IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE

At 81, the great Harpal Brar, Indian-born but long a resident of Britain, communist party founder, and revolutionary theorist, is without a doubt one of the few remaining great Marxist-Leninist thinkers of the old school. In his political career, he has fought not just the capitalist enemy, but all forms of fake and theoretically erroneous leftism, from anarchism to social democracy and Trotskyism, along with communist revisionism (which undermined and eventually contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union from within). This chat with Harpal is simply to be prized. Brar’s work deserves attention and our gratitude. We are glad Caleb Maupin arranged to make this interview widely available to activists everywhere. 

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JACQUES PAUWELS—In 1943, after victories in Stalingrad in the spring and Kursk in the summer, it was obvious that, slowly but surely, the Red Army was on its way to Berlin. That is when the Americans and British, who had been sitting on the sidelines as a titanic war raged along the eastern front, decided it was high time to open a “second front” in France, so the Soviets would not defeat Nazi Germany and liberate all of Europe on their own – and reap the benefits of that achievement. While it must be acknowledged that, in the final year of the war, following the Normandy landings, the Americans and the other western allies did make a significant contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany, that triumph was due in the very first place to the herculean efforts and huge sacrifices made by the Russian and other peoples of the Soviet Union during four long years, starting on that fateful 22nd of June, 1941.

MOA—ince December 2019 the United States has a Space Force as one of eight branches of U.S. Armed Forces. Each of those branches has lots of higher ranking officer positions. All people who are put into those want a lucrative board seat at some weapon manufacturer when they retire. They will only get one if they manage to create enough revenue for those manufacturers while they are still in uniform.

The new command therefore needs new weapons. Otherwise there will be no revenue for the weapon manufacturers and no lucrative board seats for retired officers. But spending tax dollars on weapons requires at least some nominal justification. There needs to be a threat that requires new weapons to counter it. Thus we are presented with an onslaught of UFO rumors and silly grainy videos.

Ben Norton was invited to give this talk about the fake left and imperialism. He discusses how the CIA’s “woke” recruitment ad is not new; it is rooted in an “intersectional imperialist” history going back to the first cold war, in which the CIA poured money into cultivating anti-communist, pro-imperialist progressive groups, using fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and billionaire-funded foundations like Ford and Rockefeller. Ben goes through the book “The Cultural Cold War,” and talks about supposed “leftist” CIA assets like feminist leader Gloria Steinem and Trotskyite civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, then analyzes examples of astroturfed, Nonprofit Industrial Complex-backed pseudo-left campaigns in the US, Western Europe, and Latin America.