Medical Mystery: what caused Alexander III to develop nephritis?

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William H. Warrick III for The Saker Blog
Originally October 08, 2019

Speech of President Putin at the dedication of the new statue:

“Dear Friends, Today here in Crimea, at the famous Livadia Palace, we are unveiling a monument to Alexander III, an outstanding statesman and patriot, a man of stamina, courage and unwavering will. He always felt a tremendous personal responsibility for the country’s destiny: he fought for Russia in battlefields, and after he became the ruler, he did everything possible for the progress and strengthening of the nation, to protect it from turmoil, internal and external threats. Contemporaries called him the Peacemaker tsar.

However, according to Sergei Vitte, he gave Russia 13 years of peace by not yielding but by a fair and unwavering firmness. Alexander III stood up for the country’s interests directly and openly, and that policy enured the growth of Russia’s influence and authority in the world. The country’s industrial potential was growing dynamically, while a groundbreaking labour law was adopted protecting worker’s rights, a law that was far ahead of legal practices in many other countries.

New factories and plants were opening, new industrial sectors were springing up, and the railways expanded. It was the emperor’s decree that started the construction of the Great Siberian Road – the Trans-Siberian Railway, which has been Russia’s asset for over a century. Alexander III also began a major program for the army’s modernization.

Large-scale shipbuilding projects were implemented, including those for the Black Sea Fleet. He believed that a strong, sovereign and independent state should rely not only on its economic and military power but also on traditions; that it is crucial for a great nation to preserve its identity whereas any movement forward is impossible without respect for one’s own history, culture and spiritual values.

The reign of Alexander III was called the age of national revival, a true uplifting of Russian art, painting, literature, music, education and science, the time of returning to our roots and historical heritage. It was under Alexander III that the White-blue-red flag became widely used as the national flag, which has now become one of the major state symbols of our country.

Alexander III loved Russia and believed in it, and by unveiling this monument today we pay tribute to his deeds, achievements, and merits, we show our respect for the continuous history of our country, for the people of all ranks and social classes who earnestly served the Fatherland. I am confident that the current and future generations will do their best for the wellbeing and prosperity of the Fatherland, as much as our great ancestors did. Thank you.”

***

Alexander and his wife Empress Maria Fyodorovna on holiday in Copenhagen in 1893.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]uring the summer of 1894 Czar Alexander III began feeling “not well”. His symptoms continued and worsened into September and the Czarina had to write her family in Denmark to cancel a planned visit. The Czar then went to the Crimea to try and recuperate in the warmer climes there. His health then rapidly declined and he died on Oct 20, surrounded by family after reading 2 prayers, taking communion from Father Yanyshev and prayers by the priest from Kronstadt [2]. In the last days and hours he was a total invalid unable to do anything for himself and only let the Czarina help him. He wouldn’t even let the chamberlain help him [3] (this likely means he was incontinent of bowels and urine).

The official cause of death reported the following day (presumably after post-mortem examination) was 1. “Chronic Interstitial Nephritis” 2. “Contributing causes: Consequent failure of heart and blood vessels” 3. Other Diagnoses: “Hemorrhagic Infarct of the left lung with subsequent inflammation”. Several physicians were signatories of the Autopsy Report including: Leiden, Zakharin, surgeon Girshev, Professor Popov and honorary surgeon Veliaminov. Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, Minister of the Imperial Court also was a signatory to make the document official [4].

Missing from the primary diagnosis however, is the cause of the nephritis. The Historical record is that it was “caused by his drinking” and “a bruise of his kidney” (which kidney R or L is not specified) [5]. There is a problem with both of these in that neither alcohol nor trauma are listed as causes of nephritis. The causes of nephritis are Infection, Autoimmune disease and toxic. The question then is a Medical one, not a Historical one. To answer this question his medical history is required, probably access to the archives of the Romanovs. For now however I will proceed with what little I have found.

Physically he was similar to his Grandfather, Nicholas I and his Great, Great, Great-Grandfather Peter The Great, very big and very strong with a forceful personality. His build was that of a classic middle linebacker like Dick Butkus of the Chicago Bears or Jack Lambert of the Pittsburg Steeler’s famed “Steel Curtain”. His strength was such that he was able to lift the roof of the dining car he and his family were in when their train crashed in 1888 on the way back from The Crimea so they could get out. He was said to have “bruised his kidney” in the crash and suffered “critical damage to his internal organs” (apparently the kidney) [6].

In the ensuing years he was said to have developed back pain but exactly when is not indicated and have problems with kidney stones [7]. Peter had major problems with nephrolithiasis and had a major obstruction complicated by infection and sepsis leading to his demise. His chronic liver disease from alcohol related cirrhosis also probably played a role. I have not seen anything suggesting alcohol intake even remotely close to that of Peter’s prodigious alcohol intake, but again, alcohol does not cause nephritis.

One piece of medical history that I did find was that he came down with influenza in January 1894. “With complications in the Lung” (which lung was not specified) [8]. This raises the probability of Post-Influenza Pneumonia which can cause Post Infectious Nephritis. Post Infectious Nephritis however occurs at the time of resolution of the infection and is self-limited and therefore an unlikely to be a cause of death in the September-October timeframe. Additionally symptoms of nephritis would have been present in January or February and this was not reported.

Alexander receiving rural district elders in the yard of Petrovsky Palace in Moscow; painting by Ilya Repin

His main medical problem was severe stress. When Alexander II was assassinated Russia was in dire economic straits. The economy was stagnant, there were large budget deficits that had led to a large National Debt, and the country was divided by political and social divisions due to poor execution of his father’s reforms. Also he was extremely worried about the safety of his family and himself from assassins in the People’s Will and other terrorist groups [9]. There were 8 attempts on his father the last 4 of which were complex indicating sophisticated planning, large amounts of explosives and many participants [10]. There were at least 5 attempts on him [11]. He was so fearful that on one occasion, when he entered the guard room, one of them quickly put his hand behind his back so the Czar shot him thinking he was hiding a pistol. It turned out to be just a cigarette. When he became Czar he fired all his father’s Liberal advisors, cracked down on the terrorists and returned to Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality, abolished some liberal reforms and did several things to improve the lot of the Peasants. He lowered the redemption payments and compulsory purchase of peasant plots instituted when serfdom was ended. He abolished Peter’s Poll Tax, founded the Peasant Land Bank and limited the working hours of women and children.

His other great worry relates to Foreign Policy [12]. Right after he became Czar the Three Emperors League Treaty was up for renewal. Because of the economic problems and high budget deficits he wanted to avoid war at all costs so he renewed the treaty for practical reasons. He renewed it again in 1884. But in 1887 he decided against renewal but entered into a non-aggression pact with Germany [13]. By 1890 the economy had been turned around with the assistance of loans from France for Infrastructure development and the economic policies of Sergei Witte. The Trans-Siberian RR, conceived by Alexander III had been started in 1891, the other foreign loans were being paid off from the infrastructure development. The crop failure of 1891 was a major disaster that caused half a million deaths. Intermittent crop failures were a recurrent problem of climate and soil problems in Russia but with the largest landmass (1/6th of the Earth’s surface), a modernized Military and over a hundred new ships for the Navy, many of which were steam powered, the discovery of oil, numerous and plentiful Natural Resources, Russia was looking like the most powerful country in the world [14]. This creates foreign enemies who want to destroy you and take your resources from you. Alexander decided his main allies were his Army and Navy. He changed his alliances to France [15]. During this period of the early 1890s Russia was returning to its past record of “the Gendarme of Europe (or likely Eurasia)” and the Romanov characteristic of avoiding war and being a Peacemaker.

So, now we return to the question, what caused his nephritis? The medical history of the last few weeks of his life does not support a diagnosis of infection and he was an unlikely candidate for autoimmune causes of nephritis for several reasons. The most common of autoimmune disease is Lupus and he doesn’t fit that because of his sex, Nationality, age and lack of any other conditions caused by Lupus which would have been present prior to the development of nephritis. In addition, Lupus nephritis waxes and wanes over years and his course was too rapid and besides Lupus is not a very common disease [16]. The other causes of autoimmune nephritis such as Goodpasture’s Syndrome, Wegener’s Granulomatosis, Sjogren’s Syndrome, ANCA nephritis, Sarcoid, TB, vasculitis and several others are not considered for many of the same reasons as Lupus. They are even more rare that Lupus, all have other signs and symptoms and the nephritis is prolonged. He didn’t have Alports Syndrome, a hereditary cause nor did he have any Hematopoietic disease related history so those are ruled out. Balkan Nephropathy is an endemic problem around the Danube River but he didn’t live there. About 10-20% of cases are idiopathic, in which no cause is found, but again, the course is prolonged and does not fit with rapid demise.

This leaves us with a toxin as the cause because there isn’t anything else to do it. Today the primary toxins are prescription drugs which did not exist in the 1890s. Aspirin can do it but it takes years of high intake and takes years to wipe out the kidneys. The only toxin I can come up with is arsenic. It is tasteless and odorless and small amounts in food, tea or other beverage would not be noticed by the victim and kidneys would be destroyed rapidly the longer it is given, so my Final Diagnosis is:

Chronic Nephritis from surreptitious Arsenic ingestion by unknown assassins.

This raises the question of why didn’t his doctors figure this out in late August or in September when the signs and symptoms of nephritis would be present. Arsenic had been known as a toxin long before the late 19th Century, the history of prior assassination attempts of him and the assassination of his father are huge red flags that should have been noticed. The Peoples Will employed sophisticated tactics, Russia was a World Power with enemies who wanted to dominate it and Alexander III was not the type to be dominated. He was the one who did the dominating so more work by Historians is needed to find the perpetrators of this crime.

Bibliography:

[1] Massry & Glassock’s Textbook of Nephrology Subsequent Edition
by Shaul G. Massry (Author),‎ Richard J. Glassock (Author)
[2]  Biography of Alexander III; Rusartnet, The Premier Site for Russian Culture. http://www.rusartnet.com/biographies/russian-rulers/romanov/tsar/alexander-iii
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid]
]9] Ibid
[10] The Romanovs. The History of the Russian Dynasty – Episode 8. Documentary Film. Babich-Design
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSlVgtwAcRA&t=1249s
[11] Biography of Alexander III; Rusartnet, The Premier Site for Russian Culture. http://www.rusartnet.com/biographies/russian-rulers/romanov/tsar/alexander-iii
[12] Three Emperors League; Encyclopedia.com; Encyclopedia of Russian History;
http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/modern-europe/treaties-and-alliances/three-emperors-league#1G23404101374
[13] Ibid
[14] The Romanovs. The History of the Russian Dynasty – Episode 8. Documentary Film. Babich-Design
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSlVgtwAcRA&t=1249s
[15] Three Emperors League; Encyclopedia.com; Encyclopedia of Russian History;
http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/modern-europe/treaties-and-alliances/three-emperors-league#1G23404101374
[16] Massry & Glassock’s Textbook of Nephrology Subsequent Edition
by Shaul G. Massry (Author),‎ Richard J. Glassock (Author)

 
 
This essay is part of a series on cultural, scientific and esoteric matters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Warrick was born in Philadelphia, Pa. in December 1943 and has Bachelors Degrees in Business Administration and Psychology, an MD Degree from the University of Pennsylvania and was a Family Physician in Gainesville Florida for 34 years and now does Open Source Intelligence Analysis in Geopolitics, The Empire, Public Banking and Modern Monetary Theory.

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

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The FBI-CIA War on Tupac and Socially Conscious Artists

Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.

A lot of people in the United States have never heard of the counter intelligence program. They’ve never heard of the CIA’s Operation Chaos.

Tupac Shakur: he lived life defiantly and boldly, but set off too many lethal wires.

This material was first published on December 12, 2015 / Original source is RapRehab
 

John Potash is the author of The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders. Published in 2007, it is just now beginning to circulate among a new generation of Black millennial artists and activists. Based on 12 years of intense research, it includes over 1,000 endnotes, an assortment of FBI documents and over 100 interviews. Potash’s most recent book Drugs As Weapons Against Us was published earlier this year in May 2015. This interview was conducted by telephone and transcribed verbatim.

[Lamont Lilly]:  John, thanks for sitting down to talk with me. When Tupac Shakur was shot and killed in 1996 I was a sophomore in high school who knew the rapper, but not the man. What inspired you to write about Tupac. You explore his life with such depth? 

[John Potash]: I was introduced to Hip Hop as a senior in high school.  It was around 1982/83 when a friend I wrestled with turned me on to Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five. A few years later I got into Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest. I was interested in a lot of different kinds of music, but when I got into political rap, I was paying more attention. It was right after college and I was working as a drug counselor. I was counseling someone who said that their father was a Black Panther killed by the police.

As I started to research the Black Panther Party I came across an article in 1994 in the Washington Post about Tupac Shakur being shot in the Quad Recording Studios. The reporter of the article stated that in another strange twist, the same police officer that showed up at the sexual assault scene a year earlier was the first one to arrive at the scene of the Quad Recording shooting near Time Square.

So, I researched more of what happened at the Quad Recording Studio and contacted Tupac’s trial lawyer who was representing him in the sexual assault case, which was happening at this same time. I asked him do you think the FBI is targeting Tupac like they targeted his parents with the Counter Intelligence Program . Michael Warren who was his lawyer at the time, said yes, and no one is writing about it.

I wrote a piece on what I had found and solicited several left wing magazines, but no national magazine would publish it. However, a small local press did. I was published in leftist media on other topics, but they kept rejecting the Tupac Shakur article and the fact of a new Counter Intelligence Program working against him. But in 1998, Covert Action Quarterly (which was started by CIA whistleblower, Philip Agee accepted the article. I had about 50 endnotes for the article which included my sources.

After that, some people who were close to Tupac opened up to me in a big way. They said you have to turn this into a book. From 1998 to 2007, I worked hard outside my regular job to complete the research. That’s how The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders came together.

[LL]: In your book you highlight the family legacy of the Shakurs and their long-time work within the Black Liberation Movement, dating back to Marcus Garvey  and the UNIA. You clearly illustrate how Tupac was a direct descendant of the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. In bringing this together, how did you connect with Pam Africa, Kathleen Cleaver and Mutulu Shakur, people whose contributions were obviously instrumental?

[JP]: I think the key is that these individuals are often shut out of mainstream media. I don’t know why more independent and left wing journalists did not try to cover this issue better.  But I also don’t know why all the left wing national magazines, which are all owned by whites, couldn’t see through the propaganda on Tupac. However, Covert Action Quarterly was so respected. When I first met Kathleen Cleaver at the Black Panther Film Festival, she gave a hug and said that she had read my article on Tupac. She mentioned Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother. Kathleen was explaining to me how this repression at the hands of COINTELPRO was intergenerational.

Pam Africa read the article because the cover of that particular issue was of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was also himself a target of the counter intelligence program. Once Pam Africa saw my article on Tupac, she asked how she could help me get the article out more. Pam told the editor of Covert Action Quarterly how important she thought the article was. Pam and Kathleen were a big help.

Once I met them, the information opened up. They provided additional interviews and more people who could speak on different aspects of how the counter intelligence program against Tupac and his family related to Mumia. Kathleen even shared what happened to her and husband, Eldridge Cleaver (who was also a member of the Black Panther Party).

In regards to Mutulu Shakur, he believed in the theory of my article, but Mutulu was shut off from the media. They put him in the most maximum security prison in the country. The only way that he could get his ideas out was through his website. That first article connected me to all of these individuals. Shortly after, journalist, Connie Bruck did a very good article on Tupac for the New Yorker.

In the article, she discussed the strange circumstances surrounding Tupac’s death.  She interviewed Tupac’s attorney, Michael Warren for several hours, yet none of his content made the article. Connie’s editors at the New Yorker had cut every mention of Michael Warren. They cut everything he said. That’s what we’re dealing with, an incredible censorship over mainstream media. A lot of left wing writers and activists have been shut out.

[LL]: Speaking of censorship, your book really illustrates the wide grasp that Time Warner has over the Hip Hop industry. I was completely unaware that they had censored so much of Tupac’s material, excluding full songs from albums, and chopping lyrics. Has anyone recovered this material in its original form?

[JP]: I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. You’d have to talk with his mother, Afeni Shakur on that. Afeni tried to get all of his songs from Death Row, but Death Row apparently, at one point only gave her half the songs Tupac had produced. He was so prolific – amazing at how many songs he produced by the age of 25. Afeni did get a few hundred songs from Death Row, but from what I read there were still more songs Death Row was keeping from her. So, I don’t know whether that was material that had been cut out or not. I don’t know, sorry to say.

"That is the amazing power of mainstream media censorship. It just goes to show you how far their tentacles reach. What happens is that even among left wing media, foundations are often supplying them grants to causes they’re sympathetic to. When independent of left wing media sources get grants from these foundations, which they need to stay alive, it becomes very difficult because those grants come with censorship..."

[LL]: You cover at great length, the details of Hip Hop’s “East Coast vs. West Coast” feud. I remember as a Hip Hop kid in the mid 90’s, that feud was huge. As youth, we were led to believe that we had to choose between New York or Cali – Biggie or Tupac. How was this divide manufactured from the perspective of U.S. intelligence, particularly in connection to the “East Coast vs. West Coast” Black Panther beef just one generation prior?  It’s so clear that the two generations are connected, both targeted by state surveillance, political repression and media censorship.

[JP]: There’s a book called The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian. In it, Ben shows how literally 95% of mainstream media has increasingly been controlled by a smaller and smaller amount of companies. And he kept revising that book, so it went from about 24 companies down to a dozen, and finally down to about 6 companies  controlling a vast majority of our information, and the information that we can find.

In the book, Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, they outline how the Pentagon owns and publishes well over 1,300 magazines, and we don’t know what those magazines are. It’s all classified. We can guess that most of them are the magazines in your typical Barnes & Nobles. The Pentagon is by far the biggest magazine publisher in the world.

[LL]: The Pentagon? Really?

[JP]: Yes, the Pentagon. And this comes from military journals, as Chomsky and Herman both site. Military journals admitted this. In the 1970’s, Carl Bernstein covered the senate church committee hearings on COINTELPRO and U.S. intelligence. Bernstein wrote an article about one of those hearings that covered the media in particular. At that time the CIA director admitted that well over 400 members of the media were living dual lives and were actually working for the CIA. Bernstein named who some of these people were, which included the heads of virtually all of the mainstream media organizations – the head of Time Incorporated, the head of ABC, the head of NBC and CBS, etc. These people were working for the CIA living dual lives.

Time Warner in particular, had a vice president named Charles Douglas Jackson who went back and forth being CIA architect and head of psychological warfare under different presidents to being VP of Time Incorporated. There are documents and evidence showing that C.D. Jackson was running psychological warfare operations through his media assets like Time Magazine, Life Magazine, and all the other magazines that Time Incorporated owns.  That’s how they do it, by controlling so much of the media and our sources of information. They manufacture these fake articles, and censor others, to control how we think about things.

Operation Chaos, which worked with the FBI’s counterintelligence program to target the Black Panthers and other left wing activists, is one example. We only found out about these programs because some activists broke-in to an FBI office in 1971 and confiscated these documents, and tried to get the word out as much as possible. Otherwise, we wouldn’t even know what they were doing to us.

Unfortunately, even with finding out about these documents, they still control mainstream media. The word is still getting out. A lot of people in the United States have never heard of the counter intelligence program. They’ve never heard of the CIA’s Operation Chaos. These are the things I’m trying to uncover and inform people about.

With the Black Panthers, they tried to create divisions and manufacture murderous rivalries – for example, between Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. They sent fake letters back and forth between the two of them. Stokely Carmichael , who was at one time head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was also an honorary Black Panther until the FBI began sending fake letters back and forth between Stokely and Huey Newton.

This was done to split them up and create divisions. Undercover agents would infiltrate the Black Panthers and feed false information and fake letters. I argue that in some cases, agents killed and murdered comrades and associates, to make it look like a real war. In reality, it was a “manufactured” war! And there’s more tactics they used.

In my next book, Drugs As Weapons Against Us I show how they used drugs to undermine Huey P. Newton’s competence by getting him caught up in cocaine to hurt his functioning. I show how these tactics that were used against the Black Panthers were also evident against Tupac and Biggie Smalls, and other rappers.

In prison, Tupac was getting these anonymous letters saying it was Biggie and Puffie (Sean Combs) who set up his shooting at Quad Studios in New York. Prison guards and inmates were telling him the same thing, total strangers. Tupac didn’t know what to believe. He didn’t really know what was going on at the time.

The reason U.S. intelligence was doing this was because Tupac Shakur was already a national Black leader. He was head of the New African Panthers at the age of 17 and 18 years old. That group was active in 8 cities nationwide. They were replicating what the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was doing. His mother, Afeni Shakur was a Harlem Panther leader.

[LL]: All of this history about Tupac the revolutionary – his ties to the Black Liberation Movement. Why do so many of us not know about this side of Tupac? Assata Shakur, Geronimo Pratt, Chokwe Lumumba, Huey P. Newton – Tupac was around all of them. He was learning from real-life field generals. These people are grassroots legends!!

[JP]: That is the amazing power of mainstream media censorship. It just goes to show you how far their tentacles reach. What happens is that even among left wing media, foundations are often supplying them grants to causes they’re sympathetic to. When independent of left wing media sources get grants from these foundations, which they need to stay alive, it becomes very difficult because those grants come with censorship. And this censorship is spread all over.

In regards to Tupac’s activism, the New Afrikan Panthers were the young adult organization within the New Afrikan People’s Organization – youth from the ages of 13 to 28, which was close to the age of the Black Panthers when they first started. Mumia Abu-Jamal was about 14/15 years old when he joined the Black Panthers in Philadelphia.

[LL]: That is correct, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, all teenagers.

[JP]: Yeah, that’s right. So when Tupac at the age of 18 became national chairman, they were watching him very closely. As soon as he got a solo record deal with 2Pacalypse Now, within several days of his first video “Trapped,” which was an MTV worldwide video release, the Oakland Police allegedly stopped him for jaywalking. Yet, they proceeded to choke him unconsciously and bang his head against the curb. He was targeted immediately.

Another thing that Tupac was doing as an activist was appealing to the gangs to politicize http://hiphopdx.com/news/id.29135/title.tupac-says-quad-shooting-sexual-assault-case-were-all-connected-in-previously-unheard-phone-call them. This was a part of the plan to get the Bloods and Crips to call a peace truce between each other and become leftist activists. And it was working!

It was happening all across California, first in Los Angeles right after the riots that protested the beating of Rodney King, and the cops being acquitted. The peace truces began to spread, not only among the Bloods and Crips, but across the country, to the point where the Latin Kings stopped selling drugs and turned onto left wing activism. The Young Lords, the Latino version of the Black Panthers, helped that to happen.

Tupac was actually a very serious activist http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-death-of-the-code-of-thug-life/article4228053/; people just didn’t realize it. He was somewhat hiding it because he didn’t want U.S. intelligence to know about it. Nonetheless, that’s why he was being targeted, and censored.

[LL]: That’s the same thing Fred Hampton was doing in Chicago, bringing groups together, bringing the gangs together with the community activists, politicizing this marginalized demographic, raising consciousness among the oppressed.

[JP]: And that’s why they were targeted. That’s much more important than what I can even say right now. I get into the importance of that in my next book, but the fact that Tupac could do that – the fact that Fred Hampton http://www.frso.org/about/statements/2008/fredhampton.htm could do that, even people like Lumumba Shakur, was seen as dangerous to U.S. intelligence. People like Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, the Los Angeles Black Panther leaders who were some of the first to be murdered http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21382-1969-the-year-the-black-panther-party-was-to-be-annihilated, were particularly dangerous not only to U.S. intelligence but to the oligarchy as well, to those who control this country.

[LL]: During slavery, it was common practice for slave masters to outlaw any use or presence of African drums on the plantation. They were very aware of the drum’s power, mystique and many uses. In hindsight, they were afraid of Black music’s ability to empower and mobilize people. This is the same reason artists like Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrick, Bob Marley and Sam Cooke have always been closely monitored, even targeted. This is public information now, supported by official documents. So, why is nothing being done about this?

[JP]: The oligarchy has too much power. I didn’t know about the outlawing of drums on plantations, but that makes sense. It’s all in line with what is going on today. U.S. intelligence, the ruling elite and the CIA have always wanted to control our hearts and minds. Much of this mentality and these practices come from the Nazis who “specialized” in controlling hearts and minds. It’s not always about controlling people physically. It’s also about controlling people mentally, so that they control themselves.

The key is that the biggest opponent to the CIA’s ability to control people’s minds is the presence of politically and socially conscious musicians. These types of artists can get to people’s hearts with their music, and get to people’s minds with their lyrics. These types of artists can affect people’s opinions and stimulate ideas. It comes from the passion within their music. Musicians are some of the biggest threats to the CIA. Leftist musicians are in opposition to the oligarchy and their entire apparatus, the CIA, the FBI, U.S. intelligence, all of them.

This is something we have to look at more closely. We don’t have control over the music industry, so we have to keep these artists alive. In my next book, I’ll be talking about a few white musicians as well like John Lennon  and Kurt Cobain.

[LL]: Exactly! That’s right!

[JP]: Exactly, because they had the same political passions as Tupac, and Jimi Hendrix did, too. During the last year or two of his life, Jimi Hendrix became very political. He was deeply disturbed about Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, which eventually led him to dedicate his last album to the Black Panther Party.

Jimi Hendrix was talking about the Black Panthers in live interviews. He would say things like “Hey, if you want to oppose these warmongers, you got to get your Black Panthers together to help with this.” Jimi was getting very political. He had even asked Bob Dylan to join a political organization that he wanted to start for peace. Jimi Hendrix was getting very active the last year of his life, before they killed him. Corporate media doesn’t share these things with the public, which is why not much is being done to stop it.

[LL]: Speaking of controlling minds, from 1987 to 1993/94 was a period now known as Hip Hop’s “Golden Age.” It was a time when artists like Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-One, Brand Nubian and the early Tupac were raising a lot of consciousness, particularly among Black youth. In a matter of a few brief years, however, we somehow went from “Fight the Power” to “Fuck Bitches, Get Money.” The 5 elements of Hip Hop were abandoned for the “Bling Era.” Are you saying that this shift was manufactured as well?

[JP]: I believe it was. I think it’s pretty clear. In the very beginning nobody would sign Tupac to a solo deal except Interscope Records, and the only reason Interscope signed him was because they were an up-start label at that time. Ted Field, co-founder of Interscope was an outcast among the major labels. After he signed Tupac, it only took one year and one record (2Pacalypse Now, Tupac’s most political album) before Time Warner came in and bought up a controlling interest of something like 52% or 53%.

This is when Time Warner came in and proceeded with the censorship, their industry control and their reworking of people’s albums. They also bought up at least a half dozen of other Rap labels. A number of the major conglomerates also bought up labels, virtually all of the Rap labels. They also bought out the white Rock labels.

Interestingly, Quincy Jones founded Vibe Magazine in 1993, but Time Warner had a controlling interest in that, too. At the same time, corporate sponsors were controlling the content of The Source and other magazines. Corporations were reshaping how and what we thought about Hip Hop, and actively began promoting the Rappers that weren’t political. As soon as they saw how big Hip Hop was becoming, they bought out as much as they possibly could, and started controlling who could make it in the Rap Industry and who could not.

This really began happening right before Tupac’s second album, “Strictly 4 My Niggaz” which was supposed to come out in 1992, but they delayed it for a year until 1993. They didn’t want it to come out until after the 1992 presidential elections because Tupac was speaking out against George Bush on that album. This is the seriousness of what we’re talking about here, the power of artistry.

[LL]: In chapter 39, you discuss the mysterious death of Reggae legend, Bob Marley. Bob officially died from “malignant melanoma” (a brain tumor), which derived from a very rare and dangerous type of cancer first found in the big toe of his right foot. In connection with Bob’s death, you interviewed filmmaker and former Black Panther, Lee Lew-Lee . Can you briefly describe the circumstances surrounding Bob’s death?  

[JP]: The CIA’s MK Ultra Program was a huge program investigating all different kinds of drugs that were to be used as weapons against both foreign and domestic opposition, particularly leftist opposition. Part of their program was to figure out what substances could be the quickest and most effective at causing cancer. These substances were intended to get into the body of people they wanted to assassinate.

Bob Marley had already survived one attempt on his life in 1976. He was certainly their opposition, not only due to his music, but he was also close friends with the socialist Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley. The CIA supported Manley’s opponent, Edward Seaga.

Because Marley was so influential throughout Jamaica, much less the entire the world, they knew he could easily tip the election for Manley. First, they tried with bullets. Hired gunmen associated with the opposition party, who were paid by the CIA, fired tons of bullets at Bob Marley’s house.

They hit Bob. They hit his wife, Rita Marley. They hit his manager, Don Taylor. So, Prime Minister Manley invited Marley to his secure compound manned with armed guards in order to protect him. However, they let in the film crew who was filming Marley’s upcoming concert and documentary. What they didn’t realize was that the then director of the CIA, William Colby, had his son (Carl Colby) to infiltrate the film crew. During a filming session they gave Bob Marley a gift, a pair of shoes.

They knew it was customary for a Rasta to try on a gift as soon as you get it. Bob Marley tried those shoes on immediately. As soon as he tried them on, he felt a stab in his toe. He took his foot out and it was a small metal object. No one thought anything of it at the time.

It wasn’t until a few months later that he was playing soccer and crushed his toe. Doctors revealed that his toe was full of cancer. About a year later, the cancer had spread throughout his whole body, and eventually killed him in 1981. Sam Cooke, Jimi, Tupac, Bob…these aren’t just coincidences.

[LL]: I’ve come across several books in my lifetime that have really pushed me to think more critically. I have to say this particular book has definitely been one of them. It was almost like learning about Tupac and the Hip Hop industry all over again. Have other young people asked about this book? There’s a new wave of consciousness, and Black millennial activists  are leading it. This kind of reading is the perfect eye-opener.

[JP]: Well, the feedback has been mostly positive. Most people have at least been open to the ideas I’ve laid out here, except mainstream media. They just generally won’t touch it. Radio sources are a bit more receptive; not much, but enough to get it out. I’ve done several radio programs in Los Angeles and New York….and Chicago and Philadelphia. But these sources aren’t really “mainstream.” They’re alternative sources with mass followings, like Pacifica Radio, which is a left wing network.

In regards to young people, I have had the privilege of appearing at Morgan State University in Baltimore, and several other historically Black colleges. There has been some acceptance of my work, but even those spaces have still been difficult. People are worried about keeping their jobs and their positions.

For example, Bowie State University brought me in to speak through an association with a professor there. However, when one of his colleagues tried to support my work too, and expressed interest in being a PR representative for my book, he ended up getting accosted by the police at a protest and fired from his job. We would send packages back and forth through the mail, and our packages would already be opened upon receiving them. Campus police said he brutalized them. This was nothing but censorship, against a Black professor.

Unfortunately, Black radical thought is not always welcomed, even in the spaces one would think that it should be. Oddly, I heard that someone in Durham, North Carolina mentioned my book in a newspaper editorial, but I haven’t seen it.

[LL]: Lol…unfortunately, it wasn’t me, but I’m not surprised to hear that. There’s a heavy Hip Hop influence here throughout the Raleigh/Durham area. There’s also a rich legacy here of Black resistance, Black culture and Black art. A few months I ran into your book at an Anarchist book fair in Chapel Hill. Young artists and activists are finding it for the first time, almost 10 years later. Thank you so much John for getting this out. And thank you for sitting down with me.

[JP]: Thank you, Lamont. It’s good to know the book is still moving around. I’m really glad Sister Pam Africa was able to connect us. She’s so amazing; Pam wrote the foreword. Great interview, thanks for talking with me. Let’s stay in touch. ■

NC-based activist, Lamont Lilly is a contributing editor with the Triangle Free Press and organizer with Workers World Party. He has recently served as field staff in Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, Boston and Philadelphia. In February 2015, he traveled to both Syria and Lebanon with Ramsey Clark and Cynthia McKinney. Follow him on Twitter @LamontLilly.

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Ending a Cultural Revolution Can Only Be Counter-Revolutionary (7/8)

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

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ell, you can end a Cultural Revolution without being a counter-revolutionary, I suppose, but not if you do what China did: reverse many of the progressive policies of the Cultural Revolution, and often without the People’s consent.
This series has examined the ground-breaking investigative & scholarly work The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village, by Dongping Han, a former Chinese villager himself. Han hailed from and studied rural Jimo County, interviewing hundreds of locals about the Cultural Revolution (CR) and poring over local historical records. Han was kind enough to write the forward to my new book, I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China.

Even more than Mao and the Great Leap Forward, Western Propaganda on the CR truly turns black into white. Perhaps no political event - and certainly no successful political event - is so misunderstood, negated and shrouded in misinformation and ignorance… thus this 8-part series!

What Han demonstrates is that the CR was the first effort in Chinese history to empower the average peasant against Chinese officialdom, and the results were spectacular. I keep referring to this handy mathematical summary of mine from Part 1: “You just read about 2 times more food and 2 times more money for the average Chinese person, 14 times more horsepower (which equates to 140 times manpower), 50 times more industrial jobs, 30 times more schools and 10 times more teachers during the CR decade in rural areas.”

A rededication to socialism brought more than just economic virtues, but moral ones as well, per Han: “The social vices like official corruption, prostitution, drug abuse, fake products and others that plague Chinese society today were completely absent at the end of the Cultural Revolution.”

But despite the introduction of the Industrial Revolution to China’s rural areas, despite the exponential increases in educational empowerment, despite the fact that the CR represented the first-ever effort to democratically empower rural Chinese against officialdom, despite a decade of generating the irreplaceable human capital upon which China’s 2019 success obviously rests… with the death of Mao China famously turned its back on the CR.

Let’s see what happened, and then discuss why it was a counter-revolution.

CR officials get ousted: meet the new boss, who truly was the old boss
After Mao’s death rebel leaders began to be rounded up. (As I explained in Part 5, Red Guards ain’t all red: Who fought whom in China’s Cultural Revolution?: China had, per Han, the “Rebel Red Guard Faction”, which were spontaneous, grassroots “mass associations”, pitted against the “Loyalist Red Guard Faction”, which were status quo-defending, established, “mass organisations”.) From late 1977 to early 1979 Jimo County saw purges, with few rebel leaders keeping their posts.

Who was restored? Those whom held office before the CR.

That was no quick feat, because the CR had been supported by the center and left of the Chinese political spectrum. But by 1983, “Every government office, school, factory and village was ordered to purge former rank-and-file rebels. Officials who had lost their positions at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution brought charges against individual rebels against whom they held grudges.” Han relates this was a prelude to a larger “official gouge” in rural areas in the 1980s and 1990s.

Selfless asceticism from Party officials abiding by the codes of conduct relayed in Mao’s Little Red Book and working in the fields were no longer expected. Corruption and bribery increased, children of officials got cushy jobs instead of spreading night soil, the right to use big character posters (China’s version of a free press, in no exaggeration) was excised from the constitution, Deng’s “manger responsibility” system - which gave them the authority to determine salaries – was installed.
All of that is obviously contrary to the values of the CR and in line with many Western values: no wonder the West hates the CR!

Despite these changes, to sweepingly say that “China abandoned socialism after Mao” is still nonsense because the CCP remained the vanguard party charged with protecting the 1949 revolution; China’s political system did not revert to liberal (bourgeois) democracy; China did not engage in imperialistic wars and etc. and etc. and etc.

There is the desire by many anti-socialists to see a child’s lemonade stand in socialist countries and to run away screaming: “They’ve gone capitalist!” Such absurdity is only in the self-interest of capitalism promoters, of course, but I will deal with this later. There is also a tendency among the most ardent pro-socialists to view any minor regression as proof that socialist has been betrayed and murdered.

The CR had - Han undoubtedly proves via statistics, anecdotes and analysis - brought such incredible life, power, hope and success to China’s rural areas, and the end of collectivization was a negative societal shock. Yes, the collectives had never developed evenly - that’s to be expected - but Han relates that the collectives had indeed worked for Jimo County, and that Jimo citizens opposed disbanding them in favor of the “household responsibility” system. Jimo’s county officials, along with 17 other neighboring counties, had their officials removed for dragging their feet in implementing this change.

Thus, what happened during the Deng era was very similar to the end of the USSR in that it was unexpected, unwanted and not voted on. “There was no state-sanctioned public debate about the merits or shortcomings of either collective farming or the household responsibility system.”

It should be unsurprising that data shows how rural production fell after 1983, when land was divided among Jimo County farmers: what good are huge farming machines on small family plots? How can the use of such machines be effectively coordinated among hundreds of farmers? In some villages they decided it was better to break up the machinery and sell it for scrap. Fights broke out among farmers over who could use the irrigation system, as there was no more collective solidarity. Draft animals were slaughtered to avoid arguments, further decreasing farming productivity. This is all obviously quite sad and a regression in Jimo County and across rural China.

Tiny individual plots - instead of socialist solidarity - naturally led to the need for more manual labor, which meant more children withheld from school to work on the farm: The number of teachers and staff remained the same, but high school students in Jimo County went from 20,000 in 1977 to 5,700 in 1987. This is also due to the reforms of 1978, which re-established key/magnet schools. Many schools were closed in the name of “efficiency”: Han shows how from 1976 to 1987 Jimo’s middle schools went from 249 to 106; they had 89 high schools in 1976, but just 7 in 1993. This is what happens anywhere when the guiding value is not “equality” but “efficiency”; “efficiency”, especially in Western nations, is usually a code-word for, “Because we want to give more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations.”

Han relates how Jimo’s experience mirrors that of the rest of rural China since the education “reforms”. Textbooks again became standardized nationwide, and were urban-focused (of course). In 1977 the national college entrance exam was reintroduced, and Han relates “…it has once again systematically drained talent from China’s rural areas, in the same manner as before the Cultural Revolution. Talented rural children leave home to go to college and few return. … Instead of being oriented to serve rural development, schools became an avenue to joining the urban elite. … The divorce of school curriculum from rural life has put rural children in a disadvantaged position because it is harder to study subjects that have no connections with their lives.”

Some readers will assume that such trends are inevitable - they have not read Part 6: The repatriation of young educated people back to their home villages – to serve those who had truly funded their education in the first place – was a huge factor in training up the human capital which led to the incredible exponential economic growth in rural areas during the CR decade.

Pride and confidence in people's determination.

The rural enterprises, which had been collectively owned, were now often rented to party officials or managers for a fixed rent or sold outright to them. The CR was designed to benefit the People and the Party - the post-CR reforms benefitted the Party and then the People. This is not terrible, because at least “the Party” is not Western 1%ers, but neither is it superb, egalitarian socialism. Make no mistake: the Chinese Communist Party is alive, well, thriving, secure and economically impregnable – it seems certain they are the most powerful economic force in the world - and much of their wealth was produced during the CR decade.

But, clearly, what the end of the CR meant was: a return to the pre-CR era and Party norms.

But the biggest way it was a “return to the pre-CR era” is not in the economic redistribution, but in a decaying of the other of socialism’s two pillars: political power redistribution.

“During the Cultural Revolution decade, village party secretaries had to share decision making power with a number of production team leaders, and their power was checked by a cohesive village population bound together by common public interests….The village party secretaries have gained most from the changes in power relations resulting from the division of land. During the Cultural Revolution decade, village party secretaries had to share decision making power with a number of production team leaders, and their power was also checked by a cohesive village population bound together by common public interests. The division of land eliminated the production team leaders – the most important check on village party secretaries – and also fragmented the village population, concentrating power in the hands of the village party secretaries.”
This is the counter-revolution I am referring to. However, it is a counter-revolution within an already revolutionary society, therefore it is not so very terrible - just as a “right-winger” in a socialist system is still far to the left of a leftist in a Western capitalist system.

Forget about your complaints of the inadequacies of the global political spectrum - the fortunate difference for the Chinese was: a socialist system is fundamentally not predatory in a capitalist sense, and the CR’s gains meant the Party had even more to redistribute than prior to the CR; a regression within a socialist system is infinitely less societally-damaging than regression in a capitalist system.

Han provides proof of this easily-understandable reality and logic: even though rural per capita grain consumption decreased 8% from 1975 to 1985, income increased 700%, far more than inflation (keep in mind that is per capita, not a median). Why? Because economic planning led by a vanguard party is a hell of a lot more effective and sane than relying solely on the “magic of market forces” of the modern neoliberal West (which are really just oligarchical forces). It was only comprehended by relatively few in 1849, but it should be crystal clear to the majority in 2019: management of an industry, factory or business by a socialist party secretary is far, far qualitatively different – in terms of planning, goals, national benefit, etc. – than management by an isolated and self-interested capitalist entrepreneur (not to mention a foreign and self-interested capitalist entrepreneur).

Is there is no freedom without economic freedom: first comes the money, then the democratic empowerment at your job and home? The CR proves rather otherwise - first comes the democratic empowerment then the economic freedom? Frankly, I am not interested in re-arguing if the chicken or the egg came first, because in socialism BOTH ideals are strived for and operate in a dialectic.

On a practical level: Obviously, going from a collective ownership to individual ownership drastically changed the nature of work in terms of job security and safe working conditions. The fragmentation of the collectives has – of course – fragmented the power of farmers; they have the freedom to sell whatever they want, but they lack stability, cohesiveness and solidarity because they are more capitalist.

In 1983, with the dissolution of the collectives, free medical care naturally ceased as well. The “five guarantees” introduced after 1949 - food, clothes, fuel, education and a funeral - were gone. Farmers who gave the best years of their lives to the collective found they were without financial support in their old age.

“Villagers said: ‘xinxin kuku sanshi nian, yi yie huidao jiefang qian’ (we worked hard for thirty years to build up the collectives, but overnight we returned to the status quo before the liberation).” That is from an interview in Jimo Han did in 1990, so one hopes the situation is better for them 30 years later.

Whereas the collective used to pay the tax burden, “The new taxation system in rural China is very regressive. The tax burden is not based on farmers’ income but on the amount of land they farm. Consequently, the bigger a farmer’s income, the smaller the tax burden as a percentage of his income. Vice versa, the smaller a villager’s income, the bigger the tax burden he has to pay as a percentage of his land. … Tax policy, like other aspects of de-collectivization is promoting economic polarization in villages. This, of course, is the intended outcome. Deng Xiaoping himself expressed the view that small segment of the population should get rich first, so that this small segment of the population could lead the whole society towards progress. This was a good reflection of Deng Xiaoping’s elitist mentality.”

Again, it is absurd to say that China is not Communist - the reality is that there is a left and right spectrum in socialist democracy, and that the reversal of the CR was a right-wing move within a socialist revolution, and which did not reverse the socialist revolution.

Negating the Cultural Revolution – China should stop doing the West’s work for them
Han’s final chapter is titled Negating the Cultural Revolution for good reason: not only is the CR totally negated by the West, but the Chinese Communist Party obviously wound back many of its leftist advances despite the obvious success. The reason they did this is probably because leftist advances always undermine those in the 1% in any system. Again, we must reject the typical Western historical nihilism: the 1% in a socialist system is far, far better than the 1% in the neoliberal, neo-imperialist capitalist system.

The final irony regarding Western assessment of the “horrors” of the CR is how incredibly useful they actually were in promoting social good. Mao’s idea that government servants should be fearful of being caught waging corruption… this is somehow a negative thing in the West, and apparently was to Deng as well.

“He (Deng) also announced that there would be no more political campaigns, which was like giving the officials a guarantee that they would not be harassed by the masses even if they were corrupt. Many officials slipped into their corrupt old ways very quickly.”

No more anti-corruption campaigns - the West doesn’t have to even make such a statement because capitalism is legalized corruption, after all.

Revolutionary fervor waxing and waning, waxing and waning – c’est la vie - I think it’s clear that in openly revolutionary nations, unlike the conservative nations of the West, such alternations will be more common. The good news is that the tide has turned – anti-corruption campaigns are back during the era of Xi Jinping.

Mao’s near-yearly anti-corruption campaigns, which culminated in a no-holds barred Cultural Revolution, must be examined with this counterview, if they are to be examined with a hint of objectivity and honesty. Of course, to a capitalist anyone persecuted by a socialist is always innocent of any charge….

Given that he wrote such a heckuva book, we should be interested in Han’s final words, which I humbly relate here:
“The Chinese government’s official evaluation of the Cultural Revolution serves to underline the idea, currently very much in vogue around the world, that efforts to achieve development and efforts to attain social equality are contradictory. The remarkable currency of this idea in China and internationally is due, at least in part, to the fact that such an idea is so convenient to those threatened by efforts to attain social equality. This study of the history of Jimo County has challenged this idea. During the Cultural Revolution decade and in the two decades of market reform that followed, Jimo has experienced alternative paths, both of which have led to rural development. The difference in the paths was not between development and stagnation but rather between different kinds of development. The main conclusion I hope readers will draw from the experience of Jimo County during the Cultural Revolution decade is that measures to empower and educate people at the bottom of society can also serve the goal of economic development. It is not necessary to choose between pursuing social equality and pursuing economic development. The choice is whether or not to pursue social equality.”
Superbly put. An ending worth committing to memory.

Capitalism only chooses between stagnation and development - it would rather tolerate Lost Decades, as in the current Eurozone, rather than do something that China and Iran did: effectively shut down the country to honestly discuss national problems and to democratically agree on solutions which benefit the 99%. Capitalism is the alexithymic shark which must keep moving, or it dies.

China, with their renewed emphasis on corruption and equality, did not die nor implode. Iran, despite all the hot and cold war against them, remains firmly revolutionary domestically, admiringly anti-imperialist inernationally, and far more socialist in inspiration and practice than any Western nation. Even with the current US threat of $0 in oil sales (anything to stop Muslim democracy…) there is seemingly no indication of a domestically counter-revolution of 1979’s ideals.

The Eurozone and the European Union desperately need a Cultural Revolution to democratically grapple with the structures they set in place decades ago which have created such rising economic inequality. That appears unlikely – these nations are not socialist-inspired.

This is why phrases like “social equality” contain no economic component in the West; use that phrase in the West and people will assume you are talking about racism or homophobia – they will never think you are referring to Marxist economic ideas or the idea of class.

A pity for them….

The Cultural Revolution empowered China’s poorest (rural peasants) and that created economic growth: a correlation for the West would be for those in the US to give vast sums of money and power to their Black underclass – such an idea seems impossible; the same goes for the Muslim underclass in France. Critically, both of these neo-imperialists view the exclusion of the poor from the hallways of power as absolutely fundamental to the success of their respective nations:

“Blacks/Musulmans in power? Never/Jamais! They don’t have the right values/ Ils ne partagent pas les mêmes valeurs.” You hear this openly in these societies all the time - these underclasses are just “free-riders” on the genius of the dominant racial/ethnic capitalist class and cannot (should not!) contribute significantly to society.

Such prejudice is no different than a Chinese person in 1965 who thought China could become a safe, thriving superpower by ignoring their rural underclass. Such prejudice is no different from those who are against the Yellow Vests in France.
Han’s study proves such ideas are false: Chinese empowerment of the poor generated human capital, which generated economic capital, which generated national success.

Perhaps the best Blacks and Muslims in the West can do is to wait for the Chinese to take over one day? Or, just maybe, the White rural underclass of the West will wise up and learn from socialist-inspired nations like China, Iran, Cuba and others? I’d start with re-examining China’s Cultural Revolution.

We don’t need to demonise Deng: He may have been on the right of the spectrum of socialist ideology, but he was still also a revolutionary socialist. On the global political spectrum, Deng was still far, far to the left of any supporter of antiquated liberal democracy.

What is a political revolution, after all? It is a cultural revolution
Political revolution is a cultural movement which becomes rooted over generations; it is not just a changing of the leaders - it goes even deeper than just changing the laws.

What needs to be understood about countries with socialist revolutions is their humanity: Revolutionary fervor waxes and wanes. During the CR the “left-socialist” line was predominant, whereas afterwards it was the “bourgeois-socialist” or “right-socialist” line.

Mao repeatedly pushed the “left socialist” line, which stressed loyalty to the collectives, local empowerment and reducing urban dominance to spread equality among the mass of the country (the rural areas). After Mao the so-called “bourgeois right socialist” line of Deng Xiaoping (which is still Maoism!) came to prominence, and my main point here is this: Deng had been around forever – he was in the Long March – so it’s not as if he was some newcomer who brought in brand new ideas in 1976.

“Every farmer and every politician in China knew where Deng Xiaoping stood regarding agricultural policies in late 1970s,” reminds Han.

Right-wing socialism was not something new – it had always been around, it simply had lost popularity… just as any political party (left or right) does in a Western society. Just as people do not wage endless war (except the US war on terror), people do not wage endless revolution – people tire, and that allows less-revolutionary elements to come to the fore.
Han clarifies this exactly: “Deng had the power to do whatever he wanted. But more important, he was supported by the persistence of traditional philosophies and the practices that had been challenged during the Cultural Revolution, and by people who stood to benefit by the restoration of the old ways, or thought they would.”

Show me the country or society where radical changes continued without end? There are none. Even the Revolution of Islam splintered into status quo and revolutionary sects: Sunni and Shia. It’s not as if all Shia have been unceasing revolutionaries since the assassination of Imam Ali in 661 AD, either. Revolutionary spirit waxes and wanes, and maybe this is even a necessary thing? I don’t know….

But it impossible to argue with Han’s conclusion: “The take-off of the rural economy in Jimo began not with market reforms, I have shown, but rather during the Cultural Revolution decade. Agricultural production more than doubled and a network of rural factories were established which fundamentally transformed the county’s rural economy in less than 10 years. Jimo’s story is not unique.”

Han’s assessment there – based on facts, dollars and data – is undoubtedly accurate, but only half the story: China is where it is today because the CR created the greatest wealth there is – human capital. That is socialism’s primary stated goal: allowing the realization of an individual’s potential.

By taking the Chinese peasant and stripping him of all the backwardness, retardation and disempowerment we all associate with the term “peasant”, China created its modern, intelligent, advanced workforce, whom nobody calls “peasant” anymore. China remains intensely committed to lifting up their lowest of the low – absolute poverty is about to become effectively totally eradicated after a 5-year plan led by Xi – but the CR did this en masse by reversing the existing priority of city over country in a nation which was 80% rural.

Indeed, how could Xi eliminate absolute poverty across the continent of China in just 5 years? He couldn’t - he is standing on the shoulders of massive efforts since 1949, and the CR is one of those strong, yet unappreciated, shoulders.

The CR has much to teach us today, but are we willing learn? That is the question of the next and final part of this series, which focuses on the flamingly obvious yet totally ignored parallels between China’s Cultural Revolution and France’s ongoing Yellow Vest movement.


This is the 7th article in an 8-part series which examines Dongping Han’s book The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village in order to drastically redefine a decade which has proven to be not just the basis of China’s current success, but also a beacon of hope for developing countries worldwide. Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Part 1 – A much-needed revolution in discussing China’s Cultural Revolution: an 8-part series

Part 2 – The story of a martyr FOR, and not BY, China’s Cultural Revolution

Part 3 – Why was a Cultural Revolution needed in already-Red China?

Part 4 – How the Little Red Book created a cult ‘of socialism’ and not ‘of Mao’

Part 5 – Red Guards ain’t all red: Who fought whom in China’s Cultural Revolution?

Part 6 – How the socioeconomic gains of China’s Cultural Revolution fuelled their 1980s boom

Part 7 – Ending a Cultural Revolution can only be counter-revolutionary

Part 8 – What the West can learn: Yellow Vests are demanding a Cultural Revolution

This is part of a series of dispatches by correspondent Ramin Mazaheri

About the author
I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China. His work has also appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. He can be reached on Facebook. 

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

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Maimed Yellow Vest Protestors: Worse Than Getting Shot

Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.

CROSSPOSTED WITH STRATEGIC-CULTURE

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he French marched off to war in 1914 in glorious lines of infantry in baby blue coats and bright red trousers to be mowed down by the finest technology the Industrial Revolution had to offer. For us now it is easy to see how insane this was and how flawed the understanding of both the commoners and even the experts was in terms of how combat and war actually worked at the time. This naive view of modern tactics certainly applies to street conflicts we are seeing in France as part of the Yellow Vest protests. The so-called non-lethal (and less-lethal) arms of the French authorities gives them a tactical advantage far beyond that of any assault rifle.

Thanks to the media we have become accustomed to video of protestors getting sprayed by water or having their ranks dispersed thanks to tear gas, leaving everyone wet or coughing respectively but otherwise unharmed. However this humane picture does not meet up with the realities of this civilian vs. cop style warfare.

If we are to take the Yellow Vest protestors at their word then at least 22 of them have lost an eye (from “less-lethal” Flash-ball guns) and 5 have had their hands blown off with 154 being “seriously injured”. Obviously the protestors will want to maximize their statistics but there are plenty of videos from the various actions/demonstrations showing horrible injuries which are too numerous to all be fakes. So the numbers may be off but the overall general tendencies of these injuries do occur from the French authorities in the Human Rights defending EU is a proven fact. The simple reality is that despite a nice marketing phrase non-lethal weapons cripple and on occasion kill.

In order to understand the tactical advantage that non-lethal weapons offer the government (not the individual police but the state itself) we need to put aside our emotional response to seeing French people having their limbs blown off. We have to not jump into ranting about the flagrant hypocrisy of the EU when it comes to human rights and rationally break down how the conflicts between Yellow and Blue vests could look if the arms situation were different.

Scenario A: What if the Yellow Vests were armed?

If the organizers of the Yellow Vests (all movements are organized by someone regardless of what the media tells you) were able to arm their masses with rifles this would indeed lead to horrific short-term violence that would leave a permanent stain on French history. Often hundreds or thousands of protestors are met by dozens of police and handfuls of soldiers, if the protestors were on par with their adversaries in terms of guns, then their numerical advantage would shatter the police’s will to fight.

No policemen are going to fight to the last man against a force 20 times their number, which they may partially agree with dying for nothing, nor will they open fire with tanks in the centers of their own cities. Human psychology would allow them to kill foreigners in some distant country in this manner but not at home.

In this instance of near certain death from pure numbers the police would either “stay home” or possibly switch sides overtly or covertly.

Obviously a full civil war could start from this situation, but in a street warfare sense, escalating from protest to actual hot war is technically a winning scenario as it advances them closer to attaining/changing power.

Scenario B: What if the police fought like an army?

One key component of many Color Revolutions is getting the “bad leader” to be blamed for some sort of direct use of lethal bloody media-friendly massacre. If the French police actually used assault rifles against the protestors this would demonize them to the point of justifying a Revolution. This would not just cause a civil conflict but be a national call to arms to join it, which would be a bad move on the state’s part.

Furthermore, only sociopaths can fire rifles into unarmed crowds (who are not posing a direct threat) of people who speak their own language (i.e. their own “kind”). If the French police just decided to give the order to shoot them all, then in this instance many of the French police would find rifle and bayonet worthless as they would have no desire to shoot.

The result would be a handful of deaths from each protest but the utter collapse of legitimacy of the state and possible “retreats” of police forces unwilling to fire on “their own”.

Scenario C: The “non-lethal” reality we see today.

Psychologically it is much easier for the French police to use non-lethal (in their minds) weapons against the protestors. In the subconscious mind of the policeman he can justify shooting into masses much easier with this type of weapon because in theory it “shouldn’t” kill anyone and if it does it was an “accident”. This is much easier on our psyche and morals than shooting someone in the chest with a Lebel Rifle.

Research by the University of Cambridge supports this tendency. They found that police are far more likely to use force when it is supposedly from non-lethal weapons. This non-lethal status of weapons like tasers (which can and do kill people all the time) makes them so much easier to apply on the populace especially when the subconscious of the police officer tells him that, the guy he fried the other day with a taser died as an accident, one in every so many thousand people just has a weak heart.

So looking at non-lethal weapons tactically they offer the massive psychological advantage of being able to attack without an attack registering in their conscience of the user. As stated above they are also very media and propaganda friendly when anyone who dies from them is just “an accident” giving the government the ability to retain legitimacy while gouging out they eyes of its own populace. Real guns fail at both of these points completely.

Conclusion:

One bizarre irony in our strange postmodern times is that if the Yellow Vests were actually being shot at by real guns and being killed they would be far closer to achieving some sort of systemic change. Being mutilated by all sorts of gadgets and devices of one sort or another makes it easy for the police to do their job psychologically without generating the levels of sympathy and horror from live rounds hitting the innocent that the protestors need to shatter or change the system.

The French Flash-Ball gun should be made the symbol for the EU for it provides crushing repression of the masses with great PR spin to make it seem humane and caring. It is for our safety after all that they use these right?

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

 

This essay is part of our special series

Closing words
Like vampires fearing light, capitalists elites have always been afraid of the socialist demonstration effect. A huge and constant effort is aimed at "showing" that socialism doesn't work, that it is tyrannical, inefficient, etc. Thus sabotaging and killing socialism wherever it may arise —Russia, China, Korea, Venezuela, Chile—by any means necessary, no matter how brutal and dishonest, is therefore standing policy. But socialist solutions work. And Medicare for All would show everyone in America, the key capitalist fortress, that many of our nightmares can easily vanish under socialism. For the capitalists and their hanger-ons it would be a Pandora's box.—P. Greanville

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Tim KIRBY
Tim Kirby is an independent journalist, TV and radio host.

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The Yellow Vests Are Just The Start Of The Global Working Class Revolution That’s Underway

Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.

Dateline: 30 April 2019

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n December of 1999, the lefty cartoonist Dan Perkins (pen name “Tom Tomorrow”) ended a cartoon with these words:

What can you do? You don’t matter. Your vote doesn’t matter. Your protests don’t matter. Go ahead, march in the streets and chant your little slogans. The political sophisticates and media elites will smirk at your naivete, your misguided nostalgia for the sixties, and then they will steer the conversation back to the stock market or the fabulous new restaurant they’ve recently discovered. They’re not worried about you.

And yet…something extraordinary just happened in Seattle. Demonstrators took to the streets and made their voices heard-and it made a difference. The media were forced to address issues they had previously swept under the rug, to explain why anyone could possibly be opposed to unfettered global capitalism. In a few short days, the entire debate was altered, perhaps irrevocably.

You know something’s wrong. Maybe it’s time to start making some noise about it. Happy new millennium.

Twenty years later, the brief moment of hope for working class revolution that Perkins described has become a routine occurrence. Almost every week since November of last year, France’s Yellow Vests have been agitating in the streets for the restoration of social benefits, livable wages, taxing the rich, climate action, and (according to a Yellow Vests assembly from this month) the abolition of capitalism. As the Yellow Vests in France continue to demand change amid violence from police and attacks from the media, similar rebellions are happening around the world.

Additional Yellow Vest movements have happened worldwide, from Russia to Canada to many countries throughout Europe. America’s lack of such a mass protest effort is clearly only temporary, as the United States is brimming with the same revolutionary energy that’s appearing in much of the rest of the world. This year, strike action in the U.S. has hit a 32 year high as its teacher strikes have escalated. Around the U.S. the Poor People’s Campaign has been using civil disobedience protests to continue Martin Luther King Jr’s vision for a just society. Similar rebellions are underway in seemingly every other place where poor and working people are oppressed, with examples ranging from the additional teacher strikes in Europe to the anti-government protests in Algeria to the massive recent communist-led general strike in India.

Additional Yellow Vest movements have happened worldwide, from Russia to Canada to many countries throughout Europe. America’s lack of such a mass protest effort is clearly only temporary, as the United States is brimming with the same revolutionary energy that’s appearing in much of the rest of the world.

These events make up the first stage of a revolutionary period that the capitalist world has entered into. Resistance efforts against corporate power are overall much more frequent than they were just a few years ago, and we have every reason to expect the class struggle to keep accelerating in the coming years. This is because unlike during the time of the WTO protests, the victims of global capitalism have reached their breaking point.

In America most of all, inequality has been steadily increasing throughout the developed world for almost half a century. Those in the more wealthy countries have seen their living standards decline to the point where in the United States alone, half the population is poor by modern standards. The global concentration of wealth has also led to increased poverty in the poorer nations, with NAFTA having devastated Mexico’s economy and similar damage having been done to the Latin American countries where neoliberal reforms have taken place. The imperialist powers have long carried out corporate looting in the global south, but now that inequality has risen so much in both parts of the world, ordinary people in the dominating nations have a shared sense of victimhood with their counterparts in the foreign sweatshops.

With the capitalist world’s extremely debt-ridden and unstable economic system heading for a crash that will likely be worse than the one from 2008, this restlessness among the lower classes is no doubt going to keep intensifying in the coming years. Unemployment, lowered wages, consumer debt, slashed social benefits, and government handouts for the rich will all explode after the next financial crisis, and this will drive more people to get out and fight for their rights.

But while it’s certain that the next decade will see great efforts to reject the current system, a vision for what we want society to look like next hasn’t yet been adequately articulated. This clarification of our collective goal for the future is where the anti-capitalist movement will be needed. We can’t water down our demands and accept a setup where capitalism continues with some reforms. We need to infuse our protests with an explicitly pro-socialist message, which can be articulated through signs at demonstrations, posts on blogs and social media, and public statements on behalf of the protesters. The world’s poor and working people must unite under an agenda which includes taking the means of production away from the capitalist class.

If this movement is equipped with the aspects that have been historically needed for socialist revolutions-such as an armed population of revolutionaries and strong institutions to support the people’s struggle-we’ll have a much better chance at defeating capitalism. Like all ruling classes, the capitalists won’t give up their power willingly, and they’re demonstrating this by preparing to violently crush a rebellion. President Trump’s declarations of global war on socialism are backed by the power of America’s security apparatus and militarized police departments. And Trump’s statement last month about his supporters potentially carrying out violence on his behalf showed that he and the rest of the ruling class are willing to use military force to defend their power. We’re committing ourselves to a power struggle where violence should be avoided as much as possible, but which will no doubt entail violence because of the violent nature of the people in power.

In short, this revolution will require a lot more than mere street marches. But as Perkins assessed about the WTO protests, any act of resistance can have an impact. And we’ve entered an era where acts of resistance are reaching a tipping point.

This essay is part of our special series

Closing words
Like vampires fearing light, capitalists elites have always been afraid of the socialist demonstration effect. A huge and constant effort is aimed at "showing" that socialism doesn't work, that it is tyrannical, inefficient, etc. Thus sabotaging and killing socialism wherever it may arise —Russia, China, Korea, Venezuela, Chile—by any means necessary, no matter how brutal and dishonest, is therefore standing policy. But socialist solutions work. And Medicare for All would show everyone in America, the key capitalist fortress, that many of our nightmares can easily vanish under socialism. For the capitalists and their hanger-ons it would be a Pandora's box.—P. Greanville

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff we publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for our website, which will get you an email notification for everything we publish.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  Go to the profile of Rainer Shea

Rainer Shea  I’m writing articles that counter the propaganda of the capitalist/imperialist power establishment, and that help move us towards a socialist revolution.

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Be sure to get the most unique history of the Russo-American conflict now spanning almost a century!  The book that every American should read.

Nuclear Armageddon or peace? That is the question.
And here’s the book that answers it.
CLICK HERE to buy The Russian Peace Threat.