Red Scared: Revising History at the Victims of Communism Museum

By Billie Anania

Republished from The Baffler.

“THERE IS NO WAY he is a victim of communism,” my partner quips, pointing to a photo of the late Pope John Paul II. We are near the end of our visit to the new Victims of Communism Museum, standing in an elevator-size lobby with photographs of “victims” screen-printed all over the walls. Among the many victims and honorees: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the Dalai Lama, Romanian writer Herta Müller, Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong, and Hungarian neofascist Viktor Orbán.

These public figures are the latest faces of a long campaign to flip the historical script. Ai Weiwei, among the highest-selling artists in the world, has earned his keep resolutely opposing the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, Orbán’s vocal denunciations of Soviet occupation helped launch a political career filled with what critics call “pure Nazi speech.” Despite the cognitive dissonance of this display—Müller’s father served in the Waffen-SS, for god’s sake—the strategy allows the decades-old Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to position all anti-communists as renegade freedom fighters regardless of their fascist associations, thus rebranding its Holocaust revisionism anew. What better destination for their new museum than Washington, D.C., just one mile away from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Originally founded during the Clinton era by a unanimous act of Congress, the Victims of Communism Foundation is a relic of Cold War-era propaganda. Its central belief that communism has claimed “more than 100 million” victims was lifted from The Black Book of Communism, a controversial piece of Western agitprop that has since been delegitimized by its own contributors. The book, as well as the foundation, peddle the spurious notion that a “double genocide” took place in the twentieth century: one by fascists and another by so-called “Judeo-Bolshevik Communists.”

According to the Victims of Communism team, all Nazis killed by Soviets are victims of communism, as are all deaths resulting from Covid-19. Inside the museum, Mao Zedong figures as a “mass murderer,” but Adolf Hitler is nowhere to be found. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, too, are portrayed as running authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes, yet British colonialism and American imperialism garner nary a mention. Hardly anywhere in the foundation’s documents, or in the museum, are Nazis, fascists, royals, colonizers, or capitalists portrayed as aggressors. In fact, World War II isn’t even included in the museum’s timeline.

Is now a good time to mention that the Victims of Communism Foundation’s original co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, once led the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to ally with Nazi Germany alongside Stepan Bandera, who is now a national hero of Ukraine? Not only does the foundation count Nazi sympathizers among its scant few donors, but many other immortalized “victims” were involved in the deportation and extermination of Jews, Poles, Roma, Serbs, Belarusians, and Ukrainians on behalf of Nazi puppet regimes across Europe. I went into the museum expecting to see the usual suspects among the victims—from Holocaust perpetrators Ante Pavelić and Roman Shukhevych to the kulaks and Cuban plantation owners—but was surprised to find the vaunted list has gotten a facelift. Perhaps they hope to attract a new generation of culture warriors, or just far-right trolls with Turning Point USA aspirations.

After more than an hour wandering around the building, I was left deeply unsure what, in their view, even constitutes a “victim” of communism, let alone a “communist.” No one will walk out of this institution knowing much more than some fudged numbers and fashy buzzwords. This kind of hyperbolic revisionism meets roadside tourist trap is capitalist projection at its finest, an alternative history built by dark money and reinforced by disinformation. Nonetheless, considering how much the art world masks its own regressive politics, an unabashed right-wing exhibition of this magnitude is a genuine treat for sickos like me.

Part fascist propaganda, part Epcot ride, the Victims of Communism “museum” is actually just three claustrophobic rooms of dystopian imagery and haunted house sounds, all designed to shock and appall. Tickers run at the bottom of screens endlessly tallying “victims,” while jump-cut documentary footage rushes between shots of Cuba, China, Poland, and Hungary. Along the floors and walls, the words WAR, REVOLUTION, and TERROR pop out against deep shades of black and crimson. LIES, one placard announces near an illuminated image of Eastern European Christians holding crosses. RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION, reads another, juxtaposed with stock imagery of barbed wire.

I can only describe the videos in this place as Ken Burns documentaries from hell. The first begins once visitors trigger a foot plate, enhancing the venue’s dungeon-esque quality. Then a series of jagged screens light up, interspersing photographs of Lenin, Trotsky, and Tsar Nicholas with an ominous, staccato orchestral score. Rather than address the complex historical conditions leading up to the October Revolution, our humble narrator goes straight for the gold: “Reformers hoped for a democratic solution—the Bolsheviks had another idea.”

It was hard for me not to burst out laughing at this appeal to Menshevik supremacy, but I held my cool, lest I offend the solitary front desk worker—who was, I should add, the only other person in the building. Afterward, I noticed a small glass display that held a first edition of The Communist Manifesto, as well as a Russian newspaper from the day after the Bolsheviks took power. “Marx and Engels’ manifesto gave birth to the world’s most violent regimes,” the nearby text intones. Lenin, too, is accused of single-handedly building the gulags and killing “hundreds of thousands” of Russians, leaving a “blood-soaked legacy” upon his death a few years later. Based on this room alone, one might surmise that communism is an individualistic, tyrannical ideology oriented around exploitation.

Of course, they would be wrong, but no matter to our humble curators; the museum never sets out to define communism in any capacity. In their selective version of history, once upon a time, Marx and Engels wrote an evil little pamphlet, and then—skipping right over the Paris Commune—we find ourselves in 1917 at the start of the Russian Revolution. We then jump, curiously, from Stalin consolidating power in the 1930s to the Cold War and beyond. These glaring gaps in history feel intentional in the displays devoted to starvation and imprisonment, in which Soviet gulags take precedence, but Nazi concentration camps are nowhere to be found.

A related video juxtaposes the gulags with prisons in Vietnam, China, Korea, and Cuba. Paintings and sketches made by detainees are interwoven with quotes from Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (a favorite of Steve Bannon and Jordan Peterson). Hearing the words of prisoners and experiencing their art, I was somewhat moved by the concept of creative resilience in confinement, particularly given the brilliant work produced by incarcerated artists here in the States. But it’s hard not to see this as artwashing Nazi war crimes, or what Ljiljana Radonić calls “comparative trivialization.”

By downplaying the Holocaust, the museum can seamlessly move to the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward, two periods of enforced economic reform that they portray as intentional massacres. And with little wall space remaining, they do a speed-run through Vietnam, China, North Korea, and Cambodia, sloppily tying together Juche, the state ideology of North Korea, with the Khmer Rouge. This rhetorical trick, which is hard not to perceive as racist, allows them to gloss over the nuances inherent to these distinct regions while avoiding what happened in Cambodia before Pol Pot took power. (As Anthony Bourdain once said, if you visit Cambodia, you will “never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”) In a final video, the narrator also claims that Czech protesters from 1968 desired, above all, “democracy and free markets,” rather than the loosening of Soviet control over creative and political forms of expression. As it ended, my gaze fell on a nearby wall photograph showing an East German guard fleeing to West Berlin, which is credited to the CIA.

Toward the exit, an interactive choose-your-own-adventure game allows visitors to reflect on all this “information” as a Cuban, Korean, or German individual. Two paths can be chosen on the screens provided: in the first, you comply with a newly appointed communist government, while the other takes you on the dissident path. No matter which path I chose, however, my protagonist ended up compromised—either by facing persecution or bringing shame on my legacy. The framing is utterly nihilistic, a downward spiral resulting in entrapment no matter the response. In many ways, it resembles how people describe getting arrested in the United States.

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Before going any further, I should clarify a few things. I don’t doubt the existence of persecution and suffering in communist countries. I’m well aware of the mortal consequences of agrarian reforms in China and Russia, as well as the problems of absolute power. But the Victims of Communism Museum is not the place to find valid critique; it’s a wasteland of thinly veiled bigotry. Their fast-and-loose analysis feeds into a far-right strategy to whitewash imperial, feudal, and fascist histories, developed at a time when Western countries welcomed former Nazis into top-brass positions. Moreover, selectively lifting stats from long-debunked sources only further promotes disinformation; for an example, look no further than the “horrors of socialism” resolution recently passed in the House, which parrots the “100 million victims” statistic.

Undercutting all of this, of course, is the role that Western powers have played in constraining—violently and otherwise—Soviet and Third-World autonomy. Not a single revolution of the twentieth century went without its fair share of trade sanctions, assassination attempts, and disinformation campaigns. Rather than focusing on building a new society, revolutionary movements have always been forced on the defensive—and even still, freedom of art flourished in the well-funded Soviet film industry, and Vietnam successfully ousted its occupiers. Should we really be taking what Holocaust revisionists claim about China, Cuba, and elsewhere today at face value?

Conflating communism with fascism—while conveniently eliding the horrors carried out by its own fascist honorees—is old hat for this foundation, and the museum treads well-worn territory. Curiously, many of the foremost “victims” are men, and few are Black. I almost have to admire their attempts to tiptoe around slavery and identity politics, if it weren’t for the number of Black radicals persecuted by and within capitalist countries—from the outright assassinations of Amílcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba to the persecution of intellectuals like Assata Shakur and Paul Robeson. Of course, even the nightmare fantasies concocted here include a tinge of casual racism, and it’s remarkable they even thought to acknowledge communist revolutions in Africa (albeit in small text near the exit).

As this all makes clear, the museum is not really for anyone who disagrees with conservative doctrine, or even for centrists playing both sides; it’s for far-right ideologues who already champion the views espoused here and would like their children to do the same. As with most roadside attractions, every reactionary impulse is thrown to the wall to see what sticks. While Covid-19 is simultaneously a hoax and communist plot, you can still find the Victims of Communism-branded hand sanitizer in its gift shop, along with supposedly real fragments of the Berlin Wall, anti-Che Guevara shirts, bracelets made by a Ukrainian jeweler, and—oh my—a Nora D. Clinton book on the perils of quarantining. Communists are simultaneously to blame for Covid-19, as well as for lockdowns, but please do remember to wash your hands!

By now you’ve likely seen the videos of the expansive encampment across from the museum in D.C.’s McPherson Square. Social media posts hardly convey the scale; there are countless tents across multiple city blocks keeping the city’s unhoused population warm through the winter months. “When you step outside the building you conveniently enter the real-time updating Victims of Capitalism Museum,” one astute reviewer noted. While D.C. officials recently cleared the premises—an action endorsed by the entire Washington Post editorial board—I doubt they recognize the irony here.

This is the world the Victims of Communism Foundation seeks to preserve, and the one they also tend to blame on their liberal opponents—who are also, supposedly, all communists. Coincidentally, the museum is located in the United Mine Workers of America Building where, as Mike Davis has written, union leader John L. Lewis notoriously banned communists and imposed top-down leadership to limit local autonomy. Much like Lewis, the museum’s goal is to obfuscate, yet for anyone with a working smartphone, much of it can easily be written off. At the same time, Eastern European countries like Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia have all passed laws criminalizing opposition to the “double genocide” claims, so maybe the propaganda really is working.

For now, the Victims of Communism Museum continues its mission uninterrupted—or at least from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., five days a week—all while its foundation still receives donations from fascist sympathizers across Eastern Europe and the Balkans. As recently as 2021, they installed a controversial memorial in Ottawa entirely with private funding. Rather than name victims on the memorial, the foundation instead listed the monument’s moneyed donors. Perhaps letting people Google victim names might get them into trouble again. At the very least, Canadian media remains skeptical.

“Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution,” a quote from Soviet officer Felix Dzerzhinsky reads on one wall back in the museum. True enough, but terror for whom? For the profiteers of state terror at home and abroad? Or enslavers of the prison-industrial complex who sit on museum boards? I fail to see what Mao or Stalin could do beyond the grave to significantly impact my life, but I can see how white nationalism threatens my agency. I can see that by flipping the script, fascists quickly transform into freedom fighters, and thus the severity of slavery and extrajudicial killing in capitalist countries become mere matters of opinion. Such sore winners will never be happy until every last speck of land is open for extraction—and even then, it still won’t be enough.

But, hey, don’t just take my word for it! Listen to the voices of their workers—or, if you will, the Victims of the Victims of Communism Foundation. One woman who worked there for a few months notes that “sexist and conservative management” contributed to a “toxic work environment.” Another employee claims that anyone who is not a “staunch conservative” will be “extremely uncomfortable” with management’s daily discussions and that employees are not allowed to “openly voice concerns.” While none of this sounds surprising for a U.S. nonprofit, it does speak volumes about an institution that claims to be on the right side of authoritarianism—turns out they’re just on the right.

Leftist Thought and Social Media in the Information Age

By Zoe Thomas

Republished in modified form from The Michigan Specter.

Fifty years ago, people encountered leftist thought primarily through activism, published works, and educators. In recent years, however, this has changed drastically. Today, for better or worse, the internet is the primary means through which leftism is disseminated and consumed. 

As a vehicle for spreading progressive ideas, the internet has largely been a democratizing force. Ideology is no longer solely the terrain of a relatively educated, elite vanguard. These days, you do not need to enroll in a class or even buy a book to learn about socialism. The information is freely available online and thus far more accessible to the average person.

Of course, more traditional, academic sources are available online, which does increase access to the scholarly writing of Marx and Marxists. However, this kind of literature can be intimidating and largely inaccessible to some people. Theory written centuries ago, or even modern theory written by academics, can even represent another language that enforces a kind of class divide along educational lines. To combat this and reach a broader audience, many modern leftist creators present similar ideas in a more entertaining, comprehensible way. 

Their efforts have gone a long way toward demystifying leftist ideas. This has allowed hisorically-obscured views to filter into the mainstream. But the new brand of leftist content isn’t just more accessible; it is also more relevant to the average person. Rather than just presenting centuries-old ideas, socialist creators are applying them to contemporary issues to foster practical social consciousness.

As leftist creators gain a foothold online, they are counterbalancing the conservative skew of platforms like Twitch and Reddit. And having such content in these spaces matters. It challenges the right-wing media monopoly head-on and obstructs dangerous pipelines that threaten to brainwash vulnerable young people with reactionary and regressive ideology.

But new leftist media is not without its flaws. While simplifying complex issues can be helpful, creators too often oversimplify them for marketing reasons. Moreover, some creators cultivate troubling cults of personality, touting their opinion as fact and punishing intracommunity dissent.

Indeed, many of the new left-wing personalities are of questionable moral character and frequently engage in blatant hypocrisy by clout-chasing. Of course, there are levels to their indiscretions, ranging from the purchase of expensive sports cars to using racial slurs in an attempt to win over the Right.

Perhaps the most worrying trend in new leftist media is that much of it falls prey to debate culture. Progressive commentators frequently engage with the arguments of their mainstream opponents, creating an industry of “responding to the Right.” But this approach mostly fails to win hearts and minds. Instead, it usually redounds to a battle of wits that leads nowhere.

When two career commentators debate online, it can give the appearance of real people having a conversation in which both parties listen and consider one another’s ideas. Yet, in these fabricated interactions, they both always come out on top, profiting off of important political issues that affect people’s lives. This is yet another area of politics where monetary incentives are a thoroughly corrupting force.

Although the benefits of exposing more people to leftist thought with social-media tactics are incredibly valuable and important, the manner in which it is being done leaves a lot to be desired. To be successful and remain true to its cause, online leftism must not just “fight the Right,” but exist independently from it, so as to promote the people and ideas that have given the movement its power.

Zoe Thomas is an undergraduate studying political science at the University of Michigan and a staff writer for The Michigan Specter.

Inventing Reality: Past and Present

By Youhanna Haddad

Capitalist countries like to claim that they have the freest media. President Joe Biden frequently reiterates America’s supposed commitment to a free press. In a similar vein, the British Broadcasting Corporation has repeatedly lauded the United Kingdom’s ostensible “freedom to publish.”

These statements often feature alongside denunciations of the alleged unfreedom in other countries — particularly those adversarial to Western hegemony. Such criticism tends to take on a certain form. Westerners claim that these adversarial powers tightly curate their media, only allowing information that reinforces state agendas. A recent (retracted) article in The Wall Street Journal, for example, accused China of “parroting lies” via their “solidified grip on information.”

But China is far from the only target. Whether it’s nations in Latin America and the Middle East, or Russia, the Global North’s prominent media institutions frequently remind viewers that information coming out of these places should be heavily scrutinized, with particular caution advised toward state-sponsored media. 

Since the Cold War, the imperial core has honed this rhetoric, which not only espouses the superior integrity of its media institutions but also attributes that integrity to a supposed respect for free speech rights. This narrative sounds good. But it rings utterly hollow upon closer scrutiny. In reality, free speech does little to keep the interests of capital from dictating the “news” Western media reports. As Lenin described over a century ago, “[In] capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.”

In the United States, just six corporations own a whopping 90% of the news media. This centralization demonstrates that, despite what seems like an abundance of options, the media is controlled by a tiny capitalist minority. And this minority is united by an overriding monolithic interest: profit. That means the media is only really free to report what doesn’t threaten the bottom lines of its owners.

But that is far from the only source of bias. Oftentimes, Western media institutions act at the direct behest of their governments. While the full extent of such collusion is often hidden in classified documents, what little has trickled into the public view vindicates the belief that “free” Western media is a fantasy.

The history of collusion between Western governments and media megacorporations is both storied and unsettling. Consider the 1975 Church Committee, which was organized by the United States Senate to investigate potential abuses by the CIA, NSA, and FBI. The Church Committee formed after several major news stories broke implicating the Department of Defense and CIA in the surveillance of civilians and covert assassinations of foreign leaders. 

One of the most disturbing findings was the explicit confirmation of CIA involvement in domestic and foreign media. The Committee confirmed at least “50 CIA relationships with U.S. journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations.” Additionally, it demonstrated that the CIA had control of two European press services — one of which was subscribed to by “over 30 U.S. newspapers.” With a notable lack of remorse, a senior CIA official told the Committee that, “Whether or not this type of overseas activity should be allowed to continue is subject to differing views and judgments… [in my opinion] we would be fools to relinquish it because it serves a very useful purpose.”

CIA defector Colonel John Stockwell corroborated this practice of media corruption. On his assignment to the Angolan Civil War, he allegedly headed a CIA campaign to disseminate news stories that slandered the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and their Cuban reinforcements. According to Stockwell, a full third of his CIA personnel in Angola were career propagandists. One startling falsehood they reported was a totally fabricated execution of 17 Cuban soldiers for the rapes of Angolan women. Framed as an act of feminist liberation, the imaginary victims supposedly executed the perpetrators by firing squad. This tale made its way to the front page of the Toronto Star — Canada’s largest daily newspaper — the Globe and Mail, and local papers in Winnipeg, Halifax, and Montreal. 

More recently, a 2019 bombshell in The Washington Post revealed that — even in this century — United States’ military campaigns are shrouded in lies to make them more palatable to the American public. Generals, senior federal officials, an Afghan War czar, and a Bush-era secretary of defense all confirm that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable while claiming that there was “no way” the United States could lose the war when interviewed. Federal officials faithfully chanted “steady progress” throughout the duration of the war despite knowing that their objectives were bound to fail via the means they were employing.

Today, the world's eyes are on Ukraine. Russian troops have been in the country for over nine months after Ukraine, against Russia’s repeated warnings, moved to join NATO. Since the invasion began, the United States has spent $68 billion to aid the Ukrainian government and military.  

While modern Russia is thoroughly capitalist, it's easy to see why NATO — the world’s preeminent imperialist alliance — views it as a threat. The country has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and its security interests are directly opposed to NATO’s objective of expanding eastward toward Russia’s borders. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not unexpected by any stretch of the imagination, Russian leaders have expressed for decades that their ability to defend their nation from invasion or global conflict would be severely compromised if NATO was permitted to expand toward its borders. 

Most infamously, declassified State Department documents confirm former Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” in 1990. To the contrary, NATO has admitted 14 former Soviet or Soviet-aligned states since then.

From the billions in aid to Ukraine, it’s clear the United States is investing heavily in the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Much of that aid is designated for weapons that are not yet manufactured, suggesting the United States is ready to support the neoliberal Ukrainian government for years to come. This means that — just like in Vietnam and Afghanistan — the federal government is dedicated to a long-term conflict with little regard for any public resistance they may encounter. Ask yourself: When in its history has the United States heavily funded a fighting force that was trying to improve living standards for any group of working people?

Today, we face a nonstop barrage of pro-Ukrainian media. Major news outlets have been reporting optimistically on Ukraine’s war efforts, while Russian troops remain planted on Ukrainian soil since February. Western bourgeois media is clearly trying to make NATO’s investment in Ukraine seem worthwhile, as they have done to support the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

You don’t have to be a Putin apologist to understand that Western powers see Russia as a threat to their hegemony. Those with a deep respect for human life should hope to see an expedient and diplomatic end to the conflict, with no further expansion of NATO. Unlike the United States and her allies, we should not support the effort to include Ukraine in NATO at any cost. This position is nonsensical, and only remains publicly acceptable due to the tireless media campaigns of a supposedly “free press” in the Global North.

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism.

Of, By, and For the Elite: The Class Character of the U.S. Constitution

By Crystal Kim

Republished from Liberation School.

Contrary to the mythology we learn in school, the founding fathers feared and hated the concept of democracy—which they derisively referred to as “tyranny of the majority.” The constitution that they wrote reflects this, and seeks to restrict and prohibit involvement of the masses of people in key areas of decision making. The following article, originally written in 2008, reviews the true history of the constitution and its role in the political life of the country.

The ruling class of today—the political and social successors to the “founding fathers”—continues to have a fundamental disdain for popular participation in government. The right wing of the elite is engaged in an all-out offensive against basic democratic rights and democracy itself. This offensive relies heavily on the Supreme Court and the legal doctrine of constitutional “originalism”. Originalism means that the only rights and policies that are protected are ones that are explicitly laid out in the constitution, conforming with the “original” intentions of the founders. As the article explores, this was a thoroughly anti-democratic set up that sought to guarantee the power and wealth of the elite.

Introduction

In history and civics classrooms all over the United States, students are taught from an early age to revere the “Founding Fathers” for drafting a document that is the bulwark of democracy and freedom—the U.S. Constitution. We are taught that the Constitution is a work of genius that established a representative government, safeguarded by the system of “checks and balances,” and guarantees fundamental rights such as the freedom of speech, religion and assembly. According to this mythology, the Constitution embodies and promotes the spirit and power of the people.

Why, then, if the country’s founding document is so perfect, has the immense suffering of the majority of its people—as a result of exploitation and oppression—been a central feature of the U.S.? How could almost half of the population be designated poor or low income? Why would the U.S. have the world’s largest and most extensive prison system? If the Constitution, the supreme law of this country, was written to protect and promote the interests of the people, why didn’t it include any guarantees to the most basic necessities of life?

This contradiction between reality and rhetoric can be understood by examining the conditions under which the U.S. Constitution was drafted, including the class background of the drafters. Although it is touted today as a document enshrining “democratic values,” it was widely hated by the lower classes that had participated in the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War. Popular opposition was so great, in fact, that the drafting of the Constitution had to be done in secret in a closed-door conference.

The purpose of the Constitution was to reorganize the form of government so as to enhance the centralized power of the state. It allowed for national taxation that provided the funds for a national standing army. Local militias were considered inadequate to battle the various Native American nations whose lands were coveted by land speculators. A national army was explicitly created to suppress slave rebellions, insurgent small farmers and the newly emerging landless working class that was employed for wages.

The goal of the Constitution and the form of government was to defend the minority class of affluent property owners against the anticipated “tyranny of the majority.” As James Madison, a principal author of the Constitution, wrote: “But the most common and durable source of factions [dissenting groups] has been the various and unequal distribution of property” [1].

The newly centralized state set forth in the Constitution was also designed to regulate interstate trade. This was necessary since cutthroat competition between different regions and states was degenerating into trade wars, boycotts and outright military conflict.

The U.S. Congress was created as a forum where commercial and political conflicts between merchants, manufacturers and big farmers could be debated and resolved without resort to economic and military war.

Conditions leading to the U.S. Revolution

To understand the class interests reflected in the Constitution, it is necessary to examine the social and economic conditions of the time. In the decades leading up to the U.S. revolutionary period, colonial society was marked by extreme oppression and class disparities.

The economies of the colonies were originally organized in the interests of the British merchant capitalists who profited by trade with the colonies. These interests were guaranteed by the British monarchy headed by King George III. In the southern colonies like Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, a settler class of slave-owning big planters grew rich providing the cotton that fed Britain’s massive textile manufacturing industry.

In the northern colonies, merchant economies in the port cities and associated small manufacturing industries formed the basis for the division between rich and poor. In the countryside, huge landowners who owed their holdings to privilege in Europe squeezed the limited opportunities of small farmers.

In 1700, for example, 75 percent of land in colonial New York state belonged to fewer than 12 individuals. In Virginia, seven individuals owned over 1.7 million acres [2]. By 1767, the richest 10 percent of Boston taxpayers held about 66 percent of Boston’s taxable wealth, while the poorest 30 percent of taxpayers had no property at all [3]. Similar conditions could be found throughout the colonies. Clearly, there was an established ruling class within the colonies, although this grouping was ultimately subordinate to the British crown.

On the other hand, the majority of society—Black slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants and poor farmers—experienced super-exploitation and oppression. Women of all classes had, like their peers in Europe, no formal political rights.

With these growing class antagonisms, the 18th century was characterized by mass discontent, which led to frequent demonstrations and even uprisings by those on the bottom rung of colonial society.

Between 1676 and 1760, there were at least 18 uprisings aimed at overthrowing a colonial government. There were six slave rebellions as well as 40 riots like the numerous tenant uprisings in New Jersey and New York directed against landlords [4]. Many of these uprisings were directed at the local elite and not the British Empire.

This local elite in colonial society found itself squeezed between the wrath of the lower working classes, on one side, and the British Empire, on the other.

Following the 1763 British victory in the Seven Years’ War in Europe, which included the so-called French and Indian War in North America, the French position as a colonial power competing with Britain was seriously downgraded as a result of their defeat. The French did send troops and military aid to support the colonists in their war for independence from Britain a decade later.

Following the defeat of the French in 1763, George III attempted to stabilize relations with Native Americans, who had fought primarily alongside the defeated French, by issuing the Proclamation of 1763. This decree declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds for colonial settlers, thereby limiting vast amounts of wealth the settlers could steal from the indigenous people. Chauvinist expansionism thus became fuel for anti-British sentiment in the colonies.

Making matters worse for the colonists, the British Empire began demanding more resources from the colonies to pay for the war. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the fourth Stamp Act, basically increasing taxes on the colonists. The Stamp Act of 1765 incited anger across all class strata, including British merchants, and was ultimately repealed in 1766.

The struggle around the Stamp Act demonstrated a shift in power relations between the colonists and the British Empire. While the local American elites were in less and less need of Britain’s assistance, the British Empire was in ever growing need of the wealth and resources of the colonies.

In summary, there were at least four factors that would motivate the American “new rich” to seek independence from the British crown. First, the anger of the poor and oppressed against the rich could be deflected from the local elite and channeled into hatred of the British crown—developing a new sense of patriotism. Second, the wealth produced and extracted in the colonies would remain in the pockets of the local ruling class rather than being transferred to the British Empire. Third, the local ruling class would greatly increase its wealth through the confiscation of property of those loyal to Britain. And lastly, independence would nullify the Proclamation of 1763, opening up vast amounts of Native land.

Two points qualified the drive to independence, which ultimately manifested itself in the sizable “Loyalist” or pro-British population during the revolution. First, despite the conflict between the colonists and the British government over wealth, colonists and colonizers were united against the Native American population, whom both tried to massacre and loot. The revolutionary struggle was not against exploitation, but to determine who would do the exploiting.

Secondly, in spite of the disputes over who got how much of the wealth generated by the colonies, this wealth primarily depended on the integration of the economy with British merchant capitalism. While the revolutionists wanted political distance from the empire, they could not afford a complete break.

The leaders of the U.S. Revolution

Revolutionary sentiment among the lowest classes of colonial society was largely spontaneous and unorganized. Leadership of the anti-British rebellion, groups like the Sons of Liberty, originated from the middle and upper classes. Some poor workers and farmers did join their ranks, allowing their leadership to garner popular support.

These leaders were conscious of the fact that only one class would be really liberated through independence from Britain: the local ruling class. However, in order to carry this out, they would have to create a façade of liberating the masses.

This is why the 1776 Declaration of Independence—the document used to inspire colonists to fight against Britain—includes language that was so much more radical than that of the 1787 U.S. Constitution. In fact, Thomas Jefferson had originally drafted a paragraph in the Declaration of Independence condemning George III for transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce” [5]. Jefferson himself personally owned hundreds of slaves until the day he died, but he understood the appeal such a statement would have.

Instead, the final draft of the Declaration accused the British monarchy of inciting slave rebellions and supporting Indian land claims against the settlers. “He [the king] has incited domestic insurrection amongst us,” the final version read, “and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.”

Sixty-nine percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence held colonial office under England. When the document was read in Boston, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up for a draft to fight the British. The rich avoided the draft by paying for substitutes, while the poor had no choice but to fight.

Slavery existed in all 13 British colonies, but it was the anchor for the economic system in the mid-Atlantic and southern states.

Thousands of slaves fought on both sides of the War of Independence. The British governor of Virginia had issued a proclamation promising freedom to any slave who could make it to the British lines—as long as their owner was not loyal to the British Crown. Tens of thousands of enslaved Africans did just that. Thousands managed to leave with the British when they were defeated, but tens of thousands more were returned to enslavement after the colonies won their “freedom” in 1783.

Following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which established the independence of the colonies, vast amounts of wealth and land were confiscated from Loyalists. Some of this land was parceled out to small farmers to draw support for the new government.

While most Loyalists left the United States, some were protected. For instance, Lord Fairfax of Virginia, who owned over 5 million acres of land across 21 counties, was protected because he was a friend of George Washington—at that time, among the richest men in America [6].

The drafting of the Constitution

In May 1787, 55 men—now known as the “Founding Fathers”—gathered in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention to draft the new country’s legal principles and establish the new government. Alexander Hamilton—a delegate of New York, George Washington’s closest advisor and the first secretary of the treasury—summed up their task: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people… Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government” [7]. Indeed, the task of the 55 men was to draft a document that would guarantee the power and privileges of the new ruling class while making just enough concessions to deflect dissent from other classes in society.

Who were the Founding Fathers? It goes without saying that all the delegates were white, property-owning men. Citing the work of Charles Beard, Howard Zinn wrote, “A majority of them were lawyers by profession, most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing or shipping, half of them had money loaned out at interest, and 40 of the 55 held government bonds” [8].

The vast majority of the population was not represented at the Constitutional Convention: There were no women, African Americans, Native Americans or poor whites. The U.S. Constitution was written by property-owning white men to give political power, including voting rights, exclusively to property-owning white men, who made up about 10 percent of the population.

Alexander Hamilton advocated for monarchical-style government with a president and senate chosen for life. The Constitutional Convention opted, rather, for a “popularly” elected House of Representatives, a Senate chosen by state legislators, a president elected by electors chosen by state legislators, and Supreme Court justices appointed by the president.

Democracy was intended as a cover. In the 10th article of the “Federalist Papers”—85 newspaper articles written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay advocating ratification of the U.S. Constitution—Madison wrote that the establishment of the government set forth by the Constitution would control “domestic faction and insurrection” deriving from “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal distribution of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” During the convention, Alexander Hamilton delivered a speech advocating a strong centralized state power to “check the imprudence of democracy.”

It is quite telling that the Constitution took the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and changed it to “life, liberty and property.” The debates of the Constitutional Convention were largely over competing economic interests of the wealthy, not a debate between haves and have-nots.

The new Constitution legalized slavery. Article 4, Section 2 required that escaped slaves be delivered back to their masters. Slaves would count as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of deciding representation in Congress. The “three-fifths compromise” was between southern slave-holding delegates who wanted to count slaves in the population to increase their representation, while delegates from the northern states wanted to limit their influence and so not count slaves as people at all.

Furthermore, some of the most important constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, the right to bear arms and the right to assembly were not intended to be included in the Constitution at all. The Bill of Rights was amended to the Constitution four years after the Constitutional Convention had adjourned so that the document could get enough support for ratification.

As a counter to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution gave Congress the power to limit these rights to varying degrees. For example, seven years after the Constitution was amended to provide the right to free speech, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to say or write anything “false, scandalous or malicious” against the government, Congress or president with the intent to defame or build popular hatred of these entities.

Today, many people look to the Constitution—and especially to the Bill of Rights—as the only guarantor of basic political rights. And while the Constitution has never protected striking workers from being beaten over the heads by police clubs while exercising their right to assemble outside plant gates, or protected revolutionaries’ right to freedom of speech as they are jailed or gunned down, the legal gains for those without property do need to be defended.

But defending those rights has to be done with the knowledge that the founding document of the United States has allowed the scourge of unemployment, poverty and exploitation to carry on unabated because it was a document meant to enshrine class oppression. A constitution for a socialist United States would begin with the rights of working and oppressed people.

During the period leading to the second U.S. Revolution, commonly known as the Civil War, militant opponents of slavery traveled the country to expose the criminal institution that was a bedrock of U.S. society. On July 4, 1854, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution before thousands of supporters of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He called it a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” referring to its enshrining of slavery.

The crowd shouted back, “Amen” [9].

Although slavery has been abolished, the property that is central to the Constitution—private property, the right to exploit the majority for the benefit of the tiny minority—remains. In that sense, Garrison’s words still ring true.

References

[1] James Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 10. Availablehere.
[2] Michael Parenti,Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 1974/2011), 5.
[3] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Longman, 1980), 65.
[4] Ibid., 59.
[5] Ibid., 72.
[6] Ibid., 84.
[7] Cited in Howard Zinn,Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology(New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 152.
[8] Zinn,A People’s History of the United States, 89.
[9] Zinn,Declarations of Independence, 231.

Directing the Moderate Rebels: Syria as a Digital Age Crucible for Information and Propaganda Warfare

By Ben Arthur Thomason

A decade into Syria’s catastrophe as one of the deadliest wars of the 21st century, we can take greater stock of its effects not just on geopolitics and Syria itself, but on imperial management strategies, information warfare, and popular culture, particularly when considering the interventions by the West and its regional allies. A key pillar of Western imperialist projects next to the hard power of bombs and economic sanctions is the soft power of diplomatic maneuvering, media and cultural imperialism, manufacturing public consent for war, and inventing realities to maintain ideological hegemony. The complementary dialectic between hard and soft power in the US led imperial project in Syria built on historical ventures in Muslim majority countries and evolved propaganda and civil society hybrid warfare strategies that may become foundational for 21st century warfare.

Complementing hard and soft power: the UK FCO media and civil society consortium

Early in the Syrian conflict, through a scheme code-named Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA partnered with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to flood Syria with weapons, many of which ended up on the black market or in the hands of extremist groups. In an echo of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, where Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan were supplied with billions of dollars in arms including Raytheon manufactured anti-aircraft guided Stinger Missiles, the US and its allies supplied Syrian rebels, including Salafist groups like the Harakat Nur al-Din al-Zenki Movement, with Raytheon produced anti-tank guided BGM TOW missiles.

Supplementing the hard-power pressures of sanctions and lethal aid to militants was a soft power strategy that combined diplomatic pressure, propaganda, and civil society programs. Western governments and NGOs funded, supplied, and trained pro-opposition Syrian journalists, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV stations. Pro-rebel outlets that sprung from this support were needed because Western journalists largely stayed out of reporting from rebel-held Syria for risk of being kidnapped or killed, despite the purported moderation of the Western backed Free Syrian Army and attempts to downplay the strength of extremist forces in Western media. Perhaps the most important organization, at least that we have significant documentation of right now, was a consultancy firm, Analysis Research Knowledge (ARK), and their search and rescue and media production group, Syria Civil Defence (British spelling), popularly known as the White Helmets.

Figure 1- An example of ARK’s “rebranding” projects for armed militias to sell the “moderate rebels” image (CPG01737 ARK 1.3.1, n.d.: 1)

ARK’s modern form was established as ARK FZC in 2011 and is based in Dubai, though its roots go back at least to 2009 when it was formed in Beirut, Lebanon as ARK Group or ARK Lebanon. The United Arab Emirates avoided full involvement in the arming and support of Syrian militants, instead opting to become an important partner in diplomatic and civil society efforts against the Assad government. ARK was started by former British Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) employee Alistair Harris, who got his start serving in the Yugoslav Wars. Contracting under the UK FCO, ARK first established a program for collecting and documenting alleged war crimes and set up an opposition media program called Basma Syria (Basma meaning smile in Arabic). In 2012 ARK, led by employee James Le Mesurier, a former UK military intelligence officer who also got his start in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars, established the search and rescue teams that would become the White Helmets. The group sold itself as a grassroots citizen activist humanitarian group and became media darlings in the West. 

The White Helmets were the bridge between the civil society and propaganda aspects of these soft-power pro-rebel operations. Not only did they provide services such as search and rescue, medical transport, fire suppression, and post-battle clean-ups and reconstruction, they filmed and photographed themselves doing all these things. They were often first on the scene reporting on bombings, skirmishes, and alleged chemical weapons attacks. The most famous accusations against the White Helmets, lobbed by Russian and alternative Western media, were that they collaborated with terrorist groups and staged fake attacks and/or rescue missions. Yet perhaps the more interesting and revealing thing about the White Helmets that can be confirmed is that they were a key part of a wider propaganda and civil society operation to support anti-Assad forces in Syria and justify and encourage foreign intervention led by corporate contractors working under the UK FCO.  

As the military war dragged on, Western backed militias needed to administer the areas they conquered as well as fight an information war. Since these rebel-held spaces were too dangerous for Western journalists, Western states raised a local media infrastructure through local proxies. US and European NGOs and governments funded, trained, and supplied outlets like Aleppo Media Center while ARK and its fellow UK FCO contractors set up their own media outlets like Basma, Moubader, and Syriagraph, establishing TV, radio, and magazine production for themselves or partner organizations. Other FCO contractors like Albany Associates Ltd identified and trained select spokespeople from and developed communication strategies for violent sectarian Salafi militias like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam. One prominent ostensibly grassroots media outlet for the Battle of Aleppo, Revolutionary Forces of Syria, was directly run by an FCO consortium member that partnered closely with ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), directed by Richard Barrett, former director of counterterrorism at MI6. These outlets then fed propaganda to their “well-established contacts with numerous key media organisations [sic] including Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Orient, Sky News Arabic, CNN, BBC, BBC Arabic, The Times, The Guardian, FT [Financial Times], NYT [New York Times], Reuters and others.”

Figure 2- One of several maps of Syria showcasing ARK’s media and civil society operations in Syria. “ICSP Beneficiaries” refer to local Free Syrian Police units while “Media Stringers” refer to freelance journalists trained and or employed by ARK (ITT Lot C – Technical Response)  

UK FCO contractors like Adam Smith International and ARK tried to create civil society infrastructure to provide essential services that could compete with Syrian state services. They set up a Free Syrian Police (FSP) as well as municipal governance, education, and sanitation services, while the White Helmets provided emergency fire, transportation, and rubble clean-up services. The FSP alone received hundreds of millions of dollars through US and European funding and had its own scandals of corruption and connections with terrorist groups. The White Helmets alongside media outlets set up with extensive help from Western governments and NGOs like Aleppo Media Center, or media outlets directly run by Western government contractors like Revolutionary Forces of Syria, audio-visually recorded and disseminated these services from local Arabic speaking audiences to global, particularly Western Anglophone audiences. For ARK, their civil society services and “media products” were one and the same. The US and European states spent over $1 billion on these media and civil society initiatives refined through constant polling, focus groups, data analysis, and target audience segmentation to maximize their media and public opinion impact.

Figure 3- ARK “Project Schematic” showing how civil society initiatives immediately became propaganda for local and Western audiences. The events for September-November were planned by ARK to both provide rebel governance and turn their services into pro-rebel, anti-regime propaganda. (ARK 1.2.1 Methodology, c2017)

Target Audiences: The Home Front

The White Helmets became the star group of this initiative not just because they provided local services and produced propaganda at the same time; they also gave the opposition to Assad a singular humanitarian face that could shroud the sectarian and theocratic violence that characterized the bulk of the Western backed armed opposition that eventually coalesced into ISIS. Among Western media and celebrities, that’s exactly what the White Helmets became. 

The program of influence peddling and manufacturing public consent for intervention in Syria made it to the highest levels of Western entertainment with the 2016 Oscar winning documentary The White Helmets, profiling the ARK created group. The documentary created a narrative of Russian and Assad military devils bombing helpless civilians who relied on angelic White Helmets as their only line of defense, scrubbing all rebel militias from the conflict except ISIS. It was made possible by the cheap labor of the White Helmet workers, with whom ARK had previously produced several Arabic-language documentaries, the money and government connections of oil and industrial interests through philanthropies like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the enthusiastic endorsements of US and UK media. The organization that led the impact campaign for the documentary and the White Helmets targeting celebrities and the media as well as Western halls of power was The Syria Campaign (TSC). TSC was started and heavily funded by a Syrian expat, US educated billionaire oil CEO and major UK Tory party donor, Ayman Asfari, whose company was convicted and fined in 2021 by a UK court for paying millions of dollars in bribes to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE for oil contracts. Even before the Syrian Civil War started Asfari had his hands in dirty influence peddling with the UK who led the propaganda and civil society war against Syria, the UAE, who served as a regional conduit for those efforts, and the Saudis, who helped lead the hard power militia war against Syria.

While The White Helmets documentary tugged at viewers’ heartstrings over the brutality of Syrian and Russian air power, the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets pushed for the US and its allies to establish a no-fly zone over Syria. This was the same kind of intervention that was instrumental in lynching Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and throwing that country into chaos and strife it still has not emerged from. Despite the risk of inciting a hot war with Russia that a no-fly zone in Syria implied, this policy was pushed by powerful political leaders, including the 2016 Democratic party presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Cynical weaponization of real and alleged atrocity stories to justify intervention and create easy good vs. evil stories for the benefit of US backed rebel factions in Muslim countries is not new. Journalist Joel Whitney (2016) showed that the weaponization of refugees and training pro-rebel activists to encourage and film atrocities has historical precedent in Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan. The resumes and CVs from leaked UK Foreign Commonwealth Office documents also point to these programs repeating and building off each other through history, particularly in the destabilized Muslim majority regions of the world in the past 30 years. Several prominent employees with leadership roles in these government contractors in Syria have long resumes before joining ARK and other FCO contractors. Their employee profiles demonstrate a pattern of receiving military, media, civil society, and government transition positions in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, sometimes in that order and often including several sub-Saharan African countries like Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Mali, and Nigeria as well. These ventures have occurred before and will continue.

Many details of the Western propaganda and interference schemes in Syria are still unknown, locked in classified internal government and corporate documents. Yet the few leaks and investigative reports we have reveal an extensive, well-funded, years-long propaganda and disinformation warfare campaign waged first against the Syrian government but perhaps more intensely against Western publics. Through groups like the White Helmets and the media they produced, Western governments and corporations backed up their multi-billion-dollar effort to flood Syria with weapons and fighters with propaganda and civil society campaigns worth about a billion dollars. These facilitated rebel administrations on the ground and helped sell a simplified whitewashed narrative of the Syrian Civil War and build war fervor for Western intervention. This built off historical precedents, committed by the same people who engaged in similar campaigns in other Muslim majority countries. 

It must be said that these efforts failed in important ways. While nearly all Western mainstream corporate media and politicians fell in line behind the White Helmets and the consortium’s pro-intervention narratives, war weary Western publics, particularly in the US and UK, were skeptical and unconvinced. Outlets like the Syria Campaign, the Guardian, and the BBC were quite troubled by the popular pushback they got which, despite their best efforts, could not be smeared as all Moscow agents or their useful idiots spreading disinformation. Russia and Syria did have their own propaganda strategy to counter Western media, and this is an inevitable reality of modern warfare. Their tactics included accusations against the White Helmets that, while containing important grains of truth, were overly simplistic and designed to paper over the brutal acts they engaged in as belligerents in a generally brutal war. Yet it is striking that, after so many criminal imperialist adventures in the region, public skepticism and disillusionment toward institutional narratives pushing humanitarian intervention in another Muslim country would be dismissed by political and media professionals with such pious Cold War style deflection and finger-pointing. These went so far as to include a sting operation and media smear campaign led by yet another organization created by ARK against academics investigating Western intervention in Syria. This ideological disciplining of public discourse is particularly outrageous when critical investigations into what Western states and their allies were doing in Syria without substantial, if any, public consent or knowledge reveal disturbing patterns of violence, manipulation, and good-old fashioned corruption and self-aggrandizement.

Resurrecting the Ghouls: On the West's History of Hating Russians and Rehabilitating Nazis

[Pictured: The Azov Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary group that is part of Ukraine’s armed forces]

By Julien Charles

The immensely popular Swedish noir crime procedural novels by Lars Kepler are part of one of the more compelling series in Nordic crime fiction. In particular the Joona Lina series, in which police detectives track a Hannibal-esque serial killer who wreaks havoc on those he deems deserving. It only occurred to me late in the first novel that the killer is a Russian. Jurek Walter is an ex-soldier, remorselessly cynical, immune to pain, and a brutally efficient torturer and murderer of men and women alike. His feverishly demented goal is to ‘restore order’ by punishing those who have gotten away with a lot less criminal activity than murder. In short, an unimaginable psychopath of the kind that could only emerge from the ruins of the Soviet Union. The personification of evil.

The character in the novel embodied a version of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a process by which the West caricatures other regions, nations, and people in cartoonish and sophomoric ways. The better to understand them at a glance. Almost like a kind of intellectual shorthand by which to characterize and dismiss entire populations. Perform conceptual violence on them until they can be shunted into a shape that slides neatly into a western man’s conception of the world. Fits the Western cosmology, in which the U.S. and Europe shine as lodestars in a firmament of flickering blight. Everything in the heavens is of course in desperate need of guidance from the western polestar.

Examples of the dynamic of Orientalism are particularly rife in Hollywood. Countless series and movies have pitted pious Americans against a raft of crackpot Latinos, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, and Asians bent on genocide, world domination, and numberless other monomaniacal schemes. There’s of course no small amount of projection at work here in the fictional stylings of “the best minds of [our] generation”, as Ginsberg put it.

Not unlike the Kepler book, the Tom Cruise Jack Reacher films capitalize on the by now threadbare trope of a Soviet psychopath set loose in the naive and peaceable democracies of the West. The Zec is a man who escaped or survived the gulags in Siberia to wreak havoc on the West. In one scene, he describes how he once gnawed off a few fingers to avoid working in Siberian sulfur mines. A man of such exceptional capacities is no doubt useful to certain organizations, he muses. The Zec then encourages one of his low-level thugs to chew off his thumb as a show of fidelity, or some such deranged proof. The man—human, all too human—cannot do it and is summarily executed. The bloodless Zec then waxes psychopathic, wondering why westerners are so weak.

Observe the set pieces in the Jennifer Lawrence vehicle Red Sparrow. Scenes from the West are well-lit and overflowing with human emotion; scenes from behind the “iron curtain” are dimly lit, drab in color, stylistically old-world, barren of human empathy. In short, thoroughly depressing. Of course, as part of Lawrence’s character Dominika’s training in demolishing her human emotions (weaknesses all) and steeling herself in the arts of pitiless manipulation, she must appear naked before her class and satisfy the lust of a man who previously assaulted her.

Chronic Resentments

These are caricatures of Russians who evidently have been thoroughly dehumanized by life in the USSR. What has really dehumanized these characters is the propaganda which invented them.

Few events ignite this kind of Orientalism more than a war or proxy war with Russia, America’s bete noire. Despite the fact that the wall has been down for 30 years. Despite the fact that the West enjoyed an extended period of unrestrained looting in the Former Soviet Republics. During which time mortality rates skyrocketed for citizens of those fledgling states, thanks principally to the loss of the generous social supports that underpinned their Soviet economies. Despite the fact that Vladimir Putin is an avowed neoliberal who has repeatedly sought deeper integration with Europe and America, like a stepchild desperate to claim his birthright among a welter of siblings. Despite all this, Putin’s patriotic desire to reconstitute Russia as a viable economic and military power has damned him irreparably in the eyes of the West. He is like Kepler’s killer, the manifestation of undiluted evil. Except that Putin is real.

All this comes from a long lineage of Russophobia. It dates back to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, which stirred fears of Russian plots to conquer Europe; to subsequent paranoia by British colonialists that Russia would steal the Indian subcontinent from its grasp; to the war to unseat the Bolsheviks and blistering responses to stories of mass slaughter under Soviet rule. In 1944, Hitler described Russians thusly, “These are not human beings: they are beasts from the Asiatic steppes, and the battle I am leading against them is the battle for the dignity of the people of Europe.” This view summarized the ideology behind Germany’s plan to murder 100 million Russians after the defeated the USSR. Likewise, we rarely hear that one of the small handful of groups energetically targeted for liquidation by the Nazis were communists. The Russians sacrificed 27 million people fighting off fascism. This loss is also infrequently highlighted.

The McCarthyite paranoia was a particularly acute instance of this chronic phobia. One can catch a whiff of the age-old bigotry in the propaganda of the present moment. The reflexive aggression toward Russia action in Ukraine (a recent article in The Times (UK) was entitled, “Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul”) This latest surge of bile seems in part an explosion of unresolved angst from the Russophobia of the Trump years, and perhaps a hundred years prior, though partially diffused by the fall of the wall. Yet it was still there even in the post-wall melees of capitalist looting under the doddering oversight of the Pushkin-quoting boozer Boris Yeltsin. Russians, Muscovites mostly, were freshly depicted as amoral, thieving mafiosi seduced by the flash of capital, the men brutal grotesques and the women biddable jades. Little was made of the valueless cosmos into which they’d been hurled by the blitzkrieg of capital on a society not remotely prepared for it.

(Much like the diagnosis of mental health in the West, problems of post-fall Russians were and are localized in the person, in the soul of a people, rarely traced to their societal causes. The New York Times just released a series on the “Inner Pandemic” of mental health issues, though it spends little time focusing on the circumstances that generated these crises, and which it enthusiastically supported.)

Even today one finds strains of the old Hitlerian trope coursing through the western mainstream. Recently on Germany’s ZDF channel, a guest of the Markus Lanz Show reminded viewers, with a slim smile, that, “Even if Russians look European, they are not European.” She rambled on incoherently about the Slavic view of death and noted that, “They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life.” She may as well have said they were beasts from the Asiatic steppes and referred viewers to the Jack Reacher movie. After which, perhaps, they might donate to the latest national purity fund.

This seems to be part unhinged racism, but also a psychological necessity for enemies in nation-states. And one wonders if race isn’t utilized to that end. And whether this psychological need springs from a desire for national purpose, or more from an unrelenting need of capital for new markets—and the geospatial requirements that go with it. Surely the historical Lebensraum looms large behind modern geopolitical conflicts.

Addicted to Conflict

But it isn’t just the xenophobic fear of Slavic people. There’s another element at work here. One is reminded of Colin Powell, former leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and dissembler nonpareil—before the U.N. Security Council. He once told a reporter that he feared he was “running out of enemies” in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. He was unwittingly disclosing a clandestine principle of Washington foreign policy. Namely, that it must always have an enemy. It cannot conceive a world of peaceful inhabitants, engaged in serene market exchange, celebrating a peace dividend while occasionally reminding new generations of the perils of conflict. This is not a conceit in the mental universe of the planners of American hegemony, be they retired generals on media networks, cabinet lieutenants sketching hemispheric takeovers, or well-compensated scriveners in beltway think tanks. And certainly not among the lurid corridors of K Street defense lobbyists. If Putin did not exist, Washington would have invented him. Much as they invented, to a surprising degree, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen.

More often than not, the enemy must be cut from whole cloth. They do not ordinarily present themselves. Few countries are interested in going to war with the United States. At worst most nations are disinterested in submitting themselves to American rule, which manifests in numberless ways, a protean ogre extending its tentacles across the globe. Soft power, hard power, invisible power. Be it the petro dollar and the SWIFT system that places a subject nation under the perpetual threat of American sanctions. (A form of economic colonialism.) Be it bilateral security arrangements that infiltrate the country with U.S. military personnel and ensnare it in long-term weapons contracts with beltway defense contractors. (A form of military subjugation.) Be it onerous and odious loan agreements with Bretton Woods institutions that enslave generations of citizens to corrupt banks of the global North. (A form of vassalage.) From which those citizens’ meager avenues of escape include metastasizing debt service and consequent debt deflation, firesales of national patrimony, or the trauma of default, runaway inflation, and economic collapse. Choose wisely.

Rather than being enemies of the American state, such nations would really rather be left alone. To experiment with alternative economic models including socialism and its various hybrids. To trade in local currencies. To align in regional economic blocs. But this option–attempting to implement an economic structure other than western neoliberalism–is anathema to Washington. Just ask Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and any other nation that wishes to forge its own path.

The Real Enemy

Which brings us to the real enemy of the United States. Despite reports to the contrary, it is not fascism. Fascism is merely an end-point of capitalism, which will almost assuredly emerge wherever capitalism is practiced in unregulated and unrepentant fashion. As middle class wealth craters, however broadly, and extreme wealth and privilege expands, however narrowly, it will require force to generate compliance within a resentful and restive population. We are witnessing this transition in the West right now.

All this to say that, no, fascism was never the primary nemesis. The real enemy is communism. Western capital cannot abide the notion of a workers' state full of nationalized enterprises committed to the general welfare. One which deprioritizes the profit motive and tars it with the stigma of avarice and usury. This is and has always been Washington’s worst-case scenario, which it watched materialize in the Bolshevik Revolution, a knife in the side of capital that drew blood for 74 years, and which it tried hysterically to end all the while.

Not even the shameful scourge of Nazism rising up in the heart of civilized Europe was enough to lift fascism above communism as public enemy number one. As John Steppling notes in an excellent essay on the rehabilitation of fascism, Arthur Schweitzer, author of Big Business in the Third Reich, says that many German businessmen saw virulent anti-semitism as little more than a form of “economic policy reform.”

It is instructive to read works like The Splendid Blond Beast, which outlines the myriad deceptions of the postwar era of supposed deNazification in Western Europe. As it turns out, Washington was torn on the prosecution of Nazi war crimes. Although Frederick Roosevelt and others supported harsh punishment, helped establish Nuremberg and sent principled judges like Robert Jackson, others like powerful Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and his Secretary of State brother John Foster Dulles sought to shield German industrialists and military officers, all deeply complicit and enthusiastic collaborators in the Nazi extermination campaigns.

Then there was Operation Paperclip, a full program dedicated to repatriating Nazis in the United States and installing them in key posts in pivotal internationalist institutions like the UN. And Nato’s alleged role in Operation Gladio, code name for a series of stay behind secret armies committed to armed resistance, acts of subversion, and terror, that were to be activated in the event of an invasion of Western Europe by Warsaw Pact nations, something never on the books in Moscow, but alive in the feverish imagination of beltway anti-communists. These dispersed embedded and hastily assembled paramilitaries were actually left behind to agitate against and prevent the rise of leftist (see communist) political blocs. They operated in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Portugal and across Northern Europe. Nato, the CIA, and various European intelligence agencies were not about to watch Western Europe go communist regardless of what the democratized masses aberrantly desired.

Much of this history suggests that the underlying need of capitalism for new markets is primary, and perhaps that race is a tool leveraged to rationalize what is at bottom base exploitation. Hence our general acceptance of fascism in Ukraine and hysteria against Russia.

Selective Outrage

We might argue that this is different: Russia invaded another country. On investigation the argument falters, fractures amid a sea of sharp facts: a foreign backer, a coup d’etat, an ultranationalist takeover, a Nato infiltration, a legal apparatus mobilized against its own citizens, a massacre of ethnic Russians, preparations for a final assault. And finally, a full response from Moscow.

But even if an invasion were our threshold for outrage, none of this pathos has been evident in our response to the U.S.-backed Saudi war on Yemen, or U.S. wars on Libya and Syria. Even though the western aggression is criminal and death tolls are staggering. Even though there were plenty of visuals and myths available to rouse the choler of the people: visions of rampaging soldiers on Viagra rape sprees; grotesquely thin and lifeless children in the dust of the KSA’s induced famine; the hurling of gays off rooftops in Raqqa by ‘moderate rebels’. No, our collective consciousness has definitely been conditioned to despise most of all the legatees of Soviet communism, punished for the sins of the father in the first instance and for the defense of their national autonomy in the second. War, and war propaganda, is often a kind of industrialized hatred, organized malice armed with the implements of death.

As Arthur Ponsonby says in his book Falsehoods in War Time, deceitfulness is extraordinarily useful because humanity is mendacious and credulous in near equal measure. It lies and refuses to believe it is being lied to. Ponsonby, a member of British Parliament writing after World War I, says that nations must “justify themselves by depicting the enemy as an undiluted criminal; and secondly, to inflame popular passion for the continuance of the struggle.” Obviously little has changed since our initial experience of industrial warfare. We are constitutionally and economically committed to domineering aims, are inimical to anything that might impede our expansion, and we rationalize our behavior to these ends with a healthy dose of projection abetted by racist caricature. It is a frightful concoction of pitiless greed and base prejudice.

Yet every time we think we have put these cruel rancorous sides to our human selves to rest, they reappear, refashioned in new apparel, with fresh logic, ironclad rationales. We are sold a bill of goods. Perhaps this should come as no real surprise to citizens of a country that worships a single skill, salesmanship, and a single “virtue”, wealth, as its most sacred values. Everything is a commodity and everything that has been sold in the past will be sold again. Our entertainment culture is rife with reproductions of yesterday’s stories. Why not re-commoditize fascism? Wave the colors of a new flag and herald the insignia of a new battalion. Lionize a new leader, dress him in army green and pose him on the marble stairs of the halls of power, sandbags stacked to the roofs behind him. Honor under siege.

What has been sold before will be sold again; what we have hated before we will hate again. If it isn’t quite eternal return then it surely is history recurring as tragedy then farce. This soft embrace of fascism and rabid anti-communism goes all the way back to the Bolshevik uprising. As one of Kepler’s Nordic tales is subtitled, “Sometimes the past won’t stay buried.” Yes, the graves are always rather too near the surface.

Julien Charles is a concerned citizen hoping to call attention to the authoritarian drift of states across the Western world, and the disingenuous narratives promoted to gain consensus for such measures.

Power Systems, Propaganda, and the Maintenance of Exploitation

 By Marcus Kahn

In biology class, I was taught that structure determines function. The respiratory system has a lot of surface area (structure) to absorb and distribute oxygen (function). The lungs may be built of the same basic substance as other parts of the body (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc.) but the structural arrangement at an atomic, molecular, and cellular level determines how the larger system behaves. A sword and a scalpel may be built of the same metal, but they are designed and structured to accomplish completely different tasks.

With this in mind, we should evaluate the function of our existing power system according to its structure and determine what it is designed to accomplish. This involves stripping away its rhetoric and self-image, looking at the distribution of decision-making power, and determining whether the system is capable of being reformed into something fair and equitable, or whether it’s a sword that needs to be melted down and transformed using the same basic substances, people and law.

A democratic power system seeks to give everyone an equal voice in collective decisions, rooted in the underlying assumption that such a system of governance would tend towards justice and prosperity. If the atoms are horizontally structured through laws that provide equal access to decision-making, this will lead to an equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. If the system is hierarchically structured and decision-making emanates from the top, the system will function exploitatively to the benefit of those in power. Democratic (bottom-up flow of decision-making) and authoritarian (top-down flow of decision-making) power systems may be built of the same basic substance (people and rules to govern their behavior), but their differing structures determine who they ultimately serve. When decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a few, a small minority becomes capable of systematically defending their interests by creating law and enforcing it through legally sanctioned violence.

There are examples of concentrated power in monarchies and theocracies throughout history whereby the labor of the majority is exploited for the profit of the powerful few, at the cost of human life and the ability to control that life. The ‘special interests’ of the powerful minority not only differ from the interests of the vast majority of the population. Their achievement depends on popular submission to the will of those in power. But popular submission to an exploitative power system is no easy task. It is difficult to convince people to work for you and hand over the fruits of their labor, whether that’s years of unpaid childcare or ten hours a day behind a desk. Power systems require a parallel system of belief to accomplish what they can’t enforce physically. You need to convince a substantial portion of the population, as well as yourself, that you are justified in dictating their behavior and demanding their obedience.

The way exploitative power systems are justified can usefully be termed as the ‘dominant ideology’ in a given society. Dominant ideologies have varied across time and geopolitical situation. In 14th century England you might have someone holding up a bible to justify taxing landless peasants, meanwhile an Aztec priest is across the ocean telling everyone why his divine right to rule justifies economic inequality and social control. In the more secular modern age, the dominant ideology has taken on a global and comparatively homogenous character. The modern dominant ideology, (the belief system that justifies exploitation) can be conceptually divided into four interdependent categories based off their inherent properties and historical development; patriarchy (oppression justified by gender and sexuality), state-corporate capitalism (oppression justified by property rights), imperialism (oppression justified by nationality) and white supremacy (oppression justified by perceived race).

History rarely provides neat watersheds, but much of their development and form can be explained by the residual power of fundamentalist religion, the ‘discovery’ of the New World and corresponding racist-imperialist colonial systems that extended from western Europe beginning in the 16th century, and the crystallization of the state-corporate capitalist economic system through the growth of multinational corporations and massive financial institutions since the late 19th century, accelerated after WWII and enforced by powerful Western nations, primarily U.S. military and economic power.

These forms of oppression are deeply interlinked, backed by the threat and execution of lawful violence, and justified by information distributed from powerful institutions directed by men, billionaires, powerful nations, and white people, most potently all four wrapped into one person like Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Jobs, Bezos, Murdoch, Gates, or Trump.

The means of reproducing and distributing the dominant ideology changes in tandem with technological advances. The modern development of mass information distribution systems (e.g. standardized education, corporate mass media, the public relations and advertising industries, and more recently the Internet) has given a tiny minority historically unprecedented influence over the information people receive, and therefore how they behave. If people clearly understand universal rights to freedom, health, safety, and sustenance they will resist laws, ideas, and people that oppose those rights. If they pledge allegiance to a nationalist symbol before absorbing thirteen years of revisionist history or read the same newspaper every day, they are much more likely to uphold the existing power system because they are convinced it’s the right thing to do. In its essence, what has developed over the past century is a highly sophisticated propaganda system whose ideological production is distributed among powerful institutions in the public and private sectors. These institutions are controlled by a class of individuals who share similar, though not always identical interests.

The label ‘propaganda system’ may seem counterintuitive. When we hear the word ‘propaganda’ we tend to picture a tightly coordinated and centralized government-run agency that distributes pamphlets, radio broadcasts, etc. Chomsky notes an inverse relationship between a state’s ability to use violence on its own population, and the sophistication of the propaganda system in place. The more authoritarian the power system is, the more rudimentary its propaganda, the more democratic the more sophisticated. Within so-called “free” societies like the U.K. and the U.S., violence is not always an easy option for maintaining power. Through popular struggles over the centuries, these societies have made some limited progress in securing legal protections against state-sanctioned violence, and those in power have had to find new ways to ensure obedience.

This sincere fear of public disobedience and interference in public policy has been referred to as the ‘threat of democracy’ or more recently the ‘crisis of democracy’. But the need to structurally marginalize public influence is a priority James Madison understood when designing a constitutional framework put in place to protect the interests of the ‘minority of the opulent’, and a phenomenon those in power in the 1960s and 70s understood when facing popular resistance in the form of the civil rights, anti-war, labor, and feminist movements. In response to this threat, and enabled by developments in communications technology, those with a vested interest in maintaining and furthering the existing power system established control over new means of mass information distribution to marshal public behavior without the use of force and ‘manufacture consent’ for exploitative public policy.

This system of ideological control is not centrally coordinated or even fully understood by those who participate. Executives at ABC (Disney) and NBC (General Electric) do not call each other to compare notes on how to oppress the working class. But those with ultimate decision-making power atop these rigidly structured and powerful institutions (mostly rich white men from powerful countries) share similar interests on a range of public policy issues and independently manufacture a limited range of debate that tries to ignore or vilify ideas and people that threaten their power. Though slight variations in tactics and opinion reflect the distribution of power amongst distinct institutions, the output of corporate mass media institutions is ideologically consistent due to hierarchical and undemocratic internal structures, and is also influenced by mutualistic relationships with other centers of concentrated power (e.g. a government that supplies fresh official information or the corporate advertisers who help pay the bills). These inherent structural pressures orient public discourse towards the interests of the powerful.

Corporate media institutions help to reframe critical issues that have attracted popular concern such as climate change, wealth distribution, military intervention, health care, and police power in ways that maintain the integrity of the power system and ensure the continued exploitation of the global population for private gain without meaningful public interference. By appealing to widespread dissatisfaction and perhaps themselves using the language of ‘reform’, those with power avoid addressing the need for transformative deconstruction and the institution of democratic structures of governance that are upheld by popular consent and dictated by collective decision-making rather than violence and ideological management.

How the US Government Stokes Racial Tensions in Cuba and Around the World

By Alan Macleod

Republished from Mint Press News.

“A Black uprising is shaking Cuba’s Communist regime,” read The Washington Post ’sheadline on the recent unrest on the Caribbean island. “Afro-Cubans Come Out In Droves To Protest Government,” wrote NPR .Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal went with “Cuba’s Black Communities Bear the Brunt of Regime’s Crackdown” as a title.

These were examples of a slew of coverage in the nation’s top outlets, which presented what amounted to one day of U.S.-backed protests in July as a nationwide insurrection led by the country’s Black population — in effect, Cuba’s Black Lives Matter moment.

Apart from dramatically playing up the size and scope of the demonstrations, the coverage tended to rely on Cuban emigres or other similarly biased sources. One noteworthy example of this was Slate ,which interviewed a political exile turned Ivy League professor presenting herself as a spokesperson for young Black working class Cubans. Professor Amalia Dache explicitly linked the struggles of people in Ferguson, Missouri with that of Black Cuban groups. “We’re silenced and we’re erased on both fronts, in Cuba and the United States, across racial lines, across political lines,” she said.

Dache’s academic work — including “Rise Up! Activism as Education” and “Ferguson’s Black radical imagination and the cyborgs of community-student resistance,” — shows how seemingly radical academic work can be made to dovetail with naked U.S. imperialism. From her social media postings ,Dache appears to believe there is an impending genocide in Cuba. Slate even had the gall to title the article “Fear of a Black Cuban Planet” — a reference to the militant hip-hop band Public Enemy, even though its leader, Chuck D, has made many statements critical of U.S. intervention in Cuba.

Perhaps more worryingly, the line of selling a U.S.-backed color revolution as a progressive event even permeated more radical leftist publications. NACLA — the North American Congress on Latin America, an academic journal dedicated, in its own words, to ensuring “the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from oppression and injustice, and enjoy a relationship with the United States based on mutual respect, free from economic and political subordination” — published a number of highly questionable articles on the subject.

One, written by Bryan Campbell Romero, was entitled “Have You Heard, Comrade? The Socialist Revolution Is Racist Too,” and described the protests as “the anger, legitimate dissatisfaction, and cry for freedom of many in Cuba,” against a “racist and homophobic” government that is unquestionably “the most conservative force in Cuban society.”

Campbell Romero described the government’s response as a “ruthless … crackdown” that “displayed an uncommon disdain for life on July 11.” The only evidence he gave for what he termed “brutal repression” was a link to a Miami-based CBS affiliate, which merely stated that, “Cuban police forcibly detained dozens of protesters. Video captured police beating demonstrators,” although, again, it did not provide evidence for this.

Campbell Romero excoriated American racial justice organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Black Alliance for Peace that sympathized with the Cuban government, demanding they support “the people in Cuba who are fighting for the same things they’re fighting for in the United States.”

“Those of us who are the oppressed working-class in the actual Global South — colonized people building the socialist project that others like to brag about — feel lonely when our natural allies prioritize domestic political fights instead of showing basic moral support,” he added. Campbell Romero is a market research and risk analyst who works for The Economist. Moreover, this oppressed working class Cuban proudly notes that his career development has been financially sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Cuban government critic Bryan Campbell Romero proudly touts his US State Department-funded education

Unfortunately, the blatant gaslighting of U.S. progressives did not end there. The journal also translated and printed the essay of an academic living in Mexico that lamented that the all-powerful “Cuban media machine” had contributed to “the Left’s ongoing voluntary blindness.” Lionizing U.S.-funded groups like the San Isidro movement and explicitly downplaying the U.S. blockade, the author again appointed herself a spokesperson for her island, noting “we, as Cubans” are ruled over by a “military bourgeoisie” that has “criminaliz[ed] dissent.” Such radical, even Marxist rhetoric is odd for someone who is perhaps best known for their role as a consultant to a Danish school for entrepreneurship.

NACLA’s reporting received harsh criticism from some. “This absurd propaganda at coup-supporting website NACLA shows how imperialists cynically weaponize identity politics against the left,” reacted Nicaragua-based journalist Ben Norton .“This anti-Cuba disinfo was written by a right-wing corporate consultant who does ‘market research’ for corporations and was cultivated by U.S. NGOs,” he continued, noting the journal’s less than stellar record of opposing recent coups and American regime change operations in the region. In fairness to NACLA, it also published far more nuanced opinions on Cuba — including some that openly criticized previous articles — and has a long track record of publishing valuable research.

“The radlib academics at @NACLA supported the violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, numerous US coup attempts in Venezuela, and now a US regime-change operation in Cuba.

NACLA is basically an arm of the US State Department https://t.co/xxFvxMemxo”

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 12, 2021

BLM Refuses to Play Ball

The framing of the protests as a Black uprising against a conservative, authoritarian, racist government was dealt a serious blow by Black Lives Matter itself, which quickly released a statement in solidarity with Cuba, presenting the demonstrations as a consequence of U.S. aggression. As the organization wrote:

The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination. United States leaders have tried to crush this Revolution for decades.

Such a big and important organization coming out in unqualified defense of the Cuban government seriously undermined the case that was being whipped up, and the fact that Black Lives Matter would not toe Washington’s line sparked outrage among the U.S. elite, leading to a storm of condemnation in corporate media. “Cubans can’t breathe either. Black Cuban lives also matter; the freedom of all Cubans should matter,” The Atlantic seethed. Meanwhile, Fox News contributor and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, Marc A. Thiessen claimed in The Washington Post that “Black Lives Matter is supporting the exploitation of Cuban workers” by supporting a “brutal regime” that enslaves its population, repeating the dubious Trump administration claim that Cuban doctors who travel the world are actually slaves being trafficked.

Despite the gaslighting, BLM stood firm, and other Black organizations joined them, effectively ending any hopes for a credible shot at intersectional imperialist intervention. “The moral hypocrisy and historic myopia of U.S. liberals and conservatives, who have unfairly attacked BLM’s statement on Cuba, is breathtaking,” read a statement from the Black Alliance for Peace.

Trying to Create a Cuban BLM

What none of the articles lauding the anti-government Afro-Cubans mention is that for decades the U.S. government has been actively stoking racial resentment on the island, pouring tens of millions of dollars into astroturfed organizations promoting regime change under the banner of racial justice.

Reading through the grants databases for Cuba from U.S. government organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, it immediately becomes clear that Washington has for years chosen to target young people, particularly Afro-Cubans, and exploit real racial inequalities on the island, turning them into a wedge issue to spark unrest, and, ultimately, an insurrection.

For instance, a 2020 NED project,  entitled “Promoting Inclusion of Marginalized Populations in Cuba,” notes that the U.S. is attempting to “strengthen a network of on-island partners” and help them to interact and organize with one another.

A second mission,  this time from 2016, was called “promoting racial integration.” But even from the short blurb publicly advertising what it was doing, it is clear that the intent was the opposite. The NED sought to “promote greater discussion about the challenges minorities face in Cuba,” and publish media about the issues affecting youth, Afro-Cubans and the LGBTI community in an attempt to foster unrest.

A 2016 NED grant targets hides hawkish US policy goals behind altruistic language like “promoting racial integration”

Meanwhile, at the time of the protests, USAID was offering $2 million worth of funding to organizations that could “strengthen and facilitate the creation of issue-based and cross-sectoral networks to support marginalized and vulnerable populations, including but not limited to youth, women, LGBTQI+, religious leaders, artists, musicians, and individuals of Afro-Cuban descent.” The document proudly asserts that the United States stands with “Afro-Cubans demand[ing] better living conditions in their communities,” and makes clear it sees their future as one without a Communist government.

The document also explicitly references the song “Patria y Vida,” by the San Isidro movement and Cuban emigre rapper Yotuel, as a touchstone it would like to see more of. Although the U.S. never discloses who exactly it is funding and what they are doing with the money, it seems extremely likely that San Isidro and Yotuel are on their payroll.

“Such an interesting look at the new generation of young people in #Cuba & how they are pushing back against govt repression. A group of artists channeled their frustrations into a wildly popular new song that the government is now desperate to suppress.” https://t.co/47RGc9ORuR

— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) February 24, 2021

Only days after “Patria y Vida” was released, there appeared to be a concerted effort among high American officials to promote the track, with powerful figures such as head of USAID Samantha Power sharing it on social media. Yotuel participates in public Zoom calls with U.S. government officials while San Isidro members fly into Washington to glad-hand with senior politicians or pose for photos with American marines inside the U.S. Embassy in Havana. One San Isidro member said he would “give [his] life for Trump” and beseeched him to tighten the blockade of his island, an illegal action that has already cost Cuba well over $1 trillion,  according to the United Nations. Almost immediately after the protests began, San Isidro and Yotuel appointed themselves leaders of the demonstrations, the latter heading a large sympathy demonstration in Miami.

“The whole point of the San Isidro movement and the artists around it is to reframe those protests as a cry for freedom and to make inroads into progressive circles in the U.S.,” said Max Blumenthal, a journalist who has investigated the group’s background.

Rap As A Weapon

From its origins in the 1970s, hip hop was always a political medium. Early acts like Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, KRS One, and Public Enemy spoke about the effect of drugs on Black communities, police violence, and building movements to challenge power.

By the late 1990s, hip hop as an art form was gaining traction in Cuba as well, as local Black artists helped bring to the fore many previously under-discussed topics, such as structural racism.

Afro-Cubans certainly are at a financial disadvantage. Because the large majority of Cubans who have left the island are white, those receiving hard currency in the form of remittances are also white, meaning that they enjoy far greater purchasing power. Afro-Cubans are also often overlooked for jobs in the lucrative tourism industry, as there is a belief that foreigners prefer to interact with those with lighter skin. This means that their access to foreign currency in the cash-poor Caribbean nation is severely hampered. Blacks are also underrepresented in influential positions in business or education and more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts. In recent times, the government has tried to take an activist position, passing a number of anti-racism laws. Nevertheless, common attitudes about what constitutes beauty and inter-racial relationships prove that the society is far from a racially egalitarian one where Black people face little or no discrimination.

The new blockade on remittances, married with the pandemic-induced crash in tourism, has hit the local economy extremely hard, with unemployment especially high and new shortages of some basic goods. Thus, it is certainly plausible that the nationwide demonstrations that started in a small town on the west side of the island were entirely organic to begin with. However, they were also unquestionably signal-boosted by Cuban expats, celebrities and politicians in the United States, who all encouraged people out on the streets, insisting that they enjoyed the full support of the world’s only superpower.

However, it should be remembered that Cuba as a nation was crucial in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa, sending tens of thousands of troops to Africa to defeat the racist apartheid forces, a move that spelled the end for the system. To the last day, the U.S. government backed the white government.

Washington saw local rappers’ biting critiques of inequality as a wedge issue they could exploit, and attempted to recruit them into their ranks, although it is far from clear how far they got in this endeavor, as their idea of change rarely aligned with what rappers wanted for their country.

Sujatha Fernandes, a sociologist at the University of Sydney and an expert in Cuban hip hop told MintPress:

"For many years, under the banner of regime change, organizations like USAID have tried to infiltrate Cuban rap groups and fund covert operations to provoke youth protests. These programs have involved a frightening level of manipulation of Cuban artists, have put Cubans at risk, and threatened a closure of the critical spaces of artistic dialogue many worked hard to build.”

In 2009, the U.S. government paid for a project whereby it sent music promoter and color-revolution expert Rajko Bozic to the island. Bozic set about establishing contacts with local rappers, attempting to bribe them into joining his project. The Serbian found a handful of artists willing to participate in the project and immediately began aggressively promoting them, using his employers’ influence to get their music played on radio stations. He also paid big Latino music stars to allow the rappers to open up for them at their gigs, thus buying them extra credibility and exposure. The project only ended after it was uncovered, leading to a USAID official being caught and jailed inside Cuba.

Despite the bad publicity and many missteps, U.S. infiltration of Cuban hip hop continues to this day. A 2020 NED project entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society” states that its goal is to “promote citizen participation and social change” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Many more target the wider artistic community. For instance, a recent scheme called “Promoting Freedom of Expression of Cuba’s Independent Artists” claimed that it was “empower[ing] independent Cuban artists to promote democratic values.”

Of course, for the U.S. government, “democracy” in Cuba is synonymous with regime change. The latest House Appropriations Bill allocates $20 million to the island, but explicitly stipulates that “none of the funds made available under such paragraph may be used for assistance for the Government of Cuba.” The U.S. Agency for Global Media has also allotted between $20 and $25 million for media projects this year targeting Cubans.

BLM For Me, Not For Thee

What is especially ironic about the situation is that many of the same organizations promoting the protests in Cuba as a grassroots expression of discontent displayed a profound hostility towards the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, attempting to defame genuine racial justice activists as pawns of a foreign power, namely the Kremlin.

In 2017, for example, CNN released a story claiming that Russia had bought Facebook ads targeting Ferguson and Baltimore, insinuating that the uproar over police murders of Black men was largely fueled by Moscow, and was not a genuine expression of anger. NPR-affiliate WABE smeared black activist Anoa Changa for merely appearing on a Russian-owned radio station. Even Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that the hullabaloo around Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest was largely cooked up in foreign lands.

Meanwhile, at the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020, The New York Times asked Republican Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed called “Send in the Troops,” in which he asserted that “an overwhelming show of force” was necessary to quell “anarchy” from “criminal elements” on our streets.

Going further back, Black leaders of the Civil Rights era, such as Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, were continually painted as in bed with Russia, in an attempt to delegitimize their movements. In 1961, Alabama Attorney General MacDonald Gallion said ,“It’s the communists who were behind this integration mess.” During his life, Dr. King was constantly challenged on the idea that his movement was little more than a communist Trojan Horse. On Meet the Press in 1965, for instance, he was asked whether “moderate Negro leaders have feared to point out the degree of communist infiltration in the Civil Rights movement.”

Nicaragua

The U.S. has also been attempting to heighten tensions between the government of Nicaragua and the large population of Miskito people who live primarily on the country’s Atlantic coast. In the 1980s, the U.S. recruited the indigenous group to help in its dirty war against the Sandinistas, who returned to power in 2006. In 2018, the U.S. government designated Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as belonging to a “troika of tyranny” — a clear reference to the second Bush administration’s Axis of Evil pronouncement.

Washington has both stoked and exaggerated tensions between the Sandinistas and the Miskito, its agencies helping to create a phony hysteria over supposed “conflict beef” — a scandal that seriously hurt the Nicaraguan economy.

The NED and USAID have been active in Nicaragua as well, attempting to animate racial tensions in the Central American nation. For instance, a recent 2020 NED project ,entitled “Defending the Human Rights of Marginalized Communities in Nicaragua,” claims to work with oppressed groups (i.e., the Miskito), attempting to build up “independent media” to highlight human rights violations.

To further understand this phenomenon, MintPress spoke to John Perry, a journalist based in Nicaragua. “What is perhaps unclear is the extent to which the U.S. has been engaged,” he said, continuing:

"There is definitely some engagement because they have funded some of the so-called human rights bodies that exist on the Atlantic coast [where the Miskito live]. Basically, they — the U.S.-funded NGOs — are trying to foment this idea that the indigenous communities in the Atlantic coast are subjected to genocide, which is completely absurd.”

In 2018, the U.S. backed a wave of violent demonstrations across the country aimed at dislodging the Sandinistas from power. The leadership of the Central American color revolution attempted to mobilize the population around any issue they could, including race and gender rights. However, they were hamstrung from the start, as Perry noted:

"The problem the opposition had was that it mobilized young people who had been trained by these U.S.-backed NGOs and they then enrolled younger people disenchanted with the government more generally. To some extent they mobilized on gay rights issues, even though these are not contentious in Nicaragua. But they were compromised because one of their main allies, indeed, one of the main leaders of the opposition movement was the Catholic Church, which is very traditional here.”

U.S. agencies are relatively open that their goal is regime change. NED grants handed out in 2020 discuss the need to “promote greater freedom of expression and strategic thinking and analysis about Nicaragua’s prospects for a democratic transition” and to “strengthen the capacity of pro-democracy players to advocate more effectively for a democratic transition” under the guise of “greater promot[ion of] inclusion and representation” and “strengthen[ing] coordination and dialogue amongst different pro-democracy groups.” Meanwhile, USAID projects are aimed at getting “humanitarian assistance to victims of political repression,” and “provid[ing] institutional support to Nicaraguan groups in exile to strengthen their pro-democracy efforts.” That polls show a large majority of the country supporting the Sandinista government, which is on course for a historic landslide in the November election, does not appear to dampen American convictions that they are on the side of democracy. Perry estimates that the U.S. has trained over 8,000 Nicaraguans in projects designed to ultimately overthrow the Sandinistas.

In Bolivia and Venezuela, however, the U.S. government has opted for exactly the opposite technique; backing the country’s traditional white elite. In both countries, the ruling socialist parties are so associated with their indigenous and/or Black populations and the conservative elite with white nationalism that Washington has apparently deemed the project doomed from the start.

China

Stoking racial and ethnic tension appears to be a ubiquitous U.S. tactic in enemy nations. In China, the Free Tibet movement is being kept alive with a flood of American cash. There have been 66 large NED grants to Tibetan organizations since 2016 alone. The project titles and summaries bear a distinct similarity to Cuban and Nicaraguan undertakings, highlighting the need to train a new generation of leaders to participate in society and bring the country towards a democratic transition, which would necessarily mean a loss of Chinese sovereignty.

Likewise, the NED and other organizations have been pouring money into Hong Kong separatist groups (generally described in corporate media as “pro-democracy activists”). This money encourages tensions between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese with the goal of weakening Beijing’s influence in Asia and around the world. The NED has also been sending millions to Uyghur nationalist groups.

Intersectional Empire

In Washington’s eyes, the point of funding Black, indigenous, LGBT or other minority groups in enemy countries is not simply to promote tensions there; it is also to create a narrative that will be more likely to convince liberals and leftists in the United States to support American intervention.

Some degree of buy-in, or at least silence, is needed from America’s more anti-war half in order to make things run smoothly. Framing interventions as wars for women’s rights and coup attempts as minority-led protests has this effect. This new intersectional imperialism attempts to manufacture consent for regime change, war or sanctions on foreign countries among progressive audiences who would normally be skeptical of such practices. This is done through adopting the language of liberation and identity politics as window dressing for domestic audiences, although the actual objectives — naked imperialism — remain the same as they ever were.

The irony is that the U.S. government is skeptical, if not openly hostile, to Black liberation at home. The Trump administration made no effort to disguise its opposition to Black Lives Matter and the unprecedented wave of protests in 2020. But the Biden administration’s position is not altogether dissimilar, offering symbolic reforms only. Biden himself merely suggested that police officers shoot their victims in the leg, rather than in the chest.

Thus, the policy of promoting minority rights in enemy countries appears to be little more than a case of “Black Lives Matter for thee, but not for me.” Nonetheless, Cuba, Nicaragua, China and the other targets of this propaganda will have to do more to address their very real problems on these issues in order to dilute the effectiveness of such U.S. attacks.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

Today, Defense of The Revolution Rests with the Media

Photo: © Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Shutterstock.com

By Saheli Chowdhury and Steve Lalla

Víctor Dreke, legendary commander of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, called for those defending the Revolution today to recognize that the battlefield of the 21st century is the media.

The comments were made at a conference held on Thursday, April 22, commemorating the 60-year anniversary of the Bay of Pigs—Playa Girón to the Spanish-speaking world. Comandante Dreke, now retired at age 84, spoke alongside author, historian, and journalist Tariq Ali; Cuba’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Bárbara Montalvo Álvarez; and National Secretary of Great Britain’s Cuba Solidarity Campaign, Bernard Regan.

“It is no longer about us, the over-80s,” said Dreke. “It is the next generation, those who are here, who are going to be even better than us. It will no longer be a case of combat… Right now, the media across the world has to defend the Cuban Revolution, and we and you have to be capable of accessing the media across the world to spread the truth about the Cuban Revolution. That is the battle we are waging today—to fight attempts to weaken the people, to soften the people, to try to take the country again. They have changed their tactics. We are ready, but we want to say to our friends in the Americas and around the world that Cuba, the Cuba of Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida, the Cuba of Che Guevara, will never fail, neither with us nor with the future generations.”

Dreke joined the 26 July Movement in 1954, fought under Che Guevara in the Cuban Revolutionary War and in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1965, and commanded two companies in Cuba’s historic defeat of US imperialism at the Bay of Pigs. Dreke’s autobiography, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, was published in 2002.

Cuba and Venezuela provide inspiration for Latin America and the world

Comandante Víctor Dreke drew a comparison between Cuba’s historic defense of the revolution and that of Venezuela, as both countries now face a common weapon in the arsenal of imperialism: the economic blockade.

“They block medicines for Cuba, they block aid for Cuba,” said Dreke. “They blockade the disposition of aid for Venezuela because of the principles of Venezuela, the principles of Chávez, the principles of Maduro, the principles of Díaz-Canel, the principles of this people, due to the historical continuity of this people.”

Regarding the failed 1961 US invasion of Cuba, Dreke remarked, “it was an example for Latin America that proved that the US was not invincible; that the US could be defeated with the morality and dignity of the people—because we did not have the weapons at that time that we later acquired. It had a meaning for Cuba, the Americas, and the dignified peoples of Latin America and around the world.”

Tariq Ali: we must see through ideological fabrications to defeat imperialism

Tariq Ali, esteemed author of more than 40 books, recalled the precursor of the US invasion of Cuba, the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala in which President Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown and forced into exile. A young Ernesto Guevara was living in Guatemala at that time and bore witness to the multifaceted CIA operation PBSuccess, which included bombing campaigns with unmarked aircraft and a propaganda blitz of leaflets and radio broadcasts. Ali described the evolution of CIA tactics since then:

“Normally the way they choose is to occupy a tiny bit of territory, find a puppet president, and recognize the puppet president. They are doing that in the Arab world today, or have been trying to do it. They did it with Guaidó in Venezuela, except that the Venezuelan army would not play that game and it blew up in their face, their attempt to topple the Maduro regime. They are trying it in parts of Africa. The weaponry has changed, it is more sophisticated, but the actual method they use, ideologically, is the same. That’s why it always amazes me as to why so many people believe the rubbish they read when a war is taking place.”

Ali also weighed in with a forecast for US foreign policy under the Biden administration:

“We can be hopeful for surprises… But effectively, whoever becomes president of the United States, whether it is Obama, or Biden, or Trump, or Clinton, or Bush, they are presidents of an imperial country, an imperial state, and this imperial state is not run all the time by the Congress or the Senate or the Supreme Court. The military plays a very important role in the institutions of the state, and the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency are in and out of the White House, so the president who decides to make a sharp shift—it can be done, I am not saying it cannot be done—would have to be very brave and courageous indeed.”

“Whoever from the Democrats gets elected—whatever their position—immediately comes under very heavy pressure,” Ali elaborated. “If you look at AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]… initially very radical, but now she is totally on board… I have never heard her say sanctions should be lifted, and she certainly supports even the old Trump line on Venezuela.”

Hybrid warfare in the information age

“Direct warfare in the past may have been marked by bombers and tanks, but if the pattern that the US has presently applied in Syria and Ukraine is any indication, then indirect warfare in the future will be marked by ‘protesters’ and insurgents,” detailed Andrew Korybko in the publication Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change. “Fifth columns will be formed less by secret agents and covert saboteurs and more by non-state actors that publicly behave as civilians. Social media and similar technologies will come to replace precision-guided munitions as the ‘surgical strike’ capability of the aggressive party, and chat rooms and Facebook pages will become the new ‘militants’ den.’ Instead of directly confronting the targets on their home turf, proxy conflicts will be waged in their near vicinity in order to destabilize their periphery. Traditional occupations may give way to coups and indirect regime-change operations that are more cost effective and less politically sensitive.”

Hybrid warfare, waged today by the US and its political allies in conjunction with transnational corporations that wield powerful influence over mass media and political institutions, comprises the fields of economic warfare, lawfare, conventional armed warfare, and the information war. This last and most important—according to Commander Dreke—element in turn includes the manipulation of the press to serve capitalist and imperialist interests, the manufacture of fake news stories out of whole cloth, and targeted attacks on individuals, parties, or peoples who speak out against the failings of the present order. Moreover, hybrid warfare extends to interference in the political field and in electoral processes, the mounting of media campaigns to drive public attention into particular channels, and myriad assaults on our consciousness that attempt to turn us against each other, prevent us from seeing our common interests, and confuse us as we try to overcome defeatism and work to build a better world.

Originally published by Orinoco Tribune.

Socialism's Increasing Popularity Doesn't Bring Media Out of McCarthy Era

By Joshua Cho

Republished from FAIR.

Ever since the Great Recession in 2008, and accelerating with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run, there has been a resurgence of popularity and interest in socialism in the US, and an increasing skepticism of capitalism. A 2019 Pew poll (6/25/19) reported that 42% of respondents had a favorable view of socialism, with particular sympathy shown among people who are Black (65%), Latino (52%), have family incomes below $30,000 (50%) or are between the ages of 18-29 (50%). In a 2019 Gallup survey (12/18/19), 38% saw socialism positively—more than the 34% who identify as conservatives (Gallup, 7/27/20). Gallup (11/25/19) noted that Millennials were especially attracted to socialism, with slightly more viewing socialism positively than capitalism.

Democrats across the country view socialism more positively than capitalism, with a large majority willing to vote for a socialist as president. Despite questions of what the term “socialism” means to Americans, this growing interest has provoked articles decrying the “problem” that socialism doesn’t freak out Democratic voters the way it does other Americans (Slate, 2/24/20). The Columbia Journalism Review (5/8/18) noticed that while “the radical left in the U.S. has felt invigorated in recent years,” it still hasn’t “earned left-wing voices column inches in most mainstream outlets,” with coverage limited to being “about those voices, rather than by them.”

Looking at the representation of socialism among the hundreds of pundits in corporate media, one can be forgiven for almost thinking socialist pundits don’t exist.

The New York Times opinion writer Elizabeth Bruenig appears to be the only pundit employed by corporate media who both explicitly identifies as a “socialist” and makes arguments for some form of socialism in the U.S. (Washington Post, 3/6/18).

Laurence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s Last Word, identifies as a “practical European socialist,” and argues that “we’re all socialists now,” because even Bill O’Reilly is in favor of “socialist programs” like Social Security and Medicare. The MSNBC host claims to “embrace” the label in order to “counterbalance” the excessive influence of McCarthyism in the U.S. (LA Times, 3/16/13), but it’s difficult to discern a distinctly socialist perspective in his commentary.

Straightforward advocacy of socialism is something you very rarely see in corporate media (Washington Post, 3/6/18).

The Hill’s Krystal Ball (2/17/19), cohost of the show Rising, criticized Trump’s remarks claiming that “America will never be a socialist country” for presenting the false dichotomy of “smash-and-grab capitalism” or “what’s happening in Venezuela.” The class-conscious commentator described Sanders and other democratic socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “messengers for a compelling message with an actual vision.” Although she seems not to explicitly embrace the “socialist” label like Bruenig or O’Donnell, it may be fair to describe her as a democratic socialist pundit, because she often speaks favorably of the ideology, and provides a friendly platform to socialists on her show.

It appears corporate media give some degree of space for pundits to call for replacing capitalism with a new system, so long as they don’t identify themselves or that new system as “socialist.” Times columnist Michelle Alexander hasn’t explicitly identified as a socialist, but has argued (6/8/20) that “transforming our economic systems” is necessary to achieve “racial justice” and a “secure and thriving democracy,” while approvingly citing figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Hellen Keller and Paul Robeson, all of whom argued that the U.S. “must move toward some form of socialism.” The Post’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel also hasn’t called herself a socialist, but has argued (12/10/19) that “capitalism is broken,” and that we need a “new system to better serve the common good,” without describing this new system as “socialism.”

Although CNN’s Van Jones was involved in the early 1990s with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a defunct Maoist Bay Area group, since 2000 or so, he’s identified with the “green capitalist” movement instead (Green America, Fall/2007).

“Socialism” itself is a very contested term, and many self-described socialists may not consider some or all of these pundits to be genuine socialists. Conservatism is also a broad range of ideologies, not all of which are consistent with each other, which also has self-identified conservatives who denounce others as unworthy or inconsistent with the label (New York Times, 1/14/15; The Hill, 12/16/19). Conservative audiences are not expected to approve of all pundits who identify as conservatives, or who speak favorably of conservatism. Likewise, while some socialists may be unsatisfied with these figures, it is still significant that there are pundits who embrace being labeled a “socialist” and explicitly call for alternatives to capitalism within the US.

Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó has remarked that “socialist” figures like Ocasio-Cortez would be considered social democrats in his own country (New Yorker, 6/10/20). The Times’ Paul Krugman (2/13/20) is no socialist, but he has criticized Bernie Sanders for presenting himself as a “socialist,” rather than a “social democrat,” making himself “an easy target for right-wing smears.”

It’s more common to see criticism of capitalism (New York Times, 12/4/17)—but still not very common.

One can find criticisms of capitalism in corporate media, but that is ideologically consistent with liberals or progressives who call for government intervention to deal with market failures. Columnists like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg (12/4/17), who noted that “capitalism looks like the god that failed” to young people because of the “increasingly oligarchic nature of our economy,” and the Times’ Nicholas Kristof (5/23/20), who condemned “dog-eat-dog capitalism for struggling workers and socialism for the rich,” are critics of capitalism in corporate media who aren’t necessarily calling for socialism.

Other pundits have normalized socialism by claiming it already exists in a limited form, because they conflate all government spending on social programs with socialism—not advocating for socialism so much as claiming that it already exists in the US. Thus the Times’ Roger Cohen (3/8/19) and the Post’s Catherine Rampell (3/21/19) argue that “Europe” demonstrates how “socialism and the free market are compatible,” and dismiss the capitalist/socialist dichotomy as not being a “meaningful binary,” because “all modern countries have elements of capitalism and socialism.” These pundits make arguments similar to O’Donnell’s, defending a socialism that’s hard to distinguish from liberalism, though without identifying with the label as O’Donnell does.

A few other commentators have praised socialism and defended figures who identify as socialists. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes defended Bernie Sanders from McCarthyite criticisms, and praised the Democratic Socialists of America. MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle has made remarks on-air that appear to defend democratic socialism, in addition to explaining why it is a more desirable alternative to communism (NBC News, 2/27/20). The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson has written several columns urging Democrats to embrace the party’s more progressive base (7/2/18, 7/1/19), and described “democratic socialism” as something that is “perfectly appropriate” for Ocasio-Cortez’s district, in addition to endorsing (1/15/15) Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for “economic equality”—which King suggested could be called “democratic socialism” (In These Times, 1/15/18).

Like Hayes and Ruhle, Times’ columnists like Jamelle Bouie and Farhad Manjoo have published numerous columns that appear to praise socialism or policies associated with socialists, but that appears to be the farthest they can go, as neither of them have ever embraced the label (New York Times, 2/6/19, 2/14/19, 10/22/19, 3/11/20).

“Open advocacy of socialism is now a normal part of our political discourse,” writes the Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne (2/10/19)—but it’s still not a normal part of our media conversation.

When socialism or socialists are discussed favorably, or at least not adversely, it’s often in opposition to revolutionary socialist ideologies like Marxism-Leninism (the official ideology of around 20% of the world’s population, and of the US’s greatest geopolitical rival). Democratic socialism is often contrasted with socialist states of the Global South, whether Communist countries like China or Vietnam, or multi-party systems like Venezuela or Nicaragua, which are frequently presented by even the left-most pundits as justifiable targets of imperialism. Instead, wealthy, predominantly white Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Norway are often upheld as the preferable socialist ideal (New York Times, 4/27/19).

Although the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. (2/10/19) argued that Trump and the Republican Party’s attempts to tar all Democrats as “socialist” and antithetical to “American values” will fail because “open advocacy of socialism is now a normal part of our political discourse,” it’s quite clear that McCarthyism is still constricting political discourse in the US. While socialism is being discussed more often, there’s a huge disparity between its acceptance among the U.S. population and the representation of socialists among pundits at the biggest news outlets in the country. There are almost no pundits employed in corporate media who feel comfortable openly identifying as a socialist and calling for socialism as an alternative to capitalism.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that corporate media outlets owned by oligarchs and the investor class are hostile to socialism, but when socialist pundits are virtually nonexistent at these agenda-setting outlets, despite 76% of Democrats being willing to vote for a socialist, it’s clear that these institutions are intended to propagandize the U.S. population into accepting the status quo. Even when politicians and policies often described as “socialist” are presented in a positive light, the fact that these journalists are uncomfortable embracing the label is evidence that McCarthyism still exercises a formidable restraint on the U.S. political imagination and discourse.