LUCIANA BOHNE—It was in the 1930s that the Soviet Union built schools, technical institutes, public housing, enormous industrial centers, modernized and mechanized agriculture, and gave Soviet citizens universal health care, education, maternity benefits, affordable housing–and vacations. Unemployment sank to zero. And it was at this time, too, that the second “interference” with popular democracy in USSR occurred, this time Nazi Germany–the ugly face of capitalist “democracy”–playing front man for capitalist interests, providing support for treasonous elements within the USSR–the Trotskists, the petty and rural bourgeoisie, and counter-revolutionary Germano-philes in the military.
IMPERIALISM
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—The irony is that Western leftists will openly admire the Committees to Defend the Revolution (who would certainly get physically involved were Cuba ever to actually have protests) or even the Chavista brigades, yet the Basjii who opposed the Green Movement – which most leftists, including the World Socialist Web Site, agree was a mostly upper-middle class phenomenon – receive none of this support but only scorn, fear and condemnation.
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In Masaya, opposition activists tortured, murdered and burned police officer Gabriel Vado Ruiz and would have done the same to another police officer, Rodrigo Barrios Flores, had he not escaped from his captors after enduring two days of torture and abuse. Although the extreme violence of the armed opposition activists has been responsible directly and indirectly for almost all the loss of life and injuries during the crisis, international news media and human rights organizations continue to falsely blame the government for virtually all the deaths and people injured. Amnesty International and fellow coup apologists such as Bianca Jagger and SOS Nicaragua, along with their allies in corporate media such as the Guardian, Telegraph, Washington Post, New York Times, Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC, all cover up very serious human rights violations by the opposition activists during the failed attempted coup against Nicaragua’s legitimate government.
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JOHN RACHEL—Ron Ridenour’s masterfully-written indictment of U.S. militarism and its take-all-prisoners imperial project is of such breathtaking scope and astonishing depth, it would be hard to exaggerate its value and timeliness, as the foreign policy of the Empire of Chaos now as never before in recorded history, steers the world toward apocalyptic confrontation and puts the survival of the entire human race at risk.
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Fighting Fake Stories: The New Yorker Serves Up A Doozie
17 minutes readJIM KAVANAGH—No slouch in that regard, Obama was first American President to give bunker-buster bombs to Israel—secretly, precisely because he had publicly said Israel had to curtail settlement construction in exchange for such gifts and didn’t want it to be known that he was capitulating. He was also the first American President to demand that “Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state”—a new, gratuitous, and excessive demand, insisted upon by Netanyahu.