TRUE HISTORY

A Chinese documentary seeking to explain the slow-motion downfall of the USSR in terms of historical nihilism, basically a cultural disease eventually corroding politics. Obviously many forces and events contributed to this outcome, both internal and external. During its entire life the Soviet Union was subjected to the immense hostile pressures of world capitalism—economic (boycots, sanctions, sabotage); political, military (arms race), diplomatic (isolation, blockades), cultural (defamation) etc— all spearheaded by the US, which forced Moscow to alter its course and often adopt policies that proved more costly to its socialist construction than anticipated.

as later other socialist states,

VLADIMIR GOLSTEIN—Russia is a country built on tensions and contradictions. East and West, mystical and scientific, kind and cruel, nihilistic and spiritual, empire and strong national core.

Its great political leaders, as well as its visionary writers, learn how to ride the wave of these contradictions. It takes years, and efforts, and vision, but as we know from biology or physics, that’s how you get new energy, new birth. Plus and minus, male and female.
Ukraine, on the other hand, never learned how to deal with it. Its population contains Russians, Jews, Poles and so on. Did they integrate them? Yes, in a Bandera kind of way: by killing people.

One of the most important videos by Caleb Maupin n a topic that many Americans cotnue to misunderstand given the longstanding level of toxic misinformation. What is the Ukraine? Why did the Eastern regions peoples’ republics—Lugansk and Donetsk— declared themselves independent from Kiev’s rule after the US-supported coup in 2014? What is the probable future of Ukraine and these new republics? 

JACQUES PAUWELS—The Revolution that exploded in 1789 clearly reflected the great and traumatic class contradictions that characterized the Ancien Régime. The majority of the people, the peasants in the countryside and, in the city, the patrician haute bourgeoisie as well as the plebeians, above all the Parisian artisans who would be known as the “sans-culottes”, rose up against the upper class, the elite or “establishment”, consisting of the nobility and the high ranks of the clergy, lined up behind the king. Members of the bourgeoisie took over the leadership of the revolutionary movement, but the sans-culottes performed most if not all the revolutionary heavy lifting. In the countryside, the peasants made a significant contribution to the revolutionary cause by attacking the noble seigneurs in their castles. After the cancellation of the onerous feudal obligations the peasants had resented so much, however, tranquillity returned to the countryside. Henceforth, revolutionary action would take place mostly, though not exclusively, in Paris.

JACQUES PAUWELS—Speaking of Vietnam, the American intervention in that country was a counterrevolutionary and intrinsically antidemocratic aggression, which cost the lives of two to three million Vietnamese. It is noteworthy that it was supported by US allies who were also supposed to be devotees of the democratic cause, such as West Germany, but opposed by the presumably undemocratic Soviet “satellites”, including East Germany. But this is not an anomaly from the perspective of the paradigm reflected in this book: as we have seen earlier, West Germany was far less democratic, and the “eastern bloc”-countries considerably more democratic, than we have been led to believe.