WITNESSES TO HISTORY

PATRICE GREANVILLE—He called Biden, Obama and Clinton warmongers to their faces in 2008. They laughed, but he wasn’t joking. Watch this clip from a 2008 election debate closely, and see how fellow presidential candidates with the thinly-veiled help of the whore media neutralize the spot on criticism of US foreign policy by Sen. Mike Gravel. The political whores on the panel, including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama laugh nervously as Mike Gravel accuses them of warmongering against Iraq, Iran and other nations.

ANDRE VLTCHEK—One of the vilest fabrications has been those which were unleashed against the young Soviet Union, a country that emerged from the ruins of the civil war fueled by the European, North American, and Japanese imperialist interests. Foreign armies and local violent gangs were destroying countless cities and villages, robbing, raping, and murdering local people. But determined acts to restore order and elevate the Soviet Union from its knees, dramatically improving lives of tens of millions, was termed in a derogatory way as “Stalinism”. The label of brutality was soon skillfully attached to it.

MICHAEL J CARLEY—The Great Patriotic War began at 3:30am on 22 June 1941, when the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Seas with 3.2 million German soldiers, organised in 150 divisions, supported by 3,350 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, 600,000 trucks, 2,000 warplanes. Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Spanish, Slovakian forces, amongst others, eventually joined the attack. The German high command reckoned that Operation Barbarossa would take 4 to 6 weeks to finish off the Soviet Union. In the west, U.S and British military intelligence agreed. Besides, what force had ever beaten the Wehrmacht?

JEFF J. BROWN—David is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. His articles have been published by OpEdNews (where he is also an active editor), The Greanville Post (where he is senior contributing editor), The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Global Research, and many other publications on the left. David is active in social issues relating to peace, race relations and religious freedom, homelessness and equal justice. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete for Peace, CodePink, and International Solidarity Movement. David is also a founding member of the Bioweapon Truth Commission and has contributed to its Global Online Library

RAMIN MAZAHERI—Despite their absurd claims, the vanguard party concept is not anti-democratic. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel had truly universal support from every Cuban (in Cuba) I asked because he rose level by level by repeatedly showing his competence as a civil servant. The same goes for Xi of China (as I will soon remind). Nobody expected a low-ranking cleric like Khamenei to take over for Khomeini, but he has repeatedly showed his competence and abilities; go tell the tens of millions shouting “Khamenei rahbar” (Khamenei the leader) that socialist-inspired democracy, with both direct and indirect, hasn’t worked out well. In post-1917 countries one rises to the 1% via actual competence, and not just by buying elections, as in the West.