DIANA JOHNSTONE—Historically, Westernizers in Russia have repeatedly gained influence and then lost out, because their overtures to the West were rebuffed on one pretext or another. (The British geopolitical tradition, based on the timeless dictum divide et impera, has traditionally favored policies to keep the continent divided) This merges easily with the Brzezinski doctrine of maintaining separation between Western Europe as a whole and Russia to maintain U.S. global hegemony. Western rejection of Russia naturally favors a rise of the Slavophiles. It also obliges Russia to look to Eurasia rather than Western Europe. This is happening again.
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The 75 Years’ War Against the Soviet Union
STEVEN JONAS—”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…”
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The death of reformism: Corbyn and the “broad left”
CHRIS MARSDEN—The Blairite think-tank, Prospect, proclaims, “Social democracy, the most influential force in European politics for decades, is dying.” They should know, because the party they dubbed “New Labour” was in the vanguard of the political shift to a nakedly pro-business, pro-privatisation, pro-austerity and pro-war agenda that has ended in electoral meltdown. The working class, particularly the younger generation, has abandoned the old parties in disgust at what they have done.
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Political Dynamite: Poor People’s Campaign and the Movement for a People’s Party
PATRICK WALKER—My prediction is that the forces of political revolt will eventually coalesce, resulting in the real resistance movement an extremist Trump presidency should have awakened; whether they’ll do so in time to ward off nuclear or climate catastrophe is anybody’s guess. But the elements of real, fruitful revolt (not Democrats’ largely symbolic McResistance) are now in place, and my modest task here is simply to raise consciousness about the “dynamite” political potential of fusing those elements.
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MLK: A Snap Shot in Time
GLEN FORD—The myth of the “Black Church” as the central player in the huge social transformations of the 1960s begins with the false testimonials that poured from pulpits and Black radio microphones on that Sunday, April 7th, 1968 — and have soiled the historical record ever since. Accommodation with Power — not transformation or liberation — was the watchword of the Black church, then as now.
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Daring to go beyond Western propaganda on the Great Leap Forward’s famine
RAMIN MAZAHERI—Hunger should be treated in the same way as a natural disaster; Iran’s biggest curse is earthquakes and, were it not for vast anti-Iran sentiment, many more would learn about our similarly amazing, socialist-inspired techniques for dealing with the aftermaths of earthquakes. The Chinese Communist Party has seemingly done the impossible – ended the scourge of famine in China.
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Building Movement Politics Means Fighting Democrats
GLEN FORD—We are enveloped in a toxic miasma of Russia-hate that, by sheer weight and repetition, has infested every aspect of American political thought, distorting and subverting even the most progressive-minded “movements” struggling to find a way towards human dignity under late stage capitalism in a profoundly racist country. Voices for peace and social justice are asphyxiated in the pestilential plume — unless they find their own air.
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