HISTORY AND THE CURRENT CONTEXT
[HistoryAndCurrentContext.blogspot.com]
* "Workers and community can fight GM plant closings" (2018-12-07, by David Sole, fighting-words.net/2018/12/07/workers-and-community-can-fight-gm-plant-closings/) [archive.li/bYO2A] [begin excerpt]: Detroiters also remember that the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant was built on the site of a large and stable community. Over 4200 people were driven from their homes in what was commonly known as Poletown. This multi-national community fought to keep their homes but were told by the Michigan Supreme Court that eminent domain could be used to benefit a giant corporation. Thirteen hundred homes, six churches, 144 businesses, a hospital and a school, spread over 465 acres, were seized and bulldozed for the GM plant’s construction in 1981. [...]
Public officials and union leaders have long complained about plant closings, the loss of jobs and the resulting devastation of communities, but they have been unable to launch any serious struggle due to their limited view respecting capitalist property relations both in the courts and in contract negotiations.
When GM announced its plans to close down 19 plants in 1986, a struggle emerged, led by rank-and-file workers and radical activists for a moratorium on plant closings. Spearheaded by the Stop Plant Closings Committee of UAW Local 15 (Fisher Body Fleetwood Plant), the demand was made that a job was a property right of the workers. This became a national movement led by the “A Job Is A Right Campaign.”
This organizing included mass meetings in Flint, Michigan union halls, mass in-plant meetings at the Detroit Fleetwood Plant, mass marches and rallies in Michigan and Ohio and a protest outside the national conference of governors in Traverse City, Michigan. A tent city of laid off workers, victims of plant closings, also took place on the grounds of the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, in 1988.
Although the campaign got no support from top leaders of the UAW, they did adopt language in the next UAW-GM national agreement providing for a moratorium on plant closings, albeit only after GM closed the 19 plants. The 1990’s saw another massive round of plant closings by GM, which ultimately eliminated 70,000 of 80,000 auto jobs in Flint, Michigan. [end excerpt]
- image caption: GM Fleetwood workers gather by the hundreds inside the plant to talk about keeping the plant open. T-shirts say “stop plant closings.” (1987)
- image caption: A Job is a Right leaflet, August 1988
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* "The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom - World War II and Post War (1940–1949)" (loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/world-war-ii-and-post-war.html) [archive.vn/NNu9m] [begin excerpt]:
In the spring of 1941, hundreds of thousands of whites were employed in industries mobilizing for the possible entry of the United States into World War II. Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a mass march on Washington unless blacks were hired equally for those jobs, stating: “It is time to wake up Washington as it has never been shocked before.” To prevent the march, which many feared would result in race riots and international embarrassment, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that banned discrimination in defense industries. His Executive Order 8802, June 25, 1941, established the Committee on Fair Employment Practices (known as FEPC) to receive and investigate discrimination complaints and take appropriate steps to redress valid grievances.
The fight against fascism during World War II brought to the forefront the contradictions between America’s ideals of democracy and equality and its treatment of racial minorities. Throughout the war, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations worked to end discrimination in the armed forces. During this time African Americans became more assertive in their demands for equality in civilian life as well. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial organization founded to seek change through nonviolent means, conducted the first sit-ins to challenge the South’s Jim Crow laws.
After the war, and with the onset of the Cold War, segregation and inequality within the U.S. were brought into sharp focus on the world stage, prompting federal and judicial action. President Harry Truman appointed a special committee to investigate racial conditions that detailed a civil rights agenda in its report, To Secure These Rights. Truman later issued an executive order that abolished racial discrimination in the military. The NAACP won important Supreme Court victories and mobilized a mass lobby of organizations to press Congress to pass civil rights legislation. African Americans achieved notable firsts—Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, and civil rights activists Bayard Rustin and George Houser led black and white riders on a “Journey of Reconciliation” to challenge racial segregation on interstate buses. [...]
Morgan v. Virginia, 1946 -
On July 16, 1944, Irene Morgan refused to surrender her seat to white passengers and move to the back of a Greyhound bus while traveling from Gloucester County, Virginia, to Baltimore, Maryland. She was arrested and convicted in the Virginia courts for violating a state statute requiring racial segregation on all public vehicles. The NAACP appealed her case to the Supreme Court. On June 3, 1946, by a 6-to-1 decision, the court ruled that the Virginia statute was unconstitutional when applied to passengers on interstate motor vehicles because it put an undue burden on interstate commerce. [...]
The Journey of Reconciliation -
To test the Supreme Court’s decision in Morgan v. Virginia banning segregation in interstate travel, Bayard Rustin of FOR and George Houser of CORE planned and participated in the Journey of Reconciliation. Sixteen black and white men left Washington, D.C., on a bus and train trip through the upper South. In North Carolina, three people, including Rustin, were arrested and sentenced to serve on a prison chain gang. Rustin wrote an article about his experience for the New York Post, which led to the abolition of chain gangs in North Carolina. The Journey of Reconciliation served as a model for the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides of 1961. [end excerpt]
- image caption: The Journey of Reconciliation—first “Freedom Ride”—standing outside office of Attorney S. W. Robinson, Richmond, Virginia. Photograph showing Worth Randle, Wally Nelson, Ernest Bromley, Jim Peck, Igal Roodenko, Bayard Rustin, Joe Felmet, George Houser, and Andy Johnson holding suitcases and coats. Photograph, 1947. Bayard Rustin Papers, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (068.00.00) Courtesy of Walter Naegle
You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!
11 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus in Virginia. Her case caught the attention of the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall and went to the Supreme Court. On June 3, 1946, she won. But the southern states refused to enforce the law, leading 8 white and 8 black men to invent the "Freedom Ride."
* (2015-08-17, facebook.com/TheHstryMakers/posts/you-dont-have-to-ride-jim-crow-noyou-dont-have-to-ride-jim-crowon-june-the-third/950047681709614/) [archive.vn/J5PrF]:
"You don't have to ride Jim Crow, no!
You don't have to ride Jim Crow.
On June the Third the high court said,
When you ride interstate, Jim Crow is dead,
You don't have to ride Jim Crow.
And when you get on the bus,
And when you get on the bus,
Get on the bus, sit anyplace,
‘Cause Irene Morgan won her case,
You don’t have to ride Jim Crow."
These lyrics to “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow,” were penned by Bayard Rustin and George Houser, who were the organizers of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. Also known as the First Freedom rides, the historic journey sought to challenge segregation laws on interstate buses. In the song, Rustin and Houser recognized the contributions of Irene Morgan to the breakdown of Jim Crow laws in the South.
In 1946, Irene Morgan refused to surrender her seat on a Greyhound bus headed to Baltimore, Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia.
After she was arrested and jailed, she took her case to Spottswood William Robinson, III. Thurgood Marshall would then argue Morgan’s case before the Supreme Court. During her interview with the HistoryMakers, Morgan’s niece, Jacqueline Finney Brown, described the victorious outcome of Morgan v. State of Virginia (1946), “They won. Thurgood Marshall won and it established no segregated processes on interstate travel vehicles in the United States. It was the breakdown of Jim Crow laws.”
Listen to Bayard Rustin sing “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow” here: http://bit.ly/1N3vcIF
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* "Lithuanian neo-Nazi march celebrates Nazi collaborators" (2016-02-17, religiousreader.org/lithuanian-neo-nazi-march-celebrates-nazi-collaborators/) [archive.vn/M0B67]
* "My grandfather wasn’t a Nazi-fighting war hero — he was a brutal collaborator; A deathbed promise led to me discovering his complicity in the Holocaust — and what it means beyond my family" (2018-07-14, salon.com/2018/07/14/my-grandfather-didnt-fight-the-nazis-as-family-lore-told-it-he-was-a-brutal-collaborator/) [archive.vn/UsOBj] [begin excerpt]: Growing up in Chicago’s Marquette Park neighborhood — the neighborhood that had the largest population of Lithuanians outside the homeland — I’d heard about how my grandfather died a martyr for the cause of Lithuania’s freedom at the hands of the KGB when he was just 37 years old. According to the family account, he led an uprising against the Communists and won our country back from them, only to have it snatched by the Germans. He became chairman of the northwestern part of the country during the German occupation. According to family lore, he had fought the Nazis and then been sent to a concentration camp in retaliation. He escaped that camp and returned to Vilnius to start a new rebellion against the Communists, had been caught, taken to the KGB prison and tortured. I’d heard how he was the lawyer who had led the defense for 11 rebels before the KGB tribunal, was found guilty and had been executed. His nom de guerre was General Storm. It all seemed so romantic to me. [...]
In October 2000, after my grandmother died, my brother, Ray and I took the cremated remains of our mother and grandmother back to Lithuania to be buried, as they had wished. We were surprised by the outpouring of affection shown at their funeral in the Vilnius Cathedral, and especially astonished when President Landsbergis appeared with his wife to pay their respects to the widow, daughter and grandchildren of General Storm. Many at the funeral had asked, “What about the book on your grandfather?” I answered, “I promised I would finish it.” They patted my back, squeezed my arms and kissed my cheeks. “You’re such a good daughter. Our country needs heroes.” [...]
From Vilnius, Ray and I traveled as honorary guests to Šukoniai, the northern town where our grandfather was born, to see the grammar school named after him. We were shown the modest building of white bricks and oak trim. The school director, a roly-poly man with disheveled white hair, enthusiastically grabbed our hands, telling us how pleased he was that we had come to host the ceremony in homage to our grandfather. He had heard I was writing a book. I asked him, “How did you decide to name the school after our grandfather?” Stroking his chin, he answered, “It was during a meeting of the County Board. We wanted to pick a new name instead of the Russian one we had. Your grandfather’s surfaced immediately.” Then he pulled Ray and me aside so the others couldn’t hear. “I got a lot of grief at first when we picked his name. He was accused of being a Jew-killer.”
Ray and I were aghast. Accused of being a Jew-killer? I looked around the room, at the teachers and the principal. Who were these people? Who was my mother? My grandmother? Who was I? My mind whirled: There must be some mistake. The director stroked my arm in reassurance. “I’m getting more support than ever over choosing your grandfather’s name. All of that is in the past.”
Feeling lost, I couldn’t wait for the ceremony to end so that I could ask more questions. My brother and I got into the back seat of a blue Falcon with Ašmenskas, my grandfather’s colleague, then an 88-year old with snowy white hair. He handed me a copy of the book he had written about our grandfather called "Generolas Vėtra" (General Storm), the cover of which bore a photo of my grandmother pulling my grandfather closer to her by his neck-tie. It had been published by the Lithuanian Genocide Museum, dedicated to Lithuanians who suffered during World War II, many whom died in Siberia. The museum was created in 1992, shortly after Lithuania’s independence, in response to the Holocaust, to show the world that Lithuanian nationalists had suffered under Communism just as much as Jews had under Nazism. The museum was criticized for appropriating the word genocide wrongly, and earlier this year it changed its name to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. Formerly, the museum was the KGB prison where our grandfather died in 1947, and it bears his name, along with many others’, on its gray marble walls.
“Have you ever heard any of those rumors about him killing Jews?” I asked. Ašmenskas fixed me with his blue eyes. “The Nazis appointed him to the position of county chair in 1941. He was conflicted about taking it, but he thought he could help our country more by accepting it. He was good at playing both sides of the fence, so he took it.” I knew my grandfather was the county chair, considered the height of his political career, but I had never considered that he might have been a Nazi collaborator.
Back in Chicago, I continued to sift through my mother’s material on my grandfather. I was unwilling to admit that this accusation could be true, but then I noticed a yellowing 32-page booklet titled, “Hold your Head High, Lithuanian!!!” In it, I came across a rant against Jews: “In the land of Klaipėda, the Lithuanians are being overthrown by the Germans, and in Greater Lithuania, the Jews are buying up all the farms on auction. . . . Once and for all: We won’t buy any products from Jews!” It was written by my grandfather. My hands shook: I did not want a grandfather who was the author of this brochure.
I strongly considered dropping the project, even if it meant breaking the promise to my mother. Years passed until I felt psychologically ready to continue the investigation, bracing myself for the horrifying possibility that my grandfather was indeed involved in killing Jews.
In 2013 I spent seven weeks in Lithuania. I hired a Holocaust guide, Simon Dovidavičius, director of Sugihara House, a museum honoring Chiune Sugihara, who helped 6,000 Jews escape to Japan during WWII. We became an unlikely pair, investigating the life of my grandfather. I showed him all the monuments on my grandfather; he showed me pits of where Jews were buried because of my grandfather. I gave him the book published by the Genocide Museum stating my grandfather was a hero; he gave me Holocaust books stating my grandfather was a villain.
Dovidavičius was the first to suggest that my grandfather conducted the initial akcija (action) during World War II before the Germans arrived. It coincided with Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, the same day Lithuania began its uprising with the Germans against the Soviets, marking the start of a Holocaust there, where 95 percent of its 200,000 Jews were murdered, the highest percentage of any country in Europe. (About 3,000 Jews remain in Lithuania today.)
Within three weeks, 2,000 Jews had been killed in Plungė, half the town’s population, and where my grandfather led the uprising. This preceded the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, when Nazi Germany decided to make mass-murder its state policy. Put in more chilling terms, Dovidavičius claimed that my grandfather, as captain, taught his Lithuanian soldiers how to exterminate Jews efficiently: how to sequester them, march them into the woods, force them to dig their own graves and shove them into pits after shooting them. My grandfather was a master educator.
I resumed the investigation. I sought out Damijonas Riaukia, a colleague of my grandfather during the five-day uprising. He was a 17-year-old in 1941. “Didn’t my grandfather have anything to do with the killing of the Jews?” “He wasn’t here,” he answered. “He had nothing to do with it. It was the Germans.” By this point I suspected a cover-up, but I needed proof.
Near the end of my trip, my aunt, Aldona Budrytė Bužienė, whose mother was my grandmother’s sister, described how, as a 10-year-old, she babysat my mother in 1941 in Plungė. She told me the story while we were in her apartment in Klaipėda, enjoying a lunch of chicken and rice that she had prepared. Shortly after the uprising, my grandfather moved his family into a house in the center of town once it became “suddenly free” and stayed until they moved to Šiauliai, where my grandfather became chairman of the county. “What do you mean by suddenly free?” I asked. She answered, “The Jews were gone, so the house was free. Many Lithuanians were moving into the new free houses.”
Taking a deep breath, I asked, “Do you mean the houses became free because the Jews were killed?” Looking pained, she nodded. “What about the killing of the Jews then?” I asked. “Who ordered them to be killed?”
“I don’t believe it was your grandfather’s initiative. He was too good for that.”
After a pause, I asked, “But if he was living there, as you said, and he was the head of the uprising, as Damijonas and many others said, wouldn’t he have given the order?”
As Aunt Aldona pieced together the events for the first time, putting them side by side the way I had during my trip, she shook her head and cried. “I just can’t believe it. Maybe he had no choice. He had to maintain order. I don’t know what to think anymore. I suppose it’s possible.” She seemed confused as she tried to come to terms with the possibility about her Uncle Jonas’s involvement in killing the Jews.
It turned out that the house in question faced the police headquarters, an imposing rounded structure with white and blue trim on the corner of the town’s most prominent intersection. The headquarters had been the Nazi command center. The house also stood next to the synagogue, where Jews were sequestered before they were marched into the woods and shot. Is this why my grandmother asked me not to write the book?
By the end of the trip I came to believe that my grandfather must have sanctioned the murders of 2,000 Jews in Plungė, 5,500 Jews in Šiauliai and 7,000 in Telšiai.
Back in Chicago, feeling a mix of rage and anxiety, I continued to work on the book during summers. Two months ago, my project led me to Grant Gochin, a Jewish man of Lithuanian descent now living in California, who has spent decades investigating his own family history. He learned about his cousin Sonia Beder, a Holocaust survivor who testified that armed Lithuanians prevented 6,000 Jews in her village from escaping to the Soviet Union three days before the Germans arrived. Sonia saw eighth-grade boys from the local school being recruited to help shoot these Jewish victims. Armed Lithuanian men plundered the Jews’ homes; they beat the Jews murderously; they humiliated, raped and killed girls. They set a rabbi’s beard on fire, branded his body with hot irons and shot him in front of his community. Sonia managed to escape from certain death. She survived a ghetto that had been created under orders from my grandfather, and later, she survived Dachau.
Gochin has identified more than 100 relatives killed in the Lithuanian Holocaust. Our independent research has shown that my grandfather murdered Gochin’s relatives. We decided to join forces.
While I had been focused exclusively on my grandfather over the past two decades, Gochin had launched a movement in Lithuania to expose multiple men lauded as heroes by the Genocide Museum who played a role in the Holocaust. Three years ago, he launched a campaign to remove my grandfather’s plaque from the Vilnius Library of the Academy of Science building. Despite wide media coverage and a petition signed by 19 prominent Lithuanian politicians, writers, and historians, the government refused to remove the plaque. This month, Gochin presented a 69-page exposé on my grandfather, charging the government with a cover-up of the Holocaust. I’m trying to play my small part in Gochin’s movement by offering an affidavit of support describing my research on my grandfather.
In the face of tremendous resistance by the Lithuanian government, the effort to convince it to acknowledge its role in the Holocaust will be long and hard. The souls of 200,000 Jews buried in Lithuanian soil demand such a reckoning. [end excerpt]
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Communist International History
* "Most Russians regret USSR collapse, dream of its return, poll shows" (2016-04-19, rt.com) [archive.is/qQzl8]
* U.S. Friends of the Soviet People [facebook.com/groups/291623721304790] [paypal.me/USFSP]
* "An inconvenient truth: the enduring popularity of socialism in the post-Soviet states; The popularity of the political and economic system of the Soviet Union is at an all time high in its homelands" (2018-12-28, morningstaronline.co.uk/article/inconvenient-truth-enduring-popularity-socialism-post-soviet-states) [archive.li/km4BT]
* "Socialist States are more Democratic than Capitalist States" (2018-12-25, socialism-simplified.com/2018/12/25/socialist-states-are-more-democratic-than-capitalist-states/) [archive.vn/sbZO9]
Already Existing Socialist States (AES), states with a single party system, such as the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and the DPRK (North Korea), have been incessantly slandered for decades by western liberal and conservative media and called “totalitarian dictatorships”. The reason is both the popular liberal and conservative understandings of what democracy is in the west, in countries with multi-party systems. But it is increasingly obvious here there is still a material and social paradox in the end result of our style of democracy (under capitalism) as inequality and power are so unevenly distributed.
In so-called capitalist democratic countries where different parties take power, the public is regularly distracted with blaming one party or another (liberal vs conservative or social democrat) over the lack of progress for the citizens and the society. Instead of taking on the system of capitalist democracy itself, which fails the majority of people over the demands of a tiny monied minority .
In countries with a single party system (the members of which are also elected into power, not selected by a “dictator”), there is no other party to blame so the single party must champion the majority of the people or the very system is threatened.
This article looks at democracy and its outcomes in Already Existing socialist states as a result of the changes in the material conditions in these societies.
* "Why was Soviet medical care among the best in the world?" (2018-06-08, rbth.com/history/328493-why-was-soviet-medical-care-best) [archive.vn/gYMmk]
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* "Countering the West's Lies About the Red Army's WW2 Poland Campaign; A short story about the logical dismantling of western propaganda fictions on key topics of World War II…" (2018-10-29, by Yury Selivanov, news-front.info/2018/10/29/yurij-selivanov-vremya-obvalnogo-fejkopada/) [archive.vn/nzirA], (translation, stalkerzone.org/yury-selivanov-countering-the-wests-lies-about-the-red-armys-ww2-poland-campaign/) [archive.vn/HsIeT]
US President F. D. Roosevelt on Marshal J. V. Stalin (facebook.com/StalinSociety.Pk)
"Мурзилка" Journal, January 1941
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* "The Scale of the Destruction of Soviet Cities During the Second World War" (2018-09-16, by Viktor Bergun, facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1795818610466710&set=a.413249488723636&type=3&theater) [archive.vn/ZKksm], (translation, stalkerzone.org/the-scale-of-the-destruction-of-soviet-cities-during-the-second-world-war/) [archive.vn/e0tpF]
- Note: According to modern histriography, all victims of the Nazi-lead European invasion are "victims of communism"... that's it. They are counted as victims in order to inflate the death count attributed to Stalin, despite the historical facts as far as the documented attacks against civilian populations by the Nazi-lead European armies (equipped, in part, by Wall Street companies like Ford Motor Co., General Motors, & ITT).
* comment (2018-12-30) [archive.ph/4NPiy]: It’s obvious, even to left anti-communists, that bourgeois propaganda about communism’s great death toll is hypocritical. But what must first be understood is that most of it is simply fabricated mythology.
Some of the most trusted and commonly cited sources like ‘The Black Book of Communism’ are, to be frank, bullshit. Several of the authors admitted they made up or changed many of the numbers and throughout the book use pictures of Czarist atrocities or famines from decades before the USSR even existed to show the supposed horrors of life under communism.Similarly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a known sympathizer of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, admitted that ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ was entirely made up by mashing together what he calls “camp folklore” ("Natalya Reshetovskaya, 84, Is Dead; Solzhenitsyn's Wife Questioned 'Gulag' ", 2003-06-06, nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskaya-84-is-dead-solzhenitsyn-s-wife-questioned-gulag.html) [archive.vn/glANo].
The organization Victim of Communism too resorts to the most insulting and hypocritical slander, counting those killed by US bombings in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea as “victims of communism”, as though it’s the communists who are at fault for the US war machine.
Many of our numbers and events like Holodomor are taken directly from the mouths of Nazis and Nazi collaborators. The myth that the terrible famine in Ukraine was intentional comes from the same Ukrainian ultranationalists who purged Jews and Roma under Nazi occupation. Even Stalin’s 20 number comes half from Hitler. In ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler claims Lenin, not even Stalin, but Lenin, before collectivization, before the purges, killed 10 million Russians. This is, of course, nonsense and stands up about as well as any other piece of Hitlerite propaganda but the anticommunists took the number and ran anyway. Tacked on an extra 10 million for Stalin and called it fact.
Another thing we have to consider is the fact that these were nations with reliable, modern state organs. Hell, the very same anti-communists love to criticize socialism as bureaucratic! We have reliable numbers on how many people lived there, on how many worked and were involved in state functions, and yet communism’s body count has more and larger discrepancies than the Spanish Flu. Even in actual genocides like the Holocaust or the Cambodian Genocide, though there is some disagreement, when there is it’s never by more than a couple million. Meanwhile, I’ve seen Stalin alone blamed for anywhere from 10 to 50 million people! Communism as a whole has a death toll placed anywhere between 100 to 250 million people! It’s absolutely preposterous!
The only purpose of such nonsense and whataboutism is to downplay the horrific crimes of fascism which in its short time industrialized murder. Hence why so many of our great “anti-Soviet heroes”, from Stepan Bandera to Osama bin Laden, have also been Nazi collaborators and mass murderers. It also points the spotlight away from the horrific crimes of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism which occur everyday and remain responsible for the worst genocides and massacres in history.
- comment: Notice the use of the Goddess of Freedom statue from the Tienanmen square protests they're using in that photo op. What's especially infuriating is that many of those who took part in the Tienanmen protests were Communists themselves protesting Deng Xiaoping's reforms. They were singing the Internationale before they were crushed!
* "The Data About Gulags Was Falsified to Discredit the USSR" (2018-10-25, by Aleksandr Zinovyev, via zen.yandex.ru/media/histor/aleksandr-zinovev-dannye-o-gulage-falsificiruiut-s-celiu-diskreditirovat-sssr-5bd2911372e96d00aaca8ad0) [archive.vn/XE0qY], (translation, stalkerzone.org/aleksandr-zinovyev-the-data-about-gulags-was-falsified-to-discredit-the-ussr/) [archive.vn/1u3EZ]:
The sociologist Aleksandr Zinovyev noted at the end of the Soviet period that the story about Gulags isn’t just spread for no reason: it has a specific goal — to strike a blow to the USSR. It is necessary to inflate the problem as much as possible so that citizens decide that the USSR is one continuous Gulag and that this state isn’t worthy of existing.
Those who experienced perestroika remember very well how this topic was strongly inflated. However, when archival documents were opened it became clear that Solzhenitsyn just lied to the population about the number of prisoners in Gulags.
There were never more than 2.5 million people at the same time in Gulags, including also prisons and colonies. Moreover, there were so many there only for the reason that at one time there were German prisoners of war after the Great Patriotic War.
And before war the figure in all such institutions at the same time was a maximum of 1.8 million people (1938). It is worth noting that a Gulag is a labor camp, and it was necessary in those years because there were very few prisons in the country. Before the creation of a wide network of labor camps it was quite often necessary to punish serious criminals with community service.
If to take the number of Gulag prisoners during quiet times, then it isn’t much more than the number of prisoners in modern Russia.
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* "The Forgotten Truth About Lenin" (2018-10-30, by Ilya Belous, cont.ws/@iliabelous/190868) [archive.fo/vWl0e], (translation, stalkerzone.org/ilya-belous-the-forgotten-truth-about-lenin/) [archive.vn/aS0Le]:
Who needed the execution of the royal family? Who overthrew the Tsar? Who destroyed the Russian Army? The current generation that grew up with the books of George Soros and Igor Chubais have already forgotten the truth about these events.
I will try to explain very briefly, succinctly, and to the point.
1. The interest of the Russian Empire in the First World War was to solve the Eastern question – control over the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, the longtime geopolitical need of our country.
2. England and France promised the Russian Empire to solve the issue of opening the Eastern front (against Germany and Austro-Hungary).
3. Russia fulfilled its allied role, and England realised that its promise will have to be kept, and that Russia’s “services” were no longer needed.
4. England decided to withdraw Russia from the war, artificially inciting chaos in Petrograd, and as a result, within a week the autocracy fell like a house of cards.
5. The fifth column in the State Duma, consisting of oligarchs and intelligentsia, entered into an alliance with England and carried out the bourgeois February coup, forcing Nicholas to sign a renunciation.
[The February bourgeois revolution can be compared to Euromaidan. Guchkov was bourgeois, like the oligarch Poroshenko, Shulgin – a lawyer, founder of the white guards – according to modern terminology was a representative of the creative class. The most important victory of the CIA in the information war is that millions of people now do not distinguish the February bourgeois revolution from the October people’s revolution. They think that Lenin arrested the Tsar personally. Can they show us Lenin in this picture? No, because the Bolsheviks will be back in Russia only in 2 months.]
6. On 6th April, 1917 the United States took the place of Russia in the Entente.
7. Put under pressure by the Provisional government, the Menshevik Council of St. Petersburg signed Decree No. 1, which introduced the democratic election of officers and the subordination of soldiers to soldiers’ committees. This is how the fifth column destroyed the Russian Army.
8. After the great October Socialist Revolution, Lenin was obliged to urgently make peace, because there was nobody and nothing to be at war with. He insisted on the withdrawal of all parties from the war without the annexation of contributions.
[German caricature in 1917 about the dismantlement of the Russian Army]
9. It wasn’t profitable for the entente, which was winning. They were obliged to negotiate with Germany separately from Russia. So the Brest peace treaty appeared.
[Prince Leopold of Bavaria signs the armistice in the middle of Russians and the enemy delegates]
10. The Entente interfered with the establishment of peace. On July 6th, 1918 the Social Revolutionary Blumkin killed the German Ambassador Mirbach.
11. Aleksandra Feodorovna and her daughters were German princesses, and killing them was also beneficial for England in order to aggrevate relations between Russia and Germany.
12. According to the testimony of three telegram operators from the Ekaterinburg post office, Lenin, in a conversation with Berzin by direct line, ordered him, “at the expense of his own life, to take the entire royal family under protection and to prevent any violence towards them”.
13. In order to mitigate the harsh result of the murder of Ambassador Mirbach, the possibility of delivering one or more members of the royal family to Germany wasn’t excluded.
14. From May, 1918 the whole country, from the Urals to Vladivostok, already wasn’t controlled by the Bolshevik leadership from Moscow. And it was like that until 1922. This area was ruled by separatist-anarchist sentiments – they wanted neither the Tsar nor Lenin.
15. The leaders of the Urals had their own position concerning the royal family. The Presidium of the Ural Regional Council was ready to exterminate the Romanovs already in April 1918, during their transfer from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg.
16. The decision to execute the Romanovs was made by the Executive Committee of the Ural Regional Council, whilst the Central Soviet leadership was informed about it only after it had happened.
17. Neither Lenin nor Sverdlov had anything to do with the execution of the Tsar.
These are the contents of historical documents. These are the facts. Everything else is American-liberal nonsense.
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* "From the Buran to the Caspian Sea Monster: 5 epic Soviet projects" (2018-12-26, rt.com/news/447467-soviet-epic-projects-legacy/) [archive.is/K5ET0]
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Havana, Cuba: Revolutionaries of the 26th of July Movement pay a New Year’s visit to police headquarters and wish Batista’s police a Happy New Year, January 1, 1959.
Photo by Bert Clay
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new books for distribution from New Outlook Publishers: [http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/BolshevikiPress]
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* "A History of Afghanistan" (1985, Progress Publishers) [archive.org/details/AHistoryOfAfghanistan]
* "Afghanistan: The Revolution Continues" (1984, by Makhmud Baryalai) [archive.org/details/AfghanistanRevolutionContinues/page/n1]
* "Afghanistan: The Battle Line is Drawn" (1980, by Irwin Sillber, The Institute for Scientific Socialism, San Francisco, California) [archive.org/details/AfghanistanTheBattleLineIsDrawn/page/n1]
* "Human rights in Democratic Republic of Afghanistan: Facts and Fictions" (1979, by Hamid Khurasani) [archive.org/details/azu_acku_pamphlet_jc599_a34_k48_1986]
* (2018-12-31, Steven Argue): Photo: Former CIA asset Osama bin Laden. Of all his crimes, his worst was waging a holy war on Afghanistan that murdered a million people & enslaved its women. That CIA operation overthrew a pro-woman, secular, & socialist government, replacing it with repressive anti-woman anti-communist religious fanatics. The Soviet Union didn't invade Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter's CIA were in Afghanistan arming, training, financing, initiating, & directing the Afghan counterrevolution before any Soviet troops were present. To counter that U.S. aggression the government of Afghanistan repeatedly invited Soviet troops, which were finally sent. This was not a native resistance to socialism either. Like Osama bin Laden, 100,000 fighters of this U.S. financed holy war on women were foreign fighters recruited by the CIA & U.S. allies.
Why exactly did Maoist insurgents fight the Marxist-Leninist government of Afghanistan and the Soviets during the Afghan-Soviet war??? I would think as fellow communists they would side with the government and Soviets over reactionary Islamic insurgents
The PDPA didn’t think the same thing; when they took power, they began to immediately crackdown on the PYO and Shola a-Jawad than they did to the Islamists and warlords
PDPA were revisionist opportunists; they cracked down on each other as internal factions(between the more radical Khalq and the moderate Parcham) before the USSR intervened and shot one faction in charge(the Khalq) in favour of the other
even the Khalq where revisionist
khalq’s errors lay in its attempts to force reform on the masses that did not want said reforms and, when threatened and instead of trying to connect with the masses, ask the USSR to support them.
In turn, the USSR invaded and repressed the Khalq.
Only the ALO allots with the Islamists that were supported by the West(and PRC).
In turn, the ALO also supported and defended Deng and his reforms while the rest of the MAoist forces remained separate from Islamist forces.
The problem was that the consolidated social base for the Khalq were in the cities and the majority of the country, the rural masses, were not consolidated.
And we are on the same page with the “win over the intermediate while not tailing them”; the thing was that, same as land reform, the method that the PDPA used to enact these reforms in the countryside was the use of a standing army that was a holdover of the bourgeois army pre-Saur revolution.
So the masses weren’t engaged in their own liberation as the PDPA’s own base among the masses were unravelling and would then be utterly destroyed with the USSR’s intervention.
They didn’t train and arm women or the masses in general to foster a People’s Army instead of a professional bourgeois army; this stemmed from their top-down opportunistic bent.
also it is frequently forgotten that the DPDA were Pashtun Chauvinists that messed with the Hazara pop(the Mujahideen weren't good either toward them obv) and after Najibullah was assassinated many politburo members found them themselves mixed in *with the Taliban* because of this nationalist interest. the legacy of the PDPA also veing the Uzbek Warlord General Dostum, being a good lacky in the US-led Northern Coalition
By the way, it's always good to note that comrade Faiz Ahmed was murdered by the fascistic "mujahedinn" under Hekmatyar, who were on the CIA payroll.
Massoud killed around 900 Hazaras, between 11-12 February 1993, in an operation called Afshar Operation. He and his soldiers were known for practicing ”bacha bazi”, its basically pedophilia, look it up. Sure, he was a brave commander, but surely not a hero, thats only Tajik people who thinks so
The PDPA wasn't Marxist-Leninist AT ALL. Comrades from the ALO — lead by comrades Akram Yari and Faiz Ahmed — were the true Marxist-Leninists. Also, the Shale-ye Javeed fought alongside the anti-Taliban, anti-yankee mujahedinn, not the ones led by the Bin Laden–Hekmatyar–CIA clique. The Maoists from the ALO were waging war against a counter-revolutionary, puppet governmen which has installed themselves at the behest of the Moscow social-imperialists.
No, the position of the ALO wasn't that of siding with the capitalist-roading Chinese government. Instead, they've summed up the experience of the Chinese Revolution, and although not completely correcting some of its leftist mistakes, they were mostly right on their theory and practice.
http://a-l-o.maoism.ru/98-mim.htm
1) After Hafizullah Amin's coup d'etat and assassination of Taraki, he launched launched massive purges against personal rivals inside and outside the PDPA, thus alienating people among all stratas of the Afghan population (including communists inside and outside the PDPA).
2) Many of the so-called "Maoists" in Afghanistan weren't really ideological adherents to the Mao Zedong thought but merely self-proclaimed communists who aligned internationally with the People's Republic of China no matter who comes out victorious in the power struggle in Beijing. So they continued to support Beijing even after Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping staged their revisionist coup after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, ended the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and purged its ring leaders (the "Gang of Four"), and launched "reform and opening".
The ALO and the so-called "Revolutionary Group of the Peoples of Afghanistan" led by Faiz Ahmad were rubbing shoulders with "moderate Islamists"
http://a-l-o.maoism.ru/glossary.htm#Rev.%20Group
I'm talking about the religious fundamentalists (regardless of how "moderate" they are) whom the ALO and RGPA proudly went to war hand-in-hand against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
Does it matter that the Afghan "Maoists" and their supporters among petite-bourgeois and national-bourgeois elements were not in the same category as the CIA Mujahideen. They were open enemies of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan - the most progressive and revolutionary government the country has ever seen with success - and their attack against that government only helped strengthened the CIA and Pakistani-backed Mujahideen that would soon spell their own very death years before they finally overthrew the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992. How well did it end up for Faiz Ahmad and his fake "Maoist" chums when they ended up getting assassinated one-by-one by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami and the Pakistani ISI in the mid-1980s? If they had reached out to Karmal and later Najibullah's government (which was willing to make peace with certain factions of the armed opposition groups) for rapprochement, they wouldn't have got themselves f***ing killed by their own sectarian stupidity.
The ALO's war against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and alliance with Islamists ranks as one of the stupidest, most self-destructive and most extremist courses ever taken by a communist organization
The ALO had allied themselves with the non-communist "islamists" for the fact that they needed to do so, in order to fight occupation of the country by the social-imperialist Russian invaders and the revisionist government which took over via a Moscow-ordered coup. The PDPA fail to correctly handle the contradictions amongst the people, paving over them and treating the masses of the people as "counter-revolutionary", while at the same time asking muscovite social-imperialism for help when the people started to rebel en masse and shit got out of control. Put it simply, they didn't rely on the masses of the people, using the help of a foreign superpower to help them run shit and keep the power in their hands. The PDPA itself has created the conditions for Western imperialism to recruit, fund, train and arm their own "rebels", which were enemies of the revolutionary united front led by ALO in alliance with anti-imperialist Muslim peasant insurgents. The PDPA was one of the most counter-revolutionary and sock-puppeting forces of the history of the revisionist movement, which accomplished its historical mission by maring proletarian revolution whenever it attempted to do so.
after Khalk took power during the Saur Revolution and overthrew the previous goverment, the people rejoiced and welcomed it. But the Khalks made a lot of mistakes, by introducing reforms that the people weren't ready for. The Khalks introduced land reforms, the seperation of state and religion etc. which wasn't very popular. But they never wanted any foreign presence or intervention. Only after internal rivalry intensified through Soviet meddling leaders started to kill one another: Amin was told Taraki wanted to kill him, so he killed Taraki instead, then Karmal killed Amin and others by poisening them during a meeting, and the night after Amin's death the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan and recognized Karmal as leader, which was a year after Hezbe Democratique took power. The Afghan people responded massively by boycotting the schools etc. and waves of protests started.
I think the Maoists were against Hezbe Democratique, because they were being controlled by a foreign revisionist party. And at the same time, during Amin's reign the crackdown on opposition was very brutal. So I think they sided with the Islamic fundamentalists as a tacktical alliance to resist Soviet Imperialism and their crackdown on opposition.
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* "The Israeli Fighter Pilots Who Got Rich Off Angola's Civil War and Their Link to a Massive Cyberattack; Three Israeli ex-fighter pilots operating in Africa have a surprising tie to a sophisticated attack that caused a global scare" (2018-12-31, haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-israeli-businessmen-who-got-rich-off-angola-s-war-and-their-ties-to-cyberattack-1.6792027), text [archive.vn/F3lMl]
[begin excerpt]: An international criminal probe has been investigating for the past two years suspicions that a company named Cellcom Liberia (and which has nothing to do with the Israeli mobile carrier of a similar-sounding name) ordered an Israeli-British hacker it hired in Angola (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/israeli-developer-wins-290m-angola-farm-contract-1.5445350) to wage continuous cyberattacks against a competitor called Lonestar.
The attacks, whose goal was to put Lonestar out of business, spun out of control so much so that by November 2016 the Liberian government believed the state was actually being targeted by these assaults (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/as-part-of-israel-s-return-to-africa-netanyahu-heads-to-liberia-1.5479792).
As Markerweek reported last week, hacker Daniel Kaye testified in his investigation — which took place in Germany — that the operation he carried out was ordered by the CEO of Cellcom Liberia, Avishai Marciano.
One of the controlling shareholders of Cellcom Liberia since its establishment in 2004 until mid-2016 was a secret business empire named LR Group. It was founded by three Israeli former fighter pilots, who monetized on business opportunities that arose out of Angola's 27-year-long civil war, which ended in 2002. After one of the founders, Eitan Stiva, left in 2011 to set up an independent investment fund, the company remained in the hands of the other two founders: Ami Lustig and Roee Ben-Yami. [ ... ]
A rich, anonymous trio -
The three Israelis started LR in the 1980s. They knew each other from Israel Air Force's flight academy, where they trained together to become pilots.
Similarly to other resource-rich African nations that have oil, gold, diamonds or particularly fertile soil, Angola is a paradox of a country full of natural wealth that actually makes its citizens poorer largely due to the involvement of foreigners in its local conflicts and corrupt government.
LR got involved in defense exports in Angola in the mid-80s and spent years massively arming the government there and training its troops. According to a variety of reports, the company sold Sukhoi 27 combat planes, artillery shells, and light weapons to the government. At the same time, the three founders also built airports and security systems and were involved in purchasing a plane for Jose Eduardo dos Santos, a president who ruled in Angola for 38 years through 2017. Some attribute his victory in the war to the country’s aeronautical enrichment, which LR greatly contributed to.
In the 2000s, after the war ended, the ex-pilots sought to break into civilian fields. They entered into infrastructure, technology and agriculture projects; first in Angola and then in other countries. They led ambitious projects to set up dozens of agricultural communities in Angola and Congo, modeling them after the Israeli moshav. Later they set up farms, barns, water purification plans and other agricultural projects in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, and most recently, Chad. They also supported philanthropic work such as orphanages and agricultural boarding schools in Angola — projects which they didn’t fail to share with Israeli media.
The three also dabbled in the medical field, setting up clinics in Angola and a hospital in Ukraine at an investment of tens of millions of shekels. Recently they joined a deal to train a medical team in China.
“This trio seem to be among the richest people in Israel, but because their business is private, people don't know them,” a source familiar with them said.
How wealthy are they? “Every one of them has a billion, maybe more,” the source added.
Throughout the years LR has had cellular companies in countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. The cellular network was operated by Ben-Yami and Lustig since Stiva’s retirement in 2011. The company website says it employs some 2,000 people worldwide. [ ... ]
- image caption: Ami Lustig, right, and Roee Ben-Yami, the owners of LR Group that partly controlled Cellcom Liberia.
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