blows

Blows Against Empire—2021 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

2021 was marked, from start to finish, as a year dominated by the pandemic and its attendant dramas, including vaccination, variants, and lockdowns. When the prior year had come to a close, journalists and writers had described 2020 as the “plague year” or the “lost year.” Although 2020 was defined by the onset of the pandemic and over two million deaths attributed to COVID-19, this was nothing compared to the all-encompassing, inescapable pall that COVID cast over the year 2021.

The pandemic has dealt a particularly heavy blow to residents of the world’s greatest imperialist power, where over 880,000 US citizens have perished. The country’s failure to care for the well being of its people — particularly when juxtaposed with the success of China, where about 875,000 fewer deaths have been attributed to the novel coronavirus — laid bare the futility of capitalism and individualism when faced with crisis. The parallels with global climate catastrophe are impossible to ignore.

From January 1, 2021, until the final day of the year, powerful blows reigned down on the global imperial superstructure captained by the US, leading in tow its Western European vassal states and junior partners including Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Colombia, India and the UK.

January 6: If any one event marks the end of the unipolar world led by the US since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is the cringeworthy storming of the US Capitol, incited by Donald Trump and carried out by farcical supporters united by their belief that the US presidential election was a fraud.

“Trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other US leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf — and that was before the embarrassment of the failed uprising exposed the fragility of the US capitalist regime.

Contrary to the mainstream media narrative, over half of those arrested for involvement in the January 6 insurrection were “business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects.”

January 19: On his very last day in office, disgraced President Trump labels China’s treatment of Xinjiang’s Uighur community as a “genocide.” The laughable claim is promptly echoed by mainstream/imperialist media. A month later, Canada’s parliament voted to second the motion, cementing its status as fawning minion to the US war machine. These claims were particularly ironic as Canada, like the US, is a nation founded on actual genocide.

January 28: The GameStop scandal went viral and many learned firsthand that capitalism was a giant Ponzi scheme designed to plunder their savings.

March 7: A death blow was dealt to Brazil’s Bolsonaro regime, one of the US’ largest and most compliant vassals, as former President Lula was acquitted of all charges related to the Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) lawfare scheme which had imprisoned him for 580 days. The failure of the maneuver exposed the similar proceedings against his successor, Dilma Rousseff, as a fraud, and later in the year the White House admitted the nefarious role it played in using paralegal means — also known as lawfare — to overthrow Brazil’s progressive governments and replace them with the neo-fascist Bolsonaro, whose popularity continued to bottom out through the course of the year.

March 13: The 99% rejoiced as fugitive former Bolivian dictatress Jeanine Áñez was discovered hiding under a bed and arrested by the democratically elected government of Luis Arce, committed to restoring order in Bolivia and serving justice to Áñez’s US-backed coup regime.

April 28: The gigantic paro nacional [national strike] broke out across US client state Colombia. A neoliberal austerity package passed by the Duque regime set off the mobilizations. The package would have seen Colombia bowing to IMF pressure with a swath of proposed “reforms” that increased taxes on the most vulnerable, accelerated privatization of healthcare, increased student tuition fees, and allowed for a 10-year wage freeze. The national strike was met with brutal force, dozens were killed and thousands arrested.

The immensity of the revolt led to working-class victories including “the withdrawal of the tax package, the sinking of the privatizing health project, the extension of the zero tuition to students of stratum 3, the unanimous international condemnation against the insane wave of police-paramilitary repression of the regime, the forced resignation of the ministers of finance and foreign affairs — representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie — and a parliamentary trial of the minister of war,” as detailed by the World Federation of Trade Unions.

May 14: Amid the genocidal war on Palestine waged by the apartheid state, Hamas missiles pierced the so-called Iron Dome defense system. The vaunted missile defense system, funded by billions of dollars from the US and the apartheid state, proved to be an overpriced lemon, like so many other US weapons of war, as Gaza rose to the defense of Palestinians in the West Bank, on the other side of their divided nation. The militant solidarity shown by Gaza, and its ensuing sacrifice when civilian dwellings were subsequently levelled by the apartheid state, will be remembered as a turning point in the long journey towards a free Palestine.

May 26: President Bashar al-Assad was re-elected by the Syrian people, receiving 78% of the vote. “Supporters of the president took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands as the results were publicized, celebrating what they saw as a repudiation of violence and a step forward for the beleaguered nation,” wrote Mnar Adley for MintPress News. Celebrations in Damascus put the lie to claims by the empire ruled from DC regarding Assad’s supposed lack of popular support.

May 29: A chilling reminder that Canada was founded on the genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of the land was unearthed in Kamloops, BC. A mass grave of 215 children, whose deaths were undocumented, was found at an Indigenous children’s concentration camp — euphemistically called “residential school” — after years of denial that such sites existed.

“We hear from residential school survivors who tell you of these things happening, of mass graves existing, and everybody always denies that those stories are true,” said Arlen Dumas, grand chief of Manitoba’s Assembly of Chiefs. “Well, here’s one example… there will be more.”

Sure enough, mass graves continued to be unearthed throughout 2021. The last Canadian “residential school” closed in 1996, and between 6,000 to 50,000 children are estimated to have been murdered in the concentration camps for Indigenous children.

June 6: Pedro Castillo, presidential candidate of Peru’s Marxist Peru Libre party, rose from virtual obscurity to defeat the right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori, convicted in 2008 of crimes against humanity. Castillo named staunch left-wing revolutionary Héctor Béjar as his foreign minister, who re-established diplomatic relations with Venezuela (made official on October 16), bringing an end to the Canada-led “regime”-change operation The Lima Group. Béjar referred to The Lima Group as “the most disastrous thing” Peru had ever done in the field of foreign relations.

June 24: The Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples of the World convened in Caracas, Venezuela, to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo, the decisive victory by Venezuelan troops, led by Simón Bolívar, over Spanish imperialism. Delegates from 123 countries attended the Congress, lauded as an “anti-imperialist and internationalist space for dialogue with social movements.”

June 24: Yet another powerful symbol of the crumbling foundations of the empire ruled from DC, a building collapse in Miami, Florida, left 98 people dead. Only four survived the sudden disintegration of the 12-story beachfront condominium, one of the deadliest residential building collapses in modern history. Rescue operations went on for two weeks. With each passing day, monotonous news items covered the rescue operations, effectively delaying the announcement of the death toll until few were paying attention anymore.

June 28: Russia and China announced the renewal of their 20-year long mutual cooperation pact. “The two sides agreed to continue maintaining close high-level exchanges, strengthening vaccine cooperation, expanding bilateral trade, and expanding cooperation in low-carbon energy, digital economy, agriculture and other fields and promote the alignment of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union,” reported Xinhua. The midsummer event was another milestone in the death march of the unipolar world.

July 1: The Communist Party of China celebrated 100 years since its founding. During that span, the CPC has lifted 850,000 people out of extreme poverty, according to the DC-based World Bank.

July 6: Honduras’ highest court found Roberto David Castillo guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated land defender and activist Berta Cáceres. Castillo was a graduate of the West Point US Military Academy in New York state. COPINH, the organization founded by Cáceres, hailed the verdict as a “people’s victory for justice for Berta; a step towards breaking the pact of impunity.” In addition, COPINH hoped that the conviction would open the door to “bringing the masterminds behind the crime to justice,” members of Honduras’ family of billionaires, the Atalas.

July 6: The dictator Jovenel Moïse, who dissolved parliament and ruled Ayiti (Haiti) by decree beyond the term of his mandate, was assassinated by a team of Colombian paramilitaries contracted by a Florida-based firm. Ayiti had been racked by waves of mass protests and general strikes almost continually since 2018, when Venezuela was forced to suspend the Petrocaribe program due to US economic sanctions on Venezuela’s national petroleum company PDVSA. Petrocaribe had provided cheap fuel to Ayiti in exchange for deferred payment. These deferred funds, earmarked for social programs, were instead pocketed by Moïse’s administration. Demonstrators demanded his resignation and a proper election in which Fanmi Lavalas could fully participate. The Moïse regime was propped up by the de facto ruling cartel, the Core Group including the US, Brazil, and Canada.

August 13: The Mexico Talks, a dialogue between Venezuela’s government and the opposition, began in Mexico City. To its great ire, the US was excluded from the process. Both parties signed a memorandum demanding an end to the economic blockade imposed on Venezuela by the empire ruled from DC.

August 15: With the US hastening its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban took the capital Kabul and overthrew the US puppet government. Videos filmed at Kabul airport the next day went viral, capturing the hysteria of the fleeing US forces and their supporters. At least five people died in the panic, while about 200,000 Afghans were directly killed by the failed invasion and 20-year long occupation, led by the empire ruled from DC.

September 16: Working in tandem, the resistance forces of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah break the imperial siege on Lebanon, delivering much-needed Iranian fuel. The courageous operation exposed the permeable nature of illegal US and EU “sanctions,” which had triggered shortages, fuel scarcity, inflation, and a deadly economic crisis in Lebanon.

September 16: Thumbing his nose at the empire, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador invited his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Díaz-Canel, as guest of honor for Mexico’s independence day celebrations. AMLO used the opportunity to reiterate his calls for an end to the 61-year-long US economic blockade of Cuba.

November 7: Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinista revolution that defeated the US-backed Somoza dictatorship and overcame the subsequent counter-revolutionary assault of the US-funded and trained Contra paramilitaries, was re-elected as president of Nicaragua. The result came as no surprise because Ortega has presided over a broadening of social programs and a strong Nicaraguan economy since his return to power in 2007. “The Nicaraguan people believe in their government and their electoral system,” wrote electoral monitor Dan Kovalik. “And one of the things they believe in is the government’s right, and indeed duty, to protect the country and its sovereignty from outside intervention, and in particular the incessant intervention by the US, which has been interfering in Nicaragua — often through local quislings — in quite destructive ways for over a century.”

In 2021 the rabid mainstream media assault on Nicaragua’s democracy accused Ortega of jailing his opponents, after a court order prevented Cristiana Chamorro from running due to illegal foreign campaign contributions. Chamorro’s NGO received over $6 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) since 2015, more than half of which went to influencing the 2021 elections.

November 15: Heavily publicized in Western media, this day was supposed to see a great popular uprising in Cuba, a supposed resurgence of the protests that had shaken the nation in early July, when Cuba suffered its worst COVID-19 problems.

“The nationwide ‘Marches for Change’ was scheduled for November 15,” wrote Ted Snider. “The Biden administration endorsed the demonstrations. So did Congress: on November 3, the House of Representatives voted 382–40 — and you thought they couldn’t agree on anything — for a resolution declaring ‘strong solidarity’ with ‘courageous Cuban men, women, and youth taking to the streets in cities and towns across the country.’ What the media and the government doesn’t want to tell you is that, once again, it didn’t happen.” The non-event was dubbed #15Nada.

November 21: Venezuela’s violent opposition returned to the political fray for the country’s regional and municipal “mega”-elections. These were carried out in relative peace, without any credible allegations of fraud, by Venezuela’s internationally acclaimed electoral system. The results were a sweeping victory for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The PSUV captured 19 of 23 state governorships (including the capital district), and 213 of 325 mayoralties.

November 29: Perhaps the most inspiring and surprising of the year’s significant electoral victories, in Honduras Xiomara Castro unseated US-backed narco-dictator President Juan Orlando Hernández. Castro is representative of the rising anti-imperialist political forces in Latin America. Her husband, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by the Honduran military — with Hillary Clinton’s blessing — in 2009, after he promised to convoke a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution, raise the minimum wage, and join the ALBA-TCP regional alliance founded by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez in 2004.

December 9: Nicaragua resumed diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, recognizing the One China principle and the sovereignty of China in Taiwan. Nicaragua thus ceased to consider Taiwan as a country and severed all contact and official relationship with Taipei. This expands the scope of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America and at the same time diminishes US imperial authority in the region.

2021 was marked by a series of embarrassments and defeats for the empire ruled from DC, the decisive end of US hegemony, and the birth of a new multipolar world, which promises to continue asserting itself in the face of informational and military assault throughout 2022 and beyond.

This item was originally published on January 23, 2021 by Orinoco Tribune

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Blows Against the Empire—2020 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

To say that 2020 has been memorable would be an understatement, but experience teaches us that our memories of the pandemic may well be struck from the record.

“The 1918 influenza epidemic is one of history’s great conundrums, obliterated from the consciousness of historians,” wrote Gina Kolata, and COVID-19 may yet meet the same fate.[1] Kolata recalls that not only was the Spanish flu omitted from basic history in her elementary and high school, but was also ignored in microbiology and virology courses in college, even though it killed more people than the first world war.

From the onset of the pandemic it was clear that it would accelerate the crumble of the u.s empire. Many had commented on the fragility of neoliberalism in the face of public health crises, and it was pretty obvious from the start that the imperialist system would prove incapable of handling COVID-19 in a reasonable manner.

While the u.s and its capitalist vassals fell prey to COVID-19, blaming it on China or insisting that “one day, like a miracle, it will disappear,” the pandemic overshadowed imperialist defeats in the Middle East and Latin America, and masked some of the scariest climate catastrophes in recorded history.

A chronology of 2020’s most salient dates:

 

January 5: Iraq’s parliament voted to expel all u.s troops from the country. Deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Units of Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, was assassinated in a January 3 drone strike—in addition to Iran’s General Soleimani—the last straw for Iraq politicians’ toleration of any u.s troops on their soil. About 5,000 u.s troops remain in the country. The ruling was the final blow to Bush Jr.’s lie that the Iraq War would “bring freedom” to Iraqis, who instead revile the u.s for killing a million of their brothers and sisters, destroying their economy and infrastructure, and bombing their most precious ancient sites.

January 6: Millions filled the streets of Tehran, Iran, following the drone killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani. Widely publicized footage of astounding mourning processions contradicted u.s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s hollow boasts: “We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom, freedom to have the opportunity for success and prosperity for their nations. While the political leadership may not want that, the people in these nations will demand it.” Coupled with the late-2019 u.s retreat in Syria, it became clear that the empire was losing their war against the Shia Crescent.

January-February: Early in the new year raging forest fires in Australia grabbed world attention. Fires incinerated over 45 million acres and caused almost 500 deaths, either directly or as a result of smoke inhalation. Ecologists estimated that over one billion mammals, birds and reptiles were killed, including about eight thousand koalas. Climate change and destruction of the environment, spurred by decades of conspicuous consumption and a dependence on fossil fuels, are the results of an anarchic capitalist economic system that profits from waste and obsolescence. The u.s produces over 30 percent of the planet’s waste but holds about 4 percent of world population, a profligate lifestyle they imagine can be exported globally.   

March 10: China announces victory in the struggle against the COVID-19 virus. To date, they’ve reported one death and a handful of cases since mid-April. Following strong measures to combat the pandemic including mandatory lockdowns and mask use, antibacterial dousing of public spaces, contact tracing, and regulating travel, China emerged as the global leader in pandemic defense. As a result China represents the one significant national economy that didn’t slump in 2020 and the world’s “only major growth engine,” according to Bloomberg. They dealt an additional blow to imperialism by sending doctors and equipment to the rescue of NATO countries, notably Italy, France, and Spain, or to stalwart u.s allies such as Brazil, Indonesia or the Philippines, in addition to helping numerous resistance nations including Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and African nations such as Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, or Zimbabwe.

April 6: Prominent right-wing political figures and news sources shared the story that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had died of COVID-19. In reality Nicaragua had recorded only one death. Camera-shy Ortega made a rare televised speech on April 15th denouncing the u.s empire for spending trillions of dollars on bombs and war but refusing to provide basic free health care for their people. By December, the u.s death rate for COVID-19 was 40 times that of Nicaragua. 

April 20: A blitz of news regarding the death of Kim Jong-un filled all mainstream media. With the pandemic claiming lives around the world this story became huge. Unsurprisingly the lie originated with media funded by the u.s regime-change operation National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

May 3: Venezuelan fishermen foiled the Operation Gideon armed invasion led by former green berets employed by private security company Silvercorp. In March trump placed a $15 million bounty on Maduro, with predictable results. Following the arrest and confession of Silvercorp founder Jordan Goudreau, we learned that u.s officials and their Venezuelan puppets juan guaidó and leopoldo lópez planned and funded the attack. Goudreau even presented documents to prove it. Eight mercenaries were killed, seventeen were captured. The photo of prostrate commandos in front of the Casa of Socialist Fishermen was cited as one of the year’s best.

May 24: Anti-imperialist nations, locked out of world markets by u.s sanctions, were starting to team up. On this day Iranian oil tankers, escorted by boats, helicopters and planes of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) of Venezuela, broke the blockade and landed in El Palito.

May 25: The public lynching of George Floyd horrified the world. In the middle of the street, in broad daylight, while being filmed, a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, until Floyd breathed no more. One of over 1,000 murders by u.s police in 2020, Floyd’s killing sparked massive spontaneous protests across the u.s in every city and town. Widespread arson and looting occurred and an army of live streamers shared daily demos, speeches, and police brutality, for those at home. The protests raged for months and had many peaks. The empire deployed the National Guard, military helicopters, and by July were using unidentified troops in black vans to kidnap protesters. At least 14,000 civilians were arrested, and 19 killed, in the protests.

May 28: Protestors torched the Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct police headquarters, where George Floyd’s killer worked. Police forces had fled the building. The incendiary images provided some of the year’s most widely shared and beloved photographs.

May 31: u.s president trump was taken to a fortified bunker as thousands of protestors besieged the White House and threatened his life. Eventually the empire’s security forces established a perimeter around the president’s residence, with multiple layers of fencing, and fought a pitched battle with bottle-throwing protestors for weeks on end.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/trump-bunker-george-floyd-protests

June 3: Cristobal makes landfall in Louisiana, the first of a record-breaking five named storms to hit the state in 2020. Lake Charles, a city that held almost 80,000 people, immortalized in The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek,” will never recover. Over 45,000 homes were damaged, insured losses topped $10 billion, and thousands of residents are still displaced.

June 20: After tweeting that “almost one million people requested tickets for the Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!" trump spoke to only 6,000 supporters and over 13,000 empty seats. He was trolled by K-Pop fans and teens on Tik Tok who had bought up all the tickets and created fake hype around the event. Photos of a dejected trump leaving the rally were wildly popular.

August 19: Out-of-control California wildfires began to gain international media attention. By this day over 350 fires were already burning. The state went on to record over nine thousand fires, burning about 4 percent of the state’s land, by far the worst wildfire season in California’s history. The smoke from the fires, which are still burning, will create a miniature nuclear winter, contributing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the cars, cities and industries in the u.s during an entire year, and release energy equivalent to “hundreds of hydrogen bombs.”

October 6: Enormous protests erupted across Indonesia in the wake of the government’s passing of an Omnibus Law that undermines workers’ rights and the environment. The law was enacted November 3; protests are ongoing and have resulted in the arrest of at least six thousand civilians including 18 journalists.

October 13: In recognition of their success in maintaining the “highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights,” both Cuba and China were elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

October 18: Luis Arce, candidate of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), swept into power by trouncing Carlos Mesa in Bolivia’s presidential election, gaining 55 percent of the vote to Mesa’s 28 percent. The results put the lie to claims by u.s-backed Organization of American States (OAS) that the 2019 elections, in which Evo Morales was elected to a new term, were fraudulent. Arce’s election vindicated those who had argued for a year that Morales was deposed in an illegitimate, u.s-sponsored coup. Coup dictator jeanine añez and her coterie of imperialist supporters were panned worldwide. añez was captured trying to flee the country while other offending politicians, such as Minister of the Interior arturo murillo, and Minister of Defense fernando lopez, escaped.

October 25: In response to gigantic demonstrations that began in October, 2019 and still haven’t let up, Chile held a Constitutional Referendum. The main objectives of the ongoing protest movement are the removal of president piñera and of the pinochet Constitution that made Chile “ground zero” for the failed neoliberal experiment. To date over 2,500 Chileans have been injured, almost three thousand arrested, and 29 killed in the protests. In the October 25 referendum 80 percent voted for a new constitution, and chose to have it drafted by a Constituent Assembly elected by the people.

November 3: trump’s loss in the u.s presidential elections wasn’t really a defeat for imperialism because biden’s regime will prove to be just as bad, or worse,  for targets of the empire.

Nevertheless, it felt like a victory for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because trump embodied outright neo-fascism and was supported by the most reactionary, racist yankees. Secondly, because, following his electoral defeat, trump and his entourage resorted to every possible ruse that CIA regime-change operations have employed in other countries for decades: crying fraud, attacking voting centers, and denouncing imaginary communists. “trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other u.s leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf. “The latest example was him calling the u.s elections a fraud. With that he made it impossible to undermine the elections in Venezuela.”

November 11: Evo Morales returned to Bolivia exactly one year to the day after his ouster. His return was celebrated by multitudes, and hailed as a “world historic event.” Morales assumed his place as head of MAS and as an eminent spokesperson against imperialism.

November 23: While u.s reported their largest increase in poverty since they began tracking data, China announced that they had lifted all counties out of poverty, and eradicated extreme poverty across the Republic. Since 1978 China has lifted over 850 million out of poverty, according to the World Bank.

November 25: Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla revealed links between members of the San Isidro movement and the u.s embassy in Havana. The failed San Isidro campaign revolved around Cuban rapper Denis Solis, detained in Havana for failing to respect COVID-19 regulations and assaulting a police officer. A small group went on a highly publicized "hunger strike" demanding his release and claiming that Cuba was repressing dissent. Meanwhile Cuba's government and investigative journalists revealed the ties, including funding and numerous meetings, between San Isidro group members, Miami-based right-wing agitators and u.s politicians in Cuba. The rapper in question, Denis Solis, didn't help his case by yelling "trump 2020!" at Cuban police officers in a video he filmed and shared himself a few days after trump had lost the election.

November 26: Over 250 million took to the streets in India, reported as the “biggest organized strike in human history,” protesting new laws that will attack farm workers and subject the nation to inequitable neoliberal doctrines. Huge masses of demonstrators marched on Delhi from neighboring states. They met barricades, roadblocks, armed security forces, teargas and all manner of obstructions, but dismantled everything and reached their target. "They are trying to give away agriculture to capitalists, just like they sold so many of our important public sector companies across India," said a spokesperson. "Through this relentless privatization they want to further exploit farmers and workers."

December 6: Venezuela’s Parliamentary Election resulted in a landslide victory for Maduro’s Chavista party PSUV/GPP, breaking a deadlock in Parliament that had lasted for five years, and ushering in a new era in Venezuelan politics that will last until the end of Maduro’s term in 2024—barring a military invasion, assassination or successful coup by imperialist powers.

The upcoming year certainly holds more of the same in store for us: embarrassments for imperialism, hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths, and a doubling-down on capitalism’s claims that it provides the only way forward, evidenced by the hubris of promotional efforts for The Great Reset.

 

 

Notes

[1] Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999