ANTI-COMMUNISM

YASHA LEVINE—In the late 1980s, these immigrants — their ideologies, their resources, their organizations, and their American support — started to flow back into their home countries. In the ideological vacuum of post-communism, their reworked ethno-nationalist mythologies flourished. From Latvia to Hungary to Estonia to Croatia — the ideas of nationalist immigrant movements that had been backed and kept warm by America’s security apparatus during the Cold War hold huge sway over their societies today.

RAINER SHEA—By applying his familiar dishonest framing tactics to demonize militant anti-capitalist strains in modern America, Hedges is trying to undermine the strains of our society that seek to carry out practical steps towards revolution. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, especially in the highly militarized United States, will require some amount of violent struggle. As Lenin concluded while he was participating in an actual anti-capitalist revolution, “The replacement of the bourgeois by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.” But Hedges attacks both those who acknowledge the necessity of violence, and those who seek to apply Lenin’s other lessons for building proletarian power.

EDU MONTESANTI—”I hate Evo Morales!” said in July last year in a talk to this reporter, a Santa Cruz de la Sierra-bases out hairdresser woman – without any political justification to that deep sentiment. A white professional at 40 years of age, only hates. She openly hates the first indigenous president in Bolivia’s history.

Cochabamba’s Lawmaker Norma Pierola has been prosecuted for racism for not greeting President Evo Morales in an official activity, late last year. Norma alleged that Morales does not respect women as a president, without any justification for that. On the contrary, the Morales administration is well-known including among critics for granting rights for women, the LGBT community, and indigenous people.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. The Russian…

JOHN FOLLIS—Evidently, the end of the Cold War and the passing of 60-years has not softened America’s attitude toward atheists. According to a 2016 University of Minnesota study, Americans have actually sharpened their negative views. It showed that atheists are still perceived as cultural outsiders who “have rejected cultural values and practices understood as essential to private morality, civic virtue, and national identity.” They were chosen “the most disliked religious minority” in the U.S. Clearly, Eisenhower and company embedded an anti-Atheist cultural bias that still remains strong today.