ANTI-COMMUNISM

In absolute unison with the revolutionary Cuban people, the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH) calls on the entire world to remain alert and oppose the interference that the U.S. government and its cronies intend to apply in Cuba. We send a warning about the implications of the recent campaign for a “humanitarian corridor” that the United States is promoting under the pretext of the pandemic, because Cuba is not only a unique country in the South, which, in addition to being among the first in the world in the vaccination ranking, thanks to its universal policies of humanistic health care and high professionalism, has one of the lowest death rates for the pandemic. Cuba has supported dozens of countries with their offering of humanity assistance to save lives, while the so called “humanitarian interventions” imposed by the United States are all about occupations, designed only to bring about destruction, misery and the most atrocious violations against the dignity of nations and individuals.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The US actively works to bribe, bully and manipulate international governments into protecting and advancing its interests. When the US was seeking UN authorization for the Gulf War in 1991, Yemen dared to vote against it, after which a member of the US delegation told Yemen’s ambassador, “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast.” Yemen lost not just 70 million dollars in US foreign aid but also a valuable labor contract with Saudi Arabia, and a million Yemeni immigrants were sent home by America’s Gulf state allies.

Or take the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which began in 1997 as an independent international body working toward the elimination of chemical weapons from the world with great success. That all changed in 2002 when the OPCW Director General, José Bustani, became viewed by the Bush administration as an obstacle to the agenda to manufacture international support for the Iraq invasion. The US threatened to cut off funding for the organization, Undersecretary of State John Bolton threatened Bustani’s kids, and Bustani was sent packing. Now the OPCW is a lackey of the US war machine whose leaders actively manipulate chemical weapons investigations to produce results which align with US imperialist interests.

CALEB MAUPIN—Forerunners of the “color revolutions”, Caleb discusses the CIA-supported Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Czech “Prague Spring” of 1968, the latter term symbolising the coming in from the frozen cold of communist tyranny. Every nation that heeded the capitalist siren song of the West became a corrupt neoliberal regime, warns Caleb. And each of these regimes were at the time of their birth hailed as great improvements over communism by many people who still define themselves as being anti-imperialist and “on the left”.

WM. ASTORE—And I thought Marxism was about class conflict, about seizing the means of production from the rich capitalists and ensuring an equitable distribution of wealth to the workers. Marxism is supposed to witness a withering away of the state as societal hierarchies are flattened or leveled in the cause of creating a more equitable and just society. Nowadays, Marxism has become a bogeyman term of great elasticity, associated with anything somebody doesn’t like that can be further tarred with labels like “liberal” or “leftist.”

The other great problem with this fantasy is the terrible relationship the Trump administration had with the truth. This president’s lies surpassed a list  of more than 20,000 false “facts”, which ended with the assault on the Capitol building in Washington because he and his followers opposed the verifiable reality of an election that Joe Biden won.