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  • Men vanish from earth leaving behind them the furrows they have ploughed. I see the furrow Lenin left sown with the unshatterable seed of a new life for mankind, and cast deep below the rolling tides of storm and lightning, mighty crops for the ages to reap.

    —Helen Keller, The Spirit of Lenin

  • The American liberal, faced with this reality, tends to concede that truth is in fact drowned out by a relentless tide of spin and propaganda. Their next move is always predictable, however. It’s another lesson dutifully drilled into them in their youth: “At least we can dissent, however unpopular and ineffectual!” The reality, of course, is that such dissent is tolerated to the extent that it is unpopular.

    Big-shot TV host Phil Donahue demonstrated that challenging imperial marching orders in the context of the invasion of Iraq was career suicide, when a leaked memo clearly explained he was fired in 2003 because he’d be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” [5] The fate of journalists unprotected by such wealth or celebrity is darker and sadder. Ramsey Orta, whose footage of Eric Garner pleading “I can’t breathe!” to NYPD cops choking him to death went viral, was rewarded for his impactful citizen journalism by having his family targeted by the cops, fast-tracked to prison for unrelated crimes, and fed rat poison while in there. [6] The only casualty of the spectacular “Panama Papers” leak was Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist who led the investigation, who was assassinated with a car-bomb near her home in Malta. [7] Then there’s the well-publicized cases of Assange, Snowden, Manning, etc. That said, I tend think to such lists are somewhat unnecessary since, ultimately, most honest people confess that they self-censor on social media for fear of consequences. (Do you?)

    In other words, the status quo in the West is basically as follows: you can say whatever you want, so long as it doesn’t actually have any effect.


    from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

  • In 1991, in the context of the destruction of the Soviet Union (Cuba’s largest trading partner), with neighbors salivating at the prospect of capitalist restoration, a Mexican journalist asked Fidel Castro, “why do you not allow the organization of people who think differently, or open up space for political freedom?” He answers frankly:

    We’ve endured over thirty years of hostility, over thirty years of war in all its forms — among them the brutal economic blockade that stops us from purchasing a single aspirin in the United States. It’s incredible that when there’s talk of human rights, not a single word is said about the brutal violation this constitutes for the human rights of an entire people, the economic blockade of the United States to impede Cuba’s development. The revolution polarized forces: those who were for it and those who, along with the United States, were against it. And really, I say this with the utmost sincerity, and I believe it’s consistent with the facts on the ground, but while such realities persist, we cannot give the enemy any quarter for them to carry out their historical task of destroying the revolution.

    (This implies, for example, that political dissidence will not have a space in Cuba?)

    If it’s a pro-Yankee dissidence, it will have no space. But there are many people who think differently in Cuba and are respected. Now, the creation of all the conditions for a party of imperialism? That does not exist, and we will never allow it. [8]

    As far as I can tell, on this score, there’s only two main differences between Fidel Castro and Western leadership. The first is that he stands for anti-imperialism and socialism, and they for imperialism and capitalism. And the other is that he’s honest about what Cuba does and why, whereas capitalist states brutally crush communist organization with mass-murder and imprisonment — COINTELPRO, Operation Cóndor, Operation Gladio, etc. — then simply lie about embracing plurality. Just think here about the notion of white North Americans celebrating “Thanksgiving.”

    And I tend to think that this is, in the final analysis, the crux of the matter. The question of “free press” and “free speech” is not separable from the question of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie versus the dictatorship of the proletariat. The idea of “political plurality” as such turns out to be the negation of the possibility of achieving any kind of truth in the realm of politics, it reduces all historical and value claims to the rank of mere opinion. And of course, so long as someone’s political convictions are mere opinion, they won’t rise to defend them. And so the liberal state remains the dictatorial organ of the bourgeoisie, with roads being built or legislation being passed only as commanded by the interests of capital, completely disregarding the interests of workers. Under regimes where political plurality is falsely upheld as a supreme virtue, the very notion of asserting oneself as possessing a truth appears aggressive and “authoritarian.”


    from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

  • Whiteness is also an imaginary concept and a figment of the racist imagination, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less real, or deadly; whiteness is a thing because people insist that it is, and use force and violence to make it so. Whiteness is a thing because white supremacists needed a name for their violent subjugation of others, and so they gave it one. In this way, whiteness is a uniquely virulent and pathological form of social identity. It cannot survive its loss of supremacy; it cannot abide competition or mixture or “impurity.” Created by racial slavery and given a second wind by European imperialism, whiteness depends on the violent subordination of all others. Celebrate your Irish heritage if you must, or your Pennsylvania Dutch grandparents; that has nothing to do with the whiteness that names me, now, but which (partially) excluded my Irish and German ancestors when they came to this nation. Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch can and will survive incorporation into a multi-ethnic nation, but it is the sine qua non of whiteness that it cannot and will not. Inextricable from racial subordination, whiteness has no other content at all: whiteness is what’s left in the melting pot after everything else has been burned away. Without that xenophobic fire, it has no meaning, no substance, no fundamental.

    This is why “white genocide” actually does have a meaning beyond “racial integration.” If you take away a white person’s ability to live as the undisputed master of the universe—to take his own experience as normal and privileged, and to presume all others to be debased copies of his own primary existence—then you take away his whiteness.


    from Buffalo Skulls

  • As a kid I always wondered what was up with the rise of Nazi Germany. How come all those people bought such over-the-top myths about Jewish people eating babies, despite no evidence to support it? [27] Where was the academic opposition? Were “educated” gentiles saying nothing on behalf of Jewish people?

    Living in Canada in 2021 put these doubts to rest. Acceptable opinion, fit for print and polite society, ranges from utterly unrestrained sinophobic hatemongering (baseless accusations of bat-eating, organ-harvesting, etc.) to, at the opposite “extreme,” ambivalent fence-sitting. The left-liberal camp never seems to find enough time or energy to forcefully challenge sinophobic allegations. In an echo of the run-up to the “War on Terror,” people express fear that opposing racism too decisively will make them appear biased towards China. It’s a strange thing: people hand-wring about the proliferation of pro-China propaganda, yet cannot name a single network or pundit associated with that view.

    Canadian liberals perform a national ritual of shame and guilt over their treatment of indigenous people, but it never translates into meaningful reparations or action. The Xinjiang atrocity propaganda blitz offers something valuable to Canadians: instead of improving the situation at home, they can therapeutically attack China. The more horrific the imagined crimes we project onto that far-away country, the more minor and forgivable our actions appear. Our collaboration with US aggression is transmuted into a form of atonement. This is routinely laid bare by Canadian pundits:

    Have the US or Canada done what China did to Hong Kong or Tibet, and want to do to Taiwan? There are a ton of faults in our treatment of Indigenous people, and the US is failing, but it’s not a comparison at the moment. [28]

    And Canadian politicians:

    Canadian Greens are calling for the 2022 Olympics to be relocated from Beijing due to ongoing genocide against Uighurs. Canada should consider whether it is feasible to offer itself as an alternative host, given our experience and venues. [29]

    This is how liberal Canadians cope with guilt, homegrown or imposed, over living on stolen land. [30] Over broken and disrespected treaties, sadistic police violence in the form of “starlight tours,” and recent flashpoints of violence against the Wet’suwet’en nation (to build a pipeline) and the Mi’kmaq nation (over fishing rights). Hearing these well-heeled Canadians speak of China transports us to an alternate reality where the explosive 2019 national inquiry’s report documenting the ongoing genocide of indigenous people in Canada never even existed. [31] Denial and projection go hand-in-hand.


    from https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/

  • The concept of “brainwashing” was invented — by a CIA agent posing as a journalist — precisely because Westerners needed a way to reflexively dismiss the phenomenon whereby their own troops were being persuaded of communist ideas during communist captivity:

    The idea of “brain-washing” can be credited to Edward Hunter, a CIA-funded writer and editor, who in 1950 started writing articles and books on the subject. His thesis was that Red China and the Soviet Union could control the minds of their respective citizenry — which explained how susceptible Americans captured on foreign soil would be.

    This new category, supposedly qualitatively different from normal ideology acquisition, itself turns out to be simply an ideological distinction without a difference.

    https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

  • The mass popular election of the supreme executive of a nation is a ritual so deeply ingrained in the western psyche that it is possible that any kind of Socialism with Western Characteristics will simply opt to maintain it indefinitely. We should, however, understand that under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, it is simply a pressure valve for discontent. Figures around the globe that have advanced against Capital while playing completely by the constricting rules of electoral democracy have all quickly found that Capital will soon abandon pretense and move against them in a gangster fashion when able. Some examples that illustrate this pattern are Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Salvador Allende, Olof Palme, Enrico Mattei, and Mohammad Mosaddegh.

    In addition to open gangsterism, we can also observe the steady erosion of the ability of any of these venerable political institutions to challenge Capital. Consider term limits. The US Constitution was amended to enforce term limits in direct response to FDR’s popular 12-year presidency (he died in office, going on for 16). As a policy, it is self-evidently quite anti-democratic (robbing the people of a choice), but nevertheless it has been conceptually naturalized to the extent that the 2019 coup against Evo Morales was premised explicitly on the idea that repeated popular electoral victories constituted a form of dictatorship. If rotation was important to avoid corruption or complacency, corporations and supreme courts would institute term limits too. Term limits ensure that in the miraculous scenario that a scrupulous, charismatic, and intelligent individual becomes a rebellious political executive, they won’t be in power long enough to meaningfully challenge the entrenched power of corporate vehicles manned by CEOs with decades of experience. Wolfgang Schäuble, a powerful advocate of austerity policy in Europe, succinctly summarized the extent to which electoral democracy is subordinate: “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.” One Party States and Democratic Centralism are not the result of lack of sophistication or cronyism, they are a proven bulwark that acknowledges that political power will often need to be exerted against the will of Capital, and so the wielders of said power must necessarily undergo a much more serious vetting process than a popularity contest.

    from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/