MEDIA SCUM

ERIC ZUESSE—RFK Jr. is strongly against continuing the war in Ukraine (he’s the only candidate in both Parties who is) — this war that has brought hundreds of billions of dollars of additional sales to NATO’s armaments-manufacturers; and, so their ‘news’-media are overwhelmingly campaigning against him and for Biden to win the Democratic Party’s nomination.

EDITOR—Harpal Brar, Caleb Maupin and Joti Brar discuss the nature of Imperialist war, the importance of revolutionary defeatism, and the fact that Imperialist war isn’t an aberration within capitalism, but an inevitability while capitalism holds sway over the world. The panel also looks at the effect of the emergence of nuclear weapons on the international communist movement, the gain and subsequent loss, thanks to soviet ingenuity in Russia and China, of the monopoly of nuclear armaments by the US empire, and how revisionism used the fear of nuclear doom to undermine the necessity of continued class war.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—This is because propaganda only works if it doesn’t ring people’s cognitive alarm bells. You can’t slide propaganda down people’s throats if it triggers their critical thinking gag reflex. If you want to poison someone’s food, you can only pull off the deed if they don’t taste the poison or throw it up before it takes effect.

JIMMY DORE SHOW—There’s much debate on the left as to how much better, if at all, Democrats are compared with Republicans. Kyle Kulinski’s not engaging with that debate, however, as he forcefully recently asserted that black people tend to vote blue because Democrats are “one trillion times better” than Republicans.

RANIA KHALEK— It’s been 20 years since the US invaded Afghanistan. As the US finally withdrew, Taliban control over Afghanistan has been portrayed as inevitable. But what happened to the other political forces in the country? The war on Afghanistan didn’t really start in 2001. US meddling goes back to the 1970s and British meddling even further. Most people don’t know that there have been liberal, secular nationalist and communist Afghan forces who tried to transform their country but were prevented from doing so by Western imperial powers who supported religious and tribal conservatives to maintain control.