The problem with progressive left politics in the US is precisely the focus on personalities and heroes.
IMO this is wrong. When you look for heros you get charismatic psychopaths who sell out. Bill Clinton, Obama, AOC, Sanders, Howard Dean.
Heros are not one man or one woman. Heros are every man and woman. Real politics of the left is about empowerment of the masses. Not power for me (and my family dynasty), and you walk behind us and pick up some crumbs when I drop them to you.
No politician is going to save everyone. And any politician who claims to do this is a charlatan.
I appreciate that Jill Stein does not claim to do this. So that is a good start. But people should not put her on a pedestal. Vote for her, but watch and keep her and the Party honest. And dont rely on her personally. There should always be many people involved in leadership and capable of stepping in, and the people should trust themselves and their judgement of reality, not only the words of the figurehead or titular leader of that moment.
Another problem is too much emphasis is put on elections and voting and not enough on organizing in between elections. After consistently electing the lesser of two evils, progressives typically go back to sleep, smug in their self-righteous echo chamber and quick to point out how they warded off the monstrosity on the right.
Also, not enough focus on the "democratic" institutions themself. Voting and having elections isn't sufficient to make institutions democratic.
For those in the USA, Ranked Choice Voting is low-hanging fruit. https://fairvote.org/
Larger changes are needed, but that is an important step forward.
I live under the Dominion of Canada -- while this article is focused on the USA, it really should be focused on FVEY, CANZUS, etc as this Imperialism isn't centered on one single government institution but built into worldviews promoted within the Anglosphere (UK+CANZUS where CANSUZ=Canada, Australis, New Zealand, United States).
I write about "democratic" institutions under the Dominion of Canada regularly.
Please do not ever feel that you are overdoing your efforts allowing all of us to be better aware of the real goings-on in the Empire. As one reader and supporter, I need to know and others who respond today would be of like mind. Being a rationalist, I need to accept the supremacy of reason and have never had one reason to suspect that anything you write will not fill that bill.
Yes, we all know parts of it, but you have the happy knack of putting it all together so thousands of readers can be better informed.
Full marks to you both for that. You do fulfil a need, Caitlin and Tim. Believe me.
If you eat Doritos- you are supporting the empire, if you use a SodaStream, you are supporting empire, if you watch tv or the internet- you are supporting empire, if you drive a Tesla, if you’re a communist, a fascist, a liberal, a conservative, a religious fanatic, a Karen, a hive-mind modem, a voter-you support empire...
Stalin and Pol Pot both killed millions of innocents. Yes, the West also has committed genocide, but it isn't exclusive to the West. It happens to be a sad attribute of the human race. However, the human race is also not just exclusively genocidal. It has also done good things throughout history, and their have been good people, both in the East and West.
Democracy...the worst form of government, always turning into oligarchy, per Aristotle...The US was formed as "a Republic, if you can keep it." Ben Franklin rightly guessed that we couldn't keep it...
As I recall Pol Pot came to power after the US spent years bombing the hell out of Cambodia, and got to power, and stayed in power with the help of the US government. It wasn’t the US who finally ran him out of there. He is better an example of a western-created genocidal leader.
How come that referring to what Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler and all other psychopathic maniacs have done is an argument for the so called “guardians of world peace, democracy and freedom” to do the same? Shouldn’t it be exactly the opposite that “because so and so, we will never do the same”?
Stalin, for all his many world-historic crimes (primarily committed against the working class and peasantry of the USSR) led the successful effort to crush fascism in WWII. As a Trotskyist even I must give him high fives for *that* achievement.
If you put Nancy Pelosi, Victoria Nuland and Nikki Haley in change, you think anything would change? Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton in the past.
Plenty of bloodthirsty, genocidal US women out there in modern history books, not to mention the present news outlets.
"Medevedev's grim bookkeeping included the following tragic episodes: 1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929; 9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands and another 2 to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program; 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine in 1932-1934; 1 million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935; 1 million executed during the ''Great Terror'' of 1937-1938; 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps; 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated during World War II; and at least 1 million arrested for various “political crimes” from 1946 to 1953."
Right, some UK rag is expected to objectively list a few things re Russia.
Especially amusing is "artificial famine" - Stalin just wanted to have some fun. The other events also took place just because he must have had too much Georgian wine. Nothing whatsoever to do with what was happening on the outside - various interventions and Europe's preparation for the war.
Let's see, if Putin decided to switch on Stalin the shit happening in Russia and around it would be over very quickly (as corrupt and bought by the western NGOs collaborators - read traitors - abound in Russia). However, quite a few innocents would be swept as what necessarily happens with such measures. So Putin is "soft" and "flexible", as in "Putin judo", the special kind of judo only Putin knows how to do. That this approach takes time and eventually might lead to many more people killed - including innocents - is beside the point.
Regardless, the west will put Putin down as the greatest dictator. While they actually love having him there - he appears to have a steel jaw. Or, rather, the people are forced to have it for him.
Yeah i dunno a lot of generalization of humankind and a lot to unpack there. we should absolutely assert power and dominion over the oligarchs and assume control from them. calling for mutiny of the armed forces and holding the criminals accountable is a fundamental Good.
Actually, Stalin and Pol Pot shared western values. Stalin's political philosophy didn't arise in Russia. Pol Pot's political philosophy didn't arise in Cambodia. No - they both had a political philosophy which originated in a German gentleman called Karl Marx.
Yet Karl Marx would have been horrified at how his philosophical theses had been misappropriated, in a similar way that fascists and eugenicists misappropriated Darwin's theory of evolution to justify ethnic cleansing
The first recorded genocides are biblical. The Hebrews were instructed by Moses and later by others to slaughter the men women children and even the domestic animals of their enemies.
Modern Israelis, though mostly not descended from the ancient Hebrews, emulate them well in this respect.
Right. Imagine believing the word of God would condone such actions. Imagine thinking God views the world like a game of Risk. I believe the inversions go way way back. I think the Abrahamic narrative structure needs to die. On top of everything else, it stifles the development of true spirituality by convincing you God is somewhere other than inside your mind. Yes, he created you and you are the most amazing of all items in the known universe, but he hid the truth from you and you have to understand this impossible to read book and our sophistry to find it. Also, you must neglect yourself and serve the project,
“Keep America Safe, Secure and Prosperous”? We are none of those things. Perhaps the Oligarchy is, but the vast majority are anything but safe, secure and prosperous. Far too many are sick as well, in one form or another, from our “healthcare” system, which is a misnomer if ever there was one.
Well, as someone who was born behind the Iron Curtain and lived most of his adult life, I am perfectly aware of the dictatorship and its nature. I spent most of my life waiting for the "Free World" to come, it came in 1989 and I have been living in it for 35 years and I gain my experience. After gaining and going through these experiences, I can only spit when someone opens their stinking mouth about "Western values" in front of me, and I only pity the Western people who lived their lives in an Imperial Amphitheater grinning stupidly and thought it was freedom! However, only the ruling class applied the "Panem et circenses" methodology to them, because if they stuffed their stomachs staring at their stupid brainwashing propaganda television, they don't know that they owe their current prosperity to the fact that their rulers subjugated other countries on the planet and thanks to their armies, they can to force the inhabitants of the planet to make the western world live better at the cost of their misery! But the modern Odoaker is already knocking on your doors and one day all empires will fall to dust!
Dr. Andrzej Lobaczewski was deported from communist Poland as a dissident. Once he moved to The Free And Democratic West, he found that communist Poland was practically a hippie commune by comparison.
This sort of thing happened to principled dissidents who behind the iron curtain believed the tales of the West. Solzhenitsyn is one of them to become disappointed and refusing to collaborate.
There’s a great song by Phil Ochs called “I ain’t marching anymore” which speaks to this exact sentiment. We all long for #WorldPeace, but I’m afraid the best we can do at the moment is avoid total nuclear annihilation.
Nothing short of a workers socialist revolution is going to bring an end to the reign of terror the US capitalist class has forced upon the world since the emergence of US imperialism in the 1890s. Workers of the US, Unite! The main enemy of the US working class is not China or Russia but the US capitalist class, their wholly-owned-and-operated two-party "Democracy(TM)" and their Deep State and their war machine. We need to build a revolutionary socialist workers party right here in the Belly of the Imperialist Beast to even begin this struggle. Are you up for it? If yes, let's discuss - openly. Communists are not secret conspirators; we announce our aims publicly because, unlike our pro-capitalist opponents, we have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. Workers Of The World, Unite to Stop World War Three!
Unfortunately we have not worked out a successful way of producing an actual united workers' socialist revolution. Further thought, further imagination, further experimentation seem to be needed. One thing we can count on, though, is that the militarism of Harris, Walz, Trump, and so forth will lead to yet other, newer disasters, so that even the slowest among us may eventually notice the problem and stop expecting heroes to rescue them.
Building a revolutionary socialist workers party is easy compared to leading a successful workers socialist revolution; but the only type of political party that has ever led a successful overthrow of the capitalist class is a Leninist vanguard party: obviously, that is the first critical step in the process. What we need to acknowledge is the impossibility of creating an egalitarian workers state overnight: there must be a period of transition from capitalist to socialist economic forms or else it's almost certain there will be a complete collapse of the economy. This is where both the Stalinists and Maoists screwed up their revolutions.
A nation born in violence tends to major in violence for at least a century and often several. Unfortunately you cannot overthrow the "capitalist class" without violence and that is their specialty. By the time your "revolutionary socialist workers party" has 100 members it will contain at least 5 TLA agents. Whatever happens next is unpredictable in detail but will not be favorable to your aims.
The only violence the working class needs to wield is that which is necessary to defend the workers state from the violence of the deposed capitalist class and its bribed murderous flunkies. As for police infiltration of workers organizations: it has always happened in every nation on Earth but never succeeded in preventing a well-organized revolutionary socialist party from prevailing in the long run.
I’m on board with that idea so long as we’re committed to individual rights and a spiritual conception of humanity. In fact, I suspect the spiritual component is what Marxism has totally whiffed on over the decades. It isn’t all about material. It really isn’t. If we could see ourselves as all instances of something much bigger, maybe we could get outside our own egos and appetites and find a new way.
As for the so-called "spiritual world" that non-materialists insist exists, absolutely no evidence at all has been discovered by wide-ranging scientific inquiry in the past 400 years, which strongly implies that this supernatural/spiritual world exists only in the imaginations of its proponents.
After every successful workers socialist revolution, the deposed bourgeoisie always opens up their wars to drown the revolutions in workers and peasants blood over the issue of - to them - the sacred "rights of the individual" being trampled upon by the victorious worker and peasant masses. In fact, the only "rights of the individual" they care about are the rights of wealthy *capitalist* individuals to run roughshod over the vast majority of working class and peasant individuals in eternal pursuit of the only things the capitalists care about, which are money and the overwhelming political and economic power money can buy.
Actually, *every* successful workers socialist revolution has led to a massive increase in the standard of living for workers and peasants in those countries, even in the face of constant economic, political and military attacks from the imperialist powers. The only new world superpowers to emerge since WWI have all been the products of successful workers revolutions; far and away the most dynamic economic model of all time is the mixed economy of the People's Republic of China.
I don't know much that is definitive about Falun Gong since most of what we are told about their alleged plight comes to us through the anticommunist bourgeois press; but it appears that too many of their leaders have become - wittingly or unwittingly - manipulated by the US and other intelligence agencies in order to provoke insurrectionary conspiracies inside and against Socialist China. With these types of attacks so often being traced back to the CIA and their kind, of course Socialist China tends to respond very harshly to such provocations - which we defend as it is absolutely necessary in order to defend that degenerated workers state from counterrevolutionary insurrection.
There is not one major government on the face of this Earth that is entirely honest. And, yes I am quite aware there is a sub-rosa intel war going on. Insofar as I am able to determine Falun Gong was unpolitical before the repression. Obviously the Empire's media presstitutes will make use of any negative information about the Empire's enemies. Then this information can easily be called Empire propaganda. However enough expat relatives of the disappeared have spoken out to confirm it has actually happened.
Yes a worker-mandated revolutionary workers state, absolutely necessary to crush any attempt by the bourgeoisie or any of its proxies (including their thinly-veiled emanuenses masquerading as "Libertarians") from re-establishing the dictatorship of the capitalist micro-minority.
Revolutionary Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism has nothing at all to do with "crushing" anyone except the most ruthless exploiters and mass-murderers of workers and peasants among the capitalist classes and their hired killer flunkies.
There is a world of difference in class terms - i.e. in the most fundamental terms - between a socialist workers state and a fascist corporatist/militarist capitalist state.
Of course all human beings exist as both individuals AND as members of many collectives: at school, where they work, in their communities and as members of various social classes. Yours is a fine example of non-dialectical thinking which you were taught in schools sponsored and funded by capitalists, where we are taught the primacy of the rights of the individual *capitalists* to rob workers blind if they so desire. Individual workers and peasants have no rights at all except those granted to them by the capitalist government owned and operated by and for the benefit of the wealthiest capitalists.
History demonstrates that all Empires exist and are sustained by violence....As Tacitus wrote two millennia back, "they make a desert and call it peace." Empires are inherently evil, and they harm the empires citizens almost as much as they harm the conquered....
As Diana Johnstone points out in her very important book Hillary Clinton, The Queen of Chaos, the empire fights "spoiler wars". They are not concerned so much with winning as making sure nobody else does. Their ambition to maintain global dominance is no longer there and no longer achievable. They are tilting at windmills.
Biden and Clinton are cut from the same cloth, both liars and vicious warmongers.
Of course. People say that the US lost the War On Iraq, the War On Libya, and the War On Syria.
This is nonsense. Happy horseshit rhetoric aside, the real goal of each of these wars was to turn these countries into failed states. The West succeeded magificiently in the case of Iraq and Libya, and is keeping Syria on slow boil.
Yesterday, I started reading Joe Sacco's "Footnotes in Gaza" and for 45 minutes, I became deeply -- viscerally -- linked to the Palestinian people like never before. It was painful in the most profound sort of way. I was transfixed -- couldn't even sip water or look out a window into sunshine. I came away with tears in my eyes, with psychological scars from just that 45 minutes, and it took me closer to how damaged those poor folks really must be from all the years of nonstop brutalization by Zionist psychopathy. It's an outrage about whose exposition no volume of your prose, verse and art can possibly be excessive.
George Orwell in 1984 predicted this world very accurately. Endless war from southwest Asia to eastern Europe. Repression of dissidents. This day has arrived.
Not only does your reporting and commenting full fill an urgent need of addressing the essential problem. It keeps my heart just soft and open enough not to turn into a cold and dark stone 🙏
Yes, we fight on because we must, no matter what the odds. It helps so much that we have strong like-minded voices to turn to like yours. Your strength and courage, heart and commitment make a difference. Thank you.
"When your progressive hero starts singing the praises of a monster like Cheney, it’s time to find different heroes."
I've found a better hero than genocide-enabling Bernie Sanders. Her name is Dr. Jill Stein. She's fighting hard for people, planet and peace.
Anyone who is endorsed by Dick Cheney or who praises Dick Cheney's endorsements is suspect. WMDs anyone?
The problem with progressive left politics in the US is precisely the focus on personalities and heroes.
IMO this is wrong. When you look for heros you get charismatic psychopaths who sell out. Bill Clinton, Obama, AOC, Sanders, Howard Dean.
Heros are not one man or one woman. Heros are every man and woman. Real politics of the left is about empowerment of the masses. Not power for me (and my family dynasty), and you walk behind us and pick up some crumbs when I drop them to you.
No politician is going to save everyone. And any politician who claims to do this is a charlatan.
I appreciate that Jill Stein does not claim to do this. So that is a good start. But people should not put her on a pedestal. Vote for her, but watch and keep her and the Party honest. And dont rely on her personally. There should always be many people involved in leadership and capable of stepping in, and the people should trust themselves and their judgement of reality, not only the words of the figurehead or titular leader of that moment.
Its the only way.
Another problem is too much emphasis is put on elections and voting and not enough on organizing in between elections. After consistently electing the lesser of two evils, progressives typically go back to sleep, smug in their self-righteous echo chamber and quick to point out how they warded off the monstrosity on the right.
Also, not enough focus on the "democratic" institutions themself. Voting and having elections isn't sufficient to make institutions democratic.
For those in the USA, Ranked Choice Voting is low-hanging fruit. https://fairvote.org/
Larger changes are needed, but that is an important step forward.
I live under the Dominion of Canada -- while this article is focused on the USA, it really should be focused on FVEY, CANZUS, etc as this Imperialism isn't centered on one single government institution but built into worldviews promoted within the Anglosphere (UK+CANZUS where CANSUZ=Canada, Australis, New Zealand, United States).
I write about "democratic" institutions under the Dominion of Canada regularly.
https://mcormond.blogspot.com/2021/01/lets-work-to-fix-parliamentary-flaws.html
Please do not ever feel that you are overdoing your efforts allowing all of us to be better aware of the real goings-on in the Empire. As one reader and supporter, I need to know and others who respond today would be of like mind. Being a rationalist, I need to accept the supremacy of reason and have never had one reason to suspect that anything you write will not fill that bill.
Yes, we all know parts of it, but you have the happy knack of putting it all together so thousands of readers can be better informed.
Full marks to you both for that. You do fulfil a need, Caitlin and Tim. Believe me.
If you eat Doritos- you are supporting the empire, if you use a SodaStream, you are supporting empire, if you watch tv or the internet- you are supporting empire, if you drive a Tesla, if you’re a communist, a fascist, a liberal, a conservative, a religious fanatic, a Karen, a hive-mind modem, a voter-you support empire...
communists do not support empire. (see 'calling harris communist...'- cpusa is not communist, acp is).
Pretty much. WE ARE the West!
Genocide is a Western value. See history.
Stalin and Pol Pot both killed millions of innocents. Yes, the West also has committed genocide, but it isn't exclusive to the West. It happens to be a sad attribute of the human race. However, the human race is also not just exclusively genocidal. It has also done good things throughout history, and their have been good people, both in the East and West.
But they didn't pretend to be "democracies" either!
Democracy...the worst form of government, always turning into oligarchy, per Aristotle...The US was formed as "a Republic, if you can keep it." Ben Franklin rightly guessed that we couldn't keep it...
And it's quite a bit more involved than the way it's presented in the West.
Like, let me see Stalin's plan to just kill his own people, just for the heck of it, why not.
indeed, stalin's millions come from empire's history books. pol pot was cia backed.
As I recall Pol Pot came to power after the US spent years bombing the hell out of Cambodia, and got to power, and stayed in power with the help of the US government. It wasn’t the US who finally ran him out of there. He is better an example of a western-created genocidal leader.
Using "someone else did it worse" is an argumentum ad hominem and therefore a logical fallacy.
Except I didn't say that. Putting words into someone's mouth is a strawman fallacy.
How come that referring to what Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler and all other psychopathic maniacs have done is an argument for the so called “guardians of world peace, democracy and freedom” to do the same? Shouldn’t it be exactly the opposite that “because so and so, we will never do the same”?
Stalin, for all his many world-historic crimes (primarily committed against the working class and peasantry of the USSR) led the successful effort to crush fascism in WWII. As a Trotskyist even I must give him high fives for *that* achievement.
Thank You, Jamenta. We visited the Tuol Sleng museum as a family, for the lesson.
Yes, but the genocidists of today are so open about it, with cheering sections in MSM.
It's because humans have a bad habit of putting macho men in charge of everything.
If you put Nancy Pelosi, Victoria Nuland and Nikki Haley in change, you think anything would change? Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton in the past.
Plenty of bloodthirsty, genocidal US women out there in modern history books, not to mention the present news outlets.
More like these men, and those women who follow them, put themselves in charge.
THATCHER!
🙏🏼
Stalin did not “kill millions”
How Many People Did Joseph Stalin Kill? https://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kill-1111789
"Medevedev's grim bookkeeping included the following tragic episodes: 1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929; 9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands and another 2 to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program; 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine in 1932-1934; 1 million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935; 1 million executed during the ''Great Terror'' of 1937-1938; 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps; 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated during World War II; and at least 1 million arrested for various “political crimes” from 1946 to 1953."
Right, some UK rag is expected to objectively list a few things re Russia.
Especially amusing is "artificial famine" - Stalin just wanted to have some fun. The other events also took place just because he must have had too much Georgian wine. Nothing whatsoever to do with what was happening on the outside - various interventions and Europe's preparation for the war.
Let's see, if Putin decided to switch on Stalin the shit happening in Russia and around it would be over very quickly (as corrupt and bought by the western NGOs collaborators - read traitors - abound in Russia). However, quite a few innocents would be swept as what necessarily happens with such measures. So Putin is "soft" and "flexible", as in "Putin judo", the special kind of judo only Putin knows how to do. That this approach takes time and eventually might lead to many more people killed - including innocents - is beside the point.
Regardless, the west will put Putin down as the greatest dictator. While they actually love having him there - he appears to have a steel jaw. Or, rather, the people are forced to have it for him.
Are you having a laugh, jamenta?
Genocide is definitely NOT an “attribute of the human race.”
Humans are fundamentally good, though capable of bad. Humans who aspire to power and dominion are fundamentally bad, though capable of good.
Yeah i dunno a lot of generalization of humankind and a lot to unpack there. we should absolutely assert power and dominion over the oligarchs and assume control from them. calling for mutiny of the armed forces and holding the criminals accountable is a fundamental Good.
Actually, Stalin and Pol Pot shared western values. Stalin's political philosophy didn't arise in Russia. Pol Pot's political philosophy didn't arise in Cambodia. No - they both had a political philosophy which originated in a German gentleman called Karl Marx.
Yet Karl Marx would have been horrified at how his philosophical theses had been misappropriated, in a similar way that fascists and eugenicists misappropriated Darwin's theory of evolution to justify ethnic cleansing
Yes it was the Vietnamese communists who overthrew the Pol Pot regime
Ok, then Genghis Kahn, Mao Zedong, Holodomor ...
Right, tell us about Holodomor, regurgitate what Ukrainian Nazis came up with as part of their revving up towards the current situation.
Yes. But I am Western. May the Cambodians deal with their own. Finding atrocity elsewhere while denying its own is another western trait
To dikran Tulaine,
👏👏
Also an Eastern value. See history. China is commiting genocide as we speak but no one talks about that. Funny.
I talk about it a lot, actually. But I live here, vote here and try to change, here.
The first recorded genocides are biblical. The Hebrews were instructed by Moses and later by others to slaughter the men women children and even the domestic animals of their enemies.
Modern Israelis, though mostly not descended from the ancient Hebrews, emulate them well in this respect.
Right. Imagine believing the word of God would condone such actions. Imagine thinking God views the world like a game of Risk. I believe the inversions go way way back. I think the Abrahamic narrative structure needs to die. On top of everything else, it stifles the development of true spirituality by convincing you God is somewhere other than inside your mind. Yes, he created you and you are the most amazing of all items in the known universe, but he hid the truth from you and you have to understand this impossible to read book and our sophistry to find it. Also, you must neglect yourself and serve the project,
Yeah. And I think the Christian world took to Deuteronomy like ducks to water. And used it against the Jews. Not all the world is Abrahamic though.
“Keep America Safe, Secure and Prosperous”? We are none of those things. Perhaps the Oligarchy is, but the vast majority are anything but safe, secure and prosperous. Far too many are sick as well, in one form or another, from our “healthcare” system, which is a misnomer if ever there was one.
100 percent agreement. The USSA/NATO/MIC needs to die.
Well, as someone who was born behind the Iron Curtain and lived most of his adult life, I am perfectly aware of the dictatorship and its nature. I spent most of my life waiting for the "Free World" to come, it came in 1989 and I have been living in it for 35 years and I gain my experience. After gaining and going through these experiences, I can only spit when someone opens their stinking mouth about "Western values" in front of me, and I only pity the Western people who lived their lives in an Imperial Amphitheater grinning stupidly and thought it was freedom! However, only the ruling class applied the "Panem et circenses" methodology to them, because if they stuffed their stomachs staring at their stupid brainwashing propaganda television, they don't know that they owe their current prosperity to the fact that their rulers subjugated other countries on the planet and thanks to their armies, they can to force the inhabitants of the planet to make the western world live better at the cost of their misery! But the modern Odoaker is already knocking on your doors and one day all empires will fall to dust!
Dr. Andrzej Lobaczewski was deported from communist Poland as a dissident. Once he moved to The Free And Democratic West, he found that communist Poland was practically a hippie commune by comparison.
This sort of thing happened to principled dissidents who behind the iron curtain believed the tales of the West. Solzhenitsyn is one of them to become disappointed and refusing to collaborate.
There’s a great song by Phil Ochs called “I ain’t marching anymore” which speaks to this exact sentiment. We all long for #WorldPeace, but I’m afraid the best we can do at the moment is avoid total nuclear annihilation.
Yours faithfully,
I love his "We're The Cops Of The World."
And don’t forget, another one of his best, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.”
Nothing short of a workers socialist revolution is going to bring an end to the reign of terror the US capitalist class has forced upon the world since the emergence of US imperialism in the 1890s. Workers of the US, Unite! The main enemy of the US working class is not China or Russia but the US capitalist class, their wholly-owned-and-operated two-party "Democracy(TM)" and their Deep State and their war machine. We need to build a revolutionary socialist workers party right here in the Belly of the Imperialist Beast to even begin this struggle. Are you up for it? If yes, let's discuss - openly. Communists are not secret conspirators; we announce our aims publicly because, unlike our pro-capitalist opponents, we have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. Workers Of The World, Unite to Stop World War Three!
100% agree.
Unfortunately we have not worked out a successful way of producing an actual united workers' socialist revolution. Further thought, further imagination, further experimentation seem to be needed. One thing we can count on, though, is that the militarism of Harris, Walz, Trump, and so forth will lead to yet other, newer disasters, so that even the slowest among us may eventually notice the problem and stop expecting heroes to rescue them.
Building a revolutionary socialist workers party is easy compared to leading a successful workers socialist revolution; but the only type of political party that has ever led a successful overthrow of the capitalist class is a Leninist vanguard party: obviously, that is the first critical step in the process. What we need to acknowledge is the impossibility of creating an egalitarian workers state overnight: there must be a period of transition from capitalist to socialist economic forms or else it's almost certain there will be a complete collapse of the economy. This is where both the Stalinists and Maoists screwed up their revolutions.
A nation born in violence tends to major in violence for at least a century and often several. Unfortunately you cannot overthrow the "capitalist class" without violence and that is their specialty. By the time your "revolutionary socialist workers party" has 100 members it will contain at least 5 TLA agents. Whatever happens next is unpredictable in detail but will not be favorable to your aims.
The only violence the working class needs to wield is that which is necessary to defend the workers state from the violence of the deposed capitalist class and its bribed murderous flunkies. As for police infiltration of workers organizations: it has always happened in every nation on Earth but never succeeded in preventing a well-organized revolutionary socialist party from prevailing in the long run.
I’m on board with that idea so long as we’re committed to individual rights and a spiritual conception of humanity. In fact, I suspect the spiritual component is what Marxism has totally whiffed on over the decades. It isn’t all about material. It really isn’t. If we could see ourselves as all instances of something much bigger, maybe we could get outside our own egos and appetites and find a new way.
As for the so-called "spiritual world" that non-materialists insist exists, absolutely no evidence at all has been discovered by wide-ranging scientific inquiry in the past 400 years, which strongly implies that this supernatural/spiritual world exists only in the imaginations of its proponents.
After every successful workers socialist revolution, the deposed bourgeoisie always opens up their wars to drown the revolutions in workers and peasants blood over the issue of - to them - the sacred "rights of the individual" being trampled upon by the victorious worker and peasant masses. In fact, the only "rights of the individual" they care about are the rights of wealthy *capitalist* individuals to run roughshod over the vast majority of working class and peasant individuals in eternal pursuit of the only things the capitalists care about, which are money and the overwhelming political and economic power money can buy.
There is a lot of room between the US causing war, being corrupt, and "we need a workers revolution."
That has been tried and failed repeatedly.
Actually, *every* successful workers socialist revolution has led to a massive increase in the standard of living for workers and peasants in those countries, even in the face of constant economic, political and military attacks from the imperialist powers. The only new world superpowers to emerge since WWI have all been the products of successful workers revolutions; far and away the most dynamic economic model of all time is the mixed economy of the People's Republic of China.
Yes tell that to the many thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in China who have been disappeared into the gulag and the organ banks.
I don't know much that is definitive about Falun Gong since most of what we are told about their alleged plight comes to us through the anticommunist bourgeois press; but it appears that too many of their leaders have become - wittingly or unwittingly - manipulated by the US and other intelligence agencies in order to provoke insurrectionary conspiracies inside and against Socialist China. With these types of attacks so often being traced back to the CIA and their kind, of course Socialist China tends to respond very harshly to such provocations - which we defend as it is absolutely necessary in order to defend that degenerated workers state from counterrevolutionary insurrection.
There is not one major government on the face of this Earth that is entirely honest. And, yes I am quite aware there is a sub-rosa intel war going on. Insofar as I am able to determine Falun Gong was unpolitical before the repression. Obviously the Empire's media presstitutes will make use of any negative information about the Empire's enemies. Then this information can easily be called Empire propaganda. However enough expat relatives of the disappeared have spoken out to confirm it has actually happened.
State-Mandated Socialism ?
Yes a worker-mandated revolutionary workers state, absolutely necessary to crush any attempt by the bourgeoisie or any of its proxies (including their thinly-veiled emanuenses masquerading as "Libertarians") from re-establishing the dictatorship of the capitalist micro-minority.
If you're still thinking about crushing people you haven't gotten the idea yet.
Revolutionary Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism has nothing at all to do with "crushing" anyone except the most ruthless exploiters and mass-murderers of workers and peasants among the capitalist classes and their hired killer flunkies.
state-mandated = coerced
not really any67 different than fascism
There is a world of difference in class terms - i.e. in the most fundamental terms - between a socialist workers state and a fascist corporatist/militarist capitalist state.
collectivist terms
You treat people as classes
I treat them as INDIVDUALS
Of course all human beings exist as both individuals AND as members of many collectives: at school, where they work, in their communities and as members of various social classes. Yours is a fine example of non-dialectical thinking which you were taught in schools sponsored and funded by capitalists, where we are taught the primacy of the rights of the individual *capitalists* to rob workers blind if they so desire. Individual workers and peasants have no rights at all except those granted to them by the capitalist government owned and operated by and for the benefit of the wealthiest capitalists.
Bernie Sanders, the official face of progressivism in mainstream US politics, actually said the words “I applaud the Cheneys”
LOL
History demonstrates that all Empires exist and are sustained by violence....As Tacitus wrote two millennia back, "they make a desert and call it peace." Empires are inherently evil, and they harm the empires citizens almost as much as they harm the conquered....
As Diana Johnstone points out in her very important book Hillary Clinton, The Queen of Chaos, the empire fights "spoiler wars". They are not concerned so much with winning as making sure nobody else does. Their ambition to maintain global dominance is no longer there and no longer achievable. They are tilting at windmills.
Biden and Clinton are cut from the same cloth, both liars and vicious warmongers.
Of course. People say that the US lost the War On Iraq, the War On Libya, and the War On Syria.
This is nonsense. Happy horseshit rhetoric aside, the real goal of each of these wars was to turn these countries into failed states. The West succeeded magificiently in the case of Iraq and Libya, and is keeping Syria on slow boil.
Death to U.S. hegemony !
Thank you Caitlin. You nailed it.
I’m sickened by this shit every day.
But I don’t have 1,000kg bombs being dropped on my tent. I don’t fear my children being ripped to shreds at any moment.
So I have to keep raising my voice any way I can.
Yesterday, I started reading Joe Sacco's "Footnotes in Gaza" and for 45 minutes, I became deeply -- viscerally -- linked to the Palestinian people like never before. It was painful in the most profound sort of way. I was transfixed -- couldn't even sip water or look out a window into sunshine. I came away with tears in my eyes, with psychological scars from just that 45 minutes, and it took me closer to how damaged those poor folks really must be from all the years of nonstop brutalization by Zionist psychopathy. It's an outrage about whose exposition no volume of your prose, verse and art can possibly be excessive.
George Orwell in 1984 predicted this world very accurately. Endless war from southwest Asia to eastern Europe. Repression of dissidents. This day has arrived.
Not only does your reporting and commenting full fill an urgent need of addressing the essential problem. It keeps my heart just soft and open enough not to turn into a cold and dark stone 🙏
Yes, we fight on because we must, no matter what the odds. It helps so much that we have strong like-minded voices to turn to like yours. Your strength and courage, heart and commitment make a difference. Thank you.