The Pro-Trump Mood in Greece
JOHN KIRIAKOU
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Thinkers, Rhodes, Greece, 2006. (Riccardo Romano, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Special to Consortium News
I spent the past two weeks on my ancestral island of Rhodes, Greece, helping my cousin settle his late father’s estate. It’s no surprise that everybody — and I mean literally everybody — wanted to talk about this month’s U.S. presidential election.
Greece has long had an anti-American streak stemming from U.S. support for the 1967-1974 military dictatorship that killed, tortured, and imprisoned thousands of people just because of their political views. Indeed, the governing conservative New Democracy Party (ND) wins elections only because there are so many socialist and communist parties that they split the left-wing vote and allow the conservatives to govern.
But much to my surprise, every leftist I’ve spoken to, including just about everybody in my own family from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to the Socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) has offered full-throated support to Donald Trump.
After hearing this over and over again, I decided to probe a little to get to the bottom of how lifelong socialists and communists can support a billionaire businessman who leads a capitalist and conservative political party. But the reasons for their admiration of Trump were quite simple. They saw Donald Trump as the anti-war candidate.
They hate what is happening to the Palestinians and Lebanese, despite the fact that their government is unabashedly pro-Israel (as is Donald Trump.) They hate that the United States has armed one Orthodox Christian country, Ukraine, against another, Russia. And they hate that the United States has done nothing about the 50-year-long Turkish military occupation of Cyprus.
The Greeks genuinely believe that if anybody is going to end the Ukraine war or tell the Israelis to stop killing civilians in Palestine and Lebanon, it’s going to be Donald Trump. (I disagree strongly that Trump has any love whatsoever for the Palestinians. Indeed, he’s been Benjamin Netanyahu’s lapdog for years.)
But the Greeks argue that Democrats have only made the international situation worse, so why not give Trump another chance to make things better, like he did with North Korea, at least temporarily.
Immigration
Trump, in Yuma, Arizona, in June 2020, walking along the completed 200th mile of the border wall with Mexico. (White House/Shealah Craighead)
There’s another issue that the Greeks agree with Trump on, too. That’s the issue of immigration. The Greeks are well known for their hospitality. There’s even a word for it: Filoxenia, which means “love of the stranger.”
When Afghanistan and Iraq began falling apart, private Greek citizens actually stood on the beaches to welcome them as they washed ashore in rafts and to give them food and clothes. That changed when the European Union gave Turkey billions of dollars to hold refugees in Turkey and the Turks instead began forcing them across the border into Greece and just pocketing the money.
The Greeks, in turn, built a wall along the land border with Turkey. That enraged the Turks, of course, but the wall actually worked. And when Trump started talking about building a wall along the southern border with Mexico, the Greeks were all in.
As a progressive American voter, and a truly independent one at that, I’m not optimistic about the next four years. Abortion is of primary importance to me. So are the environment, workers rights, health care and education. I support easier immigration and an easier and quicker path to citizenship. Donald Trump will likely destroy all of that.
With that said, I believe that there are two areas where Trump is right. One is his support for a less interventionist foreign policy. The other is criminal justice reform. Trump issued a lot of pardons when he was president. He issued a lot of commutations. And he worked to do something about the sentencing disparities between white people convicted of crimes compared to people of color. At least there was that.
Donald Trump already has served one term as president. Consequently, he’ll be a lame duck beginning the moment he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20 with nobody on Capitol Hill owing him anything. He’ll be permanently out of office in four years.
Is it possible that we could be pleasantly surprised, then, on some of these issues? I expect to be far more disappointed than anything else. But I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer. I’m going to try to convince myself that some good will come of this. I don’t know exactly what it’ll be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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Shen Yun dance company and its secretive parent, Falun Gong, investigated
Mark Gruenberg
People's World
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Shen Yun is barely disguised anticommunist propaganda, and especially an anti-China op, supported by Western governments and the usual coterie of brainwashed ignorant celebrities. Along with their paper Epoch Times, Shen Yun is Falun Gong's (a bizarre cult proscribed by Beijing) most successful propaganda and recruiting vehicle. The video below shows clearly where its ideology lies. It has even been described as such on its Wikipedia page.
Shen Yun troupes tour the world, infusing classical Chinese dance with propaganda skits against the Chinese government and socialism. The dance company is particularly active now that we are approaching the big annual holiday season for shows.
Falun Gong is also in legal trouble with both New York state and the federal government. But the advertising for the dance company doesn’t tell you that.
While the temple is the centerpiece of Falun Gong’s sprawling complex near Warwick, the reality is different. The complex includes the Fei Tian Academy of the Arts for training and schooling Shen Yun dancers. But when the dancers go out on tour, they often don’t get paid.
“Fei Tian students aren’t employees and as such cannot be paid salaries,” the dance company told the Epoch Times. Like Shen Yun, that paper is a Falun Gong enterprise. So is New Tang Dynasty TV, a cable channel.
Many former Shen Yun dancers told the New York Times they were not paid at all in their first year on tour. By their early to mid-20s, most were being paid $12,000 a year or less.
The federal minimum wage of $7.25 hourly works out to $15,080 for a year of 40-hour weeks. But many of the ex-dancers told the paper’s probers their workweeks were far longer than that—with no overtime pay.
The New York Labor Department is investigating other abuses at the Warwick complex and in the dance company, the Times reported. The prime one is using underage performers—the teenage dancers—without seeking, and receiving, a DOL permit for their employment.
This Friday, March 8, 2019, photo shows the Falun Gong Dragon Springs compound in Otisville, N.Y. After years of additions, the lakeside site features Tang Dynasty-style buildings close by modern, boxy buildings that would fit into a contemporary office park. Dragon Springs said 100 people, mostly students, live there. | Julie Jacobson/AP
Shen Yun finally got one this year, after the paper’s exposé. It mandates the dance company report to the state every month about underage performers and get a new permit every month.
But both the dance company and Falun Gong maintain the dancers are “students” at their academy, not “employees” under labor law. That’s important. Under current National Labor Relations Board rulings, college student workers, such as the Shen Yun dancers are “employees” with the right to unionize and bargain over working conditions, though a Republican-majority board appointed by incoming President Trump could reverse that.
Complaints about lack of pay finally prompted the New York State Labor Department to open an investigation of the dance troupe earlier this year, after a multi-part New York Times expose blew the cover off the secretive Shen Yun and Falun Gong’s abuses.
Abuse for more than a decade
Those abuses have lasted for more than a decade, the Times reported. But, according to a state audit almost ten years ago, the state Labor Department cannot act on its own but only respond to complaints it receives. And it didn’t get any until the Times’s stories hit the pages nationwide.
But some of the abuses the Times revealed aren’t legally covered.
The Times and other sources reported that “an atmosphere of fear” and isolation of the students-turned-dancers are a big abuse. There are also threats that individual dancers would “go to hell” for mistakes they make and there is a lack of proper medical care for on-the-job injuries.
Ben Hurley, an Australian who left Falun Gong after a dozen years as a member, reported four years ago that even then—three years after his initial blog about it—he got reports from once-scared members.
“The stories express a mix of excitement and terror,” Hurley wrote on the Religion and Ethics website after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. ran its own exposé of Falun Gong. “Excitement that they can now listen to pop music, or eat sashimi, or have a beer, or have sex, or take up a hobby, or hang out with non-believers—without feeling filthy and unworthy.
“And lingering terror as they face up to their living god, and attempt to banish him from their minds and out of their lives.”
That living god is Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi. “A number of people labored over the decision to contact me before finally plucking up the courage because they believed that Li could read their minds,” Hurley wrote.
It’s not the only belief Li fosters in Falun Gong.
“The ABC portrays Falun Gong as a threat to public safety due to its dangerous teachings on medicine, and that it is secretive and dishonest. Foreign Correspondent and Background Briefing”—the two Australian programs that ran ABC’s exposes—“both rejected such a characterization of its coverage.”
The two Australian programs said “They simply gave critics an opportunity to be heard and Falun Gong a fair opportunity to respond. But from my perspective, after being a staunch follower for 12 years, such a characterization would be accurate.”
Other Falun Gong beliefs promulgated by its founder are “gay people being disgusting, interracial children have no heaven to go to, and aliens are slowly taking over human bodies—not to mention the less-publicized, but widely-held, belief that Donald Trump is an angel from heaven.”
And that may be a problem for the U.S. Justice Department, especially after Trump takes it over in January when he enters the White House again.
Charged in money-laundering crypto scheme
Dancers with the troupe work in virtual slave labor conditions causing injury to the young workers according to investigators. | Instagram/Shen Yun Performing Arts
“Just days after Trump was found guilty” in a New York courtroom of multiple counts of violating state campaign finance laws, the Justice Department “arrested and charged the CFO of the far-right newspaper Epoch Times in a $67 million money-laundering crypto scam,” SFist reported.
“The Epoch Times, of course, promotes and helps fund the ubiquitously advertised propaganda dance show Shen Yun.”
The dance company’s ads are ubiquitous at bus stops, on media, and on billboards in major U.S. cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., promoting its performances.
The dance company, technically a non-profit organization, got a tax break from New York State years ago to construct the Warwick complex. But it doesn’t pay for the ads, even though the New York Times revealed its annual revenue totaled $265 million last year.
Instead, the ad money comes from the Epoch Times plus local chapters of Falun Gong scattered around the U.S. The Epoch Times itself doesn’t want to pay full freight for its ads, according to one newspaper advertising rep who, under a pseudonym, posted her experience with the paper’s ad buyer on Reddit.
The buyer claimed that as a non-profit organization, Shen Yun should get a 50% discount. After an increasingly testy hour-long discussion, the paper’s ad rep walked away from the sale.
Propaganda against the People’s Republic of China infiltrates the Shen Yun dance itself, Gia Tolentino reported in a long expose in The New Yorker. Many audience members seemed to realize it, a survey of postings on Reddit and other social media shows, and discounted it. Nevertheless, it looms.
“A man came onstage to sing a song in Chinese, which was translated on the screen behind him. ‘We follow Dafa, the Great Way,’ he began, singing about a Creator who saved mankind and made the world anew,” the New Yorker story said.
“Atheism and evolution are deadly ideas. Modern trends destroy what makes us human,” he sang. “In the final dance number, a group of followers, who wore blue and yellow and clutched books of religious teachings, battled for space in a public square with corrupt youth.
“Their corruption was evident because they were wearing black, looking at their cell phones, and, in the case of two men, holding hands,” wrote Tolentino.
“Chairman Mao appeared, and the sky turned black. The city in the digital backdrop was obliterated by an earthquake and then finished off by a Communist tsunami. A red hammer and sickle glowed in the center of the wave. Dazed, I rubbed my eyes and saw a huge, bearded face disappearing in the water.
“’Was that…?’ I said to my brother, wondering if I needed to go to the hospital.
“’Karl Marx?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I think that was a tsunami with the face of Karl Marx.’”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Gruenberg
Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Israel Genocide Tracker account reportedly causing panic among Israeli soldiers
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First run on Oct 29, 2024
Israel Genocide Tracker is an X account created in May that scans social media and gathers data on Israeli soldiers from previous posts they had published boasting about their actions in Gaza. It then creates a profile for each soldier, including personal information such as their name, age, family origin, and army unit. According to TRT, which cited Israel’s Channel 12 News, multiple soldiers have expressed concerns over the account. “I’m afraid they could Google my name and find it there,” one soldier told Channel 12.
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- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
“Genocide as Colonial Erasure”: U.N. Expert Francesca Albanese on Israel’s “Intent to Destroy” Gaza Democracy Now!
Democracy Now!
U.N. Expert Francesca Albanese
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Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de... We are joined by U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, who says Israel is committing genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Facing accusations of antisemitism from Israeli and U.S. officials, Albanese is in New York to present her report, titled "Genocide as colonial erasure," which finds that Israel's genocide is founded on "ideological hatred" and "dehumanization" and "enabled through the various organs of the state," and recommends that Israel be unseated from the United Nations over its conduct. She argues that Israel's attacks on U.N. employees, including the killings of at least 230 U.N. staff in Gaza, its flagrant violations of U.N. resolutions and international law and the unique status of "the first settler-colonial genocide to be ever litigated before [an international] court" justify this measure. Israel's continued impunity, Albanese warns, "is the nail in the coffin of the U.N. Charter."
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Americans are ‘socialised’ into capitalism, racism and Zionism | Noura Erakat | The Big Picture
Noura Erakat
MIDDLE EAST EYE
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Nov 13, 2024 The Big Picture PodcastWhat is the link between Zionism, capitalism and the American empire? Fresh off the back of a deeply toxic, all consuming US election - one in which the issue of Palestine and the war in Gaza was largely ignored - we examine what it means to survive a system intent on silencing and marginalising dissenting voices. Despite the key role the Biden Administration has played in arming and supporting Israel, a position opposed by the majority of Americans, few political voices were interested in challenging or even speaking about this policy. A policy which mirrors the US’ own bloody history of colonialism, empire and exploitation. An environment in which voices who challenge the status quo have fewer and fewer platforms to express their dissenting views. This week on The Big Picture Podcast, Mohamed Hassan sits down with human rights attorney, legal scholar and professor at Rutgers University Noura Erakat.
Erakat is one of the boldest and most precise Palestinian-American voices in the public eye, and says despite speaking for years about the legal rights of Palestinians, she has always been sceptical of the law. In October she wrote a piece for The Nation titled ‘Nothing Will Ever Be The Same’, in which she says a year of genocide in Gaza has changed her as a person, as a Palestinian and as a legal scholar.
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- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS