BIG BROTHER FACEBOOK: DRAWING DOWN THE IRON CURTAIN ON YANKEEDOM

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By BRUCE LERRO

POSTED BY BARBARA MACLEAN / PERSPECTIVES / 14 JUN 2018 | PLANNING BEYOND CAPITALISM

Leading a double life

When my partner, Barbara, first opened an account on Facebook, she used it in a way that most people in Yankeedom use it. Her network was an eclectic assortment of family, current and former workmates, new and old friends, neighbors and relatives living in other parts of the country. Most of what was posted on this account were pictures of kids, dogs and kitty cats, vacations, dinner outings, jokes – nothing too controversial. Like most members of Yankeedom, religion and politics were off limits. However, there was a kind of politically unconscious assumption operating that liberal values prevailed and that somehow the Democratic Party embodied those values. I nicknamed her Facebook account the “Suzy Cream Cheese” account after the Mothers of Invention’s album because it only dealt with surface preoccupations.As the most recent US presidential primaries heated up and people took sides about Hillary, Bernie and Jill Stein, the Suzy Cream Cheese page started to be “not nice”. The political unconscious became conscious. The assumption was that all women – in the name of feminism – should vote for Hillary. My partner thought this was a very shallow understanding of feminism and posted an article she wrote that was published in a number of online radical newsletters titled, “Feminism is Bigger Than Gender: Why I’ll Be Happy in Hell Without Hillary.” Oh dear. After she posted that article on Facebook, she got the cold shoulder and lost a couple of friends. Around that time she opened up a second “political” Facebook account and started adding to it a whole new group of far-left friends and acquaintances. She continued posting “suitable for family viewing” comments with her Suzy Cream Cheese account while posting and responding to socialist and communist posts on her political account.

The Two Faces of Facebook

Neither Barbara nor I are sociologists of social media or specifically of Facebook, so what follows is experiential. However, we do know a thing or two about how capitalist institutions operate in general and Facebook is no exception.The primary purpose of Facebook is to sell ad space to marketers. But how do you reach the Yankee public? You make it easy for Yankees to set up individual accounts so that Yankees can do what we do best—talk about the micro world of family, dogs and friends. In the process, hopefully people will purchase some of the products or services touted in the ads. Facebook has also made it possible for individuals to join groups and set up pages that then allow them to place ads to publicize their group or organization. For Facebook, reading groups, hobbies and support groups are fine.

If you're a woman, says Facebook, this is your only natural and permissible choice.

But Facebook has encountered a problem that many other capitalist institutions have. The problem is that you can set up the conditions for selling your products, but you can’t control people’s motivation for buying the product, (joining a group or setting up a political page) or what they will do with the product (what kind of group they will form). Facebook could even tolerate political groups. But the political imagination of Facebook consists of Republicans and Democrats. What Facebook had not counted on is the proliferation of political groups that exist outside both parties. As most of you know, there are many anarchist groups, Leninist groups, social democrats and even council communist groups. On the right there are all sorts of nationalist and fascists groups. It is safe to say that Facebook, as a capitalist institution, does not want to host these groups but until recently has not been able to do anything about it.

Planning Beyond Capitalism Meets Suzy Cream Cheese Facebook

Six years ago Barbara and I co-founded an organization called Planning Beyond Capitalism. The name pretty much says what we are up to. As an anti-establishment organization our main problem was, and still is, outreach. We stumbled and bumbled our way with the help of some anti-establishment social media whizzes who convinced us we could reach a lot more people through placing ads on Facebook. Facebook calls it “boosting”. At first, we were skeptical because the language used in placing an ad on Facebook seemed to have nothing to do with politics. They were ads for businesses. They encouraged us to “pick the right brand” and “target our audience” for best “market return”. We weren’t a business and we weren’t a non-profit. The best category we could find was “community organization”.

One of the things we do on Planning Beyond Capitalism is to select one article from a left-wing news source and write one post and commentary each day. We call this “Capitalist News Interpreted”. We publish these posts daily on Facebook, but don’t “boost” them. But every couple of months or so we write a longer article, in which we make an analysis of world events, mostly in the United States, from the perspective of our organization. We put these in the category of Perspectives. Over the course of two or three years we found four or five political newsletters in which to publish our perspectives. In addition, we decided to “boost” those perspectives on Facebook.

Our pattern was to boost our perspective for one week for the cost of $30.00 to run for one week. This money came out of our own pockets. We were able to select our demographics – age, gender, interests – and we could post it to almost any country in the world. In selecting our audiences when we first started boosting our posts, the choices of “anarchism” and “socialism” were available for us to select. Typically, in a single week we reached about ten thousand people – with a ratio of people in that audience of people who “liked” our perspective from about 20% to 33%. The number of “shares” in a week ranged from 75 to about 250 depending on the article. In the process of doing this, we began hearing from people in other parts of the world. Some of those people then began to write for us.

We were pretty amazed that Facebook approved of virtually all our perspectives in 2016 and 2017 despite our anti Democratic Party, anti-capitalist slant. Here are some of our titles:

No Pink Wooly Caps for Me

Open Letter to the Sandernistas: The Political Revolution Continues – Hearts, Bodies and Souls

Planning Beyond Capitalism meets Big Brother Facebook

Things began to change for us on Facebook when I published an article on April 1st of this year claiming the Democratic Party was worse than the Republican Party for 90% of the population. After we posted a link to it on our Facebook page we tried to boost it.

Greater of Two Evils: Why the Democratic Party is Worse than the Republican Party for 85% of the U.S. Population

Facebook rejected our ad and we contested that rejection. They said it was sensationalistic, involved hate speech and promoted violence. We contested this rejection and after two arguments from us, won our appeal. We ran the ad for two weeks because of its popularity. It reached 38,000 people, had many hundreds of shares and we gained about 100 new followers.

The next article we published was written by an Iraqi comrade of ours living as a citizen in Russia. The article was about why Russians are upset with Americans.

Why Russians are Upset With Americans – Seen Through the Eyes of an Iraqi

This ad was again disapproved by Facebook but for different reasons: it was “political”. We contested this as well. Below is our argument:

We have been boosting posts on FB for 2 years. Every single one of them has political content. Why is this particular one being singled out? However, this is the first article that we’ve published about Russia, written by someone living in Russia. We believe that you are not authorizing this ad because it is a favorable account of the Russian people, which does not conform to the Democratic Party’s anti-Russian ideology. This article was written by a Russian citizen and is written from his own observations and viewpoint. Furthermore, his sources are documented and it is neither sensationalistic nor violent. We are not advocating for Russian foreign policy. We are talking about average Russian citizens. If you read the article, you would see that your response is exactly the reasons Russians are upset with Americans. Their experiences are suppressed, while we maintain the stereotypes of them as in the cartoon image that leads the article. This, to us, constitutes blatant discrimination.

Facebook’s response was a boilerplate line about what constitutes a political post. Their policy about political ads had changed as of May 7^th 2018. It implied that their disapproval had nothing to do with its content. It was because the category was “political”. We were told that in order to consider having our ad approved, we had to register as a political organization. In order to do this we needed to:

Be citizens of the United States
Provide proof of citizenship
Provide a residential address
Provide a drivers license number
Provide a Social Security number

All this – simply to place a political ad. Doesn’t this sound like we are registering to be investigated by the FBI or CIA? Oh, no that’s just left wing paranoia.

Further, they said it would take up to six weeks to verify this and to approve out ad. But not to worry, they would delete all our information once it checked out.

As the author of the article on Russia, Jamal, pointed out, his other two articles that had been accepted by Facebook were far more political than the one they just rejected. But that was before their change of policy. Jamal rightfully pointed out that the rejected article was more historical, sociological and cultural than political. However, the upper middle class honchos of Facebook, having taken one class in political science in the United States, cannot tell the difference between sociology, political economy, and culture. Their formula is:

Russia = political = bad

America = Democratic Party = good

To paraphrase an old country tune, “Take this job and shove it”, we told Facebook to “take your political registration and shove it”.

No, there is no “Iron Curtain” in the US. That is for Russians.

Our Analysis of Facebook

We think it is reasonable to suspect that Facebook wants to get rid of its “political underground”, the groups that exist beyond the two party system. Why? For one thing people at both extremes of the political spectrum are not likely to buy the products that are advertised on their pages. The second reason is that our ads are chump change for them. Getting rid of us will cost them close to nothing in revenue. The third reason is political. Facebook, like most media institutions is committed to the Democratic Party. Cleaning its house of “Fake News” (the news and opinions of the socialist or fascist sides of the spectrum) will steer people back to reasonable choices like the Democratic Party. It is our belief that this change in policy requiring organizations like ours to register as political groups has occurred in 2018 is, in part, because this is an election year.

There are other indicators Facebook is closing ranks. In selecting an audience for our article, we noticed the choices given under political interests on the left, the furthest left available to choose was “very liberal”. There was no socialist choice even though a self-proclaimed socialist ran as a Democratic in the 2016 primaries.

If anyone reading this has recommendations for alternatives to Facebook that would allow us to place political ads to broaden our reach, please contact us. It’s time for those of us on the far left to find an alternative to Big Brother Facebook.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bruce Lerro has taught for 23 years as an adjunct professor of psychology at Dominican University, Golden Gate University, and Diablo Valley College. He is the author of two books about early human societies: From Earthspirits to Sky-Gods: The Socio-Ecological Origins of Monotheism, Individualism, and Hyper-Abstract Reasoning and Power in Eden: The Emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

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The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the end of American liberalism

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To this day, RFK remains a controversial figure in US history. Vilified and distrusted by many for his fierce anti-communism, and collaboration with the HUAC, Roy Cohn and a bunch of McCarthy-type undesirables, he is also seen by many Americans as a late-blooming tribune of the people.

Dateline: 6 June 2018

Fifty years ago, early in the morning of June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, only hours after winning the Democratic presidential primary in California by a narrow margin over Senator Eugene McCarthy. Kennedy was shot three times, in the head, neck and abdomen, and the head wound, which scattered bullet fragments throughout his brain, proved fatal. He died nearly 26 hours later, at 1:44 a.m. on the morning of June 6. He was only 42 years old.

The murder of Robert Kennedy was only one of a series of political upheavals that made the year 1968 the most explosive and event-filled since the end of the Second World War. The year began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which staggered the Johnson administration and fueled antiwar sentiment in the United States; first Eugene McCarthy and then Kennedy entered the presidential race, challenging Johnson for re-nomination and leading to his announcement on March 31 that he would not run for reelection. Just four days later, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr., the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking rioting in major cities throughout the United States. Throughout this period, college campuses were convulsed by protests over Vietnam, racism and police violence.

The year 1968 marked the most intense crisis of the American political system since the Great Depression, and it came as the culmination of major gains by the working class during the post-World War II period. Workers had fought through the great class battles of the 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s to build industrial unions and increase their living standards. This was the driving force of a broader democratic development, particularly the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the demands for equal rights for women, an end to the persecution of gays, the 18-year-old vote and other progressive reforms.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his period came to an end with the Vietnam War, in which millions of American youth, mainly from the working class, were drafted and sent to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia against a popular national liberation movement. The American ruling class under Lyndon Johnson initially attempted to combine “guns and butter,” but when forced to choose, sought to defend its world position at the expense of the working class at home. The Democratic Party, which was the dominant of the two big business parties from the Depression through the heyday of the post-war boom, was ripped to pieces by the resulting conflicts.

One of the most striking manifestations of this period of crisis was the series of assassinations—President John F. Kennedy in 1963, civil rights militant Malcolm X in 1965, then Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy only two months apart in 1968. The cumulative effect of these murders was immense. Millions were embittered and alienated from the entire official political system, viewing these tragic events, whatever the immediate circumstances, as part of an effort to cut off potentially progressive social reforms and strengthen the domination of conservative and right-wing forces.

Robert Kennedy’s death in particular marked the end of the period, going back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, in which the Democratic Party presented itself as the party of quasi-social democratic reform, promoting economic measures that would improve the living standards of the working class as a whole, white, black and immigrant, while setting certain limits on the domination of big business. This period—between the inauguration of Roosevelt and the assassination of Robert Kennedy—was only 35 years, far shorter than the 50 years that have transpired since.

It is ironic that an individual who began his career as a Catholic anticommunist, the privileged son of a multi-millionaire sympathizer of the Nazis, should come to stand on the left wing of the Democratic Party and make an appeal to the working class. Robert Kennedy's career personified the contradictions of the Cold War liberalism of the Democratic Party, a fatal effort to marry a “progressive” liberal agenda with anti-communism and imperialist militarism.

His political activity encompassed the anticommunist witch-hunt, where he worked side-by-side with Senator Joseph McCarthy, to his work as US attorney general in the early 1960s, where he both aided the civil rights movement and authorized FBI wiretapping of Dr. King, to his role as a US senator from New York, supporting the social reforms of the Johnson administration while increasingly coming into opposition with its war policies in Vietnam.

There is little doubt that Kennedy was profoundly affected by his brother’s killing and that he privately believed the assassination was carried out by elements in the national security apparatus that he himself had once served. But he was also a man of his class, acutely sensitive to the deep and potentially explosive social divisions in American society. His reformism, like that of Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, was aimed not at overcoming capitalism, but saving it, even if that meant imposing modest sacrifices on the ruling elite for its own good.

This reformist stage of American political development effectively ended with the second Kennedy assassination. That this was a significant turning point in history was reflected in the outpouring of mourning. While the killing of Robert Kennedy did not have as much of a shock effect as the assassination of his older brother—in the case of Robert Kennedy there was a greater element of despair and withdrawal—millions of people lined the route between New York City and Washington as a train brought his casket for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Never again would a Democratic presidential candidate be able to make such a wide appeal to working class voters of all races. Subsequent nominees, even those posing as “left” such as George McGovern in 1972, did so on foreign policy or cultural grounds, not economics, and had little to offer the working class.

When Edward Kennedy sought to reprise his brother’s role in his 1980 challenge to the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, the effort fell flat. American capitalism, in the grips of the second global oil crisis in a decade, no longer had the resources, let alone the appetite, for any significant social reform. The ruling class was turning sharply to the right, towards Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States, and the scrapping of what remained of the welfare state.

Those Democrats who became president after Robert Kennedy’s death—Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008—were all cut from the same cloth: fiscally conservative, distant from the working class, pro-corporate, intent above all on demonstrating their bona fides to the military-intelligence apparatus and Wall Street. Every Democratic president since RFK has either scrapped even a pretense of domestic social reform or else, like Obama, offered counter-reforms that would actually reduce living standards and social benefits while seeking to disguise them as progressive (Obamacare, school “reform,” etc.)

The perspective of liberal reform was viable only during the period in which American capitalism enjoyed a dominant and even unchallenged position in the world economy. That period has long ended. The defense of jobs, living standards and democratic rights, as well as what remains of the social conquests of the past such as Social Security and Medicare, requires the independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system, in complete opposition to all factions of capitalist politics, including the discredited remnants of Democratic Party liberalism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Martin is a senior political analyst with wsws.org, a Marxian publication.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Ukraine – The Babchenko Hoax Was Part Of A Corporate Raid

DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY “B”

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Dateline: June 01, 2018

The case of the death and resurrection of the Russian journalist A. Babchenko in Kiev is even more surreal than it seemed so far. According to Ukrainian sources and court documents the whole hoax was part of an attempt to raid and take over a private company. High levels of the Ukrainian security services staged the whole affair not only to blame Russia but also for someone's personal gain.

In 2017 Arkady Babchenko, despised in Russia for his open hostility against its people, came via Israel to the Ukraine. He was welcome in Kiev for his anti-Russian position. Babchenko found a job with ATR, a Crimean Tatar TV station. The fine-print on the ATR website says that it "was supported by the Media Development Fund of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine".

On May 29 the Ukrainian government claimed that Babchenko had been assassinated. As usual the death of a journalist hostile to Russia was used by NATO aligned media to blame Russia, the Kremlin and Putin. That there was zero evidence that Russia was involved did not matter at all. A photo of the allegedly killed Babchenko laying in his blood emerged.

Crisis actor Arkady Babchenko at work

The very next day the General Prosecutor of the Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko and the head of the National Security Service (SBU) Vasyl Grytsak (also written as Hrytsak) held a press conference and presented a very alive and happy Arkady Babchenko. He had not been shot at all. The whole hoax, it was explained, was launched to find the people behind an alleged assassination campaign originating in Russia. In this official version the Russians hired some Ukrainian "operator" who then hired the "killer" to assassinate Babchenko. The hired killer told the police about it and the hoax of Babchenko's death was staged to find the culprits behind the plot.

All those western "journalists" who had believed Ukrainian government claims without any evidence and wrote unfounded accusations against Russia were not amused. The Ukrainian government exposed them as the mere propaganda tools and fools they are. The "journalist" Babchenko himself, interviewed by Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky, comes off as a naive and rather dim light.

Yesterday the "hired killer", one Alexey Tsymbalyuk, went public. He is a Ukrainian nationalist who had fought against the the Russia supported entities in eastern Ukraine. He has since become an orthodox priest.

via Alec Luhn Would an operator for Russia hire an Ukrainian nationalist and priest who had fought Russian aligned entities in east-Ukraine to kill a well known anti-Russian figure? Hmmm.

The SBU did not confirm that Alexey Tsymbalyuk is the "killer" but Ukrainian media seem to believe him.

The General Prosecutor of the Ukraine named one Boris German (also written Herman) as the Russian paid "operator" who had hired Alexey Tsymbalyuk to kill Arkady Babchenko.

Boris German denies that he worked for Russia.

According to Strana.ua (Russian, machine translation), Jewgenij Solodko, the attorney of the accused "operator" Boris German, rejects the accusations against his client. Boris German (the man) is co-owner of a Ukrainian joint venture with the German (the country) company Schmeisser (also written Schmyser or Shmyser) which produces optics for sniper rifles. German's company had good relation with his customers at the Ukrainian defense ministry. He had also supported the "anti-terror-operations" of Ukrainian nazi formations against the "Russians" in the east.

The attorney says that over the last six month German's apartment and company had been searched by the SBU several times. The SBU, he alleges, shook German down for some $70,000. The SBU, he writes, had not presented any evidence of any Russian involvement. The attorney denies, according to the Strava.ua report, that his client had any connection with Russians.

Meduza's report on German's court appearance presents a slightly different version:

The man charged with trying to organize the murder of the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko announced in court on Thursday that he was acting as a Ukrainian counterintelligence agent.German says he started cooperating with Ukrainian counterintelligence after he was approached by an “old acquaintance” living in Moscow who “works at a Putin foundation, organizing unrest in Ukraine.” German says he was told to learn more about the flow of Russian money into Ukraine funding certain politicians and “terrorist groups.”

According to reports in the Ukrainian media, German said his acquaintance in Russia is named either Vyacheslav Pivovarkin or Vyacheslav Pivovarnik. It’s still unclear if German accuses this person of ordering Babchenko’s murder.

It is curious that the attorney makes claims which are partly contradicting those made by his client.

The killing, the killer and the operator who hired the killer were all fakes. Arkady Babchenko, Alexey Tsymbalyuk and Boris German all worked with the Ukrainian security service. All seem to have anti-Russian credentials.

But wait, the mess gets even deeper.

In our piece yesterday we laid out how the Ukrainian plot and other recent incidents were arranged to discredit Russia just in time for the start of the soccer World cup in Russia. It turns out that this was only one aspect of the hapless plot.

Bloomberg writer Leonid Bershidsky points to a piece by one Volodymyr Boiko, a "parachuting instructor in Kiev", who describes (in Ukrainian) an even darker level of the story.

Boiko quotes from official Ukrainian court reports giving their case numbers and dates. He starts (machine translated):

Just do not laugh. The imitation of the "murder" of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, which caused such anger in international diplomatic and human rights circles, was a way to resolve the corporate dispute between the founders of the Ukrainian-German joint venture "Schmayser", whose head Boris Herman, SBU head Grytsak and the Prosecutor General Lutsenko was declared the customer of murder and terrorist, acting on the tasks of Russian special services.

The court papers show that the whole affair started in February 2016 and was about an attempt to take over a company. Since 2016 German, the executive director of the company, was fighting off creditors including the founder of the company. These creditors alleged that German, or the company he led, had not paid back some loans and demanded to take over the company to cover their losses. German argued that the loan had been repaid and produced receipts. The creditors said that they were counterfeit. Several cases and many motions were filed and the whole court case ran for nearly two years. German seems to have won it.

Such attempt to take over a company via fraudulent court claims have been a distinct feature of the "wild east" after the Soviet Union broke apart. In Russia, in the Ukraine and elsewhere fraudulent legal cases, physical raids, intimidation and murder were regular means to grab industrial assets. As such the German case is nothing remarkable. But its further development into an absurd hoax makes it special.

As their attempt to raid German's company through a court campaign over minor loans failed, the raiders, with SBU chief Grytsak seemingly behind them, thought out a different way to go after German. Hence the Babchenko hoax and the "operator" allegations.

Volodymyr Boiko continues (machine translated):

But "getting" Herman through the police his opponents could not, because judges consistently refused to choose a precautionary measure due to the insignificance of the crime. And then the order was taken by the Department of Counterintelligence of the SBU. Apparently, it is a primitive provocation directed at the arrest of the head of the joint venture "Schmyser" in order to take away the share of the authorized capital of the enterprise, which he, according to the opponents, owns unlawfully.

The story Boiko tells is consistent with the claims German's attorney made about long ongoing SBU raids of German's apartment and company. The court paper Boiko cites seem valid. It likely is a real part of the Babchenko story, but it still may not be the whole truth.

The staged murder, with a fake cadaver, a fake killer and a fake operator behind it, was endorsed (video) at the highest levels of the Ukrainian government.

"Western" media used the hoax to accuse and defame Russia and its president Putin without the slightest supporting evidence. That alone is already a serious mess and reveals the utter failure of "western" journalism and media.

The background of the case, a takeover of a company by illegal means, demonstrates the total social failure of the "western" coup in Ukraine. The worst of the worst, robber barons like Poroschenko and criminal bankers like Kolomoisky went on to steal billions of "western" aid while the Ukrainian state fell apart. Defying the courts, the power of the state is secretly abused for slapstick worthy plots to grab up industrial assets.

The victims are the people of Ukraine who were robbed of their means and their security. Russia, the permanent boogeyman of the "west", is least to blame for it.

Posted by b on June 1, 2018 at 12:33 PM | Permalink

SELECT COMMENTS

Well done b, how the fok did you see that angle?
Nevertheless, the whole story defies imagination, I mean the scrips are wilder than a 3rd rate Hollywood flick, but maybe the Ukrainian Idiot unservices watch.
Ukraine has debased itself (Further) with this, the already known connections to the vile scumbag at Bellincat, Elliot Higgins, made people wary. Now they are not wary, but fully aware of the lies.
If we keep on being bombarded like this, eventually I will doubt who I am.

Posted by: Den Lille Abe | Jun 1, 2018 12:48:46 PM | 1

funny how the US/UK-established vassal puppet regime in ukraine closely resembles the ones in africa and south america. i guess you can export sociopathic ayn rand thinking anywhere and have it turn out roughly the same.

good work. it's always fun to be reminded what actual journalism looks like.

Posted by: the pair | Jun 1, 2018 1:46:23 PM | 2

thanks b... that is pretty impressive how insane and whacked out all of these ukrainian nationals are, not to mention how they have succeeded in providing another example of how the msm at present is a real joke... i am sure the reporters are not impressed though.. the fact this story is as convoluted as it is tells me how messed up ukraine and the west are at this point.. all there attempts to smear and frame russia are looking very unstable at this point.. add this to the pile of bs that includes the white helmets, syrian defense, moderate headchoppers, and etc. etc.. i think the point is already passed where ordinary people don't trust the media as they might have in the past.. this story helps in that regard..

Posted by: james | Jun 1, 2018 1:49:35 PM | 3

I don't believe a word of it, this is Banderastan Orthodox Easter.

Posted by: jsn | Jun 1, 2018 2:00:43 PM | 4

It is also possible that the Russian intelligence have cynically organized the fake murder affair with the aim of ridiculing and discrediting the western media and the western intelligence and their impatient leaders.
It could be Russia's revenge on the Skripal affair.

Posted by: Virgile | Jun 1, 2018 2:20:44 PM | 5

The EU should get serious about admitting Ukraine to the club. It would mean much less paperwork for lonely European bachelors and there would be an immediate boom in the camouflage clothing and partially used military equipment business.

If only Poland could be a bit more reasonable about Galicia.

Posted by: dh | Jun 1, 2018 2:21:27 PM | 6

Am a bit confused. Was it Boris Herman the German who headed the joint venture who is referred to as 'German' in the following text? His fellow victims being SBU head Grytsak and the Prosecutor General Lutsenko? The bad guys being unnamed creditors..?

Posted by: mbur | Jun 1, 2018 2:49:37 PM | 7

Some insignificant imperfections:
line 5: ... As usual the death of a journalist hostile to Russia ...
line 27: ... the German (the country) company Schmeisser ...
line 45: ... was only one aspect ...Other than that, another fine piece of investigative reporting!

Posted by: xor | Jun 1, 2018 2:51:43 PM | 8

About the Author

"b", whom some think is a German citizen named "Bernhard" is Moon of Alabama's founding editor.

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

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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The 75 Years’ War Against the Soviet Union

Part 1
The 75 Years War Against the Soviet Union, Part 2

One of many statues honoring Lenin even today. (CC BY-SA by andresmh)

For the Greanville Post, submitted on May 21, 2018

By Steven Jonas

made it clear that they were ignoring it .

Outside of Russia, it has been widely noted that the Soviet Union, which was established as a result of the October Revolution, lasted only 75 years. Many observers, capitalist or socialist or other, have taken some satisfaction in this occurrence. Many Marxist-Leninists, including myself, took and have taken the demise of the Soviet Union with sadness. However, some of us, at least, recognize that among Lenin’s many great contributions to the understanding of human history and how it works is the concept of “two steps forward/one step back.”

Oliver Cromwell, a member of the petty rural nobility, but standard-bearer of the rising mercantile bourgeoisie (“middle class”) carried out the first popular and—in limited terms—successful revolt against a reigning monarch, the revolution culminating in regicide a full century before the French beheaded their own king. Both social revolutions—despite important changes in the political and cultural fabric—eventually were rolled back as the bourgeois merely wanted to join the privileged classes, not eliminate them.

Indeed, what can be considered as the first capitalist revolution against the then predominant feudal order (or a variant of it) can be said to have been the Cromwellian Revolution in England, 1640-61. To be sure, it did not represent industrial capitalists, for the industrial revolution would not get underway until the mid-18^th century. But it did represent the rising mercantile capitalists — and it failed. Now one could have said at the time, “see, capitalism will never work; feudalism and royal primacy in government will always be the systems of state control.” And one would have been wrong. In judging what happened in the Soviet Union, one should certainly take the Cromwellian lesson intro account.

Now Lenin for the most part applied his “two steps forward/one step back” formula to what was happening in the early development of the Soviet Union that occurred during his lifetime that was cut short so tragically. But in my view (and perhaps Lenin’s too) the concept can be applied, not simplistically of course, but applied never-the-less to the overall development of socialist revolution (as happened in the development of capitalism). And let us hope that that is the case. For if socialist revolution does not begin to develop around the world, fairly soon, our species and many others will be gathered up in what I have termed “The Suicide of Capitalism.”

There is another model for what some see as a road to socialism and that is the Chinese hybrid socialist-capitalist system. But the Soviet approach, at least until it became corrupted (in the literal sense of the word), was intended to build a purely socialist state, at the time. Which failed, as is well-known. But it did not fail on its own. For, for the entire 75 years of its existence it was confronted by what will someday come to be known as “The 75 Years’ War Against the Soviet Union.”

In this series of two columns I will VERY briefly review/list the major events in that major war that was waged by Western Capitalism/Imperialism against the Soviet Union. It was mainly non-military (with the exception of the Great Patriotic War, 1941-45). But nevertheless, it was a war which had the very definite aim of overthrowing the Soviet system. I list below its major elements. In Part 2 of this column, I will discuss each one in a bit of detail. Of course, a full treatment would require much more space than we have here. Indeed, a book could well be written on the subject (and some have, albeit indirectly). But this can be considered to be a start on a subject which has been widely ignored. In my view, however, it has to be taken into account in any accounting of what happened in and to that great socio-historical experiment known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Major Elements of the 75 Years War:

“The Intervention,” on the side of the “White Russian” resistance to the Red Revolution, began almost immediately after its initial success in overthrowing the Provisional Government.
After the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921, the Western Powers were slow to recognize the Soviet government. The United States was the last to do so, in 1933.
During the rise of Nazi German militarism, the two major Western powers, France and Great Britain refused to negotiate any joint defense pacts with the Soviet Union.
The “non-intervention” policy of the Western Democracies” (including the United States) in the Spanish Civil War made the continuing anti-Soviet policy clear.
Then came Munich; https://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/dr-js-bf-commentary- no-160-peace-in-our-time-obamas-munich/10178-dr-js-bf-commentary-no-160- peace-in-our-time-obamas-munich.
1941-45, Anglo-American cooperation with the SU.

But the delayed opening of the Second Front in France was interpreted by some as confirming this approach.
Anti-Soviet policy was under development before WWII was over. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/wipe-the-ussr-off-the-map-204-atomic-bombs-against-major-cities-us-nuclear-attack-against-soviet-union-planned-prior-to-end-of-world-war-ii/5616601)
The atomic bombing of Japan was not necessary for the US to win there. A major factor was the aim of U.S. policy to keep the Soviet Union a) out of Japan and b) from enabling the Korean Resistance to take over the whole peninsula from the justly hated Japanese occupiers (See my Korea column for text.)
Stalin wanted peaceful co-existence, to occur after the end of World War II. (His approach is detailed in a book entitled Stalin’s Wars(https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300136227/stalins-wars).

11 . Interference to prevent the development of pro-Soviet but non-Soviet sphere of influence European govts.: in the Italian election in 1948, in the Greek civil war.

Churchill’s Declaration of the Cold War in the famous “Iron Curtain” speech.
U.S. post-war German policy: unilateral currency reform; setting up the GFR; the Berlin Blockade.
The Hungarian counter-revolution of 1956. The Arrow-Cross.
The Cuban “Missile-Crisis.”
The maintenance of the Cold War even during the major diversion for the U.S. of the War on Viet Nam.
Carter/Brzezinski and Afghanistan: “We will create the Soviet Union’s Viet Nam.” And they did.
Leading to the Reaganite Final Arms Race.

(open source)

Part 2

Flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

The Major Elements of the 75 Years War:

What has been called “The Intervention,” on the side of the “White Russian” resistance to the Red Revolution, began almost immediately after its initial success in overthrowing the Provisional Government. It was an armed counter-revolution led by the principal capitalist/imperialist power of the time, Great Britain. Winston Churchill was a leading promoter of the Intervention. Among the other nations involved were the United States, Japan, Romania, China, Greece, Serbia, Italy, and Canada.

After the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921 (and the withdrawal from Soviet territory of the Intervening nations), the Western Powers were slow to recognize the Soviet government. The United States was the last to do so, in 1933.

As the Nazi threats to peace in Europe developed in the mid-1930s, the Soviet Union offered on a number of occasion to negotiate an anti-Nazi pact, primarily with the two major Western powers, France and Great Britain. They consistently refused. Indeed, in both countries there was considerable pro-Nazi political sentiment.

The “non-intervention” policy of the “Western Democracies” (including the United States) in the Spanish Civil War made the continuing anti-Soviet policy clear. One major factor in these Western powers’ refusal even to send arms to the Spanish Republican government was that the Spanish Communist Party was a significant component of the governing coalition of the Spanish Republic. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany not only sent weapons but also fought on the side of the Spanish fascist rebellion. The Soviet Union played a limited role—albeit critical on several occasions, in supplying arms to the Republic.

Then came Munich . With Nazi Germany threatening to invade Czechoslovakia the Soviet Union offered military assistance to the Czechs, as well as the British and the French, in order to thwart the invasion. In fact, the Red Air Force was warming up on airfields just across the Czech border, ready to fly to the aid of the Czech army. But for Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, it was more important to keep Hitler pointing east, towards the Soviet Union, a declared enemy from the time of Mein Kampf— the famous “Drang Nach Osten” — than it was to save the Czechs from the Nazis. After vainly trying, on numerous occasions, to get the British and the French to sign a joint defense pact against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union finally gave up. With the signing of the “Nazi-Soviet pact” on August 25, 1939, they bought time against what they knew was eventually going to come from the Nazis.

The Nazi invasion — Operation Barbarossa— was launched on June 22, 1941. It was the only “hot” component of The 75 Years War.

The delay by the United States and Great Britain in opening of the Second Front in France on June 6, 1944, was interpreted by some as being content to let the Soviet Union bleed, especially after it had won what came to be recognized as the turning point of the Second World War, victory in the Battle of Stalingrad, on February 2, 1943. In the course of the War, all told, the Soviet Union lost between 25 and 27 million dead, military and civilian. Total U.S. military casualties in World War II amounted to about 400,000. The Soviet losses—military and civilian, and not counting housing and infrastructure, was comparable to the death of all the inhabitants of Texas, California and New York at the time, a tragedy so vast (and so rarely visualised by Western publics, especially the Americans), that the mind simply boggles. It is noteworthy that much of the animosity of the Western public toward Russians and their lack of empathy for their suffering is essentially built on constant hostile propaganda.

There are claims that a resumption of anti-Soviet military policy .was under development before WWII was over. On the fringe of such an attempt, it was well-known that when the right-wing U.S. General George Patton captured large numbers of German troops on the Southern flank of the U.S. front, thinking that his army, with them, might keep going East, he first had them stack their weapons rather turning them over for disposal. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower put an end to that maneuver as soon as he heard of it.

The atomic bombing of Japan was not necessary for the US to win there. A major factor was the aim of U.S. policy to keep the Soviet Union a) out of Japan and b) from enabling the Korean Resistance to take over the whole peninsula from the Japanese occupiers. As World War II was coming to a close, the Soviet Union was poised to invade Japan and its then colonial possession, Korea, on August 8, 1945. One motivation for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) was to foreclose the possibility that the Red Army would establish a foothold on Japanese territory (the first landings were to be on the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido) and would quickly take over the whole of the Korean Peninsula.

Stalin wanted peaceful co-existence, to occur after the end of World War II (see Chap. 10 of Stalin’s Wars, by Geoffrey Roberts, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). The Western Powers would have none of it.

In the immediate post-war period, there was interference by the Western powers to prevent the development of pro-Soviet governments in the non-Soviet sphere of influence in Europe: U.S. interference in Italian election in 1948, and British intervention in the Greek civil war. (The Communists there had borne the brunt of the guerilla war waged during the Nazi occupation and wanted their rightful place in the post-war government. Denied that, war broke out.)

Churchill’s reputation as a great man is largely the product of sycophantic ruling class propaganda, on both sides of the Atlantic. In truth the man was a devious, self-promoting cold-blooded imperialist warmonger and anti-communist who once even advised the RAF to bomb Iraqi villages that failed to pay their assigned tribute.

Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946, just 6 months after the conclusion of the Second World War, with the surrender of Japan, has always been shaped by the Western powers as describing something that the Soviet Union under Stalin had done. Since Stalin was still hoping for the establishment of peaceful co-existence between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers, that speech was really the opening major salvo — from the Western side — in what became the “Cold War,” the continuation of what became the 75 Years War that lasted until the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992.

U.S. policy Western Europe confirmed for the USSR that the Cold War was fully underway: unilateral German currency reform; setting up the German Federal Republic; the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 is always presented in the West as failed revolt by democratic forces against the communist government of Hungary. From the perspective of the Hungarian Communist side, however, the picture was rather different (The Truth About Hungary: Facts and Eyewitness Accounts, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957). From that perspective, it was a neo-fascist revolt by the forces that had ruled Hungary from 1919 to 1945 (first under the world’s first fascist dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, at the end under the even-more vicious Arrow Cross, who were hanging known communists from street lamps in downtown Budapest). That had to be put down, even it meant calling in Soviet tanks.

The “Cuban-Missile Crisis:” See Appendix I.

In the late 1970s, there was a secular revolt in Afghanistan and free elections were held for the first time. The Communist candidate, with Soviet backing (in this strategically-located, neighboring country), was elected. He proved to be not a very effective leader. And then so the Soviets promoted a replacement for him, provoking a certain amount of unrest. Led by his notoriously anti-Soviet National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. President Jimmy Carter determined to begin providing major support for a wide variety of anti-Communist or just anti-government Afghani as well as foreign forces (one group of fundamentalist Saudis was led by the future famous Osama bin Laden). Brzezinski famously said: “we can give them their Viet Nam.” And they did. It turned out to be one of the last phases of the 75 Years’ War.

All of this, and many other events of the Cold War, led to the Reaganite Final Arms Race of the 1980s, which in the end spent the Soviet Union into the ground, and collapse. With an economy 1/6 the size of the American, every dollar spent by Washington on weapons implied a $6-dollar effort by the Russians. Not to mention that the arms industries, being in private hands in America, as a capitalist nation, have a built-in interest in constant growth, with wars—real and most often manufactured—the best approach for extraordinary profits to all members of this malignant sector. In the Soviet Union, and still in Russia, the arms industry is basically controlled by the state.

The ultimate aim of Western Imperialism, the destruction of the Soviet Union was achieved. Of course, Russia has remained in place, and still functions to some extent as a rival to Western Imperialism. But it is in the form of a “clash of capitalisms,” nothing like that grand Soviet historical experiment, aiming to replace capitalism with socialism.

I have a distribution list for my columns. If you would like to be added to it, please send me an email at sjtpj@aol.com.

About the Author

The Planetary Movement; a contributor to the “Writing for Godot” section of Reader Supported News; and a contributor to From The G-Man. Furthermore, he is an occasional contributor to BuzzFlash Commentary Headlines and The Harder Stuff. He is also a triathlete (34 seasons, 250 multi-sport races).

Dr. Jonas’ latest book is Ending the ‘Drug War’; Solving the Drug Problem: The Public Health Approach, Brewster, NY: Punto Press Publishing, (Brewster, NY, 2016, available on Kindle from Amazon, and also in hardcover from Amazon). His most recent book on US politics is The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel (Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, Brewster, NY), and available on Amazon. This book is currently being serialized on OpEdNews, a project that will likely continue throughout the 2017 calendar year.
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