GROVER FURR—n the January – February 2023 issue of Current Affairs there appears an article titled “Stalin Will Never Be Redeemable/” Its subtitle reads: Stalin was socialism’s worst enemy. History is easily forgotten, so nostalgia for the “Man of Steel” needs to be guarded against. A person who knows of my long interest in Joseph Stalin and the “Stalin years” of Soviet history alerted me to this article when it appeared online. He wondered what my response to Skopic’s accusations against Stalin might be.
I have been studying the Stalin period of Soviet history for many years now I decided to write a response to Skopic’s article because it is a brief compendium of many of the allegations made against Stalin not only by overtly pro-capitalist and anticommunist writers, but by persons who are, or wish to be, or think that they are, on the anti-capitalist Left.
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JIMMY DORE SHOW—The January 6 Committee would have us believe that the hundreds of January 6 “insurrectionists” were violent extremists bent on staging a coup and overthrowing the U.S. government. But now that Tucker Carlson has been granted access to the 40,000+ hours of footage, the Fox News host has provided an alternate viewpoint — and he shows how the committee outright lied to the American public about the nature of the protests, the extent of the violence and the participation of undercover FBI agents in encouraging protesters to enter the Capitol.
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A must-watch video for anyone who cares about the preservation of freedom and truth. In his entire career, Glenn Greenwald has never produced a more urgent, lucid, or braver anatomy of disinformation in the modern age. Let this program stand as a guide to the manufacturing of lies in support of tyrannical power everywhere, and especially in the United States.
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JOHN GERASSI—Che Guevara had no illusions about what this will mean in Latin America. He wrote: “The present moment may or may not be the proper one for starting the struggle, but we cannot harbor any illusions, we have no right to do so, that freedom can be obtained without fighting. And these battles shall not be mere street fights with stones against tear-gas bombs, nor pacific general strikes; neither will they be those of a furious people destroying in two or three days the repressive superstructure of the ruling oligarchies. The struggle will be long, harsh, and its battlefronts will be the guerrilla’s refuge, the cities, the homes of the fighters–where the repressive forces will go seeking easy victims among their families–among the massacred rural populations, in the villages or in cities destroyed by the bombardments of the enemy.”
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DOROTHY LENNON—In the past, I’ve written about how late night comedians are the court approved jesters of the oligarchy. When I post my commentary, someone usually asks, “But what about John Oliver? He is usually better.” No, he’s not. My analysis is applicable to the HBO host. During the 2016 election, he castigated those who dared to venture outside the two corporate parties. When dissecting Green Party nominee Jill Stein’s proposal to cancel all student debt, he compared it to Donald Trump’s proposal to compel Mexico to pay for a border wall. Recently, he defended and omitted information about transgender athletes and puberty blockers for children being peddled by Big Pharma.
