SPECIAL: Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union (Text & Videos)

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Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union

By Mario Sousa

From Hitler to Hearst, from Conquest to Solzhenitsyn

Soviet battery at work in the Crimea. Their precision and obstinacy gained them German respect.

The history of the millions of people who were allegedly incarcerated and died in the labour camps of the Soviet Union and as a result of starvation during Stalin’s time.

INTRODUCTION

Stalin was the West's bete noire for generations: he was a firm believer in communism, unbribable and impossible to intimidate. He was at the USSR's helm during some of the toughest years of the young state, including the Nazi onslaught. He provided the capitalists with a perfect propaganda platform onto which they could and did pile up all manner of lies to scare people about communism and the Soviet Union.

In this world we live in, who can avoid hearing the terrible stories of suspected death and murders in the gulag labour camps of the Soviet Union? Who can avoid the stories of the millions who starved to death and the millions of oppositionists executed in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time? In the capitalist world these stories are repeated over and over again in books, newspapers, on the radio and television, and in films, and the mythical numbers of millions of victims of socialism have increased by leaps and bounds in the last 50 years.

But where in fact do these stories, and these figures, come from? Who is behind all this?

And another question: what truth is there in these stories? And what information is lying in the archives of the Soviet Union, formerly secret but opened up to historical research by Gorbachev in 1989? The authors of the myths always said that all their tales of millions having died in Stalin’s Soviet Union would be confirmed the day the archives were opened up. Is that what happened? Were they confirmed in fact?

The following article shows us where these stories of millions of deaths through hunger and in labour camps in Stalin’s Soviet Union originated and who is behind them.

The present author, after studying the reports of the research which has been done in the archives of the Soviet Union, is able to provide information in the form of concrete data about the real number of prisoners, the years they spent in prison and the real number of those who died and of those who were condemned to death in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The truth is quite different from the myth.

The present author, Mario Sousa is a member of the Communist Party in Sweden, KPML(r). The article was published in the Communist Party’s newspaper Proletären in April 1998.

There is a direct historical link running from: Hitler to Hearst, to Conquest, to Solzhenitsyn. In 1933 political change took place in Germany that were to leave their mark on world history for decades to come. On 30 January Hitler became prime minister and a new form of government, involving violence and disregard of the law, began to take shape. In order to consolidate their grip on power the Nazis called fresh elections for the 5th of March, using all propaganda means within their grasp to secure victory. A week before the elections, on 27 February, the Nazis set fire to parliament and accused the communists of being responsible. In the elections that followed, the Nazis secured 17.3 million votes and 288 deputies, about 48% of the electorate (in November they had secured 11.7 million votes and 196 deputies). Once the Communist Party was banned, the Nazis began to persecute the Social Democrats and the trade-union movement, and the first concentration camps began to fill up with all those left-wing men and women. In the meantime, Hitler’s power in parliament continued to grow, with the help of the right wing. On 24 March, Hitler caused a law to be passed by parliament which conferred on him absolute power to rule the country for 4 years without consulting parliament. From then on began the open persecution of the Jews, the first of whom began to enter the concentration camps where communists and left social-democrats were already being held. Hitler pressed ahead with his bid for absolute power, renouncing the 1918 international accords that had imposed restrictions on the arming and militarisation of Germany. Germany’s re-armament took place at great speed. This was the situation in the international political arena when the myths concerning those dying in the Soviet Union began to be put together.

The Ukraine as a German territory

At Hitler’s side in the German leadership was Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, the man in charge of inculcating the Nazi dream into the German people. This was a dream of a racially pure people living in a Greater Germany, a country with broad lebensraum, a wide space in which to live. One part of this lebensraum, an area to the east of Germany which was, indeed, far larger than Germany itself, had yet to be conquered and incorporated into the German nation. In 1925, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had already pointed to the Ukraine as an essential part of this German living space. The Ukraine and other regions of Eastern Europe needed to belong to the German nation so that they could be utilised in a ‘proper’ manner. According to Nazi propaganda, the Nazi sword would liberate this territory in order to make space for the German race. With German technology and German enterprise, the Ukraine would be transformed into an area producing cereals for Germany. But first the Germans had to liberate the Ukraine of its population of ‘inferior beings’ who, according to Nazi propaganda, would be put to work as a slave labour force in German homes, factories and fields - anywhere they were needed by the German economy.

The conquest of the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union would necessitate war against the Soviet Union, and this war had to be prepared well in advance. To this end the Nazi propaganda ministry, headed by Goebbels, began a campaign around a supposed genocide committed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, a dreadful period of catastrophic famine deliberately provoked by Stalin in order to force the peasantry to accept socialist policy. The purpose of the Nazi campaign was to prepare world public opinion for the ‘liberation’ of the Ukraine by German troops. Despite huge efforts and in spite of the fact that some of the German propaganda texts were published in the English press, the Nazi campaign around the supposed ‘genocide’ in the Ukraine was not very successful at the world level. It was clear that Hitler and Goebbels needed help in spreading their libelous rumours about the Soviet Union. That help they found in the USA.

William Hearst – Friend of Hitler

Son of a mining prospector turned newspaper tycoon, the towering Scot-Irish William Hearst (1.91 m) was one of the great anti-communist and raw imperialist scourges of the 20th century. His overt Nazi sympathies were logical.

William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the ‘father’ of the so-called ‘yellow press’, i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.

This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to ‘arrange’ matters. It is this which in fact characterises the ‘yellow press’: lies and ‘arranged’ atrocities served up as truth.

These lies of Hearst’s made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US’s first TV stations, BWAL – TV in Baltimore. Hearst’s newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years – on r issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.

William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler’s righthand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.

After his visit to Hitler, Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with ‘revelations’ about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union – murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!

The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine

The "discovery" of articulate and famous dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a boon for American anti-Soviet propaganda. Quirky and complex, Solzhenitsyn was an old-fashioned White Russian nationalist who eventually proved difficult to manage by the west, although his anti-Sovietism never waned.

One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine. This campaign began on 18 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American ‘6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union’. Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathiser, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine. The truth of the matter was altogether different. In fact what took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a major class struggle in which poor landless peasants had risen up against the rich landowners, the kulaks, and had begun a struggle for collectivisation, a struggle to form kolkhozes.a bit

This great class struggle, involving directly or indirectly some 120 million peasants, certainly gave rise to instability in agricultural production and food shortages in some regions. Lack of food did weaken people, which in turn led to an increase in the number falling victim to epidemic diseases. These diseases were at that time regrettably common throughout the world. Between 1918 and 1920 an epidemic of Spanish flu caused the death of 20 million people in the US and Europe, but nobody accused the governments of these countries of killing their own citizens. The fact is that there was nothing these government could do in the face of epidemics of this kind. It was only with the development of penicillin during the second world war, that it became possible for such epidemics to be effectively contained. This did not become generally available until towards the end of the 1940s.

The Hearst press articles asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine – a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists – went into graphic and lurid detail. The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union. This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union. In the wave of protests against the supposedly communist-provoked famine which the Western press unleashed, nobody was interested in listening to the Soviet Union’s denials and complete exposure of the Hearst press lies, a situation which prevailed from 1934 until 1987! For more than 50 years several generations of people the world over were brought up on a diet of these slanders to harbour a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union.

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BONUS VIDEO MATERIALS

The author offers a lecture on the same topic: CIA asset Robert Conquest's lies about socialism and USSR.

AND, WHAT IS A COMMUNIST? Communist have been slandered for over 100 years, with the bourgeois press and politicians attributing all manner of sinister and sordid motivations to their activism, including the absurd notion they want to acquire power, as if power for power's sake, or to line their pockets, was all that communists were after. In this video, Michael Parent puts such stupid and insidious notions to rest.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The present author, Mario Sousa is a member of the Communist Party in Sweden, KPML(r). The article was published in the Communist Party’s newspaper Proletären in April 1998.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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An American: “Why I Don’t Trust My Government, At All”

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Filth and criminality naturally flow to the top of the American power heap. Of late, as signaled, among others, by Barack Obama, unindicted war criminal George W Bush has also been receiving a warm welcome among liberals, and his rehabilitation is now certain.

Would you trust your government if it were headed by a President who just now appointed to become the head of the CIA, the very same person who had headed the CIA’s interrogation of a 9/11 suspect whose interrogation consisted of 83 waterboardings (plus other tortures, which blinded his left eye), all in order to get him to say that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, so as to ‘justify’ invading Iraq?

Current U.S. President Donald Trump has appointed, to head the CIA, Gina Haspel, who, as a CIA official in Thailand, the Chief-of-Base there, or Thai “COB”, in 2002, had headed the interrogation of suspect Abu Zubaydeh, and kept using waterboardings and other means of torture against him until he would implicate Saddam Hussein. He told them what he thought they wanted to hear, but didn’t know that this was what they wanted the most to hear. As Raymond Bonner described it at propublica on 22 February 2017:

chief of base and another senior counterterrorism official on scene had the sole authority power to halt the questioning.

She never did so, records show, watching as Zubaydah vomited, passed out and urinated on himself while shackled. During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah lost consciousness and bubbles began gurgling from his mouth. … At one point, Haspel spoke directly with Zubaydah, accusing him of faking symptoms of physical distress and psychological breakdown. …

The CIA officials in Thailand understood that the methods they were using could kill Zubaydah and said that should that happen, they would cremate his body. If he survived questioning, Haspel sought assurances that “the subject will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.”

So far, that promise has been kept. Zubaydah is currently incarcerated at Guantanamo. His lawyers filed a court action in 2008 seeking his release, but the federal judges overseeing the case have failed to issue any substantive rulings [after now 16 years]. …

[Ultimately,] the source on whom the CIA had based its assessment that Zubaydah was number three or four in the al-Qaida organization had recanted his testimony, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture released in 2014. The agency would ultimately conclude that Zubaydah was not even a member of al-Qaida.

So, a man who wasn’t even in Al Qaeda, is being hidden from the public because the U.S. Government 17 years ago captured him in Pakistan and tried to get him to say that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 but they didn’t get the false testimony they required from him, and so he’s still hidden at Guantanamo so as to continue still deceiving the American public (such as to support U.S. use of torture), and to continue keeping his case against the U.S. Government away from whatever (laughable) international-law bodies exist.

Buried in a December 2008 Vanity Fair article by David Rose is this:

The tribunal president, a colonel whose name is redacted, asked him: “So I understand that during this treatment, you said things to make them stop and then those statements were actually untrue, is that correct?” Abu Zubaydah replied: “Yes.”

Some of those statements, say two senior intelligence analysts who worked on them at the time, concerned the issue that in the spring of 2002 interested the Bush administration more than almost any other — the supposed operational relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Given his true position in the jihadist hierarchy, Abu Zubaydah “would not have known [about] that [even] if it was true,” says Coleman. “But you can lead people down a course and make them say anything.”

Some of what he did say was leaked by the administration: for example, the claim that bin Laden and his ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were working directly with Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. There was much more, says the analyst who worked at the Pentagon: “I first saw the reports soon after Abu Zubaydah’s capture. There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda’s supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”

Within the administration, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was “an important chapter,” the second analyst says: overall, his interrogation “product” was deemed to be more significant than the claims made by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, another al-Qaeda captive, who in early 2002 was tortured in Egypt at the C.I.A.’s behest. After all, Abu Zubaydah was being interviewed by Americans. Like the former Pentagon official, this official had no idea that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured.

“As soon as I learned that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” the Pentagon analyst says. “I was so angry, knowing that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it became one reason to attack Iraq.”

As I documented in my “America’s News Is Heavily Censored”, George W. Bush knowingly lied on 7 September 2002 when he said that the IAEA had just issued a new report that Saddam Hussein was within six months of having a nuclear weapon. When the IAEA denied, several times, that there was any such new report, the press ignored it, and the public impression from the President’s lie remained unchallenged in the press.

Barack Obama was no better, and he continued almost all of the cover-ups and lies from his predecessor. This is not a partisan matter. It is a matter of a bipartisan dictatorship, which rules in Washington.

I give this here as only one of the large number of conclusive, rationally undeniable, reasons why it would be ludicrous to trust the U.S. Government.

About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

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Further Signs of More War: A Most Dangerous Game

MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.

The dangerous role played by prostituted politicians like Theresa May—a glorified imperial puppet— in the service of the anglozionist mafia is to be expected, but why aren't more people rising in anger and revulsion at these interminable criminal charades? The only answer has to be found in the empire's unrelenting war on truth, reaching now totalitarian dimensions.

Donald Trump’s days of playing the passive/aggressive host of a reality-television game show are coming to an end. Either he fires all the apprentices who might slightly hesitate to wage a much larger world war and lets the bombs fly, or he will be replaced by one who will. Signs are that he has learned what his job entails and the world will suffer more death and destruction as a result.

Back in the days of the first Cold War – the late 1950s to early 1960s when our little world came close to extinction – my very large family appeared on many American television shows. Their names told the story of those times: “Who Do You Trust,” “To Tell the Truth,” “Charades,” “Play Your Hunch,” and “Beat the Clock,” to name a few. It was as if those silly game shows were unconsciously suggesting we probe a little deeper behind the headlines to discover what was really going on before the Doomsday Clock ran out.

Today things are far more sophisticated and sinister, with a massive and unrelenting war on truth being waged by the Western corporate media, an arm of the CIA, capitalism’s invisible army. It is a twisted game show with deadly consequences. Its method is Janus-faced. From one face, repeat over and over again bold-faced lies always lacking in evidence – e.g. Russiagate, WMD in Iraq, the Syrian government used chemical weapons, Russia is an aggressor planning to invade Eastern Europe, three World Trade Center buildings fell into their own footprints in virtual free fall speed because of fires, etc.; from the other face, play the game of suggesting to the public that they know more than they do because they watch CIA-backed shows like “Homeland,” movies like “Zero Dark Thirty,” and are being informed by all the so-called ex-CIA and intelligence commentators that populate the corporate media and explain what’s really going on. The old adage that “you never leave the CIA” has somehow imperceptibly morphed into “Yes, we can; trust us.”

Now we have the British Prime Minister Theresa May accusing Russia of poisoning in England the double-agent Sergei Skripal and threatening Russia to give a “credible” explanation why they killed this man or else, a man who sold the identities of Russian agents to the UK for cash, putting them in serious danger. Or else, she says, the UK “will conclude that this action amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom.” Naturally she presented no evidence for Russian involvement, but the BBC, as is its wont, speculates on how the British may punish Russia, and the other corporate media chime in. But we are left to wonder where this is leading. Could it be Syria? Former British diplomat Craig Murray suggests it could be a false-flag setup aimed at raising Russiaphobia to hysterical proportions. But to what end?

"Today things are far more sophisticated and sinister, with a massive and unrelenting war on truth being waged by the Western corporate media, an arm of the CIA, capitalism’s invisible army. It is a twisted game show with deadly consequences. Its method is Janus-faced..."

If we look to the United Nations and the accusations and threats flying from the mouth of the US Ambassador Nikki Haley, Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power’s doppelganger in war lust, we see that the picture expands. Haley threatened that the US will take unilateral action in Syria against Syrian and Russian forces if the UN didn’t adopt her resolution that would have allowed anti-government terrorists plenty of time to escape from East Ghouta. She said, echoing words we have heard numerous times:

It is not the path we prefer, but it is a path we have demonstrated we will take, and we are prepared to take again….When the international community fails to act, there are a times when states are compelled to take their own action(s).

In response we have the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warning that another US strike on Syrian government forces would have serious consequences. And the Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov saying,

We have reliable information about militants preparing to falsify a government chemical attack against civilians. In several districts of Eastern Ghouta, a crowd was assembled with women, children, and old people, brought from other regions, who were to represent the victims of the chemical incident.

He added that “White Helmets” activists (proven to be financed by the US and UK) had already arrived at the scene with satellite video transmitters ready to film the scene and that the Russians had discovered a “laboratory for the production of chemical weapons in the village of Aftris which was liberated from terrorist.” After the planned false-flag attack, the US was going to bomb government held districts in Damascus fulfilling Haley’s threat.

And here in the US, Col. Lawrence Wilkinson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff when Powell lied at the UN in 2003 to garner support for the criminal attack on Iraq, spoke to The Israel Lobby and American Policy 2018 conference ten days ago and said, speaking of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, that:

They’re both headed for war. Of that I’m convinced. They will use Iran’s allegedly existential (sic) to Israel presence in Syria which is becoming even more so from a military perspective every day, Hezbollah’s accumulation of some 150,000 missiles if we believe our intelligence agencies. The need to set Lebanon’s economy back yet again, that’s important. Look at what they’re deliberating right now with regard to the new very, very rich gas find in the Eastern Mediterranean with Israel claiming Section 9 and Lebanon claiming Section 9. Take that, Lebanon. We’re going to bomb you, then you’ll let us have it. And that will be their excuse.

Now Rex Tillerson is out as Secretary of State and the head of the CIA, the far more war minded Mike Pompeo slides naturally into the role. Musical chairs for the power elite. As Trump has said of Pompeo, “We are on the same wavelength.” Riding that same wavelength is Nikki Haley, a trio whose alliance bodes very poorly for Middle Eastern peace or for any rapprochement with Russia. The game turns deadlier as the Presidential Apprentice learns the rules and the empire prepares to shed more innocent blood in an unholy alliance with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other “team players.”

But this time the game won’t be, in the words of another CIA liar, “a slam dunk.” The opponents are ready this time. The game has changed.

And in eastern Ukraine, the snow should be melting in the next 3-4 weeks.

Play your hunch.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, Ed Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He states: "I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding." His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

Venezuelan Cryptocurrency, el Petro, Has Won Whether It Succeeds or Not

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

BY RORY HALL, EDITOR IN CHIEF, THE DAILY COIN

PUBLISHED MARCH 13, 2018 · UPDATED MARCH 13, 2018

There has been a variety of articles published by TelesurTV, the first week of March, covering the advancements and influence of el Petro, the Venezuelan created cryptocurrency backed by oil and possibly gold and diamonds as well. The White Paper for the currency is yet to be released, but when the cryptocurrency was first announced at the beginning of December 2017 Venezuelan President Maduro stated it would be backed by gold, diamonds and oil.

Today our friend and colleague Jeff Brown, China Rising, passed along two different articles that show the global impact of el Petro and why the Federal Reserve Note is moving closer to the dustbin of history with each passing day. If you think the criminals benefiting from the world reserve currency status of the Federal Reserve Note aren’t concerned about el Petro and cryptocurrencies in general, well, look no further than what Menendez and Rubio are doing in the U.S. Senate.

Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Menendez and his Republican counterpart, Marco Rubio, have co-authored a letter denouncing the Petro, and requesting that the U.S. Treasury Department closely monitor its progress. The lawmakers also made suggestions on measures the agency can take to undermine the success of the digital currency. Source

It is no secret that nations around the world are moving away from the “world reserve currency” Federal Reserve Note, U.S. dollar, and either utilizing direct currency swaps, primarily with China or coming to terms in more creative ways of conducting international commerce. The days of a world reserve currency system are numbered and we at The Daily Coin believe those days will run out before the calendar strikes 2030.

Venezuela Pres. Maduro has been encouraged by the Petro's swift acceptance in key sectors.

Cambodia is inspired by Venezuela’s el Petro and has decided to create their own cryptocurrency, EntaPay. Some of you are thinking “who cares, it’s Cambodia!” To which I say – death by a thousand cuts is still death.

EntaPay sounds like someone has been paying close attention to what is happening, not only within the crypto space, but fully understands how dangerous the Federal Reserve Note, US dollar based system has become to any nation that doesn’t fall in line and do as they are told. The days of the US government being able to strangle a nation with economic sanctions, using the world reserve currency, are rapidly coming to an end.

A press release describing Entapay said that the cryptocurrency would serve as “the connection between integration payment of encrypted currency and the real world. It has the great potential to even replace Visa as the new mainstream payment mode.”

The statement also mentioned the Petro, saying that it was a means to “assist” Venezuela in “avoiding the Western world’s economic sanctions.”

Threatened with sanctions by western governments, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen may view the launch of Entapay as an economic survival tactic for the future. Source

These are, basically, the same words Russian President Putin used when he stated moving away from the Federal Reserve Note, US dollar was a matter of national security.

Venezuela’s economy has been crushed by some of the sanctions imposed by the US government and was a major catalyst for the development of el Petro.

On Feb. 20, Venezuela officially launched the Petro, the first cryptocurrency backed by oil reserves. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said the goal of the digital coin is to combat sanctions and the “economic war” waged by the United States government and its junior partners against his country and advance “on issues of monetary sovereignty, to make financial transactions and overcome the financial blockade.” Source

Venezuela is on the verge of being able to move their country away from US sanctions and, move towards "the socialist nightmare" Maduro has envisioned. Oh, wait a minute, that’s already happening. Could it get worse; could Maduro gather in more power with the success of el Petro?

The Petro, the world’s first national cryptocurrency based on natural resources, has generated sales over five billion dollars during its pre-sale period and has recorded over 186,000 certified purchases. The sale of the Petro has also significantly strengthened the country’s foreign reserves amid increased international aggression.

The announcement of the continued success of the cryptocurrency was made by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro during a meeting with members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV, in the Plaza Bolivar in Caracas on Friday.

Maduro explained that the revenue generated from the sale of the Petro would be used to service “everything our country needs” and formed part of a wider “economic solution” the country’s government had put together.

Data released by Carlos Vargas, Venezuela’s Superintendent of Cryptocurrency and Related Activities, shows that over 83,000 persons in 127 countries have made certified purchase offers for the states cryptocurrency. Source

How many other nations, like Cambodia, are watching this scenario unfold in Venezuela? How many other nations are asking the same questions these two nations are asking and beginning to answer?

We do NOT support Venezuelan President Maduro, we do NOT support cryptocurrencies. We are merely pointing out nations around the world are now using tools against the US and the world reserve currency system that were not on the radar as of September 2017. Those tools are now seedlings taking root on opposite sides of the planet to be rid of the world reserve Federal Reserve Note and the crippling effects of saying or doing something the US deep state/shadow government is opposed. What we are seeing are the consequences of an out-of-control government, that, under the Bush, Jr and the Obama regimes made calculated and deadly global moves that have awakened leaders across the planet. These leaders are now doing whatever is necessary to get away from the clutches of dollar hegemony.

—The Daily Coin

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rory Hall, The Daily Coin. Beginning in 1987 Rory has written over 1,000 articles and produced more than 300 videos on topics ranging from the precious metals market, economic and monetary policies, preparedness as well as geopolitical events. His articles have been published by Zerohedge, SHTFPlan, Sprott Money, GoldSilver, Silver Doctors, SGTReport, and a great many more. Rory was a producer and daily contributor at SGTReport between 2012 and 2014. He has interviewed experts such as Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Dr. Marc Faber, Eric Sprott, Gerald Celente and Peter Schiff, to name but a few. Don't forget to visit The Daily Coin and Shadow of Truth YouTube channels to enjoy original videos and some of the best economic, precious metals, geopolitical and preparedness news from around the world.

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Things to ponder

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

• PATRICK MARTIN, WSWS.ORG

"Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the “axis of evil” that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA..."

In a three-part series published last week, the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.

If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.

Since its establishment in 1947—under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman—the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice.

In the wake of the Watergate crisis and the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon, reporter Seymour Hersh published the first devastating exposure of the CIA domestic spying, in an investigative report for the New York Times on December 22, 1974. This report triggered the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission, a White House effort at damage control, and Senate and House select committees, named after their chairmen, Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike, which conducted hearings and made serious attempts to investigate and expose the crimes of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

Hollywood (and the mainstream media) embrace of shows like "24" are simply a glorification and "sexification" of the most sordid and anti-democratic police and intel work. It's never hyperbole when we say the corporate media are willing and eager accomplices in the crimes of US imperialism at home and abroad.

The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD; Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century.

The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as “Murder Incorporated.”

In that period, it would have been unthinkable either for dozens of “former” military-intelligence operatives to participate openly in electoral politics, or for them to be welcomed and even recruited by the two corporate-controlled parties. The Democrats and Republicans sought to distance themselves, at least for public relations purposes, from the spy apparatus, while the CIA publicly declared that it would no longer recruit or pay American journalists to publish material originating in Langley, Virginia. Even in the 1980s, the Iran-Contra scandal involved the exposure of the illegal operations of the Reagan administration’s CIA director, William Casey.

PLUS QUE ÇA CHANGE...Mainstream TV was already busy singing the praises of the FBI back in the 1960s (the eponymous tv series, with Efrem Zimbalist Jr as agent Lewis Erskine, lasted almost a whole decade, until 1974). The concept later became a fungus with more police shows invading the small screen. This at a time when Hoover was busy disrupting legitimate antiwar and anti-racist dissent across the nation.

How times have changed. One of the main functions of the “war on terror,” launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed protector of the American people against terrorism.

This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.

The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins (24, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty, etc.)

The American media has been directly recruited to this effort. Judith Miller of the New York Times, with her reports on “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, is only the most notorious of the stable of “plugged-in” intelligence-connected journalists at the Times, the Washington Post, and the major television networks. More recently, the Times has installed as its editorial page editor James Bennet, brother of a Democratic senator and son of the former administrator of the Agency for International Development, which has been accused of working as a front for the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid “experts” and “analysts” for the television networks.

In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.

This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama’s endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.

The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of media backers—Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times, the entire editorial board of the Washington Post, most of the television networks—are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged “human rights” grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.

The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are “former” agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This “retired” status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.

The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.

The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.

The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its “bodies of armed” serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.

Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the “axis of evil” that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a “lesser evil.” On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author is a senior editorialist with wsws.org, a Marxist publication.

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

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[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

Things to ponder

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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