and rise of neoliberalism as a manifestation of a transition from socialization of wealth (post-war miracle) to socialization of misery (tendency of the profit rate to fall, long depression in European capitalism);
  5. Degeneration of social democracy into a demented form of “humanitarian imperialism”;
  6. 6) Cannibalization of Europe by Germany with the creation of the EU and more importantly the EZ;
  7. 7) The institutionalization of Atlanticist ideology in Germany with the creation and codification of the EU (a dialectic reverse of point 6);
  8. 8) A desperate German attempt to expand eastwards (the “

Some things are hard to understand here. 6 and 7 for instance – the notion about a dialectic reversal. 6 describes how Germany is gobbling up or expanding its influence over all of Europe in a sense. 7 describes how Europe or NATO is gobbling up Germany and reducing it to insignificance (I think).

8 is the same. It describes how Germany is trying to expand its influence eastward in the wake of an expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, using the EU as the governmental branch and NATO as the military of this “state.” However, at the same time as Germany hurries to follow NATO in its footsteps, this new Great Game exhausts the US Empire, which is the military core of NATO that is blazing the trail for Germany in the first place (I think).

Alt Left: Does Neoliberalism Even Work In High-IQ Societies?

Clavdius Americanvs: As for why right-wing Alpha societies turn feudal? IQ must be factored in. Low-IQ countries that go the right-wing capitalist way simply don’t have enough high-IQ types to make it in the free market. So the bulk of the population Alpha or not ends up starving, or a serf, or both. The few high-IQ Alpha males and their relatives are the victors in the winner-take-all game of capitalism.

Well they did this the world over in Latin America, Southeast Asia including the Philippines and Indonesia, Taiwan, and South Korea. They did it in some African countries like Rhodesia and South Africa, and Morocco. It doesn’t work. You have to impose it by a rightwing dictatorship because otherwise no one votes for it. Neoliberalism has never even been imposed on most of Africa or the Arab World because literally nobody wants it. It’s hardly even been tried in Europe either.

If it works so great in high-IQ countries, why do the Europeans,  Russians, and Chinese all reject it?

Even the Japanese and South Koreans don’t have neoliberalism. The Socialist Party has literally been in power for much of the time in postwar Japan, and the Communist Party is surprisingly large.

Even in South Korea, South Korea was only created after 300,000 armed Communists were exterminated in that country from 1945-1950. When North Korea conquered almost all of South Korea during the Korean War, armed South Korean communist guerrillas sprung up immediately in every conquered zone. They were already there and waiting for the North Koreans.

After the South Korean government took back all this territory, they rampaged around the country, seeking out and killing many of the people who had taken up arms and their supporters. Again over 300,000 were killed. There was also a Communist uprising on Jeju Island around this time that was put down viciously. Obviously Communism was quite popular in South Korea from 1945-53.

Alt Left: Your Enemy Doesn’t Exist? Create Him! Your Enemy is a Nice Guy? Force Him to Act Bad!

Jason: There’s not much the small can do but be a bitch of the strong, and the Cubans figured Russia was way nicer to get along with and far away enough.

Sure, what are you going to do? Keep kissing your enemy’s feet and pleading with him to be nice or tell him to fuck off and go ally with anyone else, even his worst enemy if the new guy is offering the peace pipe at a ridiculous discount? Humans aren’t stupid.

I can’t believe we blame Castro for going Commie. We pretty much shove Castro into Communism. By the way, we did that to a lot of places. You want to demonize someone but they don’t act bad yet? Simple. Deviously manipulate them to make them act bad and turn them into your enemy.

All shitty countries and people do this. The US, Israel, Turkey, the Gulf Arabs, the EU, the Latin American Right, and fascists and capitalists (same thing) in general name it. If your enemy doesn’t exist, fucking create him, dammit! If your enemy acts good, force him to act bad, dammit!

And then in your shitty controlled propaganda media, demonize your newly created enemy as your enemy, meaning he is out to screw you, and watch the hundreds of millions of Normietards eat it right up. The biggest joke in the whole world is that human beings are smart. LOL! Come on. If we were really as brilliant as we crow that we are, there is no way that we would ever fall for this nakedly and embarrassingly transparent dishonesty, but nope, we fall for it all the time.

An intelligent species is relatively inoculated against most basic scams on the account of its brains alone. Obviously we ain’t very smart at all if we can’t think our way out of these scams on our minds. I think that is why they are trying to shut down the Dissident Net.

The Dissident Net is tearing away the curtain, revealing the wizard at the helm as nothing but a scam artist, and is showing that the emperor’s arguments in his state and media are as naked as his garb. The Dissident Net is showing Westerners how to think. Since we absolutely do not have any sort of freedom of press at all in the West, this is the only thing that they fear more than anything else: the day their propaganda just doesn’t work anymore.

Alt Left: An Overview of the Early Years of the Cuban Revolution, 1954-1961

transformer: What do you think of this article Robert? I don’t trust right wing sources but how literate was Cuba back in 1959?

That website is falsely named. It is not an “intellectual” website dedicated to the intellect and the pursuit of knowledge. Sure, it is an erudite, bright, and educated website, but the only intellectuals it appeals to are hard rightwingers. It’s basically the philosophy of your average American conservative Republican. Those sites are run by ideologues, and they are not very honest.

I will try to take apart this argument as best as I can, but if you Google these questions, there are many leftwing websites who offer far better rejoinders than I offer here, especially with more facts, figures, and dates.

That argument is not good because there was vast poverty in the countryside along with terrible health and dental care. There was vast inequality in Cuba. There was quite a bit of wealth in the cities, particularly in Havana, but the conditions in the countryside were awful, pure 3rd World.

To give an example, I believe that there may have been no doctors in Cuba outside of Havana. All of the doctors and dentists lived in Havana serving people with money for cash so they could make a lot of money. The Mafia owned Cuba, and Havana was a sleazefest full of criminals, gangsters, and prostitutes.

Blacks had essentially no rights at all. They actually lived under a strict Jim Crow-like segregation that was as bad as what existed in the South. The Blacks in Cuba were fucked.

The whole country was owned by foreign, mostly US, interests, including the sugar cane and tobacco fields, the cigar and nickel industries and the casinos and bars. A few country-sellers latched onto the large US corporations that ran everything in Cuba and got their fair share of the loot.

But the Cuban people as a whole, meaning the Cuban state, barely saw a nickel of profits from any of those foreign-owned fields and industries. There also was little or no trickle down effect from the foreign-owned industry. Most Cubans felt that Cuba had once more become a colony of the US. After all, it was more or less owned by US companies, right?

Cuba used to be a colony of the US. We stole it from the Spanish after the Spanish American War. US rule was not popular. Jose Marti is known as the liberator of Cuba. He led an insurrection in 1898 in which Cuba gained its freedom. The Philippines was also rebelling at this time.

But after the US left, in 1911, a new law was passed called the Platt (?) Amendment that basically said that the US still ruled Cuba and had a right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs anytime it wanted to.

Even the most rightwing anti-Castro Cubans are not particularly pro-US, and if you bring up that amendment, they’ve all heard of it, and they act angry about. After all, most anti-Castro types are Cuban nationalists. Cubans are very nationalistic and proud people. That amendment remained in place until Castro won the revolution in 1959.

Batista’s army collapsed without even much of a fight because at one point in the revolution, even the middle classes in the cities went over to Castro. When the middle class supports a revolution, you are out of power. Previously the middle class had probably been mostly neutral.

Batista was also horribly corrupt and no one was happy about that. As Castro overran Havana, Batista and his government flew out to the US on airplanes. The US lifted them out. There are still quite a few pro-Batista Cubans in the Cuban community in Cuba. That’s why the Cuban exiles are not popular in Cuba.

A lot of Cubans in the countryside were not literate. Even schooling was bad out there. And Castro did run a literacy program that got the country to 9

Castro was middle or even upper-class himself. He was Galician of almost pure Spanish blood (Cuba is full of Galicians). He had just graduated from law school, and he was in fact an attorney. So he was a very smart guy.

Che was actually a physician! He graduated from medical school in Argentina and was granted a license to practice medicine. I’m not sure if he ever actually practiced medicine. He was also a very smart guy.

Che took a motorcycle tour around Latin America, and he was appalled at the poverty he saw there. He had grown up in Buenos Aires in a moneyed family, and this was a hidden secret about the continent for him. A book called The Motorcycle Diaries was later published using the notes he took as he traveled around South America.

He became radicalized by his bike tour. He heard about the Revolution in Cuba, and he went there to help them out pure idealism with stars in his eyes. Che was also White like Castro and came from old Buenos Aires money. He probably had Italian and Spanish blood at the least, like most Argentines.

He married in Cuba and had a couple of kids before he was murdered by the CIA in a hospital in Bolivia in 1967 after being arrested in the nation for rebellion. He was very good to his wife and young children. The wife and children are still alive. You can even go see his son if you go to Cuba and have the right connections.

His wife and kids remember him very fondly. Che was a selfless and altruistic man. There is a slogan in Cuba: “Be like Che.” It is very popular. It means to be selfless and idealistic and sacrifice for others, to not be selfish and greedy. The slogan is popular among university students in particular. If you go to Cuba, you will hear Cuban university students, male and female, saying that their philosophy is to “be like Che.”

There must have been something wrong with the Batista system because a lot of university students, teachers, etc. took part in the early demonstrations against Batista. At some point, the Left went to the mountains and took up arms.

Either before or after, Batista ran death squads that rampaged through Cuba’s cities, murdering teachers, students, and the unarmed Left in general. They murdered thousands of defenseless and unarmed Cubans this way.

The army would not even fight for Batista. That’s how corrupt he was. In fact, many of the anti-Castro Cubans fought with Castro in the mountains to get rid of Batista, but they turned on him when he went Communist. They felt betrayed. I don’t mind these exiles so much. I have spoken with some of their children. At least they fought with Castro. But they tend to be very bitter. They think they got double-crossed and backstabbed by Castro.

Castro was originally simply a social democrat, and the initial revolutionary program was a social democratic one.

However, it was a very nationalistic revolution, and they started seizing foreign-owned businesses very quickly. The Cubans offered to pay off the owners for the market value of the businesses over a 30-year period. That offer it still in effect. 10

So their businesses didn’t really get confiscated. Castro offered to pay full value for them, but these stubborn reactionaries turned down the offer. It’s their own damn fault they lost their businesses.

The seizing of the foreign-owned property went on for a couple of years and was extremely popular among the extremely nationalistic Cubans. So you can see that Castro’s revolution, like Mao’s and Ho’s, was also and perhaps primarily a nationalist revolution.

Castro went to New York soon after he took power, and he was greeted with large crowds of cheering supporters. Castro talked about how much he loved America and Americans. I believe he was sincere. A lot of the US ruling class – the rich and corporations – were very suspicious of Castro from the start. They didn’t trust him. They didn’t hate him. They were just very leery of him.

Castro asked for US support and aid to help rebuild the country, but the US had turned hostile  by then due to the business confiscations and refused to give him a nickel. This went on for a couple of years with each side getting more hardened until Castro finally turned to the USSR in desperation in 1961 for support since the US was flipping him off.

Castro’s argument was that he tried to have a relationship with the US, and we told him to go to Hell, so we forced him into the arms of the Soviets. He sealed an alliance with the USSR in 1961. The US promptly imposed a cruel embargo on Cuba which has been there ever since.

The embargo’s official justification was to cause so much poverty and misery in Cuba that the people would rise up and overthrow Castro. Here it is 60 years later, and we still give the exact same reason for the embargo. If the embargo is intended to cause the people to overthrow Castro, when is it going to start working? So far it’s been 60 years of utter failure, but we keep chasing the White Whale.

Over the next year, Castro grew increasingly radical, and by 1962, he abandoned social democracy, his originally ideology, and took up Marxism-Leninism. After Castro went Communist, a lot of his old comrades turned against him along with many others who were not happy with his turn to the hard Left. These contras took up arms, formed guerrilla bands in the mountains, and waged a brutal civil war that went on until 1970.

Yes, the Cuban government executed 10,000 people between 1959-1970, but almost all were for “rebellion,” typically armed rebellion. There have hardly been any executions since.

Jews and Communism Redux

Polar Bear: What little Communist literature I’ve read seemed very pro-German, Ehrenberg?

I don’t understand. Ilya Ehrenberg was one of the most anti-German people who ever lived.

However, after the war, the USSR had excellent relations with East Germany. Communism was quite popular in East Germany, and nostalgia for the GDR is still a big thing there. A lot of people reminisce about the old days and are not happy with the new capitalism. A lot of West German Leftists left and moved to East Germany after the war. Incredible, isn’t it? People actually moving to a Communist country.

Of course Marx was extremely pro-German. He was a German man after all. Marx didn’t really consider himself to be a Jew. Neither did Trotsky. That’s just bullshit made up by anti-Communist antisemites, which is like 9

Polar Bear: No, I believe it was Engels. He was also very soft on Jews.

Ha ha ever read The Jewish Question by Marx (1843)? It’s hard to read but a lot of super-Jews really hate the paper. They think it’s antisemitic. I don’t think it really is. It’s anti-Jewish religion. He says there is no Jewish religion – all the religion is is capitalism and love of money ha ha. Good times, good times! Marx didn’t like Christianity either. He didn’t like any religion. I don’t think he disliked Jews ethnically. After all he was Jewish himself. Marx’s father was a rabbi!

Polar Bear: Maybe the great unifier early on was Jews.

There were not that many Communists from Marx’s death until the Russian revolution. The early pre-Soviet Communists were not particularly Jewish. Stalin was a bank robber. Lenin spent most of his time abroad in Germany. They were all wanted men.

Yes, there were a lot of Jews among the early Bolsheviks, but in 1917, 7

Hardly anyone wanted the old Royalists back. There were definitely pro-royalists all right though. Those were the Whites in the Russian Civil War. But they lost. Even the Russian Army and especially the Intelligence Services all went over to the Reds.

And the Whites killed a lot of Jews during the Civil War. The Reds probably hardly killed any. Even in the USSR, yes, Jews were prominent in some fields. The NKVD ended up being very Jewish in the 1930’s, but it was run by a Georgian named Beria.

Old Soviets said that ethnicity never mattered in the USSR. You were not supposed to care or talk about things like that. A lot of Jews just drifted into that position at that time for whatever reason. A lot of Russian Jews really hated the Czar, so quite a few of them took to Communism well. But the majority of the people in the USSR supported the Communists. How do you think they won the war?

And there were just as many Latvians as Jews among the early Bolsheviks. Does anyone  talk about evil Bolshevik Latvians? Of course not. It’s like the old adage: Maybe one out of ten Jews is a radical, but five out of ten radicals are Jews. Get it?

Polar Bear: Seems like a lot the men that married Jews ended up hating them.

I don’t know about that. I had a Jewish girlfriend for 5 1/2 years. She was kind of a bitch and she sort of talked down to me and yelled at me a lot to the point that even other women were complaining about how she treated me.

But she adored me and she was a real “stand by your man” and “live your life through your man” type. Almost like a Filipina or Thai woman in that sense. I never expected Jewish women to be like that maybe a lot of them are. They also have a reputation for being nurturing.

As an aside, there are a lot more “stand by your man” and “live your life through your man” types than you think. It’s fairly normal if she’s crazy in love with you. Maybe it helps to be goodlooking too, no idea.

The people who don’t like Jewish women are Jewish men ha ha. I’m not sure if Gentile men even care that much. There’s sort of a war going on between Jewish men and women, sort of like the war between Black men and women.

And I don’t know if it was a factor in Marr’s case.

I think Marr is hilarious. Guy married three different Jewish women, divorces all of them and then forms the Anti-Semitic League, the first openly anti-Jewish organization in modern history. Ha ha! I have no idea what effect his wives had on him. Maybe none. But it is pretty funny just to tell the story because it seems like his Jewish wives drove him so insane that he founded the first modern anti-Jewish organization.

Lulz all around!

Alt Left: “CIA Installed Dictatorship Replaces Democracy in Bolivia,” by Stephen Lendman

If you have been paying attention, there has been a fascist coup sponsored by the US of course (CIA) in Bolivia. The two point men for the fascist coup were Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The coup was run out of the US Embassy in La Paz. The Western media are all lying like maniacs like they always do.

Background: There has been a presidential election underway in Bolivia. This was the first round, and it featured Maduro, his competitor Mesa, and nine other.

If one party got more than 5

If neither party got more than 5

If neither party got more than 5

The counting stopped for a day at 8

Lie #1: Evo Morales, the leftwing leader who won the free and fair election and was removed via a CIA fascist coup, defied the Constitution in running for a fourth term as the Constitution says he can only run for three terms. Keep in mind that he won all three previous elections handily.

There was a ruling that said that Morales could not run for President a fourth time, and Morales appealed that ruling all the way to the Supreme Court. For some reason or other, the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional for Morales to run for a fourth term. That’s the official ruling of the court. That’s democracy in action, folks. You can’t blame Morales for that.

It was the Supreme Court’s ruling, not his. Rulings by Supreme Courts anywhere are legitimate and must be followed by all parties. I don’t have any information about whether the Supreme Court is allied with Morales or whether he put pro-Morales people.

But what if he did? Didn’t the Republican Party just in defiance of all tradition stack the Supreme Court in their favor, including stealing a Democratic justice who was appointed by Obama. Can someone tell me why a Supreme Court ruling in any country justifies a fascist coup? Please explain.

Lie #2: It was very suspicious that the counting stopped for a day and then when it started up again, there were enough votes to push Morales over. This smells like fraud. Not true. Bolivia counted the election in precisely the way that the US-supported OAS wanted them to.

This was the OAS-designed system. The OAS system had a preliminary count of 8

Lie #3: The OAS conducted an investigation of the election that proved electoral fraud by Morales. Not so. The OAS indeed issued a very sleazy report saying that the election was fraudulent, but if you read the report, it presented absolutely no evidence of this fraud whatsoever. It claimed fraud while presenting no evidence of such. Once again, this is typical of how the US acts all over the world all the time, year in and year out. America is one of the sleaziest countries on Earth.

Lie #4: The OAS report proved that it was statistically unlikely that Morales got enough in the final 1

Lie #5: Pre-election polls showed that Morales would not get enough votes to win. Yep, one election poll done by the opposition that found results completely opposite to every other election poll. Actually, election polls were excellent evidence that there was no fraud, but election polls predicted a Morales win by 10 points precisely. Can someone please show me how it is possible for pre-election polls to predict fraud? I’m all ears.

Lie #6: Since Morales committed fraud, there was no choice but for the military to replace him in a coup. Not true. Amidst all the violence and rioting, Morales called for international observers to do a monitored audit or recount of all of the votes. If Morales deliberately committed fraud, why would he ask confidently for a recount.

Lie #7: Morales is a crook. Not so. There have been a number of presidential, constitutional, and legislative elections since Morales came in. Morales has never been proven to have stolen a single vote in any election, so Morales has never engaged in election fraud in the past. One wonders why he would start now. Further, even if Morales only got a 9 point lead (which is a lie), why would he commit fraud? He could just go to a runoff which he would obviously win handily.

Lie #8: The fascist coup was a win for democracy. Many US politicians and all of the US and Western media are proclaiming the fascist coup which overthrew a democratically elected leader in a 10

The CIA has overthrown more governments than I can count. It’s always a leftwing government that gets overthrown and it’s always a far right or fascist government that gets installed. Every time the CIA conducts a fascist coup against a democratically elected leftwing leader, US politicians and the entire Western media all scream that this is a victory for democracy.

This is Orwellian. It is also a grotesque abuse of language itself. How are fascist coups that overthrow democratically elected leaders ever victories for democracy? That’s a bizarre doublespeak lie right out of 1984. America specializes in doublespeak and bizarre Orwellian language. That’s what those stars and stripes represent.

I would also like to point out the US (and the rest of the West) are extreme supporters of fascism all over the globe. We supported fascism before WW2 and then we supported it again after WW2.

In fact, WW2 was the only time in our nation’s history that our nation went to war against fascism or rightwing military dictatorships. I guess those particular fascists got a bit out of hand.

Although supporting fascism doesn’t mean that America is a fascist country, we are definitely one of the world’s biggest supporters of fascism and rightwing dictatorships and we have been for 120 years. That flag of yours represents support for fascism for over a century. Are you Americans ok with that? If so, why?

Just to show that this was not a win for democracy, the military installed opposition government is basically a dictatorship. The putschist regime has shut down freedom of the press. The coup government is threatening all pro-Morales journalists with arrests.

In addition, the opposition has been banned from running for office for all time.

Morales has been banned from running for office. On what grounds?

Many members of the MAS, his party, have been placed under arrest. On what charges?

When members of the MAS showed up in the legislature to take their seats, uniformed soldiers prevented them from taking their seats. Why?

Morales’ home, the homes of his relatives, and the homes of many MAS legislators were burned to the ground by the rioters. How on Earth was that justified?

In addition, martial law has been declared in Bolivia and soldiers and police are fanning out through the country, raiding homes of opposition members from east to west, smashing up their homes and arresting opposition party members. How is it that police and the army rampaging all over the land arresting thousands of opposition supporters (on what charges?) could possibly be justified?

This is the “death squad” type crackdown that follows every CIA coup. After the coup, there is typically a “reign of terror” run by the CIA and the fascist coup regime in which significant numbers of opposition supporters are rounded up, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or out and out murdered. It happened in Guatemala, Haiti, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, Greece and Turkey.

The reason for this is to make people think: if we elect another leftwing government, there’s going to be another fascist coup followed by a reign of death squad terror in which I might just get killed. See how that works?

That’s democracy?

Ban the opposition party, arrest the lawmakers of the opposition, refuse to let opposition lawmakers seat themselves in the Legislature, burn the homes of the opposition political leaders to the ground, and send security forces all over the land arresting opposition supporters?

That’s how democracy works? According to the Western media, this is democracy in action.

Keep in mind that the opposition seized power when by any accounting, they lost the last election. They either lost it by nine or 10 points, but what difference does it make? They lost.

So the opposition lost by 9-10 points, and the US overthrew the obvious winner of the election and installed the party that lost the election badly. Overthrowing winners of elections and installing losers of elections is a victory for democracy? What the Hell’s the matter with Americans? Why do they fall for these crazy lies?

CIA Installed Dictatorship Replaces Democracy in Bolivia

Evo Morales is Bolivia’s democratically elected and three-times reelected Bolivian president.

In cahoots with Bolivian fascists, military, and police along with US imperial tool Organization of American States (OAS), CIA forces toppled Morales for not subordinating the country’s sovereign rights to US interests.

Morales’ majority Movement for Socialism (MAS) legislators were intimidated and threatened not to interfere with the coup.

In response to the OAS’ Big Lie about electoral fraud (none occurring) Pompeo congratulated the organization for serving US interests over the rights and welfare of Bolivia and its people.

Separately, he thanked self-declared, unelected, illegitimate usurper president Jeanine Anez for “lead(ing) her nation through this democratic transition (sic)” that the Trump regime went all-out to eliminate, with a CIA-installed fascist tyranny replacing it.

An unnamed senior state department official called transition to despotism in Bolivia “a significant moment for…democracy in our hemisphere”, democracy being a notion both extremist right wings of the US one-party state abhor, especially at home.

Anti-Morales Bolivians in the streets post-election, “standing up for (the) legitimacy of their electoral process,” were actually CIA-recruited thugs.

Key Bolivian military and police officials were enlisted to support the coup. At first, majority pro-Morales legislators couldn’t enter parliament because security forces refused to guarantee their safety.

Days later, they formed a legislative quorum, swearing in MP Monico Eva Copa as Senate president and Sergio Choque as lower house Chamber of Deputies president.

Pro-Morales supporters control Bolivia’s Legislative Assembly for now, but that control is tenuous at best without military and police support.

Anez illegally self-declared herself president, breaching the constitutional requirement for a parliamentary quorum to be in session for approval.

She breached articles 161, 169, and 410 of the Constitution.

Article 161 lists the Legislative Assembly’s functions, a quorum required for them to be performed. They include “accept(ing) or reject(ing) the resignation of the president (and) vice president.”

Article 169 states the following:

“In the event of an impediment or definitive absence of the President, he or she shall be replaced by the Vice President and, in the absence of the latter, by the President of the Senate, and in his or her absence by the President of the Chamber of Deputies.

In this last case, new elections shall be called within a maximum period of ninety days…In case of temporary absence, the Vice President shall assume the Presidency for a term not to exceed ninety days.”

Article 410 states:

“Every person, natural and legal, as well as public organs, public functions, and institutions, are subject to the present Constitution…The Constitution is the supreme norm of Bolivian law and enjoys supremacy before any other normative disposition.”

Anez is a US-anointed hard-right political nobody, elected to Bolivia’s Senate in 2014 with 91,895 votes – 1.

Until the CIA coup, most Bolivians knew little or nothing about her. Telesur noted that “Latin America recorded a new ‘self-swearing’ in coup script that, without a doubt, seems familiar,” adding:

“Violence in the country continues by radical opposition groups that have burned indigenous population symbols.”

“Meanwhile in La Paz, (the country’s political capital) thousands of supporters of Evo Morales are being mobilized in rejection of the coup d’etat and its discriminatory and racist acts.”

Telesur reported, citing Menta Communication’s Luciano Galup, adding:

“Over 4,500 Twitter accounts (were) created to legitimize (the illegitimate) coup (with) almost no followers…These action have scant effect on domestic politics…But worldwide they can function as (pro-coup) propaganda…”

…a way for dictatorships and their sponsors to legitimize what’s illegitimate.

Calling Twitter’s action “a scandal,” Galup noted that 3,612 accounts have “between zero and one followers,” adding:

“(T)he most scandalous thing is there are 4,492 accounts that were created between yesterday and today to participate in the (coup). They created 4,492 accounts in two days.”

Images released support his charges.

On Friday, illegitimate coup d’etat regime communications minister Roxana Lizarraga threatened independent journalists reporting accurately on what’s going with “sedition,” saying:

“Law will be fully enforced against those journalists or pseudo-journalists who are seditious, whether they are nationals or foreigners (sic),” warning:

The (illegitimate) interior ministry is compiling a list of journalists opposed to the coup d’etat regime.

Arrests were made, more likely to follow.

The coup d’etat regime cut diplomatic ties to Venezuela and ordered its embassy staff to leave the country one day after Anez usurped power, likely acting on orders from Washington.

Separately, she warned that if Morales returns to Bolivia, his legal right, he’ll face charges, falsely saying:

“He knows he has to answer to justice (sic). There is an electoral crime (sic). Nobody has thrown him out, but yes, there’s a need for him to respond regarding electoral fraud (sic), in addition to many allegations of corruption (sic).”

Earlier she said her (illegitimate) foreign ministry will file an official complaint with Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s government for granting Morales asylum.

Coup d’etat regime foreign minister Karen Longaric announced Bolivia’s withdrawal from the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), established in 2004 by Venezuela and Cuba, with other regional nations joining the alliance later. The international organization is intended to foster cooperative social, political, and economic integration of Latin American and Caribbean nations.

Large-scale pro-Morales protests continue in La Paz and elsewhere demanding Anez resign and calling for reinstatement of Morales as Bolivia’s legitimate president.

CIA-installed usurpers control Bolivia. Resistance continues. The US got another imperial trophy if its dark forces can keep it — no guarantee given Bolivia’s long history of resisting tyranny.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Alt Left: The US: All Guerrillas We Don’t Like Lack Agency and Are Simply Pawns and Puppets of an Enemy State

In guerrilla wars nowadays, all guerrilla groups who the US says are enemies are labeled by the US as being pawns of some dastardly foreign power. The revolutionaries themselves are deprived of all agency and reduced to mere puppets who carry out orders from some large state sponsor. The puppets probably don’t even want to do these attacks! They’re probably being being forced to by their diabolical patrons!

In the Latin American revolutions of recent years, all of the revolutionaries were deprived of agency and reduced to mere puppets, first of Satanic Cuba and ultimately from the Devil itself, the USSR. Of course these revolutions were not started by internal politics, vast differences between the rich and poor, grotesquely unfair systems, murderous death squad states who torture and murder any dissidents on the Left!

Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia were all wonderful countries. There weren’t any starving masses living in tin shacks with no water, sewage systems, jobs, or access to medical care, education, transportation or even money to buy food or anything like that!

You see, all the countries got let off the hook, and the US got to say that it wasn’t the horrific conditions inside the far rightwing country that were producing the obvious armed Left guerillas that such states often logically produce. The guerrillas were just idiots, useful ones to be sure, or even puppets on a string. Everything’s fine in these countries, and not one single progressive change needed to be made.

Instead this was just Castro’s Cuba – boo, hiss – exporting revolution to these poor innocent Latin American countries who are trying their best to serve their people! Oh, poor countries! These sad, pathetic, ignorant guerrillas are being made into pawns and puppets of malign Commies against their will! Oh, poor guerillas!

And ultimately of course the revolutions were all coming from the USSR. The motive was always nothing  more than Soviet expansionism. The Soviets were trying to export Communism all over the world to every country, rich and poor, leftwing and right, those who served their people and those who left them to die without a nickel! Bad Soviets! They were so mean!

In other words, all leftwing revolutions had nothing to do with the objective conditions inside the country. They were all caused by the deplorable Soviets exporting their depraved Communism the world over.

By saying that the Houthis are just Iranian puppets, useful idiots, and fools without any gripe who are mercenaries on the payroll of the Iranians, we are saying that conditions are just fine in Yemen, and the Houthis took arms for no reason.

According to the US and various Sunni Arab states in the region, the Houthis are revolutionary pro-Iranian crazies who are trying to take over the country as part of a sneaky Iranian project to take over all of the Arab countries, oppress and lord it over them, steal their resources and leave them penniless, and worst of all, force all of them all to convert to Shiism.

See how this “puppets of X regime” nonsense plays out? It’s usually nothing but a flat-out lie. Most civil wars happen for a reason. What sort of reason? An internal reason based on the objective conditions in that country, conditions that the guerrillas think are wrong or unfair – that’s what reason. Of course guns don’t grow on trees, and most guerrillas need to have state sponsors in order to acquire their weaponry. They have to buy them somewhere.

Alt Left: Who Are the Neoconservatives?

White nationalists say the neocons are just a bunch of Jews who go around the world meddling  in the foreign affairs of other countries, fighting wars for the Jews, and starting all sorts of other conflicts and aggressions. As with most things, it’s not completely true at all, but there is a kernel of truth there that the stereotype is based on.

It’s not true at all that all neocons are Jews, as neocons have now merged with Cold Warriors, Monroe Doctrine enforcers, and plain old US imperialists – in other words, the standard US militarized financial imperialism which constitutes our only observable foreign policy.

The neocons have now merged with the Cold Warriors who destroyed Central and South America in the 1980’s and 1990’s as part of a fight against Communism (which was really a fight against any sort of socialism in our hemisphere). Of course this militarized, belligerent, menacing, psychopathic US foreign policy is there simply to serve the interests of the US rich (mostly investors) and US corporations.

When you join the army, you are joining the Army of McDonalds and Microsoft, and you will fight and die for General Foods and Exxon. The Pentagon is simply the military arm of the US corporations. It’s their own private army. The US military hasn’t done anything good, decent, sensible, or non-psychopathic in a long time now.

You’re not fighting to defend American shores from aggressors. They never attack us anyway. But like all bullies, we constantly complain that the weaker nations we beat up on are always on the verge of attacking us. So neoconservatism in one form or another is now official US foreign policy of both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Trump has thrown a wrench in that somewhat, as he is at heart an isolationist.

All of the Democratic candidates for President, even Sanders, are more or less neocons. So all of the liberals and Leftists in  the US government are actually neocons. All Republicans are obviously neocons, as the original neocons were Jewish conservative Democrats who converted to Republicanism under Reagan.

Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate I can think of who is not a neocon. Ro Khanna, a representative from Silicon Valley, is also not a neocon. And the much-hated Squad of Ayanna Pressly, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Omar Ilhan are not only not neocons, but they are openly critical of US imperialism.

Indeed the original neocons were absolutely very heavily Jewish, as they came out of early 1970’s Jewish pro-Vietnam War conservative Democrats around Scoop “The Senator from Boeing” Jackson. They were reacting against the  counterculture and the Democratic Party.

They saw the Democrats as being taken over by the Counterculture, who they saw as dirty, lazy, drug-taking, dissolute, promiscuous, poorly groomed and dressed, anti-Israel, pro-Soviet Communists and traitors. This was an  often older and definitely generation of Jewish men (really a bunch of squares) who were outraged by the Counterculture, particularly the important role that many of their fellow Jewish men (in other words, hipsters) had played in it.

The split between conservative and liberal Jews goes way back. Just looking at New York, the original Jews who came there were very poor, and they organized on a very pro-worker basis as proletarians and poor people.

They were very leftwing and in fact were responsible for much of the growth and prospering of the US Left for the last century.  This is why it is hard for US Leftists to get very antisemitic, despite constant blathering on the Right about “leftwing  antisemitism,” which for all intents and purposes, barely exists. Our movement has a huge debt to Jews for their important role in creating and nurturing it.

Most of them continued to be liberals, liberal Democrats at least, but a number of others were socialists and even Communists.  The blacklisted accused Communists of the 1950’s McCarthy hearings was significantly Jewish, as were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for spying for the USSR.

However, during this time, a smaller group of conservative Jews also arose. These were the landlord types in New York City who rented apartments to these poor leftwing Jewish workers.

A lot of the agitation of these leftwing Jews was around rents and abusive landlords and slumlords (in other words these very landlords among others), many of whom were also as noted Jewish, and these Jewish landlords were not too happy about the constant well-deserved lawsuits and complaints the Jewish leftwing tenants filed against them as owners of these buildings.

To this very day in fact, 7

I hope all you Jews out there are proud of yourselves for engaging in ghetto ethnic warfare behavior. You can see why the assimilation of the Jews was a progressive project from the moment Napolean opened the gates of the ghettos and the blighted, ignorant, superstitious Jews staggered out into the light of real society. This is how they act when they’re not assimilated. And this is why Israel, by definition a land of unassimilated Jews, acts as awful as it does.

The archetypal figure for these rightwing Jews organized around this landlord class was the attorney Roy Cohn, a closeted homosexual who was also one of the nastiest American public figures of his time.

US Jews had never cared much about Israel, but the 1967 War threw all of that into stark focus, as the US Jews saw the existence of the Jewish state as threatened. US Jewish support for Israel skyrocketed after that war.

Like the Senator they crowded around, they backed strong military support for Israel, a massive arms buildup, and ramping up of the Cold War against the Soviet Union (some had been Trotskyites earlier, but the revelations about Stalin in the 1950’s ended that affair). They didn’t care much about social issues.

There is even an early publication from 1973, a monthly magazine, that is said to be the first neocon publication. They prospered under Reagan, hibernated and plotted secretly under Clinton, and grew much more bold under Bush when they plotted the Iraq War in 2003.

Anyway, White nationalists despise the neocons as what they see as a bunch of Jews forcing our government to meddle in the internal affairs of other lands and getting us into a lot of useless, unwinnable wars, many of which they refer to with some justification as “wars for the Jews.” And they don’t feel like fighting and dying for what they see as a bunch of muds anyway.

Alt Left: The “Roosevelt Knew” Bullshit

There has long been a strain of conspiracy theory, which had significant evidence in its favor nonetheless, that Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor and allowed the attack to go ahead anyway.

This has long been a favorite of rightwingers then and now. Conservatives at the time thought Roosevelt was a traitor who had deliberately filled his Cabinet with many Soviet spies to whom he gave much classified information.

This is the Commie spy network that Joe McCarthy, etc. set about going after in the 1950’s during the Red Scare. There doesn’t seem to be good evidence for this.

To this day, standard anti-Semitism is almost always rightwing or far rightwing and is heavily tied in with anti-Communism among other things such as anti-modernism and anti-liberalism, two movements that the Jews were seen leading.

Anyway, there were many hard conservatives in the Pentagon around the time of World War 2, and quite a few of them were starting to imbibe the “Jewish Communist threat” line.

Winston Churchill himself was one of the originators of the Jewish Bolshevik hysteria when he made some paranoid and agitated statements along the lines that the Bolshevik revolution was a Jewish one soon after the October Revolution was through.

It was these nutty reactionary anti-Communist anti-Semites in the Pentagon who were responsible for the “Roosevelt knew” line.

Revilo Oliver had worked in intelligence at the Pentagon during the war and later said that Roosevelt had allowed the Pear Harbor attack. Two very conservative admirals stated after the war that Roosevelt should be tried for treason for allowing the attack. These two admirals did not have good evidence for their charges.

Oliver is apparently lying. He was an extreme anti-Communist, a White nationalist racist, a Nazi sympathizer, and a hardcore anti-Semite who later became very active in the early days of the National Review, to show you how tainted the early days of Buckley’s journal were.

Oliver is of course also a Holocaust denier who railed about the bombing of Dresden (which he exaggerated as such types are wont to do) and the Nuremberg trials, which he regarded as an outrageous orgy of murder. Which in some ways it was, unfortunately.

It doesn’t take long to deeply review the case of the Pearl Harbor advance knowledge theory to show that it is nonsense. We never cracked the main code that the Japanese used in the weeks before the attack. The Japanese fleet turned off their radios as they sailed to the attack, a brilliant move.

Radar was in its infancy and worked poorly. Nevertheless a radar operator noticed large blobs on the screen and notified his superiors, who laughed and told him they were clouds. Early radar has a hard time distinguishing between ships and clouds. His observation made it up to a general nevertheless, but the general laughed the blobs off as clouds too.

It is certainly true that Roosevelt was trying to push the Japanese into a corner and many thought he was trying to bait them into a war. I believe that’s pretty uncontroversial. In fact, the US was alarmed at how upset the Japanese were at the US’ moves such as the embargo on oil sales to them.

In fact in the months leading up to the attack, the US increasingly felt that the Japanese were getting ready to attack the US. They weren’t sure it was going to happen, but they thought it likely. What they didn’t know was where and when it would take place, and Pearl Harbor was not considered to be a likely a target. The large US garrison the Philippines was considered a more likely target.

Roosevelt definitely wanted war with the Japanese. He had made statements along the lines that no way was he going to allow the Japanese to run amok all over the Pacific, conquering lands and slaughtering the natives while brutally colonizing them.

There was a telegram sent to the Japanese ambassador in Washington the night before the attack telling him that the Japanese government was going to break off relations with the US. It was in an earlier code that had already been broken.

The Pentagon felt that that meant that a Japanese attack may be imminent. However, a warning to that effect sent out to US forces in the Pacific got lost in the shuffle and was only read too late by most of its recipients.

There were 10 full investigations of the Pearl Harbor attack. No foreknowledge of the attack by Roosevelt or anyone else in the administration was ever demonstrated.

Although there is some interesting evidence in favor of this conspiracy theory, at the end of the day it doesn’t seem to hold water and simply seems to be one more club that the Right uses to bash Democrats along with one of the Right’s most hated Democrats of all, Roosevelt.

Furthermore the people who traffic in this theory are pretty unsavory. It is a favorite of a variety of conspiratorial rightwing types, including fanatical anti-Communists, hardcore anti-Semites, neo-Nazis/Nazi sympathizers, Holocaust deniers, White nationalists and other charming folks.

A Chinese Man Looks at Africa

How many times have we heard this before? This video is being condemned in the comments as racist. It’s not. Anyway, how many times have you heard similar things about Africans? There’s no end to anecdotes like this. That said, I think the Chinese will be very good for Africa. People do not understand the Chinese Communist Party. They really are Communists. I know this. There’s no need to argue about it. This notion that they have all turned into radical neoliberal laissez faire capitalists is wishful thinking on the part of the capitalists. Their system is called Market Socialism or the Social Market, and that is exactly what it is. 8 The Chinese effort in Africa is not neocolonialism or imperialism. China is not an imperialist country. It can’t be. They work on the basis of solidarity, not neocolonialism and imperialism. A Communist country can’t be imperialist anyway. Social imperialism was a made up thing that never existed. Soviet imperialism was a notion invented by the Cold War. The Chinese do and will operate in Africa on a win-win basis. We win, you win. Exactly the opposite of the way the US and other imperialist countries operate – my way or the high way, do as we say or else, we exploit you while you lie back and enjoy it, etc.

November 22, 1963: The Day the Music Died

A very nice comment from one of my commenters. A friend of mine had lunch with a former attorney for LBJ who had worked in the LBJ Administration. He later got wrapped up in Watergate somehow, I believe as part of the prosecution. Keep in mind that LBJ’s own personal attorney says that LBJ was part of the plot to kill Kennedy. .Some of the gunmen were part of LBJ’s own “hit squad.” Believe it or not, a lot of big US politicians have their own “hit squad goons.” I believe that George Bush did and I believe the Dick Cheney did too. In fact, I think that Cheney’s goons killed Paul Wellstone by sabotaging his plane. Barbara Boxer herself has hinted the Cheney killed Wellstone, but she also hinted that everyone who knows is too afraid to speak on the record about it. Bush’s goons will do things like break into your home, poison your dog, etc. His goons poisoned three dogs belonging to one whistleblower, killing all of them. Some of Bush’s enemies have ended up dead “drown in bathtubs” and by mysterious “heart attacks” in cheap hotel rooms. Drowning you in your bathtub is a favorite CIA/Mossad/KGB intelligence agency way to kill people. I believe that all three of these agencies are capable of injecting you with a drug that will give you a heart attack and leave no trace. This man, a high ranking member of the LBJ Administration, told my friend that JFK was killed by “the foreign policy establishment of the United States.” That’s a long way of saying Deep State. Ever since then, I think every President knows that the punishment for going against the Deep State is “the Kennedy treatment.” As much as I despise Trump, I realize that the Deep State has it in for him mostly for kissing up to Russia, telling NATO justifiably to go to Hell, and making pretenses at a less imperial foreign policy with fewer wars and armed conflicts. There was an internal coup in the White House and Steve Bannon etc were sidelined in by a crowd around (((Jared Kushner))). (((Kushner)))’s group were the Deep State neocons. Soon after the coup, Trump attacked Syria as if he were ordered to by his new masters. Trump is now just another neocon in addition to being by far the most Jewish, or really Jewy, President in history. These Alt Right antisemites need to think this over. Trump is New York, in flesh and bones. Forget Israel. New York is the Jewish state. These idiot Nazis are supporting a fanatical Zionist who is frankly the most Jewish President we have ever had. He’s a Judaized Gentile, but still, if you see Jewishness as a spiritual feature as opposed to an ethnic or religious one, Trump is surely more Jewish in spirit than any President we have ever had. Why these Nazis are falling all over themselves from President Donald SuperJew is beyond me. I think these guys didn’t get the memo.

RL: Everybody who was alive back then knows exactly what they were doing when they shot the President. When democracy died. When the dream of America died with the Deep State coup. When the joke of American democracy was shown as the pathetic sham it’s always been, a think veneer for Deep State and oligarchic rule, the very story of America itself.” CB: The day the music died. Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of a dangerous military-industrial-scientific elite; he’d separately spoken of the CIA’s “legacy of ashes.” Over the following three years, Kennedy, a womanizer and drug user who very likely owed his victory to vote fraud in Chicago,

  1. Engaged in back channel contacts with Khrushchev and Castro (the public didn’t know of course, but doesn’t the charge sound familiar?).
  2. Turned down the Joint Chiefs’ Operation Northwoods Plan to use false flag attacks (a precursor to 9/11) to justify an invasion of Cuba.
  3. Refused airstrikes in support of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
  4. Fired CIA director Allen Dulles and his top deputy.
  5. Refused a first-strike nuclear attack during the Cuban missile crisis.
  6. Secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling their missiles from Cuba.
  7. Told associates he would splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind, etc.

The Deep State was mightily pissed with Kennedy, and Kennedy knew he was in danger. The same Deep State still runs things of course, and they are much more open in their hatred for Trump than they were with Kennedy (Hillary was the Deep State/Establishment choice, beloved by the intelligence agencies (at least the people at the top), Goldman Sachs and the other big banks, the EU, the Bilderbergers, the CFR, the Chinese, Rupert Murdoch and most other billionaires, the Bushes, etc. etc. The same media types that covered up for the real assassins of the Kennedys and MLK (and continue to cover up subsequent Deep State crimes) are even more rigidly controlled now than during the days of Operation Mockingbird, open in their allegiance to their Deep State masters. You don’t have to like Trump to consider that he, like Kennedy, has made some excellent enemies. Peter, Paul, and Mary were good, and I even saw them in concert once, as well as at Newport. But the song that gave me chills in 1963, and still today, was Dylan’s Masters of War.

Something Wrong with America? or Why Is America Hated? By A. J. Harvey-Hall

An interesting piece from a reader and financial supporter (thank you!) of this website. Hope you enjoy it.

Something Wrong With America? or Why is America hated?

By A. J. Harvey-Hall, Australia

Where do I start? I originally wrote this in 2013 when I was mad as hell, and here we are in 2015, and I am still mad as hell at you guys. Most of what I have written has come true. Don’t believe me – ask your Remote Viewing (Project Stargate) people to drop in and check me out. It works both ways in case you are unaware. Coming from Australia I can tell you a hell of a lot of where America “went wrong”. I am not saying Australia is/was perfect – it’s just a fact we were the last large island/continent settled by the so-called enlightened Westerners – due to distance we saw where everyone else stuffed up and decided as a whole not to do that (Commonwealth knowledge?). Canada is very similar to Australia, so look to them as well. One thing’s for certain – everyone gets a fair go in this country. We are multicultural and tolerant. Early Western settlers did not treat the Aboriginals appropriately, but in summary, it was probably no different to any superior culture that overtook another at some time in history. It’s easy to look back and say what the Westerners did to Aboriginals was disgraceful. I have a right to tell you how it is because Australia is the only country that has fought every war alongside America all through WW1 and WW2 and several “police” actions. Let’s revisit some words spoken by one of your greatest presidents in the course of the America’s Cup back in 1962 when Australia was still a country of 10 million: Quoting Kennedy –

Ambassador, Lady Beale, Ambassador and Mrs. Berckmeyer, Ambassador and Lady Ormsby Gore, the Ambassador from Portugal, our distinguished Ministers from Australia, Ladies and Gentlemen: I know that all of us take the greatest pleasure in being here, first of all because whether we are Australian or American, we are all joined by a common interest, a common devotion and love for the sea. And I am particularly glad to be here because this Cup is being challenged by our friends from Australia, this extraordinary group of men and women numbering some 10 million, who have demonstrated on many occasions, on many fields, in many countries, that they are the most extraordinarily athletic group in the world today, and that this extraordinary demonstration of physical vigor and skill has come not by the dictates of the state because the Australians are among the freest citizens in the world, but because of their choice… Australia became committed to physical fitness, and it has been disastrous for the rest of us. We have the highest regard for Australia, Ambassador. As you said, we regard them as very satisfactory friends in peace and the best of friends in war. And I know there are a good many Americans of my generation who have the greatest possible reason to be grateful to the Australians who wrote a most distinguished record all the way from the desert of North Africa, and most particularly in the islands of the South Pacific, where their particular courage and gallantry I think met the strongest response in all of us in this country. But I really don’t look to the past. I look to the present. The United States and Australia are most intimately bound together today, and I think that — and I speak as one who has had some experience in friendship and some experience in those who are not our friends — we value very much the fact that on the other side of the Pacific, the Australians inhabit a very key and crucial area and that the United States is most intimately associated with them. So beyond this race, beyond the result, rests this happy relationship between two great people. – President John F. Kennedy, Newport, Rhode Island, September 14, 1962

Let’s go back to the (your) War of Independence: The English were wrong in what they were doing – hence independence – not a problem. In gaining independence however you put in place the building blocks that as of today are not crumbling – they have already crumbled. Every builder in the world knows that unless your foundations are spot on and repaired when cracks appear, a structure cannot live for hundreds of years. You must update and repair as you go to ensure the building is viable for hundreds of years ongoing – not just paper over it. The building I am referring to is the “United States of America”. It has now crumbled as a result of a demarcation dispute between your two political parties that act worse than our Australian Parliament. Each party is only out to make a name for itself and has lost the understanding of “serving the people”. Let’s talk about your constitution – ohhh – am I upsetting you already? Remember I am an outsider who is looking in giving you an unbiased opinion. When your Constitution was framed it was OK, for the day! It is now the oldest ‘out of date’ Constitution in the world. Don’t stand behind your outdated constitution. Start again. Be bold. Yes – you have made amendments, but those amendments are just papering over extensions – you need to go back and look at the foundations and do the work there. Take one example – a right to bear arms. It was OK 200 years ago when things were a bit rough – it is not acceptable in the 20th or 21st Centuries, but you will not remove that right. How many people have died in your country as a result of that one so called right? Your gun culture is one of the bases (not basis) that has crumbled. This is ultimately why you have numerous police forces that are happy to shoot first and ask questions later. Your children and work colleagues will continue to die in massacres as a result of this “right“. They will continue to die in soft target areas such as schools, mass transport, malls, parades (early days – wait for it). Hang on – maybe the British, Russians or Communists are still coming to invade. Pity you don’t update your Constitution the same way you enforce updates to laws you force upon people who want to trade with you. You allow gun lobbyists to “set the course” with government officials, senators and the public. Since when did lobbyists of any ilk run the government? Since when did they represent “the people”? You continue to think of arms as a gun – they are no longer guns – instead are bombs, viruses or maybe even the Internet itself. But it’s OK because you have a right” to bear arms. Let’s talk about your medical care. Actually let’s save time and refer to Michael Moore. He is spot on. How can you allow your own citizens suffer and even die on the streets because they don’t have medical insurance? And some of your citizens applaud this stance. How about your returned veterans – even wounded veterans have to fight to get medical assistance upon return – why – because you outsourced the process and someone applied expiry dates that wounded veterans were not aware of. It then requires an act of Congress or a law to be passed to allowed them back into the system. More veterans have committed suicide upon return that you lost in actual combat. That is an absolute disgrace. Even that poor, small country across from Florida – Cuba – does it better than you. A pissant island makes you look like a disgrace. Ohhh that’s right…you won’t interact with them because they put one over you in the Cuban Missile crisis. Get over it – you eventually did with Vietnam. And that leads me to another chapter – Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia…or shouldn’t I mention all the “minor” illegal wars you waged? You lost LOST the Vietnam War – admit it. You will also lose the Afghanistan and Iraqi Wars. The Middle Eastern wars are also bankrupting your country – why can’t day to day Americans see this? No one (starting with Alexander the Great) has ever conquered Afghanistan – get real or get out. If you think those wars are over, and as G. W. Bush said, “Mission completed”…think again. You have effectively put people in charge who are far worse than the dictators that were already there in Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Afghanistan etc. and now you are trying to do the same in Crimea via the Ukraine. You are responsible for the extremists that are now running around the Middle East, and I don’t mean Al Qaeda. You are responsible for the creation of ISIS. Let’s look at all those African refugees (including Syrians, Lebanese etc.) who are risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea to get to Europe. The USA is totally responsible for all these simply because of WMD lies that resulted in the invasion of Iraq. All Middle East actions from thereon are his fault. He is a war criminal – oopps did I break one of your laws saying he is a war criminal in the land of the free and home of the brave? The land of free speech? Fact – history is written by the victors. The USA is trying to run the Middle East like a corporation – all the top executives from the G. W. Bush era on are criminals lining their own pockets. Starting wars in the 21st century will no longer get a country out of a recession. It’s simply profit-making. Why don’t you take Saudi Arabia to task for 9/11? Ohhh that’s right, they control the oil flow. Don’t upset them – why don’t you find an alternative to Middle East oil? Are you getting a message here? The entire world dislikes and even hates you. You have acted the bully for many years after The Korean War, effectively destroying the good will you established in the early 20th century. You are hated across all lines – economic, religious, social, political and otherwise. What is your obsession with Israel? Fact – Israel was founded by Jewish terrorists. They set off bombs, killed people and destroyed property to achieve their aims. Because the world had ‘sympathy’ for Jews after WW2, it happened and a blind eye was turned. Today Middle America strongly believes in the Bible literally and as such wants to see Israel succeed in order the “Second Coming” results. People – the Bible is a guide. It is not Gospel. Why? In the early centuries, the Roman Catholic Church held conferences and decided which books, writings and teachings ended up in “The Bible”. God did not decide which early Christian books ended up in The Bible – so it is absolute rubbish for someone to state that the Bible guides what the United States should do. Too many real accounts of Jesus’ workings were excluded. The Roman Catholic Church is responsible for closing our eyes to the real Christ. Hopefully Pope Francis can arrest this BS. There are numerous United Nations resolutions that Israel has refused to comply with. By the way – are you (USA) financially paid up with the UN, or do you still refuse to pay in a timely manner in order to attempt to remind them that you rule over them? How about the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq that lead to invasion? Colin Powell held up a drawing and said – here is the proof. You never found proof and never admitted you were wrong. Yes – Saddam Hussein was a bastard but he had the warring clans under control. It was all ALL about oil and nothing else. When the mud got too deep, you changed tact and said it was all about democracy. How far is Greece from Iraq? – damn closer that the USA. If the Greeks could not influence them – you sure in Hell can’t. You can resolve the Palestinian problem in a matter of weeks, but you won’t due to that “minority” in the Middle East. This bullshit has been going on for 60 years. Everyone knows (sorry – obviously you don’t) – the longer a problem festers, the harder and more costly it is to resolve. I worked in the finance industry for many years and can only say that the number of times “we” (non-Americans) had to change our processes and rules etc. because the USA had set ‘”new standards” makes me sick. The standards set were not improvements – they were changed to line your pockets. Look at Sarbanes Oxley for example – the world spent hundreds of billions of $’s attempting to comply because the USA would not do business with another country unless they did so only to see the USA itself found it too costly to implement itself! What a joke! We now have many European countries in dire straits as a direct result of the exporting of American ways. You destroyed the financial industry with your Subprime rubbish. What about changes to financial models and makes etc. of any product or service that demand that people buy the “updated” version to reline your pockets. This is simply to keep the money wheel turning. You are desperately trying to ensure it keeps turning long enough for your problems to be passed to some other country or the next generation. Ever thought about how much you spend on items such as defense, spying, war, inventing, manufacturing and using machines of war? Just imagine if only half of that was diverted to your health programs, science or to the benefit of other countries less fortunate? What about converting the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines into an international force for peace and relief of local and international disasters? How can you allow a company to have a patent on the human breast cancer gene? You have to be kidding the world – but then again that’s your Constitution at work. No one owns human genes! What happened to the “United States” that I remember as a child? That far-off country whose technology was so far advanced we could never dream of equaling. What happened to that country that every county – even Russia in the old days – feared  -a form of respect? Oh – and how long before I get the FBI, CIA, and all your other bullshit muscle agencies to frame me for some rubbish and shut me down… A parting true story: In late 1978/early 1979 my family traveled to Washington state where my father was working on behalf of a company in Australia. Unfortunately, departing Auckland NZ they had an emergency which meant we had to go back, dumping fuel on the way. 24 hours later we took off again after repairs and finally landed in Honolulu. My mother was pretty savvy and said get to the front of the Customs line so we can get to the connecting flight to LA. Well – I was at the front of the queue, 18 years old, looking at an overweight female Customs officer wearing a gun strutting back and forwards. Her welcoming words to the Australians and New Zealanders were, “If you step over that yellow line, I will shoot you!” What a fucking joke – in 1978! No wonder you have a gun problem. Welcome to America! Congratulations to the NRA who lobby the most congressman/women on both sides. Fact – I was born in July 1960, and in November 1963 I still vividly recall my parents being very upset when they heard of the news of Kennedy’s death despite my being three years old. All the more remarkable is the fact that we lived in Papua New Guinea – a protectorate of Australia at the time – literally a colonial backwater. I was too young to understand but remembered the words Kennedy and death and vaguely remembered the Cuba Crisis. We cried in the backwaters of the Pacific! I fully understand that the Kennedys had their dalliances. Small beer in the scheme of things. He and his brother are the standard you must return to. Did Kennedy not say “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country?” And in closing, written on the base of the Statue of Liberty…

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazurus

My country totally lacks world-shaking oratory ,but I think we more than make up with it in our actions.

The Hell with the Pentagon

As the agency which enforces US foreign policy at gunpoint, the Pentagon has always blown. First of all, there is no such thing as the Defense Department. When has the Pentagon ever defended the country? Pearl Harbor? They did a fine job there, huh? Obviously the task of the Pentagon is not to defend the US mainland, which is all it ever ought to do anyway. Its task is to running around the world starting wars and killing people in other countries. Leaving aside whether that is sometimes a good idea (and I think it is,) what’s so defensive about that? The real name of the Pentagon is the War Department.That’s what it was always called until World War 2, which the War Department won. After that in a spate of Orwellian frenzy, we named an army of aggression an army of self-defense and comically renamed its branch the Defense Department. It’s like calling cops peace officers. You see anything peaceful about what a cop does in a typical day? Neither do I? There was a brief glimmer of hope there in WW2 when we finally starting killing fascists and rightwingers instead of sleeping with them, but the ink was barely dry on the agreements before we were setting up the Gladio fascists, overthrowing Greek elections and slaughtering Greek peasants like ants. Meanwhile it was scarcely a year after 1945 when the US once again started a torrid love affair with fascism and rightwing dictators like we have always done. We were smooching it up right quick with Europe’s fascists, in this case the former Nazis of Germany (who became the West German elite), Greek killer colonels, Mussolini’s heirs, actual Nazis in Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, Jew-Nazis in Palestine, Franco (who we never stopped sleeping with anyway), Salazar, the malign Mr. Churchill, the true repulsive Dutch royalty and disgusting European colonists the world over, who we showered with guns and bombs to massacre the colonized. In 1945, a war against fascism, reaction, Nazism and malign colonialism had ended, and for some reason America had fought against these things instead of supporting them as usual. 1946, and we were back in old style again, hiring Nazis by the busload for the CIA, overthrowing democratic governments and putting in genocidal dictatorships, becoming butt buddies with fascist swine everywhere. So you see we have always pretty much sucked. World War 1 was fought amidst one of the most dishonest propaganda campaigns the world had ever seen, the Korean War was a Godawful mess where we turned North Korea to flaming rubble with the population cowering in caves while slaughtering 3 million North Koreans. The horrific catastrophe called the Indochinese Wars, such as the Vietnam War, the Secret War in Laos and the Cambodian Massacre, where we genocided 500,000 Cambodians with bombs, driving the whole place crazy and creating the Khmer Rogue. Panama and Grenada were pitiful jokes, malign, raw, naked imperialism at its worst. The Gulf War was a brief return to sanity but turkey shoots are sickening. Of course that followed on with the most evil war in US history, the Nazi-like war on aggression called The War on the Iraqi People (usually called the Iraq War), the Afghan rabbit hole which started out sensibly enough but turned into another Vietnam style Great Big Mess. I suppose it is ok that we are killing Al Qaeda guys and I give a shout out to our boys over there fighting ISIS or the Taliban and Al Qaeda in South-Central Asia, Somalia and Yemen. Some people need killing. But I sure don’t feel that way about their superiors, the US officers who fund and direct ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc. out of an Operations Center in Jordan with Jordanian, Israeli (!), Saudi, UAE, and Qatari officers. And it was very thoughtful of the Pentagon to cover up the Ukrainian Air Force shootdown of the jetliner which we saw on the radar of our ships in Black Sea. And it was nice of the US to relay the flight path of the Russian jet to the Turks 24 hours in advance so they could shoot down that Russian jet and kill that pilot. One hand giveth and the other taketh away. For every good thing we do in Syria and Iraq, we do 10 or 20 bad things. Pretty much the story of the Pentagon. Sure if you fought in WW2 or one of the few other decent wars, you have something to be proud of, and I can even say, “Thank you for your service,” but the main thing is that you signed up for the rightwing army of the rich that is dead set against the people and popular rule everywhere on Earth. Sure, it’s a great army, professional, super-competent and deadly, but it’s generally tasked with doing lousy things. Why anyone would sign up for that reactionary nightmare of an institution is beyond me. America needs to level the Pentagon and put in a true People’s Army instead. Like that would ever happen.

How the Pentagon and the CIA De Facto Created the FARC

Colombia has a very strange political system. There are two main political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, who are striking in that there seems to be so little difference between them. They are both parties of the Colombian ruling class, possibly representing a “liberal” versus “conservative” split in the ruling class a long time ago. Just guessing, the split may have had something to do with religion with the conservatives being the more religious party and wanting a bigger role for the Church in the state and the liberals being more modernizing reformers who were more secular and dedicated to more of a church-state split. Unbelievably, these two ruling class parties who are barely different at all, spent the entire 1950’s murdering each other by the hundreds of thousands in an insane bloodletting called “La Violencia.” A Leftist politican (I think his name was Galan) was elected in the late 1940’s, but he was quickly murdered by the Colombian ruling class, which is what they always do with any Leftist who wins an election down there. This was the first time that Colombia had elected anyone even remotely resembling a progressive reformer, so of course the ruling class murdered him immediately. His killing set off huge riots all over Colombia that raged for a long time and were difficult to put down. I believe that this set off the Violencia because I think Galan, a Leftist, actually ran on the Liberal ticket. Most of the people slaughtering each other during this idiotic Violencia were just the Colombian urban poor and the poor peasants of the rural areas. The ruling classes formed armies out of these poor people and sent them out to commit mass murder on each other. After 300,000 deaths caused by the Colombian ruling class in the Violencia, the roots of the Marxist revolution down there took hold. The FARC were the remains of Violencia fighters who said the heck with this war and took refuge at a place called Mariatelia in Colombia in 1964 and set up communal farms there. They were tired of fighting and just wanted to be left alone. The Colombian media went crazy screaming about the “Communist government” that seceded from the state had formed down there. The CIA was in on this wild propaganda process from the start. Eventually the Colombian government went down to this area with a large army force and attacked these communes with massive weaponry. The Pentagon and the CIA were involved in the battle. The US and the Colombians even used chemical weapons to try to exterminate these farmers. The farmers fought back, but they were outnumbered. Maybe 90-9 The survivors realized that there was no way to live in peace with what has always been a genocidal Colombian ruling class, and they took up arms to defend themselves. This is the way that almost all Leftwing guerrilla wars got started in the Cold War. The Left got tired of sitting around waiting for the government to come out and murder them, so they decided that as long as the government was going to come out and try to kill them, they might as well get some guns and try to defend themselves. This is how the FMLN, the URNG, the FARC, the ELN, the Sandinistas and even the MRTA got started. So this was the beginning of Manuel “Sure Shot” Marulanda and the FARC, essentially created by the mass murders of the Pentagon and the CIA in Colombia.

The "Failed Socialism" Lie

A good argument can be made that the Communist economic system failed pretty badly. The capitalist economic system fails pretty badly too in many places, but it fails in a different way, and it seems that many folks prefer a failed capitalist system (as we have in the US right now and in my other countries) to a failed Communist system. The system that failed was one where the state owned the entire means of production. The economy was a planned economy, often referred to as the Command Economy. It didn’t work very well. The USSR had something called Gosplan, a huge building in Moscow that housed that part of the state that planned the economy every year. For instance, Gosplan would have to decide how many eggs to produce per person per year. They would have to make a wildassed guess of how many eggs the average person would eat in a year, and then they would produce that many eggs. It is almost impossible to plan an economy this way due to the vicissitudes of human nature. Also not pricing things by supply and demand caused all sorts of problems. The prices of things often did not reflect their true cost, so things would be sold for far less than it cost to produce them. This pricing problem caused all manner of problems. Needless to say, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the subsequent fall of the East Bloc, this system was rejected as a poor model for an economic system. So when people say “failed socialism” they are referring to the Command Economy like the one that the USSR had. This is the only type of socialism that has failed. There are many other types of socialism, and they still all work just fine. However, rightwing propagandists and liars have seized on the failure of the Soviet system to wage a disgusting and dishonest campaign against all types of socialism, including those that work just fine. Lately it has been expanded even to social liberalism, which is the leftwing economic model that the US has, since we really do not have a social democracy. I suppose social liberalism can be though of as social democracy light. They have also expanded “failed socialism” to include all government regulations of business and the entire welfare state including Social Security and Medicare. Anything the government does other than cops or the army is “failed socialism.” What they are really saying is that Social Security and the other welfare state programs and environmental and all other regulations are all Communism. The right wing has actually been saying this since the end of World War 2 in this country when the Cold War started up. The US government got in on this lie, and the US state has been propagandizing the “failed socialism” model every time some leftwing government shows up in Latin America and tries to raise the minimum wage.

US Foreign Policy 1946-2016 in a Nutshell: Kill the "Communists"

The US foreign policy line since 1946 with regard to other governments particularly in Latin America, is that anything leftwing in the economy, including government schools, state health care, land reform, labor regulations, labor unions, the minimum wage, and any and all redistribution of wealth programs is all Communism. We have murdered or helped murder millions of people since 1946 after calling them Communists for doing a land reform or raising the minimum wage. The US has also murdered or helped murder thousands of labor union members and leaders because the US line since 1946 is that labor unions are Communism. Hence all members of unions and especially their leaders are Communists. The US line since 1946 is that all of these leftwing movements must be suppressed in one way or another, and anyone standing in the way, such as community leaders, labor union members, students, peasants, and native American tribe members are all Communists and are subject to harassment, arrest, beating, firings, torture, imprisonment, and especially murder. The US, the land of freedom, has murdered or helped murder hundreds of thousands of the people listed above, since according to the US, they were all Communists, and Communists need to be killed. Even with the end of the Cold War, we are still murdering or helping to murder thousands of these people every year after calling them Communists. This “kill the Communists” campaign is one of thee pillars of US foreign policy for both the Democrats and the Republicans. This project is run out of the Executive Branch, especially the State Department (many of whose employees in embassies are CIA agents), the CIA, the DIA, The National Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, USAID, the Foundation for US Labor Reform, and especially the Pentagon. The Pentagon actually has an institute called the School of the Americas in the US South where they teach this “kill the Communists” philosophy to military officers all over the continent. These officers are trained in how to set up and run rightwing death squads to terrorize the people, or excuse me, the Communists. There are also many courses in advanced torture techniques. Almost all of the worst mass murderers in Latin America since 1946 are School of the Americas graduates.

Friday the Thirteenth in Paris

Here.

Superb article by Chris Floyd,  one of my favorite writers. He pins the blame for all of these jihadist monsters on the US.

I do not think that is 10

All you have to do to get US support is be a rightwing government and this holds true under both Republican and Democratic Administrations. The radical fundamentalist and often sectarian Islamists absolutely hated secularism, socialism and Communism, so they were and are great tools for us to use when we attacked secular, nationalist, socialist or Communist governments anywhere on Earth.

We started this crap with the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, where we used Islamists to help in the coup. In 1965, we used Islamists among others to help Indonesia kill 1 million Communists in a very short period of time. We really picked up the pace with Brezhinski’s brilliant idea under Carter to use radical Al Qaeda types to overthrow the Communist government in Afghanistan. The Afghan jihad virtually created the international jihad, and Al Qaeda and the rest of the global jihad types. There are allegations, not quite proven, that the US helped to arm, fund and train the Chechen radical Islamists against Russia. We used Islamists against Libya and now Syria. We are currently arming Islamists against Iran.

Bottom line is we helped to create this whole mess. Not through pure design, sure, but these global jihad monsters were the logical outcome of US policies which continue to this very day in Syria and Yemen where we are supporting radical Sunni Wahhabi Islamists sectarians including Al Qaeda against the populist Houthi rebellion and the majority of the Yemeni Army who has gone over to them. We recently backed radical Sunni Islamists in Lebanon to attack Hezbollah.

Global jihad is our baby. It’s our Frankenstein. We made it, and now we have to deal with the consequences.

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