ANTI-COMMUNISM

DUNCAN GRAHAM—There are around three million ethnic Chinese in the country according to Indonesian government statistics, though some academics claim the real number is three to four times greater. Whatever, tiny figures in a population of 270 million. Yet the Orang Tionghoa wield huge business influence, drawing resentment which sometimes turns violent.

STUART SCHRADER—In the case of Indonesia, General Soekanto, the first director of the country’s national police, was among the most favored U.S. intelligence assets in the 1950s. Unlike other national police executives who emphasized improved crime control an objective when seeking U.S. aid, Soekanto acknowledged that Indonesia’s program was singularly focused on “reducing Commies.” It began with assistance to the Mobile Brigade or Mobrig, a 20,000-man specialized unit of the national police (125,000 total), considered the most reliable instrument to carry out the U.S. political agenda.

GROVER FURR—In the first 12 chapters of my book Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ (2015). I check – verify, to prove or disprove – as many of the statements made by the defendants at the Moscow trials as I could. Earlier in 2018 I published an updated version of this research as a separate book, The Moscow Trials As Evidence. We have overwhelming evidence that the defendants in the Moscow Trials were indeed guilty of at least those crimes to which they confessed. In fact, in some cases – e.g. that of Nikolai Bukharin – we now know that the defendants were guilty of crimes to which they never confessed. We also have a lot of evidence now that confirms that Leon Trotsky was indeed collaborating with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, as accused in the Moscow Trials.

YASHA LEVINE—See, getting captured by the Nazis isn’t so bad! Hand in your vintovki comrades and surrender while you still have time! The reality of course was that if you were captured you’d either be either shot or die a horrible death by freezing, starvation, slave labor, and disease. In Mauthausen, for example, the Nazis mass starvation and machine gunning operation reached such epic proportions that all the rotten blood and guts contaminated the local water supply. But that wasn’t not the PR line Leonid’s new masters wanted to circulate!

PATRICE GREANVILLE—Anti-Stalinism has served for many decades as psychological and disinformation shorthand (not to mention ubiquitous battering ram) for anti-Sovietism, and, in general, anticommunism. Therein lies its immense value to Western capitalist propaganda. It is clear that once you successfully implant the false equation that Stalin’s sins—as proclaimed by his legion of detractors— equals communism, the rest is straightforward: it’s far easier to demonise a man than a whole complex system which many people, despite the unrelenting propaganda, find intriguing and often, when capitalist brutality and indecency show their true face, downright attractive.