EDITOR—Joti Brar demolishes the carefully cultivated myth that bourgeois democracy and periodic elections can possibly improve the lot of the working class, or eventually hand over power to the actual producers instead of the (ever-fewer) billionaires. Topics: History of elections and electioneering in capitalist nations. Joti reviews the record of capitalism as far back as 1820 • Overproduction, the incurable illness of capitalism • Election time circus in the US • The looting of the Soviet Union could not solve global capitalism’s problems • Inexorable impoverishment of the vast majority of humanity under global capitalism. • Constant instability and war.
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ROGER BOYD—You would expect some substance from a person that could be a heart beat away from being president of the United States, but then we have J. D. Vance. He was born in Middletown Ohio in 1984, and he has written that his childhood was one of poverty, abuse and his mother’s drug addiction; being raised mainly by his maternal grandparents. In 2003, after graduating from high school, he joined the US Marine Corp in the non-combat role of military journalist, including six months in Iraq in 2005. Working to all intents and purposes in the public affairs section of the US Marine Corp, Vance would have become experienced in how to put stories together that hide much of the truth and weave stories that humanize what is an elite killing machine.
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EDITOR—Israel’s latest airstrike on Iran does not impress Ray McGovern. In this chat he explains his reasons, and why he thinks the power equation in the Middle East has changed or is about to change—for the better. Ray came to Washington from his native Bronx in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985. Ray is an expert in Russian history and culture, and a man who chooses to live by honouring moral integrity, which he does not see his compatriots in high places doing now or even when he was young and thought they did.
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FEMI AKOLAFE—o, we are not Russian bots and are not persuaded by Russian propaganda, even though I feel entitled to be swayed by whatever I choose.
It is the 500+ years of unremitting violence and destruction that people of the European Stock have inflicted on the rest of humanity that makes some of us cheer Putin as he struggles to end the hegemonic domination of the World by Westerners.
I am no expert on biology, much less on genetics, so I cannot offer opinions on what exactly makes people of European extraction find it impossible to live and let live. Why do they have an insatiable desire to dominate and control?
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EDITOR—The fall of Fascism, subsequent nationalizations, the entrance of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) into government, the rise of workers’ commissions, the mobilization of urban and rural protest, and land occupations held the world in thrall, if only for a short time. In the end, the corporatist bureaucratic state apparatus and its economic partners emerged renewed, chastened, and not unscathed. Chilcote singles out the durability and continuity of the state apparatus as a major factor in the prevailing hegemonic bloc and blames the fractiousness of the Left for failing to replace it. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, the attempts to create a counter-hegemonic bloc paved the way for democratic, pluralistic politics in Portugal.
