* "Lincoln and the socialist roots of the Republican Party" (2011-12-16, occasionalplanet.org/2011/12/16/lincoln-and-the-socialist-roots-of-the-republican-party/) [archive.is/jUOzU] [begin excerpt]:
"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people. " —Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837
"Everyone now is more or less a Socialist." —Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war, 1848
"The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world." —Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen’s Association to Lincoln, 1864
These quotations begin a chapter in John Nichols new book, The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition—Socialism. He wrote The “S” Word in response to Newt Gingrich’s comment, in 2010, that “the socialist infiltration of American government and media is even more disturbing than the threats from foreign terrorists.”
Although both Republicans and Democrats pretend that socialism is a foreign idea antithetical to the “American Way,” Nichols argues that socialism has a long, proud history in America. He writes about Tom Paine who admired early socialists, Horace Greeley who employed Karl Marx as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, and Helen Keller who was an avowed socialist. But one fascinating chapter, reprinted in full at the International Socialist Review, reveals that Republican president Abraham Lincoln had not only immersed himself in the ideas of European Utopian Socialists, and German Communists, but spoke about them publicly.
Lincoln was an avid reader of newspapers, especially of the New York Tribune, which was the great Republican paper of the day. It took a strong stand against slavery in the south. But it also had forceful opinions on the relationship between Labor and Capital, arguing that “Labor needs not to combat but to command Capital.” Greeley wanted to “expose the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed.” Nichols writes:
"Greeley welcomed the disapproval of those who championed free markets over the interests of the working class, a class he recognized as including both the oppressed slaves of the south and the degraded industrial laborers of the north." [end excerpt]
---
* "Remembering when bankers tried to overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictator" (2019-03-21, bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/fdr-coup) [archive.is/gWyrU]
* "What the GOP learned when the wealthy tried to overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictator" (2019-03-24, alternet.org/2019/03/what-the-gop-learned-when-the-wealthy-tried-to-overthrow-fdr-and-install-a-fascist-dictator/) [archive.is/0fCqP]
THE BERLIN-MADRID-SOUTH AMERICAN AXIS—AND WHAT WE MUST DO TO FIGHT IT [archive.fo/mY23l#selection-2123.20002-2123.20078]
Falange: The Axis Secret Army in the Americas Hardcover – January 1, 1943 by Allan Chase A controversial work that claims that axis undercover agents were operating in North and South America.
---
* "1987: Real War Stories" (2018-06-16, totaleclipse.blog/2018/06/16/1987-real-war-stories/) [archive.fo/DVvMk]
* "1988: The Iran-Contra Scandal Trading Cards" (2018-07-30, totaleclipse.blog/2018/07/30/1988-the-iran-contra-scandal-trading-cards/) [archive.is/Ij8SL]
IRAN-CONTRA SCANDAL TRADING CARDS Text 01988 Paul Brancato. Art 1988 Salim Yaqub. Eclipse Enterprises, P.O. Box 1099, Forestville, California 95436
- [card 27 text]: Senior Israeli Intelligence Official DAVID KIMCHEDavid Kimche, a 30-year Mossad (Israeli intelligence) veteran, directed Israel's Foreign Ministry until 1986. In February 1982, Kimche and National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane (see card #28) arrived at a secret plan for Israeli participation in U.S. covert actions in Central America. First, Israeli military advisors trained Guatemalan and Honduran armed forces. Then, after Israel captured tons of East Bloc weapons from the PLO during its June 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israel offered to send these weapons to the contras in return for favorable prices on U.S. fighter planes. The Reagan Administration agreed to this proposal, and the Pentagon assigned Richard Secord (see card #19) to oversee the weapons shipments. Shortly after being visited by the NSC's Michael Ledeen in May 1985, Kimche began to promote Manucher Ghorbanifar's credentials to American officials (see card #26). By August he had convinced McFarlane and Oliver North (see card #13) that Ghorbanifar's contacts could produce CIA agent William Buckley and other hostages (see card #25) in return for generous shipments of weapons to Iran. The "Iran initiative- arms-for-hostages plan failed, but Israel continued to supply weapons to the contras through 1986. One arms network was run by a former Mossad agent named Mike Harare, a close associate of Panama's drug-dealing General Manuel Noriega. While supplying East-Bloc arms to the contras, Harare was also shipping Medellin Cartel cocaine out of Panama. (see card #11).
* "1989: Brought to Light" (2018-07-22, totaleclipse.blog/2018/07/22/1989-brought-to-light/) [archive.is/HhtR4] [begin excerpt]: If you’ve ever seen a two hour American TV documentary, you’ll be able to follow along perfectly, because it’s told without any comic book storytelling techniques, really. You have a narrator (probably a very deep, serious, male one) doing the voice-over, explaining everything to you, and then you have rapid, rapid edits that gives you a sentence or two of sound bites from people, and it’s a mixture of re-enactments and people telling us the story.
And it’s a story of the CIA planning to kill an independent Contra leader and blaming the Sandinistas for the murder. Instead it goes slightly wrong, as these CIA operations usually do, and they kill five journalists instead. We also get a lot of information about other (mostly botched) operations they attempted, like killing a US ambassador.
Mostly these pages don’t need to be a comic book at all: They’d work just as well with just the “narrators” text as a newspaper article. [...]
Now, Brabner has most of her information about these proceedings from the Christic Insitute (of Silkwood fame), which I understand has had their reputation somewhat tarnished in later years, so I have no idea how much of this stuff is accurate, but if we’ve learned anything over the last decades, it’s that all the lefty conspiracy theories about the CIA from the 80s have been proved to be true, so… [...]
Most of what Moore describes was controversial at the time (*gasp* “CIA involved with toppling Allende in Chile? What slander!”) has now transmogrified into things that are self-evident and trivial (*yawn* “Of course the CIA had to intervene. It’s just common sense.”) without ever stopping by the “Oops; sorry for lying all these years” stage. [...]
Between these two 30 page pieces, we have a two page strip by Paul Mavrides that uses the metaphor of an diseased Uncle Sam, and a doctor who tells him what he has to do to get better. [end excerpt]
* "1989: Friendly Dictators Trading Cards" (2018-08-01, totaleclipse.blog/2018/08/01/1989-friendly-dictators-trading-cards/) [archive.is/H3bhv] [begin excerpt]:
- [card 1 text]:
FRIENDLY DICTATORS TRADING CARDS Text C1989 Dennis Bernstein & Laura Sydell. Art C1989 Bill SienkievAcz Eclipse Enterprises, P.O. Box 1099, Forestville, California 95436
[...]And here we have Pinochet doing a jig on Allende’s grave. I wonder whether the writers gave him any pointers or whether Sienkiewicz came up with this stuff on his own. “Democracy’s the breeding ground of communism.”
The first sixteen cards are all about South and Latin America. I was starting to wonder whether we wouldn’t move out of the Americas at all, but the last sixteen cards are from all over the world, which is a relief.
And we even get some people that I had forgotten all about, like Sitiveni Rabuka in Fiji in 1987 (which was the most recent CIA-led coup at the time, I think).
- [card 23 text]: GENERAL SITIVENI RABUKA
Commander, Armed Forces of Fiji
On April 30th, 1987, General Vemon P. Walters, the CIA's "typhoid Mary" of coup making, slipped into Fiji. Two weeks later, General Sitiveni Rabuka stormed the Fijian Parliament and arrested the newly elected Prime Minister, Dr. Timoci Bavadra. Bavadra's fledgling Labor Party had just defeated Fiji's pro-U.S. puppet Prime Minister, Ratu Sir Kamese Mara, and although Bavadra's support for a nuclear-free South Pacific was welcomed by the regional populace, "a nuclear free zone would be unacceptable to the U.S., given our strategic needs," said former U.S. Ambassador to Fiji, William Bodde, Jr., who added, "The U.S. must do everything possible to counter this movement." Indeed, it appears it did just that. Thirty-two days after his electoral victory, Dr. Bavadra was overthrown by the pro-nuclear General Rabuka. "We're kinda delighted," said one Pentagon spokesman after the coup. "All of a sudden our ships couldn't go to Fiji, and now all of a sudden they can."Once in control, General Rabuka quickly allied himself with some of the most brutal regimes in the world. "Military dictators seem to like other military dictators," says deposed Fijian Prime Minister Bavadra. "It did not take long for our illegal rulers to establish strong lies with Indonesia, Taiwan, and South Korea." Under General Rabuka's U.S. supported police state, Amnesty International has reported, for the first time in Fijian history, cases of illegal detention and torture. "What we are seeing, " says Fijian political scientist James Anthony, "is the Latinization of the Pacific."
[end excerpt]
* archival page (home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/Cards_Index.html) [archive.is/GUNH8], single-page (friendlydictators.blogspot.com) [archive.is/aslWF] [begin excerpt]:
2 MAXIMILIANO HERNANDEZ MARTINEZ
General of El Salvador
A failed uprising organized by EI Salvador's Communist Party founder, Farabundo Marti, six weeks after Hernandez Martinez had seized power in a 1931 coup, sparked the General's crackdown on "communists." "Roadways and drainage ditches were littered with bodies," writes Raymond Bonner. "Hotels were raided; individuals with blond hair were dragged out and killed as suspected Russians. Men were tied thumb to thumb, then executed, tumbling into mass graves they had first been forced to dig." U.S. warships were stationed off-shore, ready to send in Marines to aid the General in case he ran into serious opposition.
Hernandez Martinez was run out of the country in 1944, but his memory was celebrated as recently as 1980, when the Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Brigade carried out a series of death-squad assassinations of prominent Salvadoran leftists. Farabundo Marti, killed during the purge, has also left a legacy: the rebels currently fighting the U.S. backed government of El Salvador call themselves the FMLN, the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front.
3 FULGENCIO BATISTA
President of Cuba
Cuban Army Sergeant Fulgencio Batiste, first seized power in a 1932 coup. He was FDR's handpicked dictator to counteract leftists who had overthrown strongman Gerardo Machado, "the Butcher". Batista ruled for several years, then left for Miami, returning in 1952 just in time for another coup, against elected president Carlos Prio Socorras. His new regime was recognized in a flash by President Eisenhower.
Under Batista, U.S. interests flourished and little was said about democracy. With the loyal support of Batista, Mafioso boss Meyer Lansky developed Havana into an international drug port. Cabinet offices were bought and sold and military officials made huge sums on smuggling and vice rackets. Havana became a fashionable hot spot where America's rich and famous clinked cocktails with mobsters.
As the gap between the rich and poor grew wider, the poor grew impatient. In 1953, Fidel Castro led an armed group of rebels in a failed uprising on the Moncada army barracks. Fidel temporarily fled the country and Batista struck back with a vengeance. Freedom of speech was curtailed and "subversive" teachers, lawyers and public officials were fired from their jobs. Death squads tortured and killed thousands of "communists." Batista was assisted in his crackdown by Lansky and other members of organized crime who believed Castro would jeopardize their gambling and drug trade. Despite this, Batista remained a friend to Eisenhower and the U.S. until he was finally overthrown by Castro in 1959.
[...]
7 ANASTASIO SOMOZA, SR. AND JR.
Presidents of Nicaragua
The Marines invaded Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed until 1933, fighting but never defeating the revolutionary Augusto Sandino. They created the Nicaraguan National Guard and installed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. Then Sandino, who had signed a truce and put down his arms, was assassinated by Somoza. In 1935, General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua, said: "[I was] a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism - I helped purify Nicaragua for [an] international banking house." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it another way. "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
Corruption, torture, and wholesale murder of dissidents continued for 45 years under two generations of Somozas, for after Somoza Garcia was gunned down in the streets in 1956, his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle took control. The Somozas plundered Nicaragua and became millionaires. The younger Somoza, "the vampire dictator," made $12 million a year buying the blood of his people and selling it abroad at a 300% mark-up, but his biggest single rip-off occurred in 1972 after an earthquake killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans: Somoza had his National Guard seize $30 million in international relief supplies and sold them to the highest bidder. Near the end of his reign, he aerially bombed his own capital to stay in power, but he was overthrown in 1979 by a rebel group who called themselves the Sandinistas, after the revolutionary hero his father had slain.
[...]
9 GENERAL EFRAIN RIOS MONT
President of Guatemala
"A Christian has to walk around with his Bible and his machine gun," said born-again General Efrain Rios Mont, military ruler of Guatemala from March 1982 to August 1983. Rios Mont was one in a long series of dictators who ran Guatemala after the Dulles brothers and United Fruit, backed by the CIA, decided that elected President Jacob Arbenz held the country "in the grip of a Russian-controlled dictatorship" and overthrew the country's constitutional democracy in 1954. The succession of corrupt military dictators ruled Guatemala for over 30 years, one anti-communist tyrant after another receiving U.S. support, aid, and training.
After the 1982 coup that brought Rios Mont to power, U.S. Ambassador Frederic C. Chapin said Guatemala "has come out of the darkness and into the light." President Reagan claimed Mont was given "a bum rap" by human rights groups, and that he was cleaning up problems inherited from his predecessor, General Romeo Lucas Garcia. Ironically, Garcia had given $500,000 to Reagan's 1980 campaign, and his henchman, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the "Godfather" of Central American death squads, was a guest at Reagan's first inaugural celebration. Sandoval proudly calls his National Liberation Movement "the party of organized violence."
Mont simply moved Garcia's dirty war from urban centers to the countryside "where the spirit of the Lord" guided him against "communist subversives", mostly indigenous Indians. As many as 10,000 Indians were killed and over 100,000 fled to Mexico as a result of Mont's "Christian" campaign.
10 ROBERTO SUAZO CORDOVA
President of Honduras
Alvarez, who made enemies among his troops because he pocketed U.S. aid and because he belonged to the "Moonies", a far-right South Korean religious cult, was overthrown by the military in 1984. Suazo's ties to Alvarez cost him his bid in the next election, but death squad activity and U.S. aid to Honduras continue. Many high ranking government and military personnel during and after Suazo's term were drug traffickers, and although the U.S. government denies knowledge of this, there is evidence to the contrary. In fact, the U.S. embassy was renting space from known drug dealers.
[...]
15 VINICIO CEREZO
President of Guatemala
According to Amnesty Intemational, "arbitrary arrest, torture, 'disappearance' and political killings were everyday realities" for Guatemalans during decades of U.S. financed military dictatorship. In January 1986, Christian Democrat leader Vinicio Cerezo was elected President and said he had "the political will to respect the rights of man," but it didn't take long to find out that his political will was irrelevant in the face of Guatemala's well-oiled military machine. Hopes for change were dashed when Cerezo announced he would not nullify the "self-amnesty law" declared on the eve of his election by General Oscar Mejia Victores, establishing amnesty for all past military offenses committed from General Efrain Rios Mont's coup in 1982 (see card 9) through the 1986 elections.
Although Ronald Reagan's State Department asserted "there has not been a single clear-cut case of political killing," within months of Cerezo's inauguration opposition leaders attributed 56 murders to security forces and death squads, while Americas Watch claimed that "throughout 1986, violent killings were reported in the Guatemalan press at the rate of 100 per month." Altogether, Americas Watch says, tens of thousands were killed and 400 rural villages were destroyed by government death squads during Reagan's term in office.
Colonel D'Jalma Dominguez, former army spokesman, explains: "For convenience sake a civilian government is preferable, such as the one we have now. If anything goes wrong, only the Christian Democrats will get the blame. Its better to remain outsde: The real power will not be lost."
16 ALFREDO CRISTIANI
President of El Salvador
General Hernandez Martinez's 1932 anti-communist purge (see card 2), was carried out on behalf of EI Salvador's rich coffee oligarchy, the so-called "Fourteen Families." New president Alfredo Cristiani is a member of those same "Fourteen Families" and his ARENA party is linked to brutalities surpassing Hernandez Martinez's. Cristiani, former leader of a motorcycle gang, the "Bad Boys," is a perfect figure-head: photogenic, moderate-sounding, schooled in Washington D.C., and indebted to the military for power. As puppet president, he yields to ARENA founder Roberto D'Aubuisson, whom former U.S. Ambassador Robert White calls a "pathological killer."
D'Aubuisson, a former cashiered Army Major with ties to Jesse Helms arid the U.S. right, studied unconventional warfare in the U.S. and Taiwan. He once told European joumalists, "You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism, so you killed them." According to D'Aubuisson, "the Christian Democrats [Ex- President Jose Napoleon Duarte's party] are communists," but Jesuit priests are "the worst scum" of all. U.S. State Department cables indicate D'Aubuisson "planned and ordered the assassination of the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero." It is believed he was behind the White Warriors Union (UGB), whose slogan was "Be patriotic - kill a priest." In 1989 six priests were slain and Cristiani soon admitted his U.S. trained soldiers had committed the murders. Yet, although assassinations of priests are notable, 70,000 other civilians have been killed by the Salvadoran military and the death squads since 1980.
[end excerpt]
* "11 Pinochet Ex-Military Convicted For Burning Protesters Alive; Sixty-five percent of De Negri's body was burned and died after four days; Quintana survived the attack despite suffering excruciating burns to 62 percent of her body" (2019-03-21, telesurenglish.net/news/11-Pinochet-Ex-Military-Convicted-For-Burning-Protesters-Alive-20190321-0031.html) [archive.is/oc4vO]
* "Argentina: Military Dictatorship Victims Will Not Be Forgotten; The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo called to remember the 43 anniversary of the 1976 Military coup d'état" (2019-03-23, telesurenglish.net/news/Argentina-Military-Dictatorship-Victims-Will-Not-Be-Forgotten-20190323-0013.html) [archive.is/gJmLg]
* "Thousands of Argentines at Day of Remembrance,Truth and Justice; The march occurred to pay tribute to the victims left by the bloody and last military dictatorship (1976-1983) in Argentina" (2019-03-24, telesurenglish.net/news/Thousands-of-Argentines-at-Day-of-RemembranceTruth-and-Justice-20190324-0024.html) [archive.is/RAyDm]
* (2019-03-24, facebook.com/teleSUREnglish/photos/a.492297374247003/1647891218687607/?type=3&theater): Salvadoran Roman Catholic archbishop Saint Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez fought against repression and the crimes committed by death squads against the Church and civilians.
In 2015, 35 years after Romero’s death, Pope Francis declared him a martyr. In March 2018, following the medically inexplicable cure of a terminally ill Salvadoran woman whose husband had been seeking Romero’s intercession, Pope Francis approved the miracle necessary for Romero’s canonization, which took place at the Vatican on October 14, 2018.
But for many, the real miracle of Romero was his unrelenting fight for the poor people of El Salvador and Latin America. "The Bishop of the Poor," as he is known, is still remembered as a gentleman who was prominent in the resistance against the U.S.-funded war in El Salvador.
On this day, we remember his outstanding work and legacy.
---* "11 Pinochet Ex-Military Convicted For Burning Protesters Alive; Sixty-five percent of De Negri's body was burned and died after four days; Quintana survived the attack despite suffering excruciating burns to 62 percent of her body" (2019-03-21, telesurenglish.net/news/11-Pinochet-Ex-Military-Convicted-For-Burning-Protesters-Alive-20190321-0031.html) [archive.is/oc4vO]
* "Argentina: Military Dictatorship Victims Will Not Be Forgotten; The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo called to remember the 43 anniversary of the 1976 Military coup d'état" (2019-03-23, telesurenglish.net/news/Argentina-Military-Dictatorship-Victims-Will-Not-Be-Forgotten-20190323-0013.html) [archive.is/gJmLg]
* "Thousands of Argentines at Day of Remembrance,Truth and Justice; The march occurred to pay tribute to the victims left by the bloody and last military dictatorship (1976-1983) in Argentina" (2019-03-24, telesurenglish.net/news/Thousands-of-Argentines-at-Day-of-RemembranceTruth-and-Justice-20190324-0024.html) [archive.is/RAyDm]
* (2019-03-24, facebook.com/teleSUREnglish/photos/a.492297374247003/1647891218687607/?type=3&theater): Salvadoran Roman Catholic archbishop Saint Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez fought against repression and the crimes committed by death squads against the Church and civilians.
In 2015, 35 years after Romero’s death, Pope Francis declared him a martyr. In March 2018, following the medically inexplicable cure of a terminally ill Salvadoran woman whose husband had been seeking Romero’s intercession, Pope Francis approved the miracle necessary for Romero’s canonization, which took place at the Vatican on October 14, 2018.
But for many, the real miracle of Romero was his unrelenting fight for the poor people of El Salvador and Latin America. "The Bishop of the Poor," as he is known, is still remembered as a gentleman who was prominent in the resistance against the U.S.-funded war in El Salvador.
On this day, we remember his outstanding work and legacy.
* Today, March 22nd, 2019, marks 76th Anniversary of the horrific Khatyn massacre - on 22 March 1943 Ukrainian nationalists (now glorified in Ukraine) and their Nazi masters burned nearly 150 people alive in the village of Khatyn.
- Note: In the USA, anti-Soviet propaganda is still pushed, so that ALL deaths during WW2 are blamed on "Stalin"... ahem, what do the facts actually show? "The 'Official' Version of the Katyn Massacre Disproven? Discoveries at a German Mass Murder Site in Ukraine" by Prof. Grover Furr [https://web.archive.org/web/20131012041015/https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furr_katyn_preprint_0813.pdf]
---
* "The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA" (2018-10-09, greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) [archive.is/WpmOG] [begin excerpt]:
The Conditions of the Prisons
A 1957 CIA document titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.
5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
The following are excerpts of the CIA document, underlined and put together for the reader:
[end excerpt]
---
From Beria: My Father Inside Stalin's Kremlin by Sergo Beria
"Some time later my father drew up the instructions for the committee charged with rehabilitations. He recommended that all the trials be reviewed, including the pre-war ones, and that Trotskyism be treated as a political tendency and not as spying. (...) [M]y father ... replied drily that the Party had everything to gain in taking the initiative in exposing past crimes if it wanted to be respected world-wide. "
p. 259
Malenkov, Saburov, and Prevukhin sided with him but Khrushchev and Kaganovich opposed, presenting a resolution the effect that this would be premature. This was a problem that called for special study. Rehabilitation commissions had to be set up, the people had to be prepared, saved from shock, and we must avoid harming the international Communist movement. On that last point my father, irritated at being blamed for 'hastiness,' replied drily that...
p. 258
"As he did not want to leave the press in the Party's charge, my father put the censorship under the control of the MVD. (...). Some time later he brought me a pile of books in English. 'We are going to publish all that,' he said. He gave me, among other books, works by British economists and war memoirs. (...) He intended to publish translations of foreigners' writings about politics and economics. (...) He wanted, also, to publish the writings of Bukharin and Trotsky, so that people should realize that they presented genuine political tendencies and were not agents recruited by foreign intelligence services." (p. 254)
"Once Stalin was buried, the Politburo members started to swagger around. 'Now we'll put the country on its feet again.' My father was pleased because he could now implement reforms that previously had been inconceivable." (p. 251)
"But my mother ... was very frightened for him, and for me, too, Being more intuitive she did not share the optimism of my father, who thought that after Stalin's death were no linger in physical danger." (p. 251)
“After the break between Tito and Stalin in June 1948 my father explained to me that he had never disapproved of Tito: ‘Every state has the right to pursue the policy of its choice.’ He was conscious of the analogies between Yugoslavia and Georgia. (…). Malenkov, doubtless influenced by my father, who was against that condemnation and often cursed the Cominform, hesitated where the Yugoslav question was concerned. He did not like the anti-Tito campaign but said that he was obliged to take part in it. That was not enough for Stalin, who stuck the label ‘Titoist’ on him as well as on my father.” (p. 210)
“In 1951 the members of the Politburo, Bulganin, Malenkov, Khrushchev and my father began to appreciate that they were all in the same boat and it mattered little whether one of them was thrown overboard a few days before the others. They felt a sense of solidarity once they had faced the fact that none of them would be Stalin’s successor…. They therefore agreed among themselves not to allow Stalin to set one against another, and that they would immediately inform each other of anything Stalin said about them, so as to frustrate his manipulations. They recalled their former intrigues and buried their old grievances. Khrushchev told my father that Stalin had asked him for reports on the national question when he was in the Ukraine, though in principle, policy on that matter was still a preserve of the NKVD. This solidarity among the members of the Politburo increased as time went by. They also confided in Mikoyan, who understood the situation. But Stalin’s intrigues left traces which were not completely wiped out. It must be said that Stalin constructed his provocations around an element of truth.
“After about six months Stalin guessed what was going on and unceremoniously demanded of the members of the Politburo: ‘Tell me, are you forming a bloc against me?’ He took the steps he thought appropriate and began to meet Ignatiev, the head of the State Security without going through the Politburo.”
(Beria: Inside the Kremlin, Sergo Beria, p. 239)
“The doctors concerned were divided into two categories, the British spies and the American spies. All the Jewish doctors’, described as British spies, were alleged to be Beria’s men. Subsequently the survivors told my father and then, after his assassination, me that they had been savagely beaten in order obtain statements that compromised him.” (p. 243)
"But the Romanian Communists found nothing more intelligent than to complain to Stalin that ‘reactionary anti-Soviet military men connected with Britain are coming to power.’ They were, of course, unaware that my father was behind this policy. He was shaken by Tolbukhin’s death because this meant he now had nobody to put his policy into practice. The task was going to be difficult in Romania, whereas the Communists, few in numbers, were fanatical. I think my father had some hope of the Minster of Finance, V. Luka, who later fell victim to the purges.” (p. 196)
“He succeeded in giving military aid to Israel. Stalin did not know everything and did not necessarily approve of everything that my father did in this connection, in a sphere where he could act discreetly and without asking for permission, by using his personal network of agents.” (p. 208)
---
* "#WorldPoetryDay: Langston Hughes Poem Praises Lenin; For #WorldPoetryDay, teleSUR takes a look at Langston Hughes, the U.S. poet who once referred to himself as a communist sympathizer before the term became a dog whistle for any political opponent" (2019-03-21, telesurenglish.net/news/WorldPoetryDay-Langston-Hughes-Poem-Praises-Lenin-20190321-0024.html) [archive.is/KBZCL]
---
* "Russian nostalgia for Soviet Union reaches 13-year high" (2018-12-19, reuters.com/article/us-russia-politics-sovietunion-idUSKBN1OI20Q) [archive.is/CZrQK]
---
* "Puerto Rico: A People Challenging Colonialism; A People's Primer" (1976, EPICA Task Force, illustrated by Luis Cancel)
* "Panama: Sovereignty For a Land Divided: A People's Primer" (1976, EPICA Task Force, editing coordinator, Diana de Graffenreid)
* "Nicaragua, A People's Revolution" (1980, EPICA Task Force; ISBN 10: 0918346045 / ISBN 13: 9780918346049)
* "Grenada. The Peaceful Revolution" (1982, EPICA Task Force; ISBN 10: 0918346053 / ISBN 13: 9780918346056)
---
Desde El Salvador: Boletin internacional. No. 1 (Julio-Agosto). El Bloque Popular Revolucionario a los pueblos del mundo
San Salvador: El Bloque Popular Revolucionario, 1978. [10p.], 8x10.5 inches, wraps lightly creased from having been folded for mailing. Text discusses activities of the Popular Revolutionary Bloc.
El Salvador Initiative Campaign. San Francisco says: No more Vietnam wars
San Francisco: El Salvador Initiative Campaign, [1983]. Four-panel 8.5x11 inch brochure folding out into informational poster; very good.
Calls for a ballot initiative in SF demanding the immediate withdrawal of all United States military aid and personnel from El Salvador.
Help end US intervention in El Salvador: come to the city-wide mobilization of the El Salvador Initiative Campaign [small poster]
San Francisco: El Salvador Initiative Campaign, [1983]. 8.5x14 inch mini-poster; very good.
Calls for help in placing an initiative on the ballot in SF demanding the immediate withdrawal of all United States military aid and personnel from El Salvador.
No draft, no war / US out of El Salvador [pinback button]
San Francisco: Solidarity Publications, [198-]. 2-inch button depicting a helicopter hovering next to an outline map of Central America
Stop US Intervention in El Salvador [pinback button]
San Francisco: NG Slater, [1981]. 1.75 inch pin, map of Central America with gunsights targeting El Salvador
Stop U.S. intervention in El Salvador! No more Vietnam Wars! [sticker]
[San Francisco]: n.pub. [198-]. 3x4 inch sticker with "crack and peel" backing, outline map of El Salvador with gunsight focusing on El Salvador
50,000 dead. How many more? End Reagan's war in Central America [poster]
n.p. [198-]. 11.5x17.5 inch screenprint poster, depicting a partially lit face peering out of the darkness. Very good. Broduced in the San Francisco Bay Area.
---
* "We Can Be Friends: Origins of the Cold War" book (1952, by Carl Marzani) [https://archive.org/details/WeCanBeFriends]
---
* "Who Started the Korean War?" (2017-09-26, exploredprk.com/articles/the-korean-war-who-started/) [https://web.archive.org/web/20190322182427/https://exploredprk.com/articles/the-korean-war-who-started/]:
Sixty-seven years have passed since the Korean war. But the US is, still today, struggling to distort the truth of its outbreak.
Then, who started the Korean war?
Drawing of 38th Parallel and US Occupation of South Korea -
In August 1945, the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army, in cooperation with the Soviet troops, launched the general offensive to liberate Korea and brought Japan to its knees. The defeat of Japan gave an upset to the US that had dreamt of placing the whole Korean peninsula under its control and using it as a springboard for its strategy of world domination. Unable to realize its wild ambition, the US put forward a so-called “practical solution” for occupying half of the Korean peninsula.
According to an instruction of the then US President Truman, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee prepared a draft for the Soviet and US troops to disarm the imperial Japanese army with the 38th parallel of the Korean peninsula as the dividing line. Truman approved it on the spot and ordered to make it as a written document, “General Order No.1”, and inform the Allied Powers of it on August 13. In fact, the 38th parallel as a dividing line in Korea was never the subject of international discussions. It was unilaterally contrived by the US.
According to this order, the advance contingent of the 24th Army Corps of the US arrived at Kimpho Airport on September 4, 1945 and the corps landed in Inchon, Pusan and Mokpho between September 8 and mid-October.
Referring to this, even Americans say: The war of the Wall Street against the Korean people started practically from September 1945 when its generals landed in south Korea.
Military Preparations for War and Armed Provocations on 38th Parallel -
The US rigged up and expanded the south Korean puppet army with a view to keeping the balance of forces at a “ratio of ten to one” over the north Korean army and trained it the American way. It also seized its prerogative of supreme command over the puppet army.
From 1945 to 1949, the US offered to south Korea military aid worth over 1 billion dollars. While stepping up the combat readiness of the puppet army, it deployed its reinforced forces in the areas along the 38th parallel. It also newly built or repaired military roads and conducted the work of building positions on a large scale.
At the same time, the US imperialists egged the puppet army on to launch armed provocations against north Korea in the areas along the 38th parallel. Their armed provocations from 1947 to June 1950 numbered over 5,150.
Such provocations were not simple “armed conflicts” but “test wars” committed repeatedly with a focus on the directions of main attack according to military action plans for “northward expedition”.
Fujishima Udai, a Japanese commentator, said as follows on July 4, 1975: The US scheme to unleash a war in Korea did not kick off unexpectedly on June 25, 1950, which is usually called the day of the outbreak of the Korean war. It started from 1947 right after the Second World War.
Outbreak of Korean War -
After rounding off war preparations, the US imperialists buckled down to action.
Truman sent Secretary of Defence Johnson, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Bradley and Advisor to the State Department Dulles to Seoul and Tokyo on the pretext of discussing a “peace treaty” with Japan so as to ultimately make sure of the preparations for war against north Korea and take relevant measures.
Dulles arrived in Seoul in mid-June 1950 and made final examination of the war preparations of the puppet army in a trench along the 38th parallel. Giving instructions to ignite a war to Syngman Rhee, he said he came here with Truman’s order to inspect the preparations for a “northward march” with his eyes and kick it off in case everything is OK, adding that there is no need for further delay.
On June 25, 1950, the south Korean puppet army, in combat readiness under the direct command of the American Military Advisory Group, launched a sudden armed invasion of the DPRK all along the 38th parallel.
But the US imperialists suffered an ignominious defeat in the war by the Korean people who turned out in the heroic struggle to firmly defend the destiny of their country and nation.
[end article]
* "Korea: The Lie that Led to War" (by John Pratt, issued in 1951 by the Britain-China Friendship Association; via marxists.org/history/international/comintern/1951/korea.htm) [archive.is/zNc5I]
- Note: according to the U.N. Charter, Chapter 7 Article 107, the U.N. had no jurisdiction in Korea, the Moscow Agreement a post WWII military agreement superseding U.N. authority, making U.N. supervised election's in the south illegal, not to mention war inevitable. Here an observation from an unlikely source, the most Conservative anti-communist at the time (1951), Britain's top Asian Diplomat Sir John Pratt. Contradicting western conventional wisdom, a scandal back then, the only place you can find this stalwart anti-communist's opinion today is ironically on the Marxist Internet archive.
---
* "Sean Gervasi. (R.I.P.) Economist exposed U.S. German role in Balkans" video page (2019-06-05, by Gary Wilson in New York, youtube.com/watch?v=ePw0Wp7lsxA) [archive.is/8853h]:
The memorial service for Sean Gervasi, held here Aug. 15 at the Martin Luther King Labor Center, was both a personal tribute and a political event. It was attended by more than 200 people.
Gervasi died unexpectedly in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on June 19 from stomach cancer. He was 63.
Since the early 1990s, Gervasi had been documenting and exposing the role of the imperialist powers in the breakup of Yugoslavia. He was working on a book, "Balkan Roulette," at the time of his death. The book, which was nearly done, is expected to be published next year.
Gervasi was an economist trained at the University of Geneva, Oxford and Cornell. His political career began when he took a post as an economic adviser in the Kennedy administration. He resigned in protest after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
After his resignation, Gervasi was never able to get work again in this country as an economist, despite his impressive academic credentials. He became a lecturer at the London School of Economics after leaving Washington. Notwithstanding his great popularity, the school refused to renew his contract in 1965.
The Daily Telegraph in London reported in its obituary on Gervasi that this "led to one of the first student sit-ins" of the 1960s.
During the 1970s and 1980s he was an adviser to a number of governments in Africa and the Middle East, helping them navigate the hostile and predatory world of transnational corporations and megabanks. He also worked for the UN Committee on Apartheid and the UN Commission on Namibia.
In addition, Gervasi was a journalist, contributing to a wide range of publications, from the New York Amsterdam News to Le Monde Diplomatique. He was a frequent commentator on the listener-supported Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York.
In 1976, Gervasi broke the story of how the U.S. government was secretly arming the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In the late 1980s, Gervasi began to focus on the Cold War and what he called the "full court press," a basketball term for a highly aggressive strategy. In an article published in the Covert Action Information Bulletin in 1990 after the breakup of the USSR, Gervasi showed how the Reagan administration's strategy of economic isolation, a gargantuan arms buildup with the threat of a nuclear attack, and CIA-directed sabotage had been decisive in bringing down the USSR.
Gervasi backed up his analysis with careful scholarship and documentation.
Gervasi was widely respected as a leading independent figure in the left. But his views were contrary to the fashionable dogma that blamed the USSR's collapse almost exclusively on failures of leadership and excessive centralization of the economy.
Gervasi saw the breakup of Yugo slavia as an extension of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the first step in a NATO takeover of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He became active in exposing the role of external powers, particularly the U.S. and German governments, in fomenting the civil war in the Balkans.
Among other activities, he led a team of researchers at the International Action Center in New York that collected information on the U.S. role in the breakup of Yugoslavia.
His view that the war in Bosnia was sparked by the aggressive machinations of the imperialists, and not age-old ethnic rivalries, alienated Gervasi from much of the liberal and progressive movement. Journals to which he had once regularly contributed would no longer print his articles. He had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book on the Balkans.
Gervasi's contributions as an independent thinker were strongly presented at the memorial in the keynote address by Heather Cottin, his wife. She focused her talk on his fight to expose imperialism's role in the destabilization of the USSR and Eastern Europe and the impact this has had on the liberation movements in the Third World.
Among the many speakers who paid tribute to Sean Gervasi's life and work were Samori Marksman of listener-sponsored WBAI radio, former Amsterdam News editor Don Rojas, political activist Alan Dorfman, author Nadja Tesich and Sara Flounders of the International Action Center. A delegation came from the Serbian community.
* "UN court increases Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic’s sentence to life in jail for ‘Srebrenica genocide’ " (2019-03-20, rt.com/news/454298-bosnian-serb-leader-karadzic-genocide/) [archive.is/U4s6f]
* "UN Orders Life Imprisonment for Serb Leader over Genocide; Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader has been convicted for genocide and war crimes and meeted out life sentence; Former Bosnian Serb leader charged with life imprisonment by the U.N. for masterminding the massacre of almost 8,000 Muslims in July 1995" (2019-03-20, telesurenglish.net/news/UN-Orders-Life-Imprisonment-for-Serb-Leader-over-Genocide-20190320-0021.html) [archive.is/OnjTV]
* "Serbian war criminal Karadzic gets life sentence; UN judges on Wednesday ordered former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to spend the rest of his life in jail for the "sheer scale and systematic cruelty" of his war crimes a quarter of a century ago" (2019-03-20, presstv.com/Detail/2019/03/20/591555/Serbia-Radovan-Karadzic-) [archive.is/wLvSc]
---
* "The Death of Dr. David Kelly. Murdered on the Orders of Her Majesty’s Government?" (2011-10-13, globalresearch.ca/ten-years-ago-the-death-of-dr-david-kelly-murdered-on-the-orders-of-her-majestys-government/5343229) [archive.is/yKbUY] [begin excerpt]:
On July 18, 2003, British biowarfare expert and UN weapons inspector David Kelly was found dead on Harrowdown Hill, near his home in Oxfordshire. Ruled a suicide by the official judicial inquiry chaired by Lord Hutton, now a group of British doctors is challenging the Attorney General’s decision not to hold a coroner’s inquest into the death, citing the overlooked, suppressed and modified evidence suggesting Dr. Kelly was murdered.
This is the GRTV Backgrounder on The Death of Dr. David Kelly.
From the outset, there have been questions about the nature and timing of Dr. David Kelly’s death, as well as the official investigation and subsequent inquiry into the events of that day.
As a UN weapons inspector who had been to Iraq dozens of times to investigate allegations of Saddam Hussein’s bioweapons stockpile, Kelly became the centre of attention in the summer of 2003 when he was revealed as the source of a controversial BBC report alleging that the Blair government had “sexed up” its dossier on Iraqi WMD. In the wake of that scandal, he was called to testify before a parliamentary committee investigating the BBC report and was aggressively questioned about his role in the scandal. He was found dead two days later. [end excerpt]
* "The Mysterious Death of Dr. David Kelly" video page (2019-03-23, by Norman Baker and Richard Galustian, globalresearch.ca/mysterious-death-dr-david-kelly/5672425) [archive.is/AaCEl]:
Introduction by Richard Galustian
As we contemplate the 16th anniversary this week of the start of the Iraq war, we are forced to ponder on the insanity of that decision by the US and UK in anticipation very soon of a similar disaster developing, again no doubt for oil, this time though in Venezuela.
However what many will consider ‘a side show’ by comparison to the more than a million dead Iraqis and thousands of dead and wounded American and British soldiers, needs further investigation and reflection. That is the case of one of Britain’s foremost scientists, Dr. David Kelly, who allegedly committed suicide.
The justification used by the US and UK, of the existence of WMDs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was that Iraq posed an immediate and imminent threat to the West – now known to be an absolute falsehood; a complete lie.
We must never forget the demise of Dr. Kelly in 2003, whose mysterious death in woods near his home, as he was, amongst other things, one of the most senior weapons inspectors that visited Iraq on numerous occasions on behalf of the UN prior to its invasion.
Before giving more detail, two comments are important to mention at this point. First one by John Scurr, a world renowned vascular surgeon is reported as saying that he does not believe it possible that Dr Kelly died in the manner officially stated.
And second a report that a former British Ambassador, David Broucher was called to give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry into Dr, Kelly’s death, after telling Foreign Office colleagues of an extraordinary remark Dr Kelly made to him shortly before he died. Dr Kelly told him he thought he would be ‘found dead in the woods’ if Iraq was ever invaded.
Some of the more outrageous ‘conspiracy theorists’ claim Kelly was assassinated by a foreign intelligence service, some name the CIA or Private Military Contractors at the behest of the CIA but predictably can provide no evidence.
It is worth revisiting again the narrative provided by the UK Government as regards the death of Dr. Kelly because of its potential relevance to a repeat of ‘regime change’ that might occur soon in Venezuela and the justifications that may follow such an action.
For the record Dr. Kelly worked at various MoD facilities in the UK and frequently at Porton Down, as head of microbiology.
Kelly worked with other scientists at Porton Down in Salisbury who have also died under questionable circumstances, for instance, Dr. Richard Holmes, whose body was found in the same woods as Dr. Kelly, in 2012, two days after going for a walk, and one month after resigning from Porton Down; and to Vladimir Pasechnik’s death in November 2001, another Russian defector, who allegedly died of a stroke. His death was not publicly announced until a month later. Dr. Kelly had been involved in his debriefing when Pasechnik left Russia.
I defer to Norman Baker who provides us with a more forensic examination of the facts as we know them today.
So below is a video of approximately one hour length presented by British MP, Norman Baker, who articulates brilliantly many specific inconsistencies related to the claims that Dr. Kelly killed himself.
The video speaks for itself and I hope stimulates readers to consider the many ramifications should it be proven Kelly was murdered.
* "Norman Baker - THE STRANGE DEATH OF DAVID KELLY" (2018-06-01) (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEvcIAF-5lA):
Norman Baker, a UK Member of Parliament for many years and author of The Strange Death of David Kelly, explains why questions over the mysterious death of UN weapons inspector Dr David Kelly won’t go away. The official ‘Hutton Report’ on his death was a whitewash and the conclusion that the government weapons inspector took his own life is not supported by the facts. Norman says: “Dr Kelly was a good man, who served the world well. We owe it him to get to the bottom of what happened that fateful day in July 2003.’
Recorded at Truth, Mysteries and New Frontiers [Glastonbury Symposium], July 2009
www.glastonburysymposium.co.uk
---
* "WWII brought blacks to the East Bay, whites fought for segregation" (2018-11-23, sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/When-WWII-brought-blacks-to-the-East-Bay-whites-13417228.php) [archive.is/7f256]
---
On June 15, 1990, janitors who were paid as little as $4.25 an hour were marching peacefully in L.A.'s uber-wealthy Century City district. When they linked arms to cross the street, police -- wielding their batons -- began to indiscriminately pound the marchers, injuring more than three dozen.
The next day the janitors returned -- in greater numbers and with greater resolve. They quickly won their first union contract. In the years following, "Justice for Janitors" -- a term coined a few years earlier in Pittsburgh -- became a way for 133,000 janitors in 33 cities across the country to win higher wages and a union.
---
* "They Came to Stay: North Americans in the U.S.S.R." book (1987, by Paula Garb) [https://archive.org/details/CameStayUSSR]
* "Novosti Press Agency Answers Letters about Human Rights in the USSR" (1988, by Mikhail Yefimov) [https://archive.org/details/NovostiLettersHumanRights]
---
* "American scholar’s 37-year experience in China" (2019-03-20, news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514f3367444e33457a6333566d54/index.html) [archive.is/LNUKg]
---
* "Antonio Veciana, Mystery Man in JFK Assassination", Part 1 (2019-02-25, whowhatwhy.org/2019/02/05/antonio-veciana-mystery-man-in-jfk-assassination-part-1/) [archive.is/NsuoO], Part 2 (2019-03-21, whowhatwhy.org/2019/03/21/antonio-veciana-mystery-man-in-jfk-assassination-part-2/) [archive.is/fa8Py]
---
* "If There Are Fascists, It’s CounterPunch And Jacobin – The Real Problem Is This System And Its Guardians" (2019-03-22, by Joaquin Flores, fort-russ.com/2019/03/flores-fascists-its-counterpunch-and-jacobin-the-real-problem-is-this-system-and-its-guardians/) [archive.is/qnahI]
---
* "Quite Right, Mr Trotsky! Some Trotsky Myths Debunked and How Trotskyists Today Hamper the Fight for Peace and Socialism" (1985, by Denver Walker) [https://archive.org/details/QuiteRightMrTrotsky/]
---
* (2018-03-23, facebook.com/FlameOfLiberation2015/photos/a.1590286007915359/2094188844191737/?type=3&theater) [archive.fo/8Bhqc]: The most anti-Soviet citizens of the USSR were zionists. One of the most well known was Ayn Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum) who was one of the ideological founders of the extreme right-wing economics known as Libertarianism or neoliberalism. There was also a massive zionist anti-Soviet campaign called "save Soviet Jewry" or "free Soviet Jewry" which was responsible for most of the anti-Soviet protests in the west during the Cold War and even terrorism against Soviet diplomats.
---
* "Zionism versus Bolshevism. A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People" (1920-02-08, by the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, for the Illustrated Sunday Herald, via fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html) [archive.is/EZLxZ]:
SOME people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.
Disraeli, the Jew Prime Minister of England, and Leader of the Conservative Party, who was always true to his race and proud of his origin, said on a well-known occasion: "The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews." Certainly when we look at the miserable state of Russia, where of all countries in the world the Jews were the most cruelly treated, and contrast it with the fortunes of our own country, which seems to have been so providentially preserved amid the awful perils of these times, we must admit that nothing that has since happened in the history of the world has falsified the truth of Disraeli's confident assertion.
Good and Bad Jews -
The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race. The dual nature of mankind is nowhere more strongly or more terribly exemplified. We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.
And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.
'National' Jews -
There can be no greater mistake than to attribute to each individual a recognizable share in the qualities which make up the national character. There are all sorts of men -- good, bad and, for the most part, indifferent -- in every country, and in every race. Nothing is more wrong than to deny to an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, the resulting consequences are more decisive.
At the present fateful period there are three main lines of political conception among the Jews. two of which are helpful and hopeful in a very high degree to humanity, and the third absolutely destructive.
First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, "I am an English man practising the Jewish faith." This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the "National Jews" in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour.
The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honorable and useful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia's economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organizations, the Russian Co-operative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholder of friendship with France and Great Britain.
International Jews -
In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
Terrorist Jews -
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews, it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.
'Protector of the Jews' -
Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people. Wherever General Denikin's authority could reach, protection was always accorded to the Jewish population, and strenuous efforts were made by his officers to prevent reprisals and to punish those guilty of them. So much was this the case that the Petlurist propaganda against General Denikin denounced him as the Protector of the Jews. The Misses Healy, nieces of Mr. Tim Healy, in relating their personal experiences in Kieff, have declared that to their knowledge on more than one occasion officers who committed offenses against Jews were reduced to the ranks and sent out of the city to the front. But the hordes of brigands by whom the whole. vast expanse of the Russian Empire is becoming infested do not hesitate to gratify their lust for blood and for revenge at the expense of the innocent Jewish population whenever an opportunity occurs. The brigand Makhno, the hordes of Petlura and of Gregorieff, who signalized their every success by the most brutal massacres, everywhere found among the half-stupefied, half-infuriated population an eager response to anti-Semitism in its worst and foulest forms.
The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies, which are now being perpetrated. This is an injustice on millions of helpless people, most of whom are themselves sufferers from the revolutionary regime. It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at the present time.
A Home for the Jews -
Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. it has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and centre of national life. The statesmanship and historic sense of Mr. Balfour were prompt to seize this opportunity. Declarations have now been made which have irrevocably decided the policy of Great Britain. The fiery energies of Dr. Weissmann, the leader, for practical purposes, of the Zionist project. backed by many of the most prominent British Jews, and supported by the full authority of Lord Allenby, are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement.
Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.
Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.
Duty of Loyal Jews -
It is particularly important in these circumstances that the national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy. In this way they will be able to vindicate the honor of the Jewish name and make it clear to all the world that the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement, but is repudiated vehemently by the great mass of the Jewish race.
But a negative resistance to Bolshevism in any field is not enough. Positive and practicable alternatives are needed in the moral as well as in the social sphere; and in building up with the utmost possible rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine which may become not only a refuge to the oppressed from the unhappy lands of Central Europe, but which will also be a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory, a task is presented on which many blessings rest.
- image caption: Picture caption: "Mr. Churchill inspecting his old regiment, the 4th Hussars, at Aldershot last week."
- Mr Churchill's authorship of this article has been authenticated by one of the world's leading Churchill bibliographers, Richard Heinzkill, of the University of Oregon, Eugene. (fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/Heinzkill090884.html) [archive.is/Fe9ni]
- A shorter version was inadvertently posted here for four years in 2002 (fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920_short.html) [archive.is/DjX71]. We apologise.
---
* "Netanyahu: Hitler Didn't Want to Exterminate the Jews Prime minister tells World Zionist Congress that Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews, but Jerusalem's Grand Mufti convinced him to exterminate them, a claim that was rejected by most accepted Holocaust scholars" (2015-10-21, haaretz.com/israel-news/netanyahu-absolves-hitler-of-guilt-1.5411578) [archive.is/wUV07]
